V2 Chapter 51: Arrival at the Stargate
The meeting between Venus Carpé and Belisarius Cawl went smoothly.
In the presence of a Martian Archmagos, this perceptive woman deployed her diplomatic instincts and commercial acuity without any sign of being overawed. She understood clearly that in front of the Mechanicus's absolute rationality, discussions of loyalty or faith were entirely superfluous. Only the exchange of interests and the demonstration of practical utility would move this particular audience.
Through a series of carefully constructed concessions and logistical support provisions, Venus reached a binding cooperation agreement with Cawl.
She had not won his trust. A ten-thousand-year-old Archmagos did not extend trust to a dynasty of profit-motivated Rogue Traders. But she had successfully established that the Carpé dynasty had usable value, and that value was sufficient for Cawl to agree to the mortal fleet accompanying him as an auxiliary force for opening the unknown region.
When they left the communications room, Venus walked ahead, turned her head, and gave Duvette, who had been present throughout, an extremely satisfied smile. The expression on her face announced that she considered herself to have just won a hard-fought engagement.
Duvette stood with his arms folded, watching Venus's shoulders shift with the small, self-pleased movements of a person in that particular state, and allowed himself a fractional raise of one eyebrow.
He kept the observation entirely to himself: for someone who had effectively consolidated control of a dynastic house and was one formal transfer of the warrant of trade away from becoming the Carpé dynasty's outright master, this level of visible self-congratulation over a partial victory was not entirely in keeping with the gravity of the role.
Cawl offered no further commentary on the arrangement. He directed Duvette and Venus out of the core communications area without ceremony and stated in his flat electronic tone that after transmitting a "routine survey" report to Terra as sufficient cover, the fleet would depart immediately.
Over the three months that followed, Duvette remained with the Ash Watchers-Eisenmark 112th Regiment in the dedicated quarters Cawl had assigned to them.
It was an exceptionally long Warp transit. The fleet needed to cross from one edge of Imperial space to the other.
After the main Warp leg, they would emerge in the region designated the Calixt sector, and then drive directly into the transit corridor known as the Koronus Passage. That route was a killing ground of violently unstable Warp storms. The only way through to the coordinates of the alien stargate was straight down it.
In terms of living conditions, Cawl's Ark Mechanicus was considerably better than the standard Astra Militarum transports that functioned more or less like mobile coffins. The Archmagos maintained constant gravity and air circulation in the designated areas. Ordinary Guardsmen were even permitted the small luxury of warm water for washing.
The one genuinely intolerable aspect of the transit was the food.
The Mechanicus logistics system had not designed its provisions with mortal palates in mind. The synthetic rations allocated to the 112th were a grey-white paste of a colour and consistency that the stomach protested on sight. Combined with the hot water, the high-concentration salt supplements, and the pure protein paste, the resulting mixture, when cooked, produced something that landed in the mouth somewhere between wet cardboard and medical disinfectant.
For veterans of the 112th, this registered as a nuisance rather than a hardship. They had long since made peace with eating whatever would keep them alive, regardless of whether it could by any reasonable standard be described as food.
What actually worked on the nerves of every Guardsman aboard, and on Duvette's, was the atmosphere.
The Ark's environment was saturated with mechanical prayer chants at various frequencies, continuous and unending. Layered underneath those were the low-frequency hum of the Cogitator Arrays and the sounds of Tech-Priests moving through metal corridors, smelling of machine oil, their augmetic eyes sweeping across the living soldiers with the particular quality of instruments registering data of uncertain value.
Aboard this vessel, ordinary flesh and blood had the ambient quality of something mildly out of place.
Duvette lay on his back on a cold metal bunk, staring at nothing.
The cabin lighting had been reduced to sleep mode. Floating beside the bunk was a servo-skull in its dormant state, which was Cawl's contribution to the arrangement, and which functioned as a full-time surveillance instrument.
Through the heavy metal bulkhead, the monotonous drone of mechanical prayer, something resembling the low murmur of an enormous hive of machinery, continued its effort to force its way through his eardrums and into his brain.
Over three months of transit, this sound combined with [Flesh Engine]'s passive had become something approaching sleep deprivation by slow attrition.
"Emperor's teeth, can these prayers not stop for five minutes."
Duvette finally reached his limit. He kicked the blanket off, hauled himself off the hard bunk, and grabbed at his own hair in frustrated irritation.
The servo-skull activated the instant the words left his mouth. The hollow eye sockets lit with harsh red light. The miniature vox emitter produced a voice entirely without affect.
"Blasphemous language directed at the Omnissiah detected."
"Get out of my way." Duvette gave the thing a single unhesitating backhand that sent it spinning toward the far end of the cabin.
The skull steadied itself in mid-air on its suspensors. An anti-collision field hummed faintly. It reoriented with its red eye locked onto Duvette and raised its output by one notch.
"Behaviour assessed as hostile. Initiating report to Archmagos Cawl..."
