been amplified by what I’d made him do, and he was close to losing his mind entirely.
I’d had the map in my thoughts for a long time. Attempting to study it was probably pointless, but I nevertheless had sat in front of it for hours, trying to understand what it represented. Slovo’s words had reverberated in my head more than once.
Suppose they knew what was going to happen. Suppose they knew which way the tides were pulling.
They clearly had done. This was not a random development, it was something long-planned and brought to bear after the labour of millennia. That left the possibility that we might make use of their schematics. Perhaps Slovo could no longer see the Astronomican, but he could see the conduits as we travelled through them, and if they corresponded to the map in any way then he should be able to make use of it.
He might have been exhausted, and he might have been half-mad, but he was a wily old soul and saw what I was thinking without me having to grapple with the concepts in sign language he understood.
‘Oh, no,’ he warned, wagging a finger as if I were a child in schola. ‘Oh, no. Too risky. Far too risky. We don’t know anything about it. Perhaps they let you find it. Considered that, eh? I wouldn’t spit on it.’
But he would do more than that. He would study it, and he would use it. I would take it up to his chambers under armed guard and make him memorise its swirls and ganglia. The alternative was to sit here, rotting, while our supplies ran out and our engines choked for lack of fuel.
When I turned to him, Erefan was studying me with a strange expression. He didn’t know about the map. None of them did, save Slovo.
‘What are we doing, then?’ he asked.
I almost hesitated. For all my professed resolve, I understood the terrible risk here. Death was one thing – stranded in the void, gradually running out of air and light. The warp was another, a place in which death was the absolute best thing that could possibly happen.
But there was really no choice, not if the balance of things was understood. I had to get to Terra, and if I damned myself and everyone else in the attempt, we’d still do it.
We go back in, I signed, looking deliberately at Slovo the whole time. And we trust in Him.
Six hours later, that’s what we did. I’d had to literally grip Slovo’s head by both temples to get him to look at that flayed-skin schema again, and it had made his nose bleed and his breathing rapid, but there was just enough residual loyalty left in that dried-out body to get him through it and plan something like a route.
Before the shutters came down I took a final look out of the real-viewers. The void itself looked just as it ever did. You’d never have known there was anything wrong, and the stars burned across the arch of darkness, cold and clear. All that terror was cloistered on the other side, locked across the divide of emptiness, barred from psychics by laws older than the universe itself.
I’d always had so much trouble understanding that. Perhaps non-blank humans could grasp it more readily, given their sensitivity to the psychic substrates, but for me it was beyond imagination. Hestia had told me once that our limitation was no different to colour-blindness, but that was a comforting fallacy. A person might live easily in a world where a certain hue was missing, but I lacked so much more. The very characteristic that made me able to slay the daemonic made me completely unable to understand it.
Soon, though, the shutters came down and the vision disappeared. Once all was prepared, the klaxons sounded in anticipation of the leap. I made my way to the command bridge – I wanted to be close to Erefan in case this went wrong. As ever when we attempted a jump, all crew were armed and ready. What remained of our standing defence force had been distributed across the decks, waiting apprehensively.
The chimes sounded, the chronos clicked over, the plasma drives coughed out and the warp drives engaged. For a second there was that gut-turning lurch – the snag of realities pulled out of synch – and then we were immersed, back into the realm of dreams.
Erefan’s face was set hard with concentration. For a while, the cogitators whirred just