Void Stalker (32 page)

‘This will take some getting used to,’ Cyrion voxed. He was still bemused at the aquila showing on the edge of his retinal display. In Deltrian’s many modifications and reconfigurings, he’d evidently not managed to scrub that detail from the armour’s internal systems.

Talos was distracted by the vox-net; the reports of Second and Third Claws engaging the enemy higher up in the catacombs, and the Bleeding Eyes’ savage curses as they fought on the surface. He tried not to wonder what Malcharion was doing – the captain had decided to die alone, and he couldn’t find flaw with that desire. First Claw would have to split up soon enough. Once unified resistance became impossible against greater numbers, it would come down to murder in the dark, and every soul for himself.

He’d never worn Tactical Dreadnought war plate before, and the sensation was a surprising one. His battle armour was as familiar as his own skin, and as comfortable as clothing once wearer and suit bonded over time. Terminator plate was a different beast from tusked helm to spiked boots; every muscle in his body felt revitalised, stinging with strength. He’d expected to feel sluggish, but the range of motion and speed of movement was little different from the times he’d trained out of his armour. The only disconcerting aspect was the forward-leaning hunch, leaving him always on the edge of breaking into a run.

Talos had tried running. It resulted in a quicker, more forceful tread that was somewhere between a stagger and a sprint. Compensatory servos and stabilisers wouldn’t allow him to pitch forward and fall, though the shift in the centre of his balance still felt unusual after so many centuries crusading in his modified Mark V plate.

One of his hands was an armoured glove the size of a
l
egionary’s torso – the power fist active and rippling with a passive force field. The other clutched a heavy rotary cannon, his finger resting on the curved trigger. They didn’t have much ammunition for the assault cannon. When First Claw scavenged the suits from the Salamanders, they soon learned the Imperials had used most of their reserves. He carried his double-barrelled bolter locked to his thigh, ready to draw it the moment he dumped the empty cannon.

Mercutian reached with his oversized power fist, tapping at the ornate tusks Deltrian had grafted to the muzzle of his bullish helm.

‘I once saw Malek of the Atramentar head-butt someone with his tusks,’ he said. ‘I’d like to try that.’

Talos held up a fist for silence – or as close as they could come to silence while in suits of armour rumbling like the idling engines of four battle tanks.

A hail of razor-edged discs sliced out from the corridor ahead, followed by the advancing forms of eldar warriors. They hesitated in their tracks when they saw what was stalking towards them. Several of them scattered, while others fell back, still firing. Talos heard the shuriken projectiles clattering against his armour, with the same tinkling sound of glass shards breaking on the floor.

In reply, he squeezed his trigger, filling the tunnel with the distinctive flashing roar of an Imperial assault cannon. Suspensors in his elbow, wrist and the gun’s grip counterbalanced any recoil, letting him aim without distraction, but his retinal feed had to dim to compensate for the brightness of the muzzle flash.

First Claw stood in disbelief ten seconds later. Talos tilted the cannon to get a better look at its steaming, reddening barrels.

‘Now
that’s
a cannon,’ said Cyrion, as the four of them waded through the organic mess left in the corridor. ‘Can I use it for a while?’

Marlonah wasn’t sure
what she was hearing anymore. Sometimes the stone hallways echoed with what sounded like distant gunfire, other times it seemed like nothing more than the wind, weaving through the dark at her side.

She had a lamp pack – no crew member on an Eighth Legion vessel would walk a ship’s halls without one – and she knew the power cell would be good for another few hours at least. What she didn’t know was what to do, or where to go.

Does is make a difference? What does it matter if I die down here or on the plains?

She still had her stub gun, for what it was worth – a primitive little slug-thrower compared to a Legiones Astartes bolter, make no mistake. It’d be fine for shooting herself in the head before she died of thirst, but it wasn’t much use if she walked into a battle. Slaves weren’t permitted weapons on the
Echo of Damnation,
but the thriving black market trading going on in every level of life took care of that. The Legion never enforced such a law anyway, for they feared no uprising. She suspected they enjoyed a little spice to the challenge when they hunted crew members for sport, as well.

