Night Lords Omnibus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Three more corpses, each as frost-rimed and death-tensed as the first, each one frozen tight to the metal floor of their corridor tomb. Septimus touched the closest ice-hardened wound with his gloved fingertips, making a face as he touched torn bones and red meat as unyielding as stone.

  He felt the decking shiver under thudding footfalls. With the ship open to the void, the approaching demigod’s steps were soundless, sending tremors through the floor. Septimus raised his head again, and the lamp beam illuminated a suit of armour the troubled, turgid blue of flawed sapphire.

  ‘Septimus,’ the towering suit of armour voxed. In its dark fists was a heavy bolter of bulky, archaic design, much too large for a human to carry, adorned with bleached skulls hanging from chains of polished bronze. The cannon’s muzzle had been forged into a wide-jawed skull, the barrel thrusting from the skeleton’s screaming mouth.

  Septimus knew the weapon well, for he was the one who maintained it, repaired it and honoured the machine-spirit within. He rose to his feet.

  ‘Forgive me, Lord Mercutian.’

  The warrior’s slanted eye lenses scanned him with unblinking scrutiny. ‘Is something amiss?’

  Mercutian’s voice, even over the vox, had a quality most of the others lacked. Nestled among the inhuman depth and resonance was a hint of altered vowels, born of his accent. The refined edge to Mercutian’s speech hinted at a youth of expensive education, and it coloured his Nostraman.

  ‘No, lord. Nothing is amiss. Curiosity overtook me, that’s all.’

  The warrior inclined his head back down the corridor. ‘Come, Septimus. Stay close. Does the additional weight trouble you?’

  ‘No, lord.’

  That was a lie, but not much of one. He carried a heavy ammunition canister over his shoulder, in addition to the oxygen tanks on his back. The canister was densely packed with folded belts of ammunition for the massive bolter cannon clutched in Mercutian’s gauntlets. The warrior carried two similar containers himself, locked to his belt.

  Another voice crackled over the vox – also speaking in Nostraman, but with a bladed end to each syllable. Septimus knew the hive ganger accent well enough. He’d learned to speak it himself, as a natural inflection when his master had taught him the language. Most of the demigods spoke in the same way.

  ‘Hurry up, both of you,’ the voice barked.

  ‘We’re coming, Xarl,’ replied Mercutian.

  The warrior led the way, immense gun lowered, boots thumping noiselessly on the decking. He stepped over the dead bodies, paying them no heed.

  Septimus moved around them, marking how each one had been disembowelled with gruesome totality. He’d seen wounds like these before, but only on hololithic biological displays.

  As he followed Mercutian, the slave adjusted the tuning dial on his wrist.

  ‘Genestealers,’ he whispered into the private channel.

  The woman on the other end was named Octavia, for she was the eighth slave, just as Septimus was the seventh.

  ‘Be careful,’ she said, and she meant it.

  Septimus didn’t reply at first. Octavia’s tone showed she knew just how insane her own words were, given the existence they shared as pawns of the Night Lords.

  ‘Have they told you why we’re here? I’m not buying the salvage story.’

  ‘Not a word,’ she said. ‘They’ve been silent with me since we left the Sea of Souls.’

  ‘We used to salvage hulks all the time back on the Covenant of Blood. At least, when we weren’t cut to pieces by Imperial guns. But this feels different.’

  ‘Different how?’

  ‘Worse. For a start, this one is bigger.’ Septimus checked his wrist chronometer again. He’d been on board the hulk for three hours now.

  III

  Three hours before, a wicked blade of a vessel had translated in-system, leaving the warp’s grip in a burst of plasma mist and engine fire.

  The ship was the dark of a winter’s midnight sky, its edges embossed in the kind of beaten, shining bronze that covered the armoured torsos of Terra’s ancient heroes in those ignorant, impious generations before mankind had first reached out into the stars.

  A thing of militaristic beauty – armoured ridges and gothic spinal architecture, presented in sleek viciousness. It was a barbed spear, blackened-blue and golden bronze, surging through the void.

