The blisternest was an organic structure the size of a large Terran hive. Its walls, compartments, chambers and linking tunnels were curved and organic, and seemed to have been formed or grown from some greyish, semi-transparent material that had been extruded and then woven, hardening in the air. From the outside, it looked like a swollen blister. Inside, it was like venturing through the chambers of some alien heart. There was a general dampness and humidity, and sections of the structure throbbed and pulsed wetly, heaving with pus-like fluids that pumped and writhed through the building’s skin. The compartments and chambers inside were more like valves and organic voids, the spaces inside living structures. There was mould and fungal growth, and pockets of vapour. The echoing tubes throbbed with the tek-tek-tek sound, and the deeper agitation of the more powerful warrior-forms.
At regular intervals the interior sounds generated by the nation of Chromes were drowned out as airstrike support howled in overhead. Low-flying attack runs left blossoming trails of firestorm fury in their wake, engulfing the upper levels of the blisternest. Flights of Caestus rams, specialist vehicles designed for ship-boarding actions, had been unleashed too, driving their armoured prows into the skin of the vast nest to deliver assault squads of shield-corps brothers.
Slaughter waged his own war through the dank, miasmal chambers. The muzzle-flash of his bolter, jumping and sun-bright, lit up the green twilight of the nest. He kept his sword drawn. The big warrior-forms tended to get the bolter rounds. The regular Chromes met his blade’s edge. In places, the dipping, curved floor of the nest tunnels was ankle-deep in swilling Chrome ichor. The standing fluid reflected the crackling light of multiple fires, and crimped with ripple patterns every time an airstrike shook the ground.
A pack of Chromes rushed him down the flue of a tunnel. Slaughter stood his ground and set in with sword and boltgun. Severed or exploded aliens peeled away on either side of his resolute form, or were hurled backwards into their kin. Slaughter bellowed the battle cry of Daylight Wall, and urged his brothers up the ducts and grimy arterial conduits that the nest used as corridors.
His yellow armour was flecked with soot and slime. He smashed a charging Chrome away from him with the back of his fist. The thing broke as it hit the nest wall and left a spatter of juice as it slid down. One of the bigger, darker things attacked. With a grim smile, Slaughter realised he was thinking of these things as ‘veterans’. They were the old guard. He admired their skill and their power. They had fought wars for their benighted race out among the stars. He could see that in them. They had protected their own and perhaps conquered territory. He wondered which xenos species they had battled that he had also fought.
The first thing a good warrior always did was respect his enemy. He evaluated and assessed his foe, and woe betide him if he failed to appreciate what his opponent brought to the field. Slaughter had nothing but appropriate respect for the ‘veterans’. He’d seen them gut and dice enough of his shield-brothers that day already. The losses were going to be high. At least, he reflected, the damn lordlings and politicos would be pleased. The war against the Chrome advance was proving that serious threats still remained, and that military forces like the Imperial Fists were not expensive luxuries.
The second captain met the veteran’s approach with his blade, deflecting the scything claws of the upper limbs. The veteran was strong, and managed to smash the sword out of Slaughter’s grip.
He cursed and shot it through the brain case with his bolter. The entire front of his armour was sprayed an instant grey. Another lumbered towards him and he shot that too, blowing out its midsection and snapping its spinal membranes. Frenzy finished the next with his axe.
‘Getting tired, captain?’ Heartshot asked Slaughter.
Slaughter told him what he could do with his rotor cannon, and then retrieved his sword.
‘Anterior Six and Ballad Gateway are now in the nest with us,’ reported Frenzy, his voice a vox-buzz.
‘That’s good enough,’ said Slaughter. ‘Four walls should bring this place down.’
‘There are assault squads from Zarathustra in the upper levels too,’ said Coldeye.
‘We can close the book,’ said Slaughter. ‘By the next time the wretched local star rises, we–’
His words were drowned out. A sudden and deep noise boiled out of the guts of somewhere, out of space itself. It was brief, but it was immense. It shook the nest. It overloaded the frequencies of their vox-systems for a moment. It hurt their ears.
