Sons of the Hydra Read online

  Backlist More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library The Beast Arises 1: I AM SLAUGHTER

  2: PREDATOR, PREY

  3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

  8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

  9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

  10: THE LAST SON OF DORN

  11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR

  12: THE BEHEADING

  Space Marine Battles WAR OF THE FANG

  A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

  THE WORLD ENGINE

  An Astral Knights novel

  DAMNOS

  An Ultramarines collection

  DAMOCLES

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

  OVERFIEND

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

  ARMAGEDDON

  Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

  Legends of the Dark Millennium ASTRA MILITARUM

  An Astra Militarum collection

  ULTRAMARINES

  An Ultramarines collection

  FARSIGHT

  A Tau Empire novella

  SONS OF CORAX

  A Raven Guard collection

  SPACE WOLVES

  A Space Wolves collection

  Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  PART I

  The Serpent’s Egg

  Spitting Venom

  Turning Tail

  The Viper’s Nest

  PART II

  Snake Eyes

  Snake Oil

  Once Bitten

  Cold Blooded

  A Breed Apart

  Slither

  PART III

  Turning The Scales

  Second Skin

  PART IV

  Sea Serpents

  The Shrewdness of Serpents

  Forked Tongues

  Shedding Skin

  Serpents Beneath

  Political Animal

  PART V

  To Cut The Head From The Hydra

  Poisoned Hearts

  Serpents Change Their Skin, Not Their Fangs

  Snakes Alive

  The Reptilian Brain

  Ouroboros

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Shroud of Night’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  –––––––– –––––––––– –––––––––– –––––––––––––––– –––––––

  Have you ever watched a serpent cross the burning sands? Watched one slither beneath the surface of the sea? They are creatures of lethal beauty. They move with a confident economy, caution and grace.

  –––––––– –––––––––– –––––––––– –––––––––––––––– ––––––– –––––––– –––– ––––––– ––––– –––––––––––– ––––––––––– ––––––––––––––– –––––– –––––––––––––––– ––– ––––––––––– –– ––– – ––––––––– ––– ––––––– –––––––––– –––––– ––––––––– ––– – –– – ––––––––– –––––––––––

  Of our path, I can only say this. We are the serpent that slides and winds, appearing to head this way and then that, all the while our movement taking us ever forward. While our brothers have fallen wholesale to stagnation and damnation, we have retained our identity and purpose. ––––––––––– ––––––––––––––– –––––– –––––––––––––––– ––– ––––––––––– –– ––– – ––––––––– ––– ––––––– –––– Outsiders struggle to comprehend our motives. To the princes primordial we are allies uncertain. We are unmoved by the living lies of the xenos. To the ailing Imperium, with its myriad afflictions, we are both poison and antidote.

  We suffer them all, as they suffer us –––––––– –––––––––– –––––––––– –––––––––––––––– It is the way of our Legion. The way we have made it. The way it has to be. For we are the most necessary of evils and the destinies we craft for others, as well as our own, cannot be denied. –––––––––––––––– ––– ––––––––––– –– ––– – ––––––––– ––– ––––––––––– –––––––––– ––––– –––––––––––

  – credited Alpharius Omegon, Primarch of the XX Legion,

  at ––––––––––––––– (circ. 9–––123.M––)

  PART I

  ‘FOR THE EMPEROR!’

  α

  The Serpent’s Egg

  ‘Initiate burn.’

  The machine-spirit of the Dreadclaw Serpent’s Egg registered the command and responded, the Alpha Legion drop pod breaking away from the main swarm of cultist vessels. Armoured assault boats, hump shuttles and orbital lighters were left behind as the Dreadclaw rocketed ahead of the flotilla of adapted boarding craft.

  While the Dreadclaw streaked silently across the void, the roar of the ancient rocket engines could be felt through the pod’s reinforced superstructure, through the troop compartment, the floor hatch and the descent cradles. Caged in one of these and surrounded by heavy-duty pneumatics, gravitic dampeners and inertials, was Lord Occam. Occam of the Alpha Legion. Occam the Untrue. Strike master and leader of the warband known a
s ‘the Redacted’.

  ‘Aft pictcaster,’ Occam ordered, his voice a cold-blooded hiss. He could hear the evenness of his breathing feeding back across the vox of his serpent-head helm, along with that of his five power-plated companions.

  Again, the craft’s machine-spirit complied, with almost reptilian indifference. The runescreen mounted in front of Occam’s command cradle sizzled before crystallising into a pict-feed of the craft left behind by the Dreadclaw’s acceleration. He surveyed the scene with the confidence of a master tactician, the overlays of his plate optics flushed with identica and estimates of velocity and distance.

