Excerpt- A Tyranid Lunch - The Last Hunt

They were all going to die. Augur station Vox Primary Ankum had admitted as much before the station’s commander, Sensorium Master Crasus, had ordered him to be silent. None of them needed the vox primary’s analysis to know what was about to happen.

Augur analyst Davrick’s main viewscreen had just come back online. It had shorted out three times in the last hour, overloaded by the sheer weight of returns it was getting from the augur arrays that monitored the edge of the Darkand System. The counter for his sector had stalled at 1314 and was simply blinking on and off, its red digits throwing Davrick’s face into light and dark, light and dark. The displays all around him were now a morass of un identified, organic returns, rendered all but useless by the weight of data appearing across the screens.

Augur Station JUF-D19/Rimward’s processors were unable to comprehend the sheer size of Hive Fleet Cicatrix as it arrived in-system.

Tech-adept Groll seemed to have gone into some sort of standby, cortical plugs still linking him to the deep-space station’s drives. He sat bound in his binary communion chair, eyes glazed, pale lips quivering. Crasus had given up trying to bring him back online.

‘Estimated time to contact?’ the sensorium master asked, voice hoarse. He was watching the external pict screens.

‘Unknown,’ another of the void station’s six-man crew, Sereen responded. ‘My systems are all glitched, but running off the last speed and trajectory readings we managed to file, I estimate no more than ten minutes.’ Nobody replied. Everyone’s eyes were on the pict-feed.

The external recordings had managed to pick out their doom. The view of real space in the station’s immediate vicinity was a grainy, static-washed green, but the resolution was enough to make out the thing approaching them through the void. The augur’s systems had been constructed to collate and analyse nonvisual data – such clinical information was of far more use than the scant things that could be detected through the naked eye, watching viewscreen images of distant objects. In a twist of cruel irony, JUF-D19/Rimward’s grainy old pict recorders were the only pieces of data collection equipment not overloaded by the sheer size of the xenos fleet.

Now that fleet’s vanguard was visible. Something was nearing the station, drawing towards it with a silent, eerie inevitability. Its form defied easy definition. Davrick, born to a middle-ranking ash hiver family on Colaris Prime, had never seen the ocean before, but he’d witnessed the strange, frilled creatures imported as foodstuffs for Colaris’ teeming hab blocks from harvest worlds like Aquim and New Haven. The thing approaching JUF-D19/Rimward looked like one such creature, albeit far larger and cast out into the void. Its back was a gnarled, curling hump of scarred bone plating, while its underside was a mass of dozens of limb-like tendrils that waved back and forth with a lazy synchronisation, as though powering it forward through the depths. Streamers of void-frozen fluid clung to its fronds, while its head constituted nothing more than a fleshy maw. Orifices in its spine shell occasionally gouted bursts of bio-effluvium that crystallised in the void.

‘Vanguard organism,’ Analyst Korday said, as though to break the awful silence that had fallen over the station. ‘No specific class or designation.’

‘Estimated time to contact less than five minutes,’ Sereen added quietly.

‘We’re about to be boarded, or God-Emperor knows what else,’ Crasus snapped, trying to wake up his stunned crew. ‘I want  everything wiped, now. Follow your damned protocols.’

The icy, expectant stillness that had settled over the station dissipated as they all hurried to comply. Davrick began to wipe his core cogitators and processor units, inserting a series of codes that were authorised by Crasus’ gene stamp. The hurried activity helped draw his mind away from the cold sweat slicking his body, the throbbing in his skull and the base, panic-stoked fear churning in his stomach.

‘Systems are beginning to go offline,’ he confirmed. ‘Criticals multiplying, chief.’

Crasus didn’t respond. He was too busy giving authorisation to Ankum to scramble the vox-systems. Sereen was wiping data-slates while Korday was dumping sheaves of paper backcopies and data readout chits into the vacuum chute. Only Groll was motionless, still staring into nothing.

‘Tech-adept, respond,’ Crasus said, turning his attention to the Adeptus Mechanicus acolyte. The coghead remained unmoving.

