by Nick Kyme
Usabius and I followed, my brother giving me a dark look suggesting that our travelling companion was not quite as composed as we both thought he was. Haukspeer had briefly lost his mind in the bone valley and there might be some semblance of that still resonating within him. Without knowing what it was that assailed us, I could not be sure. Even as an Apothecary, he would not be spared the terrible psychological damage we had all suffered as a result of surviving the massacre. To experience death on such a scale would test even a Space Marine’s mental fortitude.
Early on, in those first days when we were still scrambling for order and searching futilely for meaning, I had heard stories of legionaries even taking their own lives because the weight of anguish was too much to bear. Never with a pistol to the mouth or temple, or a blade to the torso as it was in the days of the ancient Romanii Empire, but rather by simply venturing out at night on their own and seeking out the enemy. I could think of no other word to describe it than suicidal. Those not broken in the body like Sulnar harboured other wounds, ones of the mind instead.
I watched the Raven Guard keenly as he entered through the open ramp into a realm of shadows beyond. As I followed, I exchanged a quick glance with Usabius telling him to watch the right flank as I concentrated on the left. There could be anything inside the drop-ship, anything. My eagerness to find my father, Vulkan, was almost overwhelming but I did not allow it to cloud my sense of caution. Slow, precise, methodical: that was how the primarch had taught us; that was how it would be.
From the outside the drop-ship looked perpetually, blindingly dark but once we were inside it was a different story. Lumen-strips set into the ceiling still functioned. At least some did. They flickered intermittently, reminding me of the Purgatory’s cargo bay, describing a scene of utter devastation. Broken pipes, exposed wires, crushed bulkheads, split doors and shattered mag-harnesses – it was like the intestines of some metal behemoth, wrecked and ruined by a massive and sudden trauma.
The impact of the crash had pushed the ventral corridor backwards, presumably when the Stormbird’s nose struck the earth. The cockpit had crumpled, split apart entirely, and the pressure of that destruction had pressed the neck back, forcing most of the troop cages into the cargo bay.
Stepping over a strut of metal spearing out from the deck where half the plating had been burned away, revealing a bent and ravaged grille beneath, I saw my first corpse.
It was another Salamanders legionary, and for a moment I fought down a fist of panic as it lodged in my throat at the thought that this might be Vulkan. It was not, and I cursed myself for the relief I felt at that.
The deeper we progressed, through snaking, spitting wires and spastic lighting, the more bodies we saw. A Raven Guard, back broken and twisted over a fallen beam; an Iron Hand crushed beneath a section of collapsed ceiling where the upper deck had come down; a Salamander, barely visible through the cloud of vapour spewing from a broken coolant pipe, half-frozen by liquid nitrogen but his true death revealed upon closer inspection as impalement by a trio of iron rebars.
For a moment I considered the reason why we did not find as many bodies at the entrance was because some predator, indigenous or otherwise, had crept in and dragged away the easy meat, unwilling to venture further for fear of what the darkness harboured. I banished the thought quickly, treating it as dangerous.
Death was multitudinous and varied. Some legionaries bore no evidence of how they had died at all, still strapped in their cages, upright but certainly dead. Carnage was everywhere. And that revelation terrified me beyond the limits of what I had been conditioned to feel.
If there were this many slain and no survivors then that could surely mean only one thing…
‘Keep going.’ Usabius was right behind me, stopped dead, and I realised belatedly that I too was not moving.
‘So much death…’ I whispered, garnering an approbative glance from Haukspeer who went ahead of us.
Scarcely a hundred metres long and it had taken us almost a half-hour just to reach this point in the cargo bay.
Usabius merely patted my shoulder. ‘It does not mean he is slain too. It’s possible that–’
Haukspeer held up his lightning claw, indicating he had found something.
I drew in close to him.
‘Movement,’ he hissed, staying as low as his damaged armour would allow before breaking off into the shadows and disappearing a moment later.
