On Wings of Blood

by Warhammer 40K

  Nathan clutched closer still to the wall and plucked up his courage, carefully shuffling one foot along the cabling. He shifted some weight to it and shakily drew the other foot closer. With a supreme effort of will he unhooked one hand from the wires and reached out to grasp them further along. Then he rested and sweated before shuffling his foot forward again. So he went for the remaining five paces: slide, grip, shuffle, rest; slide, grip, shuffle, rest; slide, grip…

  Nathan almost fell into the opening when he came to it. The horrible sensation that he might fall off just as he pulled himself to safety was almost overwhelming. Once inside the opening he sat trembling for only a moment, before summoning the energy to crawl further away from the edge.

  The interior of the narrow space looked like the choir stall of some Ministorum chapel. Narrow seats crammed along either wall beneath gothic arches of tubular metal. At the far end a porthole of stained glass was lit fitfully from behind by swirling colours. Kron stood silhouetted against the glass. He turned to face Nathan and pressure doors rolled shut behind him, shutting the dank breath of the crevasse outside. ‘Well done, lad. I was thinking ye weren’t goin’ to make it.’ His voice sounded as smooth and calming as the raspy little goblin could make it.

  ‘What the hell did you leave me alone out there for?’ Nathan demanded.

  ‘To see if you’re as tough as I’m thinking ye are.’

  ‘Oh really, and do I pass muster?’

  ‘I’ll be needing to hear the end of your story to know that.’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with this!’

  ‘Come, lad, I can tell by the look in yer eyes that you don’t think that’s true. “Coincidence” is just a name that fools use for events they don’t understand.’

  Nathan blinked at Kron and gave a mental shrug. What harm could it do to finish the story if it gave Kron one less thing to be evasive about? ‘All right, but then you better give me some answers or I’ll crawl right back out of here and tell it to the armsmen.

  ‘As I said, I opened the inner hatch to the cargo bay. Once it was open I overrode the outer hatch controls and hung on tight. I knew the drums in the bay were badly secured because me and Kendrikson had been too busy watching each other to make a decent job of it. The outer hatch blowing was enough to break them free and dump them into the void between the Pandora and the pirates. I was almost crushed by the stampede of metal cylinders but by the Emperor’s grace and a strong grip I was able to keep a hold and stayed on the ship instead of being flung out among the cartwheeling drums outside.

  ‘A few seconds later the first drum connected with the docking thrusters of the pirate ship. I’d been playing for time, just hoping to upset their approach, but the drums were filled with liquid oxygen. The touch of the thrusters was enough to make them explode like bombs. Dozens of the cylinders exploded in slow, slow motion, the tendrils of fire reaching back further into the cloud and detonating the rest. The escalation scared me badly and I hauled myself within the inner hatch and closed it an instant before the expanding bubble of flames washed across the Pandora. The deck bucked and the handful of drums which had not escaped with their fellows rolled around and clashed angrily.

  ‘In a second the shock wave had passed and I looked out of the hatch to see the pirate ship spiralling off, fires clinging to it and debris leaking from it like a blood-trail. I went forward and up to the bridge where that slob Captain Lage was defecating in his britches. Lage claimed that Kendrikson had held him at gunpoint and forced him to cut the engines and wait for the other ship. Minutes before the explosion Kendrikson had taken a raft and left the ship. Naturally he had taken all of the archeotech we had been smuggling with him.

  ‘I was surprised when I heard Kendrikson had been seen in Juniptown on Lethe. I’d thought he was dead or long gone. I knew I could pick up a bounty for his head so I went hunting for him in the back alleys, which is home turf for me. But both me and Kendrikson were seized by men from the Retribution. And that is how I began my new career in the Imperial Navy…’

  ‘Ye never actually knew Kendrikson?’ Kron asked softly.

  ‘No, I knew of him, worked with him, but he avoided me and most people from what I heard – he was a guy so weird he didn’t even have a nickname. He was just “Kendrikson”, and that said it all. All right, I’ve told you my tale, now it’s time for you to give me some answers. No stories, just tell me the truth. Who were those men with Kendrikson?’ Nathan glared at Kron, daring him not to answer, to push him over the edge into screaming fury.

