Chapter 2: Alone in the Metal Guts
The metal screamed as the chainaxe tore through it. Not the ship’s metal. Zynth’s.
One moment, the adept was shoving Rutaba backward with shocking, hydraulic force. The next, the World Eater’s weapon carved a rising arc through the space where Rutaba’s neck had been, and found the mechanicus instead.
The impact wasn’t clean. It was a catastrophic failure of components. Ceramite, plasteel, flesh, and cabling exploded outward in a shocking spray of black oil and bright, red blood. The sound was a terrible symphony of shearing metal and a wet, abrupt choke from Zynth’s vox-emitter.
Rutaba landed hard on his back inside a low, square opening—a ventilation shaft. His last view of the corridor was framed by the jagged duct edge: the World Eater, a monolith of rage, wrenching his gore-slick axe free from the twitching wreckage of Zynth’s lower half. The adept’s torso, trailing wires and ropy intestines, slid down the wall with a soft, final clatter.
The single green eye-lens flickered once, and went dark.
“Blood is… payment,” the World Eater growled, the words dripping with a lust that was religious and obscene.
Gamer’s Peace didn’t stop the vomit. It just made Rutaba turn his head to the side as his stomach emptied itself onto the duct floor. The acidic burn in his throat was a real, tangible anchor. He’s not looking this way. The sound of the kill. The spray. He’s savoring it.Move.
He moved.
He scrambled backward on hands and knees, the rough metal tearing his palms. The duct was pitch black, smelling of stale, metallic dust and a new, lingering note of promethium and blood. Behind him, he heard the chainaxe rev again, a questioning roar. Then a furious bellow as the Traitor Astartes realized his second target had vanished.
He’s too big for the duct.For now.
A new sound joined the chorus. A wet, pulsing squelch, like a heart beating inside a lungful of phlegm. It was close. It seemed to come from the duct walls themselves, a syncopated rhythm that vibrated through the thin metal.
The xenos bio-form. The thing Zynth said was merging with the ship.
Rutaba crawled. Darkness was total. He navigated by touch and terror, feeling his way forward. His breathing was a ragged, loud thing in the confined space. He tried to quiet it, tried to listen. The squelching receded, then grew louder from a side branch up ahead. It was herding him. Or it was everywhere.He found a junction. Three choices. Left, right, down. The left hummed with the squelching rhythm. The right echoed with a distant, metallic pounding—the World Eater trying to punch his way in? The downward shaft smelled different. Less dust. More ozone and decay.Down.
He swung his legs into the vertical shaft, feeling for rungs. There were none. Just smooth, slick metal. He braced his back against one side, his feet against the other, and began a desperate, shimmying descent. The technique was clumsy, born of forgotten playground agility. His shoulder, burned from the corrosive mist, screamed in protest.
He dropped the last ten feet, landing in a crouch in a slightly larger tunnel. A dim, flickering emergency lumogel strip cast a failing yellow light. This was a maintenance corridor, older, narrower than the main halls. The walls weren’t just metal. They were veined with thick, pulsating strands of something wet and meaty, a deep burgundy color shot through with threads of sickly yellow. It looked like cancerous muscle tissue. It breathed.
The squelching was louder here. A gentle, persistent sound, like walking through mud.
“Okay, you’re in the guts,” he whispered to himself, the sound swallowed by the organic walls. “The thing’s guts. Or the ship’s new guts. Same difference.”
He had nothing.No weapon. No ally.No map. The cold equations of his situation were absolute. He was a soft, slow, tiny piece of biomass in a digestive system designed to grind battleships.
Gamer’s Peace presented the solution, absurd in its simplicity: Keep moving. Find a terminal.Find a tool. Find a way out.
He started down the corridor, stepping over the bony, discarded remains of a servitor, its skull fused to the floor by a tendril of the meat-stuff. The flickering light made the shadows of the growths writhe. He rounded a corner and froze.
