The Beast Arises

The adept began to make louder noises. He gurgled and choked on the amorphous sound-forms and half-words bubbling out of his voicebox. The sound was coming from his throat, across his palate, as if he was enunciating something primordial, something from the dark, hindbrain portions of his mind.

It grew louder still, deeper, more brutal. It was an ugly sound, an animal sound, atavistic.

Finally, there were words.

‘Did you hear that?’ Laurentis cried.

‘What did he say?’ asked Nyman.

‘Did you hear that?’ Laurentis repeated, excitedly.

The tech-adept, blind, rigid and drooling, was repeating one phrase, over and over, in a deep, bass voice.

‘I am Slaughter,’ he was saying. ‘I am Slaughter.’

‘Oh, that’s not right,’ said the magos, suddenly disappointed. ‘That’s you.’

He looked at Slaughter.

‘That’s what you say,’ said Laurentis. ‘That’s the thing you say. He’s overheard you and he’s just repeating it. Poor, mindless fool. I said he was no good. Too damaged, you see? Too damaged. Just repeating what he heard. What a pity. I had such high hopes. The whole thing’s a failure.’

Slaughter looked at the tech-adept, who was still in rigour, grunting out the crude phrase.

‘He’s never met me,’ he said. ‘He’s never heard me say that. He’s never met me.’

Twenty-Seven

Ardamantua — orbital

Something was happening to the nearspace shadow around Ardamantua. The gravity storm was intensifying. All the sensors and auspex arrays on the bridge of the Azimuth went into the red scale, and then the vermillion, and then went to white-out. Glass dials cracked and blew out of their brass mounts. Sensor servitors squealed and clutched at their aug-plugged eyes and ears, or wrenched out their cortical jacks in sprays of blood and amniotic fluid. The main strategium flickered and then died in a ribboned flurry of collapsing hololithic composition streams.

Admiral Kiran, who had been closely observing the attempts to steer the wounded Amkulon towards the flank of a recovery tender, leapt out of his high-backed throne. The cosmological event had accelerated so suddenly, so violently. The seething, simmering storm surrounding the target planet had, in the space of twenty or thirty seconds, turned into something else entirely. The cream of his sensory and detection bridge crew were crippled and blinded, and most of his primary range-finding and scanning apparatus was annihilated. He was quite sure that the planet was about to die. From the energetic signature dynamic, as he had briefly glimpsed it before the screens went dead, the gravity anomaly was expanding, spiking. The planet would never survive a trauma like that. Tectonic rending and seismic disruption would husk the world like a ripe crop, and squirt the molten core of Ardamantua into space in a super-cooling jet of matter.

‘Shields! Shields!’ he yelled, though his experienced deck crew were already enabling the Azimuth’s potent forward shields. Kiran hoped that the commanders of his fleet components closest to the nearspace rim would have the wit to initiate emergency evasive manoeuvres and pull back from the planet zone as rapidly as their real space drives would allow.

If the planet died, his fleet would die with it.

‘What’s happening?’ Heth yelled, running onto the bridge in his breeches and undershirt, braces around his hips, shaving cream covering half of his chin. His aides and attendants rushed after him as if they could somehow complete his ablutions while he yelled at Kiran.

Maskar also appeared, emerging from the chart room with data-slates in his hand, a bemused expression on his face.

‘We have a situation,’ Kiran said, trying to pull data up onto his repeater screens. ‘We have a very serious situation. Something is happening to the planet.’

He turned and yelled at the strategium officers.

‘Get that thing re-lit! Get a data-feed up! I don’t care if you have to act as live connectors and hold the power couplers together with your bare hands!’

They rushed to obey him, though there seemed to be little hope of restoring the feed. Sparks and filaments of shredded and burned-out cable showered from the cavernous roof of the Azimuth’s bridge. Several of the gleaming silver consoles had burst into flames and two large monitor plates had cracked with gunshot bangs and exploded. Servitor crews rushed forwards to extinguish the conflagrations and haul the injured crewmen away, burned and peppered with glass chippings.

Kiran’s bridge crew were some of the best in the Imperial Navy. Whatever could be said about Lord High Admiral Lansung, he insisted on the highest degree of schooling for the first-line and primary battlefleet candidates. Working with the tools they had to hand, the sensorium techs managed to reconnect the strategium main display and re-engage it to half-power.

An image blinked into view, fuzzy and indistinct, flaring with distortion and interference.

‘What is it? What are we looking at—’ Heth began.