Fear the Alien

by Christian Dunn - (ebook by Undead)

  The flames from Kaspel’s amateur incendiary quickly went out, and the fans halted their movement as suddenly as they had started. Kaspel blinked, wiping gore from the lenses of his mask. Ignoring the alien remains smeared around the shaft, he began to carefully make his way back to the generatorium.

  Whallon had a broken rib, and possibly a punctured lung. That didn’t stop him from talking as Kaspel untied him.

  “Came down here to find you,” he said, stretching his arms and wincing. “Then this lot appeared out of nowhere. I think there’s only a few more, including the leader. They tied me up and left me here to play with later. Then, when they had problems with their tech, they started asking questions.”

  Whallon nodded towards a series of squat black devices spread around the base of the generator stacks. Kaspel hadn’t noticed them before—there was something about their near-featureless blackness that made the eyes slide off them. As Whallon slowly pulled himself to his feet, Kaspel inspected one of the alien machines.

  It was a black box with curved edges, seemingly made out of some kind of stone or crystal. Indentations in the top could be either controls or instructions. Translucent cables snaked from the box, some attaching to various points on the generator stacks, others to the nearby alien machines. Following the trail of cables, he could see that some led out into the corridors of the ship.

  “I think,” said Whallon, “these are for moving the Sanctity.”

  “Yes,” replied Kaspel. “I think you are right.” The dark eldar had their own means of travel barely comprehended by other species. Could a device like this, provided with enough power, drag an entire battlecruiser through space? Kaspel had no way of telling. Whatever the device did, it was heretical technology outside the sacred machinery of the Imperium.

  Kaspel decided against tampering with the eldar machine, as he had no idea what side effects that might cause. Best to leave it where it was for now, and deal with the immediate threat first. If the eldar managed to jump the Sanctity into the webway, the ship would be repurposed or cannibalised for parts while the crew would be converted into soulless, broken slaves. These were not fit fates for either the Emperor’s machine or men.

  “Where did they go?” Kaspel asked.

  “Down into the engines,” replied Whallon, who had given up on standing, and slumped back against the pillar. “I…” He coughed again, a splatter of blood at the corner of his mouth.

  Kaspel nodded. “Rest. Your injuries are not fatal, but may be if you strain them.” He put an arm around Whallon, and helped him stumble across the room to a chair in front of a cogitator terminal. “The xenos have isolated communications with the rest of the ship. Eventually the bridge will realise and break through. When they do, they will need you alive to direct them.”

  Whallon nodded. His skin was pallid and sheened in sweat, but he was still an officer. He would hold out.

  “I will locate the xenos, and do what I can to stop them.”

  Whallon nodded again, then pointed towards a dark corner of the room, near where he had been tied up.

  “They had my bolt pistol before I could use it,” he said, pausing to take another painful breath. “Threw it over there. Ceremonial, but it works.”

  Kaspel nodded gratefully, and followed Whallon’s gesture to find his holster belt, crudely cut in half where the eldar had torn it from the officer, but with bolt pistol still attached. The weapon was heavy, but well-polished and with ornate patterns engraved on the barrel. It was clearly decorative, a reward for some previous action, but it might prove useful.

  Giving one last nod to Whallon, Kaspel checked the pistol’s clip, and left the generatorium. Following the alien power lines, he headed back towards the engines.

  While enginseers were more attuned to the workings of machines than of humans, Kaspel was nevertheless aware that he was in shock, and that his best hope for remaining efficient was to keep moving, to act without stopping to think. However, it did occur to him how fast his perceptions were being changed.

  Since killing the two eldar with the fan blades, he had been covered in their drying blood. An hour ago, the thought of even a drop of alien blood touching him would have been horrific, a notion to be quickly suppressed. Kaspel’s encounters with the eldar had changed him. Yes, the xenos were hateful abominations, but as repellent as they were, there was no need to fear them for their physical differences. It was not their blood, flesh or bone that was a threat, disgusting as it was.

