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Cover

Dream of the Locust – Tom R Pike

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Flesh and Steel’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Dream of the Locust

Tom R Pike

‘Beware the locust, for he dreams only of endings.’

– Masali proverb, first attested in the 38th millennium

Technoarchaeologist Kem Okhotnik’s cogitative instincts ruled out the possibility of good news before Shulgi even spoke.

<Still no response to query,> said Shulgi in a short binharic bark. The receiver dish affixed to the skitarius alpha’s head irised closed and retracted into the place her right ear had once been. She returned her omnispex to the clasp on her left thigh.

‘Her voice is silent,’ agreed Okhotnik. It was an affirmation of existing data.

The Dream of the Locust was making no broadcasts. Okhotnik’s hails in both binharic and Gothic had gone unanswered. Yet her communications arrays appeared to be in full working order. One could only conclude that the crew who had once been the Dream’s custodians were now dead.

When the Dream of the Locust emerged intact from the warp after a decade lost within, the wisdom of the forges had been divided on whether anyone aboard would be alive. But Okhotnik himself had assumed the crew to be dead from the first data Ryza had acquired regarding the Dream’s trajectory. Ryzan long-distance sensors had caught the ship emerging from the warp, and then watched her drift sidelong. Okhotnik’s mission was not rescue, but salvage.

The technoarchaeologist’s Shark assault boat was stocked with ten skitarii rangers and a datasmith. Near the rear of the compartment, two Kastelan robots idled: Awning-19V and Fulminant Niner. Each robot in the maniple was twice as tall as Okhotnik and older than the Imperium of Man. Yet they looked new. Their surfaces had recently been polished to a shine by servitors unworthy of accompanying them. They were magnificent machines, controlled by doctrina wafers that Datasmith Mosse would have to insert manually into a cavity behind their chestplates any time their instructions had to be changed. She was an expert at doing so under fire.

To an unaccustomed eye, the skitarii would have looked grotesque. Markos XVI’s head was floating in a jar of oil bolted to the front of his chest. Rhy Holmqvist had a third arm sprouting from his neck, just below the jaw. Okhotnik himself had a third upper appendage, his servo-arc claw emerging instead from his back. To Okhotnik’s eyes, the skitarii looked efficient. They were honoured to have been selected as tools worthy of the whetstone.

Technoarchaeologist Kem Okhotnik, Disassembler of Ways, was known on Ryza as obsessive in his attention to detail. Long ago, he had once spent an entire decade retrieving and cataloguing cyber-organic tongues, even turning down an upgrade because his work wasn’t yet finished. After he finally accepted his upgrade, he had led many forays that recovered archeotech. This expedition was just the latest.

The assault boat was ancient, held together by prayer as much as by rivets. To Okhotnik’s right, a microfracture leak in an old pipe slowly vented oil into the cabin, therein mingling with the scent of incense. The Dream of the Locust, on the other hand, was pristine. The old Mechanicus frigate, still a third of a solar hour away, showed no signs of hull damage. Remarkable.

Ensure the cargo is retrieved. That was the dictum with which Okhotnik had been tasked. He had reprogrammed the cogitator that interfaced with his organic brain to prompt him at regular intervals, playing back the mission briefing in his mind. He wanted to be centred, to be focused. And he wanted his team to be as well.

<Pilot,> said Okhotnik, <carry my voice to our escorts.> He switched his cyber-organic eyes off visual light, showing him instead wireframes. He glanced to the left and right simultaneously, pivoting his eyes in opposite directions, peering through the walls of the Shark and into the void beyond. Out past the armoured hull of their assault boat, flanking it on both sides, flew two Fury interceptors.

The Shark’s pilot extended his finger towards the console. A cap unscrewed itself, and a tendril snaked out of the finger, worming its way into a receptacle on the console. Another tendril extended from the back of the pilot’s head, reaching for Okhotnik. It unfolded like a steel flower, steam hissing from its joints, forming a dictaphone. A sigil on the board lit up with the crimson red of Mars. Okhotnik’s voice was live over the voxes of the three ships in his explorator squadron.

‘What is our task, tools of the Machine God?’ he asked his team. Ten skitarii, a datasmith, and the three ships’ pilots answered him in unison:

‘Ensure the cargo is retrieved. Secure it and return it to Ryza. All tools expendable in service of this goal. Do not damage the cargo. Do not open it. Do not investigate what is within, nor allow others to do so.’

The optimal solution was one where Okhotnik triumphantly flew the Dream back under its own power. But even the Dream was expendable, just like Okhotnik.

Okhotnik had been given just a little more information than his team. He knew how to identify the cargo by the container it was in. He knew it needed a power supply. That was all.

Not for the first time, curiosity stirred within him, only to be tamped down by his higher-level subroutines. Do not investigate what is within. He was a tool of the Machine God, a long, grasping, articulated arm, thrust out into the darkness, built to seize. An arm required only the neurons necessary to operate its fist.

An arm would be deconstructed for useful parts if it no longer served the function it was designed for.

Okhotnik’s right eye saw the interruption before the console lit up with green warning sigils.

<Technoarchaeologist, an object is emerging from the warp,> said the Shark’s pilot.

Okhotnik brought both his eyes to bear on it. A twisted mass of metal was coming out of a spiral funnel from the immaterium.

The new vessel, for it was in fact a vessel, had been formed by crudely bolting six – no, seven – ships together at odd angles. The bulk of its hull was recognisably an old Imperial troop ship, but the craft were from a variety of cultures, and all had been mangled.

Ryza knew this enemy too well. Okhotnik had faced them in the void and in the dirt. He had fixed his servo-arc claw around their limbs and snapped them off, collecting data on the way the enemy bounced back from injury anew with howling fury. At least twice, they had nearly killed him. The image that stayed in his mind was of a warboss, its face framed by jagged metal armour, leering down at him as it had prepared a killing blow that never came.

The orks were scavengers and opportunists. They would not know what was aboard the Dream. Even most of the Dream’s former crew had not known what it carried – or indeed that it had carried anything – before they had apparently perished in the warp. The secrecy around the vessel’s cargo was one reason for optimism that it might still be aboard, and that Okhotnik might find it first.

Okhotnik’s eyes and cogitator ran calculations. The intruder had emerged from the warp closer to the Dream than the explorator expedition had. This enemy always seemed to experience an abundance of luck.

‘Tools of the Machine God,’ asked Okhotnik, still broadcasting over the vox, ‘does the arrival of xenos change our mission?’

‘It does not,’ his team responded.

‘How many times have we repulsed them from Ryza?’

‘Time and time again. Times beyond counting.’

‘Datasmith Salva Mosse, Stalwart of the Token,’ Okhotnik said, turning his left eye backwards in his skull, his vision penetrating through his brain and cogitator to watch her reaction, ‘what is your own personal count?’

‘I have helped the Machine God drive the xenos from our forge in thirty-nine instances,’ Mosse responded.

The old tech-priest would not brag unless Okhotnik ordered her to do so. What was left of her organic face was marred with scars from a dozen of those campaigns. Privately, Okhotnik thought Mosse’s total was probably higher. Perhaps she was removing edge cases from her analysis. Raids, skirmishes and the like. She was centuries old.

He let her keep her humility.

‘Thirty-nine times,’ he said. ‘A machine is deterministic. From the same input, it reaches the same result, every time.’

The team murmured prayers.

Okhotnik’s right eye, still fixed on the ork vessel, watched dozens of splinters and chunks peel away from it: boarding barges, rigged from old torpedoes and skiffs. Little more than hull, engine, and hatch. They hurled themselves towards the Dream, each seeking to be the first to defile the ghost ship.

