Soul Drinker

by Ben Counter

  'Tertiary fuel stacks.' said Manis, the Diligent's Master of Ordnance, as a blossom of fire burst against the scorched metal shell. 'They knew what they were doing.'

  Chloure guessed the Soul Drinkers had planted bundles of grenades, or maybe explosives salvaged from the Van Skorvold arsenals, equipped with timers. Every Space Marine, he guessed, would have had extensive demolitions training and would know exactly where to plant a charge to hurt that star fort the most.

  'Can we save it?' he asked.

  'Not a chance.' said Manis.

  Even Chloure could tell that the star fort was already tilting alarmingly towards the pale orb of Lakonia. The gravitic sta­bilisers, Manis informed him, had been the first to go. Probably melta-charges, but again bundles of standard grenades would do the trick if you knew what to look for.

  Another explosion, the largest, tore a massive section out of the side of the star fort. The flaming wreckage scattered from the hull as if in slow-motion before winking out in the vacuum. It was moving quicker now, turning over ponder­ously as it fell into a terminal orbital decay.

  His mission had been to apprehend the Van Skorvolds, dis­mantle their empire, and take it over in the name of the Administratum. He had thought he had done an extraordi­nary job, using just the right rumours to bring the Soul Drinkers into the operation, saving valuable resources and casualties by having the Space Marines clear the fort of resis­tance. But instead he had failed in his mission as completely as could be imagined - the fort was destroyed, his fleet dam­aged, the possibility of an Administratum-controlled human cargo business in flames. He might as well have left the Van Skorvolds in charge - the Administratum would have been far better off.

  He tried to tell himself the worst thing was the billions of credits burning up before his eyes. But in truth, Chloure knew there were whole Imperial organisations devoted to publicly punishing men who had failed as totally as he had.

  'Your orders, sir?' Vekk stood proud with his arms behind his back, as if nothing had happened.

  'I suppose we'd better follow them.' said Chloure wearily. 'We'll lose them but there will be questions if we don't try.'

  'Aye, sir.' Vekk turned and started barking out orders as if they were important.

  All that revenue, he told himself. Bloody Khobotov. Bloody Marines. All that revenue.

  CAIXISTHENES VAN SKORVOLD never found a way out of the old defence station's command centre, let alone the star fort itself. When the friction with Lakonia's atmosphere melted the outer hull and sent flames gouting through the star fort, he died screaming as the skin and muscle was scorched from his bones. Finally he was reduced to a fine ash and scattered over Lakonia's rolling green countryside along with several million tons of flaming wreckage.

  Veritas Van Skorvold found and launched one of the few saviour pods she had bothered to keep maintained on the star fort, and got far enough clear of the station to avoid being dragged down into its orbital decay. She drifted for three days and was picked up by the Hydranye Ко, which was stationary in high orbit while repairs were carried out. She was promptly arrested and thrown in the brig. The security systems had failed along with rest of the ship and keeping her incarcerated proved very tiresome, especially when she began biting whoever was assigned to guard her. Captain Kourdya was heard to voice on several occasions the suspicion that the Soul Drinkers had let her live deliberately for the sole pur­pose of annoying him.

  Every warrior needs a funeral pyre. Commander Caeon got his when the flames roared through the hull of the star fort as it broke up in the atmosphere. Caeon was, perhaps inevitably, very difficult to burn. But by the time the star fort had disintegrated, this proudest of Soul Drinkers was noth­ing but dust.

  Chapter Five

  THE GUNDOG AND the Unendingly Just had been fleeing for six months, the last five of which had been spent hidden in the depths of the Cerberian Field. From a distance it was beauti­ful, a scatter of glowing dust clouds and sparkling asteroid fields, lit by the stars being bom in its heart. Up close it was hideous - the outer regions were composed of chewed-up lumps of rock that span in random patterns, the largest the size of moons, the smallest still enough to degrade engine intakes and speckle portholes with cracks.

