Black Tide Page 14

  “That won’t stop them coming for us,” said Noxx.

  The Blood Angel nodded. “I know. But the deeper we go, the lower the chance that any engagement will be detected by the enemy.”

  The other sergeant shook his head. “You’re risking us all.”

  Rafen let out a bark of laughter at that. “Of course I am! But risk is our meat and drink!” He glared at Beslian. “Now carry out my orders.”

  The adept gave a shaky nod and began to speak in machine-code. The servitors stuttered and jerked into action, working their control lecterns.

  “And what commands do you have for us?” said Ceris, his brow furrowed.

  “Alert the squad. The order is… stand by to repel boarders.”

  The hunter-predator forms had eyes, but they were poor things, vestigial orbs that could only penetrate the oily murk close at hand. Instead, they felt their way through the oceans of Dynikas V through networks of electroreceptor nerves in their bony skulls and feeler barbels that writhed about lipless mouths ringed with teeth. They tasted and smelled their way through the thick waters, riding on sonic vibrations that showed landscapes of sound and pitch.

  Once, when their hive had first deposited its spoor upon this world, they had been something close to the genus of tyranid that humans called a lictor; but a rapacious evolutionary cycle and a physiology based on an infinitely malleable octo-helix DNA had tailored them to fit the new environment where they found themselves. Now the lictors bore only the most basic resemblance to their more common kindred. These creatures were sleeker, skinned with sheer microspines, sporting flat fans of talons that doubled as steering vanes. Powerful legs slick with secreted mucus thrashed hard against the ocean, propelling them forward.

  Their animal minds reacted to the object they sensed before them, the metallic mass falling away into the gloom. The returns from their sonic barks were garbled and confusing; the lictors were made furious by this. There were no scent receptors in the murk, nothing to warn them off from something that might have been part of their kind. The object was alien to them; it carried the taste of other worlds with it and a warmth that was out of place in the cold seas.

  Coming closer, slowing to match pace, the tyranids unfurled their claws from the flesh pockets where they lay and raked them along the hull of the Neimos. Looking for purchase, for a way in.

  Kayne dipped a finger in the oil of anointing and traced it around the muzzle of his bolter as Brother-Sergeant Rafen spoke. “Watch your fire,” he was saying. “Single shots only. Close quarter weapons. Any collateral damage could make this hulk our grave, so be circumspect.” His commander brandished a plasma gun, the coils turned to their tightest beam setting.

  Kayne looked around, still uncertain as to why Rafen had assembled them in this chamber. It was a slope-floored bay along the ventral surface of the submersible, towards the aft but clear of the steering vanes. The deck disappeared away at a steep angle, while a grid-floored balcony ringed it along the plane of the main deck. It reminded the Astartes of a Thunderhawk’s drop bay, but wider.

  The deck of the Neimos trembled as something rebounded off the portside hull, drawing everyone’s attention. Kayne heard another sound seconds later—a high-pitched screeching, like blades scraping against blades.

  At his side, the Flesh Tearer called Sove cocked his head and scowled. “Talons,” he said sombrely, making a claw of his hand to demonstrate.

  “We’re tinned meat to them in this iron coffin,” muttered Ajir. “They’ll be sick of their diet of traitors and each other… They’ll be hungry for something new.”

  “The xenos will find only death,” retorted Eigen.

  Rafen turned to Puluo, who stood near a control podium. “Flood it,” he ordered.

  Puluo nodded gravely and worked a dial; immediately, sluggish laps of seawater began to fill the lower level. The sloping floor vanished beneath them, and Kayne realised he had been correct; the deck beneath the gantry was a single piece, a massive hinged drop-ramp. Above him, set in secure racks, there were blocky capsules with fins and propellers—auxiliary craft of some kind, he imagined, that could be manoeuvred over the ramp and then released.

  An unpleasant thought occurred to him. “We’re going out there?”

  “Not yet,” said Rafen, a wolfish smile playing about his lips. “Remember your tactical studies, brother. Choose your battlefield, lest the enemy choose it for you.”

  “Outside, we’re at a disadvantage,” added Puluo. “We’d need tethers, boot magnets…”

  “You want to bring those things in here?” Noxx’s voice was low.

