Excerpt - Legacy - The importance of Geller Fields

Death had come to the Gann-Luctis late in the voyage, as the ship tried in vain to force its way through a great thunderhead of force towards a momentary break of calm Yimora thought he glimpsed somewhere ahead. There had been pressure, crashing pressure that had made the ship's astropaths howl and claw at their clothes and skin, begging for sedation and crying out prayers. Domasa Dorel had felt it in her warp eye, like a finger jabbing into her forehead, and she had covered her brow with a phylactery containing hexagrammic inscriptions by House soothsayers on Terra, written in tattoo-ink on strips of her own cloned and cured skin. It usually helped. It didn't now.

Death came in as the ship burst free of the thunder-head and catapulted into the space beyond, not a calmer passage as it had seemed but a tight corkscrew of energy spinning through dimensions that no human sensibility could comprehend. The ship began to tumble as Yimora desperately looked for a way through and the Geller field rippled as the riptide struck it, closed on it, seemed to bite at it. It bowed further and further inwards and then, for less than a hundredth of a second which set off klaxons and bells throughout the Gann-Luctis' besieged hull, it flickered out.

Death came in through that tiny gap, while Varro Phrax stood in the doorway of his stateroom and watched his wife hold down their yelling, thrashing son. Even the most ignorant ship's labourer knew in a basic way that the immaterium somehow resonated with emotions: drawn by them, feeding off them, feeding them in turn. Varro and Ksana had been ready for the warp dreams, knowing what was waiting for them when they slept, and they had said the right prayers and hung the purity seals at the corners of their bed. But Dreyder must not have been paying attention when he said his prayers and allowed his words to wander, and some time after they had closed the drapes on his bed he had pitched away the little pewter aquila they had given him as a charm, playfully, absent-mindedly or in some transient pique. Warp-dreams were bad, but Varro remembered from his days on the flotilla that for a young mind they were worse. For a young mind that did not understand to expect them they must be far worse still. He remembered how blasè he had been back on Gunarvo, saying, "He'll get a few bad nights and then he'll be used to them," and felt sick.

"Go." Ksana told him. "I'll take care of him. He's awake now, but the dream got him so frightened he doesn't know it yet. I have him. You go on." Varro closed the door.

Rikah was waiting in the passageway, leaning against one of the mosaics of capering nymphs and cherubs that lined it. He was twiddling the end of one of his implanted vox-vanes, his usual sign of nerves. That was when the klaxons went off again and both men flinched at the sudden clangour.

Death found itself born inside the Gann-Luctis, inside the re-established Geller field that cut it off from the beautiful warm fluidity of the immaterium outside. It had found itself born through no conscious effort of its own: in the moment the field had flickered, its essence earthed itself quickly and painlessly into a mind inside like a spark jumping across a circuit-gap and then it was in a dry, cold, glaring straightjacket of a universe, surrounded by minds imprisoned in meat that jabbered and flapped.

It didn't like the way the meat behaved, so it did certain things that its instincts suggested and the meat took on new shapes and patterned itself through this horribly constricting cell of dimensions differently and then there was no more behaviour. It did not like the way that there were ways in which it could not move, but it found it could do things to change the little physical universe it found itself in. It could unravel things and part things, and it found that rending and breaking was far more delicious here than manipulating the soft stuff of the warp. And so it went looking for more meat to break, meat whose little droplets of spirit would puff so exhilaratingly into nothing when it pushed on them.

The noise of the klaxons barely registered with it, but they terrified Varro and Rikah. Varro was three steps down the corridor before the horrifying thought hit his mind's eye and he doubled back. But inside their room his family were still alive and unpossessed: Dreyder now crying steadily instead of screaming, Ksana cradling him. Rikah touched his shoulder.

"We need to arm, Varro. Ship's drill. We're able-bodied personnel."

"What about getting our own?"

"Best to use what's in one of the lockers," said Rikah, glancing around them. "Let's not show our hand yet. If we don't think we're going to get through this otherwise, then maybe. For now, just come on." Varro followed him away. Twice he broke his promise to himself and looked back at the stateroom door.

[...]

It didn't seem like much longer before they were close enough to hear the screaming.

A man ran back past them, one of the ratings they had seen earlier. The buzzblade he had carried was splayed out into streamers of metal, some of them threaded into and out of his flesh in a way that stitched his arm to his body. He was howling, scorched, almost naked, insane, and Cherrick felled him with a point-blank hellshot.

Varro groaned, but nobody argued: broken minds were a threat in a warp storm.

The ramp brought them to an assembly area, rows of benches across the hall and order-sheets pasted to the walls. Now the benches were overturned and broken and a crowd of crewmen were coming the other way, screaming and shoving, trying to have someone, anyone, their enemy or their best friend or the man from the shift-crew whose name they barely knew, anyone to get between themselves and death.

