The Outcast Dead

by Graham McNeill

  He felt the needle depress the surface of his skin, but before it could draw blood, Adept Scharff had his hands wrapped around Hiriko’s shoulders. He yanked her off her feet and hurled her against the chair that had held Kai prisoner for so many nightmarish sessions of psychic interrogation.

  ‘Scharff!’ yelled Hiriko. ‘Whatever is in you, fight it!’

  Her attacker paid no heed to her words and Kai slid down the wall beside the door as he punched her square in the face. Hiriko reeled from the blow and sagged against the chair. Scharff leapt upon Hiriko and wrapped his hands around her neck, throttling the life out of her even as his face purpled with the effort of resisting the force that impelled him to murder.

  Kai knew he should join this struggle, but his limbs were filling with ice water and lead.

  Scharff’s hands were crushing the life from Hiriko, and the restraint she had shown towards her fellow neurolocutor was forgotten as she accepted that the force controlling Scharff was too strong for him to defy.

  Kai saw the needle glint in the harsh overhead lights, and watched as it described a short arc that saw it thrust into Adept Scharff’s eye. The man howled and his back arched in pain. Scharff hurled himself away from Hiriko, as though distance from the source of his hurt could somehow lessen it. Viscous fluids drooled down Scharff’s cheek and he flopped onto his back as the chemicals raced to his brain.

  His body convulsed as rogue electrical impulses sent his muscles into spasm. Spittle flew from his mouth and a hideous wet gurgling bubbled up from his lungs with bile-flecked foam. Scharff beat his heels on the floor and scrabbled with clawed hands, tearing out his fingernails and leaving bloody tracks on the tiles.

  Hiriko slumped to the floor as Scharff’s body twitched with what remained of his life, and Kai felt sick to his stomach at the sight. He had watched the astropaths of Choir Primus die, had felt Sarashina’s blood on him, and had listened to the entire crew of the Argo die, but to see a man die so painfully right in front of him was a truly horrific sight.

  The interrogation chamber was silent save for the soft chiming of the bio-monitoring equipment, Hiriko’s laboured breathing and the dripping of noxious saliva from Scharff’s gaping mouth.

  Kai let out a terrified breath, knowing he had only a few precious moments to make the most of the opportunity Scharff had given him. Before he could do more than recognise that fact, a booming impact struck the door of the interrogation chamber. Another swiftly followed, and Hiriko smiled as she slid down onto her side.

  ‘They’re coming for you,’ she said, her words coming out in a hoarse rasp.

  Another impact shook the door, and this time it buckled inwards, the locks holding it closed shattered by the force assaulting them. One further blow tore the door from its housing, and it landed of the tiles with a booming clang. A towering shape in a form-fitting yellow bodyglove ducked through the doorway, and Kai backed away from this latest terror.

  Long black hair framed a face of thick, flattened features that nevertheless combined in a handsome whole, and Kai smelled a pungent reek emanating from the warrior’s skin as he extended a hand towards him.

  ‘Kai Zulane, I am Atharva of the Thousand Sons,’ said the giant. ‘Come with me.’

  FOURTEEN

  Flight and Fight

  THE GIANT’S WORDS took a moment to sink in, and even then Kai couldn’t process their meaning. There could be no question that this figure was a Legiones Astartes warrior: his bulk and unspoken threat was undeniable, but there was more to it than that. Kai saw the world through artificial eyes, and every sweep, curve and angle of the giant’s face seemed somehow more solid than any other living soul he had seen.

  ‘You are Legiones Astartes,’ said Kai, his words slurred and little more than a whisper.

  ‘I already said that,’ stated the giant, taking hold of Kai’s shoulder and hauling him to his feet as though he weighed nothing at all. Atharva was enormous, as tall as Saturnalia, but broader and more powerfully built.

  ‘Why?’ said Kai.

  ‘I have little time for questions, and no patience for ones so ambiguously formed,’ said Atharva. ‘Our escape has not gone unnoticed, and warriors we cannot face will be on their way. Now we must hurry.’

  Kai stumbled through the buckled doorway of the interrogation chamber. He glanced over his shoulder at the recumbent form of Adept Hiriko, wondering if she were alive or dead. Despite all that she had subjected him to, Kai hoped she still lived.

