Black Tide

by James Swallow

  Noxx shook his head. “Mohl would have known. He would have warned us.”

  “It doesn’t matter how,” Rafen broke in. “All that matters is that we deal with this quickly.” Off Turcio’s nod, he gestured at the gangway. “Gather the brothers, begin a sweep of the ship from bow to stern.”

  The Blood Angel nodded and moved past them to carry out the order, while Rafen entered the infirmary. Noxx hovered at the hatchway, brooding.

  Inside the compartment, beneath the glow of a lume array, Brother Gast was busy inside the torso of the tech-priest. He had removed his gauntlets and vambraces, and thick, oily blood marked his hands where he worked in Beslian’s wounds. Assisting him, a wiry machine-slave wearing a leather smock deployed a small laser quill, and it buzzed and sizzled as the helot used it to seal veins, wires and conduits.

  Beslian himself had all the cast of a corpse, a piece of battlefield detritus. If not for the festoons of wires connecting him to the glass-dialled monitor frame above his pallet, and the slow chime of a life sensor, Rafen would have thought him long dead. He watched the Apothecary-Cleric’s labour for a moment; on some detached, distant level, he was intrigued by the sight of the adept’s internals. The warrior had always wondered what kind of heart beat inside the shrunken chest of these cogs.

  On another nearby pallet, shrouded by a support collar, the heavy form of Brother Sove lay unmoving. The injured Flesh Tearer’s breaths came in a low, rasping rhythm. Rafen spared him a brief look. The warrior was in a healing trance, the engines of his Astartes implants working to repair him. Sove seemed oddly disproportioned, however, with one entire limb missing from his body.

  Gast applied a dermal stapler and a vac-tube of morphic glue to the incision in Beslian’s side, and began to close him up. Without turning, he spoke to the other Astartes. “The adept is lucky to be alive. Turcio found him before his bio-implants completely shut down from the physical shock. Blood loss was great. I doubt he will come to consciousness for several hours yet. There were many incisions across the torso, from more than one weapon.” He pointed out weeping, bloody lesions and areas of heavy tissue damage. “Blunt trauma about the head and neck. Multiple planes of attack.”

  “You are suggesting there was more than one assailant?” said Noxx.

  Gast’s head bobbed. “Not a suggestion, brother-sergeant, but a statement of fact. And these were persons of reasonable strength, too. The violence behind these wounds was done in frenzy, with speed. Not, however, with much skill.”

  “If it were an Astartes who did this, Beslian would have been killed with a single blow,” mused Rafen. “Quickly and economically.” He pointed at the adept’s throat, considering how he would have done such a thing. “A sharp, crushing blow there. Or perhaps a blade into the braincase.”

  “As I stated, the attack was inexpert,” continued Gast. “Beslian survived it, for one thing.”

  “Then we have a witness, after all,” said Rafen. “Was there any neural damage to him?”

  Gast moved away, letting the servitor finish the work of closing up his patient. He cleaned his hands with a sanctified cloth. “Difficult to be certain. My learning stretches to battlefield medicine and the calling of the sanguinary priesthood, but no further.”

  Rafen leaned in, studying the ashen face of the injured adept. “Wake him.”

  “Sir?” Gast stopped, and threw a questioning glance towards Noxx. “Perhaps I was unclear about Beslian’s physical state—”

  “You were clear enough,” said Rafen. “Now wake him.”

  The servitor stepped away and slouched into a standby stance, its task completed. Gast reached for a narthecia pack and hesitated. “If I do this, you understand it could end his life?”

  “If there are intruders aboard this craft, that could end all our lives,” said Noxx. “Do as the Blood Angel says.”

  “As you wish.” Gast adjusted an injector tubule, drawing a measure of fluid into it. He paused over a nozzle visible in the meat of Beslian’s neck. “I would marshal your questions now, lords,” he told them. “The adept may not be coherent… or alive… for long.”

  The tubule hissed; the effect was almost instant.

  Beslian’s body went rigid, the mechadendrites and servo-arm sprouting from his spine flexing and whipping at the air. His back arched and he went into a harsh spasm, releasing a sound somewhere between a screech and a sob. The adept’s eyes opened and fixed on Rafen. He began to prattle in machine code, the chattering noise rising with his panic.

