Ascension by Darius Hinks

Author:Darius Hinks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2020-03-23T15:30:50+00:00

21

‘Draik,’ said Isola, speaking out of the darkness. ‘Wake up.’

Draik kept his eye closed for a moment, not ready to face reality until he could fix all of its components into their proper places. He remembered the flight from the battle cruiser and the subsequent crash. He pictured Audus, howling as she burned, trying to save Quintus. His pain grew at the memory of Isola, tumbling away from him, taken by the Blackstone.

‘Isola?’ he gasped, opening his eye.

It was not her, but Grekh. The alien’s blank eyes reflected Draik’s own, pained expression.

‘My head,’ muttered Draik, feeling a large bruise on the back of his skull.

‘I hit you,’ said Grekh.

Draik winced. ‘Why?’

‘To remove you from the gunship. You were about to die.’

Draik stared at his bloody reflection in Grekh’s eyes, Isola’s final moments playing over in his head. Then he closed his eye and slipped back into darkness.

His eyepiece whirred into life and he saw the hallucination that had plagued him since they left Precipice: Isola, falling away from him. But it was not a hallucination. It never had been. All this time he had put it down to cognitive interference, but it had been something far more profound, far stranger: a premonition.

‘I could have saved her.’

‘You tried,’ said Grekh. ‘She let herself go.’

‘I could have prevented all of it.’ He kept his eye closed, still watching the vision in his eyepiece. ‘I knew this was going to happen and I could have stopped it.’

‘The Blackstone showed you,’ said Grekh.

Draik was about to disagree but he realised it was as good an explanation as any. How did the premonition get into his eyepiece? Something or someone had placed it there. Why not the Blackstone?

As he watched Isola endlessly falling he felt a loss surpassing anything he had felt before. It was even greater than his pain at being banished from Terra. Then the scene changed and he saw the other disaster – Precipice, snatched from the void and hurtling towards the surface of the Blackstone Fortress.

‘Janus?’ said another voice and Draik opened his eyes to find Taddeus had shoved Grekh aside. ‘Look at this,’ said the priest, his voice an urgent whisper. Draik wondered if he might have dreamt the crash. Taddeus looked elated rather than saddened. His eyes were glinting with even more fervour than usual.

Draik sat up and looked around. They were on a ledge, high up on one of the Blackstone’s sheer walls with a chill wind slicing into them. The wall sloped away beneath them at a forty-five-degree angle, down into a river of darkness. The servo-skulls were gliding overhead, flashing light across the surface of what seemed to be a vast, black pyramid.

‘The gunship?’ asked Draik.

‘Back that way,’ said Grekh, pointing his rifle into the darkness. ‘The ledge is about half a mile from here. I have been carrying you.’

‘We didn’t want to hang around until those heretics caught up with us,’ said Raus, sitting a few feet away next to Audus, who was hunched over with her head down, her arms wrapped in wet bandages.

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