  “Aye,” nodded Rafen. “We’ll take them and move on.” He was in the process of removing his right gauntlet.

  Noxx approached him. “Did you strike your head upon the deck during our drop from orbit, Blood Angel? That’s not a bold plan, it’s a foolish one!”

  “The tyranids will tear their way into this vessel if we do not stop them. Better we face them head on, on our terms, than let them hole the Neimos.” Rafen stowed the armoured glove and drew his combat blade. He glanced at the others. “Weapons up. Prepare to meet the enemy.”

  Kayne moved towards a cargo container, already figuring lines of fire from the partial cover, when the Flesh Tearer sergeant spoke again.

  “Hold!” snapped Noxx, raising his hand to the other Astartes.

  Rafen eyed him. “You countermand me? Did you not agree to follow my orders?”

  “I said I would obey you for now.”

  “You mean, until you took issue with one of my commands?” Rafen closed his bare hand around the knife’s naked blade, drawing blood. “I’ll discuss mutiny with you if you wish, cousin. But not here.” He stepped down the ramp until the brackish seawater was lapping over his boots. “First we deal with the xenos.”

  Kayne watched Rafen extend his hand, curled in a fist; blood from the shallow gash pooled and dripped into the water.

  “Gather yourselves,” said the sergeant. “They’ll come to us now.”

  Noxx growled in the back of his throat and shot his Flesh Tearers a sharp look; in turn, the warriors in red and black went to the ready.

  Close by, Ceris unsheathed his force mace. He aimed it towards the deepest part of the now-flooded bay. “There!”

  Kayne saw movement in the murky waters, shapes that were slick and fast, shifting like smoke. He had once heard that some ocean predators were capable of scenting a single drop of human blood in the water from more than a kilometre’s distance; if that were true, then he imagined that the tyranids swarming about the Neimos could not help but be drawn in.

  The pool’s surface suddenly grew turbulent, and in the next moment night-black forms exploded out from the water.

  Kayne opened fire, even though he had but a vague impression of the shape of his target. He glimpsed a torso, barbed curves of claw and snapping flukes. Bolt rounds crashed from his sidearm, and a surge of harsh scents crashed over him; saline, old rust, the rot of decayed fish-meat and something foul and acidic. He grimaced; the creatures could exude a chemical trail that, left unchecked, would attract every tyranid for hundreds of kilometres.

  A bright spear of plasma roared through the air and blasted one of the tyranids back into the water, bolt shells following to rip through its torso.

  “Lictors!” snarled Sove, snapping off shots from behind a reel of cable. “But different… like Cretacia’s selachians…”

  “Adapted,” said Kayne, through gritted teeth. “They killed the top predators on Dynikas and then became them!”

  Five of the creatures had emerged from the pool; one already lay shaking and dying. The rest let out shrieks pitched so high that Kayne felt needles of pain in his skull.

  “Nothing lives!” Rafen shouted, leading with the plasma gun in his fist. “Kill them quickly, before they can summon more of their kind!”

  Ceris leapt boldly from behind cover to strike at one of the lictor-shark hybrids, bringing down his force mace in a humming a
rc of white light. Where the weapon struck the beast, the psyker projected a bolt of telepathic power through the brief instant of contact, and the tyranid screamed again—this time, in agony. Kayne turned, aiming down the iron sights of his bolter, lingering for a split-second over where to place his shot; he fired at the corpse-flesh wattles around the throat of the beast and hit his mark. The lictor’s feeder tendrils thrashed and it vomited up black blood from its lamprey mouth.

  The psyker bellowed a war cry and beat the xenos again and again with the mace, the spikes of psy-force cleaving open the bony exoskeleton of the lictor’s head.

  A hot wave of burned air from plasma fire gusted past Kayne as he shot twice more into Ceris’ target, all the better to be certain of the kill. More alien screams drew his attention as a second tyranid stumbled into the water, one massive scything talon melted and cracked like wax from a candle. Ejected shells clattering off the gridded deck at his feet, Brother Puluo ended the wounded, bellowing beast by marching shot after shot from his heavy bolter up the line of the alien’s torso.

