‘The extinction of countless solar systems. Entire galaxies, eaten down to their heart.’ Marcus palms his face, looking out again through the porthole. Outside, in the cthonic abyss, the Nepenthe floats, defiant of classification. Matte panelling and no viewports, no turrets, nothing that approaches the familiar accoutrements of a ship, a rectangular cuboid like someone had carved the ship wholesale from the void itself.
‘Yes, but it isn’t personal.’ Cornelius rises, restless, moves to examine the servitors, while Marcus watches the Nepenthe expand from improbability to irrefutable fact. Probes orbit its obsidian mass, magnesium scintilla that somehow cast no reflection on the oil-deep surfaces. He charts their transmissions; still no indication of where a docking area might reside. If this keeps up, they’d have to gouge a route of their own. ‘Tyranids do not have agendas. Their motivations are pure. It’s simple hunger, bestial and uncomplicated.’
‘Careful, brother. What you suggest is heresy.’ A door opens. Hypaspists file into the room in lock-step and flank the brothers; silent, watchful.
‘As is everything we believe in.’ Under the mask, Marcus is certain that his brother smiled. ‘You’re not getting cold feet now, are you?’
There is no opportunity to reply. Another door apertures and the brothers turn to see Lupus corralling a phalanx of battle-automata into the room, Scyllax Guardians to the last unit. In spite of himself, Marcus is impressed. Who would have thought their expedition would warrant such vaunted protection? At his attention, the machines halt, half-skulls swinging to triangulate on his position, his reflection repeated in the multitude of their glass-green eyes.
‘The Magos insisted,’ Lupus explains, glaring. ‘He thinks this is a good idea.’
An accusation implied in the inflection of the words, but Marcus circumvents an answer with a half-smile. He pushes onto his feet and pads towards the enginseer. ‘And I imagine it will be. The space hulk–’
It wriggles across his tongue, the phrase. Space hulk. Marcus had been so insistent on censoring its use, but the words slip now from his lungs, independent of conscious decision, effortless in their articulation. But Lupus doesn’t comment on them, preoccupied first with his automata and then the sight unfolding outside of the window.
Slowly, the Nepenthe becomes reticulated with incandescent razorwire, the lines so narrow that Marcus might have missed them if it wasn’t for the intensity of their fluorescence. As he watches, the ship dismembers itself, separating along axial points intelligible only to its private algorithms. Doors are configured, hinges; biometrics familiar to naval morphologies. A mouth opens in the anterior of the ship, beckoning, its throat studded with orange guard lights.
The entry point is the exact size of their shuttle.
‘Report.’
Veles’ voice is static-warped, higher than in actuality. The Scyllax, cervical vertebrae annexed by the Magos, jabbers in irritation, its resident machine-spirit clearly displeased by the parasitism. Marcus endures its regard without complaint, while the enginseer endeavours to soothe the automaton. Around them, silence save for the biometrics of their footsteps, broadcasting aggregate weight, positioning, number. Cornelius looms ahead of the vanguard, wax-white in the dim.
‘Nothing so far.’
Marcus would have appreciated a psyker or two in their convoy, someone that might be able to predict an ambush, or at least emptiness. It must exist, after all. The brothers had communed with her for years.
‘As far as we can tell, this entire docking facility is… new.’ So fresh from parturition, in fact, that the scaffolding is warm beneath Marcus’ grip.
The tunnel is concentric rings, bordered with ganglia of exposed circuitry, contact with their topology prevented by thick glass. One method of ingress, one option for exit. A killing ground, Marcus thought, and shudders at his own description.
‘It feels like it was custom-built specifically for our landing or, at least, modified based on their morphometrics.’ The climate is equatorial. Humid enough for condensation to bead and roll off the automata, and drip from the servitors as they lumber ahead of their operators. The air breathable, if faintly pungent with exhaust. ‘The infrastructure is astounding. Entirely modular, as far as I can see. I don’t recognise the polymers used here. We’ll need to take samples. I wish you could see this, Magos.’
‘Trust me, Genetor, I am perfectly happy experiencing this by surrogate.’
