Sanctified

Mark Clapham

It was a view that few would ever see, an uninterrupted line of sight from the interior of an Imperial battlecruiser in space to the surface of a planet, with only the slight shimmer of a protective energy field between the two. The world below filled the vision, the halo of the atmosphere glowing fiercely. Even the most jaded of humans would concede it a rare sight, one deserving of at least a moment’s appreciation.

Kaspel tried to ignore it, and kept his back turned to the gaping hole in the ship’s hull as much as possible. It was not that he suffered from vertigo – it was the presence of the world below that perturbed him.

As a tech-priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus, serving the glory of machines and the Emperor, Kaspel had never known the feel of alien soil beneath his boots, or faced one of the xenos in person. He had been raised on the brotherhood’s home of Mars, and then had performed his sacred duties within the engineering decks of the Imperial Navy’s starships. He had walked corridors of sanctified metal his entire life, and although he was proud to contribute to the fight against the enemies of man, Kaspel had no desire to have direct contact with either the aliens or their worlds.

He had his work. The tear in the hull of the Imperial battlecruiser Divine Sanctity was severe, the result of a damaged necron ship clipping the Sanctity in battle, demolishing part of the engineering deck and crippling one of the ship’s engine units. The battle had raged a day, fire lighting the sky as the battlefleet had rallied to repel the enemy.

Humanity had prevailed, but while the rest of the battlefleet had continued to push back the necron forces, the damage to the engines of the Sanctity had left it stranded in orbit over the now-dead world. While the temporary energy shields maintained the atmosphere and gravity within the exposed sections, Captain Rilk was eager to rejoin the front as soon as possible, and had expressed this desire to Kaspel in no uncertain terms.

Kaspel had found these entreaties unnecessary and vaguely offensive – he was a tech-priest, and would restore all systems to full and blessed order with the correct repairs and rites, as efficiently as possible. What more or less would he do?

With the atmosphere restored, Kaspel and his servitors could work efficiently and swiftly. The most severe damage had been to one of the ship’s engine units, each of which was a hexagonal tube of machinery as tall as a hab block that stretched down the full length of the vast chamber, terminating in a thruster cone at the rear of the ship. A plasteel wall separated the visible end of the engine unit from the thruster itself. The chamber was shaped around the engine unit, with crawl spaces above and below the unit, and an access walkway on either side.

From where Kaspel stood, staring down at the thruster end of the unit, the hull damage gaped to his left, while to his right teams of servitors were methodically repairing the damage to the engine unit. The hull tear stretched above and below, and to access the damaged engine the servitors had to negotiate a rig of temporary scaffolding, a flimsy mesh of wire and tubular girders that often opened out into a direct view of space.

The servitors did not have the sentience to be unnerved by the illusion of an endless drop below them. Kaspel only went on to the scaffolding when his attention was urgently required.

The work was going well today. Servitors could be unreliable, but with the correct monitoring and direct instructions, Kaspel found that their many hands – and other mechanical appendages – made light work of straightforward repairs. Unnerved by the sense of exposure from the tear in the hull, Kaspel was relieved to leave the engine chamber and returned to the darker sections of the engineering decks.

For the next hour, Kaspel roamed the dark corridors and access shafts which weaved around the mechanisms of the great engines, mostly on foot but occasionally using his three mechadendrites, mechanical arms connected to his spine, to climb to difficult areas. As he moved, he recorded progress and issued fresh instructions to the technomats, occasionally stopping to administer a necessary rite or prayer.

As he took a shortcut down an airshaft between two levels, his mechadendrites finding purchase where human fingers could not, Kaspel ran some diagnostic incantations, ritually working through the processes of the engine, and the ceremonies that would bring each repaired part back online.

There was something wrong. The work was progressing, but the systems were not responding as they should – whole areas which should have come back online were still dead. Curious.

Kaspel dropped out of the shaft, and landed on the deck, the floorplates clanking under his weight. The corridor he had dropped into was a functional tube plated with thick slabs of plasteel on the walls and floors. The more ornate decorations of the Imperial style were reserved for the other end of the ship, where the officers worked and lived. In the engineering decks, practicality ruled over aesthetics: pipes and cables threaded in and out of the walls, and unmarked doors led to small work areas filled with cogitator terminals and spare components.

Kaspel straightened the thick red robes which covered his utilitarian leather coveralls, and was about to proceed to the next point in his inspection when he noticed an arm extending from a recess further down the corridor. It was a fleshy arm, ending in a basic pincer attachment.

