Rakel said hopefully, ‘Maybe we ought to get to know this world a bit better before we do anything drastic? It seems so hospitable. There are bound to be people. People might know where that other portal is. They might think it something else than what it is. They might shun it, or worship it.’
Grimm glared. ‘Oh you’d love to dilly-dally, wouldn’t you? Have a holiday.’
‘We have the jewels,’ she said eagerly. ‘We can buy information. We can buy people.’
‘There aren’t bound to be people,’ Jaq contradicted her. ‘There may be no one at all.’
Grimm licked his lips. ‘Or else there may be crazed green-skinned orks who would love to enslave us. Fancy being a painboy’s slave?’
‘I’m waiting,’ said Lex impatiently.
Sighing, Grimm took out his knife. He spat on the blade derisively as though to confer antisepsis. ‘This is just the sort of skilful surgery that painboyz love to indulge in!’
‘I don’t know anything about such creatures,’ protested Rakel.
‘Well, we’d better get off this planet sharpish before you have a chance to find out!’
‘You’re saying these things to pressure me. There’s no evidence.’
‘Huh. Trees are green. Why shouldn’t the inhabitants be green too?’ Grimm sniffed. ‘Doesn’t smell polluted,’ he granted. ‘Proper ork world ought to be heavily polluted.’
‘You seem in a foul mood,’ Jaq said to the abhuman. ‘I think I ought to hold the knife.’
‘Foul mood?’ Grimm echoed. ‘You wouldn’t know. Course I’m not!’ He grinned, ruddy-cheeked. ‘I’m just psyching myself up to torture Lex, that’s all.’ Having sworn a false oath, he mustn’t undermine its effect on Rakel by indulging his inner misery, or else that deceitful oath would have served no purpose.
While Lex knelt as if before an altar, Grimm applied pressure to that giant man – knife-point against lens.
W
ONDROUSLY, THE FINGER-LIGHT
reappeared. The light of Dorn, swore Lex. Or of the luminous path. Maybe both were aspects of the same guiding radiance.
When Lex pointed eastward, his finger brightened. To north or south or west, it dimmed.
They gathered ripe nuts from low branches, and big sweet blue berries from bushes, and meaty fungoids. Lex ate first, to test the fare.
Non-toxic. Nutritious. Hospitable.
A
LL DAY THEY
tramped through forest without incident other than the scuttling of occasional half-glimpsed little animals. Towards evening, the trees thinned out. Stumps bore axe marks, some quite recent. Wood had been felled for fuel or for building materials.
Orks would have demolished whole swathes of forest indiscriminately, leaving vast scars. Had human beings wielded the axes? Maybe wild eldar lived here, those puritanical fanatics who had fled to the fringes of the galaxy before the Slaaneshi spasm devastated their civilization; and who had survived because of their self-denial. Yet such a world should not be linked to the webway. Of course it might have become linked long after settlement.
Yesterday, sheer exhaustion had put the travellers to sleep before daylight departed. So they had not seen the night sky. If this world was out on the fringes, stars might seem thin. Black intergalactic void would be close at hand. Alternatively, depending on hemisphere, the vast bulk of the home galaxy might be radiantly visible all at once. If so, this might indeed be a wild eldar world, of exodites, so called. Except for the webway entrances.
Most likely this was a primitive human planet which had long lost touch with the Imperium, and even with the memory of colonization.
Eventually they came to a great clearing. Grey ash covered hectares of land. Charred stumps of beams poked up here and there. A whole close-packed town must have occupied this space, quite recently. The town had been incinerated. Tramping through the ash, they came upon a few burned broken skeletons. But not many, not many at all.
Had enemies sacked and burned the town? The degree of destruction seemed beyond the technology level of axe-wielders. Why were there so few bones?
A stony rutted road led away through more trees. Warily they followed that route. After some twenty kilometres they came to what must recently have been an even more substantial town. It had also been reduced to ashes. The road continued, utterly deserted apart from themselves. At dusk they bivouacked in a small clearing at a sensible distance from the road.
The sky had been cloudy during much of their march. Now it cleared, as light was quitting it.
Soon they were staring up at a chain of tiny moons strung pearl-like across the zenith. A hundred little moons, perhaps. Each like a bleached snail shell, or like some curled-up fossilized foetus, chalky white. A snail, or a foetus, with a beak perhaps. Stars were scanty – but those moons, those many moons in an unnatural ring!
