by Steve Parker
‘Acknowledged,’ said Karras. ‘But once the accursed thing has done its job, how are we to know? How do we access the results?’
‘From the moment of detonation, a psychic backwash will begin. It will be similar to receiving information via clairvoyance. Of all present, you alone will be able to process the data. Only you will be able to discern it fully, to understand it. To that end, the moment it is safe to do so, you must drop your barrier and open yourself to the psychic resonance. It is only the initial detonation that is dangerous to the others.’
Karras shook his head. ‘You have not prepared me adequately for this, Sigma.’
‘There are no preparations for this. Trust your Librarius training and your gift and you will see. The resonance will imprint directly on your awareness not only a clear knowledge of the terrain ahead, but the density of life forms and any concentrations of psychic strength. This knowledge will be critical to the survival of the team and the success of this operation. Now attack the hexagraphe, and be ready to shield your squad.’
The others watched, unsettled, uncomfortable with things beyond their understanding and unsure of what they should do. Karras ordered them closer together, the easier to shield them all. Then he began to focus violent energies on the orb.
He spread his feet wider and tensed, allowing his inner gates to widen, channelling a flow that changed from a stream to a crashing torrent. Something in the air changed. The others felt it. Skin prickled beneath thick armour. Karras bared his teeth. He felt so strong, so alive. As balefire manifested around him, licking over the black and silver of his ceramite, he wanted to call out, to roar a battle-cry. It was too long since he had felt this. He bunched his muscles, focused, intense, and the strange white flames surrounding him began to flare taller and brighter.
The others watched as the air darkened the floating orb. It seemed to be swallowing what meagre light existed in these surroundings. Soon its spherical form was lost in a nebulous black shadow that simply hung in the air and continued to grow. As it grew, a screaming sound filled the minds of all present, all of them but one: the Exorcist, Rauth.
Karras began chanting a low mantra, words taught by Cordatus that would concentrate the flow like a laser. Centering his awareness in his lower abdomen, he unleashed a level of energy now that could have ripped a gunship from the sky or could have torn a tank to pieces.
The scream of the strange eldar device reached its peak. Everything went suddenly black. There was a deafening sound, a mighty crack like a great tree splitting. Karras switched focus, throwing up a bubble of psychic defence just in time. Even so shielded, the Space Marines and servitors were buffeted backwards a step. The lambent water below the rocky bridge on which they stood became rough with choppy waves that lapped against the cavern’s sheer walls.
Normal light returned, the light of the bioluminescent moss, the crystals and the glowing waters below. There was no sign of the hexagraphe now. None at all.
‘Drop the barrier and ready yourself, Librarian!’ ordered Sigma.
Karras did so, and the flood of information began, washing over him like a torrent.
In his mind’s eye, he saw the tunnels that led from this cavern, thousands of passageways – no, tens of thousands – from lava tubes no wider than a fingertip to massive gaping roads that could accommodate a Thunderhawk in flight. He saw every intersection, every pit, every body of cold, still water, the stalactites, the stalagmites, the flowstones and the deep, undiscovered, untapped veins of margonite, soledite and a thousand other materials from common to priceless.
And then there was the foe.
At first, he sensed only the footsoldiers. Genestealers. Mindless individuals slaved to one far greater. They were deadly enough in their own right. Even alone, a genestealer was capable of killing a Space Marine if only it could engage him at close quarters. They needed no weapons. They were weapons, crafted by evolution to the point of absolute lethality. Their speed and stealth allowed them to get close. Their claws and talons could shear through ceramite as if it were little better than tin. Perhaps worse still, they could implant members of a host-species with gene-altering packets of organic material – the genestealer’s kiss by which they spread their abhorrent infection, undermining from within all those who would stand in their way.
