Lords of Blood, page 114
‘Only when I say,’ the Space Marine said, and moved away.
Idrin woke and smacked his lips loudly. It was warm down in the base of the wheelhouse, and he was pungent.
‘Daytime already?’ he asked. He yawned noisily. ‘What’s for breakfast?’ he said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE MIST
The mist grew thicker as the day advanced, plunging them into a world of half-shapes and sinister noises whose location could not be judged, and Cellew was forced to turn to her instruments to navigate.
‘Throne,’ Cellew said, more than once, as she checked over the tiny screens. Twice they grounded the boat on mudbanks, though the strength of the Space Marines made pushing themselves off a simple matter.
Reeds rasped over the boat’s hull. The mist trapped the sound around the boat, making it oppressively loud. The three Space Marines faced different directions, staring out over the water.
‘They could help us a bit,’ Cellew whispered to Idrin. Her resentment overcame her fear, but only just. ‘Emperor alone knows what technomancy they have in those armoured suits. I bet they can see right through this fog.’
‘It’ll rise soon – it always does,’ said Idrin.
‘What do you know about it?’ she said. ‘Who’s the pilot here?’
He raised an eyebrow.
‘You’re in a fine mood today.’
She glared at him as she spun the wheel to avoid a floating log.
‘I didn’t want to come on this trip,’ she said.
‘It is a mission, Cellew, not a jaunt. We have to make the best of what the Emperor sees fit to give us.’
‘You don’t believe that,’ she said. ‘You never believe that. You’re always looking out for yourself, and I’m always getting dragged into it.’
‘Yeah, well,’ said Idrin. ‘You’re still alive.’ He frowned. ‘What are they doing now?’
Bedevoir had raised his left hand and clenched it into a fist. He was waving two fingers on the other hand out off the port side, turning the gesture into a point.
‘Battlesign,’ Idrin said, dropping his voice to a whisper.
‘What?’
‘Battlesign. Non-verbal communication. Cut the engine and shut up.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that.’
‘You know I’m supposed to be your commanding officer, right?’ Idrin murmured. He fetched his lasrifle. ‘Look, if they think it’s a good idea to be totally silent, then we should probably do the same thing too, don’t you think? Now, shush.’ He grasped the wheelhouse doorknob very carefully, and eased the door open. Cold air blew in, misting up the windows immediately. Cellew mouthed a silent curse and scrubbed at the glass with her sleeve, then shut off the engine.
The boat coasted forward a few yards before snagging on the reeds and drifting to a halt. Idrin pushed the door shut as quietly as he could, then padded over the deck to the side of Dolomen. Of the three, he found the Blood Angels sergeant the most engaging.
Dolomen heard him coming though Idrin could have sworn he moved totally silently. The Space Marine spared him a brief glance and made a chopping motion with the blade of his hand. Idrin nodded. Silence. He understood.
Very carefully, Dolomen pointed off to the port side. His armour made tiny whines and whirrings with every movement.
Idrin followed Dolomen’s blood-red finger. He flattered himself that he had good eyesight, but at first he could see nothing in the mist except eddies in the fat droplets that made up the cloud.
Dolomen pointed again, more emphatically this time, then Idrin saw. Something was floating through the fog. The main part of it was a massive, brownish sac, somewhat like a part-deflated game ball. Tentacles hung down from the underside like weed roots. Most just trailed along the water surface, but two were larger and more muscular looking, and it was by grasping at the vegetation and pulling itself along with these that it traversed the marsh. A comparatively small head of vaguely insectile appearance was set to the lower front part of its buoyancy sac. Several black eyes swivelled this way and that independently of one another. A number of delicate, arm-like mandibles fronted its mouth.
Astorath spread his fingers and moved his hand over the swamp. He opened and clenched his fist twice, then shook his head, and held up a single finger, which he then pointed at the enslaver. Only one.
The xenos had still not seen them, but it was coming closer. Perhaps its eyes are weak, thought Idrin.
Bedevoir noiselessly tapped his bolt pistol and shook his head.
