by Ben Counter
Glass tanks, like large aquaria, stood in rows of ten, running down the length of a huge refrigerated room. Each one had a clear lid that was open, or in the process of opening, to let out the thing that lay within. The tanks were full of clear fluid in which were suspended the results of the experimentation happening beneath House Yathe. Some were multiple bodies fused together, or parts from several sources welded into one abomination. Others were a single body distorted beyond humanity. They were slithering and lurching from their tanks, trailing cables and hoses. There must have been fifty or more of them in the room, all gibbering and hissing as they were forced awake.
Through a series of archways in the far wall, Cyvon glimpsed ivory robes fleeing. The Uppermost Hand, their quarry.
‘There!’ he shouted. He lined up a shot down the room, but his aim was spoiled by the two-headed mutant that loomed up at him. This creature was taller than a Space Marine and tottered on four multijointed legs. Cyvon shot it in the throat and one of its heads was thrown off its body in a spray of thin, sputtering blood. The other head, split down the middle to the greyish brain matter, howled in anger. Cyvon drove the butt of his bolt rifle into the opening in the mutant’s skull and the weapon crunched through the front of its cranium. He tore the gun out, taking clods of brain with it.
The mutant crashed to the floor but the Uppermost Hand was gone. He had fled into the industrial guts of the facility. Refrigerant pipes and generators filled the space beyond this room.
If there was another way out of the laboratory, he would escape. He had a whole city to hide in. If he lost himself in the tangle of Hollowmount, or other cultists linked up with him to get him to safety, the Soul Drinkers might never find him again.
Sasan was grappling with something that had the torso of a human, with bundles of tentacles for limbs. Pitamenes leapt onto one of the tanks and fired down at the throng approaching them. Blood sprayed across the floor and walls, and mingled with the fluid in the tanks.
A lumbering horror of distended flesh and grafted muscle absorbed half a magazine of Pitamenes’ fire before it fell. A cell door in the wall of the chamber burst open and something resembling a serpent made of human bodies slithered out. Its mouth was a fanged ring of contracting flesh. Dozens of hands ran along its flanks, propelling it along at inhuman speed.
There were too many of them.
Cyvon pivoted to shoot down a skeletally thin clawed thing that leapt at him, ducked low under a swinging fist and blasted a chest cavity open. They were all around him, a pressing wall of flesh, and every volley of fire opened up a smaller and smaller circle of freedom around him through the crowding mutants.
‘Whosoever shall stand against my brethren, I shall stand before him!’ boomed a voice heavy with authority. ‘And I shall cut from him his heretic’s heart!’
Cyvon recognised the voice of Sergeant Respendial. Three of his squad erupted into the room from the side, stammering out a volley of fire that withered away a dozen mutants. Brother Katanes charged past the sergeant and beheaded one of the mutants with a swing of his combat knife, firing into another before vaulting a tank and landing a short distance from Cyvon.
‘You kicked up an ungodly din down here, brothers!’ said Katanes. Cyvon knew him well: they had sparred on the Suffering of Helostrix on the journey to Kepris. Katanes had an exceptional feint and a talent for turning an opponent’s miss into a choking headlock.
‘He’s ahead,’ said Cyvon. ‘He’s running.’
‘Not for long. The Second Squad are here to show the Third how it’s done.’
Katanes fought back to back with Cyvon as the throng eased off enough for Sasan to link up with them. Respendial and the third of his squad, Meneduch, fired into the crowd.
The snake-thing lurched over them. It bit down even as bolter shells ripped into it. The abomination’s jaws closed on Meneduch, and Cyvon heard the crunch of fracturing ceramite. Respendial bellowed and dived at the blasphemy of flesh. His combat knife stabbed again and again into its squirming bulk, and malformed organs showered the tiles with gore.
‘Move!’ shouted Cyvon to his squadmates. ‘Cold and fast! Not one faltered step!’
The three Soul Drinkers in the centre of the room forged forward through the mutants. Their combined fire drove a bloody channel through the malformed bodies. When one of the mutants survived its wounds, Pitamenes executed it on the ground.
