Void Stalker

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  With no method of thrust or creating inertial force, he was almost certain to drift away until his death. This… this was not optimal.

  Something caught his robe, jerking him in place. He turned in the weightless, airless nothingness, seeing the hand clutching the very edge of his cloak, and the warrior that the gauntlet belonged to.

  The Night Lord regarded him through curving eye lenses. Tears, painted in red and silver streaks, ran down the daemonic faceplate.

  ‘I heard you on the vox,’ said Lucoryphus of the Bleeding Eyes.

  ‘Praise be to the beneficence of the Machine God,’ Deltrian sent back over the communication link.

  The Raptor pulled the adept back onto the hull, without bothering to be gentle about it.

  ‘If you say so,’ Lucoryphus rasped. ‘Remain here. I will slit your ambusher’s throat. Then get back to your repairs.’

  The engines housed on his back cycled into silent life, their roars stolen by the airless void. With a burst of manoeuvring thrusters, the Night Lord kicked off from the ship’s skin and boosted over to the damaged pylon.

  Deltrian watched him depart, so overcome with relief he decided not to record the Raptor’s disrespect for later archiving.

  This time.

  Xarl dropped the sword, and with almost insane patience, he moved to lean against the arched wall. He remained there for a timeless span, cataloguing his hurts, catching his breath. The blood leaking through his breastplate smelled too rich, too clean. Heartsblood, he knew. That wasn’t good. If one of his hearts was sundered, he’d be laid up for weeks adapting to an augmetic replacement. He couldn’t move one arm, and the other was numb from the elbow, the fingers starting to seize up. One knee was refusing to bend, and the pain in his chest was getting colder, spreading farther.

  He grunted again, but couldn’t move away from the wall just yet. Another minute, perhaps. Let his regenerative tissues catch up to the damage. That’s all. That’s all he needed.

  Cyrion was the first to rise, pulling himself up by the opposite wall. His armour looked almost as ruined as Xarl’s, and rather than help the others, he lifted the now-dead hammer in his hands.

  ‘Its power cells are depleted to eighty per cent now. Perhaps it was hitting us harder than it hit you.’

  Xarl didn’t reply. He kept leaning against the wall.

  ‘I’ve never seen a duel like that,’ Cyrion added. He moved to where his brother stood.

  ‘Get away from me. I need a moment to breathe.’

  ‘As you wish.’ Cyrion moved over to Talos, who still lay paralysed on the deck. A vial of chemical stimulant injected into the prophet’s neck sent his muscles into spasm, and he rose, choking, a moment later.

  ‘I have never been hit with a thunder hammer before. Variel will bore us all with details of what it does to a nervous system, but I never want to feel it again.’

  ‘Be glad the blow was glancing.’

  ‘It did not feel glancing,’ Talos replied.

  ‘If you’re still alive, then it was glancing.’

  One by one, First Claw rose to their feet.

  ‘Xarl,’ Talos said. ‘I can’t believe you killed him.’

  The other warrior faced his brothers with an amused sneer. ‘It was nothing.’ He caught his helmet when Talos tossed it to him. For a moment, Xarl stroked his fingers along the winged crests – the ceremonial Legion decoration – looking down at the bitter visage he presented to the galaxy.

  His eyes were clear of blood, but his skull was a shattered mash of bone and flesh. Even rolling his eyes in their sockets bred enough pain to drive him to his knees, but he wouldn’t allow such weakness to show. Blinking was an agony so fierce he lacked the imagination to describe it even to himself. He didn’t even want to know how much of his face was left. The others were looking at him with worry in their eyes, and that only made him angrier.

  ‘Can you still fight?’ Talos asked.

  ‘I’ve felt better,’ replied Xarl. ‘But I can fight.’

  ‘We need to move,’ Mercutian said. He was the weakest of them all. Without power, his armour was almost useless, adding nothing to his strength or reflexes. The joints didn’t whirr, and the backpack didn’t hum. ‘We need to link up with one of the other claws if we’re being boarded again.’

  ‘Xarl,’ Talos said again.

  The warrior looked up. ‘What?’

