Soul Drinker

by Ben Counter

  The child closest to him was crying quietly. A tough one, this, because she had to be to make it this far. But this was too much.

  'It's alright,' he said, hoping he sounded like someone who could be believed.

  'It's because she can't do anything about it.' said the child's father, who had buried her mother in the garbage spoil of the star fort a year earlier. 'You can deal with anything if you can fight it. But this... we all feel so small.'

  'Faith.' said Yser quietly. 'There is nothing else.'

  Another hit, and was followed by the huge crunch of an explosion which seemed to boom from everywhere at once. The Shockwave threw many people to the floor and for a minute there was no sound, only a ringing white noise.

  They were going to die. They were all going to die.

  'THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE.' TALAYA'S face was lit by the ghostly green glow from the screens of data arrayed in front of her. Chloure had begun to think of it as her natural appearance. 'The route's been Interdictus for six hundred years.'

  'Then what is that?'

  Half the bridge viewscreen was taken up with the best image they could bring up of the Gundog, a blurry fractured purple-black shape pocked with tiny orange-white explo­sions as the first waves of bomber swept over it. The other half was full of complicated wavelength readouts that fluctu­ated violently. Chloure wasn't an expert in these things, but every officer on the Diligent's bridge had told him the same thing. It was the signature of a warp route, the entry/exit point of a rare and relatively stable path through warp space. It was pulsing with the energy of a large volume of shipping hurtling through it. This was unusual because all the charts said there was no warp route there.

  'I don't know.' replied Talaya. It was the first time Chloure had ever heard her say those words. Perhaps she was human after all.

  'Alright. Will Tsouras know about this?'

  'Probably more than us.' said Vekk. 'Of course, you know what it is.'

  He paused for effect. Chloure glared at him.

  'Six hundred years ago they closed warp route 391-C after something woke up inside it and ate a transport convoy. They lost about three hundred thousand souls. Their astropaths tried to get a signal out but all was left were a few echoes. Walls of flesh, they said. Walls of flesh closing in.'

  'Why wasn't anybody told?'

  'The route's been dead for centuries, consul. Besides, it's just some mariner's tale.'

  'Only now it's got hungry again?'

  'Could be, consul.'

  Then one of the logisticians screamed and a shower of sparks burst from the mind-impulse link plugging him into the sensorium banks. He spasmed violently before the mind-jacks were thrown free and he convulsed to the ground. Petty officers barked orders and a couple of menials hurried for­wards to drag away the smoking body. The rest of the logistician corps did nothing, locked into the world generated by the sensor arrays.

  'What now?' asked Chloure, trying not to gag at the wafting reek of charred skin.

  'Feedback.' said Talaya. 'Something big.'

  For the first time in six hundred years, warp route 391-C opened.

  FIGHTER COMMAND ON board the Penitent's Wrath was a vast sheer-sided circular pit of iron in which rows and rows of flight controllers, lexmechanics, statisticians and tech-adepts were arrayed along rows of sensor screens and holo displays. Most of them never left. Some of them had been born there.

  Snatches of comm-link transmissions from the fleet's attack craft rang through the air. The attack wings were in a ragged state - some were executing attack runs on the Soul Drinkers' cruisers, others were on their way into the maw of the Cerberian Field or limping half-strength back towards the fleet carriers. Every crew out there had been thrown into shock in the last few seconds as an immense warp rift had opened up just outside the Cerberian Field and started dis­gorging starships.

  '-out of nowhere... starboard retros out...'

  'Claw leader to all points! Break formation and bank fleet-ward, Now!'

  '-down, going down, going...'

  Tsouras strode between the mem-bank columns and star maps. All he heard were the sounds of a crisis beginning. Naval Chaplains intoned the death-rites over comm-links to crews who were bombed-up and burning. Vacuum seals popped, men screamed, igniting fuel ripped through hulls. Where there had been heartless efficiency just a few minutes ago there was now confusion and desperation.

