‘And that could slow us down?’ asked Gaunt.
‘By a margin of weeks, if we’re unlucky,’ said Spika.
‘Still, you’re saying the storm isn’t the real problem?’ Gaunt pressed.
‘No,’ said Spika. He held up a finger for quiet. ‘You hear that?’
Gaunt listened, and heard many sounds: the chatter and chime of the multiple cogitators ranked around the warship’s bridge; the asthmatic wheeze of the air-circulation system and environmental pumps; the hum of the through-deck power hubs charging the strategium display; the deranged murmuring from the navigator’s socket; the voxed back-chatter from the crew; footsteps on the deck plates; the deep, deep rumble of the warp drives behind everything else.
During the course of the Salvation’s Reach mission, he had begun to learn the multifarious ambient running noises of the Armaduke, but not enough to become an expert.
‘Not really,’ he admitted.
‘Not really?’ asked Spika. ‘No?’ The shipmaster sounded disappointed. Though the life and the lifetime expectations of a Navy man were, quite literally, worlds away from those of a Guard officer, the two men had bonded during the mission tour, and had both gained insight into operational worlds quite alien from their own. They were not friends, but there was a measure of something that, nurtured, might one day resemble friendship. Clemensaw Spika seemed rather let down that Gaunt had grasped less shipboard nuance than he had expected.
‘It’s quite distinct,’ Spika said, sadly. ‘Number two drive. There’s an arrhythmia in its generative pulse. The modulation is out of step. There. There. There. There.’
Like an orchestral conductor, he beat his finger to a pattern. It was a pattern that Ibram Gaunt did not have the experience of practice to discern.
It was Gaunt’s turn to shrug.
Spika adjusted the brass levers on his armrests, and swept his command seat around. The entire chair, a metal-framed throne of worn leather with banks of control surfaces and levers set into each arm, sat upon a gilded carriage that connected it to a complex gimbal-jointed lifting arm. At a touch, Spika could hoist himself above the entire bridge, incline to share the point of view of any of the bridge stations below, or even raise himself up into the bridge dome to study hololithic star-map projections.
This more gentle adjustment merely turned the seat so he could dismount and lead Gaunt across the bridge to the bank of stations occupied by the Master of Artifice and his key functionaries.
‘Output display, all engines,’ Spika requested.
‘Output display, all, aye,’ the Master of Artifice answered. His hands – busy bionic spiders that dripped spots of oil and were attached to wrists made of rotator struts and looped cables jutting from the fine double-buttoned cuffs of his duty uniform – played across the main haptic panel of his console. Each finger-touch caused a separate and distinct electronic note, creating a little musical flurry like an atonal arpeggio. The Master of Artifice was not blind, for Gaunt could see the ochre-and-gold receptors in his enhanced pupils expanding and contracting his irises, but his attitude was that of a sightless pianist. He was not looking at what he was doing. His picture of the universe and the ship, which were, after all, the same thing, was being fed to him in a constantly updated flow through aural implants, and through data-trunks that ran up his neck like bulging arteries and entered the base of his skull through dermal sockets.
A hololithic display sprang up above the man’s station. Side by side, in three dimensions, the rising and falling graph lines of the Armaduke’s engines were arranged for comparison. Gaunt’s limited expertise was not found wanting now.
‘I see,’ Gaunt said. ‘Clearly a problem.’
‘Clearly,’ replied Spika. ‘Number two drive is operating at least thirty-five per cent below standard efficiency.’
‘The yield is declining by the hour, shipmaster,’ the Master of Artifice said.
‘Are you examining it?’ asked Gaunt.
‘It’s hard to examine a warp drive when it’s active,’ replied Spika. ‘But, yes. Nothing conclusive yet. I believe this down-rate is the result of damage we sustained during the fight at Tavis Sun on the outward journey. Even a micro-impact or spalling on the inner liner might, over time, develop into this, especially given the demands we’ve made on principal artifice.’
‘So this could be an old wound only now showing up?’ asked Gaunt.
Spika nodded.
‘The Master of Artifice,’ he said, ‘prefers the theory that it is micro-particle damage taken during our approach to Salvation’s Reach – ingested debris. This theory has some merit. The Reach was a particularly dense field.’
‘What’s the prognosis?’ asked Gaunt.
‘If we can effect repair, we’re fine. If we can’t, and the output continues to decline in this manner, we may be forced to exit the warp, and perhaps divert to a closer harbour.’
Gaunt frowned. They’d travelled non-stop since departing the Reach, except for one scheduled resupply halt at a secure depot, Aigor 991, a week earlier. It had not gone to plan. Resupply was urgently needed: the raid had expended a vast quantity of their munitions and perishable supplies, but they’d been obliged to abort and press on without restocking. Gaunt was reluctant to make another detour. He wanted to reach their destination as fast as possible.
‘Worst case?’ he asked.
‘Worst case?’ Spika replied. ‘There are many kinds of worst case. The most obvious would be that the drive fails suddenly and we are thrown out of the warp. Thrown out of the warp… if we’re lucky.’
‘Is there anything,’ Gaunt asked the shipmaster, ‘which suggests to you that luck follows the occupants of this vessel around on any permanent or regular basis?’
‘My dear colonel-commissar,’ Spika replied, ‘I’ve lived in this accursed galaxy long enough to believe that there’s no such thing as luck at all.’
Gaunt didn’t reply.
Spika walked back to his command seat and resumed his station.
‘I will begin running assessment variables through astronavigation to see if there are any viable retranslation points,’ he said. ‘I intend to give this condition twelve hours grace. Twelve hours to correct itself or to be repaired. After that, I will be effecting the neatest possible real space translation in the hope of finding a safe haven or fleet support.’
Gaunt nodded.
‘I take it this is all for my information?’ he asked.
‘Colonel-commissar,’ said the shipmaster, ‘if we are forced to terminate this voyage prematurely, or if the drive fails, it is more than likely we will find ourselves adrift in hostile space. There will, very probably, be no safe haven or fleet support. It is likely we will have to protect ourselves.’
He adjusted some armrest levers, and rotated his seat up into the navigation dome and the eternal glow of the star maps.
‘I am telling you this,’ he called down over his shoulder, ‘so that you can ready your Ghosts.’
Gaunt walked aft from the warship’s bridge, ignoring the salute of the Navy armsmen. He clattered down two companionway staircases and entered Port Primary, one of the ship’s main communication corridors. There was a general bustle to and fro; servitors and crew, and the occasional Tanith First trooper who threw him a salute.
The sounds and the smells of the ship were all around him. Warp stress was pulling at the Armaduke’s frame, and deck plates creaked. Wall panels groaned. Ice had formed in some places, glazing the walls, and unexpected hotspots trembled their haze in others. Blast shutters, which stood at twenty-metre intervals along Port Primary, ready to slam shut and compartmentalise the long thoroughfare in the event of a hull breach or decompression, rattled in their frames, temporarily malformed by the tensions of the warp.