02 - Blood Reaver

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  He tapped the volume gauge. Silence became the dead-voiced whispery hiss of interference, even at full volume. Wonderful. No, really. Just great. Like he had the credits spare to call out the technical servitors again? Beautiful.

  He let the remote fall from his oil-stained fingers, where it promptly ended up bisected on the floor, missing its battery pack again. He then said “Balls to this” out loud to the empty habitation chamber, decided he was too tired to bother unfolding the couch into its bed position, and worked on sleeping off yet another pointless day in an increasingly pointless life.

  Was he proud? No. But “just” seven more years of this, and he’d have enough saved to drag himself off Ganges for good, catching a shuttle to somewhere else—somewhere with prospects slightly less grim. He’d have signed up for the Imperial Guard long ago if his eyes could see worth a damn. But they couldn’t, so he hadn’t.

  Instead, he worked the construction belts here, sighing his way through a job deemed too menial to bother programming a servitor for.

  Maruc drifted into sleep with these thoughts at the forefront of his aching head. It wasn’t a restful sleep, but that didn’t matter because it didn’t last long anyway.

  The screen started shrieking.

  Maruc jerked back from the border of sleep with a series of curse words, grabbing at the remote and slapping the battery pack back into place. He dulled the volume while his free hand checked his ears to make sure they weren’t bleeding.

  They weren’t. He was almost surprised.

  A glance at the digital chron on his wall showed he’d been asleep, or almost there, for less than five minutes. Sound had evidently returned to the monitor, though it didn’t sound like any distortion he’d heard before. This unit had given him a fair share of technical issues. His screen had crackled, buzzed, popped and hissed before. It had never shrieked.

  Bleary-eyed, with a pounding headache, he raised the volume again. The sound grew louder, but no clearer. A tortured machine whine, pitched painfully high. A hundred human voices, formless and tuneless, rendered inhuman as they drowned in static. It was both, and neither.

  The lights flickered above. Another power cut coming. Ganges was a run-down backwater at the best of times, stuck in orbit around a dead world at the arse end of nowhere. Last time the lights died, they’d been out for three day cycles before the tech crews had the illumination generators breathing again. Work hadn’t ceased, of course. Not with the production schedules each sector had to meet. The entire western district of the station spent seventy hours working by torchlight. Dozens of menials had lost limbs or fingers in the machinery, and that week’s obituaries ran as long as a saints’ day prayer scroll.

  Maruc hauled himself off the couch just as the lights went out. Fumbling in the dark brought him to the wall, and he opened the emergency supply cabinet containing his lamp pack, with a batch of standard-issue battery packs that would serve in every one of the hab-room’s scarce and simple appliances. He was always lax in charging them, so which ones were still live remained a mystery for now. He stuffed all eight of the palm-sized discs into his overall pockets, operating under the shaky light of his hand-held torch, then crashed back onto the couch to await the inevitable personnel announcement that would demand they all “Behave as normal”, and that “Illumination shall be restored at the earliest possible juncture”.

  Throne. What a hole.

  Two minutes went by, and became five. Five became ten. Every once in a while, Maruc would click on his lamp pack and aim the torch’s beam at his wall chron, frowning at the passing of time.

  At last, the chime sounded from the vox speaker mounted above the door. Instead of the automated message he’d been expecting, the stationwide vox system gave the same screaming whine as his screen, only twice as loud. His hands slammed to his ears, as if fingers and dirty palms could block over a hundred decibels of skull-aching shrieking. Maruc hammered the door release with his elbow, spilling out into the communal hallway on his knees. The sound followed him, crying from the deck speakers out there as well. Other doors slid open, but that only amplified the sound: the scream leapt from individual hab-rooms as other personnel staggered from their own chambers.

  What the hell is going on?

  He yelled the words, but never heard them leave his throat, nor did anyone nearby respond.