Astorath looked to Dolomen. He made a series of signs with his right hand that Idrin could not follow. Dolomen reacted by kneeling beside the larger crate of supplies the Space Marines had brought with them. He opened it quietly and from inside he took out a pistol so large Idrin would have struggled to lift it with both hands.
Idrin recognised it as a sun gun, a plasma-projecting weapon of some rarity. There’d been sun gunners in his regiment when he’d fought off-world, and some of the officers had carried smaller versions of the pistol, but he’d not fired one, ever, and had no desire to. In his experience they were as deadly to the wielder as the foe.
Dolomen raised the gun. The glassite charging coils on the top flickered and turned an electric blue. The gun whined with building power. It gave off a great and sudden heat, and Idrin took a step back.
The noise of the gun grew louder as its charge built, the glow becoming painful to look upon. The psyren heard, or saw, or in some other way sensed it, and turned towards the patrol boat.
Its black eyes locked with Idrin’s, and he felt his will drain away. There was no compulsion to act, no struggle, but the awful sense that his self was gurgling down a hole in the ground, and that he was no longer welcome in his own body.
He was trapped in his skull, but the worst of it was that he felt no urge to fight. He was a ghost to himself, an irrelevance, possessed of a will and an importance equal to that of a clod of earth. He barely even realised that his arms were rising, his fingers thumbing off the safety catch on the lasrifle. The psyren was going to shoot Sergeant Dolomen, using him as its agent. Idrin did not care that was happening.
It was worse than being dead. It was fascinating.
The sun gun discharged. A searing beam of energy cut through the mist, boiling it away for yards either side. It struck the enslaver a little above the head cluster. The buoyancy sac shrivelled away to nothing. The beam passed through it and continued on for forty yards beyond the target before it lost coherency and dispersed in a cloud of ionised air.
The psyren fell into the water without making a sound.
Idrin blinked. He was suddenly aware of himself again, and awake to the need to live. He was pointing his rifle at Dolomen’s head. Bedevoir had hold of the end, and gently pushed it down.
‘You’d be lucky to break ceramite with this,’ he said.
‘I… I am sorry,’ said Idrin. ‘I didn’t mean–’
‘The psyren had you,’ said Astorath. ‘You are innocent. Do not fear.’
‘I wasn’t afraid,’ said Idrin, which was true. He didn’t feel much of anything.
‘It would have been better going for one of us,’ said Bedevoir.
‘I felt it try,’ said Dolomen. ‘It tried to stop me. It failed. Then it took him. He was the easier target.’
The enslaver floated on the surface like a discarded sack. The water was beginning to move around it.
‘Our minds are hardened against such attacks,’ said Astorath, coming alive. ‘It was bound to fail.’
‘It wasn’t,’ said Bedevoir. ‘They took some of my brothers. We need to be careful of these things.’
Cellew waited for a command from Astorath before restarting the engine. Its electric mosquito whine started up again, and they pushed off.
The enslaver was moving once more as larval eels tugged at it and tore it to pieces.
‘There’s plenty of life on this planet,’ said Dolomen. ‘What kind of brain do the eels have?’
Idrin found it hard to think. He struggled to retrieve the information, then again to form it into words.
‘None,’ he said. ‘They’ve a complex spinal column, I think. I don’t know. But what I’ve been told is they have no brain.’
‘That is a small blessing,’ said Dolomen.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE BLACK WATER
They emerged from the fog a few hours later as they crossed onto the sea, though the demarcation on Dulcis was debatable at best. The divide was better described by the fog, which formed a heaped pile behind them, solid as a fortress guarding the land, but vanished over the open sea.
Idrin stood and pointed at a mark on the black water, some miles past where the last of the reed beds petered away.
‘That’s Mainrig,’ he said.
‘Distance, three point three miles,’ said Bedevoir.
‘Stop your craft, shipmistress,’ ordered Astorath.
Cellew, who had become more sullen as the day wore on, obeyed without a word.
