Black Tide

by James Swallow

  “Rafen!”

  Vetcha heard the tone in the Raven Guard’s voice and he tensed. The Long Fang felt a tingle along the hairs of his forearms and tasted something greasy and metallic in the back of his throat. He knew that ethereal spoor of old, and his lip curled to be within reach of it. There was witchery afoot, and it was close by. He focused his thoughts on that idea for the moment, using his ingrained loathing of all such sorcery to drag his attention away from the still-burning pain of the wound Cheyne’s knife had inflicted upon him.

  “What is wrong with him?” asked Tarikus.

  The silent Blood Angel gave a sudden gasp and grunted in pain. “Ceris…” he muttered.

  “Who?” The Space Wolf didn’t know the name.

  “One of my battle-brothers, a psyker…”

  Vetcha spat, his suspicions confirmed. “A weirdling, you mean…”

  “My brothers are coming for us. Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers. They’re going to attack the fortress.” The warrior’s voice took on a new strength. “The Emperor turns His face towards our endeavours, kinsmen. The time for revenge is upon us.”

  “This… Ceris…” said the wary Tauran. “He spoke with you? In your thoughts?”

  Vetcha sensed the nod in Rafen’s words. “Aye. With his talents at our command, we will be unstoppable.”

  The Space Wolf made a negative noise. “Perhaps so, as much as I hate to admit it. In all the years I have been in this place, Bile has never held a psyker hostage here.”

  “How could he?” said Kilan. “There are no walls nor barred gates for a mindspeaker. We can use Rafen’s witch-kin to tip the balance for us!”

  “We must take the fight to the traitor,” said the Blood Angel, quickening with the pace of the moment. “We need to gather the rest of the detainees.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Tarikus. “Kilan, if you will lend me your aid?”

  “Gladly, Doom Eagle.”

  Rafen smiled. “Find the assault team.”

  “And then?” The veteran noted how Tarikus and the others had immediately deferred to the Blood Angel’s leadership; the lad had a way about him, all right.

  “Then,” said the Raven Guard, “we’ll bring the wrath of Holy Terra down upon this place.”

  “Indeed,” said Rafen. “Vetcha, if you will lead the way, we will enter the tower and deny Fabius Bile any chance of escape.”

  “Gladly—” The Space Wolf’s voice died in his throat as he began to speak. The fire from the blade cut was growing in power, and he clenched his hand, feeling the sensation in it as if it were a distant thing. “Gladly,” he repeated, this time with more force. “Follow me, you pups, if you think you can keep up.” Before any of them could question his momentary lapse, he was moving away, the senses of sound and tread guiding him towards the heavy doors that led to Bile’s inner sanctum.

  His face turned from Rafen and the others, the old man’s lips moved in a rare moment of prayer. Vetcha mouthed a silent plea to the God-Emperor and mighty Russ. He asked them for a measure of strength. Not for long. Just long enough to see the day to its end. The veteran fought off a shudder. All he needed was enough strength to stave off the warp-venom that had coated Cheyne’s blade.

  The approach to the fortress was a maze of gunfire. Las-rounds and bolt shells criss-crossed in the air as Noxx and his strike team pushed forward along the dirt road. Resistance was lighter than they had expected, but still stiff enough to trouble them. Sove laid down a line of krak grenades, showing that even with one arm he could still provide a lethal addition to any assault. Eigen and the Blood Angel Turcio were in cover behind a stalled vehicle, sniping at the shadowy figures appearing in the gun-slots of the bunker.

  Noxx fired off a salvo of shots and ducked back behind a stone pillar. The psyker was close by, his crimson helmet wreathed with tiny jags of lightning. “Care to conjure a hellbolt for us?” said the sergeant. “We’re in danger of losing our momentum here.”

  “I am afraid my attention is elsewhere.” The Codicier seemed distant, distracted. “Sensing… I am sensing the dimensions of this place. There is a very strong warp energy signature…” He pointed in the direction of the tower. “In there.”

  The Flesh Tearer cursed. “Tell me you’re not talking about another warp gate! I’ll not blast down the doors to this place to find the stink of Fabius Bile and nothing else!”

