The Aeria Gloris was now only hours from the area confirmed as the last known location of the errant vessel, and with each passing moment Amendera Kendel felt her unease grow. She chided herself that the source of her concern was not simply the obvious matter of what caused the craft to go dark, but also a trivial personal disquiet. She felt slightly guilty at her outward treatment of her adjutant. Novice-Sister Leilani had allowed her anxiety over the Warmaster’s rebellion to occupy too much of her thoughts and it was affecting her meditation; but by the same token, Kendel dwelled on something that was, in all honesty, far more inconsequential.
The Validus carried the flag of the Oblivion Knight Sister Emrilia Herkaaze, and the woman was not unknown to Amendera Kendel. Far from it; they had first met in the dark iron halls of a Black Ship just like this one, both of them drawn to the notice of the Sisters of Silence as children. Each of them recruited from worlds in the Belladone Reach, Kendel and Herkaaze had shared a vague kinship throughout their aspirant trials, but as they had grown into full Sisterhood, the women’s early friendship soured. Now, years later, they were bitter rivals, each nursing antipathy for the other. She refused to draw up the reasons from her memory, instead letting them bubble and churn just below the surface of her thoughts. To dwell on such things would only dilute her focus still further.
Sister Amendera wondered if the Witchseeker Harroda was aware of their ill-feeling towards one another; she thought it likely, as little seemed to pass beneath the notice of Sister-Senior Celia’s diamond-sharp gaze unnoticed. Perhaps, in its way, this was a test for her. Ever since the incident at the Somnus Citadel and her involvement with the renegade Death Guard Garro, Kendel had become aware that she was being scrutinised by her peers. To what end, she could not be certain.
The Knight became aware of her adjutant and her second watching her intently, waiting for her to proceed. She nodded and scrolled further on through the data encoded on the pict-slate. ~This is confirmation of what we have already been told,~ she signed with her free hand. ~Records of the ship’s tithe and previous ports. Estimation of current weapons load-out and systems capacities–~
She halted abruptly. The dense data transmission sent out to them via machine-call vox had some additional matter appended, key among them a single digitised datum captured from a partial astropathic communication. The protocols associated with Black Ship signals were completely absent; normally, any communication sent from vessel to vessel would be prefixed with a number of codicils and ciphers. There were none. The message had been sent uncoded, in the clear.
Out loud.
Kendel pushed the ‘execute’ key and the slate replayed the datum. In the quiet of the Aphonorium it seemed like shouting.
A woman’s words, rough and strangely toned, as if it had been a very long time since she had used them and could not quite remember how to speak. Two words. Just two words, but they brimmed with a terror so powerful that Sister Amendera felt her hands contract into fists, and she saw Nortor and Mollitas fall breathless.
‘The voice…’ said the woman. ‘The voice…’ And then once more, as a ragged scream. ‘The voice!’
‘What does it mean?’ The novice blinked and frowned, staring at the pict-slate. ‘It must have been a sister, but she spoke the words… She spoke them aloud.’
At her side, the Null Maiden nodded slowly. Typically, Sisterhood transmissions sent to locales beyond line-of-sight were despatched not with words but in an ancient machine-readable variant of ThoughtMark known as Orsköde, a mechanical rattle of clicking that to untrained ears would resemble the sounds of turning cogwheels. For this woman, undoubtedly one of Herkaaze’s cadre, to not only eschew that but to willingly break her Oath of Tranquillity… The implications were ominous.
~The ship never exited the empyrean,~ noted Thessaly. ~We can only guess at what they might have encountered in warp space.~
Amendera felt a cold chill across her, as one might feel on a summer’s day if a shadow passed before the face of the sun. She remembered the stink of death and decay in the corridors of the Somnus Citadel, a fly-swarmed man-shape of something insectile and foul, killing and corrupting with every clawed footstep.
She did not need to guess at what horrors the warp could hold. She had already seen them, spilled out into the real world.
A maddened sea of blood-churned surf, curtains of nameless and impossible colour, great howling halls of flayed emotion; the hellish nightmare of the immaterium raged around the Aeria Gloris as the Black Ship closed the distance towards its drifting sister-vessel. The incalculable monstrosity of warp space thundered and screamed, beating at the energy bubble of the Geller field, clawing at the craft that dared to penetrate this realm of pure psychic force; even the massed numbers of Untouchables aboard were not enough to hold such energies at bay. Without the protective barrier, the Aeria Gloris would be engulfed.
The Validus floated there, the only sign of any life the dull emerald glow from the emitter coils visible about her warp motors. Power still flowed through the derelict, but the craft made no moves to turn to meet them, nor to offer communication through vox or tight-beam laser. Alive and yet dead, the Validus floated, serene against the madness.
If the two vessels had met in normal space, it would have been policy to send across a scout party on a boarding craft, allowing the Aeria Gloris to stand off and bring her cannons and torpedo launchers to bear, lest the Validus suddenly become a threat worth terminating. But here inside the screaming caverns of the empyrean such protocols could not be followed. Instead, an altogether more delicate approach was required.
With care, the shipmaster’s bridge crew brought the Aeria Gloris closer and closer until the glimmering non-matter of her Geller field brushed that of the Validus. Cogitators programmed for just such tasks passed orders, via festoons of golden commwire and mechadendrites, to servitors using scrying scopes to measure the energy spectra being broadcast from the other Black Ship. By agonising moments, they brought the vessel’s protective envelope into synchrony with its neighbour. Like two bubbles meeting on the surface of a pond, they touched one another, shifted and finally merged. Such an operation was a difficult one, but then the Black Ships were crewed by some of the finest crop of thinking serfs available to the Imperium. It would take their constant stewardship to maintain the merging of fields; a single miscalculation would collapse both, and open the starships to the ocean of insanity lapping at their keels.
And yet the Validus drifted as if upon a calm sea. Seasoned veterans among the crew serfs talked among themselves and spoke ill of such unusual circumstance. Some, those who thought themselves safe to do so beyond the sight of the Sisters, even bent at the knee and offered a prayer to Terra and the Emperor.
The warp was rage, and constant with it. But here, in this place, there was a cavity within the churn and thunder, an expanse where all seemed becalmed. If it had been the surface of a planetary ocean, then there would have been no breath of air, only glassy water from horizon to horizon. Such things were unknown by the shipmaster, and with the tradition of all sailors dating back to the times of mankind’s first voyages in craft of wood and sail, he and his men feared and cursed it.