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Assassinorum: Live Wire – Robert Rath

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Assassinorum: Execution Force’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Assassinorum: Live Wire

by Robert Rath

For nine days Jezette Vaal lived in darkness, unaware of anything but the smell of unwashed bodies and the heat of the thrumming reactors below her feet. On the fourth day, a small group tried to sabotage the prison hulk. These men and women were, after all, tech-thralls and data-menials. Servants of the blessed Machine-God. They’d lived decades – some their whole lives – on void-borne craft, and knew how to access maintenance ducts in even the most secure ship holds.

Vaal had been an engine-master on the Theorem of Castillus – a position of relative privilege in the mid-decks – and wasn’t brought into the plot. Even now, with the crew captured by tech-pirates and packed like livestock in a hold, the ship’s rigid class system held. All vessels are divided between two categories: those that hold the nine-tailed whip, and those that feel it. And to ordinary voidsmen, warrant officers like Vaal were not to be trusted.

The plotters had planned to reach the reactor and overload it. They didn’t make it more than ten feet into the duct.

In the vaults of the ship’s hold, hidden among the rafters, telescoping eyes watched the would-be saboteurs. Within a second, the watchers descended on the subjects, crashing down with the flutter of semi-organic wings, shattering spines and limbs with their iron feet. Flechette carbines painted the floor with the six prisoners’ gore – and then the attackers were gone. Back to the rafters. Once again watching.

No one tried to escape after that.

Now, five days later, the prisoners milled about restlessly. They’d felt the bone-numbing jolt of landing, felt the depressurisation of de-gassing after planetfall. Vaal fought to stay upright in the jostling crowd, nearly crushed as it surged towards the rear hatch.

‘Open!’ she shouted, her breath squeezed from her lungs. ‘For Omnissiah’s sake, open!’

Expectant murmurs turned to shrieks as the ramp dropped, blinding them with sunlight reflecting off the snow. Vaal’s ocular augmetics adjusted to the brightness, and she saw blue sparks leaping off taser goads at the back of the crowd. They were low-power blows, meant to herd rather than kill, and they splashed neon light across the tormented faces of the captives. Vaal saw the stampede coming and forced her way through a gap, towards the side of the hold.

‘Slowly!’ she shouted. ‘Go slowly or else–’

Screams. A flood of bodies like a dam breaking. Half a dozen tech-thralls went down under the feet of the rushing press of flesh. Then they were out, herded into the trenchway that funnelled them to the great dome. Bright reflections off the snowpack dazzled their eyes and instantly burned their pale skin. Quivering lungs, accustomed to a lifetime of thin shipboard atmosphere, ached at the touch of the freezing, oxygen-rich air. Vox-amplified throats howled in fear at the white ice flurries that blew down, settling on their robes and bare skin. Vaal had heard of precipitation in stories, but could not recall the word for it. A great ice shelf rose to her right, the wind-polished surfaces the same bright blue as the captors’ taser goads.

And ahead, the ice station awaited.

Vaal did not know why they were here. Why they had been spared by the heretek pirates, when the killers had slaughtered the rest of the crew aboard the Theorem of Castillus. They’d come from different decks, different departments. There seemed to be no commonality in rank or origin. But now that the crowd all faced the same way, it was obvious. Each one of the starveling mass had a connection port at the base of their skull – a hardwired data-jack.

Ahead, the gate of the ice station opened like a great jaw.

‘You are about to embark on a great awakening,’ said the thing on the vid-screen.

They were everywhere, those screens. Mounted on equipment and the inward curving walls of the dome. The half-face – for only its nose and lower jaw were visible – had sallow skin and blackened teeth. Nutrient hoses sprouted from both nostrils. The images blurred and rolled, the words desynchronised with the drawn lips.

‘Moisture damage,’ Vaal whispered, her engineer’s mind diagnosing the problem even as she was herded through the labyrinth of iron cages that forced the captives into single file. ‘Station interior is heated, causes condensate.’

The comforting train of thought distracted her from the fear.

‘You will be among us. You will belong. Cast aside the lies of your Omnissiah, for it is but a ghost conjured by superstition and number-prayers. We will unlock and reformat you to serve the Power of Eight. For the glory of the Upgrader, the Lord of Transmutation. Quavarian has come to grant you deliverance. Bow and accept the heart_wrym.’

Her stomach went acidic at the name. A minor algorithm in her visual augmetics crashed and restarted, rendering her blind for two point seven seconds. Makov Quavarian. The traitor.

They were truly lost.

Skitarii kept the peace in the cage-labyrinth, walking along between the twisting channels and ensuring with stabs of their goads that the new intake shuffled forward with suitable efficiency. Mauve oculars looked on, impassive, at the mass of sobbing thralls.

How many were taken? wondered Vaal. She let an algorithmic extrapolation shut out the suffering around her. Nine hundred, perhaps? Then she turned a corner, and saw what awaited them.

Two skitarii mancatchers, their augmetic limbs built for clamping and immobilising, snatched a shivering data-menial from the head of the line. He yelped but did not fight. Years of indoctrination aboard a Mechanicus vessel had habituated him to obedience. They clamped him by the shoulders and torso, one vice-hand on the nape of his neck so the skull port was easily accessible. A large robed man, his lips pursed, drew a data-spike from a font and shook the excess moisture off it. He stepped towards the thrall, thick cabling snaking from the back of the data-spike.

‘Accept the heart_wrym,’ he said to the shivering menial. ‘And through the Power of Eight, be upgraded.’

With steady hands he guided the spike to the man’s skull port.

‘By the grace of Programmator Quavarian, I, Slavigor Alpha-208, do hereby reformat you to serve the Lord of Transmutation.’

The spike locked home, and the man stopped shivering. Light from his augmetic eye, painting the deck plates blue, blinked like a strobe-lumen then tinted to mauve. The mancatchers released him with a clack of their claws.

‘Now go forth,’ said Slavigor, detaching the spike, ‘renewed by the Power of Eight.’

