Lords of Blood, page 115
The ladder led to a rockcrete foot several times larger than the rest. The Space Marines climbed out and found themselves on a dirty landing for a metal staircase that ran up beside the leg, switching back and forth in neat turns so that it occupied the smallest amount of space. Wire caged the world out. They moved to the gate, thick effluent slipping underfoot. On the wire fences, signs warned of death for trespassers, suggesting the stairway was reserved for the rig’s higher castes, yet it was as rickety and filthy as everything else.
They prepared their weapons, clearing mechanisms of sludge and water. Nothing moved under the rig, no people, no wildlife. Holes in the corroded deck overhead let in harsh daylight and gave the illusion of stars in a night sky. Greasy waves slopped listlessly against rockcrete and steel. Away from their position was the area hit by the Red Wings from orbit. The legs were buckled and the upper parts had fallen into the water. A few buildings retained their shape as they’d fallen through, but most had been reduced to a tangle of broken girders and twisted plating. The sea washed over the remains with each surge of the swell. Elsewhere, the deck had been vaporised. Several round holes, each twenty feet across, were grouped towards the north-eastern end, the result of lance fire. Dolomen watched these most closely as Bedevoir inspected the stairway entrance. Wounded metal moaned in pain as it shifted under the tide and wind. Nothing descended through the holes.
‘Locked,’ Bedevoir said.
‘Force it,’ said Astorath.
Bedevoir wrenched the door open. The lock gave with a loud snap. The three warriors waited, guns ready, Astorath with his axe prepared to strike. Everything remained calm.
‘Move on,’ Astorath said. ‘Quickly.’
They ran up the steps. Thick rubberised plastek treads muffled their footsteps, and they made little sound. The whine of their armour was covered by the slap, slap, slap of oily water, and the groan of the stairs mingled with the soft squeals and creaks of the damaged rig. As they ran, they reconfigured their armour for normal operations. Coolant hushed from vents. Water and filth ran off their plates The breathing grilles in Dolomen’s face mask swivelled into their open position, letting in the ripe stench of the rig: dead flesh, human waste, untreated industrial effluent and spilled chemicals. Dolomen had smelled that scent a thousand times on dozens of worlds. It was the smell of slow extinctions. It was the smell of humanity.
They emerged onto the main deck cautiously, weapons ready. Devastation only hinted at by the state of the rig below greeted them openly. Cranes leaned drunkenly onto one another. Toppled buildings lay dead, their skeletons blackened lattices exposed by fire. The rig creaked in the wind blowing off the ocean.
‘Nothing. No contacts,’ said Dolomen. He lowered his plasma pistol.
‘Auspex,’ commanded Astorath.
Bedevoir unclamped the scanning device from its place on his thigh and activated it. A gridded pattern showed on the screen.
‘There’s a large collection of biosignals that way,’ he said, pointing. ‘There’s nothing else here – they’re all in one place, xenos and human.’
‘Do you have any sign of your missing brothers?’
‘None, my lord. No return on location beacons, or ceramite. It’s hard to get any kind of clear signal in all this mess.’
‘The location of the incident is there,’ said Astorath. He pointed to the converted oil tanks. ‘According to Brother Lamorak’s information, it is the site of initial xenos incursion. We shall go there first.’
‘Then what are they doing over there?’ Dolomen asked. Bedevoir had datapulsed the auspex readings into his helm display, and he looked towards the place highlighted by biosigns. A pile of wreckage blocked his view.
‘There has been activity here,’ said Bedevoir, pointing out various places close by. ‘Paths through the wreckage. The xenos have been doing something.’
‘But nothing now.’
‘Elimination of the xenos is a secondary objective,’ said Astorath. ‘We have a greater purpose. We must find the lost.’
They crossed the rig at a loping run. Bedevoir kept his auspex active, alert for any sign that they had been detected. They crouched low, hugging the paths cut through the debris by the xenos’ slaves. Dolomen kept a ready eye out for any clue as to what the enslavers’ intentions were, but there was none. The psyrens were a species of extreme mystery, their nature and motivations still subject to speculation thousands of years after mankind’s first encounter with them.
