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Silent Hunters – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Prologue

1

‘There are monsters out there.’

The gunner gestured along the barrel of the heavy stubber.

The loader squinted out over the sea, that endless, bloody sea. All he could see were slowly moving waves.

‘Where?’

‘In the deeps.’

The loader shook his head and turned back to tending his lho-stick, shielding it from the wind. Even with them hunkered down in the emplacement the wind sent zephyrs that alternately set the lho-stick flaring or, when the wind was leavened with salt spray, threatened to extinguish it entirely.

‘So you reckon these “monsters” are why they’ve got us here, pointing our guns at nothing. Never knew you were so in with the… with the…’ The loader’s words stuttered away into silence. The gunner glanced whitely at him, the fear showing in the swift peripheral movement: a look, and then away.

They learned, they all learned, not to mention those whose names carried on the air. Those who did not learn, who failed to take the hint from turned-away faces and shuttered eyes, disappeared in the night or, worse, walked out in the bright light of day.

Better to forget your own name than to call on one who might answer.

The gunner – he had put away his name as he had put away his humanity – stared out over the sea, squinting at the light scattering among the waves. The world was ocean, studded with a bare handful of coral uprisings, extrusions from the depths. Back in the forgotten past, when he had been a boy and had a name, people had lived on the ocean, making their living by fishing for the debris of the wrecks that littered the shallow seas around the coral atolls. But beyond the atolls, on the horizon where the sea swallowed the sky, the waters fell away to the deeps. That which plunged into the ocean there went down into the abyss.

The world had been called Sagaraya then. Occasional memories surfaced in the gunner’s mind of when he had sailed with his father and his uncles on light outriggers launched from the mother ship – a city of floating vessels, ships tied together, rising and falling over the endless waves. Sometimes, in the depths of the night watch, when he hovered between sleep and waking, the gunner lingered among those memories, feeling the warmth of the sun on his back and the shock of the water as the boy he was plunged in, diving fish-quick into the depths to retrieve some precious item from a wreck.

For wrecks there were aplenty: they fell in fiery ruin from the sky, the wash from their falling rocking the mother ship as it anchored among the atolls. The tales his people had once told said that Sagaraya was an ocean amid the sea of stars, set athwart the currents of space in such a way that many a vessel, voyaging between suns and caught by a rip tide, was carried along, helpless, until the current sent it plunging down into Sagaraya: the world of ocean receiving castaways from the world of stars.

Sometimes the gunner even remembered the stories his people had told of their coming to this world of water, of how they too had fallen from the sky. But the waters of Sagaraya had extinguished the fire of their falling and washed away the memory of the world from which they had come. The sea washed everything away.

The gunner, in the few dreams that pierced the waking dream of his life, sometimes felt himself in the sea’s womb, swimming, the light playing over his flanks and the sea bottom below him, as free and weightless as the fish. But in those dreams, a glance ahead showed always the same thing – the sea falling away into the deep: dark, without end.

They called that the Fall.

Where the shallow seas plunged into the abyss.

Some of the younger divers hunted around the edges of the Fall, pulling down below the thermocline, where the warm waters of the shallow sea ended and the cold ocean began. There, sometimes, the deep currents pushed upwards wrecks that had been a thousand years adrift in the depths. Strange creatures stalked those wrecks, and stranger treasures waited those brave and strong enough to venture in for them.

It was one of those wrecks, drifting from the deep, that had brought the gods from the sky. Whispers of it ran among the divers, the young men eager to earn glory and girls from their exploits. Tales told that it held, deep in its belly, a treasure that would unlock the stars, carrying whoever possessed it beyond the sky. The wreck the gunner had glimpsed himself. He had still been too young to be allowed to venture it. His father had laughed at his desperate pleas.

‘There will be others, when you are old enough and big enough,’ his father had said.

His father had been wrong. There were no more wrecks to dive after that. No more swimming beneath the sun on the shifting waves. There was an end to their names.

