Gesar landed on top of Tam’s legs as he fell backwards. Tam could tell the Space Marine was badly concussed. If he wasn’t dead yet the amount of blood pouring out of him meant that he didn’t have much time. Which was a small mercy, but Gesar would never have wanted the kroot to have his body.
Tam flipped his pistol away from his working right hand and reached for the frag. There was suddenly a shadow above him and his hand exploded in pain as a rifle butt smacked it away from the grenade and fingers broke under the violent strike.
He screamed despite himself and looked up into a cat-eyed kroot. Green slits for eyes. The same eyes that had looked right up at him at the comm station.
The kroot spoke a harsh language that Tam couldn’t understand. It was all hard explosions of words, strange pauses and rolling sounds deep in the thing’s throat. Then a human voice joined the kroot’s, and above him a man in the livery of the blue and gold worn by the human traitors stepped into view. His gaze on the kroot was almost beatific.
“You fight well. The tau like their little human helpers, but the ones here are too weak. You have strong meat, good bones and very good eyes.”
It was the voice they had heard earlier in the building. It seemed that this was the kroot’s translator, and he listened carefully and repeated what his master said as the kroot stamped around Tam and examined him.
“Traitor… you betray our Emperor and your people. You are worse than the mutants who scuttle from the warp. A daemon is an abomination, a mutant a twisted thing, but you have damned yourself… for what?”
The traitor was obviously from Coruna, and Tam wondered if he had worn the garb of the Coruna Imperial Guard before he had taken to the kroot’s side. There was no telling how far and how deep the treachery went.
“You have not seen the magnificence that is unity. You do not… cannot understand the glory of a Greater Good beyond our corpse Emperor. The tau have shown us truths you lack, the kroot have shown us the glory of unity.”
Gesar was gurgling and his arm rose weakly up as if searching for a weapon. Tam thought he heard a curse trembling on the Astartes’ lips. Then he saw another kroot walk up and calmly thrust a blade under his chin, and Gesar’s arm fell and was still.
“Why? Why the bodies?”
The kroot seemed to study him, and Tam looked around and saw the differences in colour, in height, in everything about the kroot. They were a melting pot of different physical attributes even more diverse than the multitude of humans scattered across the stars.
“Blood will tell. The kroot seek only unity, and your meat tells the kroot how to be. They give the gift of unity, and they become stronger. They will take your flesh in unity and become better fighters in low gravity. They will see better. They need fresh meat. Their only constant is change.”
“We’re soldiers, we’re not something churned out of the fabritoriums!”
The traitor continued to translate for the kroot leader as the xenos studied Tam through those alien cat-eyes.
“This is the way of all flesh. The tau don’t care what happens to the dead, and they never check to see if humans could survive wounds, so we get as many bodies as we need, and it makes us stronger. They don’t care because it serves their Greater Good.”
The kroot leaned in closer, and drew a thin knife from an arm sheath. He slid the tip carefully up Tam’s face until the point rested under Tam’s right eye.
“Your Emperor and priests fill their giant warriors with machines and organs to make them strong. Their meat is powerful, but the kroot need all kinds. Otherwise they would break down. You’re saving their race. You should be proud. Instead of being flung away in the name of a dead Emperor you’ll become one with the kroot, and in your unity you will bring them strength and help them survive to spread deliverance.”
“Don’t… please, don’t do this to me!”
The traitor was directly translating the kroot’s words again, and Tam noticed that the man had backed up, away from the xenos who were gathering around him. Tam could hear a catch in the man’s voice, and the traitor’s eyes cast downwards.
“You will live on, human, isn’t that what your kind like? Isn’t that why they spread out among the stars? Isn’t that why your Emperor puts his organs and blood in his Space Marines? You will live forever as part of the kroot, and someday a human will look at one of us and see your eyes… such good eyes.”
Tam screamed until the moment the rifle butt connected with his forehead, and dimly he felt rough hands and claws pulling at his clothing and lifting him up.
He thought he saw a light for one moment, and felt someone tugging at his eyelids, and he thought of the black bird, pecking at the nameless Guardsman in the woods, and then everything went black as the knives came down.
THE CORE
Aaron Dembski-Bowden
“Look out at my father’s Imperium.
Do not unroll a parchment map or analyse a hololithic starchart.
Merely raise your head to the night sky and open your eyes.
Stare into the blackness between worlds—that dark ocean, the silent sea.
Stare into the million eyes of firelight—each a sun to be subjugated in the Emperor’s grip.
The age of the alien, the era of the inhuman, is over.
Mankind is in its ascendancy, and with ten thousand claws we will lay claim to the stars themselves.”
—Primarch Konrad Curze,
Addressing the VIII Legion
during the Great Crusade
I
It knew itself only as the Eldest.
More than its name, this was its place in creation. It was the oldest, the strongest, the fiercest, and it had tasted the most blood. Before it had become the Eldest, it had been one of the lesser breed. These weakling creatures were the Eldest’s kin, though it remained distant from them now, seeking to quieten a hunger that would never fade.