In the quietude, I heard venting pipes, the crackle of electricity and the groan of slowly shifting, cooling metal. All sounds I would expect in an empty drop-ship denuded of life. But then another sound encroached, a distant moaning. It echoed, resonating off the tight, contracted confines of the vessel, wending through corridors and spilling out into the cargo bay, barely audible until we had got close enough to hear it.
Someone injured. Alive.
I started to rush, but Usabius drew me back.
‘Be calm, brother. We do not know what we face yet.’
‘It could be Vulkan.’ I practically gasped the words, almost breathless with hope.
‘Be calm.’
Part of the ceiling had crashed in on the cargo bay, bringing slabs of metal, columns and chunks of the drop-ship’s superstructure with it. It created a sort of ragged bulkhead, a considerable blind spot that we were perched at the corner of.
A corridor of bodies, entangled in wreckage, made progress through this part of the ship difficult. We had to carefully pick our way through it, pausing every few seconds to make sure the sound was still there and our father yet lived.
I told myself it was Vulkan. I willed it to be so. To countenance anything else would be to give in to despair, to give up completely, and I had come too far and endured too much for that.
The route through the drop-ship became narrower still, harder to traverse. A sideways impact had crushed a section of the collapsed troop hold in the Stormbird’s flank. Through a charnel house of broken bodies and wreckage I saw the booted feet of a warrior half-obscured by a fallen beam. Haukspeer was a spectre hovering ahead of me, appearing and disappearing like a broken pict capture as the single lumen flickering overhead swung its light back and forth across the corridor. His claw was up, the signal to wait.
It took every mote of my resolve to do so, especially when I saw those booted feet move. It was a small motion, easy to miss, but we were standing so still, listening and looking so intently. In my mind’s eye, I saw the scalloped greaves of my father, the deep sea green of his armour, his cloak of cascading emerald, the fanged maw of his fearsome battle-helm, those red lenses radiating power and compassion…
Vulkan…
Enveloped in darkness, these details were impossible to discern but I heard the figure moan, and then another sound that came from above us.
The Raven Guard looked up.
I noticed that the lumen-strip was shaking more vigorously as the vibrations from something moving above fed down to it through the drop-ship’s hull.
‘Haukspeer, we must go to him now!’
I exchanged a glance with Usabius. We would move on Vulkan in the next few seconds.
‘Wait…’ hissed the Raven Guard. ‘Something is not–’
The screech of rending metal cut apart the silence, as harsh artificial light strafed in from the ceiling where the drop-ship’s hull had just been ripped away. Magnesium-white turned ruby-red as the blind-hunter leaned into view, squatting over the tear it had created in the roof. A discordant hoot of alarm and excitement burst from its harrowing-horn with the sudden discovery of prey.
Us.
‘Kill it!’ I roared, and unleashed my bolter.
Explosive shell impacts rippled across the blind-hunter’s nose cone, staggering it and forcing its flaring nasal pits to contract. It reeled as I fed it another burst, rocking back on its haunches like a punch-drunk pugilist until it moved out of sight.
During the short respite, I seized Usabius by the arm.
‘Go to Vulkan!’ I tol
d him urgently, ‘Protect him, get him out if you can. Haukspeer and I will draw this thing off.’
There was no argument. Usabius did as I asked and ran down the shattered corridor, passing under the gaping hole in the roof, and kept on going.
‘Haukspeer!’ I yelled, but the Raven Guard was already coming towards me.
‘We run,’ he said.
‘Agreed. We must draw it off, so that–’
‘Just tell me this, Salamander,’ he snapped, interrupting me. ‘Are you my ally still? Can you do this?’
I was not sure what Haukspeer meant. Perhaps he had experienced too much in his makeshift apothecarion, seen iron-hard warriors break like brittle, rusted metal and it had shaken his faith in any soldier under pressure.
‘You can count on me, brother,’ I assured him, just as the red lamps of the blind-hunter returned. ‘To the end.’
Haukspeer cast a quick glance over his shoulder and gestured to a tightly packed corridor that broke off from the cargo bay. ‘This way.’
I went after him, the angry bleat of the harrowing-horn resounding in my ears.
