BEHIND A BROKEN SHIELD
1
Tales of Geller field failure are the ghost stories of the void. Ships that never reach their destination are gently referred to as ‘lost with all hands in the Sea of Souls’, and we clutch at those delicate words, turning aside from thinking what they really mean. I have more experience with void travel than most humans could conceive, and I still know next to nothing of the warp. The dead dwell there in their multitudes. That I know. The dead, and daemons that feast on the living.
I’ve boarded a ship that drifted back to reality after its Geller field failed. That was the mercantile runner Opportune, and I watched through Vadhán’s eyes as he swept the ship with a strike team of Spears, only to find its mangled iron bones sucked clean of life. The ship was a tomb, its hull and innards twisted beyond reckoning, let alone refit. When Vadhán withdrew his men, he ordered the Opportune destroyed. We prayed for the spirits of those lost in the Sea of Souls – a useless benediction, and all we could do.
The ship had been in the warp, unshielded, for too long. There was nothing uncorrupt in her carcass, nothing left untainted that we could salvage, and no clue as to what had happened to her crew when the naked wrath of the warp flooded through her decks. So it became a legend, just another ghost story.
But I was aboard the Hex when her Geller field failed.
2
Sound and motion came back to us in the same moment, flooring us with thunder. The ship screamed with sirens. The vox-system vomited static into every deck, loud enough to destroy all other sound.
Around me, it was black. Absolutely, completely black. There was blood in my mouth. I was blind, deafened by the roar of the abused vox-speakers, and wounded. How badly wounded, I didn’t know. When I breathed in, I choked it back out a second later. The air was foul and too thick to pull into my throat. I remember thinking, with the fragile clarity of rising panic, that to breathe in again would kill me. The air tasted toxic. Then the heat hit: hot enough to strike like a physical blow – I was slippery with stinging sweat, my face streaming with it, attacking my eyes.
Training took over. I needed my senses back. In the dark I fumbled with my helmet, needing to twist it straight before pulling the rebreather into place and slamming the visor down. Targeting data flared into existence, tracking helplessly over the blackness. I pulled in my first clean breath, forcing it to be deep, trying to take control of my racing heart by what I let into my lungs.
A scream sounded over the helmet’s internal comm, one of anger as much as shock. Tyberia. A flicker-flash of gunfire followed it, somewhere to my left. It illuminated my surroundings just enough to turn the air from black to grey, orienting me, restoring a hint of what was up and what was down. I was already cycling through vision overlays, pulling myself to my feet. I’d not known until then that I was down on the deck.
‘Tyberia?’ I voxed to her. My voice was a strangled choke. ‘Report.’
Nothing.
‘Tyberia? Kartash? Amadeus?’
Again, nothing.
The thermal-optic feed was a migraine smear of burning light. Monochrome thermal imaging fared better in piercing the murk, turning the absolute blackness into dark mist. Heat warnings sang in my ears until I muted them to pulsing runes on my visor. My rebreather filtered the air but did nothing for the heat. I was sucking in slow gulps of what felt like promethium jet wash.
I fumbled again. My shoulder light finally woke up, spitting out a thin beam that achieved little beyond showing the swirling particles of filth in the air.
Smoke. It was smoke. The Hex was on fire.
Shapes resolved in the ashy mist. Walls that flickered and danced like water, fading in and out of sight. The deck was clearer; the smoke was thinner closer to the gantry flooring. Our arming chamber swam in and out of focus around me; a room that I’d lived in for months on the way to Kouris lost all familiarity in the obscuring smoke. I moved forward, weighed down by armour that had never felt so heavy, and smashed my shins on one of our clothing chests. I’d thought I was close to the door. I was actually on the far side of the chamber.
Tyberia cried out again, this time with nothing but anger. I couldn’t see her, and even the muzzle flash was gone now, but I heard the throaty roar of an Engager discharging over our intra-squad comm. After it, I caught the crunch of her pump-action reload.
