Blood Sacrifice Read online

  Strongarm swept around the doorway and sprayed the room with a burst of full-auto.

  ‘Clear,’ he said.

  The others moved to join him. The medicae servitor was lying on its back in a spreading pool of blood and viscera, its organic parts shredded by Strongarm’s grenade. The room was filled with broken cogitator equipment, smashed screens and buckled metal cabinets that spewed yellowed fanfolds of ancient paper records.

  ‘Throne,’ Strongarm muttered as he took a step forwards to stand over the fallen nurse.

  ‘Nuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrssse!’

  Its chain scalpel roared into life and plunged into the inside of Strongarm’s thigh, severing the femoral artery in a great fountain of blood.

  ‘Run!’ Strongarm was bleeding out in a life-ending crimson spray before Cully’s horrified eyes. He pulled the pins on his bandolier of krak grenades one after the other even as he collapsed, his mouth set in a grim line of determination.

  Dying is what soldiers are for.

  ‘No!’ Cully shouted, but it was too late. They ran.

  The explosion took out three walls and brought down a section of the ceiling, filling the corridor with choking dust, and Strongarm went up to the Emperor’s glory riding a comet of high explosive fire.

  Into the smoke and chaos came the bark of a heavy automatic weapon and a hail of autocannon rounds that all but vaporised Trooper Esannason where he stood.

  ‘On the six!’ Cully roared. ‘Return fire! Kill, kill, kill!’

  They blazed on full-auto, las-shots slicing through the choking miasma of dust and blood and fragments of chewed-up ferrocrete at a shadowy, half-seen figure that responded with another thunderous roar from its autocannon.

  Steeleye dialled in and blasted a hotshot straight through it, knocking it back three or four paces, and Varus arced a frag grenade after it. They hit the deck, covering as best they could in the enclosed space of the corridor. The explosion went up and out and brought more of the ceiling down in a shower of broken, filthy tiles, and Cully came up on one knee and emptied his lasgun’s power pack into whatever was left until it stopped moving.

  Cully lowered his smoking weapon and paused to wipe sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.

  ‘Reload,’ he ordered, and they did as he said.

  ‘Strongarm,’ Varus said quietly, and Cully could only nod.

  He hadn’t known Esannason, not really, but Strongarm had been in his section back on Vardan IV and they had fought some of their bloodiest battles together. He had been a good man, a good soldier.

  Death and death and death.

  He went forward to see what they had killed.

  The thing was perhaps six and a half feet tall and had obviously once been a woman. She was less heavily modified than the nurses, but even so her right arm had been taken off at the shoulder and replaced with an articulated heavy weapon mount that ended in the autocannon. Its feed belt passed clean through her metallically augmented torso to the ammunition hoppers that bulged out of her left hip and lower back. The skin there was stretched to ragged edges where the metal met her flesh in a way that hurt to look at. The sutures and flesh-welds looked new and painful, and there was even still a tinge of sickly colour to the remaining exposed skin of what was left of her human body. Her flesh was burned raw with weeping blisters where the feed belt had ripped through it at the terrifying cyclic speed of the cannon firing on full-auto.

  ‘This one’s a dedicated combat servitor,’ Cully said.

  ‘Was,’ Lopata corrected him, and grinned.

  The big man had killed an ork in single combat, Cully reminded himself. Not much was likely to frighten Lopata, but personally he found his stomach rebelling as he looked down at the mostly organic face of the dead woman. She was just some plain-faced hive worker; she certainly didn’t have the look of the hardened criminals and blasphemous heretics who were usually condemned to servitude under the Adeptus Mechanicus and turned into these necessary abominations.

  ‘Not a heavy one,’ Steeleye rasped. ‘I’ve seen those, when the enginseer was repairing our firebase’s Earthshakers under enemy fire back on Vardan IV. They’re like half-human tanks. This one looks like it was put together in a hurry.’

  ‘Or as a prototype experiment,’ Varus put in.

  The others turned to look at her.

