Night Lords Omnibus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘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 through 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.

  Maruc couldn’t claim such a witness account himself. He suspected that was why he was still alive. He’d stuck to the smallest passages from when he’d first heard the reports of the killers coming aboard, leaving them only for necessities like raiding food stores or scavenging through stockrooms for battery packs.

  Too cold for that now. Now they had to move, and pray other sections of the station still had heat.

  For a time, he’d considered just giving up, just laying down in the confined crawlspace of a maintenance burrow and letting the ice take him. He’d probably never even decay after he died. At least, not until Adeptus Mechanicus salvage crews arrived to restart the heat exchangers... then no doubt he’d collapse and bubble away into a smear of rot along the steel.

  At the next junction, Maruc waited a long time, doing his best to listen over the sound of his own heartbeat. He started to move down the left passage.

  ‘I think we’re okay,’ he whispered.

  Joroll shook his head. He wasn’t moving. ‘That’s the wrong way.’

  Maruc heard Dath sigh, but the other man said nothing. ‘This is the way to the canteen,’ Maruc said as softly and calmly as he could manage, ‘and we need supplies. This isn’t the time to argue, Jor.’

  ‘That’s not the way to the canteen. It’s to the right.’ Joroll pointed down the opposite corridor.

  ‘That’s towards the Eastern technical deck,’ Maruc replied.

  ‘No, it’s not.’ Joroll’s voice was rising now, with a querulous edge. ‘We should go this way.’ The nearby ventilator fan continued its slow clicking.

  ‘Let’s just go,’ Dath said to Maruc. ‘Leave him.’

  Joroll spoke before Maruc had to make the choice, for which the ageing manufactorum worker was immensely grateful. ‘No, no, I’ll come. Don’t leave me.’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ Maruc said gently, having no idea if it would really make any difference. ‘And keep your torches low.’

  Maruc led them on. Another left. Another. A long corridor, then a right. He froze at the turn, reluctantly aiming his torch down the hallway at the double bulkhead entrance to the canteen.

  ‘No...’ his voice was soft, strengthless in a way even whispers weren’t.

  ‘What is it?’ Joroll hissed.

  Maruc narrowed his stinging eyes, letting the beam of light play around the sundered doorway. The bulkhead was off its joints, torn from the wall in a wrenched mess of abused metal.

  ‘It’s not good,’ Maruc murmured. ‘The killers have been here.’

  ‘They’ve been everywhere,’ said Dath. He almost sighed the words out.

  Maruc stood shivering in the biting cold, his torch beam falling victim to the tremors of his hands. ‘Let’s go,’ he whispered. ‘Quietly.’

  As they drew near the broken doors, Joroll sniffed. ‘I smell something.’

  Maruc breathed in slowly. The air felt cold enough
to scald his lungs with iceburn, but he didn’t smell a damn thing beyond wet metal and his own stink. ‘I don’t. What is it?’

  ‘Spices. Bad spices.’

  Maruc turned away from the quivering look in Joroll’s eyes. He was cracking now, no doubt about it.

  Maruc was the first one to turn the corner. He crept to the edge of the torn doorway, looking around the large chamber in its wash of siren-red lighting, unable to make any real detail out from the gloom. The tables, dozens of them, were overturned and thrown around, to be left wherever they landed. The walls were dark and pitted with gunfire’s touch, and a horde of chairs were spilled across the floor – doubtless the remains of a worthless barricade. Bodies, lots of bodies, lay draped over the tables and stuck spread-eagled to the icy floor. Open eyes glinted with frost crystals, while smears of blood had become beautiful pools of ruby glass.

  At least nothing was moving. Maruc lifted the torch and let the light shine in. The darkness parted before the torch, and the lamp pack revealed what the emergency lighting hadn’t.

  ‘Throne of the God-Emperor,’ he whispered.

  ‘What is it?’

  Immediately, he lowered his torch beam. ‘Stay here.’ Maruc wasn’t going to risk Joroll’s patchwork sanity in there. ‘Just stay here, I’ll get what we need.’