  Kayne felt his lips draw back from his fangs, felt the rumble of his blood in his ears. The taste of battle was in his mouth, sweet and strong.

  Ajir was caught on the backswing of another lictor’s fin-tail, and he tumbled over the deck and into the water, landing in the shallows with an angry shout. As he splashed back up the ramp to rejoin the fight, Gast and Eigen harried the beast with shots to its face. Noxx had gone in close with his chainsword, carving great jagged slashes in its chest-armour. A muscle spasm racked the lictor, and it fired a fan of flesh hooks at the sergeant. Noxx parried the attack and caught the sinewy chords trailing the hooks in the teeth of his weapon, ripping them out with a growl of spinning blades. Turcio lent his weapon to the Flesh Tearers, his bionic arm absorbing every iota of recoil as he fired one-handed at the tyranid’s legs. Driven to the deck, Noxx snarled and buried his chainsword in the soft underbelly of the lictor, his weight behind it to force the chattering weapon into the vital organs within.

  One more. Kayne swung about as Rafen called out his name in a warning. He ducked, and the hum of air buffeted him as a massive crescent talon tore past; a moment’s delay, and the alien’s heavy blow would have connected with his head. He released two snapshot rounds as he let himself continue the turn, the bolter tucked low. Kayne heard the distinctive crunch-crack of the mass-reactive shells as they impacted on the lictor’s chitinous torso plates. It lowed in pain, but it did not halt its attack.

  A bony fin-limb, barbed at every joint, scraped across the deck at him like a trailing whip, gobs of stringy mucus looping from it. He fired at it, but there was nowhere else for him to go; caught in the rush of the battle he had let himself be forced into a corner, blocked in by cargo containers and the far wall. Splaying open with a wet hiss, the talons rose before him—

  —and then the lictor-shark was staggering backwards, hooting in pain. A halo of smouldering plasma fire wreathed its back and it spun in a circle, wild with distress. Kayne saw Sove leap up and try for a point-blank kill, but the xenos flailed, clipping him and knocking the Flesh Tearer’s gun from his grip. Undaunted, the snarling Space Marine pressed his attack. A massive push-dagger, a long and slender triangle of polished, fractal-edged steel, flicked out from a snap-rig on Sove’s vambrace. Leaning into the blow, he put the wicked tip of the weapon into a point between two thick ribs and pushed it down to the hilt, twisting the dagger to widen the wound.

  Kayne fired at the creature, and was dimly aware of other shots streaking in from other quarters, each Astartes careful to nip at the tyranid’s limbs for fear of striking their comrade.

  The lictor hooted and lashed out. Kayne saw the attack in all its bloody glory. The beast ripping at itself to tear out the blade in its gut. Sove’s weapon, and his hand and right arm with it, torn away and discarded in a welter of blood. The Flesh Tearer, his shoulder jetting crimson, batted away like an afterthought by the swing of a talon-fluke.

  Sove was flung into a collection of storage bins and vanished into the clutter. The last of the lictors, blood an oily black river from its torn abdomen, became the centre of a hail of bolt shells and plasma fire. The creature’s death screams beat at the walls before becoming the thin, fading hiss of flash-boiled fluids.

  Rafen walked to the corpse and kicked it into the flooded section of the bay, the meat-smoke and spent cordite in the air drifting about him. His face was scratched and bleeding. “Vent this to the ocean. Let their kindred feast on their corpses.”

  Kayne moved towards the mess of fallen containers where Sove had landed, but Noxx was already there, with the Apothecary-Cleric Gast a step behind. The sergeant tore savagely at the debris and dragged his injured man from the deck. Sove had lost his helmet in the fall, and his bearded face was pale.

  Rafen began to speak. “Is he—”

  “Alive,” grated Noxx. The Flesh Tearer hesitated on the verge of something unspoken, and finally added, “for now.” Before Kayne’s commander could say more, Noxx issued terse orders to Gast, and the cleric bore Sove away towards the Neimos’ upper decks.

  After a long moment, Kayne saw Rafen secure his weapon and study the slick of dark fluids across the pool of seawater. “We have consecrated this world with our blood and that of the enemy,” he said to the air, his gaze distant. “And if we must, we will choke these seas with their dead.”

