Vel Khorath saw the Space Hulk through the bridge viewport and knew immediately that they were going to board it.
The behemoth drifted at the edge of the system's outermost orbital, a fused mass of ships and station segments, and asteroid material and wreckage compressed into a single structure roughly eighty kilometers along its longest axis. Its silhouette was jagged and dark against the starfield, and the few lights visible on its surface were weak, intermittent flickers of systems that had been running on emergency power for longer than anyone cared to guess. The hulk rotated slowly on an axis that didn't correspond to any gravitational body, and the rotation gave the bridge crew a view of its full profile: a canyon of fused hulls along the portside, a cluster of what had once been ships welded together at their midsections by heat and pressure, and a vast open wound near the stern where an explosion had peeled the outer layers back and exposed interior decks to the void.
Vel stood at the bridge's secondary tactical station with his gauntlets resting on the console's edge and watched the hulk complete a quarter-rotation. The Shrieking Silence sat at a safe distance of forty thousand kilometers, engines idling, the ship's systems running on reserves that were uncomfortably close to crisis.
"Fuel," said Trask from the command throne. The word came out flat, a statement and a command.
Trask led the warband because he'd killed the man who led it before him, and nobody had challenged the arrangement since. He was large even by Astartes standards, and his midnight-blue armor was scarred along every surface and decorated with strips of dried skin that he'd taken from officers of three different loyalist formations over the past decade. His helm sat on the throne's armrest, and his bare face was lean and pale and tired.
"Indeed," Vel agreed.
They needed it. The Shrieking Silence had been running on fumes since the ambush at Karis Chorn, where a Raven Guard strike force had materialized out of the void and crippled their escort before they'd even realized they were being hunted. They'd lost the Weeping Brother, a frigate that had served the warband for six years, and the damage to the Shrieking Silence's port engine array had forced them to limp through two Warp transits on reduced thrust, burning fuel at a rate that left them with perhaps one more jump before the tanks went dry. One more jump, and then they'd be adrift, and drifting in a galaxy where the Lion's fleets were methodically hunting every Night Lord they could find meant dying.
The Space Hulk was an answer. Hulks were scrapyards and fuel depots and armories and tombs all at once, and the Navy frigates visible in the hulk's mass had almost certainly carried plasma reactor fuel in quantities that would fill the Shrieking Silence's reserves twice over. Of course, the risk was the unknown. Hulks attracted things. Xenos, Orks, automated defence systems still running on logic that had outlived their builders, and occasionally something worse.
Vel's gut told him the risk was acceptable because the alternative was worse.
"Soran," Trask said. "Scan it."
Soran was the youngest of the thirty-one Night Lords aboard the Shrieking Silence, inducted during the Heresy's final year, and he'd survived the decade since by being useful. His fingers moved across the auspex console and the array cycled through its sweep, and after forty seconds he turned.
"Minimal energy signatures," Soran said. "Reactor bleed from at least two of the Navy hulls, consistent with dormant plasma systems still cycling at maintenance levels. No life signs on standard bands. No vox traffic. No active weapons systems. There's something in the deep interior that the auspex can't resolve; the hulk's mass is too dense for a clean read past the first three hundred meters of structure, and the fused materials are scattering the return signal."
"Something," Trask repeated.
"An energy reading. Low-frequency, constant, very faint. Could be a reactor in standby. Could be a power cell bank. Could be residual Warp bleed from whatever transit dumped the hulk here." Soran paused. "I can't tell you what it is without getting closer, but it shouldn’t be anything to be concerned about."
Trask looked at the hulk through the viewport for a long time. The rotation had brought the cluster of fused frigates into view again, their Imperial aquilas still visible on two of the four hulls, the gold paint faded and scored but stubbornly legible.
"We board," Trask said. "Vel, take First Claw. Soran, you're with them. Find the fuel reserves, assess viability, and report. If the reserves are intact, we dock and pump. If they're compromised, we strip what we can carry and leave."
"And the energy reading?" Vel said.
"Investigate if it's on your route. Avoid if it isn't. We're here for fuel, not mysteries."
Vel nodded and left the bridge.
First Claw assembled in the embarkation deck and boarded the Thunderhawk in the order they always boarded: Vel first, then Mordren, then Halsk, then Soran, then the five others whose names Vel used and whose company he tolerated because they could fight and follow instructions. Nine Night Lords in midnight-blue ceramite, armed and sealed, and the Thunderhawk lifted from the deck and crossed the void between the Shrieking Silence and the Space Hulk in six minutes of silence broken only by the pilot's occasional course corrections as he navigated the debris field that orbited the hulk in a thin ring.
