Void Stalker Read online

  Malcharion turned on his waist axis, lashing out again, crushing with his fist even as it spewed liquid fire from its mounted flamer. The aliens weaved back, but not fast enough. Two died beneath his pounding fist; one wailed as it dissolved in the torrent of corrosive fire.

  The Dreadnought breathed in deep, inhaling the scent of the now empty corridor. Instead of cold air filling his lungs with the scent of murder, he felt the oxygen-rich fluid of his coffin bubbling with his breath, and smelled nothing at all beyond the chemical stink-taste of his tepid confines.

  When he shivered, it translated as his metal body juddering, reloading his autocannon with a clunk and a click. When he sighed, it left his sarcophagus as a machine’s snarl.

  Temptation almost made him open the vox-net again, but the fawning regard of those he’d once commanded was an irritant he had no desire to deal with. Instead, he hunted alone, stealing what pleasure he could from how things had changed.

  Malcharion moved around the slender corpses, his waddling stalk shaking the tunnel with each tread. Without hope of stealth, he had to play a different game.

  ‘Eldar…’ he growled. ‘I come for you.’

  Lucoryphus crouched atop the ruined battlements, watching the sky. He could hear his brothers eating the eldar behind him, but hadn’t partaken himself. He’d eaten their flesh before, and felt no compulsion to repeat the experience. Their blood was thin and sour, and their skin lacked any of the salty richness found in a mouthful of human meat.

  The leader of the Bleeding Eyes wasn’t sure where the eldar were appearing from. Despite maintaining a vigil of the sky and refusing to descend into the catacombs, he’d seen no sign of alien landing craft. Yet they kept appearing, here and there, moving from behind broken walls or manifesting atop fallen spires.

  The fortress ruins spread for kilometres in every direction. He knew his Raptors couldn’t cover all that ground alone, though he drove them hard, making the attempt. What confused him most of all was that the aliens didn’t seem to be appearing in the numbers he’d been expecting. They had enough ships in the void above to land an army. Instead, he was witnessing small fire teams and scout parties descending into the labyrinth, and butchering those few that remained on the surface.

  The thrusters on his back gave a sympathetic whine in response to his musing.

  ‘Ghost ships,’ he said.

  Only one of the Bleeding Eyes bothered to look up from their meal. ‘You speak?’ Vorasha hissed.

  Lucoryphus gestured upward with a deactivated lightning claw. ‘Ghost ships. Vessels of bone and soul in the void. No crew but the ghosts of dead eldar.’

  ‘Ulthwé,’ Vorasha said, as if that was agreement enough.

  ‘Silent ships, piloted by bones, captained by memories. An unbreakable armada in the heavens, but on the ground?’ His head jerked with a muscle tic. ‘They are not so strong. Not so numerous. Now we know why they owned the heavens, but fear the earth.’

  The Raptor breathed slowly, inhaling the planet’s unhealthy air through his mouth grille. Mist rose with each exhalation.

  ‘I see something,’ he said.

  ‘More eldar?’ asked one of the pack.

  ‘A shadow within another shadow. There,’ he pointed to the overhang of a rotted stone building. ‘And there. And there. Many somethings, it seems.’

  When the challenge came, it was given in a tongue Lucoryphus couldn’t understand, shouted from a throat he ached to slit. The eldar warrior knelt atop a wall two hundred metres away, a crescent blade in one hand, and great eagle wings arcing up from his shoulder blades.

  As soon as the cry carried across the air, another four winged figures revealed themselves, each one crouched atop a broken tower or ruined wall.

  ‘Bleeding Eyes,’ Lucoryphus whispered to his kin. ‘At last, some prey worth hunting.’

  Uzas and Mercutian were first. With none of the Mechanicum’s blessings or prayers, it took significantly less time for them to get ready. While they waited, Talos and Cyrion stood watch in the northern and southern tunnels, listening to the sounds of battle carrying over the vox.

  ‘Armour primed,’ Mercutian voxed to Talos. ‘Uzas is ready, too.’

  ‘That took almost half an hour,’ Cyrion noted. ‘Still not a rapid process, even without the Machine Cult’s ramblings.’

