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  Orphans of the Kraken - Richard Williams

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  Orphans of the Kraken

  Richard Williams

  I am not yet dead.

  I am only on the brink. I cannot tell anymore how long I have been here. My first heart begins its beat. I count the minutes until it finishes and begins again. I clutch at the sound as long as I can. It is my only reminder that I am still alive.

  It is not fear that holds me from the edge. I see what is ahead and it welcomes me. But I have made an oath. Until I have held to my word, I cannot allow myself to fall.

  The tyranid hive ship drifted silently in space. I watched it through my window. It was vast and it was an abomination, ugly beyond description, organic but no creation of any natural god. It was also, as best as we could determine, very, very dead.

  My name is Brother Sergeant Tiresias of the Astartes Chapter Scythes of the Emperor, and I came here searching for legends.

  I command the 21st Salvation Team, and if that sounds like a grand title then let me correct you now. It is not. There were eight of us at the beginning, myself and seven neophytes. Battle-brothers in training, youths, juveniles, children. I am told that they are our future. I know better; we do not have a future.

  By that day I had been in their company, and they in mine, for over two years. Our time together had not been easy, nor without loss. The three empty seats beside me were testimony to that. But the three we had left behind had not disappointed me nearly as greatly as the four who remained. They had slunk to the far end of the assault boat, gathered around one of their number who was making some small adjustment to the squad’s heavy bolter. They spoke softly, thinking they would not be heard.

  ‘There… I think it’ll work better that way.’

  ‘Are you sure, Brother Narro? It is not Codex.’

  ‘Of course he’s sure, Hwygir. Who’re you going to trust? Your brother here who’s been slicing up these vermin as long as you have, or a book written by some hoary old creaker? These bugs weren’t even around back then so the codex is as much use as a–’

  ‘Show some respect, Vitellios,’ the fourth of them interrupted. ‘The sergeant can hear you.’

  ‘Pasan. I tell you, after all he’s put us through, I don’t give a scrag if he does.’

  It had not always been like this. At the start, in our first few insertions, their voices had been full of hope and they had spoken of what we might find. They had repeated the stories they had heard during their training: rumours of Space Marines wearing the insignia of the Scythes still alive inside the tyranid bio-ships; stories of Navy boarding parties surrounded, nearly destroyed, before being saved by such warriors who then disappeared back into the depths; stories of bio-ships convulsing and crumpling in the midst of battle, though untouched by any external force. Stories. Legends. Myths.

  They believed, though. They fantasised that, in every dead bio-ship we sought, whole companies of Astartes waited. That they had not been annihilated in the onslaught of Hive Fleet Kraken at all. That Hive Fleet Kraken, that almighty judgement upon us which had destroyed fleets and consumed worlds, might have simply overlooked them. And so they had survived, forgotten, until these seven brave neophytes arrived to rescue them and become heroes to the Chapter, and become legends themselves.

  Myths. Fantasies. Lies. As I already knew and they, once they stepped aboard a bio-ship for the first time, quickly discovered.

  ‘Ten seconds!’ the pilot’s voice crackled over the intravox. ‘Brace! Brace! Brace!’

  I braced. Here we went again. Another legend to chase, another myth to find, another lie to unmask. How many more before we finally accept it? How many more until we finally decide to end it all?

  My wards advanced cautiously from our insertion point into the ship. They fell into their formation positions with the ease of long experience. The hivers, the up-spire Narro and the trash Vitellios, took turns on point and edge. The trog savage Hwygir carried the heavy bolter on his shoulder further back as snath. Pasan, one of the few of the neophytes to have been born, as I, on noble Sotha, walked in the tang position to allow him to command.

  If our auspexes and scanners had not already told us that the hive ship was dead, we would have known the instant we stepped aboard. The corridors were dark; the only light our own torches. As they illuminated our path ahead we could see the skin of the walls sagging limply from its ribs, its surface discoloured and shrivelling. The door-valves gaped open, the muscles that controlled them wasted.

