Void Stalker

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  He broke into a run, the pain in his joints all but forgotten. ‘Let me through,’ he said when he needed to, though the crowd parted and was fleeing in the opposite direction with little encouragement from him. The gunship had been more than enough.

  He made it three streets before his knees gave up the fight. He leaned against a shack wall, cursing at the needles in his joints. His heart felt no better, racing to the point of strain, sending tendrils of tightness through his chest. Dannicen thumped a fist against his breastbone, as if anger would soothe the spreading fire.

  More orange glows were showing stark against the clouds now. More of the city was burning.

  He caught his breath, and forced his knees to obey him. They shivered but complied, and Dannicen stumbled forward on shaking legs. He made it another two streets before he had to stop and let his breathing catch up to him.

  ‘Too old for this foolishness,’ he coughed as he slumped against the wall of a grounded Arvus industrial shuttle now serving as a family home.

  Legiones Astartes power armour makes a distinctive thrum: the loud, violent hum of immense energy waiting to be released. The armour joints, not coated in layers of ceramite, are still armoured against harm and filled with servos and fibre-bundle cabling in imitation of living muscles. They snarl and whine with even the most modest movement, from a tilt of the head to a clench of fist.

  Dannicen Meyd didn’t hear any of this, despite it taking place mere metres away from where he stood, struggling to catch his breath. His blood was up, and his ears deaf to all but the ragged drumbeat of his own heart.

  He saw the street clearing of life as people fled. Many were looking back at him, their eyes and mouths wide in screams Dannicen couldn’t quite hear. His teeth itched now, and his gums ached. There was a tremor in the softness of his eyes, as though an aggressive, subsonic sound pulsed nearby. Something he couldn’t hear, but could feel like an unwanted caress.

  He blinked, wiping away the sting of his watering eyes, and lifted his head at last. What he saw crouching on the roof of the shuttle was enough to tear the thin walls of his heart at last.

  The figure wore ancient battle armour, contoured ceramite the colour of midnight. Lightning bolts marked the armour-plating in clawed streaks. Slanted red eyes stared down at him from their place in a skull-faced helm. Spikes and spines knifed up from the figure’s bulky armour, glistening with moisture in the moonlight. Blood coated the thing, from its face to its heavy boots.

  Three heads, their ripped necks still leaking, were tied to its shoulder guard by their own hair.

  Dannicen was already on his knees, his burst heart losing all rhythm. Instead of blood, it pumped pain. Bizarrely, his hearing faded back into being.

  ‘You are suffering heart failure,’ the crouching figure told him in a deep, emotionless rumble. ‘The constriction in your chest and throat. The breath that will not come. This would be more amusing if you feared me, but you do not, do you? How rare.’

  Dannicen raised his lasrifle, even through the pain. The figure reached down to take it from his hands, as though stripping a toy from a child. Without looking, the warrior crushed the barrel in his fist, mangling it and casting it aside.

  ‘Consider yourself fortunate.’ The figure reached next to lift the ageing man by his grey hair. ‘Your life ends in mere moments. You will never feel what it is like to be thrown into the skinning pits.’

  Dannicen breathed out a strangled, wordless syllable. He was soiling himself, without feeling it, without realising, as he lost control of his body at the edge of death.

  ‘This is our world,’ Mercutian told the dying man. ‘You should never have come here.’

  Tora Seech was seven years old. Her mother worked in a hydroponics basement, her father taught sector children to read, write and pray. She hadn’t seen either of them in several minutes, since they’d run into the street and told her to wait in the single room that served the family as a house.

  Outside, she could hear everyone shouting and running. The city’s sirens were wailing loud, but there’d been no storm warnings before this. Usually her parents gave her a few days to pack and get ready to head to the shelters before the sirens started up.

  They wouldn’t have left her here. They wouldn’t have run away with everyone else and left her here alone.

