Fear the Alien by C. Z. Dunn

Author:C. Z. Dunn [Dunn, C. Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Warhammer 40K
Published: 2011-01-09T07:00:00+00:00

For the next hour, Kaspel roamed the dark corridors and access shafts which weaved around the mechanisms of the great engines, mostly on foot but occasionally using his three mechadendrites, mechanical arms connected to his spine, to climb to difficult areas. As he moved, he recorded progress and issued fresh instructions to the technomats, occasionally stopping to administer a necessary rite or prayer.

As he took a shortcut down an airshaft between two levels, his mechadendrites finding purchase where human fingers could not, Kaspel ran some diagnostic incantations, ritually working through the processes of the engine, and the ceremonies that would bring each repaired part back online.

There was something wrong. The work was progressing, but the systems were not responding as they should—whole areas which should have come back online were still dead. Curious.

Kaspel dropped out of the shaft, and landed on the deck, the floorplates clanking under his weight. The corridor he had dropped into was a functional tube plated with thick slabs of plasteel on the walls and floors. The more ornate decorations of the Imperial style were reserved for the other end of the ship, where the officers worked and lived. In the engineering decks, practicality ruled over aesthetics: pipes and cables threaded in and out of the walls, and unmarked doors led to small work areas filled with cogitator terminals and spare components.

Kaspel straightened the thick red robes which covered his utilitarian leather coveralls, and was about to proceed to the next point in his inspection when he noticed an arm extending from a recess further down the corridor. It was a fleshy arm, ending in a basic pincer attachment.

He approached to find one of the servitors slumped in the alcove, head to one side, mouth frothing and eyes wide. It was not uncommon for servitors to fail, to lose mental coherence and to be jettisoned into space, but there was something in the wild expression in those eyes which gave Kaspel pause.

He adjusted the vision in his augmented eye to thermal, and observed the heart of the servitor as a hastily pulsating mass within the servitor’s chest, pumping hard. The lungs were also working overtime. It was as if… Kaspel dropped to one knee, and rolled the servitor over onto its front. He ran a gloved hand over the implants on the back of its neck, the mechanisms that turned a vat-grown humanoid into a robotic creature capable of basic tasks. Kaspel’s fingers found what he had suspected: a neat cut had been made in one cable, and the wires within reversed.

The alteration was a simple one, but specific, reversing the neural dampener that prevented servitors from being distracted by physical pain. Someone had very precisely altered this unfeeling creature to make it experience intense agony. Kaspel tore out the cable, and then removed a couple of further connections, cutting off all power to the brain. The servitor shuddered briefly, and died.

Kaspel corrected himself as he stood up. The servitor had never been alive. However, such deliberate sabotage needed to be reported.

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