Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

  “Where? I want a location.”

  “The gue’la warship, Kor’o. Aft segment.”

  The comm chimed.

  “O’Men’he? This is Aun’el Ko’vash. I suggest you pull back somewhat...”

  “Of course, Aun’el. What’s happening?”

  “It would appear our little gambit paid off, Kor’o.”

  “Aun’e—?”

  “Prepare to engage, Kor’o. They’ll be helpless in moments.”

  Men’he glanced bemusedly at the viewscreen. The Enduring Blade seemed to shudder abruptly, the bright lights glimmering across its continental surfaces dimmed and winked off before rising again in an angry crimson luminescence. The stabilising thrusters on its belly — volcanic vents oozing a myriad of smoggy emissions and crackling energies — flared briefly, bringing the unwieldy shape to a premature halt.

  Men’he carefully pulled back the Kenvaal to match the distance of the Tash’var and watched, astonished.

  “Aun’el?” he commed. “What’s it—”

  The engines exploded.

  In one bright moment the scaffold arrays and tiered buttresses arranged around the Enduring Blade’s bulging engine vents plumed and shredded, a snaking chain reaction billowing up from beneath like pus from a wound. It spilled over in a garish torus of effervescent gases and vacuum starved flames, pulverising entire decks and fragmenting the rear sections of the vessel. The engine stacks heaved from their bases upwards as though expelling a final breath, long ribbons of mangled machinery and blocky architecture blasting clear from the wreckage.

  “Bloodwind...” Men’he hissed beneath his breath, forgetting himself.

  A kor’vre trilled calmly, “Brace for debris.”

  The Tel’ham Kenvaal shuddered lightly as shards of fused, atomised detritus bounced from its hull. Gun drones quickly and efficiently atomised any potentially threatening wreckage.

  Men’he stared at the devastation and gaped. The immobilised vessel swung around from the force of the detonations, the pathetic remaining thrusters venting impotently to control the gyration.

  “O’Men’he?” the comm said, startling him from his astonishment.

  “Y-yes? Uh, yes, Aun’el?”

  “I rather think that should slow them down. Focus on their juntas-side batteries, please. I want them crippled.”

  Librarian Delpheus felt the detonation all around him. Deep in the heart of the Enduring Blade its concussive force shook everything, roaring throughout the cavernous techbay which Ardias and his sergeants had commandeered. For a moment he was sure the walls themselves palpitated, a shuddering vibration running the length and breadth of the craft. He saw a ruby wet gut inside his mind, peristaltic waves of muscle contractions dragging him closer to digestion.

  He shook his head, annoyed at the lack of focus. A thousand psychic screams churned across the ether, a final painful legacy of those who had died in the blast.

  He sagged into a seat in the small console arena at one end of the tech-bay, watching as dust scurried tiredly from the duct courses around the ceiling, making the coils and loops of cables sway and buckle. A small illuminator on the wall, glowing with the angry red ochre of emergency conditions, spat sparks and clanked to the deck. The entire ship rumbled.

  Captain Ardias scowled, clinging to a stanchion nearby. He’d led his command team from the Marines’ reclusium cells into the main sections of the ship, hoping to find a means of monitoring events vessel-wide. Delpheus’s psychic senses had led them unerringly to this techbay, finding within a group of tech-priests that cowered at one end of the chamber, chanting purifying litanies over a bewildering array of machines and metallic constructions.

  “What was that?” Ardias growled, shooting an inquisitive glance at Achellus, his squad’s Techmarine. The red-armoured giant scowled and bent over the multifaceted monitors and consoles at the end of the hangar, augmented limbs and armatures fluttering across the controls.

  “Stand by,” he grunted, slender metal fingers sliding into socket relays with a cascade of rasps.

  “The engines have been destroyed.” Delpheus said, his voice dead. Ardias looked up at him in surprise.

  “How do you know?”

  He sought for an adequate explanation, unable as ever to find the words to explain. He shrugged helplessly. “I just know.”

  Achellus tilted his head and shrugged. “The engines are gone,” he concurred.

