[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  The blind grenades thrown by First Claw rattled as they skidded across the mosaic-inlaid floor of the bridge chamber, detonating within a half-second of each other. A thick burst of black smoke spread from each grenade, and while the smoke screens belched out by each device were nowhere near enough to blacken even half of the vast bridge, that was never the intention with which they’d been deployed. The four grenades clanged across the deck towards the forward gunnery station and exploded there, blinding the dozen officers and servitors at the prow weapons consoles.

  As the naval ratings staggered back from the blinding cloud of smoke, the servitors remained where they were—slaved to their stations and emitting monotone warning complaints at the low level electromagnetic radiation in the cloud that stole their sight.

  At that moment, the forward guns of the great Sword fell silent.

  On another vessel, the Exalted grinned, knowing First Claw had reached the enemy bridge.

  Several of the Sword’s bridge crew cried out blessings to the immortal Master of Mankind. Among them, only the most pious and the most desperate actually believed the God-Emperor would save them.

  Helios Nine, blessed with a paradise of cover in the form of angled work stations and railings, raised their weapons as one, drawing beads on the savaged starboard door.

  A figure emerged, blacker than the shadows from which it stalked. Vith took in the sight—a towering killer, too large in all ways to be considered human, clad in bulky ceramite plate forged in a forgotten era. He drank in the details within the space of a single heartbeat: in one hand was a blade of gold, as long as Vith was tall, sparking with lethal power and still dripping molten metal from the door it had sliced through. In the other fist, an oversized bolter with a wide muzzle, open like the maw of some great beast.

  Its helmed visage was painted with a skull’s staring face, bone-white over midnight blue, with glaring red eye lenses lit up from within. A scroll, tattered and burn-marked by small-arms fire, was draped across its left shoulder, the surface of the creamy paper covered in runes alien to Vith’s eyes. On the other shoulder a clutch of short chains hung from the ceramite, bronzed skulls hanging from the dark iron links like morbid fruit, rattling as the figure moved.

  Vith’s tearing eyes took in one detail above all others. The ruined Imperial eagle across the figure’s chestpiece, carved from ivory and since marred by blade strikes to scar the symbol in a simple but effective act of desecration.

  The armsman leader had no comprehension that the Night Lord had taken the chestpiece from a fallen Astartes of the Ultramarines Chapter a few years before. He had no idea that ten thousand years ago when this warrior had first worn his own war-plate, only the favoured III Legion, the Emperor’s Children, had been granted the honour of wearing the aquila upon their armour. He had no idea Talos wore it now, even defiled, with a comfortable sense of irony.

  What Vith did know, and all that mattered, was that a Traitor Astartes had come into their midst, and that unless he ran—maybe even if he did run—he was a dead man.

  Vith was many things. An average officer, perhaps. A little too fond of his drink, certainly. But he was no coward. He would die with the words so many Imperial soldiers had died with on their lips across the millennia.

  “For the Emperor!”

  As noble as the sentiment was, his cry was utterly swallowed by what the Night Lord did next.

  Talos’ retinas were bombarded with chiming runes flickering across his visor. Target upon target upon target, detailing white flashes where weapons were visible. A single step into the chamber, he didn’t raise his weapons, nor did he seek cover. As soon as he emerged from the broken doorway, he threw his head back, blanking his visor of all the threat runes, and he screamed.

  It was a roar no unaugmented human could ever make: as resonant and primal as a feral world reptilian carnosaur. The roar, already inhumanly loud, was amplified by the vox speakers in Talos’ helm to deafening levels. Powered as it was by his three lungs, the cry stretched out for almost fifteen seconds at full strength, echoing through the corridors of the Sword in a flood of sound. The crewmen plugged into their consoles felt it physically, sending tremors through the vessel’s steel bones. Across the ship, tech-priests and servitors linked to the ship’s systems felt the machine-spirit soul of the Sword shiver in response to the unearthly roar.

