Devourer - Joe Parrino Read online

  Jatiel’s boltgun barked and a stream of high-velocity, high-calibre rounds cut down the first emerging ranks of tyranid organisms. He fired one-handed. Those that slipped past were met by the sergeant’s power mace. The golden, inverted teardrop of blood crunched into an alien’s misshapen head, blowing out its brains against several more. His return stroke struck them down in turn, breaking bones, shattering bodies, culling meat.

  ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius! For the Angel!’ he snarled, helmet vox-casters set to maximum, throwing his cry of belligerence and rage at the invading xenos.

  Ventara and Asaliah joined him in the age-old war cry, running into the chamber. The pallid xenos creatures recoiled, sensitive aural organs nearly overwhelmed by the wall of noise. Bolts scythed them down as the two other Space Marines culled them.

  ‘The hangar is no longer a viable option,’ said the Deathwatch veteran.

  Errant shots cut into the boarding organism that had delivered the tyranids onto the Golden Promise, prompting mewling cries of pain.

  More creatures emerged from within the boarding pod, vomited out in a slurry of viscera and sickening liquids. These were four-armed organisms, each limb ending in a deadly claw.

  ‘More genestealers,’ Ventara spat. The aliens jinked and danced, flickering out of the way of fired bolt shells. Nimble and deadly monstrosities loped through the fug of blue smoke and squelched into the slurry of dissolving serfs.

  One got inside Jatiel’s guard before Asaliah’s hurled combat knife skewered its head. It aspirated blood as it died, gurgling as dripping chunks of jellied brain oozed from the hole in its skull.

  Beetle creatures whirred through the blue smoke, latching on to the front of Jatiel’s armour. They started chewing, spitting acid onto the ceramite and cutting in. He swiped them off, desperate to remove the creatures before they damaged something vital.

  More termagants flowed around the genestealers, firing beetles from obscene organic rifles. The Space Marines were pushed down the corridor, retreating in the face of the tyranid onslaught.

  ‘There are too many of the xenos!’ Ventara yelled.

  ‘We need a defensible position,’ Asaliah agreed.

  Jatiel had a map already overlaying his visor. His eyes rolled over the options, but there were precious few and none nearby. He spat curses into the vox.

  They passed from one section into another, vaulting over a trough in the deck. All the while they fired their boltguns. All the while tyranids died. But it was not enough, nowhere near enough.

  Asaliah stopped firing, wheeled and slammed his fist into the wall. A bulkhead dropped down, pounding through squealing tyranids.

  Silence and smoke filled this section of the ship. Fires burned from within habitation quarters. Life pods sat quiet and empty in their cradles, waiting for serfs too filled with duty and obedience to ever use them. Drooling servitors patrolled the area, sweeping for dust and particulates. Some had fire crawling along their organic flesh.

  The distant crackle of lasweaponry echoed through the corridors. The Space Marines followed the sound. Halfway down the Golden Promise’s length, they entered an observation deck.

  Armourglass windows stared out into the vacuum. Tyranid creatures, some ray-like, others attached with the mindless insistence of molluscs, glared down from the windows. More organisms swooped past.

  But something else dragged at Jatiel’s attention. Beyond the tyranids sucking on the glass, beyond the hive ships, the sergeant could just see a green glow emerging from the ancient structures that orbited Perdita. Lightning stabbed out from a sudden rift in reality. Then a crescent-shaped ship appeared, hanging in the darkness.

  ‘As if one xenos wasn’t enough,’ Asaliah spat.

  The newcomer’s movements were slick, sliding between the grasping tyranid ships. Sheet lightning broke from random surfaces. Each blast terminated a bio-vessel, breaking it to bleeding pieces.

  Then it slid past, bound for Perdita’s surface, punching through more xenos hive-ships.

  Something critical died in the Golden Promise. Jatiel watched a surge of fire sweep from the bow of the ship, back towards the engines. Secondary blast doors slammed shut. A serf was carved in two by the descending portal. He set up a shrieking wail, agonised and horrible.

  Ventara ended him with his gold-encrusted power sword.

  Localised gravity failed as the ship began to spin, pushed by the explosion back into Perdita’s orbit. The Blood Angels snapped their maglocked boots to the deck.

