On Variel’s left arm, his vambrace was a converted narthecium unit, containing liquid nitrogen storage pods, flesh drills, bone saws and surgical lasers. While his faceplate no longer bore the white paint of an Apothecary, he still carried the tools of his specialised craft. Instead of human skulls hanging from chains on his armour, Variel’s war plate was decorated by the shattered helms of Red Corsair Astartes. It was these differences, subtle but significant, that set him apart from the others of First Claw.
Both Talos and Variel clutched their bolters, barely watching Deltrian work, instead focussing their attentions around the spacious chamber and the rows of blank cogitator screens.
Septimus hadn’t removed his helmet, even with breathable air restored. He walked closer to Talos, casting a sidelong glance at the busy tech-priest.
“Master,” he voxed to the towering Astartes.
Talos spared Septimus a momentary look. The slave’s long hair, lank with sweat, was tied into a scruffy ponytail. The bionic portions of his face were glinting with reflection from the overhead lights—well maintained and clean.
“Septimus. Be ready. The xenos are near.”
The Legion serf didn’t ask how everyone but him seemed to know what was coming. He was long-used to his human senses rendering him disadvantaged in the company of the warriors he still instinctively referred to as demigods.
“Master, why did you bring me here?”
Talos appeared to be watching a distant, shadowed wall. He didn’t answer.
“Master?”
“Why do you ask?” the warrior said, still paying little attention. “You have never questioned your duty before.”
“I seek only to understand my place and role.”
Talos moved away, bolter at the ready. The Night Lord’s mouth grille emitted a vox-distorted snarl. Septimus tensed, and didn’t follow.
“I sense your fear. You are not here as bait. Remain sanguine. We will keep you alive.”
“Deltrian suggested otherwise.”
“We might be here for days, Septimus. If our armour needed repairing, I wanted you at hand to do your duty.”
Days…? Days?
“That long, master?”
There was a series of clicks as Talos changed to a limited vox channel, between himself and his slave.
“In respect for our honoured tech-adept, I will not say that Deltrian works slowly I will alter the description, citing instead that he works meticulously But you are not dense, Septimus. You know what he is like.”
“Yes, but still… Master, could this really take days?”
“I sincerely hope not. It has already taken long enough. If the—”
“Soul Hunter.”
Talos swore softly, and in Nostraman the curse came out like gentle poetry. The voice coming over the vox was harsh, almost screeching. Lucoryphus’ blood was up, and it filtered into his voice with astonishing clarity.
“Acknowledged, Lucoryphus.”
“Too many of them.”
“Confirm xenos sightings in—”
“Not the aliens! Bastard sons of Vulkan! Two full teams. They kill and kill. Nine Bleeding Eyes are dead. Nine to never rise again. Nine of twenty!”
“Be calm, brother.” Talos bit back the urge to rail at the Raptor leader for his accursed vainglory. Such idiocy had cost nine lives in a battle that could never have been won without patience and caution.
Letting them slip the leash had been a mistake.
“I go now to Vorasha,” Lucoryphus hissed. “We slaughter them all this time.”
“Enough. Will you fall back now? Will you wait until we regroup on the ship and strike from the void?”
“But the—”
“Enough. Fall back to your second team and abandon the Protean. Return to First Claw and we will make ready to leave. Let the Throne’s slaves scurry around for their own salvage.”
“Understood.”
“Lucoryphus. Confirm your intentions.”
“Will fall back. Find Vorasha. Return to First Claw.”
“Good.” Talos terminated the vox-link, swallowing a mouthful of bitter, acidic saliva. Not for the first time, and not for the last, he reflected that he loathed the duties of command.
Lucoryphus cast the melta gun aside, letting it clatter to the deck. He wouldn’t be needing it again. The thrusters on his back still streamed thin smoke from coolant vents, powering down after the sudden boost necessary to send him up into the ceiling in order to escape the chattering storm bolters of the Salamanders’ elite warriors.
With the melta gun—a weapon stolen from the twitching corpse of Shar Gan—he had seared a whole in the ceiling and escaped up to the next deck.
