I am Slaughter Read online

  ‘You must have been in the vicinity already,’ said Zarathustra.

  ‘Yes,’ said Severance. ‘We managed to identify this zone, despite the geological upheavals, as the site of the original blisternest, so my wall has been section-searching the area to look for survivors.’

  ‘And ammunition,’ remarked Severance’s second-in-­command, Merciful. His tone was mordant.

  Daylight smiled. He was amused that both he and Severance had independently lighted on the same strategy. It reassured him that the core training of the Chapter was both profound and reliable.

  ‘Have you found anything?’ asked Zarathustra.

  ‘A few pitiful dead,’ replied Merciful. ‘Crushed by the tormented planet or overthrown by the Chromes.’

  ‘They’re not the real enemy,’ said Severance.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Tranquility.

  ‘The Chromes are just a hazard, and the cause of our undertaking here,’ Severance replied. ‘But there’s something else. Something that wasn’t here before. You can feel it. You can hear its voice on the wind.’

  As if to underscore his remark, noise bursts echoed across the valley.

  ‘Substantiate that,’ said Daylight very directly.

  ‘I cannot,’ Severance replied. ‘It’s a gut feeling.’

  ‘The walls do not deal in gut feelings,’ said Daylight. ‘The shield-corps relies on what is verifiable.’

  He looked at Severance uneasily. Perhaps the brother had been here too long, subjected to the extremities of the environment. Perhaps gravity, or one of the other natural or even unnatural forces being twisted and convoluted on Ardamantua, had affected his personality or his brain chemistry. Where Daylight had felt reassured by the overlap of their tactical decisions, he now felt a distance, as if the bond of the shield and wall did not connect them at all.

  ‘Have you seen the shape in the sky?’ Severance asked.

  ‘What? No,’ said Daylight.

  ‘Some things cannot be substantiated,’ said Severance. He rose from where he had been sitting on the boulders scattered at the shore and gestured Daylight to follow him. Daylight did so reluctantly. The pair clambered up an outcrop overlooking the dark mirror of the lake.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Severance. ‘Look.’

  ‘At what? What am I looking at? The sky?’

  ‘No, look at the lake.’

  ‘You asked if I had seen the thing in the sky–’

  ‘Be patient, Daylight. It comes and goes.’

  They waited. Daylight felt he was wasting valuable time.

  ‘Look,’ said Severance.

  The scudding, racing cloud-cover, moving across the heavens like a black lava flow, parted briefly, riven by the wind and orbital disruption. Sunlight speared through in a pale beam. The sky beyond the cloud was white and blank, like static. There was nothing to be seen.

  But in the lake…

  Daylight started. It was there and gone in an instant, but he had seen it. He reset his visor recorder for immediate playback, and then froze the image.

  Therein, the clouds were parted, drawn like drapes to show a colourless sky where nothing resided. In the reflection below, however, trapped in the surface of the lake, the patch of bright sky did contain something.

  Something large and ominous, an orb that seemed to press down on the wounded planet.

  It was a moon. A black, ungodly, hideous moon.

  Twenty-Five

  Ardamantua

  They had been walking around the lake edge in the company of Severance’s squad for several hours when they spotted the flare.

  It lofted up in the distance, an incandescently bright pin-prick, then shivered as it hung in place, before fading and falling away, all effort spent.

  ‘One of mine!’ Severance cried. ‘Move!’

  They began to make the best pace possible. As the leaders ran ahead, Captain Severance told Daylight that his sub­divided wall had agreed to use basic flares and visual signals to stay in contact, given that everything up to and including short-range helm-to-helm vox was useless.

  The ragged Asmodai troopers couldn’t keep up. Major Nyman had put his helmet back on, exhausted by the impure air, but rather more troubled by the constant noise bursts. Even those Asmodai who had kept the visors of their orbital drop-suits firmly sealed since planetfall were feeling the effects. The noise bursts echoed into the cavities of their helmets and armour, unsettling them. It was psychologically hammering them.

  Severance pointed to four of his men and told them to stay with the Guardsmen and bring them along behind. Then he set out at full pace.

