by Guy Haley
‘Brother Astomar, Brother Tarael, pan left to right.’
The Terminators obeyed, torsos rotating as they tracked their augur eyes over the room. Voldo watched as the suit lights slid over the wreck of dead machinery embedded in the walls. One corner of the room was wrinkled up into a metal wave, never to break, the result of the vessel’s impact when joining the hulk.
He developed a better picture of the room. Eskerio had been correct, it was a cargo lift. Doors like the one they stood in were in three of the four walls. A short corridor lined with dirty hazard striping led away from the fourth side to his left, almost certainly to an external airlock.
He watched as the lights went back and forth, bright spots on dead walls, a fainter halo around each, and in that halo…
‘Wait!’ Alanius said. ‘Brother Tarael, pan back one metre, drop the vertical twenty degrees.’
Tarael bent forward slightly, the full beam of his suit light picking out a huddled shape upon the floor.
‘Do you see it, Brother Voldo?’ asked Alanius.
‘Yes. A corpse.’
‘A crewman. Cover my advance,’ Alanius said.
Without discussion, Alanius clumped past and went into the lift room. Voldo cursed inwardly. That was reckless, as reckless as those damned Knights of Blood had been on No Glory, and he chided himself for not heeding his own warning to Galt. He resolved to keep a sharper hold on his counterpart in future. To stop him now, mid-action, would be a grave insult for one of the same rank, for all Voldo being designated commander.
Voldo checked the motion tracker. Nothing. Annoyed, he followed the Blood Drinkers sergeant into the lifthead.
The impact damage was worse close up. He glanced to the left side, checking the airlock as he walked past. The doors were so buckled they barely deserved the name, ruptures formed jagged metal lips that puckered round slashes of dark. Whatever the craft abutted in the crush of the hulk had formed a seal over the torn airlock, keeping in the tenuous atmosphere.
Alanius knelt on one knee by the corpse. Voldo stood over him and bent forward. His suit beam lit upon a human skeleton within a standard Imperial ship’s emergency suit. Both hands were thrown up to the face. Alanius gently lifted an arm with the tip of a claw away from the helmet visor. The glove of the hand was missing, exposing the dead man’s grey finger bones. The hand flopped onto the floor with a rattle, bones coming apart and rolling across the metal like dice and bouncing into the air.
Behind the yellowed plastek faceplate a skull gaped. Its jaw hung loose, mouth wide in a silent scream.
Voldo ran his light down the suit. The chest had been ripped open, ribs shivered into fragments.
‘Eviscerated,’ said Alanius. ‘What is your opinion as to this man’s fate, cousin?’
‘Xenos pirates mayhap. But look, these are surely the marks of claws.’
Alanius ran his light up the wall. ‘Aye,’ he let it rest on a gruesome sight. A hand and arm hung from the wall. A screaming face protruded above it, its terror preserved for all time in metal. ‘I know of few weapons that can cause such melding between the organic and inorganic.’
Voldo called Clastrin to join them. A moment later he stood by their sides.
‘A Geller collapse,’ Clastrin’s paired voices said, ‘followed by uncontrolled translation from the empyrean. This is a likely explanation for the contamination of the ship’s metal by human flesh. This man would have become displaced into the metal, becoming one with its fabric.’
‘A Geller field collapse? This other was clearly slain,’ said Alanius, gesturing at the corpse.
‘Pirates, raiders quick to fall upon a stricken ship,’ said Clastrin. ‘The possibilities are many.’
‘Yes,’ said Voldo.
Alanius stayed kneeling, staring at the dead man. Voldo felt a rush of brotherhood for the Blood Drinker.
‘You think on his fate?’
‘Dying, alone in the dark. Yes. It pains me our kind are too few to protect them all,’ said Alanius. ‘They treat us like gods and yet they still die.’
‘The Adeptus Astartes cannot be everywhere. We do what we can. The loss of a billion lives is nothing if the Imperium stands,’ said Voldo sternly.
‘We are here now, are we not? Too late for him and his comrades. He would have died in terror, with no succour.’
