Chapter 38: Genestealers
The space hulk's interior was disorienting in a way that had no logical explanation.
One moment Duvette and his unit were moving through a passage that could have come from any Imperial Navy vessel — rusted conduit, flickering emergency lighting, the particular enclosed smell of metal that had been sealed for decades. Then they stepped through a warped pressure door and the space changed entirely.
The compressed metal passage was gone. In its place: a vast, broken expanse that opened vertically for what must have been thirty meters, a high dome ceiling of which more than half had collapsed, revealing the mechanical understructure of another vessel above — different construction, different era, pressed against this one by whatever force had assembled the hulk over millennia. The scale of what the dome had once been was still legible in what remained.
Duvette looked across the floor through his helmet's visor. Massive blocks of stone and fragments of colored glass lay scattered across it. In the shadows, several ruined angel statues stood where they had been placed: their wings had been deliberately broken off, and their faces had been worn to ambiguity by the passage of time. The stained glass, the statuary, the proportions of the surviving architecture — this had been a cathedral, or something built to serve the same purpose.
"Stay sharp," Duvette said into the communications channel. The fifty soldiers moved without needing further instruction, spreading into a standard defensive formation, weapons up, advancing in short careful movements.
The silence was complete except for the sound of boots on rubble.
They were passing a massive fallen angel statue, one wing buried in the stone floor, when Stroud stopped.
The bald hunter went still with the complete absence of motion that Duvette had seen him use before. His gaze was locked on the shadows around them, his combat shotgun held in a white-knuckled grip.
"Boss," he said through the channel, his voice low. "Something's wrong. There's something there."
Duvette checked his helmet display immediately. The readout was flat: only the blue contacts of his own unit, nothing else registering. He looked to the soldiers carrying auspexes — the same result, their screens showing only static interference.
But Stroud did not fabricate threats.
Then Duvette felt it himself.
A cold that started at the base of his spine and moved directly upward into the base of his skull. Every hair on his body stood up simultaneously. The whole unit reacted — soldiers all around him going rigid at the same moment, hands tightening on weapons.
Threat Sense. The passive was triggering across the entire formation.
Before he could order a tighter formation, Juno moved.
Without a word of warning, the Lord Inquisitor spun on her heel, raised her right hand, and pointed at a rubble-filled corner of shadow to the right.
A crack of electrical discharge tore through the air. A thick bolt of blue-white psychic lightning erupted from her fingertips and drove into the corner with the force of something that could not be accounted for by the scale of the woman producing it.
Duvette's eyes went sharp. A psyker. A powerful one. That answered the question he had been carrying since the Siren's Fury.
A shriek came from the corner and a Genestealer lurched into the open — purple-skinned, its body scorched black along one side, multiple limbs dragging on the stone floor as it came. Half-ruined, still coming.
Finn had already raised the lasrifle. He did not bother with the scope. The shot left the barrel and the Genestealer's head ceased to exist. The beam had gone through it cleanly, the body dropping and sliding another meter on the stone before coming to rest.
The sound of that shot broke something.
The silence shattered and the darkness came alive.
From the overhead beams, from behind the collapsed columns, from the cracks in the broken floor tiles, Genestealers emerged in a continuous and accelerating stream. Purple bodies moving at a speed that did not fit the size of them, flowing up walls and across the ceiling with the ease of things that treated every surface the same. They came with sounds that built on each other into a combined noise that had weight and pressure and no resemblance to anything human.
"Too many!" Juno's voice cut across the channel. "Fall back to the passage we came through! Move!"
Standing in the open against an encirclement of this size was extinction, not a fight. The unit moved, firing as they went, falling back toward the cathedral's entry point in controlled bounds.
Duvette activated Focused Volley without hesitation.
The effect was immediate — the unit's combined fire tightened and concentrated, individual shots finding better purchase as the skill reached through the formation. The suppressing fire held a corridor of movement open ahead of them.
At the rear, Anderson and several other soldiers planted themselves with the promethium flamers. Anderson roared something into the channel, locked his trigger, and drove a column of burning orange out along the floor in a sustained arc. Genestealers in the leading wave burned and shrank and fell, and the fire created a brief wall that the next wave had to push through.
In the middle of the formation, Finn moved with a deliberate calm that was at odds with everything happening around him. He was the only soldier in the unit, besides Juno, not wearing a sealed tactical helmet — his mechanical eyes turned continuously, adjusting, locking, and each time they did a las-bolt followed the lock. Every target he marked fell with a headshot. The state of the target, the angle, the distance — none of it seemed to matter to the mechanical eyes.
But the numbers.
The Genestealers came in a purple tide that filled the available space from every direction simultaneously, one wave breaking against the fire line and the next already forming behind it. The encirclement was closing at a visible rate. The unit's suppression was buying distance, not stopping the advance.
Juno abandoned whatever restraint she had been exercising.
The blue-white lightning that had come from her right hand intensified to something that surrounded her entirely, arcing between her fingers and the floor and the nearest stone surfaces without apparent direction or control. The temperature around her dropped so sharply and so fast that frost began forming on the rubble at her feet, spreading outward in thin crystalline sheets, coating the stone with a pale layer that crackled under every boot that touched it. Each step she took forward, multiple bolts struck simultaneously — anything between the unit and the exit took it.
Duvette knew what she was doing was dangerous here. The veil between realspace and the Warp was thin inside a space hulk — thinner than anywhere outside the Eye of Terror. Sustained heavy psychic discharge in this environment was not the same risk as the same discharge anywhere else.
He stayed as close behind her as the formation allowed, firing his bolt pistol without breaking stride.
"Aah!"
A voice in the channel. Left side.
Duvette turned. A soldier on the flank had caught his boot on a block of rubble and gone down — one second, just one second of lost footing, and two Genestealers cleared the fire line and hit him.
Duvette raised his bolt pistol and put a round through the skull of the one on the soldier's chest.
The second one had its arm raised, the raking claw at the apex of the motion.
He revved the chainsword and charged.
The spinning teeth drove into the Genestealer's body at speed and he forced them through with his full weight behind it, shredding the limb and the torso simultaneously. The fluid that came off it was hot and smelled of something organic and deeply unpleasant and covered most of his front.
"Up! Now! On your feet!"
He grabbed the soldier by the shoulder of the carapace armour and pulled, got him upright, and drove him back toward the unit at a run.
Between the two of them and the main body, the Genestealer mass had already closed. They were separated by a gap of purple bodies — two figures on an island with the tide coming in from all sides and the shoreline pulling away.
"Anderson!" He put everything he had into his volume. "Cover us!"
The big man turned on his heel. Anderson swung the flamer's barrel around to bear on the gap between Duvette's position and the unit, made a brief and very unkind assessment of the geometry, and burned a corridor through the mass.
The fire swept past them close enough that Duvette felt the heat through the carapace. The Genestealers on both sides of that corridor disintegrated. The corridor stayed open for exactly as long as it needed to.
Both of them crossed it at a run and rejoined the formation.
In the crossing of lightning and fire, the unit cut the last of the encirclement apart and made it back to the passage they had entered from.
Duvette looked at the passage.
And under his breath, behind his helmet, he said: "What the hell."
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