"We also received a message from the Arcadia," an officer reported. "They encountered Lion's fleet. They are heading in our direction."
"So he has arrived," Guilliman sighed.
"We must prepare a parade in his honor. We cannot receive the First-Found without a welcome. That would be inappropriate," said Lady Euten.
"A parade," I said, thinking what it would be like if he had arrived with his fleet on Caliban.
"Are you jealous?" the Lady Chamberlain asked.
"Not at all!"
"You are. You really are. Because, after all, he is the Lord of the First Legion, the First-Found Son. I never thought you were capable of such jealousy, my lord. Such behavior is beneath you."
Guilliman mumbled something under his breath, something unintelligible to everyone.
"It's quite obvious," Euten added, lost in her thoughts. "He is the leader of the First Legion, and thus the first of the sons, but he was not the first one found."
"What are you getting at, woman?"
"First doesn't always mean best. After all, you have your own Imperium, not him."
Lion. The Lord of Caliban. He looked down on some of his brothers, while he admired others: Rogal, Magnus, and Sanguinius, and even—damn him—Leman Russ. They deserved admiration for who they were. However, he only felt diminished by two of his brothers; only two intimidated him, only in the presence of those two did he feel overwhelmed.
Lion El'Jonson and Horus Luperkal.
"Captain, we're getting distress signals," Grumpy said, checking the signal on the monitor. These months, all these months of practice, finally showed their effect; he was effortlessly switching between dozens of tabs, analyzing everything.
"That ship?" I asked, seeing the wreckage of a ship orbiting in space. I could feel the taint of Chaos emanating from it.
"Yes."
I could sense the Chaos, but my intuition told me to check the wreck anyway. "Trek, prepare the men for boarding," my voice boomed from the loudspeakers in the barracks.
"Get ready, move out! Harpoons loaded and checked! First squad, you take the harpoons. Second, axes. Third, you take rifles! MOVE IT, MOVE IT!"
The pirates were still putting on their old vacuum suits. Miss Nibe, as the pirates called her, was still studying the documents and creating the organs needed to perform the surgery. So, everyone was still too small to fit into the Astartes armor.
The ready pirates ran to the ship's side hatches, and the huge hangars of the Arcadia pulsed with extraordinary energy. Tens of meters high, lit only by a harsh, pulsing emergency light, they resembled hives preparing for an attack. A sharp smell of ozone and grease hung in the air, mixing with the scent of sweat and rusting metal. Organized chaos reigned everywhere: here, someone checked a harpoon cable; there, another pirate gritted his teeth, pulling an ammo belt.
Each of them held a harpoon pistol—solid, clumsy tools, ready to pierce the target and pull the pirate straight to it.
Above the side hatches, leading straight into the void, large, digital signboards informed of the countdown; their red numbers relentlessly marked the time until launch.
The pirates didn't maintain formation. They stood in dense groups, loosely, however they pleased, loudly joking and shouting. Military men, those of Discipline, would certainly set up appropriate, straight formations, perfect for an assault. But not them. Their strength was precisely that wild freedom and unpredictability. They were pirates.
"Everyone ready?!" Trek asked, entering with the squad leaders. He looked at the faces of his brothers; they were ready. "Engage magnetic boots, or the vacuum will suck you out. And I'm not going to save you," he joked at the end.
"Screw you!" someone shouted jestingly.
"TREK! TREK! TREK!" all the pirates chanted, laughing.
"You know what to do. Maximum alertness. The Captain said something's lurking there," Trek said to the squads.
"Yes, sir!"
They stood, whistling and joking, but it was clear that each of them was tense. They all waited for the signboards above the hatches to suddenly light up a bright red, and for the displays to show the relentless countdown.
At that same moment, a group of three hundred pirates armed with heavy launchers rushed closer to the hatches, taking up position. They knew what to do. The moment the hatches opened, their job was to blast the wreck's walls to dust, paving the way. Seconds later, a second group of pirates behind them would fire special harpoons. The weapons would slam into the target's hull, stretching strong ropes between the Arcadia and the enemy ship. The pirates would slide down these ropes directly onto the hostile vessel, launching a merciless boarding action.
