Black Tide

by James Swallow

  Ceris nodded. “There’s a core of intent, out in the web of connections between the implants. That’s the strongest aspect of his persona. If we can isolate it, kill the servitor hosting that fragment of him…”

  “Then he’ll die a second time…” Noxx nodded to himself.

  Rafen studied the psyker. “You can do this?”

  Ceris nodded. “I can.”

  “Then put an end to him—”

  Without warning, the deck beneath them echoed as if it had been struck by the hammer of a giant.

  Loose items scattered and crashed to the floor, and the lume rods over their heads flickered and sparked. A long, lowing groan sounded, the torsion of an ancient hull tightened under sudden, lethal pressure.

  Rafen staggered and grasped at a stanchion. “Something struck us!”

  “Zellik?” said Kayne.

  Eigen shook his head. “That came from outside the hull.”

  Noxx reached for his gun. “Those lictor-hybrids, back for more!”

  Another blow resonated, and the Neimos listed sharply to port, robbing them of their balance once again.

  “We’re too deep for them,” Rafen told him. “It’s something else.”

  EIGHT

  A writhing, flexing impulse shocked down the length of the tyranid and it shot forward through the stygian sea, barbed tentacles exploding outward in a grasping motion.

  The bony armour across its torso scraped along the starboard flank of the Neimos, and the creature’s chromatophores flashed redly, declaring its attack colours. The alien’s probing limbs looped around the hull and scraped the anechoic plating, scoring deep grooves. Chemo-sense glands in the tips of the tentacles led them towards sealed vents and hatches. The tyranid wanted to open the vessel to the ocean, rip it inside out and feed on what was hidden within.

  Steely coils tightening, the predator-form cemented its embrace of the submersible, acidic venom gels secreting from its body where metallic tusks snapped at the curved hull. The Neimos rocked and twisted, the skeleton of the ship flexing against itself as the tyranid pulled and pushed.

  The deck tilted wildly as Rafen raced down the narrow corridor, and he slammed into the wall, the plate of his shoulder pauldron smashing an inert screen. Sparks glittered from a damaged junction box near his head and he ignored the dazzling flares, pressing on. Through the gridded flooring beneath his boots he heard voices, angry and sharp, calling out in the guttural snarls of battle-language. The Blood Angel took another two steps and heard a creaking howl above. He threw up his arms in time to catch a broken length of pipe as it swung down, allowing a trickle of waste water to drip free. Shoving it aside, he pressed on, striding through the aft hatch of the command chamber.

  A small fire had taken hold inside one of the control consoles, and a servitor was pouring retardants into the machine’s innards; elsewhere running lights flickered ominously and the chamber shook as another glancing blow caressed the Neimos. Warning clarions rang a constant underscore.

  “Report!” he cried, drawing the attention of another helot. All of the machine-slaves seemed irritatingly unruffled by the vessel’s condition, their expressions as blank as they would be on a cruise through millpond-calm waters.

  “Working,” said the servitor, chattering out a punch-card from a cavity in its chest. “Alert condition. The Neimos has made contact with a xenos biological.”

  “Is that so?” said Noxx, arriving a few steps behind him. “I’d hardly noticed.”

  Once more, the ship rang like a struck bell. The rest of the battle-brothers followed Noxx into the chamber, all of them chafing at this indignity.

  “Observe,” the servitor was saying. Rafen studied it, wondering about the xenos gem buried in its grey matter. Was some fraction of Matthun Zellik’s mind in there right now, watching this interchange? He frowned and dismissed the thought. One problem at a time.

  The helot worked a set of carved wooden keys and a flickering hololith sprang up over the chart table. It dropped in and out, but the ghostly image was stable enough for the Astartes to get an understanding of what they were facing. The holographic display showed a resonance-scan model of the Neimos, and wrapped around it like some obscene lover was a thing of tentacles and barbs, a bullet-shaped form covered with quills.

  “Throne and blood,” muttered Eigen. “It’s a kraken.”

  “Not like those from the home world,” said Noxx. “It’s tyranid. It cannot be anything else.”

  Rafen nodded. “Another ocean-evolved form, like the lictor-sharks.”