  ‘What?’ Cully asked.

  ‘That feed mechanism,’ Varus said. ‘I’ve seen combat servitors too, but I’ve never seen that before.’

  Lopata shrugged. ‘So what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Varus admitted. ‘But I don’t like it.’

  ‘I don’t like any of this,’ Cully said, ‘but we’re here now and something is obviously very wrong. We’re going to find out what it is, and we’re going to put a stop to it. Move out.’

  ‘Why would anyone do this, though?’ Steeleye growled quietly as she matched Cully’s stride through the echoing halls.

  ‘The answer’s always the same,’ Cully said. ‘Follow the money. There’s an ork warband on its way and only us poor bloody infantry here to stop it. The uphive is in panic, that’s no secret. If you were a filthy rich uphiver under siege and afraid for your life and the lives of your family, and someone offered to sell you a heavy weapons combat servitor… what wouldn’t you pay?’

  ‘If who offered?’ Steeleye asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cully said, ‘but if someone did… I’m just guessing here, but those body parts and work smocks in the waste bins were all local. This is a hive world, Steeleye. There are gangers here. People who might just do a thing like that.’

  ‘You honestly think someone is creating experimental combat servitors to sell to the uphive families?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he had to admit, ‘but I wouldn’t rule it out.’

  ‘But who? Who would even know how?’

  Cully didn’t know. All he could do was shoulder his lasgun and advance.

  It was in the Emperor’s hands now.

  Dareus Vorn swallowed bile and tried not to look.

  The Genetor was bent over the operating table again. Long mechanical tentacles reached out of her hunched back through the slits in her floor-length crimson robe, whirring as they manipulated the instruments they held. Mechadendrites, he had learned those were called, and he knew they were fused directly into the Genetor’s spine. The very thought of it made him feel sick, but that was nothing compared to… well, everything else.

  The subject was shrieking again. Without looking up, the Genetor reached out an unnaturally lean, elongated metallic hand and stabbed a button with a fluted, claw-tipped finger. The narthecium’s injector pistons hissed as they moved to drive their long needles home, and the subject fell silent once more.

  Below, somewhere in the facility, Vorn could hear shooting. He ignored it, but all the same his hand wandered to the ornate bolt pistol holstered at his side under his elegantly cut coat. He was a heavy operator back in Hive Lemegeton, one of the top gangers on the planet in fact. He was still scared out of his mind.

  The Genetor put down her instruments and turned to face him.

  Vorn thought of the Genetor as ‘her’ because she used a feminine name, but that was all. So little of her was still organic that it was utterly impossible to tell otherwise. She said her name was Babette Vitzkowski, and she was the main reason why Vorn felt ready to soil his well-tailored breeches in fear. She straightened up to her full seven feet, her mechadendrites arching over her shoulders as she regarded him from a vision slit from which a tight burst of low-intensity laser light flickered and pulsed, as a stream of squealing binary machine language emitted from the grilled speaker where her mouth had once been.

  ‘Forgive me, Genetor,’ Vorn said. ‘I lack the knowledge to understand the holy binharic cant.’

  She knew that, of course, but over the last few months Vorn had
learned that when the Genetor was lost in her work she could grow forgetful of mundane, human things. She regarded him for a moment before she spoke aloud, her vox/synth emitter crackling slightly.

  ‘Ensure that noise is what it is supposed to be,’ she said.

  Vorn nodded.

  ‘At your command,’ he said, and went to check.

  Any excuse to flee her presence was something he took gratefully and without question, every single time. When something looks too good to be true it always is. Vorn should have known that at the time, but greed had won out in the end. It was, he knew, far too late to back out now.

  His control room was on the third floor, the same as the Genetor’s experimental operating room, whereas servitor production happened downstairs on level two. It sounded like that was where the shooting had come from. The earlier gunfire had been on the ground floor and outside where it didn’t matter, followed by an explosion and three high-discharge las-shots that told him they had a sniper in their squad.

  That was good.

