Chapter 39: Gravity Anomaly
Duvette and his unit pushed back to the entry corridor — and found that the Imperial Navy-style passage they had come through no longer existed.
In its place was a vast space assembled from scrap bronze, salvaged engines, and ship debris welded together with no apparent care for structural integrity. Warped metal plates had been beaten into walls and joined at rough weld points where dark rust-water seeped through the seams. The walls were marked with wild totems painted in blood and crude pigment. In every direction: metal-junk shanties and mounds of accumulated rubbish.
Ork construction. Unmistakable.
Duvette silently reminded himself about the space hulk's spatial instability. He had accepted it intellectually before boarding. He had not fully processed what it meant until this moment — that the route back to the Shark could simply no longer exist.
The Genestealer sounds came from behind. They had followed. Purple bodies moved across the welded metal walls with all six limbs, deep claw-marks left in the rough surface with each handhold.
He checked the unit HUD in the upper left of his vision. Fifty soldiers. No dead. Several suits of carapace armour had taken damage in the breakout and several soldiers were carrying wounds, but for what they had just come through, everyone still standing was nothing short of remarkable.
"Keep moving."
Juno's voice came from ahead. She was pressing the back of her hand to her mouth as she spoke, her voice noticeably rougher than it had been. Duvette noticed her hand was trembling.
He narrowed his eyes and nodded.
"On her."
The unit moved again. The soldiers carrying las-carbines held the rear, firing continuously back toward the pursuing Genestealers. Red beams crossed the dim space in straight lines. With Threat Sense and Focused Volley still active, the Genestealers' characteristic sudden-attack speed was somewhat mitigated — the soldiers were getting fractional warning before each surge, and their shots were connecting at a meaningfully higher rate.
But this approach had an end point. He could hear the continuous firing behind him and knew the ammunition expenditure. The Genestealers were endless. They came from every crack and gap in the structure in a continuous pressure.
The unit pushed forward.
Ahead: noise. Metal impacts and guttural shouting.
Duvette brought the unit around a corner made from stacked salvaged engines and the entire formation stopped.
About twenty Orks were beating each other in an open area.
They wore patchwork armour assembled from scrap iron, and they were swinging crude cleavers and clubs. The group had formed a loose circle around two Orks at the center who were fighting over a piece of glowing scrap with the full commitment of beings who had no concept of anything else currently mattering. Fists on armour, excited howling, metal impacts filling the space.
The Orks registered the humans and the Genestealers at the same moment.
Every one of them turned and looked. Small eyes found Duvette's unit. A second of stillness.
Then every Ork erupted.
"Waaagh! It'z purpleskinz an' pinkskinz!"
They threw down their internal dispute and grabbed their weapons. Half of them charged toward the Genestealers. The other half charged toward the humans.
The howling carried through the metal space and something answered it from further out. Heavier footsteps began approaching from multiple directions simultaneously. The entire junk-built space trembled with the response.
Duvette's decision took less than a second.
"Change direction! Left flank! Break through!"
Between the Genestealer pursuit from behind and the Ork charge from ahead, with more Orks converging from every direction, any error in the next thirty seconds meant the end of the unit.
Juno was noticeably compromised. The veins at her temples had risen to the skin's surface. Her pale face was covered in cold sweat. She had her eyes closed, breathing fast, concentrating on something internal.
The unit divided into two groups as it moved left: one continued suppressing the Genestealer pursuit with lasrifles and flamers, the other turned its shotguns, plasma guns, and meltaguns on the incoming Orks. Ork physiology required it — broken limbs did not stop their charges. The heavy weapons were necessary.
"Move! Faster!"
Juno opened her eyes.
She reached out and took a plasma gun from the soldier beside her. The strength behind the motion was not a request — the soldier could not have held onto the weapon if he had tried. The surprise on his face was clear even through the helmet. She raised the weapon, barely aimed, and fired at a support point at the top of a junk mountain to their right.
The plasma bolt crossed the space in an instant. It hit the support point and the heat melted through the crude welding of the structure in a fraction of a second.
The space shook.