  ‘Them’s muties, shipmen that’s spent too long sailin’ the void an’ lost their faith. The beast song’s in their heart now and they live like lice on the innards o’ the ship – sometimes they’ll even grab compartments and feast on the poor shipboys if they can. Once in a century the captain’ll put the ship into port and flush her guts with poison to clear ’em out but ’tween times there’s always muties in the crossways and trunks. Seein’ as we’re in a big war right now there’s more than ever, and they’ll be lookin’ to call the beasts aboard all the time, invite ’em in as it were. Out there’s whole squadrons who’ve succumbed to the beasts in men’s hearts in past times, ones I reckon we’ll be fightin’ soon enough. Kendrikson probably pretended he were possessed to scare ’em into obeying him. The pirates’ ship ye saw, did it have a mark on it? A rune or sigil?’

  ‘Yes it did, most do. I don’t see–’

  ‘Did ye see it well enough to know it again?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m asking the questions now.’ Nathan had recovered enough energy to stand and hauled himself up to face Kron. ‘What’s a Luminen? I asked you before and you didn’t answer but now you’re going to tell me. What made Kendrikson a Luminen and how did that give him lightning in his veins and the power to melt steel like wax?’ Nathan took a step closer, looming over Kron in the narrow space. ‘Tell me!’

  Kron grinned up at him before turning and pointing at the stained glass. ‘I bet the pirates’ symbol looked like that.’

  Nathan gaped. The intricate, geometric designs of the window centred around a central icon. A halo of gold with rays so short and square that they looked like crenellations on a castle wall. In the centre was a grinning skull, picked out in loving detail with strands of platinum wire and swirls of crushed diamond. He snapped his gaze back to Kron. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It answers both your questions, lad. Kendrikson and yon pirates came from the same place. They made him a Luminen, took him an’ made crystal stacks of his bones an’ electro grafts of his brain, gave ’im skinplants and electros so’s he could summon lightning an’ channel it an’ much more. He was a war-child of the Machine-God, what the uninitiated call an electro-priest, though not one in a hundred can hide his power an’ look like a normal man like he did.’

  ‘The Machine-God – you mean the tech-priests of Mars, don’t you, the Adeptus Mechanicus?’

  Kron nodded solemnly and Nathan suffered a painful insight into the awesome power that organisation wielded within the all-powerful Imperium. Tech-priests ministered to machines and engines on every civilised world, every interstellar ship. The Navy might man its ships but the tech-priests ran them. Their prayers and runes brought life to cold, dead metal and their forge worlds produced weapons in their billions for the Emperor’s eternal war against aliens, heretics and traitors. In theory, at least, killing Kendrikson made him one of the latter. A sobering thought indeed.

  ‘All right then, what’s this place? Those look like shuttle controls. Am I right in presuming that it’s an escape pod of some sort?’

  ‘Aye, lad, a cutter. Good for a planetary hop if ye don’t mind the waiting, as she’s a mite slow.’

  ‘Given what I’ve just heard I’d jump ship now if we weren’t in the warp.’

  ‘Death by fulguration if they catch ye,’ Kron muttered with an honest-looking shudder.

  ‘Well, we can
’t go back. If they find out who Kendrikson was and who killed him I’d wager they’ll come up with something even more unpleasant.’

  ‘Nay, lad, if anyone knew who Kendrikson was he wouldnae have been in the gunrooms. Tech-priests only come to repair battle damage and such.’

  ‘So Kendrikson was originally out to get back the archeotech for the tech-priests and got press ganged accidentally, but why didn’t he tell the Navy who he was? They would have let him go for sure.’

  ‘Many times servants o’ the Emperor bury their real selves behind false memgrams and such, makes ’em hard to ferret out even wi’ soul-seers. Their real purposes run in the background, watching the puppet show through the eyes and ears until they’re in position to accomplish their mission. Then they become a whole different person. The Luminen part was just standing by for orders, but it must have decided that you needed killin’ to keep its past buried.’ Kron let that sink in for a few seconds before passing judgement on the matter.

