by Nick Kyme
Xathen caught it in his peripheral vision. Dirty white carapace against mottled green shoulder guards. Slope-fronted war-helms with slatted grille-masks. A foul odour. Only one conclusion.
‘The Death Guard are here!’ snarled Xathen. ‘Slay them!’
He wanted vengeance. He wanted honour.
Most of all, he wanted the sons of Mortarion to suffer.
Unleashing an inferno, Xathen bathed the tunnel in fire.
‘Betrayers will burn!’ he vowed, shouting at the writhing form inside the conflagration he had just ignited.
It took him a few seconds to realise someone else was shouting too.
Zadar again.
Mu’garna and Baduk had him around his shoulders, hauling on the flame-projector.
Xathen roared, incensed and confused. ‘Unhand me!’
Smoke occluded his vision, even through his helmet lenses. A warning icon was flashing, though. Belatedly, Xathen realised Kur’ak’s tactical ident had turned amber.
Wounded. Biometrics relayed by the retinal feed suggested critically.
Too late, Xathen knew what he had done.
Dirty white carapace became fire-blackened drake-green. A brother on his knees, his armour smouldering, his rebreather fused so he could not even scream his agony.
The fire ebbed, Xathen’s weapon shut off by his comrades. He remembered slumping against a crate of medicae supplies, his fuel tanks shrieking loudly as he slid down and they scraped against metal.
Zadar reached Kur’ak first. The wounded Pyroclast was still burning as he fell onto his side.
His mind reeling at what he had done, Xathen looked up to the heavens and found someone looking back at him.
He frowned, confused.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asking, slurring the question.
Mu’garna and Baduk had slowed when they saw Zadar turn. He was shouting again, and urging them back with furious sweeps of his arm.
It took another second for Kur’ak’s promethium reserve to cook off and for the tank he carried it in to explode.
Kur’ak and Zadar were blasted apart. Mu’garna and Baduk were ripped off their feet and thrown into a bulkhead. Armour plate cracked, audible above the explosion.
The memory of Isstvan V reared its ugly head again and, for the second time during his life, Xathen burned.
Thirty-Eight
Bad spirits
Battle-barge Charybdis, uninhabited lower decks
Adyssian had followed the refugee girl as far as the lower decks.
He had almost caught her in the refectory, chasing her through a labyrinth of benches and stools, the scent of stale recycled rations tainting the air, but she had slipped away. Her laughter mocked him, echoing in the expansive ship’s mess, which was unnervingly desolate with the Charybdis on lockdown.
Hard as he tried, he could not catch her. She was always a little farther ahead, her dainty form disappearing behind a bulkhead and her grubby white dress trailing in her wake like little angelic wings. Always, though, she left enough of a trail for him to follow.
‘Girl!’ Adyssian had called out more than once. ‘Come here, girl. It isn’t safe for you.’
‘It isn’t safe for you…’ the girl repeated, giggling. ‘Chase! Chase!’ she cried gleefully.
It struck Adyssian as strange that this was the same terrified little girl he had seen on the embarkation deck, she who looked so much like the daughter he had lost. He would not lose this one.
He considered requesting help again, but kept his vox-unit attached to his belt.
At last, he chased her down to one of the sparsely populated lower decks. Some maintenance work was ongoing, but the only crew Adyssian passed during his pursuit of the girl had been mind-wiped servitors.
And he hadn’t seen any of them for quite some time.
She was standing at the end of a sealed duct, perfectly still as if expecting to be found, as if knowing it was the end of the game.
‘That’s enough now,’ Adyssian told her from the other end of the corridor, eyes straining to make her out in the low light.
The girl didn’t answer straight away.
Adyssian couldn’t quite see her face. Her hair was obscuring it and she was just off to one side, her head slightly turned away.
He took a step towards her, but only a step. What she said next seized his limbs as surely as any paralytic toxin.
‘Daddy…’
Maelyssa’s voice.
