V2 Chapter 53: Daemon World and Chaos Temple
When the encrypted holographic briefing transmitted the final navigation coordinates and destination background data to all parties in the fleet, the bridge of the Ark of Omen fell into a silence that pressed down on the space.
On the holographic projection, Venus Carpé's face, which had been maintaining the composed restraint of an aristocrat, went completely flat the moment she registered the nature of their destination.
"Damn you, Duvette. You did not tell me that the first cost of this venture was the entire family's soul."
Standing beside Cawl, Duvette received Venus's outburst with a completely calm shrug.
"This is not within my control, Venus." He produced an expression that communicated genuine helplessness. "This is the Archmagos's decision."
Cawl, working the Cogitator Array beside him, produced a stream of binary language, apparently to confirm that Duvette was correct.
On hearing that the decision came from Cawl, Venus went silent. After a long pause she exhaled heavily. There was no one else to blame. They had come of their own choice.
The contrast with Venus's barely-contained resistance was provided by the other party listening in.
Lord Inquisitor Heinz Werner, the Thorian who represented the Inquisition's highest authority, had been wearing his characteristic and carefully manufactured pleasant smile until the words "daemon world" reached him. At that point, without any attempt at concealment, something nakedly fanatical crossed the round face.
For a Thorian convinced with his entire being that the Emperor's will would manifest physically in mortal flesh, there was no location in the galaxy better suited for testing mortal faith and witnessing miracles than the stronghold of daemons.
"Lady Carpé, your fear is a direct expression of insufficient faith in the God-Emperor."
Heinz's mild voice came through the communications channel with a quality of devout certainty that carried its cruelty without raising the tone.
"If faith can only exist in a safe and protected cabin, it does not deserve the name. A daemon world is the finest forge available for testing loyalty and miracle alike."
He turned his head, and the eyes behind the holographic projection locked onto Duvette with a fixedness that was not mild at all.
"I will not remain in a safe orbit. Commissar Duvette, I will personally lead an Inquisitorial task force to accompany the 112th to the surface. I intend to stand beside you and witness with my own eyes whether you are capable, in this particular extremity, of manifesting what you have been called a miracle."
Duvette did not respond to Heinz's declaration.
"All communications ending. Full fleet, prepare to enter gravitational capture range."
Belisarius Cawl's flat electronic voice terminated every conversation simultaneously. After confirming that the Carpé fleet and the Inquisitorial cruiser had both adjusted to formation and prepared for impact buffering, the Archmagos issued the final order.
The Ark's main drives engaged. In the slow, heavy acceleration of something enormous beginning to move, the fleet began its approach toward the crescent-shaped stargate floating in the deep void.
Duvette stood at the command console on the bridge, eyes fixed forward. As the megastructure grew in the armoured viewport until it filled the entire frame, a quality of wrongness that had no adequate description settled over every person on the bridge.
There was no dramatic visual effect. At the instant of crossing the gate's threshold, Duvette's stomach dropped as though something in the physics of the universe had seized him, and while his body remained standing rigidly on the bridge's metal deck, some other part of him was hauled violently somewhere very far away.
His senses scrambled.
He heard a voice at a great distance shouting "For Terra and the Emperor!" in tones of extreme desperation. He heard the collapse of an enormous structure in fire. He heard Space Marines in heavy plate, speaking in battle-slang that had not been used since the Great Crusade, cursing traitors with a ferocity that had nothing restrained in it.
Then: nothing. Every sound stopped. His visual field reassembled into focus.
On the bridge, servitors were reporting minor damage across the ship in their affectless voices. The Cogitator Array's primary console was displaying over three hundred mutually contradictory timestamps simultaneously.
But the physical atomic chronometer at the ship's base layer showed that from the moment they entered the gate to the moment they emerged, not one second had passed. They had crossed a galactic distance that no human mind was properly equipped to hold, in the physical equivalent of an instant.
"Remarkable. Extraordinary mechanism."
Cawl's voice came from beside Duvette, saturated with an investigative excitement that had abandoned the effort to sound composed.
"This appears to be a forced topological rewrite using the physical universe as the entry point and the unknowable dimensions of the Warp as the folding medium. It has eliminated the spatial distance between two points instantaneously."
