Salamanders: Rebirth Read online

  A great swell of water was rising. Xarko went perpendicular to the tide, swimming hard against the edge of a growing wave. The anvils, rather than hold him down, began to slip. Only force of will kept them manacled. Driving furiously, arm over arm, legs beating hard, he risked a glance over his shoulder… and smiled.

  The coal-black hunters were following.

  He swam on, all the while the currents shifting below him, the tide ever pulling. As he raced, he heard voices, half snatched before the roar of the flaming sea carried them hence. In the fiery-wreathed depths, he half glimpsed faces that were about to resolve before they too were dashed by the ocean’s fury.

  The wave was rising, curling, and in a moment it would break.

  Xarko rose with it, his body screaming. The hunters gave chase, darting after him like flung spears. Xarko reached the wave crest just as it crashed. He crested the peak with a last surge of strength and the hunters, fractionally behind him, were smashed apart. Gasping, Xarko rolled gently down the back of the wave. The tumult ended, and the sea was calm again.

  Taking a few moments to gather up his depleted strength, Xarko heard the voices return. One rose to prominence amongst the clamour. Whomever it had, did or would belong to cried out in anguish. The tides began to rise again, this time a reflection of the mental turmoil expressed through the twilit ocean rather than the incursion of neverborn entities.

  Xarko turned, trying to discern a pattern to the images painted in fire upon the water. He thought he saw a face, locked in a silent scream before it grew too wide and ate itself in a fount of spume.

  An echo faded with the image, two words, difficult to grasp.

  Ferro ignis.

  Yes, that was it.

  Fire sword.

  Xarko had no idea as to its meaning.

  He wanted to delve deeper, find truth within the tides, but another voice wrenched him back. Unlike the cry he had heard across the ocean, Xarko recognised this one and allowed his mental tethers to unravel. One by one, the chain links around his ankles unpicked themselves and fell into the sea where they dissolved like ash. Slowly, deliberately, Xarko detached mind and body from this realm and awoke in another… aboard a spaceship.

  Transition from the other realm to the one of matter and substance was not immediate. Xarko first became aware of the chamber around him. His psychically heightened senses slowly faded in a diminishing pulse, like an echo reaching its aural terminus. He felt the ship, the souls aboard, his Librarian’s eye seeing everything in a burst of psychic sonar.

  Engines were at full stop, anchor was laid and the low thrum of life support systems barely intruded on the quietude. Serfs roamed the corridors, performing such circadian rhythms as was required of them, but it was almost ghost-like on the Forge Hammer.

  The ship was slumbering. Ever since the seekers had departed, a state of dormancy had descended upon those left behind as if their existence was held fast in amber until the others returned to report their findings.

  In his darkened chamber, Xarko drank in the silence and absorbed the shadows. His crouched form exuded steam. Wisps of white vapour rose up into the air filtration systems of the frigate. On his perch nearby a drygnirr with blue scales and a yellow crest cawed and snapped.

  ‘I see it, no need to shout, Kraelish,’ Xarko murmured, still coming around from his journey across the fire tides.

  A vox hail lit up the console in front of him.

  ‘Speak,’ said Xarko.

  ‘It’s me,’ a stern voice answered. ‘We’ve found the ship.’

  The feed was a little broken, unclear. Atmospheric interference had been fouling communications. Either that, or Agatone was leading his men further down into the hive.

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Xarko.

  ‘Just ash, brother.’ Agatone left a short pause before saying, ‘Your voice is slurred, Codicier. I thought Vel’cona advised you to limit your time trawling the fire tides.’

  ‘I’m just tired, brother-captain,’ Xarko lied. ‘No need for concern.’

  Another pause as Agatone considered his response.

  ‘Have you heard anything from the others?’ he asked.

  Xarko used the console to activate a screen. Weak light bled from it, illuminating his features. They were sharp, angular. Not uncommon in Nocturnean psykers. His eyes glowed a deep crimson but there was the faintest trace of cerulean blue there also, as his recent exertion of power had yet to fade completely.