The Eldest twitched in its repose, not quite asleep, not quite in hibernation, but a state of stillness that haunted between the two. Its thoughts were sluggish, a slow crawl of instinct and vague sensation behind its closed eyes. The consciousnesses of its kin whispered in the back of the Eldest’s mind.
They spoke of weakness, of a lack of prey, and that made such whispers ignorable.
Nor was the Eldest a creature capable of dreaming. Instead of sleeping, instead of dreaming as a human would, it remained motionless in the deepest dark, ignoring the thought-pulses of its weakling kin and allowing its somnolent thoughts to linger on the hateful hunger that pained it to its core.
Prey, its sluggish mind ached, burning with need.
Blood. Flesh. Hunger.
II
The demigods moved through the darkness, and Septimus followed.
He was still unsure why the master had demanded he accompany them, but his duty was to obey, not to question.
He’d buckled himself into his ragged atmosphere suit—a poor comparison to the demigods’ all-enclosing Astartes war plate—and he’d followed them down the gunship’s ramp, into the blackness beyond.
“Why are you going with them?” a female voice had crackled over his suit’s vox. To reply, Septimus had needed to switch channels manually, tuning a frequency dial built into the small suit control vambrace on his left arm. By the time he’d patched into the right channel, the female voice had repeated the question in a tone both more worried and more irritated.
“I said, why are you going with them?”
“I don’t know,” the servant replied. He was already falling behind the Astartes, and was practically jogging to keep pace. For all the use it was, the luminator mounted on the side of his helm cast its weak lance of light wherever he looked. A beam of dull amber light speared ahead, cutting the darkness with illumination so thin and dim it was almost worthless.
The spotlight brushed over arched walls of unpolished metal, gantry floor decking and—after only a few minutes—the first body.
The master and his brothers had a
lready passed, but Septimus slowed in his stride, kneeling by the corpse.
“Keep up, slave,” one of them voxed back to him as they descended deeper into the dark tunnels. “Ignore the bodies.”
Septimus allowed himself a last look at the body—human, male, frozen stiff in the heatless dark. He could have been dead a week, or a hundred years. All sense of decay was halted with the vessel powered down and open to the void.
A rime of frost coated everything with a crystalline second skin, from the walls to the decking to the dead man’s tortured face.
“Keep up, slave,” the voice called back again, snarling and low.
Septimus raised his gaze, and the weak beam trailed out into the darkness. He couldn’t see the master, or the master’s brothers. They’d moved too far ahead. What met his questing stare instead was altogether more gruesome, yet not entirely unexpected.
Three more corpses, each as frost-rimed and death-tensed as the first, each one frozen tight to the metal floor of their corridor tomb. Septimus touched the closest ice-hardened wound with his gloved fingertips, making a face as he touched torn bones and red meat as unyielding as stone.
He felt the decking shiver under thudding footfalls. With the ship open to the void, the approaching demigod’s steps were soundless, sending tremors through the floor. Septimus raised his head again, and the lamp beam illuminated a suit of armour the troubled, turgid blue of flawed sapphire.
“Septimus,” the towering suit of armour voxed. In its dark fists was a heavy bolter of bulky, archaic design, much too large for a human to carry, adorned with bleached skulls hanging from chains of polished bronze. The cannon’s muzzle had been forged into a wide-jawed skull, the barrel thrusting from the skeleton’s screaming mouth.
Septimus knew the weapon well, for he was the one who maintained it, repaired it and honoured the machine-spirit within. He rose to his feet.
“Forgive me, Lord Mercutian.”
The warrior’s slanted eye lenses scanned him with unblinking scrutiny. “Is something amiss?”
Mercutian’s voice, even over the vox, had a quality most of the others lacked. Nestled among the inhuman depth and resonance was a hint of altered vowels, born of his accent. The refined edge to Mercutian’s speech hinted at a youth of expensive education, and it coloured his Nostraman.
“No, lord. Nothing is amiss. Curiosity overtook me, that’s all.”
The warrior inclined his head back down the corridor. “Come, Septimus. Stay close. Does the additional weight trouble you?”
“No, lord.”
That was a lie, but not much of one. He carried a heavy ammunition canister over his shoulder, in addition to the oxygen tanks on his back. The canister was densely packed with folded belts of ammunition for the massive bolter cannon clutched in Mercutian’s gauntlets. The warrior carried two similar containers himself, locked to his belt.
Another voice crackled over the vox—also speaking in Nostraman, but with a bladed end to each syllable. Septimus knew the hive ganger accent well enough. He’d learned to speak it himself, as a natural inflection when his master had taught him the language. Most of the demigods spoke in the same way.
“Hurry up, both of you,” the voice barked.
“We’re coming, Xarl,” replied Mercutian.
The warrior led the way, immense gun lowered, boots thumping noiselessly on the decking. He stepped over the dead bodies, paying them no heed.
Septimus moved around them, marking how each one had been disembowelled with gruesome totality. He’d seen wounds like these before, but only on hololithic biological displays.
As he followed Mercutian, the slave adjusted the tuning dial on his wrist.
“Genestealers,” he whispered into the private channel.
The woman on the other end was named Octavia, for she was the eighth slave, just as Septimus was the seventh.
“Be careful,” she said, and she meant it.