Death came behind them, framed in the archway where the assembly area split like the arms of a Y into two low corridors. It capered and flopped on the red-slicked deck, pausing with each little leap or stamping step as though the sensations of its lacerated feet slapping against the metal were odd and delicious. It had been unfamiliar with the limitations of the meat it had somehow become snagged in at first, and by the time it had learned that the pitiful little extremities the meat owned were supposed to move only in certain ways most of its joints had been broken or dislocated by the inhuman will moving its muscles. There was a point when if had wanted to pass through a hole it had managed to make in a bulkhead that the meat had to run around, but the hole had been barely wide enough for one extremity to fit through, so it had crumpled the hard little bone frame the meat was strung up on and fed itself through the hole like a snake. The frame had not reassembled on the other side, and trying to hold it in place through will was tiring. Now its skeleton was a mass of bone fragments and splinters all clicking and grating as it moved. Its feet either splatted on the metal with the sound of raw meat or clicked like a dog's foot from the bone jutting through the sole.

The midshipman's uniform it had worn when it had still had the human mind it had been born with was soaked red and dripping, but not all of the blood was its own. With a crackle of tearing flesh it shot out an arm, the skin popping as the limb distended, and a hand that looked like a cudgel spiked with bone thudded into the back of one of the rearmost crew. Only Cherrick, standing his ground at the head of the formation and clubbing crew aside as they ran at him, actually saw the red shape drag its catch back. Suddenly more bone splinters sprouted through its skin: first just their points like droplets of hard white sweat and then their whole length like bloodied cactus-spines, and it took the screaming crewman into its embrace. He screamed for a moment longer, then the red thing let him drop and gave out a gargling wail that could have been triumph, disappointment or something else beyond human thought.

The sound was enough to redouble the panic, and in another moment most of the hunt-and-destroy squad had disappeared up the ramp, all thoughts of drill and duty forgotten. Perhaps half a dozen were left, knocked sprawling or tangled in the benches or cowering by the walls. One shrieked and writhed in Cherrick's arms and two more were grappling with the troopers. Varro and Rikah both backed away, trying to protect Domasa from the brawling before the troopers realised it wasn't worth the trouble for people obviously so determined to run.

They let them go and two sprinted away, one cannoning into Varro and then on up the ramp. The other curled against one wall, weeping.

The metallic scratch-click of shells being rammed into a shotgun snapped Varro's attention back onto what was in front of them. In amongst the wrecked furniture, three crew were making a stand. The two they had seen with the flamer-cart crouched behind an upturned bench and worked frantically on a fuel connection; they had lost their trolley, but a little metal egg that must have been an emergency reservoir hung from a hose on the side of the casing. The sound he had heard came from the woman next to them, frantically reloading a snubby, wire-stocked shotgun as the red thing loped out of the arch.

Varro walked shakily forward, feeling as though his body was going to tear itself apart in the way the red thing's seemed to be: the instincts branded into every cell of his body wanted to propel him back up the ramp even as his horrified, disbelieving mind told him he had to go forward. His gun trembled as he raised it.

The red thing took a half-step and reached for the men with the flamer, but this time its arm seemed to have trouble stretching and a shower of blood and bone splinters pattered down onto the deck. The woman with the shotgun panicked and set off one blast, stunningly loud in the low metal space. Shot rattled and stung off the metal roof and blew out two of the lamp housings; two more began to flicker and spit erratically, and the sudden sporadic light gave everyone's movements a staccato quality that only added to the dreamlike horror.

The red thing staggered another step. Even with his ears ringing from the shotgun blast Varro could hear the sickly tearing sound its neck made as its head tilted up to look at the flickering light. One of its eyes was gone, a wet flap of skin and hair from its exploded scalp hanging over and partly sucked into the empty socket. The other eye, turned glistening black like a basalt pebble, bulged as though some unimaginable pressure from inside was about to burst it and it glittered madly in the light from the broken lamps.

The crewwoman took a breath, steadied herself and fired again as the snaking, wavering arm veered towards her. This time her aim was true, and the arm turned into a blood-spray that painted the ceiling and wrecked the half-broken lamps.

Suddenly the room was almost light-less. The thought that the red thing might be advancing on them in the dark threw Varro into a panic. His hand clenched the trigger, more fear-reflex than aim, and the room was lit by a quick flurry of dim red stabs of light as Rikah joined in. At a shouted order from Cherrick two of the ship's troops opened up too, and then the rest of them, with Cherrick at their head, darted ahead into the assembly area proper, fanning out in a line, planting their feet and adding their own fire.

"Split!" Cherrick was shouting. "Split up! Make sure if it gets near you it only gets near one of you!" And indeed, the other troopers were spreading out. Varro, his nerves and instincts screaming again, forced himself to move into the room and around the opposite wall, aim and fire again.

