Screams of Chechenwaldr
4
The Monster Inside
{Transformers Fall of Cybertron OST: Transport Flight}
He almost missed it. Only a quick cough of his thrusters saved him from plummeting off the side and down into the mountains below.
The Fallen flipped on his own axis, landing boot-first onto the solid extension house from whence one of the massive harpoon cables was sticking out from.
The wind howled, and as he tried to stand up, the funnel almost swept him off the deck. Stumbling madly for a moment, his suit's sensors kicked in, and the mag-heels adhered to the metal, fixing him from the peril.
"*Dangerous altitude levels detected! User is advised to find proper vehicular relocation.*"
"Oh shut it." The Fallen clicked off his AI, his heel rapping hollowly as he took a struggling step forwards.
WwSSSHHHHH~! –yelping, he steadied against another tornado-strength whoosh of wind. Keeping himself stood on the housing-block at least gave him time to think.
He knelt, mag-palms on his gauntlets affixing beside his boots. He'd have to monkey-crawl to navigate the exterior of the ships. His gaze swept the overwhelmingly scrappy Ork hull. He could try to blast his way inside and fight towards the boarding nose. Something told him that by the time he cut through all of those Orks, it'd be too late, assuming he'd actually win.
Or.
He looked over the rim of the mount-block.
The colossal cable gave off wobbling choruses in the wind, sounding like a gigantic spring being jittered against a wall. The distance to where the harpoon was lodged with tens of others in the flesh of the Marathon was flyable, probably over forty feet, but flyable.
Suddenly, something smacked into the Fallen's face, his shields flaring, his head being kicked back from a heavy force.
Bolts whizzed past him and clattered about the decking. Just below the cable was a ratty gang of gantry walks. There was a bellowing platoon of green, piggish creatures scrambling about.
Orks.
Each one of them was over six feet in height. They brandished ugly rifles, brutish axes, fat pistols and swords, and even spears. The wind was giving them hell too. Many of them were gripping the shanty guard walls of the gantries. One of the Orks tried climbing up the hull to reach him, but an errant gust of cyclone's wind slammed him face-first into the plates before he tumbled down into the aerial dogfights flickering between the ships and the mountains.
The Fallen de-magged his limbs, giving himself a prepping few breaths before he leaped like a lemur off the side of the house-block.
His hands gripped and spiraled clockwise on the boarding cable as he used it for momentum. He hurled towards the gantries, his thrusters guiding the distance.
A second later, and the brutish cries of the Orks became loud and in his face. He landed among them by gunning his thrusters and purposefully stamping down with his heels.
The EMG concussion from his shields ruptured vital organs, shattered bones and split open flesh. A small mountain of Orks went flipping and careening in all directions, their squeals and screams being lost on the wind tunnel. Buckets of blood spattered the Fallen, flickering away and off the energy barrier encasing his form. As he rose from the sopping viscera, an Ork jumped from one end of the gantry, an axe in both its big hands as it swung.
The Doomblaster cracked twice, vaporizing each of the Ork's knees in mistings of gore. The howling beast tumbled forwards, allowing the Fallen to connect its face with his knee. The blow shattered its skull, before he batted it over the railing with a strike of his plunger.
More Orks came in trundling landslides of green muscle, howling mouths and swinging blades. The Fallen spread his stance and jogged into the cone of the charge. The Plunger of Doom arced up, a cluster of limp, cartwheeling corpses flipping away with trails of globular blood. He mowed down an entire mob with the blaster, squeezing the trigger and advancing with his eyes down the iron-sights. He had to duck and twist when an Ork weathered having its arm blown off, and swung at him anyway with the axe in its other hand. The Fallen weaved under his elbow and shoulderchecked the xeno over the guard wall.
Butchering the fodder provided some warming up that the flight in the Lightning hadn't been able to do, and in some ways, it was marginally entertaining. But this was distracting him.
Limp corpses with shattered skeletons flipped away in reams, the Orks shrieking and squawking out ragged, terrible death-cries as they were slain. One of the Greenskins shouldered through a mob wielding a gun that was so big, it took over his entire back and shoulder with a gripped-rig fed by a pair of clinging drum barrels. The deffgun rattled with ear-piercing coughs that muted the Ork's manic laughter. The Fallen's body jerked as a series of heavy bolts exploded or slacked off his shields.
He pushed through the force and shot the Ork through the face, pulping its chest with a dismissive lash of his heel. Another mob of tumbling Orks spilled down the gantry he had come from, advancing over the highway of gore and corpses he'd left in his wake. The Fallen pulped an Ork into the floor with his plunger, rattling the whole gantry-list as the gravitonic powers in the toiler-wear dented the decking inwards and loosened rivets. He throttled the power for his back-thrusters, bracing to avoid lifting off. Flesh singed as a troupe of Greenskins were sent reeling with their faces and chests melting off their bones from the white-heat.
The Fallen spun and brought his projector-nozzle to bear: a cluster of sticky plasma grenades coughing out of his wrist and affixing to the gantry deck.
The explosion screamed on the wind and cut the bridge in two. The section that the fresher mob of Orks was on dipped forward like a truck's ramp on screeching struts. It deposited the whole yowling crowd down into the aether and mountains below like a bucket spilling out liquidized earth.
Suddenly, a bellowing warcry overtook the panicked wails of his victims. The Fallen spun around just in time to see an axe whose head was made of two whirring, grimy buzzsaw blades swinging towards him.
The blow sounded like an ingot being thrown into a woodchipper as the axe dug into his chest. His energy shields flared and the warning klaxons screamed as the heavy Choppa ate them away with alarming celerity. There was an eight-foot-tall Ork grinning at him over the pommel of the polearm, his jaw armored with a dual-tusked metal mandible plate painted with checkerboards.
The Fallen roared and snapped the huge axe off its pole with a downwards strike of his plunger. The motor exploded and showered them both with shrapnel. That finally did it, and the Fallen's shields clapped away into nothingness, his HUD going red inside his helmet as he was left exposed.
The Ork Nob distanced himself, tossing the useless handle away before ripping a Slugga sidearm free of his hip. Two shots missed but one bolt hit the Fallen's chest, blowing up and leaving a scorched rent in the synthetic weave. The human flung himself forwards, a shot from his Doomblaster penetrating in and out the other side of the Ork's ribs. His plunger amputated the Nob's forearm and the subsequent pistol with a wet crack. When the huge Ork bellowed in pain, the Fallen gave a kick of his thrusters, matching the Nob's taller height, and head-butted him right between the eyes. The Ork's face compressed into his skull like a scrunched, bloody pancake, and the towering corpse collapsed.
Before he could be pinned again, the thrusters flared on full power, and the Fallen rocketed off the gantry-array, aiming for the breach in the Marathon's comparatively organized hull.
A gust of wind shot him off course. His shields had just started to come back when the Fallen grunted, and he was slammed bodily into the hulk of the Ork frigate. He crawled down the shattered plate and took off again for the breach, ignoring his weak shields.
The Fallen used his shoulder to penetrate a loose section of the Marathon's innards. He rolled through the broiling cone of flames and wreckage, landing with a heel-bound skid into a wrecked service capillary.
He could visually identify almost three layers of decks coinciding with the scorched mass of the Ork ship buried in the hauler's guts. The Orks poured out of breaches ripped through their ship's flesh, out of thick bulkheads, and some were even crawling up the cables linking the harpoons. They threw themselves at the exposed decks of the ship, many falling to their deaths in the flaming wreckage or out of the ship completely to the skies below.
The Fallen picked out clusters of human soldiers, PDF troopers and naval ensigns wielding Las weapons and Autoguns. The Orks stampeded over the reams of casualties these defenders inflicted, before breaking their formations in whirlwinds of bloody melee.
"*This is Marathon! Repelling teams have been dispatched! There are breaches in several main sections, the Orks are overwhelming us! We need counter-boarders!*" –One of the Marathon's bridge crew, a woman, came crackling through the comms.
Think fast.
The Fallen jump-jetted over the burning gap, landing in the rear of a flow of Orks overwhelming a thin line of PDF. He butchered his way through the madness, plunger swinging, Doomblaster barking.
"Get back." –His voice bellowed out to the Guardsmen, enhanced by the amplifiers in his helm.