  ‘Take the hammer. You earned it.’

  Xarl lifted his helm back into place. It clicked once, sealing to his collar locks, and his voice left his vocaliser in its usual vox-altered snarl.

  ‘Talos,’ he said. ‘My brother.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I regret arguing with you before. It is no sin to wish for a life with meaning, or a way to win this war.’

  ‘We will speak of this later, brother,’ said Talos.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Later.’

  Xarl took a single step closer. His head rolled forward in a slow nod, and his body followed in a boneless topple. He collapsed into the prophet’s arms, utterly limp, his armour broadcasting the tuneless whine of a flatline signal.

  IX

  REPULSION

  ‘I have broken a hundred oaths. Some by design, some by chance, some by misfortune. One of the few I still seek to honour is our pledge to the Mechanicum. No Legion can stand without the foundations provided by the exiles of Mars.’

  – Konrad Curze, the Night Haunter,

  Primarch of the Eighth Legion

  Talos dragged the body onto the bridge. Xarl’s armour growled along the decking, the ceramite grinding every step of the way.

  ‘Leave him,’ Mercutian said. He was bareheaded now, his powerless suit no longer tied into the vox. ‘Talos, leave him. We have a battle to fight.’

  The prophet hauled Xarl’s body to the side of the chamber, leaving his brother lying by the western doors. When he rose, he took in the sight before him through impassive eyes. The bridge was deep in its usual bustle of noise and organised chaos, with officers and servitors calling back and forth, running between their stations. First Claw, what remained of them, moved to the eastern doors, checking their weapons as they walked. Humans scattered before them, all gestures of respect going ignored.

  Only Talos lingered by the command throne. ‘Why aren’t we engaging the enemy ship?’

  ‘You don’t want it as plunder once we’ve beaten these dogs into their graves?’ Cyrion voxed back.

  Talos turned to the occulus, watching the scarlet strike cruiser drifting with excruciating patience. ‘No,’ he said, ‘No, you should have known I would not.’

  ‘But we can’t board them with every squad engaged.’

  ‘Are you insane? I don’t want to board them,’ the prophet said. ‘I want them to burn.’

  ‘They’re half a system away, hanging back out of weapons range. They pulled away as soon as they released boarding pods.’

  Talos looked at his brothers, then at the crew, as if they were deluded beyond comprehension. ‘Then chase them.’

  As the ship warmed up around them, Cyrion cleared his throat. ‘You want to destroy that ship? Truly?’

  The prophet shook his head, not in denial but confusion. ‘Why is that so hard to understand?’

  ‘Because it is hardly the province of pirates to annihilate any reward from their raids.’ Cyrion looked at the distant ship. ‘Think of the ammunition reserves on that cruiser. Think of the thousands of crew, the resources, the weapons we could take as plunder.’

  ‘We have all we need on board the Echo. I do not want plunder. I want revenge.’

  ‘But…’ Cyrion trailed off as Talos watched him for a moment, his face without expression.

  ‘No,’ the prophet said. ‘It burns. They die.’

  The eastern doors opened on dense hydraulics. Variel limped in, his
augmetic leg giving off sparks from its locked knee. Blood washed the flayed leathery flags of skin draped across his armour. The symbol of the Corsair’s fist was a hammer-broken ruin on his shoulder guard, while the other pauldron showed the Legion’s winged skull with bloodstained pride.

  ‘Fifth Claw has purged the principal habitation decks,’ he said. ‘The Genesis warriors are bleeding us, but the tide is turning.’

  Talos said nothing.

  ‘Xarl?’ Variel asked him.

  ‘Dead.’ Talos didn’t glance at the body. He sat in the command throne, grunting at the pain of his wounds. Combat stimulants were holding off the worst of it, but he needed to get out of his armour soon. ‘Take his gene-seed later.’

  ‘I should harvest it at once,’ Variel replied.

  ‘Later. That is an order.’ He looked over to his brothers, stood in a pack. ‘The other claws need Variel. Get to the Hall of Reflection and defend Deltrian at all costs. I will ensure all squads fall back to you once their killing is done.’

