Tyrant of the Hollow Worlds

by Mark Clapham

  …and it was gone, and Huron was Huron Blackheart, master of the Red Corsairs.

  Rotaka glanced from side to side, his wavering gaze hidden by his helmet. If anyone else, Corsair or mortal, had seen what he had just seen, they didn’t react to it.

  ‘My lord,’ hissed Garreon, his voice strained through the chokehold. ‘You will have these worlds, and you will have them in time.’

  Huron dropped the Corpsemaster and scowled, turning his gaze to his other subordinates. The Red Corsairs did not flinch as the Tyrant’s gaze swept across them, but even the most debased and corrupted of the human slaves backed away, heads bowed in terror.

  ‘Anto,’ Huron snapped to the sorcerer. ‘Give me better news, to relieve this… disappointment.’ He spat the last words out like poison in his throat.

  ‘All is not entirely lost,’ said Anto, beginning a conversation that Rotaka could no longer hear as the Tyrant and the sorcerer walked away, deep in muttered conversation.

  Garreon, seemingly unfazed, also drifted away, as did the other officers. There was much to do. But Rotaka needed to filter his thoughts. What had he just seen? He trusted his own senses, stretched as they had been by life in the Maelstrom, and knew when the warp pushed against the skin of the conventional universe, threatening to break through.

  The key lay in Huron and Garreon’s heated exchange of words. Huron had said that he didn’t have time. Impatience and egotism were part of Huron’s personality, and with unswerving loyalty Rotaka would never question the Blackheart’s right to treat the Red Corsairs as an extension of his will and desires, their achievements a mere reflection of his own brilliance. But this was something more than a mission of conquest; there was a rawer motive beneath Huron’s words, something personal.

  And Garreon’s response. Chillingly, the Corpsemaster’s words hadn’t been evasive or defensive, but reassuring. The idea that his master needed the soothing words of the likes of Garreon shook Rotaka’s sense of himself.

  A Space Marine, even one who had rejected the Emperor and submerged himself into the wildness of Chaos, rarely knew uncertainty, but Rotaka knew it now. He had thought this a campaign of conquest, but the intense exchange between Huron and Garreon suggested some other purpose.

  If they were not on the Hollow Worlds to conquer them, what were the Red Corsairs doing there?

  Out in space, Pranix’s escape pod continued on its course, taking the slow, warp-free journey to find aid, its passenger as much a prisoner to his own decision as anything else, unable to alter its course.

  Alone, he was the only hope the Hollow Worlds had for liberation.

  Part Two

  Twelve

  165 days later

  The train never stopped. Five storeys high, longer than most settlements on the Hollow Worlds, its armoured sides hanging low over the edges of the planetary ridges on which it rode, it was a monstrous, heavily defended machine that kept moving, was almost impregnable and near unstoppable.

  Rotaka and his squad intended to board it.

  The Red Corsair stood at the top of a captured refuelling tower. The planet was so heavily forested that the trees even rose above the level of the ridges themselves, and towered over the habs in Plini’s populated regions. The canopy of the forest cast a dapple of shadows over the featureless metallic stretch of the ridge.

  Rotaka eyed the countdown in the corner of his helmet display. It would not be long now – it had taken weeks to assemble the information and work the calculations to predict the passage of the train, which could even navigate the intersections of the ridges, allowing it to travel virtually anywhere on the grid.

  Now they were here, and it came to this – Rotaka’s reaction times, and a hook on the end of a super-strong, highly flexible beam.

  The seconds were counting down. Either this would work, or he would be torn in half in the attempt. Or, even worse, if the calculations were wrong, they could miss the train altogether, and he’d have to explain his failure to Huron.

  The beam Rotaka was holding was connected to a harness strapped around his power armour, which in turn was connected to a length of retractable high-tensile cable that connected Rotaka to Hulpin, who was in turn tied to Verbin, who in turn… and so on, the entire squad linked in a chain.

