Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Lin suddenly remembered the Forge Ship on the Azure Star, the one carrying Tyranid corpses in its holds.

At the time he had wondered why a Forge Ship entangled with the fate of the Second Legion would be hauling dead Tyranids around. Now, it seemed, he had his answer.

If the far side of the Predator's Eye was bound up with the Second Legion, then the Second Legion's Primarch could hardly be unconnected to the Tyranids.

The Lictor's appearance drew a low ripple of shock from the Astartes.

They had expected daemons to come through the rift. Instead they got a xenos species none of them had ever seen.

It was their first sight of the creature, but years of unbroken war let them read the horror of the swarm in its menacing shape. "Where did that bio-weapon come from?" Issaga demanded.

Lin had no wish to look too prophetic. "No idea. Kill it first!"

In an instant every weapon they had set up, long-barrelled and short, swung onto that single Lictor.

The Lictor came through the gateway announcing itself with a shrill screech, and landed to find a hundred muzzles trained on it in perfect unison.

The swarm's vanguard scout visibly froze. Something almost human flickered in its compound eyes — hesitation.

Faced with a lethal threat, it began edging back toward the gateway like a man who had walked through the wrong door, as though it had not just come crashing in with claws spread and jaws wide.

For a low-order swarm organism that should have known nothing but obedience to the Hive Mind, this Lictor was showing far too much initiative.

"It's running!" Lin fired first. His shot tore the curtain off the engagement, and the massed firepower fell on the Lictor all at once.

The Lictor twisted and darted through the storm of rounds, desperate to fall back into the Predator's Eye. In the process it showed everyone present its astonishing agility and its ability to melt into its surroundings. Fortunately the volume of fire on Lin's side was saturating, and in the end it was torn to pieces.

But more Lictors came pouring out of the Predator's Eye. These cunning assassins used the first one's death as cover to slip onto the battlefield, creeping toward the Astartes behind their camouflage.

Luckily these still fairly primitive Lictors had not yet evolved any means of blinding an auspex. Guided by the returns, most of them were picked off one by one.

It was no long-term solution. Thorne shouted across to Lin, "We need to shut the Predator's Eye!"

"Then cover me!"

Closing the Predator's Eye meant Lin had to touch the gateway directly, and wading through the swarm to do it was clearly not the clever option.

Lin swung himself into the battle-truck Evil Sun had built. Neos, at the controls up front, turned around. "I think we've picked a fight with something we were never meant to touch."

Lin waved that off. "You just drive. Leave the thinking to me."

"You got it!"

Neos brightened, plainly delighted. He stamped the accelerator flat and the ram on the nose bit into the swarm like a beast's tusks, crushed limbs and green blood spraying wide, and in moments Lin was delivered to the edge of the rift.

"Oi, Neos lad, see that? Our truck's the best there is!" Evil Sun roared with laughter and slapped Neos on the shoulder, then turned to Lin with eager devotion. "Boss, I'll cover you on the way out!"

He took the roof-mounted big shoota himself and swept a clear patch of deck around the gateway. The warp rift still needed time and Psychic power to widen, and had not yet grown too vast; standing on the truck's roof, Lin reached the rift's edge without difficulty.

The slow expansion stopped dead. The Psychic energy running through it guttered out, like current meeting an enormous resistance in a circuit.

It began to shrink. The swarm spilling out registered at once who was responsible for the change. They turned as one and converged on Lin.

Lin raised his Energy Shield and gave the order. "Fire on me!"

Astartes fire concentrated on the battle-truck. The rain of bolt rounds destroyed most of the creatures surging at Lin; the few rounds and claws that reached him were caught by the Energy Shield, and any bug still minded to press the attack was dealt with by Evil Sun.

The gateway's size limited both the size and the number of the creatures coming through, and it was still contracting. The swarm's attacks grew feebler by the second.

This ancient warp rift was still straining against Lin, but the swarm that had used it to reach the Shanzheng had already recognized a lost cause. They stopped feeding new organisms through onto the ship, and those already aboard began to withdraw.

Had Daenyathos opened the Predator's Eye with Lin absent, the Shanzheng might genuinely have ended up a playground for the swarm. But Lin was present, and so this crisis that barely qualified as one ended just that simply.

"Take a few alive!" Lin called out.

The warp gate was withering fast; Lin estimated it would seal completely before the last of the creatures made it back through. His warning was meant to make the Astartes ease off so they wouldn't pulp every last specimen he could vivisect. But that easing off was exactly the opening the last group needed.

