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VERMILION

Ben Counter

It had the humanoid shape common to many intelligent xenos, but its four limbs and head made up the totality of its resemblance to a human being. The inner layers of its skin were bioluminescent, while the outer layers formed black flaps and ridges running along the front of its head and body. From the back of its torso and limbs hung thousands of half-metre-long cilia, quivering tendrils that, it was surmised, propelled it through the oceans of its home world much like the flagellae of single-celled Terran organisms. Its strange gnarled skin created hundreds of gills all over it, and gaseous respiration was achieved through twin pulsing air sacs in its throat.

It had no eyes. Its sensory input came from the pits along its arms and legs, which absorbed scents from its surroundings. It therefore knew exactly what was going on around it. It knew it was a prisoner.

The Imperial Fists had shackled the xenos in a drop-pod. The drop-pod stood in the centre of a shattered plain of crystal that reflected the rose-pink sun through a million broken facets. Bullet scars scattered multicoloured sprays of light, refracted further through the translucent pools of blood that had yet to dry.

Several other drop-pods, in the red and yellow livery of the Imperial Fists, stood, still smouldering. The twenty Space Marines of the strike force were grouped up around the landing site, keeping a watch in all directions.

And a short distance away was the Ordo Xenos Field Research Outpost, draped in bodies both human and xenos. The metal and flakboard watchtower made up the head of an installation that punched deep into the crystalline surface. Its doors had been blasted open and most of the bodies were heaped up around the scorched entrance. Jumpsuited tech-orderlies had been dragged out and butchered on the crystal plain. Gun-servitors had shot down dozens of xenos – one servitor was still trundling back and forth, training its autoguns across the battlefield.

‘We were too late,’ said Sergeant Ctesiphon. Two of his battle-brothers were hauling bodies out of the outpost and laying them out. Two more were heaping up the dead aliens, ready for immolation. ‘Scout Nemeidos reports that none living remain inside.’

‘Did Carmillas keep any live specimens?’ asked Librarian Deiphobus, the force’s commanding officer.

‘It seems not,’ replied Ctesiphon. ‘Nemeidos’s squad will do a full sweep, but it looks like there are only tissue samples, not whole organisms.’

Deiphobus knelt beside the body of a woman whose long blonde hair was half-scorched black. She wore carapace armour, tailor-made for her slight figure, and emblazoned with the stylised ‘I’ of the Inquisition. One of her eyes was a fascinatingly complicated bionic, multi-faceted and apparently controlled by intricate clockwork. In life she must have been very striking.

‘We need to get the body to the apothecarion,’ said Deiphobus. ‘Some inquisitors conceal datavaults inside their bodies. Back of the skull, base of the spine. Perhaps she saved her research.’

‘Is there anything you can do?’ said Ctesiphon.

Librarian Deiphobus took off one of his gauntlets and held his hand over the dead inquisitor’s face. He closed his eyes, and concentrated for a moment. ‘The body is fresh,’ he said. ‘Sometimes some consciousness remains. But not here. She is gone. All of her.’

The other bodies were Ordo Xenos researchers. Most of them had some augmentation – a bionic eye, or obvious cranial implants under a shaven scalp. Many had hands plated in heat-resistant ceramite, to help them handling dangerous samples. They had been killed with a mixture of small arms fire and blade wounds.

‘The xenos struck quickly,’ continued Deiphobus. ‘It does not take a psyker to see that. We arrived but an hour after we received Carmillas’s distress signal and yet the battle was cold when we got here.’

‘How did these aliens even know she was here?’ said Ctesiphon.

Deiphobus glanced behind him, at the sealed drop-pod.

‘There is a place,’ he said, ‘where that very secret waits for me.’

They staked out the xenos like a sacrifice on some primitive world. Each limb was fixed to a post driven into the crystal ground. Its head was restrained, so it could not look away from Deiphobus as the Imperial Fists Librarian stood over it. The pink sun glared down into its face.

Squad Ctesiphon surrounded the alien, their boltguns ready.

‘These heathens slaughtered an inquisitor’s entire personal staff,’ said Sergeant Ctesiphon. ‘At the first suggestion of danger, you will each put two rounds into this alien’s central mass.’

‘I doubt that such will be necessary,’ said Deiphobus as he knelt beside the alien. ‘But if I give the order, execute it.’

‘Emperor’s luck be with you,’ said Ctesiphon.

‘The first thing we learn in the Chapter Librarium,’ replied Deiphobus, ‘is that there is no such thing as luck.’ He took off his right gauntlet and placed his hand against the alien’s forehead. Creatures with approximately human form tended to keep their brains in what passed for their heads. Deiphobus felt an unyielding cranium under the layers of rubbery, spongy skin.

He closed his eyes. He let his mind sink back away from his senses, imagining his consciousness draining out towards the hind-brain where the instincts of a human still remained, not quite erased by a Space Marine’s training.

He imagined a black ocean, torn by storms and endlessly deep. He fell, as if from the deck of a ship, and plunged into that ocean. The input of his senses – the faint whining wind of the crystal plains, the smell of gunsmoke and dried blood from the battlefield, the feeling of the armour encasing his body – fell away, separated by an increasing stretch of liquid darkness.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Hammer and Bolter Issue 17 (2012).
This eBook edition published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-305-6

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