As the blast doors finally ruptured, Ulantus roared with defiance, triggering the first volley of fire from the Devastators. An immense bank of bolter fire lashed out of the firing line, shredding the remnants of the doors and the first of the necron warriors that emerged through the smoke. A hail of grenades bounced and rolled into the breach, where they detonated and filled the lost prow sections with blazing infernos of shrapnel.
When the firing stopped, another cheer arose from the barricade. Smoke plumed and billowed out of the ruined blast doors, but no necrons emerged from the devastation. Hope washed over the defenders in a cruel wave.
An almost inaudible scratching noise started to scrape through the structure of the corridor. It grew louder and louder, scraping and rustling until it became a metallic din. Little flecks of black appeared on the floor in front of the blast doors. They looked like beetles or roaches, scurrying across the ground. There were dozens of them, then hundreds spilling out into the corridor. Hundreds rapidly became thousands, pouring out of the breach towards Ulantus and the Devastator Marines. Then a thunderous cacophony of beating wings erupted from the breach and a great cloud of flying scarabs burst out of the smoke, like a solid black, gleaming cloud of sharpened metal.
Flamers erupted into life and bolters spat shells relentlessly, but the scarabs swarmed around the attacks and engulfed the firing line, flowing up, over and through the barricades. Ulantus hacked out with his chainsword, smashing hundreds of the alien beetles and swatting them away as they tried to gnaw through his armour. Behind him, he could hear the screams of the unarmoured fighters on the barricade as they were eaten alive. Dropped grenades suddenly detonated, blowing sections of the barricades away and mercifully killing the militiamen that no longer had arms with which to throw them.
Ulantus yelled into the swarm, defying it with his own fury. The remaining Devastators were ablaze with fire, pouring flames and shells into the metallic cloud in disciplined volleys and then undisciplined tirades. The fight was desperate and brutal.
As the swarm swept over them and passed through into the corridors beyond, Ulantus keyed his vox bead and ordered the next section of the hull sealed behind them. He could hear the next set of blast doors close and seal further down the corridor, and then he could just about make out the metallic scurrying of scarabs as they clattered up against them in frustration.
Heavier metal thuds brought the captain’s attention back to the breached doors before him. Diffuse clouds of scarabs were still flying out of the rupture, but Ulantus could see several sets of burning red eyes approaching in the darkness beyond. As he watched, momentarily transfixed, the skeletal form of a necron warrior strode out of the shadows and placed its first foot in the brightness of Ulantus’ corridor. Its soulless eyes burnt with hellfire as it fired its long-barrelled weapon from its hip.
The gauss flayer struck the Devastator at Ulantus’ shoulder and for a moment it seemed to have no effect. There was no pressure behind the strike and the Space Marine held his ground. But then the vox was suddenly filled with screams as the Marine’s armour fizzled and then dissolved away, exposing his raw skin and muscles, which were consumed atom by atom. After less than a second, even his bones were suddenly rendered into dust.
“For the Great Father and the Emperor!” yelled Ulantus, loosing a tirade of fire from his bolter and charging forward at the warrior with his chainsword spluttering thirstily.
“Sergeant Kohath. We have an intrusion,” reported Loren, poring over a faintly glowing terminal on the bridge of the Ravenous Spirit.
The sergeant nodded, actually relieved that he would not simply have to stand on the bridge and wait for his cruiser to be exhausted of ammunition and then destroyed. “Location?” he asked, already striding towards the door.
“The Apothecarion.”
Kohath paused in the doorway, just as the blast doors slid open in front of him; he was surprised by this report. But then he shrugged and stepped through the doors, letting them hiss closed behind him again. He clicked the vox bead in his helmet as he sealed it into place, breaking into a run along the corridor.
“Loren—you have the bridge.”
“Me, sergeant? Yes, sergeant.”
That’s what comes of being the only serf whose name I can remember, thought Kohath, permitting himself a smile as the elevator doors slid open and he ran out towards the Apothecarion.
He paused for a moment outside the sealed doors and checked his bolter. This was so much better than a space battle, he thought, and then he punched the door release. The doors clicked and then hissed as the medical facility beyond depressurised and released a cloud of sanitising gases. Without hesitating, Kohath strode through the doors, snatching his bolter from side to side to cover the wide room inside.
It was empty and white. Nothing moved.
He waited, keeping his gun braced.
Nothing.