  Up above, on the surface, the world turned towards the weak glow of a distant, oncoming dawn. Light crossed the wave tops, turning them to beaten silver.

  But beneath, where the sun never reached, in the endless grey gloom of the abyssal reaches, the Neimos went deep. Alien corpse-meat twisted in the vessel’s wake, mute witness, to the fury of the Astartes. A ripper shoal found the remains and dwelled a few moments, considering the feast; but they stayed away, the animal sense of the tyranid forms aware of something far larger—and more lethal—drifting nearby. Something watching, measuring itself against the new intruders in its realm.

  Beneath, where the sun never reached, a dark and sinuous mass followed the Neimos into the depths.

  SEVEN

  Goel Beslian walked with care, listening.

  On the keel deck, in the lowermost section of the Neimos’ engine compartments, the sound of the humming drive trains was a rhapsody of machines. Finely tuned mechanisms, gears and rods and cogs married up with one another in a flawless execution of function; all of it made more incredible by the great age of the system in question. The submersible’s drives were based on a design philosophy laid down in the ages before humankind had left the cradle of Holy Terra—although like some in the service of the Adeptus Mechanicus, Beslian was one of those who secretly believed that humans had actually evolved on Mars first, and cast off to her neighbour planet before the rise of the Emperor, and not as some insisted, the other way around. Mars had always been the seat of genius, the cradle of mankind’s greatest minds.

  At a different time, in a different place, Beslian might have been able to stop and enjoy the beauty of this great machine and marvel at its works; but that was denied to him. As much as he wanted the noise and power of the engines to soothe him, all it did was grind the gears of his thoughts still further. He could find no respite.

  Finally, he stopped at the reactor control chamber, ignoring the trio of servitors working silently at their consoles, and stared at the fan of indicator lamps on the core monitor lectern. All was well, for the moment. His augmented eyes whined, losing focus, as his gaze turned inward.

  Goel Beslian was very much afraid, and his fear was so strong that he imagined it like a stench of spent spindle oil, trailing him wherever he went. He was certain that those Astartes brutes could smell his terror on him; like animal predators, they sensed it every time he was close to them.

  He looked down at the brass manipulators that were his hands. Fine pieces of work, they were, laser-cut and polished by forge-slaves. Careworn ratchets of metal, cable and ceramic, far more dextrous and face
ted than any human digits could ever be… but still they trembled. He had tried many times to adjust the feedback gain and the subtle function of his limbs, but the twitches never quite went away. When the fear came, they were there. It was a horribly human, disconcertingly fleshy thing to behold. It betrayed Beslian’s imperfections, showed him how far he was from the majesty and flawlessness of the Machine-God.

  Unbidden, a question formed in the logic spools of his enhanced brain. How did I get here? With the question came a stark jolt of self-knowledge.

  “Because I am afraid,” he told the servitors. They ignored him; unless he gave them a direct command prefaced with the correct data-phrase, they would behave as if he was invisible.

  Beslian watched them work, and felt a stab of anger so strong it surprised him. He hadn’t thought himself still capable of such emotional potency. He almost envied the machine-slaves; their higher brain functions lobotomised, the personas of the men and women they once had been excised, they were never afraid. Never angry. Never hobbled by the weight of their own cowardice. They moved back and forth, whispering the lines of their command strings to themselves, muttering order memes and operating codes. They were content with their lot, and unafraid.

  The logis was damned by his own failings. No matter how much of him he replaced with the precision of the machine, he was still Goel Beslian at his core. Still weak.

  He thought of the others, those who had come up through the training regimens of the collegia at the same time as him. They had since attained ranks far above his. He thought of his crèche-mate Lytton, who was now Lord Magos of the Mondasia Forges, of the elegant, waspish Defra who had gone on to take command of explorators, and all the others he had known. Beslian was the least of them all.

  Someone with his talents and a measure of self-confidence could have risen to become the master of a tech-guard division, or even placed in charge of his own elite cadre of archeotechnologists; but instead Beslian had worked in the shadow of greater men, hanging on the tails of their robes. He had always taken the option of lowest risk, the path of least resistance.