Sons of the Hydra

by Rob Sanders

  ‘Still reorientating,’ the warpsmith said, ‘but approaching our target trajectory.’

  ‘Void shields?’ Occam asked.

  ‘Cannot be activated in void-dock,’ Reznor told him. ‘The scaffold-platforia. The repairs.’

  ‘Like the universe, fleshling,’ Vohk said, ‘you are running out of time.’

  ‘Quoda, tell me you can read this abominate thing,’ Occam said, turning his back on the alien.

  ‘He cannot,’ Vohk assured the strike master, tapping his silver skull with one claw. ‘His warp-born powers have no dominion here.’

  ‘Everything you have said, Carthach knows,’ Occam said. ‘None of us originally belonged to the Legion. Malik was one of the Night Haunter’s attack dogs and my sergeant a hunted member of the Fallen. Quoda there is an excommunicate member of the Relictors and my warpsmith was run out of the Mentors Chapter by the Inquisition for unsanctioned technological experimentation. Carthach himself recommended Phex for service in my ranks and he is a successor son of Guilliman.’

  ‘Because he hates you,’ Omizhar Vohk told him. ‘He hates your blood and he hates the hearts that pump it, for he knows that in their own ways and for their own reasons, such hearts still beat for the Emperor. Even the attack dog, who cares little for whom he fights.’

  ‘Again,’ Occam said, with no little frustration, ‘Lord Carthach knows this. The Sons of the Hydra all strike in their different ways. It has been the hallmark of the Angelbane’s success – to this very day. Xenos-lovers. Altereds. Seditionist cells. Pirates. And yes – even loyalists. We all have our uses.’

  ‘It seems that you have outlived your usefulness, fleshling.’

  ‘Go back to Lord Carthach,’ Occam told Vohk, towering over the hunched machine in his plate. ‘Tell him that we have accomplished our objective in good faith and in his name. That as true Sons of the Hydra, we await his further orders.’

  ‘Listen to yourself, renegade,’ Vohk said. ‘Good faith. True sons.’

  ‘Tell him!’

  ‘I cannot.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it was I that advised him to fire upon you.’

  Stunned silence settled upon the command deck.

  ‘I indulged a little in the untruths that your Legion revels in,’ Vohk said. ‘I told him, now with the successor sons of Guilliman defeated, that you intended to usurp his command. I told him of your little secret concerning your shape-changing Assassin there. That you intended to set her upon him again – to finally finish what she started. I find that lies are best hidden amongst truths, no?’

  Sergeant Hasdrubal brought up his bolt pistol and levelled it at Omizhar Vohk’s silvery temple.

  ‘We should end this xenos abomination and leave,’ the sergeant said.

  Occam stared at the ancient. Vohk stared back with the green intensity of his cyclopean optic.

  ‘It’s too late for that,’ Occam said. ‘This alien thing has kept us talking and seen to that. Right?’

  ‘They almost have us,’ the warpsmith confirmed.

  ‘You said most of the fortress void shields are back up and operational,’ Occam checked, not taking his eyes off Omizhar Vohk. ‘Which ones aren’t?’

  ‘The ones through which the defence lasers would have to fire in order to strike this vessel,’ Reznor told his strike master.

  ‘It is time to find another way. It is time to make a choice, Occam the Untrue,’ Vohk said. ‘Have you outlived your usefulness or has Lord Carthach?’

  ‘Usefulness to who?’ Occam demanded.

  ‘To me, fleshling,’ the ancient said. ‘To the gods and emperors of this galaxy. To the species who might prosper here and to your Legion, who ten thousand years ago made the most difficult of choices. Can you make the same, I wonder?’

  ‘Sir?’ Sergeant Hasdrubal said.

  ‘My lord?’ Arkan Reznor asked.

  Occam looked around the command deck. From Mina Perdita’s false face to the serpentine helms of the Redacted and on to the leering skull-face of the mechanical monster before him.

  ‘Is the bombardment cannon’s target trajectory still set?’ Occam asked finally.

  ‘On the fortress-monastery, yes,’ Reznor said. ‘With the dorsal section gun crews still standing by. We can exploit the void shield opening if–’

  ‘Have them execute their captain’s final order,’ Occam said, cutting the warpsmith off.

