Black Tide

by James Swallow

  “This place will be a charnel house by nightfall,” said the Blood Angel. “In the name of Sanguinius, I swear it.” He hesitated, drawing a device from a pouch on Cheyne’s cooling corpse. It resembled an Astartes auspex, but carved from bone and slivers of crystal.

  “What is that?” said Tarikus. “A control device?”

  Rafen gave a nod. “For the cells, I’d warrant. A master key…”

  “If you open the cells, Bile will know we have escaped,” warned Vetcha. “He’ll reverse anything you do…”

  “We’ll see,” Rafen replied, and crushed the device in his fist.

  THIRTEEN

  In their current state, the warriors three—Rafen, Tarikus and Vetcha—resembled anything but the noble ideal of the Adeptus Astartes. Robbed of their armour and Emperor-blessed weapons, clad in rags and torn robes, stained with dirt and smeared with blood, an observer would have thought them to be hellish death-dealers from the heart of some nightmarish battlefield, choosers of the slain drawn up from ancient myth to bring murder to all that lay in their path.

  Only in the set of their jaw, the intention of their swift gait, did they reveal themselves for what they were. Warriors of single purpose, joined for a common goal. The Blood Angel, the Doom Eagle and the Space Wolf ran swiftly along the ascending ramp of stone and hard-packed dirt, climbing the spiralling levels towards the lip of the crater-prison.

  They came upon the iron cell chambers ranged up around them in unkempt piles. The containers creaked and rocked in the endless winds, unsecured hatches caught in the gale banging open. The sun passed behind a wall of heavy cloud and pits of deep shadow grew in the spaces between the cells.

  Rafen slowed and carefully peered into one of the open chambers. He fingered the magnetolocks on the doorjamb; they were set in the open position. “Well now. It looks like Cheyne’s toy worked.”

  Tarikus came closer, sniffing the air. He made a sour face. “These cells were not occupied, Blood Angel. I doubt they’ve been used in years.” The Doom Eagle glanced around. “Much of this infernal place lies derelict and empty.”

  Rafen considered that for a moment. Had Bile’s fortress once been filled with Astartes prisoners? And if so, where were they now? From what he had gathered from the old Space Wolf, the interned population of the retrofitted complex had to be less than a dozen lost Space Marines. “If the locks have been deactivated, then there may be battle-brothers walking free on the upper levels—”

  Vetcha sucked air in through his cracked teeth and shouted over Rafen’s words, raising the scimitar-like sword in his hand. “Warriors,” he snarled, “I smell company!”

  Rafen heard the heavy clatter of dozens of clawed and cloven feet over the tops of the metal containers. He brought up the boltgun he had stolen from Cheyne and panned it around, waiting for a target to reveal itself.

  “Behind us, too!” called Tarikus. He had a bolt pistol in each hand, aiming them in different directions.

  Above, there were the canyon walls made of cells, and below, the curve of the rocky slope. Rising up the latter, bearing weapons and stinking of spent promethium, came a cluster of cloaked New Men.

  “Come to succeed where Cheyne failed, no doubt,” said Rafen. He fired off a trio of shots, breaking up the line of the Bile’s gene-thugs.

  “Splices incoming!” shouted Vetcha.

  Rafen’s gaze snapped back in time to see a wave of beast-things boil over the edge of the cell towers and drop towards them. Once-men with aspects torn from insects, felines, bats, reptiles, canines and simians came rushing down; it was a true menagerie of horrors.

  The blind veteran bellowed the name of his primarch in a raucous war cry and became a whirl of violence, swinging the scimitar blade in lethal circuits, wading into the mass of the enemy without a moment’s pause. Rafen heard the old man laughing darkly as he took heads and cleaved bodies; the ill-trained splices had come down bunched up tightly, and Vetcha could smell their odours so clearly he had no need to look upon them to make his kills.

  Tarikus opened fire with the bolt pistols, firing both weapons at once. Rafen saw an orange-furred, ropey-limbed simian blown backward with a fist-sized hole punched in its chest, a minotal at its side killed by a round that blasted through its eye socket.