  Arella had been telling a story about her cat when everything went to hell. It hadn’t been a particularly funny story, or an interesting one, but up on the overseer deck anything that passed the time was considered a welcome distraction. Their work shifts almost always consisted of twelve-hour stints spent watching scanner screens that showed nothing, reading crew reports that never looked any different from previous days, and discussing what they’d all do once they were transferred off this derelict munitions station, hopefully rotated back to actual fleet service.

  Today, something had happened, and the crew on shift weren’t exactly thrilled. Their chief officer, Arella Kor, was especially ardent in wishing things had just stayed quiet.

  The weapons array was active, defensive turrets staring out into the void. The shields were live, layered spheres of invisible force protecting the station’s hideous hull. Arella’s eyes strayed to the timer on her console. Seven minutes and forty-one seconds had passed since the interference began. She was calling it “interference” because that sounded a lot less worrying than “the damn screaming”.

  Currently, the damn scr—the interference was being broadcast through their internal vox-net, screeched onto every deck at an insane volume. They couldn’t shut it down, and no one knew why.

  “The lights have just died in Western-Two,” one of the others called out. “Oh, shit… and Western-One. And Western-Three. And all of the Eastern sector. And—”

  Fittingly, the lights died on the command deck at that same moment. Reserve generators cycled up, bathing them all in the headache red of emergency lighting.

  “It’s an external signal.” The officer at the console next to her tapped his screen—one of the few on the station that still seemed to be functioning. “Whatever it is, it’s coming from out there.”

  Arella blew a lock of hair off her face. The command deck was always too hot, the air filtration had never worked right, and stress wasn’t helping. “Details?” She wiped her sweaty forehead on her sleeve.

  The officer stabbed his screen with a fingertip again. “A sourceless transmission, ten minutes ago. It’s here, logged in the archive. When the signal was processed by our cogitators to be recorded and filed, it… spread. Like a disease, almost. It flooded specific station systems: the communications array, and the more primitive parts of the power grid.”

  Arella sucked on her bottom lip, biting back the need to swear. “Gravity?”

  “Uncompromised.”

  “Shields?”

  “Still up.”

  “Atmosphere. Life support. Weapons.”

  “All still live. It’s a simple, brutal, randomised blurt of scrap-code. It can’t shut down anything complex. It’s just communications, auspex and… it looks like the illumination network is offline. Only the most basic systems, but they’re all filled with invasive code, impeding function.”

  She looked back at her own scanner screen, at the same wash of corrupted feedback she’d been seeing for the last ten minutes. “Scanners, lights and vox. We’re blind, deaf and mute. And you know we’ll get kicked in the teeth for this. The clankers will have demerits splashed all over our records. Just watch.” As if it would make any difference, she absently buttoned up her uniform jacket for the first time in countless shifts.

  “You’re not worried that this might be an attack?” the other officer asked.

  Arella shook her head. “Our weapons and shields still work. Nothing to worry about, except who the Mechanicus will hold accountable. And that’ll be us. Pissing clankers and their profit margins.”

  Only a few years ago, she’d have worried about all the people forced to work
in the dark. Now her first fear was for herself: the Adeptus Mechanicus wouldn’t take kindly to significant production delays, and this was going wrong in a hundred ways already. She might never get off Ganges at this rate.

  The officer next to her, Sylus, scratched at his unshaven jawline. “So we get jammed and fall off critical productivity. How is that our fault?”

  Arella struggled to keep her patience. Sylus was new to the station, only two months into his tenure, and he hadn’t mingled well. The bionics replacing his left cheek, temple and eye were ludicrously expensive—clearly he was a rich man playing at being a grunt. Maybe his wealthy father sent him here as some kind of punishment, or he was an Adeptus Mechanicus mole snooping for screw-ups. Whatever the truth, he was a stubborn bastard when he wanted to be.

  She snorted. “Who do you think the clankers will blame? ‘Pirates jammed us’ isn’t going to fly. Hell, why would anyone target a place like this? If whoever is out there could even get past our weapons, there’s nothing here worth taking.”

