Void Stalker (13 page)

There they were. The telltale forked prow of an Adeptus Astartes warship, and the runic signifiers of its weapons firing into the void. Talos watched the hololithic ship as it manoeuvred, suddenly finding itself at the heart of an asteroid field, unloading its weapons on the surrounding rocks as it sought to cut its way free.

He was almost disappointed they’d not been destroyed in the initial burst, but at least he could witness it first-hand now.

‘I cannot help but feel a moment of pride,’ he said to the crew, ‘You have done well, all of you.’

The drifting rocks tumbled through space, crashing into each other and shattering into yet more rubble. Talos watched the hololithic display as several large chunks collided with the flickering ship. The primitive imaging program displayed little of the immense damage such impacts must be inflicting.

‘Bring us in for a visual confirmation.’ Talos knew that would involve a wait of several hours to close the distance, and an idea took root to pass the time and tip the odds further against the Genesis warriors on board.

‘Hail the enemy ship, and filter the feed so every vox outlet on the ship transmits the words we speak.’

Vox-mistress Auri did as she was told. The bridge had fallen quiet after the Shriek was deactivated. Now it rang again with the voices carrying from the enemy cruiser. Monotone servitor voices formed a background chorus to the crumpling thuds of rocks impacting on the hull, and a resonant voice speaking breathlessly.

‘I am Captain Aeneas of the
Diadem Mantle.
I will not listen to your taunts, heretic, nor to your temptations.’ An explosion cut the Space Marine’s words off for a moment, punctuated by distant screams.

‘This is Talos of the warship
Echo of Damnation.
I will speak no taunts, merely truths. Your assault has failed, as has your flight from our vengeance. We are watching you die on our auspex hololiths even as we speak. If you have any last words, speak them now for posterity. We will remember them. We are the Eighth Legion, and our memories are long.
’

‘Filthy, accursed traitors,’ crackled the reply.

‘He sounds angry,’ a nearby officer joked. Talos silenced him with a wordless glare.

‘Talos?’ came the captain’s voice again.

‘Yes, Aeneas.’

‘May you burn in whatever hell awaits the damned and the deceived.’

Talos nodded, though his counterpart had no hope of seeing the gesture. ‘I am sure I will. But you will reach there before I do. Die now, captain. Burn and be mourned, for a wasted life.’

‘I fear no sacrifice. The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Imperium. In Guilliman’s name! Courage and hon–’

The link went dead. On the hololithic display the runic symboliser of the enemy warship blinked out of existence at the core of the brutal asteroid storm.

‘The
Diadem Mantle
,’ said the Vox-mistress, ‘lost with all souls.’

‘Bring us closer to the debris field, and annihilate whatever remains with a volley from our prow armaments.’

‘Aye, lord.’

Talos rose from his throne, weary and aching. ‘The entirety of our speech was broadcast across the ship?’ he asked.

‘Aye, lord.’

‘Good. May it dishearten the Genesis bastards still alive, to hear their captain die and their warship burn.’

‘Lord,’ began the Master of Auspex. ‘The use of torpedoes… That was a fine plan. It worked beautifully.’

Talos paid him scarce heed. ‘As you say, Nallen.’ He gestured to the closest officer. ‘Kothis. You have the bridge.’

The named officer didn’t salute. The masters paid no attention to such formalities. Still, he knew better than to sit in the lord’s throne. Instead, he stood by it, taking control over those hunched below him.

Talos moved to the edge of the strategium, and lifted Xarl’s corpse onto his shoulders.

‘I am going to bury my brother. Summon me only if the need is dire.’

It took almost
an hour for First Claw to reach any of the other squads. Their journey through the
Echo
’s
labyrinthine decks took them through chamber after chamber, tunnel after tunnel. At times they passed through crowds of idling slaves hiding in the dark, while other chambers were filled with the bustle of efficiency, as the Legion’s servants went about their duties. Minor repair crews and teams of menial slaves were in the majority. Several they passed looked mauled from encounters with the Genesis Chapter, and Cyrion had the uncomfortable feeling that the final crew casualty lists would number in the thousands.

