by Ian Watson
Jointed arches, which ribbed the walls, flexed occasionally. Sometimes a questing tentacle wavered out from a hole in the bone. Vents sighed gases, adding an ammoniacal reek to the hot wet cocktail of sweaty vapours, tart pheromones, sour xeno-hormones, mildew, spice of attar, and a pervasive odour of not-quite-nutmeg. Oh for Lord Vladimir Pugh’s inability to savour.
“This whole ship seems biological,” Vonreuter was saying, as he cut down one such tentacle. The appendage flopped about and grew hexagonal ruby eyes on stalks. Snakelike, it tried to slither away into a purulent yellow depression. The Lieutenant sliced it up with his sword. “So I’d say we’ll find controlling organs somewhere deep in it. Like a heart, and kidneys…”
Organs.
Deep.
The passageway branched. The saturated sponge continued for only a few metres along the leftward fork before withering into a scrofulous mat where carmine slugs were grazing. Clusters of polyps were melted glutinously down the walls, releasing larvae which wriggled into vents. The tunnel was shedding its lining, revealing ridgy cartilage, plates of grey gristle.
Across the base of the rightward passage there swelled a large pink cyst. It was suggestive of some giant mutant female ape’s bum presented for fertilisation. A low labial crater wall surrounded a semblance of a mouth with floppy lips pressed shut. The cyst was two metres across.
Marine Dolf Harlan was the first to try to cross the obstacle. He shut his visor before treading tentatively upon the side of the cyst prior to leaping. The surface was slimy. This would not have mattered, except that just then a larger relative of the patching bats came flapping at Harlan. It wrapped hooked wings around his helmet.
As Harlan tore it loose, he took an inadvertent step forward.
He began to slip.
The cyst pulsed, dilated.
Harlan fell through its open lips.
Fell? He almost seemed pulled, so swiftly did he disappear through the floor. The lips clamped shut again.
Vonreuter radioed to Harlan in vain. In vain he consulted the disposition readout on his faceplate. Dolf Harlan had vanished utterly from anywhere in the vicinity.
“Either he was disintegrated immediately,” said Sergeant Juron, “or else he travelled elsewhere double-quick. In which case—”
“Lower a sensor down,” the Lieutenant ordered.
The rune-painted sensor dangled on a fine strong chain like a thurible for burning incense to Rogal Dorn.
Chain ran through Juron’s gauntlet as sensor then tether were sucked down through the inner labia of the cyst – fiercely, till almost all of the chain had paid out. When Juron clenched his power fist and pulled, he drew up only a metre’s length of tether. The rest, and the sensor, had disappeared, severed.
Juron and the Lieutenant consulted the small veneered telemetry screen clipped to the sergeant’s arm. “Warp echo here, Sir. This thing’s a teleporter—”
“There’s no sign of reality re-entry—”
“Sensor must still be in the warp…”
“Harlan too?”
“Where’s the sense in a teleporter that doesn’t take you to any real destination?”
“Garbage disposal?”
“This thing’s bigger than human size. Got to be for transport.”
“No controls for coordinates.”
“Maybe depends where you stand on the rim. Maybe you stamp out a signal. Harlan could be right at the heart of the vessel by now.”
Yes, the cyst was an organic teleporter through warp space – but to where?
Lex spoke up, brandishing his boltgun. “Permission to follow Brother Harlan, Sirs!”
Yeri clamped tight on Lex’s arm. “No you figging well don’t.”
“You’re only saying that to get out of my sight, away from me.” Lex’s reply was brief and withering.
“Away from you?”
Before either officer could respond to Lex’s offer, the cyst in the floor convulsed…
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MARINES AND SCOUTS drew back just as the great cyst ejected an armoured form.
No, it wasn’t Harlan’s. Nor was it any Marine’s!
Before anyone could even dream of firing at this possible attacker, the suit slumped on to the floor – a dead weight.
The armour was tarnished, mottled, and blotched as if its very molecules were diseased. The figure possessed two arms and two legs – yet crooked, crab-like ones. The suit was made all of ring segments, a flexible carapace of narrow jointed hoops unlike any style that Biff remembered studying in the scriptory… The helmet was a flattened domelet, featureless but for discolourations.
