Kayne shook his head, and pointed to a large needle-dial on the far bulkhead. The pointer was crossing a band of yellow, making slow progress towards a red stop. “Depth gauge,” he explained. “Much less ocean beneath our keel and we’ll be crushed like a spent shell case.”
“Look at those bone plates,” added Gast, nodding at the image. “I’ll warrant that behemoth could survive the depths far better than we could.”
“The other way, then,” Turcio replied. “Raise the ship. If it’s a deep-dweller, when we make for the surface, it might lose interest—”
Twin impacts off the port bow jerked the Neimos sideways, the torsion popping rivets from the inner hull. Puluo swore beneath his breath as a panel near to him coughed out a shower of sparks and died. “Beastie doesn’t seem like one to be easily discouraged.”
Rafen sniffed, and caught the smells of baking wires and stale seawater wafting in from the corridor. “It’ll tear us apart if we don’t stop it.”
“The Neimos is armed with lascannon turrets,” ventured Eigen. “Mohl mentioned it before…” He swallowed and went on. “Blue-green frequency lasers, tuned for use underwater.”
“No good,” Noxx replied. “That thing is directly upon us, inside point-blank range.”
“We’ll need to deal with this in a more direct manner,” Rafen agreed. “Look it in the eye.”
“Out there?” Eigen blinked.
The Blood Angel sergeant nodded. “Out there.”
Noxx folded his arms. “A blunt way of doing it. I almost approve.” He leaned in. “Almost. But what about Zellik and these ‘fragments’? We can’t ignore what the psyker said. If some ghost of that unctuous fool is stalking this ship, we leave ourselves open to a knife in the back!”
“Indeed,” Rafen agreed. “That’s why you will take Brother Kayne and Codicier Ceris into the lower decks of the Neimos, and find the host where Zellik’s mind is hiding. Kill it and be done.” He turned away before the Flesh Tearer could respond. “Gast, Turcio. You two will remain here and maintain an open vox link. Keep this chamber secure at all costs.” The others nodded.
Rafen’s gaze swept the other Astartes; Ajir, Eigen and Puluo. “The rest of us are going to get our feet wet.”
Kayne took point, leading the way down the canted ladder well, past the secondary level and into the engineering spaces. Reaching the reactor level, he stepped off and braced himself as the submersible shivered again. The impacts on the hull were coming thick and fast now, and he felt a mist of fluid raining down from a pinhole rent in the ceiling. The stream had a rusted, heavy smell to it; somewhere the outer hull had been breached and the Neimos was taking on water. He moved onward; wasting concentration on a problem he could not solve would sap his focus.
The warrior glanced over his shoulder and into the hooded eyes of the psyker. Ceris seemed to look straight through him, the crystal matrix of his psionic hood glowing faintly in the wet dimness.
Behind him, the Flesh Tearer Noxx was a shadow outlined by a flickering safety lume. “Look sharp,” said the sergeant. “This Mechanicus freak has dogged us for long enough, and I want him dead properly this time.”
“Aye,” said Kayne, with feeling.
Ceris spoke quietly, working the bloodstained alien jewel in his hand. “He’s close,” he whispered. “Can’t stop me from seeing into the web of connections. He’s killed, and liked it. Not just Beslian.”
“Mohl?” Noxx ground out the name.
“Yes,” said Ceris distantly. “He suborned your battle-brother’s sacrifice. Took him while he could not fight back.”
Even concealed behind the solid planes of his power armour, Kayne saw Noxx go rigid as the psyker spoke. He saw cold fury on the Flesh Tearer’s face, a strange kind of rage that never reached the man’s dead eyes.
“This way,” added Ceris, pointing past Kayne into a shadowed corridor.
Noxx nodded once. “When we find the core of this man,” he told them, “the killing blow is mine alone, understand?”
Neither of the Blood Angels disputed the order. Kayne stepped forward, and led the way into the gloom.
Ajir was the last of the four to reach the antechamber at the submersible’s forward lock. The kraken-creature had latched on to the stern of the Neimos and wrapped many of its feelers around the dorsal sail, making the hatch there unusable. Similarly, the bay where they had fought the lictors was a risk; opening the ramp to the sea would let the tyranid monster slip its tentacles inside and rend the craft from within.