Slaughter’s visor display took a moment to reboot.
‘What in Throne’s name was that?’ he asked.
‘Contacting the fleet,’ reported Frenzy. ‘Checking.’
‘Some kind of transmission,’ said Chokehold. ‘Ultra-high frequency. Gross intensity. Duration six point six seconds. A new weapon, perhaps?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Slaughter grudgingly.
They resumed their advance. After a few minutes, fleet tactical reported back that they hadn’t been able to identify the sound either. It had been picked up by Imperial forces all across the planet, and in orbit too.
‘A new weapon,’ muttered Chokehold. ‘I told you…’
There was another burst about half an hour later, duration seven point nine seconds. By then, Slaughter’s force was locked in a furious hand-to-hand war with dozens of veterans. The noise took them all by surprise.
When it ended, the Chrome veterans were slightly stunned, and then recommitted to the fight with renewed fury. As though they were afraid, and starting to panic.
Six
Ardamantua
The magos biologis’ name was Phaeton Laurentis. When the first noise burst occurred he was preparing to enter the blisternest behind the shield-corps advance. The blast of sound terminally damaged two of his six sensitive, audio-specialised servitors. Like Slaughter, he immediately contacted fleet tactical, and also sent direct vox-burst communiques to the staff of his own vessel, the survey barge Priam, which was in the vanguard of the Imperial Fists fleet.
‘Tell them I need at least a dozen more audio-drones shipped to the surface,’ he told his communication servitor. The servitor, a grinning bronze skull mounted on a cloak-swathed wire anatomy, chattered its teeth mechanically as its brainstem fired processed vox data-packets into the aether. Laurentis reeled off a list of other complex devices he would need: techno-linguistic engines, parsing cogitators, vocalisation monitors, trans-aetheric responder coils.
‘Permission denied for surface drop of requested material,’ the communication servitor replied after a minute. Its voice, which emanated from a mesh speaker cone fused into its verdigrised collarbone, was oddly that of a young woman. As the voice spoke, the bronzed skull clacked its teeth aimlessly and uselessly.
‘On what authority?’ asked Laurentis, offended.
‘Undertaking Command,’ the servitor replied.
‘Open me a direct link with the Chapter Master,’ said Laurentis.
‘Pending.’
‘Of course, he will be busy. Inform me when the link is open,’ Laurentis said, and strode off to mount one of the motorised carts that would convey, on their heavy, clattering treads, the magos’ survey staff into the alien habitat.
Smoke from the nest clambered into the sky as if trying to flee the warzone. The heavens above were black with filth, and embers rained down. Around the edges of the nest, which were cracked and splintered like the shell of an egg, the soil and vegetation were awash with draining bio-fluids from ruptured nest organics and the ichor of slain Chromes. There was a pervasive stink of rotten fruit.
Such a sight, such a vivid display of an alien ecology, even one so damaged and desecrated, should have filled Magos Biologis Laurentis with total fascination. His life had been dedicated to the study of xenoforms, and it was very rare, even for a man as distinguished and respected as he was, to see such a spectacle first hand. Usually,
the only traces of hostile xenoforms and their habitats that magi biologis got to inspect were burned scraps and fused tissue residues brought back by undertaking fleets.
However, his enthusiasm for his research, and the alien specimens spread out before him awaiting his probes and scalpels, was muted. The sound had bothered him, and he knew exactly why.
A total of four noise bursts, each of progressively longer duration, occurred in the following ninety minutes. After the fourth, Chapter Master Cassus Mirhen walked slowly and thoughtfully across the gleaming bridge space of the battle-barge Lanxium, took his seat on the great steel throne, and gestured to the vox-servitor that had been waiting patiently for almost two hours.
The command crew and the bridge officers watched the Chapter Master anxiously. He was a great man, arguably the greatest warrior alive in the Imperium. His deeds and achievements were recognised on an honour roll that was the envy of all other Chapter Masters. He was commander of the Imperial Fists, and the living embodiment of Dorn himself.
