by Mark Clapham
Dry. Wet. Stomach full. Stomach empty. Pain. No pain. Hot. Cold. Breathing. Suffocating. Burning. Freezing. Muscles tight. Muscles loose. Light. Dark.
The elixir spread throughout his system in seconds, causing all his senses to flare in contradictory directions. Then the sensation passed, and he was somewhere else altogether. A frozen moment of time.
He was in that hidden room within the Palace of Thorns, still wearing the colours of the Astral Claws. Iltz, wearing those same colours, was on his knees beside him. A pipe, ripped from the wall in their fight, pushed down by Rotaka into Iltz’s neck. The blood exiting the wound, the look of mutual betrayal, brotherhood festered into hatred, exchanged by the dying and their killer. The tension through the length of pipe as it was pushed down, slippery with rust and oily water, the strain and exhilaration of combat. The certainty and confusion of following a cause, deeply believed in, to places absolutely uncertain. The fading life in the eyes of a former friend.
That moment, too, passed and Rotaka was back in the present. In one hand, he held the Cup of Blessings. In the other, he could still feel the weight of that improvised weapon.
‘Brother?’ asked Anto.
Rotaka passed him the cup. He thought carefully, and decided to answer truthfully, but not in a way that needed to be comfortable. He had passed Anto’s test.
‘A vision too, of another time,’ he replied, holding the blank gaze from Anto’s helmet. ‘Of striking down a brother for an act of treachery.’
‘A useful insight, I hope,’ said Anto.
‘A blessing from the gods will always prove useful,’ replied Rotaka.
‘Of course,’ said Anto, returning the cup to some hidden pouch beneath his robe, before addressing all of them. ‘Three of us have drunk of the Cup of Blessings, and all survived. Our enterprise is well fated.’
‘Fate?’ boomed a harsh, gravelly voice as the chamber’s doors were thrown open. The newcomer entered, flanked by bodyguards in Terminator armour. ‘Fate and the gods provide opportunity, but it is for us to seize those opportunities, and squeeze victory from the chances the gods give us.’
The gathered officers of the Red Corsairs parted as their lord, their master, Huron Blackheart, strode to the centre of the chamber. He towered over the greatest of them, dominant even in a room of demigods and sorcerers. He wore blood-red power armour, cracked and aged and emblazoned with a gold eight-pointed compass, the symbol of Chaos. A Sigil of Corruption arced behind his head like a perverse halo.
His skin was grey, dead, with patches of bone visible, augmented by bionics including the Tyrant’s Claw, an adapted power claw with built-in flamer that made up his entire right arm. As he prowled the chamber, he moved around the Corsairs, the claw flexing as if it might crush the skull of one of his underlings at any time.
Rotaka felt the fear in the room aboard the flagship, but did not share the trepidation. His master was uncompromising, but just, and Rotaka knew that if he served him well he had nothing to fear. He had followed him into the abyss and back out again, and would not have done so if he did not believe in his judgement.
His recent flashback to that day in the Palace of Thorns still lingered with him. He knew as well as anyone the hard decisions of leadership, and the need to harshly deal with betrayal.
‘Our gods I thank for providing opportunity,’ Huron said, his voice cutting through the silence of his servants. He raised his claw and gestured around the room, pointing at all of them but pausing on both Garreon and Anto along the way. ‘But it is you, my Red Corsairs, who I entrust to carry out my battle plans, to fulfil your part in my campaign, to die in doing so if required.’
Blackheart’s meaning was clear – that even in death, failure would not be tolerated, and that to fail and live would only bring a greater suffering. Rotaka felt a swell of energised pride that he would not allow himself to fail his master.
‘Our prize is great, the challenge it presents greater,’ said Huron, striding around a central point in the chamber, his Corsairs backing away to make room. ‘Valthex.’