  Every display showed the same thing - a ship, yet to be identified - had emerged from warp route 391-C insanely close to the edge of the Cerberian Field, and charged into the waves of fighters heading for the Soul Drinkers position. Close-range ordnance and turret fire had torn through several bomber wings before they had the chance to break and scat­ter. Now the forward wings were trapped in the field, enclosed in the tunnel of rock created by the gravitic war­heads, with a swift and well-armed ship blocking their path. Tsouras could hear the weapons battery-fire scything through them as they died. The attacking ship was huge - bigger than the Penitent's Wrath itself. It was fast, too, and loaded with close-range weaponry. Its pilots must be maniacs and its gun­ners trained to the point of inhumanity.

  A hundred stories of heroism and disaster were unfolding at the edge of the Cerberian Field. Tsouras didn't care about any of them. The Unendingly Just and the Gundog were still intact. All other considerations were secondary.

  'Lord Inquisitor!' Hrorvald, captain of the Penitent's Wrath, emerged from the clouds of incense. He was a large-jowled man of greater bulk than had been allowed for in the naval uniform he wore. 'Disastrous! That route had been closed for hundreds of years! Hundreds! I have briefed my command crew on a full attack craft withdrawal followed by a fleet action...'

  Tsouras held up a taloned hand to stop him. 'I want every­thing in space, captain. Everything. These could be pirates or opportunists, but they could also be heretics come to aid the enemy. If the Soul Drinkers escape then all is for nought. When the targets are confirmed destroyed, then they can regroup.'

  Hrorvald looked around at the officers following him like pupils, looking for support. 'Our men will be butchered, inquisitor! We cannot just-'

  'You know, Captain Hrorvald, it almost sounded as if you were questioning my authority. I do so hope you can prove me wrong.'

  A satisfying wave of fear passed over Hrorvald's red, flus­tered face. 'Of course. Just for information, you see. They won't survive.'

  'That has been allowed for. Now, I assume you are here to tell me the identity of our newcomer.'

  'They're jamming us, lord inquisitor, and most effectively. But... well, the visuals are very sketchy, but our tactical offi­cers have hazarded a guess. It's rather far-fetched, you see, and I… well, the long and the short of it... it's the Carnivore, inquisitor.'

  There was silence, broken only by the faint background of prayers and screams.

  'I see.' said Inquisitor Tsouras at length. 'My orders stand. Destruction of the Gundog and the Unendingly Just supersedes all other concerns. Including survival. Get to it, captain.'

  THE CARNIVORE WAS followed by the Sanctifier's Son and the Heavenblade, both smaller but still deadlier than any ship of the battlefleet. The Heavenblade swept out towards the battle-fleet, which was hastily organizing a defensive line. Out of position and with attack wings already out, there was noth­ing they could do to prevent the Heavenblade closing. It drove an arrow-straight course towards the Deacon Byzantine, ignor­ing the nova cannon shot from the heart of the battlefleet that almost clipped it to starboard.

  The Son launched a fighter wave of its own and the tract of void where the battlefleet's assault waves were regrouping became a seething cauldron of combat. The Son itself dived in, taking bomber hits all over, swatting fighters aside like insects.

  'Targets, sir?'

  Captain Trentius paced the bridge deck of the Deacon Byzantine. 'Nose. Underside, around the cargo ports.'

  'It's increasing speed, sir. Close to ramming velocity. Should we...'

  Trentius glar
ed at his master of ordnance. 'Your job is to acquire the targets I require, Bulin. Not tell me what I should and not shoot at. Nose, underside, cargo ports.'

  'I just thought that a hit on the engines might...'

  'Do a lot of thinking, do you, Bulin? It doesn't suit you. Get me targets and load torpedo tubes for a tight spread.' Trentius rounded on his chief of the watch. 'You, get those lazy bug­gers out of the boarding parties and get them on damage control detail.'

  The Heavenblade loomed large, head-on, her bone-coloured prow like the point of a knife stabbing towards the Deacon.

  'Perhaps.' came the slickly educated voice of Flag-Lieutenant Lriss, 'we should consider our options. Given the nature of the enemy and their known tactics, it might be the case that-'

  'They are not going to board us, Lriss.' growled Trentius. 'They are not going to ram us or do any of the things they would normally do.'

