Word Bearers

by Anthony Reynolds

  ‘There is no one down here,’ growled Kol Badar.

  ‘There are people here,’ said Burias. ‘I saw them on the descent.’

  The warriors drew towards the main entrance into the mining facility, an immense arched processional that led from the lift base to the main hub of the structure.

  Marduk’s eyes were drawn up above the archway. A massive figure had been roughly painted onto the plascrete wall, like a mural, though its workmanship was crude to say the least. A low hiss escaped his lips.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Burias, his eyes wide. ‘A daemon? Are these miners cult worshippers?’

  ‘No, it’s not a daemon,’ said Marduk, not taking his eyes from the primitive mural.

  ‘You are sure?’ asked Kol Badar, glowering upwards.

  ‘I feel no touch of the warp here,’ said Marduk. ‘Worship of the great gods of the immaterium would leave a palpable trace, a lingering presence, but there is none. No, this is no daemon. I could command a daemon. There is no commanding that.’

  The warriors of the Host shuffled uneasily.

  A four-armed figure was daubed on the wall above the archway, painted in garish blues and purples. Two of its arms ended in claws, while the others ended in human-like hands. Its eyes were yellow and its mouth was wide, exposing a caricature of sharp teeth, painted as simple triangles and dripping with garish red paint representing blood. A long, stabbing tongue protruded from the toothy maw.

  ‘I think your battle-lust will soon be sated, Burias,’ said Marduk in a soft voice.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘You want us to go in there?’ asked Kol Badar flatly, looking in disdain at the maintenance submersibles bobbing slightly on the surface of the dark pool of water.

  ‘This is the way that the explorator came; we must follow in his footsteps,’ said Marduk evenly.

  ‘That statement is categorically false, Marduk, First Acolyte of the Word Bearers Legion of Astartes, genetic descendant of the glorified Primarch Lorgar,’ intoned Darioq-Grendh’al.

  Marduk turned slowly towards the daemonically infused magos, glowering within his skull-faced helmet.

  ‘What?’ he said in a low, dangerous voice.

  ‘Repeat: “This is the way that the explorator came; we must follow in his footsteps” is categorically false,’ said the magos.

  Marduk licked his lips. If he did not feel like he had such control over the daemon inhabiting Darioq’s body, he would think that the magos was being wilfully obtuse.

  ‘What is incorrect about that statement?’ asked Marduk slowly.

  ‘Explorator First Class Daenae,’ said Magos Darioq in his monotone voice, ‘originally of the Konor Adeptus Mechanicus research world of UL01.02, assigned to c14.8.87.i, Perdus Skylla, for recon/salvage of the Dvorak-class interstellar freighter Flames of Perdition, which reappeared within Segmentum Tempestus in 942.M41 and crashed onto the surface of c14.8.87.i, Perdus Skylla, in 944.M41 after being missing presumed lost in warp storm anomaly xi.024.396 in 432.M35, is of the female gender.’

  Marduk blinked.

  ‘Well I am certainly glad that we got that cleared up,’ he said in a deadpan voice.

  ‘I am pleased to have caused you gratification, Marduk, First–’ began the magos, but Marduk held up a hand to stop him.

  ‘Enough,’ he impelled, the word laced with the power of the warp, and the magos fell silent mid-sentence.

  ‘Why don’t we rip out his tongue?’ suggested Burias. ‘Or his speaker box, or whatever.’

  ‘The thought had crossed my mind,’ said Marduk, before turning back towards the line of docked submersibles.

  ‘We are going in those,’ he said to Kol Badar. ‘No discussion.’

  Though wary of possible attack and on edge having witnessed the profane mural upon entering the mining facility, they had encountered no resistance as they penetrated deeper into the complex. They had come across several shrines that appeared to venerate the four-armed creature that Marduk recognised as xenos in origin, with crudely scrawled images of the beast in alcoves surrounded by offerings of tokens, charms and coins. He ordered these fanes destroyed, and the walls cleansed with bursts of promethium from flamer units.