  Cyrion stepped forward, as if to protest. ‘What about you?’

  Talos nodded to the occulus. ‘I will join you, as soon as I finish this.’

  The Raptor waited at the crater’s edge. Deltrian paid the warrior little heed, casting his attention back into the difficulties of multisecting vision. The replacement pylon was being capped by the conduction orb, while the deck crews worked to fuse the tower’s electronics to the ship’s main systems.

  Despite the absence of nerves, and the resulting lack of pain, Deltrian’s wound was a troubling one. He’d leaked precious haemo-lubricant oils in place of blood, and his minimal organic components were triggering internal alarms along his retinal displays. Worse, the straining organs were now putting increased pressure on his augmetic systems to keep him functional.

  Time was more of a factor than ever. Thankfully, work was almost complete.

  Blood crystals clattered gently against his deployed arms as he worked. The fate of Deltrian’s ambusher had apparently been an unpleasant one. The body was gone, but crystalline evidence remained, frozen in the void.

  He could hear Lucoryphus fighting again, hear it by the grunts and dull thumps over the vox, but the adept spared the Raptor no significant attention.

  At that moment, the ship gave a colossal tremor beneath his feet. The stars began to turn in the night sky, and Deltrian lost several precious seconds watching the void dance before his eyes.

  The ship was moving. An attack run, surely. He couldn’t envisage a scenario where the Night Lords would run from a smaller vessel, especially not when it had arrived to guard the world they wished to take for themselves.

  ‘This is Deltrian to the strategium. The shields will be secured within four minutes standard.’

  ‘This is Talos,’ came the crackling reply. ‘The shields are already active.’

  ‘I am aware of that. But they are unsecured, due to external pylon damage. They may yet fail again, and the probability rises to a near-certainty if kinetic force is a factor. Do not engage until the void generators are at a secure operational capacity. Four minutes. Acknowledge understanding of this critical proviso with an immediate response.’

  ‘Understood, adept. Work fast.’

  The ship shook around her. Octavia remained in her throne, watching the stars drift by on her wall of pict-feed monitors.

  ‘They’re running,’ she said. ‘The Genesis warship is trying to maintain distance.’

  Septimus stood next to the throne, his wounds still bandaged, the bruises discolouring his face now at their ripest.

  ‘Should you even be here?’ Octavia asked, unwittingly sounding more like a Terran aristocrat than ever.

  He ignored the question. ‘I don’t see how you can tell they’re running,’ he said, his throat tight and his voice scratchy. ‘It’s just a red speck in the blackness.’

  She didn’t lift her eyes from the screens. ‘I can just tell.’

  Several of her attendants bustled on the other side of the fluid pool, guarding the bulkhead door. One of them approached, the footsteps echoing around the humid chamber.

  ‘Mistress.’

  Octavia turned to glance at the bandaged, cloaked figure. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The door is sealed. Word from Fourth Claw promises this deck is safe from intrusion.’

  ‘Thank you, Vularai.’

  The figure bowed, and moved back to its brethren.

  ‘You are treating them better,’ Septimus pointed out. He knew she still missed Hound.

  She smiled, patently forced, and looked back to the screens. ‘We’re catching up, but too slowly. The engines are taking too long to burn hotter. I can almost picture the enemy captain, watching us as we watch him, hoping his boarding teams will take our bridge before we reach his ship. And they might, for this chase will take hours. Maybe several days.’

  ‘Octavia,’ came a bass rumbling voice from the gargoyles carved into the chamber walls. Their wide maws were sculpted to hold vox-emitters.

  She reached to the armrest of her throne and worked the cranking lever. It settled with a crunch.

  ‘I’m here. How is the battle going?’

  ‘Victory will have a high price. I need you to ready the ship for immediate warp entry.’

  She blinked twice. ‘I… what?’

  ‘The void shields will be secured in two minutes. You will jump the ship shortly after. Understood?’

  ‘But we’re in orbit.’

  ‘We are leaving orbit. You can see that.’

  ‘But we’re so close to the planet. And the enemy isn’t even running to the system’s warp beacons. They’re not going into the Sea of Souls.’

