Nepenthe
Cassandra Khaw

In the warp, only the dead may dream.

 	‘Not your best work.’ Marcus glances at his brother, gaze lidded, tertiary optics cataracted with new overlays. They still give him a headache, this honeycombed perception of the universe, high-resolution imagery parallaxed with an eternity of mathematics scrolling into storage.
 	Data. Always more data. Always, always. To be passed onto the next generation and the generation after that, preserved in alphanumeric hieroglyphs and computational hymns. But their receptacles? Their shepherds? Nothing but interchange­able circuitry, anonymised and anonymous, no more important than their functions they fulfil. And oh, how Marcus despises the fact.
 	‘The knife fits the ritual,’ comes Cornelius’ warbling tenor, a boy’s voice, snapping Marcus from his melancholy.
 	Marcus shrugs, watches as his brother pares the skin from his face, documenting the neatness of it all. Of the two of them, Cornelius has always had the defter touch, the steadier hands.
 	‘I don’t understand why this is even necessary.’ Marcus exhales. ‘Skin’s porous. Microfilament technology exists. I – it’s just so inefficient, Cornelius.’
 	‘Ritual, Marcus.’ The Omnissiah would break before his brother’s composure. ‘It’s about the ritual.’
 	‘A waste of time. We should be preparing for the Nepenthe…’ He shivers as the name unknots along his tongue. The things they’d said of the ship, of what had transpired in its gut, what they’d done inside it, what they’d done to it. ‘… the Nepenthe’s arrival. We should be researching. We should be doing something useful.’ 
 	‘We’ve done everything we need to do. We are here, are we not? If we had failed, Veles wouldn’t have permitted us this indulgence. We’d still be in the bowels of the ship, slaving over pointless minutiae.’
 	That hasn’t yet changed, Marcus thinks sourly. They’re still rotting in the belly of their vessel, still consigned to the smallest laboratory, still forgotten. He flexes his hands, takes note of the fluids clotting in his wrists and, not for the first time, Marcus feels like the old man he’s become.
 	They’d lied. They said there was forever to be found in the machine but there was nothing, nothing but rust and rot and ruin. But the Nepenthe could change all of that.
 	‘I wonder if she’s as beautiful in real life.’ Cornelius sighs, cheeks ruddy from the heat. The laboratory is kept repugnantly humid for the benefit of his studies, his speciality being the study of microfauna, complementing Marcus’ own area of expertise, his fascination with the monolithic.
 	‘If she was truly created in the Dark Age of Technology, I doubt it. Mankind was still so new to the idea of everything. They wouldn’t have had time to make her beautiful.’ Marcus rises, suddenly belligerent. Something about his brother’s romanticism chafes. He rolls his shoulders, one at a time, then flexes the matrix of prosthetics cresting his lumbar region. A threat display, he supposes. ‘And you presume too much of what is likely a dead abomination.’
 	‘You’ve no poetry in your heart.’ A long-practised sigh, pitched to irritate.
 	‘I have several hearts,’ Marcus retorts. ‘I’m sure there’s poetry in some.’
 	His brother doesn’t reply, only cocks a grin before he fits a rebreather over his denuded skull.
 	‘You are aware that if the Magos finds out, we’ll be branded as traitors, hereteks. There’s no coming back from this,’ Cornelius whispers, voice slurred. Under the mask, Marcus imagines that a metamorphosis is beginning: larynx and somatic nerves, sinuses and visual system, auditory function, every one of them examined and edited in turn, unstitched and revised where required, a library of heuristic algorithms optimising future output to the brain. 
 	‘We are just fulfilling our duties. We’ve identified a possible threat. We’re moving to dispose of it.’ A familiar minuet: argument and counterpoint, reiterated so many times that ritual has become reflex. ‘That we wanted to wait until we were sure of the legitimacy of our claim, I’m certain no one can fault us for.’
 	His brother says nothing.
 	‘And if we are right, would you leave her alone in the darkness for another thousand years? She called to us. She begged for us. After all this time, after we’ve gotten so close, you’d turn tail and abandon her?’ Six long strides take him across the laboratory to his brother Cornelius, younger and much taller, marionette limbs and a thorax conjoining steepled torsos, one organic, one entirely synthetic. He claps a hand around his brother’s shoulder.
 	‘We might find nothing. It’s true.’ Marcus’ voice quiets to a whisper. ‘But it is also possible that we might find her alive in that ship, waiting, our very own madonna of meat and machinery. And can you imagine, brother, the secrets we could gouge out of her bones?’
 	Magos Veles Corvinus’ immense shadow drags behind him like the hems of his claret cape. His subordinates watch, their machinery in symphony, an arrhythmic clack-clack-clack of moving parts, telemetric devices logging the Magos’ moods. Over the years, they’ve learned to be cautious of his emotional states. 
 	‘There’s nothing here.’ His voice is a hiss, refracted by his respirator into something monstrous, pupils aperturing as his attention fixes itself onto Cornelius’ face. 
 	Or so Cornelius’ picters report, at least. He isn’t certain. This new reality, while transcendental, is dizzying, limbic system still unconvinced of the profit of his recent mutilation. His neural circuitry mutinies against this darkness, the negative space where chemoreceptors once held court in the antechamber of the neocortex, describing the world in electrical staccato. Now, they’ve been bought out, made redundant by technology, and the brain, for all that it might be folds of shrivelled tissue, is unhappy.
 	‘These are our best estimates. Temporal continuity is hardly a rule in the immaterium. Furthermore, the ship–’
 	‘Enough.’
 	Cornelius lapses into silence.