While one battle-brother held the strange suit’s annulate shoulders, another strove to unfasten that helmet smoothly.
It wouldn’t budge.
With a twist of power the brother wrenched that helmet free… releasing a dusty memory of long-bygone decay – and exposing a broad low knobby head resembling that of a turtle, parchmented with withered brown leathery skin. Quite mummified, in the sarcophagus of the suit. The eyes had dried to tiny buttons on threads.
Long since.
The Lieutenant tested a skin sample with the antiquariometer from his tool pouch.
“The Carbon XIV reading gives an estimate of fourteen thousand years, plus or minus two thousand.”
Aeons since…
In another galaxy, way back before the molluscoid vessel must have even commenced its crossing of the deeps… A sense of awe stole over the Fists.
The alien’s banded gauntlet still clutched, clawlike, a handgun of convoluted design made of some ceramic material.
As in this galaxy, so in others far away… death was the currency, so it seemed.
Vonreuter retrieved the defunct gun for future study.
“This thing must have boarded the ship just as we’re boarding it now,” he surmised to Stossen. “I guess it stepped into this transporter cyst…” He scrutinised the acidic blemishes upon the armour. “And the transporter dumped it in… a solution of acid. Not a powerful acid. Its suit wasn’t eaten away… More like a…” His voice wavered into disgust. “A stomach acid. And there our alien intruder stayed for the next fourteen thousand years…”
“Until we gave the transporter critter hiccups by sliding a chain down its gullet,” murmured Biff. “Can we get Harlan back by making this figging thing puke? How ’bout dropping some choke grenades down its gob?”
Juron nodded slowly.
“If this teleporter beast’s instinct is to throw intruders into some digestive bit of it, we can’t use it ourselves… How does it tell intruders… from residents? How do those residents tell it where they’d like to go – whoever they are?”
“Use choke,” said Vonreuter. “But give the grenades some ballast. They’re too light as they are. Use the alien’s body.”
Two Scouts held the turtle-creature up in its suit, over the lips of the cyst. Biff tore the skull loose and tossed it away. In rapid succession he thumbed three of the self-priming, coin-size grenades from the dispenser on his plasteel sleeve, and dropped these hastily down the vacated neck of the banded suit. The Scouts hurled the suit down through the cyst whence it had come. It vanished.
They waited.
Down in the unseen guts of the teleporter creature, where a gagging gas spewed from a headless suit, the dead alien soldier would be enacting a minor, long-delayed revenge against the creature which had choked it inside its own armour, stifling it on its own foul alien breath…
The surface of the cyst vibrated.
A groaning throb issued from the pursed lips.
Presently a bilious miasma drifted out – but no Harlan. No battle-brother.
The Lieutenant was receiving a crackly signal on the command band; after which, he addressed his men.
“Terminator Librarian Captain Steinmuller advises all squads to thrust blast grenades into any floor cysts they come across. The Captain’s Warp-sensitive. He says this creature is a worm-tangle. Most of its bo
dy exists in the Warp – he senses dozens of these feeler openings. The worm’s tuned to every native of this ship – because they’re all keyed in to some strange composite mind. That mind’s vaster than this ship, he says. It makes him sick to think how big. All the ships are part of it. The transporter worm’s been bio-engineered… By Dorn, we’ve simply been wasting time, trying to recover Harlan! I shall scourge myself in a pain machine for the sentimentality that masks timorousness – a reluctance to advance, an excuse to linger!”
The Lieutenant crooked his power glove so as to eject the tiny disc of a grenade directly at the lips of the cyst. The blast, at close proximity, rocked the Lieutenant in his shielding armour though it was of no other consequence to him.
The cyst erupted.
Its pink lips tore apart, shredded, revealing a hairy grey well – misty and indefinite. Its throat dissolved into a grainy nothingness, smearing out of ordinary existence.
Darting to the rim, Vonreuter fired another grenade.