He approached to find one of the servitors slumped in the alcove, head to one side, mouth frothing and eyes wide. It was not uncommon for servitors to fail, to lose mental coherence and to be jettisoned into space, but there was something in the wild expression in those eyes which gave Kaspel pause.

He adjusted the vision in his augmented eye to thermal, and observed the heart of the servitor as a hastily pulsating mass within the servitor’s chest, pumping hard. The lungs were also working overtime. It was as if… Kaspel dropped to one knee, and rolled the servitor over onto its front. He ran a gloved hand over the implants on the back of its neck, the mechanisms that turned a vat-grown humanoid into a robotic creature capable of basic tasks. Kaspel’s fingers found what he had suspected: a neat cut had been made in one cable, and the wires within reversed.

The alteration was a simple one, but specific, reversing the neural dampener that prevented servitors from being distracted by physical pain. Someone had very precisely altered this unfeeling creature to make it experience intense agony. Kaspel tore out the cable, and then removed a couple of further connections, cutting off all power to the brain. The servitor shuddered briefly, and died.

Kaspel corrected himself as he stood up. The servitor had never been alive. However, such deliberate sabotage needed to be reported. Kaspel tried to vox through to the ship’s head of security, but received nothing but static. He tried other officers, or an open channel, but found the same static.

No, not quite static. It sounded like random interference, but Kaspel could make out repeating patterns. This was a deliberate signal, blocking communications.

Someone was isolating the engineering decks.

Kaspel was an enginseer, not a warrior. While he had received basic weapons training, first on Mars and then on transfer to the Navy, that training had been to meet the basic commitments of any subject of the God-Emperor that, if caught up in battle, any human should be ready to pick up a fallen warrior’s weapon and fight to the last. If the ship had been stormed, Kaspel was qualified to pick up a bolt pistol and loose a few rounds at the enemy.

This… Kaspel was not even sure what kind of situation he was in. He needed to exercise caution, and find out how deep the isolation went. He found a cogitator unit in an alcove, and ran some simple diagnostics. Not only was communication between the engineering deck and the rest of the ship blocked, but the bulkheads between the two had been sealed as well. Kaspel tried to override these obstructions, but found himself ejected from the relevant menus with a flicker of on-screen static.

That flicker of disruption meant one thing: scrapcode, chaotic data introduced into the ship’s cogitation systems to cause disruption, in this instance invisibly blocking onboard communications.

Kaspel’s breath quickened behind his mask: the creation and use of scrapcode was considered by the Adeptus Mechanicus to be heresy, a grave attack on the machine-spirit. Kaspel was an enginseer, engines and heavy mechanisms were his vocation. He knew some of the rituals and practices of maintaining cogitators, but nowhere near enough to circumvent and purge scrapcode. Kaspel would get nothing more from the cogitator.

The machine-spirit of the Divine Sanctity was under threat of corruption and it seemed, for now, that Kaspel was the only one who could try and save it.

Kaspel trod lightly, and kept to the shadows as much as possible while following the curve of the corridor. There was nothing to see in the gloom, and little to hear except the ambient glug glug of thick coolant running through the pipes attached to the wall, pipes which ran all the way to the generatorium. The coolant absorbed the excess heat from the generatorium, the then-hot liquid flowing out to the extremities of the ship where proximity to the freezing void of space re-cooled the liquid.

Kaspel was approaching one of the areas where he had set servitors to work. He could hear the hissing of welding equipment, noise consistent with the work Kaspel had assigned, but nonetheless he was cautious, slowing his pace even further. This was a heavy work area, and various tools were leaning against the walls, organised by size so even the less efficient servitors could work out which was required. Kaspel carefully stepped around a stack of plasteel panels.

Then, for a brief moment, one of the welding torches around the corner flared spectacularly, the bright orange light consuming the corridor ahead, casting a deep black shadow on the wall. The silhouette was of two figures: the lumpen shape of a servitor, hanging crooked as if chained up by the wrists, and another taller, unnaturally thin figure, standing with its feet apart, one hand raised with hideously tapered fingers – were those blades? – spread out. In those short seconds of illumination, the tall figure’s hand swung down, right into the guts of the other. Then the light source guttered out and the shadows disappeared, leaving only an echo of the noise of rended flesh.

Kaspel’s breath caught in his throat, the rebreather in his mask briefly struggling to adjust. Thoughts raced through his mind. Whoever the second figure was, it wasn’t a human or a servitor. Its proportions, the way it moved, were just wrong. Alien.

Kaspel made an involuntary step backwards, and there was a tinny crash from just behind him. He instinctively spun around, to see he had knocked over the stacked panels.