  Stray lasers chopped chunks from the rock near Ceris’ head, but he appeared not to notice. “I cannot be sure. Lord Mephiston gave me a telepathic imprint of the transit-magick Bile used to flee from Baal… This is not the same, but—”

  “Enough!” Noxx cut him off. “If we cannot get to the source of this energy, then perhaps Rafen can. Send to him, guide him to it. Tell my errant cousin that Bile will slip our grasp if he cannot neutralise it.”

  Ceris didn’t answer; instead he bowed his head low, and the crystal matrix of his psychic hood glowed brighter.

  Noxx chanced a look around the pillar, and a storm of laser fire lanced towards him. He swore again and ducked back, his eyes finding Brother Puluo across the way.

  The other Space Marine’s voice clicked in the vox bead in his ear. “There’s a high-gauge lascannon in the fire slot, lower right quadrant.”

  “I’m acquainted with it,” Noxx replied, considering a carbon score-mark across his power armour’s right shoulder pauldron.

  “All units, give me cover,” continued Puluo. “I’m going to kill it.”

  Noxx nodded in agreement. “Do as he says.”

  Puluo hefted the weighty form of his heavy bolter up in front of himself, then broke into a full-tilt ran. The second he left his cover, red streaks of coherent light stabbed out at him. Noxx revealed himself as well, firing from the shoulder, and he saw Ajir, Kayne and Gast do the same, all of them giving the enemy gunners a sudden feast of targets to choose from.

  An Astartes behind that gun would have concentrated their fire on Puluo, the largest extant threat; but instead there was a moment of hesitation, then sporadic, reflexive fire towards the other battle-brothers.

  It was enough for Puluo to close the distance. He swung down the heavy bolter as he ran and squeezed the trigger bar. The gun crashed, the reports from the muzzle echoing off the walls of the enemy stronghold. Too late, the laser cannon traversed back towards Puluo, but the Blood Angel was nimble for his size, and he weathered glancing hits across his armour to come all the way in to point blank range.

  Fuelled by battle anger, Puluo leapt up and jammed the barrel of the heavy bolter into the firing slit where the lascannon gunner was hiding. He released a wild burst of automatic fire into the chamber beyond, riding the big gun’s recoil, ranging it around to be sure that everything inside would be killed.

  With the lascannon out of operation, the rest of the squad moved up, taking down the remainder of the defenders. Ajir used hull cutters to blow open the portcullis, and together the Space Marines crossed into Bile’s fortress, wreathed in cordite smoke.

  The dour Tauran—he called himself Nisos—moved quickly, but he seemed to be always a step behind Rafen as they moved through the corridors of the lower tower, along stone passages laser-cut from the living rock. The Blood Angel paused in the lee of a support and glanced at him. Nisos was watching him carefully.

  “You have something to say to me?” Rafen pitched his voice in a whisper.

  The Tauran tapped his head. “You say you hear a voice in your thoughts. This Brother Ceris you spoke of.”

  “Not so much a voice,” Rafen admitted. “More a sense of the man…” He frowned. “It is difficult to put into words. But he is guiding me. Us.”

  Nisos kneaded the grip of a lasgun he had stolen from a dead guardian. “That does not sit well with me. How do you know it is your battle-brother? What if that presence in your thoughts is some trick of Bile’s? What if—”

  Rafen extended a hand and placed it on the Tauran’s shoulder. The edge of fear in the other man’s voice was troubling, and he w
ondered how long Nisos had been in this prison, and what manner of torments he might have endured to so unsettle him. “You must trust me, my friend. Trust that I trust the psyker.”

  “The ways of the warp are the maze of damnation,” Nisos said quietly. “I have seen men touched by the power of the immaterium, good men, and watched them burn in daemonfire.”

  “It is Fabius Bile who will burn this day,” snapped Layko, a wiry, malnourished Crimson Fist who had joined them on Kilan’s recommendation. He brandished a pair of wicked combat blades. “I am eager to give him a taste of my revenge. Why do we delay?”

  “Move with care, Son of Dorn,” said Vetcha, slipping back towards them. “New Men are close by. I smell the foe, all sweat and rotting meat.”

  Rafen nodded, half-hearing the old man. He fell silent, allowing himself to lose focus for a moment. Immediately, he sensed Ceris’ presence. The psyker was almost there in the corridor with him, like a ghost at his shoulder. Without words, the witch-kin pressed him onward. A pressure, an ethereal hand at his back, turned him to the right. He peered around the curve of another support and saw two of Bile’s New Men guarding a heavy circular hatch.