Mercutian was clearly thinking the same. ‘They hit us even harder than the Blood Angels hit the
Covenant
.’

Cyrion nodded. Given the numbers of crew lost that night at Crythe, he’d not been keen to witness another boarding assault. Still, the
Echo
had the resources and manpower to compensate for such a grievous mauling
;
the
Covenant
hadn’t.

As they walked, each of them grew aware of a moist, soft sound crackling over the vox. Uzas was licking his teeth again.

‘Stop that,’ Cyrion warned him.

Uzas either didn’t hear or didn’t care. His blood-palmed helm didn’t even turn to regard the others.

‘Uzas
.
’ Cyrion resisted the urge to sigh. ‘Brother, you are doing it again.’

‘Hnh?’

Despite Mercutian’s earlier lecture on prejudice, Cyrion didn’t think of himself as a petty creature. However, the endless run of Uzas’s tongue along his teeth was enough to make him grind his own.

‘You are licking your teeth again.’

Variel cleared his throat with gentle politeness. ‘Why does that cause you irritation?’

‘The primarch did it. After he’d filed his teeth to points, he’d ceaselessly lick his teeth and lips while thinking, like some kind of animal. He’d often cut his tongue as he did it, and the blood would flow over his lips, driving us on edge with the scent.’

‘Intriguing,’ the Apothecary noted, ‘that a primarch’s blood should have such an effect. I have never envied you your existence in their shadows, but that sounds fascinating.’

The others said nothing, showing just how much they cared to discuss that particular subject again.

‘I smell intestines,’ Uzas grunted as they entered another chamber.

‘I smell the Bleeding Eyes,’ said Cyrion.

‘Hail to First Claw,’ cawed a voice from above.

They raised their bolters as one, aiming into the roof of the domed chamber. The room itself was a hollowed-out mess, signs of abandonment in every direction. A supply room or crew barracks, was Cyrion’s guess. Four hunched figures squatted in the rafters, barely visible between the tendrilous forest of chains hanging from the ceiling.

Six Genesis warriors dangled, limp as broken marionettes, from hooks on the dirty chains. Their armour was torn open across each stomach – power cables split and layered ceramite shredded, pulled open by clawed hands. The flesh beneath was similarly mutilated, allowing their innards to rain in a slopping spill onto the decking below. Blood still dripped from three of them.

Against his instincts, Cyrion lowered his bolter. These wretches were barely his brothers, but they were murder in a fight, and the warband was fortunate to have them. The problem was keeping them in the fights they joined.
First in,
they always claimed, and that was true enough. The fact was also true that they were also
first out.

‘You have been busy,’ he said. Despite the distance, he caught a glimpse of one of them without its helm on. Blood coated its hands and what little he could see of its face, as it fed upon the organs of the hanging warriors. A scalp of black veins and misaligned bone was immediately covered by the traditional sloping, daemon-shrieking helm.

‘Throne of Lies,’ he swore.

‘What?’ Mercutian asked, keeping his voice low.

‘The warp beats in their blood more than I realised.’

The Raptors shared a series of clicks and growls, passing as discussion between the pack. One of them hissed at the Night Lords below, the sound breaking off into a rasping vox-cackle.

‘This deck is clean, First Claw. We cleaned it of enemy heartbeats.’ The Raptor’s head jerked twice, on a twitching neck. ‘You seek Lucoryphus?’

Cyrion shook his head. ‘No. We are moving through to the Hall of Reflection. We seek Deltrian.’

‘Then you seek Lucoryphus. He stands with the machine-speaker.’

‘Very well. Our thanks to you.’ Cyrion waved his brothers forward. First Claw walked around the hanging bodies, giving them a wide berth. The Bleeding Eyes never reacted well to others interfering with their kills, or with the feasts that followed.

As First Claw passed, one of the Raptors ignited the thrusters on its back, diving down from the ceiling with a thrust of smoky engine flare, sinking his claws into the exposed meat of a dead warrior’s torso. First Claw paid no heed, and moved ahead without a word.