Something leered at me from the smoke and I thank the Emperor all these years later that it wasn’t one of my companions, because with my blood up, I turned and fired the second I saw it move. I never learned what it was. Something spectral and amorphous. Something that burst into a shower of steaming blood as it dissolved back into the smoke.
I could barely see my monitron bracer in front of my face. I hammered my gloved thumb on the keyplate, sending swift-burst code across the intra-squad link.
‘Anuradha?’ It was Tyberia, answering at once. She emerged from the smoke, not as the monster had done, but with halting, searching strides. Her Engager was held high, stock against her shoulder, with the muzzle lowered to prevent the kind of fear-firing I’d just unleashed myself.
We were face to face and could still barely see each other. Mercifully, the shipwide vox finally ceased its unmanned static screech. Less mercifully, there was a momentary blast of delighted, soft laughter before it cut off completely.
‘Was that… Was that a child?’ Tyberia asked.
Maybe, or something pretending to be one. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. ‘We have to get the bridge. What were you firing at?’
‘I don’t know.’ Her face was hidden behind her rebreather and visor, but her voice caught on the words. If her heart was hammering even half the speed of mine, I knew why. Adrenaline. Fear. Disorientation. A heady mix in our bloodstreams.
We moved together, always within arm’s reach, Engagers swinging to cover the endless shadows we stalked through. I’d trained to fight in burning buildings, but to be stumbling through the inferno that devoured the Hex was beyond any controlled fire I’d fought through before. Before my training, I’d thought that fire would cast everything into stark light, blazing around me. The opposite was true. In a fire, you can’t see anything. The familiar becomes alien and almost impossible to perceive. The smoke is almost impenetrable. There’s no right answer between too much caution or too much haste. If you linger too long in one place, you’ll find yourself trapped by the flames, but if you move with speed, you’ll lose your bearings with pathetic ease in the blackness. Either way, you’re dead if you’re not lucky as well as careful.
We advanced down the corridor, crouched low. I led the way, Tyberia moved at my shoulder, constantly swinging back to check the way we’d come. Time ceased to have any meaning in those dark halls. For all the enhancements to my memory, I can’t recall how long we moved together, a two-thrall strike team, lost in the Hex’s guts. Gunfire rattled above us, behind us, beneath us… Other crew members on other decks, fighting for their lives against who knew what.
The smoke thinned enough for us to get our bearings, but it never really cleared. It lengthened every shadow and cast half of every corridor into night. At one point, the hallway floor became treacherous underfoot, sucking at our boots. When I looked down, we were ankle-deep in viscous brown slime. It stirred as we sloshed through it, sticky as animal slurry.
‘Oh, God-Emperor,’ Tyberia breathed. ‘Oh, shitting hell. Have you scanned this?’
I didn’t need to scan it. My boot had just bumped a partially articulated ribcage, coated in the slime. I knew what we were walking through. I just didn’t know who it had been. At least two dozen of the crew, maybe closer to fifty.
When I raised my head, my shoulder spotlight followed the motion.
‘Don’t look up,’ I voxed to Tyberia. ‘Just move.’
But of course she looked up, and I couldn’t move despite ordering her to. We both stared at the corridor’s ceiling, just like the walls and deck, covered in blast patterns of gore. A family of wet, red skeletons were fused with the metal of the ship. Several of them were still moving, jaws opening and closing on skinned tendons, dripping fingers reaching for us.
Our Engagers roared.
When we reloaded farther down the corridor, both spattered with the blood of dead crew, a new voice reached me through the background static of our squad’s vox.
‘Helot Secundus.’
‘Master…? Master, is that you?’
His reply was lost in static. I resisted the urge to curse down the vox. ‘Master, please repeat. Heavy interference. I’ve lost my connection to your senses.’
‘Anuradha.’ His voice was a crackle of syllables. ‘My instruments have failed. Report your location.’
I did so, and Amadeus commanded us to make our way to the third ascension concourse where he would meet us with several Spears. When he asked if we’d found the Helot Primus, I could only pray that Kartash hadn’t been in the last corridor.
‘Master, what happened?’
