Black Tide Read online

  “Here they come!” called Eigen.

  It was easy to think of the attack as many foes, not one; whip-fast cables of muscle came racing towards them, each one seemingly unconnected to the others. Lost in the shadows, the main mass of the kraken’s body seemed cut off, out of reach. It was a dangerous line of thought to take; Puluo reminded himself that each limb was only one facet of a larger foe, all of them working together at the bidding of a single predator mind.

  The firing began again, bolt rounds moving with agonising slowness. The Astartes saw the glimmer of Rafen’s sword on a falling swing, cutting a glancing blow across a tentacle that left a slick of dark blood swelling out behind it.

  Then for the first time, the sergeant raised his plasma gun and fired it; for a brief moment the area around the warriors was illuminated with a stark, hard glow that threw jumping shadows. A streak of burning white plasmatic matter lanced through the water, boiling a channel towards its target, and for a split-second Rafen vanished in a shroud of churning froth as the gun’s heat-displacement backwashed across him.

  Another tentacle shrank away, the tip withered and molten, and the kraken let out another sub-frequency howl.

  “Press the attack!” snarled his commander.

  Other than the command centre two decks above, the enginarium was where the largest concentration of machine-slaves were located, and it was little wonder. In the middle of the Neimos, sheathed with far greater protection than any other section of the vessel, the submersible’s heart and soul lurked within a massive armoured sphere.

  Ceris chanced a look up at the module, briefly entranced by the trains of light moving up and down the coolant columns that surrounded it. A fusion reactor; behind those plates of titanium and hyper-dense alloy, an ember of blazing fire churned. It was an infant star, shackled there to give power to the Neimos’ drives and internal systems. The reactor should have been tended by a drive-gang of enginseers, but the circumstance of this mission had meant that only servitors crewed this compartment.

  The psyker’s hard gaze crossed the slack and vacant faces of the machine-slaves as they went about their tasks, apparently ignorant of the fact that the vessel was under attack. Now and then, a tremor through the hull sent one of the helots off-balance and sprawling to the deck in a heap of robes; but they simply righted themselves and continued on.

  At his shoulder, Noxx spoke over his raised boltgun. “Is he here?”

  Ceris glanced down at the xenos psi-gem in his hand. Was that a flicker of emerald there behind the runes, or just the play of wan light upon the object? He couldn’t be certain. But he was certain of something.

  “He is,” nodded the psyker. “I smell the spoor of his mind. It leaves a trail.” The whispers of the stone had drawn him, like towards like, to this place.

  Kayne ratcheted the slide on his bolter. “Which one?” He panned the weapon around, drawing beads on the mumbling servitors.

  There were several of them. Ceris sensed weak glimmers of thought-energy from the machine-slaves, small flickers of mind that barely registered unless he turned his full focus on them. Zellik’s broken psyche had stained them all, the taint of the xenos implant shadowy and visible to his preternatural senses, like oil moving over water.

  Before he could reply, Noxx gave an answer of his own. “We’ll kill them all. Take no chances.”

  Ceris shook his head. “No, sir. You cannot shoot them all at once. Kill the wrong one and it will give Zellik’s essence the moment it needs to relocate to another host-mind.” An alarm began to keen as a fountainhead of liquid jetted from an overloaded valve, and a handful of servitors rushed to see to the problem. “His psyche is barely coherent. He has lost so much of himself. All the Magos has left now is his hate and his need for revenge… but we must be certain we end the helot where his spirit is hiding. Otherwise, he flees to another servitor through the implant and our search begins again from scratch.”

  “Then find him, and be sure of it,” Noxx grated. “A death is owed, and by Seth, blood payment will be taken!”

  The psyker drew up the gem in front of him and stared into its depths. The cloying telepathic miasma that shrouded the xenos device made his skin crawl, and he vowed that once this matter was dealt with—if they survived the predations of the tyranid kraken, he amended—he would take a moment to conduct a ritual of purgation and cleanse his mind of exposure to the xenos stone. How a human being, even a half-cyborg Mechanicus like Matthun Zellik, could have willingly allowed his mind to become part of this alien thing was beyond him. The Magos’ fear of death had clearly overcome any piety he might once have had. For all his oaths, the fear of death had made him into a heretic. As well as damning himself for eternity in the eyes of the God-Emperor, Zellik had damned his helot legion into the bargain. Another matter to be dealt with later, he mused; all the servitors would have to be put to death once the mission was over.

