Vaults of Terra: The Omnibus by Chris Wraight

Author:Chris Wraight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FLS
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2025-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Spinoza had been unconscious for less than an hour when the chime sounded at her bedside.

The wrench from sleep was painful, and it took her a few seconds to realise what was happening, her head still filled with semi-nightmarish dreams of lips and teeth and kohl-black eyes.

She raised herself onto her elbows, floundering to silence the chime’s bleating. The lumen flickered on, and she gradually blinked her way into focus.

It was Crowl.

‘I wish to see you in the observatory,’ he said. ‘Ensure you are in your full armour.’

The link cut before she could reply. She sat there for a moment, feeling drunk with fatigue. Her whole body protested, demanding that she return to sleep.

Sighing, she pulled herself from her cot. She stumbled from the bedchamber into the arming room, where her armour hung on its rack, ready for donning. As she laboriously applied the pieces, feeling the weight of them snap into place, something like alertness returned. She took a swig of water, rinsing it around her mouth and spitting it into the sink. Then she ran her fingers through her short hair.

The corridors outside were quiet. It was the deep of the night, and only the watch-shifts were in operation. With the re-occupation of the main citadel, the command sections felt empty and echoing, starved of occupants by the death-toll during the raid. There were barely enough bodies left to man the sentinel stations, let alone keep the myriad functions of a fully operational citadel ticking over as they should. Courvain felt sicker and more threadbare than ever – an ague-weakened body on faltering life-support.

The observatory was, as one might have expected, placed right at the summit of the main pinnacle, only overshadowed by the long comms towers with which it was linked. It jutted from the flank of the upper horn-tip of the fortress, a hemispherical protuberance with ornately inlaid windows that gave the distant impression of compound eyes. The most sensitive of the citadel’s listening equipment was housed there, together with the mid- and long-range augur arrays. The space was cluttered with linked machines, tended carefully by trained menials, continually clicking and cycling and churning out ribbons of etched parchment.

When she arrived, the place was flooded with red light. It wavered across the floors, making the tall banks of cogitators appear to sway and tremble. Erunion and Crowl were waiting for her, alongside the duty menials in their robes.

The light came from outside. It looked as if half the horizon were aflame now, and the silhouettes of the greater spires stood against a backdrop of angry, lava-like turmoil. A low rumble could be heard through the armourglass – louder than the usual grind of vehicles, a kind of glowering reverberation that got under the skin.

‘Good,’ Crowl said as she entered. ‘Now we can begin.’

Erunion looked as shattered as she felt. He shot her a weary half-smile, before turning to one of the great creations of valves and transistor-crystals and fiddling with the wires.

Of all of them, Crowl was the most animated.

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