  It took them half an hour to reach the origin of the signal flare. Daylight was beside Severance as they slowed to approach.

  It was a second search party from Lotus Gate Wall, commanded by a sergeant called Diligent.

  ‘Good to see you, sir,’ the sergeant called out. He hesitated as he saw Daylight and the other Space Marines new to him.

  ‘I see you’ve made discoveries of your own,’ he remarked.

  ‘What did you find?’ asked Severance.

  ‘The blisternest, or what’s left of it,’ said Diligent. ‘And survivors.’

  The survivors of the original undertaking assault had taken shelter in the ruins of the blisternest, using its structure to weather out the worst the gravity storms threw at them. They had, in the weeks since, constructed a makeshift stockade from boulders, wreckage and parts of the nest structure.

  Inside the jagged walls, there were men from Ballad Gateway, Hemispheric, Anterior Six Gate and Daylight walls, about one hundred and thirty of them all told, together with a few, fragile servitors. There was no substantial equipment, no heavy weapons or vehicles with them, and precious little munitions supply.

  First Captain Algerin of Hemispheric had command.

  ‘Well met in bad days,’ he said to Severance and Daylight. He looked at Daylight, and at Tranquility and Zarathustra nearby.

  ‘You left the walls unguarded to come for us? I’m not sure I approve.’

  ‘You’re not the first person to express that thought, captain,’ said Daylight. ‘We made our choice. The Chapter was beset.’

  ‘Worse than beset,’ said Algerin. His voice dropped. ‘Worse than beset.’

  He looked at the ground. His armour was almost black with filth, and it showed hundreds of nicks and gouges from Chrome claws.

  ‘The Chapter Master is dead,’ he said, aiming each word like a las-bolt at the ground. ‘He reached the surface by tele­port before the flagship was lost. He came to us. He was with us for three weeks. Chromes took him. Rent him. There were three hundred of us then. They wear us down. There are so many of them. Attrition, the coward’s tactic.’

  Algerin looked at them.

  ‘He was so angry,’ he said. ‘Mirhen, such a great man, but so angry. He railed at the gods, at the stars, to see his fleet wrecked and his Chapter shredded, and the honour that has carried us through at the forefront of all Chapters, since the very start, shredded away… by animals. By vermin and a crooked planet.’

  He took a breath.

  ‘They killed him because of his anger, you know,’ he said. ‘He wanted to kill them. He wanted to kill them all, but there were too many. I tried to pull him back. He–’

  Algerin stopped. He looked at Daylight.

  ‘You have brought ships to take us off here, wall-brother?’ he asked.

  ‘I have,’ replied Daylight. ‘But conditions are still bad. We have to devise a way for them to get close enough to effect evac.’

  ‘I don’t think conditions will improve,’ said Algerin. ‘Not any time soon.’

  He looked up as Severance’s men brought the Asmodai stragglers into the makeshift fortification.

  ‘Men,’ he said, unimpressed. ‘They will not last long. We ha
d about fifty auxiliaries with us at the start. The noises drove them mad in the first week. We had to… It wasn’t a good situation. Only one of them survived. I suspect it’s because he was scatter-brained to begin with. He’s determined though, I’ll give him that. Determined to puzzle it out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Daylight.

  ‘See for yourself,’ Algerin invited. ‘He’s with one of yours.’

  ‘I am Slaughter,’ said the second captain of Daylight Wall Company.

  ‘I am… Daylight,’ said Daylight.

  ‘I’m glad of the sight of you,’ said Slaughter. ‘You came for us. That won’t be forgotten.’

  Daylight nodded. ‘I am heartened to hear that sentiment from one mouth at least. Who is your charge here?’ he asked. A bedraggled and filthy human in ragged robes was hunkered in the corner of the nest chamber, working at various pieces of Imperial apparatus. The devices, stacked and piled against the chamber wall, many of them damaged, were running off battery power. Several of them had clearly been customised, refitted, or repurposed.

  ‘He is the magos biologis sent to accompany our mission,’ Slaughter explained. The chamber was gloomy and dank, part of the surviving underground burrows of the blister­nest. Water dripped from the organic arch of the roof.

