Chapter 5: Flowing Water, Burning Sky
@saber-pike@Auric Calm
The world contracted to the twin maws of the pulse rifles, their vents glowing a baleful green as they cycled to full charge. The hum was a physical vibration in the charged air. My’en’s finger was a millimeter from ending everything.
Rut’Aba’s mind went blank, and then it was flooded.
It wasn’t thought. It was reflex. A synaptic scream torn from a hundred other lives lived in flickering shadows. Memories of a different kind of blade, a different kind of fight, in a hundred different hellscapes. The knowledge wasn’t learned; it was imprinted, a ghost-muscle memory.
They didn’t command the pike. They surrendered to it.
The crystals flared, not with a steady light, but in a painful, stuttering burst that shot a line of white-hot agony from the weapon up their arm and into their chest. The twin points beneath their tunic burned like branding irons.
Their body moved on its own.
They spun the pike, not in a practiced martial arts flourish, but in a desperate, off-center whirl. The air around the humming crystals warped, shimmering like heat haze. My’en fired.
The pulse of green plasma, meant to vaporize chest cavity, didn’t impact. It spiraled into the distortion field around the spinning pike, bent from its path, and detonated against the alley wall in a shower of molten rockrete.
The recoil of the deflected energy nearly wrenched Rut’Aba’s arm from its socket. They screamed, a raw sound lost in the echo of the blast.
Tor’kan fired from his kneeling position. A clean, calculated shot.
Rut’Aba was already moving, the pike’s momentum carrying them into a stumbling, ungainly somersault over the second shot. It seared the air beneath their boots. They landed in a crouch, the impact jarring up their spine, and lunged forward.
My’en was cycling his rifle, a fraction of a second too slow. Rut’Aba didn’t stab. They extended the pike like a fencer, not with a blade of light, but with a vicious, crackling lance of purple energy that erupted from the tip. It wasn’t elegant. It was a jagged, unstable discharge, like lightning held in a tube. It sheared through the pulse rifle’s barrel with a shriek of tortured matter.
The rifle’s energy cell, compromised, exploded in My’en’s hands.
The Fire Warrior was thrown backwards, his gauntlets smoking, the front of his armor blackened and cracked. He hit the ground with a heavy thud, stunned, his helmet’s lens flickering.
Tor’kan was already adjusting, swinging his rifle toward Rut’Aba’s new position.
Rut’Aba didn’t stop. They planted a foot on the slick alley wall and kicked off, using the last dregs of borrowed momentum. They tucked their knees, the pike held close. It wasn’t flying. It was falling with purpose.
Both boots slammed into Tor’kan’s chest plate.
The ceramic composite cracked with a sound like a frozen lake giving way. The air blasted from his lungs in a translated, digital wheeze. He flew back, skidding through the muck, his rifle clattering away.
Rut’Aba landed hard on their side, the wind knocked out of them. The pike clanged to the ground beside them, its light dying instantly, the crystals going dark and dull as lumps of common stone. The agony in their chest subsided to a deep, sickening throb, a void where the energy had been. They couldn’t breathe. Their vision swam with black spots.
Silence, again. But this time it was the ringing, painful silence after a thunderclap.
Gutteral, pained clicks came from My’en’s helmet speaker, untranslated. He was struggling to rise, one arm hanging useless, the other fumbling for a sidearm. Tor’kan was on his back, gasping, the crack in his breastplate spiderwebbing with each ragged breath. His drone hovered uncertainly between them, its scanning beam darting erratically.Move. You have to move.
The command was a faint echo in Rut’Aba’s skull. Their body felt like shattered glass held together by wet paper. They pushed up onto their elbows, crawling, fingers clawing for the pike. Their hand closed around the cold, inert metal.It felt dead. A pipe.
A high-pitched whine started in Tor’kan’s damaged armor, a warning siren. “Breach… in thoracic plating. Sealant deploying,” a monotone helmet voice announced. He was struggling to sit up, one hand pressed to the crack.
