Collingwood 8

THE ZAROLA TRANSLATED explosively back into the relative safety of realspace. The ship came through from the blinding, deafening, maddening horror of the warp trailing debris and white clouds of flash-freezing atmosphere. As soon as she was through the gateway, the steersman hastily fired directional thrust to bring her grinding and dipping to something resembling a standstill, and loose fragments of the ship fifty metres across crashed into the mangled holes where they had once been anchored, spinning madly away from the vessel an instant later.

On the bridge, I watched on the viewscreen as the frozen body of a servitor struck the outer hull near one of the aft cameras. Its foot broke off at the ankle when it hit the metal and continued to float alongside the rest of it. In the aftermath of the spontaneous and disordered escape from the immaterium, the crew on the bridge were silent and still. We all stared wide-eyed at each-other, as though silently begging for someone to verify that we had indeed just survived the event.

As she cooled and settled, the Zarola emitted eerie groans and knocks.  I found that I was audibly panting, despite a distinct lack of exertion, and that my knuckles were white where I gripped a handrail. Past the thumping in my ears, I heard Grafson grunting and disengaging his plugs. He leant over and vomited as I stepped unsteadily down from the command dais, his right eyeball dyed completely black from numerous burst blood vessels, such was the synaptic feedback.

I met the medical team on my way off the bridge and directed them towards Grafson and Akin – for they wouldn’t need to bother with Galin or Benetek. I then set about sending out pings, one to Lady Juhász and one to Chainbers, I sent another to the Chief Medicae and our resident Magos; simple quick-fire vox signals which would marshal them to me for specific orders. Juhász was the first to respond, unsurprisingly.

‘Chainbers and I are on our way to Medicae to check on Timmins,’ she said, ‘how are things up there?’

‘Not brilliant, but I’ll explain when we all meet up.’ I said, before switching to another channel.

‘Have you any idea what it’s like trying to make soup for a hundred crew while you madmen are doing somersaults?’ I had a private laugh at the man’s remark. Of course, Chief Medicae Baylor was also the Zarola’s Head of Catering; somehow he managed to keep the two jobs despite being crap at both.

‘Any injuries down there, Baylor?’ I asked earnestly.

‘No, Emperor be praised.’

‘Well you can come and shout at us in the Medicae Conference Room, then. We’ve a lot to discuss.’

‘Right.’

I cut the link and stopped at a junction. Going left would take me to the spine lift to the Medicae deck. Instead, I carried straight on.


AS I ENTERED, I saw that my quarters had suffered badly from the impact. The desk was overturned and all of my apparatus was either badly dented and bent or destroyed entirely. I closed the door behind me and started clearing a path through the mess. Of Lottie there was no sign, but I spoke to her nonetheless.

‘Sorry about leaving you, I trust you’re not hurt.’ It baffled me how, even in the small, Spartan room, she could still escape my gaze entirely. No answer came, so I looked up from the strewn books and dataslates to try and find some sign of her, casting my eyes about the room. Something on the far wall, over my unmade bed, caught my attention. I crossed to it slowly, sill speaking to the empty air.

‘Very good, you win. You can come out now.’ It was my sketch, my little technical drawing of the Matas thing, that I had seen. It was still taped to the wall at the foot end of my cot, where I had kept it so I could alleviate the symptoms of the night-terrors, but it now had a single, long dagger protruding from it. I recognised it as one of Lottie’s; a forty-centimetre, heavily fullered, straight blade of what seemed to be obsidian; glossy and smooth and lethally sharp along the edge, with a big space in the middle, lined with emitters for the disruption field. When energised, the blade would be lit up with humming energy that would eat through any armour. It appeared to me, though, that it had been deactivated when it was thrust into the wall here, as the cut was nowhere near deep enough for a powered blade. The sketch had been stabbed just where the creature’s neck was. Decapitated, as it were.

I reached out to pull the sketch off the wall, then paused. My fingers, scant millimetres from the ageing paper, were tingling at the tips, as though conducting a current. I quickly took Lottie’s dagger, my hand just a fraction too big to fit comfortably under the polished silver guard, and sliced cleanly through the tape to bring the paper off the wall, hooking it off by the cut and keeping it a blade-length away from me.

