Fist of Demetrius

Chapter Three

Anton looked at the Fist of Demetrius where it lay in pride of place on a great marble slab of a table. He flexed his fingers experimentally and held up his hand in front of his face as if measuring its size against that of the ancient gauntlet. I could tell he was thinking about slipping his hand inside it. He was still that kind of idiot.

‘Don’t,’ I said.

He glanced around. We were alone with the Fist, back on the Lux Imperatoris, in the cluster of luxurious chambers surrounding Macharius’s own rooms. Ancient maps of a thousand systems decorated the walls. Captured banners and pennons spoke of hundreds of victories. Magnetic clamps held the Fist in position. Macharius seemed to like to contemplate it.

We were standing guard, just outside the main chamber. Inside, the inquisitor and the general discussed the next stage of the crusade or, for all I know, debated the finer points of Imperial theology. Of late, many small points of conflict had arisen between them. The ship was making its way to the transit point in preparation for the jump to Emperor’s Glory.

Ivan said, ‘You think this thing really dates from when the Emperor walked among men?’

‘How would Leo know?’ said Anton. ‘Even he’s not that old.’

I looked at it. Macharius and Drake had certainly treated it with reverence. It had that strange old-new look of archeotech, that lack of ageing that only the works of the ancients showed. ‘I don’t know. It looks old, though.’

‘You think it really belonged to Russ? That it might have been in the presence of the Emperor himself?’ There was a hunger in his voice that I recognised, a desire to experience the presence of the infinite, a wish to touch that which had once touched the divine. We are told to take so much on faith, but this might be a physical manifestation of that faith, an artefact of ancient times. Certainly Macharius thought so.

‘How would I know?’ I walked around it. It was a power gauntlet of some sort, made for someone larger than a man. I would have struggled to lift it with both hands. How could anyone have worn it? Maybe it had something in it that made it lighter or amplified the wearer’s strength when it was worn. Many of the weapons of the ancients were magical that way.

‘What does Macharius want it for?’ Anton was doing it to needle me, I felt certain, piling one seemingly naive question upon another, trying to provoke an answer.

‘Why don’t you go and ask him?’ I said. ‘Say you’re having trouble sleeping at night and you won’t be able to rest until you know. I am sure he will listen to you.’

‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’

‘There’s every need to be sarcastic,’ I said.

Ivan pinged his metal jaw with his metal finger. His gaze went from his artificial hand to the Fist. He held his hand up, palm towards him, fingers spread. One by one, he moved his fingers; I heard the whine of servo-motors as he did so. He was looking at the moving rods and pistons visible in the joints of his hand. I looked at the Fist and saw that they were there, on a larger scale.

‘He’s been collecting a lot of this stuff,’ said Ivan. He was not looking at either of us. ‘Maybe he wants to start a museum or a collection of relics in the palace back on Emperor’s Glory.’

‘Maybe,’ said Anton. ‘But would he really risk his life just to add one more thing to his collection?’

‘Who knows why he risks his life?’ Ivan said. ‘I think sometimes he does it because he is bored.’

‘The idiot is right,’ I said. ‘He particularly wanted this one, and he wanted it now. He came here personally to supervise the attack on Demetrius. There was no need for that. He could have ordered it just as easily back on Emperor’s Glory.’

‘Maybe it has magical powers,’ Anton said. ‘They say many of these relics do – that they can heal the sick, cure the lame… smite daemons.’

Those last words hung in the air uncomfortably. None of us really wanted to be reminded of the daemons we had seen back on Karsk. And yet once again, I could not help but feel that Anton in his idiot way might have stumbled on something. Macharius had been amassing his trove of holy relics since that time. What he had seen in the Cathedral of the Flame had altered him. He had looked into the eyes of a greater daemon back there, something that would have broken the sanity of a lesser man.

Certainly since then Macharius had been changed inwardly if not outwardly. He had become more driven, and much more fanatical than the man we had followed across the treacherous, rebellious hives of Karsk.