Rut’Aba got one foot under them, then the other. They swayed, using the pike as a crutch. They stared at the two warriors. They weren’t dead. The fight had bought seconds, not victory.
“You… what are you?” My’en gasped, his translator finally kicking back in. His good hand had found his pistol, but he wasn’t raising it. He was just staring at the shattered remains of his rifle, then at Rut’Aba’s普通, human hands wrapped around the unremarkable-looking pole.
Rut’Aba had no answer. They tasted copper, felt a warm trickle from their nose. They took a stumbling step backwards, towards the seemingly solid wall of rubble that blocked the alley.
“The cadence… of its energy signature,” Tor’kan wheezed, still on his back. “It matches the crash site anomaly. Not Imperial. Not Warp.Unknown. The Ethereals will… will want it.” He was trying to rally, the discipline fighting through the pain.
His drone’s spotlight fixed on Rut’Aba. A targeting laser, thin and red, appeared on their chest, painting a dot over their heart.
A new sound cut through the alley. Not the roar of war engines. Not the whine of T’au tech.
This was a wet, tearing, organic sound. A sound of something heavy being dragged over broken stone, punctuated by a low, phlegmy chittering. It came from above.
All three of them—Rut’Aba, the two wounded T’au—looked up.
The skeletal hab-blocks looming over the alley were no longer still. Shapes moved in the shadows of the shattered windows. Not human shapes. Not T’au.
They were pale, elongated things, clinging to the sheer surfaces with too many limbs. Their skin, where it caught the sickly green glow of the necrotic energy leaking from the city’s wounds, looked waxy and taut over distorted frames. Their heads were elongated, eyes glowing with the same putrid green.
One of them peeled itself from a wall and dropped, landing in a crouch between Rut’Aba and the T’au with a moist, cracking impact. It straightened, unfolding to a height of nearly eight feet. Its limbs were knotted with tendon and bone, its mouth a vertical slash filled with needle teeth. It turned its head, first towards the T’au, then towards Rut’Aba, as if deciding.
“Genestealer cultists,” My’en hissed, the translation dripping with a new, deeper fear. He forgot Rut’Aba, raising his pistol towards the new threat.
More of them dropped.Five.Seven. A dozen. They landed silently, surrounding the alley in a loose, eerily coordinated circle. The chittering was a language, a hideous, clicking harmony.
Tor’kan scrambled for his rifle. The one that had dropped first lunged, not at the T’au, but at his drone. A claw-tipped limb swiped, and the drone sparked and died, clattering to the ground in two pieces.
The standoff was shattered. Pulse fire, a brighter, sharper green, lit the alley as Tor’kan opened fire from the ground, catching a cultist in the shoulder. It screeched, a sound that vibrated in the teeth, and charged.
Chaos erupted.
Rut’Aba didn’t think. They turned and ran for the one place that wasn’t filled with fighting xenos: the solid wall of rubble.
It was still solid. It was still impossible.
They slammed against it, fingers scrambling for purchase on smooth, fused rockrete. There was no way up. The chittering was closer. They could smell them now—a sweet, rotten smell like spoiled meat and chemical runoff.
Desperation was a cold flood. They pressed their forehead against the cold stone, the dead pike in their hands. They thought of the lattice, not as a map, but as a feeling. The feeling of a door that remembered being open. The feeling of a piece of hull that remembered not being there.
The wall in front of them wasn’t a door. But everything was a memory. Even stone.
The pain in their chest returned, a dull knife-twist. They pushed against it, against the dead weight of the pike, against the solid, immutable fact of the wall.Remember.
A single, hair-thin purple line flickered in the air, about six feet up the rubble face. It wavered, sputtered. A memory of a stress fracture, of a weak point from an impact centuries old.
Rut’Aba didn’t hesitate. They jammed the pike’s tip into the faint, shimmering line. The crystals didn’t flare. They strained, and the line thickened, cracking open with a dry, grating sound like a giant’s bones shifting. Not a door.A fissure. Barely wide enough to squeeze through.