  There were no active vessels nearby, Imperial, xenos or otherwise, but had any been present – and had they possessed the capacity to break the auspex encryption haze projected by the dark ship – they would have known the ship by the name it bore in the Horus Heresy ten thousand years before.

  In that foulest of ages, this ship had hung in the skies above Holy Terra as the world’s atmosphere burned. A million ships painted the void with flame as they raged at each other, while the planet below, the cradle of humanity, caught fire.

  This ship had been there, and it had slain vessels loyal to the Golden Throne, casting them from orbit to tear through Terra’s cloud cover and hammer into the Emperor’s cities.

  Its name was Ashallius S’Veyval, in a dead language, from a dead world. In Imperial Gothic, it translated loosely as Echo of Damnation.

  The Echo of Damnation ghosted forwards on low-burning engines, cutting space in silent repose. On its bridge, humans worked in unison with beings that hadn’t been human for generations.

  In the centre of the ornate chamber, a figure sat on a throne of black iron and burnished bronze. The Astartes wore ancient armour, the pieces cannibalised from a dozen and more dead warriors over the years and repainted with great reverence. Jawless skulls hung on chains from his shoulder guards, rattling with each of the warrior’s movements and every shiver of the ship he commanded. The face he presented to the world was a skulled faceplate, with a single rune drawn from a dead language branded into its forehead.

  A hive of activity pulsed around the seated figure. Officers in outdated Imperial Navy uniforms bereft of insignia worked at various consoles, tables and cogitator screens. An ageing human at the broad helm console pushed a heavy steel lever into its locked position, and consulted the display screens before him, reading the scrolling runic text that spilled out in merciless reams. Such a flow of lore would be meaningless to inexpert eyes.

  ‘Translation complete, my lord,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘All decks, all systems, all stable.’

  The masked figure upon the throne inclined its head in a slow nod. It was still waiting for something.

  A voice – female, young, but stained by exhaustion – spoke out across the bridge, emerging from speakers in the mouths of daemon-faced gargoyles sculpted into the metal walls.

  ‘We made it,’ the voiced breathed. ‘We’re here. As close as I could get.’

  At last, the enthroned figure rose to its feet and spoke for the first time in several hours.

  ‘Perfect.’ Its voice was deep, inhumanly low, yet possessed of a curiously soft edge. ‘Octavia?’

  ‘Yes?’ the female voice asked again, breezing over the bridge. ‘I… I need to rest, master.’

  ‘Then rest, Navigator. You have done well.’

  Several of the human bridge crew shared uncomfortable glances. This new commander was unlike the last. Acclimatisation was slow in coming, as most of them had served under the Exalted – or even worse masters – for many long years. None were used to hearing praise spoken in their presences, and it aroused suspicion before anything else.

  From an alcove in the bridge chamber’s western wall, the scrymaster called out his report. Although he was human, his voice was mechanical, with half of his face, throat and torso replaced by inexpensive, crude bionics. The augmetics that served in place of his human flesh had been earned for his actions in the Fall of Vilamus, five months before.

  ‘Auspex is alive again, master,’ he called.

  ‘Illuminate me,’ said the armoured commander. He was staring at the occulus, but the great screen at the front of the bridge chamber remained half-dead,
blinded by ferocious interference. He was unconcerned, well used to such static annoyance after a journey through the warp. The occulus always took a while to realign and revive.

  Sometimes, he saw faces in the greyish storm of confused signals that blasted across the crackling viewscreen – faces of the fallen, the lost, the forgotten and the damned.

  These always made him smile, even as they screamed at him in voices of tortured white noise.

  The scrymaster spoke while staring down at his auspex displays, spread over four flickering screens, each one detailing a spread of numerical lore about the ship’s surroundings.

  ‘At three-quarters velocity, we’re fifteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds from boarding pod range from intended target.’

  The commander smiled behind his faceplate. Blood of the father, Octavia. All praise to your skills for this, he thought. To break from the Sea of Souls this close to a moving target. For such a young Navigator, she was skilled – or lucky – beyond all expectation, adapting to racing through the secret pathways of the empyrean with tenacity and instinct.