‘Maximum priority response override,’ Crasus snapped. ‘Look at me, Groll.’ The adept blinked once, slowly.

‘He’s gone, chief,’ Korday said, glancing over from the chute. ‘You gotta unplug him from the dataframe.’

For a moment Crasus looked as though he was going to reply. Then, instead, he reached down to the base of the adept’s mem-unit, sutured into the pale flesh at the base of his skull. After a moment’s hesitation, he pulled. There was an instant of resistance, then the unit disengaged with a click. Groll didn’t react, though a line of saliva escaped his sagging lips. Crasus reached up to the heavy cortical plug inserted into Groll’s cranium, near the surgery-scarred crown of his white scalp.

‘God-Emperor forgive me,’ the sensorum master muttered, before yanking the plug free. Systems across the station’s remaining displays began to chime and flash, as though the machine-spirits were calling out in shock. Groll spasmed violently for a moment, held in check by his binary chair’s restraints, then slumped back. A single hand continued to twitch and clench.

‘Eyes on your stations,’ Crasus ordered, though the surety in his voice was gone.

‘Contact,’ Sereen said.

The void monster filled the pict screen. Up close its form was even more nightmarish – Davrick could see the spine growths that lined its motion frills, and the scarring on its curled shell where debris had lashed it during its long voyage between the stars. As the station crew watched, its maw distended, pulling apart. Contrary to Davrick’s horrified imaginings, it did not possess row after row of snapping lock-teeth. Instead, its mouth was a fleshy morass of feelers, disgusting tendrils trailing icy slime. They extended as it came blindly upon the station, reaching out past the pict screen’s pan. A proximity alarm bell started to clatter, and Davrick felt the decking beneath him shudder.

‘It’s… it’s going to eat us,’ Ankum stammered, looking as though he was about to be sick. ‘Oh, Throne, it’s–’

‘Silence!’ Crasus snapped, though he too was visibly shaking.

More tendrils reached ponderously out, questing around the station’s flanks.

Secondary alarms activated, and the adamantium around the crew shuddered and groaned.

Was it going to crush them? Tear them open and expose them to the void? Suck them into the vile, drooling orifice now practically pressed up against the pict display? Davrick found himself staring at the terrifying image, unable to shift away from his workbench, unable to look at anything other than the unnatural, pulsating flesh that now filled the screen.

And then it shifted. The screen blurred, lost for a moment to static. For a second Davrick assumed one of the monster’s tendrils had knocked out the external pict-feed. But when the viewscreen came back online the image was still present.

What was more, the maw was receding. The xenos beast was reversing away from them.

The station shuddered again as the tendrils that had latched around it released their snaggle-toothed grip, sliding back into the monster’s depths as its maw constricted. It pulled away from them and then went upwards, displaying its fleshy lower fronds as it slipped over the augur masts and vox-beacons. The pict-feed on the other side of the station caught its trailing rear as it passed back down the other side, floating on in-system past the little monitoring platform.

For a moment, nobody spoke. Davrick, like the others, simply stared after the xenos creature’s languid, receding form. It was Crasus who snapped them out of it.

‘Turn off those damned alarms!’ he ordered. Korday hit the overrides, one after the other. Silence flooded the space left by the clattering emergency systems.

Even the hum of the cogitators and vox-banks, now deactivated, had gone.

Davrick had never heard the little station so silent before.

‘What do we do now?’ Sereen breathed. All eyes turned to Crasus. With what was clearly an immense effort, the old sensorum master stilled his shaking hands. The ugly emergency lighting made him look even more wizened and gaunt than usual.

‘We wait,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing else we can do. The distress beacon is still transmitting. One of the system defence cutters will pick us up.’

It was a lie and they all knew it. A vast xenos threat had just arrived in-system.
The last considerations for the captains of Darkand’s handful of combat-worthy void craft would be the salvation of the augur stations on the system’s fringes.

Nor were there any shuttles or salvation pods to facilitate an evacuation. The crew were delivered to the station and then, after six months, rotated off for a week’s leave. According to the cycle logs there was still a full Terran month to go before they were to be replaced. There was no way for any of them to abandon the station.

