Expect harsh language, blood, gore, dismemberment, a man killing people with a toilet plunger, and body-horror.

Uncensored cover images on my art feeds, DA and FA

The version of the Warhammer 40k universe I use for my Multiverse stories diverges from canon quite a bit. Armies are sometimes structured differently, some famous places/people do not exist or have been substituted, and some designs and equipment types have had modifications. Before anyone loses their minds about "Something not being correct" -just remember that's done purposefully, and if you don't like it, tough cheese-doodles

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If you choose to utilize the listed soundtracks, I recommend playing them on loop until the next paragraph break and on low background volume, soundtracks listed often go outside the range of the brand the current fanfiction is written about

And as always, one last thing: if you're a Trump supporter, you're going to hell ;)

This is part of my Portaljumper Multiverse series, which means it shares a crossover universe with most of my other Fanfictions, if you're confused, consult my bio

💀 Screams of Chechenwaldr 💀

1

The Siegholf

"Why do we seek hope and also terror when we are lost in the dark?"

"There is certainty in faith, and there is hope in prayer. A mind that finds these gifts can become something greater than what it once was.

There is dread in unrighteous hatred, and there is retribution in sin. If you forget your shield that cannot be seen, then the unspeakable will try to take your hand, and not only that: it will also call you its brother.

The worst that can be done when encountering evil is to accept defeat. But most normal men cannot possess the bravery of gods. It is why I exist, to remind you all about the true purpose in which your mortal lives are continued.

It is why some far away men that are found by their nightmares try to lock them away, and try to pretend that they never existed, when they cannot beseech us for salvation. They seek comfort in purposeful oblivion.

I have been around for a very long time, and I have learned much. So, let me advise you on something: I do not recommend doing that. You'll ruin someone's day."

-Reclusiarch Sendremas Mex Ariculio of the Black Templars, Unspecified Date: Personal Holo-Log #22,991

{EVE Online OST: Hidden Momentos}

Learning how to pilot the Siegholf was somehow harder a task than stealing her had been.

All of the keys were in native Gelic, which was a gobbly-bobbly tongue-twisting shitheap of a language. The override codes had been hidden especially well, which had cost him almost three hours of travel time and had reduced his focus from the sheer levels of frustration it had caused. One of the sloop's servitors had been killed during the firefight, thus depleting from the bridge's effectiveness in controlling her, and to top it off: the whole ship stunk like blood.

Even after he'd spaced all the crew's mangled corpses.

The victory hadn't gone as swimmingly as he would've preferred. In hindsight, painting the deck with that bridgehand after stuffing his own grenades up his ass hadn't been too bright a plan.

Luckily, the Fallen's suit was environmentally sealed. He left his helmet on, and didn't even turn off the detox filters, so the world smelled instead like artificial aromas of plastic.

It was better than dead-people stank, at least.

"Proximity alert! Paths intersect." –Warned in bold, red text across the frontal navigation panel.

"That's the point." The Fallen growled, blink-swiping away the translation software he needed to read the ship's annoying chimes. "I shouldn't have done this alone."

"I know. You're talking to yourself again."

The Fallen glared over his pauldron at the sight of his own doppelganger. A duplicate man, clad in purple-blue powered armor that hugged a thinly veiled, athletic build, with a face similarly hidden underneath a trifecta neon green visor.

Even the tophat placed over his helmet's cranium was duplicated. An exact carbon copy of himself, and he wasn't even real.

"Leave me alone, Conscience."

"Where would the fun in that be? You'd go stir-crazy if I wasn't here to keep you company." Conscience chuckled, gauntlets on his hips, he swept his gaze appraisingly around the speckled, dripping swathes of blood decorating the floors and the western walls of the bridge. "Ew. This is one fine hell of a mess!"

"I had to improvise." The Fallen rolled is eyes as he tapped a few keys on the panel.

"Improvise is one way of putting it. Personally, though, I'd describe this little charade of bloody mishap as your most recent and morbidly entertaining episode of roid-rage."

"I don't use drugs." The Fallen cocked a brow.

"Not those. I meant hemorrhoids!" Conscience sniggered, like a schoolboy under the delusion of successful mockery. "Something's crawled up that tight of yours for you to be in this kind of mood!"

"I'm not in a mood."

"You tore these folks limb from limb." Conscience reminded, his tone evening out just a bit. "Or are you about to come back with some logical explanation?"

"My blaster weapons could've punched holes in the hull." The Fallen sighed. "I needed the ship in one piece. Low and behold: success. And here you are, giving me a hard time."

"No no, not a hard time, it's just…" Conscience paced in front of the captain's throne, his voice trailing off as he smiled at the spotty patterns of cast gore marring the armrest controls. "I'm simply surprised you actually took the job."

