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Death Warrant – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Death Warrant

Robbie MacNiven

Anjelika Trayn – antiquarian, astro-cartographer and rogue trader – ran for her life. Behind her, the black jungle resounded with the sounds of pursuit. Branches split and ivy snapped as over seven hundred pounds of reptilian hunger pursued her. She ducked beneath low hanging boughs and weaved around trailing creepers. Twigs and rotting leaf-mulch whipped her as she passed. Throne, she thought. Throne, Throne, Throne. Every muscled burned. Her body was slick with a cold sweat and swamp water dripped from her black hair, stinging her eyes. The plasma pistol strapped to her thigh pinged, its core fully recharged, but there was no time to draw it, let alone turn and aim.

‘Moren,’ she panted into her micro-bead, too breathless to utter anything but his name.

There was light ahead. She threw herself at it and burst into the clearing, her eyes scanning the open ground. Six enviro-domes sat before her, their pristine white shells a stark contrast to the darkness of the jungle surrounding them. She kept running, straight into the cleared space at the heart of the camp.

‘Moren!’ Trayn knew she should never have trusted him. What better way to seize her Warrant of Trade than leave her to be devoured by a karnid? She spun around, hair trailing, her plasma pistol up and aimed.

The great lizard slewed to a halt, barely three bounding leaps from her. It was a long, sinuous thing – its grey scales rippled with honed musculature, and its broad, flat head cocked to one side as it regarded its prey. A forked tongue darted from its mouth to taste the humid jungle air. Trayn locked on to its small, black eyes, not looking at the size of the beast’s fangs.

She struggled to slow her breathing and heart rate in an attempt to keep her aim steady. The plasma pistol was an ancient one. She had once immolated a Tarsian battle-drone with it from over two dozen yards away, but such power came at a price. It took a full second of pressure on the trigger to generate a shot, and she knew full well that in that time the karnid would close the distance and disembowel her.

The deadly impasse was broken by a roaring sound, rising steadily over the noises of the surrounding jungle. The karnid cocked its head to the other side and lifted it slightly, though its hungry eyes didn’t leave Trayn. She grinned at the reptilian, relief flooding her.

‘Looks like I’m eating lizard tonight,’ she said. The words were stolen away, lost in the shriek of vectored turbofans. A gale engulfed her as Berkut, her family’s heavy gun-cutter, swept over the jungle canopy and turned in a tight circle over the clearing. The karnid let out an ululating shriek and rose onto its hind limbs, scales bristling at the new threat. For a moment Trayn thought it was going to leap at the flier.

The thudding of Dorkin’s autocannon dispelled that possibility. Trayn flung herself backwards as the ogryn opened fire from the gun-cutter’s side hatch. Great clods of damp earth were churned up by the abhuman’s inaccurate fusillade, but some shots couldn’t fail to hit. The karnid twisted as the hard rounds punched through its torso and cracked off its plated skull.

‘Not the head!’ Trayn shouted into her comm-bead. ‘I want that for the trophy cabinet!’ She knew her words were in vain – even if the ogryn could have heard her, he didn’t possess the necessary accuracy to avoid shredding the lizard.

The creature writhed and shuddered as its body was ripped apart. Finally, it slumped, the earth beneath it drenched with purple blood. Dorkin continued to fire until his auto-feeder jammed.

Berkut came in to land, the pitch of the flier’s engines dropping as the heavy gun-cutter settled on its landing prongs. Trayn deactivated her pistol and holstered it as Moren, her stocky, flint-eyed first lieutenant, dropped down from the flier’s hatch. He grinned at Trayn, an expression she didn’t return.

‘You’re shaking,’ he said.

‘I’m fine,’ she lied.

‘You thought I wasn’t going to strike in time? That I’d let that beast devour you instead?’

‘You could’ve been quicker,’ Trayn said. Forcing herself to ignore Moren’s baiting, she turned towards her enviro-dome. ‘I’m going to get changed. Have Karney prepare that thing’s carcass, then begin preparations. I want to be at the temple before the first night cycle.’

If the etchings on the mould-blotched walls were anything to go by, humans had built the crumbling structure that Trayn and her retinue had come to investigate many hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of years earlier. It was one of nine such sites dotting the jungle moon of Terix IX.

Karney, Moren’s silver-haired Catachan, was the first to re-enter the temple with his lascarbine charged. The ex-Guardsman was followed by Rubio, the expedition’s dead-eyed combat servitor. Trayn remained outside with Elgar Ghould, the rogue tech-adept, and the rest of the company.

