Sons of the Hydra

by Rob Sanders

  Moving down through the decks, she looked in on the High Serpent’s personal quarters. It was here that she had sometimes found Freydor Blatch drinking with the shipmaster or playing regicide with Ghesh the Navigator. She found him this time discussing cult business with his seven disciples. Among the most deadly of the death cultists and influential among the former prison population, the disciples were the High Serpent’s eyes, ears and mouthpiece among the cultist colony. Unlike Perdita herself, the Seventh Sons cared little for the events above Vitrea Mundi and possible repercussions to come. They would follow their Alpha Legion masters – to whom they owed everything – into the raging eye of a warpstorm. They were content to do as they were asked.

  The Assassin moved lightly through the chamber. It was more lavishly decorated than the rather sparse environs of the rest of the colony. She took up a carafe of wine and refilled the chalices of the disciples and the High Serpent himself. Blatch was in mid-diatribe and was more than distracted. While Perdita trailed her fingertips suggestively along one girl’s shoulders and the back of the High Serpent’s fat neck, Blatch barely noticed her. Confident that the Seventh Sons were discussing little of note, the Assassin pushed on.

  She retained the disguise of the cultist girl as she came across Ephron Hasdrubal. The Alpha Legion sergeant was where he could usually be found when not attending upon Lord Occam or off-ship on a mission: the practice cages. While many renegade Space Marines allowed corruption to take root in their genetically engineered flesh or their prowess to wither through the ages, the demigods of the Redacted maintained at least some rituals of their previous lives.

  As she tended briefly to the injuries of battered and broken Seventh Sons in the antechamber, Perdita watched Sergeant Hasdrubal go toe to toe with ten death cultists within the practice cages. Peering surreptitiously through the bars, she saw the bare-chested sergeant – his ship’s robes like skirts about his waist – dance through his opponents with the grace of a demigod.

  Improvising and moving from technique to exotic combat technique, Hasdrubal wielded his torturer’s multi-blade like a practice-cage gladius. The vicious death cultists – all chosen for their own differing techniques and physical talents – swung, sliced and stabbed at the legionnaire with venom-slick blades of their own. Time and again, Perdita saw the sergeant dodge razored edges of smouldering lethality, his pale skin untouched.

  While the death cultists were fast and deadly enough to cut a buzzing fly in two, the Alpha Legion sergeant’s superhuman reflexes made them appear like they were swinging through syrup. Turning the multi-blade in his hand, Hasdrubal batted aside his attackers’ lunges. Blades edged with neural mesh turned cultist weapons into contact-instruments of shrieking torture. Chainblades pranged envenomed swords from grips while energy-sheathed power blades sheared cultist weapons in two.

  With the face of a hunted man – a man with no intention of ever being taken by his loyalist Dark Angels brothers – Ephron Hasdrubal snatched up disarmed cultists and threw them down onto the deck. Others he backhanded across the practice cage with the contempt of a demigod, while the last got the legionnaire’s heel jackhammered straight into the abdomen, breaking the Seventh Son.

  The sergeant stood there, barely breaking a sweat and fine-tuning his torturer’s blade. All about him, cultists groaned and crawled over the deck in a daze.

  ‘Again,’ the sergeant ordered, prompting replacement cultists to enter the practice cage. Perdita ran in with several others. She had no intention of going blade to blade with the demigod, although she did suspect that with her temple training she might fare better than the penal colony killers being dragged out of the cage. Instead, she took the broken cultist under the arm with another Seventh Son, and helped the unfortunate away.

  The ship infirmary was mercifully not far away. Unfortunately, it was small and already overrun with injured cultists from the boarding action on the battle-barge. Seventh Sons, bandaged and recuperating, swung from hammocks that had been set up on pipes lining the corridors outside the infirmary.

  The Assassin handed the broken death cultist off to a medicae-servitor. Under the watchful gaze of two Seventh Sons minders, hostage medical staff tended to the injured.

