Night Lords Omnibus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Area secure for now. Be warned, one of these genestealers is huge. Mercutian hit it dead-on with enough bolts to burst a daemon and it just howled and ran away. I swear by our father’s name, it sounded like the bastard thing was laughing as it went. We’re falling back to the irritating tech-priest now.’

  ‘Understood. Deltrian insists this is the right ship. He has breached the starboard data storage pod. At last.’

  ‘So it’s a Titan-carrier?’

  ‘It was. It looks like more of a xenos hive now. A nest of genestealers on the edge of starvation.’

  ‘It would be pleasant to know we hadn’t wasted a great deal of time in coming here.’

  ‘That,’ Talos laughed, ‘would mean that something went right for once.’ The link went silent.

  A dead genestealer shivered no more than seven metres away from where Cyrion was standing. Cyrion blew its head apart with a single shot from his bolt pistol.

  Mercutian hauled himself to his feet with a grunt. ‘I can see why the Throne sends Terminators into these places.’

  The Eldest loped through the dark tunnels, its crouched run taking it along walls and ceilings without a thought. Deeper into the hive it ran, ever deeper, moving around the prey that reeked of strange metal and powdery fire. They were strong, and the Eldest was weaker than it had ever been before. It needed to feed on easier prey to regain its strength.

  And there was other prey. The Eldest could still smell it, even over the reek of its own wounds.

  The other prey-scent was salt-blooded and strong, and it was this meal that the Eldest sought with patient intent.

  The armoured prey were defending it, though. They encircled it, blocking off passageways and lying in wait, ready to inflict more pain. The Eldest had to avoid them, clawing and crawling through the tightest spaces and ripping new tunnels in the hive’s steel walls.

  As it ran and tore and leaped and ripped, it could sense-hear more of its kin rising from their slumbers.

  It came, at last, to an expansive section of the territory claimed by its kin, where few of its cousin creatures dwelled. The human prey was here, hiding in this immense chamber.

  The Eldest unfolded its wounded limbs again. The blood no longer flowed. True regeneration might come in time. For now, a cessation of leakage and pain was enough.

  In the darkness, the Eldest drooled and moved forwards once more. Something primal and instinctive opened within its mind, and an unheard shriek tremored out through the ship.

  Its kin must be summoned.

  Septimus watched the servitors working in the chamber. Occasionally, his breath would mist the visor of his atmosphere suit, but when it cleared the scene was much the same: the bionic slaves were loading up with heavy cogitator memory pods and strapping them to their backs. Deltrian, the robed tech-adept, monitored their activity from beside the main console in a room full of stilled monitors and data processors.

  Thousands of years before, this had been the heart of a Mechanicus warship, carrying Titans and enhanced soldiers across the stars. In this very room, tech-priests had worked their esoteric trade, storing the information of countless crusades, the gun camera footage of hundreds of battlefields, the countless vox transmissions from generations of Titan commanders and infantry officers, and most vital of all, the code-keys, voice imprints and encryption ciphers of the Titan Legion to whom this ship had once belonged.

  All of it added up to what the skeletal tech-adept had come for: the chance to lay claim to a million secrets of the Cult Mechanicus. Such lore was worth any risk. Its potential uses were infinite in the Old War against the false Emperor and the dregs of the True Mechanicum that still lingered, gasping and ignorant, on the surface of Great Mars.

  Yet it had been difficult to persuade the Night Lords of the necessity, of the possibilities on offer. They had been lured in with the temptation of potential scavenging. It was a crude compromise by the tech-priest’s reasoning. Insofar as Deltrian was able to emulate human emotion any more, he had a degree of regard for the warriors of the VIII Legion, but he mourned their lack of vision in regards to the lore he sought here.

  Still, they were always reliably earnest in pursuit of piracy. He’d played to that predilection.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Septimus asked, his breath audible over the vox. ‘First Claw has engaged some kind of huge creature.’

  Deltrian diverted an insignificant portion of his attention to replying.

  ‘Corporaptor primus.’

  ‘What?’

  The human’s voice patterns indicated the confusion of misunderstanding, rather than not hearing correctly. Deltrian emitted an irritated spurt of static from his vocabulator – the closest he could come to a sigh.