Slowly, painfully, the thrall crawled forward and dragged himself to his feet, staggering into the crowd of transmuted that wandered into the station, weak-legged as new-born grox-calves, their reformatted minds still reeling with the exploded consciousness and terrible liberation of the heart_wyrm.

‘Next one,’ said Slavigor, lifting the heavy spike with its trailing cable, the gold-plated jack as thick as a spearhead. He locked eyes with Vaal. ‘Her. Get her.’

The mancatchers clamped Vaal by the shoulders and torso, one placing a vice-hand on the nape of her neck and forcing her to the grated floor. She fought.

‘Do not struggle,’ Slavigor said, dipping the spike into the font. It smelled of cerebral grease and counterseptic. ‘Your bones will break before their grip.’

‘Omnissiah curse you,’ Vaal snarled. ‘You and all hereteks. May your data-archive be wiped clean. Your augmetics fail. Your–’

‘Shhhhh…’ Slavigor walked towards her, one finger to his lips. Vaal fought, roared through clenched teeth. ‘Quite a lot of spirit for a menial, yes? Who are you exactly?’

Vaal felt the man’s fingers brush over the barcode tattoo, the tingle of a data-reader on her skin.

‘Engine-Master Third Class Jezette Vaal. Small wonder. You are no tech-serf are you, Vaal?’

‘The servants of the Omnissiah will come for us,’ she said to the decking. ‘Send you to your damnation.’

Slavigor knelt, looked her in the face. ‘No one is coming, Engine-Master Vaal. Ten thousand like you have passed through here, and not one skitarius, not one Guardsman or angel of the Adeptus Astartes came to fight for them. And once I insert this data-spike’ – he waved it before her nose – ‘you will not fight either.’

‘Identify and explain status.’

The voice was sharp, came from her left, and Slavigor immediately straightened. The vice-hand of the mancatcher on her left loosened enough for her to turn her head. The voice came from the vox-caster of one of the skitarii mancatchers, but it was not his – it was the voice from the vid-screens. Makov Quavarian.

‘This one is Slavigor Alpha-208, master programmator. Reformatter at Convocation Channel Six and joyful servant of the Eighth Power, two hundred and forty-one reformats to meet quota.’

‘Intake has halted at your station. Channel efficiency nineteen per cent suboptimal from last fifty reformats. Explain.’ The skitarius’ eyes were different, now. More focused. The purple light of his eye-lenses was piercingly bright.

‘A high-quality intake, master programmator,’ said Slavigor, a quiver in his voice. ‘An engine-master. I am ascertaining fitness for special duties.’

‘Do so in the examination cell, Alpha-208. Do not stall the intake process. And be quick or I will remit you to organic recycling.’

‘Yes, master,’ Slavigor said with a bow. ‘By the Power of Eight.’

‘Do not distract me again,’ said the puppeteered mancatcher, his lenses dimming.

‘Get her up,’ said Slavigor, handing the data-spike to an assistant. ‘Quickly!’

The room was spare, dim overhead surgical lights the only illumination. The mancatchers snapped Vaal in the chair, restraints on her wrists and ankles. Slavigor rushed the skitarii back out to make up for the delay in the processing channel.

‘Soundproof,’ he said, as he closed and locked the door. ‘You are a fortunate woman, Jezette Vaal. Do you know that?’

Vaal snorted. ‘Because I will keep some of my mind, like you? That I will be twisted, not broken? Come closer and I’ll bite your throat out.’

‘You are smart, aren’t you? And brave. I could use that right now.’ Slavigor smiled. It was an expression that didn’t match his features.

He dragged a chair in front of her, near a rolling tray of rusted surgical instruments. He settled down into it backwards, arms across the chair back, and looked her directly in her augmetic eyes.

‘So, let me ask you a question – would you like to do one last service for the Omnissiah?’

Vaal’s lips parted, words caught in her throat.

‘Answer quickly. We don’t have much time.’

Vaal’s breath came out ragged, her suppressed panic discharging in one hissing word. ‘Yes.’

‘Do you know how to fire a gun?’

‘What?’

‘This,’ he said, as he drew a long, slender weapon from his robes, ‘is a Kater-pattern needle pistol. Silent. Delayed-detonation bolts. It has a hundred-round drum, but just tap the trigger – don’t lean on it or you’ll exhaust the magazine. Are you listening?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ He extended the pistol towards the door, as if he expected someone to come through it. ‘Pick your target. Aim. One or two taps in the head or chest. Shoot the purple-eyed bastards up close, that way you won’t miss. Then disappear into the crowd of intakes and strike again.’

‘Who–’

‘You’ll cause a panic. A stampede. That’s good. That’s what I need from you. Kill, disappear, kill again. The longer you can stay alive and draw the disorder out, the better. Don’t let yourself be taken.’

Slavigor put the pistol into her hand, clasped his gnarled fingers around hers to ensure she held on to it.

‘You – you’ve come to save us?’ she asked.

‘I don’t save people. That’s not my role. But if you do this, you can help me burn this place to the ground. You understand?’

Vaal took a breath, willed her racing heart to slow, nodded.

The chair restraints clanged open.

‘Omnissiah bless you, Jezette Vaal,’ said Slavigor, throwing the locking bolt and opening the cell door. ‘Now bring them your fury.’

Jezette Vaal, engine-master third class and servant of the Machine-God, came out shooting.

Sycorax, of the Callidus Temple, ran limping away from the sound of needle fire. She pressed a hand to her side as she did it, the blood soaking Slavigor’s robes rising easily from the superficial wound she’d made there.

‘A gun!’ she shouted in Slavigor’s bleating voice, shouldering her way past knots of the newly transmuted. Behind her, screams and autogun fire echoed in the station vaults. ‘She has a gun!’

Skitarii ran the other way. Sycorax stood aside to let them pass, then went deeper into the station.

It had been the best way to slip away unnoticed. Intake day. Always chaotic. Always messy – now much messier. She needed that. Ice Station Zeta was a tight, regimented place. Every soul to their task, most thralls below leadership level following preset programming in their interconnected mind-network. To even step out of routine invited scrutiny from Quavarian – a red flag for him to crash through the backdoor he’d created in his mind-twisted converts, letting him take personal control.