Rafen was walking from man to man, checking the joints of their wargear. “Make certain the closures of your armour are locked tight,” he said. “A single leak out there will be like a knifepoint to your flesh. You may lose a limb before you can stem the flow.”
Eigen was in a crouch, busying himself with his combat helmet. He ran a layer of sealant around the ring of his gorget. “We’ll need to stay on internal atmosphere,” he noted. “The waters outside are too noxious for our multi-lung implants to draw oxygen from.”
“Won’t be out there long enough to suffocate,” Puluo noted, working at his heavy bolter. “More likely to drown.”
Ajir considered that for a moment and fought off a shudder of revulsion. He had battled in hostile environments before, on airless moons and worlds where the atmosphere was a toxic soup that even an Astartes could not endure; but never in the ocean depths. He imagined how it might feel, to have one’s armour fill with the brackish, acidic seawater, to fall into those abyssal depths trapped in a flooded ceramite coffin. He grimaced and turned his concentration to his weapons.
His bolter was a Godwyn-pattern variant, the standard iteration of the gun found in the hands of thousands of Space Marines across the galaxy. That said, each warrior’s weapon was unique in its own small ways. Many of them were centuries old, and some had been passed down from Astartes to Astartes over the life of a Chapter. Ajir’s gun was the shade of onyx patterned with whorls of dark colour like traces of burned oil. Hundreds of names, of brothers and battles, were etched into the breech and slide mechanism, along with lines of combat prayer and holy sacrament. He checked the ammunition loads in the sickle magazine; the mass-reactive rounds were less a bullet, more a miniature rocket, and each one contained within its casing a measure of oxygenated igniter compound. Thus, even in stark vacuum or, as now, in a fluid environment, the boltgun could still deliver its lethal load.
He worked quickly, adjusting the iron sights and the muzzle brake; the waters would attenuate the velocity and range of the weapon by a large degree, and he would need to compensate. The floor was constancy shaking now, like the deck of a Thunderhawk in full flight. Ajir kept his focus, ignoring the moans of the hull-metal. They were close to the exterior of the Neimos here, with only a few layers of plasteel and ceramite between them and the dense ocean.
“As soon as we clear the outer lock, activate your magno-plates.” Rafen tapped the knee of his boot, and it gave a dull ring. “They’ll keep you on the hull, but you’ll be slow with it.” He reached into the open airlock and returned with a steel cable. “Tether yourselves and check all your battle-brothers. If one of us does chance to leave the deck, we’ll be able to reel you back in.” The sergeant drew his power sword and gave it an experimental swing.
Puluo brought forward a hexagonal case and peeled back the lid, offering it to them as if the contents were some delicacy. “Hull-breakers. Enough here for us to make chum out of that monster.”
Ajir reached in and took one of the charges; they were a modified version of the more typical krak grenades, shaped detonators designed to be applied directly to the hull of an enemy ship. When he looked up, the other warriors were waiting, their helmets in their hands.
The hull wall vibrated again, the tremors reaching up through the base of Ajir’s boots and into his bones.
Rafen looked at each of them, one after another. “Keep your heads. Don’t fight the drag of the water, it will only tire
you.” He raised his helm with one hand and locked it into place. “Measure your shots,” continued the sergeant, his voice reaching them through the vox. “Make every round count.”
Ajir and the others followed suit and stepped into the lock chamber. Eigen was the last in, and drew the heavy inner hatch closed behind him.
Rafen gave a nod to Puluo, and the Devastator Space Marine slapped at an ornate red switch. Then a deluge like a thousand hammer blows struck them as the sea thundered in to fill the chamber.
Gast looked away from the glowing red rune on the etched brass indicator board. “Forward lock reads open.”
Turcio blew out a breath, his fingers kneading the grip of his bolter. “Activate the automatic cycle. Close it as soon as they’re out of the ship.”
“Is that wise?” said the Flesh Tearer. “What if they need to fall back?”
“Any hatch we leave open is another way in for that horror,” replied the other warrior. “They know that.”
