The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,62

as normal. Signal banks ticked over, and hard-plugged servitors gazed at scrolling rune lists. I felt the steady drumbeat of the Cadamara’s systems pushing us deeper in. The atmosphere became colder, just as it always did. Anything loose rattled. The mortal crew hunched over their stations, tense and distracted.

‘He’s finding a way,’ Erefan said eventually.

I didn’t answer, but kept my attention focused on the ship’s vital signs. We were going fast by then, pushing all power into the warp coils, eking out what progress we could before the inevitable attack. Time passed – the first hour, then the next, then the next. I never relaxed. No one on the bridge relaxed. The structures around us creaked and flexed, stressed by the enormous forces thundering around them. I watched the regular status indicators from Slovo’s blister, one every ten minutes – nothing detected, nothing detected.

It couldn’t last.

‘I have a signal,’ reported Rythan suddenly.

I moved over to his station.

‘Warp-wake,’ he said. ‘Something’s locked on.’

Speed? I signed.

‘Faster than us.’

By then Erefan had patched into the feed. ‘Bigger, too.’

For a ship to encounter another ship at random within the warp was so unlikely as to be a statistical impossibility. It wasn’t so much the size – real space was vast enough by itself for encounters to be rare – but the unique nature of the empyrean. You couldn’t ‘see’ another ship while warp-bound, only detect the interaction between the vessels’ Geller harmonics and the surrounding volume of extended ether. It didn’t even mean that the ships were in close proximity, physically speaking, only that they were occupying coextensive pockets of warp space, although given the reduction in viable routes brought about by Slovo’s ‘great rift’, it seemed unlikely that this one wasn’t right on our tail. Perhaps it had found us as a result of some coincidence of galactic proportions. Or perhaps whatever flew it had access to scrying methods and psychic expertise denied to us.

They know what we’re doing, Slovo had said. They know where we’re going, and they’ll break us open to prevent it.

Still, the matter was largely moot provided we both stayed in the warp. No interaction could take place between us, only a kind of shadow play that would last until one or both of us broke the barrier back into the real universe. No doubt Slovo could see it too, locked within his blister of visions, but I couldn’t ask him to clarify, not without breaking the concentration he needed to keep us from smashing into a chronovortex and hurling us out of space and time altogether.

Maintain status, I signed, watching the ship’s signals carefully.

‘Holding steady,’ Rythan reported, his voice tight.

Erefan shot off some orders to the enginarium and redistributed part of the standing reserve to the Cadamara’s void gun batteries, such as they were. That was standard operating procedure, but I found myself almost smiling at its optimism – anything powerful enough to be capable of tracking us through the ether like this was unlikely to be as lightly armed as we were.

It wouldn’t go away. Every time I looked at the augur sweeps, the warp-wake was there, gaining on us, forging a faster and huger path through the maze. It had clearly locked on and was waiting for the chance to pounce.

And then, just then, came the report it needed.

‘Geller integrity weakening,’ came the call from further down the bridge’s rows of sensor stations.

I received notice from Slovo’s menials just a second later.

‘Daemonspoor detected,’ chirped the monotone readout. ‘Levels already high and climbing.’

Erefan turned to me for guidance. I let him wait.

Something boomed into the ship, knocking us in a slew to starboard. The overhead arches creaked, and a shower of fine dust drifted towards the deck.

I looked at the augur sweep again and saw our shadow. It was, if anything, getting closer.

Damn them, I thought. They’re in collusion.

‘Geller aegis drained across outer hull-wards,’ came another report, tinny and unwelcome. ‘Estimated time to failure – three minutes.’

The ship bucked again, as if we’d somehow slammed over an obstacle in our path. I heard the scrape and screech of things outside, and the long whine of what might have been talons down our spine. A bulkhead started to crack – I could see a filigree of microscopic lines spreading across it like age wrinkles.

Slovo’s strained voice crackled into my earpiece. ‘Get us out,’ he warned. ‘Get us out now.’

Still I waited. This was what they wanted. They were like a pack of hunters, flushing us from the thicket