Then there was something. It was not a noise, but it was more than a silence. He quietened his breathing and concentrated on his hearing.
Nothing. But there was definitively something. It was a weak, non-noise.
Gabriel.
There it was again. Gabriel.
With his bolter held out before him, Kohath stalked through the deserted Apothecarion, searching for the source of the disruption. As he pulled back one of the white curtains that had been swept around one the treatment tables, the sergeant froze.
Gabriel.
It was the farseer, Macha. She was bloodied and scarred. Her emerald eyes ran with tears and her diaphanous clothes were torn and shredded. She looked up at Sergeant Kohath with desperation in her eyes. She was pleading with him.
Gabriel?
Kohath unclipped his helmet and looked down at the farseer, his heart racing with mixed emotions. Overriding everything was the feeling that he had somehow been cheated of his last great battle. He had not come running down into the depths of the Ravenous Spirit in response to an intrusion alarm merely to play nurse-maid to an injured alien, no matter how beautiful she was. She was beautiful. But even her beauty made him angry—it was an uncomfortable, forbidden, alien beauty that filled him with as much disgust as appreciation.
“You survived, then.” That much was clear. He recalled that the other seer, Taldeer, had also managed to escape from the destruction of her ship into the relative safety of a Blood Ravens Apothecarion. He didn’t know what else to say. “Captain Angelos did not return.”
Macha gazed at him as though showing him her soul in the depths of her emerald eyes. Then she nodded. Perhaps she understood. She stood to her feet and gestured that she would follow the sergeant.
“Gabriel,” she said. This time it was a statement of fact.
* * * * *
As they were approaching the blastdoors that separated the control deck from the corridor, Kohath clicked his vox again.
“Loren. I’m returning to the bridge. You may return to your station.”
“I am already in my station, sergeant.” The reply confused him. Perhaps he had been wrong to expect the serf to take command of a strike cruiser?
The doors hissed and slid open, and Kohath strode onto the control deck, with Macha walking along behind him.
“Greetings sergeant,” said Gabriel calmly, turning from his position at the main viewscreen to face Kohath and Macha. “Good of you to join us. And Farseer Macha—I might have expected to find you here too.”
“Captain… I… I don’t understand.” Kohath looked from the captain to the other familiar faces on the bridge: Tanthius, Corallis, Jonas, Ephraim, Korinth and Zhaphel. They were all back.
“It is of no importance at the moment, sergeant.”
Gabriel. You survived the tests of the rielletann. Do you bring the Blade Wraith? Macha pushed past Kohath and walked directly up to Gabriel, staring directly into his blue-green eyes.
“Yes, farseer, I have the Blade of Vaul.” Gabriel unsheathed the legendary blade and laid it across his palms for Macha to inspect
. “But I confess that I have no idea what to do with it.”
It is a sword like any other, Gabriel, and yet like no other. It must be wielded as no other blade. She was gazing at it without looking up at him, but she paused suddenly. Gabriel, it is whole again.
“What do I need to do?” he asked, genuinely willing to do as the farseer told him. For the first time in his life, he realised that there was some knowledge, some genuine and essential knowledge, that was only possessed by aliens. In his search for truth, he would have to accept that he could never possess it all for himself.
The others waited, each of them willing to listen to the guidance of the farseer.
Macha nodded and smiled, lifting the blade out of Gabriel’s hands and turning it easily in her own. She rotated it fluidly, spinning it and flourishing it with practiced ease. It is a beautiful blade.
She looked up at the viewscreen behind Gabriel and saw the destruction and devastation. Although it was still firing, the Litany of Fury was beginning to list to one side under the onslaught from the necron Harvester. The Rage of Erudition appeared to have lost all power, and was being picked apart by a shoal of raiders from the outside and a knot of necron warriors from the inside. The Avenging Star was still fighting, but its fury was diminished and the two Shrouds were gradually beginning to assert their superiority. It is time to end this, Gabriel. The Dance of Lanthrilaq the Swift is the masque of the death and rebirth of hope. Today we have seen its rebirth. She smiled again, the familiar expression seeming utterly alien on her blood-riddled, porcelain face. We are the children of Lanthrilaq, and it is to us that this blade must pass. I will see the dance completed. This is the Blade Wraith of Vaul, and the yngir will cower before it.
