Overfiend

by David Annandale

  Ba’birin gestured for the Salamanders to follow, and he marched after the eldar.

  ‘Brother-sergeant,’ N’krumor voxed over the company channel. ‘Are we really?’

  ‘We are,’ Ba’birin told the Apothecary. ‘Or would you rather not keep a close eye on an enemy force whose target is the same as yours?’

  ‘A sound strategy,’ Ha’garen offered.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ba’birin said, and realised that his distrust of Ha’garen had tempered. He did not understand his brother’s altered way of thinking, and worried that his judgement was suspect at best. But Ha’garen was, at least, starting from a human standpoint, however far he had travelled from it. The conversation with the eldar warlock had been disconcerting. One did not talk with orks. They barely seemed to talk with each other. The only possible interaction with that race was a clash of arms. There was a comfortable simplicity, then, to their alien qualities. Orks also had but one mode of existence: attack. They were predictable. But the eldar were a hated mystery. The fact that one could communicate with some of them only compounded their disgusting otherness. This contingent was particularly off-putting. Their predilection for flame and their drake-like iconography gave them a touch of the familiar that only made them even more alien. Ha’garen strode forwards, his servo-harness turning him into a multi-limbed creature of metal. The eldar moved with grace, and their armour had a flexibility that made it seem more raiment than protection. They were entirely of the organic realm. Ha’garen was far down the path to the inorganic. He was disappearing, it seemed to Ba’birin, into the realm of the machine. He marched with clockwork precision, servo-arms flexing and grasping, shoulder mounts swivelling from target to target even as his chainaxe was angled diplomatically down. There was no trace of the flesh in his heavy, perfectly measured tread. Yet in this moment, in the presence of true xenos, he was completely human.

  Eldar and Salamanders moved down the tunnel. It ran straight for a few hundred metres. There were no branches. The metalwork was so rough, it was as if the passage were a cave mined out of a mountain of iron. It was wide enough for the Space Marines to walk two abreast. Ba’birin suspected beasts sometimes chased the slaves out into the pit. There were plenty of rotting bits of bodies. People had lost limbs in this tunnel. There were claw gouges here and there in the walls.

  Neleus voxed for his ears only. ‘They have their backs to us. How are they watching us?’

  ‘You assume that they are.’

  ‘They have to be.’

  Ba’birin nodded. ‘The one who spoke to us is a witch of some sort.’

  ‘Sending one to find one. Sensible.’

  ‘Any suggestions for what we do once we reach the prisoner?’

  ‘Other than kill them before they kill us?’ Neleus’s grin was almost visible through his helmet.

  ‘Then we agree that that should be our plan.’

  ‘There can be no other.’ Neleus sounded much less jocular.

  ‘Brother-sergeants,’ a voice interrupted. It was Berengus. He had the long-range vox equipment. ‘I have received an urgent message from Captain Mulcebar.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s good news,’ Neleus said.

  ‘The Raven Guard’s mission planetside has been successful,’ Berengus began.

  ‘I congratulate my brothers,’ Ba’birin interrupted, ‘but we already knew that, and the tactical relevance of this information–’

  ‘Culminating in the annihilation of eldar ground forces,’ Berengus finished.

  ‘Thank you, brother,’ Ba’birin said. ‘Please alert the others.’ He tightened his grip on his flamer, lifting the muzzle just a little bit higher, ready to stream death at a moment’s notice.

  ‘Do you think they know?’ Neleus wondered.

  ‘They must.’

  ‘There has been no detectable broadcast since the beginning of this encounter,’ Ha’garen put in as the information reached him.

  ‘That means nothing,’ Ba’birin said. ‘The eldar are masters of sorcerous communication.’

  ‘Then why aren’t they attacking?’ Neleus demanded.

  ‘For the same reason we aren’t.’

  ‘The mission is paramount,’ Ha’garen said, completing the thought.

