by Dan Abnett
It was Utropius who first felt the change in the air. The joints in his Mk IV armour began to vibrate, squealing with his every move, and he knew that something was about to change. With their filters on, and in their Corvus-pattern armour, his battle-brothers did not experience the change in atmosphere so readily, and were still doing their damnedest to break the choristers when he sent out the cry... Too late.
Then the wall came tumbling down.
Every hack, slash, lunge and swing that Battle-Brother Basilion had inflicted on the corpse choir finally bore fruit, and, suddenly the creatures disintegrated as one, falling to dust and bone shards on the rockcrete floor at the Space Marines’ feet.
The vibration in Utropius’s armour seals had reached a new pitch, and he was facing directly at the wall when it happened, while Cleon and Basilion were looking around at the mess of bone fragments littered all around them.
The crazed section of the wall that had been leaking un-light, crumbled and fell away. The Fissure was no longer a fissure, but a gaping hole in real time and space, a vast portal onto the warp.
As the light changed, as the un-light flooded over them in a great wave, as the myriad greys coalesced, crashing like a wave through the gap where the wall had been only seconds before, Cleon and Basilion raised their eyes to see what Utropius was already raising his useless lascannon against.
They had no name for it, although Utropius had to find the words to describe it in Basilion’s death report.
It was Chaos, and it was daemonic. It had to hunch and duck to step through the portal. When it stood upright, it became clear that the hunch was permanent, that the beast’s shoulders were so massive that its neck appeared to emanate horizontally from its chest. It was also bifurcated, carrying a mismatched pair of heads, both bestial, neither entire. One was eyeless while the other had three mouthless faces upon it. It appeared, at first, to have two pairs of arms and three legs, but when it turned, a third pair of arms seemed to sprout from its back, although they appeared flaccid, inert. Its gait was more a rolling glide than a stride and its centre of gravity was low to the ground. It was also the palest creature that the warriors had ever seen, with the thickest, whitest, smoothest hide, like the best marble, entirely without blemish, and with a dense, otherworldly sheen that seemed to bounce the un-light off its surface, creating an aura that confused the eye.
By the time Utropius had fired his lascannon and the rounds had fizzled to nothing in the un-light, Basilion was under attack. He swung and thrust with his power sword, but the beast had the longer reach, and the blurring of its form by the reflection of the un-light made it difficult to place in the environment, so every one of Basilion’s first half a dozen strikes missed its target.
Cleon quickly shouldered and aimed his meltagun, and fired a first blast of intense heat that somehow the daemon side-stepped onto, catching it directly in the torso. The un-light sucked the light out of the air, turning it ever blacker, making Cleon gasp inside his helmet. Then he saw the massive residual heat burn into the creature’s chest, and for a split-second there was relief, but only for a moment. As soon as that relief was registered it was replaced by calm, cold horror.
The heat from the melta-fire was absorbed by the dense sheen of the monster’s white hide, which glowed even whiter in a starburst formation across the centre of its torso, and Cleon realised that the beast had stepped into his line of fire deliberately. The thing bellowed a high-pitched scream of triumph, a split note as if blown too hard through a reed instrument.
Cleon and Utropius heard the words in their helmets as the beast reached out, and Basilion lunged and turned.
‘Hard weapons and hard rounds only,’ said Basilion, breathing steadily as he attacked the daemon.
Basilion’s lunge missed again, but as he turned, the daemon took hold of Basilion’s shoulders and wrenched hard at them, pulling at the armour to get at the flesh beneath. Basilion was shifted off-balance, but, in righting himself, he swung tight with his sword arm and struck his first blow, scoring a deep slit in the daemon’s left forearm. There was no blood, just oozing ichor, but the skin separated to reveal fibrous greenish matter beneath that resembled muscle. The sheen on the monster’s skin shifted as if it were some separate entity, flowing into the wound, filling it and sealing it off.
It was enough. Basilion knew how the daemon’s physical presence differed from his visual presence and he could take advantage of that.
