Void Stalker Read online

  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.

  The last of these armoured coffins depicted the triumphant image of Malcharion, rendered in burnished gold, as he’d been in life. He stood with the helms of two Imperial champions in his hands, crucified by the rays of a moonrise over Terra’s most holy battlements.

  ‘You,’ Cyrion turned to a nearby adept.

  The Mechanicus worker nodded his hooded head. ‘My name is Lacuna Absolutus, sire.’

  ‘Is work still proceeding on reawakening the war-sage?’

  ‘The battle interrupted our rituals, sire.’

  ‘Of course,’ Cyrion said. ‘Forgive me.’ He crossed the chamber to where Deltrian stood. ‘Talos ordered us here to protect you.’

  Deltrian didn’t look up from the console. His chrome fingers clicked and clacked at the keypad. ‘I need no protection. Furthermore, reports from all claws report the enemy resistance is ended.’

  Cyrion had been listening to the same vox reports. That wasn’t exactly what they’d said. ‘It is not like you to be so imprecise, honoured adept.’

  ‘Hostilities are almost at their conclusion, then.’

  Cyrion was smiling now. ‘You are annoyed, and trying not to let it show. Tell me why.’

  Deltrian emitted an irritated blurt of code. ‘Begone, warrior. Many demands press upon my time, and the array of my attention is limited.’

  Cyrion laughed. ‘Is this because your requests for assistance weren’t answered? We were engaged in battle, honoured adept. If we’d had the time to walk on the ship’s hull with you, I assure you we would have done as you asked.’

  ‘My work was critical. The repairs had to be made. If we had committed to a void battle with the enemy cruiser–’

  ‘But we did not,’ Cyrion rejoined. ‘Did we? Talos tore the moon apart instead. Beautiful overkill, that. The primarch would have laughed and laughed, loving every moment of it.’

  Deltrian deactivated his vocabulator, preventing any response based on a moment of emotional temper. He merely nodded to indicate he’d heard the warrior’s words, and continued his work.

  It was Lucoryphus that answered, from his vigil by the torture tank. ‘It does not matter. I answered his call.’

  Cyrion and the rest of First Claw turned to the Raptor. ‘Yes, after you fled with your rabid pack, leaving us to fight alone.’

  ‘Enough whining.’ The Raptor’s head jerked on the servos in his neck. ‘You survived, did you not?’

  ‘No,’ Cyrion replied. ‘Not all of us.’

  He worked alone, with his brother’s blood on his hands.

  ‘Talos,’ a voice carried over the vox. He ignored it, not even paying heed to whom it belonged.

  The extraction of gene-seed wasn’t a complicated process, but it required a degree of delicacy and efficiency made easier with the right tools. More than once in recent years, Talos had ruined gene-seed organs in the heat of battle, cutting them from a corpse with his gladius and pulling them free with his bare hands. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

  This was different. He wasn’t carving open one of his distant brothers under enemy fire.

  ‘You were always a fool,’ he told the dead body. ‘I warned you it would see you dead one night.’

  He worked in the stillness of his own meditation chamber, silent but for the humming of his armour joints and the wet-meat sounds of a blade going through flesh. His own narthecium was long gone, lost in a fight decades ago, yet he had no desire to allow Variel to do this.

  Splitting the breastbone beneath the black carapace was the most difficult obstacle. The biological augmentations that rendered a Legionary’s bones stronger than a human’s were also a bane to easy surgery. He briefly considered widening the wound close to Xarl’s primary heart, but it would involve burrowing and pulling more meat free.

  Talos hefted his gladius, testing the weight a few times. He brought the pommel orb down on Xarl’s solar plexus once, twice, and a third time with a dull thud punctuating each impact. On the fourth, he pounded the pommel down with more strength, cracking the breastbone in a ragged split. Several more thumps widened the crack enough for Talos to curl his fingers around the ribcage, opening his brother’s body like a creaking, cracking book. The smell of burned flesh and bare organs soon thickened the air in the small chamber. He reached a gloved hand into Xarl’s chest cavity, pulling the first globular node free. It resisted at first, tightly bound to the nervous system; the heart of a mesh of veins and muscle meat.

  He poured the handful of cold blood and stringy flesh into a medicae caniste
r. In better times, there had been words to say and oaths to speak. None of them felt right now.

  Talos clutched Xarl’s limp head, turning it to the side. Moving the body caused a rattle of breath to leave the corpse’s open mouth and exposed lungs. Despite his training, despite all the things he’d seen in his centuries of life, the sound caused his hands to freeze. Some instinctive responses were too human, too tightly bound to a warrior’s core, to go ignored. Bodies breathing was one of them. He felt his blood run cold, just for that moment.