  It was in this outer region that the Gundog and the Unend­ingly Just hung, powered down, hull paint almost stripped away by micrometeorite impacts. The sensor fuzz of the dust and rock clouds hid them from view and meant that moni­toring their communications was worse. In fact, the only way the besieging battlefleet knew their quarry was there was for their crews to look out into the field and spot the tiny slivers of reflected starlight gleaming off the metal of their hulls.

  It was a grim situation. Fuel was low and supplies were more so.

  * * *

  APOTHECARY PALLAS HAD been worried about Sergeant Tellos for some time. He had requested that he be the one to care for Tellos's grievous wounds, for he felt a strange sense of responsibility for the man. He had dragged him out of dan­ger and hauled his bulk up to the platform surface, and duty had insisted he finish the process by seeing to Tellos's recov­ery.

  That had been then. Now, many months on, it was concern and not a little curiosity that spurred his interest in the muti­lated assault sergeant. Of course, to allay his concerns about Tellos, he would first have to find him, for Sergeant Tellos had once more absconded from the secure infirmary bay where he was being kept until Pallas had worked out just what was happening to him.

  Tellos would be hard to find, as he had been the last half-dozen times he had escaped. The Gundog was not the largest of the Soul Drinkers' ships - their faraway main fleet included immense battle barges and bloated supply craft - but its crew were elite and few in number, and hence there were whole decks completely deserted. Here, in the monastery wing where no brother Marines had dwelt for cen­turies, the footsteps of his heavy ceramite armour echoed through the cells and chapels. The place was kept spotless by the maintenance servitors which were occasional glimmers of movement in the long shadows, but somehow that made it seem more like a ghost town.

  Pallas checked the auspex. Nothing. That in itself was wor­rying - Tellos's life-signature had been showing less and less on the auspex screen in the past few weeks. Pallas glanced around the high vaults of the ceiling and dark, matt-grey walls of the cells lining this thoroughfare. Lots of places to hide, if you knew what you were doing. Was Tellos treating this as a challenge? If so, he could evade detection for weeks down here. Maybe more - he was eating and resting less according to the latest data, and seemed to be existing on energy alone.

  The thoroughfare opened into a librarium annexe. In years gone by some of the Chapter's Marines and novices had dwelt here, before the Gundog was refitted for ship-to-ship assaults. In the librarium they had maintained some of the Chapter's records, from the newest battlefield statistics to the aged chansons written by long-dead heroes to ensure their legends were not forgotten. Heroes had been made there, and new ones rediscovered.

  Now the ceiling-high shelves were mostly bare with only a handful of texts. One was still perched on a lectern, from which a Chaplain would have berated the novices or inspired them with tales of their betters. Pallas had to take care not to crumble the yellow paper with the fingers of his gauntlet - the book was an elaborate epic of some crusade into a sector long since benighted.

  One wall of shelves was not empty, but still packed to bursting with slim volumes - they were all copies of Daenyathos's Catechisms Martial, each one illuminated and annotated by the owner, each one recovered from his body after he had died in battle. This librarium had been desig­nated their final resting place, and their removal had not been permitted when the Gundog was reassigned.

  The auspex bleeped, and a warning sigil flashed up in the corner of Pallas's vision. A life-sign. It was faint, but it could still be Tellos.

  Pallas backed up against a wall, knowing the shadows cast by the dim light would not mask his bulk from the senses of another Marine. One
hand was encased in the injector reductor gauntlet which would administer drags or remove the gene-seed of the fallen. The other grasped his bolt pistol.

  Not that he thought Tellos would attack. But Tellos had never been a predictable man and Pallas couldn't be certain.

  He saw something moving some way off, across the wide space of the librarium, edging through the archway leading in from a side-chapel. The figure's raw muscles were twined around chunks of stained metal, twin glowing lenses jutted from a stripped-down head of sinew and bone. A drum-fed autogun was held in one hand, and a twin-bladed halberd in the other. It trailed bunches of wires and servos whined as it moved.

  A combat servitor. As a novice, like any Soul Drinker, Pal­las had despatched scores of the things with boltgun, chainsword, knife, bare hands, and all manner of weaponry he might use or find on the battlefield. They were designed to die hard, giving almost as good as they got - novices who failed combat assessments did not, by definition, survive.

