Warhammer 40,000 - Anthology 13

by The Book of Blood (Christian Dunn)

  “That way.”

  Kale’s gaze drifted towards Nord. “Is he alive, this man Indus?”

  The psyker stiffened; warily extending his preternatural senses forwards. He could discern only the pale glitters of thought-energy from the spider-things and the lamp-beetles; nothing that might suggest a reasoning mind, let alone a human one. “I have no answer for you, sir,” he said at length.

  “With caution, then, brothers.” Kale walked on, and they followed him, silent and vigilant.

  The corridor narrowed into a tube, and Nord imagined it a gullet down which the Adeptus Astartes were travelling. He had encountered tyranids before, but only upon the field of battle, and then down the sights of a missile launcher. He had never ventured aboard one of their craft, and it was exactly the horror he had expected it to be.

  Tyranid vessels were not the product of forges and shipyards; they were spawned. Hive ships were spun out of knots of meat and bone, grown on the surface of captured worlds in teeming vats filled with a broth of liquefied biomass. They were living things, animals by some vague definition of the term. Electrochemical processes and nerve ganglions transmitted commands about its flesh; pheremonic discharges regulated its internal atmosphere; exothermic chemistry created light and heat. Its hull was skeletal matter, protecting the crew that swarmed like parasites inside the gut of the craft. Together, the hive was a contained, freakish ecosystem, drifting from world to world driven by the need to feed and feed.

  Even in this half-dead state, Nord could taste the echo of that aching, bone-deep craving, as if it were leaking from the twitching walls. The fleshy wattles that dangled from the ceiling, the corpse-grey cilia and phlegmy deposits around his feet, all of it sickened him with its dead stench and the sheer, revolting affront of the tyranids’ very existence. This xenos abortion was everything that the Imperium, in all its human glory, was not. A chaotic riot of mutant life, disordered and rapacious, without soul or intellect. The absolute antithesis of the civilisation the Adeptus Astartes had fought to preserve since the days of Old Night.

  Nord’s hand tightened around his pistol; the urge to kill this thing rose high, and he reined it in, denying the tingle of a building Rage before it had freedom to form.

  The chamber broadened into an uneven space, dotted with deep pits of muddy liquid that festered and spat, gaseous discharges chugging into the foetid air. Mounds of fatty deposits lay in uneven heaps, the ejecta from the processes churning in the ponds.

  Serun gestured. “Rendering pools. Bio-mass is brought here to be denatured into a liquid slurry.”

  Corae spoke for the first time since they had boarded. “To what end?”

  “To feed the hive,” Serun replied. “This… gruel is the raw material of the tyranids. They consume it, shape it. It is where they are born from.”

  Kale dropped to his haunches. “And where they kill,” he added. The sergeant picked something metallic from the spoil heaps and turned it in his fingers. A rank sigil of iron and copper, a disc cut to resemble a cogwheel. Upon it, the design of a skull, the symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  Corae turned his face and spat in disgust. “Emperor protect me from such a fate.”

  “More here,” said Brother Dane. With care, he drew to him a twisted shape afloat on one of the pools. It was a man’s ribcage and part of a spine, but the bone was rubbery and distended where acidic fluids had eaten into it. It crumbled like wet sand in the Blood Angel’s grip.

  “Adept Indus, perhaps, and his scout team…” Kale suggested. He turned to face Nord and saw the psyker glaring into the dimness. “Brother?”

  The question had barely left his lips when the Codicier gave an explosive shout. “Enemy!”

  The shapes came at them from out of the twisted, sinewy ropes about the walls. Three beasts, bursting from concealment as one, attacking from all sides.

  Corae was quick, clutching the trigger bar of his flamer. A bright gout of blazing promethium jetted from the bell-mouth of the weapon and engulfed the closest tyranid in flames, but on it came, falling into the red wave of death.

  The second skittered across the ground, low and fast, dragging itself in loping jerks by its taloned limbs and great curved claws. Dane, Serun and the sergeant turned their bolters on it in a hail of punishing steel.

  The third found Nord and dove at him, falling from the ceiling, spinning about as it came. He flung himself backwards, his storm bolter crashing his free hand reaching for the hilt of his force axe.

