by Ian Watson
The passageway was now hooped with traceries of cartilage dripping ichor. Clumps of sickly luminous cyanotic fungi protruded like bunches of hernias, nibbled by iridescent insects with gauzy wings. Stagnant sludge coated the chitin plates of the floor. Long tapeworms of silvery hue slithered in this shallow, sticky morass, sucking the slimy bilge in and shedding body segments resembling soft flat ingots. Crabby creatures with coppery carapaces carried these off in their pincers. The air reeked of a heady tart vinegar and fruity rot.
A bloated beaked belly on crooked bony legs was gorging blindly upon a pulsing fibrous tumour that thrust out from one wall. As they came upon it, the surgeon-creature reached capacity and ruptured. It released shredded, dissolving cancerous tissue into the sludge.
A replacement scavenger-belly, initially as slim as a collapsed lung, reared up on its stick limbs in turn and began compulsively plumping out. Several other flat bellies stood waiting in line to feast on this distortion of the passageway until they burst…
Hitherto burpings of gas, gurglings of juices, swishings, throbbings, and rumblings had serenaded the Fists’ advance. Now these noises hushed ominously – in time for those Marines with heavy weapons to unsling missile launcher and plasma gun.
From a floor-cyst some way ahead, erupted a creature of greenish hue – composed entirely of huge hooked claws and spikes, or so it seemed at first glance.
It bounded across the sludgy floor towards the Fists, propelling itself with flicks of a spike-tipped tail. And already a second such creature had emerged from the cyst…
The tail was a fat spring of banded muscles. A powerful thruster-leg with twin claws resembling sharpened hooves aided its rapid forward motion. From its horny loins a long fierce knife-like organ protruded, quivering. Overhead the creature brandished a single leathery hand of huge grasp, ridged with vertebrae. Two knotty fingers ended in curved talons; one in a scimitar-claw; and the thumb in a cruel gouging hook.
Midway down the body – that spring-loaded body of massive hooked blades – a distorted face bulged. The fanged mouth snarled, agape. Crazed eyes staring fixedly, close set above a tiny nose.
An almost humanoid face…
Bolts tore into that body, shattering the leering face. Yet tail and foot still propelled the clutch of claws and thrust of knife with remorselessly mighty hops.
Plasma gushed, melting and fusing the giant reaching hand. Nevertheless, the loin-organ jerked forward, impacting with a brother’s groin-guard. The spike actually penetrated a weld in the armoured pouch before snapping off, twanging.
The brother cried out and staggered.
The twisted, melting residue of the hand descended around his helmet. His visor was still open. The burning remainder of the hook-thumb ripped out an eye before the grabber’s death throes entirely disabled it; before its wrecked, ripped, charred corpse collapsed.
Its headlong assault had shielded the rush by its partner. Even as bolts ripped into that second creature, it reached a Scout. His head vanished entirely within its leathern palm. Its claws sank into his back and chest. As it dragged him up against it, its disembowelling spike slashed upward.
The second creature soon died too.
The Scout would take longer about dying – maybe even long enough to be evacuated…
His brothers dragged him against a wall, tethering him to spurs in the cartilage so that he wouldn’t slip down into the sludge.
The now-one-eyed brother, power fist clamped across his groin, protested at being assigned to guard the Scout. “I can carry on, Sir.” Juron shook his head.
Lex had hoped to lob grenades into the transporter cyst, dogged by Yeri. Biff watched Juron turn the homicidal assassin-creature over with his boot. With growing revulsion the Sergeant scrutinised that brutish viridian humanoid face, its toothy mouth locked open in a rictus of death. So vastly disproportionate was that overhead grabbing arm that the face had seemed to be located in the creature’s chest.
“Its face looks like… images of orks I’ve seen,” murmured Biff. “Though as for the rest of it…”
Vonreuter swore to himself in anguish of soul. “By Him on Earth, the blasphemy of it! I swear this thing is made from ork seed—”
“Didn’t know as we much liked orks, Sir,” said Juron.
Nor did they. Orks were an anarchic, quarrelsome, piratical race.