  That was potentially very good, if he knew his buyers half as well as he thought he did. He had to find something left in this for him, after all.

  Vorn’s mouth sagged open in relief as he watched them on the vox/pict-feed in his control room. The laboratory, the machine shop and the operating theatres belonged to the Genetor, but this place was his. He had pict-casters and vox-relays rigged up throughout the facility, the same way he spied on his blackmail subjects back in the heights of Hive Lemegeton. He knew what he was doing, but the Genetor was not one to forgive mistakes. If he had been wrong about this it would have gone agonisingly badly for him. He understood that all too well.

  ‘Keep coming, corporal,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Just keep on coming, and I might yet live to see another day.’

  He heard a burst of buzzing machine noise from the doorway, and turned to see the Genetor looming there with her crimson cowl pulled up over her gleaming metallic skull and her mechadendrites swaying slowly in the air over her shoulders. Her comm-laser flashed a tight burst of incomprehensible binary into his eyes.

  He swallowed, to see her outlined there in the doorway of his own inner sanctum. He might be profiting from this but it was her operation. He knew that, and he well understood that he was just her meat puppet, to be tolerated only so long as he continued to be useful to her.

  ‘Genetor,’ he said, and it seemed she remembered once more.

  ‘Report,’ she demanded.

  ‘Everything’s going to plan,’ Vorn said.

  The Genetor regarded him in brooding silence for a moment, then turned away.

  Vorn wiped sweat-slick hands on the thighs of his expensive breeches and fought down the need to sob.

  ‘Oh dear Emperor,’ Varus whispered. ‘Oh no.’

  Cully felt his stomach turn over as he looked into the ward. There must have been twenty or more tormented human bodies in there, all of them in various states of vivisection. The air was thick with flies and the reek of rot and pus. Many hung from hooks suspended from a motorised overhead trackway, while others lay helpless on the stained, wet bedding that covered their rusty cots. Those who still had eyes flickered them open as the troopers entered the room. Others’ heads turned blindly towards the sound of the door opening. The poor bastards were limbless, in the main, their stumps either flesh-welded into sockets or simply open and seeping blood and corruption. Thick ropes of drool hung from the mouths of those who still had mouths at all, and the floor was dark with excrement and old blood.

  ‘This is sick,’ Lopata said.

  ‘Please,’ a man croaked, one of the broken limbless horrors hanging from its hook like a side of grox. ‘Make it stop.’

  ‘Make it stop,’ another echoed, and the chorus was taken up.

  ‘Make it stop!’

  ‘Who are you?’ Cully asked.

  ‘Just a loom mill worker,’ the man whispered, the breath labouring in a chest that had a number of thick, ridged tubes emerging from it between the broken second and third rib. ‘Not… not a criminal. Please, just a worker.’

  ‘It hurts,’ something moaned, and Cully honestly couldn’t have said if it had been man or woman before the surgeries began.

  ‘How did this happen?’

  ‘Abducted,’ the man wheezed. ‘We all were. Please, it hurts. Please, please. Make it stop.’

  ‘Make it stop,’ they echoed, these living damned who could still speak at all. ‘It hurts. Make it stop!’

  ‘Abducted by who?’

  ‘Don’t know. Please, it hurts. Please!’

  Varus raised her lasgun and ended it with a single shot.

  ‘He might have told us something useful!’ Lopata protested.

  ‘I can’t,’ Varus said, as tears tracked down her grimy cheeks. ‘I can’t do this. I can’t look at this. In the Emperor’s name!’

  She flicked her lasgun over to full-auto and went to work. After a moment Cully joined her in administering the Emperor’s Mercy. They fired until the ward resembled an abattoir, until their lasguns were hot in their hands and the very air was red with misted blood, and it was over at last.

  Varus dropped her smoking weapon and put her head in her hands, sobbing.

  ‘This is blasphemy,’ Cully whispered. ‘It’s probably heresy. We have a duty to stop it.’

  ‘How?’ Varus asked.