  “Can we shake it off?” asked Turcio. “Go even deeper? Perhaps it won’t follow us down.”

  Kayne shook his head, and pointed to a large needle-dial on the far bulkhead. The pointer was crossing a band of yellow, making slow progress towards a red stop. “Depth gauge,” he explained. “Much less ocean beneath our keel and we’ll be crushed like a spent shell case.”

  “Look at those bone plates,” added Gast, nodding at the image. “I’ll warrant that behemoth could survive the depths far better than we could.”

  “The other way, then,” Turcio replied. “Raise the ship. If it’s a deep-dweller, when we make for the surface, it might lose interest—”

  Twin impacts off the port bow jerked the Neimos sideways, the torsion popping rivets from the inner hull. Puluo swore beneath his breath as a panel near to him coughed out a shower of sparks and died. “Beastie doesn’t seem like one to be easily discouraged.”

  Rafen sniffed, and caught the smells of baking wires and stale seawater wafting in from the corridor. “It’ll tear us apart if we don’t stop it.”

  “The Neimos is armed with lascannon turrets,” ventured Eigen. “Mohl mentioned it before…” He swallowed and went on. “Blue-green frequency lasers, tuned for use underwater.”

  “No good,” Noxx replied. “That thing is directly upon us, inside point-blank range.”

  “We’ll need to deal with this in a more direct manner,” Rafen agreed. “Look it in the eye.”

  “Out there?” Eigen blinked.

  The Blood Angel sergeant nodded. “Out there.”

  Noxx folded his arms. “A blunt way of doing it. I almost approve.” He leaned in. “Almost. But what about Zellik and these ‘fragments’? We can’t ignore what the psyker said. If some ghost of that unctuous fool is stalking this ship, we leave ourselves open to a knife in the back!”

  “Indeed,” Rafen agreed. “That’s why you will take Brother Kayne and Codicier Ceris into the lower decks of the Neimos, and find the host where Zellik’s mind is hiding. Kill it and be done.” He turned away before the Flesh Tearer could respond. “Gast, Turcio. You two will remain here and maintain an open vox link. Keep this chamber secure at all costs.” The others nodded.

  Rafen’s gaze swept the other Astartes; Ajir, Eigen and Puluo. “The rest of us are going to get our feet wet.”

  Kayne took point, leading the way down the canted ladder well, past the secondary level and into the engineering spaces. Reaching the reactor level, he stepped off and braced himself as the submersible shivered again. The impacts on the hull were coming thick and fast now, and he felt a mist of fluid raining down from a pinhole rent in the ceiling. The stream had a rusted, heavy smell to it; somewhere the outer hull had been breached and the Neimos was taking on water. He moved onward; wasting concentration on a problem he could not solve would sap his focus.

  The warrior glanced over his shoulder and into the hooded eyes of the psyker. Ceris seemed to look straight through him, the crystal matrix of his psionic hood glowing faintly in the wet dimness.

  Behind him, the Flesh Tearer Noxx was a shadow outlined by a flickering safety lume. “Look sharp,” said the sergeant. “This Mechanicus freak has dogged us for long enough, and I want him dead properly this time.”

  “Aye,” said Kayne, with feeling.

  Ceris spoke quietly, working the bloodstained alien jewel in his hand. “He’s close,” he whispered. “Can’t stop me from seeing into
the web of connections. He’s killed, and liked it. Not just Beslian.”

  “Mohl?” Noxx ground out the name.

  “Yes,” said Ceris distantly. “He suborned your battle-brother’s sacrifice. Took him while he could not fight back.”

  Even concealed behind the solid planes of his power armour, Kayne saw Noxx go rigid as the psyker spoke. He saw cold fury on the Flesh Tearer’s face, a strange kind of rage that never reached the man’s dead eyes.

  “This way,” added Ceris, pointing past Kayne into a shadowed corridor.

  Noxx nodded once. “When we find the core of this man,” he told them, “the killing blow is mine alone, understand?”

  Neither of the Blood Angels disputed the order. Kayne stepped forward, and led the way into the gloom.

