[Grey Knights 01] - Grey Knights

by Ben Counter - (ebook by Undead)

  It moved again. Closer this time, further down, scurrying through Yambe’s peripheral vision. He knew he couldn’t hit it—it had to be something alien, something deadly. He wouldn’t end up like Rani. Damn the ship. Gak the cargo. He wasn’t going to die out here.

  Yambe ran out of the core, ducking his head to get through the low door leading towards the ship’s stern. There was one saviour pod that he trusted to work—if no one had taken it already and if a ship passed close enough to pick up the distress signal, it might enable him to survive.

  The further into the engine section Yambe got, the more cramped and filthy the ship became. Coolant vapour swirled around his feet. The stinking, oily air clogged up his nose and made his head throb. His breathing was so heavy it hurt—he was too old for this. There was something over the vox. The film of thin static broke up and a man’s voice came through, low and strong, resonant, confident.

  “Captain Yambe,” it said. “How much fuel does your ship hold?”

  Yambe stopped. Lestin had the vox-bead. That meant the speaker had Lestin, and Lestin had been heading for the stern. Whoever had killed Lestin was between Yambe and the saviour pod.

  Yambe turned and ran back the way he had come, ducking into a service tunnel that branched off and was barely high enough to run down. He needed somewhere to hide. The shotgun in his hands felt heavy and useless. There had to be somewhere to go. The Pecuniam Omnis was an old and filthy ship, with cavernous cargo spaces you could get lost in. Yambe had once picked up a stowaway who had given the crew the run-around for seven months. He had to hide. He had to survive.

  Yambe blundered out into the ship’s shuttle bay. The bay was a large, flat cavity between two of the reactors, and held the ship’s single battered shuttle that was used for skipping between ships while in orbital dock. The shuttle was squat, tarnished and ugly, but if Rani had remembered to refuel it as he had been told, Yambe should be able to start it and get the bay doors open in time to take off.

  It was useless as a way out. It had air for about seven hours, no food, no water, and the energy cells were shot so it had to burn promethium just to heat the cabin. Its comm-link had such a limited range that it would never be found.

  But it would let Yambe choose how he died. He could hide in the ship and try to outwit the invaders, or he could flee on the shuttle and pick a death from cold, suffocation, or just walking out of the airlock.

  Yambe was about to head for the shuttle when a man walked out from behind it. Yambe began to raise his shotgun but out of nowhere a silver slash punched through his hand, slicing through to pin both the gun and the hand to his thigh. The shotgun’s barrel pointed uselessly at the ground. White shock rushed through Yambe, followed by a red tide of pain. He sunk to his knees. The tip of the blade ground against the bone of his leg but refused to come free.

  The man walking towards him was tall and well-built, wearing a battered, stained voidsuit and somehow still looking noble. His face was harsh and angular, his head shaven, and the skin of his face and scalp were covered in thick, blocky tattoos. His eyes looked straight through Yambe, so piercing that for a moment the captain forgot the pain in his hand and leg, and the hot blood spattering onto the floor.

  “How much fuel,” repeated the man in that same thick deep voice that had come over the vox, “does your ship hold?”

  “Gak you, groxbanger,” snarled Yambe. Defiance was the only thing keeping him conscious. He would not die here. He would not. He was supposed to jump ship at Epsion Octarius and start a new life, away from space. He would not die.

  The man threw something at Yambe, something warm and horribly wet that smacked into the side of his head and knocked him to the greasy metal floor. Pain rifled through him, and when the spots cleared from in front of his eyes Yambe saw Lestin’s severed head lying on the floor beside him, jaw hanging off, eyes still open. “How much fuel is there on this ship? Your man said he did not know.”

  Yambe looked up. The intruder had absolutely nothing behind his eyes. For a second, it was like looking out into the warp, the endless Chaos that drove men mad.

  “Enough…” stammered Yambe. “Enough to get to Epsion Octarius from here. You could push the reactors for more.”

  “Good,” said the man. He glanced to a point above and behind where Yambe lay. “Kill him.”