Okhotnik ran the numbers. Some orks would die simply from the force of impact with the Dream, but that would hardly dull the enthusiasm of the survivors. There was room enough aboard the barges for hundreds of orks to survive, and those that died would make room for loot.

By their blue hull markings, these were Deathskulls, unusual for this region but commonly found near potential salvage. The thought of them boarding and stripping the Dream for parts made Okhotnik’s remaining skin crawl.

The technoarchaeologist was tempted to target the ork boarding barges, but with how fast the barges were moving, only the Furies could intercept. If he sent his Furies after them, the ork vessel would be positioned to destroy the Shark. The loss of the Shark at this stage would end the salvage mission.

‘We shall see your total iterate to forty this day, datasmith,’ said Okhotnik. He spoke firing solutions into the dictaphone in binharic. <Execute,> he commanded.

Okhotnik’s eyes watched the Furies peel away. The Shark rumbled underneath his metal-clawed feet, accelerating towards the Dream of the Locust. At this speed, the impact might damage his team. Before the xenos’ arrival, such risk-taking would not have been necessary, but the calculus had changed. Around him, the skitarii strapped in.

The Furies flung themselves towards the ork ship at oblique angles, twisting in spirals to avoid incoming fire. Though the thrown-together vessel bristled with cannons, there were blind spots.

The Imperial craft strafed the ork vessel. Its gunners flung all manner of projectiles at the nimble interceptors, but the Mechanicus pilots steered clear. Their lascannons flashed with bursts of light, gouging black skids across the makeshift hull of the ork ship.

The ork vessel did not seem especially bothered. It dwarfed the tiny interceptors by several orders of magnitude. The Furies were a nuisance, it seemed, not a threat. Okhotnik knew otherwise. He had collected the necessary data. Each lascannon impact had shaken the ork ship’s hull, revealing resonances.

<Execute additional,> he said over the vox, and the Fury pilots switched to a second set of instructions.

The Furies dived closer to the ork ship. The guns of the enemy tracked them, and a few rounds of flak slammed against one interceptor’s wing, but its pilot did not falter. At the perigee of the attack arc, both Furies launched their ship-to-ship missiles in unison, targeting a joint between the ork ship’s hulls where it had been bolted together, each missile spaced out at resonant intervals.

The orks deployed countermeasures. Crates of chaff spewed space junk into the paths of the missiles. Three missiles, then four, slammed into the chaff, their payloads detonating just too far from the ork hull to cause damage. But redundancy had been built into Okhotnik’s plan, and the other eight missiles struck true.

Ruptures burst across the joint. Flames gouted into space. Okhotnik’s eyes’ visual display labelled a scattering of tiny wireframes it believed to be bodies, wrenching and writhing in the darkness.

The ship split. One of its seven hulls fully detached, cables and pipes ripping and snapping as it went. Uncontrolled explosions rippled across both pieces where they had once been joined. The smaller piece tumbled away from the main hull.

A wave of thankful prayers passed through the skitarii, but Okhotnik did not share their elation. New data was coming in.

He shouted new commands into the vox. <Execute!> But he had realised the complication too late.

The two parts of the ork ship were both still operational. And now that it was split in two and tumbling, its cannons could cover new angles. The weapons on the smaller chunk came to life.

Heavy projectiles slammed into one of the Furies. Its cockpit shattered, and its engines sputtered. Another round reduced it to scrap. The other Fury raked the smaller ork fragment with lascannon fire. The lascannons found the unarmoured underside that had once been attached to the other half of the ship. The smaller fragment of the ork vessel finally went up in glorious flame. The larger fragment, wounded but still manoeuvrable, fell back from the surviving Fury with speed that such an unwieldy ship should not have been able to muster.

A funnel opened up into the warp, swallowing the ork ship.

As the surviving Fury regrouped around the Shark, Okhotnik reassessed the situation. The ork ship had been damaged, but would likely return with reinforcements, and hundreds of orks had already cut their way aboard the Dream. Reinforcements from Ryza would not be an option – the besieged forge world had already sent all it could spare. The task would be challenging. Time would be short.

‘What is our task, tools of the Machine God?’ he asked again.

‘Ensure the cargo is retrieved. Secure it and return it to Ryza. All tools expendable in service of this goal. Do not damage the cargo. Do not open it. Do not investigate what is within, nor allow others to do so.’

As if cued, his cogitator sent him its periodic reminder:

Ensure the cargo is retrieved.

The assault boat slammed into the Dream of the Locust as close to the generatorum as Okhotnik could manage. Skitarius Oυ underwent an unplanned lobotomy when he fell sideways onto a bulkhead bolt. He still contained parts worthy of repurposing, but he was useless to the task at hand. Skitarius Quell suffered a shoulder dislocation in the impact, necessitating a field repair that compromised her actuators. She was still fit for the boarding action.

From the generatorum, the Dream could be scuttled if need be, and the cargo, which required a large and continuous power supply, was most likely to be hidden there. It was the first objective.

<Seal the inner hatch and pull the Shark back after we clear the breach,> Okhotnik instructed the pilot. <If you remain sealed to the hull of the Dream of the Locust, orks will likely board the Shark and disassemble it. But there is an outside possibility that we will need to evacuate the frigate. Be listening for pings from my control cortex.>

<Understood.>

<Execute,> said Okhotnik.

The breaching charges detonated, and the assault boat shook. Okhotnik steadied himself again. The inner hatch of the Shark opened up, revealing a smoke- and debris-filled corridor.

Okhotnik readied his eradication pistol and Omnissian axe. His eyes could not penetrate frigate hull plating, and he had no way of peering around the corner without exposing part of his head to potential incoming fire. He logged in his cogitator memory bank that he wished to apply for upgrades that would allow him to extend his eyes around corners. He had already applied for such an honour several times. Perhaps if he retrieved the cargo, it would be accepted. In the meantime, he had to pass the honour of boarding the Dream first off to an infoslave skull.

Skitarius Alpha Shulgi extended the radial dish affixed to her head and drew her omnispex. She activated the infoslave skull. Its limbs recoiled, then bucked it into the air, where it stayed, hovering.

<Enter the corridor and report,> commanded Shulgi.

The skull eased its way into the corridor, eyes and sensors aflutter.

<Clear of hostiles,> it reported back in a burst of binharic static.

Okhotnik extended a metal-clawed foot over the jagged lip of the Dream’s former hull. The corridor floor was two feet lower than the Shark’s floor, and angled at nine degrees, but he reoriented himself once he pulled the rest of his body down inside.

He moved away from the landing, allowing the nine surviving skitarii to descend. Datasmith Mosse was next. The Kastelan robots followed, ignoring the scraps of hull that stood in their way, kicking past debris. They were following a routine where they would stay near Mosse, defending her from possible threats. One did not want to lay even a friendly hand on her shoulder when they were in such a state.

For the first time in many years, humans were aboard the Dream of the Locust.

Shulgi’s omnispex synced with their location within the ship. ‘Quickest route to the generatorum is ahead,’ she reported.

<Send the infoslave skull,> instructed Okhotnik. <We will follow. If the route is obstructed, we will reassess.>

The skull flitted ahead, matching its pathfinding to the route displayed on Shulgi’s omnispex. The Mechanicus team and their Kastelans moved behind it. Okhotnik aimed for a pace that was a compromise between haste and caution. They were badly outnumbered within the Dream, and they could not charge headlong through its halls without checking doors and corners. But neither could they waste time.