  ‘No one’ll know we did for ‘im if we get back before roll call, ’cept Leopold mebbe and he ain’t going to say for fear o’ bein’ called derelict.’

  Nathan was safe as long as Kron didn’t rat on him, but he had a feeling that Kron was happy to keep their secret for the time being. They were partners in crime. ‘I’m willing to bet that there’s another way back into the crew quarters without crossing the gunroom.’

  Kron grinned.

  ‘Hajj.

  ‘Isiah.

  ‘Kendrikson.’

  The sergeant-at-arms leant over and whispered something to Lieutenant Gabriel, who paused over the great ledger he had open before him. Nathan swallowed hard. This was where Kron’s theory came to the crunch. Getting back from the cutter had been easier than he had hoped. A narrow culvert led back from the crevasse into the cubicles by the bunkroom. Nathan had carefully memorised every twist of the trunking and was determined to go back and familiarise himself further with it in the very next sleep-shift. But for now he must see whether the Angel of Retribution was at Kendrikson’s side or not.

  Lieutenant Gabriel gazed at the assembled company, eyes blinking as if he were struggling to recall Kendrikson’s face. He turned and murmured a question to the sergeant, who shook his head curtly in response. Gabriel made a small mark in the ledger and continued.

  ‘Krait.

  ‘Komoth.’

  Roll call held an additional pleasant surprise: when Lieutenant Gabriel assigned the duty roster Nathan found himself placed on the Opticon crew. His momentary puzzlement was soon answered when it became clear that he was to be Kron’s apprentice. He stole a look at the old man, who looked blandly innocent of course, and made a mental note of the apparent influence he could wield. Nathan wondered what the role of apprentice entailed, and for that matter what the Opticon was. A dim memory floated forward that the Opticon was involved in observation outside the ship. He certainly knew that the Opticon crew usually worked high up on the main gantries above Balthasar’s breech on what amounted to an extra half-deck a good twelve metres up spiral steps of skeletal ironwork.

  Whatever the duties, they could scarcely be as onerous and repetitive as the labours he was tasked with at present. As he ascended he could see other members of the guncrew moving to repair the damage he and Kron had caused in their desperate fight. The bodies were gone but charred cabling and slashed conduits were visible. Nathan wondered grimly how often they had repaired such damage without knowing its cause. The adage that ‘ignorance is bliss’ seemed to dominate shipboard life, but with good cause if what Kron had said about the muties was true. The grim pressures of warp travel became all the more nightmarish with the thought that there were malevolent entities clustered beyond the hull. Beasts that thirsted for human lives and souls, whose subconscious calls drove men mad. Nathan suddenly stopped climbing the steps as the thought struck him that he was going to help Kron observe those beasts and the empyrean, the alternate dimension that they swam in.

  The curses of the men behind made him move on, accompanied by a perverse desire to see the sinister beasts. He had mixed feelings when he reached the raised deck and saw a row of five shuttered arches lining the hull wall. There were ten in the Opticon crew and the burly rating named Isiah placed two men at each shutter. At first Nathan and Kron busied themselves greasing the shutter runners and cogs at its head and foot. After a quarter watch or so Isiah received a message from the comm-box he carried and relayed an order to raise the shutters. Kron smartly threw a lever and the shutter rose smoothly up to reveal an expanse of black glass which rose higher than his head and as wide as his outstretched arms. As Nathan glanced around at the other crews he noted a sense of nervous anticipation behind their actions, as if raising the shutters was an act of hidden significance.

  Nathan was still gazing expectantly at the black glass when the scream of a siren shocked him rigid. The titanic blast of noise seemed to make the very deck plates tremble and was followed by a booming voice which rang like the word of the God-Emperor: ‘ALERT STATUS ALL STATIONS!’

  Kron turned and ran for a set of lockers at the side of the Opticon chamber, hotly pursued by the rest of the crew. The men started pulling on pressure suits which Kron dragged from the lockers. The significance of the situation was becoming readily apparent to Nathan by now. They were going into battle, very soon. Those ridiculously cumbersome-looking, heavy, rubberised pressure suits and thick-bowled helmets could be all that stood between them and the void.

