Black Tide

by James Swallow

  He was at the twitching flanks of the tyranid monster, and the sea-beast’s thick cilia lashed out at him like a storm made of lashes. The plasma gun in its holster for the moment, he concentrated on batting the attack away with the furious blade of his power sword, parrying and slashing at the nest of probing limbs, turning them to ribbons of pasty meat. Vibrations from the kraken’s throat canal rumbled out to him, the sound of the alien’s pain drawing a wolfish grin across his lips.

  A sickle-sharp talon hummed through the water, on a downward arc that would have punched through his helmet and through into his chest had he not shifted at the last moment. In the bubbling wake of the attack, he felt a hard tug on his waist that threatened to pull him off-balance, and the warrior staggered against it. Suddenly the drag vanished and he stumbled back across the hull plates, his boots clanking. Something long and ragged spun past in the corner of his vision and he snatched at it. His glove briefly closed around a frond of severed cable, the end splayed open and frayed; his tether.

  “No matter,” he said aloud, and threw the broken cable away.

  The creature moved, the length of it sliding past him. He spied a place where Puluo’s bolt salvos had carved out a divot of armoured hide, and beneath Rafen saw pallid flesh. Without a moment’s hesitation, the Blood Angel pushed in with a heavy upward slash, cutting deep into the kraken. Even as the monster bellowed in pain, Rafen tore a hull-cutter from his belt and jammed the device into the slippery open wound.

  The kraken rolled and writhed, still turning. A concussion echoed, and a huge sphere of red-black foam blossomed above Rafen’s head. The hydrostatic shock buffeted him, but he weathered it, reaching to unlimber the plasma gun once again.

  The monster recoiled, the upper length of its body rising off the hull, its massive tentacles starting to uncoil.

  For the first time, Rafen saw the mouth of the tyranid fiend, a black chasm ringed with hundreds of rapierlike tusks that flexed and clattered against one another. Streamers of blubber and meat-matter were clogged in its multiple gumlines, the remnants of its last meal. The behemoth loomed in the twin pools of light cast by his helmet lamps, and suddenly the dark death-tunnel was expanding to fill his vision. It could consume him whole in a single snap of those gargantuan jaw-parts, swallow him down into its gullet where virulent acids and grinding bone would break the Space Marine apart.

  An armoured plate as large as the hatch on a Rhino slid up off the flank of the kraken as it fell at him; behind it Rafen saw a glassy lens and a single eye filled with hateful alien menace.

  In the space between the beats of his hearts he understood; it wanted to see him. The xenos wanted to watch as it chewed into the man-prey that had dared to defy it.

  “Not today,” he told the beast, raising the plasma gun.

  The weapon discharged with a thundering gurgle of superheated fluids; the seawater around the muzzle was instantly turned into fat orbs of gas as the plasma stream speared out and blinded the kraken’s eye.

  A hot backwash of xenos blood and boiling liquid flooded over Rafen, followed by a moaning scream so deep in the subsonic range, it made his bones vibrate and his gut twist. Mad with new agony, the tyranid reflexively released its hold upon the Neimos and became a spinning nest of flailing tentacles and talon-limbs. Angled claws and fanged feelers stabbed and lashed at nothing.

  Rafen heard someone call out; it sounded like Puluo, the dour warhound’s stern, hard voice cracking in his ears, warning him.

  It was not enough. A tentacle as thick as a Thunderhawk hull struck Rafen on the backswing as the kraken retreated. The impact broke ceramite, smashed seals and fractured bone.

  The Blood Angel knew pain, the impact of a god-hammer slamming into his spine, crushing the systems inside his backpack. Agony lit wheels of colour and flares of light behind his eyes, robbing him of the breath in his lungs.

  He tasted the heavy copper of blood in his mouth, felt the blades of broken ribs clawing at his chest. Then he realised he could no longer feel the hull beneath his feet. He could not see, thick fluids gumming shut his eyes. He was falling, tumbling.

  Rafen tried to summon the strength to speak, but he could utter no words. The effort was immense, and it forced him to a rumbling dark nothingness, where light could not follow.

