Deathwing

by Neil

  No, thought Jomi, the floater would only break down if it hadn’t been “serviced” properly. The meat-transporter was only a machine, a thing of metal and wires and crystals, based on ancient science from the Dark Age of Technology.

  Courtesy of the voice, Jomi knew now that former ages had existed, unimaginable stretches of time unimaginably long ago. The cunent age was a time of “superstition”, so said the voice. An earlier age had been a time of enlightenment. Yet that bygone era was now called dark to the extent that so much had been forgotten about it. So the voice assured him, confusingly. He mustn’t worry his pretty mind overmuch about foul daemons such as Preacher Farb prated about. Such things existed, to a certain extent, that was true. But enlightenment was the route to joy. The owner of the voice said that it had been captured by the storms of “warp-space” long ago, doomed to wander in strange domains for aeons until finally it sensed a dawning psyker talent that was peculiarly attuned to it.

  ‘You aren’t a witch, dearest boy,’ the voice had assured him. ‘You’re a psyker. Say after me: I’m a psyker, with a glorious mind that deserves to relish all manner of gratifications. Which I, your only true friend will teach you how to attain. Say to yourself: I’m the most lustrous of psykers – and remember to think of the circle, won’t you?’

  The owner of the voice would come to Jomi. It would save him from the entrail shed. It would save him from the crushing embrace of fat Galandra Puschik and from the terror of the wheel.

  ‘Soooooooon,’ cooed the voice, like the coolest of evening breezes. ‘Always think of the circle – like a wheel rolling ever closer to you, but not a wheel to fear!’

  ‘Why have we been taught to fear wheels?’ An inspiration assaulted Jomi. ‘Surely our sledges would run more easily if we used… a wheel on each corner? Four wheels which turn around as the sledge advances!’

  ‘Then it would be called a wagon. You’re such a bright lad, Jomi. Bright in so many ways.’ Of a sudden, the voice grew sour and petulant. ‘And here comes spurious brightness to cheer you.’

  ‘Gretchi!’

  Her slim limbs, mainly hidden by a coarse cotton frock, yet imaginable as fair and smooth… her breasts like two young doves nesting beneath the fabric… her chestnut hair hanging in ringlets, mostly veiling a slender neck… the huge straw hat shading that creamy complexion… the teasing eyes of a blue so much less daunting than the sun: how could such perfection have issued from Galandra Puschik’s hips? Gretchi twirled her pink parasol coquettishly.

  Did he gawp?

  ‘Whatever are you thinking, Jomi Jabal?’ she asked, as if inviting him to flatter her naively – or even vulgarly, to excite her.

  He swallowed. He muttered the truth. ‘About science…’

  Gretchi pouted. ‘Would that be the art of sighing for a girl, perhaps? Fine lords will sigh for me in Urpol some day soon, believe me!’

  Could he possibly tell her his secret? Surely she wouldn’t betray him?

  ‘Gretchi, if it were possible for you to go much further away than Urpol—’

  ‘Where’s further than Urpol? Urpol’s the centre of everything hereabouts.’

  ‘—would you go?’

  ‘Surely you don’t mean to some farm in the furthest hinterland?’ She wrinkled up her nose pettishly. ‘Surrounded by muties, no doubt!’

  He pointed at the sky. ‘No, much further away. To the stars, and to other worlds.’

  She laughed at him, though not entirely with derision. Perhaps this good-looking youth could tickle her fancy in unexpected ways?

  Should he whisper in her ear, arranging a rendezvous after work to hear his secret?

  ‘Remember the cruel wheel, Jomi,’ warned the voice.

  ‘When you come, voice, can I take Gretchi with me?’

  Did he hear a faint, stifled snarl in the depths of his mind?

  Gretchi simpered. ‘Are you pretending to ignore me now? Are your feelings hurt? What do you know of feelings?’

  He stared at the twin soft birds of her bosom, yearning to cup them in his hands. But his hands were soiled with blood and bile, the memory came to him of Gretchi’s mother feeling Jomi assiduously in her foetid imagination, exploring and squeezing him, and out of the corner of his eye he noticed Galandra Puschik glaring from the veranda of the farmhouse. Gretchi must have spied her mother too, for she promptly flounced away, turning up her nose as if at some foul reek.

