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The Core - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

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The Core

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

‘Look out at my father’s Imperium.

Do not unroll a parchment map or analyse a hololithic starchart.

Merely raise your head to the night sky and open your eyes.

Stare into the blackness between worlds – that dark ocean, the silent sea.

Stare into the million eyes of firelight – each a sun to be subjugated in the Emperor’s grip.

The age of the alien, the era of the inhuman, is over.

Mankind is in its ascendancy, and with ten thousand claws we will lay claim to the stars themselves.‘

– Primarch Konrad Curze
Addressing the VIII Legion during the Great Crusade

I

It knew itself only as the Eldest.

More than its name, this was its place in creation. It was the oldest, the strongest, the fiercest, and it had tasted the most blood. Before it had become the Eldest, it had been one of the lesser breed. These weakling creatures were the Eldest’s kin, though it remained distant from them now, seeking to quieten a hunger that would never fade.

The Eldest twitched in its repose, not quite asleep, not quite in hibernation, but a state of stillness that haunted between the two. Its thoughts were sluggish, a slow crawl of instinct and vague sensation behind its closed eyes. The consciousnesses of its kin whispered in the back of the Eldest’s mind.

They spoke of weakness, of a lack of prey, and that made such whispers ignorable.

Nor was the Eldest a creature capable of dreaming. Instead of sleeping, instead of dreaming as a human would, it remained motionless in the deepest dark, ignoring the thought-pulses of its weakling kin and allowing its somnolent thoughts to linger on the hateful hunger that pained it to its core.

Prey, its sluggish mind ached, burning with need.

Blood. Flesh. Hunger.

II

The demigods moved through the darkness, and Septimus followed.

He was still unsure why the master had demanded he accompany them, but his duty was to obey, not to question. He’d buckled himself into his ragged atmosphere suit – a poor comparison to the demigods’ all-enclosing Astartes war plate – and he’d followed them down the gunship’s ramp, into the blackness beyond.

‘Why are you going with them?’ a female voice had crackled over his suit’s vox. To reply, Septimus had needed to switch channels manually, tuning a frequency dial built into the small suit control vambrace on his left arm. By the time he’d patched into the right channel, the female voice had repeated the question in a tone both more worried and more irritated.

‘I said, why are you going with them?’

‘I don’t know,’ the servant replied. He was already falling behind the Astartes, and was practically jogging to keep pace. For all the use it was, the luminator mounted on the side of his helm cast its weak lance of light wherever he looked. A beam of dull amber light speared ahead, cutting the darkness with illumination so thin and dim it was almost worthless.

The spotlight brushed over arched walls of unpolished metal, gantry floor decking and – after only a few minutes – the first body.

The master and his brothers had already passed, but Septimus slowed in his stride, kneeling by the corpse.

‘Keep up, slave,’ one of them voxed back to him as they descended deeper into the dark tunnels. ‘Ignore the bodies.’

Septimus allowed himself a last look at the body – human, male, frozen stiff in the heatless dark. He could have been dead a week, or a hundred years. All sense of decay was halted with the vessel powered down and open to the void.

A rime of frost coated everything with a crystalline second skin, from the walls to the decking to the dead man’s tortured face.

‘Keep up, slave,’ the voice called back again, snarling and low.

Septimus raised his gaze, and the weak beam trailed out into the darkness. He couldn’t see the master, or the master’s brothers. They’d moved too far ahead. What met his questing stare instead was altogether more gruesome, yet not entirely unexpected.

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 last 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.

He knew he made the human uneasy. He was familiar with the effect his appearance had on unaugmented mortals. The equations in his mind that mimicked biological thought patterns reached no answer to rectify this adverse effect, and he was not certain it was – technically speaking – an error to be corrected. Fear had its uses, when harvested from others. This was a lesson he had learned from his association with the Night Lords.

The tech-priest acknowledged the human now with an inclination of his head. The serf was one of the chosen, and deserved a modicum of respect due to his position as artificer for First Claw’s armour and weapons.

‘Septimus,’ he said. The human started, while the servitors worked on.