A creature of three fused human bodies opened its maw and vomited a hail of bony shards. One of them struck Pitamenes in the shoulder guard, and Cyvon heard him grunt as it punched through to the flesh.
Respendial and Meneduch were peppered with the shards. Meneduch toppled, a fang as long as a man’s forearm protruding from the eyepiece of his armour. Respendial was hit in the chest and thigh and dropped to one knee, still firing as he dragged Meneduch behind him.
Cyvon felt the familiar tightening in his stomachs. If the cult of Yeceqath took a Soul Drinker’s life on this planet, then the Chapter would have its retribution. No Chapter won its laurels leaving their dead unavenged.
Cyvon burst through into the chamber beyond. It was obscured with lengths of coolant piping and the bulky shapes of generators exuding clouds of frozen vapour. This was the source of the chill preserving the biological material in the lab. Cyvon swung left and Pitamenes and Sasan right, searching for signs of the Uppermost Hand. It was darker here, but a Space Marine’s enhanced vision peeled away the darkness and revealed the cover and hiding places in merciless clarity.
A stuttering burst of light issued from the back of the room. Cyvon dropped behind a generator as chunks of machinery were sliced away and clattered smouldering to the floor. Another lance of light carved through the room, cutting clean through coolant pipes and filling the lab with a sudden burst of icy white vapour. Cyvon forged on through the opaque cloud, knowing that if he could not see the Uppermost Hand, the heretic could not see him, either.
‘Breaking right!’ came Respendial’s voice from behind. It was strained, because the sergeant was carrying Meneduch with him. ‘Katanes, cover the rear! Choke this doorway with their dead!’
‘I’ve got him!’ shouted Pitamenes, and Cyvon heard his battle-brother firing a spray of bolter fire through the chamber. In answer, another streak of laser speared through the vapour-filled room.
A shape stumbled out of the vapour and crashed into Cyvon. It was Brother Pitamenes. He grabbed at Cyvon’s arm, then fell away, suddenly limp.
Pitamenes’ hand still clutched Cyvon’s forearm. His squadmate’s arm had been severed just above the elbow. The beam had continued through Pitamenes’ torso and out through his shoulder. The two halves of Pitamenes’ body rolled apart from one another and let out a flood of gore that steamed in the cold.
More gunfire. Cyvon let Pitamene’s arm drop and ran for the sound.
He erupted into an operating room lined with cogitators and green glowing screens. Auto-surgeon units clung to the ceiling with folded bunches of blade limbs. On a dissection slab lay the corpse of a human, apparently unaltered save for the deep incision that pared its face open from forehead to chin and a neat scorched wound over the left side of the chest.
Brother Sasan was crouched by another doorway. He fired a shot into the depths of the room. In response, a bolt of plasma ripped across the dissection room and bored through the wall. Sasan threw himself to the floor, out of the line of fire.
‘I pin him, you cut him down,’ voxed Sasan.
‘Understood,’ replied Cyvon. He could not see through the banks of cogitators and shelves of lab equipment, but judging from the source of the plasma bolt, he had a good idea of the enemy’s location.
‘Burn in the Emperor’s fire!’ yelled Sasan, and fired into the room. Bolter shells exploded everywhere, throwing shards of glass and chunks of metal against the walls and ceiling. One of the auto-surgeons was struck and came apart, showering th
e room with pieces of broken surgical blades.
Another bolt of plasma followed, ripping a second molten hole out of the wall above Sasan’s head.
Cyvon charged straight at the source of the plasma. He crashed through a bank of shelves and vaulted the lab bench beyond.
The Uppermost Hand was crouched against the back wall of the room. His robes were tattered and his face bloody from the minor wounds dealt him by the flying shrapnel. One hand was outstretched, displaying the ornate rings on each finger. He had at the very least a powerful laser and a plasma weapon, all miniaturised with technology the Imperium no longer possessed. Each one could slice a Space Marine in two, if the wielder had just a split second to bring them to bear.
Cyvon did not give the Uppermost Hand the luxury of that time.
He fired as he ran, and his shot blew off the Uppermost Hand’s arm at the elbow. The hand with its digital weapons vanished in a burst of red. Cyvon slammed into the stunned cultist and rammed him against the wall with a forearm across the throat.
