Black Tide

by James Swallow

  The alien waved its hands. “Yes. Yes. No more pain.”

  Rafen gave the tau a hard look. “La’Non. Do as I say, and I will end your agony. Forever.”

  When the tau looked up at him, the beseeching look in its eyes was pathetic. “You swear this? On your deity?”

  Ceris’ eyes narrowed, his subtle power pressing down on the creature’s weakened will.

  Rafen gave a nod. “Show us,” he demanded. “Take us to the pain-bringer.”

  The muttering, stumbling tau led them on, wandering back and forth down the corridors in a meandering course that at first seemed aimless. Ceris walked behind it, the faint glow of blue about his head and the tightness of his expression signifying the constant telepathic force he was keeping on the alien.

  Rafen walked a few steps behind, his boltgun cradled in a barrel-low grip across his sternum. The sergeant was still finding the measure of the Codicier; his recent assignment to Rafen’s unit had come on the orders of the Chapter’s chief Librarian himself, the psyker-master Mephiston. Ceris, so barrack-room rumour had it, was one of several psychics personally selected by Mephiston to act as his eyes and ears throughout the Chapter; and Rafen could not shake the sense that in some way, everything he said or did within sight of the olive-skinned Codicier was somehow being observed by the man the Blood Angels called the Lord of Death. The ways of the witch-kin were beyond his experience, but Rafen did not find it difficult to imagine that Mephiston’s great distance was no obstacle to the preternatural power of the mind.

  Ceris cast a brief glance over his shoulder, and then away, as if giving some confirmation to Rafen’s thoughts. When he spoke, the Codicier had a soft voice that seemed oddly out of place for a man from the heavy stock of Baal Prime’s equatorial tribes; and his flat, hard gaze seemed to take in everything. Emotion, when the psyker cared to show it, was vague and undefined upon him. It was this, more than anything, that sat poorly with the sergeant. Every other man under his command, even the reserved Puluo, wore their spirit and fire openly. Ceris was an enigma, and Brother-Sergeant Rafen was ill at ease with the man.

  “Sir.” Brother Puluo’s voice issued from Rafen’s vox bead. An indicator rune glowing on the inside of his gorget showed that the communication was coming in on a discreet channel from his second-in-command.

  The sergeant knew Puluo had a question to voice. “Speak,” he ordered.

  The other warrior marched at his side, the blue helmet that marked him as a heavy-weapons Devastator Space Marine near-black in the shadows. “Ajir had a point. We can find our way through this maggot-nest without the help of a xenos.”

  “It is my prerogative,” Rafen replied, sub-vocalising the words so that they would be picked up by the vox but not heard by anyone else. “It is a matter of expedience, brother. The alien will serve a purpose.” His face tightened into a frown. “Too much time has been wasted on unsuccessful pursuits. If we must tolerate this creature to live a while longer in order to complete our assignment, so be it.”

  “As you wish,” came the reply, but Rafen could tell Puluo was unsatisfied with the answer.

  Truth be told, so was Rafen. But it had been several months now since he and his squad had left the Chapter’s home world Baal aboard the warship Tycho, and in those days and weeks their victories had been few. Their mission, charged to Rafen from the lips of Chapter Master Dante himself, had proven every bit as difficult as the Blood Angels had expected. Their quarry was, if anything, even more elusive than his reputation suggested. They were chasing a shadow across the deeps of interstellar space, and to date they had constantly been one step behind him.

  He threw a look back down the skirmish line of his warriors. Behind Puluo, who walked steadily with his heavy bolter held at arms, Ajir strode boldly down the middle of the corridor, glaring into each branching tunnel or open doorway, looking for an opportunity to engage an enemy. Kayne, the youngest of Rafen’s squad, followed on with careful, wary footsteps and Turcio took up the rearguard, silent and watchful. In the gloom, Turcio’s extended arm was rock-steady, the dull steel and heavy carbon of his augmetic limb hidden under his armour, a bolter in his iron-fingered grip. Each man, in his own manner, kept his focus on the duty at hand; but Rafen knew them well enough to sense the tension in them all, the tension he mirrored. Something that might have been called unease by lesser men, the edges of a disquiet that had been slowly growing as each avenue of their hunt had drawn closed, one after another.