"I must understand it."
Duvette did not respond to the Archmagos's enthusiasm.
He was staring through the viewport. The deep, clean black of normal space was gone.
In its place: a limitless diffusion of Warp luminescence spreading across what should have been a void. Dark-red dust clouds rolling without pause. Immaterial tide-shadows produced by an extremely thin and unstable barrier between realspace and the Warp.
Those moving colours, those dark-red patches twisting in the void as though they were alive, produced a dull, insistent pain at the back of Duvette's skull after only a few seconds of direct viewing. A powerful nausea and dizziness rose from his stomach toward his throat.
He forced the nausea back, narrowed his eyes, and tried to locate any trace of solid planets in the swirling, sanity-eroding dark-red expanse.
Cawl pulled himself back from his technical excitement and returned to the bridge's core control position, working at extraordinary speed to reconnect the ship's external augury arrays and deep-space detection radar.
Every screen returned nothing but interference and sharp static noise.
Simultaneously, through the fleet's high-priority communications channel, fragmented and agonised reports were arriving from the Carpé family's astropaths and Navigators and from those aboard the Ark itself. The extreme proximity to Warp rift conditions was producing severe psychic pressure on these mutant-gifted individuals, as though invisible hands were tearing at their minds from multiple directions at once.
"So we are effectively blind?" Duvette turned decisively away from the viewport, putting his back to the enormous window so that his eyes were no longer in contact with those shifting colours, and giving his skull some relief from the pressure building in it.
Cawl did not answer immediately.
He pressed a mechanical rune. The heavy armour covering plates outside the bridge viewport descended with the sound of gears engaging, sealing that dark-red void away entirely.
When the mechanical sounds ceased, Cawl completed his assessment of the fragmented readings.
"It appears... that is correct. All standard detection methods are non-functional here. We will have to rely on incomplete data fragments and whatever weak feedback the backup navigation systems can produce to locate the primary spatial anchor points this structure has established in this region."
He turned the hooded mechanical face toward Duvette.
"The highest-probability model currently indicates that these anchor points are most likely located on the daemon worlds emitting extreme Warp energy signatures, or in close orbital proximity to them."
Cawl did not address Duvette further. He confirmed through the encrypted channel that the Carpé fleet and the Inquisitorial cruiser had both sustained instrument disruption but no hull damage, then ordered the fleet to continue.
The combined fleet began its slow advance into the interior of this star system.
They remained, at least, within the physical framework of realspace.
The shifting dark-red phenomenon visible outside was simply the expression of the enormous Warp energy saturating the Hadex Anomaly bleeding outward through fractures in the barrier between dimensions. An effect comparable to the famous rift above Cadia: extraordinarily dangerous, something no mortal eye should look at for extended periods without risking psychological damage or direct soul contamination.
For the hours that followed, the fleet sealed every non-essential external observation port and moved through the dark-red stellar dust clouds at the slowest possible sublight speed.
At the primary console, Cawl ran tens of thousands of restart sequences and code overwrites.
Eventually, from within the chaos of background radiation noise, the Ark's base-level arrays managed to resolve several blurred gravitational coordinates. After cross-referencing to confirm these represented bodies with actual physical mass, the fleet adjusted heading and began closing on them.
Duvette did not stay on the bridge to watch Cawl write code. He took the internal transit vehicle back to the 112th's quarters long before that.
He knew that the moment the fleet found its target, that would be the moment his role as "observation subject" began.
The order arrived on schedule.
The combined fleet had reached high orbit above a daemon world enclosed in a dense dark-red atmosphere.
Cawl confirmed, through expendable probes and the degraded augury arrays operating at extreme close range, that the planet's surface contained enormous and geometrically regular structures of unknown nature.
But the Warp interference on that surface was too severe for any remote scan to penetrate the energy field with sufficient resolution to determine the structures' details or their internal defensive strength.
The Mechanicus therefore required ground forces to conduct what amounted to a blind confirmation: arriving in person and assessing the situation by direct contact rather than remote observation.
Cawl's command system produced three explicit coordinates.
It was an extremely dangerous blind drop. The 112th was assigned responsibility for one of the core coordinates.
