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Nightfall on Stygies – Extract

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NIGHTFALL ON STYGIES

Stark Holborn

Isonovere Holt, dauntless excavator of divine truth and magos explorator of the Technoarchaeology Sanctum, has returned to Stygies VIII unannounced from her ten-year expedition to the Calixis Sector. One of the most famed explorators since Corvilhan – may the Omnissiah see fit to cleanse his name – Holt arrived at 08:01:45 this morning aboard her vessel, the Tenebris Lucet, unaccompanied but for her legion of servitors…

– Vox-stream Epsilon V, broadcast across Praecordia Inexcitabilis, Stygies VIII

The news was everywhere. It flooded my streams, her name bleeding red across clean lines of data. By the time the great work bell sounded Exolvuntur Quinque, the whole of Stygies VIII, living, dying, waking, slumbering, knew that something extraordinary was happening.

I hurried along an echoing corridor of the Technoarchaeology Sanctum, the chimes echoing through my skull. Glowing feeds obscured my vision – datastreams and reports topped by different versions of the same words: Magos Explorator Returns. Like a starved feral-worlder falling upon a hunk of grox I combed the streams for facts: Holt’s vessel, the Tenebris Lucet, was last seen five years ago leaving Fenksworld. That she had set foot in such a place – home to exiles and hereteks and the dangers of the Library of Knowing – was enough to cast her into the darkness of suspicion. And yet, this was the same Isonovere Holt who discovered the Textoris Protocol, its binharic power hidden within the tortuous code knots of an aeldari diadem. The Holt who had sacrificed both her legs to the jaws of a predator in the jungles of Biegel-9 in order to return with the possible STC that kept our order burning midnight oil to this day.

As soon as I stepped within range of the scriptorium, a summons appeared.

<Thess 4/90.>

My official designation. Magos Xenologis Ratibor al-Aban’s datapresence filled the noosphere, stern and commanding. I made genuflection.

<Affirmative, magos?>

<You knew Holt. You were an adept under her.>

It was true. I had once been a cog in her workshop, one of thousands seconded to the task of cataloguing minor finds.

<Forty years ago, magos.>

<Time is of no matter. Report to the council chamber gallery of the Auricularium.>

The terseness of the code told me the request was immediate, but still I hesitated. The council chamber was six levels above my current rank. Even as I thought it, an access code appeared, topped by Ratibor’s sigil.

I could not help the interrogative that slipped into the noosphere.

An admonition cut across the channel, the error-correcting algorithm highlighting my impertinent question.

<AND WHERE THE MACHINE SPIRIT FALTERS, DARKNESS GROWS AND WHERE DARKNESS GROWS, CORRUPTION DOES FOLLOW, AND THUS DESPOILED WE FALL TO THE XENOS TAINT, INTO DEPTHS WHERE THE OMNISSIAH’S LIGHT CANNOT REACH.>

The Admonition Against Diminishing Efficiency. I bowed my head, the haptic sensors in my skull and neck sending out pain signals to simulate the sensation of receiving the lash.

<Omnissiah forgive me,> I recited. <May my joints be ever firm. May my plating resist the xenos taint…>

Ratibor’s datapresence simmered.

<Keep your prayers. We are about to hear the testimony of Isonovere Holt.>

‘Inquisitor?’

Balphus Grun looked up from the charts spread before him, marked all over with sites of possible heresy, a pox spreading across the ancient, thin flesh of the Imperium. A pox that too often had no symptoms and did not show itself until it was almost too late.

‘What is it, Eshmer?’

The Tempestor’s expression did not change. To some, he might have looked blank, even vacant, but Grun knew better: beneath the stony exterior, loyalty to the Imperium burned with an unquenchable flame.

‘We found her,’ Eshmer said.

Grun straightened, setting a belt of liturgical interrogation instruments clinking as he summoned the information before him. A blinking route stretched across the stars like lurid poison through a body’s veins: the path of the Tenebris Lucet.

‘She emerged from the warp near Hydraphur,’ Eshmer reported. ‘I believe she is running for home.’

Inquisitor Grun stared at a red point on the charts. Stygies VIII – the Ever-Staring Cyclops – festered in the Segmentum Pacificus like a canker. Crushed between daemon worlds, feral worlds, tomb worlds, its priests were too hungry for what they should not possess, the place wretched with rumours of illegal caches of xenos tech, experiments that far surpassed the lines of heresy. Grun and his Scions had hunted many a Xenarite through its hollow halls. If it were up to him, he would have scoured the moon from the system.

He considered for a moment sending word to his ordo for backup, but what would they do that he and his Scions could not? If the poison aboard the Tenebris Lucet had already spread to Stygies, then the only thing to do was burn it away with swift and certain judgement.

Grun’s dry lips twitched in a smile. ‘Set a course,’ he said.

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