Tales of the Amber Vipers Chapter 337
Deep in the Serpens Rex Strike-Captain Reddam drilled. In a sparse dojo he spun and thrust, creating a glittering web of lightning around himself. His power spear left a smear of ionised molecules as he weaved his way through an ancient kata, honing his movements to perfection. Designed for a Transhuman bulk, in power armour, the kata was dazzling to behold, an elegant fusion of form and function and yet Reddam found no peace in it. He pushed himself to the utmost, seeking the harmony Maru's scrolls preached was found within, but serenity eluded him.
Reddam finished his display with a flourish and snapped into a position of attention. Sweat beaded his brow and his backpack spewed heat exhaust but his clenched jaw gave more away. He was displeased. The past haunted him, the future was a veil of mist and the present a confusing jumble of impressions. If there was clarity to be found, it was not in this.
A steady clap drew his eye and he groaned when he saw Tebes and Joffel hanging at the edge of the dojo. He knew their tongues would wag but forbore stoically. Ever since he'd teamed them up as driver and gunner the pair had been bonding tight. One stoic, the other ebullient, but instead of the moderation Reddam had hoped for they seemed to be egging each other on.
"Nice moves!" Joffel laughed.
"I am far from perfect," Reddam grunted as he hefted his spear and wandered over.
"Your skill leaves us in awe," Tebes said, so deadpan Reddam struggled to tell if he was being sarcastic or not.
Joffel cocked his head, "You do seem to be throwing yourself into Maru's teachings."
Reddam sighed, "One of his scrolls said: a curse of the ancients was, may you live in interesting times. What else can we call this?"
"Are not all our lives dangerous?" Tebes asked.
Reddam shook his head, "War and battle are our way, as familiar to us as breathing. But what the Amber Vipers are about to attempt has never been tried. The Corposant promises a new paradigm of warp flight, but there's no telling what dangers it foreshadows. We could well be embarking on a voyage into damnation."
"Someone has to be the first," Joffel quipped.
"Not necessarily," Tebes countered, "This may have been attempted before, only no one came back to report its failure."
"Throne, thank you very much for that cheery thought!"
Reddam's eyes drifted to his spear, where the old hatch mark remained. The past was a briar-patch of painful memories, the deeds required to build the Amber Vipers dark and troubling. No amount of artful calligraphy or intense training in the Katas could wash away the burden he bore. Yet to think all that could be cast away on the whim of chance was worse. If the Serpens Rex was about to carry them to destruction, then everything he'd ever done was for nought.
"Hadn't you better hurry up?" Tebes asked.
"Say again?" Reddam blinked.
"The call went out, we're about to make the jump to nowhere," Joffel explained.
"Fang-rot!" Reddam yelped as he took up his spear and ran for the door.
He heard Tebes sigh, "This again, do you enjoy aggravating him?"
"I just like watching him run," Joffel sniggered.
Reddam left the training dojo with a curse on his lips and hastened across the Nest. At a steady jog he proceeded, making his way past various chattels about their tasks. The tension in the air was obvious, worried mortals looking harried and afraid. They were about to attempt something no imperial had braved before, a bold innovation in space travel. For a society that reviled invention and innovation the mere thought was disturbing.
Soon Reddam bounded into a rickety cage, which ascended on rattling chains at a servitor's direction. For all their work on the primary systems the Tech-Priests hadn't bothered replacing these conveyors with proper grav-lifts, Reddam noted sourly. In a few minutes he reached the central control room, a spectacular arena of splendid craftsmanship, filled with busy chattels. Reddam jogged down a mirror-sheen path between control pits, nodding to the statue of the Emperor as teacher and philosopher as he passed, may He watch over them this day.
Reddam soon reached the pyramid-dais that served as command lectern and took the marble steps three at a time. At the top he found Coluber, Ferrac, Shrios, Nathanal, Kerubim and Maru, waiting patiently. Around the ring of the dais were numerous pict-screens and runepads and a Hololith swam overhead, charting local space at the edge of the Quar'tok system. All of them were waiting for the final word, eager to begin.
