never been my strong point, and, as Hestia had always told me, there is greater power in righteous wrath than in meek acceptance.
I staggered. Something had hit us hard. That, I thought, was impossible. We were deep in the warp, and there were no physical objects to hit.
Then I saw the alert rune, and started to run. I was in my armour, as we all were – void passage was so perilous now that I had instructed the crew to remain battle-prepared at all times.
We were hit again. It felt like some enormous closed fist had rammed us amidships, sending the ship swinging round its centre of gravity.
As I closed in on Slovo’s sanctum, high up in the spine of the ship, I heard the screams. His chambers were entirely sealed off from the main structure during warp passage, the better to insulate him during the arduous process of guidance. I reached the first of the heavy doors and punched the access codes hurriedly. All the while I could hear booms shuddering down the superstructure, loud and getting louder.
The doors heaved open, and I smelt the stale air of the sanctum’s interior as it washed over me. The lumens were erratic, blinking across dirty bulkheads. I plunged inside, and saw a pair of acolytes holding their temples and weeping what looked like blood. They were menials from House Rehata, ungifted with the Seeing Eye, and they were wailing like slaughtered porcines.
I heard Slovo crying out from further inside. The chambers were low-roofed and braced with heavy bands of adamantium. The whole place looked like a military bunker, solid and unbreakable.
But it was breaking now. Cracks had already shot up the inner walls, shivering with released energy. I ran through the maze to Slovo’s inner domain, a sphere of iron lodged within the ship’s hull, accessible only by a single metal gantry over a moat of oil. As I crossed, I could see more breaches, popping with lightning that curled and danced across the void.
As I neared the portal it blew open, sending a cloud of noxious gas boiling out at me. Slovo himself staggered into view, his skin wet with whatever fluids he’d immersed himself in, cables still trailing from intravenous lines in his arms.
‘Get us out!’ he gasped, his mortal eyes staring and bloodshot. Thankfully he’d managed to wrap up his deadly Seeing Eye, though the rest of his robes were only loosely hanging from his scrawny body. ‘Get us out!’
I punched the runes through to Erefan – Immediate crash out of warp – and moved to help Slovo. He pushed me away, teetering on the gantry’s railing. He was wild, barely seeing what was around him, and he too had lines of blood running from his nostrils.
‘They’re getting in,’ he hissed, drooling. ‘The field’s breaking down. Get us out!’
Looking over his reeling shoulder, I could just make out the disarray in the sphere – the nutrient tank he floated in was filthy and leaking, and the cables hanging like spider’s limbs from the roof were sending spears of electricity scattering across the interior. I grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him away from it, backing up along the gantry. I could already hear the alert klaxons as Erefan did as he was asked. The ship shook wildly, blowing more lumens, then seemed to drop vertiginously, as if falling through a place where gravity still existed.
I gestured furiously at him – What happened? – but he was blind to me.
Then I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. More lights shattered, plunging the space into flickering shadow. It looked – but this was impossible – as if the walls were draining down like viscous fluid, sliding off the ship’s substructure and pooling into a slough of molten steel.
I dragged Slovo the rest of the way, back to the blast doors and into the warren of chambers beyond. He clawed at me, jabbering something about the impossibility of a Geller field losing integrity and just what took place if that happened, and how they were coming and they were getting inside and they knew who we were and where we were going.
My heart was thumping hard. There were noises echoing up from the bilges below us, distorted and shrieking. For a moment I thought this might be what the warp itself sounded like, some terrible snapshot into an infinity of agonised souls, before the Cadamara bucked again, thrown away from its ventral axis.
Inner panels punched inwards,