The Techmarine stepped forwards, and a hololithic projector built into his armour created a flickering three-dimensional image in the air at the centre of the chamber. Nine spheres, most of them cloaked in a miasma. As they moved around each other the image glitched and some of the spheres jumped from one place to another, as if the person who had made the hololith was extrapolating from incomplete information.
‘The Hollow Worlds of Lastrati,’ said Huron, audible hunger in his voice. ‘Nine hollow spheres, planets inhabited on their inner surfaces, under the possession of the hated Corpse-Emperor. Consumed by the impassable Siren Clouds, our closest access point is the Hellward Gate on the outer surface of Laghast,’ said Huron, the hololith enlarging until one of the outer planets filled the space. An orbital dock and buildings on the planet’s desolate outer surface appeared. ‘We have worked long and hard to break these defences, and even now Taemar is close to shattering the final link. When those defences fall, we strike.
‘We will crack open these Hollow Worlds, and the callow mortals who live within them will bow to new masters.’
There was a further series of ‘ayes’ around the chamber, raised fists and jubilation. Rotaka felt his pride swell again, but also a sense of trepidation that all their hopes rested on Garreon, Anto, and of course the absent Taemar.
Rotaka wished he could believe those hopes were well placed.
Two
Outstation One was a satellite connected to Plini, one of the Hollow Worlds. While Laghast was protected by a conventional, though vast, array of space-based defensive systems, Plini’s main defence was that its exterior was almost impossible to land a ship on. The mile-high rock formations prevented it, and the irradiated surface would kill anything that tried to set up the elaborate drilling operation required to break through to Plini’s inhabited interior.
The staff aboard Outstation One and Plini’s other artificial moons had to travel via Laghast to get in and out of the system, the only connection between these satellites and the planet below being the vast algae-encrusted chains that stretched from the orbiting spheres to the surface of Plini. As with so much about the Hollow Worlds, no one knew who had built the satellites or why. However, the Lastrati had fitted it out as an early warning station and communications relay, catching and boosting signals as they went into and out of the Hollow Worlds and the disruptive Siren Clouds.
Taemar picked up the adept’s severed head and turned to address his squad.
‘The satellite is guarded by tech-guard, unknown numbers,’ he said. ‘No match for us, but let’s take the objective before they know we’re here.’
It was then that they heard a distant siren. Taemar swore. One of his squad, Rioss, pointed upwards.
High above, on the other side of the outstation, figures were exiting a cluster of buildings. While Taemar was aware from his briefings that flight was impossible in the Hollow Worlds due to the artificial suns, he also knew that the outstation had no such constraints. He could see the figures lifting off into the air, presumably using jump packs, crossing the space between them and his squad with incredible speed, flying in formation.
No, not just flying, thought Taemar. Swarming.
The tech-guard were coming.
The tech-guard aboard Outstation One had been specially modified to maximise resource management aboard the remote station, their brains and bodies adapted to allow them to spend long periods dormant, yet be ready to attack in seconds. To facilitate rapid deployment, weapons had been built into their forelimbs.
Many signals could wake the tech-guard. Taemar and his squad had breached the outstation without having triggered any of the obvious alarm systems. However, in killing the adept after interrogating him for information, Taemar had caused a life sign monitor built into his chest to stop transmitting, and it was that which had raised the a
lert.
Their stripped-down biology flooded with adrenaline, lobotomised brains conditioned only to kill, pumped to a state of alert in seconds, the tech-guard rushed out of their hive-like barracks with simple orders in mind:
Find the intruders. Kill the intruders.
Taemar should have let his squad provide covering fire while he ran to the location of their target and proceeded with his mission. That would have been the most loyal and honourable course of action, and Taemar would have usually done so, for appearances’ sake if not from any actual devotion.
However, looking up into the sky as the tech-guard descended, his ego prevented him from following a cautious plan of action. His lip wrinkled with contempt for these insectoid humans. As they started firing, las-shots raining down from above, Taemar adjusted his grip on his axe.
