‘The shipboard vox is down,’ said Maddalena Darebeloved.
Ibram Gaunt nodded. He’d tried several wall outlets, and heard nothing but a death rattle of static. The quiet was unnerving. No transmitted throb of the engines, no purr of power conduits. There was just a slow, aching creak of metal moving and settling, as though the ancient tonnage of the Armaduke were begging for mercy.
Even the deck alarms had fallen silent.
Gaunt felt sick. His mind was numb and refusing to function clearly. He felt as though he’d been frozen and then defrosted. He was covered in bruises where gravity had smashed him back into the deck, but it was the slowness of his thoughts and the clumsiness of his hands that really bothered him.
From the look of her, Maddalena was suffering too. She was blinking fast, as if stunned, and her usual grace was absent. She was stumbling around as badly as he was.
Gaunt checked the load of his bolt pistol, holstered it and made off along the companionway. Maddalena followed him. There was a thin sheen of smoke in the processed air, and curious smells that mingled burning with the reek of spilled chemicals, and an odour that suggested that long stagnant sumps had been disturbed.
‘I’m going to find Felyx,’ Maddalena said.
Gaunt paused. He had expected as much. It was her primary duty, and he could hardly fault her for observing the orders of her House Chass masters to the letter.
He looked at her.
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘But Felyx is in no more or less danger than any of us. The welfare of the ship as a whole is at stake. For Felyx’s sake, it should be our priority to secure that first.’
She pursed her lips. It was an odd, attractive sign of uncertainty that Gaunt associated with Merity Chass. The duplicated face mirrored the expression perfectly.
‘He is my charge. His life is mine to ward,’ she said.
‘He’s my son,’ Gaunt replied.
‘You suggest?’
Gaunt gestured forwards.
‘We need to assess several key things. How dead this ship actually is. What the level of injury is. How long it will take – if it’s possible at all – to restore engineering function. On top of that, whether we’re at external risk.’
‘From boarding?’
Gaunt nodded.
‘The longer we drift here helplessly…’
Maddalena smiled.
‘Space is, forgive me for sounding simplistic, very large. To be prey for something, we’d have to be found by something.’
‘You were the one prepping your gun,’ Gaunt reminded her.
‘I’ll come with you to the bridge,’ she said.
They moved as far as the next through-deck junction and stopped as they heard footsteps clattering towards them.
‘First and Only!’ Gaunt challenged. He didn’t draw his weapon, but Maddalena had a tight grip on hers.
‘Stand easy, sir!’ a voice called back.
Gaunt recognised it.
‘Criid?’
‘Coming your way,’ Tona Criid called back. She came into view, lasrifle ready. With her came the command squad from A Company, which included Larkin and the company adjutant, Beltayn. Their faces were pale and haggard, as if they had all just woken up from a bad night’s sleep.
‘We were just coming to find you, sir,’ Criid said, ‘when it all–’
She hesitated, and gave a shrug that encompassed the ship around them.
‘–when all this happened.’
‘What have you seen?’ Gaunt asked.
‘A few injured crew, not much else,’ she replied. ‘Everyone’s been knocked around. I think grav was off for a moment.’
Gaunt nodded and looked at Beltayn. The adjutant was carrying his voxcaster set.
‘Is that working, Bel?’ Gaunt asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ Beltayn replied, nonplussed.
‘All ship-side comms are dead,’ Gaunt said. ‘We’re going to need our own field vox to coordinate. Set that up, see who you can reach. The regiment should have been at secondary order, so anyone still on his feet should be vox-ready.’
Beltayn unslung his voxcaster, set it on the deck, and lit it up. The power lights came on, and he began to adjust the frequency dials. Swirls of static and audio noise breathed out of the speakers.
‘All companies, this is Gaunt. Report location and status, confirm secondary order. Send that by voice and voxtype, and tell me what you get back.’
Beltayn nodded, and began to set up to send the message. He tapped it into the caster’s small keyboard, and then unhooked the speaker horn to deliver the spoken version. He was having trouble adjusting the frequency for clarity.
‘What’s the matter, lad?’ asked Larkin.
‘Beltayn?’ asked Gaunt.
‘Something’s awry,’ Beltayn replied, working with the dials.
‘Such as?’
‘I’m getting interference,’ the adjutant replied. ‘Listen.’
He turned the dial again very gently, and noise washed out of the speakers. It was a mix of pips, squeals, electromagnetic humming, dull metallic thuds and an odd, cackling signal that sounded like multiple voice recordings being played at high speed. The cocktail of sounds came and went in a haze of white hiss.
There was something chilling about it. Gaunt felt the back of his neck prickle.
‘Holy bloody feth,’ murmured Larkin.
‘Swear by the Throne, sir,’ said Beltayn, ‘I have no idea what that is.’
Eszrah Ap Niht, called Ezra Night by his Ghost friends, slipped silently along the vast, helpless carcass of the ship, reynbow in hand. He was a grey shadow, flitting through the gloomy depths of the ancient vessel.
He felt as though he had been turned inside out. He was not clear-headed. But years of fighting the silent war in the Untill had taught him that danger did not wait until you were feeling fit enough to face it. When danger came, you made yourself ready, no matter how wretched you felt.
His wits, sharply attuned thanks to his upbringing as a Nihtgane of Gereon, had identified threat sounds. He had isolated them from all the thousands of other noises drifting through the stricken voidship.
The Armaduke had become a prison, a reinforced, rusting, iron prison, its sensory systems blind and deaf. Acute human or transhuman senses were the only tactically viable currency.
Principal artifice and engineering formed the aft sections of the vessel, and comprised an echoing series of cavernous assembly chambers, stoking vaults and drive halls. There was a stink of grease and soot, a stink of promethium and the dull, zincy dust kicked out by the overheated extractors.
Gravity was abundantly wrong in the rear portion of the ship. Ezra didn’t really appreciate the concept of gravity. In his experience, drawn from the Untill of Gereon, the ground was that which a person stuck to, and to which all thrown or dropped objects returned. The same had proved to be true on the other worlds he had visited as part of the Tanith First retinue, and also true aboard the starships that carried them between battlefields.
Now that force, the authority of the ground, was gone. Ezra could feel the gentle, reeling tilt of the ship as it slowly spun end over end. It was like suddenly being able to feel the world turning on its axis. Starlight, filtering in through those dirty hull ports that remained unshuttered, slid like slicks of white oil across decks, up walls and across ceilings. Smoke glazed the air in uncomfortable swirls. For the most part, the deck underfoot drew him firmly as any ground should. But gravity wandered in places, where grav plates had failed, or mass-reactor rings had been misaligned by the violence of translation.
Ezra found himself walking down oddly sloping hallways and then, without warning, finding the vertical running briefly along the base of a wall. In one place, midway down a long loading hall, disrupted gravity fields took him off the deck, up one wall, over the ceiling until he was walking inverted, and then back down the other wall onto the deck again. All the while he had done nothing but stride in a straight line.