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Contents

Cover

Anathema – Jude Reid

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Valdor: Birth of the Imperium’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Anathema

Jude Reid

This isn’t right.

The thought arrived fully formed in Hester’s head as the bulkhead door ground upward. It brought a sense of fear with it, something different from the perpetual unease that had hung about her like prisoner’s chains since she had left Terra. This was new, sharp, rich with foreboding.

Another premonition.

‘Quiet,’ someone hissed in her ear, and her heart jolted in her chest. It had been so long since she had heard a voice – so long since she had heard any sound but the endless drone of the freight-ship’s engines – that the noise was impossibly jarring. She blinked, trying to focus her eyes as the dim red light coming from beneath the rising bulkhead intensified to a steady glow.

On the other side of the doorway, a rough-hewn passageway stretched out into blackness, its close-set walls and low roof supported at intervals by heavy miners’ props. Hester risked a glance over her shoulder and found herself staring into the wide-eyed faces of three of her four companions. They were strangers, true, but strangers with whom she had shared every moment of their huddled voyage across the system, every breath of stale tanked air. She had mind-tasted something of each of them – inchoate swirls of fears, hopes and longings that mirrored her own.

She knew them.

‘Is it safe?’ someone whispered.

‘Safer than you were before, at least,’ the fourth and last of her companions said. He was a tall, sparse man, his stiff posture and crisp diction giving him an unmistakably military air. His mind had tasted different to the rest, burning with a steady intensity against the flickering panic of the others, his fears mixed with resolution and resolve. Hester was reasonably confident that he was the only one of the four of them without a psychic gift of his own, but whatever flaws or crimes had forced his flight from Terra, they were something he didn’t seem willing to share.

The bulkhead rose the final few inches, then ground to a halt. Something moved further down the passageway, and a jolt of panic passed through the huddled group that even the least psychically sensitive person in the galaxy could hardly have failed to notice. Hester pressed herself into the bulkhead’s shadow and tried to fight down panic. This place was meant to be safe – hadn’t that been the point of sending them here? She slowed her breathing enough to extend her sixth sense, but the clamorous panic of her companions was drowning out any psychic impression of whatever was approaching.

She drew a deep breath, and a familiar smell filled her lungs – a heady abattoir mixture of astringents, counterseptics, machine oils and the sweetness of rotting meat. Blood-red light caressed the pallid skin of a bare scalp as the figure lurched forward, bent double by the effort of pushing a laden barrow. The air was suddenly very cold, a shiver working its way down her spine, every nerve and sinew pulled tight as a faint crackling hum began just at the edge of hearing. Something was about to happen. Someone was about to act.

‘Stop.’ The word came out of her lips in a plume of white breath, condensing in the icy air. ‘It’s just a servitor.’

‘She’s right,’ the military-looking man said. The bright beam of his stablight pierced the gloom, picking out the hulking fusion of flesh and machine, the expressionless face with its single augmetic eye. ‘They’ve been mining out the asteroid for decades. It’s no threat to any of us.’

Someone shifted behind her. ‘How do we know that?’ A woman’s voice this time, low and thickly accented. Hester recognised her thoughts too: a swirling mass of bitter resentment, fear, anger and loss. It had been this one, Hester thought, who had been mustering power to strike at the servitor before its nature had been understood, and that made her uneasy. The last thing they needed was a trigger-happy witch letting her fear get the better of them all.

‘It can’t hurt us. It can’t even see us. Look.’ The man shone the stablight across the servitor’s face, the beam setting rubies dancing in the depths of the single augmetic eye. ‘It’s loading the cargo container with ore. And unless you want to take the return journey back to Terra with it, I suggest you get yourselves out of there and come with me.’

The cramped passageway continued deeper into the asteroid. Servitors shuffled past the huddle as they walked, some pushing suspensor platforms or crude barrows, others bearing their loads across their shoulders, all of them with the same empty eyes, the same slack, dead faces. The air was dry and dusty, the acoustics curiously flat: every footstep muffled, every word swallowed before it could echo. Hester hurried along in the military man’s wake, hoping that his purposeful stride meant that he knew where they were going, while the other three trailed behind in a psychic cloud of confusion and unease. The woman who had spoken – the one who had come within a hair’s breadth of unleashing her power – was a stooped, tangled little thing with two bright eyes staring out from beneath a mat of hair. The other two were pale and bland, a man and woman dressed in neat grey uniforms, the sort you might find sweeping stairs or polishing brassware in the houses of the great and good. Hester had nothing in common with any of them.

Nothing at all, except their shared and unnatural nature.

‘Hester, isn’t it.’ The military man spoke without looking round, the bluntness of the statement enough to stop Hester for a moment in her tracks. He had close-cropped sandy hair and cold blue eyes, dressed in a simple tunic and breeches with no visible insignia, that still managed to look crisp even after countless hours crammed into a cargo container. ‘No need to lie about it. I know all of your names. Why you’re here.’

The cold prickle of fear coalesced again on the nape of Hester’s neck. Even a decade ago, when her unnatural nature had been met with grudging sufferance rather than outright revulsion, to speak openly of her gifts had still been unthinkable, and life had only got worse since then. Terra had changed so much in the last few years that even a lowly slaughterhouse worker could see that tolerance was becoming a rare commodity. If the mighty Emperor’s Warmaster could betray Him, what trust was left for a witch like her?

‘You’re not one of us, are you?’ she said. ‘One of the… hunted, I mean.’