Adyssian could barely breathe. His heart raced and a feverish sweat drenched his palms. ‘Not possible…’
She turned and Adyssian saw her face.
Arikk Gullero had taken the throne in his shipmaster’s absence. It fit him well, as did command. His place was upon the dais, the awesome strength of a starship almost literally at his fingertips. Before the war, he had been destined for a vessel of his own. More modest than the Charybdis, but a sturdy ship of the line nonetheless. He had served with pride under Kolo Adyssian but Gullero had ambition and the natural affinity for void war to match it.
But for Isstvan, his life would have been different.
Sitting idly in the throne, he considered that much else would now be different were it not for the massacre. His thoughts were getting away with him, and he forced himself to refocus.
The bridge was quiet with little to distract the edgy crew. Gullero had already requested a status report from Esenzi and the other officers. No change. Nothing further to do but watch and wait.
Even conversation had ebbed to little more than the odd dull murmur. Anxiety spread like a contagion, worsened with every shudder of metal, every flexed stanchion.
In the warp, a hardened bridge crew had a much-reduced level of agency. To Gullero, it bordered on impotency. Surrendering to Circe and her ability to traverse the tides chilled and unnerved him. For Gullero, returning to the cold heart of the void could not come soon enough. He only hoped the Charybdis could weather the battering she was taking at the hands of the storm.
He eyed the shuttered viewport. Its grey overlapping folds provided little in the way of distraction. His gaze roamed, surveying the crew at their stations. Several appeared calm, but their knuckles were white with gripping the edges of their consoles. Only the servitors were unmoved, their emotional concern siphoned away long ago and replaced by automated doctrine.
The Charybdis had several servitors amongst its bridge crew for rapid hard data processing and other automatic, mundane functions. Though they were cold and barely humanoid, let alone human, Gullero knew they were useful, but he still found their presence distasteful. The thought formed anew as he regarded the ship’s augury operator.
Essentially a data-interpreter, the drone had reverted to a dormant state, its limbs hanging slack by its sides, its head bowed with chin touching chest. Even the cabling running from its machine body to the augur array the servitor was slaved to looked limp and enervated.
Gullero was about to move on when he noticed something under the array itself, hiding in the thick wiring and power couplings.
A tiny pair of pale hands. A white, diaphanous dress shawling a small, infantile form.
Dingy light made it difficult to see her clearly and she seemed to shuffle farther back into the shadows below the augur station.
Gullero eased forwards in the throne, making sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks. He reached as far as the edge of the dais before he saw her again.
A girl, no more than a child.
‘Lieutenant Esenzi,’ he began, ‘do you see that?’
Lyssa Esenzi followed Gullero’s outstretched hand. She frowned at first, as several other bridge crew turned to look too, intrigued by the sudden commotion.
‘Is that a little girl?’ she asked, confusion etched across her usually stern face.
Gullero ventured fart
her forwards, crouching down as he left the dais and descending the steps leading up to it to try to reach eye level with the child. She was knelt down and just to the side so Gullero couldn’t quite see her face, obscured as it was behind strands of long black hair.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, though he felt a tremor of unease in his gut, as if he had eaten something bad in the refectory. ‘You can come out.’
Gullero heard a faint, childish giggle but the girl stayed still.
‘You can’t stay under there,’ he told her, closing on the augur station. ‘You don’t belong here.’
‘You don’t belong here,’ the girl replied in a voice so deep and absurdly wrong coming out of a child that Esenzi was immediately sick.
Gullero barely had time to process that one of his fellow officers had been violently ill when the girl crawled from her hiding place. Her hair parted as she faced him, showing to the lieutenant and all of the bridge crew what lay beneath.
To his immense credit, Arikk Gullero had the instinctive presence of mind to reach for his sidearm. He was even vaguely aware of the armsmen who had been left on the bridge coming to investigate.
But it was already too late.
