[Word Bearers 02] - Dark Disciple Read online

  The magos stood before the humming pillar, fluid leaking from the severed input-jacks in his spine. He was connected to the pillar by the one mechadendrite tentacle that had been re-grafted to his body, and his pallid, dead lips twitched as he extracted information from the heart of the installation’s data-library.

  At last, the flexible tendril was retracted, and Magos Darioq jerked spasmodically as the connection was severed.

  “Well?” growled Marduk.

  “I have disabled the automated defence system that protects the installation,” said Magos Darioq, “and initiated the self-destruct mechanism, so that our presence will not be transmitted to the god-cogitators of Mars.”

  “Good,” said Marduk. He grabbed the waving mechadendrite tentacle with a violent motion and gave it a solid wrench. It was ripped from the magos’s spinal column, writhing in his hand like a serpent. Darioq twitched, and milky liquid seeped from his mouth.

  “You have the information we need?” asked Marduk, ignoring the mixture of blood, oil and protein-fluid that dripped from the thrashing mechadendrite onto his boots.

  “That is correct, Marduk, First Acolyte of the Word Bearers Legion of Astartes, genetic descendant of the traitor Primarch Lorgar,” replied the magos. “I have identified the location of the one in whom the forbidden knowledge of xenos tech devices is installed. With this knowledge obtained, Darioq will be able to unlock the xenos tech device.”

  It was an odd quirk of the daemonic essence growing within the magos that he had begun to refer to himself in the third person. Marduk found this amusing, but at this moment he was concentrating fully on the words of the corrupted magos.

  That the magos had not been able to unlock the device himself was infuriating, but it seemed that he could do little other than find the one of whom it spoke.

  “Where?” snapped Marduk in impatience.

  Beneath the surface of Perdus Skylla, tens of thousands of people surged down access tunnel 25X1, a never-ending stream of humanity, desperate and fearful.

  They were crushed together like animals being led to the slaughter, and the air, stale and hot, was filled with shouts and curses.

  Mothers clutched wailing children to their chests, and men barked at each other, pushing and shoving. Some stumbled and were trampled underfoot, while others were pressed against the rockcrete walls, crushed by the relentlessly driving push of humanity. Others fainted, overcome by the heat and the lack of oxygen. The crowd was so tightly packed that, unable to fall, their limp bodies were carried along in the suffocating press.

  The stink of sweat and oil was heavy, the turbines of the labouring air recycling units unable to cope with the demands required of them. The rockcrete ceiling, above which was half a kilometre of solid ice, pressed down oppressively.

  The access tunnel was some forty metres wide and bisected by barriers and rockcrete pillars. Beyond these barriers, traversing down the centre of the corridor, was a sunken area of open space in which wide-gauged tracks were embedded. People pushed, shoved and cried out as they were carried along the platforms on either side of the rail tracks.

  With a blast of solid displaced air, a high-speed automated carriage sped by, gushing superheated steam and making the access corridor reverberate as it screamed along the slick, steel tracks. Knocked back a step by the force of the conveyance, people covered their eyes and gazed ruefully at the mirrored sides of the carriage as it passed. Only the wealthy guild masters and their staff had the funds and access privileges to use the highspeed conveyances.

  It was a two hundred kilometre journey to Phorcys, the sole starport off Perdus Skylla within five thousand kilometres. Access tunnel 25X1 was the only link between Antithon Guild and Phorcys, unless one wished to traverse across the frozen surface of the moon. Few ventured up to the inhospitable surface of Perdus Skylla other than outcasts; those unlucky enough not to be born into any of the great guild-houses, or who had been exiled from them for serious infractions.

  Twelve other mining guilds were connected to Phorcys, each of the proud guilds situated around the starport like the points of a compass and connected by artery tunnels like the spokes of a great wheel.

  Most of the people of Antithon Guild had never left the hab-blisters deep in the ice other than to commute to the mining facilities some five thousand kilometres below. Fewer still had been to Phorcys, and few amongst the tide of humanity had any real understanding of the distance involved. To them, Antithon Guild and its environs was their world and universe, harsh and uncompromising, but familiar and safe, and they had no need to know of anything beyond its boundaries.