Only a little time elapsed before they encountered the first of the dead rig workers. Bedevoir flipped the corpse over with his foot. A woman’s pinched face stared up at them. Her clothes were rank with filth.
‘Just over a week since the attack,’ he said. ‘The psyrens have been working their slaves hard. This one is dead from dehydration.’
‘The enslaved cease to care for themselves. Indeed, they cannot,’ said Astorath. ‘The mind-slaving is total. If the governing xenos does not look after the slave, then they die soon enough.’
‘I have not faced this foe,’ said Bedevoir. ‘Is this normal?’
‘When we are dealing with a handful of these xenos it can take them weeks to overrun a planet,’ said Astorath. ‘Sometimes, it is a single example that is encountered, and they will puppet their slave and keep them alive for as long as they need to. But who can judge what is normal for them? How can one understand so alien a mind? Nothing good can come of trying, for to understand the mind of the xenos is to invite its influence, and that is dangerous in the extreme in the case of the psyrens. Best kill them, brother, before they spread, and leave the understanding of such things to scholiasts safely locked away with their scrolls.’
Bedevoir moved on, keeping his eyes on the corpse for several steps. Her clouded eyes stared emptily skywards. Her lips were beginning to shrivel.
The three of them continued to their target. They passed several more of the corpses, then a sweet, cloying smell filled the gulley they travelled, warning them of many dead, and they came to a small courtyard piled high with bodies, neatly stacked, ten deep.
‘There must be hundreds in there,’ said Dolomen.
‘No scavengers,’ said Bedevoir.
‘Enslavers do not restrict themselves to higher minds. They will take animals as well,’ said Astorath. ‘If you see beasts, be wary – the xenos will be looking out through their eyes. Come, there is no way through here. We will double back.’
‘This place was a maze the first time I was here,’ said Bedevoir. ‘It is worse now.’
‘Be silent,’ Astorath ordered. ‘Focus on the mission.’
Although the outer shell of the oil towers remained more or less intact, fire had gutted the interior, leaving most of the floors collapsed and all within consumed. The Space Marines picked their way through ankle-deep ash and charred detritus. Dolomen pointed upwards, past the partial remains of rooms and floors, to where the shell had taken some damage.
‘This is where it happened,’ said Bedevoir. ‘This is where they were lost.’
Bedevoir played his auspex around the ruin while Dolomen visually scanned the ground. Astorath kept watch.
‘Nothing,’ Bedevoir said. ‘If Jadriel or the others are still here, there is no sign of them or their wargear.’
‘Unlikely,’ said Dolomen. ‘I do not think they are here.’
‘Unless they are with the enslaved,’ said Bedevoir. ‘Is it possible for a warrior gripped by the Rage to be taken over in such a way?’
‘No,’ said Astorath. ‘The Rage is too strong. A warrior under its influence is playing host to our gene-father’s soul. No xenos could override that. If they were here, they would be fighting. We must assume they are not.’
‘Then how did they leave?’ said Bedevoir. ‘We tracked no vessels leaving this place after the incursion.’
‘They will have departed the same way that we arrived,’ said Dolomen. ‘What is the maximum operating time underwater for Mark X armour in its Tacticus configuration?’
‘Optimally? Days,’ said Bedevoir.
‘Then they could be anywhere,’ said Dolomen.
‘Not anywhere,’ said Astorath. ‘The Rage follows a path. It is an ancient tragedy playing itself out, surely as any dramaturge’s creation. It forces the patterns of the present upon the past. If your brothers did not die here fighting the enslavers, then they will have been compelled to search out another foe. Something else they could place the label of Horus upon.’
‘There is nothing on this world like that,’ said Bedevoir.
‘Then they will have searched. The Rage follows a pattern. Part of that pattern is the journey, the road trodden to the final confrontation. The stage for this will impose itself on an area of prominence, whether that is an area of conflict, of grandeur, or here, a simple island rising over the mud.’
‘If they had gone into the reed beds, they would have been detected by now. The Joyous Garde has been constantly scanning the planet.’
‘How many islands are there within a week’s travel, on foot, in power armour, through this terrain?’ said Astorath. ‘Let us narrow our search to those places.’
