Black Tide

by James Swallow

  “This is the Magos Minoris Matthun Zentennigan Eight-Iota Zellik,” said Mohl. The Flesh Tearer’s voice was quiet, but it carried across the chamber. “A ranking tech-lord of the Magos Technicus of Mars, he is listed in the rolls as an adept-without-portfolio, with letters of marque from the Fabricator-General to conduct independent operations beyond the Segmentum Solar.”

  “In other words, he’s a law unto himself,” muttered Kayne.

  “Zellik’s rank and position allow him a great deal of liberty,” Mohl agreed. “We believe that the Ordo Xenos have been watching him for some time for overt signs of contamination, but no evidence has been forthcoming.”

  “They believe he’s treating with aliens?” said Ceris.

  “Possible,” came the reply. “Not confirmed. Zellik’s connections have so far enabled him to remain outside the grip of the ordos. But what has been determined, by agents in our employ, is that Zellik is indeed operating outside the letter of Imperial law and Mechanicus doctrine. He fancies himself as something of a collector, inclined to hoard items he considers precious rather than turn them over to his masters. Apparently, he maintains an extensive private museum… In addition, he has been trading in proscribed and rare technologies.”

  “The cog-boys would go wild if they knew that,” said Ajir.

  Noxx shook his head. “Don’t be so sure. The Adeptus Mechanicus are quite happy to bend the rules if it lets them gather up another dusty relic from the days before Old Night.” He glanced at Mohl and the Techmarine’s head bobbed in agreement.

  “So, Kayne was correct, then,” offered Rafen. “This Magos Zellik is operating on his own… Perhaps at the behest of Mars, perhaps only to enrich himself.” The Blood Angel folded his arms. “What does that have to do with our hunt?”

  “One of the names connected to his trade will be familiar to you,” Mohl explained. “A Magos Biologis by the name of Haran Serpens.”

  “Bile’s alias…” Puluo’s craggy face hardened. “This wastrel cog is in league with Chaos?” He spat on the deck.

  “We suspect he is unaware of the lie of the Serpens identity. Knowledge of what took place on Baal has yet to filter out into the greater Imperium—”

  “It filtered out to you, didn’t it?” interrupted Kayne darkly. Turcio found himself nodding in agreement. As much as he knew he should trust the Flesh Tearers, he still found it hard to.

  Mohl ignored the comment and kept talking. “It is likely Zellik has no idea who he was really dealing with.”

  “What was the nature of his trade with Bile?” Turcio spoke for the first time. “Do we know that?” The metallic fingers of his augmetic arm drummed on his vambrace, an unconscious tic he could not seem to excise.

  “Unclear,” replied Mohl.

  “It is my Lord Seth’s suggestion that we approach this Zellik and ask him to tell us all he knows of the whereabouts of one ‘Haran Serpens’…” Noxx made the statement sound almost playful.

  Turcio considered this. “The Mechanicus are a rule-bound lot. I don’t doubt our errant Magos will have chapter and verse on every trade he’s ever made, from bolt-screws to battleships.”

  “He won’t just give it up for the asking,” said Ajir. “And if he has indeed been dealing off-book, with xenos or any other enemies of Terra, then he knows his life is forfeit.”

  Ceris peered at the image. “Are we to simply confront him with this? Impose the Emperor’s authority and arrest him?”

  “He’ll flee the moment he sees our ships,” added Kayne.

  “Perhaps not,” said Noxx. “Not if he only sees my ship.”

  Rafen eyed his opposite number. “What do you mean, sergeant?”

  The Flesh Tearer’s thin lips parted, revealing his teeth. “Brother Mohl must take credit for this idea.” He patted the Techmarine on the shoulder. “We’ll bring the Gabriel in to his complex at quarter speed, contact Zellik and tell him we want to make a trade. Weapons or vehicles, or some such.”

  “You’re Space Marines. What makes you think he’d believe that you are interested in an illicit deal with him?” Turcio frowned at the Flesh Tearer. “It’s a lie a child could see through.”

  “If it were you making the approach, Blood Angel, I would concur,” Noxx replied. “But we are the Flesh Tearers.” He took in his squad with a sweep of his hand and gave a chilly grin. “And as I am sure you know, people are always willing to think the very worst of us.” Noxx glared at Turcio, daring him to disagree; and in all truth, he could not.

