The Last Hunt Page 8

  And then it shifted. The screen blurred, lost for a moment to static. For a second Davrick assumed one of the monster’s tendrils had knocked out the external pict-feed. But when the viewscreen came back online the image was still present. What was more, the maw was receding. The xenos beast was reversing away from them.

  The station shuddered again as the tendrils that had latched around it released their snaggle-toothed grip, sliding back into the monster’s depths as its maw constricted. It pulled away from them and then went upwards, displaying its fleshy lower fronds as it slipped over the augur masts and vox-beacons. The pict-feed on the other side of the station caught its trailing rear as it passed back down the other side, floating on in-system past the little monitoring platform.

  For a moment, nobody spoke. Davrick, like the others, simply stared after the xenos creature’s languid, receding form. It was Crasus who snapped them out of it.

  ‘Turn off those damned alarms!’ he ordered. Korday hit the overrides, one after the other. Silence flooded the space left by the clattering emergency systems. Even the hum of the cogitators and vox-banks, now deactivated, had gone. Davrick had never heard the little station so silent before.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Sereen breathed. All eyes turned to Crasus. With what was clearly an immense effort, the old sensorum master stilled his shaking hands. The ugly emergency lighting made him look even more wizened and gaunt than usual.

  ‘We wait,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing else we can do. The distress beacon is still transmitting. One of the system defence cutters will pick us up.’

  It was a lie and they all knew it. A vast xenos threat had just arrived in-system. The last considerations for the captains of Darkand’s handful of combat-worthy void craft would be the salvation of the augur stations on the system’s fringes. Nor were there any shuttles or salvation pods to facilitate an evacuation. The crew were delivered to the station and then, after six months, rotated off for a week’s leave. According to the cycle logs there was still a full Terran month to go before they were to be replaced. There was no way for any of them to abandon the station.

  ‘Why did it leave us?’ Korday wondered out loud, staring after the receding alien bio-ship. ‘It had us.’

  ‘We were… no threat to it,’ Crasus said slowly. ‘No threat to its fleet.’

  ‘Chief,’ Sereen interrupted. ‘Chief, look.’

  The augur analyst was pointing back at the pict screens. It took a second for Davrick to realise what it was he was looking at. When he did, the reason for their survival became clear.

  The vanguard xenos bio-ships had passed by. JUF-D19/Rimward was now at the heart of their fleet. And, compared to the organic drones that quested ahead of the main swarm, the true organisms of the hive fleet were behemoths. Davrick’s mind struggled to comprehend what he was seeing as he took in sheets of pockmarked chitin the size of small continents and toothed orifices the size of cities. The thick clusters of tendrils along its flank and underbelly writhed in the solar winds while its maw was encompassed by two great, wicked, beak-like bone plates that looked as though they could have sheared an Imperial capital ship in half.

  And the worst thing about the nightmarish leviathan was that it was coming straight towards the augur station.

  ‘Oh God-Emperor,’ Ankum stammered, over and over. Korday was quietly sobbing, his head in his hands. Sereen just stared, the image on the viewscreen reflected in her wide, dark eyes. Only Crasus turned away from the display. He walked over to the worn leather of his command chair, paused, tugged his dark blue sensorum master’s uniform straight, and sat down. His expression was unreadable, jaw locked, though in the harsh emergency lumens he looked more haggard than ever.

  ‘Crew members,’ he said, his words cutting through Ankum’s and Korday’s despair. ‘In the past decades of service, it shames me to admit that I have not said this enough. Regardless, if there was ever a time, Throne knows it’s now. It has been an honour to man this station with all of you.’

  ‘And with you, chief,’ Davrick said. He was the only one to respond. His own words felt distant, disconnected, as though he was speaking to himself from somewhere far away. His mind was sluggish, unresponsive. His breathing felt laboured. A strange, detached part of his mind supposed that he was probably having a panic attack.

