by Various
Amid all of it, he still grinned. He couldn’t help himself. The flush of victory ran through his veins, keeping his arms moving and giving his legs the strength to hold him in position.
This is my kill, he thought as he hacked away furiously, trying not to let his stupid, childish grin show too much.
My kill.
A day later and the storm lessened in its fury, though the seas ran hard for much longer. The drekkar made heavy work of it, labouring in the deep swell. The central mast still stood but much of the rigging had been ripped away. Several holes had been punched below the waterline, and no matter how fast the crew bailed it out, the bilges sloshed with seawater where the makeshift repairs had been hammered on.
Aside from Olekk, three other warriors had been dragged over the edge. That was a heavy toll for the tribe, though the scale of the prize compensated for that. The meat of the hvaluri would keep them fed for many months once the women had smoked and salted it. The tough shell would provide tools for them and the beast’s blood would be distilled into both fuel and food.
The ship ran low in the water, laden down with every piece of hide and blubber the warriors could fit aboard. It stank of the sea, acrid and salty, but no one minded that. It was a good haul, worth setting out across the blade-dark ocean for.
As they neared home Thenge sat with Kvara in the prow, chewing on a long piece of sinew and letting the grease run down his beard.
‘Feeling better?’ he asked good-naturedly.
Kvara nodded. He’d broken his arm on the leap back to the ship after the hvaluri had given up the fight, much to the raucous amusement of the rest of the crew. Even after it had been bound up with a rough splint, it still ached – not that he would ever show it.
His head was the worst of it. He didn’t dare to get it looked at by the priests. The blood still oozed thickly from the wound, and the pain grew with every passing hour. His vision was beginning to blur. It wasn’t healing.
‘I mean what I say,’ said Thenge, jabbing his finger at the blond warrior. ‘That was brave. The test of manhood awaits, and you’re ready.’
Kvara took up a string of sinew himself and chewed on it.
‘Not sure?’ asked Thenge.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Not now.’
Thenge snorted.
‘Why wait?’
Kvara looked away from him, down the longship where the rest of the crew laboured. They were his people, the ones he’d lived with all his short life. They’d never made him feel anything less than part of their world. The test of manhood – the long, solitary hunt across the icy wastes, daunted him. He didn’t fear death, and certainly didn’t fear danger, but something about the ordeal made him hang back.
He would do it, but not soon. The time wasn’t right.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, truthfully enough. He took another bite of the sinew, feeling the slippery flesh slide around his mouth. The action of eating dulled the pain slightly. ‘I’m not ready.’
He looked up then, up at the grey walls of cloud that shrouded Fenrys. In a rare break, where the sheets of occlusion gave way slightly, he thought he saw something up there, shadowing them. A huge bird, perhaps, but its profile was strangely angular. It seemed to hang motionless in the air.
‘Perhaps you’re not ready to be out on your own,’ said Thenge, resignedly.
Kvara nodded, not really paying attention. His head was getting worse. The clouds closed back together, hiding whatever it was that he’d seen.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Perhaps that’s right.’
Kvara ran his finger over the names on his armour. The snow-grey metal was softened in Lyses’s warm light. Even the blade marks, the scorches and the dents looked a little less jagged.
He didn’t need to read the names in order to remember them. They were carved on to his mind just as deeply as they were etched into the ceramite.
Mór, his thick-set face framed by black, dense sideburns. Dark hair, pale skin, like a vision of an underverse spectre with the sardonic humours to match.
Grimbjard Lek, the polar opposite. Sunny, blond, his mouth twitching up into a wicked smile at the first excuse. He’d killed with a smile on his face, that one, glorying the Allfather with every swing of his axe.
Vrakk, the one they’d all called Backhand, bulky and blunt with his powerfist thrumming, a dirty fighter but useful enough to make up for it.