‘Is that what you’re calling yourselves now?’ He turned abruptly to the right and headed along a wider passageway that branched to the right. ‘No. I’m not one of you, but I’m stuck with you all the same. My job’s to get you here and keep you safe until your transport turns up.’ He held up a hand and waited for the little column to come to a halt behind him. ‘Wait here.’

Hester watched him unfasten a pouch at his belt and pull out a palm-sized disc of metal and wax. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I thought I told you to wait.’

‘We’ve a right to know where we’re being taken, and who’s doing the taking.’

‘Do you?’ He held the seal up to a vigil-skull mounted on the wall, and the unmistakable hydraulic hiss of an opening void-lock came from somewhere ahead of them in the gloom. ‘I’m fairly sure anyone who comes this far gives up the right to ask questions.’

‘I don’t remember agreeing to that,’ Hester said, startled at her own boldness. Back on Terra she had lived a quiet life, where so much as expressing an opinion would have left her wide open to scrutiny she could ill afford to attract. Perhaps out here amongst her own kind she had nothing to lose. Certainly she had precious little left to hide.

‘You can call me Drystan.’ The man gave a sharp hiss of frustration. He directed his stablight down the passageway, and Hester caught a fleeting glimpse of the room at its end, data-looms and command consoles lying dormant in the gloom. ‘Damnation. They’re supposed to be here by now.’

‘Who are?’

He rounded on her sharply. ‘You didn’t think the Esperanza would be making the trip just for you four, did you?’

‘The Esperanza?’

‘Of course not.’ Drystan shook his head, his expression sour. ‘You didn’t think at all.’ He turned his attention back to the room and moved towards it, the stablight’s beam dancing with every step. Something was dripping in the darkness, beating out a slow, irregular pulse. ‘There are people all over the Sol System fighting and dying for you, and you don’t even bother to think–’

He stopped abruptly on the threshold. Hester craned her neck to see past him, and the creeping sense of foreboding returned, pressing down on her as though the asteroid’s gravity had suddenly doubled. She glanced over her shoulder and saw the other three had moved up close behind, huddled together like meat-beasts headed for the slaughter.

‘All of you. Inside, now.’ He shoved her forward, and she stumbled across the threshold into the darkened room, the nondescript couple and the dishevelled woman at her heels. Drystan slapped a wall-mounted control rune just inside the doorway, and a heavy door thudded down from its recess and locked into place with a hydraulic hiss. ‘Now, stay where you are. Don’t make me ask you again.’

At first glance, the room seemed almost familiar. She had glimpsed chambers like this above the meat-processing floors where she had spent her working life, places where factorum managers had overseen every part of the process from arrival through to packaging. They had been places alive with noise, cogitators and data-looms chattering out data in pursuit of ever-greater efficiency. This place was quiet, the light from the consoles banked down to an eerie green glow, the air stale and dusty like the inside of a long-sealed crypt. A mug of murky liquid lay overturned by a data-loom, the last of its contents dripping to the floor.

‘Where are you?’ Drystan muttered. A huge viewscreen that occupied most of one wall flickered into life. He dragged over a steel chair and sat silhouetted in front of the glowing static display as he bent forward over the runepad. Some hidden mechanism whirred and ground, and the screen resolved into a series of grainy monochrome pict-feeds showing mining tunnels, industrial machinery and hab-quarters. Drystan cursed softly under his breath, and the images cycled through location after location, all of them empty, at least as far as the camera could discern. Machinery moved, servitors lumbered along with containers filled or empty, but there were no signs of life at all. At last the picts settled on a triptych of images: a dormitorium full of unmade bunks, a refectory, and a wide-angled shot of what could only be the outside of the asteroid itself, the pockmarked grey surface quarried out into a broad, shallow crater.

‘What are you looking for?’ she asked.

It took a moment for Drystan to answer. ‘We’re alone here. There should be others.’ His hands flew over the runepad with practised dexterity, sending a vertical column of glowing sigils scrolling up the right side of the screen. ‘There’s supposed to be more of you, all brought here in cargo containers over the last solar week, and there’s no one here at all.’ He paused and rubbed a hand over his eyes before returning it to the runepad. ‘Which means either that something happened to them on the way here, or after they arrived. And neither thought bodes particularly well for your chances of getting out of the system alive.’

‘What about the station’s cogitators?’ Hester gestured vaguely at the screen. ‘If they made it here, wouldn’t there be a record of their arrival?’

‘Containers, yes. Unauthorised witches, no. The whole point of bringing you here this way is to avoid attracting the notice of the people that want you dead, not to set it down on data-slates. I’ve found plenty of gaps in the station’s cogitator records, but that’s nothing new. These systems were outdated a century ago – they only have enough memory to store pict-feeds from the last few days.’

A creeping chill spread across Hester’s skin. She had left Terra a hunted woman, in hopes of finding safety amongst the stars, only for that same nagging fear of pursuit to find her light years from home. Her mind swirled with questions. If someone had intercepted the other groups on their way, why not hers? She shivered in an attempt to shake off the cold, but it was sinking into her bones now, sapping her resolve, threatening to unmake her entirely. The thought of spending any longer with the terrors of this place still unknown was unendurable.

‘I can help,’ she blurted, and immediately regretted it.

‘What?’

‘Help you find out what happened here.’ She swallowed. ‘If the others made it on board, if they survived the voyage, they’ll have left… imprints. Traces of their thoughts, their feelings. Things I can sense.’

