Yet there, in the mass of its unknowable, alien thoughts, he glimpsed something. Great swirling clouds of red and black. And men, robed men with skeletal limbs of metal and copper cogs about their necks.
Corae pulled the trigger and laid a snake of fire over the beast, boiling its soft tissues beneath the hard chitin armour. Nord sheathed his axe and heard the voice again. Xeren seemed impatient.
“Perhaps you should not engage every tyranid you see.”
Kale was plucking spent flesh hooks from the crevices of his armour with quick, spare motions. “The xenos did not offer us the choice, priest. And I remind you who it was that told us this ship was dead.”
“Where the tyranids are concerned, there are degrees of death. The ship is dormant, and so the majority of the swarm aboard should be quiescent. But some may retain a wakeful state… I suggest you avoid further engagements.”
“I will take that under advisement,” Kale retorted.
Xeren continued. “You are proceeding too slowly, brother-sergeant, and without efficiency. Indus is the primary objective. Divide your forces to cover a greater area. Find him for me.”
The sergeant bolstered his gun, and any reply he might have made was rendered pointless as the tech-priest cut the vox signal.
Serun’s hands closed into fists. “He dares bray commands as if he were Chapter Master? The scrawny cog has no right—”
“Decorum, kinsman,” said Kale. “We are the Sons of Sanguinius. A mere tech-priest is not worth our enmity. We’ll find Xeren’s lost lamb soon enough and be done.”
“If he still lives,” mused Corae, nudging the powdery bones with his boot.
Reluctantly, Brother-Sergeant Kale chose to do as the tech-priest had suggested; beyond the bio-pool chamber the throat-corridors branched and he ordered Dane to break off, taking Corae and Serun with him. Brother Dane’s element would move anti-spinwards through the hive ship’s interior spaces, while Nord and his commander ventured along the other path.
The psyker threw the veteran a questioning look when he voiced the orders; in turn Kale’s expression remained unchanged. “Xeren and I agree on one point,” he noted. “We both wish this mission to be concluded as quickly as possible.”
Nord had to admit he too shared that desire. He thought of Gorolev’s words aboard the Emathia. The ship-master was right; this monstrous hulk was an insult every second it was allowed to exist.
Dane’s team vanished into the clammy darkness and Nord followed Kale onwards. They passed through more rendering chambers, then rooms seemingly constructed from waxy matter, laced with spherical pods, each one wet and dripping ichor. They encountered other strange spaces that defied any interpretation of form or function; hollows where tooth-like spires criss-crossed from floor and ceiling; a copse of bulbous, acid-rimed fronds that resembled coral polyps; and great bladders that throbbed, thick liquid emerging from them in desultory jerks.
And there were the creatures. The first time they came across the alien forms, Nord’s axe had come to his hand before he was even aware of it; but the tyranids they encountered were in some state that mirrored death, a strange hibernative trance that rendered them inert.
They crossed a high catwalk formed from spinal bone, and Kale used the pin-lamp beneath the barrel of his boltgun to throw a disc of light into the pits below. The glow picked out the hulking shape of a massive carnifex, its bullet-shaped head tucked into its spiny chest in some mad parody of a sleeping child.
The rasping breaths of the huge assault organism fogged the air, bone armour and spines scraping across one another as its chest rose and fell. Awake, it could have killed the Blood Angels with a single blast of bio-poison from its slavering venom cannons.
Around the gnarled hooves of the slumbering carnifex, a clutch of deadly hormagaunts rested, shiny oil-black carapaces piled atop one another, clawed limbs folded back, talons sheathed. Nord gripped the force axe firmly, and it took a near physical effort for him to turn from the gallery of targets before him. Instead they moved on, ever on, picking their way in stealth through the very heart of the hive’s dozing populace.
“Why do they ignore us?” Kale wondered, his question transmitted to the vox-bead in Nord’s ear.
“They are conserving their strength, brother-sergeant,” he replied. “Whatever incident caused this ship to fall away from the rest of its hive fleet, it must have drained them to survive it. I would not question our luck.”
“Aye,” Kale replied. “Terra protects.”