  Its artificial eyes scanned the librarium. Pallas knew the things had a limited range and it would not have seen him yet. Pallas hadn't even known there were any training facili­ties left on the Gundog - it must have been left here, like the books, when the monastery facilities were relocated.

  The faint snick he heard was an autogun selector flicking to full auto.

  Pallas raised his bolt pistol, drew a bead as the servitor's glinting eyes swivelled to fix on him.

  A second figure, human this time, dropped all the way down from the ceiling, blocking Pallas's aim. Something long and silver flashed and the half the servitor's head flopped to the ground, wet and gleaming fresh-cut meat. The autogun drummed out a second's worth of shots in a fan that rang around the massive architecture, paused to re-acquire the tar­get, fired again.

  The attacker was quick. They all missed.

  The servitor's halberd lashed out - it didn't have a power blade, of course, but that blue crackle of an energy field meant it was a shock weapon that would lock muscles and addle minds before the weapon's wicked point found its mark. There was a loud dash as the newcomer parried, whirled, drove his own weapon home.

  Suddenly the servitor had been opened from throat to groin, cables and muscle loops spilling out. Then its gun arm was gone, then one foot. Then the remaining half of its head.

  The pieces slid down the servitor's metal casings and flopped to the floor. There was the faint thrum of servos pow­ering down, and the sound of the newcomer's breathing as it regained composure.

  Stripped to the waist, broad-backed and pale, the man stood over the shreds of the servitor. His skin was translucent and Pallas could see the overdeveloped muscles of his back and upper arms slowly untensing as the battle-rage died down, and pick out the stark black plates of the carapace under the surface.

  The weapons were blades from an air intake fan, a metre long and sharpened lovingly. They had been polished to a mirror silver, and thrust into the cauterized stumps where his hands had been.

  'Greetings, Sergeant Tellos,' said Apothecary Pallas.

  Tellos turned. The skin on his face was the same - Pallas could pick out the muscles of his jaw as he spoke. 'Apothe­cary. I didn't expect you to follow me this far in.'

  'You are under standing orders, Tellos. You must remain in the infirmary. You have much healing to do.' Pallas could smell Tellos's sweat as he walked towards him. Pallas indi­cated the quietly oozing remains of the servitor. 'Practice?'

  Tellos smiled. 'Re-training, apothecary. If the Chapter wishes me to fight on, I must learn to do so again.'

  'Sergeant Tellos, you cannot fight. We have told you this, many times. The shock damaged the nerves, the augmeticists cannot connect any bionic-'

  'I don't need bionics, Pallas. Just because I cannot hold a chainsword doesn't mean I cannot give my life to my Chap­ter as I have always done.' Tellos held up his home-made blades, edges shining in the half-light. 'I need more practice, I know that, but I was a novice once and I can be again.'

  'No, Tellos. It is over. Talk to the Chaplain if you have dif­ficulty accepting it. My concern is your physical well-being, for you are a brother and though your days in battle are over, I still have a duty towards you. We do not know enough about what has happened to you, Tellos. We are concerned that you are changing. Whether this is your gene-seed react­ing to the trauma, we do not know. Until your condition has stabilized we cannot let you wander as you please.' He looked down at the servitor again. Where did you find that?'

  'I went exploring. I've never done that before. All these years on one or another of our ships and I never thought to find out what lay beyond the next bulkhead. Why do you think that is, Pallas? Are we afraid? Under orders? Or does it just not occur to us to question?'

  'These are matters for the Chaplain, Tellos. Let me examine you again and you can discuss them with him.'

  'I will fight again, Pallas.'

  'I know you will, sergeant. Now, will you come with me?'

  The apothecary led the sergeant out of the librarium and back towards the Gundog's infirmary, where the serf-adepts and Chapter apothecaries would puzzle over what was hap­pening to Tellos, and decide once again that they didn't know.

  * * *

  THE VIEWSCREEN IN the lecture theatre on board the Diligent showed the same unmoving image it had done for months -the scattered asteroids of the Cerberian Field lit by a glow from far within. Somewhere in the thick mass of floating rock were the two Soul Drinker cruisers.