They entered through the open wound near the stern. The Thunderhawk settled on a deck that had once been a cargo bay, the metal beneath its landing struts groaning and shifting before it held. Vel was first down the ramp, bolter up, his auto-senses cycling through spectrums as they adjusted to the hulk's interior. The air was thin and cold and carried a chemical tang that his armour's filters identified as residual coolant from a ruptured conduit somewhere in the surrounding structure. The gravity was lighter than standard by perhaps fifteen percent, and it gave his movements a loose quality that he compensated for within three steps.
The cargo bay was large and dark and empty. Whatever it had carried was long gone. The walls were buckled in places where the hull had compressed during the merger, and the ceiling had a visible bow that suggested the deck above was pressing down. Lights from Vel's helm cut through the dark and showed him rows of empty cargo racks and a far wall with two blast doors, one sealed and one hanging open on a single hinge.
"Move," Vel said.
They moved through the open door and into a corridor that ran the length of the frigate's midsection. The corridor was intact and the emergency lighting still functioned, casting the passage in a weak amber glow that made the walls look like old bone. Conduit bundles ran along the ceiling in orderly rows, and most of them were dark, but a few carried a faint hum that meant power was still reaching them from somewhere. Soran walked with his auspex unit extended, and the device clicked and chirped as it sampled the environment.
"Reactor's this way," Soran said, gesturing down a branching corridor to the left. "Two hundred meters, give or take. The fuel reserves should be adjacent."
They followed the corridor and found the reactor chamber behind a pair of blast doors that Mordren forced open with a pry bar and his shoulders. The chamber was cold and dark and the reactor itself sat in its housing at the room's centre, a cylinder of reinforced alloy four meters tall. Its status indicators were all dark except for a single amber light that pulsed roughly once per second. Dormant, but alive.
The fuel reserves were in an adjacent compartment, accessible through an internal hatch. Vel sent Halsk and two others to check them, and they came back in four minutes with a report that the tanks were at sixty-three percent capacity. More than enough.
"Trask," Vel said over the vox. "Fuel confirmed. Sixty-three percent reserves in the port-side frigate. Recommend docking at the stern breach, section seven. The deck there will support the Shrieking Silence's mass if we distribute the load."
Trask's response was immediate. "Acknowledged. Docking in twenty. Secure the route."
Vel turned to Soran. "The energy reading. How far?"
Soran consulted his auspex. The device's screen flickered, and he tapped it twice with a finger before the display stabilized.
"Deeper. Past the junction where this frigate fuses with the next hull section. Maybe four hundred meters into the interior mass." He looked up. "It's stronger now. Constant and low-frequency, and the waveform is clean. Too clean for a decaying power source. Whatever's producing it is functioning within design parameters."
Vel weighed it. Trask had said to avoid if it wasn't on their route. It wasn't on their route. But four hundred meters was close enough that whatever was generating the signal would be close to the docking point, and anything that was still functioning at design parameters inside a Space Hulk deserved identification.
"We check it," Vel said. "Mordren, Halsk, stay here and secure the fuel compartment. Everyone else, with me."
They moved deeper.
The transition between the frigate and the next hull section was a compressed seam of fused metal where two ships had been pressed together with enough force to merge their outer hulls into a single wall. The passage through it was a gap barely wide enough for an Astartes in full plate, and they filed through one at a time, their pauldrons scraping against metal that had been smoothed by the fusion process into something that looked almost organic. And beyond the seam, the architecture changed. The second hull was older, much older, and the design language was unfamiliar. The corridors were wider and taller and the walls were smooth and featureless and made of a material that Vel's auto-senses couldn't identify. It looked like stone but registered as metalite or some composite on the spectrographic analysis, and it was warm to the touch despite the ambient temperature being well below freezing.
The lighting here was different too. Instead of the amber glow of Imperial systems, the corridors were lit by a pale luminescence that came from the walls themselves, steady and directionless and faintly blue.
"This isn't Imperial," Soran said. His voice was quiet, and he'd stopped walking.
"No," Vel said.
"It's not Aeldari either. Or Ork, obviously. The material composition doesn't match anything in the database."
"Can you date it?"
Soran ran his auspex across the nearest wall. The device took nine seconds to process, and when the result appeared on the screen, Soran stared at it.
"The decay signature on the composite material suggests an age in excess of too-fucking-old," Soran said. “Hard to give an accurate measure, but it’s older than humanity.”
Vel looked at the corridor ahead. It stretched into the pale blue light, straight and wide and clean, and there was nothing in it. No debris, no dust, no sign of damage or degradation. The walls were smooth and the floor was smooth and the ceiling was smooth, and all of it looked like it had been built yesterday.
Every instinct he'd built across a heresy and a decade of running told him to leave.
He kept walking.