Any sense of relief was dispelled by the realisation of how loud that noise must have been. Kaspel barely had time to look back down the corridor, to see a lithe, shimmering figure seemingly carved out of shadows bounding towards him. Its movements were graceful, almost silent as its feet glanced off the metal deck, yet with a terrifying speed and power. The shadow-figure raised one hand as it descended on Kaspel, and he saw that it indeed wore some kind of bladed gauntlet.

Kaspel had little time to do anything but stumble backwards. His mechadendrites instinctively reached out behind him, cushioning his fall and pushing him over to land on his feet. Rather than try and stand up or break into a run, Kaspel rolled sideways again, towards the other side of the corridor.

The alien – and it was definitely alien – let out an unintelligible babble of frustration as Kaspel evaded its first blow, the blades on its hand tearing through the wall as its swipe went wide, cutting through plasteel as if it were paper. The shimmering shadow effect suddenly flickered, dissipating like interference on a cogitator screen, and Kaspel had his first proper glimpse of the enemy.

Standing before him was a figure in chitinous black body armour with elongated, deathly pale features. The long, cruel mouth was twisted in bitter frustration, well-deep eyes wide in hatred.

He had never seen one before, but Kaspel recognised the creature for what it was: an eldar. As the towering xenos moved towards him with terrifying speed, Kaspel used one of his mechadendrites to grasp the coolant pipe on the wall, pulling him to his feet. Then, a second later, Kaspel pushed himself sideways with all his strength, and once again the eldar’s clawed hand tore down through the empty space where Kaspel had just been standing.

This time though, the eldar clawed into more than just the wall, the blades on his hand tearing into one of the coolant pipes. Where the five slashes gouged into the pipe, freezing liquid gel pumped at high pressure found release and sprayed into the corridor. The eldar screamed discordantly, a terrible inhuman sound, as the freezing liquid hit it full-on. It reeled, consumed by a cloud of vapour as water droplets froze in the air around it.

A major freeze-burn like that would kill even the strongest human on contact, but Kaspel wasn’t taking any risks. He picked up one of the wrenches leaning against the wall and, holding it with both hands, swung the tool around in a wide arc to make contact with the side of the eldar’s head.

On contact, its head exploded in a shower of icy fragments, the pieces clattering off the floor and walls as they ricocheted in all directions. The blast of coolant had frozen its entire head solid on contact, rendering it brittle.

The eldar’s headless body crashed heavily to the floor, its fluid grace all gone in death. The bladed gauntlet, and most of that forearm, also shattered into frozen pieces, blackened chunks spinning across the floor.

With a hiss, the fail-safes in the coolant pipe closed off the ruptured section, diverting the flow to backup pipes. The temperature in the corridor adjusted back to normal, the mist clearing.

Kaspel dropped to his knees, the wrench feeling heavier in his hands than it possibly could be. Too close. He had been unprepared, and his improvisation with the coolant had been statistically unlikely to work. A less practically minded person would have said that he ‘got lucky’.

Leaning on the wrench, Kaspel pushed himself to his feet, and looked down at the eldar’s headless corpse. So this was the enemy. Even dead, faceless and inert, it disgusted him, from the pallid exposed flesh to the unnatural sheen of its black armour.

Kaspel told himself that there was no point searching the body, that the armour was too tight to conceal any weapons beyond the shattered gauntlet, and that if the eldar carried any plans, Kaspel wouldn’t be able to read the language. But he knew that these were just rationalisations – he couldn’t bring himself to touch the body, to make direct contact with the alien.

Kaspel recognised the black armour, its shimmering shielding, from stories and briefings. These ‘dark eldar’ were tainted by Chaos, and combined the abilities and training of their warrior heritage with the unpredictable cruelty of the dark powers.

Kaspel, on the other hand, was a non-combatant, a worker of machines. Any attempt at direct confrontation between him and the eldar would end in failure, and the Sanctity, its mission, its crew and its machine-spirit would be doomed.

He needed other ways to kill them, to use methods of his own and the machinery he was an expert in. These eldar were an affront to the machine-spirit of the Sanctity, and that spirit would provide the means of their destruction.

If other eldar had been nearby, they would have attacked by now. Kaspel felt confident enough to walk around the corridor to where the gutted servitor hung from the ceiling. Kaspel ignored it, picked up its abandoned welding torch from where it was slowly melting a hole in the floor, switched it off and tossed it aside. Such a device had been useful in the eldar’s torture games, but required too close proximity to be any use to Kaspel.