But he had a temper, oh yes indeed…
Since the latest phase of the attack had begun in the early part of the day, Mirhen had been on his feet in the ship’s strategium, watching every last scrap of data as it came through from air and ground forces, and taking personal control of every tactical nuance. Defence was the Imperial Fists’ greatest skill, and even in attack, the Chapter’s strategy was reflective and complex. Nothing was left to chance. Nothing was over-extended or risked. Leave the headlong insanity of assault to the likes of the Fenrisian Wolves or the White Scars. The Imperial Fists were the Imperium’s finest military technicians, and even the most fluid plans of assault were made with the same precision reserved for indefatigable defence. It was often repeated that the Lion had once scoffed at Dorn’s precision thinking, remarking that ‘no plan ever survives contact with the enemy,’ to which Dorn had retorted, ‘Then you’re not making the right plans.’
Indeed, Imperial Fists methodology, the methodology that had saved Terra in its darkest hour, the methodology espoused by Rogal Dorn and inherited by Mirhen, seldom used the word ‘plan’. Mirhen prided himself on ‘schemes of attack’, whereby layers of careful, preconsidered variables could be stripped back as necessary. Every step of combat – that most chaotic and mercurial of all circumstances in the galaxy – gave way to multiple possibilities. Some warriors, especially the noble Ultramarines, reacted intuitively to such possibilities as they occurred.
An Imperial Fist identified and prepared for all of them, and simply diverted to the part of the scheme that was most appropriate.
Most believed that Mirhen’s presence in the strategium, and his hands-on approach to the Ardamantua Undertaking, was typical of this obsessive precision thinking. In truth, Mirhen liked the challenge. War did not come often enough for him. It was a test, a game, an exercise, a trial. He wanted to be involved, entirely involved; he wanted to push himself.
War was fading away in the Imperium of Mankind. The purposes for which the likes of the Adeptus Astartes had been engineered were dying out. They had done their job. Peace prevailed across a billion worlds. Only distant skirmishes and half-hearted wars boiled along the hem of the frontier, most of them the endless campaigns of suppression against the ubiquitous greenskins. The orks never went away. They menaced and harried the edges of the Imperium like packs of feral dogs, and every now and then broke in through the metaphorical fence and got at the metaphorical livestock. Once or twice every few centuries, a new and potent bestial warboss arose, their numbers multiplied in response, and another of their mass onslaughts was unleashed. Mirhen knew from intelligence briefings that the greenskins were currently enjoying one of these periodic revivals, and that for the last few decades some of the frontier wars had been especially hot. But even so, they were exactly that – frontier wars. They were very far away, far too far to act as effective demonstrations of Imperial might to the population of the Terran Core. And the orks had not been a serious, palpable threat since they had been stopped at Ullanor by the beloved Emperor Himself.
Ardamantua was different. It wasn’t the frontier, it was close. It was a genuine xenos threat without being a critical one. It was also an opportunity to live-test the capabilities of his Chapter and his own mind, and to demonstrate the enduring worth of the Adeptus Astartes. Opportunities on the scale of Ardamantua were all too rare.
Mirhen’s temper was famous. It manifested, more often than not, when those around him failed to keep pace with his tactical thought process. He’d even been known to rage at cogitators and data-engines. His anger showed when the rest of the universe failed to stay in step with his brilliance.
First Captain Algerin had privately remarked that Mirhen had become Chapter Master because of his anger. Yes, his tactical genius was astonishing, but it was equalled by three dozen of the senior ranking Fists. What Mirhen had was a tactical genius tempered by passion and the unpredictability of gut feeling. Some said there was more of Sigismund in him than Dorn.
When Mirhen retired to his throne during the pitch of the assault, all of the bridge crew expected his anger to emerge. The noise bursts had confounded them and there was a tense feeling that they represented something that had not been factored into a precondition.
‘Connect me,’ the Chapter Master told the vox-servitor.