The thing in its coat of blood watched them silently, the single black ball of an eye catching the light of the las-bursts as they struck it. They did not knock it backward: normally even a laspistol shot would feel like an impact as explosive vapourisation of part of the target's surface imparted backward momentum. But the shape in red stood there, its jaw hanging slack on broken and dislocated hinges, as shot after shot burst puffs of vapour off it.

They did not seem to be penetrating as they would a human body, they simply cratered its front, as though something were binding its meat into a barrier far more dense to the bursts of incinerating light.

The shotgun did better work. Under cover of the lasfire around her the crewwoman crept forward through the wrecked and tumbled benches, clamped the stock to her shoulder and sent three more booming, flaring shots ripping into the already stippled flesh. Domasa could see it happening, see the hurt, although she could not communicate it: the thing throbbed in her vision like an ulcer and it was all she could do not to drop onto all fours.

But her warp eye could see it starting to come apart. The shotgun was what it needed: lasfire was a weapon for living creatures, a way to inflict trauma on a live metabolism to the point when it could not continue to function. But to fight something like this you needed a weapon that could not only break up a body but demolish it, physically rip it apart until the knot of will that held the flesh together was exhausted. The clot of warp stuff inside the corpse opposite her was starting to leak and lose cohesion: already it was having trouble stretching its limbs and the shredded flesh of its neck and shoulders was starting to settle and slump. The wretched heir was still playing the damn-fool hero, though, the way she had specifically tried to stop him from doing. Who did he think he was?

The barrel of Varro's gun was smoke-hot and icons were flashing down the length of the case: power cell low, mechanisms overheating. But he still ran forward. The shotgun woman was reloading again and the daemon-corpse's attention was on her; the flamer crew would not get there in time. Lasfire and shouts from Cherrick and the troopers passed over his crouched back; Rikah was two paces behind him, his own weapon approaching overheat level as he tried to cover them both.

The corpse still had not moved. Its other eye had taken a hit and ruptured; its front had been cooked black as the bolts hit it, and Rikah saw places where the bone had started to show. All Rikah could think was, "How can it not die?"

It wouldn't die, and Cherrick hated that. The thing stood there, flesh sizzling and crackling, and didn't waiver or fall. He had spent a long time learning how to break bodies and take lives, and with his mind charged and twitchy from what was going on outside the sack of meat in his sights was starting to look more and more like a calculated insult, a rebuke to his skills. Roaring wordlessly, forgetting what this thing was and what it could do to him, he advanced. He wasn't going to be resisted by the mockery in the spreading red pool, and he wasn't going to be shown up for a fool by the merchant-brat who was rushing right through the field of fire.

He spat, and his saliva sizzled on the heat-sink fin of his custom-crafted hellgun as he ejected the spent cell, kicked it away across the floor and slammed in another. He stepped over a broken bench as the two flamer-men were lugging their weapon into position, kicked one of them in the ribs and bellowed at him to move faster.

The thing in the corpse had noticed the nature of things around it change. It could not understand that this was because its eye had gone and with it the last crude analogue of physical sense, and that it now possessed only psychic sense blunted by its looted flesh. It had never had the experience of material form, knew no way to differentiate one material experience from another.

But it was starting, in some way, to sense a danger: it was now an effort to move and hold the meat together. It wanted to pop open these new bundles of inflamed emotions that were surrounding it, but it did not like the sensation of having to grip and hold the stuff of itself together; every last aspect of that sensation was utterly alien.

So it turned, but it was hard to move. It realised after a moment that there was something in the way, and just as the line of humans firing at it were starting to think that perhaps it was weakening as it walked face-first into the bulkhead, it twitched and heaved and stroked one ragged forearm-stump down the metal. The steel bulkhead parted and peeled back at the motion, like stretched cloth parting under a knife, and the meat-shape stepped through.

On the other side of the bulkhead was just air, the upper half of a double-high passageway through to the mess and to the lower decks' chapel. Tearing open the bulkhead had opened a hole in the upper part of its wall, and the thing from the warp made its meat-vehicle fall slowly, end over end, what was left of its crude senses relishing the curve and tumble; only a sad echo of what its home had been like, but good enough.

Then it stopped, and what little the thing understood of the rules of its new home seemed to mean that it would have to get up and move under its own power again. It got its arms and legs under it, lurching and slipping on broken joints forced to work at inhuman angles, and found out that it seemed to move much better now. It liked being away from the attackers and their odd sensations, but it hated being away from the strange, exhilarating taste of their souls. It tried to think of a way it could do both, but making its thoughts work in the sack of meat was hard so it picked a random direction and wandered in it, waiting to see what would happen.

