The Shadow of the Beast

by L J Goulding

  Tech-adepts and their crews were already moving to seal the damaged compartments or to effect what repairs they could. Where the fires still burned, it would perhaps be simpler to lock off the bulkheads and vent the residual atmosphere into the void…

  A single voice cut through the chaos of the vox. It was Reclusiarch Hornindal.

  ‘Security teams to the engineering decks – we are breached. Scythes, to me. Let us show these xenos which of us is the dominant species.’

  Coughing in the lingering smoke of some unseen electrical fire, Kaeron appeared at Goss’s side, his left arm clutched limply across his chest.

  ‘Deck officer!’

  Wiping blood on the back of his sleeve, Goss frowned. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Our course, man,’ Kaeron growled. ‘Can we still reach the gravity well?’

  ‘With these… things piercing our hull? It’s possible…’ He ran a hand over the console. ‘We’re restoring atmospheric pressure, at least.’

  The shipmaster nodded. ‘All power to the engines. Forget the fight. Proceed with our primary objective – we drop our shields and run.’

  Following in the footsteps of the armoured battle-brothers, Ogden’s security officers filed quickly down through the access passage to the aft engineering bays. The stench of smoke and hot bile assaulted their nostrils. A strangled scream echoed down from the upper gantries before being ominously cut short.

  Ogden checked and rechecked his weapon’s charge.

  In the stuttering light from the lumen strips down here, just above the Xenophon’s bilges, it was all too easy to imagine alien horrors lurking at every gloomy intersection they passed.

  The five Space Marines – Brother Mascios and the rest of his combat squad – had taken point as soon as the team had entered the narrow passage; Sergeant Hekaton had taken the rest of his men back to the upper levels, where a fourth tyranid vessel had breached the hull-skin. Though the Scythes, equipped with their hefty boarding shields, sought to place themselves between their loyal serfs and whatever alien threat lay in wait, they would only be able to go so far to protect them. Frantic reports from the other teams spoke of entire crew compartments that had either been flooded with xenos toxins or opened up to the vacuum.

  Chaplain Demetrios was leading Squad Certes in a desperate counter-offensive on the observation deck, now overrun by chittering, bladed creatures whose inhuman cries could clearly be heard over the combat channels. Edios had fallen, defending tech-crews in the devastated forward sections, though three of his warriors had survived long enough to drag their dying brethren from the inferno.

  On the verge of escape through the Sigma-Tumbus gravity well, the Xenophon was being torn apart from the inside. Now Ogden led his combined team in what would be the final attempt to repel the invaders.

  Fourteen of them, standing together as one in the face of an unknowable, alien foe.

  ‘For Sotha,’ he quietly reminded himself.

  A staccato burst of gunfire lit up the junction ahead, and the Space Marines heaved their shields into a defensive phoulkon formation. Ogden brought his lascarbine up reflexively and motioned for his men to hold position.

  The heavy thrashing of a large body shook the walls of the passage, followed by a low growl that rapidly turned into a gagging, fluid eruption.

  Two crew-serfs in tattered overalls were hurled out into the main passageway by a great gout of bio-acid which scored deep burns into the metal wall. They tumbled to the deck, screaming and clawing at their eyes and mouths even as their flesh came away in sticky handfuls, convulsing their last moments away with rapidly wasting muscles.

  Curses and cries of horror among the team were muted as the foul stench washed over them. It smelled like vomit and rotten, burned meat.

  Advancing quickly, two of the Scythes turned the corner to block the open junction with their shields while another hurried three of Ogden’s men over to the other side. They picked their way through the growing pool of acidic spoil, hardly daring to steal a glance into the engineering bay as they passed.

  Now flanking either side of the tunnel, the two shieldbearers pulled back and hunkered in close to the plasteel uprights as more agitated, titanic thrashing heralded another gout of bio-acid. This time it sluiced over the left-hand wall and corroded the metal plating, and the passageway began to fill with acrid, choking steam.

