Void Stalker (6 page)

The prophet stilled himself, taking a deep breath.

‘I am fine,’ he said.

Each of them looked at him with doubt in their eyes. Variel’s cold gaze was keenest of all.

‘We must speak in the apothecarion soon, Talos. There are tests to be run, and suspicions I hope are not confirmed.’

‘As you wish,’ he conceded. ‘Once we return from Tsagualsa.’

IV

THE THREAT OF WINTER

The city of
Sanctuary barely deserved the title, and it deserved its name even less. By far the largest of the settlements on the far-frontier world Darcharna, it was a mongrel cityscape formed from landed explorator ships, half-buried colonist cruisers, and simple prefabricated structures risen against the howling dust storms that blanketed the planet’s face in place of real weather.

Walls of cheap rockcrete and corrugated iron ringed the city limits, patchworked by flakboard repairs and armour-plating pried from the beached spaceships.

The lord of this spit-and-bonding-tape settlement looked out at his domain from the relative quiet of his office. Once, the room had been the observation spire aboard the Ecclesiarchy pilgrim hauler
Currency of Solace.
Now it stood empty of the pews and viewing platforms, housing nothing beyond the archregent’s personal effects. He called it his office, but it was his home, just as it had been the home of every single archregent for the last five generations, since the Day of Downfall.

The window-dome was thick enough to suppress the gritty winds into silence, no matter how they thrashed and raged at the settlement below. He watched the gale’s shadow now, unable to see the howling winds but forever able to see their influence in the flapping of ragged flags and the crashing of armoured windows slamming closed.

Will we go dark,
he wondered.
Will we go dark again? Is this the first storm of yet another Grey Winter?

The archregent pressed his hand to the dense glass, as though he could feel the gale blowing through the bones of his junkyard city. He let his gaze drift upward, to the thin cloud cover and the stars beyond.

Darcharna – the
real
Darcharna – was still out there somewhere. Perhaps the Imperium had despatched another colonist fleet to replace the one that had been lost with all souls in the deepest depths of the warp, only to find itself vomited back into real space in the Eastern Fringe. What little contact existed between this Darcharna, the Darcharna they called home, and the wider Imperium was limited, to say the least. It was also not a matter for the populace. Some things had to be kept secret.

The last had been several years before – another garbled vox message from a distant world, relaying the signal from deeper beyond. Throne only knew how it had reached them. The automated response to several centuries of pulsed calls for supplies and extraction was blunt to the point of crudity.

You are protected even in the darkness. Remember always, the Emperor knows all and sees all. Endure. Prosper.

The archregent breathed slowly as the memory curdled in his thoughts. Its meaning was clear enough:
Remain on your dead world. Live there as your fathers did. Die there as your fathers did. You are forgotten.

During his rule, he’d personally spoken to only two souls off-world. The first was the magos captain of a deep-space explorator vessel, with no interest in any dialogue beyond cataloguing the world’s usefulness and moving on. Finding little of worth meant the ship had left orbit after a handful of hours. The second soul was a lord among the sacred Adeptus Astartes, who had informed him this region of space came under the protectorate of his warriors, the Genesis Chapter. They sought a fleeing xenos fleet outside the Emperor’s light, and while the Imperial Space Marine lord had professed sympathy with the unwilling colonists of Darcharna, his warship was no place for, in his words, ‘the tread of ten million mortal boots’.

The archregent had said he understood, of course. One did not argue with warriors of heroic mythology. No, indeed – especially not when they displayed such a thin veneer of patience.

‘Do you have no astropaths?’ the Space Marine lord had pressed. ‘No psychic souls with the power to call out into the void?’

Oh, they did. Incidents of psychic occurrence were perhaps a little too common on Darcharna; a fact the archregent had considered wise to conceal from the Adeptus Astartes lord. Half of the psychically-aware men and women born to the colony cities suffered mutation or deviance beyond tolerable allowance. As for the other half, many were put down in peace when they showed signs of failing their training. What passed for an Astropathic Guild in Sanctuary was a collection of shamans and interpreters of dreams, forever whispering to ancestor-spirits only they could see, and insisting on worshipping the sun as a distant manifestation of the Emperor.

