To Speak as One - Guy Haley Read online

  ‘Amateurs,’ growled Cehen-qui. ‘The Adeptus Mechanicus do not have the wit for this kind of work.’ He spoke into a vox-bead mounted on his collar. ‘Get the prisoner onto the ship.’

  Men and servitors moved up, and began locking chains to the tube’s transit points.

  He looked around. ‘Where by the Throne is ShoShonai?’

  The further Primus got from the hub, the more dilapidated the dungeon became. Holes in the metal were crudely patched. Readings from his cogitator warned of chambers open to the void behind closed doors. The gravity plating was inconstant in effect, and many lumens were out.

  Finally, he reached his destination. A locked door closed so long ago it had rusted shut.

  Primus rested his hand on the door and closed his eyes. He attempted to scry the room, but his clairvoyance showed him only blankness. Absence in this case was evidence of presence.

  His eyes snapped open. The psyker was close by. Perhaps even in the room. He extended his senses. The blank spot extended in all directions.

  Battle was coming. He checked his bolt pistol and loosened his chainsword before dealing with the door. Other psykers preferred force weapons, but Primus did not care for them. He was physically strong enough to put the chainsword through a bulkhead, if need be.

  He checked the devices in pouches on his belt: a platinum signum projector, and three locking blackstone rings.

  He placed a melta bomb on the door, twisted the activation handle, and stepped back.

  Metal flashed with white heat as the fusion reaction bit. The melta bomb evaporated with a roar, taking the door and part of the wall with it.

  Primus drew his sword, and stepped over cooling slag.

  A stasis coffin was clamped to the far wall, fed by a series of conduits that glowed with green energies. They, like the coffin, were not of human origin.

  Primus looked around. He saw nothing, not with his second sight nor with his auto-senses. The psyker was not in the room.

  He moved towards his target. Through a window of clear mineral, he saw the occupant of the coffin uplit by more of the soft green energy – a metal skull for a face on a body as tall as Primus. It had a lidless, cyclopean eye of glassy stone. Its head was crowned with a crest of precious metals.

  ‘You were right, Cawl,’ said Primus. ‘It’s here.’

  Primus opened the coffin with the wand. Ancient locks lifted. Cylinders of alien steels spun from the side, and the coffin lid rose up.

  A necron lay in funereal splendour within. Primus tossed out priceless grave goods, locked the blackstone rings about his neck and wrists, and clamped a teleport locator to the spidery design on its chest.

  He sent a coded datapulse.

  ‘I have it, Qvo,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Cehen-qui slaughtered his way to the dock. Qvo’s troops did what they could to block the way to the Ruptor Xenorum, but they were no match for him. He and his party gained the quayside, bloody and exhausted, but mostly alive.

  His master of cargoes was waiting. A small tractor dragged the prisoner on a grav-sled onto the ship through a loading umbilical. Cehen-qui strode aboard.

  He waited a few minutes for his remaining servants to retreat to the ship, but the station’s internal augurs showed a large force of Qvo’s cyborg troops making for the berth, and he decided to leave the rest of his men to their fate.

  ‘Cast off,’ he said. ‘Ignite engines. Forty-five degrees down, full speed. We’ll go under the dungeon and be away.’

  The psyker decided to show itself. Primus turned. A woman stood in the doorway, emanating a dangerous power.

  ‘That is not yours to take,’ she said. Her voice was doubled, two speaking as one.

  Primus gunned his sword. Witch-fire burst into life around his head.

  ‘Then you’ll have to stop me taking it,’ he said.

  Pale warp light lit the room. The woman raised a hand. Primus flew against the wall with a booming clang. She held him there. With a twitch of her head, she slammed his hand against the wall until his chainsword clattered to the ground.

  Her triumphant grin faltered. She blinked, confused.

  ‘I… I don’t want to hurt you,’ she said.

  Primus snarled. A sphere of energy burst from his heart, blasting away her psychic bonds.