Aerjak and Rann, brothers-in-arms, inseparable and possessed of that uncanny awareness of the other’s state. Kvara had always had Aerjak down for the Rune Priests. He’d had a strange way about him, something tied to the wyrd, for all the good it had done him on Deneth Teros.
Frorl, the blade-master, swinging his frostblade with that unconscious, mocking ease, disdaining ranged weapons for the thrill of disruptors and steel-edge.
Rijal Svensson, wiry and fast, quick to anger and equally quick to laugh, his nose broken so many times that it had almost been not worth bothering with. He’d never accepted augmetic replacements, preferring to keep the stub of gristle and bone-shards in place to remind him not to get carried away.
Finally, Beorth, the quiet one. Only happy when hoisting his heavy bolter into position or at the controls of something huge and slung with big guns. He’d have been a Long Fang before he made Grey Hunter, if they’d let him. He’d laughed rarely, never sharing the coarse jokes the rest of them let spill from their profane lips, but when he had done, that rolling, rich, mirthful rumble had made Kvara grin unconsciously along with him.
Beorth had been the hardest, out of all of them. He’d been the one they’d never noticed unless he wasn’t there.
Kvara let his armoured finger trace out the names, clicking softly as it passed over the runic grooves.
Perhaps you’re not ready to be out on your own.
A warning light blinked on the dashboard. Kvara snapped out of his memories and took in the data.
The hub was in visual range and racing towards him fast. It was a small installation, a few hundred metres in diameter on the surface and crowned with a couple of comms towers, a few landing stages and a squat ops centre. Lights still blinked at the summit, flashing piercingly in the heat of day. The algae stretched away from it, sparse in patches and thick in others. Four lines of oily smoke rose from the harvester processing nodes, indicating that it was still working.
Kvara’s face wrinkled in disapproval. He could smell the thick stench of promethium already, a low-grade variant, greasy and sour.
His armoured fingers ran over the console, keying in the landing codes from the databank Oen had uploaded to the flyer. A pict over to his left immediately updated with the response. The protective cover of one of the landing stages withdrew, unfurling like an iron rosebud, and he banked the flyer towards it.
Nothing obviously wrong.
He touched the flyer down on the platform and jumped down from the open cockpit. Smoke poured from one of the engines, and the others wound down slowly, as if their bearings had been ground away.
Kvara strode across the apron, unconsciously checking his weapons. The bolt pistol at his waist was fully loaded and primed with the appropriate blessing. Blood, his own blood, ceremonially stained the muzzle. Across his back was strapped Djalik, his blade. It was a short, stabbing sword, notched and serrated along one of the cutting edges and with inset runes lodged under the bronze-lined hilt. Over the years the metal had been dulled with burns from the weapon’s disruptor field, making it as dark as charcoal.
Kvara sniffed the air, going watchfully. Everything was quiet. The installation barely moved on the placid waters. The warm wind blew across the towers and manufactoria units, washing over the grey plasteel in an endless, placid sigh.
Ahead of him, two doors slid soundlessly open, opening the way into the hub’s interior. Orange lights blinked on, illuminating a bare, clean corridor. Everything
smelled of the algae – a mulchy, briny tang that lingered at the back of the throat.
Kvara paused before entering, taking a final look across the hub. Aside from the low growl of automating processors, all was calm. The green waters lapped softly at the flanks of the harvester, a hundred metres down from the landing platforms.
Where are the men?
Reluctantly, having got used to the clean, unfiltered taste of the air, Kvara retrieved his battered helm from its mag-lock and screwed it in place. The balmy atmosphere of Lyses disappeared, replaced by the filtered, sterile environment of his armour-shell.
Kvara took up his bolt pistol, and breathed a prayer, the same prayer he’d uttered during every quest since Deneth Teros.
Allfather, deliver me from safety and bring me into peril.
Then he walked inside.
‘Where is he now?’
‘Alecto XI. He’s landed.’
‘That’s a long way from the last site. Have we got anything from the crew?’
