A Steel Tomb

The empty, echoing corridors of the drifting hulk had stood silently for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years as it hung in warpspace. Then the hulk fell through a tear in the fabric of reality, dropping into orbit around a real-space planet.

The planet was an Imperial world, and its Governor wasted no time. Within a week, a company of uniformed militia had boarded the vessel. Shuttles soared up from the planet’s surface, and vac-suited soldiers clamped explosives to sealed airlocks. Infantry poured in, and as the airlocks were again sealed, air was pumped into the endless bulk of the thing.

The captain in charge of the operation believed it to be routine. He strode along clanging steel corridors, accompanied by his bodyguard of nine trained Imperial Guardsmen.

They paused briefly at a crossway. The captain turned to the sergeant accompanying him, and said, ‘Sector would appear to be secure, sergeant. Radio HQ and-’. His voice trailed off as he heard the transmissions crackling from the commlink.

‘This is recon party Zulu! We are under attack! Repeat, my squad is under attack. Attackers appear to be-’ The man’s voice was abruptly cut off my a loud snap and a scything noise, before a blood-chilling scream of pure terror and pain filled the broadcast. It was joined by a quieter but no less audible screech of triumph from some unseen thing, presumably the man’s assailant. Afterwards, nothing could be heard - the gunfire had gone, and no men could be heard.

‘Daemon’s blood!’ swore the captain, ‘Did the radio centre hear that?’

The sergeant's hand flickered over the commlink as the infantry looked on nervously, glancing around themselves, training their weapons on patches of darkness. The man quickly finished his adjustments, pressing the transmit button.

‘HQ, this is recon party Tango. Do you receive, repeat, do you receive?’ The sergeant seemed astonishingly calm, considering the situation, and the captain mentally marked him down for a field promotion. The man switched the dial to receive, waiting for a reply.

None came. There was nothing but a low, sibilant hissing.

The captain gaped. ‘Are you sure that’s the right frequency?’

The sergeant looked puzzled, and replied, ‘Definitely, sir. Perhaps they’re having mechanical failures?...’ He made it sound more like a plea than a statement.

The captain sighed and nodded. ‘Damn techs never do get it right,’ he announced, for the benefit of his guard.

One of the troopers, a young man no more than nineteen standard years old, piped up, ‘Sir? Permission to speak, sir?’

‘Yes?’ he snapped. ‘What is it?’

‘The hissing, sir,’ came the reply, ‘It’s not coming from the link.’

The captain gaped at him, and slowly, inexorably, followed his gaze upwards. An air vent was right above them, and behind the grill, swathed in darkness, he could just make out a shape. It was larger than a man, with six limbs, and a knobbly carapace. It’s tiny red eyes...its tiny red eyes were looking right at him! Genestealer! He thought.

‘Oh, shit.’ he groaned, mere seconds before the grill was wrenched aside.

* * *

Genestealers were one of the most horrifying alien species yet discovered in mankind’s exploration of the stars. Standing six feet tall - and even then they were hunched! - with terrifying, heavy claws that could tear through an inch of plasteel with ease, mounted on two of their six limbs. They could move with an insectile speed, and could run as fast as a horse, never seeming to tire.

They were one of mankind’s most deadly enemies.

* * *

The captain was only one of the hundreds who died that day. The squads were taken by surprise - they had been attacked simultaneously, even as genestealers burst into the HQ through air vents, slaughtering the soldiers and technicians with ease, crushing the machinery beyond repair. The unlucky men were not equipped to deal with this kind of threat; their lasguns and autocannon simply couldn’t penetrate the thick carapaces of the genestealers. They had been slaughtered on the spot, and the aliens had lost perhaps only a dozen of their number.

The crew of the landing vessels had likewise received no warning. The genestealers had torn through the sealed airlocks with incredible ease, and had torn them apart. However, at least their deaths had meant something - with the destruction of the sealed areas, the hulk was laid open to the vacuum of space, and the attacking genestealers had been sucked away, even their thick bodies pulped by the pressure. The hulks recently repaired preservative mechanisms kicked in, and the area was sealed, but the shuttles, their crew and the aliens were all already gone.