Drystan shook his head. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Only, if there was violence–’ Her mouth was suddenly dust-dry, her hands shaking in the pockets of her coveralls. On the pict-display, the tables in the refectory were still set, half-unwrapped starch bars abandoned mid-bite, an overturned cup lying on its side in a congealed pool of nutri-slop. It was as though whoever had been eating here had stepped out mid-meal with every intention of returning. ‘If they were attacked, those emotions leave a stronger trail. Something we can use to find out what happened.’

‘And if you don’t find anything?’

‘Then we know they never made it.’

He stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head. ‘I know what you’re offering. And no.’ The tone of his voice brooked no argument. ‘I don’t want anyone using their… their abilities.’ He spat the word as though it tasted bitter. ‘Until we know what’s happened here, I can’t risk detection–’

‘And how exactly do you expect to find out what happened if you won’t let me look?’

He turned in his chair. ‘Listen to me.’ His voice was very soft, but there was no less anger in it for its lack of volume. ‘There should be twelve people here already, waiting for the Esperanza, and there aren’t.’

‘Maybe the ship took them early?’ the nondescript woman began, but Drystan cut her off.

‘Not possible. This isn’t the kind of schedule you can change.’

‘Then at least let me look.’

He stared at Hester for a long moment. ‘Oh, you’ll look, all right. But with your eyes, not with any other gift at your disposal, you understand?’ His hand dropped to his belt, and for the first time she caught a glimpse of the holster on his hip, the glint of a stub pistol nestled against his thigh. ‘That goes for all of you. If something’s happened on board, I want us to find whatever caused it before it puts the Esperanza at risk.’ He dropped his voice low, so that even Hester, close at his side, barely heard it. ‘And before it finds us.’

It was clear as they searched that the mining facility was centuries old. Under Drystan’s brusque direction, they searched the station’s central hub, moving from the command centre through the refectory, the offices, librarium and maintenance room. It was a cramped, spartan place, the walls flat expanses of hammered metal riveted down without adornment of any kind, windowless and airless with no direct route to the surface that Hester could discern.

Around the base itself, the asteroid had been mined out into a honeycomb of caverns and passageways, rich seams of ore followed one by one like streams to the ocean. They stayed clear of those, Drystan moving away from the main body of the group to inspect the base commander’s private quarters, while Hester picked through the last of the dormitoria with the other three psykers, and a sinking heart. If the other groups had reached this place and chosen to take refuge in the warren of the asteroid, finding them would be no trivial task.

‘Is that a bloodstain?’ the unobtrusive woman asked suddenly.

Hester turned away from the cupboard she had been searching, and joined the other woman kneeling on the hab-chamber floor. Her face was pressed to the ground beneath the beds as though the station’s missing inhabitants might somehow be concealed in an eight-inch gap. The other two – the woman’s companion, and the dishevelled witch woman – paused in their own search, staring at her with wary eyes. Hester didn’t need to extend her sixth sense to feel the fear rolling off all three of them.

‘Let me see.’

She lowered her head to the ground and squinted into the darkness. There might have been a faint stain there on the plascrete flooring, but if there was, it was as likely to be damp as spilled blood.

‘What do you think?’ the woman asked.

‘I don’t know. It could be.’

‘Can’t you… check?’

No prizes for guessing what she was asking. Hester sighed. ‘Drystan said not to do that.’

On the other side of the room, the woman’s companion nodded. ‘He’s right. We can’t risk drawing attention to this place. Not after everything we’ve been through to get here.’ He swallowed nervously. ‘I’m Njal. My sister’s Irine.’

Hester didn’t bother getting up. ‘Hester.’

‘We just need to finish searching the place, then all we have to do is wait for the Esperanza to come to take us to sanctuary.’ A weak smile crossed the man’s face. ‘We’re closer to freedom than we’ve ever been.’

Hester extended her arm beneath the bed, letting her fingertips trace the rough plascrete flooring until they touched the stain. Njal and Irine’s unease was crashing against her in a deafening wave, the more distant wariness of the tangle-headed woman lurking somewhere at the edge of her perception. She kept her attention away from Drystan’s presence, further off still, focusing instead on the hab, the floor, the stain. A violent act here should have left an imprint on reality – she had learned that lesson on her first day in the abattoir on Terra – but either her gift had deserted her or this place was a blank canvas. It felt as bland as if the unmade beds had never been slept in at all.

She opened her eyes to find the other two staring at her, and shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing here either.’ Drystan’s voice came across the passageway from the commander’s office, and Hester lurched upright, her heart pounding as though she had been caught in some petty crime. Drystan sounded tired, an impression that was only intensified as he appeared in the doorway and rubbed at his eyes. ‘They’re not here. We have to assume they didn’t make it.’

Hester looked down at her hands. There was a faint, rusty smear on her fingertips where they had touched the damp patch beneath the bed. She folded her arms, tucking the stain and its guilt out of sight. ‘What about the mining tunnels? Shouldn’t we check them?’

‘That’d take weeks.’ Drystan shook his head. ‘I’ll keep an eye on the pict-feeds. If there’s movement, they’ll pick it up.’ Was it his exhaustion she was feeling, or her own? She rubbed at her own eyes, fighting the urge to yawn. ‘The four of you should get some rest. I’ll keep watch from the control room.’

Njal and Irine exchanged a glance, their expressions unreadable. Hester lost her battle with the yawn. It had been so long since she had slept properly that even these narrow labourer’s bunks promised a hitherto unimaginable comfort. She sat down on the nearest, then lowered her head to the pillow, the cool fabric caressing her face in welcome.

