Fabius Bile: Clonelord by Josh Reynolds

Author:Josh Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-11-09T07:20:08+00:00

Chapter fourteen

Cambions

The Vesalius ran silent through a corroded spur of the webway. Fabius watched through a static-ridden pict-feed as the frigate passed through broken bone-white reefs of alien matter and toxic clouds of daemonic substance. A moment later, its warning bells tolled out into the blackened spiral depths, scattering flocks and shoals of Neverborn before it. Occasionally, the edges of the Vesalius’ Geller field would strike one of these shoals of impossible, squirming shapes and the daemons would evaporate in their hundreds, much to the amusement of their wiser, swifter fellows.

Defensive turrets silently tracked distant shapes, as large as any warship, as they clambered through the crooked celestial architecture of sub-space. There were giants in the webway, but they seemed content to keep to themselves, at least for the moment. The frigate powered towards the distant, shimmering square of the webway portal without incident, for which Fabius, in his laboratorium, was glad.

He stood in the tertiary strategerium, located in an antechamber of the apothecarium, and observed the vessel’s progress with satisfaction. The functions of the command deck had been surreptitiously slaved to the strategerium centuries ago, enabling him to communicate with Wolver and the crew directly, without having to abide Alkenex or one of his servants looking over his shoulder. The ship was his, whatever Alkenex thought, and it would remain so.

‘Rotate forward sensor array two points,’ he said, tapping one of the holo-displays that swarmed about him like flies. ‘Wide sweep.’ The monotone voice of a servitor assented, and a sensor feed flickered to life, joining the rest of the swarm.

Despite his assurances to the inimitable prefect, travelling through these compromised sections of sub-space was not without substantial risk. ‘Here there be monsters,’ he muttered, as the Vesalius’ aft sensor array detected something massive, burrowing through the tunnels nearby. The webway shook, and clouds of dislodged debris crunched against the ship’s hull with a sound like distant thunder. Fabius silenced the proximity alarms before they could reach the command deck and alert Alkenex’s proxies that anything was amiss.

As the unseen leviathan receded deeper into sub-space, Fabius made a note of the time and place, on the rough cartographic holo-overlay that curved around the interior of the strategerium. He fancied he was one of the few individuals, outside of the eldar, to possess a working knowledge of the webway. And with every trip through its vastitude, he only added to that knowledge. Come the day, the sub-dimension might prove to be a secure bolthole. He had already noted any number of isolated spurs that would provide the necessary space for an apothecarium, in the event of Urum’s destruction.

‘What are they doing?’ Fulgrim asked, interrupting his calculations. The clone crouched atop a nearby examination slab, his attentions on the small knot of vatborn in the corner of the laboratorium. It was not the first, or even the fiftieth question he’d asked, in the hours since he’d destroyed the last of the training servitors. His skills at combat seemed as instinctive as his knowledge-base, and returned more swiftly.

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