Sons of the Hydra (Warhammer 40,000) by Rob Sanders

Author:Rob Sanders [Sanders, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-12-25T16:00:00+00:00

PART IV

THE THIN VEIL

ν

Sea Serpents

Occam paced the tiny command deck of the Iota-Æternus.

The strike master could feel it on the bridge, in the hangars and along the freighter’s winding passageways. There was a tension – not just in the faces and voices of the Seventh Sons but also in the vessel superstructure. While the High Serpent’s cultists were nervous about entering riftspace, the Q-ship itself was making its displeasure known. Occam’s superhuman hearing picked up the high-pitched ring of unnatural vibrations through metal struts, girders and decking. Like a tuning fork, the Iota-Æternus was singing, and the tune wasn’t pleasant.

The Q-ship had held her immaterial course for days, ploughing on through the storm-wracked ether and the warped reality beyond. While Arkan Reznor had made many upgrades and customisations to the vessel, incorporating xenos technologies into the sub-light drives and weapons systems, the warp engines and Geller field generator were thoroughly Imperial. Reliably old, the field generator and warp drive had never failed Naga-Khan and the Alpha Legion. Reznor and the shipmaster’s own enginseer both considered them dependable. The warp engines and integrated field generator had never been under so much stress before, however.

Striking out from the Crozier Worlds, the Iota-Æternus made for the aberrance of the Maelstrom. At Goura Shengk’s instruction, the Q-ship entered the raging storm at the Sinistral Gate. This was an area of calm favoured by pirates and renegades striking out from the Maelstrom. Shengk insisted that his personal daemon ship, the Dissolutio Perpetua, used the Sinistral Gate for slipping out of the warp storm and running down on the Crozier Worlds and the fabricator moons of the Koronado Cradle.

From there Quoda’s choir of astropaths begged permission to retire to their quarters, insisting they were suffering mind-splitting headaches and the fact that the sorcerer couldn’t rely on their abilities in the storm. Quoda and Navigator Ghesh, meanwhile, took on a haunted look as the freighter traversed the vicious tempest. It didn’t need a psyker to feel the rancid effect of the Maelstrom on the vessel. A wave of lingering nausea swept through the cultist crew, like an extreme form of motion sickness, and even Occam felt something horrible in the pit of his stomachs.

Skimming through the tumultuous mayhem of the Maelstrom, the freighter made short warp jumps interspaced with storm-running cruises at sub-light speed. Naga-Khan and Ghesh wouldn’t risk engaging the warp-drive for too long within the storm for fear of plunging into its monstrous heart. Naga-Khan warned the strike master that they could end up getting hopelessly lost, emerge on the other side of the galaxy, become trapped in some kind of temporal distortion or be torn apart upon emerging into a region of the Maelstrom where reality was storm-shredded – fused with the strange weather of the immaterium.

The Geller field was operating constantly, with Arkan Reznor ­stationed in the enginarium to deal immediately with any problems – such problems having the potential to present the defenceless vessel to the innumerable immaterial entities and predatory daemons like bloody bait to a swarm of sharks.

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