Vulkan’s anv—gnnrrr
He crashed into the side of the vessel and rebounded. The impact was harder than expected, and his body railed against it painfully.
“Steer clear of the gunships. Use your proximity sensors.” Nu’mean’s warning came too late for a ruemi Tsu’gan.
“Expel gas from your pneumatics for guidance until locking cords are fixed,” he added.
Tsu’gan was already spiralling, waiting until he was more or less upright before evacuating a portion of the gas that fed some of the systems in his suit: oxygen, propulsion, motion—they were all vital to a lesser or greater degree but had a certain level of redundancy that made voiding a small amount of them non-critical.
In a matter of seconds, ghost-like plumes of gas were venting across the chamber as the Firedrakes fought to organise themselves. One of the drifting gunships collided with another of its fleet and the report was deafening. It didn’t prevent Tsu’gan from hearing Hrydor cry out, though.
“The beast! I see it! Engaging!” A burst of assault cannon fire shredded the air, lighting up the dark with muzzle flare. It sent Hrydor surging backwards, where he spun and struck one of the chamber walls.
“In Vulkan’s name,” he drawled, still groggy from the impact, and triggered the cannon again.
“Cease and desist. Power down—all weapons!” Praetor was floating towards him as fast as he could while staying out of Hrydor’s deadly fire arc.
Tsu’gan was close by too and moved to assist. He could hear his sergeant muttering.
“Leave me, brothers. Leave me. You are at Vulkan’s side, whose fire beats in my breast…”
He had no idea who Praetor was talking to. The rest of the Firedrakes were dispersed around the chamber. Some were trying to attach locking cords to anything stable. Others were acting… strangely. A rash of reports came over the comm-feed in rapid succession.
“…cannot move… my armour… like stone.”
“…systems failing… oxygen tainted…”
“…xenos! ’Stealers in the hold! Permission to engage…”
The last one Tsu’gan recognised as Nu’mean. “All dead… abandon ship… all hands… dead… my brothers…”
Emek, who Tsu’gan caught a glimpse of in the corner of his eye, was disappearing below, heading for something on the deck but otherwise faring much better than the heavier Terminators. He was also one of the few unaffected by whatever was assailing them.
Then he saw him.
Face a patchwork of scar tissue; eyes crimson-lidded and burning with hate; armour of red and black with scales swathing the battle-plate; horned pauldrons and long vermilion claws upon his gauntlets. There was no mistaking it.
It was Nihilan.
The leader of the Dragon Warriors was here and his thrice-damned warp-craft was afflicting them all. Tsu’gan would cleanse the Protean of the renegades. He would end them all.
Nihilan’s lips were moving. A voice like cracked parchment resonated inside Tsu’gan’s head.
“I fear nothing! Nothing!” he spat back against the accusation only he could hear.
The renegade smiled, baring tiny fangs.
“I’ll slay you now, sorcerer…” Tsu’gan sneered, aiming his storm bolter towards his hated enemy.
Tsu’gan stopped dead. His weapon, his gauntlet and vambrace, his entire arm…
“No…”
So wretched was his dismay that he could barely give it voice.
Armour of red and black covered Tsu’gan’s body usurping the familiar Salamander green. Small flecks of dust cascaded through the cracks in the joints as he felt his skin shedding like a serpent’s beneath it. The reek of copper filled his nostrils, emanating from his own body. He knew that stink. It haunted his dreams with the promise of blood and prophesied treachery. Tsu’gan’s battle-helm was no longer fashioned into the image of drake: it was bare and came to a stub-nosed snout rendered in bone. Skulls hung from bloody chains wrapped around his body.
“Arghh!” His anguish was louder this time as a Thunderhawk floated by, obscuring Nihilan from view for a moment. On its flank a face was impossibly reflected. Tsu’gan beheld his form and saw Gor’ghan there instead, the renegade that had slain his captain. It was he, he was it. Failure. Murderer.
The gunship passed. Nihilan was laughing, standing on the deck below.