  'Imagine, Lriss, your mission was rescue and not destruc­tion. You want to get in and out as fast as possible. You are facing a numerically superior but low-quality enemy already in disarray. None of their ships are worth anything to you so there's no point boarding. You're not desperate to bash up a good ship with ramming. What do you do?'

  Lriss knew better than to venture an answer.

  'No?' Trentius took a thick cigar from the pocket of his nicotine-yellowed uniform. He lit it with a flourish. 'A fire ship, Lriss. You send a fire ship.'

  The Heavenblade slewed sideways suddenly, presenting the side of its armoured hull.

  Trentius saw it was painted dark purple, with the huge chal­ice symbol emblazoned in gold.

  The torpedo spread hit and a tide of fire billowed from the underside of the Heavenblade. The entire lower decks must have been filled with nonoxidising fuel, the kind that didn't have to react with air to burn. A cloud of flame boiled off like the outer layers of a dying star, sprays of structural debris stabbed out through the massive rents opened by the torpedo blasts.

  'Burn retros, and I mean now.' ordered Trentius as his bridge crew observed the spectacle. 'She's going to go criti­cal.'

  And she did. The screen was pure white for half a minute, die plasma cores hitting critical temperature and expanding catastrophically, before they collapsed to leave a shattered husk of a spaceship.

  'Reload ordnance, move to engage, sir?' asked Lriss with a smile.

  'Don't be bloody stupid, Lriss. You think we can actually fight them?'

  THE BATTLE BARGE Carnivore, along with the strike cruisers Heavenblade and Sanctifter's Son, were more than enough. But they were joined by more - the interceptor cruiser Animosity scattered the battlefleet's flank merely by driving forward with its lance arrays charged. The carrier-fitted battle barge Mare Infernum, meanwhile, sported so many assault boat docks that they covered it like scales - the prospect of the ship launching a boarding action was so truly ghastly that the battlefleet fell into general retreat, Tsouras be damned. With the flaming wreck of the Heavenblade in their midst and the highest-quality ships now bearing down on them, the ships of the battlefleet were in utter disarray.

  Only the Deacon Byzantine held its nerve, refusing to follow the rout though it was alone and effectively surrounded - as if it knew the new fleet had no intention of attacking it.

  It was the Mare Infernum that fell back to escort the Unend­ingly Just from the Cerberian Field, battered but unbowed. Sarpedon watched from the porthole in his cell as the battle barge's near-inconceivable bulk gradually slid past against a backdrop of debris. The Gundog would be limping alongside me battle-scarred Sanctifier's Son - the first bomber wings had blown two of the main engines clean off the Gundog, but it was a tough cruiser and it would make it with help.

  The communication flashed through the comm-systems of both cruisers.

  'Fleet command orders to Librarian Sarpedon. Return to fleet ground immediately. Conclave Iudicaris to commence. Out.'

  Simple and blunt. But it told him everything he had expected.

  BY THE TIME the Lakonia Persecution's attack craft had begun to regroup at the edge of the Cerberian Field, the Gundog and the Unendingly Just were far out of their attack range, escorted by a vast and dangerous phalanx of ships into a warp route from which no bomber wing could hope to emerge. The Lakonia Persecution was scattered and useless, its attacking assets milling in confusion, its cruisers and battleships hope­lessly out of position.

  Warp route 391-C was contracting even as the Animosity, the rearmost of the fleet, slid through its shimmering gate and into the maelstrom of the immaterium. With dangerous rapidity the warp gate closed behind the cruiser, sealing off the new fleet from realspace.

  This new fleet - two battle barges and three strike cruisers, enough to fend of the mightiest fleet - had been sent by Chapter Master Gorgoleon of the Soul Drinkers Chapter. Sarpedon had under his command three companies of the Soul Drinkers. Now the other seven had sought them out to get some answers.

  Chapter Seven

  SARPEDON LOOKED OUT into space, seeing for the hundredth time the blackness that hid the Soul Drinkers from prying eyes. He knew they were far to the galactic north-east, past the Qisto'Rol system and the warp storm they called the Emperor's Wrath, on the indistinct boundary where Imperial space gave way to the Halo Zone. But he knew this only from his memory, for there was no frame of reference in sight.