The corridor ran the whole length of the Dream’s aft section. The quickest route was through a passageway that would open up on their left, about five openings further down. As they passed each opening, they checked to see that it was empty and then crossed it quickly.

Ahead of them, the skull rounded the corner and entered the target passageway. Moments later, the omnispex chirped.

‘Signal loss from infoslave skull,’ said Shulgi.

Okhotnik did not have to have cogitative instincts to deduce what that meant. He held up a fist to halt the team.

‘Did any tool detect any reports of weapons fire?’

They had not.

‘What was in the last datapacket, Alpha Shulgi?’

The alpha worked her omnispex. ‘The last packet was not fully transmitted,’ she said, ‘but what we have is an indication of an empty corridor.’

Okhotnik frowned. The sides of the equation did not match.

Shulgi seemed disturbed. ‘That skull has served Ryza for two centuries,’ she said, ‘only to vanish now. It was once a skitarius tasked with venerating the Machine God, as we are.’

Okhotnik had worked with Shulgi before. She had been his first choice for alpha on this mission. She was competent and thorough. Yet he had sometimes observed in her a proscribed sentimentality for the lives of the skitarii she commanded. No tool was perfect. Shulgi would have to continue to work to optimise her performance.

Okhotnik weighed the options available to them. There were many routes to the generatorum, and many were likely to have orks within them. But a silent killing was not the way orks operated. Some other fate had befallen the skull. It would be irresponsible to send functioning tools down a corridor that contained unknown threats.

<Query:> said Shulgi. <Permission to retrieve useful components?>

<Denied,> said Okhotnik. <Alpha Shulgi, reset your omnispex to the second-best route,> he commanded.

<This way.> The alpha led them back the way they had come, and they proceeded towards a different hallway that led deeper into the heart of the ship.

When they arrived at the opening, Shulgi checked the corner. <Clear,> she reported.

‘The bulkheads to the outermost corridor are all open,’ mused Datasmith Mosse, examining the doorway. ‘If the ship had experienced a decompression, the crew would have closed them.’

Okhotnik was only interested in the disappearance of the crew insofar as it might affect the presence of the cargo. Hopefully, whatever fate had befallen them had left the cargo intact, presumably in the generatorum. <Proceed,> he instructed Shulgi.

Shulgi rounded the corner, her pistol levelled. Okhotnik followed her.

They were already within the corridor when the technoarchaeologist’s cogitative instincts warned him that danger was imminent. <Halt!> he ordered, and the skitarii took knees, bringing their galvanic rifles to their shoulders. Okhotnik’s eyes scanned in all directions, but something within the ship was clouding his vision. He could not penetrate the corners or the walls. It felt like he had been fitted with blinders. There was nothing, nothing, nothing. Empty corridor before and behind.

The bulkhead slammed shut behind him. His eyes spun around to see its huge adamantine doors scissor shut around the body of Skitarius Macrophosphon, who did not even have time to scream. His body crumpled and bisected, the doors splitting organic and machine parts alike, and finally closing around his weapon.

Macrophosphon had carried a plasma caliver.

<Down!> bellowed Okhotnik, flooding the corridor with binharic static, but again it was too late.

The caliver’s ammunition burst. A blast of plasma rocked the hallway. Skitarius Koppen, who had been nearest the door, was ripped apart by the shockwave. Pieces of them struck their comrades. A metal splinter, half a finger thick, from one of Koppen’s augments embedded itself in Okhotnik’s chin. He yanked the splinter out with his claw as he ran back to assess the damage. Koppen and Macrophosphon were added to the casualty list.

<Move out,> Okhotnik ordered as the skitarii checked themselves for damage. The minor injuries of the surviving cyborgs would have to be addressed as they moved. <We have created quite a bit of noise in this part of the ship twice now. They will be–>

Projectiles impacted around Okhotnik. His eyes spun back around towards the interior of the Dream. Three orks carrying what they imaginatively called ‘big shootas’ had emerged from a side corridor and opened fire.

The air heated up with the crackling of rifles. Galvanic bullets sped towards the orks. Where they embedded themselves in xenos limbs, the muscles would spasm and tear, all the potential energy in the creatures’ metabolic systems unleashing itself at once.

One ork died when its own back muscles yanked its neck so hard that it snapped. Another took a bullet in its torso, its organic body’s motive force blasting a hole around the entry wound.

The third tried to limp away, slowed down by a limb that was no longer functional. Okhotnik sprinted towards it on his metal-clawed legs. His servo-arc claw snapped forward like a striking snake. He seized the ork by the neck, slammed it up against the wall, and passed a bolt of arc lightning between the electrodes of his claw. When the ork stopped convulsing, he dropped it to the floor. The wall behind where he’d held it was blackened with burned flesh.

‘I hear more,’ said Shulgi, her radial scanning the corridor the xenos came from. ‘Sixteen. Seventeen. Many.’

<Move!> barked Okhotnik. He led them past the intersection, away from the orks.

The skitarii bolted down the corridor. Feet both metal and human slammed into the adamantine tiles. Mosse and the Kastelans brought up the rear. If the orks rounded the corner and entered pursuit, the robots’ hulking frames would protect the skitarii from stray shots. Caution was no longer an effective program, leaving only haste.

As he passed the side corridor the orks had come from, Okhotnik noted with irritation that the xenos had indeed begun stripping the ship for parts. The floor of the side corridor was strewn with discarded and looted components. Okhotnik’s higher functions had to suppress the urge to stop and fix the ship.

A hissing sound came from behind one of the wall panels. Then, another, and another. Okhotnik’s eyes scanned the corridor as he ran; several panels were bending and warping as pressure built up behind them. His visual display identified the gas leaking out of them as ammonia. It was coming from beside his team and behind them.

The only way out was forward. Ahead of them was a ramp to a higher level, and the ammonia pipes did not run into the ramp chamber. They would be safe there.

<Through the corridor!> he ordered. <Ignore all reports of pain.> He maximised his stride length, muting the pleading of his legs’ servos. He could maintain his joints back at Ryza, but only if his organic components remained untainted by lethal gas. His visual display analysis showed more poisons than just ammonia now. The gas was a deadly cocktail that would penetrate even the best rebreather.

The first of them arrived at the ramp. It was a square-walled spiral that wound its way up and down through the levels of the frigate. In its centre was a sheer drop, leading all the way to the bottom of the ship.

<Proceed up three yards in elevation, then wait for the rest,> ordered Okhotnik. The gas was heavier than air. It would settle below them, falling into the centre hole.

With one eye turned backwards, he watched Markos XVI, the rearmost of the skitarii, dodge the gas. One of the wall panels buckled and burst. It flew free of its housing, smacking into the jar containing Markos’ head and embedding itself in the glass. The liquid suspending his head began to slosh out. The skitarius stumbled and fell.

Markos didn’t breathe through his head, but he still had lungs.

Alpha Shulgi hesitated. She turned back.

‘All tools expendable!’ said Okhotnik, but she did not respond. She ran back for Markos, who was not dead yet. He was struggling to get to his feet. Shulgi, nearly at his side, began coughing and retching.

Okhotnik sent an override to her through his control cortex, but she withdrew her radial and shut her mind to him. A normal skitarius would not have been able to do so, but Shulgi was strong of will. Okhotnik resented her deeply in that moment.