  Or at least it had been safe until the first of the sirens had begun to wail and the pict broadcasts had declared that Perdus Skylla was being evacuated.

  No reason for the evacuation had been issued from the guildmaster general’s office, and the twenty-three million strong population of the moon had been in shock. Shock had quickly descended into panic as rumours spread of an imminent xenos invasion, rumours that were not in any way refuted by the Administratum.

  Groups of the Skyllan Interdiction Force pushed through the crowds, attempting to maintain order. They wore their customary white body armour over sky-blue uniforms, and held high-powered laslocks across their chests. Snarling, shaggy-coated mastiffs with gleaming mechanical eye-augments strained at their leashes, sensing the tension in their masters.

  An armoured Catalan-class squad vehicle moved slowly along one of the platforms, its white, high-compound plasteel chassis gleaming beneath the humming strip-lights overhead. Its flashing lights and blaring siren urged people out of its path, but its progress was slow, for there was no room to allow the vehicle through.

  The winged emblem of the mercenary force was resplendent across the broad grill on the front of the heavy vehicle, and a pair of armoured soldiers stood in its dual turret at the rear, swinging the massive twin-linked heavy bolters left and right. Their faces were all but obscured by their white helmets, and black visors hid their eyes from view.

  For twenty-five generations, Perdus Skylla had employed the Skyllan Interdiction, an outside mercenary agency funded by the wealthy mining guild conglomerates. They served as the military force protecting the guilds’ assets in lieu of a Planetary Defence Force, while simultaneously acting as local law enforcement. Better trained and equipped than most Imperial Guard regiments, the hiring of the Skyllan Interdiction Forces had allowed the mining guilds to concentrate on their endeavours without having to draw away any of its skilled workforce to form a PDF.

  Still, even with the mercenaries present within the tunnel to help restore order, the flow of humanity was little short of a rout.

  One of the long-furred mastiffs let out a long growl, eyes locked on the ceiling. Seeing nothing, its master jerked its chain hard, silencing the beast.

  A creature of shadow clung to the ceiling of the corridor, virtually undetectable to the naked eye or the sophisticated targeting matrices built into the helmets of the Skyllan Interdiction Force. It moved like a spider, making its way across the ceiling with slow, purposeful movements. Its lean, black armoured body disappeared for a second, its menacing form turning as insubstantial as smoke, only to reappear within the shadow of a grilled turbine further along the roof.

  The creature’s skin was inky black, and elegant runes of alien design were cut into its flesh. The runes glowed with a cold, inner light.

  Turning its gaze downwards, it peered malevolently over the sea of humans with eyes that were milky white. It paid particular attention to the armed forces of the Skyllan Interdiction, and its limbs quivered with barely contained bloodlust. The blades running up its forearms hummed in anticipation.

  The mastiffs below went into a frenzy of barking as the creature’s scent carried to them, and their handlers struggled to control the powerful beasts. The creature disappeared into shadow once more as eyes scanned the ceilings, straining to pick out what had disturbed the dogs.

  The air recycling turbin
es cut out, abruptly. The few who registered the sudden change in air pressure gazed up at the slowing fans in concern. Without the recycling units, the air in the tunnel would turn to poison within hours, as all the oxygen was used up and replaced with the toxic carbon dioxide exhaled by the masses.

  Skyllan Interdiction Forces tapped their helmets as their communications went down, as if jammed by interference.

  Then the first of the lights went out.

  First, one of the lights faded to darkness, then another. The strip lights began to fail, one after another, in both directions, like a wave. People screamed as darkness engulfed them. The lights were going dark faster than a man could run, and within less than a minute every light in sight was dead.

  The darkness was complete, all consuming and as black as the abyssal depths of the oceans below. People clutched at one another in panic, unable even to see a hand waving in front their face, and the crowd surged. Spotlights on the Skyllan armoured vehicle clicked on, and they wove back and forth, piercing the darkness like beacons.