  Sylus was no longer listening. Arella rose from her seat, mouth hanging open, staring out the command deck window at a ship that shouldn’t exist.

  The Covenant of Blood was born in an age when humanity did more than reach for the stars—mankind sought to conquer them. Great shipyards had ringed the planets of the Sol System, as the Emperor led the species back into the galaxy on a crusade to unite every world of worth within His aegis.

  The vessels brought about in that era sailed the stars ten thousand years ago, before rediscovered Standard Template Constructs homogenised the technology of the entire human race. Innovation was not considered a sin. Deviation in the name of progress was visionary, not blasphemy. Like many of the warships born in those first fleets, the Covenant’s design was initially based on fragments of STC technology, but not limited to it. When it sailed under full power, it tore through space as a sleek hunter, owing as much to the contours of ancient Crusade-era warships as it did to the blocky structure of an Adeptus Astartes strike cruiser.

  The Exalted’s affection for its vessel went far beyond pride. It was a haven, the creature’s sanctuary from a galaxy that desired its destruction, and the Covenant was the weapon it wielded in the Long War.

  On its command throne, the creature licked its jaws, watching the image of Ganges Station expand in the occulus. They’d ghosted this close, undetected by the station’s instruments or weapons batteries, but as they neared the invisible edge of the Ganges’ void shields, they were close enough to be seen by the naked eye.

  “Closer, closer,” the Exalted drawled to its bridge crew. “Maintain the Shriek.”

  Arella’s monitor still showed a confused storm of data; flickering after-images, information screeds and signals tracked that simply couldn’t be there. One moment it registered fifty-three ships almost on top of each other. The next, nothing but empty space.

  Outside the view window, the ship drifted closer. Armour plating—layers of black, bronze, cobalt and midnight—reflected the gaze of distant stars.

  “It looks like an Errant strike cruiser,” she said. “A big one.” She chewed on her bottom lip, unable to take her eyes from the ship drifting closer. “The Marines Errant aren’t due for resource collection until the end of the production cycle, nine and a half months from now.”

  “It’s not the Marines Errant,” Sylus replied. “Not their colours, nor their symbol.”

  “So who the hell are they?”

  Sylus laughed, the sound soft and low. “How am I supposed to know?”

  Arella sat back down, breathing through her teeth. “Why aren’t we firing?” She felt the rise in her voice, perilously close to a whine. “We have to fire.”

  “At Imperial Space Marines?” One of the others looked appalled. “Are you insane?”

  “They’re in our space with no clearance, are making no attempts to hail us, and are jamming all our sensors to worthlessness? Coming in on a docking drift with a Mechanicus outpost, full of resources to be shared with the Marines Errant Chapter? Yes, we should be defending ourselves.” She swore again. “We have to fire, somehow.”

  “With no target lock?” Sylus was resisting panic with much better grace. If anything, he looked almost bored, working his console and retuning dials with a safecracker’s patience.

  “Get Station Defence to fire their guns manually!”

  Sylus scowled now, trying to listen to his earpiece. “Internal vox is down. What do you want me to do, Arella? Shout down the corridor and hope the whole station hears? They’re blind down there, anyway. Illumination is dead. How will they get to the turret platforms?”

  She clenched her teeth, watching the warship drift closer. Almost three thousand people were on board Ganges, and they had the firepower to stave off an entire pirate fleet. Now, a single enemy ship was aiming for their heart, and the only people that knew couldn’t say a damn thing to the people that could actually do something about it.

  “Run out the guns,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Open the gun ports. We’ll set the eastern weapon batteries to fire at the ship’s rough coordinates. Program it as a live-fire drill. It’ll work!”

  “That’s a good idea.” Sylus reached for his holstered side-arm, and without any hesitation at all, drew it and fired in a single smooth movement. The gunshot cracked in the small chamber, startlingly loud. Arella slumped from her chair into a boneless heap, with a hole drilled neatly through her forehead. Mushy wetness decorated the wall behind her. “And it would’ve worked,” Sylus finished.