  ‘It’s fast enough,’ Talos replied. ‘Mercutian, Uzas, cover us.’

  Talos waited until a low, industrial grinding sound echoed down the tunnel. The fall of each bootstep was a roll of thunder.

  ‘Your turn,’ came Uzas’s vox-altered growl. The new helm was a muzzled and tusked visage, sporting eye lenses of ruby red and a painted daemon skull. The armour itself emitted a constant, guttural hum, and was wide enough to fill half the corridor on its own.

  ‘How does it feel?’ Talos asked his brother.

  Uzas stood straighter, against the war plate’s natural hunch, and the power generators hummed louder. In one hand, he held a new-model storm bolter, the aquila markings defiled by scratches or melted away completely. His other arm ended in a power fist, the thick fingers crunching closed in reverse bloom.

  On one shoulder, the broken draconic symbol of the Salamanders Chapter was buried beneath a bronze icon of the Eighth Legion, hammered into place by thick steel rivets.

  ‘It feels powerful,’ said Uzas. ‘Now hurry. I wish to hunt.’

  She answered him, shriek for shriek and blade for blade. The Bleeding Eyes took to the air on howling thrusters, filling the sky with filthy exhaust fumes in their pursuit of their prey. The eldar, armoured in contoured war plate of innocent blue, replied to the hateful shrieking with war-calls of their own – each one a piercing, dismissive cry.

  The fight was an ugly one; Lucoryphus knew how it would play out the moment they first clashed. The eldar ran and the Raptors gave chase. Most of the alien sky-maidens were armed with slender, tapered laser rifles, spitting out coruscating stabs of energy. They needed distance to use them, while the Raptors filled the sky with the clatter of short-range bolt pistols and the desperate whine of slashing chainblades eating air and going hungry.

  The first to fall from the sky was his brother Tzek. Lucoryphus heard the death rattle over the vox – a choking gargle from bloody lungs and a ruptured throat – followed by the spiralling whine of engines failing to fire. The Raptor twisted in the air, keeping his own foe back by lashing out with his clawed feet, just in time to see Tzek’s body crash into the uneven ground.

  The sight caused his tongue to ache, filling his mouth with hissing ichor. Tzek had been with him down the many years of twisted time, since the first night of the Last Siege. To see such a noble soul broken by alien filth made him angry enough to spit.

  The eldar leaned back, hawkish wings vibrating with a melodic chime as she flipped in the air, swooping as true and elegantly as a bird of prey. The gobbet of corrosive slime missed her completely.

  Lucoryphus followed her, engines roaring and breathing smoke in opposition to her musical glide. Each cut from his claws sliced nothing more than air, as the alien bitch danced back, diving and arcing aside, seeming to soar on thermals.

  The Raptor released the frustrated scream he could no longer contain. Either the wind stole much of its potency, or her sloping, crested helm inured her to burst eardrums, for she ignored it completely.

  She soared higher, spinning through the sky, her blade trailing electric fire. Lucoryphus of the Bleeding Eyes chased her, his fanged maw screaming as loudly as his protesting engines.

  Her grace counted only when she danced through the air; in a straight and honest chase, he had her dead. They both realised it in the same moment. Lucoryphus caught her from behind, carving through her wings with his lightning-kissed claws. They cleaved through the alien-forged material, crippling her in mid-flight.

  With another war cry, she twisted in the air, bringi
ng her sword to bear even as she started to fall. The Raptor parried her blade, letting it rasp against his charged talons. His free hand gripped her throat, keeping her aloft and in his arms for a precious second more.

  ‘Goodnight, my sweet,’ he breathed into her faceplate. Lucoryphus released her, letting her tumble from the sky in mirror of Tzek’s ignoble demise.

  His laugh died as soon as it began. She’d not fallen more than three seconds before one of her kin caught her at the end of a swooping dive, angling down to bear her to the ground.

  ‘I think not,’ the Raptor hissed, leaning forward into a dive of his own. He could hear them over the wind, shouting to one another in their babbling tongue. He had to bank sharply to avoid her pistol spitting its jagged light back up at him, but with the eldar’s erstwhile saviour encumbered, they had no chance of outrunning the Raptor’s second assault. Lucoryphus hit them both like a bolt from above, latching his claws into both torsos and tearing the two figures apart.