Through the eyes of the mask, Cyvon could see the Uppermost Hand’s eyes widen in shock and terror. He pressed his forearm to cut off the man’s air and render him unconscious.
Cyvon heard a small metallic ping, easy to miss in the after-echo of the bolter fire and laser blasts, but too familiar for him to ignore.
The cultist had pulled the pin on a grenade with his remaining hand. Cyvon gauged the situation in a heartbeat. It was a fragmentation grenade. At zero range it could blast Cyvon’s armour apart.
Cyvon dropped the cultist and leapt backwards. He rolled over the dissection table, bringing the corpse on it down on top of him as he tipped the table onto its side to form a shield of polished steel.
‘Down!’ he yelled. Behind him, Sasan backed out of the plasma-spattered doorway.
The grenade exploded and the room was a sudden, deafening storm of shrapnel, reflected back and forth between the walls in a fraction of a second. The cogitator screens popped and shattered. Electronics burst into sparks. The scorched air rushed out and boomed back in again, throwing debris and shrapnel across the room in a flurry of steel and glass.
The sound echoed through the facility, dying down. Cyvon checked himself mentally for injuries. He had come through battered but unhurt. He got to his feet to see the dissection room completely wrecked, with the metal-clad walls scorched and pitted around where the Uppermost Hand had been. The dissection table was studded with shards of smouldering metal, but thankfully had held to protect Cyvon from the explosion.
‘Not much left to work with,’ said Brother Sasan, looking at the smoking stain that remained of the Uppermost Hand.
Sergeant Respendial struggled into the room with Brother Meneduch. ‘They’re barricaded out,’ said the sergeant. Meneduch coughed once, and Cyvon saw he was alive, though severely injured. The spike through his eyepiece was still there.
‘Brother Pitamenes has fallen,’ said Katanes from the doorway.
‘And for what?’ growled Respendial. ‘To kill one mutant in robes. Whatever he knew is lost to us. He wiped out all this place’s secrets along with himself.’
Cyvon looked down at the body at his feet – not the Uppermost Hand, but the corpse he had thrown off the dissection table as he had dived for cover. The dissection room had been the heart of the laboratory, with the vivisections and experiments watched over by cultists feeding the results into the cogitators. The machines were as wrecked as the rest of the chamber, but the body on the floor was intact.
‘It’s preserved,’ said Cyvon, kneeling by the body. It was a man with his face split deeply down the middle, the skin expertly peeled back from the wound by the precision blades of the auto-surgeons. ‘No decay. Minimal mutation. Chest wound right over the heart, laser burn. He died quickly.’
‘Brothers, I believe we have found the place the cult make their Thricefold,’ said Sasan. ‘At least where they perfected the method.’
‘What can you do with it?’ asked Respendial.
‘There is only one way to answer that, sergeant,’ replied Sasan.
Cyvon cradled the corpse’s head. The neck was intact. The brainstem, too. ‘I can try,’ he said.
Chapter Four
There comes a time in the life of every faithful soul when he is asked how far he will go to do what is righteous. There can only be one answer. As far as it is possible to go, and then beyond, unto destruction.
– Father Balthan Eugenivov, The Keprian Vengeance
The strike force would not wait there long. The heretics had withered against the Soul Drinkers’ onslaught, but there was no telling what reinforcements the cult could throw at them. They could hold out indefinitely but doing so would not help behead the cult. The Soul Drinkers had to finish with House Yathe, and be gone.
They gathered in the laboratory to clear out the bolter-riddled chamber full of experiment victims, recover their dead and minister to the wounded. Brother Meneduch lay on the floor of the dissection room with his helmet removed and a medicae patch over one eye. The remains of Brother Pitamenes were bundled up to be carried. They would not be left behind.
Sergeant Phraates was walking wounded, too. He could barely heft the weight of a bolter. His injuries had been patched up as best as was possible without an Apothecary, and he watched proceedings with a scowl, as if angry at his body for daring to have found itself in the path of the Uppermost Hand’s digital weaponry.
‘Hold him still,’ said Cyvon.
