Void Stalker (7 page)

The vox-channel crackled live again, as though the channels were being tuned. The abettor gave a joyless smirk of triumph. The archregent smiled in response.

‘Interference, indeed. You win this round,’ the old man said, but his fingers froze before they touched the dial. The voice rasping from the speakers wasn’t human. It was too low, too guttural, too cold.

‘You should never have settled on this world. Our shame is our secret to keep. Tsagualsa will be clawed clean of life once more. Hide in your cities, mortals. Lock your doors, reach for your weapons, and wait until you hear us howl. Tonight, we come for you.’

V

A PURE WAR

Dannicen Meyd had
noted his fifty-eighth birthday a month before, and on Darcharna that made him practically ancient. The grit in his bones from a life on the dust plains meant that it ached to move and it ached to lie still, and these days he did a lot more of the latter than the former.

The plains gave a man a serious beating over the years. There were the skin abrasions to deal with, which came with their own infections soon after. Then you had black lung to worry about from the grit getting into your mouth and nose, eventually losing lung tissue to decay or infection, and spending most of your time coughing up bloody phlegm.

Sore eyes were a constant misery – always leaking, yet somehow always dry – and his vision was clouded over by years of particulates dulling his
sight
. He didn’t hear so well, either. The Emperor only knew what decades of ashy grit had done to his ear canals, but when his blood was up and his heart beating fast, everything was muted and faint, like he was hearing things underwater.

His heart hurt worst of all. Now it rattled and raged at him every time he walked for more than a few minutes.

All in all, he was a man with every right to his complaints, yet he had very few. Dannicen Meyd wasn’t a man given over to musing over misery. He’d tried to talk Rivall out of the plains life, though. That hadn’t worked out so well. It went almost exactly the same as it’d gone when Dannicen’s own father had tried to say the same words to him, way back in a life before all these aches and pains.

He was giving in to that often-replayed memory when the city’s sirens started up their discordant wail.

‘You’re not serious,’ he said aloud. Storms were starting damn early this year. Last he’d heard from Rivall, they were supposed to have a few weeks yet, maybe even a month.

Dannicen hauled himself from the couch that served as his bed, sucking air through his teeth as his knees crackled in chorus. Both joints came awake with needling jabs beneath the bone.
Nasty, nasty. Getting old is a bitch, make no mistake.

A shadow passed his window. He looked up just as fists started pounding on the flakboard plank that served as his door.

‘Throne of the bloody Emperor,’ he grunted as his knees gave another protest, but he was up and walking no matter what they had to say about it.

Romu Chayzek was on the other side of the door. Romu Chayzek was also armed. The battered Guard-issue lasrifle hadn’t been new this side of the millennium’s turning, but as Watchman for South-43 Street down to North/South Junction-55, he had the right to bear arms in his patrols.

‘Going hunting for dust rabbits?’ he almost laughed, gesturing to the gun. ‘A little early to be shooting looters, kid.’

‘The sirens,’ Romu was panting. He’d obviously run here, down the muddy alley that served as a street for the prefabricated bunkerish buildings.

‘Storms are early.’ Dannicen leaned out of the door, but any view of the horizon was stolen by Sanctuary’s broken-tooth skyline. Families were pouring from their homes, milling through the street in every direction.

Romu shook his head. ‘Come on, you deaf old bastard. To the sub-shelters with you.’

‘Not a chance.’ The Meyd house had stood up to every Grey Winter so far, as had most of those in this section of the city. South Sector, 20 through 50, had the choicest picks of the troop landers way back at the Day of Downfall. All that armour did the deed when it came to keeping out the worst of the dust storms.

‘Listen to me, it ain’t the storms. The archregent’s under attack.’

For a moment, Dannicen didn’t know whether to laugh or go back to bed. ‘…he’s what?’

‘This ain’t a joke. He could be dead already, or… I don’t know what. Come on! Look at the sky, you son of a bitch.’

Dannicen had seen the panic in Romu’s eyes before, on the faces of those he’d served with outside the walls. That animal fear of being lost on the plains, turned about and directionless as a dust blizzard bore down. Helplessness – sincere, absolute helplessness – painted across a man’s face, turning it sick and ugly.

He looked to the west, towards the distant archregent’s tower, where a faint orange gleam illuminated the evening sky behind the rows of awkward urban stalagmites serving as a cityscape horizon.

‘Who?’ he asked. ‘Who would attack us? Who even knows we’re here? Who even cares?’

Romu was already running, blending in with the crowd. Dannicen saw him reach a cloth-wrapped hand to help a young boy back to his feet, and shove him into the press of bodies.

Dannicen Meyd waited another moment, before he took his aching knees and arthritic hands back inside his house. When he emerged, he carried his own lasrifle – and this one worked just fine, thank you very much. He’d used it in his own days as a volunteer Watchman, shooting looters in the Grey Winters after his retirement from storm-scrying.

He kept to the edge of the crowd, walking west as they pressed east. If the archregent was under attack, to hell with running and hiding. Let it never be said that Dannicen Meyd didn’t know how to do his bloody duty.

He looked down, just briefly, to check his lasgun. That was the moment he heard the dragon.

The crowd, every one of them, screamed and crouched, covering their heads as the beast roared overhead. They looked up with terrified eyes as the roar hurt their ears. Only Dannicen remained exactly as he was, his bloodshot eyes wide in awe.

The dragon was black against the grey sky, screaming above them on howling… engines. Not a dragon at all. A flyer. A gunship. But nothing had flown on Darcharna for centuries. The crowd was screaming now, thin parents carrying their even thinner children and hiding their eyes.

