by Rob Sanders
‘Can’t we outdistance it?’ Klute enquired.
‘The nearest opportunity for a safe jump point is hours away,’ Torres informed him, and then to a nearby lieutenant, ‘Get me specifications. I want to know that vessel’s reach. We need to stay out of range for as long as possible.
‘This whole area is a confluence,’ Epiphani threw casually into the conversation ‘If we were to enter the warp here the fast-flowing currents alone would tear us apart.’
‘I have a partial registration,’ Torqhuil announced. ‘She’s very old – looks like the Strigoi Shipyards – her designation at launch, at least, was the Hellebore.’
‘Why run without shields?’ Klute put to the captain.
‘Why run without charging your batteries?’ she said, answering a question with a question. ‘You can sure as hell bet that we’re running with both of ours.’
‘She needs all power for her engines,’ Czevak called from the rear of the command deck. Klute and Torres turned. ‘Shields and batteries would considerably hamper her ability to catch us. Besides, she won’t be using either.’
‘And how would you happen to know that?’ Torres asked with sarcasm.
Czevak came forward, hands still in his pockets.
‘Magnify!’ he ordered across the deck. The lancet window displayed an even closer rendering of the fast-closing vessel. The reason for the Hellebore’s colouring became obvious now. Every square metre of her hull was decorated with skulls – both human and alien. Something else demanded the attention of the bridge and the exchange of orders and information across the chamber died. The Hellebore’s hold was open and trailing zero-gravity gore into the dreadspace of the Eye, marking its bloody path and progress towards the Malescaythe.
‘She’s a Khornate renegade destroyer,’ the High Inquisitor told the bridge with confidence. ‘That form of decoration is particular to pilgrim raiders out of the Blood Moons of Koryban. They’re berserkers who jump around the Eye of Terror attacking anything and everything in their path. No prey is too large. Besides, she probably carries thousands of pilgrim warriors, ready to overwhelm enemy vessels. The trail is undoubtedly the celebratory carnage and butchery of the last crew they captured.’
‘They’ll run down under our guns with no shields and try to board?’ Torres said incredulously.
‘Even if they didn’t need the extra power to catch us, shields would be a coward’s precaution. Long range gunfire is also frowned upon by the Korybanians. The Blood God does not reward such tactics and the Blood Moon pilgrims want to meet their Master. They pray that one of their sporadic, warmongering jumps around the Eye will take them to the Blood God’s realm where they will be rewarded by their god. Their vessel, adorned with the skulls of their fallen enemies, will be added to his throne.’
‘Well, they won’t get their chance,’ she assured him and then barked, ‘Ordnance – charge and run out the starboard battery.’
‘That’s a mistake,’ Czevak told Torres.
The captain was aware that the bridge had heard the inquisitor make the claim. She couldn’t risk not hearing him out.
‘Proceed.’
‘They’re berserkers – they know no fear. Your broadsides will not daunt them. Besides – look at that graceless prow, it’s obviously been adapted and reinforced for such an eventuality. The Hellebore will soak up everything you throw at it and then draw alongside, throwing every bloodstained soul they have back across at your exhausted gun crews. They’re Khornate berserkers – they’ll be insane with rage and will not wait to suit up. They’ll come straight across, armed to the teeth.’
Torres couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘They’ll board, unsuited, across the void?’
‘That is the Korybanian’s typical strategy, yes,’ Czevak assured her. The captain shook her head. In all of her years as a rogue trader and frigate captain in the Imperial Navy she’d never heard of such insanity.
‘Are you suggesting that we make a warp jump?’ Klute asked his master.
‘Highly unadvisable,’ Epiphani piped up.
‘Well?’ Torres said. It was clear that she little liked or trusted their new guest, but neither was she ready to give up her precious Malescaythe to a blood-crazed cultship and become part of the horrific gore-splattering celebrations down in the enemy vessel’s hold.
‘I can give you the victory your professional pride demands, Captain Torres,’ Czevak announced, soaking up the attention of the command deck. ‘And secure our escape, but only if you follow my instructions to the letter – no matter how disagreeable you find them.’
