“Any contacts from nearby vessels?”
“None, master.”
All good so far. The commander nodded to the left side of the bridge, where the defensive stations were manned by ragged-uniformed officers and servitors capable of focussing on nothing but their appointed duties.
“Maintain the Shriek,” he ordered.
“Yes, master,” one of the officers called. The man, an acolyte of the broken Mechanicum, possessed an additional pair of multi-jointed arms extending from his back-mounted power pack. These worked on a separate console beside the one he manipulated with his biological fingers.
“Plasma bleed is significant,” the acolyte intoned. “The Shriek can be maintained for another two point one-five hours before aura-scrye inhibitors must be powered down.”
That would be long enough. The commander would cease the Shriek as soon as the region was absolutely secure. Until then, he was content to let the Echo of Damnation fill nearspace with a thousand frequencies of howling noise and wordless machine-screams. Any other vessels in range to trace the Echo on their scanners would find their auspex readers unable to detect definitive targets in the jamming field, and their vox channels conquered by the endless static-laden screams.
The Shriek had been Tech-priest Deltrian’s most recent invention. Invisibility to Imperial scanning had its uses, but it also fed with greedy abandon on power that other areas of the ship needed to function. When the Shriek was live, the void shields were thin, and the prow lances were completely powered down.
“All remaining power to the engines.” The commander still watched the distorted occulus. “Bring us closer to the target.”
“Lord,” the scrymaster swallowed. “The target is… it’s vast.”
“It is a Mechanicus vessel. The fact it’s huge is no surprise to me, nor should it be to you.”
“No, master. It reads as significantly larger than vessels of approximate design and specification.”
“Define ‘vast’,” said the commander.
“Auspex reports indicate a mass in approximation of Jathis Secundus, master.”
There was a pause, during which the bridge fell almost silent. The loudest sound was the commander’s breathing, which rasped in and out of his helm’s vox-speaker. The crew were still unfamiliar with their new master, but they could all too easily recognise the harsh breathing of an Astartes on the edge of losing his temper.
“We have dropped from the warp,” the commander hissed through closed teeth, “to seek a ship fused within a space hulk. And you are telling me the scryers indicate this hulk is the size of a small moon?”
“Yes, my lord,” the scrymaster cringed.
“Do not flinch when addressing me. I will not slay you for delivering irritating information.”
“Yes, master. Thank you, master.”
The commander’s next reply was interrupted by the occulus, at last, resolving into focus. The static cleared, the distortion bled away.
The screen showed, with treacherous clarity, a distant mesh of conjoined, ruined spaceships, fused together as if by the will of some capricious, mad god.
And it was, as the commander had cursed, the size of a small moon.
One of the other Astartes by the commander’s throne stepped forwards, his own dark helm inclined towards the occulus.
“Blood of Horus… There must be two hundred ships in that.”
The commander nodded, unable to look away. It was the largest drifting hulk he’d ever seen. It was, he was almost certain, the largest any human or Astartes had ever seen.
“Scan that insane mess for the remnants of the Mechanicus exploratory vessel,” he growled. “Hopefully it will be one of the ships merged at the outer layers. Acolyte, cease the Shriek. Helm, bring us in closer.”
A muted “Compliance, master”, came from the primary helmsman.
“Make ready First Claw for boarding operations,” the commander said to the other Astartes. As he re-seated himself on the metallic throne, he stared at the growing superstructure filling the occulus. Details, warped contours, mangled spires, were beginning to become visible.
“And inform Lucoryphus of the Bleeding Eyes that I wish to speak with him immediately.”
When its claws were not in use, they closed into awkward talons, curling in upon themselves and betraying a creature no longer suited to walking along the ground. Its movements had a jagged hesitance as it entered the chamber, punctuated by twitches in its limbs and flaw-born tics in its enhanced musculature. This spasming posture had nothing to do with cowardice, and everything to do with the fact that the beast was caged—forced to act as one of its former brethren—forced to walk and speak.