  It was a dark sector. Nebula clouds that could swallow whole systems formed a featureless backdrop through which only the brightest stars could shine. It was abandoned and quiet, and it could take decades for anyone to find the Soul Drinkers here. It had been marked by the Chapter millennia ago as somewhere they could lie low in case of emergency. An emergency such as this.

  Closer was the Soul Drinkers' fleet, the size of a sector armada, formed almost entirely of lightning assault craft -some pregnant with pods and boarding torpedoes, others weighed down with lances and nova cannons. The Leuctra was hanging in the blackness beside them, and on the other side was the Carnivore still bearing the scars of the Cerberian Field.

  A battle barge was one of the most deadly creations that mankind could wield. And there were two of them here, detailed solely to guard the darkship on which Sarpedon and his Marines were being held. It was with a curious pride that Sarpedon realised what important prisoners they were. The rest of the Chapter considered them rebels whose conduct had brought a stain of suspicion to the name of the Soul Drinkers, and rogue Space Marines were not to be trifled with. The rest of the fleet could be seen glittering further out. A silver diamond was the immense training platform on which novices and Marines made practice drops and dummy assaults, live ammunition and hard vacuum combining to force combat discipline into the brothers. The strike cruisers looked like a shoal of fish in the distance - amongst them would be the Gundog and the Unendingly Just, undergoing flame-cleansing by the servitor purge-teams in case Sarpedon's Marines had brought the stain of corruption back with them. Furthest away yet huge and bright, was the Glory. Immense: half as big again as a standard battle barge. Its hull was smothered in gold and the great gem-chased chalice on its side was visible even from the darkship.

  For good or ill, Sarpedon's fate would all be decided on the Glory, in the hallowed gathering hall of the Chapter elders and the chambers of Chapter Master Gorgoleon. Perhaps Sarpedon and his Marines would be exonerated, perhaps they would be killed. But it would be easier now either way, for they were at least amongst brothers at last.

  Sarpedon turned from the porthole and headed back towards the light of the auto-surgeon, bright on the dim infir­mary deck. The stained metal slab on which Sergeant Tellos lay gleamed with new blood as the sanguiprobes peeled back the skin of his abdomen and sunk thin shafts into his organs. Apothecary Pallas, standing over him with two serf-orderlies, watched the complex readouts on his holoslate flicker with the flow of information. The orderlies both had their mouths and ears sutured shut - they had been supplied by the Chap­ter infirmary and were not permitted to speak or to hear tainted words
.

  'Will he live?' asked Sarpedon.

  'I am beginning to suspect that life and death are relative terms, commander,' replied Pallas. 'He will probably soon cease to be alive in the normal sense. But I do not think he is about to die, either.' He pressed a finger into the skin of Tellos's chest - it was greying and translucent, and beneath it could be seen the twin hearts beating and the tough third lung rising and falling. The skin puckered and rippled, like something gelatinous. 'His body chemistry has changed and his biorhythms are very erratic. He has sudden floods of energy.'

  'And his mind?'

  Pallas shrugged. 'As far as Iktinos can tell, he is convinced he will fight again. No matter what we do, he keeps training. A Marine with no hands is like a mockery of a warrior, but sometimes he almost has me convinced. I don't pretend I can know what he is thinking.'

  The probe array, spindly like a skinny metal hand, rotated and a finger with a long transparent tube leading from its tip stabbed down into Tellos's stomach. A thin line of red ran up the tube as the blood was drawn out. 'The gene-seed itself shows no abnormalities, so the source of the changes is a mystery. I would endeavour to find out just what was causing all this but our facilities here are limited. We've given samples to the Chapter apothecarion in case they can help, but they won't.'

  'They wouldn't. Not while there is chance they would be aiding traitors.'

  The probe withdrew and began knitting Tellos's skin back together. But the blades of the tiny manipulators kept slip­ping through the altered tissue and the join was left ragged. Slowly, the ripped skin began to flow together, as if melting, until there was no trace left of a wound.

  'The other battle-brothers are the same.' Pallas was saying. There is no obvious cause for those who are changing. Your­self included. You haven't eaten for weeks now - there should be some degradation in energy levels or muscle mass. But here's nothing.'