And there are so many, thought Karras. Thousands of them. We can hardly hope to make a dent. I see now why this cannot be a purge. By the Throne, if we become trapped down here…
And yet, the worst was still to come. As the hexagraphe’s explosive psychic resonance sped further along the twists and turns, Karras sensed the tyranid nests – vast nurseries filled with new abominations waiting to be born. Not just genestealers. The infestation had already reached a new phase. Other organisms were being born – other variants, larger and smaller both, all lethally specialised expressions of tyranid genetic evolution. And there were people down there – trapped, infected and doomed. One of them had to be White Phoenix.
Suddenly, his awareness was wrenched away from them, yanked forcibly towards something incredibly powerful. He knew it could be only one thing.
He felt another power looking back at him, sensing him, scrutinising him.
He knew it was the broodlord, because he had never sensed anything so cold and so alien. It was a mind utterly inscrutable, and his own withdrew from it on reflex, repelled by the darkness within it.
Here is death, he thought. Here is the reaper made flesh.
The motto of his Chapter had never seemed hollow to Karras. Not even for the briefest moment in all his centuries of war.
Fear not death, we who embody it in His name!
He had always been proud to live by those words, to fight under banners bearing them in bold Gothic script. But, by the Throne, those words sounded hollow now. This beast, this tyranid monstrosity from beyond the domain of man… It embodied death with a perfection and authority Karras could not dispute. This was a being perfectly evolved to kill in every conceivable way. Yes, it was the broodlord that embodied death. Not he.
‘Insanity,’ he groaned, and glared at the servo-skull hovering just in front of him. ‘And now it knows us, Sigma. Now it knows who we are and what we are. The horde is mobilising. The hunt has begun. And we are the prey.’
7
Chyron’s insides bubbled with anger and impatience. Better they had left him in stasis on the Saint Nevarre than drag him down here to stand guard in an empty chamber no one, not even the enemy, cared about.
A black pox on the wretched miners that made the tunnels too small for him. He ought to be with the others. Who knew what they were doing right now? Vox-comms had quickly eroded to nothing but hissing static as the rest of the kill-team had moved further and deeper into the planet’s bowels.
He raged at the thought of others seeing combat while he sat here like a glorified watch-dog. By the souls of all those lost, it was an outrage. An outrage!
Looking at the gun-servitor quietly covering the tunnel mouths and passageways at his back, an impulse flickered through him, only momentary, but there nevertheless. It was the urge to obliterate the little man-machine. The servitor had done nothing wrong, but such was the rage within Chyron that no one and nothing was safe when such a mood took him.
He cursed in the old dialect of his swamp-covered home world – a birthplace he had shared with many of his late battle-brothers. Even as he called the old curse to mind, his anger was cooled and was replaced by that deep melancholy to which he was far from a stranger.
Am I the only one left who curses in such a way? Might there not be some remnant of the Chapter out there among the stars, perhaps looking for others who survived the battle with the hive fleet?
The hive fleet in question was the vast tyrannic incursion which had struck the Ultima Segmentum like a sudden, lethal plague. Hive Fleet Kraken.
By Terra, there had never been darker days than those. Chyron had been there at the beginning, but his performance against the tyranid v
anguard had marked him for Deathwatch service, and he had left his brothers to serve the Watch with honour, believing he would soon return to them with many scars to show – and perhaps even with access to the Watch’s advanced weaponry, a factor he had once hoped would help turn the tide.
Scars he had in great abundance, of course. So many, in fact, that his body needed this damned iron box to keep the pieces together. But though he had won honour and more with his deeds, when the time came to end his term of service, there was no Chapter left to which he might return.
As far as Chyron knew, none left alive bore the heart-and-bloody-tear icon of the formerly mighty Lamenters.
He was no fool. Chapters vanished. It happened. The war for dominion over this sprawling galaxy demanded blood by the oceanful. It could not be won without sacrifice. But the knowledge did nothing to salve his spiritual wounds.
There were few places to take solace. One, of course, was in ending the lives of as many foul tyranid spawn as he could hope to encounter. It was why he became so enraged at the thought of others battling while he stood and waited. The other was in that narrow thread of hope, his most fervent wish, that one day, he would see the Chapter icon on another Space Marine’s pauldron, and know for sure that Chyron Amadeus Chyropheles was not the last of his kind.