  We waded through a putrid sludge. Though it moved like a sewer it was no waste product, it was alive. It was billions of microscopic tyranid organisms, released by the bio-ship at the moment of its death and designed solely to consume the flesh of their dead parent, consume and multiply. More creatures, gigantic to the microbes, tiny to us, floated amongst them, eating their fill, then were speared and devoured by larger cousins who hunted them.

  The hive ship was dead, and in death it became filled with new life. Each creature, from the sludge-microbe up, was created to feed and to be fed upon in turn, concentrating the bio-matter of the ship into apex predators that would bound gleefully aboard the next bio-ship they encountered to be re-absorbed and recycled. In this way, the tyranid xenoforms transformed the useless carcass of their parent into another legion of monsters to take to the void. The carcass of their parent, and any other bio-matter foolish enough to have stepped onboard.

  ‘Biters! To the right!’ Vitellios called. The lights on the gun barrels swung around in response. I heard the double shot as Vitellios and Pasan fired and then the screech of their target.

  ‘Step back! Step back!’ Pasan ordered automatically. ‘Narro!’

  Scout Narro had his bolter ready and triggered a burst of fire at the creatures. The shells exploded in their midst, bursting their fat little bodies and tossing them to the side.

  The shots would alert every active tyranid nearby. Pasan swivelled his shotgun with its torch across the leathery walls of the chamber, searching for more. Vitellios simply blasted every dark corner. There was another screech for his trouble. The Scouts swung their weapons towards the noise, illuminating the target with blazing light.

  There was nothing there. The corner was empty. The sludge rippled slightly around the base of the armoured buttress supporting the wall, but that was all.

  I waited for Pasan to order Vitellios to investigate. I saw the acolyte’s helmet turn to the hiver, his face shining gold from his suit lights. I waited for him to give the order, but he did not. He turned his head back and started to move out of position himself.

  ‘Scout Pasan, hold!’ I ordered angrily. ‘Scout Vitellios, assess that area.’

  Vitellios, expecting the order, stepped forward with a confidence no one in his situation should have. He enjoyed it, though, defying the others’ expectations, claiming that places like this reminded him of home. Though having seen myself the lower hive levels on the planet where he was born, I would not disagree.

  Vitellios prodded the floor beneath the sludge to ensure it was solid and then stepped right into the corner. He shone his torch up to where the armoured buttress ended just short of the roof.

  ‘Vitellios!’ Narro whispered urgently. ‘It’s moving!’

  Vitellios had an underhiver’s instincts. He did not question. He did not waste even a split-second to look at the buttress that had suddenly started shifting towards him; he simply ran. br />
  ‘Hwygir!’ he called as he sprinted clear, kicking up a spray of sludge behind him.

  Hwygir pulled the trigger on the big gun. The hellfire shell sped across the chamber and smashed into the buttress even as it launched itself at the Scout fleeing away. The sharp needles within the shell plunged into the creature’s body, pumping acid, and it spasmed. It tore itself from the wall, revealing the tendrils and sucker-tubes on its underside and collapsed into the sludge, there to be recycled once more.

  What it revealed, what it had slowly been consuming, was even more horrific. Three metres high, even collapsed against the wall, was a tyranid monster the size of a Dreadnought. Its skin was armoured like a carapace, its limbs ended in claws like tusks, its face was all the more dreadful for having been half-eaten away.

  ‘Fire!’ Vitellios shouted, and he, Pasan and Narro poured a half dozen rounds into the juddering, foetid corpse.

  ‘It is dead already, neophytes. Do not waste your ammunition.’ Shaking my head, I rechecked the auspex for the beacon’s signal. ‘This way.’

  I had begun with seven neophytes under my command. On the hive ship identified as #34732 Halisa, we stumbled across a colony of dormant genestealers and Neophyte Metellian was killed. On #10998 Archelon, Neophyte Quintos lost an arm and part of his face to a tyranid warrior corpse that had more life in it than he had assumed. It almost bested me before I caught it with my falx and finally put an end to it. On #51191 Notho, Neophyte Varos slipped through an orifice in the floor. When we finally located him in the depths of the ship, he had been crushed to death.