  “Logis!” Rafen snapped, demanding Beslian’s attention. “Who attacked you? Tell me!”

  The adept tried to speak and raised a hand. A whirring noise issued from his lips. The sound wavered and changed; it was like listening to a vox open to a dead channel, the winds of static slowly giving way to the certainty of a comm-broadcast. From the rambling babble, Rafen caught a single clear word and his eyes narrowed.

  “Zellik!”

  Gast heard it too, and turned to the Blood Angel. “The Magos? He died in space. Perhaps the adept’s mind was damaged after all…”

  Beslian was shaking, rocking back and forth. “Zellik wants to kill me!” The words were heavy with distortion, warped and barely articulate. “All of him! Revenge! Revenge—”

  The tech-priest’s writhing head slumped as he spoke, and for the first time it tilted towards the quiescent servitor standing by the monitor frame. Beslian’s mouth opened wide, wider than any normal jaw should have allowed, and from his lips came a siren wail.

  It happened so quickly that the motion was a blur; the servitor twitched once and launched itself at the Mechanicus adept. One hand, not a thing of flesh and blood but a medicae tool with scalpel fingers and jointed probes, stabbed out and plunged into Beslian’s eyes. Steel digits buried themselves to the knuckle in his skull and tore.

  Rafen reacted, lashing out with a punch at full force. The blow from his mailed fist stuck the murderous servitor in the base of the spine, where a set of iron piston-legs joined the nub of a human pelvic bone. Fluids jetted and the machine-slave fell to the deck. The shock of the impact seemed lost on it, however; it still scrambled towards the adept, fingers wet with optic jelly clawing desperately to inflict more damage.

  He heard the helot mutter something as it fell. It sounded like the word “traitor”. With a growl, he raised his boot and stamped the servitor’s throat into the deck plate.

  The attack had taken only seconds, but the sudden silence from the life sensor made it clear enough damage had been done. Rafen’s face twisted in a grimace as Beslian’s head lolled back, showing bloody, empty eye sockets.

  “It appears you were correct,” said Gast, after a moment.

  “It appears we were both correct,” Rafen replied.

  Noxx crouched and turned over the corpse of the servitor. “This was our attacker? Or one of them, at least?”

  Gast shook his head. “Not possible. That machine-slave is tether-tagged to the infirmary chamber. Its programming prevents it from leaving this compartment.”

  “He said Zellik.” Rafen studied the dead man, thinking. “Zellik wanted revenge.”

  “Matthun Zellik is dead,” insisted Noxx. “I am as certain of that as if I put an end to him myself.”

  Rafen glared at the helot. “There is dead, and then there is dead.” Inwardly, he chided himself; the warrior had not even thought to consider a machine-slave as a potential assailant.

  The mindless servitors could barely be described as human. For the most part they were done-stock, gene-formed replicae spawned in growth tanks beneath the mountains of Mars, or else the bodies of felons and heretics given over to the Cult Mechanicus for repurposing. Wired with implants, bionics, data-spools and tool pods, whatever scraps of a persona might exist in them were ruthlessly expunged by stringent rituals of conditioning. Some were programmed for combat operations, some for computing tasks in tandem with cogitators, but the helots aboard the Neimos were not nearly so advanced. They were technomats,
capable of performing set regimens of duties and little else. They had no sentience, no more will of their own than a boltgun or an auspex.

  At least, that was what Rafen had believed. “The Magos reaches out from his grave,” said the Blood Angel. “He hated Beslian for his part in our capture of the Archeohort. The servitors are the tools of his vengeance.”

  “How is that possible?” said Gast.

  “If the helots did this, then we must cull them,” added Noxx. “We do not have one enemy aboard, we have a dozen!”

  Rafen shot him a look. “And how will we pilot this vessel without the servitors, cousin? How will we run its reactors, keep its machine-spirit in check?”

  Gast gathered up the dead servitor and placed it on a work table. “I do not understand. One helot, perhaps, prepared by Zellik for just such an occurrence, I could accept. But all of them?”

  Rafen thought of something that Mohl had mentioned on the command deck of the Archeohort. “Or more than that. An… infection.”