Tsu’gan clawed his way to the sorcerer, grasping whatever he could to propel himself, using up the pneumatic pressure in his suit.
A pair of clashing gunships narrowly missed him, but Tsu’gan barely noticed in his determination to reach Nihilan. Around him, his brothers struggled against their own phantoms. Hrydor’s belligerent wailing became as white noise. Tsu’gan ignored it all. They didn’t matter. A glancing blow struck his pauldron, resonating agony through the suit that he bit down and endured. Only vengeance mattered.
A life for a life. Those were the words he’d used to justify murder.
Tsu’gan came close enough to reach his prey.
Locking hands around the renegade’s neck, he squeezed.
“Laugh now, bastard! Laugh now!”
And Nihilan did. He laughed as blood spilled from his mouth, as the veins burst on his forehead, as his neck was slowly crushed.
Emek’s voice broke through the veil that had fallen across the chamber and across the Firedrakes.
“Restoring power now. Brace yourselves.”
Gravity returned along with the lights.
The Terminators fell. So too did the gunships like asteroids from the sky.
A piece of Thunderhawk fuselage missed Tsu’gan by less than a metre. Chunks of debris broken off from the gunship’s body during the impact rained against his armour, but he weathered it. In his hands, he was holding a corpse. Its neck was crushed and when he loosened his fevered grip, the head fell off.
Tsu’gan let the wretched body of a dead serf go. Disgust became relief as he saw the reassuring green of his battle-plate. The hallucination had passed. He was himself again, although the trauma of it still lingered as if waiting to be rekindled.
“What happened?”
Praetor was releasing his hold on Hrydor, who had also recovered but was shaken by his experiences, when he answered.
“There is something aboard this ship. Something kept quiescent by its systems,” he admitted. “Like a healthy body rejects foreign invaders, so too does this vessel.”
“How is that possible, brother-sergeant? It’s just a ship.”
Nu’mean came up alongside him. The Firedrakes were converging, finding strength in proximity and all wanting to know what the phenomenon was plaguing the corridors of the Protean. Mercifully, the Terminators had escaped being crushed to death by the plummeting Thunderhawks.
“A ship that has been to the warp.” He regarded Praetor. “Its stench is redolent with every rotation of the life support systems. And that is not all.”
The moment was pregnant with anticipation, as if a terrible revelation was at hand. In the end, it was Praetor that broke the silence.
“Seeing will make an explanation easier.”
“Seeing what?” asked Hrydor, his composure returning. So powerful, so mentally invasive had their ordeals been that an ordinary man would be rendered a gibbering wreck. As it was, Space Marines were hewn of sterner material and found their faculties stressed but were otherwise not lastingly affected.
“In the cryo-stasis chamber,” said Nu’mean. “We go there now. Come on.” He was leading them out across the bay, now trashed with the wreckage of the downed Thunderhawks and littered with small fires, when Emek spoke up.
“Something on the power fluctuation readings is wrong,” he said to no one in particular. The Apothecary was standing before the room’s main operational console and had accessed a data stream concerning the recent power outage.
“It wasn’t caused by a sporadic energy surge?” asked Praetor.
Emek turned.
“No, my lord. The power from the ship’s sy
stems was diverted to another section. It looks like it was used to open a previously sealed bulkhead door.”
“Genestealers don’t do such things. They nest, confined to whatever area they’ve colonised. It’s not in their nature to explore,” said Nu’mean.
Tsu’gan stepped forwards into the circle that had developed between the two sergeants and the Apothecary. His tone was mildly annoyed.
“Meaning what, exactly?”
Praetor answered without looking at him. His eyes were on the distant blast door and the way ahead to the cryo-stasis chamber.
“It means we are not alone on this ship. Someone else has boarded the Protean.”
The rest of the journey to the cryo-stasis chamber was conducted in silence. There was no way of knowing who or what else was aboard the Protean or their relative location to the Firedrakes. They exercised extreme caution now. Every junction, every alcove was checked and double-checked.