Such things had been alien to the creature, if not completely anathema, for some time now. It walked on all fours, hunched over in a cautious stalk, hand-talons and foot-claws clanking on the deck. The cylindrical turbine engines on its back swayed with the creature’s awkward gait.
The being’s helmed face showed little evidence of the ties to its bloodline, now changed by war and the warp into something altogether more hateful. Gone were the runic markings and a painted skull over blessed ceramite. In place of traditional Legion signifiers, a sleek faceplate offered a howling daemon’s visage to the world beyond, with a mourn grille set in a scream that had lasted since its god-father died.
The twisted face flicked to watch each of the other Astartes in turn, snapping left and right like a falcon choosing prey. The servos and fibre bundle cabling making up its armour’s neck joints no longer purred with easy locomotion, they barked with each accusing twitch of its face.
“Why summon?” the creature demanded in a voice that wouldn’t have been out of place creaking from the gnarled maw of a desert vulture. “Why summon? Why?”
Talos rose from the command throne. First Claw moved as he moved, five other Astartes approaching the hunched creature, their weapons within easy reach.
“Lucoryphus,” Talos said, and inclined his head in respect before saluting, fist over both hearts, his gauntlet and forearm covering the ritually mutilated Imperial eagle emblazoned across his chest.
“Soul Hunter.” It snarled a chuckle from lungs that sounded much too dry. “Speak, prophet. I listen.”
Soon after, the Echo of Damnation drifted in close, dwarfed by the immense hulk and utterly eclipsed in the shadow it cast from the light of a distant sun.
Two pods blasted from housings in the ship’s belly, twisting like drills through the void until they pounded into the softer metal of the hulk’s skin.
On the Echo’s bridge, two signals pulsed back to the communications array. The first was soft-voiced and coloured by vox crackle. The second was delivered in short, sharp hisses.
“This is Talos of First Claw. We’re in.”
“Lucoryphus. Ninth Claw. Inside.”
IV
Ten hours in, and seven hours since he’d last spoken to Octavia. The ship through which they travelled had gravity and air cyclers active, which was a small mercy.
Septimus knew better than to confess his hunger to the Astartes. They were above such things, and had no mind to be concerned with mortal needs. He had dehydrated ration tablets in his webbing, but they did little more than take the edge off his hunger. First Claw moved through the dark corridors with a relentlessness made sinister by their silence. An hour before, Septimus had risked stopping to take a piss against a bulkhead, and had needed to sprint to catch back up to them.
His return had been greeted with nothing more than a growl from one of the squad. Clad in ancient armour, a bloodied palm-print smeared across the faceplate, Uzas had snarled at the returning human.
As greetings went, by Uzas’ standards it was almost cordial.
They’d travelled through fourteen vessels, though it was a nightmare to decide just where one finished and another started, or if they were moving through the aborted remnants of a malformed ship they’d already crossed in another section.
Most of t
he time was spent waiting for the servitors to cut—cutting through sealed bulkheads; cutting through warped walls of fuselage; cutting through mangled metal to reach a traversable area beyond.
The two servitors laboured with mindless diligence, their actions slaved to the signum control tablet held in Deltrian’s skeletal hands. Drills, saws, laser cutters and plasma burners heated the air around the two bionic slaves as they carved their way through another blockage of twisted wall.
The tech-priest watched this through eyes of emerald, the gems sculpted into layered lenses and fixed into the sockets of his restructured face.
Deltrian had fashioned his own body to exacting standards. The schematics he had designed in the construction of his physique were, by the standards of human intellect, closer to art than engineering. Such was the effort necessary to survive the centuries alongside the Astartes, when one lacked the immortality allowed by their gene-forged physiology.