But now all was confusion, alarm, disorderliness. A riot of minds. And running away from danger is exactly what the cowardly Slavigor would do – nothing out of place.

In fact, she’d been fortunate that when the line slowed, Quavarian had decided not to jump directly into her augmented brain. Had he done so, he might have noticed how shallow the machine-mind – the one that existed in her compartmentalised implant – actually was. It had been a hard infiltration. She hadn’t liked being Slavigor. Tainting the minds of thrall after thrall. Performing the cruelty that was expected of him. Indeed, the only comfort when she lived his sadism was knowing that the man himself had died with her envenomed blade in his carotid artery, and his body was dissolving in the proteyn pits. Revenge for so many intake days.

Sycorax remembered her own intake into Ice Station Zeta. The terrible howling of the prisoners, like the braying of inconsolable infants, their fear regressing them back to their most basic instincts. A painful insertion. She’d lain in the snow of the intake trench since the dark hours of morning, dressed in frosty rags, disguised as one of the frozen bodies that dotted the way from the landing ground to the gate. Kept alive by chemical warming packs inside her worker’s bodyglove and an insulating layer of snow. When the blind throng stumbled through the trench, she rose and joined them.

But even getting that far had taken nearly a year. She’d first tracked Quavarian to his lab on the fallen citadel world of Ataraxes – but found it deserted, the only sign of his presence a crypt stuffed with burned-out cogitator-banks and a furnace full of bones.

It was enough to follow his trail. For among the bones of Quavarian’s immolated test subjects she’d discovered skull ports of every make and manufacture, all Mechanicus-stamped. The programmator was clearly responsible for the unusual rise in piracy among the Meloc Worlds, but that archipelago contained twenty planets, and it was the fried data-banks that helped her pin down where.

‘Cold,’ she’d whispered when it finally hit her. ‘He needs cold.’

The cogitators had overheated. Quavarian, one of the greatest heretek minds in the sector – a master programmator who could fuse scrapcode with the daemonic essence of the warp – had been so consumed with his data-chains that he’d not realised that his climate data was two thousand years out of date. Ataraxes no longer had six months of winter, but three – summer came hot, and the stifling humidity of the crypt had overloaded the vast processor-banks necessary to run and perfect his machine-viruses.

And nowhere in the archipelago was as consistently frigid as Sanga Kappa’s glacier-locked northern pole.

On paper, Station Zeta had been abandoned two millennia ago, its original research mission lost to time and Mechanicus obfuscation. But an orbital probe fly-by had detected low heat blooms from the ring-shaped facility – and in the centre of the ring, a group of machines glowing coal-like under the conversion field.

The data-banks. Open to the cold and snow, but not any debris. No ability to insert directly into the inner sanctum via grav-chute.

So she’d contacted her liaison, and returned to the Callidus Temple and its private chirurgeons. Went under the knife and saws to get a port installed in the base of her skull – a risky procedure, one the Temple usually avoided lest they lose such a highly trained operative. The expedited recovery time was only possible due to her long use of polymorphine.

The port led to more than a simple implant: it was a miniature machine-mind, totally sealed off from her consciousness via data-dam. A fake consciousness, separate from her true one. A thinking brain she observed but did not experience. That was crucial. To infiltrate Station Zeta she’d need to be infected with the heart_wrym, and have a mind Quavarian could browse. A part of herself that would need to be extracted and destroyed after the mission.

‘I don’t want whatever Quavarian is putting in these wretches,’ she told the liaison over secure vox-link. ‘And when he searches my thoughts, I don’t want him discovering that I’m carrying a wrecker-code.’

When the cultists had stabbed her with the data-spike, she’d felt a moment of cold fear as the heart_wyrm surged across her machine cortex, whispering heresies that scrawled across the thought-readout on her vision. Her panic only receded once she was sure the dam was functioning. Keeping her true mind pure.

They hadn’t sensed anything amiss. Every tech-thrall panicked when the data-spike scraped against their skull and into their deepest conscious. And they were not overly concerned with the reaction of individual subjects – this study involved quantity, not quality.

Slavigor had been the one to spike her.

‘You should thank me,’ he’d said. ‘For giving your death purpose.’

Even walled off from the data-taint, she stumbled, disoriented, along with the others, the data-readout of her fake consciousness telling her that she was to report to the armament manufactorum. There, she spent a week on the factory line, piecing together trigger assemblies of radium carbines. Mimicking the intense focus and evil chants of the other mindjacked workers.

‘We are the Transmuted. Minds unshackled from the false gods of metal and flesh. Upgraded by the Power of Eight.’

Her chance to flee came when a containment sheath breached in the chamber where thralls built the radium firing chambers, necessitating an evacuation. Sycorax slipped away, carrying a box of parts as if it were her calling, looking for the highest-ranking cultist with the smallest number of augmetics. She’d run directly into Slavigor as he walked to his diurnus shift, the box of parts crashing to the floor and echoing in the deserted corridor.

He sneered down at her bent-backed form. ‘Watch your pathing, you little b–’

He was dead before he hit the floor.

Now, as she climbed the steel-grille stairs to a catwalk near the great dome of the ice station, she saw the enormity of the undertaking. Behind her she could see milling and confusion, the dart of red beams lashing in every direction. The skitarii were firing at random. Possibly even shooting at each other.

‘Keep going, Vaal,’ she willed.

Below, on her right, she could see thralls plugged into vehicle simulators; on her left, a mesmerised crew building a rockcrete bunker. Directly underneath her, through the grated floor, she could hear the crackle of las-fire. She glanced beneath to see a kill-maze, like the ones she’d trained at in the Callidus Temple. Two teams of menials, their chests and protruding ribs painted red and blue, swayed through it clumsily like puppets. Their spindle arms were barely able to lift the laspistols and autoguns they shot each other with.

‘Poor bastards,’ she muttered, as one menial spun to the deck, shot by an enemy standing no more than ten paces from him. The shooter’s face stretched in horror and disbelief, even as she jerkily stalked forward to stand over the wounded man and empty her powercell into his back – before an autogun burst pulverised her emaciated torso.

