Chapter 2: Interrogation in the Sky
The Valkyrie’s engines were a teeth-rattling scream, a physical pressure inside Rut’Aba’s skull. The interrogation hadn’t started yet. This was just the commute.
They were seated on the cold, vibrating deck of the troop bay, wrists locked behind them in heavy, black manacles. Not just metal. A dull, leaden numbness radiated from the cuffs up their arms, a fog creeping toward their core. Psi-dampeners. The Imperium wasn’t taking chances.
Opposite them, Commissar Vale sat strapped into a jump seat, perfectly erect, his cap on his knees. He watched Rut’Aba with the dispassionate interest of a geologist examining a strange rock. The two Scions stood flanking the rear ramp, immobile as statues, their hellguns cradled but power cells humming a bright, threatening note.
The pike-staff was secured in a portable stasis field generator bolted to the deck between them. A faint blue dome of energy shimmered over it, freezing it in a moment of inert darkness. The crystals were dead black.Lifeless.
But the ship was alive.Or dying. It shuddered violently, the engine noise dipping for a heart-stopping second before roaring back. The dim lumens flickered. Rut’Aba felt it first in their teeth—a high-frequency vibration, wrong and sickly.
Vale’s eyes flicked to a small, buzzing gauge on his wrist. “Gellar field fluctuation.Minor. The warp is a jealous neighbor. It whispers to the hull.” His gaze returned to Rut’Aba. “It seems to be whispering to your artifact as well.”
Rut’Aba followed his look. A fine bead of something black and oily was forming on the bulkhead next to the stasis field. It swelled, trembled, and traced a slow, glistening path down the rusty metal. It smelled of ozone and burned hair.
“It’s not my artifact,” Rut’Aba said, their voice rough from disuse and the dry, recycled air.
“It responds to you,” Vale countered, unbuttoning a leather glove with deliberate slowness.“It fed for you. It killed for you. That makes a relationship.” He peeled the glove off, revealing a hand that was pale, long-fingered, and criss-crossed with faint, silvery scars. “Let’s discuss the nature of that relationship.”
He unhooked his harness and stood, moving with a predator’s grace against the Valkyrie’s shuddering. He knelt before Rut’Aba, his closeness an invasion. The smell of him—starch, gun oil, and something coldly antiseptic—cut through the ozone stink.
“The medicae’s initial scan was… intriguingly blank,” Vale murmured. He didn’t touch them yet. His eyes were cataloging. “No gang markings. No service sigils. No genework augmentation nodules. Just… flesh. Untouched. Unclaimed.” His hand came up, hovered near Rut’Aba’s collarbone. “Until now.”
His fingertip touched a spot just below the neck. The contact was electric, clinical. He traced a line across the skin, following an invisible path. “Dimensional lattice burn. Faint.Almost healed. But the pattern is unmistakable. You didn’t come through a gate, did you? You didn’t walk. You were… pushed. Or pulled.”
Rut’Aba remained silent, staring at a fixed point on the riveted ceiling. They could feel it, the path he traced—a ghost of searing pain, a memory of being torn through layers of reality like paper.
“The body remembers what the mind tries to forget,” Vale continued. His finger moved to their arm, tracing another line, then another across their ribs. Each touch mapped a journey, a scar from a reality that had rejected their passage. “These are exit wounds. From a place that isn’t a place. Who sent you? What were you running from?”
His hand paused over their sternum, where the heart beat a steady, defiant rhythm. “Or what were you running toward?”
The Valkyrie jolted again. A deeper, groaning shudder ran through its frame. This time, three lumens blew out with a pop, plunging the bay into deeper gloom. The emergency strips cast a sickly red light.
In the bloody halflight, the oily sweat on the bulkhead thickened. A second droplet joined the first. Then a third. They weren’t just beading. They were weeping.
The stasis field around the pike flickered, its blue hue stuttering. For a fraction of a second, the black crystals swallowed the red light and gave nothing back.
Vale didn’t flinch. His eyes, fixed on Rut’Aba’s, saw their involuntary flicker toward the weapon. “It calls to you.Even caged. Even silenced. Fascinating.”