  The New Men were closing the gate, however. Rafen eschewed cover and dropped to one knee. A spindly arachkin that made it to him reared up; in return he slashed with the cluster of blades along the muzzle of Cheyne’s bolter and opened the creature’s gut, spilling ropes of steaming entrails across the dirt floor. Kicking the dying splice away he fired into the advancing party.

  Vetcha howled as a canine took a bite from his arm; in turn the Space Wolf cut the dog-thing apart. “How many?” he called out.

  “More than enough,” Tarikus retorted, gunning down a pair of rat-men. He staggered back, ejecting spent ammunition clips from his pistols, reloading on the move. “Has every one of them in this hell-hole come to fight us?”

  “It would seem so…” Rafen offered, then grimaced as the gun in his hand locked on a fouled round. Cursing the ill-maintained condition of the purloined weapon, he worked the slide as the New Men charged. Ejecting the misfire, he slammed a fresh round into the chamber, but Bile’s gene-formed warriors moved like lightning. Shots went wild as the biggest of them—a man-mountain of flesh in a long mantle of leather rags—struck the Blood Angel with a heavy mace.

  Rafen rolled with the impact, letting it knock him off his feet. He landed hard and wheezed. The effort to get back up was burdensome, suddenly twice as difficult as it should have been. He felt the now familiar, unsettling spasm against his ribcage. The parasite was moving, awakening.

  “Mistake,” said the cloaked warrior, its voice rumbling like an engine. “Nothing but pain for you now. Nothing but pain.”

  Rafen raised the gun and his finger tightened on the trigger; but the New Man was already speaking, whispering the parasite’s cantrip. Cheyne, so it seemed, was not the only one who knew the words of the agony prayer.

  The Blood Angel tried not to scream, but the exhalation burst from him uncontrolled; white-hot jags of torture lashed through his nerves and he stumbled, dropping the gun. Every muscle in his body was aflame, his flesh aching with searing, burning pain. The core of the fire inside him was the roiling, writhing maggot, thrashing within the meat of his chest. He tried to frame a litany of strength, an entreaty to Sanguinius to grant him fortitude, but every iota of his self was given over to the agony. He was an empty vessel, slowly filling with suffering.

  The hulking figure’s voice grew louder and louder, the sound reaching Vetcha and Tarikus. They too fell, weapons silenced, as their bodies rebelled against them.

  The New Man drew in a deep breath, preparing to speak the terminal stanza of the pain-prayer. These words would stimulate the daemonic parasites within earshot into a fatal frenzy, climaxing in an eruption through flesh and bone that would kill their hosts.

  He did not begin. A spear of rusty iron, hastily fashioned from a length of gantry, whistled out from the shadows beyond the cells and impaled the New Man through the throat, silencing him. The rod lodged there and blood burst from the entry and exit wounds in a red tide.

  From the shadows came figures in torn robes, warriors who resembled anything but what they were. Some were scarred and beaten, others dazed or hollow of eye as if they moved through a dream; but all of them brought death as their companion. The freed Astartes rushed forward in a tide of fury, ripping apart the splices and storming straight into the lines of the New Men. Every throat that could be cut was cut, every voice of the enemy silenced before a single word of the pain-prayer could be uttered.

  The agony abated, withdrawing from his body, and strong hands hauled Rafen to his feet. He lurched unsteadily and shuddered, as if uncomfortable in his own flesh, as if it had become ill-fitting on him. “Warp take this thing,” he grated. “Someone give me a blade and I’ll cut it out of myself right now!”

 
“That would be a mistake, kinsman.” Rafen looked up into a craggy, frost-grey face lined with a cross-hatching of deep, livid scars. “They know when you’re trying to kill them. The cursed things bleed a poison so potent it can shrivel your hearts to cinders.”

  “I… I am Rafen, of the—”

  The pale-faced Astartes waved away his words. “Blood Angels, yes. We know who you are, Son of Sanguinius. I am Kilan of the Raven Guard.”

  “Well met, Kilan.” Rafen panted, feeling his flesh retaking control of itself. “You heeded my call.”

  Kilan looked around at the rest of the unkempt handful of warriors as they performed confirmation kills on the enemy survivors. “You opened the doors.”

