The Inquisition War (62 page)

The sword in his hand was his slave. He hurled it at a daemonette. The blade impaled the daemonette against the succulent thigh of a tongue-lashing steed. Zephro dived for the shuriken pistol dropped by a slaughtered Scorpion. He fired at a devotee, lacerating the man’s sword-arm to scarlet ribbons, the dangling streamers of a toxic jellyfish.

Human musketeers and pistoleers were climbing from behind their barricades. Desperate hope was upon their exhausted faces as they discharged their guns, then used their spent weapons as clubs.

Lightning-swift, the Scorpions were striking and striking.

Z
EPHRO HAD REGAINED
more than himself. He had gained illumination. It was as though, despite his psychic gifts, milky cataracts had previously covered his eyes – and the eyes of his mind. Through these veils he had peered only dimly at reality. Small wonder that he had squandered his gifts upon summoning shadows. Daemonic possession had imposed tyrannical lurid lenses over those eyes of his. Salvation from possession had stripped away the lenses, and had razored away the cataracts too, and had seemed to him even to shave away the jelly of his eyes so as to strip the retinas bare – and likewise the retinas of his mind – so that he perceived reality raw and flayed and primal.

Thereby he had acquired a bright, icy inner shield against Chaos, which would reflect Chaos back upon itself.

Later, in Ulthwé, mercurial flamboyant alien Harlequins would teach him more, focusing his purified vision on the hidden depths of the cosmos upon which the froth of raging events swirled.

This galaxy of so many starclouds, so many billion suns, so many worlds pullulating with life, was a frail raft afloat upon the immaterial warp of festering mind-essence. Four terrible Chaos powers had already congealed, the fourth of these – Slaanesh – when the eldar fell through overwhelming self-indulgence. These anti-gods lusted to overthrow reality by violence or disease or lust or mutability, inaugurating a reign of mutating, metastizing, brawling nightmare forever. Already the Eye of Terror was a tumour of vile disruption in the fabric of the galaxy.

The human race had almost fallen, once, when the Emperor’s bosom comrade, Horus, had been corrupted by Chaos. To defeat Horus, the Emperor had sacrificed almost all of Himself that could properly be described as “human”. What hope was there henceforth but in brutal repression? Repression – until the paralysed Emperor Himself would finally fail; and the human race, deprived of its beacon, would succumb in a psychic nightmare which would give birth from the sludge of tormented souls to its own terminal Chaos god.

Yet there
was
a hidden hope.

Of a shining path.

Of all the forsaken goodness coagulating into a radiant being of light and wonder.

Of the coming of the
Numen
, a deity for New Men, for transformed and transfigured humanity.

If only the Emperor’s unacknowledged offspring could be found and brought together – by those who had achieved illumination. Zephro would learn of other such extraordinary Illuminati as himself, who had been possessed by Chaos yet who had endured and who had purged themselves either by their own will or else by help of exorcism.

V
IVID BANNERS WERE
planted around the tiers of the amphitheatre. The spectre of Stalinvast hung overhead. Swooping Hawks and Dire Avengers continued their mimic combat. Other aspect warriors were beginning to practise upon the terraces: Striking Scorpions and Howling Banshees. Under the gaze of the silent Solitaire the Harlequins continued their rehearsals.

Zephro said to Ro-fhessi, ‘I suppose the desired outcome of this ceremony and the Imperial attack it provokes mightn’t become apparent until another decade or even century.’

The farseer replied mildly, ‘You can always linger at the Crossroads of Inertia again, my illuminated friend.’

Friend?

Was Zephro really a
friend
of any eldar? Oh yes. No doubt.

To a certain degree, to a certain extent.

Though, in the present crisis, any eldar of his acquaintance who put on the aspect of a warrior would override any past sentimentalities, becoming a perfect killer and survivor. As any Imperial invaders would soon learn to their cost.

To what extent had Zephro constantly been steered in his errands by farseers whose cryptic vision of probabilities must elude even the most illuminated human being?