  Though they faced no resistance, a growing crowd of humans, miners it would seem, were shadowing their progress. At first, just a few figures were seen ghosting their steps, ducking into the shadows whenever warrior brothers looked in their direction. As they continued onward they attracted more of a following, until hundreds of miners were following in their footsteps, though they still maintained a wary distance. Marduk felt their anger as the shrines were obliterated but, wisely, they did not dare to attempt to stop the actions of the Word Bearers.

  Not wishing to be slowed, Marduk ordered the warrior brothers to ignore the growing crowd that shadowed their progress, pressing on with an increasing sense of urgency.

  The interstellar freighter Flames of Perdition had settled on the ocean bed some eight kilometres from the mining complex, and the last recorded location of the explorator he sought had been a docking station of submersible maintenance vehicles. Presumably, the explorator and her team had commandeered a flotilla of the craft to investigate the submerged ship, and so Marduk’s progress had led here, to the very same dock.

  Half a dozen submersibles were docked here, held in place by massive locking clamps that looked like giant, mechanical crab claws. Each of the submersibles was the size of a Land Raider and roughly spherical in shape, with an array of sensors protruding from forward hulls like the antennae of insects. A pair of mechanical arms were under-slung beneath their bulbous chassis, just visible in the dark water, and the monstrous insectoid limbs ended in powerful claws, industrial-sized welding tools and drills the length of two men.

  Hundreds of onlookers watched from the shadows, crowding in around the gantries overlooking the holding pool of the dock. Marduk glimpsed hooded faces, eyes gleaming with feverish light and their skin an unhealthy, blue-tinged pallor. The tension in the crowd was palpable, and the warriors of the Host kept their weapons ready, yet the miners made no move to obstruct them.

  Four-armed stick figures had been scratched into the circular boarding hatches in the sides of the submersibles, as well as phrases scrawled in what must have been the local Low Gothic dialect. It made little sense to Marduk, though he was schooled in dozens of Imperial dialects, but the general message could be understood. The scratching seemed to indicate that the submersibles were the ‘carriages of the earthly gods’, and that to enter them would bring enlightenment.

  Marduk was repulsed by the idolatrous pseudo-religious sentiments, but he had not the time nor the inclination to ‘educate’ these wretches of their misguided beliefs. They would all be dead soon enough anyway.

  ‘You still maintain these people are not daemon worshippers?’ asked Kol Badar, tracing his finger along the deep gouges that formed the stick figure of a four-armed monster. It certainly did look daemonic, but Marduk was certain.

  ‘I believe these people are held in the sway of xenos creatures,’ he stated. ‘A tyranid vanguard species, perhaps. I feel that there is some form of psychic control over these miners that draws the hive fleet like a lure. These deluded fools are worshipping a xenos creature, or a host of them, that will be the death of them.’

  ‘Worshipping xenos as gods?’ asked Khalaxis, his voice expressing his disgust.

  Marduk nodded.

  ‘A powerful foe, then,’ said Burias with relish.

  ‘Oh yes,’ agreed Marduk. ‘A powerful foe.’

  Marduk peered at the small view-screen. The submersible had no viewing portal; it was built to traverse the deepest abyssal channels of the ocean floor, and at extreme depths even the most heavily reinforced window would crumple beneath the tremendous pressure. In its stead, the grainy, black and white pict screen fed visual information from the sensor arrays on the exterior of the deep-sea vessel.

  The interior of the submersible was cramped and hot, and the Wor
d Bearers had needed to commandeer four of them to fit all of the warriors accompanying Marduk. The secondary locking gate on the underside of the sub-docks slid aside, and the four mining craft descended into the open water, powerful impeller motors whirring.

  Burias sat at the controls of the craft, looking ludicrously large hunched over the dials and levers that controlled the pitch, speed, depth, direction and roll of the submersible. It was a simple control system akin to that of a shuttle, and he had little trouble becoming familiar with it. He grinned like a madman as he discovered the controls of the exterior robotic arms, and in the view-screen Marduk could see the massive power-claw snapping, and the huge drill spinning, creating a small whirlpool of turbulence.