  “In more ways than one,” said another Astartes, his tone heavy and weary as he approached. “How did you do it?” The swarthy, shaggy-haired warrior had a bull’s head icon branded into the meat of his arm that marked him as a brother of the Taurans Chapter.

  “Luck,” said Rafen, “luck and the Emperor’s grace.”

  “Ave Imperator,” said Kilan, bowing his head. When he looked up, he had a feral grin on his lips. “I tell you, Rafen, I am almost giddy. So many attempts at escape we have made, so many failures… When the cell doors opened, many of us refused to leave.”

  “They thought it was another of Bile’s mind games,” said the Tauran. “More of his bloody tricks of the brain.”

  “No game,” said Tarikus, coming closer. “Not this time.”

  Kilan studied Rafen, the deep red of his eyes boring into him. “Those were fine words you spoke, Blood Angel. They stirred a fire in all of us.”

  “I did nothing,” he replied. “I only reminded you of what you already know.”

  “He has a way of doing that, ja,” said Vetcha, his breathing laboured. The Space Wolfs words got a hard look from Kilan and the other escapees.

  “Why is this relic still drawing breath?” spat the Tauran. “He’s a collaborator. He should be corpse flesh!”

  “You dare?” growled the old veteran. “Try if you will, runt!”

  “He helped us,” Tarikus insisted. “The androgyne died by his hand.”

  “Indeed?” said Kilan, his grin widening. “Then it appears you chose your moment well, Long Fang. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a Space Wolf showing such slow cunning and restraint.”

  Vetcha’s lip curled. “Ja. Well. Live a decade inside an iron cell and you have plenty of time to discover a more… careful method.”

  “We have to move,” said the Tauran. Rafen sensed the man was unconvinced, but he knew that alacrity was more important. “Matters of reproach and culpability can be considered after the fact. The fires are burning out. Soon the smoke will dissipate and the sentinels will over fly the cells. We can’t be caught in the open.”

  “The others, the Astartes still up there,” Tarikus insisted, gesturing at the ramp. “No man will be left behind. Today we either burn this place and leave it behind, or it becomes our grave.”

  “Rafen, what say you?” Kilan turned to the Blood Angel, but the other man was staring into space, as if listening to a voice only he could hear. “Rafen? Do you hear me?”

  Do you hear me?

  The thought-question billowed into telepathic vapour and faded. Ceris blotted out everything around him; the thudding rumble of the Neimos’ engines, the pitch and roll of the submersible’s deck as it rose up through the ocean, the chatter and movement of the crew-servitors at their control stations. He was dimly aware of the others nearby, the Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers gathering their weapons for one final check before they took to the battle.

  The Codicier had already prepared himself in a moment of quiet contemplation, finding an empty crew cabin where he could consecrate his force mace with a measure of sanctified oil, blessed by the High Chaplain Argastes himself. The weapon hung at his hip, ready for use, and his bolt pistol, duly cleaned and newly affixed with fresh purity seals, nestled in his holster. Ceris was upon one armoured knee, head bowed and his helmet at his feet. The soft sapphire glow of his psychic hood cast a cold light around him, and he sensed the air of unease it created in his battle-brothers. They kept a distance from him as he worked his magick; even among his kindred, the ways of his psionic arts were forever viewed with distrust.

  He pushed out again. Out past the sparks of thought that were his comrades; Noxx, the warrior’s feelings marbled by streaks of darkness and duty; Kayne, fighting down his self-doubts as if they were monsters to be slain; Ajir, unable to let go of the conflicts inside him; Gast, clear and strong like ice; Sove, struggling to hide the pain of his injuries lest he be thought unfit to fight; Eigen, proud and ready; Puluo, caught between nursing his hate and hoping to see his commander again; and Turcio, repeating the litany of weapons, seeking focus in the name of his primarch.

  Ceris pushed out, out past the hull of the Neimos, ignoring the flashes of feral xenos hate at the edges of his sensorium, looking, seeking. Finding knots of fear and hope, all tied around one another. Finding… Rafen. He felt a moment of pride to know that his kinsman was not dead.

  Do you hear me? Stand fast, brother. We are coming for you.