  For now, though, he had a coward to find. Steeling himself, Ceris pushed a blade of mental force into the psi-gem and once more he glimpsed the web of connections between the flicker-minds of the technomat slaves.

  The sense of Zellik was immediate. He lingered in the air, a coil of his thought-trace hanging smoke-thick, invisible to all without the witch-sight. What remained of the Magos’ ragged psyche was made of rage and terror.

  And it was stronger than Ceris had expected. Even as he realised his error, cursed his arrogance, he felt the shift in the psionic tempo of the chamber.

  “Which of them is he?” Noxx hissed, growing impatient.

  Every helot in the chamber—those at the leaking pipeway, those at the reactor consoles, the rune-watchers and the rod-runners—all at once their minds dimmed and allowed themselves to be written over by a sketch of Matthun Zellik’s thoughts.

  “Hate you,” whispered one of them, gripping a carved iron spanner with menace. “Hate you.” Lips moved, and each of them joined in a chorus of muttering, breathy loathing.

  Ceris shot a look at Noxx. “All of them,” he said.

  A machine-slave with bulbous loading arms of fluted steel stumbled forward at Kayne, chattering louder and louder.

  The Space Marine put a shot into its chest and it wavered, but did not halt; then all the helots were moving and shouting.

  It was as if a switch had been thrown; one moment, Turcio and Gast stood across from one another, either side of the chart table display, the servitors busy at their stations. The next, the command deck exploded into a riot of noise and motion.

  Every machine-slave, at every station and console stopped their work and turned to stare at the Space Marines—and then they were shouting, raising their hands and manipulators, crying out.

  “Hate you. Hate you hate you hate you hate you hate you—”

  Their blank expressions, normally masks of bland vacancy, were twisting in inchoate rage as they crashed about, surging towards the two Astartes.

  Turcio knew the look of murder-lust well. He had seen it many times on the faces of his foes. He brought up his bolter, the pistons of his bionic arm locking reflexively into a firing position—and he hesitated. Elsewhere aboard the ship, he would have discharged the shot without a moment’s thought, but here in the command chamber they were surrounded by vital systems at every turn, the cogitators and calculating engines that ran every element of the Neimos’ functions. Even if he scored a direct hit, a bolt round would over-penetrate the torso of a helot and go on to wreak further damage.

  At the last second, he reversed his grip on the firearm and slammed the butt of the gun into the face of the nearest member of the maddened horde. Bone and silver cracked, blood spurting from the nostrils of the servitor in a crimson fan. It sank to the deck, killed the instant a shard of skull cut into its brain matter.

  Across the table, Gast brought up his gauntlet and punched down a technomat grasping at his arms. The blade-sharp reductor protruding from the armoured glove’s underside pierced the chest of the servitor and it gave a strangled cough, cho
king out pink foam.

  Gast batted it away, drawing his serrated flaying knife with a flourish. “Blood’s oath!” growled the sanguinary cleric. “It’s a revolt!”

  Turcio let his bolter swing away on its shoulder strap and mirrored the Flesh Tearer’s actions, bringing up his own combat blade. “We can’t kill them… the ship…” Mumbling its anger, another helot lashed out, and the Blood Angel knocked it away with the pommel of his weapon.

  “They may not give us the choice!” said Gast, shouting to be heard over the choir of murderous cries.

  The servitors were massing before them, forming into ordered ranks, leaving their duties behind. Turcio stepped back, unsure of how to proceed, and felt a stanchion at his back. The helots were backing them into a corner.

  Gast pointed. “The rudder!”

  With no hands on the steering yoke, the controls moved freely, and Turcio watched the tiller jerk and tilt as the Neimos was buffeted by the kraken. The deck took on an angle, growing steeper every moment. The Astartes looked up and saw the depth gauge dial twitch and shift. Ungoverned, the submersible entered a shallow, turning descent.

  Eigen felt the change in aspect immediately as the current washed over him. “The ship… We’re changing course.”