He knew he made the human uneasy. He was familiar with the effect his appearance had on unaugmented mortals. The equations in his mind that mimicked biological thought patterns reached no answer to rectify this adverse effect, and he was not certain it was—technically speaking—an error to be corrected. Fear had its uses, when harvested from others. This was a lesson he had learned from his association with the Night Lords.
The tech-priest acknowledged the human now with an inclination of his head. The serf was one of the chosen, and deserved a modicum of respect due to his position as artificer for First Claw’s armour and weapons.
“Septimus,” he said. The human started, while the servitors worked on.
“Honoured adept,” the slave nodded back. The corridor they occupied was low and claustrophobic. First Claw were busying themselves elsewhere, patrolling nearby chambers.
“Do you know why you are here, Septimus?”
Septimus didn’t have an answer.
Deltrian was an ugly thing of darkened metal, fluid-filled wires and polished chrome—a metallic skeleton complete with its circulatory system, and wreathed in an old robe of thick weave, the colour of blood in the moonlight.
It must have taken a perverse sense of humour to reforge your own body over the decades into something that looked like a bionic replica of some pre-Imperial Terran death god. Septimus didn’t share the joke, if indeed it was one.
For the moment, Deltrian’s eye lenses were deep green, likely cut from emeralds. This was by no means a permanent feature. Often, they were red, blue or transparent, showing the wire-works behind, linking to a brain that was at least partly still human.
“I do not know, honoured adept. The masters have not told me.”
“I believe I am able to make an approximate analysis.” Deltrian laughed, buzzing like a vox slipping from the right frequency.
There was a threat buried in that. Irritation made Septimus bold, but he kept his hands from resting on the two holstered laspistols at his hips. Deltrian might be favoured as an ally from the Mechanicus, but he was just as shackled in service to the VIII Legion as Septimus was.
“Feel free to enlighten me, honoured adept.”
“You are human.” The skinless creature turned its death’s-head grin away to regard its servitors once more. “Human, and unarmoured in enclosing ceramite. Your blood, your heartbeat, your sweat and breath—all of these biological details will be detected by the predatory xenos species aboard this hulk.”
“With all respect, Deltrian,” Septimus turned, looking back at the long corridor they’d walked down, “you’re deluded.”
“I see you and I hear you all too well, and my engineered stimulus array is comparable to the senses of the genestealer genus. My aural receptors register your breathing like a world’s winds, and your beating heart like the primal drums of a primitive culture. If I sense this, Septimus—and I assure you that I do—then you should know that the many living beings sheltering on this derelict sense it as well.”
Septimus snorted. The idea of the Night Lords using him—one of their more valuable slaves—as bait, was…
“Contact,” voxed Talos.
In the distance, bolters began to bark.
V
The Eldest stirred from the cold, cold darkness of the nothingness that was as close to sleep as its species could know.
A faint pain echoed, faded but troubling, in the base of its curved skull. This weak pain soon spread with gentle insistence, beating through its blood vessels and twinning with the creature’s pulse. The pain cobwebbed down the Eldest’s spine and through its facial structure, emanating from its sluggish mind.
This was not the pain of a wound, of defeat, of a hunter denied. It did not eclipse the hunger-need, but it was even less welcome. Its taste and resonance were so very different, and the Eldest had not felt such a thing for… for some time.
Its kin were dying. The Eldest felt each puncturing hole, each ravaged limb, each bleeding socket, in this echoing ghost-pain.
In the darkness, it uncoiled its limbs. Joints clicked and cracked as they tensed and flexed once more.
Its killing claws shivered, opening and closing in the cool air. Digestive acid stung its tongue as its saliva ducts tingled back into life. The Eldest drew a shaking breath through rows of shark’s teeth, and the cold air was a catalyst to its senses. Its featureless eyes opened, thick ropes of drool slivering down its chin, dangling from its maw to fall in hissing spittle-droplets on the decking.
After dragging itself from the confines of its hiding place, the Eldest set out through the ship in search of the creatures killing its children.