“I—”
The force axe fell from Nord’s fingers and the impact upon the bone deck seemed louder than cannon fire. Suddenly, without warning it was there.
A black and cloying touch enveloping his thoughts—the same sense of something alien he had felt aboard the Emathia.
A presence. A mind. Clouds, billowing wreaths of black and red, surrounding him, engulfing him.
“There… is something else here,” he husked. “A psychic phantom, just beyond my reach. Measuring itself against me.” Nord’s heart hammered in his chest; he tasted metal in his mouth. “Not just the xenos… More than that.”
He grimaced, and strengthened his mental bulwarks, shoring them up with raw determination. The dark dream uncoiled in his thoughts, the rumbling pulse of the Red Thirst in his gullet, the churn of the Black Rage stiffening his muscles. All about him, the shadows seemed to lengthen and loom, leaking from the walls, ranging across the sleeping monsters to reach for the warrior with ebon fingers.
Nord gasped. “Something is awakening.”
Across the plane of the hive ship’s hull, Brother Dane brought up his fist in a gesture of command, halting Corae and Serun. “Do you hear that?” he asked.
Corae turned, the flamer in his grip. “It’s coming from the walls.” They were the last words he would utter.
Flesh-matter all around the squad ripped and tore into bleeding rags as claws shredded their way towards the Astartes. With brutal, murderous power, a tide of chattering freaks boiled in upon them, spines and bone and armoured heads moving in blurs. They were so fast that in the dimness they seemed like the talons of single giant animal, reaching out to take them.
Gunfire lit the corridor, the flat bang of bolter shells sounding shot after shot, the chugging belch of fire from the flamer issuing out to seek targets. In return came screaming—the blood-hungry shrieks of a warrior brood turned loose to find prey.
The horde of tyranid soldier organisms rolled over the Space Marines with no regard for their own safety; mindless things driven on by killer instinct and a desire to feed, they had no self to preserve. They were simply the blades of the hive, and the very presence of the intruders was enough to drive them mad.
Perhaps beings with intellect might have sensed the hand of something larger, something at the back of their thoughts, compelling them, driving them to destroy. But the termagants knew nothing but the lust to rip and rend.
Symbiotic phero-chemical links between the tyranids and the engineered bio-tools in their claws sent kill commands running before them. Like everything in their arsenal, the weapons used by the warriors were living things. Their fleshborers, great bell-mouthed flutes of chitin, spat clumps of fang-toothed beetles that chewed through armour and flesh in a destructive frenzy.
Numberless and unstoppable, the brood swallowed up Corae and Serun, opening them to the air in jets of red. Dane was the last to fall, his legs cut out from under him, his bolter running dry, becoming a club in his mailed fists. At the end of him, a storm of tusk blades pierced his torso, penetrating his lungs, his primary and secondary hearts.
Blood flooded his mouth and he perished in silence, his last act to deny the creatures the victory of his screams.
Brother Nord stumbled and fell to one knee, clutching at his chest in sympathetic agony. He felt Dane perish in his thoughts, heard the echo of the warrior’s death, and that of Corae and Serun. Each man’s ending struck him like a slow bullet, filling his gut with ice.
&nb
sp; Nord’s heart and its decentralised twin beat fast, faster, faster, his blood singing in his ears in a captured tempest. The same trembling he had felt back in the chapel returned, and it was all he could do to fight it off.
He became aware of Brother-Sergeant Kale helping him to his feet, dimly registering his squad commander guiding him away from the hibernaculum chamber and into the flesh-warm humidity of the corridor beyond.
“Nord! Speak to me!”
He tried to answer but the psychic undertow dragged on him, taking all his effort just to stay afloat and sensate. The shocking resonance was far worse than he had ever felt before. There had been many times upon the field of combat where Nord had tasted the mind-death of others, sometimes his foes, too often his battle-brothers… But this… This was of a very different stripe.
At once alien and human, unknowable and yet known to him, the psychic force that had compelled the termagant swarm reached in and raked frigid claws over the surface of his mind. A pan of him screamed that he should withdraw, disengage and erect the strongest of his mental barriers. Every second he did not, he gave this force leave to plunge still deeper. And yet, another facet of Nord’s iron will dared to face this power head-on, driven by the need to know it. To know it and destroy it.