Kaspel couldn’t risk using the coolant again, as there was only so much damage those pipes could incur before the system began to fail and threatened a terminal overheat. But there were other mechanisms that could be used.

Deep in thought, Kaspel reached for the welding torch he had just abandoned, and began to unscrew a panel on the side of the tool.

The generatorium was the largest chamber on the engineering decks, dominated by the generator stacks, monolithic structures which lined one end of the room. Each generator stack was squat and metallic at the top and bottom, with transparent panels in the middle that showed the fierce currents of power flowing within, white-hot energy crackling around incandescent elements. In the open space before the stacks, freestanding cogitator terminals displayed the flow of power, while riveted columns stretched from floor to ceiling, bracing the entire room. Vast cables, heavily insulated, ran from the stacks and into the walls, floors and ceilings, feeding power all across the ship.

More functional workstations lined the walls at either side of the stacks, while directly opposite, the walls were peppered by half a dozen vast bladed fans set in wide air shafts, all of which were presently inert, but capable of draining the atmosphere from the room in seconds if required. Each fan was covered by a thin metal mesh, and set at head height from the floor.

The generatorium was not a quiet place: a relentless hum from the vast power within the generator stacks filled the air. Kaspel entered the room via a door in the shadow of the stacks and although he could hear raised voices over the din, he couldn’t make out any words.

Edging around the stacks towards the voices, Kaspel began to make out the words. There were two of them, both male and neither human. They spoke in Imperial Gothic with no discernible accent, their words oddly stilted as if they had learned the language without ever hearing it.

‘Let us try this again,’ said one. ‘How do we restore the power?’ This voice was infinitely weary, as if talking to a child or pet.

‘Tell us now,’ said another, sharper voice. ‘Then we will make it quick.’

There was a ragged, spluttering sound, and then a third, human voice spoke up weakly.

‘I told you… I don’t know.’ There was a pause, another ragged breath. ‘And if I did, you could–’

A laboured coughing fit cut off the insult. Kaspel recognised the human voice as Whallon, one of the captain’s lieutenants who spent most of his days relaying orders around the Sanctity. He had doubtless been sent down to engineering to check on Kaspel’s progress, only to get picked up by the eldar.

Kaspel didn’t doubt Whallon was telling the truth – if Kaspel couldn’t solve the power problem, a non-technical officer certainly wouldn’t be able to. When the eldar realised that, Whallon was dead. There was little time to spare. Kaspel checked the small pouch of liquid tied to his belt, and carefully untied it. The pouch was vacuum-sealed, but the contents were volatile. He held it gingerly in one gloved hand.

Prepared, he peered around the corner of the stack. There were only two eldar in the open space before the stacks, and they were standing over Whallon, who was tied to one of the pillars that braced the chamber. Whallon, slumped low with his arms wrenched back against the pillar, was staring up at the two eldar defiantly. His dress uniform had been torn open at the front, cuts and bruises dotting his face and chest.

Kaspel was fortunate again, as the eldar were standing with their backs to him as they repeated their questions with greater urgency. The more laconic eldar was leaning on an ornate stave, while the other held a viciously serrated blade. Both wore the same black armour as the creature that Kaspel had already destroyed.

He quickly surveyed the room, working out the distances. Technically minded, he easily calculated what was required. It was possible, narrowly.

‘Tell us what we want to know!’ hissed the blade-wielding eldar. He moved as if to stab Whallon with his blade, but it was just a feint – instead he pulled the blade away and brought his empty hand down, delivering a backhanded blow to Whallon’s face. The studs on the eldar’s glove left shallow cuts in Whallon’s cheek.

Kaspel stepped out of the shadows, adjusting the volume controls in his mask vox for maximum effect.

‘Ask me,’ he said, his synthesised voice echoing around the room.

His words had the desired effect. The eldar snapped around, too well-trained to show surprise or dismay, or maybe just too alien to even feel such things. They did not reply, but reacted, starting towards Kaspel the moment they registered his presence.

But Kaspel had moved first, running not towards the eldar, but to the far wall of the chamber, where a pile of crates was stacked under the great extractor fans. That wall was slightly nearer to Kaspel than it was to the eldar, so he had a head start.

Not looking back, he kept running. They would want to capture him alive, to find out what he knew, or at least that was his hope. If he was wrong, a shot to the back would take him down soon enough.

When he reached the crates, Kaspel jumped onto the first one, which was only a third of his height. As he clambered on top of the next, the stave-bearing eldar threw his weapon. The stave tore through Kaspel’s cloak and embedded itself in one of the storage boxes, narrowly missing his side.