  The growl started from far away, and came closer each time her heart beat. It was a dog’s growl, an angry dog fed up with being kicked. Then the footsteps followed it. Something blocked the pale light from her window, and she dragged her thin blanket higher. She hated the sheet, it had fleas that brought her out in itchy lumps, but it was too cold without it. Now she needed it to hide.

  ‘I see you under there,’ said a voice in the room. A low, snarling voice with a crackle, like a machine-spirit come to life. ‘I see the heat of your little limbs. I hear the beat of your little heart. I taste your fear, and it is sweet indeed.’

  The bootsteps thudded slowly closer, making her bed shiver. Tora squeezed her eyes shut. The sheet was a whisper against her skin as it was dragged away, leaving her cold.

  She screamed for her parents when the cold metal hand gripped her ankle. The shadow hauled her from her bed, holding her upside down. She saw the brief flash of a long silver knife.

  ‘This will hurt,’ Cyrion told her. His red eyes stared at her without emotion, without life. ‘But it will not last long.’

  Gerrick Colwen saw one of them when he went back for his pistol. At first he thought his street was empty. He was wrong.

  His first clear glance was of a figure almost a metre taller than a normal man, wearing spiked armour drawn from the depths of mythology. A skinless, bleeding body hung over each shoulder, raining dark fluid onto the dark armour-plating. Three more cadavers trailed along behind in the dust, hooked to the walking warrior by bronze chains pushed into their spines. Each of them had been skinned in the same crude rush, the skin peeled and torn from their body in indelicate rips. Dusty soil coated them now like false skin, painting the exposed musculature dark with ash.

  Gerrick raised his pistol, in the bravest moment of his life.

  Variel turned to him, a bloody flesh-saw in one hand and an ornate bolt pistol in the other. A sourceless peal of thunder boomed between them.

  Something hit Gerrick in the stomach with the force of a truck crash. He couldn’t even shout, so fast did all air leave his lungs, nor did he have time to fall before the bolt in his belly detonated, taking him apart in a flash of light.

  There was no pain. He saw the stars spinning, the buildings tumbling, and fell into blackness just as his legless torso struck the mud road. The life was gone from his eyes before his skull cracked open on the ground, spilling its contents into the dirt, leaving him long dead before Variel started skinning him.

  Amar Medrien pounded his fists on the sealed door.

  ‘Let us in!’

  The shelter entrance for three streets of his subsector was in the basement of the Axle Grinder, a dive bar set on a tri-junction. He never drank there, and the only time he’d spent more than five minutes in the place was the Grey Winter four years before, when most of his district had endured three weeks underground during dust storms that ravaged their homes.

  He stood outside the sealed bulkhead with a tide of others, locked out of their assigned emergency shelter.

  ‘They locked it too early,’ voices were saying, back and forth.

  ‘It’s not a storm.’

  ‘Did you see the fires?’

  ‘Why did they seal the doors?’

  ‘Break them down.’

  ‘The archregent is dead.’

  Amar ran his fingers along the door’s seams, knowing he wouldn’t find any sign of weakness, but with nothing left to do in the press of bodies from behind. If they kept packing the basement – and the flood showed no sign of slowing – he’d be crushed a
gainst the old iron before long.

  ‘They’re not going to open it…’

  ‘It’s already full.’

  He shook his head as he heard the last remark. How could it be full? The bunker had room for over four hundred people. Close to sixty were still out here with him. Someone’s elbow dug into his side.

  ‘Stop pushing!’ someone else shouted. ‘We can’t get it open.’

  Amar grunted as someone shoved him from behind. His face thumped against the cold iron, and he couldn’t even get enough room to throw an elbow back to clear some space.

  The tinny whine of the door release was the most beautiful song he’d ever heard. People around him cheered and wept, backing away at last. Sweating hands gripped at the door’s seams, pulling it open on hinges in dire need of oiling.

  ‘Merciful God-Emperor…’ Amar whispered at the scene within. Bodies littered the bunker’s floor, each one mutilated beyond recognition. Blood – a slow river of the thick, stinking fluid – gushed out across Amar’s boots and over the ankles of those waiting behind him. Those who couldn’t see what he saw were already shoving against those in the front rows, eager to get into their false solace.