  Was he here? The question was one Rafen had asked himself a dozen times over the course of the Tycho’s mission. On the surface of Seyrin Minoris; amid the ruins of a Dark Eldar slaughterdome; in the depths of Nadacar hive city; and through the rolling madness of warp space. A dozen leads, fragmentary sightings and half-truths drawn from a network of spies, scrying viewers and Imperial intelligence reports. Every one of them had proven to be a dead end, a wasted journey. Each time, the question. Each time, the search unfulfilled, the target lost.

  Or was it that the subject of the hunt was just as fearsome and as clever as his enemies said he was? At Nadacar, Rafen had been certain he had seen him, glimpsed the hulking figure forcing its way through a mass of penitents. In the makeshift laboratory they had found, adorned with the wet remains of a Hereticus Inquisitor and his retinue. A goblet of wine, still warm to the touch. The smell of him lingering in the room. So close; but not close enough.

  And with every disappointment, Rafen felt the blade of failure push deeper into his heart. For all the forgiving words of his master, it had been he who allowed the quarry to first make his escape from Baal. Even if no one else blamed Rafen for it, he laid the heavy responsibility upon himself. For a moment, a blink of memory clouded his thoughts, the recollection of a thing made of psy-smoke and ectoplasm hanging in the air before him. A howling skull-shaped gateway.

  Rafen’s hand drew tight around the grip of his bolter, and he tried to dispel the thought. It did him no good to torture himself with recriminations. Instead, he used the anger he felt as fuel, to power him on, to sharpen his senses.

  They had been reduced to sifting through a detritus of information culled from sources so widespread and unreliable, that their veracity barely rose above the level of tall tales spun by tavern drunkards; and yet, as they had crossed the span of vacuum towards the hull of the drifting tau colony, something in Rafen’s spirit had resonated like the strings of an electroharp. The renegade was close. He felt it in his bones.

  Somewhere in this xenos warren, somewhere deep in the gloom, an arch-traitor, the self-styled Primogenitor of Chaos Undivided, former lieutenant of the Emperor’s Children, a twisted Apothecary, a murderer and torturer of men, was working his evil.

  Rafen glanced down at the oath of moment adhered to the vambrace of his power armour. The strip of sanctified parchment bore a spot of dark colour, a droplet of blood from the veins of Corbulo himself, the Master of the Red Grail and lord of the Chapter’s sanguinary priests. The oath-paper was Rafen’s vow, committed to words and sanctified in the sight of the God-Emperor of Mankind.

  A promise to find and to kill the man known as Fabius Bile.

  The voice told La’Non where to take the gue’la. After hours—or was it days?—of loping along the spiralling corridors, the tau brought the armoured humans to one of the largest of the colony asteroid’s interior spaces. An elliptical cavern tapering to a point, the bulk of the open void was taken up by a faceted orb built of the same bland polymetal that so much tau construction was made from. Thick rods extending from the floor, the walls and ceiling held the bone-white sphere in place. Fixed focus gravity generators made it possible to walk up and over the surface of the orb, as if standing on the face of a tiny moonlet. Inside it, La’Non knew, there were vertical floors stacked one atop another. It had once been the colony’s infirmary, now become a place of horrors.

  The gue’la who came after the storm had spat them out, the pain-bringer, he had made his home here. All the politic words and platitudes at firs
t, all the masks he wore and the honest entreaties to help the lost colonists, his lip service about wanting to join them in the service of the Greater Good. All lies.

  La’Non heard the voice urging him on and he began to tremble and shiver. He felt the mind-force of the blue-armoured human at his back, making his legs move like stuttering pistons. Between the two opposing pressures, the tau felt as if his skull was about to burst. He whimpered, remembering all the things that had spilled from the infirmary. The pain-bringer and the great metal spider emerging from his back, the devices that cut and sliced and stitched. The monstrous pleasure he took in giving La’Non the limb.

  And then all the others. The hybrids he built from bits of diverse species, things that never should have shared flesh, melded together by means that were beyond the understanding of a common earth caste clerk.

