by Nick Kyme
The Warpsmith’s helm broke off, hitting the deck with a clang. A scarred, grey face looked at Haephestus with malice. The Traitor Marine fired back, a plume of burning promethium that lapped around the edges of Haephestus’ refractor field. He was unscathed but momentarily blinded. It also fouled his targeting array, so his next shot went wild.
The Traitor Marine was moving, a swarm of serpentine mechadendrites uncoiling from its scabby robes and armour. It was also choking, though as the fire marring Haephestus’ vision ebbed he saw a crusting membrane beginning to form over the Traitor Marine’s exposed face as its mucranoid organ went to work. Skin was already flaking off though, dissolving like parchment in acid. Yellowed bone gleamed beneath. Haephestus fired off a rapid salvo, striking armour, eroding softsealed joints. The Traitor Marine stumbled, one of its serpentine arms whipping around some pipework to steady it as the others snapped out blades and churning saws.
Haephestus engaged further defences, stepping back as the abomination desperately hurtled at him. An array of las-cutters, plasma-torches and meltaguns attached to multi-jointed servo-arms snapped from their mountings on his back. The resulting fusillade cut the Traitor Marine apart, bisecting limbs and cleaving through armour as if it were nothing. The discombobulated pieces struck the deck in a noisy mess, mechadendrites sparking and flopping weakly with the dying dregs of abruptly severed power.
Only then did Haephestus feel the pain receptors in his body light up like mercury flares. He clutched his side where the shot had struck him. Blood and oil oozed from between armour plates. The wound was deep, and he staggered, holding on to the wall to steady himself before welding the armour shut and restoring its hermetic seal.
The weapons array retracted behind his back, and Haephestus was about to return to the core to determine exactly what had been done to it when alpha and beta charged at him through the gap in the gate. His termination protocols had no effect, some hostile code driving the cyborgs and overriding all other commands. It bled off them like an invisible fog, briefly fouling the Techmarine’s visual returns and slowing his reactions.
Alpha struck him across the chest, the fork arm lethal and denting Haephestus’ plastron.
Beta clamped his left forearm and squeezed.
Haephestus shunted away the agony to another part of his brain. The vambrace of his left arm had twisted, and the bone was being crushed. He used his right hand to unclamp a short-hafted axe from his belt. A thumb and forefinger twist of the grip saw the haft lengthen to a long polearm. Haephestus swung, the cog-toothed axe blade burring.
Oil and biological matter spattered his armour as he bisected alpha across the coronal plane. The resultant downswing clove beta’s skull in two, the blow hard enough to split his rib bone and lodge the blade halfway down the servitor’s chest. Organs and machine parts spewed out between the tear in beta’s environment suit like an overstuffed sack finally bursting its stitches. The biological slop mixed with alpha’s in a grimy, dark slurry.
Haephestus’ armour systems registered severe damage. His primary and secondary heart showed massively elevated activity. The rapid influx of hyper-endorphins had made him groggy. He leaned heavily on the cog-axe, using its haft as a crutch. The left arm was useless and hung at his side. The plastron had held, but his rib plate beneath had suffered severe trauma, leaving every breath feeling like churned glass on his insides. Blinking rapidly and trying to prevent his body from going into extreme shock, Haephestus saw figures through the gap in the gate.
They were moving quickly, hunting through the shadows and the chemical fog. They wore masks. They were coming for him.
ALL HANDS
The vox had brought Sicarius to his feet. He strapped the scabbarded sword he had left by his side back onto his belt.
‘Stay here,’ he warned Vedaeh, who nodded mutely, knowing better than to challenge the captain after what she had just heard.
He was heading for the door to the Reclusiam and almost at the edge of the threshold when she said, ‘Be careful, Cato. You are the heart of this ship and those aboard. All hands look to you.’
Sicarius paused to absorb that statement, opened the door and stepped out of the room.
Gaius Prabian was waiting for him on the other side.
‘I assume you have heard, captain?’
