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Relics - James Swallow

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RELICS

James Swallow

Brother Doramaca let off another trio of bolter rounds and ducked down behind the broken stone, feeling the heavy boots of his power armour sink into the dark basalt sands. His breathing seemed impossibly loud inside the confines of his helmet, echoing with each heavy exhalation. Warning runes blinked back at him from the corners of his sight; a new salvo of incoming fire registered as bright traces on the visor display and his enhanced senses caught the dull smacks of impact noise as the enemy shots struck his cover.

He felt the sickly sensation of his skin crawling on his right arm, and glanced down at the limb. Despite the fact that his flesh ended at the stump of his elbow and his forearm was a construct of dulled steel, the Space Marine could still feel the phantom response as if the organic matter were still there. He’d lost the arm in a training accident, the bones and muscle crushed flat under the treads of a Predator, but part of his mind would not let go of it. The metallic replacement twitched around the grip of his bolter, clicking against his armour. Doramaca sucked in a breath and braced himself, bringing the gun to a ready stance. More shots keened over his head, the sound of their passage barely audible in the thin, gauzy atmosphere. The Marine chose his moment and vaulted up and over, pacing a pair of bursts toward his attacker. The shots were too wide of the mark for anything other than a lucky hit and were intended to make the foe keep his head down. Doramaca sprinted across the black sand towards a large dune; it would be a better vantage point and less exposed than his previous position.

Bolt shells snapped at his ankles, excavating small craters in the drifts around him. Puffs of dark ejecta flew head-high in lazy, low-gravity clumps, rattling off his wargear and dirtying the gunmetal silver of his armour. He launched himself over the edge of the dune and rolled behind it. A brief moment of elation ran through him; but then it fled just as quickly as his legs lost purchase and he tumbled head over heels, the basalt sand sucking at him, dragging him to his knees. He cursed as his bolter was knocked from his fingers, desperately trying to stagger to his feet. The planet’s damnable gravity was so much lighter than that of his native Gathis and, despite all his attempts, Doramaca had still not adjusted to it. This fact cost him the engagement. Teetering, he was blindsided by a point-blank bolter shot that hit him in the back of the head, and Doramaca unceremoniously fell face first into the black grit.

His adversary approached with a casual gait that made Doramaca’s headlong rush seem manic in comparison. The other figure used the barrel of his bolter to nudge the young Space Marine and turn him over. ‘Poor,’ said his opponent. ‘Very poor.’

Concealed behind his helmet, Doramaca’s face flushed hot with anger and abashment. He reached up to wipe away the sticky patina of marker fluid that coated his visor, deposited there by the harmless impact of the frangible training ammunition. ‘I…  lost my footing,’ he offered lamely.

‘I can see that, lad. But you’ll lose your head if you put yourself in an enemy’s sights like that.’ The other man took the Marine’s bionic arm and hauled him to his feet. ‘You became careless. You had avoided my detection for almost nine hours, but you let your eagerness overrule your better judgement. Now, collect your weapon and stand down.’

‘Sergeant, I-‘ Doramaca began to protest, desperate to explain his mistake.

The other Marine, his armour identical but for a set of sergeant’s insignia, silenced him with a gesture. ‘No recriminations. No excuses. I expect my men to fight at the highest standard, and this is why we come to Serek to train. You failed today, but you will not fail tomorrow, understand?’ The elder warrior did not wait for an answer and he nodded at the desolate landscape around them. ‘Here, you get a second chance, but on a real battlefield you’ll have no such luxury.’ He tapped the winged skull sigil engraved on his shoulder pad. ‘Death comes to a Doom Eagle soon enough, lad. Don’t meet him halfway.’

Doramaca gave a sullen nod. ‘Yes, Sergeant Tarikus.’

Tarikus’s lip curled in a slight smile and he pointed. ‘Join Colius. You two can continue the patrol alone.’

The sergeant watched the youth stride away to meet the other novice. The Marine was cocksure and arrogant, even for a member of the Adeptus Astartes and, as loathe as he might be to admit it to anyone else, Doramaca reminded Tarikus of himself in his younger years, before his potential had been harnessed and tempered. It was the sergeant’s duty to mould the whelp into a battle brother truly worthy of the name, along with a handful of other junior Marines recently promoted up to full Doom Eagle rank. Tarikus had never really considered himself a teacher, but as the decades had gone by, he found more and more that he had a knack for it; he had developed a mentor’s eye for the men around him, an ability to pick out the nascent skills in them and direct them for the good of the Chapter. And so, that role had brought him here again, returning for another sortie to the barren plains of Serek, where nothing dwelled except sand and rock and thin, razor-edged winds.

It was a planet bled dry of colour, a monochrome wilderness in shades of grey and black that extended from dark horizon to dark horizon. A patchwork world of stony foothills and monolith mountains, ebon sandscapes and endless bleak vistas where no life claimed dominion, not the smallest of hardy plants, not even bacteria. Here, to this place that was the very definition of the word barren, the Doom Eagles sent their troops to make pilgrimage and to drill and train in the featureless wastes.