It was orks who had seized those three hives out in the ash wastes of Necromunda, compelling the long march culminating in much slaughter and destruction. The Imperial Fists felt a prejudice against orks – though equally, without the provocation offered by those green-skinned brutes, would the Fists have been moved to establish a base on Necromunda which was to prove so fertile a source of future recruits?
Thus many Fists also felt a kind of twisted bond with orks – who were only noisy homicidal trash, and posed no ultimate radical threat to the Imperium. Such as this vast fleet of gastropoidal living ships seemed increasingly to pose…
“Don’t you see, Zed?” asked the Lieutenant, lapsing into intimacy. “This… assassin creature… has been made from ork seed. Look at its green face! Ork genes have been perverted into this foul, lethal shape…”
“Pretty good weapon,” grunted Biff.
“Yes, pretty good.” Vonreuter’s tone was bitter.
“These… beings… on board this ship – these things from another galaxy! – must have gathered orks from some frontier star on their way into our galaxy, and done this with them.”
He was incensed. “Oh I reserve the right to kill all orks I come across. Oh yes I do indeed. But they remain our own galaxy’s orks – the human galaxy’s, our Emperor’s galaxy. How dare extragalactic creatures come here to harvest and pervert our natives!”
The Lieutenant kicked the corpse. His voice hushed. “I don’t believe we could accomplish this trick… No, I don’t. Or else we would have…”
“Seems as how they made Genestealers,” said Juron. “Made ’em from something else, I guess. Now this… And what else besides? What other species might they have their eyes set on?”
“Could it be… any species – whatever they come across? Including… us? We mustn’t leave any dead Fists behind! I must communicate this thought to the Terminator Librarians. Imagine if the creatures that can transform an ork into this self-propelled weapon could lay their claws on our progenoid glands! If they could capture the code of our blessed primarch!” Vonreuter almost gagged.
“So where are the alien filth?” asked Juron.
Lex had ranged quite some way beyond the destroyed teleporter cyst, accompanied by Yeri. Now he shouted out from beside a muscular door he had teased open: “Pay-dirt, Sir!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
IN A RIBBED vault huger than the Fists’ Assimularum Hall, hundreds of vile creatures thrust from nooks in the walls – an array of angular gargoyles.
Coated in an integument of translucent resin, these motionless creatures seemed hewn of porous coral of amber, russet, and golden hue. Long fang-jawed heads reared upon vertebral wind-pipes from a humpbacked thorax – heads whose greatly elongated occipital region suggested that a substantial brain greater than human size was contained within the elliptical skull.
The creatures all possessed six armoured limbs. The two upper arms were dextrous, with clever-looking hands. The two lower arms had claw-tipped spades as secondary hands. The legs were jointed, and horny-hoofed. Between rump and thorax was a wasp-waisted girdle. The upper body perched flexibly upon the lower armoured haunches. These erect hexapeds were twice the stature of a man.
Slime from orifices that honeycombed the walls oozed slowly over the embalmed creatures, lending them a lustrous glaze in the light cast by…
…by several slab-footed stumpy humanoids with foetally large bald heads. Their arms had been abolished, becoming mere vestigial nubs poking back from the shoulders, as though otherwise they might attempt to tear off the parasitical organic machines that infested their faces. Tubes plunged into their
mouths, their nostrils, and their eye sockets. A clawed foot held tight to the dome of their skulls. A single large eyeball, cinctured within a bony cup, rose above that foot-fixture… and beamed out leprous light… now bathing the intruding Marines.
“Blasphemy!” lamented Vonreuter, as those silent humanoid searchlights shuffled through the slime which drained across the pitted floor.
One of the Scouts vomited; and Lex rounded on him. “Moron! You’re putting your juices into this ship – to taste.”
The Scout apologised as if Lex was an officer.
Yeri stared at the armless searchlight dwarfs in a fascination of disgust – and of rage at the limited destiny so tyrannically engineered for these purpose-bred cripples.
“Human stock,” he muttered. “They come from human stock.”
“We breed cyborgs,” Biff reminded him quietly.
“Ah, but in the Emperor’s service,” Yeri retorted tightly. “That’s very different, isn’t it? That’s sacramental labour. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?” he demanded, his voice giddily trembling on an edge of hysteria.