  “A viral meme?” Gast’s brow furrowed.

  “Cut that thing open and find us some answers,” demanded Noxx.

  The cleric nodded once, and reached for a bone saw.

  Crossing an abyssal trench, the Neimos’ forward velocity slowed a degree as the ocean exerted tidal force across the plane of the submersible’s course. Working to return the craft to its pre-programmed heading, small thruster modules hidden beneath anti-cavitation cowls came to life, nudging the vessel through the field of cross-currents.

  Hiding in the thin lines of wake bubbles, the tyranid flattened its body into a planar shape, settling into the same pattern of motion. The sensor array on the tip of the Neimos’ X-fin tail planes relayed a tiny return, twitching a needle on a gauge before the dull gaze of a tethered crew helot.

  The servitor blinked and the datum did not register; behind those dead eyes, another process took place, as a very different kind of killer stalked the vessel.

  “Let me see if I can fathom this,” said Ajir, with scorn in his voice. “We are hunting a killer hiding in the hollows of this hulk, sent by a man who was flashed to ashes as the Archeohort burned up on re-entry. A dead traitor whose cogs and gears are still raining down on this light-forsaken planet.”

  “You seem to have the measure of it,” muttered Puluo.

  Ceris watched Ajir rock off the curved wall of the cargo bay and stalk across the space that served as their makeshift arming chamber. “Does the brother-sergeant think we do not have enough impossible tasks already?”

  The psyker sensed a tic of annoyance in the aura of Turcio, who stood close by, examining a fan of tools in his hand. “Would you rather we did nothing and risk the same fate as Beslian?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Ajir replied. “I can kill any servitor who tries to end me without a moment’s thought.”

  Eigen, the lone Flesh Tearer in the room, was staring at the floor, deep in thought. “Not if that servitor unlocks the reactor’s machine-spirit, or sends this ship past its crush depth.”

  “He’s right,” said Turcio. “This isn’t a problem we can solve with a bolt round.”

  Ajir’s eyes flashed, but he held his tongue. Ceris had sensed the fractious relationship between the two warriors under Rafen’s command from the moment he had joined the squad. Turcio openly wore a penitent brand on his cheek, the mark burned into his skin in recognition of the rites of purification he had endured. The warrior had been one of those who followed the false angel Arkio, only to repent at the revelation of his pretence and return to the fold. A second mark, one only visible to someone with the witch-sight, coloured Turcio’s aura—regret. The colour of the emotion marbled everything about him; even though Lord Dante himself had forgiven the transgression of the Blood Angels misled by Arkio, Turcio had not forgiven himself. Ajir, whose aura rarely strayed from the crimson tinge of fury, seemed to think it was his avowed purpose to remind Turcio of his penitent status at every juncture.

  Ceris wondered why Ajir could not look past the brand. He sensed something there about the other Astartes, but far enough below the surface that he could not read it.

  He put the matter aside as Kayne opened the hatch and stepped aside to allow Sergeant Rafen to enter with Noxx and Gast. The young Blood Angel stood astride the entrance, cradling his bolter. Puluo had ordered it so—it seemed prudent, given recent events aboard the Neimos.

  Rafen wasted no time with preamble. “Logis Beslian is dead.” He explained what had transpired in the infirmary with the medicae servitor.

  Eigen frowned. “If the machine-slave wanted to kill him, why did it not do the deed the moment Turcio brought him to the sickbay? It must have had the opportunity.”

  Gast nodded. “It only attacked after Beslian was awakened. After he mentioned Zellik’s name.”

  “A trigger word,” said Puluo. “Hypnogoge assassins use the same technique to activate a servile.”

  “It’s more than that.” Rafen glanced at Noxx. “Show them.”

  The Flesh Tearer veteran had a bloodstained cloth in his hand, and with a gesture of disgust that twisted his scarred face, he unfolded it to reveal a faceted gemstone, a long emerald droplet webbed with fine golden threads. Ceris could make out a line of green glyphs along the surface of the object; something about the hue and the way it reflected light made him immediately erect his mental barriers.

  “What is it?” said Noxx.

  “Xenos,” added Rafen, with dour certainty.