  The progenoid organ in Xarl’s throat was much easier to recover. Talos used the tip of his gladius to carve through the skin and sinewy muscle, making a wide wound in the dead flesh. He pulled out another handful of bloody tissue and vein-stringy meat, placing it in the canister with the first.

  A twist, a seal, and the medicae canister locked tight. A green rune activated along its side.

  For several slow breaths, Talos knelt next to his brother’s body, saying nothing, thinking nothing. Xarl’s mutilated remains scarcely resembled the warrior in life – he was a defeated, broken thing of ripped flesh and ruined ceramite. The traitorous thought entered his mind of scavenging his brother’s armour, but Talos suppressed the vulture’s urge. Not Xarl. And in truth, there was little remaining worth the effort of plunder.

  ‘Talos,’ the vox insisted. He still ignored it, though the voice pulled him from his dead-minded reverie.

  ‘Brother,’ he said to Xarl. ‘A hero’s burial awaits.’

  Talos rose to his feet, moving to his weapon rack. An ancient flamer rested as it had for years, cleaned of all rust and corrosion, its unlit nozzle emerging from a brass daemon’s wide maw. He’d never liked the weapon, scarcely even used it since first tearing it from the hands of a dead warrior of the Emperor’s Children five decades before.

  A click of his thumb activated the pilot light. It hissed in the chamber, an angry candle flame casting a sharp glare in the gloom. He slowly aimed the weapon at Xarl’s body, breathing in the scent of his brother’s ruptured flesh and the chemical tang of old promethium oil.

  Xarl had been there when Talos first took a life: a shopkeeper slain by a boy in the lightless Nostramo night. He’d stood with him as the gang wars swept the cities, always cursing with gutter invective; always first to shoot and last to ask questions; always confident, never regretting a thing.

  He was the weapon, Talos thought. Xarl had been First Claw’s truest blade, and the controlled strength that formed their backbone in battle. He was the reason other claws had always backed down from facing them. While Xarl lived, Talos had never feared First Claw losing a fight. They had never liked one another. Brotherhood asked for no friendship, only loyalty. They’d stood back to back as the galaxy burned – always brothers, never friends; traitors together unto the last.

  But none of it seemed right to say. The flamer hissed on in the spreading silence.

  ‘If there is a hell,’ Talos said, ‘you are walking there now.’ He aimed the weapon again. ‘I believe I will see you there soon, brother.’

  He pulled the trigger. Chemical fire breathed out in a sudden roar, washing over the body in short bursts. Ceramite darkened. Joints melted. Flesh dissolved. He had a last sight of Xarl’s blackening skull, the bones resting in a silent, eyeless laugh. Then it was lost in the smoke choking the air.

  The fire quickly spread to the chamber’s bedding and the scrolls on the walls. The spoiled-meat reek of burning human flesh turned the cloying air even fouler.

  Talos washed the body in a final spread of liquid fire. He stowed the flamer over his shoulder, locked the medicae canister to his thigh, and reached for his weapons last of all. Talos took Xarl’s helm with one hand and his own bolter with the other. Without looking backwards, he strode through the smoke and engaged the door release.

  Thick, coiling smoke poured into the hallway beyond, and with it came the smell. Talos walked from the chamber, sealing the door behind him. The fires would die out soon enough, starved of oxygen and fuel in the chamber.

  He’d not expected anyone to be waiting. The two humans stood quietly, their cupped hands shielding their mouths and noses from the thinning smoke.

  Septimus and Octavia. The seventh and the eighth. Both tall, both dressed in dark Legion uniforms, both permitted, as so few slaves were, to carry weapons. The former stood with his damaged facial bionics clicking each time he blinked or moved his eyes. His long hair framed his face, and Talos – who had little gift for reading human expression beyond terror or anger – could make no sense of the emotion on Septimus’s features. Octavia had her hair bound in its usual ponytail, her forehead covered by her bandana. She was getting thin now, and unhealthily pale. This life wasn’t being kind to her, nor was her own biology, as her strength faded to be fed to the child growing inside her.

  He recalled his order that the two humans remain apart, and his more recent demand that Septimus remain in the hangar. In this moment, neither seemed to matter.

  ‘What do you want?’ Talos asked them. ‘There is nothing to salvage from Xarl’s wargear, Septimus. Do not ask.’

