The Voice of Mars (Warhammer 40,000) by David Guymer

Author:David Guymer [Guymer, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2018-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

‘She Who Thirsts and Ayoashar’Azyr are the masters of this dance, but it is the Laughing God who shapes their tune, for it is a fine tragedy indeed.’

– Fall

I

The alpha skitarius dragged Melitan along the walkway by the wrist. She kicked out with her feet, trying to find purchase on the runebanks as they slid by her, succeeding only in knocking over a few stools. The cyborgised veteran condensed more strength into his one arm than she could summon from her entire body.

And if she could get away from him – what then?

She felt herself succumbing to panic. Her heart was beating faster, thoughts spilling through her mind at a frenetic pace. She was numbly aware of herself pleading with the dumb Legio Cybernetica muscle-brute plodding on behind her, even as she wriggled like a maggot under a vivisector’s needle. With another pointless, piercing scream, she dug her heels into the grated flooring, yanked on her trapped hand and scrabbled along the floor for something to hold on to. Her fingers tore in her desperation, leaving bloody trails on the metal behind her. The blinking lens lights of the binary infocytes in the underslung data cradles blurred beneath her, stars in the heartbeat before warp translation. The lights were not especially bright, but they stung her eyes, setting off a pulsing migraine that made her gasp, killing her own efforts to escape as she slapped her palm to her forehead.

‘Why do you struggle?’ The alpha sounded genuinely perplexed. ‘We have been waiting decades for this moment. The chance to abase ourselves before the Sapphire King.’

Clutching her face in one hand, Melitan could only scream. It was an inhuman sound that came out of her, something ripped out of her, torn, mangled by a shrill binaric register that had the skitarii legionaries twitching in discomfort. Her eyes filled with racing numerals, as if her brain had triggered a purge and restart. Her mouth widened, but no sound emerged now but a strangled whine.

‘What is this?’

The alpha tightened his grip on her wrist and pushed the still-warm emitter of his plasma pistol to the roof of her head. The other skitarii backed off, warily, drawing weapons from sidearm holsters and covering their alpha.

Thrashing on the end of its chain, the robo-mastiff snarled and snapped at Melitan, salivary lubricant flying from its heavy jaws, its noospheric olfactors picking up the forced rewiring of Melitan’s higher processes and driving it wild.

Surrendering to the mastiff’s instincts, the keeper let some slack into the chain.

Pain erupted from somewhere deep in Melitan’s brain, repealing the mastiff’s paralysis codes and burning a command phrase into the ashes of her insular cortex.

‘Deimos!’

Motive Force abandoned the robo-mastiff even as it exploded forwards. It was as if the verbal override had doused its battery packs and severed every wire in its make-up, its sub-intelligence wiped clean before its dead body had crashed to the floor.

The keeper looked up from the junk metal shackled to her arms and at Melitan. It

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