Awestruck men and women clad in burnt fatigues with hell on their faces staggered away, dragging off their wounded as their rearguard peppered the Orks with Lasfire. The Fallen bellowed as he stomped on a Nob's face, turning his head into jelly.
One breach was slaughtered. Secure.
But there were still so many more.
Some chambers and passages that the frigate had bored into had been sealed by emergency bulkheads, somewhat stabilizing and controlling where the Orks could enter the Marathon. However, there were still tens and tens of passages and cellblocks that the ramming maneuver had cracked open like cans, and the Orks were eager to messily do away with the vulnerable contents inside.
The Fallen didn't know how long he spent inside the breach, butchering and killing and maiming and slaughtering in an almost endless procession. He killed hundreds and hundreds of Orks. His Doomblaster mowed down entire formations, his plunger crushed and pulped all the mobs that got close.
When the Fallen swept a Nob's legs out from under him, he peppered the Ork's torso with the Doomblaster when the beast tried to rise. A light weight locked over the Fallen's foot.
He looked down, and a little goblin-like creature snarled back up at him, its teeth grinding uselessly against the energy shielding as it tried to gnaw on his leg.
The Fallen sneered, a whip of his blaster's handle knocking the Gretchin's head off his shoulders in a spurt of deep red blood.
Skittering around the big Ork's came scrawny, groveling little horrors wielding knives and even forms of tools such as hammer and screwdrivers. There were hundreds of them, maybe ten for every Ork in some cases.
The Fallen didn't even give the Grots the liberty of dying from his weapons. He stepped on them with bloody crunches and squashes as he killed their larger kin, punting them like footballs, liquidizing their trembling bodies with his heels, eviscerating them when they leaped at him with the butt of his blaster.
It still wasn't enough.
"*The Mercenary went down against the Marathon.*"
"*Negative! The repeller teams on the Marathon claim he's alive and helping them!*"
"*That's not possible.*"
The Fallen was too busy screaming, roaring and killing to bother announcing his presence in the comms.
"Get up. Run."
He yanked a scrabbling Guardsman out from under the mass of the Ork that had been pummeling him. The Fallen snapped the xeno's neck and threw away the corpse.
"Thank you." –A woman in PDF garb called as she and her squad hurried down the passage for the emergency seal.
The Fallen was gone already, rocketing towards another chaotic brawl in the lower sections of the breach, desperate to save as many as he could.
Here, however, the Orks hadn't cornered a batch of defenders.
They had used magnetic explosives to finish ripping open a ceiling panel grid in one of the Marathon's belly-mounted storage lockers.
One filled with women and children.
[💀]
{EVE Online OST: Hidden Momentos}
-The Fallen screamed, and it echoed down the corridors of the Spacehulk.
Defiance could only be harbored so much before it lost its weight. He stalked down the halls, with an expression of hate wrought upon his face. Hatred for being reminded, for the entity making him see it again.
"It changes nothing." Conscience softly spoke to him, in a rare moment of perhaps comforting intention. His other half knelt when the Fallen collapsed in a stoop on the deck. "You can't let this thing weaken you in such a way. Some of these stories are just unavoidable."
"-It was avoidable!" The Fallen barked, his breath wheezing. For the first time since he'd boarded the Chechenwaldr, his composure began to slip, and he could feel the entity on the air, swelling with accomplishment as it finally found a chink in his mental faculties' armor. "I wasn't fast enough."
"You were faster than anything the Imperials had!" Conscience gawked. "Sublight engines, fightercraft, an incoming fleet of reinforcements and the arms of a million soldiers! You were the only one who got there exactly on time, exactly in the thick of the fighting! You can't seriously let this thing- this- this freak that's trying to fuck with you, you can't let it make you question yourself? Not over something like that!"
"Conscience." The Fallen gasped, wrenching his eyes shut when more distant screams whispered in the backdrop of the passageway. His chest felt like shattered glass. His heart was in his throat, and cold shower's head of dread had wetted his shoulders.
What had happened.
The past.
The truth, actually.
The truth and root to so much that he hated within himself.
"Way ta leht da lads ave deir dessertz."
The Fallen and Conscience both looked up.
The Nob that he had killed so long ago on the gantryway of the Ork ship, the one with the iron-jaw plate, stood in the passage, leaking puss and gore from where his face had been. He spoke with no mouth, just a gurgling trench that had blended everything together into a mosh-pit of blood and ruin.
"Makes ya wondh why ya even giv a Grot's-arse bout it all." The Orks burbling voice hitched as his green throat flexed, like some sort of sick ventriloquist using themselves as the dummy. "One puny little hoomie cant stop it, da way dese werlds werk."
"He can still kill all of you." The Fallen snarled, foam gathering in the back of his mouth as he stared utterly enraged daggers at the walking corpse. "The only good Ork is a dead Ork. You mass-murdering, animal mother fucker. There'll come a day. A day I finally find the last of your filthy, disgusting kind and butcher them after a war of extermination. I am your end, Ork. You think any of the others in this place are going to do it? You're mistaken. Not even the C'tan. It's going to be me. I will kill all of you."
The Ork Nob collapsed into broiling, dusty black smog. Throaty and bellowing laughter began to bounce up and down the passages. The volume was so high, that it appeared as if the walls themselves were now cackling in hysterics, closing in on him and locking the Fallen in pure darkness.
"Pointless." –The whispers harassed. Tens of them. Tens of whispering voices.
"Fool."
"Useless."
"Killer."
"Manipulator."
"Waaaggghhh~!"
The mutterings and secrets were scattered when a deafening warcry took over the air.
The Fallen looked up from the floor, seeing what he saw on the Marathon.
An advancing mob of tumbling, roaring, spittle-trailing, axe-wielding Orks came for him, scrambling over one another in their bid to swarm and tear him limb from limb.
The Fallen growled like a dog, mounting himself on all fours as he prepared to leap. The air flickered, a brilliant blade of neon purple plasma bursting to life from his wrist, the Plunger of Doom whooshed as the cup became bathed in liquid flame, illuminating the passage a sickly combination of pink and yellow.
With abandon, he sprung from the deck wildly, howling at the top of his lungs as the need to kill and rip and break overwhelmed his senses.
He hated Orks.
Every single one of them was going to die, and then, only then, would he kneel to drink their blood.
[💀]
{DOOM Ost: Residual}
The inside of the impromptu passenger bay was not designed to hold people. The Marathon was a belt runner, filled with tens of one-way vaults built for bulk, and the storage of unrefined ore veins dug up from asteroids.
With only one sealed bulkhead to escape from for the refugees staking it out in the massive ore-vault, the chamber quickly started to become a quagmire.
The Orks were merciless, purely because their minds weren't even capable of processing the value, much less the existence of morality. Squealing families, habwives, terrified children, infirm and elderly, scattered like cockroaches under a heated light from above as the Orks poured through the detonation-breaches. Women were halved by axes, children were stepped on like they were incessant rodents. The Orks hacked, stomped and shot with abandon, some of them even cackling as the mindless target-practice abided their sick sense of entertainment.
When the Fallen killed his way through one of the breaches, he landed in an ocean of mixing gore. It spattered up to his knees with contrailing globs. He was transfixed in horror for only a moment.
A laughing Ork hit him across the face with a knife bigger than his arm. The Fallen fell back into a pile of corpses, a pair of bloodstained, pale-skinned women, the last expressions of terror still wrought on their faces as they drowned the floor with their spilled vitality. One of them was clutching a swaddled ball of cloth, the infant within wasn't even in one piece anymore, because an Ork had shot it and her with a Slugga bolt.
As the Fallen stared at the viscera, another Ork turned from spraying the mixed crowd of allies and victims with gunfire, trundled over, and went to use his rifle as a blunt.
The Fallen woke up from his stupor, and rolled through the gore, almost slipping as he tried to right himself. His fist entered the Ork's chest and burst out his back, crimson-slicked fingers clenched around a ragged section of the alien's spinal column.
The Fallen ripped upwards and split the Ork's head and shoulders in two with his augmented forearm and wrist. He ran the spinal sect through another Ork's eye before pulping his guts with his other gauntlet.
The Fallen's plunger returned and it swung to and fro, limp Orks tossing around the great ore-vault in bouts, where they slammed into the ceiling and left blood-slicks down walls to join the mixed carpet of the dead.
