Fighting down a shudder, the novice-sister found her gaze drifting up to the gantry above the bridge platform. There was a single hatch up there, a thick disc of metal set in a heavy ring of black iron; beyond it would be a narrow tunnel leading to the astropath habitat, where the ship’s tame psykers would parse messages for transmission across the interstellar deeps. Such sections of a starship were always heavily shielded, for even the smallest amount of telepathic interference could upset their delicate sensory paths; aboard a Black Ship, the matter was magnified a thousandfold.
Only the most highly trained, the most tightly controlled of the astropath kindred could ever serve aboard a vessel that was such a riot of psi-noise, and even then the life expectancy for them was a fraction of that of their fellows aboard normal ships of the line. Even their sanctorum, isolated from the rest of the craft through advanced technologies, energy fields and thick walls of psi-resistant metals, was pale shelter for them. Leilani could not help but wonder what had transpired in there after this… awakening.
She looked back to find the Oblivion Knight watching her. Sister Amendera gestured in BattleMark, having clearly come to the same conclusion. ~Investigate and evaluate.~
Grimly, the novice accepted her orders with a nod and shucked off her cloak, so that she could more easily enter the narrow conduit overhead. Removing her bolt pistol, Leilani checked the weapon and reached for the access ladder, willing her hands not to tremble.
The hatch yawned open to present her with a shallow, gloomy tunnel lit from the far end by pale blue illuminators. Without looking back, she ascended, leading with her pistol. She smelled decay in the stalled, stagnant air.
The chamber was spherical and smooth-walled, the faint light spilling from oval lumes arranged in a ring around the interior equator. The inner surface of the murky chamber glittered gently where intricate lines of microscopic text ranged around from pole to pole. Leilani felt a moment of confusion, of wrongness, and in the next second she had the reason why.
‘Gravity,’ she said aloud. ‘There’s gravity in here.’
Usually, the astropaths aboard a craft of this class would live in a null-gee bubble, cut off from the graviton generators of the rest of the ship so that they could float freely without concern for the vagaries of something so base, so mundane as walking upon their feet. But here, the nullifying field was inactive, and she sought and found a sparking control panel some distance up the curved walls where the command switches has been forcefully disabled.
It was then that she saw them, and understood. There were three astropaths in the choir of the Validus, and it appeared that, while afloat overhead, with great care they had removed their outer robes and fashioned them into nooses, fixing one end to the upper ranges of the hollow chamber and the others about their necks. Then, one of them must have destroyed the controls and allowed the pull of gravity to reclaim their bodies, and snap their necks.
The corpses of the dead psykers swayed slightly in the flow of new air that had followed Leilani up the access tunnel. In the low light, she could not make out any features upon the three; their faces were puffy, blood-streaked orbs, turned to ribbons of wet meat where they had clawed at themselves in some sort of frenzy.
When Sister Leilani returned to the bridge platform, Kendel read what the young woman had seen in the astropath chamber from the paleness of her face.
~All targets self-terminated.~ The novice-sister gave her report in BattleMark without thinking, but Kendel chose not to correct her. The sight had shaken the girl. Mollitas was far stronger than she gave herself credit for – if she had not been, the Oblivion Knight would never have chosen her as her adjutant – but she was reluctant to test her own limits and, until she did, the Oath of Tranquillity, the mark of the Aquila and true Sisterhood would be beyond her reach.
~Orders?~ Sister Thessaly stood before her commander, toying with her weapon.
The Oblivion Knight hesitated for a moment, then nodded to the senior of the Sister-Vigilators. ~Split squads,~ she signed. ~Vigilators, aft approach.~ Kendel touched her chest. ~This unit, forwards. Descend and converge.~ She brought her hands together and clasped them. In one context the symbol could mean alliance, in another collision, or even amalgam. In this, it indicated a target to be located and isolated. It was not necessary for her to outline their objective; the last words of the shipmaster had made that certain.
She switched speech. ~We will find our sisters,~ she told them. ~This is our order and our obligation.~
Nortor made the sign of the Aquila.
‘In the Emperor’s name,’ whispered Mollitas.
They emerged into an icy cavern, boots crunching on rimes of hoarfrost and snow, the access channel to the dungeon decks carpeted with a blanket of oily grey slush. It was a peculiar sight to see inside the metal halls of a starship, more suited to a winter’s day upon some distant colony world. Kendel’s breath emerged from her mouth in trails of white and she threw a questioning look to the novice. They were deep inside the Validus now, nowhere near the exterior hull where the leeching cold of space could reach them. The Knight raised a hand to her armoured collar to toggle a vox control, intending to signal the Vigilators. Were they seeing the same thing? Was this yet another of the strange spot-effects that were scattered throughout the interior of the derelict Black Ship?
But a motion from Nortor made her hesitate. The other Sister nodded towards tall columns of dirty ice clustering in one corner. There was movement behind them and breath, white in the air.
‘Who is there?’ The novice-sister gave voice to the question. ‘Show yourself.’
Kendel felt a weak, familiar pressure at the back of her skull. It was like the sense of heaviness in the sky before a storm, or the very faintest of echoes. She was drawing her eagle-head sword when a figure suddenly bolted from between the ice pillars, half-running, half-skidding towards them.
A man in a frost-caked overall came at her, an iron manacle and length of broken chain clattering about one ankle. She saw a leering grin and eyes wide, showing too much white. Haloes of vapour formed around his hands and she felt the already-low temperature drop still further. He was conjuring snow out of the air, grabbing it and moulding it into blades of ice.
Kendel knew the kind welclass="underline" a cryokene. She held up a hand to halt Nortor from placing a bolt shell through his breastbone as a matter of course, and let the psyker come on towards her, his bare feet slapping at the frozen deck plates.
In the man’s eyes she saw the moment, as she had so many times before with her other quarries, when understanding hit him. In mid-run, the psyker pushed into the edge, the faint, ghostly periphery where Kendel’s Pariah gene began to exert its influence upon him. He entered the invisible zone about her where the Sister’s Untouchable nature created a pool of nothingness in the shadow-space of the warp. Some of Amendera’s kindred were stronger in this than others, and in some the great gift of Silence manifested itself in different ways; for the Oblivion Knight it was an unseen sphere that extended beyond her flesh, dampening the power of any psyker with increasing severity the closer they came.
The cryokene stumbled, the ice storm he had been creating from thin air suddenly evaporating in his clawed hands, the ice shattering. Kendel met his gaze with a warning glare and shook her head in mute censure.