Around Copley, all internal lights and monitors flickered and went out. Red backup lighting kicked in.
‘Reaper Two down,’ reported the pilot over the force-wide channel. ‘All systems offline.’
No one heard him. Comms were dead. He was speaking to himself up there in the cockpit.
‘Reaper flight, report!’ barked Copley.
Nothing.
‘Reapers One and Three, do you copy?’
‘The link is dead, ma’am,’ said Morant, picking himself up from the floor. He had a cut on his head. Some of the others had been thrown around, too. They groaned as they got to their feet and then helped their fellows. The Space Marines had remained standing, holding on to the crash net above them. Some of them helped the Elysians up. Solarion and the one with the razor teeth did not, Copley noted.
That Ultramarine was easy to respect as a sniper, but damned impossible to like. The other one she didn’t know. He looked like a monster from a bad dream.
Her people were looking at her, awaiting her command.
‘Crack that rear hatch manually,’ she barked, ‘and get an eye on the other Stormravens. Check on the Dreadnought, too. I need a full damage report. I’m going up front to talk with Graka.’
‘That was thermonuclear,’ said Solarion. ‘You crack that hatch and you know what it means for your people. We Space Marines will be fine, but not you.’
Copley glared at him. She didn’t need it spelled out like that in front of her men. She knew damned well what it meant. What choice was there?
‘We can’t lie here in the dirt. How long till t’au fighters start running sweeps, looking for us? We have to get in the air and back to Chatha na Hadik. So we have to go outside. We take that chance, or we die here, three crippled birds waiting to be shot to pieces.’ She looked around at her people. Reluctant, but resigned. They knew she was right. ‘If we’re lucky, and if he’s still alive somehow, maybe Talon Alpha can get word to us while we’re doing the repairs. We’d all better hope so. Because if he’s dead, we have no idea where we stand with Epsilon. Operation Shadowbreaker is not over. Do you all hear me? This op is not over until we have the target! Now get out there. We have work to do!’
Triskel held up a hand, his auspex scanner in the other. He was glaring at it, his mouth a tight line. ‘Not safe to open the hatch, ma’am. Radiation levels in the red.’
‘Since the other options are get caught by the t’au or just wait to die, I’m afraid we don’t have a choice, Tris.’
‘You need not venture out,’ said one of the Space Marines, his voice so unnaturally deep and resonant compared to Triskel’s and Copley’s. He gestured to his brothers. ‘We will be unharmed. It is we who shall effect the repairs.’
Copley bowed with gratitude, but said, ‘That’ll mitigate it somewhat, my lord, but either way that hatch has to open.’ She turned to her men. ‘So get to it, lads.’
Her troopers went into action. They tried furiously to crack the hatch, but it was jammed with sand from the outside. It took the prodigious strength of Brother Androcles to open it at last.
The Elysians watched in quiet awe as he did, his raw strength far superior to all of theirs combined. They were the best, hard men who completed hard missions, but to a man, they felt like children next to the Space Marines.
When the hatch was open, daylight flooded the inside of the compartment. Hot, flinty air rushed in, strong with the smell of burning silicates. The Space Marines, unarmoured but utterly undaunted by thoughts of radiation, stepped out into the blazing desert light.
‘I’m going up front to speak with Graka,’ Copley announced.
As she turned towards the cockpit, Morant put a hand on her arm. ‘Ma’am, about the Death Spectre… Much as I want to, I don’t think even a Space Marine could have survived that. Not even Talon Alpha.’
Copley didn’t look at him. She brushed his hand off, saying nothing. She needed to believe Karras was still alive, that it hadn’t all gone to shit like this. Morant’s words made her angry, because they meant Shadowbreaker was a lost cause, a failed op. She had always been able to pull bad ops back from the abyss before now.
Had she been depending on the Deathwatch too much?
Should she have gone into the lower levels with them?
Morant was right. The chances were high that Karras and Rauth were dead. No way for anyone on foot to escape a thermonuclear blast radius that size. Hell, even at full speed, the Stormravens hadn’t managed it.
