Sons of the Hydra

by Rob Sanders

  For a moment, everything became immaterial fury, spectral claw and maw. Leaving the Geller field surrounding the Iota-Æternus and entering the pocket of rancid reality protecting the Chaos raider, for a second Occam and his Alpha Legion renegades were at the physical and spiritual mercy of daemons. Horrific denizens of the warp storm swarmed about them, drawn like moths to the flame of the legionnaires’ mortal existence. Occam’s auto-senses registered their alarm as beasts of the beyond moved in with talons, tentacles and daggered jaws. His hearts thundered in his chest. A moment later it was over, as they entered the aegis of the other ship.

  The legionnaires tumbled along the length of the Chaos raider, over baroque mouth-muzzled turrets and monstrous chains that criss-crossed the ruinous obscenities plastered across the red and black hull. Hurtling towards the tower and command decks situated towards the aft of the vessel, Occam reached out for augur arrays, ether vanes and trailing chains that enveloped the ship. Smashing through arrays and snapping vanes with his tumbling velocity, the strike master reached out and locked the hydraulics of his suit’s powered arm. With his gauntlet grasping the links, Occam allowed his grip to run for a while – slowing him down, before locking onto the chain and allowing the bundled servos and hydraulics of his plate to soak up the recoil.

  Drifting with the force of the raider’s acceleration, the strike master proceeded to haul himself arm over arm up the length of chain. As he reached the hull of the Chaos ship, he found that Malik had locked onto the same length of chain, while Sergeant Hasdrubal had managed to anchor himself to a smashed augur array. Mag-locking the soles of their boots to the hull, the Alpha Legionnaires made their way towards the cathedralesque lancet ports of the raider’s bridge. Like the rest of the vessel, the command deck had received a mauling. Battle damage had left the section a mess of twisted scrap and ugly repairs. Ports nearest the damage were scorched black, with colossal cracks running through the armourplas.

  Remaining concealed, Occam peered inside. The bridge beyond was cramped, like that of the Iota-Æternus, and bathed in emergency lighting. Servitors and pirate crew had been brutally interfaced with their station cradles and runebanks. Cabling and spiked chains draped from the ceiling and ran across the deck. Groups of piratical raiders were gathered about the bridge like the members of a hive gang staking out their territory, sitting on railings and leaning against burned-out runebanks. Their flesh was a battleground of warp-ravaged affliction and ritual scarification, the symbols of Dark Gods cut into their mangled features.

  Occam cast his cycling optics across the command deck. While the interfaced deck crew suffered in silence, the Maelstrom pirates were roaring their insanity and jubilation at having rammed the Iota-Æternus. Then he saw it. The pirates were not alone. They were not even in command. Occam made out the nightmare shapes of power-armoured figures. Hunched in the filthy crimson of their plate, their suits were decorated with hanging hooks, chains and mail skirts. Goura Shengk was right. These were not Bearers of the Word. Scored brutally into their ceramite, the renegades wore the sigil of the Tyrant of Badab. These pirates haunted the immaterial havoc of the Maelstrom, preying on the vessels lost within and raiding Imperial shipping in the sub-sectors surrounding the warp storm. Occam could see that the ramshackle bridge still bore signs of battle damage, possibly from engagements of secession as the Tyrant led them from the light of the Emperor’s benevolence into the darkness of self-serving heresy.

  ‘Red Corsairs, out of Hell’s Iris,’ Occam told his legionnaires across the suit vox. Magnetically anchored to the hull with every step, the strike master presented himself – walking out before the great lancet windows. He was joined by Vilnius Malik and Sergeant Hasdrubal, their plasma guns primed and aimed at the ports. ‘They have embraced heresy – let them feel the embrace of the storm that follows.’

  Within, the vessel’s captain stood up from his pulpit throne as he saw the impossible. Alpha Legion Space Marines, standing on the exterior hull, pointing their weapons at the armourplas of the bridge viewports. The Red Corsairs captain was draped in threadbare furs and had a patch riveted across one of his helm optics. On a brazen chain attached to the deck the captain restrained a grotesque hound of red scale, daemon fang and claw. With its spiked hackles up and leathery frill sprung, the monster snarled at the intruders it saw through the towering lancet ports.

