Pain cannot bypass programming. Even halfway to dying, the hypaspist will serve. It kicks against the genestealer, lasgun pushing into position, while the creature envelopes its face with its tendrils. Now, the warrior screams, a thin and animal noise. Its fingers clench and it pumps las-fire into the underside of its captor’s mandibles. Over and over, until the feeding genestealer’s skull splits from the assault.
Pale curds of brain, crisped by ballistics, splatter across the tech-priest’s robes. All at once, Cornelius is no longer paralysed, animal brain supplanting terror, pushing him up, forward, away from what had transpired.
For the first time, Cornelius really takes a look at the tableau.
It cannot have been more than twenty minutes since their arrival. But the walls are soaked, the floor mosaiced with so much meat that Cornelius can no longer remember if the landing had a colour. Over and again, Cornelius finds himself being surprised by how much of it there is, every glob of debased muscle run-through with wires and broken tubing, like so many parasitic worms evicted from a home.
The servitors keep dying in clumps: thick-witted, slaved to targeting subroutines that are simply too slow to be effective against the xenos. But at least they serve a purpose, distracting the genestealers from more competent prey; the hypaspists and the Scyllax, closing ranks behind their monotasked peers. Unfortunately, there are only so many bodies to go around.
‘Genetor. You are in danger. We should move.’ Stilted delivery in a chrome-plated voice, full of squeals and pops as the larynx fizzles to uselessness. Cornelius shifts his attention to the hypaspist to his right, the cyborg drenched in gore. ‘Genetor, you are without weaponry. You should correct the situation.’
No secret that the troops of the Adeptus Mechanicus undergo emotion-suppression surgery, but Cornelius can’t help but wonder, as he falls into lock-step, just how much is flensed from the parietal lobe. What does it take to allow an animal to shamble through the act of dying without so much as a whimper? The hypaspist bleeds in ropes of grey offal, lasgun braced against the hollow of an exposed abdominal cavity, but it evidences no discomfort, nothing but a slurred vigil.
‘Genetor, you are without weaponry–’
‘We need to find my brother.’ We need to find her. Almost simultaneous, that other statement, articulated with more fervour than any requests to seek out Cornelius’ absent sibling. Since their approach, he’s not been able to hear her, not even a chord to allay his fears, his grief at being so unfathomably alone; a self-aware cyst of neural tissue piloting a rotting corpse.
The hypaspist scissors straight with a crunch of bone, head cocked at a twenty-seven degree angle. ‘Genetor Marcus is–’
Before it can finish, Cornelius hears his brother scream, a killing sound whetted by the raw crackle of electric. He pivots to find Marcus and Lupus, flanked by automata, retreating from a corridor he’d not noticed before. Above them, clinging to the balustrades, bodies coiled like upside-down raindrops, a writhing mass of genestealers prepares for the drop.
The Nepenthe… blinks.
A voice floods the capillaries of the ship: female, faintly adenoidal.
‘You are in a protected void sphere,’ she intones without inflection. Magnesium-white pinholes of light flare along the surface of the Nepenthe, even as the strange voice pours from every speaker, every stretch of space along the Explorator vessel. ‘You are in a protected void sphere. Move, or we will register your inaction as a declaration of aggression.’
‘Move.’ Something cracks the monotone. ‘Or there will be nothing of you to move.’
‘Marcus!’ Cornelius bellows in time for his brother to jump sideways, but Lupus moves a half-second late.
The genestealers descend as the hydra of Lupus’ mechadendrites rise, servo-arms razor-ridged, snapping at the air with moray eel mouths. But the enginseer’s enhancements are industrial, intended for fine work, not martial use. They break on hide intended to withstand worse. Two of the genestealers clasp Lupus by the shoulders, tug like dogs in competition for a wishbone, and as the enginseer wails, a third leans over the man, tentacles swaddling his gaunt face.
Something breaks.
Snaps.
Cornelius wastes no time on empathy, on fear, not even when Lupus’ throat distends and tears, as one of the genestealer’s smaller feelers breaks through the skin, a red-glazed jut of keratin. He knows what comes next. The Scyllax scream in one voice, inlays short-circuited by Lupus’ misfiring synapses; there is no syntax for his agony, no way to translate that pain into coherent actionables, no option but to shriek in symphony, their machine-spirits algospasmic.