‘Roan’s men were vetted by Venatio. No sign of taint, no moral corruption of any sort.’
‘Darkness finds a way into men’s hearts,’ was the only explanation the company champion could give.
They started walking swiftly in the direction of deck thirteen, Sicarius only hesitating a moment to ensure the door to the Reclusiam was sealed behind him.
‘I want protection for Vedaeh,’ he said, cloak flapping behind him with the urgency of his steps.
‘I have seen to it, my lord. A squad of armsmen are on the way.’ Prabian paused, then added, ‘There were no Astartes to spare.’
‘We should have kept a closer eye on Roan. Isolated like that…’
‘You think we could have stopped it?’
They had passed through the first corridor, Sicarius acknowledging the few crewmen they met along the way. The mood was feverish, on edge, although only the Ultramarines knew the nature of the thing that had manifested in deck thirteen. Its presence had been felt nonetheless, and spoke for the pervasive influence of the warp on ignorant and unready minds.
‘I think the warp has depleted us, and I think we are currently ill-equipped for another crisis.’
Crossing a junction, they headed left. The next section ended in a chevron-marked barrier. Prabian dismissed the enginseer standing sentry outside with a curt slash of his hand. He then proceeded to lift the gate, hauling it up with raw strength and revealing the maintenance shaft beyond.
‘I know there is no point in telling you to armour yourself before we commit ourselves to this encounter,’ said Prabian.
Sicarius stepped onto the reinforced mesh platform and engaged the mechanism that set it churning down into the darkness below. Prabian jumped lightly aboard and pulled the security gate back down behind him. Flashing lumens lit the shadows in intermittent yellow light as they descended. They strafed Sicarius’ face, picking out scars and old wounds.
Another face watched him from beyond the gate. It kept pace with the lift, a constant presence as the decks went past in blurry stencilled lettering. Its eyes glowed, burning dulcet and green, a malign intelligence contained in a mechanised body. Sicarius stared back. His hand, clenched around the haft of the Tempest Blade, tightened its grip.
‘I have all the armour I need,’ he replied and averted his gaze.
Musty air and the reek of machine oil drifted up to them on the noisy breeze of coolant fans. Heat came with it, drawn from the ship’s engines. The maintenance shaft ran down the entirety of the lower decks. It moved steadily, but not quickly. It was made with dependability in mind, not speed, but it was direct and the quickest way to their destination.
‘Then I ask only this…’ said Prabian, drawing his sword. The gladius was forged of Talassarian steel. It had a blue tinge to the metal, a quirk of the folding process, and the words ‘animo’ and ‘honoris’ were etched in High Gothic on either side of the blade. The edge caught the light and flashed brilliantly like captured fire before returning to its original state. ‘If you are planning on doing anything reckless then some warning would be appreciated. I would prefer you to at least afford me the opportunity to give my life for yours. Penitence for failure doesn’t suit me, Cato.’ Prabian gave a half-smile.
Sicarius laughed. ‘I make no promises, Gaius. Stay on your toes.’
Prabian gave a short bow. ‘It is my perpetual state of being.’
They faced forwards, the clunking refrain of the lifter the only sound between them until Sicarius drew the Tempest Blade. Lightning crackled down its perfect length, and it glowed with an inner fire that no darkness could quench. Its casting was perfect, a mirror-sheen blade of storm-wrack adamantium that
appeared to churn with the wildness of oceans. Intricate filigree bedecked the hilt, the nobility of Sicarius’ familial line captured in metal.
A metallic chime sounded as their two swords came together, both a signal to war and a mark of utmost respect between warriors. The weight of duty descended.
‘We have to save them, Gaius.’
‘On my honour, captain,’ he replied, ‘we will or I shall die trying.’
Pillium fell to his knees for the third time. He had one hand pressed against the red wound to his chest and his free arm draped around Sharna’s shoulders. She could not bear his weight – the fact she even tried was almost laughable, but he had neither the strength nor the will to argue. She cried out as his armoured body pressed upon her, a small noise suggestive of stifled pain. It carried a note of desperation.