"Maybe because it isn't a job, per say?" The Fallen glanced back at him. The console bleeped. He cursed under his breath and started working to undo the error. "Shit, I hate using the translator."

"Funny thing, being that you designed it." The Fallen's own mind strolled around the viscera, as carefree as an old lady among daisies and bread-crumb dieted birds. He stopped in front of one of the auxiliary command strata-stations, cocking his head at the emotionless, dead-faced servitor hard-wired into the coupling slot via a bushel of twisting cables. "I think I like our tastes in décor much better. It involves less uses of corpses."

"They get the job done." The Fallen shrugged, glancing over at the servitor. Half of its face was replaced with bio-plating, and an eye had been sloughed away to make room for a direct brain-link, a funnel spawning a ponytail of wire that snaked into the console panel below the servitor's hip. "Sometimes I hate the Imperium."

"Depends on the day!" Conscience laughed, poking at the servitor's one remaining eye, and giggling when the dry ball squished morosely under his plated finger. "Nasty."

"Now is the first time you've appeared out of the blue this whole ride. I'm assuming there's something you wanted." The Fallen shook his head. "Or have I gone insane enough for you to become petty?"

"We're way past that, brother." Conscience smirked, stepping away from the servitor. "You shouldn't see our discussions as such a bad thing. If I'm not here, or you don't have some derg-taco to stuff, you start to go idle. Things go badly for you when you're completely idle, remember? Stuff starts catching up to you, and…" He gestured. "-You have a good chance of ending up like Mr. Appliance and Skin here."

"I'm a simple man, and to me, victory denotes ownership." The Fallen snapped. "I shot the captain of this ship in the face. So now, it's my ship. And I say: get the fuck off my bridge, and leave me alone, at least until I get to where I'm going."

"You'll have to figure out that navigation software before then I think." Conscience pointed at the warning bubbles on the console.

"Conscience."

"Right right, I'm gone, don't twist anything." For a second, a mischievous grin slithered up the creases of Conscience's mouth. He zipped over to the servitor, gripping its lifeless jaw to wiggle it about in mimicry of speech. "I wuv you Fallen! My mother was a lawnmower and my dad an arson convict with strange fetishes!"

"Shut up." The Fallen barked, and his Conscience vanished into thin air. "…Finally."

Suddenly, the Fallen heard steel creaking. He looked down, and with a gasp, released his gauntlets from where he'd been angrily gripping the sides of the console station.

His fingers had left sausage-like rents in the metal, thanks to the augmentations and enhancers in his suit. Sometimes it was easy to forget that whilst armored, he was perfectly capable of crushing a solid brick in his palm.

"Pathfinding intersect. Redirect overridden. Continue at your own risk." –Blared the warning sigils on-screen.

It was like the damned console was mocking him.

He glanced around the little sloop's gore-slicked bridge.

The Imperials believed in Machinespirits, right? Even the bunglers and smugglers. The Fallen had never given religion credence no matter what reality he was in across the Multiverse, but perhaps in the case of this galaxy, there might have been something to it.

Not that it's important.

Sighing away a nauseating wash of stress down his throat, the Fallen confirmed a last few digits on the console and stepped back, his gaze locked on the blanket of blue-black flesh outside the sloop's viewport. It was speckled with tens of millions of little sparkling dots, and distant nebulae created oceanic patterns of transfixing color that mimicked deep aquas and serene lavender shades.

The Kogheifen System was beautiful, when you put aside the shit that festered in it due to its residents.

The Hive World of Krueg Linhold was the system capital planet. It acted as the black, beating and inky heart to a larger machine of criminal enterprises, religious fervor and corrupt politicking. There hadn't been a war in the constellation for almost three thousand years, and yet somehow throughout that time, the Imperials had found ways to pollute the joint regardless of the actions of hostile, outside powers.

Independent prospector syndicates dominated the outer asteroid belts, and they frequently employed privateers to 'redirect' their competing corporations' supply shipments. The Hive World was divided into millions of little fiefs by a variety of gangs and cartels, and the Arbites maintained such a fleeting presence in Kogheifen that barely any of the innumerable crimes committed every second here went addressed. It didn't help that the planetary governor of Krueg Linhold had actively invited Kroot mercenaries into his defense armies, and rumors were going around that someone in the system had not only paid an army of Orks to fight for them, but that they had also equipped them with fresh Imperial Guard gear and machines.

Kogheifen was another brilliant example of human compassion, if one could catch the drift.

The Fallen had been to a million places like it. Each and every one of them managed to make him sick in a hundred varieties over.

My job is never done.

The Fallen made sure to blink-click a few of the reminder bubbles in his helm's holographic HUD, just for himself, once things started getting rough.