The material tore as Kaspel climbed, and he cursed himself for not abandoning his cloak earlier. While his fingers scrabbled for purchase, he used his mechadendrites to tear the thin protective grille away from the fan. It came off in one go, rivets popping out and showering down.

The horizontal shaft was twice the height of a man, and three closely placed fans were between Kaspel and the next grille, after which the shaft dropped down to a further set of fans and, eventually, a discharge pipe that expelled fumes directly into space. Each of the three fans had sixteen blades, and Kaspel had to carefully manoeuvre to squeeze between them. As Kaspel pulled himself between the razor-sharp blades of the first fan, which was placed only slightly past the rim of the shaft, he dared to glimpse behind him. The blade-wielding eldar was below, about to strike. Kaspel pulled his booted feet away just before the sword came down, and rolled into the gap between the first two fans.

Kaspel scrambled to his feet in the narrow gap, and began to squeeze past the blades of the second fan. He slipped on the oiled, curved wall of the air shaft, and raised his arm defensively as he bumped into a fan blade. The blade cut straight through one sleeve of his leather coveralls, and grazed his left arm, drawing blood. He winced.

Kaspel shuffled quickly through. One fan to go. He looked back, to see the blade-wielder gracefully stepping between the inert blades of the first fan, angling its lithe limbs like a practised gymnast.

With little gap between each fan, Kaspel was at the final fan immediately after passing the second. Suppressing any dangerous haste, he pushed between the blades. One of his mechadendrites clanked against the blades, but he was through.

Kaspel turned his back to the thin wire mesh that was between him and a sheer drop, the pouch of liquid in his hand. The eldar were nearly upon him, the blade-wielder already stepping through the second fan, while his comrade was in turn a step behind him.

Kaspel threw the pouch between the blades of the fan, and it hit the vent wall just next to the second fan. The contents spilled wide, sloshing everywhere, and burst into flames.

Kaspel had carefully siphoned the liquid from the welding torch, knowing its volatility, especially when in an oxygenated environment. The eldar recoiled slightly at the fire, but were unconcerned. Why should they be? They were armoured, and it was only a little fire.

However, a little fire in the sensitive workings of a battlecruiser was a dangerous thing, and the systems were built to compensate. As the flame burst out in the vent, the fans came to life without warning, changing from completely static to a rapid spin in seconds.

Kaspel was blown back into the grille as the triple blades tore into the two eldar, cutting through their armour, flesh and bone without discrimination. The grille buckled under his weight but held as a blast of air and eldar remains was sucked down the air shaft, slipping through gaps in the mesh to slide down the shaft and be expelled into space.

The flames from Kaspel’s amateur incendiary quickly went out, and the fans halted their movement as suddenly as they had started. Kaspel blinked, wiping gore from the lenses of his mask. Ignoring the alien remains smeared around the shaft, he began to carefully make his way back to the generatorium.

Whallon had a broken rib, and possibly a punctured lung. That didn’t stop him from talking as Kaspel untied him.

‘Came down here to find you,’ he said, stretching his arms and wincing. ‘Then this lot appeared out of nowhere. I think there’s only a few more, including the leader. They tied me up and left me here to play with later. Then, when they had problems with their tech, they started asking questions.’

Whallon nodded towards a series of squat black devices spread around the base of the generator stacks. Kaspel hadn’t noticed them before – there was something about their near-featureless blackness that made the eyes slide off them. As Whallon slowly pulled himself to his feet, Kaspel inspected one of the alien machines.

It was a black box with curved edges, seemingly made out of some kind of stone or crystal. Indentations in the top could be either controls or instructions. Translucent cables snaked from the box, some attaching to various points on the generator stacks, others to the nearby alien machines. Following the trail of cables, he could see that some led out into the corridors of the ship.

‘I think,’ said Whallon, ‘these are for moving the Sanctity.’

‘Yes,’ replied Kaspel. ‘I think you are right.’

The dark eldar had their own means of travel barely comprehended by other species. Could a device like this, provided with enough power, drag an entire battlecruiser through space? Kaspel had no way of telling. Whatever the device did, it was heretical technology outside the sacred machinery of the Imperium.

Kaspel decided against tampering with the eldar machine, as he had no idea what side effects that might cause. Best to leave it where it was for now, and deal with the immediate threat first. If the eldar managed to jump the Sanctity into the webway, the ship would be repurposed or cannibalised for parts while the crew would be converted into soulless, broken slaves. These were not fit fates for either the Emperor’s machine or men.

