Space Marine

by Ian Watson

The three brothers helped suppress human pirates and green-skinned alien pirates…

  They helped restore a deposed lord, Vendrix – just as they had overthrown the Lord of Karka’s Sun…

  AND IN THE Librarium the astropaths maintained devout contact with far Earth, which likely none of the Fists would ever see, even if they lived to the age of four hundred years.

  Earth! Hub of humanity – ever struggling to sustain the grievous burden of overseeing, however sketchily the affairs of a million scattered worlds. Some far planets might only win scrutiny once in a decade, or once in a century. Swathes of stars could shine unnoted for a generation. These were only those where the human race festered. Millions of other star systems were still mere celestial coordinates, if they were accurately charted at all.

  Ten years passed by.

  What was ten years to the Imperium – or to the galaxy? It was but an eyeblink.

  To Lex and Yeri and Biff it signified a steel stud drilled into their foreheads… so modest, so discreet… yet so dense with each of the five and a quarter million minutes that had passed for them in the interim.

  Minutes of purity and prayer and pain, of devotion and of the dealing of death.

  Necromunda? “The deathworld”… their far-off, one-time home? Why, the entire galaxy was a realm of living death. Only through death could the Imperium, and humanity, survive; and they were death’s angels…

  PART THREE

  TYRANID TERROR

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “WE’RE GOING IN through its anus,” Biff whooped boisterously. Indeed. Indeed.

  What else could that puckered sphincter be, in the white bony hull of the vast, gastropoidal alien vessel?

  The leviathan that loomed ahead seemed a cross between a nautilus and an omnivorous, space-faring snail. It was the length of a four-K asteroid, and almost as high where its shell spiralled upward in a circuit of increasingly small osseous chambers. The shell was bleached chalky by aeons of radiation.

  Even as the armoured Fists, tightly packed into a stretched boarding torpedo, stared at the forward view-screen in its mount of bronze bones, that sphincter pulsed.

  It expelled a quick milky cloud, which the torpedo’s sensors assayed as consisting of bitter liquid dregs, foul gas, and ashy debris – the fart of a leviathan…

  FAR AWAY, A shadow had darkened the warp…

  At first, and for many years, astropaths and starship Navigators had hardly heeded that encroaching smudge within the phantasmal realm through which ships skipped from star to star in weeks or months instead of thousands of years; and through which the psychic communicators forged their mind links…

  For the umbra seemed small, being far away – no more than a minor maculation, an inky blemish in a distant corner of the eye of the galaxy.

  It appeared from beyond the reach of the Astronomican, the Emperor’s psychic beacon projecting from Earth as a lantern in the darkness.

  It lay far to the celestial south-east, originating beyond the Imperial frontier where the cone of space and stars known as Segmentum Tempestus abutted on Ultima Segmentum – though “frontier” was only a euphemism for a total evaporation of known human presence into a void of unknown suns; and similar vacant gulfs aplenty existed within the supposed frontiers…

  That shadow was distant. Being distant, it seemed a trivial puzzle, a mere mole on the face of the heavens.

  However, the galaxy is to a star cluster far larger than a whale is to a microbe; and a miniscule macula could be vaster than the sphere of a hundred suns.

  That shadow must be a psychic force – for all was ultimately raw thought in the warp. The shadow must be the echo of a vast mentality – slumberous, now awakening… to what purpose?

  If that mentality were of the ordinary universe of reality, it must be mountainous to cast such a thought-shadow.

  Mountainous – or else multifold as a swarm of locusts… Or somehow… both of these at once.

  Presently, astropathic signals from outrider worlds in that easterly spiral arm of stars were quenched… though years might pass until their absence was noted.

  Some astropaths who served the Inquisition tried to penetrate the nature of the shadow, and died insane. They raved of cold, empty gulfs of timeless void that stretched out between galaxies, vacancies too vast for sanity. Nothing human could cross such immensity. Yet something had crossed. And had crossed the gulfs between other galaxies, previously. Inexorably.

  Those astropaths died – yet not before exonerating Chaos of responsibility.

  The departments of several High Lords of Terra were notified: the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, the Navis Nobilite and the Chartist Captains, the office of the Astronomican, the Adeptus Terra.