It banked above them, streaming fire from its thrusters as the wind rattled grit against its armour-plating. Its own momentum had it drifting as it hovered in the air, fighting the wind raging against the dark hull. Its leering prow seemed to watch the panicking people below before the gunship slowly veered away. Buildings shivered and cracked as its thrusters gave a thunderous boom, kicking the flyer across the sky and into the distance in the time it took Dannicen to blink.

He broke into a run, the pain in his joints all but forgotten. ‘Let me through,’ he said when he needed to, though the crowd parted and was fleeing in the opposite direction with little encouragement from him. The gunship had been more than enough.

He made it three streets before his knees gave up the fight. He leaned against a shack wall, cursing at the needles in his joints. His heart felt no better, racing to the point of strain, sending tendrils of tightness through his chest. Dannicen thumped a fist against his breastbone, as if anger would soothe the spreading fire.

More orange glows were showing stark against the clouds now. More of the city was burning.

He caught his breath, and forced his knees to obey him. They shivered but complied, and Dannicen stumbled forward on shaking legs. He made it another two streets before he had to stop and let his breathing catch up to him.

‘Too old for this foolishness,’ he coughed as he slumped against the wall of a grounded Arvus industrial shuttle now serving as a family home.

Legiones Astartes power armour makes a distinctive thrum: the loud, violent hum of immense energy waiting to be released. The armour joints, not coated in layers of ceramite, are still armoured against harm and filled with servos and fibre
-
bundle cabling in imitation of living muscles. They snarl and whine with even the most modest movement, from a tilt of the head to a clench of fist.

Dannicen Meyd didn’t hear any of this, despite it taking place mere metres away from where he stood, struggling to catch his breath. His blood was up, and his ears deaf to all but the ragged drumbeat of his own heart.

He saw the street clearing of life as people fled. Many were looking back at him, their eyes and mouths wide in screams Dannicen couldn’t quite hear. His teeth itched now, and his gums ached. There was a tremor in the softness of his eyes, as though an aggressive, subsonic sound pulsed nearby. Something he couldn’t hear, but could feel like an unwanted caress.

He blinked, wiping away the sting of his watering eyes, and lifted his head at last. What he saw crouching on the roof of the shuttle was enough to tear the thin walls of his heart at last.

The figure wore ancient battle armour, contoured ceramite the colour of midnight. Lightning bolts marked the armour-plating in clawed streaks. Slanted red eyes stared down at him from their place in a skull-faced helm. Spikes and spines knifed up from the figure’s bulky armour, glistening with moisture in the moonlight. Blood coated the thing, from its face to its heavy boots.

Three heads, their ripped necks still leaking, were tied to its shoulder guard by their own hair.

Dannicen was already on his knees, his burst heart losing all rhythm. Instead of blood, it pumped pain. Bizarrely, his hearing faded back into being.

‘You are suffering heart failure,’ the crouching figure told him in a deep, emotionless rumble. ‘The constriction in your chest and throat. The breath that will not come. This would be more amusing if you feared me, but you do not, do you? How rare.’

Dannicen raised his lasrifle, even through the pain. The figure reached down to take it from his hands, as though stripping a toy from a child. Without looking, the warrior crushed the barrel in his fist, mangling it and casting it aside.

‘Consider yourself fortunate
.
’
T
he figure reached next to lift the ageing man by his grey hair. ‘Your life ends in mere moments. You will never feel what it is like to be thrown into the skinning pits.’

Dannicen breathed out a strangled, wordless syllable. He was soiling himself, without feeling it, without realising, as he lost control of his body at the edge of death.

‘This is our world,’ Mercutian told the dying man. ‘You should never have come here.’

Tora Seech was
seven years old. Her mother worked in a hydroponics basement, her father taught sector children to read, write and pray. She hadn’t seen either of them in several minutes, since they’d run into the street and told her to wait in the single room that served the family as a house.

Outside, she could hear everyone shouting and running. The city’s sirens were wailing loud, but there’d been no storm warnings before this. Usually her parents gave her a few days to pack and get ready to head to the shelters before the sirens started up.

They wouldn’t have left her here. They wouldn’t have run away with everyone else and left her here alone.

The growl started from far away, and came closer each time her heart beat. It was a dog’s growl, an angry dog fed up with being kicked. Then the footsteps followed it. Something blocked the pale light from her window, and she dragged her thin blanket higher. She hated the sheet, it had fleas that brought her out in itchy lumps, but it was too cold without it. Now she needed it to hide.

‘I see you under there,’ said a voice in the room. A low, snarling voice with a crackle, like a machine-spirit come to life. ‘I see the heat of your little limbs. I hear the beat of your little heart. I taste your fear, and it is sweet indeed.’

The bootsteps thudded slowly closer, making her bed shiver. Tora squeezed her eyes shut. The sheet was a whisper against her skin as it was dragged away, leaving her cold.

She screamed for her parents when the cold metal hand gripped her ankle. The shadow hauled her from her bed, holding her upside down. She saw the brief flash of a long silver knife.

‘This will hurt,’ Cyrion told her. His red eyes stared at her without emotion, without life. ‘But it will not last long.’

Gerrick Colwen saw
one of them when he went back for his pistol. At first he thought his street was empty. He was wrong.

His first clear glance was of a figure almost a metre taller than a normal man, wearing spiked armour drawn from the depths of mythology. A skinless, bleeding body hung over each shoulder, raining dark fluid onto the dark armour-plating. Three more cadavers trailed along behind in the dust, hooked to the walking warrior by bronze chains pushed into their spines. Each of them had been skinned in the same crude rush, the skin peeled and torn from their body in indelicate rips. Dusty soil coated them now like false skin, painting the exposed musculature dark with ash.

Gerrick raised his pistol, in the bravest moment of his life.

Variel turned to him, a bloody flesh
-
saw in one hand and an ornate bolt pistol in the other. A sourceless peal of thunder boomed between them.