‘Where did they go?’ Kaspel asked.

‘Down into the engines,’ replied Whallon, who had given up on standing, and slumped back against the pillar. ‘I…’ He coughed again, a splatter of blood at the corner of his mouth.

Kaspel nodded. ‘Rest. Your injuries are not fatal, but may be if you strain them.’ He put an arm around Whallon, and helped him stumble across the room to a chair in front of a cogitator terminal. ‘The xenos have isolated communications with the rest of the ship. Eventually the bridge will realise and break through. When they do, they will need you alive to direct them.’

Whallon nodded. His skin was pallid and sheened in sweat, but he was still an officer. He would hold out.

‘I will locate the xenos, and do what I can to stop them.’

Whallon nodded again, then pointed towards a dark corner of the room, near where he had been tied up.

‘They had my bolt pistol before I could use it,’ he said, pausing to take another painful breath. ‘Threw it over there. Ceremonial, but it works.’

Kaspel nodded gratefully, and followed Whallon’s gesture to find his holster belt, crudely cut in half where the eldar had torn it from the officer, but with bolt pistol still attached. The weapon was heavy, but well-polished and with ornate patterns engraved on the barrel. It was clearly decorative, a reward for some previous action, but it might prove useful.

Giving one last nod to Whallon, Kaspel checked the pistol’s clip, and left the generatorium. Following the alien power lines, he headed back towards the engines.

While enginseers were more attuned to the workings of machines than of humans, Kaspel was nevertheless aware that he was in shock, and that his best hope for remaining efficient was to keep moving, to act without stopping to think. However, it did occur to him how fast his perceptions were being changed.

Since killing the two eldar with the fan blades, he had been covered in their drying blood. An hour ago, the thought of even a drop of alien blood touching him would have been horrific, a notion to be quickly suppressed. Kaspel’s encounters with the eldar had changed him. Yes, the xenos were hateful abominations, but as repellent as they were, there was no need to fear them for their physical differences. It was not their blood, flesh or bone that was a threat, disgusting as it was.

No, what Kaspel knew was worth fearing, worth confronting, was the aliens’ dark intent and capacity for inflicting their will on the human race. Their actions on the ship had demonstrated that. Only a small group had infiltrated the Sanctity, but they had violated everything in their path, torturing a loyal officer of the Imperial Navy, corrupting the cogitators with scrapcode and tainting the ship’s precious power source with their vile machinery.

It was as Kaspel had always been taught, but never experienced – even the slightest touch of Chaos or the gentlest brush with alien thinking corrupted, and their every influence needed to be excised by force and fire. Kaspel had learned these abstract lessons long ago, but only now did he understand their basis in concrete fact.

One small area of corruption, untreated, could undermine the whole.

Kaspel stopped in his tracks, his thoughts racing ahead of him. Of course, that simple lesson… it was a principle that men of the Imperium lived and died by, yet it hadn’t occurred to Kaspel that it could apply to the ship’s predicament as well. It all made sense now; he could see where the problem was.

One of the Divine Sanctity’s engine units had failed, not just in terms of its operation but in terms of diagnostics. The cogitative mechanisms which compensated for any error had misinterpreted the damage to the engine unit as a failure of the power supply, and tried to divert massive amounts of energy from the generatorium to rectify the imagined power failure. Thanks to this freak error, the other engine units could not build up enough power to move the ship. This was a problem, but one that had also prevented the eldar’s parasitic technology from functioning properly.

Two problems, two sources of corruption in the machine. Purge both, save the whole. It was elegant simplicity, coming together like great cogs clicking into place. Kaspel instinctively, reverently, touched the golden cog of the Adeptus Mechanicus that hung on a chain around his neck. As ever, the machine provided a solution, and it was for the tech-priest to follow its lead.

Kaspel increased his pace. He knew where the eldar would be, and he knew how to deal with them.

Kaspel found himself back where he had begun the day, in the chamber containing the damaged engine unit. The energy field that prevented the atmosphere from escaping through the tear in the hull still shimmered in place.

As he entered the chamber, walking under a bulkhead which would rapidly drop down and seal off the area in the case of an atmosphere breach, Kaspel heard raised eldar voices, and the clank of their armoured boots on scaffolding. The trail of alien cabling ran down the walkway, and disappeared to the right, into the gap in the side of the engine unit. The bodies of the servitors that Kaspel had left to work on the engine damage lay scattered across the walkway, swiftly dismantled by eldar blades.

As Kaspel had expected, the eldar were working on the core of the damaged engine unit, out of his line of sight.

