THE TAKERS
Ferro-Giant Omicroid
Saltire Vex, Pelagic Industrial World
Chalnath Expanse
Sleet hammered on the prayer shack’s rusted tin roof. The downpour pelted so hard that stray drops pattered through, setting the ring of candles inside sizzling like hot fat in a skillet.
‘Oh mighty T’au’va, hear us.’
The riggers within raised their voices to compensate for the lashing storm. Robed in ochre sackcloth, they were kneeling around a statue crafted from cheap bars of soap.
The idol was sculpted well enough, showing the likeness of a faceless figure with far too many arms. One of its hands proffered a stylised cornucopia made from a crumpled tin rations pack; another held a stiletto made from a broken toothpick.
‘T’au’va, hear our prayer,’ called out the priestess in front of the statue. A tall woman with a sump-swimmer’s build, her voice was clear and strong over the distant rumble of thunder. She turned an empty salve flask over and over in her hands.
The storm boomed in the distance, closer now.
‘Hear us, and grant us salvation,’ replied the bedraggled crowd of people around her.
The priestess noted with a pang of empathy that some of them were shivering, their twisted limbs wrapped tight to ward against the sodden air. She felt tightness in her chest, a vague notion that something bad was coming.
Something far worse than mere cold.
‘Bring us the deliverance of the communal soul,’ she said. ‘We offer ourselves to you.’
‘We join our strength with yours,’ came the response.
‘We do this not for gifts from the stars,’ continued the priestess. ‘Nor to escape the mind-plague. We do this so that we might serve you in the Greater Good, and be remade in its light.’
‘For the good of all,’ echoed the throng.
The riggers drew close, clasping their hands together until they stood in a tight circle, the statue and its candlelight beneath them. The priestess smiled through her consternation, making eye contact with each of her fellows.
With a shriek of tearing metal, a full half of the roof was ripped away, high winds blasting in a barrage of sleet that extinguished the candles and sent several of the riggers scattering to the walls like cockroaches seeking cover.
The priestess looked up in shock. In places, the night sky rippled like water, the outline of something huge and strangely transparent made visible only by the heavy rain rebounding from its contoured edges.
‘Run!’ she shouted, diving headlong behind Gravide, the largest of their number. She saw Ultrecht kick open the bolted door with a grunt, Aala scooping up the statue behind him and cradling it to herself before running through the sleet to flee out of the shack’s bolted door. Gravide made after them.
Jensa Deel hesitated. Some instinct told the priestess not to follow close. Instead she turned back, making for a discoloured panel at the shack’s rear.
A split second later, she felt something hot and wet cover her entire flank, then a backwash of heat accompanying a swelling tide of pain. As the animalistic need to run fought against the urge to turn and look, the priestess put her shoulder to the discoloured section of the wall – the same section she had divested of its rivets several months ago. For a moment, the panel held fast, but adrenaline and panic lent Deel a surge of strength.
Suddenly, the metal gave way. She tumbled out, grazing her shin on the frame at the base.
‘Jensa,’ came a cry from behind her. ‘Wait!’
The priestess glanced back for a moment. Alaweir was behind her, slicked with blood amongst a scattering of torn corpses. Her eyes were wide in a crimson mask. Then a blinding explosion of light silhouetted Alaweir for a moment, and she vanished in a cloud of red mist.
Deel gaped. They were all gone. The only sign that her friends had ever been present was the blood painting the walls and iron floor. It was already being washed away by the sleet.
The priestess ran as fast as she could down the gantry, her steel-toed boots clanging on the walkway grilles. Driving rain lanced needle-like into her forehead. The chill of it numbed her face as she darted from stanchion to stanchion, hands reaching to cling onto the cold, hard and familiar uprights of the colossal promethium rig.
She felt a terrible pressure building in her head, a growing headache so intense it felt as if her skull might burst with the stress. That thing she had seen above the shack had been camouflaged so well it was invisible but for its outline. There was only one explanation.
The Takers had returned.
There was a shrill scream from above, cut ominously short. Deel doubled over and stumble-ran under the sill of an observation post. She took a look up through a half-grille to the next storey. Something moved, high above; she caught a glimpse of a slow, predatory advance.
Deel’s breath heaved in her chest, heart pounding from exertion and panic. Forcing herself to calm down, she ran across an open expanse of gantry towards a ladder tube and jumped legs-first for the entry port, sliding over the lip and twisting straight down. She blocked her fall with her elbows extended. Shrugging off the impact, Deel grasped the rungs and started descending three at a time.
