Into the Black

(Elsewhere)

“Imperatrix, the Black Star upstarts and the Traitors in their midst have entered the Godsrealm.”

The Imperatrix stirred. This was most welcome news. The Black Stars were the only creatures amongst the flawed creations outside the Imperium that she viewed as rivals to the Perfected. Not that she gave such a lofty status to them willingly, of course. But it would be foolishness itself, the mark of an imperfect being, to not acknowledge their accomplishments, and how they had changed things in the universe. She was the Imperatrix, and all Perfected were cast in her image, and she would not make the mistake of underestimating the cleverness of the Black Stars.

The Traitors, on the other hand, were another story altogether. They had rebelled against her, and publicly claimed that the Black Stars were superior to the mighty Ihm Imperium! And then, before they could be properly dealt with for their impertinence, they had escaped, running from the Imperium like chiska beasts, and joined the Black Stars. It was a blemish upon her pride that they still lived.

A blemish that needed to be wiped out, for her to attain True Perfection.

“What is the Armada doing?”

“They are tracking the Black Stars, herding them as you commanded. They are being careful not to get too close to the Black Star ships, out of concern for their FTL torpedoes.”

The Imperatrix nodded. “That is in line with the visions I’ve been given. What course are they setting?”

“As you commanded, the Armada has prevented them from making a course either back to where they could escape the Eye, or towards the core, where the Feral Ones are taking on the followers of the Glutton. They have no allies where they are heading. All is the Godsrealm, save the Anomaly.”

“Good. And the Anomaly?”

“Yes, your Majesty. The Armada will herd the Black Stars to the Anomaly. They are clever, and they are expendable. It is unlikely that anything they could find would be something that they could take with them, certainly not while keeping it functional the whole time. And when the Anomaly collapses, the Armada can move in for the kill.”

“Excellent. Lead the Armada personally. There will be no mistakes. Black Star will break down and break through the defenses, and you will follow in their wake, doing as they did, so that you can gain the power of the Anomaly for the Imperium.”

“By your command, Imperatrix.”

(Flag Bridge, BSN Ama-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi, Hellspace)

It was hard to say how long we’d been in Hellspace. Oh, the clocks we had all said that it had been about 48 hours since we’d entered the eye, but that didn’t mean it had actually been 48 hours. With the time dilation constantly changing like a kid playing with a fader knob turning the lights up and down at random, it could have been anything from 6 hours to 10,000 hours on the outside, and we’d have absolutely no idea.

Finding a way out of Hellspace was going to be problematic. We didn’t have the tech to open a rift on this side, and I wasn’t sure if that was something we could build with what we had on hand. It wasn’t like you could go and just throw some random parts together and expect it to work.

It wasn’t like a Hellspace drive was the only way to get out of Hellspace. If you looked outside the realm of technology, there was always the possibility that a psyker or sorcerer could open up a rift from Hellspace to realspace. The problem with that idea was that the kind of power needed to rip a hole in reality big enough for a ship to get through, and then to hold it open for a fleet to follow after? That was more than any mortal could manage, at least on their own.

There were ways to augment a sorcerer’s powers, of course, but those ways involved rituals. Unfortunately, the only rituals I knew of required either a lot of people, and a lot of time, or they required sacrifices. Lots of sacrifices. Either way, it wasn’t something that I wanted to be associated with. There was no telling what kind of consequences those rituals might have on me, if I conducted them.

So, our options for getting out of Hellspace was to either find a rift that formed naturally, or to get a ship with a Hellspace drive. Since finding a rift would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, that meant the ship was the better option. We just needed one ship. If we had that one ship with a Hellspace drive to open a rift, and hold it, long enough that we could get through, we would be home free.

Getting the ship we needed without getting slaughtered by the two Ihm Armadas still tracking us through Hellspace was easier said than done, however. Each armada outnumbered and outmassed us, and our most potent weaponry would be useless, or worse than useless, inside Hellspace.

Of course, even if we knew positively of a rift that we could get out of, finding it was a whole other challenge. Even the sensor systems we’d copied from the Lost Tech archive we’d found on Star’s Reach, and tested with the Chaos Brigade’s ships, only went so far. I didn’t it was like trying to navigate on a stormy sea at night, with only the lights on your own ship to light the way.

Dead reckoning wasn’t exactly a skill taught in the game world. Or, when it was taught, it was usually in the context of survival in hostile environments on a planet of some kind. Where there were landmarks to go off of, even if they were just the stars in the sky, not the featureless, ever-roiling boiling chaos that was Hellspace.