The other two would be handled by Cawl's Skitarii and combat servitors, for whom fear was not a factor that had any effect on their operational parameters.
The Carpé dynasty's private soldiers, who lacked the heavy assault experience needed for core coordinate operations, were assigned to clear secondary landing zones, establish extraction platforms, and manage orbital supply drops. The Rogue Trader forces would not independently probe core coordinates. They would provide atmospheric heavy transport and air fire support.
When Duvette learned during the pre-drop briefing that Cawl himself would be leading forces to the surface of this daemon world personally, he allowed himself one quiet internal observation while pulling on his carapace armour.
The old creature had been alive for ten thousand years, and his hunger for ancient technology and knowledge had reached the point where he was willing to personally descend into a daemon world without any particular concern for what that said about his priorities.
In the assembly bay at the quarters, Duvette delivered no lengthy pre-battle address. The soldiers of the 112th in front of him were already in full carapace, their weapons cleaned and ready. At the formation's front: the five veterans in force-feedback power armour.
"Check seals. Chamber rounds." Duvette fitted the peaked cap that represented absolute authority in his role, drove the plasma pistol into the holster inside his greatcoat, and brought one hand forward in a single sharp gesture.
"Move out."
The heavy metal boarding doors slid open. Several thousand fully armed Guardsmen moved in step through the hangar and into the heavy transport vessels waiting in the launch positions.
The drives roared. The transport formation, screened by interceptors, pulled clear of the Ark's hangar and drove toward the dark-red daemon world below.
Duvette sat in the command compartment of the transport and watched the vessel punch into the atmosphere, the hull shuddering with the grinding sound of atmospheric friction.
He had already run the scenarios: Warp daemons hitting the hull during descent, concentrated anti-air fire from Chaos forces below, various categories of interception.
What happened was none of those things.
The radar showed no intercept contacts at altitude. The hull took no fire, energy or kinetic. The transport descended in an unsettling and complete silence, passing through a layer of dark-red lightning-streaked atmosphere and entering the planet's inner airspace without incident.
As the distance to the surface closed, Duvette looked through the thick armoured porthole at the shrouded landscape below.
Initially it was a blurred dark point.
As the altitude dropped rapidly, that point expanded in geometric progression until, by the time they were approaching the landing zone, an enormous complex of structures filled every part of the visible frame.
A temple complex. The scale of it was enough to suppress coherent thought.
Seen on an ordinary Imperial world, architecture at this scale might have produced awe. What Duvette saw here produced something different: a quality of madness and desecration emanating from the structures themselves, independent of whatever might be inside them. They were constructed in a Gothic style, recognisable in its basic elements, but twisted in ways that maintained their own internal coherence while violating every principle that should have governed them.
At the tops of the soaring spires, where the twin-headed eagle should have been, enormous and confrontational eight-pointed stars of Chaos had been carved instead.
The outer walls, built from some dark stone of unnamed origin, were covered densely in carved scripture that produced a physical reaction of discomfort in the viewer that was difficult to suppress.
The coloured windows did not depict the Emperor's glory. They depicted, with considerable fidelity to the material, daemons slaughtering Imperial warriors, and winged figures descending into corruption in pools of blood.
At the complex's edges, on the columns of its plazas, in the enormous black stone braziers that occupied every available raised surface, eerie green flames burned with a stillness that fire should not have been capable of maintaining.
Duvette's pupils contracted sharply.
For anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of this universe, the architectural style, which combined religious fanaticism with Chaos corruption into something that had its own terrible completeness, was an extremely clear signature.
"I could identify who built this at a considerable distance," he noted privately, and withdrew his gaze from the porthole.
On the System panel, the Chaos Corruption metric was climbing at a slow and steady rate.
There were no visible living enemies yet. But the planet itself, and the temple itself, were already radiating lethal malice without distinction or preference.
The transport's landing struts struck the enormous plaza of dark rock outside the temple complex with a heavy impact. The hatch unlock tone sounded through the cabin.
"Get ready, soldiers." Duvette drew the plasma pistol and waited for the ramp to drop. "We have genuinely arrived in hell this time."
The ramp began its descent.
"I have a feeling we are about to meet those damned Chaos traitors again."