‘You think he wants all these ancient holy artefacts so he can fight daemons when he meets them?’ Anton asked. He was looking from face to face now, like a child afraid of the dark seeking reassurance from his parents. The difference was that Anton knew there really were monsters out there in the night.

‘I don’t think that’s impossible,’ was all I could find to say. The doors to Macharius’s inner sanctum opened. Macharius emerged. ‘Best get ready to depart,’ he said. ‘We will soon be making the jump to Emperor’s Glory.’

I wondered if he somehow knew what we had been talking about.

We were in our stateroom when the signal for the jump was given. Warning lights started to flicker red then blue. Klaxons sounded one long blast then one short blast then one long blast. There was an interval of a few heartbeats before it started again.

‘Here we go,’ said Anton. He looked sickly. He had never liked warp jumps. I could hardly blame him for it, no sane man does. I looked out of the great stained armourglass porthole. Already a massive blast-shield was sliding into place over it, like the black disc that takes a bite out of a sun during a solar eclipse.

‘Interstellar jumps,’ said Ivan. ‘I hate them.’

‘You always say that,’ I said.

‘Because it’s always true,’ said Anton. He sounded nervous. It was the only time you were ever likely to hear him so. More even than Ivan he detested this part of space travel.

‘It never gets any easier,’ Ivan said. ‘How many jumps do you think we’ve made? Two hundred, two hundred and fifty?’

‘I’ve never counted,’ I said.

‘Me neither,’ said Anton.

‘That’s because you can’t count over twenty,’ said Ivan. ‘And if you ever lose a finger or a toe you won’t even be able to count that high.’

‘Ha-bloody-ha!’

He moved towards the couch and was starting to strap himself in. I began to do the same. Even as we did so, the last of the stars and the blackness of space vanished behind the metal transit shutters. The lights stopped flickering and became steady, and yet it felt like we were sitting in the dark, waiting for something terrible to happen. I could remember a similar feeling during my childhood in Belial, when the gangs used to fight outside in the corridors of our building and there was only a thin thermaplas doorway between us and them.

You always hear stories about ships that go missing: ghost ships lost in the warp for centuries, crewed by dead men, and those that have suffered catastrophic, inexplicable disaster in the endless darkness of space. People dismiss such things as mere tales, but they crop up with remarkable regularity anywhere star-sailors gather and the crews of the great interstellar ships come to drink. And there is no one, no one at all I have ever met, who does not sense the sheer wrongness of it when a ship makes the jump into that terrible sub-realm beneath the skin of the ordered universe, where they go in order to travel the vast distances between stars.

I never really know what to expect. All jumps are different. Sometimes they happen so smoothly that you don’t even know they have taken place. Sometimes entering the warp is like being in a shuttle as it hits atmospheric turbulence on its way down. Sometimes it is a lot worse. This time, there was just a weird sensation of falling, a momentary nausea and then nothing much at all for what might have been heartbeats, or might have been millennia.

‘Is that it?’ Anton asked. He sounded shaky but relieved. His words had an odd sound to them, though, as if they were coming from a great distance away and subtly distorted.

‘Well, we’re still here,’ said Ivan. ‘Wherever here is.’

He had put his finger on it, of course. We had no real idea where we were, and we were not going to have until the ship reached the exit point of its transit. Only the Navigator guiding the ship had any ideas about that. We were cut off from all sight of our surroundings by those huge armoured blast-shields. No one aboard the ship would talk to us about what was taking place, and I suspected that few of them actually knew. It was one of those things we were discouraged from asking questions about when we were common soldiers, and we had never gotten back into the habit of doing so when we became attached to Macharius’s command.

‘How long you think we’re going to be here for?’ The note of worry was back in Anton’s voice. It was one of those things that was strangest and most difficult about warp travel. You never knew how long you were under. The ship existed in a bubble separate from normal time as it passed in the universe above. Your wrist chrono and the ship’s clocks might say one thing, that you had been away for a few days or a few weeks, but when you reached port and consulted with the Imperial Standard timepieces maintained there, you might find that days or months or years had passed instead. There were tales of people who had been gone for centuries and did not look a day older when they returned.

