The Wrong Verse

The Ardent Penance had been missing for eleven months, and the first strange thing about finding her was that she looked fine.

Mathias watched her grow in the Thunderhawk’s forward viewport: a long grey strike cruiser hanging dark against a dead star, hull unscorched, spires intact, no breaches anywhere. A ship that had been through a battle would have told you so. This one looked like she was waiting.

“Eleven months,” Aldric said from the harness across the aisle. He was the kind of brother who filled a silence by reflex, and the squad had stopped hearing it years ago. “No wreckage, no beacon, no word to the Crusade. And then two days ago, that.”

That was still playing, low, through the cabin speakers. The Shipmaster had passed it down as a recording, looped on the long-range band, and by now Mathias could have recited it himself.

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

A breath. A click of static. Then the beginning again.

“That is not how it is sworn,” Hadrian said.

He sat at the end of the bench with his helm in his lap and his eyes closed. Aldric squinted at him.

“A wounded man, perhaps. A word slips.”

“It slips in the same place every time. A wounded man’s mistakes wander.”

Nobody answered that. The recording started over.

The docking clamps took hold without a word from the Penance. No challenge, no clearance, only a long mechanical shudder as the cradle accepted them like a door left unlocked. The inner hatch cycled. Mathias was third down the ramp, bolter up, and he stopped a step short of the deck without meaning to.

The hangar was spotless. Gunships stood in their cradles, tools hung on their racks, and the deck plates had been scrubbed to a dull shine. The lamps overhead were on a slow cycle, brightening and fading, as though the ship couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be seen.

It was warm. That was the second strange thing. A ship that had been dark for months should have been cold enough to crack the paint, and instead the air lay on his armor like breath. Condensation ran down the bulkheads in long, even trails. Under the promethium and the old incense he could smell something sweet, like fruit left in a closed room.

Hadrian had come down last. He stopped at the foot of the ramp, tilted his head and drew a slow breath through his nose. Then he put his helm on, and Mathias heard the seals lock.

“Single file,” Hadrian said, over the squad channel. “Aldric, take the point. Mathias, the middle. I will hold the rear.”

Mathias fell in behind Aldric. “You have smelled this before,” he said.

“Once. A long time ago.” Hadrian’s voice came from close behind his shoulder, level as ever. “Keep to the wall.”

They went in. The crew quarters were empty, and every bunk was made with the blanket folded square at the foot. The mess hall tables were laid for a meal, with cups set out and none of them used. There was no dust and no blood, nothing scorched, nothing broken. It looked like the whole ship had stepped out for prayer and would be back directly.

The racks in the armory were full. Lasguns by the hundred in neat rows, a dozen bolters in their own cradle at the end. Every one was in its place, every seal intact, which meant that nobody aboard had reached for a gun.

“Where are the dead?” Aldric said. “Three hundred crew and nine brothers. A ship does not lose that many and leave the beds made.” For once he did not follow it with anything.

Nobody offered an answer.

The vow had followed them in. It came from the corridor speakers now, not the Thunderhawk’s, thin and patient, and the farther they went the louder it grew. It was the same words, the same wrong verse. At the third junction Mathias realized what bothered him about it. The pauses were wrong. A recording would have run the same length every time. This voice drew breath before it spoke, and the breath was different each time, a little shorter, a little wetter.

“That is no recording,” he said.

“No,” Hadrian said.

“I will not turn from the foe,” said the speaker above them. “I will not leave the field.”

Somewhere ahead, toward the bridge, a door they had not touched slid open on its own.