Even as they watched, one of these mini-moons detached itself from the procession and began to dip down towards the atmosphere. Lex blasphemed softly.
‘What are those?’ Rakel asked softly, as if in fear that those eerie moons in orbit might hear her voice. Lex’s reply was as cold and hard as marble.
‘You saw genestealers in the hermitage on Sabulorb, Rakel. Now discover a terrible secret. The creatures in those ships up there are what created the stealers. They are more dreadful than genestealers. They are known as
tyranids
. Tyranids harvest whole worlds of their biological material to mould and mutate into abominations. They strip worlds bare. The process had begun here, with the harvesting of the highest life-form: Man.’
T
YRANID HIVE-FLEETS
came from way across the intergalactic gulf, two million light years or more. Presumably they had stripped a previous galaxy bare of all life. Life was their raw material. Out of this raw material they made such abominations as screamer killers and fleshborer guns and scavengers.
Of course, “screamer killer” was merely a name which human survivors of early encounters with tyranids had bestowed – upon heavy rotund battle-creatures which shrieked horrifyingly as they scuttled forward, virtually invincible, flailing their razor-edged arms and spitting toxic bio-plasma. Merely a human label – for something vilely inhuman.
Fleshborers, likewise! Merely a name, screamed by psychotic survivors, in an attempt to describe a hand-weapon which was a brood-nest of vicious beetles, beetles which the weapon would goad to leap convulsively towards a target, to gnaw through flesh and bone like paper...
Their very ships were organic creations, compounded of thousands of modified creatures slavishly linked by an empathic central gland. Throughout the vast fleet of millions of vessels and sub-vessels a collective mind presided. Destroy ten thousand vessels (if only one could!) and still the mind presided. Destroy a hundred thousand (vain hope!) and still the mind would be relatively unimpaired. Its units would continue stripping worlds of life to assemble more parts of itself.
Neither the ravaging warriors – whom the Space Marines knew as tyranids – nor the carnifex screamer killers, were individual entities. Each was only a specialized cell in the colossal multifarious organism of the hive-fleet. The infiltration of the home galaxy had been underway for a couple of centuries or so – a menace as deadly as the powers of Chaos which for aeons had been spreading their cancer within the galaxy.
The tyranid swarm was yet another incontestable reason why the Imperium must conduct itself remorselessly and even mercilessly, lest humanity be devoured...
Might it be that deliverance from Chaos could only come about in the end by the absorption of all life into the tyranid swarm? What a vile and terminal remedy this would be.
Lex pounded his fist into his palm, without extinguishing his finger of glory.
‘I have fought them! I have been inside a tyranid vessel on a raid. We were backed by a battle fleet. I was wearing full combat armour—’
Now he was one Space Marine alone, and almost naked. Dressed in mere clothes, his companions might as well be naked. As for their pathetic armoury... If a tyranid even glimpsed them, they were doomed to become raw material.
How could they sleep that night, with those snail-like ivory vessels in the sky? With vessels descending periodically, and others rising into orbit, conveyers of captured flesh!
The first wave of the onslaught had already passed through this region, removing the highest life-forms for use. Lucky old carnivore in its cave, to have escaped harvest, and then to be blessed with swift oblivion!
The four travellers must move on as soon as could be, following the finger, praying that the other portal was not five thousand kilometres away, nor even a thousand, nor a hundred. How could they hope to cover even a hundred kilometres before a new wave of harvesting passed across the surface of this doomed world?
Yet first they must get some sleep. If, during sleep, a harvester might detect and seize them, how could they possibly doze off? Terror would keep them awake, and exhaust them. Unless...
‘I’m no assassin,’ Jaq said. Did his gaze reproach Rakel that she was no real assassin either? ‘I’ve witnessed a certain assassin kill with the touch of a finger upon the neck. A lesser pressure renders a person unconscious. I understand the principle. I know the vital nerve. The Inquisition teaches us the frailties of the human body. I propose...’
To render unconscious. Unconsciousness might segue into natural restorative sleep.
Lex was trained to be able to nap during any lull in combat. It must be Lex who would numb the others.