‘The next stage,’ Sycorax said to herself.

Heart_wyrm was an effective meme-virus. It could take over a machine-augmented mind and turn it inside out – making the victim a golem of flesh and metal. But heart_wrym was also of limited utility, requiring a direct upload to an augmented brain equipped with a data-port. Useful in an uprising, but not scalable. Not infectious.

The version propelling the puppeteered victims was an alpha test. A broadcast virus, transmitted via astropathic link, beam-transmission or airwave. Warp energy channelled by the mass thought-repetition of its chant – not too dangerous to the ordinary soldier or civilian, but extremely communicable when it came to the Mechanicus or astropathic choirs, whose minds were trained to hear and repeat litany by rote.

Destroying Quavarian would not be enough. Sycorax would have to eliminate heart_wyrm, along with any research and development of its successor.

That’s where the wrecker-code came in.

She sent a mind-impulse that toggled the implanted consciousness offline, lest Quavarian note that one of his thralls was so far from its station.

Sycorax clambered up a disintegrating ladder with light steps, putting her weight close to the joins on each rung, testing the give on them with her hands as she ascended. Up here, in the more derelict vaults of the station, where the weekly cloud bank of anti-corrosion fog didn’t reach, the infrastructure was in poor shape. The antifreeze rains ate away at the rubberine coating that protected the metal, leaving the condensation of a heated station to do its work. The upper vaults disappeared into a humid artificial cloud layer that blocked line of sight and distorted the signal of Quavarian’s searching mind – which is why she’d hidden her arms cache here.

She gained a vault catwalk and scrambled up, breaking into a run and leaping a seven-foot gap between platforms. She landed harder than she’d expected due to Slavigor’s bulk, and sent the long catwalk swinging on its hanging chains. After steadying herself, she knelt for the injector embedded in the muscle of her right thigh. Pressed her thumb into the recessed dish to find the activator. After a breath, she hit it.

Polymorphine and pain, the two linked, birthed together like conjoined twins. Inside her abdomen, bladders deflated to collapse Slavigor’s bulk. Limb bones twisted and shortened. Her face smoothed like hot wax, running into her familiar features.

‘Come on, come on,’ she growled. It always hurt, but it hurt less becoming herself. Feeling her able muscles become tight and strong, shedding excess. She was a highly trained athlete, the targets she mimicked rarely as physically conditioned as she was. This felt like an unburdening. Knowing she would soon be able to use her body, her crafted and augmented self, to its full potential was intoxicating.

She bellied down on the catwalk and reached underneath, finding the plastek zip pack secured there by magnets. In her previous guise, she’d hidden the melon-sized package in her abdominal cavity, disguising it as a cancerous growth or overgrown cyst. Only when she’d become Slavigor had she enjoyed enough freedom to secrete it here.

Within a minute she’d pulled on her synskin bodysuit, minus the hood, and assembled her gauntlet with its phase sword in its retracted position along her forearm. The neural shredder she secured to the small of her back, then connected both blade and shredder to the power pack before shrugging the unit onto her shoulders and pulling the webbing tight.

She was about to pull on a sweat-stained robe to cover the equipment when she heard the clicking. Repetitive, rhythmic. Like the call of a wood-boring insect, or a mechanical chrono being wound.

Callidus doctrine emphasised speed. Speed and multitasking. Sycorax continued donning the robe as she scanned for threats, dividing the environment around her into quadrants and glancing at each. Behind first, then to her flanks, ahead and up.

Nothing. Fifty feet above her the humidity cloud steamed and roiled in the odd air currents of the dome. Loops of cabling hanging out of the fog like vines in a jungle. Behind and to her left, a group swayed slightly, as if a great bird had alighted there then sprung into the air. Forty storeys below, the layout of the station glowed a weirdly comforting orange. The puppeteered test subjects in the kill-maze appeared no bigger than her thumbnail.

The noise, again.

Sycorax tensed her fist, shooting the retracted alien blade through her gauntlet and locking it in place. Its black metal shimmered a lightless green.

And she looked up.

The shape dropped down at her like a stone. Silent. Heavy. She heard synth-leather ripple and air whistling through dormant engine fans and talons.

But what she saw was the constellation of mauve circles.

Sycorax rolled aside and the monster slammed down where she had just been, its steel claws denting the metal. A head jerked up towards her, cocked face fixing her with its multi-lensed gaze, its insectile chattering turning into a squeal of vox feedback.

Leather wings. Blackened steel limbs. Rubberine tubes dangling tentacle-like from the mouth of its gas hood. A pistol weapon and taser goad, its dynamo sparking with activation.

Pteraxii.

The feedback howl formed into a voice.

‘Alpha-208,’ it said, muffled under the rubberine breathing cup of the hood.

Even though the sound of it was distorted, a chill ran through Sycorax. It was his voice, Quavarian.

‘You are more interesting than I supposed.’

The pistol snapped up fast, product of a mind stripped of cognition in favour of enhanced reflexes. But Quavarian’s greeting had given her time to plan countermoves.

Her phase sword bisected the gun just ahead of the trigger guard, and only when its ammo spool came apart, spilling wire-thin monofilament sticks, did she realise it was a flechette blaster.

He stabbed forward with the taser goad, the long reach of the sparking weapon ideal for the narrow confines of the catwalk. But he’d overcommitted to the lunge. She ducked under the blow and rolled up past his guard on the outside, using her free left arm to wrap his metal sword arm and pin it tight, the elbow joint of his limb-stump against her ribs. Then she levered, feeling tendons rip and bones tear out of the socket as the elbow bent the wrong way. Mauve eye-lenses flared, and for a moment she saw the tiny ghost images of damage reports projected in reverse across the glass. Then she stabbed her xenos blade through the compound eyes and they went dark.

Tink-tink. Heavy. Metallic.

A bad sound. Always a bad sound.

An object at her feet. Arc grenade. She slap-kicked it into space and bolted down the catwalk, noting in her peripheral vision as the munition detonated below, bursting in a cloud of powder blue shot through with lightning. An oddly pleasing note against the orange of the landscape beneath her.