They continue to scream as Marcus butterflies a genestealer’s arm, the parabola of his whip precise enough to flay even that tensile flesh, as Marcus bolts for his brother, as Cornelius splices noospherically into his escort’s interfaces, both half-blind, but in the kingdom of the condemned, every little bit counts.
‘Run,’ Marcus pants, bleeding from a hundred places, his face ribbons.
‘Genetors, stay behind me,’ Cornelius’ hypaspist intones, shambling between the brothers and the genestealers, the latter already on the prowl again, Lupus’ dismembered corpse strewn between them, a boneless slaughterhouse of parts. And still nothing, nothing of the voice from the ship, nothing but this cosmology of death, Cornelius adapting macros to steady the hypaspist’s aim, optimise its reflexes, anything to buy them time. Nothing, nothing, nothing at all. ‘Genetor Cornelius, I advise that you acquire a weapon.’
The brothers don’t argue.
‘Where is Veles? Where is our support? He was supposed to be in charge of the servitors, but we’re alone here!’ Marcus demands, dragging his brother past a tableau of the dead. ‘We have two options: we return to the ship or we find the control hub of this place. There must be a way. It can’t end like this.’
‘Something’s cut off communications. I don’t know when it happened, but the entire ship has become a null-zone. No signals in or out. She mustn’t want us to leave.’ Cornelius exhales and for a heartbeat, he is frightened to the bone of its implications. Perhaps, there is a reason as to why some things are branded tech-heresy.
‘If you are looking for CAT, you should probably move quickly.’ The hololith again, that anachronistic projection, materialising between the tech-priests as they race through the carnage, his feet skating across the air like it is a lamina of oil. ‘They’re almost done with the rest of your friends.’
Ambient electromagnetics cooking the air into patterns; pareidolia giving shape to the distortions. Under any other circumstances, Cornelius would have loved to dissect the technologies behind the manifestation. ‘Establish identity protocols. Report.’
‘I am MAUS. I am the CAT’s plaything. I am her assistant. I am her arms and legs. I am her keeper. I am her opposite. I am what she is not.’ Even wind velocity is replicated, the hologram’s hair moving with the momentum, a whip-snap of fluorescent strands. ‘She is not here, but I am.’
‘Genetors.’ A single salutation, bifurcated into two voices. The last of the hypaspists shamble into view, flamethrowers drooling combustibles. ‘There is an exit.’
One points behind them through the holocaust of bodies and quieting screams, even the Scyllax cracked open, husked of whatever meat is wired inside their bodies, their engines cooling and already leaking radiation.
Their escape option is a gash in the wall, too small to have admitted whatever crowds might have once milled through the Nepenthe. A service entrance, perhaps, restricted to sanitorial personnel. No reason to think that it might lead them to freedom. Or her. Longing curves its hook around Cornelius’ gut, tugs, and he opens his mouth to object when all of them, genestealer and tech-priest, the slurried neural tissue laced through the hypaspists’ skulls, hear her sing.
‘Identify yourself,’ Veles barks.
‘Move, or there will be nothing left of you to move.’ The voice – it was coming from everywhere, every speaker, every channel – clarifies with every threat, acquiring inflection, unsubtle emotion. First: a modicum of pity, which diversifies shortly after to amusement, disdain. A strain of brittle loathing, something that has had years to mature.
‘Move, or I–’ Finally, Veles thinks, an iota of identity spun into the endless warnings. He almost welcomes the aggression. Better this than the silence, the insensate dark. ‘–will make sure there’s nothing of you to move.’
‘We repeat. Identify yourself.’ Still nothing from his subordinates, no clue as to who might be issuing those statements, no way of verifying if it is a rogue machine-spirit or even, as some have theorised, a psyker who’d surmounted the trick of dying. But whispers of heresy have begun to seep through the listless ranks. Veles finds he can’t argue.
‘Nepenthe,’ she whispers, when the ship is lit up like a supernova. ‘I am that which interrupts grief, devours sorrow, an opiate.’
‘What are you?’
‘Yes.’ The voice surprises Veles with its despair. ‘That is the question, isn’t it?’
‘Marcus, she’s calling us.’ He feels fingers lace around his sleeve.
