The order came too late. Mohl flung himself away as a sheet of metal dropped like a guillotine blade across the ruined entranceway, cutting off any means of escape. Immediately, the deck began to shift as a crack opened in the floor beneath their feet. The false consoles yawned open like mouths to accept the mannequins, folding away into hidden spaces like some clever theatre trick. Stanchions and supports contracted into themselves, every handhold slowly retracting as the angle of the floor became steeper with every passing moment.
A belch of hot, dry air vented into the chamber and Rafen caught sight of a harsh orange glow beneath them. A long tray of molten metal, perhaps a conveyer barge from the foundry modules of the Archeohort’s factorium, was sliding into place down there, ready to accept them when they lost their grip and fell.
As a trap, it was as elaborate and melodramatic as one might have expected from an arrogant Mechanicus tech-lord, and as Rafen looked up, he saw the ceiling overhead fold back to present a hanging gondola pod, and in it, behind glass and webs of brass, an adept and a bodyguard of skitarii. He saw no silver mask—it was not Zellik himself, then—but he could not miss the cluster of optical relays bristling from the bottom of the gondola. Wherever he was, the damned skulk was watching them inch towards death as if it were some kinema performance made for his amusement.
Boots scraping against the steepening floor, Rafen punched an armoured fist through the metal and made a temporary handhold for himself. He heard Puluo utter a curse as the Devastator Space Marine almost lost his grip before Noxx pulled him back.
They had moments before the strange folding room turned itself inside-out and deposited them all into the embrace of the molten iron. Even with their power armour, it would be questionable if the Space Marines could survive for more than a few seconds in such incredible temperatures.
“If we fall, he falls with us,” Rafen snarled, and with his free hand took aim at the gondola. His bolter crashed, and with it sounded shot and shell from his comrades as they joined in the attack. For a moment it seemed as if the defiant gesture would be in vain; but then the armoured glass webbed with fractures and splintered. Red and black fluid spurted through the shimmering air and a heavy tech-guard tumbled past them, falling soundlessly into the hot bath of liquid metal. The gondola began a desultory retreat along a dangling cable, but it was too late. By exposing themselves to watch the Space Marines die, the Mechanicus lackeys had placed themselves in the firing line.
With a stuttering wail of binary, the cloaked adept lost balance, stumbled into the air and fell, serpentine cyberlimbs whipping about, snatching at nothing.
Cursing the choice he was forced to make, Rafen let his precious bolter fall from his fingers to release his free hand. Extending as far as he dared, the Blood Angel lashed at the adept’s robes and grabbed a handful of them. He grunted as the additional weight strained his one handhold, but did not release.
Beneath him, his weapon spiralled away into the glowing, sluggish liquid, melting into a string of hard, concussive blasts as the ammunition exploded with the heat.
The adept twisted about and came to rest dangling from the Space Marine’s arm. He looked up, showing a face that was almost human; only his sapphire-blue augmetic eyes ruined the illusion. The Mechanicus tech-priest wore an expression of utter panic.
“That gun served me well,” Rafen snarled. “Give me a reason why I should not send you to fetch it back!”
The adept’s binary chatter warped and changed, becoming recognisable speech. “Zero zero zero no no no no,” he rattled. “Please no, zero, no! My orders… I did not—”
“Stop this death trap!” shouted the Blood Angel. “Or I swear you’ll perish screaming!”
“One one one yes yes yes!” The tech-priest stuttered out a reply, and from beneath his cloak came a viper’s nest of mechadendrites. Manipulator tips reached for the walls, probing, flipping open seamless panels that Rafen had not even known were there. The adept gave a clicking sigh, and at once the floor reversed its motion. The contracting panels and columns were arrested, then began to telescope once more. In moments, the chamber was resetting itself, returning to its original form.
Rafen stood up, still holding the tech-priest in his grip, as the metal wall behind him rose in stutters. Heavy impact marks had distended it where Ceris and the others had tried to break through.
The psyker advanced warily into the false room. “Lord?” he asked, the question in his hard eyes.