  In theory the momentum would carry them to–

  But there was no more time to dwell on the theory, as in the distance something was moving down the ridge towards Rotaka, hurtling forwards. A low rumble could be heard, enough to cause a flock of red-and-blue birds to fly out of the canopy overhead and sweep down into the depths of the forest, chirruping alarm as they went.

  Rotaka raised the beam with the hook on the end to exactly the right height and position, and tried to slacken his muscles as much as possible. A Space Marine’s superhuman strength was an incredible asset, and one of the reasons he might even survive this, but being too rigid when he encountered an unstoppable force would simply break him.

  It came, a great beast of metal moving at incredible speed.

  Time for a single breath. Rotaka found some calm within himself, allowed time to slow around him, to let himself relax within the protective confines of his power armour.

  The train passed them. The hook caught the loading scoop, and Rotaka was whipped off his feet at tremendous speed. As the beam went taut, he bashed into the side of the train, the cable threatening to tear him in half as it jerked Hulpin off his feet.

  Rotaka was being pulled along so fast he was horizontal, trailing like a paper ribbon along the side of the train, an insect clinging on to a behemoth.

  He had a matter of seconds to act before the weight of the Red Corsairs following him pulled him apart.

  Slamming repeatedly into the side of the train, the rush of air turning his helmet’s auditory sensors into a blur of white noise, Rotaka took a magnetic clamp and slapped it onto the side of the train. Then, holding on to the clamp, he braced his boots against the train’s shell, the soles magnetically locking to the near featureless surface of black-grey metal. Finally, he let go of the beam and used his free hand to push a mechanised pulley reel on the cable into the train, thumbing a red button on the side so that it drilled a hole and locked itself in place, a flurry of metal filings whipping away into the distance.

  Secure, clinging to the side of the train, Rotaka looked back. His squad had all secured themselves, Hulpin having dug in with his chainfist and the others locking themselves in place as Rotaka had. The cable that connected them trailed down the side of the train, fastened in multiple places.

  ‘That actually worked,’ said Rotaka in disbelief.

  ‘You should have more faith,’ growled Hulpin over the vox.

  Rotaka checked the display in his helmet, which had switched to a different countdown the moment the train passed their initial position.

  ‘Tunnel in three minutes,’ said Rotaka.

  Letting the cable extend with him as he went, Rotaka pulled himself up the beam hand over hand, then re-secured the cable next to the hatch the hook had caught itself on. This was a supply scoop, which would snatch bags hanging by the side of the line – a primitive but effective way of getting supplies onto the train without it stopping, and the train’s only vulnerable point.

  Rotaka disconnected the beam from his harness, then pulled the grapple away from the scoop. He threw the whole contraption away from the train and it fell into the jungle.

  Looking at the chute behind the scoop, it was big enough to accommodate a large sack, or even a human, but there was no way a fully armoured Space Marine would fit through such a narrow tube. Bracing himself against the side of the train, Rotaka held the lip of the chute with one gauntleted hand and tried to manually force it away.

  He strained, but it didn’t work – the outer lip of the scoop was bent out of shape in Rotaka’s grip, but the shape of the chute as a whole wasn’t affected. ‘I�
�m going to have to blow it,’ he voxed. ‘Stay back.’

  Making sure he had a tight grasp on the cable, swinging experimentally before he did so, Rotaka set an explosive charge with a short fuse and chucked it straight down the chute.

  He hoped that the tube didn’t take the charge too deep into the train, or damage the vehicle’s outer shell.

  The explosive gone, Rotaka shuffled back down the train along the cable, hand over hand, boots scraping the side of the vehicle as he shifted his huge weight along.

  The explosion barely shook the train. A plume of flame and debris was caught by the wind and thrown back down the length of the train, a chunk of flaming metal narrowly missing him. Smoke was left trailing out of a hole in the side of the train, one frayed with bent flaps of blasted metal.