He’d been hit himself. With a cracked breastplate, Lucoryphus could feel his armour’s strength depleted, some vital power feeds cut by explosive bolter fire.
Bipedal walking was an awkward trial even when uninjured, so Lucoryphus crawled as he’d become accustomed, all four claws finding tight purchase on the gantry floor.
He moved with unnerving speed, though it hurt to do so.
“Vorasha…” his lips were wet with blood. The pain of his wounds was an irritant, but no more than that.
“Yes-yes.” The vox distortion was savage now. Lucoryphus’ war plate was in worse shape than he’d first thought. His visor kept fuzzing with static at inconvenient moments.
“Orders are to return to First Claw.”
“I heard this,” Vorasha replied. “I will obey.”
“Wait.”
“Wait?”
“More Salamanders than we first saw. Many more. Find xenos nests. Awaken aliens. Lead aliens to Salamanders. Both enemies fight, both enemies die. Vengeance for Bleeding Eyes.”
Vorasha’s reply was a serpentine snigger, Ss-ss-ss.
“Go now!” Lucoryphus screeched. “Lead xenos to Salamanders!”
IX
With a moist snick, the membranes covering the Eldest’s sensitive eyes peeled back. It looked down the long chamber, seeing telltale suggestions of flickering movement. The human-scent was stronger now. So much stronger.
The Eldest stalked forwards, claws scraping on the metal floor. Two of the more dangerous prey-breed, those with the hammering weapons of punching fire, had entered the chamber. Though the Eldest’s bestial intelligence did not count them capable of slaying the creature, it had learned its lesson well. This was not a hunt to make alone.
From its place of hiding in the shadows, The Eldest had been screaming in silence for some time. Its kin were coming, dozens upon dozens of them, coming through the tunnels and chambers nearby.
It would be enough to overwhelm even the most dangerous prey.
“I see it,” Talos voxed.
He stared into the darkness, looking away into the six hundred metres of shadowed chamber to the north. “It emerged from the wall a moment ago.”
“I see it, too.” This, from Variel. He approached Talos and hefted his bolter, his thermal sight easily piercing the gloom. “Blood of the Emperor, Mercutian wasn’t lying.”
“A broodlord,” the prophet murmured, watching the hideous alien—all chitinous limbs, clawed appendages and bulbous skull—creep closer. “An immense one. Fire when it reaches optimal range. Avoid damage to the wall cogitators.”
“Compliance,” Variel said, and Talos could still hear the edge of reluctance in the newcomer’s tone. His induction into the VIII Legion was still fresh, and he wasn’t used to taking orders.
Talos raised his bolter, sighting through the targeter and drawing breath to summon the others. The vox chose that moment to erupt in sounds of gunfire and Nostraman curses. All of First Claw were engaged, flooded by waves of the weakened beasts.
The others evidently had their own problems.
On Talos’ red-tinted visor, a proximity rune turned white. In the very same moment, Talos and Variel opened fire.
Deltrian’s fingers blurred as they tapped keys, pushed levers and adjusted dials. The locking cod
e obscuring the information he desired was remarkably complex, and forced a degree of instrument adjustment even as his personally designed crack-keys did their work in the cogitator’s programming. This was not an unexpected development, but it necessitated a division of attention that the tech-adept found galling. Added to the annoyance, the firefight fifty metres to his left was a raucous irritation, for bolters were hardly quiet weapons, and the corporaptor primus—a breed of xenos Deltrian had never witnessed firsthand—howled endlessly as it endured the process of being blown apart by explosive rounds.
The crack-crack, crack-crack of Septimus’ laspistols joined the throaty chatter of boltgun fire, forming a curious percussion.
Almost… Almost….
Deltrian emitted a bleat of machine code from his vocabulator, the sound emerging as a tinny and flat pulse to anyone untrained in comprehending such a unique language. It was as close to a cheer as he had come in many years.
Sixteen separate memory tablets slid from the main cogitator’s data sockets. Each one was the approximate size and shape of a human palm. Each contained a century of recorded lore, right back to the ship’s founding decades.
