V2 Chapter 52: Warp Tumour and Temporal Disruption
On the broad bridge of the Ark of Omen, which had the scale and atmosphere of a great cathedral dedicated to function rather than faith, Belisarius Cawl immediately took control of the highest-grade communications array.
The Archmagos's mountain-sized frame stood motionless at the primary console, countless data-cables extending from the ports beneath his robes, attempting contact with the Imperial vessel stationed near the stargate: the Spear of Tarsus, the first ship confirmed to have passed through the gate and returned alive.
Cawl needed everything that ship's machine-spirit and surviving navigation logs could provide: operational data on the gate's mechanisms, and whatever intelligence had been gathered on the unknown star region beyond it.
Simultaneously, the Ark's belly launch bays opened in sequence.
A batch of advanced augury probes equipped with the most precise Martian sensors available, and a wing of unmanned scout vessels controlled directly by servo-brains, were fired into the deep void without hesitation. They crossed the space between the Ark and the gate in brief streaks of light before being swallowed entirely by the absolute darkness at the crescent's centre.
Duvette was excluded from the intelligence exchange between Cawl and the Spear of Tarsus as a matter of course.
He had neither the clearance nor the standing to be present for that class of classified communication. He also had no particular need to listen.
He stood quietly in the shadow at the bridge's edge, watching Cawl's busy frame, his own mind entirely undisturbed.
In this cold and deceitful universe, when it came to foreknowledge of major future events and deep intelligence on hidden star regions, there was almost no one who could match what he carried, save the being currently seated on the Golden Throne on Terra.
While the Archmagos was fully occupied with the data exchange, Duvette moved to an unlocked independent communications terminal, entered his commissar's highest-grade encryption sequence, and opened the 112th's command channel on the lower decks.
"Evan. Log highest combat readiness order." He issued the instruction to the 112th immediately.
He understood clearly what was behind that gate. The lost star region the stargate connected to was known in the Imperium's future official star charts as the Hadex Anomaly.
Its nature was closely comparable to the Eye of Terror. It was a massive tumour of Warp energy grown into the fabric of realspace, radiating a constant and malevolent dark-red light that bent the physical laws of surrounding space sufficiently to render navigation instruments and augury systems nearly inoperable.
But the Hadex Anomaly's most distinctive and most extreme characteristic was something else entirely: it distorted time.
It functioned as a temporal black hole, apparently expelling time outward from some unknown dimension in a continuous stream.
This produced catastrophic disruption to the sequential flow of events in affected regions, to the point where causality itself became unreliable.
Within the influenced star region, a ship executing what appeared to be a routine short-range Warp jump might emerge to find that months or years had passed in realspace while they were in transit.
Even astropathic communications between Navigators would be shredded by temporal turbulence, with fragments of messages that had never been sent appearing unbidden in receivers' minds.
Given this, Duvette had already calculated that Cawl's probes were almost certainly not coming back on schedule. When they returned, it would likely be months after launch regardless of how long the transit itself appeared to take from their onboard perspective.
He was still running survival probabilities in his mind when the heavy blast doors at the bridge's core section opened again.
Cawl's enormous frame returned to the forward section of the bridge. The Archmagos's manner was visibly different from a few minutes prior. His lower limb systems were moving faster than usual, the metal chassis striking the deck with a heavier cadence. From the vocaliser beneath his half-mechanical face, an uninterrupted and unconscious stream of extremely high-frequency binary noise was emanating without apparent intention.
The servo-skulls accompanying his movement were cycling up and down with an anxious rhythm, their metal mandibles clicking in rapid, irregular intervals.
Duvette looked toward him, and Cawl's augmetic eye met his at the same moment.
"I believe we will need to go through that gate in person." The layered synthetic voice carried an unmistakable combination of gravity and something close to compulsive investigative interest.
"Why?" Duvette asked the question with exactly the right amount of puzzlement at the unknown, knowing the answer already.
"My probes have returned." Cawl produced the statement as flatly as if it were unremarkable, which made it rather more remarkable.
"That quickly?" Duvette let the appropriate frown appear.
"No. Not now." Cawl's enormous frame moved to stand beside Duvette, both of them facing the viewport and the distant megastructure beyond it. "They returned one standard Terran week ago. To be exact: my probes were recovered by a Martian colleague one week before I launched them, and the core recorded data was handed over to me just now during the ship exchange."
Cawl's augmetic eye flickered once.
"Fortunate that it was a colleague who recovered them, and not the Ordo Chronos."
Duvette stood where he was and said nothing. He understood Cawl had not finished.
"But that is not the most critical element."
Cawl brought the great Omnissian axe down against the deck with a single blow, turned, and stood with his back to the stargate.
"The navigation logs of the Spear of Tarsus confirm that the act of passing through the gate itself produces no temporal displacement or distortion whatsoever. Which means the only factor capable of causing the probes to cross a temporal boundary is the region on the far side of the gate, where there is clearly a severe collapse of physical law in effect."
"I suspect the spatial primary anchor point of this alien device is located at the very centre of that temporally disrupted region."
His voice returned to its baseline of absolute rationality.
"I need to verify this in person. And the probe data, combined with the base-level survey material compiled from the Spear of Tarsus's logs, indicates that within the star region surrounding that anchor point, there are multiple celestial bodies that have been definitively classified as daemon worlds."
Cawl lowered his head. The vast shadow of the Martian red robes fell over Duvette completely. The voice carried no room for any response other than compliance.
"Prepare yourself, my test subject. You will go and execute my tasks."
Without waiting for any reply, Cawl turned on his lower drive systems and moved directly toward the long-range communications array. He had notifications to transmit: the Carpé family fleet following at the rear, and the Lord Inquisitor.
Duvette watched the Archmagos's retreating frame.
He turned his gaze back to the viewport and the enormous ancient gate floating in the void beyond it, devouring the dying star's light without reflection or return.
He drew a slow breath that carried the ambient smell of machine oil.
"This," he said quietly, to no one in particular, "is going to be complicated."
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