  Horror dawned in Jatiel’s soul. He knew what was coming. ‘All hands, brace for impact!’ he shouted. He was still bellowing the order when fire danced along the Golden Promise’s battered hull, erasing encrusted tyranids vomiting warrior organisms into her decks, when the storied ship entered Perdita’s atmosphere, on an inexorable course for the dead planet’s surface.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jatiel awoke to a pain such as he had never known. Something felt wrong in his head, as though something had come loose. He opened his eyes, saw through the green lenses that stared from his helmet. He thanked the primarch that the systems were still functional. He lay over a melting puddle of ash and snow. That should have brought meaning and understanding to where he was, but his mind refused to focus.

  The Blood Angels sergeant braced his hands beneath him. Servos whined as he tried to push himself up.

  He toppled and fell, overbalanced. Blood pooled beneath him, the deep and rich red of Space Marine vitae. Jatiel tried to push himself up again, grunting and heaving out breath that burned like fire. Something felt wrong, terribly wrong. His vision blurred. The ash and snow was gone, replaced by star-filled blackness. The two images wavered, fading into one another.

  ‘No,’ he cried.

  A weight settled on his back. A calming voice, Adeptus Astartes deep, spoke. ‘Easy, sergeant. Easy.’

  His backpack whined as something clicked. Power thrummed through his armour as it reactivated. ‘Up you come,’ said Asaliah, an echo of his words on the Golden Promise.

  Jatiel was pulled to his feet. ‘Took a beating, Jatiel,’ said Asaliah. The Deathwatch veteran’s face, left bare to the feeble atmosphere, was a mask of pain and gritted teeth. Furrows had been carved in his flesh, rocks studding it from where he must have slid. Jatiel couldn’t tell whether Asaliah referred to himself, the sergeant, the Golden Promise or the situation in general.

  Asaliah shot Jatiel’s right side a pointed look.

  Jatiel glanced down and saw the reason why he couldn’t push himself up. His right arm was gone. His prized power mace was missing.

  Jatiel’s gaze drifted away from Asaliah and he saw the Golden Promise burning. ‘The serfs?’ he asked, working his jaw, stretching his wrenched muscles. He used his left hand to crack his jaw back into place.

  ‘No unarmoured mortal would have survived that crash. We are lucky we were in the observation dome. We were thrown free from the ship when it fell. Your head preceded us, sergeant. Truly, you are blessed with a thick skull.’ Asaliah hazarded a smile, and then winced in pain.

  Jatiel barked an ugly laugh. ‘What of Ventara?’ he asked after a moment.

  ‘I’ve yet to find him, sergeant. I did find this, however.’ Asaliah offered Jatiel Ventara’s bolter. ‘We should be armed.’

  ‘Acknowledged, brother.’ Jatiel cocked the boltgun, awkwardly cradling it with the stump of his right arm. ‘This will take some getting used to.’

  Asaliah grinned. ‘I suspect you’ll manage.’

  They picked their way out of the rubble, moving away from the burning Golden Promise. The ship groaned as it settled into Perdita’s crust. Jatiel saw that the great vessel had carved into the planet’s depths.

  ‘What lies beneath us?’ he asked.

  ‘Some sort of cave network.’ Asaliah shrugged. ‘The tactical briefings never hinted at their existenc
e.’

  ‘We should ascertain if a threat is here, try to find the xenos that appeared in orbit.’

  Asaliah nodded. ‘As you say.’

  The pair descended awkwardly through the treacherous footing. Spars of metal stabbed from Perdita’s surface, relics of the crash, offering handholds and a precarious route down.

  Obsidian replaced granite the deeper into the crust they moved. Great metal cables snaked through the rock, sparking and stabbing out from broken ends where they had been snapped by the Golden Promise. Melted adamantium, ablated and super-heated by the ship’s disastrous entrance into Perdita’s orbit, dripped past them in sizzling streams.

  Jatiel was breathing heavily. An insistent rune in his helm-display announced that he had a fractured skull. Shadows swooped, shadows that Jatiel knew had no basis in reality. He blinked the rune away.

  As they neared the bottom of the hole, Jatiel slipped and fell. Without a right arm to stabilise him, the sergeant clattered and slid down into the darkness. He knew that Asaliah would be following as quickly as he dared.