  The Space Marines were silent, each of them considering Noxx’s words. Finally, Rafen spoke. “Brother Mohl is to be commended. This has the makings of a good plan. So good, in fact, that I find myself wondering why Lord Seth did not simply send you to prosecute it alone, without the involvement of my Chapter at all.”

  “Ah,” said Noxx, “there’s more to it than that.”

  “There always is,” Puluo said dryly.

  “Zellik’s base of operations is a mobile platform… It would be a misnomer to consider it a ship or a space station. The Archeohort is neither one nor the other.”

  “Archeohort?” The word was unfamiliar to Turcio.

  “Show them,” Noxx told Mohl. The Techmarine touched a luminous keypad and the lens viewer shifted again. The new shape was hard to grasp, and for long moments Turcio stared at it, trying to draw meaning from what appeared to be a collection of gigantic derricks clustered about an egg-shaped core. It reminded him a little of the fat dust spiders that lurked in the sublevels of the fortress-monastery. The scale was hard to reckon from the image, however.

  “The construct is essentially a mobile processing facility, dedicated to the recovery of lost scientific relics. It moves from star to star, sifting planets for archeotech. Zellik has a small army of skitarii and savants, and the construct is well armed. A single vessel would not pose a serious threat to it.”

  “The question answered,” Noxx said with a nod. “Our Chapter’s starfleet is small. It was difficult enough to detach the Gabriel for this duty. But in order to hobble Zellik, two ships are needed. One to close to point-blank range and rake the platform with its guns—”

  “And another to sweep in and bracket the Archeohort, aye. I see.” Rafen nodded back. “You have this… construct’s location?”

  “Beyond the Holda and Precipice systems, out on the lip of the void before the Ghoul Stars.” Mohl’s answer was immediate. “Zellik returns there frequently to sift the corpse worlds along that axis.”

  Turcio and the others listened as Noxx went on, outlining his plan to attack the Archeohort. There were a few times where Brother Rafen offered observations, largely points of finesse where the blunt, unchained approach of the Flesh Tearers could benefit from the more aloof viewpoint of Blood Angel thinking; but as the meeting drew to a close, he saw a slow hunter’s smile forming on his commander’s lips, the mirror of it on the faces of the other Astartes.

  It was a good plan. It would work. And for the first time in what seemed like forever, the black mood that had gripped the Blood Angels on their return from the tau colony lifted a little. The distant call of battle was coming, and Turcio felt it in his hands as they itched to hold a weapon.

  At last, Rafen stepped up to the viewer table and stared into the depths of the image turning above it. “Let us find this Magos Minoris Matthun Zentennigan Eight-Iota Zellik,” he said carefully. “Let us find him and put him to the question.”

  Inside the boarding torpedo, the only light came from the sickly yellow-green glow of biolume sticks. Tethered to the pod’s support stanchions with lines of wire, they drifted back and forth like dull leaves caught in a breeze. Rafen’s occulobe implant had tightened the orbs of his eyes to allow him to see better in the near-darkness, but even so the interior was a landscape of greys and blocky shadows. He moved with care between the Space Marines in their acceleration webs, towards the bow. His enhanced hearing caught the peculiar low yowl that echoed into the capsule’s hull from the tethers outsid
e. Pulled like a lure on a line, the boarding torpedo moved in the shadow of the warship Gabriel, largely occluded by the vessel’s mass. The cables snaked back to the cruiser through open space, servitors working the reels at their far ends in careful coordination; the machine-helots puppeted the capsule, they shifted and tacked it as waterborne sailors might do the same to a sail, helping it to maintain all of the precious velocity it had accrued since they had entered the system.

