They moved deeper into the Black Ship’s interior, past long corridors of testing cells walled in with spherical shields made of psi-toxic phase-iron, across the gantries between the utility decks. Overhead, stalled carriages on angular rail channels that in other times would shuttle crew and material from tier to tier and down the city’s-length of the vessel were frozen in mid-journey, faint lights burning inside. Along the way they found more signs of curious phenomena: other places where hull metal had been turned into dust or wet slurry by means unknown, one section where the air was hazed by a smoke that hung like a frozen image until they passed through it, and chambers where the walls, floor and ceiling were painted over with a molecule-thin layer of human blood. It seemed without rhyme or reason to Leilani; perhaps it was the touch of the warp at the hand of these things.
At last, they reached the command deck, another broad corridor that branched off into smaller ancillary chambers, with the open amphitheatre of the Validus’s bridge at the far end. Lit in the yellow smoulder of the lumes were masses of bodies, piled atop one another in a disordered fashion, as if a thronging crowd had perished instantly on its feet and been left where they had fallen. Ahead of her, Sister Thessaly hesitated and held up a hand to halt the rest of the group. There was a strange murmur in the air, an ebb and flow like the sound of surf on a shore. It took a moment for the novice to realise that it was breathing.
She peered at a group of the bodies closest to her – they were crew serfs, their duty uniforms simple tan affairs with a minimum of braid and sigils – and was startled. They were not dead; none of them were. Instead, the whole mass of the crewmen lay, blank eyes seeing but not seeing as if in some form of catatonia.
Nortor prodded one of them with the tip of her boot. When there was no reaction, she reached down and took the hand of a serf. Without pause, the Silent Sister broke the man’s finger. The wet snap of bone sounded, but little else.
Sister Amendera picked her way through the bodies to peer into an open iris hatch on the far wall; Leilani followed her, recognising the doorway as the entrance to a saviour pod. There were more bodies inside, some of them strapped into the seats of the escape capsule, others lying on the floor where they had dropped. Like the serfs in the corridor, all of them were alive but insensate. The novice studied the face of one man, a bridge officer by the rank tabs on his shoulder boards. His eyes were those of a doll, glassy and infinitely empty.
‘Whatever did this destroyed their minds.’ She glanced around the corridor again. ‘All of them. All at once.’ Leilani’s throat became arid as she imagined this scene replicated all through the Validus, with every crewmember reduced to a fleshy husk, minds ruined by some catastrophic, instantaneous flash of psychic force. ‘In Terra’s name,’ she whispered, ‘what happened here?’
Further down the corridor, one of the Vigilators rapped on the steel wall to attract their attention. ~No Sisters,~ she signed.
~Onwards,~ ordered the Oblivion Knight.
The Vigilators shouldered away the bodies of fallen crew choking the entrance to the bridge proper, and the Silent Sisters entered with weapons at the ready, casting their sight into every shadowed corner on the ready for attack. A long platform that extended out over the main oval of the control pit several metres below, the bridge was designed in such a way that the Black Ship’s commanding officer could stand at the rail as if at the prow of an ocean-going vessel, and see his staff ranged out beneath him. Only the most senior crew had stations on this level, and the wide banners of flickering hololithic screens formed an arc of glassy lenses in the air above their consoles. Most of the monitors were little more than rains of static, but some still functioned, showing the process of autonomic systems inside the Black Ship’s drive core, the steady tick of life support. Leilani noticed one screen displaying a feed from an exterior camera; the blunt bow of the Aeria Gloris was visible, rendered in shadow against the churning red-purple hell of warp space. Other active screens were lined in dark crimson, trailing pennants of emergency warning glyphs. One of the Vigilators scrutinised an engineer’s panel, her long leather-clad fingers moving over the keys.
~The kill-switch was not activated,~ she signed. ~There was no release of the termination option here.~
Nortor looked up from a console by the command throne. ~Shipmaster’s log is intact.~
Kendel sheathed her sword with a grimace and gestured for Sister Thessaly to continue. The other woman tapped a string of keys on the console and a crackling hum issued out from vox grilles hidden in the steelwork.
Leilani caught sight of a man in a commander’s dark kepi, sprawled out on the deck in lee of a Y-shaped stanchion; it was this man’s voice that filled the dank air of the bridge as the data-spool rewound. Each entry was short and precise, punctuated by a clicking code indicating numerical data. The shipmaster spoke of an urgent signal that had reached them outside the normal strictures of contact protocol, a faint entreaty that the astropaths aboard the Validus had considered strangely phrased and slightly disturbing. The bonded psykers complained of their disquiet at the communiqué, and they were sickened by a peculiar resonance that clung to the signal, an echo of phasure displacement that troubled them greatly. And yet, the message was in order, bearing the ciphers that guaranteed the authority of the highest levels of the Silent Sisterhood. The novice saw her mistress scowl at this, her eyes narrowing. The briefing imparted by Sister Harroda had mentioned nothing of any message sent to the craft before its disappearance.
The shipmaster spoke of a single, simple order contained in the transmission. The Validus’s captain was commanded to bring the vessel to a halt in this region of the ever-turbulent warp and await further contact. This they had done, only to encounter the first incidents of the atemporal phenomena that the Sisters had witnessed on their passage through the lower decks. The entry ended, and after a pause Nortor triggered the next in the sequence.
~This is the last,~ she noted.
Again the voice of the shipmaster; but this time he seemed like a different man, the matter-of-fact clarity with which he had recorded his earlier logs gone. Leilani listened carefully and heard spikes of raw panic in the captain’s words fighting to overwhelm his self-control. She heard him pause and mutter, his voice rising and falling as he fretted over the fate of his ship.
There, amid the sudden and alien calm, something had begun down on the dungeon decks. Moving like a tide, radiating like a nova, inside the iron holding cells the massed psyker cargo awoke as one, burning out the neuroshackles that held them in check, the potent dampening filters pumped into their bloodstreams becoming weak and ineffective. The Validus’s astropathic choir began to scream. There was weeping and bellowing and–
Silence.
~The final entry ends here,~ signed Sister Thessaly. ~There is nothing else.~
Leilani felt sickened, as if an invisible patina of dirt was suddenly coating her flesh. The idea of rampant, uncontrolled psykers in such number was utterly abhorrent to her. It was everything the Sisterhood stood against, and it made her feel soiled to think she was in close proximity to such a thing.