Tarikus found himself glad that his Chapter bore darts of red trim on their weapons and armour; Serek’s colourless environment was so stark that it could convince a man that he had lost the ability to see anything but black and white.

The shifting sands played hoaxes on the eyes of the unwary, moving in slow ripples like a languid ocean. It was common for new arrivals to believe that unseen things lurked beneath the surface of the glassy deserts, as tricks of the light from Serek’s white sun glittered off the basalt grains. Experience had taught him that Serek was as dead as the sacred relics gathered in the Doom Eagles Holy Reclusium.

Little evidence remained of the planet’s previous occupants save the sad remnants of cities given up to the inexorable weight of the sands and the hard radiation of the sun. As Tarikus recalled, the Imperium’s historians recorded evidence that Serek’s populace had destroyed themselves in the last centuries of the Dark Age of Technology; they had stripped away most of their atmosphere in a single act of war, a vast nuclear conflagration the cause of which was lost to antiquity. They had died in their billions, and now nothing remained of them save the endless sands and stones that stood in mute contemplation of a dead world, no more than a grave marker for a forgotten, murdered people.

The air was so thin here that an unprotected human would quickly suffocate in it, but a Space Marine could go bare-headed with some effort, if circumstances demanded Sometimes, Tarikus would remove his helmet and listen to the mournful winds, drinking in the despair and the terrible melancholy of the place. If I possessed the eye of a psyker, the sergeant considered, what would I see here? A landscape of ghosts from hill to valley? For the Doom Eagles, Serek was a keyhole glimpse into the landscape beyond death and, for Tarikus, a sobering reminder of his mortality. Little wonder that the Chapter master had chosen this place as a training ground; if the neophytes who came here were as struck by it as Tarikus was, then Serek served its purpose well.

Presently, he crested a hill and from the mouth of a shallow cavern came the blink of light on silver as Brother Mykilus saluted. ‘Ho, sergeant,’ he called, ‘What of our new recruit? Did he beat my score?’

Tarikus gave him a sideways look. ‘Afraid he might outpace you?’

Mykilus made a gruff chug of amusement. ‘Perhaps I made a wager on his performance.’

He gave Mykilus a hard look. ‘You may compare your prowess when we are home on Gathis. For now, I require your most serious mind.’

The Marine replied with a terse nod, and they slipped into the cavern, pulling a camo-tarp over the entrance.

Nearby, a patch of sand shifted and sank as if pressed by an invisible footfall.

Brother Doramaca glanced at Colius, another of the novices assigned to the sortie. Where Doramaca was whipcord-strong and broad across the chest, Colius was stocky and thick around his muscles, short for a Space Marine but bold and fast on his feet. They moved quickly and silently, the cold starlight casting their weak shadows over the ground.

‘How did you fare?’ Colius asked after a while.

Doramaca spared him a look. ‘We should be mindful of our patrol, brother.‘

Colius frowned. ‘Our instructors are not here now, Doramaca. We may speak freely for the moment.’ He made a show of looking around the dark landscape. ‘Besides, I’ll warrant that we two are the only living things hereabouts.’

The other Marine replied with a cautious nod. Colius spoke the truth but it wasn’t unknown for the veterans to place the odd target drone in the path of a trainee to see how they would deal with it. Or worse: deliberately give them a patrol pattern that strayed into a minefield.

‘Well?’ Colius pressed. ‘Speak.’

‘Tarikus located me and I was dispatched with a single shot.’ The words tumbled out of Doramaca’s mouth in a rush. ‘I failed.’

‘You’re too hard on yourself, brother. I too was caught out by the caldera. Brother Korica laid a trap for me with tripwire.’

Doramaca shook his head. ‘We are supposed to be the best, yet Tarikus and his men find it effortless to beat us. How can either of us hope to bring honour to the Chapter if we cannot outdo them?’

Colius smiled, ‘Only the best come to train on Serek and we are meant to lose in these engagements. How else can Tarikus know the measure of our strengths and skills?’ He shook his head. ‘Our instruction did not end when we left the Eyrie. As the Emperor wills, we must strive to better ourselves for as long as we serve...’

When the other Marine did not answer, Colius paused in mid-stride and turned. Doramaca had halted a dozen paces behind him and was staring at the dark sands intently. ‘What is it?’ Colius asked.

‘The sand,’ Doramaca whispered.

Colius relaxed a little. ‘Our passage disturbed it, nothing more.’

In reply, the youth drew out his auspex, examining the glyphs on its display. Colius saw the dim glow of the device as it blinked over Doramaca’s faceplate. After a few moments, he grew impatient and beckoned his battle brother. ‘Come now, Doramaca. You are allowing your ill humour to prey on your mind. We are alone out here.’

‘Perhaps.’ The other Marine did not sound convinced, but he put the sensor away and stepped onward.

Colius watched him approach, and he heard Doramaca’s grunt of annoyance when his right boot sank to the knee, as a patch of sand slipped away underneath him. ‘The Warp take this place,’ the Marine snapped. ‘Is there any solid ground on this Light-forsaken dustball?‘ Doramaca’s words were cut short with a gasp of pain as he stumbled, slipping to his haunches.