  Yambe looked around. There was someone standing over him—he hadn’t heard them sneak up behind him. It was woman wearing a glossy black bodyglove, her face masked, her clothing tight over muscles like snakes coiled around her limbs. Gold-flecked eyes looked down at him, filled with disgust.

  “I can’t die here…” said Yambe, but that didn’t stop her from drawing a long, gleaming sword and cutting Yambe clean in two.

  Alaric could not feel the state of the Trail, as Ligeia had done, but it was clear enough from the reports coming into the fortress on Trepytos. The forge world of Magnos Omicron was in open civil war, where regiments of tech-guard loyal to the Imperium fought the Titan Legions that followed the world’s blasphemous prophet. Volcanis Ultor was in a state of martial law, with Cardinal Recoba using the Balurian heavy infantry to patrol the streets and seal off the wealthy upper levels from the cultist hordes sure to emerge from the underhives.

  The Trail’s small battlefleet began harassing shipping between the worlds, destroying any freighter that would not give a satisfactory account of its crew and cargo.

  An apocalyptic malaise fell over many worlds. Imperial citizens flocked to the cathedrals as rumours spread. Preachers led massed prayers for deliverance and forgiveness for the sins of the people against the Emperor, and in places it was impossible to tell the cults of Ghargatuloth and the Imperium apart.

  Alaric was beginning to realise just how powerful Ghargatuloth must be. He could cause suffering and horror simply by the rumour of his existence.

  Perhaps all the information Alaric needed was locked up in the archives on Trepytos. But he couldn’t root through the endless vaults of decaying ledgers to find what he needed. Inquisitor Klaes’s entire staff had tried many times before, and they had failed. All Alaric had to work with were the reports coming in from the rest of the Trail, and a handful of properly catalogued works on the Trail’s history.

  The room at the head of the archives was high and draughty, with watery shafts of light seeping through the tall, thin arched windows to pierce the gloom. A few of the fortress staff were working at the bookshelves that lined the room, bringing down reference works that Alaric had requested. He knew he would not be able to find anything that Ligeia had not already examined and dismissed, but he had to cover all the possibilities. There was too much at stake to assume anything.

  In front of Alaric were hundreds of report sheets, each detailing some atrocity committed by the cults of Ghargatuloth. Bomb blasts, assassinations, uprisings, and more sinister things—heretical broadcasts over vid-nets, raids on Imperial cathedrals, mass kidnappings.

  Inquisitor Ligeia had delved straight into the heart of darkness, into the beliefs and insanities that drowned the minds of Ghargatuloth’s followers. Alaric could not do the same—compared to Ligeia’s, Alaric’s mind was a closed room.

  “Brother-Captain,” said a familiar, deep voice. Alaric looked up from the stack of papers to see Tancred walking towards him through the archive room. A couple of the fortress staff looked round in surprise at Tancred’s sheer size—he wore his Terminator armour, and in it he stood almost twice as tall as some normal men. “Fortress astropaths have received the message that Genhain has reached Titan.”

  “Good.” Alaric still hadn’t got used to being addressed as “brother-captain”. “I want us ready to head out as soon as the Rubicon returns. We don’t have any time left. Ghargatuloth is already rising.”

  Tancred nodded at the piles of papers. “How bad is it?”

  “Bad. There isn’t a world free of corruption. Even Magnos Omicron is suffering. The Planetary Defence Forces are completely overwhelmed. Local law enforcement
is the same. The Arbites are doing what they can but there are just too many cults to pin down.” Alaric shook his head. “How long have they been there? Sophano Secundus was one thing, it’s an isolated world, one tainted individual could last for centuries there. But we’re talking millions of men and women, in hundreds of cults across almost every single world of the Trail. And they’ve all lain dormant until now.”

  “The Navy could quarantine the place. Declare a crusade.” Tancred was serious—whole sectors of space had been purged before. The Sabbat Worlds, the Asclepian Gap, a handful of others, each cleansed in a great crusade of Imperial armies and battlefleets.

  “If the Trail was in open rebellion,” replied Alaric, “and if the Eye of Terror wasn’t tying up half of the Imperium’s forces, then maybe the Malleus could do it. But not now. Ghargatuloth won’t play his hand overtly enough to bring the whole of the Imperium down on him. It’s up to us.”