His probing finger moved lower, tracing the line of their hip. The touch was no longer just clinical. It was possessive. A surveyor claiming a resource. Rut’Aba’s muscles coiled, a spring tightening. The psi-dampening manacles sent a fresh wave of null-static up their nerves, a warning shock.
“Commissar.” One of the Scions spoke, his voice a digitized rasp from his helmet grille. “Field integrity at eighty-seven percent. The resonance is localized to this bay. Recommend moving the artifact to isolation.”
“In a moment,” Vale said, his attention never leaving Rut’Aba’s face. His hand was on their thigh now, his thumb pressing into the muscle. Searching. “There is more to map. The scars are a biography. I am merely… reading.”
Rut’Aba let out a slow breath. They stopped looking at the ceiling. They looked down, meeting Vale’s flinty gaze. Their voice was a flat, quiet stone dropped into the humming space between them. “You’re touching Imperial property. The Mechanicus likes its specimens intact.”
A faint, genuine smile touched Vale’s lips. A predator appreciating a prey’s last bite. “A fair point.” He increased the pressure of his thumb, a painful, intimate dent in the flesh. “But damage is a spectrum. A bruise is a lesson. A broken bone is a confession. They will understand the necessities of… verification.”
The Valkyrie groaned like a dying beast. A seam in the hull above the pike shrieked, and a viscous rope of the black, oily fluid spooled out, splattering across the top of the stasis field. The blue energy dome sizzled, warped.
The pike-staff moved.
It was a tiny shift. A vibration so subtle it was more felt than seen. But every crystal along its length flared with a single, syncopated pulse of deep purple. Not the hungry light from the manufactorum.This was darker. Angrier. A choked scream.
The fluid on the bulkhead was streaming now, painting runnels of shimmering black tar.
“Sir,” the Scion repeated, urgency edging his synthetic tone.
Vale finally stood, peeling his gaze from Rut’Aba. He looked at the weeping hull, at the straining stasis field. His scarred hand flexed.“Very well. Secure it for transfer to the main hold. Double the damping field.” He glanced back at Rut’Aba, a final, measuring look. “We will continue our discussion planetside. The Magi have tools that can read the deepest layers of a biography. They will peel yours back, one screaming page at a time.”
The Scions moved. One powered down the stasis field. The blue dome vanished. The moment it did, the pike-staff fell silent and dark, as if exhausted. The oily weepings slowed to a trickle.
As the Scion reached for it, Rut’Aba spoke again. “It’s not an artifact.”
The Scion hesitated, his armored glove an inch from the haft.
“It’s a key,” Rut’Aba said, looking past Vale, out into the red-dark nothingness of the troop bay. “And you’re taking it right where it wants to go.”
Vale paused at the cockpit hatch. He didn’t turn. “A key opens a lock. What lock awaits on Calth?”
Rut’Aba leaned their head back against the cold hull, closing their eyes. The vibrations of the ship were changing, deepening, as it began its descent. “You’ll know,” they said, almost too quiet to hear, “when it starts turning.”
The transport ship was a tomb dressed as a troop carrier. The Resolute Mendicant. The name was stamped on rusting placards next to devotional slogans that had flaked into obscurity.
Rut’Aba was shoved into a cramped cargo hold near the engine bays, a space never meant for the living. The air was a stagnant cocktail of old sweat, ozone from malfunctioning conduits, and the pervasive, sweet-metallic scent of decay. The reason for the stench lined the walls.
Dead Guardsmen. Dozens of them. Still in their scarred carapace armor, still strapped upright into makeshift berths. They were casualties from a previous campaign, frozen in their final moments—a head lolling here, a chest cavity gaping there—being shipped back to Calth for processing, recycling, or whatever pious fiction passed for burial. Their eye sockets were dark voids in the flickering, failing light.
Rut’Aba’s new manacles were anchored to a deck ring between two particularly gruesome corpses. One was missing his lower jaw. The other had a clean, blackened hole through his visor.