  Reports, illuminated by scribes, were sometimes pigeonholed.

  Gradually, awareness of a threat was gathering – though still whelmed in ignorance.

  THE FORTRESS-MONASTERY of the Imperial Fists was, and long had been, traversing Ultima Segmentum, describing a slow arc through those easterly marches which would take almost forever to complete…

  Many more worlds had fallen silent. Ponderously, the Imperium had awoken to a creeping nightmare.

  Some understanding of the alien cause of this was retrieved by an otherwise disastrous expedition launched by the Blood Drinkers Marine Chapter into that now mute, umbral zone of the fringe. Other Marine companies had failed to return from forays; and one entire Chapter, the Lamenters, seemed to have vanished utterly.

  After years of planning, Imperial battleships were now gathering in Ultima Segmentum.

  Marine Chapters, whose names were almost legendary, were about to collaborate on a thrust into that shadow zone. The Space Wolves, the Blood Angels, the Ultramarines, the Blood Drinkers… and the Imperial Fists.

  During the coming crusade the Fists might meet the same fate as the Lamenters – so that their fortress-monastery might fly onward eventually, empty of battle-brothers, bereft of command guidance, a castrated abode of servitors and cyborgs who would continue the rituals of maintenance in the lost monastery for millennia more, robotically, senselessly, alone in their corridored world of deserted firing ranges, forbidden chapels, taboo laboratories where dust would gather throughout aimless millennia… if the Fists failed.

  IN A SPEECH from the balcony of the departure bay, Lord Commander Pugh had impressed on his Fists that Space Wolves, Ultramarines, Blood Angels were all valiant, dedicated Chapters – but that Fists were pre-eminently planners as well as fighters; thinkers, wise warriors.

  What the Imperium, itself awakening to an impending new calamity, needed now above all was knowledge of the nature of this creeping threat – of the substance that cast the terrifying shadow… a substance which seemed intent on devouring the entire south-east spiral arm – in a few centuries or millennia – and then perhaps all of the human galaxy, within a few tens or hundreds of aeons…

  “WE’RE RAMMING IN through its arse!” Indeed.

  As were other Fist-packed torpedoes, aimed at other orifices where the alien hull might prove vulnerable…

  A sun shone distantly, biliously illuminating the outermost methane gas giant of this solar system. The planet, of churning poisonous cyclones hundreds of miles deep segueing into the pressurised liquid manure within, was a verdigris crescent cupping gaseous darkness. Pallid sickle moons attended it.

  Known to the Guild of Navigators as Lacrima Dolorosa, the sun seemed from certain perspectives to be a teardrop dangling from an eye-shaped constellation. Beyond Lacrima Dolorosa the starfield thinned, its diamantine lactic veils torn into rifts revealing the ultimate night of the extragalactic void – from where the blot in the Warp had issued: the shadow of whole fleets of these molluscoid alien ships, arriving in the sprawling, half-charted galaxy of Man – and of abhumans and unhumans, and of an inhuman, unspeakable Chaos – after a voyage which must have measured millennia.

  Those ships…

  They suggested fossilised ancient creatures which might
once have grazed the submarine abysses of giant worlds, sucking up whales as if whales were minnows; creatures which had petrified a hundred million years previously yet nevertheless were still virulently alive. Still ravenous…

  A thousand such ships, many of them even more gargantuan than the torpedo’s own chosen target, were now drifting in to the Lacrima Dolorosa system.

  Yet this thousand was perhaps only one per cent of the swarm that summed up to the substance that cast the Shadow…

  What manner of creatures dwelt inside such convoluted, organic-seeming ships? Creatures which might still perhaps be slumbering, for the most part.

  Hopefully, still slumbering whilst the eerie fleet drifted past that outermost gas-giant on a course inward towards Lacrima Dolorosa III, a world of feral human beings who had relapsed into barbarism at least ten thousand years previously, according to some ancient Administratum archives.

  Now the legendary “gods” of those barbarians would wage war with monsters in their skies… unnoticed and distantly to begin with… until in the end alien fiends might gorge themselves on that lush and savage world.

  Unless the Fists and Ultras and Angels and Imperial battleships repelled this rolling invasion.

  Which seemed unlikely.

