by Henry Zou
To the credit of the Guardsmen, their well-drilled fire discipline showed through. The whickering fusillade died out, but they didn’t lower their steaming muzzles. Roth was suddenly very aware of nine lascarbines trained on him.
‘Lower your weapons, I am Obodiah Roth of the Inquisition.’ Roth stressed the significance of his last word, thrusting his badge of office towards the troops.
As all soldiers would have done, they looked to their sergeant, a grizzly beast with the well-nourished build of a lumberjack. The sergeant, levelling his gaze on Roth, didn’t move.
‘Don’t listen to him lads,’ snarled Grizzly.
Roth breathed deeply. The still air was now heavy with the smell of burnt ozone. The gaping maws of nine las-weapons filled his vision. He didn’t realise when exactly the Sirenese behind him had stopped screaming, but they didn’t utter a sound now. He could tell the sergeant was staring at the stout chrome-plated plasma pistol in his shoulder rig, daring him to make a move.
Roth drew it.
‘Lower. Your. Weapons.’ Roth repeated.
‘Don’t be stupid now. We wouldn’t want there to be any accidents between us,’ replied Grizzly, his tone cold and even.
‘I have the authority.’
‘And I have my orders, inquisitor. This isn’t your war.’
Roth’s pulse felt like a war drum. He could tell they were not going to see reason. They were forcing him to play his final hand and Roth had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. The inquisitor clenched his jaw and pointed up the mountain slope.
‘Sergeant. Up there, three hundred paces behind you, is a huntsman with a Vindicare-class Exitus rifle. Don’t bother looking, he’s well hidden. What I can tell you, is that he was trained by the lodge-masters of Veskepine and I’ve seen him shoot the eyes off an aero-raptor in mid flight. Give him four seconds, he’ll put down half your squad. It’s your call Sergeant.’
‘You’re bluffing,’ said Grizzly, but his voice wasn’t so calm. This wasn’t his game anymore.
‘If you say so.’
There was a pause. Then the sergeant looked to his men and nodded reluctantly. Nine lascarbines were lowered to the ground. Far up the slope, a crop of slate rock and gorse weed juddered then moved. Bastiel Silverstein, in a fitted coat of dark green piranhagator hide unfurled himself from concealment. In his hands was a rifle, long and lean. Roth flashed his man the hand signal for stay alert and turned his attention back on the sergeant.
‘Sergeant…’
‘Sergeant Clais Jedda, Second battalion Airborne Sappers of the Forty-fifth Montaigh Assault Pioneers.’
‘Sergeant Jedda.’ Roth repeated, letting the name hang heavily in the air before continuing. ‘What the hell are you and your men doing?’
‘Clearing a path, until you got in the way,’ he replied, still defiant.
‘A path to where?’
‘Urgent priority mission. On orders from my battalion colonel. It’s none of your concern, inquisitor.’
‘You made it my concern, sergeant. If you tell me nothing, I will charge both you and your colonel for collusion of criminal activity. He would be very displeased, don’t you think?’ Roth had cornered him. He knew Jedda was the type of soldier who would rather risk ire from the Inquisition than the wrath of his commanding officer.
‘There’s nothing criminal here. These people are all potential threats. Two days ago we lost a patrol of Pioneers on their way to an AOI. Gone. Wiped out. I’m not taking any chances with my boys.’
AOI. Guard terminology for area of interest. Roth raised an eyebrow, ‘What area of interest, sergeant?’
‘An off-world landing craft. A four-man patrol picked up signs of a large metallic object in an ice cavern two kilometres west of here. Their last transmission confirmed it was a lander, frozen solid with snow. Must have been right under our noses since before the winter months.’
Roth was definitely interested now. The snow entombment meant it must have slipped past the planetary blockade at least six or seven months ago. Perhaps it was linked to the psychic disturbances, perhaps not, either way he would need to know more.
‘Sergeant Jedda. You will cease terrorising these people immediately. Furthermore, you will not fire at all, unless permission is granted.’
‘Permission…’ he was really caught off guard now.
‘Yes sergeant. Permission from me. I’m coming with you.’
The ship was a merchant runner, entombed under a tongue of glacial ice. The burnt sepia of its painted hull appeared incandescent under the striated ice, almost aglow with lambent energy. A cavern formed its cradle, where it slumbered in the throat of a frosty maw, framed by fangs of icicles.