The gunner had been there when the divers returned, triumphant, bearing the treasure from the deep. In the mother ship, they had unveiled it, holding it up for all who were tall enough to see. The gunner had sat upon his father’s shoulders that he might see over the crush.

There had been many items retrieved from that old, deep wreck that had drifted in the currents of the ocean. The divers – the gunner remembered them, their faces still young, vibrant, alive – had wielded their prizes, raising them above their heads, as the Fisher King summoned them each to display their finds before the crowd of whispering, gasping, cheering onlookers.

Then, last of all, there was the glass. It was black.

Strange glass, indeed, that allowed no light to pass through it.

To the eye, it was little more than a fused lump, melted in part as if by a fire beyond imagining. Even in brightest day, the sun of Sagaraya had no power to warm it: the glass was cold, cold as the deep, dark ocean of the Fall.

Stranger still, to the eyes of those watching fishermen and divers, was its condition: it was pristine. Neither algae nor barnacle obscured its surface; not even coral, endlessly seeking a solid home in the shifting sea, had adhered to its night dark.

The diver who had found the glass held it high, turning it that all the fisherfolk might see it.

‘Throw it back!’

The screech was high and cutting, slicing through the silent awe.

The gunner remembered his young self turning with the crowd to see who spoke such words, and the murmured repetitions of the name, spreading through the crowd like the waves: Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother…

Mother, small, her back hunched into a shell shape by the weight of the years she carried, crabbed towards the Fisher King and the assembled divers.

‘Why do you counsel this, Mother?’ asked the Fisher King. ‘It has ever been the custom of our people to take the gifts of the great deep and offer them to the gods in return for their favour. Why would you have us do different with this?’

Mother stopped, her way barred by two young men, friends and followers of the divers who stood clustered on the Fisher King’s harbour.

‘Cast it away,’ Mother repeated, her voice growing shriller, higher, thinner, in the panic of her urgency.

The Fisher King glanced doubtfully at the divers who surrounded him. These were the young men with knives and spears who rode the waves: from among them would come his successor when he was no longer able to pass the challenge and swim below the mother ship, from one side to the other. But, as yet, none of them had seen fit to contest the throne. A glance at the lowering expression on the young man who had found the black glass told him that casting the treasure back into the deep would see him challenged when next the red moon rose.

But it was Mother who spoke. Oldest. Wisest.

‘Let us think on this, Mother. Allow me to summon the Port. Then we shall hear your words and your warning. Until then, I ask you, wait.’

Mother looked up at the Fisher King, sat on his throne of shell, her eyes near as black as the glass. For the first time he could remember, he saw hesitation in her eyes.

‘Very well. Summon the Port. But, until the Port meets, keep that… that thing secret.’

‘I will send messengers to all our vessels upon the sea and summon the Port,’ said the Fisher King, ‘where you will speak and tell your fears so that all may hear and decide our course.’

So the Fisher King had promised.

But even as a boy, the gunner had seen the impatience and the irritation on the faces of the young men gathered around the Fisher King. He doubted that they would brook this delay before bringing what they had found to the market.

He was right.

Even while the vessels returned to port, some of the wares recovered from the wreck were taken to the market. There, on the atoll reserved for them, men – and some creatures that barely passed for men – descended from the sky to browse the items salvaged from the many wrecks of the ocean world.

Then the gods came. Descending in flame and wrath from the sky, drawn by tales of what the young men had found. Even as the Port met, and debated, and decided, fruitlessly, to cast the glass back into the deeps, the gods were taking as votaries the impatient young men, eager for glory, and sending them to do their bidding.

The men with bloodied hands.

That was the name they took when they put down the Fisher King, tearing him apart. That was the name they had when they came for Mother.

