Inferno Volume 2 - Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

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  WHAT WAKES IN THE DARK

  Miles A Drake

  Hailing from Amsterdam, author Miles A Drake makes his second venture into the Dark Imperium’s alien-infested battlefields to spin a story of danger and intrigue.

  While on deep void patrol, Sergeant Achairas and his Tactical Squad of Death Spectres are ordered to urgently rendezvous with a member of the Ordo Xenos. They learn that Black Station Thirsis 41-Alpha has fallen silent after reports emerged of buried xenos archaeology being uncovered. Achairas and his elite warriors must locate the heretical device capable of untold destruction at all costs, or die trying.

  His eyes opened to the reflection of a ghost. An apparition stared back at him from the surface of the inky river that flowed silently below him. He regarded his own shimmering image for a moment. His ivory pauldrons were in stark contrast to the ebon ceramite plating he wore. His helm was gone, revealing bleached, hairless features – gaunt, but cast in the wide mould of a transhuman skull. His eyes were as black as the void.

  ‘The river…’ he muttered, his voice deep but barely a hiss as he overcame his disorientation. He looked up, into the rest of the ill-lit cavern.

  It was vast, its obsidian walls disappearing into the gloom, and a veritable landscape of jagged black glass formed hills and peaks in the distance. The colossal space was lit by an ephemeral glow, emanating from nowhere and everywhere at once.

  He stood on the bank of the Black River. That meant death was near. Its dark waters were impenetrable, plodding and relentless as they wound their way through the mantle of dead Occludus, his home world. They gave life as they exhaled the atmosphere during each perihelion, and they brought death when they inhaled it again, on the aphelion.

  His vision resolved, seeing the far bank, several hundred paces away.

  It was there. He was there.

  ‘Megir…’ The Space Marine bowed, his voice barely a hiss. It would carry across, in the total silence of the cavern, towards the master he had never, until this night, seen.

  ‘Achairas,’ a voice returned. It was older, many hundreds of years more lifeless than his own. It was ragged, and echoed impossibly through the Stygian darkness. The voice came from the structure on the opposing bank, from the jagged throne of dark crystal, entombing his master in this place of death and silence.

  That throne was the Shariax, the tomb of the Chapter Master of the Death Spectres. And it was seen only by those who were marked with doom.

  Achairas regarded the Shariax, master of himself and all of his brothers, with reverence. Its crystalline lattice of dark razors, spurs and blades was woven around a cadaver in black-and-white artificer armour. The crystal was a symbiote, growing from the Megir where he sat, fusing with ceramite and flesh alike.

  Achairas advanced deeper into the waters.

  ‘Wait,’ the Megir commanded, halting his steps. ‘Return to the shore. This is not your time.’

  ‘But I am in its waters…’ Achairas looked down. The darkness coiled around him, tugging at his armour like the cold hands of the dead.

  ‘You are,’ the Megir agreed. ‘Your destiny has been marked. And death is its end. But you must still follow the path to meet your ending.’

  Achairas looked back up. The certainty of his own doom did not bother him. ‘What path?’

  ‘Follow the call. Follow it to what is buried. Learn what wakes in the dark and ensure that the Menrahir are warned.’

  Achairas nodded. The words were cryptic, and he did not understand them, but it did not matter. The Megir had spoken. He had given Achairas a command, to learn something and warn the Council of Librarians that shepherded his Chapter in their master’s absence.

  ‘Now return to the shore,’ the Megir commanded once more.

  Achairas did as he was bidden, wading through the beckoning waters. He stepped from the shifting, glittering silt onto the broken obsidian beyond the banks. His vision dimmed, then faded entirely.

  And he awoke from his dream.

  898.M41 – System Thirsis 41,

  Subsector Thirsis, the Halo Region

  Brother-Sergeant Achairas stood with his compatriots and their new guests within the aphotic strategium of the Vox Silentii. He listened to the muffled chatter of Chapter-serfs and servitors as he watched the bleak orb of Thirsis 41-Alpha slowly approach on the external pict-feed. The vaulted arches of the deck were decorated with images of death and darkness.

