Someone — something — was slaughtering the crew. It stalked the arterial corridors of the station, bathed in shadow and the dying heartbeat of crimson emergency lamps. Primary, secondary and even tertiary power nodes had been sabotaged, communications reduced to a droning buzz of white noise that repeated endlessly across open vox-channels. Korja had been trapped between pneumatically sealed bulwarks for what he could measure as 3 days; time had become impermanent, the incessant growling of his belly the only reminder of the grim reality.
Cundara Station was a relatively unimportant relay point between the Ultima Segmentum and its surrounding territories, used by smaller Imperial craft with the explicit coordinates and clearance codes for the purposes of refueling and potential resupply. Korja served aboard the station as a noncommissioned junior dock-supervisor, the sad penance of being born 14th in line to a minor aristocratic household on a backwater agriworld. He recalled the nights of his youth spent stargazing up to the heavens and dreaming of rogue trader’s life — charting the galactic rim, cataloguing unexplored trade routes and accruing an entourage of lackeys, companions and potential lovers — yet voidbound life had proven the opposite of his idyllic youth.
Korja’s tongue was thick with dried mucous, his head swimming in the darkness as stale, recycled air provided less and less of what his aching brain so desperately needed. The stench of his own musk clogged his nostrils, and as much as it pained Korja’s pride, the stench of his designated pissing-corner was becoming unbearable. He prayed to the Emperor for salvation, and alternatively, leniency. He had not seen the horrors beyond his plasteel prison, only the initial cries of confusion and the shuffling of hurried footfalls. At first, there were those who’d inquired of his well-being, spending a few meager minutes to override the locked emergency doors. It had all seemed like a bad joke until the screaming started; God-Emperor, the screams. Korja pushed them from his mind, slumped against the unfeeling plasteel as he shifted between the darkness of reality and that of his mind. The junior officer was prepared to slip back into a dreamless sleep when the steady thump of pounding boots echoed from the other side of the bulwark opposite to him. His legs were numb yet his heart pounded with an adrenal burn that tasted of copper in his mouth, the primal tension of his reptilian hindbrain kicking into gear.
Korja could just barley make out the voices on the other side, interrupted by a loud, atmospheric crackle. The flash was blinding, futilely shielded from his gaze by a trembling palm. His eyes had been held captive to the darkness for far too long and the light was beyond blinding. After a few moments, the serpentine hiss of failing pneumatics escaped the room, the door cracking open and spilling in the soft, golden glow of a torch.
Except it wasn’t a torch. Silhouetted in the still-flashing glare of wall-rigged nodes, a warrioress swept the room; the stock of a combi-melta pressed firmly into the crook of her shoulder. She was just as tall as Korja, if not a few inches taller, and the officer could just make out the glinting plates of ebony ceramite; a sister of the cloth, tempered through fire and faith, an adepta sororitas.
Korja would never forget the face that the angel wore, her features framed in a curtain of wavy, silver hair. Her brows were furrowed with the concentration of a trained professional, and her lips were set into a thin line, as if her words could not reach beyond the cage of her clenched teeth. She spoke, eyes narrowed in accusatory slits, “Identify yourself. Now.”
Korja scrambled to his feet, his heart racing. His mind was a tempest, yet words still evaded him. She was as the angels depicted in the illuminated tomes that graced the chapel on his homeworld, and as the statues of ancient heroes, forged through the hands of artisans and artificers alike. Her gaze was stern, yet her countenance held a softness, as if the burden of the dead lay heavily upon her heart.
“Officer Korja Hektal.” He answered, first in a rasp, voice hoarse from days of thirst and silence.
The sister looked him up and down with a gaze that could strip adamantium.
“Junior Officer,” Korja corrected. It was almost humorous, how naked he felt before her, even in the fullness of his uniform; his eyes darted away from hers, settling upon her breastplate. Emblazoned upon the armor was a chalice, surrounded by an intricate filigree and the letters ‘A, R, H’ , etched below the cup. The sigil of the Adepta Sororitas, the Order of the Ebon Chalice. Korja had been so distracted by her appearance that the twin-barreled bolt rifle aimed at the groove between his eyes had become an afterthought. “We have been boarded…”
He trailed off, his words catching in his throat. She lowered her weapon, and nodded.