It took them several minutes, through several tracts of closely confined corridors, before they reached the area of the ship designated for cryo-stasis. A four-way junction led up to the chamber. The way behind them, they knew. Turning left and right were another two corridors. According to Emek, the right as the Firedrakes faced it went to a bank of saviour pods. The left went deeper into the Protean and a maintenance sub-deck. A short strip of corridor approximately a metre long continued ahead and brought them to the cryo-stasis chamber itself.
The room was heavily locked down. An almost impervious bulkhead door cordoned it off and kept it sealed from idle explorers. Formerly, the Protean had been Nu’mean’s ship. The brother-sergeant possessed the access codes that would open up the chamber and reveal whatever it was they had ventured this far for, and with an Apothecary in tow.
The bulkhead retracted into the thick corridor walls on either side, slipping into previously unseen recesses that closed themselves off once the procedure was complete.
Cold air, charged with liquid nitrogen mist from inside the chamber, beckoned them closer. The room was not especially large or remarkable. It was square and held twenty banks of clear cylindrical, coffin-like receptacles capable of housing a Space Marine in full armour. This was where crewmembers could go during a long space journey. It was also a place to keep the badly wounded until a space station or dock could be reached which had superior medical facilities to those of the cruiser.
At that moment, as the Firedrakes entered and dispersed around the room, it had but one resident.
“We didn’t bring you here to save anyone, Brother Emek,” said Praetor as he stood before the only occupied cryo-tank.
Within, a crystallised frost veneering the glass, was an alien figure. Peaceful, as if in death, its helmet had been removed. The eldar’s almond-shaped eyes were closed. Its long angular face was androgynous and oddly symmetrical. It wore robes over segmented armour inscribed with peculiar, alien runes. Hands folded over its chest, it took on the semblance of a bizarre, sleeping child, disturbing and beguiling at the same time.
“No, not a saviour at all,” uttered Emek, regarding the serum within his gauntlet with fresh understanding. “I am here as an executioner.”
“So now you know,” Nu’mean broke in, unwilling to wait a moment longer. Pipes fed down into the cryo-tank, pumping in the solutions and gases needed to keep the subject in suspended animation. It also had a console, as they all did, which controlled the tank’s operation. A small port, ringed invitingly by brass, enabled additions to be made to the liquid nitrogen amalgam and the fluids that kept the occupant of the tank alive.
Praetor put his hand on Nu’mean’s shoulder.
“Prepare him for what must be done. We will guard the entrance. If these interlopers are close…” He let the implication hang in the air for a moment, before ordering the other Firedrakes out, leaving Emek and Nu’mean alone with the frozen xenos.
Tsu’gan retired from the scene reluctantly, eager to know just why this one alien was so important and why they hadn’t simply thrust chainfists through the glass and killed it without all the needless ceremony.
“Death to the alien,” he spat under his breath as he was leaving.
“The nerve agent will render the creature brain-dead,” Nu’mean explained. “It is virulent and fast acting but must be applied through the brass receptor port.” He gestured to the ring on the console.
“I had thought my mission here was to revivify one of our lost brothers,” said Emek, unaware of his impropriety and eyeing the still alien body of the eldar. He knew a little of the race and recognised it as a farseer, some kind of eldar witch. “Its psychic emanations have been affecting us since we boarded the Protean.”
“Yes,” Nu’mean answered calmly, rarely, now at peace with closure so close at hand. “Warp exposure has bonded him to the ship, for it is a he. Praetor felt it, so too did I but didn’t voice it. The cryo-process is the only thing keeping the wretch down. Without it, even the slightest breach, we would be exposed to his witchery. I lost over three thousand hands on this ship to capture this creature. Cruel fate threw us into a warpstorm just as his xenos kin fought to free him. I could do nothing for the men and women of this vessel. I lost battle-brothers, too. My order to curtail the evacuation condemned them all.”
Even with all the years now having passed, all those lives… all the ones the Salamanders had sworn to protect, were felt keenly by Nu’mean. A prisoner of war the farseer might no longer be, but he was still an enemy.
Emek’s posture hardened noticeably. “What must we do to kill it?”