The corridor ended in a large, circular chamber—a pump station or a regulator hub. But the machinery was gone, swallowed. The entire chamber was a wall of the same pulsating flesh, a vast, vertical membrane. Within it, shapes were suspended. Human shapes. Crewmen in tattered uniforms, arms outstretched, faces frozen in silent screams. They were embedded, connected by thick, cord-like tendrils that plugged into their spines, their eye sockets, their mouths. Their bodies were pale, waxy, like larvae in a cocoon.
One of them, a woman with short-cropped hair, turned her head. Slowly, gratingly, with the sound of tearing cartilage. Milky, vacant eyes found his. Her lips, cracked and dry, parted.
A sound emerged.Not from her mouth. From the meat of the wall itself, a vibrating, chittering buzz that formed into a crude parody of words.
“Joinnn uzzz.”
Rutaba’s blood turned to ice. The calm in his mind fractured for a second, a spiderweb of pure panic. He took a step back.
“No,” he breathed.
“Sssseeearrrcchhh,” the wall buzzed through the corpse’s mouth. “Connnnecct.”
The membrane bulged. A new tendril, glistening with clear slime, ripped free from the mass and lashed toward him, moving faster than anything that size should.
He ducked. It whistled over his head and smashed into the wall behind him, leaving a dent. It retracted, coiling like a whip.
Another lashed out from his left. He threw himself forward, rolling under it. He came up running, not back the way he came, but along the curved edge of the chamber, looking for any exit, any crack.
The whole wall was quivering now, a dozen tendrils emerging, flailing, seeking. The chittering buzz filled the air, a psychic static that drilled into his teeth.
He saw it—a maintenance hatch, half-hidden behind a fleshy column. It was small, circular, and rusted shut. A tendril smashed the wall beside it, showering him in flakes of rust and warm bio-slime.
He reached the hatch. The release wheel was fused with rust. He gripped it, threw his weight into it. It didn’t budge.A shadow fell over him. He looked up. A tendril, thick as his thigh, tipped with a barbed, bony probe, was poised to strike.
His mind went white. Then a single, stupid, mundane memory surfaced: penetrating oil. The maintenance guys at the warehouse always swore by it for seized fittings. Tap it with a hammer first. Shock the rust.He had no hammer. He had his fists.
Ignoring the looming threat, he balled his hand and slammed the side of the release wheel, once, twice, a third time with all his strength. Pain flared in his knuckles. On the third hit, with a shriek of metal, the wheel moved a millimeter.
He grabbed it again, heaving. It turned, groaning in protest. One full rotation. The latch disengaged.
The tendril stabbed down.
Rutaba wrenched the hatch open and fell through, just as the barbed tip screeched against the metal where his head had been. He kicked the hatch shut behind him, hearing the fleshy impact as the tendril slammed into it.
Darkness again. And quiet, save for his own pounding heart and the muffled, furious thrashing against the hatch.
He was in a narrow, dry accessway. No meat-stuff here. Just cold, dead metal and the smell of ozone. He allowed himself thirty seconds of shuddering, silent hyperventilation, forehead pressed to the cool floor. The image of the embedded crew, the sound of that buzzing voice, played on a loop.
It’s learning. It’s using them to speak.
The horror was no longer just physical. It was intellectual. This thing was digesting the ship’s knowledge, its crew, its very structure. He was in a stomach that was also a brain.
He pushed himself up. The accessway led to a ladder, which descended into a larger, quieter space. It was a storage bay of some kind. Racks of unused components, coated in dust. Crates with faded stencils. And in the center, under a single, working lumosphere, a sight that made his heart lurch: a solitary, matte-black Arvus lighter, a small utility shuttle. It was compact, boxy, and beautiful. Its ramp was down.
Hope, sharp and dangerous, pierced through the dread.
He approached cautiously. The bay was silent. No squelching.No pounding. The shuttle looked intact. He mounted the ramp, his steps echoing in the vast bay.
The interior was dark. The control throne was empty. He slid into the pilot’s seat, his hands running over the controls. They were unfamiliar, covered in Gothic script and sacred seals, but the basics were universal: throttle, attitude, ignition.
He found the power rune. He pressed it.Nothing.
He pressed it again. Held it.
A single console light flickered, then died. A low, drained powercell whine echoed through the cabin.