With the fire slackening, the creatures massed in front of the rift. Purple energy rippled across the knotted cluster of bodies and then poured into the Predator's Eye. The rift, on the verge of sealing for good, was forced open by an inch of raw power — just enough for the survivors to escape.

The Space Marines, who knew nothing of the Tyranids, took it for an ability the creatures simply possessed. Only Lin's eyes went wide.

"Psychic power?" He could hardly believe it.

Psychic power was, in the end, the ability to drive Warp energy with thought to produce supernatural effects, which was why psykers tended to arise among beings that possessed souls and rich emotion.

But the Tyranids were pure bio-weapons, manufactured by the Hive Mind.

Setting aside the later Zoanthropes and Neurothropes, which used living psychic conduits and linked directly to the Hive Mind, what right did the rest — creatures without even souls — have to wield Psychic power?

Yet the fact was in front of him. That ordinary swarm of Lictors and Hormagaunts had used Psychic power to return to the far side of the Predator's Eye.

The rift Lin had been suppressing finally closed once they were through. The energy ring supporting it went dark, and the device that had once been moved aboard the Shanzheng because it was too dangerous to leave anywhere else now held nothing but cold silence.

It was shut. Completely.

The brief firefight had been too bizarre even by Astartes standards. They spent a long while double-checking before they would accept the battle was truly over.

But the question still hung over all of them — what in the Emperor's name were those things?

They turned their questioning stares on Lin, and all Lin could do was shrug.

He understood the ordinary swarm, in part. These Psychic-capable specimens he was far less sure about.

Fortunately Admidel dragged over a half-dead Lictor, run through by his Soulspear.

Lin's personal retinue always responded more eagerly to his requests, and thanks to this one surviving captive he was not left without a starting point.

"I'll need to dissect it before I can answer. Ship this one and the rest of the bodies down to the laboratory on the manufactorum stratum. I'll have a result for you then."

The Second Legion veterans set about gathering the corpses without being told twice. But the Imperial Fists Dreadnought cut across them.

The huge machine scooped the bodies off the deck and spoke in a tone that left no room for argument. "I am going with you."

Lin glanced at him and said nothing. Issaga, standing to one side, had objections. "Honoured Dreadnought, a task like this is somewhat beneath—"

"No task is high or low. And I can carry every specimen alone. It is more efficient this way."

That hardly justified a Dreadnought serving as Lin's assistant, but something in the machine's unspoken authority stopped Issaga from pressing. "Then what should we be doing?"

"Clear the battlefield. Make certain no enemy was missed. And contact Kurande. You have a great deal of work ahead of you."

All Issaga could do was watch the Dreadnought shoulder every corpse and follow Lin out alone. Only when it had passed beyond his sight did he turn to Thorne beside him. "His presence is a good deal heavier than yours."

Thorne's standing as an Imperial Fists Captain from the days of the Great Heresy carried weight enough, but that Dreadnought's aura eclipsed him by a wide margin.

"My guess is he was some consul or castellan from before the Great Crusade," Thorne answered. "But if he doesn't want to reveal himself, we'd best not dig."

The Dreadnought had his own agenda, but Lin had to admit he made a thoroughly competent assistant.

"Scalpel," Lin said.

A mechanical arm extended, gripped a dissecting blade with perfect steadiness, and passed it over.

Lin took it, his attention fixed on the corpse in front of him. With the angle calculated by his auxiliary equipment, he opened the chitin shell with a light stroke, exposing the layered muscle and the branching nerve channels beneath.

The Dreadnought's arms assisted with surprising dexterity, passing fresh instruments, occasionally using its integrated laser cutter to help Lin separate a section too stubborn to work by hand.

It was clearly no stranger to carving flowers on an eggshell.

The research itself did not go smoothly. Lin worked through most of the bodies for a long stretch, and his questions only multiplied as he cut.

He still remembered the Tyranid specimens on the Azure Star with their Hydralisk-like features. Those things had given him a genuine fright at the time — and now, on his first proper encounter with the Tyranids, he found this batch carried none of those Zerg-like structures at all.

Measured against what Lin had expected, these creatures were startlingly clean.

Most critically, he found nothing resembling a living psychic conduit.

Which pushed the explanation for low-order organisms wielding Psychic power toward a very frightening angle.