"Report away." Duvette walked toward it, raised his boot, and drove it hard in the direction of the cabin door. "Get out."
The servo-skull's indicator lights flickered through what appeared to be a complex logic assessment. It did not attempt retaliation. It floated silently out of the cabin.
Duvette went to the narrow wash station, hit his face with ice-cold water, and forced the residue of the interrupted sleep and the accumulated irritation back down.
Staying in the room was pointless. He pulled on the black commissar's greatcoat, left the quarters, and followed the complex metal corridors toward the bridge section.
The combined fleet was still moving through the turbulent tides of the Warp.
Under the Ark's extraordinarily powerful Gellar Field, the Chaos storms outside were held at the hull's edge without any penetration.
The Carpé Rogue Trader fleet was not permitted anywhere near the Ark of Omen's core perimeter. They followed at the outer edge of the course Cawl had designated, working through the Warp wake the Ark carved open ahead of them.
Lord Inquisitor Heinz Werner's black cruiser followed at the formation's rear like something that had decided to haunt rather than travel, maintaining the same precise and slightly unnerving distance throughout.
Three factions. Three months in the Warp. A fragile equilibrium that held because none of them had cause to break it yet.
When Duvette cleared the security checkpoints and stepped onto the bridge, which was broad enough to suggest an entire cathedral had been repurposed for navigation, he found Cawl already at the main command console.
The mountain-sized frame stood motionless. Countless data-cables ran from the ports beneath his robes to the bridge's primary Cogitator Array.
At the sound of Duvette's approach, Cawl turned halfway. The augmetic eye pulsed red, registered Duvette's presence with the particular quality of someone noting the status of an experiment, and returned to the transit countdown without comment.
Qvo-77, standing to Cawl's side, turned his pale human face toward Duvette and produced a familiar mild smile.
"Colonel-Commissar. We have arrived."
The instant Qvo-77 finished speaking, the entire deck lurched with a physical violence that had no gentle edges. This was the reaction of a ship tearing itself free of the Warp and forcing its way back through the barrier of realspace, a process that the universe did not perform quietly.
A nauseating weightlessness swept through the bridge. The fleet pulled clear of the Warp's turbulent tides and settled back into the cold and silent void of realspace with the particular heaviness of something very large coming to rest.
"The veil is stable. Gellar Field disengaging. Optical arrays coming online."
The servitors' affectless announcements were accompanied by the heavy hydraulic groan of the enormous armour plate covering most of the forward viewport rising open.
Duvette moved to the viewport and narrowed his eyes.
The system outside had not been entered in any Imperial star chart. No planets capable of supporting life. No asteroid field. In the deep, dead silence of the vacuum, only two things occupied the visual space.
The first was a dying star in the middle distance, radiating its fading, sickly red light with the particular quality of something that had been burning for too long.
The second was a structure.
For any conventional warship, its size approached the astronomical. It floated in the deep void, a vast and irregular crescent of ancient construction.
Its surface was the grey-brown of deep stone, dense and oppressive. Across that cold surface, geometric patterns of dark gold and iridescent metal ran in arrangements that had no reference point in human aesthetic logic. They did not repeat. They did not align with any axis a human mind could find natural.
At the structure's edges, the material appeared to exist at a slight remove from the dimension it occupied, shimmering and blurring faintly in the weak light of the dying star, the way a mirage behaves at distance.
At the centre of the enormous crescent was an absolute darkness. Not the darkness of shadow. A darkness that consumed the scanning instruments' detection frequencies along with the light, returning nothing.
Duvette was still looking when Cawl's layered voice moved through the bridge, carrying the precise and unhurried quality of a researcher examining a subject.
Cawl raised one heavy mechanical limb and directed it toward the aged red giant beyond the viewport.
"That star is a cooled ember, left by chance in the proximity of an ancient construct. Or more accurately: it is a sacrifice, dragged across space by the gravitational anomalies this gate has produced over its long existence, and drained of whatever vitality it had."
The optical sensors in Cawl's frame lit with something that, in any other context, might have been called excitement. He kept his gaze on the crescent structure.
"The megastructure itself is the highest technological achievement of an ancient alien civilisation. Its underlying mechanisms are entirely beyond our current capacity to model. It requires no physical matter from the material universe as fuel. It draws its energy directly from the endless tides of the Warp."
At that point, the radar array produced a short burst of identification tones. In the shadow at the crescent's edge, several Imperial vessels floated at rest. The site was not entirely unexplored.
"It appears our colleagues arrived ahead of us."
Cawl withdrew the arm he had extended toward the stargate. He turned his enormous frame, took the great Omnissian axe in both hands, and his lower limb systems produced their deep mechanical hum as he moved toward the bridge exit.
"Come. I will understand every mechanism of this construct."
The electronic voice settled over Duvette with the particular quality of something that does not require agreement.
"And understanding is the first step toward mastering it entirely."