“Of course,” he muttered, slumping back. “Of course it’s dead.”
A soft, mechanical click sounded behind him.He turned.
In the shadowed rear of the cabin, a figure straightened up from where it had been crouched behind a cargo pallet. It was humanoid, clad in the patchwork, scavenged armor of a voidsman, a heavy rebreatzer obscuring its face. In its hands was a long, solid-looking wrench, held like a club.
The figure took a step forward, into the light. The rebreatzer hissed.
“Well,” a weary, female voice crackled through the vox-grille. “Aren’t you a little scrap of luck.”
The wrench didn't lower. The rebreatzer’s filters whirred as the figure took another step, examining him under the weak light. “You’re not crew. Your face isn’t on the wall yet. How?”
“Luck’s been a mixed bag,” Rutaba said, keeping his hands visible on the dead console. His shoulder throbbed. “Mostly bad. You here for the shuttle, too?”
“Was.” The woman gestured with the wrench at the dead controls. “Powercell’s drier than a Prioress’s heart. Been scavenging what I can. Juice this thing. No dice.” She finally lowered the wrench, leaning against a support strut. “Name’s Elara. Last of the Wrath’s gun-deck crew. More or less.”
“Rutaba.” The simplicity of an introduction felt absurd. “Logistics.”
Elara snorted, a hollow sound through the rebreatzer. “Great. You can log our way into a grave. Neatly.” She tapped the side of her mask. “You’re burned. Warp-tainted mist?”
“Something like that.”
“Get used to the scars. If you live.” She pushed off the strut and moved to a locker, pulling out a cracked med-kit. She tossed him a grimy injector. “Anti-septic. For the surface rot. Won’t fix the spiritual corruption.”
He caught it, stared at the unfamiliar device. “How do I…?”
“Pointy end on the burn. Push the button.” She turned back to rummaging. “You came from the upper decks. Saw the thing in the walls?”
“I had a conversation with it.” He pressed the injector to his seared shoulder. A hiss, then a cooling numbness spread through the fire. He gasped in relief. “It asked me to join. Wasn’t very persuasive.”
That made her turn. She stared for a long moment, then a short, sharp laugh escaped the grille. “Emperor’s teeth.A talker. That’s new.” Her humor vanished. “Means it’s digesting higher functions. We’re running out of ship.”
“The adept, Zynth… he said there might be a functional shuttle bay.” Rutaba discarded the spent injector. “He didn’t get more specific before…” He trailed off, the memory of the spray of oil and blood stark.
“Before the World Eater turned him into spare parts,” Elara finished, her voice flat. “Heard the party. Felt the vibrations. That thing’s a blunt instrument. The thing in the walls… that’s the real cancer.” She held up a battered auspex scanner, its screen cracked but glowing faintly. “I’ve been mapping the decay. The bio-form’s core is deep, near the old reactor. But its nerves are everywhere. Including,” she pointed the auspex toward the sealed bay doors, “right outside.”
The scanner’s blurry feed showed the outlines of the massive doors. Clustered against them on the other side were dozens of lumpish, heat-blurred signatures. Waiting.Listening.
“It knows we’re here,” Rutaba said.
“It knows something is here that doesn’t sing its song. It’ll get bored. Or hungry.” Elara tossed the auspex onto the pilot’s seat. “Zynth was right about one thing. There’s a secondary bay. Two decks down, starboard aft. Used for arquitor munitions haulage.Less glamorous. Maybe less digested.”
“Maybe?”
“Everything’s a maybe. The way there is through the lower maintenance runnels. Which are now its digestive tract.” She eyed him, head to toe. “You’re small. That’s useful. Can you stay quiet?”
“I’ve been quiet since I got here.”
“Good. Follow my steps.Touch nothing. And if you feel a sudden urge to pray to something new, tell me. I’ll put you down clean before you start sprouting tentacles.” She said it with the casual tone of someone discussing bad weather.
She led him out of the shuttle and to a corner of the bay where a heavy floor grating had been pried up. A yawning, dark shaft led down, exhaling a breath of warm, moist air that smelled of mold and iodine. The squelching rhythm was a faint, pervasive throb up through the metal.