Jaq demonstrated. Then he, Rakel and Grimm lay down. ‘Don’t push too hard,’ said Grimm. ‘In fact I think I’d rather be bashed on the head with the butt of a boltgun.’
A moment later he lay still. Was he unconscious, or dead? Attentively Lex bent low over the abhuman.
‘Still alive. Squats are tough.’ From Jaq: ‘I commend my spirit...’
Lex rendered Jaq unconscious, checked his vital signs, then turned to Rakel. ‘Wait—’
‘Yes, lady?’
‘These tyranids... I never knew how hideous the universe can be. The genestealers, and those corrupt renegades... And Sabulorb, a whole world incinerated...’
‘That was due to variability in its sun. Unless the arch-enemy somehow acted as a catalyst.’
‘It’s all so terrible...’
‘I’ve seen worse, lady. I’ve seen a Chaos world itself. Compared with that madness, a tyranid vessel is relatively comprehensible, however execrable.’
‘It’s too much, too much. We are true companions, aren’t we, after a fashion? Four companions in a hell.’
‘After a fashion,’ he conceded. He would never have dreamed that an Imperial Fist might be asked to regard a thief as a companion. Yet a Space Marine was ever a protector of the vulnerable. Ach, Rakel was an instrument for Jaq to play upon. She had been this ever since she made the terrible mistake of trying to rob the mansion. Could it be that he felt pity at this moment?
How futile, in a pitiless cosmos.
‘Put me to sleep now,’ she begged. Was she really asking for him to kill her, in such a way that she would never know?
‘No more talk,’ he said, ‘or we might wake the others up.’
With his fingers he touched her neck, powerfully yet gently – more gently than he had touched Grimm or Jaq, though with the same result.
J
AQ HAD CAST
an aura of protection. Would this suffice against a sweeping mass of scavenger creatures endowed with an instinct to harvest life? Or against alert tyranid warriors if any remained in the vicinity?
The stripping and processing of the life of this world was only commencing. The full task might take ten years or twenty. Time was no object to an immortal hive-mind which had coasted through the gulf between galaxies for hundreds of millennia. Meanwhile the forest remained with its freight of lesser life. Empty, now, of man’s presence. Man’s burned places were empty alike of dogs or horses or goats. All taken, selectively, as the initial prizes of the harvest.
Eventually even worms and beetles would be gathered, sifted out. Even microbes and bacteria would be gleaned by microscopic nano-collectors, until there was utter sterility, and that sterility was further sterilized by fire.
Lex’s finger was glowing more brightly.
Let it be, let it be, that the two portals were close together. Twins, in resonance with one another. Energy-tubes which had divided only at the very last moment of formation.
T
HE ROUGH ROAD
had veered away from the direction which Lex’s finger indicated. They were hiking through golden and scarlet woodland untouched anywhere by axe. These trees were both strange yet familiar. A tree was not a species. It was a biological structure, obeying similar constraints of gravity and photosynthesis.
Undergrowth was sparse, probably stunted by chemicals secreted by the roots of the trees in the eternal battle for space and resources.
Steep crags were rising amidst the woodland. Here and there, deep rocky shafts plunged vertically down amidst the loam and humus: deep natural wells. Sometimes snapped branches had fallen across these wells and accumulated a mat of debris. These might have been the lids of traps. To tread this woodland unwarily by night could be fatal.
Deep down in the water at the bottom of one sheer wall, there floated a segmented, horny hunchbacked body – a six-limbed gargoyle. Twice the size of a man, wrought of amber and russet coral, the hue of the autumnal trees.
‘That’s one of them,’ whispered Lex.
Rakel did try to stifle her cry of panic and dismay.
Wasp-waist. Armoured haunches. That long lurid head. Its claws had grooved the sides of the well in vain. Eventually it must have drowned.
Then, deep down, golden eyes opened. Those eyes glared upward. The body convulsed in the water. Claws raked at stone. If only the golden gargoyle could scale the slippery vertical sides. Yet it could not, despite the lure of the flesh peering from overhead. ‘Kill it?’ asked Grimm.
‘No,’ said Lex. ‘Our guns are too noisy. Even the lasers. The echo in the well shaft would boost the din.’
‘Pity we don’t have a needle gun.’ Grimm glanced at Rakel’s expended digital weapon, and shrugged. ‘Would have done you good, girl, shooting your fears.’