‘Why are we stopping here?’ said Idrin. ‘My lords,’ he added as an after-thought.
‘You are not coming with us,’ said Dolomen. ‘You saw the effect the enslaver had on you. This place is crawling with them. You won’t last longer than a few moments, and then you’ll be dead. That’s why.’
‘That’s fine by me,’ said Idrin. ‘But what about you? One couldn’t latch onto your mind, but there’s a lot out there.’
The Space Marines were reaching into their weapons crate and pulling out spare magazines from racks. Dolomen took out the plasma pistol and hooked it to his belt. Bedevoir supplemented his bolt pistol and chainsword with a compact flamer. Astorath watched them, totally still. He took nothing, but placed his helmet over his head when Dolomen handed it to him.
‘We have with us Lord Astorath. His will is powerful. It will guard us from their influence.’
‘How? Is he a witch?’ Idrin looked at the Redeemer with renewed interest.
‘Be respectful,’ growled Bedevoir.
‘No, he is not. It is more complicated than that,’ said Dolomen. ‘Through great heroes of our Blood such as the Lord Redeemer of the Lost, the spirit of our primarch Sanguinius, the Great Angel, may work and protect us.’
Dolomen checked his weapons as he talked, as did Bedevoir. They then checked over each other’s armour, calling off a checklist. Astorath remained motionless.
‘I have datapulsed the location of nearby solid ground to Cellew’s navicogitator. You will meet us there.’
‘That’ll be Ollin’s Isle. I know it,’ said Idrin.
‘Do not arrive before the designated rendezvous, in case the enemy are present,’ said Dolomen. ‘Stay quiet. Do not attract attention to yourselves. Keep your vox on in case we need to contact you, but do not signal us. The enslavers have many unusual senses.’
‘Prepare battleplate for void sealing,’ Astorath commanded.
Ports and vents on the warriors’ backpacks hissed shut. The louvres in the grilled vents in their masks turned and sealed themselves closed. Lights on panels blinked on.
Then Bedevoir and Dolomen drew their weapons, planted the tips on the deck and knelt with their hands clasped over the pommels, Dolomen’s over his sword-long combat blade, Bedevoir on the ornate guard of his chainsword. Astorath stood over them in benediction.
‘By the will of the Archangel of Baal, Lord Sanguinius, the saviour, the sacrifice, do we pledge ourselves anew to the Emperor’s purpose,’ the kneeling warriors said. The quality of their voxmissions was changed by their armour’s reconfiguration, rendering them robotic, yet it could not hide their reverence.
‘He’s a priest?’ said Idrin to himself. ‘Huh.’ He found that mildly interesting.
‘Blessed be the Blood,’ said Astorath.
‘Blessed be the Blood,’ the others replied.
Their short ritual done, they stood as if nothing had happened, and walked to the edge of the boat. The whole vessel tipped in the water, the side opposite lifting a foot above the surface. The gunwale dipped almost level with the sea.
That shook Cellew out of her sulk. She burst out of the wheelhouse. ‘Hey!’ she shouted. ‘Hey! You’ll sink us!’
‘Fear not, fair maiden,’ said Bedevoir sardonically. He stepped off the edge of the boat. He made a small splash, and sank. Astorath looked into the sea for a few seconds, then followed. Before Dolomen jumped in he turned back to Idrin and Cellew.
‘We will see you in five hours,’ he said. ‘Emperor watch over you.’
He plunged into the water. Idrin rushed to the edge. A few silvery bubbles rocked their way to the surface and popped, but he could see nothing through the peaty water.
‘Well,’ he said. He looked out to Mainrig, half-expecting a cloud of xenos to rise into the sky and come flying over to attack them. Nothing did. That stretch of the sea was usually crammed with boats and barges going to and from the rig, laden with meat and workers, but it was eerily empty.
A bird shrilled somewhere deep in the marshes behind them. Cellew shivered.
Idrin had an idea.
‘You know, I have a way we can keep each other warm.’
