“Plasma chamber depleted,” Vorasha’s voice slithered from his helm’s snarling speaker-grille. “The power has bled from the chamber over decades, yes-yes.”
“Restore it.” The Raptor leader emphasised the order with a short, sharp sound somewhere between a shriek and a whisper. “Do this now.”
Vorasha’s talons clicked on keys and worked levers. “I am not able to do this. Most of the vessel is lifeless. Can send power from section to section, yes-yes. With ease. Open bulkheads too dense to burn through fast. Cannot restore all power to all sections.”
Lucoryphus’ reply came in a keening, aggrieved tone. “Many redundant sections. Kill power in them. Then we move.”
“It will be done,” said Vorasha, and began to divert what little power remained in the ship’s blood vessels, forcing it into the sections that the Bleeding Eyes Raptors had to cross. At his estimate, Vorasha was going to be able to save them almost an hour of burning through locked bulkhead doors on their way through the ship.
“What is this ship?” Lucoryphus asked, his faceplate turned to the ceiling, seeking any indication of allegiance or identity.
The answer came from one of the others. Zon La found a body no more than ten seconds after his leader had asked the question. Armoured in green, it lay on the raised gantry deck above the enginarium floor; cut into pieces by the violence of alien claws, it displayed its brotherhood all too clearly in the bronze dragon emblem across its breastplate.
“XVIII Legion,” the Raptor hissed, recoiling in disgust. Zon La’s tongue ached with the sudden need to spit his corrosive saliva onto the skeletal corpse.
Vorasha, linked to the ship’s faded power core, turned to Lucoryphus. “Power killed in redundant decks. Ship name is Protean, yes-yes, XVIII Legion.”
Lucoryphus chuckled behind his faceplate. The red eye lenses stared out, with scarlet and silver tears painted in twin trails down his cheeks. It was a visage shared by all his bothers in the Bleeding Eyes. Each of them watched the world through helms with slanted eyes and cried tears of quicksilver and crimson.
“Salamanders. We killed so many in the Old War. Amazed any still draw breath.”
“Wait-wait.” Vorasha never really talked—he hissed and clicked in place of true speech, but the other Raptors could make out the meaning in his broken language with ease. “I sense others. I hear others nearby.”
Lucoryphus was as tense as his brothers, head tilted.
He had heard it, too. Weapon fire.
“Salamanders,” Zon La rasped. “Still alive on ship.”
Lucoryphus was already making his ungainly way to the double doors that led deeper into the ship’s decks.
“Not for long. Nine of you, remain with Vorasha. Nine more, with me.”
Xarl and Uzas, both warriors of First Claw, sprayed the hallway with suppressive fire, bolters kicking in clenched fists. Uzas’ field of fire was random, chewing down whichever alien beast drew his attention each particular second. Xarl was all controlled aggression, bolts punching home into the skulls of the closest aliens and crippling those that sought to rise again.
Both of them picked up the crackling declaration from Talos, and both were equally infuriated. The Bleeding Eyes, several hours deeper into the amalgamated hulk, had encountered loyalist Astartes.
Salamanders.
Too far away—far too far—for First Claw to reach them. Talos ordered his brothers to maintain the guardianship of Deltrian and purge the corridors of alien threats.
Xarl concentrated his anger into a killing urge, drawing his chainsword and tearing left and right, weaving wounds among the genestealers that reached the embattled warriors. Uzas, never one for subtlety or self-discipline, howled his bitterness through the uncaring hallways and tore into the aliens with his bolter, his chainblade and even his bare hands.
“Lucoryphus, this is Talos.”
“No words now. Hunting.”
“Assess the enemy threat first. Do not engage without assured victory.”
“Coward!”
“We have the Echo of Damnation in the void nearby, fool. We can cripple their ship in space and deploy boarding pods at our leisure. Do not engage without assured victory. We do not have the strength here to face down Terminators.”
No reply came, except for the rabid charging of hand-claws and foot-talons on metal decking.