  ‘There is no time to debate this, Octavia. I am ordering you to engage the warp engines as soon as the void shields are secured.’

  ‘I’ll do it. But what’s the destination?’

  ‘Nowhere.’ He sounded impatient now, which she found a rare change. ‘Jump closer to the enemy. I want to… to shunt the ship through the empyrean, and ambush the enemy strike cruiser. I am not wasting days chasing these fools across the stars.’

  She had to blink again. ‘You’re talking about ripping a hole in space to leap through the narrowest slice of the empyrean. The engines will barely be live before we’ll need to kill power to them. It will be a jump of less than a second, and even then, we may overshoot by a long way.’

  ‘I did not say I cared how it was done.’

  ‘Talos, I’m not sure this can be done.’

  ‘I did not ask that, either. I just want you to do it.’

  ‘As you wish,’ she said. Once she’d worked the lever back, cutting off her vox-link to the bridge, Octavia took a deep breath. ‘This will be interesting.’

  ‘Construction complete.’

  Deltrian began to retract his augmetic arms, while the servitors fell back into a hear/obey pattern around him.

  ‘Orders?’ one of them voxed to him.

  ‘Follow me.’ Deltrian was already moving, his magnetic boots pounding along the hull in silent shivers. ‘Lucoryphus?’

  The Raptor waited at the crater’s edge, three red helms in his clawed clutch. ‘You are finished, at last? We must regain immediate access to the ship.’

  Lucoryphus lifted from the decking on a gentle surge of thrust. Gone was the crawling, awkward creature – out here, freedom altered him into something much more lethal. Guidance thrusters breathed little jets of soundless pressure, keeping him suspended in place.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Talos intends to jump the ship.’

  ‘That is incorrect terminology.’

  Lucoryphus merely snorted. ‘It is still happening.’

  ‘When?’

  Deltrian didn’t stop walking. He strode past the hovering Raptor, head down, eye lenses focused on
the closest bulkhead set into the ship’s skin. It was still over three hundred metres away.

  ‘Must I truly answer that question with a detailed chain of events? He intends to engage the warp engines as soon as the void shields are secured. I have repaired the final pylon. Thus, they are secured. Thus, to clarify further, he intends to jump the ship now. Have you ever borne witness to a living organism left unprotected in the warp?’

  Deltrian could hear something wet over the vox. He suspected it was the Raptor’s smile.

  ‘Oh yes, tech-priest. I most certainly have.’

  The ship rumbled beneath the adept’s boots, building strength and momentum the way a beast draws breath to roar.

  Deltrian cycled through his epiglottal vox-triggers. ‘Lacuna Absolutus?’

  ‘Your Reverence?’

  ‘Inform me of your location at once.’

  A spurt of amused code fed back over the link. ‘Do I detect trace amounts of concern in your query, Revered One?’

  ‘An answer, if you please.’

  ‘My team is between sixteen and twenty seconds’ journey from our closest maintenance bulkhead, approximately six hundred metres roll-ward and prow-ward from your position. I believe the…’ His words washed away in a flow of static.

  ‘Lacuna Absolutus. Finish vocalisation.’

  Static remained the only reply.

  ‘Hold,’ Deltrian ordered. The servitors obeyed. Lucoryphus did not, he was already at the next bulkhead, claws gripping the hull as he keyed in the access cipher.

  ‘Lacuna Absolutus?’ the adept tried again. The white noise continued unabated, until Deltrian applied audio filters to the vox-channel, scrambling through the chaos. It rendered one sound clearer than all else.

  ‘Lucoryphus,’ Deltrian said.

  The Raptor hesitated, in the middle of hauling the circular bulkhead door wide open. ‘What is it?’

  ‘My subordinate, Lacuna Absolutus, has been engaged. I have deciphered the sound of servitor death across the vox-link.’

  ‘So?’ The Night Lord swung the door wide, peeling back the steel to expose the crawlspace within. Beneath their boots, the ship gave a premonitory shudder, its engines gaining power. ‘Build another assistant, or whatever it is you do to engineer your slaves.’