She drew deeper, gaining confidence, reaching out further and further along the veins of the station, supping more and more of its lifeblood. Coruscating waves broke across her limbs and sparks glittered in her eyes. Deeper still she sought, her consciousness dividing and dividing, becoming one with the energy, seeking the source of the power, drawn along its modulating waves like a creature returning on instinct to its spawning grounds.

As she infiltrated the power network, she picked up other discharges. Bio-electrical impulses from passing humans; she felt their hearts beating, their brains firing in cumbersome flashes, the thrum of power through muscle as they walked. Sound waves were everywhere, vibrating the whole station from bow to stern, clattering engines and humming terminals, and voices – thousands of voices from every direction, setting the artificial world a-tremble. She honed her thoughts, listening in to scatters of conversation, the barbaric yaps of the humans filling her with a sense of omniscience.

Ah-hotep became data as she entered the internal digital matrix, flashing as static across flickering screens, spiking in read-outs and clattering from typesetting devices. The code used by the humans was idio­syncratic, crude on some levels yet impenetrable on others. She let its flow take her across the systems until she found what she was looking for.

The reactors.

While her data-self started disassembling the protocols of the control system, her electrical tendrils probed at the magnetic barriers shielding the power of captured stars. Even through the containment fields she could feel the throbbing power. It reminded her of the tesseract vaults that imprisoned the power of the C’tan shards and she wondered if one day she might get to drain a star god of its energy.

While she deciphered primitive equations, an idle data-thrall touched upon something else: barricades of locks and ciphers enclosing some morsel within. A simple flex of her cortical influence decoded the mecha­nism’s identifiers and a frisson of joy pulsed through the plasmancer’s being.

‘Weapons control.’

Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

Alarms blazed across the orbital palaces’ command centre, accompanied by flows of vermillion across data screens and the rapid mumbling of servitors. The Imperial commander’s staff reacted slowly to the alert as red lights flashed beneath the domed ceiling, their thoughts suppressed by the renewed necron soul-dampening.

At the heart of affairs stood Aeschelus and a number of the ­Imperial commander’s senior advisors. Almost half as tall again and twice as broad as his companions, the captain knew he looked more like an animate statue than a living warrior.

‘How exactly are we under attack?’ Aeschelus demanded of the two figures in front of him.