The sergeant did not answer; instead he drew his power sword from the scabbard across his backpack and pressed the glowing blade to his prisoner’s chest. “Where is Matthun Zellik?” he demanded.
The adept gulped air. Blood and oil dripped from his dangling limbs, pooling on the deck. “Understand, Astartes, I could not stop him.”
“I did not ask you for an excuse,” Rafen growled. “You came to capture the moments of our deaths for your master’s pleasure. You have already forfeit your life to me. Answer, and it will end quickly.”
Noxx took a menacing step closer to the struggling tech-priest. “More than he deserves,” snarled the Flesh Tearer. “Give him to me, cousin. I’ll make him speak.” The other sergeant drew his flaying knife, the wicked barbs along one edge glinting.
“I do not know where he is!” shouted the terrified adept. “I, Logis Goel Beslian, swear on my oath to the Omnissiah that I do not know! Zellik’s sanctum cube is in constant motion throughout the mechanism of the Archeohort. You cannot find him unless he wants you to!”
Rafen’s lips thinned. “Then, my esteemed Logis Beslian, you have no more value to us.” He turned the sword to present the tip to the adept’s sternum.
“I can bring him to you!” Beslian bellowed at the top of his voice, the grating words filtering through a collar of speaker globes at his neck. “Spare me and I will aid you!” The adept cast around, perhaps hoping to find a forgiving countenance among all the Astartes. He found nothing but cold anger.
With a sneer of disgust, Rafen released his grip on the prisoner and let him drop at the feet of one of Noxx’s warriors, a sanguinary cleric named Gast. “Keep this wretch breathing,” he ordered.
He stalked away, kneading the grip of his blade in annoyance at being forced to defer the kill. Noxx came to him.
“You believe this creature’s lies?”
“If you have a better suggestion, I would hear it, cousin.” Rafen gave him a sideways look. “This construct is like some vast logic puzzle… It confounded your brother Mohl as it confounds the rest of us.”
“I suspect a trap,” Noxx insisted. “I always do. It’s how I’ve managed to live so long.”
“And yet you entered the false chamber first.”
The Flesh Tearer gave a nod. “True. But the best way to break a trap is to trip it.”
Rafen returned the nod. “Then we shall do so. I will not waste time on this strutting Mechanicus fool Zellik when our real prey is still beyond our reach.”
FOUR
Clicking and gasping, Beslian led the wary Astartes to a wide conveyor module that swiftly carried them up several levels of the Archeohort’s shifting interior. Gast had bound the wounds the adept had taken from shrapnel hits, but not too well. Noxx wanted the tech-priest to suffer, and Rafen saw no reason to countermand the Flesh Tearer’s order.
Techmarine Mohl positioned himself like a watchful hawk at Beslian’s side, scrutinising the adept for any sign of obvious perfidy. Mohl’s bolter was at a constant ready; if Beslian thought to cross them, he might conceivably act before a line Space Marine could follow what he was doing—but not Mohl. The quiet, precise warrior would kill the adept where he stood, and Beslian clearly knew it.
The conveyor arrived at a domed space somewhere near the top of the construct. A host of armed gun-servitors were there to meet them, but they had barely a moment to react before Beslian sang a binary code string that put them all into a stupor. Their weapons drooped to the deck and their heads lolled; whatever the adept had do
ne, it robbed the machine-helots of all intent and motion.
The Space Marines deployed in a combat wheel, as Rafen took stock of the antechamber they stood in. Ahead, high glass doors patterned with gold etching like the tracks of a circuit board promised more beyond. Artificial light, tuned to resemble the ruddy hue of a Martian day, flowed from hidden lume arrays past the dome proper.
Rafen gestured to Noxx, indicating the somnolent gun-servitors. “Brother-Sergeant, if you would?”
Noxx drew his knife once more and gave a curt nod. “Just so.” He summoned a couple of kinsmen to assist him, and with quick, brutal actions, they moved among the silent helots, killing them one by one with vicious, slashing blows that tore open throats and veins. Rafen saw Kayne grimace and look away.
Beslian made a moaning sound. “Astartes, there is no need to do that! They are in quietus! They can do you no harm!”
