When it came, the detonation had been like the laughter of a thunder god, consuming every other noise and blasting great waves of destruction along the vessel. Kais had lurched headlong to the ground, momentarily astounded by the force of his handiwork. The deck split open beneath him and he scrabbled, crying out, for sturdier ground. Chain reactions rumbled for long raik’ans, shaking loose bolts from the ceiling and killing the lights in a surge of crimson standbys. Ripples of deflected force surged through the bulkheads, eliciting a great grinding, gnashing sound that hurt his ears and left him shaking his head in confusion.
And then it was all quiet.
All quiet, for the first time since he came aboard this ugly mausoleum ship. No more distant semiconscious reportage of the sonorous engines, rumbling throatily He’d wondered, skulking in the devastation, how many people, how many hundreds — maybe thousands — had perished. He could see them in his mind, pale lips gaping fishlike, as their lungs collapsed and their blood turned solid, tumbling out into the vastness of space.
He thought back to the decompressing chamber in the promenade aboard the Or’es Tash’var. All those tau and gue’la slipping into nothingness in a rush of blasted air and silent screams. He’d been horrified at the raw power of the vacuum, a destructive force above and beyond his tiny, mortal rages and flaws. It had humbled him.
And what now, now that he’d shredded a city-in-space and vented its chittering, maggotlike occupants into that same vacuum? Shouldn’t he feel godlike? Shouldn’t that single act of genocide obliterate whatever bitterness he might have in his soul, eclipsing utterly the numbness, outshining the relentless glare of his father’s eyes? Shouldn’t it be significant?
No. He didn’t feel a thing.
Dazed, appalled at his own detachment, he’d stumbled upwards through the ship’s layers until he could go no further and there, seeing all around him the dislodged wreckage and shorted circuitry of his handiwork, he’d moved onto the great buttresses and masonry causeways overarching the service spaces. Impossible pits yawned on either side of every path.
He was wandering blindly, trying to hail the Or’es Tash’var, a lone figure picking its way towards the distant monolith of the vessel’s bridge, when he was shot in the leg.
He’d run, of course. He couldn’t even see the sniper, let alone return fire with any accuracy. Warm dampness oozed across his hoof copiously, and he fired some random — useless — shots into the cavernous underhull and sprinted for cover, groaning and seeing stars with every step. Ensconced within a low-roofed bridge intersection, he shakily eased himself to the ground to examine the wound. The projectile had punctured the muscle of his lower leg, gashing an ugly hole and singeing the flesh around it. He fished for his last medipack and applied it heavily, pushing down until he almost blacked out, then tying it off. The pressure was appalling, like liquid metal cooling and expanding around the flesh, but it allowed him to walk, at least. In a perverse way the pain was invigorating, a constant reminder of his vitality (and mortality) that cut through the numbness more completely than wholesale slaughter ever could.
So now he hurried across the bridgeways, keeping low, grunting quietly every time the ragged wound flexed inside its healing binding. He wanted to laugh, somehow, some morbid sense of absurdity bubbling up inside him. He’d killed hundreds today, thousands even. He’d waded through the blood of his enemies and relished every moment, he’d overcome exhaustion and adversity with an almost supernatural aptitude, defeating the finest warriors these pale-faced gue’la could throw at him.
To be outdone now, to be maimed so suddenly by some distant, unseen foe— beyond control or retaliation: it was ridiculous. It was like a cruel joke, like a clonebeast outrunning its pursuers and earning the admiration of the crowd— only to be slaughtered for meat in the fio’toros’tai abattoir districts.
The bridgecastle loomed overhead, an ebony mace wielded victoriously above the ship’s spire-encrusted spine. Kais glimpsed it again and again through the irregular viewing portals above the causeways, set amongst the distant rafters and buttresses of the inner surface of the hull. Around its base an amalgamation of stone fortresses rose majestically into a single buttressed chapel, steel pendants and icons infesting its multifaceted roof, lowermost walls penetrating the ship’s shell. It rose up from within the Enduring Blade like a blistered melanoma, turrets for singed hair follicles and the angular bridge at its tumorous apex.
He’d wondered what to do after the engines died. He couldn’t raise El’Lusha on the comms — couldn’t really believe that there was anyone friendly left in the universe. He seemed so cut off, so immeasurably enmeshed within the grinding wheels of this confrontation, that nothing else was real. He resolved, mind clouded by anxieties, that alone or not he would attempt to pursue the goals his commanding shas’el had set. So he headed for the bridge.
The chapel’s entrance, accessible only via a bridge that extended across a gulf between an outer and inner strata of the vessel’s segmentation, was a causeway-deathtrap. Its slender crossings were pocked by bullet holes and las-scorches and several dead tau lay in a huddle at its entrance. Kais sprinted past without stopping, his mutilated leg a dull crimson roar in his mind. The snipers, wherever they were, announced themselves in a flurry of ghostly ricochets and squib blasts, too distant for the sound of their firing to betray their positions. The dead shas’las wriggled and shook obscenely as they absorbed the crossfire, not safe from damage even in death. Kais hurdled the butchered pile and landed with a muffled shriek, feeling the abused flesh of his leg tearing as he braced against the impact.
He rolled awkwardly and sprung forwards, sensing rather than seeing the impact craters disappearing behind him, and crawled upright feeling winded and dazed. The chapel swarmed open around him, an impossibly vast space that made him stagger in astonishment. Every pillar was a granite behemoth, ascending with prehistoric grace into the distant shadows of the ceiling, where leering gargoyles and stylised figures hulked and glared. Gargantuan stained-glass lenses fractured the light, daubing primary colours across his dirtied armour. He stood for a moment and basked in the massiveness of it all, insectified in an instant. Again he was a maggot, invading something incomprehensibly huge. How could he hope to topple all of this?
Then he looked around and a group of Space Marines was staring at him.
He lurched away with a cry, mind still fizzing with the shock of the bomb blast and the pain of his leg, melting his thoughts into an ugly hash of impression and details. Their features swam before his eyes:
Glaring yellow vision slits and grey-green helmets.
Domed shoulder guards and grasping segmented gauntlets.
Gunmetal weapons, racked and glaring hungrily.
But there was blood too, and the features didn’t seem to interlink properly. There was something...
He shook his head, wincing, and took a deep breath. When he turned back the image slotted into place with grisly precision and for the second time within as many decs he had to force himself not to gag. It was another massacre, another abattoir zone of gut-churning carnage, but this time not mere frail troopers that had been shredded. Their helmets were cleaved and shattered, eye lenses fragmented and the pulpy flesh beneath drawn out like mollusc meat.