Rutaba looked from the hole to Elara. “You first.”
She went down, climbing onto a fixed ladder.He followed. The climb was endless, the darkness below absolute. The sounds from the walls grew clearer, more layered. The wet pulsing was joined by faint, watery drips and a sound like cracking knuckles.
They dropped into a service trench, barely wide enough for them to walk single-file. The walls here were not yet meat. They were weeping, sweating a clear, syrupy fluid that gathered in sticky pools on the walkway. Phosphorescent fungi, shaped like grasping hands, glowed a soft blue from crevices.
Elara moved with a predator’s grace, avoiding the puddles. Rutaba mimicked her, his shoes already slick. They travelled in silence for minutes, the only sounds their breathing and the ship’s dismal chorus.
A new sound emerged. A whisper.
It came from everywhere and nowhere, layered over the dripping. It was the murmur of a crowd, indistinct, but carrying fragments of clear Gothic. …secure the manifold… and …all is dust… and …the pain, the sweet pain…
Elara froze, holding up a clenched fist. She pointed to the wall. The clear fluid beading on the surface trembled with each whispered syllable. It was condensing from the air itself.
“It’s dreaming,” Elara whispered, her voice barely a breath. “Or remembering. Don’t listen. It’s how it gets in.”
They pressed on. The whispering grew teeth, becoming more focused, more directed. Little morsel.So tired. Join the chorus. We see your friend’s death. We tasted his logic.
Rutaba’s pace faltered. Zynth’s final moment, the spray of his components, flashed with surgical clarity. A deep, weary sadness welled up, followed by a numb, inviting emptiness. To just stop. To let go. The Gamer’s Peace quivered, analyzing the emotion as an external stimulus, a psychic intrusion.It helped. A little.
“It’s lying,” he muttered, more to himself than Elara. “It doesn’t taste logic. It just wrecks things.”
Ahead, the trench opened into a larger processing space, now a cathedral of grotesque transformation. The machinery was entirely subsumed. Great pistons now moved slowly, encased in translucent bags of fluid that churned with dark shapes. Conveyor belts had become tendon-like straps, sliding lumps of unidentifiable matter toward a vast, beating heart-like organ suspended from the ceiling.
And the people were here, too. Dozens of them, partially dissolved into the ecosystem. Some were still moving, their limbs twitching in time with the pulses, their mouths open in soundless vowels.
Elara signaled a halt, crouching behind a control terminal that had sprouted fleshy nodules. She pointed across the open chamber. On the far side was an archway, a clear path leading away. Between them and it, the floor was a living membrane, quivering with each beat of the heart-organ. It was thirty feet of exposed, sentient ground.
“We run,” she mouthed. “Fast.Light. It feels vibration.”
Rutaba nodded, his mouth dry. He focused on the archway, on the promise of solid metal beyond. He took a breath, counted to three in his head, and lunged from cover.
He’d taken two steps when the whispers stopped. The entire chamber seemed to hold its breath. Then the floor beneath him rippled.
It was like running on a waterbed. His foot sank into the spongy surface, releasing a puff of spores. A tremor ran through the membrane. The great heart above gave a mighty, syncopated thud.
Alarms—biological, urgent—screamed through the air, not from vox-casters, but from a thousand newly formed slit-like orifices in the walls.
Elara was ahead, sprinting with terrifying speed. “Move!”
He ran, each step a struggle against the sucking, grasping floor. Tendrils, thin and whip-like, erupted from the surface around his ankles. He stumbled, fell hard onto the warm, wet surface. It yielded under his weight, threatening to envelop him. A thick, anchor-like cable of muscle peeled away from the wall to his right, lashing toward him.
A wrench flashed through the air. Elara had turned back. The solid metal head smashed the tendril aside with a wet crack. She didn’t stop to fight. She grabbed the back of his collar, just as Zynth had, and hauled.“Up! Now!”