Colius took a step forward, extending a hand to help his comrade. Doramaca threw back his head and bit out an animal yelp of agony. ‘My leg!’

Without warning, the sands around Doramaca’s feet began to writhe, moving and shifting like storm-tossed waters. For one split second, Colius thought he caught a glimpse of something mirror-bright and shiny beneath the surface of the rolling grit, then it was gone. Doramaca discarded his bolter and pulled at his greaves, tugging on his leg as if it were caught in a mantrap. There was a cracking sound, muffled by the dust; the distinctive bone-snap noise of fracturing ceramite.

Colius hesitated, his bolter in his hands. Was this some sort of test? He spun around in place, scanning the horizon, searching for the bulky shapes of other Adeptus Astartes in power armour.

‘Brother!’ Doramaca’s voice was high with pain and effort. ‘Something… I can feel it inside my boot! Spines… Needle-‘ The Marine’s words ran into one another, turning into a thin shriek. Colius crossed the distance to him, leading with his bolter. The tips of their gauntlets touched and then, with a sudden shock of motion, Doramaca shrank into the grip of the sand. One moment he was there, the next his torso was disappearing under the shifting black matter, arms flailing like those of a drowning man.

Brother Colius almost tripped over in surprise, but then all thoughts of rescuing Doramaca fled as the rippling, hissing sands spread out around him, the shuddering dust moving to rise in a wave. Acting on instinct, he let fly with a brace of shells, watching gouts of alluvium burst upward. The bolt shells were ineffective, cutting into the grit but doing little else to slow its whispering advance. Again, he saw the brief glimmer of starlight on something polished and silvery as it rushed toward him. Unwilling to follow Doramaca to his fate, Colius leapt clear of the shifting sands and ran for an outcropping of grey stone and, impossibly, the sinkhole came after him, licking at his heels.

With a cry of effort, Colius landed on the island of rock and threw himself flat. All around the edges of the outcrop, the black sand bubbled like boiling water.

Colius pressed his free hand to his helmet and called out, ignoring the strict protocol for radio silence that was part of the exercise. ‘To arms! There’s something in the sands! It took Doramaca!’

In the cavern, Tarikus silenced the rest of the squad with a throat-cutting gesture. In other circumstances he might have doubted Colius’s words, but the panicked tone of the youth’s voice was unmistakable.

‘What idiocy is this?’ grated Korica, ‘The whelp has fallen into a sinkhole?’

Tarikus ignored the comment. ‘Colius, you are mistaken. This planet is devoid of life-‘

‘No!’ The young Marine’s words crackled through the ear-beads of every assembled man in the camp. ‘I saw it! A living thing, silver blades, under the sand!’

‘Hold your position, lad,’ Tarikus replied. ‘We’ll come to you.’ The sergeant exchanged glances with Korica. ‘You remain here with the other trainees. I’ll take Mykilus and Petius to investigate.’

Korica frowned. ‘Lord, this is some fool’s errand.’

Brother Petius paused in gathering up his apothecary gear. ‘What if it is not?’

The tiny motors in Korica’s bulbous bionic eyes whined as they mimicked a narrow stare. ‘Serek is nought but sterile rock, brother. Those pups are over-reacting.’

‘Can you be sure?’ Petius insisted. ‘Certainly, in all the centuries that our chapter has come here, no life has been found.

But what if it simply did not want to be discovered?’ Petius replied.

Tarikus quickly loaded his bolter. ‘Indeed. We are new to this sector of the planet, Korica. There may be dangers here we are not aware of.’

Korica accepted this with a shrug, and said no more. He was not convinced.

The sergeant pulled open the camo-cloak, pausing at the cavern’s threshold. ‘For now, it is my order that all training ammunition loads be replaced with warshot. If some xenos threat is out there, we must be prepared to kill it.’

Korica watched them go and, after a long moment, he reloaded his bolter.

With Tarikus gone, the Doom Eagles in the cave became muted and introspective. To keep their minds on their duties, Korica ordered the trainees to douse the biolumes and suit lamps and work in the near-darkness. They field-stripped their weapons in rotation to clean out the thick slurry of sand that gathered around the mechanisms of their bolters. Their implanted occulobes gave them vision far better than that of any low-light sensor, but still the cavern’s thick gloom reduced the effective range of their eyesight. Korica irritably ordered one of the junior troopers to stand watch and let himself drift into a shallow trance; the Catalepsean Node in his brain took over and gently rested him, dropping his right cerebral hemisphere into a sleep while the left floated on the edge of wakefulness.

It had been so long since the Marine had slept in the manner as men understood it that the sensation was foreign to him. To utterly surrender oneself to temporary unconsciousness was unthinkable for an Astartes. Slow glaciers of thought wandered through Korica’s mind as he became still; he felt a fuzzy, unfocussed disdain for Colius, a vague mental sneer at the youth’s manner. Korica had considered Colius unworthy of promotion to Battle Brother status, but Captain Consultus had thought otherwise. Perhaps that might change if the boy was showing his true colours now, panicking at nothing out there on the dark desert.

