Fear the Alien

by Christian Dunn - (ebook by Undead)

  He adjusted the vision in his augmented eye to thermal, and observed the heart of the servitor as a hastily pulsating mass within the servitor’s chest, pumping hard. The lungs were also working overtime. It was as if… Kaspel dropped to one knee, and rolled the servitor over onto its front. He ran a gloved hand over the implants on the back of its neck, the mechanisms that turned a vat-grown humanoid into a robotic creature capable of basic tasks. Kaspel’s fingers found what he had suspected: a neat cut had been made in one cable, and the wires within reversed.

  The alteration was a simple one, but specific, reversing the neural dampener that prevented servitors from being distracted by physical pain. Someone had very precisely altered this unfeeling creature to make it experience intense agony. Kaspel tore out the cable, and then removed a couple of further connections, cutting off all power to the brain. The servitor shuddered briefly, and died.

  Kaspel corrected himself as he stood up. The servitor had never been alive. However, such deliberate sabotage needed to be reported. Kaspel tried to vox through to the ship’s head of security, but received nothing but static. He tried other officers, or an open channel, but found the same static.

  No, not quite static. It sounded like random interference, but Kaspel could make out repeating patterns. This was a deliberate signal, blocking communications.

  Someone was isolating the engineering decks.

  Kaspel was an enginseer, not a warrior. While he had received basic weapons training, first on Mars and then on transfer to the Navy, that training had been to meet the basic commitments of any subject of the God-Emperor that, if caught up in battle, any human should be ready to pick up a fallen warrior’s weapon and fight to the last. If the ship had been stormed, Kaspel was qualified to pick up a bolt pistol and loose a few rounds at the enemy.

  This… Kaspel was not even sure what kind of situation he was in. He needed to exercise caution, and find out how deep the isolation went. He found a cogitator unit in an alcove, and ran some simple diagnostics. Not only was communication between the engineering deck and the rest of the ship blocked, but the bulkheads between the two had been sealed as well. Kaspel tried to override these obstructions, but found himself ejected from the relevant menus with a flicker of on-screen static.

  That flicker of disruption meant one thing: scrap-code, chaotic data introduced into the ship’s cogitation systems to cause disruption, in this instance invisibly blocking onboard communications.

  Kaspel’s breath quickened behind his mask: the creation and use of scrapcode was considered by the Adeptus Mechanicus to be heresy, a grave attack on the machine-spirit. Kaspel was an enginseer, engines and heavy mechanisms were his vocation. He knew some of the rituals and practices of maintaining cogitators, but nowhere near enough to circumvent and purge scrapcode. Kaspel would get nothing more from the cogitator.

  The machine-spirit of the Divine Sanctity was under threat of corruption and it seemed, for now, that Kaspel was the only one who could try and save it.

  Kaspel trod lightly, and kept to the shadows as much as possible while following the curve of the corridor. There was nothing to see in the gloom, and little to hear except the ambient glug glug of thick coolant running through the pipes attached to the wall, pipes which ran all the way to the generatorium. The coolant absorbed the excess heat from the generatorium, the then hot liquid flowing out to the extremities of the ship where proximity to the freezing void of space re-cooled the liquid.

  Kaspel was approaching one of the areas where he had set servitors to work. He could hear the hissing of welding equipment, noise consistent with the work Kaspel had assigned, but nonetheless he was cautious, slowing his pace even further. This was a heavy work area, and various tools were leaning against the walls, organised by size so even the less efficient servitors could work out which was required. Kaspel carefully stepped around a stack of plasteel panels.

  Then, for a brief moment, one of the welding torches around the corner flared spectacularly, the bright orange light consuming the corridor ahead, casting a deep black shadow on the wall. The silhouette was of two figures: the lumpen shape of a servitor, hanging crooked as if chained up by the wrists, and another taller, unnaturally thin figure, standing with its feet apart, one hand raised with hideously tapered fingers—were those blades?—spread out. In those short seconds of illumination, the tall figure’s hand swung down, right into the guts of the other. Then the light source guttered out and the shadows disappeared, leaving only an echo of the noise of rended flesh.