‘The mortals will know,’ said Dolomen.
‘We should investigate this concentration of bioforms,’ said Bedevoir.
‘This planet is doomed,’ said Dolomen. ‘Why waste our time?’
‘Because it is my duty to put right our mistakes,’ said Bedevoir.
‘We shall,’ said Astorath, after a moment’s consideration, ‘but quickly.’
Astorath, Bedevoir and Dolomen crept closer to the concentration of biosignals. As they neared they saw that the edges of the area had been built up with sheets of scavenged metal, creating a wall around part of the rig. They skirted round it. Finding no openings, they headed for a block of prefabricated habitats less damaged than the rest and went up to the flat roof, where they looked down into what they suspected was a ramshackle fort. It was anything but.
Inside the walls a series of pools had been constructed around one of the lance holes punched through the rig. All manner of materials had gone into their making, from sagging canvas and plastek sheets held up by ropes to crudely welded metal units. Each was full of murky liquid in which bobbed large, oblate spheroids strung together by fibrous strands. Human slaves stood motionlessly around them.
The enslavers floated over the pools, anchored in place, their tentacles dipping in and out of the liquid and turning the spheres over, pushing some down and raising others up to the surface.
‘Eggs?’ said Dolomen. He looked at Astorath.
‘It is likely,’ said Astorath. ‘These things must reproduce somehow, though I have never heard of anything like this.’
‘There were many more than this,’ said Bedevoir. ‘The rest must have spread across the planet.’
‘There are few of their slaves left,’ said Dolomen. ‘What has happened to them?’
‘Food for their young,’ said Astorath. ‘Observe.’
One of the rig workers came to sudden, jittery life. He marched to the edge of one of the tanks, took up a knife from the side, cut his own throat with it and while vitae sprayed from his neck in a broad fan, replaced the knife, before clambering calmly into the water. The alien’s influence seemed to leave him for a second before he died. He thrashed madly amid the bulbous eggs as the last of his life drained away, then lay still.
The enslaver tending the pond pulled itself over the body, and serenely rearranged the eggs. The filthy liquid shivered at the introduction of blood. The eggs palpitated.
‘They’re hatching,’ said Bedevoir.
Small white things the size of a human hand slipped free of gelatinous casings. If they were the young of the enslavers, they looked nothing like them, seeming more like leeches than the vaguely cephalopodic adults. Despite the hatchlings’ smallness, from their vantage the Space Marines saw them clearly with their enhanced eyesight. Mouths snapped mechanically at one end. Fringes of hair-like cilia surrounded them. Besides a single, dull black eye above the mouth, they had no other features.
‘Abominations,’ growled Dolomen. ‘Give me a psy-scan. Locate the ones responsible for the aegis over this place.’
‘There,’ said Bedevoir presently. He pointed out a woman stood alone. It appeared some attempt had been made to keep her alive, for her front was stained with foodstuffs.
‘There,’ he said, again pointing out a worker who had also been fed, though like the woman he stood in a posture of slack-jawed idiocy, his eyes permanently open and drool running down from his mouth.
‘There’s the last,’ Bedevoir said, indicating a third, similar individual.
Dolomen quietly prepared his bolter. ‘My lord, we should take the psykers down, at least, and vox the Joyous Garde. They can finish this nest from orbit. If all these eggs hatch…’ He paused, as he did not know for sure what would happen. ‘If they mature here and get off-world somehow, or head into the warp and to another system close by, then Lord Dante will have an unlooked-for threat to account for. We cannot contain an enslaver plague while finishing Leviathan.’
‘I concur,’ said Astorath. ‘We must not rely on our actions to come, but act now.’ His thumb rested on the activation switch of his axe. He drew his bolt pistol with his left hand. ‘They will come for us. They will try to bend us to their will. When you feel the vile touch of their minds upon yours, think hard upon the glory of Sanguinius. Let him be your shield. Remember the Litanies of Hate.’
‘Permit not the xenos to live,’ Bedevoir and Dolomen said together.
‘Slay them all.’
‘You take the nearest two, I shall bring down the furthest,’ said Dolomen, sighting down the barrel.