Talos exhaled slowly. It left his helm’s vox-speakers as a daemonic rasp. This was not going to plan.
His standing orders for the strike cruiser had been to power down and activate the Shriek if any Imperial vessels came into the system. There was little chance the Salamanders’ ship had detected and destroyed the Echo, but Talos was far from sanguine. Deltrian was taking too long, and Lucoryphus, as always, was an uncontrollable element.
“First Claw to Echo of Damnation.”
“…cr… s… aw…”
The vox was still worthless. They’d have to get back to the hulk’s outer layers to restore contact. “Deltrian,” Talos voxed. “Status report.”
VII
The Eldest rounded a corner, clinging to the walls with claws that crunched purchase in the arched, ancient steel. It didn’t slow down, not even for a fraction of a heartbeat. Burning saliva stung its jaws as it drooled down its chin.
Prey.
Two. Ahead.
The Eldest leaped over the bodies of fallen kin, moving its headlong dash to the ceiling as it tore forwards, still not slowing in its stride. Claws ripped handholds in the corridor’s roof with vicious speed. Bodily, it shoved its lesser kin aside, bashing through those tall enough to obstruct its passage. In better times, their links to the Eldest’s mind would have sent them scurrying aside respectfully, sensing their lord’s approach.
“Reloading.” Mercutian dropped to one knee and ejected a spent ammunition belt from the massive heavy bolter.
At his side, Cyrion took aim with his own weapon, and the corridor echoed with the familiar crashing of a bolter letting loose on full auto.
“Reload faster.”
“Keep shooting,” Mercutian snarled.
“It’s on the damn ceiling…”
“Keep shooting.”
Beneath and around, the hard bodies of its kin were shattering and bursting under the prey’s defences. The prey ahead—two of them—unleashed a sickening stream of burning anger that blasted the Eldest’s kin apart.
The heated projectiles began to crash against the Eldest’s skin. It suddenly remembered what pain felt like.
Mercutian buckled the ammo feed into place and lifted his heavy bolter again. It took three awful seconds to power up again, then its internal mechanisms clunked into life.
An instant’s glance saw Cyrion’s bolter fire laying waste to the weaker creatures, but the huge beast was shrieking its way through a volley of bolter fire, still sprinting across the ceiling, eating up the metres between them.
He didn’t rise to his feet. Remaining where he was, he pulled the trigger handle and felt his armour’s stabilisers kick in to compensate for the cannon’s recoil.
The heavy bolter shook as it disgorged a stream of high-velocity explosive bolts, each one pounding chunks of chitinous meat from the creature’s exoskeletal flesh.
As the twelfth bolt struck home, the beast fell from the ceiling, plunging into the seething mass of lesser creatures below. Mercutian lowered his aim, and let his cannon chew into them next.
The Eldest smelled its own blood, and this was somehow more shocking than the pain of its burst-open, bleeding wounds. The scent overpowered the wounds of its kin, eclipsing them in richness and potency.
The lord-creature drew in its damaged limbs, curling them close to its body. It had misjudged the prey. The prey was fierce. The prey could not be battled as equals, but must be stalked as meat to be hunted.
This was the Way. The Eldest’s hunger had blinded it to the Way, but the pain of its mistake served as the most forceful of reminders.
Hunched and defeated but
utterly devoid of shame, the Eldest tore its way back down the passageway, slaying its own kin in its need to retreat from the prey.
Minutes later, in the silent darkness again, it uncurled its wounded limbs, waiting for the blood to stop flowing.
A single thought-pulse screamed noiselessly through the decks above and below. More of its kin spread across the hive, weakened by hunger themselves, uncoiled and rose from their own states of near-slumber.
The Eldest moved away, seeking to come at the prey alone next time, and with greater patience.
Mercutian lowered the heavy bolter and sank back against the wall. Cyrion locked his bolter to his thigh, and drew a pistol and chainblade.
At last, the corridor was mercifully quiet. Occasionally, a dead alien would twitch.
“Talos, this is Cyrion.”