The trainees seemed to flash past in blurs. In the semi-sleep state, Korica’s time sense was distorted as hours moved by him in what seemed like minutes. Dimly, he was aware of a faint haze of white light peeking through the camo-cloak. Serek’s harsh sun was on the rise and with it came the curtain of radiation that would render all but short-range communications useless. Had Colius sent his call for help now, Korica mused, it would have been drowned in a sea of interference.

He heard the voices of the trainees then high-pitched yelps followed by quick, flat chugs of noise that could only be bolter fire. Suddenly, he was coming up from the depths of the Node’s embrace, the silver blurs and flicks of firelight around him slowing and slowing until they resolved into Doom Eagles back-lit by the discharges from their weapons.

‘Report.’ The word stretched like tallow.

‘In the walls!’ One of the trainees shot back at him, as Korica bounced to his feet. ‘Can’t count them all-‘

He dismissed the novice with gesture and jogged deeper into the cave, down toward the noise of the fighting. Along the way, his boot crunched over something metallic, but he did not pause to study it. Korica halted, fingering a shattered biolume hanging from the wall. He narrowed his eyes, straining to see, as more gun-flashes lit the dark.

The images came like static pict-prints on a slate, strobing off silver and black armour. Korica saw one young disciple clawing at his face as something like a dismembered steel hand clung to his throat, a single green eye hissing hot against his flesh. Another novice seemed to be missing an arm and more of the metal things were biting into his leg with bright sparks where razor mandibles chopped through ceramite. In the dimness, the cavern floor was writhing, a mass of cyclopean emerald glitters moving and crawling over one another. Korica found himself revising his opinion of Colius’s call for help as he unleashed the fury of his bolter rifle into the shifting flood of arthropod forms. Some of them clattered and broke where his rounds hit, but most of them just slid away from the blasts, turning and racing toward him in a tide. The armless novice collapsed and died against the cavern wall, and as Korica backed away he saw the beetle-things snatching at the fallen youth’s armour, ripping components out of it and racing away with them clasped in their forelegs.

‘Fall back!’ he shouted over the general com channel. ‘To the cave mouth!‘

Then the walls popped like boils and hundreds more of the machines came at Korica from every side, emerging from cracks in the black sandstone in seething profusion. Bladed teeth with edges made of fractals sank into the Doom Eagle’s shoulder and suddenly his gun arm, bolter and all, was lying on the floor, trailing streams of pink fluid. Korica did not even register the event until his nerves misfired and he roared with animal agony. The engineered Larraman cells in his blood went into overdrive, clogging the severed arteries and triggering endorphins to smother the incredible pain. Korica drove his fist into a beetle-thing that leapt across his chest and then ran heedlessly toward the cavern mouth. Behind him, he did not see the machines carefully remove the power armour from his severed limb, then discard the useless flesh.

Korica burst through the ragged, flapping orifice of the camo-cloak and stumbled to his knees. He caught sight of three more novices standing around him. Three, out of nine men.

The things would be only seconds behind him; they had come out of the walls, out of the sands and if Korica did not kill them now, then the four of them would die as well. ‘Grenades!’ he bellowed, tugging a quartet of krak munitions from his belt. Ignoring his pain, he chain-linked the detonators and then threw them with his remaining hand. The trainees followed suit and sent a dozen more gunmetal spheres looping into the maw of the cave. Korica saw the glint of hundreds of green eyes in there, but then the grenades blew all at once and the cavern entrance turned into a heap of broken, jagged rocks.

They found Colius perched like a raptor on the prow of his stone island at sunrise, and he made no move to approach them as they came across the black sand, unaware that they were walking over the spot where Doramaca had been dragged away.

‘Ho, brother.’ Sergeant Tarikus waved at him. ‘Report.’

The novice took a long time to answer. He pointed at the ground under Tarikus’s feet. ‘They took him. Gone in seconds. Like a sinkhole.’

Petius studied the youth. ‘There are many points of subsidence on Serek-‘

‘A sinkhole with teeth,’ Colius continued as if Petius had not spoken. ‘Sinkholes don’t have teeth.’

Tarikus drew himself up on to the stony outcropping. ‘You found yourself some cover, then?’ His voice was neutral. ‘The... It couldn’t get you up here, eh?’

Colius shook his head. ‘They’ll be back. They got what they wanted for now. They’ve already looted this place.’

Mykilus made a face. ‘You’re talking in riddles, boy. Explain yourself.’

‘Already looted.’ Colius repeated, and he knelt on the stone. ‘See?’

Tarikus studied the patch of granite where the novice was pointing and his eyes narrowed. Cut into the stone were crude glyphs of grinning faces and toothed mouths. ‘Ork runes,’ he said quietly. ‘But how can that be?’

‘Saints of Terra,’ Mykilus breathed. ‘My lord, do you know what this is?’ He pointed at the outcropping. ‘This stone isn’t native to Serek. It’s heat-smoothed by orbital passage.’

‘A meteorite?’ said Petius.