‘Honoured adept,’ the slave nodded back. The corridor they occupied was low and claustrophobic. First Claw were busying themselves elsewhere, patrolling nearby chambers.

‘Do you know why you are here, Septimus?’

Septimus didn’t have an answer.

Deltrian was an ugly thing of darkened metal, fluid-filled wires and polished chrome – a metallic skeleton complete with its circulatory system, and wreathed in an old robe of thick weave, the colour of blood in the moonlight.

It must have taken a perverse sense of humour to reforge your own body over the decades into something that looked like a bionic replica of some pre-Imperial Terran death god. Septimus didn’t share the joke, if indeed it was one.

For the moment, Deltrian’s eye lenses were deep green, likely cut from emeralds. This was by no means a permanent feature. Often, they were red, blue or transparent, showing the wire-works behind, linking to a brain that was at least partly still human.

‘I do not know, honoured adept. The masters have not told me.’

‘I believe I am able to make an approximate analysis.’ Deltrian laughed, buzzing like a vox slipping from the right frequency.

There was a threat buried in that. Irritation made Septimus bold, but he kept his hands from resting on the two holstered laspistols at his hips. Deltrian might be favoured as an ally from the Mechanicus, but he was just as shackled in service to the VIII Legion as Septimus was.

‘Feel free to enlighten me, honoured adept.’

‘You are human.’ The skinless creature turned its death’s-head grin away to regard its servitors once more. ‘Human, and unarmoured in enclosing ceramite. Your blood, your heartbeat, your sweat and breath – all of these biological details will be detected by the predatory xenos species aboard this hulk.’

‘With all respect, Deltrian,’ Septimus turned, looking back at the long corridor they’d walked down, ‘you’re deluded.’

‘I see you and I hear you all too well, and my engineered stimulus array is comparable to the senses of the genestealer genus. My aural receptors register your breathing like a world’s winds, and your beating heart like the primal drums of a primitive culture. If I sense this, Septimus – and I assure you that I do – then you should know that the many living beings sheltering on this derelict sense it as well.’

Septimus snorted. The idea of the Night Lords using him – one of their more valuable slaves – as bait, was…

‘Contact,’ voxed Talos.

In the distance, bolters began to bark.

V

The Eldest stirred from the cold, cold darkness of the nothingness that was as close to sleep as its species could know.

A faint pain echoed, faded but troubling, in the base of its curved skull. This weak pain soon spread with gentle insistence, beating through its blood vessels and twinning with the creature’s pulse. The pain cobwebbed down the Eldest’s spine and through its facial structure, emanating from its sluggish mind.

This was not the pain of a wound, of defeat, of a hunter denied. It did not eclipse the hunger-need, but it was even less welcome. Its taste and resonance were so very different, and the Eldest had not felt such a thing for… for some time.

Its kin were dying. The Eldest felt each puncturing hole, each ravaged limb, each bleeding socket, in this echoing ghost-pain.

In the darkness, it uncoiled its limbs. Joints clicked and cracked as they tensed and flexed once more.

Its killing claws shivered, opening and closing in the cool air. Digestive acid stung its tongue as its saliva ducts tingled back into life. The Eldest drew a shaking breath through rows of shark’s teeth, and the cold air was a catalyst to its senses. Its featureless eyes opened, thick ropes of drool slivering down its chin, dangling from its maw to fall in hissing spittle-droplets on the decking.

After dragging itself from the confines of its hiding place, the Eldest set out through the ship in search of the creatures killing its children.

It smelled blood in the air, heard the rhythm of a prey’s heart, and scented salty sweat on soft skin. More than this, it sensed the buzzing hum of living sentience, the brain’s fleshy electricity of emotion and thought.

Life.

Human.

Near.

The Eldest clicked to itself with bladed mouth-parts, and leaned forwards into a hungry run, bolting through the black passageways with its claws hammering on the metal.

Kin, it sent silently, I come.

