The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,11
corridor’s lumens strobed uncomfortably on low power levels.
I activated my helm’s cartographic scanner and isolated the chamber I needed. There was a direct route through the lower strata, avoiding the station’s populated zones, which made my task a little easier. I went quickly, hugging the plentiful shadows.
Most of the living things I encountered were servitor-grade, blind and limping creatures of metal and pulled-flesh that ignored me. A few human-normals lingered in those wells of darkness, and as soon as they laid eyes on me they looked even more nauseous than they had before, before hurrying away. I caught sight of flashes of grey in the dark, and filmy eyes, and emaciated hands clutching at ragged cloak-ends.
Humanity, I thought to myself. Master of the stars.
Soon one of those wretches would get a message up to what passed for the authorities in that place, alerting them to the strangely armoured interloper skulking along in the gloom, but by that point I planned to be long gone.
I reached my destination – a locked door set amid a whole row of locked doors. The plasteel was pitted and spotted with rust, and in the centre of the panel was a small armourglass slide-viewer.
I might have chosen to depress the summon-chime and wait for someone to pull the viewer’s shielding back, but long experience had taught me that my unique repulsiveness could be detected even through a solid mass, so I seized the mechanism with my gauntlet, activated a freeze-grip and shattered it.
Then I was through, kicking the door aside and scanning beyond it. I detected movement from six warm-bodies within – two up close, four more further off. Las-fire criss-crossed out of the gloom, aimed immediately and accurately. I ducked under the worst of it, letting my armour deal with the rest. The hot stench of scorched auramite filled my nostrils as I opened up with my flamer.
I caught the two closest in that inferno, and soon heard the counterpoint of their screams. A lasgun’s power unit blew, showering the confined space with a burst of static, but by then I was already pushing through the shimmering flame-curtains to the ones beyond.
They fired back, and I perceived outlines of armoured bodies trembling in the heat-shake. Nothing they possessed could harm me. My presence alone was enough to make their flesh rebel, and I could smell panic in their gestures. I used my flames like a flail, pulling them round and melting their crude armour plates.
Even as they were dying I learned something of them. They were better equipped and better armed than the cult members I had expected, which was good, as it indicated we’d found a higher breed of degenerate. I glimpsed snatches of bare flesh as their armour crisped away – pale and diseased – before it too was consumed. They did not run, despite their fear. Never let it be said that hatred had blinded me entirely to quality – I could appreciate a foe who stood their ground.
Soon, though, only one remained – the woman I had come for, backing away from me. She was portly, swathed in a layer of fat that was probably synthetic and designed for endurance during void transit. She was wearing the slack uniform of a maintenance supervisor, marked with pale grey runes of relevant expertise, but she was no maintenance supervisor.
Even one of the ungifted, even one of the very stupidest of our species, ought to have been able to spot it – the wrongness, hanging over her like foul flatus. There were no visual cues, just a certain manner, a certain bearing, and it shrieked out moral squalor.
I let the flamer gutter out. She looked at me, her eyes half-steady, holding a lasgun two-handed. She had dark hair, matted with greasy sweat.
She grinned at me twitchily. I could see she was terrified. Perhaps she knew better than most what I lacked that I should have possessed.
‘They told us you’d be a danger,’ she said.
I don’t know what she expected me to do then. Talk to her? I wasn’t even remotely tempted. Talking, like most things, is a skill built on repetition. After a while, you lose even the motivation to practise.
I looked around the chamber. Documents were spread out across dark iron tables, among them data-slates and secure comm-canisters. On one of the walls was a great chart made of what looked like animal hides, only part burned away by my flamer. It contained symbolic representations of planetary systems, connected by a skein