‘Who knows?’ Ivan said. ‘And I mean that most literally. I doubt even our captain and his pet Navigator have the answer.’

Slowly, things started to settle, Anton’s voice sounded normal. It was as though our minds were becoming accustomed to their new surroundings.

We settled down for the journey.

I do not know how long we were in the strange realm but somehow it felt too long. The days seemed stretched. There were odd gaps in my memories. My dreams were troubled. When not on bodyguard duty all of us spent time prowling the endless corridors of the ship, exchanging words with the crew. They were tense, as a crew always is when crossing the warp. They were all too aware of what could go wrong.

Then it happened, the thing that every star voyager fears. Warning lights flared. A terrible vibration passed through the hull of the ship. Weird moaning cries filled the air. I sprang upright in my bunk and reached for a weapon.

‘What in the name of the Emperor?’ said Anton. He pulled himself upright, tugged on his gear and reached for a weapon. It was as instinctive for him as it was for me, although the chances were that there was nothing for us to fight out there.

‘I don’t like this,’ said Ivan. It was understandable. No one likes to hear alarms going off on a starship, particularly not one under way.

‘Really,’ I said. ‘Why ever not?’

‘It makes it difficult to sleep,’ he said and wrinkled a nostril.

The ship started to vibrate as if it were being impacted by a shower of giant meteorites.

‘That’s not good,’ said Anton. His fingers were white where they gripped his sniper rifle. I nodded. I knew we were all thinking about those tales of ships that had sailed off into the dark between the stars never to be seen again. Maybe we were about to find out what happened to them.

All of the lights flickered and went out for a moment. My mouth went dry and my stomach lurched. The thought that without power a starship is just a gigantic coffin entered my mind. No air getting purified and circulated, no heat to drive back the cold of space. No void-shields to ward off enemies. It was so black in the cabin that I could not see my own hand let alone the faces of my companions. I thought of tombs. I thought of ships full of frozen corpses floating through the infinite void. I thought of haunted vessels uncovered a thousand years after they last set out by terrified Imperial explorers. I took a deep breath and told myself not to panic.

It was hard. I could feel my heart pounding against my ribs. I closed my eyes, though it made no difference to the amount I could see. The knowledge that each breath might be my last filled my mind and brought with it a primitive, animal fear. I told myself to breathe, then to take another breath and then another. As long as I was doing that I was still alive. Every breath was a small victory over death.

‘Leo,’ said Anton. There was an undercurrent of fear in his voice.

‘Yes?’ I said. I was proud of the fact that my voice came out level and strong.

‘Any chance of you paying back those five credits you borrowed on Glory?’

‘Not till next payday.’

‘Guess I’ll have to wait then.’ The ship began to shake, violently, like a hive in the grip of a quake. I could feel the vibration passing through my body. The whole floor seemed to be moving up and down. My head hit something hard, and stars flickered across my field of vision. Something wet ran down my brow, blood most likely. I grabbed the support strut of my bed. Muscles twisted in my arms as I tried to maintain my position. I felt the ache of my wound return redoubled. I was not healed well enough for this. I bit back a shout of pain.

The vibration increased. It was far worse than anything the Lux Imperatoris had endured from the planetary defence batteries back in the Demetrius system. I heard a groan from across the room and the clatter of metal hitting metal, and it came to me that Ivan had been tossed right across the chamber.

There were great groans from the hull as if the metal were coming under enormous stress, and the shuddering and bucking of the ship reached a crescendo. Suddenly, everything was silent and still. For a moment I heard nothing save the sound of my own breathing. It was not a good sign. The last thing you want to hear on a starship is silence. It might be the last thing you ever hear.