  Crasus had no more orders to give. He simply sat, watching the viewscreen. Davrick reached out towards his little pict capture of Amilia and Drui, his wife and son, tacked to the side of his monitor. He would see them again, some day. He was sure of it. A fresh surge of stuttered oaths from Ankum distracted him before he could pull the pict off the side of the display.

  The tyranid bio-ship had filled the viewscreens. Even as the stunned crew watched, the monstrosity’s great, hooked chitin beak split apart. The maw yawned wide, impossibly wide, wide enough – Davrick was sure – to swallow one of Darkand’s moons. Its shadow fell across the augur station, blotting out the light of the stars. The structure around them seemed to shudder, as though its terror matched that of its crew. The viewscreen now showed nothing but static-washed darkness. It had swallowed them whole.

  Korday had slumped on the deck, shaking and weeping uncontrollably. Crasus was looking down into his lap, knuckles white where he gripped the arms of his chair. Ankum had finally stopped gibbering.

  ‘Sereen,’ he managed to say, looking over at the augur analyst. ‘Sereen, there’s something I need to tell you…’ She continued to stare at the now-blank viewscreen.

  A sudden impact threw them all. Davrick found himself sprawling across the deck, almost on top of Korday. The station shook violently, tremors dislodging rune banks and audio systems and sending Davrick’s empty recaff tin bouncing across the deck. The alarms triggered again across the cramped station. Crasus, who alone had managed to stay in his seat, deactivated them without comment. The viewscreen had gone offline completely, showing nothing but grey static.

  ‘Th-they’re going to board us?’ Ankum stammered as they picked themselves up. Any response was lost in another jarring impact. The station’s frame shrieked in protest at the stresses put upon it. With their systems scrambled and broken it was impossible to tell exactly where they were, or what was happening outside.

  The station seemed to settle slightly, the sounds of tortured metal reduced to a low creak. They all scanned the ceiling, looking for any sign of a breach.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ Sereen said. It was the first time she’d spoken since seeing the bio-ship. They all listened, breath held, straining to hear over the groan of adamantium and Korday’s muted sobs. Eventually Davrick caught what Sereen had detected, a faint scratching, scrabbling noise, as though someone – or something – was scraping across the outside of the hull. It mirrored the scratching tormenting all of them from inside their own skulls.

  ‘They’re on the hull,’ Davrick said. Before he could go on, a crash shattered the breathless quiet. The section directly above Crasus’ chair, in the centre of the station’s cockpit, collapsed. With it came a flood of broiling green liquid that struck Crasus just as he looked up.

  If the old sensorum master managed to draw breath to scream, the bio-acid flooded his mouth, throat and lungs before he could make a sound. Davrick caught an impression of his death as he was lost entirely in the torrent – flesh sloughing from bones, organics consumed in a heartbeat. The rest of the crew recoiled, but too slowly – Sereen, nearest to the centre of the cockpit, was struck by the acidic spray. Her hands went up to her exposed face, and her screaming filled the claustrophobic space.

  ‘No!’ Ankum wailed, lunging across his bench to catch the augur analyst as she collapsed. He managed to drag her hands away from her face, then recoiled. Her features had already been reduced to pockmarked bone, her eyeballs running like liquid from their sockets, meat and tendon slipping away with her fingers. Still she screamed. Ankum doubled over and was sick.

 
Davrick, whose station was furthest from Crasus’ chair, ­scrambled back on top of his bench as the flood of acid spread across the decking plates. Sereen had collapsed into the rising swill, her body coming apart. Ankum tried to push himself against his vox-banks but was sick again, and collapsed. The bugs got to him before the acid.

  There were insects in the hissing, steaming slime – writhing, sightless maggot-things with hard black shells. They swarmed from the discoloured, vomit-like bio-matter, the air full of the susurration of their passing as they swiftly covered the deck and then the cogitator stations, workbenches and walls, riding the rising tide of acid. First hundreds and then thousands of them reached Ankum, swarming over his boots and knees and up his arms where he was crouched against the vox-systems. He tried to scream, but choked on his own bile. His eyes rolled back into their sockets as the alien swarm began eating him alive.

