“Adeptus Astartes.” The voice had all the tonality of a command, a summons, a demand to be given fealty.
Filtered and machine-altered, the word emitted from a speaker embedded in a face where a mouth had once been. Eyes of titanium clockwork measured the Blood Angels coldly. Flesh, what there was of it, was subsumed into carbide plates that disappeared beneath a hood. A great gale of black robes hung loose to pool upon the decking, concealing a form that was a collection of sharp angles; the silhouette of a body that bore little resemblance to anything natural-born. Antennae blossomed from tailored holes in the habit, and out of hidden pockets, manipulators and snake-like mechadendrites moved, apparently of independent thought and action.
This thing that stood before them at the edge of the frigate’s tacticarium, this not-quite-man seemingly built from human pieces and scrapyard leavings… This was Xeren.
“Your mission will commence momentarily,” said the tech-priest. He shifted slightly, and Nord heard the working of pistons. “You are ready?”
“We are Adeptus Astartes,” Kale replied, with a grimace. The words were answer enough.
“Quite.” Xeren inclined his head towards the hololithic display, which showed flickers of hazy light. “This zone is filthy with expended radiation. It may trouble even your iron constitution, Blood Angel.”
“Doubtful.” Kale’s annoyance was building. “Your concern is noted, magi. But now we are here, I am more interested in learning the identity of this hulk you have tasked us to secure for you. We cannot prosecute a mission to the best of our abilities without knowing what we will face.”
“But you are Adeptus Astartes,” said Xeren, making little effort to hide his mocking tone. Before Kale could respond, the tech-priest’s head bobbed. “You are quite right, brother-sergeant,” he demurred, “I have been secretive with the specifics of this operation. But once you see your target, you will understand the need for such security.”
There was a clicking sound from Xeren’s chest; Nord wondered if it might be the Mechanicum cyborg’s equivalent of a gasp.
“Sensors are clearing,” noted Gorolev. “We have a clean return.”
“Show me,” snapped Kale.
Earlier during the voyage, just to satisfy his mild interest, Nord had allowed his psychic senses to brush the surface of Xeren’s mind. What he had sensed there was unreadable; not shrouded, but simply inhuman. Nothing that he could interpret as emotions, only a coldly logical chain of processes with all the nuance of a cogitator program. And yet, as the hololith stuttered and grew distinct, for the briefest of moments Nord was certain he felt the echo of a covetous thrill from the tech-priest.
“Here is your target,” said Xeren.
“Throne of Terra…” The curse slipped from Gorolev’s lips as the image solidified. “Xenos!”
It resembled a whorled shell, a tight spiral of shimmering bone curved in on itself. Coils of fibrous matter that suggested sinew webbed it, and from one vast orifice along the ventral plane, a nest of pasty tenticular forms issued outwards, grasping at nothing.
It lay among a drift of broken chitin and flash-frozen fluids, listing. Great scars marked the flanks of the alien construct, and in places there were craters, huge pockmarks that had exploded outwards like city-sized pustules.
There seemed to be no life to it. It was a gargantuan, bilious corpse. A dead horror, there in the starless night.
“This is what you brought us to find?” Kale’s voice was loaded with menace. “A tyranid craft?”
“A hive ship,” Xeren corrected. The tech-priest ignored the silence that had descended on the Emathia’s bridge, the mute shock upon the faces of Gorolev’s officers.
“A vessel of this tonnage is no match for a tyranid hive,” said Nord. “Their craft have defeated entire fleets and pillaged the crews for raw bio-mass to feast upon!”
“It is dead,” said the priest. “Have no fear.”
“I am not afraid,” Nord retorted, “but neither am I a fool! The tyranids are not known as ‘the Great Devourer’ without reason. They are a plague, organisms that exist solely to consume and replicate. To destroy all life unlike them.”
“You forget yourself.” Xeren’s tone hardened. “The authority here is mine. I have brought you to this place for good reason. Look to the hive. It is dead,” he repeated.
Nord studied the image. The xenos craft exhibited signs of heavy damage, and its motion and course suggested it was unguided.