  He entered the canteen, boots crunching on the red glass puddles of frozen blood. His breath was white mist before his face, curling away in the dim light as he moved. Giving the bodies a wide berth wasn’t easy – Maruc did all he could to avoid touching them, though he couldn’t help looking. What torchlight had shown in grim clarity was more obvious up close: not a single corpse in this chamber had escaped desecration. He stepped over a skinned woman with cringing care, and moved around a heap of leathery strips, where her harvested flesh was frozen to the floor. As he moved, her leering, skinless face of bared veins and blackening muscle offered him a toothy smile.

  Some of the bodies were little more than reddened skeletons, either missing limbs or barely articulated at all, ice-dried and hard as they lay across tables. The chill had done a lot to steal the smell, but Maruc could tell now what Joroll was talking about. Bad spices, indeed.

  He crept closer to the closed storage bulkhead, praying the wheel-lock wouldn’t squeal when he turned it. Maruc braced against the frostbitten metal in his hands and twisted it. For once, fortune was on his side – it gave with a sudden lurch and turned with well-oiled mercy. With a deep breath, he hauled the bulkhead open, revealing the walk-in storage room behind.

  It looked unlooted. Shelves of dried ration packs in boxes, crates of reconstituted meat product; every container stamped proud with the aquila or the cog of Mars. Maruc was three steps in when he heard the scream behind him.

  He knew he could hide. He could shut the storage door and freeze to death alone, or find a crawlspace and wait for whatever was happening to be over. His only weapon was the lamp pack in his numb hand, after all.

  Joroll screamed again, the sound disgustingly wet. Maruc was running before he realised it, boots slapping on the cold floor.

  A killer entered the canteen, dragging Joroll and Dath in its hands. Throne, the thing was huge. Its black armour in the red gloom was a smear of ink spilled into blood, and the vicious buzz rising from its internal power generator was enough to make Maruc’s teeth itch.

  Joroll was dead weight in its hand, the dark fist wrapped around a throat that shouldn’t bend that far back. Dath was still kicking, still screaming, dragged by a handful of hair in the killer’s clutch.

  Maruc threw the lamp pack from his sweaty grip. It clanged off the killer’s shoulder guard, spinning away from the icon of a winged skull without leaving a dent.

  It caused the killer to turn, and growl two words through its helm’s vox speakers.

  ‘I see.’

  With casual indifference, the killer hurled Joroll’s corpse aside, dumping it on a table alongside a skinless body. Dath thrashed in the monster’s grip, his heels kicking at the icy ground seeking purchase, his numb hands clawing uselessly at the fist bunched in his long, greasy hair.

  Maruc didn’t run. He was sore to his bones from the cold and the cramped spaces, half-starved and exhausted from three nights without sleep. He was sick of living as a rat, with desperate fear the only emotion to break through the pains of hunger and the slow onset of frostbite. Too defeated to force a futile run, he stood in a chamber of skinned bodies and faced the killer. Would death be worse than living like this? Really?

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ he voiced the thought that had rattled around his head for days.

  The killer didn’t stop. An armoured hand, already coated in frost, thumped around Maruc’s throat. The pressure was worse than the cold. He felt his spine creaking and crackling, felt his throat’s sinews crushed together to feel like a bunch of grapes in his neck, choking off any breath. The killer lifted him with slow care, anger emanating from the skull painted across its faceplate.

  ‘Is that a question?’ The killer’s head tilted, regarding him with its unblinking red eye lenses. ‘Is that something you wish to know the answer to, or is your mind misfiring in a moment of panic?’ The grip on his throat loosened enough to allow speech and a few gasps of precious breath. Each heave of Maruc’s lungs drew stinking air into his body, cold enough to hurt.

  ‘Why?’ He forced the word through spit-wet teeth.