  Korday killed himself. Face still streaked with tears, he leapt directly from his bench into the stream that had consumed Crasus and his command chair. He was gone in an instant, as the breach in the station hull was burned wider.

  As Ankum’s eaten-out remains collapsed into the bio-organics sloshing about the cockpit’s deck, Davrick stood rooted to the top of his bench. He couldn’t think, couldn’t move. He was in the throes of panic – a part of him realised he should end it quickly like Korday, but another part was desperate for another way out, any way out that avoided the nightmare bile that was burning away everything. It was digesting them whole. Even as the terror kept him in place Groll’s binary chair collapsed, pitching the unresponsive tech-adept into the effluvium. His red cloak billowed for a moment before he was lost, coming apart amidst the steaming clouds of liquefied organics.

  For a moment, Davrick was alone. For a single, ludicrous second, everything felt surreal, ridiculous, almost calm. It had to be a nightmare. None of this horror could possibly be real.

  Then his bench collapsed.

  ‘Oh, God-Emperor, no!’ he screamed, trying to scramble back onto the plasteel’s disintegrating remains. ‘No, no, no!’

  The bio-acid caught him, sloshing around his boots and his lower fatigues. His panicked wails quickly turned to screams of agony as the material was eaten away, exposing flesh that in turn began to slough off. Muscle and sinew became grey, organic paste, that revealed bone that gave way and splintered beneath its own acid-gnawed weight.

  Davrick died slowly, on his knees, eaten up inch by inch by the bile and the sightless, burrowing things that swam in it. Eventually the insects flooded his raw throat, choking and suffocating him as they ate out his eyes and bored through his nose and ears and into his brain. The acid took what remained.

  As another section of the hull caved to emit a fresh gout of vicious toxins, the picture of Amilia and Drui fell from the side of Davrick’s primary viewscreen into the flood. In an instant, the smiling wife and son were gone, consumed entirely.

  The Pride of Chogoris,

  high orbit, Darkand

  The sensorium gantries edging the bridge of the Pride lit up with fresh augur reports, underlining the strained features of the crew zarts working to transcribe the scanned outputs.

  ‘We’ve lost contact with the last of the system’s rimward augur stations, voyagemaster,’ one reported, the words clicking in Tzu Shen’s ear.

  ‘Acknowledged,’ he responded. He was already aware of the station’s loss. The data cables linking his throne mount to his cranial nodes and black carapace fed him constant updates from across the ship’s systems – scanner arrays, vox-clusters, the enginarium, the weapons decks. The sigil representing Augur Station JUF-D19/Rimward had blinked from existence in his mind’s eye moments earlier. The only thing that surprised him was that it had remained online and transmitting for so long, surrounded as it was by the spreading stain representing Hive Fleet Cicatrix.

  ‘Bring us to a fresh heading,’ the venerable voyagemaster ordered over the short-range vox. ‘Point two-four starboard. Level speed.’

  A flurry of acknowledgments clicked back over the link. Shen let out a slow breath and settled himself on the ship’s throne mount, feeling his flesh twitch where the cables and subdermal implants snagged. The slight change in the ship’s stance was unnecessary, but it did not sit well with a White Scar to remain stationary, whether upon the Plain Zhou or in the void’s depths. They had been locked in position, stasis-anchors dropped, for almost six Terran hours. He knew that the rest of the Fourth Brotherhood’s fleet would be responding to the fractional change he’d ordered, adjusting their own headings to maintain the an-chi – the holding formation adopted in Darkand’s high orbit.

  He ran through the deployments one more time via his mind links, one hand subconsciously stroking the long, white hair of his forked beard. The Pride of Chogoris sat at the heart of the Fourth Brotherhood’s ships, in the place of honour. To its starboard, and a little lower on the atmospheric plain, was the Sword-class escort squadron, three vessels: the War Wind, Tulwar and Starsteed. To port, anchored slightly higher, were the twin Cobra escorts, ­Falcon and Steppe Lord. The formation was loose, flexible, and offered the maximum capacity to both hold and attack. It was a typical pattern, adopted by Shen and his escort voyagemasters a thousand times.

