Sahaal basked in the air above it all, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
The centre had been a colereum, at one time.
A vast hydroponics dome, bristling with sludge-farmed crops, its inwardly-mirrored surface recalled an insect's eye, iridescent and multifaceted. At one time it had disgorged a thousand tonnes of starchpaste every year, diverted among rust-thick pipes to a million habs. At one time.
It had borne its relocation into the abyss with poor grace.
The crops had died when the collapse occurred, their irrigation channels cut forever. What little water filtered into the underhive was tainted by its descent, and those few hardy weeds that had escaped had grown shaggy and truculent, skins thick with mutant bristles. Only the lamps had survived, globular drones of archaic design with thrumming gravmotors and simple logic-minds. They roved the dome with ultraviolet torches blazing, unconcerned with the absence of vegetation, faltering only when their aeons-old fuel reserves perished.
Sahaal straddled the dome like a beetle, limbs moving with insect confidence, drawing himself up its pregnant camber. At its crest he paused, gazed through its scars at the buildings within, and raised his hand to the bandolier straps of his jump pack, plucking at the grenades that dangled there.
The pirates' base was a sprawl of lodges and canvas tents, centred about a stone-walled tower, a fitting headquarters for a leader. There, Sahaal guessed, he would find his prey. Around it guards sprinted between salvage stores and bivouacs with guns brandished, shouting orders, faces milky in the ultraviolet glow. Vehicle engines ignited in a cascade of throaty roars, tracks grinding as they spun towards the colereum's exit.
'We're under attack, Teqo's blood!' Sahaal heard, filtered amongst the screams. 'Dozens of them! All directions!'
A roar from the east told him the bodies of the three slain guards had been found, adding to the confusion, and to the west the dry sound of lasfire — unmistakable in its breathless crackle — supplied the finishing touch.
The Glacier Rats were shooting at shadows.
Nodding, he sunk needle claws into the pinions of the dome, braced every muscle of his body, and closed his eyes.
'In your name, my master,' he said. 'Always.'
And then he drew a breath.
And then he tossed back his head.
And then he screamed.
At its maximum volume, the voxcaster of his ancient helm could burst the veins of a man's skull and turn his teeth to powder. He'd seen men fall paralysed to the floor at the Raptor's shriek, and birds fall stunned from the sky.
In Herniatown, the colereum's mirrored dome exploded.
Dozens of men paused in their panic and glanced up, glimpsed a nightmare figure haloed by ultraviolet, then fell screaming as eyes and mouths filled with splintered glass. Their final sight would haunt the brief remainder of their lives, bathed in a shower of jewelled fragments, a banshee on the crest of a razor-tipped wave.
Then the grenades began to fall, and from each roiling fireball a spume of hooked shrapnel sprayed itself outwards, making mince of flesh.
Sahaal stretched out his claws and exalted in the carnage. He felt for an instant that he could taste the fear of his victims, and tilted his body to rise on its whispering thermals, bathing in the horror he had sown, glorying in his own awesomeness, ascending to deity on wings of terror!
But—
But, no. No!
Even at the peak of such vicious pleasure he shied away, gnashing his teeth. In base exaltations lay an insidious danger. Focus was the key. Always. Focus and devotion.
In vengeance upon the false Emperor, in the name of my Master.
All else was corrupt and meaningless. He must condition himself to feel pleasure in the execution of his work, pleasure at drawing a step closer to his goals... But never pleasure in the act itself.
The fear, the destruction, the death: these were tools. Weapons. Aspects of the artist's palette. Means to an end.
Never the end itself.
He went amongst the dying men with restraint, after that — although those who fell in his path might not have known it. Most were injured, able only to stagger aside as he passed, claws bloodied. He gave little thought to stealth now: whether his panicking prey saw who — what — was in their midst was now irrelevant. None would survive to speak of it.
In a quiet part of his mind he wondered how he must seem to these half-blind worms, supplicating as he passed by, or else cut their throats with the contempt they deserved.