  While the cultists were willing servants of the Alpha Legion and operatives like Perdita engaged in service to the renegades, the talents of some were less than voluntary. The Redacted didn’t boast an Alpha Legion Apothecary and so penal colony medics, nurses and servitors were taken hostage by the liberated Seventh Sons and put to work in the ship infirmary. Moved between the medical facilities and the brig, the medical staff and chirurgeons were treated well in exchange for use of their life-saving talents when the circumstances required it. Perdita suspected that the colony medics were simply waiting for the day an Imperial cruiser might capture the Iota-Æternus and finally free the hostages. What made the medical staff even more pliable and cooperative, however, was the insistence by their Seventh Sons patients that even should that come to pass, they would only see the inside of another cell – this time in some backwater Inquisition stronghold.

  Not far from the practice cages, Perdita could hear the shooting range. The single thunderclaps of a boltgun echoed up the passageways, prompting the Assassin to change her disguise once more. Selecting the appearance of the broken cultist she had just delivered to the infirmary, she brought up her hood. Utilising props and abandoned clothing from the crowded infirmary, she changed her gait and the confidence with which she carried herself. She passed through the range to find the renegade known as Vilnius Malik there. Like his Alpha Legion brothers he was dressed in ship’s robes and aiming a Stalker-pattern boltgun down the length of the shooting gallery.

  Cultist wranglers had manhandled several mutants into the plasma-blasted range. Such creatures, never in short supply on the fringe worlds of the Maelstrom, were no good to themselves or anyone else. As they ran awkwardly between bolt-blasted cargo crates, Malik – his eye to the Stalker’s scope – picked them off. Blowing the heads off the mutants might have seemed a mercy but for the delight clear on the legionnaire’s face. As Seventh Sons cultists wrestled another grotesque mutant from storage incarceration, Perdita gave them room. Picking up a pair of ammunition crates, she moved on.

  The Assassin found the Redacted’s warpsmith hard at work in his workshops, overseeing the workmanship of a small army of interfaced technical servitors. His mechadendrites snaked about him, making small recalibrations and adjustments before whipping back into his plate. Not unlike the sorcerer Quoda, Perdita always found Arkan Reznor hard at study and work. Torghai Naga-Khan might have been shipmaster of the Iota-Æternus but the vessel really belonged to the arch-experimenter Reznor. His servitors and upgraded servo-automata maintained the converted freighter, while the Q-ship’s concealed weapon and sprint engine columns both benefitted from customisation with alien technologies.

  Unlike Quoda, who always maintained a haunted, detached air, Reznor was happy to share enthusiasm for his work and technical passions. His invaluable contribution to the Redacted had undoubtedly enhanced the small warband’s effectivity and allowed them to achieve much more than their numbers might suggest.

  As Perdita entered the workshop, she found herself barred by the appearance of the warpsmith’s personal servo-automata – Beta, Zeta and Theta. Using their underbelly nest of serpentine mechatendrils, they took the ammunition crates from her and hovered before the Assassin, prompting her to leave the workshop.

  Finding herself in the aft-section of the ship, Perdita pulled her hood up over her head and walked down a dark corridor from which adjoined the private cells of the Alpha Legion overlords. Outside the chambers belonging to Autolicon Phex, the Assassin’s excellent hearing picked up a sound. She slowed, taking a furtive look up and down the passage before listening closer at the metal of the door.

  Within, Perdita could hear muffled whimpers, harsh whispers and the sound of banging, like a head against a wall. Phex had been the latest addit
ion to the Redacted. The Assassin knew of Phex’s treatment at the hands of the Angelbane and the arch-lord’s insistence that he join Occam the Untrue. As she listened to the demigod’s suffering, Perdita considered how each member of the Redacted was a madman in his own way and that the addition of another would make little difference.

  At the rear of the ship, situated between the customised engine columns of the Iota-Æternus, were the private chambers of Lord Occam. Of the Untrue, the Assassin knew almost nothing. He was unusual, even for a member of the Alpha Legion. Perdita knew precious little of the Imperium of ten thousand years ago but understood that like the rest of the Emperor’s Space Marines, the Alpha Legion had once been loyal. Like the Imperium itself, the Legion had been shattered by the events of the galactic civil war and even more by a short eternity of stagnant disintegration.