  We have inserted into over a dozen dead hive ships now. We Salvation Teams have probably stepped aboard more bio-ships than any other human warrior. Perhaps more than any alien as well. When I speak, it is with that experience. For all the vaunted diversity of the tyranid fleet, for all that Imperial adepts struggle to catalogue them into thousands of ship classes; the truth is that once you are in their guts they are all the same: the same walls of flesh, the same valve portals; the same cell-chambers leading to the major arteries leading to the vital organs at the ship’s heart.

  But for all the now routine horrors I have witnessed within these ships, on occasion they can still surprise me.

  ‘God-Emperor…’ Narro whispered as he looked out across the expanse.

  The beacon had taken us up, but the tubule we followed did not lead into another cell-chamber, nor even into an artery. Instead it dropped away into a cavity so vast that our torches could not reach the opposite wall. At our feet, the sludge slovenly poured over the ledge in an oozing waterfall into the darkness on the floor. To our left, one side of the cavity was filled with a row of giant ovoids; each one as big as, bigger even, than our mighty Thunderhawks. They glistened with a sickly purple sheen as we shone a light upon them. Several of them were split open. One was cracked. Inside, emerging from it, still clenched tight upon itself in a rigor of death, I saw the creature these birthing sacs contained.

  Bio-titans.

  Bio-titans. Massive war-engines that, even hunched like spiders, towered over our heaviest tanks on the battlefield. Screaming, hideous, living machines bristling with limbs, each one a weapon, which had carved apart so many Imperial lines of defence.

  ‘There… there’s another one,’ Pasan said and I shone my torch after his. It wasn’t just one. The cavity was filled with these monsters, every one collapsed, knocked aside, dead. Their bloated bodies and scything limbs were barely distinguishable from the flesh of the hive ship beneath them.

  It was Narro who finally broke the silence.

  ‘Hierophants,’ he concluded as he peered at them. ‘Immature, judging from their size.’

  ‘You mean these are runts?’ Vitellios exclaimed, his usual cocksure manner jolted from him.

  ‘Oh, indeed,’ Narro replied. ‘Certain reports from defence troopers quite clearly–’

  ‘Of course they are, Scout Vitellios,’ I interrupted. ‘Do not underestimate our foe in the future. Acolyte Pasan, the beacon leads us forwards, organise our descent.’

  Pasan stepped along the cliff-face, examining the floor far beneath. The other neophytes watched the path or checked their weapons.

  ‘Honoured sergeant… could you… could you look at this?’ Pasan asked me quietly.

  Throne! Could this boy not even command as simple a task as this by himself?

  ‘What is it, acolyte?’ I said, biting down on my irritation as I went over to him.

  ‘The floor…’ He lay down flat and angled his torch to the base of the cavity directly beneath us. ‘They look… they’re biters, aren’t they? It’s covered with them.’

  I looked; he was right. What appeared to be solid ground was indeed the segmented backs of a thousand biters packed together as though they were crammed in a rations can.

  ‘And what will you do about it, acolyte?’

  Pasan hesitated. Vitellios did not.

  ‘We should head back, we can find a way around–’

  I cut him off. ‘An Astartes does not retreat in the face of common insects, neophyte. He finds a way through.’

  I turned back to Pasan and watched the youth think. He finally produced an answer and looked at me for approval. His plan was sound, but still I was unimpressed by his need for my validation.

  ‘What are you waiting for, acolyte? That is your plan, issue your orders.’

  ‘Yes, sergeant. Culmonios, load a hellfire shell and deploy here.’

  Hwygir nodded with all the eagerness of one who knows his inferiority and only wishes to be accepted. He had been birthed Hwygir, most certainly on some dirt rock floor on Miral. He had chosen the name Culmonios when he became an Astartes, I found it distasteful to address a stunted savage such as he with such a noble appellation. I used it in speech at first, but I could never bring myself to think it. Only Pasan still used it now.

