The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  Even as they watched, one of these mini-moons detached itself from the procession and began to dip down towards the atmosphere. Lex blasphemed softly.

  ‘What are those?’ Rakel asked softly, as if in fear that those eerie moons in orbit might hear her voice. Lex’s reply was as cold and hard as marble.

  ‘You saw genestealers in the hermitage on Sabulorb, Rakel. Now discover a terrible secret. The creatures in those ships up there are what created the stealers. They are more dreadful than genestealers. They are known as tyranids. Tyranids harvest whole worlds of their biological material to mould and mutate into abominations. They strip worlds bare. The process had begun here, with the harvesting of the highest life-form: Man.’

  TYRANID HIVE-FLEETS came from way across the intergalactic gulf, two million light years or more. Presumably they had stripped a previous galaxy bare of all life. Life was their raw material. Out of this raw material they made such abominations as screamer killers and fleshborer guns and scavengers.

  Of course, “screamer killer” was merely a name which human survivors of early encounters with tyranids had bestowed – upon heavy rotund battle-creatures which shrieked horrifyingly as they scuttled forward, virtually invincible, flailing their razor-edged arms and spitting toxic bio-plasma. Merely a human label – for something vilely inhuman.

  Fleshborers, likewise! Merely a name, screamed by psychotic survivors, in an attempt to describe a hand-weapon which was a brood-nest of vicious beetles, beetles which the weapon would goad to leap convulsively towards a target, to gnaw through flesh and bone like paper...

  Their very ships were organic creations, compounded of thousands of modified creatures slavishly linked by an empathic central gland. Throughout the vast fleet of millions of vessels and sub-vessels a collective mind presided. Destroy ten thousand vessels (if only one could!) and still the mind presided. Destroy a hundred thousand (vain hope!) and still the mind would be relatively unimpaired. Its units would continue stripping worlds of life to assemble more parts of itself.

  Neither the ravaging warriors – whom the Space Marines knew as tyranids – nor the carnifex screamer killers, were individual entities. Each was only a specialized cell in the colossal multifarious organism of the hive-fleet. The infiltration of the home galaxy had been underway for a couple of centuries or so – a menace as deadly as the powers of Chaos which for aeons had been spreading their cancer within the galaxy.

  The tyranid swarm was yet another incontestable reason why the Imperium must conduct itself remorselessly and even mercilessly, lest humanity be devoured...

  Might it be that deliverance from Chaos could only come about in the end by the absorption of all life into the tyranid swarm? What a vile and terminal remedy this would be.

  Lex pounded his fist into his palm, without extinguishing his finger of glory.

  ‘I have fought them! I have been inside a tyranid vessel on a raid. We were backed by a battle fleet. I was wearing full combat armour—’

  Now he was one Space Marine alone, and almost naked. Dressed in mere clothes, his companions might as well be naked. As for their pathetic armoury... If a tyranid even glimpsed them, they were doomed to become raw material.

  How could they sleep that night, with those snail-like ivory vessels in the sky? With vessels descending periodically, and others rising into orbit, conveyers of captured flesh!

  The first wave of the onslaught had already passed through this region, removing the highest life-forms for use. Lucky old carnivore in its cave, to have escaped harvest, and then to be blessed with swift oblivion!

  The four travellers must move on as soon as could be, following the finger, praying that the other portal was not five thousand kilometres away, nor even a thousand, nor a hundred. How could they hope to cover even a hundred kilometres before a new wave of harvesting passed across the surface of this doomed world?

  Yet first they must get some sleep. If, during sleep, a harvester might detect and seize them, how could they possibly doze off? Terror would keep them awake, and exhaust them. Unless...

  ‘I’m no assassin,’ Jaq said. Did his gaze reproach Rakel that she was no real assassin either? ‘I’ve witnessed a certain assassin kill with the touch of a finger upon the neck. A lesser pressure renders a person unconscious. I understand the principle. I know the vital nerve. The Inquisition teaches us the frailties of the human body. I propose...’

  To render unconscious. Unconsciousness might segue into natural restorative sleep.

  Lex was trained to be able to nap during any lull in combat. It must be Lex who would numb the others.

  Jaq demonstrated. Then he, Rakel and Grimm lay down. ‘Don’t push too hard,’ said Grimm. ‘In fact I think I’d rather be bashed on the head with the butt of a boltgun.’