  The tunnel ended in a long chamber filled floor to ceiling with cages. They were rough cubes, about a metre and a half on each side. There were no platforms or walkways reaching to the upper prisons, just a tangle of rope ladders. Some of the cages were empty. Most were not. Inside the tiny boxes were the arena participants. Ba’birin saw humans, eldar, kroot and more. There were even a few orks. This was a menagerie in which the differences between species had been all but erased. The prisoners were all feral, ravening rage and gibbering fear. He didn’t hear a single intelligible word, only the whining pleas and growling threats of beasts. There was nothing to salvage here. A conflagration would be nothing less than euthanasia.

  ‘Is our target here?’ he asked Ha’garen, eyeing the advance of the eldar carefully.

  The Techmarine shook his head. ‘Nearby, but not part of this collection. These are not slaves. Not any longer.’

  ‘Where, then?’

  A moment passed, a tick during which Ba’birin sensed Ha’garen’s consciousness vanishing into mechanistic meditation, as if he were a walking cogitator. Then he was back. ‘Down another level,’ he said. ‘Then we look.’

  Ahead, the eldar had stopped. They had spread out in a rough circle, and appeared to be focused on a section of decking. Kaderial gestured Ba’birin forwards. ‘I am, by circumstance, delighted,’ he said. ‘Farseer Elisath, reaching the end of his misfortune, lies almost directly below.’

  Ba’birin glanced back and forth between the deck and the eldar. ‘You are suggesting cutting through.’

  ‘Motivated by strategy, I am.’

  Neleus said, ‘You don’t appear to be equipped for this sort of work.’

  The same thought had occurred to Ba’birin as he ran his eyes over the eldar arsenal. He didn’t know what they had concealed on their persons, but they weren’t holding anything other than their primary weapons. The fusion guns would punch through the deck easily enough, but they would also vaporise anything beneath. The prisoner would not survive such a rescue.

  Kaderial spread his hands. ‘We are, by the fates, embarrassed.’ His ornate, conical helmet turned Ha’garen’s way. ‘While you, by the same, are prepared.’

  Ba’birin glanced at Ha’garen’s plasma cutter. ‘You are inviting us to gain initial entry to the target’s prison?’

  Kaderial stepped to one side. He made a sweeping, expansive gesture that took in both deck and Salamanders. ‘By our wishes,’ he said.

  ‘Brother-sergeant?’ Ha’garen voxed.

  ‘I’ve never seen such a shameless trap,’ Neleus observed, still on the company channel.

  ‘It can afford to be,’ Ba’birin said. ‘We can’t refuse it.’

  ‘We don’t know what Ha’garen will be cutting into.’

  ‘It is not likely to be explosive,’ Ha’garen put in, ‘or the eldar would be destroyed also. They are too close.’

  Neleus wasn’t placated. ‘It isn’t likely to be the location of our target, either.’

  When Ha’garen spoke again, it was with resignation. ‘There is little choice. Furthermore, I estimate that the likelihood of our being in the immediate vicinity of the target is high. So...’

  He moved forwards.

  ‘With our thanks, Forge Master,’ Kaderial said.

  Ha’garen froze. He could still take offence, Ba’birin noted. ‘I am no such thing,’ the Techmarine snapped at the eldar. ‘There is but one Master of the Forge, and that is Master Argos. You taint his honour and mine with your tongue.’

  Kaderial cocked his head. ‘Perhaps. My apologies, by your leave.’ He seemed amused. ‘Still, by your path, you ar
e exceptionally at one with the machine.’

  Ha’garen ignored the comment. He lowered his cutter-wielding servo-arm until it was close to floor level. The plasma beam sliced metal, scalpel in flesh. Ha’garen traced a large rectangle, far larger than would be needed for simple access down below. He was thinking, Ba’birin realised, of squad movements, planning for speed and force. The eldar stepped back out of the way of the widening perimeter. They made no objection.

  Ba’birin’s suspicions grew.

  ‘They are being much too accommodating,’ Neleus said, echoing his thoughts.

  Ba’birin said nothing. But as Ha’garen completed the cut, he raised his flamer. He angled it towards the floor, ready to incinerate whatever might lunge from below, but it would take nothing to jerk the muzzle higher and train it on the Fire Dragons.

  Ha’garen’s two manipulator servo-arms reached down and fastened their vice grips to the decking. He finished. The outline of the cut was incandescent. He gave the decking a yank. It lifted as a single piece three metres long by two wide. The eldar did not rush in. Ba’birin took a cautious step forwards to see what was below.