  Three sigils were lit up on the screen, one of which was active. Below each sigil, lines of biorhythmic data identified each individual member of all three hunt-teams. A chrono-stamp indicated their last recorded communication. Two had been silent for several hours.

  ‘Nothing. They made planetfall, but all quiet since then. Yours is the first voice I’ve heard in a while, brother-captain.’

  Agatone paused to give orders to the other warriors in his hunt-squad, before resuming his conversation with Xarko.

  ‘Lok went west into the tunnel complex, Clovius north to the silos. Down here, taking any direction is like entering a labyrinth.’

  ‘Our father faced a similar trial, or so legend says.’

  ‘Not like this. It’s like trawling in a sea of effluence. Whatever prompted him to seek refuge here, I cannot say. Sah’rk nests have more charm.’

  ‘Will you keep looking? What if he’s already gone? Or dead?’

  ‘If he’s dead there’ll be a mess, and we can track it. Warriors like him don’t die easily. I think we’re close. Zartath claims he has his scent.’

  ‘You trust him, the mutant I mean?’

  ‘You realise he can hear you, Codicier?’

  ‘He knows my feelings. I have voiced them often enough to his face.’

  ‘Consider yourself fortunate he has yet to cut yours open.’

  ‘I shall bear that in mind, brother-captain,’ said Xarko, smiling at an empathetic snarl from Kraelish. ‘And so your quarry, will you keep looking?’

  ‘I must.’

  ‘Then I shall continue to monitor you from the Forge Hammer.’

  ‘All quiet up there?’ asked Agatone, as the conversation began to wind down.

  ‘Peacefully so.’

  ‘And the tides, Xarko… what did you learn from them?’

  Now it was Xarko’s turn to pause as he considered the question.

  ‘Unsure, but they are fickle. There was… some turmoil.’

  ‘I am not a psyker, Xarko.’ Agatone chafed. ‘What exactly does that mean?’

  ‘That something is going to happen, something important. Soon, I think.’

  Agatone took a few seconds to respond.

  ‘Stay out of the tides, Xarko,’ he said eventually. ‘Some mysteries are best left alone.’

  ‘As you wish.’ Xarko bowed to the shadows and cut the vox-link.

  Silence was restored and darkness reasserted. He closed his eyes to cast his consciousness out amongst an ocean of thought and began to roam. Serfs went about their duties, the decks were quiet with bulkheads sealed and all systems were running normally. For now, they remained undetected.

  But Xarko’s psychic awareness stopped at Forge Hammer’s armoured hull. It failed to reach into space. For if it had he would have known that all was far from normal. He would have perceived the small ship gliding slowly towards their anchorage in the upper atmosphere and he would have felt the homicidal intent emanating from the few determined souls aboard.

  ‘Lieutenant Makato,’ Xarko spoke down the vox-feed to his chief armsman.

  ‘My lord,’ came a firm reply a few seconds later.

  ‘I am entering my sanctum, and not to be disturbed.’

  ‘Understood, my lord.’

  Xarko severed the link, closed his eyes and re-entered the fire tides.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sturnd
rang, the underhive of Molior

  The crash site reached at least fifteen metres in all directions. Debris littered the ground, great streams of it like mechanised intestine. In the hive levels above, detritus hung from girders and gantries, serving as evidence of the ship’s difficult landing. Ship no longer, it was now a partially destroyed wreck. Scorch marks blackened its flanks, deeper and longer on the right-hand side where the engine had exploded. Dust, grit and dented fuselage, half-exposed to the bare metal, obscured much of the gunship’s iconography. Its flattened nosecone, shattered glacis and ruptured right wing made even identifying its class a challenge.

  It was a Thunderhawk, a gunship with a winged lightning bolt symbol described in black on its side amidst a field of bile-yellow. The amount of damage inflicted on the ship, together with the obvious hostility of its impromptu landfall, made it even more surprising that at least one of its occupants had survived.

  Exor emerged from behind the ship, having been to examine the engine damage.

  He shook his head, the mechadendrite tools he had been using to perform the rituals of function retracting in their haptic implant sleeves as he breathed, ‘Omnissiah… I have no idea how he landed this ship and lived.’

