The ship vibrated with more than the unleashing of power; reality trembled, pushing open a tear not into the warp, but into subspace, that strange, ephemeral realm that existed between the universe of energy and the universe of matter. A burst of sparks shot out from an overloaded console. A number of hololiths blinked and went out. Lumens burst. Cables ruptured, sending fatal arcs of electricity into a dozen tech-priests as the Motive Force burst free. Bangs sounded from all over the deck as machines failed. Tocsins rang, but their alarms were lost in the roar of the impossible science of the Grand Experiment.
A mighty thrumming vibrated through the bones and bonded endoskeletal augments of everyone aboard. The tumult ceased abruptly, passed over and through the ship like an ocean breaker moving over a reef. The whine of machines quieted. The vibrating faded away into ever decreasing, unpredictable aftershocks.
On the last functioning hololith, space flashed with green lightning that faded slowly. When it did, Ullanor had gone.
‘Simple and elegant,’ said Van Auken. ‘Success is assured.’
Servitors thumped forward to remove the corpses of those tech-priests who had given their lives in the service of the Machine-God.
‘Contact Lord Vangorich. Inform him that the planet has been cast into the heart of the nearest blue supergiant hyper-star. Ullanor is no more,’ said Kubik. ‘Prepare my private pentere. He will wish to congratulate me personally. Van Auken, you shall accompany me as architect of this great endeavour. Have our astropaths signal the explorator teams. Ullanor is to be stripped to the core of useful technology, commencing immediately. No trace of the orkish presence upon the world can be left. The motive engines that moved the crust must be dismantled. If the world is explored or settled, there shall be no indication that the orks were ever there. I so command it.’
‘As you command, prime of primes,’ intoned his crew.
‘All hail the Omnissiah, He that giveth knowledge so that we might perform miracles in His name,’ said Kubik. He powered his grav chair and ascended through a portal in the ceiling. There was no celebration from the crew of the Ark Majesty. They worked on without comment. Success was its own reward.
At the back of the room, Isolde headed for the door.
Isolde shed her magos metallicus disguise as soon as she was able. Reassuming the role of one of Kubik’s household adepts, she headed off to decks unused by thinking beings. Servitors congregated there in their multitudes, but Isolde passed them unchallenged, her cowled form hidden by the soft red light of the lumens.
Life support was at the minimum required to keep the servitors’ organic components alive. She was shivering by the time she found a data conduit sized for humans to access and crawled inside. With numb fingers she searched through a tangle of copper cables and shining fibre-optics until she found an unshielded line. Her dataspike slid into it easily enough, and once she had checked the crawlspace both ways for Mechanicus repair vermin, she contacted the Grand Master.
A black screen appeared on her palm-sized data-slate, the coat of arms of the Assassinorum bold in white upon it.
‘Red Haven, Mariazet Isolde, Temple Callidus,’ she said. ‘Confirm.’
‘Identity confirmed. Line checked. Line secure,’ said the slate.
Vangorich’s face appeared a second later in grainy monochrome.
‘Isolde, good to see you. Tell me now, can I believe what I just saw?’
‘Regretfully no, Grand Master,’ she said. ‘They lied. They’ve moved it, not destroyed it. They’re going to plunder it.’
Vangorich looked away. ‘Stupid,’ he said. When he looked back his eyes were hard. ‘Where is Ullanor now?’
‘I don’t exactly know. I’ve got the name and the stellar signifier. The code puts it on the edge of the Segmentum Solar, and if it’s named it’ll be on a chart somewhere. It did have nine worlds, orbiting a main sequence yellow star not unlike Sol. The code is for an uninhabited system marked for colonisation. They got quite agitated about moving Ullanor at exactly the right moment to displace the existing fourth world safely, a place called Chosin, so I don’t know if that’s of any worth as a planet. I can’t tell you any more than what I gleaned through eavesdropping. This ship has its datacore encrypted so heavily it’d take a Vanus acolyte a week to get into it. I don’t have the skills. I can’t exload to you. Verbal report only.’
‘Give me the code and name.’
‘Yes, Grand Master,’ she said. ‘PL-SS042002-9001. The prime-assumptive world is Pelucidar. The system must be named for it.’
‘Pelucidar? Never heard of it,’ said Vangorich. ‘Good work, Isolde. Severing contact now.’
The screen blinked out. Isolde stowed her data-slate, checked outside, and slipped away.
Chapter Six
Holy ordos
There were gardens under the ice and rock of the Antarctic; the recreated habitats of a thousand worlds graced the deepest catacombs of the Inquisitorial Fortress. Most were small, places for the study of dangerous environments or the pharmacological benefits to be wrested from promising species, but there were those set aside for meditation. The Inquisition understood well the need for calm and clarity.
The Park of Oak was one of those places, forty hectares of vibrant green caged by skies of black Antarctic rock.
Veritus met Wienand under the gnarled branches of an ancient tree that had never seen the sun. Its leaves rustled in the unvarying breeze of ventilation ducts, otherwise the forest was silent; no bird or beast lived there. The deep quiet sharply defined the crackling of leaves under her feet and the hiss and whirr of Veritus’ life support system.
‘Wienand,’ said Veritus. He was haggard, his skin looser and paler than normal. She attributed it to the conclusion of the war against the Beast. The closure of a mission often had the same effect on her — months of high activity and adrenaline were followed by deferred exhaustion.
‘Is it time for us to resume our struggle for the seat of Inquisitorial Representative?’ she asked.
‘I hope not,’ said Veritus. He appeared disappointed that she had brought it up. He rested an armoured hand upon the trunk of the tree. ‘There are more pressing concerns.’
‘Let’s get this one out of the way, then. I’ve made my decision. I will relinquish the seat to you. My concern was the alien threat, and that is now done. It is your turn.’
Veritus was taken off guard, but composed himself before an expression of surprise could take shape. ‘You have my gratitude.’
‘You have mine,’ she said. ‘I’ve sat in the Senatorum too long. I have to think of the future. It is time I began to train a successor.’
Veritus became thoughtful. ‘Something I have neglected. I never had time to plan for that future, and yet the future is why we are here. You know that Terra was once an ocean world, inhabited by a trillion different species of life?’
‘I cannot really imagine it, Terra is so… dead,’ she said. ‘Although I have seen other oceans, it is impossible to picture them here.’
‘It was a long time ago. I am very old, Wienand, but even in my youth Terra looked much the same as it does now. But once, it was rich in life,’ said Veritus. ‘Our ancestors, for all their might, did not take care for the future.’
‘I have been lectured about that more than once by the eldar,’ said Wienand.
‘Hypocrisy is their most aggravating characteristic. The fall of their empire sterilised countless worlds,’ he said. ‘You put too much faith in them.’
‘And you too little,’ she said. ‘They are implacably opposed to Chaos, and have helped me many times.’
‘The eldar are prideful and conceited, practically blind to their own faults.’ He smiled tiredly. ‘Listen to us. You are the one who champions defence against the alien, but works with them against Chaos. I am the one who fears Chaos above all things, but lectures you about the xenos threat. Maybe we are both right. The eldar are right about one thing, we must think of the future. The Inquisition must change.’