The Death of Integrity Read online

  Gallio manoeuvred himself around, craning his head as best as his bulky shoulders would allow into the hole he had made. Voldo watched his suit feed.

  ‘Brother-sergeant, the vessel is at an awkward angle.’

  Voldo saw the corridor, the end concertinaed where it had been forced up against the unnamed ship they sought to leave. The corridor on the next vessel dropped steeply at a twenty degree angle, heading away until it was lost to perspective and the uncertain illumination of lighting millennia old.

  ‘Proceed, Brother Gallio.’

  ‘The lighting is active,’ said Eskerio. ‘I would be wary of the grav plates, brother.’

  Gallio looked upward. The floor of the new vessel was the ceiling, relative to where they were. ‘Affirmative.’ He said. He eased his bulk through the hole, catching his cowling on the jagged breach. He fished around for a piece of metal, and tossed it far into the corridor. Sure enough, the shard flew true until it passed over into the undamaged section of the corridor, when it suddenly arced and dropped with a clatter to the corridor floor.

  Clastrin placed himself in the newly carved door, servo-harness arms extended into the other ship, covering Gallio as he moved forward.

  When Gallio got to the section of active grav plates, he walked up the wall, his boots clicking as they drew themselves onto the metal. The corridor was even narrower than the one he had left, a rat run, and Gallio had trouble getting himself into a position where he could make the transition from the wall to this new floor. He wavered slightly as his boots disengaged and the gravity tugged him upward, but then he was standing on the ceiling, and beckoning to his fellows.

  Clastrin followed, his smaller armour and servo-harness making his transition from one orientation to another easy.

  Eskerio was next, then Voldo. The sergeant reached the section where gravity functioned before radioing to Alanius, who stood in rearguard with Astomar at a crossway that allowed them to stand side by side.

  ‘We are coming,’ said Alanius. ‘I will be glad to leave this place, until the time to reclaim Curzon arrives.’

  ‘Emperor protect him,’ said Voldo.

  The party walked corridors where dust lay thick. The silence was oppressive, infiltrating their spirits, working itself somehow under the constant hum of their suit’s mechanisms and the chattering information of the sensoriums to suffocate them with its presence. It was a permanent, unending silence, a silence that did all it could to remind them that while their noise persisted it might seem suspended, but would return as soon as they had passed. It was the silence of deep space, of the warp: the silence of death.

  Voldo spoke only to give orders, the others to respond. They trudged onward, following the glowing line of Eskerio and Azmael’s map to their salvation. The ship was strangely proportioned, the corridors only just wide enough to accommodate the armour. It was of human build, but like so much of the hulk of unknown age or origin. Clastrin found data portals and briefly interrogated the ship’s spirit, but its databanks were empty, its records stripped away by time or trauma. There were few doors leading from the long corridor they walked, opening onto cramped rooms whose contents were ruined, or which had been crushed altogether.

  For two kilometres they walked this peculiar way. The external temperature rose with every metre, until the air reached twenty degrees.

  ‘The reactor in a nearby ship,’ said Voldo, eyeing a purple vortex on the map some way ahead of them. The ship’s prow projected into a large void, the other side of which the fusion reactor of a much larger vessel burned, locked in a perpetual cycle of matter creation and annihilation.

  They passed over a sharp bend in the corridor, where the ship had been folded upon itself. A hundred metres before them were a set of doors. They approached cautiously, Gallio’s storm bolter ready at the party’s front.

  The doors opened, powered still. They went through into a modest command module; four decks and a bridge, according to their map.

  Clastrin cast his gaze around the bridge. There were but three chairs, for a captain and a first and second pilot. There was no navigator’s throne, and nowhere else in the command module that one might be found. The bridge was weirdly undamaged. Pristine instruments lay under a layer of dust, some of their standby indicators still blinking. The lighting was functional, if dulled by age, and the gravity plates held things in their proper place. By the captain’s chair, a cup sat. The blast shields were down over the two windows.

  Clastrin extended a data probe and plugged into a port, bringing up schematics onto a filthy screen.