  To his surprise, Nathan managed to finish clamping himself into a suit before anyone else.

  The helmet locked down onto a broad ring across the shoulders of the suit but had a visor made up of different layers, the last of which was little more than a slit in the armour plate. He slid back all the layers and saw Kron had done the same. Nathan felt relieved that he wouldn’t have to breathe the stale, sweaty air inside the suit just yet. ‘How long does this oxygen last?’ he asked Kron, tapping the dented brass cylinder plumbed into the side of the suit’s chest.

  ‘A watch or so for somun’ as big as ye.’

  ‘Just eight hours? They don’t want us to get any ideas about wandering off, do they?’

  ‘Ye can always get more air on the ship and if ye… part company wi’ the ship an’ ye’re not picked up they wouldnae be able to find ye anyway. Ye’d be drifted too far into the void.’

  ‘All right, what do–’

  The deck lurched beneath their feet and there was a sickening sensation of falling for a second. Isiah shouted at them to get to their stations. Nathan noted that the rating now bore a pistol and what looked suspiciously like a shock maul and sprang to his post as best as the suit’s heavy boots would allow.

  The monolithic siren blasted twice. A commanding voice spoke: ‘BATTLE STATIONS. BRACE FOR IMPACT!’

  The deck shuddered and dropped again. This time the falling was longer. Nathan slid the visor down, grabbed a stanchion and braced his legs. He felt sick and hollow. The suit was stifling. He fought an urge to tear the helmet off and scream his lungs out. An insistent, intellectual part of his brain kept telling him to be calm and that the ship was simply preparing itself and surging majestically into battle. But the animal instincts of his body felt every jar and shake as an infernal choir of death screams.

  The ship lurched and fell again. This time Nathan actually felt his feet leave the floor. He felt as though part of him was being torn away; all the roiling emotion in his body began coalescing into a tearing sense of dislocation. A tangible shock rang along the length of the ship and Nathan realised they had left warp space.

  The black glass of the Opticon flashed white and then cleared to show a scene of awesome beauty. A night sky bisected by titanic thunderheads of cloud reared above a fiery sunset. Static lightning cobwebbed the depths and climbed up to blush the clouds with purple. Stars stood out sharp and clear, their own fires made to seem cold by their distanc
e.

  ‘The void never looked so beautiful or terrible before,’ Nathan whispered, his fear drained away by the majesty of it all. Kron’s voice crackled in his earpieces.

  ‘That’s right, lad, ’cause through this glass ye see as the ship does – heat, light, magnetism, radiants and etherics are all clear to her.’ Kron slid out a large circular lens which was attached to the window frame by a system of brass rods and runners. The thick frame of the lens held two number counters and two raised icons. Kron expertly tracked it across the surface of the window. The numbered wheels of the counters spun in response, one horizontal, one vertical.

  The ship shuddered again, and Nathan swayed against the window, his helmet ringing off the unyielding surface alarmingly. The sensation of almost being pitched out into the void was enough to make his palms sweat inside the cursedly thick gloves. As he straightened up, Isiah was barking orders to the crews to search different coordinates. Kron slid the lens across until the metriculators showed 238.00 by 141.00, their search area. At that spot the lens resolved a dark area which had shown occasional vagrant twinklings into an asteroid field, rolling mountains of stone lit by the star’s fiery light.

  ‘What are we looking for, Kron, just rocks?’ Nathan asked with shaky levity. The old man was tracking the lens back and forth across the field with deft, economical movements. Each time he reached its periphery he depressed one of the runes, and the tumbling stones shown in the lens were outlined in red with strings of numbers showing speed and distance which remained in the glass after the lens slid away.

  ‘Anythin’ that might show us where the foe’s a’lurkin – a glint here, or a bloom o’ heat there.’ Kron never took his eye from the lens as he spoke, Nathan slid back his topmost, armoured visor so that he could see better.