by Ben Counter
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
1
‘My thoughts upon witnessing Malodrax for the first time were akin to those of a chirurgeon who, when opening up the body of a diseased patient, witnesses a growth of such incurable malignancy that his instincts are to sew the incision back up and flee the operating theatre.’
– Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan
The scraping of the coral against the spaceship’s hull was a howling, as if a pack of wolves were clawing at the Breaker of Darkness. The whole ship shuddered, the churning of the outer hull’s torn steel a cry of pain.
‘Was it like this?’ asked Chaplain Lycaon.
Captain Lysander’s face did not change. His features were square and solid, and it seemed he had kept his jaw clenched since the Breaker had dropped out of the warp into real space at the edge of this remote system. ‘It was worse,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Lycaon.
They were the only two Imperial Fists on the bridge. The rest of the crew here were servants of the Chapter, unaugmented men and women who served on the strike cruiser. The tension here was the kind that could only exist among those who had not ascended to the stature and rank of Space Marine, for it was based on fear. The Breaker’s bridge was a gloomy and arcane place, where the clockwork of the ancient difference engines and cogitator arrays were laid open, thousands of cogs and pistons chittering away in a constant background whisper. Bridge officers read the topography of space around the ship from reams of numbers spat out in loops of parchment from the cogitators, or fed punchcards into the command helms to coax tiny adjustments from the Breaker’s thrusters. The Malodracian Reef was hidden from them outside the hull, but it was picked out in zeros and ones, a terrible equation that changed even as it was solved. Upwards of fifty navigation crew were on duty for the approach through the reef, every one terrified.
The ship lurched. Some of the crew were thrown to the deck. Punchcards slewed across the floor and loose cogs pinged free.
‘They will try to herd us closer,’ said Lysander.
‘They?’ asked Lycaon.
‘The reefs are haunted,’ said Lysander. ‘Predators. Wreckers. They will try to dash us against the reef and break us open.’
‘But they will not succeed,’ said Lycaon. ‘You have seen to that.’
Compared to the Reclusiarch, the most senior Chaplain in the Imperial Fists, Lysander looked plain, if that could ever be said of a Space Marine. His armour was deep golden-yellow with no adornment except for the red fist emblem of the Chapter on one shoulder pad – he had returned to the Chapter lacking his own armour with its decoration of deed and rank. Lysander was captain of the First Company by right, the post he had held when he had been taken from the Chapter, but one glance told that he was not standing shoulder to shoulder with the great warriors of the Chapter now. Lysander’s bolter was slung over one shoulder. Even in the short time he had spent back with the Imperial Fists he had acquired a custom model, with an enhanced scope array and an enlarged box magazine. The steel studs in his forehead told of his long service. There his ornamentation ended, compared with the skull-mask and dozens of Chaplain’s honours worn by Lycaon.
He had been away for a thousand years. If he was to be what he once was, he would have to rebuild everything he had earned. He would have to start on Malodrax.
Another sound reached the bridge – a shriek, like that of someone in pain or terror, thin and wailing, yet strong enough to cut through the groaning of the ship’s painful journey through the reef. The cogitators on the bridge reacted, spewing reams of parchment printout as if in alarm.
‘That’s the Red Widow,’ said Lysander. ‘It means we are close to the inner reaches, but close to danger as well. She dwells at the edge of the whirlpool in the heart of the reef. If she draws us in, we are done for.’
‘Is she on the map?’
‘She is.’ Lysander carried a leather case on the belt of his armour. He unlatched it and took out a folded piece of hide, cured light-brown, and shook it open. It was the hide of an animal, hairless, and covered in the intricate contours of a detailed map. It was covered in illustrations of fanciful creatures – serpentine monsters with fringes of tentacles, huge fish swallowing spacecraft whole, swarms of winged creatures carrying off unfortunate sailors. The pictures symbolised real creatures whose true forms could not be drawn.
Lysander laid out the map on one of the cogitator housings. Flag-Captain Remor, the helmsman of the Breaker, hurried over from the heap of printouts he was reading. ‘My lords,’ he said.
‘Here,’ said Lysander, indicating a place near the centre of the map. It was a black spiral, a whirlpool, and at its edge was the image of a woman. Her body was elongated and thin, her arms long reaching talons, her face avian and stretched, half-hidden in lank hair. She wore a dress of rags picked out in red ink, one of the few splashes of colour on the map. ‘If we skirt around the whirlpool we will be safe from her, but she will try to drag us into the currents. Once we are past, there is a way through.’ He ran a finger along a canyon edged by sharp masses of coral, winding across to the edge of the map. ‘It will be tight going, but it will take us out of the reef.’
‘Can you do it?’ asked Chaplain Lycaon.
‘We can,’ said Remor.
‘Commander Langeloc said the same thing the last time I was here,’ said Lysander. ‘Remember that.’
