Battle for the Abyss

by Ben Counter

  It was wondrous. Ulargo was filled with the sight of it; no, not the sight, but the sheer experience, for the warp was not composed of light, but of emotion, and to experience it was to let it speak to the most fundamental parts of his soul.

  The sky of hatred split apart and a yawning mouth opened up above Ulargo’s soul. Teeth of wrath framed the maw. Beyond it was a black mass, seething like a pit of vermin. It was terror.

  Mouths were opening up everywhere. Mindless things, like sharks made of malicious glee, slid between the thunderheads of passion. They snatched at the soul-specks of the Fireblade’s crew, teeth like knives through what remained of their minds.

  Even love was turning on them, filling them in their last moments of existence with a horrendous longing for all the things they would never have, and appalling, consuming grief for everything they once had, but would never see again.

  The maw bore down on Ulargo. Teeth closed in on him, an appalling coldness sheared through him and he knew that it was the purity of death.

  The boiling mass seethed. The last vestiges of his physical self recoiled as worms forced themselves into a nose and mouth that no longer existed.

  The warp turned dark, and Ulargo drowned in fear.

  ADMIRAL KAMINSKA REACHED the bridge to find an ashen-faced crew before her. Cestus had just arrived, his countenance stern and pensive as the distress signal emanating from the Fireblade repeated on the ship-to-ship vox.

  ‘This… Ulargo… Fireblade… damaged in transit… request dock… repairs…’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Kaminska, feeling all colour drain from her face as she heard the voice of a man she thought was dead. ‘Vox traffic is rendered null whilst in warp transit.’

  ‘Admiral, the Fireblade claims to be abeam to our port side,’ offered Helms-mate Kant as he monitored further communications.

  Kaminska looked instinctively over to the viewport and, despite the shimmering interference caused by the Geller field, she could see Ulargo’s ship, a little battered by the initial sortie against the Furious Abyss, but otherwise fine.

  Common sense warred with the emotions of her heart. Ulargo was a comrade in arms. Kaminska had thought him lost and now she had an opportunity to save him.

  ‘Guide them in to make dock at once.’

  HUNTSMAN HAD CHASED the elusive figure to a dead end in the complex of corridors aboard Aft Deck Three of the Wrathful. Doors punctuated the apparently endless passageways that led into more barrack rooms and occasionally isolation cells.

  As he approached slowly, drawing the lume-lamp across the figure’s body, he noticed that his quarry faced the wall. He also saw the fatigues it was wearing more clearly. It was the deck uniform of the Fireblade.

  ‘Halt,’ he ordered the figure sternly, with a quick glance behind to ensure that his armsmen were still in support.

  From the back, he judged the figure to be male, but a scraggly wretch to be sure with unkempt hair like wire and a stench that suggested he hadn’t washed in many days.

  Huntsman activated the vox-bead.

  ‘Bridge, this is Officer Huntsman. I have detained a male deck crew in Aft-Three,’ he said. ‘He appears to be wearing a Fireblade uniform.’

  Helms-mate Kant’s response came through crackling static.

  ‘Repeat. Did you say the Fireblade?’

  ‘Affirmative – a deck hand from the Fireblade,’ Huntsman replied, edging closer.

  ‘That’s impossible. The Fireblade has only just docked with us.’

  Huntsman felt a cold chill run down his marrow as the figure turned.

  Somehow, the light from the lume-lamp wasn’t able to illuminate a belt of shadow across the top of the figure’s head and eyes, but Huntsman saw its mouth well enough. The deck hand made a wide, gash-like smile with rotten lips caked in dry blood.

  ‘In the name of Terra!’ Huntsman screamed as the figure’s jaw distended impossibly wide and revealed dozens of needle-like teeth. Fingers lengthened into talons, nails drenched in blood and razor-sharp. Eyes flashed red in the darkness, like orbs of hate. Huntsman fired.

  ON THE BRIDGE, rending screams and scattered gunfire emitted from the vox followed by an almighty static discharge that ended in total silence.

  ‘Raise the Officer of the Watch at once!’ Kaminska ordered.

  Kant worked at the array, but looked up after a few minutes.

  ‘There is no response, admiral.’

  Kaminska snarled, hammered an icon on her command throne and opened another channel.