Heat pressed against my back in a sudden, prickling pressure wave. As well as their claws, the Dark Mechanicum had fashioned the blind-hunters many weapons. An underslung flame unit was tailored for cleansing, and I thought I had seen the glint of two shoulder mounts in the glimpse I caught of the monster in the muzzle flare of my bolter.
Could be autocannons; possibly something else, something worse. I knew some of the walkers carried webbers, filled with scything monofilament; others, more debilitating radiation weaponry. Hard-armoured, ceramite over-carapace concealing some unknown biological horror beneath, the blind-hunters were part organic, part machine and almost invulnerable to conventional weapons. As Haukspeer and I rushed through the cluttered cargo bay, tripping over bodies, snagging and scraping our armour on the half-destroyed ship, I wished dearly that I had something more potent than a boltgun.
After the gout of flame failed to kill us, the blind-hunter did not pursue. It could not, the confines of the crashed Stormbird were too tight. Instead, it scurried across the roof. I heard its talons raking gouges in the hull as it tracked us with its sensors. Named blind-hunters, the walkers were actually far from sightless. Through painful and often fatal experience, we had learned the search lamps they used contained some kind of bio-sweep and heat-tracking wave. I did not know why the beams switched from white to red, but I suspected it was some genetic quirk from the walkers’ organic component. None of it mattered now. The only significant fact was that no legionary on foot had ever outrun one and encounters with the hunters could only end in death for the walker or its prey. To my knowledge, the former had yet to come to pass. Our odds of survival, then, were extremely narrow.
I felt the last dark grains in my hourglass slipping towards the neck. Soon they would be spent, so I vowed that I would give Usabius enough time to get Vulkan out and to safety. If my life meant nothing else, it would at least mean that.
Haukspeer halted at the edge of the corridor, and was looking up.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘We need to get it to follow us. If we allow it to catch–’
‘Too late. Listen,’ he said, pointing to the ceiling with one of his talons.
I frowned. ‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘That’s the point,’ replied the Raven Guard. ‘It’s stopped.’
Following his gaze, I whispered, ‘Above us?’
Haukspeer nodded slowly, stepping back as I raised my bolter.
The likelihood of my shots penetrating through the ragged shreds of the ceiling was extremely small but I was not trying to hit it, I was trying to goad it.
In my peripheral vision, I saw Haukspeer unclip a frag grenade from his belt.
‘Ready.’ I did not wait for an answer and squeezed the trigger.
Mass-reactives pummelled the ceiling, taking out sections of shattered metal and exposing the numerous fractures in the hull. A huge chunk of pipes, the remains of the upper deck and scorched armour-plating crashed down in a deluge. The blind-hunter fell with it, surprised when its footing suddenly gave way beneath it. Half-collapsed on one reverse-jointed knee, it leered over at me with its crimson search lamps. I allowed a bellow from its harrowing-horn before I fired another burst. This time I raked its underslung arsenal, puncturing the flamer’s tank and sending roaring promethium over its lozenge-shaped body in an incendiary wave.
Some of the conflagration struck me too, my armour’s internal temperature gauge spiking then redlining on my retinal lens display. I ignored it. To let up now, to hesitate or falter for an instant, was to die.
‘Pour it on!’ I cried, hoping Haukspeer had heard me.
A deafening boom followed by a dense pressure burst confirmed he had. The ground fell away beneath me, or rather I was lifted above it as the grenade blast took me off my feet and smashed me into a broken troop cage. Fighting my way free from a pile of bodies, I fired off a snap shot. One-handed, my aim was poor but in the resulting flash I saw Haukspeer facing off against the monster, his lightning claw flaring like a defiant torch against the darkness.
The blind-hunter was wreathed in fire that was slowly dying out. It had a dent in its carapace and several pieces of shrapnel embedded in it went deep. Wounded but far from immobilised, the flame unit wrecked but its remaining arsenal intact, the walker had lost little battle efficacy. As Haukspeer threw himself at it, one of the blind-hunter’s shoulder mounts hummed into life.
