Void Stalker (27 page)

‘You cannot stand with us on Tsagualsa.’

That made him stop. Variel’s eyes – ice
-
blue to Talos’s black – lifted in a slow, sterile stare.

‘You tell a hilarious jest,’ the Flayer said, utterly without warmth.

‘No jest, Variel. You are holding the key to a significant piece of the Legion’s future. I am sending you away before the battle. Deltrian’s ship is capable of warp flight. You’ll be going with him, as will your equipment and your work.’

‘No.’

‘This is not a debate, brother.’

‘No.’
Variel tore the flayed skin from his pauldron, revealing the winged skull beneath. The symbol of the Eighth Legion stared back at Talos with hollow eye sockets. ‘I wear the winged skull of Nostramo, the same as you. I will fight and die with you, on that worthless little world.’

‘You owe me nothing, Variel. Not anymore.’

For once, Variel looked close to stunned. ‘Owe you?
Owe you?
Is that how you see our brotherhood? A series of favours to be repaid? I
owe you
nothing. I will stand with you because we are both Eighth Legion. Brothers, Talos. Brothers unto death.’

‘Not this time.’

‘You cannot–’

‘I can do whatever I wish. Captain Malcharion agrees with me. There is no room on Deltrian’s vessel for more than ten additional warriors, and even that is better devoted to relics that must be returned to the Legion. You and your work must be preserved above all.’

Variel took a breath. ‘Have you ever realised how often you interrupt those you are speaking with? It is almost as irritating a habit as Uzas constantly licking his teeth.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Talos replied. ‘I’ll work on this alarming character flaw in the many years of life I have left. Now, will you be ready? If I give you twelve hours and as many servitors as you need, can you ensure your equipment is loaded aboard Deltrian’s ship?’

Variel bared his teeth in an uncharacteristic angry smile. ‘It will be done.’

‘I’ve not seen you lose your temper since Fryga.’

‘Fryga was an exceptional circumstance. As is this.’ Variel pressed his fingertips to massage his closed eyes. ‘You are asking much of me.’

‘Don’t I always? And I need you to do something else, Variel.’

The Apothecary met the prophet’s eyes again, sensing something disquieting in the other Night Lord’s tone. ‘Ask.’

‘Once you’re gone, I want you to find Malek of the Atramentar.’

Variel raised a thin eyebrow. ‘I am never returning to the Maelstrom, Talos. Huron will have my head.’

‘I don’t believe Malek will have remained there, nor do I believe the Atramentar would willingly join with the Blood Reaver. If they boarded a Corsair vessel, it was for another reason. I don’t know what that reason was, but I trust him despite what happened. Find him if you can, and tell him his plan worked. Malcharion lived. The war-sage resumed command, leading the Tenth again in its final nights.’

‘Is that all?’

‘No. Give him my thanks.’

‘I will do all of that, if you wish. But Deltrian’s ship will not get far without needing to refuel. It is too small for long-range flight. We both know this.’

‘It doesn’t have to get far. Not at first. It just needs to get away from here.’

Variel gave a grunt of displeasure. ‘The eldar may chase us.’

‘Yes. They may. Any other complaints? You’re wasting what little time I can give you.’

‘What of Octavia? How will we sail the Sea of Souls without a Navigator?’

‘You won’t,’ Talos replied. ‘That’s why she’s going with you.’

He could have
guessed her reaction would be somewhat less polite than Variel’s. Had he bothered to predict such a thing, he’d have been quite correct.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘I’m sick and tired of doing what you tell me.’

Talos wasn’t looking directly at her. He walked around her throne, casting his gaze across the fluid pool, remembering the chamber’s previous occupant. She’d died in filth, broken apart by the bolters of First Claw. Despite a memory that bordered on eidetic, Talos found he couldn’t recall the creature’s name now.
How rare.

‘Are you listening to me?’ Octavia asked. The tone of her voice, so exquisitely courtly, drew his attention back.

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ She sat in her throne, one hand cradling her swelling stomach. Her near-emaciation made the pregnancy all the more prominent.

