The Death of Integrity (10 page)

‘Let us hope we do not, brother,’ said Alanius.

‘This is the way, brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio, gesturing forward. ‘In the centre of this vessel is a vertical shaft – a cargo lift, I judge – that leads right through this ship. From there we shall be able to head downwards, and from a lower deck access the vessel abutting this and so deeper into the hulk. That way we will swiftly reach the point determined by the tech-priests as best for their device.’

‘How far to the shaft?’

‘One hundred and fifty metres.’

Voldo’s eyes flicked over to his rad-counter, down in the bottom right of his helmet display. ‘Radiation levels appear low,’ said Voldo. ‘They will increase.’

‘Yes brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio. ‘This component vessel’s tertiary reactor is still active, and leaking.’

‘Will your servitors last, Magos Nuministon? They are not shielded,’ said Alanius.

‘They are disposable, Lord Sergeant Voldo, and they will last long enough to fulfil their purpose,’ Nuministon said. His voice, unlike the others, blared from his helmet speakers, violating the deathly peace of the hauler.

‘Deactivate your external helmet vox, magos. We are here as shadows. Do not announce our presence. Communicate via vox-caster only,’ said Voldo.

There was a click as Nuministon obeyed without demur. Voldo was grateful, he had half-expected a refusal and an arrogant proclamation on the strength of the Machine-God and the power of the metal over the flesh. He had seen many men die painfully because they held fast to the convictions of one sect or another. In his long experience, providence and plate were better shields than conviction.

‘An oversight on my part. You have my apologies,’ said Nuministon.

‘We proceed. Brother Militor, hold position and cover our rear.’

‘Yes, brother-sergeant.’

‘I shall leave Brother Curzon with you,’ said Alanius.

‘That is wise,’ Voldo turned to face the two Space Marines, blood and bone armours stood shoulder to shoulder. ‘The two of you await my command,’ said Voldo. ‘You will cover and monitor this accessway. The nearest known brood chamber lies some way outside this vessel, but we are still deep in the genestealer’s primary habitation zone, and I will not leave our rear exposed.’

‘Yes brother-sergeant,’ said Militor.

There was a rumble. The hulk shook. Flakes of corrosion fell down from the pipes along the ceiling. The Terminators’ massive torsos twisted atop rock-steady legs as they scanned the ceiling and walls. The tremor lasted twenty seconds or so, bringing with it the sounds of grinding metal and the impact of mass against mass before gradually subsiding.

‘What was that?’ said Azmael.

‘A hulk quake,’ said Voldo.

‘Level seven on the Meullin scale,’ said Clastrin.

‘Indeed,’ said Nuministon.

‘The agglomeration is unstable. Our bombardment will have redistributed its mass loading,’ said Clastrin. In any one place in the hulk the gravity was so low as to be non-existent. But gravity wells formed by active grav plates unevenly drew in loosened mass, there was the irregular motion of the hulk to accommodate, and then variance in its own localised gravity fields owing to the density of its constituent parts. All contributed to the violent shifting of the material trapped in the hulk. ‘A further peril.’

‘There will be more,’ said Eskerio.

‘In all probability, brother,’ said Clastrin.

‘Another reason to be on our way, fulfil our objectives and depart swiftly,’ said Voldo. ‘Brothers, on me.’

In a long line the party clumped on down the corridor, alert to signs of the enemy, leaving Militor and Curzon alone in a lonely pool of suit-cast light.

They gained the shaft without incident, their passage disturbed only the dust and the ghosts of the dead. Voldo kept an eye on the mapping and motion tracking equipments’ feeds as they progressed. Within his suit display, corridors sharpened as their equipment gained a grasp on the true form of their proximate environs. The auspex detected no signs of movement other than their own. Only the reconnaissance party showed up on the map. Each member was represented by a pulsing icon; the appropriate badge for their order – skull and nova, blood drop and chalice, and the skull and cog of Mars. Far to the rear of the line in the corridor Militor and Curzon’s markers throbbed. The life signs of Voldo’s men and feeds from their suit picters crowded the left of his visor screen, the tick-tick-tick of the rad-counter a metronomic beat to their advance.