  The natives of Lacrima Dolorosa III were almost certainly doomed – an event which in itself was of no account, a fate that was inherently trivial. Except, of course, to the victims…

  The prize, here, wasn’t a dispensible world of savages but rather knowledge – of those intruders from the Dark Deep, to the nature and purpose of which only scattered, dire hints as yet existed…

  A COCCYX OF bleached bone jutted into space, bearing the sphincter at its tip like a quartet of triangular haemorrhoids clutched within bands of livid muscle. Where the heads of these scarlet protuberances touched, a tiny hole still puffed acidic discharge.

  The nose of the torpedo impacted rupturingly in that meatus, wrenching its tissue open, burrowing deeper convulsively with thrusts of its jets as the Fists clung to stanchions.

  The torpedo rocked as a shaped charge on the nose cone erupted, blasting a passageway ahead. Swiftly the spring-loaded cone itself petalled open, becoming a fourfold hatch pressing fiercely against the inner anal walls in the manner of a surgical dilator.

  “Out, out, out!”

  This rectum of the alien ship curved rightward, aslosh with steaming cloacal fluids, banded with slowly pulsing purple peristaltic sinew. The high shriek of escaping atmosphere had already diminished to a whistle as the injured anus cramped tighter, reflexively, around the girth of the plasteel troop-carrier which had penetrated it.

  The colon itself soon branched into multiple oozing tubes too small to enter. But the side wall had been lacerated into thick gristly ribbons. Captain Helstrom and Lieutenant Vonreuter sliced at a mass of blast-dissected cartilage with their power swords, carving a crude wide doorway that bled gluey snottish threads.

  Beyond: a hooped oval chamber leprously aglow with a skin of white algae, and ankle-deep in glutinous dank sludge. A trio of tall deltoid doors stood open upon ribbed corridors. Tubes looped along one corridor like glossy intestines strung on crutches of varnished bone. Swollen varicose veins webbed areas of tissue between the ribs. The curved jambs of those doorways trembled, holding back a pulsing curtain of puckered flesh.

  Each door was some kind of mindless slave-creature, anchored by tentacles, whose only role was to open and shut.

  As more Marines crowded into the chamber, Yeri was thrust towards a door and poked one of several softly glowing green nodules on its muscular rim with the barrel of his boltgun, prying experimentally – as an ex-tech well might. The stiff fleshy curtain relaxed with a sigh, shutting itself tight but for a long dimpled crack.

  “We’re being shut in!” exclaimed someone.

  “No—” Yeri probed again. The door dilated open once more. “Pressure of the blast must have activated the doors…”

  “It’s got all those buttons to push at different heights,” Biff observed. “Must be critters of lots of different sizes on board—”

  And the tallest must be at least twice a man’s height…

  Lex rubbed condensation from the outside of his visor. The air was so humid. However, a silver ikon of nostrils winked upon his field of vision. So the atmosphere was breathable enough.

  Captain Helstrom was calling for the two Marine Scout squads to vacate the torpedo and join their armoured seniors, further packing the chamber.

  They, of course, wore no helmets, and swore at the full impact of the foetid odours, of which the Marines’ suits merely brought a diagnostic whiff to the wearers’ olfactory lobes.

  The alien ship wheezed and rumbled, droned and gurgled – from afar off, nearby, who could tell? Vibrations propagated through the flesh and bone. Echoes haunted the corridors.

  Algae on the walls of the chamber was sliding – clumping into bizarre blotches. Were those recording the nature of the damage to the orifice by which the Fists had entered?

  “Dumb design, those doors,” sneered Biff. “If your arse craps out, you don’t want half your guts flying outa the hole. You want your inner bulkheads shut!”

  “They would have closed,” said Yeri. “But then the shaped blast ripped through and pushed with just the right pressure to open them—”

  A whirring of wings…

  From along one corridor flapped a cloud of scaly, violet, batlike creatures. Claws serrated their wings. The rushing cloud thickened rapidly, purpling then blackening the corridor. Biff hit at a control nodule on the door jamb – but that door must be heeding some ultrasonic signal broadcast by the cloud. It stayed open.

  Hand flamers brought down dozens, hundreds of the creatures. Blazing clusters, fused together by the ignited jellified oil, sizzled in the sludge. The door also blazed, its muscles and rooted tentacles writhing as if agonised.