The sketch fell from the tip of Lottie’s blade as I saw what it had revealed. Beneath the sketch, the wall was rotting. The bare metal was black, the top layers flaking away to reveal softer material underneath, caught in the advanced stages of entropy. I flung the blade down on the bed, and leapt over to the heap of broken apparatus where my desk lay I frantically, noisily scrambled through the pile until I came upon a compact laser burner. This I then hurriedly hooked up to the power socket on the wall, praying that it would still work. The beam flickered into life and I put it on its least focussed setting before sitting it atop the pile like a little trophy. Taking the fallen sketch – which had already left a dark patch on the floor – in a pair of pliers, I held the top corner in the beam until it caught fire, then I placed it on the floor and retreated to what I hoped was a safe distance.

The paper burned unbearably slowly at first, but eventually gave off a bigger and much hotter flame, such that I winced back, feeling it burn into my eyes. In a matter of seconds the sketch was nothing but ash, and I breathed a loud sigh of relief. I became aware of another presence in the room and looked up to see the black shape of Lottie, trailing steam and dripping hot water, with a towel covering her modesty and a toothbrush protruding from her mouth.


I SLAMMED THE two lumps of metal down on the table in the meeting room with a shocking clatter; three of the four other people in the room visibly jumped at the noise. I took my seat and waited for the others to do the same. Chainbers sat opposite me and immediately started studying one of the shards.

‘What are these?’ Juhász asked me in particular, picking up the other one.

‘Parts of the Zarola.’ said Rhosan, who had not been startled earlier. Juhász turned the piece of plating in her hands, studying the patch of decay that contaminated it, where the metal had sagged and distorted. Chainbers put his piece down and Rhosan’s pale green eye-lenses regarded it with what might have been wariness; his face was an indistinct mask of gleaming skeletal augmetics.

‘They’re from my quarters.’ I continued, making sure I was apologetic and solemn, ‘I taped a sketch to the wall, of the creature Chainbers and I fought on Calverna.’ Now Juhász dropped her fragment, recoiling in disgust.

‘Daemon shit.’ she spat in an unexpectedly animated manner.

‘Needless to say, I’ve burnt the sketch and intend to be a lot more careful in the future.’ I said before addressing Chainbers, ‘Gordon, if you took anything from the scene, even picts, I want it and these thoroughly destroyed.’ He nodded.

‘I shall feed them to the reactor.’ Rhosan intoned.

‘I’ve never heard of anything like this before,’ Juhász said, having recovered her composure, but still not deigning to touch the fragments again, ‘I trust nothing else was tainted.’

‘It’s impossible to really tell without a psyker, but I think this is all of it.’

‘Yes, all very horrible, but shall we talk about what happened before the Inquisitor’s drawing came alive?’ Baylor said with his arms folded. I only noticed when I looked at him that his clothes were covered in greenish sediment in clumps, with the odd chunk of diced vegetable lodged here and there; evidently he’d had something of an encounter with that soup.

‘Honestly, we’re not sure.’ Juhász began, ‘But it’s reasonable to speculate that whatever we had following us in transit got close enough to make contact.’

‘Frankly it’s a miracle we’re all still alive.’ I said needlessly, ‘But I expect we’re dramatically off-course. Once the astronomers have done their calculations we’ll know exactly how much by. In the meantime, Captain Akin is compromised, which means we will all report to Inquisitor Juhász.’ Lobelia looked uncomfortable. She was evidently not used to coordinating a whole ship, despite her vast wealth of experience. I found her nervousness somewhat reassuring. Everyone on the ship was well and truly out of their respective comfort zones at this point, with the possible exception of Rhosan, whose features were unreadable.

‘For now, you all need to see to your duties.’ Juhász said, ‘Tending to the wounded, assessing the damage and keeping morale up. I’m sure you’re all experienced enough to cope without too much hand-holding.’ Baylor eyed me suspiciously, as if asking me what I’d be doing in the meantime. I declined to answer him.


OVER THE CHAOS and clamour of the storm, a droning could be heard. An almost constant, faintly rhythmic tone that seemed to correspond with the long, dizzying, yawning motions of the vessel and the roaring torrent of rainfall that hammered onto the deck. The noise of cruel nature was given structure by the singular voice of the seventy-strong crew.

There was a time, I had been told, when singing was banned; when neural whips would crack to stop the raucous and often quite explicit work songs, which would then be reduced to the low, repressed groans of a workforce in pain. Through the howling wind and the crashing of the hull on the cold sea, the song that the crew now sung seemed all but indiscernible from that other, more familiar sound. Nevertheless, the syllables carried over the storm and the rumble of the winch motors. The song was about work and life on the seas, timed to the ‘holling’ and ‘chooking’ rhythm of the workers. Fernwood, the eldest of the crew and its unofficial leader, called over the storm in her shrill tone, then the rest of us chorused an answer. I sang too, partly out of habit, but mostly because I knew it was expected of me, and I knew what the crew did to rabble-rousers on the open sea. Tyranny is, after all, its own mother.