Voldo walked slowly but effortlessly, the great mass of the Terminator armour moved by its own motive systems. As such, its size required only a little more effort on his behalf than his usual plate; it was cumbersome but did not hinder him. His breath came easily, the sound of it filling his helmet. This, the ticking of the rad-counter, his steady, heavy footfalls, the whirr of motors, the quiet hum of the armour’s power plant – these were the sounds that made up his immediate world. The suit’s sensorium, far more complex than that found in simple power armour, filled his vision and his mind with information gathered from the environment. He could feel the armour as if it were his own skin, in a numbing, distant way, like he wore an overcoat made of his own shadow, doubled sensations that required much acclimatisation. The suit’s feeds attempted to be all-encompassing, but paradoxically the effect could be isolating, dangerously so. One could fall into a kind of trance within the suit. Lulled by the sense of protection it conferred and the womb-noises of its mechanisms, a certain blindness to peril could set in, until it was too late.

The armour, for all its sensorium’s sophistication, provided a limited view to his eyes of flesh. His peripheral vision was circumscribed by the edges of the suit’s cowling and shoulder pads. He could turn his head only so far to the left or right. In a similar manner, he could not look far either down or up without tilting his torso, the movement allowed by the plastron and outer placard that made up his breastplate being restrictive. He could not, of course, see behind him without rotating the whole of his body, and the suit cameras of his squad were invaluable in providing alternative views of the environment.

On the open battlefield, such things were a lesser concern, but in the cramped confines of the spacecraft, they could be deadly. It was fortunate that the ceramite and armourplas that clad his body was proof against most weapons. Brothers equipped in tactical Dreadnought armour had to maintain a high level of situational awareness. Making war in this manner was mentally and psychologically taxing even for the superhuman Adeptus Astartes. It was not only matters of honour that restricted the armour’s use to the Veteran Company; inexperience was as perilous as a direct lascannon hit to those wearing Terminator plate.

A broad doorway emerged from the dark. Glittering motes of dust danced in the beams of their suit lights. Voldo raised his right fist and clenched it. Behind him, the brothers of the Novamarines and Blood Drinkers fanned out. Voldo had his map zoom in, mentally selected the icons for brothers Astomar, Eskerio and Tarael. He used his suit visor overlay to plot new positions for them. He executed the command and sent it to the two squads. All this took a breath, his thoughts conveyed from his mind to the ports in his black carapace and thence to the Terminator armour’s own cogitator and on to the squad. Wordlessly, the veteran brothers obeyed. The deck shook as they plodded past him.

‘I request access to your squad’s feed, Veteran-Sergeant Alanius.’

‘Granted freely, cousin,’ said Alanius, his voice was liquid, as perfect as his physical form, but there was a hint of arrogance to the Blood Drinkers sergeant which Voldo found objectionable.

A chime from his vox, and five more square pict views popped into life in his helmet. Those of his own squad reduced in size to accommodate them. In the views from the three Space Marines by the door, he could see a large, high-ceilinged room twenty metres across. A yawning, black square pit seven metres each side occupied its centre.

‘Brother Astomar, Brother Tarael, pan left to right.’

The Terminators obeyed, torsos rotating as they tracked their augur eyes over the room. Voldo watched as the suit lights slid over the wreck of dead machinery embedded in the walls. One corner of the room was wrinkled up into a metal wave, never to break, the result of the vessel’s impact when joining the hulk.

He developed a better picture of the room. Eskerio had been correct, it was a cargo lift. Doors like the one they stood in were in three of the four walls. A short corridor lined with dirty hazard striping led away from the fourth side to his left, almost certainly to an external airlock.

He watched as the lights went back and forth, bright spots on dead walls, a fainter halo around each, and in that halo…

‘Wait!’ Alanius said. ‘Brother Tarael, pan back one metre, drop the vertical twenty degrees.’

Tarael bent forward slightly, the full beam of his suit light picking out a huddled shape upon the floor.

‘Do you see it, Brother Voldo?’ asked Alanius.

‘Yes. A corpse.’

‘A crewman. Cover my advance,’ Alanius said.

Without discussion, Alanius clumped past and went into the lift room. Voldo cursed inwardly. That was reckless, as reckless as those damned Knights of Blood had been on No Glory, and he chided himself for not heeding his own warning to Galt. He resolved to keep a sharper hold on his counterpart in future. To stop him now, mid-action, would be a grave insult for one of the same rank, for all Voldo being designated commander.

Voldo checked the motion tracker. Nothing. Annoyed, he followed the Blood Drinkers sergeant into the lifthead.

