Space Marine

by Ian Watson

  So Yeri was feeling this bizarre spasm too… this amputation, this abortion of a part of oneself…

  “I can feel Biff gone! Don’t you sense it, Lex? It’ll be like this if you die! Such utter desolation. You mustn’t die! Not here, where death is magnified… You must survive. Get out of here. I challenge you to a duel, Lexandro d’Arquebus. Do you all hear?” he cried to their companions. “I am challenging d’Arquebus to the duelling boots because… because…” What cause could there be? What adequate formal insult? “Because he caused Tundrish to die by believing the Zoat’s lies himself! The Zoat lied, and Biff died – to prove it otherwise!”

  Lex laughed at Yeri, to hide his pain. “You’re being heretic, brother.”

  “Brother… Yes, Biff was your secret brother – and mine! Now that he’s gone, we’re closer, aren’t we, Lexy? The two of us. And I’ll see you damned,” he cried passionately. “Is my challenge witnessed?”

  No time for witnessing challenges…

  As the tattered leaking green slug slumped, a cyst erupted through the floor with a shriek of tearing tissue. A flesh volcano burst open, unfolding its lips.

  Aye, summoned by the dying slug-organ…

  Tyranid warriors, wielding those deathspitter guns and whirling boneswords, stumbled hissing into the chamber.

  Five… six looming tyranids.

  For a moment they paused; and that ghastly cracking reverberated as the component creatures within the guns chewed the husks from the living, poisonous ammunition.

  Those boneswords weren’t glowing with an aura, as the other ones had glowed… Two of the tyranids collided, snarling, with one another. The aliens seemed disorganised and confused, uncoordinated… as if suffering from shock, from rupture, alienation from their fellows. These ruthless puissant dragons were almost vulnerable… now that the green slug-organ had perished. Lex tensed.

  And what went through Yeri’s mind at that precise moment?

  That Lex was about to rush into their midst, boltgun blazing? That Lex would seize the chance of great honour, of slaying those vicious extragalactic dragonoids single-handedly – and recklessly?

  That Lex was about to kill himself in defence of his brothers, so as to win some greater measure of repute than scumnik Tundrish?

  That Lex, though not in a literal sense, was also about to lose his head?

  Lex must not thrust himself forward fatally, and so steal himself away into nothingness – or into the embrace of Dorn – as Biff had done…

  Before the other brothers could even begin to open fire, Yeri pre-empted any such lethal move by Lex.

  With a bark of apology, Yeri snatched Juron’s power sword from him.

  “Pull out, Sir!” he cried. “Report about the Zoat’s lies! I’ll hold the beasts off!”

  Yeri leapt towards the tyranids, boltgun spitting fire, sword humming – preventing his brothers from shooting, else they would kill him.

  Briefly Juron stood nonplussed.

  For Yeri had seized that power sword away from his officer in combat. Yeremi Valence would deserve… disgraceful reprimand, the pain-glove, maybe even execution… if he lived.

  Therefore he must die honourably…

  Six towering tyranids could surely ensure this, no matter how malcoordinated they might be. He who had helped Juron seize that Titan deserved no less – such thoughts must have raced through the sergeant’s mind. For Juron decided to back Yeri up.

  “Do it, Valence!” he cried, even as Yeri fired into the thorax of his first target, and swung his power sword to connect with a bonesword of his next opponent. “Pull out, lads! Back to the torp!”

  A blazing, acid gobbet erupted screaming from a deathspitter, impacting on Yeri’s plastron.

  A bonesword descended upon his helmet, its serrated edge snapping.

  Spade-claws reached for him.

  “Pull out, d’Arquebus!” bellowed Juron. “Withdraw!”

  Premature! Premature. The climax of their intrusion into this grotesque, gastropoidal starcraft should have been Lex’s own glorious death.

  His glory… his death. His death; his glory…

  By withdrawing, Juron was saving Yeri from dishonour for his fevered deed… which had prevented Lex from carrying out almost the same impulsive action…

  And that was why Yeri had really seized the sergeant’s sword. So as to force Juron’s hand.