The knowledge of what had happened down there after Morant was ordered away would lie dead with them forever.
Operation Shadowbreaker had always been a long shot. Too many variables. Too many unknowns.
Karras and Rauth were gone. Swallowed up in the blast.
The rogue inquisitor and the t’au commander had pulled out and blown everything sky high.
Epsilon slipped us. Our one shot, and she slipped right through our hands.
Somehow, though, a tiny voice in Copley’s head told her it wasn’t over.
She shook her head. If things hadn’t been so bad, she’d have laughed at herself. Who was she kidding? Shadowbreaker was a mess. They’d lost people. The target had got away. And even now, she and her people were being irradiated to potentially lethal levels because they needed to effect emergency repairs or die out here on the open sand.
No one wins all the time.
But the voice in her head was persistent. She was still alive. And if she was alive, she was still in the game. And if she was still in the game, she could still win.
It wasn’t over. She still had a job to do.
Thirty-seven
From blinding light to deepest darkness.
Karras felt himself being pulled down, dragged deep into a black void. Around him, he could hear things moving, breathing, slithering, their claws scratching on stone. He heard a chorus of voices in terrible anguish and another chorus mocking them cruelly. He heard songs sung in forbidden languages and chanting that both repelled and entranced.
His own voice was weak and quiet in his mind, all but drowned out by the cacophony around him. He concentrated on his own thoughts, violently rejecting everything else that sought to smother him.
Was I fast enough? Did I throw up the barrier in time?
The blast had been powerful. Definitely thermonuclear.
He had never been forced to defend against something of that magnitude. Given time to think, he might not have tried, certain he could not. But he had acted on reflex, as much to save Darrion Rauth as to save himself.
Still, the price…
Was his desperate, reckless use of ethereal power about to cost him his soul?
Familiar laughter. Unnatural. Inhuman.
It echoed in the vastness of Karras’ inner universe, that bottomless well of the simultaneously infinite and infinitesimal self.
It emanated from a growing presence, rising up from below to meet him as he plunged further from physical reality.
Karras tried to recoil from it, revulsion washing over him.
The laughter grew louder, until it was so loud it seemed to Karras that he himself might be the source.
‘You insist on disappointing me, Death Spectre,’ said a dozen voices at once, each of different tone and timbre. ‘I thought I made myself clear about what the consequences would be.’
Unbidden, the monstrosity’s name rang loud in Karras’ mind.
Hepaxammon. Prince of Sorrows.
Again, the laughter. ‘Names I chose to give you. Among a thousand peoples on a thousand worlds, I am known by many others. You cannot begin to imagine the sphere of my influence. I am older than your petty Imperium, Space Marine. And you have made the mistake of underestimating me. Ah, such consequences you will face!’
In Karras’ mind, there flashed a sequence of images, each so vivid they
might have been real, as if he were being skipped across the surface of time and space like a flat stone on still waters, forced to witness places and times of the daemon’s choosing.
The Death Spectre war fleet departing Occludian orbit en masse.
A titanic battle in space. Several Space Marine fleets including that of his Chapter locked in desperate combat with a vast tendril of the tyranid incursion. Hopelessly outnumbered, unable to fall back.
Ships aflame, shedding sections of hull as they crashed white hot through a thick planetary atmosphere before knifing into the ground like thrown javelins.
And Space Marines, so many Space Marines, staggering from a thousand burning wrecks only to be swarmed upon, their desperate defence easily overwhelmed by a living tsunami of tyranid bioforms.
Space Marine deaths on a scale Karras had never seen.
Brave brothers eaten alive by bio-acid, or speared and sliced apart by talons as long and sharp as the power-scythes of the Death Spectres First Company, the War-Geists.
Massacre. Hopeless, bloody massacre.
The end of the Chapter, its fate the same as that of Chyron’s Lamenters.