Torres choked back an involuntary objection – the kind that seemed to sail from her lips whenever she was in the High Inquisitor’s presence. ‘I mean it,’ Czevak insisted, turning to Klute for authority and support. ‘Once committed, any deviance from the strategy would spell doom for everyone on board this vessel.’
Torres looked from Czevak to Klute to the Iconoclast destroyer growing in their sights. The captain recalled Czevak’s previous ‘strategy’ on the archeodeck.
‘I know I’m going to hate this,’ she admitted to the bridge and herself, before collapsing into her throne.
Czevak stepped forward. ‘Brother Torqhuil, a word.’
Alarum
ACT I, CANTO V
Starboard gun deck, Rogue trader Malescaythe, The Eye of Terror
Enter BROTHER TORQHUIL
The word Czevak had for the Relictors Techmarine was ‘cogitator’. The inquisitor put to the Space Marine the very real benefit that might be reaped by laying their hands on the Hellebore’s bridge mnemonic cogitator. If the suggestion hadn’t seemed so ludicrous to Torqhuil then he might have readily agreed. As a Khornate raider, the Hellebore would enter the squalls and storm fronts of the warp at a whim, only to have the haphazard immateriology of the Eye spit them out on the other side of the warp rift. There they would hunt for prey, spill blood and take skulls in the name of their god before returning to the insane, unreality of the warp again and its perverse serendipitude. This would mean that the Hellebore’s mnemonic cogitator would have recorded the raider’s encounters in the Eye, across thousands of years and hundreds of different cultist captains. A wealth of information, obediently logged by the cogitator’s logic engine from its original inception as a loyalist Imperial escort ship to the heretical, piratical and wide ranging practises of its present, lay in the equipment. Information, that might very well further the aims of both the inquisitor and the Relictors Space Marine.
When Torqhuil had raised the possibility of corruption, Czevak assured him that the Korybanian heretics were simple in their barbarism and tended not to go to the lengths of incorporating daemonic entities into their machinery or possessing their vessels. To the Khornate cultists blood was the object, that and the slaughter required to spill it. A vessel – no matter how grotesquely decorated – was simply a means to achieving that end across as large an expanse as possible. Since the Malescaythe had little choice but to endure an attack by the Iconoclast, Czevak reasoned that they might as well attempt to achieve something into the bargain beyond a simple escape. Besides, the last thing that an attacking Khornate raider would expect was a simultaneous attack on themselves.
The idea appealed to Torqhuil, despite little knowing the inquisitor. Czevak seemed an inherently dangerous person to be around and the Relictor should have put as much space between himself and the inquisitor as possible. He was likely to have the most powerful of enemies, alien, Chaotic and Imperial, and seemed recklessly adept at getting other people killed. On top of that, Torqhuil simply didn’t like him and still harboured suspicions that the real Czevak was dead and that the Malescaythe now harboured an imposter. In opposition to the myriad of reasons not to entertain the inquisitor and his outlandish plans was the simple reason that no other human in the galaxy could boast his knowledge of Chaos, its tools and machinations and that, above all else, made the High Inquisitor’s presence and leadership an unavoidable necessity for the R
elictor.
The Techmarine had been simultaneously appalled and secretly impressed with Czevak’s solution to the Malescaythe’s daemonic intrusion and expected nothing less in respect to the inquisitor’s plan to recover the Hellebore’s bridge cogitator. The Adeptus Astartes was not disappointed.
Standing behind a gunnery deck bulkhead, the Techmarine waited. Bringing his servo-arms in tight behind him, he held his power axe in one rust-red gauntlet. The deck was silent and still. On Czevak’s suggestion, Torres had evacuated and sealed off the starboard side deck compartments and then presented the Hellebore the Malescaythe’s starboard side. The inquisitor reasoned that even if the Malescaythe fired first, the gun crews would be swiftly hacked to pieces by degenerate cultists and the vessel stormed. Whatever damage Torres could inflict upon the cultship would be nothing compared to what the roaring deluge of Khornites would do to her crew. Czevak had instructed her to give the Iconoclast a run but ultimately to allow it to steadily overhaul the rogue trader and assume a boarding position. Torqhuil, on the other hand, was to wait on the empty gundeck, lined as it was with the lonely colossi of ancient, mega-bore laser cannons. They looked odd without crews and power coursing through their accelerators – odder still, sitting in their mighty carriages, unpresented to an enemy aggressor whose hull Torqhuil could see passing a short span from the lifeless gunports.
