Elsewhere, on the lower decks of the Aeria Gloris, power moved to mechanisms capable of tunnelling through the layers of space-time, and a great flare of boiling light enveloped the ship’s teleportarium stage. The women stood upon it shimmered like mirages and were gone.
The transition flash faded into the darkness and Sister Amendera gestured with her drawn sword. To her right, Leilani held a bolt pistol in one hand and an auspex in the other, her attention on the chiming reports of the sensor device.
To her left, Thessaly was already cutting order-gestures in the air, flinging the shapes towards the three Sister-Vigilators that had accompanied them. Kendel ran a finger over her forehead without conscious thought, absently tracing the red lines of the Aquila tattoo there. She took a careful breath, glancing around the low, wide corridor they had appeared in. The Knight had expected to find the chamber cold, perhaps the air inside thin from slowed life support functions and proximity to the outer hull; she had ordered the teleport servitor not to target them too deeply into the Validus’s mass, for fear that the risk of a mis-integration would grow with the distance of projection. But the air here was warm and dry, like a desert just after sunset. And more than that, there was peculiar stillness to it, as if the motes of dust around them were suspended in some sluggish fluid.
Kendel stepped forwards, letting her blade lead her, making small, experimental cuts in the air. Despite her faint discomfort, she couldn’t find anything immediately wrong. The gravity seemed normal, and she could smell… nothing.
‘Thermal blooms in that direction,’ offered Sister Leilani, her voice strangely flat. She pointed ahead, towards the end of the corridor. Ahead there were shapes piled untidily beyond the low greenish glow of the lumes in the walls, sharp-edged metal frames of tubes and wire.
~Cages,~ signed Nortor.
The Knight nodded and advanced. She had ventured no more than a few steps when a gasp of alarm made her turn about. One of the Vigilators had approached a support pillar made of iron, which extended from the deck to the ceiling above. Her hand was in a fist and she opened it to her commander. Amendera watched a rain of metal sand fall lazily from her fingers, glittering in the lume-light. The Vigilator gestured to the pillar and showed where she had touched it. The Sister’s gloves had left dents in the iron. It crumbled beneath even the lightest of touches, becoming more powder.
Kendel snapped her fingers and Sister Leilani dutifully moved to the stanchion, tracing the scanning device over its length. She frowned and repeated the action, clearly unhappy with the initial reading. ‘Odd,’ she admitted, her words dulled and distant-sounding. ‘The auspex suggests that this piece of the ship’s structure is far older than the rest of the metal in this corridor…’ Her frown deepened. ‘By the order of several million years.’
The Knight allowed herself the rarity of a faint grunt of dismissal and beckoned her troop onwards. Strange as that was, it would not do to become bogged down in such minutiae so quickly. The group moved on, towards the discarded cages, and at once Kendel understood exactly where the teleport flash had deposited them. They were at the perimeter of the Validus’s husbandry yards, where the hunting animals deployed by the ship’s prosecutor squads would be corralled.
The thought had only just occurred to her as she crossed some invisible membrane and a barrage of sensation suddenly assaulted her. There was no force-field barrier, no detectable wall to divide one section of the corridor from another; it was simply that one moment the air about her was dead and quiescent and the next it was dense with smells and sounds. Perhaps, like the warping of time around the metal stanchion, the two ends of the passageway existed in differing states.
Nortor came to her side and she saw the other Sister’s face wrinkle in faint disgust. Here, the air was thick with the coppery stink of old, spilled blood, a heavy perfume of rust that almost concealed other, earthier stenches of rotten meat and faeces. The tainted air here also carried sound differently; it was clearer, harsher on the ears. Kendel heard a scraping, a dripping, from one of the shadowed corners. She stepped over a flattened enclosure, seeing a mush of small bones, flesh and white feathers inside. Among the pieces of the dead raptor were shiny golden psiber circuits that flashed as they caught the light.
One of the Sister-Vigilators aimed her bolter in the direction of the sound and thumbed a switch on the weapon’s flank; an illuminator rod fixed to the barrel snapped on, casing a cold oval of white light before it. The scraping paused, and there at the edge of the torchlight a pair of eyes glowed. More beams stabbed out to reveal a large, pale-furred mastiff as it sniffed in the direction of the women. The snout of the enhanced canine was brown and wet, and as it panted, the glassy vials of accelerant fluids implanted in its back clinked together. To one side, Nortor snapped her fingers in a command string, but the animal ignored her. After a moment, the hound looked away and bowed its head, returning to its task. Kendel took a careful step closer and the animal was fully revealed, lapping at a wide comma of blood pooled about the head and neck of a crew serf. The top of the man’s skull was open, and in one hand he held a Sisterhood-issue stake-thrower. She studied him for a moment; he appeared to have used the weapon first to nail his legs to the deck by firing a long quarrel through each ankle, then one more through his other hand.
‘He tried to crucify himself,’ said Leilani.
The en-dog was looking up at them again, and slowly its lips drew back to show metal teeth, a low growl building in its throat. Kendel heard the fluid in the tubes bubble and hiss. She had seen the damage these animals could do firsthand when she herself had given orders to release them. The Knight threw a glance at Sister Thessaly and made an open-handed gesture.
~Flamer.~
There was a snap-hiss as the pilot lamp lit, and Nortor brought her weapon off the strap and around in one smooth action. Before the en-dog had the chance to rock forwards off its steel-clawed feet, the Sister squeezed the trigger bar and bathed the animal in a cloud of burning promethium. It died with a squeal and they left it where it fell, moving on towards a bank of access shafts.
Kendel saw her novice dally a moment around the animal’s corpse and snapped her fingers. Leilani’s head bobbed in acknowledgement, and she followed.
The light from the gun torches swept left and right around them as Kendel gave the other woman a sideways look. ~That will not be the only death we see this day,~ she signed. ~Look.~
The Vigilators moved on, and in heaps here and there, piled up against the walls or amid the smashed cages, there were dead after dead. Raptors, hounds and servitors.
But not a single Sister.
The deck plans of the Validus had been encoded into the memory tubes of Leilani’s auspex, and once the boarding party had found their bearings, it was a simple matter to orientate themselves in order to scale the Black Ship’s inner tiers towards the commandery and bridge. Sister Thessaly took a moment to send a vox message back to the Aeria Gloris, a staccato chatter of clicks that signified all was well, that the mission was proceeding as planned; but the novice could not help but wonder how anything they encountered here could be ‘as planned’.
The Validus was a death ship, a floating tomb, and if it had not been silent before, then it truly was so now. Leilani knew the emergency protocols as well as any Sister. The standing orders aboard Black Ships were rigid and unchangeable: in the event of any shipboard catastrophe of such magnitude that the command crew could not overcome it, failsafe switches would flood the dungeon decks with Life-Eater, a bio-weapon of terrible swiftness and horrific virulence. If the Sisters aboard this ship were as dead as the serfs they had found, then so were the witches. It had to be so; if it were not, then why were the boarding party still alive, why had they not been attacked the moment they teleported aboard? Moreover, she knew that whatever had killed the unfortunates they had found had been no gas or bio-weapon.