The pain came a moment later, thumping through her fevered brain, but she pushed it away. Black spots swam in front of her eyes, threatening to merge together and steal her sight entirely.
The thing that had killed Alaweir was close. She could feel its gaze on the back of her neck.
Deel jumped the last twelve feet, landing with an impact so hard it made her knees feel as though they had been struck with lump hammers. Recovering her balance, she grabbed the rigger wrench from a pressure release alcove. She brought it around like a sword, batting clumsily at her invisible assailant.
The blow did not connect, for there was no one there. Her eyes darted into every corner and pool of shadow, but still found nothing.
Slowly, the pain in her head began to recede a little.
Shuffling sidelong, crab-like, down a tight maintenance passage, Deel reached another set of rung hollows and began to descend. These contingency routes were hardly ever used, but had been built into the leg of the colossal rig in case the main apertures were ever ablaze.
The smell of crude promethium filled her nostrils, its odour thick and powerful enough to sting the inside of her nose despite the mist of seawater that filled the air of the lower levels. With the noise of the storm above, there was no way she would be able to hear the approach of the Takers. An invisible enemy could snatch her away at any moment.
The thought made her squeeze her eyes shut, reaching out with her mind to feel for anything that came with deadly intent.
There was an explosion from high above. Deel opened her eyes once more on reflex, raising the wrench as if to strike. The rig shook as if hit by some colossal impact, toppling her sideways.
She reached out for a nearby grille on instinct. Its rust-sharpened edges cut at her fingers, but she kept her footing. Drops of her blood whipped away into the storm, some spattering the mesh of the gantry, others carried down into the iron depths of the rig’s base.
Out to the west she could see the ocean, colder and crueller than she had ever seen it before. It had been thrashed into a frenzy of white-capped waves that hammered into the rig’s thick stanchions.
Sleet whipped in from the edge of the rig, carried almost horizontal by the storm. As she emerged to find the next ladder tube down, an icy blast of air and water hit her like a jet from a burst pipe. She stood firm and fought forwards.
For a moment, she thought she saw lights out there in the darkness, arranged in tight groups. They were moving too fast to be rig ships, too fast even for the Valkyrie carriers of the Astra Militarum.
More Takers, then, come to seal her fate. This time, it would be someone else that struck the names from the rigger’s register the morning after the tempest, someone else that counted the cost and set in motion the prescribed period of grieving.
Something flickered in the edge of Deel’s vision. On instinct, she threw herself to one side. She cried out as a burst of light and heat flung her along the gantry in a tangle of limbs. The rusted grille she had kept close had taken the brunt of the explosion, but the energies had washed through it. The back of her fatigues hung in rags, exposing long burns, ribbons of duracloth and ruined skin flapping in the wind.
Deel gave a long, keening cry. ‘Please,’ she said, her jaw shuddering in cold and pain. ‘Just let me live.’
There was a crack of lightning and, almost simultaneously, a double boom of thunder. The storm was immediately overhead now.
In that strobing flash, Deel saw a light in the corner of her eye. She hefted her wrench and ran for the narrow corridor between two giant fusil capacitors, her lungs aching. The backs of her thighs were singing with pain, the icy rain stabbing its cold talons into her open wounds.
The priestess rebounded from the walls as she half-ran down the narrow passage, cursing herself for a fool as she realised it led to the northern edge of the rig. Not good enough. The work platform on the other side was dangerously exposed.
Deel winced as she heard another scream, this time close by.
Wriggling through a triangular gap inside one of the rig’s main supports, she used the criss-crossing diagonal bars like the rungs of a ladder, planting her feet at each junction so as not to lose her footing on the rain-slicked metal. She clung tight as she descended, avoiding scraping her wounded back and legs on the salt-encrusted uprights of the support.
Another dozen steps down and she would be able to crawl back out on the level below. Another two levels below that, and she had a shred of hope for survival. Perhaps, if she could make it to the pontoon, an evacuation craft might already be loading up.
Klaxons blared high above as the rig’s auto-responses finally awoke to the fact it was under attack. The alarms came much too late, as usual. The Takers worked too fast and too stealthily for such conventional measures to thwart them.
In the distance Deel saw blurs of movement, a shadow briefly visible behind a ring-iron fence. Something massive had stalked past her position as she passed Level Tert-Epsilon.
