Darkness in the Blood by Guy Haley

Author:Guy Haley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2020-09-23T16:13:03+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

GHOST SHIP

Teus stood up from the body. It was broken into several pieces and scattered across the corridor. A tangle of intestines joined parts of the torso to the separated pelvis. The legs spread back at an extreme angle, disarticulated at the hips. One of the feet was a yard away from the ankle. So it went on. His stablight picked out all the little frosted mounds of meat stuck to the floor, the walls and the ceiling.

‘Another body,’ he voxed to Arael.

‘How many is that now?’

‘One hundred and six, at my last count. Not many, even for a ship of this size. It looks like a skeleton crew. Whoever these people were and wherever they came from, they left in a hurry.’

‘The forge will be able to tell us both of those things. As soon as we have notice to them they will send a Techmarine out here to commune with the ship’s central spirit convocation.’

‘I am curious to know.’

‘Do not expect them to share what they find, unless it is deemed necessary.’

‘That does not seem fair somehow,’ said Teus. ‘We found this ship.’

‘You do as you are ordered, brother. Service is its own reward.’

Arael was Teus’ brother-mentor, assigned to guide him through his first years as a battle-brother, although in some ways Arael was as much of a stranger to the Blood Angels as Teus was. Teus might have been newly elevated, fast-tracked through apotheosis and the Tenth Company to help refill the Chapter’s depleted ranks after the invasion, but he was Baalian. Arael was not. Arael was one of Cawl’s Mars-born, from Terra itself if Teus had correctly read the hints he dropped, born a galaxy away and eight thousand years ago. The thought of such vast distances in time and space awed Teus. He was surprised at the emotion. He had thought angels were beyond such mortal feelings. He still had much to learn.

‘Do you have any contact with the command deck?’ Teus swept his bolt carbine across the corridor. The stablight attached to the side of the gun cast a brilliant circle of white on the frosty walls.

‘None. Nothing but blood and scraps of flesh. Sound off your sensor readings, and boost power to your data array.’ Arael’s vox-signal was choppy. The walls of the ship presented serious obstacles to short-range communications.

‘Negative on life signs. Negative on power emissions. I am proceeding to the enginarium.’

‘Go carefully, brother. Watch your back. Keep half your attention on your auto-senses and make sure they are tuned to the optimum input feeds. Your battleplate sees a lot better than you do.’

Teus grunted at the warning. Arael was an overly cautious warrior.

Thin air moved sluggishly as he passed down the corridor. Heat spill from his reactor curled in smoking eddies from his venting ports. There was a major breach on the tenth level, but otherwise the ship was undamaged, and its atmosphere had been retained for the most part. The ship’s power must have been down for some time. Void cold had seeped into the bones of the craft.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.