Fight on till then, he told himself. Earn that moment with the blood of your foes.
There was sound from behind him: a metallic clattering and a shuffling that echoed briefly from the high chamber walls.
Chyron turned casually, unconcerned, thinking that perhaps his mindless companion was merely adjusting itself. As he did, there was the sudden roar and flash of ignited rocket fuel.
Something white hot raced from one of the tunnel mouths straight towards Chyron’s glacis plate. He saw it spiral towards him almost in slow motion, on a trail of white smoke that stretched out from the tunnel mouth like a ribbon.
He was still turning when it struck him hard and exploded, punching off a thick chunk of armour from the upper left corner of his frontal plate. The impact sent him staggering two steps back.
Had the missile hit him dead centre, he might have joined his fallen brothers there and then.
Bolter-fire erupted from the gun-servitor’s weapons, shaking its pale form as it rattled a torrent of rounds into the tunnel mouth so clearly marked by the missile’s trail. Screams of agony and the wet sound of internal detonations followed as at least some of the rounds found enemy flesh.
Chyron recovered his balance and was about to add fire of his own when, from at least a dozen passage mouths, armed targets surged forwards, firing and screaming like men possessed.
Bright, thick beams of las-fire licked across Chyron’s plate, scoring it, tracing deep lines in the outer layer, but doing little real damage beyond that. Futile, too, was the fusillade of stubber and pistol-fire that rattled off him in bursts of sparks and metal chips.
You cannot harm me. You have made a fatal error in judgement. The price will be your lives!
Chyron fired back, stitching an entire hemisphere of the chamber with a stream of lethal shells from the assault cannon that was his right-side armament. The large-calibre bullets tore through bodies as if they were made of naught but wet tissue. Blood gushed over the cold floor, quickly freezing there in great icy slicks. Corpses, many of them torn in half by the raw power of the weapon, slapped to the ground and lay their steaming, leaking all their heat into the air as their contents slid out to quickly cool.
Between them, Chyron and the gun-servitor met that first wave with such deadly force that the chamber was turned into an absolute slaughterhouse.
The Dreadnought lost all thoughts of regret and self-pity then. All he knew was battle-lust and the joy of slaughter. Who were these foolish people that they attacked a member of the mighty Space Marines? No ordinary member, either. What manner of men would hurl themselves at a Dreadnought?
His arrogance and revelry in bloodshed undid Chyron then.
He heard a clang. A vibration shook through his right side. He tried to turn to see what had happened, but his arc of vision didn’t extend to looking down at his own form. It was fixed forwards. He rotated further and saw a strange-looking man with shining yellow eyes backing away from him.
Four arms! He has four arms!
‘What have you done?’ Chyron roared at him.
Without waiting for an answer, he turned his assault cannon on the retreating figure and opened fire.
The hail of bullets turned the target to bloody mulch. There was nothing left that resembled human form at all. But, no sooner had the strange enemy been obliterated than Chyron discovered what the noise and the shudder had been.
Demo charge!
An explosion rocked him, knocking him from his piston-powered legs, hurling him twenty metres across the icy chamber floor in an uncontrollable skid.
Parts of his right arm and shoulder showered to the ground, a hail of plasteel and adamantium that had only moments before been his primary weapon.
Chyron’s HUD went wild with warning lights. Alarms screeched at him.
He ignored them all. With a roar of absolute rage, he struggled to his feet, levering himself upwards with the power fist that was his left hand. He turned his gaze back to the centre of the chamber just in time to see the gun-servitor overwhelmed and torn apart by thick-set men with mining lasers. Others were still pouring from the tunnel mouth, a great surge of armed insanity intent on the Dreadnought’s absolute destruction.
Another missile arced out towards him, but he saw it coming and managed to avoid it by a hair’s breadth. His sensors blinked a temperature warning as the missile’s tail-fire brushed him. It struck the wall a few metres behind him. The concussion wave kicked him forwards and pelted him with a rain of small rocks.