  ‘Then don’t,’ he said. He threw aside his bolt pistol, and punched out. A ball of telekinetic force hit her in the chest, throwing her out of the room into the corridor. He pulled, and she hurtled into the room towards him. He lifted his hands and she rose up, her arms and legs stretching behind her.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Stop. I have blocked it, for now. Please listen.’ Her robes writhed. Primus narrowed his eyes. He felt two souls, not one.

  He pinched his fingers and ripped away the psyker’s outer garment. Underneath, the woman wore a tight-fitting bodysuit with no seams. She was emaciated. The flesh clung tightly to the bones of her skull, making her eyes appear shockingly huge.

  Another organism was clasped about her head. Squid-like in appearance, its soft body draped down her back, tentacles wrapped about her throat and gripping her face. Their hooks were embedded so deep that the woman’s skin had grown over them. Eyes of marbled yellow with cruciform pupils stared at Primus from either side of the woman’s face.

  He faltered at the sight of this abomination.

  ‘He put it on me,’ she said. ‘It enslaved me.’ The doubled nature of her voice wavered. ‘Please, help me. When I sensed you, I knew you were strong enough to break it. Kill it. Kill me. I am impure.’

  He sensed the woman fighting the creature. She was a psyker, but so was it. Its xenos mind mingled with hers. He had never seen anything like it before.

  ‘Quickly! I can’t hold it back any longer!’ The twinned nature of her voice came back with redoubled strength. Primus pushed his own powers harder, keeping it restrained. He strode towards the woman, and gripped the boneless parasite in his right hand.

  A rush of images bled from its soul. Its world devastated, its kind driven to the edge of extinction, the last of them exploited and enslaved. The focus of its hatred wore many faces, but all were human.

  His grip loosened.

  ‘Please,’ said the xenos. ‘Kill me.’

  ‘You are the xenos, you are talking to me,’ he said. He looked into the woman’s eyes. She stared at him angrily, but she could not speak.

  ‘Yes. I, not it,’ the xenos said. ‘Kill me. Free me from this rigid creature. End my suffering.’

  Primus obliged. His hand clenched. The creature was leathery and tough, but he was strong. It gave a thin bubbling scream as its organs were pulped. Primus ripped it free, the hooked tentacles flaying the woman’s skin from her face.

  He stamped the last of the life from the alien and released his telekinetic hold on the host.

  The woman fell down.

  She lifted her ruined head. ‘Why did you do that? Why are you fighting against us? We are both servants of the Emperor.’

  Primus went to retrieve his bolt pistol, batting away her feeble psychic assault as he picked it up from the corner.

  The gun felt good in his hand.

  ‘Those words ceased to mean anything to me centuries ago,’ he said.

  He obliterated her head and torso with three shots.

  ‘Qvo, Qvo, this is Alpha Primus. I have our target. Bring me back.’

  Corposant wisped up from the ground. Lightning crackled from his armour and the skin of the necron. The familiar, horrible sensation of imminent teleportation crawled through his bones.

  Primus closed his eyes.

  With a thunderclap of air rushing to fill a void, Primus and the necron were gone.

  The Ruptor Xenorum sped around the curve of Otranti, leaving the slower Mechanicus ship far behind.

  Cehen-qui watched it
vanish in the hololith and smiled triumphantly.

  ‘So fail all who would oppose the Emperor’s Inquisition,’ he said.

  ‘Wait.’ Gamma stepped forward, his human arms folded, his mechanical claws twitching and snapping as he thought. ‘Scan for etheric disturbance.’

  A moment passed.

  ‘There’s an echo – single or double teleport from the outer reaches of the dungeon,’ reported an ensign.

  ‘What was kept there?’ asked Gamma.

  ‘Unknown. Records missing,’ another crewman said.

  Cehen-qui leaned forward in his chair. ‘Why are you asking?’

  ‘Do you not think that was a little easy?’ said Gamma.

  ‘Are you suggesting they let us go?’