  ‘Corporaptor primus. The patriarch of a genestealer brood. The alpha, apex predator.’

  ‘How do you kill something like that?’

  ‘We do not. If it finds us, we die. Now cease vocalisation. I am engaged in focussed activity.’

  Deltrian enjoyed another three minutes of relative silence, then the muffled clanking of distant footsteps, far too fast to be human, far too soft to be Astartes, echoed through the console as the adept worked. The distant tread vibrated the panels – the tremors imperceptible to a mortal, but registering on the sensitive pads of the tech-adept’s metal fingers.

  He spared a moment of his concentration to send a short burst of digital code to display written Gothic text across First Claw’s visor displays:

  Genestealer threat

  has breached perimeter.

  My work

  is at a sensitive stage.

  With this task completed in less than the time it would take a human heart to beat, Deltrian continued working, entering numerical crack-keys to pierce the cogitator console’s encoded information locks. He was close now, close to being able to bleed the console’s memory banks, and loathed the fact a distraction would soon arrive.

  VIII

  The Bleeding Eyes crouched, gargoyles of ceramite with twisted faces rendered into silent howls. The tunnels here were wider, freer, with ceilings sporting secondary decking and mazes of overhead cables. It was on these decks, and among these dense cables serving the low-power ship as veins, that the Bleeding Eyes waited.

  Beneath them, their prey had taken the bait. The green-armoured warrior in bulky Terminator plate stomped without a hint of grace, pounding his way through the corridors, firing at shadows with his underslung rotator cannon. Something was wrong. From their perches, the Night Lords listened to the Throne-loyal Astartes admonishing enemies that did not exist, evidently fighting a battle that had naught to do with the present. Burning holes streaked the walls where the cannon’s stream of fire pitted the metal in long bursts of anger.

  The Bleeding Eyes shared muted vox-chuckles and stared down at the deluded warrior. He was clearly afflicted by a most amusing madness.

  And yet… he had taken the bait. Shar Gan still led the Terminator on, appearing at junctions and corners, offering the flash of dark armour and screeching through his helm’s vox-speakers. Whatever the Salamander believed he was seeing, he still gave relentless chase to Shar Gan, paying no heed to the Raptors crawling several metres above him, making their way on all fours across decking and power cables.

  Only when Lucoryphus had deemed they’d come far enough, did they spring the trap.

  ‘Seal the doors,’ their leader hissed. Both bulkheads slammed closed, cutting the corridor off from the rest of the ship. At a distant control console elsewhere on the ship, Vorasha and the second team of Bleeding Eyes were laughing.

  In the corridor below, the Terminator halted, retaining enough sense to realise he was trapped. The warrior looked up at last, as ten chainblades revved into snarling life.

  The Bleeding Eyes held to the decking, the overhead cabling, even the walls and ceiling. Lucoryphus whispered into the vox, a moment before his Raptors pounced.

  ‘Kill him.’

  Talos entered the data storage chamb
er. Gravity had been restored in this area of the Mechanicus ship, and with the recommencement of gravity came the reintroduction of an artificial atmosphere. The ship automatically sealed off the voided sections with bulkheads.

  The restoration of air also brought a new aspect to this curious hunt. Sound had returned. It was unwelcome – the inner workings of the storage modules rattled and clanked like the engine of some struggling vehicle. Pistons hammered within the cogitators’ innards. Talos had no desire to know why the archaic storage machinery required such moving parts, and the sound – in the six minutes since air had been restored by Deltrian’s servitors – was growing steadily more irritating.

  Variel had reached the chamber a few minutes before the prophet. As Talos entered, the newest member of First Claw nodded in greeting, but said nothing.

  Variel’s armour showed his newfound allegiance, but lacked much of the ornamentation worn by his brothers. On his pauldrons, instead of the VIII Legion’s fanged skull flanked by daemon wings, Variel’s insignia displayed a clawed fist, rendered in black ceramite, broken by ritual hammering.