The ship itself was a blunt-nosed cruiser about two hundred paces long, the hammerhead of its prow pockmarked with the scars of asteroid collision. Roth surmised by its squat boxy frame that it was a blockade runner, similar to the type favoured by illicit smugglers and errant rogue traders.
Roth and his team approached the ice cave down a narrow gorge, advancing slowly down the rock seam. The inquisitor led the way, auspex purring in his grip. Behind him, Silverstein and the Montaigh Guardsmen formed a staggered file with weapons covering every angle of approach. They reached no further than the shadow of the cave entrance when the auspex chimed three warning tones. A solitary target flashed on the display, half a kilometre from their position, almost right on top of the beached cruiser.
Roth signalled for a halt and lower. Sinking to a wary crouch, he squinted into the cavern with his plasma pistol primed. He took in the vastness of the cave, its immensity dwarfing the colossal docking hangars of Imperial battleships. Before him, towering colonnades of ice buttressed a vault ceiling of shimmering white-blue. Arroyos of melt water reached like veins across the cavern floor and forked through the grooves of snow dunes. Roth couldn’t see a damn thing.
‘Bastiel,’ he hissed, almost at a whisper. The huntsman hurried to him, keeping low to the ground.
‘Sire, what did you find?’
‘Nothing. That’s the problem. See what you can make of this.’ Roth showed the huntsman his chiming auspex.
Silverstein lowered his Exitus rifle and scanned the cave, optiscopic eyes whirring and feeding data. He achieved a lock-on almost instantly.
++Solitary target, stationary. Height 1.5 metres. Mass density approx. 40–50kg. Target identification: Female, human 98% – Female, xenos 57% – Humanoid, other 36%. Target distance: 298.33 metres. Status temperature – ALIVE.+++
‘Sire, I’m reading what appears to be a lady sitting on a snow dune, about three hundred metres to our front. What would you like me to do?’ Silverstein asked.
‘Nothing yet. Good job Bastiel.’ Roth then turned around to face Sergeant Clais Jedda and clicked once for his attention. ‘Sergeant, were there any women in the patrol which was lost here?’
The sergeant shook his head. ‘There aren’t any women in the Assault Pioneers, sah.’
Roth chewed his lip, a nervous habit he had never quite shaken off. Finally, he stood up and gave the hand signal for his team to do likewise. ‘Bastiel, we’re going to press on as before, but I want you to cover that target with your rifle. Make sure it never leaves your sights and tell me what you see. Clear?’
‘Clear, sire.’
With that, the team resumed its cautious advance, prodding through the snow. The ship’s ice mesa loomed closer and so did the lone figure at its base.
‘Sire, it’s definitely a woman. She’s seen us too and she has stood up.’ They were less than two hundred and fifty metres away now.
‘What do you see Bastiel? Tell me what you see.’
‘She’s young; I’d say no more than thirty standard. She has a weapon too. Some sort of polearm. Could be a secessionist, sire.’
Two hundred metres and closing. Roth’s eyes darted across the icescape, seeing a possibl
e ambush behind every crest, every ridge. Despite the relentless cold, Roth was suddenly very glad for the frictionless trauma-plates that hugged his body.
‘She’s looking straight at me sire,’ reported Silverstein.
They were within one hundred metres now and Roth no longer needed Silverstein’s relay to see the young woman on the snow dune. He could tell she was slim, made slimmer by the brocaded sapphire silks that cascaded down her frame. Where the broad painted sleeves ended, her forearms were tattooed with verse after verse of war-litanies. She was unmistakably a Blade Artisan.
‘Kill her!’ urged Sergeant Jedda.
‘No! Stand down!’ Roth turned and snapped ferociously at the Guard squad.
Ahead, on the crest of the dune, the Blade Artisan had anchored her weapon in the snow: if not a sign of peace, then at least a gesture of armistice. The weapon was as exactly long as she was tall. It was a thin glaive, half of it leather-bound staff, half of it straight blade.
‘Come forth and announce yourself,’ she commanded firmly.
Roth was wary but recognized diplomacy as the greatest faculty at his disposal. He emulated her gesture by inserting his plasma pistol back onto its shoulder rig.
