Void Stalker (31 page)

‘Fly
.
’
Variel’s eyes were enough of a threat. ‘Focus on your duty.’

Vularai let the wrappings fall at last, and cast aside the heavy cloak. She reached up to her face, removed the glare-goggles and checked her bandana was in place.

‘You’re not leaving me alone on that piece of crap ship, with that mechanical abomination,’ said Octavia. ‘I’m coming with you.’

Deltrian made his
way to Octavia’s chamber in the vessel’s bulbous belly, seeking to contain any traces of irritation from manifesting in his movements or vocalisations.

When he’d given the order to his servitor-pilots to make their way through the asteroid field, all had been well.

When he’d calculated the best prospective location to risk entering the warp without attracting attention from eldar raiders
or
risking a hull breach from accidental collision during acceleration and reality dispersion, all had still been well.

When he’d ordered the warp engines to begin opening the tear in the fabric of the material void, all had still been well.

When he’d ordered Octavia to ready herself, and received no reply of confirmation… he encountered the first flaw in an otherwise perfect process.

Repeated attempts to contact her elicited the same response.

Unacceptable.

Truly, utterly unacceptable.

He’d ordered the vessel back into hiding, and started to make his way down to her chamber himself.

A handful of her attendants scampered aside from his hurried advance down the corridor. That in itself would have been curious to anyone that knew the Navigator well, but Deltrian was no
t
such a soul.

His thin fingers overrode the lock on her bulkhead, and he stepped into the cramped chamber, standing before the cabled throne.

‘You,’ he said, preparing to initiate a long and accusatory tirade, centred on themes of obedience and duty, with subsidiary aspects of self-preservation to appeal to her biological fear of corporeal demise.

Vularai sat back in Octavia’s throne with her boots up on the armrest. Without her bandaging, she was a wretched thing – anaemic flesh showed the veins underneath, swollen and black like cobwebs beneath the thinnest skin. Her eyes were watery, half-blinded by cataracts, and ringed by dark circles.

For several seconds, Deltrian catalogued a list of visual mutations in the woman he was seeing before him. Her warp-changes seemed subtle by some standards, but the overall effect was a fascinating one: beneath her thin flesh, it was possible to see the shadow of bones, veins, muscle clusters and even the beating silhouette of her heart, moving in disharmony with her swelling, contracting lungs.

‘You are not Octavia,’ he vocalised.

Vularai grinned, showing scabby gums populated by cheap iron teeth. ‘What gave it away?’

Talos was last
to enter the chamber. The prophet panned his gaze around the empty hall again, alighting at last on the only other living souls. Fifteen servitors stood in slack-jawed repose, too dead of mind to be considered truly patient. Almost all of them had their arms replaced by lifter claws or machine tools.

First Claw moved over to the stowage crates the lobotomised slaves had hauled down into the depths.

Talos was the first to pull something forth. He held a massive cannon in his gauntlets – a lengthy, multi-barrelled weapon rarely used by the Eighth Legion.

With a glance at the closest servitors, he dumped the cannon back in its crate. It rested atop a ceramite breastplate, densely armoured and proudly displaying its aquila shattered with ritual care.

‘We don’t have long,’ he said. ‘Let’s get this started.’

XXV

SHADOWS

They ghosted down
the corridor, blacker than the shadows that shielded them. His eyes weren’t what they once were – relying on movement as much as shape – but he watched them draw nearer, moving in a haunting, sinuous unity he could only call alien.
Alien.
While the term was accurate, even as the creatures bore down on him, he felt the term lacked a certain poetry.

He knew little about this xenos breed. They burst the same as any human under the grinding hail of auto
-
cannon fire, which was reassuring but hardly a surprise. Watching them shatter and crumble in wet showers told him very little he didn’t already know.

Had he been able, he’d crouch over one of their corpses, peeling the broken armour back, and learn all he needed in a feast of flesh. With the taste of blood on his lips, his enhanced physiology would infuse him with instinctive knowledge about the fallen prey. In an existence he still barely understood, the pleasure of tasting fallen foes’ lost lives was one of the things he missed most of all.

Eldar.
He admired them for their disciplined silence even as he found their bending grace repulsive. One of them, evidently unprotected by its fragile interlocking plates, burst across the left wall in a wet slap of gore and clattering armour.

He couldn’t kill them all with the sluggish cannon that served as his arm. Several of the aliens ducked and weaved beneath his arc of fire, conjuring chainblades into their thin-fingered hands.

The Night Lord laughed. At least, he tried to. He gagged on the pipes and wires impaling his mouth and throat, while the sound emerged as a gear-shifting grind.

With no hope of outrunning them, he still needed to step back to brace himself. The feeling of them chopping and carving at his vulnerable joints was an unusual one – without pain, without
skin,
the sensation became an almost amusing dull scrape. He couldn’t make out individual figures when they were this close, but the corridor lightning-bolted with sparks from the blades chewing into his connective joints.

‘Enough of that,’ he grunted, and lashed down with his other fist. The servos and cable-muscles of his new body lent strength and speed beyond anything he’d known in life. The fist hammered into the stone floor, shaking the entire corridor and breeding a rain of dust from the ceiling. The alien wretch caught beneath his downswing was a pulped ruin, smeared across the ground.

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 alien
s
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, bringing 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.