It smelled blood in the air, heard the rhythm of a prey’s heart, and scented salty sweat on soft skin. More than this, it sensed the buzzing hum of living sentience, the brain’s fleshy electricity of emotion and thought.
Life.
Human. Near.
The Eldest clicked to itself with bladed mouth-parts, and leaned forwards into a hungry run, bolting through the black passageways with its claws hammering on the metal.
Kin, it sent silently, I come.
VI
Lucoryphus and his team were not slowed down by the presence of a human or a tech-priest. Nor did they rely on lobotomised servitors to breach obstructions. Instead, several of Lucoryphus’ Raptors were armed with melta guns, breathing out searing surges of gaseous heat intense enough to liquidate the metal it blasted.
As a pack, the Bleeding Eyes—still growing used to their new designation of Ninth Claw—moved at far greater speed through the amalgamation of twisted ships. Unlike Talos and First Claw, Lucoryphus and his brothers had no specific target. They scouted, they stalked, they sought whatever of worth they could find.
And so far, that had been nothing at all.
The boredom was made bitter by the fact that had they been heading deeper in search of the conjoined Mechanicus vessel at the hulk’s core, Lucoryphus was sure the Bleeding Eyes would have been there by now, and on their way back out.
Vox was increasingly erratic as Ninth Claw pressed ahead of their brothers, and Lucoryphus was fast losing patience with First Claw’s progress. The initial hesitations had come from their human slave holding them back. Then their tech-adept had forced them to lag behind while he—while it—bled information from various databanks and memory tablets in the ships First Claw was cutting through.
“Vaporiser weapons,” Lucoryphus’ hissing voice carried over the vox, “Melta-class weapons. No cutting. No cutting servitors. Much faster.”
Talos’ reply was punctuated by the dull juddering of bolters. “Noted. Be aware, we’ve encountered an insignificant genestealer threat. Minimal numbers, at least in this section. What is your location?”
Lucoryphus led his pack onwards, through spacious corridors, each of the Raptors hunched and loping beast-like on all fours. The construction of these passageways was utterly familiar.
“Astartes ship, Standard Template Construct. Not ours. Throne slaves.”
“Understood. Any xenos presence
?”
“Some. Few. All dead now.” The cylindrical engine housings on his back idled in disuse, occasionally coughing black smoke from vent slits. “Moving to enginarium. Vessel still has partial power. Some lights bright. Some doors open. Ship not ancient like others. This is close to hulk’s edge.”
“Understood.” More bolter fire, and the dim sounds of other Astartes cursing as Talos replied, “These things are stunted and weak. They seem almost decrepit.”
“Genestealer xenos present for many decades. No prey, no strength. Beasts grow old, grow frail. Still deadly.”
“It’s no struggle, yet.” The chatter of bolters began to die down. “Report status every ten minutes.”
“Yes, prophet. I obey.”
On four claws, the once-human stalked on, his slanted eye lenses following the contours of the walls.
The corridor at last opened up into a large room, blissful in its dark silence, populated by towering generators and a wall-mounted plasma chamber that still—against all expectations—emitted a faint orange glow from the volatile cocktail of liquids and gases roiling in the glass chamber’s depths.
Without needing orders, the Raptors spread across the engine deck, moving to consoles and gantries, taking up firing positions to cover the room’s exits. Several of the pack let their thrusters whine into life, boosting their way up to the higher platforms.
With difficulty, Lucoryphus fought down the urge to soar with them. Even in the confines of the ship’s interior, he ached to leave the trudging discomfort of the ground behind.
Indulging a little, he cycled his turbines live with an effort as simple and natural as drawing breath. The kick of thrust carried him across the enginarium, to land in a neat crouch before the main power console. Eight dead servitors lay scattered around the controls, reduced to figures of bone and bionics.
One of Lucoryphus’ best, Vorasha, was already at the console, his curving finger-talons clicking at the controls.
Fear the Alien Page 26