He glanced back at the horrid sprawls of spewed blood behind him.

Once things started getting rougher.

And he had no doubt that they would, especially if the stories about where he was going were true.

The Siegholf gave a deep, mournful groan as it glided fluently through the empty void of space. The engines hummed minutely, and the hull occasionally gave a secretive murmur or sharp click as the structuring settled.

All in all, she wasn't a bad ship, per say. Her speed was average for a vessel of her size, and her fuel compliment was excellent. Utilizing the decompiler scanners in his suit, his systems estimated that the Siegholf could travel through space without a stop for fuel for almost four months.

And she wasn't terribly ugly either.

Imperial warships were born from a design quota that matched the regality and attempted majesty of an old-world carrack. Their bows were bladed hulks intended for ramming and boarding actions, and their spines bristled with forests of spires and exterior subsidiary structures. They were not graceful or extraordinarily fast in comparison to other designs the Fallen had seen, but they were durable. Insanely so. Imperial spaceships could put up with a lot of punishment.

The sloop itself wasn't an example of these monstrous cruisers, battleships or barges, though its flesh had been sculpted in mimicry of them.

The Siegholf was vaguely scorpion-shaped, except the space where the tail would've gone was where the bridge had been installed. The placement of the arachnid's arms was encrusted with after-burners and exfoliation thrusters around a trio of fat engines, and finally, the underbelly and flanks were equipped with exchanging rows of las-lances. There were four forward-facing autocannons reticulated with a trio of lascannon addendums.

In a lightweight fight against fighter or commercial craft, the sloop was a dangerous opponent indeed.

But her armament wasn't important to the Fallen, in fact, he doubted he'd even ever have to use any of it.

The Siegholf had come into his hands purely because of convenience. She was the closest undocumented, criminal-owned ship that the Fallen could've forcibly appropriated, at least, without attracting the attention of Imperial authorities.

It would've been nice if the folks in Kogheifen spoke as much Low Gothic (which the Fallen could rightfully describe as English) as they did their native tongue of Gelic, which was closer to another language he'd encountered many times throughout his portaljumping: German.

"*Surrounding area is clear of contacts.*"

-Force of habit. He kept checking his motion sensors as he walked out of the bloodied bridge and down the main gantry spine. The Siegholf had halls ribbed with iron struts and illuminated by ugly, thin holo-strips nestled in the plated ceiling. Aside from the low levels of steam dancing around the deck, the guts of the ship were eerily dark, and even more eerily still.

It made the Fallen jumpy. He was used to places like this being filled with things or people that wanted to kill him. The awkward atmosphere of peace inside the ship just felt weird.

"I'll be out of this thing soon anyhow." He mumbled to himself under the drone of the engines, adjusting his tophat. "Maybe then I can jump to some world that likes the color pink more, just to mix up the bag."

Aside from the bridge and spinal gantry, the Siegholf was as compact as its class suggested. Imperial sloops varied by purpose, but for a bunch of gunrunners, they hadn't needed very much.

When the Fallen had butchered the crew, he had taken to searching the ship up and down before actively using it. In the rear belly-cell storages, there were piled containers and a pair of old motorcycles that probably hadn't been used in years. The crates were stuffed to the brim with Stubber weapons and Las-power packs. Undoubtedly, it was all arms shipments that the Imperials didn't sanction, and it was no telling whose hands the guns would end up in.

The Fallen had been operating in the local system for the last few months. Cleaning house, as he sometimes put it. Though, with the sheer volume of garbage that went down in this reality, stamping out the greater evils was more of a passing hobby. One man could never fix this galaxy. It was too far gone.

Not that that would stop him from trying.

Idly, he passed into what had once been the crew's quarters of the Siegholf. Around eight bunks now sitting empty met him, caught under the dull gaze of flickering fixtures wired into the ceiling.

He'd rifled through their belongings. A hefty sum of Imperial Crowns had ended up in his Nanobox, along with some stupid handheld entertainment tablet he'd found in a drawer. It had a small, low-rendered puzzle game installed on it, and he'd used it once or twice now to pass by the traveling time.

"Sorry guys." The Fallen muttered, angling his hat at the bunks. "I hardly knew you."

"And wouldn't wanna' be yah'!" Conscience appeared, cackling from the other side of the room. "Good times, good times. I love our job!"

[💀]

Only through the Siegholf's tachyon-augments in the scanner servers was the Fallen able to pinpoint the location of what he sought.

That was the hard part: finding it in the vastness of space.

The next part was visually identifying it.

And given that the bulbous mass of twisted, evil metal was the size of an Imperial Battlebarge, missing it with the naked eye once in range was a fault only the blind or delusional could suffer.