‘The Geller field collapsed before we broke back into real space. The Venatrix launched some kind of psychic mine.’ I could hear the bark of Amadeus’ bolter behind his words. I could also hear screaming that couldn’t possibly be coming from a human throat. It fell silent after another three bolt detonations. ‘The ship was exposed to the Sea of Souls for exactly one point three-five seconds,’ my master continued. ‘Half of the Hex is aflame. Many more decks are flooded by manifestations from the immaterium. Additionally, the Venatrix has followed us back into the void.’
I felt no tremors of weapons fire around us. ‘Is she engaging us?’
‘No. She is boarding us. Do as you were ordered and reach the concourse – we have to repel the Pure.’
‘We’re almost there, master.’ I kept my voice from shaking. ‘Two minutes, no more.’
‘Acknowledged, Helot Secundus.’ And then from nowhere, he added, ‘Be careful.’
I led Tyberia as we ran, heading down one of the ship’s long spinal thoroughfares, grateful for the dissipating smoke. My heart was beating fit to burst, my body stinging from adrenaline. I could hear Tyberia experiencing the same thing; her breath sawed over the vox, into my ears. We ascended a spiral staircase, then crossed a landing at a dead sprint. No bodies anywhere. That, at least, boded well. The heat was still oppressive enough to leave my senses swimming, but mercifully the fires were lessened here.
We rounded the corner at the next junction, and through the wispy smoke, we saw Amadeus at the far end of the corridor. His towering silhouette filled the hallway, and even with all detail lost in the ashen mist, the sight of him fuelled me with relief. The intensity of that emotion almost made me forget myself and greet him with laughter.
Amadeus stood amidst several downed bodies, the shadows at his feet human in scale, writhing and crawling. With idle brutality, he aimed his boltgun down at one of the crawling men and fired. The shell burst the body apart. Gore flowered in the air. Then he placed his boot on the back of a second crawling figure, pinning it in place for a second execution.
Tyberia, with less battle experience, lacked my restraint. ‘Master!’
Amadeus looked up from his work, staring at us through the smoke. He didn’t answer her. He just started running. The decking quivered beneath his heavy tread as he powered towards us. Something so huge had no right to move that fast.
I realised a moment before Tyberia. I was in cover, behind a bulkhead, when the bolts started crashing around us. She hurled herself at my side, crouching behind the dense steel door I was using as a shield.
‘It’s not–’
‘I know, I know.’ I clutched my Engager to my chest and glanced at Tyberia. The ceramite bootfalls pounded closer, carnosaur-loud. My heart was thudding just as fast. A hundred dead heretics and cultists to my name, yet I was trembling like a newborn in winter. Death hammered its way down the corridor towards us.
‘We take him together,’ I said, sounding far surer than I felt.
‘What do we–’
The door exploded against us. My miscalculation almost killed us both, as the Adeptus Astartes warrior chose not to take cover; he chose to break through ours with a bull-rush charge. The bulkhead was ripped from its hinges, crashing to the deck. Tyberia and I were thrown across the gantry floor in clatters of carapace armour. I could hear him over the cacophony, the predatory snarling of his armour joints, the sickly, atomic keening of his power pack: behind me, above me, close, so close.
I moved faster then, than ever before or ever since. I rolled to my back, bringing my Engager up towards the towering shadow, firing at point-blank range. I had one split second of vindication: that Engagers were Space Marine-killers; that he was close enough to hit; that no matter my fear, he couldn’t survive a blast like this.
The shotgun roared in my hands.
I missed.
The shadow above me was a blur of motion. My hands moved without thought, chambering another round. Crunch-click. I fired again.
And missed again. My senses were half a second behind the warrior’s blurring movements. As I fired, he was already weaving away with protesting armour joints. As I chambered a shell, he was already raising his blade.
He kicked the Engager from my hands, hard enough that my fully bionic arm sent a knife of pain through my shoulder. Gunless and on the ground before this god of war, I discharged my terminus-eye. The blast lasered through my helmet, destroying my visor, lancing past the shadow’s raised arms. I missed again. The terminus beam relied on striking where I was looking, and I could barely follow his movements.
