The bridge died.
“Intruder!”
“Get it!”
“Cover the officers! Cover the off—”
“Watch the instruments, damn you! Keep working!”
The meltagun was heavy in Kais’s grip, a blocky cumbersome thing that lacked the lightweight grace of his carbine. When he’d prised it from the mutilated grip of a dead Space Marine in the chapel below, he’d inspected the various coils and switches that clung like scales to its base. Eventually he decided that the trigger was the only control he really needed to understand and, leg wound still aching uncomfortably, had climbed the twisting staircase towards the bridge.
“Ensign! Get down! Get down!”
“Servitors to the front!”
“Mechserv #34 respo—”
“Emperor’s mercy!”
It didn’t shoot so much as dissolve its victims. He stood with legs planted sturdily, arm muscles bunched to support the growling, churning weapon. A splayed column of superheated air roared from its rounded muzzle; a devastating horizontal fountain that blasted flesh and bone apart like ash in a gale. The armsmen, supposedly guarding the bridge, were the first to go, shotguns igniting in their hands before they could even be brought to bear. Brass-mounted consoles slewed away in a waxlike sheen of melted surfaces and burning components, drizzling liquid metals across the room.
“Deck officer! Deck officer! To me!”
“—aaaaaaaaaaa—”
“—sweet mercy my foot’s gone oh Living God—”
“killitkillitkillit!”
A trio of servitors, blade-limbs grasping out for him, slunk away like snow devils in the sun. Their flesh peeled off in a second, leaving asymmetrical frames to twitch and shudder as their lubricants ignited and their strut supports melted to nothingness. The last few gue’la, hair singed and clothes scorched, exchanged terrified glances and sprinted clear. He enveloped them in the fusion stream and watched, heart racing, as they floundered and flapped and became part of the deck.
“—aaa—”
“—gkkhh—”
And then there was silence. He might as well have been the only living being in existence, in that moment. A solitary figure, exhausted and wounded, death clinging to his limbs like a black shroud. The enormity of the command deck wrapped him in a bubble of solitude and silence, even the clicking, whistling gauges and controls faltering away into an aural smog. From the vast viewing dome set above the room, the infinite reaches of the void peered down upon him— transforming him into a solitary bacterium staring in wonder from its perch on the back of a great, dead whale. The meltagun slid from his hands with a clatter that he didn’t even notice.
Somehow he felt... cheated. He hadn’t yet resolved his feelings. Hadn’t passed or failed his Trial by Fire with any certainty either way. He could still feel the Mont’au devil lurking below the surface of his mind, hungry to escape and flex its bloody claws again. He felt prematurely amputated from his rightful resolution — a quest that had neither ended in glory or ignominy, but rather fizzled out before its true conclusion.
He supposed, abstractly, that he should contact El’Lusha. He’d cleared the bridge. The Or’es Tash’var was defeated. The ethereal would want to know. Instead he found himself wishing for more, glancing about in the hopes of finding another enemy to fight.
So, like a light splitting through tormented clouds, like the impossible surreal luminosity of the tau’va, radiant and glorious at the termination of a long, snaking pathway, fate conspired to fulfil his request. An elevator grumbled nearby, rising with frozen slowness.
The doors began to slide open. Kais drew his knife.
Constantine burst from the officers’ lift in a black mood.
He’d wasted at least half an hour on some damn fool meeting requested by Severus, the preening bastard. Evidently the governor was either missing or dead, conspicuous in his absence at the boardroom. As a result of the unnecessary diversion Constantine had been unavailable to command his vessel in its moment of need, its engines had been systematically destroyed and now who knew what xenogen devilry the tau were planning to inflict upon his crippled vessel? Rushing back to the bridge, he was unable to contact his command crew for a status update, and, to top it all, had found himself confronted by a grisly abattoir of ruptured Space Marines in the chapel outside his command deck. The Raptors had failed.
An imperial warship, Constantine believed implicitly, was impregnable. The religious certainty of the Navy’s dominance, of their ships’ deific majesty, had been drilled into him since his youth, years before. For his command to irrevocably collapse in such a short period of time; for his god/ship to be so crippled and sundered in his absence and beyond his control, it was a feeling not unlike falling. Everything he’d ever known, everything he’d ever been certain of and taken for granted, fell away from beneath him in a rush of flame and debris and blood.
Fine. Let it fall. But let it not be said that in his most testing hour Lord Admiral Benedil Constantine had shirked his duty as a leader.
He would have Severus executed for ineffectual command, the time-wasting fool. He would dispatch messages conveying his great displeasure to the Administratum and to the Raptors’ fortress-monastery on Cortiz-Pol. He’d regroup the Fleet Primus, file an immediate request for backup from the Secundus and Tertius armadas, then obliterate every last one of the grey-skinned abominations currently wreaking havoc aboard his vessel. Heads, he decided furiously, would roll.
Besides, there were still the Ultramarines. He’d drawn upon the Raptors to guard the vessel’s principal sections at Severus’s demand, aware that Captain Ardias and his men might well regard the choice as an insult. Well, it couldn’t be helped; the governor’s Administratum documents had given him implicit command over the situation, and if he chose to snub the warriors of Ultramar then there was nothing Constantine could have done about it. At least now, in the midst of this madness, he had an entire company of the Imperium’s finest warriors to assist in his liberation.
With that thought in mind, he stamped from the elevator and found a long, wickedly sharp blade pressed against his throat.
“Nk,” he said.
“Be quiet, you.” Gloved hands gripped him from behind and the voice was thick with an unknown accent. An exotic, unrecognisable odour assaulted his senses, its explanation startling him.
“X-xeno!” he flinched away from the contact, gasping. Briefly he was struck by the insanity of finding himself more terrified of contamination than of physical death, but the thought was quickly chased away by added pressure upon the knife. He almost choked. The figure behind him pulled him into the shadows, like a spider seizing its prey.
“I said, be quiet,” the voice insisted, three-fingered hand gripping his shoulder. “Who are you?”
“No-hkkk-nobody.”
“Lies.”
“What?”
“The colours and the metal circles. You’re important.” The hand tapped pointedly upon the constellation of medals pinned to Constantine’s chest, making them sway and jingle prettily. The alien’s words were recognisable but clearly strained, impeded by a limited Low Gothic vocabulary. Constantine was briefly impressed that a mere warrior could speak an alien tongue at all (after all, could he, an admiral, speak tau?), but recognised it at once as a dangerously heretical thought and purged it from his mind.
“No...” he hissed. “J-just an ensign—”
“Lies. Who are you?”
“Nobo—”
The xenogen cut his throat. It was white fire — a single burning ribbon of pain beneath his chin that sliced open with dreadful slowness.