would die in that place, but every corpse we created still felt like a benediction, an offering on the altar of our long suffering. I thought of my sisters on Arraissa when I killed. With every life I ended, I signed another name, matching the corpses to those who I still remembered.
Eventually we neared the very base of that huge vessel, down in the ballast sumps where the air was thick with carbon dioxide and the decking throbbed with enginarium-heat. Our band had dwindled under the constant counter-assault, and even one of Valerian’s chamber had been killed at last, his head smashed in by a power-fisted brute with a daemon-blade. The rest fought on after that without the merest change in demeanour – their blows remained just as metronomically perfect, neither faster nor slower, an exactitude of tick-tock slaughter.
It was only as we neared our destination, the place that Valerian had selected as the one where we would make our stand, that I felt something nag at me – a numinal drag, like a sudden flex of high-grav, slinking through the mire of semi-light. The corridors slipped by in a blurred orgy of close-packed carnage, and the drag became more pronounced, until I felt like I was heading into something at once totally new and also horribly familiar.
We finally fought our way into a high chamber with a heavy pair of saw-toothed blast doors on the far side. Valerian dismantled a legionnaire guard single-handed, spinning bodily into him before breaking his neck, while we jointly took care of the rest. Then we laid charges against the doorway, dozens of them, and blew it into sprayed fragments.
On the far side, a great cylindrical well gaped ahead of us, a circular shaft that disappeared into the body of the vessel above us and out through the lower hull below. The volume of it was colossal, over a hundred metres in diameter and far higher. When I looked down I could see straight out into the void, and the shining disc of Vorlese’s upper atmosphere glared back at us from behind a glitter of void shielding. Electric force snaked up and down the shaft, catching on feeder vanes jutting out at regular intervals. For a moment I was seized with a powerful lurch of vertigo, realising that we had raced onto a precipice over the infinite.
I looked up. Something vast was suspended above us, held tight by massive chains the diameter of Rhino transports. It was truly gigantic, a long shard of black stone that led right back into the heart of the ship, faceted like a crystal, humming and yanking against its bonds. At first I didn’t understand what it was, only that it was so big that half the entire cruiser must have been hollowed out in order to carry it.
Then I suddenly knew why I felt the way I did. Perhaps no other mortal would have experienced quite the same sensation, for that thing, that immense rod of dark stone, was the same as I was. It was a null. A blank. A sink and a dissipater of psychic force. I was a lone individual, capable of projecting my unique repellence only a few metres – this thing must have had the power to deny the warp over a vast range.
I didn’t fully understand what purpose that could serve, but I could begin to make a guess. This ship had come halfway across the galaxy bearing this null cargo, retrofitted purely in order to carry it, racing far ahead of the great armies of the Despoiler in order to bring it into position here. From the gap in the cruiser’s hull I could even see the carnage wrought below us on the planet’s surface – a vast scar cut into the pristine terrain, hundreds of square kilometres burned and secured in preparation for what was to come.
It would launch. The shard would be hurled down at the world below. And when it did, this system would go dark. Already I could sense an enormous build up of power around us, and saw red marker lights race down the long shaft to the aperture at the hull’s edge.
The chains! I signed, frantically, seeing that the great fixings where the shackles met the inner wall would soon blow, loosing the shard to plunge planetwards.
The concave surface of the shaft was riddled with stairways and access platforms, latticing the walls all the way up. Above us was the first of many anchor-points for