  No, what Kaspel knew was worth fearing, worth confronting, was the aliens’ dark intent and capacity for inflicting their will on the human race. Their actions on the ship had demonstrated that. Only a small group had infiltrated the Sanctity, but they had violated everything in their path, torturing a loyal officer of the Imperial Navy, corrupting the cogitators with scrapcode and tainting the ship’s precious power source with their vile machinery.

  It was as Kaspel had always been taught, but never experienced—even the slightest touch of Chaos or the gentlest brush with alien thinking corrupted, and their every influence needed to be excised by force and fire. Kaspel had learned these abstract lessons long ago, but only now did he understand their basis in concrete fact.

  One small area of corruption, untreated, could undermine the whole.

  Kaspel stopped in his tracks, his thoughts racing ahead of him. Of course, that simple lesson… it was a principle that men of the Imperium lived and died by, yet it hadn’t occurred to Kaspel that it could apply to the ship’s predicament as well. It all made sense now; he could see where the problem was.

  One of the Divine Sanctity’s engine units had failed, not just in terms of its operation but in terms of diagnostics. The cogitative mechanisms which compensated for any error had misinterpreted the damage to the engine unit as a failure of the power supply, and tried to divert massive amounts of energy from the generatorium to rectify the imagined power failure. Thanks to this freak error, the other engine units could not build up enough power to move the ship. This was a problem, but one that had also prevented the eldar’s parasitic technology from functioning properly.

  Two problems, two sources of corruption in the machine. Purge both, save the whole. It was elegant simplicity, coming together like great cogs clicking into place. Kaspel instinctively, reverently, touched the golden cog of the Adeptus Mechanicus that hung on a chain around his neck. As ever, the machine provided a solution, and it was for the tech-priest to follow its lead.

  Kaspel increased his pace. He knew where the eldar would be, and he knew how to deal with them.

  Kaspel found himself back where he had begun the day, in the chamber containing the damaged engine unit. The energy field that prevented the atmosphere from escaping through the tear in the hull still shimmered in place.

  As he entered the chamber, walking under a bulkhead which would rapidly drop down and seal off the area in the case of an atmosphere breach, Kaspel heard raised eldar voices, and the clank of their armoured boots on scaffolding. The trail of alien cabling ran down the walkway, and disappeared to the right, into the gap in the side of the engine unit. The bodies of the servitors that Kaspel had left to work on the engine damage lay scattered across the walkway, swiftly dismantled by eldar blades.

  As Kaspel had expected, the eldar were working on the core of the damaged engine unit, out of his line of sight.

  To Kaspel’s right, the vast hexagonal engine unit towered above him, as intimidating in its own way as the tear in the hull to his left, a looming structure that contained the power transformers and other machinery that converted raw energy into the thrust necessary to propel the battlecruiser through space.

  Kaspel couldn’t risk closing the bulkhead behind him, partially because it would close off his escape route, but mainly because it would alert the eldar to his presence, which would make his job far harder.

  Battlecruisers were assembled in the space docks that orbited some of the Adeptus Mechanicus’ forge worlds. Ships were built reverently
, over many years, enginseers and other adepts working tirelessly in the vacuum to build them. By necessity, the work was modular—components were forged on the world below, brought up in shuttles, and then installed into the frame of the growing ship. Beneath the hull, a ship was not just a single machine, but also many machines, brought into harmony as a single entity. Many parts, one whole.

  Kaspel knew that what had once been brought together could be torn apart. The hull damage had taken out many of the supporting points which fixed the engine unit in place within the main structure of the battlecruiser. By Kaspel’s reckoning there were five supports left that needed to be manually unbolted. The struts themselves were vast, but the levers for releasing them were easy enough to shift.

  Once Kaspel had released the five struts, all he needed to do was breach one of the engine unit’s many plasma capsules. The entire chamber would lock down and purge the atmosphere and, without the struts holding it in place, the engine unit itself would roll right out of the chamber into the vacuum.

