War in the museum, p.1
War in the Museum, page 1
part #6 of Black Library Celebration 2020 Series
Contents
Cover
War in the Museum – Robert Rath
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Mark of Faith’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
War in the Museum
By Robert Rath
VISHANI: Phaeron, wise men say that common foes make common friends.
NEPHRETH: Wise advice – if one wishes to be common.
– War in Heaven, Act V, Scene IX
Specimen rehydration at seventy-two per cent, lord archaeovist.
His arch-cryptek, Sannet, sent the thought as an interstitial message, preserving the silence.
Trazyn, Master of the Solemnace Galleries, Preserver of Histories, and He-Who-Is-Called-Infinite nodded and motioned with two metal fingers. The gesture opened Sannet’s thoughts so that the glowing glyphs unfurled above his metal skull like a scroll. Trazyn liked what he saw there – they were getting close.
The organism’s clawed hooves levitated a finger-width above the floor, held aloft by repulsor fields so gravity could not ravage its dripping corpse. Scalloped plates of chitin shielded the desiccated flesh of its limbs. A rock-ribbed exoskeleton encased shrivelled organs. Arms held wide, head erect, the hive tyrant dwarfed the metal giants that stood before it. A rehydration array elevated up and down its bulk, hissing as it sprayed the creature with anti-necrotic revivicants.
This was, Trazyn reflected, likely the most dangerous restoration he’d ever attempted. Tyranid synapse creatures were known to reanimate from even the most extreme wounds, so there was no sense taking chances. Indeed, the reason the specimen was in such poor shape owed something to the tortured nature of its acquisition.
It had been quite a puzzle, acquiring an undamaged tyranid splinter fleet. Baiting it to the tundra world of Vuros had been simple enough; the real difficulty had been identifying and intercepting the tyrant’s atmospheric entry pod on its way to the surface. With their synaptic overlord freeze-drying in the cold of space, the disoriented splinter fleet had been easy to lure into the tesseract fields. The downside, of course, was that the tyrant had needed nearly a century of rehydration until it was fit for display.
Trazyn had earmarked it as the centrepiece of his Tyrannic Wars exhibit.
Outside in the main gallery stood a full splinter of Hive Fleet Kronos, frozen in the moment of landing, a wave of blue-tinted claws and crimson armour about to crash down on an Imperial outpost. Undulating waves of rippers. Termagant packs. Genestealers emerging from tunnels in the loamy earth. Gargoyles circling overhead.
And if the plumping bulge of the tyrant’s flesh was any indication, it would soon join them.
Trazyn’s cowardly kin had warned him against it, of course. In fact, when Hive Fleet Behemoth bore down on Solemnace, Trazyn’s aeon-long rival Orikan the Diviner had even prophesied that the Great Devourer would destroy both Trazyn and his galleries. The mystic fool had been so disappointed when Trazyn simply triggered deep-space lures so the swarm parted around Solemnace, like a river around a stone.
They were correct about one thing, however – this restoration demanded extra security. He’d banished all but a pair of crypteks and four lychguard to minimise the chance of mishap. A full legion waited outside the galleries, along with a new surrogate body in case Trazyn needed to evacuate his consciousness quickly. In the event of a containment break, secure doors would seal this small band in, sacrificial offerings to be atomised by the spider-leg banks of gauss flayers pointed at the limp tyrant.
After all – if it awoke, who knew what might happen to the exhibits outside?
But it should not come to that. A century ago, Trazyn had personally supervised the crypteks as they’d drilled into the tyrant’s armoured skullcap and implanted six mindshackle scarabs into its shrunken brain. Trazyn’s metal fingers danced across the haft of his empathic obliterator, beating a delighted tattoo on the weapon. Was this perilous? Certainly. But eternity got dull without a hint of peril. And for an immortal necron, boredom was more dangerous than even the largest alien horror.
An alert sketched across his vision, overlaying the thoughts of Arch-Cryptek Sannet. Behind him, the lychguards’ metal necks shifted in their ball mounts.
