Deathfire

by Nick Kyme

  ‘If the field goes, we go. All of us.’

  Var’kir scanned the tactical feed. Far’kor Zonn and Igen Gargo were the only Salamanders even close to the generatorium.

  The preacher and his retinue had passed beyond reach. Further Word Bearers were already swelling the ranks of the traitors.

  Ungan leaned behind a bulkhead to reload. ‘We can’t break through. Not without help.’

  ‘It’ll be too late,’ said Var’kir.

  ‘I can stop them, or at least slow them down until reinforcements can arrive.’

  Var’kir turned his fiery lenses on Hecht. ‘You? How do you plan on even getting to the generatorium?’

  ‘The ducts that run between this deck and the one below. I’ll double back, enter through a maintenance hatch. Go under, and pass by unseen.’

  Hecht was already moving off when Var’kir grabbed him. Hecht looked down at the gauntleted hand clamped around his wrist. ‘Is there a problem, cousin?’

  Var’kir glared, deciding if there was or not. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘You’re needed here. Besides, a Chaplain would be missed but I’m not even supposed to be on this ship.’

  The Chaplain’s eyes narrowed behind his skull mask. ‘I thought this was exactly where you were meant to be.’

  ‘You don’t like me much, do you, Var’kir?’

  ‘I like traitors even less.’

  ‘Is that what I am to you? Because it looks like I’m being shot at too.’ Hecht shrugged. ‘I am an agent of Malcador. You can either trust me or we all die. We’re probably doomed anyway.’

  ‘Get to the generatorium ahead of that damned preacher,’ Var’kir told him, and let Hecht go.

  ‘They’ll never see me coming,’ he said coldly, before slipping away.

  Them or us? thought Var’kir.

  Quor Gallek had left the firefight with Degat and twelve others. He could feel the presence of the Neverborn, and still sense the psychic tether he had used to bring Degat’s chosen aboard the ship. It was like a wire, stretched taut. Pull just enough and upon release, it would snap back to its origin point. Pull too much, and the wire would snap in half instead.

  The ritual had required sacrifice, as all do. Every Altar on the Monarchia had run red, the vessel’s cells emptied of prisoners. Several of Degat’s warriors had died before even reaching the Salamanders ship, though ‘death’ would be too kind a word to describe what had actually happened to them.

  Every deed, every pact brought a cost. And the bill was never truly paid. Quor Gallek accepted that; he accepted the price to be part of the great cull. Humanity, and its great unwashed hordes, deserved nothing less than extinction.

  A nerve tremor wracked Quor Gallek’s body, making him convulse. He spat up blood against the inside of his faceplate. Another cost.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Degat gestured with the tip of his chainsword. He was running, and blood on the weapon’s teeth flecked the wall.

  Through the fading agony, Quor Gallek saw the trails of a diaphanous white dress disappearing into another corridor section.

  ‘Ignore it.’

  ‘It was a child. A girl.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  Degat snarled, or smiled. It was hard to tell which.

  ‘One of your pets, preacher?’

  Quor Gallek didn’t answer. He could feel the hunger of the ones waiting outside, eager to taste. Like a menagerie in reverse, the predators held outside by the cage, impatiently awaiting admittance.

  And something else. Powerful. Coming… The wire stretched taut. It pulled on Quor Gallek’s bones.

  ‘Hurry, Degat.’

  Forty-One

  Absent fathers

  Battle-barge Charybdis, foredecks

  Vulkan walked the halls of the Charybdis. Like some lonely wraith, he moved slowly with barely a spark of life.

  It could not be real. Numeon’s mind screamed at him to deny it, and yet...

  ‘Father!’

  Numeon cried out, feeling the sudden tremor of excitement within Zytos too.

  But Vulkan kept up his slow, purposeless tread, his armoured footfalls ringing dully against the deckplate. In a few more seconds, he slipped from sight.

  ‘It’s not possible…’ Zytos breathed, stunned and a few steps behind Numeon as he chased down the primarch.

  It’s not possible. The words resounded inside Numeon’s head as he tried to remember where he had been and what he had been doing before this moment, but there was only Vulkan, leading them on.