  ‘Single system vessel,’ said Clastrin. ‘An interplanetary ore-hauler or container ship.’ The vessel’s image, made at a time when it had been whole, showed a long, thin superstructure with space for thirty containers arrayed around and along its spine.

  ‘No warp engines,’ said Azmael.

  ‘None. But anything that plies space might find itself trapped in an agglomeration should the conditions be right,’ said Clastrin. ‘A warp storm in-system or being caught in the translation of a larger ship could have cast this craft into the empyrean, or it could have fallen into the gravitic embrace of the hulk while it drifted through real space, and been drawn with it back into the warp.’

  ‘Eerie. It is as if they have but stepped out,’ said Azmael. ‘And will return soon.’

  ‘I always find hulks so, brother,’ said Genthis. ‘They are haunted places.’

  ‘That they are,’ said Azmael, and went back to his auspex. Voldo noted that the Blood Drinkers’ battle fervour had abated, and they spoke now with the hush of learned men abroad in quiet spaces.

  ‘The great cavity that Cousin Eskerio spoke of lies outside this vessel, does it not?’ asked Alanius.

  ‘It does,’ said Eskerio. ‘The command module projects into it as an arrow penetrates a board.’

  ‘Forgemaster,’ said Alanius. ‘Can we activate the blast shields, to see our way forward?’

  ‘We can,’ said Clastrin. He did not need to examine the ship’s systems to see it was so. ‘If the ship’s windows are broken, this entire section may become subject to decompression, compromising the atmospheric perturbation and sonar detection aspects of our sensoriums. Brother-Sergeant Voldo, what say you?’

  ‘Brother Eskerio?’

  ‘The auspex indicates some atmosphere in the void, at what precise pressure, I cannot say.’

  Voldo nodded. ‘It is worth the risk. I say open them.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Clastrin.

  The Forgemaster unplugged himself and walked to the first pilot’s console. He brushed away its coating of dust and activated controls that seemed fit for children under his armoured hands. More lights flickered on around the bridge. There came a soft bell, and a request for confirmation in antique Gothic. Clastrin gave it, and the blast shields screeched open, shedding centuries of grime as they slid into their housings.

  ‘Sanguinius protect us!’ hissed Azmael.

  Through the windows, the assembled brothers of the Novamarines and the Blood Drinkers saw a metal cavern, a space captured between the hulls of two ships of overwhelming size – the one opposite them of Imperial origin, the other an alien giant whose smooth skin made up the floor and nearside wall – and into which the command module of their cargo ship protruded. A split twenty metres wide in the hull of the Imperial vessel revealed the roiling energies of an active fusion reactor within. The light it emitted reached into the cave as the rays of an old and feeble sun, illuminating parts of the hulls with stark light, and plunging their crannies into utter blackness.

  Upon the gothic detail of the crushed Imperial ship were genestealers. Scores of them, curled into foetal balls, lying atop or embracing each other with their many limbs. They stirred fitfully as they slept, their fluted bodies moving sinuously against their fellows’ as they dreamed alien dreams, their tubular tongues sliding over black teeth.

  Bathed in the light and warmth of the reactor, the gene-stealers rested deep in hibe
rnation, until the chance to infect another being with their awful genes came to pass, spreading their contagion deeper into the Imperium.

  ‘Our route takes us close by this roost,’ said Clastrin. ‘It is a risk.’

  ‘There are so many of them,’ said Alanius. ‘To fight them would be a fine way to die.’

  ‘I am in no haste to embrace such glory, cousin,’ said Voldo. ‘Better to live and serve the Emperor further.’

  ‘Then what do we do?’ said Gallio. ‘How soon until these genestealers awaken to our presence and pursue us? We will fare badly against so many.’

  ‘Our route goes from this vessel into the xenos craft beneath us, and passes under the roost space,’ said Azmael. A red line blinked in the Terminators’ sensorium maps. ‘From there, we will be able to access the Imperial vessel, and make our way through it to the surface.’ The map zoomed out, showing the flank of the Imperial vessel heaved up into a low hill on the skin of the hulk.

  ‘Three more kilometres to traverse,’ said Genthis. ‘A way to go, brothers.’