  Another memory pushed itself forward, presenting itself to him as some horrific gift by the chattering voice. Recalling a moment when La’Non spoke, actually managed to utter a few words to the pain-bringer as the gue’la tethered him to an operating table.

  The tau had asked him why. What reason was there to come to this lonely knot of star-lost castaways, to give them false hope and then torment them so? What value could it possibly have to him?

  The pain-bringer had not lied then. He told La’Non he did these things not only because he could, but because it amused him.

  La’Non remembered nothing but the screaming after that. Stumbling along the curved floor, he heard the sound in his head again, the voice wailing in pain. The limb curled up and punched the tau in the face, staggering him, and the shock lit energy inside him. Without understanding, disconnected from himself, the tau began to echo the inner scream with his voice. He pulled at the skin of his face, but the sound would not cease.

  “The xenos!” Ceris snarled out a warning as the tau stumbled away, clattering heedlessly through piles of wreckage and alien debris. The creature was shouting into the air, babbling a tirade in its own sibilant, incoherent language.

  Rafen was already bringing his bolter to bear, sighting down the scope atop the weapon’s frame. Leading the target, he thumbed the selector to single-shot and began to apply gentle pressure.

  But in the next second a bolt of blue-white fire lanced through the sullen air and clipped the alien with a near-hit. The tau described a jerky pirouette and went down in a puff of thin blood. Rafen reacted as a second pulse beam went wide of him and cracked into a toppled heap of storage bins.

  “There!” shouted Kayne, the youth’s sharp eyes catching sight of the shooter. He pointed, and Ajir released a spray of bolt rounds into the low wall the other Blood Angel had indicated. With a cry, another tau exploded from the cover, brandishing a smoking weapon. The alien was clad in pieces of the sand-coloured armour Rafen recalled from hypnogogic training tapes, but the wargear was smeared with dark fluids and in poor order. Strangest of all, the tau warrior’s face was oddly proportioned; spindles and bits of chitin festooned the right side of the alien, and when it screamed, the noise from its mouth was a rattle of bones.

  Rafen put the xenos down with a single shot to the chest, and it blew backwards into wet rags. The dying alien had not finished twitching when more lines of blue fire probed out towards the Blood Angels. From heaps of wreckage and the shadowed doors of habitat pods, more of the creatures emerged. They hooted and roared, all of them bellowing a shared pain at the Space Marines. Rafen picked out one word being repeated, over and over. Gue’la. Gue’la. Gue’la.

  “The alien brought us to an ambush!” Ajir snarled, clear reproach in his voice.

  “No,” grunted Ceris. “I would have known it.”

  Rafen didn’t venture an answer; he only frowned, and began to fire.

  The ragged, screaming tau boiled out of the passageways and the fallen heaps of wreckage formed by broken habitat capsules. Some of them were soldiers—the so-called “fire warriors” of their kind, the line infantry in their strange rectilinear armour sheaths—but more were civilians, functionaries, non-combatants. Many of them bore weapons, doubtless looted from fallen members of their kind or the armoury of whatever xenos garrison had been stationed in the colony. The strident shrieking of pulse bolts echoed around the vast oval chamber, lines of perfect lightning blazing outward, hugging the ground.

  Rafen’s Blood Angels splintered, moving through cover, pacing up towards the enemy advance. They fell into battle routine with rote precision, ready and geared to give death to their attackers. The heavy crack of bolters warred with the screaming alien guns, and from the corner of his eye, the sergeant saw Puluo plant his boots, lean into his heavy bolter’s weight and unleash it. Flame gushed from the flash-hider of the weapon in cruciform flares, great brass casings launching from the ejection port in a fountain of metal, a punishing wave of rounds lashing out as the Space Marine turned slowly in place, tearing down everything in his arc of fire. Unarmoured tau caught in the midst of his kill zone lost limbs or exploded into flecks of meat, while the soldier-xenos went down, howling if they were not already dead.

  Puluo’s weapon alone should have been enough to put the fear of the God-Emperor into any enemy; but still the tau came on. Rafen had never fought their kind before, and what he knew of them came only second- and third-hand from other warriors, from his late mentor Koris and the indoctrination schema of his training. All of that had told him the tau were a clever foe, wily and careful in battle. That was not what he saw here.