The man was
only a man in the loosest, most physiological sense. He had no comprehension that he’d ever possessed a name, nor was he truly sentient beyond an ability to express the same tortured emotion over and over again. His existence was divided into two planes of experience, which his strangled mind interpreted as Torpor and Scourging.

In moments of Torpor, which lasted for oceans of time between Scourges, he drifted in a milky haze of numbing sensation, doing nothing, seeing nothing, knowing nothing but an eternity of weightlessness and the taste of salty chemicals in his lungs and throat. The only thing that could be generously interpreted as thought was the faint, distant echo of anger. He didn’t feel fury itself, but rather the memory of it: a recollection of once knowing rage, without knowing why.

When the Scourging came, it came in a storm of pain. The anger rose again, sparking through the veins of his head like misfiring power cables. He’d feel his jaws opening, his tongueless mouth silently screaming into the cold nothingness that cocooned him.

After a time, the pain would fade, and the false anger it brought would drift away with it.

It was happening now. The man once known as Princeps Arjuran of the Titan
Hunter in the Grey
breathed the cold liquid of his chemical womb, inhaling fluid and excreting filth as his ravaged body was at last allowed to rest.

Lucoryphus of the Bleeding Eyes stood before the glass tank containing the tortured man. He didn’t like to stand upright, but some things bore closer investigation. The Raptor tapped a claw on the glass.

‘Hello, little soul,’ he rasped in a smiling whisper.

The body within the suspension tank had been hobbled, its legs ending below the knees and its hands amputated at the wrists. Lucoryphus watched the crippled figure writhing in the fluid, lost in whatever inner torments drifted through its drugged mind.

‘Do not touch the glass,’ Deltrian’s toneless voice still conveyed his disapproval.

Lucoryphus jerked twice, his helmed head twitching on his neck. ‘I will break nothing.’

‘I did not ask you to break nothing. I asked you to refrain from touching the glass.’

The Raptor cawed a short whine and dropped back down to all fours. He watched the excruciation needles withdrawing from the prisoner’s temples, and turned his attention to the tech-adept.

‘This is how you make the Shriek?’

‘It is.’ Deltrian’s chrome face was hidden in his hood, as he worked on powering down the pain engines feeding into the suspension tank. ‘The prisoner was a gift from First Claw. They tore him from his throne in a Titan’s mind-chamber.’

Lucoryphus hadn’t heard the tale, but he could guess the details easily enough. In truth, the Shriek fascinated him. To render an enemy vessel’s scanners inert and useless, to drown them in a voxed screed of tormented scrapcode… such technology was rare enough, but still possible in any one of a hundred ways with the right genius and the right materials. But to breed electronic interference from the pain of a single human soul, to filter organic agony through the ship’s systems and use it to harm the enemy – that was poetry the Bleeding Eyes leader could sincerely appreciate.

He tapped the glass again, uttering a low snarl that wasn’t quite a laugh.

‘How much of your brain-flesh is still human?’ he asked.

Deltrian paused, his multi-jointed fingers hovering over the console keys. ‘That is a matter I have no desire or motivation to discuss. Why do you ask?’

Lucoryphus inclined his sloping daemon helm to the amniotic tank. ‘Because of this. This is no cold, logical creation. This is the work of a mind that understands pain and fear.’

Deltrian hesitated again, unsure whether to process the Raptor’s words as a compliment. It was always difficult to tell with the Bleeding Eyes. He was prevented from a need to answer, as the doors opened on grinding hydraulics. Four figures stood silhouetted by the red emergency lights beyond.

‘Hail,’ said Cyrion.

The Hall of
Reflection was more museum than workshop, and within its walls Deltrian was monarch of all he surveyed. Cyrion watched him for a while, canting binary orders to his menials, directing their efforts to unknowable projects.

The Night Lord walked around the chamber, ignoring the bustle of robed adepts and mumbling servitors. His gaze fell upon the weapons being repaired, and the great Dreadnought sarcophagi chained to the walls, housing the Legion’s revenants, forever awaiting reawakening.