Though Cornelius’ face now sits fermenting in a tide of bacteria, Marcus can still picture his sibling’s expression, an urgent wonder. ‘She’s here. She’s awake. She’s real.’
He does not answer. Not at first. Too enraptured by the glissando of her voice, its notes decanted straight into his nervous system, Marcus can only exist, transfixed by the reality of her. They’d waited for so long. Yet, some treacherous nodule of his mind disdains from submitting to the ecstasy, instead persisting in pointing out that this isn’t so much blasphemy as it is mutinying against self-preservation.
But they’ve come this far.
And what else do they have?
‘Marcus.’
‘I hear her, I hear her.’ He untethers his brother’s grip from his robes, every cell subsumed by the rapture of her acknowledgement. Drunk, Marcus thinks. He is drunk on the harmonics of her, somehow, that dose of oxytocin quickly metastasising into a full-on addiction. Anything so long as she doesn’t go silent again. There is just enough of Marcus to understand he should run. But he can’t, won’t.
‘Let’s go.’ They move, their escape obfuscated by the final coda of the Scyllax, the muzzle-flash accompaniment.
To Marcus’ distant astonishment, the genestealers do not follow. But why would they need to? hisses a voice in his head. The brothers were herding themselves to the pantry.
A killing ground.
Marcus pushes the thought down.
The corridor narrows until they can only pass one at a time, the hypaspists taking point. Cornelius crab-walks behind them, the bizarre mathematics of his physique ill-suited for the restrictive space. Marcus comes last. No light whatsoever save for the radiation from their tacticals, the pallid glow from behind the hypaspists’ visors. Briefly, as he anchors the flail at his waist, Marcus considers jury-rigging some method of producing actual luminance, but the thought is superseded by childish superstition: if he can’t see them, maybe, they won’t be able to see him.
‘I wonder where she’s taking us.’ Cornelius breaks the quiet, voice muddied by pleasure, embarrassing almost in its intensity, like a lover’s appetite wantonly advertised. His fingers click across the walls, an irregular heartbeat. ‘I wish – I wish I understood what she was saying. But there is so much interference. I wish… I wish…’
Marcus says nothing. It occurs to him how empty of words he is. Especially now, with nothing but precedent fish-hooked through his breastbone, not even the euphonics of her voice to compel him, its notes dialled to faint static. White noise. Faith and white noise and the knowledge there’s no way to go but forward. A hiss-click of vox frequencies, remarkable only in its stark duality: it means nothing to Marcus, everything to Cornelius.
In that moment, Marcus learns to hate his brother.
‘What is she saying to you?’ Try as he might, he can’t scrub his voice of its envy.
Cornelius halts. ‘Nothing. Nothing precise. But she has to know we’re here. She has to be calling to us. Why else would she be… singing?’
Again, language fails him as his body has failed him, is failing him. Marcus digs the heel of his palm into his brother’s shoulder, pushes him forward. They don’t speak at all. Occasionally, Cornelius moans into the dark – closer, closer, Marcus, oh, can’t you hear her, she’s telling us to come closer – like some prophet wasting to bone in the desert, but neither Marcus nor the hypaspists reply, and there is no other sound save for the drip of condensation, their footsteps in lock-step.
A trapezoid of light razors through the gloom, dust-moted. Through the cavity in the wall, Marcus can hear machinery in respiration, meat in preparation. He breathes in, holds his breath pinned against the roof of his mouth as one of the escorts crooks their gloved hand, beckoning them onward.
‘Here,’ murmurs his brother, dazed-sounding, all eloquence drained to effortful slurring. ‘She’s here. She’s here. She’s waiting for us. Can’t you hear her, Marcus? Can’t you hear her call?’
‘Yes,’ he lies softly in return. ‘Yes, I can.’