  Ajir was the last of the four to reach the antechamber at the submersible’s forward lock. The kraken-creature had latched on to the stern of the Neimos and wrapped many of its feelers around the dorsal sail, making the hatch there unusable. Similarly, the bay where they had fought the lictors was a risk; opening the ramp to the sea would let the tyranid monster slip its tentacles inside and rend the craft from within.

  Rafen was walking from man to man, checking the joints of their wargear. “Make certain the closures of your armour are locked tight,” he said. “A single leak out there will be like a knifepoint to your flesh. You may lose a limb before you can stem the flow.”

  Eigen was in a crouch, busying himself with his combat helmet. He ran a layer of sealant around the ring of his gorget. “We’ll need to stay on internal atmosphere,” he noted. “The waters outside are too noxious for our multi-lung implants to draw oxygen from.”

  “Won’t be out there long enough to suffocate,” Puluo noted, working at his heavy bolter. “More likely to drown.”

  Ajir considered that for a moment and fought off a shudder of revulsion. He had battled in hostile environments before, on airless moons and worlds where the atmosphere was a toxic soup that even an Astartes could not endure; but never in the ocean depths. He imagined how it might feel, to have one’s armour fill with the brackish, acidic seawater, to fall into those abyssal depths trapped in a flooded ceramite coffin. He grimaced and turned his concentration to his weapons.

  His bolter was a Godwyn-pattern variant, the standard iteration of the gun found in the hands of thousands of Space Marines across the galaxy. That said, each warrior’s weapon was unique in its own small ways. Many of them were centuries old, and some had been passed down from Astartes to Astartes over the life of a Chapter. Ajir’s gun was the shade of onyx patterned with whorls of dark colour like traces of burned oil. Hundreds of names, of brothers and battles, were etched into the breech and slide mechanism, along with lines of combat prayer and holy sacrament. He checked the ammunition loads in the sickle magazine; the mass-reactive rounds were less a bullet, more a miniature rocket, and each one contained within its casing a measure of oxygenated igniter compound. Thus, even in stark vacuum or, as now, in a fluid environment, the boltgun could still deliver its lethal load.

  He worked quickly, adjusting the iron sights and the muzzle brake; the waters would attenuate the velocity and range of the weapon by a large degree, and he would need to compensate. The floor was constancy shaking now, like the deck of a Thunderhawk in full flight. Ajir kept his focus, ignoring the moans of the hull-metal. They were close to the exterior of the Neimos here, with only a few layers of plasteel and ceramite between them and the dense ocean.

  “As soon as we clear the outer lock, activate your magno-plates.” Rafen tapped the knee of his boot, and it gave a dull ring. “They’ll keep you on the hull, but you’ll be slow with it.” He reached into the open airlock and returned with a steel cable. “Tether yourselves and check all your battle-brothers. If one of us does chance to leave the deck, we’ll be able to reel you back in.” The sergeant drew his power sword and gave it an experimental swing.

  Puluo brought forward a hexagonal case and peeled back the lid, offering it to them as if the contents were some delicacy. “Hull-breakers. Enough here for us to make chum out of that monster.”

  Ajir reached in and took one of the charges; they were a modified version of the more typical krak grenades, shaped detonators designed to be applied directly to the hull of an enemy ship. When he looked up, the other warriors were waiting, their helmets in their hands.

  The hull wall vibrated again, the tremors reaching up through the base of Ajir’s boots and into his bones.

  Rafen looked at each of them, one after another. “Keep your heads. Don’t fight the drag of the water, it will only tire you.” He raised his helm with one hand and locked it into place. “Measure your shots,” continued the sergeant, his voice reaching them through the vox. “Make every round count.”

  Ajir and the others followed suit and stepped into the lock chamber. Eigen was the last in, and drew the heavy inner hatch closed behind him.

  Rafen gave a nod to Puluo, and the Devastator Space Marine slapped at an ornate red switch. Then a deluge like a thousand hammer blows struck them as the sea thundered in to fill the chamber.

  Gast looked away from the glowing red rune on the etched brass indicator board. “Forward lock reads open.”

  Turcio blew out a breath, his fingers kneading the grip of his bolter. “Activate the automatic cycle. Close it as soon as they’re out of the ship.”