Lin abandoned the corpses and turned to the half-dead Lictor.

On the examination table, the Dreadnought held the thing pinned fast. Its compound eyes still gave off a faint glimmer, as though protesting in silence against the fate closing in on it.

Lin glanced at the monitors. The Lictor's brainwaves were pulsing back and forth in a weak, irregular rhythm.

The level of activity was no higher than that of a human imbecile, but in a Tyranid organism its very presence was an anomaly.

The irregular signal matched what he read in those compound eyes, and from the two together Lin could infer its emotions.

It was angry. It was afraid. It was uncertain.

Tyranid brains were tiny, because apart from the synapse creatures that served as relay stations for hive signals, none of them needed to think at all.

Their brains were no more than the crudest signal receivers plus an instinct database for when the signal dropped. Every remaining scrap of energy and biomass went to serve a more efficient harvest.

Emotion, for the swarm, ought to be inefficient and unnecessary.

But it had emotion — which meant Lin had to work out why these organisms retained baseline emotional function alongside such rudimentary cognition.

Turning it over and over, the only conclusion he could reach was to link that fact to their Psychic power.

If every one of them possessed simple emotional fluctuation — or to put it another way, if every one of them had a soul — then they had the foundation for generating Psychic power at the individual level.

Lin began to imagine these creatures as something like greenskins. Every greenskin was a natural psyker; their handling of the power of "I reckon" was crude in the extreme, but pack them together and they generated an unstoppable Waaagh! tide.

The anomaly here had also manifested only once the creatures clustered. Carried through the ork analogy, it meant every single organism commanded a shallow trickle of Psychic power. Get enough of them in one place and they would form a natural psychic field and wield it according to their collective will.

That line of reasoning explained how these creatures used Psychic power without any specialized psychic organ. Lin couldn't verify the theory from a single Lictor, but he suspected it was very close to the truth.

Yet why was the swarm built this way? Was this simply how the Tyranids used Psychic power before they formally entered the galaxy — or was this deviation from everything Lin knew tied to that Second Primarch who still hadn't shown his face anywhere?

And most crucially of all: what would ensouled Tyranids do to the balance of the galaxy?

Chaos dies for the realm; the greenskins hold the gate.

The swarm would become the Imperium's chief threat in the ages to come, but the Imperium was not the only power fighting the Great Devourer.

Chaos loathed these soulless things that stripped ensouled sentients down to the bone, which was why Chaos war-hosts also appeared on the front lines against creatures that annihilated the very source of the Four Chaos Gods' strength — and the swarm, in turn, dispatched forces specifically to deal with Chaos in the name of clean biomass.

But if the swarm had souls too, would the war against the Great Devourer — a war that should have dragged the Four Chaos Gods into the mire alongside everyone else — turn instead into an amusement park where They could sit back with a fishing rod and enjoy the show?

Lin didn't dare draw conclusions from what he had now. But he could feel himself closing on a conspiracy measured in millennia at the very least.

Not just the four peddlers in the Warp, but the Emperor who had created the Primarchs, and the Great Devourer that had yet to reach the galaxy — all of them tangled up in it.

Opening the Predator's Eye had advanced the mystery of the Second Legion not one step. It had only raised the stakes.

Lin let out a breath and asked the Dreadnought beside him, "What's your read on these creatures?"

"I am not a professional biologist."

"I'm not asking for a professional analysis. I'm asking what you think."

Lin turned around, staring at the Dreadnought as though his gaze could bore straight through its sarcophagi.

"Your opinion, in your own name — Lord Rogal Dorn."

[Author's Note 1: In a very early short story, a band of Imperial Fists purging Tyranids encountered a creature called the Dragon-Lizard.]

[Author's Note: That creature is never mentioned any more, but back then it served as the Hive Mind's diplomat. It tried to seduce the Imperial Fists, claiming that joining the Tyranids was the only way to fight Chaos — submit to the Hive Mind and you would never fear the taint of Chaos again.]

[Author's Note: The method of joining was to be eaten by them. They would extract human genetic material and let it endure forever, creating a new humanity under the will of the swarm.]

[Author's Note: It feels like the early Tyranids weren't purely positioned as the Great Devourer — but like the Dragon-Lizard, all of that was later scrapped.]

[Author's Note 2: The Tyranids didn't arrive in the galaxy only in 40K. Catachan already had degenerated Tyranid organisms adapted to the local ecosystem long before 40K.]

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