"Nice of you to join us," Coluber scoffed.
"Secundus always arrives in the nick of time," Reddam japed as he rested his spear on his shoulder.
"Just in time to watch us die," Shrios muttered.
"Brave heart," Coluber chided, "This will be the Amber Viper's greatest success, I am sure."
"If we ever get started," Ferrac grumbled.
Kerubim was bending over the pict-screens and reported, "Making final consecrations now. Mihas and the Psykers are installed, energy levels rising, hyper-dimensional calculations are inloading. We're nearly ready."
Nathanal checked another screen, "All compartments secure. Defences active and void shields primed. Primus and Secundus are deployed across the Nest and the Revenge is secure in her drydock."
"Berio didn't want to join us," Reddam noted.
"The Cerberii have no place here," Maru stated firmly, "This is a day of glory, not shame."
"At least they'll die at their posts," Shrios spat.
Reddam rolled his eyes and asked, "So this voyage will be instantaneous?"
Nathanal explained, "Binaric data-models suggest that subjective time will not exist. We will drop into Nonspace and emerge at the same instant, some one to two thousand lightyears distant."
"Thousands of lightyears in a second, it will revolutionise Imperial space travel," Coluber declared.
But Ferrac scoffed, "Couldn't you narrow it down to within a thousand lightyears?"
"We're currently working on a lot of supposition, as we gather more results we will be able to predict our vectors with greater accuracy," Nathanal explained.
Kerubim straightened up, "The Psykers are screaming, power charge reaching optimal levels. We're ready for your order."
Coluber lifted his chin and declared, "Today the Amber Vipers will change the course of history. Our mission will strengthen the Imperium, but the means by which we accomplish it will free mankind from the fickle tides of the Warp. The eyes of all living beings are upon us, let us make the Emperor proud. For the Imperium of Man: commence!"
Kerubim pressed a rune and a deep hum ran through the control room. Reddam braced, expecting a helter-skelter plunge into an interdimensional vortex. Accustomed to Warp translations of staggering violence he thought the Nest would shake like a newborn colt, with screaming wrenches of the superstructure and wailing Machine Spirits. He waited for the chattels to weep and alarums to blare, but there was nothing. A slight vibration in the deck, a hint of coldness down the spine, that was all he felt.
"Did it work?" Shrios asked.
Kerubim checked a reading, "Confirmed, we are in the Ghostwind."
"That was anti-climatic," Ferrac scoffed.
"Better than breaking up on entry," Kerubim retorted, "We should return to realspace in a second."
Moments crawled by as all waited, but nothing happened. Reddam frowned as Ferrac began to count, "One... one... one..."
Kerubim's eyes darted from pict-screen to pict-screen, reading Binaric gibberish as he hummed, "This is perturbing."
"Two... three... four..." Ferrac recited testily.
"Something is off," Kerubim muttered.
"Five... six... seven..." Ferrac counted in an accusing tone.
"There..." Kerubim winced, "There seems to have been a miscalculation."
That provoked groans and Shrios snorted, "A thought occurs: the Corposant didn't work, we haven't moved a sodding inch!"
"No, we have entered the Ghostwind," Kerubim affirmed, "All readings confirm it."
Reddam gulped, "We are adrift in an endless nothingness of empty space!"
"Let me work!" Kerubim retorted as he began hammering runepads, whirring arose from under his collar as data-spools began furiously cogitating reams of information. Nathanal joined him and the pair began jabbering back and forth about technical terms Reddam didn't pretend to understand. Reddam's distress beat on the walls of his mind but he forced himself to stillness. In the face of death a Space Marine showed no fear, though the treacherous thought arose this could be worse than death. Adrift in the dark for eternity, with no rescue possible and no marker for their graves. Could their souls escape this interdimensional pit, or would they be doomed to these fathomless depths forevermore?
