The Beast Arises

A body flew over his head, hit the tunnel wall with a twig-snap of fracturing bones, went limp and fell at his feet. It was Overseer Finks, the convoy manager. Laurentis recoiled and felt the hot acid of reflux in his throat. He wanted to stop and help his colleague, though the overseer was clearly past helping. He didn’t need a Laudex Honorium in Advanced Biologis to know that any human missing quite that much torso probably wasn’t alive any more.

It felt squalid, however, squalid and shameful to just step over the man’s body. It felt improper to pass by and keep running. But the alternatives, stopping or turning back, seemed even more unfortunate.

Laurentis realised, with a scientist’s detached precision, that he had frozen. Fright had conquered flight. He was shutting down.

The cart he had dismounted from, the cart he had been in the process of running past, suddenly overturned and slammed into the side of the tunnel. It deformed and buckled, metal plating and machine components shredding and scattering. It had been half-sheltering him, but now he was alone, a man standing beside a corpse with a curved, slimy wall behind him.

The cart compressed further as the advancing warrior-form pounded it and mashed its structure into the wall. The heavy throb of clack-clack-clack welled out of the dark beast’s oesophagus. Blood and oil drooled off its claws.

‘Golden Throne preserve me,’ Laurentis muttered, his voice as quiet as a sub-vox echo.

Eight

Ardamantua — orbital

Captain Sauber, known as Severance, commander of Lotus Gate Company, cocked his head to one side.

‘This isn’t the noise bursts?’ he asked.

‘No, sir,’ replied the adept. ‘Though they are recurring.’

‘We have compiled a list of timings and durations, sir,’ added another adept. ‘Would you like to review it?’

‘No,’ said Severance. He kept staring at the cogitator screen, processing the data. ‘You’re saying this isn’t the noise bursts?’

‘No, sir, a separate phenomenon,’ replied the first adept.

‘Gravitational?’ asked Severance.

‘Yes,’ said the adept.

‘It reminds me of the mass-gravity curve of a Mandeville point,’ said Severance.

At his side, Shipmistress Aquilinia clucked her tongue, impressed.

‘What?’ asked Severance, turning to look at her.

‘You recognised a Mandeville curve from a schematic profile,’ said the shipmistress, looking up at him. ‘I thought you were just a soldier. That’s impressive.’

‘The mass-gravity curve is similar to a Mandeville point,’ said the adept, ‘though of far, far less magnitude—’

‘Which makes it all the more impressive that the captain recognised it,’ Aquilinia snapped at him.

‘Yes, mistress.’

‘Can we get to the point?’ asked Severance. ‘Are we detecting gravitational instabilities in the Ardamantua orbital zone?’

‘Slight ones, yes, sir,’ said the adept.

‘The whole zone was surveyed as we approached,’ said Severance.

‘These are new,’ said the adept.

‘Like the noise bursts?’ asked Severance.

The adept nodded. ‘We noticed the first approximately two minutes after the initial noise burst occurrence. And only then because of a slight drift in our orbital anchor point. Analysis showed that a tiny gravitic anomaly had occurred eighty-eight point seven two units off the portside drive assembly, causing the anchor-slide. We corrected. Then we scanned, and saw that sixteen other anomalies of similar profile had occurred during the period.’

Severance turned and crossed the long, narrow bridge of the strike cruiser Amkulon. It was like the nave of an ancient cathedral, with various function-specific crew departments working in lit galleries stacked on either side above him. Aquilinia hurried after the massive armoured warrior.

‘Open a channel to the flagship!’ she cried. ‘The captain wants voice to voice with the Chapter Master!’

‘You read my mind,’ said Severance.

‘I grasp the significance,’ she replied. ‘If there’s genuine, previously undetected gravitational instability in the orbital zone, we will have to back the fleet out. That would seriously compromise the ground assault.’

Severance nodded. He felt cheated. His wall wasn’t even deployed yet. His men were prepped and ready in the drop holds of the Amkulon.

‘Did you see them?’ he growled at Aquilinia. ‘The gravity blips, popping up like blisters, and then closing again. Have you seen that before?’

She shook her head.

‘I’ve seen gravity fraying close to major mass giants,’ she said. ‘And you get that kind of peppering, blistering effect on the fringes during translation in and out of the empyrean.’

‘Hence the similarity to a Mandeville profile?’

‘Exactly. Throne’s sake, captain, I’ve seen plenty of non-Euclidian gravity effects on the rip-curve of the translation interface. Daemon space does not behave itself, as my mentors used to say.’

‘But you think this is natural?’

She shrugged. A brass-framed optic slid down from her crested headdress, spearing data-light into her left eye so she could review the adept’s findings again.