The pike-staff, sealed inside a larger, humming stasis-crate, was bolted to the deck ten feet away. A Mechanicus adept—a skinny wisp of a man with mechadendrite cables snaking from his spine—hovered around it, muttering prayers to the Machine God and taking readings with a chattering scanner. He flinched every time the ship groaned, which was constantly.
The Mendicant wasn’t flying. It was crawling. The warp engine, a battered old thing two decks below, whined and coughed like a tubercular lung. Each sputter made the lumens dim and the Gellar field—that fragile bubble of reality keeping the immaterium out—fluctuate with a nauseating lurch.
With every lurch, the dead crew around Rut’Aba seemed to… sigh. Air whistled out of lung cavities. A stiffened finger tapped against a thigh plate. And the oily black fluid returned, not just on the walls now. It beaded on the breastplates of the corpses, welled up from between the deck plates, and dripped from the ceiling in fat, iridescent drops.
The adept whimpered, his scanner screeching with conflicting data.“Contamination! Psychic residue amplifying! The field must not be harmonized with the artifact’s… its…” He lacked the word.
Rut’Aba watched a droplet land on the stasis-crate. It didn’t sizzle. It slithered, seeking a seam. They could feel the pike in there.Not humming with power. It was… listening. Straining. Tuning itself to the dying scream of the Gellar field.
A heavy bootstep sounded on the gridded deck. Goran, the older Guardsman from the triage tent, shuffled into the hold. He carried two mess tins. He looked like he’d aged a decade. His eyes darted to the corpses, to the weeping walls, then settled on Rut’Aba with a mixture of fear and a grim, grudging pity.
“Throne, it reeks in here,” he muttered, thrusting one tin through the bars of a makeshift cage that had been welded around Rut’Aba’s anchor point. “Commissar’s orders. Keep the specimen functional.”
The “food” was a gray paste. Rut’Aba made no move to take it.
Goran set his own tin down, leaned against the corpse with the missing jaw, and sighed. He didn’t seem to care. “Look, witch, or whatever you are… that was a hell of a thing you did back there. Swatting those shells.” He took a bite of his paste. “Bought my squad time to fall back. Maybe saved my idiot kid, Rolk.”
Rut’Aba said nothing.
“Vale’s got you pegged for a xeno-tainted curio,” Goran continued, talking through his food. “Gift-wrapped for the tech-priests. They’ll take you apart on that orbital. Screw by screw. Thought you should know.”
“I know,” Rut’Aba said, their first words in hours.
Goran nodded, as if they’d confirmed something. “The Medicae.Seyn. He tried to file a discrepancy report. Said your initial scans were clean. No taint. Vale had him transferred to a penal infantry unit. Front line. Probably dead already.”
A muscle feathered in Rut’Aba’s jaw. They looked at the black fluid creeping toward the stasis-crate.
“So,” Goran said, his voice dropping. “If that thing really is a key… and you’ve got any other miracles in you… now’d be the time.” He glanced nervously at the whimpering adept, then back at Rut’Aba. His message was clear. He wasn’t here just to deliver food.
The ship gave a violent, sideways lurch. A deafening metallic shriek echoed from the deep, followed by a sudden, terrible silence from the warp engine. The lumens died completely, plunging the hold into a blackness so absolute it felt solid.
Then the emergency strips flickered on, bathing the world in pulses of stark, blood red.
In the strobe-light horror, the dead men strapped to the walls opened their eyes.
Not metaphorically. The corpse next to Goran, the one without a jaw, turned its head. Empty sockets filled with the same oily, iridescent black fluid that wept from the walls. It looked at Goran, and a wet, sucking sound came from its ruined throat.
All around the hold, the same terrible, synchronic movement. A chorus of creaking armor and gurgling voids. The stasis-crate containing the pike began to vibrate, a resonant hum that shook the deck plates. From within, a deep purple light started to pulse, slow and insistent, like a dormant heart restarting.
The Mechanicus adept screamed, a high-pitched sound of pure doctrinal terror.“The field! The Gellar field is failing! It’s harmonizing with the resonance! It’s singing back!”
Goran was on his feet, laspistol drawn, backing away from the animate corpse. “Frak!Frak! What did you do?”