Utropius began to take pot-shots at the daemon with his boltgun, missing until he was able to assess Basilion’s movements, and could then prove something of a distraction to the beast. The bolt-rounds caused only the most superficial wounds, but they made the creature flinch and swat at the annoyance, enabling Basilion to do his work.
The daemon relied too heavily on its ability to appear physically elusive, and then on its second skin to protect it. Basilion quickly overcame the first; the second had to be a matter of perseverance. The Space Marine, known for his prowess at hand-to-hand combat with a bladed weapon, went into overdrive, cutting and thrusting, hacking and slashing, swinging and slicing. It was not his intention to cause one fatal blow, but to strike over and over again. This was a war of attrition, and he was in it alone.
Cleon watched his brother for a moment, marvelling at his skill, and then set to work doing the only thing he could: he began to work on the rockcrete using his melta to cut new sections of wall to fill the gap where the Fissure had broken through. He worked hard and he worked fast, and as soon as this threat was over, the Fissure would be blocked off. Cleon would see to the physical barrier and they would ensure that the governor, that the Imperium of Mankind, maintained a spiritual barrier in perpetuity. The faithful would be brought in to claim back this place and to pray over it.
The daemon took flesh wounds over three of its limbs and down the left side of its torso while it raged and stomped and grabbed at its assailant. Then it came a little to its senses. It stood its ground, reached out its hands and gathered the un-light around it, between its upper pair of hands. Its lower pair of arms continued to pinwheel, trying to grab at Basilion, who was too quick on his feet, too clever to get caught.
The first searing thread of black light took advantage of the ripped seal at Basilion’s left shoulder joint. It slowed the Space Marine down for a second, and the daemon caught him, wrenching his left shoulder from its socket and tearing the flesh and muscles of his neck and back. Basilion threw his power sword to his right hand, and, drawing a breath as his Larraman’s organ began its work, he set about the daemon anew.
The daemon’s many flesh wounds were beginning to ooze slightly. The dense sheen covering its skin was thinning, and more and more of it was pouring into the open gashes that were appearing all over it. The skin looked more grey than white, and the creature began to look slow and sickly.
Basilion’s sword, almost black by the time he had finished attacking the corpse choir, was losing some of its colour, and regaining a little of its shine.
The daemon continued to draw un-light between its hands, to gather it into hard black balls, and then to send slender beams of it to cut into Basilion’s armour and flesh. His right leg was the new target as the next beam of un-light left the daemon’s hands and cut into the armour across the Space Marine’s thigh. He tried to avoid it, but could not step away; all he could do was fight on, cutting and slicing, leaving as many marks in the daemon’s skin as he could possibly manage. He caught the fingers of the daemon’s left hand as it raised them to control the un-light, slicing across the four digits and then twice across the outstretched palm and again across the wrist. With every new cut, every existing wound leaked a little more steadily, the sheen on the skin grew a little duller and the daemon came a little more into focus.
Then Utropius’s bolt-rounds began to penetrate, embedding themselves in the sheen, causing it to gather and cover the new injuries, spreading it ever thinner,
making it work ever harder.
Basilion’s right leg was gone, the stump cauterised. It did not prevent him fighting on. His left arm was useless, his shoulder torn away, but he would live.
Then the sheen began to drip from the daemon’s skin, thinned and contaminated by the fluids that it was meant to contain, and the beast grew angry. The bolt-rounds hurt, and the Space Marine with his endless swinging was a thorn in its side. The sheen began to run down every surface, every contour of the daemon’s body, and off at every joint and angle, and with it ran the daemon’s lifeblood, the ichor that powered its physical being.
Angered, the daemon did not have the patience to gather the un-light for another onslaught, so it blundered forward and lunged at Basilion, grabbing low at his left leg. Basilion had been compensating as best he could for his missing lower limb, but could not resist being bowled over. The daemon grasped the leg with all four of its great, clawed paws and swung and twisted Basilion through the air. Basilion refused to be disorientated, and decided to take full advantage of being inside the daemon’s reach, inflicting as many long, deep cuts on the creature’s massive torso, shoulders and neck as he could manage before he was flung aside, his left leg badly twisted and mangled, his armour disjointed and mostly missing, broken at all the seals.