But the worm’s throat was already crimping tight reflexively, folding in upon itself, amputating the ravaged mouth. The grenade travelled hardly any distance down before seeming to implode rather than explode. From the rim of the cyst flesh was flowing, bunching to seal the hole with bulging tumorous tissue – as the Lieutenant leapt back.
Wrong way to do that, reckoned Biff. Stickin the grennies in a suit was subtler. That way, the worm gulped the bait right down its gob into its guts…
His totem spider was haunting his vision again, waving innumerable long sinuous legs. Legs that faded in and out of existence, leading to locales far and near…
There were invisible tunnels in this ship, living tunnels through the Warp, which no Marine could use.
And the denizens of this vessel were all linked by spidery mental legs…
The Lieutenant sucked in his breath as he harkened to the comm-band.
“Squads are under attack,” he relayed to his men.
“Genestealers – and something worse… a claw and spike creature that bounces along… Genestealers! Can this be where they come from?”
Juron shuddered. “Do you reckon they’ve been bred – like that worm, and the patch-bats?”
“Genestealers don’t have any tech of their own, do they? We find them adrift in hulks, but they don’t seem to comprehend machines.”
“Not our sort of machines. Maybe that’s because they’re only used to a living machine.”
“I swear this ship’s been created by something. It didn’t create itself.”
“Whatever sort of critter could create genestealers?”
The humid atmosphere was tetchy, oppressive. Vonreuter swore. “Why haven’t we been attacked yet?” He seemed to take this as a personal affront.
Or as though an attack might relieve the tension. Plainly the Lieutenant’s feelings communicated themselves to Lexandro, who power-leapt over the tumouring cyst, to range ahead on point. Of course, Yeri followed him, alert to peril.
“Wait,” called Vonreuter. “Beware the brash boldness that masks lack of foresight!”
Though how could there be foresight, where all was whelmed in mystery?
Has to be a body that coordinates, reasoned Biff.
Something that houses the overmind. Something physical in this ship. An organ. And it’ll commune with similar bodies in all the other ships – telepathically through the warp – like so many different brain cells, to add up to the Shadow Mind…
The lootenant said as much regarding a heart and kidneys. Find that mind-organ, and skrag it, and the local denizens might experience a spot of difficulty…
Vonreuter decided to divide his men into two sub-units. The taciturn Sergeant Ruhr would accompany one group along the leftward, cartilaginous passageway. Sergeant Juron and he would lead thirteen others in a quest along the passage of the cyst.
Thus the three brothers of Trazior, together with seven battle-brothers and three of the canary Scouts, were soon proceeding in the company of that same sergeant who had led them so tellingly and boldly when they seized Sagramoso’s Emperor Titan.
Subdivided deployment made sense in such passageways where at most three Marines could fight side by side. Dividing, and spreading, the Fists were like lethal bacteria invading the body of a behemoth.
Lex grinned at the sergeant, plainly exhilarated by the opportunities this new disposition of forces might offer. Juron was no slouch. And Vonreuter could probably be encouraged to wild deeds.
Yeri noted Lex’s grin – and Biff registered Yeri’s trepidation.
Very much on the alert on behalf of his loathed brother, Yeri was feeling ominous qualms as to Lex’s degree of self-control…
How thin is the line, mused Biff, between loathing and love…
Between animosity and admiration! Or even… adulation, adoration. Ardour!
Ach, Yeri pursued some grand abstract dream of “justice” – but he didn’t savvy the spider-patterns in his very own soul. He failed to comprend his own inner tangle.
The focus of Yeri’s faith, at his tech mother’s knee, had been the Emp.
Add to that later, the blessed Rogal Dorn.
But then Yeri developed this twisted fixation upon Lex… as a way of expressing Marine valour and piety.
Which meant that his piety was in fact some way from being as pure as he imagined.