  It was the waiting formation. It meant nothing was happening. And that never sat well with any of them.

  With a thought-impulse the White Scar cast the net of his consciousness wider, tapping into the analysis scans of the system’s rimward edge and the final data packets delivered by the augur stations before they’d gone offline. The transmissions had been vital – they’d been able to map out the extent of the xenos fleet before contact had been lost. The entire swarm had now translated in-system, clustered around the primary hive ships. They were making their way ponderously – though, according to the ­latest long-range detection by the Pride’s own augur probes, with increasing speed – towards Darkand, bypassing the system’s uninhabited worlds, a trio of gas giants, and a radiation-scorched wasteland labelled on the star charts as Tachi’s Folly. Assuming their pace continued to increase, estimates saw them contesting high anchorage in around forty hours’ time.

  As far as Shen was concerned, there would be no contesting at all.

  The space above Darkand was almost clear, bar the White Scars fleet and the planet’s unmanned communications satellites. The meagre defence gunboats and fast cutters responsible for guarding the planet’s orbital anchorages and shipping lanes in the absence of the Imperial Navy had been ordered away, along with the commercial freighters and merchant vessels clustered in low orbit. Shen had provided them with coordinates to the system’s coreward edge, away from Darkand. If the worst happened and the planet was lost, they would be able to translate into the empyrean while the xenos were still feeding. The undermanned defence ships would only get in the way of the White Scars fleet, and it made sense to salvage what they could while there was still an opportunity.

  Shen was aware that Joghaten had already made it clear to Darkand’s leading dignitaries that the White Scars had no intention of safeguarding any ranking Imperial assets, or accommodating them on board the Pride. The governor and his ministers would stay on the planet, along with the rest of the planet’s inhabitants, and live or die there, as the fates willed. All that concerned Shen now was having a clear orbit space. The next few hours had to play out exactly as planned if the Fourth Brotherhood was to have any hope of survival, let alone victory.

  Shen pulled his consciousness back in, momentarily syphoning out much of the vast flow of information filling his thoughts. The Pride of Chogoris and its small attendant fleet was far removed from the panic besetting Darkand’s exospheric shipping lanes. The yurut bridge was a quiet, calm place, thick with the sweetness of burning incense sticks and undercut by the gentle throb of the idling plasma drive and the click and tap of cogitator cores and rune boards.

  It had always been a place of or
der and measured calm, even before Shen had taken the throne mount from his predecessor, almost four centuries ago. The Pride of Chogoris was what White Scars voyagemasters referred to as a harmonious ship. When the peoples of Mundus Planus had first ventured into the star-seas, they had carried many of their cultural cues with them. Chogorian captains identified the state of their vessels in terms of balance. Each ship possessed its own jïngshén – spirit – and each was different in nature.

  Some traversed the endless void and the depths of the empyrean with a heavy weariness, made old and staid through many millennia of service. Many others hungered for the rush and release of battle, their plasma drives and warp engines always biting a little closer to the limit, their augur clusters probing for new, worthy foes. Still others sought to battle against the constraints placed upon them by their voyagemaster, especially if he had only recently taken his throne mount, or the ship was particularly venerable. The ship might drift off course unless constantly monitored, or it might stubbornly keep its shields raised long after the start of the deactivation protocols.

  The bond between the Pride and the voyagemaster had only grown stronger down the centuries, especially after Shen had lost his natural-born sight. They had caught a fleeing tyranid splinter fleet off the spiral arm of the Nebrison Cluster in late 970.M41. The xenos had turned at bay, and proved stronger than had been anticipated. Bio-warrior organisms had succeeded in boarding the Pride and penetrating the primary yurut. The zarts, fighting bravely with what they had to hand, had held the shrieking swarm long enough for Joghaten and his brothers to arrive – Shen’s last sight had been of the Master of Blades falling in amidst the hissing xenos, his twin tulwars a storm of striking silver, face a mask of controlled, icy fury. Then an alien’s claws had raked Shen, and taken his eyes.