(A Warhammer 40K Tale)
Written by P.H. Boer
The Hymn of Penance, an Imperial supply ship, had gone dark. No vox signals. No warp beacons. No signs of life. Only a single transmission, garbled and frantic, reached an Imperial listening post on the edge of Segmentum Tempestus before the void swallowed the ship whole. The message repeated just two words in a crackling loop that faded into static.
“They come.”
In response, the Inquisition dispatched a vessel under the command of Ordo Xenos. Aboard the sleek, lightless silhouette of the Lament’s Judgement, Acolyte Torrin Malvik stood surrounded by his retinue. Though not old, Torrin’s pale skin and sunken eyes bore the weight of grim duty, etched deep by years of silent war. Beside him stood Lexmechanic Varn, his crimson robes folded tightly over a body more machine than man, and Armsman Jevran, a grizzled former Arbites officer known for handling the kinds of cases others refused. Five storm troopers completed the team, their carapace armor dull under the red interior lights, hellguns held at ready.
As the Lament’s Judgement closed on the drifting supply ship, auspex arrays screamed in warning. No life signs. No functioning systems. No breaches. The Hymn of Penance floated like a coffin, its bulk dark and still in the endless void.
At the airlock, Torrin stood unmoving. His fingers tightened around the rosarius at his neck, whispering a prayer beneath his breath. The boarding torpedo slammed against the hull of the dead ship with a grinding clang, and the cutting torches began their work.
The hatch fell open with a shriek of parting metal, and a wave of stale, metallic air rolled out, heavy with the scent of old blood and dead oxygen scrubbers. Darkness loomed inside the supply ship. Cold, untouched by the Emperor’s light.
They stepped in.
Their helmet lamps flared to life, piercing the suffocating dark. Beams swept over steel walls smeared with rust, ichor, and something blacker than oil. The floor beneath them groaned as they advanced, boots crushing shattered power cells and spent shell casings. Every surface bore the signs of panic. Las-blasts had scorched the bulkheads. Strange marks were gouged deep into the plating. Whatever had happened here, it was violent, fast, and left no time for order.
Varn moved ahead of the others, mechadendrites twitching as he interfaced with a damaged wall console. The soft whirring of servos filled the silence while the others stood watch, weapons leveled into the dark.
“Partial access to data logs restored,” Varn said flatly. “Significant corruption detected. Beginning playback.”
The hololith sputtered into life, casting a flickering blue projection across the corridor. A young officer appeared, slick with sweat, his face ghost-pale and eyes darting off-screen.
“Lieutenant Dren, Hymn of Penance, Deck Gamma,” he stammered. “Emperor preserve us… we’ve sealed the bulkheads, but it won’t hold. The… things are in the ventilation. We hear them moving… scratching… They took the lights first. Then the cogitators. We don’t know how they got aboard.”
The hololith cut to static. Silence reclaimed the corridor.
Jevran cursed under his breath, eyes scanning the darkness beyond their narrow beams of light. “What could have done this?”
Torrin didn’t answer immediately. He studied the marks on the wall, the scorched steel, the stripped wiring. His knuckles tightened on the grip of his plasma pistol. “Not anything I’ve studied,” he said at last. “At least… not that’s been catalogued.”
Jevran frowned. “You’re telling me this wasn’t some boarded raid gone wrong?”
Torrin shook his head slowly. “This isn’t a raid. This is consumption. Something got in and tore through this ship like it was meat.”
Behind them, Varn let out a mechanical click as he moved forward. “Then the question remains,” he said, voice flat as steel. “What is hungry enough to erase an entire crew… and leave no corpses?”
They pressed on. Hall after hall twisted through the ship’s guts, the sameness of metal walls and corroded deck plating stretching endlessly. The pools of thick black liquid grew deeper. The lights from their helmets gleamed off it like a sick parody of water. None dared ask what it once was.
Eventually they reached the central data vault. Deck Alpha. The reinforced doors were bent open from the outside, metal curled inward as though torn by something far too large to belong on a human ship.
Inside, cogitator banks lay shattered. Blood smeared the walls in long trails. A single figure slumped in the far corner, back against the bulkhead, rotting skeletal hands wrapped around a cracked data-slate. His uniform marked him as a scribe.
Jevran knelt by the corpse. The ribs were shattered, pried outward like the petals of some grotesque flower. “Something pulled his organs out,” he muttered. “Took them whole.”