  He heard Ajir call out on the general vox channel. “Turcio, respond. What’s going on in there? Turcio? Gast?”

  Over the open comm, the Astartes caught the clatter of steel on steel and the faint sound of sirens.

  “We can’t go back,” Rafen’s voice cut through everything. “Trust your battle-brothers to keep the ship secure. We have our target. We cannot tarry!”

  The Flesh Tearer looked up the line of the hull and found the silhouette of the Blood Angel sergeant beckoning him forward. The blazing arc of his power sword left a sparkling pennant of froth trailing from the blade.

  “Move!” snapped Puluo, underscoring his commander’s orders.

  Eigen gritted his teeth and did as he was told to. Each footstep was difficult, and he felt his muscles tensing against it. He had trained to fight in many conditions, sparring in the swamps of Cretacia with weights tied to his legs, engaging in close combat in spaces without air or gravity. This was no different. He remembered the words of Amit, first Master of his Chapter, drilled into him as an initiate; There is no battlefield that can defy us. We are masters of all wars. The maxim gave him focus and he pushed on.

  Fighting on the hull, in the dense grip of the ocean, was like nothing he had ever done, however. Strange echoes of subsonic sound caught in the hard current of the waters came to him, and it was difficult to draw a bead. They were closing in on the main mass of the kraken now, and the large tentacle arms still lashed back and forth over their heads, beating at the hull of the Neimos.

  He could see the humped body of the tyranid monster, lit in split-second flashes as Rafen fired boiling bolts of plasma at the creature, and Puluo tossed hull-breakers into the fast-moving tide, letting the ocean carry the explosives into the beast. What he had thought were deeper threads of polluted murk were actually slicks of alien blood trailing away from burn wounds in the kraken’s thick-armoured flanks.

  Smaller limbs reached from the creature’s torso, and these were more akin to great bone talons. They sliced through the waters leaving lines of shimmering photoplankton in their wakes.

  The crashing echo of gunfire resonated towards him, and from the corner of his visor he saw Puluo firing a burst of heavy bolts into a questing serpent-limb that flicked up behind them. The warrior’s shots were true—he was getting the range now, as were they all—and the limb blew apart in a sphere of concussion.

  “How do we kill this freak?” Ajir was saying, breathing hard.

  “We get closer,” Rafen told him, the fury of battle thick in the other man’s words. “Blind it, choke it, shoot it until it dies, whatever we must! Our mission will not end because of this xenos abortion!”

  Eigen nodded. “Aye!” He took heavy steps forward, his boots ringing on the hull, leading with his bolter. He aimed for the phosphor spots on the kraken’s hide, and it reacted with a shiver and a subsonic screech as he fired.

  “To your right!” came a shout. Eigen heard Ajir call out his name in warning and he pivoted at the waist in time to see a line of barbs rip towards him over the curvature of the Neimos’ hull. The splayed talons tore a ragged channel through the grey-black sheath of anechoic tiles and Eigen reacted, dodging away; but his reflex to tuck and roll was the wrong one, and his magno-clamped boots resisted. Too late, he tried to turn, but the spinning fanged club at the end of the tentacle caught him. Barbs ripped into ceramite and punctured layers of plasteel and flexmetals. Locked in place, Eigen fell back under the force of the blow but did not fall, his arms spinning like windmills. With a shout of effort, he pushed himself back to a standing stance, but the kraken’s lethal limb was already snaking back and away.

  It was then his breath was struck from him as he felt an icy fist at his gut, and with it a growing chill that spread quickly across his torso. For a moment he feared it was shock from a penetrating wound, perhaps even some kind of venom injected into him by the glancing attack—but then he saw the streamer of bubbles issuing from the rent in his chest plate. He smelled rust and stale salt; his armour was flooding with seawater.

  “They keep coming!” shouted Kayne, blowing the head from the shoulders of a rod-runner. Gunfire echoed around the engine deck. “You have to stop this!”

  Ceris struck out and punched a technomat with a pincer-claw arm to the deck. The blow staggered the helot and left it shaking, but it rocked back and swiped at him again. Blood and bone fragments bloomed in a lethal burst as a round cleaved into it from behind, killing it instantly.