  The killer growled its words from the skull-faced helm. ‘I made this Imperium. I built it, night after night, with my sweat and my pride and a blade in my hands. I bought it with the blood in my brothers’ veins, fighting at the Emperor’s side, blinded by his light in the age before you entombed him as a messiah. You live, mortal, only because of my work. Your existence is mine. Look at me. You know what I am. Look past what cannot be true, and see what holds your life in his hands.’

  Maruc felt piss running down his leg, boiling hot against his skin. The Great Betrayer’s fallen angels. Mythology. A legend. ‘Just a legend,’ he croaked as he dangled. ‘Just a legend.’ Breath from his denial steamed on the warrior’s armour.

  ‘We are not legends.’ The killer’s fist tightened again. ‘We are the architects of your empire, banished from history’s pages, betrayed by the husk you worship as it rots upon a throne of gold.’

  Maruc’s stinging eyes took in the silver aquila emblazoned across the killer’s chestplate. The Imperial eagle, cracked and broken, worn by a heretic.

  ‘You owe us your life, mortal, so I give you this choice. You will serve the Eighth Legion,’ the killer promised, ‘or you will die screaming.’

  IV

  ASUNDER

  Taking the station had been as easy as any of them could’ve hoped. There was pride to be taken there, albeit not much. If a warrior could find glory in capturing a backwater manufactorum installation like this, then Talos wouldn’t begrudge him for it. But as victories went, it rang hollow. A raid of necessity, not of vengeance. A supply run, the words taunted him, even as they dragged a smile across his lips. Not the kind of engagement that would be adorning the Legion’s banners for centuries to come.

  Still, he was pleased with Septimus. And glad to have him back aboard the ship – two months without an artificer had been an annoyance, to say the least.

  Three nights ago, Talos had taken his first steps onto the station’s decking. It was not a treasured memory. The boarding pod’s doors flowering open, twisting the steel of the station’s hull with that distinctive whine of protesting metal. Then, as always, emerging into a welcoming darkness. Visors pierced the black with programmed ease. Thermal blurs looked vaguely embryonic as they curled in upon themselves: humans on all fours; reaching blindly; cowering and weeping. Prey, crying around his ankles, resisting death by only the most pathetic and futile attempts.

  Humanity was at its ugliest when desperate to survive. The indignities people did to themselves. The begging. The tears. The frantic gunfire that could never pierce ceramite.

  Th
e Eighth Legion stalked through the station almost unopposed, stealing what little excitement there might’ve been. Talos spent several hours listening to the braying of other Claws over the vox. Several had run amok, butchering and relishing in their ability to inspire fear in the trapped humans. How they’d cried their joy to one another, during those long hours of maddened hunting.

  ‘Those sounds,’ Talos had said. ‘The voices of our brothers. What we are hearing is the Legion’s death rattle. Curious, how degeneration sounds so much like laughter.’

  Xarl had grunted in reply. It might have been a chuckle. The others forbore comment as they moved down the lightless corridors.

  Three nights had passed since then.

  For those three nights, First Claw had done as the Exalted had ordered, overseeing the Covenant’s resupply. Promethium fuel was taken in barrels and vats. Raw, roiling plasma was leeched out of the station’s generators. Ore of all kinds was taken in great loads to be turned into materiel in the Covenant’s artificer workshops. Useful members of the station’s crew – of the few hundred that escaped the initial massacres – were dragged aboard the ship in chains. The vessel still remained docked, even now sucking what it needed through fuel lines and cargo loaders.

  Six hours ago, Talos had been one of the last to drag slaves aboard, finding them hiding in a canteen that had clearly been a site for one of the Claws’ butchery. According to the Exalted, the Covenant of Blood would remain docked another two weeks, leeching everything of worth from the processing plants and factory foundries.

  All was as well as could be expected, until someone slipped the leash. The slaughter aboard Ganges was done, but some souls were never satisfied.

  A lone warrior stalked the Covenant’s decks, blades in his hands, blood on his faceplate, and his thoughts poisoned by superstitions of a curse.