Black Tide

by James Swallow

  “Get out!” shouted Ajir.

  Puluo shoved Kayne hard in the back and the younger Astartes fell the remaining distance to the deck. The other warrior pivoted and jumped after him, one of the Flesh Tearers a heartbeat behind. The last man, slowed by the bulk of a heavy flamer, fared poorly. With a sudden belch of expelling air, the entire torpedo was ejected back the way it had come, the expanding wave of gel ballooning to form a wall before the atmosphere could go with it. Noxx swore a gutter oath.

  “A cultured bio-form,” said Mohl dispassionately, probing the hardening matter with a finger. “Programmed to act like living tissue. Sealing wounds and ousting foreign bodies.”

  “On a tyranid ship, perhaps,” said Turcio. “But here?”

  “Perhaps the stories of Zellik’s contact with the xenos were not wrong after all.” Ajir made a sour face.

  They were not given time to dwell on the question, however. A shout went up from the front ranks, a Flesh Tearer crying out over the concussion of his own bolter. “Contact!”

  “Engage!” replied Rafen. “Sweep and clear!”

  A spill of tech-guard troopers surged towards them from one branch of a curving corridor, in their haste the grey cloaks they wore flapping out behind them like the wings of raptor birds. A second rank of slow-moving gun-servitors followed on, lumbering along the wide passageway, weapons clicking as self-loaders spun up to speed.

  The reaction time of Zellik’s men was to be commended; on the ship of an ally, Rafen would have done just that, but here the matter became a minor impediment. A chorus of bolters crashed and met the guards with lethal force, the mass-reactive shells from the weapons opening them in red flashes. Bits of human meat and metal implants were flung about the walls. Enemy fire from the front rank came past in a wash of laser light, beams hissing across the surface of ceramite armour, cooking off layers of protective sheathing. The strangled crackle of split air molecules sounded around the Astartes, and the corridor was suddenly filled with the acrid tang of ozone.

  The shambling gun-servitors, the bodies of men remade with pistons for legs and great weapon tubes in place of arms, fired next, and Rafen ducked into the cover of a stanchion as Turcio took a glancing hit and spun to the deck. The machine-helots were all armed with close-range stubbers, fat ammo hoppers upon their bent backs feeding the weapons with frangible-tipped rounds. Close to the exterior hull of a starship, heavy bullet loads were a hazard—a single misplaced shot could breach a portal or even a wall, and cause an explosive decompression. Astartes, every one of them a marksman, did not concern themselves with such minor details.

  Rafen heard the shattering of the bullet-tips as they rattled harmlessly off Space Marine armour and grinned. In their haste, Zellik’s soldiers hadn’t rearmed their guns, using the low-velocity, man-stopper shells more suited to dealing with pirates or common human foes. The candlepin-thick bolt shells of the Space Marines, on the other hand, were far more lethal, over-penetrating every target they hit. Turcio was already back up into a crouch, taking off the heads of gun-servitors with carefully aimed shots.

  Noxx vaulted forward, and with a kick he put the last tech-guard down, clubbing him to the deck with his gun. The skitarii burbled something in machine-code, but the noise ceased when the Flesh Tearer stamped on its throat. “That will do as a down payment for the man this cost me,” growled the veteran.

  The Archeohort began to rotate.

  Slowly at first, moving with the lazy, inexorable pace of a moonrise, then gaining speed as the arrays of tiny thrusters hundredfold across its surface added power to the turn. Gun pods the size of habitat blocks spun and moved on thick brass rails that ringed the outer hull, pausing to reload at the maws of static ammo hoppers before sliding back to seek the Astartes ships and barrage them.

  Tycho’s shipmaster threaded his ship between a pair of towering gantries and let his forward tubes lay upon the closest of the gun-carriages. Spatial torpedoes leapt into the dark, crossing the distance on angry flares of thrust before transforming into fists of nuclear flame. Sheets of mobile armour plate raced to absorb the detonations and came too slow, some of them torn apart and tossed into the dark.

  Above, the Gabriel supported its brother-ship with sheeting rains of superheavy las-bolts, burning away the brassy lustre that clad the hull of the Mechanicus construct.