  Of the three other officers on shift, two sat stunned, while the third reached for his own pistol. That one died first, sighing back in his chair as Sylus pumped three rounds into his chest. The other two both sought to run. Headshots ended their plans, spraying more skull fragments and dark paste around the control chamber.

  “Messy work,” said Sylus.

  He booted one of them out of the leather control throne and started working the console, tending to several of the station’s primary systems in neat succession. The gun ports stayed sealed—a hundred turrets all denied the power they needed in order to activate. The launch bays and escape pod hives were locked, power completely siphoned away, trapping everyone on board the station. At last, the station’s void shields collapsed, starved of nourishing energy and severed from their fallback generators. Alarms began to wail in the chamber, which he ended almost immediately. Irritating sound, that.

  Sylus took a breath. He felt like lifting his boots up and resting them on the console, but—bizarrely—it seemed needlessly disrespectful. Instead, he rose to his feet, reloaded his pistol, and moved over to the vox console where he’d been sitting before.

  A single blue light flickered. Incoming message. He clicked it live.

  “Report.” The voice on the vox was between a gurgle and a growl.

  “This is Septimus,” he replied. “Ganges Station is yours, my lord.”

  III

  NIGHTFALL

  Rats always survive.

  Nothing to be proud of in that thought, yet it was shamefully apt. He’d lasted longer than most in this dim, crimson world of emergency lighting.

  “Let’s go,” Maruc whispered over his shoulder. With their lamp packs beaming thin slits of light ahead, the three men moved through the corridor. Each time a spear of torchlight brushed the wall, deck markers painted onto the hull proclaimed the passage as E-31:F. Maruc always did everything he could to keep off the station’s main corridors. No part of Ganges was exactly safe since the killers had come, but Maruc had made it for a few day cycles longer than most by being cautious above all. He kept to the tertiary passages and maintenance ducts whenever possible.

  He knew he stank from enduring seventy-nine hours of unwashed bodies crawling through the dark, and his eyes were aching pools, pained from the endless squinting. But he was alive. Like a rat, he’d survived, listening to the sounds of distant screaming, gunfire and laughter resonating thro
ugh the iron bones of Ganges Station.

  The worst thing was the cold. How could cold be so intense that it burned? Ice crystals painted diamonds across the metal walls around them. Their breath left their lips and noses in thin clouds, taking precious warmth with it. Maruc was no doctor, but he knew they’d not survive another night in this section of the station. The killers, whatever they were, had broken the heat exchangers in East Ganges. Maybe they wanted to flush the remaining crew out from hiding. It was possible. Or maybe they were bored with their hunt, and wished only to freeze the remaining crew to death wherever they’d gone to ground. Neither thought was exactly comforting.

  “You hear that?” Maruc whispered.

  Ahead of them, something metal rattled upon metal. He hissed the signal to halt, and three lamp packs peered down the hallway. Nothing. A bare corridor. The rattle carried on.

  “It’s a ventilation turbine,” Joroll whispered. “Just a vent fan.” Maruc turned away from the other man’s wide eyes and the airy press of his rancid breath.

  “You sure?”

  “It’s just a vent fan. I think.” Joroll’s voice was as shivery as his hands. “I worked in those ducts. I know the sounds they make.”

  Sure, Maruc thought, but that was before you cracked. Joroll was slipping faster than the rest of them. He’d already started to piss himself without realising. At least when Maruc did it, it was to keep warm. Another survival tactic. Rats always survive, he thought again with an ugly smile.

  “Come on, then.”

  They moved with exaggerated caution, not truly knowing what the killers could sense. Joroll had caught the best look at one, but wouldn’t speak about it. Dath, bringing up the trio’s rear, claimed to have seen more than Maruc, but it still wasn’t much to go on—a huge figure with red eyes, screaming with a machine’s voice. Dath had fled before seeing anything more, diving through a maintenance hatch and panting his way down the crawl-tunnels while his work crew were noisily torn apart behind him. One killer had been enough for fifteen people.