  A series of vox-clicks between the giants betrayed the fact that they were again communicating with one another over closed channels. Frustrated, Ogden used the Chapter’s non-verbal battle language to demand an appraisal from them, his bare hand casting the gesture twice for emphasis.

  Brother Mascios stole another glance into the bay, before signing out to the rest of the team.

  Single large target. Twenty-five metres, straight ahead.

  He leaned towards Ogden, with a gesture of almost paternal concern.

  Immobile. Extreme hazard.

  Ogden nodded, and divided his men into three fire-groups – one to each flank and one to cover the centre. The Space Marines edged into the groups without instruction, moving instinctively into the perfect tactical deployment.

  Frag grenades were suddenly passing between their gauntleted hands. It was to be a frontal assault, then.

  At Ogden’s command, the three groups burst from the tunnel by sections, emerging through the shattered remains of the bay’s main hatchway. The fire-groups clustered behind the shieldbearers, keeping their heads down and advancing quickly as the first grenades detonated in the enclosed compartment.

  In spite of what they had already heard from the Xenophon’s other security teams and the Space Marine squads engaged throughout the ship, Ogden was still not prepared for the sight that greeted him in that chamber. His pace faltered as his mind tried to process it.

  The outer wall, triple-skinned away from the hull with reinforced plasteel and adamantium alloys, had burst inwards where the tyranid ram-vessel had breached the Xenophon, spearing through the inner bulkheads as though they were made from nothing more than wax. Around the breach, amidst the twisted iron debris and jutting rebar, the deck plates were scorched and buckled by the mass of the alien vessel’s living proboscis as it had forced its way in.

  And there it lay. A thrashing, mewling thing, easily the size of a great Sothan phantine; recoiling from the frag blasts and bolter fire that peppered its fleshier parts with stinging shrapnel as they began their assault.

  Though the majority of its hide was horned and armoured in thick chitin, it had blossomed open to feed upon the soft bodies of the ship’s crew – half-digested human remains and smears of bloody juices fizzed and hissed on the deck before it. Ogden knew that those Chapter serfs who laboured down in the engineering decks under the watchful eye of the tech-adepts would have little access to small arms, and certainly no projectile weapons powerful enough to prevail against a monster such as this. When the main bulkhead portals between sections had sealed in response to the hull breach, they would have been trapped down here with it.

  The thing heaved up and roared, its tusked mouthparts snapping wide and lashing at the nearest fire-group as they drew around to the right. It plucked one of them from his feet, to the horror of his comrades, and the man disappeared into the gaping maw with a single ragged scream.

  In a panic, the two remaining security officers bolted for the cover of an upended machine cart, their shots flashing harmlessly off the thing’s horned crest as they ran. Their Space Marine shieldbearer bellowed at them to hold position, and in that moment of inattention the beast struck; it splintered the ceramite of his boarding shield and cleaved deep into his armoured torso. The warrior was flung to the deck, choking blood inside his helmet and clutching at his spilled innards.

  Horrified, Ogden saw bloated, venous sacs behind the first crest of the proboscis swelling as they filled with liquid. It was preparing to vomit up another gout of di
gestive acids.

  But Mascios had already seen the danger. The armoured giant crossed the wreckage-strewn bay in the space of two heartbeats, avoiding the whipcord feeder tendrils that writhed at the thing’s flanks, and leapt in with his combat blade drawn. With a wordless battle-cry he stabbed down into the lowermost sac again and again, spilling gallons of steaming fluid over his armour and onto the deck, robbing the beast of the fuel for its attack.

  The horrid mouth clammed shut, the whole proboscis shaking from side to side in an agonised frenzy, batting the Space Marine away with its sheer bulk.

  But it was enough. Between the three groups, they poured bolter and las-fire into the gaps between its segmented chitin plates and stitched the weaker membranous flesh with shots every time it opened its mouthparts to roar. Mascios himself ended it, stuffing a clutch of grenades into the torn flesh behind the armoured crest before diving clear.

  The muffled blast almost severed the proboscis entirely. It showered the walls and ceiling with bloody alien filth and sent the slack, ruined mouth crashing to the deck.