But still, the Fallen could understand the mistake being made. There was part of him that didn't want to see the Chechenwaldr, purely because of its reputation. Perhaps this was how some of his more knowledgeable foes felt when he came for them.

Dread.

The Chechenwaldr inspired nothing else, with its grotesque facing and indomitable stature, the Spacehulk looked like a looming predator, one whose skin was gridded with a fetid population of jagged teeth, and was strewn with bones that erupted from its filthy, rotting flesh.

Records dated the Chechenwaldr to at least an age of two-hundred-plus years. It had transitioned in and out of the Kogheifen solar system nearly six hundred and seventy-two documented times during its lazy drift through the waxing and waning orifices of the Warp, over the last pair of centuries. Nobody knew the identity of most Spacehulks, and fewer still knew which ship or ships were first lost to give birth to the hulk itself for eventual buildup. Spacehulks always clumped. As they traveled in and out of the Immaterium, their mass grew bigger and bigger as more spatial debris was lodged into its skin, be that other adrift ghost vessels, wreckage, and even asteroids.

The Chechenwaldr, however, was an anomaly in terms of definition: people actually knew where its horrible existence had started.

The disappeared Battleship known as the Finite Tolerance: manufactured on a daemonic Forge World, used by the renegade Impestus Gore fleets against the Imperial Navy. Finite Tolerance had been destroyed by the Kogheifen defensive alliance in the neighboring star system of Behl. Evidently, the Tolerance followed them home even after death. It was this system and Behl that the Chechenwaldr (Death Wagon loosely in Gelic) periodically appeared in over the years. The people of Kogheifen had staved off war in their local space for millennia, but they sometimes carried home infections from outside tithed deployments across the Imperium.

It wasn't the Chechenwaldr itself that the Fallen wanted.

There was a prize inside of it. A treasure, but one corrupted by the Ruinous Powers undoubtedly.

That meant that he had to go inside.

The Siegholf drifted closer and closer to a mass of blackness that blotted out the stars. The Chechenwaldr was immense. The Tolerance's original hulk could be picked out making the mass' spine and belly. Her nose and face had been blocked away by a cluster of shattered asteroid corpses and unidentifiable debris that had fused to the hull. Where the Battleship's engines had once been, now there were darkened wounds gaping into the cold void. The Spacehulk was deathly silent, and it left behind itself a wide, gargantuan trail of little crumbs and morsels that had sloughed off it and drifted away.

The interior of the Fallen's stolen ship occasionally gave off noises now. The spaced thud and clunk of plates and chunks of steel bouncing off the hull as the Siegholf nosed through the cloud of shit that the Spacehulk sweated.

"So there's a few ways we can do this…" Conscience rubbed the chin of his duplicate helm, him and the Fallen side-by-side in the gory bridge, as they watched the Chechenwaldr fill the viewport entirely. "But we need the ship to survive, so the easy way's out."

"As usual." The Fallen sighed. Taking his eyes off the viewport, he scanned the screen of the central command console below his chin. "Hold on."

The Siegholf had a boarding umbilical in the lower nose. It wasn't designed for pirate-level actions on an unwilling vessel, but the Fallen didn't need a completely sealed link. His suit would keep him alive in the void as long as the Wyvern Plasma generator in the spine continued functioning. The danger came from draining the generator and storage cells too quickly for it to regenerate his oxygen levels. The Fallen could use his back-mounted thrusters to fly over by himself, but it was only good for short trips between basings when in space.

If he used the jetpacks too much, he'd suffocate.

So, the stolen smuggler's sloop was going to act as his stage-coach.

"There's a good docking spot, right under that ominously shaped mountain of daemonically-warped metal!" Conscience smiled. "This place looks fun! I can't wait for you to go in, guns blazing. We'll probably make a ton of friends with the neighborhood kids."

"Go fuck yourself with a machete."

The Fallen keyed in the coordinates, closing out his translation HUD. The ship groaned as its flightpath was adjusted.

The servitors would handle stabilization from here. Hopefully, nothing would chance by the sloop while the Fallen was inside. The last thing he needed right now was an overeager crew of void-brigands thinking they'd found an easy coffer to pillage.

"It'd be their last mistake." Conscience chimed as he bustled around the bridge's L-gantry. "You know that stopping this impending disaster won't make a difference, right? This entire galaxy is the worst thing we've ever seen. There'll just be a hundred more."

"Now it's only ninety-nine." The Fallen growled. "Don't try to talk me out of this. Just because I'm the only schmuck out of trillions here that gives a rat's ass about order doesn't mean I'll stand by and watch."

"Saving anyone, and any amount of them counts, eh?"

"Something like that."