  “You sound as if you despair.” There was a dangerous note of steel in Tancred’s voice.

  “There is no despair, justicar,” replied Alaric. “Not while one of us still lives. I am simply aware of how cunning our enemy is. Ghargatuloth has been planning this for some time, probably from before Mandulis banished him the first time. It might not even be an accident that he is returning at the same time the Eye of Terror is opening. And we have one advantage.”

  Alaric picked up a handful of the reports, some of the worst. “He’s out in the open. All this is distraction, Tancred. He’s trying to blind us, and as far as the Arbites and the PDFs are concerned it’s working. But we are different. We know that until his cultists bring him fully back into real space, he will be vulnerable. Once he gets dug in like on Khorion IX it will take nothing short of a crusade to get to him, if we even keep track of him. But now he is vulnerable. He knows we are here, and he is afraid of us.”

  “But how do we find him, brother-captain? We cannot fight what we cannot see.”

  Alaric held out his arms, indicating the whole of the archives. “It’s here somewhere. Ghargatuloth’s cultists have to make the preparations for the rituals that will bring him back, and most of the cults on the Trail are rising up just to distract the Imperium from those few who are making those preparations. Ligeia could have filtered out the real cult activity from the distractions, but she is not here, and so we must do it instead.”

  “I should let you work, then. My men must stay sharp.”

  “Of course. Emperor guide you, justicar.”

  “Emperor guide you, brother-captain.”

  Alaric watched Tancred leave. As far as Tancred was concerned, the Grey Knights should be fighting the vermin who were setting the Trail alight, not hunting through the archives for clues that probably weren’t there. Tancred would never voice such doubts openly—he was too much a soldier, too aware of how he slotted in to the vital chain of command. But he could not hide his concerns from Alaric.

  Alaric knew he could only ask obedience from his Grey Knights, and not control everything they thought. But he hoped that he could keep their trust for long enough to find a lead on Ghargatuloth, because Alaric could only fight one enemy.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE VAULTS

  They said you could feel the years on Titan, layers of history weighing you down. The truth was that Titan’s gravity was slightly heavier than Terran standard due to the superdense core that had been injected into the moon some time during the lost Dark Age of Technology. But there was some truth to the saying—history was literally etched into the rock of Titan, faces of forgotten heroes, inscribed litanies of deeds once famous, murals depicting terrible battles against the forces of Chaos. The whole surface of Titan was inscribed as if by a huge chisel, forming a network of battlements and citadels, and it had been carved layer upon layer since before the dawn of the Imperium. There was so much history there that it would overfill all the libraries of the Inquisition, if only it could be unlocked.

  Justicar Genhain wondered how much the Imperium could learn if its scholars could properly read all the images and messages that covered the walls of Titan’s vaults. Beneath the upper levels of Titan, where the Grey Knights lived and prayed, were the catacombs where their dead were buried. Down here, there were vaults and tunnels carved by artisans from before the Ordo Malleus had even been formed from the fires of the Horus Heresy. As Genhain followed the procession down to the vault where his battle-brothers would be buried, he saw faces of Grey Knights in archaic marks of power armour, locked in endless combat with leering stone daemons. A column was wrought to represent an unnamed saint of the Imperium. The names of battle-brothers covered the vaulted ceiling; Grey Knights who had died in action but whose bodies had never been recovered for burial. Genhain walked behind Chaplain Durendin. In full black power armour, the face of his helmet a skull of gunmetal grey, Durendin had walked these tunnels many times before. As a chaplain, he was the guardian of the dead just as he guarded the spiritual health of the living brothers.

  Behind Genhain, the battle-brothers of his squad carried the biers on which lay the body of Brother Krae, the dead Grey Knight from Squad Tancred that Genhain had brought back to Titan on the Rubicon. Brother Caanos had died on Sophano Secundus, too, but his body had been left on the planet. Genhain knew that if the Grey Knights were to close in on Ghargatuloth, there would be many more to bury beneath Titan before it was over.