  Under the withering fire, the Archeohort turned, and as it did iris vents opened along its stern, disgorging engine bells woken from their dormancy.

  Elsewhere, directed by cold machine anger, other hatches slid free to present new weapons to the fray.

  “We need to locate and secure the command centre,” Rafen was saying, as the corridor opened out on to a vast open space in the middle of the Archeohort. “Where is it?”

  Mohl shot him a look. “That will not be easy, lord.”

  The Techmarine’s commander gave him a hard stare. “You told me you knew the configuration of this behemoth’s interior!” said Noxx.

  “I do,” Mohl continued. “And that is why I know it will not be easy to find a single chamber in the middle of all… of this.”

  Rafen stopped, and for a moment he felt a twinge of vertigo as his mind struggled to process the sight in front of him. Beyond the railed tier where the corridor had brought them out, the inside of the Archeohort was a hollow drum, and around it ran twisting ranges of staircases and ramps that defied gravity and sense, some inverted and connecting to one another in odd profusion, others looping like Mobius strips. And in the middle of this, shifting back and forward on complex systems of rails and vast, towering pulleys, massive wedges of decking as large as city blocks were constantly in motion. The noise was constant, a screeching of metal on metal, a hissing orchestra of working mechanisms as the wedges locked together, moved, unlocked, inverted, rotated and shifted. The motion was regular and fluid, lock-step-perfect.

  “It’s reconfiguring itself all the time,” said Ajir. “How could you ever find your way around this thing? Enter one room here and a moment later you exit it on the other side of the complex!”

  A slab of deck ground past them as Mohl located a skinny copper podium and bent over it. Rafen saw the thin, snake-fast movements of his mechadendrites as they probed outward and found interface ports on the podium’s surface.

  “Cover him,” he ordered, and brought his bolter to his shoulder. Aiming upward, through the weapon’s targeting scope he picked out a flight of clockwork monitor birds as they broke off from a circular flight pattern and angled towards them.

  Puluo braced himself and unleashed an arc of shell-fire into the air from his heavy bolter, the rounds killing most of the machine-proxies with murderous blowback.

  Mohl shivered and stepped down. “No maps for this place,” he coughed. “There are wards in place and the Archeohort’s machine-spirit is conflicted. But even as it will not show me some things, that too is a guide of sorts.”

  “We go where it doesn’t want us to go?” said Kayne.

  “Aye,” replied the Techmarine. He tapped his helmet. “I have computed a route. I have it here, but we must go now. If we tarry, the configuration will shift and it will be rendered meaningless.”

  Another deck slab rotated into place, and Mohl made for it, the rest of them following him.

  Rafen grimaced at the mad geometry all about him. “How can we hope to find a way through this giant’s puzzle?”

  Noxx gestured towards his man. “We make sure we keep Mohl alive.”

  The harpoons were taller than the statues atop Mount Seraph. Spinning, barbed things the length of a gun-cutter or system boat, they were ejected from the Archeohort’s interior and ranged up and out through the hidden ports, probing after the Gabriel and the Tycho. The weapons had crews, after a fashion, if one were willing to give that name to a handful of limbless human torsos tanked in shock-resistant canisters of support fluid.

  Chains with links that could loop a hundred men, double- and triple-threaded, rippled out behind the thruster-gui
ded lances, screaming from helix rigs in the Archeohort’s hull. The weapons spun and twirled, racing for the bodies of their enemies.

  Cannons answering with death, the two warships veered from their courses, making stiff turns that sent grinding gravity shocks the length of their iron spines; but it was not enough.

  “Quickly!” The deck parted beneath Kayne’s boots, one planted on one side, one on the other, one section rising, the other dropping away. He felt strong hands take a grip on him as he reached out to take the hand of a Flesh Tearer. His fellow Astartes grunted with effort and Kayne pulled him up just as the deck they had been upon changed from horizontal to vertical orientation.

  “This place is like the inside of an engine, all moving parts and grinding gears,” growled the Flesh Tearer. “My thanks, cousin.”