The impact damage was worse close up. He glanced to the left side, checking the airlock as he walked past. The doors were so buckled they barely deserved the name, ruptures formed jagged metal lips that puckered round slashes of dark. Whatever the craft abutted in the crush of the hulk had formed a seal over the torn airlock, keeping in the tenuous atmosphere.

Alanius knelt on one knee by the corpse. Voldo stood over him and bent forward. His suit beam lit upon a human skeleton within a standard Imperial ship’s emergency suit. Both hands were thrown up to the face. Alanius gently lifted an arm with the tip of a claw away from the helmet visor. The glove of the hand was missing, exposing the dead man’s grey finger bones. The hand flopped onto the floor with a rattle, bones coming apart and rolling across the metal like dice and bouncing into the air.

Behind the yellowed plastek faceplate a skull gaped. Its jaw hung loose, mouth wide in a silent scream.

Voldo ran his light down the suit. The chest had been ripped open, ribs shivered into fragments.

‘Eviscerated,’ said Alanius. ‘What is your opinion as to this man’s fate, cousin?’

‘Xenos pirates mayhap. But look, these are surely the marks of claws.’

Alanius ran his light up the wall. ‘Aye,’ he let it rest on a gruesome sight. A hand and arm hung from the wall. A screaming face protruded above it, its terror preserved for all time in metal. ‘I know of few weapons that can cause such melding between the organic and inorganic.’

Voldo called Clastrin to join them. A moment later he stood by their sides.

‘A Geller collapse,’ Clastrin’s paired voices said, ‘followed by uncontrolled translation from the empyrean. This is a likely explanation for the contamination of the ship’s metal by human flesh. This man would have become displaced into the metal, becoming one with its fabric.’

‘A Geller field collapse? This other was clearly slain,’ said Alanius, gesturing at the corpse.

‘Pirates, raiders quick to fall upon a stricken ship,’ said Clastrin. ‘The possibilities are many.’

‘Yes,’ said Voldo.

Alanius stayed kneeling, staring at the dead man. Voldo felt a rush of brotherhood for the Blood Drinker.

‘You think on his fate?’

‘Dying, alone in the dark. Yes. It pains me our kind are too few to protect them all,’ said Alanius. ‘They treat us like gods and yet they still die.’

‘The Adeptus Astartes cannot be everywhere. We do what we can. The loss of a billion lives is nothing if the Imperium stands,’ said Voldo sternly.

‘We are here now, are we not? Too late for him and his comrades. He would have died in terror, with no succour.’

Voldo rested his hand on the other sergeant’s shoulder. ‘If that is so or not so, they are long gone and we have other foes to concern ourselves with. I admire your care for life, in these dark times men are careless with what is most precious of all, and for the nature of this man’s death I feel also grave regret. But we have another task that will save others from similar pain. Come, we must go on.’

Alanius rose from his knees, a laborious action in Terminator armour, despite the minimal gravity.

Voldo asked Eskerio to mark the doorway and then the two sergeants had their men gather around the lift shaft. While Astomar and Gallio kept watch, the others retrieved flares from their utility pods and threw them down into the shaft. The flares flew more than fell, tumbling into the dark until they became little bigger than matchlights. Their connection with the bottom was nearly inaudible, bouncing around the shaft until their energy was spent. They continued to burn, flickering over the dross at the bottom of the shaft.

‘Sounding, five hundred metres,’ said Eskerio.

‘Magos Nuministon, Forgemaster Clastrin, is the lift still functional?’

By this point Clastrin had gone to an interface unit by one of the doors, Nuministon beside him, a freshly unscrewed panel lay on the floor. Various manipulators from Clastrin’s harness were plugged into the guts of the wall. Nuministon’s supplications to the dormant machines murmured in the force’s helmets.

‘No, brother-sergeant. It is inactive. If you would but wait, I will reroute power… Ah. I have it.’

A screech from behind the walls, an unsteady thrum, and running lights flickered on in the four corners of the shaft. Most remained dark, but there were enough to pick out the shaft’s general condition.

‘I have accessed the ship’s datacore, what is left of it. I have activated what systems I can. Our way may be easier ahead.’ said Clastrin. ‘This ship was the bulk agricultural hauler
Father Harvest
, registered 481.M37, in the Segmentum Obscurus. Crew complement of one hundred and eighty-nine, thirteen passengers. Lost 329.M38 with all hands. Take note of the name for the records of the Administratum, so that its fate might be noted.’