I was uncomfortably aware of all the sounds that were missing: the rumble of the drives, the whoosh of the great air-circulators, the low humming of the lights, the hundreds of small noises that signalled that the ship and its crew were alive and well. I held my breath, wondering how long it would be before all the systems failed and we died. At that moment, the lights flickered back on. I looked around the cabin. Ivan lay on the ground nearby. Anton was hunched up in his lower bunk, glaring wildly around, fists wrapped round the support stanchions he had been using to hold himself in place. With a groan Ivan raised himself from the floor and said, ‘Someone should have a word with whoever is piloting this ship. I think he still needs to learn a few things.’

‘He got us through whatever it was,’ Anton said.

‘We don’t know that yet,’ I said. They looked at me. I mopped blood off my face with a rolled up shirt and wondered what was going on.

Along with Macharius we stormed onto the bridge of the Lux Imperatoris, pushing through corridors that teemed with uniformed crew members performing urgent repairs. Hundreds of officers bustled around, reacting to incoming data, barking orders into speaking tubes, saluting as they took orders in turn from their superiors. Half the holo-screens looked dead. Tech-priests moved around them intoning technical liturgies as they performed the rituals of maintenance and repair on cracked command altars. The air stank of incense, rising above half-melted machinery. It made me nostalgic for the old days, for riding in the belly of a Baneblade.

The ship’s captain was sitting there on his command throne, surveying his officers as they went about their work. His face was darkened on one side by some kind of flash burn. Men limped and nursed injuries. Medical adepts inspected bodies stretched out on the floor between command altars.

‘What happened?’ Macharius asked.

‘We were caught in a warp storm, Lord High Commander,’ the captain said. ‘It came upon us suddenly as we passed through the immaterium. It separated us from the rest of the fleet. We could not remain in it without being destroyed. Our Navigator plotted an escape course that brought us up in this system. It was the only thing he could do, otherwise we would have been destroyed.’

‘And where exactly is this?’ Macharius asked. The captain steepled his fingers and let out a long breath. He looked at one of the officers who wore the uniform of an astronavigator, a grizzled, grey-haired man with his arm in a sling.

The astronavigator said, ‘I will need to take sightings and plot our position on star charts to be entirely certain. My initial observations lead me to believe that we are in the system marked as Procrastes on old charts, but I would like to confirm that. When a warp storm strikes you can be driven a long way from your initial destination. We are lucky our Navigator managed to bring us out at all.’

‘I’m aware of that fact,’ Macharius said.

‘It is a relatively rare occurrence, Lord High Commander,’ said a smooth new voice. We looked around. A member of one of the great Navigator Houses had entered the command deck. He must have come from the sealed chamber from which he guided the ship. He was a mutant, but the third eye which he used to look out into the warp was decently concealed by a thick brocade scarf bearing the emblems of his House and calling. He did not wear Naval uniform. Instead, he was dressed in the sort of formal court clothes that one associated with the great merchant Houses of the Imperium. ‘The main thing is that we have survived. Many do not.’

The captain looked up from the divinatory altar that he was studying. ‘We have suffered some damage to the ship as we exited the warp. It will take us a few hours to perform repairs.’

One of the officers rose and turned to his captain, clicked his heels, saluted and made a report. ‘Sir, we are picking up considerable comm-chatter. It seems that there is a human inhabited world in this system, and it is coming under attack by xenos.’

That got Macharius’s attention. ‘Record those communications and relay them to me. I wish to know what is going on here.’

If the Navy captain was offended by that peremptory instruction he give no sign of it. ‘Of course, sir,’ he said. ‘But there is nothing we will be able to do until we restore the main power cores and get our engines back online again.’

‘I want you to keep me informed of every development,’ Macharius said. ‘I want to know everything that is happening here. If those xenos make a move against us, let me know immediately.’

‘It will be so,’ the captain said. We followed Macharius off the command deck.

We looked out the huge circular viewport at the dark, dark curtain of space beyond. Macharius had returned to his chambers for the moment, leaving us to our own devices. We had chosen to inspect the damage to the ship from the nearest vantage point to our berths.

