Black Tide Read online

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bioengineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants—and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  ONE

  Everything is madness.

  That was the clearest explanation, the simplest, most logical answer. There could be no other truth; any alternative was impossible. The undeniable fact was that the universe turned on an axis of insanity, and any being who struggled to deny that fact was utterly doomed.

  Understanding of this truth was no reward, however. Moving through the thick, sticky silt that coated the surface of the effluent channel, La’Non paused and looked down at his right hand, the spindly grey fingers caked with filth and dried bloodstains. The other arm—the alien thing—hung limply at his side, the grotesque greenish-brown bulk of it forever pulling him off balance, upsetting his gait and motion. It reached up to wipe muck from his forehead, but he slapped it away and used his good, true tau limb to do the job. La’Non didn’t like to stop too often. If he kept moving, then the voice in his head stayed away. He imagined it like a phantom, a spectral thing that moved as he moved, in perfect lockstep; but it was slow, and he could outrun it. For a time, at least.

  Time enough to understand that the mad universe hated him. Hated him and wanted him to suffer, so much so that it had broken off pieces of itself and sent them here, to this place, where they might torment him to death.

  He felt the voice coming, and shouted a curse at it, the snarled words echoing down the channel. With a hard effort, La’Non kicked out the service grille above him and hauled himself up, on to the work gantry. He allowed the alien limb to help; he would not have been able to make it otherwise.

  From there, he moved up and up, spiralling through the turned tubes cut through the rock, passing once or twice through voids where great deposits of nickel-iron ore had nestled, back when this place had just been a vast stone adrift in the void.

  La’Non stopped once more and started to weep. This he did for a few minutes. He couldn’t be certain why these intervals came and went without pattern or regularity. Instead, he sat through them, let them take their course. It had become possible, ever since the day he had awoken with the limb grafted to him, to compartmentalise himself in this way, distancing the functions of his body from his mind. Eventually, as they always did, the racking sobs went away and he moved on, towards the surface. The tracks of tears cut lines down his dirty cheeks, and he noted the pattern as he caught his own reflection in a large piece of glassaic, broken off from a window. He was a sorry sight. The robes he had once worn in his role as a minor earth caste functionary had been replaced by the ripped oversuit he had taken from a dead kroot, and it was only the broken pieces of his necklace, balled up in a pocket, that recalled his rank. His drawn face was pallid, the flesh hanging from his skull like an ill-fitting mask made from parchment. The big arm at his side swung back and forth; it was heavy with muscle, twitchy and hot to the touch. La’Non didn’t dwell on it, looking away from the shapes of alien flesh, the places where implanted things beneath the surface hissed and bubbled. He padded, feet bare, through the splinters of the rest of the glass, and felt nothing. He pressed his weight down deliberately, but felt no pain. Blood was there, pooling between his toes, but no sense of it reached him. And so he moved on. Upward. Outward.

  The colony was like a kittick fruit from a tree infected by boreworms. Oblate in a rough sense, lumpen across its outer skin, inside the asteroid was all tunnels and voids, eaten through and cross-connecting. Factories and oxy-plants, arboreas and habitat pods, places of exercise and teaching and leisure, the home to a hundred thousand tau… Or at least, it had been.

  La’Non had come when the colony had been opened, drifting out at the farthest edge of the Tash’var system. He’d lived a good life here, until the tempest had arrived.

  He remembered little of it. He learned the story later, in fragments. A warp storm, sudden and terrible, swallowed up the colony and tore it away, spat it back out like indigestible food into some other part of space. Far from home. Far from Tau.

  And there, while they were alone and lost, the strange gue’la had come, the human with his many devices of pain and his army of freaks. The madness came with the invader, the great revelation.

  How long ago was that? Days? Years? La’Non had lost his sense of the passage of time, and he recalled old wisdom that said a being should recognise such a thing as the first roadstone on the path to insanity. Perhaps, if and when he reached the outer tiers, perhaps when he saw the dark sky again for the first time in… however long it was, he would know. But so many things had kept him from moving forward. The nest of crazed vespids that blocked his path down in the food stores. The crippled and near-dead kroot he had killed with a broken chair. The thing that had seemed to be a female of the air caste, but was actually a bag of meat and blood. She took the most of his time. Talking to him, being a friend to him. When the alien limb had driven her head into a stone wall and crushed it, La’Non had watched with dispassion, still reaching for an understanding at that point in his journey.

  The colony was a place of death and decay now, the survivors of the strange gue’la’s horrific experiments discarded to perish, ejected into the bleak corridors to live or die at the hands of those who had escaped his knives, or the other victims. For the longest time, La’Non had lived in fear of being recaptured, submitted once more to the white-hot pain and endless agonies. His hand—his good hand—moved to his throat, as he thought of how he had screamed himself ragged. As he did this, the voice whispered in his ear. It had caught up to him.