The Hellebore’s gunports were anything but lifeless. Like the Malescaythe, there were no cannons presented at the field-phased openings, but there were armies of feral, blood-drenched cultists howling their rabid intention to tear the rogue trader and everyone inside it apart. Some wore crude rebreathers and goggles; others sported improvised ponchos of foil and had wound insulation tape around extremities. They wielded hammers, axes and chainswords – as well as their own warped limbs – anything that would make a god-pleasing, bloody mess of their victims. They blinked a simple, uncomprehending rage at their target. The Relictors Space Marine watched as they swarmed the gundecks, tearing and thrashing at each other to get a place near the exterior airlocks. As the bulkheads fired, streams of blood-crazed, corrupted cultists poured from the port side of the raider, propelling themselves out of the airlocks like skydivers and sailing across the black, frozen distance between the two vessels with faces frost-glazed in masks of wrathful determination. Torqhuil couldn’t see anything daemonic or monstrous coming across, which would have reassured Captain Torres – Czevak had assured her that the Gellar field would keep anything possessed or immaterial from breaching the vessel again.
The deck fell to darkness as the lamps cut out along the silent row of cannons. Positioning himself at the airlock, Torqhuil felt the Malescaythe’s artificial gravity die about him and his power-armoured form began to drift up weightlessly from the deck. That had been the second part of Czevak’s plan. Cut the power – the light and heating – then the artificial gravity of the starboard deck compartments. Then, the final life support system still operating in the noiseless, rapidly cooling darkness, the atmosphere. The airlocks fired, rolling aside in unison, explosively expelling the gunnery deck’s oxygen in a howling maelstrom that blasted Torqhuil at high speed across the deep cold of space.
Unlike the Khornate cultists, who had only scraps of foil and their mindless fury to sustain them, Torqhuil had an enclosed suit of ceramite plates and a helmet feeding him oxygen. As a relatively young Techmarine, who had returned to his Chapter from Mars just months before the Relictors’ excommunication, he had been blessed with a Mark-VIII suit of Errant armour, the most advanced suit of power armour available to Adeptus Astartes forces. While a silent agony preoccupied the cultists – no doubt charging their demented hearts with further rage, Torqhuil could afford the luxury of concentration. As he bolted across the inky blackness towards the side of the Khornate vessel, the empty sockets of a thousand skulls stared back at him.
Smashing across the bone-encrusted hull, Torqhuil spread his servo-arms and mechadendrite limbs, locking onto the architecture of the moving vessel. After a brief tumble along the Hellebore’s side, the Techmarine anchored himself and went to work priming the lock mechanism on a maintenance airlock that hadn’t been used in millennia. Artificial atmosphere screamed from the destroyer’s side, dragging several unfortunate pilgrims along the adjoining corridor and braining them against the hatch. Allowing the bodies to spin off into the void, Torqhuil crawled spider-like inside, his servo-arms and the magnetic soles of his boots providing constant stability against the gale of evacuating atmosphere.
Two bulkheads into the cultship’s interior, Torqhuil re-established atmospheric integrity. At a viewport, the Techmarine saw cultists, frothing at the mouth, complete their crossing. Without the force of escaping atmosphere propelling them they didn’t have to worry about shattering their bodies against the rogue trader’s side. They had other things to worry about, however. Ordinarily, the army of maniacs, fuelled by a raving thirst for carnage, would recover swiftly from the brief flash-freeze of open space and go about their business of wanton murder. What they found were sections devoid of victims, warmth, gravity, light and oxygen. Swiftly, the Blood God’s pilgrims began to fall to an enemy they couldn’t bring to battle – the empty void.
Fortunately for Torqhuil, the Hellebore was almost as deserted as the rogue trader’s starboard sections. Very few cultists had remained to garrison the Iconoclast. This had been key to the raider’s tactical success in the past, throwing every gore-mental degenerate the vessel had in one barbaric storm at craft sometimes much larger than itself. This time the strategy had resulted in decimation and a clear path to the Hellebore’s bridge.