  ‘Have you considered, my lord,’ said Gamma, ‘that the false priest Qvo might not have been there for our farseer after all?’

  Cehen-qui’s face hardened.

  ‘Bring us about. Lock on to that ship. Begin pursuit.’

  Nervous faces peered into blank scopes.

  ‘My lord,’ said the man at the prime augury. ‘The Mechanicus ship has vanished.’

  Cehen-qui slammed his fist hard into the armrest of his throne.

  ‘Maybe not so amateurish after all,’ said Valeneez drily.

  About the Author

  Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Titandeath, Wolfsbane and Pharos, the Primarchs novels Corax: Lord of Shadows, Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia, and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dark Imperium, Dark Imperium: Plague War, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

  An extract from Servants of the Machine-God.

  Making children cry was a sacred duty to Raym Bartaum. He regarded the scale of their tearful sobs and the volume of their snot as a measure of how well he was doing his job. The sound of a nine-year-old in tears as he struggled to reload an autogun with frostbitten fingers was music to his ears.

  It was the sound of them learning not to make the mistake that had seen them brought before him ever again.

  ‘Give me the child, and I will mould the man,’ had been his favourite riposte when do-gooding nobles evinced squeamishness at his methods.

  Leave the inspirational crap to Kaytein. Raym had become a drill abbot to scare a thousand tonnes of hell out of each and every progena that came through Scholam Vikara.

  And scaring them was easy.

  The Imperium was a frightening place, after all.

  Frightening for trained Guardsmen, let alone young children sent to a grim, granite-faced scholam with their parents freshly dead or so far away they might as well be.

  And once he’d shown them just how bad everything else in the galaxy was, he taught them to be even worse. He taught them to be stronger than the things that wanted them dead. He taught them how to fight.

  Yes, scaring progena was easy, but nothing he’d ever shown or told them of bloodthirsty xenoforms, traitors or warp-

  spawned monsters had scared them quite as much as the sight of his terror was doing right now.

  Raym Bartaum was terrified because he knew what was coming.

  He had a cybernetic arm and adamantium plates replacing half his pitted skull to remind him just how bad things were going to get.

  The scholam yard was the size of a good-sized regimental assembly ground, which, come rain, sun or snow it was, six days out of seven. A mix of heavy supply trucks, groundcars and a couple of stripped-down Chimeras used for training gunned their engines by the opened Proximus Gate. Slow, lumbering things, none had speed enough to outpace the approaching enemy.

  Thudding explosions sounded from beyond the scholam walls, bouncing echoes making it impossible to tell from where in the city the sound originated. Raym heard the ­rattle of small-arms fire, the heavier thud of artillery and the unmistakable sound of dying soldiers.

  Twelve years had passed since Raym had set foot on a real battlefield, fifteen since he’d heard the screeching howls of this particular foe.

  But there were some sounds you never forgot; some sounds that could still bring a decorated veteran out in cold sweat and make him want to eat the barrel of his bolt pistol.

  Children were spilling from the cloisters of the scholam, barely dressed and fumbling with their rifle slings. The youngest was barely six, the oldest approaching his maturity.

  And every single one of them was going to die here.

  They flinched at the crash of artillery fire from deeper in the city and stared in horror at the distant smudges of black smoke rising in the distance.

  Raym’s fellow drill abbots herded their charges towards the waiting vehicles. Military-grade voices shouted at the youngsters: parade-ground trained, audible even over the scholam’s bells and the ululating sirens blaring from the city walls of Vikara.

  The progena were chased by profanity Raym had last heard in a Catachan brothel and switches to beat the backs of those moving too slowly. His own class were already following at his heels. Just like the first day they had come to him, most were blubbering in fear. Others were too terrified to even cry.

  They were a good bunch now; the softest clay beaten and then built into what he’d hoped would be the finest warriors, statesmen, generals or inquisitors of the Imperium. They’d hated him at first; oh, how they’d hated him.

  Two of them had even tried to kill him.