He must appear a giant. He stood far taller than even their mightiest champions, and that despite the hunched posture his armour had adopted. Striding on heavy boots, autoreactive claws flexing at their tips, greaves that tapered towards horn-like knees pistoning above, he moved through their midst like a vulture-treading with care, the twin ridges of his jump pack recalling furled wings, beak-like helm sloping forwards like a jutting jaw.
And where he stepped through curling fronds of smoke and dust, where he moved without fear through sooty flames and hopped across boiling craters, where shadows moved around him like a living mantle, then it was his eyes alone that these dismal rag-men would recall: blazing red, like embers at the heart of a cooling hearth.
The stone tower was all but deserted when he reached it, its guards lying dead from shrapnel wounds at its door, and he swatted the portal from its hinges with a casual shrug. He inhaled as he entered, praying to the cold spirit of his master that here, at last, he would find the prize and its thief.
In the latter respect at least his prayer was answered.
The attack came from above, the flash-flicker of a muzzle igniting warning runes in his eyeplates. He pounced aside even as the hail of lead landed around him, armour whining in protest. Thick plumes of dust and shattered stone danced, and the staccato rattle of a hellfire gun shook the tower from base to tip. The first inelegant sweep of his attacker's hand raked him with lead, and despite the speed of his reaction knocked messy craters into the filigreed surfaces of his armour.
The impacts did not wound him. In those few lucky places that the attacker found his target he failed even to penetrate Sahaal's carapace, inflicting nothing but petulant surface-scars on the midnight blue shell. This was quite enough of an insult to enrage him nonetheless.
He bounded vertically — rising on the wash of his crested engines — and gashed at the wooden spars of the spiral gantry, splinters and singed beams toppling below him, the rhythmic collapse of each level — koom-koom-koom-koom — like the pounding of a fearful heart.
The gunman, lost somewhere in a haze of spinning wood, cried out as his platform dissolved. He skittered broken nails along stone walls, clutching for handholds, and hit the ground with an untidy crunch, leg twisted in fractured angles.
He groaned, struggling against the fuzz of shock.
And then something landed beside him. Something vast, clothed in black and blue. Something with the eyes of a devil, that flexed its claws and hissed like a serpent, that stepped closer and leaned down to inspect him, as a cat might a mouse.
Something that ran a blade, almost tender, across the glowing electoo of the man's forehead.
'Nikhae,' it said.
And finally, hearing his own name from this nightmare's shrouded lips, the man's voice came back to him. His shock parted like thinning smoke, and as the claws reached out to touch him he screamed with the ragged vestiges of his breath. 'Where,' the voice hissed, 'is it?'
Zso Sahaal left Herniatown an hour later, thoughts clouded. The package he had taken with him had been left in his wake, placed carefully amongst the scraps of offal — shredded by the force of his fury — that had once been Nikhae. It would claim the lives of any who remained within the town's sagging grid, but where the thought of such wide-scale revenge should gratify him, Sahaal felt only emptiness.
The Corona was gone.
It had been sold.
Traded.
Bartered, like some plebeian commodity.
&nbs
p; He walked from the town's northern entrance without a care for stealth or destination, in a haze, and when a cloaked figure approached from the darkness to bow before him he barely paused, whipping a thoughtless claw into and through its neck in a single motion. The body collapsed and his feet carried him on, and from the shadows a chorus of gasps arose around him. Finally, begrudgingly, he glanced up from the ground to regard this new circumstance.
There were fifty or more, each draped in black, prostrating themselves in terror and awe. More scum, worthy of his blades...
Sahaal sighed, flicked blood from his claws, and prepared for more slaughter.
'H-hail,' one of them said, her wide eyes avoiding his gaze. 'Hail to the Emperor's angel. Hail to the holy warrior.'
Sahaal stared at her, uncertain. He had expected opposition, terror, pitiful aggression — but not obeisance.
'What do you want?' he hissed, and each of them shivered at the sound of his voice.
'O-only to serve you, my lord,' the woman quailed, extending her right hand in a tall salute. 'Ave Imperator!'
And then the Umbrea Insidior's promethium reactor-cell, the bulky package he had removed so carefully from its crippled generarium, reached critical mass in the heart of the Glacier Rats' territory and detonated with the force of a thousand grenades.