<Datasmith, retrieve her.>

Mosse and the Kastelans were approaching Markos and Shulgi. The datasmith, her rebreather working at twice its rated power consumption, tried to take Shulgi by the arm and help her towards the entrance to the ramp, where Okhotnik and the other skitarii waited. Shulgi slapped Mosse’s hand away. Responding to the perceived threat, Fulminant Niner seized the alpha with its power fist and slammed her into the wall, killing her instantly – an overreaction, but the Kastelans were not attuned to nuance.

Mosse did not share Shulgi’s sentimentality. She had survived countless campaigns by inuring herself to the horrors of friendly fire. The Kastelans had done worse to better. She grabbed the omnispex from the floor where Shulgi’s dead hand had dropped it, and sprinted for the ramp.

Once Mosse had climbed up to meet her comrades, she peeled her rebreather off her face. Tubes and wires came with it, emerging from her mouth and nostrils, but she cut them away with a circular saw that she produced from her left forearm.

‘Contaminated,’ she said, tossing the rebreather aside and choking the broken wires back down. In the hallway behind her, the ammonia cloud covered the floor three feet deep. The wireframe view showed Okhotnik that Markos had collapsed and breathed his last.

<Reassessment,> said Okhotnik, irritated by the pointless casualties. <This is not the work of orks.>

‘I have seen something like it before,’ Mosse said. Her voice had a raspy tone now, even by the standards of the Adeptus Mechanicus. ‘But the records are faint. I suffered damage to my memory banks a century ago. I will keep working to retrieve the relevant data.’

<Xenos below,> said Dak-Д. His galvanic rifle sounded.

Okhotnik spotted the orks. They were two levels down. War cries and shoota fire echoed up and down the ramp. The technoarchaeologist took aim with his eradication pistol and loosed a cone of hot light. The blast turned the head of an ork into acrid smoke, its body’s momentum carrying it forward and off the edge of the ramp. It plummeted into the bowels of the ship.

‘Up,’ commanded Okhotnik, and they climbed.

The generatorum was three floors above them. Just three floors, then a straight shot to the cargo. But something was wrong.

A screaming sound emitted from the ship’s vox. Its speakers spread it up and down the ramp. An unaugmented human would simply have heard a burst of static, but to Okhotnik’s team this was dangerous. Okhotnik reflexively muted the input from his ears.

<Mute!> he commanded. <Execute!>

Most of the skitarii managed to muffle the scream; the Kastelans, which did not take commands in audible binharic, were unaffected. But Junit Quell did not mute her inputs in time and succumbed to the virus broadcast over the vox. She reached a claw out towards one of her comrades.

Okhotnik got to her first. He seized her by her wounded arm, and snapped it off at the shoulder. The actuators of the joint groaned, severed but still spinning, as if she could still hurt him with the missing arm if she just tried to swing it hard enough. He lifted her up and tossed her off the ramp. On her way down, her head smacked against one of the lower levels.

A shoota round grazed Okhotnik’s shoulder. He stepped back from the edge. <Up,> he commanded over his control cortex, and the skitarii resumed their climb.

Okhotnik lingered. He ripped a wall panel off, and dug through the ship’s guts beyond it. His eyes identified the wires that powered the ship’s vox. He yanked them out.

He unmuted his ears, and listened briefly. The scream had gone silent.

<Unmute,> he commanded over his control cortex as he ran to catch up to his team. He did not want any of them to die because they could not hear an enemy approaching.

He exited the ramp to see the archway leading to the generatorum. Its bulkhead was closed. The skitarii were taking up positions around the archway to defend it, as Mosse swapped out doctrina wafers from the chests of the Kastelans.

‘Breaching the entrance?’ Okhotnik asked.

Mosse nodded. ‘It has been locked.’

<Keep the door intact,> he ordered. <We will need it.>

<Acknowledged, technoarchaeologist.> She finished her work, and the giant robots began a new program. They gripped the huge door from below, working their fists beneath it, and heaved it upward.

At first, it did not budge. But a Kastelan, once programmed to do something, simply did not stop. It would wear itself down into sand as fine as the dust of Mars before abandoning its instructions.

Inch by inch, the door went up. Okhotnik turned back to face the ramp. He took a knee, and brought his pistol to bear.

When the orks reached the top of the ramp, the skitarii opened fire. The first five xenos fell without loosing a shot. The next squad of xenos was more tactical. Begh Seventeenmark took a round to his torso, but the wound was not lethal. His arc rifle snapped lightning at his attacker, who fell down the hole with a subverbal bellow.

<We are through!> exclaimed Mosse behind Okhotnik. <Generatorum is clear of hostiles!>

<Stand your ground, skitarii,> ordered Okhotnik. He assessed that there were only a few more orks in this group. Although holding the door open risked the Kastelans’ endurance wearing out, leaving any of these xenos alive would ensure that some of the enemy knew their exact position.

Four more orks were felled by galvanic rounds, and the survivors retreated back down the stairwell. Okhotnik strode to the edge of the ramp. His eradication pistol fired twice, and then no further action was needed.

One ork had died with its hand elbow-deep in the wall panel Okhotnik had removed. These creatures were lootas. They were fighting below peak efficiency because they were distracted by the opportunity to salvage.

<Into the generatorum,> he ordered, and his team poured in.

The generatorum was a vast atrium, at least seven yards high. At its centre, suspended in the air, a large sphere glowed red – the reactor. Conduits connected it to the walls, ceiling and floor. Fuel pods, also spherical, were stored neatly against the walls of the room.

Okhotnik was pleasantly surprised at the absence of orks.

<They may close the door,> said Okhotnik.

Mosse swapped out doctrina wafers. The Kastelans stepped inside and released the door suddenly. It came crashing down with a thunderous bang.

<Seal two of the doors. Leave just that one,> Okhotnik said, pointing to the last door. Something was happening to the ship’s systems, and he did not want to count on the door locks.

Dak-Д and Rhy Holmqvist had welding attachments. Holmqvist’s was on the third arm that came from his neck. The two skitarii began sealing shut the door they’d come in through, and the other that Okhotnik had designated to be closed off.

Ensure the cargo is retrieved.

The technoarchaeologist’s eyes scanned the generatorum in more detail. The cargo was not immediately apparent, but his higher functions tamped down on panic. Nothing had so far seemed to be missing due to the Dream’s time in the warp, and the orks had obviously not reached the generatorum yet. There was no reason to expect the cargo would not be here, somewhere.

A large amount of power was being syphoned off the reactor. He could see it flowing under the floor tiles. He traced the current with his eyes, and crossed to the place it appeared to stop. He extended an impact driver from his right wrist, and fitted it with the correct ratchet size. The impact driver chattered with teeth-numbing force as he removed the heavy bolts holding the tile down. When all four bolts were removed, he suppressed the urge to label and store them for reassembly.

He lifted the tile clear. Disciplined machines or not, the skitarii who weren’t involved in sealing the doors discreetly peeked at what was underneath. He pretended not to notice. His attention was on the black coffin.

The coffin had been sealed with three sets of blessed chains and padlocks. It was the size of a man. Power conduits wrapped it in their embrace.

He retrieved a power supply from his gear. His hands worked quickly, swapping the coffin’s conduits to draw from the mobile power supply. As he did this, he felt something within the coffin stir, but ignored it.

Mosse approached him while he worked. ‘It is the machine spirit of the ship,’ she said.

‘Do not investigate what is within,’ he said firmly.

‘I do not mean the cargo,’ she said. ‘I mean that which has been killing us.’

His left eye tilted sideways to look at her. The old veteran looked disturbed, something he had not thought possible.

‘The machine spirit is attacking us? Why?’