How dare these flimsy mortal things attempt to strike him down? He was Taemar of the Red Corsairs, and he would crush these creatures without remorse. He had spent many days trapped aboard a small pod with his squad to reach Outstation One, and had plenty of anger to work through. These attackers would provide the perfect outlet.
As the tech-guard descended from the sky, and the rest of the squad started to return fire, Taemar dropped into a crouch and…
…and jumped.
A combination of weak gravity and Taemar’s immense physical strength allowed him to leap high into the air. As he leapt he swung his axe around in an arc before him, cleaving three or four of the tech-guard into a shower of metal pieces and bones as he smashed through their front line.
The tech-guard swarmed onto him as he jumped, some feeling the cut of his axe but others scratching at his power armour with the sharpened ends of their metallic limbs, trying to pull the plate away, clawing towards his helmet-less head, a dozen pale, humanoid faces with compound eyes and blackened teeth chittering at him.
As they piled onto Taemar, he reached the peak of his ascent, and fell. His assailants, clinging and clawing at him were dragged down as he fell like a meteor.
He landed on his feet, smashing into the ground with incredible force, the shock throwing off his attackers in a tumble of twisted limbs and screeching mouths.
Then he was up, a towering figure, blood dripping from countless small cuts on his cheeks and forehead, piling into the massed tech-guard as they fired upon him and fruitlessly raised clawed limbs against him, the axe dripping with sluggish dark blood and watery artificial fluids as it swung back and forth, hacking the forces of the Adeptus Mechanicus to pieces.
As those who had landed were butchered, other tech-guard attempted to gun him down from a safe distance, but then Taemar’s squad – who had so far been fighting a much harder battle against the hordes of oncoming enemies – grouped together to gun down the fliers with their bolters, the sky lighting up with explosions.
Blood and metallic fragments rained down, and in the centre of the carnage was Taemar, still cutting through three or four attackers at a time.
The last few tech-guard tried to withdraw and regroup, but it was too late. The Red Corsairs’ bolters flared, and the final attackers were brought down.
Then all was silence. Taemar breathed deeply, taking in air tainted with blood and cordite and the oily stench of burned, broken machinery. He looked upon his squad, whose armour was dented and scorched from the attacking tech-guard, and laughed out loud, throwing his axe in the air so it spun, then catching it by the handle.
‘Is the blocking signal still working?’ he asked his men.
Rioss consulted a hand-held auspex. ‘Block still in place,’ he confirmed. Taemar noticed that the Red Corsair had a blast wound in one side of his chest. ‘Whatever alert may have been raised here, it won’t have left the station.’
‘Good,’ said Taemar, returning his axe to its place on his back as he did so. ‘Let’s find what we came for, shall we?’
Taemar and his squad found a couple of adepts manning the cogitation banks, and he gunned them down perfunctorily, barely raising his bolter before holstering it again.
Once he found the correct terminal, he took out Valthex’s device. As with so much of Valthex’s technology, it had a touch of sorcery about it, technical genius enhanced by other techniques that Valthex had learned in the Maelstrom. When Taemar attached the device to the cogitator bank, the connecting wires seemed to guide his hand, hungrily seeking out the correct sockets.
Taemar pressed the helpfully bright red sigil on Valthex’s device. A flicker of static passed across every screen in the room, then nothing.
‘Lower the block,’ he said.
Rioss tapped on his auspex, and nodded.
Taemar looked again at the screens, and smiled. Valthex’s art was subtle. To those who received relay messages via Outstation One, nothing would have changed. In reality, everything had. A blind spot had been created within the early warning system, a filter within communications.
He checked his chronometer. They were ahead of schedule. A shame that he had no means of informing Lord Blackheart that his part in the scheme had been completed with such efficiency. Never mind, it was done and that was what counted.
‘Objective completed, signal for extraction,’ he ordered.
‘The sea in the sky, the sea in the sky,’ muttered Veteran Sergeant Kretschman of the Cadian 301st as he tried to concentrate on the ground beneath his feet rather than the distant ground above his head.