Rut’Aba stared at the glowing crate, feeling the song the adept was talking about. It wasn’t a sound. It was a pressure, a wrongness tuning itself to a perfect, destructive pitch with the dying machine-spirit of the ship.
They pulled against their manacles, not to escape, but to feel the cold bite of the metal. This wasn’t their miracle. This was the key turning.
The first lock was about to open.
The corpse with the missing jaw leaned forward, its restraints creaking. The black fluid filling its sockets pulsed, as if blinking. A wet, phlegmy rattle bubbled from its open throat.
Goran stumbled back, his laspistol shaking. “Holy Throne, no. No, no, no.” He fired.
The blue-white beam seared through the corpse’s neck, severing the remaining tendons. The head lolled sideways, but the body kept straining against the straps, hands clawing at the air.
All around the hold, the dead were twitching, pulling at their bonds with a sound like grinding porcelain. The adept’s scanner exploded in a shower of sparks. He squealed, scrambling backward on his mechadendrites. “The resonance! It’s not a failure! It’s a symbiosis!”
Rut’Aba understood now. The pulsing from the pike wasn't fighting the dying Gellar field. It was matching its frequency, note for screaming note, weaving the unraveling reality into a new and terrible pattern. This wasn't their old world's clean physics. This was a universe of psychic rot, where thought could curdle matter and dead gods whispered in the static between stars.
They yanked hard at the manacles. The cold, numbing metal bit deep into their wrists. A sharp, localized sting flared in both forearms, right under the cuffs. It was a precise, warning pain. The Medicae’s words from a lifetime ago in the triage tent echoed. ‘Psi-dampeners.’ They were that, yes. But they were also something far simpler, far more brutally Imperial.
“Goran,” Rut’Aba said, their voice cutting through the cacophony of groaning metal and wet, rattling breaths. “Don’t try to get these off me.”
Goran fired twice more into another corpse that had ripped one arm free. The las-bolts cratered the chest plate but didn’t stop the slow, deliberate movement. “What?” he yelled, not looking.
“The cuffs.” Rut’Aba held up their wrists as best they could. The manacles were sleek, lined with almost-invisible capillary ports. “They’re dampeners. But they’re also linked. Remove one without the precise counter-signal…” They met Goran’s wild eyes. “The feedback loop vaporizes everything within ten feet. They don’t just contain. They make sure you can’t be taken.”
A corpse in a sergeant’s chevron-laden armor tore its entire upper body free from the webbing. It didn’t stand. It slumped to the deck, then began dragging itself forward, one armored hand over another, its helmeted head leaving a smeared trail of black ooze.
The adept was praying, a stream of binary and High Gothic pleading. One of his mechadendrites shot out, a welding torch flaring to life. He aimed it at the stasis-crate’s locking mechanism. “Sever the source! Silence the song!”
“Don’t!” Rut’Aba and Goran shouted in unison.
It was too late. The torch touched the crate’s seal.
The purple light inside the crate didn’t explode.It contracted. For a microsecond, it became a tiny, dense star of absolute blackness—a hole in the light.Then it released.
The force wasn’t concussive. It was a wave of silent, pure pressure that flattened the air. It slammed the adept into the ceiling with a sickening crunch of metal and bone, extinguishing his torch. It threw Goran against a wall of straining corpses. It hit Rut’Aba like a physical weight, pressing them into the deck.
The stasis-crate’s lid blew off, spinning into the darkness like a discarded coin.
The pike-staff stood upright within, unsupported. Every crystal was now a conduit for the weeping black fluid from the ship itself. The viscous stream flew from the walls, from the ceiling, from the eye sockets of the dead, arcing through the air to fuse with the weapon. The humming rose to a deafening, psychic drone that bypassed the ears and vibrated the teeth inside their skulls.
The dragging corpse at their feet grabbed Rut’Aba’s ankle. Its grip was iron-cold, crushing.
Goran shoved himself up, breathing ragged. He leveled his laspistol at the thing’s head point-blank. “Let go, you bastard!” The shot turned the helmet into a slagged oven, but the fingers only tightened.