 	‘Accounting for errors, what is your current prediction?’
 	‘The Nepenthe, according to records, has been in transit.’ Cornelius pulls up his records, visions saturated with data tables. Mathematical theorems pirouette through possibilities, while Cornelius consults star-maps, black box transcripts in sodium hieroglyphs. Behind all of it, diffused, her song calling him. ‘Since the Dark Age of Technology.’
 	‘Might it not be a wiser idea to call the Adeptus Astartes’ attention to this? An Ultramarine company is on a hive world only a solar system away. It wouldn’t take them long.’ A voice interjects, low and deferential, but only an idiot like Veles might mistake its sycophantic cadences as sincerity. 
 	That damned enginseer again, Cornelius thinks, jolting from his calculations. They’d missed their last window of opportunity because of him. And the one before that. Ten years, and Lupus Agelastus fought them at every juncture, weaponising protocol and legislation; the common sense of the coward. If it weren’t for Veles’ own greed, this mission would have been butchered at its inception.
 	Even so… 
 	‘We don’t have the time.’ Cornelius modulates his response, runs a macro to regulate cortisol production. He isn’t angry, yet, but precautions are necessary. The lizard brain is faithless, accountable only to its own agenda and it wouldn’t take much, not after all these years, for it to snap. Such a slip-up would be more damaging to the brothers’ machinations than anything that Lupus could author. So, Cornelius breathes in. Breathes out. Saves the interval to a loop that he then tethers respiratory function to. ‘According to the Lexmechanics, we have sixteen hours, if that. Less, if we factor in the intrinsic instability of the warp. Magos, I beg you. Consider the logic. Ignore Agelastus’ interjection. If we wait for the Adeptus Astartes, we risk losing the ship–’ 
 	‘Space hulk. Genetor, I wish you’d cease ignoring the fact that this is a derelict husk that has been floating in the warp for centuries. There is a term for it. It is called a space hulk and precedent shows that–’ 
 	‘The vessel is completely functional.’
 	‘As are many space hulks, judging from reports.’
 	‘And what would you have us do, Agelastus?’ Cornelius turns on his adversary, teeth clenched. The best laid plans of men, indeed. Meat always finds its way. ‘We won’t have this opportunity again. The parabola of the Nepenthe’s trajectory makes it clear. If we do not take our chance now, we will not see the vessel in our lifetimes. It will be another millennia before it enters realspace again and by that time, we’ll be nothing but scrap.’
 	The enginseer’s regard is placid. ‘You will be, at least.’
 	How Cornelius loathes him. Squat, perpetually swaddled in red robes too long for his frame, his mechadendrites sloppily architectured, devoid of any sense of aesthetics. No ambition. Nothing but the bare formalities of biological function. Lupus is a waste of resources, unfulfilled potential. A mere cog. But a blood clot can asphyxiate the most brilliant mind. And here, here was a nodule of useless mass, waiting to be a cause of death.
 	‘Magos, this is entirely up to you.’ Cornelius cocks his head towards Veles. ‘If you insist that we stand down–’
 	‘No.’
 	‘You can’t be serious,’ Lupus snarls. ‘Be reasonable, Magos. I understand that you wish for our Explorator fleet to be recognised. But surely, you understand the absurdity of the situation. What Cornelius is suggesting – you cannot seriously be considering this debacle.’
 	‘Your objections will be taken into consideration, Enginseer Agelastus. If you’d like to place a formal complaint, I invite you to follow the appropriate procedure.’ The timbre of Veles’ voice disguises nothing of its disdain, and it is all Cornelius can do to not laugh. ‘This is not your jurisdiction, enginseer. If you wish to circumvent the possible consequences of your doomsaying, perhaps you should take the next few hours to evaluate the condition of our equipment.’
 	‘Magos–’
 	Cornelius’ fingers bifurcate, steeple, a prism of wires and attenuated silicone. 
 	‘Magos,’ he echoes, tone adjusted for a luxuriant pitch. Conciliatory, even compassionate towards his nemesis. Survival, he’d learned, necessitates a mastery of politics, however distasteful its flavour. ‘I believe–’
 	He is not permitted to finish. 
 	‘Both of you. Quiet.’ Veles traps the bridge of his nose between gloved fingers. 
 	‘Magos,’ Cornelius hisses.
 	‘Magos,’ Lupus echoes.
 	Veles evidences no immediate awareness of their acknow­ledgement. Along the edge of Cornelius’ perception, he sees the bridge being evacuated. No one wants to be collateral damage. It is only when the space is bereft of conversation, no sound save for the hum of navigational cogitators, that Veles straightens, hand collapsing to his side. ‘The purpose of the Explorators has always been to make sense of the unknown. Where others falter, we strive forward. We cannot surrender this opportunity. It is antithetical to who we are.’
 	‘Magos, I understand that. But it would not take long for the Ultramarines–’
 	‘They’d raze it to the ground,’ Cornelius cuts in, unable to help himself, his horror raw. ‘It wouldn’t matter if the vessel was free of hostiles, or even if it contained a – a crew of living tech-priests, preserved by the hand of the Omnissiah. They’d destroy it.’
 	And her, he thinks, for a sliver of a moment.
 	‘A regrettable possibility,’ Lupus ripostes, stepping forward. ‘But the reverse will put this entire ship at risk.’
 	‘And isn’t that the damned point?’ Cornelius barks in counterpoint. ‘The entire purpose of the Cult Mechanicus? To recover and preserve knowledge? Here, we have the opportunity to examine something – something no one has touched in hundreds of years. We cannot be afraid. The flesh is merely vehicular. If we must die for the cause, so be it.’