With a powerful, mechanical roar, the hatches lifted, revealing the black, treacherous abyss of space. With a hiss of escaping air, the pirates engaged their magnetic boots, feeling their soles slam against the metal floor. This prevented them from being instantly sucked into the void. With grim expressions, they ran forward, stopping right at the edge. In a single instant, they aimed and fired. The projectiles, heated to a white-hot state, sliced through the icy distance between the ships like luminous daggers. In the deafening, terrifying silence of space, broken only by balls of flame exploding, they tore open the walls of the enemy ship, spewing fountains of ionized gas and shattered fragments from within.
"HARPOONS, GO!" Trek ordered, taking his sword from his deputy. He had to leave his axe behind; the Captain had ordered him to fight with a sword to get used to it.
The harpooners rushed to the edge of the hatches, aiming with precision slightly above the freshly torn holes in the wreck's plating. With a dry hiss of compressed air and the growl of electromagnetic accelerators, they fired. Heavy tips slammed loudly deep into the wreck's metal structure, and behind them, strong ropes unspooled like silver spider silk, connecting the Arcadia to the target. The pirates feverishly secured the lines to anchor points on the ship's deck, preparing the path.
An unsettling calm reigned over the wreck, or at least that's how it looked from a distance. The silence that fell after the explosions was unnatural. They didn't know that in the very heart of the wreck, in its dark, tangled corridors, the Darkness had awakened. It was waiting to begin its feast soon.
Trek, clipping onto a line first, slid down. With a hiss of escaping air and the screech of magnetic brakes, he moved quickly toward the wreck. His power sword, buzzing with greenish energy, was already ready. He was prepared to fight for every inch of space until his men arrived, creating a stable foothold.
When his boots landed with a dull thud on the wreck's plating, Trek looked around, holding his sword aloft. The weapon pulsed with unstable energy, and miniature electrical arcs shot from the blade now and then. As he passed one of the metal pillars, the sword's energy warped violently, connecting with the metal structure for a moment like a small bolt of lightning. Around him, dozens more pirates joined him, sliding down the ropes and taking up positions. Seeing that more pirates had secured the only two entrances to the chamber, Trek approached the squad commanders.
"Babi and Bob, you two go with your squads down the corridor straight ahead. Tosh and I are going left. Rook, you stay and secure this spot in case we need to retreat. Remember, the Captain said something might be lurking here, so don't let your guard down." He paused for a moment to see if everyone knew what to do. "I remind you of the objectives: the engine room, the armory, the bridge, the crew quarters, and if there's a lab, we need to find it. Those who find the engine room should try to turn on the power. That's all."
"Clear as a whore's conscience," Babi said.
"Alright, we'll start on Channel 3 just in case."
Trek, issuing short, decisive orders, moved deeper into the dark corridor. Tosh and their men followed close behind him. Using the flashlights built into their helmets, they illuminated their path. However, the deeper they ventured into the wreck's guts, the worse their light sources worked. In some inexplicable way, the further they advanced, the darker it became around them.
The flashlights seemed to be operating fine, their beams were strong, but they simply couldn't pierce the gloom. This was no ordinary darkness; it was an active, light-consuming blackness that seemed to grow with every step.
Continuing into the escalating darkness, they began to feel tension and stress. Visibility dropped drastically; they couldn't see anything more than five meters in front of them. Worse, every time they encountered a fork in the corridor, they had to dispatch another squad, thinning their forces.
Suddenly, from deep within the ship, echoing through the metal tunnels, they heard a full burst from an automatic rifle. It wasn't them. It was one of the squads that had taken a different path. They immediately checked the emergency channel—it was empty. No one reported contact. Only their own men, who had also heard the shots, quickly switched to the same channel, waiting for information. The silence in response was just as terrifying as the volley itself.