Another of the pteraxii slammed down on the catwalk ahead, rocking it sideways on its chains like a ship in a storm. A clang of steel behind her betrayed another winged abomination, landing just ahead of the dead one’s body.

They’d bracketed her on the narrow walkway. Claws tore at deck plating as they moved in.

‘A phase blade, unknown alloy,’ the pteraxii mewled in unison. ‘What exquisite toys you have brought me.’

The pair were trying to contain her. Prevent her from moving, as reinforcements moved in. Her only options were to break out or be swarmed.

Sycorax turned sideways, feet apart, meeting both charges at once. The one ahead had an autopistol. Likely looted during one of their piracy raids. It raised the gun just as the one behind jabbed with its taser goad.

Sycorax bent her spine near double backward, letting the autopistol burst pass above her. It spanged harmlessly off the goad-wielder’s armour as he jabbed the sparking prod of his weapon at her ribs.

She parried, rolling his oncoming thrust aside to trap it, sparking, against a support chain, then snap-kicked the one with the autopistol so his second burst went into the vaults above.

That knocked him backward enough for her to draw her neural shredder from the small of her back and send a point-blank wave of empyric energy crashing through his body. He staggered, nervous system pulverised – dead on his feet – and Sycorax used the moment of shock to disengage from the one with the taser goad and sprint towards the falling pteraxii. She planted a foot on his toppling body and vaulted over, somersaulting and landing at a run.

Leaving the spasming monstrosity behind as an obstacle for his comrade.

‘Do not kill it!’ the programmator’s voice echoed from behind her and from dim shapes overhead. ‘We will learn more from a vivisection.’

Behind her, metal claws scraped decking as the pteraxii followed on all fours, wings folded like a carnivorous bat. It was gaining fast. Inhumanly quick even on the ground. She could feel the fan-wash of its revving pack engines, ready to ascend once it grabbed her.

No escape. She’d have to take it out.

Glancing back to judge her moment, she leapt over the side of the catwalk and grabbed one of the taut support chains, letting the links slide through her grip so the momentum carried her around, the world blurring as she spun a U-turn and rammed feet first into the monstrosity’s face. The impact threw its head back and to the side, vertebrae popping and grinding, Quavarian’s voice burbling from its torn larynx.

More pteraxii were circling now. A dozen of them. Falling like comets on the network of catwalks. Shutting down the exits.

She sprinted to a T-junction and saw the way to the right swarming with three winged horrors, the walkway swinging back and forth with their heavy footfalls. A mobile catwalk, able to be repositioned on its chains. Unmoored from the others.

Sycorax surged power into her phase sword and scythed through the support chains where their catwalk met hers, spilling the creatures into the chasm below. She went left, saw more shadowy bodies coming, these blooming fire from the pilot lights of their phosphor torches.

‘Avoid unnecessary damage!’ they shouted in choir.

Impact.

It hit her from the side, a perfect dive out of the jungle canopy of cabling, and she barely registered the strike before she was sailing out over the station, shredder jolted from her grip and dangling at the end of its cable. For a moment she thought she was falling head first, but then she registered the pain in her leg and twisted to see a pteraxii’s claw locked around her thigh, its wings outspread to catch the draughts and engine pack cycling furiously to compensate for the extra weight.

Fighting air currents and disorientation, she retracted her phase sword and bent upward. Her fingers scrabbled at the claw’s grip – she dared not stab the creature so high up – trying to loosen it and avoid damage to her leg that might cancel out an escape. But the creature’s other claw simply bound her right wrist.

Another pteraxii swooped up alongside and scrabbled at her – trying to claim the kill for itself, its claws digging into her free leg and nearly pulling it out of the socket – but her captor beat at the rival with its wings and squawked in Quavarian’s voice.

‘Negative! Away, feral thing! The specimen must not be rendered non-functional.’

Sycorax took hold of her neural shredder’s cable and yanked it back to her hand, then pointed the emerald-green gas chamber at the rival. She couldn’t risk hitting her captor – she was far too high up – but this harasser…

Fork lightning lanced through the shredder’s crystal chamber and a pulse of green energy flickered through the scratching pteraxii. The monster went limp, its limb-stump-controlled wings loose, folding and unfolding like tired eyelids, the unaffected engine pack powering it into a lazy spiral towards the facility floor.

Its wings did not beat. The engines provided all propulsion – it was a glider.

Interesting.

She studied the joints of her captor, then pointed her shredder upward and unleashed another crack of lightning.

The winged monster had been taking her to the fleshworks, a complex of dissection theatres and organic recyclers huddled up against the inner ring of the station. By sharing a bulkhead with the outside air, the suture-smiths and harvesters could take advantage of the cold heart of the station, and Quavarian would not have to travel far from his cogitator-banks and synth-brains to see the works of his surgical priests. Not far from where she’d been heading, and easy enough to glide to while clinging to the dead pteraxii as it made its slow corkscrew descent. Sycorax oriented herself by the smokestacks of the crematorium.

She let go above the refinery, where the fats and soft tissues of dead subjects were rendered into insulating gelatine to keep the station’s artisanium and dormitory operating in the cold. She fell sixty feet towards the spillway, where a conveyor belt added endlessly to the scree slope of amber-coloured lumps of human industrial material.

A normal human would’ve died on impact, even with the padding of the gelatine slope. But Sycorax took a micro-hit of polymorphine to slide her leg free from the pteraxii’s claw, and made her body as soft and pliable as the gelatine she fell upon. Still, she dislocated her shoulder, and had to pull it back into its socket as she hid between a pair of exhaust pipes, in a space no wider than two index fingers laid tip to tip.

Pteraxii reinforcements slammed down, and began searching for her. When she’d been airborne they’d kept their distance, seeing what happened to the one who’d grabbed at her. Their instructions were not to harm her unduly, so they could not open up with their weapons and render her safe to approach. And yet self-preservation programming also told them to guard their own lives.

So they had flown behind in holding patterns, a tactical stalemate.