  ‘Primary dock, respond. This is Admiral Kaminska. Disengage from the Fireblade at once,’ she said, shouting the orders.

  Nothing. Communications were dead.

  A warning klaxon sounded on the bridge. Seconds later, the Wrathful shook with external hull detonations.

  ‘Admiral,’ cried Helmsmistress Venkmyer, ‘I’m reading armour damage to the port side, upper decks. How is that even possible?’

  ‘The Fireblade is firing its dorsal turrets,’ she answered grimly.

  ‘It seems Ulargo’s ship survived after all,’ said Cestus, donning his battle helm, Antiges following his lead, ‘only not in the way we had hoped.

  ‘All Astartes,’ he barked into his helmet vox, mercifully unaffected by the radio blackout, ‘convene on Aft-Three, Primary Dock, immediately.’

  A LONG, LOW scream keened through the Wrathful, vibrating through the hull, then another and another until a chorus of them was shrieking through the ship. It sounded like the death screams of hundreds of terrified men.

  Mhotep lowered his smoking boltgun once he had dispatched the creature back to the ether. He had arrived too late to save the Officer of the Watch and his armsmen who lay eviscerated on the floor and part way up the blood-slicked walls.

  The thing had been warp spawn, that much was apparent, wearing a shadow form of one of the Fireblade’s crew rather than inhabiting a body directly. The momentary breach in the Wrathful’s Geller field had allowed it aboard ship. Mhotep’s instincts told him that it was just a harbinger, and he headed off quickly to the Primary Dock.

  Crewmen were hurrying down the Wrathful’s corridors, and they struggled to get past the bulky armoured Astartes as he fought to gain the Primary Dock. The engine sections started just stern-wards of the shuttle decks and the ship was getting up to full evasion power.

  Shouldering past the frantic crew, Mhotep saw another figure impeding his progress, but one of flesh and blood, standing rock-like in grey power armour.

  ‘Brynngar,’ said the Thousand Son levelly at the Space Wolf who had just emerged from an adjacent corridor.

  The World Eater, Skraal, with two of his Legion brothers appeared suddenly alongside him from the opposite corridor. Standing at the intersection of the crossroads, a strange sense of impasse existed for a moment before the Wolf Guard snarled and turned away, heading for the Primary Dock.

  THE FIVE ASTARTES emerged into chaos.

  Men and women of the Wrathful fled in all directions, screaming and shouting. Some brandished weapons, others sought higher ground only to be torn down and butchered. Blood swilled like a slick on the dock as the attendant deck crews of the Wrathful were torn apart by fell apparitions dressed in the garb of the Fireblade. The crew of the lost escort ship had changed. Their mouths were long and wide as if fixed in a perpetual sadistic grin. Needle-like fangs filled their distended maws like those of the long-extinct Terran shark, while long, barbed fingers curled like claws tearing at skin, flesh and bone.

  They fell upon the human deck crews with reckless abandon and were devouring them, the bloodied rotten faces of the gruesome predators alive with glee.

  ‘In the name of Russ,’ Brynngar breathed as he saw the docking ports that joined the two ships disgorge numberless hordes of twisted Fireblade crew.

  ‘They are warp spawn!’ Mhotep told them, drawing his scimitar, ‘wearing the bodies of our allies, whose souls are now hell-bound, lost to the empyrean. Destroy them.’

  Bry
nngar threw his head back and roared, the sound eerie and resonant from within the confines of his battle helm. With Felltooth in one hand and bolt pistol in the other, he charged into the fray.

  Skraal and the World Eaters followed, brandishing chainaxes and bellowing the name of Angron.

  A TRIO OF vampire-like warp spawn fell under the withering report of Mhotep’s bolter as he trudged across the Primary Dock and through the visceral mire sloshing at his feet. The copper stink assailing his nostrils would have overpowered a normal man, but the Thousand Son crushed the sensation and closed with the enemy.

  Barks of bolter fire were tinny and echoing through his helmet as he cut down an advancing warp spawn, parting its sternum and decapitating it with the return swing. The hordes were everywhere and soon surrounded him. The muzzle-flare from his weapon illuminated the grim destruction he wrought with flashing intermittence, the keening wail of his scimitar a high-pitched chorus to the din of explosive fire.

  He felt something trying to push at the edges of his mind, testing his psychic defences with tentative mental probing. Slogging through the despicable horde, he was drawn closer to the source of it, even as it was drawn to him, and he felt the pressure on his sanity increase.