  Perdita understood from working amongst the renegades that the once proud Alpha Legion – worthy, proficient and loyal – now shared the same fate as other fallen Legions. The Legion was a nest of knotted serpents, an entity as one but with every fanged head pulling in a different direction. Cells operating on their own. Alpha Legion warbands, forming brief collectives under charismatic arch-lords like Quetzel Carthach. The rare sub-sector wide Harrowing – crude cataclysms coordinated under the cover of Black Crusades.

  As Perdita entered Occam’s vaulted chambers she heard her master within.

  ‘Priest,’ the strike master said, his words like a warning, ‘there is nothing to fear here. Pray, enter.’

  The Assassin listened to the lie. She knew that as well as the medics, Occam had taken a priest. Confessor Kressnik had been sent to the penal colony to use his skills in oratory to draw the prison population from their serpent worship and back to the Emperor’s light in readiness for regimental processing – the Seventh Sons were to become part of a cannon-fodder penal legion.

  Occam had taken an interest in the priest, routinely having him brought to his chambers. What the strike master didn’t know was that Kressnik had hanged himself in his cell within hours of being taken prisoner and that Perdita had been impersonating the priest and keeping the legionnaire’s counsel ever since.

  Perdita let her cultist robes slip off to reveal the ragged remains of the priest’s filthy white cassock. She pulled up the priest’s voxhailer half-mask to cover the bottom part of her face and produced his limp mitre from a pocket. Arranging her hair beneath the mitre, she took a moment to assume the priest’s limp and moved on inside.

  Inside the chamber was dark, which worked well for the Assassin. A stained-glass window in the rear of the chamber threatened to bathe its gloom in a multitude of colours whenever the Q-ship’s sub-light engines fired. Perdita entered a room within a room. Incongrously, a tiny chapel lay within.

  She knew the history of the shrine from Occam. When reports had reached the strike master that Word Bearers ships out of Ghalmek had hit the shrine world of Canticula, he had ordered the Iota-Æternus diverted there. All the Alpha Legion had found was smouldering ruins and suffering.

  The precious artefact denoting Canticula as a shrine world was the tiny, unassuming Chapel of the Immaculate Ascension. The chapel had been built upon the supposed site of the Emperor’s landing there, early in his crusade to spread humanity’s dominion throughout the stars. It even incorporated a partial impression of the Emperor’s armoured boot, left behind by his visit and preserved by natural processes.

  The Assassin didn’t know whether the artefact was fake – as many claiming such heritage were – but the little, backwater world had become a destination for pilgrims who wanted to walk in their God-Emperor’s footsteps. Claiming that where the Master of Mankind had been the dark forces of the galaxy could not follow, Canticula – and the Chapel of the Immaculate Ascension in particular – had become a magnet not only for exorcists and daemonhunters but also those believing themselves tainted or even possessed. On the flags about the altar and on the sides of the holy object itself, Perdita had noted the faded markings of ancient hexagrammic wards, purity seals, chiselled extracts from the Lectitio Divinitatus and sigils of banishment. She suspected that many pilgrims arrived at the chapel with shackled loved ones who were merely suffering from mental afflictions or delusions brought on by toxic hive world environments. In reality, the Assassin knew little about such arcane rituals and protections and for all she really knew, a thousand polluting entities might have been banished upon the altar.

  The Word Bearers had certainly believed in the shrine world’s significance and had decimated its small cities from orbit. Arriving on Canticula, Occam the Untrue discovered the ruined chapel to be partially intact and the altar untouched by the destruction that had rained down from the heavens. Using lighters and the Seventh Sons as labour, the strike master had what was left of the chapel transported up to the Iota-Æternus and rebuilt in his chambers.

  As Perdita walked through the derelict chapel and approached the altar she could see the partial impression of the boot print inset in the surface. It looked like nothing to her, but for billions across the Imperium – including Lord Occam – it was a visual reminder of the Emperor’s enduring presence in the galaxy. It represented the difficult path walked by the Master of Mankind and the truest of his subjects. The symbol of a destination as yet unreached.