Voldo rested his hand on the other sergeant’s shoulder. ‘If that is so or not so, they are long gone and we have other foes to concern ourselves with. I admire your care for life, in these dark times men are careless with what is most precious of all, and for the nature of this man’s death I feel also grave regret. But we have another task that will save others from similar pain. Come, we must go on.’
Alanius rose from his knees, a laborious action in Terminator armour, despite the minimal gravity.
Voldo asked Eskerio to mark the doorway and then the two sergeants had their men gather around the lift shaft. While Astomar and Gallio kept watch, the others retrieved flares from their utility pods and threw them down into the shaft. The flares flew more than fell, tumbling into the dark until they became little bigger than matchlights. Their connection with the bottom was nearly inaudible, bouncing around the shaft until their energy was spent. They continued to burn, flickering over the dross at the bottom of the shaft.
‘Sounding, five hundred metres,’ said Eskerio.
‘Magos Nuministon, Forgemaster Clastrin, is the lift still functional?’
By this point Clastrin had gone to an interface unit by one of the doors, Nuministon beside him, a freshly unscrewed panel lay on the floor. Various manipulators from Clastrin’s harness were plugged into the guts of the wall. Nuministon’s supplications to the dormant machines murmured in the force’s helmets.
‘No, brother-sergeant. It is inactive. If you would but wait, I will reroute power… Ah. I have it.’
A screech from behind the walls, an unsteady thrum, and running lights flickered on in the four corners of the shaft. Most remained dark, but there were enough to pick out the shaft’s general condition.
‘I have accessed the ship’s datacore, what is left of it. I have activated what systems I can. Our way may be easier ahead.’ said Clastrin. ‘This ship was the bulk agricultural hauler Father Harvest, registered 481.M37, in the Segmentum Obscurus. Crew complement of one hundred and eighty-nine, thirteen passengers. Lost 329.M38 with all hands. Take note of the name for the records of the Administratum, so that its fate might be noted.’
Voldo checked his sensorium map. ‘We will best exit this vessel by the deck seven below this one. Confirm, Brother Eskerio.’
Eskerio adjusted the device set into his power fist. ‘Deck eight has a weakened section that can be cut through quickly, so that we might attain entry to the deeper vessel.’
Voldo addressed Clastrin and Nuministon. ‘Once we have reached the deck, use our safety lines to help bring you down. Brother Blood Drinker Tarael, remain here with the magos until we call for him. Militor, Curzon, respond.’
‘Brother-sergeant,’ said Militor, his voice peppered with interference.
‘Redeploy to the lifthead. Curzon and Tarael are to rejoin us, following down the shaft once we have established a perimeter on deck eight.’ If they ran into difficulty, Voldo reasoned, the close combat capabilities of the Blood Drinkers would be useful, while Militor’s longer-range armament made him the natural choice for covering such a large area as the lifthead. That Voldo wished to keep all the Blood Drinkers where he could see them was a further consideration.
Tarael stood back as the other Terminators stepped over the edge of the void, feet tapping at the walls of the shaft until their mag-locks made a firm connection. Armour motors whining, fibre bundles straining against the hulk’s weak native gravity and the armours’ mass, the Terminators hauled themselves over so that they were at ninety degrees to the ship’s nominal floor.
They were facing down directly to the hulk’s mass centre, held to the side of the shaft by their boots. The gravity was so weak, up and down were illusory. Safety lines shot out from the back of their suit cowls, super-strong wires tipped with razor grapnels that punched into the ceiling, spreading wide within the ship’s skin. Should the mag-locks fail, they would prevent the veterans from floating free.
The descent took some time, the Terminators proceeding carefully. Far below them, they could make out bones amid the debris at the foot of the lift shaft before the flares burned out.
They made it to the eighth deck without incident, where they clambered into that level’s lift room. It was a match for the lifthead, the lift being open on all sides on every loading deck. The Space Marines spread out, investigating the few chambers on the level around them. These were cargo holds in the main, expansive spaces that filled two decks vertically, with entry points so they could be loaded from two points, one every other deck. The holds were full of putrid, unidentifiable rot. Their walls were bowed inwards by the pressures exerted upon the ship by the rest of the hulk, and the catwalks that ran over them were buckled.