  It told him the same story again. The voice liked this story, liked it a great deal; that was the only explanation he could think of, for the repetition and the endless recurring talk of the same motifs, the same images. The voice told La’Non of another tau who was also called La’Non, who had a pair-bond and a habitat that was small but comfortable, who was respected for his work ethic even though he was not a being of outstanding nature. A tau who was a fair husband to a quiet wife and a careful father to a lone child who was troublesome as all children are. This other La’Non—which could clearly not be him, because he would have remembered if he had a wife and a son—had lost all that was important when a great storm came and split his home asunder. The voice came to the end of the story and began to tell it again. It never tired of the tale. />
  La’Non started shouting wordlessly and banging his head against the deck. Presently, the voice went away again. Perhaps it had other people to talk to. Others who liked the story of this different La’Non better. Dizzy, wiping away his blood, he moved on again, grateful for the silence.

  He ate something that resembled vegetable matter, a hank of it he found rotting in a shadowed corner of a corridor, then supped spoiled water from an overfilled bathing sphere in a collapsed hab pod. La’Non followed the sign-lanterns up the slow, long ramps, spiralling around and around. The light tug of gravity generators, power still flowing to them from the mighty fusion reactor in the colony’s core, enabled him to walk the inner circumference of the corridor-tubes; the technology let the tau use every iota of space within the asteroid for living and working.

  No life now, though. Instead the colony was a corpse, and all the things swarming inside it just pests and vermin. La’Non was like that, a maggot inside dead flesh. Not a living thing, not like he used to be. Not like the other La’Non spoken of by the voice in his head.

  But he was at peace with that. Understanding had given him contentment, if that was what a being could call it. Before, La’Non had been afraid he had lost his mind, been driven into lunacy by the agony and the limb. He thought better of it now, though.

  He had gone sane. Yes. Clear to him. It was just that everything else was madness. Once he faced the night beyond, he would be certain of it. The last iota of doubt would be banished. If only he could find silence, find a way to end the pain, then he would be content.

  Hours or days or years later, the tau found himself at the shipgates. The alien limb was scratching at the walls as he passed along them, rapping greenish knuckles on oval portals webbed by fracture damage. Presently, La’Non found what he sought. A hatch, an iris of dense metal alloy, each oiled leaf of it tight and closed. He didn’t remember the sequence to open it, but his good hand did, and worked the hooded keypad in the wall.

  Through the fractured window, past the frosting of oxygen ice, he could see the black beyond. But not really. He couldn’t really, truly see it. Not with the naked orbs of his own eyes. To really understand, to look the mad universe in the face and know it, he had to go out there. Or was he really venturing inside for the first time? La’Non wondered if the voice knew the answer. He smiled. Soon the pain would be gone and the voice would never trouble him again.

  Busy with the sequence, he glimpsed but ignored the motion of a red shadow beyond the portal. It wasn’t important; like the other La’Non and the wife and the child, it was a forgettable thing. Only this action, this moment, was significant.

  Sound and vibration reached him, and his grey face twisted in confusion. Beyond the iris hatch there were noises, heavy footfalls and grinding impacts. That did not seem correct. On the other side of the iris there should only have been a stark white anteroom, the decompression chamber and the racks of skintight environment suits. The space should have been empty and ready for La’Non. The last barrier between him and the mad universe, waiting out there for him to arrive. For the tau to tell it he understood.

  Then the iris keened as its metal blades came open and retracted into the stone walls. La’Non felt the alien limb twitching as he turned from the panel to take the next step.

  The open hatchway was blocked by a statue made of crimson. La’Non looked up at it, taking in the form in a glance. It was humanoid, all curved shapes and hard edges. A heavy thing, carved to resemble arms and legs of bloated muscle, a small and fierce head sporting eyes as sharp as gemstones, a breath-grille mouth set in permanent grimace. Across its chest, a symbol; wings made of beaten gold growing from a wet, glistening droplet of ruby. And in one hand, the largest weapon La’Non had ever seen, a great steel block of mechanism bigger than any common pulse carbine. The yawning muzzle presented a black tunnel towards him.

  There were others, too, more of the same crammed into the airlock space, stooped. Barely contained by the walls, hard and menacing. They sparked memory of the gue’la who had brought all the pain and understanding to the colony—these things were the same but different. The same mass, the same form. La’Non wondered if they shared the same cruelty as well. He asked the voice in his head if it knew the answer. Had the universe sent these new monsters to follow in the tracks of the pain-bringer? Were they the next act in its insanity, a new anguish for him to endure? And in doing so, learn a new truth?

  La’Non offered his good hand in a gesture of greeting, but the alien limb wanted to participate as well, and rose in a fist.

  Brother Ajir’s boltgun rose, and in that moment Brother-Sergeant Rafen snarled out a command word. “Hold!”