Utropius had stopped shooting and was offering up a prayer.
Basilion landed face down, and the daemon stepped onto his back, jamming two of its heels hard between the Space Marine’s shoulders as it gathered together more un-light. It fed one beam directly into the back of Basilion’s armour while rending and tearing to get at flesh and muscle and bone. It fed a second beam directly at the right shoulder joint of Basilion’s armour, severing the limb that was wielding his power sword, silver-bright and gleaming once more, utterly destroying the Space Marine.
Utropius never let up with his boltgun, firing round after round at the daemon, whose body was now a dull grey, weeping ichor from every wound, the sheen utterly used up and gone.
It wasn’t the bolt-rounds that killed it, though.
The warp daemon suffered a death by a thousand cuts.
When they were sure that Basilion had triumphed, Utropius and Cleon threw the daemon’s corpse back through the portal, now as lifeless and dull as the beast, and placed the rockcrete panels that Cleon had cut over the place they called the Fissure.
IX
Basilion’s body was left in the care of the governor, who ordered a state funeral for the great warrior, and a permanent shrine to be built to him on the site of his death.
On their return to Ithaka, Apothecary Utropius deposited the gene-seed in the repository, Basilion’s gauntlet in the reliquary and his power sword in the armoury as was the Iron Snakes’ custom. Three things came back to the home planet, by right, of which one must be brought to life, one must be brought to use and one must be brought to rest.
Then the Apothecary and his battle-brothers stood on the shore at sunset as Utropius emptied his flask back into the ocean, the flask that had carried the Ithakan water that could have no other Imperial use, for it had anointed the Iron Snakes’ dead brother, and it could bring nothing but ill-fortune to any who used it thereafter.
Basilion is dead. Long live the gene-seed. Long live the Iron Snakes. The Emperor protects.
Here’s my story from the 2013 chapbook. Like Nik’s, it’s ‘historical’, a flashback (though not as far as hers) to an earlier time. It is a curiosity. It’s a Gaunt story, but not a Ghosts one. This is Gaunt, pre-Tanith…
Dan Abnett
A Ghost Return
Dan Abnett
I
Location: Formal Prime, Sabbat Worlds, 755.M41
They were walking by lamplight, finding their way by the criss-crossing beams of their lamp packs. They were deep underground, so of course it was going to be dark.
Except it seemed unnecessarily, extravagantly dark. Lightless. As though some kind of anti-light, an un-light, had been poured into the gloom to thicken it.
Every few seconds, and to no particular rhythm, the earth shook.
Ibram Gaunt could feel it through his boots. He swapped his lamp pack to his right hand, and placed his left palm against the tunnel wall. He felt the rough surface transmit the vibrations. At every subterranean quiver, dirt trickled down from the ceiling, or spilled from loose sections of the old, decaying arches.
The men in the advance squad could feel the shaking too, and it was putting them on edge. Gaunt could tell that by the way the beams of their lamps jerked and shifted at every tremble. Gaunt knew someone should say something. That someone was him, a part of his duty.
‘Shelling,’ he said. ‘The Warmaster has focused the artillery divisions on Sangrel Hive. It’s just shelling.’
‘Feels like the world’s moving,’ muttered one of the troopers.
Gaunt tilted his lamp to find the man’s face. Picked out starkly by the lamp’s beam, Trooper Gebbs shielded his eyes at the glare.
‘It’s just shelling,’ Gaunt assured him. ‘Concussion from the shelling.’
Gebbs shrugged.
The ground shook. Pebbles skittered.
‘Why are we here?’ asked another man. Gaunt’s lamp beam moved to identify Trooper Ari Danks.