  Noxx sprinted to the corridor outside the infirmary, and he was immediately assailed by the stench of stale seawater. Washes of the tainted liquid sloshed around his boots, draining away through the gridded deck plates. He saw Puluo, the Blood Angel resting heavily against one wall with his helmet off. He was breathing hard, glaring at the floor.

  “Eigen?” said the Flesh Tearer.

  “He lives.” The dark-skinned Astartes called Ajir approached, his lank black curls spilling out over his neck ring. “Thank the Throne.”

  Noxx glanced at Puluo. “Zellik is no more. You drove off the creature?”

  The warrior gave a nod. “Aye. At a cost.”

  The sergeant took a breath, glancing around. “Rafen…”

  Puluo nodded grimly. “Beastie took him. Saw it happen. Tore the lad right off the deck, threw him into the murk. Gone.”

  “He does not answer the vox,” said Ajir quietly. “Auspex read is null. In those currents out there, even if the cursed xenos didn’t devour him…” The Blood Angel trailed off, his gaze turning inward.

  They were silent for a long moment. Noxx glared at the deck, examining the sudden kernel of regret the he felt in his chest. Another brother lost… “Damn this duty,” he muttered.

  When he looked up, Noxx found Puluo and Ajir watching him intently. “Command of the mission now falls to you, lord,” said the Devastator Space Marine. “What are your orders?”

  Noxx told them.

  NINE

  Time was broken and bleeding; it had that in common with Rafen.

  He was aware of the passage of moments, not in a linear manner, but in fits and starts that lanced into his thoughts. Each elapse was a jagged shard of pain and awareness piercing the blood-warm veil that had engulfed him.

  His body was feverish with heat, the outward manifestation of his enhanced Astartes physiology as it worked to repair him. Bones were knitting, fluids clotting and wounds drawing closed all over his body, but Rafen’s mind struggled to hold on to any sense of it.

  Dislocated from the real world, he bobbed upon the turbulent surface of consciousness like a cork, dropping into the troughs of towering waves and vanishing into the black depths. Now and then he would surface, become aware, only to sink back again.

  He tried to draw the pieces together into some kind of cogent chain of events.

  The spindrift fall through the dark abyss of the waves; yes, that had happened to him. In the moments after the pain of the kraken’s parting attack, he had been lost. The agony of the impact, so great and so breathtaking, seemed a distant thing to him now. How quickly the flesh forgets, he thought.

  Breaking the surface; that too was real… wasn’t it? His helmet filled with oily seawater, cradled in the leeward surge of a low, fast breaker. The battle armour’s simple machine-spirit reacting, trying to keep him alive. The icy cold at his back from the broken cryo-pods of the microfusion reactor. The shapes of the mud-coloured wave tops ranging away beneath a rusty, weeping sky. Something out there in the distance, regular in shape, glittering dully. Rescue? He dared not hold on to the ideal, for fear it would disintegrate in his thoughts.

  The little creatures in the water; eel-like things with bony plates across their heads like arrow tips. Probing at him, looking for new wounds in his armour. Tyranid things, yes. The biomechanical striations clear as he grabbed one and crushed it in his armoured fingers. Some phylum of refuse-consuming animal, perhaps, seeing the Blood Angel as little more than organic mass in need of denaturing.

  The dark waters again. Fathomless deeps, burning with blood, thundering with the sound of life. Was that real? Did that exist outside his skull, or was it a torpid fever-dream?

  Fingers fi
nding the chains around his wrists, the lanyards trailing to his weapons. The gun and the sword not lost to him. A flash of elation. Good. The looming abyss of this alien ocean was denied his weapons. To perish unarmed seemed somehow wrong, as if meeting the veil of death stripped bare and weak.

  The shape again, coming closer. Shadows framed against dimming clouds. A ship? A tall, blade-sharp prow. The heavy, rotting scent of tyranid pheromones, a haze of foetid mist descending. The air greasy and acid.

  Dark and light. Dark and light. Dark…

  The light—

  The blunt, brutish lines of the patrol craft rode high in the sluggish swell, solar vanes creaking in the constant wind. Searingly bright illumination from questing spotlamps turned the waters around the drifting body into lines of stark, jumping shadows. The crimson-armoured figure stood out like a livid brand, and in moments webber guns had been deployed, projecting nets of sticky matter out into the sea. The figure made weak attempts to push away, but to no avail. The mesh of cultured biofibres wrapped around the limbs of their target and stiffened; immediately the retractor mechanisms inside the webbers chugged into life, dragging in their catch across the lowered trawl deck at the aft of the vessel.