  A moment later he lay still. Was he unconscious, or dead? Attentively Lex bent low over the abhuman.

  ‘Still alive. Squats are tough.’ From Jaq: ‘I commend my spirit...’

  Lex rendered Jaq unconscious, checked his vital signs, then turned to Rakel. ‘Wait—’

  ‘Yes, lady?’

  ‘These tyranids... I never knew how hideous the universe can be. The genestealers, and those corrupt renegades... And Sabulorb, a whole world incinerated...’

  ‘That was due to variability in its sun. Unless the arch-enemy somehow acted as a catalyst.’

  ‘It’s all so terrible...’

  ‘I’ve seen worse, lady. I’ve seen a Chaos world itself. Compared with that madness, a tyranid vessel is relatively comprehensible, however execrable.’

  ‘It’s too much, too much. We are true companions, aren’t we, after a fashion? Four companions in a hell.’

  ‘After a fashion,’ he conceded. He would never have dreamed that an Imperial Fist might be asked to regard a thief as a companion. Yet a Space Marine was ever a protector of the vulnerable. Ach, Rakel was an instrument for Jaq to play upon. She had been this ever since she made the terrible mistake of trying to rob the mansion. Could it be that he felt pity at this moment?

  How futile, in a pitiless cosmos.

  ‘Put me to sleep now,’ she begged. Was she really asking for him to kill her, in such a way that she would never know?

  ‘No more talk,’ he said, ‘or we might wake the others up.’

  With his fingers he touched her neck, powerfully yet gently – more gently than he had touched Grimm or Jaq, though with the same result.

  JAQ HAD CAST an aura of protection. Would this suffice against a sweeping mass of scavenger creatures endowed with an instinct to harvest life? Or against alert tyranid warriors if any remained in the vicinity?

  The stripping and processing of the life of this world was only commencing. The full task might take ten years or twenty. Time was no object to an immortal hive-mind which had coasted through the gulf between galaxies for hundreds of millennia. Meanwhile the forest remained with its freight of lesser life. Empty, now, of man’s presence. Man’s burned places were empty alike of dogs or horses or goats. All taken, selectively, as the initial prizes of the harvest.

  Eventually even worms and beetles would be gathered, sifted out. Even microbes and bacteria would be gleaned by microscopic nano-collectors, until there was utter sterility, and that sterility was further sterilized by fire.

  Lex’s finger was glowing more brightly.

  Let it be, let it be, that the two portals were close together. Twins, in resonance with one another. Energy-tubes which had divided only at the very last moment of formation.

  THE ROUGH ROAD had veered away from the direction which Lex’s finger indicated. They were hiking through golden and scarlet woodland untouched anywhere by axe. These trees were both strange yet familiar. A tree was not a species. It was a biological structure, obeying similar constraints of gravity and photosynthesis.

  Undergrowth was sparse, probably stunted by chemicals secreted by the roots of the trees in the eternal battle for space and resources.

  Steep crags were rising ami
dst the woodland. Here and there, deep rocky shafts plunged vertically down amidst the loam and humus: deep natural wells. Sometimes snapped branches had fallen across these wells and accumulated a mat of debris. These might have been the lids of traps. To tread this woodland unwarily by night could be fatal.

  Deep down in the water at the bottom of one sheer wall, there floated a segmented, horny hunchbacked body – a six-limbed gargoyle. Twice the size of a man, wrought of amber and russet coral, the hue of the autumnal trees.

  ‘That’s one of them,’ whispered Lex.

  Rakel did try to stifle her cry of panic and dismay.

  Wasp-waist. Armoured haunches. That long lurid head. Its claws had grooved the sides of the well in vain. Eventually it must have drowned.

  Then, deep down, golden eyes opened. Those eyes glared upward. The body convulsed in the water. Claws raked at stone. If only the golden gargoyle could scale the slippery vertical sides. Yet it could not, despite the lure of the flesh peering from overhead. ‘Kill it?’ asked Grimm.

  ‘No,’ said Lex. ‘Our guns are too noisy. Even the lasers. The echo in the well shaft would boost the din.’