“Speak,” the prophet’s voice crackled back over the vox.
“Area secure for now. Be warned, one of these genestealers is huge. Mercutian hit it dead-on with enough bolts to burst a daemon and it just howled and ran away. I swear by our father’s name, it sounded like the bastard thing was laughing as it went. We’re falling back to the irritating tech-priest now.”
“Understood. Deltrian insists this is the right ship. He has breached the starboard data storage pod. At last.”
“So it’s a Titan-carrier?”
“It was. It looks like more of a xenos hive now. A nest of genestealers on the edge of starvation.”
“It would be pleasant to know we hadn’t wasted a great deal of time in coming here.”
“That,” Talos laughed, “would mean that something went right for once.” The link went silent.
A dead genestealer shivered no more than seven metres away from where Cyrion was standing. Cyrion blew its head apart with a single shot from his bolt pistol.
Mercutian hauled himself to his feet with a grunt. “I can see why the Throne sends Terminators into these places.”
The Eldest loped through the dark tunnels, its crouched run taking it along walls and ceilings without a thought. Deeper into the hive it ran, ever deeper, moving around the prey that reeked of strange metal and powdery fire. They were strong, and the Eldest was weaker than it had ever been before. It needed to feed on easier prey to regain its strength.
And there was other prey. The Eldest could still smell it, even over the reek of its own wounds.
The other prey-scent was salt-blooded and strong, and it was this meal that the Eldest sought with patient intent.
The armoured prey were defending it, though. They encircled it, blocking off passageways and lying in wait, ready to inflict more pain. The Eldest had to avoid them, clawing and crawling through the tightest spaces and ripping new tunnels in the hive’s steel walls.
As it ran and tore and leaped and ripped, it could sense-hear more of its kin rising from their slumbers.
It came, at last, to an expansive section of the territory claimed by its kin, where few of its cousin creatures dwelled. The human prey was here, hiding in this immense chamber.
The Eldest unfolded its wounded limbs again. The blood no longer flowed. True regeneration might come in time. For now, a cessation of leakage and pain was enough.
In the darkness, the Eldest drooled and moved forwards once more. Something primal and instinctive opened within its mind, and an unheard shriek tremored out through the ship.
Its kin must be summoned.
Septimus watched the servitors working in the chamber. Occasionally, his breath would mist the visor of his atmosphere suit, but when it cleared the scene was much the same: the bionic slaves were loading up with heavy cogitator memory pods and strapping them to their backs. Deltrian, the robed tech-adept, monitored their activity from beside the main console in a room full of stilled monitors and data processors.
Thousands of years before, this had been the heart of a Mechanicus warship, carrying Titans and enhanced soldiers across the stars. In this very room, tech-priests had worked their esoteric trade, storing the information of countless crusades, the gun camera footage of hundreds of battlefields, the countless vox transmissions from generations of Titan commanders and infantry officers, and most vital of all, the code-keys, voice imprints and encryption ciphers of the Titan Legion to whom this ship had once belonged.
All of it added up to what the skeletal tech-adept had come for: the chance to lay claim to a million secrets of the Cult Mechanicus. Such lore was worth any risk. Its potential uses were infinite in the Old War against the false Emperor and the dregs of the True Mechanicum that still lingered, gasping and ignorant, on the surface of Great Mars.
Yet it had been difficult to persuade the Night Lords of the necessity, of the possibilities on offer. They had been lured in with the temptation of potential scavenging. It was a crude compromise by the tech-priest’s reasoning. Insofar as Deltrian was able to emulate human emotion anymore, he had a degree of regard for the warriors of the VIII Legion, but he mourned their lack of vision in regards to the lore he sought here.
Still, they were always reliably earnest in pursuit of piracy. He’d played to that predilection.
“Did you hear that?” Septimus asked, his breath audible over the vox. “First Claw has engaged some kind of huge creature.”
Deltrian diverted an insignificant portion of his attention to replying.
“Corporaptor primus.”
“What?”