Septimus didn’t reply at first. Octavia’s tone showed she knew just how insane her own words were, given the existence they shared as pawns of the Night Lords.
“Have they told you why we’re here? I’m not buying the salvage story.”
“Not a word,” she said. “They’ve been silent with me since we left the Sea of Souls.”
“We used to salvage hulks all the time back on the Covenant of Blood. At least, when we weren’t cut to pieces by Imperial guns. But this feels different.”
“Different how?”
“Worse. For a start, this one is bigger.” Septimus checked his wrist chronometer again. He’d been on board the hulk for three hours now.
Three hours before, a wicked blade of a vessel had translated in-system, leaving the warp’s grip in a burst of plasma mist and engine fire.
The ship was the dark of a winter’s midnight sky, its edges embossed in the kind of beaten, shining bronze that covered the armoured torsos of Terra’s ancient heroes in those ignorant, impious generations before mankind had first reached out into the stars.
A thing of militaristic beauty—armoured ridges and gothic spinal architecture, presented in sleek viciousness. It was a barbed spear, blackened-blue and golden bronze, surging through the void.
There were no active vessels nearby, Imperial, xenos or otherwise, but had any been present—and had they possessed the capacity to break the auspex encryption haze projected by the dark ship—they would have known the ship by the name it bore in the Horus Heresy ten thousand years before.
In that foulest of ages, this ship had hung in the skies above Holy Terra as the world’s atmosphere burned. A million ships painted the void with flame as they raged at each other, while the planet below, the cradle of humanity, caught fire.
This ship had been there, and it had slain vessels loyal to the Golden Throne, casting them from orbit to tear through Terra’s cloud cover and hammer into the Emperor’s cities.
Its name was Ashallius S’Veyval, in a dead language, from a dead world. In Imperial Gothic, it translated loosely as Echo of Damnation.
III
The Echo of Damnation ghosted forwards on low-burning engines, cutting space in silent repose. On its bridge, humans worked in unison with beings that hadn’t been human for generations.
In the centre of the ornate chamber, a figure sat on a throne of black iron and burnished bronze. The Astartes wore ancient armour, the pieces cannibalised from a dozen and more dead warriors over the years and repainted with great reverence. Jawless skulls hung on chains from his shoulder guards, rattling with each of the warrior’s movements and every shiver of the ship he commanded. The face he presented to the world was a skulled faceplate, with a single rune drawn from a dead language branded into its forehead.
A hive of activity pulsed around the seated figure. Officers in outdated Imperial Navy uniforms bereft of insignia worked at various consoles, tables and cogitator screens. An ageing human at the broad helm console pushed a heavy steel lever into its locked position, and consulted the display screens before him, reading the scrolling runic text that spilled out in merciless reams. Such a flow of lore would be meaningless to inexpert eyes.
“Translation complete, my lord,” he called over his shoulder. “All decks, all systems, all stable.”
The masked figure upon the throne inclined its head in a slow nod. It was still waiting for something.
A voice—female, young, but stained by exhaustion—spoke out across the bridge, emerging from speakers in the mouths of daemon-faced gargoyles sculpted into the metal walls.
“We made it,” the voiced breathed. “We’re here. As close as I could get.”
At last, the enthroned figure rose to its feet and spoke for the first time in several hours.
“Perfect.” Its voice was deep, inhumanly low, yet possessed of a curiously soft edge. “Octavia?”
“Yes?” the female voice asked again, breezing over the bridge. “I… I need to rest, master.”
“Then rest, Navigator. You have done well.”
/>
Several of the human bridge crew shared uncomfortable glances. This new commander was unlike the last. Acclimatisation was slow in coming, as most of them had served under the Exalted—or even worse masters—for many long years. None were used to hearing praise spoken in their presences, and it aroused suspicion before anything else.
From an alcove in the bridge chamber’s western wall, the scrymaster called out his report. Although he was human, his voice was mechanical, with half of his face, throat and torso replaced by inexpensive, crude bionics. The augmetics that served in place of his human flesh had been earned for his actions in the Fall of Vilamus, five months before.
“Auspex is alive again, master,” he called.
“Illuminate me,” said the armoured commander. He was staring at the occulus, but the great screen at the front of the bridge chamber remained half-dead, blinded by ferocious interference. He was unconcerned, well used to such static annoyance after a journey through the warp. The occulus always took a while to realign and revive.
Sometimes, he saw faces in the greyish storm of confused signals that blasted across the crackling viewscreen—faces of the fallen, the lost, the forgotten and the damned.
These always made him smile, even as they screamed at him in voices of tortured white noise.
The scrymaster spoke while staring down at his auspex displays, spread over four flickering screens, each one detailing a spread of numerical lore about the ship’s surroundings.
“At three-quarters velocity, we’re fifteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds from boarding pod range from intended target.”
The commander smiled behind his faceplate. Blood of the father, Octavia. All praise to your skills for this, he thought. To break from the Sea of Souls this close to a moving target. For such a young Navigator, she was skilled—or lucky—beyond all expectation, adapting to racing through the secret pathways of the empyrean with tenacity and instinct.
Fear the Alien Page 25