  Retreating, he turned back to the other Astartes. “In there,” he began. “A psionic energy source, likely the power for our target’s arcane warp-sorcery. It must be neutralised.”

  Nisos shivered. “I feel it in the air. A taint, slick on my skin.”

  Rafen nodded. He could feel it too, the telltale greasy texture in the atmosphere, the sense of lurking power like the precursor to an oncoming storm.

  “Two guards,” noted Vetcha. “I expected more.”

  Nisos gestured around at the walls; a distant alert klaxon had been sounding for some time. “The others have probably been drawn off to deal with the escape, or Rafen’s friends.”

  “We go, then?” said Layko, battle-need written large across his drawn features.

  “Oh, indeed, we go,” Rafen replied.

  They charged around the corner in a tight wedge, Rafen leading from the front with the barbed bolter screaming. The closest of the New Men was hit and fell, injured but still alive. The second dodged away, sending laser flashes back towards them.

  Nisos returned fire with his captured lasgun and scored hits on the second New Man; the gene-freak’s cloak smouldered and caught fire.

  Layko came in shouting and beheaded the downed guardian as he tried to rise again. The body fell to the deck, but the Crimson Fist continued to hack at it, shredding flesh and bone into an unrecognisable mess.

  With Vetcha covering their rear, Rafen and Nisos sprinted past the massive hatch and bore down on the last guard. The enemy released a fan of laser fire, and had he been clad in his battle armour, Rafen would have dared to wade straight into it and let the ceramite shunt away the lethal flashes of hard light; but he was wounded, ill-prepared, poorly-armed and slowed by the parasite, and such brute-force tactics now would have ended him.

  Instead, he threw himself forward, low and close to the ground. Rafen fell into a tuck and roll as Nisos harried the New Man with return fire, and the Blood Angel came up close to the guard, leading with the bolter. He stabbed the blade-wreathed muzzle of the gun into the meat of his enemy’s thigh, and before the New Man could react, he fired. At point-blank range, Cheyne’s gun blasted a massive divot of flesh from the creature and sent it howling to the ground. Nisos swept in, and fired another laser blast through the New Man’s eye; the energy bolt instantly flashed the guard’s brain matter to steam and his skull exploded in a cloud of pinkish-grey mist.

  Rafen kicked the corpse away and returned to the hatch. Vetcha had pulled Layko away from his kill; the emaciated Astartes was covered in splashes of blood, his fists as crimson as his Chapter’s sigil. Layko’s face was set in a rictus grin.

  Acting quickly, the Blood Angel found the series of iron levers set into an alcove along one of the walls. In moments, the heavy hatch began to groan open, swinging out in thick hinges.

  New gales of the psyker-stink gusted out at them as the doorway widened, and with it came another, horribly familiar smell—the battery-acid stench of tyranid pheromones, heavy and cloying in their nostrils.

  Rafen cleared his throat with difficulty and took a shallow breath as he moved to cross the threshold; and suddenly, the docile parasite awoke once again. His hand went to his chest, expecting another surge of pain, but this was different. The maggot-thing seemed to be trembling, vibrating inside his flesh. The sensation was nauseating and he felt revolted to his core by it.

  The Blood Angel looked up to survey the chamber beyond the hatch and the disgust churning inside him grew tenfold.

  Nisos was next, Vetcha and Layko following. All were silent, all sharing the same horror at the sight before them.

  The chamber was spherical, and shrouded with metal walls, although these were hardly visible beneath the layers of oozing, gelatinous matter coating every surface. High overhead, above a raised gantry, light seeped in from a circular window. With a flash of understanding, Rafen recognised it as the viewing port he had seen in the floor of Fabius’ laboratory.

  The wan illumination cast shadows everywhere, but was not so merciful as to hide the full scope of the monstrosity that dominated the room. Hanging in mucus-encrusted chains from a cruciform support frame was the distended and diseased form of a limbless tyranid beast, shrouded by the softly glowing planes of crystalline psi-baffles.

  “A zoanthrope,” grated Layko. “Throne and blood, it’s alive…”

  “Bile’s pet,” said Vetcha, with a nod.