  “Hera’s blood...” Ardias growled, eyes staring into nothing. Delpheus’s probing mind could feel the anxiety oozing from him, a helplessness entirely alien to one so used to the rigours and certainties of the Codex.

  “The Raptors failed...” the captain whispered. “We weren’t there.” He turned his gaze upon the Librarian, an intense glare of accusation and hostility. “We weren’t there, Delpheus, at your suggestion.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Delpheus replied, keeping the quaver from his voice.

  “How dare you?” Ardias almost roared. “Countless lives lost and you think ‘it doesn’t matter’?”

  The sergeants exchanged glances, uncomfortable with their captain’s palpable fury.

  “No, brother-captain,” Delpheus maintained, closing his eyes, it doesn’t. “I told you before: we are needed elsewhere. Something is coming.”

  Ardias almost snarled. “Brother Delpheus, my faith in the scrying of psykers — even those that I count among my brothers — extends only so far.” He took a breath, controlling his temper. “Thanks to this episode my faith is waning.”

  “But—”

  “Codex Article 4256, sub-section 4, third lesson. ‘In the face of an overt and exposed foe, the pursuit of intangible threats is a waste of resource.’”

  “I know the text, brother-captain. You need not remi—”

  “The Ultramarine is a realist and a pragmatist, Delpheus, who is careful not to divide his attention. I was a fool to accept your counsel.”

  “It was not ‘counsel’, brother. It was truth. You will see, yet—”

  “My patience is spent. Assemble the company, we go to battl—”

  “Please!” Delpheus found himself begging, desperate to vindicate his prophecy. “In the Emperor’s name! I can’t explain what’s coming, but whatever happens, whatever we do, we’re needed here and now. I know it!”

  “And where is ‘here’? Some forgotten techbay? Why bring us here?”

  “I... I don’t know.”

  Ardias turned away, muttering furiously. Delpheus rubbed his temples, wondering vaguely whether the clawing, chittering pain in his mind would ever be gone.

  His eyes fell upon the wall. The light fitting that had fallen open sparked lamely, coils of ruptured cabling hanging out. He frowned. There was something...

  Oh, Emperor-God no...

  He looked up. A series of looped ducts hung overhead, arcing flaccidly with the weight of years. A dribble of water parted from a cracked, rust smeared pipe with a quiet plip.

  No no no no no...

  He looked back at the light fitting. The filament, exposed metal smoking and fizzing, lay half-concealed behind a tangle of wires. Overloaded and crippled by the force of the engines’ destruction, it blinked spasmodically:

  Flash. Flash. Pause. Flash. Pause. Flash-Flash. Pause.

  “Brother-captain?” Delpheus said, staring at it. Ardias turned to him with a weary grunt.

  “What now?”

  “I’m about to die.”

  The wall yawned open like a hungry mouth, wet edges slurping and sucking obscenely, malefic light blazing around its edges.

  Something came out and stabbed him through the heart.

  Kais hurried across arterial bridges.

  They sprouted chaotically from high tiered walls, plush tapestries and red velvet walkways branching and intersecting tapering cords of steel and rock. They arched out across abyssal spaces, smoke-fogged and bat-haunted. This high within the vessel’s infrastructure, bulbous viewing galleries and veinlike corridors opened up on
to glass-fronted panoramas of the void beyond. The distant flickering of lights and tumbling shadows announced majestically that the fleet battle continued to rage. Every now and then a shuddering, grinding roar — like steel skies being torn open by celestial blades — heralded another tau-fired salvo of munitions gouging into the crippled vessel’s flanks. He lowered his vision and limped onwards, hoping the blood trail was dwindling.

  The explosion that had ripped the engines from the gue’la vessel had shaken him. He thought he’d given himself enough time to get clear, setting the charges for five raik’ors then scampering, rat-like, along hallways and gantries; scuttling up ladders and diving into lifts. He’d broadcast several all-frequency alerts to the other shas’las aboard, urging them to get clear of the engine decks as soon as possible. There were no replies.