Varn approached and reached out, servo-arms snaking forward. Torrin raised a hand. “Not yet,” he said. “Let’s listen first.”
The tech-priest blinked once, then connected to the slate. A dull glow spilled across the bulkhead, projecting the face of the scribe in his final moments. His eyes were wide. Too wide.
“Scribe Malion, recording,” he whispered. “Deck Alpha is lost. Deck Beta is overrun. They come in waves… unstoppable… endless. The void shields held, but they found another way.
”He glanced off-screen, his voice dropping lower. “They don’t see like we do. They sense us. They know when we move. When we hide. They want more than to kill us.”
He swallowed hard.
“They consume us.”
The projection died, but the timestamp flickered. There were more entries. Varn cycled through them as the team kept their weapons raised and their breaths short.
The next entry bled onto the wall in fractured light. Malion’s face had grown gaunt. The bags beneath his eyes looked inked in, and his voice trembled with exhaustion.
“Day twelve. The lower decks have fallen. We’ve barricaded ourselves in Alpha, but the screams…” He paused, running a hand through sweat-matted hair. “They don’t tire. They don’t stop. You can hear them when it’s quiet enough. Chittering. Clicking. Like laughter.”
Another flicker. Another log.
“Day fifteen. We thought we could fight. Blessed lasguns, frag grenades, promethium. It slowed them. That’s all. We tried the vox, but it’s gone. The Astropath is gone. Or worse.” His eyes shifted toward something off-screen. “We burned the chapel. It was the only place left to fall.
”The projection jumped, stuttering on a low growl in the background. The final entry began with Malion holding the slate close to his face, sweat pouring from his brow. His voice was thin, rasping.
“Day nineteen. It’s over. They’ve breached the sanctum. They’re in the walls. The vents. They…”
He looked up. Something shifted in the shadows behind him.
“They are here.”
The screen died.
No one spoke.
A sound rose in the silence. Subtle at first. A dry click. Then another. Scraping. Like brittle bone raking across metal.
Jevran’s hellgun snapped upward, his grip white-knuckled. The storm troopers moved to cover the corridors, forming a loose perimeter around the room. Torrin stepped forward, rosarius swinging at his chest, plasma pistol humming softly in his grip.
“They’re watching us,” he said quietly.
The sound grew. Claws tapping in rhythm. Echoes swelling from every angle. Then a scream, sudden and sharp, split the air. One of the troopers vanished beneath a blur of movement and shadow. His helmet light spun across the bulkhead, spraying white until it blinked out in a mist of blood.
“Fall back!” Torrin shouted.
He fired. The corridor flashed blue as the plasma bolt struck the shape, something with too many limbs and glistening plates instead of flesh. For the briefest instant it recoiled, not from pain, but as if marking its next movement.
The bolt hadn’t stopped it. Only illuminated it.
They ran. Down the corridors, past the shattered bulkheads and flickering emergency lights. The ship vibrated around them now, a low thrum beneath the deck plating. Something was moving. Many somethings. Close. So close.
Jevran turned his head, panting between bursts of gunfire. “They’re herding us.”
Torrin didn’t look back. “They want us somewhere.”
The lights above flickered as they passed, always one step behind.
The group burst into a wide chamber, stumbling to a halt amid blackened walls and scattered debris. Melted icons of the Emperor lay crushed beneath soot and ash. The air hung thick with the reek of burnt flesh and promethium, every breath clinging to the back of their throats like guilt.
Jevran turned slowly, scanning the charred pews and altar. “This was the chapel.”
Torrin stepped forward, boots crunching over what might have once been bone. He stopped at the altar, its aquila half-melted and curled inward. A single data-slate rested in the ashes, still glowing faintly. He picked it up with care, thumb brushing soot from the screen before activating it.
A woman’s voice whispered from the speaker, hoarse and raw.
“If you find this, we are already dead. They took our bodies. Our minds. Our… souls. They are endless. They are hunger.”
The slate blinked out.
For a moment, no one spoke. Then the clicking returned.
This time it came from everywhere. Above. Below. Inside the walls.
The storm troopers tightened their formation, weapons trained on every dark doorway. Varn stepped to one side, servo-arms twitching in readiness.
“They’re closing in,” Jevran said through clenched teeth. “They were guiding us here.”