  In the silence that followed, the Redacted heard the bombardment cannon fire and felt the buck of the linear accelerator through the deck. The Alpha Legionnaires moved towards the lancet screens and waited for the inevitable. Either the magma bomb warhead would hit the fortress-monastery first or the Bas-Silica’s defence lasers would blaze the defenceless battle-barge out of the heavens. As an apocalyptic glow rose up from the planet surface, Occam felt his plate sag slightly. Whether this was relief or the weight of responsibility for the atrocity he had just committed, he could not tell. Regardless of the hundreds of thousands of Imperial citizens that had just been vaporised, the bombardment cannon had buried hundreds of Alpha Legion Space Marines and their cult followers beneath them. For a moment the spectacle held the legionnaire’s gaze.

  ‘Sir,’ Ephron Hasdrubal said. Occam turned.

  Omizhar Vohk was gone.

  Behind his faceplate, Occam snarled. Had Carthach intended on celebrating his victory by finally purging the Redacted? Or had the alien ancient simply convinced the Angelbane of imminent betrayal, as he had done with Occam?

  The strike master felt the optics of his legionnaires on him. An explanation was required. A direction, at least – even if Occam didn’t know what that direction was.

  ‘Whichever way you look at this,’ he told the Redacted, ‘we have done the Emperor’s work here today.’ The Alpha Legionnaires nodded their helms slowly in sombre agreement.

  ‘Your orders, strike master?’ Reznor asked.

  ‘It will not be long before the Astral Fists and the Angels Eradicant break system,’ Occam told them. ‘Krayt and his pirates will not be able to delay them for long. We are not going to be here when they arrive. Quoda, accompany the sergeant. I want the armoury checked on our way off this hulk for anything useful to replenish our own – specialist ammunition and equipment, rare grenades and artificer weaponry. Check with Reznor regarding our needs. Reznor, I want you to re-establish atmospherics and pressure on the thorax gun decks. Then have the sub-light engine columns engaged. Push this beast into a fast-deteriorating orbit. Phex, go with Perdita and prep the drop pod and lighter. Malik, with me. We’ll all meet back at the Serpent’s Egg and abandon the ship.’

  As members of the Redacted took to the elevator car and dropped down through the holes in the command deck, Occam took one last look through the lancet screens at the glowing crater that had been the Bas-Silica. Vilnius Malik joined him.

  ‘Looks like we’re on our own,’ Occam said.

  ‘It won’t prey on my conscience,’ the former Night Lord answered.

  ‘Mine neither,’ Occam assured him. ‘For I can’t afford to have one.’

  PART II

  GHOST LEGION

  ε

  Snake Eyes

  The Assassin assumed the identity of another. It was her way. It hurt just to be herself and such inner torment drove her to seek solace in the shapes of other people. Everyone. Anyone but herself.

  Mina was a mistress of shadow and suggestion. Aboard the Iota-Æternus she did not bother with polymorphine. Every agonising transformation under the powerful drug’s influence cost her. The temple, however, had equipped her with many skills. Silence. Stealth. Agility. Even when she could be seen, she made herself unremarkable. Unobtrusive and part of the pattern.

  Even without wasting the chameleon-like properties of the drug, her arts of deception were considerable. She was a keen observer of human behaviour. She also had an exquisite control over both body and voice – the kind of skills that an actress or performer could only dream of wielding. S
he moved like a phantom in flesh, stealing props and clothing to aid her presentation as she went. She was presently a robed young man. Lithe. Muscled like a killer but with the glinting eyes of a hooded, religious deviant. One of the Seventh Sons trusted by the superhuman sorcerer Carcinus Quoda to work at his beck and call in the librarium. The Assassin used serpent and death cult tattoos on her skin, as well as penal colony identica codes from Korsino 421, where the Seventh Sons had been radicalised and recruited.

  She crossed the small command deck of the Iota-Æternus with her gorgon mask hanging from the belt of her robes. The Alpha Legion vessel was a refitted Q-ship – a sprint freighter outfitted with hidden heavy weaponry. Typically, such Q-ships would be mixed into freighter convoys to act as a deterrent and surprise defence against pirates. The Redacted had found the Iota-Æternus – with its cargo holds outfitted with concealed batteries and extra decks for housing their cult armies – perfect for their needs. The Q-ship made for a versatile base of mobile operations for Occam the Untrue and his Alpha Legionnaires.