“Of course it’s different,” Biff agreed. He hated the impious thunk which had prompted him to compare two such very different situations. He must stop thunking. In this terrible alien ship the subtleties and equivocations of thunking might prove both damnable and lethal.
Yet another thunk did promptly intrude – a more Fist-like thunk. Which he might be wise to voice quickly…
Before Biff could utter his thunk, Yeri jerked a power thumb at the giant gargoyles.
“We could take a trophy,” he snarled at Lex. “We could cut one of these loose while it’s still hibernating. Take it back for experiment. To squeeze info.”
“Yesss,” said Lex softly. “A trophy…”
A trophy of fame… After surgical interrogation, one of those great dire skulls might excellently well be mounted in a chapel…
Whatever was in Yeri’s mind? wondered Biff.
Ah… Biff comprehended. Furnished with the most impeccable of excuses, namely a paralysed prisoner, their team would be obliged to withdraw. Precious Lexandro would be honourably removed from a location which seemed all too likely to kill all of them, and him, before too long…
How Yeremi’s obsessive fixation was twisting his reason, and almost perverting the call of duty – oh so justifiably and piously!
“Sarge,” Biff said to Juron, voicing his thunk, “these gargoyle beasts mightn’t have been roosting too long. They mightn’t be too deep in their Sus-An state.”
“Mightn’t they? Why?”
“Well, if this ship has already raided some solar systems in our galaxy so as to take orks and humans and… manipulate their genes… to create living weapons and torches, these beasts must have been up and active within recent years. They haven’t been sleeping for aeons. We should kill ’em all quickly. They’re just… snoozing… in between stars.”
“Unless—” Lex threw this word solitary and naked into the debate.
“Unless what?” demanded Juron.
“Unless,” continued Lex, “other parts of the ship have been active – but not this one. Maybe this lot haven’t batted an eyelid since they left Andromeda before Rogal Dorn was born! Scared to touch them, aren’t you, Biffy? That’s the truth of it.”
Oh, Lex was most seduced by the notion of carrying back such an important souvenir. Yeri looked pleased at his own guile.
Lexandro smiled unpleasantly at Biff. “Easier to skrag ’em all where they’re hanging – that’s what you think, eh? ‘Skrag’ is the correct scumnik parlance, isn’t it?”
One of the searchlight dwarfs focused upon Lex, but the creature seemed otherwise mindless so he paid it no heed.
Lex sneered. “I’m not scared of touching horrors, Biffyboy… Permission to cut one loose with a laser, Sir?” he requested of the Lieutenant.
“You’re right, d’Arquebus,” agreed Vonreuter. “We’re here for knowledge as much as to exterminate. Knowledge precedes extermination. Knowledge perfects extermination.”
The Lieutenant snapped a lasgun loose from a thigh-holster on his plasteel cuisse. Silver runes embossed the barrel. After adjusting setting and focus deftly with his power glove, he handed the weapon to Lex to do the honours.
Lex stepped up to the petrified monster looming from the oozing wall.
“Yes,” whispered Yeri.
A searing needle of coherent light lanced from the gun. Resin cracked. Resin burst. Slime sprayed.
Steam billowed, assaulting nostrils with a sour vinegary whiff. A long golden eye clicked open. A spade-claw jerked.
The dragon-creature which loomed over Lex twitched. Lubricants began filtering from its pores.
The periscopic eyeballs of the searchlight dwarfs swivelled. They beamed that ashen radiance more brightly at the ranks of gargoyle-dragons poised in their slime-coated brittle sheaths.
A crackling as of a frozen lake being trampled by mastodons propagated around that foul organic cathedral den. Everywhere, resin was cracking.
Great dragon bodies were shifting fractionally – or, to the alarmed eye, seeming to shift – as though fossils were softening back into flesh inwardly.
“Blast ’em all!” howled Vonreuter, swiftly changing his mind as to the merits of transporting a supposedly paralytic monster.
“Back off, d’Arquebus! All fire at will!” bellowed Juron, entirely in accord.
