Part 28 (1/2)
The station was dying. Rihat knew it. Blood red emergency light suffused the trembling docking corridor, and he could hear the low hiss of atmosphere bleeding into the void through cracks. The doors of the Aethon's docking bay remained open as the dwindling stream of people swarmed through them. They had got as many as they could, but there were many more that they had left: hundreds trapped in parts of the station that could not be reached, pockets of Guardsmen surrounded and dying to the creatures that swarmed into the station even as it was torn apart. He had spoken to many of them over the vox, listening to their curses and cries over the spilling static. If he survived he knew he would hear those voices again for years to come, ghost voices cursing him from his dreams.
*We must close the dock, colonel,' called one of the last two White Consuls from just beyond the toothed blast doors. *The station is coming under sustained bombardment. It will begin to break apart soon. If we are to outrun its death we must break dock.'
Rihat shook his head. *Not yet. There are more who may reach us. Your Librarian ordered me to save all I could. I will honour that order.'
The s.p.a.ce Marine paused for a moment then gave a curt nod.
Rihat looked back to the people pa.s.sing him. Grey-robed menials hurried beside purple-mantled prefects. Bloodied and pale-faced Guardsmen, some still cradling their weapons, jostled beside tech-adepts and slab-muscled ratings.
*Colonel, we must break dock now.' The harsh voice made his head snap around. Hurrying towards him were Hekate and Colophon, the bent-backed astropath wheezing as he kept up with the psyker's long strides. *The bombardment will claim the station in moments; you must give the order now.'
Rihat looked from Hekate to Colophon. The old man looked pale, almost s.h.i.+vering with fear.
*What of Cyrus? He went to find you?'
The old man shook his head. *I have not seen him,' he said.
*Colonela' began Hekate, but he cut her off.
*We will go at the last possible moment, mistress.' He gestured at the few people that hurried towards the dock, but kept his eyes locked with the psyker's stare *The last possible moment.' Hekate glanced at the two s.p.a.ce Marines bracketing the open blast doors, and people still pa.s.sing through. *I suggest you get on board. There is not much time.'
The psyker curled her lip but walked away towards the Aethon, Colophon limping in her wake.
They came for him again, a tide of teeth, and claws. His storm bolter was silent and empty, discarded on the corpse-strewn floor. Lightning arced from his hand, leaping from body to body. Many fell but the rest still came forwards, scrambling over the dead with vulture cries. They reached him, claws scoring through armour, opening its polished innards to s.h.i.+ne in the light of their dead eyes. Cyrus could feel strength leaching from him through a dozen wounds. With a grunt of effort he raised his sword above his head, both hands wrapped around the worn grip. A withered creature hissed at him as it lunged forwards. His first cut split it in two. The second cut scythed through another's stomach and spine.
Something struck him from behind, his shoulder armour splitting as pain stabbed through him. His knee buckled to the ground. He could taste his own blood. Around him he could feel the creatures that had been astropaths laugh at him through the warp.
He could feel the worn joints of the armour gauntlet against his fingers, and the dull pressure of his fingers still gripping his sword. He had expended every weapon he had, used every skill he knew, and still he would fall to the fate he had foreseen. The creatures closed on him. He looked up, pulling himself to his feet. There was one thing, one terrible thing that he had not yet dared to do. It was a monstrous thing, a thing warned against and as difficult to survive as it was to control. Inside his helmet he smiled grimly to himself. With the last shred of his focused will he reached out and ripped a hole through reality.
The creatures fell back as Cyrus stood. The air around him was an accelerating cyclone of flickering power. He ripped the hole wider, his mind holding the vortex in front of him. It opened wider and wider, spinning with distorting shreds of reality. Twisted bodies vanished into the spinning hole, sucked through it with shrieks of anger and fear. For a second Cyrus held the vortex controlled, felt his mind try and grasp the thing he had birthed into being. He began moving a second before he lost control. The vortex broke from his grip with a shriek like shattering gla.s.s. Its black maw ripped wider, spinning everything it touched to nothingness.
Cyrus ran for the doors, feeling his wounded body fill with pain as he moved. Behind him the maw of the vortex grew with a hungering shriek.