  They cheered. Between them all, they had brought the mighty beast low.

  Brother Mascios rose, his battle-plate pitted and scored where the powerful acid had worked upon it. The bare metal and ceramite rendered him as a ghost, a pale reflection of his glorious Chapter colours and with wisps of steam rising from the more delicate joint seals. He released the catches on his helmet and pulled it off to reveal reddened, sore features and bloodshot eyes.

  Another of the Scythes stood tall and honoured him with the old Sothan salute – right fist closed over the primary heart, then swept out before him. The salute of the reaper, the inevitable victor. Mascios returned the gesture with a thin smile, though he appeared pained by his exertions and the loss of his fallen battle-brother.

  Behind him, Ogden saw the flesh of the tyranid vessel twitch. Just once – most likely the post-mortem constrictions of its alien physiology.

  Then a second time.

  And again.

  He tried to speak, to yell out a warning, but no sound left his lips.

  The dead flesh was writhing. Churning.

  The xenos erupted from the body of their vessel like maggots from a sun-warmed carcass. Ogden froze at the sight. Brother Mascios turned, and in that moment they were upon him. Many-limbed horrors of teeth, claws and glittering, savage eyes, they rose up from Ogden’s childhood nightmares and spilled into reality – so grotesque, so inhuman, and yet… so familiar. They moved and killed with a hunched, insectoid gait, and Mascios’s hot blood splattered across the serf-sergeant’s face.

  Gunfire erupted, along with cries of terror and alarm as dozens more of the creatures swarmed into the chamber.

  Ogden sank to his knees on the deck, his lascarbine clattering from numbed fingers. He simply could not will himself to rise against them; some primitive, animal part of his brain would not allow it. He was utterly entranced as they lunged and shrieked and tore into his comrades and masters.

  It was almost a blessed relief when their scything xenos talons pierced his own flesh and carved him to pieces. Yet in that final moment, he nonetheless felt a strange, cold reassurance that he had done his part.

  Hornindal was lost once more in the holy fury of combat.

  Without conscious thought he struck left, the powered discharge of his crozius shattering a leaping tyranid’s skull into sticky fragments. He raised his bolt pistol to the right and put two rounds into the central mass of another, before whirling on his heel to strike at a third.

  Suffer not the alien to live.

  Those words might well have been one of the principal tenets of his faith – nay, the word of the almighty Emperor of Mankind himself! – such was the fervour with which Hornindal now fought.

  It seemed, though, that this was to be his end. No glorious death alongside his Chapter brothers on the field of war, no last stand worthy of a small monument in the Reclusiam for his successors to revere. Not that he had pursued such things; he had lived modestly, as a Scythes of the Emperor should, always ready to defend humanity and willing to give his life for that noble cause.

  He had made peace with it, as he always did, before he had even drawn his weapons and taken his battle-oaths. But he was going to die here, unknown and unremembered, and for that he would make the xenos pay a hefty price in blood. Another wave of the vile creatures – during the Tyrannic War, they had called them ‘gaunts’ – spilled from the ruptured bulkhead portals at the far end of the corridor. He loosed five shots from his pistol with a steady hand, and five more fell dead.

  ‘Hold, abominations!’ he cried out through his helmet’s enhanced vox-projectors. ‘You will not cross this threshold. Not while I still draw breath, nor after.’

  Even without the gruff burr of the dying klaxons that were sounding in every chamber and compartment throughout the ship, he doubted that the things could have heard or understood him.

  The Reclusiarch fought with his back to the sealed portal that led to the astropaths’ chambers. He had made the tech-crews weld it shut, before casting off his cloak to await the skittering, living tide.

  Beyond all else, the chantry could not be overrun.

  They had to send the warning.

  He had left a single armed security officer in with them, to ensure that they did not turn upon one another in some alien madness – a stern man who looked like he would do his duty without remorse. The psykers had gone on howling in terror even as the bulkhead had been sealed. ‘Walled in’, they had called it. Walled in with their shadowy nightmares.

  His bolt pistol ran dry. He calmly reloaded it, taking the last clip from his belt, and watching the gaunts scramble over the mounds of their dead that clogged the corridor before he opened fire once more.