  Rafen studied the beast coldly. Distended and horribly warped by its massive brain, nearly half the mass of the hydrocephalic tyranid psyker-creature was made up by its huge head, a hammer-shaped mass of blackened chitin armour over pulsating pink matter. A drooling mouth of yellowed fangs hung open, serpent tongues lolling out and dripping thin fluids. Rheumy eye-pits glared back at him from beneath a bony cowl, and even in the alien expression, the Blood Angel could sense a palpable, ready hatred. Beneath the bloated head, a sinuous body barbed with protrusions and strange tusks thinned into a long, barbed tail that hung like a piece of dead meat. Wicked talons the length of a man’s forearm were curled up against the zoanthrope’s torso. Every now and then, they would twitch in palsy.

  Alone, this xenos thing was horror enough; but there was more here. Raw-edged wounds filmed with blood that would not clot, seeping from incisions on the alien’s spine. Flays of skin peeled back and held in place by heavy iron spikes revealed a swollen bolus of glistening flesh that hung loose towards the floor. Pipes, wet with ichor, penetrated every part of the alien’s torso. With each laboured, breathy exhalation the creature made, faint traceries of fine dust were drawn up the tubes, away into sockets on the curved walls.

  Rafen dared to take a step closer, and the zoanthrope showed more teeth; but the gesture seemed cursory, and without real intent. Peering at the sac, he saw movement within it, and heard a faint keening. Instantly, the maggot in his chest flexed, making him choke. He saw the same reaction from the others. With disgust, Rafen watched the sac pucker, and from it fell a newborn parasite, shiny with wet mucus.

  “They’re everywhere,” said Layko, almost gagging on the words. “Look!” He pointed with his swords. Concentrating on the shadows, Rafen’s vision grew definite and he saw what the Crimson Fist meant. What he had first thought might be spoil heaps or piles of shed matter were slowly moving masses of the maggot parasites.

  “Little wonder those things Cheyne implanted in us are so agitated,” said Nisos. “They can sense the closeness of these others.”

  Rafen paused, turning back to the wheezing zoanthrope. Closer now, and he could see it was weak and sickly. The flesh of the xenos was pallid, and the surface of its chitin armour was pitted and cracked. A fetid air of necrotic decay shrouded the thing. The alien’s head tilted to present him with a jaundiced, milky eye, and he felt a faint wash of telepathic energy move over him. The Blood An
gel shuddered, but held fast; the sensation passed as quickly as it had come.

  “A creature like this…” began the Tauran. “It could shatter our minds with a single thought.”

  “Perhaps once,” said Vetcha. “But not now. Bile has made it his slave.”

  Rafen nodded. He could see the lines of sutures along the curvature of the zoanthrope’s skull, the places where Fabius’ chirurgeon had bored into the alien’s brain matter and lobotomised it. “The traitor shows cunning, as ever,” he said. “Just like this fortress, he has taken what he could find here and perverted it to his own ends.”

  “If this zoanthrope is the breed sow for the parasites…” began Nisos. He retched. “Emperor preserve us! We are tainted by the blood of the alien!”

  “Calm yourself,” said Vetcha. “We’ll wail over who is sullied with what when the task at hand is complete.” He turned to Rafen, his blind eye sockets blank and without pity. “We must kill this thing.”

  Rafen nodded. “Aye. The beast’s psychic might is at Bile’s command. If he uses it to forge a warp gate, he will be lost to us.”

  “But the protection, the pheromones!” snapped Layko, pointing at the tubes. “I abhor the xenos as much as any Astartes, but if it dies… what then?”

  The Blood Angel studied the mechanisms drawing the scent-chemicals from the zoanthrope’s gland clusters. “The veil will fall. Any tyranid predators close by will be drawn to the fortress.”

  “So we kill the zoanthrope, and its kindred will come and consume us all!” said the Crimson Fist.

  “But if we let it live, Bile will flee.” Rafen shook his head. “There is no debate to be had here.” He raised the barbed bolter and aimed at the alien creature’s head. He tensed, expecting it to lash out, to strike at him in some wild, final effort; instead the zoanthrope folded down its claws and bowed to him, the chains about it slackening.

  Nisos hesitated before taking aim with the lasgun. “Curious. It must know what we are about to do.”