“So noted,” said Rafen, without interrupting Noxx’s execution detail. “Now tell me. Have you brought us to Zellik?”
“The next best thing,” said the adept. “Behold…”
Beslian was breathless as he worked a spinning orb-lock on the end of a gimballed armature and, with the correct manipulation, the glass doors answered with a shudder of hidden workings. The entranceway slid back and the adept moved in on hissing piston-legs, his flat iron hooves clattering against a floor made of polished marble. Mohl followed, aiming his gun at Beslian’s spine.
Rafen led the rest of the unit inside, and what he saw brought a tic of frustration to his lips. He had expected some sort of inner sanctum, perhaps the kind of opulent quarters a man who fancied himself superior might have—but not this.
There were perfect lines of glass cases ordered in row after row, most of a uniform size, the odd one here or there much larger so as to accommodate… what?
He peered at the cabinet closest to him and saw on pads of velvet, a dozen golden bowls, each the width of his spread hand, each with a regular circuit-pattern etched across them. They wore the tarnish of heavy age, but he made out a shimmer as the light caught them, tiny captured rainbows crawling across their surfaces. Looking still closer, he made out the glow of a stasis field screen enveloping the objects, and there in the corner of the case was a small data-slate. He tapped it and text appeared, but the words meant nothing to him.
“Those are precursor relics,” Beslian hissed from across the hall. “Tens of thousands of years old, made on Terra before humans left their birth world.”
Understanding came to him then. He turned around and felt a kick of revulsion as he saw something he certainly did recognise; the severed skull and forearm of a necron warrior, corroded and age-worn, but still horribly distinctive. Other cases contained unintelligible bits of machinery, things that might have been human-made in eras beyond Rafen’s reckoning. Some held objects that could only be weapons, his warrior’s intuition immediately picking out shapes that suggested caged lethality. “A museum,” said Puluo.
Mohl gave a slow nod. “Zellik is a collector. These are his prizes.”
Ajir sneered. “We did not come aboard this monstrosity to plunder it! These… relics are meaningless to our quest!”
Beslian gave a clicking gasp, exasperated. “You do not understand. This is the Magos’ relical! What you see here are artefacts beyond value, they are his greatest trophies! He values them more than a parent would their children.”
Rafen nodded, a plan forming in his thoughts. “Then let us get his attention.” The Blood Angel strode back to the case containing the bowls, and with a sweep of his sword he cut the cabinet open, ripping through the stasis generator. The ancient objects were touched by the air of the outside world for what might have been the first time in recorded history; they rapidly discoloured, puckered and crumbled into particles of sparkling dust. Distantly, the Astartes registered the sound of a discordant alarm.
Beslian let out a screech and made an ill-advised motion towards the sergeant. His action was immediately arrested by the pressure of Mohl’s bolter in the back of his neck.
Rafen destroyed the necron relics next, and allowed himself a grin at that; then another case, and another, precious bits of silicon and chromium-steel dashed to fragments that he ground into powder beneath his boots. Rafen did not once look upward, to the roosts he had noted upon entering the domed chamber, where doubtless more of Zellik’s monitor birds were nesting.
Beslian was making a gibbering sound, halfway between a clock-tick and a sob. He held out his hands in entreaty.
Rafen glared back at him. “You brought us here, adept. What did you expect us to do?” He glanced around at the other Space Marines. “All of you,” he called, his voice rebounding from the dome. “Take your weapons. Destroy everything in this room. Leave nothing intact.”
“NO!” The cry vibrated the air around them, and Rafen could not help but smile a little at it. A hololithic mist formed before them, the chrome face and the suggestion of a rust-red hood growing more distinct by the second. “Savages!” it cried, “Base fiends, animals! You have no understanding of the riches you trample upon! Every item in this chamber is a rarity, worth more than your lives a thousand times over!”
“Such a pity, then,” Rafen replied, swinging the sword again to cleave open an odd fluted thing that resembled a musical instrument.
Zellik cried out through the holo-image with such pain in his voice, that for a moment Rafen wondered if the tech-lord was somehow physically connected to the objects in the room. The Magos’ ire turned on his adept. “Beslian, you cur! After all that I gave you, and this is how you repay me? You betray the Omnissiah to these Astartes thugs?”