‘What are the chances that Deltrian’s ship will even make it to safety?’

Talos saw no sense in lying to her. He looked at her long and hard, letting the seconds pass by to the rhythm of her heartbeat. ‘Your chance of survival is almost amusingly small. But a chance, nevertheless.’

‘And Septimus?’

‘He is our pilot and my slave.’

‘He’s the father of–’

Talos held up a hand in warning. ‘Be careful, Octavia. Do not mistake me for a being able to be moved by emotional pleas. I have skinned children before their parents’ eyes, you know.’

Octavia clenched her teeth. ‘So he’s staying.’ She wasn’t sure why she said it, but it came out in a spill, nevertheless. ‘He’ll follow me, somehow. You can’t keep him here. I know him better than you do.’

‘I have not yet decided his fate,’ Talos replied.

‘And what about you? What’s your “fate”?’

‘Do not speak to me in that tone of voice. This is not the Imperial Court of Terra, little highness. I am not impressed or awed by a haughty tone, so save your breath.’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m… just angry.’

‘Understandable.’

‘So what will you do? You’re just going to let them kill you?’

‘Of course not. You saw what happened when we tried to run, how we battered our prow against blockade after blockade. They won’t let us run to the Great Eye. The noose started to close around us the moment I let out the psychic scream. We make our stand here, Octavia. If we leave it any longer, we’ll lose our last chance to choose where this war will be fought.’

‘You’re not answering my question.’

‘We’re going to die.’ Talos gestured to her bank of wall monitors, each one showing a different angle outside the ship – each one an eye staring upon the millions of rocks drifting in the void. ‘How can I be clearer? How can it be more obvious? Outside this asteroid field, alien warships wait for us to make our move. We’re dead, Octavia. That’s all there is to it. Now ensure you are ready to leave the ship. Take whatever you wish, it matters nothing to me. You have eleven hours before I never want to see you again.’

He turned and left, shoving aside two of her attendants that didn’t scatter quickly enough. She watched him walk away, tasting freedom on her tongue for the first time since she was captured, and unsure whether the taste was as pleasant as she remembered.

The door opened
with smooth traction, revealing his master in the entrance arch.

Septimus looked up, Uzas’s helm still in his hands. He’d been making the final repairs to the left eye lens socket.

‘Lord?’ he said.

Talos walked in, filling the humble chamber with a chorus of snarling joints and the ever-present hum of live armour.

‘Octavia leaves the ship in eleven hours,’ the Night Lord said. ‘Your unborn child goes with her.’

Septimus nodded. His eyes never left his master’s faceplate. ‘With respect, lord, I had already guessed.’

Talos walked around the room, casting his attention here and there, never lingering for long on one thing. He took in the half-repaired pistols on the desk; the sketches of schematics; the charcoal drawings of his lover Octavia; and the clothing left in messy heaps. Above all, the small space bled a sense of life, of personality, of being the sanctum of one specific living soul.

A human’s room,
Talos thought, reflecting on the empty lifelessness of his own personal chambers – chambers resembling the quarters of any other Legionary, except for the prophecies scrawled on the iron walls.
How different they are to us, to leave their imprint so sternly on the places they live.

He turned back to Septimus, the man that had served him for almost a decade now.

‘We must speak, you and I.’

‘As you wish, master.’ Septimus put the helm down.

‘No. For the next few minutes, we will forget the roles of those who serve and those who are served. For now, I am neither
master
, nor
lord
. I am Talos.’ The warrior removed his helm, looking down with his pale features calm.

Septimus felt the mad urge to reach for a weapon, unnerved by this strange familiarity.

‘Why do I feel like this is some frightening prelude to slitting my throat?’ he asked.

The prophet’s smile never reached his dark eyes.

Octavia and Deltrian
weren’t getting along, which was a surprise to neither of them. She thought he was unbearably impatient for such an augmented creature, and he thought she smelled unpleasantly of the biological chemicals and organic fluids involved in mammalian reproduction. Their relationship had started with those first impressions, and gone downhill from there. It was a relief for both of them when she went to her quarters for her final preparations before flight.