The boy had been there, an excited follower among the crowd, sensing the charge in the air, the iron-electric tang of blood about to be spilled. He had followed the men carrying Mother to their new master, manhandling her over the shifting boats of the mother ship towards the coral atoll where the new gods had installed themselves. He remembered the dry crack as they broke one of Mother’s fingers. Her hiss of pain. The splash as they held her face underwater. He had watched, half ashamed, half exulting in the overthrowing of all the powers of his world.

Then she had turned her face to him. Mother had looked through the crowd of gesticulating, jeering figures and her black eyes had locked on his. And she had spoken to him. Even amid the tumult, the madness of the crowd, he had heard what Mother said.

‘You will remember yourself before the end.’

They had dragged her away then, leaving the boy shocked and staring after them. Dragged her to the temple to the new gods, where the divers left their offerings of the riches of the ocean for the payment of the gods’ blessing, and there they offered Mother’s life in sacrifice.

But Mother had cheated them. Her ending was meant to be long and agonising, a threnody of pain offered in hope of slaking the thirst of thirsty gods.

But Mother had loosed her soul from its flesh before the rite had even begun. In their frustration, they flayed the insensate body, but Mother was gone. What was left was only meat and they no more than butchers.

After Mother’s death, his people put aside their names. There was only service to the gods, the capricious, demanding, insatiable gods. Some among his people ascended so far in their service that they were given new names. But the gunner was not one of these. He served. He endured. He tried to forget his name. The dream memories plagued his sleeping but then he would wake into the dream of his life and shut those memories away.

Now he was assigned to this lonely gun emplacement. The loader was an off-worlder. The gunner had not asked his name, nor had he ever offered it.

The loader, after their brief, aborted conversation, went back to tending his lho-stick. He had an apparently inexhaustible supply of the cheapest varieties; the smoke stink clung to the gunner’s hair and skin for all of his off-watch.

The gunner followed the barrel of the heavy stubber with his eyes, noting the rust spots and algal growths already stippling the metal. The sea transformed metal into itself, turning something smooth and engineered into a profusion of budding, sprawling life.

Going past the stubber, the gunner looked out to sea. His eyes narrowed. The horizon had disappeared into an obscurity of grey. A sea fog, a haar, was rising over the cold, deep waters beyond the Fall, which lay nearer here than elsewhere in the shallow sea. The gunner tasted the air. It stung, with an electric vivid bite: charged, it was pulling the haar to itself. Soon, within half an hour he judged, the fog would roll in, and then everything would be reduced to a grey, closed world.

The haar, heavy with its electrical charge, blanked out all communication by vox, reducing every message to random blurts of noise. Even the voice was muzzled, for the haar swallowed sound. It was all but impossible to speak to a man you could not see, and since sight was reduced to mere feet, there were few people indeed you could speak to while the haar lay over the shallow sea.

The gunner scanned the waves. In advance of the oncoming fog, they had reduced to ripples. Tiny cousins to the great ocean rollers. A small, unwonted smile tugged at the gunner’s lips as he watched the setting sun playing light games with the waves.

It was beautiful.

Then the waves started to swirl in closing, whirlpool rings, about a hundred yards from shore where the sea began to shallow.

They were like the rings the withdrawing tide made when playing around a rock outcrop soon to be exposed.

But the tide was rising.

The gunner stared.

The ripples were approaching, coming closer to the beach. There were others too, flanked behind and beside the first.

The waves broke, and parted for a moment, over the first.

He saw grey. A shape pitted and scarred. Then the water covered it again.

The gunner scanned, looking left and right, searching for where it had gone. Was it some item of wreckage being washed in to shore?

Then it emerged.

It rose from the waves. Twin pits of black light burned in its depths, turned towards him in dreadful contemplation.

The gunner felt his grip tighten on the stubber’s stock. His finger tightened on the trigger.

It rose higher from the sea. It was striding towards him, the water glistening as it flowed in slick waves off its grey mass, revealing curved, intricate patterns, interlaced designs of black and grey: spears and teeth and suns and heads. And sharks. The great maw gaped blackly from the creature’s chest.