  Lex felt tempted to disobey the sergeant; to wade in with Yeri, side by side. To stand shoulder to shoulder with that… despicable embarrassment. With that leeching spurious brother…

  Wouldn’t other brothers reproach Lex for leaving Yeri here? Wouldn’t Yeri thus have won at long last? Wouldn’t he have succeeded in humiliating Lex?

  Assaulted by Yeri’s bolts, a tyranid snapped apart midway, its horny wasp-waist demolished. The hooves of its mighty legs drummed. Its sting-tail jerked in orgiastic convulsion – while its upper body fell, head roaring, claws and digits raking the floor.

  Yeri was firing blindly now, swinging the power sword blindly. A tyranid’s claws were inside his helmet, raking his face, scooping jelly, and he was screaming… rapturously.

  “Out! Battle order! Back to the torp!”

  Lex obeyed Juron.

  IT PROVED TO be a timely order. As the surviving brothers pounded through the reeking passageways, Juron let them hear the clipped reports on the comm-channel. Other parties were returning from deep penetration, too.

  Alien resistance had slackened off, become chaotic, as though the ship was stunned. Yet wisdom counselled withdrawal, for this was primarily an info-raid. Info must be digested. Seizing the ship as such had never been a prime concern. Indeed, that would have been a vain endeavour, given the organic character of the vessel.

  Now the Fists were setting powerful delayed-action demolition charges in that oozing, many-chambered womb of monsters as they withdrew. Soon, scavengers might begin to try to eat those charges, to digest them with caustic juices.

  Lexandro expected that the pang of amputation, the aborting spasm, would come once more to him on account of Yeri.

  It did not come in quite the same way. It built slowly, parasitical upon the pain he couldn’t help feeling at Biff’s passing.

  Lex did not intuit the exact moment of his other brother’s death. Yet Yeremi Valence was dead by now. Lexandro knew that full well.

  THE DISORIENTED LIEUTENANT Vonreuter, whom they had hoped to collect en route, lay half-chewed by scavenger macrobes. Fortunately, his chest was still intact, so Brother Mahler, who kenned the art, paused to harvest his progenoid glands.

  In a sense, the Lieutenant would live on.

  Unlike Yeremi…

  Unlike Biff, whose decapitated body had become a feast for iridescent beetles breeding fast in the shell of his suit in that chamber where he had challenged the Zoat. After flushing out his husk with flames, Sergeant Juron shoved a charge down the neck of Biff’s armour into a chest a-rattle with bare ribs, shreds of black carapace, and crisped beetle.

  And so they withdrew, withdrew.

  OF THE NINETY men who had erupted into the tyranid starship, sixty-one returned to pack into the boarding torpedo…

  …which blasted hindward out of the anal sphincter, carrying them into the clean stark emptiness of space.

  Other torpedoes were departing from other vents in that great blanched nautiloid vessel – and from other vessels.

  The particular extragalactic craft they had been inside began to shudder silently, on screen, as charges exploded within.

  It did not rupture. However, Imperial battleships began launching plasma and barrage bombs at other invading coiled leviathans.

  How elegantly those human battleships drifted, pulsing out their seething balls of plasma. Those were vertical cities, spiry and crenellated, ghostly in the light from distant Lacrima Dolorosa – cities bonded to spear-blade decks that jutted out for a full four kilometres with underslung warp-keels far to the forrard. Quite as much bulk hung below the poop as so
ared above so that each vessel seemed afloat upon its own reflection in a lake of quicksilvered glass.

  Long-range guided barrage bombs erupted against the towering alien hulls, cracking chambers open.

  Throbs of incandescent ionised gas, compressed in containment fields, burst, bringing inferno where atmosphere gushed, a furnace blaze that imploded inward.

  Yet there were a thousand invaders; and from the gaping mouths of the most gargantuan snail-ships there now began to spew a stream of ominous beaked white baby vessels, each the size of a small corvette. These sped in swift, if lazy-seeming, arcs towards their tormenters. They swam through space like so many blanched fossil foetuses.

  Laser batteries on the decks and towers of the cathedraline battleships opened fire, stitching the void.

  Ivory foetuses erupted.

  Yet there were so many of those.

  Others dived upon decks, upon spires. Silent explosions shattered the serenity of those battle-cities, tearing their elegant plasteel tracery, blasting cavities which gushed a mist of shattered weaponry and personnel…

  SPREAD OVER CUBIC megaklicks, the battle drifted past the jaundiced gas-giant and its pallid moons, inward.