  ‘HUH!’ GRIMM, THE tough stocky red-bearded dwarf, said to himself. ‘Huh indeed, a world that bans wheels! Strange and many are the worlds!’ The squat pushed back his forage cap to scratch his bald pate, which was scarred from a battle wound on Valhall. As a result of this injury, his skull had been shaved clean, and he was trying out baldness as a style. Fewer nesting places for lice! Now he would be compelled to leave his beloved trike, mounted with twin cannon, in the hold of the Imperial ship.

  Grimm scanned the cavernous plasteel dormitory through his dark shades. Imperial icons gleamed, each lit by a glow-globe, sharing wall space with cruder battle-fetishes of the giants, one of which was draped respectfully with a ram’s intestines from the arrival feast the night before. Scraps of meat, hair, broken bones littered the floor, mashed into the semblance of a brown and grey carpet on which assorted insectoid vermin grazed, or lay crushed themselves. The dormitory had ceased to reek; it had transcended stench, attaining a new plane of foetor as though the air had transmuted. Stinks did not usually perturb Grimm, but he wore nostril filters.

  ‘Huh!’

  The ogryn, Thunderjug’ Aggrox, quit sharpening his yellow tusks on a rasp. ‘Woz matter, titch?’

  Sergeant-Ogryn Aggrox was a BONEhead, who had undergone Biochemical Ogryn Neural Enhancement. Thus he was capable of a degree of sophisticated conversation. Could be trusted with a ripper gun too.

  Grimm, natty in his green coveralls and quilted red flak jacket, surveyed the crudely tattooed megaman in his coarse cloth and chain mail. Several battle badges were riveted to the giant’s thick skull.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Grimm, ‘being forced to walk or ride draught horses keeps the peasants in their places, don’t it?’

  ‘Seems use floaters, though,’ objected Thunderjug.

  ‘Oh well, you need to hurry fresh meat to the spaceport and up into orbit to be void-frozen. In my not-so-humble opinion banning wheels is going a bit over the top. I like wheels.’ Especially the wheels of his battletrike. ‘I guess in this neck of the galaxy the wheel represents the godless science of the Dark Age…’

  In common with all squats, Grimm was an instinctive technician. Watching Imperial “technicians” sketch hexes against malfunction amidst their rune-painted machinery and hearing them utter incantations to an engine disturbed him mildly. In a sense his own race were in a direct line of descent from the obscure ancient days of science, when warp storms had cut the squattish mining worlds off, to evolve independently.

  Oh my sacred ancestors! he thought. Still, everybody to their own religion.

  Most of these thoughts were too complicated to convey even to a BONEhead ogryn.

  The giant plucked a thumb-sized louse from his armpit and crunched the grey parasite speculatively between his teeth. Just then, ogryn voices bellowed.

  Two warriors had bared their tusks. Seizing mace and axe respectively, they began to hack at one another’s chainmail in a bellicose competition. Spectators roared wagers in favour of one combatant or the other, or both, stamping their great feet so that the steel dormitory rocked and groaned.

  Thunderjug lowered his head and charged along the dormitory. He butted left, he butted right with his steel-plated skull. The quarrellers resisted, butting back at their sergeant, though not disrespectful enough to raise axe or mace against him. Finally Thunderjug seized the two by the neck and crashed their heads together in the manner of two wrecking balls till the fighters subsided and agreed to behave.

  ‘Shu’rup all!’ After issuing that command, Thunderjug ambled back, spat out a broken tooth, and
grinned. ‘Gorra keep order, don’ I?’

  Grimm removed his fingers from his ears, and combed some mites from his beard. Would he have been happier billeted with the true-human Grief Bringers? Undoubtedly more comfortable; less liable to be squashed by a reeling heavyweight. On the other hand, he had come to count on Thunderjug as something of a friend, a brainy bull among this herd of buffalos. Grimm prided himself on mixing with all sorts and conditions. He hadn’t too much experience of Imperial Marines. There weren’t all that many in the galaxy. But they seemed a shade cliquish.

  Exemplary fellows, needless to say, but so devoutly dedicated to the traditions of their Chapters. A roving squat, who only gave nodding acquiescence to the worship of the Emperor, saw the universe from a slightly different angle.

  From whichever angle, the galaxy was a fairly menacing sprawl of mayhem. Grimm decided to strip and clean his bolt gun; though without bothering to pray to it.

