knew that the vision was close.
I turned from that place and made haste. I could not summon Urbo – the relic had to be taken out of the reach of mortals, destroyed if possible, locked away if not, and there were those whose entire lives were devoted to such exigencies. I found myself wondering how many such artefacts existed across the thousands of shrines on Terra, accumulated over long and patient millennia, and the thought chilled me.
I moved down the long nave and out into the red glow of the smouldering sky. Ahead of me stretched a towering, many-layered labyrinth of gathering confusion.
‘Shield-Captain Valerian,’ I voxed, feeling pain grow in the palm that held the sword. ‘Priority message for Tribune Italeo. Request immediate dispatch of Talion lifter to my location. Daemonspoor located on Terra, within sight of the walls.’
I could hardly believe I was speaking the words.
‘Recommend also summons be sent for assistance,’ I said. ‘It is time, I think, that we spoke to Titan.’
Aleya
They got in.
Every time they broke through, I destroyed them. Every time I destroyed them, they inflicted more damage. We were being killed, slowly, taken apart as we raced through the crumbling vaults of creation.
I had prepared as well as I could, given the constraints I was working under. I would have given anything to have had some of my sisters with me, but Erefan’s troops did better than I might have expected. They were far better trained and conditioned than the average trooper of the Astra Militarum, of course. Their drills had been taken from the guard manuals of the Black Ships, and so they knew how to respond to an order in battle-sign. They were psycho-steeled against all but the worst creatures of the Enemy, and so given appropriate warning could hold their nerve against much that a regular soldier would have balked at.
But that was the limit of it. When the nightmares clawed their way inside our cracked and leaking hull they could only hold position for a few seconds before they were forced into a bloody retreat. We adopted a terrible pattern of fight and flight – Erefan would keep us in the warp for as long as he possibly could. That might be several days, other times just a few hours. As soon as Slovo detected a break in the Geller field the order would be given to crash back into real space. Sometimes we would avoid a full breach then, and would slam back into the world of the senses unharmed. Other times we would smash a critical system and have to scramble madly to keep the plasma drives from overloading. And sometimes, worst of all, we would emerge into the physical void carrying new passengers – soulless like me, dragged up from the etheric swamp of the empyrean and ready to slaughter.
The last time had been the worst. I had been at my station in the very centre of the vessel, waiting like an ambush hunter at the major intersection of a dozen transit arteries. The Cadamara was not a big ship – less than a kilometre long, and with only a few dozen inhabited levels – but that still left hundreds of metres to traverse once the alarms started to sound.
I heard Slovo’s warning, then Erefan’s command to crash out, then the squeal and boom of the plasma conduits coming online, then mortal yells.
I ran hard. My flamer twitched in my grip, ready to explode into life, and my blade glinted in the shadows. It took me a long time to get to them, and by the time I was close my comm-bead was crammed with the howls of the dying and the terrified.
I burst into a narrow feeder corridor just below the aft enginarium tanks. A dozen of Erefan’s soldiers were scrambling back towards me, firing at something unseen in wayward bursts. Even if I could have shouted at them to fall back they wouldn’t have heard me – they were already breaking into that cold-sweat terror that fused their fingers to their triggers and locked their rational capacities closed.
So I shoved my way through them, flicking the safety from my flamer. The corridor was choked with bodies, piled up like sacks of grain and sodden with blood. For a moment, I couldn’t see what had done the damage. Here was the one disadvantage of my soulless state – I had to use my physical senses to detect the daemon, and had no access to the psychic