Chyron rose again, set his stance wide and roared at the mob rushing towards him. He lifted his power fist into the air, the weapon crackling with deadly arcs of blue energy.
‘To me, you brainless dogs! To me, you twisted fools! Chyron of the Lamenters will teach you how to die!’
8
Still on the rock bridge where they had deployed the eldar psychic mapping device, Karras took a moment to brief the others on the path ahead. The hexagraphe had done its job, and in a remarkable way. To Karras, it was almost like having an automapper inside his brain, only far, far more advanced. He could almost feel the tunnels, feel the currents of hot and cold air that pushed and pulled through them. They were like great calcified arteries leading to yawning caverns that were like vast fossilised hearts.
I know where we must go. I know exactly which route to take. I can even see an exfil path that will cut around the cave-in. What a device, indeed. But if I fall in battle…
‘Listen,’ he told the others. ‘I have to give you this knowledge. I have to share with you the map I have in my head.’
‘How do you propose to do that?’ asked Zeed. ‘Draw it out?’
‘I’m going to imprint it directly on your minds. Solarion, come forwards.’
‘I don’t think so, Karras,’ said the Ultramarine. ‘You’re not messing with my mind.’
‘Don’t waste time, Talon Three. You’re on point. You need the information and there’s no other way. Or at least none faster.’
Solarion was still reluctant, so Karras stepped straight towards him and thrust his open palm onto the point-man’s breastplate. ‘Ready yourself. This may cause pain.’
He said it quickly, giving Solarion no real chance to protest further before Karras speared a tendril of psychic force into the Ultramarine’s mind and wrote the relevant information directly onto it.
When he took his hand away, Solarion crumpled forwards, gasping, breathing hard. As he straightened, he groaned. ‘Don’t… don’t ever do that again.’
‘Do you have it?’ Karras demanded. ‘Can you see?’
Solarion turned his attention inwards for a long quiet moment before he responded.
‘Incredible,
’ he muttered. ‘Yes. Yes, I see it. I don’t know how you did that, and I don’t bloody like it, but I have it all as if I had memorised it from somewhere myself. I know where White Phoenix is. I know where the nurseries are. And, Throne help me, I know where the broodlord is, too.’
‘I will go next,’ said Zeed, unsettlingly eager, pushing past Solarion to stand before Karras. It was apparent he still wanted a shot at the broodlord, despite the warnings of the inquisitor.
When Solarion, Zeed and Voss had all accepted the psychic transfer, Karras turned in the direction they must follow.
‘Wait,’ said Voss. ‘What about Watcher?’
‘He will move with the rest of us,’ said Karras. ‘He doesn’t require the transfer.’
‘What?’ said Zeed. ‘Why not?’
‘Drop it, Ghost,’ said Karras. ‘Check your chrono. Five hours and sixteen minutes until the extraction deadline. Almost half our allotted time gone and we’re not even halfway. So we had better pick up the pace. All of us.’
Voss and Zeed threw each other a look. Even with their helms on, they understood each other. It was nothing to do with the chrono. Whatever lay between Karras and Rauth was the real reason the Exorcist was not being imprinted as they had been. They didn’t like not knowing. But the tone in Karras’s voice said it was the wrong time to push him.
‘I’m designating this cavern RP2. Omni, I want these bridges rigged with charges. The next time we pass through here, we’ll have a lot of company. The structures in this cavern will work to our advantage. With a minimum of explosives, we can at least slow the genestealers down. They’ll have to scale the walls and ceiling to pursue us. Can you manage it?’
‘Of course I can, Scholar. A few melta-charges will rip right through these spans.’ He leaned over the edge of the rocky bridge under his feet and looked down. ‘It’s a long drop to the water.’
‘Margonite-infused solutions are highly corrosive,’ said Karras. ‘Anything that falls in there isn’t stepping out again. Watch your footing, all of you.’