VI

Lucoryphus and his team were not slowed down by the presence of a human or a tech-priest. Nor did they rely on lobotomised servitors to breach obstructions. Instead, several of Lucoryphus’s Raptors were armed with melta guns, breathing out searing surges of gaseous heat intense enough to liquidate the metal it blasted.

As a pack, the Bleeding Eyes – still growing used to their new designation of Ninth Claw – moved at far greater speed through the amalgamation of twisted ships. Unlike Talos and First Claw, Lucoryphus and his brothers had no specific target. They scouted, they stalked, they sought whatever of worth they could find.

And so far, that had been nothing at all.

The boredom was made bitter by the fact that had they been heading deeper in search of the conjoined Mechanicus vessel at the hulk’s core, Lucoryphus was sure the Bleeding Eyes would have been there by now, and on their way back out.

Vox was increasingly erratic as Ninth Claw pressed ahead of their brothers, and Lucoryphus was fast losing patience with First Claw’s progress. The initial hesitations had come from their human slave holding them back. Then their tech-adept had forced them to lag behind while he – while it – bled information from various databanks and memory tablets in the ships First Claw was cutting through.

‘Vaporiser weapons,’ Lucoryphus’s hissing voice carried over the vox, ‘Melta-class weapons. No cutting. No cutting servitors. Much faster.’

Talos’s reply was punctuated by the dull juddering of bolters. ‘Noted. Be aware, we’ve encountered an insignificant genestealer threat. Minimal numbers, at least in this section. What is your location?’

Lucoryphus led his pack onwards, through spacious corridors, each of the Raptors hunched and loping beast-like on all fours. The construction of these passageways was utterly familiar.

‘Astartes ship, Standard Template Construct. Not ours. Throne slaves.’

‘Understood. Any xenos presence?’

‘Some. Few. All dead now.’ The cylindrical engine housings on his back idled in disuse, occasionally coughing black smoke from vent slits. ‘Moving to enginarium. Vessel still has partial power. Some lights bright. Some doors open. Ship not ancient like others. This is close to hulk’s edge.’

‘Understood.’ More bolter fire, and the dim sounds of other Astartes cursing as Talos replied, ‘These things are stunted and weak. They seem almost decrepit.’

‘Genestealer xenos present for many decades. No prey, no strength. Beasts grow old, grow frail. Still deadly.’

‘It’s no struggle, yet.’ The chatter of bolters began to die down. ‘Report status every ten minutes.’

‘Yes, prophet. I obey.’

On four claws, the once-human stalked on, his slanted eye lenses following the contours of the walls.

The corridor at last opened up into a large room, blissful in its dark silence, populated by towering generators and a wall-mounted plasma chamber that still – against all expectations – emitted a faint orange glow from the volatile cocktail of liquids and gases roiling in the glass chamber’s depths.

Without needing orders, the Raptors spread across the engine deck, moving to consoles and gantries, taking up firing positions to cover the room’s exits. Several of the pack let their thrusters whine into life, boosting their way up to the higher platforms.

With difficulty, Lucoryphus fought down the urge to soar with them. Even in the confines of the ship’s interior, he ached to leave the trudging discomfort of the ground behind.

Indulging a little, he cycled his turbines live with an effort as simple and natural as drawing breath. The kick of thrust carried him across the enginarium, to land in a neat crouch before the main power console. Eight dead servitors lay scattered around the controls, reduced to figures of bone and bionics.

One of Lucoryphus’s best, Vorasha, was already at the console, his curving finger-talons clicking at the controls.

‘Plasma chamber depleted,’ Vorasha’s voice slithered from his helm’s snarling speaker-grille. ‘The power has bled from the chamber over decades, yes-yes.’

‘Restore it.’ The Raptor leader emphasised the order with a short, sharp sound somewhere between a shriek and a whisper. ‘Do this now.’

Vorasha’s talons clicked on keys and worked levers. ‘I am not able to do this. Most of the vessel is lifeless. Can send power from section to section, yes-yes. With ease. Open bulkheads too dense to burn through fast. Cannot restore all power to all sections.’

Lucoryphus’s reply came in a keening, aggrieved tone. ‘Many redundant sections. Kill power in them. Then we move.’