Illuminati such as he gathered in the Emperor’s Sons and stepped up their campaign of confusion to the Inquisition. Renegade Illuminati continued to infect untold worlds unawares with the hydra entity, seducing power-hungry inquisitors to their perverted cause. Were the eldar farseers genuinely concerned for the survival of the human species?

To Zephro’s grief, most eldar viewed the human race as irredeemably brutish, a teeming plague of pox-flies whose maggots fed on a million worlds. Humanity’s downfall would be a disaster of galactic magnitude. How could a Numen, a shining path, arise from this infestation? Or would the shining path only be akin to ignis fatuus glowing over a foul swamp, a will-o’-the-wisp?

Zephro must believe that a Numen could arise! He must believe that New Men would emerge everywhere, men and women like himself, illuminated, and shielded against Chaos.

‘Ro-fhessi,’ said Zephro, ‘what is the probability of Jaq Draco arriving here?’

Draco had served the purpose of the Illuminati so usefully, and unknowingly. If Draco had survived, and stored himself away, Stalinvast must be a hideous beacon to him – supposing that he had been able to learn of the impending ceremony of Harlequins. A tiny fraction of the reason why Eldrad Ulthran had ordained the Stalinvast Rite of Catacylsm might be to lure the moth of Draco to this flame. Draco could only become an Illuminatus if he suffered – and survived – the atrocity of possession by a daemon... Ro-fhessi shrugged.

‘One cannot
speak
of probabilities. One cannot utter them nor assign a percentage. One can only envisage lighter and darker shades in the aching spectrum of
B’fheidir
.’

Aye, in the sickening swirl of
maybe
and
perhaps
which only a farseer fathomed...

This habitat orbiting the cinder of Stalinvast continued to prepare itself simultaneously for sacred ceremony and for slaughter.

TWELVE

Trespassers

A
BATTLE IN
space is largely invisible, as well as silent. On battle-screens, aglow with icons generated by devoutly anointed cogitator machines relying on radar and deep-scannings, the ebb and flow of conflict is generally comprehensible.

Not so comprehensible for the majority of participants.

The speed of ships and the vast volume of void in which they manoeuvre frequently makes an engagement between whole fleets appear to be a matter of isolated spasmodic duels interspersed by vast longueurs. The unique blend of terror and tedium could sometimes cause gunners to fire at phantoms of the imagination; they would be punished by induced pain – though leniently, since gunners in their armoured flash-gauntlets and their boom-hoods were respected specialists.

Perhaps to be punished thus was preferable to the stress of awaiting a breathless excruciating demise which might come now or never.

Much of the Battle of Stalinvast – that fight of futility – was characterized by terror-tedium. This was especially true since the Imperial Fleet was on a rein known only to its fanatical admiral and to his highest officers. Many of the orders – to break off, to veer, to neglect a damaged enemy vessel – must have seemed insane or even treasonable to anyone not privy to the logic behind those orders.

How many participants could comprehend the full picture, or even a fraction of the facts?

Thousands of men immured in engine halls or galleys or repair shops or arsenals might have had little idea that any engagement was even taking place – until, perhaps, death deeply breached part of the hull in their vicinity.

The cacophony of machinery, the shriek of steam gushing from ruptures, the crackle of electric discharge from generators: these were like the very air one breathed – until an alien missile might impact and plasma would gush, and air would rush away. Then at last convulsing victims might momentarily know the silence within which the true events were occurring.

Of course, most of the crew would have heard combat klaxons – or a devout address by a chaplain broadcast from a gargoyle-speaker high up a sculpted internal tower. Nevertheless, many hundreds of technicians in the bowels of the battleships had long since been rendered stone-deaf by the perennial din. These communicated entirely by hand signals. Would they even hear the roar of a power-shaft when laser cannons fired from the decks? At least they would feel the shuddering vibrations...

