It’s not the ground. It’s a deck.
He can feel the throb of engines coming through it. Drive engines. The air is dry, artificially maintained. He can smell smoke.
‘Why can I smell smoke, John?’ he asks.
He can’t read whatever it is that’s etched into the polished walls. He realises he’s glad he can’t.
‘John? Where did you go?’
There are starfields outside the windows. There’s blood on the floor. Bloody footprints on the marble, bloody handprints on the walls. Tapestries have been torn down. There are bullet holes in the bulkhead panels: craters blown by bolt-rounds, gouges cut by lasers, by claws. There are bodies on the floor.
It’s not a floor, it’s a deck.
He can hear fighting. A huge battle. Millions of voices yelling and screaming, weapons clashing, weapons firing. The din is coming up through the deck. It’s echoing, muffled, through distant archways and half-seen hatches. It’s as if monumental, cataclysmic history is happening just around the corner.
‘John?’
There’s no sign of John. But he can feel the back-of-the-neck prickle of other minds. Minds as bright as main sequence stars.
‘John, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here at all.’
He moves forward, through an archway twenty times as tall as he is, into a chamber fifty times as tall. The walls and pillars are cyclopean. The air is filled with smoke and dying echoes.
There is an angel dead on the floor. On the deck. The angel is a giant. He was beautiful. His sword is broken. His golden plate is cracked. His wings are crushed. Blood streaks his armour and soaks the carnodon-skin mantle he wears. His hair is as golden as his armour. He has teardrops on his cheek.
His killer is waiting nearby, black as night, made of rage, masked by shadow. The edges of his wargear are chased with gold, giving his darkness a regal outline and shape. The gold encircles the eyes he wears on his chest and harness: baleful, red, staring eyes. He fumes with power. He prickles hot, like a lethal radiation leak. He’s polluting the galaxy just by standing in it. There’s a crackle. A fizzle. Malice so terrible a rad-counter could pick it up.
The killer is huge. His shoulder plates are draped with a cloak of furs and human pelts. A spiked framework surrounds his head: a psychic cage, an armoured box. There is a light glowing inside the box, a ruddy glow. The killer’s head is shaved. He is looking down, his face in shadow. He is looking down at the angel he has just killed. Cortical plugs and bio-feeds thread his scalp like dreadlocks. He is a beast made flesh, and shod in iron. He is made of pure hatred.
Oll Persson realises he should not be here. Anywhere, anywhere in the cosmos but here. He starts to back away.
The killer hears him move or senses him. The killer slowly raises his massive head. Light seeps up from the gorget, underlighting his face. Arrogant. Proud. Evil. He opens his eyes. He stares at Oll.
‘I… I renounce you, evil one,’ Oll stammers. He touches the little symbol around his neck, an instinctive gesture of protection.
‘You… what?’
‘I renounce you as evil.’
‘There is no evil,’ says the killer, his voice a landslip rumble of mountains falling. ‘There is only indifference.’
The killer takes a step towards Oll. The floor – the deck – trembles under the weight.
He halts. He’s looking at something. He’s looking at something in Oll’s hand.
Oll glances down, confused. He realises he’s been holding something in his other hand all along.
He sees what it is.
The killer makes a sound. A sigh. His lips part, connected by tiny strands of spittle. He looks Oll straight in the face. Straight into his soul.
Oll turns away. He cannot bear to look into those eyes any more. He turns to run.
He sees the light behind him.
He was so captivated by the killer, by the prickling, enveloping darkness, he almost didn’t see the light to begin with.
Now he sees it. It’s not the light it used to be. It’s not the light he used to know.
The light is fading. It was once the most beautiful light, but it’s dwindling. It’s ebbing away and growing dim. Golden, broken, like the angel. And, like the angel, brought low by the killer made out of darkness.
Beyond the light is a vast window port.
Through it, Oll sees the hazy glory of Terra.
The human homeworld is burning.
‘I’ve seen enough,’ says Oll Persson.
It’s the shock. It’s just the shock. You’ve been hurt, and I’ve shown you plenty. Plenty. I’m sorry, I really am. No one should have to see that. No one should have to deal with all of that in one go. But there really isn’t time to be gentle about this.
You saw what you had to see. I showed you where you have to go.
Now, this will hurt. This will be hard. You can do it. You’ve done hard before. Come on, Oll. Come on, my old, dear friend Ollanius.
It’s time to wake up. It’s time to w–
Oll wakes.
No sunlight. No bed. No singing from the kitchen.
Grey light. Fog. Cold.
Pain.
He’s fallen on his back, twisted. His hands are sore, and so is his back, and one of his hips too. His head feels as though iron screws have been driven into it.
He sits up. The pain gets worse.
Oll realises the worst of the pain isn’t his aches and sprains and bruises.
It’s the aftershock. The aftershock of the vision. He rolls onto all fours and dry-heaves, as if he’s trying to vomit out the memory and be rid of it.
It would be tempting to think it was just a nightmare. Tempting and easy. Just a bad dream that happened because he’d had a bump on the head.
But Oll knows the human mind doesn’t imagine things like that. Not like that. Grammaticus was here. The bastard was here. Not in the flesh, but as good as. He was here, and that’s what he had to show.
It says a lot that John made the superhuman effort, and took such an immense risk, to come. It says a lot, and what it says doesn’t sit comfortably with Oll Persson.
He gets to his feet, unsteady. He’s battered and bruised. His clothes are caked in mud that’s just beginning to dry and stiffen. He tries to get his bearings.
There’s not much to see. A dense grey mist is shrouding the entire world. There are rumbling sounds, and dull flashes up behind the clouds. Far away – Oll’s guess would be to the north – there’s a glow, as if something big on the other side of the fog is burning.
Something big like a city.
He looks around. The ground’s a slick of stinking black mud and ooze, of mangled agricultural machinery and broken fence posts. This is the spew the tidal wave left in its wake. This is what’s left of his land, of his fields.
He stumbles along, his boots squelching in the muck. The thick fog is part smoke, part vapour from the flood. The ground stinks of mineral cores and riverbed mire. All of his crops have gone.
He sees a line of fence posts, still standing. From the height of them above the muck, the flood wave left about a metre of silt and soil behind it. Everything’s buried. Worse than damned Krasentine Ridge. He sees a hand, a man’s hand, sticking up out of the black ooze, pale and wrinkled. It looks as if he’s reaching up, grasping for air.
Nothing to be done about it.
Oll reaches the fence posts and leans on one of them. He realises that it’s the gate at the end of the west field level. He’s not where he thought he was at all. He’s about half a kilometre west. The force of the flood water must have carried him, carried him like flood litter, like flotsam. Bloody wonder he didn’t break his limbs or get his brains dashed out against an upright post; it was a wonder he didn’t drown.