  People pushed towards the light sources, like moths being drawn to an open flame, and their panicked faces shone like ghosts in the cold light. They pressed against the armoured vehicle as if it was a talisman, those at the front crushed against its armoured sides by those pushing from behind.

  Overhead, the nigh-on invisible figure had reappeared, and the runes carved into its flesh glowed with power. Still hugging the ceiling in defiance of gravity, it slid a curved, double-bladed punch dagger from its sheath. Other blades slid from the back of its hands, jutting forward over its fists like the talons of a great cat, and a low hiss of anticipation passed its lips as it waited for its dark kin to arrive in response to its summons. It did not have to wait long.

  A ball of lightning appeared, hanging in mid-air for a fraction of a second before it exploded outwards, blinding those nearby with the sudden burst of energy and throwing them to the ground. The crackling energy was gone in an instant, and an impenetrable void was left in its wake. It was like an inky black pool of water, though it was vertical and hung in mid-air, a plane of absolute darkness no thicker than a single molecule.

  Ripples appeared across its surface, as if a pebble had been tossed into its centre, and whining shapes sped from the rent in real space, hurtling up the access corridor at tremendous speed. They screamed overhead, slicing like knives through the darkness. Blades cut through flesh, and hot blood splattered into the faces of hundreds of people, who screamed in terror. Many threw themselves to the ground in fear and were trampled to death by their brothers, sisters and wives in their panic to escape. However, with no lights, and with the tunnel packed from wall to wall with terrified people, there was nowhere to run.

  The spotlights atop the armoured Skyllan Interdiction vehicle turned frantically, trying to lock onto the enemies that screamed past them, but they could only hold the speeding shapes in the light for a fraction of a second. A shape dropped from the ceiling, landing lightly atop the vehicle, and the troopers saw a shadowy blur in the rough outline of a humanoid figure perched on the roof of the armoured car before the spotlights were shattered.

  The panicked troopers manning the turret-mounted heavy bolters opened fire into the darkness, and muzzle flare lit the area.

  A sleek black shape hurtled past, and the mercenaries chased it with high-explosive rounds. They hit nothing but the walls and pillars of the tunnel, ripping away head-sized chunks of rockcrete.

  The troopers’ mastiffs had erupted into frantic barking and were fighting at their chains. Their masters turned around on the spot, laslocks held to shoulders as they struggled to sight the enemy. Dark shapes were zooming through the tunnel, but the troopers’ targeting systems were unable to lock onto the targets.

  There was a blur of movement and one of the troopers was sliced open from groin to throat. He squeezed the trigger of his weapon as he fell, blasting into the crowd of surging people, cutting several of them down.

  People screamed and ran as the sounds of gunfire echoed deafeningly, fighting each other in their desperation to get to safety. The other troopers turned left and right, trying desperately to hold their targets in sight. A shape screamed overhead, and a trooper’s head was severed from its body. The shape was a hundred metres further up the tunnel before the head hit the ground.

  Streams of tiny bladed splinters spat out of the darkness towards the mercenaries manning the turret of the armoured vehicle. The razor-sharp shards sliced through their armour and flesh, and blood sprayed out across their pristine white armour.

  Their gun silenced, the darkness was once more complete. Screams of terror and pain accompanied the speeding shapes, invisible in the darkness, as they cut through the air. There was a sudden gust of displaced air as another high-speed carriage screamed along the tracks in the middle of the tunnel, the lights from within the automated, servitor-controlled conveyance shining brightly, sending shadows dancing.

  Tall-helmeted figures were visible in the flash of light, dragging people kicking and screaming back into the darkness.

  A beam of pure darkness stabbed into the high-speed transport, rocking it. The beam tore through the fore-carriage, cutting through the engine block, seats and half a dozen occupants before passing through the roof, leaving a scorched black ring on the ceiling of the tunnel.

  Two more searing beams struck it, and the front carriage was knocked off the rails. With the squealing of protesting metal, it slammed into the side-barriers, tearing through them in a shower of sparks. Striking the raised platform at speed, the conveyance tilted up on its nose, and the second and third carriages buckled behind it and rolled onto their sides.