Marlonah wasn’t sure how long she’d been alone before the thumping started. She made her way through the deserted catacombs, sending her torch beam ahead, letting it cut the blackness as best it could. All sense of direction had long since abandoned her. Sound echoed strangely down here, to the point she wasn’t even sure whether she was heading towards the thumping or avoiding it completely. It never seemed to fade or grow any stronger.

She never saw what knocked the lamp pack from her grip. A breath of air passed by the back of her neck, and a rough impact against her hand sent the torch clattering to the ground. For a split second, its spinning beam sent insane shadows against the walls: the silhouettes of witch-thin figures with elongated, inhuman helms.

Marlonah went for her gun before the torch had fallen still. That, too, left her hand with what felt like a kick to her fist.

The second time she felt the breath, it was against her face. The voice emerging from the darkness was as unwelcomingly soft as velvet on bleeding skin.

‘Where is the Prophet of the Eighth Legion?’

She aimed her fist at the voice in the blackness, but her punch met nothing but air. A second, third and fourth swiped through the same nothingness. She could hear the subtle movement and breathing of something dodging her in the dark, betrayed by the smooth scrape of armour plates sliding with every weave.

A hand bolted around her throat, collaring her with thin fingers sheathed in cold iron. She managed a single blow against the unmoving arm, before she was slammed back against the wall. Her boots scrabbled against the stone, unable to reach the ground. Her rough augmetic leg made clicking, whirring sounds as it struggled to find the floor.

‘Where is the Prophet of the Eighth Legion?’

‘I’ve lived my whole life in the dark,’ she told the unseen voice. ‘Do you think
this
scares me?’

The collar of fingers tightened enough to cut off her breath. She wasn’t sure if the thumping was getting louder, or if she was being deceived by her own rising heartbeat.

‘Filthy, blind, poisonous, cancerous mon-keigh animal. Where is the Prophet of the Eighth Legion? Thousands of souls remain at stake while he draws breath.’

Marlonah thrashed in the stronger grip, beating her fists against the armoured arm.

‘Stubborn creature. Know this, human: the silent storm approaches. The Void Stalker comes.’

The clutch at her throat vanished as fast as it appeared, dropping her to the ground. The first thing she thought, as she heaved the stale air back into her body, was that her heartbeat hadn’t lied. The thumping was all around her now, the thudding crunch of steel on stone. It sent trembles through the ground beneath her, and the wall against her back.

Marlonah scrabbled for her lamp wand, chopping its thin blade of illumination around the chamber. She saw stone, and stone, and stone, and… something immense, and dark, and leering down at her with rumbling joints.

‘What are you doing down here?’

He came in
too hard, at a bad angle, and tumbled across the dusty ground. It took a moment to haul himself back up to all-fours, and another two attempts to stand straight. His metallic foot-claws splayed to compensate, digging into the soft dust.

The pain was… quite something. He tasted blood with each breath, and the ache of his muscles put him in firm mind of the three nights he’d been racked by Lord Jiruvius of the Emperor’s Children.

That hadn’t been a pleasant war. Losing it had felt even worse.

Lucoryphus hadn’t landed far from the last eldar. He walked over to her prone form, noting the trail of bloody fluid leaking from several of his armour joints. His war plate was an interesting display of battle cartography, marked by laser burns and punctures from the aliens’ short bone-daggers.

The Raptor rolled the sky-maiden’s corpse with his foot-claw. Her slanted eyes, as lifeless as sapphires and much the same colour, stared up into the grey heavens. On her chest was a smooth red jewel, named by her kindred as a soulstone. Lucoryphus tore it from the armour and swallowed it whole. He hoped her immortal spirit would enjoy its fate to dwell forever within his bowels.