Torrin’s gaze swept across the chapel. “Maybe they wanted to see what we’d do. What we’d burn.”
Then came the sound of metal shearing. A deep groan, followed by a thunderous collapse, as a portion of the wall gave way and vanished into a storm of splinters and shrapnel. Dust choked the room as shapes began pouring through the breach.
They did not roar. They did not scream. They clicked and moved and clawed. A flood of limbs, too many, each tipped in gleaming hooks. Chitin glistened in their lights for the barest second before motion blurred it into a swarm.
The storm troopers opened fire. Bolts of red lit the dark like flares, cutting into the tide. One of the creatures reeled back, part of its body torn away. Another fell twitching. But the rest surged forward without pause, flowing over their dead like water rushing past stones.
Torrin fired his plasma pistol, each blast thundering through the gloom, carving chunks from the nearest shapes. They did not slow. Jevran dragged a wounded trooper backward, firing his shotgun one-handed. The blasts tore into the things with brutal finality, but still they came.
“They’re not even trying to avoid the fire,” Jevran shouted.
“They don’t need to,” Torrin replied. “There’s too many.”
Varn planted his servo-limbs and unleashed arcs of electricity into the approaching mass. Sparks danced across chitin. A few fell twitching. Most did not.
“I am unable to halt their advance,” the tech-priest intoned. “They are adapting.”
“Then we move,” Torrin barked, pointing toward a rear corridor choked with smoke. “To the upper decks. Now.”
The survivors broke from the ruined chapel, fleeing past the wreckage of faith and fire. Behind them, the swarm feasted.
They ran, the sound of pursuit echoing in fractured rhythms behind them. Screeches of metal, the stutter of failing lights, the rasp of claws on steel. Somewhere in the dark, the swarm tore through the dead, tearing meat from armor and swallowing the last of the chapel’s silence.
Jevran fired blind into the shadows behind them, shells booming in the narrow corridors. “They’re not pushing… they’re playing with us.”
Torrin didn’t slow. “No. Not playing. Herding.”
The passage opened suddenly into a vast chamber, tall as a cathedral and twice as hollow. A cargo hold. Crates were scattered like bones, some still sealed, most torn open and empty. The air smelled wrong. Rot and ammonia. Like something had lived here too long. Or died here too many times.
Voices whispered above them. Too distant to be real. Too close to ignore.
“We need height,” Torrin snapped. He pointed toward a crooked tower of containers leaning into one another like drunken sentinels. “There.”
They scrambled up the crates, grasping for handholds, boots skidding on slick surfaces. The storm trooper named Ralick slipped once, catching himself on a jut of rusted metal. Blood dripped from his leg where something had torn through his armor, but he didn’t cry out.
Below, the sound grew louder.
Clicking. Clicking in waves. Faster now. Eager.
At the peak of the stack, Varn turned, the faint glow of his optics reflecting the void.
“I will slow their advance,” he said.
Torrin’s head snapped around. “No. We move together.”
Varn was already descending. “Your deaths would be inefficient. I will serve better this way.”
Before anyone could argue, the tech-priest’s limbs drove into the deck like spears. A pulse surged through him. Light crackled across the metal as electricity snapped outward in a web of brilliance. The first ranks of the swarm spasmed violently, limbs twitching, bodies folding in on themselves.
Dozens fell.
Then came the next wave.
They poured over the fallen, over each other, shrieking without voices. Varn’s limbs flailed once more, spewing arcs of power, but it was too late. They were on him. They tore into him, pulling wires and metal, ripping through steel like cloth. His scream was not a scream. It was a feedback howl that echoed through the chamber and then abruptly cut off.
Jevran swore. “He bought us seconds. That’s it.”
They didn’t wait. They climbed. The last stretch of containers groaned under their weight. Below, the horde swelled again, pouring into the hold with renewed purpose. Something in the way they moved had changed. They were no longer following.
They were chasing.
They found the blast doors already broken. Forced open from the inside.
Torrin paused at the threshold, staring into the dim sanctum beyond. His breath came in sharp bursts, each one frosting the inside of his rebreather. “This is where it began,” he muttered. “I can feel it.”
Jevran shoved past him. “Then this is where it ends.”
The captain’s sanctum was untouched by fire, untouched by the chaos that plagued the rest of the ship. Gilded aquilas and tattered purity seals clung stubbornly to the walls. A holo-projector blinked softly at the chamber’s center, casting fractured light across the floor where a body slumped against the command throne. Blood pooled beneath the corpse in a slow, dried halo.
