Black Tide

by James Swallow

  Hiding in the blaze of crashing wreckage, the shape and form of it lost in the roaring heat and fury of the fallout, the Neimos spun in towards the waiting waters.

  At first, incredible heat buffeted the bullet-prow of the vessel, in seconds burning through the sheaths of lamellar armour protecting the leading edges. Beneath, energy-siphon technology invented twenty thousand years ago, its functioning and nature lost to time, worked to bleed off the intense glow. It fed on the friction, suckling on the heat to power itself, turning the energy back against its origins.

  Invisible cloaks of ionised particles flared around the craft, visible only to the enhanced cyber-sense organs of the machine-slave crew. Over and over, sonic booms crackled across the night side of Dynikas V as falling debris shattered the speed of sound. In the apex of one such compression wave, the Neimos came down trailing fire, a single burning arrow amid a hundred others.

  Sensor returns tripped switches in the vessel’s control systems, causing stubby dual-function winglets to emerge from the hull. At the same time, great grey-blue cones of untearable synthsilk billowed from the aft of the Neimos, filling quickly with a mix of spent gases from the engine core and the local atmosphere. The wide ballutes stiffened and gave the ship a moment’s stability. Still concealed beneath an umbrella of tumbling wreckage, the Neimos veered into a series of slow turns, the fins bending air this way and that, bleeding off the terminal velocity of descent. Without the remnants of the Archeohort to blind them, the sensors of the orbital gunskulls would have picked out the craft in moments; but for now all they could detect was a field of conflicting, corrupted returns. To discover the Neimos among such wild disorder would be akin to finding one single torch amid an inferno.

  Then; the impact.

  The churning ocean waters rose and fell beneath a sky cut by streaks of fire, and from that flame-lit darkness the Neimos came like the hammer of a war god. Flicker-fast gravity displacement fields, fed on the energy converted from the heat of atmospheric interface, haloed the submersible as it touched the wave tops. An invisible bowl of force ballooned outwards, displacing kinetic power, cutting a channel into the murky sea.

  The vessel howled as it passed through a storm of dynamic stress more powerful than anything it had experienced so far, and the back-shock discharged a sharp thermal flashover, oily water boiling instantly into a greasy fog of superheated steam.

  All this happened in seconds, before a thunderclap of displacement sounded loud as the Neimos vanished beneath the surface, the descent ballutes torn away, the guide fins crumpled and discarded.

  The craft was down and sinking, as the rain of wreckage continued all around it.

  In the warm silence of the liquid-filled capsule, Brother Ceris allowed himself to use the brief moments of quiet as respite. It was only a matter of fine concentration to draw in his preternatural senses, to wall off the rushing ebb and flow of psychic input pressing in from his battle-brothers. Some of them were afraid, although they would never show it; others angry, all of them tense with the sublimated urge for combat. The mingling of emotion-colours was strong to him. Warriors of the Adeptus Astartes were not known for their metered natures—they were bold and potent, and that character informed every single aspect of their beings. But what drew the psyker’s thin lips into a cool smile was the realisation of a clear truth. For all the outward dissimilarity between the noble Blood Angels and the savage Flesh Tearers, in their hearts and minds they were alike. At the core, no different.

  Ceris felt a brief swell of certainty; they would win. Fabius Bile would die a death and the sacred blood would be preserved. He felt this so keenly that it almost seemed like precognition—and when a voice in the back of his thoughts suggested that he only believed what he wanted to, he silenced it. Failure would not be accommodated. They would succeed; they had to. To return to Baal with empty hands would be the greatest shame Ceris could imagine.

  He drifted on the edge of dreams as the fall took its course, the shocks through the hull distant and vague. Had the Neimos been manned by a human crew, he might have felt the mists of their anxieties, but the mind-wiped servitors working the vessel’s systems had no such emotions to give. Dimly, he sensed the deaths of two of them as the force of the drop damaged minor systems in different compartments, but they perished with all the circumstance of a candle being snuffed out.