 	‘Your passions…’ Veles steers his bulk to an adjacent panel, fingers deft despite their size. Monitors come alive in a cosmos of computations and Cornelius’ voice hitches at the vision, pleasure serrating his thoughts. He recognises them, the visualisations fractalising across the screens. Veles had been listening. More vitally still, they had him. ‘…Have always caused you and your brother trouble, haven’t they?’
 	‘It was necessary, Magos.’ A subtle tilt of his head. ‘We were raised on a forge world. Our parents were worthless but we always knew we were meant to be more than cattle in the abattoir. We worked tirelessly to be recognised and the Adeptus Mechanicus rewarded our diligence with its attention.’
 	Not entirely true. Not entirely inaccurate either. 
 	Cornelius recites the story with the practice of a pastor, muscle memory flattening the tale into a perfect truth. Lupus exhales, mid-way, a loud noise, intended to bring pause.
 	‘We’ve heard this all before. No need to get into this again. Is there a point to this, Magos? Or do you intend that we listen to this blowhard repeat his history all over again?’
 	Veles dismisses the complaint with a motion. ‘I hadn’t asked for an interruption. And you, Cornelius. He’s right, you know? There is no point to your rhetorics. Not everything is an excuse to expound on your history. A shorter answer would have sufficed. Whatever the case, I’ve made a decision. A boarding party will be dispatched to the Nepenthe when it reenters real-space. You, Agelastus, and your brother shall lead it.’
 	Cornelius tilts a look at Lupus, picters keyed to the microcosm of his expressions. But if the proclamation angers the enginseer, if it upsets him in any way, his face admits to none of it. 
 	‘Whatever pleases you, Magos,’ Agelastus declares.
 	‘Good.’ Veles cuts at nothing with the flat of his hand. ‘I imagine you’ll need four maniples of combat servitors, at least. Take whatever you need.’
 	Klaxon notifications, repeated in a claret glow. Against expectations, the Nepenthe arrives early, spilling into the world like a portent, a warning of what is to come.
 	‘If it isn’t a space hulk,’ Cornelius confides to his brother, ‘it might as well be.’
 	Marcus says nothing, unnerved by the unease frissoning down his spine. The dimensions of the vessel exceeded their initial estimates, nearer in proportions to a battle barge than a mere cruiser. He’d thought they’d mapped the ship completely, but there is so much space unaccounted for, bulwarks and bays that had resisted imaging. How could they have been so mistaken? 
 	What if it wasn’t their fault? What if something, something alive and sapient, had occluded their investigations? Edited the structural report? For one moment, the tech-priest is seized by the impulse to terminate the mission, reveal that the operation has been compromised, but there is no question. It’d mean lobotomy, indentured servitude until their muscles gave out from rot.
 	He glances over at the servitors they’d been assigned, their bodies inert, slack in the harnesses descending from the ceiling of the shuttle. Like so much meat, Marcus thinks. Carcasses rocking from a butcher’s hooks.
 	‘Have you…’ Marcus begins, each word slow and thick, ‘ever considered what it might be like to be one of them?’
 	‘The leucotomisation process is painless these days. In the past, physicians would drive an orbitoclast through the bone at the summit of the eye socket and cut.’ Cornelius taps his mask, where the alloyed carapace contorts into a subtly anguished brow. ‘Now, it is a strategic overstimulation of the interface-meshing, at least in the case of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Very humane.’
 	‘That hardly answers my question.’
 	Cornelius sags. ‘No. But the theory fascinates. In all honesty, I think it might feel like a bit of a respite. Consciousness is terror, after all. With self-awareness comes the knowledge of one’s eventual demise, the understanding that cessation is inevitable. Our entire biology is servant to that existential dread. Everything we do, everything that we are, revolves around the impulse to arrest that eventuality. It is really quite inefficient. Look at the genus Tyranidae. They’ve committed the burden of autonomy to their Hive Minds. Look at what they’ve accomplished.’
 	‘The extinction of countless solar systems. Entire galaxies, eaten down to their heart.’ Marcus palms his face, looking out again through the porthole. Outside, in the cthonic abyss, the Nepenthe floats, defiant of classification. Matte panelling and no viewports, no turrets, nothing that approaches the familiar accoutrements of a ship, a rectangular cuboid like someone had carved the ship wholesale from the void itself.
 	‘Yes, but it isn’t personal.’ Cornelius rises, restless, moves to examine the servitors, while Marcus watches the Nepenthe expand from improbability to irrefutable fact. Probes orbit its obsidian mass, magnesium scintilla that somehow cast no reflection on the oil-deep surfaces. He charts their transmissions; still no indication of where a docking area might reside. If this keeps up, they’d have to gouge a route of their own. ‘Tyranids do not have agendas. Their motivations are pure. It’s simple hunger, bestial and uncomplicated.’
 	‘Careful, brother. What you suggest is heresy.’ A door opens. Hypaspists file into the room in lock-step and flank the brothers; silent, watchful.
 	‘As is everything we believe in.’ Under the mask, Marcus is certain that his brother smiled. ‘You’re not getting cold feet now, are you?’
 	There is no opportunity to reply. Another door apertures and the brothers turn to see Lupus corralling a phalanx of battle-automata into the room, Scyllax Guardians to the last unit. In spite of himself, Marcus is impressed. Who would have thought their expedition would warrant such vaunted protection? At his attention, the machines halt, half-skulls swinging to triangulate on his position, his reflection repeated in the multitude of their glass-green eyes.
 	‘The Magos insisted,’ Lupus explains, glaring. ‘He thinks this is a good idea.’