‘Soul Hunter,’ he voxed at last.

The prophet’s voice was flawed by distance distortion and gunfire crackles. ‘I hear you, Lucoryphus.’

‘The Bleeding Eyes are dead. I am the last.’

He heard Talos give a grunt of effort. ‘It grieves me to hear that, brother. Will you join us down here?’

The Raptor looked to the fallen walls, the remnants of once-great battlements. Storm clouds were gathering above them – an anomaly on this weatherless world.

‘Not yet. Something comes, Talos. Watch yourselves.’

XXVI

STORM

The rain started
the very moment her boots touched the Tsagualsan soil.

Lucoryphus watched her from his tenuous perch, crouched on what remained of a long stretch of battlement wall. Five eldar soulstones sat cold in his guts. When he closed his eyes, even just to blink, he was certain he could hear five voices screaming in a lamenting dirge.

How curious,
he thought, as she manifested. She stepped from a heat shimmer in the air itself, falling a dozen feet to land on her toes, with arms outspread. Her armour consisted of silver
plating, shaped like slender musculature over a black bodysuit that shimmered like fish scales. In one hand was a staff – scimitar-bladed at both ends and wet with slow ripples of liquid lightning. In her other fist, she clutched a throwing star the size of a battle shield, ending in three hooked dagger blades. The fire that danced along the alien steel was black, forged through a craft Lucoryphus wasn’t certain he wished to know.

H
er face was
shielded by
a silver death mask, sculpted in the cold-eyed image of a screaming goddess. A high, long crest of black hair flowed down her shoulders and back, somehow immune to the wind sending dust-wraiths haunting through the ruins.

Everything about her radiated wrongness, even to a creature as warp-touched as he. For several seconds, the heat haze remained around her, as if she were at risk of being rejected by reality.

This is no eldar maiden,
the Raptor knew.
Perhaps she was, once. Now… she is something much more.

Lucoryphus’s claws tightened on the stone as the eldar war-goddess flew across the ground in a blurred sprint, her feet barely gracing the earth. One moment she was a silver blur in the ruins; the next she was gone, either vanished into thin air or descended underground – Lucoryphus wasn’t certain.

‘Talos
.
’
H
e opened the vox-link again. ‘I have seen what hunts us.’

Second Claw had
survived for over three hours in a series of running gunfights, repelling wave after wave of alien attackers. The only lights to flash down the tunnels and illuminate the chambers came from the staccato flicker of weapons fire, or the rare clash of opposing energy fields when a power sword met another of its kind.

Yuris was limping from the blade wound to his thigh. He knew his brothers would leave him behind soon. It wasn’t a matter of needing to talk them into abandoning him, nor did it come down to something as noble as self-sacrifice. They’d leave him behind because he was getting slower, and getting weaker. His life had become a liability to theirs.

The Night Lord caught his breath with his back to a wall. He locked his bolter to his thigh for a moment, reloading it with a crunching smack, and only a single hand.

‘My last,’ he voxed to the other two survivors. ‘I’m out of ammunition.’

‘We’ll fall back to the reserve crates,’ replied Fal Torm. The truth was implicit in the other warrior
’
s
words: they would fall back to the ammunition reserves, but they’d almost certainly leave him behind. If Yuris’s death bought them a few more seconds, then all the better.

‘You’re hurt worse than you’re admitting,’ said Xan Kurus. The backswept wings on Xan Kurus’s helm had been shattered off hours before, broken away by an alien blade. ‘I can smell your lifeblood, and hear the strain in your hearts.’

Yuris couldn’t catch his breath. It was difficult to inhale, forcing air into a throat that felt too tight.

Is this what dying feels like?

‘I’m still standing,’ he voxed back. ‘Come. Let’s move.’