  Perdita looked up. Through the doorless archway of the shattered chapel she saw Occam the Untrue sitting in the chamber’s command throne like a troubled king. Crafted of jet, in the slithering semblance of a many-headed hydra, the throne glistened in the gloom. Dismissing a servo-skull and the Seventh Sons assigned to his personal needs like assembling his plate and preparing weaponry, Occam got up from the throne. His ship’s robes trailed along the polished floor as he approached the chapel. Even without his armour, his footsteps sent quakes through the deck that Perdita felt through the cold soles of her bare feet.

  Marching in through the archway, the demigod knelt before the altar and made the sign of the aquila across his chest. Even now, the Assassin considered, it was such a strange thing to see a renegade Space Marine do.

  ‘Confessor,’ Occam said, his words bouncing unnaturally through the shattered architecture of the rebuilt chapel. ‘Hear me.’

  With a theatrical look of dread crossing her false features, Perdita assumed the role of the priest once more. She readied her voice and became the priest in manner and syllable.

  ‘If I must.’

  ‘Gracious, as always,’ Occam said.

  ‘For all the grace allowed a prisoner,’ Perdita replied.

  When the strike master didn’t reply immediately she thought she might have pushed the confessor’s disdain too far. Confessor Kressnik was a man of the God-Emperor, kept incarcerated aboard an Alpha Legion vessel for its captain’s amusement. Perdita had decided that the priest would be proud but still fearful – as indeed she was in the presence of Occam the Untrue. ‘Whatever good grace I am allowed, is yours.’

  ‘You are wise beyond your years, confessor,’ Occam said.

  ‘Speak unto me,’ Perdita said, ‘as you might before your God-Emperor.’

  ‘And he will listen?’

  ‘He listens as a father to His children.’

  ‘His wayward children,’ Occam said.

  ‘The unfavoured are not forgotten,’ Perdita told him, trying her best to emulate the priest and a hundred others she had known with their dry sermonising. ‘Unburden your hearts, Space Marine.’

  Perdita watched as Lord Occam flicked his gaze up at her briefly. It felt like the sights of a sniper’s rifle aimed at her head.

  ‘I have served the Master of Mankind,’ Occam said, ‘in a life long forgotten and I serve him still.’

  ‘Yet you keep company with deviants and heretics,’ Perdita interjected.

  ‘They are weapons to be wielded,’ the strike master said, ‘and a weapon is nothing in itself. A razored blade. An undetonated charge. A shell, silent and unrealised within its magazine. A weapon needs a hand to direc
t its destruction. To decide who will live and who will die by its agency.’

  ‘And you are that hand?’

  ‘No,’ Occam the Untrue told her. ‘The Emperor is – for I am a weapon also and he had directed me towards his enemies.’

  ‘The heretics you fight beside…’

  ‘If that is what the Master of Mankind wills, then yes,’ Occam said, his words growing keener and sharper with every utterance.

  This is what Mina Perdita had learned about the strike master from such conversations. He wanted to be questioned; he wanted to be challenged. He was unsure of which direction to take. Occam the Untrue was no less lost than the madmen and corrupted souls under whose banners he had fought. In a galaxy of confusion, uncertainty and lies, Perdita decided, even a member of the Alpha Legion was allowed doubt. Standing before him in the semblance of a priest, she was a living embodiment of such a principle.

  ‘The Imperium in its present state is not the dominion the Emperor intended,’ Occam said, his voice laced with accusation. ‘It forever totters on the precipice of destruction, is infested with alien empires and riddled with the taint of corruption.’

  ‘Do you not share in some of that responsibility, renegade?’ Perdita put to him.

  ‘I do not,’ Occam said. ‘The lords of the Holy Ordos, the Ecclesiarchy and the battle-brothers of the Adeptus Astartes do. Through their every feeble action, they sustain the ailing beast that is the Imperium. I want to put it out of its misery. I want to purge the rot and the stagnation. I want what the Master of Mankind wants – the empire we were promised.’

  ‘How can you know the mind of the God-Emperor?’ Perdita pressed. She backed from the altar as Occam suddenly got to his feet. The Assassin cursed herself. Instead of venting his imperious fury, the strike master narrowed his eyes at her in thought and recognition. Perdita’s heart thudded in her chest. She had responded to the legionnaire’s sudden movement with the reflexes of an Assassin, not an elderly priest.