She strapped herself into the uncomfortable throne in the belly of Deltrian’s squat insectoid ship. Her ‘chamber’, such as it was, offered a single picter-screen and barely enough room to stretch her legs.

‘Has anyone ever sat here and tested this equipment?’ she asked as a servitor slid a slender neural spike into the modest and elegantly-crafted socket
at
her temple. ‘
Ouch.
Careful with that.’

‘Compliance,’ murmured the cyborg, staring with dead eyes. It was all the answer she received, which didn’t surprise her, either.

‘You push until it clicks,’ she told the lobotomised slave. ‘Not until it comes out my other bloody ear.’

The servitor drooled a little. ‘Compliance.’

‘Throne, just go away.’

‘Compliance,’ it said for a third time, and did exactly that. She heard it bumping into something in the corridor outside, while the ship shook on the deck with final armament loading. Octavia’s box of a room had no porthole windows, so she cycled through the external picter feeds. Image after image of the
Echo
’s
main hangar deck flickered across the screen. Thunderhawks were being loaded with full payloads, and drop-pods were winched into position. Octavia watched with emotionless eyes, not sure what to feel. Was this home? Would she miss all of it? Where would they even go, if they managed to get away?

‘Oh,’ she whispered, watching the screen. ‘Oh, shit.’

She paused the scrolling feed, keying in a code to tilt one of the imagefinders on the ship’s hull. Loader buggies and crew transports ferried back and forth; a lifter Sentinel, stolen from some long-past raid
,
clanked its way past, steel feet thumping on the deck.

Septimus, with a beaten leather bag over one shoulder, was speaking with Deltrian by the main gangramp. His long hair covered his facial augmetics, and he wore a subtly armoured bodysuit beneath his heavy jacket. A machete was sheathed at his right shin, and both pistols hung low at his hips.

She had no idea what he was saying. The external viewfinders didn’t offer sound. She watched him slap Deltrian on the shoulder, which the stick-thin cadaver of chrome didn’t seem to appreciate, if his recoil was anything to go by.

Septimus made his way up the gangramp, and vanished from view. The screen showed Deltrian return to directing his loader servitors, and the endless flow of machinery being brought aboard.

She heard the knock at her bulkhead door almost immediately after.

‘Tell me you’ve got your bandana on,’ she heard him call through the metal.

She smiled, reaching a hand to check, just in case. ‘You’re safe.’

The door opened, and he dumped his gear the moment he’d closed it behind him. ‘I was dismissed from service,’ he said. ‘Just like you.’

‘Who’ll fly
Blackened
down to the surface?’

‘No one. There are only enough squads for three gunships.
Blackened
has been loaded into this ship’s conveyance claws already. Talos has bequeathed it to Variel, full of his apothecarion equipment and relics from the Hall of Reflection. It’s to be returned to the Legion in the Eye, if we ever make it that far.’

Her smiled faded, the sun going behind the horizon. ‘We’re not going to make it that far. You know that, don’t you?’

He shrugged, evidently sanguine. ‘We’ll see.’

Word had surely
spread throughout the ship of the upcoming battle, but the
Echo
was a city in space, with all the various multitudes such scope implied. On the highest crew decks, the battle to come was a matter of focus – the officers and ratings knew their parts to play, and went about their duties with all the professionalism of those aboard an Imperial Navy warship.

On the lower decks, as one ventured deeper into the ship’s innards, the battle was either a matter of prayer, ignorance, or helpless muttering. The thousands who fed the ship with their blood and sweat, toiling in the reactor chambers and the weapon battery platforms, had no wider understanding of the situation beyond the fact a battle would soon be fought.

Talos went alone to the primary hangar deck. Tenth Company’s surviving warriors were already on board their drop-pods, while their Thunderhawks were loaded with wargear to be ferried down to them on the surface. Servitors stood in idle silence here and there, waiting for the next order that would engage their limited response arrays.