Word Bearers

by Anthony Reynolds

  The largest of the hive ships veered to avoid the flagship’s torpedoes, but its immense bulk turned slowly, and it was clear that it could not avoid the impacts. Smaller bio-ships interposed themselves, and three torpedoes exploded prematurely as they slammed into the sides of the lesser vessels. The last three plasma torpedoes hit their target, and gobbets of flesh the size of city blocks were blasted from the behemoth’s flank.

  ‘Order the Valkyrie to pull back,’ said Augustine to one of his aides. ‘She is getting too close.’

  ‘Yes, admiral,’ came the response, and the order was quickly passed on.

  ‘Ground invasions have commenced on both the Perdus moons,’ said Gideon Cortez, Augustine’s trusty flag-lieutenant, his face grim.

  Augustine sighed wearily. He didn’t know how long it had been since he had slept. Plenty of time to sleep when you are dead, he thought.

  He had already ordered the destruction of six inhabited Imperial worlds in this sector, but at least those worlds had been successfully evacuated before he had been forced to order their destruction.

  Trying to give the citizens of the two moons as much time to evacuate as possible, Augustine had moved the blockade forward, so that the fleet could hold back the tyranid advance for as long as possible. Now, he looked down upon the twin moons, orbiting the gaseous giant nearby, and he cursed that he could buy them little more time.

  ‘Percentage of the populations evacuated?’ he asked, already dreading the answer.

  It had been estimated that the twin moons of Perdus Skylla and Perdus Kharybdis would require three journeys of the bulk transport ships available, at the minimum, for a complete evacuation. As far as he was aware, only one journey had been completed.

  ‘Less than thirty per cent,’ replied Gideon.

  ‘How many are left?’ asked Augustine. He didn’t really want to know the answer, but felt that he ought to know how many people he was condemning to death.

  ‘On Perdus Kharybdis, around eighty million,’ said Gideon in a quiet voice.

  ‘Eighty million,’ said Admiral Augustine in a weary voice, ‘and Perdus Skylla?’

  ‘No more than twenty million.’

  ‘The evacuations were more successful there?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Gideon Cortez, shaking his head. ‘The population of Perdus Skylla is but a fraction of its twin, mostly labourers and mine workers.’

  ‘One hundred million loyal souls, and we are going to eradicate them, like that,’ said Augustine, clicking his fingers together.

  ‘Some might say it is a blessing, sir,’ said Gideon, ‘better than being devoured by the xenos.’

  ‘Yes, you are quite right,’ snapped Augustine. ‘They should be thanking us.’

  Gideon gave him a hurt look, and the admiral sighed.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gideon,’ he said quickly, ‘that was unfair. How long would it take to do one final evacuation run?’

  ‘The carriers are already en route for a final pickup,’ said Gideon, ‘though they will need an escort. Six hours, they’ll need, according to the logistics reports.’

  ‘Order the left flanks to close up, with the Cypra Mordatis at the fore,’ said Augustine after a moment of deliberation. ‘We can buy them six hours.’

  Feeling Gideon still hovering behind him, Augustine turned to face his flag-lieutenant, one eyebrow raised.

  ‘You have something to say, Gideon?’

  ‘Can we really hold them for another six hours?’ asked the flag-lieutenant, his voice low to avoid any of the other crew members overhearing his words.

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Augustine, ‘but we owe it to those people to try.’

  Gideon still did not look happy.

  ‘You can’t save them all,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ agreed Augustine, shaking his head, ‘I cannot.’

  The Idolator banked and jinked from side to side as hundreds of mycetic spores, fired by the hive fleet still some ten thousand kilometres from Perdus Skylla streamed down towards the surface of the moon. Each of the cyst-like chrysalis organisms was filled with a deadly warrior cargo, which would scour all life from the doomed world. They fell like a meteor shower through the atmosphere, their shell-like exteriors glowing hot as they descended at phenomenal speeds.

  One of the spores passed within metres of the shuttle, which was pulled to the side by the rush of air, but the guidance systems of the ship hauled it back on course, narrowly being struck by another pair of mycetic spores as they roared down towards the surface of Perdus Skylla.