Like the corridors leading to it, the raider’s command deck was a homicidal nightmare. Torqhuil led the way with his unholstered bolt pistol. The deck was partially flooded with a bloody gruel, a mixture of freshly splattered gore and old, blackening blood, percolating with disease and danger. The walls and ceiling sections were red and dripping with recent death although it was difficult for Torqhuil to tell if the dribbling mess came from fluids that had fountained upwards out of mutilated bodies or down through the grating of higher decks. The Relictor found more of the same as he made a cautious entrance to the Hellebore’s bridge.
The flood was deeper there and the port screens splashed with jets of smeared gore, making the Techmarine wonder how the power supply to the bridge’s logic engines, codifiers and runebanks hadn’t already shorted out. Piles of entrails, fingers and fragments of shattered bone sat in the stinking sludge. Corpulent rats the size of hounds fought and squealed over shrivelled limbs, while other assorted organs – hearts, livers, kidneys – sat like ghoulish trophies, arranged on consoles and instrumentation in different stages of decomposition.
Brass automatrons sat hardwired into their filth encrusted stations, motionlessly monitoring the Hellebore’s systems. Above, the vaulted roof of the command deck jangled with heavy chains, suspending a forest of corpses. The bodies dangled upside down with arms trailing; all sporting ragged neck stumps where their heads used to be. Torqhuil assumed that the skulls could be found decorating the exterior of the vessel.
Moving along the command deck wall, it didn’t take Torqhuil long to find the bridge mnemonic cogitator. It was a thoroughly neglected piece of equipment – the cultists taking more interest in where they were going rather than where they had been – but it was operational and actively logging the present ship to ship engagement in its remembrance banks.
Rubbing a clotted handprint from the bottom of the nearest port screen, the Relictor saw that the Hellebore had slowed and drawn parallel to the Malescaythe, careful not to overshoot and completely overhaul the rogue trader. The frozen bodies of Khornate pilgrims were now drifting from the Malescaythe’s starboard sections and bouncing down the side of the vessel, smashing and
shattering about the rogue trader’s architecture. Something bothered Torqhuil about the vessels and their relative positions. Drawing alongside a fleeing vessel – in a pursuit – to moun
t a close boarding action was much too sophisticated a manoeuvre for a mechanical automatron or automated ship’s system. Despite the seeming distance, the two vessels were almost touching.
Holstering his bolt pistol and bringing his power axe back to life with a sizzle, Torqhuil turned and cast his eyes around the gloom of the command deck. Moving up the slippery steps to the pulpit, the Techmarine found he had to push through the thicket of dangling bodies as the fingers of their suspended forms touched the elevated mezzanine deck. Torqhuil found the captain’s throne in the nest of leaking cadavers, turned eerily away from him. Reaching out with his servo-arm and bringing his power axe up in readiness for the kill, Torqhuil slowly turned the throne.
It was empty, but for a single power armour helmet – red, like the Techmarine’s own, but studded, squalid and ancient. It bore an ugly Mark-V type faceplate grille and the frontispiece was crafted into the semblance of a bovine skull, brown with age and armed with wicked horns.
Something thunked its way to the pulpit decking. Torqhuil turned, servo-arms split between the ominous helmet and the noise. Then – everywhere at once, echoing across the confines of the command deck – the horrific chug-chug thrashing of a chain weapon. Torqhuil fell to a crouch on the filth-puddled floor. He caught a glimpse of the weapon, a chunky flail made up of an untidy pile of interlinked saw blades, all ripping and sparking against the deck and each other.
A gore-glistened shadow reared to full height amongst the swarm of swaying corpses. As its arms came up, the stinking rags that had disguised it cascaded from the shoulders of the giant. They revealed burnished, blood-drenched Heresy-pattern power armour – at once both magnificent and foetid to behold. The hulk dripped with gruesome trinkets and markings dedicated to Khorne, Butcher of Souls, Lord of Hate and Deep Drinker of Mindless Rage. His studded shoulder plate was splattered with fresh carnage and the gaping jaw markings of his Traitor Legion – the infamous World Eaters. From the Chaos Space Marine exploded a thunderous roar of demented fury.