It was safe here, wasn’t it, she thought, as she closed her eyes. She would have sensed it otherwise. Her gift was a curse, but it had never failed her before.

She held to that thought, and let sleep drag her down.

The scream jolted Hester back to consciousness so sharply that for a moment she had no conception of where or who she was, merely a panicked and disembodied mind floating in a black and endless void. Then her head struck the underside of the bunk above her. White light flared across her vision, anchoring her consciousness firmly in her mortal flesh. Irine was still screaming, her high, panicked wails echoing from the passageway outside the sleeping chamber. Hester lurched to her feet and stumbled towards it, every nerve and muscle in her body jangling with the sudden surge of adrenaline.

‘What is it? What happened?’

‘Njal – he’s gone…’ Irine was hunched over in the passageway like a scared animal, her voice a terrified whine.

‘What do you mean, gone?’ Hester’s thoughts were slow and stupid, her head pounding in time with her racing pulse. She took a half-step closer. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t– I can’t–’ With a visible effort of will, Irine pulled herself upright. There was no mutilated corpse on the ground beside her, only a pool of dark liquid on the plascrete and smeared onto the palms of her hands.

This time there was no mistaking the liquid for anything other than blood.

‘I asked you, what happened?’

‘He was restless.’ Irine looked down at her hands, her eyes widening in horror. ‘He said he was going to stretch his legs. Go for a walk so he didn’t disturb me any more.’ She turned her hands back and forward in the lumen light, as though admiring a pair of gleaming crimson gloves. ‘I should never have let him go. It was only a few minutes, and then I heard… I heard…’

A hand closed on Hester’s shoulder, and she turned, biting back a scream. The wild-haired woman – Mahar, that was the name she had volunteered during the search – was looking back with one filthy-nailed finger held to her lips for silence. And then the passage erupted with the thunder of Drystan’s heavy booted feet as he ran towards them.

‘What’s going on?’

‘I thought you were watching the pict-feeds?’ Hester snapped back, and felt a faint satisfaction as Drystan’s cheeks flushed scarlet. ‘We woke up to find Irine screaming in the corridor. Njal has vanished. He got up and wandered off on his own, by the sounds of it. There’s blood. Irine heard something. I don’t know what could have happened.’

Drystan’s mouth was set in a flat, bloodless line. ‘Irine. What did you hear?’

Irine’s wails paused long enough for her to draw a shuddering breath. ‘Footsteps. Heavier than Njal’s. And then – a soft sound like ripping silkcloth.’ Her cheeks were glistening with tears. ‘And all I found was the blood.’

‘Hester. Can you sense what happened?’ Drystan bent over and touched his own fingers to the bloodstain.

‘I can.’ Now that she was being asked, Hester felt strangely unwilling to use her gift. She wasn’t a tool to be used and discarded at will, and it was time Drystan realised that. ‘But I thought I wasn’t allowed to.’

‘Do it. Please.’

‘Then you’ll need to move her out of my way.’ Hester glared at him. If he wanted her help, she was going to make him earn it.

‘Fine.’ He barged past her, grabbed Irine by the scruff of her tunic and hauled her back along the corridor. Hester bent down and touched her fingers to the crimson pool, feeling its warmth, the sharp copper smell filling her nostrils – and nothing else.

Something cold twisted in the pit of her stomach. Spilled blood should radiate emotion like a blazing sun, but this was blank, dead, soulless. Her gifts had abandoned her, she thought, and bit back a panicked laugh. The miraculous cure she had longed for all her life had finally come to pass. The fact that it had happened here and now was almost too bitter an irony to bear.

‘Nothing,’ she said at last.

‘Nothing?’ Drystan’s expression was unreadable, his voice soft and careful.

‘I’m telling you there’s nothing here. Unless…’ A tiny flicker of hope kindled in her. ‘What about – what about the servitors?’

‘What about them?’

‘Is it possible…’ She ran her tongue over cracked lips, the words sticking in her throat like a lump of gristle. ‘Could they have been reprogrammed? To attack us? It might explain why I can’t feel anything here.’ Even so, she knew she was grasping at straws. There was no possibility so much of Njal’s lifeblood could have been spilled without some emotion on his part.

‘It’s not the servitors,’ Drystan said flatly.

Irine was leaning against the wall, her knees drawn up to her chest with her arms wrapped around them, still half wailing and half sobbing. Mahar was half hidden in shadows, her glittering eyes watchful as they moved from Drystan to Hester to the bloodstain on the floor. Something moved in the darkness, accompanied by a soft shuffling sound that might simply have been dust and debris stirring in the wind.

Except that the air in here was motionless.

‘We’re going to the command centre,’ Drystan said sharply. ‘With me. Now. Run.’

The pict-screens were still active when they returned, the room empty except for a cooling mug sat on the work-console by a hastily overturned chair. Drystan righted it and retook his position at the screens as the security door sealed itself behind them.

‘Watch.’ He rewound the pict-feed and set it playing again. There was Njal emerging from the dormitorium, his face nothing but a pale oval as he took step after halting step, the view from above picking out his balding scalp and a stain on the shoulder of his tunic. Irine let out a sudden sob, reaching out for the screen with her bloodstained hands, but Drystan shouldered her aside. ‘I said, watch.’

The screen flickered again. A dark shadow passed across it, almost too quickly for the eye to follow, and then Njal and the shadow both were gone. The pict-sequence reversed again, and this time Drystan played it forward frame by single frame. First, the doomed psyker. A step forward. A moment’s hesitation. His head turning, his expression turning to shock, then horror.