Rikah had been first to the breach it had made in the bulkhead, and at first Cherrick and the others thought that he had been attacked by the way he staggered back from the opening with his mouth working. But each of them when they looked through the opening had to fight down the same visceral response at the sight of the once-human body walking away from them in a kind of dragging scuttle, its palms flat on the deck and its knees and ankles both bending through right-angles in the wrong direction to bring the soles of its feet onto the floor. Its head hung limply down, almost brushing the floor as if it wanted its ruined face to watch the bloody prints its hands and feet left on the deck behind it.

"Can't," gasped Rikah, breathing harshly in between dry heaves, "can't we wait? It has to be dying." But Varro and Cherrick were already shaking their heads.

"Not an option," said Cherrick without his usual unkindness. "They sometimes die, they sometimes get stronger. And if there's another accident and this happens again there is no way that I'll have two of them about at once. I've never heard of anything like that happening on any ship that survived its passage. See to Madame Dorel if you can't come with us."

He turned to the crew and troopers behind him. "Who's got climbing line?" One of the troopers started to reach for the kitpack at the small of his back, then froze, arm twitching and mouth gaping under his combat-bridle. The others were reacting the same way. Varro had taken a convulsive step back and Rikah had clapped a hand to his mouth.

Cherrick registered this in a half-second; a half-second later he heard the sticky sound of something wet encircling his helmet and smelled blood and burnt meat. A half-second after that he punched the quick-release on his helmet strap and sucked his body down toward his boots, and as he toppled into a clumsy roll and came up scrabbling he heard the splintering sound as the warp-thing crushed his helmet between splayed and distended fingers.
It had disappeared from sight below them, then wriggled about and walked easily up the wall and back to the tear it had made: now the sac that had been its head hung in the gap while its fingers snaked around the helmet trying to find why there was no mental death-spasm as the ceramite and fibroc shattered in its grip.

There was a boom and hand and helmet both vanished: the crewwoman had reloaded her shotgun again.
Too confident, though, and too far forward. The thing's head split open like a lamprey and sprayed hot blood and flechette-sharp fragments of skull with every bit the force of the shotgun blasts. The fountain of red decapitated the crewwoman and three slivers of bone went through the face of the trooper behind her: both pitched backward as Varro jumped forward with a yell and jammed his gun into the dripping stump. The barrel sizzled in the meat and then he began to pump the trigger as Rikah and Cherrick both tried to drag him away.

Varro was lucky that the cell of his gun was so low, because when the clogged and overheated barrel finally hit flashpoint and exploded there was little enough power behind it to be soaked up by the warp-thing's body.

The thump of power was still enough to send him staggering back, though, his face, chest and hands painted with blood.

What came swarming through the hull breach behind him was no longer remotely human. It leaked and stank and moved on a collection of limbs, some its old human ones and some sucking tendrils of flesh that it had extended from its torso.

The thing hurled itself out of the breach, past Varro, Rikah and Cherrick and straight at the troopers who were the ones right in front of it, knocking them flying. One died immediately, gouged in a dozen places by bone claws, one thrashed two metres backwards with his throat open before he gave one final kick of his legs and lay still.

There were three quick las-shots in succession that sent bursts of reeking steam up from its skin, then it leapt again.

The slow, almost thoughtful pace of its moves was gone now, now it was all predation and deadly speed. Two more dead by the time a third shot had been squeezed off. Cherrick leapt up and pelted back toward the ramp, Rikah dragging Varro away from the wails and crackling bone. The flamer crew were both screaming at them to get aside, and as Varro passed them they managed, finally, to produce a spurt of white heat that lit the assembly area ferociously and brought the stink of melted plastic to the air as three benches slumped down into pools of slag.
Acrid smoke made a wall across the room, and as the firelight died the after-images added to the dimness.

There was only silence, and Varro had time enough to collect himself and look around for a replacement weapon before the thing flew out of the dimness and sprawled over the flamer crew. They screamed in unison, their voices sounding eerily alike, like brothers, and then Cherrick took careful aim and snapped off a single hell-shot.

He hit exactly what he was shooting at, the weak spot where the hose coupled the flamer to its reservoir.

There was a tiny flare as the seal was breached and then Cherrick flung himself flat as a roaring orange-white cloud filled the room. The flamer crew didn't scream; they didn't have time. But something howled as its flesh was incinerated and the lattice of thoughts it had tried to hold together were left with nothing to anchor them.

Domasa and the three men felt the scream begin in their bones, build through their forebrains and finish somewhere in the writhing subconscious; on nights to come that scream would still reverberate through their nightmares. As Domasa saw the knot of force finally untangle and melt away, the flames swirled and all but guttered: weaving in and out of the pools of burning plastic, paths of hoarfrost glittered in disturbing patterns before they evaporated. The last of the lights blew out, and in the darkness the whispering echoes of that death-scream seemed to echo and slink through the smoke for a long time.