Torrin approached the projector, fingers trembling as they grazed the controls. It sputtered, then stabilized, revealing a pale man in a tattered uniform.
“Captain Dael Maros,” the projection said. “Final log.”
His voice was dry paper. His eyes hollow.
“I don’t know if this message will reach anyone. If it does… don’t come here. Don’t send anyone. This isn’t a raid. This isn’t anything we’ve catalogued. They don’t kill for conquest. They don’t kill for cruelty.”
His mouth trembled.“They devour.”
He leaned closer, his face swallowing the projection.
“They sense life. Like beacons. We prayed. We burned. We begged. Nothing slowed them. Nothing mattered. They are endless.”
The light cut out. Torrin turned slowly toward Jevran. “We have to destroy the ship.”
“With what?” Jevran barked, gesturing to Ralick, who sagged against the wall, his armor slick with blood. “We’re barely alive.”
The blast doors suddenly slammed shut behind them.
Then the vents screamed with the shrieks of tearing metal. Hatches groaned. The sound was everywhere. A tide of it. Then came the roar, not mechanical, not animal, something between. Something that didn’t belong.
The walls shuddered.
They came in.
Not one. Not ten.
A flood.
The storm troopers opened fire, what few remained. Jevran emptied his shotgun, the sound lost in the surge. He dropped it, drew a blade, and charged. His first strike severed a limb. The second tore into a twisting form that barely slowed. The third met something too large, too slick, too wrong.
The swarm engulfed him.
Torrin stood near the throne, plasma pistol glowing in his grip, rosarius clenched in his free hand. He whispered the litany through gritted teeth.
“The Emperor is my shield. The Emperor is my sword. The Emperor…”
The words vanished beneath the chittering.
He fired. Each bolt a flare against the dark, searing through alien flesh. Still they came. They reached him. Claws raked his armor. His shoulder went numb. Blood sprayed the controls.
Ralick did not scream. Propped against the wall, barely conscious, he pulled the pin on a grenade and held it tight to his chest.
“For the Emperor,” he breathed.
The explosion tore through the nearest wave, sending chitin and gore across the sanctum. It bought a heartbeat.
Nothing more.
Torrin stumbled. His back struck the command throne. The projector sparked. The captain’s face reappeared, flickering, broken, watching with silent, eternal dread.
A hand clamped down on Torrin’s shoulder. He spun, ready to fire, but it wasn’t one of them.
It was Jevran.
His armor was split and bleeding. His blade was gone. He held a jagged length of pipe, gripped like a weapon.
“Get to the projector,” Jevran said, breath rattling. “Transmit it. Make it count.”
Torrin didn’t argue. He turned and climbed, blood dripping from his fingers onto the holo-controls.
The projector whined.
Static.
Then the captain’s words began again. “This is no ordinary enemy. They are hunger incarnate…”
Torrin leaned into the signal, shouting over the chaos.
“This is Acolyte Torrin Malvik. The Hymn of Penance is lost. Do not come. This ship is a grave. It’s…”
Something struck him from behind. His plasma pistol flew from his hand, clattering across the floor. Bones cracked. His knees gave.
He turned.
It towered over him. Larger than the others. A shadow made flesh, carapace pulsing like a breathing wound. No eyes. Just need.
Torrin reached for his rosarius.
He whispered a final prayer.
The creature lunged.
# # #
Weeks later, the Lament’s Judgement emerged from the warp in silence.
They had waited as long as protocol allowed. No vox signal. No recall. Nothing but the echo of Torrin’s final broadcast, cut short mid-sentence.
The Inquisition reviewed the footage. Silent chambers. Flashes of light. Static. Screams. The last coherent log sealed under Ordo Xenos classification, locked behind iron code and ritual.
The Hymn of Penance was declared lost. Cause: xenos incursion.
No further details provided.
Within the vaulted archives of the Inquisition, Torrin Malvik’s name joined the others, forgotten martyrs of forgotten missions. There would be no funeral. No shrine. No prayers.
Only the recording.
Flickering across a dim dataslate. Looping through the endless dark.
“This is no ordinary enemy.”
“They are hunger incarnate.”
“They are endless.”
“They are endless.”
“They are endless.”
Tales from the Boer’s Head 