‘Nothing. Not a thing.’
‘When was the last transmit?’
‘Uh, hang on.’
Eim steadied herself against the sway of the flyer. It was a big one, capable of spending several days out over the water and accommodating a full assault company. She didn’t like using craft that big – their judder and yaw, as well as the fuel-tinged air, made her nauseous, and the grunts got restive cooped up in the holds.
‘We don’t have anything from them for six days, ma’am.’
Eim turned to the comms officer and raised an eyebrow.
‘Why wasn’t that picked up? They’re meant to be checking in daily.’
The comms officer, a grey-faced man with deep-sunk eyes and an unfortunate overbite, shrugged apologetically.
‘There are a lot to monitor.’
Eim swore and rubbed her eyes with the balls of his fists. Throne of Earth, she felt tired. Oen would owe her for this when she got back.
‘Okay, run a scan. Check for anything.’
‘I can’t see… Whoa. I really don’t know… what is that?’
Eim pushed him aside and leaned over the augur console. As she watched the shapes clarify, she felt a sudden, cold thrill shudder through her body.
‘How close are we to him?’
‘A long way. Procurator Oen insisted on a range of–’
‘Forget that. We’re going in. Signal Nyx, but don’t wait for a response.’
She turned away from the comms officer and looked out across the cramped bridge space. Other officers looked up from their stations. Their expressions had switched from mild boredom into nervous expectation.
‘Get the men armed and ready to deploy,’ she said, speaking to the company commander, a squat, low-browed man called Frehis Aerem. ‘All squads, assault order, ready to drop on my word.’
Eim looked back at the console before he’d had a chance to respond. As she watched the augur line sweep round for another pass, she felt her heart start to thump faster within her chest.
‘Damn you, Oen,’ she muttered, shaking her head as she watched the data stream in. ‘You let him go out there – this is on your conscience.’
The corridors were quiet and lit only by dim orange light. Every metre of them was pristine, scrubbed clean and glistening. Octagonal hatches appeared at regular intervals along the walls, all closed. Kvara tried one of the handles, and it clicked against the bolt lock. He punched through the mechanism, cracking the handle, and the hatch swung open.
The chamber on the far side was empty. There was a desk, two metal chairs, a scale model of the harvester station on a sideboard. More orange light flickered from a semi-functional lumen, catching the jewels in a cheap devotional image of some primarch or other. No one was inside and, from the sterile smell of it, no one had been inside for some time.
Kvara turned back, walking through the network of corridors. Despite his heavy boots, his footfalls were soft. The power armour hummed – a low, grinding noise at the edge of mortal hearing – the only thing that broke the dense fog of silence.
Kvara paused, inclining his head, listening carefully. For a second, there was a trace sound, right on the edge of his audible range. Nothing he could latch on to, and not enough data for the helm to augment.
He started walking again, keeping his pistol held high. The grey hair along the back of his neck stood erect, brushing against the collar of his armour. He could feel his thick blood pumping vigorously around his bulky frame. His awareness had sharpened up, causing his muscles to loosen and his pupils to dilate. He heard his own breathing resonate within the helm, close and hot.
I come for you. You know I am here.
At the end of the corridor was another intersection. He waited again, watching, listening, absorbing.
Show yourself.
The lights blew.
The corridor plunged into darkness. Something raced up out of the shadows, phenomenally fast, scrabbling on the metal floor as it came.
In the nanosecond before Kvara’s helm compensated, it swerved around the corner and out at him. A hellish face, obscenely long and crested, lashed up out of the dark.
Kvara loosed two bolts, aiming fast. They impacted with a crack and flash of light, shattering a brittle shell. High screams, alien screams, echoed from the walls.
More of them arrived, leaping over the fallen outrider. Jointed limbs clattered over metal, flashing ice-white as more bolt-flares lit them up. They came in a tangled rush, jostling each other, jaws wide and biting.