  Pulling on the trigger, Occam pumped a blast of plasma at the armourplas. The sphere of raging hydrogen sailed through the void and struck the damaged port with a flash. A molten blaze spread out from the site of impact and seared through the spidery cracks in the plas. Beyond, the strike master could see the confusion and horror of the bridge. Pirates scrambled instinctively back from the lancet ports while the Red Corsairs moved aggressively forward with their boltguns. As the plasma broke through, burning a hole through the thick plas, the bridge of the raider evacuated. Air rushed from the hole and a storm of suction passed through the command deck, knocking pirates off their feet. Clawing for anything, they were torn from handholds and dragged across the chamber. Smashing through the railings and runebanks, broken bodies flew at the breached lancet screen.

  As Malik and Sergeant Hasdrubal opened up similar holes in other command deck windows, a hail of bodies was sucked towards them with the evacuating atmosphere. When the force of the bodies hit the breach, the lancet windows shattered. Anything not secured was shot out into the void, past Occam and his two legionnaires. Data-slates. Servo-skulls. Servitors torn from their interface cradles. Pirates. Even Red Corsairs who had failed to anchor themselves in time.

  The stream of souls shot away from the Chaos raider, passing out of the sheath of reality protecting the vessel, and the Tyrant’s chosen became a feast for thousands of swarming warp entities.

  With the lancet ports gone, Occam joined his legionnaires in shooting blazing balls of plasma into the bridge. Smacking such blasts into runebanks and bridge architecture, the Alpha Legion advanced. While several Red Corsairs had managed to anchor themselves, they had been caught off guard. The appearance of the Alpha Legion, the evacuation of the chamber, and the zero-gravity environment they suddenly found themselves in, made demands on the pirates that Occam was only too willing to exploit.

  With the howling storm of atmospheric evacuation gone, the strike master clumped his mag-locked way in through the shattered lancet port and across the command deck. Using runebanks as cover, the Redacted advanced, feverishly blazing away with their plasma guns at anything that moved.

  Everything seemed to move in silence and slow motion. Wild boltfire rocketed across the bridge at the legionnaires. The strike master took brief cover, avoiding the worst of the gunfire, with several bolts taking apart a runebank and another glancing off his pauldron. Zeroing in on the positions of remaining Red Corsairs, Occam burned a hole straight through a renegade struggling in the absence of gravity. Hasdrubal turned a runebank into a molten mess of dribbling metal with repeated blasts of his plasma gun, forcing a Red Corsair out of hiding. Malik was ready with his own long-shot weapon, putting a sizzling globe of sub-atomic hydrogen straight into the side of the Red Corsair’s helmet.

  With the armoured bodies of dead renegades floating away, the Alpha Legion pushed on across the command deck. Holding onto the wall and launching out from behind a runebank, a chain-draped Red Corsair swung out with the thrashing barbs of a curved sword. Malik was forced to turn it aside with a side-smash of his plasma gun. As the weapon was torn from his grip and spun at the wall, Malik savagely tore his bolt pistol from its holster. The Red Corsair kicked away from the wall and came at him. They grabbed each other’s armoured wrists in their gauntlets, and Malik and the pirate held the pistol and chainsword at arm’s length, tumbling through the zero-gravity of the chamber.

  Occam and his sergeant stomped on towards the throne, where they discovered a Red Corsairs captain taking cover. As the throne soaked up the sizzling blasts of plasma, the pirate captain pulled a massive chainaxe from where it was she
athed across his back. Swinging down in slow motion, the Corsairs captain smashed the chain with which his daemon hound was restrained.

  The monstrous hound bounded off the floor and into the zero-gravity of the bridge, moving with infernal speed and grace. Landing and launching itself from the pulpit rail, the daemon beast bounced off the chamber ceiling and straight down at Ephron Hasdrubal.

  As the sergeant wrestled the abomination, Occam finished the throne with the last of the hydrogen in his flask, turning it into slag. The Red Corsair burst through the remains of the throne, covered in strands of melted metal, and swung the gigantic chainaxe furiously. With a floating savagery, the Tyrant’s champion tore the weapon’s thrashing head through runebanks and railings, forcing Occam back. The strike master didn’t have time for such an engagement. Letting the Red Corsairs captain pull himself across the architecture of the bridge, demolishing runebanks and columns with swipes of his axe, Occam pushed away, floating out of the weapon’s barbed reach.