‘I am Inquisitor Obodiah Roth of the Ordo Hereticus, and these–,’ he said, gesturing to the men behind him, ‘–are servants of the God-Emperor.’
‘Tread lightly, inquisitor. I am Bekaela of the Blade and this ship is mine to guard.’
‘Was it you who slew the soldiers, who came here two days past?’
‘Nül. The ship killed them.’
At this reply, Roth heard the thrum of lascarbines as the Guardsmen racked their weapons off safety. Their blood was up and unless Roth could extract some straight answers soon, the situation would be out of his hands.
‘Blade Artisan, these men will shoot you soon, unless you tell us what happened.’
Bekaela did not seem at all daunted by his warning. ‘Shoot then, if you wish. But I have foresworn my oath to the Sirene Monarch. I have no quarrel with your soldiers.’
‘Very well then. What lies in that ship?’
‘Nothing. Everything. Sixteen moons ago, they came here to Sirene and claimed to be the Monarch’s children – his scions.’
It was not an answer he had been expecting. The Sirene Monarch, Roth knew, had been a cultural figurehead of Sirene, a tradition that harked back to the pre-Imperial history of the planet. It had been the Sirene Monarch who had renounced Imperial dominion and ousted Lord Planetary Governor Vandt. Pre-war records had shown that when the isolated Imperial outposts and missions had been overrun, the natives certainly had no access to interplanetary travel and there had never been mention of the Monarch’s offspring.
‘Scions?’ Roth asked.
Bekaela nodded. ‘Yes, his children came in this ship, sixteen moons ago. The Monarch embraced his children and welcomed them home. It had been a grand ceremony; many clan-fighters had feasted there. I know because I was there too.’
‘The Sirene Monarch has been in hiding ever since the war began, if not dead,’ Roth countered. He could sense something poisonous was at work on this planet and part of him did not want to believe it.
‘He is not dead. I know where he hides,’ Bekaela said.
That was almost too much information to digest at once. Since the beginning of the campaign, Imperial forces had been driven in relentless pursuit of the fugitive Monarch, slated as the spiritual leadership of the guerrilla insurgency. Hundreds of aerial bombing runs, thousands of infantry patrols had all amounted to nothing. But now this.
‘Why would you give us this information?’ Roth pressed.
‘Because I’ve seen what lies in that ship and if they are the Monarch’s bloodline, then he is no Monarch of mine!’ she proclaimed.
It only dawned on Roth then, that Bekaela was not guarding the ship from intruders. She was guarding against whatever lay within from getting out.
Sergeant Jedda, however, was not one to be convinced. ‘It’s a trap. That witch probably gave my boys the same speech before they got off’d,’ he growled. His men chorused in assent.
Roth was not so quick to make his conclusion. The significance of her story, if true, was far too monumental to dismiss. His duty as an inquisitor compelled him to investigate deeper. Stepping forward, slightly away from his team, Roth summoned a subtle wisp of mind force and gently probed her mind. Bekaela tensed visibly from the intrusion.
‘What did you just do?!’ she hissed.
‘I was testing your intentions.’
‘Don’t do that again, or I’ll kill you and make it painful.’
Roth nodded sincerely. He would not. Besides, he already knew all that he needed to know. She was telling the truth, on both accounts.
‘My team and I, we must explore this ship.’
‘Then I will come with you,’ she said. Her tone brokered no argument.
‘So you are willing to aid us?’ Roth mused. ‘As an ally?’
‘No. I hate you. But I will help my people. They do not know what I know. I’ve been in that ship.’
‘What’s in there?’ Roth asked.
‘You will see,’ was the answer.
The ship was alive.
Or at least that was what Roth first thought. Wet ropes of muscle and pulsing arteries groped and twisted along the walls and mesh decking of the dormant ship. The air was nauseatingly warm and humid. It was as if something infinitely virulent and shapeless was incubating within the cruiser’s metal chassis.
Roth’s team had entered via a breach in the ship’s hull and found themselves in a disused maintenance bay. Banks of workbenches lined the walls where raw tendrils of flesh had begun to creep over them. In the upper-left corner of the ceiling, an enormous balloon of puffy flesh expanded and contracted rhythmically like a monstrous lung.