  Each of the spores was the size of a Rhino transport vehicle, and a direct hit would cause tremendous damage to the unshielded Idolator. Engines roared as the shuttle veered sharply to avoid a collision, but its movement took it into the path of another descending spore, which clipped the side of the ship, sending it into a spin.

  The Idolator rolled through the air, dropping hundreds of metres and narrowly avoiding being struck by more of the spores, but it came back under control, pulling out of its death spin and shooting once more skywards, pulling free of the descending shower of ohrysalides.

  Burias and Kol Badar picked themselves up, the Coryphaus reading the damage reports that spewed from the mouth of a graven, daemonic face. He swore.

  ‘We are not going to make it to the Infidus Diabolus,’ he said, scrunching the thin strips of mnemo-paper in his fist. ‘Guidance systems are damaged, and the aft engines are at quarter power.’

  Burias was silent while the Coryphaus muttered, his strategic mind working to solve the problem.

  ‘Do we have enough power to break from the moon’s gravity?’ he ventured.

  ‘Yes,’ snapped the Coryphaus, ‘but we’d be drifting. We’ll conserve our power once we have broken the atmosphere, and fire the engines to take us past the Imperial blockade. We’ll order the Infidus Diabolus to break from its mooring and come to meet us half way.’

  ‘The Imperial fleet will be aware of its presence as soon as it pulls out of the radiation of the sun,’ said Burias. ‘If they turn their fleet…’

  ‘Then we must pray that they do not. Let us hope that the cursed Imperials are too occupied by the xenos to swing their blockade.’

  ‘And if they don’t?’

  ‘Then we are dead.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ‘You are wasting your time,’ growled Marduk, blood and spittle dripping from his lips. His head was held immobile by bladed callipers that had emerged from the floating slab on which he lay, making any movement of his head or neck impossible. He glared at the eldar tormentor out of the corner of his left eye, his daemonic right eye rendered useless.

  ‘I won’t break,’ snarled Marduk. ‘You will have to kill me first.’

  His torturer did not look up, his utterly black eyes focused on the incisions that he had cut into Marduk’s neck. He was gazing into them, prodding and poking around the area where one of his progenoid glands, those sacred glands that contained the essence of his enhanced gene-seed, had been surgically removed thousands of years previously. As if satisfied, the eldar closed up the wound, and lifted what looked like a spike-tipped handgun from a pad that hovered at his side.

  Marduk tensed, thinking momentarily that perhaps the eldar was going to kill him. The eldar ran the spiked tip of the pistol along the edge of the incision at his neck, and Marduk hissed in pain, feeling a searing laser melting his flesh. The eldar replaced the strange implement back on its floating platform, and Marduk realised that the wound in his neck was sealed.

  The First Acolyte stared at the spiked pistol-like piece of apparatus for a moment, and then flexed his neck from side to side as the callipers retracted from their clamped position around his cranium. The bladed lengths slid away soundlessly, and came to rest around his head like a razor-sharp halo, leaving him free of their constriction, but still protruding from the hovering slab, just centimetres from his head.

  Marduk hissed as fresh pain seared across his abdomen. Two long cuts bisected his
flesh, and snarling, he leant forwards to watch the monstrous eldar surgeon at work. Doubtless that was the reason his head restraints had been retracted, so that he could witness the surgery being performed upon him. His skin was sliced, and the thick black carapace beneath, the implant that allowed his holy armour to be plugged directly into his body, was cut open with laser-tipped tools.

  The biomechanical creature hovering on the pulsing ceiling reached out with four slender limbs, each of them piercing one corner of his flesh, painfully drawing his sliced black carapace apart to expose the stomach cavity. The wraith-like eldar began to probe his organs with his slender fingers. Marduk’s chest had not yet been cut open, but he knew that it was just a matter of time. He had witnessed two of his brother Space Marines have their organs removed, though Marduk had noted that the eldar was careful to leave his victims alive, using inferior substitute organs to keep them going. It had taken some time to cut through the black carapace beneath the flesh of the warriors’ chests, but the tools of the twisted creature were powerful.