  ‘Pity we don’t have a needle gun.’ Grimm glanced at Rakel’s expended digital weapon, and shrugged. ‘Would have done you good, girl, shooting your fears.’

  Rakel swallowed several times, suppressing an impulse to vomit.

  Down in the well that great tough coral body doubled up, as if to impale itself with its own barbed tail, thus to boost itself upward like some rococo missile from a silo.

  Jaq twitched at the empathy call. The psychic howl impinged on him only slightly, rather as the ultrasonic cry of a bat might register upon a sensitive ear as the faintest twitter. Yet it was perceptible.

  ‘It’s signalling its kin. We must run!’

  HOW THEY RAN.

  Wary of further hidden well shafts. Alert for distant sounds. Lex’s stabbing finger was radiant. Ahead, ahead.

  Soon, from a good way behind – yet ever closer – came a whinnying inhuman shriek of pursuit. That warbling whistle might have been meant to panic or manipulate prey which had ears to hear. Maybe air was squeezing through certain ducts in the external skeletons of the loping pursuers, causing this moaning wail.

  Glancing behind: a distant flash of amber and russet – which was certainly not foliage in motion. Another glimpse. Tyranids were hunting.

  ONE OF THE monsters had sighted them. Impossibly, its pace seemed to increase. In its upper set of arms it was clutching what seemed to be a great golden drumstick which might have been torn from some ostrichlike bird.

  Lex knew that instrument all too well. A deathspitter.

  One of the vilest bio-weapons used by the tyranids. The organic gun consisted of three types of creature bonded together. In a hot, wet womb, hard-shelled toxic maggots were bred as ammunition. When firing occurred, a slimy spider-jawed creature would seize a maggot and strip it of its shell, laying bare the corrosive flesh. To rid itself of contact with the caustic body-fluids, the jutting bowel of the gun would spasm, ejecting the poisonous maggot-flesh through the air at high speed. The slimy flesh, itself burning in agony at contact with oxygen, was like phosphorus to any victim which it spattered against.

  Such nauseating devices did the tyranids turn other creatures into, in their biological conquests.

  During the time which the raiding party of Fists had spent aboard a tyranid vessel, Lex had seen armless humanoids whose heads were clamped by organic lamps... To imagine oneself – or Rakel – similarly transformed! Shorn of arms, and of willpower. Converted into a mobile lantern. Perhaps only the prisoners’ protoplasm and their gene-runes would be exploited to manufacture such servitor creatures.

  Either way, the prospect was unbearable. This ghastly fate was befalling the former inhabitants of this planet right now; and might in a few more minutes befall Lex and companions. That, or caustic high-velocity maggots from the deathspitter...

  ‘What,’ panted Grimm, ‘what’s that thing it’s carrying?’

  ‘You don’t want to know!’

  At that moment Rakel tripped and sprawled.

  LEX SKIDDED. HE doubled back. He hauled her, hand under armpit, even as she was trying to scramble up. How he lugged her along. He might have plunged into another of the well-shafts but for Grimm’s shout of warning: ‘Watch out!’

  Pain lanced urgently through his finger of glory. Pain, the signal; pain, the revealer. His finger glowed so brightly that in another moment it might well ignite.

  ‘It’s here, right here!’ he bellowed.

  Grimm paused. Jaq swung around. Lex craned to stare down the shaft, half-blindly, holding Rakel over the edge so that she gasped and writhed.

  Lex prayed to see – and prayed not to see – an opening to the webway somewhere down below in the precipitous wall of the well. To see, because then they would have found it. Not to see, because without ropes the entrance would be unreachable. Ropes, and many spare minutes! The tall tyranid was loping nearer by the second, thrusting its deathspitter forward like some anti-grav device which was towing it headlong, aimed at the humans. More tyranids came into view. That wailing warble might have been a war-cry if these creatures had been human or abhuman or eldar or ork, anything individual and of this galaxy.

  Lex only saw sheer sides of stone and blank blue water shining at the bottom of the shaft.

  Water, so blue.

  The entrance was horizontal, not vertical. It was underwater. ‘Leap, leap!’

  Lex tossed Rakel, shrieking, down the shaft. He seized Grimm and hurled him likewise.

  To the robed inquisitor on the far side of the well: ‘Jump. Jaq, jump!’

