by Ben Counter
If these were dungeons beneath the palace they were for the most exquisite prisoners. Inlaid patterns of coloured metals picked out the images of faces on the walls, all of them similar to those of the necron warriors the Astral Knights had encountered above but with elaborate crowns and regalia. The lower the squad descended the lower the ceilings and the more frequently they came across what looked like shrines – statues of faceless steel beings framed in alcoves, with offerings of precious metal bars laid out in front.
Ghazin wondered what Hyalhi expected to find down here. He knew better than to ask a direct question of the Chief Librarian, because he knew he would be asked three more in return.
‘Do you hear that?’ asked Felhidar as he and Ghazin crept around yet another corner, bolters aimed in front of them.
‘Just,’ said Ghazin. A regular metallic sound came from up ahead, the crunch and hiss of machinery. ‘Stand by,’ he voxed to the rest of the squad. ‘We’re scouting ahead.’
Ghazin and Felhidar approached the source of the noise, a dark archway in the side of the corridor. The faces on the walls here were eyeless, with horizontal rectangles for mouths and headdresses of golden spheres.
‘Think on our brethren fighting the battles topside,’ said Felhidar grimly. ‘They have enemies to visit our anger upon. We are down here creeping around like thieves.’
‘Hyalhi knows what he is doing,’ said Ghazin.
Felhidar just grunted in reply. Hyalhi seemed to have selected Felhidar for his honour guard precisely because he viewed everything with such cynicism.
Felhidar backed against the archway. He motioned Ghazin to take up position at the other side. Ghazin darted across the open archway, catching a glimpse of moving machinery and dark metal as he did so. There was no change in the noise, now a rattling din, to suggest anyone had seen him.
Felhidar held up a clenched fist, then brought his hand down sharply. Go.
Ghazin rounded the corner into the machine room.
The first thing he saw was a human corpse, naked and skinny, hanging from a hook that rattled along a track built into the ceiling. Thin arms of glistening articulated steel pared the body apart, separating the head and the limbs. The parts were deposited on an elaborate conveyor which took them towards a bank of processing machines at one end of the room, with dozens of insect-like robot appendages to pick up the parts and force them down jaws lined with blades and grinders.
Tiny scarabs scurried across the conveyor as the oozing body parts moved along. Their mandibles peeled off skin and muscle, separating organ and bone into neat piles arranged as precisely as the work of an artist. By the time the body reached the processors it had been broken down into pieces so completely that it did not resemble a person any more, but the components of a puzzle from which a human corpse could be assembled.
Another body was brought in along the ceiling. The processors finished swallowing the first as the second was placed on the conveyor.
The room stretched on. Another processing array stood a few metres down through the darkness, then another. From the sound of it there were many, many more.
A larger machine loomed past the first. This one received the processed corpse matter, carried by hundreds of scarabs. This machine, like a squat hundred-armed beast of steel, transformed the body parts into blocks of compressed bone or flesh, to be carried off by yet more scarabs to be stacked like so much cargo against the wall of the room.
Everything glistened with blood. It stained the conveyor and the paring blades. The scarabs left trails of tiny blood-dots wherever they scurried. It dribbled from the jaws of the processing machine. It oozed from the stacks of compressed meat and bone.
‘You wanted a focus for your anger, brother,’ said Ghazin.
‘I would burn this whole planet,’ said Felhidar, ‘if I was the only one of us left alive to do it.’
Steel limbs clattered against the ceiling. A shape larger than any of the scarabs rattled just out of sight.
‘Movement!’ voxed Ghazin. ‘We are not alone, brothers!’
Felhidar saw it long enough to aim and fire a burst of bolter rounds. In the muzzle flare Ghazin saw a spidery shape, like a necron warrior but with longer limbs and hung with sheets of bloody skin. The shape of a human face flapped at its side – the skin was human, taken from one of the processed corpses. Instead of carrying a gun this warrior had hands and feet ending in talons as sharp as the processing machines’ paring blades.
