Dan Abnett - First and Only

But Oric, the cook from the kitchen block, had a broader mind. He would lift the boy in his meaty arms and point his nose to the sky to catch a glimpse of every ship and every shuttle. Ibram had a toy dreadnought that his Uncle Dercius had carved for him from a hunk of plastene. Ibram would swoop it around in his hands as he hung from Oric's arms, dog-fighting the lights in the sky.

One had a huge lightning flash tattoo on his left forearm that fascinated Ibram. 'Imperial Guard,' he would say, in answer to the child's questions. 'Jantine Third for eight years. Mark of honour.'

He never said much else. Every time he put the boy down and returned to the kitchens, Ibram wondered about the buzzing noise that came from under his long chefs overalls. It sounded just like the noise his tutor's arms made when they gestured.

The night Uncle Dercius visited, it was without advance word of his coming.

Oric had been playing with him on the sundecks, and had carved him a new frigate out of wood. When they heard Uncle Dercius's voice, Ibram had leapt down and run into the parlour. He hit against Dercius's uniformed legs like a meteor and hugged tight.

'Ibram, Ibram! Such a strong grip! Are you pleased to see your uncle, eh?'

Dercius looked a thousand metres tall in his mauve Jantine uniform. He smiled down at the boy but there was something sad in his eyes.

Oric entered the room behind them, making apologies. 'I must get back to the kitchen,' he averred.

Uncle Dercius did a strange thing: he crossed directly to Oric and embraced him. 'Good to see you, old friend.'

'And you, sir. Been a long time.'

'Have you brought me a toy, uncle?' Ibram interrupted, shaking off the hand of his concerned-looking nurse.

Dercius crossed back to him.

'Would I let you down?' he chuckled. He pulled a signet ring off his left little finger and hugged Ibram to his side. 'Know what this is?'

'A ring!'

'Smart boy! But it's more.' Dercius carefully turned the milled edge of the ring setting and it popped open. A thin, truncated beam of laser light stabbed out. 'Do you know what this is?'

Ibram shook his head.

'It's a key. Officers like me need a way to open certain secret dispatches. Secret orders. You know what they are?'

'My father told me! There are different codes… it's called 'security clearance'.'

Dercius and the others laughed at the precocity of the little boy. But there was a false note in it.

'You're right! Codes like Panther, Esculis, Cryptox, or the old colour-code levels: cyan, scarlet, it goes up, magenta, obsidian and vermilion,' Dercius said, taking the ring off. 'Generals like me are given these signet rings to open and decode them.

'Does my father have one, uncle?'

A pause. 'Of course.'

'Is my father coming home? Is he with you?'

'Listen to me, Ibram, there's—'

Ibram took the ring and studied it. 'Can really I have this, Uncle Dercius? Is it for me?'

Ibram looked up suddenly from the ring in his hands and found that everyone was staring at him intently.

'I didn't steal it!' he announced.

'Of course you can have it. It's yours…' Dercius said, hunkering down by his side, looking as if he was preoccupied by something.

'Listen, Ibram: there's something I have to tell you… About your father.'

PART FIVE

THE EMPYREAN

ONE

Gaunt had been talking to Fereyd. They had sat by a fuel-drum fire in the splintered shadows of a residence in the demilitarised zone of Pashen Nine-Sixty's largest city. Fereyd was disguised as a farm boss, in the thick, red-wool robes common to many on Pashen, and he was talking obliquely about spy work, just the sort of half-complete, enticing remarks he liked to tease his Commissar friend with. An unlikely pair, the Commissar and the Imperial Spy; one tall and lean and blond, the other compact and dark. Thrown together by the circumstances of combat, they were bonded and loyal despite the differences of their backgrounds and duties.

Fereyd's intelligence unit, working the city-farms of Pashen in deep cover, had revealed the foul Chaos cult – and the heretic Navy officers in their thrall. A disastrous fleet action, brought in too hastily in response to Fereyd's discovery, had led to open war on the planet itself and the deployment of the Guard. Chance had led Gaunt's Hyrkans to the raid which had rescued Fereyd from the hands of the Pashen traitors. Together, Gaunt and Fereyd had unveiled and executed the Traitor Baron Sylag.

They were talking about loyalty and treachery, and Fereyd was saying how the vigilance of the Emperor's spy networks was the only thing that kept the private ambitions of various senior officers in check. But it was difficult for Gaunt to follow Fereyd's words because his face kept changing. Sometimes he was Oktar, and then, in the flame-light, his face would become that of Dercius or Gaunt's father.

With a grunt, Gaunt realised he was dreaming, bade his friend goodbye and, dissatisfied, he awoke.

The air was unpleasantly stuffy and stale. His room was small, with a low, curved ceiling and inset lighting plates that he had turned down to their lowest setting before retiring. He got up and pulled on his clothes, scattered where he had left them: breeches, dress shirt, boots, a short leather field-jacket with a high collar embossed with interlocked Imperial eagles. Firearm-screening fields meant there was no bolt pistol in his holster on the door hook, but he took his Tanith knife.

He opened the door-hatch and stepped out into the long, dark space of the companionway. The air here was hot and stifling too, but it moved, wafted by the circulation systems under the black metal grille of the floor.

A walk would do him good.

It was night cycle, and the deck lamps were low. There was the ever-present murmur of the vast power plants and the resulting micro-vibration in every metal surface, even the air itself.

Gaunt walked for fifteen minutes or more in the silent passageways of the great structure, meeting no one. At a confluence of passageways, he entered the main spinal lift and keyed his pass-code into the rune-pad on the wall. There was an electronic moan as cycles set, and a three-second chant sung by non-human throats to signal the start of the lift. The indicator light flicked slowly up twenty bas-relief glass runes on the polished brass board.

Another burst of that soft artificial choir. The doors opened.

Gaunt stepped out into the Glass Bay. A dome of transparent, hyper-dense silica a hundred metres in radius, it was the most serene place the structure offered. Beyond the glass, a magnificent, troubling vista swirled, filtered by special dampening fields. Darkness, striated light, blistering strands and filaments of colours he wasn't sure he could put a name to, bands of light and dark shifting past at an inhuman rate.

The Empyrean. Warp Space. The dimension beyond reality through which this structure, the Mass Cargo Conveyance Absalom, now moved.

He had first seen the Absalom through the thick, tinted ports of the shuttle that had brought him up to meet it in orbit. He was in awe of it. One of the ancient transport-ships of the Adeptus Mechanicus, a veteran vessel. The Tech-Lords of Mars had sent a massive retinue to aid the disaster at Fortis, and now in gratitude for the liberation they subordinated their vessels to the Imperial Guard. It was an honour to travel on the Absalom, Gaunt well knew. To be conveyed by the mysterious, secret carriers of the God-Machine cult.

From the shuttle, he'd seen sixteen solid kilometres of grey architecture, like a raked, streamlined cathedral, with the tiny lights of the troop transports flickering in and out of its open belly-mouth. The crenellated surfaces and towers of the mighty Mechanicus ship were rich with bas-relief gargoyles, out of whose wide, fanged mouths the turrets of the sentry guns traversed and swung. Green interior light shone from the thousands of slit windows. The pilot tug, obese and blackened with the scorch marks of its multiple attitude thrusters, bellied in the slow solar tides ahead of the transport vessel.