T
HOSE ABOARD
T
ORMENTUM
Malorum
scrutinized screens for hours. Fennix eavesdropped on the astropaths aboard the battleships. Meh’lindi scanned through the vox traffic. This was sometimes hectic, sometimes mute. Periodically Jaq stared through a magnilens at remote flashes of light. Then he would swing the oculus towards the distant thin sickle of Stalinvast. From this celestial angle, the pus-yellow sun scarcely lit one-tenth of the planet. “Huh!” was Grimm’s frequent gloss on the developing situation.

F
ROM THE DECK
of a Gothic-class battleship Cobra destroyers had flown to engage several eldar wraithships. Though the Cobras could boost quickly and turn tightly, this squadron seemed disinclined to push to the utmost – whilst wraithships could tack with such bird-like elegance, flexing the solar sails on their towering bone-masts.

A Cobra’s vortex torpedo ran beyond one wraithship before exploding. The explosion disrupted the very fabric of space. The wraithship yawed. Yet it wasn’t drawn into the disruption. Laser pulses raced from a second wraithship at the Cobra. Screens absorbed the energy. A third wraithship fired plasma cannons. The Cobra’s screen flared in apparent overload before dying. Those shields should have accepted much more load. Had the generators not been properly blessed? Had the captain lowered the shields prematurely to bleed off the excess?

A final laser fusillade caught the stern of the Cobra. Its engines exploded, blasting the broad bows forward even faster amidst a meteoric shower of wreckage, unsteerable ever again. Already the wraithships and other Cobras were diverging vastly, leaving behind fading plasma and a shuddering wrinkle in the void.

A
GREAT IMPERIAL
ironclad powered implacably towards a cluster of wraithships, shedding its flotilla of support vessels like chaff. Ordinarily these minnows would ransack neighbouring worlds and planetoids for ore or fuel. If they remained upon the ironclad’s decks, many were certain to be destroyed.

The ironclad was an armoured mountain range of peaks and plateaux, as pitted and scarred by previous battles as a moon by meteor strikes. This ancient battleship possessed no screens. Giant plates of adamantium, tens of metres thick, were its protection – if not to those who manned its laser turrets and plasma cannons.

An Eldar Shadowhunter jinked nearby. It pulsed laser bolts at the ironclad. It raked the adamantium with blooms of energy. Craters were punched, fleabites on a cudbear except to the crew in the immediate neighbourhood of impact.

That Shadowhunter was here. It was there. It was a dancing cloud of fragmentary kaleidoscopic glimpses. When it accelerated, its presence was a mere shimmer, a nausea amidst the stars.

Its holoscreen was no energy shield, however. The ironclad loosed a massive broadside at the Shadowhunter. The eldar vessel’s masts and sail disintegrated, though not the great shark of the hull.

Wraithships dispersed as this armoured bull of planetoid size charged towards them, spewing superheated plasma from its rear. The Imperial forces were closing in upon Stalinvast – yet so circuitously. Cobras and support vessels were all over space. Many seemed to present themselves as deliberate targets to challenge the eldar vessels.

‘T
HERE’S NO SENSE
to it,’ said Grimm. ‘That ironclad alone – if it is an ironclad – could probably ram its way inward and burst the orbital hub wide open. I know it ain’t a Tyrant ship with an energy ram on the prow, or a Dominator with an inferno cannon. But it could, I’m sure it could.’

Grimm was so proud of his tech-knowledge of ships.

Mile’ionahd, their supposed eldar captor, said to him curtly, ‘Obviously this is all a diversion to confuse my people while a surgical intrusion occurs. I believe our wraithships can cope with a frontal assault, though.’

‘Huh to that.’

T
ORMENTUM
M
ALORUM
WAS
in stealth mode. Aboard the ship, for hours, it had been whisper time. The gravity generator was switched off. Jaq had conjured an aura of protection, injecting his psychic power into the energy shields, willing invisibility. May their vessel be a blank to all observers and all instruments.

‘In nomine Imperatoris: silentium atque obscuritas,’ he prayed profoundly.

More of the ravaged planet was discernible now. The bleached skull was blessedly veiled in poisonous cyclones. The eldar habitat was also visible via magni-lens.