Even so, it wasn’t that she couldn’t endure these changes or that cataloguing them led to distraction. The truth was far blunter than anyone not of a noble Knightly bloodline could ever easily grasp. After a lifetime of piloting her own machine, Jaya was living inside a body that wasn’t her own. She was wearing someone else’s skin.
She walked the still-unfamiliar Knight through the hangar, swaying against the buckles of her throne with its graceless gait. Runic signifiers on her weapon monitors showed her ammunition by weight instead of exact numerals, estimating payloads. She felt her teeth clenching at the prickle along her skin, the blood-rush of bearing lethal armament once more.
For the first time since setting eyes upon this war machine, she felt the tremble of a connection. She could kill again. She could destroy.
This was strength. This was power.
What was your name? she wondered, looking around the cockpit. Who were you before you were beaten, shamed and left for dead?
She brought the Knight around towards the hangar’s rear, where the massed wreckage of tanks and troop transports was serving as obstacles to manoeuvre around or assault with arm-mounted melee weaponry. Recognising their baroness’ approach, two other scions walked their machines back out of the way, giving her the field.
And she swore in that moment that she felt the immense engine block housed in the armoured compartment behind her growl just a little louder.
She glanced to the crackling monitor linked to her left arm’s gun-feed. Target locks refused to hold. Alignment chimes that should be ringing in clear, constant signals instead stuttered and hiccupped. How typical of this machine. How–
No. No more excuses. She didn’t care. She leaned forwards in the throne, riding the uncomfortable, shaking gait, and guided the war machine’s left arm upwards. No trajectory calculations. No aiming. No hesitation. She raised the arm and fired.
Stabilisers kicked in late, subjecting her to two seconds of teeth-clacking shivers, but Jaya scarcely noticed. Her grin was morbid with black laughter as a stream of tracer fire roared forth and pulverised the wreckage of a loader transport, punching molten yellow holes in its scorched hull. By the time her heart had beat six times, the flyer was barely recognisable. In its place lay a steaming mangle of blighted metal.
Jaya strode forwards, her clawed mechanical feet crushing thousands of spent shells into the deck. The sword that formed her right arm thunder-cracked into life, sheathed in an energy-spitting power field. A second peal of thunder rang out across the great hangar as she battered the annihilated wreckage aside with the swinging blade.
Later, she would remember hearing cheers across the vox. Later, she’d recall Torolec’s pleased murmurs of benediction. Later, she’d rest well for the first time in months.
The Knight-Castigator overbalanced on the backswing, almost stumbling; Jaya slammed the opposing foot down, catching herself from falling, and immediately reared back up to full height. Another skull-rattling volley spat in a tracer stream from the over-under twin barrels of her primary cannon, stitching a trail across the hulls of three trashed Rhinos.
The blade fell again, swinging down in an impaling execution – a warrior finishing off a fallen foe. Jaya slammed a foot down on the shattered civilian transport beneath her, keeping it in place as she wrenched the sword free again. This time she didn’t overbalance. Flakes and scraps of metal sizzled along the sword’s edge as they dissolved in the power field’s heat.
The towering Knight raised its blade high before an audience of menial hangar crews, servitor slaves and their sacristan overseers; yet the gesture wasn’t for them. In ragged mimicry, the active Knights present each answered as best they could. Some raised blades or bullet-starved barrels of their own, others blared raw noise from their bullhorns, while those rendered unarmed and otherwise silent lowered their unpainted faceplates in respect.
Sacristan Apex Torolec consulted the data-slate in two of his four hands, allowing himself a thin smile at the sight of his baroness’ cockpit feed. Perhaps this was going to work, after all.
Thirteen
What has happened before / The use of glory / Prophecy and foresight
Ra opened his eyes to absolute blackness. A darkness deep enough to penetrate the senses, filling his eye sockets like pools of spilled oil. He waited for his perceptions to align. There was no fear. He knew the sensation of his master’s summons.
Remorse sat within his heart, this time. The ambush at the Ossuary still tore at him, its questions presenting no easy answers.
We were so close.
No answer came from the Emperor – if his king had even heard.
Soon, there was light. Faint. Fractured. Tormentingly distant. Light manifesting in pinpricks, the iota-eyes of faraway suns. They speckled the void in a milky rash, glinting, winking, each one staring with a light that took a brief eternity to reach Ra’s senses.
He was without form and shape. He merely existed in the void, a presence above a world cradled in the infinite black, a war-eaten planet bathed by the fusion glare of its insignificant yellow sun.
‘Terra,’ he said, without mouth, breath, teeth or tongue.
+Terra.+ The Emperor’s voice thrummed through his skull. Disembodied, as eternal as any star. +Mere centuries ago, in the thrall of the Unification Wars. Warlords and archpriestesses and magician-kings and clan chiefs fight over the harrowed territory of a broken world. My Thunder Legion marches to war against them. Against all of them.+
‘It grieves me not to have fought at your side in those days, my king.’
+Your loyalty is noted, yet your grief is irrelevant.+
‘Why am I here?’ Ra thought and spoke at once. No discernible separation existed between what was in his mind and what he vocalised into the void.
+Because I will it.+
It was the only answer he required, but he had hoped for more. Whatever purpose this illumination served was, so far, beyond Ra’s guesswork.
With a wrenching lurch, the stars spun. Light bent and folded. The infinite blackness at once welcomed and rejected him, embracing his presence but defying his senses as he sought to process the speed at which he flew through the void. Nebulae bloomed before him, around him, as thick to the eyes as the poison gas clouds of forbidden weaponry, yet perfectly dark to all other senses. Worlds turned around god’s-eye stars, some seared beneath the fat blue heat of swollen suns, some left cold on the outermost edges of the stellar ballet, travelling almost in exile among the frozen rocks that tumbled through deep and lifeless space.
So many of these globular jewels were not jewels at all, as unsuited as they were to cradling human life. For all of the terraforming pushed upon the galaxy’s scattered worlds during the wonderworking of the Dark Age of Technology, an infinity of planets still revolved in the savage, storm-wracked, gaseous serenity that rendered human habitation impossible.