  More of the ork ship’s sickly penumbral light. He was looking at another corridor, with more cells on either side of it. The drop was a short one. The space was not cavernous like the one where they stood. The cries of prisoners moaned up through the gap. The babble of pleas drowned out individual voices, but Ba’birin could still make out the articulations of words and phrases. The souls down there were still sentient. Theirs, he thought, was the more cruel fate. They could hope for rescue, and despair when it did not come.

  ‘Where is he?’ Ba’birin asked.

  ‘Aft and port, by my numbers,’ said Kaderial. ‘A few lengths more.’ He made an elaborately casual hand gesture that suggested both an apology and shrug. ‘Cutting directly above, by my thinking, would have been lethal to our lost one.’

  ‘Quite,’ Ba’birin said. He and Neleus faced each other, sharing a silent debate. Split the squads or descend together? Attack the eldar now, forestalling the trap?

  He recoiled at the idea of the pre-emptive strike. There was no honour in the act, and though he knew the warlock was setting him up, he lacked the formal proof that would satisfy his own conscience. The Salamanders had experienced treachery in the most foul form imaginable at the dawn of the Heresy, and it was repugnant to consider an action that even approached that particular sin. The eldar were a race that Ba’birin despised with every fibre of his being, but the behaviour of these warriors had all the trappings of honour, even if that couldn’t possibly be the truth of their actions.

  ‘Together,’ Neleus said.

  ‘Yes,’ Ba’birin agreed. They would not be divided. ‘Brothers,’ he called to the squads, and then dropped down to the deck below.

  ‘The orks, by their noise, are not long in coming,’ Kaderial said. ‘Do not tarry.’

  Ba’birin bit back a retort. He could hear the growing savage rumble. The greenskins must have discovered that their bombardment had not produced the expected number of bodies.

  Aft and port, Kaderial had said. Ten metres on, the Salamanders found the cell. The eldar seer was crouched inside the claustrophobic box, weak and covered in filth, but his gaze steady. He looked more than a little confused as Ha’garen ripped the door off its hinges.

  ‘Can you understand me?’ Ba’birin asked. When the eldar said nothing, the Space Marine jerked a thumb, and the prisoner staggered out of his cell. The Salamanders moved to surround him. Down the corridor, a group of ork guards were yelling at each other and the intruders. Two of them ran deeper into the ship. The others attacked. Berengus’s bolter cut them down. ‘Which way?’ Ba’birin asked Ha’garen.

  The Techmarine looked at the cabling. ‘Back,’ he said. ‘The routes from that deck to our entry point are more direct.’

  Ba’birin accepted this, along with the imminence of the struggle for custody of the seer. He still couldn’t see what strategic benefit the eldar were imagining would be theirs by letting the Salamanders take first possession of the prisoner.

  They headed back. Halfway there, Kaderial called to them. ‘It is done?’

  ‘It is,’ Ba’birin answered. He braced himself. The opening was just ahead. He could see the Fire Dragons outlined in the noxious glow of the larger chamber.

  ‘He did not suffer long, by your hands?’

  Ba’birin froze. Calculations and assumptions crumbled. What? he thought. The eldar had been pretending concern for the prisoner’s safety? They had been assuming the Salamanders were pretending too? What, what, what?

  ‘Ah,’ Kaderial said. ‘This is, by its perversity, a realm most inimical to sight. But now I see.’

  The silhouettes moved. Fusion guns and dragon’s breath fired.

  Everything became flame.

  Madness.

  Obliteration.

  Chapter Five

  Amidst the flash, amidst the hurtling through disintegrating space, amidst the battering thunder-burn of being caught in a fusion gun fusillade, Elisath slipped onto the skein. Time expanded as he dropped into the impossibly dense knot of his own tangled fates. The grains tumbling down the abyssal hourglass paused. When the next grain fell, his body would collide with something unyielding, unforgiving. If the impact were hard enough, the knot would be sliced as his fates came to an end. But if the blow was not fatal, the knot would grow more tangled yet. He still couldn’t see far. To the disorienting energy and randomness of the orks had been added the gigantic improbability that was now unfolding. An improbability he had helped bring about.