Yeri shot the searchlight dwarfs first, blowing away their periscope eyes, blasting their blasphemed humanoid tissue apart.
Lex, who had leapt back cursing in frustration, fumbled with the setting on the lasgun to restore its pristine lance of death-light.
The chamber dinned cacophonously like some giant drum being beaten from within by frantic percussionists as the Fists sprayed exploding bolts around the walls into every slimy niche occupied by those towering six-limbed alien nightmare-knights…
As those segmented, horny, hunchbacked bodies jerked…
As slime and sluggish purple blood suppurated…
Biff fired skraggingly, sensing a great Spidergob of Death suffusing his limbs, a god who was this galaxy’s totem.
This god eyed as anathema such creatures from another island-universe who would devour his children. His myriad festering offspring – human beings and feral humans, abhumans and unhumans the like of Orks – were rightly the Spidergob’s to devour!
The human galaxy – its starry spiral arms winding around a blazing core which concealed a black eater of stars, a pit of ultimate night – was web and spider at once… spinning slowly, greedily feasting on the life that it bred so fecundly…
These creatures from beyond the Dark Deep were of a foreignness so utter that the Spider-God awoke, and, beholding them through Biff’s eyes, twitched with a flux of nauseated antipathy…
Or so it seemed to Biff. And Biff knew that the Spider would very likely also consume him too, as a bloody gobbet to soothe its dyspepsia.
At last the Fists ceased fire. Did any of the aliens, savaged in their embalmment, remain alive? The ribbed, spattered walls were hung with hundreds of wrecked cadavers which might still twitch, but which surely posed no further threat…
Yeri’s gaze darted all about the chamber, alert for any wounded dragon which might nevertheless launch itself, stumbling, at Lexandro.
Thus Yeri was the first to see a sphincter door pulse open and three fully alert kin of the slaughtered rush through, hissing enragedly.
TWO CARRIED LONG devices resembling great golden drumsticks of tissue and cartilage torn loose from the shoulders of some flightless alien bird. Spurred contoured bone, with a menacing hole in the end, protruded.
The third waved two shimmering swords of yellow horn, one in each upper hand. A spike jutted from the pommels, the sting-tail of some mutated armoured worm which formed the hand-guard, stubby parodies of mouth-fingers clinging tight to the base of the blade.
Blazing gobbets erupted from the holes in the fronts of the dru
mstick-guns, streaking like conflagrating phosphorus, screaming through the air.
One gobbet ploughed into a corpse hanging from the wall, bursting, spattering sizzling acids.
The second struck Vonreuter on his thigh-armour, and began corroding, eating through plasteel, as the Lieutenant swiped at the clinging volatile smear.
A hideous crackling noise issued from the swollen butts of those guns as the wielders, hands plunged deep within, cranked some trigger.
Already Yeri was returning fire.
Biff too.
And Juron, and the others.
Those eerie drumstick-guns did not fire again immediately. They crunched, within, and shuddered – in which short span of time bolts tore into the snarling nightmare-knights… so that when the guns did emit new flaming projectiles, the guns were already tumbling from the dying creatures’ grasp.
No bolts reached the sword-wielder, though.
Those razor-sharp horns swished through the air, aglow, in frenzied circuits, as the warrior advanced. Bolts were simply batted aside by the scintillating aura of force conjured in mid-air.
Juron and a limping Vonreuter both converged, waving their power swords. Each attacked one horn-blade.
As the humming monomolecular edges of their swords met those force-field-spinning razor-horns in shuddering collision, rainbow energy cascaded.
One horn split, its worm-handle shrieking.
The other locked with Vonreuter’s blade, bearing down upon him from his alien assailant’s greater height. The creature lashed out with a hoof. This impacted on the acid-weakened zone of his thigh, buckling the fast-corroding armour. From between the towering alien’s legs its spiked tail jerked upward into the crumpled cuisse, piercing through into the Lieutenant’s muscle and carapace.
But its blades no longer wove that cordon of energy.
Lex had circled at speed. Firing upward, Lex shattered that great-brained head.
The creature collapsed over Vonreuter, bearing him staggering backward to the ground, impaling his thigh even further.
