Chapter 11: Warp Imps
The ventilation duct system of a space hulk was a three-dimensional spiderweb of extraordinary complexity.
These ducts had belonged to different warships hundreds of years ago. When those ships collided, compressed, and fused together in the warp to form this hundred-and-twenty-kilometre graveyard of steel, their individual ventilation systems had been forced together in the same collision, twisted, snapped, and rewelded into something new.
For Rosen, it was the best battlefield imaginable.
They turned seven or eight corners. At some junctions the passage narrowed enough that they had to turn sideways to squeeze through.
The Ork roars and disordered footsteps behind them bounced and multiplied through the duct network until it sounded like pursuers were closing in from every direction at once.
Then, as they passed through the fourth duct junction.
"Greenskins ahead." Number 1's awareness signal came through.
Through Shared Awareness, Rosen pulled up Number 1's visual feed. About thirty metres ahead, below a duct exit, a small group of greenskins was wandering through a corridor.
Three Ork Boyz, a dozen or so Gretchin, scattered loosely across an open stretch of corridor, drifting aimlessly. They clearly weren't part of the pursuing force. Just another small warband that happened to be patrolling or scavenging in the area.
"Push through."
Going around wasted time. Time was the distance between them and the several hundred greenskins behind them.
The instant Rosen hit the deck, the Catachan Fang was already driving into the nearest Ork Boy's armpit, straight toward the heart chambers above.
The Ork Boy let out a roar of fury and grabbed for Rosen's head with its free hand.
Rosen stepped aside and drove his knee hard into its gut.
In that same instant, Number 3's blade cut in from the side into the Ork Boy's neck and precisely severed its central spinal cord.
[Life Point +7]
Numbers 1 and 4 took the second Ork Boy together.
One in front, one behind. Number 1 caught the sweep of an iron pipe studded with welded nails on his blade. Number 4 came in from the side and rear, driving the Catachan Fang into the kidney and twisting upward toward the heart.
The Ork Boy howled and turned. Number 4 was already clear. Number 1 followed with a cut straight through the carotid artery, opening most of its neck.
[Life Point +7]
The third Ork Boy was caught between Numbers 2 and 5. It swung a large curved blade left and right, holding off both Catachan soldiers for nearly five seconds.
Five seconds was its limit. Number 5 cut through the Achilles tendon on its right foot. The Ork Boy pitched forward and Number 2 drove the Catachan Fang through the back of its skull, destroying enough of the brain stem that it stopped moving even by Ork standards.
[Life Point +7]
The Gretchin weren't worth considering.
They scattered in every direction the moment the three Ork Boyz went down. Rosen didn't bother chasing them.
All six kept running.
The footsteps in the ducts were getting closer.
Rosen led the group through a blast door that had warped down to a gap barely half a metre wide, then over a metal platform section.
Then he saw it. A perfect place to go to ground.
A small shuttle of indeterminate age, wedged diagonally into a gap between two deck levels.
The fuselage had been crushed badly out of shape, but the cockpit and the mid-section cargo bay were largely intact, forming a narrow enclosed space roughly six metres long and under a metre and a half wide.
More importantly, the shuttle was wedged in at close to a forty-five-degree angle, which put its entrance at a position that was easy to miss entirely.
"In."
All six moved quickly into the shuttle wreckage.
Number 2 went in last. Before pulling himself in, he rearranged the metal debris outside to further conceal the entrance.
Then they went still.
Outside, Ork footsteps rumbled past close to the shuttle wreckage.
"Where did those rotten humies go?"
"Smell them! Smell out those humies!"
"I can't smell anything! It's all rust in here!"
"You useless snot!"
The greenskins didn't give up the search. They swept back and forth through the nearby area, Ork Boyz roaring and Gretchin shrieking abuse at each other, not far away.
Rosen's group waited in silence.
The shuttle's crumpled outer hull blocked most of the sound and light. Inside it was completely dark, with only the faintest traces of light seeping through cracks in the warped hull plating, barely enough to make out the rough shapes of the people around him.
Then Rosen felt something wrong.
Like something was looking directly at him through the metal wall.
"Heh heh heh heh heh heh..."
A thin, high-pitched laugh seeped through the left-side hull plating.
Rosen's pupils contracted sharply.
On the left wall, a face was slowly surfacing from beneath the metal.
A face roughly the size of a fist.
Two oversized eyes, wildly out of proportion with the rest of it, irises a murky orange-yellow, pupils slit vertically like a cat's.
The mouth was stretched wide at the corners, showing several rows of small, sharp teeth.
Two small curved horns grew from the top of its head. The left one was shorter than the right, as if something had bitten a section off.
An Imp.
The lowest-tier daemonic entities of the warp. Listed in Inquisitorial archives as Minor Incorporeal Malevolent Presences. If true daemons were the sharks of the warp's abyss, these things were the parasites clinging to the shark's skin.
But parasites had teeth too.
For an ordinary human, even the weakest Imp was capable of eroding sanity and destroying a soul.
The Great Rift had shredded the barrier between realspace and the warp, and this hulk had been soaking in the warp for hundreds of years. The material structure had been compromised to an extreme degree. For a low-tier entity like an Imp, pushing through an interface this severely weakened was as simple as a fish lifting its head above water.
"Poor little insects, hiding in here trembling?" The first face cackled from the hull plating.
Then, on the right wall less than an arm's length away, a second face emerged.
This one was uglier than the first.
Its left eye was gone. The empty socket was filled with some kind of writhing dark-red parasitic growth. Half its lips had been bitten away, exposing the uneven teeth below and a length of blackened tongue.
"Hee hee hee... six little mice, hiding in a tin can."
The one-eyed Imp let out a laugh that set the teeth on edge. "There are so many big green cats outside looking for you. If I made a noise, they'd all come right over..."
"You're going to die here."
The first Imp ran its tongue across its teeth. "I can smell the fear in your souls. Sweet. Sticky... feed me more of it, before you die!"