Obscenities of a poet left the Fallen's lips. He had no other way to so express the sheer rage he experienced from what he had seen. He shot down clusters and clusters of Orks, crushed them, beheaded them, disemboweled them, beat them with their own severed limbs. He crumpled whole faces in his fists like they were balls of paper. He studded corpses with sticky plasma-grenades and kicked them into the clusters of Orks still pouring through the gaps. His shields collapsed and would not recharge as axe blows blunted off his armor, rounds burst against the plate and green fists bounced off his cuirass as the Orks feebly tried to grapple him as he killed them.
Suddenly, the slaughter wasn't so straightforward. The mobs of Orks had completely lost interest in the scattered remnants of the refugees as they escaped through the shipping archways on the other side of the chamber. Some of them on the outskirts of the engagement were backing away, their bloodthirst drowned in an uprising of terrible realization.
The Fallen couldn't stop bellowing as he killed and killed and killed. Fountains of gore coated him a thick red, and sloshed down the deck like crimson rivers. He had become a tornado of violence. Every Ork who was caught in proximity seemingly came apart with rips of flesh and snaps of bone.
More and more dead Orks covered the floor.
Landing over or beside the smeared remnants of babies, serenely still old men and pieces of their wives.
With his amplifiers cranked to their max volume, the Fallen split open a Nob's ribcage like a gruesome blooming flower.
Then he rose in the fleshy, twitching detritus, reared back his head, and screamed.
With the vox-vents catching his voice, he sounded like a bellowing titan. His voice reached such high volume, that it shook the walls, caused the rivers of blood to ripple, and sent Orks reeling from him with their piggish faces scrunched in agony. Some of the Orks had blood trickling from their pointy ears, some bled from their eyes and noses.
The Fallen couldn't even feel the strain on his throat.
All he could keep doing was scream and scream and scream.
The air roared, the Plunger of Doom flickered to life, its cup catching on fire and howling challenge. The plasma-blade snarled to life out his other arm's wrist.
One of the Ork Nobs in the mob hollered out something in his bestial dialect.
The Fallen couldn't hope to translate it directly, but he knew exactly what it meant, as the squadrons of Orks started to clamber over one another, the whole mob fleeing for the detonation-breaches in sheer panic.
The Fallen threw himself into them, relishing their cries of pain as he cleaved and slammed and lopped them down with his melee weapons like a scythe to crops. More and more of the Orks started crying out the same thing.
Run.
-For something even more terrible than them had boarded the Marathon with them.
[💀]
Wherever his frantic retreat had taken him, it was a place bathed in dim green light, and the grungy walls were encrusted with some long-gone chemical solvent that had flowed freely at hip-depth.
Maddnut heaved as he jogged across the chamber, only stopping when a huge, discus shape was revealed in the dim light blocking his path.
After a moment of examination, he saw that it was a big bulkhead, mechanical, and angling downwards like an overcompensated cellar-door.
There was a latch-terminal nearby. The Mek gazed with panic back down the dark hall he had come from, and scurried over to the lever. He gave it a yank, grumbling with relief when a small klaxon chirped, and steam began to waft from the edges of the hatch.
Metal shrieked, and the deck quivered. The massive plate arched up and up, and as soon as he could clear it, the Mek ducked and threw himself down the portcullis.
He landed at the bottom of the shoot, heels hitting solid metal. There was an alley-passage ahead, and it thrummed quietly as Maddnut hurried between the two metallic alcove walls. His footfalls challenged the pattern of thrumming only minutely.
Th-ruummm…Th-rummmm
-It sounded like something was meticulously and slowly pulsating. One could easily have mistake the guts of this behemoth to be the belly of an actual beast of flesh. Maddnut ducked his skull-antenna and kept running. He'd been doing nothing but since the shadows had come, the darkness controlled by whatever was on this ship.
He supposed it all made sense.
He was supposed to be dead, with Steltha, back on Dellos. Every other Ork there as far as they were concerned had been pounded into wet dust by the Guard. It felt like something besides the errant unpredictability of his machinery had gone wrong, like they had both cheated fate of their destinies.
Now of course, for most Orks, philanthropy wasn't even a categorizable fart on the wind, and Maddnut was the last one in all of this who should've even recognized the presence of spirituality.
But then again, he hadn't exactly had a choice when the thing inside this ship had started chasing him.
Whatever that thing was.
In all his years, he'd never seen anything like it. There were stories of Ork shamans who had power over weird stuff, but Maddnut had never witnessed one of them for himself. Psykers were rare among humans, they were doubly so among Orks. Probably one out of every million Orks that survived spore-incubation was even applicable to begin to understand Warp energies.
It could've been the Chaos Crazies, he thought as he ran.
Humies weren't supposed to grow the limbs those whackjobs did, nor were they supposed to get as big as they did.
Not aside from Space Marines, but as far as Maddnut was concerned, the latter didn't exist. He and Steltha had never seen one, and they hadn't met any Orks who had seen any either.
All stories and rubbish. Humans were too weak to create such modifications.
But Maddnut was concerned with the psionics here. Whatever was living inside the ship had mad power of the Weird.
"Ain't nuffin I can build ta elp dat." He grumbled incessantly to himself, out of breath as he sought salvation in the foul-smelling sewer tunnels. "Steltha's on his own he iz. Gotta find da right bitz, build meself anuvver tellyporta, and I canz get da ell outta here!"
He needed scrap, metal, parts, rivets, screws and plates. He needed to scavenge. Somehow, picking off the dead in the many battlefields he and Steltha had been to seemed safer than this.
Where did one even begin to look? He couldn't just start ripping the whole ship up with that thing looking for him.
…Unless…
"Humies are cowahds." Maddnut brightened, pausing to rest against a wall. "Dey nevva wanna go down wit their ships. They gotz pawds, and Fightas, ta run away like little squigs when da bigga muthership blows up."
Escape pods, Imperial aircraft.
There had to be something in this gigantic ship. That was his ticket to escape, and if he happened upon Steltha along the way, well, that doubled as good too, but Maddnut was out regardless. Steltha made good protection in exchange for the Mek's services, but if there was thing finite among Orks to a pinch, it was honor in contracts. He could always join up with another mob.
But first, he needed to find another terminal. The debacle in the battery cells hadn't given him enough time to memorize the map of the ship, or at least copy it down somewhere.
He'd have to deduce for himself where everything was.
He snorted at a dull, yet still foul smell filling the tunnels around him.
Sewage.
Ancient sewage, but piss and shit nonetheless, probably mixed with a cocktail of acidic solvents commonly used in Imperial warship design for cess tanks and disposal networks. All human sewers connected to where they lived. If he could find the right way to go towards the habitation blocks, the blocks connected to where the humans worked. Hangar workers and flightcrew had to be given a cot from somewhere…
Hisssk~! –a light, feline hiss crept out from down an adjacent tunnel.
He probably shouldn't have left the bulkhead open. But then again, would it have made a difference? This thing didn't seem to care about walls or distance.
Maddnut mewled in terror and started running again despite the burn in his legs.
He regretted building that stupid platform.
Getting shot by a bunch of angry pinkskins seemed a whole lot cleaner than what was happening here. All those mummified corpses were flashing back into his mind.
Ironically, right as the Mek thought of it, he narrowly had to adjust his footing to avoid a small pile of three of the same corpses. Bloodless, dry and shriveled humans in ruined naval uniforms, all with their eyelids gone, grins shooting up and down their distorted faces.
Just then, Maddnut clattered to a halt in the tunnel.
There was another body lying across the ground, blocking his path.
He stepped closer, shrinking away again when the dim light revealed a bulbous, drained face of an abnormally large pinkskin grinning back up at him.
The beast-man's limbs were sprawled, and what appeared to be a dark uniform secured with drab plates and a vest covered most of the tattered carcass. The Ogryn had been thinned so much by whatever had killed all of these people, that his armor protruded on its own latches against the ground, his cadaver becoming wilted strains of twigs laid at the belly of wide, opened tin-cans.
In his panic he began to see.
The bodies.
Some of them were different.
Down another tunnel were five strewn piles of skin and bone. They were reptilian, with crocodile-like skulls straining against their taught remnants of scaly skin. Somehow, even without a human's mouth, they were grinning too, like toothy vampires eager for blood.