‘I have done this before, brother,’ said Sasan. ‘Remember?’
The body from the slab lay on the floor. It was not an ideal situation for the procedure, but the dissection table was ruined and there was no time to find a better location. As Sasan immobilised the corpse’s head with his hands, Cyvon used a miniaturised circular saw to cut a long line along the forehead. It was an implement he carried for just the purpose. The saw slid through bone as Cyvon followed the curve round the temple, and Sasan lifted the head so he could cut right around the back of the cranium.
Cyvon pulled the top of the skull away. With a liquid sucking noise the bone separated, revealing the dark crimson of brain matter.
The brain looked healthy. Cyvon had seen enough that he knew the signs of injury or the beginnings of decay. Lacking a handy medical implement, he took his combat knife and shaved off a sliver of cortex with the monomolecular tip of the knife.
‘Moment of truth, brother,’ said Sasan. ‘Let us hope this dead fool saw something.’
The omophagea was an organ in a Space Marine’s spinal cord that connected to the stomach via an implanted bundle of nerves. Through some alchemy long lost to human understanding, it could absorb genetic material and filter out information from recent changes to the DNA. It required fresh central nervous system matter to work. In some Space Marine Chapters the omophagea had ceased to function entirely, and in many others it could give only the vaguest and most superficial information. Other Chapters eschewed its use as obscene or too misleading to be useful. On occasion, however, an individual Space Marine could possess an unusually active omophagea, and his Chapter would accept its use. Brother Cyvon was one such individual. The gene-seed of the Sangprimus Portum contained within it a genetic echo that had surfaced in him, a relic of the primarchs and their astonishing power. To him, the results of the omophagea were not the vague snatches of emotions or thoughts from the recently deceased. To him, they were real.
Cyvon put the sliver of brain matter on his tongue, and swallowed it down.
He felt the tendrils of another being’s memories pulling at his consciousness.
There was pain. Cyvon’s body tensed with it. These were the very first impressions of the dead man’s last memories. Pain and panic. He felt the red line of agony down his face as a scalpel carved through his forehead, nose and jaw. He felt the ghosts of restraints around his wrists and ankles. He forced him
self to take in a long, slow breath and reassert himself. The memories were not his, he told himself. He was not this man. This pain was not his…
He was lying on the slab in the dissection room. The auto-surgeon was clicking and whirring above him. Its scalpels were wet and red with his blood. He did not have the body of a Space Marine, but of a normal man. He felt its restrictions around him, like being held in chains. He tried to move and realised even these flawed limbs would not do what he commanded of them. He was paralysed.
His vision was fuzzy with the chemicals used to thin his blood and halt his movement, and he had to force his eyes to focus. His head lolled to the side, and he saw a woman.
She was handsome, not beautiful. Her sharp, angry face was crowned with a mass of unruly blonde hair tied into place. She wore a set of clothing resembling an ornate military uniform with brocade and epaulettes, and a set of medals on the chest.
‘Yathe,’ said a voice from the other side of the room. ‘We have yet to see results.’
The woman’s face was crossed by a mixture of fear and anger. ‘I cannot work miracles,’ she retorted. Her voice was the cut glass of an aristocrat. ‘I am not you.’
‘You are not,’ came the reply. There was something off about the voice. It was a man’s, but with a quality to it that was not human.
A figure walked into view. It was significantly taller than the woman, with elongated, inhuman proportions. It wore a set of armour of curved interlocking plates, coloured white and jade green with an intricate incised pattern of thorned vines twining and knotting together. A fat crimson gemstone was mounted in the middle of the breastplate. Its face was a horror. It seemed stretched and distorted, as if seen through a cruelly curved lens. The eyes were huge and black, the nose and mouth small, the cast of the features a picture of arrogance and cruelty, the black hair swept back. It carried a tall staff topped with the symbol of a crescent moon.
It was not alone. A second alien figure wore deep-green armour and an all-enclosing helm with triangular eyepieces and a pair of mandible-like lasers built into the faceplate. The rear of the helm curved up to form a high white crest. The armour gave the creature considerable bulk, matched by the size of the chain-toothed sword scabbarded at its side.