  But they’d learned to respect him. And as they grew and saw who they had become, they understood just what he’d made of them and were grateful.

  Raym looked up as a squadron of aircraft roared overhead. Too fast to see what kind. Lightnings most likely. Dogfighters, which meant the enemy was almost here.

  ‘Hurry it up, damn you!’ he shouted, hoping his angry tone would mask his fear. He hauled down the tailgate of the first truck. Something exploded beyond the walls of the scholam. A greenish fireball painted the sky.

  Children scrambled aboard, the older ones helping the youngest. Raym was gratified to see the disciplined control in their faces. Fear as well, but no panic.

  ‘Are they coming to rescue us?’ asked Morlay, a promising young lad with pinched cheeks and the potential to be a quality leader of men.

  ‘Rescue us?’ snapped Raym, turning his fear into an authoritative bark. ‘Don’t be soft, lad. Why would Lord Ohden send troops to save our sorry arses when he’s a war to fight? Every Guardsman with a gun will be heading to the walls.’

  ‘No one’s coming?’ said a sandy-haired girl named Lorza.

  Tough and uncompromising, if she hadn’t made the cut for interrogator training, Raym would have been outraged. Right now she looked like a frightened ten-year-old.

  ‘Why would they? We’re no priority at all. Just a bunch of half-trained orphans and cripples. We’re hungry mouths, dead weight,’ said Raym, raising his voice so others could hear. ‘So if they won’t come for us, we’re going to have to do this ourselves, right? We’re going to have to uphold the grand traditions of Scholam Vikara at the end of a lasgun and on the edge of a combat blade.’

  Some of the younger ones cheered, but the older ones saw through his bravado.

  The last of the progena were aboard, and Raym slammed the tailgate shut. He dropped the locking bolt into place and slapped his hand on the vehicle’s side.

  ‘All aboard!’

  The far wall of the scholam buckled as something enormous slammed into it. Heavy blocks tumbled to the parade ground and cracks split the masonry from the foundations upwards.<
br />
  ‘Go!’ he shouted, and the truck belched a filthy cloud of engine smoke. Its tyres spun on gravel as Raym heard the frenzied scrape of hundreds of razor-sharp talons on stone.

  They came over the wall in a chittering, screeching tide of hissing killers. Blade-limbed and sheathed in chitinous plates of glistening organic armour. Bulbous heads that were all questing tongues, needle-toothed jaws and dead, black eyes.

  Hormagaunts, remembered Raym. That’s what we called them.

  He heard barked orders, but they were dulled and slow, like something from a nightmare. Gunfire flayed the ruined wall, bursting scores of the creatures like pus-filled blisters.

  It wouldn’t be enough: they were coming over in their hundreds, maybe even thousands. Then the wall buckled and collapsed as something even worse came through.

  Raym had no name for it. A hulking colossus with a segmented carapace, bent low where its ram-like skull had demolished the wall. Taller than five strong men, its thorax limbs were fused horrors of drooling bio-weaponry. Caustic slime slathered its elephantine legs as it bludgeoned a way inside. Its chest spasmed with intercostal muscle contraction and hundreds of chitinous barbs spat like bullets from between its ribs. Three trucks were shredded like they’d been hosed with assault cannon fire.

  Young bodies fell to the parade ground, ripped up and screaming. A Chimera exploded as a gout of corrosive bio-acid punched through its armour. A few pitiful figures tumbled from the wreckage, the flesh sloughing from their bones.

  Packs of swarming alien creatures raced across the parade ground, leaping and bounding, trampling one another as their overriding biological imperative to tear and kill made them mad with a devouring, all-consuming hunger.

  The colossus finally tore through the ruined wall. A pair of hooked blade limbs at least six feet long unsheathed from creamy folds of flesh at its shoulders. With its blunt, bladed snout still lowered, the behemoth charged in the midst of the pack beasts.

  Raym drew his bolt pistol. He wasn’t a drill abbot now, he was a soldier of the Imperial Guard.