  The whole machine flipped onto its side and smashed over the platform’s edge, tearing the barrier fully away and smashing through the surging masses. Hundreds were crushed as the carriages flipped across the platform to the sickening sound of metal being wrenched out of shape and scraping across the hard platform surface. It slammed into the tunnel wall, crushing more people between its bulk and the rockcrete walls, and finally came to rest. Electricity discharged across mined metal wheels and sparked from the rails that had been half-ripped from the floor.

  In the wake of the mayhem and silhouetted against the sparks, more black figures advanced through the press of bodies, smashing people to the ground with sharp blows before dragging their semi-conscious bodies back into the darkness.

  Mastiffs yelped as they were torn to shreds by concentrated bursts of deadly fire. A blurred shape, little more than a vague, hazy outline, moved like quicksilver through the press of humanity, slicing and cutting, and the last of the Skyllan Indictment Forces were slaughtered without holding any of the enemy in their sights long enough to fire upon them.

  A trio of shapes, in tight formation and moving impossibly fast, veered around the wreckage of the mined rail conveyance, banking over the heads of the terrified masses as they screamed towards the rear of the Catalan-class armoured vehicle. It was peppered with spitting gunfire and detonated as its fuel tanks ruptured, exploding in a blinding fireball that hurled the vehicle across the seething platform.

  The three sleek shapes sped through the inferno unscathed and gunned their engines, hurtling once more up the tunnel into the darkness, travelling hundreds of metres in seconds.

  The blades of the turbine fans began to spin once more, and the strip lights flickered falteringly before humming back into life. The carnage unleashed in the last twenty minutes was revealed under the cold light of the glow-strips.

  Hundreds of bodies were strewn across the floor, blood pooling beneath them where they had fallen. The blackened shell of the Catalan-class vehicle was upside down against a wall, pinning half a dozen charred corpses beneath it. Sparks burst intermittently from the rails, which had buckled and been torn from their housings.

  The ruin of the conveyance’s carriages was testament to its speed when it had crashed, for they were wrenched out of shape, and their plasglass windows were sha
ttered ruins. Its curved roof had been half ripped off, and the shattered barrier it had crashed through was twisted beneath it. Bodies, their heads smashed and limbs severed, were spread around the wreck, either crushed when the conveyance rolled off the tracks, or thrown from their seats inside. Blackened holes the size of fists showed where the vehicle had been struck by dark-matter weapons.

  There was no sign of any living thing within the tunnel, and not one of the corpses twitched or groaned. Where earlier the tunnel had seethed with life, now it was utterly bereft, and the only sounds were the humming of the strip lights, the reverberations of the recycle units and the odd spark from the mined tracks.

  Of the thousands of people not slain, there was no sign. Nor was there any sign of their attackers. Only the carnage left in their wake was evidence of their having existed at all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Staring through the twenty-metre wide observation portal of the bridge, Admiral Rutger Augustine looked out over the vast length of his flagship vessel, the mighty Retribution-class battleship Hammer of Righteousness.

  She looked like an immense, armoured Imperial cathedral, majestic and of such a scale as to be almost incomprehensible. Six kilometres from stern to prow, hundreds of spires ran along her length, joined together by flying buttresses and archways, and she bristled with the finest weapon systems that the Imperial Navy could boast.

  Hundreds of close-range turrets were set across her armoured hull, each the size of four super-heavy battle tanks, and a dozen torpedo tubes, each gaping almost forty metres wide, were inset into her sweeping, massively armoured prow. It was in her broadside batteries, however, that the Hammer of Righteousness’s true power lay.

  Running almost the complete length of the battleship, the starboard and port batteries were capable of unleashing an incredible amount of firepower, easily enough to cripple even the largest warship with a single barrage, or lay waste to entire continents if she entered the upper atmosphere of a rebellious planet. Indeed, the resistance of entire planets had crumpled merely at her appearance in their sub-system, fearful of the wrath that she could unleash.