  ‘Any contacts from nearby vessels?’

  ‘None, master.’

  All good so far. The commander nodded to the left side of the bridge, where the defensive stations were manned by ragged-uniformed officers and servitors capable of focussing on nothing but their appointed duties.

  ‘Maintain the Shriek,’ he ordered.

  ‘Yes, master,’ one of the officers called. The man, an acolyte of the broken Mechanicum, possessed an additional pair of multi-jointed arms extending from his back-mounted power pack. These worked on a separate console beside the one he manipulated with his biological fingers.

  ‘Plasma bleed is significant,’ the acolyte intoned. ‘The Shriek can be maintained for another two point one-five hours before aura-scrye inhibitors must be powered down.’

  That would be long enough. The commander would cease the Shriek as soon as the region was absolutely secure. Until then, he was content to let the Echo of Damnation fill nearspace with a thousand frequencies of howling noise and wordless machine-screams. Any other vessels in range to trace the Echo on their scanners would find their auspex readers unable to detect definitive targets in the jamming field, and their vox channels conquered by the endless static-laden screams.

  The Shriek had been Tech-priest Deltrian’s most recent invention. Invisibility to Imperial scanning had its uses, but it also fed with greedy abandon on power that other areas of the ship needed to function. When the Shriek was live, the void shields were thin, and the prow lances were completely powered down.

  ‘All remaining power to the engines.’ The commander still watched the distorted occulus. ‘Bring us closer to the target.’

  ‘Lord,’ the scrymaster swallowed. ‘The target is… it’s vast.’

  ‘It is a Mechanicus vessel. The fact it’s huge is no surprise to me, nor should it be to you.’

  ‘No, master. It reads as significantly larger than vessels of approximate design and specification.’

  ‘Define “vast”,’ said the commander.

  ‘Auspex reports indicate a mass in approximation of Jathis Secondus, master.’

  There was a pause, during which the bridge fell almost silent. The loudest sound was the commander’s breathing, which rasped in and out of his helm’s vox-speaker. The crew were still unfamiliar with their new master, but they could all too easily recognise the harsh breathing of an Astartes on the edge of losing his temper.

  ‘We have dropped from the warp,’ the commander hissed through closed teeth, ‘to seek a ship fused within a space hulk. And you are telling me the scryers indicate this hulk is the size of a small moon?’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ the scrymaster cringed.

  ‘Do not flinch when addressing me. I will not slay you for delivering irritating information.’

  ‘Yes, master. Thank you, master.’

  The commander’s next reply was interrupted by the occulus, at last, resolving into focus. The static cleared, the distortion bled away.

  The screen showed, with treacherous clarity, a distant mesh of conjoined, ruined spaceships, fused together as if by the will of some capricious, mad god.

  And it was, as the commander had cursed, the size of a small moon.

  One of the other Astartes by the commander’s throne stepped forwards, his own dark helm inclined towards the occulus.

  ‘Blood of Horus… There must be two hundred ships in that.’

  The commander nodded, unable to look away. It was the largest drifting hulk he’d ever seen. It was, he was almost certain, the largest any human or Astartes had ever seen.

  ‘Scan that insane mess for the remnants of the Mechanicus exploratory vessel,’ he growled. ‘Hopefully it will be one of the ships merged at the outer layers. Acolyte, cease the Shriek. Helm, bring us in closer.’

  A muted ‘Compliance, master,’ came from the primary helmsman.

  ‘Make ready First Claw for boarding operations,’ the commander said to the other Astartes. As he re-seated himself on the metallic throne, he stared at the growing superstructure filling the occulus. Details, warped contours, mangled spires, were beginning to become visible.

  ‘And inform Lucoryphus of the Bleeding Eyes that I wish to speak with him immediately.’

