V3 Chapter 85: My Lady, Your Judgment Is Ten Thousand Years Overdue
By the time Duvette burst onto the command bridge with the thirteen Shadow Wolves of Luna, all that remained was wreckage scattered everywhere and pools of blood.
Shattered servitors and slaves lay beside the consoles, and several Oathbreaker corpses had been cut into pieces. Between the command throne and the Blood Mirror, a large section of deck had been neatly removed, its edges so smooth they showed no trace of any cut at all, and beneath the gap lay nothing but bottomless dark.
Duvette stopped and frowned at the shadows to one side of the bridge.
In truth, a yellow marker had already appeared on his strategic map as he'd approached. It had lingered only briefly before vanishing, taking the red marker representing Kosorax with it.
Quick work, that.
Duvette muttered to himself.
Trazyn was already off hiding somewhere unknown once again. Duvette had no intention of hunting him down for now; there was a genuine arrangement between them, after all, and given that the Necron had shown up here on his own initiative, he'd surely come calling again for his own purposes sooner or later.
There were more pressing matters right now.
Duvette looked at the duplicate bridge on the strategic map, the one that shouldn't exist at all. He left a position beacon marking the spot, then moved on with the Shadow Wolves of Luna.
They pressed on deeper into the hull.
The Conqueror kept actively rearranging its own interior, flesh bulkheads growing out from between the metal layers, trying to seal off the way forward. Following Duvette's instructions, the Shadow Wolves burned straight through both the obstructions and the armour behind them with their melta weapons.
The strategic map showed they were closing on a region that jutted out from the Conqueror's main structure, somewhere it shouldn't belong.
That space sat between several magnetic lift shafts and transit corridors, yet had never fully connected to the structure around it. Going by the ship's original dimensions, there was no way it should have room for an entire second bridge.
Before long, the group entered a stretch of abandoned space.
This was one of many voids scattered through the Conqueror's hull. Gravity here was almost nonexistent, the air just as thin; fine metal debris hung suspended above the passage, drifting only slightly as the group passed through.
Duvette wore no breathing mask.
Given his current physical state, an environment like this wouldn't hamper him for the time being. The Shadow Wolves' power armour had already sealed itself, their helm lenses glowing faintly in the dark.
The corridor curved away ahead of them, long, narrow, and intricate.
Blood covered everything around them, the bulkheads coated as though glazed in dark red. It welled slowly from around the rivets in time with some hidden pulse, still falling straight down toward the deck even in near-weightlessness, its speed not slowed in the slightest.
Duvette took a moment to get his bearings, then pointed toward a hatch ahead on the left.
Two Shadow Wolves stepped forward at once.
Their melta guns fired together, melting through the magnetic seal and the surrounding armour. With a heavy crash, the hatch toppled inward, revealing an even more decayed corridor beyond.
This place still carried the heavy weight of an older era.
The metal walls still bore the Twelfth Legion's insignia from the Great Crusade era, and faded Legion numerals remained visible in places. The entire space felt as though it had been sealed away entirely once the Conqueror swallowed it into its own body, cut off from the outside world since the defeat at Terra, or perhaps even earlier still.
The instant Duvette stepped into the corridor, red mist rose in the distance.
Lotara Sarrin's figure appeared once more.
She stood at the far end of the corridor, her white captain's uniform stirring gently within the mist. Her face had lost its earlier calm, and her voice now carried an unmistakable edge of severity.
"Stop."
"You are entering a forbidden area."
"Leave my ship, now!"
As her voice cracked out, the corridor around them began to warp.
The bulkheads first closed inward, nearly crushing against the Shadow Wolves' shoulder plates, then abruptly flared back outward the next instant. The metal structure shuddered without pause, and the deck beneath their feet stretched out into a narrow path with no visible end.
Specks began appearing in Duvette's vision.
The specks quickly coalesced into rows of elongated faces. They reached out from the far end of the corridor with outstretched arms, watching Duvette at strange, tilted angles, lips moving ceaselessly as though calling his name.
They wanted him to keep moving forward.
And to lead him somewhere wrong.
"Psychic contamination? On me?"
Duvette let out a cold snort.
[Silence] activated.
An unseen force swept the length of the corridor in an instant. Lotara Sarrin's red-mist projection scattered along with it, and the warped faces and shifting bulkheads vanished entirely from Duvette's sight.
Tch.