  “This object was buried in the base of the medicae servitor’s cerebellum,” Gast explained, “and the wires you see emerging from it were laced into elements of the helot’s organic brain.”

  Eigen grimaced at the gemstone. “A control device?”

  Rafen nodded. “Or something of the like.”

  “We know the Inquisition suspected Zellik of trading in alien materials. This, and what we saw in his museum, is confirmation.” Noxx held the gem as if he could barely stop himself from crushing it to powder.

  Ceris came closer. The bauble was drawing him to it. He had to get a better look, see it more clearly.

  Behind him, Turcio showed the tools in his hand. “Blood traces on these implements, lord. I took them from a trio of servitors in the reactor control chamber where I found Beslian.”

  “We should open the skulls of those three,” snapped Ajir. “No doubt we’ll find the same foul implant in them as well.”

  “It’s worse than that,” said Rafen. “I asked Brother Gast to conduct an auspex scan of a random pick of servitors.”

  “Once I knew what I was looking for, I found them easily.” Gast gave a heavy sigh. “Brothers, cousins. Every machine-slave aboard the Neimos carries one of these jewels inside their skull. I suspect that Zellik implanted his entire helot crew with them.”

  “We kill the crew—assuming one of them doesn’t scuttle the ship before we can end them all—and we’re dead in the water.” Noxx outlined the hard reality of the situation. “We let them live, and there’s no way to be sure that they won’t turn on us at a moment’s notice.”

  “We can’t trust any of them,” Turcio was saying, but Ceris’ attention was elsewhere. He was reaching for the stone. He could feel the sense of it, even through his gauntlet. A strange cold heat, like the heart of a dead star.

  “Let me see,” he said, and before Noxx could stop him, he took the xenos gem from the other man’s palm.

  It sang to him; and it was not a pleasing melody.

  A shouting, atonal chorus beat at Ceris’ psionic senses. There were a hundred voices, and they were all one voice. All drowned in rage and pain and heart-stopping terror. All mad with the need for vengeance. All of them Matthun Zellik.

  It was as if Ceris stood in a hall of broken mirrors, but in every shattered reflection he saw the Magos’ scowling, screaming, weeping face. He could feel a piece of the man’s soul, a shard of his mind and spirit enclosed in this tiny sliver of gemstone. The psyker steeled himself and dared to probe dee
per, peeling back layers of the device.

  Within its indigo depths he saw lines of quantum connectivity stabbing out in all directions, each ending in another gem buried in another mind. And dimly, he perceived the web that meshed the implants into one enclosed system. Reaching out, he felt his psy-senses rebound off walls of alien symbology, preventing him from seeing more. Ceris felt the edges of a broken, furious mind out in the web-mesh, moving from point to point, and he knew its name.

  “Zellik!” The psyker choked out the word and recoiled from the gemstone as if it had bitten him.

  “You looked into it…” said Noxx. “What did you see, witch-kin?”

  Rafen came to the Codicier’s side and spared him a measuring look. “That was foolish, brother. That thing could have burned out your soul!”

  Ceris shook his head, colour returning to his cheeks. “I… felt compelled. It was the right thing to do.” He glanced around at the other warriors. “Zellik is dead, of that you may be certain, but he is still plaguing us.” The psyker pointed at the implant gem. “This is, as Sergeant Rafen said, of alien origin. A psi device, capable of storing part of a living consciousness.”

  Eigen’s expression was incredulous. “You’re saying that Zellik somehow… copied himself into a machine-slave?”

  “Not one,” said Ceris, “all of them. He splintered his mind and spread it out among them, parsed like the chapters of a book.” He paused, thinking. “Perhaps, with enough intact elements, he might have been able to reconstitute his psyche at a later time… and cheat death.”

  “If Zellik’s mind controls these servitors, then why are we still alive?” demanded Kayne, shooting a tense glance over his shoulder into the corridor.

  “It’s not control,” said Ceris. “He did this as a desperate act. There are only fragments of him left, perhaps enough to draw together briefly, but not enough to fully manifest.”

  “Not yet,” said Puluo.

  Rafen’s lips thinned. “If Zellik exists in these… fragments… then perhaps we can expunge him, erase him like a toxic data-meme.”