  The sergeant slipped over an edge, body cartwheeling as it encountered empty, stale air. Jatiel’s thoughts deserted him as he fell the last metres.

  Cables snapped at him, violently arresting his momentum. They held for microseconds, then broke in showers of sparks and lightning. He hit more and more, until he neared the bottom of the chasm. The last held and the sergeant was stuck, gently swaying in the darkness.

  Liquid dripped from above, pattering across the blood-red plates of his armour. He blinked. The runes asserted that his skull was fractured. They announced that his brain suffered from oedema, swelling in its case, punished by trauma. Strain was placed on his psyche. The cracks in his mind widened further. He ignored the insistent bio-readouts.

  ‘Sergeant,’ a voice called.

  Jatiel knew the cadences of the voice, recognised them, but could not match a name or a face to it.

  ‘It’s Asaliah,’ said the voice. Asaliah. Of course. ‘I am going to cut you down. Hang tight.’

  Jatiel nodded and then laughed, the sound echoing. ‘Hang tight,’ he said. The words and the situation were absurd. He could see Asaliah’s face highlighted in the darkness, pale and worried.

  The report of a boltgun echoed, suddenly loud and bold. Sparks flew and Jatiel fell.

  Fifteen metres down he hit the smooth, polished planes of the floor. Stone and ribs cracked. Ceramite fractured. Jatiel blacked out with the pain.

  Asaliah was there to help him up. ‘My thanks,’ said Jatiel.

  Lights clicked from Asaliah’s armour, splitting the gloom and cutting away the strobing darkness. The broken hulk of the Golden Promise pressed down from above, shifting and creaking in the darkness. Small fires still burned on her. Blood and ichor dripped from cracks in the hull, the last remains of the serfs that had called her home and the xenos that had broken her.

  Jatiel pushed out a breath, laboured and wheezing. It emerged as a snarl from his helmet’s vocalisers. A groan replied from the darkness. The two Space Marines’ bolters snapped up, hunting in the darkness. ‘Xenos?’ Jatiel voxed.

  ‘No,’ said Asaliah. ‘That was human.’

  Asaliah’s light pierced the gloom, but barely broke into the obsidian-walled depths. Strange carvings reflected the light back at them, tinging it green. Skulls, great metre-high reliefs, watched from the black, shadows lingering in their sockets.

  The groan came again, a wet cough of pain, thick with blood.

  Asaliah’s light shone, illuminating the space just below the Golden Promise.

  A metal spar had stabbed into the floor, then broken free from the wreck. Impaled on that spar, pierced through his groin and abdomen, was Ventara. The Space Marine hung, blood drooling down the metal. His armour, with all its beautiful decoration, was cracked and broken.

  Jatiel and Asaliah rushed to his side, both hobbling as fast as their abused bodies allowed. ‘This looks grim, sergeant,’ said Asaliah.

  ‘It does. We’ll have to pull him off.’

  Asaliah nodded. With a grunt, the Deathwatch veteran stepped below the impaled Space Marine. Jatiel took up position beneath Ventara’s backpack. They shoved, inducing pain-born stars to dance in Jatiel’s vision.

  Ventara groaned again, chemically numbed, voice thick with drool. He barely moved, sliding up the glistening length of broken metal. Asaliah grunted and they shoved the wounded Space Marine off the spar.

  Jatiel heard scrabbling from above, claws snicking against the adamantium hull of the Golden Promise. Screeches came from the upper darkness, filled with alien hunger. Jatiel caught glimpses of bioluminescence, of bone and red chitin.

  He opened fire, trying to track the aliens, to follow their movement patterns. The sergeant hit something. Blood spattered against the broken hulk of the frigate. A headless body fell, crunching grotesquely into the stone beside Jatiel.

  The fallen creature writhed on broken limbs before exhaling a noxious breath and dying.

  Asaliah added his own fire to his sergeant’s before Jatiel’s bolter clicked dry. He dropped the clip and pulled a new one from his belt, but it would not fit. It had been dented by his fall, wrenched out of shape. He had no time to find another.

  Genestealers swarmed towards the Space Marines, hissing their vile hunger. Four-limbed monstrosities leaped forward.