  The tyranid landed hard and rocked off its hooves; Nord got his first good look at the thing and recognition unfolded in his forebrain, the legacy of a hundred hypnogogic combat indoctrination tapes. A lictor.

  Humanoid in form, tall and festooned with barbs, they sported massive scything talons and a cobra-head tail. Where a man would have a mouth, the lictors grew a wriggling orchard of feeder tendrils. They were hunter-predator forms, deployed alone or in small packs, stealthy and favoured of ambush attacks. Unless Nord and his brothers killed them quickly, they would spill fresh pheromones into the air and summon more of their kind.

  He reversed and met the alien with the flickering crystal edge of the axe, reaching into his heart and finding the reservoir of psychic might lurking within him. As the axe-head bit into the lictor’s chest, Nord channelled a quickening from the warp along the weapon’s psi-convector and into the xenos’ new wound. Its agonised shriek battered at him, and he staggered as it tried to claw through his armour. Nord’s bolter crashed again, hot rounds finding purchase in the pasty flesh of its thorax. He withdrew the axe again and struck again, over and over, riding on the battle-anger welling up inside him.

  The Blood Angel was dimly aware of a death-wail off to his right, half-glimpsing another lictor fall as it was opened by shellfire and chainblade; but his target still lived.

  A talon swept down, barbs screeching as they scored Nord’s chest plate; in turn he let the axe fall again, this time severing a monstrous limb at the joint. Gouts of black blood spurted, burning where it landed, and the Codicier threw a wall of psionic pressure outwards, battering at the wounded creature.

  The lictor’s hooves slipped on the lip of a bio-pool and it stumbled backwards into the lake of stringy muck; instantly the churning acids ate into the tyranid and it collapsed, drowning and melting.

  Nord regained his balance and waved a hand in front of his visor as oily smoke wafted past; the third tyranid was also dying, finally succumbing to Corae’s flamer and the impacts of krak grenades.

  A mechanical voice grated through his vox-link. “Kale. Respond. This is Xeren. We have detected weapons fire. Report status immediately.”

  Ignoring the buzzing of the tech-priest, the psyker approached the last dying lictor as Corae took aim with his flame-thrower, twisting the nozzle to adjust the dispersal pattern. The force axe still humming in his hand, his psychic power resonating through him, Nord caught the sense of the tyranid’s animal mind, trapped in its death throes. He winced, the touch of it more abhorrent to him than anything he had yet witnessed aboard the hive ship.

  Yet there, in the mass of its unknowable, alien thoughts, he glimpsed something. Great swirling clouds of red and black. And men, robed men with skeletal limbs of metal and copper cogs about their necks.

  Corae pulled the trigger and laid a snake of fire over the beast, boiling its soft tissues beneath the hard chitin armour. Nord sheathed his axe and heard the voice again. Xeren seemed impatient.

  “Perhaps you should not engage every tyranid you see.”

  Kale was plucking spent flesh hooks from the crevices of his armour with quick, spare motions. “The xenos did not offer us the choice, priest. And I remind you who it was that told us this ship was dead.”

  “Where the tyranids are concerned, there are degrees of death. The ship is dormant, and so the majority of the swarm aboard should be quiescent. But some may retain a wakeful state… I suggest you avoid further engagements.”

  “I will take that unde
r advisement,” Kale retorted.

  Xeren continued. “You are proceeding too slowly, brother-sergeant, and without efficiency. Indus is the primary objective. Divide your forces to cover a greater area. Find him for me.”

  The sergeant bolstered his gun, and any reply he might have made was rendered pointless as the tech-priest cut the vox signal.

  Serun’s hands closed into fists. “He dares bray commands as if he were Chapter Master? The scrawny cog has no right—”

  “Decorum, kinsman,” said Kale. “We are the Sons of Sanguinius. A mere tech-priest is not worth our enmity. We’ll find Xeren’s lost lamb soon enough and be done.”

  “If he still lives,” mused Corae, nudging the powdery bones with his boot.