It was only now, in the dimness and the flicker, that Korja noticed the others that filed into the room. One, a masked warrior of a similar height to the sister, his panoply a mixture of grayish camouflage and equipment too sophisticated for the regular footman of the Astra Militarum; a heavy rebreather shielded his face, circular goggles both insectile and expressionless. While Korja lacked an innate knowledge of Militarum stratification, a ranking official would have recognized the commando as a member of the Tempestus Scions. The lasgun he shouldered was an impressive thing, much unlike those commonly issued amongst ordinary guardsman; Korja was relieved to see another well-armed individual. The second was a hunched tech-adept, sporting the crimson robes most often associated with Martian machine-clergy. ‘She’ was still quite human, surprisingly, barring the metallic grill that replaced her lower jaw and a cybernetic left eye; an unblinking, cool cyan. A rather awkward mechadendrite jutted from the spine of her robes, a large, clattering claw that flexed in jerky, short movements.
The sister exchanged her own name, “I am Sister Superior Athene. These are my compatriots, Sergeant Thrun and Tech-adept Sigmata Rejan…We haven’t much time to explain.”
Hope swelled within Korja’s overworked heart, impossibly high on the sweet endorphins of an impending rescue. He had forgotten about the horror of the last three days, and was about to open his mouth to say something — anything, really — when the sound of a heavy footfall made him freeze. It came again, and again, a series of dull thuds. Something was coming down the hallway. The tempo was steady and uninterrupted, deliberate. A rattling shudder that bounced along the vents.
Korja nearly took a step forward outside of his own volition, compelled by some primal urge to rectify the unknown nature of his terror, to see the thing in its fullness and cease the endless torment of an overactive imagination. A hand gripped him tightly by the bicep, a cold gauntlet that could have belonged to either of the Scion or the Sororitas. Korja was jerked roughly back to the doorway, a finger pressed tightly to the sister superior's pursed lips.
Sergeant Thrun’s voice was a whisper, though it rang loud in Korja’s ears, “It’s teasing us.”
Teasing?
“We are being hunted.”
That much had been obvious to Korja days ago. Something was wreaking havoc upon Cundara station, something hungering and vile, yet the junior officer had yet to behold the horrors that lie beyond his prison. “By a xenos?” Korja asked between shallow exhales.
“Incorrect,” This time it was Tech-adept Rejan, her voice a syncopated blend of low-gothic and Martian binary, “Astartes.”
***
They had found the crew of Cundara Station.
Or, what was left of them.
The hallways had been stained by the bloodshed, the air cloying with the smell of iron and copper. They had passed corpses, both the whole and the partial, all with the same, macabre expressions on their faces. Eyes rolled back, mouths contorted into grotesque grimaces. Loose flaps of pinkish skin clung to the ventilation ducks, spreading the nauseating odor further. There was a certain savagery to the aftermath that belied the predator’s intelligence. These were Korja’s fellow crew hands, some of whom most certainly beneath his command. It was hard to match the loose scraps of desiccated skin to the rigor-taut corpses that decorated the halls. It had taken its time, fed upon their agony like a banquet of shrieking delicacies.
The Scion took point, his hotshot rifle raised, and Sister Athene kept close to the rear. They moved quickly, though not quickly enough. Korja could still feel the phantom gaze upon his back.
“Impossible,” Korja fought back the urge to vomit, half-blessed by an empty stomach, “The Emperor’s angels are not capable of…This.”
Sister Athene was silent, the hard, glassy look on her face betraying the truth. Korja felt a twinge of guilt, as if he had been the one to commit the atrocity.
Athene had explained their presence on the station. Cundara was not a major waypoint for the Sororitas, but an important stop in the transit between several other, more populated relay stations. She, the tech-adept and the Scion had merely banded together by circumstance. “It is, but the thing that stalks these corridors has not dwelt beneath the Master of Mankind’s light in centuries.”
“They could never fall.” Imperial propaganda was unyielding in that regard. The genehanced warriors of the God-Emperor’s own creation could not be corrupted. Korja had once found solace in that particular line of dogma. To be told otherwise was gut-wrenching to say the least.