  “Is that wise?” said the Flesh Tearer. “What if they need to fall back?”

  “Any hatch we leave open is another way in for that horror,” replied the other warrior. “They know that.”

  Gast frowned; the Blood Angel was right. He turned back to the panel and manually activated the remote hatch control—but he stopped short of venting the water-filled airlock.

  Turcio glowered into the shimmering green frame of the hololithic display. He traced the lines of the tyranid’s probing limbs and his brow furrowed. Distant thudding impacts sounded from the aft of the vessel. “The kraken… it’s pushed tentacles into the thruster ring. I think it’s trying to choke the propellers.”

  The cleric-warrior came to his side. “It must be drawn by the vibrations…” He trailed off as an unpleasant thought occurred to him. “Or perhaps by deliberate intent.”

  “Tyranids are xenos animals,” retorted Turcio. “Cunning, yes, but still beasts.”

  Gast shook his head. “Can you be certain? What if the beast out there is sentient?”

  “Why would you believe such a thing?”

  The Astartes watched the scans of the writhing cephalopod. “I cannot shake the sense that this monster is toying with us.”

  Puluo strode forward from the airlock and the plane of his perception switched; he went from the level of the Neimos’ horizontal interior decks to the side-on surface of the exterior hull. The murk out here was thicker than he had expected, the soupy rust-coloured ocean reducing his visibility to close combat range. Needle-lights at the temples of his battle helmet snapped on, casting hazy cones of illumination out before him, but they did little to improve the situation.

  His boots thudded dully on the black and grey hull; the surface curved away from him to the right and the left, vanishing towards a hidden horizon. Puluo could feel the motion of the vessel through the waters; he was facing aft and the pressure of the headway current was pushing insistently at his back. Without the magno-plates in the soles of his boots, he would have already been coasting sternward, his tether playing out behind him. He took another step, feeling the drag on every motion he made. The Astartes could hear the sea all around him, a slow and steady rumble like the rushing of blood in his ears. For a moment, he felt utterly isolated; then his vox bead crackled and Rafen spoke. “There, to the stern! Do you see it?”

  The optics in Puluo’s helmet worked to enhance the view and abruptly, he did see it. Only the vague impression of the thing, a huge, hulking shadow in the middle distance. It had gathered itself along the lines of the submersible’s fins, and although he could make o
ut no fine details of it, the Blood Angel could gauge its size. The kraken loomed like a faraway thunderhead, and Puluo dragged his heavy bolter upward. Distances were deceiving out here—the thing looked as if it could have been kilometres away. He concentrated on the tiny particles of waterborne debris drifting around him, using their passage to gauge the range.

  Something glowing a dull cherry-red, like forge-fired metal, moved towards them.

  “I think it sees us,” said Eigen.

  The shape drew close, defining into a splayed cobra-head leading a serpentine coil of thick, sinewy flesh. In the light from the helmet lamps it was corpse-white and lined with sucker rings bigger than a man’s head. The red glow came from a fluorescing spot across the tip of the vast tentacle.

  Puluo’s grip tightened on his trigger-bar and he fired a three-round burst from the hip. The gun’s languid recoil pressed him into the current, as lines of squealing compression fanned out behind the bolt shells. Everything seemed to move in slow motion—everything but the massive whipping limb of the kraken. Two out of three of the shots missed the mark, but the third hit hard and the tentacle shuddered with pain. Eigen and Ajir fired into it, following Puluo’s lead.

  “Advance!” called the sergeant, his power sword’s active blade wreathed in a halo of frothing bubbles. “Move in and engage all targets of opportunity!”

  Puluo needed no more encouragement. Quickly, taking the measure of this new, strange field of combat, he moved with steady, exact steps. He fired as he went, and first blood was earned as the flexing feeler tore apart along its length. Inky vitae billowed and twisted from the wound.

  A low, hollow moan vibrated through the water, the pitch of it so deep Puluo felt it through the bones of his ribcage.

  “You have its attention, brother,” said Ajir.

  Puluo gave a slow nod, as a scattering of red discs grew brighter and more distinct in the murk. The colour strengthened as the moaning peaked, and more pieces of the larger shadow seemed to break off and move closer.