The passage dilates into open space, unexpectedly commercial in its make-up. The servitors illuminate an out-of-commission fountain, the centrepiece of what Marcus presumes was a stage, its rococo anatomy choked by pathways. Mechanical stairs abseil diagonally from higher levels, six flights in total, the space ascending into a domed firmament. Refracted by the displays is the halcyon vision of a terrestrial night sky, fast-forwarding through cosmic phenomena. Everything is clean, scrupulously maintained.
Except it shouldn’t be.
The impractical design of the ship, its apparent devotion to leisure; all tenets of a time when interstellar travel was something to venerate. The air should be clogged with dust, the hallways stinking of effluvium, rusty water and decomposing protein. It shouldn’t be so clean. Marcus runs his eyes along the landing again, searching, uncertain.
Despite everything, despite fact, despite logic, it feels as though they’ve breached a moment locked in freeze-frame and, any moment now, animation will return, bodies will shuffle into visual range, music will play…
‘You should have started running.’
Marcus jolts at the voice, which, he realises too late, is being transmitted stereoscopically, ricocheting from old-fashioned transducers, syllables sawed-off in places, the upper registers completely missing. Not that it damages the message. A hololithic projection grafts itself together in the corner: a man, wire-slim, sitting astride the lip of the fountain, knee pulled to his chest.
Whoever the manifestation had been modelled upon, Marcus realises with a thrill of excitement, that person must have predated the Imperium. Nothing in his features is familiar.
Even as Marcus gawks, the figure articulates a smile, combing fingers through hair pomaded perfectly in place. To the tech-priest’s surprise, the keratin fibres respond, tussling in obedience to physics, and the figure sighs.
‘Really. You should have started running.’
‘Defensive positions!’ Cornelius, bellowing already, more cautious, more grounded in the practical. Hypaspists swarm forward, the servitors moving in parallel. But it is too late.
Around them, the ship awakens.
Once, when he’d been too young to imagine being old, Cornelius had pressed his nose against a pane of smudged glass and watched as a cephalopod crawled along the bottom of a tank. At first, it had been the same muddied colours of the sediment but as it scrabbled forward, its rubbery flesh had blued, had brightened; by the time it’d lunged for its prey, a dying fish, seeping gases and lacings of waste, the creature burned like plasma.
Metachrosis. He’d learn the word much later, and only remember it again in the black of the Nepenthe. Lights nictitate in undulating spirals, threading the outlines of bodies he should have seen, should have noticed long ago. Cornelius levels his gun, fires, fires again, even as screams burst around him. Their camouflage must involve some variety of neurotoxin, a specialised pheromone intended to impede memory encoding. Something, anything. How else could he have missed them?
Something massive shrieks at Cornelius through the bichromatic chiaroscuro, darkness and the red glare of energy weapons. He turns. He estimates it to be about two metres, maybe less, maybe more. Accurate telemetrics require a mind not at war with itself.
What successfully registers: tentacles slopping from a gaping jaw, each pseudopod teethed and stippled with hooks. Bipedal physiognomy, slightly hunched. A carapace that might have been skin once, but is now a scabrous leather. What he fails to process: a na
me.
Cornelius knows he recognises the aberration howling closer by the heartbeat, that some distant vector of consciousness has a name for this nightmare. But he cannot call it to his tongue, not even as the thing’s arms petal into hooks. Six limbs now, seven, the last no doubt meant to spear him like a fish.
Even as the amygdala barks its denial, even as Cornelius’ cognition shrinks into itself, something more ancient, a basal instinct scrimshawed into the bones, raises his gun again and shoots until the clip exhausts itself.
His artillery does nothing.
Cornelius’ arm drops to his side, slack, gun clattering to the floor. He stares. The thing snaps its head back, cephalopodic mouth exposed under a ring of straining tentacles, and at the sight of it, a word unwraps from Cornelius’ lungs.
‘Genestealer.’