  Kaspel’s breath caught in his throat, the rebreather in his mask briefly struggling to adjust. Thoughts raced through his mind. Whoever the second figure was, it wasn’t a human or a servitor. Its proportions, the way it moved, were just wrong. Alien.

  Kaspel made an involuntary step backwards, and there was a tinny crash from just behind him. He instinctively spun around, to see he had knocked over the stacked panels.

  Any sense of relief was dispelled by the realisation of how loud that noise must have been. Kaspel barely had time to look back down the corridor, to see a lithe, shimmering figure seemingly carved out of shadows bounding towards him. Its movements were graceful, almost silent as its feet glanced off the metal deck, yet with a terrifying speed and power. The shadow-figure raised one hand as it descended on Kaspel, and he saw that it indeed wore some kind of bladed gauntlet.

  Kaspel had little time to do anything but stumble backwards. His mechadendrites instinctively reached out behind him, cushioning his fall and pushing him over to land on his feet. Rather than try and stand up or break into a run, Kaspel rolled sideways again, towards the other side of the corridor.

  The alien—and it was definitely alien—let out an unintelligible babble of frustration as Kaspel evaded its first blow, the blades on its hand tearing through the wall as its swipe went wide, cutting through plasteel as if it were paper. The shimmering shadow effect suddenly flickered, dissipating like interference on a cogitator screen, and Kaspel had his first proper glimpse of the enemy.

  Standing before him was a figure in chitinous black body armour with elongated, deathly pale features. The long, cruel mouth was twisted in bitter frustration, well-deep eyes wide in hatred.

  He had never seen one before, but Kaspel recognised the creature for what it was: an eldar. As the towering xenos moved towards him with terrifying speed, Kaspel used one of his mechadendrites to grasp the coolant pipe on the wall, pulling him to his feet. Then, a second later, Kaspel pushed himself sideways with all his strength, and once again the eldar’s clawed hand tore down through the empty space where Kaspel had just been standing.

  This time though, the eldar clawed into more than just the wall, the blades on his hand tearing into one of the coolant pipes. Where the five slashes gouged into the pipe, freezing liquid gel pumped at high pressure found release and sprayed into the corridor.

  The eldar screamed discordantly, a terrible inhuman sound, as the freezing liquid hit it full-on. It reeled, consumed by a cloud of vapour as water droplets froze in the air around it.

  A major freeze-burn like that would kill even the strongest human on contact, but Kaspel wasn’t taking any risks. He picked up one of the wrenches leaning against the wall and, holding it with both hands, swung the tool around in a wide arc to make contact with the side of the eldar’s head.

  On contact, its head exploded in a shower of icy fragments, the pieces clattering off the floor and walls as they ricocheted in all directions. The blast of coolant had frozen its entire head solid on contact, rendering it brittle.

  The eldar’s headless body crashed heavily to the floor, its fluid grace all gone in death. The bladed gauntlet, and most of that forearm, also shattered into frozen pieces, blackened chunks spinning across the floor.

  With a hiss, the fail-safes in the coolant pipe closed off the ruptured section, diverting the flow to backup pipes. The temperature in the corridor adjusted back to normal, the mist clearing.

  Kaspel dropped to h
is knees, the wrench feeling heavier in his hands than it possibly could be. Too close. He had been unprepared, and his improvisation with the coolant had been statistically unlikely to work. A less practically minded person would have said that he “got lucky”.

  Leaning on the wrench, Kaspel pushed himself to his feet, and looked down at the eldar’s headless corpse. So this was the enemy. Even dead, faceless and inert, it disgusted him, from the pallid exposed flesh to the unnatural sheen of its black armour.

  Kaspel told himself that there was no point searching the body, that the armour was too tight to conceal any weapons beyond the shattered gauntlet, and that if the eldar carried any plans, Kaspel wouldn’t be able to read the language. But he knew that these were just rationalisations—he couldn’t bring himself to touch the body, to make direct contact with the alien.