‘The ship was empty for a decade,’ she said. ‘It became used to solitude. Then the orks boarded and began stripping it for parts. It awoke screaming. Then we breached a hole in its side. It thinks we are here to abuse it, too.’

Mosse stared at the coffin as Okhotnik began carefully lifting it out of its hiding place.

She continued, ‘I went through something like this on… on a station. I do not recall where or when. The machine spirit had gone feral in the absence of prayer. It did not recognise my team when we boarded. I lost them.’

‘How did you survive?’

‘I do not recall.’

And yet she had.

The coffin was out. Okhotnik’s arms pivoted around his body, strapping the coffin securely to his back. His hip actuators groaned but bore the weight. He did not want to leave it in the generatorum, which could be accessed from too many points and would be a priority for the orks to loot. Safer to haul it down side corridors containing little of value. He would keep an eye fixed on it at all times.

The skitarii finished sealing the doors. Everyone was now waiting on his orders.

<We must take the bridge,> he said, facing his team. <And we must hold the generatorum. We will fly the Dream of the Locust back to Ryza intact. We must depart before ork reinforcement vessels arrive. En route to Ryza, we will hunt down the remaining xenos aboard.>

It was possible. He had himself, a datasmith, and four skitarii. With the Kastelan robots, he could concentrate tremendous firepower in a confined space. Hundreds of orks were likely aboard, but they were distracted and scattered. He would have to deal with the machine spirit as well, but that would be easier now that they knew what they were facing.

He disliked that he had to split the team up, but he could not fly the Dream back if orks stripped the reactor for parts.

He had to work with the tools he had.

<Datasmith Salva Mosse, Stalwart of the Token – you will hold the generatorum.>

He did not add that there was simply no one else he could trust to do this. The datasmith could not effectively lead skitarii, and he did not know how to program the Kastelans.

She straightened her back. <I will hold the generatorum,> she said. She drew new doctrina wafers out of her robes to feed to the Kastelans.

He turned to the four surviving skitarii: Begh Seventeenmark, Dak-Д, Rhy Holmqvist, and Gnostos K 41. Sparks occasionally flickered within the gouge in Seventeenmark’s gut from the shoota round he’d absorbed.

<We will take the bridge,> Okhotnik said.

The skitarii acquitted themselves well on the march to the bridge.

The signs of ork barbarity were everywhere, with blue Deathskull glyphs sprayed on the walls and pieces ripped from every corridor. With every passing minute, the Dream of the Locust was becoming less a ship and more a scrapyard.

Some orks had clearly been tasked with abandoning their salvage attempts and setting up barricades to deal with Okhotnik’s team. Seventeenmark, Holmqvist, and K 41 expired while breaching an ork barricade, though breach it they had.

Somewhere along the way, Okhotnik’s control cortex became disconnected from Mosse. He could not be sure if it was because of the distance, or the machine spirit, or because the datasmith herself had suffered damage. He doubted the latter, but could not discount it, and there was no time to go back. They had to take the bridge and set course for Ryza before the orks received reinforcements.

And so Okhotnik and Dak-Д arrived at the corner around the threshold of the bridge.

Okhotnik could hear orks mumbling and growling within, but the machine spirit was still interfering with the proper functioning of his eyes. Shulgi could have distinguished the number easily by sound, but Okhotnik lacked some of her augments. He suppressed the temptation to go back for her body and retrieve them for himself.

‘They do not seem aware we are here,’ hissed Dak-Д in a whisper.

‘Agreed,’ said Okhotnik quietly. The orks had not even closed the bulkhead. Something heavy inside the coffin strapped to his back shifted.

Okhotnik considered the skitarius. A well-oiled machine functioned better than one that was neglected. Around the corner there were perhaps five xenos, and he only had two tools available to dispense with them. He needed both operating at maximum efficiency.

‘When were you repurposed to serve the Machine God?’ he asked, though he knew the answer.

‘Seventy-three solar years ago,’ answered Dak-Д.

‘And which of your programs was most effective?’

Dak-Д’s face bore the hint of a smile. ‘I purged Ryza’s databanks of a piece of pernicious scrapcode.’

‘What would the scrapcode have done if unattended?’

‘It was a wasteful subroutine,’ said Dak-Д. ‘Its aim was to eat up runtime. It operated beneath the notice of the mechasapients. But I found it.’

<It is here now,> said Okhotnik, invoking his control cortex to insinuate himself into Dak-Д’s mind. <You have found it again. It wears the face of xenos.>

Dak-Д’s body stiffened. <I see it.>

<It is around the corner.>

<I thought I had purged it.>

<You did an excellent job, skitarius. You purged it from Ryza. But it left behind a worm here, on the Dream of the Locust. Your task is nearly complete. Nearly.>

<I know how to remove it, technoarchaeologist.>

Okhotnik checked the clip on his pistol and drew his Omnissian axe.

<Execute,> he said in binharic.

Okhotnik darted past the corner as Dak-Д took up a firing position from around it, their movements in perfect sync. Galvanic rounds seared the air past his ears. The coffin weighed down his strides, but he was still fast.

One ork lay dead before Okhotnik even set foot on the bridge. His eradication pistol reduced the head of another to ash. But one miscalculation had become obvious. Instead of the ordinary ork boyz he had been expecting, his eyes now picked up elaborate blue face paint and the large weapons the orks carried. Three of the living orks on the bridge were nobs, their brows thick and their shoulders broad. The other was a warboss in blue-painted armour, half again as tall as Okhotnik.

‘Boss Gekdug, look! Redboyz!’ hollered one of the nobs, stepping towards Okhotnik and inadvertently taking a shot the technoarchaeologist had intended for the warboss. The hole Okhotnik put in the nob’s armour did not appear lethal.

The warboss grabbed the nob by the shoulder. ‘Git!’ Gekdug yelled. ‘Gettin’ in da way.’ He hurled the other ork aside.

More galvanic rounds streaked into the room. Dak-Д was operating at peak performance. One bullet pierced a nob’s eye, but Warboss Gekdug and the other standing nob closed the distance towards Okhotnik with shocking speed for such large creatures.

Okhotnik fired his pistol, but Gekdug had dodged before the technoarchaeologist managed to finish pulling the trigger. Okhotnik stepped back towards the doorway, hoping to force them to funnel into single file.

They obliged. A nob, the first to queue up, slashed at Okhotnik’s gun-hand with a cruelly edged chain-choppa. Its whirring teeth bit through his armour as if it were parchment, cleaving his mechanical hand away.

Okhotnik leapt backwards, evading a swipe from the nob’s power klaw. He swung his axe at the ork, striking it on the shoulder. At the same time, he swept the nob’s feet with one of his claw-feet. The nob hit the deck hard. Okhotnik stomped on its head. All his weight and that of the coffin he carried slammed downward, the force concentrated into the sharp points of his claw-foot. The nob would not be getting back up.

But despite all Okhotnik’s augments, Gekdug had no trouble plucking the axe out of his grasp as if it were a toy in the hand of a child.

‘Runty,’ said Gekdug, crushing the axe in his power klaw.

Okhotnik leapt back again. He lashed out at the warboss with his servo-arc claw. Once, twice, he stung Gekdug with the claw, but the warboss maintained his assault. Behind Gekdug, the wounded nob was getting to its feet again, and behind Okhotnik, Dak-Д was running low on ammunition.

Firing past the melee, Dak-Д put another round into the wounded nob, who finally slumped dead against the wall. As Okhotnik re-emerged from the corridor leading Gekdug, Dak-Д let out a binharic scream and charged at the warboss.

<Fall back!> ordered Okhotnik, but Dak-Д was still enraptured by his earlier command.