  Kaspel could take out one of the plasma capsules from the doorway with a single shot from Whallon’s bolt pistol. He would then have a couple of seconds to step back into the corridor before the bulkheads came down.

  Kaspel began to climb the side of the engine unit. Eventually, he reached a large strut which emerged from the wall and embedded deep into the unit itself. Kaspel found the red release lever on the side of the strut, and pulled it all the way back. There was a low metallic grinding, but thankfully this didn’t attract the eldar’s attention.

  The collision with the necron vessel had demolished the other support strut on the outwards-facing side of the engine unit, whereas the other side had two struts intact. Using both his human arms and his mechadendrites, Kaspel climbed onto the top of the engine unit, crossed the top and lowered himself down the other side until he reached the parallel strut to the one he had already released. He repeated the process with the lever, and then lowered himself down to the walkway on that side. As quietly as he could, he ran to the thruster end of the chamber, then climbed up and pulled the release lever on the other strut on that side.

  What remained were the two vertical struts which came down through the ceiling and into the top of the unit. Kaspel climbed back up the engine unit, and slowly made his way across the top of the machine. It was not a flat surface, and he needed his mechadendrites to maintain his balance.

  He reached the first vertical strut, and pulled the release lever. All that remained was to release the last strut, return to the doorway and shoot out one of the plasma capsules.

  His job nearly complete, Kaspel began the careful approach to the last strut, making his way back down the top of the machine, away from the thrusters. As he did, the voices of the eldar became louder. He was approaching the point where the hull damage had penetrated the engine unit deepest, where the eldar were doing their work.

  Kaspel reached the last strut, and pulled the last lever. Nearly done.

  He stayed atop the engine unit, moving quickly but carefully in the direction of the door. Where the engine had been damaged he had to shuffle around the temporary scaffolding rig that allowed access for repairs. He looked down into the web of scaffolding.

  In the very heart of the engine unit, two eldar were at work, supervised by a third who was clearly their leader. Like Kaspel, the eldar had realised that the damaged engine unit was not just stalling the ship, but preventing them siphoning power from the generatorium to drag the Sanctity into the webway. They seemed to have found their own solution, and were rigging a complex mechanism into the heart of the damaged unit using white-hot, precision cutting tools.

  Kaspel shuddered at this latest violation of the machine-spirit.

  The leader, who had removed his helmet to reveal cruel features and deep black eyes, was obviously unhappy with the progress of his warrior technicians, and paced imperiously across the bars of the scaffold. He twitched to the left and right, and then, seemingly rolling his eyes back, he looked up.

  The lead eldar’s gaze caught Kaspel looking down. The alien barked a command to his men.

  Caution abandoned, Kaspel ducked around the scaffolding and ran across the top of the machine as fast as he could, all the while trying not to lose his footing. Behind him he could hear the metallic clattering of someone climbing the scaffolding.

  As he reached the edge of the machine on the hull side, only a short distance from the door to the rest of the ship, there was the harsh report of a weapon being fired, and then another. Something shattered against the ceiling near Kaspel’s head, but the second shot was closer. A thin shard of crystal tore through Kaspel’s shoulder, cutting right to the bone. He was overwhelmed with pain as he rolled off the top of the machine and fell the rest of the way, landing heavily on the walkway below.

  Some part of his mind was warning him that the eldar used poison weaponry, but this was the least of Kaspel’s worries. The fall had broken his leg, and his arm below the shoulder wound felt completely numb. He heard the screams of the eldar leader.

  Kaspel rolled onto his back, and looked down the walkway. An eldar was running towards him, weapon raised.

  He had seconds left to live. There was no more time, no escape.

  Kaspel thrust his good hand into his robes, finding Whallon’s bolt pistol. He looked around, locating the spherical, silver shape of a plasma capsule slightly further down the engine unit, its metallic bulge curving out of the machine’s side. Kaspel raised the bolt pistol, and as he did so his mechadendrites reached sideways towards the engine unit, finding pipes and struts to hold on to.