Its face was a parody of a skull in metal. Red lenses glinted in the gunfire. Its slit mouth seemed curled into a mocking snarl. Its chest was covered in spikes onto which had been impaled a fresh human cranium and spinal column.
Felhidar’s burst missed and the warrior scuttled along the ceiling behind the large processor.
Ghazin ran into the room and crouched beside the nearest conveyor for cover. Parts of the bloody corpse rattled past his eyes and he forced himself to ignore them. More movement clacked and scurried in the darkness.
The first warrior leapt down, impossibly fast, right at Felhidar. Felhidar squeezed off a few more shots but they flew wide, and the necron was on him. Bladed fingers reached for the seals of his armour and the eye-pieces of his faceplate. Felhidar was on his back, bowled over by the suddenness of the attack.
Ghazin jumped up and ran right at the warrior. A Space Marine was an exceptionally skilled warrior, but his muscular and skeletal augmentations made him massively strong by human standards and sometimes that raw strength was what mattered. Ghazin charged into the necron, hit it square on and slammed it into the wall behind Felhidar.
Flaps of shredded skin clung to Ghazin’s faceplate, obscuring his vision. He went by instinct, ramming an elbow into the necron and feeling metal fracturing. He forced it into the wall as if it were a giant insect he was trying to crush. He fended off the creature’s hand as it reached for his face, and forced his bolter up under the lower edge of its ribcage.
Ghazin fired point-blank up into its body. Pain lanced through his side as the necron thrashed at him and a blade found the gap between chestplate and abdominal armour. A second shot erupted out through the necron’s shoulder and the third blew its head almost completely off.
Mechanical components clattered to the floor. The necron shuddered and let out the sound of fracturing metal. Ghazin pulled his arm free and wrenched its head off with his hand. With something like this, it paid to be sure it was dead.
‘More of them,’ snarled Felhidar. He was firing as he spoke into the carpet of scuttling limbs approaching along the dark chamber’s ceiling. Each necron was draped in human skin and glistening red with fresh blood. Ghazin counted eight, ten, twelve and more.
The rest of Hyalhi’s honour guard reached the archway and ran in, firing as they went.
‘Brother, you are wounded,’ voxed Apothecary Saahr as he ran by. Saahr was the most experienced of the squad, with a score of symbols on his left forearm armour to denote each battle-brother whose life he had saved in combat.
‘It is not bad,’ said Ghazin, a moment before the cold pain caught up with him. The blade had cut deep. He felt the tightness in his chest that came from internal bleeding filling up the space between organs. He tried to run forward into the cover of the conveyor but his legs did not obey and they buckled underneath him.
He put a hand out to catch his fall. He gasped down a breath and felt another flash of pain as he tried to fill his lungs.
‘Saahr, get him clear!’ ordered Hyalhi as he entered the chamber. ‘Brothers, form up! Do not fight them alone!’
Saahr grabbed Ghazin’s shoulder guard and hauled him back to the archway. Each breath was agony. It felt like the blade was still in there, twisting deeper with every motion.
‘It is bad,’ said Saahr. ‘Do not mistake foolishness for valour, Brother Ghazin.’
Saahr began to work on the fastenings holding G
hazin’s breastplate on. Ghazin turned his head to watch as Hyalhi strode into the middle of the battle. Already two necrons had been felled by concentrated bolter fire but others were surrounding the squad and leaping down to strike and scuttle away. Brother Masadh knocked a bladed hand away with the stock of his bolter. Brother Hesheth caught a charging necron by the back of the head and slammed it to the floor. Two more of the squad joined him in shattering its body with volleys of point-blank fire.
But there were more necrons. Too many.
Hyalhi raised his force staff and stood clear of the rest of the squad. ‘Hold fire!’ he demanded. He made of himself a target, too tempting for the necrons to resist as they clambered across the ceiling over the heads of the squad to get at the Librarian.
Three of the necrons jumped down from the ceiling at Hyalhi. Hyalhi planted the end of his force staff into the floor.