Her strength was augmented, he realized—subtle servo-assists in her legs and frame. She dragged him, stumbling, the remaining distance. The archway loomed. Just as they crossed the threshold, the anchor-cable shot forward again, smashing into the archway’s edge. Stone and metal fractured.
They didn’t look back. They ran down the new corridor, a clean, metal one, the sounds of the outraged bio-form fading behind them. They collapsed against a wall, gasping. Rutaba wiped slime from his face.
Elara checked her wrench, then looked at him. “Logistics,” she said between breaths, a jagged edge of adrenaline in her voice. “You’re a lot of trouble for a little guy.”
Before he could answer, a different, familiar sound echoed down the corridor from ahead. Not a squelch. Not a whisper.
It was the distinct, rhythmic, and growing CLANK-CLANK-CLANK of ceramite boots on deck plating.
Elara’s eyes went wide behind her rebreatzer. She looked at Rutaba, then back the way they’d come, toward the stirring bio-form.
“Choice time,” she hissed, her knuckles white on the wrench. “The digestion chamber, or the butcher?”
The chainaxe’s revving sawed through the bio-form’s wet whispers, a promise of a simpler, more violent end.
“Shit,” Elara breathed, the word flat and final. Her eyes darted between the two horrors. “Back into the meat-grinder it is.”
She moved, pulling him not toward the clanking, but back the way they’d come, toward the archway and the disturbed digestion chamber. The floor shuddered. The distant, furious thrashing of the anchor-cable against the archway’s frame had stopped. An ominous, watchful silence had taken its place. It was waiting for them.
“New plan,” Rutaba hissed, resisting her pull. His mind, that cold engine, calculated trajectories of failure. “The butcher is just one. The wall is the whole room. We can’t outrun a room.”
“We can’t outrun that either!” she snapped, jerking her head toward the relentless CLANK-CLANK-CLANK.
The sound was closer now, accompanied by a low, grinding hum of active power armor. A shadow, vast and monstrous, began to stretch down the corridor from the junction ahead. They were out of time for debate.
Rutaba pointed to a side passage Elara had missed—a narrow gap between corroded pipe assemblies, dripping with condensation. “There. Go!”
They ran for the gap just as the World Eater filled the corridor behind them. The thing didn’t bellow. It simply accelerated, a crashing juggernaut of spiked iron. They squeezed into the tight space as the chainaxe bit into the wall where they’d stood, chewing through metal and cable in a shower of orange sparks.
The passage was a tight, vertical crawl, more of a chimney. They scrambled upward, the metallic snarls of the pursuing Astartes muffled but indefatigable below. Rutaba’s burned shoulder scraped against a jagged rivet, sending a bolt of white pain down his arm. He swallowed a cry.
They spilled out onto a gantry overlooking a vast, dark shaft—a primary coolant conduit, long dry. Across the chasm, maybe fifty feet, was another gantry and a promisingly solid-looking blast door. A single, rusted maintenance walkway bridged the gap, its mesh decking half-collapsed.
“Go, go, go!” Elara shoved him onto the walkway.
The entire structure swayed under their weight. Rutaba focused on his feet, on the hexagonal patterns of the mesh, on not looking down into the impenetrable black below. They were halfway across when the World Eater emerged onto the gantry behind them. He didn’t pause. He stepped onto the walkway.
The groan of overstressed metal was deafening. Bolts sheared. Cables snapped.
“Run!” Elara screamed.
They ran. The walkway pitched violently, listing to the left. Rutaba’s foot slipped through a gap in the mesh. He fell, his torso slamming onto the deck, his leg dangling in open air. Elara turned, grabbed his arm, and hauled. Her augmented strength yanked him free as the walkway tore completely loose from its right-side moorings.
It swung down in a screaming arc, slamming into the side of the chasm. Rutaba’s world became a cyclone of noise and wrenching metal. He clung to the broken mesh as the walkway, now a dangling bridge, shuddered and vibrated. The World Eater, impossibly, had kept his footing, gripping the handrails, his red eye-lens fixed on them as he began to climb the steep incline, his chainaxe held in one hand.
“The door!” Rutaba yelled.
