by Darius Hinks
The dam juddered, filling the valley with a low, mournful groan.
Arcs of electricity fused togaether, forming a single bridge of light across the top of the dam. Then Mephiston dropped back down from the light and walked towards Calx, trailing smoke and sparks. As he walked, strands of electricity tore away from the pylons and attached themselves briefly to Mephiston’s back, flickering there for a moment, like wings.
The dam shuddered again and Calx’s legs had to dance furiously beneath him to stop him falling.
Mephiston muttered into a vox-bead at his collar and Calx heard a crackled response.
‘Chief Librarian,’ gasped Calx. ‘What have you done?’
His words were drowned out by a sound like falling mountains. The dam shifted again and the corpuscarii slumped lifelessly in their iron cages.
The wall of light vanished. A column of water blasted out from the centre of the dam, slamming into the ranks of battling warriors. It was hundreds of feet wide and laden with tonnes of masonry. It smashed through skitarii and ork alike, tearing armour and flesh, thundering through the trenches and shattering the gun emplacements.
Calx reeled in shock as the water carved through the valley, filling the air with blood and dust. He looked at Mephiston in horror. The Space Marine had ruptured the dam. He could not quite grasp the idea. It was so absurd that his mind could not latch on to it.
Mephiston did not even look at what he had done. His gaze fixed on the hulking aircraft that had brought him to the dam, now lifting up from the landing pad with a deafening thruster blast. Mephiston waved vaguely at the distant end of the valley, then, as the gunship banked off through the dust clouds, he strode towards the edge of the dam, dragging Calx with him.
The electro-priests hung lifelessly from their cages, their wall of energy gone. There was nothing to spare Calx from the dizzying truth. The jet of water was growing bigger and more furious. The battle had been transformed. Hundreds of corpses rushed out across the valley as it filled with water, and the front lines of both armies collapsed into a chaotic slurry. Thousands of greenskins were still trying to charge towards the dam, but they were either slipping in the gore or crushed by the blast. The scale of the destruction was staggering.
‘What are you?’ whispered Calx, his face just inches from Mephiston’s.
‘Death,’ replied Mephiston calmly. Then, still holding Calx, he leapt from the dam.
They fell dozens of feet before Mephiston summoned broad, flickering shadow wings and wrenched them into a rolling loop. They soared out over the battle as vapour trails tore past them. A storm of crimson-clad killers was falling from the sky. As the gunship boomed overhead it spewed a lethal rain: Blood Angels, borne by the howling jet turbines on their backs. There were other ships, barely visible overhead, and tiny figures were plunging from those too, guns already blazing as they ripped down through the clouds.
Calx’s heart pounded behind his metal ribcage. Even fear and grief could not suppress his awe. The Emperor’s death angels, come to wreak bloody vengeance. ‘Omnissiah preserve us,’ he whispered.
Mephiston turned his loop into a dive and Calx lost all sense of direction. They hurtled through spume and blood towards the heaving mass of warriors below.
He howled as the ground rushed towards him, but seconds before they hit, Mephiston righted himself and landed with such ease that Calx barely felt the impact. He staggered nonetheless, disorientated from the flight, scrambling like a spider.
Mephiston kept Calx upright as he turned to face the orks. The xenos howled as they pounded towards them. They were grotesque, like oversized apes, so top heavy with scarred muscle that they should barely have been able to walk, but still they thundered across the rocks with incredible speed. Their heads were hung low between absurdly broad shoulders and their faces mostly hidden behind crudely hammered iron – all he could see was their massive, tusk-filled jaws and burning, ember-like eyes.
One of Calx’s limbs was an ancient thermal weapon – a volkite blaster so heavy that it required three of his other arms to lift it. He hefted the antique gun and trained it on the approaching orks.
Before Calx could fire, Mephiston strode towards the orks, blocking his shot. The Blood Angel drew his sword and levelled it at the greenskins, raising his other hand to the sky in a grasping gesture.
The orks shook and staggered, gripped by palsy. Mephiston wrenched back his hand and blood erupted from their mouths. Their bodies jolted and innards burst from their skin. They toppled in a heap.