‘It will be done,’ said Vorasha, and began to divert what little power remained in the ship’s blood vessels, forcing it into the sections that the Bleeding Eyes Raptors had to cross. At his estimate, Vorasha was going to be able to save them almost an hour of burning through locked bulkhead doors on their way through the ship.

‘What is this ship?’ Lucoryphus asked, his faceplate turned to the ceiling, seeking any indication of allegiance or identity.

The answer came from one of the others. Zon La found a body no more than ten seconds after his leader had asked the question. Armoured in green, it lay on the raised gantry deck above the enginarium floor; cut into pieces by the violence of alien claws, it displayed its brotherhood all too clearly in the bronze dragon emblem across its breastplate.

‘XVIII Legion,’ the Raptor hissed, recoiling in disgust. Zon La’s tongue ached with the sudden need to spit his corrosive saliva onto the skeletal corpse.

Vorasha, linked to the ship’s faded power core, turned to Lucoryphus. ‘Power killed in redundant decks. Ship name is Protean, yes-yes, XVIII Legion.’

Lucoryphus chuckled behind his faceplate. The red eye lenses stared out, with scarlet and silver tears painted in twin trails down his cheeks. It was a visage shared by all his bothers in the Bleeding Eyes. Each of them watched the world through helms with slanted eyes and cried tears of quicksilver and crimson.

‘Salamanders. We killed so many in the Old War. Amazed any still draw breath.’

‘Wait-wait.’ Vorasha never really talked – he hissed and clicked in place of true speech, but the other Raptors could make out the meaning in his broken language with ease. ‘I sense others. I hear others nearby.’

Lucoryphus was as tense as his brothers, head tilted.

He had heard it, too. Weapon fire.

‘Salamanders,’ Zon La rasped. ‘Still alive on ship.’

Lucoryphus was already making his ungainly way to the double doors that led deeper into the ship’s decks.

‘Not for long. Nine of you, remain with Vorasha. Nine more, with me.’

Xarl and Uzas, both warriors of First Claw, sprayed the hallway with suppressive fire, bolters kicking in clenched fists. Uzas’s field of fire was random, chewing down whichever alien beast drew his attention each particular second. Xarl was all controlled aggression, bolts punching home into the skulls of the closest aliens and crippling those that sought to rise again.

Both of them picked up the crackling declaration from Talos, and both were equally infuriated. The Bleeding Eyes, several hours deeper into the amalgamated hulk, had encountered loyalist Astartes.

Salamanders.

Too far away – far too far – for First Claw to reach them. Talos ordered his brothers to maintain the guardianship of Deltrian and purge the corridors of alien threats.

Xarl concentrated his anger into a killing urge, drawing his chainsword and tearing left and right, weaving wounds among the genestealers that reached the embattled warriors. Uzas, never one for subtlety or self-discipline, howled his bitterness through the uncaring hallways and tore into the aliens with his bolter, his chainblade and even his bare hands.

‘Lucoryphus, this is Talos.’

‘No words now. Hunting.’

‘Assess the enemy threat first. Do not engage without assured victory.’

‘Coward!’

‘We have the Echo of Damnation in the void nearby, fool. We can cripple their ship in space and deploy boarding pods at our leisure. Do not engage without assured victory. We do not have the strength here to face down Terminators.’

No reply came, except for the rabid charging of hand-claws and foot-talons on metal decking.

Talos exhaled slowly. It left his helm’s vox-speakers as a daemonic rasp. This was not going to plan.

His standing orders for the strike cruiser had been to power down and activate the Shriek if any Imperial vessels came into the system. There was little chance the Salamanders’ ship had detected and destroyed the Echo, but Talos was far from sanguine. Deltrian was taking too long, and Lucoryphus, as always, was an uncontrollable element.

‘First Claw to Echo of Damnation.’

‘…cr… s… aw…’

The vox was still worthless. They’d have to get back to the hulk’s outer layers to restore contact.

‘Deltrian,’ Talos voxed. ‘Status report.’