They were Tarellians, with their Autoguns lying useless and scattered among them. Maddnut had never seen their like before.
His sightseeing was ended when a terrible scream crashed through the tunnels from whence he came. He didn't stick around to wait for the liquid shadow to start flooding down to smother him. The Ork ran.
[💀]
The chamber was so big that Maddnut had to stagger back on his heels to take in the whole sprawl.
A monstrous pair of reflector tanks straddled by wrecked gantry ways acted like capital buildings in the center of a city of pump-stacks and green-metaled block-expanses, ones so big, that they acted as a second open-topped story of the whole chamber itself.
This place was big enough to fit a Stompa machine in here. Not even just: maybe a small Gargant.
There were enough pipes, beautiful clumps of coppery wire, and spidering cables that he had all the parts he needed. There were enough loose plates and scrap lying around that any Mek would've been in heaven.
But Maddnut had abandoned that plan.
He fidgeted as he tried to get his inner-scavenger under control, so he could concentrate.
"Not enuff time." He murmured. "Need a ship furst."
This was the ship's life-support chamber. Somehow, it was still somewhat active, maintaining jointly the gravitational bubble and the oxygen levels. Steam trickled out from tanks and crept along the deck like giant slugs.
But what caught Maddnut's attention was a sprawl of computer terminals on one of the second-level boxes. After nearly breaking his neck getting up a gantry ladder, the Mek started repeating what he had done earlier, and this time, he got the console working after only two punches and a single kick.
He scrolled through the layout of the ship.
It was known as the Finite Tolerance, a battleship.
Humans always had such stupid, uninspired names for their ships. What was such poetic hoshposh in the face of things like Gobsmacka and Da Big Booma? What nonsense.
There was a docking bay running the ship's rib-section closest to his position. It would be a bit of a slog, but if Maddnut ran, he could get there shortly by comparison to rotting away in this hellhole.
He glanced at the floor by his side, examining another of the mummified dead humans lying on the floor. Trying to ignore the hideous grin on the pinkskin's face, he snatched up the Stubber rifle lying on the deck.
The gun worked similarly to a shoota. Maddnut's finger barely fit inside the trigger housing, but the magazine in its belly was obviously active, because when the Mek fiddled with the trigger, the gun coughed and a round punched through the ceiling.
A distant scream and the hollow thuds of gunfire whispered out from one of the chamber's many arches. Maddnut watched the bulkhead and gulped.
He needed to move again.
"Ah nutz." The Ork looked back at the 3d graph on the console screen longingly. He needed that map. "…Mmf. Maybeh… Jus maybeh… I fink…"
A ripped-out panel later, and the Ork fiddled with bushels of coppery wire that he yanked free of the console's hip like they were entrails. He spooled the wire, picking through some of the link-clusters with a finger until he found a small pipe.
Maddnut used his nail to peel the rubberized coating off, and picked free the blue wire inside.
"Desperashun calls fer measurez." He quoted under his breath.
It took a moment of fiddling, but he eventually found the small intake latch on the side of his head, where the cranial bionic-cap and his head-antenna were.
Slipping the bundle of wire-heads into the intake port, Maddnut scraped off from adhesive off the console's interior, and jammed all of the plugs in with a stuff of his used nail. He twisted a few times, grunting in satisfaction when the ponytail of cables remained draping, linking his head to the mainframe.
"Normalleh, I'd get a few volunteers ta test da feery. But I'm werkin slim pickins, no fanks ta Steltha." He mumbled, typing on the keyboard. The Mek reached behind his head, and yanked on a latch at the base of his skull. He quivered, and a highly-pitched squeak buzzed out of his throat. Bands of orange energy began to course up and down the antenna sticking out of the cap. "Ere goes nuffin."
Maddnut clicked another rune on the board, and then, he hit the power-indicator.
The reaction was immediate.
Sparks kicked out from the bundle on his head, and steam started rising from the opened panel. The computer gave off an unnatural, revving noise, and the light indicators under all the keys flickered.
"Wot's da problem now I wondah?!" Maddnut snarled in frustrating, spamming the powerkey with his finger. "Dere aint no differinse between a brane and a board, everyone knoes dat! Jus gimme da zoggin map will ya?!"
Suddenly, a jolt shot up the wires and straight into Maddnut's head.
There was a flash, and a blast of force caused the Mek to shrilly announce a rather feminine shriek as he wrenched off his feet and thrown across the deck. The wires snapped free of his head, steaming, with volcanic tips.
As Maddnut flew backward, the Autogun in his other hand began to scream, bullets flickering out in all directions.
The life-support chamber was a gigantic iron box. Many of the rounds started ricocheting off of surfaces, and within seconds, the whole chamber had become a light-show as orange daggers of death zigged and zagged in all directions.
One of the rounds shredded a control box to one of the reflector tanks. Another wedged through a gap in the protective housing and ignited one of the oxygen pumps layering the upper-story boxes.
The explosion was deafening and shook the whole ship, reams of flames rushing to fill out the city of stacks below as the pressurized oxygen began to suck up the fire. The blaze slipped into the base-vents of the gigantic reflector-tanks, and they both burst in dazzling displays of silvery flame and blinding light. The Chechenwaldr groaned and the whole structure rattled as if the Hulk had been rammed by another ship outside.
When Maddnut hit the rear wall of the now flaming chamber, he did not slide down to the floor, instead, he remained suspended off the deck, arms wide, eyes rolling in his head from the shockwave of what had happened.
"-Zoggin squig-stools." He cursed, blinking and scrunching his eyes. "…Erhm… maybe dat wuzent such a good ideer."
But then, when Maddnut tried to blink away the coronas of purple-blue burned into his vision from the explosion, he noticed that the retinal scars on his left eye weren't going away, no matter how many times he worked his eyelids.
After a moment, the Mek wheezed in surprise.
It was the map of the ship!
It had worked!
Maddnut had literally burned the diagram into his head! Whether from the explosion or some Orky miracle of technology, there it stood. A miniature diorama of the Finite Tolerance, with all decks beheld.
"I take it bakk!" He cackled over the roaring fires illuminating him bronze. "Dat wuz da best ideer I've 'ad in evva! I'm a geneeus I am!"
Another explosion rocked the chamber. The Mek gulped, and started swimming through the air towards the doorway he'd come in through, his gaze flickering to the corona-map he had zapped into his iris as he went.
[💀]
By the twentieth Ork, the Fallen began to realize that he had been tricked again.
The memories and current reality were blurring together. As soon as he saw the derelict, vacant, and dark passages of the Chechenwaldr, the lively, blood-spattered halls of the Marathon erected in their place.
One minute, empty air whistled coldly at him, and the next, an angry Ork was in his face, slashing wildly with an axe or firing a pistol.
Breathe.
Illusions.
The Fallen heaved as he ripped back with his flaming plunger. The apparition of an Ork vanished under the strike into a dissipating mist of shadow. For a while, the Fallen stared at where the alien had been.
When the next vaulted down a tunnel and came at him with a machete, the Fallen turned to face it, but instead of rushing to meet its fury, he did the unthinkable.
He lowered his weapons.
The Ork bellowed and leaped into the air, the blade slicing crudely down onto the Fallen's head.
It connected.
And then turned to mist.
SShk!-sskkk….
-Nothing but wafting smoke.
The Ork warcries ceased, and the tunnels fell silent. The Fallen stuped to a knee, his lungs burning from the exertion of dueling with empty air. He had been made into a blundering fool, slashing at shadows, yelling at nothingness.
"Not the first time for that." Conscience said, appearing behind his shoulder.
The Fallen just focused on calming down, but did give a rude hand-gesture to acknowledge his doppelganger.
"Center anti-wards." He spoke, out of breath. "Get this thing to stop going in my head."
"*Wards at full strength. Emitting psionic frequency.*" –The AI reported.
The Fallen could literally feel a weight taken off his shoulders, the splitting headache he had cooled significantly.
But it was still there, in the background. The air felt wrong.
"*Contact with entity detected. Nullifying chance of repossession, currently standing at: 67%.*"
"Show me where I am."
The holograph came back up of the Finite Tolerance in his HUD.
There, his marker was right in the center of the ship.
Right beneath the bridge, and what was labeled as a subsidiary technical insertion command chamber, for auxiliary installations. The chamber was highlighted red.