  Abandoning his plasma gun, Occam lurched back. He kicked the shaft of the chainaxe to one side and spun around, his armoured elbow smashing into the Red Corsair’s helm. As the seals popped, Occam brought up his fist with powered force to blow the helmet clean from the captain’s head.

  As the red helmet flew upwards and struck the ceiling, Occam was treated to the horror of the Red Corsair’s ravaged features. A pallid, warp-smeared skull-mask of ritual scars and tumours, the captain’s face leered at him through the frozen nothingness of the void. His misting breath was stolen from between his needle teeth and black lips. One eye was missing, a stapled mess, while the other bulged and was iced over. Rather than stop the blind pirate in his tracks, it turned him into a frenzied machine – swinging his axe about like a thing possessed.

  Looking back down the length of the command deck, Occam saw the lamps above the bridge elevator change. Klaxons erupted across the rest of the ship, and he imagined that reinforcements were making their way up to aid their masters. He put another console between him and the furious renegade, buying a few precious seconds. Pulling himself up by floating chains and cables drifting from the ceiling, Occam moved out of the wild path of the axe. The strike master allowed the Red Corsair to bury the monstrous weapon in the mangled runebank, grabbed for a bridge column and swung himself around.

  As the elevator doors opened, a small horde of warp-scarred pirates were ripped from the car with the evacuating atmosphere. Their flailing bodies shot across the command deck.

  The Red Corsair struggled to free his axe. Occam landed a kick on the captain’s breastplate and sent his enemy tumbling. The pirate captain smashed into the stream of evacuating bodies. Occam watched the Red Corsair go, carried out into the waiting void.

  Sergeant Hasdrubal, meanwhile, was cloaked in a mist of rancid ichor. Holding the daemon hound as it clawed at his plate and snap its monstrous jaws shut around his helm, the sergeant stabbed his multi-blade repeatedly into the creature’s belly, using every torturous application of the weapon as he thudded it into the struggling beast. Finally, he tossed the twitching body of the hound after its master.

  ‘Fire in the hole,’ Vilnius Malik called out across the vox-channel as the legionnaire rested the soles of his boots on his opponent’s chest and kicked away. Disengaging and flipping backwards out of the arc of the curved chainblade, Malik left the Red Corsair with a melta bomb locked to his plate. In a moment of panic, the renegade reached down and tried to tear the explosive off. Detonating in an optics-searing flash, the Red Corsair disappeared – vaporised from reality. In the zero-gravity, the blast reached across the bridge. Heat washed over Hasdrubal, clearing the cloud of daemon blood from about the sergeant.

  Bringing himself back down to the deck and mag-locking his soles to the metal, Malik recovered his weapon and joined the sergeant by the main bank of consoles.

  ‘Reznor?’ Occam asked across the vox.

  ‘Standing by,’ the warpsmith reported.

  As Reznor spoke to Malik and Sergeant Hasdrubal through the rudimentary controls on various runebanks, Occam issued his orders.

  ‘Kill the engines,’ he said as he recovered his own plasma gun. He stared out of the blasted lancet screens. The Iota-Æternus was still there, its starboard battery smashed, with the reinforced prow of the Red Corsair raider bulldozing it on through the red globular mist: on towards the Mawtex.

  As the Q-ship began to drift away from the ramming prow and disappear through the haze, Occam realised that Hasdrubal had managed to cut power to the raider’s sub-light engines.

  ‘Malik,’ Occam called. ‘Scuttle the vessel. Purge locks on all levels and drop the hangar integrity fields. Empty this crate into the Maelstrom.’

  ‘Affirmative,’ the former Night Lord said with relish, before using his runebank to execute the order. Occam could only imagine the horror taking place down through the decks of the pirate raider. Mortal crew members would be dragged across chambers and along corridors, their bodies broken against the twisted, unfeeling architecture of the Chaos vessel before being blasted out of section air-locks by the streaming hundred. Occam nodded to himself. The daemon entities haunting the Mawtex would feed well on such a bounty.