  As yet, in the zenith at night, those feral barbarians on Lacrima Dolorosa III wouldn’t even be able to glimpse the very brightest of the carnage, still so many hundreds of millions of kilometres away was their jungle world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  IN THE GALLERY of the Solitorium which jutted below the fortress-monastery, Lexandro knelt alone, searching his heart.

  He ignored the vistas of bilious nebulae and of ten thousand stars – those tiny cyanotic lanterns and angry carbuncles frozen in their fevered burning in the void. He scorned the pastel dapple of stained starlight dimly washing upon the plasteel flagstones through the mullioned oriel windows.

  Lieutenant Kroff Tezla, the total amputee, was long gone, back to his Blood Drinkers brothers. A frigate from that Chapter had taken Tezla home at the end of the Gathering of Commanders preceding the Lacrima Dolorosa Crusade.

  Lexandro was alone.

  The memory of the mutilated Kroff Tezla remained, lolling in his cup-shaped cart, attended by simian servitors. That staunch man!

  And on one lonely day three “brothers” had visited him, out of almost impertinent curiosity…

  Yeri had wondered whether Tezla regretted his survival.

  Lex had quibbled, in order to score a point over Yeri. Then he had asked whether brothers of that exotic, sanguinophiliac Chapter supped each other’s blood – an intrusion upon Tezla’s privacy which had irked the man, an intrusion upon grief.

  And upon his terrible separation – from his brothers, and from his own limbs.

  Now Lexandro was also separated, spiritually amputated, in a way he had never been able to envision; in a manner that he never could have foreguessed. All of his prayers to Rogal Dorn were as dust or wormwood. Futility haunted him – a gulf deeper and more annihilating than any heat-sink.

  He recalled his confession to Chaplain Lo Chang of the cratered moon-face, in a chapel where a tyranid skull now hung, its jaw snarling, its swollen occipital braincase jutting back into a niche draped with purple velvet in the manner of some vertical jewel box.

  Lo Chang had sat behind a filigree screen, upon a painstool – not so much that he should experience due anguish at a brother’s admission of shortcomings… Nay, the constipative pangs induced in the nerves of his buttocks may have been subtly pleasurable… but so that thus he might sympathetically take into himself some of the confessee’s misery, then defecate this discomfiture out of his own body, metamorphosed into crass waste matter, fit to be jettisoned.

  “When I pray now to our primarch, to dedicate myself afresh,” Lex had whispered, “a cold void yawns within me… where previously the spirit of Dorn filled me with his presence, his heat, his glow… It’s as though Rogal Dorn has withdrawn his aura of blessing, his grace.”

  THANKS TO THE Lacrima Dolorosa Crusade, somewhat more was now known about the workings of the tyranid hive fleet.

  A fifth of the gastropoidal vessels invading that solar system had been destroyed or disabled – either by Marine boarders or by battleship bombardment – before the depleted Imperial forces had withdrawn from the area, leaving the incoming snail-ships to gorge on the jungle world and its ignorant inhabitants.

  A fifth of the invaders was perhaps one five-thousandth of the estimated mass of vessels in the entire hive fleet. Unless this was an underestimate. Perhaps it was. Much was still whelmed in darkness; hidden by the Shadow in the warp.

  A fraction. Yet still… a measurable fraction.

  And the hive fleet moved slowly, in historic terms.

  Though swiftly, in cosmic terms.

  And it would replenish itself. And make slave-monsters of more men, by harvesting their gonads and the genes in their cells with which to breed living tools.

  But still, the crusade as such had succeeded, had it not? More was known.

  More about the vast genesplicer-queens that spewed out their ruling tyranid offspring and also the whole gamut of biological constructs conceived by these queens… genestealers, Zoats… and the cloned living weapons and living tools genetically crafted from captured slave-species. More was known about the energy cortexes that pumped fluids around the living ships. More about the sensory clusters that transmitted neurochemical signals.