"*Scans detect strong source of magicka energies matching the profile of the assaulting force.*"
The entity was getting desperate.
He was right on top of it.
"Redirect all aux-power into the ward channelers." He sneered, rising and running down the hall as fast as he could go. "Let's finish this."
More Orks came at him from the sides. The Fallen ignored them, letting the screeching aliens turn to mist as soon as their fists or weapons came into contact with him. He shouldered through blankets of black smoke, defeating the illusions again and again.
"Cease!" –Hissed a woman's voice.
"Wrong way-!" –Called a man.
"Eat you." –Croaked something inhuman.
The Fallen leaped when something other than an illusion blocked his path.
There was a pair of corpses. He stopped after them to peer back at the uniformed husks soon after.
A man and a woman, dressed in fatigues, with the tattered remains of backpacks strapped over their shoulders.
The voices… the screams.
He glanced at the other end of the tunnel.
There was a creature slumped and long-dead against the bulkhead wall. It had four legs and four arms, its reptilian, eyeless head slumped over a shriveled breast drained of fluids.
As the Fallen stared, the monster's scales crinkled, and the eyeless head slowly rose to look back at him.
He blinked, and again, it was just a harmless alien corpse.
The voices and the screams, and the apparitions.
The entity used the identities and words of its own victims as a weapon. Most of the corpses were the traitor crewmembers who had served on the Finite Tolerance during her war against the Imperium. But so many other casualties here must have been salvagers, scavengers, pirates seeking plunder. The Chechenwaldr had killed them all.
"Distance to marker." He grumbled, taking back off into a sprint.
"*0.08 kilometers.*"
"I'm going to end this."
Just then, another Ork lumbered into view from a tunnel ahead of his pass. The creature was huge, a Nob, with scrunched eyes and several wounds mottling its arms and face.
The creature huffed steam through its tusks before its scanning gaze landed squarely on him.
It was another illusion.
The Fallen kept running, ignoring it as he had the other tricks.
But then, the Ork snarled, mumbling some assortment of curses under its breath that involved the word 'Eldar' –and it raised a double-barreled rifle longer than the Fallen's legs.
{Epic Percussion Orchestral Cinematic: The Duel}
The shoota shrieked, and bullets ripped up the tunnel everywhere. The Fallen gasped when two rounds burst off his chest, reducing his shields and staggering him from his run.
"I found yah, yu bleedin Eldah-pig!" Steltha bellowed, taking cover behind a sprawl of workcrates as he reloaded his magazines. He raised his gun again and started shooting. "Kill da Wierdum!"
The Fallen squared his stance and threw himself across the deck. He landed with a thunk of metal, rolling behind a portcullis portal as the bolts shredded deck plates and punched holes in the walls.
Steltha snatched up a Stikkbomb from his vest, banging the crush-charge on a crate before hurling it at the portal.
It landed heavily by the Fallen's foot.
The human glanced down at it, and his thrusters screamed, shooting him like a missile across to the other end of the tunnel.
The grenade exploded in a shower of sparks and smog, blinding both of them as the soot clogged the passage. Regardless, Steltha kept a healthy stream of bullets clattering in the Fallen's general direction, bellowing out another warcry as he fired with abandon.
"Yous ain't gettin my teef." Steltha snarled, vaulting over his cover, he dumped his empty rifle, snatching up his pistol and an axe. "But I's gettin your ead, dirty Eldah."
The Fallen compressed his back to a drum he'd landed behind, rising slowly. He'd stowed his plunger and wristblade, double-handling the Doomblaster as he peered past the drum's flank.
His motion-detector picked up the big Ork as a fat, red dot.
He was certainly no illusion. That was a very real, very pissed-off Ork.
But it was just one.
The Fallen used the blaster's barrel to fix an angle on his hat.
One Ork was nothing.
As soon as Steltha covered half the deck, the Fallen jolted from cover, a single shot cracking out of the Doomblaster's nozzle.
The plasma ate into Steltha's flank and burst out the other side with a spray of burnt gore.
The Nob snarled through the pain, backhanding the wall of drum barrels aside with his big, muscled arms. He towered over the Fallen by almost three heads. Steltha reared down, bellowing a warcry that cast spittle across the Fallen's green visor.
The Ork swung out with his axe, and the Fallen ducked under the blow cleanly. Steltha met the motion, and against the Fallen's assumptions, he landed his dodge with a Slugga barrel steadied for his cranium.
Steltha grinned and pulled the trigger. The Fallen's shields flared and he was tossed onto the deck heavily, the shot nearly ripping his head out of his own neck from the force.
The Fallen vaulted off his shoulder, a kick shattering three of Steltha's fingers and sending the slugga flipping over his shoulder. The Nob roared, smacking his damaged, green hand over the Fallen's ankle. He threw the human like a discus frisbee, him slamming into a support pylon with a shriek of dented metal.
Uninhibited by the cauterized wound or his shattered fingers, Steltha thundered through the still standing drums, bringing the axe down on the Fallen's head.
"Waaagggh~!"
The Fallen rolled and the axe ate through the floor.
His thrusters righted him deftly, a kick shattered Steltha's knee and forced the Ork to stoop. He followed up with a pistol-whip to the skull.
Steltha cried out raggedly and sprawled on the deck a bleeding, heaving mess.
The Fallen went to execute him with the Doomblaster.
-But then the entire Spacehulk creaked, and the floor rumbled. A wind tunnel howled and a phantom hurricane's breeze swept up every object inside the chamber.
The Fallen's shot punched through the deck in a near miss, the force catapulting him backward and into the cyclone, as he realized what had happened.
The gravity had shut off again, throughout the whole ship. He flipped chaotically across the passage, grunting as he met the wall back-first with a bark of metal.
Steltha was also lifted off the deck. He rolled sideways through the air, piggish eyes locked on the Fallen as he doggy-paddled over the now levitating arrays of cast-away drum barrels.
The Ork grabbed a drum and used the momentum to throw himself down an intersection. Three bolts from the Doomblaster vaporized a pair of drums and punched orange holes through the hull right on his heels, but ultimately without fruit.
The Fallen sneered and steadied himself against the wall, watching as his motion-tracker lost the Ork's vitals as he gained distance.
Fuck.
It had all happened so fast, that it almost seemed as if the Ork really had been an illusion.
The proof though existed to the contrary. The Ork's axe was still lodged in the deck handle-up, and his crudely built rifle and pistol joined the array of floating debris around the chamber, steaming and listless as they rotated in the void.
The Fallen Nano-boxed his weapons, and used his back-thrusters to start traveling between all the objects down the chamber.
So close.
The holo-marker was just a few corridors away.
He could finally find the source of the screams inside the Chechenwaldr.
[💀]
{EVE Online OST: Surplus of Rare Artifacts}
After a few corridors of floating travel, the Fallen came across a bulkhead.
"Sealed." He whispered to himself, his fingers running down the grimy surface as he steadied his free-glide through the void against the door. The door's golden-skull-rimmed console screen read that beyond the doors, the atmosphere had vacated. "If the gravity was turned off, then the emergency doors sealing in the atmosphere had to have been breached, right?"
"*Negative.*" –Dutifully reported his AI. A schematic bubble showed clearly that oxygen was still being pumped throughout the heart of the battleship.
That meant that something was wrong with the life support. Soon, the Chechenwaldr would become an airless husk through and through, just like the outer decks and additive debris of the Hulk had been when he had first boarded. But it wasn't dead yet. It would take hours of him and whatever amount of Orks were onboard breathing- him without his helmet, which wasn't happening –for the oxygen to start to run out.
That was assuming, though, that all of the bulkheads leading out to space were sealed, which they must have been, because no depressurization had happened anywhere in the Tolerance's decks. He would've known when an invisible vortex began to flush him down the halls at breakneck speeds. He'd seen the horrors of sealant breaches in the past. Bloody memories, just like the Marathon had been.
A lot of this could've been chalked up to Warp energies. Time didn't pass right in the Immaterium, and Spacehulks were aspects of it, embodiments poisoned to their bones with its essence.
There might have been hundreds of breached bulkheads. Time dilation and unexplained phenomenon could've been the only things controlling the airflow for all he knew.
Well, enough of the automated systems still worked.
The Fallen found the bulkhead's lever-console. He overrode the Low Gothic blurb on the keys and activated the mechanism. Klaxons murmured, and red flashing lights rotated phantasmally around the dark hall.