“My orders come from the highest echelons of the Magistratum,” continued the tech-priest. “I am here to oversee the capture of this derelict, in the name of the God-Emperor and Omnissiah!”
“Capture…” Kale echoed the word. Nord saw the veteran’s sword-hand twitch as he weighed the command.
“Consider the bounty within that monstrosity,” Xeren addressed them, Adeptus Astartes and officers all. “Nord is quite correct. The tyranids are a scourge upon the stars, a virus writ large. But like any virus, it must be studied if a cure is to be found.” A spindly machine-arm whirred, moving to point at the image. “This represents an unparalleled opportunity. This hive ship is a treasure trove of biological data. If we take it, learn its secrets…” He gave a clicking rasp. “We might turn the xenos against themselves. Perhaps even tame them…”
“How did you know this thing was here?” Nord tore his gaze from the display.
Xeren answered after a moment. “The first attempt to take the hive was not a success. There were complications.”
“You will tell us what transpired,” said Kale. “Or we will go no further.”
“Aye,” rasped Gorolev. The captain had turned pale and sweaty, his fingers kneading the grip of his holstered laspistol.
Xeren gave another clicking sigh, and inclined his head on whining motors. “A scouting party of Archeo-Technologists boarded the craft under the command of an adept named Indus. We believe that a splinter force from a larger hive fleet left this ship behind after it suffered some malfunction. Evidence suggests—”
“This Adept Indus,” Kale broke in. “Where is he?”
Xeren looked away. “The scouting party did not return. Their fate is unknown to me.”
“Consumed!” grated Gorolev. “Throne and Blood! Any man that ventures in there would be torn apart!”
“Captain,” warned the brother-sergeant.
The tech-priest paid no attention to the officer’s outburst. “It is my firm belief that the hive ship, although not without hazards, is dormant. For the moment, at least.” He came closer on iron-clawed feet. “You understand now why the Adeptus Mechanicus wish to move with alacrity, Blood Angel?”
“I understand,” Kale replied, and Nord saw the tightening of his jaw. Without another word, the veteran turned on his heel and strode away. Nord moved with him, and they were into the corridor before the Space Marine felt a hand upon his forearm.
“Lords.” Gorolev shot a look back towards the bridge as the hatch slammed shut, his eyes narrowing. “A word?” Suspicion flared black in the man’s aura.
“Speak,” Kale replied.
“I’ve made no secret of my reservations about the esteemed tech-priest’s motive and manner,” said the captain. “I cannot let this pass without comment.” His face took on the cast of anger and old fear. “By the Emperor’s grace, I am a veteran of many conflicts with the xenos, those tyranid abominations among them.” Gorolev’s words brimmed with venom. “Those… things. I’ve seen them rape worlds and leave nothing but ashen husks in their wake.” He leaned closer. “That hive ship should not be studied like some curiosity. It should be atomized!”
Kale held up a hand and Gorolev fell silent. “There is nothing you have said I disagree with, ship-master. But we are servants of the God-Emperor, Nord and I, you and your crew, even Xeren. And we have our duty.”
For a moment, it seemed as if Gorolev was about to argue; but then he nodded grimly, resigned to fulfilling his orders. “Duty, then. In the Emperor’s name.”
Nord opened his mouth to repeat the oath, but he found his voice silenced.
So fleeting, so mercurial and indistinct that it was gone even as he turned his senses towards it, Nord felt… Something.
A gloom, stygian-deep and ominous, passing over him as a storm cloud might obscure the sun. There, and gone. A presence. A mind?
The sense of black and red clouds pressed in on the edges of his thoughts and he pushed them away.
“Nord?” He found Kale studying him with a careful gaze.
He cleared his thoughts with a moment’s effort. “Brother-Sergeant,” he replied. “The mission, then?”
Kale nodded. “The mission, aye.”
The boarding torpedo penetrated the hull of the tyranid vessel high along the dorsal surface. Serrated iron razor-cogs bit into the bony structure and turned, ripping at shell-matter and bunches of necrotic muscle, dragging the pod through layers of decking, into the voids of the hive ship’s interior.
Then, at rest, the seals released and the Space Marines deployed into the alien hulk, weapons rising to the ready.