  When its claws were not in use, they closed into awkward talons, curling in upon themselves and betraying a creature no longer suited to walking along the ground. Its movements had a jagged hesitance as it entered the chamber, punctuated by twitches in its limbs and flaw-born tics in its enhanced musculature. This spasming posture had nothing to do with cowardice, and everything to do with the fact that the beast was caged – forced to act as one of its former brethren – forced to walk and speak.

  Such things had been alien to the creature, if not completely anathema, for some time now. It walked on all fours, hunched over in a cautious stalk, hand-talons and foot-claws clanking on the deck. The cylindrical turbine engines on its back swayed with the creature’s awkward gait.

  The being’s helmed face showed little evidence of the ties to its bloodline, now changed by war and the warp into something altogether more hateful. Gone were the runic markings and a painted skull over blessed ceramite. In place of traditional Legion signifiers, a sleek faceplate offered a howling daemon’s visage to the world beyond, with a mouth grille set in a scream that had lasted since its god-father died.

  The twisted face flicked to watch each of the other Astartes in turn, snapping left and right like a falcon choosing prey. The servos and fibre bundle cabling making up its armour’s neck joints no longer purred with easy locomotion, they barked with each accusing twitch of its face.

  ‘Why summon?’ the creature demanded in a voice that wouldn’t have been out of place creaking from the gnarled maw of a desert vulture. ‘Why summon? Why?’

  Talos rose from the command throne. First Claw moved as he moved, five other Astartes approaching the hunched creature, their weapons within easy reach.

  ‘Lucoryphus,’ Talos said, and inclined his head in respect before saluting, fist over both hearts, his gauntlet and forearm covering the ritually mutilated Imperial eagle emblazoned across his chest.

  ‘Soul Hunter.’ It snarled a chuckle from lungs that sounded much too dry. ‘Speak, prophet. I listen.’

  Soon after, the Echo of Damnation drifted in close, dwarfed by the immense hulk and utterly eclipsed in the shadow it cast from the light of a distant sun.

  Two pods blasted from housings in the ship’s belly, twisting like drills through the void until they pounded into the softer metal of the hulk’s skin.

  On the Echo’s bridge, two signals pulsed back to the communications array. The first was soft-voiced and coloured by vox crackle. The second was delivered in short, sharp hisses.

  ‘This is Talos of First Claw. We’re in.’

  ‘Lucoryphus. Ninth Claw. Inside.’

  IV

  Ten hours in, and seven hours since he’d l
ast spoken to Octavia. The ship through which they travelled had gravity and air cyclers active, which was a small mercy.

  Septimus knew better than to confess his hunger to the Astartes. They were above such things, and had no mind to be concerned with mortal needs. He had dehydrated ration tablets in his webbing, but they did little more than take the edge off his hunger. First Claw moved through the dark corridors with a relentlessness made sinister by their silence. An hour before, Septimus had risked stopping to take a piss against a bulkhead, and had needed to sprint to catch back up to them.

  His return had been greeted with nothing more than a growl from one of the squad. Clad in ancient armour, a bloodied palm-print smeared across the faceplate, Uzas had snarled at the returning human.

  As greetings went, by Uzas’s standards it was almost cordial.

  They’d travelled through fourteen vessels, though it was a nightmare to decide just where one finished and another started, or if they were moving through the aborted remnants of a malformed ship they’d already crossed in another section.

  Most of the time was spent waiting for the servitors to cut – cutting through sealed bulkheads; cutting through warped walls of fuselage; cutting through mangled metal to reach a traversable area beyond.

  The two servitors laboured with mindless diligence, their actions slaved to the signum control tablet held in Deltrian’s skeletal hands. Drills, saws, laser cutters and plasma burners heated the air around the two bionic slaves as they carved their way through another blockage of twisted wall.

  The tech-priest watched this through eyes of emerald, the gems sculpted into layered lenses and fixed into the sockets of his restructured face.

  Deltrian had fashioned his own body to exacting standards. The schematics he had designed in the construction of his physique were, by the standards of human intellect, closer to art than engineering. Such was the effort necessary to survive the centuries alongside the Astartes, when one lacked the immortality allowed by their gene-forged physiology.