‘Grenades into the tanks, then we run,’ said Astorath. He tuned his vox to the Red Wings’ carrier signals. ‘Joyous Garde, prepare to fire upon Mainrig at my signal.’
The response was swift, for the Red Wings had been waiting for contact.
‘Affirmed, Lord Astorath.’
A flutter of wings passed overhead. Dolomen saw one of the flying mammalians the locals called day bats flapping by. A commotion broke out immediately by the tanks. The enslaved workers came alive all at once, their heads turning towards the Space Marines. The enslavers began to move agitatedly. Colours pulsed dully in the sunlight over their dull flesh.
‘We’ve been seen,’ said Dolomen.
The three Space Marines opened fire as the enslaved erupted into activity and ran from the pit.
Boltguns banged. Dolomen’s target vanished in a red mist. Astorath’s dropped, missing its head and most of its shoulder. Bedevoir’s shot also flew true, but hit a worker running in front of the target. He fired again quickly, slaying the psyker.
‘It’s done,’ said Dolomen. ‘The psykers are down. Grenades, to be sure.’
Together they rained death down onto the tanks. The grenades plopped into the bloody fluids before exploding, shredding the eggs and the young. Shrapnel scythed up, puncturing the buoyancy sacs of the psyrens. Three fell. The tanks burst, and a slurry of decaying body parts, dead larvae and ruptured eggs poured from them, running over the deck and dropping into the sea. Bedevoir riddled another enslaver with bolt fire. Its sac collapsed, and it dropped out of the air, limbs shaking in distress. Dolomen took out his plasma pistol and incinerated a fifth.
Some among the crowd of onrushing workers stumbled to a confused stop and looked around themselves uncomprehendingly, the xenos that controlled them now dead, but more threw themselves forward, clambering madly over the piles of wreckage to reach the Space Marines’ position.
‘If they reach us, we will be trapped, and easy prey for their masters,’ said Astorath.
Dolomen’s pistol thrummed loudly again as it unleashed a stream of plasma. The enslaver it hit exploded, showering burning meat everywhere.
‘We go now,’ said the Redeemer.
Firing behind themselves, the three leapt down from the top of the hab-block. It was three storeys tall, but their armour absorbed the impact, and they were away, shoving through the frenzied crowds who rushed around the building’s base to swamp them.
Dolomen thrust his plasma pistol back into its holster as he ran. He kicked down a man who tried to tackle him, breaking all his ribs with the weight of his boot and crushing his organs. He slammed the muzzle of his boltgun across the face of another, smashing the jaw clean off the skull, then opened up with the weapon, setting his fire mode to full-automatic. The bolt rifle shook in his arms as he used it to scythe down the enslaved workers that tried to bar his way.
Astorath ran to his left, jumping from roofs to the pinnacles of debris piles, each landing accompanied by a thunderous swipe of his axe that obliterated his targets. Bedevoir fired and fired. The Space Marines were far faster than unenhanced humans, and they outpaced the larger number of them, their pounding feet shaking the broken rig. Debris tumbled down the sides of wrecked facilities. Deck plates bounced loose, revealing the sea below. More of the enslaved burst out of the wreck. Dolomen smashed them down with his fists and his gun.
They were nearing the edge of the rig when a psyren lurched skywards from its hiding place, buoyancy sac shedding charred debris and pieces of metal.
Astorath ignited his jump pack. Jets roaring, he flew off the edge of the rig, arced high and plummeted down, disappearing into the waters with a mighty splash. Bedevoir followed, hurling himself by bodily force alone, then finally Dolomen.
The enslaver hauled itself rapidly over the rig’s surface and whipped out a tentacle, wrapping it around the stabiliser jet of Dolomen’s backpack as he leapt. Dolomen jerked back a little, but his impetus was barely arrested, and he fell, trailing the xenos like a parachute behind him.
He sealed his vents as he plunged into the water. The alien jerked as it hit the surface, but it did not let go, and it was seemingly more at home in the water than Dolomen was. It acted as a flotation device, holding him up as more and more tentacles reached out and slipped around his arms and head.
