Chapter 4: A Weapon Unfit for Mortal Hands
The silence after Elara left was a physical thing, thick and cold. It was broken by the Apothecary’s dry rasp. “He is unsuitable for standard plate. Even Scout carapace would necessitate significant skeletal reinforcement. A liability in close confines.”
Castellan lurgen grunted, his eyes still on the hololith. “Then he goes in a void-suit. A walking map. He points. We kill.” He finally turned his glacial stare to Rutaba. “You will be equipped.”
They didn’t take him to a locker room. They took him to a cathedral.
The Armory was not a storage closet. It was a vaulted, echoing chamber where the air thrummed with the residual energy of a million deaths. The scent was ozone, sacred oil, and the sharp, clean smell of honed metal. Racks rose like metallic forests, holding row upon row of brutal, beautiful instruments of war. Chainswords slept in cradles, their teeth whispering promises of dismemberment. Bolters, each a masterpiece of destructive engineering, glowed with softly humming charge-lights. Massive, ornate suits of power armour stood in silent vigil against the walls, like iron saints awaiting the call to battle.
In the center of the room, beneath the looming, grim-faced gaze of a massive obsidian statue of the Emperor, the Apothecary awaited them beside a cluttered workbench. He had shed his helmet, revealing a face that was all sharp angles and pale, taut skin, his head shaved and scarred with service studs. He looked at Rutaba with the dispassionate interest of a chemist observing a new reagent.
“You require an implement,” the Apothecary stated. “You lack the mass for a chainblade. The recoil of a bolt pistol would shatter your wrist. A standard combat blade is insufficient for xenos bio-matter. Tendrils will simply regrow around a simple cut.”
Rutaba looked at the wall of weapons. It was like being asked to choose a toothpick in a lumberyard. Everything was colossal, built for hands twice the size of his, for strength he couldn’t comprehend. The pragmatic part of his brain, the part that had optimized shipping lanes and container weights, assessed the problem. He wasn’t a fighter. He was a guide. He needed distance. Leverage.
“A pike,” Rutaba said, his voice bouncing off the distant ceiling. “Something long.Sharp. To keep the tendrils back.To probe. I don’t need to kill it, I just need to not touch it.”
The Apothecary stared at him. Castellan lurgen, who had been inspecting a thunder hammer, let out a short, derisive breath that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“A pike,” the Apothecary repeated, the word tasting absurd in his mouth. He turned, his white armour whispering, and scanned the towering racks. His gaze passed over halberds, power lances, and two-handed swords that glowed with energetic fields. He seemed to dismiss them all.Then he stopped. He reached into a shadowed alcove, not a main rack but a sealed niche, and pulled something out.
It was not like the other weapons. It was longer, sleeker, a masterwork of another age. A long, polished haft of dark alloy, tipped with a vicious, leaf-shaped blade that seemed to drink the light. Along the blade’s length, intricate circuitry was etched, now dormant and dark. It was breathtakingly simple, and utterly lethal.
“You want reach, mortal?” the Apothecary rasped. He tossed it, underhand, across the space between them.
Rutaba’s hands came up on instinct. The moment his fingers closed around the haft, his knees buckled. The weight was immense, deceptive. It felt like catching a falling engine block. The haft was cold, almost alive, and vibrating with a deep, sub-audible hum. He staggered, muscles screaming, and managed to plant the butt on the deck with a loud clang that echoed through the hall. He leaned on it, breathing hard, his arms trembling.
“This is reach,” the Apothecary finished, a hint of something like grim satisfaction in his tone.
“What… is it?” Rutaba gasped, hefting it. It had to be over eight feet tall, putting the blade well above his head.
“A relic. Recovered from a derelict in the Ghoul Stars. The machine-spirit is dormant. Its provenance is… uncertain.” The Apothecary approached, tracing a finger near the blade’s base where a power field generator was housed. “It is a Guardian Spear. Or a crude facsimile thereof. The haft is adamantium. The edge is monomolecular. It requires no chain teeth to sever. It separates. Activate the field,” he instructed.
Rutaba fumbled along the haft, his fingers finding a worn depression.He pressed.
The world crackled.