The ship rumbled as it closed proximity with the docking-zone. Klaxons briefly wailed as the Fallen descended the gantry flight, illuminating the dark confines of the sloop a deep bloody red.

The umbilical chamber was a buttressed rectangle sealed at the nose with a spiral vault. It was cramped enough that maybe only two or three people at a time could pass through it. The Fallen cursed when his tophat caught on one of the buttress-struts and fell off his helm.

"Just remind me: what are you going to do with it?" Conscience called over from the way he'd come.

The Fallen fixed his hat, punching the completion rune beside the vault-lock. The klaxons wailed again, and the hull started to quiver under a deep, thrumming grumble.

"I'm going to break it." The Fallen muttered.

"Emperor's Protection." –Read the little keypanel under the rune.

"And your Emperor can fuck himself with a machete too."

The umbilical fastened as well as it could outside, shaking the ship one last time as the affixer-claws grappled into the tortured hull's flesh. With a stark report of metal, the chamber sealed its rear bulkheads, and the sound of hissing steam signaled the beginning of the depressurization process.

The Fallen blink-clicked a key on his HUD. The world became muted suddenly, and the artificial smell inside his helmet strengthened as the suit sealed itself for void and toxic-environment operations.

"Activate motion sensors." He mumbled aloud.

"*Activating. Caution: system feedback reports heavy sensor-baffling. Results may not be accurate.*" –Came the feminine, automated voice of the suit's AI.

"Check extended range. The whole Spacehulk's in a cloud?"

"*Confirmed. Opposing vessel is rendered blind once interior-side. Proceed with caution.*"

"Yeah, thanks for the concern." The Fallen's sigh crackled through his vox-amplifiers. He glanced at the deck beside his boots.

"I thought you liked working alone." Conscience didn't appear, but his voice was clear as day in the Fallen's head. "The automated crap obviously isn't filling the void. Missing the old squeeze?"

"God almighty, just shut your mouth."

{EVE Online OST: Surplus of Rare Artifacts}

The vault-hatch screamed, and all at once it vanished into a stowage slit in the flooring. The even smaller airlock cell was ajar, and past the gray hull's chin and the bit of the Siegholf's nose-structuring that could be seen above, a translucent tube ringed with struts of gold-colored metal extended out into space. The umbilical shivered briefly, as if it was caught in some sort of phantom space-breeze.

The Fallen took a deep breath, and he swiped his gauntlets by the Nano-box on his hip. His weapons of choice materialized in his palms from clouds of swimming particles.

The Doomblaster in his left grip, a Wyvern Plasma weapon whose plasmite shots could punch through solid titanium.

And finally, on a wooden handle with a black cup: The Plunger of Doom in his right.

The first step was a muffled bump in his hearing. He slowly started trotting down the umbilical, fingers tightening on the grips of his weapons.

Aw nuts.

He sort of wished his suit's AI had been lying or something. He peered at the detection blurb in his HUD, and truth to word, it came back as a disorganized mess of fading and appearing yellow blips.

The Chechenwaldr had some Warp-born madness enshrouding its hull that nullified scanners and communication. It didn't surprise him. Spacehulks were prone to stuff like that.

But all of them didn't have that.

Only the really bad ones did.

Shit.

The tube ended in a narrow berthed mouth surrounded by servo-jointed clench-arms. The hull was rent through, and the gap was too wide for the tube to have affixed entirely to vacuum-seal the breach. That was only a problem for a crew working with limited air, though. The Fallen walked down the rest of the tube, and dispersed through the coned exit way with a little leap, floating head-first into the darkness ahead.

"Filters, please." He murmured. The blackness suddenly drained away like liquidy ink as the night-vision setting turned itself on. "Bring up the schematics for the Finite Tolerance, it's the closest I've got."

The HUD added a bubble filled with the wire-frame mesh he'd downloaded from Imperial war records. The Chechenwaldr had obviously made some changes to the interior mapping of the original Battleship, but this was still somewhat accurate to follow, especially with the deeper decks.

"*Setting waypoint.*" The AI chimed.

"Let's do this."

[💀]

The interior warrens of the Chechenwaldr were an entirely different world. All of them so far lacked any form of atmosphere completely. The Fallen traversed as many with his magnetic heels trotting down the decks as he did floating, the latter guided with sporadic kicks from his back-thrusters.

Debris spiraled or lazily drifted everywhere, like clouds of falling snow that had somehow stopped mid-drift all at once to populate the void. Streams of bluish, dim illumination from outside the hull dappled through every gap and rent like beams of aqua sunlight.

The only thing the Fallen could hear as he navigated around smashed ceiling-structures, blasted bulkheads and mangled decking was the quiet hiss of his own breathing, and the occasional, muted thud as his hands and feet made contact with something.

