Watchers in Death by David Annandale

Author:David Annandale
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2016-07-18T07:41:40+00:00

Six

Terra – the Imperial Palace

On Daylight Wall, Koorland watched and listened to the night. He had hoped to return to find the silence banished. Instead it was waiting for him, between the sounds of celebration, coiling around the lights in the dark.

This is the victory I have brought you, Koorland thought. Perhaps the citizens of Terra did not feel the silence. Or perhaps they were trying to banish it. Koorland could make no such pretence.

The silence of the dead regarded him from the depths of the night.

There were fires burning out there, but they were the bonfires of celebration and thanksgiving. The flames of destruction caused by the moonfall had been extinguished. Most of them. Towards the equator, one of the firestorms still burned. And the devastation would take centuries to repair.

In orbit above Terra, there was more damage. The void war had ended with the destruction of the moon. Many Imperial Navy vessels had been destroyed. Others barely limped back to port. At least the ork interceptors had been obliterated by the shockwave of the moon’s explosion.

Earlier in the day, in the Great Chamber, Koorland had listened to Tobris Ekharth read the tally of victory. Hundreds of millions dead. Entire regions of the Imperial Palace had vanished. Some of the craters were ten kilometres wide. So much dust had been thrown into an atmosphere already dark with pollutants, day had been banished for years to come. Terra cycled through the heavy gloom of evening to the most profound night. Ash fell across the globe, white and grey and black, an accumulation of dry, gritty snow.

When Ekharth had finished, Koorland looked at Kubik. ‘Why did this happen?’

‘The analysis of this event is ongoing,’ the Fabricator General said. ‘We may be years from a definitive answer.’

‘Then give us a theory.’

Servos hummed. Kubik inclined his head. ‘Our adaptation of ork technology is still imperfect. We postulate that we failed to account sufficiently for the variance between our modifications and the originals. It is possible the teleportation of the moon would have been successful had the devices been powered entirely by our own energy sources. The attempted integration, however, failed.’

‘The xenos and the human cannot coexist,’ Veritus said quietly.

‘Well observed, inquisitor,’ said Kubik. ‘We might hypothesise a technological conflict. One that was resolved with the teleportation of only one half of the moon.’

‘To where?’ Koorland asked.

‘We do not know.’ Kubik waved his mechanical fingers. ‘The destination is unimportant. Given the energy released, we may presume that what vanished met the same fate upon arrival as that which remained.’ The fingers coiled into tight spirals. The gesture looked very like frustration. ‘These reasons for failure remain conjectural. We will need considerably more experimental data to obtain a more complete understanding of where we succeeded and where we failed. It is unfortunate that none of our sensors survived.’ His optics turned to Koorland. The gaze felt accusatory.

‘The equipment on the Herald of Night was destroyed?’ Lansung asked.

‘Scanning and recording devices were,’ said Koorland. ‘All circuits were melted when the kill-teams were teleported back to the ship.

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