A nimbus of blinding white energy, like captured lightning, engulfed the blade. The hum became a deafening scream of pure power. The air itself warped around the edge, smelling of ionized oxygen and violence. Rutaba felt the hair on his arms stand on end. The weight didn’t change, but the weapon now felt unstable, wild, a live power line in his hands.
“It will cut through ceramite. Through plasteel. Through xenos chitin. It will ignore density. It severs molecular bonds,” the Apothecary said, raising his voice over the roar. “Do not touch the field. Do not let it touch anything you do not wish to be in two pieces.”
Rutaba’s mind raced. A Guardian Spear. Custodes gear. The Emperor’s own bodyguards. This was a museum piece, a holy artifact. And they were giving it to him, a logistics clerk from another universe, to use as a glorified cattle prod.He released the trigger. The field died with a descending whine, leaving the air acrid and his ears ringing. The silence that followed was profound.
“The machine-spirit is… slumbering. Resigned. It will not fight you. But it will not aid you, either. You are not its rightful bearer.” The Apothecary handed him a simple, heavy power pack on a belt. “The charge will last for fifteen standard minutes of continuous use. Use it sparingly.”
Castellan lurgen strode over, looming over Rutaba and the spear. “You will stay at the center of the kill-team. You will point the way. You will use that to clear obstructions. You will not engage the foe directly. That is our purpose. Your purpose is to get us to the heart. Is this understood?”
Rutaba looked from the Castellan’s stern face to the deadly elegance of the spear in his hands. It was a tool. An absurd, over-engineered, lethally beautiful tool. Just like this entire crusade. He nodded, hefting the spear again, trying to find its balance point. It was like holding up a steel girder.“Understood. Stay in the middle. Point at the bad stuff. Don’t swing this at anything important unless it’s already trying to eat me.”
lurgen’s expression didn’t change, but something flickered in his eyes. Perhaps it was the ghost of approval for blunt comprehension. “Suit him,” he ordered a waiting serf.
The void-suit was a heavy, cumbersome thing of layered plastifol and plasteel plates, smelling of stale sweat and sanctified air-scrubbers. The serf helped him into it, the clamps and seals hissing shut. It was like being sealed inside a refrigerator. The helmet’s heads-up display flickered to life, painting ghostly runic script over his vision: atmospheric pressure, oxygen levels, a schematic of the suit itself. It felt both impossibly advanced and clunky as hell.
Finally, they stood in the Teleportarium.
This chamber was all wrath and geometry. A broad, circular platform of black iron, etched with glowing runes of teleportation and banishment, sat beneath a crackling dome of energized brass. The air smelled of burnt honey and static. Tech-priests, their forms shrouded in red robes, their mechadendrites plugged into ancient consoles, chanted binary hymns. The other members of the kill-team were already assembled: five Black Templars, including Castellan lurgen. They were colossal in their full plate, a wall of black and white inscribed with prayers of hate. They checked their weapons with ritualistic care—bolters, a flamer, lurgen’s mighty power sword. They did not speak. The only sounds were the hum of the dome, the chant of the tech-priests, and the clink of ceramite.
Rutaba stood among them, a small, grey figure leaning on a spear that was taller than he was, feeling like a child who had wandered into a tank battalion.
A tech-priest with a vocalizer that hissed like steam approached lurgen. “Coordinates are set, Castellan. The xenos psychic signature provides a strong beacon. Teleportation in sixty seconds. The Geller field of the Valhalla’s Wrath is in catastrophic failure. Warp exposure is probable. Recommend psyk-out wards.”
lurgen nodded. Another robed attendant approached with a thick, grey paste on a palette. He began daubing it on the Templars’ armour in symbol patterns. When he came to Rutaba, he paused, looking at the unadorned void-suit.
“He receives the ward as well,” lurgen commanded.
The cold, gritty paste was smeared on Rutaba’s chestplate and forehead. It smelled of null-ash and bitterness. “It disrupts the immaterium’s perception of you,” the Apothecary’s voice crackled in his helmet’s vox-bead. “It will not stop a daemon. It may make you taste… bland.”
Great. He was now a bland, tiny man with a very sharp stick.