  He screamed at the effort it took, his rapturous shriek echoing across the sky. The wingless maiden went one way, falling and spinning down through the air to crash in a mangled heap, smeared over the ground. The male fell in similar reflection, blood raining from the wounds in his breastplate. His wings quivered, seeking a final flight, but the drying blood on Lucoryphus’s claws told the last of that particular tale. The Raptor sneered as the eldar struck the earth, flopping over the rocks as he came to pieces in the tumbling impact.

  He was still smiling when he turned in time to see Vorasha die next. His brother fell back from a mid-air grapple, his body raining meat and shards of armour-plating as it plummeted. The eldar who’d shot Vorasha at point-blank range turned in the air, bringing his rifle up to aim at Lucoryphus.

  The Raptor leader tilted forward and boosted closer, another shriek leaving his scarred lips.

  Talos led First Claw through the corridors in a new kind of hunt. With no need to heed any caution, the four Terminators thudded their way onward in a loose phalanx, unfamiliar weapons aimed at the ready.

  ‘This will take some getting used to,’ Cyrion voxed. He was still bemused at the aquila showing on the edge of his retinal display. In Deltrian’s many modifications and reconfigurings, he’d evidently not managed to scrub that detail from the armour’s internal systems.

  Talos was distracted by the vox-net; the reports of Second and Third Claws engaging the enemy higher up in the catacombs, and the Bleeding Eyes’ savage curses as they fought on the surface. He tried not to wonder what Malcharion was doing – the captain had decided to die alone, and he couldn’t find flaw with that desire. First Claw would have to split up soon enough. Once unified resistance became impossible against greater numbers, it would come down to murder in the dark, and every soul for himself.

  He’d never worn Tactical Dreadnought war plate before, and the sensation was a surprising one. His battle armour was as familiar as his own skin, and as comfortable as clothing once wearer and suit bonded over time. Terminator plate was a different beast from tusked helm to spiked boots; every muscle in his body felt revitalised, stinging with strength. He’d expected to feel sluggish, but the range of motion and speed of movement was little different from the times he’d trained out of his armour. The only disconcerting aspect was the forward-leaning hunch, leaving him always on the edge of breaking into a run.

  Talos had tried running. It resulted in a quicker, more forceful tread that was somewhere between a stagger and a sprint. Compensatory servos and stabilisers wouldn’t allow him to pitch forward and fall, though the shift in the centre of his balance still felt unusual after so many centuries crusading in his modified Mark V plate.

  One of his hands was an armoured glove the size of a legionary’s torso – the power fist active and rippling with a passive force field. The other clutched a heavy rotary cannon, his finger resting on the curved trigger. They didn’t have much ammunition for the assault cannon. When First Claw scavenged the suits from the Salamanders, they soon learned the Imperials had used most of their reserves. He carried his double-barrelled bolter locked to his thigh, ready to draw it the moment he dumped the empty cannon.

  Mercutian reached with his oversized power fist, tapping at the ornate tusks Deltrian had grafted to the muzzle of his bullish helm.

  ‘I once saw Malek of the Atramentar head-butt someone with his tusks,’ he said. ‘I’d like to try that.’

  Talos held up a fist for silence – or as close as they could come to silence while in suits of armour rumbling like the idling engines of four battle tanks.

  A hail of razor-edged discs sliced out from the corridor ahead, followed by the advancing forms of eldar warriors. They hesitated in their tracks when they saw what was stalking towards them. Several of them scattered, while others fell back, still firing. Talos heard the shuriken projectiles clattering against his armour, with the same tinkling sound of glass shards breaking on the floor.

  In reply, he squeezed his trigger, filling the tunnel with the distinctive flashing roar of an Imperial assault cannon. Suspensors in his elbow, wrist and the gun’s grip counterbalanced any recoil, letting him aim without distraction, but his retinal feed had to dim to compensate for the brightness of the muzzle flash.

  First Claw stood in disbelief ten seconds later. Talos tilted the cannon to get a better look at its steaming, reddening barrels.