The station burned. Red fire ate through armour plating, sucking the oxygen from its innards, twisting the bones of its structure until they cracked and distorted like the broken spine of a dying leviathan. Warp fire mingled with the blaze, daemonic faces rising and falling through the flames.
The circling s.h.i.+ps of the execution fleet silenced their guns for an instant, pausing before the last blow fell. A narrow spread of torpedoes spat from the prow of The Sixth Hammer. Black darts running on bright trails, they carried the most esoteric and dangerous of payloads. As they struck the heart of the station the vortex mechanisms created a rippling chain of holes through reality. Black centred spirals opened in an overlapping cyclone that pulled the station into oblivion.
Cyrus ran through corridors filled with smoke and wreckage. His helmet display was pulsing with environmental warning icons that told him of sudden pressure changes, spiking toxicity and fatal oxygen levels. His torn armour was bleeding air from multiple rents. Some of the fibre bundles running through the armour had been severed. He could feel his muscles tearing as they hauled the armour's dead weight through a limping run.
He turned a corner and saw the armoured doors of the dock still open, the docking bay of the Aethon beyond lit by strobing warning lights. There was a figure slumped over the dock controls, a last soul standing guard over the gates to safety.
Rihat was dying, his skin pale with oxygen debt, but his hand was still clamped over the door controls keeping the doors open to the very last moment. Cyrus paused. Behind him the long pa.s.sage was beginning to twist and buckle.
*Colonel,' he said. The man did not move. *Rihat.' His eyelids flickered and his blue lips mouthed something that Cyrus could not hear. Back down the pa.s.sage a wide tear opened in the wall, spreading across ceiling and floor, sucking flames and air into the blackness beyond. Cyrus reached down to lift the colonel but the man had stopped moving, his eyes staring without seeing. Cyrus thought of saying something, whispering a last word to the man's soul. He thought of the station that was being torn apart at that moment, as many dying within it as might have reached the Aethon, and could think of nothing that would give the dead comfort.
Cyrus moved the man's hand from the dock controls. With a sound of hissing pistons the Aethon's blast doors began to close. He walked alone between the closing teeth as the s.h.i.+p broke its bond with the station. Behind him the pa.s.sage came apart with a shriek of rending metal.
The vortices swallowed the last of the station's carca.s.s. On their edge, the white hull of an Adeptus Astartes battle-barge turned, engines straining to claw against the forces pulling it back into the waiting mouths of the growing vortices.
On his throne Inquisitor Xerxes saw the s.h.i.+p slip from the imploding debris of the station and make for open s.p.a.ce, noting the heraldry of the White Consuls. A n.o.ble Chapter indeed but one laid low in recent times. The loss of such a s.h.i.+p would be a blow to a brotherhood fading into history. But he could not permit any to outrun a decree of Exterminatus. He nodded to one of the bridge officers and watched as the destroyers and light cruiser accelerated into a looping course that would cut the s.h.i.+p off before it could reach the system's edge.
The closed doors to the Aethon's bridge waited in front of him. The carved images of Sabatine glinted in the light of braziers on either side. He paused, tasting the breath that flowed in and out of his lungs.
The daemon would have gone to the bridge to be close to the centre of decisions and authority, to ensure it could influence its own escape. He had hurried through the s.h.i.+p, pa.s.sing servitors and confused knots of refugees from the station. He had felt tremors run through the s.h.i.+p as its engines fought against the pull of the vortices that had taken the station.
He had stopped in front of the bronze doors. Flickers of half-remembered visions poured through his mind. He knew what would happen, what all the fragmentary glimpses would amount to, the price that would have to be paid.
Slowly he reached up, unlocking his helmet from his armour and tossing it onto the deck. He let out a long breath. The suppressed pain of his wounds was a spreading numbness across his body. He brought his sword up, resting his forehead against the flat of the blade. It was cold against his skin. He thought of the ash of a dead world in his fingers, of his brothers shouting their death lament, of Rihat mouthing unheard last words, of looking up to see a Black s.h.i.+p in a blue sky.
*It is what we were made for,' he muttered to himself and pushed the bronze doors open.