  ‘The reactor will pose a problem,’ said Astomar. ‘We can expect the heat to increase, and radiation will be high. How long has that reactor burned? I doubt its fires are clean.’

  ‘You are correct,’ said Nuministon. He had not spoken for some time, and Voldo was almost surprised he was still there. ‘That is a Helios fusion reactor. I have not seen a functioning model for many years. It is thousands of years old, the knowledge to construct such a compact power source lost. Watch!’ He pointed, and the Space Marines saw a flare not unlike that spat out by a star spurt from the white core of the reactor. Rather than uncurling from the source as a stellar flare would, the containment fields stretched it into a fat band around the central mass. ‘That is a malfunction, the machine is compromised.’

  ‘The containment fields are not operating at optimum efficiency,’ said Clastrin.

  ‘What allows energy out, allows matter in. It is likely that the fuel sources have become contaminated with other material, or the reactor would not burn. Such a device operates with near-zero sum inputs, but input is nevertheless required on aeon-scalar periods,’ said the magos.

  ‘And impure fuel begets poison,’ said Clastrin.

  ‘How I would love to minister to it and heal its hurts! The reactor alone is of great value, the Lord Magos Explorator was correct in his assumptions about this hulk.’

  There was something in the way he said this that prompted Alanius to ask him, ‘You doubted him, magos?’

  ‘We have had our differences of opinion in the past,’ said Nuministon. His mechanical voice hid the stiffness Voldo suspected it otherwise would have held.

  ‘None of this will profit anybody if the hulk cannot be cleansed,’ said Voldo.

  ‘I agree. We must take the data I have gathered to our superiors,’ said Alanius.

  ‘Which way then, brothers?’ said Gallio.

  Eskerio pointed with his modified power fist. ‘Downwards.’

  They doubled back to the bend in the ship’s spine. They spent some minutes making sense of the magos’s soundings here, as the data was confused, but eventually it appeared that the cargo vessel’s prow had punched all the way through the alien craft to project into the cavern. The part of the alien ship that had been speared was flat, after the fashion of a broad wing, and it appeared that this had been folded over on itself at some point in the past, leading to a messy geometry in the spaces below them.

  Clastrin cut their way from the cargo craft into the alien ship. There had been no sign of the pursuing genestealers for many hours, and so Voldo allowed Clastrin the time to do his work, fearing the racket from Gallio’s chainfist would awaken the genestealers hibernating in the roost.

  Clastrin cut the cargo ship’s hull unhurriedly and methodically. The doorway he made was neat, and when it was done he pulled a large section away.

  A labyrinth of contorted alien plastics was revealed to them.

  ‘We must be swift here, brothers’ said Voldo. ‘The genestealers have not found a way into this cargo ship, but the space below us opens in multiple places into the roost cavern. There will be active xenos below, and if they find us, they will bring their siblings to wakefulness.’

  They went through the breach. There was no artificial gravity in the alien ship. Whatever race had manufactured it had long gone from the galaxy, for the Adeptus Astartes did not recognise its form, nor did the two initiates to the Martian mysteries understand its construction, which was a seemingly random lattice of spurs that interlocked with little logic.

  They floated free, and used this matrix to pull themselves along, quickly at first, but then with wariness. Some of the spurs were solid as iron, others went to powder at the slightest touch, and Brother Astomar was sent careening through a whole section of them when one snapped in his hand. Astomar stopped himself rightly enough, but the noise he made was significant, and the Space Marines were put on edge. They tensed, stretching out their senses through the suits’ sensorium suites. Voldo moved himself, his suit lights catching on the matrix.

  Voldo was about to signal the all clear when Eskerio spoke.

  ‘Contact,’ he breathed.

  Voldo and the others searched it out. There at the bottom of the tangled structure, a pulsing mark. It was heading unerringly toward them.

  ‘We must go fast now,’ said Voldo. ‘We shall abandon stealth.’

  Two more red marks flashed, then ten more.

  ‘We are one hundred and fifty metres from the Imperial ship’s hull, brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio.

  Alanius turned quickly. ‘There! Movement!’

  ‘Go now!’ shouted Voldo.