<I purge thee!> Dak-Д yelled at Warboss Gekdug. He leapt into the air, pulling back the butt of his rifle to strike the ork in the face.

Gekdug grabbed the skitarius in midair. The warboss’ power klaw was big enough to seize the cyborg by his torso. The pistons on the claw thrummed, and Gekdug’s fist tightened. Dak-Д’s armour cracked and ruptured. He dropped the rifle.

Okhotnik ran to aid Dak-Д, but Gekdug’s other fist swatted him aside. The technoarchaeologist was hurled back into the bridge. He slammed hard into a console. The coffin on his back tumbled free. His visual display informed him that he was badly concussed.

Okhotnik’s limbs felt heavy. His eyes had trouble focusing, and then they locked themselves on to the warboss’ power klaw.

Setting aside the thumb, which was of course an outlier, Gekdug’s power klaw had three pistons. Yet there were four fingers. Each finger articulated individually, something which struck Okhotnik as patently impossible, from a mechanical perspective.

He had disassembled many ork devices, and none could be found to be useful as either tools or weapons in his own hands. A false tongue Okhotnik had removed from an ork prisoner had allowed the ork to speak, and the creature had even claimed it could taste, but it had been revealed to be a simple chunk of iron with bolts punched through it. Yet two ork tools had nearly killed Okhotnik when wielded by an ork before today, and now a third was breaking one of his better tools before his own eyes.

Ork tools worked because the orks believed that they worked. And the reason that this ork was standing, and that Okhotnik was prone, was because the ork had greater faith. Whatever Gekdug might understand that faith to be, did he not, in his own way, worship the Machine God? The orks, whose mechanisms should not work – what kept them running but faith?

Okhotnik’s cogitator tried to suppress this heretical thought, but some of its linkages to his organic brain had been severed.

Dak-Д vomited oil and blood onto Gekdug as the warboss tightened his fist further. ‘You are a virus!’ the skitarius said through gasps. ‘I purge you!’ Activating his wrist-mounted welder, he swung his fist at Gekdug’s face, but the warboss moved his head out of the way and laughed.

‘Ha ha! A virus. It’s yoo who is da virus! Virus is runty.’ After one final squeeze, the skitarius stopped struggling.

Okhotnik was halfway to standing when the warboss returned to him and again sent him tumbling with the swipe of a fist. Okhotnik’s arm, the one which still had a hand, broke his fall, its actuators giving out.

‘Runty redboyz, flying runty kroozas,’ said Gekdug, who moved towards a console. He spoke with a voice from the back of the throat – a guttural voice. Even without Shulgi’s modifications, Okhotnik could hear every drop of spittle and sputum. ‘Maybe dis runty redboy tells Gekdug what’s in da box, hmm?’

In his compromised state, it took Okhotnik a moment to understand the threat.

Prior to the technoarchaeologist’s arrival on the bridge, Gekdug’s team had rigged a crude interface with the ship’s systems. They had been working to commandeer the vessel when Okhotnik interrupted them. On the console was a display showing the Shark and the remaining Fury. He was threatening to use the Dream to fire on them if Okhotnik did not tell him what was in the coffin.

‘The Dream of the Locust is a complex machine,’ murmured Okhotnik. ‘She will not yield to you.’

The warboss laughed again. ‘You fink Gekdug not know how ta make da krooza fly! I can fly. I can fly big kroozas, runty kroozas. Anyfing.’ He smiled widely, revealing his oversized fangs. ‘So maybe, runty humie tells Gekdug what’s in da box?’ Gekdug nodded towards the coffin.

Okhotnik tried to stand again, but both his arms gave out underneath him.

Gekdug laughed. ‘Da redboy wants ta krump me, still. Even when he knows what dat means I’m gonna do.’

Gekdug pressed a large button on his makeshift console. The floor below them rumbled as missiles were loaded and launched.

On the display, the Fury and Shark engaged in evasive manoeuvres, but both were overcome by the sheer volume of projectiles. They burst into shards as Okhotnik watched.

‘Now Gekdug is gonna open da box himself.’ The warboss walked towards the coffin, examining it. ‘Dis ain’t your gubbinz. Not your Emprah’s. Too old. Runty redboyz did not make dis.’ Okhotnik came to appreciate, too late, that the ork was not stupid.

‘You are wrong,’ gasped Okhotnik. He was shifting some subroutines out of his damaged brain, into his cogitator, keeping only his conscious mind in the organics. It would not be efficient, but it might give him control of his limbs again.

‘Not wrong. Not even dif’rent,’ said Gekdug, toying with the padlocks with a claw finger. ‘We are bof nickin’ gubbinz dat are not ours, breakin’ fings we don’t un’erstand.’

Okhotnik sent pings to his limbs, flexing them subtly. His servo-arc claw still worked. His legs were undamaged. He would be able to stand and attack again once he was done migrating subroutines. But there did not seem to be enough time.

‘I do understand this ship, this machine,’ said Okhotnik. ‘It speaks to me and I hear it. It calls, and I answer. Its spirit pleads to be freed from your shackles. I saw the signs all up and down the corridors. It reviles you.’

‘Dis krooza wants ta be free from yoo also, redboy. Do ya hear it now? What’s it sayin’ ‘bout Gekdug, hmm? Why didn’t it save ya?’

Gekdug gingerly extended a claw into the first padlock. Okhotnik was surprised the ork did not just smash the seals, but the warboss seemed to understand that he might have need for the padlocks again after glimpsing inside.

Okhotnik’s subroutines were halfway done migrating. Even his handless arm would be semi-functional when he was done, but he would only get one chance.

‘You will not like what is inside,’ Okhotnik warned.

Gekdug laughed at Okhotnik’s bluff. His claw sprung the first padlock. Two more remained.

‘Old gubbinz,’ mused Gekdug, inserting his claw into the second padlock. ‘But humies, yooz like old fings. Why? Becuz da future, your future, is no good. Your kleverness, kunnin’, all in da past.’

The second padlock yielded quicker than the first, and Gekdug moved on to the last one.

Okhotnik ran calculations. He would not be able to stand in time. He compromised some of the subroutines in ways they should not be compromised. He rushed data decompression that should not be rushed. He would lose most of the function in his eyes, but all tools were expendable.

Gekdug smirked. ‘What yoo are now, redboy? Nobo’y would want ta be dat. Nobo’y wants ta look at da future and fink, it’ll neva be as good. But dat’s da humies’ future. Dat’s why yooz try so hard, pretendin’ not ta be humies.’

Okhotnik’s damaged organic brain briefly supplied the heretical information that the ork was correct – that life in the Imperium was worse than what had come before it, and indeed this was the only reason technoarchaeologists existed – but his higher functions were coming back online, and they suppressed the thought with a fury as violent as the warboss’ assault.

The final padlock sprung open right as Okhotnik’s limbs came under his control again. As Okhotnik stood, Warboss Gekdug opened the coffin.

A swarm of small black somethings flowed out of the coffin. The data from Okhotnik’s eyes could no longer be believed, and the lid of the coffin obscured some of his view. Whatever they were, they poured out, each connected to the others, forming limbs where there had been none.

Gekdug’s curiosity had its limits. He started to jump back, but the flowing arm of the coffin seized him around the neck before he could. It pulled him towards its maw.

Okhotnik ran towards the coffin, his eyes flickering unbidden from wireframe to visual and back again, and he almost stumbled. He was not sure any more whether he could really see what was happening to Gekdug or whether his damaged mind was filling in the gaps with extrapolated data. But it seemed that the ork and his mega armour alike were being dismantled as the warboss bellowed, and the pieces were pulled into the coffin.