As he shut his eyes to the fire, Var’kir sagged against the brazier pan. His gauntleted hands gripped the edge of the hot basin but did not burn. Only his face lay exposed, the rest of him was armoured in fire-retardant ceramite.
He had wanted desperately to see, to find some vestige in the flames, some inkling that Vulkan would return. Instead he saw immolation, a conflagration to ignite a world.
Its meaning was lost, much like the Chaplain.
Slowly, he felt himself leaning closer, felt the prick of heat from the burning brazier. Something moved behind him, a scrape of metal against stone, a booted foot springing off the artificially rendered flags of the solitorium.
Var’kir opened his eyes to fire. He recoiled, his head almost ablaze, his skin already burning and through blurred, heat-hazed vision saw an enemy bearing down upon him.
Word Bearer! Clad in the grey iron of his founding.
Var’kir roared, raising the dragon-headed crozius to defend himself.
The Word Bearer came at him with sword drawn but, rather than attack, the Colchisian only parried as Var’kir swung at him.
Spatha blade met the drake-scale haft of the mace. Sparks raked off the edge of the sword, near blunted by the tough hide.
‘Only cowards and assassins strike from the shadows,’ Var’kir hissed, his eyes streaming. ‘I was born in fire, you fool! You can’t kill me like that.’
‘Not trying to…’ managed the Word Bearer, clamping his hand around the Chaplain’s wrist as Var’kir’s seized his throat. The beleaguered warrior nodded behind the Chaplain, letting go of his sword. ‘Look!’
Something in the Word Bearer’s tone made Var’kir turn, just a little, just enough to see the little girl retreating into the shadows at the edge of the room.
‘What is…?’ Var’kir released his grip, seeing not an enemy but Kaspian Hecht, who quickly swept up his sword and ran at the girl.
‘She’s just a child,’ cried Var’kir, but Hecht ignored him. Shadows smothered the strange girl, and before Hecht could act she was gone.
‘Not a child,’ said Hecht, his voice still a choked whisper.
He sheathed his sword and gestured to the brazier pan behind Var’kir. It had been polished to a mirror sheen and reflected the back of the Chaplain’s armour. Visible through the haze were two tiny handprints against his shoulder guards, too high and too wide to have belonged to a little girl but present nonetheless.
‘Not even close,’ uttered Hecht.
‘I thought you were…’
‘I know what you thought. She would have burned you alive in that flame.’
‘I didn’t realise… How, though? She was just–’
‘Not a child,’ Hecht reminded him.
Var’kir tried to raise his brothers, but got no response from the vox.
‘Dead?’ asked Hecht.
Var’kir nodded. ‘What do you know of this creature?’
‘Creatures. There’ll be more. Use your mace. Bolt shells will barely scratch them. We are in their realm now. They’ll be stronger, tough to kill.’
‘Kill?’
‘In a manner of speaking. These are not Unburdened, Chaplain. They are diabolus, Neverborn daemons.’
Var’kir took up his helmet. As he slammed the skull mask over his face, the burns caught the light. Red raw flesh framed by ugly, painful welts. Salamanders were born of fire but they were not immune to its effects.
‘Not given to apology then?’ remarked Hecht, only half serious.
‘No,’ Var’kir replied flatly.
But the cold fire of his eye lenses met Hecht’s. Understanding passed between them, a debt was acknowledged and an immediate bond of trust established, one that formed when one warrior saved the life of another.
‘We find Zytos and Numeon,’ said Var’kir, the doubts that had festered during his isolation usurped by the sudden need to act. ‘Immediately.’
Thirty-Nine
Cold light
Battle-barge Charybdis, foredecks
An icon flashed insistently on Zytos’s retinal display, a silent plea for help.
It came from the bridge.
Every attempt to raise Adyssian or any officer at that location had so far been met with static.
‘Still down,’ said Zytos. Vox across the entire ship was the same, as if the Ruinstorm had reached inside the Charybdis to exert its blinding, deafening influence.