And then the shadow.

Drystan froze the image in place. His fear was unmistakable, sharp and bitter as sweat. Of course her gift had chosen to return now, Hester thought, when it was nothing but a distraction.

‘Look.’ He moved the pict-feed on a single frame, and the shadow came into a degree of focus for the first time. It was clearly human, dressed in a suit of armour with a dark drape of cloth billowing behind it like a shroud.

‘Who is that–’ she began, but Drystan’s hand tapped the runepad, and the screen went black.

‘Forget it.’ His voice was tight, his hand shaking where he rested it against the console.

Irine’s voice cut across the stillness. ‘It took him. He saw it–’

‘I told you to forget it.’ Drystan turned from the screens, two spots of colour appearing on his pale cheeks. ‘There’s someone on the station, we know that now. There’s four of us, and one of them. The Esperanza is less than eight hours away–’

‘In eight hours we could all be dead too!’ Tears were running down Irine’s face, two fat trails that seemed to gouge furrows in her cheeks.

‘We’re sealed in here. Even she –’ Drystan checked himself. ‘Unless they’ve brought cutting lasers they’re not getting through those bulkheads.’

‘We should never have come here.’ Irene drew a snuffling breath. ‘We should never have believed you.’

‘No one begged you to come.’ Drystan turned in his chair but didn’t rise. ‘Have you any idea what this journey cost? How many people died to get you here?’

‘And what use is it to any of us if we’re all dead too?’ Irine’s hand lashed out towards his face, and Drystan caught her wrist, twisted it and shoved her away in one contemptuous movement. She stumbled back, clutching her injured arm to her chest, mucus trailing from her nostrils to wet her face even further. ‘I’m going. I’m done with this.’

‘Wait.’ Hester put a hand out in an attempt at reassurance, but Irine flinched away as if she had struck her. ‘You can’t–’

‘I can. Those cargo containers are going back to Terra. We got into them and out again without being noticed. We can get back in them again.’

‘And what then?’ Hester fought to keep her voice calm. ‘We’ve been missing for weeks. You can’t just expect to walk back into your old life, and even if you do, nothing’s changed down there. People like us are still being hunted–’

‘How do you know that?’ It was Irine’s turn for her face to blaze scarlet. ‘Because people like him tell you we’re in danger! People are getting taken away – that doesn’t mean they’re being harmed.’

Hester gritted her teeth. ‘Irine, if you go out there, you’ll die.’

‘And how exactly are you going to get to the Esperanza without going out there too?’

Hester opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again.

‘Let her go.’ Drystan suddenly sounded very tired. ‘Let her take her chances. I’m waiting for the Esperanza, and I’d suggest anyone that wants to survive this does the same. We’ll work out a way to reach it. If we can work out where she–’ That pause again. ‘The hunter is, I can lower void-gates and bulkheads, clear us a path to the docking platform on the surface. We just need to wait a little longer.’

Irine, it seemed, had no intention of waiting. Hester called her name, and she stopped with her hand hovering over the door controls.

‘Please don’t.’

‘I’m going.’ The door slid up, revealing the gaping blackness of the station beyond. ‘Good luck.’

Irine slipped away into the dark. The bulkhead door dropped into place and sealed itself with a hydraulic hiss.

It took at least half a standard hour before Hester noticed that Mahar was missing as well.

‘How long now?’ Hester asked.

Drystan’s eyes didn’t leave the viewscreen. He had been replaying the moments before Njal’s disappearance over and over for what felt like hours, frame after repeated frame in the centre of the screen. The rest of the screens displayed live pict-feeds from every corner of the station, though they might have been a still image for all the movement most of them showed.

‘How long ’til what?’

‘Until the ship gets here. The Esperanza?’ She tried the unfamiliar word in her mouth, savouring the pleasing roundness of the vowels. A solar day ago she had never heard of it. Now it was the focus of all her hopes for the future.

‘It’s on its way.’

‘Can you reach it? Tell them what happened?’

Drystan shook his head. ‘I can’t break protocol. One transmission in both directions when it leaves the Mandeville point, then silent running ’til it reaches us. We can’t risk anything else. If the people hunting you find it, then Refuge itself and everyone in it is in danger.’

‘Refuge?’

He tapped the runepad, and the image froze with Njal mid-turn, his eyes widening in surprise. ‘A world far enough away from Luna that the hunters can’t find you. As safe as anywhere can be for the likes of you.’

She studied his face carefully. ‘And what about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘Why are you here?’ His age was hard to guess – older than she was, certainly, with a dusting of grey in his sandy hair, fine lines around his eyes made more prominent by the solar tanning of his skin. ‘You’re not one of us. What’s your stake in all of this?’

‘The same as yours, now.’

‘That’s what I mean.’ A few days ago a conversation like this would have been unthinkable, but her new boldness refused to subside. The alternative was silence, and waiting out this unbearable tension. ‘It didn’t have to be. You’re not one of us. You could be safe doing… whatever it is you did before. Not out here in the void, risking your life.’

‘Safe.’ He snorted. ‘Nothing I ever did was safe. That’s why I’m here. I saw enough of what was going on from the other side, and I’m not going back.’

‘You’re one of–’ She tilted her head towards the screen. ‘One of them? The hunters?’

That drew a proper laugh from him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. But there are things they can’t do for themselves. Or choose not to. I saw enough of what they were doing to want no part of it. And when the chance came to get out, I took it. That’s all.’

‘Who are they?’