Gekdug latched his power klaw on the side of the coffin, pushing against it with all his strength. With his other hand, he braced against the lid, trying to shut it. But still it took him apart.

One tendril of the swarm looked at Okhotnik now. How did it look without eyes? How did it know he was there? He ran faster, knowing that if he slowed, he would fall victim to the same fate as the ork.

Okhotnik leapt towards them both, claw-feet first. He aimed one foot at the lid and the other at Gekdug’s back.

When he hit the ground again, the room was still and silent.

He struggled to sit up. The coffin’s lid was closed, and the warboss was gone.

He did not take the reprieve for granted. He crawled over to the coffin and refastened the padlocks as hastily as his one good hand and servo-arc claw would allow. A swift check told him that the power supply was still attached.

He gasped for breath. His visual display informed him that he was dying.

Even if he somehow managed to return the coffin to Ryza, he would be compelled to reveal the fact that he had glimpsed something within it, even if that glimpse had been partial and poorly understood. The cargo was also contaminated with a dead ork. Do not open it. Do not investigate what is within, nor allow others to do so.

Even if Okhotnik somehow made it home, he was likely to be cycled down for parts. And yet…

Ensure the cargo is retrieved. That was the first dictum. That was what he had to see done, above all else.

Okhotnik stood again. His unreliable eyes scanned the bridge. He needed to inventory the tools at hand. Perhaps he could re-establish contact with Datasmith Mosse.

The bridge’s consoles were all mangled by orks, but in a neglected corner Okhotnik found a servo-skull.

<Query,> wheezed Okhotnik, and the servo-skull fixed its gaze on him. He was relieved to see that it still worked. <Generatorum vox status.>

<Operational,> said the servo-skull.

A blessing. The orks had not stripped the vox-conduits to the generatorum yet, and Okhotnik had only destroyed the conduits further down.

<Activate vox in generatorum,> Okhotnik commanded.

<Active,> said the skull.

<Okhotnik to Mosse, query,> said Okhotnik.

He waited, but there was no response.

<Okhotnik to Mosse–>

‘What dat noise?’

Okhotnik froze. The voice which had come out of the return signal was that of xenos. It did not seem possible. It was an obscenity that the orks could have prevailed over, and were likely now dismantling, the ancient Kastelan robots. Okhotnik simply could not imagine the perfect machines falling to them.

And yet they had.

He shut the vox down. <Query,> he said to the servo-skull. <Generatorum status.>

<Reactor active. Reactor control rods not functional,> said the servo-skull. <Ship not warp-capable.>

Okhotnik was trapped alone aboard the Dream.

It was at that moment that the makeshift ork console lit up with blue sigils. A Deathskull vessel was emerging from the warp.

The sad reality dawned on Okhotnik, his higher functions unable to suppress it. The Dream of the Locust was doomed. He felt a twinge of compassion for the ship. Its machine spirit had called out for help, but none was coming.

Acting on a compulsion, Okhotnik grabbed the ork console with his servo-arc claw and ripped it out. Sparks flickered among the exposed cables and conduits underneath. He noted with sorrow and frustration that the button Gekdug had pressed, which had destroyed Okhotnik’s ships, was not actually connected to anything. He jammed his handless arm into the mass of cables.

I do not need to know how it works. I do not need to understand. I only need faith in the Machine God.

He set his eyes to visual and closed them. He did not look while he took cables in his left hand and claw and inserted them into the stump where his right hand had been. When he had thoroughly attached himself to the ship, he knelt behind the ruined console and prayed.

<You are like me – a soul contained in a vessel that is mostly machine,> he canted to it, and he thought he felt something stir within the ship in response. <You are like me – created by tech-priests who sought a tool for a particular function.>

The machine spirit reached out and touched his mind with the skittishness of an abused animal.

<You are like me – our functions seem to have slipped out of our grasp, for reasons we cannot understand.>

He was not imagining it. It was there.

<You are like me – we both love and serve the Machine God.>

He felt a wave of relief from the machine spirit. Warmth flooded over him. It accepted him into an embrace. The two broken tools shared their pain. Okhotnik did not have tear glands any more, but if he had, they would have been operating at capacity.

<Neither of us will die alone,> thought Okhotnik.

The machine spirit pulled away at that. Okhotnik’s eyes flickered in surprise. The ship was not ready to die.

A hazy image entered his mind – an escape pod. Intact. And the understanding that there was only one. The xenos had stripped all the rest for parts.

<There is still time?> he asked.

There was.

He opened his eyes. He searched for the omnispex, and found it on the floor where it had fallen during the fight. He fumbled with getting his claw around it, and pulled it closer to the console. He threaded a datafeed between them, and the omnispex chirped with an update: a location within the ship.

Click. Click. Conduits were detaching themselves from his arm.

It was time to go.

Okhotnik limped, his claw gripping the chains of the coffin as he dragged it up the corridors. He could no longer carry it. It was, somehow, no heavier than it had been before consuming Gekdug, but Okhotnik was weaker, and the mounting points on his back had broken. The coffin whined as it scraped along the floor. It did not help that he was dragging it up ramps the whole way. The pod the orks had not scrapped yet was above the bridge, among the top levels of the ship.

In his dazed state, as life drained from him, he ignored the shouted threats of orks. Things happened that silenced them – terrible things that turned boasts into howls of pain. His eyes no longer always turned where he wanted them to, so he only saw glimpses of what occurred. Some were vented into the void, but others met worse fates. He had a half-memory of a room full of the creatures, where the doors closed around them. Through a porthole in the door, he watched the room fill with blood, as the orks pounded and banged on the doors.

By the time he was ready to pass through the room, it was dry again, and he dragged the coffin behind him.

He got the sense that the machine spirit was exhausting itself, and that the orks elsewhere in the ship were running amok freely. It was focusing all of its essence on clearing the way for him.

Finally, he arrived at the corridor with the escape pod. He rounded the corner to see two gretchin disassembling its inner hatch and put what was left of his strength into his stride. His foot-claws stomped towards the grots. One dropped its tools and turned to run. The other threw a spanner at Okhotnik, whose reflexes had become so poor that it thumped him in the chest.

When he overtook the spanner thrower, he unhooked his claw from the coffin and seized the grot. He threw it at the fleeing one. Their heads klonked together satisfyingly, and they both went still.

He examined the escape pod. The seal was broken. The pod would not hold an atmosphere inside itself again without repairs that Okhotnik probably did not have time to perform. There was only room inside for one person, or one coffin.

Okhotnik was born of machine. He despised sentimentality, and he had orders. But there was no one who could interrupt his subroutines and quash his self-preservation instincts, if he did not do it himself. Would he really sacrifice himself for the Machine God?

He would.

He heaved the coffin aboard and wired it into the pod’s circuitry, leaving his portable power supply with it as a backup. It would not last long enough for the pod to get anywhere. But he did not need to understand how the larger machine of which he was a part would work. He only needed to believe that it would.

He closed the pod’s broken hatch, then closed the ship’s hatch around it. The grots had taken apart the launch controls, but he found the appropriate wires within the wall and connected them.

The pod rumbled into the void.

Okhotnik wanted to sink to the floor then, to give in to his obsolescence, but he could not. The incoming ork vessel would see the escape pod and attempt to salvage it.

Back to the bridge.