Movement in the central gallery.
‘My lord,’ warned the lych-captain.
‘Yes, yes, I see it,’ said Trazyn. ‘Continue to guard the specimen, I’ll investigate.’
‘Allow me to accompany you, lord,’ the lych-captain answered, the balefire in his oculars flaring with concern. ‘Safeguard protocols state–’
‘Don’t fuss, captain.’ Trazyn picked up his empathic obliterator. ‘What’s going to hurt me in my own gallery?’
Trazyn turned and walked into the dark, holding the glowing headpiece of the staff before him like a torch.
Normally, Trazyn would have lit the central gallery – but power was better spent on the restoration. He walked into the back line of the invasion, weaving between carnifexes that rose like hills in the shadowed darkness. Warriors, their limbs fused into deadly bio-weapons, posed in the act of firing clouds of flesh-boring organisms.
Trazyn skirted around a tyrannocyte drop spore half-buried in the tundra floor. Hormagaunts emerged from it, clambering over each other to join the living carpet of organisms that made up the bulk of the invasion force.
Trazyn was well used to wandering the galleries alone, but he was not yet accustomed to this exhibit. Its scale was almost hard to comprehend – so much so that when arranging it he’d navigated the scene by floating overhead in a Catacomb command barge. Now, inside the ravening horde, he felt a novel tingle of fear. The soft glow of his obliterator reflected on long talons and venom spraying in arcs from baggy throat sacs. His heavy footfalls echoed back at him.
‘Probably a wraith,’ he muttered. ‘Receivers go down and they default to their last task.’
He was being foolish, of course. These organisms were preserved in hard-light, encased like insects in amber. Touch a claw and it would cut you, but they could no more move than a wax figure could.
Unless there had been an earthquake. Unless a nexus fault opened a tesseract labyrinth. Unless…
The weight hit him from behind without warning, sending him toppling forward, pinning him to the simulated earth. Sensors wailed in agony as a scythe-talon as long as a gauss flayer punched through his shoulder with a shriek of bone on metal. Clawed feet dug into his scaled cloak.
Trazyn gripped the empathic obliterator, firing up the headpiece.
‘Don’t touch me,’ he said, and struck blindly over his shoulder.
A clawed hand closed over his head and twisted.
Vertebrae servos whined and popped with strain, living metal groaning as it bent to its limit. Talons dug into his ocular sockets and green sparks burst in his vision.
Then with a crack, the tension broke and he could feel his head tear free from his shoulders, spine grating on shoulder guards as it slithered free. Phosphorescent reactor fluid spouted. Cables stretched like ligaments as the hand pulled his head upward and turned it to face the killer.
Trazyn got a glimpse of the creature – made kaleidoscope-mad by his shattered oculars – before the alien crushed his metal skull.
To be honest, Trazyn did not particularly like being murdered. The rush of transferring his consciousness from one body to another felt like free-falling through a planet’s atmosphere.
The lychguard he’d possessed arched its back, limbs extending and metal skin bubbling as Trazyn’s essence suppressed the host’s personality-programs, rearranged the antique armour and refashioned the guard’s warscythe into his own empathic obliterator.
‘My lord. What happened?’
It took a moment for Trazyn to orient himself to who was speaking. The lychguard captain.
‘A complication,’ said Trazyn, rotating one wrist to test how it responded. ‘It’s the lictor. Flesh-Stealer. Vicious little creature. Hunted the tundric nomads for two years after the initial acquisition. At least only one hard-light field failed, and that bio-form was the only thing in–’
‘Seal the door, arch-cryptek,’ the lych-captain ordered, his safeguard protocols overriding normal chains of command. ‘My lord, call in the legion.’
‘And let ten thousand warriors loose in my collection with gauss flayers?’ snorted Trazyn. ‘I think not. Perhaps the deathmarks.’