A bucket-shaped war machine roared into view, bristling with bastardised firearms. Mephiston raised his hand again but, before he could strike, Calx loosed off a shot. The war machine became a wall of flame, taking down a row of orks as it detonated.
Mephiston spoke into his vox and waved his sword at the Blood Angels screaming overhead. Everywhere Calx looked they were slamming down onto the churned earth, unleashing a fierce barrage of bolter fire, toppling wave after wave of the green-skinned monsters.
Calx fired again and raced through the chaos, dodging shots and flames as he scrabbled across the trenches.
Mephiston was just ahead of him and as the Blood Angel advanced through the battle, Calx’s awe grew. The Chief Librarian had not even drawn his pistol. Each time a group of orks lumbered through the fumes, Mephiston simply grasped at the air and ripped blood from their bodies, before striding over their broken husks.
Everywhere Calx looked he saw islands of floating corpses – Guardsmen, skitarii and xenos, pulverised by the force of the water. The dam was crashing forwards, engulfed in flames.
He had the courage to do what I could not, thought Calx. Beyond the valley, the continent was littered with Mechanicus research stations, all under attack. The greenskins would have destroyed them all, but now Mephiston would halt the enemy advance. Calx had been facing a slow, ignominious defeat, but Mephiston had found a route to victory.
Calx painted the air with his volkite blaster, igniting more greenskins as he scrambled on through the carnage. The orks fell back before him, and Calx cried out a staccato stream of binharic, cursing the xenos in the name of the Machine-God.
The battle fumes banked away to reveal a ruined gun emplacement up ahead. Mephiston had climbed up onto the trashed rockcrete to survey the hell he had created.
Calx hurried towards him, wracking his brain for everything he knew about the Blood Angels Chief Librarian. Somewhere in his meticulously organised cerebral cortex, Calx found an image that matched the scene up ahead – his enhanced brain retrieved a centuries-old pict feed. It showed Mephiston, surrounded by slaughter on an unimaginable scale, in a world rent by war and psychic flames. ‘Armageddon,’ breathed Calx, pausing to incinerate another greenskin, staggering under the force of the blast as he immolated the snarling monster. ‘He was born there.’
Calx reached the pile of rubble and clambered up towards Mephiston. As he crested the broken wall and saw the corpse-crowded valley spread out before him, he realised that Mephiston had recreated the place of his birth – Hydrus Ulterior now looked as horrific as Armageddon.
‘You came to save us,’ whispered Calx, glancing at Mephiston with a mixture of dread and astonishment.
Mephiston ignored him, scouring the bloodbath. Blood Angels were slicing through the drowning armies, trailing promethium fumes as their jump packs hurled them forwards. Orks and vehicles disintegrated before their white-hot barrage of bolter fire. Anything not flattened by Mephiston’s destruction of the dam was now being torn down by his assault squads.
‘When did it begin?’ Mephiston spoke softly, despite the din of the battle.
‘My lord?’
‘The poison in the minds of your men – when did it begin? When did they start to unravel?’
Calx was relieved to understand. ‘Twelve days, three hours and twenty-seven minutes ago. The first reported case was a data
smith. I heard about–’
Calx faltered as a shadow dropped through the clouds and hurtled towards them. It was one of the crudely built ork vehicles – a single jet turbine with crooked wings and a ridiculous mass of guns welded to its fuselage.
The aircraft dived straight for them, spewing oil, armour plates and fumes. The pilot had turned a crash into an attack, singling Mephiston out as a final target. Calx’s enhanced optics zoomed in on the ork at the controls. His brutish features were locked in a manic leer as he wrestled with his juddering vehicle.
There was no time to shoot and Calx muttered a prayer.
Seconds from impact, the aircraft froze. The pilot’s grin became a rigid, blood-spattered mask.
The entire battle halted. Blood Angels hung in the air, bolter rounds hovering inches from the muzzles of their weapons. Skitarii troops reached in motionless agony towards the rocket-slashed skies. Even the torrent from the broken dam had paused, a silvery mountain of liquid, thousands of tonnes of water, just hanging there.