  The fall passed quickly, or so it seemed, the sus-an membrane in his grey matter lulling him into a demi-sleep for a brief time. Not quite the full oblivion of suspension, but enough to rest his body for the coming fight. Then, as quickly as it had begun, it was over, and he felt the fleeting torpor bleed away.

  Ceris became aware of the shock fluid draining into the rack’s exit vents, and presently the oval hatch before him rose up. Shrugging off the slicks of gel that stuck to his armour, he climbed out and allowed a servitor to blast him clean with an air jet. The rest of the squad were ministering to one another; there had been only minor injuries, contusions and bruising from the roughness of the descent. With their enhanced healing factors, the slight damages experienced by the Space Marines would be forgotten within hours.

  “Still with us then, witch-kin?” said Eigen, clearing sluggish fluid from the vanes of his breather grille. “Did you enjoy the trip?”

  “I dozed through it,” Ceris replied, in all honesty.

  Turcio gave a wry chuckle. “I should have thought of doing that. A warrior should take his rest whenever he can.”

  Ceris nodded. “I’ll warrant none of us will find the time for respite from hereon.”

  “Just try to stay awake when the enemy come calling,” Eigen retorted. Irritation hazed his aura, and Ceris suspected that the Flesh Tearer had felt the sharp bite of every second of the drop from orbit.

  A glimmer at the edge of his thoughts drew up his attention and the psyker glanced across the deck to where Noxx and Rafen stood in conversation. One of the bridge servitors was with them, and from its mouth drooled a spool of data-tapers. “That moment may be closer to hand than you might wish,” said Ceris, seeing the tension in the gait of the two sergeants. Without waiting for Eigen to reply, he walked away, approaching his commander.

  Rafen was fingering the end of the tape, studying it intently. “There is no margin for error?”

  “None,” clattered the servitor.

  “So quickly?” Noxx frowned. “Tell me that the element of surprise has not been lost to us already!”

  “I think not,” said Rafen. “We would be under fire already if that were so.” He looked up at Ceris. “Codicier. Have we been touched by witch-sight?”

  The psyker shook his head. “No, lord. I would have felt the passage of it.”

  “There are surface vessels in the area,” Noxx said by way of explanation, raising his voice so all the Astartes could hear him. “Barges and a fast cutter, if the sound of them rings true. Too close for comfort.”

  With a gurgling hiss, the last of the descent racks cracked open, and a bedraggled figure stumbled out, collapsing to the deck. The Logis Beslian gave a metallic choke, and spurts of liquid escaped from gill-vents hidden beneath his sodden cloak. He emitted a low, wet moan that drew the cleric Gast to his side. The rest of the Space Marines ignored him.

  “We’ve barely made planetfall,” Ajir grated. “How could these Chaos whelps know we are here?”

  “They must have already been nearby,” offered Turcio. “A patrol, perhaps?”

  “On the other side of the planet from Bile’s stronghold?” Ajir shook his head. “For what purpose?”

  Turcio ignored the barbed tone in the other Blood Angel’s tone. “There is still much we do not know about the traitor’s work on this world.”

  Rafen was nodding. “Fabius is shrewd. He sends these vessels to investigate the wreckage… Likely to recover what he can, knowing the value of Zellik’s Archeohort.”

  “Do we engage them?” said Sove.

  “Curb your impatience, Flesh Tearer,” Kayne folded his arm
s, glaring at the other Astartes. “We do that and we lose the only advantage we have!”

  “You would rather hide in the shadows?” Sove took a step towards the young Space Marine.

  “That will suffice,” snarled Noxx. “There will be blood enough to sate all of us when the fight comes. But until that moment, we hold.” He shot a hard look at Sove. “Clear?”

  The Flesh Tearer nodded once. “Clear, brother-sergeant.”

  Ceris watched the interchange, and then cleared his throat. “With all due respect, I must point out that there is a third option. Neither to attack nor to lie dormant.”

  Rafen eyed him. “Go on.”

  “We are in the lair of the enemy, and yet as Brother Turcio noted, we move with only our wits and our courage to guide us. We should gather our strength, learn what we can about these vessels and the men Fabius crews them with.”