  When he felt the Xenophon’s engines gutter and die for the last time through the deck beneath his feet, Hornindal gritted his teeth and let out a long, slow breath. He turned to the cowering serf, who fired sporadic and wildly inaccurate laspistol shots from his hiding place in the open wall panel beside the sealed portal.

  ‘Sub-lieutenant Goss, contact the shipmaster.’

  When the ship-wide vox channels had gone down, Kaeron had sent the young officer with a portable wired unit to stand by the Reclusiarch until the very end. To ensure that the lines of communication were not broken, no matter what happened.

  The terrified serf patched the link through to Hornindal’s internal vox, gripping the channel monitor close to his ear but unable to tear his eyes away from the encroaching xenos creatures.

  ‘Shipmaster Kaeron,’ Hornindal said, with a degree of finality in his voice.

  There was a burst of static, and it was some moments before any response came.

  ‘Lord Reclusiarch. We have lost the main engines. The aft decks have fallen.’

  Hornindal fired another shot, decapitating a tyranid as it crested the mound.

  ‘Have we reached the planetoid?’ he asked. ‘Can you complete the escape manoeuvre using auxiliary thrusters?’

  There was a long pause. Goss stared up at the Space Marine, a plaintive look on his face. The pandemonium of the bridge was still audible before Kaeron replied.

  ‘No, my lord. We have entered the Sigma-Tumbus gravity well, but we were already off course and underpowered. We won’t be able to pull away on the far side of the elliptic. Our orbit has begun to decay.’

  Hornindal sagged. ‘That’s it, then,’ he said without emotion. ‘It’s over. Launch the beacon.’

  ‘Of course, Lord Reclusiarch. Will you record a message?’

  ‘I will.’

  Goss screamed in frustration, and snapped off a flurry of shots with his pistol.

  ‘I should have known, my lord!’ he cried. ‘Tumbus. It means tomb…’

  Ignoring the serf’s hysteria, Hornindal checked his own magazine. He could
feel a deep rumble building in the walls around them; not the rhythmic hum of the Xenophon’s systems, but the inexorable pull of conflicting gravities and the rush of atmosphere over her hull.

  Sixty-five seconds to impact.

  ‘This is Brother-Chaplain Hornindal, Reclusiarch of the Scythes of the Emperor, Adeptus Astartes. Chapter vessel Xenophon has encountered a tyranid vanguard fleet deep in the Artaxian subsector. The local Mandeville point is mined. Do not attempt to recover this beacon, I repeat: do not attempt to recover this beacon. Advise our home world of Sotha it lies in the path of the xenos invaders. Look to our–’

  A screeching burst of static cut the channel, followed only a moment later by a reverberating explosion that rocked the ship. The remaining lumen strips went dark.

  ‘Kaeron! Confirm beacon launch!’ he bellowed. This time there was no response.

  Like rats, the gaunts scattered, disappearing into the gloom.

  Thirty-two seconds.

  The frantic Goss cried out in alarm as the corridor began to tilt down towards them, and even Hornindal stumbled as the mounds of xenos corpses shifted. The two of them would be buried alive, crushed against the bulkhead by the weight of their kills in the enclosed space.

  Another blast tore up from the decks below and sheared metal panels from the corridor’s ceiling, hurling the Reclusiarch bodily into the sealed portal. Debris and foul alien carcasses tumbled down onto the two of them as the Xenophon’s angle of descent increased.

  Sotha. Oh, noble Sotha… heed our warning.

  Hornindal recalled the horrors he had seen unleashed upon conquered worlds during the Tyrannic War. Seas drained, populations consumed. The horizon blighted by vast xenos towers that pierced the heavens.

  He imagined this doom for his home world, and he wept.

  Seventeen seconds. Sixteen.

  The mighty warrior swatted aside the corpses that slipped and skidded down the slope of the ruined corridor, gripping young Goss by his uniform tunic and dragging him up from the crush.

  Protect them always. And when you cannot, simply aid their passing.