He was not part of it any more. He could only look at the world he had left, dispassionate. The things that had mattered so much when he had been alive were meaningless. Duty had ceased to be a concept. Hope was revealed to be a laughably perishable quantity. Victory was an empty promise someone once made.
The light of the heedless stars moved slowly. Across the deck, along the walls, across the ceiling, around and around like the morning, noon and night of a fast-running day. Perhaps this was how a ghost saw the world. Perhaps time and the day-night rhythm of life ran fast to the dead’s eyes, to make eternity more endurable.
Except, no.
The stars weren’t moving. The Armaduke was. Powerless, dead, inert and gravity-shot, it was tumbling end over end in real space.
The Ghost considered this with glacial slowness, forcing his frosted mind to think. The ship was moving. How had it come to this? What doom had overtaken them? Had death come upon them so swiftly and so traumatically that the memory of life’s end had been ripped entirely from his recollection?
How had he died?
The Ghost heard drumming. It was getting louder: steadily, progressively louder.
He saw something in front of his eyes. It was a metal washer, a small one. It was hanging in the air before him, rotating very slowly, not falling at all. Light winked off its turning edges. Two more washers and an oil-black restraining bolt drifted across his field of vision from the left in perfectly maintained formation. They passed behind the first washer, creating a brief astrological conjunction before drifting on.
The drumming became louder.
The Ghost felt pain. Slight, distant, but pain nevertheless. He felt it in his phantom limbs, his spine, his neck. The aftertaste of the agonies he had suffered in death had come with him to the other side of the veil, to haunt his shade.
How fitting. How true to the universe’s treacherous nature. Only in death does duty end, but pain does not end with it. That’s the thing the priests and hierophants don’t tell you. Death is not a final release from pain. Pain stays with you. It clings to you forever.
What other lies had he been taught in his brief existence? The revelation made him want to curse the names of the ones who had given him life, the ones who had pretended to love him, the ones who had demanded his loyalty. It made him want to curse the Throne itself for telling him that death was some kind of serene reward.
It made him want to curse everything.
The Ghost opened his mouth.
‘Feth you all,’ he said.
His breath smoked the air. His skin was cold.
Wait, breath?
The drumming became louder.
It was the blood pounding in his ears.
Suddenly, he could hear again. His world was abruptly full of noise: his own ragged breathing, the cries and moans of those nearby, the wail of alarms, the mangled shriek of the ship’s hull and superstructure.
Gravity reasserted itself.
The washers and the restraining bolt dropped to the deck. The Ghost dropped too. He hit a surface that was slick with frost, and he hit it hard. All the airspaces and blood vessels in his body realigned to gravity. He half choked as his windpipe flexed. His lungs panicked. His gut sloshed like a half-filled skin of sacra. All around him, he heard other impacts, and realised it was the sound of every other loose and unsecured object aboard the old ship falling to the deck. Inside the Armaduke, it was raining things and people.
The Ghost got to his feet. He was not steady. A ghost was made for floating, not walking. Every part of him hurt.
He found his lasrifle on the deck nearby. He picked it up with hands that did not work as well as he would have liked. Could a ghost touch things? Apparently so.
Perhaps this was some penance. Perhaps he had been called back to mortality for one final duty. Another lie, then. Even in death, duty did not fething end.
The Ghost moved down the companionway. He heard whimpering. He saw a young Belladon trooper, one of the new intake, sitting on the deck with his back to the wall, his teeth clenched like a rat-trap, nursing a broken wrist. The boy looked up at the Ghost as he loomed over him.
‘What happened?’ the boy asked.
‘Am I dead?’ asked the Ghost.
‘What?’
‘Am I dead?’
‘N-no. No, sir.’
‘How do you know?’ asked the Ghost.
He saw terror in the boy’s eyes.
‘I d-don’t know,’ the boy said.
‘I think I am dead,’ said the Ghost. ‘But you are not. You can walk. Get to the infirmary. Consider us at secondary order.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The youngster winced, and clambered to his feet.
‘Go on, now,’ the Ghost said.
‘What are you going to do?’
The Ghost thought about that.
‘I don’t know. But I reckon the God-Emperor has some purpose reserved for me, and this gun suggests it will involve killing.’
‘S-something you’re good at, then,’ said the boy, trying to seem braver than he actually was.
‘Am I?’
‘Famously, sir.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Thyst, sir.’
‘Get to the infirmary, Thyst.’
The boy nodded, and stumbled away.
Nearby were two of the ship’s crew personnel, deck ratings. One was bleeding profusely from a deep cut across the bridge of his nose. The other was trying to pick up all the labelled machine spares that gravity had inverted out of his push-cart.
‘What happened?’ the Ghost asked them.
The bleeding man looked up at him.
‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘It has never happened before.’
The left side of the Ghost’s upper lip curled slightly in a frustrated sneer. He turned away. He knew pretty much nothing about voidships, but he was sure that this was what the commander had warned them about. The commander. The commander. What was his name? The Ghost was having such difficulty remembering anything about his life. It hadn’t ended that long ago.
Gaunt. That was it. Gaunt.
What was it Gaunt had said? ‘The Armaduke is experiencing drive issues. It might not bring us home. If we fall short or explosively de-translate, I want the fighting companies ready for protection duties.’
The Ghost tried a wall-vox, but nothing but static came out of it. They had light and they had gravity, but the ship was stricken. They were dead in the water. If something came upon them, they’d be helpless.
If something tried to board them, how would they even know?
The Ghost suddenly hesitated. He looked up at the ceiling. There was too much noise, far too much: the fething alarms and damage klaxons, the squealing of the hull de-contorting, the babble of voices.
It was probably his imagination, conjured by the trauma of his violent death, but the Ghost could swear he had just heard something else.
Something wrong.
Up. It was coming from above him, high above.
How did he know that? How could he discriminate one noise from the chaotic swirl of sounds coming from all around him?
Because he could. It was something else he was good at.
He clambered up a deck ladder. The soreness in his limbs was fading. Just bruises. Bruises and bone-ache. He felt a deep chill in his heart, in the very core of him, as if he were a slab of grox meat that had been dragged out of the vittaling freezers and left on a kitchen block to thaw. His fingers were working, though. The clumsiness was fading. Any minute now, he’d get back some useful faculty.
Like the ability to remember his own fething name.
He began to climb. He had purpose at least. Duty. A fething unasked for duty, whether he wanted it or not. That’s why the Holy God-Emperor of Mankind, thrice cursed be His whim, had brought him back, dead from beyond death, to serve his regiment and his commander. It had to be him. That much was clear. It was a purpose, a duty fit only for him. Something he was good at. Otherwise, why would the Master of Terra have requisitioned his soul, and pulled him back through the veil for one last miserable tour in the life-world? But why did the God-Emperor need a dead man when there were evidently many living around him?