  His rational mind rebelled, but his emotions had ensnared him.

  Vulkan walked.

  It had happened before. On Macragge. Vulkan had arisen. None had seen it, not like this, but it was the same. The Lord of Drakes lived, albeit clenched in some strange and somnambulant state.

  As Numeon neared the end of the junction where Vulkan had just disappeared, Zytos cried out.

  ‘Brother, wait!’

  Despite the desperate emotion hauling on his limbs, Numeon stopped and turned to regard his sergeant.

  ‘I didn’t see it,’ said Zytos, catching up.

  Numeon frowned, eager to be moving again but some nascent instinct holding him firm. ‘See it?’

  ‘The spearhead. It wasn’t there, brother.’

  ‘He removed it – that’s why he has returned to us. He must have…’ Numeon paused, suddenly struggling to think.

  This isn’t real...

  ‘Where are we?’

  The part of the ship they were in looked unfamiliar and yet utterly ubiquitous.

  Numeon shook his head, trying to banish the fog across his thoughts. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, resolved to his course again.

  No, wait. Think. Think!

  Given the size of a battle-barge, there were many regions of the Charybdis he didn’t know. Zytos nodded, the same uncertainty of thought evident in his movement.

  Together, they made for the end of the junction and turned sharply to see Vulkan waiting for them. He was beckoning, but did not respond to either of his sons.

  ‘Do you smell that?’ Numeon whispered.

  ‘Our father is here, Artellus. He is among us again!’

  He is not. This wraith isn’t him. It can’t be him... can it?

  It was as if Zytos had not heard him, but Numeon was certain he had spoken.

  Though Vulkan’s presence was unmistakable, barely fifty strides away, he was shrouded in gloom and as Zytos and Numeon edged closer another shadow slid out of the darkness, like an assassin’s blade silently slipping from its sheath.

  He who was one with the night, the orphan of Nostramo.

  Konrad Curze.

  Both Zytos and Numeon had weapons drawn but Curze shrank behind Vulkan, acting almost as his shadow. Neither could draw a bead.

  The smell returned, an odd aroma distinctly out of place, out of phase.

  Burnt metal?

  Numeon could see no fire. The deck was cold, like the shark’s eyes of Curze.

  Zytos was running, shouting for Vulkan to turn, turn and see the killer at his back.

  Numeon smelled burning metal, and now felt the heat warming his greave.

  I have to awaken.

  A hot aura bled off the fuller, where it remained clamped at Numeon’s side. At his slightest touch, the lie unravelled and the dream faded, revealing the ghost deck and the gaping chasm between it and the one below that Zytos heedlessly careered towards.

  Numeon fired three shots into the air with Basilysk to stop Zytos from plunging to his death. But a moment beforehand, a flicker of movement passed over the primarch and Vulkan’s beckoning changed into a desperate plea to stop. Even from a distance, Numeon could see him mouth the word, Don’t.

  The bolt shells came later. By then, Zytos had already slowed
enough, so the warning made a difference.

  Before them lay a chasm.

  The tear between decks resembled a fanged maw of twisted struts and mangled rebar. A jagged lip of bent metal led off into darkness. Zytos teetered at the brink of it, the lie lifted from his gaze a moment later than Numeon.

  On the other side of the gap, the girl from the bridge stood exactly where Vulkan had been.

  Zytos made for his sidearm but Numeon’s voice through the vox stalled his hand.

  ‘Don’t waste your ammunition or your anger.’

  The girl slowly retreated, giggling as she bled back into the shadows.

  ‘What is that thing?’ asked Zytos, as Numeon came to stand beside him.

  ‘I suspect we’ll find out very soon, brother.’ He looked around at the cold deck, bereft of atmosphere. ‘I can’t even remember coming here.’

  Zytos slowly shook his head.

  ‘How can we trust our eyes now?’

  ‘Trust your instinct, Zytos.’ He brandished the sigil, recalling the last second transformation in his primarch. ‘And trust Vulkan.’

  Numeon brought up the data screed over his retinal display.

  ‘Ship’s schematic has us close to where Adyssian’s ident puts him. We didn’t deviate far.’