Sergeant Kale led from the front, as he always did. He slipped down from the mouth of the boarding torpedo, playing his bolt pistol back and forth, sweeping the chamber for threats. Nord was next, then Brother Dane, Brother Serun and finally Corae, who moved with care as he cradled his flame-thrower.
The weapon’s pilot lamp hissed quietly to itself, dancing there in the wet, stinking murk.
The Codicier felt the floor beneath his boots give under his weight; the decking—if it could be called that—was made up of rough plates of bone atop something that could only be flesh, stretching away in an arching, curved passageway. By degrees, the chamber lightened as Nord’s occulobe implant contracted, adjusting the perception range of his eyes.
Great arching walls that resembled flayed meat rose around the Blood Angels, along with fluted spires made of greasy black cartilage that drooled thin fluids. Puckered sphincters lay sagging and open, allowing a slaughterhouse stench to reach them. Here and there were the signs of internal damage, long festering wounds open and caked with xenos blood.
Nord picked out glowing boles upon the walls arranged at random intervals; it took a moment before he realised that they were actually fist-sized beetles, clinging to the skin-walls, antennae waving gently, bodies lit with dull bio-luminescence.
There were more insectile creatures in the shadows, little arachnid things that moved sluggishly, crawling in and out of the raw-edged cuts.
“Damage everywhere,” noted Serun, his gruff voice flattened by the thick air of the tyranid craft. “But no signs of weapons fire.”
“It appears the tech-priest was right.” Kale examined one of the walls. “Whatever fate befell this ruin, it was not caused by battle.” He beckoned his men on. “Serun, do you have a reading?”
Brother Serun studied the sensor runes on the auspex device in his hand. “A faint trace from the adept’s personal locator.” He pointed in an aftward direction.
“That way.”
Kale’s gaze drifted towards Nord. “Is he alive, this man Indus?”
The psyker stiffened; warily extending his preternatural senses forwards. He could discern only the pale glitters of thought-energy from the spider-things and the lamp-beetles; nothing that might suggest a reasoning mind, let alone a human one. “I have no answer for you, sir,” he said at length.
“With caution, then, brothers.” Kale walked on, and they followed him, silent and vigilant.
The corridor narrowed into a tube, and Nord imagined it a gullet down which the Adeptus Astartes were travelling. He had encountered tyranids before, but only upon the field of battle, and then down the sights of a missile launcher. He had never ventured aboard one of their craft, and it was exactly the horror he had expected it to be.
Tyranid vessels were not the product of forges and shipyards; they were spawned. Hive ships were spun out of knots of meat and bone, grown on the surface of captured worlds in teeming vats filled with a broth of liquefied biomass. They were living things, animals by some vague definition of the term. Electrochemical processes and nerve ganglions transmitted commands about its flesh; pheremonic discharges regulated its internal atmosphere; exothermic chemistry created light and heat. Its hull was skeletal matter, protecting the crew that swarmed like parasites inside the gut of the craft. Together, the hive was a contained, freakish ecosystem, drifting from world to world driven by the need to feed and feed.
Even in this half-dead state, Nord could taste the echo of that aching, bone-deep craving, as if it were leaking from the twitching walls. The fleshy wattles that dangled from the ceiling, the corpse-grey cilia and phlegmy deposits around his feet, all of it sickened him with its dead stench and the sheer, revolting affront of the tyranids’ very existence. This xenos abortion was everything that the Imperium, in all its human glory, was not. A chaotic riot of mutant life, disordered and rapacious, without soul or intellect. The absolute antithesis of the civilisation the Adeptus Astartes had fought to preserve since the days of Old Night.
Nord’s hand tightened around his pistol; the urge to kill this thing rose high, and he reined it in, denying the tingle of a building Rage before it had freedom to form.
The chamber broadened into an uneven space, dotted with deep pits of muddy liquid that festered and spat, gaseous discharges chugging into the foetid air. Mounds of fatty deposits lay in uneven heaps, the ejecta from the processes churning in the ponds.
Serun gestured. “Rendering pools. Bio-mass is brought here to be denatured into a liquid slurry.”
Corae spoke for the first time since they had boarded. “To what end?”