Hepaxammon’s voice whispered to him now, as if only centimetres from his ear, as soft and coaxing as a lover’s but dripping with poison and bile.
‘You doubt, Death Spectre, but you will see. You cannot imagine the extent of my influence, the depth of my machinations. Men of such rank and power. Names that would shock you. Wheels within wheels. That you are here, now, with the Exorcist, is no matter of happenstance. I warned you. You did not heed me. The extent of your punishment will strike you to the core. The Death Spectres will be commanded to deploy in full force. And none will see Occludus again.’
Karras roared in denial. ‘The tongues of daemons drip with lies! Your words are hollow!’
Hepaxammon’s presence retreated a little. Karras could feel it, though all was still blackness and void. Why? Was it pushed back by the strength of his conviction?
‘You will learn in time,’ it told him. ‘Jormungandr. Remember that name. The end of the Death Spectres. No, not just their end, but their damnation. I will not stop with simply destroying them. In the aftermath, I will cause others to question their decisions. The loss of a thousand worlds will be placed at their feet. The losses of other Chapters, too. Thousands of dead Adeptus Astartes. I will make it so. Your beloved brotherhood will be dishonoured for all time.’
The abomination paused, then added, ‘This I do because you disobeyed me. There is no more bargain to be made. Now, I will speak to Darrion Rauth. I cannot sense him, but he is here. I know you sought to save him. Your thoughts have given him away.’
Karras sensed the daemon focusing elsewhere, preparing for something.
The last time he had encountered this horror, he had been saved by Athio Cordatus, mentor and friend. The Chief Librarian had foreseen the daemon’s intrusion into Karras’ reality. He had placed a psychic safeguard along several of Karras’ prime futures.
But there was no such safeguard now.
My khadit, thought Karras, did you not foresee this too? Am I too far along a shadowed path?
The daemon’s presence suddenly flooded Karras’ consciousness. He felt it surge into him like icy water into the lungs of a drowning man. He felt himself overwhelmed, swept up and tossed around as if by an unstoppable tidal wave. Karras desperately scrambled for something to hold on to. He reached for mantras and litanies long committed to memory, but the daemon deflected him from them easily.
‘I have waited long for this,’ Hepaxammon hissed with obvious satisfaction. ‘Darrion Rauth evaded me once. Broke his oath. Betrayed his vow. Through you, Lyandro Karras, he will finally pay. Watch through your own eyes, listen with your own ears, powerless to intervene as I take my due!’
Karras found himself looking out through his own eyes. He could feel his body, feel his armour around him, his pulse, his breathing. He saw his hand flexing and his mind flooded with panic and rage, because it was not he who had flexed it.
He was no longer in control. He was a passenger.
‘Enjoy the ride,’ said Hepaxammon.
Karras’ eyes fixed on movement to his left. There was Rauth, pushing himself to his feet.
The Exorcist was looking back the way they had come. Most of the tunnel down which he and Karras had run had collapsed. Nothing could be seen of the loading area, just a wall of fallen rock.
He turned and looked the other way, and saw that the tunnel ahead of them was still intact. Karras’ barrier hadn’t just saved them – it had prevented the collapse of the tunnel beyond them.
The Death Spectre’s sorcery had stopped the fury of a nuclear blast. He had saved them…
Rauth turned to Karras and regarded him for a moment. He walked towards him, unfastening his helm as he did.
Three metres from Karras, he stopped and said, ‘Your helm, Scholar. Take off your helm.’ His bolter was aimed straight at Karras’ head. ‘I need to see your face!’
Rauth knew he shouldn’t be alive. For the Death Spectre to save them, the amount of power from the warp must have been dangerously high. And now he sensed that something was deeply wrong. His training on Banish had been comprehensive and very specific. His instincts never lied. His subconscious was powerfully attuned to the presence of evil, and it was itching now, telling him Karras had opened the inner gates too wide. Something fell had forced its way through.
‘You heard me, Scholar,’ he growled. ‘Helm. Now.’
Karras got to his feet, but did not remove his helm.