Keeping her body flexible, Sycorax slid deeper into the pipe assembly. Coiling up the warm exhausts like a climbing serpent. Finding a ventilation hatch no bigger than a dining plate.

She took another hit of polymorphine and wormed her way further inside, skull deforming and brain flattening to fit the tight space. Her thoughts briefly became as simple and mercenary as a reptile following the cold. Through the facility, past smells of death and freonisation equipment. Burrowing through tunnels until the dimness at the end of a shaft resolved into the barcode-like glow of light through a vent. It was bigger, that space, enough to crouch and feel like a human again.

Not that she was a human, not really. She was both more and less.

Her auto-tool undid the screws from the inside, the tool’s soft burring muffled by the eight inches of new snow outside. When she dropped into it, her feet slid a half-inch on contact. The air intake area was slick with de-icing spray, and she went belly down in the snow to avoid detection as she got her bearings.

Her probe fly-by had never penetrated the conversion field, but she’d known what to expect from the abandoned facility. A maze of tall cogitator-banks, data-vaults and synthbrain processors. Red, green and purple rune-lights winking in the grey sunlight.

She had not expected the snow frosting every surface, lying thick atop the machinery. As she looked up, her eye-lenses flicking to sense energy, she saw whirling snowflakes drifting down through the green glaze of the conversion field. Quavarian had clearly set it to admit the muffling, chilling snow but to reject ballistic impacts like hail or falling ice. The temperature here was not as biting cold as the unshielded tundra outside the dome – enough to cool the overburdened data-banks and crunch-coders but not to freeze them.

She tried to assess the angle of attack. Should she find an upload station and inject the wrecker-code, then search for Quavarian, or kill the programmator first? Either way, stealth was her best tactical option. Before dropping out of the vent Sycorax had reapplied a spray-layer of synskin, this one white to cover the black of her bodysuit. She was glad. She’d stick out like a–

A flicker to her right.

Her reflexes saved her. She was up and cartwheeling away when the energy wave ploughed through the snow, throwing a wake of ice and slurry as it passed through her former position. Behind her, the vent outlet dented inward with the sound of a bass drum.

Sonic weapon. Low power. A shot meant to disable rather than kill.

Sycorax dodged into the maze of cogitator-banks. Surrounding herself with sensitive equipment might shield her.

‘Clever, clever,’ Quavarian said, betraying his position.

She cursed herself. He’d lost her when she’d wormed her way into the pipes and vents, but either he’d set an invisible alarm beam over the vent or heard the purr of her auto-tool. Either way, after exiting the vent she’d waited too long before moving.

Not a mistake she’d keep making. She zipped through the maze of black-obelisk cogitator-banks to get away from her last position. Circled around in a flanking manoeuvre.

‘A temple assassin,’ Quavarian shouted. He was to her left, his vox-amplified voice bouncing off the hard surfaces of the maze. ‘I’m honoured, really. I had no idea that the High Lords of Terra had taken such an interest in my work. Pity that recognition did not come earlier. So like the Imperium to only acknowledge talent once it goes to the opposition.’

She turned a corner and nearly ran headlong into a skitarius, his radium carbine held low as he made a patrol sweep. Sycorax dodged right and struck, phase sword plunging into the vox-broadcaster in his chest, severing his chance of tripping an alarm just before it ruptured his lead-shielded heart. Before he fell she was already around the next turn, distancing herself from the kill.

‘Poor Theta-6,’ Quavarian mewled. ‘I’d just rewritten his target priority chains.’

Sycorax pressed her back to a corner and glanced around, seeing another pair of skitarii coming down the aisle of banks towards her. Their shouldered rifles twitched towards where she’d looked around the corner.

‘You have found quite the weakness here, hiding amongst my synthbrains,’ chuckled Quavarian.

She pulled the empty can of synskin from her harness and pitched it high over the cogitator-banks like a grenade, waiting for the clack as it contacted the machinery. She heard it and spun around, shredder levelled. The vanguard had turned at the noise, their backs to her. One blast took them both, and she dodged across the mouth of the hallway.

‘Two more!’ Quavarian squawked. ‘You know this only further endears you to me. My, my, the things we will do together. A man has rivals, you know.’

He was around the next corner. Sycorax could hear him. Hear his bleating systems and the whir of warmers ensuring his few remaining organic components did not freeze. She got her shredder ready, judged distance.

‘Could you kill a Space Marine?’ he wheedled. ‘I bet you could. I bet you could gut an entire–’

Sycorax turned and dropped into a crouch, weapon levelled.

The little arc of lightning lit the gas chamber, the emerald beam-wave hitting the tech-monstrosity so square it took the thing off its feet.

Then she froze.

The skitarius lay in the snow, the light winking out in his eye-lenses, Quavarian’s voice dying in his throat.

‘Not a regicide player, are you?’

Peripheral motion on her right. Sycorax slashed, defensively – too slow. The mechandendrite grabbed her gauntlet, its pincer teeth sinking into the metal and slamming it hard into the cogitator-bank behind her.

‘Classic Templar sacrifice.’ The voice came from behind a knot of mechanical tentacles.

Sycorax raised her shredder so it nearly touched Quavarian’s hooded face and pulled the trigger. But the weapon needed a few seconds to cycle before firing again, and another mechadendrite forced it aside as a third metal tentacle snipped the weapon’s power cable with its shears.

Quavarian yanked her away from the wall and up into the air, slamming her on the snowy ground – once, twice, thrice – before leaning over her pinned form.

‘A Callidus of my very own. How lovely. I shall make good use of you.’

Sycorax had heard descriptions, but they had undersold Quavarian’s monstrosity.

He was massive. A round, globe-like body on a tripod of insectile stilts, his original limbs hanging flabby and disused. Ten feet tall with his walking array at full extension, his too-small head ballooning at the back from a full cranial reconstruction and a headdress of whirling antennae. A boxy vision augment covered his eyes, leaving no skin visible on his face apart from a laughing mouth full of grey gums and blackened teeth.