  ‘Variel ordered me to find you, lord. He requests your presence in the apothecarion as a matter of urgency.’

  ‘And it took both of you to deliver this message?’

  ‘No.’ Octavia cleared her throat, lowering her hands. ‘I heard about Xarl. I’m sorry. I think… by your standards, by the Legion’s ideals, I mean… he was a good man.’

  Talos’s exhalation became a snort, which in turn became a chuckle.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Xarl was a good man.’

  Octavia shook her head at the warrior’s sarcasm. ‘You know what I mean. He and Uzas saved me once, just as you did.’

  The prophet’s chuckle became laughter. ‘Of course. A good man. A heretic. A traitor. A murderer. A fool. My brother, the good man.’

  Both humans stood in silence as, for the first time in many years, Talos laughed until his black eyes watered.

  XI

  FATE

  Chaos reigned in the Primary Apothecarion. On the Covenant of Blood, the Legion’s medicae sanctum had been more a morgue than a surgery, becoming a place of stillness and silence – a chamber of cold storage vaults, old bloodstains on the iron tables and memories hanging in the sterile air.

  The opposite was true on the Echo of Damnation. Variel walked from table to table, through a sea of wounded humanity, his unhelmed face betraying no emotion. Human crew and legionaries alike cried out, reaching for him, filling the air with the reek of sweat, the heat of escaping life and the stink of chemical-rich blood.

  Hundreds of tables lined the chamber in rows, almost all of them occupied. Mono-tasked lifter servitors hauled corpses from the slabs, dragging living wounded onto the tables in replacement. Drains in the floor suckled at the blood sloshing across the dirty tiles. Medicae servitors and crew members trained in surgery were sweating as they worked. Variel strode through it all, a gore-streaked conductor overseeing a wailing orchestra.

  He paused by one gurney, glancing down at the tangled crewman’s body laying there.

  ‘You,’ he said to a nearby medicae servitor. ‘This one is dead. Remove his eyes and teeth for later use, before incinerating the remains.’

  ‘Compliance,’ murmured the bloodstained slave.

  A hand gripped his vambrace. ‘Variel…’ The Night Lord on the next table swallowed blood before he spoke. His clutch tightened. ‘Variel, graft the new legs onto the stumps and let’s be done with it. Do not keep me here, when we have a world to conquer.’

  ‘You need rather more than new legs,’ Variel told him. ‘Now remove your hand.’

  The warrior gripped tighter. ‘I have to be on Tsagualsa. Don’t keep me here.’

  The Apothecary looked down at the wounded legionary. The warrior’s face was half-lost in a wash of blood and burned tissue, baring the sk
ull beneath. One of his arms ended at the bicep, and both legs were fleshy stalks leaking fluid from the ravaged ceramite where his knees had once been. The Genesis Chapter had almost killed this one, no doubt about it.

  ‘Remove your hand,’ Variel said again. ‘We have discussed this, Murilash. I do not like to be touched.’

  The grip only grew tighter. ‘Listen to me…’

  Variel clenched the warrior’s hand with his own, prying the fingers back and holding tight. Without a word, he deployed the laser cutters and bone saw from his narthecium gauntlet. The saw bit down.

  The warrior cried out.

  ‘What did you just learn?’ Variel asked.

  ‘You wretched bastard!’

  Variel tossed the severed hand to another servitor. ‘Incinerate this. Ready a bionic left hand with the rest of his planned augmentations.’

  ‘Compliance.’

  In the corner of the apothecarion, where they leaned against the wall watching the organised chaos, Cyrion chuckled and voxed to Mercutian.

  ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘Variel really is one of us.’

  ‘I would have cut out Murilash’s heart,’ Mercutian replied. ‘I’ve always loathed him.’ The two warriors lapsed into silence for a time.

  ‘Deltrian reported they’re back to working on reawakening Malcharion.’

  Mercutian’s reply was to sigh. Through the vox, it was a breathy crackle.

  ‘What?’ Cyrion asked.

  ‘He will not thank us for awakening him a second time. I would give much to know why Malek of the Atramentar spared the war-sage’s existence.’

  ‘I would give much to know where in the infinite hells the Atramentar are. Do you believe they went down with the Covenant?’

  Mercutian shook his head. ‘Not for a moment.’

  ‘Nor I,’ Cyrion agreed. ‘They didn’t evacuate with the mortals, nor in a Legion gunship. They never reached the Echo of Damnation. Which leaves only one choice – they boarded an enemy vessel. They teleported onto a Corsair ship.’