  ‘Now that’s a cannon,’ said Cyrion, as the four of them waded through the organic mess left in the corridor. ‘Can I use it for a while?’

  Marlonah wasn’t sure what she was hearing anymore. Sometimes the stone hallways echoed with what sounded like distant gunfire, other times it seemed like nothing more than the wind, weaving through the dark at her side.

  She had a lamp pack – no crew member on an Eighth Legion vessel would walk a ship’s halls without one – and she knew the power cell would be good for another few hours at least. What she didn’t know was what to do, or where to go.

  Does is make a difference? What does it matter if I die down here or on the plains?

  She still had her stub gun, for what it was worth – a primitive little slug-thrower compared to a Legiones Astartes bolter, make no mistake. It’d be fine for shooting herself in the head before she died of thirst, but it wasn’t much use if she walked into a battle. Slaves weren’t permitted weapons on the Echo of Damnation, but the thriving black market trading going on in every level of life took care of that. The Legion never enforced such a law anyway, for they feared no uprising. She suspected they enjoyed a little spice to the challenge when they hunted crew members for sport, as well.

  Marlonah wasn’t sure how long she’d been alone before the thumping started. She made her way through the deserted catacombs, sending her torch beam ahead, letting it cut the blackness as best it could. All sense of direction had long since abandoned her. Sound echoed strangely down here, to the point she wasn’t even sure whether she was heading towards the thumping or avoiding it completely. It never seemed to fade or grow any stronger.

  She never saw what knocked the lamp pack from her grip. A breath of air passed by the back of her neck, and a rough impact against her hand sent the torch clattering to the ground. For a split second, its spinning beam sent insane shadows against the walls: the silhouettes of witch-thin figures with elongated, inhuman helms.

  Marlonah went for her gun before the torch had fallen still. That, too, left her hand with what felt like a kick to her fist.

  The second time she felt the breath, it was against her face. The voice emerging from the darkness was as unwelcomingly soft as velvet on bleeding skin.

  ‘Where is the Prophet of the Eighth Legion?’

  She aimed her fist at the voice in the blackness, but her punch met nothing but air. A second, third and fourth swiped through the same nothingness. She could hear the subtle movement and breathing of something dodging her in the dark, betrayed by the smoot
h scrape of armour plates sliding with every weave.

  A hand bolted around her throat, collaring her with thin fingers sheathed in cold iron. She managed a single blow against the unmoving arm, before she was slammed back against the wall. Her boots scrabbled against the stone, unable to reach the ground. Her rough augmetic leg made clicking, whirring sounds as it struggled to find the floor.

  ‘Where is the Prophet of the Eighth Legion?’

  ‘I’ve lived my whole life in the dark,’ she told the unseen voice. ‘Do you think this scares me?’

  The collar of fingers tightened enough to cut off her breath. She wasn’t sure if the thumping was getting louder, or if she was being deceived by her own rising heartbeat.

  ‘Filthy, blind, poisonous, cancerous mon-keigh animal. Where is the Prophet of the Eighth Legion? Thousands of souls remain at stake while he draws breath.’

  Marlonah thrashed in the stronger grip, beating her fists against the armoured arm.

  ‘Stubborn creature. Know this, human: the silent storm approaches. The Void Stalker comes.’

  The clutch at her throat vanished as fast as it appeared, dropping her to the ground. The first thing she thought, as she heaved the stale air back into her body, was that her heartbeat hadn’t lied. The thumping was all around her now, the thudding crunch of steel on stone. It sent trembles through the ground beneath her, and the wall against her back.

  Marlonah scrabbled for her lamp wand, chopping its thin blade of illumination around the chamber. She saw stone, and stone, and stone, and… something immense, and dark, and leering down at her with rumbling joints.

  ‘What are you doing down here?’

  He came in too hard, at a bad angle, and tumbled across the dusty ground. It took a moment to haul himself back up to all-fours, and another two attempts to stand straight. His metallic foot-claws splayed to compensate, digging into the soft dust.

  The pain was… quite something. He tasted blood with each breath, and the ache of his muscles put him in firm mind of the three nights he’d been racked by Lord Jiruvius of the Emperor’s Children.