  Four of his nine battle-brothers were on deck, monitoring key systems and overseeing the serfs. The other five were attending to their various tasks about the ship, or were taking their Hours of Silence.

  The Megir’s warning had foreshadowed a call, a black-clearance astropathic cry, flagged with markers of the Ordo Xenos, from the quarantined world of Sarvakal-22b. Achairas’ squad and their Nova-class frigate had been in silent vigil, monitoring the Sarvakal Cluster along the edge of the Ghoul Stars for years, lying in ambush for the retreating Cythor Fiends that fled the fury of the Black Templars’ crusade.

  It was beyond any doubt in Achairas’ mind that the astropathic cry was the call the Megir had forewarned him of. He had immediately brought his ship to full power to make for Sarvakal-22b, and sent missives to the other four ships the Death Spectres had committed to the vigil, explaining his withdrawal from the campaign.

  Several days of warp travel through the unstable sector had brought them to the source of the message, a world of nightmare oceans and monolithic alien spires. It had indeed come from an inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos. With his work documenting the Cythor Fiends’ disturbing empty worlds finished, he was requesting aid for another assignment, one of a more pressing, and sensitive, nature.

  That inquisitor now presented a wraith-like silhouette as he observed the feed from the Vox Silentii’s heavily modified augur arrays. Grey robes obscured tortured, mangled flesh and replacement machine. A mask of faceless steel concealed a flensed skull, and nearly a third of his body was galvanised metal, meshed seamlessly into his slate-grey carapace armour.

  This was Inquisitor Senerbus Astolyev. Sergeant Achairas had heard the name before. It was synonymous with radical ideals, known well enough to those possessing clandestine knowledge in the Halo Region. He was an inquisitor renowned, and loathed, for turning the weapons of the enemy against the enemy. To the Space Marine, it was sound reasoning, but such a line had always to be trodden carefully, and Achairas did not yet know how light Astolyev’s tread was.

  ‘Six point eight standard days ahead of schedule, barring warp-related time oscillations,’ Magos Explorator Vemek commented. ‘The technology of this vessel’s peculiar… adaptations… intrigues me. The augur systems and internal energy absorption coils are beyond the capabilities of most Adeptus Astartes vessels…’

  The magos beside the inquisitor was a small man, entirely concealed behind augmetic replacements and bone-white robes, his four mechadendrites shuddering in excitement.

  Both Achairas and Astolyev ignored Vemek. The magos had been a mild annoyance since the inquisitor had boarded with his retinue of acolytes and Adeptus Mechanicus personnel, and Achairas did not approve of his meddling with the vessel’s systems.

  ‘Keep your fascination to yourself,’ Brother Nym reminded the magos, as he approached to join in the observations. Like all the Death Spectres, Nym was clad in black ceramite, with ivory pauldrons bearing the heraldry of a hooded skull on crossed scythes. He was albino, and completely hairless, with black, pupilless eyes. Such was the result of the faulty mucranoid gland that was present in all of the Chapter’s warriors.

  ‘I’m more concerned with the auguries themselves, magos.’ Achairas steered the conversation back to what mattered.

  He watched the hololithic display, studying the image of Thirsis 41-Alpha, committing the bleak geology of the planetoid to memory. It was a dead wo
rld of no consequence, orbiting a stillborn star, a brown dwarf. But the auguries had detected an energy source of unprecedented power burning in the upper crust of its scarred surface.

  ‘The power source is situated directly below the excavation site,’ Inquisitor Astolyev rasped, turning to Achairas. The inquisitor had already elaborated that it was far more than a simple excavation site. It was an operation involving an Inquisitorial shroud station – seven hundred personnel divided among servants of the Ordo Xenos and the Adeptus Mechanicus, working secretly, hidden from all other Imperial eyes.

  ‘I take it this is a new discovery,’ Achairas guessed.

  ‘Indeed. This is… an anomaly.’ The inquisitor’s hesitation did not bode well.

  Achairas had already been briefed about the shroud station falling silent. The Ghoul Stars were a place of unnatural danger. A station or colony going dark was not unheard of, but Subsector Thirsis was unusually quiet, unusually devoid of the typical xenos and nightmare phenomena plaguing these regions.