The corridor terminated at a chamber. There was no door; the corridor just widened in a smooth curve and became a circular room approximately thirty meters across. The ceiling was high, ten meters at least, and the pale blue luminescence was brighter here, concentrated in the walls and the floor and the ceiling until the room felt like the inside of a lantern. The walls were carved with geometric patterns, precise and repeating in sequences that spiralled inward toward the room's centre, and Vel's eyes followed the sequences without wanting to and felt a pressure behind his temples.
At the centre of the room, on a raised platform of the same warm composite, something lay.
It was humanoid. It was tall, perhaps three meters from the crown of its head to its feet, and it lay on its back with its arms at its sides and its eyes closed. Its skin was pale, almost white, and its hair was white and long and spread across the platform beneath it in a fan that caught the blue light. It wore robes of grey and white that draped over a frame that was lean and angular and still. Its chest did not move and its fingers did not twitch. It had been lying there for a very, very long time.
"What the hell is that?" Drevak said from behind Vel. His voice was too loud.
"Quiet," Vel said.
Soran stepped past Vel and raised his auspex. The device's screen lit up and the readings scrolled in columns of data that Soran processed as they appeared.
"It's alive," Soran said. "The life signs are suppressed, almost undetectable, but there's a metabolic cycle running at a rate of approximately one cycle per solar year. Heart rate..."
He paused and checked the reading again. "One beat every forty-seven minutes. Respiratory exchange is happening at a rate I can barely measure. This thing is in suspended animation, and it's been in it for so long that the auspex is having trouble computing the duration."
Vel looked at the figure on the platform. The pale face was smooth and ageless and the closed eyes were set beneath brows that angled upward at the outer edges. The hair was white and fine. The hands at its sides were long-fingered and still and the nails were dark, almost black, and shaped to points.
There was a symbol on the figure's forehead. Two concentric circles, the inner one slightly raised, grown into the skin and a shade darker than the face around it.
"We're leaving," Vel said.
He turned, and his boot caught the edge of the platform's base.
The sound was small. Ceramite against composite, a scrape that lasted less than a second. But the vibration traveled through the platform's material, and the material carried it inward and downward and into the structure beneath, and the structure had been designed to transmit exactly this kind of stimulus to the thing resting on its surface.
The figure's chest rose.
The motion was slow and smooth and deep, a single inhalation that expanded the ribcage beneath the grey robes and held it there for three seconds before releasing in an exhale that Vel felt against his face. The breath was warm and dry and carried no scent at all.
The heartbeat changed. Soran's auspex screamed a warning tone and the data on the screen scrambled and reformed and scrambled again as the device tried to track a metabolic acceleration that jumped from one beat per forty-seven minutes to sixty beats per minute in two seconds.
The figure's eyes opened.
They were pale, almost colourless, and ringed with concentric circles that radiated outward from the pupil in a pattern that matched the geometric carvings on the chamber's walls. The eyes moved, tracking from the ceiling to the walls to the floor and then to the nine Night Lords standing at the platform's edge, and they settled on Vel and held.
Vel raised his bolter.
The figure sat up. The torso rose from the platform in a single unhurried motion, and the white hair fell from the platform's surface and cascaded down the figure's back and shoulders. The head turned and the ringed eyes passed over each Night Lord in sequence.
Then the figure stood. Vel's initial estimate had been wrong. The figure was closer to three and a half meters tall, lean and angular and straight-backed, and it looked down at the Night Lords. Its expression gave nothing away.
"Open fire," Vel said.
Nine bolters spoke simultaneously. The concentrated volley hit the figure across its chest and torso and the mass-reactive rounds detonated against the grey robes and the flesh beneath them and the sound filled the chamber in a roar that bounced off the smooth walls and multiplied.
The figure didn't move.
The bolt rounds struck and detonated and the explosions bloomed across the figure's body in flashes of orange and grey, and the smoke obscured the torso for a moment, and when the smoke cleared the figure stood exactly where it had been standing. The robes were scorched in places. The skin beneath was unmarked.
Vel's finger held the trigger and the bolter cycled through its magazine and the rounds hit the figure and did nothing. Drevak fired a melta blast from three meters and the beam struck the figure's left shoulder and the air around the impact point shimmered with thermal distortion and the shoulder didn't burn and the skin didn't blister and the beam just scattered.
The figure raised one hand.
Vel felt the pressure before the effect arrived. It pressed against him from every direction, a compression of the air itself, and his armour's structural integrity warnings activated across six separate plates simultaneously.
Drevak's power armour folded inward at the chest and the waist and the joints, the ceramite crumpling as if squeezed from all sides at once, and the sound was a grinding metallic shriek that lasted less than a second. Blood burst from the seams and the visor shattered inward, and what was left of Drevak hit the floor and rolled two meters before stopping.