  Kaspel recognised the black armour, its shimmering shielding, from stories and briefings. These “dark eldar” were tainted by Chaos, and combined the abilities and training of their warrior heritage with the unpredictable cruelty of the dark powers.

  Kaspel, on the other hand, was a non-combatant, a worker of machines. Any attempt at direct confrontation between him and the eldar would end in failure, and the Sanctity, its mission, its crew and its machine-spirit would be doomed.

  He needed other ways to kill them, to use methods of his own and the machinery he was an expert in. These eldar were an affront to the machine-spirit of the Sanctity, and that spirit would provide the means of their destruction.

  If other eldar had been nearby, they would have attacked by now. Kaspel felt confident enough to walk around the corridor to where the gutted servitor hung from the ceiling. Kaspel ignored it, picked up its abandoned welding torch from where it was slowly melting a hole in the floor, switched it off and tossed it aside. Such a device had been useful in the eldar’s torture games, but required too close proximity to be any use to Kaspel.

  Kaspel couldn’t risk using the coolant again, as there was only so much damage those pipes could incur before the system began to fail and threatened a terminal overheat. But there were other mechanisms that could be used.

  Deep in thought, Kaspel reached for the welding torch he had just abandoned, and began to unscrew a panel on the side of the tool.

  The generatorium was the largest chamber on the engineering decks, dominated by the generator stacks, monolithic structures which lined one end of the room. Each generator stack was squat and metallic at the top and bottom, with transparent panels in the middle that showed the fierce currents of power flowing within, white-hot energy crackling around incandescent elements. In the open space before the stacks, freestanding cogitator terminals displayed the flow of power, while riveted columns stretched from floor to ceiling, bracing the entire room. Vast cables, heavily insulated, ran from the stacks and into the walls, floors and ceilings, feeding power all across the ship.

  More functional workstations lined the walls at either side of the stacks, while directly opposite, the walls were peppered by half a dozen vast bladed fans set in wide air shafts, all of which were presently inert, but capable of draining the atmosphere from the room in seconds if required. Each fan was covered by a thin metal mesh, and set at head height from the floor.

  The generatorium was not a quiet place: a relentless hum from the vast power within the generator stacks filled the air. Kaspel entered the room via a door in the shadow of the stacks and although he could hear raised voices over the din, he couldn’t make out any words.

  Edging around the stacks towards the voices, Kaspel began to make out the words. There were two of them, both male and neither human. They spoke in Imperial Gothic with no discernible accent, their words oddly stilted as if they had learned the language without ever hearing it.

  “Let us try this again,” said one. “How do we restore the power?” This voice was infinitely weary, as if talking to a child or pet.

  “Tell us now,” said another, sharper voice. “Then we will make it quick.”

  There was a ragged, spluttering sound, and then a third, human voice spoke up weakly.

  “I told you… I don’t know.” There was a pause, another ragged breath. “And if I did, you could—”

  A laboured coughing fit cut off the insult. Kaspel recognised the human voice as Whallon, one of the captain’s lieutenants who spent most of his days relaying orders around the Sanctity. He had doubtless been sent down to engineering to check on Kaspel’s progress, only to get picked up by the eldar.

  Kaspel didn’t doubt Whallon was telling the truth—if Kaspel couldn’t solve the power problem, a non-technical officer certainly wouldn’t be able to.

  When the eldar realised that, Whallon was dead. There was little time to spare. Kaspel checked the small pouch of liquid tied to his belt, and carefully untied it. The pouch was vacuum-sealed, but the contents were volatile. He held it gingerly in one gloved hand.

  Prepared, he peered around the corner of the stack. There were only two eldar in the open space before the stacks, and they were standing over Whallon, who was tied to one of the pillars that braced the chamber. Whallon, slumped low with his arms wrenched back against the pillar, was staring up at the two eldar defiantly. His dress uniform had been torn open at the front, cuts and bruises dotting his face and chest.

  Kaspel was fortunate again, as the eldar were standing with their backs to him as they repeated their questions with greater urgency. The more laconic eldar was leaning on an ornate stave, while the other held a viciously serrated blade. Both wore the same black armour as the creature that Kaspel had already destroyed.