‘Why did it leave us?’ Korday wondered out loud, staring after the receding alien bio-ship. ‘It had us.’

‘We were… no threat to it,’ Crasus said slowly. ‘No threat to its fleet.’

‘Chief,’ Sereen interrupted. ‘Chief, look.’ The augur analyst was pointing back at the pict screens. It took a second for Davrick to realise what it was he was looking at. When he did, the reason for their survival became clear.

The vanguard xenos bio-ships had passed by. JUF-D19/Rimward was now at the heart of their fleet. And, compared to the organic drones that quested ahead of the main swarm, the true organisms of the hive fleet were behemoths.

Davrick’s mind struggled to comprehend what he was seeing as he took in sheets of pockmarked chitin the size of small continents and toothed orifices the size of cities. The thick clusters of tendrils along its flank and underbelly writhed in the solar winds while its maw was encompassed by two great, wicked, beak-like bone plates that looked as though they could have sheared an Imperial capital ship in half.
And the worst thing about the nightmarish leviathan was that it was coming straight towards the augur station.

‘Oh God-Emperor,’ Ankum stammered, over and over. Korday was quietly sobbing, his head in his hands. Sereen just stared, the image on the viewscreen reflected in her wide, dark eyes. Only Crasus turned away from the display. He walked over to the worn leather of his command chair, paused, tugged his dark blue sensorum master’s uniform straight, and sat down. His expression was unreadable, jaw locked, though in the harsh emergency lumens he looked more haggard than ever.

‘Crew members,’ he said, his words cutting through Ankum’s and Korday’s despair. ‘In the past decades of service, it shames me to admit that I have not said this enough. Regardless, if there was ever a time, Throne knows it’s now. It has been an honour to man this station with all of you.’

‘And with you, chief,’ Davrick said. He was the only one to respond. His own words felt distant, disconnected, as though he was speaking to himself from somewhere far away. His mind was sluggish, unresponsive. His breathing felt laboured. A strange, detached part of his mind supposed that he was probably having a panic attack.

Crasus had no more orders to give. He simply sat, watching the viewscreen.

Davrick reached out towards his little pict capture of Amilia and Drui, his wife and son, tacked to the side of his monitor. He would see them again, some day.

He was sure of it. A fresh surge of stuttered oaths from Ankum distracted him before he could pull the pict off the side of the display.

The tyranid bio-ship had filled the viewscreens. Even as the stunned crew watched, the monstrosity’s great, hooked chitin beak split apart. The maw yawned wide, impossibly wide, wide enough – Davrick was sure – to swallow one of Darkand’s moons. Its shadow fell across the augur station, blotting out the light of the stars. The structure around them seemed to shudder, as though its terror matched that of its crew. The viewscreen now showed nothing but static-washed darkness. It had swallowed them whole.

Korday had slumped on the deck, shaking and weeping uncontrollably. Crasus was looking down into his lap, knuckles white where he gripped the arms of his chair. Ankum had finally stopped gibbering.

‘Sereen,’ he managed to say, looking over at the augur analyst. ‘Sereen, there’s something I need to tell you…’ She continued to stare at the now-blank viewscreen.

A sudden impact threw them all. Davrick found himself sprawling across the deck, almost on top of Korday. The station shook violently, tremors dislodging rune banks and audio systems and sending Davrick’s empty recaff tin bouncing across the deck. The alarms triggered again across the cramped station. Crasus, who alone had managed to stay in his seat, deactivated them without comment.

The viewscreen had gone offline completely, showing nothing but grey static.

‘Th-they’re going to board us?’ Ankum stammered as they picked themselves up. Any response was lost in another jarring impact. The station’s frame shrieked in protest at the stresses put upon it. With their systems scrambled and broken it was impossible to tell exactly where they were, or what was happening outside.

The station seemed to settle slightly, the sounds of tortured metal reduced to a low creak. They all scanned the ceiling, looking for any sign of a breach.

