make my way to the hangar before my route was cut off. There was nothing left to salvage here, though the scenes of destruction and the bodies encased in ancient armour would give the enforcers pause when they eventually arrived.
I moved out carefully, keeping my dagger in hand. I’d have to get back to the Cadamara swiftly, get out of range of Arraissa, and then plan my next move. There were many possibilities, but I needed time to think, to start to make sense of what had happened. Grieving would come when I could afford it – right now, I had to assume I was hunted, as were perhaps all my kind still operating out in the void.
He calls His daughters Home.
I couldn’t get the words out of my mind. They echoed as I broke into a run, fleeing through the blood-webbed corridors.
What did it mean? What did any of it mean?
I returned to the Cadamara, hardly bothering to evade the clusters of frantic air traffic that threatened to bar my way. Civil defence assets had been fully mobilised by then, as had the matt-black flyers of the planetary Arbites units. Their enforcers were effective troops, but I shuddered to think what slaughter would have taken place had they arrived in time to disturb the true enemy.
Even for us, I admit, there was a tendency to think of our foes as deranged and bloodthirsty, ever likely to sink into a berserk frenzy when the opportunity for slaughter presented itself. Some of them were, of course, and we had won battles on the basis of our greater discipline, but that was to underestimate the true masters of ruin, who fought as keenly and as shrewdly as they had once done as servants of Terra.
They were taking out identified targets, moving on before discovery, making the best use of their numbers. I thought again to the star map from Hellion.
My thoughts were interrupted by the commencement of the docking cycle. I pulled inside the hangar, secured the interceptor and made my way back to the command bridge.
‘Widespread damage to major planetary infrastructure,’ Erefan reported, somewhat superfluously. ‘No sign of enemy units remaining in-system.’
There had been one, though, I thought to myself.
My crew would need orders now. They would need to be told what to do, and how to react. In the normal run of things I would have given them what they needed without hesitation, but I was still in a state of shocked grief. Erefan must have sensed it, for he started giving commands without waiting for me.
‘Take us out of orbit,’ he commanded. ‘Beyond augur range, then hold for further instructions.’
The Cadamara swung round, bumping up against some tumbling wreckage, then boosted clear of the upper atmosphere. As we picked up speed for system-exit, I saw the colossal outline of an Astra Militarum troop carrier emerge over the horizon. Arraissa had its own regiments, and one had clearly been scrambled already. The clean-up was beginning.
Then we were gone, boosting clear of the debris and back out into the open void. Once the Cadamara’s engines hit full tilt, the world shrank back quickly, first a pale orb, then a spot, then nothing. I knew somehow it would be the last time I would ever see it, and so watched the viewers the whole time to ensure I would remember the sight.
The crew said nothing to me. Most averted their eyes, though I caught a few snatched upward glances from the scanner pits. They knew I had no soul. They were probably wondering whether I also lacked a heart.
I sent a message to the ship’s Navigator, indicated for Erefan to carry on as he was doing, then went back to my own quarters. Once there, I retrieved the items I had taken from Hellion, most of them still shrouded in null-fields. I started to go through them all, activating any comm-canisters I could find, studying the scraps of parchment and ritual prayers.
After a while of this, the Navigator, Slovo, appeared. I could sense the extreme wariness in him. It was harder for him than it was for human-normals to be close to me. At least they were only partly psychic creatures, whereas Slovo was at the opposite end of the spectrum – a being wholly steeped in the tide of souls. I found him fairly objectionable too, but that was mostly down to poor personal hygiene.
‘You asked for me, lord,’ he said, bowing stiffly.
He was a skinny man, draped in dirty robes