  “Kayne,” said the Blood Angel. “And you?”

  “Eigen,” came the reply. “How these Mechanicus cog-boys can live in this and not be turned insane for looking at it, I cannot know.”

  “Cogs are cogs,” shrugged the Astartes. “They’re mad enough already.”

  Swift and low, the warriors threaded through ranks of quartz columns that reached away to support a vaulted roof overhead. Everywhere there were panes of glass that displayed streams of flashing machine-code, some hanging on suspensors, other chained to walls or the pillars themselves. The waterfalls of symbols cascading ever downward were utterly unintelligible to Kayne, but he knew that to someone like Mohl, these screens were filled with secrets. They were windows into the raw workings of the Archeohort and its machine-spirit, the mechanical equivalent of what he might see if he peered down a kinescope and into the swarming cells of his own blood.

  Up ahead of the unit, Kayne heard Mohl call out directions; the Techmarine seemed to know where he was going, but so far each chamber they had passed through was one oddity after another. A tremor reached up through the floor and the metallic tiles beneath their boots shook.

  Eigen frowned. “Not the decking this time… That was an impact from outside.”

  “Perhaps our ships are making headway against this thing,” Kayne replied. “It’ll count for little if we can’t stop Zellik running for the warp, though.”

  “Enemy!” The cry came from the middle of the formation—from the psyker Ceris, he noted—and in the same moment a wavering blue-white cloud phased into reality over their heads. Kayne raised his gun in time to see a face gain definition and form; a giant face coated in mirror-bright silver, shrouded by a red-trimmed hood.

  “That’s him…” said Eigen. “It’s some sort of hololithic image.” The Flesh Tearer looked around, searching for anything that resembled an emitter pod.

  “Astartes!” The air around them vibrated into the sound of the Magos’ voice. “You have made a great error in attacking me! I stand with all of Mars at my side! Your Chapters dare to board my vessel without my permission, kill my helots? Have you gone mad?”

  Up ahead, Brother-Sergeant Rafen skidded to a halt on the polished tiles and shouted back his defiance to the floating image. “Surrender, Zellik. Present yourself to us now and I’ll consider lenience. Your petty infractions of Mechanicus laws are of no importance to me. But you have information we want, and we will not leave without it.”

  Zellik spluttered with amazement and ire, the sound like the clicking of switches. “Your arrogance outstrips your idiocy, Blood Angel. Once I have left your warships behind, I will make your living bodies into cannon-bearers, and your Chapter Master will beg my forgiveness!”

  “There!” Eigen pointed at a spherical pod floating high up in the shadows. “The projector device. You see it?”

  Kayne aimed. “I see it, cousin.” He released half a breath and fired.

  The sphere exploded in a flat bang of noise, and Zellik’s face winked out.

  “Good shot,” remarked Puluo. “I’m already sick of him.”

  The deck trembled again, and this time Kayne released a snarl of annoyance. “Not a hit this time…”

  “Contact!” Eigen called, pointed once more. The Flesh Tearer had sharp eyes, it could not be denied. More tech-guards were emerging from behind a quartz pillar across the way, charging at the Space Marines.

  Kayne saw something arc through the air towards him, and recognised the shape of a grenade. “To cover!” he yelled, shoving Eigen away and into the lee of another column, as gunfire erupted around them anew.

  The grenade landed and detonated—but instead of an explosive discharge, a globe of emerald energy expanded out, at full size perhaps big enough to envelop a groundcar. When the glow dissipated, there was a perfect circle cut through the decking, the edges smooth and bright as if polished.

  “Baal’s blood! It must be a demat sphere!” said Ceris, firing off a burst as he approached. “An archeotech weapon. Like a teleport, but everything inside the radius is disintegrated. I never thought to see such a relic in action…”

  “I though those devices were a myth!” said Eigen.

  “So did I,” the psyker said grimly. “It would appear otherwise.”

  Kayne saw a flicker of movement. “Another one!” A second globe looped towards the assembled Space Marines, projected by a weapons-helot with a scaled-down trebuchet instead of an arm.