Nu’mean began the procedure to open up the receptor port for the vial. He removed his battle-helm to do it, to better see and manipulate the controls.
“It will take only a moment. Prepare the vial,” he said.
Emek ejected it from his gauntlet and engaged the syringe at the end. “Ready, my lord.”
“Almost there…” Nu’mean began before all power feeding the cryo-chamber cut out completely.
Outside, the lights died.
Praetor was turning, heading back into the chamber when he saw the Apothecary recoil from the cryo-tank, a bolt of arc-lightning ripping him off his feet. It had come from the stasis tank. His cry echoed around the chamber as he spun and lay prone on the ground.
Another lashed out like a whip, ripples of psychic power coursing over the cryo-tank’s surface in agitated waves. Nu’mean staggered as the bolt struck him but stayed standing, protected by his Crux Terminatus.
“Get back!” Nu’mean, not wishing to test the limits of his personal ward again, seized Emek by the ankle and proceeded to drag him bodily across the floor.
“Storm bolters!” yelled Praetor.
Tsu’gan stepped inside and unleashed a salvo. The explosive shells stopped a few centimetres from the frozen cryo-vessel, detonating harmlessly in mid-air. The impacts blossomed outwards, as if striking some kind of miniature void field, and dissipated into nothing.
It saved Nu’mean from another bolt of arc-lighting as he almost threw Emek through the doorway and then barrelled out of the chamber himself. The bulkhead slammed shut after him, Praetor on hand to seal it.
At least the doors were still working, evidently controlled by a different part of the vessel’s internal power grid.
Even with the chamber sealed, with the power still out, Tsu’gan could feel the hallucinations returning. Though his logical mind told him they were not real, his senses railed against it. They told him he could smell copper, see shadows coalescing into foes in the long corridor ahead of them, taste the bitter tang of sulphur stinging his palate.
“Be strong of mind, brothers,” Praetor told them, even as Nu’mean was attending to Emek.
“He is badly wounded,” he said, all the old guilt and sense of impotence rushing back in a flood.
A large crack parted the Apothecary’s plastron. Blood was welling within it. There were scorch marks too, a long gash of jagged black infecting the armour like a wound itself. Part of Emek’s h
elmet was broken away. An eye awash with crimson blinked back tears of blood.
“I am wounded…” he rasped. He tried to look around but found he could not. Vital fluids bubbled in his throat and he could hear the slow rhythm of his secondary heart kicking as it attempted to cope with the trauma.
Tsu’gan looked on and found his anger towards the Apothecary had fled, to be replaced by concern. He was his brother and now, faced with seeing his potential death, realised he had acted ignobly towards the Apothecary. It was not behaviour worthy of a Salamander of Vulkan. Once tied to the Ignean Emek might have been, but he was not the one that Tsu’gan hated.
“He’s dying,” he uttered.
Nu’mean ignored him. “We must restore power to the cryo-chamber,” he told Praetor. “I won’t leave this unfinished.”
Praetor nodded. The Firedrakes were clustering the corridor. They’d set up a defensive perimeter, responding to their conditioned training routines. If there was one thing Salamanders knew how to do, and do well, it was hold ground.
“Stay here,” he said, “and be ready to move in again on my signal. I have the schemata of the ship. I’ll take my squad and find the central power room.” He glowered meaningfully. “Then I’ll find whoever shut it off and do the same to them. Bloodily.”
“In Vulkan’s name, brother,” said Nu’mean as they departed.
“We’ll need his will in this,” was Praetor’s response as he clanked away down the corridor. A short distance, and a junction led them away from the medical deck and deeper into the Protean’s cold heart.
Tsu’gan scanned the shadows warily. This part of the Protean was largely untouched and possessed an eerie quality, as if all life in its empty corridors had simply ceased. No struggle, no damage, just absence.
“I’m detecting no signs of ’stealer habitation,” reported Brother Vo’kar. He partnered Tsu’gan as they advanced towards the central power room under Praetor’s instruction.
Fear the Alien Page 10