And each was priceless—an artefact of unrivalled possibility.
“It is done,” the tech-adept said, and began to gather the data-slates, apparently unaware that no one was paying him any heed at all.
He turned to the melee in time to see the alien beast, its body a mess of burst wounds and both ovoid eyes left as ragged, fluid-weeping craters, cleave Variel’s leg at the knee with one of its few remaining limbs. A scythe of blackened bone, its bladed edge cracked and bleeding, chopped down in a lethal arc.
Ceramite armour shattered. The Astartes went down, his leg severed, and still he fired up at the horror drawing closer to slay him.
The death blow came from Talos. His armour a broken mess of claw-chopped metal plating, the prophet took another flailing limb strike to the side of the head in order to risk coming close enough to use his power sword. Lightning trembled along the golden blade as it sparked into life, even as the genestealer patriarch clashed a half-amputated sword-limb against the Night Lord’s helm. White-painted shards of his faceplate tore free, scattering across the metal decking like hailstones.
Talos was close enough now. With half of his face laid bare and bleeding from the creature’s last blow, he rammed the relic sword into the beast’s spine, plunging it two-handed through exoskeletal armour, toughened subdermal muscle flesh, and finally into vulnerable meat and severable bone.
A twist, a wrench, a curse and a pull. He sawed the sword left and right, foul-smelling blood welling up from the widening wound.
The alien shrieked again, acidic ichor spraying from its damaged teeth to rain upon Variel’s armour in hissing droplets. Talos gave his golden blade a final wrenching pull, and the beast’s head came free.
The creature collapsed. It twitched once or twice, the savage wounds across its body leaking sour fluids as well as dark blood. The smell, Septimus would later tell other slaves back aboard the ship, was somewhere between a charnel house and a butcher’s shop left open to the sun for a month. It broke through all air filters, clinging right to the sinuses.
Variel’s armour was pockmarked gunmetal-grey where the corrosive juices from the beast’s maw scored away his war plate’s paint. His severed leg wasn’t bleeding—the coagulants in Astartes blood were already working to seal the wound and scab it over. Any pain was dulled by his armour’s narcotic injectors dispensing stimulants and pain suppressors into his bloodstream.
Yet he growled a curse as he dragged himself away from the stilled beast, and swore in a language only he understood. Deltrian analysed the linguistic pattern. It was most likely a dialect of Badab—a tongue from Variel’s home world. The details were irrelevant.
Talos’ suit of armour was almost entirely stripped of colour, the acids and burning blood having blistered the ceramite and scorched the dark paint away. He regarded the creature’s steaming body, with half of his face visible due to the damage he’d taken to his helm.
The tech-adept saw the prophet scowl, and fire another bolter shell into the dead alien’s severed head. What remained of the genestealers skull vanished in an explosion of wet fragments that clacked off the walls, the floor and Talos’ own armour.
Septimus looked on, catching his breath. He knew repairing and repainting both of these ancient suits of battle plate was going to be a time-consuming process. He felt it was to his credit that he didn’t say so here, and busied himself holstering his Guard-issue laspistols, before leaning against the wall.
“To hell with that,” he breathed.
Deltrian watched this scene for exactly four point two seconds.
“I said, ‘It is done’.” He couldn’t keep the rising impatience from his tone. “May we leave now?”
X
When the Echo of Damnation pulled away from the hulk, the Shriek fell silent as plasma contrails misted the void behind the ship. Engines running, breathing the mist into space, the Echo tore away from the vast amalgamation of forgotten ships.
On the command throne, his armour still a grey and cracked ruin, Talos watched the occulus. It showed a slice of deep space—no more, no less.
“How long ago did they leave the system?” he asked. These were the first words he had uttered since returning and taking the throne. The answer came from one of the ageing human officers, still in his Imperial Navy uniform, albeit stripped of the Emperor’s insignia.
“Just over two hours, my lord. The Salamander vessel was running dangerously hot. We think the Shriek unnerved them—they broke orbit and ran, rather than seek the signal’s source.”