The armoured shields had been rolled back. I could see the great pockmarks in the ship’s sides and the small human figures moving along them, checking for flaws in the hull. From here I could see exactly how huge the ship was, a self-contained worldlet, larger than a dozen parade grounds, large enough for an army to march across. There was a suggestion of mountainous hills in the way the superstructure rose over the plains of the lower hull.

‘Think they’ll find anything?’ Anton asked.

‘If the hull had breached while we were in the warp we most likely would all be dead now,’ I said.

‘Not if it got holed at the last moment, as we emerged. Something might have broken in then,’ he said.

‘You’ve been listening to too many sailors’ stories,’ I said. ‘Next you’ll be saying that a hundred years might have passed since we left Demetrius.’

‘Well, they might have,’ said Anton.

‘Yes, they might have, but what difference would that make to us? We’re still alive. That’s all that matters.’

‘We might have missed the crusade.’

‘We could not be that unlucky,’ said Ivan.

‘I doubt any more than a couple of weeks has passed,’ I said, not at all liking the direction this discussion was taking. None of the others seemed to have realised that all of the things they secretly feared had already happened to us. None of us would ever be going home. All of us were marooned in time and space. All we had left was each other and the people we knew. The Imperial Guard was our home now. It had been for many years.

‘Any idea where we are?’ Ivan said.

‘Not where we’re supposed to be, that’s for sure,’ I said. ‘This isn’t Emperor’s Glory. The sun’s the wrong colour.’

‘Another hellhole in the back of beyond then,’ said Ivan. ‘Some things never change.’

‘You think we’re lost?’ said Anton. There was a faint note of panic in his voice.

‘We might be,’ I said, just to wind him up. It was Ivan who chose to break the suspense.

‘Even if we are, they’ll soon find a way to get us home.’

‘Did you see that bloody mutant, that Navigator?’ said Anton. I looked around to make sure none of the crew were close enough to overhear him. The crews of ships are strange. They spent a lot of time locked in these durasteel coffins. They are loyal to each other, and they have no love for outsiders. Not that Anton ever paid much attention to such things.

‘He’s a mutant who has the blessing of the Imperium,’ said Ivan. I could tell the words were making him uneasy even as he said them.

‘Gives me the creeps,’ said Anton. ‘They say they have an extra eye in the middle of their foreheads, that’s why they keep them wrapped. They say it looks into other places, let’s them see things that are not there.’

‘You’ve seen things that weren’t there, when you’ve drunk enough,’ I said. I watched a tiny figure clamber over a gargoyle on the hull. He seemed to come unstuck, like a fly taking off from a wall and began to drift off into space. I wondered if I was watching a small, distant tragedy about which I could do nothing. It would not be for the first time in my life.

I could see Anton’s features reflected translucently in the armour-glass. He sucked his lower lip thoughtfully. The scar flexed on his forehead. He was uneasy. ‘It’s bad enough having to get on these ships,’ he said eventually. ‘Now we don’t even know where we are.’

‘Not much different from usual in your case then, is there?’ said Ivan.

‘You think there might be some sort of curse on the Fist? You think it might be responsible for this happening? Those priests weren’t too happy about us taking it.’

There had been a time when I would have laughed in his face for suggesting such a thing, but I had seen too many strange things since we left Belial. We all had. I watched the drifting crewman. He was tugging himself back in on a line. Maybe he had drifted off deliberately to get a better view of the hull section. In any case I felt relieved.

‘You think some heretic priest’s curse is stronger than the blessings on this ship?’ Ivan asked. ‘It’s as venerable as a Baneblade and served the Emperor just as long as Old Number Ten.’

Anton appeared to consider this. ‘No, probably not.’

‘Good,’ said Ivan. I wondered at the vehemence in his voice and suspected he was just as uneasy as Anton. He just hid it better.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll get home in one piece,’ I said and added eventually in a murmur too low for the others to hear.