VII

The Eldest rounded a corner, clinging to the walls with claws that crunched purchase in the arched, ancient steel. It didn’t slow down, not even for a fraction of a heartbeat. Burning saliva stung its jaws as it drooled down its chin.

Prey.

Two. Ahead.

The Eldest leaped over the bodies of fallen kin, moving its headlong dash to the ceiling as it tore forwards, still not slowing in its stride. Claws ripped handholds in the corridor’s roof with vicious speed. Bodily, it shoved its lesser kin aside, bashing through those tall enough to obstruct its passage. In better times, their links to the Eldest’s mind would have sent them scurrying aside respectfully, sensing their lord’s approach.

‘Reloading.’ Mercutian dropped to one knee and ejected a spent ammunition belt from the massive heavy bolter.

At his side, Cyrion took aim with his own weapon, and the corridor echoed with the familiar crashing of a bolter letting loose on full auto.

‘Reload faster.’

‘Keep shooting,’ Mercutian snarled.

‘It’s on the damn ceiling…’

‘Keep shooting.’

Beneath and around, the hard bodies of its kin were shattering and bursting under the prey’s defences. The prey ahead – two of them – unleashed a sickening stream of burning anger that blasted the Eldest’s kin apart.

The heated projectiles began to crash against the Eldest’s skin.

It suddenly remembered what pain felt like.

Mercutian buckled the ammo feed into place and lifted his heavy bolter again. It took three awful seconds to power up again, then its internal mechanisms clunked into life.

An instant’s glance saw Cyrion’s bolter fire laying waste to the weaker creatures, but the huge beast was shrieking its way through a volley of bolter fire, still sprinting across the ceiling, eating up the metres between them.

He didn’t rise to his feet. Remaining where he was, he pulled the trigger handle and felt his armour’s stabilisers kick in to compensate for the cannon’s recoil.

The heavy bolter shook as it disgorged a stream of high-velocity explosive bolts, each one pounding chunks of chitinous meat from the creature’s exoskeletal flesh.

As the twelfth bolt struck home, the beast fell from the ceiling, plunging into the seething mass of lesser creatures below. Mercutian lowered his aim, and let his cannon chew into them next.

The Eldest smelled its own blood, and this was somehow more shocking than the pain of its burst-open, bleeding wounds. The scent overpowered the wounds of its kin, eclipsing them in richness and potency.

The lord-creature drew in its damaged limbs, curling them close to its body. It had misjudged the prey. The prey was fierce. The prey could not be battled as equals, but must be stalked as meat to be hunted.

This was the Way. The Eldest’s hunger had blinded it to the Way, but the pain of its mistake served as the most forceful of reminders.

Hunched and defeated but utterly devoid of shame, the Eldest tore its way back down the passageway, slaying its own kin in its need to retreat from the prey.

Minutes later, in the silent darkness again, it uncurled its wounded limbs, waiting for the blood to stop flowing.

A single thought-pulse screamed noiselessly through the decks above and below. More of its kin spread across the hive, weakened by hunger themselves, uncoiled and rose from their own states of near-slumber.

The Eldest moved away, seeking to come at the prey alone next time, and with greater patience.

Mercutian lowered the heavy bolter and sank back against the wall. Cyrion locked his bolter to his thigh, and drew a pistol and chainblade.

At last, the corridor was mercifully quiet. Occasionally, a dead alien would twitch.

‘Talos, this is Cyrion.’

‘Speak,’ the prophet’s voice crackled back over the vox.

‘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 chamber. 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.

And each was priceless – an artefact of unrivalled possibility.

‘It is done,’ the tech-adept said, and began to gather the data-slates, apparently unaware that no one was paying him any heed at all.

He turned to the melee in time to see the alien beast, its body a mess of burst wounds and both ovoid eyes left as ragged, fluid-weeping craters, cleave Variel’s leg at the knee with one of its few remaining limbs. A scythe of blackened bone, its bladed edge cracked and bleeding, chopped down in a lethal arc.

Ceramite armour shattered. The Astartes went down, his leg severed, and still he fired up at the horror drawing closer to slay him.