  When it came, the detonation had been like the laughter of a thunder god, consuming every other noise and blasting great waves of destruction along the vessel. Kais had lurched headlong to the ground, momentarily astounded by the force of his handiwork. The deck split open beneath him and he scrabbled, crying out, for sturdier ground. Chain reactions rumbled for long raik’ans, shaking loose bolts from the ceiling and killing the lights in a surge of crimson standbys. Ripples of deflected force surged through the bulkheads, eliciting a great grinding, gnashing sound that hurt his ears and left him shaking his head in confusion.

  And then it was all quiet.

  All quiet, for the first time since he came aboard this ugly mausoleum ship. No more distant semiconscious reportage of the sonorous engines, rumbling throatily He’d wondered, skulking in the devastation, how many people, how many hundreds — maybe thousands — had perished. He could see them in his mind, pale lips gaping fishlike, as their lungs collapsed and their blood turned solid, tumbling out into the vastness of space.

  He thought back to the decompressing chamber in the promenade aboard the Or’es Tash’var. All those tau and gue’la slipping into nothingness in a rush of blasted air and silent screams. He’d been horrified at the raw power of the vacuum, a destructive force above and beyond his tiny, mortal rages and flaws. It had humbled him.

  And what now, now that he’d shredded a city-in-space and vented its chittering, maggotlike occupants into that same vacuum? Shouldn’t he feel godlike? Shouldn’t that single act of genocide obliterate whatever bitterness he might have in his soul, eclipsing utterly the numbness, outshining the relentless glare of his father’s eyes? Shouldn’t it be significant?

  No. He didn’t feel a thing.

  Dazed, appalled at his own detachment, he’d stumbled upwards through the ship’s layers until he could go no further and there, seeing all around him the dislodged wreckage and shorted circuitry of his handiwork, he’d moved onto the great buttresses and masonry causeways overarching the service spaces. Impossible pits yawned on either side of every path.

  He was wandering blindly, trying to hail the Or’es Tash’var, a lone figure picking its way towards the distant monolith of the vessel’s bridge, when he was shot in the leg.

  He’d run, of course. He couldn’t even see the sniper, let alone return fire with any accuracy. Warm dampness oozed across his hoof copiously, and he fired some random — useless — shots into the cavernous underhull and sprinted for cover, groaning and seeing stars with every step. Ensconced within a low-roofed bridge intersection, he shakily eased himself to the ground to examine the wound. The projectile had punctured the muscle of his lower leg, gashing an ugly hole and singeing the flesh around it. He fished for his last medipack and applied it heavily, pushing down until he almost blacked out, then tying it off. The pressure was appalling, like liquid metal cooling and expanding around the flesh, but it allowed him to walk, at least. In a perverse way the pain was invigorating, a constant reminder of his vitality (and mortality) that cut through the numbness more completely than wholesale slaughter ever could.

  So now he hurried across the bridgeways, keeping low, grunting quietly every time the ragged wound flexed inside its healing binding. He wanted to laugh, somehow, some morbid sense of absurdity bubbling up inside him. He’d killed hundreds today, thousands even. He’d waded through the blood of his enemies and relished every moment, he’d overcome exhaustion and adversity with an almost supernatural aptitude, defeating the finest warriors these pale-faced gue’la could throw at him.

  To be outdone now, to be maimed so suddenly by some distant, unseen foe— beyond control or retaliation: it was ridiculous. It was like a cruel joke, like a clonebeast outrunning its pursuers and earning the admiration of the crowd— only to be slaughtered for meat in the fio’toros’tai abattoir districts.

  The bridgecastle loomed overhead, an ebony mace wielded victoriously above the ship’s spire-encrusted spine. Kais glimpsed it again and again through the irregular viewing portals above the causeways, set amongst the distant rafters and buttresses of the inner surface of the hull. Around its base an amalgamation of stone fortresses rose majestically into a single buttressed chapel, steel pendants and icons infesting its multifaceted roof, lowermost walls penetrating the ship’s shell. It rose up from within the Enduring Blade like a blistered melanoma, turrets for singed hair follicles and the angular bridge at its tumorous apex.

  He’d wondered what to do after the engines died. He couldn’t raise El’Lusha on the comms — couldn’t really believe that there was anyone friendly left in the universe. He seemed so cut off, so immeasurably enmeshed within the grinding wheels of this confrontation, that nothing else was real. He resolved, mind clouded by anxieties, that alone or not he would attempt to pursue the goals his commanding shas’el had set. So he headed for the bridge.