  Reluctantly, Brother-Sergeant Kale chose to do as the tech-priest had suggested; beyond the bio-pool chamber the throat-corridors branched and he ordered Dane to break off, taking Corae and Serun with him. Brother Dane’s element would move anti-spinwards through the hive ship’s interior spaces, while Nord and his commander ventured along the other path.

  The psyker threw the veteran a questioning look when he voiced the orders; in turn Kale’s expression remained unchanged. “Xeren and I agree on one point,” he noted. “We both wish this mission to be concluded as quickly as possible.”

  Nord had to admit he too shared that desire. He thought of Gorolev’s words aboard the Emathia. The ship-master was right; this monstrous hulk was an insult every second it was allowed to exist.

  Dane’s team vanished into the clammy darkness and Nord followed Kale onwards. They passed through more rendering chambers, then rooms seemingly constructed from waxy matter, laced with spherical pods, each one wet and dripping ichor. They encountered other strange spaces that defied any interpretation of form or function; hollows where tooth-like spires criss-crossed from floor and ceiling; a copse of bulbous, acid-rimed fronds that resembled coral polyps; and great bladders that throbbed, thick liquid emerging from them in desultory jerks.

  And there were the creatures. The first time they came across the alien forms, Nord’s axe had come to his hand before he was even aware of it; but the tyranids they encountered were in some state that mirrored death, a strange hibernative trance that rendered them inert.

  They crossed a high catwalk formed from spinal bone, and Kale used the pin-lamp beneath the barrel of his boltgun to throw a disc of light into the pits below. The glow picked out the hulking shape of a massive carnifex, its bullet-shaped head tucked into its spiny chest in some mad parody of a sleeping child.

  The rasping breaths of the huge assault organism fogged the air, bone armour and spines scraping across one another as its chest rose and fell. Awake, it could have killed the Blood Angels with a single blast of bio-poison from its slavering venom cannons.

  Around the gnarled hooves of the slumbering carnifex, a clutch of deadly hormagaunts rested, shiny oil-black carapaces piled atop one another, clawed limbs folded back, talons sheathed. Nord gripped the force axe firmly, and it took a near physical effort for him to turn from the gallery of targets before him. Instead they moved on, ever on, picking their way in stealth through the very heart of the hive’s dozing populace.

  “Why do they ignore us?” Kale wondered, his question transmitted to the vox-bead in Nord’s ear.

  “They are conserving their strength, brother-sergeant,” he replied. “Whatever incident caused this ship to fall away from the rest of its hive fleet, it must have drained them to survive it. I would not question our luck.”

  “Aye,” Kale replied. “Terra protects.”

  “I—”

  The force axe fell from Nord’s fingers and the impact upon the bone deck seemed louder than cannon fire. Suddenly, without warning it was there.

  A black and cloying touch enveloping his thoughts—the same sense of something alien he had felt aboard the Emathia.

  A presence. A mind. Clouds, billowing wreaths of black and red, surrounding him, engulfing him.

  “There… is something else here,” he husked. “A psychic phantom, just beyond my reach. Measuring itself against me.” Nord’s heart hammered in his chest; he tasted metal in his mouth. “Not just the xenos… More than that.”

  He grimaced, and strengthened his mental bulwarks, shoring them up with raw determination. The dark dream uncoiled in his thoughts, the rumbling pulse of the Red Thirst in his gullet, the churn of the Black Rage stiffening his muscles. All about him, the shadows seemed to lengthen and loom, leaking from the walls, ranging across the sleeping monsters to reach for the warrior with ebon fingers.

  Nord gasped. “Something is awakening.”

  Across the plane of the hive ship’s hull, Brother Dane brought up his fist in a gesture of command, halting Corae and Serun. “Do you hear that?” he asked.

  Corae turned, the flamer in his grip. “It’s coming from the walls.” They were the last words he would utter.

  Flesh-matter all around the squad ripped and tore into bleeding rags as claws shredded their way towards the Astartes. With brutal, murderous power, a tide of chattering freaks boiled in upon them, spines and bone and armoured heads moving in blurs. They were so fast that in the dimness they seemed like the talons of single giant animal, reaching out to take them.

  Gunfire lit the corridor, the flat bang of bolter shells sounding shot after shot, the chugging belch of fire from the flamer issuing out to seek targets. In return came screaming—the blood-hungry shrieks of a warrior brood turned loose to find prey.