I was wrong. They were not autocannons. Solid-shot would have been merciful compared to what happened next. A heat-hazing melta beam stabbed from the blind-hunter’s left shoulder, the wide dispersal making it tough to dodge. Haukspeer tried but the edge of the pulsing microwaves hit him on his right side, cruel given that his left was already a ruin. His lightning claw withered and sloughed away, taking most of his remaining arm with it. The attack faltered in a scream of the Raven Guard’s agony. He fell, rolled, tumbled until he slumped in a throbbing heap. As he raised his head, still trying to fight, the blind-hunter’s second weapon cycled into action.
A gobbet of monofilament spat from the fluted muzzle of a webber, expanding into a net of lethal, glistening crystal. Instinct, flaring hot nerve endings, made Haukspeer struggle as he was pinned by the web. Any infinitesimal movement, breathing, a muscle spasm, even blinking, would make the web contract. Suffocation through extreme pressure on the lungs and larynx would usually kill the victim, but Haukspeer was a legionary and his fortitude transcended that of a mortal man. His fate was the razor edges of the net, its savage teeth so sharp, so narrow that they were invisible to the naked eye, even if their effects were not.
I averted my gaze as the Raven Guard was denatured in his armour, only dimly aware I was still firing and my bolter had just chanked empty. Its abrupt silence was filled instantly with the last of Haukspeer’s screaming. I thought I heard defiance and rage in his last cry, and took a measure of selfish pride in that.
Tossing my useless bolter aside, I drew my chainblade. ‘Come here, you bastard…’
Turning slowly, framed in the ambient light from the gaping hole in the roof, the blind-hunter fixed its red lamps on me. Twin battle-claws extended from beneath its torso, unfolding with a strange, syncopated motion. It snapped each of its pincers once, racking its shoulder mounts back to a dormant position as it recognised an easy kill.
I had never seen malice expressed by a machine before. Not until that moment.
The short bleat from its harrowing-horn purred almost like a sadistic laugh.
‘Vulkan’s fire beats in my breast…’ I began, preparing to make my stand as the last of the dark sand ran out.
A sharp whine from above made me squint, hurting my ears even inside the relative protection of my helmet. There was a brief flash, like a nova flare, before a beam of coruscating energy lanced the blind-hunter square in the torso. Light pierced metal, terrible and penetrating. Unstoppable.
; The purr became a hacking, vibrating cough as the hunter twisted against the beam’s impact. Shoulder mounts swung desperately into position, darting back and forth in search of an aggressor, but it was too late. The blind-hunter’s organic components were dead, or close to death. Its legs buckled, torso smouldering from the wound.
I heard a low hum of a capacitor building back up to power before a second beam strafed the shadows, clipping the hunter’s nose cone and burning off its nasal pits. I located the firer; a legionary silhouette, legs braced with a shoulder-slung cannon. The beam came from the weapon he carried, and though it flickered with intermittent energy it was potent. Armour that had defied my bolter’s shells capitulated against the conversion beamer, and in that moment of revelation I knew the identity of my saviour.
As the hunter finally slumped into a ruin of sundered metal and scorched organic matter, the legionary put up his cannon and called down to me. His voice resonated around the debris-strewn chamber, and was made colder, more mechanistic for that.
‘Are you injured, brother?’
‘No, Ironwrought,’ I replied to Erasmus Ruuman, ‘but Haukspeer is dead.’
Ruuman paused as if weighing up the appropriate response.
In the end his choice was fitting.
‘That is a great loss to his Legion.’
‘He died with honour,’ I said, but deliberately did not look at the remains of Haukspeer’s corpse. By now the razor web would have made a mess of him. There would be little to see and I had no desire to remember a noble warrior and friend that way.
‘Don’t come down here,’ I warned Ruuman. ‘Footing is treacherous. Many of the slain died poor deaths in here, brother.’
‘I have bio-scanned the ship,’ the Ironwrought replied, ‘and detected a single additional life sign, but it’s weak.’
‘As did we. I’m going to him now.’
‘Very well. I’ll cross via the roof,’ said Ruuman. ‘Meet me at the exit to the troop hold.’