  His shock betrayed his youth, as did his voice. It had the mechanised cadence of most Techmarines, only lighter. Exor was far from being a veteran, unlike his two much more grizzled companions.

  ‘What else?’ asked Agatone, his deep voice slightly muted inside the folds of his hood. He looked sidelong at the dead hivers they had left in their wake and considered hiding the bodies. As Space Marines, they had little to fear from the underhive’s inhabitants but in a large enough pack they might prove problematic and dead always brought carrion in a place like this.

  He returned his attention to Exor.

  ‘It won’t fly again,’ declared the Techmarine. ‘One engine is gone, along with the wing on the right-hand side. Weapon systems and all forms of cogitation are defunct. Landing stanchions are wrecked and the hull’s structural integrity needs a complete re-armour before it could ever be considered for atmospheric flight. In short, the ship is dead, captain. Machine-spirit and all.’

  Agatone grunted as he considered the ramifications. With his own visual assessment, he added what he could to the information Exor had provided.

  Scratches marred the exterior hull that were not a result of crash damage, stripping the paintwork to bare metal in places. As well as the crushed forward aspect of the ship, the rear was also badly damaged, its exit ramp ripped away and long gone. A gaping hole where the ramp should have been provided access to a charnel house of bodies within. Some looked like battle dead, ferried from Nocturne but dying before their Apothecary could minister to them or retrieve any gene-seed from the truly lost causes. Like the ship, they wore armour of yellow livery with the black winged bolt symbol on their shoulder guards. Closer inspection had revealed the dead had been gnawed upon where the flesh was exposed, as if by whatever carrion-eaters lived this far down in the city’s underhive.

  Agatone approached the rear hatch. Zartath had gone back inside the ship, disappearing through a ragged hole in the fuselage that led to darkness and the reek of blood. Trusting the dead gangers had no other scouts in this section of the underhive, he drew back his hood. It itched, and he was used to being bare-headed. Even the stifling confines of his battle-helm would have been preferable. But they had left their armour aboard the frigate that had laid anchor in Sturndrang’s upper atmosphere. Agatone had insisted; they would be less conspicuous that way. He felt almost naked without his full battleplate, having to settle for body-carapace and half greaves normally reserved for sparring. A storm cloak completed the ‘disguise’, concealing their armour but unable to mask the Salamanders’ sheer size. Their equipment also came without battle-helm, which meant ear beads for vox, no tactical data-feed and no respirator.

  So there was no filtration of the underhive atmosphere, which stank. It was redolent of petro-chem, fycylene and low-grade promethium, amongst other synthetically produced combustibles. Despite the rank odour, it failed to conceal the stench of putrefaction emanating from inside the ship’s hold.

  Agatone scowled. ‘Reeks of decay.’

  ‘Fecal matter also. Sections of the hold are swimming in the crud.’

  ‘Indigenous?’

  The voice of Zartath snorted with amusement. ‘I doubt the Malevolents soiled their armour, though with your errant drake amongst them and bent on killing some may have.’ He snorted again, in derision this time, ‘They don’t know from savagery…’

  Agatone ignored the feral boast, though it was becoming all too common since they had made planetfall. ‘Was our quarry wounded?’ he asked. ‘Beyond whatever injury he sustained during the crash.’ If he was struggling with an injury, it would make hunting him easier, his pattern more predictable. He would seek out a medic, or whatever sawbones passed for thus in this decrepit burrow.

  A low snarl answered. ‘Unlikely. Everything I see suggests he took them by surprise. He killed them quick, but painful.’

  Exor joined Agatone. The Techmarine activated his auspex. ‘Bio-scan reads negative. Blood’s all theirs. Some samples from the hold might yield more though…’

  ‘As I said,’ Zartath growled, unable to disguise the contempt he felt towards the Techmarine, ‘I don’t need the artifice of your Martian masters to tell me that.’

  Despite his youth or possibly because of it, Exor rose to Zartath’s slight as he emerged from the hole in the fuselage.