“Thirty seconds,” the tech-priest intoned.
The Templars activated their weapons. The chamber filled with the rising whine of power fields and the solid chunk-chunk of bolters being armed. Rutaba’s mouth was dry. He gripped the haft of the Guardian Spear, his thumb hovering over the field trigger. Gamer’s Peace presented the statistics: teleportation mishap rates (low, but catastrophic), bio-form encountered per Zynth’s data (high), survival probability of an unarmored human in a boarding action against an unknown xenos organism (negligible). He acknowledged them and filed them away. The data was irrelevant. The only relevant variable was the mission.
“Ten seconds. Stand by for Emperor’s Grace.”
lurgen turned his helmeted gaze towards Rutaba. “Remember, native. You are the guide. We are the blade. Stay close. And do not waver.”
The runes on the floor flared into blinding life. The dome above them roared, energy arcing across the brass ribs. The world began to dissolve into a symphony of screaming light and tearing atoms.
Rutaba’s last thought before the universe ripped itself apart was a mundane, professional observation.
The teleportarium needed better vibration dampeners.
The universe reassembled itself with a sound like a hammer striking his soul.
One moment there was light and thunder, the next there was a stomach-lurching drop into utter stillness and near-darkness. Rutaba’s boots hit the deck plating with a solid, grating clang. His senses swam, the afterimage of the teleportarium burning in his eyes. A wave of nausea rolled through him, held back only by the cool, artificial barrier of Gamer’s Peace. He took a deep, filtered breath from his helmet.
The air inside the Valhalla’s Wrath was worse than he remembered.
It was hot, thick with a cloying organic humidity that his suit’s external sensors registered as a toxic cocktail of ammonia, pheromones, and rotting meat. The only light came from the stark white beams of the Black Templars’ helmet lamps, cutting swathes through a gloom that seemed to swallow sound itself. They were in a wide junction, corridors branching off into darkness. The walls were no longer grey plasteel.
They were veined with pulsating, violet-hued tissue. Thick cords of sinew, glistening with moisture, spanned the ceilings like grotesque capillaries. The floor was slick with a clear, viscous fluid that bubbled slowly in places. The distant, rhythmic thump he’d felt before was now a pervasive, gut-level vibration he could feel in his teeth.
“Perimeter clear,” Castellan lurgen’s vox-grille snapped, short and sharp. The five Templars formed a loose circle, their bolters sweeping the dark archways. Their movements were efficient, precise, utterly silent.
Rutaba leaned on the Guardian Spear, willing his legs to stop trembling. He focused on the sensor readout on his helmet display. His suit’s rudimentary auspex was pinging a basic structural map—a ghostly overlay of the ship’s original deck plans, now corrupted by sprawling, amorphous masses that represented the bio-form’s growth. He cross-referenced it with the memory-map extracted from his own mind. A glowing path highlighted itself.
“The core nexus is three decks down, central spine,” Rutaba said, his voice sounding too loud in the oppressive quiet. “Most direct route is through that main arterial corridor. Zynth’s data showed the least biomatter density there… twelve hours ago.”
“Density is now variable,” the Apothecary’s voice, still back on the battle barge, crackled in their comms. “Auspex shows life signs saturating the surrounding chambers. They are dormant. Do not rouse them.”
“Understood,” lurgen said. He pointed a single, armored finger forward.“Advance. Champion Varek, point. Neophyte Gherant, rear-guard. The native stays at the center. Move.”
They moved. The sound of their advance was a discordant symphony: the heavy, surefooted clank of ceramite boots, the soft whine of servo-joints, and the slick, sticky squelch as they trod through the organic mess underfoot. Rutaba’s lighter steps made almost no sound. He kept the spear vertical, his eyes darting between his helmet’s map and the shifting shadows beyond the cone of light.
The arterial corridor was a cathedral of flesh. Rib-like structures of hardened chitin arched overhead, supporting a ceiling that now respired with a slow, sickening rhythm. Things dangled from above—shapes that might once have been crewmen, now suspended in translucent sacs, their forms melted and reconfigured into something still and awful.