After a moment Nathanal looked up, "The vectors we inloaded are unwavering and power is being expended to propel us. We are on course, but much, much slower than predicted."
"How did this error occur?" Coluber growled.
"I did say we have little data to work with, and nobody has even probed nonspace. This is all new."
Kerubim nodded, "We must collect as much information as we can in the Ghostwind, Cawl will want to know everything."
They fell to the consoles, working furiously but Ferrac asked, "Can we look outside?"
"Only if you want to go mad," Reddam spat.
"It's not the Warp, there's no Daemons out there pressing to get inside... right?"
"Push the surveyor feed into the Hololith," Coluber ordered.
The sphere overhead flickered and reformed, becoming an orb of purest black. Reddam waited for images to form, but there was nothing to see. Space outside the Nest's hull was void of all matter, not even a single atom to be found. Spectral augurs looked for energy spikes, stellar radiation, vox-emissions, x-rays and microwaves, but found nothing. The bleak wasteland between stars was lively compared to this, the Ghostwind was devoid of all conceivable forms of matter and energy. If there was an atom out there it would lack the energy to hold electrons to its nucleus. Just looking at the Ghostwind made Reddam's brain throb, a faint headache resting right behind his eyeballs.
"It's just endless desolation," Shrios spat.
"Basement of the universe indeed," Ferrac rumbled.
Reddam looked over a reading, "It's as close to absolute zero out there as our surveyors can measure. Not a star to be seen, and there's no signs one ever existed here. We're not even picking up gravity waves. The Logic Engines can't even tell if we're moving."
"The Corposant is running," Ferrac noted, "But that means nothing if physics don't apply here."
"This feels wrong, in a way I can't explain," Shrios whispered.
Maru spoke up, "The Warp is absent."
"Excuse me?" Reddam started as he gazed up at the Librarian-Dreadnought.
Maru explained, "For the first time in your lives you experience the absence of the Warp. All living beings have a connection to the Immaterium, a source of inspiration and vitality some call a soul. We are removed from that wellspring, not disconnected, but remote. The Ghostwind resides in the furthest corner of creation from the Warp. I am a potent Psyker but I can barely feel the faintest tickle of its presence. No Daemons claw at my mind, no voice promising and threatening in equal measure. Is this what it is like to be you?"
Reddam shuddered, "It's like emptiness has its own existence. Not merely an absence, like dark is to light, but a presence with genuine substance. As if nothingness was a wet blanket, wrapping us in choking damp, clinging to our hull and trying to drag us down."
"I really don't want to get stuck here," Ferrac grumbled.
"Me neither," Coluber agreed, "Adepts?"
Kerubim looked up from his labour, "We are factoring new data into our Binaric models. It seems we were entirely wrong about the workings of time in the Ghostwind. The Machine Spirits are computing our course according to Psyker's prediction, they insist we are on the correct vector, though we have no reference points to corroborate that. Power levels are cycling slower than anticipated, but I cannot deduce if that means our efficiency is reduced or merely an artefact of the Ghostwind. If our calculations are correct, we should return to Realspace in three days, subjective to our perception. We may suffer realspace time dilation, but until we can cross-reference with an Astropathic relay we have no idea if it's worse than making Warp transit."
"And if we don't return as planned?" Coluber asked.
"The power the Psykers provided before they died will last five days. If we don't emerge before then, we will drift eternally in this empty wasteland."
Nathanal rubbed his forehead, "We better come out, this place is giving me a headache."
Reddam could only stand as a mute witness while the Serpens Rex plunged into the hollow void that was the Ghostwind. The shining starfort was utterly alone, the only mote of light in a sea of infinite dark. There was no choice save to trust their course was true, and nothing any of them could do were it wrong. So the Serpens Rex sailed as a lonely wanderer, all alone in the endless night that underpins all reality.