Purple-white crackles of power flashed up from the staff’s impact like miniature volleys of lightning. Two of the necrons were blasted to metal shards by the burst. The last one was thrown to the floor and Hyalhi caught it with his free hand as it fell, holding it up by the segmented metal column of its neck as if to examine it. The necron was still hung with human skin, with a fringe of severed hands around its shoulders like a mantle.
‘Horror is not a weapon that works against an Astral Knight,’ said Hyalhi, seemingly ignoring the other necrons scurrying towards him. ‘Let us see this lesson is well taught.’
It was with the absolute minimum of movement that Hyalhi avoided the lashing blades of the necrons that dropped down around him. Every movement, no matter how slight, took him out of the path of a killing blow. A tilt of the head kept him from being decapitated. A half-step backwards took him out of the arc of a slash that could have laid him open from sternum to spine.
Ghazin had seen it before. Hyalhi only used his powers to their fullest when absolutely necessary – the honour guard speculated that he had only a limited well of psychic power to draw from, or that too long channelling them would put his mind at risk. Every time, it was mesmerising.
It took Ghazin’s mind partially off the pain as Saahr opened up the chestplate of his armour. Saahr’s right arm was clad in a medical gauntlet incorporating transfusers, an array of miniaturised medical tools and even a micro-laser for delivering the Emperor’s Mercy to brothers too wounded or physically compromised to live. A circular saw blade extended from Saahr’s palm and he cut a neat slit in the internal breastplate of fused ribs that protected Ghazin’s organs.
The pressure was suddenly relieved. The internal breastplate granted protection to the vital organs but it could also prevent bleeding when it might be desirable. The blood pooling in Ghazin’s chest had somewhere to go and he was able to take in a proper, full breath, the relief of which was far greater than the pain of Saahr’s ministrations.
Hyalhi spun out of the way of several necrons as they tried to disembowel or decapitate him at once. He flicked out his staff, and a burst of purplish lightning showed he was discharging a portion of his psychic power through it into the warrior he struck. The warrior’s metallic skull was split open and circuit-like components, the equivalent of its grey matter, scattered across the floor.
Ghazin instinctively tried to rise to help the Chief Librarian, but Saahr held him down. Ghazin realised he was too weak to resist.
More necrons swarmed at Hyalhi. Hyalhi evaded them with perfect efficiency of movement, but even he could not keep going forever.
Hyalhi dropped to one knee, his head bowed. At his unspoken order the rest of the Astral Knights opened up with a volley of rapid bolter fire just below head height. The storm of fire streaked over Hyalhi and ripped into the necrons.
Hyalhi had made himself an open target and the necrons, so eager to take such an exalted head, had made themselves just as vulnerable in their haste to kill him. They were caught in the open, crowding before the bolters of the Astral Knights, lined up as if for an execution.
Necron skulls were shattered. Arms were blown from shoulders. Necrons staggered, headless, as the last motes of information ran through their motive systems before they clattered to the floor.
Hyalhi still had the necron in his free hand. He held it up and crushed its steel spine in his gauntlet. The lights went out behind the panes of its eyes. ‘Advance, brothers,’ he ordered.
The necron warriors had lost more than half their number. Many were missing limbs or bleeding sparks from torso wounds. They scurried away as the honour guard followed, snapping fire into them. More necrons fell. One was thrown broken onto the conveyor and chewed up by the processing machine that kept churning away throughout the firefight.
‘Still, brother,’ said Saahr as he continued working on Ghazin’s chest wound. Ghazin felt a line of pain as something was inserted through the incision the Apothecary had made. ‘The wound has penetrated your lungs. Both have collapsed. Your multi-lung alone is keeping you breathing. One aorta is severed and your coagulants are not enough to seal it. The bleeding will continue until you can be properly treated. I cannot do that here but I can make you stable and prevent the bleeding from pressuring your organs.’
‘I can fight,’ said Ghazin.
‘No, Brother Ghazin, you cannot,’ said Saahr. ‘What repairs I have done can be unmade too easily. It benefits us nothing for you to kill yourself without troubling the enemy to act. When our mission is done I can tend to you properly and get you back to fighting shape, but until then you will hold back.’