The underhive shook, the floor quaked like a living tiling, and as his new congregation cowered around him, Sahaal basked in the phosphorlight of Hernia-town's rain.
Mita Ashyn
Hemmed on all sides by drooping adamantium walls, the force of Herniatown's devastation erupted not outwards, but upwards.
Above Herniatown stood Cuspseal.
Mita had returned to the lower tiers from the under-city beneath a stormcloud of suspicion and fear. The psychic resonance of the murdered woman — a spectral shadow that only she had felt — had affected her profoundly, and as Sergeant Varitens stalked off to report to his commander she had hastened to a control room at the precinct's peak, pushing aside servitors and tech-acolytes in her haste to reach the communications consoles.
She was thus ensconced, struggling with the infuriating business of conferring with Inquisitor Kaustus, when the quake hit. It had almost been a relief.
Given that the hivelink — a mass of switchboard feeds crammed amongst ducts city-wide — was prone to broken signals and interferences, and that the control room's bustle was as endless as it was raucous, she had expected Kaustus's quiet tones to be rendered inaudible. As it was, his reaction to Mita's report was easily gauged despite its volume: describing to him the particulars of the murders had been an object lesson in futility, and his voice had dripped with an utter lack of interest. She began to appreciate why Orodai had insisted she see the slaughter for herself. Mere words could not hope to describe it.
'...desecration on a... a savage scale, my lord, and—'
'Savage, you say?' his clipped tones had dripped with scorn. 'And in the underhive, no less? Imagine that.'
She'd fancied she could hear him rolling his eyes.
'My lord, I... I know it must seem... insignificant, and perhaps my regard for it appears ridiculous to you, but—'
'It does not appear ridiculous, girl. It is ridiculous. Worse, it is a waste of my time. Murders in the underhive! You're a servant of the Inquisition, not some underling lawman sent to solve every tawdry crime.' He huffed loudly, and Mita had imagined him toying with the tip of one polished tusk. 'You will in future not burden me with every tedious item of detail that y—'
'But my lord, I felt such darkness! It... it hangs like a cloud! A shadow in the warp!'
The link's brass speaker, fashioned in the shape of a gasping fish, fell silent. Mita had stared at it, uncertain. Had he severed the connection?
'M-my lord?'
Kaustus's voice had been cold when at last he spoke.
'You will never interrupt me again. Is that quite clear?'
Her stomach had knotted. 'O-of course, my lord. My apologies.'
'My patience has limits, child. Do not test them.'
'I am sorry, my lord, truly... It's just that...' she'd fumbled for words, the memory of the body twisting her guts, flickering before her. Its naked shape haunted every blink and its empty eyes — hollows that led only to shadow — regarded her mutely from her own mind. Should she say it? Should she voice her suspicions? By the Throne, she'd been so sure, but now that she came to it, now that it needed to be spoken, suddenly it sounded ludicrous. Melodramatic. Too much.
But the words!
Adeo mori servus Imperator Fictus, Ave Dominus Nox.
The words had filled her with such certainty that she'd all but screamed her fears when she saw them, biting her tongue all the way back to Cuspseal, desperate to tell her master.
She must tell him. She must.
In the control room, staring at the voicetube with her stomach churning, she'd taken a breath, composed herself, injected formality into her tone, and said it.
'Inquisitor, it is my belief that the taint is abroad within the hive.'
This time the pause had dragged long and deep, and when he spoke Kaustus's voice was so quiet that she'd strained to hear his words.
'Chaos?' he'd whispered. 'You think the city harbours Chaos?'
She'd choked back a retch at the very word, and had gripped the speakertube as if clinging for dear life.
'Yes, my lord,' she said, committed. 'Or... or something like it, Emperor preserve.'
'Interrogator Ashyn,' Kaustus had said finally, and it seemed to Mita that a strange new element had entered his tone, a hint of ice that had not registered before. 'We are servants of the Ordo Xenos. We have come to this world to unmask the cancer that is xenophilia. That is the course we shall pursue.'