Gast frowned; the Blood Angel was right. He turned back to the panel and manually activated the remote hatch control—but he stopped short of venting the water-filled airlock.
Turcio glowered into the shimmering green frame of the hololithic display. He traced the lines of the tyranid’s probing limbs and his brow furrowed. Distant thudding impacts sounded from the aft of the vessel. “The kraken… it’s pushed tentacles into the thruster ring. I think it’s trying to choke the propellers.”
The cleric-warrior came to his side. “It must be drawn by the vibrations…” He trailed off as an unpleasant thought occurred to him. “Or perhaps by deliberate intent.”
“Tyranids are xenos animals,” retorted Turcio. “Cunning, yes, but still beasts.”
Gast shook his head. “Can you be certain? What if the beast out there is sentient?”
“Why would you believe such a thing?”
The Astartes watched the scans of the writhing cephalopod. “I cannot shake the sense that this monster is toying with us.”
Puluo strode forward from the airlock and the plane of his perception switched; he went from the level of the Neimos’ horizontal interior decks to the side-on surface of the exterior hull. The murk out here was thicker than he had expected, the soupy rust-coloured ocean reducing his visibility to close combat range. Needle-lights at the temples of his battle helmet snapped on, casting hazy cones of illumination out before him, but they did little to improve the situation.
His boots thudded dully on the black and grey hull; the surface curved away from him to the right and the left, vanishing towards a hidden horizon. Puluo could feel the motion of the vessel through the waters; he was facing aft and the pressure of the headway current was pushing insistently at his back. Without the magno-plates in the soles of his boots, he would have already been coasting sternward, his tether playing out behind him. He took another step, feeling the drag on every motion he made. The Astartes could hear the sea all around him, a slow and steady rumble like the rushing of blood in his ears. For a moment, he felt utterly isolated; then his vox bead crackled and Rafen spoke. “There, to the stern! Do you see it?”
The optics in Puluo’s helmet worked to enhance the view and abruptly, he did see it. Only the vague impression of the thing, a huge, hulking shadow in the middle distance. It had gathered itself along the lines of the submersible’s fins, and although he could make out no fine details of it, the Blood Angel could gauge its size. The kraken loomed like a faraway thunderhead, and Puluo dragged his heavy bolter upward. Distances were deceiving out here—the thing looked as if it could have been kilometres away. He concentrated on the tiny particles of waterborne debris drifting around him, using their passage to gauge the range.
Something glowing a dull cherry-red, like forge-fired metal, moved towards them.
“I think it sees us,” said Eigen.
The shape drew close, defining into a splayed cobra-head leading a serpentine coil of thick, sinewy flesh. In the light from the helmet lamps it was corpse-white and lined with sucker rings bigger than a man’s head. The red glow came from a fluorescing spot across the tip of the vast tentacle.
Puluo’s grip tightened on his trigger-bar and he fired a three-round burst from the hip. The gun’s languid recoil pressed him into the current, as lines of squealing compression fanned out behind the bolt shells. Everything seemed to move in slow motion—everything but the massive whipping limb of the kraken. Two out of three of the shots missed the mark, but the third hit hard and the tentacle shuddered with pain. Eigen and Ajir fired into it, following Puluo’s lead.
“Advance!” called the sergeant, his power sword’s active blade wreathed in a halo of frothing bubbles. “Move in and engage all targets of opportunity!”
Puluo needed no more encouragement. Quickly, taking the measure of this new, strange field of combat, he moved with steady, exact steps. He fired as he went, and first blood was earned as the flexing feeler tore apart along its length. Inky vitae billowed and twisted from the wound.
A low, hollow moan vibrated through the water, the pitch of it so deep Puluo felt it through the bones of his ribcage.
“You have its attention, brother,” said Ajir.
Puluo gave a slow nod, as a scattering of red discs grew brighter and more distinct in the murk. The colour strengthened as the moaning peaked, and more pieces of the larger shadow seemed to break off and move closer.
“Here they come!” called Eigen.
It was easy to think of the attack as many foes, not one; whip-fast cables of muscle came racing towards them, each one seemingly unconnected to the others. Lost in the shadows, the main mass of the kraken’s body seemed cut off, out of reach. It was a dangerous line of thought to take; Puluo reminded himself that each limb was only one facet of a larger foe, all of them working together at the bidding of a single predator mind.