  ‘I have no interest in your death,’ intoned his torturer, still engrossed in his work. Marduk could feel the fingers probing within him, handling his enhanced organs. The feeling was uncomfortable, but he pushed the sensation away, focusing his mind.

  ‘If your intention is not to kill me, what then is to be my fate?’ asked Marduk, feigning weakness in his voice.

  The twisted surgeon did not pause in his work, and for a moment Marduk thought he would not get an answer, but at last the eldar spoke.

  ‘Upon reaching Commoragh,’ said the eldar, though Marduk did not recognise the word, ‘your savayaethoth, your… soul-flame… will be drained from your body. This soul-essence will be delivered to Lord Vect, for him to do with as he pleases. Your savayaethoth burns brighter than those of your comrades. Most likely, the Lord Vect will take it into himself. All that you are will be consumed, utterly and completely, and She Who Thirsts will be denied her claim upon him a little longer.

  ‘The soul-extraction,’ continued the eldar torturer, ‘is excruciatingly painful. What you have experienced thus far is nothing beside it, and I have been known to prolong the process for a week or more.’

  ‘What will happen to you if I die beneath your scalpel before then?’ asked Marduk.

  ‘My master would be displeased,’ said the eldar simply, as if he were talking to an imbecile.

  ‘Your master is going to be very displeased, then,’ said Marduk, and his primary heart stopped beating.

  Admiral Rutger Augustine stared at the blinking icon in disbelief. Scans had picked up the telltale sign of a ship moving towards the rear of the Imperial blockade, emerging from within the radiation field of the system’s dying sun.

  ‘It’s an Adeptus Astartes cruiser, sir,’ said his aide in awe. ‘And it’s big’

  ‘Yes, I can see that,’ snapped Augustine, ‘but is it friend or foe?’

  ‘You think it may be renegade, sir?’ asked the man, looking at him in shock.

  ‘I don’t know. I have received no information of a Chapter of Astartes coming to our aid, though it would be welcome. That they have not intervened thus far does not bode well.’

  ‘Initial hails have been ignored,’ said the aide. ‘The archives are being scoured as we speak to identify the vessel.’

  ‘Fine,’ snapped Augustine, waving the man away.

  ‘Trouble?’ asked his flag-lieutenant, Gideon Cortez, as he strode to the admiral’s side.

  ‘Possibly,’ replied Augustine. ‘Damn it, I need more ships.’

  ‘We could always order the Exterminatus of the Perdus moons now,’ said Gideon in a low voice. ‘Pull back, and swing to face this strike cruiser.’

  ‘No,’ said Augustine. ‘I want that last convoy secured before I make the order.’

  ‘Are the lives of those people down there worth risking the fleet for?’ asked Gideon.

  Augustine clenched his fists. Then he sighed.

  ‘I’ll give it one hour,’ he said. ‘Order the Implacable to disengage and swing around to the rear, with its full escort. Order them to stand off, though. Let the Astartes make their move.’

  Glowing runes flashed, appearing in the air above Marduk’s still chest, and the haemonculus’s pitch-black eyes flashed towards them in alarm.

  With a flick of his bloody fingers he banished the runes and brought another set up before him, swiftly acknowledging the diagnostic reports. The mon-keigh’s secondary heart had failed to pick up where its larger organ had failed. His subject was dead.

  No! This could not be, he railed. There was no possible way that the subject’s heart could have stopped, unless the creature had control of its functions, but such a thing was surely impossible in one as lowly as this lesser being.

  More glowing runes appeared, hovering in the air above the mon-keigh’s body, and Rhakaeth frowned deeply as he pulsed a swift mnemo-command to the lesser talos-artifice hovering above him. The creature’s spider limbs were twitching nervously, sensing the displeasure of it master. His subject was not breathing.

  Rhakaeth stabbed a needle into the Space Marine’s neck before dropping the syringe to a waiting hover-pad, and summoning a breath-regulator to his side with a wave of his hand. Above, the lesser talos-artifice sank low above the table at Rhakaeth’s mnemo-command, rubbing its forelegs together. Blue electricity jumped between the two bladed limbs, and at Rhakaeth’s command, it touched the tips of the blades to the subject’s chest.

