The Word Scratched Out

The bridge lay four decks up and most of a mile forward, and Aldric took the point at every turn without being asked.

The marks started on the second deck. Mathias saw them first, because the man in the middle of a column has nowhere to look but up: long gouges in the ceiling plating, grouped in fours, deep enough to show bare metal under the paint. They ran the length of the corridor and never once came down to the walls.

“Those are above my head,” Aldric said. He stretched an arm toward the nearest set, gauntlet flat, and fell a hand short. “A long way above.”

“Yes,” Hadrian said, from the rear. He did not add anything to it.

A little farther on they passed a compartment where the crew had barricaded themselves in. Lockers were dragged against the door and a cross-brace was welded to the frame, still bright at the seam. The door had held. The ventilation grille above it had not. It hung from a single bolt, bent back like the lid of a tin, and a clear amber residue had dried along its edge, thick as candle wax. Inside there were bunks, a table, a stack of lasguns leaning in the corner that nobody had picked up. Nothing else.

The chapel was the next door along, and it stood open. Mathias would have gone past it. Hadrian put two fingers against his pauldron, and he stopped.

Every ship of the Chapter carried the vows on its chapel walls, cut into the stone from floor to vaulting, so the brothers prayed with them at their backs. Someone had gone along the wall with a blade, line after line, and gouged out one word in each. Where yield should have stood there was a bright scar in the stone, and beside each scar, in a ragged hand, another word had been cut in its place. Leave. It had been done hundreds of times. Some of the hands were neat. Some of them were barely letters.

“The crew,” Aldric said.

“And the brothers,” Hadrian said. “Come.”

At the last junction before the bridge, the lamps went down on their slow cycle and did not come back up. The autosenses in Mathias’s helm washed the corridor green. Ahead, the vow, which had been in his ears for two days, stopped in the middle of a line.

“The voice has stopped,” Aldric said.

“Hold.”

Something fell from the ceiling.

Mathias saw it for the length of a breath: pale and long, too many arms, a head like a blade laid flat. Aldric’s bolter caught it twice in the air and it landed anyway, folded itself against the wall and came along it faster than a thing that size should move. Mathias fired and hit the wall. Aldric went down under it with a grunt. Then Hadrian was there, one stride and no more, and his sword went through the creature where its neck met its shoulders, and he put his boot against its ribs and pulled the blade free.

It was over in three seconds. It had not made a sound.

Aldric got up on one knee and looked at what lay on the deck. The blood was pale and thin, and it carried the same sweetness as the hangar. “What is that?”

“A scout,” Hadrian said, and wiped his sword on its hide.

“For what?”

“For the rest.”

Nobody said anything after that. Above them, down the corridor, the vow began again, from the middle of the line where it had stopped.

The bridge doors stood open. One lamp burned, the glow of the vox console, and by it Mathias made out the command stations, dark and empty, every chair turned to face the same way. At the far end, in front of the console, a brother in the black and white of the Chapter knelt with his helm set on the floor beside him. His armor was clean. His back was to them. His head was bowed to the microphone, and he was speaking into it, quietly and steadily, in a voice that breathed a half-beat late.

“I will not turn from the foe. I will not leave the field.”

“Ansel,” Aldric said.

The voice stopped.

For a long time nobody moved. The brother at the console lifted his head, slowly, the way a man does who has been bowed a very long while. When he turned, only his head turned, and Mathias saw that his face was still his own, mostly. The skin had gone grey at the temples, ridged along the brow like something pressing from beneath, and his eyes were dark all the way across.

“Brother Aldric,” Ansel said. “Brother Hadrian. I did not think the Chapter would send anyone.” He smiled with a mouth that was entirely courteous. “Forgive me. I have been saying it wrong on purpose. For eleven months. It was the only warning I could think of.”

Behind them, back in the dark of the corridor, something began to move.