  Still shut off from the Charybdis’s wider vox-feed, they could locate the shipmaster but not contact him.

  Only a single deck separated the Salamanders from Adyssian, but they had to move fast.

  As a boy on Terra and later as a cadet in the fleet, Adyssian had heard tales of the sirens. Back then he had treated them with the same seriousness as he would the myrwyrd or the kraeken. Such beasts were antiques of myth and legend, the tales of the voidborn or ageing shipmasters who had spent too long away from civilisation.

  Since the war, he had seen many things that defied explanation but nothing like the apparition of Maelyssa.

  No rational explanation existed for it, so Adyssian had recalled the myth of the sirens. Often in the guise of beautiful women, they would lure gullible sailors to their doom. In the void, that meant the wake of a solar flare or the gaping maw of a black hole. Aboard the Charybdis it was even more insidious. This siren had lured Adyssian with his grief, but now its lie had been exposed, it would not be denied its due. His soul.

  Even as he fled, protected by Ushamann’s aegis, he could feel the essence of his mortality being slowly leeched away. He wondered if it would be so bad to submit to the soul hunger.

  ‘Hold to your purpose.’ The Librarian’s voice was like a clarion call ringing through the fog of Adyssian’s self-doubt. ‘There is no surrender for you or I, shipmaster. A soul is not consumed and then at peace. It will burn forever in eternal torment.’

  ‘Did you… read my mind?’

  ‘Your weakness is obvious.’

  They had paused for a moment, so Ushamann could get his bearings and marshal his strength. The Librarian looked gaunt, as if it were his essence and not Adyssian’s being drawn out by the sirens.

  ‘So is yours,’ Adyssian replied. ‘How much longer can we keep going?’

  ‘Until I can get us to the Librarium.’ He sagged, as if the strength in his legs was about to give out, and had to lean heavily on the wall to stop from falling to his knees. ‘I have fashioned… wards.’ Ushamann gasped for breath, and the glow around his eyes began to fade. ‘She is close…’

  Absent for so long, the playful giggling returned. Its echo reached them before Adyssian saw her.

  ‘Librarian…’

  Ushamann’s answer was a crash of power armour hitting the deck. He had slipped into unconsciousness

  Forty-Two

  Life and limb

  Battle-barge Charybdis, generatorium

  A narrow defile, flanked by stout bulkheads, offered the optimum defensive redoubt against attack.

  Even so, Zonn calculated it would not be enough. He had been tempted to retain the labour gangs, to rapidly re-task any servitors with offence protocols and violent subroutines. It would take a matter of seconds to achieve. But that would reduce these men to offal. Living and breathing, in some instances, but ultimately just dead meat.

  He had sent them to the upper decks, away from the approaching Word Bearers, to seal themselves within their quarters or lockers.

  If the Charybdis and its crew survived this latest crisis, they would need the enginseers and labour gangs, the servitors and machine-helots that would keep it running. Legionaries knew nothing of such matters, save a few. Or rather, two. And if he and Gargo remained unreinforced they would be dead and of no further use in this regard.

  ‘We hold them here.’ Gargo sounded emphatic as he hefted his bolter into position, using the flanged edge of the right-side bulkhead as a makeshift firing lip. He also sounded belligerent.

  Zonn had his post on the opposite side, similarly hunkered down, his eyes scanning for lifter activation, forced incursion, teleportation flare or any of several other ways the Word Bearers could reach them.

  ‘It will come down to a close-quarters exchange,’ he told Gargo, reviewing streams of tactical scenarios, alloyed to hundreds of data-variables. Weapon jam, configuration of enemy, number of enemy, enemy armaments, strategic dispersal… As things stood, in no version of events did he or Gargo emerge alive, let alone victorious.

  ‘We have an answer to that, brother.’

  A hammer hung from a mag-clamped loop around Gargo’s belt. He had his smaller combat blade too. Zonn’s servo-arm made for an effective weapon, and he also carried a short sword in a drake-scale scabbard on his hip. Even with the plethora of blades, drills and saws he could unleash from his haptic implants, the modest arsenal would not be enough.

  At the edge of the generatorium hub, the wail of klaxons presaged the imminent arrival of a lifter platform. Flashing amber light strobed the deck. Heavy gears working down shafts of cabling fought with the warning drone from the alarms.