The dim corridor settled back into its true shape.
The Shadow Wolves of Luna still held their formation, unfazed; clearly none of them had seen any of what had just happened, from beginning to end.
Duvette offered no explanation, and simply kept moving.
[Silence]'s effect ran its course quickly.
The group reached the end of the corridor, where a heavy adamantium blast door blocked their way. Duvette glanced at the old insignia marked on it, then stepped aside.
The Shadow Wolves began cutting at once.
The melta beams traced along the magnetic seals, the adamantium slowly glowing red. Once the last anchor point melted through, Markus raised his storm shield and drove it into the door.
A great crash echoed down the corridor.
The blast door toppled inward, kicking up a cloud of dust.
The space beyond shared the exact same layout as the command bridge Kosorax had used.
There were astropathic stations, comm stations, a strategium, and a command throne set high above, just the same. But most of the equipment had long since gone to ruin; many stations were nothing but warped frames now, their original purpose only guessable from where they stood.
Plasteel cabling hung draped over the abandoned railings.
The strategium to the right was still ringed with armoured cover, though the screens around it had long since gone dark. There was no brass pool of blood here, no strangled witches, none of the half-daemon scholars who traced the outside battlefield in blood.
This bridge still held the structure a Gloriana-class battleship's command deck was meant to have.
Decayed.
Ruined.
And yet the order of ten thousand years past could still be traced within it.
Duvette looked up at the command throne, set atop a raised steel dais.
The throne faced away from them, buried deep in shadow. But the strategic map told Duvette there was someone there.
Someone who should have died a very long time ago.
Duvette did not hesitate. He climbed the eight steps leading to the throne, the Shadow Wolves following behind.
The instant his foot came down on the first step, the psychic contamination around them surged violently. His [Silence] had already run out, but Duvette paid it no mind at all.
The second step.
The third.
By the time Duvette had climbed all eight steps, he found he was still climbing.
The dais holding the throne hadn't drawn closer by even a hair; if anything, it kept rising further away. The eight steps stretched out beneath his feet into a mountain with no visible summit, thick darkness churning below the whole party.
The Shadow Wolves still followed close behind Duvette.
But the distance between them kept stretching, until each of them seemed to be walking a road without end, entirely alone.
Duvette stopped and looked up, frowning.
It was nothing but illusion. There was no real mountain here at all.
He refused to accept the logic of this warped space, refused everything it showed him and told him. In this moment, only the reality he himself acknowledged was real.
Duvette stepped forward again, and by the force of his will alone, the dais that had seemed forever out of reach snapped back into place before him. The instant his final step landed, he stood directly behind the command throne, the Shadow Wolves reappearing at his back as well.
Duvette walked around the throne and looked into the deep darkness it held.
A pale old woman lay slumped in the seat.
She wore a filthy white captain's uniform, her withered body stuffed into it like dry straw shoved carelessly into a sack. A red handprint, stained with ancient blood, marked her chest, rising and falling faintly with each shallow breath.
Whatever sat upon that throne had given up every pretence now.
All that remained before Duvette was a skeleton wrapped in a scant layer of grey-white skin. What flesh remained had been pinned to the bone with bird-bone nails, much of it already rotted black.
That shape scarcely resembled anything human anymore.
With a harsh, grinding sound, Lotara's skull turned toward Duvette.
Lidless eyes lay covered in a dry, filmy membrane, her membranous nostrils twitching faintly. Her skull flinched back on instinct, as though trying to draw away from the man approaching, but the body fused to the throne could not move an inch.
Only her head and one hand still had any movement left in them.
That hand, too, had withered down to bone and thin skin, and only a single finger still held any real strength. It tapped rapidly against the armrest, the motion like a dismembered spider still struggling to move.
A rasping voice rose from deep in Lotara's throat.
She tried to say something.
Duvette cut her off without ceremony.
"Captain Lotara Sarrin."
He planted his dragon-skull staff on the floor with a heavy strike.
The dull impact echoed across the ruined bridge.
At Duvette's will, the eyes set into Entropy's Song's dragon skull blazed red, casting light over the rotted body seated in the throne.
"You might have a great deal you want to say."
"You can curse me, argue your case, tell me the whole of what you've lived through."
Duvette held her withered gaze.
"But from here on, there's only one thing you need to know, and accept."
"Your judgment has come. Ten thousand years overdue."