More were coming. Five.Six. A shuffling, clanking half-circle of animated armor and dripping blackness, closing in.
“The key!” Goran screamed, desperation shredding his voice. “Use the damn key!”
Rut’Aba stared at the pike, ten impossible feet away. They felt its call, a magnetic tug in their chest. But the warning sting in their wrists was a sharper, more immediate truth. To reach for it, to channel that power, would mean… what? Would the manacles sense the surge and decide preemptively to erase them?
The corpse holding their ankle began to pull, slowly, relentlessly. Another closed in from the left, a rusted combat knife still clutched in its dead hand, raised for a downward stab.
There were no good choices. Only endings of different flavors.
Rut’Aba made a decision. They stopped pulling against the manacles. They focused instead on the connection, the horrible, hungry song between the pike and the ship’s dying heart. They didn’t try to control it. They just listened. And then, they added a single note of their own—a focused, razor-sharp strand of pure intent.Not me. The bonds.
The crystals flared.
A whip-thin tendril of black-and-purple energy, liquid and solid all at once, snapped across the hold. It didn’t touch Rut’Aba. It didn’t touch the corpses.
It kissed the deck ring their manacles were anchored to.
The metal didn’t melt. It unmade. A quarter-sized section of the reinforced deck plate vanished into microscopic dust, leaving the ring dangling by a thread. Rut’Aba yanked their arms apart with a desperate shout. The thread snapped.
They were free, still cuffed, but no longer chained to the floor.
The corpse with the knife brought it down. Rut’Aba rolled, the blade sparking off the deck where their chest had been. They kicked out, their bare foot connecting with the corpse’s knee. It felt like kicking a statue. Pain blossomed in their toes, but the thing staggered.
Goran was beside them now, firing steadily, methodically. He wasn't aiming to kill. He was aiming to cripple—kneecaps, ankles, weapon hands. “The key!” he bellowed again. “Grab it and let’s go!”
“I can’t just grab it!” Rut’Aba scrambled backward, the cold dead fingers finally pried loose from their ankle. The psychic drone was solid now, a wall of sound pressing in. The walls themselves were breathing, bulging inward with a leathery, organic sound. “It’s a live circuit! Touching it raw might…” They didn’t finish. Might what? Fuse them to it? Burn them out? Turn them into just another conduit for the black fluid now painting the world?
A new sound cut through the drone—a shrieking, metallic agony from deep within the ship. A primary support beam near the hold’s entrance buckled, twisting like taffy. The doorframe groaned, crumpling inward.
“Hull integrity’s going!” Goran yelled, grabbing Rut’Aba’s arm and hauling them up. “Forget the damn stick! We have to move now!”
The collapsed doorway was now a jagged mouth of torn plasteel. Beyond it, the corridor was a nightmare of strobing red light and screaming crewmen. Something was in there with them—something that moved in jittering, impossible bursts, leaving sprays of blood in geometric patterns across the walls.
The pike-staff, sensing Rut’Aba’s decision to flee, seemed to… object. The column of swirling fluid and light around it bent. It lashed out, not at them, but at the ceiling above the exit.
With a sound of shearing tectonic plates, a five-ton conduit cluster tore loose and crashed down, sealing the jagged exit completely in a tomb of sparking wires and shattered metal.
They were trapped. The hold was becoming a digestion chamber. The corpses, slower but relentless, closed the circle. The pike stood at its center, a beckoning monolith.
Goran backed into Rut’Aba, his laspistol’s power cell blinking empty. He swore, tossing the weapon aside, drawing a dented combat blade from his boot. “Any other miracles?” he panted, his voice thick with despair.
Rut’Aba looked at the weeping walls, at the resonating pike, at the explosive cuffs on their wrists. A terrible, ice-cold clarity settled over them. They knew this universe now. It didn’t trade in miracles. It traded in sacrifices.
“One,” Rut’Aba said, their voice suddenly calm. They turned from the sealed exit, from Goran, from the advancing dead. They took a step toward the pulsing, hungry light. “But you’re not going to like it.”