  Rafen used a series of iron handholds welded to the inner hull, moving from ring to ring, hand over hand, drifting in the null gravity. Each ring had a rime of frost on it where ambient moisture in the air had chilled far below freezing, and every exhalation that escaped the Blood Angel’s mouth emerged in a puff of vapour. The biting cold gathered on his bare face, stiffening the flesh over his cheekbones and his chin. The craft’s internal heating mechanisms—in fact, practically all of the torpedo’s energy-dependent systems—were inoperative. It was all another facet of the ruse, to cloak the capsule in the cold of space to make it appear like any one of a million other pieces of frozen, lifeless debris. It was the only way they could chance to launch a boarding operation against Zellik’s Archeohort. Teleporters would not work; the construct was possessed of some kind of arcane dispersal field generator that would scramble any incoming matter signal into something unrecognisable. An approach towards any of the heavily defended airlocks, or docking bays bristling with autonomic guns, would be suicide. A forest of sensors turned mechanical eyes to all points of the aetheric compass. The only way in was the brute-force approach, and Rafen had seen the brief flash of relish in Noxx’s dead eyes at the thought of that.

  Arriving at the tapered prow of the capsule, Rafen pulled himself to one of the few windows in the torpedo’s hull, a circular porthole little bigger than his clenched fist. He brushed away a layer of ice crystals and peered out into the dark.

  What he saw there gave him pause. The Archeohort was rising above the bow of the Gabriel, and at last he understood the size of it. The construct was easily the mass of a city-sprawl, and the spider-like impression presented by the image viewer was cemented as he watched kilometre-long gantries cluster from the complex’s main core around the drifting remnants of a slab-sided space hulk. They were closing the distance to the Archeohort with every passing second, and as the thing loomed, Rafen picked out bright sparkles of hard light along the places where the gantries brushed the derelict’s hull.

  “Zellik’s savants are taking the wreck apart,” Noxx’s voice reached him. “Sifting it for anything of value.”

  Briefly, Rafen wondered after the origin of the hulk. The diminishing shape didn’t have the look of a warship about it. The craft had probably been some ancient colonial transport, perhaps set off from Terra before the Age of Strife in search of new frontiers and a better life. But now, whatever death had befallen it, the old ship was suffering a second ignoble ending as the Archeohort picked at its bones.

  He turned away from the port and found Noxx’s shadowed form in front of him. “This will be a challenge,” said the Flesh Tearer. “Zellik’s skitarii are trained in the use of exotic weapons. I’ll warrant we’ll get some exercise over there.”

  Rafen accepted this and tapped his fingers on the hilt of his sheathed power sword. “I imagine so.”

  Noxx studied him, and finally pointed to a circular design etched into one of his armour plates. “The Iron Halo. I had wondered if they would give you an honour for what you did at the sepulchre.”

  “I was told I had earned it. But I was only there at the end. Others fought as hard as I, in other places, at other times.”

  The other man’s flat, shallow smile flashed briefly in the gloom. “Such modesty. Only one as earnest as you could carry that off and not seem false with it.”

  Rafen’s jaw stiffened. “I speak what I feel. I do not play at humility.”

  “A commander never can,” came the reply. “And speaking of command. Before we are finally committed to this sortie, a point of protocol. We share the same rank, but one of us has to have the final word.”

  “And you think you should be the one?”

  “I am the senior battle-brother. It seems only proper.”

  “I may not have as many service studs in my brow as you, Noxx…” It was the Blood Angel’s turn to show a dry smile. “But this is my mission. Perhaps I should best you for the privilege?”

  “Hardly the place, don’t you think? And there’s no guarantee it would go in your favour, as it did last time.” Noxx inclined his head. “Very well, Rafen. I’ll defer to you. For the moment.”

  Around them, the torpedo shifted as the tethers were let out. “Not long now.” He looked around and found Brother Mohl, his helmet still sealed, seated at a vox console. If not for the occasional twitch of his head, or a tic of motion from his servo-arm, the Techmarine could have been an empty suit of power armour. Enclosed in there, Mohl was conversing with the Archeohort’s crew, laying the keel of the lie that would get them aboard. Rafen briefly switched to the comm-channel Mohl was using, but the strident noise in his ear bead made him wince. It was nothing but an atonal rattle of binary code.

  He switched out again and sub-vocalised into the general vox. “Brothers, be ready. Take your breaching stations.”

  Turcio bent over an inert control console and spoke a prayer of activation, his thumb resting on the activation rune. “On your command, sir,” he said.

  “Moment of truth,” rumbled Puluo.