  There were splices down there, eyes wide with interest as this strange new captive rolled out of the waves towards them. They exchanged twitchy glances, scratching at the implants protruding from the grossly inflated muscle mass of their arms. The larger of the two, a male modificate spliced with arachnoid DNA, turned its eight-eyed head towards the arrival and ventured closer to it.

  This was unexpected. The ships had been diverted off their usual patrol-and-trawl missions by an urgent summons from Cheyne, the Master’s subaltern. The command had forced them to dump the entire xenos harvest from that week’s gatherings and make full speed to a region near the Oxide Banks. The splices were confused, but they knew better than to disobey Cheyne’s orders, which carried the weight of the Primogenitor himself.

  Soon it became clear why they had been sent, however. The sky lit with the death of a starship, and soon a rain of wreckage came upon them. They had not stopped since, sifting the fall of debris for useful materials, throwing what they could not use over the side and packing out the hold with the choice pieces. Like their master, the splices were adept at taking whatever was at hand and turning it to new purposes. Every piece of salvage had a use.

  But they had found nothing living; not until now.

  The arachkin-modificate closed in on the figure in the nets and saw a man-thing in power armour, close to its own mass. Using its vestigial extra arms, it peeled away the lines of webbing, flicking its spindly fingers to dislodge the gooey adhesives that matted it. The tall, distended head nodded to itself. It recognised this. It knew a servant of the Corpse-God when it saw one.

  The arachkin turned back to speak to the other modificate, a canine-splice with a glistening snout and constant snarl about its lips. “Astartes,” it said, the word thick with sibilance from a mouth crowded with mandibles.

  The canine barked a curse word; it became a yelp of surprise as the Space Marine abruptly jerked from where he lay upon the greasy, shifting deck, swinging a sword. The weapon seemed to have come from nowhere, doubtless lost in the folds of the thick netting, now freed by the arachkin’s thoughtless interest.

  The power sword stuttered, the energy vanes within it misfiring, but still the blade was heavy and lethal. The weapon took the modificate’s head from its neck in a welter of blood, and suddenly the Astartes was coming to his feet, staggering.

  The other splice smelled pain on the Space Marine, and knew instinctively that the abhuman was badly injured; yet still deadly, as the headless corpse of the arachkin demonstrated. The dead modificate’s remains slid off the deck and into the ocean as the ship rose into another swell.

  Another strangled bark, this time pitched high for panic and need. In answer, the other modificates came running, and they brought more webbers and the crackling lengths of electromag halberds.

  They wasted no time and set about the wounded Space Marine, all of them understanding that what little advantage they had would be lost if they dallied. In the end, it took every splice on the crew to fell the Astartes, and even then he killed two more, turning them to screaming torches before the plasma gun could be struck from his grip.

  When the warrior in crimson armour stumbled and fell, all of them came in and took a turn with the halberds, beating and shocking him into pain-wracked unconsciousness.

  The dark—

  The kills seemed faraway, dreamy and incoherent incidents that could have been the creation of a fevered mind. Rafen felt an icy cold upon his bare skin and it was with that shock that he strained open his rheumy eyes, forced a focus upon his hands. They floated before him, indistinct and grimed with muck and caked blood. His chest shocked him with razor-blade stabs each time he dared to take a breath, and he became aware of more and more sites of pain scattered across the map of him. There was wetness seeping through his garb of micropore weave, and with this understanding Rafen’s sluggish thoughts at last caught up to his predicament.

  His power armour was gone; he had been stripped without care or attention, as the torsion marks and cuts on his legs and arms attested. Clad only in a rough set of threadbare prison garments, Rafen was lying in a reeking metal cell, damp with patches of grey mould and orange rust. Cables as thick as his wrist disappeared away into the gloom, extending out from heavy iron collars about his neck, his forearms and ankles. The fetters were arranged so that he could not stand, could not move more than a few steps from where his captors had left him.