  On Variel’s left arm, his vambrace was a converted narthecium unit, containing liquid nitrogen storage pods, flesh drills, bone saws and surgical lasers. While his faceplate no longer bore the white paint of an Apothecary, he still carried the tools of his specialised craft. Instead of human skulls hanging from chains on his armour, Variel’s war plate was decorated by the shattered helms of Red Corsair Astartes. It was these differences, subtle but significant, that set him apart from the others of First Claw.

  Both Talos and Variel clutched their bolters, barely watching Deltrian work, instead focussing their attentions around the spacious chamber and the rows of blank cogitator screens.

  Septimus hadn’t removed his helmet, even with breathable air restored. He walked closer to Talos, casting a sidelong glance at the busy tech-priest.

  ‘Master,’ he voxed to the towering Astartes.

  Talos spared Septimus a momentary look. The slave’s long hair, lank with sweat, was tied into a scruffy ponytail. The bionic portions of his face were glinting with reflection from the overhead lights – well maintained and clean.

  ‘Septimus. Be ready. The xenos are near.’

  The Legion serf didn’t ask how everyone but him seemed to know what was coming. He was long-used to his human senses rendering him disadvantaged in the company of the warriors he still instinctively referred to as demigods.

  ‘Master, why did you bring me here?’

  Talos appeared to be watching a distant, shadowed wall. He didn’t answer.

  ‘Master?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’ the warrior said, still paying little attention. ‘You have never questioned your duty before.’

  ‘I seek only to understand my place and role.’

  Talos moved away, bolter at the ready. The Night Lord’s mouth grille emitted a vox-distorted snarl. Septimus tensed, and didn’t follow.

  ‘I sense your fear. You are not here as bait. Remain sanguine. We will keep you alive.’

  ‘Deltrian suggested otherwise.’

  ‘We might be here for days, Septimus. If our armour needed repairing, I wanted you at hand to do your duty.’

  Days…? Days?

  ‘That long, master?’

  There was a series of clicks as Talos changed to a limited vox channel, between himself and his slave. ‘In respect for our honoured tech-adept, I will not say that Deltrian works slowly. I will alter the description, citing instead that he works meticulously. But you are not dense, Septimus. You know what he is like.’

  Yes, but still… ‘Master, could this really take days?’

  ‘I sincerely hope not. It has already taken long enough. If the–’

  ‘Soul Hunter.’

  Talos swore softly, and in Nostraman the curse came out like gentle poetry. The voice coming over the vox was harsh, almost screeching. Lucoryphus’s blood was up, and it filtered into his voice with astonishing clarity.

  ‘Acknowledged, Lucoryphus.’

  ‘Too many of them.’

  ‘Confirm xenos sightings in–’

  ‘Not the aliens! Bastard sons of Vulkan! Two full teams. They kill and kill. Nine Bleeding Eyes are dead. Nine to never rise again. Nine of twenty!’

  ‘Be calm, brother.’ Talos bit back the urge to rail at the Raptor leader for his accursed vainglory. Such idiocy had cost nine lives in a battle that could never have been won without patience and caution..

  Letting them slip the leash had been a mistake.

  ‘I go now to Vorasha,’ Lucoryphus hissed. ‘We slaughter them all this time.’

  ‘Enough. Will you fall back now? Will you wait until we regroup on the ship and strike from the void?’

  ‘But the–’

  ‘Enough. Fall back to your second team and abandon the Protean. Return to First Claw and we will make ready to leave. Let the Throne’s slaves scurry around for their own salvage.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Lucoryphus. Confirm your intentions.’

  ‘Will fall back. Find Vorasha. Return to First Claw.’

  ‘Good.’ Talos terminated the vox-link, swallowing a mouthful of bitter, acidic saliva. Not for the first time, and not for the last, he reflected that he loathed the duties of command.

  Lucoryphus cast the melta gun aside, letting it clatter to the deck. He wouldn’t be needing it again. The thrusters on his back still streamed thin smoke from coolant vents, powering down after the sudden boost necessary to send him up into the ceiling in order to escape the chattering storm bolters of the Salamanders’ elite warriors.

  With the melta gun – a weapon stolen from the twitching corpse of Shar Gan – he had seared a whole in the ceiling and escaped up to the next deck.