  The chapel’s entrance, accessible only via a bridge that extended across a gulf between an outer and inner strata of the vessel’s segmentation, was a causeway-deathtrap. Its slender crossings were pocked by bullet holes and las-scorches and several dead tau lay in a huddle at its entrance. Kais sprinted past without stopping, his mutilated leg a dull crimson roar in his mind. The snipers, wherever they were, announced themselves in a flurry of ghostly ricochets and squib blasts, too distant for the sound of their firing to betray their positions. The dead shas’las wriggled and shook obscenely as they absorbed the crossfire, not safe from damage even in death. Kais hurdled the butchered pile and landed with a muffled shriek, feeling the abused flesh of his leg tearing as he braced against the impact.

  He rolled awkwardly and sprung forwards, sensing rather than seeing the impact craters disappearing behind him, and crawled upright feeling winded and dazed. The chapel swarmed open around him, an impossibly vast space that made him stagger in astonishment. Every pillar was a granite behemoth, ascending with prehistoric grace into the distant shadows of the ceiling, where leering gargoyles and stylised figures hulked and glared. Gargantuan stained-glass lenses fractured the light, daubing primary colours across his dirtied armour. He stood for a moment and basked in the massiveness of it all, insectified in an instant. Again he was a maggot, invading something incomprehensibly huge. How could he hope to topple all of this?

  Then he looked around and a group of Space Marines was staring at him.

  He lurched away with a cry, mind still fizzing with the shock of the bomb blast and the pain of his leg, melting his thoughts into an ugly hash of impression and details. Their features swam before his eyes:

  Glaring yellow vision slits and grey-green helmets.

  Domed shoulder guards and grasping segmented gauntlets.

  Gunmetal weapons, racked and glaring hungrily.

  But there was blood too, and the features didn’t seem to interlink properly. There was something...

  He shook his head, wincing, and took a deep breath. When he turned back the image slotted into place with grisly precision and for the second time within as many decs he had to force himself not to gag. It was another massacre, another abattoir zone of gut-churning carnage, but this time not mere frail troopers that had been shredded. Their helmets were cleaved an
d shattered, eye lenses fragmented and the pulpy flesh beneath drawn out like mollusc meat.

  Great gash marks rent the shoulder plates and armour fragments open, brittle edges awash with lubricating fluids and thick pulses of blood, running together in colloidal swirls. Kais found himself running a gloved hand in morbid fascination along one such tear, wondering what manner of blade could have so neatly parted such powerful armour.

  There was no sign of a culprit, only a shredded perimeter of bolter craters, plasma-scorched metal and smoothed puddles of solidified melta-damage to attest to these abstract chunks of armour and flesh ever having lived.

  Kais swallowed hard and let his eyes wander upwards to the red carpeted staircase that rose from the airy centre of the chapel. Somewhere above this bloody grotto was the bridge.

  He looked back down at the fleshy detritus and stooped to pick something up.

  Delpheus, sprawled on the deck, gnashed his teeth together and fought to stay conscious. It was happening. It was all happening. The masked fiend, inverted. All coming true.

  Bolter fire hammered at the air, a furious staccato making his ears ache. Phosphorescent light blossoms capered across his eyesight, amorphous puddles of purple and blue left hanging nebulously in their wake.

  Something screamed. He felt his first heart, punctured cleanly with a single razor-sharp blow, palpitating faintly and beginning to die. He expelled a gurgled lungful of air and was unsurprised to taste a thick syrup of blood and bile pooling from his mouth.

  “A...” His voice was a lugubrious swamp croak, bubbling pathetically. He spat a gobbet of filth and tried again. “A... Ardias...”

  Something blurred above his head, a crackling haze of form and light, rocketing across his vision with a hyena’s giggle. Bolter fire chased it and it was gone, a scampering shape swallowed by the shadows. Nothing he was seeing made any sense.

  “What’s...” he mumbled, brain too detached to operate. He wanted information, wanted to cry out for a weapon so he could help his comrades fight back this... this...