‘No,’ Colius replied, and with a flourish he pressed his fingers into a narrow crack. Black sand puffed into the air and the stone outcrop grew a hatch that opened into a hollow interior. ‘It’s an ork rok. A greenskin ship, hidden here in the desert like an iceberg under the ocean.’

Tarikus peered into the dark below. ‘What did you mean when you said “looted”, lad?’

Colius’s face was grim. ‘Come see, sergeant.’

Tarikus left Mykilus and Petius on the tip of the rok and followed Colius into the void within. The trainee explained as they descended through ragged tubular corridors and jerry-built spaces daubed with aged orkish graffiti that in his alarm after Doramaca’s abduction, he had scrambled on to the stone, thinking it a safe location, but all too quickly he had triggered the hatch and discovered that what he thought was solid ground was nothing more than an eggshell between him and the writhing things in the sands. Colius had not dared to venture in too far, lest the hidden predators swarm in through the numerous rents and gaps in the rok’s patchwork hull. As he told his story, Tarikus stepped cautiously over the places where black sand pooled in the ork ship’s interior.

It was impossible to tell how long the xenos vessel had been on Serek, certainly something in the order of hundreds of years, Tarikus guessed, no doubt long before the Doom Eagles had come to use the world for their purposes and long enough ago for the craft to have become buried in the sand. The impact crater it left had filled in and smoothed away. The manner of the rok’s arrival was of no importance, however – the orks aboard it were clearly all dead and so the question of any possible greenskin presence was moot. The vile creatures were ill-suited for an environment such as Serek’s poisoned landscape, and if some had survived, the sunlight would have riddled them with cancers within months if they hadn’t starved first. But it was not the manner of the rok crew’s death that tugged at Tarikus but rather it was the state of their remains. Ork klans were notorious for self-mutilation and the commonplace use of clumsy bionics, even steel peg-legs and hooks for hands, but these ork bones, bleached white and crumbling to powder, had no metal attachments upon them. The Sergeant noted several skeletons with clear screw holes where iron teeth or metal limbs had once been attached, now vacant. Similarly, there were many spots inside the ship where the vessel’s vital components had been torn out, gouged from the rock by the action of tiny claws.

‘Scavengers,’ said Tarikus quietly. ‘All the dense and refined metals have been taken away.’

‘Pillaged,’ Colius nodded. ‘Like a battlefield looter pulling gold teeth from men’s skulls. It’s why they took Doramaca. It’s why they’ll want to take us all.’

Tarikus let the youth’s dispirited words pass without comment, concentrating instead on a huge rent in the side of the rok’s ragged fuselage. ‘Did you venture down this far before we arrived?’

‘No, sergeant.’

The sergeant stepped up to the gaping hole, a space large enough to drive a Rhino through, and peered out. ‘Do you see this? Perhaps these greenskin fools were the first to fall victim to whatever took our brother.’ He gestured into the dark. ‘Look here.’

Colius did as he was ordered and gingerly stepped up to Tarikus’s shoulder. Beyond the exterior of the ork rok was an open cavern with walls lost in the darkness. It was ancient, a vast basalt-walled sphere formed millions of years earlier by expanding bubbles of molten magma. When it had crash-landed, the rok had penetrated the surface of the void and lodged there like a dart piercing an apple.

‘There is a structure there,’ the young Marine pointed at a shape in the far wall. ‘Not orkish design.’

‘No.’ Tarikus studied the smooth archway through his helmet’s optics. ‘Human, perhaps, but I’ll warrant it is nothing from the Imperial era.’

Colius fought to keep a tremor from his voice. ‘What should we do, sergeant?’

Tarikus studied the arch. ‘Investigate.’

There were angry voices out on the sands and Tarikus emerged from inside the rok to find four more Doom Eagles clustered around the stone outcropping, one of them engaged in a spitting curse-fight with Petius. The sergeant recognised the configuration of Brother Korica’s armour, but with a start he registered that the Marine was missing an arm. The three novices with him shifted uneasily, their hands never leaving the triggers of their bolters.

Petius removed an injector from Korica’s stump and the Doom Eagle shook his head, as if that would banish the pain from him. He caught sight of Tarikus and made eye contact with him. ‘Sergeant, I bring grave news.’

The tone of his voice told the tale. ‘How many dead, Korica?’

Korica spread his good hand and his stump twitched; the medicine Petius had dosed him with made him slur a little. ‘Only we remain.’

‘He talked about steel beetles, sir,’ Mykilus broke in, making a shape in the air with his fingers. ‘Six-legged things with green eyes.’

Tarikus studied the horizon. ‘It is well you located us, Korica. By night, you may not have found us out here.’

The other Marine jutted his chin at a rod-shaped device on Tarikus’s belt. ‘The teleport beacon, brother-sergeant. I had the trainees scan for its signals with their auspexes. Even Serek’s star cannot mask those transmissions.’

‘Indeed.’ Tarikus took the device in his hand and considered it for a moment.

‘We should leave this place,’ Colius said in a low voice. ‘Can you not activate the beacon and have us returned to our ship?’

The sergeant eyed the young Marine. ‘Curb your fears, lad. We are the Adeptus Astartes and we do not flee from a blooding.’