  BRYNNGAR SHRUGGED OFF a creature clinging to his arm and smashed it with Felltooth, the rune axe cutting through wasted bone like air. He thrust his bolt pistol into another and used the warp spawn’s momentum to lift it from the ground. Triggering the weapon, he blasted the creature apart in a shower of bone and viscera. Then the Space Wolf lunged and butted a third, almost dissolving its rotted cranium against his battle helm. Gore and brain matter spoiled his vision, and Brynngar wiped his helmet visor clean with the back of his gauntleted hand.

  With the destruction of the physical body, the warp spawn appeared to lose their hold on the material plane and dissipated. They were easy meat. Brynngar had fought far hardier foes, but in such swarms they were starting to tax him. Even his gene-enhanced musculature burned after the solid fighting. For every three the Wolf Guard slew, another six took their place, pouring like rancid ants from the docking portals.

  Brynngar realised to his dismay, hacking down another spawn, that gradually he was being pushed back.

  He caught sight of Skraal through the melee. The World Eater was similarly pressed, though a bloody mist surrounded him from the churning punishment wreaked by his chainaxe. He could not see Skraal’s fellow Legionaries; Brynngar assumed they had been swallowed by the horde.

  A sudden tearing of metal, mangled with the sound of tortured souls, rent the air, and Brynngar felt the deck lurch from under him as it seemed to twist in on itself.

  The integrity fields, which kept the dock pressurised when the dock ports were open, flickered once, but held. The physical structure did not. A huge chunk ripped out of the deck as if bitten by unseen jaws, three decks high. Debris was tumbling out into the ether. Brynngar looked away, for to do otherwise would be to comprehend the naked warp and embrace madness.

  Something stirred beyond the breach, out in the infinite. Brynngar felt it as the hackles rose on the back of his neck and the feral nature of his Legion became suddenly emboldened. For a brief moment, the Space Wolf wanted to tear off his helmet and gauntlets and gorge himself on flesh like a beast of the wild. He backed away of his own volition, realising that something primal and terrible was with them on the dock.

  MHOTEP HAD FORCED his way to the docking portals, through a swathe of warp spawn. His armour was dented and scratched from their ether claws and his body heaved with exhaustion. It was not physical prowess that would save them here, but the discipline of the mind that needed to hold fast.

  Mhotep had felt the presence, too, and standing before the docking portal he beheld it in his mind’s eye. It was dark and seething: a pure predator.

  ‘It has seen me,’ he said calmly into his helmet vox, the warp spawn hordes recoiling suddenly from the Thousand Son, regarding him in the same way a Prosperine spirehawk regards its prey. ‘I cannot hide from it now.’

  BRYNNGAR WAS ALMOST back to back with Skraal, the two Astartes having been fought back to the blast doors, when he heard Mhotep through his vox.

  ‘Seen what?’ snarled the Space Wolf, gutting another warp spawn as Skraal cleaved the arm from another.

  ‘You cannot prevail here,’ the voice of Mhotep came again. ‘Get out and seal the doors. I will remain and activate the dock’s auto-destruct sequence.’

  Many vessels of the Imperial Fleet came with such precautionary measures built in to their design by the Mechanicum. They were meant as weapons of last resort, should a ship be overrun and in danger of capture. If a ship could not be defended or retaken from an enemy then it would be denied to them utterly, although in this case, Mhotep’s sacrifice would not destroy the ship, only vanquish the foes that were besieging it.

  ‘Do so now!’ urged the Thousand Son.

  Brynngar had lost sight of him, though his view was curtailed as he forced himself to look away from the tear into the naked warp beyond. Although it rankled, the Space Wolf knew when he was chasing a lost cause.

  ‘Come on,’ he snarled to Skraal who hacked and hewed with berserk fury, ‘we are leaving.’

  ‘The sons of Angron do not flee the enemy,’ he raged in response.

  ‘Even so,’ Brynngar said, smashing a warp spawn aside. Ducking a blood-maddened sweep of Skraal’s chainaxe, he punched the World Eater hard in the chest with the flat of his hand. The stunned Astartes was lifted off his feet and sent sprawling through the open blast doors. Brynngar trudged after Skraal’s prone form, carving a path through the horde with Felltooth.