The sound of several closing doors sealing in this cell section slammed out in the distance.
Ch-Chung… Ch-Chung… Ch-chung…
Soon, the cell was isolated.
Stand back++ -Read the console.
The Fallen magnetized to the deck, hissing through his teeth as a great whooshing noise rushed around him. His suit locked down and switched to HAZ protocols instantly, sealing him in with his own personal oxygen supply.
All noise vanished, save the muffled thunk of the bulkhead doors sliding aside to give him access.
The Fallen cautiously mag-stepped through the arch and revealed the grand chamber beyond.
It was the bridge of the Finite Tolerance, still enamoring in scale and purpose even after it had become a grave for its patrons. It was huge and triple-leveled. Rows of stations where the corpses of operators lye hard-wired to their machines still sat in the dark. Tens of servitors remained frozen where they had collapsed in the middle of aisles, or where they had been built into their consoles. Some of the corpses were in eternal suspension.
As the Fallen decoupled from the deck and floated through, he was briefly stilled when he realized that the roof of the whole chamber was gone, exposing a slick of blue-black space and stars above, the throat of a long, serpentine mouth ragged with ripped metal.
The bulkheads here must have been sealed long ago when the battleship was first destroyed. It was said an Imperial shell had penetrated through the Tolerance's decks and armor in a purely lucky- or unlucky for the crew –shot. The shell had wedged in the deck upper the bridge and had imploded, exposing the ship's brain to the cold void. Whatever had happened this time to the life support meant that this scene was a portent. Something must have broken itself pretty badly because soon, nobody would ever stand on the decks of this ship again.
Reams of dim blue light cascaded down the spine of the leveled bridge, illuminating the damaged, slumped admiral's throne at the topmost tier of the levels.
The throne held a corpse. As the Fallen used his thrusters to glide over to it, he gripped the side of the throne and peered at the occupant.
There was a slumped man in the seating, drained of blood, and mummified like all the others. Locks of preserved, now stark-white hair levitated around his desiccated skull like the fronds of a palm tree. A naval uniform whose breast had been warped by a stitchwork depicting a bladed, Chaos Star garbed his frail body. There were still bundles of cables eternally linking his opened, bionic scalp to the foundation of the throne.
"Huh, poor guy, he probably didn't get out much." Conscience shrugged, floating by in a hammock-pose with his hands behind his head. His voice emerged unaffected, despite them being in a Zero-G non-atmos environment. Such was the conundrum of his own mind. "You think that's where all the weird hocus-pocus has been coming from? Because if it is, then, sheesh, that fellow's one anticlimactic son of a bitch. I guess it's usually the loudest barkers who are the most pathetic."
"No, it isn't him." The Fallen's voice crawled out in the muted void. "But…" He ran a plated finger on the edge of the Chaos Star on the admiral's vest. The corpse stared through him vacantly, the mummified face twisted, as if the admiral had died cackling from sheer madness. "…If he were alive, he'd probably know something about what's going on here."
"And to think, this whole ride could've been made a lot easier if it was just Genestealers." Conscience huffed, still free-floating as he drummed his fingers together. "Say, putting aside our foul luck for a moment: are you okay?"
"What kind of question is that?" The Fallen grumbled, staring at the dead admiral's lifeless eyes for a moment more before gingerly pushing off the throne's arm. He glared at his other. "You know what's happening in here as much as I do."
"In the Spacehulk you mean?"
"No, idiot. In here." The Fallen jabbed a finger on the cranium of his helmet. "What's done is done, and that was a long time ago. There wasn't any more that could've been done, even if I wanted it to be a different outcome."
"But you're just talking hollowly now, I can tell. Just remember that you theoretically can't lie to me because I'm you." Conscience chortled. "But here's a truthful fact: you blame yourself."
"Who wouldn't?" The Fallen drifted across the bridge, grabbing a station guardrail and kicking his thrusters to cross the distance.
"It wasn't the first time something like that happened, nor will it be the last. Our job, as a Portaljumper, has a lot of negatives that go along with the positives. Think about your job description, the little blurb you'd have on a resume: part-time cartographer, intern in medicine, engineering and historian studies, full-time soldier…"
"Don't say it." The Fallen sneered when Conscience started to giggle.
"Oh man, the unique state that the 'Marital Status' –blurb would be in on your dossier. I think you'd run out of space to put down the names."
"If you started harassing me again in some attempt to make me feel better, I want you to know that it's doing the exact opposite." The Fallen shook his head as he swept through a breached doorframe. "First I have some Warp-freak thing messing with my head, and I start swatting at fake Orks-"
"-Not that last Ork, though. That big one with the fucked up eyes. Illusions don't shoot you in the face to the best of my knowledge." Conscience held up an inquisitive finger. "Education stands true!"
"It's another problem to add to the list: probably a crew of Freebooters trying to scavenge the Spacehulk. There's never just one Ork anywhere. Tonight really is a blast from the past." The Fallen sighed, glass hazing his eyes as he floated. "The only thing worth salvaging now is the satisfaction I'll get from killing whatever's causing the hallucinations. At least I could walk away with a bit less of a hunch in my back, and I won't repeat the Marathon."
"Oh no, the Ship Whose Name Shall Not be Spoken." Conscience mockingly wiggled his fingers at him. "Just stop it. The one thing I've been trying to convince you to do your entire life is to stop torturing yourself like some defeatist prick. People die, sir. People die frequently, especially when war happens. If you hadn't been there, all of those people would've died, instead of just some of them. It's really a simple thing to process, and there should be no weight behind it. A hundred sacrificed so that a thousand may live? That's the best anyone can do, in comparison to just standing there and doing nothing."
"An art you've mastered." Insulted the Fallen.
"You and me are the same." Conscience spoke, his tone turning to that of disappointment as he floated along. "If you think that's all I do in these times, then… Gosh, who can help you?"
"I don't need help, and I don't want help." The Fallen snarled. "Help help help, that's all people can talk about, is how can I help? Fuck you. You can help me by fucking yourself. I swear, Conscience, you're no better than this illusion-casting thing that's trying to kill me right now, and you're no better than all of those fools who were prepared to do nothing when that transport was being ransacked. All you have is words. I've had to fight with words my entire life. I'm done using words."
"So," Conscience crossed his arms, chiming, as if the answer had been there all along. "then just act."
"I am acting." The Fallen roared. With an angered bellow, he used the deck as a springboard, catapulting through the debris-strewn void.
His back-thrusters blared, and the interdimensional warrior collided with a frail bulkhead shoulder-first, smashing the already warped panels inwards with a blasting of liquid sparks. The impact sounded like a muffled clap through the receivers in his helmet. The Fallen- infuriated –floated into a gallery chamber beyond.
-But then, what he saw past the gantry guards lining the flank-walk caused him to pause.
He suddenly had forgotten why he was so angry. He forgot his Conscience, the memories that the enigmatic horror had violated, and played back for him.
All he could think of now was the capsule tank.
"No!" –Barked an alien voice, and the void seemed to thicken with oil as the entity redoubled its efforts, desperate to ward away the threat that had found it. "You do not belong here! You do not belong! You do not deserve to reap what you sow: your history proves it."
[💀]
Steltha snorted and snarled like a wild hog as he tore through the passages of the ship. His eyes were burned, the cauterized plasma-shot had penetrated his torso through and through, and three fingers on his hand were bent the wrong way.
To make matters worse, the alien warrior had also shattered Steltha's kneecap. Now that he had hindsight's company, the Nob realized that that creature was the first real living thing he'd seen in this whole Hulk, aside from Maddnut, wherever that Grot-lover was…
It was the first living thing, and it was no Eldar.
In fact, if Steltha didn't know any better, he'd have said the thing was human.
But that couldn't be right.
No humans he'd ever seen fought that good or that quick. For a moment, memories of the tales he'd heard about Imperial supersoldiers known as Space Marines flowed back into his mind. Maddnut thought they were a load of rubbish, but Steltha had always kept in the back of his mind some glimmer of caution about the supposed hoax. He'd seen plenty of nasty things in this galaxy. He didn't put it past the Imperials to shield themselves behind giants made from laboratories.
But that also didn't explain the source of the mental attacks he'd endured. The human couldn't have been responsible, Steltha had had him for a moment, and the only way his enemy had saved himself was through melee and speed.