Mykilus made an off-hand gesture at the sky. ‘It would not matter even if we did send the signal. Our ship is out of range… If we began the teleport recovery incantations now, our bodies would never reach the vessel. We would be scattered and lost, the very matter of us never to be reconstituted.’

‘How long until the ship is close?’ said one of the other novices.

‘Not soon enough,’ retorted Korica.

Tarikus returned the beacon homer to his belt and gave his assembled men a hard stare. ‘Something inhuman lives on this world and by the Emperor, for every moment it draws breath it is an affront to the his divine will. These… machines crave iron and steel like a man does food and they will surely come for us if we do not search for them.’ He tapped the breastplate of his armour for emphasis.

Korica was nodding his agreement. ‘I saw them stripping a novice of every piece of wargear he wore. Filthy little despoilers, they took my arm just for the ceramite that cocooned it.’

‘For what purpose?’ Petius asked. ‘What reasoning could there be to gather these scraps, like the pieces of some grotesque puzzle?’

‘We shall endeavour to find out,’ Tarikus grated. ‘Pool your weapons and ensure that every man has equal ammunition and stores.’

Colius knew the answer to his question before he even asked it. ‘What do you intend, Sergeant?’

‘We’ll take the Emperor’s Light to these mech-beasts and burn them from their lair.’

The Sergeant led the survivors down through the canted decks of the broken rok until they reached the magma chamber. Tarikus did not pause or tarry to see if the novices were at his heels, he simply pressed onward, with Korica to his right and Brother Mykilus to the rear of the column. To his credit, Colius kept his own counsel as they descended, although it was clear to all of them that the young Marine’s nerves were worn through. Glancing at him through the slit visor of his helmet, the apothecary, Petius, wondered what fate might befall Colius when they returned to Gathis. Tarikus was a fair commander, but he was an unforgiving taskmaster and the novice’s behaviour would likely warrant some sort of negative citation at best. At worst, Colius might find himself reduced in rank or dismissed from line service.

The Doom Eagle’s thoughts were interrupted as they reached the huge archway in the magma cavern’s wall. Mykilus examined the stone, fingering the shallow cuts of runes in its surface. ‘Some form of Low Gothic?’ he said aloud.

Korica knelt, still a little unsteady from the cocktail of anti-shock potions coursing through his bloodstream, and picked at the rocky floor. ‘There are tracks in the stone here, a finger deep. Lines of them, following the tunnels beyond the arch.’

‘I’ve seen similar,’ said one of the trainees. ‘On Phaedra, in the outzones. They serve as guides for ore trucks between the mines and the smelter-cities.’

‘Like a hive-world’s pneu-trains,’ Tarikus nodded. ‘Yes, the lad has something there. This arch leads into transport arteries, the remains of some rail system created before the holocaust.’

‘We go on, then?’ said Petius.

‘Need you ask?’ Tarikus called over his shoulder, leading the way.

The tunnels spread out like the roots of a tree, a thick main line of six tracks that snaked down at a shallow angle, branching at intervals into tributaries that looped away toward unknown destinations. They passed the remains of massive stone surge doors that had been dropped to block the passage from the outside world, but the thick granite slabs were broken jagged teeth now, rent by a force so strong, so elemental in its fierceness that even stone had been burnt by it. Tarikus examined the walls – there were more runes and the construction style had altered slightly. This part of the caverns had been built with defence in mind, with an eye towards military strength.

‘Tunnels again,’ Korica murmured, his surviving hand wandering to his bionic eyes. ‘Always tunnels.’

‘Look sharp,’ snapped Tarikus, drawing him back to the moment at hand. Soon the pain from his wounds would return to the Marine, and the sergeant wanted to keep him focussed, not nursing the memories of old hurts inflicted in similar places.

It was Mykilus who found the body. He almost walked right past it and it was only the subtle shift of his biolume’s light that alerted him. The dull glow from the lamp reflected off a flat, fish-belly white hummock of meat cast aside at the mouth of a drain trough. The Doom Eagle held up a hand to halt the rest of the unit and approached the thing. His voice cut through the still, blood-warm air. ‘It’s Brother Doramaca. What’s left of him.’

Tarikus approached. ‘His skin has been ruptured...’

Mykilus nodded. ‘The scavengers stripped him naked and stole everything he carried.’

‘And not just that,’ Tarikus pointed to the corpse. ‘Look there: his bionics have been torn out, and the sub-dermal armour carapace removed from beneath his flesh.’

The Marine knelt by the body, studying the precise razor-cut slashes in the dead soldier’s integument. ‘Whatever killed him did it without passion. This is the work of a cold and calculating mind.’

And when it was sure that the eight abhumans were fully occupied with the matter of their dead comrade, the calculating mind that had directed the death of Doramaca bid the larger of its servants to return to wakefulness and harvest the men. Colius heard a skittering noise from overhead as hinged leg-flaps moved against the black stone roof. He looked up to see a faceless block of machined metal staring back at him, lit by a clump of luminous emerald optical sensors.