It was the third time the expedition had visited the site. On this occasion, they had decided to erect their camp a thirty-minute trek away from the temple. As with the other structures they were investigating on Terix IX, there was some sort of machine-distortion emanating from the ancient ruins, and it grew worse the nearer anyone got. It had caused the auspex to scramble and distorted the vox-units. It had forced them to construct relays to maintain contact with the Saint Justinian, which was being kept by its helmsman, Contin, in high orbit. In the two Terran months they had been on the jungle moon, none of them, not even Ghould, had identified the source of the disturbances. Like the absence of whoever had first built the temples, it was an enigma that had overshadowed everything since their arrival.

‘Clear,’ Karney called, his voice accompanied by an automated blip from the transmission unit sutured into Rubio’s pale throat. Trayn brushed aside the jungle creepers that half obscured the temple’s opening and entered, followed by the rest of the expedition. Dorkin, Moren’s pet ogryn, hesitated, gazing fearfully at the confined space.

‘Stand guard,’ Trayn ordered him from inside, pointing at the temple’s entrance. ‘You’ll wait for us here. Yes?’

The abhuman batted at the fat-bellied rotflies swarming around his sweaty scalp, and glanced uncertainly at Moren. Trayn’s second hesitated for a moment before nodding.

The temple was as they had left it the day before. The lumen strips rigged in the lower side chambers were still active, filling the rock-rooms with an electric buzz. Blue plastek tarps set up to shield sections of the walls from the moisture dripping through the cracked ceiling were also undisturbed. Trayn felt foolish sending Karney and Rubio in first. Such caution would have seemed excessive were it not for the occurrences. In addition to the strange effect Terix IX’s ruins had on sensorium and communications equipment, there had been other events that had left them all unsettled. Rubio frequently picked up phantom returns, swivelling and engaging the auto-loader of his heavy bolter despite the fact there were no targets in sight. The vox-master, Pedra, likewise heard strange sounds over the communications systems – when pressed, he’d admitted they had seemed like voices, though he couldn’t decipher what they were saying.

‘Get back to it,’ Trayn said, nodding at Dros. The aged lexographer grumbled and hitched his robes, limping over to a section of wall lit by the lumens before pulling out a magni-scope and ux hair dust brush. Dros had spent every day since their arrival inspecting the inscriptions and carvings on the temple walls. Thus far, he had learned precious little other than the fact the moon’s absent natives had fought one another incessantly before uniting to construct the ancient buildings. The information was of little use to them. Trayn had long suspected her late father had only kept Dros on the bounty roll out of charity.

‘They’re still active,’ Moren said, his voice bouncing weirdly around the temple’s cracked chambers. Trayn turned to see that he had a hand on one of the upright stone caskets that lined several of the walls. They might have been for human remains, but stood a little too tall and narrow. Stranger still was the stone they were made of – it vibrated to the touch. They had found similar sarcophagi in every one of the temples they had investigated so far. On several occasions, they had tried prising them open or even blasting them with charges, but to no avail. Beneath the worn, human-crafted stone was a different material, black and unyielding. Neither Dorkin’s strength nor Karney’s lascutters could prise them open. They continued to throb with a strange, dormant power.

‘Leave them,’ Trayn ordered. ‘The tunnel is more important. I want to be down and back up again before we hit the deep night cycle.’

Moren hesitated for a moment, but eventually stepped away. The rest of the expedition, Dros excluded, had already gathered around the entrance Rubin had uncovered four days before. Something had tripped the servitor’s targeting matrices – while they had been investigating the temple’s side-chambers, it had opened fire seemingly at random, caving in a wall with a hail of heavy bolts. Beyond, they had discovered the tunnel. They had been down three times, discovering strange, smooth passages constructed from a metal-like substance, black as jet. None of the expedition had travelled far – the tunnels quickly became confusing, and even Karney had complained of the unsettling nature of the place. Today, however, would be different. During the last night cycle, Ghould had completed the subsurface scan he’d been conducting since they’d unearthed the entrance. Four servo-probes had mapped out the tunnels and chambers beneath. The complex was vast, and thanks to the tech-adept, Trayn now had a good section of it transcribed onto a data-map.

‘We’re going down again,’ she said, the slate containing the map in one hand, a stab-lumen in the other.

‘You think the periapt is down there?’ Karney asked, lighting a cigar. The question had been directed at Moren, but Trayn answered it.

‘There’s only one way to find out.’

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