There was a blaze of light, and a very human bellow of defiance. Another flash. The voice grew louder – she recognised Rotheran’s phlegmy roar – before it was abruptly silenced.
The acrid stink of promethium grew almost unbearable as Deel descended towards the vat farms, forcing herself to focus on her progress. ‘Hand over hand,’ she panted. ‘Just take it easy. Can defeat the Takers. Just need a chance.’
She realised she was muttering into the storm, and forced herself into silence by biting her lip. She needed to conserve her breath. Another ten steps, and she would come out near the gate. Beyond that were the promethium vats. There, she would make it to the pontoons and the freedom they represented – or a death that would be swift and spectacular.
Perhaps the vats’ sheer volatility would stop the Takers from risking a direct attack. Perhaps she could make it after all. Deel burst from her hiding place in the stanchion and sprinted the distance into the vat farm through the front gate.
The caulk-swathed servitor caryatids on either side of the promethium gate growled in confusion. It offended them to see her pass without the correct vocal offerings and blandishments. They set their hazard klaxons bleating an intruder alarm as she passed, so strident and aggressive that even a born killer might be scared away.
So much for stealth. At least she might draw a few of the Takers away from her colleagues before they put her down for good.
‘Come any closer and I’ll spark these up!’ she shouted, waving her wrench at the promethium vats.
The only answer was the boom of waves pounding against the stubby, broad legs of the rig’s main supports.
Deel sprinted to the rear of the vat farm, its monolithic cylinders looming on either side of the gantry run. She pushed into another triangular pillar through a slim aperture, blocking the pain from her mind as she slid one leg, then the other through the widest opening she could find. She got her hips through – no mean feat in itself – and dropped down to the lower level with a clang.
Biting back a sob of pain and self-pity, she desperately fought the urge to touch the ruin of skin on the back of her legs. She was safe, for the moment. She had to be.
Deel saw another flicker of movement, less than a hundred feet to the north on the other side of the gate. The tang of bile rose up unbidden in the back of her throat as she wiggled back and away, praying to T’au’va that she remained unseen. She emerged from the other side of the triangular pillar and ran on animal instinct, her hindbrain taking over to drive her away as fast as she could run. Putting the promethium vats at her back, she staggered out onto the reclaimant pontoon, hoping desperately to see an evacuation craft loading nearby.
Nothing.
Just an endless vista of crashing grey waves, the nearest slapping hard at the cylindrical fuel-siphons marching out to the sea.
Something massive loomed from behind the closest of the siphon pillars, its outline visible only because of the frozen rain pummelling into its flank. A Taker.
Deel screamed as a tide of pain swelled up from her spine to eclipse her mind. She went blind, staggering into a foetal crouch as her brain burned like a lidless eye bathed in simmerfuel. Then there was a sudden release, and a feeling like cool water dousing her aggravated nerves.
When she opened her eyes once more, the stanchions to her right had been carved apart, their edges glowing cherry-red as if slashed by some high-powered cutting laser. A crane rig, two of its legs shorn straight through, creaked ominously before looming, toppling and crashing down, its bifurcated top half spinning end over end into the violent waters below. A giant double wave rose from the impact, sending sea spray high before falling back with a crash.
Revealed behind the crane rig was a giant some twenty feet in height, its ochre mass seemingly frozen in place. It was inhuman and surprisingly bulky, its bulbous head set within a wide and powerful frame. Standing atop one of the promethium siphons, it had its arms poised as if it was about to leap. Strange lights flickered upon its extremities, and cords of electricity writhed around the dual scars of molten metal that cut diagonally across its torso.
Deel felt numb as the reality of the vision before her sank in.
The Takers were not ghosts, nor were they storm giants come from the sky to claim a feast of human flesh.
They were something far more formidable. Xenos.
The massive machine rippled as if underwater, its smooth-lined sophistication otherworldly next to the rugged Imperial constructions around it. Even as she watched, it shimmered, its outlines blurring to blend with the steel grey of the water behind.
‘We are your allies!’ shouted Deel into the storm, her words snatched away by the wind. She linked her hands, fingers twining in the sign of the Greater Good. ‘We are gue’vesa!’
The giant machine took a gunner’s crouch, swinging around the strange tripartite gun that formed its arm.
Horror swamped Deel’s mind. She ran from the machine, leaped from the edge of the pontoon and dived headlong into the raging sea.