  “Fair point,” said Puluo. “But we’re Astartes. Not spies.”

  Eigen nodded in agreement. “We’re bred for attack, not to observe.”

  “True,” admitted Rafen. “But some aboard this vessel are.” He studied Beslian as the adept got shakily to his feet.

  With a racking cough, the Mechanicus tech-priest grimaced at his own sorry state, before slowly becoming aware that every Space Marine in the room was staring at him. He flinched as if he had been struck, and backed away from Gast. “Oh no,” he husked. “What do you want of me now? Have you not taken enough?”

  “Our duty to the Golden Throne never ends, adept,” said Gast.

  The Neimos had survived the fall from space with only minor damage, and there was a quiet exchange of amazement between some of the Space Marines. Rafen was certain that Gast and Eigen had placed a wager on some fatal occurrence taking place, and his brow furrowed at the idea of betting on something that might have killed them all. The crude humour of it escaped him.

  At his command, with Beslian parsing the orders for the servitor crew, the submersible was brought up to sensor depth, hovering below the surface. The Mechanicus tech-priest was reluctant to obey at first, citing numerous reasons why raising the ship would be dangerous; but a combination of Noxx’s barely-veiled threats and a small amount of flattery on Rafen’s part brought the adept around to the idea.

  Tethered by a long cable, a scrying pod sheathed in low-visibility, detection-resistant materials was released from a cowling in the dorsal tower. It rose slowly, silently breaking into the turbulent waves.

  Up above, under the glowering, windswept Dynikan night, constant winds lashed across the ocean, ripping at the swell. The heavy, oxide-laden waters seethed and churned, the impacts of wreckage from the Archeohort still echoing on. Parts of the construct would continue to rain down on the planet for several hours, and the atmospheric distortions and contact shocks made it difficult to get clean scan returns. But the problem cut both ways; while the Neimos could not clearly read the distant flotilla, neither could the enemy be certain of detecting the submarine. A spread of light wreckage floated on the writhing surf, and the Neimos moved into its shadow.

  In the command centre, Rafen stood with Noxx and Ceris, watching the complex play of the sensor returns. The rest of the Space Marines were elsewhere, preparing their wargear in a cargo bay the servitors had converted into an arming chamber.

  Beslian leaned in to study a pict-screen. “I believe I have a match.” He tapped the panel with a servo-arm. “See here. The Standard Template Pattern of this barge is known to me. It is a Kappa-Rho-Six ocean transit freighter, Lapidas pattern.”

  Rafen saw a grainy pict overlaid by the glowing lines of a schematic stencil. The large ship lay low in the water, and the basic slab-sided shape of it was disfigured by fluted additions that resembled castle donjons.

  “Retrofitted weapon emplacements, perhaps,” suggested Noxx, thinking along the same lines as the Blood Angel.

  “Aye. But these…” Rafen pointed out the vanes of a peculiar crystalline antenna and a bulbous sphere riddled with holes. “What function do they have?”

  Beslian didn’t attempt to supply an answer to that question, and continued on a different tack. “Records indicate that several ocean-going craft were deployed with the explorator fleet sent to set up an agri-works on this planet. That vessel would appear to be one of them.”

  “Fabius probably salvaged whatever the tyranid attack had not destroyed,” said Noxx. “Efficient use of materials. This world is far off any conventional trade axis or warp route. Doubtless the traitor would have found it hard to ship in a large amount of new hardware.”

  “He uses what he has to hand,” agreed Rafen. “His fortress is likely to be a repurposed facility left over from the farming colony. That could work in our favour.” The sergeant filed that thought away for later consideration.

  Noxx’s blank eyes narrowed and he gestured at a secondary scrying relay. It was a sweep display, green-on-green, and each time the hands looped around, dots of luminescence appeared and then faded. “This is not the flotilla,” he stated.

  Beslian shifted uncomfortably. “It is not. These are… biological returns.”

  Rafen sucked in a breath. The ecosphere of Dynikas V was bereft of any native life, which meant any living thing they encountered that wasn’t connected with Bile’s operations could only be of one origin. “Tyranids? Did you not deem it important to inform us of their proximity?”