The adept shook his head. “I… I warned you to stop, Matthun. I told you one day the Emperor’s warriors would come looking for us. You said I was wrong, but I computed this long ago!” Beslian stood and shook a steel fist at the hololith. “I will not be dragged down with you! You think you can defy Mars and Terra forever? How many logs have you falsified? How many lies have you told to our masters?” He shivered, clearly the effort of this new defiance hard upon his bent back. “No longer! I will not be a party to it!”
Zellik’s metallic face was a mix of anger and dismay. “I trusted you!” he snarled.
Rafen aimed his sword at the ghostly image, taking charge of the situation once more. “Magos Zellik. I care nothing for your toys and the falsehoods you tell your lords on Mars. But I will take this construct apart piece by piece until I find you, and I will commence by obliterating this gallery of relics… unless you are willing to submit to us.”
The Magos sneered. “You threaten me? I will rip your ships apart! Every gun-servitor in the Archeohort is converging on your location…” He trailed off as Rafen walked towards a particular artefact displayed inside a cylindrical cabinet. “What are you doing?” Zellik demanded, his panic rising.
There, hovering in mid air, floating on suspensors, was a nested set of turning rings, each one etched with tiny script, all of them constantly moving about one another. The device, whatever it was, gave the impression of incredible delicacy, as if it were made from spun glass. With languid care, Rafen drew back his power sword to the top of its sweep.
“Stop!” cried Zellik. “Stop! Stop! No more! I beg you, no more!” He gasped. “That object is millions of years old. It is the last of its kind in existence. Please, I beseech you, do not destroy it!”
Rafen held the sword up. “You have only to surrender to me and I will do nothing more.”
Zellik’s face faded away, and with it his defeated words hummed in the air. “Very well.”
The Archeohort was theirs. As battles went, it had been a comparatively bloodless one, but then Rafen recalled the doctrines drilled into him by his late mentor, Brother Koris. The old warhound had often reminded him that the victory taken with guile and not gunfire was all the sweeter—but by the same token a warrior was right to take care that such a victory did not dull the need to remain watchful.
The sergean
t stood in a cloistered corridor on the outer face of Zellik’s construct-ship; an enclosed highway for pneu-cars ranged away in both directions, lit by glow-globes and the illumination from the void, via hexagonal windows the size of a Land Raider. Grim-faced, he watched as motes of light swarmed around the massive chain tethering the Tycho to the Archeohort, a squadron of vacuum-resistant Mechanicus drone-helots burning through the links with beam-cutters. In the silence, he saw the chain shatter and fragment, the line of the lethal harpoon severed at last. Out of sight, on the other side of the Archeohort, another army of drones were doing the same to the Gabriel. The forward flight of Zellik’s ship had been arrested before a warp gate could be opened, and now adrift in open space, the tech-lord’s legions of servitors had been turned to the business of repairing the damage he had inflicted upon the Astartes cruisers.
Zellik had come to them as if he were still in command, ringed by a phalanx of his best tech-guards. Every one of the skitarii had been armed with weapons of arcane origin—laser fans, ornate bolt carbines, icefire guns capable of projecting streams of freezing flame, sonic mutes—and every one of them was killed before they could fire a shot. Noxx led his Flesh Tearers in their abrupt, fierce murders, taking the balance of the cost incurred by the earlier death of his luckless battle-brother and the Gabriel crewmen lost to the harpoon hit.
The tech-priest remained untouched by even the smallest splash of spilled blood or lubricant, standing all ashudder amid the carnage. Zellik was elsewhere now, in a bare storage chamber the Astartes had swiftly repurposed as a holding cell. Rafen ordered the Flesh Tearers Apothecary-Cleric Gast to attend to the Magos, using his tools to perform a surgery on Zellik that cut out the tech-priest’s wireless machine-vox implant. Zellik’s screams had taken on a strange tone, like the groaning of deck plates twisted out of shape by gravitic stressing. He would not speak to his ship or his minions again unless the Adeptus Astartes permitted it.
Black Tide Page 8