  The horde of tyranid soldier organisms rolled over the Space Marines with no regard for their own safety; mindless things driven on by killer instinct and a desire to feed, they had no self to preserve. They were simply the blades of the hive, and the very presence of the intruders was enough to drive them mad.

  Perhaps beings with intellect might have sensed the hand of something larger, something at the back of their thoughts, compelling them, driving them to destroy. But the termagants knew nothing but the lust to rip and rend.

  Symbiotic phero-chemical links between the tyranids and the engineered bio-tools in their claws sent kill commands running before them. Like everything in their arsenal, the weapons used by the warriors were living things. Their fleshborers, great bell-mouthed flutes of chitin, spat clumps of fang-toothed beetles that chewed through armour and flesh in a destructive frenzy.

  Numberless and unstoppable, the brood swallowed up Corae and Serun, opening them to the air in jets of red. Dane was the last to fall, his legs cut out from under him, his bolter running dry, becoming a club in his mailed fists. At the end of him, a storm of tusk blades pierced his torso, penetrating his lungs, his primary and secondary hearts.

  Blood flooded his mouth and he perished in silence, his last act to deny the creatures the victory of his screams.

  Brother Nord stumbled and fell to one knee, clutching at his chest in sympathetic agony. He felt Dane perish in his thoughts, heard the echo of the warrior’s death, and that of Corae and Serun. Each man’s ending struck him like a slow bullet, filling his gut with ice.

  Nord’s heart and its decentralised twin beat fast, faster, faster, his blood singing in his ears in a captured tempest. The same trembling he had felt back in the chapel returned, and it was all he could do to fight it off.

  He became aware of Brother-Sergeant Kale helping him to his feet, dimly registering his squad commander guiding him away from the hibernaculum chamber and into the flesh-warm humidity of the corridor beyond.

  “Nord! Speak to me!”

  He tried to answer but the psychic undertow dragged on him, taking all his effort just to stay afloat and sensate. The shocking resonance was far worse than he had ever felt before. There had been many times upon the field of combat where Nord had tasted the mind-death of others, sometimes his foes, too often his battle-brothers… But this… This was of a very different stripe.

  At once alien and human, unknowable and yet known to him, the psychic force that had compelled the termagant swarm
reached in and raked frigid claws over the surface of his mind. A pan of him screamed that he should withdraw, disengage and erect the strongest of his mental barriers. Every second he did not, he gave this force leave to plunge still deeper. And yet, another facet of Nord’s iron will dared to face this power head-on, driven by the need to know it. To know it and destroy it.

  Against the sickness he felt within, Nord tried to see the face of his enemy. The mental riposte was powerful; it hit him like a wall and he recoiled, his vision hazed crimson.

  With a monumental psychic effort, Nord disengaged and slumped against a bony stanchion, his dark skin sallow and filmed with sweat.

  He blinked away the fog in his vision and found his commander. Kale’s pale face was grave in the dimness. “The others?” he whispered.

  “Dead,” Nord managed. “All dead.”

  The sergeant gave a grim nod. “The Emperor knows their names.” He hesitated a moment. “You felt it? With your witchsight, you saw… the enemy?”

  “Aye.” The psyker got to his feet. “It tried to kill me. Didn’t take.”

  Kale stood, drumming his fingers on the hilt of his chainsword. “This… force that assaulted you?”

  He shook his head, “I’ve never sensed the like before, sir.”

  “Do you know where it is?” The veteran gestured around at the walls with the chainsword.

  Nord nodded. “That, I do know.”

  He heard the hunter’s smile in the sergeant’s voice. “Show me.”

  At the heart of every tyranid nest, one breed of creature was supreme. If the carnifexes and termagants, ripper swarms and biovores were the teeth and talons of the tyranid mass, then the commanding intellect was the hive tyrant. None had ever been captured alive, and few had been recovered by the Imperium intact enough for a full dissection. If the lictors and the hormagaunts and all the other creatures were common soldiery, the hive tyrants were the generals. The conduit for whatever passed as the diffuse mind of this repugnant xenos species.