He was faster getting back. It was downhill, and he was not hauling anything. On his way, he shed parts he no longer needed that had been weighing him down. He bid farewell to his servo-arc claw, to his left arm, even to one of his eyes. He reduced himself to little more than legs, a brain, a cogitator, and the necessary structure to connect them together.

He risked everything to return to the bridge. He would have fallen to the first grot that challenged him, but all the orks he passed were dead. The machine spirit, too, was burning its candle from both ends.

When he arrived, he found the bridge still empty of orks. He entered it, stepped over the bodies of Dak-Д and the nobs, and half sat, half fell in front of the console. He stuck the stump of his arm back in, and the conduits and cables reattached themselves. He shut his eye and switched it off entirely.

He was the ship.

He could see space around the Dream of the Locust. His vision was patchy, with blind spots where orks had removed sensors. But he located the escape pod, and the ork ship. He had been right. It was disengaging from its approach vector towards the Dream in order to pursue the pod.

Okhotnik twisted his arm gently clockwise. He did not understand why he thought it would work, but he trusted that it would.

The ship yielded to him, firing its remaining working thrusters, and turned clockwise.

At the appropriate moment, he arrested the turn, firing counter-thrusters. The ship no longer had an even number on each side, so it took some time to stabilise the orientation, but between him and the machine spirit, they managed.

He pushed his stump arm down, deep down into the console – as far down as it would go.

The main engines of the Dream of the Locust fired for the first time in over a decade. One sputtered and died, missing a coolant line, but he shifted fuel balances to the others to keep the ship on course.

The machine spirit embraced him protectively. He braced what remained of his body.

The ships collided.

Okhotnik slammed into the console with devastating force. He felt one of his legs snap and break off at the knee, which at this point he found to be comical. His arm was almost yanked free of the console, but the conduits did not relinquish their grip on him as the horrific sounds of tearing metal filled the bridge. The Dream shook, tremors rippling through it as the ork ship’s munitions detonated within the ancient frigate’s hull.

The pod was safely away, on a slow, plodding course for Ryza.

Okhotnik and the ship held each other as both came apart.

Ensure the cargo is retrieved. His cogitator logged the dictum as accomplished. It noted with disapproval that the secondary objectives had been failed. His higher functions suppressed the note of disappointment.

<What will happen to the pod, I wonder?> Okhotnik thought.

The machine spirit did not have an answer.

<Will it be found? And by whom? Before or after its power runs out?>

The machine spirit did not know, and it did not need to know. Neither did Okhotnik. They were tools of the Machine God, and they had served their function.

About the Author

Tom R Pike grew up collecting an aeldari army, which today only serves as reservists. His writing also appears in Analog Science Fiction & Fact. ‘Dream of the Locust’ was his first story for Black Library.

An extract from Flesh and Steel.

It was raining the day that I met her.

I pulled up my Ceseen-Avrostar groundcar halfway across the Redway. Behind me, Nearsteel’s habclaves huddled in the downpour. Ahead, the proud tooth of the Steelmound knifed the black morning sky.

I stepped out into the kind of soul-soaking deluge that plagues Nearsteel this time of year. Rain drummed on the brim of my hat. I like a wide brim: good for the sun and the rain both, though it wasn’t much use just then. I turned up the collar on my coat. That didn’t help either. Rivulets of cold water, gritty with desert dust, ran down my neck. Winter was on its way. Soon the mountains would be turning dirty white.

Barriers walled off our side of the red line separating sovereign Alecto territory from the Mechanicus enclave. Lights flashed through the rain, bouncing off armoured sanctioners and making them leap in and out of view. The barriers were a sorry boundary, not much of an obstacle at all. I held up my holo-seal to the nearest sanctioner. He took it from me. The rain messed with the projection and he peered at it for an age. He could tell I was a probator. We have a look. No uniformity to garb or weapons, but the eyeshine from our retinal implant marks us out as officers of the Lex, and there’s a certain physicality besides.

‘Probator Noctis?’ he said finally and loudly, competing with the roar of a ship coming into the Steelmound voidport halfway up the spire. Although it was thousands of feet in the air, its engines were louder than a hundred manufactories working full pelt.

‘Yeah,’ I said. The ship was a long black shape ablaze with lights. I wondered where it had been, and where it would go next. Somewhere better than Varangantua, I thought. ‘Still bringing ships down, even in this,’ I said. The wind was getting up. It would be blowing a gale up there.

‘What?’ the sanctioner shouted over the screaming engines.

‘Nothing.’

He handed back my holo-seal. I put the wallet inside my coat, and got a pocket full of water. It was freezing. I should have worn a thicker shirt.

‘That way!’ he said, pointing. Wind ripped at his storm cloak. Rain blew hard and cold into the backs of my legs.

I hate this time of year.

I tugged the brim of my hat. He needn’t have told me where the action was. The localis sceleris was blindingly obvious, even to a sanctioner. There was a crowd of ours on one side, a line of theirs on the other, lights flashing around them all, a lot of guns on display. A face-off between Mechanicus personnel and Alectian enforcers would have been remarkable anywhere, but it was taking place in the exclusion zone, and that made it dangerous. Nobody ever goes out in the zone, not ever. I had set foot that deep into the Redway twice in my entire life, and I’m one of the few people who can go into it without being shot.

Water bounced off the plaza. I couldn’t see the red line that marked the divide, but it was close. I was feeling the tingle I get when I know I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be.

I moved past groups of sanctioners. Rain rattled off their armour. I don’t envy them their kit; it’s heavy, hot and not much protection against a good weapon, but they were a damn sight drier than me.

Our men were scattered about. The Adeptus Mechanicus’ lot were in ranks. They had the shape of men, but they weren’t, not any more. I couldn’t see a single organic limb among them. The slit visors of their sallets glowed with blue light. They’re cyborgs, all of them, Adeptus Mechanicus soldiers. If you took the helmets off them all, you’d be hard-pressed to find a human face. They made me uncomfortable. As well as the departmento iris, my own right arm and shoulder are replacements, a memento of a case that went bad a few years back. When I see the Martian machine men, I remember I’m not as human as I was, and I don’t like that. They say the flesh is weak, but if you replace it all with machines there’s nothing human left. To be human is to be weak. The Mechanicus have forgotten that.

Focus on the job, I told myself. Get out of the damn rain.

It took me a moment to find who I was looking for.

Hondus’ broad shoulders were hunched against the downpour, a Fumario he couldn’t ever hope to light jammed between his lips. His hands were thrust deep into pockets that must have been filling like ponds. His eye glinted as he accessed the dataveil. This was a murder of a most unusual kind, worthy of deep-scan, the reason we were all out there in that filthy weather in the first place.

I went over. Hondus is more than my boss, he’s my friend, so he doesn’t get my usual level of insouciant charm. Insolence, the higher-ups call it. I prefer wit.

‘Probator-senioris,’ I said.

‘How’s the knee?’ he asked, not taking his eyes off the corpse. Or, I should say, off the top half of it, because the body had been neatly cut in two. Everything from the waist up was on our side, everything from waist down was on theirs, the bottom half hidden behind the Mechanicus grunts. Whoever had done it had left the pieces about eight feet apart on either side of the red line.

‘Still twinging,’ I said. I’d got pretty busted up chasing a suspect a couple of weeks before, one inadvisable jump and an encounter with our less-enlightened sanctioner brethren. ‘Thanks for asking.’

‘This is a Throne-damned mess,’ he said. The light in his eye went out.

‘Very neat,’ I said, looking over the torso. All the organs were sliced right through, and part cooked. ‘What have we got?’

He sighed so deeply it came out of his mouth like a deathbed complaint.

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