  He’d been hit himself. With a cracked breastplate, Lucoryphus could feel his armour’s strength depleted, some vital power feeds cut by explosive bolter fire.

  Bipedal walking was an awkward trial even when uninjured, so Lucoryphus crawled as he’d become accustomed, all four claws finding tight purchase on the gantry floor.

  He moved with unnerving speed, though it hurt to do so.

  ‘Vorasha…’ his lips were wet with blood. The pain of his wounds was an irritant, but no more than that.

  ‘Yes-yes.’ The vox distortion was savage now. Lucoryphus’s war plate was in worse shape than he’d first thought. His visor kept fuzzing with static at inconvenient moments.

  ‘Orders are to return to First Claw.’

  ‘I heard this,’ Vorasha replied. ‘I will obey.’

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘Wait?’

  ‘More Salamanders than we first saw. Many more. Find xenos nests. Awaken aliens. Lead aliens to Salamanders. Both enemies fight, both enemies die. Vengeance for Bleeding Eyes.’

  Vorasha’s reply was a serpentine snigger, Ss-ss-ss.

  ‘Go now!’ Lucoryphus screeched. ‘Lead xenos to Salamanders!’

  IX

  With a moist snick, the membranes covering the Eldest’s sensitive eyes peeled back. It looked down the long chamber, seeing telltale suggestions of flickering movement. The human-scent was stronger now. So much stronger.

  The Eldest stalked forwards, claws scraping on the metal floor. Two of the more dangerous prey-breed, those with the hammering weapons of punching fire, had entered the chamber. Though the Eldest’s bestial intelligence did not count them capable of slaying the creature, it had learned its lesson well. This was not a hunt to make alone.

  From its place of hiding in the shadows, The Eldest had been screaming in silence for some time. Its kin were coming, dozens upon dozens of them, coming through the tunnels and chambers nearby.

  It would be enough to overwhelm even the most dangerous prey.

  ‘I see it,’ Talos voxed.

  He stared into the darkness, looking away into the six hundred metres of shadowed chamber to the north. ‘It emerged from the wall a moment ago.’

  ‘I see it, too.’
This, from Variel. He approached Talos and hefted his bolter, his thermal sight easily piercing the gloom. ‘Blood of the Emperor, Mercutian wasn’t lying.’

  ‘A broodlord,’ the prophet murmured, watching the hideous alien – all chitinous limbs, clawed appendages and bulbous skull – creep closer. ‘An immense one. Fire when it reaches optimal range. Avoid damage to the wall cogitators.’

  ‘Compliance,’ Variel said, and Talos could still hear the edge of reluctance in the newcomer’s tone. His induction into the VIII Legion was still fresh, and he wasn’t used to taking orders.

  Talos raised his bolter, sighting through the targeter and drawing breath to summon the others. The vox chose that moment to erupt in sounds of gunfire and Nostraman curses. All of First Claw were engaged, flooded by waves of the weakened beasts.

  The others evidently had their own problems.

  On Talos’s red-tinted visor, a proximity rune turned white. In the very same moment, Talos and Variel opened fire.

  Deltrian’s fingers blurred as they tapped keys, pushed levers and adjusted dials. The locking code obscuring the information he desired was remarkably complex, and forced a degree of instrument adjustment even as his personally designed crack-keys did their work in the cogitator’s programming. This was not an unexpected development, but it necessitated a division of attention that the tech-adept found galling. Added to the annoyance, the firefight fifty metres to his left was a raucous irritation, for bolters were hardly quiet weapons, and the corporaptor primus – a breed of xenos Deltrian had never witnessed firsthand – howled endlessly as it endured the process of being blown apart by explosive rounds.

  The crack-crack, crack-crack of Septimus’s laspistols joined the throaty chatter of boltgun fire, forming a curious percussion.

  Almost… Almost….

  Deltrian emitted a bleat of machine code from his vocabulator, the sound emerging as a tinny and flat pulse to anyone untrained in comprehending such a unique language. It was as close to a cheer as he had come in many years.

  Sixteen separate memory tablets slid from the main cogitator’s data sockets. Each one was the approximate size and shape of a human palm. Each contained a century of recorded lore, right back to the ship’s founding decades.