  More about the hive mind synapses, which united each individual ship with the mass of ships, sustaining in total the Overmind, and sharpening the perceptions of tyranids and constructs…

  “You destroyed the hive mind synapse,” Lo Chang had explained patiently to Lex. “That organ is what links a tyranid ship into the hive fleet Overmind. It bonds the damned creatures and their bio-constructs within the vessel, attuning all the brood-kin almost telepathically. The closer they come to it, the more powerful its influence. Your own psychic profile was only point zero one, I believe… Yet the proximity of that slug-organ could have magnified aspects of this a hundredfold. Our Terminator Librarians sensed the power of that organ; but Librarians are trained to resist such… disruptions. And then your Brother Tundrish died horribly, very close to you. Very close. Hence your anguish – and your astonishment at such anguish. You’re now blocking off the aura of Dorn from your traumatised mind, to protect yourself from… being overwhelmed. The death of Tundrish still afflicts you. Of Valence too. That pang has flowed through the channel of infinite loss cut by the slug-organ as it perished. Open your mind to Dorn, d’Arquebus. Let Dorn’s light flush away the deathly darkness.”

  But it was useless.

  How galling it was to know that Biff and Yeri had traumatised his mind by dying…

  Lex must purge that invidious taste of gall, for it shamed him.

  He was shamed in the knowledge that Biff had died heroically – saving them from folly, from the deceit of that Zoat. He was shamed that Yeri had also died, officially at least, a hero… though actually a victim of obsession, bent on safeguarding Lex from lethal heroics.

  He was chagrined at being ashamed.

  Astonishedly, he grieved – at being deprived of a part of himself by Yeri’s death, and Biff’s.

  Was Lo Chang simply guessing at that hundredfold effect? Was Lex’s grief, and guilt, simply mediated by a great arching green alien neural slug?

  Or was his grief, his sense of amputation from his two brothers, genuine?

  Did it matter which?

  Aye, it did. For he knew that now he was brotherless, amongst brothers.

  Ten years earlier, how he would have welcomed this freedom from the demeaning shadows of that pair from Trazior…

  Yet now… He who had forsaken his own bloodkin – his two silly sisters – was forced to admit that, unrecognised by himself until now, acknowledged at last only by virtue of absence – of terminal, irremediable absence – he had gained twin brothers, twin shadows of himself… who had now vanished, so that, rendered shadowless by the
ir deaths, Lex’s own puissant flesh and blood had become curiously insubstantial to him.

  At Lo Chang’s urging, he prayed again, in vain.

  Dust.

  Ashes.

  “You must chasten your soul in the Solitorium,” said the Chaplain, “till you can find a modus salvationis for yourself.”

  The Chaplain had waddled from behind the screen towards the consecrated Ablutorium cubicle to relieve himself of the freight of Lexandro’s confession.

  But no weight had lifted from Lex’s spirit.

  SO LEX KNELT alone with the universe, which could swallow any soul, or world, or species.

  Out there amongst the stars were rebel lords and insurrectionists… Those could be neutralised. There were eerie aliens such as slann and eldar, brutish aliens such as Orks… Those could be stalemated.

  Now the cunning ruthless tyranids were invading remorselessly to incorporate human and alien flesh as twisted tools into their own enigmatic imperium of the Overmind…

  Whilst occultly hidden yet ever liable to erupt, unspeakable Powers of Chaos corrupted the cosmos like plagues…

  Amidst those silent stars, deafened by void, death-rattles chattered amidst screams of madness.

  Fists must clench firm. Superhuman bodies, crafted from fierce devout archangelic primarchs by the God-Emperor, must resist all heresy.

  As yet, Lex’s body remained unflawed.

  Mighty, but comely.

  He thought of Yeri’s azure eyes – ripped out by claws; of his blond locks, the runes on his cheek, his fawning insolent jealous smile.

  He thought of Biff’s sharpened teeth and green eyes and grotesque tattoo, and his greasy black hair – all torn off in a bundle.

  How could Lex adequately honour his dead brothers so that Dorn’s grace would return to him once more? Gradually, he realised how.

  FIRST HE WENT to Biff’s deserted cell.

  A skeletal hand lay half-engraved upon the small worktable, beside the buffing wheel and a pitcher of paraffin. During the time-dilated absence of the Fists, dust had settled on these – dust which no servitor had dared to suck or lick up, though the floor and sleeping pallet were kept impeccably clean. An ikon of Dorn hung on the wall.