The firing began again, bolt rounds moving with agonising slowness. The Astartes saw the glimmer of Rafen’s sword on a falling swing, cutting a glancing blow across a tentacle that left a slick of dark blood swelling out behind it.
Then for the first time, the sergeant raised his plasma gun and fired it; for a brief moment the area around the warriors was illuminated with a stark, hard glow that threw jumping shadows. A streak of burning white plasmatic matter lanced through the water, boiling a channel towards its target, and for a split-second Rafen vanished in a shroud of churning froth as the gun’s heat-displacement backwashed across him.
Another tentacle shrank away, the tip withered and molten, and the kraken let out another sub-frequency howl.
“Press the attack!” snarled his commander.
Other than the command centre two decks above, the enginarium was where the largest concentration of machine-slaves were located, and it was little wonder. In the middle of the Neimos, sheathed with far greater protection than any other section of the vessel, the submersible’s heart and soul lurked within a massive armoured sphere.
Ceris chanced a look up at the module, briefly entranced by the trains of light moving up and down the coolant columns that surrounded it. A fusion reactor; behind those plates of titanium and hyper-dense alloy, an ember of blazing fire churned. It was an infant star, shackled there to give power to the Neimos’ drives and internal systems. The reactor should have been tended by a drive-gang of enginseers, but the circumstance of this mission had meant that only servitors crewed this compartment.
The psyker’s hard gaze crossed the slack and vacant faces of the machine-slaves as they went about their tasks, apparently ignorant of the fact that the vessel was under attack. Now and then, a tremor through the hull sent one of the helots off-balance and sprawling to the deck in a heap of robes; but they simply righted themselves and continued on.
At his shoulder, Noxx spoke over his raised boltgun. “Is he here?”
Ceris glanced down at the xenos psi-gem in his hand. Was that a flicker of emerald there behind the runes, or just the play of wan light
upon the object? He couldn’t be certain. But he was certain of something.
“He is,” nodded the psyker. “I smell the spoor of his mind. It leaves a trail.” The whispers of the stone had drawn him, like towards like, to this place.
Kayne ratcheted the slide on his bolter. “Which one?” He panned the weapon around, drawing beads on the mumbling servitors.
There were several of them. Ceris sensed weak glimmers of thought-energy from the machine-slaves, small flickers of mind that barely registered unless he turned his full focus on them. Zellik’s broken psyche had stained them all, the taint of the xenos implant shadowy and visible to his preternatural senses, like oil moving over water.
Before he could reply, Noxx gave an answer of his own. “We’ll kill them all. Take no chances.”
Ceris shook his head. “No, sir. You cannot shoot them all at once. Kill the wrong one and it will give Zellik’s essence the moment it needs to relocate to another host-mind.” An alarm began to keen as a fountainhead of liquid jetted from an overloaded valve, and a handful of servitors rushed to see to the problem. “His psyche is barely coherent. He has lost so much of himself. All the Magos has left now is his hate and his need for revenge… but we must be certain we end the helot where his spirit is hiding. Otherwise, he flees to another servitor through the implant and our search begins again from scratch.”
“Then find him, and be sure of it,” Noxx grated. “A death is owed, and by Seth, blood payment will be taken!”
The psyker drew up the gem in front of him and stared into its depths. The cloying telepathic miasma that shrouded the xenos device made his skin crawl, and he vowed that once this matter was dealt with—if they survived the predations of the tyranid kraken, he amended—he would take a moment to conduct a ritual of purgation and cleanse his mind of exposure to the xenos stone. How a human being, even a half-cyborg Mechanicus like Matthun Zellik, could have willingly allowed his mind to become part of this alien thing was beyond him. The Magos’ fear of death had clearly overcome any piety he might once have had. For all his oaths, the fear of death had made him into a heretic. As well as damning himself for eternity in the eyes of the God-Emperor, Zellik had damned his helot legion into the bargain. Another matter to be dealt with later, he mused; all the servitors would have to be put to death once the mission was over.
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 98