  Six figures filled the vestibule beyond the chamber in which he’d spent an unknown amount of time, six warriors of enormous bulk and distinct character that was immediately apparent even if they hadn’t sported tattoos and Legion markings on engorged biceps, mountain-ridge shoulders and forearms larger than Kai’s thighs. Instantly, he knew who had rescued him from his cell.

  ‘You are the Crusader Host,’ he said.

  ‘What is left of it,’ said a warrior with hair that was a dirty mix of pale white and dark roots. ‘You do not see us at our best.’

  ‘That name is meaningless to us now,’ said another with a bare chest that rippled with muscles and crudely-inked tattoos of weapons and teeth. ‘We are dead to the Imperium.’

  ‘We are outcast,’ spat the warrior next to him, and Kai saw a resemblance between the two that went beyond their shared genhancements.

  ‘The Outcast Dead,’ said Atharva, with a sly twist of a grin. ‘If you knew what that meant in ages past, you would appreciate the irony of that.’

  ‘The Outcast Dead,’ repeated a grim-faced warrior who was a giant even in the company of giants. ‘A dishonourable name for warriors, but a more fitting one than the last we bore.’

  ‘What’s happening here? I don’t understand what’s going on,’ said Kai.

  ‘What is to understand?’ said a brute with half his head encased in hammered pig iron and plugged with copper-wound wires. ‘We are fighting to be free. You are coming with us.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Again with the vaguely-worded questions,’ said Atharva, shaking his head. ‘Tagore, Asubha and Subha are World Eaters, Kiron is Emperor’s Children, Severian a Luna Wolf and that hulking brute with the shaved skull is Gythua, a true son of Mortarion. We were incarcerated, as were you. And as Tagore says, we are fighting to be free, a situation that would be made a great deal easier if you were to save your questions until later. Understood?’

  Kai nodded, and Atharva gestured to the corridor behind the warrior he had named as Kiron. Severian ghosted down its length, far faster and quieter than a man of such bulk had any right to move.

  Atharva turned to one of the World Eaters and said, ‘Subha, keep this one safe.’

  ‘I am not your lapdog, sorcerer,’ snapped the warrior.

  ‘And yet you will do it,’ said Atharva with a firm, demanding tone. Kai sensed a brief flare of psychic energy, but said nothing as Subha nodded and took hold of him. The warrior’s fingers easily encircled Kai’s upper arm, and he winced at the strength of the grip.

  Atharva gave him a smile that was part conspiratorial, part shared secret, and set off after Severian. The rest of the group fell in behind them, moving with a familiarity that spoke of decades of training.

  He had seen warriors of the Legiones Astartes many times before aboard the ships of the XIII Legion, but where the Battle Kings of Macragge were honourable paragons of all that it meant to be noble, these warriors were more like corsairs or mercenaries.

  Or traitors, thought Kai, remembering why they had been held captive in the first place.

  He was in the company of traitors, so what did that make him?

  THE PACE WAS brutal, and Kai wasn’t so much walking behind the Space Marines as being dragged by them. Tunnels of rock, corridors of antiseptic sterility and bare stone passageways passed in a blur until Kai lost all sense of direction.

  ‘Enemies,’ came a voice from ahead. Little more than a whisper, yet sounding as though the speaker were right in front of him. Kai saw Se
verian at a cross junction, making a chopping motion with his hand along a corridor at right angles to their route.

  ‘Tagore,’ said Atharva.

  ‘On it. Asubha, low and fast.’

  ‘Me first,’ said Kiron, rolling around the corner with a rifle that looked absurdly tiny in his fist. He fired two blisteringly bright shots in quick succession, before ducking back into cover.

  ‘Go,’ he said.

  Tagore bared his teeth and ran around the corner with Asubha at his side. Kai heard the pounding of feet and a feral roar that sounded inhuman in its ferocity. The grip on his arm tightened, and Kai let out a muffled grunt of pain.

  ‘My arm, you’re hurting me,’ he said.

  Subha looked down at him, as though offended he was even talking to him.

  ‘My brothers kill, yet I am nursemaid to a mortal,’ he hissed, but the grip on Kai’s arm relaxed a fraction. Screams of pain and fear echoed from the walls, and Kai jumped in fright.