It dawned on Biff that paradoxically Lex must, for Yeri, be standing in for the remote Emperor in some strange dreamlike regard. Lex had become a substitute personage close at hand who represented aristocratic supremacy and ruthless disdain. Disdain – and therefore apparent injustice – was what the Emperor must needs exercise towards all mere individual human beings – for the sake of the whole human race and its future. Injustice, within a vaster tapestry of eventual triumphant virtue…
In no way could Yeri rebel against the harsh God on Earth. Nor could he even allow himself to contemplate the slightest doubt or anger. Indeed, resentment would be as futile as for a flea to feel offended at the conduct of a cudbear in whose pelt it dwelled.
Yeri surely did feel a streak of bitter antipathy towards Him-on-Earth whom he must serve and adore. Lex was the repository for this dark, unadmitted rancour which must coexist with worship deep in Yeri’s soul.
Which meant that, should Lex be killed, Yeri might start to question his whole faith. It would seem as though his own focus of fervour had betrayed fatal frailty. He might lapse into heresy.
Huh, thought Biff, convinced nonetheless of the truth of his analysis.
He patted his boltgun with his power glove.
Megabossgod’s namenz is Death… he reminded himself. No need to confide his suspicions as to this kink in Yeri’s faith to a Chaplain. None whatever.
He ought to. But he wouldn’t.
Thus Biff would in turn act as protector to Yeri. This twist amused Biff richly. Only he, the ex-scumnik, had the sophistication to understand Yeri’s heart. And oh no, he wouldn’t pull the rug out from under Brother Valence. Biff’s would be a secret sort of protection, knowable only to Rogal Dorn in a private prayer. How much more honourable this was than Yeri’s vulgar bodyguardianship of pretty Lexandro; than the ex-tech’s ambivalent, hate-streaked fawning.
Biff realised, then, the extent to which he himself was also meshed in this sticky web of brotherhood…
Suppose one brother died. All three were so intimately bound up in one another’s destiny. Therefore perhaps all three would be doomed to die. Maybe there was a sickening inevitability about this.
The namenz is Death, spake the Spider, clearly, inside Biff’s head. Death is the namenz.
Biff heard those very words. They weren’t voiced by Rogal Dorn, but by something deep and atavistic. Maybe that was the very voice of Necromunda, world of death, from which he thought he had escaped, now reaching out across the years and across the light years to reclaim him.
A terrifying wave of superstition swept over Biff, rocking the superstructure of rational thunks w
hich he had painstakingly erected within himself. He sketched a hex sign with his power glove, and whispered a confused, hopeless prayer.
“Spider spirit, don’t betray me. Rogal Dorn, array me in your light.”
He had sinned in thought. He had thunked too far. His nimble mind had performed a deconstruction job upon Yeri’s motives. In so doing, Biff had almost cast impertinent doubt on the supremacy of the Emperor and the primarch, had he not?
At one remove… using Yeri Valence as his mental model…
Biff’s facial tattoo itched fiercely, as though its outlines were being renewed, re-etched with knife-point and caustic acid and dye.
Deconstruct, he thought giddily. Destruct. Destroy.
Seek and learn, by all means – but most of all, destroy, to appease the hungry Spider… which no longer seemed to be an avatar of wisdom guiding Biff to intuitions of hidden patterns, but an instinctual power ravenous to survive through the spilling of alien blood and ichor.
Fists must be clever.
Yet cleverness was finally a self-deceit. Biff slapped Yeri’s shoulder pauldron. “Have faith, brother,” he urged.
Yeri, who could not see Biff’s crazy grin, misunderstood. Of course he would misunderstand.
“Lex won’t get away from us into the embrace of death,” replied Yeri. He spoke as though he had actually seduced Biff into his own endeavour, as a secondary bodyguard for lordly Lexandro d’Arquebus.
Yet perhaps it was an appropriate reply, after all. Perhaps Yeri did now have a true partner in the preservation of that impetuous, disdainful brother.
“We’ll embrace death together, all three,” muttered Biff, as if cursed.
Three bodies, bound together.
Three corpses-to-be – and keeping invisible company with them, the powerful courtesan of the cosmos who was neither male nor that other sex either, but who was neuter – as exactly befitted… Extinction.
Many of the Marines must have been suffering similar soul-riving pangs inside that eerie living ship. Many battle-brothers might well have been praying that their faith would supercharge them…