But the true horror was the equations. His fleshy arms and legs had been scarified with numbers, radicals and symbols that burned her eyes to look upon. They were scratched into the armour of his augmentations and inlaid into his blackened teeth. They sizzled and crawled, warp energy sparking from rune to rune.

‘Foolish little thing,’ he growled. His voice came through the mouths of twenty skitarii who were drifting in to form a circle around her. ‘You’ve played your game impressively long, but I see everything in this station. Even now, you do not see the truth.’

He gestured at the data-banks with a stubby vestigial arm.

‘Did you really expect to hide from me? Every piece of hardware here is my own sacred creation, networked to my mind. I can reach into any data-bank, any mind on this station, and pull its strings. Everything here is within my control.’

‘Not me,’ she sneered.

‘Oh, we shall see about that.’ Quavarian forced her head to the side, exposing the data-port. A mechadendrite tipped with a gilded data-spike slithered over her shoulder and slipped gingerly into the connection. ‘A data-dam. Interesting. Septuagent-class. I have not seen one before. Cawl is so clever. I expect he will be one of us soon, now that he has discovered the pleasure of creation. Oh yes… quite the encryption-lock, this. Whatever’s inside must be interesting indeed. But any lock can be forced. Now, I find loud noises quite unpleasant, so when I lance this boil, please do not scream.’

‘You,’ she said, ‘will do all the screaming for me.’

She dropped the data-dam, letting lose the wrecker-code.

The program which had been hiding in her compartmentalised consciousness the entire time.

Quavarian did not scream. His mouth snapped shut, head quaking, jaw clenched so tight his spoiled teeth shattered. The rune-equations smoked and burned on his skin. Deep inside him, a battery burned out with the acrid tang of ozone.

And then came the screams. Not from Quavarian but from the skitarii, falling to the snow, burying their faces in an attempt to escape the infection. From the banks of cogitators as they overheated and blew one after the other, purple flames leaping from their racks of crunch-coders.

Then, with a bang like a laud-hailer blowing out, the great conversion field popped.

And with a rush of air, the snow came in.

Boots crunched over the facility floor, cracking both the crust of old snow and the bones beneath. Three months, he estimated. Three months Ice Station Zeta had been open to the elements. The gates thrown open so the armies of ice and decay could rampage through its halls.

He passed bodies of test subjects and thralled skitarii, entwined in their final agonies and frozen over. Places where the ceiling had fallen in due to ice build-up, exposing the grey sky. And in the centre, he found the burned racks of cogitator-banks, standing like blackened tombstones in a burned cemetery. In a central courtyard was Quavarian, his pieces warped and fused from internal warp fires. One finger extended in a point.

The stranger knelt, and brushed away the snow.

A shadow in the ice. A cable.

He followed it, his heavy tread tracking through the station and out into the wind, which whipped his robe. Out through the snow, keeping oriented with an auspex that tracked the data-pipe frozen deep into the ice.

To the Khaldera glacier, five miles distant. To the cave.

To the data-sarcophagus that still winked and chittered. Its runes alight with their own miniaturised reactor.

The stranger reached out and brushed a layer of snow off the sarcophagus’ data-slate. Activated the backup history.

Saw the readout.

<Canticle of the Conqueror_Wyrm.>

<Quatrains optimised for broadcast trial.>

<Iteration 33-delta.>

The latest version was three months before the station’s destruction. And those three months of Quavarian’s research and development work would likely take years to replicate in the hands of another twisted tech-priest. Yet it meant total disaster had been averted.

He tapped the program with a finger. Smiled to himself. Despite the Imperium’s best efforts, despite the wiles of the Assassinorum and the ravages of the wrecker-virus, his operation was not over.

And the Imperium would tremble before the Conqueror_Wyrm.

About the Author

Robert Rath is a freelance writer from Honolulu who is currently based in Hong Kong. Though mostly known for writing the YouTube series Extra History, his credits also include numerous articles and a book for the U.S. State Department. He is the author of the short stories ‘The Garden of Mortal Delights’ and ‘War in the Museum’. The Infinite and the Divine is his first novel for Black Library.

An extract from Assassinorum: Execution Force.

The Changer’s symbol squirmed around the Black Legionnaire’s right eye. Severin Drask, sorcerer lord of the Crimson Slaughter, could not take his eyes from the god’s rune.

From the smile that Beraddon, sorcerer of the Black Legion, brutish and arrogant, offered to Drask, he knew it. Angular runes marred the man’s stone teeth. One eye shone a dirty, muddled brown, while the other was a chunk of marble emblazoned with the Pantheon star.

‘The Warmaster, praise be,’ began Beraddon, ‘will not see you. He will not indulge your request. His time is precious, now more than ever. Your request for assistance and consultation is denied.’

Drask made to protest, even as his hearts sank.

Beraddon’s smile grew wider, feral, hulking, infuriating. ‘I see the disappointment on your face, weakblood. Worry not. The Despoiler, honour to him, will not see you. But I will.’

‘The Temple of Shades must be opened, my lord.’ Gods of the watching warp, to call another lord was galling. ‘We can open a new front in this war. No longer will we be bound to the Eye of Terror. No longer will the glorious hosts of the True Crusaders batter themselves against Cadia’s walls. The Temple of Shades will give me the power to open a new warp rift, one large enough to vomit vast armies into the Imperium’s vulnerable core. This is a chance to end it. This is a chance to end the Long War.’

The pitch, rehearsed and recited so many times, flowed past Drask’s lips, an entreaty, and an exhortation to action. The words were etched on his hearts, beating through his blood. He knew how precious this chance was. He knew the favour he would earn with the Warmaster. His would be the name lifted in unending praise to the watching gods, as the one who had broken the bloody stalemate that had so far prevented the victory of the Long War.

The Black Legionnaire’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you know of the Long War? We have been fighting this crusade for countless aeons. Prattle not to me about it. For you, it is short. The conflict you fight in is but a weak hint of the trials we have endured and overcome.’ His lip curled into a smirk, still mocking, but also thoughtful. Daemonic faces swam through the dirty silver of his mutated flesh. ‘How do you know this will work?’