The steel thing released its grip from the ancient bricks and dropped on him, cutting in a gravitic pulse just feet from the ground to soft-land. The throb of the null-field knocked Colius on to his rear. He saw two more of the shield-shaped insect forms dropping into the midst of the other Doom Eagles just seconds before the roar of bolters echoed down the tunnel. The novice aimed at where he thought the massive beetle machine was and opened fire. The six-legged mechanoid skipped sideways, its claw-feet flicking up sparks, and it snapped at one of the other Marines. With smooth, economical movements the insectile robot cut him in two with scythe-like talons and moved on to seek out another target, disgorging a couple of its smaller scarab-shaped brethren to set to work on the corpse. Colius shot at it again, a grin popping into life on his face as his rounds found the thing’s silvery hide.

In the midst of the ambush proper, Korica braced his bolter as best he could and unloaded the a clip into another one of the machines. He swore at it for daring to take his arm from him and challenged it to try and take the rest. The mechanoid’s blocky head bobbed in some analogue of quizzical consideration and then the creature surged forward. Korica’s gun ran dry in the instant the enemy swatted it from his hand and he back-pedalled, fingers finding his combat knife without any conscious orders from his mind. The spidery machine paused, rearing up to present its claws, and that was enough for Korica to leap back at it. He buried the blade up to the hilt in the robot’s braincase and the Marine’s action was rewarded with a hissing gout of sickly green sparks. Petius came to his aid, tossing Korica a reload with one hand and emptying his bolter into the wounded target with the other. The machine shivered and.

‘Doom Eagles! To me!’ Tarikus roared out the order and the Marines shifted to regroup around the veteran’s position, laying down streaks of enfilading fire. Mykilus dropped to one knee, unlimbering the multiple shot missile launcher on his shoulder to a firing position. Back along the tunnel in the direction from which they had come, he could clearly see more shapes skittering down the walls in jerks of movement and the Marine felt his gut tighten. They had walked right beneath these machines as they waited dormant above them and not a single one of their auspexes had detected the hulking things lying there. Mykilus shuttered the thought away and spoke a litany under his breath as he turned the launcher from safe mode to a firing state.

Tarikus placed a heavy hand on his shoulder and jerked his head at the roof. ‘Too many of them coming, lad. You know what to do, eh?

The Doom Eagle brought the weapon up to his shoulder and the sighting lens dropped into place over his left eye. Through the optic he caught the flash-frame sight of one of the novices bifurcating under enemy claws. He squeezed the trigger and fired.

A cluster warhead looped out of the launcher tube and spat orange fire across the tunnel. The machines paused to watch it pass over them and it struck the cavern roof, filling the air with tumbling rocks. Mykilus felt friendly hands dragging him back as a curtain of obsidian dust rolled forward. Black grit clouded his visor.

It seemed like an eternity, but when the rumbling stopped, he cleaned the sand away and found that a new wall had grown up between the Marines and the machines. Colius helped him to his feet and gestured toward a square of pale yellow light – a hatchway in the distance. Without waiting to see if anything was still moving under the curtain of stones, he followed the novice with a wordless nod.

‘It’s a control bunker,’ Tarikus was saying as the last of the Doom Eagles caught up with him. ‘As I suspected, this part of the tunnels was not built for civilian use.’ The bunker’s door lay fallen behind him, dislodged by the shockwave from the cave-in.

Petius looked around the vast, shallow room. Banks and banks of silent machinery lined the walls, thick with dust. Incredibly, a few of them still glowed with faint light. Mykilus joined him as they peered at one screen that showed a flickering map of Serek’s surface.

‘These lines about the planet,’ Petius noted, ‘more tunnels, perhaps?’

Mykilus shook his head. ‘No, brother, see here.’ He pointed at a jagged set of symbols. ‘These are the edges of the planet’s tectonic plates. Fault lines.’

‘Touch nothing,’ Tarikus said sharply. ‘There may be booby-traps.’

Colius beckoned the sergeant to one of the other consoles. ‘This one shows a human. It could be a log of some kind.’

Tarikus removed his helmet and leaned close to the blurry panel. True to Colius’s words, the pale face of a terrified man glimmered there, his mouth frozen in the midst of a cry for help. The Marine touched a single glowing glyph on the screen and in a rush the display threw up a procession of jarring, disconnected images.

He saw pictures of majestic cities reaching into skies that were raining green fire; dark pyramid obelisks shimmering into solidity in the midst of screaming civilians, carpets of silver scarabs rushing like floodwaters, rending and tearing, skeletal figures advancing over broken bodies and symbols, lines and circles in complex patterns. The garbled speech of the man sputtered from the console’s speaker, an incoherent stream of thick sibilants punctuated with one recurring word.

‘Necrontyr.’ Tarikus repeated the name, and it felt alien on his tongue.

Now the man was showing a console like the one where Petius stood and, with a grim, grey face, he activated the controls. The display showed death-black clouds emerging across the sky, humans and machines alike cooking in murderous firestorms; but something was wrong, and the man slumped to his feet, weeping over a display of blinking red icons. Tarikus has seen the same thing in battle, the man’s nerve had failed him and for that his whole world had suffered. As the replay ended, he looked down and realised that he was standing in a patch of dull powder: the dusty remains of the messenger.