His face shut off like the slamming of a bulkhead door, and any fleeting moment of connection passed. ‘If you want my advice, if it comes to it, don’t let them take you alive.’

The room went black.

Drystan was on his feet before Hester had a chance to react, grabbing her arm and pulling her up with him as he rose, the chair clattering to the ground behind them.

‘Move.’

Hester’s muscles locked solid, straining against his grip by reflex alone. ‘Move where?’

He jerked her arm sharply, pulling her forward as his stablight flared into life. The beam picked out motionless data-looms, inert consoles, unilluminated runepads as he dragged her towards the void-lock. ‘She’s cut the power.’

‘What do we do now?’ Hester fought down panic. Every inch of her wanted to crawl into the shadows and hide, to close her eyes and wait for the nightmare to pass, but Drystan’s hand was locked tight around her wrist, dragging her towards the bulkhead door. ‘What if she’s out there – what if she’s waiting?’

‘Then we’re done.’ He touched the unlit runepad by the door, then, when there was no response, opened a hatch set into the wall beside it and pulled down the U-shaped lever nestled into the alcove. The door-seal released with a hiss, and he let go of her wrist long enough to heave the door up so that there was enough space to crawl beneath. ‘But it’s possible she’s still dealing with the others out there in the dark.’ He swallowed, his mouth twisted as though his own spit tasted bitter. ‘We head for the docking platform. If we can get there ahead of her, if we’re there when the Esperanza’s gun-cutter arrives, we can still get out of this.’

A cold sweat broke out across Hester’s skin. Her stomach clenched into a knot, her chest tight as if the atmosphere had suddenly become too thick to breathe, as though the walls were pressing in, muffling sound, dulling her vision.

‘What is it?’ Drystan asked.

‘I don’t–’ Her mouth was dry, the words choking her. ‘I can’t–’

‘It’s her.’

The dread in his voice was enough to break her paralysis, and she let him drag her through passageway after stifling passageway until the appalling presence faded enough for her to think clearly again. Hester wiped her hand across her face, and brought it away streaked with pinkish blood.

‘Is she gone?’ she managed, her voice nothing but a hoarse rasp.

‘She’s not following us,’ Drystan whispered. ‘For now, at least.’

Hester tried to slow her breathing, steady the thudding pulse in her skull. Every inch of her skin was soaked in sweat, her muscles screaming in protest at their sudden exertion. What she had felt back then had gone beyond fear, into raw, suffocating terror. The hunter’s mere presence had destroyed every inch of her composure, making her nothing but a meat-beast in a slaughterhouse, rationality replaced by pure, terrified instinct.

‘How did she do that?’

‘It’s not what they do. It is what the hunters are.’

The voice came from the shadows ahead of them, low, soft and heavily accented. Mahar stepped into the torch beam, still filthy and ragged, but something had changed in the way she carried herself. Her hair was knotted on top of her head in an improvised scalplock, and some time in her absence she had gouged a series of horizontal wounds across her cheeks and forehead, daubing her nose, eyelids and chin in streaks of what was presumably her own blood. She was standing straighter, too, looking more like a techno-barbarian in the dim light than the wretch she had been before.

‘The hunter’s coming.’ There was an audible shake in Drystan’s voice. ‘We need to keep heading for the docking platform.’

‘You cannot flee the hunter,’ Mahar murmured, the words leaving her lips as though learned by rote. ‘The hunter cannot be stopped. The time will come we must face her.’

Drystan shook his head. ‘You don’t understand at all, do you? Anything you’re planning, she’ll kill it stone dead, then if you’re very lucky, she’ll kill you.’

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. My people know the Knights of Oblivion all too well. They have taken many harvests of our kind, but they are not without their weaknesses.’

‘Did you see Irine?’ Hester asked, but Mahar shook her head.

‘No. But I heard her taken. She is with her brother now.’

‘Dead?’

‘Of course not.’ Mahar’s face creased in what might have been a smile. ‘Surely you know that is not the fate the hunters intend for us.’

The dreadful stifling chill was spreading through Hester’s limbs again. She glanced at the other woman and saw her own unease reflected in the hooded eyes. ‘Not now,’ Hester said. ‘She’s coming.’

Drystan nodded. ‘Then we move. Now.’

The passageways opened up as the three of them ran, until the asteroid’s interior resembled the hive of some monstrous, primitive arthropod. Huge scars marked the stone, stigmata gouged out by mining claws. The air was noticeably cooler, filled with the bitter sharpness of ozone and a distant sparking hum, the faintest of shimmers visible in the distance as they passed branching passageways that led out to open space. Hester ran until her lungs were burning, searching the limits of her perception for the hunter’s presence, but her surroundings were so awash with the fear and panic of her companions that she could barely feel beyond them.

The ground shook beneath her, hard enough to send her lurching into a wall.

‘Docking clamps,’ Drystan said, without breaking stride. ‘The Esperanza’s gun-cutter.’ The relief in his voice was unmistakable. ‘If we can stay ahead of her, we might still make it out of here.’

Light was spilling through the far end of the tunnel, a pale, distant glow that slowly resolved into a thousand pinpricks of starlight. The air was thin and cold, the gravity diminishing as they reached the asteroid’s surface and ran out onto the dusty grey plateau. The air tasted of dust and ozone, the unnatural atmosphere seeping from a rusting array of atmospheric pumps studded at intervals around the vast, rocky plain. The stars overhead were impossibly bright, but even their beauty was eclipsed by the promise of salvation that lay just ahead.