‘Of course,’ said Remor. ‘But in defeat the next victory is born. The Chapter learned from the Shield of Valour’s fate. Our crews are taught about its downfall. We will not repeat it.’
‘To your helm, then,’ said Lycaon. ‘Bring us in safe.’
The bridge crew responded to the arguing cogitators, typing on valve-operated keyboards as cumbersome as church organs. Brass compasses skittered across diagrams of the ship and her engine arrays. A small body of crewmen were hurtling through calculations on abacuses with beads of ivory and jet.
‘What is the Red Widow?’ asked Lycaon as the two Imperial Fists watched the barely controlled chaos of the bridge.
‘I do not know,’ said Lysander.
Outside the Breaker of Darkness, something let out a shrieking laugh.
/> The Breaker was an old ship, a noble ship, her hull laid down in the fifth millennium after the ascension of the Emperor to the Golden Throne. Shipwrights of the forge-world Ruo’s Hope had built into her hull and bulkheads strands of psychoactive metals, the secrets of their alloys long since lost, which were to the daemon and the spirit of the warp like red-hot wires that burned and dismembered. Clerics of the Imperial Creed had blessed her, and bathed the bolts of her construction in vats of consecrated machine oil. The Librarians of the Imperial Fists had reinforced her further with wards and protective circles of ancient and arcane origin, which forbade entry to beings of the warp.
For this reason it was a full thirty minutes before the damage control teams began reporting casualties. Stationed across the ship, on full alert as the currents of the Malodracian Reef dragged at the Breaker, they saw in the strobing light of failing glow-globes the remains of crew members smeared and torn across walls and ceilings. Some witnessed first-hand others lifted off their feet, twisted around and stretched until they came apart as if wrenched by giant invisible hands.
The order went out to break open the arms lockers, well stocked with autoguns and shotguns for use in the close confines of the ship’s corridors. Crewmen shot one another in the darkness that rippled through the ship. Systems were strained – the lighting was always the first to go as power was driven to the plasma reactors and their coolant systems. More died, folded up and crammed into heating ducts or slammed over and over into the steel deck.
The Breaker’s psychic defences flared and the attackers became visible as flickering images, their spectral hands around the throats of the dead. They had long serpentine bodies like eels, skinny torsos, many-jointed arms that creaked and snapped as they wrapped around their prey, and faces that were knots of insectoid horror.
In the cells, where the battle-brothers meditated and trained away the days in transit across space, bells tolled to rouse the Imperial Fists to action. They threw on their armour and took up their weapons, with barely time for the most hurried blessings to make their wargear ready. First Sergeant Kaderic was the ranking officer on that deck, and he called for every Imperial Fist to hold the cells. They could not rush off in ones and twos to face down the enemy, to be separated and picked off. They could not assist the crewmen calling for help. That was how the enemy would defeat them, and the enemy could not.
Not now. Not when the Imperial Fists had yet to shed a drop of blood on Malodrax.
Lysander vaulted down a stairwell, dropping to the next deck down with a ringing impact on the steel deck. Screaming was coming from down the corridor, which led to several dozen crew cabins and storerooms. Pipes and ducts wound along the ceiling, hung with embroidered prayer-strips that were currently doing little good for the crew.
One of the enemy darted along the corridor, ducking into a side cabin. Lysander barely glimpsed it as it shimmered past – it was something like a sea creature, something like a scrawny, wiry, elongated man, with a dash of spider or diseased fly. Lysander swept his bolter after it but it was gone. In its wake was a screaming that turned to a gurgling howl, and then was cut off. A spray of gore spattered from the cabin doorway.
By the time Lysander was at the door only the creature’s tail could be seen, sliding through the bloody steel of the cabin wall. The crewman who had hidden there had been dragged from under the bunk and ripped open, slit down the middle lengthways and almost turned inside out.
Lysander put a shoulder down and charged. He slammed into the cabin wall and it gave way, steel five thousand years forged buckling under his impact.
If the spirit could be said to have human emotions, it expressed surprise then, as Lysander burst into the mass of pipes and cabling inside the wall. It coiled back on itself and shrieked, its face opening up into a fan of extendable mouthparts coiled to strike.
Lysander took aim and fired, stuttering volleys of bolter fire into the spirit. Even halfway into the parallel world of the warp, the spirit’s flesh had enough consistency to be mangled and torn. Bolter fire ripped it open and it came apart, the scraps of its spectral flesh dissolving back into the warp.
Lysander kept moving, forging through the machinery into the corridor beyond. Screams were coming from everywhere, and isolated bursts of gunfire, but he couldn’t be distracted any further. He spotted the next stairwell and ran down the steps.
The deck below was clad in stone. It echoed the monastic cells that were a Space Marine’s home. The Imperial Fists were based on their fleet, and many of their ships were fashioned to recall a planetbound fortress such as those Rogal Dorn was famed for building. On the Breaker the decks were dark and gloomy, lit by ribbons of burning gas from concealed jets in imitation of torch or candlelight.