‘Do you hear that?’ Sereen said. It was the first time she’d spoken since seeing the bio-ship. They all listened, breath held, straining to hear over the groan of adamantium and Korday’s muted sobs. Eventually Davrick caught what Sereen had detected, a faint scratching, scrabbling noise, as though someone – or something – was scraping across the outside of the hull. It mirrored the scratching tormenting all of them from inside their own skulls.

‘They’re on the hull,’ Davrick said. Before he could go on, a crash shattered the breathless quiet. The section directly above Crasus’ chair, in the centre of the station’s cockpit, collapsed. With it came a flood of broiling green liquid that struck Crasus just as he looked up.

If the old sensorum master managed to draw breath to scream, the bio-acid flooded his mouth, throat and lungs before he could make a sound. Davrick caught an impression of his death as he was lost entirely in the torrent – flesh sloughing from bones, organics consumed in a heartbeat. The rest of the crew recoiled, but too slowly – Sereen, nearest to the centre of the cockpit, was struck by the acidic spray. Her hands went up to her exposed face, and her screaming filled the claustrophobic space.

‘No!’ Ankum wailed, lunging across his bench to catch the augur analyst as she collapsed. He managed to drag her hands away from her face, then recoiled. Her features had already been reduced to pockmarked bone, her eyeballs running like liquid from their sockets, meat and tendon slipping away with her fingers. Still she screamed. Ankum doubled over and was sick.

Davrick, whose station was furthest from Crasus’ chair, scrambled back on top of his bench as the flood of acid spread across the decking plates. Sereen had collapsed into the rising swill, her body coming apart. Ankum tried to push himself against his vox-banks but was sick again, and collapsed. The bugs got to him before the acid.

There were insects in the hissing, steaming slime – writhing, sightless maggot-things with hard black shells. They swarmed from the discoloured, vomit-like bio-matter, the air full of the susurration of their passing as they swiftly covered the deck and then the cogitator stations, workbenches and walls, riding the rising tide of acid. First hundreds and then thousands of them reached Ankum, swarming over his boots and knees and up his arms where he was crouched against the vox-systems. He tried to scream, but choked on his own bile. His eyes rolled back into their sockets as the alien swarm began eating him alive.

Korday killed himself. Face still streaked with tears, he leapt directly from his bench into the stream that had consumed Crasus and his command chair. He was gone in an instant, as the breach in the station hull was burned wider.

As Ankum’s eaten-out remains collapsed into the bio-organics sloshing about the cockpit’s deck, Davrick stood rooted to the top of his bench. He couldn’t think, couldn’t move. He was in the throes of panic – a part of him realised he should end it quickly like Korday, but another part was desperate for another way out, any way out that avoided the nightmare bile that was burning away everything. It was digesting them whole. Even as the terror kept him in place Groll’s binary chair collapsed, pitching the unresponsive tech-adept into the effluvium. His red cloak billowed for a moment before he was lost, coming apart amidst the steaming clouds of liquefied organics.

For a moment, Davrick was alone. For a single, ludicrous second, everything felt surreal, ridiculous, almost calm. It had to be a nightmare. None of this horror could possibly be real.

Then his bench collapsed.

‘Oh, God-Emperor, no!’ he screamed, trying to scramble back onto the plasteel’s disintegrating remains. ‘No, no, no!’

The bio-acid caught him, sloshing around his boots and his lower fatigues. His panicked wails quickly turned to screams of agony as the material was eaten away, exposing flesh that in turn began to slough off. Muscle and sinew became grey, organic paste, that revealed bone that gave way and splintered beneath its own acid-gnawed weight.

Davrick died slowly, on his knees, eaten up inch by inch by the bile and the sightless, burrowing things that swam in it. Eventually the insects flooded his raw throat, choking and suffocating him as they ate out his eyes and bored through his nose and ears and into his brain. The acid took what remained.

As another section of the hull caved to emit a fresh gout of vicious toxins, the picture of Amilia and Drui fell from the side of Davrick’s primary viewscreen into the flood. In an instant, the smiling wife and son were gone, consumed entirely.