Well, it wasn’t entirely true that there were no landmarks. There were two points that warped and shifted a little less than anything else in this thrice-cursed dimension. Two points that were our best hope for navigating this chaos.

One was the Eye of Despair. Of course, that was less like a landmark, and more like a place where all the ‘currents’ of Hellspace began flowing to. It was like someone put a hole in the bottom of a tub, and all the water was rushing there, trying to spill out into the universe beyond.

That was the landmark I had expected. The one I didn’t expect was something like a beacon, or a lighthouse. It was hard to judge distances in Hellspace, since time and space were constantly in flux, but the beacon felt as though it were further away than the Eye was, and definitely away from the Ihm Imperium.

Regardless, two landmarks at least gave us something to do some basic dead reckoning from. The Armada was still herding us, away from both landmarks, but at least we had some idea of which way we were traveling. It would have been all too easy to start traveling in circles with this insane place.

“Any idea where the fleets are trying to herd us?”

Raven shook her head at my question. It was clear that the Ihm fleets were trying to herd us somewhere. They were staying far enough back to keep out of range of our weapons, but they always moved to intercept when we strayed too far off the course they wanted us to take. Since we couldn’t turn and face them without risking total destruction, that left us little choice but to go where they wanted us to.

“Not yet. There’s too much interference from, well, everything. We still have our two landmarks, so we know we’re going in the same direction, but there’s no way of knowing where that relates in comparison to realspace. We could be still in Ihm space, or beyond the bounds of Known Space by now, and the only way to find out would be to get back into realspace.”

I sighed. “Yeah, I expected you’d say something like that. I just wished I knew where they wanted us to go, and why. Obviously, they want us to go on this track, but why? What is out there, and why bring us to it? I somehow doubt that this is to introduce us to their god, or arranging a visit with the Imperatrix, so it has to be something else.”

“I’m sorry, Admiral, but there’s no more data on that than before.”

(Elsewhere)

Shrask shuddered, as the blind screaming of the skies tried to blow her away with sound and fury that was more felt than heard. She shuddered, but she pressed on. She was the last living soul on the planet, and so she had to press on, to ensure that what happened was remembered. So that justice could be had for the fallen.

She was the last living soul on the planet, but that did not mean that other souls weren’t here with her. She could see them, all around her, some pale and ghostly, others looking like they could almost be alive again. But they were all dead. Dead, but not gone. This place wouldn’t let them leave.

She remembered when the scar in the sky washed through the system, and descended upon the planet. Now, the sky was what it was, and all sense and order was gone from the world. But in those first few hours, people had been afraid, for they had not known what was to come. Though, if they had known, they likely would have been even more afraid.

First, it had seemed like a dream. The ‘Perfected’, those sycophants and cloaca-polishers of the bitch empress and her furgan-shit goddess, had been the first to perish. They died screaming, as the air burned around them with flames that were cool to the touch and ignored any attempt to put them out, even burning underwater or in vacuum. They burned, and the Perfected fell, dead, the first spirits to rise.

If it had just been the Perfected, then Shrask would not have cared, but the burning did not stop there. More and more, the burning spread, like a wildfire spreading through dried grasslands. Before long, it became easier to say who had not burnt, rather than ask who had.

Until she was the only one left.

Somehow, for some reason she did not understand, the burning never came for her. She was the last on the planet, the spirits told her so. She thought about not waiting for the burning, to take matters into her own claws, and join the rest, but that was the kind of weak choice a Perfected would make. She would remember, and record everything, so that, one day, someone might find her words, and these people could be remembered.

(Flag Bridge, BSN Ama-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi, Hellspace)

The ship shuddered. Not the rhythmic rumbling of the engines taking on more load, or the sharp shock of an impact, but something else. It felt almost as though they had been brought up short by the back of the shirt.

“Admiral! I think we have something!”

“What is it? Onscreen!”

The screen cleared, and then focused on something that I hadn’t thought to see in this place. It was a planet! There was an actual planet here, in the middle of Hellspace! Somehow, I managed to keep my jaw from impacting the floor.

“Report.”

“The planet has an atmosphere, and looks stable. We appear to be in some kind of stable pocket in the middle of Hellspace. Time dilation estimated to be almost zero.”

“What was that we felt? Some kind of barrier?”

“Perhaps. At the very least, there was something akin to tidal sheer when we passed through the barrier.”

Raven paused, as alarms started blaring. “Sir! Hellspace shields are being drained across the fleet! All ships reporting shields critical, and failing!”

“Any sign of demon incursions?”

Raven blinked, checked the data again, and looked back at me. “None. There are no incursions, anywhere on the ship or in the fleet. Even with the shields completely down.”

“Well, just what the hell have we found?”