  On the bridge, Lord Admiral Valiance Arventaur, at one with the Sword’s machine-spirit in a way infinitely more intimate than any other, began to cry blood.

  All of this went unnoticed by the armsmen surrounding their commander. They, like every other human in the sweeping circular chamber, were on their knees, hands clutching at their bleeding ears. Several would have killed themselves to escape the sense-shattering sound, had they been able to reach for their guns, which lay discarded where they fell.

  Talos lowered his head, seeing the threat runes blink back into existence. The smoke cloud was thinner now, but drifting to cover much of the command deck. Everyone, every single mortal on the bridge, was prone. The Sword idled in space, most of its guns fallen silent. Talos imagined the Warmaster’s fleet converging on the ship now, the eyes of every captain glinting with murderous intent.

  Time was short. The Claws deployed on the Sword of the God-Emperor had a handful of minutes to achieve their mission objectives and get back to their pods before they were killed in the coming destruction.

  In that moment, something happened that Talos would never forget to his dying day. From fifty metres away, through a break in the smoke and past the staggering forms of deafened crew, he met the admiral’s eyes. They bled thick red tears, the same trickles that ran from his nose and ears, but his expression was unmistakable. Never, in the countless years Talos had made war against the servants of the False Emperor, had one of the Imperial wretches glared at him with such hatred.

  He treasured the moment for the single, blood-warming instant it lasted, then whispered a single word. “Preysight.”

  At the soft command, his suit’s machine-spirit complied, masking the red-tinged view of his eye lenses in a deep, contoured series of blues. Through the smoke, even through the cover of consoles and work stations, the bridge crew were revealed to him in a maelstrom of blurry orange, red and yellow smears of heat sources against the cold blueness around.

  Cyrion, Xarl and Uzas stepped up behind him, and he heard their whispered commands as they activated their own hunting vision.

  With thermal sight active, they stalked forward, blades and bolters coming up to spill the blood of the Sword’s best and brightest as the mortals scrambled to recover their weapons.

  The admiral was the last to die.

  By that point, the bridge was a charnel house. Through the dissipating smoke that finally succumbed to the emergency air scrubbers, all one could see were the ruined bodies of a hundred crew and their slain defenders, Helios Nine. The four Night Lords moved here and there, taking chainswords to consoles and ripping the nerve centre of the failing Sword of the God-Emperor to pieces.

  The names of the slain were meaningless to Talos, and he had no idea that the last to fall by the admiral’s throne, shotcannon pounding out its ignorable bark, had been Cerlin Vith.

  Vith wheezed out the last of his life through his ruptured lungs, unable to lift his chin from his chest. He had been irrelevant to Talos, an irritating thermal blur, and the Night Lord had dispatched him with a simple thrust of his golden blade. As Vith fell, Talos kicked him from the throne’s podium, his attention already elsewhere as Vith’s head cracked on a railing and the mortal descended slowly into death.

  Lord Admiral Valiance Arventaur stared up at the creature who would be his murderer. The blood-coloured eyes of Talos’ helm stared down at the old man merged to his chair. Now, it made sense why the admiral had not raised himself up in the bridge’s defence. The mortal did not exist—in the flesh—below the waist. His uniformed torso was directly bound to his command throne by snaking cables sutured against his pelv
is, linking him bodily to the ship as surely as the tendril-wires in the back of his head tied his consciousness to the Sword’s machine-spirit.

  Talos wasted perhaps a second wondering when the admiral had submitted to this invasive, restrictive surgery, and how long he had been confined here—a living piece of the vessel he commanded—bound to his throne as a half-human mess of flesh, wire, cables and fluid exchange tubing.

  He wasted that second and then, gripped by curiosity, he wasted another by asking “Why would you do this to yourself, mortal?”

  He never got an answer. The admiral’s unshaven chin trembled as he tried to speak. “God-Emperor,” the old man whispered. Talos ignited his power blade again, shaking his head.