Kvara pulled back, firing all the time. His arm moved only by fractions, picking out target after target, cracking apart the growing swarm of xenos creatures. The intersection clogged quickly with smashed shells and oozing pulp, but he kept coolly firing.
Just as the ammo counter ran down, the onslaught ceased. The last of the chittering screams died away, leaving a pile of twisted, snapped and cracked shells in front of him.
Kvara ejected the old magazine, slammed a fresh one into the pistol housing and drew his blade with his left hand. Djalik’s disruptor field fizzed into life, throwing an electric blue aura out from the cutting edge.
He strode out into the intersection, wading through a swamp of broken, twitching carcasses, watching for more of the xenos to come at him.
He knew what they were. He’d fought such beasts on a dozen worlds.
Hormagaunts, the Imperium called them.
Kvara liked fighting tyranids. Unlike Traitors, for whom he could feel nothing but a blind, disgusted fury, or the greenskins, which were contemptible, tyranids were a force he could respect.
They were pure. They suffered from neither fear nor corruption nor fatigue. Like the native beasts of his own world, they lashed out with an unsullied primal aggression, driven to kill out of hammered-in instinct and never stopping until death took them or the task was completed.
They saw him as prey. He saw them as prey. That made things even.
Ahead of Kvara the corridor opened out into a wide, square room. Banks of equipment were arranged in long rows, all still clean and unsullied. Across them lay the bodies of the hub’s crew, very much not clean and unsullied.
They had been ripped open. Their bodies, what was left of them, hung in glistening loops of gristle and sinew all across the room. A few had tried to get out, running for the double doors on the far side of the space. The trails of blood, as thick and dark as engine oil, didn’t reach very far. The corpses still had looks of horrified surprise on their faces – those, at any rate, who still had faces.
Kvara swept the room with his pistol. The lights were still down, and his helm picked the outlines of the bodies in fuzzy grey light.
He sensed them coming before his armour’s equipment did. A skittering, scraping run, muffled by the closed doors to the corridor beyond, punctuated by the high-pitched rattle
of xenos vocal cords. They were racing toward him – dozens of them, maybe more.
Kvara grinned.
The doors burst apart, thrown aside by a press of straining bodies. Blurred xenos outlines, skeletal and reptilian, swarmed through the gap and into the room, screaming at him with stretched-wide jaws, pouring over the surfaces in a rolling wave of needle-teeth and hooked claws.
‘Fenrys!’
Kvara charged straight back at them, leaping over a slumped pile of eviscerated bodies and bringing his blade round in a wide, blistering arc. He hurled himself into the tide, loosing volleys of bolt-fire that flashed out in the dark like storm lightning.
They came on, lashing out at him, and he shattered their talons. They leapt up to maul him, and he broke their snapping jaws. He spun round, shifting from one foot to another, punching out, slicing back with the blade, firing all the while. Scrawny xenos bodies smashed apart, bursting open and spraying fluid across his whirling, gyrating armour.
More of them poured in through the broken doors, streaming into the chamber and leaping up to make contact with him. They bounded over the bodies of their own dead, desperate to draw blood.
Kvara smashed his pistol-hand round, caving in a swollen xenos skull, before sending two more rounds spinning into two more targets, jabbing up with the blade and hauling it back through the entrails of another flailing monster.
They were all over him, tearing and screaming, but he was faster, bigger and stronger. As they howled with agonised frustration, he grunted with coarse satisfaction. His gauntlets were heavy and sticky with fluids, but he kept them moving. The liquid splattered over his breastplate, dousing the graven names under layers of filth.
He had been bred to do this. There was nothing left for him but this. Only in such work could his soul find a measure of peace even as his body pushed itself to the extremes of performance.
He was back where he belonged. Back in the fight.
‘Kvara!’
Mór’s voice was strained over the comm, broken up by the crackle of ordnance. Huge, thumping crashes distorted the feed.