‘Something is wrong,’ said Dakar, speaking through a fanged mouth-grille. ‘Adyssian would have answered – someone would have reached out by now.’
They had paused, the five Salamanders, at the threshold between decks. Below lay the main barracks and armouries. Above, the command deck, where the bridge, apothecarion and other vital facilities were situated.
Numeon nodded. ‘Agreed.’
‘So we head to the bridge,’ said Zytos. ‘With all haste.’
Vorko rapped gauntleted knuckles against his leg. The greave was missing – Gargo had not yet finished its reforging – but the wound from the volkite was eminently visible.
‘I’ll only slow you down,’ admitted the flamer legionary.
Numeon clapped Vorko lightly on the shoulder guard.
‘Hold here, brother. And if one of us doesn’t return soon, gather whoever you can and prepare to defend this ship.’
Vorko nodded solemnly, and Zytos could not deny a sense of satisfaction at seeing Numeon step up to embrace his destiny.
The rest moved off quickly, with Numeon setting a fierce pace.
‘You believe they are dead.’ Zytos wasn’t asking.
‘I believe they might be if we don’t hurry.’
The hard metallic impacts of booted feet resonated urgently through the deck. No one got in their way. The corridors were deserted, the majority of the ship having been placed on curfew until they were no longer besieged by the storm.
‘That signal-ident,’ Dakar began as he raced behind the two Salamanders officers.
Zytos already knew what the other legionary was thinking.
‘Extreme warning, yes, I saw that too.’
Numeon’s expression darkened behind his fearsome drake mask. It was clear even in the tone of his voice. ‘Someone must still have been alive to raise it. Whether they still are depends on who, or what, has taken the bridge.’
They would find out soon.
‘An attack?’ asked Abidemi. ‘We are the only ship riding this storm.’
The deck lurched as if to remind them, throwing the Salamanders hard against the wall, but they kept their feet.
‘I don’t think it’s a ship,’ said Zytos, unhitching his
hammer as they cleared the next junction and the doors to the bridge came into view. ‘But it’s not only ships that sail the seas of the warp.’
As they reached the bridge’s outer threshold, nothing obvious presented itself. No evidence of breach or weapons discharge of any kind. No bodies either.
‘Insurgents we missed?’ suggested Dakar, unclamping his boltgun from the side of his generator.
Numeon shook his head. ‘Not Death Guard. This feels different.’ He gripped the sigil, having already drawn Draukoros in the other hand. The fang-toothed blade shone hungrily in the dingy light.
‘What then?’ asked Zytos.
Numeon pressed his ear against the unyielding metal, listening through his helm’s auto-senses.
‘I hear nothing. No commotion of any kind.’
‘Are we too late?’ asked Zytos.
‘No,’ Numeon uttered in a rasp, edging away from the door again. ‘Something’s in there. I could hear it. Something that can infiltrate our ship unseen and silence it with barely a hand raised in opposition.’ His eye lenses met Zytos’s; the sergeant had taken up a position on the opposite side of the arch frame.
‘Suppressing fire, then draw swords,’ he said to the others, remembering what Aeonid Thiel had told them about daemons.
Dakar and Abidemi nodded in unison.
Mag-clamping the sigil to his belt for a moment, Numeon tried the doors. They were immense, easily large enough for several legionaries to pass through abreast or for a Dreadnought to walk under without needing to stoop. Several metres thick, it would take lascutters and blasting charges to bore through. During warp transit, especially in the storm, the doors should have been secured.
Numeon found them unbarred. He gestured to Dakar and Abidemi, who took up ready positions outside the door. One favoured his bolter snagged in the crook of his shoulder; the other held it low and braced against his armoured hip.
‘Find your targets, single shots,’ Numeon told them. ‘Remember, there could be mortals in there who are our allies. By the same token, those mortals might not be who or what they seem.’