‘Lysander!’ called First Sergeant Kaderic. He carried his chainsword in one hand and a single-handed axe in the other, a sparring weapon from the deck’s training circles, and had donned his armour rapidly with the sketchiest of wargear rites. Kaderic was old, his face blunt and grizzled, the kind of man who served as the lynchpin of the veteran First Company. He was Lysander’s second-in-command in the First – technically. ‘The enemy cannot wait to die, they rush to meet us!’
‘Malodracians call them the Grey Hungers,’ said Lysander. ‘Predators, like animals. All but mindless. They wait for ships to wreck upon the reef, and feed on whatever is inside.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Kaderic.
‘Nothing more,’ replied Lysander. ‘They can be killed.’
‘That will be enough.’
The First Company of the Imperial Fists was ready to make war. The elites of the Chapter, the veterans and specialists entitled to wear the white trim of the First, were usually spread throughout the Chapter and the various warzones in which it fought, lending their expertise and steadfastness where it was most needed. For Malodrax two squads had been gathered together, along with support troops, into a single strike force, because this was not a war like any of the thousands being fought across the Imperium, where the Imperial Fists answered the call of the Imperium’s Warmasters. This was the Imperial Fists’ fight alone. This was revenge.
They had not expected to fight until the strike force reached the planet’s surface, but that did not mean they were not prepared. Already almost a hundred Space Marines were armed and ready training their bolter sights across the corridors and crossroads of the cell block, or clustered in the centre of the sparring circles covering every approach. The battle-brothers who specialised in close assault had their chainblades ready. Devastator Squad Gorvetz was gathered in the chapel beneath the black marble statue of Rogal Dorn, where their heavy weapons could fill the wide corridor leading to the chapel doors with chains of shrapnel and plasma fire.
‘A good fight, captain,’ said Kaderic. ‘You must have missed those.’
Before Lysander could reply, a screeching sound tore through the cell block from every direction. The artificial torches flickered and shadows leaped.
‘Break the foe!’ cried Sergeant Gorvetz. ‘Hammer and anvil! Thunder and sky!’
The Grey Hungers charged. They rose from the ground and descended through the ceiling. Others rippled along the corridors, lurching from cell doors, snuffing out the torch flames as they passed through the walls.
The volley of bolter fire was so vicious that for a moment there was nothing but the roar of gunfire and the howl of shrapnel. A steel gale blasted through and the warp spirits were shredded. One spirit made it through, slithering to the feet of Kaderic. Its mouthparts shot out but Kaderic cut through them with his axe, driving the point of his chainblade down through its body with his other hand.
A fat bolt of plasma immolated one of the Hungers, dissolving it away into a spray of ash. Lysander snapped off a volley of shots of his own, and somewhere in the cauldron of fire another Hunger was destroyed, its head blown apart into a burst of translucent gore. All this seemed to take
place in silence, the noise too brutal for any one sound to make it through.
But there was one sound. It wormed its way into the back of Lysander’s head, its fingers running up the inside of his skull.
It was laughter. A thin, reedy cackle, something between glee and the crazed laughter of complete terror.
Lysander grabbed Kaderic by the shoulder. ‘It’s the Widow!’ he shouted.
Kaderic dropped to one knee and leaned in close to hear. ‘The Widow?’
‘The Red Widow!’
‘Where?’
Lysander tried to pick out the strains of the sound. The gunfire faltered for a fraction of a second and he could make out the strains of it again, high and grating.
‘The apothecarion!’ he yelled.
The Breaker of Darkness had a sickbay for the crew, but the Imperial Fists had their own apothecarion equipped for a Space Marine’s unique physiology, and at that moment its treatment slabs were not empty. If the Red Widow was to feed, that was where she would find the most accessible meat among the Imperial Fists.
‘Hold fire!’ yelled Kaderic. ‘Hold fire! Moving!’
Kaderic’s squad halted firing long enough for Lysander and Kaderic to run past the chapel doors towards the apothecarion, situated at one end of the cell block. Ahead, bloodstained foot- and handprints glowed against the walls, iridescent drops of gore dripping from the ceiling. The door ahead was shut, banded iron sprayed with blood.
Lysander shouldered the door off its hinges. The shriek of laughter and the stench of spoiled blood hit him as hard as a bolter round.
A dozen treatment slabs were laid out in the apothecarion. Autosurgeons hung from the ceiling and glass cylinders of artificial organs and rolls of synthetic skin lined the walls. Medicae-servitors, their metal casings adorned with scalpel-tipped manipulators, were parked at recharging stations in the corners of the room. A chart of a Space Marine’s body, including the many additional organs that helped turn a man into one of the Adeptus Astartes, adorned the ceiling like a fresco in a cathedral, picked out in ivory and silver.