‘There is no sign of the enemy, veteran-sergeant,’ said Alanius over the vox, reporting back to Voldo. ‘The damage to the ship is greater here, and in two of the three holds there is a large amount of radioactivity. I am glad we do not go that way.’
While the others secured the deck, Azmael, Eskerio and Voldo repeatedly checked their auspexes. Voldo directed the two veteran battle-brothers to probe this direction and that until he was satisfied they still moved unnoticed. A perimeter established, the seismic device was lowered down and pulled in by the Novamarines. Clastrin, Nuministon and the servitors followed. Clastrin spurned the safety lines, using the four additional limbs of his servo-harness to clamber down the shaft in the manner of a mechanical spider. Then the two brothers of the Blood Drinker’s Veteran Company rejoined the main body of the party. Militor remained above. The group gathered together again, Voldo checked the dwindling long-range vox signal strength, and hailed the Novum in Honourum.
‘We are on the eighth deck of the agri-hauler, and about to proceed further, lord captain. Communication will become more difficult as we go on.’
Galt’s voice crackled back, almost lost to the voice of the star and the seep of radioactive particles spilling from the ships’ reactors. ‘Let the flash of righteous weapon fire light your way. Come home safe, Veteran-Sergeant Voldo, Veteran-Sergeant Alanius.’
‘Yes, lord captain.’ Voldo disengaged the long-range link, glad to be rid of the hiss of static. ‘Brothers, onwards.’
Further into the ship the Space Marines of the two Chapters went, checking and rechecking each door and corridor as they went.
‘Your caution increases, lord sergeant,’ said Nuministon.
‘Genestealers rarely venture to the very outermost levels of an infested hulk,’ said Voldo. ‘But it is in dark places like this, deeper in, where the unwary might be ambushed and infected unseen, that they prefer to wait,’ said Voldo. ‘I would have thought that you, magos, with your remit you would be aware of this.’
‘Rarely do I encounter such creatures,’ said Nuministon haughtily. ‘My work is of a higher order.’
‘Be thankful that you do not, then,’ said Voldo sharply.
They made it into a corridor where most of the lights were on and the artificial gravity was working. The Forgemaster checked the stability of the corridor’s grav plating.
‘They are active,’ Clastrin said. ‘You may disengage your mag-locks.’
Voldo was pleased. With the mag-locking off, they could proceed with greater speed.
The corridor was bent out of true, the damage to the ship’s fabric growing greater the deeper they went into the hulk. In one place the Terminators had to squeeze through a section where the floor rose up close to the ceiling. Small cells lined the corridor, crew quarters, or perhaps those for passengers paying for passage on the merchantman. Not far beyond the narrowing, they passed a room the doorway of which was part-blocked. A barricade had been thrown up behind it; heavy bars welded in place. It looked formidable but had not held, the door had been slashed open and peeled back into wicked triangles, the barricade smashed down.
Voldo had Brothers Genthis and Curzon approach. Light played along their claws as they activated their energy fields. They adopted combat stances, wheeled into the doorway, investigated, and let their weapons drop and deactivate.
‘Brothers, we have found the remainder of the ship’s crew,’ said Genthis. He bowed his head and pointed inside with his lightning claws.
The room, a kitchen, it seemed to have been, contained a scene of ancient slaughter. The bones of the men who had once staffed Father Harvest were scattered like twigs across the floor, black bloodstains on the walls marked their passing from this life into the next. All else had passed, ground to dust by the passage of time.
‘Emperor preserve their souls,’ said Alanius softly.
It was a small room, insignificant, its mundane purpose adding to the poignancy of what must have been a desperate last stand.
‘They await the final call to serve, their lot in this life is done, in the next they may excel,’ said Voldo, emotionlessly reciting the prayer of Honourum. ‘Had xenos broken into the ship, at least the crew would have died quickly.’
‘That is somewhat callous, brother-sergeant,’ said Alanius. ‘They were men of the Imperium, men such as we are sworn to protect.’
