Zozar’s consciousness found movement, still traumatised by the dreams. The scream inside him stopped before vocalisation. It took a few moments to orientate himself out of the dream state, pushing the terrible vision away.

With comprehension came awareness of his physicality inside the stasis chamber. A tripodal body, skeletal beneath plates of armour. Multiple arms, each beweaponed with gun or blade, pulsing with hatred-turned-energy. The skorpekh lord felt no flesh nor organ, and deep within the construct of his form throbbed an emptiness where his half-remembered soul should have been.

The last tattered vestiges of his loved ones fluttered from thought and the emptiness inside swelled with a different strength. Rage. A rage ­powered by a loss magnified through the lens of aeons. Rage fuelled by a guilt only known to one that had doomed his love by his own hand.

Rage and hate flowed, crackling across metal bones. All living things would perish in the inferno of his anger. All was ruin and all would be rendered unto ruin for all time.

His despair needed venting or it would consume him.

Zozar the Destroyer had woken.

Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

The Destroyers created an empty zone in the heart of the stasis decks, like a wound in Simut’s extended cortical field. To prevent any potential spread of the Destroyer malaise that made them such unrepentant slaughterers, they were isolated from the rest of the cryptek network. Simut did not care to think what pseudo-emotions thrashed about beyond the boundary zone between his consciousness and that of Zozar and his followers.

A dedicated swarm of canoptek constructs attended to the wakening ceremonies. They too were sequestered from the main body of Simut’s minions and would accompany the Destroyer legion down to the surface. Only through several layers of secure canoptek nodes did the data flow of the process reach the overlord, passing through triple-redundant decontamination protocols and a final check by Phetos’ subsystems.

When all was prepared Simut received the burst-signal from Zozar, demanding he be released from the final quarantine bonds.

‘Power up the translocation arrays!’ announced Simut, taking his place upon his throne after some time spent inspecting the display screens. The command pulsed through Phetos and into the tomb ship’s compu­tational banks. Dimensional grips sank into the subspaces between the spheres, drawing on a limitless supply of power. Deep within the interior levels of the immense vessel pyramidal transformers stirred into action, turning raw power created by the drift between dimensions into energy that thrummed along the circuits of the mastaba, bathing the lord and his royal warden in its jade glow.

The Destroyer tombs crackled with unleashed power, false lightning leaping from chamber to chamber, coursing along corridors to spear from one canoptek attendant to the next. Within moments the whole zone was awash with molecular distortion as the boundaries of space-time collapsed under the will of Simut.