  The next grain wanted to fall. His body would soon hit. He raced up and down the paths that were visible to him, stealing a bit more time. The loss of his waystone was a cancer of fear on his soul. If death waited with the plummet of that grain, he was engaged in his final acts of awareness before he fell prey to She Who Thirsts. So he took what he could.

  He meditated on irony.

  His body spinning. The moment coming. Time slowed, but unforgiving, and coming for him.

  He was being hunted by his kin. So he had taken the only path open to him. He had placed himself at the mercy of the Salamanders. His vision of the future was crippled, but the thread drawn by the Fire Dragons had been clear enough. They thought that killing him would preserve the secret of the shard. Stupid. Didn’t they know whose ship they were on? Didn’t they see where it was headed?

  Didn’t they know what ork it was who ruled here?

  Blocking Kaderial’s vision had been a simple matter. Weak as he was, Elisath was more than a match for the warlock. All he had had to do was direct Kaderial’s attention to the thread that saw the Salamanders coming to kill him. This was the particular irony that Elisath savoured now: the most improbable thread had been the one that common sense would have declared inevitable.

  The grain dropped. Time and frailty hurled him from the skein, back to his body and the annihilating pain of his salvation.

  A sun was born inside the kroozer. It was the offspring of simultaneous fusion and flamer barrage. It was a tiny, wailing infant of a star, an insignificant mote. Except that it did not seem like a mote in a ship’s corridor. It did not seem insignificant from the inside.

  Ha’garen understood the principles of the fusion gun. He knew it was similar to the Imperium’s melta weapons. He knew what such a weapon did to defensive positions. To armour. To living flesh. But he did not have the luxury of reflecting on his theoretical knowledge of the fusion gun. He was too busy surviving his practical experience of its blast in the midst of a flamer attack. His world became a sear of absolute light in the microsecond before his helmet lenses shuttered, sealing his eyes in sight-preserving darkness. The heat, no less absolute, was the teeth of the light. It devoured all. It snapped its jaws around Ha’garen, and there was a moment of pain such as he had never imagined. It was a wave an
d a spike, an invasion from without and an attack from within. It swallowed every thought, sensation and instinct. It was his all.

  And yet no, it was not. As absolute as the light, as absolute as the fire, was the core of his being, defined and shaped by the Promethean Cult. It shouted with exultation, taking the exterminating blow, accepting yet another strike on the shaping anvil, rising to the test that Vulkan sent his sons. To be of Nocturne, to be a Salamander, was to confront the ordeal. It was to endure.

  And thus grow stronger.

  And from the Omnissiah, the gift of the mortification of the flesh. What is weak shall be replaced. What is strong shall be transformed.

  In his faiths, Ha’garen found the strength to survive a first moment in the jaws of the fire. A second moment would have killed him, but the decking melted faster. The shape of the corridor evaporated. The Salamanders dropped. The deck below disintegrated just as they hit it, and the lower abyss of the kroozer opened its jaws wide.

  His lens shutters opened. Ha’garen fell into darkness. He hit something, bounced off, slammed into more metal. He bounced between ill-defined objects, his fall slowing. His eyes had adjusted before he hit the bottom. He processed his surroundings and his injuries simultaneously.

  His armour was badly scorched, his body burned not by flame but by sheer heat. The damage to the flesh was extensive but shallow. Regeneration was already under way. His armour was still viable, though one of his manipulator arms had melted to slag. Joints and seams were distorted, making movement more awkward. He took a step, learning the new character of the armour, learning what compensatory effort would be necessary to keep up his reaction speed.

  Neleus, his voice strained, was calling for the count. Ha’garen answered, all the while processing the new circumstances, analysing, evaluating, extrapolating options.

  The space they found themselves in was enormous. It was the largest they had yet seen on this ship. As far as Ha’garen could tell, it ran the entire length of the hull, and its ceiling was a good thirty metres high. The Salamanders’ plunge had been broken by what appeared, at first glance, to be two towering heaps of scrap metal. The Space Marines had been deposited in a valley between these twisted mountains. Flames licked at the hole through which the squads had fallen. The glow was fading, the infant star dying.