No one had joined the channel yet. Even if something had killed them, they should have already been resurrected and immediately reported the threat, the type of enemy, everything. But that didn't happen. Trek hoped it was just their equipment malfunctioning in the strange, suffocating gloom. However, a cold and ruthless intuition inside him suggested something completely different. He felt a cold shiver run down his spine. It was possible he had just lost a few men, and this time, forever. This thought, in the face of their theoretical immortality, was more terrifying than anything they had encountered before.
"Squad 17 here! We found the squad that was shooting!" the commander of that squad reported.
"Report!"
"Their armor..." He broke off, seeing the macabre scene before him. "They're torn open like a can! Blood everywhere, everywhere.... The bodies are gone."
It wasn't a broken machine or a simple malfunction. It was much, much worse. Something had simply devoured them without a trace, consumed their bodies entirely. Suddenly, the cruel truth struck with full force: they couldn't be reborn because there was nothing left to be reborn from. Harlock had always hammered this into them, repeating it almost to the point of annoyance: their immortality only worked if even the slightest piece of their tissue remained, a tiny fragment from which the Black Matter could begin regeneration. Now they realized the horror of what had transpired—all it took was to consume them, to devour them completely, for them to die once and for all. A predator lurked in the wreck's gloom, one that knew the immortal pirates' weak point. It was madness.
Trek focused for a moment, thinking. "Close on me, let's go!" he ordered, moving slowly, ready to attack at any moment.
Babi and Bob walked together, sinking into the growing darkness. Babi tightly gripped his machine gun, its barrel seemingly chilling in the increasingly dense gloom. Bob clutched his battle axe, its blade now just a black smudge. Behind them, dozens of pirates, armed to the teeth, crept almost soundlessly. In this cramped corridor, their weapons could turn anything in front of them into Swiss cheese.
As soon as they found some stairs, they headed up, wanting to reach the bridge. If the engine room was still running, they could turn on all the power from the bridge. Bob repeatedly used his axe to destroy obstacles and barricades that the previous crew had most likely left to defend themselves against something.
The sounds of their breaking through echoed through the wreck's empty corridors, only to return a moment later, now transformed into a dark, monstrous roar of the ship. Hearing it, they got goosebumps. The pirates at the very rear felt the worst, feeling as if the darkness itself was watching them. They walked facing the void, ready to fire everything in their magazines at the slightest sign of anyone or anything.
"Babi, how long have we been walking?" Bob asked, feeling a drop of sweat run down his neck.
"Not a whole hour," he replied, jumping out from around the corner with his pirates. "Clear, let's keep going."
"STOP!" Bob commanded, staring into the void where he'd just seen a flash of light that seemed to reflect off something.
The pirates hid behind the corner of the corridor, their rifles slightly protruding, aiming into the pervasive emptiness. They heard a step. Then another. And a moment later, hundreds of steps, heavy and measured, like a never-ending march. As if an entire horde was advancing toward them, slowly and statically, with mechanical precision.
Hearing another step, they finally saw who, or rather what, was making those ghostly sounds. Skeletons emerged from the gloom, but not the kind they might expect. These were human skeletons with remnants of gray, desiccated flesh clinging to the bones, looking as if they'd been dug up from some mass grave. But that wasn't all. In place of their left hand, each had a permanently mounted, rusting Gatling gun, their barrels black and corroded. In place of the other arm, an ammunition box was attached to the shoulder, half-open, with visible, rusted cartridges. On their backs, right by the spine, they had strange, mechanical backpacks from which tangled cables and tubes emerged; these were clearly controlling their every movement. A stale, earthy smell of decaying tissue and old metal emanated from each of them.
Their heads, which had been hanging limply downwards, rose with a horrifying grinding sound of rusted gears. In their empty eye sockets, one by one, red visors switched on, emitting an ominous glow in the surrounding darkness. One, three, nine... Suddenly, the entire horde activated with mechanical precision, their movements jerky and unnatural. All the visors simultaneously focused on the pirates.
The rusty barrels of their Gatling guns, mounted in place of their hands, began to rotate with a metallic clatter, shedding a cloud of small rust particles from the casing. The air filled with the smell of overheated metal and staleness, heralding a slaughter.
"TAKE COVER!" Bob yelled, jumping behind the corner.