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The Helwinter Gate – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CHAPTER ONE

The Blade of Naxian ran hard through the void. It was a good ship, one of the best Hera Soteqa had ever served on, and that was something to cling on to in such times. Everything else seemed to be falling apart, lost in the confusion of contradictory astropathic screaming. She could almost see the break-up in the chain of command unfolding before her eyes. It was hellish, unusual, something to keep you awake in the hot night. She’d spoken to the priest about it. ‘It will pass,’ he’d told her. She didn’t believe him. He didn’t seem overly sure, either.

Finally, though, some solid orders had come in. Someone, somewhere, had got a grip, and assets were being mobilised. The Blade of Naxian was one of them, and now it was racing towards the Klaat System’s Mandeville horizon, ready for translation out towards Admiral Freer’s muster at Coronis Agathon. The Defender-class light cruiser would be a small but useful part of what looked like a serious conglomeration – cruisers, battle cruisers, even a few line battleships, they said – that had been plucked and swiped from every Navy rotation in the subsector.

Something was up. No one said what it was. Probably no one, not even the Blade’s bridge-captain, Avilo, knew. Orders would be given at Coronis Agathon, they said, and then at least a few of them would know a little more.

Soteqa hurried down the long corridor, her boot heels clacking on newly cleaned panels. As comms officer senioris, her place was on the command bridge, but too many things needed attending to in the hours before they attempted the warp crossing, and most of those she preferred to oversee in person. She’d already spent too long down in the depths of the augur-coils, trying to get some sense out of lexmechanics, making sure that by the time the frenzy of incoming data started up the machine-spirits would be primed and ready. Mno-8, the tech-priest, had detained her for a frustratingly long time over some anomalies on the ranged scans, something the priest thought pointed to a sensor malfunction, but which looked to her like typical Martian fussiness.

Still, she’d raised a report and sent it up to the bridge augur-monitors. Then she’d headed back along the vessel’s central core transit route, taking a mag-train sternwards and disembarking at the fourth cargo hold. That still left a long walk down a series of high-vaulted corridors, all of them utilitarian, gleaming, scoured every rotation by hard-driven menial crews and servitor gangs. The entire ship was tightly run, but this section was given special attention. Soteqa passed three separate checkpoints before reaching her final destination, every one manned by squads of armsmen bearing lascarbines and siege-shields. As she went through each point, the atmosphere became colder by a few degrees. By the time she reached the last set of blast-doors, pocked with ancient scour-marks, she felt the cold sink into her bones.

A different breed of guard waited for her at the threshold – four sour-looking characters in nightshade robes carrying electro-staves. They had the eye-within-an-I icon of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica inked onto their foreheads, and their skin was the shade of translucent grey that told of lives spent within sealed cells without natural light.

‘By His grace, lieutenant-commander,’ the foremost of them said, speaking in that dry whisper that they all seemed to use. The speaker was a woman, stick-thin under her robes, with thin lips and dark shadows around her eyes. ‘You wish to consult him before we make the transition.’

‘That would be appreciated,’ Soteqa said.

The woman inclined her head, stepped aside and keyed in a code on the lock-panel. The heavy doors juddered open, letting strangely scented air waft out – something charred, or maybe spoiled.

The chamber on the far side had once been a storage area, capable of taking standard trade-modules or tethered vehicles on loading claws. The main deck was more than six hundred yards across, the roof ninety feet up. In normal times, it would have rung to the echoing clang of lifters on tracks, underpinned by the smells of engine oil and the glare of arc-lumens. Now it felt like another world – a mist-wreathed, fabric-enclosed echo of a fine Terran princeling’s apartments. Elaborate ironwork partitions had been raised, each of them decorated with glyphs in hard-to-discern patterns. The deck itself hummed, not from the buried thunder of the plasma drives, but from subtler harmonics, rhythms that few mortals found easy to endure. The cold became oppressive.

Soteqa picked her way through a tangle of cables, some as thick as her body, all of them rimed with frost. A maze of doorways led off in many directions, all bleeding a fine mist. Attendants in uniform black livery padded to and fro bearing scrolls, datatubes, brass siphons. A faint sound made the air throb – a murmuring, as if a thousand sleepers were mouthing something unintelligible as they dreamed.

The complex had been constructed four years ago, while the Blade of Naxian underwent a scheduled refit in the Naval dockyards of Mholo. It had since been refined, then further extended, until it had become as integral a part of the ship’s body as the engines, power plants or gun decks. Truth be told, the facility was now the principal reason anyone, Admiral Freer included, cared about the Blade of Naxian.