  A few of the warp spawn had found their way through to the other side of the blast doors that led from the Primary Dock. Brynngar was about to hunt them down when a barrage of bolter fire scythed through them like wheat.

  Inside his battle helm, the Space Wolf grinned as he saw the battered forms of the Ultramarines.

  ‘Down!’ cried Cestus who was leading the group, and Brynngar hit the deck as a fusillade of fire erupted overhead.

  Arching his neck, the Space Wolf saw the smoking bodies of more warp spawn fall into a heap at the dock threshold. Swinging out a hand, he thumped the portal icon and the blast doors slid shut with a hydraulic pressure-hiss.

  ‘We must seal the doors,’ he snarled, rolling on his back as Antiges, Morar and Lexinal charged past him to guard the portal.

  STRIPPING AWAY THE verisimilitude of the warp spawn crew, Mhotep saw that they were not separate entities at all. They were the extension of a single conjoined conscious, raw emotion given form. Tentacles snaked from three gaping maws lined with cruel teeth that had once been the docking portals, and flesh sacks like finger puppets danced along them.

  As he stepped forward, he brandished his scimitar, a power sword engraved with hieroglyphics: the old tongue of Prospero. Mhotep was acutely aware of the blast doors shutting behind him, though the sound was far off, as if listened to in a separate dimension from the one he currently inhabited. Realising he was alone, the Thousand Son tapped into the innate power of his Legion, the psychic mutation common to all sons and daughters of Prospero that had earned Magnus the condemnation of Nikaea. Mhotep’s power, like that of all the Astartes of his Legion, was honed to a rapier-like point and when properly channelled could be deadly. The nay-sayers of Nikaea had been right to fear it.

  Mhotep stowed his bolter, for it would not avail him here, and drew forth the wand-stave. Inputting a rune sequence, played out in the jewels along its short haft, the item extended into the length of a staff. Holding the weapon up to his helmet lens, Mhotep peered through the speculum at the tip. The tiny, silvered mirror became transparent and, through it, the Thousand Son saw the entity for what it was.

  The warp had been cruel. It had taken the ship and its crew and transfigured it into something wretched and debased. Tiny black eyes rolled in the armoured carapace and the bodies of its crew writhed all over the surface of the sh
ip, trapped within a translucent membrane that sheathed it like living tissue. They were deformed, fused together with their tortured expressions stretched out as if melted. These were the souls of the Fireblade’s crew and they were lost to the warp forever.

  The portion of the escort ship that had penetrated the cargo hold eked from the belly of the ship like an umbilical cord, the tentacle strings spilling from the maws at the end of them revealed to be tongues. The sound that emanated from them was appalling. The warp screamed from the Fireblade’s throat, a screeching gale that threatened to knock Mhotep off his feet. He stayed upright, however, and found what he was looking for in the partly insubstantial hull of the former Imperial ship.

  The Thousand Son intoned words of power and an ellipsis of light burned into the deck plate. The Prosperine hieroglyphics on his staff flared bright vermillion. Spinning the staff around, Mhotep drove the scimitar into it pommel first and it became a spear.

  ‘Back to the deeps!’ bellowed the son of Magnus, his aim fixed upon the warp-entity’s tainted core. ‘There will be no feasting here for you, dead thing! By the Silver Towers and the Ever-Burning Eye, begone!’

  Mhotep flung the spear just as the tentacles closed on him, a burning trail of crimson light following its psychic trajectory. It struck the Fireblade in the heart of its central maw and a great explosion of light detonated within. Spectral blood fountained and the reaching tentacles withered and burned.

  The illumination built, blazing out of the maw and Mhotep was forced to look away from its brilliance. The scent of acrid smoke filled his nostrils, penetrating his helmet filters, and raging flames engulfed his senses together with the primordial scream of something dying in the fathomless ether.

  IN THE CORRIDOR beyond the Primary Dock, ceiling plates fell like rain as the walls of the Wrathful shuddered with fury. Cestus and Antiges fought to get to the doors as the tremors hit. The rippling shock waves were coming from the Primary Dock.

  Staying on his feet, Cestus drew his power sword and was about to beckon forward a group of engineers, who were lingering behind them, to fuse the blast doors when the horrific din emanating from within stopped. Smoke and faint, white light issued through the cracks.