A gun-cutter, locked into the landing platform’s docking clamps – and there, hanging above it like a gilded chandelier in the void, was what could only be a voidship.

Two hundred yards to freedom. Hester willed her failing legs to greater speed, but the dust-covered rock slipped away beneath her feet, the fluctuating gravity an impediment rather than an assistance, the air suddenly too thin to breathe. The dreadful numbing chill was spreading through Hester’s limbs again.

Mahar grabbed the meat of Hester’s arm and dug her nails into the soft flesh, and when Hester turned to protest met her eye with an intense glare.

‘Run. I will deal with the hunter. Now,’ Mahar said. ‘While we still can. The hunter must not reach the rescue craft. If she does, all is lost.’

She lifted her hand, and raked the wounds on her face open with her nails. Blood rushed down both cheeks in a surprisingly heavy flow. ‘Changer, hear me now!’ A dull hum was building in the air, rising and falling like a straining machine. Mahar’s face contorted with apparent effort. Blood-red smoke was rising from her skin, bearing a sharp, coppery scent with it into the air. ‘I offer my blood, my flesh, as sacrifice! Grant me your strength, your wrath, your power to stand against–’

Mahar’s head exploded.

Hester’s mouth dropped open, her feet suddenly frozen to the spot as the headless corpse took a halting step forward, dropped to one knee, then fell. A stub pistol was in Drystan’s hand, a fine plume of smoke rising from its muzzle, his face drawn with tension.

‘Why?’ Hester managed.

‘There are worse things than the hunter.’

And as if in reply, the hunter stepped from the shadows of the tunnels out into the light at last.

Dressed from toe to throat in an ornate suit of power armour, she was a vision in monochrome, her hair falling in a dark spill from the crown of her head, the lower half of her face covered with a bevor that jutted forward like the prow of a voidship. She stalked forward like something from a nightmare, a huge greatsword hanging sheathed down her back, a heavy cloak with a fur mantle swirling around her legs. Cold radiated off her in waves, sapping Hester’s strength along with all the colour of the world.

The woman raised her hands and made a sharp gesture, clearly directed at Drystan. His pistol was still drawn, the muzzle pointing directly at the woman’s chest, but she paid it no notice. She gestured again, her fingers flashing too quickly for the eye to follow, and he shook his head, his face flushing crimson with fear or guilt or both. He shot Hester a sidelong glance, then flicked his head almost imperceptibly towards the gun-cutter in its docking clamps. His meaning was clear. If she was quick, she might yet make it to freedom.

‘Lady Jenetia.’ Drystan’s hands were steady as he held out the pistol. The hunter shook her head and gestured sharply again, but there was no expression in her colourless eyes. ‘This is wrong. All of this. The hunt. The Golden Throne and its hunger. Nothing is worth this sacrifice – this slaughter. Not even Him–’

The hunter was almost on him now, her eyes narrowed, her hands flashing out her words. Drystan’s face visibly paled. ‘Please. The Esperanza is a beacon of hope in these dark times. The people it saves may yet be of use to you in the war to come.’

The Knight’s gauntleted left hand jerked sharply downwards. Hester didn’t need to know the sign-dialect to understand that the conversation was over.

‘Very well.’ Drystan bowed his head. ‘I ask only for a clean death at your hand. Surely my service on your voidship has earned me that.’

The Knight paused, inclined her head thoughtfully, then nodded. Her attention only left his face for a fraction of a second, but that fraction was enough. His finger went tight on the trigger, but in the instant before the slug left the barrel, the Knight’s blade flashed out at impossible speed and severed his hand at the wrist. The pistol and the hand that gripped it arced through the air like a comet trailing blood. Drystan looked at the stump with wide-eyed disbelief, his mouth dropping open – and then a second strike took his head from his shoulders.

The pistol.

Hester was moving before it hit the ground, dragging her protesting limbs over the dusty earth with agonising slowness. The Oblivion Knight’s mere presence was turning her blood to ice, twisting her guts into knots, turning her heart to a lump of meat in her chest. The pistol struck the ground and bounced from the severed hand’s grip, and Hester fell to her knees and scrabbled for it in the dust, fumbling it into her grasp as the Oblivion Knight bore down on her, powerblade crackling.

She had seconds left.

Maybe not even that.

Hester rolled onto her back, took aim at the approaching Knight, and fired. The slug struck the warrior’s chestplate squarely in its centre, then ricocheted harmlessly away.

It was over.

If it comes to it, don’t let them take you alive.

Hester raised the pistol to her own temple, but before she could pull the trigger the Knight was on her, kicking the pistol from her grasp and sending her sprawling to the ground. A gauntleted hand seized Hester by the coveralls and rolled her, helpless onto her back. Two blazing dark eyes stared down from above the visor affixed to the lower half of the woman’s face as the Knight fixed mag-cuffs across Hester’s wrists, her ankles, then a muzzle that jammed her jaws together with inexorable force. Then, the Oblivion Knight stepped over her and headed for the gun-cutter locked into the asteroid’s docking clamps.

There were no gods in this age of enlightenment, but Hester prayed to them all the same, just as her ancestors had done for generations.

Grant me a quick death.

There was no reply.

Death would claim Hester in time, but not yet. Many days and many light years lay ahead of her on her final journey before she would reach the foot of the Golden Throne, but there, at least, her prayer would be answered.