  Krae was covered in a white death caul, draped over the huge plates of his Terminator armour. The shape of his Nemesis halberd was visible, placed on his chest with his gauntleted hands folded over the hilt. Behind Krae’s bier, several novices walked. They were young trainees who had only just begun the transformation into Grey Knights—they carried the censers that filled the close air of the catacombs with the dark, spicy smell of sacred incense. Genhain remembered the time, almost hidden in the fog of psycho-doctrination and endless medical procedures, when he had walked behind the funeral procession of a dead Grey Knight and wondered how long it would be until it was his body on the bier, draped in white.

  The procession moved in silence through the catacombs. Here and there the walls opened up into cells cut into the stone, each holding the mouldering bones of a centuries-dead Grey Knight. Here and there were inscriptions on the floor, almost obliterated by the marching feet of countless funeral processions, detailing the names and histories of the battle-brothers lying nearby. Genhain read fragments of names as he passed. Some of the dead down here would not even be recorded in the histories of the Grey Knights, having fought and died in times skipped over by the earlier records.

  Durendin reached the chamber where Krae was to be buried, and led Squad Genhain and the novices in. Several stone coffins lay on pedestals, perhaps fifty of them, ranged through the chamber. Three of the pedestals had no coffin, and it was onto one of these that Krae was placed.

  Krae would lie there until Squad Tancred returned from the Trail, when Tancred and Krae’s battle-brothers would remove Krae’s armour and Nemesis weapon, ritually cleanse his body, and oversee the Chapter artificers as they built the coffin around the body.

  In the earliest days, great heroes of the Grey Knights would be buried with their weapons and armour. But the valuable Terminator armour could not be spared, and soon it would be worn by a Marine newly inducted into one of the Chapter’s Terminator squads. Krae’s gene-seed, harvested from the body just after his death by Tancred himself, would be implanted into a novice and a new Grey Knight would take shape. His weapon would be handed to a Marine just receiving his first sacred blade, his bolter ammunition would be redistributed amongst the Chapter. In this way Krae would continue to fight the Great Enemy, and have his revenge against the foul forces that killed him.

  “Before the sight of the Emperor most high, in the face of the Adversary, did Brother Krae fall in combat with the forces of corruption.” Durendin’s voice was low and grim, and seemed to fill the whole catacomb. The Liber Daemonicum contained dozens of different funeral prayers, and Duren
din had spoken each of them hundreds of times. Brother Krae had chosen one of the simplest to be spoken at his death—Genhain remembered Krae as a humble man, one who followed Justicar Tancred’s orders absolutely, seeing himself as nothing more than an instrument of the Emperor’s will.

  Genhain and his Marines bowed their heads as Durendin continued. Behind them, the young novices hung on the chaplain’s every word, seeking meaning for themselves in the eulogy for the fallen Krae. “The Enemy found no purchase in his mind, and no mercy from his arm. In the Emperor’s sight did he fall, and at the Emperor’s side will he fight to destroy the Adversary at the end of time. In the name of the Golden Throne and the Lord of all mankind, let our Brother Krae live on through our fight.”

  Durendin’s prayer finished, the young novices filed out silently. They would return to their cells and meditate on all the battle-brothers like Krae who had fallen before, and whose gene-seed organs were now implanted in the novices to regulate their transformation into Grey Knights.

  Genhain turned to Brother Ondurin, the Marine who carried his squad’s incinerator and acted as unofficial second-in-command. “Ondurin, take the squad back to the Rubicon and have the crew prepare to take off. I shall be with you shortly.”

  Ondurin nodded and silently led the Marines of Squad Genhain back out of the chamber. It would take them two hours to reach the entrance to the catacombs.

  Justicar Genhain was left alone in the chamber with Durendin.

  “Brother-Captain Alaric did Brother Krae a great honour in delivering his body to Titan,” said Durendin. “But he did not send you and the Rubicon just for that.”

  “You’re right, chaplain. He has sent me to make a request.”

  Durendin nodded. “I received your astropath’s message. It is a rare request. I do not know of a similar request being made for many centuries. It is even rarer for such things to be granted. Alaric explained all of this?”