Space Marine or not, Weirdum or not regardless, his attacker had royally kicked the shit out of him. Steltha was lucky to have escaped at all.
Weakling.
Fake-Gitshak's words echoed in his skull.
Steltha snorted.
No. No he wasn't about to take a load of guff from some dead git, especially one that had half his face ripped off his skull like it was a sheet of old wallpaper.
Gitshak was the one who got snuffed out by the Eldar. Steltha had killed a drove of them and had gotten away with it.
Back in the present, the Nob finished propelling himself through another arch. He stewed in the dark, blinking with only one eye on his wilted face as he noticed movement ahead.
It must have been the human again, wandering around, looking for him in the forest of floating wreckage. Steltha was ready this time. The mind-games had ceased, and he was acutely aware of his surroundings again.
The Kommando grumbled, patting around his vests and pouches for a weapon. He came back up with a shiv barely the length of his hand from tip to wrist, clenching it as he pushed a twisted plumage of metal out of his way.
He closed in on the shadow, letting the void carry him as he reared back to strike, and then-
"-Gork's arse-~!" –The shadow shrilly yelped.
"Madd'?!" Steltha gawked, twisting and flailing as he tried to stop his gravity-lacking path. "Luukowt-!"
The Mek shrieked like a woman and hurled himself to the side, the massive Nob slamming into the wedged barricade of a fallen pylon Maddnut had been grappled to. Steltha steadied himself, snarling as he shook his head.
"-Gyah, why iz it dat you always get me smacked inta sumfin? Nevva fails it don't." He grumbled.
"Boss! I wuz jus lookin fer an escap- ah, I wuz, uh… lookin fer yu, ah-ha." Maddnut held onto a wall, grinning cheaply. "-I wuz just gettin dat consoley fingy ta werk, and den, dis killa fing came outta da dark! It wuz da dark! Couldn't shoot it, scare it off or stab it proppa. I had ta leg it good." He pointed at his eye. "And, I kno howz we can get outta ere!"
"Wot?" Steltha scratched at his facial burns. "How?"
"I burned da-" Maddnut paused, cocking his head. "Oi, wha happened tu yer fase? Ya didn't crash a plane inta someone again didjya?"
"Shut yer gob." Steltha flicked some scabs away, watching them spin and float off like miniature, crusty asteroids. "Ran inta sum trubble. Dere's an ooman on dis ship, and he's got badarse type dakka, put a ole in me too."
"One humie did all dat?!" Maddnut gawked at the cauterized crater on Steltha's flank. The Nob's growling refocused him. "-Uh, well, I can get us out, cuzz I burned da ship-mappeez inta me eye! Reteenal corronahs I fink it iz. I hooked up da oomie's computa ta me ead. Now I cant evva get lost in ere again!" The Mek triumphantly said.
Steltha managed to glare even with the burns.
"An I don't suppose ya thought uv a way ta reverse dat improvement uv yurs when we get out, didjya? Ya squig-gaggin simp."
"-I did actualleh! I-! …..Wait, erhm… oh." Maddnut sulked, picking at his lip. "…Actualleh, I didn't fink uv dat."
"It bettah not stawp ya frum buildin any of the dakka I need when we get bakk ta werk." The Nob warned. "So wot's yer big palaan ta get us 'ome?"
"Dere's a hangah-bay on da side uv da ship! Everyfing iz so well preservee and such dat dere's gotta be a werkin Fighta or two." Maddnut explained. "We can blast our wayz out if we gotta!"
"Dis iz a tite spot, Madd'." Steltha commented as the two Orks fell into floating paths beside one another, the Mek of course always staying back by a step or two in case things got hairy.
"I can't elp but finkin its been werse mor offen." Maddnut heavily blinked a few times, keeping tabs on the greenish-purple outline of the schematics as he wrenched his face. "Agh! Da colorz faden on da map! Me bleatin rehteenaz mus be fixin demselves!"
"Jus get da hangar-spot memerized." Steltha spat. "Get us off dis Eldah-stankin humie-ship, and I'll fergiv ya fer dat tellyporta bringin us ere in da furst plase!"
[💀]
The smell let him know that he was too late first.
It wasn't from the soil, or the clumps of roots sprouting fingers along the ceiling-expanses of the cave's chambers. It wasn't even from the deceased grazing animals whose rotting corpses decorated the mouth of the cavern in piles of black and red viscera.
The Clicker Wolves had been easily dispatched, it wasn't the danger of these alien animals attacking him that was the true ugly heart of the story.
It was one of the few times the Fallen had longed for something so horrific.
When he had first found the homestead, the man had been solemn and quiet, grim-faced, but the woman, the woman had been beside herself. Moaning sobs were all she had the strength left to muster. The Fallen actually didn't see her face the entire time he was on the property, for she had buried her head in the child's blanket, and refused to detach herself even to eat.
The man had claimed that the Clickers had come in the night. He had killed one of them, with the hunting rifle in his shed, but still, more of them had come inside. They had wounded his wife, as evidenced by the drying, still red wrappages mummifying her forearms where the wolves had clawed her.
But it was not the state of his wife that had the man utterly lost.
The wolves had taken the child. The three-eyed, six-limbed canids native to the Neshfor Steppe were a common plague for the Fuedal states that existed in its prairies and fertile crop-valleys. The cities were safe behind their walls.
It was the farmers who suffered their predations when the wolves' food supplies of untamed grazing beasts ran low during the winter, sometimes overeager packs would stalk isolated homesteads.
And rarely, rarely, the creatures would mount an assault, if starvation was truly the dominating factor.
The Fallen felt a sick sense in that he had some luck, to be there at such an infrequent occurrence to bear witness to the end result.
Still, it was all the same. He'd tracked the wolves, killed the wolves, ransacked their den…
When he returned to the family with only pieces, the woman's sobs had turned into shrieks.
The Fallen had been inside airplanes that had crashed to the ground, or that had exploded mid-air. He had been aboard ships ripped apart by cannon fire. He had been inside cars that had been totaled, flipping end over end after being hurled over bridges or down cliffs.
Nothing, no shriek of steel, rip of metal or crash of aluminum could compare to the haunting sounds that woman made.
Most of the time, the memory thankfully had remained buried, along with so many others of its awful, evil kind. It had been shielded, and the Fallen recalled his journey to the Imperial steppe world back then with only the remembrance of something else.
A condor's cry.
When he disregarded the context, the woman had sounded exactly like the razor-winged predator-birds that lived in the hills sealing in the steppes.
The hill condors would shrilly cry to one another, to challenge interlopers or to find mates.
So that was what the Fallen had turned the experience into.
Those sounds hadn't come from a grieving mother.
It had just been a bird. Some constipated feathery flyer with nothing better to do than scream at roadside caravans over the side of its stupid nest of twigs in a tree.
It was just a bird.
But the entity unmasked that. It made him understand what the sound really was. The bird's echoing cry across endless mountains became twisted, and vile. It morphed before him, deepening, undulating, turning itself into a wailing screech.
Beyond my control.
Never could have known.
"That is precisely correct."
The Fallen looked up at Conscience, his doppelganger standing over him with a presiding gaze over his crossed arms. The Fallen had collapsed into a fetal position on the floor. His other half looked less than pleased, even under that helm and that dashing tophat.
"Everything that this creature is using on you is a farse." Conscience shook his head. "It's all a farse to lure you away from it, because it's weak, and it's afraid of you."
"…I-I was… t-too slow-" The Fallen blubbered, digging his fingers into the cranial cap of his headwear, rocking on the floor. His tophat slipped off, and rolled away on the deck, coming to rest by Conscience's foot.
"No, you insolent man." Conscience sighed, glaring at the hat forlornly. "I've been telling you that forever, and now I have to stand here and watch this, watch you. As you lose yourself in this completely avoidable cloud of delay and evil. You are being influenced by an outsider, a thing, not even someone worth the label of an identity. You are letting them worm their way into your mind, and you are giving them control."
"-I- c-can't stop it-"
"Oh Jesus almighty." Conscience tisked with a sneer. He leaned down, his voice an ashen whisper. "You are disgusting."
The Fallen glanced back up at him, his teeth bore underneath his visor.
"Leave me alone." He snarled.