  Perdita passed between the cultist-manned runebanks of the cramped bridge, her robed shape cutting a silhouette into command deck lancet screens. Upon the orders of Lord Occam, on the return of the Serpent’s Egg and cult boarding craft to the Q-ship, the Iota-Æternus had taken position in the nearby Kraal Nebula. The Alpha Legion vessel was holding hidden station in the nebula, monitoring the Vitrea Mundi system in the aftermath of the attack.

  The Assassin passed beneath the gaze of Torghai Naga-Khan, shipmaster and captain of the Iota-Æternus. A Chogorisian, Naga-Khan was a verbose character full of charm and intellect.

  In the interests of extra security and perverse indulgence, Perdita made it her business to move unrecognised amongst the ship’s cultist crew and trusted operatives like Freydor Blatch and Captain Naga-Khan. The Assassin even occasionally chanced her hand with their enigmatic overlords, the renegade demigods of the Alpha Legion, especially if she sensed there was something particularly significant and unshared transpiring among them.

  Perdita knew, for example, that Naga-Khan had been first officer on an Imperial Navy frigate during the Damocles Crusade. There to check the aggressive expansion of eastern xenos empires, Naga-Khan was unfortunate enough to get caught up in a mutiny against a tyrannical, spire-born captain. Taking control of the vessel and knowing that a court martial and a commissar’s noose awaited him back with the Imperial fleet, Naga-Khan gave himself and his frigate up to their enemies, the alien t’au. Finding employment with the xenos collectivists, Naga-Khan became a Gue’vesa privateer, using his inside knowledge to prey on military convoys supplying Imperial forces in the Damocles Gulf. Ever the free spirit, the successful privateer began selling his talents to the highest bidder, finding himself finally in the employ of Occam the Untrue.

  Climbing the starboard pulpit staircase, Perdita moved past Naga-Khan. The shipmaster was drinking some kind of Chogorisian horse-swill from a wineskin, droplets of which dribbled down the luxurious black length of his moustache, beard and hair. Naga-Khan drank almost constantly, feeding the shipmaster’s ego and pushing him and his vessel on to ever more audacious feats.

  Behind the shipmaster’s throne, Perdita entered the librarium, which occupied the rear section of the command deck. As Perdita shuffled past printed vellum and ducked beneath jawless servo-skulls spewing it out from their quill-mounted mandibles, she moved through other trusted members of the Seventh Sons. The Assassin knew that loyalist Space Marine Chapters manned their libraria with powerful psykers responsible for interstellar communications and warrior-clerics who maintained the Chapter’s repositories of wisdom and history. Such Space Marines kept reports, researched treatises and maintained the memoirs of the Chapter’s greatest martial minds.

  Alpha Legionnaires like the Redacted had precious little need for such repositories. Instead, the sorcerer Carcinus Quoda ran his intelligence-gathering operation out of the librarium command centre. Perdita moved through the hololithic displays and runebanks, which were covered in vellum scrolls and data-slates. Under Quoda’s authority, calculus logi, lexomats and linguitor units went to work on data gathered by cultists, operatives, code-scrubbers and the sorcerer’s small astropathic choir-coven. Seemingly drawn to the other warp-sensitive mutants on board, Ghesh – the ship’s Navigator – also frequented the librarium.

  Like all witchbreeds, Carcinus Quoda was odd. Reserved and cautious, he was like a blind man feeling his way through the galaxy’s secrets – sifting for anything of use to the Redacted. Perdita watched the twitchy sorcerer move about the intelligence centre, his towering figure dressed in ship’s robes. While displaying no obvious corruptions, despite his sorcerous dabblings in the warp, Quoda had a weakness for artefacts – both alien and those tainted by Chaos – that might help the Redacted serve the Emperor. His Chapter had been excommunicated for such heresy. Perdita knew that he kept dangerous relics in a secure vault, adjoining his private suite of cells, but had never managed to gain admittance. She monitored the sorcerer out of the corner of her eye as he riffled through scrolls, consulted attendant cultists and communed with his astropathic choir.