  The adept flinched, as if fearful of being struck for his misdeed. “They are not a threat… Not yet, lord. They are too distant.”

  Noxx nodded. “They’re closer to Bile’s ships. If they attack, they’ll attack them before us.”

  “No,” Ceris intoned. The Codicier had not taken his gaze from the pict-screen, remaining intent on the peculiar constructs Rafen had indicated. “They do not see the flotilla. The xenos are blind to it.”

  “How is that possible?” Noxx frowned, and pointed at the sweep scan. “Those scaly bastards are so close they could rise up and spit at those boats.”

  Ceris shook his head. “They will pass.”

  Rafen watched the progression of the scan. The staggered dots of the tyranid shoal were crossing near to the barges, which had cut their engines and started to drift. “How can you know that?” he asked the psyker.

  “Because I see the ships…” He tapped his psychic hood. “But I do not see them.”

  “The antenna?”

  Ceris nodded. “Perhaps a psionic dampener. When I reach out to sense the minds of the beings aboard those craft, there is nothing but a wall of white noise.”

  “The tyranids are animals but they’re not blind,” said Noxx. “That can’t be all there is to it.”

  “You are correct,” said Beslian, turning back from a chattering cogitator. “The sensor pod has been sampling the atmosphere of the planet to determine hazard protocols.” He held up a fan of printed parchment. “These readings suggest a large amount of a particular tyranid pheromonal deposit in the air. Several parts per million, far more than I would expect.”

  “Spores?” Rafen’s lip curled as he said the word. He had witnessed the work of the xenos spores on the flesh of men, and been disgusted by their loathsome virulence.

  “Negative,” replied the adept. “I will need to crosscheck to be certain, but we appear to detect a prevalence of death-indicator pheromones.”

  The tech-priest quickly elucidated; in tyranid hives, just as in those of common communal insect life, information was passed via pheromone scent-markers. Thus, something that was toxic would be marked as not-food, something to be denatured and rendered in conversion pools would be marked as consumable, and should a hive member die, their corpses would secrete a pheromone that labelled them as dead, attracting workers to recover and recycle their biomatter.

  Confronted by such scent-markers, the warrior creatures would simply ignore something their primitive brains considered to be dead, as long as it remained inert and did nothing to confuse that understanding. The subterfuge would never work on higher-order tyra
nids, those capable of intelligent reasoning approaching that of a human being—but on Dynikas V, there was no apparent evidence of high-level clades such as norn queens or hive tyrants; only warrior forms adapted to the planet’s ocean environment.

  “The bulb array on the barge,” concluded Beslian, nodding to himself. “It is a dispersal mechanism for the pheromones.”

  “Bile’s fortress must possess the same technology,” said Rafen. “The tyranids do not attack him because they cannot sense him.”

  Noxx jutted his chin at the screen. “But they do sense us. See?”

  The alien shoal was changing course, veering towards the coordinates where the Neimos hid among the floating wreckage.

  Rafen glanced at Beslian and saw what flesh there was on the adept’s face go pale. In the next second, Beslian moved with a jerk towards the helm console.

  “We have to flee!” he piped. “Bring the drives on-line, make for maximum speed—”

  “Belay that order!” snapped Rafen. “Thruster discharges will show on the scrying grids of those barges. You’ll bring them to us as surely as if you sent up a mag-flare.”

  “But the creatures…” The adept controlled himself with a visible effort.

  “They’ll attack us if we remain close to the surface,” said Ceris.

  “They are tyranids,” snorted Noxx. “They’ll attack us wherever we are.”

  “We do not have the benefit of Bile’s protective devices! We cannot simply lie dormant and pray that they leave us be!” Beslian’s metallic fingers knitted. “If the Neimos cannot run from them, neither can we stand and fight!”

  Rafen glanced at Ceris. “There’s always a third way.” He stepped up and addressed the crew servitors. “Bring back the pod and take us down. Leave the thrusters off-line. Fill the ballast tanks and let us sink into the depths.”