‘My lord,’ said Sannet, furiously making notes with his stylus. The great sleep had damaged his engrammatic matrices, and he could no longer remember information unless he wrote it. ‘I have diagnosed a nexus fault. The legion did not make its last check-in cycle. I’m not sure we can call the deathmarks.’
‘I’m going up.’ Trazyn let his consciousness flow into the nexus network, racing through cables and channels as if carried through an underground stream.
Then his spirit-algorithm stopped dead. He felt the data of his mind bunching up, boxed in, memories of past and present overlapping. He reversed himself before the code of his consciousness scrambled.
He opened his oculars. ‘We are locked in. Sannet, have you detected seismic activity?’
‘No, lord.’
Trazyn rubbed his chin, the alloy of his finger scraping his age-pitted death mask. He summoned a phos-glyph panel and scanned diagnostics. Normal, except he could not call data for anything past this floor. The shadow-clock was also two minutes behind planetary time. Clearly a fault had cascaded through the nexus, slowing the system.
Unless…
‘Cease rehydrating,’ said Trazyn. ‘Scan for brainwaves.’
‘None,’ said Sannet.
‘Could this creature cause a distortion?’
‘Previous specimens have not.’
‘We’ve never had a tyrant.’
‘What is our protocol?’ asked the lych-captain.
Trazyn thought for a moment. ‘This beast is no match for an overlord and his lychguard, eh? Sannet, you stay. Seal the door behind us so the thing cannot reach its master.’ He paused. ‘And how many mindshackle scarabs can you spare? Pity to waste a good specimen if it can be avoided.’
So it would be a hunt, like in the days of flesh. An overlord and his retainers, going forth to capture a great beast with naught but their might and their wits.
Pity, Trazyn thought, that we do not have a chariot.
Blackstone doors ground shut behind them, the cyclopean blocks meeting with a tone that reverberated through the chamber. They moved in a miniature phalanx, two lychguard up front with their shields and hyperphase swords. Trazyn on one flank with his obliterator, the under-cryptek with his staff on the other. The lych-captain guarded their backs, his warscythe held high in a guard.
Slow and cautious. Scrying for bio-signatures.
But there were bio-signatures everywhere. Each hard-light hologram encased real, living flesh. The hunting party flicked through visual filters. Heat. Radiation. Empyric field.
Trazyn ran an ocular scry over the mid-sized creatures arrayed in the back line. A brood of tyranid warriors stood, discharging foul ammunition. A lictor crouched, statue-still as if about to pounce. Tyrant guard circled protectively around the space where their master would soon reside.
Trazyn looked down the line, at the biovore battery with its fleshy spore-ammunition…
Wait.
That didn’t make sense. Lictors were infiltration organisms. They didn’t belong in the back line. How could he have made such a careless placement?
He hadn’t, of course. When Trazyn turned back, the lictor was gone.
‘On guard,’ he warned, bracing for attack.
The thrown spore mine arced out of the darkness. Trazyn’s ocular array analysed it in mid-air, noting the way its toxic sludge moved from chamber to chamber as it contracted. He saw its pulsing rapidly increase – like the heart of a panicked animal – as it neared the lych-captain.
Who raised his warscythe.
‘No!’
The lych-captain intercepted it with a perfect vertical slice. Had it been a grenade or shell, he might have scythed through the detonation cap. Instead the spore opened, rotten and steaming. Ropy splashes of bio-acid descended on the phalanx. The lych-captain took the worst of it, tarry ichor covering his chest and face. His metal body screamed as it warped and deformed, the armour plates of his front expanding so quickly it bent him over backward and snapped his spine. The cryptek to Trazyn’s left dashed away, one arm a melting ruin.
And as soon as they broke formation, Flesh-Stealer was on them.
It came for him, and Trazyn gathered power in his obliterator, bringing it to the floor like a hammer. The layer of tundra parted before him, a billowing shock wave of jade energy throwing immobilised termagants away from the furrow.
The lictor dodged aside, the blast bubbling its chitin and mangling one leg. That did not stop it. Tendrils of flesh, each tipped with a hooked curve of bone, lashed out like amphibian tongues. They snared his arm and dragged him close.