The three survivors of Second Claw retreated further into the dark, breaking into a ragged run. Mere hours before, Yuris had led nine other souls. Now he was the high and mighty lord over two warriors, both of whom were preparing to abandon him the moment the opportunity presented itself.

As with humans, all eldar were not created equal. Yuris had learned that at great cost. The ones with weak projectile rifles and thin armour of black plate and mesh weave – they died like weak children and shot with all the skill expected of any hive-born member drawn from humanity’s urban dregs. But the others… The shrieking witches and the sword-killers…

Six warriors dead in three hours. The alien maidens would dissolve out of the dark, weaving past any gunfire, and lock blades with the Night Lords in a storm of blows. Whether they killed or not didn’t seem to change their behaviour; as soon as the first blade clashes were done, they’d break away and flee back through the tunnels.

The howling was the worst part of every charge – they’d scream a dirge long and loud enough to wake the forgotten dead of this accursed world. Each howl knifed a sliver of ice right into the back of his head, doing something to his brain, slowing his reactions enough to leave him straining to parry every blow.

Ah, but Second Claw hadn’t gone down easy. They were the hunters, after all. Yuris had slit three of the maidens’ pale throats himself, grappling them from behind and ending them with a quick, sawing caress of his gladius.

Back and forth it went: charge, defend, hunt, slice, retreat…

Yuris stumbled in his run, his hand resting on the wall for balance. He’d run ahead of his brothers, but that soon became limping alongside them, and at last, limping and lagging behind.

‘Goodbye, Yuris,’ Xan Kurus voxed from up ahead. Fal Torm didn’t even stop – he carried on at a dead sprint.

‘Wait,’ Yuris said to Xan Kurus. ‘Wait, brother.’

‘Why?’ Xan Kurus was already running again. ‘Die well.’

Yuris listened to his kindred’s bootsteps growing fainter. His stumbling run devolved into a simple stagger, and he crashed against the wall, sliding down to his knees.

I don’t want to die on Tsagualsa.
The thought rose, sourceless and unbidden. Was Tsagualsa truly a worse place to die than any other?

Yes,
he thought.
The carrion world is cursed. We should never have returned here.

The ancient superstition brought a painful smile to his bloody lips. And what did it matter? He’d served, hadn’t he? He’d served loyally down the centuries, and ripped pleasure from a galaxy that had never been able to deny him.
Until now…

Yuris tried to grin again, but blood spilled from his mangled lips in a black gush.

No matter. No matter. It was a fine thing, to be alive and to be strong.

His helm tipped forward as that strength finally faded, seeping out with his blood.

‘Yuris,’ the vox crackled.

Begone, Fal Torm. Run ahead, if you wish. Let me die alone and in peace, bastards.

‘Yuris,’ the voice repeated.

He opened his eyes without realising they’d been closed. Red-tinted vision returned, showing his cracked breastplate and the stump where his left hand had been less than an hour before.

What?
he asked, and had to make a second attempt to speak it out loud. ‘What?’ he voxed.

His retinal display feeds were white blurs of scrolling gibberish. Blinking twice brought them back into resolution.

Xan Kurus’s life signals registered as a flatline. As did Fal Torm’s.

That cannot be.
Yuris forced himself to his feet, biting back a groan at the agony of his broken knee and missing hand. His armour’s damage prevented it from flooding pain inhibitors into his bloodstream, only compounding his torment.

He found his last two brothers in the hallways ahead, and shook with suppressed laughter. Both bodies were sprawled across the stone floor, their ruination exacting and complete. Xan Kurus and Fal Torm were both cleaved in half at the waist, their bodies separated from their legs. Blood decorated the floor in patternless blotching.

Neither of them had a head. Their helms were free of their severed necks, released to roll against the wall once the corpses fell.

Yuris couldn’t bite back the laughter. Despite abandoning him, they’d died before
him, anyway. Even through the pain, the notion appealed to his sense of poetic justice.