‘You getting all philosophical now, Ari?’ Gebbs asked with a chuckle made throaty by the dust in the air.
‘I just wondered what the Throne we were supposed to be doing?’ Danks replied. ‘There’s nothing out here. Just these endless, pitch-black bloody ruins…’
‘So you’d rather be hacking your way through Charismites in the hive-stacks, would you?’ asked Trooper Hiskol.
‘At least it wouldn’t be as black as up my–’
‘Enough,’ said Gaunt. He didn’t have to raise his voice, and the troopers didn’t have to turn their beams to see his face and read its expression. They ceased their chatter. Some of them had served long enough to remember when Gaunt had just been ‘the Boy’, Oktar’s cadet, but none of them were about to forget what that young cadet had become. Gaunt was the commissar. He was discipline.
The ground shook again. Gaunt heard a little river of grit spill down the curve of the tunnel wall. He had to admit that Trooper Danks had a point. What were they doing here?
Gaunt understood the mission parameters clearly enough, and frankly, given the intensity of the hive-war, this advance detail was a blessed relief.
Even so, he’d calculated the journey time that morning, overestimating to allow for detours where the maps didn’t match the navigable reality of the undersink, and they should have reached their destination two hours ago.
Gaunt told the men to wait, and used his lamp to pick his way along the unlit tunnel. The officer in charge of the detail was standing at the next bend, checking his charts.
Major Czytel glanced up at the lamplight bobbing towards him.
‘That you, Gaunt?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We may have taken a wrong turn back there, Gaunt,’ Czytel said. ‘At that junction where the tunnel split.’
He turned and twitched his beam back the way they had come, partly as an indicator, partly to pick out Gaunt’s face.
Gaunt nodded. He’d presumed as much. Galen Czytel was old school, and most definitely remembered the time when Gaunt had merely been ‘the Boy’. Unlike the rank and file, he had never really got over the idea that Ibram Gaunt was an over-educated, over-privileged scholam boy with too much book-learning and not enough actual soldiering. Czytel liked what he called ‘honest men’. He seemed to be allergic to anybody who had an air of the officer class or entitlement. Czytel had ‘dragged himself’ up through the Hyrkan ranks. He’d freely tell you that, possibly several times in the course of one regimental dinner.
In fact, when Gaunt received his full promotion at Oktar’s deathbed on Gylatus Decimus, Czytel had been one of a group of
officers who had formally requested that Gaunt be transferred out of the Hyrkan Eighth to another unit. They felt that it would ‘undermine morale’ because the men ‘would not take seriously the authority of an individual who had previously been the regiment’s mascot’.
General Caernavar had thrown the request out quickly. Ironic then, it was officers like Czytel, and not the regular troops, who had found such difficulty in accommodating Gaunt’s maturity.
Gaunt, for his part, had learned that it was best not to correct Czytel unless absolutely necessary. An officer’s mistake could be carefully smoothed over by a diligent commissar. An open argument between an officer and a commissar had potentially devastating effects on discipline.
‘We’ll go back,’ Gaunt said. ‘It’s not far. Or we could go on to the next intersection, and move east.’
‘The next intersection?’ asked Czytel.
In the lamplight, Gaunt could see that Czytel was looking at him with a sort of sneer. ‘You haven’t got your chart out. You just remember that, do you?’
‘I reviewed the route this morning,’ Gaunt replied. ‘I don’t have my chart out because–’
He stopped. He had been about to say ‘because you, as officer in charge, were leading the route’.
‘I will double-check,’ Gaunt said. ‘I could be wrong.’ He reached for the data-slate pouch attached to his webbing, but Czytel just handed over his own slate. It looked like impatience, that Czytel didn’t want to wait while Gaunt produced his data-slate and woke it up. But it was actually a small concession, one which allowed for the idea that Czytel might have made a navigational error. The major wanted to keep the peace too.
Gaunt reviewed the screen.
‘Yes, you see, sir? The next intersection seems to allow access to this sinkway here. That should lead us directly to the shrine.’