“Many have.” Sister Athene swept an empty ventilation duct with her combi-melta, certain that she’d seen something scamper past the rusted grates. The bodies that littered the deck, however, told a different story. No xenos would have bothered to remove the remains; it would have simply fed. This thing, however, seemed to take a twisted pleasure in the act. The sweeping red light of her torch illuminated the gore, and the horror on her face was a sight to behold. The Sister Superior did not cry out, however, as she had not wept for many years.
She continued, voice firm, and without emotion, a soldier, not a person, reciting scripture, or the tale of a particularly gruesome battle, something told by veterans who were already long broken.
Rejan added her own, albeit limited, perspective, speaking between the mechanical hisses and clicks that punctuated her whirring serves, "The heretic Astartes have long abandoned the Emperor's light...And this is the result."
Korja could not argue, and the quartet pressed deeper. “We’re a long way from the emergency raft-pods.” The junior officer found his voice, a quivering croak amongst the seemingly endless carnage, “and I doubt any remain.”
“Incorrect, again.” Tech-adept Stigmata lacked an social brevity.
Sergeant Thrun elaborated for her, “They’re still there. We got close.”
“In assumed you tried to leave.” Korja didn’t like where the conversation was headedz
“It’s a trap,” Athene stopped, holding Korja’s attention as she did so. Even given the circumstances, the sister superior was a breathtaking sight, her skin pale as starlight and her hair like spun silver, her eyes a piercing blue, as cold and unforgiving as steel. It was easy to get lost in the details, to lose himself to the distraction. “There used to be seven of us.”
The four of them snapped to attention as a shrill scream erupted from the ventilation shaft above, the sound of metal crumpling and twisting under the force of something inhuman. Korja didn't get to see the first few seconds, only the sudden burst of motion and the sound of the Scion's rifle, a series of searing bolts cutting through the dark and into the vent. Korja was frozen, watching as the shape dropped down onto the Sergeant.
Thrun was strong, much stronger than a man of his size, even with the augmetic braces bolted into his limbs, but his opponent was faster. Inhumanly so.
Korja's brain struggled to process the scene, his eyes darting from the Scion to the shadow and back again. Tech-adept Stigmata ducked into a nearby corridor, taking cover behind a corner, her mechadendrite extended in the direction of the skirmish. The tech-adept's optics glowed with an angry, cerulean blue, the servos and gears inside her chassis whirring and clicking with the rapid discharge of a laspistol.
Athene pushed Korja to his back, ducking low and rattling off a few ear-drum splitting bolted shots in the general direction of the fray. She did not with to hit the Scion but knew that killing their tormentor would be a worthy sacrifice for her honor-bound ally. Unfortunately, neither Thrun or the superhuman assailant were hit by the gyroscopic payloads.
It was the ease of it that nearly caused Korja to defecate himself, the ease at which a decorated veteran of the Astra Militarum’s elite was flailed about like a rag doll in the hands of a child. The birth of a new light nearly blinded all of them as it filled the darkness of the station with a crackling bloom of incandescent electricity. Twin wrist blades, wreathed in the plasmic glow of a matter-disrupting power shield, exploded into the front of the Scion’s chest and through a mangled backplate.
The sergeant's mouth opened as if to scream, yet no noise was made. His face was a mask of shock and fear, an expression that seemed foreign on his stern features. Sergeant Thrun was lifted up, suspended on the glowing tips of the claws and the black, hulking silhouette that held him aloft. The shadow turned to the trio with a slow, measured gait, a single, burning eye visible amongst the darkness of its helmet, a crimson glare.
Athene and Korja watched the Scion as the claws slipped from his chest and the warrior disappeared into the gloom. "Sergeant?" The Sister Superior's voice was quiet, yet commanding, the first hint of emotion that she had displayed throughout their entire exchange. Neither the commando or the traitor remained, but in his shell shocked horror, Korja had finally beheld the monstrosity they faced and longed to forget it; the conjurings of his imaginations were but childish fancies to the terror’s true form.