The look of disgust Cellew gave him was almost comical. ‘Not on your life, sir.’ She patted the autopistol holstered on her right hip meaningfully, then went into the wheelhouse. She locked the door behind her.
Idrin shrugged. Out over the water, nothing moved.
Putting one step in front of the other was hard work, even with power armour. There was no facility in the armour’s design to drive them through the water more quickly, and so their progress was a slow plod.
The sea was less than thirty feet deep, but so heavily tinted by the dark soils of the marsh that visibility was down to a couple of yards. The surface was an indistinct play of yellow light that fuzzed away to nothing. Beneath that the water was a murky brown, but where the Space Marines walked it was black as the void. Junk from thousands of years of human habitation dotted the seabed everywhere, in some places covering it completely. Drifting plastek twined round weeds. Rusted metal jutted from the silt. The seabed looked to be in a constant process of coverage and renewal. Though the currents then were weak, they must have been strong enough some of the time to sweep the seabed free of rubbish, or the refuse from the rig would have piled up high enough to make islands, in time leaving it high and dry. Dolomen had seen that happen on other worlds. Perhaps the population of Dulcis recycled more than they threw away. Perhaps there just weren’t enough people on Dulcis to choke its biomes to death. As a Blood Angel, Dolomen spent a great deal of his time trying to maintain balance in his mind and soul. He was not the only one among his brotherhood who turned his need for equilibrium outwards, and had developed a fascination for the good functioning of human societies. This was not unusual. The Chapter had as many scholars as it did artists among its ranks.
For all the befoulment, life thrived in the water. Evolution drew parallels on most worlds, but the piscids of Dulcis seemed to favour anguilliformes over more conventional shapes. From shoals of hair-thin, glassy fish that nibbled on discarded plastek, to arm-breadth predators whose mouths were many times too big for their bodies, Dolomen saw a profusion of differing sorts of all sizes, though none of the larger kinds. Waving fronds of aquatic plants trailed most of the way to the surface, the broken human artefacts serving as root anchors as well as lairs for animals.
As they trudged nearer the rig, his sensorium registered a higher concentration of chemical pollutants in the water, along with a greater amount of organic spill. The amount of plant life decreased, with a concomitant drop in the level of oxygen. There were jumbles of large bones in untidy subaquatic middens amid the piles of old metal and plastek. Broken fishing gear abounded: nets and lines and harpoons. Much of it was organically derived, and so was breaking apart while the metal rusted away, yet there was enough to accumulate to dangerous levels and snare unwary creatures.
After some time, Dolomen’s armour cogitator detected regular shapes ahead in the water. They were nearing the rig. His power armour would keep him alive for days down there, but Dolomen disliked fighting in liquid of any kind. He hated the slowing effect on his limbs, and the way it sapped power from his blows. Bolt weapons worked almost as well in water as they did in atmosphere or void – their rocket-powered ammunition pushed through whatever they had to – but Dolomen was relieved to know their underwater march was nearly done.
The first of the bodies appeared soon after – a man in utility coveralls stained with oil. Wounds to his chest had killed him, but from what weapon it was hard to tell. Crowds of tiny eels wriggled around his open flesh, tearing at sea-bloated meat washed white in the water.
After that, the sea was thick with the dead. They floated face down on the surface, arms reaching for the Space Marines. Severed legs bobbed past under the water, kept buoyant by the soles of their shoes. Swarms of scavengers were at work, ripping at the corpses, cleaning bones. Fragments of muscle and skin clouded the water. A litter of fresh bones and half-stripped skulls appeared on the seabed.
Dolomen crushed them underfoot.
Huge, bell-shaped plugs of rockcrete resolved in the murk. The great plasteel legs they supported were shadows over the water. The rubbish was at its absolute worst between the supports, and Dolomen had to cut his way through old lines and shrouds of sacking every few yards.
They found a footing that had a staple ladder sunk into it. The rungs were crusted in shellfish and badly corroded, but looked strong enough.
‘I’ll go first,’ voxed Dolomen, and began to climb.