  While the Dreadclaw carried the Redacted within its pitted, viridian hull, the freight compartments of the trailing cultships were packed with members of the Seventh Sons. Each a mask-wearing death cultist, the Seventh Sons and their disciples were devoted killers to a man. They were feverishly loyal to Occam the Untrue and his small band of merciless traitors. Faithful to the archenemy Alpha Legion. Devoted to an Imperium of chaos and confusion.

  ‘Boarding harrow on target,’ the Alpha Legion strike master announced. ‘Cycle hull casters.’

  One by one the hull exterior pictcasters gave Occam a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the hazy void and the Absinthia system beyond. Half the void was dominated by the sunburst smear of the Maelstrom. The distant warp storm raged on in silence.

  Within the Absinthia system itself, sun-hugging gas giants and rocky outliers were just visible through the dust. Planets, shattered by ancient, apocalyptic wars against long-dead xenos races, orbited their system star in crumbling stability. These dead worlds were crowded with a blizzard of haulage brigs and the baroque platforia of orbital mining operations. Their exposed, ore-rich cores were plundered by chartered hordes of environment-suited guild slaves. Also in wide orbit around the Absinthia star were system defence platforms and small void forts. With a small flotilla of system ships, patrolling monitors and adamanticlads, they provided security for the mining worlds and protection from the corsairs and pirates that prowled the sub-sectors bordering the warp storm. This proved hardly necessary, however, since the capital world of the Absinthia system, Vitrea Mundi, was the Adeptus Astartes home world of the Marines Mordant.

  ‘Forward casters,’ Occam said.

  Ahead of the Serpent’s Egg was Vitrea Mundi itself: a large, bleak planet of smoky white. The mining world had been home to the Ultramarines successor Chapter for six thousand years. The planet’s landscape was dominated by giant salt crystals and systems of soda lakes. Amongst the scarring of open-cast craters, Vitrea Mundi boasted but one city. Visible from orbit, Salina City was settled like a dark polar smudge about the mighty ‘Bas-Silica’ – the fortress-monastery of the Marines Mordant.

  High above the planet, Occam could see the wreck of the battle-barge Assiduous, freshly returned from coreward sectors where the Marines Mordant had lost two companies of battle-brothers to Hive Fleet Leviathan. Acid-splashed and battle-damaged, the venerable vessel had barely made it back to Vitrea Mundi. Caged in orbital scaffolding and surrounded by Adeptus Mechanicus forge tenders, the battle-barge was undergoing extensive repairs. It was here that the target of the Redacted lay.

  In truth, the Redacted were but one of a number of Alpha Legion warbands operating within the Absinthia system. Like Occam’s small band of renegades, they were gathered under the banner of Quetzel Carthach – Angelbane, Master of Harrows and Arch-Lord of the Alpha Legion. The disparate warbands had come together under his leadership like a pack of opportunistic death world predators. While retaining their own character, leaders and motivations, the warbands joined Carthach and his own – the Sons of the Hydra – for mutual dark glory. Together, under the banner of the Sons of the Hydra, the Alpha Legion cells had secured victories that could not be achieved alone. Like the one they were currently trying to secure against the Marines Mordant.

  ‘Scrambling augur returns,’ Occam said, flicking switches. Addressing the machine-spirit of the Serpent’s Egg once more, the strike master told it, ‘Cut thrust and roll to port.’

  Mina Perdita made her way through the cargo compartment of the bulk lighter. Instead of pallets of freight to be shuttled between sprint traders and a planetary surface, the craft was crammed with cultists. Recruited and liberated from the penal colonies of Korsino 421, where the Alpha Legion had already ensured that serpent cults, death cults and ritual sacrifice held sway, the Seventh Sons were devoted to the murderous needs of their legionary saviours. Dressed in dusty robes, scraps of armour and gorgonesque masks, the Sons still wore their explosive penitentiary collars about their necks. Decorated in the form of serpents, the collars were the ultimate sign of subservient loyalty to their Legion masters.

  The cultists and their disciples stood in unwavering discipline, waiting for the signal to unleash their talents. They held their venom-slick blades and needle pistols close to their bodies, however, and moved aside for Mina Perdita. The Seventh Sons were ritual killers and serpent cultists to a man, but all respected the art of death as it was represented in Perdita’s hallowed flesh. She came from the clandestine temples of the Officio Assassinorum.

  Dressed like a Seventh Son, she carried a cult mask as she passed through the crowd. Her face was already not her own, however, the effects of polymorphine adapting her surgically modified flesh to become a living lie. One day she might be female, and the next, male. Dark-skinned and then light. Her face could assume the broken brutality of a hive world ganger or the clean patrician lines of spire nobility. She was everyone and no one.