They clawed their way up the slanted, broken walkway toward the far gantry. The blast door was there, its control panel dark. Elara reached it first, slamming her palm against a manual release. It didn’t budge. She swore, throwing her weight against the lever. Rutaba joined her, adding his meager force. The lever gave an inch with a protesting shriek.
The World Eater was halfway to them, climbing with terrifying, deliberate speed.
The lever moved another inch.Another. With a final, tooth-jarring crack, it engaged. The blast door hissed, sliding open just a foot—enough to squeeze through. Elara shoved Rutaba into the gap. He slid through into the darkness beyond.
Elara turned, raising her wrench in a futile, defiant gesture as the Traitor Astartes reached the top of the slope, his weapon rising for a final, apocalyptic chop.
They got no chance for choice as they turned the corner they ran into different kinds Astartes, these wore all black, on their left shoulder armor was a cross.
The hallway was a kill-zone. Rutaba collided with a wall of ceramite that felt like a mountainside, bouncing off and landing hard on the deck. Elara stumbled back, wrench clattering from her grip.
They weren’t alone. Before them stood three giants, their armor a stark, unadorned black, pristine against the ship’s decay. The left shoulder guard of each bore a single, stark white emblem: a straight, severe cross. Their helms were blocky, imposing, their presence a silent thunderclap of absolute authority. They weren’t chasing. They were waiting, their backs to a sealed vault door, weapons held at rest.
One of them, his pauldron edged in white, shifted his gaze. It passed over Rutaba and Elara as if they were litter, and fixed on the World Eater now filling the doorway behind them.
The black-armored Astartes spoke. His voice was a granite avalanche, devoid of rage, brimming with contempt. “Filth.”
The World Eater’s chainaxe rose to a guard position. A wet, eager chuckle emanated from its vox-grille. “Dorn’s whelps. Your corpse-god sends morsels to delay the feast.”
“We are the feast,” the black templar stated, and his brothers moved.
There was no roar, no battle cry. There was only sudden, shocking violence. The two other black-clad warriors stepped forward, their movements terrifyingly coordinated. One raised a storm shield, a wall of black adamantium that met the roaring chainaxe with a cataclysmic shriek of tormented metal. The other swung a crackling power sword in a devastating arc, forcing the World Eater to parry.
The corridor became a confined storm of flashing energy fields, grinding teeth, and the brutal impacts of superhuman strength. The air superheated with ozone and scorched ceramite. Rutaba scrambled back, pulling Elara with him, pressing themselves into an alcove as the titans clashed.
The World Eater fought with deranged, relentless fury. The Black Templars fought with cold, surgical precision. It was chaos versus dogma, and for a moment, the raw, unfettered power of the Traitor seemed dominant.
Then the leader joined. He did not draw his weapon. He simply stepped forward, timing his movement to the micro-second his brother’s shield absorbed a massive overhead blow. In that instant of vulnerability, the Templar commander slammed his powered gauntlet into the World Eater’s helm.
The crunch was sickening, a sound of collapsing architecture. The Traitor’s head snapped back. The Templar commander grabbed the dented helm, spun the disoriented giant, and drove him face-first into the wall with tectonic force. The impact cratered the plating. Before the World Eater could recover, the leader’s sword flashed from its scabbard and hammered point-first into the joint between the Traitor’s backplate and gorget.
A howl, this one of genuine agony, erupted from the World Eater. The black sword had found something vital. He stumbled, his movements turning sluggish.
“Purge the unclean,” the commander intoned, his voice still utterly level. His brothers advanced as one.
Rutaba watched, his Gamer’s Peace filing the spectacle away under ‘Cataclysmic Force Majeure.’ This was a power his logistics couldn’t quantify. Elara was frozen beside him, her breath coming in shallow hitches behind her rebreatzer.
The leader turned his helm. The blank, red optical sensors found them in the alcove. He took a single step toward them, the deck vibrating under his weight. He looked from Rutaba’s civilian clothes to Elara’s scavenged gear, his silence more interrogating than any shout.
“Explain your presence,” he commanded, the words leaving no room for evasion. “Before my patience and this xenos-tainted hulk expire together.”