  Noxx raised his smoking bolter, holding away a wild servitor at arm’s length with his free hand. “You heard the boy!” said the veteran. “If this is happening all over the ship—”

  “It will be done!” retorted the psyker.

  Kayne wondered exactly how it would be done; but then again, he did not want to know. The strange magicks of the warp disquieted him, and he found it hard to mind his ease with someone only steps away from a sorcerer wearing the armour of a Space Marine. Ceris’ eye-line crossed his and, for a moment, the Blood Angel wondered if the other man had read his thoughts.

  Ceris’ mailed fist closed around the alien gem Gast had cut from the brain of the dead servitor, and he gasped. Immediately, eldritch viridian light spilled from the gaps between his fingers, and the crystals lining the Codicier’s psychic hood flashed blue-white with power.

  “Hate you,” cried the marching machine-slaves. “Hate you. Hate you. Hate—”

  Silence fell like an axe blow, sudden and without warning. For a long second, all Kayne could hear were the faint clarions of warning sirens on the upper decks and the constant rumble and moan of the tortured hull.

  Ceris took a step deeper into the chamber, pushing through the statue-still helots. They stood in place, trapped and twitching as if rebelling against the paralysis forced upon them. Kayne saw sweat film the psyker’s brow, his eyes narrowing. A greasy, electric tingle filled the air, setting the warrior’s teeth on edge; the overspill of telepathic energy clouded the room.

  With effort, Ceris raised the hand gripping the glowing gem and held it out, pointing with his fist. “I feel him. He is there.”

  A lone servitor, an overseer model constructed to serve as gang-master for the rod-runner helots, stumbled and staggered. It moved as if it were wading through thick oil, unable to drag itself free. The machine-slave tottered towards Ceris with its hands curled into talons, moaning and snarling. Kayne fancied he saw a greenish glimmer deep in the sightless eyes of the helot. The meat of its face twisted and distorted, and for a moment it took on the cast of the silver mask he had seen floating in the holoprojection aboard the Archeohort.

  In a stuttering, punch card chatter, the servitor’s head tilted back and it spoke. “You will pay for this!” The voice was
crackling and broken, like a fouled recording spool. “I’ll make every one of you pay!”

  “He’s trying to flee…” Ceris bit out the words. “Shift to… another host…” The glowing stone throbbed and pulsed. “Take him now!”

  Kayne aimed his bolter, but what he saw made him pause. Wreathing the head of the howling servitor was a ghost, a faint tracery of Magos Zellik’s screaming face shimmering like an auroral discharge. As he watched, tiny fireflies of green melted out of the air and merged with the phantom; they were the fragments of Zellik’s shattered psyche coming together, perhaps in a last desperate effort to resist the psyker’s will.

  “Now!” cried Ceris.

  “Make… You… Pay!” cried the strangled voice; but before it could speak again, a figure stepped out of the gloom behind the helot and bright steel flashed.

  A toothed knife, trimmed with wicked barbs the length of its blade, burst from the open mouth of the servitor. Brother-Sergeant Noxx leaned in, pushing his weapon in through the back of the machine-slave’s skull. Kayne heard the sickening crack of breaking bone, and then a second sharp report, like glass breaking.

  The helot coughed out black blood and pieces of broken gemstone, the screaming ghost about it releasing one final howl before it discorporated and became nothing. With a savage jerk of his wrist, Noxx tore his blade from his kill and spat upon the corpse at his feet. “For Mohl and Sove and all the others,” he grated. “This time you stay dead, you worthless maggot.”

  Ceris gave a slow nod, and dropped the psi-gem to the deck. Still panting from the effort, he brought down his boot on the emerald stone and ground it into powder beneath his heel. Kayne thought he heard a distant scream, but then it was gone.

  All around them, the servitors turned about and ambled back to their workstations, ignoring the Astartes as if they were not there.

  Rafen saw Eigen take the hit from the kraken and cursed as the Flesh Tearer recoiled. He saw a dim red shape moving towards the other man across the hull—the murk was too thick to be sure if it was Ajir or Puluo—and the sergeant forged forward, knowing that his battle-brothers would aid the injured warrior.