Soul Drinker: 20th Anniversary Edition (Soul Drinkers: Warhammer 40,000 Book 1) by Ben Counter

Author:Ben Counter [Counter, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2022-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The warp was a dark and terrible place, a realm where fears and emotions were made real, where the nightmares of men found form, and evil things lived. There were malevolent forces that called themselves gods, and mindlessly violent predators. There were no safe paths through the warp, and only the guiding light of the Astronomican beacon and the skills of the Navigator caste could bring a ship home.

The risks of travelling the shifting ways of the empyrean were offset by the vast distances that could be travelled in a matter of hours, so that ships which sailed the warp for a few days could make several years’ worth of distance in real space. But inevitably, when ships departed the safety of reality and ploughed the waves of the warp, some did not return.

Worse, some returned changed.

Ghost ships. Prodigals. Craft which had been gone sometimes thousands of years, suddenly spat back out into real space. The terrible forces of the warp could twist their structures or weld lost ships together, and sometimes – the worst times – they brought something back with them. Their original names forgotten, these ships were known as space hulks.

Sarpedon couldn’t tell how old this particular space hulk was, but it must have been older than any he had heard of. It was not the first he had seen, for the Soul Drinkers were suited to storming hulks and destroying them before their inhabitants could pose a threat. But it was the most ancient, and by magnitudes the biggest.

His half-arachnid form let him clamber along the walls and ceiling, so any foe he found would suffer a moment’s disorientation in which Sarpedon could strike. This particular part of the hulk was Imperial, as witnessed by the aquila and devotional texts on the bulkheads. It had been an Imperial Guard hospital ship, with wards running its whole length and a huge quarantine and decontamination sector in the stern. It was also in a sensor-shadow, a part of the hulk which had been veiled from the fleet’s intensive life-sign scans. Which meant it had to be searched the old-fashioned way.

Sarpedon rounded a corner and looked down from the ceiling at the ward. It was perhaps a kilometre and a half long. Centuries ago the rows of beds and equipment stations had been lit by unforgiving strip lights, but now the lights were dim and the beds were mouldering. Shadows gathered too dense for even Sarpedon’s eyes to pierce.

He dropped down onto the floor and flipped the closest couple of beds with a talon. The layers of grime had built up over the centuries – which was good, for it meant nothing had been here to disturb them.

‘Sarpedon to control, waypoint nine reached.’

‘Acknowledged, Lord Sarpedon,’ came Givrillian’s voice over the vox. Sarpedon had been happy to appoint Givrillian as the mission’s tactical co-ordinator, where his level head would be put to best use. Givrillian was back on the Glory with the HQ, while Sarpedon led the search on the hulk.

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