"*Exterior section grouped to Number One. Cleared via visual. These pathways diverge from those on the schematics map.*"

"Mm." The Fallen grunted at the stupid AI, his eyes accusing as they swept across the updating schematic block. His suit was changing local areas he passed through. Evidently, the Spacehulk had warped much more of the Tolerance's interior than he had initially thought. "Scan readouts are still crap. Watch this place be nothing after all, and the relic's gone already."

"You know that's unlikely." Conscience chuckled. "The last attempt anyone made to board this thing was decades ago, and those poor slobs never came back. If anyone found it, they stayed with it. Imperial records aren't all fried-books and propaganda, just ninety-nine percent of them."

Regardless, the Fallen could've punched a wall.

This wasn't much better than the eerie halls of the Siegholf. In fact: it was worse.

"It's amazing that the Battleship didn't get pounded into a complete scrap-heap from all the shelling." Conscience wondered, as the Fallen reached out, wristing aside an eternally floating maintenance-lantern with a shattered yoke. "The records said it depressurized, right? Sucked everyone out through a bunch of tiny holes at once 'cause the life-support got smacked with a battery shot."

The Fallen grimaced as he recalled the text for himself. Horrible things had gone on down here, forget that the ship had been owned by Chaos renegades before it's death. The mass depress had occurred at the height of an engagement the Tolerance was locked in with Imperial warships. It had been punched full of holes, and a lucky shell eviscerated the support stratum in the ship's lower spine. She'd died an internal and slow death. The Tolerance had been killed by an assassin's scalpel, and so her mighty hulk had never been broken, technically.

But, broken or not…

She was quite empty.

The Fallen passed through a bolted gallery through a bulkhead that was partially stowed in its slit-box. The ceiling here had buckled inward in the shape of a cone, the fat girth of an asteroid peaking through the slivers in the plating. Rows and rows of storage containers were held to the decking via secure-stations slipped as organized slots in the northern wall. Some of the stations had been smashed, so their crated contents orbited like an array of blobs in a lava lamp around the bay.

As the Fallen magnetized to the deck, he felt a vibration quiver up from his heels and jitter his entire body. A muffled groan echoed inside his helmet.

The Spacehulk must have been shifting. Hopefully, he handled landed in a section that was getting ready to snap off.

"Waypoint destination?" The Fallen lightly nudged a floating Imperial workcrate from his path with his plunger's cup as he trotted across the deck.

"*Marking.*"

The Fallen sighed when he saw the readjusted blip.

Still so far away.

"At least the scans aren't losing their minds." He muttered. "I think I had my fill shooting up those smugglers when I-"

The Fallen pushed another crate out of his way.

And it immediately revealed a humanoid shadow reaching out for him in the darkness.

The Fallen swore and kicked off the deck on a heel. He brought the Doomblaster around and fixed a bead on the shadow's head.

However, as he floated backwards and touched against one of the struts, he realized that the sight was less dangerous.

But it was no less disturbing.

A mummified corpse, one wearing a ragged Imperial-standard naval uniform. The man's skin was gray and shriveled, hugging closely in emaciation to his bones. His mouth was tightly clenched shut, and the lips had crumbled away, leaving him to be in a constant state of hideous grinning. Somehow, the eyes hadn't rotted to dust, and so they were bulging and wide with the absence of lids.

"Jesus." The Fallen whispered. He took another look around the storage bay.

There were others too, snugly hidden among the floating crates and behind strut-pylons. They all reached out with dead arms and splayed dead legs. All of them grinning with rotted teeth and lidless eyes.

"Bio-signatures are blank." He cringed as he floated closer to one of the dead. It was a woman, face distorted into the zombified commonality here, her gray hair flowing over her head like a cone of dirty liquid in the zero-G. A puff from his thrusters steadied him, and he gripped the body's shoulder. It was so thin, that her shoulderblade fit in his palm like a baseball. "Blank obviously. Any detection of enigmatic energies?"

"*Negative.*"

"Stray magicks?"

"*Also negative. Will require samples to further diagnose cause of death or stray inflictions.*"

"I figured that."

He clicked a key on his wrist-console, and a needle slipped out from the projection port above his wrist. The head slipped through the crinkly, dead skin on the woman's neck. He waited a second for a small strain bio-sample to clear the tubes, and then he shoved the corpse away with a disgusted frown.

"Run those by me when you have an analysis."

"*Affirmative.*"

Csssshhhhrrrrkkkkkkkkkk…..

The Fallen glanced up. There was another deep, rattling and metallic moan that caused the whole hulk to shiver. He'd been through an entire cell-block and hadn't run into any true problems yet…

But this felt different, and very very wrong.