  ‘We’re the Astra Militarum,’ Cully said. ‘We do what we do. We find them, and we kill them.’

  He’d said something like that once before, he remembered, back on Vardan IV. He gritted his teeth and forced down the memories, forced himself to stay resolute.

  One more time, he told himself. You can push your luck that far, Cully.

  Lopata blew his cheeks out and sighed.

  ‘If there are many more of those things we’ll lose, and then we’re dead, every one of us. If we’re lucky. If we’re not, we’ll probably end up like these poor bastards, lobotomised and amputated and–’

  ‘We won’t lose,’ Steeleye said, and Cully nodded.

  ‘We have to stop this,’ he said. ‘Someone is sweeping workers off the streets and doing this to them. Someone is selling the end products to the uphivers. That’s war profiteering, and we’re going to put a sodding end to it.’

  Lopata nodded slowly.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m with you there.’

  ‘War profiteering, am I?’ Vorn sneered as he watched them over the vox/pict-feed in his control room. ‘Well, aren’t I a bad boy, Corporal Cully, you self-righteous prig. And you, Corporal Lopata, you nearly bit my man’s hand off for an easy payday, so don’t you come on all holier than thou now. I’m just trying to stay alive. You’re no better than I am and you know it.’

  He pushed himself back from the desk and got to his feet, drew his bolt pistol and checked it held a chambered round. They would be on their way up soon, and he had some people he wanted them to meet.

  Vorn crossed the corridor to the special holding room, the space that had once been the medicae facility’s secure mental ward, and looked through the armourglass viewport in the heavy ceramite door. They were both docile now, but he knew how easily that could be changed. They waited side by side, drooling as they stared vacantly into space. They had changed so much since he had brought them to the facility.

  Vorn had known servitors before, of course, but these two were something different. Something new, in an existence where innovation was far from encouraged. They were highly trained, highly skilled, and they were un-lobotomised. The Genetor’s new drugs alone had been enough to break them but still leave their combat training intact. It had been easy enough to lure them away from their posts with promises of a high-stakes game of Crowns and all the amasec they could drink.

  The enemy makes work for idle hands, after all.

  ‘We need to go up again,’ Varu
s said. ‘This facility is a three-storey building, they’ll be on the top level.’

  ‘So find the stairs, scout,’ Lopata growled.

  The stairwell they had taken from the ground floor didn’t go any higher, and Cully could only assume that the top floor had once been the secure section of the medicae facility and off limits to both the normal patients and what few visitors they may have had.

  Varus led them away from the horrors of the ward and down another flyblown corridor until she found the access stairs that led up to the top floor.

  ‘There,’ Steeleye said. ‘See that?’

  Cully shook his head.

  ‘See what?’

  The veteran sniper’s augmetic vision often detected things the natural human eye missed, and Cully always listened to her when she spotted something.

  ‘That little hole in the corner of the ceiling,’ Steeleye said. ‘It blinked, just for a second. That’s a concealed vox/pict-caster.’

  ‘Great,’ Lopata muttered. ‘So someone’s watching us. Probably has been since we got here.’

  ‘This just gets better and better,’ Varus said.

  Cully lifted his hand toward the camera and made an obscene gesture.

  ‘Hey, arsehole,’ he shouted. ‘We’re the Imperial bloody Guard, and we’re coming for you! Death and death and death!’

  ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ the others chanted.

  Cully raised his lasgun and shot out the camera. The stained and filthy ceiling tile exploded as the las-round tore through it, and a length of sizzling cable snaked down from the cavity above and swung in the air, smoking.

  Lopata kicked the door open and led the way up the stairs.

  Vorn jerked back from his screen as the pict-feed went out with a blinding flash of searing white energy that threatened to overload his display equipment.

  He reached out and flicked the vox-switch.

  ‘They’re coming, Genetor,’ he said. ‘The best subjects you’ve ever had – two veteran corporals, a scout, even a sniper. I have programmed the new servitors to take them alive.’