‘No!’ screamed Roxanne, and the angel looked up, fastening its eyeless stare upon the huddled group of mortals that sheltered below the statue that had imprisoned it for so long. Its mournful cries echoed from the walls like a chorus of all the souls damned to oblivion throughout the ages. Kai heard his death in the sound.

Roxanne took hold of his hands and turned him to face her.

‘Kai, this has to end,’ she said. ‘And it has to end now!’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t stop this, I don’t know how.’

‘You do,’ she said. ‘That’s the only thing I know for sure about all of this. Only you can stop this.’

‘How?’ said Kai, feeling the inexorable approach of the daemonic angel.

‘Come with me,’ said Roxanne, closing her eyes.

Warmth spread from Roxanne’s hands, passing from her flesh and into his. Her breathing deepened, and Kai felt the touch of her strange manifestation of psychic energy. The Navigators were a breed apart from astropaths, and no one beyond the confines of the Navis Nobilite truly understood the full extent of their powers. Kai’s breathing deepened, and he felt as though his very essence was being drawn into Roxanne.

He wanted to rebel against this surrender of the self, but Roxanne’s soothing voice drew him into her. The sensation was not unlike the early stages of a nunciotrance, and though their physical bodies were in mortal danger, Kai let himself be enfolded in Roxanne’s strange power. If this was death, then where better to meet it in than in the soul-embrace of a friend?

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘To the Argo,’ said Roxanne.

KAI OPENED HIS eyes and found himself in the familiar dreamscape of the Rub’ al Khali, the endless desert sweeping to the edges of the world in cursive arches of golden sand. He stood by the azure lake, its waters rippling with strange tides and the sun hanging on the far horizon like a semicircle of molten bronze.

The fortress of Arzashkun glittered like a bauble in the middle distance, its towers turned gold in the sunset and its walls shimmering in the heat haze coming off the desert. He knew he should try to reach the safety of the fortress, but felt a curious reluctance to venture in that direction. Instead he turned his gaze towards the shores of the lake.

A regicide board was set up on low table, the pieces arranged apparently at random, for it seemed as though certain pieces were placed on squares they couldn’t possibly have reached. Kai remembered playing against someone here, a hooded figure with golden eyes, but the memory refused to divulge any further details.

Roxanne stood beside him, holding his hand as the sun sank slowly to the horizon.

‘The sun is setting,’ said Kai. ‘It’s never done that before.’

‘This isn’t just your dreamspace anymore. It’s mine too.’

‘I know, but I don’t mind.’

‘It’s beautiful here,’ said Roxanne. ‘I can see why you come here.’

‘It’s safe here,’ said Kai. ‘At least it used to be.’

‘Before the Argo?’

He nodded, already sensing the lurking presence of the black horror beneath the sand. It felt like an age since he had come here, though he knew it could only have been a day or so. Time was meaningless in a nunciotrance, and a dreamer could live an entire lifetime in the course of a single dream.

‘It’s here, isn’t it? The Argo.’

‘Yes,’ said Kai, as the shadow beneath the sand drew ever closer. He could feel the grasping claws of guilt and the tendrils of remorse working their way towards the surface of the sand, but he felt no urge to run for the safety of the fortress.

Roxanne said hehad to end this, and nothing was ever ended by running away.

This time he would face whatever emerged from the depths of his subconscious.

As though drawn towards them by Kai’s willingness to face it, the horror of the Argopushed up from the sand, an oozing black nightmare of screaming death. Kai struggled against its pull, and the fear that Roxanne’s presence had kept at bay rose up in a suffocating wave.

‘I can’t do this,’ he said.

‘You can,’ replied Roxanne, taking his hand. Kai wished he possessed even a fraction of her composure. ‘I’m right beside you, and this is my dreamspace too, remember?’

‘I remember,’ said Kai as the black tide dragged them down like oily quicksand.

‘Then let me show you what Isaw,’ said Roxanne.

TWENTY-FOUR

The Argo

The Dead Can Forgive

The End of the Game

THE BLACK SAND swallowed Kai, and his panic slammed into him like a resurgent tide. He took a terrified breath, but rather than the oily liquid texture he expected, a breath of achingly cold air filled his lungs. Instead of total darkness, Kai was plunged into a kaleidoscopic hallucination of myriad colours and swirling vortices. He felt sick to the pit of his stomach at the churning maelstrom of phantom images, howling currents and voids of non-space exploding around him.

Yet for all its horror, there was a reluctant beauty to everything, an ethereal quality that thrilled as much as it terrified. It stretched all around him as far as his eyes could see, and it took Kai a moment to recognise that he was seeing this magnificent vista through more than two eyes.

No sooner had the realisation come than he felt the immense, implacable weight of the starship beneath him, its vast bulk stretching behind him like a vast slice of an azure city cut from the metal skin of a planet and set on a course through the stars. He knew this ship, though he had never seen it from such a vantage point.

Whole once again, this immense marvel of technology was the Argo.

The entire vessel shuddered like a newborn, and Kai wondered at the forces required to so easily buffet such an incredible weight. A lashing tendril of variegated light swirled down from an unfolding nova of black energy and slammed down towards the ship. A flare of actinic light shimmered on the edge of perception as it struck the vessel’s shields, dissipating with what sounded like a roar of terrible frustration.

Another smear of red stormclouds spiralled into existence just off the curving, plough-blade of a bow, and Kai felt the ship’s engines strain as it strained to avoid the burgeoning fury. As though sensing the Argo’s attempts to evade, the stormclouds swelled and threw out grasping spears of hungry light. They too smashed into the shields, and the squalling flare of light seemed more piercing, more strained to Kai.

The entire vessel lurched as yet more tempests blew up around it, slamming it to the side with no more effort than a leaf in the wind. An explosion on the tapering topside flared, and Kai saw a series of towers studded with thin pylons vanish in a searing, short-lived fireball.

A portion of the shields collapsed, a gaping wound in the Argo’s protection, and he felt the ship’s captain turn the vessel away from the most violent monsoons in an effort to protect the open flank.

Whatever beauty Kai felt this region possessed was immediately forgotten. This was a place of terrible, unimaginable danger. No right thinking person would willingly cast themselves here. This realm of existence was anathema to life, and it was not meant that humanity should venture far from its home of placid existence of Terra.

Fresh detonations blossomed along the length of the Argo, and more of the vaned towers collapsed as the storms overloaded the pylons’ ability to keep them at bay. A forward portion of the starboard flank exploded outwards, venting frozen air like a spray of white blood.

Kai wanted to close his eyes, but he was not cast in this unfolding drama as a participant, merely an observer. He twisted as the ship trembled like a wounded beast, the thunderous detonations wracking its hull eerily silent from his vantage point. The power of the destruction working its way along the vessel was like the hammerblow footsteps of a Mechanicum battle engine.