  “I saw your Emperor. A handful of times, back in the age before he betrayed us all.”

  The sword slid into the admiral’s chest with sickening gentleness, inch by slow inch, charring the dusty white Battlefleet Crythe uniform as the powered blade burned the material where it touched. The blade’s tip sank into the bone of the command throne behind the mortal’s back, forming yet another bond between the admiral and his station.

  The effects were immediate. The bridge lighting flickered, and the ship itself groaned and rolled, tormented, like an injured whale in the black seas of Nostramo. The admiral’s death flooded the ship’s machine-spirit, and Talos withdrew the blade in a harsh pull. Blood hissed on the golden blade, dissolving against the heat.

  “And,” the Night Lord said to the dying man, “he was no god. Perhaps not a man,” the Astartes smiled, “but never a god.”

  The admiral tried to speak once more, his hands trembling as they reached out to Talos. The Night Lord gripped the dying shipmaster’s frail hands and left them folded over the blade wound in his chest.

  “Never a god,” Talos repeated gently. “Know that truth, as you die.”

  With the admiral’s last breath, the lights on the bridge failed forever.

  The crew of the Sword of the God-Emperor might have regained control of their ship, except for two factors in the Night Lords’ attack.

  First and foremost, the teams of crew and armsmen that reached the bridge found the helm and every control console in the room ruined beyond use, displaying the jagged wounds left by the chainblades of First Claw. Using low-light visors to see in the darkness, these would-be saviours also found the admiral dead in his throne of bone, his face set in a twisted expression that lay somewhere in the ugliness between pain, hatred and fear.

  The command decks might have been savaged beyond fast repair, but the under-officers aboard the Sword had only to ensure the grand cruiser could move from the battle, and its armour could easily sustain it until it could thrust clear of the orbital war. Efforts were redoubled in tech crews and officers racing to the enginarium decks, which was where the second factor came into play.

  Talos and First Claw had not been alone.

  The second impediment to regaining any semblance of control over the ship was that the secondary enginarium sector was in the hands of the enemy. While this section of the ship was nowhere near as vital to overall function as the main engine decks, it was a significant disruption to power flow and drive efficiency. The Night Lords hadn’t hit the primary sections and allowed themselves to be drawn into protracted fire-fights. They’d hit all they needed to hit; enough to take the Sword out of the fight with a minimum of delay and effort.

  Teams of armsmen stormed the massive engine chambers seeking to oust the invaders, but Second and Sixth Claws had left their pods with their bolters barking and held their ground until the order to leave. When that order finally came, the defiant Imperials retook the subsidiary enginarium chambers, only to find a farewell gift left by the Night Lords, who had fastened explosives to the same hull section that their pods had breached in the first place. When the detonators counted down to zero, the explosives took out a vast section of the already compromised hull wall, leaving a sizeable portion of the secondary enginarium decks open to the void.

  This killed any hope of crew transit to and from the primary enginarium decks alongside the starboard edge of the grand cruiser, and left the secondary engines silent and dead. Directionless, with neither a brain nor a beating heart now that the bridge and enginarium were disabled, the Sword of the God-Emperor rolled in space, naked without its shields, taking a million scars from the weapons of the Warmaster’s fleet.

  In the space of half an hour, a handful of Astartes had killed several hundred Imperial souls, kept the two key areas of the vessel disrupted and only loosely in loyal control, and made their escape after ensuring no significant repairs could be made in time.

  Aboard the Covenant of Blood, the Exalted—already anticipating the praise he would receive from the Warmaster—ordered the helm to run close to the suffering Sword and be ready to receive boarding pods back into the starboard landing bays.

  His personal screens mounted in the arms of his command throne spilled digital data in a ceaseless stream of green runes on a black setting.

  Second Claw had disengaged and awaited retrieval.

  Sixth Claw, the same.

  Fifth Claw… no contact. No contact since launch. The Exalted suspected the pod had been destroyed almost as soon as it left the Covenant, hammered into nothingness by the pulverising fire from the grand cruiser’s broadsides. A shame, certainly. Five souls lost.