  ‘Every day I am reminded of how much of a beast you are, Zartath. Cursed, I’ve heard some say. Half human.’

  Where Zartath was wiry and gaunt, Exor had flatter, plainer features. In keeping with the traditions of the magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, he carried several augmetic and cybernetic implants that gave him a partially mechanised appearance, and these were made all the more apparent because of the stripped-down armour he was wearing. But this was not the only marked difference between them. Exor’s skin, much like his captain’s was onyx black and his eyes a deep fire-red.

  Zartath’s skin was pale under his cloak and armour. Although he had sworn fealty to his adopted Chapter, even undergone its ‘rite of pain’ to become one of them, he was still not of Nocturne. His eyes still blazed, though, but not with the captured fire of a Nocturnean heritage and a genetic First Founding ancestry, but with an intensity of purpose and spirit that had seen him live where others had perished in the slave arenas of the dark eldar.

  In the earliest years, not long after the war on Nocturne, the great Dragon Strife as some referred to it, Agatone had found it difficult to trust the mutant. He questioned his inclusion in the Chapter, an issue deliberated over for years in the Pantheon Council, but now he was forced to admit that if properly directed and motivated Zartath could be a loyal and potent asset.

  Even so, he still needed a strong hand now and again. A leash, according to his more vocal detractors. Agatone did not like to think of him as some hound – it felt disrespectful. But it was not always easy.

  Zartath bared his teeth, and claws.

  ‘Let him up,’ said Agatone, brooking no argument. ‘Sure or not, Exor needs to examine the ship.’

  Bone claws retracting into his gauntlets, Zartath leapt down. The ossified growths were the physical manifestation of his mutancy, a gross distortion of the radius or ulna; only surgical x-ray or autopsy would reveal which with any certainty. Exor had expressed which methodology he would recommend to discern an answer. Zartath’s mandible bone and teeth were also unusual, the canines overlong and pronounced like fangs. His mouth, both inside and his lips, was black. So too his tongue which tapered to a sharp point like a dagger.

  Some Chapters, such as the Marines Malevolent, would hunt down and execute what they regarded as deviations from the Emperor’s genetic design, a template that had regrettably been diluted over th
e millennia since its initial perfecting. None now existed who could restore it, and so there were those amongst the Adeptus Astartes regarded as ‘cursed’ and although the Salamanders did not ostensibly count themselves amongst these puritans, there were still some for whom the presence of such an obvious mutant element in their ranks was not only distasteful, it was also dangerous. It had made the ex-Black Dragon’s transition to the Salamanders difficult.

  As if to emphasise the fact, Zartath glared at the Techmarine as they passed each other, his body almost shaking with repressed violence.

  ‘Shall we see who is the more human, brother?’ Zartath snarled, showing his savage nature again. ‘Let me cut the metal from your flesh. I doubt the remainder would amount to much. Certainly, there’d be no spine amongst the offal.’

  Exor had climbed halfway into the ship when the augmetic replacement of his right eye flared, crosshairs interleaving over the iris and cornea as he accessed an internal targeting matrix. His right hand, a bionic, strayed towards his holstered bolt pistol.

  ‘Cease,’ Agatone told them both. The two had been at each other’s throats since planetfall, and it was trying the captain’s patience. In truth, each now came from a different world. Zartath, though he had adopted the Salamanders as his Chapter now and wore their deep green livery, was still a Black Dragon. Not merely that, he was also a mutant and still prone to volatility. Exor was younger, not long returned from Mars where he had been privy to the secrets of the Adeptus Mechanicus and emerged a fresh-forged Techmarine. Like Zartath, his loyalty was irrevocably split, partly to Nocturne and the Chapter, partly to the red Martian world.

  Conflict, Agatone reminded himself again, was inevitable.

  ‘I brought you here to hunt, Zartath,’ he said. ‘So, hunt. Find his trail.’

  Like a hound brought to heel, the ex-Black Dragon nodded and obeyed.

  Alone for the moment, Agatone considered their surroundings and the likelihood of the success of their mission.