To Kaspel’s right, the vast hexagonal engine unit towered above him, as intimidating in its own way as the tear in the hull to his left, a looming structure that contained the power transformers and other machinery that converted raw energy into the thrust necessary to propel the battlecruiser through space.

Kaspel couldn’t risk closing the bulkhead behind him, partially because it would close off his escape route, but mainly because it would alert the eldar to his presence, which would make his job far harder.

Battlecruisers were assembled in the space docks that orbited some of the Adeptus Mechanicus’s forge worlds. Ships were built reverently, over many years, enginseers and other adepts working tirelessly in the vacuum to build them. By necessity, the work was modular – components were forged on the world below, brought up in shuttles, and then installed into the frame of the growing ship. Beneath the hull, a ship was not just a single machine, but also many machines, brought into harmony as a single entity. Many parts, one whole.

Kaspel knew that what had once been brought together could be torn apart. The hull damage had taken out many of the supporting points which fixed the engine unit in place within the main structure of the battlecruiser. By Kaspel’s reckoning there were five supports left that needed to be manually unbolted. The struts themselves were vast, but the levers for releasing them were easy enough to shift.

Once Kaspel had released the five struts, all he needed to do was breach one of the engine unit’s many plasma capsules. The entire chamber would lock down and purge the atmosphere and, without the struts holding it in place, the engine unit itself would roll right out of the chamber into the vacuum.

Kaspel could take out one of the plasma capsules from the doorway with a single shot from Whallon’s bolt pistol. He would then have a couple of seconds to step back into the corridor before the bulkheads came down.

Kaspel began to climb the side of the engine unit. Eventually, he reached a large strut which emerged from the wall and embedded deep into the unit itself. Kaspel found the red release lever on the side of the strut, and pulled it all the way back. There was a low metallic grinding, but thankfully this didn’t attract the eldar’s attention.

The collision with the necron vessel had demolished the other support strut on the outwards-facing side of the engine unit, whereas the other side had two struts intact. Using both his human arms and his mechadendrites, Kaspel climbed onto the top of the engine unit, crossed the top and lowered himself down the other side until he reached the parallel strut to the one he had already released. He repeated the process with the lever, and then lowered himself down to the walkway on that side. As quietly as he could, he ran to the thruster end of the chamber, then climbed up and pulled the release lever on the other strut on that side.

What remained were the two vertical struts which came down through the ceiling and into the top of the unit. Kaspel climbed back up the engine unit, and slowly made his way across the top of the machine. It was not a flat surface, and he needed his mechadendrites to maintain his balance.

He reached the first vertical strut, and pulled the release lever. All that remained was to release the last strut, return to the doorway and shoot out one of the plasma capsules.

His job nearly complete, Kaspel began the careful approach to the last strut, making his way back down the top of the machine, away from the thrusters. As he did, the voices of the eldar became louder. He was approaching the point where the hull damage had penetrated the engine unit deepest, where the eldar were doing their work.

Kaspel reached the last strut, and pulled the last lever. Nearly done.

He stayed atop the engine unit, moving quickly but carefully in the direction of the door. Where the engine had been damaged he had to shuffle around the temporary scaffolding rig that allowed access for repairs. He looked down into the web of scaffolding.

In the very heart of the engine unit, two eldar were at work, supervised by a third who was clearly their leader. Like Kaspel, the eldar had realised that the damaged engine unit was not just stalling the ship, but preventing them siphoning power from the generatorium to drag the Sanctity into the webway. They seemed to have found their own solution, and were rigging a complex mechanism into the heart of the damaged unit using white-hot, precision cutting tools.

Kaspel shuddered at this latest violation of the machine-spirit.

The leader, who had removed his helmet to reveal cruel features and deep black eyes, was obviously unhappy with the progress of his warrior technicians, and paced imperiously across the bars of the scaffold. He twitched to the left and right, and then, seemingly rolling his eyes back, he looked up.

The lead eldar’s gaze caught Kaspel looking down. The alien barked a command to his men.

Caution abandoned, Kaspel ducked around the scaffolding and ran across the top of the machine as fast as he could, all the while trying not to lose his footing. Behind him he could hear the metallic clattering of someone climbing the scaffolding.

As he reached the edge of the machine on the hull side, only a short distance from the door to the rest of the ship, there was the harsh report of a weapon being fired, and then another. Something shattered against the ceiling near Kaspel’s head, but the second shot was closer. A thin shard of crystal tore through Kaspel’s shoulder, cutting right to the bone. He was overwhelmed with pain as he rolled off the top of the machine and fell the rest of the way, landing heavily on the walkway below.