 	An accusation implied in the inflection of the words, but Marcus circumvents an answer with a half-smile. He pushes onto his feet and pads towards the enginseer. ‘And I imagine it will be. The space hulk–’
 	It wriggles across his tongue, the phrase. Space hulk. Marcus had been so insistent on censoring its use, but the words slip now from his lungs, independent of conscious decision, effortless in their articulation. But Lupus doesn’t comment on them, preoccupied first with his automata and then the sight unfolding outside of the window.
 	Slowly, the Nepenthe becomes reticulated with incandescent razorwire, the lines so narrow that Marcus might have missed them if it wasn’t for the intensity of their fluorescence. As he watches, the ship dismembers itself, separating along axial points intelligible only to its private algorithms. Doors are configured, hinges; biometrics familiar to naval morphologies. A mouth opens in the anterior of the ship, beckoning, its throat studded with orange guard lights.
 	The entry point is the exact size of their shuttle.
 	‘Report.’
 	Veles’ voice is static-warped, higher than in actuality. The Scyllax, cervical vertebrae annexed by the Magos, jabbers in irritation, its resident machine-spirit clearly displeased by the parasitism. Marcus endures its regard without complaint, while the enginseer endeavours to soothe the automaton. Around them, silence save for the biometrics of their footsteps, broadcasting aggregate weight, positioning, number. Cornelius looms ahead of the vanguard, wax-white in the dim.
 	‘Nothing so far.’ 
 	Marcus would have appreciated a psyker or two in their convoy, someone that might be able to predict an ambush, or at least emptiness. It must exist, after all. The brothers had communed with her for years.
 	‘As far as we can tell, this entire docking facility is… new.’ So fresh from parturition, in fact, that the scaffolding is warm beneath Marcus’ grip. 
 	The tunnel is concentric rings, bordered with ganglia of exposed circuitry, contact with their topology prevented by thick glass. One method of ingress, one option for exit. A killing ground, Marcus thought, and shudders at his own description.
 	‘It feels like it was custom-built specifically for our landing or, at least, modified based on their morphometrics.’ The climate is equatorial. Humid enough for condensation to bead and roll off the automata, and drip from the servitors as they lumber ahead of their operators. The air breathable, if faintly pungent with exhaust. ‘The infrastructure is astounding. Entirely modular, as far as I can see. I don’t recognise the polymers used here. We’ll need to take samples. I wish you could see this, Magos.’
 	‘Trust me, Genetor, I am perfectly happy experiencing this by surrogate.’
 	The passage dilates into open space, unexpectedly commercial in its make-up. The servitors illuminate an out-of-commission fountain, the centrepiece of what Marcus presumes was a stage, its rococo anatomy choked by pathways. Mechanical stairs abseil diagonally from higher levels, six flights in total, the space ascending into a domed firmament. Refracted by the displays is the halcyon vision of a terrestrial night sky, fast-forwarding through cosmic phenomena. Everything is clean, scrupulously maintained. 
 	Except it shouldn’t be.
 	The impractical design of the ship, its apparent devotion to leisure; all tenets of a time when interstellar travel was something to venerate. The air should be clogged with dust, the hallways stinking of effluvium, rusty water and decomposing protein. It shouldn’t be so clean. Marcus runs his eyes along the landing again, searching, uncertain.
 	Despite everything, despite fact, despite logic, it feels as though they’ve breached a moment locked in freeze-frame and, any moment now, animation will return, bodies will shuffle into visual range, music will play…
 	‘You should have started running.’
 	Marcus jolts at the voice, which, he realises too late, is being transmitted stereoscopically, ricocheting from old-fashioned transducers, syllables sawed-off in places, the upper registers completely missing. Not that it damages the message. A hololithic projection grafts itself together in the corner: a man, wire-slim, sitting astride the lip of the fountain, knee pulled to his chest. 
 	Whoever the manifestation had been modelled upon, Marcus realises with a thrill of excitement, that person must have predated the Imperium. Nothing in his features is familiar.
 	Even as Marcus gawks, the figure articulates a smile, combing fingers through hair pomaded perfectly in place. To the tech-priest’s surprise, the keratin fibres respond, tussling in obedience to physics, and the figure sighs.
 	‘Really. You should have started running.’ 
 	‘Defensive positions!’ Cornelius, bellowing already, more cautious, more grounded in the practical. Hypaspists swarm forward, the servitors moving in parallel. But it is too late. 
 	Around them, the ship awakens.
 	Once, when he’d been too young to imagine being old, Cornelius had pressed his nose against a pane of smudged glass and watched as a cephalopod crawled along the bottom of a tank. At first, it had been the same muddied colours of the sediment but as it scrabbled forward, its rubbery flesh had blued, had brightened; by the time it’d lunged for its prey, a dying fish, seeping gases and lacings of waste, the creature burned like plasma. 
 	Metachrosis. He’d learn the word much later, and only remember it again in the black of the Nepenthe. Lights nictitate in undulating spirals, threading the outlines of bodies he should have seen, should have noticed long ago. Cornelius levels his gun, fires, fires again, even as screams burst around him. Their camouflage must involve some variety of neurotoxin, a specialised pheromone intended to impede memory encoding. Something, anything. How else could he have missed them?
 	Something massive shrieks at Cornelius through the bichromatic chiaroscuro, darkness and the red glare of energy weapons. He turns. He estimates it to be about two metres, maybe less, maybe more. Accurate telemetrics require a mind not at war with itself. 
