Space Marine (Warhammer 40,000)

by Ian Watson

‘Taste the products of their loosened bowels to tantalise Tzeentch! He loves the transformation of meat into manure. Such is the Cycle of Change! He will bring back the dead inside living flesh. His abominations will turn sane men into madmen, and living bodies into cadavers.’

Theory: Tzeentch was the angel investor behind the Human Centipede franchise.

guided them here as surely as bees to pollen, or rats to an abandoned baby.

like WHAT to a baby?

‘We’re going in through its anus,’ Biff whooped boisterously. Indeed. Indeed. What else could that puckered sphincter be, in the white bony hull of the vast, gastropoidal alien vessel?

No no i deserve this i did this to myself

bones, that sphincter pulsed. It expelled a quick milky cloud, which the torpedo’s sensors assayed as consisting of bitter liquid dregs, foul gas, and ashy debris – the fart of a leviathan…

No stop i can't take anymore

‘We’re ramming in through its arse!’ Indeed.

Yes we heard you the first time

coccyx of bleached bone jutted into space, bearing the sphincter at its tip like a quartet of triangular haemorrhoids clutched within bands of livid muscle. Where the heads of these scarlet protuberances touched, a tiny hole still puffed acidic discharge.

I am screaming in public reading this like I just had to explain to the paramedic I'm working with what was going on with my face.

The nose of the torpedo impacted rupturingly in that meatus, wrenching its tissue open, burrowing deeper convulsively with thrusts of its jets as the Fists clung to stanchions.

Biff should say "it's Fisting time!"

inner anal walls in the manner of a surgical dilator.

At this point this book is an endurance test for my sanity

This rectum of the alien ship curved rightward, aslosh with steaming cloacal fluids, banded with slowly pulsing purple peristaltic sinew. The high shriek of escaping atmosphere had already diminished to a whistle as the injured anus cramped tighter, reflexively, around the girth of the plasteel troop-carrier which had penetrated it.

I mean...that's...an image.

muscular rim with the barrel of his boltgun, prying experimentally – as an ex-tech well might. The stiff fleshy curtain relaxed with a sigh, shutting itself tight but for a long dimpled crack.

You see it too right??

‘It’s got all those buttons to push at different heights,’

I will not make a prostate joke

‘Dumb design, those doors,’ sneered Biff. ‘If your arse craps out, you don’t want half your guts flying outa the hole. You want your inner bulkheads shut!’

Biff's tips for rectal prolapse

Vents sighed gases, adding an ammoniacal reek to the hot wet cocktail of sweaty vapours, tart pheromones, sour xenohormones, mildew, spice of attar, and a pervasive odour of not-quite-nutmeg. Oh for Lord Vladimir Pugh’s inability to savour.

Space marines vs c diff

Organs. Deep.

At this point i dont trust him not to make this weird

was suggestive of some giant mutant female ape’s bum presented for fertilisation. A low labial crater wall surrounded a semblance

Oh i mean of course

Fell? He almost seemed pulled, so swiftly did he disappear through the floor. The lips clamped shut again.

Im not the only one seeing vagina dentata here right? Giant hole that consumes men?

Three corpses-to-be – and keeping invisible company with them, the powerful courtesan of the cosmos who was neither male nor that other sex either, but who was neuter – as exactly befitted… Extinction.

That other sex

From its horny loins a long fierce knife-like organ protruded, quivering. Overhead

I lack words and sanity HORNY LOINS

Nevertheless, the loin-organ jerked forward, impacting with a brother’s groin-guard. The spike actually penetrated a weld in the armoured pouch before snapping off, twanging. The brother cried out and staggered.

Screaming

Fists’ Assimularum Hall,

At this point even assimularium just looks....nope

armless searchlight dwarfs

This really needs to be a punk band name.

Spurred contoured bone, with a menacing hole in the end, protruded.

I got ur menacing hole You can tell he is winning this 1v1 versus my sanity.

As the humming monomolecular edges of their swords met those force-field-spinning razor-horns in shuddering collision, rainbow energy cascaded.

Pride month celebrated

From between the towering alien’s legs its spiked tail jerked upward into the crumpled cuisse, piercing through into the Lieutenant’s muscle and carapace.

Mother of Freud

Within, draped in slime, hunched a paralysed tattooed human woman with braided ropes of brown hair, her breasts and belly alike swollen with a slow pulsing commotion of what might well have been larvae… ‘No time for this right now,’ gasped Vonreuter.

When is it time for this? FUN FACT early on when testing their omophagea, Lex experienced being a heavily pregnant tribeswoman. The only times Ian mentions women (that other sex lol) they are leaking and pregnant. *side eye*

Jarring his own helmet against Biff’s, jerking his own face forward, Lex either bit or kissed those purpled, near-corpse lips. Which, he knew not, though he tasted blood. All meaning eluded Lex right then. He anointed Biff’s lips with his own spittle as one might kiss a hand-bomb…

Oh boy more spuomancy.

His brain – and braincase – may well have been reduced to their original simple destiny as a nutting, head-butting instrument… Yet he was honoured, too; for even in his death throw he had butted for Rogal Dorn.

It should be horrifying and instead im HONKING

to lips in the moaning, capillary-webbed walls,

You know the joke where the genie gives a list of the three things you can't wish for, and the guy wishes for something like 'I wish my computer moaned when I put a USB drive in' and the genie says, OKAY there are FOUR things you can't wish for?

searing sensation of amputation… A sense of void within… of the abortion of a parasite which proved, by its absence, to have been of some perverse value and significance, after all. Biff had been an ever-niggling subtext to the pious litany of Lex’s life. He had lent significance by contrast. Yes, damn it, significance!

OMG what is Biff doing all up in my narcissism GOSH

‘Pull out, d’Arquebus!’ bellowed Juron. ‘Withdraw!’ Premature! Premature. The climax of their intrusion into this grotesque, gastropoidal starcraft should have been Lex’s own glorious death.

Thanatos drive this is 100% deliberate and I will lay good money that Watson has read a ton of Freud. Understood it? Maybe not. But read it? Yep.

Chang had sat behind a filigree screen, upon a painstool – not so much that he should experience due anguish at a brother’s admission of shortcomings… Nay, the constipative pangs induced in the nerves of his buttocks may have been subtly pleasurable… but so that thus he might sympathetically take into himself some of the confessee’s misery, then defecate this discomfiture out of his own body, metamorphosed into crass waste matter, fit to be jettisoned.

Did you forget the butt stuff? it's back!!

The Chaplain had waddled from behind the screen towards the consecrated Ablutorium cubicle to relieve himself of the freight of Lexandro’s confession.

This is just so unnecessary

During the time-dilated absence of the Fists, dust had settled on these – dust which no servitor had dared to suck or lick up, though the floor and sleeping pallet were kept impeccably clean.

Do you not have swiffers

he himself licked the tool and buffed it on his pus-yellow tunic till the rune-etchings on the silver shaft shone.

Stop licking things