  Amar saw severed limbs cast in every direction; blood-spattered fingers gently curled as they dipped into the bloody pools across the floor. Body upon body upon body, many strewn where they had fallen, others heaped in piles. The walls were flecked with graceless sprays of red over the dark stone.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, so quiet that he couldn’t even hear himself. The shoving from behind didn’t cease. ’Wait…’

  He stumbled with the pressure, staggering into the chamber. As soon as he crossed the threshold, he heard the roar of a chainblade revving up.

  Streaked with blood, most notably a fresh palm-print on the faceplate of his helm, Uzas rose from his hiding place beneath a cairn of corpses.

  ‘Blood for the Blood God.’ He spoke through lips stringed by spit. ‘Skulls for the Eighth Legion.’

  The archregent looked down at the fires, and wondered how metal ships could burn. He knew it wasn’t the hull itself catching flame, but the flammable contents within the vessel’s body. Still, it seemed strange to watch smoke and flame pouring from ruptures in the walls of his grounded ship. The wind couldn’t steal all the smoke. Great plumes of it choked the air around the observation spire, severing his sight beyond the closest buildings.

  ‘Do we know how much of the city is burning?’ he asked the guard by his desk.

  ‘What few reports we’ve had suggest most of the population is making it to their assigned shelters.’

  ‘Good,’ the archregent nodded. ‘Very good.’ For whatever it’s worth, he thought. If their attackers had come to kill them, hiding in the subterranean shelters would achieve nothing beyond herding the people together like animals for the slaughter. Still, it reduced the chaos on the streets, and that made it progress of a kind.

  ‘The lockdown list, sire,’ another guard said. He wore the same bland uniform as the first, and carried a data-slate in one gloved hand. The archregent glanced at it, noting the number of shelters reporting green light lockdowns.

  ‘Very good,’ he said again. ‘If the raiders make demands, I want to be informed the moment the words have left their lips. Where is Abettor Muvo?’

  Providence answered, as Muvo entered before any of the twelve guards could reply.

  ‘Sire, the western granaries are burning.’

  The archregent closed his eyes. He said nothing.

  ‘Landers are coming down in the western districts, deploying servitors, mutants, machinery and… Throne only knows what else. They’re excavating pits and hurling the bodies of our people into the holes.’

  ‘Have we managed to send word to the other settlements?’

  The abettor nodded. ‘Respite and Sanctum both sent acknowledgements of warnings received.’ He paused for a moment, his bloodshot eyes flicking to the scene beyond the glass dome walls. ‘Neither of them will have any better chance at defending against this than we do.’

  The archregent took a breath. ‘What of our militia?’

  ‘Some of them are gathering, others are heading into the shelters with their families. The Watchmen are organising shelter retreats. Should we call them off storm protocol?’

  ‘Not yet. Spread word through the streets that all Watchmen and militia should gather at their assigned strongholds as soon as the shelters are locked down. We have to fight back, Muvo.’

  He looked at his two guards, and cleared his throat. ‘With that in mind, might I have a weapon, young man?’

  The guard blinked. ‘I… sire?’

  ‘That pistol will do, thank you.’

  ‘Do you know how to fire it, sire?’

  The archregent forced a smile. ‘I do indeed. Now then, Muvo, I need you to… Muvo?’

  The abettor raised a shaking hand, pointing over the archregent’s shoulder. Every man in the chamber turned, facing a huge vulture silhouette in the smoke. The dome was dense enough to drown out all sound, but the amber flare of the gunship’s engines cast myriad reflections across the reinforced glass. They watched it rise higher, an avian wraith in the mist, until it hovered above the dome’s ceiling. Fire washed down against the dome, spilling liquid-like over the surface, beautiful to behold from below.

  The archregent saw the gunship’s maw open, a ramp lowering into the air, and two figures fall from the sky. A flash of gold from one of their hands speared downward, splitting the dome with brutal cracks from the impaling point.