“They did not find the ship?”
“They barely even looked, my lord. They withdrew their boarding teams and fled.”
Talos shook his head. “The sons of Vulkan are placid and slow, but they are Astartes and know no fear. Whatever sent them crawling from the system was a matter of grave import.”
“As you say, my lord. What are your orders?”
Talos snorted. “Two hours is not an insurmountable head-start. Follow them. Make ready all Claws. Once we catch them, we will tear them from the warp and pick apart the bones of their ship.”
“Compliance, master.”
The prophet allowed his eyes to drift closed as the ship rumbled into activity around him.
The Hall of Reflection housed what few relics remained to the warriors of Talos’ warband. In more glorious eras, such a chamber would have been a haven for prayer, for purification through meditation, and to witness the Legion’s history through the weapons and armour once borne and worn by its heroes.
Now, it served as something not quite a workshop, and not quite a graveyard. Deltrian was lord of the chamber, a haven where his will and word were law. Servitors worked at various stations, repairing pieces of armour, replacing the teeth-tracks of fouled chainswords, forging new bolter shells and creating the explosive innards.
And here, in ritually preserved stasis fields, the ornate sarcophagi of fallen warriors were mounted on marble pedestals, awaiting the moment they would be mounted in the bodies of dreadnoughts and sent to war once more. Several fluid-filled suspension tanks bubbled away, most empty—in need of flushing and scrubbing—and a few occupied by naked figures rendered indistinct by the milky, oxygen-rich amniotic fluids.
Deltrian had returned to his sanctum several minutes before, and was already inserting the data tablets into the sockets of his own cogitators, to drain the lore into his own memory banks. The doors to the Hall of Reflection remained open. Deltrian allowed the data transfer to occur unwatched, and instead waited for the guests he was expecting.
At last, they arrived. Twelve warriors, in a ragged line. Each of the dozen Astartes showed signs of recent and grievous battle. Each of them had survived a harrowing six further hours on board the hulk, fending off genestealers and hunting the accursed creatures back to their nests.
The Salamanders had done an admirable job in their purging, but had still lost a total of six warriors on board the Protean, thanks to the efforts of Vorasha and the Bleeding Eyes diverting wave after wave of xenos beasts into their section of the ship.
Six souls lost, six warriors fallen. It did not seem many, on the surface of things. The Night Lords had lost nine—all of them from the Bleeding Eyes. Lucoryphus seemed untroubled.
“The weak fall, the strong rise,” he’d said as they boarded the Echo of Damnation. Deltrian observed that this was as close to philosophy as the degenerate warrior had ever come. The Bleeding Eyes leader had no reply to that.
Deltrian watched the twelve Astartes enter the Hall of Reflection now. Each pair carried a great weight between them: the broken bodies of armoured Salamander warriors. One of the butchered warriors was carved with both surgical precision and gleeful brutality, slain by the Bleeding Eyes and earning the ignoble honour of being the first to fall. The others showed a vicious spread of genestealer wounds: punctured breastplates, sundered limb guards, crushed helms.
But nothing, Deltrian mused, that would be irreparable.
The Night Lords arranged the bodies on the mosaic-inlaid floor. Six dead Salamanders. Six dead Salamanders in Terminator war plate, complete with storm bolters, power weapons and a rare assault rotator cannon—practically unseen amongst the Traitor Legions, who were forced to wage war with scavenged equipment and ancient weaponry.
This haul, this sacred bounty in the blessed Machine-God’s name, was worth infinitely more than the lives of fourteen Night Lords. Deltrian caressed the draconic emblem of the Salamanders Chapter, embossed in black stone on one dead warrior’s pauldron. Such markings could be stripped, the armour itself modified and refashioned… the machine-spirits turned bitter and of more use to the VIII Legion.
Let the Night Lords spit and curse for now. He could see it in their black eyes: each one of them recognised the value of this haul, and each one hoped to be one of the elite few ordained to wear this holy armour once it was profaned and made ready.
Fear the Alien Page 28
