‘How’s that possible?’ said Praxa­medes. ‘How can it be generating negative reality?’

‘No warp pressure,’ suggested Aeschelus, stepping back. He glanced around the strategium, but it was only the warp engine display that was not showing green across the banks. ‘If Kosa is right, there is nothing to act against the Geller field, so it is still expanding.’

‘Reduce energy input to Geller field by forty per cent,’ Nem­etus told the officers at the controls. They passed the order to the tech-priests in the bowels of the ship, glancing at each other in amazement as the readings continued to climb. ‘Keep dropping it to maintain current coverage.’

‘Captain, we are moving at speed without any means of changing course,’ Kosa told them hurriedly over the voxmitter. ‘We are also drifting slightly off-heading, as far as I can ascertain. If we do not translate back to realspace soon we will be dozens of light years away from our intended destination.’

‘Understood, Navigator. You have permission to translate back to realspace.’ Aeschelus flexed his fingers, obviously frustrated, but Praxa­medes could see there was no alternative and was glad to see the captain being prudent.

‘You do not understand, captain,’ replied Kosa, voice trembling. ‘I was not asking permission. We are moving through the warp while simultaneously lacking any traction to use to break back into realspace. I have attempted to translate twice since we dropped into warp space with no success! We are trapped!’

There were times when one simply had to accept that events play out as they will without any way of changing their course. Ah-hotep had resigned herself to this reality on a frequent basis since her assignment to Simut’s fleet. She could not divine whether his total ambivalence to her advice was simply pride, distrust of her as a plasmancer or that he genuinely believed he was above such concerns and knew better.

The systems of her tomb ship were enthralled to the overlord’s command protocols, greatly hampering anything she might attempt to cut off the humans’ ability to use their astromantic capabilities. As a plasmancer she was keenly aware of the delicate cosmic flow of energy through the whole star system, from the raging radioactive fire of the star to the bio-fields of the thousands of humans inhabiting the target world and its far-flung outposts. She could not directly detect the presence of astromantic energy, but she knew enough from her studies of blackstone and the capture of human astromancers that there was always a residual physical effect to the presence of neversea energy. A shadow on reality, cast by unnatural powers.

So it was that she could sense the humans gathering together their astromantically potent forces on the major satellite orbiting their world. Its energy signature betrayed it as an object of artifice, a large space station hung above a sparsely populated planet. Even from several orbits’ distance the gathering of personnel capable of interacting with the ­neversea was distinct.