Against the sickness he felt within, Nord tried to see the face of his enemy. The mental riposte was powerful; it hit him like a wall and he recoiled, his vision hazed crimson.
With a monumental psychic effort, Nord disengaged and slumped against a bony stanchion, his dark skin sallow and filmed with sweat.
He blinked away the fog in his vision and found his commander. Kale’s pale face was grave in the dimness. “The others?” he whispered.
“Dead,” Nord managed. “All dead.”
The sergeant gave a grim nod. “The Emperor knows their names.” He hesitated a moment. “You felt it? With your witchsight, you saw… the enemy?”
“Aye.” The psyker got to his feet. “It tried to kill me. Didn’t take.”
Kale stood, drumming his fingers on the hilt of his chainsword. “This… force that assaulted you?”
He shook his head, “I’ve never sensed the like before, sir.”
“Do you know where it is?” The veteran gestured around at the walls with the chainsword.
Nord nodded. “That, I do know.”
He heard the hunter’s smile in the sergeant’s voice. “Show me.”
At the heart of every tyranid nest, one breed of creature was supreme. If the carnifexes and termagants, ripper swarms and biovores were the teeth and talons of the tyranid mass, then the commanding intellect was the hive tyrant. None had ever been captured alive, and few had been recovered by the Imperium intact enough for a full dissection. If the lictors and the hormagaunts and all the other creatures were common soldiery, the hive tyrants were the generals. The conduit for whatever passed as the diffuse mind of this repugnant xenos species.
Some even said that the tyrants were only a subgenus of something even larger and more intelligent; a cadre of tyranid capable of reasoning and independent thought. But no such being had ever been seen by human eyes—or if it had, those who had gazed upon it did not live to tell.
It was the hive ship’s tyrant that the Blood Angels sought as they entered the orb-like hibernacula, the tech-priest’s objective now ranked of lesser importance. If a tyrant was awake aboard this vessel, then none of them were safe.
“It’s not a tyranid,” husked Nord. “The thought-pattern I sensed… It wasn’t the same as the lictor’s.” He paused. “At least, not in whole.”
Kale eyed him. “Explain, brother. Your gift is a mystery to me. I do not understand.”
“The mind that touched my thoughts, that rallied the creatures who attacked us. It is neither human nor xenos.”
The sergeant halted. “A daemon?” He said the word like a curse.
Nord shook his head. “I do not sense the taint of Chaos here, sir. This is different…” Even as the words fell from his lips, the psyker felt the change in the air around them. The wet, damp atmosphere grew sullen and greasy, setting a sickly churn deep in his belly.
Kale felt it too, even without the Codicier’s preternatural senses. The sergeant drew his chainsword and brandished it before him, his thumb resting on the weapon’s activation stud.
A robed figure, there in the dimness. Perhaps a man, it advanced slowly towards them, feet dragging as if wounded. And then a voice, brittle and cracked.
“Me,” rasped the newcomer. “You sense me, Adeptus Astartes.” The figure moved at the very edge of the dull light from the lamp-beetles. Nord’s eyes narrowed; threads of clothing cables perhaps, seemed to trail behind the man, away into the dark.
Kale aimed his gun. “In the Emperor’s name, identify yourself or I will kill you where you stand.”
Hands opened in a gesture of concession. “I do not doubt you already know who I am.” He bowed slightly, and Nord saw cords snaking along his back. “My name is Heraklite Indus, adept and savant, former Magis Biologis Minoris of the Adeptus Mechanicus.”
“Former?” echoed Kale.
Indus’ shadowed head bobbed. “Oh, yes. I attend a new master now. Let me introduce you to him.”
The strange threads pulled taut and lifted Indus off his feet, to dangle as a marionette would hang from the hands of a puppeteer. A shape that dwarfed him lumbered out of the black, drawing into the pool of light.
White as bleached bone, crested with purple-black patches of armour shell, it bent to fit its bulk inside the close quarters of the hibernacula; a hive tyrant, in all its obscene glory.