"After everything you've done, this is what you let get to you? You complete and utter fool. How dare you spit in the face of all you've been given. Your Portaljumping, what you've done for the dragons? The dragons? Have you honestly forgotten them? Your link to reality and your own heart. Why would you disrespect them like this? After they've given you so much? You're better than this."
"Conscience." The Fallen spread out his arms, tears running down his cheeks. "This is it. The armor, the guns, the fucking plunger and this- this damned hat-"
"That 'damned hat' –is your identity, and everything it entails." Conscience jammed a finger in his visor. He handed the Fallen his lost headwear, shoving it into his chest. "Put it back on. Get yourself out. Overpower this entity, and kill it. Remount the Grand Quest."
"-It's all a lie."
"Why?"
"Because-"
"You're weak?" –Conscience finished for him, smiling warmly. "If you were weak, you wouldn't even be here. It isn't about the armor, or the dragons, or your training. That isn't important, but what is, is only-"
"Me."
{Fallout 3 Battle 4}
The Fallen opened his eyes.
A face sneered back at him in pure hatred.
Suspended in the center of the gallery, the capsule-tank had remained powered for the two centuries it had been lost with the ship. Where the depressurization had killed the crew, the sealed environment inside the tube had kept the abomination alive.
Maybe once, in some forlorn age, the creature might have been a human infant. But now, the once frail frame had been terribly mutated and warped into something beyond foul. Extra legs sprouted in diagonal, mismatched bushels from its bloated hips, jaggedly forming a forest around its lower half, like the spines on a pufferfish.
A third arm tipped with a crab's pincer claw craned with three times the length of its body, cramped and stuffed into the top of the tank's bubbling liquid stomach. The face had grown elongated, like some horrific hybridization between the brittle skull of a small human, and the stocky snout of a pig.
One eye was reptilian and centered with a red iris, the other was still that of a child's, glowing white, its opened lids crackling with tiny hairbands of Immaterial energy that it probably didn't even know how to entirely control.
Nested in the center of the chemical solvent bath, heavy, tentacle-wrapped cables linked the beast's swollen, green belly to the fungus-crusted basing of the tube. Inside the glass, it seemed almost harmless, hideous, but ultimately not a threat.
When the infant's angled, tusked mouth opened, and the same shriek that woman from his past made screeched in his ears, the Fallen understood the truth.
The same unnatural darkness from before began to flood like tar from the large dais-arena surrounding the tank as the creature screamed. When the Fallen looked down, expecting the impenetrable black to swallow him, his eyes widened in terror from what he saw.
The darkness was an illusion! It was not really intelligent shadows that had been closing on him.
The sorcery was meant to enshroud.
It was really bushels and blankets of slimy, green tentacles. Each of them squealed and hissed, their tips splitting open to reveal tiny lamprey-mouths filled with human infant molars and bat's fangs.
The mummified corpses! The creature drove its prey mad, swallowed them in the illusion, and drank their blood like a plant's roots to water in the soil. It mimicked the voices and cries of its victims afterward, repeating a terrible and grim cycle.
The Fallen cried out and fell away from the encroaching tendrils. Some of them whipped and rose as they neared the heat of his armor suit. Their tips wetly burst open with sprays of crimson and green ichor, the wails of tens of human newborns groaning out all at once in the Fallen's mind as the teeth dripped.
Scrambling back through the zero-G, the Fallen kicked his thrusters, landing against and steadying on the chamber wall.
In the dim blue light of the cells, he could see the large science-station arena surrounding the tank. Once, researchers and servitors had worked in the stations lining the ring, but now, the whole structure was overgrown with bushes and forests of glistening tendrils. There were more mummified corpses, grinning insanely as if they were pleased with their new homes nestled among the tendrils and flesh-vines that had robbed them of their blood.
The creature opened its mouth again, and another shriek pierced the Fallen's ears.
"Go, man!" Conscience screamed in his head, nowhere to be found in the stead of being heard. "Fight!"
The Fallen wrenched his eyes wide, his expression returning to its usual concentrative fullness. He adjusted the rim of his tophat, the Plunger of Doom and the Doomblaster materializing from the nanites in his hands.
"So you're the illusion master?" He scoffed openly as the tendrils lashed out for him en masse. "You're just an ugly little kid who got drop-kicked out the crib by a drunk, inbred mother. I'm gonna' piss on your corpse."
The tendrils sprayed reams of green gore as the plunger swung through them and severed them all. The Doomblaster barked, scything through the walls of tentacles as they rose to meet him. It was like hacking through regenerating colonies of weeds. More and more tendrils rose out in their efforts to snare him. The Fallen chopped, slashed, hammered, and shot with abandon, the dim chamber now alight with purple luminance.
With a bellow, the Fallen slammed the plunger down on the deck, releasing a shockwave that ruptured a sea of the tendrils. Walls and walls of the things went flipping wetly everywhere, shredded and burst like delicate tissue paper.
The Fallen shouldered through the reams of floating gore, the green mucus slithering away off his shields as he jet-packed for the tube. The blaster sprayed a fine stream of plasma right for the abomination's infantile head behind the glass.
The plasma didn't kill it, however. A previously invisible wall flickered to life, vanquishing the bolts in bursts of neon light and sprayed plasma.
"That won't keep me from you." He snarled. The monster just shrieked at him again and redoubled its efforts to overwhelm him with the tentacles.
The Fallen switched weapons in his hands, spraying his blaster left and right to hold back the tide. He sided the Plunger of Doom, exposing his wrist port, a bundle of grenades depositing themselves across the dais-arena.
The purple explosions cast tsunamis of gore and flaming wreckage everywhere with muted cannon-thuds. Inside the tube, the abomination's shrieks changed to ones of its own agony, not those of its mimics.
He shot at the tube intermittently as he slashed, the invisible barrier flickering weaker and weaker with each hit.
A tendril snared the Fallen's wrist like a whip, his shields draining as the unnatural force compressed to try and crush him.
He ripped it away with his other gauntlet, gunned his thrusters, and spun into the air as a neon-blue top in the dark that cast away the colonies of ravenous tendrils in bursts of blood and gory chunks.
The Fallen stabilized on his jet-pack-slots, facing down the monster as he Nano-boxed the Doomblaster, and retrieved next its larger brother.
The Tube Blaster.
The abomination writhed inside the tank, the cables, and tendrils inside pulling taught as it tried to yank itself to the back of the tube in some vain effort to escape.
Its reptilian eye glowed just as white as the infant's eye did now, crackling bands of lightning building around the tank's metal base.
The Tube Blaster barked, and a pair of heavy plasma bolts slammed into the invisible barrier. With a muted crack, it vanished, and another bolt smashed into the tube with a brilliant burst of glittering glass and spilling, floating globules of chemicals.
The tentacles everywhere withered, and the psionic screams of the monster became fevered and even more horrific.
I have you.
The Fallen nose-dived, zooming downwards, his guns packed away, the Plunger of Doom brandished in both hands.
He raised his weapon, roaring as he descended for the killing blow.
A bolt of Warp-lightning shot out of the shattered tank and hit him in the chest.
A crackle of static and thunderous clap filled his hearing. The Fallen spun out in a vicious end-over-end series of flips before he slammed into the chamber wall with enough force to envelope the metal behind him. He slumped inside his armor, his HUD alight with all kinds of warnings.
HAZ systems compromised.
AI not responding.
Sealants weakened.
Imminent risk of suffocation.
Imminent risk of depressurization.
Imminent risk of 3rd degree burns from an exterior source.
The Fallen's growl turned into a chuckle as he raised a trembling, armored hand to his helmet, watching with fascination the fingers of lightning flickering up and down his armor as the Warp energies began to cook him alive.
Man, Conscience, if I'm the important one, then how the hell do things like this happen?
The Fallen cackled, smiling widely as more bushels of tendrils slithered out with haste to ensnare him.
By the shattered tank, the mutant child was floating in a forest of glittering glass shards and pulsating globs of chemicals. Unaffected by the lack of air, it dangled from the cables linking it inside the tube, its mouth flexing eagerly in chewing motions as its eyes focused on where the human's heart was under the plate.
Sometimes, I hate my job, the Fallen thought, jerking as the tentacles started boring through his suit, unshielded because the damned lightning had shorted everything out. It's really too complicated for a simple guy.
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