Ahriman: Exile by John French

Author:John French
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

XI

WARP BREACH

‘We must run,’ screamed Egion.

Carmenta felt terror, and it was not all her own. Egion was crying in her soul, his terror bleeding through the mind-impulse link. Her engine’s flames fluttered and misfired. Stars and darkness blurred in the sensors that were her eyes.

Don’t let me go, she moaned. Please don’t let me go. The Titan Child’s engines spluttered and died. It streaked forwards on its momentum, the station looming closer by the second. Hold on to me, she pleaded. Something is coming for us, for us all. Do not let me go.

In her cable cradle her body went into convulsions. She retched oil and blood through the mouth slot in her lacquered mask. She was drifting, her mind unanchored. Voices whispered in her ears, telling her of things she had forgotten, of the darkness of a labour hab, of the broken turning of a fan, and the chopped light falling across the body of a man curled on a soiled pallet. He twitched and gave a hacking breath. His eyes opened. She had thought he was looking at her, but he would never see her again. The air had reeked of urine, mould and rust, she had forgotten that. How could she forget that? It was not a memory, it was the present. She was not the Titan Child. She was not Carmenta. She was nothing but a girl starring at her father’s face, and watching his blood-pink spittle dribble down his cheek. She could see the cogged tattoos of service under the runnels of spit.

The memory vanished.

I am losing control, she thought.

‘It’s here,’ shouted Egion, over the link. She could almost see him twisting in his amniotic tank, defecating and bleeding in panic. ‘It is here, we must run. Run.’

‘No. We must…’

‘We must run,’ he shouted, and as he shouted his voice carried the vision of his fear into her mind.

She saw what he had seen. It was like seeing a reflection caught in rippling water, all form and pattern breaking as soon as it was seen. She could see beyond the grey lines of the station, behind the stars. Shapes moved there, huge and protean. Scales and scabs of colour clung to their bulk. They waited, their hunger barely restrained.

Carmenta shrieked as a machine. Throughout the Titan Child power conduits ruptured, spilling gas and burning fuel into her insides. The plasma reactors faded and surged. She felt her own body twist in the cradle of cables. Her engines were still burning, but she was numb to them. She was losing her grip on her Titan Child. Her hull was shaking, trembling like skin exposed to an icy wind. Egion’s terror was flooding her with human fear and the ship was trying to shake her free. She had to cut the interface with Egion, or he would destroy them.

She forced her mind back into the link. Her mind became the Titan Child again, ramming through her systems, trailing code damage and corrupt routines. She grasped the mind-impulse link and in that instant she saw him.

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