It was indeed an astartes. The traitor wore a suit of dark, midnight armor, plastered with ghoulish motifs of death and terror. There was a pallor, an unhealthy, greyish tint to his skin, only visible from exposed biceps that bulged with inhuman musculature. The armor was an afterthought in comparison to the bulk of the warrior, the plates thick and adorned in a style that Korja had never seen before, not even in the most obscure tomes or ancient, hololithic records. At least not in a loyalist design. His helmet, by the Golden Throne, his helmet. A leering skull, framed in a mane of serrated spikes. His left eye had been replaced by a glowing, cybernetic replacement, and sloped, crimson wings reminiscent of a bat curled at its sides.
Korja had never felt such horror in his life. The thing had not spoken, the low growl emanating from within its helm enough to make Korja's very bones rattle. It was an animal. An abomination.
It was gone now, the darkness its only witness. The Scion had fallen to the floor with a wet, metallic slap. Thrun was dead, his body broken and his armor a tattered husk.
"I-It killed him.." Korja's breath was a ragged pant, his chest heaving, "Just like the others."
"The sergeant knew his fate."
"But why..." Korja's voice cracked, "Why the rest?"
Athene looked away, the hard set of her jaw visible. She was not a woman accustomed to loss, not after losing so many in the last decade, "It is a game to them. The Night Lords are not known for their mercy."
"How do we kill it?" Korja heaved dryly.
Rejan reemerged from her cover. The tech-adept concealed her emotions as well as any other disciple of the Omnissiah, yet there was some neutered, human aspect of her psychology that had survived the apotheosis of steel. While her bionic eye remained an unblinking disc of cyan, her remaining human orb was wide and filled with dread. "Night Lord. Heretic Astartes. Traitor." She muttered the names in succession. “Archives indicate proclivity for terror tactics, stealth-based operations and sabotage. Specialization is close-quarters melee and ranged weaponry. We are at a substantial disadvantage. Suggest a tactical retreat."
Athene nodded, a gesture of respect. The Sororitas were a close-knit group, as were the Scions and the Adeptus Mechanicus, yet there was still a divide, a wall erected by the differences of their philosophies and cultures. It was only in the presence of the enemy that their bonds were forged. "Adept. Do you still have access to the ship's internal systems?"
"Affirmative," The tech-adept answered, her voice a series of metallic clicks and whirs, "All data storage and communication nodes are corrupted. Unable to reach Cundara's vox-channels."
“If we can reach the command bridge’s control column could you reinitiate the long-range vox transmitter? We could send out a beacon, something…” Korja knew some of the details surrounding such protocol and even possessed the proper activation keys for lesser subfubctions. He could help Rejan. At best, he didn’t need to die as a sniveling runt of a man. The sororitas, as cold as she was, had inspired something within Korja; an ideal, perhaps? His dreams of becoming a swashbuckling trailblazer may have died in the nightmare that was Cundara station but Korja remained a loyal servant to the Golden Throne. Only in death did duty end.
Sister Athene shook her head, silky silver hair swaying across the sharp, angled curve of her cheekbones, "That is suicide. It will kill us before we reach the command bridge."
"I'm going to die anyway, Sister Superior," Korja argued, his voice surprisingly strong, "I may be of little use, but if I can help you destroy this…Heretic…I will gladly offer myself to the Golden Throne."
It was an honorable thought, one that was not lost on Athene. For a moment, her gaze softened, her features no longer hardened by the cruelty of war and the burden of leadership.
"Your sacrifice would be great, Junior Officer." The sororitas nodded, the beginnings of a smile gracing her full lips, "Very well. I accept your offer, Korja Hektal."
Athene extended her arm, palm open and upturned.
Korja placed his own hand in hers.
Such fraternization was frowned upon amongst Sororitas. They were champions of the faith, daughters of piety and retribution, but Athene was human. The junior officer held no true rank, possessed no specialized skillsets or arsenal of weaponry, yet had answered the call to action when the Emperor demanded it. They faced a foe so ancient that it had clawed from the blackened annals of history to destroy them, a being of shadow and terror born from the betrayal of the ancient Legiones Astartes, yet three mortals stood defiant.
Athene squeezed his fingers tightly. "Sigmata. Take the rear. Keep us safe."
The tech-adept bowed her head, her optics glowing with an angry, cerulean hue. "As the Omnissiah wills."
"You’ve spent the most time on this station, Korja, lead the way."
Korja nodded, his throat tight.
***