“Don’t look at them,” Rutaba muttered to himself, a habit from his old life. “Just features on the map. Waypoints.”
“Silence,” lurgen commanded.
A hundred meters in, the first attack was not a dramatic leap, but a slow betrayal. The floor beneath Neophyte Gherant, the rearmost Templar, simply liquefied. One moment it was firm, the next it was a hungry, toothless maw of grasping pseudopods that wrapped around his ankle with shocking speed. He didn’t scream. He grunted, stumbling, and brought his chainsword down in a roaring arc that severed the tendrils in a spray of acidic yellow sap.
But the noise was the trigger.
The walls woke up.
With a sound like a million wet sheets tearing, the fleshy veneer peeled back from a dozen alcoves. Figures stumbled out. They were humanoid, mostly. They wore the tattered remains of naval uniforms, but their flesh was bleached white and fused with glossy black chitin. Their faces were smooth, featureless masks, save for horrifying, vertical slit mouths that dripped clear fluid. They moved with a jerky, insectile speed, clacking mandibles hidden within those slits.
“Genestealer cultists!” Varek, the pointman, bellowed, his bolter roaring to life. The first three-round burst caught the lead hybrid center-mass, punching through its chitinous chest and detonating inside. It blew apart in a cloud of gore and shell fragments.
The corridor became a storm of muzzle flashes and screaming aliens. Bolter shells tore through the press of bodies, each impact a miniature concussive blast. A cultist got too close to Brother Haakon, who calmly smashed its head into pulp with the stock of his heavy flamer. The air filled with the smell of cordite, seared meat, and a sharp, peppery alien stench.
Rutaba stayed in the center, as ordered. He held the Guardian Spear in a ready position, its dormant blade pointing forward. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat his mind acknowledged and filed away. A cultist, its lower body a mess of tentacles, scrambled over a fallen body and lunged at him, claws extended.
Instinct took over. Not the drilled, brutal instinct of the Templars, but an older, more elegant memory. BACK IN HIS ORIGINAL UNIVERSE RUTABA WAS PROFICIENT IN PIKE ART. He had spent three summers in a historical society, learning the long axe and the pike. The forms came back not as thought, but as muscle-deep recall.
He didn’t swing the massive spear like a club. He used its length.
Planting the butt, he angled the tip down and stepped forward, meeting the lunge with a sharp, precise thrust. The motion was economical, a product of hundreds of hours of drill. The monomolecular point, even inactive, punched through the cultist’s chitinous sternum with a wet crunch. He shoved, using the creature’s own momentum to impale it deeper, then violently wrenched the haft sideways, leveraging the body off to the deck.
It wasn’t a killing blow, but it was a perfect stop. The creature writhed, pinned. Before it could rise, lurgen was there, his power sword descending in a crackling blue arc, severing its head from its shoulders.
The Castellan didn’t pause. He moved on, cutting down another hybrid. But as he passed Rutaba, his vox-grille emitted a static-laced burst that sounded almost like approval. “You can point more than a finger, it seems.”
The brief, violent engagement was over in twenty seconds. Twitching, acid-bleeding bodies littered the corridor. The silence rushed back in, heavier now, charged with the promise of more.
“Amoebic sentry response,” the Apothecary commented over the comms. “The organism knows we are here. It will funnel you. It will test you. It will adapt.”
“Let it try,” Varek growled, reloading his bolter with a heavy, final click.
They pressed on, descending through a maintenance shaft that had become a slick, vertical throat. They emerged into a vast chamber that must have been a secondary cargo bay. It was here that the map and reality diverged catastrophically.
Zynth’s data had indicated a clear path around the bay’s perimeter. The bio-form had other plans. The entire open space was a single, colossal organism. The floor was a spongy, muscular surface that undulated gently. The walls were a living honeycomb, each cell pulsing with a faint, greenish bioluminescence. In the center of the room, where cargo containers should have been, stood a throbbing, pillar-like structure of fused biomass and machinery—a grotesque fusion of a plasma conduit and what looked like a gigantic, beating heart.
Tendrils, each as thick as a man’s thigh, hung motionless from the ceiling like the roots of some subterranean nightmare.
