‘Careful, brother. What you suggest is heresy.’ A door opens. Hypaspists file into the room in lock-step and flank the brothers; silent, watchful.
‘As is everything we believe in.’ Under the mask, Marcus is certain that his brother smiled. ‘You’re not getting cold feet now, are you?’
There is no opportunity to reply. Another door apertures and the brothers turn to see Lupus corralling a phalanx of battle-automata into the room, Scyllax Guardians to the last unit. In spite of himself, Marcus is impressed. Who would have thought their expedition would warrant such vaunted protection? At his attention, the machines halt, half-skulls swinging to triangulate on his position, his reflection repeated in the multitude of their glass-green eyes.
‘The Magos insisted,’ Lupus explains, glaring. ‘He thinks this is a good idea.’
An accusation implied in the inflection of the words, but Marcus circumvents an answer with a half-smile. He pushes onto his feet and pads towards the enginseer. ‘And I imagine it will be. The space hulk–’
It wriggles across his tongue, the phrase. Space hulk. Marcus had been so insistent on censoring its use, but the words slip now from his lungs, independent of conscious decision, effortless in their articulation. But Lupus doesn’t comment on them, preoccupied first with his automata and then the sight unfolding outside of the window.
Slowly, the Nepenthe becomes reticulated with incandescent razorwire, the lines so narrow that Marcus might have missed them if it wasn’t for the intensity of their fluorescence. As he watches, the ship dismembers itself, separating along axial points intelligible only to its private algorithms. Doors are configured, hinges; biometrics familiar to naval morphologies. A mouth opens in the anterior of the ship, beckoning, its throat studded with orange guard lights.
The entry point is the exact size of their shuttle.
‘Report.’
Veles’ voice is static-warped, higher than in actuality. The Scyllax, cervical vertebrae annexed by the Magos, jabbers in irritation, its resident machine-spirit clearly displeased by the parasitism. Marcus endures its regard without complaint, while the enginseer endeavours to soothe the automaton. Around them, silence save for the biometrics of their footsteps, broadcasting aggregate weight, positioning, number. Cornelius looms ahead of the vanguard, wax-white in the dim.
‘Nothing so far.’
Marcus would have appreciated a psyker or two in their convoy, someone that might be able to predict an ambush, or at least emptiness. It must exist, after all. The brothers had communed with her for years.
‘As far as we can tell, this entire docking facility is… new.’ So fresh from parturition, in fact, that the scaffolding is warm beneath Marcus’ grip.
The tunnel is concentric rings, bordered with ganglia of exposed circuitry, contact with their topology prevented by thick glass. One method of ingress, one option for exit. A killing ground, Marcus thought, and shudders at his own description.
‘It feels like it was custom-built specifically for our landing or, at least, modified based on their morphometrics.’ The climate is equatorial. Humid enough for condensation to bead and roll off the automata, and drip from the servitors as they lumber ahead of their operators. The air breathable, if faintly pungent with exhaust. ‘The infrastructure is astounding. Entirely modular, as far as I can see. I don’t recognise the polymers used here. We’ll need to take samples. I wish you could see this, Magos.’
‘Trust me, Genetor, I am perfectly happy experiencing this by surrogate.’
The passage dilates into open space, unexpectedly commercial in its make-up. The servitors illuminate an out-of-commission fountain, the centrepiece of what Marcus presumes was a stage, its rococo anatomy choked by pathways. Mechanical stairs abseil diagonally from higher levels, six flights in total, the space ascending into a domed firmament. Refracted by the displays is the halcyon vision of a terrestrial night sky, fast-forwarding through cosmic phenomena. Everything is clean, scrupulously maintained.
Except it shouldn’t be.
The impractical design of the ship, its apparent devotion to leisure; all tenets of a time when interstellar travel was something to venerate. The air should be clogged with dust, the hallways stinking of effluvium, rusty water and decomposing protein. It shouldn’t be so clean. Marcus runs his eyes along the landing again, searching, uncertain.