  According to the information Astolyev had divulged to the Death Spectres, the excavation had begun eight years earlier, the goal to unearth a vast, monolithic structure of unknown xenos origin. Initial carbon readings had dated it back sixty million years.

  ‘Could the origin of the power source coincide with the time of the last astropathic cry?’ Achairas inquired. When the research station had fallen out of contact, it had submitted one last frantic signal that had been received some six weeks prior. Of course, given the nature of the medium through which astropaths communicated, the true ‘time’ of the cry’s origin could not accurately be determined.

  ‘Possibly,’ Astolyev admitted. ‘Vemek, can you discern when this power source was first detected?’

  ‘Preliminary scans indicate that it has grown in magnitude by six point three eight per cent since our first observation,’ Vemek replied, taking in the hololithic feed data. ‘The growth in magnitude has been exponential, not linear. I should be able to calculate when it originated. Roughly.’

  The magos chittered with his servitors, the binaric chirps indecipherable to Achairas’ ears. Judging by the way the inquisitor angled his head, as if listening, he guessed that Astolyev had the prerequisite implants to understand them.

  ‘Analysis of reverse exponential growth traces the power source’s origin to seven point three three eight weeks ago,’ Vemek buzzed, after a few moments.

  The inquisitor sighed. Or hissed.

  ‘Convenient,’ Brother Nym growled, his drawling accent evident of his non-Occludan birth. Nym was from the marshes of Atropos Sigma, one of six worlds the Death Spectres recruited from.

  ‘Close to when the astropathic cry might have been sent,’ Achairas agreed, frowning. While it was imprecise, the times lined up too well to be coincidence. ‘And I can’t help but notice that the power source seems to emanate from within the xenos structure.’

  The inquisitor did not respond.

  ‘What is down there?’ Achairas asked. His tone carried threat and command, even though he voiced the words as an inquiry.

  After a few moments of tense silence, Astolyev responded. ‘I don’t know.’

  Even with the man’s augmetic voice, Achairas sensed an undercurrent of unease in the reply. It was clearly not something the inquisitor was used to saying.

  Achairas knew there was one way to get more information, and that was to make planetfall and investigate in person.

  898.M41 – Thirsis 41-Alpha,

  Subsector Thirsis, the Halo Region

  A long retro thruster burn slowed the Vox Silentii’s immense re-entry speed over the course of many hours, and the vessel sank into a wide orbit around the small, battered black orb of Thirsis 41-Alpha.

  The ground team was diverse. Three forces, independently led, yet all unified in the desire to find answers, had embarked upon the ebon-plated Thunderhawk Apparition, and descended towards the eerie, rugged landscape of the world below. The inquisitor led his own team, thirty warrior acolytes in slate-grey, void-sealed carapace armour, devoid of any heraldry. Their helmets were fed by backpack-mounted canisters via thick tubes, and their optical lenses glowed a faint green. Many possessed cybernetic augmentations and their hotshot lasguns, flamers and bolters were clenched calmly in their hands. These were well-disciplined, elite soldiers, Achairas noted, not the typical rabble used by some, more eccentric inquisitors. Astolyev was known to possess a private army, and resources provided by an alliance with the Dalvarakh Explorator Consortium.

  Magos Vemek led two squads of grey-robed skitarii rangers, their rebreather masks hissing vapours, and their many eye-lenses shimmering with an emerald hue. Most were armed with galvanic rifles, though a few carried faintly humming arc-rifles and plasma calivers. A trio of heavily armed gun-servitors were their support. These lumbering behemoths were draped in armour, their limbs fused and linked to multi-meltas. Their withered, grey flesh and slack, drooling jaws seemed entirely at odds with the destructive power they could unleash.

  Achairas’ own team was four of his battle-brothers, Tactical Marines in black ceramite. They stood in their acceleration harnesses, faceless in their corvid helms, each running over their own pre-battle mantras. Only Brother Celaeno did not bear a bolter, his flamer mag-locked to his thigh-plate instead.