  Rotaka shuffled back towards the gap in the train’s shell, looking up to see the mountains approaching ahead. Clinging to the side of the train one-handed, he blind-fired his bolter into the hole a couple of times, to discourage any defenders.

  Reattaching his bolter to his thigh, Rotaka swung around to look in the hole. It was still slightly too small for a Space Marine to slide through, and the mountains were looming fast.

  He swung back along the cable, gathered some momentum, and gave one of the flaps of metal protruding from the hole a two-footed kick. It shifted slightly from the impact, but didn’t move enough to expand the hole. Rotaka rebounded from the kick, and had to scramble his heavy boots against the wall of the train to stop himself from falling.

  The mountains were nearly upon them. Rotaka took a bigger swing, detaching the safety cable from the wall of the train, and launched himself at the flap of metal, slamming into it with his entire body weight.

  The flap tore backwards, ripping a larger hole in the side of the train. Rotaka slipped downwards and had to grab on to the eye sockets of a decorative skull to not fall further.

  Looking up, he could see the hole was big enough now.

  ‘In, now,’ he voxed. ‘I’ll follow.’

  Hulpin scrambled across to the hole, punching handholes in the side of the train with his chainfists along the way, and threw himself in head first. Before his boots had even disappeared, Verbin was doing the same, then Malinko.

  Wuhrsk took hold of a ridge of metal above the hole and slid in feet first, grabbing the safety cable and pulling it in. Rotaka, swinging at the end of the cable, let go of the secure hold he had on the skull and scrambled up the sheer metal surface, his hands reaching out to Wuhrsk, who grabbed his wrists.

  ‘Pull!’ Wuhrsk shouted over the vox, and Rotaka was pulled in, his heavy, power-armoured form scuffing through the ragged metal hole and into the open interior of the train. As his heels passed into the interior the train reached the tunnel; a wall of rock smashed the rough edges off the hole they had just entered.

  Rotaka looked back. Outside the hole there was nothing but the dark of the tunnel, rock passing a couple of inches from the outside of the train.

  ‘Tight fit,’ he said, as Verbin pulled him to his feet. Wuhrsk was firing up the corridor at unseen targets, while in the other direction – towards the rear of the train – the way was blocked by wreckage from the explosion.

  ‘Where now?’ asked Hulpin.

  ‘Our mission objective will be at the head of the train,’ said Rotaka, removing Iltz from his carrying harness and reactivating the servo-skull. He gestured for Wuhrsk to lead the way.

  The interior of the train was decorated in the more decadent styles of the Imperium, bejewelled skulls inset into walls draped with dark velvet tapestries. The relative opulence indicated the status of the train’s main passenger, who was kept in such luxurious imprisonment to prevent the ever-changing knowledge he or she possessed from being captured. Even the system governor could only contact the passenger via vox, and the on-board staff had been interbreeding new generations for hundreds of years.

  It was just as the official they captured on Laghast had described it, a perfectly sealed system.

  The carriage had a series of cabins on the right. Some of them had open doors with dead men and women lying in the doorway where Wuhrsk had gunned them down. Most looked locked. The squad kept them covered as they moved down the corridor, but there were no further attacks, and no sign of life.

  Rotaka looked down at the dead. They all had the same reddish-brown hair colour, light brown skin and bright blue eyes. Clearly the gene pool wasn’t deep enough amongst the retainers who staffed the train, thought Rotaka, aware that if he, one of many battle-brothers made physically similar by gene-seed descended from the same primarch, noticed evidence of in-breeding then it must be bad.

  They moved through a deserted, open carriage decorated with wood panelling and littered with small shrines. Iltz floated around, scanning little nooks and corners out of Rotaka’s visual range but raising no alerts.

  ‘I don’t think much of their serfs,’ said Wuhrsk, shaking a thick layer of dust off a parchment before tossing it aside. ‘I’ve seen tomb worlds kept in better repair than this place.’