  Two disappearances of prey-samples. Capture, no longer a concept. The deathspitter farted its first shrieking maggot-slug from that bowel of a barrel – as Lex dived.

  What if he was wrong? When he hit the water, what if Rakel simply surfaced nearby, and Grimm alongside her – and there they would all float impotently, staring up for a few last moments until fierce inhuman heads loomed above?

  Lex clove the water.

  Blueness blinded him. Down he travelled, down. The water twisted him around. The water was thrusting him upward.

  And, oh Dorn, he did break surface, to find Rakel bobbing close by, spluttering, and Grimm bereft of his forage cap, wallowing, and only moments later Jaq’s grizzled water-slicked head was breaking surface too; and all four were treading blue water confined by stone.

  Above, bending down, were long, drooling, jagged heads.

  SIXTEEN

  Warworld

  DISORIENTATION DEPARTED. ABOVE was the roof of a cave. Dripping stalactites grew downward. Those were the heads Lex had thought he saw. To one side the rim of the pool was high. Then it slanted down steeply to water-level. The high side was a smooth weir down which a film of water flowed. The low side was a natural sluice, draining excess water away along a subterranean channel. The spillage of blue light from below the surface of the pool illuminated the smooth mouth of a dry passage. Underground flood torrents must have smoothed the mouth whenever it rained heavily on whatever world was above.

  SOAKED, THEY WERE recovering breath upon a slanting mass of rock beside that tunnel mouth. Lex’s finger no longer glowed. The only light came from the webway portal underwater, until Grimm produced an electrolumen from a pouch.

  Items: boltguns and a couple of laspistols and a force rod, wet yet seemingly sound. Jaq’s monocle. His rolled mesh armour which had been secured under his robe. Jewels, and the paraphernalia of Grimm’s pouches. Some spare nuts, soon eaten.

  ‘Why ain’t we back in the webway?’ Grimm was the first to demand of Jaq. ‘Flushed down a sewer pipe we were, from one pan of piss into another.’ Grimm directed the light beam into the stone passageway. The passageway angled slowly upward before rounding a bend of its own, where it seemed to narrow considerably. ‘Let’s get going! Those things can follow us.’

  ‘I think not,’ said Lex. ‘Th
ey have other business... harvesting.’ Jaq prayed softly, but to what power?

  Soon he said, ‘If a luminous finger no longer points elsewhere, that is because the proper place is right here. Do we understand all the intricacies of the webway? Do even Great Harlequins understand? The entry to the webway must be right here, in the pool.’

  ‘Boss, this entry leads to a well with monsters up top!’

  ‘This was unlike any other webway link. Hardly a link at all!’

  ‘You mean more like a topological twist? A geometrical anomaly? Sort of like causes the zero-energy containment field controlling the warp-core in a neoplasma reactor?’

  Jaq glared at Grimm, who added hastily, ‘You’d need to ask one of our engineer guildmasters about that. Me, I’m just an ordinary engineer.’

  ‘An engineer who probably thinks himself superior to the tech-priests of Mars!’

  ‘Those magi,’ Grimm muttered under his breath, ‘whose devout experiments with squattish warp-core tech resulted in the buggering up of Ganymede.’

  ‘What did you say? Never mind! Here is some such twist, I do believe. Diving back into the portal from this side ought to take us into the true webway.’

  Rakel’s voice quavered. ‘Dive... back in again?’ She turned to Lex in appeal.

  He rose, still wet. He gripped her by the arm, to lead her. ‘Rakel, we’d better dive from the highest bit of rock before we lose our taste for water.’ She fought in vain. ‘Those monsters... I never knew the horror!’

  ‘I told you there are worse than those.’

  ‘Our lives are spent in a torture chamber—’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Lex, ‘it happens to be a vastly large torture chamber. Billions of naive people do actually survive relatively unscathed until a natural death.’

  ‘Not I. Not I.’

  Rakel screamed as he leapt with her.

  THEY HAD EMERGED, sprawling, into misty blue webway. The end of the tunnel was liquid, held back by some membrane which permitted the passage of living beings but not of inanimate matter. Was this membrane a creation of the eldar during an earlier era? Or was it a phenomenon of the webway itself? In this universe, as Jaq knew all too well, the unknown and unknowable vastly overshadowed the entire vault of knowledge.