Voldo turned away from the grey bones and black blood. ‘I meant no callousness nor disrespect to these men; but conjecture on their fate, however awful, is ultimately meaningless. Whatever battle was fought here was done long ago. Long before the ship was attracted to the agglomeration and found another peril to stalk its halls.’
They passed on toward the final corridor they had to traverse in the broken agri-hauler, the way to the next ship in the hulk. They opened the door to this corridor, and Voldo’s rad-counter buzzed like an insect taking flight.
There was a strange mist low on the air, green and heavy. Tendrils of it uncurled themselves into the doorway, trailing across the feet of the group.
‘Radioactive fog,’ said Voldo.
‘It is the air itself, poisoned by the dying of machines,’ said Clastrin. ‘This we certainly may not breathe.’
‘We are far from the sources of active radioactivity,’ said Voldo.
‘That suggests the fog will only grow thicker as we proceed. The environment here is poorer than anticipated,’ said Nuministon. ‘This is valuable data, useful for the assault. It will not harm you. Your armour is proof against such hazards, as is mine.’
‘You speak truly,’ said Alanius, ‘but your servitors, magos, their organic components will die.’
‘And as I stated before, they will persist long enough to fulfil their purpose,’ replied Nuministon.
‘We should hurry our pace nevertheless, lest they fail. It would go ill if two of our brothers are occupied with transporting the device and we are attacked,’ said Voldo.
‘I concur, brother Novamarine,’ said Alanius.
The party proceeded, kicking the fog into uncanny shapes. It grew thicker, rising from the floor to fill the corridor to the ceiling, crowding their vision and disabling their long-range sensors. Suit light beams were forced nearer and nearer to their source as the fog grew denser, until each Terminator appeared as a bulky phantom led by a bobbing will-o’-the-wisp. The glow from the ship’s functioning light fittings withdrew within the vapour, becoming pale smears of uncertain origin. Doors gaped wide and sudden. Where the floor buckled it came as a surprise and the Terminators stumbled. Lesser men, even lesser members of the Adeptus Astartes, would have felt their nerves fray in these circumstances, but these were the veterans of two great Chapters, and they felt nothing but a heightened sense of wariness.
‘Switch to echo location,’ said Voldo. ‘Sound will be our guide.’
‘Will it not alert the xenos?’ asked Azmael. ‘When we fought them on Xoros Ten, they appeared to be able to hear well into the ultrasonic range.’
‘Yes,’ said Voldo. ‘They will be able to hear the echo locator’s voice, but only if they are near. It is better to know the ground and risk combat than to be blind.’
The Terminators did as ordered. Sonic units pulsed.
‘This is a poor situation, brothers,’ said Eskerio. ‘Radiation is far higher than we anticipated.’ The motion tracker was a useless fuzz beyond seventy metres, the map limited to a series of stacked boxes painted in high-pitched sound.
‘We are close to the exit point,’ said Voldo. ‘Be steady.’
They came to the end of the corridor, where it took a sharp bend to the left, following the hull’s inside. Further that way the corridor was blocked, the hull and ceiling pressed down as if a hand had crushed the ship, but the wall directly ahead was clear, with space for Clastrin and Gallio to work. They approached, and Voldo and his comrades felt their weight shift.
‘The grav plates here are dead,’ said Clastrin. ‘Re-engage mag-locks.’
A series of clunks sounded as boots locked to the floor.
‘Here Brother Gallio, this is to be our way into the next ship.’ Voldo indicated a patch of wall.
‘I will aid you, Brother Gallio, as before,’ said Clastrin.
The Master of the Forge and veteran brother set to work, the others standing guard over them. Alanius had Brother Curzon station himself by debris, in case something did come through. Others hunted out underfloor access ways, or roof vents and crawlways that led into the ship’s systems. Genestealers could cram themselves into remarkably tight spaces, to emerge where least expected.
The veteran brothers stood as still as statues, green fog caressing their armour, the long silence of the ship torn by the crackle and whine of Gallio’s chainfist and the hiss of Clastrin’s plasma torches. Voldo checked his mission clock. Three hours in. In another five the tech-priests of the explorator fleet would expect the device to be functional and start their own machines. There was no way to signal them should that not be the case.