My hands began to bleed as I hauled repeatedly on the gurney that held yet more of the vast nets. This far out, at this time of year especially, sea ice would build up around where the gurney sat on its tracks. I and the four other men who had been trying to shift it quickly pissed on the wheels, our precious fluid steaming in the freezing air. We then gathered behind the thing, bracing our legs against it and giving it one mighty shove. The ice splintered off and the gurney rolled off down the deck and clanked against the buffers at the aft. A team jumped on it and dragged the nets off to be used somewhere.

Without warning, powerful arms seized me. I had been too busy watching the gurney to notice what was going on around me. I counted six arms holding my limbs and head still. I knew screaming and thrashing would be futile. I looked up to see a dark, grimacing, hollow-cheeked face. Not one I recognised, one of the other crew members, perhaps. He hated me, I could tell that much. Not just the mild, casual hatred of an individual towards an unfaithful partner or a colleague whose promotion came at the expense of their own, but a real hatred; one born of a grim and ill-favoured life, for the loss of a wife and a child for which (I’m sure he believed) I was entirely to blame.

A blow landed on my jaw, splitting my lower lip. Another followed it, cracking the bone. Then the other fist struck me twice in the ribs, breaking the lower one messily. The man clutched my face with white knuckles, making my jawbone flash white with hot pain, and leaned in close. He hadn’t the words to express his anguish and rage, so he simply screamed, loud and long, spraying me with spittle from his empty gums. I met his gaze neutrally. I would not allow him the satisfaction of frightening me, despite his ferocity and violence. He had nothing to threaten me with.

Nevertheless, his friends gave me a few more on our way over to the side. I caught a glimpse of a guard further up the deck and, beneath his heavy storm coat and hood, I was just able to discern that he was grinning. As the vertigo of the fall seized me an instant later, I saw the same expression echoed on four more faces. Dark, foaming water closed around me.


A WEEK AFTER the incident with the sketch, while the Zarola still hung limp in the void, far away from any sort of civilisation, Juhász and I met in the Medicae suite again. Through the view panel on one side of the room we could see into a surgery, where a cleaning servitor pensively handled a mop and a faulty lamp flickered. When Juhász entered I had been there for twenty minutes or so, lost in thought, but I quickly became aware of her presence, not least because she made the room feel claustrophobic with her sheer mass.

‘Have you been to the Astronomy chambers recently?’ I asked her. On the other side of the glass, the servitor finished its cleaning routine and shambled off through the door, momentarily interrupting the shaft of light that stabbed in from the rest of Medicae. Juhász came and stood next to me; uncomfortably close, as though actively trying to intimidate me.

‘No, Ingram, I haven’t. Not really my scene.’ She replied. I knew this was a lie, but I played along for the sake of continuity. The lights came on in the theatre and the automated chirurgeon descended from the apparatus stem in the ceiling. A pale, flabby Servitor’s torso of indeterminate gender hung in the centre of the machine, with half a dozen gleaming surgical arms sprouting from various points on its circumference and the end of a command wafer which bore an Inquisitorial seal protruding from the back of its skull. It seemed to pose menacingly above the table before it started its work with mechanical force and efficiency.

‘They told me that we are sitting in empty void,’ I said as the surgery began, ‘about twenty-seven light-years from the Askelphion system, just on the border of the Drusus Marches.’ The glass was thoroughly soundproofed, and the body on the table was held totally immobile, but I knew enough about the procedure to imagine the screams and the thrashing, not that they typically lasted for very long. I fancied I could see Lobelia grow a shade whiter as she realised what she was watching.

‘Not a system I’m familiar with.’ she said. This was true enough. I hadn’t been entirely familiar with the name either until I’d trawled through an entire shelf of the Zarola’s library earlier that day. In just a few seconds, the chirurgeon’s operation was complete; it retreated back into the stem which hung like an immense uvula from the theatre’s cavernous ceiling, leaving a thin, pale remnant on the table. Its chest rose and fell rapidly, the face hidden by the long helm the chirurgeon had clamped around it.

‘Well it’s Imperial.’ I said as I left, ‘That’s the important thing.’