Soteqa pushed further in, reaching a basalt-clad chamber with a steep roofline and High Gothic inscriptions carved on the walls. The deck was hidden under stone flags, and candles flickered on metal sconces. They liked their little touches of home, did the choir.

Talek was waiting for her there, tethered to his throne, his dried-up face peering at her from under a heavy dark cowl. He wore the same black robes as his staff, though translucent tubes ran out from under his cuffs and squirmed their way into banks of instrumentation arranged in a wide arc around him. Lenses glowed in the murk, bleeding out a pale green light. Auto-quills scratched away on thick bundles of vellum, fed by slow, clunking machinery. He sat amongst it all, tethered by it, nourishing it.

‘Lieutenant-commander,’ said Lervio Talek, master of the ship’s astropathic relay node. ‘Welcome.’

‘Apologies for the disruption,’ Soteqa replied. ‘I know you’re busy.’

‘No need. You wish to check on our progress before we cross the veil.’

‘It’s been difficult.’

Talek let slip a sour chuckle. ‘That is one word for it.’ He shuffled in his throne, and the web of tubes jangled. ‘We lost another one, four hours ago. A promising astropath, one with a long future of service ahead of her. Burned out, burned up. Such a waste. I finalised her training myself.’

Soteqa could have told him similar stories from her own crew – ratings going insensible from fatigue, officers opening void-hatches and walking calmly out into the airlocks. Perhaps, though, those working in this strange place did suffer more than the rest. She could hardly imagine what they witnessed with their empty eye-sockets, lined up in their tight rows, bound with iron fetters, forced to dream the raw stuff of madness for hour after hour.

‘There have been storms before,’ she said. ‘But I need to know–’

‘If this is truly worse. If it is a different order. Yes, I believe so. I believe it is.’ He sniffed, and for a moment Soteqa caught a glimpse of a pale grey cheek under the cowl’s shadow. ‘We get fragments, only fragments, and they all tell me the same thing. It is like a tapestry, the warp. If it is calm, you see the pattern on its surface. If it is disturbed, the pattern is rumpled. If it becomes too disturbed, the only pattern is the disturbance.’

‘And now?’

‘I see things never taught me by my instructors on Terra. Maybe they never existed before. So, it is true, I think some great event is coming. Maybe just in this sector. Maybe in all sectors. That is the problem, of course – we cannot see far ahead of ourselves. We send our messages, and only get back faint echoes. I sometimes wonder if we are the only ship left. The only people left alive in all creation. Alone in the dark.’

Soteqa had little time for such talk. ‘With respect, that’s–’

‘Nonsense. I know. But I am an old man. My imagination runs away with me.’

‘So what are we heading into?’

‘A wall of fire. On the far side of it, I see nothing. On this side of it, I see hosts gathering, like crows flying ahead of the storm. I wonder that they can follow their orders, or that they can even hear them. Many will not make it. The structure of the warp will become more violent. Massed hull-translations will be extremely perilous.’

‘You know, then, what lies beyond the muster.’

‘I do not.’

‘But what is the gossip?’

He laughed – an amphibian croak. ‘Gossip? We are not schola students, commander. We are the soul-bound, the ether-scryers. When we confer, it is because we have something to–’

He suddenly broke off. He inclined his head to one side, as if listening.

Just as he did so, an alert throbbed at Soteqa’s collar. It was red – she would have to attend it.

‘We will speak again,’ she said. ‘But, for now, I emphasise the importance of this. The relay – your relay – was placed on this ship precisely because fixed planetary nodes were becoming unreliable. We cannot know for sure that the messages in your archive have been received by anyone else at all, and that makes me worried. They might be more valuable than we understand.’

He looked at her. Or, at least, she thought he looked at her – you could never tell just what was going on under that heavy fabric hood.

‘I understand perfectly, commander,’ he said. ‘But you are needed elsewhere. The danger has, I think, caught up with us.’

Mno-8 was angry. Few things made him angry. Much of his emotional life had been burned away when they had first delved into his skull and started to replace the folds of fleshy matter with more reliable wafer banks. After that, he’d learned to adjust to the muffled existence of a senior tech-priest, one close to the Omnissiah, a being of logic and cold calculation.

But it hadn’t all gone. Being disregarded, being talked down to – that still made him angry. Few people dared to do it. He knew, on some level, that Soteqa hadn’t meant it, either. She was stressed, her mind racing down a whole gamut of alleys, and she hadn’t wanted to spend her valuable time with him among the flickering augur banks. Still, she’d been curt. And, for some reason, whereas he could ignore or overlook a whole host of other human failings, that spiked his emotion-injectors.