  ‘Anything from the Omega-Echidnax?’ a Seventh Son asked her. The deep lines of his face and the glint of bridge lamps off the short silver bristles of his close-cropped head betrayed the cultist’s age. A former prisoner, just like the rest of the Seventh Sons, his abilities had been put to work in the librarium rather than as part of death cultist boarding actions. Perdita looked down at the vellum scraps she was absently flicking through. She handed him a piece that detailed a lack of vox-contact and returns from the Angelbane’s flagship. As they had concluded for other vessels belonging to the Sons of the Hydra, Quoda’s logi and intelligence analysts had determined that in all probability their crews – thinking all had been lost on the surface of Vitrea Mundi – had fled the system.

  ‘What about other vessels in the region?’ the silver-haired cultist asked, squinting at the report Perdita had handed him. She passed him a data-slate this time, identifying vox-intercepts from an Astral Fists strike cruiser that had just broken system. The Astral Fists’ communications would go unheeded. There was a glowing crater where the Bas-Silica and Salina City used to be. The aged Seventh Son shuffled off to show the reports to his master, Carcinus Quoda. Quietly, the Assassin left the bridge and librarium.

  It was easier indulging in the art of being others. She had done so many terrible things during her time in the Officio temples. She had murdered men and women, the young and the old. She had been the personified end to defenceless aliens and humans tainted beyond use to themselves. In training she had even killed sister Assassins: girls with whom she had lived and trained. Perdita sometimes thought that she might be hiding from the terrible things done to her, rather than those she had inflicted upon others. Horrors experienced in infancy, before the temple surgeons had experimented upon her flesh and frame with muscle-rupturing chemicals, pop-up plates of carapace and pneumatic bone extensions. Things she could not remember or recall.

  She was no longer some temple tool to be unleashed at another’s choosing. Conversely, she had no intention of becoming like others she had seen – an acolyte of some Ruinous Power promising gifts of change that she already possessed. She was not interested in coin, opportunity or protection – all of which she could procure for herself. In breaking her, the Alpha Legion had given her purpose. Occam the Untrue was her compass and his objectives her true North.

  In reality, the action above Vitrea Mundi had constituted a brutal coup rather than a purge. The Redacted, among other Alpha Legion cells operating loosely under the Angelbane’s banner – like Naetrix Krayt’s pirates – were still technically Sons of the Hydra, only now with the usurping Occam the Untrue as their de facto leader.

  Perdita had no idea what Lord Occam’s next move might be. So far, it just seemed to involve hiding in the Kraal Nebula. Perhaps he planned upon joining forces with Krayt. Perhaps he would run down the Om
ega-Echidnax and transfer his operations to the flagship. Perdita considered he might even follow through on the Angelbane’s operations in the Vitrea Mundi system and attack the arriving Astral Fists. Before deciding whether or not to stay with the Alpha Legion, the Assassin intended to find out – and she wouldn’t simply wait for a fork-tongued announcement from the ship’s demigod overlords.

  Moving through the Alpha Legion vessel, Perdita indulged another identity. Her next choice was one of the slight, bright-eyed girls she had seen on the dormitory decks.

  While the renegades busied themselves with the lofty prosecution of labyrinthine schemes, and operatives were either recruited or imprisoned on board for the utilisation of their talents, the Seventh Sons ran a small, self-sufficient colony on the converted decks of the freighter. They were not cult slaves to be organised into meatshield formations or regiments being transported aboard Navy carriers to their deaths. The Iota-Æternus was their home and the Alpha Legion overlords walked among them like household gods. On Korsino 421 the prisoners were too deadly and unified by the death cult faith to be segregated. The penal colonies were close-knit criminal communities, where order was maintained not by walls and wardens but by cult structures established by the High Serpent and his Alpha Legion sponsors.

  Moving from the trudging step of a librarium attendant to the light tread of a colony courtesan, she adjusted her hair and cult robes in a savage design to frame her harsh but attractive features. She showed off other tattoos. By the time she turned into one of the colony’s open deck thoroughfares, containing serpent shrines, fighting pits and communal galleys, her disguise was complete.

  Brushing shoulders with other brothers and sisters of the Seventh Sons, Perdita could smell spicy food being prepared and felt the spray of blood from death cultists competing for sport in shallow fighting pits crafted from cargo crates. She passed individual cells where cultists were indulging in sense-heightening narcotics, being tattooed and ritually scarred. She stepped over poisonous serpents that slithered across the deck. Collected from myriad worlds, their venom was used in temple ceremonies. Many had escaped their containment to infest the ship.