  The asteroid field blocked all but the most basic scans from the battlefleet. So far all the intelligence they had gathered told them only that the Gundog and the Unendingly Just had scarcely moved for the last five months. As to what the Soul Drinkers were doing, how many there were left, what they were planning, the state of their ships and remaining arma­ments - all they had was guesswork.

  The Cerberian Field was a nightmare. Trying to engage the Soul Drinkers was suicide, for the cruisers would just coast deeper into the field while the Imperial battleships were torn up by the asteroids as they tried to pursue. But equally, the Soul Drinkers couldn't escape from their hiding place, since the battlefleet was now far larger than they could hope to evade, large enough to bring numbers to bear wherever the Space Marines tried to break out.

  Consul Senioris Chloure never thought he would be glad to lose control of the most important mission of his life, but now he felt a curious strained relief that he no longer com­manded the battlefleet in any meaningful way. His name might be tagged onto official communications to mark his nominal command, but his opinion was no longer worth anything.

  It meant he was a passenger, an observer, unable to alter the events around him. It also meant he could absolve him­self of any responsibility for what might yet become another bloodbath.

  If Vekk hadn't suddenly decided to go all dashing and effi­cient they would never have picked up the warp-trail of the two strike cruisers. There would have been no astropathic communication with the sub-sector admiralty and the sub-battlefleet would not have swollen with every light year to become a mighty flotilla of the Emperor's Navy. The Hydranye Ко had stayed at Lakonia for repairs but there were now cruis­ers, escort squadrons, several fighter-bomber wings, a Departmento Munitorum hospital ship and innumerable support craft swarming around a stationary position outside the Cerberian Field. They had even been joined by the Peni­tent's Wrath, a Ragnarok-class that had seen better days but was nevertheless an immense capital ship bristling with more destruction than Chloure could comprehend.

  'Five months,' he said to himself.

  'Consul?' came a questioning voice from behind him.

  Talaya must have been standing there for some time. She was a naval tactician, one of several dozen sent by the admi­ralty who had gradually eroded Chloure's authority until they were running the battlefleet by committee.

  'Tactician. I thought I was alone in here.' He indicated the giant viewscreen of the amphitheatre - normally used for training lectures, it had been
rigged to mirror the view from the screen on the bridge. 'Sometimes it helps to take stock of the situation away from all the noise and bustle.'

  'Indeed. You do not have to explain. Your position must be one of great stress and tension.'

  Chloure couldn't tell if she was being subtly critical, or if she simply wasn't much of a people person. She had a sharp, pale face that didn't seem designed for expressions and stood out spectrally against the dark blue of her uniform. 'You were saying, consul?'

  'I was just thinking... they've been out there five months. Nothing has come or gone. We've had whole fleets of supply ships in and out, but they haven't had anything. Not one shuttle. What are they doing for food? Or fuel?'

  'Our data regarding Space Marine resistance to privation is grievously lacking.' said Talaya. 'It is entirely possible they do not need food or water at all in the conventional sense. Even their life support requirements may not be the same as those of a normal naval crew given their resistance to hazardous battlefield conditions.'

  'Maybe. Hardly encouraging if we're trying to starve them out.' It was the only way he could see to break down the Soul Drinkers and bring them in for disciplinary procedures. All offensive strategies had been ruled out given the density of the asteroid field and the probable attack capabilities of the strike cruisers themselves, not to mention the horror of another boarding action by the Soul Drinkers.

  Of course, quite who would conduct the courts martial of three hundred Space Marines wasn't certain given the number of Imperial authorities mat could claim wrongs done to them at the star fort and ordinatus platform. It wasn't even clear if there were brigs on the ships of the battlefleet secure or numerous enough to hold troops who they said could tear through bulkheads with bare hands and take hellgun shots to the chest and laugh. No one had thought that far ahead.

  'A blockade is only one strategy. There may be others. It is being suggested that the arrival of further attack-configured craft would make a conventional attack feasible. A Golgotha-class factory ship has been requested, to be refitted for clearing a path through the field.'