  Jatiel missed his mace as they came close in the blink of an eye. Bereft of the beautiful weapon, Jatiel resorted to using the empty bolter as a club. The weapon proved effective as a blunt instrument of death as he broke through a genestealer’s chest cavity. Organs were blown out of the mauled xenos’s back. It flew back into more of the beasts.

  Others danced and jinked, moving inhumanly quick on long limbs. They scrabbled and clawed.

  Ventara opened up with a bolt pistol, slurring litanies of fury and thirst through his chemical haze. Asaliah’s bolter fire was expertly timed. Each bolt broke through one xenos, breaking out in a spray of blood and bone fragments, to find a home in another.

  The horde of genestealers thinned.

  ‘My–’ Jatiel began. A xenos slipped through his guard, past the bolter, past his armour. Its clawed limb reached out. He ducked, trying to get out of its way. He tried and failed. It knocked into his helmet. A horrible pain blossomed in his skull. He blacked out.

  Jatiel awoke to find Asaliah and Ventara surrounded by the broken and bleeding corpses of genestealers.

  Ventara shared a worried, knowing look with Asaliah.

  ‘I am fine, brothers,’ said Jatiel, seeking to allay their concern.

  ‘As you say, sergeant,’ Ventara replied. The Space Marine clutched at the horrific wound that carved through his centre. It continued to bleed, a bad sign to one blessed by the gene-seed of Sanguinius. That the wound would not clot, that the Larraman cells and leucocytes of his advanced biology could not repair the injury, did not bode well.

  With the combat over, the xenos dead – this wave at least – Asaliah sprayed synthetic flesh over the horrific injury. Ventara removed his helm. His pupils were large, dilated to account not just for darkness, but for the chemicals that raged through his system.

  ‘Your orders, Jatiel?’ Asaliah asked.

  The sergeant cradled Ventara’s bolter, reloading it awkwardly with one hand. ‘As before. We ascertain the threat these xenos pose. We find a way to warn Lord Dante.’

  His brothers nodded, but he could see disquiet in their eyes. Their situation was dire. Without a ship, how would they warn their Chapter Master? With the tyranids consuming this system, how would such a message even reach him before he brought the strength of the Chapter here?

  Jatiel shoved the doubt aside. It served no purpose here. Questions had never suited him. Only duty. Only ever duty. ‘We go deeper.’

  So they did, through the darkness, weaving between massi
ve chambers, black as the void. They moved past xenos carvings that glared with mindless, empty hunger. Sounds echoed behind them, the scrabbling purchase of claw against smooth stone, the scrape and susurrus of xenos breath.

  The Space Marines ignored the noises, letting the sounds wash over them. They had a mission, and nothing else mattered.

  Green lights swam through the gloom-filled depths. A hum suffused the air, setting dust to floating. Jatiel was no expert in xenos blasphemy, but even to him it was apparent that something here was awakening.

  Little beetle machines watched from cracks in the wall, Asaliah’s torchlight winking off micro-lenses and metal carapace. All around their reflections were thrown back at them, bouncing off the smooth obsidian of the walls. Carved reliefs displayed skeletal xeno-forms battling against what Jatiel thought appeared to be eldar.

  ‘What are those?’ Ventara asked, his voice blurring through the gloom, slurred with pain and chemical pain-suppressants.

  ‘Eldar,’ answered Asaliah simply, his voice grim.

  Noise came from above, a subtle clicking sound, like gears shifting or a pen tapping.

  Asaliah’s light illuminated the ceiling. Green lenses stared down.

  Ventara bellowed, ‘Contact!’

  Jatiel opened up with his boltgun as the alien construct descended on millipede callipers from the ceiling, hovering like a Land Speeder. It screeched at them in a machine burble.

  Light played about the large lens that served the construct for a face. Energy coalesced. The chattering boltgun threw rounds into the construct’s body, glancing off rippling alien materials. Sparks flew. As it moved, the construct phased in and out of existence, bolts passing through the now translucent body. Each phased effort brought the alien machine closer.

  Lightning spat from its eye, barely missing Jatiel. His armour blackened, paint abraded into ash. He could feel intense heat flash-burning his skin.

  Asaliah’s bolter barked again, joined by Ventara’s pistol. But the creature faded, dropping into the darkness.