Despite everything, despite fact, despite logic, it feels as though they’ve breached a moment locked in freeze-frame and, any moment now, animation will return, bodies will shuffle into visual range, music will play…
‘You should have started running.’
Marcus jolts at the voice, which, he realises too late, is being transmitted stereoscopically, ricocheting from old-fashioned transducers, syllables sawed-off in places, the upper registers completely missing. Not that it damages the message. A hololithic projection grafts itself together in the corner: a man, wire-slim, sitting astride the lip of the fountain, knee pulled to his chest.
Whoever the manifestation had been modelled upon, Marcus realises with a thrill of excitement, that person must have predated the Imperium. Nothing in his features is familiar.
Even as Marcus gawks, the figure articulates a smile, combing fingers through hair pomaded perfectly in place. To the tech-priest’s surprise, the keratin fibres respond, tussling in obedience to physics, and the figure sighs.
‘Really. You should have started running.’
‘Defensive positions!’ Cornelius, bellowing already, more cautious, more grounded in the practical. Hypaspists swarm forward, the servitors moving in parallel. But it is too late.
Around them, the ship awakens.
Once, when he’d been too young to imagine being old, Cornelius had pressed his nose against a pane of smudged glass and watched as a cephalopod crawled along the bottom of a tank. At first, it had been the same muddied colours of the sediment but as it scrabbled forward, its rubbery flesh had blued, had brightened; by the time it’d lunged for its prey, a dying fish, seeping gases and lacings of waste, the creature burned like plasma.
Metachrosis. He’d learn the word much later, and only remember it again in the black of the Nepenthe. Lights nictitate in undulating spirals, threading the outlines of bodies he should have seen, should have noticed long ago. Cornelius levels his gun, fires, fires again, even as screams burst around him. Their camouflage must involve some variety of neurotoxin, a specialised pheromone intended to impede memory encoding. Something, anything. How else could he have missed them?
Something massive shrieks at Cornelius through the bichromatic chiaroscuro, darkness and the red glare of energy weapons. He turns. He estimates it to be about two metres, maybe less, maybe more. Accurate telemetrics require a mind not at war with itself.
What successfully registers: tentacles slopping from a gaping jaw, each pseudopod teethed and stippled with hooks. Bipedal physiognomy, slightly hunched. A carapace that might have been skin once, but is now a scabrous leather. What he fails to process: a name.
Cornelius knows he recognises the aberration howling closer by the heartbeat, that some distant vector of consciousness has a name for this nightmare. But he cannot call it to his tongue, not even as the thing’s arms petal into hooks. Six limbs now, seven, the last no doubt meant to spear him like a fish.
Even as the amygdala barks its denial, even as Cornelius’ cognition shrinks into itself, something more ancient, a basal instinct scrimshawed into the bones, raises his gun again and shoots until the clip exhausts itself.
His artillery does nothing.
Cornelius’ arm drops to his side, slack, gun clattering to the floor. He stares. The thing snaps its head back, cephalopodic mouth exposed under a ring of straining tentacles, and at the sight of it, a word unwraps from Cornelius’ lungs.
‘Genestealer.’
One of the hypaspists intercepts the creature’s trajectory, knocking the genestealer aside and down, the two tumbling. The world renders in hyper-vivid strokes, sensory oversaturation bracketed by screams and the screech of metal torn apart. Before Cornelius can recover equilibrium, the genestealer digs talons into the tech-guard’s chest and pulls.
Ribs crack. Viscera – barely recognisable as liver and intestine, glands and other sweetbreads, genetic optimisation and augmetics having made for more streamlined offal – disgorge from the gash. The warrior does not cry out, only convulses as it begins haemorrhaging oil and blood, body sagging. The genestealer raises its prize upwards, tentacles burrowing through the mangled flesh.
‘Genestealers,’ Cornelius repeats, tongue heavy in his mouth. No, he thinks. That’s not right. No, not quite. Almost.
Finally: ‘Ymgarl strain. Omnissiah take them, I thought these were extinct.’