  ‘YOU WERE BORN under warped stars, Jomi,’ sighed the voice. ‘Once, the warp seemed merely to be a zone through which our ships flew faster than light. Oh we were innocent then in spite of all our science! Naive and callow as lambs, such as your sweet self.’

  Jomi shifted uneasily. Of late, a cloying stickiness had begun to creep into the accents of the voice at times. As if his informant realized this, its tone grew crisper.

  ‘But then all over the galaxy that we had guilelessly populated, psykers such as yourself started to be born.’

  ‘So there weren’t always psykers around?’

  ‘By no means to such an extent. When the powers and predators of Chaos took heed of those bright beacons, they spilled into reality to ravage and warp the worlds.’

  ‘Those powers are what Preacher Farb calls daemons?’

  ‘As it were.’

  ‘Then he’s right in that respect! You said I shouldn’t worry my head about daemons.’

  ‘Your sweet head… your puissant mind…’

  From the low scrubby hillside Jomi stared towards the huddle of Groxgelt. At this hour the south pole of the gas-giant seemed almost to rest upon the headman’s mansion and the Imperial Cult temple as though that golden ball would crush and melt the biggest buildings that Jomi knew. The sun’s blue radiance ached. Due to a trick of light and wispy clouds, a bilious greenish miasma – the colour of nausea – seemed to drip from one limb of the hostile parent-world upon the town.

  A skrak flew overhead, seeking little lizards to dive upon, and Jomi sat very still till the unpleasant avian discharged a tiny bomb of acidic excrement elsewhere.

  ‘Ah comely youth, guard your skin,’ came the voice, which could spy through his eyes.

  ‘Does Chaos make our sun breed wens and carbuncles on our flesh?’ Jomi asked.

  ‘Oh no. Your sun is rich in rays beyond violet. You’ve been fortunate to resist those rays yourself. You’ll be even luckier when I reach you.’

  ‘How does Gretchi know to wear a wide hat and carry a parasol?’

  ‘Vanity!’

  ‘Does she have an extra sense to tell her?’

  ‘If so, she needs it. In other respects she appears senselessly empty-headed.’

  ‘How can you say so? She’s so beautiful.’

  ‘And presently she will sell what you call beauty, but only as a minion and a toy; only till she withers.’

  ‘Beauty must mean something,’ protested Jomi. ‘I mean, if I’m fair and I’m a psyker… isn’t there any connection, voice?’

  From far away Jomi seemed to hear a stifled cackle of laughter. ‘So you subscribe to the theory that body and soul reflect one another?’ Heavy irony coloured the reply. ‘In a dark sense that’s often true. Should Chaos seize a victim, that victim’s body will twist and warp… if body there be!’

  ‘How can a person not have a body?’

  ‘Maybe one day you’ll learn – how the spirit can soar free from the flesh.’ Was the voice telling him the truth? And how could that be the road to ecstasy, whatever ecstasy really signified? As if agitated, the voice began to ramble. ‘I was one of the earliest psykers back in the epoch when true science gave way to strife and anarchy… Oh the madness, the madness… I was marooned. Our ship malfunctioned… it died in the warp. All through the dark aeons since, I’ve heard the whisperings of telepaths from the real universe. I’ve eavesdropped on the downfall of civilization and on its grim and terrible, ignorant revival… I could never escape. I lacked a beacon that cast a suitable light.’

  ‘How long do aeons last?’ Jomi still had very little idea.

  For a period there was silence, then the voice answered vaguely, ‘Time behaves differently within the warp.’

  ‘Has your body been warped at all?’ asked Jomi.

  Again, that distant cackle…

  ‘My body,’ the voice repeated flatly. ‘My body…’ It said no more than that.

  Phantom gangrene dribbled from the gas-giant.

  SERPILIAN PRAYED. ‘In nomine Imperatoris… guide us to the golden boy that we may prison him, or rend him, or render him unto You, as You wish. Imperator, guard our armour and our gaze; lubricate our projectile weapons that they do not jam. Bless and brighten the beams of our lasers; fiat lux in tenebris…’

  And cleanse my vision too, he thought. Pierce that aura of protection which cloaks the boy; and tear away any cataract of doubt.