  Apparition’s retro-thrusters roared as it decelerated through the planetoid’s thin atmosphere, the interior temperature rising to almost unbearable levels for the mortals surrounding him. The modified thermal coils within the Thunderhawk directed excess heat inward, practically boiling those within, but emitting next to no thermal signature for enemy augurs to detect. Achairas patched his auto-senses into the forward display of the gunship, watching the crater, the most prominent feature in the otherwise Stygian landscape, grow as they hurtled towards the surface.

  He saw the installation, the shroud station, precariously positioned over the feature’s rim, three massive struts suspending it from the cliff face. Its main bulk hung below, reaching the floor, where the excavation site sprawled outward from it in the form of countless quarries and trenches snaking towards the crater’s centre.

  Apparition set down on the landing pad that made up the majority of the shroud station’s upper surface. It was large enough to support the Thunderhawk, while providing an excellent vantage point over the surroundings.

  As Achairas, taking point, stepped out of the lowering bay door with his battle-brothers, he was among the first to gaze upon the lifeless darkness of the world. A communication and augury tower protruded from the north-eastern edge of the landing pad. Four Hydra batteries would have provided cover from the station’s corner points, but their guns drooped, inactive and dead. Three red-plated Arvus lighters stood wrecked in their landing spots, their hulls scorched from within.

  ‘Secure the perimeter,’ he ordered his brothers. They complied in silence, fanning out to inspect the towers and check for hostiles.

  The vista beyond the landing platform was of jagged thorn-like mountains to the east. The dim red orb of the stillborn sun shimmered on the far horizon, beyond an expanse of broken plains. The thin atmosphere barely held the light, and every ragged outcropping cast long shadows.

  Achairas strode to the edge of the pad that faced the crater as the other teams disembarked. A few hundred yards down, he saw the criss-cross of deep grooves and gouges, veritable chasms in their own right, leading towards the central stepped quarry.

  It was there. The reason they were here.

  A ruin. A lone, black apex protruded from the wounded rock, surrounded by cylindrical hab-units and Adeptus Mechanicus excavator engines. It appeared to be covered in some manner of scaffolding.

  The light-devouring darkness of the pinnacle was unwholesome. Though it was scarcely larger than the workers’ habs around it, Achairas felt uneasy just looking at it. It was not a sensation he was used to.

 
He scanned the horizon in case there was something he’d missed. Magnifying his vision, he expected to find nothing, but was surprised when he did find something. It was a lone black monolith, a few dozen yards in height, but many miles away.

  ‘Inquisitor?’

  Astolyev had joined him at the edge.

  ‘That monolith in the distance. What is it?’ Achairas inquired.

  ‘The sentry pylons, we named them,’ Astolyev’s grating voice replied. ‘The reports indicated that there were six of them, scattered out beyond the ruin at equidistant range from the centre, and each other.’

  ‘I assume they’re related to the ruin?’

  ‘Undoubtedly. The architecture is the same. We were unable to discern their purpose, but they were projecting an unknown energy signature. A signature the augury-scans of your vessel did not detect during our approach.’

  ‘Then something has changed,’ Achairas mused.

  ‘That seems likely,’ Astolyev agreed. ‘Something caused this station to drop off the grid, and these pylons are as suspect as anything else. Have your vessel continually monitor them and the ruin below. Just in case.’

  Achairas raised an eyebrow, invisible beneath his helmet. The Death Spectre was not used to receiving commands from anyone other than his captain, and the Menrahir, but in this case, he would have chosen the same course of action. Thus, he relayed the command to Brother Vairan on the Vox Silentii.

  There had been no greeting party, and the orbital bioscans had been disrupted by the mysterious energy fluctuations emanating from the buried power source. It was yet unclear if there were any survivors hidden within the station or the excavation site. Achairas drew his auspex, and ran a preliminary scan of their surroundings. The device’s sensors would only pierce the upper levels of the complex, but it would provide some indication of what might wait below.

  ‘No life signs near the landing pad,’ he reported into the general vox-net. ‘If anything is still alive, it’s deeper within the station.’