  Such was the Assassin’s devotion to her calling that few could even remember – including Perdita – whether she had originally been man or woman. While retaining the name and pronoun, she was just at home in the semblance of one as the other. Sometimes, for perversity’s sake, she made it deliberately difficult for others to tell.

  Regardless of her lethal abilities and gift for deception, Mina Perdita knew that the criminals and cultists wouldn’t lay a finger on her. For like the High Serpent – the leader of their death cult – Mina Perdita answered directly to Lord Occam. She was an agent and operative for their demigod overlords, and as such had the ear of the dread warriors of the Legion.

  Pulling herself up the ladderwell with gymnastic ease, Perdita found herself in the cramped cockpit of the lighter. While a Seventh Son sat in the pilot’s seat, the High Serpent lounged at the co-pilot’s station. Portly and sporting a top-knot that draped down the back of his shaved head, the High Serpent had thrown his own mask casually upon the station console. Perdita grunted before allowing the flesh of her face to tremble and spasm into the semblance of one of the High Serpent’s trusted disciples.

  Freydor Blatch – leader of the Seventh Sons – did not look like the head of a death cult. Unlike his followers, Blatch lacked the physical prowess and sharp reflexes of a killer. The only sharp feature he boasted was his tongue and the wit that proceeded from his thin lips. His ears jangled with hoops and cult icons, while his chubby arms were entwined in serpentine bracelets. He had even had the rolls of belly fat protruding from his cult robes tattooed to appear like the coils of a great snake. Sitting at the station and staring out into the dust-stained void, the High Serpent looked positively bored.

  ‘Perdita,’ Blatch acknowledged, spinning lazily around in the co-pilot’s chair and giving the disciple a casual look. ‘Glad you could join us. The show is about to begin.’

  The Assassin didn’t bother to change, keeping the thick-necked appearance of the disciple. Perdita was unsurprised that Blatch had recognised her. Polymorphine, syn-skin and the practised skills of an actress were enough to fool most people. They were not nearly enough to fool Blatch, however, who had long been in the business of deceiving others. Most of the time the High Serpent recognised her, but even he had his blind spots.

  A consummate charlatan, Freydor Blatch had made it his life’s work to move between the ranks of the Ecclesiarchy and the cultish groups of heretics fes
tering in the underbelly of various cardinal worlds. Perdita had heard that Blatch had grown up on Laurentia Secundus, a Schola Progenium prodigy. A wastrel, too impressed with himself to settle for the life his drill-abbots had planned for him, Blatch had moved about the Ecclesiarchical planets of the Crozier Worlds like interstellar flotsam. Assuming the guise of pontiffs and cult figureheads with fraudulent ease, Blatch had garnered wealth and influence. That was before coming to the attention of the Alpha Legion and accepting an offer from Occam the Untrue that he could not afford to refuse.

  Mina Perdita could neither have accepted nor refused such an offer. Her temple training and brutal Officio Assassinorum indoctrination made choice an illusion. The Holy Ordos of the Inquisition had despatched her to infiltrate the Sons of the Hydra and assassinate Quetzel Carthach, Arch-Lord of the Alpha Legion. She had failed, and death would have awaited her if it hadn’t been for the intervention of Lord Occam.

  Disguising her failure as that of another, Occam took her as his prisoner. Too valuable a tool to be allowed to rot in a cell, he broke her. He shattered Mina Perdita and reassembled what was left into something both lethal and loyal. Now she was his. Keeping knowledge of Perdita’s infiltration and intended assassination from Carthach himself, Occam the Untrue engaged her lethal talents for the Redacted. And so, that was how a trained killer and a professional con artist came to work for the renegade Space Marines of the Alpha Legion.

  ‘Aren’t you watching it?’ Blatch said to the pilot, getting out of his seat to slap the cultist across the back of his shaved head.

  Perdita narrowed her eyes and peered through the cockpit canopy. The Dreadclaw drop pod carrying her masters had streaked off before shutting down its thrusters. Like a warped and blossoming flower, the rolling pod opened its landing claws, beneath which lurked the venomous threat of Alpha Legion infiltrators.

  Blatch leant forward and depressed a vox stud on the co-pilot console, encoding an open channel: ‘All craft – cut thrust.’

  Like the Dreadclaw, the flotilla of cultist boarding craft killed their engines and drifted with inertial grace towards the Assiduous. The Assassin felt the deceleration through the deck and reached up to steady herself against the low ceiling of the cockpit. She watched the Serpent’s Egg hurtle towards the Adeptus Astartes flagship, the battle-scarred behemoth seeming to grow before the silent advance of the lone pod. The launch bay of the battle-barge’s hammerhead prow section gaped open before the spinning Dreadclaw, like the mouth of some great beast of the void.