‘Get up,’ she urged, and Pillium heard the guttural retching and swallowing of the beast as it devoured the last morsels of Tiberus. ‘Please…’ More whimpering from the mortal. Her heart thundered and Pillium could tell her sanity hung by a tenuous thread.
‘Get her out!’
A cry from deeper into the hall. Had deck thirteen really been this long? It had not felt far on the way in, but then he hadn’t had to crawl on his hands and knees.
The words were Seppio’s, one of Secutius’ squad. Pillium turned, still down, and wanting to draw a weapon he no longer had in a hand that was unable to grasp it. The other Primaris Marine lived, then. The darkness hid him from sight. The lamps had shorted or the power drain had reached a critical mass. Either way, it was as black as the deep ocean and just as forbidding. Muzzle flare tore a hole in the dark, a savage rip doomed to reseal, that revealed a head, arms and torso but no legs. The beast had ripped them off.
It had caught them, half charging, half flying on its nascent wings, faster than they could outrun.
Aegidus had been the rearguard. He had engaged, bolt rifle spitting out the last of its rounds. He had died quickly, bludgeoned and crushed by a gnarled fist. Cajus had been less fortunate. His death was piecemeal and slow. Only Seppio and Tiberus dragging Pillium back from the torture had prevented him from selling his own life as cheaply.
It had bought them time, the beast’s sudden fascination with Cajus’ anatomy. It had obliterated Aegidus’ skull, and smeared it across the deck, bone, blood and matter. Cajus’ head it flensed whilst it was still attached to the body. His screams of agony rang for several haunting minutes.
They had got close to the entrance, where Sharna would roll back the gate and lock this thing in its prison until more warriors could be found to help kill it. Pillium could see the way out now, even as he remembered Secutius, caught up in the beast’s claws and pulled apart like a piece of meat. And Tiberus, engulfed behind its wings as the beast pounced. Their ends were ignominious, inglorious.
Pillium hauled himself up, Sharna pushing ineffectually. In a part of his brain, the small part that was not otherwise occupied with thoughts of how he might survive to later kill this monstrosity, he supposed she needed to focus on something, some small act to keep the terror at bay just a little longer. Fear killed the mind and the death of the mind led to the death of the body, and that is why fear had been bred out of his kind. It had no purchase, but something had slipped in, regardless of his conditioning. In the presence of the beast, Pillium felt a primordial unease, a deep and abiding sense of wrongness that he could not shake.
Seppio’s last act of defiance ended as his weapon fell silent. Pillium ran, Sharna clinging on around his neck, though the agony was incandescent. His wounds knitted, the bones realigned. It hurt like a forge fire and retreat was anathema to him, but to stand his ground now was to meet death and condemn Sharna to the same fate. He would not have that on his conscience, even in death, especially in death where there was no hope of redemption.
‘Hold on to me, quartermaster,’ he said, and heard the roaring of the beast behind them.
‘Kharnath!’ it raged, in a voice dredged from some dark abyssal place.
They barrelled through the opening, pounding hoof-beats like a cavalry charge hounding their steps.
Pillium let Sharna down and turned to face the beast. It had slowed, perhaps to savour the kill. It was huge, a hulking shadow of red-meat skin and over-taut and bulked muscle. Hot, coal-black eyes regarded him with bestial malice. Wings at full stretch cast a bat-like shadow. Smoke, spilling from its hide, obscured the rest.
‘Seal it,’ said Pillium and unsheathed his gladius, determined to at least die with a weapon in his hands.
The emergency lumens at the edge of the entranceway flickered. Sharna failed her first attempt at the lock code, her shaking fingers making a mess of it.
‘Do it now, quartermaster,’ Pillium urged, getting into stance and readying himself for a fight he could not contest, let alone win.
Sharna tried again and this time the lock code was accepted. Gears grinding, the door began to move. It had reached halfway when the lumens winked out and all power failed. The door stopped moving. Sharna’s anguish was a barely heard whisper.