Mephiston stood calmly before this strange tableau. He had taken a crystal vial from his robes and poured a single drop of crimson liquid. The droplet remained suspended before his face, shimmering like a ruby.
‘You must be wrong,’ he said, his voice ringing out through the strange silence.
‘Wrong, my lord?’
‘The mind-sickness must have started before then.’ There was a quiet urgency to Mephiston’s words. ‘Think again.’
‘My lord, my cerebral circuits were hand-woven on Mars, in rituals prescribed by the Fabricator General himself. My powers of recall were blessed and re-blessed in the Temple of All-Knowledge until–’
Mephiston loomed over him. ‘The blindness began over a year ago. I had barely left the Ameritus Sector when I felt it.’
‘Blindness? We have not been blinded, my lord. The corruption is spiritual, not physical. De spiritualibus-daemonium…’ His ocular implants coiled back into his hood and he waved at the corpses of his men. ‘It’s more disgusting than blindness. It is a degradation. They turned us into beasts.’
Mephiston shook his head. ‘This has to be the place. This has to be the cause of my blindness. Every one of my auguries pointed here.’ He was no longer looking at Calx, but at the comms tower that barred the entrance to the valley. ‘Even a mind forged on Mars can be mistaken.’
Calx was outraged. ‘My lord, there is no one more devoted–’
‘Ignorance is the mother of devotion.’ Mephiston fixed Calx with a cold stare. Then he turned away, drew a knife from within his robes and inscribed a shape into the ruined wall of the bunker. He flicked the blade with a casual, seemingly thoughtless gesture, but when he stepped back Calx saw that the design he had worked into the stone was intricately wrought. It was a fragment of a celestial map. Mephiston placed a drop of blood onto the design and the delicate spheres and arcs began turning, gliding across the crumbling rockcrete. Even in such a strange form, Calx could recognise the continental shapes of the largest planet.
‘Hydrus Ulterior,’ he muttered.
Mephiston stared at the image, peering intently at each annotated line. ‘Everything points to here.’
He waved the image away and turned back to the droplet he had left hanging in the air. He touched it with his fingertip, breaking the stasis. It splashed down onto the rubble.
Hell enveloped them. Sound, movement and violence crashed through the valley and time lurched forwards.
Calx flinched as the ork jet screamed towards them, but Mephiston dismissed it with a casual wave of his hand. The aircraft crashed down a hundred feet away and the resultant fireball bathed the ruins in light, adding another column of fire to the chaos.
Mephiston hauled Calx on through a shattered archway, striding down a trench that led to the end of the valley.
An ork rose from the filth, lunging at Calx with a guttural roar. It barrelled forwards, clutching a massive chainaxe. The weapon’s teeth whirred and rattled as the ork brought it down at Calx’s face.
Mephiston strode on, not noticing the attack, but Calx managed to raise one of his heavily plated servo-arms in time to take the impact. The ork leant its full weight against him, the chainaxe ripping through Calx’s arm, spitting brass and phenolic cabling.
The ork’s face was just inches from Calx’s. The monster’s foetid breath washed over him as its enormous jaws widened in a teeth-filled roar.
Calx reached to his belt and turned a dial. A blinding charge rushed through his servo-arm and the ork stiffened, its roar turning into a gargle. The chainaxe jammed and the ork’s eyes rolled beneath its heavy brow.
Calx shoved his sparking limb harder against the spasming monster, surrounding them both in smoke and spitting fat. Then, with another click of the dial, he allowed the dead ork to fall away, dropping it back into the water with an explosion of steam.
Mephiston was now a distant figure, but Calx was determined to catch up. The greenskins were about to receive the Emperor’s judgement and he wanted to be on hand to see them pay for what they had done. With the water rising above his thighs, Calx wrenched open a hatch in his neck and shoved a cartridge into a socket beneath his jugular.
There was a whine of servos as the program took effect. The forest of legs beneath Calx jerked and clicked into motion, unfolding a new set of struts that jolted Calx several feet higher into the air. As he continued down the trench, Calx looked even more like an arachnid, swaying on his umbrella of spindly limbs.
