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War in the Museum – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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War in the Museum

By Robert Rath

VISHANI: Phaeron, wise men say that common foes make common friends.
NEPHRETH: Wise advice – if one wishes to be common.

– War in Heaven, Act V, Scene IX

Specimen rehydration at seventy-two per cent, lord archaeovist.

His arch-cryptek, Sannet, sent the thought as an interstitial message, preserving the silence.

Trazyn, Master of the Solemnace Galleries, Preserver of Histories, and He-Who-Is-Called-Infinite nodded and motioned with two metal fingers. The gesture opened Sannet’s thoughts so that the glowing glyphs unfurled above his metal skull like a scroll. Trazyn liked what he saw there – they were getting close.

The organism’s clawed hooves levitated a finger-width above the floor, held aloft by repulsor fields so gravity could not ravage its dripping corpse. Scalloped plates of chitin shielded the desiccated flesh of its limbs. A rock-ribbed exoskeleton encased shrivelled organs. Arms held wide, head erect, the hive tyrant dwarfed the metal giants that stood before it. A rehydration array elevated up and down its bulk, hissing as it sprayed the creature with anti-necrotic revivicants.

This was, Trazyn reflected, likely the most dangerous restoration he’d ever attempted. Tyranid synapse creatures were known to reanimate from even the most extreme wounds, so there was no sense taking chances. Indeed, the reason the specimen was in such poor shape owed something to the tortured nature of its acquisition.

It had been quite a puzzle, acquiring an undamaged tyranid splinter fleet. Baiting it to the tundra world of Vuros had been simple enough; the real difficulty had been identifying and intercepting the tyrant’s atmospheric entry pod on its way to the surface. With their synaptic overlord freeze-drying in the cold of space, the disoriented splinter fleet had been easy to lure into the tesseract fields. The downside, of course, was that the tyrant had needed nearly a century of rehydration until it was fit for display.

Trazyn had earmarked it as the centrepiece of his Tyrannic Wars exhibit.

Outside in the main gallery stood a full splinter of Hive Fleet Kronos, frozen in the moment of landing, a wave of blue-tinted claws and crimson armour about to crash down on an Imperial outpost. Undulating waves of rippers. Termagant packs. Genestealers emerging from tunnels in the loamy earth. Gargoyles circling overhead.

And if the plumping bulge of the tyrant’s flesh was any indication, it would soon join them.

Trazyn’s cowardly kin had warned him against it, of course. In fact, when Hive Fleet Behemoth bore down on Solemnace, Trazyn’s aeon-long rival Orikan the Diviner had even prophesied that the Great Devourer would destroy both Trazyn and his galleries. The mystic fool had been so disappointed when Trazyn simply triggered deep-space lures so the swarm parted around Solemnace, like a river around a stone.

They were correct about one thing, however – this restoration demanded extra security. He’d banished all but a pair of crypteks and four lychguard to minimise the chance of mishap. A full legion waited outside the galleries, along with a new surrogate body in case Trazyn needed to evacuate his consciousness quickly. In the event of a containment break, secure doors would seal this small band in, sacrificial offerings to be atomised by the spider-leg banks of gauss flayers pointed at the limp tyrant.

After all – if it awoke, who knew what might happen to the exhibits outside?

But it should not come to that. A century ago, Trazyn had personally supervised the crypteks as they’d drilled into the tyrant’s armoured skullcap and implanted six mindshackle scarabs into its shrunken brain. Trazyn’s metal fingers danced across the haft of his empathic obliterator, beating a delighted tattoo on the weapon. Was this perilous? Certainly. But eternity got dull without a hint of peril. And for an immortal necron, boredom was more dangerous than even the largest alien horror.

An alert sketched across his vision, overlaying the thoughts of Arch-Cryptek Sannet. Behind him, the lychguards’ metal necks shifted in their ball mounts.

Movement in the central gallery.

‘My lord,’ warned the lych-captain.

‘Yes, yes, I see it,’ said Trazyn. ‘Continue to guard the specimen, I’ll investigate.’

‘Allow me to accompany you, lord,’ the lych-captain answered, the balefire in his oculars flaring with concern. ‘Safeguard protocols state–’

‘Don’t fuss, captain.’ Trazyn picked up his empathic obliterator. ‘What’s going to hurt me in my own gallery?’

Trazyn turned and walked into the dark, holding the glowing headpiece of the staff before him like a torch.

Normally, Trazyn would have lit the central gallery – but power was better spent on the restoration. He walked into the back line of the invasion, weaving between carnifexes that rose like hills in the shadowed darkness. Warriors, their limbs fused into deadly bio-weapons, posed in the act of firing clouds of flesh-boring organisms.