A cultist was behind them, its breath hot and foul. Rut’Aba dropped the pike, grabbed the edges of the crack, and pulled themselves up and through, skin tearing on sharp stone.
They tumbled into darkness on the other side, into the choking smell of dust and mildew. They turned, scrabbling for the pike, reaching back through the crack to grab it.
On the other side, the alley was a kaleidoscope of violence. Green pulse fire lit up struggling, monstrous shapes. A cultist, half its head gone, was still clawing at Tor’kan’s legs. My’en was backed against a wall, firing his pistol wildly.
Their eyes met Rut’Aba’s through the crack. His helmet lens was cracked, one side dark. For a second, there was no translation, no empire, no war. Just two beings in a hole, watching the nightmare come.
Rut’Aba pulled the pike through. The fissure in the rubble snapped shut with a final, gritty crunch, sealing with a sound of solid, unmoving stone.
The sounds of the fight became muffled, then distant, then were cut off entirely.
Silence.Darkness.
Rut’Aba lay in the thick dust, trembling, their body a map of fresh aches atop the old, deeper bruises. The points in their chest were cold now. Empty. They clutched the dead pike to them, its metal chilling their skin.
They were in another enclosed space. But this one was quiet.For now.
From somewhere in the absolute black, deep within the bowels of the collapsed hab-block, came a new sound. A slow, wet, rhythmic scraping.
Something was down here with them. And it was dragging itself closer.
The scraping was a living sound, wet and deliberate, cutting through the muffled silence like a saw through bone. Rut’Aba held their breath, the dust in their mouth turning to paste. Every instinct screamed to run, but their body was a locked column of pain, wedged in the dark. The pike was just a cold, heavy rod in their fist.
They strained their eyes against the absolute black, searching for any telltale glow of eyes or bio-luminescence. Nothing. Just the oppressive, swallowing dark and that horrible, rhythmic drag-scrape, drag-scrape. It was closer.Maybe ten meters away. The smell hit them next—not the cultists’ sweet rot, but a metallic, oily stench laced with the coppery tang of stale blood and something else, something chemical and sharp.
“Come on, move,” they whispered to their own limbs, a raw, internal command that sparked a fresh wave of agony from their ribs. They pushed up onto their elbows, the grit on the floor grinding against their torn clothes. The movement was too loud.The scraping stopped.
Silence, thicker and more terrifying than before, pressed down on them. Rut’Aba froze, halfway to kneeling, one hand on the rough floor, the other white-knuckled around the pike. Their own heartbeat was a frantic drum in their ears, surely loud enough for the thing in the dark to hear. Seconds stretched, each one a lifetime of waiting for an attack that didn’t come.
Then, a low, synthesized wheeze, like a broken ventilator struggling for air. A single, dim red eye flickered to life in the darkness, casting a weak halo of light on the ground just before it.
The light illuminated a wreckage of twisted metal and plasteel, a form that was more machine than anything else, but horrifyingly, unmistakably, not. It was the lower half of a Space Marine, the massive, sculpted ceramite legs fused and mangled around the ruined cockpit of what might have been a light scout vehicle. Wires and fluid lines snaked from the torn armor, connecting to the metal hull. One arm was gone at the shoulder. The remaining arm ended not in a hand, but in a ragged, sparking industrial claw that dragged the whole wreck forward an inch at a time.
The single red eye-lens, set in what remained of a helmet fused to the cockpit frame, fixed on Rut’Aba. A crackling, vox-distorted voice emanated from a grille.
“Throne… you are… not it.” The voice was a ruin, static and pain woven together. “The signal… the anomalous energy signature. It was you.”
Rut’Aba slowly, slowly, got to their knees. “I don’t have a signal.”
