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The Nine – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Nine

Justin D Hill

The sun had set upon Unity.

A new day was breaking upon the Imperium of Man and the robed shape of Adept Sota stood to watch it arrive in a rising tide of bloody red light.

Beneath the heavy mesh robes, her form was an example of the grotesque lengths the adepts of the Omnissiah went to perfect the human body: air vents were set along her metallic spine; brain-casing engorged with gold-plated circuitry; limbs replaced with coiled tentacles, mechadendrites, and data-ports better able to service machine spirits and ancient archeotech.

The only movement came from within the shadows of her heavy hood, where the sagging remains of Sota’s human face hung from the metallic skull like an afterthought. Muscles that had once given that dead-flesh visage humanity and expression and emotion had long since atrophied. Her skin hung slack on the abandoned face, and a thread of drool hung from the corner of the lopsided mouth, from which a corrugated sheath of pipes emerged. Nerves connecting the remaining eyeball had been cauterised. The optic organ twitched blindly as Sota stood at the gunnery viewport of the cruiser Aeternum Infernus, watching the red light of Sol as it crept across the northern plains of Sacred Mars.

There was a bare hiss of metallic lungs venting through her air grilles as, at last, the cinder-fields and smokestacks of Deuteronilus Mensae Ridge came into view, and finally the adjacent forge of her old master, hidden in a volcanic crater under a five-hundred-metre-thick ice cap.

A legionary entered the gunnery chamber. The Sons of Horus warrior had removed his helmet. His face was square and massive, half of the scalp disfigured with scar tissue – an old skin graft stapled to his skull with thick iron tacks. His genhanced bio-spore filled the chamber.

‘Calends.’ A gentle female voice that was not her own hissed through Sota’s vox-grille. One of her mechadendrites tasted the exudation, sampling pheromones and corpuscles: his state of health was robust, his heartbeats regular, but there was a sour taste there too that intrigued her.

A nerve in the legionary’s cheek twitched and her mechadendrite tasted his emotional response. There was disappointment and regret, a sense of having been thwarted. He said, ‘Adept Sota.’

She moved towards him, and she felt him noting the movement of each of her mechadendrites. There were many, hidden beneath her robes, each one equipped with exotic weaponry, each one laced with an array of toxins and poisons.

‘You are running combat simulations through your head,’ she observed in a low hiss.

His eyes narrowed, and the muscles in his bull neck flexed. ‘Negative,’ he lied. ‘We are allies in this cause.’

Sota paused briefly as her data-coils ran millions of combat simulations. She considered her chances of beating him in a one-on-one fight very good. The genes that made him superhuman were also his vulnerability. She could fashion toxins that could unmake him at the genetic level, and turn his genhanced musculature into putrid slime.

‘We are approaching the target,’ he stated. ‘It is time to prepare your warhead.’

Adept Sota turned back to the gunnery port, a mechadendrite connecting with the chrome data-port. Binharic streams of ship readings streamed through her ocular array. The hermetically sealed bio-forges of her former master, Adept Rueon Villnarus, lay beneath her, as oblivious and vulnerable as a sleeping child. She laid a metallic digit upon the icy glass of the viewport and traced its tip along the surface, in the manner of a chirurgeon who marks the scalpel’s line upon the patient’s flesh, relaying the exact location to the ship’s machine spirit.

‘It is time,’ Sota hissed in something like her own voice: a cold and chilling sound.

Calends led her inside the dorsal loading bay of the cruiser. Alarm lumens flashed lurid shadows through the stacked gantries, chains, and ammo-cranes as Legion-thralls hauled ordnance from the magazine lifts, armed the warheads, and loaded them onto the gunnery carriages. They laboured in enforced silence. The only sound was the crack of neuro-lashes upon their backs, the tramp of their boots, and the binharic blessings that the tech-priests broadcast through their vox-grilles.

Sota’s own missile stood apart, on its own chassis, a team of thralls waiting to drag it towards the vast missile tubes, their brass-goggled faces reflecting the flashing lumens.

She descended the stairs, black robe dragging behind her on each step. A grav-bier waited for her, four slaved human brains wired into each corner, sheaths of ducting plugged into their spinal cords. Their legs moved in a synchronised march as they carried her to the missile’s side.

The phial appeared from the hidden folds of her robes, clasped in the metallic clip of a mechadendrite. Ice crystals formed about it and flakes began to catch on her black robe. A dread malevolence emanated from the oily brown liquid. Something was moving inside the phial, winking in and out of reality. It was the work of her macabre genius, a pathogen for which there was no defence.

They could all feel the dread. The chamber fell so still she could hear the low, strained note as the great warship bent to the gravitational pull of the planet beneath them. The hymn of tortured metal seemed fitting to Sota as she slid the crystal into the warhead mounting, which was connected to a diffuser aerosol charge and fuse. She loaded the phial into the warhead with a click, and ice crystals crackled along the missile’s surface.

Hidden under her robe, one hand hung wasted and atrophied at her side, forgotten among the sheath of mechadendrites that fussed about her. The muscles of her remaining arm had long since stopped responding to mind-pulses, so one mechadendrite lifted the robe to expose the palsied limb. The arm appeared from beneath the black-mesh folds, the pale skin waxy and translucent, the flesh hanging slack upon the prominent bone. Another mechadendrite took the hand within its claw and lifted it towards the missile, manipulating it so that a single finger was raised in a pointing gesture.

Villnarus – just seventy-two digits of binharic code. A name that took bare milliseconds to cant. Sota’s voice was just a whisper as the tip of her finger touched the cold iron of the warhead, as brief and as fleeting as a farewell kiss.

‘Load it,’ Calends ordered. There was a groan as a thousand thralls took up their chains.

Sota watched as her missile was hauled towards the loading bays.

She could feel the noosphere of Mars below. It was quiet and poised and fretful. The sacred planet was sick. Ever since the union with Terra, tumours of divided loyalty had been seeded into the Mechanicum. Traitors were scattered throughout its forges. Each had to be cut out from the flesh, the bloody wound cauterised, the carcinoma destroyed. Only then could a pure Mechanicum be reborn.

It had been a long time since Sota had spoken his name, but the dead-flesh of her sagging face twitched as she imagined the movement of her mouth – the plosive touch of tongue and lips to teeth and palate.

‘Goodbye, Villnarus…’

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