  ‘The stifling order of the Corpse-Emperor’s Imperium can only lead to decay and degradation,’ intoned Hulpin.

  ‘Thanks for the sermon,’ said Rotaka. He suspected that the Imperium generally ordered its assets to be kept in better repair than this, and that the poor state of the train was due to the mental decay of the on-board crew rather than some theological failing, but he wasn’t going to rile Hulpin by saying that aloud.

  Entering the next carriage they found a single open space broken up by ranks of tall bookshelves. Watery light filtered down between the shelves, sunlight seeping through dirty windows in the roof above. Ladders and balconies allowed the retainers to access all books.

  It was the perfect place for an ambush, and as the Red Corsairs entered they were fired upon from all directions.

  Rotaka led his squad through the room, firing their bolters on retainers as they emerged from behind the shelves or fired down from the balconies above. Just ahead, four retainers were rolling a mounted plasma cannon into position.

  Verbin ran past Rotaka, punched the nearest mortal away from the heavy weapon and grabbed it. He didn’t bother to detach it from its tripod but instead swung the whole rig towards the other three retainers and fired. The plasma bolt, fired at near point-blank range, obliterated the three retainers and blew a hole in the side of the train through which another couple of retainers obligingly fell.

  As Verbin fired, Malinko swung his flamer around to ignite the last of the retainers.

  ‘Keep pushing ahead,’ said Rotaka. ‘Verbin, bring the cannon just in case. I don’t want to crash this train until we’ve got what we came for.’

  Verbin nodded, tearing the plasma cannon from its tripod and using a long strip of leather to sling the weapon over his back.

  In the next carriage, Rotaka found a small group of retainers, one aged and wearing a more elaborate uniform than the rest, setting explosives at the connecting, concertinaed section between this carriage and the next.

  Wuhrsk and Hulpin gunned down the other retainers while Rotaka grabbed the most senior one by the throat.

  ‘You’re too late,’ hissed the old man through Rotaka’s grip. ‘The charges are set. The explosion will be any second.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Rotaka. ‘We don’t need the rest of this train anyway.’

  The old man looked confused, then disappointed, then horrified, all in the space of a second. Such fleeting, stupid mortal emotions, thought Rotaka.

  He was about to crush the man’s throat, when he paused.

  ‘Where are your children, slave?’ Rotaka asked, releasing his grip.

  The old man’s fear turned to terror. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘The children,’ repeated Rotaka. ‘We know your family has been on board for generations. Where are the children?’

  ‘I
will not tell you,’ said the old man.

  ‘Very brave of you, so let me guess – they’ll be at the rear of the train, where they cannot disturb your passenger,’ said Rotaka, picking up the old man by the arm, dragging him to the intersection with the library carriage and throwing him in.

  ‘Live and tell them of your failure as they grow, old man,’ said Rotaka. ‘By the time you work out how to climb down from this rail these worlds will be ours, and your descendants will know new masters. Prepare them for a life serving the Red Corsairs.’

  The old man ran off between the shelves, Rotaka’s last words echoing after him.

  The Red Corsairs moved into the front carriage of the train. Shortly after, they heard an explosion. Rotaka looked back to see the rest of the train disappearing behind them, slowing to a halt as the front carriage and the engine kept moving.

  They were left in an elaborately decorated corridor, tiled in black stone edged with gold, leading to double doors of carved red wood. The Corsairs burst through those doors to find a single passenger, their target, waiting quietly for their arrival.

  Once, he may have been a mortal man like any other. Now, he or she – it was hard to tell – had grown huge, and was plugged into the machinery around them with countless tubes and wires. The ends of these attachments disappeared beneath rolls of pallid, aged flesh. The head of this creature was little more than a lump of pasty meat set upon a much larger lump of pasty meat, the folds of eyes and mouth and nose only barely different to all the other folds on its body, a mere wisp of hair clinging to its bald scalp. He resembled nothing less than a bloated, extremely complex servitor.