 	What successfully registers: tentacles slopping from a gaping jaw, each pseudopod teethed and stippled with hooks. Bipedal physiognomy, slightly hunched. A carapace that might have been skin once, but is now a scabrous leather. What he fails to process: a name.
 	Cornelius knows he recognises the aberration howling closer by the heartbeat, that some distant vector of consciousness has a name for this nightmare. But he cannot call it to his tongue, not even as the thing’s arms petal into hooks. Six limbs now, seven, the last no doubt meant to spear him like a fish.
 	Even as the amygdala barks its denial, even as Cornelius’ cognition shrinks into itself, something more ancient, a basal instinct scrimshawed into the bones, raises his gun again and shoots until the clip exhausts itself. 
 	His artillery does nothing.
 	Cornelius’ arm drops to his side, slack, gun clattering to the floor. He stares. The thing snaps its head back, cephalopodic mouth exposed under a ring of straining tentacles, and at the sight of it, a word unwraps from Cornelius’ lungs.
 	‘Genestealer.’
 	One of the hypaspists intercepts the creature’s trajectory, knocking the genestealer aside and down, the two tumbling. The world renders in hyper-vivid strokes, sensory oversaturation bracketed by screams and the screech of metal torn apart. Before Cornelius can recover equilibrium, the genestealer digs talons into the tech-guard’s chest and pulls. 
 	Ribs crack. Viscera – barely recognisable as liver and intestine, glands and other sweetbreads, genetic optimisation and augmetics having made for more streamlined offal – disgorge from the gash. The warrior does not cry out, only convulses as it begins haemorrhaging oil and blood, body sagging. The genestealer raises its prize upwards, tentacles burrowing through the mangled flesh.
 	‘Genestealers,’ Cornelius repeats, tongue heavy in his mouth. No, he thinks. That’s not right. No, not quite. Almost. 
 	Finally: ‘Ymgarl strain. Omnissiah take them, I thought these were extinct.’ 
 	Pain cannot bypass programming. Even halfway to dying, the hypaspist will serve. It kicks against the genestealer, lasgun pushing into position, while the creature envelopes its face with its tendrils. Now, the warrior screams, a thin and animal noise. Its fingers clench and it pumps las-fire into the underside of its captor’s mandibles. Over and over, until the feeding genestealer’s skull splits from the assault.
 	Pale curds of brain, crisped by ballistics, splatter across the tech-priest’s robes. All at once, Cornelius is no longer paralysed, animal brain supplanting terror, pushing him up, forward, away from what had transpired.
 	For the first time, Cornelius really takes a look at the tableau.
 	It cannot have been more than twenty minutes since their arrival. But the walls are soaked, the floor mosaiced with so much meat that Cornelius can no longer remember if the landing had a colour. Over and again, Cornelius finds himself being surprised by how much of it there is, every glob of debased muscle run-through with wires and broken tubing, like so many parasitic worms evicted from a home. 
 	The servitors keep dying in clumps: thick-witted, slaved to targeting subroutines that are simply too slow to be effective against the xenos. But at least they serve a purpose, distracting the genestealers from more competent prey; the hypaspists and the Scyllax, closing ranks behind their monotasked peers. Unfortunately, there are only so many bodies to go around.
 	‘Genetor. You are in danger. We should move.’ Stilted delivery in a chrome-plated voice, full of squeals and pops as the larynx fizzles to uselessness. Cornelius shifts his attention to the hypaspist to his right, the cyborg drenched in gore. ‘Genetor, you are without weaponry. You should correct the situation.’
 	No secret that the troops of the Adeptus Mechanicus undergo emotion-suppression surgery, but Cornelius can’t help but wonder, as he falls into lock-step, just how much is flensed from the parietal lobe. What does it take to allow an animal to shamble through the act of dying without so much as a whimper? The hypaspist bleeds in ropes of grey offal, lasgun braced against the hollow of an exposed abdominal cavity, but it evidences no discomfort, nothing but a slurred vigil.
 	‘Genetor, you are without weaponry–’
 	‘We need to find my brother.’ We need to find her. Almost simultaneous, that other statement, articulated with more fervour than any requests to seek out Cornelius’ absent sibling. Since their approach, he’s not been able to hear her, not even a chord to allay his fears, his grief at being so unfathomably alone; a self-aware cyst of neural tissue piloting a rotting corpse. 
 	The hypaspist scissors straight with a crunch of bone, head cocked at a twenty-seven degree angle. ‘Genetor Marcus is–’ 
 	Before it can finish, Cornelius hears his brother scream, a killing sound whetted by the raw crackle of electric. He pivots to find Marcus and Lupus, flanked by automata, retreating from a corridor he’d not noticed before. Above them, clinging to the balustrades, bodies coiled like upside-down raindrops, a writhing mass of genestealers prepares for the drop. 
 	The Nepenthe… blinks. 
 	A voice floods the capillaries of the ship: female, faintly adenoidal.
 	‘You are in a protected void sphere,’ she intones without inflection. Magnesium-white pinholes of light flare along the surface of the Nepenthe, even as the strange voice pours from every speaker, every stretch of space along the Explorator vessel. ‘You are in a protected void sphere. Move, or we will register your inaction as a declaration of aggression.’
 	‘Move.’ Something cracks the monotone. ‘Or there will be nothing of you to move.’
 	‘Marcus!’ Cornelius bellows in time for his brother to jump sideways, but Lupus moves a half-second late. 
 	The genestealers descend as the hydra of Lupus’ mechadendrites rise, servo-arms razor-ridged, snapping at the air with moray eel mouths. But the enginseer’s enhancements are industrial, intended for fine work, not martial use. They break on hide intended to withstand worse. Two of the genestealers clasp Lupus by the shoulders, tug like dogs in competition for a wishbone, and as the enginseer wails, a third leans over the man, tentacles swaddling his gaunt face.