  ‘Don’t let them get too close too soon,’ said Zonn as he took aim down his bolter sight.

  The base of the lifter platform churned into view through a pall of venting pressure, edged with chevrons and surrounded by a metal cage.

  ‘Short sustained bursts,’ said Zonn.

  Fifteen legionaries waited aboard, weapons ready. Crimson armour caught the light and shone like freshly spilled blood. Through his enhanced vision, Zonn discerned script upon the Word Bearers’ plate and flesh. He also saw a Chaplain amongst their number and possibly a regular line officer.

  ‘Bolters,’ said Zonn as the cage rolled back in a concertina of folded metal, ‘and heavy explosives.’

  As suspected, they had come to destroy the generatorium and with it the Geller field.

  ‘Here they come!’ shouted Gargo, and they lit up the deck with muzzle flare and fury.

  Ranked up tight coming off the lifter cage, the Word Bearers used their vanguard warriors as ablative armour. They died first and quickly, but were of little importance. Chaff surrendered to the scything bolter fire.

  The rest dispersed upon egress, finding cover in jutting alcoves or behind support columns.

  ‘I count nine!’ Speaking through the vox, Gargo had no need to raise his voice but the adrenaline forced his words into a shout.

  Zonn concurred. Six legionaries were down, the dead left where they fell and the critically injured allowed to writhe in pain. Gargo fired a round into the head of a Word Bearer whose chest cavity had been ripped open.

  ‘Save your shells, brother,’ Zonn told him, ‘and let the wretches suffer.’

  Return fire came back at them, sporadic at first but then with greater intensity as the Word Bearers began to act in unison. Zealots and priests they might be, but the XVII were still legionaries and ably demonstrated the tactics of such.

  The narrow defile the Salamanders had chosen as their choke-poin
t soon became filled with a hail of mass-reactive shells, forcing them back. A stray shot hit Gargo in the left shoulder. His guard took most of the impact, dispersing force across its rounded contours, but the explosive round still detonated. Stabbing shrapnel cut through adamantium to bury itself in the meat of Gargo’s shoulder.

  He grunted in pain as a ricochet narrowly missed his faceplate, and ducked back behind the bulkhead, the bolt storm levelled against it steadily chewing up the metal. The black-smiter glanced across a pulsating cordon of bolter fire at Zonn, who was hunkered down the same.

  ‘How are we the only legionaries able to defend the generatorium?’ he cried, a sense of injustice creeping into his voice.

  Stretched thin across a vast ship, even with many of its decks sealed off and shut down, without the Charybdis’s armsmen, the Drakes were always going to struggle to contain a mass assault across several locations simultaneously. They were vulnerable, exposed by whatever was masquerading beneath the flesh of the girl in the white dress.

  Zonn had no answer. It defied reason, but they were alone and no logical argument would change that fact. Pragmatism, as taught by Vulkan, had to prevail.

  ‘Let them come,’ said the Techmarine. ‘We halt them here, eye to eye, tooth to tooth.’

  Gargo blind-fired around the edge of the slowly disintegrating bulkhead and was rewarded with a shout of pain from an unseen enemy. It was close. The Word Bearers had begun to advance.

  ‘Tell me you have a stasis field generator or a force shield amongst your many trappings, Techmarine.’

  ‘I have saws, drills, plasma-cutters and a host of reparation equipment. Nothing further.’

  ‘Could we collapse this corridor? Bring it down on them and force them to cut through the debris?’

  ‘A sound suggestion, Brother Gargo, but the generatorium enclave is fashioned to withstand ship-to-ship ordnance blasts. We possess nothing that would achieve our desired effect.’

  Gargo blind-fired again. So did Zonn, who knew his ammo count was getting low.

  ‘Tooth and claw it is then,’ said Gargo as the last of his shells ran dry and the bolter chanked empty. He dropped it, drawing his hammer and sword. He kept the hammer in his flesh-and-blood hand, to evenly distribute the killing efficacy of his weapons. An able swordsman, Gargo was a brawler at heart and crouched low into his preferred combat-ready stance.