  ‘Burias, it is not a toy,’ said Marduk.

  The submersible struck one of the underside legs of the mining facility, and Burias looked around at Marduk guiltily.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, and stopped fooling around with the robotic arms to concentrate on piloting the craft. It wanted to turn to the left all the time, and he struggled with the controls to keep it steady.

  It levelled out abruptly and swung around smoothly to port, its impeller motors whining as the submersible powered forwards. Burias swore.

  ‘You seem to have got the hang of it,’ said Marduk.

  Burias held his hands up, removing them from the controls.

  ‘I’m not controlling it,’ he said. ‘It is following an automated piloting route.’

  He consulted the stream of data on a side-screen.

  ‘It’s taking us to the downed ship.’

  They could do little but watch the grainy pict screens as the submersible carried them away from the mining facility, following its pre-determined route.

  The ocean floor was jagged and uneven, and jutting spears of rock reared up before them, but the submersible traversed the terrain carefully, rising above the smaller outcrops, and accelerating beneath vast bridges of rock.

  The undersea landscape was breathtaking, with vast cathedral-like spires of rock rising thousands of metres up into the dark water. Their vision slowly diminished the further they got away from the glow of the mining facility, until they could see only what was lit by the powerful spotlights on the prow of the submersible.

  The lights of the other craft blinked, as all four of the submersibles travelled along the same line. As they passed beneath yet another towering arched causeway, they came upon a sheer drop-off, an undersea cliff that plunged down into blackness. It was down this vertical wall that the submersibles dropped, leaving trails of bubbles in their wake.

  The sheer drop seemed to have no bottom. The chasm must have been over two kilometres in width, and it dropped away into utter darkness.

  At last, something came into view, something immense.

  ‘Gods of the ether,’ swore Burias as they came upon the wreckage of the Flame of Perdition.

  The Dvorak-class freighter was wedged between the walls of the chasm, its prow and stern ground into the sheer walls of the drop-off, bridging the bottomless gap.

  As the submersibles ploughed on through the clear water, impeller engines whirring, the sheer size of the ship became apparent. It was one thing to see battle cruisers hanging in space where there were few reference points to give an indication of their sheer scale, but seeing this ship wedged firmly between the two distant sides of the chasm was breathtaking.

  A portion of the lower stern looked as though it had been sheared away. It might have suffered the damage as it struck the mouth of the chasm, or it might have occurred thousands of years before the ship entered this sub-system, long before it had smashed through the ice crust of Perdus Skylla. According to Darioq-Grendh’al, the ship had been lost in a warp storm anomaly for some six and a half thousand years. Anything could have happened to it in that time.

  Warp storms were notoriously unpredictable, and time and distance became blurred within their bounds. The Flame of Perdition might have been drifting through the nebulous warp storms for fifteen thousand years, twenty thousand years, thrown like a leaf on the wind through the ether. Or, equally as likely, it might have seemed to its crew to have been gone only a fraction of a second before it struck the surface of the frozen moon, and plunged into the oceanic depths.

  During its time in the warp, and wherever else it may have emerged, the ship may have encountered any number of daemonic and xenos entities, and it was highly possible that some of the creatures remained onboard.

  Apart from the shattered stern, the ship appeared to be in a remarkably complete state, and though Marduk feared that its interior had been flooded, there was every likelihood that at least the upper decks might still contain breathable air.

  At such depth, and with its integrity compromised, what air did remain within the ship would have shrunk to a tiny fraction of its previous volume, but if any man-made structure could withstand the immense pressure as deep as this, it was a space-faring cruiser.

  The submersibles ploughed inexorably towards the ship that grew ever larger in the small pict screen. As they drew closer, Marduk could see that the sides of the ship were scarred. Entire sections of its thick armour had bubbled, and other portions looked unnaturally smooth, like the skin of a burn victim, or as if they had been splashed with corrosive, high-grade acid.

  The four submersibles drew towards the immense freighter, dipping down towards one of its gaping, water-filled hangar bays, still following an automated route.

  ‘At least they seem to know where they are going,’ said Marduk.