  Time seemed to slow, the eldar raising its weapon, as Kaspel took aim. He was not a warrior, but he was an enginseer, with a sharp eye and the mind to calculate trajectory. Kaspel squeezed the trigger.

  The plasma breach was a ripple of fierce blue energy that consumed the nearest section of walkway, which tore apart, blasting the eldar out of the gap in the hull. The energy field fizzed as the eldar passed through it, out into the vacuum, but remained intact. Although Kaspel was just outside the range of the plasma breach, the walkway under him buckled, and he was left hanging limply from the side of the engine unit.

  The lights in the chamber switched to deep red, and a klaxon sounded. Kaspel heard the bulkheads crash down, isolating the chamber from the rest of the ship.

  Then it began, the entire engine unit detaching itself from the Sanctity, grinding free, rolling thrusters-first out of the ship. As it moved, the plasteel wall that separated the engine from the thruster itself ripped apart, and the atmosphere began to rush out of the chamber. Kaspel saw the eldar leader emerge from the damaged area of the engine, only to be sucked out into space. As the unit ground space-wards, the scaffolding covering the damage collapsed into a storm of splinters that scattered into space.

  Kaspel didn’t see the other eldar die, but he didn’t need to. No one was leaving alive.

  The solid grip of Kaspel’s mechadendrites kept him from being sucked away as the engine unit slid free of the Sanctity. Then Kaspel was floating in the void, free of the ship’s artificial gravity, clinging to the damaged machine.

  The air was gone, the transmission of sound with it, and there was only the sound of Kaspel’s own frantic breath echoing within his mask. His airtight facemask with its built-in rebreather would grant him a little more life in the vacuum than his enemies had.

  The lenses in his mask were beginning to freeze up, but Kaspel looked back, and to his satisfaction saw that, with the damaged unit removed, the remaining thrusters were back online, firing in an automated test pattern. The Sanctity was alive once more, its machine-spirit safe, its crew free to rejoin the war on another front.

  Kaspel’s war, however, was over. While his augmentations allowed him to survive in the vacuum for a while, they did not add up to the protection of a spacesuit. He was frosting over. Subjected to the vacuum of space for much longer, the more vulnerable parts of his life support would crack.


  Kaspel suspected that he wouldn’t actually live long enough to see that happen. Propelled free of the Sanctity’s grip, the engine block was beginning to feel the effects of the gravity of the planet below. Kaspel tightened his mechadendrites around the machinery behind him, and looked towards the planet below.

  Soon enough, Kaspel would be burned away along with everything but the hardiest parts of the engine, incinerated as the engine unit entered the planet’s atmosphere. But for a second, just before his vision was consumed by the glare of re-entry, Kaspel maximised the capabilities of his augmented senses, letting the rush of sensory data consume him.

  For a moment, Kaspel took in the view of an alien world. The continents, vast and grey-brown, dappled with forests and streaks of mountain ranges. The seas and lakes, purplish blue. The wisps of cloud in the atmosphere. The irregular grey mass of once-great cities, long since deserted by whichever species had walked the soil.

  As Kaspel fell towards his first and final contact with alien ground, he felt no fear, no fury only awe at the scale and complexity of the world below, the endlessly intricate mechanisms of a universe that defied the knowledge and rituals of his science, that would be, to him, forever alien.

  FACES

  Matthew Farrer

  In the end Jann couldn’t stay away, and so here she came again creeping back into the tower’s red-blurred shadow, hunched over with a rusted torque-stave in her hand. The shouting, drumming storm was two days gone now, and no matter how hard Jann listened all she could hear was the soft crackle of her footsteps in the sandflake drift and her own breathing, dry and frightened. At this hour, at this angle, the depot tower was a lightless block of black against the blood of the sky behind it. No movement, no voices. Even the great metal bulk of the pipeline was inert.