The human’s voice patterns indicated the confusion of misunderstanding, rather than not hearing correctly. Deltrian emitted an irritated spurt of static from his vocabulator—the closest he could come to a sigh.
“Corporaptor primus. The patriarch of a genestealer brood. The alpha, apex predator.”
“How do you kill something like that?”
“We do not. If it finds us, we die. Now cease vocalisation. I am engaged in focussed activity.”
Deltrian enjoyed another three minutes of relative silence, then the muffled clanking of distant footsteps, far too fast to be human, far too soft to be Astartes, echoed through the console as the adept worked. The distant tread vibrated the panels—the tremors imperceptible to a mortal, but registering on the sensitive pads of the tech-adept’s metal fingers.
He spared a moment of his concentration to send a short burst of digital code to display written Gothic text across First Claw’s visor displays: “Genestealer threat has breached perimeter. My work is at a sensitive stage.”
With this task completed in less than the time it would take a human heart to beat, Deltrian continued working, entering numerical crack-keys to pierce the cogitator console’s encoded information locks. He was close now, close to being able to bleed the console’s memory banks, and loathed the fact a distraction would soon arrive.
VIII
The bleeding eyes crouched, gargoyles of ceramite with twisted faces rendered into silent howls. The tunnels here were wider, freer, with ceilings sporting secondary decking and mazes of overhead cables. It was on these decks, and among these dense cables serving the low-power ship as veins, that the Bleeding Eyes waited.
Beneath them, their prey had taken the bait. The green-armoured warrior in bulky Terminator plate stomped without a hint of grace, pounding his way through the corridors, firing at shadows with his underslung rotator cannon. Something was wrong. From their perches, the Night Lords listened to the Throne-loyal Astartes admonishing enemies that did not exist, evidently fighting a battle that had naught to do with the present. Burning holes streaked the walls where the cannon’s stream of fire pitted the metal in long bursts of anger.
The Bleeding Eyes shared muted vox-chuckles and stared down at the deluded warrior. He was clearly afflicted by a most amusing madness.
And yet… he had taken the bait. Shar Gan still led the Terminator on, appearing at junctions and corners, offering the flash of dark armour and screeching through his helm’s vox-speakers. Whatever the Salamander believed he was seeing, he still gave relentless chase to Shar Gan, paying no heed to the Rapt
ors crawling several metres above him, making their way on all fours across decking and power cables.
Only when Lucoryphus had deemed they’d come far enough, did they spring the trap.
“Seal the doors,” their leader hissed. Both bulkheads slammed closed, cutting the corridor off from the rest of the ship. At a distant control console elsewhere on the ship, Vorasha and the second team of Bleeding Eyes were laughing.
In the corridor below, the Terminator halted, retaining enough sense to realise he was trapped. The warrior looked up at last, as ten chainblades revved into snarling life.
The Bleeding Eyes held to the decking, the overhead cabling, even the walls and ceiling. Lucoryphus whispered into the vox, a moment before his Raptors pounced.
“Kill him.”
Talos entered the data storage chamber. Gravity had been restored in this area of the Mechanicus ship, and with the recommencement of gravity came the reintroduction of an artificial atmosphere. The ship automatically sealed off the voided sections with bulkheads.
The restoration of air also brought a new aspect to this curious hunt. Sound had returned. It was unwelcome—the inner workings of the storage modules rattled and clanked like the engine of some struggling vehicle. Pistons hammered within the cogitators’ innards. Talos had no desire to know why the archaic storage machinery required such moving parts, and the sound—in the six minutes since air had been restored by Deltrian’s servitors—was growing steadily more irritating.
Variel had reached the chamber a few minutes before the prophet. As Talos entered, the newest member of First Claw nodded in greeting, but said nothing.
Variel’s armour showed his newfound allegiance, but lacked much of the ornamentation worn by his brothers. On his pauldrons, instead of the VIII Legion’s fanged skull flanked by daemon wings, Variel’s insignia displayed a clawed fist, rendered in black ceramite, broken by ritual hammering.
Fear the Alien Page 27