  ‘The way is clear,’ said Atharva, rounding the corner and gesturing for the others to follow. Kai was dragged along with the Space Marines, and the scene of carnage he faced at the end of the corridor was so utterly horrific that he retched until his throat was raw.

  A host of bodies – it was impossible to say how many – lay in dismembered abandon at yet another cross-junction. Broken limbs, caved-in skulls and ruptured torsos lay scattered like the leavings of a slaughterhouse and wild arcs of blood looped over the walls in scarlet arches. That Space Marines were killers of men was a fact Kai understood on a very basic level, but to see the reality of their unleashed power was a shocking, sobering moment.

  Kai had done nothing wrong, but these warrior’s Legions had betrayed the Emperor. Just by talking to them he would be considered no better than a betrayer. Yet they had saved him from death and were killing these men for reasons he could not even begin to fathom. Though this scene of butchery sickened him, Kai had sense enough to know that any chance of life was better than the death he was certain to face had he remained here.

  Only two bodies had escaped the attention of the butchers that had made a ruin of more than a dozen men in a few seconds. These two soldiers had been armed with large-calibre energy weapons, and both were headless, their necks ending in cauterised stumps.

  ‘You shoot well,’ said Atharva as Kiron moved up the corridor.

  ‘Marksman first class,’ said Kiron, tapping his shoulder. ‘Only Vespasian ever outshot me in tourneys’

  ‘Tourneys?’ spat Tagore. ‘Why waste time on play when there are wars to be won?’

  ‘To hone one’s skills, Tagore,’ said Kiron, as though offended. ‘Perfected skill beats raw violence every time.’

  Tagore clenched his fists over the broken stub of his spear blade. ‘Another time and I would show you the error of that belief.’

  ‘Pissing contests? Now? Are you insane?’ demanded Gythua.

  Tagore laughed and slapped a hand on Kiron’s shoulder with enough force to draw a scowl of displeasure from the Emperor’s Children warrior.

  ‘Another time,’ repeated Tagore.

  Kai let out a pent up breath, feeling the horrible tension that had built up in that fleeting confrontation. Their prowess as warriors gave meaning to each Space Marine, and to impugn that was the gravest of insults. In a brotherhood of equals, such posturing was friendly rivalry, but among warriors who shared no bond other than that forced upon them, it could be deadly.

  ‘Where to now?’ said Tagore. ‘The net will be closing.’

  ‘This way,’ said Severian, taking a passageway that led upwards.

  ‘You knew the Custodian’s mind,’ said Tagore. ‘Is the Wolf right?’

  ‘He is,’ confirmed Atharva. ‘Severian’s awareness serves him well.’

  Again they set off, and each time the Space Marines met resistance, they demolished it with efficiency that would have been cruel had it not been achieved with such clinical precision. Only the three World Eaters seemed to take any pleasure in the violence, but even that was more about the display of prowess than any base enjoyment of slaughter.

  Onwards and ever upwards they pushed, sometimes fighting their enemies, sometimes avoiding them. Severian and Atharva had knowledge of this prison that was more than the equal of the soldiers tasked with preventing their escape, though Kai could not imagine how they could have come by such information.

  ‘Where are the Legio Custodes?’ asked Kai, in a moment between desperate flight and visceral bloodshed. None of the Space Marines had an answer for him, though he saw the same question had occurred to them all.

  ‘They are not here,’ said Gythua. ‘That is all that matters.’

  ‘They are heading to Prospero,’ said Atharva. ‘If they are not there already.’

  ‘Prospero?’ said Kiron. ‘Why?’

  ‘To slay my primarch,’ said Atharva, and Kai heard the resignation in his voice.

  Even Tagore had no reply to that, and Kai sensed their shock at so bald an assertion. Clearly there was little love lost between these warriors, but to hear so terrible a thing spoken aloud reminded them of what they had lost by being brought here.

  ‘Is such a thing even possible?’ asked Kai.

  Atharva looked at him as though he had said something profoundly stupid, but the moment passed. ‘Regrettably, it is entirely possible. We are all wrought from the raw matter of stars and the Great Ocean, but even stars can die and oceans turn to dust.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ asked Asubha.

  ‘I know it because Primarch Magnus knows it,’ said Atharva.