Those leaders who donned the mantles of Ecclesiarchs – the archregent and abettor among them – sympathised with the solar reverence on this darkest of worlds. Despite most of the cities’ populations having access to the old archives, a huge number of them considered themselves among the faithful.

Even so, there were limits. At best, the Astropathic Cult was a den of deviancy waiting to happen, with little to no ability to actually communicate off-world. At worst, they were already heretics in dire need of purging, just as they’d been culled by former archregents in previous generations. How many times had they called out into the void never to receive an answer, never to even know if their cries were loud or strong enough to reach other minds?

The archregent stood at his window for some time, watching the stars decorating the sky. In his reverie, he didn’t even hear the dull grind of the door opening on low power.

‘Archregent?’ came a tremulous voice.

He turned then, to be met by the thoughtful eyes and perpetual frown of Abettor Muvo. The younger man was slender to the point of ill health, and his bloodshot eyes and yellowing skin told of organs working poorly. In this regard, he was no different from any of the population in Sanctuary, or any of the other settlements across Darchana. Crude hydroponic plantations in the sunless bowels of beached void cruisers sustained the surviving descendants of the first colonists, but hardly enriched them. There was – the archregent had decided long ago – surely a difference between living and simply being alive.

‘Hello, Muvo,’ the ageing man smiled. It deepened the lines of his thin face. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?’

‘The storm-scryers have sent word from the east hills. I thought you’d want to know.’

‘I thank you for your diligence. Am I to assume Grey Winter falls once more? It feels early this year.’ But then, it felt earlier every year. One of the curses of getting old, he thought.

The abettor’s scowl softened for a rare moment. ‘Would you believe, we actually have an uplink?’

The archregent didn’t bother to conceal his surprise. Vox and pict communication beyond Sanctuary’s walls, and often within it, were so unreliable the technology bordered on being abandoned. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d spoken over a vox in the last two years, and even then, all three of those times had been within Sanctuary’s city limits.

‘I would like that very much,’ he said. ‘Visual?’

The abettor gave an abrupt grunt and said nothing.

‘Ah,’ the archregent nodded. ‘I thought not.’

The two men moved to the archregent’s battered desk, looking into the dead screen set in the wooden face. Several dials needed re-tuning before anything like a voice resolved itself.

Rivall Meyd, the
son of Dannicen Meyd, was a technician in the same vein as his father. He carried the official rank of storm-scryer, which gave him no small pride, but travelling up into the hills and predicting weather patterns was only a small part of his duties. Most of the people walled up back in Sanctuary and the other encampments knew little of his work.

He was content with their ignorance. Using his heirloom meteorological auspex scanners was more glamorous to layfolk than the truth, which was that he spent most of his time bandaged and goggled against the grit of the dust plains, looking for things that didn’t exist and wasting time on things that couldn’t be repaired.

They needed metal. The people of Sanctuary needed metal almost as much as they needed food, but there was almost none to be found. Any veins of ore he found in his travels were hollow and worthless. Any scrap metal from damaged ships on the Day of Downfall had been vultured up by his predecessors decades ago.

The vox towers and storage bunkers were another matter, but enjoyed the same measure of failure. The first generation of colonists, fresh from the Day of Downfall, had clearly been optimistic and enterprising souls. They’d built relay networks of communication towers across the plains, binding each city by the dubious reassurance of vox contact. Bunkers had been established beneath the ground, to refuel and resupply travellers making the overland journey between cities and satellite settlements. Even from their first landing, it was little trouble to brew and refine promethium fuel for wheeled vehicles, though flyers and void-worthy vessels were grounded – thirsty for fuel and unable to sustain flight in the winds anyway.