  Ajir gave no sign that he had heard the order, and simply extended the motion of the gun, using the butt of the weapon to strike the alien away instead of killing it outright. The dishevelled tau was projected backward into the corridor of polished rock beyond the airlock antechamber, and it clattered to the deck in a heap of spindly limbs. For a moment the only sound was the scrape of the alien’s feet as they skittered over the floor, failing to find purchase. Thin blood from a new cut oozed across the tau’s dirt-smeared aspect. A moan escaped its lips.

  With careful, spare motions, Ajir flicked his weapon to discard the dash of alien blood that had marked it. Brother-Sergeant Rafen heard him give a quiet sniff of disdain. “It lives still,” said the other warrior.

  Rafen’s helmeted head turned and found Brother Ceris. The Codicier gave a nod, sensing his commander’s unspoken instructions before he gave voice to them. Ceris pushed forward to the front of the group; of all the Adeptus Astartes in the antechamber, he was the only one not clad head-to-foot in crimson battle armour. Ceris’ wargear was indigo, with only his right shoulder pauldron toned blood-red. The warrior removed his helmet and turned a narrow, flinty gaze on the alien. Crystalline devices surrounding the back of his head glowed gently, the contacts and mechanism of the psychic hood built into his power armour working their arcane science. The tau shrank away from him, muttering, and threw a worried glance towards Rafen.

  The sergeant followed Ceris’ example and detached his own helm, dark shoulder-length hair falling free as he did so. Rafen studied the alien without pity. “Can you understand my words, xenos?”

  The tau didn’t respond; after a moment, Ceris spoke. “It does.” The crystals pulsed slightly, and Rafen sensed a faint tang of ozone in the cool air, the overspill of the Codicier’s careful psychic pressure on the alien creature.

  “La’Non speaks your tongue, gue’la,” it said, in a papery, weak voice.

  “We seek something,” Rafen told it. “Here, on your colony. You will be compelled to help us find what we are looking for.” He inclined his head towards Ceris, the inference clear. The psyker leaned in, unblinking, glaring at the trembling tau.

  “This place has nothing but agony within it,” rasped the alien. “Nothing for you. Only the agony and the voices.”

  Rafen continued, ignoring the interruption. “We are looking for another… Another gue’la.” He grimaced, the xenos word tasting foul upon his lips. “Tell us what you know.”

  “Pain-bringer!” The name was an abrupt snarl. “You… You are the same!”

  From behind him, Rafen heard a gruff growl of annoyance. “We are nothing like him,” spat Brother Turcio.

  “Show it the image,” continued the sergeant. He turned to Brother Kayne, who stood nearby with his rifle at the ready. “We must be certain.”

  Kayne’s face was hidden behind his helmet, but his motions betrayed his irritation. Like the others, Kayne shared the ingrained urge to terminate any alien life he encountered, and it came hard to resist it. Rafen understood; he felt the same way, but the mission took precedence, and to prosecute that to its end he would do whatever was needed—such as allow an undeserving xenos a few more moments of life.

  The younger Astartes produced a disc-shaped pict-slate from a pocket on his belt and stepped forward, offering it to the alien
at arm’s length.

  The tau blinked blood from its eyes and peered owlishly at the screen; and in the next second what colour there was in its corpse-grey flesh faded. Rafen recognised the expression on the creature’s face; horror, it would seem, looked the same no matter what species you belonged to. The alien brought up its hands to cover its eyes, one of them spindly and skeletal, the other thick-set and muscled.

  “The creature’s arm.” Turcio’s voice came over the vox in his ear-bead, on a general channel that only the other Space Marines would hear. “It’s wrong.”

  At Turcio’s side, steady as a statue, a heavy bolter in his grip, Brother Puluo offered his taciturn opinion. “Mutation?”

  “No,” said Ajir, with a bored tone in his words. “I’ve killed enough of them to know one from another. That’s something different.” He glanced at his commander. “Perhaps we ought to slit its throat and return it to the ship, give the sanguinary priests a curio to toy with.”

  The tau watched them with a strange mixture of terror and compulsion, likely aware that they were talking about it, even though no sound escaped the sealed helmets and ear-beads of the hooded Space Marines. Gingerly, it got to its feet, blinking. The alien’s breathing was shallow, and it was stooped. It extended a trembling finger into the darkness. “Below, below,” it muttered. “Pain-bringer. Below.”

  “You will show us,” Ceris insisted, his gaze never wavering.

  “Gue’la, the word is no. No. No.” The xenos began pulling at itself with the thick, distended limb. “Cannot go back. Will not.” It pointed past the Astartes, to the outer airlock doors. “Outside. Yes. To see the universe, face it. Stop the voice. Voice voice voice…”

  “The creature is unhinged,” Ajir sniffed. His bolter rose again. “What do we need with a guide, lord?” He glanced at Rafen.

  “It is afraid,” Ceris noted. “The torments of fear have pushed it over the bounds of sanity. The creature believes that it will be forced to live through more pain if it returns to the inner tiers of the colony.” He grimaced, as if reading the thoughts of the tau sickened him.