  Rafen nodded, shrugging into his own restraint harness. Without the function of the mechanisms usually employed to maintain them, the disposition of the boarding torpedo’s short-range thrusters was unknown. He glanced at the chronometer on the bulkhead, marking off the elapsed mission time. The capsule would be coming around now, the tethers playing out to turn it into a shot from a sling. The thrusters were supposed to double that speed, to bring them in too fast for the Archeohort’s gunnery cogitators to react. If they failed to fire, the capsule would move slowly and the guns would mark their range in short order.

  The chronometer’s moving hand swept across the pinnacle of the clock face and Rafen dropped his hand like a blade.

  Turcio stabbed the rune. A second ticked by, then another. Already, the pull of acceleration was tugging on all of them as the boarding torpedo was released. “Perhaps—”

  The Blood Angel never finished the thought; instead a thundering roar sounded from the aft of the capsule, and every warrior aboard was forced into his harness as gravity fell hard upon them.

  Rafen struggled to spy through the small porthole, glimpsing only the shimmer of starlight off hull metal, but nothing he could define; then there were stark, silent lashes of colour blazing through the windows as lances of energy lit the void with their brilliance. Outside, the Gabriel’s shipmaster had deployed his guns and fired on the Mechanicus construct at point-blank range. The boarding torpedo sailed among the unleashed maelstrom, masked once more by the salvoes as it made its terminal approach.

  Mohl disconnected a mechadendrite from his helmet and spoke across the general vox channel. “Zellik broke contact,” he reported. “When the Gabriel refused to stand to and allow him to dispatch a lighter, he grew suspicious.”

  A near-hit made the torpedo rock and the hull moaned. “And that’s not all,” muttered Puluo.

  “The Archeohort has engaged the cruiser,” added the Techmarine.

  “Clearly,” said Noxx. “Now, if all goes to plan, the Tycho should be making its approach from the far side.” He glanced at Rafen. “If your shipmaster is as good as you say, then Zellik will be too busy dealing with a pair of Astartes cruisers to direct his attention towards us.”

  “Tycho will do its part,” said the sergeant.

  Noxx was about to add something, but then the torpedo found its mark and struck the Archeohort’s outer skin. With a resonant boom of metal on metal, the capsule made impact and began its work.

  As wolves would strike a bear, the two warsh
ips came close and circled the hulking Archeohort, making sweeping turns about the mass of the huge construct. Cannon fire, laser light and clouds of missiles flashed between the three combatants. The guns of Zellik’s scavenger machine were not sluggish—they threw out hard pulses of x-ray radiation that lashed at the Tycho and the Gabriel, the backscatter of the attacks throwing sheets of colour into the void like an auroral display.

  In return, the Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers cruisers gave their guns freedom to rake across the hull of the enemy. At this close a range, even a blind man could not have missed the target; but like the bear against the wolves, the Archeohort took the bites and claw-scratches, slow and heavy, returning with massive sweeps of fire that could crack hulls if they chanced a solid hit.

  Now free of the derelict hulk it had been feasting upon, the construct’s gantry-limbs began to coil inward, drawing to itself in a pattern of self-preservation.

  The entire forward quarter of the boarding torpedo was a massive brass drill, hardened with a molecule-thin layer of cultured diamond and a sentanium tip. Spinning at furious speed, it chewed through the outer layers of carbide plating on the Archeohort’s dorsal hull and ploughed inward. Tracks with spike-tipped teeth along the flank of the capsule pulled it through ripped splines of metal, plastic and wood, atmosphere and fluids outgassing around it into the vacuum. Great phlegmy boles of vac-sensitive gel vomited from pressurised canisters, racing to seal the breach made by the Astartes—and all too quickly the boarding torpedo’s forward momentum was arrested.

  Rafen was already tearing free of his restraints, his bolter in his hand. “Deploy, deploy!” he snarled. “Take the pace, brothers!”

  Another of Noxx’s Flesh Tearers was at the prow, and with a grunt of effort, he slammed down the heavy iron lever that released the drill mechanism. The conical bow splayed open into four segments, giving the Space Marines their exit. In quick, ordered lines, the two squads exited into Zellik’s craft. Puluo, Kayne and a pair of Flesh Tearers were the last aboard, and Rafen glanced back at them in time to see the pod shake. The gelatinous matter ringing the capsule bubbled and spat, writhing as if it were alive; and then the torpedo jolted backwards.