The servitor extended its vox-speakers and opened its mouth. A beam of light projected out of it and formed a hololithic image on the deck at the Chapter Master’s feet.
A jumping, inconstant pict image of the magos biologis appeared, cut and broken by atmospherics and data-feed. Laurentis was in profile and appeared to be riding on some kind of open vehicle, and the light conditions were poor.
‘Magos,’ said Mirhen.
‘Sir,’ the magos crackled back over the speakers. He turned to look at his pict unit, his face turning full on in the image.
‘You sent a signal?’
‘Over two hours ago, sir. I need to transport equipment to the surface from my vessel, and permission has been denied.’
‘There is an assault underway, magos. I was not in a position to grant orbit to surface passage for any non-military transport.’
‘Are you now in a position to authorise my request?’ asked the magos. ‘If I can explain, I need the items so I can–’
‘You don’t need to explain, magos,’ said Mirhen.
‘I don’t?’
‘It concerns these bursts of noise, doesn’t it?’ asked the Chapter Master. ‘Your comm-request came through very shortly after the first one. You have not got in my way before, magos. It was slow-witted of me not to realise that you would only request a surface drop in the middle of an action like this if it was both urgent and pertinent.’
‘I appreciate the compliment, sir. You are quite correct.’
‘Tell me what you know,’ said Mirhen.
‘I believe the sound is organic in origin.’
‘Organic?’ asked the Chapter Master. ‘On this scale? Magos, it was a global detection–’
‘Organic, though it may have been synthesised and boosted,’ Laurentis replied. ‘I cannot explain why I feel this to be the case. I hope you will trust my experience and judgement. Both of those things tell me it is organic.’
‘A bio-weapon? Something the Chromes have that we haven’t predicted?’
The holo-image of Laurentis shook its head.
‘I think it is communication, sir,’ he said. ‘We just have to work out what it is saying. Hence my request for additional equipment.’
‘Your transport is already underway at my order,’ said Mirhen.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Are you suggesting the Chromes are trying to communicate with us? Since mankind first encountered them, they have not shown any propensity for sentient communication.’
‘This attack may have pushed them to a level where they feel co
mmunication is necessary, sir,’ replied Laurentis. ‘Perhaps they have broken their long silence because they are desperate to sue for peace or surrender. I cannot answer that yet, but I believe it’s clear that something is trying to communicate.’
‘Stay on this link, magos,’ Mirhen said. ‘I want to hear more about this, and I want to be apprised as soon as–’
He broke off as the pict image of Laurentis became choppy. The magos appeared to be agitated. There were flashes of light, and a great deal of background noise and interference. The image started to jump and wink out.
Then it shut off altogether.
‘Reconnect!’ Mirhen roared. ‘Reconnect that link!’
‘Transmission disrupted at source, sir,’ the servitor reported.
‘I think the magos’ party has come under attack,’ said Third Captain Akilios, awaiting his master’s orders.
‘I can damn well see that,’ said Mirhen. ‘Route the nearest available ground forces to him immediately. Pull his fat out of the fire. I need him alive.’
Seven
Ardamantua
Claws. They were definitely claws. They weren’t ‘digital blades affixed to or articulated from forelimbs’, which was a phrase Laurentis was pretty sure he’d used several times in the genotype description he’d composed for the Chromes.
They were claws.
It was perfectly straightforward to see them as such when they were swinging at you.
The Chrome was massive. It was one of the darker-hued forms, one of the new ones that Laurentis had overheard a great deal of vox-traffic about once the Adeptus Astartes had entered the blisternest.
He’d been dying to see one.
How ironic.
It must have weighed about five hundred kilos. Its hard-shelled back was ridged, with a pronounced, sclerotic-looking hump. The shoulder portions and upper joints were bound with layers of muscle and sinew, like a great simian. The face… The face was not a face. It was a knot of ocular organs on the snout of the armoured head-crest, surmounting a powerful set of chattering mouthparts. The sound it made – clack-clack-clack – was like some funereal march, like a death-drum, like rot-beetles clicking away in wood.