Trazyn skirted around a tyrannocyte drop spore half-buried in the tundra floor. Hormagaunts emerged from it, clambering over each other to join the living carpet of organisms that made up the bulk of the invasion force.

Trazyn was well used to wandering the galleries alone, but he was not yet accustomed to this exhibit. Its scale was almost hard to comprehend – so much so that when arranging it he’d navigated the scene by floating overhead in a Catacomb command barge. Now, inside the ravening horde, he felt a novel tingle of fear. The soft glow of his obliterator reflected on long talons and venom spraying in arcs from baggy throat sacs. His heavy footfalls echoed back at him.

‘Probably a wraith,’ he muttered. ‘Receivers go down and they default to their last task.’

He was being foolish, of course. These organisms were preserved in hard-light, encased like insects in amber. Touch a claw and it would cut you, but they could no more move than a wax figure could.

Unless there had been an earthquake. Unless a nexus fault opened a tesseract labyrinth. Unless…

The weight hit him from behind without warning, sending him toppling forward, pinning him to the simulated earth. Sensors wailed in agony as a scythe-talon as long as a gauss flayer punched through his shoulder with a shriek of bone on metal. Clawed feet dug into his scaled cloak.

Trazyn gripped the empathic obliterator, firing up the headpiece.

‘Don’t touch me,’ he said, and struck blindly over his shoulder.

A clawed hand closed over his head and twisted.

Vertebrae servos whined and popped with strain, living metal groaning as it bent to its limit. Talons dug into his ocular sockets and green sparks burst in his vision.

Then with a crack, the tension broke and he could feel his head tear free from his shoulders, spine grating on shoulder guards as it slithered free. Phosphorescent reactor fluid spouted. Cables stretched like ligaments as the hand pulled his head upward and turned it to face the killer.

Trazyn got a glimpse of the creature – made kaleidoscope-mad by his shattered oculars – before the alien crushed his metal skull.

To be honest, Trazyn did not particularly like being murdered. The rush of transferring his consciousness from one body to another felt like free-falling through a planet’s atmosphere.

The lychguard he’d possessed arched its back, limbs extending and metal skin bubbling as Trazyn’s essence suppressed the host’s personality-programs, rearranged the antique armour and refashioned the guard’s warscythe into his own empathic obliterator.

‘My lord. What happened?’

It took a moment for Trazyn to orient himself to who was speaking. The lychguard captain.

‘A complication,’ said Trazyn, rotating one wrist to test how it responded. ‘It’s the lictor. Flesh-Stealer. Vicious little creature. Hunted the tundric nomads for two years after the initial acquisition. At least only one hard-light field failed, and that bio-form was the only thing in–’

‘Seal the door, arch-cryptek,’ the lych-captain ordered, his safeguard protocols overriding normal chains of command. ‘My lord, call in the legion.’

‘And let ten thousand warriors loose in my collection with gauss flayers?’ snorted Trazyn. ‘I think not. Perhaps the deathmarks.’

‘My lord,’ said Sannet, furiously making notes with his stylus. The great sleep had damaged his engrammatic matrices, and he could no longer remember information unless he wrote it. ‘I have diagnosed a nexus fault. The legion did not make its last check-in cycle. I’m not sure we can call the deathmarks.’

‘I’m going up.’ Trazyn let his consciousness flow into the nexus network, racing through cables and channels as if carried through an underground stream.

Then his spirit-algorithm stopped dead. He felt the data of his mind bunching up, boxed in, memories of past and present overlapping. He reversed himself before the code of his consciousness scrambled.

He opened his oculars. ‘We are locked in. Sannet, have you detected seismic activity?’

‘No, lord.’

Trazyn rubbed his chin, the alloy of his finger scraping his age-pitted death mask. He summoned a phos-glyph panel and scanned diagnostics. Normal, except he could not call data for anything past this floor. The shadow-clock was also two minutes behind planetary time. Clearly a fault had cascaded through the nexus, slowing the system.

Unless…

‘Cease rehydrating,’ said Trazyn. ‘Scan for brainwaves.’

‘None,’ said Sannet.

‘Could this creature cause a distortion?’

‘Previous specimens have not.’

‘We’ve never had a tyrant.’

‘What is our protocol?’ asked the lych-captain.

Trazyn thought for a moment. ‘This beast is no match for an overlord and his lychguard, eh? Sannet, you stay. Seal the door behind us so the thing cannot reach its master.’ He paused. ‘And how many mindshackle scarabs can you spare? Pity to waste a good specimen if it can be avoided.’

So it would be a hunt, like in the days of flesh. An overlord and his retainers, going forth to capture a great beast with naught but their might and their wits.

Pity, Trazyn thought, that we do not have a chariot.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Kevin Chin.

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