For now it waded waist-deep through water that would have covered the gunner to his neck. Its eyes were black: dark with the ocean void. And its eyes were turned on him.

The gunner slowly released the stubber’s trigger.

The giant stopped. It stood up to its knees in water, now. The waves broke about its legs, swirling brokenly into an eddy. Behind and beside it, other giants were still too. Waiting.

‘There are monsters out there…’

The loader looked up from tending his lho-stick and, seeing the gunner staring out to sea, glanced in the same direction.

‘By the powers…’ he swore, and looked at the gunner. ‘Why aren’t you firing? Shoot!’

But the gunner released the stock handles.

The loader glanced back towards the ocean, then pushed the gunner aside. ‘Get out of the way.’

‘…but none so monstrous…’

The loader reached for the trigger.

The gunner drew his autopistol from his waist holster and pressed it to the side of the loader’s head. Feeling the pressure, the loader turned.

‘What are–’

‘…as that which we have become.’

The loader’s head jerked back and he fell across the lip of the emplacement, staring up at the blue of the sky, a new eye in the centre of his forehead.

The gunner stood up slowly. He climbed out of the emplacement and began to walk down across the beach to the giant.

No. He was not walking to the giant. He was walking to pass the giant.

As the sand firmed beneath the gunner’s feet, he looked into the creature’s black, void eyes. And the void looked into him.

Then, as the gunner approached the water’s edge, the giant reached up and removed its helmet.

The face the gunner saw might have been a brother of his own: the same dark-coloured skin and broad brow, with the designs that covered the giant’s armour swirling over its cheeks and forehead too – as they did on the gunner’s own face.

The gunner stepped into the sea.

The water felt familiar. As if it had been waiting upon him.

The giants stood still and silent as he walked towards them, the water reaching to his knees and then his waist, so that he was forced to wade.

Approaching the leader, the gunner looked up at its face. Now close, he saw that despite the surface similarity in their appearance, there was an underlying pallor to the giant’s skin, as if he had been grasped by pale death and yet still lived. The initial similarity in the eyes was deceiving, too: the gunner’s own eyes were dark but the giant’s were black as the ocean deeps, beyond the reach of the sun. The giant that looked down upon him was old beyond his understanding.

The gunner, looking up at the giant, spoke a word, a name long suppressed, and the giant received the word in silence.

Then the gunner walked past the giant, turning his eyes out towards the sea. The water was deeper and he struck out, swimming, cutting a line through the gentle waves towards the point, not far from here, where the shallow sea fell away into the deep. Although the gunner did not look back, he felt the gaze of the giants following him as he swam out to the open ocean.

The haar was coming closer to land, following in the wake of the giants.

Coming to the Fall, the gunner took several quick, shallow breaths before filling his lungs.

The gunner knifed, diving downwards, swimming with all the pleasure of the boy he had once been and all the power of the man he was. He swam, pulling himself deeper against the buoyancy of his own body, pulling himself down and down and down. He could see the Fall, the cliffs plunging into the dark, but he had gone beyond their edge. He was passing into the deep ocean.

As the last light faded and the diver, lungs straining, came to where the endless void of the deep ocean began, he opened his mouth and with all his life’s breath called his name into the ocean void.

And the void received his name and carried the diver down into its depths, his hair flowing out around his head in a dark streaming halo.

‘Tangaroa.’

The giant spoke the name as he stood in the surf.

The haar was approaching.

He signalled the other waiting giants.

The haar rolled past them, swallowing the grey giants into its blankness.

Soon, the islands of the shallow sea would be covered in fog, and all would be reduced to voice and void.

The giant led the Carcharodons, the stalkers of the outer darkness, into that void.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Vladimir Krisetskiy.

Silent Hunters © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Silent Hunters, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-513-4

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To my squad of noisy hunters, Theo, Matthew and Isaac.

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