Tyberia’s Engager barked from the side. The descending sword sparked with detonating shell fragments and whirled from the warrior’s hand. She caught his weapon, but we couldn’t hit him. We could barely see him.
One of us, I wasn’t sure whether it was me or Tyberia, shouted to aim for the head, aim for the head. The other yelled that they were trying.
The warrior in white moved back in the same furious blur of motion. My reaching grip found my fallen Engager and I fired again, aiming for his head – this time he buckled, staggering off balance. I didn’t see if I’d hit him, I could only guess. When he turned away, I saw the crimson basilisk on his white pauldron: the serpent circling an orb that could only represent a subjugated world.
My shot bought us both a precious few heartbeats to scrabble away. We moved like panicked villagers before a tidal wave – nowhere to go, nowhere to run, fleeing in mindless, animal instinct. I’d only seen Mentors and Spears move the way the Pure moved. To be on the wrong side of that breathtaking violence was a lesson I’d gladly never have learned.
I made it to my feet in time to meet the warrior’s fist. The force was unreal, a beast’s kick to the sternum, driving all breath from my body, shattering my carapace breastplate, hurling me against the corridor wall with enough force that I felt my helmet crack and my skull crack inside it. My cheekbone crunched like pebbles. For a second I was sure I was dead – down on my knees against the wall, blinded by greyness, slavering bile into my rebreather. I groped for the Engager that had tumbled from my grip. I think I said something. I have no recollection of what, or why.
Tyberia’s shotgun bellowed. The shadow above me thrashed but didn’t move away. A talon of ceramite tore at my face, ripping my helmet free, and I screamed because my eye came away with it. I felt the snap, the disconnection of the optic bindings from my broken eye socket.
Tyberia’s Engager roared again. Shell fragments scratched me with cutting heat. I thought, with dizzy surety, she hit me, she hit me.
The warrior cast me down to the deck again. Tyberia cried out as the shadow-giant moved on her. I felt, but didn’t see, the slam as Tyberia struck the corridor wall.
One last time, my hand slapped on my fallen Engager. I raised it, glaring with my remaining eye, firing at the brute’s back. Once, crunch-click, twice, crunch-click, thrice, crunch-click.
The Pure turned to me. His red eye-lenses blazed. He took a step towards me… and went to his knees with a crash louder than any other yet. He raised an empty hand to the blown-out ruination of his chest, where his fingertips stroked over the mangled ceramite crater, filled with wet red pulp that had been his organs and flesh only seconds before.
And still he came for me. He fell to the deck, dragging himself towards me with both hands. I fired my last round, taking him in the faceplate, snapping his head to the side as the Engager round bored through his skull and blasted a red spray out the back of his helm. Laughter gargled from the half of his head that remained. He spoke, though the words were mangled without half of his face.
My reply was wordless, furious fear. I screamed as I dived on him, and in my hands was the priceless power sword that I’d neither earned nor deserved. I rammed it down with both hands, hilting it in his body. The second blow daggered through his spine in a clean plunge, carving deep into the deck beneath him. I know there was a third, as well as a fourth, but I lost count after the fifth. There were more. I just don’t know how many more.
Finally, he lay still.
I stumbled from his back, crawling away from what I prayed was his corpse.
‘Throne of the God-Emperor,’ I panted, slumping with my back to the corridor wall. ‘Throne of the God-Emperor.’
Tyberia was unconscious. Maybe dead, for all I knew. I tried to focus on my monitron bracer, to vox to Amadeus, only to see it’d been smashed in the fight. It flickered, detuned and unreliable.
‘Anuradha,’ said a voice, further down the corridor.
‘Master?’ I looked through the haze of smoke.
No. It wasn’t a Space Marine; it was a skeletal figure, reaching out to me, not in hostility but pained need. I knew him at once. There was no way I could mistake who it was. We were in the warp, the realm of the dead, and the dead had come to welcome us.
‘Water,’ my father said to me. ‘Anuradha. Water. Please.’