# Iocounu Station [short]



## Mossy Toes (Jun 8, 2009)

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*IOCOUNU STATION*

(Current entry in _RiaR: Turning_ on the BL Bolthole)

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The world _turned._

Axial rotation, angular momentum. Iocounu Station was a small world, all things considered. It was a carefully designed, delicately balanced world: a tiny ring of steel spinning through the night sky. It turned ceaselessly, pirouetting through its stately orbit of Iocounu below and held to that ellipse by constant, careful adjustment in the form of the half-kilometer plasma flares of its six stabilization jets.

The world turned by slow degrees, and within it, Lhyme fled for his life. He was sobbing uncontrollably as he ran, and his. The air reeked of piss and bile. The corridor’s walls pressed in on him with the weight of the darkest possible theological revelation.

Daemons.

Lhyme had never been a religious man--for all that he, as a foreman, had enjoyed putting the fear of the Emperor into his charges--so it absolutely shattered him to be forced into belief in this way. And what the things had done to his workers: splashing through their organs, playing nonsense games with shattered limbs, and gleefully torturing survivors… he shuddered at the recollection. He been the only one to make the lift in time.

It was that damned Chalroes; he was sure of it. That sickly new arrival had been bending ears around the station for weeks now, poking his nose where it didn’t belong. It had to be Chalroes who had brought these horrors into the station.

Finally, he reached the barracks. He came to a horrified halt. Not here. Not here _too._

The corpses of Iocounu Station’s guardsmen were interwoven with each other in a mangled heap. As he watched, flayed flesh twitched and exposed bones snapped. The writhing corpses of a handful of guardsmen reared up, crumpled into the misshapen lobe of what was unmistakably a head. The lips of each of the amalgamation’s constituent bodies twitched into a score of gurgling giggles.

“We’re coming for you, Mister Man,” the hulking abomination simpered as it undulated slowly forward. “We know you. We surround you. We’re all throughout this spinning playground. We can always find you, Mister Man.”

The lighting died and red emergency lights came on, casting a hellish glow on the abomination’s writhing fleshscape. Lhyme let out an animal whimper and fled. Delighted laughter followed him, hounded him, and bored like a drill into his brain.

He tried to imagine a place where he might be safe, but the thing’s words rang altogether too true, and there was no telling when he might run into more of its horrific ilk. The station was too _small_--a bare handful of kilometers in circumference. He thrust away such concerns in favor of flight.

Things followed; things that crawled and skittered, that clattered behind air vents and leered from the shadows. Insubstantial wraiths mouthed obscenities and plucked at his clothes. A group of tall, eyeless creatures straightened from their meal of human corpses and turned their heads to follow his passage. Their snakelike tongues licked their bloodstained lips.

Lhyme drifted as he ran, for a time, floating on a cushion of shocked disbelief. His dislocation was punctured by the corpse of a daemon, which dragged him to a halt. So they could die, after all. So somebody up here was killing them.

He crept timorously to the distended corpse. Lasbolts had pierced its hide, and the slayer’s bootprints in the black ichor headed spinward along the station’s ring. Lhyme followed them.

More bodies, both human and daemon. Some of the daemons had died by lasbolt, and some by blade. Once he lost the trail of bodies and had to backtrack. Once he was forced to hide from a macabre stampede of pustule-ridden imps. The trail ascended into the innerworks: the tightest circle of passages in the ring.

At long last, nearly too late, Lhyme found the daemon hunter. The corpses of six pale, chitinous androgynes lay dead around him. Slumped against the wall, bleeding through rents in his carapace armor, was Chalroes. He was whiter now than ever, paler even than the daemon corpses around him, and a shattered sword was clutched in his hand.

“Lhyme,” Chalroes croaked as the foreman approached.

“It was--you? You killed them? Emperor, I’d thought--you had brought them.”

“The rot was already here,” said Chalroes, every word an ordeal. His free hand flopped to his belt pouch. “Couldn’t stop it. But no time. Dying. You have to…” he broke off coughing. Lhyme knelt beside Chalroes and fished the object out of his pouch--hissing, recoiling and nearly dropping the rosette when he saw it.

Chalroes’s lips twitched in a humorless smile. “Have to get outside. Station can’t be allowed to survive. Redirect stabilization jets… hub cables.” Lhyme flinched at the thought, but… what was there left, here in the station? Ruin, desecration, atrocity. He nodded tremulously.

“Get to airlock. Foreman’s authority… should suffice. I’d give you my laspistol, but… empty.” Chalroes laughed at that for some reason, painfully letting out a low, hitched chuckle. Then Inquisitor Chalroes fell still, lifeblood leaking from his lips.

Lhyme stood hesitantly, then balled his fists. He had a job to do.

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It took him hours--evading daemons, using a plasma cutter to cut his way out the powered-down airlock, clunking across the interior of the ring in a vac-suit, then turning the plasma cutter carefully, oh so carefully, to the support struts and fastenings on the nearest stabilization jet--but he did it.

He watched with grim satisfaction as the jet pivoted, twisting against its remaining struts beneath its own thrust. The vast jet of superheated plasma swept inward, cutting across and severing nine of the dozens of cables that fastened the station to its hub; that balanced the massive, incredible stresses of the station’s rotation against each other. The jet continued its sweeping path to score the inside of the ring, cutting through layers of decking which vented atmosphere in great gouts.

Adamantium and steel groaned. The station shuddered violently, increasingly violently, as the rotary tension was distributed unevenly and yet more cables snapped. An hour passed, and the station ring began to warp into an oval. The hub writhed, a spider with a web whose threads were being snipped one by one.

Metal clashed with inertia, and metal lost. The station cracked and broke apart, chunks of the ring snapping off and spinning into decaying orbits in Iocounu’s gravity well. Lhyme, thrown away from the station in its dying convulsions, watched his home die with tears in his eyes.

He’d done his best, and succeeded in destroying the daemons. That’s all he could tell the Emperor, when he met Him--and he was sure, now, that he would meet Him. If there were daemons, it stood to reason that the Emperor opposed them.

His vac-suit began to heat up as he accelerated on his shallow arc toward Iocounu. He would burn up in reentry, but that didn’t matter.

He’d done his best.

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## Dave T Hobbit (Dec 3, 2009)

Another great story, with a suitable 40K solution to the issue.


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## Vallyuk (Nov 7, 2011)

I like it, very descriptive. I look forward to reading others like this.

Thumbs up!


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## Mossy Toes (Jun 8, 2009)

Honestly, I'm thinking about stretching it out to about two or three times as long, including a connecting scene between Chalroes's death and the cutting of the jet, featuring the return of the amalgamation highly.


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## Dave T Hobbit (Dec 3, 2009)

It works at the length it is, so you do not need to extend it.

That said, I have expanded stories in the past myself to better capture my vision, so I say go for it and see how it works.


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## Ambush Beast (Oct 31, 2010)

*Hello*

Other than a couple of verbal errors near the beginning the story was very cool. I love the way Lhyme put the fear away and fought through it, relying on faith and duty to accomplish the task that he had been given. 

P.S. been missing you in the contests.


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## Mossy Toes (Jun 8, 2009)

I definitely intend to make this month's competition, thanks. I've been more or less off the internet for the summer, but that's changed for the better.


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## VulkansNodosaurus (Dec 3, 2010)

Great, as expected. The opening was particularly descriptive. I think that the story would indeed work well if it was slightly longer, as currently there's a certain imbalance in the pacing (though I suppose it does make some sense- when Lhyme gains clarity of purpose, everything speeds up.)


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