Black Tide (Blood Angels Book 4) by James Swallow

Author:James Swallow [Swallow, James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2011-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Time was broken and bleeding; it had that in common with Rafen.

He was aware of the passage of moments, not in a linear manner, but in fits and starts that lanced into his thoughts. Each elapse was a jagged shard of pain and awareness piercing the blood-warm veil that had engulfed him.

His body was feverish with heat, the outward manifestation of his enhanced Astartes physiology as it worked to repair him. Bones were knitting, fluids clotting and wounds drawing closed all over his body, but Rafen’s mind struggled to hold on to any sense of it.

Dislocated from the real world, he bobbed upon the turbulent surface of consciousness like a cork, dropping into the troughs of towering waves and vanishing into the black depths. Now and then he would surface, become aware, only to sink back again.

He tried to draw the pieces together into some kind of cogent chain of events.

The spindrift fall through the dark abyss of the waves; yes, that had happened to him. In the moments after the pain of the kraken’s parting attack, he had been lost. The agony of the impact, so great and so breathtaking, seemed a distant thing to him now. How quickly the flesh forgets, he thought.

Breaking the surface; that too was real… wasn’t it? His helmet filmed with oily seawater, cradled in the leeward surge of a low, fast breaker. The battle armour’s simple machine-spirit reacting, trying to keep him alive. The icy cold at his back from the broken cryo-pods of the microfusion reactor. The shapes of the mud-coloured wave tops ranging away beneath a rusty, weeping sky. Something out there in the distance, regular in shape, glittering dully. Rescue? He dared not hold on to the ideal, for fear it would disintegrate in his thoughts.

The little creatures in the water; eel-like things with bony plates across their heads like arrow tips. Probing at him, looking for new wounds in his armour. Tyranid things, yes. The biomechanical striations clear as he grabbed one and crushed it in his armoured fingers. Some phylum of refuse-consuming animal, perhaps, seeing the Blood Angel as little more than organic mass in need of denaturing.

The dark waters again. Fathomless deeps, burning with blood, thundering with the sound of life. Was that real? Did that exist outside his skull, or was it a torpid fever-dream?

Fingers finding the chains around his wrists, the lanyards trailing to his weapons. The gun and the sword not lost to him. A flash of elation. Good. The looming abyss of this alien ocean was denied his weapons. To perish unarmed seemed somehow wrong, as if meeting the veil of death stripped bare and weak.

The shape again, coming closer. Shadows framed against dimming clouds. A ship? A tall, blade-sharp prow. The heavy, rotting scent of tyranid pheromones, a haze of foetid mist descending. The air greasy and acid.

Dark and light. Dark and light. Dark…

The light–

The blunt, brutish lines of the patrol craft rode high in the sluggish swell, solar vanes creaking in the constant wind.

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