Trazyn screamed a curse in Old Necrontyr.
A sickle talon stabbed down through his open mouth and burst the base of his skull.
Trazyn activated the cryptek’s oculars and saw his old surrogate – now reverting back to a lychguard – sink to the floor. The remaining two lychguards were boxing Flesh-Stealer in with their shields, getting between Trazyn and the marvellous specimen.
Flesh-Stealer howled as a blade bit its rubbery muscle. It smashed down at one of the guards and he raised his shield to take the blow. The lictor vaulted off it, using the hulking guard as a springboard in its leap towards Trazyn.
Trazyn raised the cryptek’s staff of light, unleashing a white-hot beam at the horror falling towards him. Lightning speared through the chamber, strobing on frozen tyranid bodies. One of the lictor’s grasping arms spun away, severed.
Flesh-Stealer still came down right on top of him, bone scythes burying deep in the space between his shoulder plates and ribcage. Then it heaved and opened his chest like a cabinet.
Before Trazyn activated his new oculars, he urged the hijacked body to run.
Scatter. He sent the communication as an interstitial command package, the new plan arriving in the remaining lychguard’s mind instantly and fully formed. It can only chase one of us. Head for the Imperial outpost display.
Trazyn needed reinforcements.
He reshaped his legs for speed, not daring to look back. The lychguard was far to his left, heavy feet pounding the artificial ground. Trazyn weaved through packs of termagants, vaulted ripper swarms.
The settlement was close. Hab-blocks and bunkers emerged from the shadows. Trazyn pulled up a phos-glyph panel as he ran, keyed in an order. A bunker’s plasteel double-doors drew open.
He could feel the beast behind him, gaining. Nearly there.
It caught his scaled cloak, dragged him down. This time he was smart enough to transfer before he died.
Trazyn did not even glance at the lictor savaging his former body. He leapt through the bunker’s double-doors and keyed an order. They rolled shut with a reverberating clang.
‘Welcome to our special exhibit, Imperial Heroes of the Tyrannic Wars,’ said a voice. Trazyn’s own voice, in fact. ‘Please approach this gallery by starting on the left, and proceed in a shadow-clock fashion to see the greatest…’
‘Hush,’ Trazyn said.
The voice cut off.
Trazyn didn’t know why he’d installed the automated system. Dead Gods knew, no one came here without him as a guide. But a few millennia back he’d suffered an attack of conscience and began worrying whether anyone would understand his galleries if he were ever destroyed. So he’d taken on the responsible, if dull task of recording guides in every language known to the Necron Empire.
He passed warriors in blood-red ceramite and commissars leering under peaked caps. In one diorama, a group of snipers from the Catachan XVIII nestled in a shooting hide, their bio-signatures masked by the mound of termagant corpses piled atop the dugout roof.
Trazyn stopped in front of a case, summoned a phos-glyph panel.
‘Assigned to study the aquatic wildlife of a remote world, Magos V–’
‘I said hush,’ Trazyn snapped. Then softer: ‘Awaken, my friend.’
The magos biologis was hunched over the severed head of a tyranid warrior, his crab-like servo-arms paused in the act of trepanning open the cranium with a surgical laser. It was his rust-coloured robe that stirred first, falling slack as gravity took it – no longer buffeted by the sea winds of his maritime fortress.
‘There’s been a breakout,’ Trazyn said, hoping auditory speech would break the thought-loop.
The magos paused. ‘I advised you not to refurbish the tyrant.’
‘It is not the tyrant. Though it may be… involved. There has been a nexus fault. We cannot signal the legion, I cannot transfer consciousness, and Flesh-Stealer has awoken.’
‘Only the lictor?’ The magos’ eye-lenses rotated in suspicion.
‘Keep staring at me like that, magos, and I’ll stop sending your little research packages to the Mechanicus. Or should I keep sending them, but add a little gift of my own – a jokaero code-virus perhaps?’