  The trog hefted the bulky heavy bolter to the lip of the ledge.

  ‘He’ll need bracing,’ Vitellios muttered.

  ‘I was just coming to that,’ Pasan replied. ‘Vitellios, dig in and brace him. Narro too. Have the next shell ready as soon as he fires.’

  Finally I saw something of command coming to Pasan. He organised the squad into a firing team slowly and methodically. He even carved into the tubule wall itself to provide a steadier base to shoot directly down at the floor and strapped the heavy weapon to Hwygir tightly to ensure the recoil at such an awkward angle did not tear it from his hand.

  ‘Fire!’ Pasan ordered finally. The squad braced and Hwygir pulled the trigger. ‘Reload. Adjust aim. Fire. Reload. Adjust aim. Fire. Reload.’ Pasan continued, the squad following along. ‘Halt!’

  He and I looked over the edge. The flesh scouring acid of the hellfire had eaten into the biters and, without a foe close by, they had scattered away from the wall and started to feed instead on the corpses of the bio-titans, leaving a path clear across the cavity. It was as I had expected.

  What I had not expected was what had now been revealed, the food on which the biters had been feasting. I looked down, my throat tight in horror, at the field of damaged and pockmarked power armour now on display, black and yellow like my own. The feast had been my brothers.

  I had only ever seen such a sight before in my dreams, my nightmares of Sotha’s destruction. I was there at the fall, but I did not witness the worst of it. By the time our last lines were being overrun, I was already aboard a Thunderhawk, unconscious, my chest and legs a mess of cuts and bio-plasma burns. A sergeant had pulled me from the barricade as I fell, thrown me upon an exhausted ammo-cart returning for fresh supplies and then stepped back into the battle. None who survived knew my rescuer’s name.

  I do not know how I made it from the ammo-cart onto one of the escaping Thunderhawks. I do remember how the Thunderhawk spiralled and dropped as it desperately sought to dodge through the rain of landing sp
ores still pouring down, now unopposed, upon my home. I was awake in time to feel the last tug of Sotha’s gravity upon me as we left it to be consumed by our foe, and to know that we had failed our holy duty.

  We cleared the bio-titan birthing cavity of the biters and lesser xenoforms. It took nearly a full day, with the mysterious beacon still a steady pulse upon our auspex, but it had to be done. This place was no longer a simple obstacle to be surmounted in our larger search; it was sacred ground. We called back to the boat and ordered our retainer workers despatched to join us. When they arrived they added their firepower to our own in the final clearance of the cavity. My wards stayed on watch while our retainers began their work to recover our fallen brothers. We counted, as best we could, the armour of thirty-seven battle-brothers. Over a third of a company had died in this place, battling the fledgling bio-titans as they burst from their sacs. What a fight it must have been.

  The armour bore the markings of the Fifth Company. They had not been on Sotha when Kraken came. They had fought and died months before. Chapter Master Thorcyra had despatched them to the very edges of the sectors the Scythes protected, responding to reports of rebellion and xenos incursion, while he himself led a force to counter an uprising to the galactic north. He did not know then that those incursions were the mere tip of the emerging Hive Fleet Kraken. We received a few routine reports back from the Fifth, garbled by psychic interference, and then they were swallowed by the shadow in the warp.

  By the time another company was free to go after them the truth of the Kraken had emerged, as had the threat it posed to Sotha itself. A general recall was ordered, every battle-brother was called back in defence of our home. And so the Fifth became just another mystery, a hundred warriors amongst the millions who had already died at the talons of the Kraken and the billions more who were to follow.

  ‘So it’s true,’ Senior Retainer Gricole said as he approached me in the birthing cavity. ‘Another mystery solved.’

  ‘Get your men working with all speed, Gricole. Secure the area so I can lead my wards on. We are here for the living more than the dead.’