'But—'
'You are young, interrogator. Already you have served two masters. You lack continuity. You lack experience. You are unqualified in the ways of Chaos.'
'But... my lord,' she'd struggled with the plug of frustration in her throat. Why could he not trust her? What reason could he have for such belligerence? 'My lord, I feel it. I sense it. It stalks the shadows...'
'That,' and his voice had allowed no room for argument, no hope of persuasion, 'is not in your power to diagnose. Is that all, interrogator? Or do you have more spurious assertions to make?'
Standing there with mouth agape, a forked pathway had presented itself to her, and she had closed her eyes to explore its shimmering angles. Beyond the guiding techniques of the psi-trance, without even consulting the lesser arcanoi of the Imperial tarot, she knew that such echoes of the future — uninvited and uncontrolled — should be mistrusted. They presented fickle visions of what might be, writhing on skeins of chance, and the adept-tutors at the Scholia Psykana had warned their charges to be wary of their deceptions.
Nonetheless, the options had been as vibrant as had she been seated in her meditation cell, and she'd regarded them with the tranquillity of a practiced, competent psyker.
On the one hand she could return to her master's side. She could kow-tow to his desires, disregard her own judgements, suppress the condemnation of his eccentricities and accept his authority. She could trust in his righteousness and serve him with the devotion his rank deserved. In time, she could see, she would gain a portion of his respect.
Or she could believe what her heart told her: a path that ran ragged with uncertainty, violence and blood.
And glory.
'My lord,' she'd said, enslaved to her ambition. 'I would ask your blessing in undertaking a hunt.'
'A hunt.'
'Yes my lord. For the killer.'
The speaker crackled softly, as if astonished by her request.
'Interrogator,' it said eventually. 'Either your brain is addled by the crudity of your surroundings or your insolence is greater even than I had feared. Your request is d—'
And then the connection had broken, the lights flickered, and the world turned on its head.
The way Mita saw it — d
uring the hours of madness that followed the quake — an interrupted refusal was no refusal at all.
In a metropolis as densely populated as the hive, any upheaval causing fatalities in the mere hundreds could barely be considered calamitous. Nor was Cuspseal's regimented architecture overly disturbed by the subterranean blast: its buttresses and spindled towers continued to stand, its bleak factories barely paused in their ceaseless grind, and its cabled walkways simply swayed before resuming their sprawl. And if here or there a habstack found its view altered, or a chapel leaned from its foundation where before it stood proud, then the teeming masses could be relied upon to shrug and thank the Emperor-on-high that the quake had not been more devastating. The ancientness of this skyless place weighed heavily, and deep in their hearts each hiver felt its fragility keenly. It was a house of cards, a tower of glass, and would require but one carelessly cast stone to crumble.
The floor of Cuspseal had developed a tumour. Where centuries before Herniatown had sagged into the shadows, now it had returned in contempt of those baroque towers built on its spine. It shrugged off the habs and trams and levered itself upright, its ceiling bulging from the Cuspseal foundation like some malign growth. It was here, at the disaster's epicentre, that the loss of life was greatest: hivers tumbling from splintered roads, crushed between pounding slabs. Dust boiled up and out like a living thing, breeding a race of staggering mud-caked zombies. In places the rising hillock split, plumes of molten metal rising from its rents, and there the explosion could vent itself, great tongues of fire licking the bases of gantries above. The stink of flesh wrestled with screams of terror for dominance, and for a brief hour Cuspseal resounded not with the usual factorial tumult, but with the sights and scents of a warzone.
It was perhaps a reflection of hive existence that the city barely paused in its industry at the quake's arrival. In the tier above it, or a single kilometre to either side, there the hive was as oblivious as was Governor Zagrif himself, insulated in the hive's peak. If any aristocrat from Steepletown found his apartments powerless for the instant it took ancient rerouters to correct the blip, or if some high-tier merchantman discovered his flow of mouldpaste interrupted before he could reassign his contracts, then such things could be attributed to the whims of the hive ghosts, or the will of the Emperor, or — at the very least — to just another aspect of the creaking, ineffective workings of hive life.
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