A few men did survive the attack - some had fainted in their terror and had been ignored, whilst others had been knocked unconscious in the attack, and a few had been left for dead by the genestealers - although with the wounds inflicted upon them, they might as well have been.

Perhaps these few were the unlucky ones. They wondered the hulk for hours, terror and paranoia building up within them, until hunting genestealers caught and slaughtered them. Soon, less than half a dozen soldiers roamed the empty decks. They had been driven nearly to madness by terror, exhaustion and hunger, and mistakenly saw their fellows as roaming monsters. The fought among themselves, whilst lone genestealers watched with alien amusement, before slaying the victor.

Finally, only one man remained. This was Private Holtz, one of the captains guard who had been knocked unconscious in a fight with another man. The thickset corporal had roared in triumph, before realising in a moment of clarity what he had done. As he fell to his knees, his face in his hands, a genestealer crept up behind him and tore his head from his shoulders with a single sweep.

Holtz awoke soon after. He stared in horror at the headless corpse lying beside him, and stumbled to his feet. He knew that he had to get away from the hulk and warn the planet, but his first priority was to stay alive. He drew the dead corporals pistol from it’s sleek leather holster - now drenched in blood - and turned away, gagging. He crept away, keeping to the shadows, swearing revenge on the aliens for the atrocities they had commited.

* * *

After plodding solidly for hours through dozens of identical corridors, crawling through tightly confined vents and ducts, and at one point dropping through the floor as it gave way beneath him, Holtz finally admitted to himself that he was well and truly lost.

He also realised that he would continue to be lost until he found the company HQ, where there would almost certainly be an electronic map of the hulk - or at least a partially complete one - that the techs would have pieced together using the information compiled from various scans and patrols. Using this map, he could easily find his way to the shuttles and escape. The entire escape plan was a shaky one, he realised, but it was all he had.

Still, wandering aimlessly was not the best of methods - he could easily stray unwittingly into the middle of a genestealer brood. Yet, it was again all that he could do.

As he shuffled nervously along one extremely dark and narrow walkway, he wondered why he had not yet been killed. Humans are not, by nature, stealthy creatures, and he was a large man. Perhaps the aliens simply hadn't noticed him, or they had all withdrawn into the darkest recesses of the hulk.

It didn’t occur to him that he was being hunted.

* * *

Headquarters was in ruins.

Dead soldiers, technicians and engineers were spread about the room… and over the equipment. Spread was the right word - the genestealers delighted is messy killings; the terror in their prey seemed to excite them. Holtz gagged; he saw a hand clutching a radio handset. The hand was not attached to the arm - there was a just a gory stump, with a thin sliver of bone jutting out. He turned away, and caught sight of another gory mess. It took a lot of puzzling to realise it was the pulverised mess of another man's decapitated skull.

Clasping a hand over his gasping mouth, he stumbled through the devastation, seeking some sort of map. All of a sudden, he spotted the tactical map - a hard copy, printed out before the hologrammatic projection unit - prised by their now dead commander - had been ruined. It was small, and only showed this area of the hulk, but it was enough. Holtz knew he could use it to find an escape route from this charnel house.

There was a clanging noise behind him.

* * *

The alien hissed in sadistic pleasure as it smelt the terror of the fleeing human. It poured off him like his perspiration, and the genestealer could smell it, revelled in it. It hissed again as it hauled it's knobbly carapace through the narrow air vents that accompanied every corridor around the space hulk.

The human was here… hiding, it guessed, in the Place of Much Killing. Yes, the slaughter had been good there. Much killing, much fear. Red blood had coated the walls; the thick, oxygen-rich blood of the humans. Now it would return, and add another corpse to the many.

The genestealer struck.

* * *

Holtz whirled at the noise, and caught a glimpse of one of the identical grilles around the ceiling being punched inwards by an unholy strength. The shadow of a misshapen humanoid pulled itself through the vent, and before he could open his mouth, it leapt.

Screaming, Holtz dived forwards onto the floor - a reflex action that saved his life. The wicked claws that had been reaching for him soared inches over his prone body, and the genestealer clattered into the equipment that filled the room.

The initial shock of the attack past, Holtz' training took over. He rolled, raising his autopistol, and fired off a burst of shells.