Every emotion Ghazin had told him he had to fight. A noble son of Obsidia did not back down, even when it would be logical to do so, and that was a trait an Astral Knight kept. But he also knew Saahr was right. If he invalided himself by fighting when he should not, he would rob the Chapter of a battle-brother as surely as an enemy who killed a Space Marine in battle.
‘I must at least keep up,’ said Ghazin.
Saahr was replacing Ghazin’s breastplate. The device he had inserted was a small tube that Saahr fed through one of the life-sign ports on the breastplate. ‘This will keep the pressure from building up,’ he said. ‘On your feet.’
Ghazin felt as weak as a child as he climbed to his feet. His legs seemed only barely able to support his weight. His bolter felt heavier than when he had first picked it up as a new recruit, before the augmentations had given him the strength to wield it properly. He had been hurt before in battle, for no Astral Knight went any length of a career without an enemy finding its mark on him, but never this badly.
Hyalhi and the honour guard had fended off the last of the necrons and were moving through the corpse processing chamber. The other members of the honour guard reacted much as Felhidar had done, swearing to destroy Borsis to pay it back for the crimes of its inhabitants. Though the World Engine had destroyed whole worlds and countless Imperial citizens, to see the dehumanisation of their corpses, living people reduced to a commodity like so much building material or currency, brought the evil of it sharply into focus. Before, Borsis could have been considered a force of nature like a supernova or an asteroid impact, something that was destructive but without will or malice. But what they saw here was malice. There was no other interpretation. The World Engine had been respected and feared – Borsis could only be hated.
‘Those they do not need as slaves,’ said Hyalhi, examining the larger processing unit, ‘who are surplus or flawed, are brought here. The necrons must have a use for the materials they render from them. These warriors clothe themselves in their skin but that does not account for such an elaborate effort to process so many corpses.’
‘Then what do they do with it all?’ wondered Felhidar.
‘If we are to answer that question,’ said Hyalhi, ‘then we must know more. It is the same obstacle that must be overcome if we are to take the fight to the necrons or to cripple the World Engine. We must know more. That is why we are down here. Borsis wants to tell
us its secrets and we must find a way to listen.’
Ghazin limped up to the rest of the squad. The floor around them was littered with shattered necron parts and scraps of skin. ‘Take comfort that the machine came off worst,’ said Felhidar, looking at Ghazin’s wounds. ‘And my thanks for finishing what I started.’
‘Well, I saw you were out of your depth,’ replied Ghazin. ‘It would not have been very brotherly to leave you wriggling around on the floor.’
‘They’re stopping,’ said Saahr. He was right – one by one the conveyors and arrays of paring blades were clanking to a halt.
‘We must have damaged them,’ said Brother Masadh.
‘All of them?’ asked Felhidar.
Ghazin looked down at movement around his feet to see dozens of the tiny scarabs scuttling around the floor, weaving between the Astral Knights.
Hyalhi crouched down to watch them more closely. They scurried past him into the depths of the corpse processing chamber. The last machines were falling silent, leaving corpses half-dismembered over the conveyors. ‘Follow them,’ said Hyalhi. ‘Stay wary.’
The Astral Knights moved with Hyalhi deeper into the chamber. Every one of them was still expecting a necron warrior, draped in oozing skin, to leap at them from behind one of the machines. Ghazin crunched through the fallen remains of shattered necrons as he took up the rear, each step sending bolts of pain up through his body. The scarabs were swarming over the back wall of the chamber. There were thousands of them now, a glistening carpet of tiny metal bodies.
Sparks fell from the wall as the scarabs cut through the bloodstained steel. The Astral Knights instinctively spread out, ready to riddle whatever came through the wall with bolter fire. Ghazin could barely hold his bolter up and found himself leaning against the nearest machine.
The scarabs finished boring through the wall and rolled back as the cut section fell in. It landed with a loud boom and the scarabs swirled across the ceiling now, forming a huge symbol over the Astral Knights heads. It was a familiar symbol, one that Techmarine Sarakos had speculated was a glyph from the necrons’ language.