The death blow came from Talos. His armour a broken mess of claw-chopped metal plating, the prophet took another flailing limb strike to the side of the head in order to risk coming close enough to use his power sword. Lightning trembled along the golden blade as it sparked into life, even as the genestealer patriarch clashed a half-amputated sword-limb against the Night Lord’s helm. White-painted shards of his faceplate tore free, scattering across the metal decking like hailstones.

Talos was close enough now. With half of his face laid bare and bleeding from the creature’s last blow, he rammed the relic sword into the beast’s spine, plunging it two-handed through exoskeletal armour, toughened subdermal muscle flesh, and finally into vulnerable meat and severable bone.

A twist, a wrench, a curse and a pull. He sawed the sword left and right, foul-smelling blood welling up from the widening wound.

The alien shrieked again, acidic ichor spraying from its damaged teeth to rain upon Variel’s armour in hissing droplets. Talos gave his golden blade a final wrenching pull, and the beast’s head came free.

The creature collapsed. It twitched once or twice, the savage wounds across its body leaking sour fluids as well as dark blood. The smell, Septimus would later tell other slaves back aboard the ship, was somewhere between a charnel house and a butcher’s shop left open to the sun for a month. It broke through all air filters, clinging right to the sinuses.

Variel’s armour was pockmarked gunmetal-grey where the corrosive juices from the beast’s maw scored away his war plate’s paint. His severed leg wasn’t bleeding – the coagulants in Astartes blood were already working to seal the wound and scab it over. Any pain was dulled by his armour’s narcotic injectors dispensing stimulants and pain suppressors into his bloodstream.

Yet he growled a curse as he dragged himself away from the stilled beast, and swore in a language only he understood. Deltrian analysed the linguistic pattern. It was most likely a dialect of Badab – a tongue from Variel’s home world. The details were irrelevant.

Talos’s suit of armour was almost entirely stripped of colour, the acids and burning blood having blistered the ceramite and scorched the dark paint away. He regarded the creature’s steaming body, with half of his face visible due to the damage he’d taken to his helm.

The tech-adept saw the prophet scowl, and fire another bolter shell into the dead alien’s severed head. What remained of the genestealer’s skull vanished in an explosion of wet fragments that clacked off the walls, the floor and Talos’s own armour.

Septimus looked on, catching his breath. He knew repairing and repainting both of these ancient suits of battle plate was going to be a time-consuming process. He felt it was to his credit that he didn’t say so here, and busied himself holstering his Guard-issue laspistols, before leaning against the wall.

‘To hell with that,’ he breathed.

Deltrian watched this scene for exactly four point two seconds.

‘I said, “It is done”.’ He couldn’t keep the rising impatience from his tone. ‘May we leave now?’

X

When the Echo of Damnation pulled away from the hulk, the Shriek fell silent as plasma contrails misted the void behind the ship. Engines running, breathing the mist into space, the Echo tore away from the vast amalgamation of forgotten ships.

On the command throne, his armour still a grey and cracked ruin, Talos watched the occulus. It showed a slice of deep space – no more, no less.

‘How long ago did they leave the system?’ he asked. These were the first words he had uttered since returning and taking the throne. The answer came from one of the ageing human officers, still in his Imperial Navy uniform, albeit stripped of the Emperor’s insignia.

‘Just over two hours, my lord. The Salamander vessel was running dangerously hot. We think the Shriek unnerved them – they broke orbit and ran, rather than seek the signal’s source.’

‘They did not find the ship?’

‘They barely even looked, my lord. They withdrew their boarding teams and fled.’

Talos shook his head. ‘The sons of Vulkan are placid and slow, but they are Astartes and know no fear. Whatever sent them crawling from the system was a matter of grave import.’

‘As you say, my lord. What are your orders?’

Talos snorted. ‘Two hours is not an insurmountable head-start. Follow them. Make ready all Claws. Once we catch them, we will tear them from the warp and pick apart the bones of their ship.’

‘Compliance, master.’

The prophet allowed his eyes to drift closed as the ship rumbled into activity around him.