  He quickly surveyed the room, working out the distances. Technically minded, he easily calculated what was required. It was possible, narrowly.

  “Tell us what we want to know!” hissed the blade-wielding eldar. He moved as if to stab Whallon with his blade, but it was just a feint—instead he pulled the blade away and brought his empty hand down, delivering a backhanded blow to Whallon’s face. The studs on the eldar’s glove left shallow cuts in Whallon’s cheek.

  Kaspel stepped out of the shadows, adjusting the volume controls in his mask vox for maximum effect.

  “Ask me,” he said, his synthesised voice echoing around the room.

  His words had the desired effect. The eldar snapped around, too well-trained to show surprise or dismay, or maybe just too alien to even feel such things. They did not reply, but reacted, starting towards Kaspel the moment they registered his presence.

  But Kaspel had moved first, running not towards the eldar, but to the far wall of the chamber, where a pile of crates was stacked under the great extractor fans. That wall was slightly nearer to Kaspel than it was to the eldar, so he had a head start.

  Not looking back, he kept running. They would want to capture him alive, to find out what he knew, or at least that was his hope. If he was wrong, a shot to the back would take him down soon enough.

  When he reached the crates, Kaspel jumped onto the first one, which was only a third of his height. As he clambered on top of the next, the stave-bearing eldar threw his weapon. The stave tore through Kaspel’s cloak and embedded itself in one of the storage boxes, narrowly missing his side.

  The material tore as Kaspel climbed, and he cursed himself for not abandoning his cloak earlier. While his fingers scrabbled for purchase, he used his mechadendrites to tear the thin protective grille away from the fan. It came off in one go, rivets popping out and showering down.

  The horizontal shaft was twice the height of a man, and three closely placed fans were between Kaspel and the next grille, after which the shaft dropped down to a further set of fans and, eventually, a discharge pipe that expelled fumes directly into space. Each of the three fans had sixteen blades, and Kaspel had to carefully manoeuvre to squeeze between them. As Kaspel pulled himself between the razor-sharp blades of the first fan, which was placed only slightly past the rim of the shaft, he dared to glimpse behind him. The blade-wielding eldar was below, about to strike
. Kaspel pulled his booted feet away just before the sword came down, and rolled into the gap between the first two fans.

  Kaspel scrambled to his feet in the narrow gap, and began to squeeze past the blades of the second fan. He slipped on the oiled, curved wall of the air shaft, and raised his arm defensively as he bumped into a fan blade. The blade cut straight through one sleeve of his leather coveralls, and grazed his left arm, drawing blood. He winced.

  Kaspel shuffled quickly through. One fan to go. He looked back, to see the blade-wielder gracefully stepping between the inert blades of the first fan, angling its lithe limbs like a practised gymnast.

  With little gap between each fan, Kaspel was at the final fan immediately after passing the second. Suppressing any dangerous haste, he pushed between the blades. One of his mechadendrites clanked against the blades, but he was through.

  Kaspel turned his back to the thin wire mesh that was between him and a sheer drop, the pouch of liquid in his hand. The eldar were nearly upon him, the blade-wielder already stepping through the second fan, while his comrade was in turn a step behind him.

  Kaspel threw the pouch between the blades of the fan, and it hit the vent wall just next to the second fan. The contents spilled wide, sloshing everywhere, and burst into flames.

  Kaspel had carefully siphoned the liquid from the welding torch, knowing its volatility, especially when in an oxygenated environment. The eldar recoiled slightly at the fire, but were unconcerned. Why should they be? They were armoured, and it was only a little fire.

  However, a little fire in the sensitive workings of a battlecruiser was a dangerous thing, and the systems were built to compensate. As the flame burst out in the vent, the fans came to life without warning, changing from completely static to a rapid spin in seconds.

  Kaspel was blown back into the grille as the triple blades tore into the two eldar, cutting through their armour, flesh and bone without discrimination. The grille buckled under his weight but held as a blast of air and eldar remains was sucked down the air shaft, slipping through gaps in the mesh to slide down the shaft and be expelled into space.