The Twice-dead King: Reign (Warhammer 40,000 Book 2) by Nate Crowley

Author:Nate Crowley [Crowley, Nate]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

THE LAST ARGUMENT OF KINGS

The departure of the Akrops from Carnotite could not have been any less like its arrival. While the gravitic trebuchet had hurled it in-system, very literally, like a siege munition, the great ship passed into the ghostwind without so much as a whisper of displaced energy.

Even the fading of Carnotite’s blood-red darkness took place so subtly that Oltyx’s ever-vigilant optic arrays missed the change entirely. In the end, he only knew the transition had happened at all some seconds after it had finished, when he noticed just how silent the void had become.

There were no stars visible beyond the viewports of the bridge. But that was only the start of the emptiness. To necron senses, the void was a loud place. It rumbled with the baritone call of gravity wells, shivered with quantum turbulence, and even in the most desolate places was parted from time to time by the shriek of radiation from distant stars. Here, though, there was nothing. According to the external thermoreceptors, the temper­ature beyond the hull hovered so close to absolute zero that any heat detected could well have been a measuring error – which was saying a lot, given the precision of necron instruments. If there had been a single atom to be found in this boundless dark, it would have lacked the energy even to hold electrons to its core. But there were no atoms out there. There was no matter at all.

Darkness made visible, thought Oltyx, remembering the phrase from one of Mentep’s endlessly quoted homeworld epics. Like Am-heht’s carapace, he saw now, as his recognition array retrieved what refrenation-damaged images it could from the moments when he had looked directly upon the warlock.

For all the unfathomable complexity of the science with which Mentep had cracked it open, this was a brutally simple place. It was so stripped-down, so abjectly barren, that Oltyx even fancied he understood why Am-heht had sneered at the idea of calling it a place at all. It was nowhere in the most profound sense – the nothingness which lay not just in the cracks between dimensions, but in the cracks between the cracks. And since it was nowhere, Oltyx figured, perhaps it could be anywhere, too.

But the king of Ithakas was no philosopher, and saw little point in postulating. The one thing he was sure of was this: for all the reasons his people had disliked the sea, and subsequently the void too, he despised the ghostwind. The necrontyr had been a people of land and of sun, and their deathless successors were beings with literal star-stuff at their cores. This place was anathema to everything they had ever been.

Oltyx could see it, in the way the groups of shipless nobles clustered fractionally closer together across the bridge. Fear. Or if not fear, at least a discomfort which tessellated very closely with the shape of fear. It was subtle, of course. It might not even have been tangible, to one who had not been adjacent to fear so often as Oltyx had.

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