Rivall stood at the cliff’s edge, brushing dust from the lenses of his macrobinoculars and looking back at Sanctuary as a stain on the horizon. Most of the city stood empty now. The fleet had come to Darcharna with almost thirty million souls cramped in the confines of pilgrim carriers and repurposed troop ships serving as colonist vessels. Planetwide estimates now numbered them at fewer than a third of that, in the four hundred and seventieth year since the Day of Downfall.

‘Meyd, get over here.’

‘What is it?’ He lowered the macrobinoculars and moved over the rocks back to his partner. Eruko was wrapped as he was, no skin showing against the abrading wind. His friend was crouched by the backpack vox-caster, working the dials.

‘It’s only the bloody archregent,’ Eruko said. ‘If you’re not too busy staring at the horizon.’

Meyd crouched with him, straining to hear the voice.

‘…fine work, storm-scryers,’ it was saying between distortion crackles. ‘…Winter?’

Meyd was the one to answer. ‘The scanners register a drop in temperature, as well as an increase in winds, over the last week. The first storms are coming, but Grey Winter is still a few weeks away, sire.’

‘Repeat please,’ the voice returned.

Meyd breathed in deep, and lowered the cloth strips wrapped around his face, baring his lips to the scratching wind. He repeated himself, word for word.

‘Good news, gentlemen,’ replied the archregent.

‘So we’re gentlemen now?’ asked Eruko quietly. Meyd smiled back.

‘Sire?’ Meyd spoke into the speech-handle. ‘Any word from Takis and Coruda?’

‘Who? I am afraid I’m not familiar with their names.’

‘The…’ Meyd had to pause to cough glassy grit from his throat. ‘The team responsible for the next eastern boundary. They went to scout last night’s asteroid for iron.’

‘Ah. Of course. No word yet,’ the archregent replied. ‘My apologies, gentlemen.’ Rivall Meyd liked the old man’s voice. He sounded kind, always patient, like he genuinely cared.

‘I assume this contact is only possible because you managed to repair the erosion damage to East Pylon Twelve.’

Meyd smiled, despite the grit stinging his lips. ‘It is, sire.’ He didn’t add that they’d needed to junk an old dune-runner buggy to get it done.

‘A rare victory. You have my thanks and admiration, both of you. Come to my office when your rotation ends. I will offer you a glass of whatever passes for alcoholic finery in my admittedly limited cellar.’

Neither Meyd nor Eruko replied.

‘Gentlemen?’ the archregent’s voice rang out. ‘Ah, have we lost the link?’

Eruko hit the ground first, his cheek breaking against the stone. He said nothing. He did nothing, except bleed in silence. The blade through his heart had killed him instantly.

Meyd wasn’t dead when he fell. He reached a bleeding hand to the vox-caster’s emergency rune button, but lacked the strength to push it. Bloodstained fingertips smeared meaningless patterns over the button’s plastek surface.

‘Gentlemen?’ asked the archregent again.

Meyd drew the last breath of his life, and used it to scream.

The archregent looked
at the abettor. The younger man toyed with the hem of his brown robe’s sleeves.

‘I would like you to tell me that was interference,’ the archregent said.

The abettor sniffed. ‘What else would it have been?’

‘It sounded to me like someone was crying out, Muvo.’

The abettor attempted to force a smile. It wasn’t entirely successful. With respect to the older man, his hearing wasn’t what it once was. They both knew how often Muvo had to repeat himself for the archregent.

‘I believe it was interference,’ the abettor said again.

‘Maybe so.’ The archregent ran his hands through his thinning white hair, and took a breath. ‘I would still feel more comfortable sending out a search team if those gentlemen have not restored contact within the hour. You heard the wind, Muvo. If they fell from those cliffs…’

‘Then they’re already dead, sire.’

‘Or in need of help. But dead or alive, we are recovering them.’ He felt curiously energised for a moment. The dust plains had taken too many of them over the years, and Eruko and Meyd were close enough to recover in a few days, if the dust storms were really going to stay away a while longer.