  The depleted ranks of Grief Bringers knelt cumbersomely in their bulging, burnished, insignia-blazoned power armour, which was principally a dark pea-green, with engrailed chevrons of headachy purple. Visors raised, they gazed intently at the inquisitor who wore borrowed vestments, of the slain Chaplain. Green chasuble; purple apron filigreed with the emblem of the Chapter. The long mauve stole dangling from Serpilian’s neck to his knees was embroidered with aliens in torments. Amulets and icons chinked and clinked.

  ‘I have decided I shall bless our ogryn warriors too,’ Serpilian murmured to Hachard, who knelt beside him. ‘Ogryns are men too. After a fashion. A blessing does not depend on the receiver but on the giver. Does a laspistol possess a brain, commander? A spirit, yes! But a thinking brain? Ogryns have spirits.’

  Thus, at this sacred moment, did he condone his decision to dilute the strong wine of the Marines with the crude ale of the barbarian giants. Serpilian could guess what the commander might be thinking. ‘Not on my ship they don’t have spirits. A few bucketsful to drink, and the place would be wrecked.’ Or maybe this was only Serpilian’s own guilt speaking to him. That he, a survivor, should be wearing the vestments of a Chaplain who had fought the enslavers so fiercely.

  The assembled Grief Bringers’ eyes shone with pious dedication. All this, to hunt for one boy… Serpilian’s instinct still told him that this mission mattered deeply. If only his vision was clearer! The very veiling of his insight suggested that he and the Marines faced a powerful adversary and might win a great reward.

  To Hachard, he whispered, ‘Ogryns and Space Marines must be as one body under your command. The former are not simply battering rams. If I do not bless them, we all fail in reverence.’

  Would the Grief Bringers’ slain chaplain have blessed the loyal, stout Stenches too? Hachard twitched, but of course made no objection.

  ‘Benedictio!’ Serpilian called out loudly. ‘Benedictiones! Triumphus! Let your watchword for this mission be: Emperor-of-All.’

  ‘Emperor-of-ALL!’ the Grief Bringers chorused in response.

  As Serpilian quit the assembly area, he vowed to redouble his exertions to sense the ambiguous presence of the boy. His rune bones continued to thwart him almost as if in conspiracy with the power that was aiming itself at the boy; almost as though those bones were enacting a five-hundred-year-delayed vengeance upon the Inquisition which had stripped the flesh from them.

  Very well. He must dispense with their aid. He must use sheer mental discipline. He must attempt to put himself into the boy’s frame of thought – for there was a link of destiny between himself and his quarry, was there not? He must detect the
boy by that ploy.

  He must forget all that he himself knew of the Imperium. He must erase all that he knew of the arcane wisdom of the Inquisition, garnered over millennia of terrible experiences and steadfast purity and, in Serpilian’s case, some decades of duty.

  He must imagine himself born on a farming moon. He must visualize his brain coming into bloom with bizarre petals – unseen by his fellow peasants – petals that served as esoteric psychic radar dishes, with unfurling stamens acting as antennae of the mind; each of these stamens tipped with pollen that would prove tasty to a daemon or a predator.

  He mustn’t ask himself: where precisely is this flower growing? Instead he must ask: how is this flower feeling right now?

  He must identify with what he would pluck and present to the Emperor. He must imitate his prey. By that expedient he might dispel the psychic mist. Why, if he concentrated sufficiently well on pretending to be such a boy he might even distract whatever malign force was homing in – as though a heat-seeking missile were presented with a glowing decoy.

  But first…

  Serpilian had paused deep in thought in a corridor braced with mighty ribs and muscled with black power cables. Now he strode onward to the ogryn dormitory.

  He ignored the stink, which was really no worse than the odour of many burst bowels; so he told himself. He disregarded the vermin underfoot, which were really akin to diminutive, edible pets.

  ‘Benedico homines gigantes!’ he cried out.

  ‘Shu’rup ogryns!’ bellowed the BONEhead sergeant, snapping to attention.

  As Serpilian rattled through his litany of blessings and invocations all he received from the bulk of his congregation by way of responses were grunts and belches. These noises might, nonetheless, be signs of ogryn piety. The lone squat technician, clasping forage cap in hands politely, grinned sympathetically and zanily as if that little man felt some peculiar affinity for Inquisitors.

  The engines of Human Loyalty were beginning to whine and its hull to wail. The cruiser was at last descending through the moon’s atmosphere.