  ‘He was supposed to study the xenoforms while we killed them. I was set to guard him when our fortunes changed. I’ve been doing that ever since, pretty much.’

  They approached the scientist. He was intent on his work, muttering to himself. He was in need of a decent shave. His hair, dirty and unruly, had been clipped back in a bunch using the bent clasp of an ammunition pack.

  ‘His name is Laurentis,’ said Slaughter.

  ‘Magos,’ said Daylight, crouching beside the magos biologis. ‘Magos? I am Daylight.’

  Laurentis looked at him for a moment.

  ‘Oh, a new one,’ he said. ‘You’re new. He’s new, Slaughter. See? See, there? I’m beginning to tell you apart.’

  He smiled.

  Noise bursts echoed outside the chamber, and Laurentis winced and rubbed his ears roughly with begrimed knuckles.

  ‘The wavelength is changing. It’s changing. Today, and these last few days. Greater intensity. Yes, greater intensity.’

  The magos biologis looked at them as if they might understand.

  ‘I had specialist equipment,’ he said. ‘I was sent it by the Chapter Master himself…’

  He paused, and thought, his eyes darkening.

  ‘He’s dead now, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Slaughter.

  ‘Well, yes. Sad. Anyway, before that happened, him, dying, he sent me equipment. I asked him for it. Specialist equipment. I asked for it, you see? But so much of it was damaged before I could use it. Everything went a bit crazy. Yes, a bit crazy.’

  ‘The magos believed from the very outset,’ Slaughter said to Daylight, ‘that the noise bursts were a form of communication. He wanted to decipher them. A drop of specialist equipment to allow him to do that was arranged, but it had been overrun by Chromes and half-scrapped by the time we got to it.’

  ‘Communication,’ said Daylight. ‘From the Chromes?’

  ‘I thought so at first,’ said Laurentis, jumping up suddenly to stretch his cramping legs. ‘Yes, yes, I did. At first. I thought we had underestimated the technical abilities of the Chromes. I thought we had underestimated their sapience. They migrate from world to world. That suggested a great capacity for… for, uhm…’

  Another noise burst, a longer one, had just echoed though the darkness of the stockade and the ruined nest, and it had rather distracted him.

  ‘What was I saying?’ he asked them, digging his knuckles into his ears again and jiggling his head.

  ‘Communication?’ prompted Daylight. He remembered very clearly what had been spoken of on the bridge of the Azimuth. The noises coming from Ardamantua read as organic – boosted and amplified for broadcast, but organic. Like a voice. ‘You believe it’s communication?’ he pressed.

  ‘Yes! Yes! That’s what I thought! That was my theory, and it seemed a valid one. I thought the Chromes were trying to surrender, or negotiate peace, that’s what I thought at first. Do you remember me saying that, Slaughter?’

  ‘I do, magos,’ said Slaughter.

  ‘Then I thought they might be trying to compose a challenge. Then I thought they might be warning us, you know, warning us not to mess with them. Then, then I thought they might be trying to warn us about something else.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Daylight.

  ‘Well,’ said Laurentis, ‘it doesn’t much matter, because I don’t believe it is them at all any more. Do I, Slaughter?’

  ‘You don’t,’ said Slaughter.

  ‘I think it’s someone else. Yes, that’s what I think. Someone else.’

  The magos biologis looked at them both.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘I think I’d like you to explain more,’ said Daylight. ‘Who do you think this someone else is?’

  Laurentis shrugged.

  ‘Someone very advanced,’ he said. ‘Very advanced. Take gravity, for example. They are very, very advanced in that field. Gravitic engineering! Imagine! They’re shifting something. And this world, it’s just the delivery point.’

  ‘What are they shifting?’

  ‘Something very big,’ said Laurentis.

  ‘A moon?’ asked Daylight. Slaughter looked at him sharply.

  ‘It could be a moon. Yes, it could be,’ said Laurentis. ‘You’ve seen the reflection in the lake, have you?’

  ‘I have,’ said Daylight.