The Hall of Reflection housed what few relics remained to the warriors of Talos’s warband. In more glorious eras, such a chamber would have been a haven for prayer, for purification through meditation, and to witness the Legion’s history through the weapons and armour once borne and worn by its heroes.

Now, it served as something not quite a workshop, and not quite a graveyard. Deltrian was lord of the chamber, a haven where his will and word were law. Servitors worked at various stations, repairing pieces of armour, replacing the teeth-tracks of fouled chainswords, forging new bolter shells and creating the explosive innards.

And here, in ritually preserved stasis fields, the ornate sarcophagi of fallen warriors were mounted on marble pedestals, awaiting the moment they would be mounted in the bodies of dreadnoughts and sent to war once more. Several fluid-filled suspension tanks bubbled away, most empty – in need of flushing and scrubbing – and a few occupied by naked figures rendered indistinct by the milky, oxygen-rich amniotic fluids.

Deltrian had returned to his sanctum several minutes before, and was already inserting the data tablets into the sockets of his own cogitators, to drain the lore into his own memory banks. The doors to the Hall of Reflection remained open. Deltrian allowed the data transfer to occur unwatched, and instead waited for the guests he was expecting.

At last, they arrived. Twelve warriors, in a ragged line. Each of the dozen Astartes showed signs of recent and grievous battle. Each of them had survived a harrowing six further hours on board the hulk, fending off genestealers and hunting the accursed creatures back to their nests.

The Salamanders had done an admirable job in their purging, but had still lost a total of six warriors on board the Protean, thanks to the efforts of Vorasha and the Bleeding Eyes diverting wave after wave of xenos beasts into their section of the ship.

Six souls lost, six warriors fallen. It did not seem many, on the surface of things. The Night Lords had lost nine – all of them from the Bleeding Eyes. Lucoryphus seemed untroubled.

‘The weak fall, the strong rise,’ he’d said as they boarded the Echo of Damnation. Deltrian observed that this was as close to philosophy as the degenerate warrior had ever come. The Bleeding Eyes leader had no reply to that.

Deltrian watched the twelve Astartes enter the Hall of Reflection now. Each pair carried a great weight between them: the broken bodies of armoured Salamander warriors. One of the butchered warriors was carved with both surgical precision and gleeful brutality, slain by the Bleeding Eyes and earning the ignoble honour of being the first to fall. The others showed a vicious spread of genestealer wounds: punctured breastplates, sundered limb guards, crushed helms.

But nothing, Deltrian mused, that would be irreparable.

The Night Lords arranged the bodies on the mosaic-inlaid floor. Six dead Salamanders. Six dead Salamanders in Terminator war plate, complete with storm bolters, power weapons and a rare assault rotator cannon – practically unseen amongst the Traitor Legions, who were forced to wage war with scavenged equipment and ancient weaponry.

This haul, this sacred bounty in the blessed Machine-God’s name, was worth infinitely more than the lives of fourteen Night Lords. Deltrian caressed the draconic emblem of the Salamanders Chapter, embossed in black stone on one dead warrior’s pauldron. Such markings could be stripped, the armour itself modified and refashioned… the machine-spirits turned bitter and of more use to the VIII Legion.

Let the Night Lords spit and curse for now. He could see it in their black eyes: each one of them recognised the value of this haul, and each one hoped to be one of the elite few ordained to wear this holy armour once it was profaned and made ready.

Nine lives in exchange for the secrets of a Titan Legion and six suits of the most powerful armour created by mankind.

Deltrian always smiled, for that was how his skullish face was formed. Now, however, as he regarded his newfound riches, the expression was sincere.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aaron Dembski-Bowden is a British author with his beginnings in the videogame and RPG industries. He's written several novels for the Black Library, including the Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Helsreach and the New York Times bestselling The First Heretic for the Horus Heresy. He lives and works in Northern Ireland with his wife Katie, hiding from the world in the middle of nowhere. His hobbies generally revolve around reading anything within reach, and helping people spell his surname.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2010 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Clint Langley

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