With that, Macha stepped back from Gabriel and held the sword to her chest. She folded her arms around it and whispered something inaudible in a tongue that none of them recognised. The blade burst suddenly into green flames, but they did not burn her. She muttered some more indiscernible sounds and the flames flared still more brightly, expanding into a radiant aura that swept around her figure, transfiguring her into a being of pure psychic energy.
Thank you, Gabriel. The thoughts did not feel like hers any more.
An explosion of light ripped through the control room, dazzling the Blood Ravens momentarily. When it faded, Macha was gone. Turning to the viewscreen, they could see a pulse of green warpfire unlike anything they had ever witnessed before, like a gash torn through into the immaterium itself, as though the blade had somehow ripped through the boundaries between realms. The tear stretched out of the prow of the Ravenous Spirit all the way to the hull of the necron Harvester, where it was joined by a fork of similar energy arcing out of the heart of the Litany of Fury.
As soon as the energy touched the hull of the Scythe cruiser, its armour buckled and folded, as though the merest touch of that force was enough to repel the pristine and perfect material technology of the necron. The Harvester folded and crumpled, collapsing back in on itself as though it were being reduced into a two dimensional form. Then, in a sudden explosion of darkness, the Harvester imploded, sucking the great rips of fire into a massive vortex that spiralled momentarily, dragging the Dirge raiders, the remaining Jackals and the Shrouds into a tempest of immaterial fury that consumed them in a single gulp. After a second, there was nothing left but the gently floating wreckage of Blood Ravens vessels and the limping shape of an eldar cruiser. All vestiges of the necron were gone.
Apothecary Medicius emerged from the Implantation Chamber and moved quickly between the patients in the Litany of Fury’s Apothecarion. He found Captain Angelos standing at the side of a fallen Space Marine and stood a short distance away, waiting for the appropriate moment to approach the Commander of the Watch.
Gabriel looked down at the battered and bloodied form of Ulantus. His body had been recovered from the forward sections of the prow sector after the boarding action had finally been repelled. It was broken and ruined, but it would not be beyond the expertise of Medicius to bring the straight-laced captain back to full operational strength.
Gabriel watched the unconscious Ulantus for a moment then nodded. He had done the right thing—Gabriel would leave the Litany in his hands again, if he had to.
“Captain Angelos,” said Medicius as Gabriel turned away from Ulantus. “There is someone I think you should meet.”
The captain followed the bustling apothecary through the cluttered and overfull Apothecarion. There had been many casualties over the last few days, and Medicius had his work cut out for him. They paused momentarily next to the sarcophagus that still held the body of Chaplain Prathios in stasis. Gabriel placed his hand onto the casket and whispered something that Medicius did not hear.
At the far side of the Apothecarion was a flimsy, white door which led through into a consultation chamber. Medicius paused in front of it and waited for Gabriel to catch up. Then he clicked the release on the door, turned, and hurried back to see to his patients.
The door slid open and Gabriel stepped inside.
“Captain Angelos. Scout Ckrius Qurius reporting for active duty.”
Gabriel looked at the stranger for a few seconds, not recognising the scarred and wizened face that was protruding from the immaculate and highly polished armour of the scout. “Ckrius?” he said eventually, suddenly realising who this was. “Ckrius, is that really you?”
As he gazed at the new Blood Ravens scout, he felt a wave of relief wash over his soul. As long as strong new warriors were surviving the implantation process, even in such an accelerated and sub-optimal form, there was hope for the future of the battered and beaten Chapter. Recruits like the young Ckrius, plucked out of the smouldering remains of Tartarus, held the fate of the Blood Ravens in his hands.
Looking down at the new scout’s hands, as though ready to shake one of them, Gabriel’s eyes widened in horror. In place of hands, Ckrius had grown strange fleshy stumps with a series of intertwining tendrils protruding where fingers should have been. The tendrils swayed delicately and interlaced into a sequence of solid forms that approximated hands.
“Scout Ckrius,” snapped Gabriel, recoiling automatically from the sight of the mutation, as he realised that the rapidity of the implantation process had clearly exacted a cost on the former Guardsman. He hesitated, weighing up the possible alternatives in his head. He thought back through the incredible pain and suffering that the neophyte had endured, all the tests that he had passed, and finally thought back to the spirit that the youthful fighter had shown against the orks when he had first encountered him on Tartarus. Finally, he thought of the empty berths that were scattered throughout the Litany of Fury, and he reached a decision. “Find some gauntlets for those immediately.”
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[Dawn of War 03] - Tempest Page 31