‘I understand this,’ Mykilus said, after a moment. ‘The people here, they attempted to detonate geo-nuclear charges. They intended to destroy their world rather than let those machines take it.’

Tarikus nodded. ‘But our friend here could not complete his orders. The weapons did not all detonate, so only the atmosphere was scourged.’

The other Marine examined the trigger console. ‘This control is still live. The charges below remain in ready mode, even after millennia.’

The sergeant was about to speak, but a shout cut him off.

‘Sergeant!’ One of the novices called from his post at the hatchway. ‘Something approaches!‘

All eyes saw the novice die, from outside the room a wreath of green flame enveloped the youth and it flayed him. Ceramite, flesh and bone were seared from him in screaming flickers of light, turning the Marine into twists of blackened matter barely identifiable as human. Before his remains had settled, the open doorway disgorged a swarm of scarabs and the larger forms of the spider-machines. They surged into the bunker chamber, flowing up over the walls like fast-growing fungus.

No orders were needed. The Doom Eagles opened fire as one and channelled every ounce of their battle prowess into killing the mechanoids.

Tarikus cursed himself. He had unwit-tingly lead his men into a trap, bottling them up here inside the control room, and now these necron things would have them all as trophies. The sergeant clasped the teleport homer. This deep below ground, he had no way of knowing if the strike cruiser orbiting the planet was in range, or even if the matter transporter would be able to recover them if he activated it. Tarikus weighed the device in his grip and thumbed the activation stud regardless. In seconds, it would be fully charged – and he would decided what to do when that moment came, and before.

Then something else entered the room. Perhaps if someone who had never seen a human skeleton had been asked to build one from a second-hand description, then this is what they would have made. It seemed to shimmer and move in blinks of motion, one moment here, the next over there, impossibly travelling without moving. The skeleton-thing walked through its insectile army with the surety of a warlord among helots, glistening bright metals showing across it like polished jewels. Weapons fire seemed to slide off the necron lord, vanishing into the arcs of electric energy that webbed the air around it.

Colius shot it in the head, and Tarikus clearly saw the bolt shells pass through the mechanoid’s skull as the steel briefly became insubstantial. With cold light glittering in its eye-sockets, the lord turned its terrible visage on the youth. Hot streaks of energy licked out of its vision slot and flensed him apart before he could conjure a scream. The necron drifted over Colius’s body toward Tarikus, claws like a bouquet of butcher knives extending out toward him. Like all its minions, it was utterly silent in its purpose.

The homing beacon went hot in the sergeant’s hands and he made a sudden, terrible decision. ‘Mykilus!’ he shouted, ‘ Detonate the geo-charges!’

The Marine hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘Aye!’ he replied, dropping to his knees in cover behind the trigger console. Tarikus drew back from the advancing necron, closing the distance between himself and the rest of his men.

Korica was yelling challenges to the machines as they clustered around them, slowly and inexorably. ‘Come, take me if you can, xenos! I defy you!’

Tarikus gripped the beacon and held it up, locking gazes with the lord. He could see it clearly now, the full shape of the man-form illuminated by the witch-fire that danced about it. It was a patchwork of metals, limbs and parts of its framework clearly forged from the scavenged pieces that the scarabs had gathered. A segment of the humanoid’s gunmetal ribcage glinted and Tarikus felt a cold fury. The thing had stolen parts of Doom Eagle armour to rebuild itself and to see his chapter’s wargear in so corrupted a form filled the Marine with righteous hate.

For a moment, he fancied that the necron understood what he intended to do next, but he would never know for sure.

‘Ready!’ Mykilus called, a nest of wires trailing from his auspex to the blinking control panel. ‘By your command!’

‘Stand to!’ Tarikus shouted, and the survivors closed ranks. ‘Now!’

Deep beneath the surface of Serek, a command that had been delayed for untold centuries now came, and the patient engines of destruction that lurked in the abyssal depths of the planet were finally, irrevocably unleashed. In the bunker, the necrons were held back as a globe of coruscating energy enveloped the Space Marines, the edge searing off the tips of the piecemeal warlord’s razor fingers.

As Serek tore itself apart around them, Tarikus saw the Necrontyr machine’s face shift and melt as the teleport cycle began, every atom in his body singing as the arcane technology reduced him to pure energy. With the last ounce of his will, he cursed the necron lord with the wrath of the Emperor, Aquila, and the Doom Eagles.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Swallow is a New York Times bestselling author whose stories include the Horus Heresy novels Nemesis, Fear to Tread and The Flight of the Eisenstein, along with Faith & Fire, the Blood Angels books Deus Encarmine, Deus Sanguinius, Red Fury and Black Tide. His short fiction has appeared in Legends of the Space Marines and Tales of Heresy, along with the audio dramas Heart of Rage, Oath of Moment and Legion of One.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Originally published in issue 43 of Inferno! in 2004. This version published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

© Games Workshop Limited 2013. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-1-78251-056-7

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