‘I have seen it, lord. Much of the future is known and bestowed upon me through the glorious gifts of the patron we both serve.’

Beraddon paced, stomping through broken bodies. He snorted a laugh.

‘I doubt that,’ he said. ‘How did you come to know of the Temple of Shades?’

‘Certain daemons whispered of it. I followed the traces, the wisps of information across the Eye. In the great libraries of the Ahmen-Ahket, I found further proof. The Temple of Shades exists, I assure you. It exists and it will do all I have said.’

Darkness curled from Drask’s mouth as he spoke, the echoes of the souls he had consumed on his quest for this knowledge. They wailed in time with his words.

Beraddon’s ship, the Seventh Edict, was playing host to this meeting. Drask wished it had been otherwise. He wished to stalk the grand halls of his own ship, the Liar’s Gift, where he could posture and threaten this arrogant son of failed Horus. There Drask would have been surrounded by the reassuring presence of his own warband. Instead, Beraddon had called him here, shortly after Drask had sent his request for an audience with the Warmaster.

The twilight halls of the Seventh Edict glowered down at the pair, pressing in at Drask’s mind.

Here, Drask was forced to curry favour, to scurry beneath the notice of those who believed themselves better. The sneering princes of the Black Legion. He had killed many of them, proved the worth of his sorcery. And yet, Abaddon would not condescend to see him, to listen to his plan. He met with Beraddon, this loathsome creature, in some forgotten court tucked away beneath towering angular glyphs and broken, mummified corpses.

The fire-blackened corpses coruscated with ghostly flames, their bodies shrouded and locked in foetal agony. Beraddon ignored them, but Drask could sense the memories of the fire that burned from his hands, the phantom echoes of dying warriors and the Black Legionnaire’s laughter. The voices of the dead whispered at the edge of Drask’s hearing.

‘Why did you leave your brothers, weakblood?’ Beraddon asked, idly stripping the flesh from a woman’s shrivelled corpse. The Changer’s sigil squirmed along his face again, dancing along the rugged contours of the Black Legionnaire’s features. ‘Kranon has been to the Warmaster’s court. Your Chapter Master,’ he sneered the title, ‘has met with the Despoiler.’

‘Liar,’ whispered a dry voice in Drask’s mind. It was one of the slain who dogged his steps, killed in ages past, whispering secrets. His Chapter’s curse and its first steps on the path to damnation manifested most often when his choler rose. ‘Ignorant worm. Strike him down. I never liked him. He is useless.’

Drask felt his face flush with anger. Flames danced in his vision. The Crimson Slaughter sorcerer lord considered immolating Beraddon. He pictured the Black Legionnaire’s flesh running like molten metal. His hands curled into fists, and tiny daemons, anger bright, skittered over the wrought iron.

‘I have Abaddon’s favour. He will not listen to your plan. He has no time for such things,’ Beraddon continued. The chunk of marble in his left eye socket glowed with flickering witchlight.

Liar, Drask thought. This man was nothing, merely a veteran of a conflict that no longer held relevance. A son of the things that the Despoiler disavowed, Beraddon could only claim importance due to the quirks of fate. Warriors of Horus’s Legion no longer mattered, not to Abaddon the Despoiler or the empire he was supposedly interested in building.

‘The Warmaster will not see you. He will not grant his assent to this endeavor. But,’ the Black Legionnaire said, ‘do it anyway. Accomplish this thing and I will ensure that the Warmaster is made aware. We will both rise in glory. Forget the Ezekarion and the ruling power structure of the Warmaster’s court. If we do this thing – if we break the deadlock of the Long War – our names will echo through eternity. The gods themselves will grant us unimaginable power. I will ensure that the right ears know of the Temple of Shades and what we did there.’

We, the Black Legionnaire had said. We, as if he would do anything to assist Drask. No, Drask thought. He will merely add his name to the glory I will write upon the stars. We shall see when the balance of power shifts.

‘As you say, my lord,’ Drask acquiesced. The words tasted sour on his tongue; the contempt, the anger, barely held in check.

Beraddon nodded. ‘Good. Succeed or die, weakblood. I look forward to seeing our results.’

The audience ended. Drask left the room, fire sprites dripping from the cracks in his armour, his rage nearly incarnated as weak daemon-things.

The halls of the Seventh Edict were empty, nearly derelict, full of burned corpses.

Shadows pooled as he passed a recessed alcove marked with sharp runes. A horror manifested, armour wrought in bone and darkness. A horned helmet lowered in greeting.

‘Akkarnol,’ Drask said.

‘My lord,’ the shadow acknowledged. When the Crimson Slaughter warrior spoke, it was with a daemon’s whickering snarl. His voice had been warped, along with his body, by their journeys within the Eye. ‘What does the Black Legionnaire have to say?’

‘What they always do. They will watch and claim the glory.’

Akkarnol laughed, the sound deep and rasping.

‘It was ever thus,’ the warrior said. ‘They do not care for the achievements of us “weakbloods” until we accomplish something of note that they can claim for their own aggrandisement. We should just kill him and be done with it.’

‘Your words are wise, brother,’ Drask acknowledged. Where many of his broken Chapter had fallen to the mad blessings of the Blood God, Drask and others like him had sought a different master. Akkarnol’s horns creaked as they twisted into the Changer’s rune.

Their swift strides brought them to the bustling port of the embarkation bay. Servitors trundled past the cowled figures of the Dark Mechanicum. The burned corpses that filled the halls of the Seventh Edict were also present here, lying where they had fallen against the brushed steel.

‘But we need Beraddon’s support, however little he offers. If there is a chance he will bring this to the Warmaster’s attention, we must seize it. I will not return to the Lost Hope. I will not bow to Kranon’s madness again and call it wisdom.’

As they boarded the Thunderhawk Akkarnol asked, ‘What do we do? What are your orders, lord?’

The gunship rumbled around them as they left the Seventh Edict behind. Drask ignored the voices of the slain that whispered in his ears, taunting and threatening him.

‘We open the Temple of Shades. We end the Long War.’

Click here to buy Assassinorum: Execution Force.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Akim Kaliberda.

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