The Beast Arises

Marcarian nodded to the work crew. Their plasma torch was making rasping, shallow cuts into the bulkhead that had sliced the section in half. And Marcarian’s vox-liaison too, by the looks of it. The hiss and whine of spent plasma was strangely reminiscent of the white noise leaching from the transceiver set, as if there was some cosmic confluence of which Zerberyn, for all his gifts, could never be anything but unaware.

‘A shame,’ he said, and meant it. She had been competent.

Marcarian toed aside the twisted aluminium frame of a console chair, taking the ivory sliders and brass dials and deftly recalibrating the board. Zerberyn pushed the left headset earpiece up against his corresponding ear and listened.

White noise whispered from the set. Static. Which was a misnomer in many ways. It implied a steady state, something unchanging, but the sound crying through Dantalion’s receiver arrays was anything but steady. It crested and fell, hissed and crackled, and precipitously dropped or rose in pitch. It was cosmic background noise, stellar radiation, energy bleed from unshielded power sources — which, on the command deck just then, must have numbered anywhere in the high thousands. It was almost like voices, whispers at the very edge of straining.

‘Stop!’

A horrible sensation chased down Zerberyn’s spine, similar to the feeling of the counteractant that the Apothecary had injected into him but a hundredfold worse for having no discernable material source. As if a soul could feel rotten. As if static had the taste of copper and smoke. He tightened his grip on the physical surety of the headset and turned to Marcarian.

‘Dial it back.’

The shipmaster did so. The noise dropped away, to be replaced by a sound in his head like knives on the wind. It was a voice.

+Dantalion… Dantalion, respond.+

‘The system is fried,’ Marcarian was saying, a vox-wraith in his other ear. ‘It’s the receiver. It can’t distinguish signal from noise.’

‘Do not touch the controls,’ Zerberyn snapped. He felt sick. Not physically of course — his gifts prevented that — but he felt spiritually spoiled. He twisted around the headset’s microphone bulb and spoke into it. ‘Is that you, Epistolary? Is this Guilliman?’

A sound like laughter prickled the static.

+My name is Kalkator, Warsmith of the Fourth Legion, in command of the cruiser Palimodes.+

Zerberyn froze. He wanted nothing more than to tear the headset from his face, but it was as though the absolute cold of the void had soaked into Dantalion

’s antennae, run through her wires, and iced the muffler to Zerberyn’s ear.

‘I do not speak with traitors,’ he hissed.

+Then just listen. You are in danger here. Your jump has not taken you far from the ruins of Vandis. Your vessels Paragon and Intrepid are in the Corus System. Paladin of Rubicae is in Randeil and Vindicator in Quaillor. Guilliman and Excelsior are in the Ooran System. None more than an hour from an ork fleet. And trust me,

Dantalion, they are coming.+

‘Trust you…?’

Marcarian was looking up at him, uncomprehending. Some horror in his eyes made the bruised skin at the back of Zerberyn’s neck creep. He spoke again into the pickup.

‘How do you know the coordinates of our ships? How are you reaching us?’

+Favours given, favours owed. Do you really want those kinds of answers, Exemplar?+

‘What of the rest of the fleet?’ he said after an uncomfortably extended pause. ‘What of Alcazar Remembered? What of the Interdictor?’

+You are the last to emerge and I had almost given up on the possibility of any more of your ships making it from the warp intact. My ship made it to the Mandeville point and was primed for translation when Vandis was destroyed. The empyrean buffered her systems against the star’s death throes.+

‘An escape paid for in the blood of my brothers. No depth of space could obscure from me the warmth you show your allies, Iron Warrior.’

The voice dropped into the seethe of static. Zerberyn could hear the crackle of emotion.

+There was a time when Magneric and I were thought closer than brothers. Our bond was stronger than I expect you to understand, forged by the glories of an age you cannot conceive. I found his faith contemptible, his obsession with me pitiable. Magneric would be even less fulsome in his remembrance of me were our fates reversed, but I will remember him as a brother. Do you think your Imperium the sole proprietor of a finite store of grief? We are not so different, you and I.+

‘How so?’

+Did pragmatism not lead you to abandon your own Chapter Master?+

‘We did not see the Alcazar Remembered destroyed.’

+I did not see the Emperor slay Horus, but I know that it was so.+

Zerberyn snarled. ‘Do not ever forget it.’