  The subject jolted, his body arching as power surged through him, and the runic projectors informed Rhakaeth that its twin hearts had recommenced their regular beat. Two heartbeats later, they had stopped again, however, and the haemonculus realised that the being was resisting his attempts to revive it.

  Rhakaeth gestured, and additional hardware emerged from the underside of the operating slab, hovering up to his side. It mattered not that the creature was attempting to kill itself. It had no choice in the matter. He would keep it alive whether it wished it or not.

  Leaning down low over the subject’s lifeless face, Rhakaeth hissed in the crude, human tongue.

  ‘You will not escape me so easily,’ he hissed, ‘and I shall make you pay for such disrespect.’

  The subject’s dead eyes flickered suddenly, its primary heart lurching back into life. Rhakaeth tried to pull back, realising that he had been tricked, but he was too slow, and the subject’s teeth flashed for his throat.

  It had not been hard to fool his torturer. The eldar were an arrogant race and Marduk had guessed, correctly, that his captor would have no real understanding of Astartes physiology or what it was capable of.

  It had been a simple matter to activate his sus-an membrane and begin the process of entering suspended animation, though it had taken more control to halt his primary heart completely.

  Marduk bit into the eldar’s neck, his teeth gripping the jugular tight. The eldar’s flesh was dry, like a desiccated cadaver’s. It would have been so easy to rip out its throat in one sharp movement, but that would achieve nothing other than fleeting satisfaction. Instead, he turned his head to the side, pulling the eldar across him, dragging its face towards one of the recurved, protruding calliper blades positioned to the side of his face.

  Bladed spider limbs stabbed into his flesh, straining to pull its master free, and he felt the scalpel fingers of the eldar slashing frantically against his face and neck, but Marduk had no intention of relinquishing his hold. With relentless strength, he pulled the eldar towards the blade, careful not to tear its throat out. Still, the eldar resisted, but its body was weak in comparison to Marduk’s, even restrained as he was, and the thick muscles of his neck bulged as he pulled the haemonculus onto the point of the blade. The tip of the calliper pierced the dry, wasted skin of its cheek, and a trickle of blood ran from the wound down the blade.

  The eldar uttered something in its sharp language, and the blade-restraints were instantly retracted, ensuring that the torturer was not impa
led, but also freeing Marduk’s limbs.

  The First Acolyte surged upright, tearing a chunk of dry flesh from the eldar’s throat. The haemonculus fell backwards, gasping, hands trying to stem the blood flow gushing from the wound, and Marduk swung his legs from the bladed slab hovering just off the floor.

  His stomach was still sliced open, and four of the spider-like legs of the eldar-machine hovering above him still pierced his skin. They slid from his flesh, and all twelve of the slender, powerful limbs descended towards him, stabbing and cutting. Marduk grabbed the spiked, gun-like instrument from the floating tray to his side, and with one hand holding his organs in place, he rolled himself off the bladed slab.

  Marduk hit the ground hard, his intestines bulging from between his fingers. He rolled under the hovering slab, narrowly avoiding the stabbing legs of the spider-being that smashed down to impale him.

  The haemonculus was crawling away, one hand clasped to his throat, blood gushing across the floor. He was trying to call for aid, but all that came from his mouth was a gargle of blood and froth.

  Praying to the gods of Chaos that it would work, Marduk pulled the flaps of skin across his abdomen and pressed the bladed tip of the surgical instrument against the join. Its trigger was too small for his large fingers to easily operate, and they slipped off the slender trigger rune twice. The spider-creature wrapped its limbs around the bladed, hovering slab under which Marduk lay, and with a surge of power it hurled the table aside, throwing it into the wall, which shuddered and cracked beneath the impact.

  Marduk managed finally to squeeze the trigger, and with a swift, painful movement, he roughly sealed the incisions. A pair of glossy black spider-limbs stabbed into his shoulders, and he howled with pain as the slender limbs passed through him, impaling his body on their lengths, and the wound-sealing implement fell with a clatter from his hands.

  The First Acolyte was lifted into the air, still impaled on the two limbs, and was hurled away from the frenzied spider-creature. He struck the wall heavily, sending a ripple of cracks arcing out across its surface, and slid to the ground.