Two of its four arms were withered and folded to its torso, the pearlescent surface of their claws cracked and fractured. The other arms ended in ropey whips of sinew that threaded across the floor and into the adept’s flayed spine, glittering wetly where bone was revealed beneath his torn robes.
And yet… The towering tyranid’s breathing was laboured and rough, and from its eye-spots, its great fanged jaws, its fleshy throat-sacs, thin yellow pus oozed over crusted scabs. For all the horror and scale, the tyrant seemed slack and drained, without the twitchy, insectile frenzy of its lessers. A stinking haze of necrotic decay issued from it; Nord had tasted the scent of death enough times to know that this alien beast was mortally wounded.
“What have you done, Indus?” demanded Kale, his face twisted in disgust. In all his years, the veteran sergeant had never seen the like.
“Neither human nor xenos.” Nord repeated his earlier statement, the words suddenly snapping into hard focus. With a whip-crack thought, he sent a savage mental probe towards the adept; Indus spun to face him with a glare and the telepathic feint was deflected easily.
The adept nodded slowly. “Yes, Blood Angel. We are the same. Both blessed with witchsight. Both psykers.” Indus cocked his head. “Xeren never told you. How like him.”
“No matter,” growled Kale. Without hesitation, the sergeant opened fire and Nord followed suit, both Space Marines turning their weapons on the ugly, abhorrent pairing.
The hive tyrant shifted, drawing Indus close in a gesture of protection, shielding the adept from the bolt-rounds that whined off its chitinous armour. Its head lolled back and a high screech issued from between its teeth; in reply there were hoots and howls from all around the Adeptus Astartes.
In moments, sphinctered rents in the hibernacula walls drew open, spilling dozens of mucus-slicked hormagaunts into the chamber. The chattering beasts rose up in a wave and the Blood Angels went to their blades. Kale’s chainsword brayed as it chewed through bone; Nord’s force axe cut lightning-flash arcs into meat, as barbed grasping claws dragged them down.
Nord caught a telepathic spark as blood from a cut gummed his right eye shut; he drew up his mental shields just as the hive tyrant released a scream of psychic energy upon them.
The wave of pain blasted across the chamber and the Codicier saw his battle-brother stumble, clutching his hands to his head in agony. Nord
fared little better, the tyranid’s telepathic onslaught sending him spinning. For long moments he waited for death to fall upon him, for the mass of hormagaunts to take the opportunity to rip him apart—but they did not.
Instead, the hissing monsters retreated, forming into a wall before the Space Marines, shielding Indus and the tyrant.
Nord went to Kale and helped him to his feet. The sergeant had lost his bolter in the melee, and he still shook from the after-effect of the psychic scream.
“We could have killed you,” said Indus. “We chose not to.”
“You speak for the xenos now?” spat Nord.
Indus gave a crooked smile. “A soldier’s limited mindset. I had hoped for better from one with the sight.” He came forwards, the shuffling tyrant at his back. “I found this creature near death, you understand? Too weak to fight me. I pushed in, touched its thoughts…” The adept gave a gasp of pleasure. “And what I saw there. Such riches. The knowledge of flesh and bone, nerve and blood, an understanding! More than the scribes of the Magis Biologis could ever hope to learn. Race memory, Adeptus Astartes. Millions of years of it, to drink in…”
* * *
“Fool,” replied the Blood Angel. “Can you not see what you have done? The creature is near death! It used what strength it had to lure you in, place you in its thrall! It uses you like it uses these mindless predators!” He gestured at the hormagaunts. “When it is healed, it will reawaken every horror that walks or crawls within this hive, and turn again to the killing of men!”
“You are wrong,” Indus retorted. “I have control here! I spared your lives!”
“I?” snapped Kale. “A moment ago you said ‘we’. Which is it?”
“The hive answers to me!” he shouted, the warrior creatures howling in empathy. “I gave myself to the merging, and now see what I have at my hands…” Indus drew in a rattling breath. “That is why Xeren sent you here. He is like you. Afraid. Jealous of what we are.”
[Warhammer 40K] - Victories of the Space marines Page 17