One of the hypaspists intercepts the creature’s trajectory, knocking the genestealer aside and down, the two tumbling. The world renders in hyper-vivid strokes, sensory oversaturation bracketed by screams and the screech of metal torn apart. Before Cornelius can recover equilibrium, the genestealer digs talons into the tech-guard’s chest and pulls.
Ribs crack. Viscera – barely recognisable as liver and intestine, glands and other sweetbreads, genetic optimisation and augmetics having made for more streamlined offal – disgorge from the gash. The warrior does not cry out, only convulses as it begins haemorrhaging oil and blood, body sagging. The genestealer raises its prize upwards, tentacles burrowing through the mangled flesh.
‘Genestealers,’ Cornelius repeats, tongue heavy in his mouth. No, he thinks. That’s not right. No, not quite. Almost.
Finally: ‘Ymgarl strain. Omnissiah take them, I thought these were extinct.’
Pain cannot bypass programming. Even halfway to dying, the hypaspist will serve. It kicks against the genestealer, lasgun pushing into position, while the creature envelopes its face with its tendrils. Now, the warrior screams, a thin and animal noise. Its fingers clench and it pumps las-fire into the underside of its captor’s mandibles. Over and over, until the feeding genestealer’s skull splits from the assault.
Pale curds of brain, crisped by ballistics, splatter across the tech-priest’s robes. All at once, Cornelius is no longer paralysed, animal brain supplanting terror, pushing him up, forward, away from what had transpired.
For the first time, Cornelius really takes a look at the tableau.
It cannot have been more than twenty minutes since their arrival. But the walls are soaked, the floor mosaiced with so much meat that Cornelius can no longer remember if the landing had a colour. Over and again, Cornelius finds himself being surprised by how much of it there is, every glob of debased muscle run-through with wires and broken tubing, like so many parasitic worms evicted from a home.
The servitors keep dying in clumps: thick-witted, slaved to targeting subroutines that are simply too slow to be effective against the xenos. But at least they serve a purpose, distracting the genestealers from more competent prey; the hypaspists and the Scyllax, closing ranks behind their monotasked peers. Unfortunately, there are only so many bodies to go around.
‘Genetor. You are in danger. We should move.’ Stilted delivery in a chrome-plated voice, full of squeals and pops as the larynx fizzles to uselessness. Cornelius shifts his attention to the hypaspist to his right, the cyborg drenched in gore. ‘Genetor, you are without weaponry. You should correct the situation.’
No secret that the troops of the Adeptus Mechanicus undergo emotion-suppression surgery, but Cornelius can’t help but wonder, as he falls into lock-step, just how much is flensed from the parietal lobe. What does it take to allow an animal to shamble through the act of dying without so much as a whimper? The hypaspist bleeds in ropes of grey offal, lasgun braced against the hollow of an exposed abdominal cavity, but it evidences no discomfort, nothing but a slurred vigil.
‘Genetor, you are without weaponry–’
‘We need to find my brother.’ We need to find her. Almost simultaneous, that other statement, articulated with more fervour than any requests to seek out Cornelius’ absent sibling. Since their approach, he’s not been able to hear her, not even a chord to allay his fears, his grief at being so unfathomably alone; a self-aware cyst of neural tissue piloting a rotting corpse.
The hypaspist scissors straight with a crunch of bone, head cocked at a twenty-seven degree angle. ‘Genetor Marcus is–’
Before it can finish, Cornelius hears his brother scream, a killing sound whetted by the raw crackle of electric. He pivots to find Marcus and Lupus, flanked by automata, retreating from a corridor he’d not noticed before. Above them, clinging to the balustrades, bodies coiled like upside-down raindrops, a writhing mass of genestealers prepares for the drop.
The Nepenthe… blinks.
A voice floods the capillaries of the ship: female, faintly adenoidal.
‘You are in a protected void sphere,’ she intones without inflection. Magnesium-white pinholes of light flare along the surface of the Nepenthe, even as the strange voice pours from every speaker, every stretch of space along the Explorator vessel. ‘You are in a protected void sphere. Move, or we will register your inaction as a declaration of aggression.’
‘Move.’ Something cracks the monotone. ‘Or there will be nothing of you to move.’