“Lies.” The thing dragged itself another foot closer, the claw screeching on the stone. The red light washed over Rut’Aba’s face, then down to the pike. “That… device. Its resonance is a scream in the warp. It drew them. It drew me.” The eye-lens dimmed, then brightened. “I am Brother-Sergeant Valen, of the Crimson Shields. My squad is ash. My body is… compromised.”
Rut’Aba’s mind scrambled. A Space Marine. Or what was left of one. The ultimate human weapon, now a crawling, half-mechanical wreck talking about signals. “I crashed. That’s all. I’m not from here.”
“Irrelevant.” Valen’s claw gripped a piece of rubble, pulling his mass forward with a groan of metal. “The xenos trace the same emission. The cultists are drawn to the psychical backlash like flies to a corpse. You are a beacon. And you are uneducated in its use. A hazard.”
“So turn it off,” Rut’Aba said, their voice edged with a helpless frustration they couldn’t mask. “Tell me how.”
A wet, coughing laugh echoed from the vox. “It is not a switch. It is a… symbiosis. I scanned the wreckage of your pod. The readings are impossible. You should be dead, fused to the reactor core. You are not.” The red eye seemed to bore into Rut’Aba’s chest. “What are you?”
“Tired,” Rut’Aba snapped, the word bursting out of them. “Lost. And really, really sick of things asking me that.” They used the pike to stand, their legs shaking. “You said I’m a beacon. What happens now?”
“Now, you draw every hostile entity in this sector to this location.” Valen’s claw flexed, sparks falling to the dust. “The logical action is to sever the source. To dismantle you and the device.”
Rut’Aba took a shaky step back, raising the dead pike like a staff. “You can try.”
“I could.” The admission was flat. “It would be my duty. But my duty also demands I report the xenos incursion and cultist proliferation to the last known Imperial foothold. My transmission arrays are destroyed. Yours are not.” The eye-lens shifted, looking past Rut’Aba at the sealed wall. “The T’au have localized augur systems. Their ship, or a forward command, will have a wider array.”
“You want me to walk up to a T’au ship and ask to borrow their comms?” Rut’Aba’s laugh was brittle and short. “They just tried to kill me.”
“And I am trying to decide if I should.” Valen’s form sagged, a hydraulic joint hissing. “You are an unknown.A risk. But you are a tool that can reach a frequency I cannot. A choice must be made.”
The scraping started again, but he was turning, painfully reorienting his wrecked body toward a deeper part of the collapsed chamber. “There is a subsurface conduit. It leads towards the river district. T’au signals are concentrated there. You will go. I will… facilitate.”
“Facilitate how?” Rut’Aba didn’t lower the pike.
“By providing a path. And by being a more immediate, louder target.” Valen’s claw punched into a wall of collapsed ductwork, tearing it open with a shriek of protesting metal. Darkness yawned beyond. “The things outside this ruin are still hunting. They will key on my bio-signature first. It is… pronounced. You will have a window. A short one.”
He looked back, the red light painting Rut’Aba in stark relief. “Reach their communications hub. Broadcast the clearance codes I will give you on the Emergency Militarum frequency. Someone will hear. Then your purpose is served.”
“And then?” Rut’Aba asked, already knowing the answer.
“Then you will no longer be my concern.” Valen began to drag himself into the duct, his voice growing muffled. “The codes are as follows: Kappa-Imperator-Seven-Niner-Zero, authentication ‘Sanguis Clausum’. Repeat it.”
Rut’Aba repeated the string of letters and numbers, the phrase tasting like iron and finality.
“Good.” His voice was almost gone, swallowed by the duct. “Go. And try not to shine so brightly, little beacon.”
The red eye-lens winked out. A second later, from the direction of the sealed alley, a tremendous crash echoed, followed by the explosive report of a weapon that could only be the Marine’s last, functional sidearm. A roar of alien rage answered it.
The diversion had begun.
Rut’Aba turned and plunged into the dark conduit, the sounds of a dying angel’s last war ringing at their back. The pike felt heavier than ever. The cold points in their chest began, faintly, to ache.