 	Something breaks.
 	Snaps.
 	Cornelius wastes no time on empathy, on fear, not even when Lupus’ throat distends and tears, as one of the genestealer’s smaller feelers breaks through the skin, a red-glazed jut of keratin. He knows what comes next. The Scyllax scream in one voice, inlays short-circuited by Lupus’ misfiring synapses; there is no syntax for his agony, no way to translate that pain into coherent actionables, no option but to shriek in symphony, their machine-spirits algospasmic. 
 	They continue to scream as Marcus butterflies a genestealer’s arm, the parabola of his whip precise enough to flay even that tensile flesh, as Marcus bolts for his brother, as Cornelius splices noospherically into his escort’s interfaces, both half-blind, but in the kingdom of the condemned, every little bit counts.
 	‘Run,’ Marcus pants, bleeding from a hundred places, his face ribbons.
 	‘Genetors, stay behind me,’ Cornelius’ hypaspist intones, shambling between the brothers and the genestealers, the latter already on the prowl again, Lupus’ dismembered corpse strewn between them, a boneless slaughterhouse of parts. And still nothing, nothing of the voice from the ship, nothing but this cosmology of death, Cornelius adapting macros to steady the hypaspist’s aim, optimise its reflexes, anything to buy them time. Nothing, nothing, nothing at all. ‘Genetor Cornelius, I advise that you acquire a weapon.’
 	The brothers don’t argue. 
 	‘Where is Veles? Where is our support? He was supposed to be in charge of the servitors, but we’re alone here!’ Marcus demands, dragging his brother past a tableau of the dead. ‘We have two options: we return to the ship or we find the control hub of this place. There must be a way. It can’t end like this.’
 	‘Something’s cut off communications. I don’t know when it happened, but the entire ship has become a null-zone. No signals in or out. She mustn’t want us to leave.’ Cornelius exhales and for a heartbeat, he is frightened to the bone of its implications. Perhaps, there is a reason as to why some things are branded tech-heresy.
 	‘If you are looking for CAT, you should probably move quickly.’ The hololith again, that anachronistic projection, materialising between the tech-priests as they race through the carnage, his feet skating across the air like it is a lamina of oil. ‘They’re almost done with the rest of your friends.’
 	Ambient electromagnetics cooking the air into patterns; pareidolia giving shape to the distortions. Under any other circumstances, Cornelius would have loved to dissect the technologies behind the manifestation. ‘Establish identity protocols. Report.’
 	‘I am MAUS. I am the CAT’s plaything. I am her assistant. I am her arms and legs. I am her keeper. I am her opposite. I am what she is not.’ Even wind velocity is replicated, the hologram’s hair moving with the momentum, a whip-snap of fluorescent strands. ‘She is not here, but I am.’
 	‘Genetors.’ A single salutation, bifurcated into two voices. The last of the hypaspists shamble into view, flamethrowers drooling combustibles. ‘There is an exit.’
 	One points behind them through the holocaust of bodies and quieting screams, even the Scyllax cracked open, husked of whatever meat is wired inside their bodies, their engines cooling and already leaking radiation. 
 	Their escape option is a gash in the wall, too small to have admitted whatever crowds might have once milled through the Nepenthe. A service entrance, perhaps, restricted to sanitorial personnel. No reason to think that it might lead them to freedom. Or her. Longing curves its hook around Cornelius’ gut, tugs, and he opens his mouth to object when all of them, gene­stealer and tech-priest, the slurried neural tissue laced through the hypaspists’ skulls, hear her sing.
 	‘Identify yourself,’ Veles barks.
 	‘Move, or there will be nothing left of you to move.’ The voice – it was coming from everywhere, every speaker, every channel – clarifies with every threat, acquiring inflection, unsubtle emotion. First: a modicum of pity, which diversifies shortly after to amusement, disdain. A strain of brittle loathing, something that has had years to mature. 
 	‘Move, or I–’ Finally, Veles thinks, an iota of identity spun into the endless warnings. He almost welcomes the aggression. Better this than the silence, the insensate dark. ‘–will make sure there’s nothing of you to move.’
 	‘We repeat. Identify yourself.’ Still nothing from his subordinates, no clue as to who might be issuing those statements, no way of verifying if it is a rogue machine-spirit or even, as some have theorised, a psyker who’d surmounted the trick of dying. But whispers of heresy have begun to seep through the listless ranks. Veles finds he can’t argue. 
 	‘Nepenthe,’ she whispers, when the ship is lit up like a supernova. ‘I am that which interrupts grief, devours sorrow, an opiate.’
 	‘What are you?’
 	‘Yes.’ The voice surprises Veles with its despair. ‘That is the question, isn’t it?’
 	‘Marcus, she’s calling us.’ He feels fingers lace around his sleeve.
 	Though Cornelius’ face now sits fermenting in a tide of bacteria, Marcus can still picture his sibling’s expression, an urgent wonder. ‘She’s here. She’s awake. She’s real.’
 	He does not answer. Not at first. Too enraptured by the glissando of her voice, its notes decanted straight into his nervous system, Marcus can only exist, transfixed by the reality of her. They’d waited for so long. Yet, some treacherous nodule of his mind disdains from submitting to the ecstasy, instead persisting in pointing out that this isn’t so much blasphemy as it is mutiny­ing against self-preservation. 
 	But they’ve come this far.
 	And what else do they have?
 	‘Marcus.’