‘First, a question,’ he said, and Rauth’s lip curled. The voice was nothing like Karras’. Rauth had heard it before. He’d once struck a bargain with it, commanded to do so by those in charge of testing neophytes on his Chapter home world. Strength, speed, power and glory for a thousand years unbroken.
And the price?
Just his immortal soul.
Every Exorcist had to summon a daemon and risk the bargain. It was the first part of the final test. Reneging on the deal and exorcising the monstrosity back into the warp was the latter part.
Most of the aspirants who failed their tests in other Chapters simply died. Those that failed the tests of the Exorcists lost their souls to an eternity of torture and madness in the warp.
And most didn’t make it. Eight in ten became possessed with no hope of recovery and had to be destroyed. But not Rauth.
He had tricked Hepaxammon. The daemon had tried to take its due early, to trick the trickster, but Rauth’s soul had already been hidden away, out of the daemon’s reach. It resided inside an infant, a clone of Rauth himself kept permanently in cryosleep. While the clone slept, the soul was hidden. Hepaxammon would never find it.
And without his soul inhabiting his conscious body, Rauth had become impossible to track. It was only through Karras, damn it, through his herculean effort to save them both, that the beast had found him after a century of searching.
The question came. Rauth had known it would.
‘Where is the soul you promised me, cur? Where is my due?’
Rauth’s finger squeezed the trigger of his bolter, then stopped just before the biting point.
It was Karras that stood before him. His Alpha.
Though the worst had happened, the very thing Rauth had been assigned to Talon to watch for, now that he had to deal with it, he found himself holding back. The Death Spectre had proven himself a force to be reckoned with, a brother not to be underestimated.
As bad as things looked, Rauth just couldn’t fire.
If he gave Karras time, might the Death Spectre find a way? Was he fighting Hepaxammon from within even now?
The daemon laughed, unfastened Karras’ helm and dropped it to the ground.
Rauth saw that the chalk-white face of his squad brother was already changing. The re
d eyes had turned black. The perfect, even white teeth were now wickedly pointed. As he watched, red seams appeared in Karras’ cheeks. He opened his mouth and they split apart with a spray of blood. His jaw began to protrude like a wolf’s muzzle.
‘Where did you hide it, Exorcist?’ demanded the daemon.
The air had turned icy cold and there was a foul stench on it, like corpses rotting.
Karras’ armour began to mutate, the ceramite and plasteel growing sharp spines and barbs, the pauldrons morphing to form hideous, leering faces where once there had been symbols of honour and pride. The fingers of Karras’ gauntlets stretched into long, curving talons, and the air around him began to shimmer and churn as if he were surrounded by a swarm of black flies stirred into frenzy.
The foul stink of brimstone emanated from his body as it hunkered down into a bestial half-crouch.
There was a wet, throaty chuckle. ‘You cannot fire on me, Exorcist, and you know it. You would only be slaying your brother.’
‘Scholar will understand. It was inevitable, after all.’
‘Ah, yes,’ breathed the beast. ‘How ironic. You were assigned to Talon to safeguard against this very thing. And yet, it is your very presence on Talon Squad that caused this. How does that make you feel, deal-breaker?’
Rauth dropped his bolter to the ground, took a step back, drew his combat knife and settled into a fighting stance. With his left hand, he drew something small and metallic from a pouch on his webbing. This he held in his closed fist. The daemon’s eyes flicked to it, but the beast could not see what it was.
‘I don’t think I’d enjoy just blowing you away,’ said Rauth. ‘I’ll get a lot more satisfaction from carving you up.’
The abomination dropped to all fours, its form so twisted that it barely seemed to be Karras’ body at all. ‘When I destroy your physical form, Exorcist, your soul will awaken in the place where you have hidden it. I will know. I will sense it. And I will hunt it down and devour it. There will be nothing you can do to stop me.’
Rauth raised his knife and began circling right. ‘Weaker the mantis who talks too much,’ he told the daemon.
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