The Night Lord to Drevak's left died the same way, and the one behind him, and the two at the chamber's entrance who had been turning to run.
Vel felt his armour begin to compress. The chest plate bent inward and pressed against his sternum and his breath cut off and his ribs flexed and his vision went red at the edges. He tried to move and his limbs wouldn't answer because the armour had locked into a configuration that no longer matched the shape of a human body. The ceramite screamed as it folded.
Soran was the last. He'd dropped the auspex and drawn his sidearm and fired three shots that struck the figure's face and bounced off the smooth pale skin and ricocheted into the ceiling. The figure's ringed eyes turned to him, and the hand that was still raised shifted a fraction, and Soran's armour folded around him in a single compression that drove his knees into his chest and his arms into his sides and his helm into his shoulders. The compressed mass dropped to the floor beside the auspex unit, which was still running.
The chamber was quiet.
The figure lowered its hand and looked at the nine compressed shapes on the floor with the same flat and calm attention it had given the living ones. The ringed eyes moved from body to body, and then they moved to the corridor beyond the chamber's entrance, and then upward, through the ceiling, through the layers of fused hull and ancient composite and void, toward something above.
The figure walked out of the chamber and into the corridor. Its bare feet made no sound on the smooth floor. Its white hair trailed behind it, and the pale blue luminescence in the walls brightened as it passed and dimmed after it had gone.
It moved through the Space Hulk's interior without hesitation, navigating corridors and junctions and fused seam transitions as if it knew the layout already or didn't need to. Where passages were blocked by collapsed structure, the figure raised a hand and the obstruction moved. Metal bent and stone shifted and compacted debris compressed itself flat against the walls, clearing a path that sealed behind the figure after it had passed.
It reached the stern breach in four minutes. The Shrieking Silence sat beyond the breach, docked against the hulk's outer surface with umbilical lines running between the strike cruiser's fuel intake ports and the frigate's reserve tanks. The ship's running lights cast long shadows across the hulk's exterior, and the void beyond was black and cold and full of stars.
The figure stepped through the breach and onto the hulk's outer surface. There was no atmosphere. The figure stood in hard vacuum and the white hair drifted slowly in the absence of gravity, and the grey robes settled against the lean frame, and the ringed eyes looked at the Shrieking Silence.
The figure raised both hands, palms facing the strike cruiser.
The effect began at a point in the void approximately two hundred meters above the Shrieking Silence's dorsal surface. Space compressed. A sphere of gravitational force materialized, and the pull was immediate and absolute. The strike cruiser's hull groaned as every structural member registered the new vector simultaneously, and the groan built into a scream as the metal began to bend toward the sphere.
The Shrieking Silence's hull plating tore free in sheets. The dorsal armour peeled upward and away from the ship's spine, each plate ripping loose and rising toward the sphere. The bridge tower bent at its base, the metal stretching and thinning before snapping, and the severed tower rose and compressed against the sphere's surface and flattened.
The ship's spine cracked. The main structural keel, designed to absorb the stresses of Warp transit and weapons fire and collision, fractured along three points simultaneously as the gravitational sphere drew the ship's mass upward and inward. The engine block separated from the stern and rose in a tumbling mass of reactor housing and thrust nozzles and fuel lines that trailed plasma in dying arcs. The fuel tanks ruptured and the plasma ignited in the void, a silent bloom of white and blue that lasted two seconds before the gravitational sphere consumed the fire and the fuel and the metal that had carried them.
Trask was on the bridge when the ceiling folded. He had three seconds to understand what was happening, enough time to open his mouth, and then the bridge compressed around him and joined the rising mass of crushed metal that climbed toward the sphere. The Thunderhawk in the embarkation deck lasted longer; its hull was reinforced for atmospheric entry, and it held its shape for an additional second and a half before the gravitational forces exceeded its tolerances and the gunship collapsed inward and joined the rest.
Halsk and Mordren were in the fuel compartment. The compartment's walls bent inward in a smooth and accelerating curve that closed the space around them, and the fuel tanks burst and the plasma consumed them before the compression finished the job.
The Shrieking Silence ceased to exist as a ship. Every tonne of metal and fuel and ordnance and thirty-one dead Night Lords compressed into a sphere roughly forty meters across that orbited the gravitational point the figure had created. The sphere was dark and dense and it cooled rapidly in the void, its surface smoothing as the component metals fused under pressure.
The gravitational sphere held for ten seconds and then released. The compressed mass hung in the void, a dark and perfect sphere, slowly drifting along the vector the Shrieking Silence had occupied before it was destroyed.
The figure lowered its hands.
“Annoying.”