“To feed the hive,” Serun replied. “This… gruel is the raw material of the tyranids. They consume it, shape it. It is where they are born from.”
Kale dropped to his haunches. “And where they kill,” he added. The sergeant picked something metallic from the spoil heaps and turned it in his fingers. A rank sigil of iron and copper, a disc cut to resemble a cogwheel. Upon it, the design of a skull, the symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Corae turned his face and spat in disgust. “Emperor protect me from such a fate.”
“More here,” said Brother Dane. With care, he drew to him a twisted shape afloat on one of the pools. It was a man’s ribcage and part of a spine, but the bone was rubbery and distended where acidic fluids had eaten into it. It crumbled like wet sand in the Blood Angel’s grip.
“Adept Indus, perhaps, and his scout team…” Kale suggested. He turned to face Nord and saw the psyker glaring into the dimness. “Brother?”
The question had barely left his lips when the Codicier gave an explosive shout. “Enemy!”
The shapes came at them from out of the twisted, sinewy ropes about the walls. Three beasts, bursting from concealment as one, attacking from all sides.
Corae was quick, clutching the trigger bar of his flamer. A bright gout of blazing promethium jetted from the bell-mouth of the weapon and engulfed the closest tyranid in flames, but on it came, falling into the red wave of death.
The second skittered across the ground, low and fast, dragging itself in loping jerks by its taloned limbs and great curved claws. Dane, Serun and the sergeant turned their bolters on it in a hail of punishing steel.
The third found Nord and dove at him, falling from the ceiling, spinning about as it came. He flung himself backwards, his storm bolter crashing his free hand reaching for the hilt of his force axe.
The tyranid landed hard and rocked off its hooves; Nord got his first good look at the thing and recognition unfolded in his forebrain, the legacy of a hundred hypnogogic combat indoctrination tapes. A lictor.
Humanoid in form, tall and festooned with barbs, they sported massive scything talons and a cobra-head tail. Where a man would have a mouth, the lictors grew a wriggling orchard of feeder tendrils. They were hunter-predator forms, deployed alone o
r in small packs, stealthy and favoured of ambush attacks. Unless Nord and his brothers killed them quickly, they would spill fresh pheromones into the air and summon more of their kind.
He reversed and met the alien with the flickering crystal edge of the axe, reaching into his heart and finding the reservoir of psychic might lurking within him. As the axe-head bit into the lictor’s chest, Nord channelled a quickening from the warp along the weapon’s psi-convector and into the xenos’ new wound. Its agonised shriek battered at him, and he staggered as it tried to claw through his armour. Nord’s bolter crashed again, hot rounds finding purchase in the pasty flesh of its thorax. He withdrew the axe again and struck again, over and over, riding on the battle-anger welling up inside him.
The Blood Angel was dimly aware of a death-wail off to his right, half-glimpsing another lictor fall as it was opened by shellfire and chainblade; but his target still lived.
A talon swept down, barbs screeching as they scored Nord’s chest plate; in turn he let the axe fall again, this time severing a monstrous limb at the joint. Gouts of black blood spurted, burning where it landed, and the Codicier threw a wall of psionic pressure outwards, battering at the wounded creature.
The lictor’s hooves slipped on the lip of a bio-pool and it stumbled backwards into the lake of stringy muck; instantly the churning acids ate into the tyranid and it collapsed, drowning and melting.
Nord regained his balance and waved a hand in front of his visor as oily smoke wafted past; the third tyranid was also dying, finally succumbing to Corae’s flamer and the impacts of krak grenades.
A mechanical voice grated through his vox-link. “Kale. Respond. This is Xeren. We have detected weapons fire. Report status immediately.”
Ignoring the buzzing of the tech-priest, the psyker approached the last dying lictor as Corae took aim with his flame-thrower, twisting the nozzle to adjust the dispersal pattern. The force axe still humming in his hand, his psychic power resonating through him, Nord caught the sense of the tyranid’s animal mind, trapped in its death throes. He winced, the touch of it more abhorrent to him than anything he had yet witnessed aboard the hive ship.
[Warhammer 40K] - Victories of the Space marines Page 16