Raised above the water, Calx was able to pick up speed and race after Mephiston, rejoining him at the end of the trench where the Blood Angel had climbed up onto a landing platform – a circular disc of rockcrete carried on the shoulders of a crumbling, stone lion. Mephiston was in the process of driving back two ork dreadnoughts, slicing through their can-shaped armatures with a flurry of sword strikes. It was a one-sided fight and the xenos were lying in a heap of smouldering engine parts by the time Calx reached the Chief Librarian.
Mephiston was about to speak when more Blood Angels slammed down onto the platform, sending tremors through the stone lion as it took the weight of their power armour.
Most of the Blood Angels took up defensive positions around the platform, training bolters on the surrounding massacre, but the senior officer strode up to Mephiston. He removed his helmet and pounded his chest armour in salute. His appearance was more how Calx had imagined Blood Angels: shoulder-length, flaxen hair framing refined, imperious features. He looked like one of the exalted saints that crowned the frescoes of Hydrus Ulterior’s cathedrals. However, when he reached them and saw the blood oozing from Calx’s wounds, the Blood Angel’s expression changed. His nostrils flared and the muscles along his jaw tightened, as though Calx had angered him. Almost immediately, the ancient warrior regained his look of cool disdain, but Calx took a few steps back. The Adeptus Astartes were a stranger breed than he had expected.
‘The valley is clear, Chief Librarian,’ said the Blood Angel, casually announcing a victory that had eluded Calx for weeks. ‘Lieutenant Servatus has led his Hellblaster squads around to the east, checking the perimeter. They are encountering only minimal resistance. You have…’ The Blood Angel hesitated, glancing back at the dam. ‘You left us little in the way of opposition, my lord.’
Mephiston nodded vaguely and then gestured towards a slender shape at the far end of the valley. ‘How many at the comms tower?’
‘Something is confusing our auspex, lord, but Servatus estimates only two hundred at most. They are heavily armed and Servatus saw a dozen war machines but…’ He shrugged. ‘A hundred or so greenskins against twenty of us. It will be a quick fight.’
Mephiston nodded. ‘They have a weapon of some kind – the cause of this mind-sickness. They’re using the comms tower to amplify it. Leave that to me.’
The Blood Angel nodded, then filled the air with heat and noise
as his jump pack hurled him back into the sky.
Calx expected Mephiston to race after his men, but he remained where he was, watching from the landing pad as the squads of Blood Angels screamed past, spewing bolter fire as they reached the tower at the end of the valley.
Greenskins boiled up from the surrounding trenches.
‘That’s more than a hundred,’ said Calx, as the valley shook with the sound of xenos war cries.
Mephiston was not watching the battle. His head was tilted back and a red film had clouded his eyes. They looked like fresh wounds, gouged into his bone-white face.
‘Chief Librarian,’ crackled the vox in Mephiston’s gorget. ‘You should see this. I think we have found the weapon you mentioned.’
Mephiston’s eyes cleared. ‘Hold your positions,’ he replied. ‘You know the layout of the comms tower,’ he said, turning to Calx.
Calx nodded. ‘It’s a galvanic pulsometer. One of the earliest–’
Mephiston grabbed him by the shoulder and whispered a string of words into his face. The chill deepened. There was something sepulchral about the language but Calx’s pulse raced in response, as though the Chief Librarian had triggered an injection of combat stimms.
As they raced on towards the tower, Calx’s limbs trilled with energy and he found he could run at an incredible pace. In a matter of minutes they had reached the trenches surrounding the tower.
Half of the Blood Angels were still outside the pulsometer, stalled by scrums of muscle-bound orks pouring across the trenches. The Blood Angels fought with a savagery surpassing even the brutality of the xenos, hacking at the orks with chainswords and combat knives in a frenzy of bloodlust. The orks were revelling in the ferocity of the fight, chanting a savage mantra, bellowing and snorting in unison. Their cries were so loud they matched the fury of the gunfire.
Mephiston hacked through the chanting orks, charging for a shattered entrance at the base of the tower with Calx rushing after him, still firing. The doors were clinging weakly to their hinges and Mephiston smashed straight through, shielding Calx from the impact as they landed on the other side, scattering masonry into a vaulted antechamber.
