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Anathema – Extract

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Anathema

Jude Reid

This isn’t right.

The thought arrived fully formed in Hester’s head as the bulkhead door ground upward. It brought a sense of fear with it, something different from the perpetual unease that had hung about her like prisoner’s chains since she had left Terra. This was new, sharp, rich with foreboding.

Another premonition.

‘Quiet,’ someone hissed in her ear, and her heart jolted in her chest. It had been so long since she had heard a voice – so long since she had heard any sound but the endless drone of the freight-ship’s engines – that the noise was impossibly jarring. She blinked, trying to focus her eyes as the dim red light coming from beneath the rising bulkhead intensified to a steady glow.

On the other side of the doorway, a rough-hewn passageway stretched out into blackness, its close-set walls and low roof supported at intervals by heavy miners’ props. Hester risked a glance over her shoulder and found herself staring into the wide-eyed faces of three of her four companions. They were strangers, true, but strangers with whom she had shared every moment of their huddled voyage across the system, every breath of stale tanked air. She had mind-tasted something of each of them – inchoate swirls of fears, hopes and longings that mirrored her own.

She knew them.

‘Is it safe?’ someone whispered.

‘Safer than you were before, at least,’ the fourth and last of her companions said. He was a tall, sparse man, his stiff posture and crisp diction giving him an unmistakably military air. His mind had tasted different to the rest, burning with a steady intensity against the flickering panic of the others, his fears mixed with resolution and resolve. Hester was reasonably confident that he was the only one of the four of them without a psychic gift of his own, but whatever flaws or crimes had forced his flight from Terra, they were something he didn’t seem willing to share.

The bulkhead rose the final few inches, then ground to a halt. Something moved further down the passageway, and a jolt of panic passed through the huddled group that even the least psychically sensitive person in the galaxy could hardly have failed to notice. Hester pressed herself into the bulkhead’s shadow and tried to fight down panic. This place was meant to be safe – hadn’t that been the point of sending them here? She slowed her breathing enough to extend her sixth sense, but the clamorous panic of her companions was drowning out any psychic impression of whatever was approaching.

She drew a deep breath, and a familiar smell filled her lungs – a heady abattoir mixture of astringents, counterseptics, machine oils and the sweetness of rotting meat. Blood-red light caressed the pallid skin of a bare scalp as the figure lurched forward, bent double by the effort of pushing a laden barrow. The air was suddenly very cold, a shiver working its way down her spine, every nerve and sinew pulled tight as a faint crackling hum began just at the edge of hearing. Something was about to happen. Someone was about to act.

‘Stop.’ The word came out of her lips in a plume of white breath, condensing in the icy air. ‘It’s just a servitor.’

‘She’s right,’ the military-looking man said. The bright beam of his stablight pierced the gloom, picking out the hulking fusion of flesh and machine, the expressionless face with its single augmetic eye. ‘They’ve been mining out the asteroid for decades. It’s no threat to any of us.’

Someone shifted behind her. ‘How do we know that?’ A woman’s voice this time, low and thickly accented. Hester recognised her thoughts too: a swirling mass of bitter resentment, fear, anger and loss. It had been this one, Hester thought, who had been mustering power to strike at the servitor before its nature had been understood, and that made her uneasy. The last thing they needed was a trigger-happy witch letting her fear get the better of them all.

‘It can’t hurt us. It can’t even see us. Look.’ The man shone the stablight across the servitor’s face, the beam setting rubies dancing in the depths of the single augmetic eye. ‘It’s loading the cargo container with ore. And unless you want to take the return journey back to Terra with it, I suggest you get yourselves out of there and come with me.’

The cramped passageway continued deeper into the asteroid. Servitors shuffled past the huddle as they walked, some pushing suspensor platforms or crude barrows, others bearing their loads across their shoulders, all of them with the same empty eyes, the same slack, dead faces. The air was dry and dusty, the acoustics curiously flat: every footstep muffled, every word swallowed before it could echo. Hester hurried along in the military man’s wake, hoping that his purposeful stride meant that he knew where they were going, while the other three trailed behind in a psychic cloud of confusion and unease. The woman who had spoken – the one who had come within a hair’s breadth of unleashing her power – was a stooped, tangled little thing with two bright eyes staring out from beneath a mat of hair. The other two were pale and bland, a man and woman dressed in neat grey uniforms, the sort you might find sweeping stairs or polishing brassware in the houses of the great and good. Hester had nothing in common with any of them.

Nothing at all, except their shared and unnatural nature.

‘Hester, isn’t it.’ The military man spoke without looking round, the bluntness of the statement enough to stop Hester for a moment in her tracks. He had close-cropped sandy hair and cold blue eyes, dressed in a simple tunic and breeches with no visible insignia, that still managed to look crisp even after countless hours crammed into a cargo container. ‘No need to lie about it. I know all of your names. Why you’re here.’

The cold prickle of fear coalesced again on the nape of Hester’s neck. Even a decade ago, when her unnatural nature had been met with grudging sufferance rather than outright revulsion, to speak openly of her gifts had still been unthinkable, and life had only got worse since then. Terra had changed so much in the last few years that even a lowly slaughterhouse worker could see that tolerance was becoming a rare commodity. If the mighty Emperor’s Warmaster could betray Him, what trust was left for a witch like her?

‘You’re not one of us, are you?’ she said. ‘One of the… hunted, I mean.’

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