He knew that he was talking to himself aloud, rambling in a way that others might consider evidence of mental disorder, and could see the sideways looks people were giving him as they jostled past on the busy streets of Eridano, but he didn’t care. His mantra was very useful to him as a coping mechanism to calm himself and deal with certain unfortunate realities of his current environment. Besides, he had nearly died in the service of the Emperor. These Hollow Worlders, these Lastrati, sheltered by their metal skies, could stuff their sideways glances.
The months of recovery were a blur to him now, and the continents above were not helping him regain focus. He had been almost dead when that scout, Kulbard, had pulled him out of a pile of bodies on Tarff. The battle there was over and the 301st had moved on, to the Hollow Worlds, where the regiment was regrouping in preparation for their next deployment.
His journey had brought him to the outer Hollow World of Laghast, and from there to Eridano, a city spread across several islands of an archipelago, the natural land supplemented by artificial areas built on stilts. The looming buildings blocked some of that sinister sky, while narrow canals ran between, rackety footbridges overhanging them at many different levels. Kretschman pushed through crowded streets, elbowing sullen, broken-faced civilians out of the way as he searched for the streets he needed, consulting the hand-drawn map he had been given by Kulbard.
Those were the clear parts of his recovery, Kulbard finding him in infirmaries and barracks as he travelled alone, helping him make his way back.
Eventually, Kretschman came to a long, narrow street overlooked by towering habs, leading out to where he needed to be. After a long walk, he reached an Imperial Guard barracks surrounded by high rockcrete walls topped with razor wire. He banged on the door, and was greeted by a familiar face poking out from the small hatch that opened in the plasteel.
‘We thought you were dead,’ said Sergeant Rothke. His tone suggested he didn’t think of Kretschman’s survival as being particularly negative or positive, simply a surprise.
‘Really?’ said Kretschman, sliding the stamped parchment indicating he was ready for duty through the hatch. Rothke’s face disappeared as he checked the documents.
‘You’ve been gone for months,’ said Rothke, when his face reappeared.
Months? Had it really been that long? For Kretschman, so much of the end of that campaign, even before his injury, was a blur. Even now there was so little he recalled.
‘Well, here I am,’ was
the best response he could manage. ‘I’m fit for duty now.’
‘Best report straight to the commanding officer,’ said Rothke, unbolting the heavy door and waving Kretschman in. ‘Officers’ quarters and command are in the round building. Can’t miss it.’
‘You can take me with you, sergeant,’ said a voice behind them. ‘I need to speak to the most senior officer in your regiment.’
Kretschman turned to see a short man. He was balding, somewhere in middle age and wore the same grey coveralls that most of the workers on Laghast seemed to wear. Kretschman had never even heard him approach and, judging by Rothke’s startled reaction, neither had the man ostensibly guarding the entrance gate.
‘And what the hell do you want?’ demanded Rothke, moving to block the civilian’s path.
The civilian sighed and raised a hand, gesturing to indicate he was going to slowly remove something from his jacket.
Rothke, lasrifle in hand, nodded for the civilian to show whatever papers he held.
The civilian removed something small and round from his inside pocket, raised it in the general direction of Rothke and Kretschman. An image of a red seal emblazoned with a stylised letter ‘I’ appeared in the air between them.
‘I am Inquisitor Pranix of the Ordo Malleus,’ said the man. ‘What I want, and what I am going to get, is complete authority over your entire regiment, beginning right now. The Hollow Worlds of Lastrati are under grave threat.’
Three
The Tower of Astropathy dominated the skyline of the mountain city of Carapel, one of the southernmost cities on Laghast. The tallest building within the entirety of the Hollow Worlds, its crooked spire seemed to wind its way towards the artificial star above, even though the astropathic choir who resided within the dome at the top of the tower had their minds turned in the opposite direction, out of the system and towards sacred Terra.