The junk mountain made the sound of metal under terminal stress. The support structure gave way, and tens of thousands of tons of accumulated debris began to slide — engines, broken armor plates, twisted piping, all of it going at once in a cascade that built rapidly into a roar.
"With me!"
Juno turned without hesitation and ran toward a narrow gap that the collapse had just opened in the wall to the left, her voice gone almost completely to gravel.
"After the Inquisitor! Now!"
The unit ran at full speed. Every breath in the channel was ragged, but no one fell behind. They went through the gap and found a deformed maintenance passage — compressed by the structure around it, the original walls pushed inward.
Behind them: the collapse arrived. The junk mountain came down directly across the area where the Genestealers and Orks had been fighting, the mass of metal burying purple and green beneath it indiscriminately. The survivors on both sides immediately turned on each other. The humans were a secondary concern.
"Incendiaries."
The soldiers at the rear pulled promethium incendiaries from their belts, cleared the pins, and threw them back into the passage entrance. A wall of fire rose across the entry point and stayed there.
The pursuit was cut off.
They moved through the twisted maintenance passage for approximately five minutes, the space narrowing as they went. The shoulder guards of the carapace armour scraped against both walls with a sound that went through the teeth. No one slowed.
Light appeared ahead.
Juno came out first. Duvette followed.
The space beyond was relatively open and looked like a hangar deck that had been torn apart and compressed by the surrounding mass: anti-slip metal grating on the floor, a high vaulted ceiling of which most had collapsed, elaborate pipe and cable networks visible above through the gaps. The scale suggested a capital warship of some kind.
At the far end of the space: an opening.
A vertical shaft dropping straight down into darkness with no visible bottom.
Duvette walked to the edge. His helmet's illumination beam went down into the shaft and the darkness consumed it before revealing anything below. The shaft walls were smooth metal, completely without handholds or ladder rungs.
He turned to look at Juno.
The Inquisitor stood at the shaft's edge. Her face was expressionless. Her breathing had steadied slightly, but the cold sweat was still moving down her forehead. She looked at Duvette once.
Then she stepped forward and dropped into the shaft without a word.
The black coat billowed upward as she fell, caught the air for a moment, and was swallowed by the dark.
Duvette stared at the opening.
He turned to Stroud. The bald man gave what amounted to a shrug, constrained by the carapace armour's shoulder guards but visible enough.
Duvette drew one long breath and set his jaw.
"Jump."
He stepped forward into the shaft.
Weightlessness. Immediate and complete. His heart moved up into his throat. His stomach offered an opinion on the subject. He was in freefall, dark on all sides, wind noise rising around him from the speed of the descent.
Then the direction of gravity changed.
What had been a vertical drop became a horizontal deceleration. Duvette went from falling toward the bottom of the shaft to landing flat on his back on a solid metal surface. The carapace armour's cushioning absorbed the impact, most of it, and what remained drove the breath out of him.
He lay there and breathed.
The physics of the space had simply changed. Or this was a gravity anomaly area — a section of the hulk where the vector of gravity had been redirected and never corrected.
No light at all in the surrounding space. The helmet's night-vision engaged automatically, the world shifting to an eerie uniform green.
Duvette pushed himself up slowly and looked around.
The architecture here was completely unlike anything he had seen in the rest of the hull. Not Imperial. Not Ork. Could it be the remains of an Eldar vessel? He looked at the broken data panels set into the walls and the clean, ordered geometry of what remained. The Eldar aesthetic was organic, curved, grown rather than built. This was not that.
Tau, perhaps?
He let out a slow breath. Or — and this was harder to dismiss — could this be a relic of the Dark Age of Technology? Pre-Imperial human construction, from an era of science that the Imperium had spent ten thousand years trying to forget.
"Stop staring. Keep moving."
Juno's voice came from ahead of him, rougher than he had ever heard it.
He turned. Behind him, soldiers were arriving one after another, dropping from the ceiling and landing on the floor around him as the gravity's redirection caught each of them mid-fall. Fifty soldiers, dropping from above and landing flat, the process repeating itself until everyone had arrived.
All fifty. All still present.
Duvette stood, knocked the dust from his carapace, and looked ahead.
"Form up. Follow the Inquisitor."
***
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