‘Marcus!’ Cornelius bellows in time for his brother to jump sideways, but Lupus moves a half-second late.
The genestealers descend as the hydra of Lupus’ mechadendrites rise, servo-arms razor-ridged, snapping at the air with moray eel mouths. But the enginseer’s enhancements are industrial, intended for fine work, not martial use. They break on hide intended to withstand worse. Two of the genestealers clasp Lupus by the shoulders, tug like dogs in competition for a wishbone, and as the enginseer wails, a third leans over the man, tentacles swaddling his gaunt face.
Something breaks.
Snaps.
Cornelius wastes no time on empathy, on fear, not even when Lupus’ throat distends and tears, as one of the genestealer’s smaller feelers breaks through the skin, a red-glazed jut of keratin. He knows what comes next. The Scyllax scream in one voice, inlays short-circuited by Lupus’ misfiring synapses; there is no syntax for his agony, no way to translate that pain into coherent actionables, no option but to shriek in symphony, their machine-spirits algospasmic.
They continue to scream as Marcus butterflies a genestealer’s arm, the parabola of his whip precise enough to flay even that tensile flesh, as Marcus bolts for his brother, as Cornelius splices noospherically into his escort’s interfaces, both half-blind, but in the kingdom of the condemned, every little bit counts.
‘Run,’ Marcus pants, bleeding from a hundred places, his face ribbons.
‘Genetors, stay behind me,’ Cornelius’ hypaspist intones, shambling between the brothers and the genestealers, the latter already on the prowl again, Lupus’ dismembered corpse strewn between them, a boneless slaughterhouse of parts. And still nothing, nothing of the voice from the ship, nothing but this cosmology of death, Cornelius adapting macros to steady the hypaspist’s aim, optimise its reflexes, anything to buy them time. Nothing, nothing, nothing at all. ‘Genetor Cornelius, I advise that you acquire a weapon.’
The brothers don’t argue.
‘Where is Veles? Where is our support? He was supposed to be in charge of the servitors, but we’re alone here!’ Marcus demands, dragging his brother past a tableau of the dead. ‘We have two options: we return to the ship or we find the control hub of this place. There must be a way. It can’t end like this.’
‘Something’s cut off communications. I don’t know when it happened, but the entire ship has become a null-zone. No signals in or out. She mustn’t want us to leave.’ Cornelius exhales and for a heartbeat, he is frightened to the bone of its implications. Perhaps, there is a reason as to why some things are branded tech-heresy.
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br /> ‘If you are looking for CAT, you should probably move quickly.’ The hololith again, that anachronistic projection, materialising between the tech-priests as they race through the carnage, his feet skating across the air like it is a lamina of oil. ‘They’re almost done with the rest of your friends.’
Ambient electromagnetics cooking the air into patterns; pareidolia giving shape to the distortions. Under any other circumstances, Cornelius would have loved to dissect the technologies behind the manifestation. ‘Establish identity protocols. Report.’
‘I am MAUS. I am the CAT’s plaything. I am her assistant. I am her arms and legs. I am her keeper. I am her opposite. I am what she is not.’ Even wind velocity is replicated, the hologram’s hair moving with the momentum, a whip-snap of fluorescent strands. ‘She is not here, but I am.’
‘Genetors.’ A single salutation, bifurcated into two voices. The last of the hypaspists shamble into view, flamethrowers drooling combustibles. ‘There is an exit.’
One points behind them through the holocaust of bodies and quieting screams, even the Scyllax cracked open, husked of whatever meat is wired inside their bodies, their engines cooling and already leaking radiation.
Their escape option is a gash in the wall, too small to have admitted whatever crowds might have once milled through the Nepenthe. A service entrance, perhaps, restricted to sanitorial personnel. No reason to think that it might lead them to freedom. Or her. Longing curves its hook around Cornelius’ gut, tugs, and he opens his mouth to object when all of them, genestealer and tech-priest, the slurried neural tissue laced through the hypaspists’ skulls, hear her sing.
Maledictions Page 2