‘Oh, Throne…’
THE VITAL SPARK
They had been infiltrated. As Haephestus fought the cultists in the catacombs, he knew this was the only logical explanation. He also realised the goal here was not to kill him – even with one hand, he was destroying his enemies with ease – it was to delay him and sabotage the ship.
Power, it always came to this. Dominance, rulership, energy, everything that man and alien had fought over for millennia was for power. In the deep engine core it had a physical manifestation, the very force that drove the ship and gave it life. Sever that and the ship would die. But that had not been the sole aim of the Warpsmith he had fought and killed. The life blood of the ship had not just been cut off, it had been compromised. Tainted. Haephestus felt the data-corruption in the air. It had altered the golems’ programming, turning alpha and beta against him. And it had crept into the entire vessel. The ship’s data-feed fed through him. In nano-seconds he was able to parse vast screeds of binharic, deciphering the extent of the damage. Life support, motive function, everything had been compromised. A total and complete shutdown of all systems, barring one. The warp engine derived its power from a self-perpetuating source. Only it and the Geller field it generated remained operational.
Haephestus processed as he fought, multitasking with a Martian’s cognitive assurance.
As he attempted to root out the data-corruption, a cultist came swinging at him with a chainaxe. It was an industrial model, designed for cutting pipes and metal plates. Even swung with a mortal’s meagre strength, it would chew through softseal armour joints without difficulty. Haephestus took the blow on his shoulder, sparks spitting from the guard, chain teeth snapping at paint but little else. He swung his arm around, the volkite pistol back in his hand, and cored out the cultist’s chest.
He shot two more at distance, deflagrating their crude environment suits and letting them die painful deaths from the atmosphere’s toxicity. Stepping over the writhing bodies, he engaged the rest. The cog-axe was back mag-locked to his hip. His injuries had stabilised and he could walk and fight, but his left arm hung useless at his side. In the narrow spaces of the deep engine core, Haephestus had determined a pistol was the more efficient option. So it had proven.
Four more cultists lay dead. Haephestus took no satisfaction in it. To him, war and battle were equations, a balancing of effort versus efficiency. He counted twenty dead in total. All baseline human, all dressed in crude environment suits, all bearing the aquila, albeit the tattoo had been roughly scratched away. These men and women had once been crew. Now they were enemies. Privation and fear had driven them to madness. Haephestus had no logic to explain the influence of the warp but he knew the longer they were adrift in its capricious tides, the chances of their survival diminished.
He walked heavily back to the core. Principal amongst his concerns now was the reignition of the main furnace. The energy conv
ersion rate of the core was less than suboptimal. Failure to boost output soon would result in permanent endothermic stasis. After that, no available measures would bring the power back online.
In the few minutes it had taken to reach the core, Haephestus had isolated and neutralised the hostile data-cyphers released by the Warpsmith. They had been rudimentary, scrapcode that even a low-level tech-priest could unravel. Its deployment, then, had not been to permanently disable the ship. The intent was temporary paralysis. He wondered what for.
The vox was still scrambled. The malicious code and his current depth in the ship conspired to make communication to above decks impossible. He was still scrubbing transmission bands when he re-interfaced with the core via mechadendrite implant. Engaged fully with the core’s machine-spirit, Haephestus perceived the rapidly diminishing output and concluded there was a need for drastic action.
He disconnected from the core, quickly mounting an access gantry to where the furnace burned laboriously. An immense metal chamber contained the fiery heart of the ship, a molten promethium mixture like magma. Haephestus had to manually open up a small porthole in the coal-black vessel. It took considerable effort and the application of heavy-grade Mechanicus tools. A volatile sea churned within, its perfect actinic blue waves flickering with crests of white fire. Warning sigils instantly flared across the Techmarine’s retinal lens display. He dismissed them. Even operating at a fraction of its potential, the heat spikes were significant. His armour bore the brunt, a convection wave that blistered paint and ate at ceramite.