  The Space Marines shoved themselves off, the sheer bulk of their suits smashing struts to pieces as they flew. Their left hands crackled as they activated the energy fields surrounding their power fists, and they used these to batter their way through the forest-like mass of supports.

  Voldo risked a look back. Below them, genestealers launched themselves from strut to strut, scurrying upward, their six limbs lending them a grace and speed in the low gravity that the Terminators could not match. He raised his gun, but did not fire. The targets were moving fast and were in dense cover. ‘Conserve your ammunition, brothers!’ he shouted.

  They bludgeoned their way through the struts. The hull narrowed, the floor and ceiling three metres apart. They were forced to work their way around irregular cysts bulging inward from the fabric of the hull. Voldo scrambled between two of these, to find Gallio carving a way out of the alien ship. Nuministon came next, then the compromised Genthis, followed by Clastrin, Alanius, Azmael, and Eskerio. Astomar was last, kicking at something that dragged at his feet. Voldo caught sight of a leering alien face through the suit picter. The genestealer’s lower hands grasped the Space Marine’s greave, but it struggled to get its sharper upper claws at him. Eskerio leaned over and discharged his storm bolter. Astomar’s armour sparked as the missiles caught him. One found its mark in the genestealer’s face and it went limp as its head exploded. Astomar kicked at its hands, until he dislodged it, and pulled himself into the demi-chamber formed by the curved cysts.

  The motion tracker was alive with dots, a wave of xenos rendered in flashing red. Voldo glanced back. The three Blood Drinkers were attacking the rubbery material of the hull wall with their lightning claws, gashing it. Clastrin worked again with Gallio. The Forgemaster’s plasma torches burned, but made little impact on the strange material that made up this part of the hull. Where Gallio’s chainfist penetrated the wall, the hull’s elasticity made it pucker around the blade, snagging the weapon’s teeth and keeping it from being properly breached. Their exit was minutes away from readiness.

  ‘Brother Eskerio! Clear a way for Brother Astomar! Astomar, let fire on my mark.’

  A genestealer lunged at the gap. Astomar punched it in the shoulder with his power fist, caving its shoulder into its chest. He kicked it free. Eskerio shot down three more with co
ntrolled bursts from his storm bolter. Grasping claws forced their way between the other cysts, raking at the air, but the spaces between were too small for them to force their way through.

  Voldo waited until there were no live genestealers by the gap. The sensorium did its best to differentiate the auspex motion detector’s data into dead and live foes, those it deemed no longer a threat turning a deep amber. Four of these floated in the space beyond the cysts, a sickle-shaped formation of twenty or so live contacts beyond that. It was imperative that the promethium of Astomar’s heavy flamer could spread far. If he fired while the gap was plugged, only single genestealers would take the brunt. In the worst case, the fires could wash back into their own space, and they were capable of overwhelming even the great protection of Terminator armour.

  ‘Brother-sergeant, I have a clear field!’

  ‘Fire!’ shouted Voldo.

  Fire bellied out from the heavy weapon, gushing through the gap and billowing out into the wider space beyond. Genestealers shrieked, and Voldo was gratified to see many more contacts turn amber.

  ‘Emperor! The matrix is ablaze,’ said Astomar.

  Voldo looked himself, shouldering Eskerio aside. The structure of the ship had caught fire.

  ‘Should keep them back for a while,’ said Genthis.

  ‘Do not count on it, brother.’ More red dots were closing in on them.

  ‘Almost there, brothers!’ shouted Gallio. His chainfist squealed, the disruption field banging as alien materials went to atoms.

  ‘Look brother-sergeant, the fire.’ Astomar drew Voldo’s attention back to the blaze. It died back quickly, the bone-like matrix smouldering low. Voldo checked his sensorium.

  ‘The flames have consumed the available oxygen,’ said Astomar.

  ‘The xenos will suffocate,’ said Nuministon.

  ‘No,’ said Voldo. ‘Even a vacuum is nothing to them.’ He looked back to Gallio’s work. ‘Ready yourselves!’

  The elastic properties of the hull were exhausted, and Gallio’s weapon suddenly punctured the material fully. A rush of air blasted in through the rip, the hull flapped like a flag in the wind. The fire, suddenly nourished, exploded.