  ‘Whatever it is, it’s still in transition. If it’s a moon or a planet­oid… well, Throne save us all. That’s a different class of everything. I mean, we can terraform, we can even realign small planetoids in-system. But shifting planetary bodies on an interstellar range? That’s… god-like. There are rumours, of course. Stories. Myths. They say that the ancients, the precursor races, they say they had power of that magnitude. Even the eldar once, at the very peak of their culture. But not any more. No one can do that any more. Not on that scale.’

  ‘Except… whoever the voice belongs to?’ asked Daylight.

  ‘Yes, well, perhaps,’ said Laurentis.

  ‘And who does the voice belong to?’ asked Daylight.

  Noises boomed and howled. Laurentis scrabbled at his ears again like a man with headlice, and pulled a pained face.

  ‘That’s the real trick, isn’t it?’ he agreed. ‘Knowing that. Knowing that thing. We’d have to translate the words first, and find out what they were saying. Maybe… maybe they’re introducing themselves to us? Maybe this is a contact message. A hello. I’ve spent six weeks trying to figure that out…’

  He made a sweeping gesture that encompassed his makeshift pile of devices and equipment.

  ‘…six weeks, working with these items, which are hardly ideal. It’s so hard to jury-rig what I’m missing. The parsing cogitators are a particular loss. And the vocalisation monitors. I’ve made do with quite a lot, actually, quite a lot, but Throne alive! What I wouldn’t give for a decent grade tech-servitor, or a vox-servitor… or… or an augmetic receiver. Cranial! Cranial implants! I never took them myself, you see?’

  ‘If this is contact,’ asked Daylight, ‘it’s surely hostile?’

  Laurentis nodded, blinking away another noise burst with a shake of his head. ‘I mean, definitely. Definitely. But it would still be worth hearing what it had to say for itself.’

  ‘You would confirm a hostile intent, then?’

  ‘I don’t have to!’ Laurentis exclaimed. ‘Look at the rats!’

  ‘The rats?’ asked Daylight.

  ‘No, not rats. The Chromes. That’s what I mean. The Chromes. Like rats. You can gather so much data by observ
ing the behaviour patterns and habits of animals. Rats. Remember when I first called them rats, Slaughter? Remember that?’

  ‘I do, magos,’ said Slaughter.

  ‘I said it as a joke, at first,’ said Laurentis. ‘I said it because their behaviour reminded me of rat behaviour. Rats suddenly turning hostile and flooding into a new area with great and uncharacteristic aggression. It can be very scary. Very dangerous. They’re not a threat. They live under the floorboards and in the walls for years, never harming anyone, and then they are turned into a threat. Turned into one!’

  ‘How?’ asked Daylight.

  ‘Because they are threatened, by a greater natural predator. Something they fear. Yes, fear enough to make them attack things they would not normally attack. In this case, the Imperium. And Space Marines! Goodness me, the Chromes are just animals. They are just vermin! They’re rats, rats, you see? We’re fighting them because they’ve been driven into our zones of space by something they do not want to be around. They are fleeing, fleeing for their lives, and it’s made them desperate enough to battle us.’

  He looked at them both.

  ‘It makes sense, doesn’t it?’ he asked, pleased with himself. He grinned. Daylight noticed that, at some point, several of the magos biologis’ teeth had been knocked out. The gappy smile made him look more like an eager child than a credible expert.

  ‘If they’re animals, how are they travelling between worlds?’ asked Daylight. ‘How are they effecting interstellar and void transport?’

  Laurentis clapped his hands and did a little jig.

  ‘That’s another thing, you see? You see? That’s sort of what clinches it because it neatly answers the other mystery! How do the Chromes get from world to world? How do they migrate? What explains their diaspora? Nothing! They can’t do it! They’re animals! QED something is bringing them here! They’re moving through the tunnels!’

  ‘The… tunnels?’ asked Daylight.

  ‘Yes. Tunnels. There’s probably a better word for it. I haven’t really worked this material up into a presentation form yet. Tunnels will have to do. The tunnels built by whoever the voice belongs to.’