  ‘Or they are leading us into a trap,’ said Burias, angrily flicking switches and yanking on the controls.

  The four deep-sea craft, dwarfed to insignificance by the sheer size of the Flame of Perdition, entered the cavernous hangar bay. It was a surreal experience to drift through the submerged bay, to pass by upturned shuttles that had clearly been tossed around the expansive hangar bay by the force of the impact with the ice, or the chasm sides. The four submersibles ghosted through the massive open space, leaving a swirling wake of turbulence behind them that blurred the water.

  They began to ascend vertically, climbing up through the flooded levels of the ship, the automated controls carefully navigating them safely through the tangle of shattered girders and twisted metal.

  The corpse of a man dressed in naval fatigues reared up in front of the submersible, filling the pict screen with its cadaverous rictus grin. The flesh was almost completely rotted from its bones and as the submersible bumped the corpse out of the way, one of its arms came loose. A host of wriggling eel-creatures squirmed from the cavity, thrashing madly, and then the corpse drifted out of sight.

  As they continued to ascend, passing through flooded cargo bays and freight holds, they passed more corpses, all being slowly devoured. They powered along a wide corridor, the tilt that the ship had come to rest at forcing the submersible to travel at an obtuse angle.

  They entered another area of the ship, and the submersibles bobbed to the surface of the water like corks. Automated pressurisation systems kicked into gear, slowly equalising with the outside pressure, and once the dials began to flash green, the access hatch began to release. It swung wide with a slight vacuum hiss, and Marduk stepped out into knee-deep water. The submersible had brought itself up to a raised gantry twenty metres above what appeared to be a holding area. Evidently, the upper portion of the ship was still structurally sound, and air had been trapped within it.

  Marduk’s helmet readouts gave him a flood of information and he saw that the air was unsafe for an unprotected human to breathe. Astartes warriors, with their superior, genhanced physiology, would probably last around an hour before they expired.

  Marduk saw that the submersible he had emerged from was drawn up alongside half a dozen others.

  ‘The explorator and her team’s vessels, presumably,’ said Kol Badar, stamping through the water to Marduk’s side.

  A massive doorway yawned behind them, leading further into the Imperial
freighter. With no other obvious way of proceeding, Marduk led the warriors through its arched expanse.

  They came upon a series of bulkheads, part of the latticework that subdivided the ship into distinct sections, adding strength to the whole and allowing areas of the ship to be isolated from each other in the event of hull breach.

  Though there was no power within the ship – its plasma core reactors were clearly dead, or at least dormant – the bulkheads could be accessed manually. Kol Badar ripped one of them open with a wrench, half-expecting to be washed away by a flood of water. Once all the warriors had passed the bulkhead it was sealed behind them once more, and the next bulkhead opened. The ship beyond was dark, but the air was breathable without danger, and Marduk felt certain that this was the way that the explorator had taken.

  He grinned within his helmet. He could almost feel the presence of the wretched devotee of the Machine-God. He had but to reach out to possess her.

  ‘She is here, somewhere,’ said Marduk. ‘I know it.’

  ‘She’d better be,’ growled Kol Badar.

  Warily, the warriors of the Host began to move further into the wrecked hulk that was the Flame of Perdition, weapons at the ready.

  They had advanced for over three hours, though in that time that had been forced to retrace their steps a dozen times as their way was blocked by shattered sections of the ship, or by bulkheads that led back into the flooded lower sections.

  Burias’s mood, previously buoyed by Marduk’s optimism, had slowly soured as the sheer improbability of finding the explorator within this confusing maze was driven home. Kol Badar was right. The cursed worshipper of the profane Machine-God could be anywhere within the ship, if she were here at all. The ship was over two kilometres in length and consisted of almost fifty deck levels, depending on where within the ship one was located. In addition, a myriad of air ducts, sub-floor tunnels and inter-deck stowage vaults made the Flame of Perdition a veritable labyrinth, and despite the fact that perhaps seventy per cent of it was flooded and impassable, it would take a Herculean effort and incredible luck to locate a single individual within its confines.