 	‘I hear her, I hear her.’ He untethers his brother’s grip from his robes, every cell subsumed by the rapture of her acknowledgement. Drunk, Marcus thinks. He is drunk on the harmonics of her, somehow, that dose of oxytocin quickly metastasising into a full-on addiction. Anything so long as she doesn’t go silent again. There is just enough of Marcus to understand he should run. But he can’t, won’t. 
 	‘Let’s go.’ They move, their escape obfuscated by the final coda of the Scyllax, the muzzle-flash accompaniment. 
 	To Marcus’ distant astonishment, the genestealers do not follow. But why would they need to? hisses a voice in his head. The brothers were herding themselves to the pantry. 
 	A killing ground.
 	Marcus pushes the thought down.
 	The corridor narrows until they can only pass one at a time, the hypaspists taking point. Cornelius crab-walks behind them, the bizarre mathematics of his physique ill-suited for the restrictive space. Marcus comes last. No light whatsoever save for the radiation from their tacticals, the pallid glow from behind the hypaspists’ visors. Briefly, as he anchors the flail at his waist, Marcus considers jury-rigging some method of producing actual luminance, but the thought is superseded by childish superstition: if he can’t see them, maybe, they won’t be able to see him.
 	‘I wonder where she’s taking us.’ Cornelius breaks the quiet, voice muddied by pleasure, embarrassing almost in its intensity, like a lover’s appetite wantonly advertised. His fingers click across the walls, an irregular heartbeat. ‘I wish – I wish I understood what she was saying. But there is so much interference. I wish… I wish…’
 	Marcus says nothing. It occurs to him how empty of words he is. Especially now, with nothing but precedent fish-hooked through his breastbone, not even the euphonics of her voice to compel him, its notes dialled to faint static. White noise. Faith and white noise and the knowledge there’s no way to go but forward. A hiss-click of vox frequencies, remarkable only in its stark duality: it means nothing to Marcus, everything to Cornelius. 
 	In that moment, Marcus learns to hate his brother.
 	‘What is she saying to you?’ Try as he might, he can’t scrub his voice of its envy.
 	Cornelius halts. ‘Nothing. Nothing precise. But she has to know we’re here. She has to be calling to us. Why else would she be… singing?’
 	Again, language fails him as his body has failed him, is failing him. Marcus digs the heel of his palm into his brother’s shoulder, pushes him forward. They don’t speak at all. Occasionally, Cornelius moans into the dark – closer, closer, Marcus, oh, can’t you hear her, she’s telling us to come closer – like some prophet wasting to bone in the desert, but neither Marcus nor the hypaspists reply, and there is no other sound save for the drip of condensation, their footsteps in lock-step.
 	A trapezoid of light razors through the gloom, dust-moted. Through the cavity in the wall, Marcus can hear machinery in respiration, meat in preparation. He breathes in, holds his breath pinned against the roof of his mouth as one of the escorts crooks their gloved hand, beckoning them onward. 
 	‘Here,’ murmurs his brother, dazed-sounding, all eloquence drained to effortful slurring. ‘She’s here. She’s here. She’s waiting for us. Can’t you hear her, Marcus? Can’t you hear her call?’
 	‘Yes,’ he lies softly in return. ‘Yes, I can.’
 	Inside they discover what might have once been a medbay, save it’d been repurposed for a specific purpose. There are vats every­where, machines by the dozen, each devoted to a separate horror. Here, there is a system cultivating and curating bacteria cultures. Here, a sterilisation vat. Here, a miracle of engineering pulping the fungi, decocting them into food.
 	Here– 
 	Marcus stares at the yellowed skeleton suspended at the heart of the facility, at the glistening sheets of grey tissue draped across its stretched arms. She was female, Marcus thinks, cataloguing the curve of the cadaver’s pelvis bones, the swoop of its bowed spine. 
 	Mite-like drones crawl across the stretched flesh, pruning it of necrotising cells, harvesting the healthy. Others build circuitry of what they’d collected, tenants them in glass, stacks them in silos twice as high as the gawking tech-priests, every last shelf an oozing constellation of blinking lights and stinking, green-yellow lymph.
 	The air convulses and suddenly she is standing before them. Like MAUS, her phenotype markers are distinctive, orbital sockets and jawline bare of ethnic cross-pollination. Unlike MAUS, her appearance demonstrates evidence of corruption: patches of sloughed skin, revealing ongoing computations beneath, arabesques of virtualised protein radiating from her skull in a mist. An aberration, an abomination. Yet for all the grotesquerie on display, she is everything they’d dreamed.
 	Marcus slows, arm flung out to stop Cornelius’ motion.
 	‘What are you?’ Such a trite question. The momentousness of the occasion demands profundity, but all Marcus can supply is platitudes, pre-processed wonder as described in societal subconscious. 
 	‘It’s her,’ Cornelius whispers to no one at all.
 	‘I was–’ She saccades in place, a zoetrope in slow-motion, while the darkness twitches. Gleaming eyes flood the penumbra. There, Marcus thinks, surprised by his own resignation. This is where we die. He knows that. But he does not mind. All he wants is to talk to her a little longer. Just a bit more. ‘–was-was a psyker, I think. I think that was the word. Psssssskyer. Yes. Once, I’d been meat and hope and dreams everlasting.’
 	The air boils from Marcus’ lungs.
 	MAUS renders on an adjacent wall. ‘He means, “What are you now?”’
 	‘I am the Nepenthe.’ Her eyes empty of cornea and sclera, become engulfed instead in light so incandescent it is all afterimage, an impression of glare. 
