‘That’s because you can’t count over twenty,’ said Ivan. ‘And if you ever lose a finger or a toe you won’t even be able to count that high.’
‘Ha-bloody-ha!’
He moved towards the couch and was starting to strap himself in. I began to do the same. Even as we did so, the last of the stars and the blackness of space vanished behind the metal transit shutters. The lights stopped flickering and became steady, and yet it felt like we were sitting in the dark, waiting for something terrible to happen. I could remember a similar feeling during my childhood in Belial, when the gangs used to fight outside in the corridors of our building and there was only a thin thermaplas doorway between us and them.
You always hear stories about ships that go missing: ghost ships lost in the warp for centuries, crewed by dead men, and those that have suffered catastrophic, inexplicable disaster in the endless darkness of space. People dismiss such things as mere tales, but they crop up with remarkable regularity anywhere star-sailors gather and the crews of the great interstellar ships come to drink. And there is no one, no one at all I have ever met, who does not sense the sheer wrongness of it when a ship makes the jump into that terrible sub-realm beneath the skin of the ordered universe, where they go in order to travel the vast distances between stars.
I never really know what to expect. All jumps are different. Sometimes they happen so smoothly that you don’t even know they have taken place. Sometimes entering the warp is like being in a shuttle as it hits atmospheric turbulence on its way down. Sometimes it is a lot worse. This time, there was just a weird sensation of falling, a momentary nausea and then nothing much at all for what might have been heartbeats, or might have been millennia.
‘Is that it?’ Anton asked. He sounded shaky but relieved. His words had an odd sound to them, though, as if they were coming from a great distance away and subtly distorted.
‘Well, we’re still here,’ said Ivan. ‘Wherever here is.’
He had put his finger on it, of course. We had no real idea where we were, and we were not going to have until the ship reached the exit point of its transit. Only the Navigator guiding the ship had any ideas about that. We were cut off from all sight of our surroundings by those huge armoured blast-shields. No one aboard the ship would talk to us about what was taking place, and I suspected that few of them actually knew. It was one of those things we were discouraged from asking questions about when we were common soldiers, and we had never gotten back into the habit of doing so when we became attached to Macharius’s command.
‘How long you think we’re going to be here for?’ The note of worry was back in Anton’s voice. It was one of those things that was strangest and most difficult about warp travel. You never knew how long you were under. The ship existed in a bubble separate from normal time as it passed in the universe above. Your wrist chrono and the ship’s clocks might say one thing, that you had been away for a few days or a few weeks, but when you reached port and consulted with the Imperial Standard timepieces maintained there, you might find that days or months or years had passed instead. There were tales of people who had been gone for centuries and did not look a day older when they returned.
‘Who knows?’ Ivan said. ‘And I mean that most literally. I doubt even our captain and his pet Navigator have the answer.’
Slowly, things started to settle, Anton’s voice sounded normal. It was as though our minds were becoming accustomed to their new surroundings.
We settled down for the journey.
I do not know how long we were in the strange realm but somehow it felt too long. The days seemed stretched. There were odd gaps in my memories. My dreams were troubled. When not on bodyguard duty all of us spent time prowling the endless corridors of the ship, exchanging words with the crew. They were tense, as a crew always is when crossing the warp. They were all too aware of what could go wrong.
Then it happened, the thing that every star voyager fears. Warning lights flared. A terrible vibration passed through the hull of the ship. Weird moaning cries filled the air. I sprang upright in my bunk and reached for a weapon.
‘What in the name of the Emperor?’ said Anton. He pulled himself upright, tugged on his gear and reached for a weapon. It was as instinctive for him as it was for me, although the chances were that there was nothing for us to fight out there.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Ivan. It was understandable. No one likes to hear alarms going off on a starship, particularly not one under way.
‘Really,’ I said. ‘Why ever not?’
‘It makes it difficult to sleep,’ he said and wrinkled a nostril.
The ship started to vibrate as if it were being impacted by a shower of giant meteorites.
‘That’s not good,’ said Anton. His fingers were white where they gripped his sniper rifle. I nodded. I knew we were all thinking about those tales of ships that had sailed off into the dark between the stars never to be seen again. Maybe we were about to find out what happened to them.
All of the lights flickered and went out for a moment. My mouth went dry and my stomach lurched. The thought that without power a starship is just a gigantic coffin entered my mind. No air getting purified and circulated, no heat to drive back the cold of space. No void-shields to ward off enemies. It was so black in the cabin that I could not see my own hand let alone the faces of my companions. I thought of tombs. I thought of ships full of frozen corpses floating through the infinite void. I thought of haunted vessels uncovered a thousand years after they last set out by terrified Imperial explorers. I took a deep breath and told myself not to panic.
It was hard. I could feel my heart pounding against my ribs. I closed my eyes, though it made no difference to the amount I could see. The knowledge that each breath might be my last filled my mind and brought with it a primitive, animal fear. I told myself to breathe, then to take another breath and then another. As long as I was doing that I was still alive. Every breath was a small victory over death.
‘Leo,’ said Anton. There was an undercurrent of fear in his voice.
‘Yes?’ I said. I was proud of the fact that my voice came out level and strong.
‘Any chance of you paying back those five credits you borrowed on Glory?’
‘Not till next payday.’
‘Guess I’ll have to wait then.’ The ship began to shake, violently, like a hive in the grip of a quake. I could feel the vibration passing through my body. The whole floor seemed to be moving up and down. My head hit something hard, and stars flickered across my field of vision. Something wet ran down my brow, blood most likely. I grabbed the support strut of my bed. Muscles twisted in my arms as I tried to maintain my position. I felt the ache of my wound return redoubled. I was not healed well enough for this. I bit back a shout of pain.
The vibration increased. It was far worse than anything the Lux Imperatoris had endured from the planetary defence batteries back in the Demetrius system. I heard a groan from across the room and the clatter of metal hitting metal, and it came to me that Ivan had been tossed right across the chamber.
There were great groans from the hull as if the metal were coming under enormous stress, and the shuddering and bucking of the ship reached a crescendo. Suddenly, everything was silent and still. For a moment I heard nothing save the sound of my own breathing. It was not a good sign. The last thing you want to hear on a starship is silence. It might be the last thing you ever hear.
I was uncomfortably aware of all the sounds that were missing: the rumble of the drives, the whoosh of the great air-circulators, the low humming of the lights, the hundreds of small noises that signalled that the ship and its crew were alive and well. I held my breath, wondering how long it would be before all the systems failed and we died. At that moment, the lights flickered back on. I looked around the cabin. Ivan lay on the ground nearby. Anton was hunched up in his lower bunk, glaring wildly around, fists wrapped round the support stanchions he had been using to hold himself in place. With a groan Ivan raised himself from the floor and said, ‘Someone should have a word with whoever is piloting this ship. I think he still needs to learn a few things.’