  ‘Iota-Æternus, respond,’ Occam said across the vox.

  ‘Here, strike master,’ Carcinus Quoda returned, the sorcerer’s voice crackling with the growing distance.

  ‘Status?’

  ‘The shipmaster confirms that we have steering way,’ Quoda said. ‘Reznor is preparing a damage report for your return.’

  ‘Our guest?’ the strike master asked.

  ‘Is still our guest,’ the sorcerer said.

  ‘Very good,’ Occam said, satisfied. ‘Send a lighter. We’re coming back.’

  ξ

  The Shrewdness of Serpents

  The ship felt different.

  It was as apparent to Mina Perdita as it was to all on board the Iota-Æternus. The Seventh Sons were like the crew of any vessel entering the immaterium. Superstitious sayings were uttered, rituals were observed for good fortune. Thanks would be given as the vessel broke the warp at the end of its journey, however long or short it might have been. Entering the Maelstrom was something else, though.

  Even in the service of their Alpha Legion overlords, the Maelstrom had been a phenomenon to be skirted and avoided. Its radiance was always there, dominating the void.

  Lord Occam had committed the Iota-Æternus and its crew to plunging into the depths of the deadly storm with only a traitorous Word Bearer as their guide. Sayings and rituals were not enough to comfort the cultist crew this time.

  Passing through the living quarters Perdita could see that the Seventh Sons were suffering. They were as stalwart as ever in the prosecution of their duties and murderously loyal to Lord Occam, but days riding the perverse currents of the storm had left many cultists ashen-faced and the corridors were tinged with the sharp tang of vomit. Even the charlatan Freydor Blatch found it hard to keep up appearances, the High Serpent having lost his appetite for private revelry. He still took a bottle of amasec to his chambers at the end of the watch, however, claiming that the potent liquor served to calm his stomach.

  As for Perdita, she grumbled and vomited with the rest of them but mainly to keep up appearances. Every time she endured the effect of polymorphine burning through her veins she had to suffer the bending of bones, the stretching of skin and the rupture of flesh. The first few times she had attempted such transformations at the temple she had emptied her stomach onto the polished stone floor. Now, it took a little more than the sickening roll of the ship in a perpetual storm to unsettle her.

  Ordinarily the death cultists of the Seventh Sons were unshakeable. Their faith was sustained, like Perdita’s own, by the expectation that they were always mere moments from the end, expecting death to come for them in the form of a bolt or blade. The Maelstrom represented something else, however. The entities howling through the storm, dragging their claws along the hull or whispering s
eductive horrors to the cultists through their dreams did not promise anything. Their gift was a thousand wishes granted and the eternity of torment that came with them. The cultists were ever fearful that the Geller field might collapse and their flesh would be torn to ribbons by the daemon monstrosities rampaging through the ship. Their ultimate terror, however, was that they might answer the call of such entities and surrender their souls. Such were the fears of mortals in the crushing depths of warp-churning oblivion.

  Perdita was dressed like a female menial, a member of the Seventh Sons the High Serpent had assigned to attend upon their Alpha Legion overlords. Carrying clean cloths and a metal bowl of water, she approached the demigod known as Autolicon Phex. The legionnaire stood as still as a statue outside a door in the corridor. Dressed in full plate and carrying a monstrous heavy weapon, he was guarding the cell housing the Word Bearers prisoner. Lord Occam had commanded that the renegade not be referred to as such. As a guest on board the Iota-Æternus, however, the Word Bearer still warranted a legionnaire keeping watch on his quarters, Vilnius Malik on constant stand-by and, of course, Perdita herself. As a menial, the Assassin tended upon the Dark Apostle, ready to take the necessary measures to end the Word Bearer should his intentions turn hostile.

  ‘You again,’ Goura Shengk said as she entered. Acting as a menial might, Perdita bowed her head before the hulking traitor. Getting up from one knee in his deck robe, the Dark Apostle brought back his hood to reveal the black mess of his face. The Assassin said nothing. What could a menial possibly have to say to such a being?

  As she placed her bowl and cloths down on a stone pedestal, she noticed that the Word Bearer was still staring at her and that he was bleeding. There were speckles of red on his sharp teeth and a wound, seemingly self-inflicted, on his hand.