Inside they discover what might have once been a medbay, save it’d been repurposed for a specific purpose. There are vats everywhere, machines by the dozen, each devoted to a separate horror. Here, there is a system cultivating and curating bacteria cultures. Here, a sterilisation vat. Here, a miracle of engineering pulping the fungi, decocting them into food.
Here–
Marcus stares at the yellowed skeleton suspended at the heart of the facility, at the glistening sheets of grey tissue draped across its stretched arms. She was female, Marcus thinks, cataloguing the curve of the cadaver’s pelvis bones, the swoop of its bowed spine.
Mite-like drones crawl across the stretched flesh, pruning it of necrotising cells, harvesting the healthy. Others build circuitry of what they’d collected, tenants them in glass, stacks them in silos twice as high as the gawking tech-priests, every last shelf an oozing constellation of blinking lights and stinking, green-yellow lymph.
The air convulses and suddenly she is standing before them. Like MAUS, her phenotype markers are distinctive, orbital sockets and jawline bare of ethnic cross-pollination. Unlike MAUS, her appearance demonstrates evidence of corruption: patches of sloughed skin, revealing ongoing computations beneath, arabesques of virtualised protein radiating from her skull in a mist. An aberration, an abomination. Yet for all the grotesquerie on display, she is everything they’d dreamed.
Marcus slows, arm flung out to stop Cornelius’ motion.
‘What are you?’ Such a trite question. The momentousness of the occasion demands profundity, but all Marcus can supply is platitudes, pre-processed wonder as described in societal subconscious.
‘It’s her,’ Cornelius whispers to no one at all.
‘I was–’ She saccades in place, a zoetrope in slow-motion, while the darkness twitches. Gleaming eyes flood the penumbra. There, Marcus thinks, surprised by his own resignation. This is where we die. He knows that. But he does not mind. All he wants is to talk to her a little longer. Just a bit more. ‘–was-was a psyker, I think. I think that was the word. Psssssskyer. Yes. Once, I’d been meat and hope and dreams everlasting.’
The air boils from Marcus’ lungs.
MAUS renders on an adjacent wall. ‘He means, “What are you now?”’
‘I am the Nepenthe.’ Her eyes empty of cornea and sclera, become engulfed instead in light so incandescent it is all afterimage, an impression of glare.
This is why the past is heresy, Marcus thinks hazily, speared by her gaze.
‘I am her protector, her-her mother, her guardian. I am the one who keeps her crew safe.’
Cornelius interjects, some ghost of him restored. ‘Everyone’s dead. There are nothing but genestealers on board this ship, and–’
‘There are sixteen hundred and forty-five living beings on the ship,’ she continues, unperturbed, and all Marcus can think of is how much he wishes he knew her name. Her name and not the ship’s, the name of the girl who’d animated the bones standing centrepiece in the room, who was still alive now. ‘I have monitored their biotelemetrics. I have adjusted the climate of the ship in accordance to their requirements. I have ensured optimal conditions for their survival within the limits of available resources.’
‘Those aren’t your crew.’ Marcus staggers forward while tentacles bloom in the half-light steeping around the mainframe, an irridescing biome of creeping purples and then eyes, flat and animal. How many of them? How many of them are there? He cannot conjecture a number, refuses to even consider the exercise. The same way he cannot envision what it must be like to be here, alone in the nothing, surrounded by the dead and the hungry, trapped. ‘They’re all dead. Or… or changed. These things aren’t human. Your–’
‘Do not touch her,’ MAUS snarls, suddenly in high-definition, three dimensional and already peeling from the wall. ‘Do not touch her. If you touch her, I’ll make sure that you will never stop dying. Do not touch her. Why are you even here, anyway?’
‘She called us,’ Cornelius whispers as their escorts finally sag onto the ground, offal puddling from their open wounds, slopping outwards in moist clusters. ‘She called us here. Lady, we’ve come so far for you. Through the void and the silence, through the endlessness. Through the hungry dark.’
‘There is no way,’ CAT whispers.