  The squad of canine modificates standing guardian over the dock were skittish and nervous. All of them were given to making low yowls and they constantly fingered their lasguns, their attention being drawn back time after time, away from the featureless ocean they were commanded to watch and over their shoulders to the fortress proper. A ribbon of black smoke emerged from behind the ridgeline, growing slowly into the sullen clouds overhead. Their sensitive ears picked out the noise of gunfire, but no word reached them from the tower. No new orders came, and with every minute that passed, the canines were losing their focus. It was a failing with this breed of human-splice; without a commanding influence on them, they fell into simple action-reaction patterns.

  They were unprepared for the invasion from the sea. Breaching the surface like the massive sifter-whales that once thrived in the oceans of Dynikas V, the submersible Neimos arrived in an explosion of spray and churned foam. The bullet bow of the vessel pushed a shock front ahead of it, the wave lashing up to wash over the patrol cutter tethered to the corroded dock pilings. The impulse-drive propellers concealed in fairings along the stern of the Neimos thrashed at the rusty water, hydrojet systems pushing the craft forward at its maximum surface velocity. The stubby central sail rose like a raised axe head, streams of seawater sluicing across striations of still-fresh damage; in places, the broken tips of kraken talons were still embedded in the rubbery anechoic skin of the submarine.

  The canines scattered, running in halting loops, then stopping, then running back, unsure of what to do next. Finally, one of the modificates—a splice that had been an Imperial Guardsman in its old life—raised a laser rifle and fired on the oncoming vessel. The rest of the dog-things began to snarl, and they too opened fire. Drawn by the shrieking concussion of the beam weapons, further up on the rocky shore the silent ferrocrete pilings twitched and folded open, the auto-guns within awakening.

  Any ship wanting to make dock would have slowed; the Neimos did not. Atop the dorsal sail, a cupola extended from beneath a sealed cowling, presenting a tubular lens array made of etched brass. The weapon was modelled on the shape of an extinct form of Terran selachian, its toothy mouth the muzzle of the energy cannon. Sharp blue-green light lashed out, bursting canines unlucky enough to be caught in its nimbus.

  The Neimos rammed the stern of the cutter and a swell of seawater flooded into the open deck of the converted trawler craft as it wallowed. The vessel tilted and shifted to starboard, sinking. Now with only a few feet beneath its keel, the submersible ploughed on, losing a steering vane on a bent curl of iron reaching up from the derelict dock. The last of the canines lost their will and ran for the shoreline, but the invader was already upon them. The craft cleaved through the supports and decking of the ramshackle quay, collapsing it into the churn along with the rest of the guards.

 
Laser fire, red like hate, lashed out from the auto-guns on the beach, burning great craters in the hull of the Neimos. The vessel would not stop; in answer, the blue-green ray from the top of the sail cast around like a lighthouse beam, scorching a line over the rocky shore, fusing stone and gritty sand into black glass before finding the target. Pulses of emerald lightning flashed and the auto-guns were obliterated in fans of detonation, the servitor brains within boiled alive in their nutrient tanks.

  At last the submarine’s thrusters died, but the swell it rode drove it on, up the apron of the coast and on to the rough seashore.

  With a shuddering moan of tortured metal, the Neimos came to a halt on a rise of displaced gravel, listing a few degrees to port as the craft settled. Conformal hatches blew open on explosive bolts and spun away. From the interior of the craft came nine figures in armour all shades of crimson, and they raced up the beach in loping steps, making for the site of the smoke plume.

  A kilometre or so offshore, the surface of the ocean appeared to boil. In the shallow waters, a cluster of tentacled, furious beasts swam around and about in angry confusion. Cilia beat the water and hooked beaks of chitin gnashed. The prey had vanished into a fog of chaos, merged into a strange barrier of pheromone stench and telepathic anathema that forced the krakens away even as they tried to swim into it. The tyranids were driven back with shuddering force, repulsed like magnetic poles; beyond that, so powerful was the genetic compulsion within them that their own flesh failed to obey the hunger brimming in their thoughts.

  Some of the smaller, younger krakens attacked one another in annoyance, their food-need and anger finding expression elsewhere. The older and larger xenos, and the dominant male that had led them here, whipped at the younglings to quiet them. Their simple, bestial predator brains were bewildered, but they were patient hunters. They drew in their tentacles, sleek bodies bobbing in the slow current, and waited.