  Kayne watched in amazement as Ceris jumped up into the air, to meet the demat sphere as it fell towards them. The psyker plucked the globe out of its arc and threw it as he dropped; it was a clumsy interception, but still effective. The sphere landed at the feet of the helot who had thrown it, and it triggered. The dissipation effect hummed and when it faded, there were only the odd, starkly severed parts of three gun-servitors remaining.

  Ceris landed heavily and stumbled, drawing gunfire. Without hesitation, Kayne and Eigen ran from cover to aid him, and the three warriors broke into a dash, racing to close up with the rest of their comrades.

  “Zellik must really want us dead,” ventured Turcio. “Those spheres are worth a governor’s ransom.”

  “Then you should consider it a compliment, penitent,” said Ajir.

  Mohl gestured towards a diamond-shaped door cut into the wall. “We are wasting time. Zellik is trying to trap us. This way, quickly!”

  Lasers snapping at their heels, the Astartes moved on, killing everything that dared to follow them.

  Tycho took the spear through the plough-shaped blades of its bow plate; Gabriel fared worse, the other harpoon entering the hull of the strike cruiser along its portside axis at an oblique angle. Both weapons buried themselves in the marrow of the warships and locked fast.

  And then, even as the echo of the impacts resonated and faded, the huge chains of vacuum-forged alloy flexed and pulled taut. Deep inside the mechanism of Zellik’s great construct, wheels began to turn, gears worked, and the lines drew home, reeling them in.

  The shipmasters of the Tycho and the Gabriel had given their gunnery captains leave to fire with freedom, and so they did, punishing the Archeohort for such an attack, others training guns on the lines of chain, hoping to sever them.

  On the other side of the construct, a hundred tiny suns flared into being, boles of fusion fire spilling out into the void. With increasing speed, the Archeohort dragged its attackers away, moving towards clear space free of the debris that clogged this zone. Calculations were already being made, formulae computed, courses laid in. A leap to the warp would follow, and the ships now chained to the construct, like rabid dogs straining at their leashes, would be ripped apart by the flux of transition.

  The melta bomb exploded and took down not only the armoured hatchway sealing off the command chamber, but also a few sections of wall to either side. The corpses of the heavy gun-servitors that had defended the entrance were ripped apart where they lay, the ammunition in their weapons cooking off in secondary blasts. Noxx led the charge with Puluo at his side, both Astartes shouldering in through the smoke-wreathed remains of the entrance with guns blazing. Skitarii went down in disarray, those that had not already been killed by th
e funnelled blast of the breaching charge.

  Rafen followed them in, Turcio and Ajir at his flanks, delivering the Emperor’s judgement with snapshot fire to the twitching, hooded figures sitting in the control pits before their command organs. The Blood Angels sergeant was only a few paces into the room when his keen Astartes senses, honed through the action of countless battles, rang a sour note in his mind. He halted suddenly. “Wait…” he began, a creeping disquiet spreading through him.

  Outside, holding the corridor with the other Space Marines, Brother Ceris made a growl in his throat—a sound of warning.

  Ajir was deepest into the chamber, frowning at a seated adept. For all the sudden violence of their entrance, the crew at their stations had barely reacted. The warrior pushed the barrel of his bolter into the adept’s back and gave it a hard shove. The figure rocked forward and the hood fell away.

  There was no face beneath it, only an oddly featureless orb crafted to vaguely resemble a human head. It was a mannequin, little more than a body-proxy like those deployed on firing galleries. Rafen had destroyed thousands of them in target practice with his bolter and his sword.

  Noxx ripped the cloak from another crew-serf, then another and another. All were identical automata, ghosting through the motions of a command crew. Only the handful of tech-guards that had been in the room appeared to be what they had seemed. “What is this?” demanded the Flesh Tearer.

  Mohl was behind him. “This is the command centre…” he muttered. “I am certain…”

  “It’s a fake,” said Turcio. “Like a castle made of cloth and wood to fool a distant observer!”

  Rafen glared at a console before him; it was nothing but a flat panel of blinking lights. “Out!” he shouted.