His scans could've kept him in the loop, if the damned place wasn't so fucky.

"Can we pinpoint anything through this mess? Focus all scans on a concentrated grid in the areas I'm indicating. Punch through the static, and do one them one at a time if you have to."

"*Attempting.*" His suit chimed. "*Grids one through four: indicated clear. Grid five: disturbance noted.*"

"What kind of disturbance-"

Before he could finish his sentence, the hull quivered, and a sharp crack gave off enough sound that it reached his helm through the void.

At once, the levitating mummies and crates and all debris in the chamber collapsed.

And the Fallen fell flat on his face.

C-DNNKK~! –His suit dented the decking as he slammed into the floor. A cacophony of similar rackets etched out from around him. Heavy crates thundered down and corpses shuffled and thumped, limply sprawling out in the absence of gravity, all still grinning.

"Ow." The Fallen mumbled in the coming moment of stillness.

"*Previously unidentified gravitation system has charged. Floatation in this section of the vessel had been rendered null.*"

"I gathered, thank you." He growled, rising onto his feet to look around.

The Fallen kicked a leg through the air, and he nudged a drum lying on the floor beside him, the latter creaking as it rolled over and hit a strut. Sound waves were uninhibited in addition to everything else, if the obvious hadn't already been realized.

"This is impossible." The Fallen muttered. "The ship's Swiss-cheese."

"Peculiar, that." Conscience appeared, startling him as he strolled pleasantly in a zig-zag through the corpses littering the deck. He nudged one's head with his foot. "Maybe we should ask Frankenstein here what happened: hell-o, do you, speak-a, the Engliss?!"

"God, you're unbearable."

A few key-taps later, and nothing was revealed. His suit could only determine a point of energy buildup that might've signaled the location of a machine or computer. Even with that, the signal was choppy, and it could only be placed in a vague area overlooking the flank of his objective marker.

How did the gravity come back on with so many breaches in the hull? It was like water being completely stopped by a kitchen strainer. It didn't make any sense.

"Maybe the hulk's a bit more active than we planned on it being." Conscience shrugged as he walked closer. "Listen, I can hear all those little worries flowing around in your mind, because you're me and everything."

"It isn't like I can't worry." The Fallen frowned.

"I'm not suggesting you should. I am suggesting to keep the panic outside and focus on analyzation. It could save our lives."

"We don't know if we're risk yet."

From down a nearby ajar bulkhead, there extended an inky emptiness flooded with pure black, a darkness-engorged hallway, devoid of any illumination.

From that darkness came the minute, distant, and hollow report of a ragged shriek. A cry of terrible pain from an ambiguous gender. It was a sound of pure horror, regardless of flesh.

"Oh-ho, we're definitely at risk." Conscience shivered, following the Fallen's grim gaze. "You remember everything we've studied about daemons, right?"

"It might not be daemons." The Fallen sneered at him. "And it isn't a good idea to jump to the absolute worst possibility. It could just be Warp echoes."

Another distant scream, one that floated against all the walls and the ceiling like a passing draft. That one echoed for a bit longer, and it definitely came from the throat of a male.

"Watch our back, please." Conscience implored.

"My back." The Fallen snapped, briskly turning around to start moving for the hallway the first scream had come from. "It's just my back, Conscience. I'm not going down that route ever again, not any more than I already have."

[💀]

The unmistakeable murmur of active machinery touched through the deck. When the Fallen followed it to its source, he revealed a widely opened chamber, one not natural to the artificiality of the Tolerance.

The western face was all tortured metal, the skeletal remains of a series of prior cells that extended several stories into a black ceiling. The ground transitioned from rolling hills of jagged asteroid-stones and patches of mangled decking. There was a crater from one of the space-rocks marring the space just ahead. It was stuffed to the brim with jagged metal and debris.

At least here there was some form of light. He still couldn't explain how and why the gravity had come back, but it seemed that the deeper into the Chechenwaldr he went, the more compact the hulk's composition was.

Strobe-lamps lit a dull green illuminated several portions of the dissected block spanning the west. The Fallen could see tens of little chambers up there, organized around the halved-section of the ship like slots for storage bins. A light flickered in one of the rooms above. For just a second, he caught a glimmer of movement, hidden among the chaotic flashing of the broken fixture inside.

"Confirm contact?" He muttered, fingers wriggling on the handle of the Doomblaster.

"*Negative confirmation. Scans empty.*"

Damn it.

He glanced at his HUD.

The baffling was screwing with his motion sensors completely. It actually seemed to get worse now that the gravity had been restored.

He couldn't imagine trekking through this ship without the nightvision filters. For kicks, he briefly turned the filter off, and felt his heart sink into his guts from how quickly the complete and utterly impenetrable blackness rushed to cover his eyes.