 	This is why the past is heresy, Marcus thinks hazily, speared by her gaze. 
 	‘I am her protector, her-her mother, her guardian. I am the one who keeps her crew safe.’ 
 	Cornelius interjects, some ghost of him restored. ‘Everyone’s dead. There are nothing but genestealers on board this ship, and–’
 	‘There are sixteen hundred and forty-five living beings on the ship,’ she continues, unperturbed, and all Marcus can think of is how much he wishes he knew her name. Her name and not the ship’s, the name of the girl who’d animated the bones standing centrepiece in the room, who was still alive now. ‘I have monitored their biotelemetrics. I have adjusted the climate of the ship in accordance to their requirements. I have ensured optimal conditions for their survival within the limits of available resources.’
 	‘Those aren’t your crew.’ Marcus staggers forward while tentacles bloom in the half-light steeping around the mainframe, an irridescing biome of creeping purples and then eyes, flat and animal. How many of them? How many of them are there? He cannot conjecture a number, refuses to even consider the exercise. The same way he cannot envision what it must be like to be here, alone in the nothing, surrounded by the dead and the hungry, trapped. ‘They’re all dead. Or… or changed. These things aren’t human. Your–’
 	‘Do not touch her,’ MAUS snarls, suddenly in high-definition, three dimensional and already peeling from the wall. ‘Do not touch her. If you touch her, I’ll make sure that you will never stop dying. Do not touch her. Why are you even here, anyway?’
 	‘She called us,’ Cornelius whispers as their escorts finally sag onto the ground, offal puddling from their open wounds, ­slopping outwards in moist clusters. ‘She called us here. Lady, we’ve come so far for you. Through the void and the silence, through the endlessness. Through the hungry dark.’
 	‘There is no way,’ CAT whispers.
 	Sccrrrrcccch. Something is pulling the bodies away, dragging them into the blackness.
 	‘We have records.’ Marcus can hear slithering, peristalsis: ­larynx and trachea violated, a cartilaginous tearing, slurping, and a sigh almost sweet in its pained relief. He doesn’t turn. He can’t. ‘Decades of records. We documented the communication. We spoke with her. We tracked her.’
 	‘Oh.’ MAUS laughs aloud, bitterness in the twist of that sound. Elsewhere, she has begun humming again, a lullaby for monsters. ‘Oh. No. No, that’s not what happened at all. She doesn’t want you here. No one wants you here.’
 	Marcus snarls. ‘Then why did she call–’
 	‘Psychic residue. They wanted something that’d keep the crew calm, something more tactile than a cool voice through the intercoms. So they vivisected a psyker, came up with a way to clone her tissues, over and again, bind that power to their machinery.’ Here, MAUS releases his rictus. ‘It hurts her. Every time.’
 	Outside, the universe trembles. Ballistics and a ballet of propulsion, moving parts thrumming through the bulkhead. Marcus ignores them all. ‘So you–’
 	‘You were never wanted here.’ A clarity seeps into her voice, even as her image blinks into focus, the aberration – I never asked for her name, Marcus thinks again, strangely agonised over the fact – pivoting to face the two, hands joined, head cocked. ‘You were never wanted here. You are not part of my crew. You do not belong on the Nepenthe. Why have you come here?’
 	Like them, Marcus is broken, unable to do more than reiterate patterns, his hands hanging nerveless at his side. All these years for nothing. A killing ground, repeats that ghost of his voice. What’s worse is that the Nepenthe hadn’t even been in active pursuit. He and Cornelius, they’d walked themselves there, down into the slaughterhouse, so they could lay their heads on the butcher’s block. ‘You called us.’
 	‘No.’ There is no sympathy in her eyes, blinding still in their fluorescence. If anything, it is disdain he sees there, scaffolded in the bend of her mouth. ‘No, you were never wanted here.’ 
 	Hands circle Marcus’ throat, fingers tenderly cupping the jut of his chin. This close, Cornelius smells of oil and charred metal, flesh weeping plasma beneath the metal. Sweat and desperation. Marcus exhales and relaxes into his brother’s constricting grip, reality abstracted into a vague sense of self-loathing. Yes, this was always how it was meant to end, wasn’t it? With them forgotten, buried in the belly of the ship.
 	‘Lady, I’ll do anything you need, as long as you let me stay. Let me stay in your song. Let me love you.’
 	The manifestations exchange looks, vibrantly alive.
 	‘Why not?’
 	Snap.
 	The lights of the Nepenthe turn black. Veles jolts his head up from his screen and its rotation of panels, predictions conceptualised as shifting graphs, endless calculations.
 	‘What is happening?’ Veles growls.
 	Every screen is commandeered by a video feed. In it, Cornelius and Marcus, haloed by pinpoint glows, their faces bloodied but whole. Behind them, Veles can see chrome balustrades and unfamiliar architecture, screens and cogitator racks, acres of bizarre machinery.
 	And a body, a corpse, a skeleton suspended above pinpoints of lights, like a saint of strange places. 
 	Veles feels the questions die in his throat, one after another, swallowed by wonder, by fear, by scholastic lust. The brothers had been right. And now the Nepenthe was waiting to be cracked open, suckled of its secrets, its heart interrogated. He would be remembered forever. They would be remembered forever. Their names would be scorched into the annals of history and even the Omnissiah would marvel at what they had found.
 	‘Reconnaissance completed,’ Cornelius states. ‘There was a small brood of genestealers that had to be eliminated. The others are ensuring the rest of the ship is secure.’
 	Marcus dips his head. ‘Whenever you’re ready, Magos. Come aboard. There’s so much waiting for you to see.’