Further exploration of the ship’s corridors, deck and compartment revealed only more of its pulsating innards. The deeper into the heart of the cruiser they progressed, the thicker the infestation. The walkway that led to the ship’s bridge funnelled into an orifice of ridged cartilage. They could see no further, as a pink membrane of tissue expanded over the entrance.
‘Do you know where we are?’ Roth asked Bekaela.
‘Nül. I have never been beyond the first compartment. This place is cursed, it’s all bad following.’
Roth was not sure the Blade Artisan’s prognosis was the correct one, but it was apt enough. He moved toward the membrane, careful not to step in the pools of semi-viscous liquid that collected on the deck plating. He holstered his pistol and was in the act of gingerly reaching out to touch the organic membrane when all three auspexes in his team chimed simultaneously. Roth froze.
‘What’s the reading?’ he asked.
‘I’m getting multiple rapid movements converging on this corridor intersection,’ one of the Assault Pioneers reported.
‘Yes sir, I’m getting the same readings,’ another trooper echoed.
Roth about turned, drew his pistol and trained it on the inflamed flesh cavity that was once a t-junction.
‘Readings are too fast. I suspect we’re just picking up latent electrical currents from the ship’s circuitry,’ a third trooper added. They waited in tense silence.
‘Trooper Wessel, double time ten paces back and get me a new reading. We could be standing under an electrical hub,’ Sergeant Jedda barked.
With his eyes on the auspex and carbine hard against the shoulder, Trooper Wessel approached the intersection. He peered into the gloom, sweeping his auspex about to get a better reading.
The thing slashed out of the darkness so fast it severed Wessel’s spine and bounded off his corpse. Streaking through the air in a shower of blood, it landed on another trooper crouched within the corridor and eviscerated him too. An eruption of wild las-fire crazed the spot wher
e the thing had been, but it was moving again.
‘What the hell is that?’ Roth shouted at Silverstein as his plasma pistol unleashed a mini-nova of energy down the corridor.
The huntsman tried to get a lock on the creature as it slammed into its third victim. He barely registered the profile of its blurring outline.
++Target analysis: Xenos, Hormagaunt. Subspecies: Unknown. Origin: Unknown. Hive fleet: Unknown – Data Source: Ultramar (745.M41).+++
‘Tyranid,’ Silverstein replied. With a spectacular shot that anticipated the creature’s next running leap, he blew out its skull carapace with an Exitus round.
Another two shapes shrieked into the corridor, straight into the storm of fire laid down by Roth’s team. The inquisitor aimed his pistol, ready to fire when it seemed like the world exploded behind him. The membrane plugging the ship’s command bridge burst, and from the darkness surged a monster so tall it was almost bent double in the corridor. From its segmented torso, four bone scythes connected to hawser cables of muscle slashed like threshing sickles. As an inquisitor, Roth was privy to knowledge otherwise deemed heretical for others. Yet knowing the enemy and its power sometimes replaced ignorance with fear. Roth recognised the thorny frame of sinew and plate hurtling towards him and froze in shocked awe.
It was a genestealer broodlord and it was on him so fast he had no time to react. The only thing that saved him was Bekaela’s glaive singing through the air to intercept the beast. The Blade Artisan pirouetted with a twirling downward stroke that severed one of the monstrosity’s upper limbs. In reply, the tyranid speared her into the wall with a battering ram of psychic force.
Roth wasted no time in engaging the broodlord. He activated his Tang War-pattern power gauntlet and moved inside the broodlord’s guard with a thunderous right-hook. The creature snaked back its torso with serpentine grace, evading the blow and swept in with its three remaining hook-scythes. Roth ducked, feeling an organic blade skip against the frictionless shoulder plate of his armour.
They fought on two separate planes. While their bodies raged, so too were their minds locked in a psychic duel. The tyranid was much stronger, its mind a tidal wave of raw, seething force. Roth was not a potent psyker, but what ability he had, he utilised well, sharpening and tightening his will into a poignard of deliverance. Although the broodlord’s mind was like the staggering force of a blind avalanche, Roth’s was the clean mind-spikes and mental ripostes of a Progenium-trained psychic duellist. It was like a death struggle between the kraken and the swordfish.