  His captors…

  With an effort, Rafen cleared the fog in his mind and tried to think back. He gathered in the pieces of the past few hours, sifted them for meaning and nuance. It came back to him in shards of recall. The agony of the shock-staves upon him, and the blessed embrace of nothingness. The sense of losing something… yes, the moment when they sullied the holy armour of his Chapter, tearing it from him, bearing it away. His gun and sword taken, his helm ripped from his head.

  “The voice…” He spoke without thinking as another piece of memory resurfaced. In the moments before a fall into silence and darkness, he had seen something. A shimmering ghost made of light, a towering figure in a coat of screaming faces.

  “Fabius…”

  The traitor had been speaking in low tones, communicating with one of the bestial mutants that attacked him. Rafen struggled to gather back what he had heard, but his memory failed him, clouded by pain. All he remembered was the holograph of Bile, peering through the bars of his cage and smiling thinly, nodding to the mutant. Then speaking, the words lost to Rafen’s ears, but the movements of his lips clear enough to read.

  “Bring him to me!”

  The Blood Angel nodded to himself, thinking back to the words that Ceris had said to him in the chapel aboard the Tycho. Was this some machination of the God-Emperor, he wondered? Did the Master of Mankind hold the skeins of Rafen’s life so tightly that He himself had brought these events to pass? Every step along this path had been to bring Rafen face to face once more with the creature that called itself Fabius Bile—but now fate had torn him from his battle-brothers, ripped apart the careful plans he had drawn against this traitor, deposited him here. Alone and unarmed.

  He closed his eyes and let himself seek the edges of a healing trance, drawing into himself. Through the roll and motion of the cell floor, he was certain the ship he was aboard travelled at high speed—doubtless back to Bile and his fortress, to the very place Rafen wanted to be.

  The Blood Angel sat in silence and let his body repair itself, marshalling himself, making ready. If the Emperor brought him to this, then it was right and true; and if it were nothing more than capricious fate, then fate would be damned.

  He was unarmed; but no Astartes was ever truly without a weapon as long as he could draw another breath.

  He was alone; but no Astartes was ever truly alone, no
t with his battle-brothers and warrior kindred still there in the deeps, the mission still in their hearts.

  In the darkness, he prayed silently for guidance.

  The desultory light of the Dynikas star cast shafts through the fast-moving tier of cloud ranging over the curved archipelago, the wind hard and constant across the waves. The sand-seared shapes of the rocky island chain rose up from the turbulent, ruddy waters. Smoothed by the action of millions of years of typhoons, the outcrops of stone—rare atolls that were the very tips of colossal undersea mountains—resembled great growths of coral or fungus, sculpted into curves and even lines that belied organic forms where none actually existed. Like all else on Dynikas V, the island chains had been scoured clean of life by the tyranid splinters marooned on the planet. In this place, that had meant human life as well as native flora and fauna. An agri-colony, built to farm the richness teeming in the Dynikan oceans, had been the first to fall to the rapacious devourers. Buildings and structures cut from the rock or assembled by Imperial hands were made into ghost sites, every man, woman and child taken and consumed by the hive.

  This place, this monument to human ill-fate, was where Fabius Bile had come to craft a bolt hole for himself. Upon the empty ruins, on a world no sane being would ever dare to visit, in a region dead and forgotten to the galaxy at large, the twisted genetor had built his fortress.

  The patrol craft roared into the bay along the main island’s southern coast, engines dying with a howl as the wave-surge brought the vessel in to the crumbling ferrocrete docks. Derelict pilings hung at crooked angles, the last remnants of a complex that had been built for dozens of trawlers. Only one small section of the dock was maintained; the rest had been forgotten and allowed to fall into disrepair.

  Chugging greasy smoke into the air from its exhausts, a defiled Atlas recovery tank grumbled into place, the crane extending from its rear spooling out lines of heavy black chain. The vehicle had once served the Imperial Guard in the Emperor’s name; now it was despoiled with the iconography of the Eightfold Path, and stripped down to its iron frame. A snarling, hooting avian modificate capered on the prow of the vehicle as its chains dropped through a hatch in the trawler’s deck. Sounds of violence issued out from within, flashes of hard electric discharge following them. The chains went taut and the crane pulled back.