  But First Claw… Their pod was still attached. The last to be fired from the Covenant, their pod hadn’t impacted as close to their target objectives as the others.

  “Talos,” the Exalted drawled.

  “This isn’t happening.” Cyrion had to smash his chainsword against the wall to free it of the spasming, screaming armsman he’d impaled. “We’re not going to make it in time.”

  First Claw was embattled in the myriad corridors between the bridge and the gunnery deck where their boarding pod had struck the hull. Around them, the great ship shuddered violently, already breaking into pieces. The Night Lords had no idea how much of the Sword was still intact, but from the screams trailing across the hacked enemy vox, there wasn’t going to be anything left worth speaking of within the next few minutes.

  They’d met a flood of Imperial crew coming their way, which at first had been a surprise and had quickly become an annoyance. As they’d butchered the mortals running at them in the low-ceilinged corridor, Xarl had joked that it was amusing to see humans running towards them for a change.

  “Makes the hunt all the easier,” he smiled.

  “You say that,” Cyrion replied, “but you have to wonder what they’re running from if we’re a more pleasant option.”

  Xarl reached for a running female officer, grabbing her by the throat to drag her into a headbutt that caved in the front of her skull and snapped her spine. He hurled the body into the oncoming horde, knocking several people from their feet to be trampled by the advancing Astartes. Her blood was smeared across Xarl’s helm, starkly dark against the skull-white of his painted faceplate.

  “I see your point, brother,” he said to Cyrion.

  As Talos listened to the scraps of enemy vox that reached his ears, Aurum rose and fell with mechanical precision, almost without any attention at all. A picture built up in his mind—a picture of the ship ahead and the horrendous damage it was taking as the Warmaster’s fleet picked it apart like a flock of vultures worrying a fresh corpse.

  “It seems,” he spoke calmly, “the gunnery decks between here and our pod are taking the brunt of fire from our fleet.” His bolter roared once, but the range was too short. The high-calibre shell pounded right through a running Imperial’s chest and out his back, to explode against the wall beyond.

  Cyrion chuckled as he saw.

  “What do we do?” Uzas, more coherent now, asked as he laid about left and right with his combat blades. “Can we cross the suffering sections?”

  “Gravity is out, and they are ablaze,” Talos replied. “No, we need to get back to the bridge. Close to it, at least. E
ven getting to the pod will take too long. The ship is in pieces already, and the crew are swarming like ants in a kicked hive.”

  “Then we kill our way there!”

  “Be silent, brother,” Talos told Uzas. “The sheer number of lives we need to end is the main reason this will take too long. The gunnery deck must be in pieces by now. These mortals are coming from there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Uniforms, Xarl,” Talos replied.

  Xarl, always one to need the proof of his own eyes, grabbed another human attempting to flee past. The man’s uniform looked like every other—white and generic. What was Talos talking about? He lifted the struggling man off the ground by his greasy hair, holding the officer’s yelling face close to his bloodstained faceplate. Through the vox speakers in his helm’s snarling mouth grille, Xarl’s voice came out at insane volume.

  “Tell me where you are stationed. Is it the gunnery de—,” an officer—quite deaf now—hurriedly drew a pistol in shaking hands and fired it point-blank into Xarl’s face. The small slug pinged against the ceramite, knocking Xarl’s head back a little before ricocheting with a wet crack back into the man’s own forehead. Xarl took one look at the deep red groove in the man’s skull and dropped the corpse, swearing in Nostraman. He could hear that bastard Cyrion laughing over the vox.

  “Fine,” he said, ignoring Cyrion’s laughter. “Why the bridge?”

  “Because it has several decks beneath it that won’t explode if a lance strike hits them,” Talos said. “And because I’m going to do something we may regret.”

  With those words spoken, he blink-clicked the spiralling rune on his retinal display that represented the Covenant.