Useless. The caseless rounds had as much effect on the genestealer as so many paper balls flung at a battleship. Those that hit it were squashed flat on the thick carapace, rebounding onto the floor. Those that did not hit the alien soared past it, crashing into the arrays of equipment behind the genestealer.

Something exploded.

Holtz flung his arms over his head and bit the floor. He felt a hot wave of flame blast over him, and a tremendous explosion nearly deafened him. It took thirty seconds for his hearing to return, time enough for the genestealer to slaughter the dazed trooper.

Fortunately, it was in no state to do such a thing. When Holtz finally raised his head, all he could see were a few charred and blackened limbs. Caught right at the centre of the blast, the bug had been blasted into its component limbs, and flash-roasted.

The map! It had been destroyed in the explosion - the holo-projector where it had lain was a smoking ruin. He nearly sobbed, before his left hand finally relaxed its grip. It unfolded, and Holtz saw the crumpled map lying, unharmed, in his palm.

Stumbling to his feet, he felt like cheering with relief and joy. But he did not dare - the aliens would surely have heard that blast and come running, and even if not that charred lump of carapace might not have been alone.

Turning from the devastation, Holtz ran from the room. He only had one place to go, now.

* * *

There it was! The shuttle Holtz had flown in on remained clamped to the hulk, and the flexible tube by which it had been attached was unharmed. In fact, even the blast doors leading up to it were unlocked and opened. No need to shut them, now that the hulk had been pressurised - in this area, at least.

He had been lucky. There were no attacks or ambushes as he fled to the shuttle that had been marked on the map by a tiny, artistically drawn icon. He had passed what had been a recon squad, however, and had stopped briefly to gather what equipment he could. He was now armed with a bolt pistol - obviously a family heirloom by the ornate decorations upon it - and several clips for it, as well as a few grenades and a laspistol. Holtz hoped fervently that he would not have to use the weapons.

Tripping over the end of the entry tube, Holtz cursed, but continued to scramble along the wobbling tube. His equipment bounced freely along, slowing his progress, but he ignored it and moved onwards. Risking a glimpse backwards, he saw nothing. The tube was empty bar him.

The shuttle was the same. Empty. The pilot and crew were gone. They had probably gone aboard with the others, abandoning their shuttles. What kind of genestealer would have the intelligence to fly a shuttle?

Oops.

What kind of Planetary Guardsman would have the intelligence to fly a shuttle? Holtz had sure as hell never flown one.

He sighed, sitting down before the controls. Now was as good as time as any to learn.

* * *

With a sighing of released air, the flexible tube disconnected from the space hulk. The blast doors at the hulk shut automatically as it's antiquated systems detected the loss of air pressure. Similarly, Holtz had already programmed the airlock on the shuttle to shut itself. Now he was just left with twenty metres of flexible tubing hanging from his shuttlecraft - and there, now it too was released. Peering out of the shuttle, he could just about see the tube drifting away, propelled by the slight explosive charge used to disconnect it.

Now he just had to activate this crate's automatic systems. They would take him back to the planet's surface perfectly - the government would not allow for human error as far as a space to ground landing was concerned. And the shuttle's systems were astonishingly comprehensible, even to a semi-literate man like Holtz. There it was - he rapped a few buttons, toggled a lever, acknowledged the computer's question, and leaned back as the shuttle began to swing about on its gyroscopes. It was done - he was free of the hulk. Now he could simply kick back and relax… he would not exactly be given a heroes welcome back home, but at least he was alive. And that was all that mattered right now.

The space hulk would soon be far behind him, along with its grim cargo of dead guardsmen and terrible genestealers. The planetary governor could call for aid from the Legions Astartes - the elite Space Marines of the Empire. They would cleanse the hulk with their righteous fire, with the Emperor's blessing. The damn alien filth would not stand a chance against humanity's finest. Holtz grinned as he imagined the fate awaiting the genestealers.

There was a hiss behind him.

Holtz swung about, jerked from his dozing slumber, but there was nothing - it was just the jets on the shuttle firing. It had completed swinging about and, course plotted, had started thrusting for the planet. The hiss was just the ship adjusting some perfunctory system or another. He relaxed, swinging back around to look out of the shuttle.

There was a second hiss - and this one was far more primal than the first.

And behind private Holtz, a demon reared its ugly head.

Shaun Green, 1999