About the Author

Jude Reid lives in Glasgow with her husband and two daughters, and writes in the narrow gaps between full-time work as a surgeon, wrangling her kids and failing to tire out a border collie. In what little free time she has, she enjoys tabletop roleplaying, ITF Tae Kwon Do and inadvisably climbing big hills. Her many stories for Black Library include the Warhammer 40,000 novels Creed: Ashes of Cadia, Morvenn Vahl: Spear of Faith and Daemonbreaker.

An extract from Valdor: Birth of the Imperium.

Sevuu watched the flyer come in from the west, low across the ravines of eastern Anatolya, a deepening sky at its back. He shaded his eyes with a dry palm, squinting against the glare of the slowly sinking sun. Before him stretched the baking stonescape of rock and smoulder, still angry, still hot.

The flyer trailed two lines of dirty smoke. As it neared, dipping in the heat, Sevuu noticed its chipped red hull, its old-style turbine nacelles. It was big – a twenty-seater, maybe – but out of shape.

Sevuu smiled. Just like her to find a rust-hulk, the kind of thing any out-of-luck merchant prince would scrape up from a salvage yard. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her in a Palace vehicle. All that gold didn’t really suit her.

He waited, standing still as the dust billowed up around his robes. The flyer extended landing pads, and the turbines swivelled earthwards. In a whine-hail of engines, it came down, kicking up dry soil across the landing site.

Then he moved, walking gingerly across the rock-strewn field, covering his mouth against the grit with a mesh scarf. The first two people out of the flyer were her guards, chainmail armoured, environment masked, projectile-weapon clutching. Sevuu had never discovered what regiment or detachment she took her close protection from – it was hard, even now, to keep track of all the current, semi-current, legal and illegal military units on a world whose only real occupation for several mortal generations had been killing.

Then she emerged, waddling down the ramp, swaddled in grey skirts, clomping her heavy boots, eyes hidden behind thick shades. Her hair was tied up, wrapped around in a red scarf, exposing only patches of her dark, tough skin.

Sevuu went up to her, extending his hands in greeting. She grabbed them both, squeezing hard.

‘Sevuu,’ she said.

‘Madam High Lord,’ he replied.

‘Ready to show me?’

‘Everything,’ he said.

On the journey, two things occurred to him as if for the first time, despite how often he had made the same flight and seen the same things.

The first was the vastness of the place. Soon after lifting again from the landing stage, locked down in the flyer’s hold and pressed up against a smeary viewport, he could see the land wrinkle away towards the curved horizon, a mass of cranial defiles and pale orange mesas. The sky was still a pale blue in the west, darkening at the apex of the atmosphere’s dome, and long shadows ran west-east.

This country had no settled name. It had been depopulated for hundreds of years, just another casualty of chem-clogged warfare and environmental collapse. So much of the globe was the same. Humanity had clung on during the years of strife, crammed within the iron shells of the great coastal cities that now peered across boiled-off seabeds, but not everywhere. For hundreds of kilometres, thousands of kilometres, there was nothing now – just the tick of poison-detectors and rad-counters, the scuttle of six-eyed rodents, the brush of a reproachful wind.

This place, he had been told, had once been called Urartu. There had been kings here, just as there had been kings everywhere – tech-warlords with violent courts, barely deserving the many titles they were given. So far, so unremarkable. You could have said the same about the wild steppes of Asia, the teeming weapon factories of Europa, the hyper-cities of Pan-Pacifica – all at one another’s throats, gripped by the terror and ecstasy of killing.

But there was something about this place. Something primordial.

And that was the second thing. The rocks were old here. Very old. The ruins were old. The watercourses were old. You could smell the age, staining everything, humming softly under a surface cocktail of military-grade chemical spills.

Sevuu was not a historian. There had only been real historians operating on Terra for a short time, ever since He had brought them back into service, and so the past was to him as it was to almost everyone, a blurry mass of myth and conjecture. But you looked at the rocks, here. You ran your finger over them, and you felt where old rainfall had pattered and the hoof-prints of extinct animals were preserved, and you knew. You knew that a story had started here, so long ago that its opening words would never be remembered, but that the story itself still mattered, for it hadn’t finished yet.

Sevuu looked over at High Lord Uwoma Kandawire, who was not looking through the viewport at the scenery. She was sitting in her chair, small and uncomfortable. Her hands gripped the armrests. She had taken her shades off, and that made it easier to see the unease on her face.

‘You have already had a long journey,’ Sevuu said.

Kandawire glanced up at him, roused from thoughts of her own, then shot him a wry smile.

‘You’d have thought,’ she said, ‘that after all we’ve done, all we’ve gone through, we could design an atmospheric flyer that didn’t make me puke.’

Sevuu nodded. Of course, the High Lord was incorrect. There were plenty of flyers that she could have taken, ones that glided through the air with nary a vibration, air-conditioned and whisper-quiet; but they were ostentatious and expensive and would have been noticed by any of the hundreds of makeshift intelligence operations working both within and without the Palace system. And so she, Mistress of the Lex Pacifica and commander of a bureaucracy of thousands, had made herself pukesome on a rattling hunk of poorly riveted steel. Admirable devotion to the cause.

‘Not far now,’ Sevuu said.

Kandawire pushed her shoulders back, hard into the flaking synthleather padding, and tried to ride the judder. ‘I read your ’slate bulletin,’ she said. ‘Anything to add before we arrive?’

Sevuu shook his head. ‘Not really. I can’t decide if they were careless, or we were thorough.’

‘You were thorough. It’s why I chose you.’

‘Or they thought, with some justification, that no one cared enough to look.’

Click here to buy Valdor: Birth of the Imperium.

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