  Still more bats thronged, squealing, into the chamber, clotting the air. Marines clawed down fistfuls, crushing the flying vermin. A Scout shrieked…

  “Stand still! Do nothing!” bellowed Helstrom.

  He was right.

  The bat-things weren’t intent on the Marines at all. Mindlessly they were attaching themselves to that opening which power swords had carved in the tattered wall of the colon. Reaching out, they hooked together. Thus they created a protective patching membrane made of themselves.

  More bats dived upon this, thickening it. Claws pierced neighbouring bodies. Hot sulphurous juices squirted, vulcanising the rubbery anatomies, stiffening and fixing them in place.

  Presently the gaping hole was sealed.

  Most of the rest of the horde quenched the burning door with their bodies. At last the flow of bat-things ceased. Late comers settled upon the colour-coded blotches of algae and began to feed, digesting whatever information those contained, or perhaps erasing it as obsolete.

  In three separate groups, Marines and Scouts began to move out cautiously along the trio of diverging corridors. Whenever they returned – if ever they returned – they would cut or blast their way through that stiff membrane of a thousand dead beasts to reach the torpedo.

  A CURDLED LIGHT suffused the broad bone-braced passageway that Yeri trod along, dogging Lex’s heels. Biff trailed a little way behind. He was keeping an eye on the half dozen raw Scouts. So was Sergeant Juron.

  Juron and he weren’t worried that those mighty rumbustious striplings might rampage away impulsively down some side branch. They were conscious of what full Marines sometimes murmured of as the “can-airy factor”.

  Legend had it that long ago in the foul toxic depths of Necromunda scavvy gangs used to carry a twittering yellow birdie in a box on expeditions into unknown chambers. That birdie was sensitive to levels of pollution. The melodies it tweeted were a litmus of the air quality. If it shut up, or keeled over, better slap on a respirator quickly or else die in spasms.

  ’Course, any such morsels of captive live protein had long since vani
shed down guys’ and gals’ gobs on Necro – ’cept up in the high towers maybe. Nowadays you had reactive patches to show up poisons, ’suming you could find or trade or steal some; and most scavvies couldn’t…

  Yet the saying lingered on. “Can you breath the airy? Send in a can-airy!”

  Sure, the Scouts had respirators in their kit, but they didn’t have full armour because their carapaces weren’t meshed in to their nerves yet. Thus they were a kind of litmus, a kind of can-airy. And by now the full Marines had their visors open so as to conserve their air tanks. So Biff kept a wary eye on the can-airy Scouts.

  Normally, he guessed that Lord Pugh wouldn’t have sent Scouts on a first foray into such an environment. However, the whole Chapter was in on this mission to penetrate a trio of the alien vessels. The other cousinly Chapters were targeting similar groups of ships – while Imperial battleships stood by to blast as many more as possible apart. If possible.

  Willy-nilly, it was can-airy time for Scouts, who couldn’t seal themselves up tight.

  If Lord Pugh lost too many of his Scouts, would he find some other part of his own sensory system or his anatomy that was disposable, as a penance? After taste buds, what else? Perhaps his eyes? Perhaps he would have those replaced with harsh schematic cyberlenses which would eradicate any softness from his perceptions?

  Pushy Lex paced ahead with Vonreuter as though he was the Lieutenant’s special aide. Vonreuter was an almost albino blond, with washed-out limpid eyes and duelling scars that seemed like little teeth set in his cheeks. The party numbered thirty – their stretched boarding torpedo had been capacity-packed with ninety men.

  So far, so good. Or bad.

  Walls in this region were a mass of mauve jelly-blobs oozing thin strings of blue exudate on to a disconcertingly glowing spongy floor. Each bootstep printed a temporary luminous puddle in that sponge. Iridescent beetles dropped into these from the ceiling where they had seemed like glittery scales. They spun in a frenzy of drinking – and died, floating belly up.

  As the spongy material resumed its former contours, arachnids darted from fleshy puce vents low down the walls to chew the beetles and vomit the cud into those same vents. These arachnids were little more than oversized jaws and a digestive sac mounted on six flexible spidery legs.