  No more was said on the matter, and their brutal, bloody ascent to the surface of the world continued. Where ambushes were laid, Severian would strike from the shadows. Where attacks came upon them without warning, Tagore and Asubha would counterattack with furious strength. Where men with guns filled the passages with fire, Kiron would drop them with pinpoint shots that boiled brains within skulls before bursting them like overfilled balloons of blood and brain matter.

  When barriers were erected to bar their path, Gythua would wade through hails of gunfire to batter them down, shrugging off the shots of his enemies as though they were of no more consequence than insect bites. Dried blood slathered the Death Guard’s chest, and a charred crater the size of Kai’s fist had been bored in his side. Armoured doors presented no obstacle to them, for Atharva possessed a golden ring, like that worn by Saturnalia, which unlocked every portal closed against them.

  As the last such shutter was opened, Kai was bathed in the most beautiful illumination he had ever seen, a light he thought he had forgotten, the light of Terra’s sun. Kai’s augmetics recognised the filtering effect of an integrity field on the sunlight and realised they were in a mountainside embarkation bay. A row of gold-trimmed shuttles and landers lined one of the cavern’s walls, and a number of less ornate craft hissed and vented pressurised gasses as servitors and loaders cleared their cargo holds and stowage bays.

  ‘Move,’ said Severian, looking back the way they had come. ‘They know where we are now, and aerial units will be scrambling soon.’

  Half carried, half dragged by Subha, Kai and the others ran into the hangar. Surprised faces turned towards them, ground crew, tech-priests and menials. None of them dared challenge the intruders in their midst, for it was clear that these bloodied daemons were butchers of men.

  Gythua led the way, a limping mass of bloodied muscle and scar tissue. He growled with a mixture of pain and anger, leaving a spotty trail of sticky droplets in his wake. Kiron ran alongside him, ready to help his friend should he falter yet keeping his hands to himself lest the proud Gythua take offence. Severian followed and Tagore went with him. Asubha ran to the nearest craft, a sleek cutter that had not long touched down by the heat haze rippling around its engine vanes.

  ‘Can you fly it, brother?’ shouted Subha.

  ‘This thing? In my sleep,’ replied his twin.

  A tech-priest in crimson robes with a rotati
ng series of eye lenses attached to a radial disc attempted to intervene, but Subha put him down with a casual swipe of his spear. Even as the shorn halves of the Martian fell, the body’s upper half continued to harangue the World Eater as a burst of panicked binary static screeched from his shoulder-mounted augmitters.

  Alarms shrieked from above, and an armoured blast door began rumbling across the wide rectangle of open space visible through the integrity field. Spinning warning lights threw stark shadows and a hellish orange glow through the hangar as the ground crew who could flee took to their heels.

  ‘Get on!’ shouted Kiron. ‘Hurry, the close-in defence guns are coming online!’

  Subha dispensed with any pretence of courtesy and picked Kai up as though he were a recalcitrant child. The World Eater sprinted towards the open hatchway as the rest of the Outcast Dead climbed aboard.

  ‘Atharva!’ shouted Subha. ‘Catch.’

  Kai yelled as he sailed through the air, but Atharva caught him without difficulty and swung him around to plant him in a crew seat bolted to the fuselage. Kai felt as though every single bone in his body had been battered, and bit back a vulgar insult as Atharva pressed him into his seat.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘This will not be a smooth ride.’

  Subha threw himself on board as Asubha feathered the engines of the craft with a sudden shriek of power injection. The cutter leapt into the air and spun around as the crew door slid shut with a pressurising hiss of pneumatics.

  ‘Go!’ shouted Kiron. ‘Get us out of here, World Eater.’

  The cutter leapt forward like an unleashed colt, and but for Atharva’s restraining hand, Kai would have been hurled down the length of the compartment. The craft lurched and he heard hammering blows on the aircraft’s hull.

  ‘Are they firing on us?’ he yelled over the screaming engines and battering impacts.

  Atharva nodded, bracing himself with his free hand on the ceiling of the cutter’s crew compartment. Gythua slumped against the bulkhead, as Kiron held a stanchion beside him. Subha lay prone on the metal decking, and Tagore clung to the bulkhead at the entrance to the cockpit while Severian simply stood in the centre of the compartment as though this was just a routine lift off.