  Both figures’ boots struck the cracks as they fell, shattering the dome’s ceiling in a storm of glass. Razor diamonds rained into the centre of the chamber, coupling with the breathy roar of the gunship’s engines, no longer held silent by the transparent barrier.

  The figures fell twenty metres before thudding down onto the deck with enough force to send tremors through the chamber. For a moment, they knelt in the dent they’d caused, crouched in their impact crater with their heads lowered. Glass hailstones broke almost musically against their armour.

  Then they rose. One held an oversized chainsword, the other a golden blade. They moved in predatory unison, animalistic without intent, walking towards the desk. Each of their steps was a resonating thump of ceramite on iron.

  Both of the archregent’s guards opened fire. In the same moment, both armoured warriors threw their weapons. The first died as the golden sword speared him through the chest, dropping him to the floor in a twitching heap. The second went down as the chainsword smashed into his face and torso, the live teeth eating into his flesh. Streaks of warm meat and hot blood splashed across the abettor and archregent. Neither man had moved.

  The archregent swallowed, watching the armoured figures approach. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why have you come here?’

  ‘Wrong question,’ Xarl smiled.

  ‘And we owe you no answers,’ said Talos.

  The archregent raised the borrowed pistol and sighted down the barrel. The warriors kept walking. Next to him, Abettor Muvo was interlacing his fingers, seeking to quell their shaking.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ the archregent said.

  ‘If he did,’ replied Talos, ‘he would never have sent you to this world.’

  Xarl hesitated. ‘Brother,’ he voxed, ignoring the old man with the gun. ‘I am getting a signal from orbit. Something is wrong.’

  Talos turned back to the other Night Lord. ‘I hear it, also. Septimus, bring Blackened along the eastern edge of the spire. We must return to the void at once.’

  ‘Compliance, master,’ was the crackling reply. Within moments, the gunship was hovering by the dome’s edge, gangramp lowering like an eagle’s hooked maw.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ the archregent whispered again, trembling now.

  Talos turned his back on the mortal. ‘It would seem t
hat on rare occasions, he really does.’

  Both Night Lords dragged their swords clear from the dead bodies as they ran, and drew bolters mid-sprint, opening fire on the reinforced glass. Their armoured forms crashed through the damaged barrier, taking them into the smoke and out of sight. The archregent watched their silhouettes vanish into the darkness of the gunship’s innards, still unable to blink.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ he said a third time, amazed that it was so very, tangibly true.

  Talos held his head in his hands. The pain was a rolling throb now, pushing at the back of his eyes. Around him, First Claw were readying their weapons, standing and holding to the handrails as the gunship climbed back into the sky.

  ‘Is it a Navy vessel?’ Cyrion was asking.

  ‘They think it’s an Adeptus Astartes cruiser,’ Xarl held a hand to the side of his helm, as if it would aid his hearing. ‘The vox reports are exciting, to say the least. The Echo is taking a beating.’

  ‘We outgun any of their cruisers.’ Mercutian was kneeling as he refitted his heavy bolter, not looking up at the others.

  ‘We outgun them when they don’t break into the system and knife us in the spine from a perfectly executed ambush,’ Cyrion pointed out.

  Talos drew breath to speak, but no words left his lips. He closed his eyes, feeling tears in his eyes and hoping it wasn’t blood again. He knew it would be, but holding to hope prevented his temper from flashing free.

  ‘The Sons of the Thirteenth Legion,’ he said. ‘Armour of scarlet and bronze.’

  ‘What is he saying?’

  ‘I…’ Talos began, but the rest of the sentence fled from him. The sword hit the deck first. The prophet collapsed to his hands and knees a moment later. Behind his eyes, the darkness was returning in a tidal roar, hungry for his consciousness.

  ‘Again?’ Xarl sounded angry. ‘What in hell’s name is wrong with him?’

  ‘I have my suspicions,’ answered Variel, kneeling beside the prone warrior. ‘We have to get him to the apothecarion.’