The little neon-green indicators and his green visor provided some dim resonance in the dark, but other than that…

He switched it back on, and looked again at the room above.

It was just the tail-end of something.

For some reason, the imagery of flowing cloth came to mind when he tried to piece together what it was.

Something that sounded like the hiss of an angry housecat slipped from the shadows by his flank. He whirled on a heel and trained the Doomblaster at nothingness.

What. The. Fuck.

"…C-Conscience?"

Nothing. His other half had gone silent. The Fallen swallowed a lump, and he scanned the massive cavity-chamber for anything, even an angry, hungry monster, at least it would be something alive that would mean he wasn't alone.

You've been through worse. Keep going.

He had to fight his own legs to start moving deeper, and he felt his blood turn to ice as he did so.

He should've kept one of those damned smugglers alive, just to cart around as a prisoner. Again, anything for him not to be so solitary in this dark, messed up Spacehulk.

The Fallen managed to be more subdued when a second cat's hiss snuck up from his side. When he looked over: nothing.

Those barely even exist anymore in this reality, he remembered. So what's with the hissing?

Clm-clmmm… -A heavy pair of thuds somewhere in the black.

His sensors were still blank.

The asteroid crater in the center of the chamber was evidently not as it seemed. A warped tunnelway drove through the debris ever downwards, spiraling, like the inside of a gigantic, drained vein. That was the closest route he had to get to the objective marker, as much as he didn't like it.

The compressed debris crinkled and clacked as he stepped down and into the tunnel, ducking to prevent his tophat from getting snagged on any of the metal-teeth lining the walls.

A little ways down, he stopped dead when his boot compressed onto a plate. Metal groaned, and the entire bottom of the tunnel for the next ten feet twitched.

The Fallen's eyes slowly melded down to gaze past his armored foot, and through some minute slivers breaching the dark, messy compactions.

He swallowed.

This required care.

The thrusters in his back-plating kicked to life, lighting up the tunnel a fluorescent, neon-blue as little wafts of energy pumped from the vents. The Fallen hovered another foot, tucking to avoid the ceiling. He slowly started levitating forward and over the unstable patch of the ground.

"*Contact detected!*"

The Fallen jolted in his flight path. He craned over to aim his gun at the way he had come, a large, crimson blip squirming down the motion-detection screen in his HUD as it came closer.

Finally, killing something should help take off the edge.

But what came around the corner was not what he was expecting.

The Fallen's guts sank into his heels as a huge, blanket-like mass of blackness undulated down the tunnel towards him, like frosting rime crawling up metal.

His nightvision filter did nothing to show what was within it. And where it had first been silent, the deep, starving exhale of a phantom throat boomed in near-deafening volume.

The Fallen grunted and pulled the trigger, a trio of purple plasma-bolts flickering out into the tunnelway, lighting it with pink rings as they traveled. The shots hit the wall and spattered molten metal and sparks, passing through the black mass without finding a target.

A woman's scream pierced his helm's intake-valves. He grit his teeth as the auditory-sensors dulled the volume to protect his eardrums. The blackness washed over him hungrily, completely blinding him.

The Fallen stumbled back, and the floor fell out from under him. As the debris crashed, and the woman's scream was joined by the agonized shrieks of so many others, the Fallen descended into a cold void, going, going and going, harried by the terrible wails of those unseen in the dark.

Screams became creaks, howls became groaning debris-mass. The blackness retreated, and his nightvision filter came back, just in time to reveal the cloud of rubble that was falling with him, and keeping pace.

The Fallen cried out, cartwheeling his limbs from the weightlessness. A deck-plate slammed into his cuirass, jolting him down even faster as he grunted from the trauma. Luckily, the energy shields protecting him staved off the brunt of the impact. They flashed white in the dark before simmering back to invisibility.

Something angled and heavy met the back of his helm. The resultant crack was staggering, sounding like a gunshot as the Fallen's head bounced off a jagged corner of scrap walling-in the pit. He flipped end over end twice before finding the bottom.

CSSHHHHHK! –deck-plates flew everywhere and sparks kicked. The Fallen hit the ground and compressed by almost a foot into the metallic floor.

Debris rained everywhere, shuddering the deck and giving off loud clatters, rips and roars. A severed pylon punched through the floor like a gigantic, hurled spear right next to the Fallen's flank, erected upwards and pointing at the way it had come from.

Tin cans.

The Fallen shivered as he waited for the crashing and banging to stop. Stones clobbered and what sounded like a hubcap finished tinnying.

"*Warning! Multiple contusions detected.*" –Chimed his suit cheerily.

The Fallen could only muster a single, quick response:

"…Ow."

[💀]