“We are in its stomach,” Rutaba whispered, his auspex screaming with solid life-sign readings.
“There is no alternate route,” lurgen stated, studying the chamber. “We go through.”
The moment the first Templar’s boot sank an inch into the fleshy floor, the chamber reacted. The hanging tendrils snapped taut, whipping down with whip-crack speed. Not at the armored Templars, but at the weak point.At Rutaba.
He saw it as a logistics problem. Three vectors of attack, high velocity, target: him. Gamer’s Peace filtered the terror into data points. He had the spear. He had the space behind Brother Haakon, who was priming his heavy flamer. He had maybe two seconds.
He didn’t try to parry. The force would shatter his arms. He dropped into a low, yielding stance he remembered from pike drills, letting the first lashing tendril slide over his shoulder with a screech against his void-suit. At the same time, he thrust the spear upwards, not to stab, but to guide the second tendril’s path past his helmet. The third was coming straight for his chest.
“Haakon, low!” Rutaba shouted, his voice tight.
The Templar didn’t hesitate. He dropped to one knee, the promethium tanks on his back clearing a line of fire. Rutaba hit the deck, rolling over the spongy floor. A torrent of blessed flame roared over his head, enveloping the third tendril in a wave of clinging, liquid fire. The thing thrashed, emitting a sound like a boiling kettle.
Rutaba came up, covered in foul-smelling muck, and planted his spear. He didn’t have the strength to cut the tendril. But he didn’t need to. “Varek! Its anchor point, ceiling at two o’clock!”
Varek’s bolter snapped up. A single, blessed shell struck where the burning tendril met the ceiling. The explosive round detonated in a flash of light and concussive force. The tendril, severed structurally if not physically, went limp and crashed to the floor, a smoldering ruin.
The floor beneath them heaved.
It was no longer a surface. It was a mouth. The spongy material retracted in a wide circle, plunging them towards a pit lined with spiral rows of grinding, bony teeth. The whole chamber was a trap.
“Emperor’s blood!” lurgen roared. “Grapples!”
Magnetic grapnels shot from the Templars’ vambraces, anchoring into the distant far wall with solid clangs. They swung over the abyss, massive figures moving with surprising grace. Rutaba had no grapnel.
He had a spear, a memory, and a split-second decision.
As the floor fell away beneath him, he didn’t panic. He saw the closest, still-thrashing, flaming tendril hanging over the pit. It was an anchor. He took two running steps on the crumbling edge and leaped, not away from the pit, but across it. He slammed the haft of the Guardian Spear down onto the burning appendage, using it as a vaulting pole.
The ancient wood-and-steel techniques translated poorly to an eight-foot adamantium pole and a slick, burning surface. He didn’t get a clean vault. He got a chaotic, spinning skim that sent him careening towards the far wall. He hit the pulsing organic surface hard, the breath driven from his lungs. His gloves scrabbled for purchase on the slick, living wall. He began to slide downwards, back towards the grinding maw.
A massive, armored hand closed around the back of his void-suit’s harness. Castellan lurgen held him suspended, the magnetic grapple in his other hand straining against their combined weight. He hauled Rutaba up onto a narrow, shuddering ledge of fused machinery.
“Your methods are unorthodox,” lurgen said, his voice a low rumble over the screams of the dying bio-mass and the roar of Haakon’s flamer cleansing the pit’s edge. He set Rutaba down. The Guardian Spear, miraculously, was still clutched in Rutaba’s white-knuckled hand.
“They’re practical,” Rutaba gasped, sucking in filtered air.He looked back. The pit seethed below. They were on the far side of the chamber, the path to the core nexus now a treacherous climb down a sloping, fleshy ramp.
The beating of the central heart-structure grew louder, more frantic. It felt like the ship itself was panicking.
lurgen looked at the spear, then at Rutaba, his helmeted head tilting slightly. “You understand distance.Angles. You see the weakness, not the monster.” He activated his power sword again. The crackling energy cast harsh blue shadows on the horrific landscape. “A different kind of weapon.Good. Now point again. The heart is close. It knows we are here.”
He looked towards the pulsing central pillar, its rhythmic light now stuttering in alarm. “And it is afraid.”