So he clattered down the corridor, his mechadendrites flailing, his red cloak snagging on the metal grilles. The entire ship was racing, creaking, banging, flying along as if caught in a blast of real-world wind. Captain Avilo was clearly desperate to get into the warp, and yet – and yet – no one was listening to the real threat-indicators. On another day, there would be much less haste, but then this kind of madness was contagious, and the un-fixed humans suffered from it worse than his people. The armsmen needed to be dragged out of their garrison-units and training halls and sent to the deck intersections. It needed to happen now.

He burst into the chamber, squeezing his overextended bulk through the access hatch before emerging on the far side like an arachnid splaying out from its burrow.

The crew looked up, startled. Twenty of them, all in dark-blue Navy trim, half-buried among the analogue lenses of cogitator nodes. One of them got up from her station – the senior operator here, Calja Yui, just a level or two below Soteqa in the arcane hierarchy of the upper decks.

‘My lord tech-priest,’ she started. ‘Can I help–’

Mno-8 held up a warning dendrite, then slotted three of his power claws into input jacks lodged in a rack over the line of augur stations. One of his cortex-bundles negotiated with the gaggle of machine-spirits who squatted within the chamber network, while another took over the hololith projection unit.

‘Listen,’ he croaked, using the vox-emitter stuck just under his clavicle, since his jaw was long gone. ‘Observe.’

A schematic whirled into ghostly life, glowing eerily amid the gloom of the comms-chamber. Yui did as she was bid, and looked at it. A big blob of light traced a slender arc between two points. One was the hive world of Klaat, the nondescript anchorage they’d just spent three months at, pressing new crew, filling the cavernous promethium bunkers, dealing with a never-ending procession of dignitaries and officials trying to find out what was going on with their protection details and trade-route escorts. The second was the Mandeville limiter, a specific horizon marked with very old runes indeed – humans had given those phenomena the same basic names since their discovery, long before the dawn of the Imperial Age. The arc traced from one to the other, speeding away from Klaat and almost intersecting with the first rune.

‘Yes?’ asked Yui. ‘You show me only what every other lens in this place shows me.’

‘Observe,’ said Mno-8 again, rattling a serpentine dendrite with a turbo-hammer at its terminus. ‘The plasma-wake correction at 25-6-4. Observe.’

Realspace augurs used a number of techniques to give signals staff the data they required. Much of the actual knowledge behind their construction was buried in STCs so old that few truly comprehended them, but some use-factors were still well understood – that plasma drives operating at full burn created distortion fields that required compensation, lest the input retinas overload and blow into static. The hololith suspended between the two of them displayed all the telltale indicators of such compensation – lines of blocky image correction, flickering like faulty lumens in a storm.

To her credit, Yui did her best. She looked in the right places. ‘I see noth–’

‘At 25-6-4. This is chronomark minus four. We are accelerating into the present. Observe.’

She narrowed her eyes. Soteqa had done the same, though not for long enough. Her deputy lingered a little longer.

‘Just a sensor artefact,’ she said, eventually.

‘Negative.’

‘We see them all the time. It’s tracking our velocity and course exactly.’

Mno-8 swept up to her, elevating to his full height, which placed his gold skullcap near the iron-plate chamber roof.

‘Until chronomark minus two,’ he growled. ‘When it disappears.’

‘Which you’d expect. We are at preliminary translation approach – the shutdown cascade has started.’

‘Standard Naval procedure. Only, this is well known. A hostile, one with advanced scanner tech and extreme speed, could use that knowledge. They could use it to get in close.’

‘Anything coming in on that path would have to be tiny. And anyway, no pilot could fly the course.’

‘No human pilot.’ Mno-8’s cloak shuddered as his many limbs rearranged themselves under it. ‘The Archenemy is everywhere. We know this. We have seen the signs in every subsector. Why do you not see the danger? One of my fallen brothers, using some devious archeotech, could conceivably–’

He broke off. Yui looked up. The hull had just boomed, as if it had hit something solid, something unyielding. No alarms went off. The Blade of Naxian just kept running, bolting, haring along.

‘What was that?’ Yui asked, suddenly looking worried.

‘Maybe nothing,’ said Mno-8 grimly. ‘Or maybe, just maybe, your sensor artefact has now become strangely solid.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited - Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Marc Lee.

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To Hannah, with love.

With many thanks to Nick Kyme and Kate Hamer for their
editorial support, Rachel Harrison for the design work,
and Aaron Dembski-Bowden, John French and Gav Thorpe
for invaluable input on all things Space Wolves

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