  “Rage…” muttered Ceris, close at Rafen’s side. “Nothing but rage.”

  The psyker sensed the mindset of the aliens more clearly than the sergeant ever could, and saw what Rafen did. Fury was something the Blood Angel knew well—far too well, he admitted—and it was there before him in the tau. Their tactics were blunt and hard, with only the letting of blood on their minds. This was not the combat of a foe defending a location from an invader. It was anger, pure and simple. These xenos had been wronged, and they wanted someone to pay in kind.

  The leading edge of the attack wave was downed, dead or dying, and Puluo found his pause, the heavy bolter’s muzzle running cherry-red and shimmering with heat. In the moment, the tau advance surged, pulse rounds converging on the Blood Angels in threads of icy energy.

  A figure mounted the curved roof of a collapsed habitat pod and flung itself at the sergeant. Rafen glimpsed dun-coloured armour and a curved helmet, featureless but for a peculiar mono-optic eye. The fire warrior led with a pulse carbine and the Blood Angel rocked off a fallen stone roundel to meet the alien in mid-leap. With one arm, Rafen forced the carbine away, shots screaming from it over his shoulder. In the heartbeat-fast pace, he was aware of a particle stream creasing the upper surface of his pauldron. The tau was smaller, lighter than the Space Marine, but its momentum was toppling Rafen backward.

  The world tipping about him, he jammed the muzzle of his bolter into the gap between the plates of the alien’s articulated armour and pulled the trigger. At point blank range, the tau was bifurcated, its legs and abdomen spinning away in one direction, the remains of the torso falling free, dragging wet ropes of intestine with it.

  Rafen landed hard and rolled, coming up in time to see Ceris deploy his force mace in a glittering arc. The blunt-headed weapon grew spikes made of psionic energy, and the Codicier used it in an upward swing that batted another half-armoured fire warrior into a fallen wall. Wreathed in crackling energy, the tau vomited blood and perished.

  Nearby, on a low mound of debris, Kayne and Turcio engaged a group of frenzied xenos at close range. The youth brought forward the crest of his helmet and put down a bulky male with a strike against its skull. Rafen’s eyes narrowed as he watched the alien fall; like the one he had seen moments before, this tau’s body seemed deformed, strange spines sprouting from its back, one arm folded up in a withered curl of bone and talon.

  Turcio made a kill with his boot, grinding an armed creature in torn robes into the rock, dodging as its hands flailed at him. In a f
luid motion, the Blood Angel followed through and put two more tau to death as they came at Kayne.

  On the vox channel, Rafen heard a concussive grant of anger and moderated pain, and immediately knew it was Ajir. Swinging about, he found the other Space Marine where he had fallen to one knee, the black streaks of pulse hits marring the crimson perfection of his battle armour. The sergeant thumbed his bolter’s fire-select to fully automatic and lent his battle-brother support, blazing back towards the trio of fire warriors moving and shooting as they closed in. One went down, then another, bolts slamming through polymer and into meat and bone.

  The last round belonged to Ajir, who made the engagement’s final kill from where he crouched, taking off the top of the last fire warrior’s skull in a low-deflection shot. The alien staggered closer before gravity finally captured it and dragged the corpse to the bloody ground.

  Rafen extended a hand to Ajir, but the other Space Marine did not acknowledge it. Instead, he righted himself without assistance and got to his feet. The Blood Angel removed his helmet and spat into the dust. Rafen saw red in the spittle but did not remark upon it.

  “Lord,” called Turcio, who stooped to poke one of the corpses with his gun barrel. “You should see this, I think.” The penitent brand on his cheek was livid with his exertions.

  Rafen left the glowering Ajir to his own devices and crossed to where Turcio’s kill lay in a crumpled heap. Another anomaly, he noted. This tau bore odd fleshy wattles that spilled out of places beneath its clothing, as if they had burst through like tumours. In patches, the characteristic grey-toned skin veered towards pink. The dead alien had a piecemeal look to it, as if swatches of flesh had been cut from a human and merged with the tau’s own skin. But there were no sutures, no marks where differing organic matter had been conjoined. There were simply spaces of meat where tau ended and human began. The sergeant felt his lip curl in disgust as the scope of the discovery became clear to him.