The blade th
at
killed Yuris struck first in the back, driving through his lower spine and bursting from the layered armour over his belly. Foul, glistening ropes of offal followed it out, as his insides tumbled in a sick heap at his boots.

Yuris managed to remain standing for another couple of heartbeats before the blade struck again. He saw it this time; a blur of spinning silver and burning black, slashing through the air quicker than a blink. It cleaved into his ripped stomach and tore out from his lower back, and this time Yuris fell to the ground with a cry and a crash.

For one grotesque moment, he found himself on his back, reaching with his one remaining hand to drag himself back over to his legs.

Then she was above him. The creature Lucoryphus had warned them about. His racing, firing, dying mind screamed at him to act. He had to vox the others. He had to warn them she was already down here.

But that didn’t happen. He said nothing. He warned no one. Yuris opened his mouth, only to choke a hot flood of bile and blood down his neck.

The silent witch-queen lifted the spear cradled in her other hand, and lifted it high above. She said a single word in crude Gothic, her accent spicing it almost beyond recognition.

‘Sleep.’

For Yuris, blessed blackness dawned at last, with the fall of an alien blade.

The first howls
had caught him unprepared. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

When First Claw linked up with Faroven’s Third Claw, both squads readied to hold an expansive network of chambers for as long as they could, replete with annex rooms, fall back tunnels and defensible junctions.

‘Have you seen Malcharion?’ was Faroven’s first question.

‘He still hunts alone,’ Talos had replied.

The screaming maidens came in the wake of those words. After fighting the weakling warriors of the last few hours, the shrieking assault had been an unpleasant change in pace and tactics. Still, it had at least stopped Cyrion from pining to use the assault cannon.

The first howls had caught them unprepared. Before the blade-witches attacked, they shrieked their mournful cries, using the song itself as a weapon. Immunity to fear meant nothing in that song’s shadow – Talos felt his blood run cold, felt his muscles slowing, felt sweat break out at his temples, as his body reacted the way any terrified mortal’s flesh might.

The sensation had been… incredible, almost intoxicating in its unnatural force. Like nothing he’d ever felt in all the long decades of his life. No soul enhanced by gene-seed could feel terror, yet even though the creeping doubt never touched his mind, the physical sensation of feeling fear still forced a laugh from his throat. To think
this
was a pale reflection of what he inflicted on those he killed? To sense it first-hand?

How educational,
he’d thought, grinning his crooked grin. The amusement was admittedly dampened by the deadness in his limbs, and short-lived enough to burn away in his anger a moment later.

But the aliens were among them by then. They cut and cleaved and carved with their mirrored blades, savaging the ranks of the last two Night Lord claws left standing. They danced as they killed, as though performing some inhuman dance to music only they could hear. Each of their helms was sculpted into a shouting death mask, open mouths projecting the psychically amplified shriek.

A lovely trick,
he thought, hating himself for admiring anything an alien breed could create.

As the prophet deflected a descending sword with the back of his armoured glove, he fancied – in his fever – he could sense the song’s edges himself. The crash of blades on ceramite was the rapid clash of soft drums; the grunts and cries of his dying brothers became the rhythm beneath it.

‘Be silent,’ he snarled, backhanding the alien wretch with his power fist. Her shrieking ended along with her life: with a wet crack against the stone wall behind.

The eldar were gone as quickly as they’d come, fleeing back into the tunnels.

‘They’re not howling now,’ Cyrion had laughed.

Talos hadn’t laughed. Three of Third Claw lay dead, cut to pieces by the banshees’ blades. Only one of the eldar had fallen; the one he’d smashed aside with his fist.

Talos walked his careful, crunching way across the chamber. As he drew near, he saw her fingers twitch.

‘She still lives,’ Faroven warned.

‘So I see.’

Talos pressed his boot down on her hand, the gears grinding in his knees. It took no effort at all – the Terminator suit made it no harder than drawing breath – to crush her hand into a bloody smear of paste.