Some part of his mind was warning him that the eldar used poison weaponry, but this was the least of Kaspel’s worries. The fall had broken his leg, and his arm below the shoulder wound felt completely numb. He heard the screams of the eldar leader. Kaspel rolled onto his back, and looked down the walkway. An eldar was running towards him, weapon raised.

He had seconds left to live. There was no more time, no escape.

Kaspel thrust his good hand into his robes, finding Whallon’s bolt pistol. He looked around, locating the spherical, silver shape of a plasma capsule slightly further down the engine unit, its metallic bulge curving out of the machine’s side. Kaspel raised the bolt pistol, and as he did so his mechadendrites reached sideways towards the engine unit, finding pipes and struts to hold on to.

Time seemed to slow, the eldar raising its weapon, as Kaspel took aim. He was not a warrior, but he was an enginseer, with a sharp eye and the mind to calculate trajectory. Kaspel squeezed the trigger.

The plasma breach was a ripple of fierce blue energy that consumed the nearest section of walkway, which tore apart, blasting the eldar out of the gap in the hull. The energy field fizzed as the eldar passed through it, out into the vacuum, but remained intact. Although Kaspel was just outside the range of the plasma breach, the walkway under him buckled, and he was left hanging limply from the side of the engine unit.

The lights in the chamber switched to deep red, and a klaxon sounded. Kaspel heard the bulkheads crash down, isolating the chamber from the rest of the ship.

Then it began, the entire engine unit detaching itself from the Sanctity, grinding free, rolling thrusters-first out of the ship. As it moved, the plasteel wall that separated the engine from the thruster itself ripped apart, and the atmosphere began to rush out of the chamber. Kaspel saw the eldar leader emerge from the damaged area of the engine, only to be sucked out into space. As the unit ground spacewards, the scaffolding covering the damage collapsed into a storm of splinters that scattered into space.

Kaspel didn’t see the other eldar die, but he didn’t need to. No one was leaving alive.

The solid grip of Kaspel’s mechadendrites kept him from being sucked away as the engine unit slid free of the Sanctity. Then Kaspel was floating in the void, free of the ship’s artificial gravity, clinging to the damaged machine.

The air was gone, the transmission of sound with it, and there was only the sound of Kaspel’s own frantic breath echoing within his mask. His airtight facemask with its built-in rebreather would grant him a little more life in the vacuum than his enemies had.

The lenses in his mask were beginning to freeze up, but Kaspel looked back, and to his satisfaction saw that, with the damaged unit removed, the remaining thrusters were back online, firing in an automated test pattern. The Sanctity was alive once more, its machine-spirit safe, its crew free to rejoin the war on another front.

Kaspel’s war, however, was over. While his augmentations allowed him to survive in the vacuum for a while, they did not add up to the protection of a spacesuit. He was frosting over. Subjected to the vacuum of space for much longer, the more vulnerable parts of his life support would crack.

Kaspel suspected that he wouldn’t actually live long enough to see that happen. Propelled free of the Sanctity’s grip, the engine block was beginning to feel the effects of the gravity of the planet below. Kaspel tightened his mechadendrites around the machinery behind him, and looked towards the planet below.

Soon enough, Kaspel would be burned away along with everything but the hardiest parts of the engine, incinerated as the engine unit entered the planet’s atmosphere. But for a second, just before his vision was consumed by the glare of re-entry, Kaspel maximised the capabilities of his augmented senses, letting the rush of sensory data consume him.

For a moment, Kaspel took in the view of an alien world. The continents, vast and grey-brown, dappled with forests and streaks of mountain ranges. The seas and lakes, purplish blue. The wisps of cloud in the atmosphere. The irregular grey mass of once-great cities, long since deserted by whichever species had walked the soil.

As Kaspel fell towards his first and final contact with alien ground, he felt no fear, no fury, only awe at the scale and complexity of the world below, the endlessly intricate mechanisms of a universe that defied the knowledge and rituals of his science, that would be, to him, forever alien.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Clapham was born and raised in Yorkshire, studied and worked in London for over a decade, and is now an itinerant writer and editor based in Exeter, Devon.

Mark has written prose and scripts for characters including Doctor Who, Bernice Summerfield and Iris Wildthyme, as well as comic scripts for acclaimed indie publisher Accent UK. Mark is Content Editor for the Shiny Shelf review site and blogs at the modestly named www.markclapham.com

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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ISBN 978-0-85787-355-2

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