Atlas Infernal

by Rob Sanders

  Readjusting to a reality in which he hadn’t just been blown apart by bolt-fire, Klute slapped the clutching hands away that Czevak had just used to save him.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Klute said. A cold fury seized him. He’d engaged a retinue of henchmen to find the infamous Bronislaw Czevak. Now that they had, the same Bronislaw Czevak was sealing their fate. ‘Answer me, damn it!’

  Czevak looked back into Klute’s hard eyes.

  ‘Oh, we’re serious now aren’t we? Had enough of Nemesis Tessera already, Raimus?’ Czevak accused. ‘You thought the Holy Inquisition would welcome us back with open arms? It’s time for a dose of reality, my friend.We’re on our own.’

  ‘This is not a game!’ Klute bawled. To prove his point, fragments of profane masonry rained down about them as the Grey Knights blasted at the Slaaneshi obelisk. ‘People are dying. People who have risked their lives for you. Your people. I have told you this before; renegades and heretics they may be, but if we cast them aside like cannon fodder without thought of consequence or human compassion then we are no better than the warp scum and true evil we hunt.’

  Czevak looked about him as the Grey Knights shredded the monument to dust. The reliquary chamber was a demolished mess that offered little in the way of nearby cover. Making a run for it – even with the Domino field – the High Inquisitor suspected that the Grey Knights’ expert fire would find them.

  ‘If you feel that way,’ Czevak told his former acolyte, ‘then you are really going to hate what I’m going to propose next.’

  ‘Answer my question,’ Klute snarled. ‘Where have you been while the Imperium’s finest have been taking us apart?’

  Czevak extracted a bell jar stasis casket from inside the bottomless pockets of his Harlequin coat. It swung on a handle, like an oil lantern and bore a symbol in gold, an inverse horse shoe struck through with a horizontal line.

  Klute’s anger flared once more but Czevak held up a finger. The gunfire had stopped. He stuck his head out from behind the obelisk.

  ‘Over here!’ he yelled. The Grey Knight pinning Saul Torqhuil brought his storm bolter back up. The second was stomping towards them. Dodging back behind the bolt-eroded obelisk the two inquisitors heard the reassuring blaze of storm bolter fire hammering into the masonry. To keep Saul Torqhuil alive, Czevak needed the Grey Knights’ attention on them.

  ‘What is that and how can it possibly be worth dying for?’ Klute demanded.

  ‘This is what is going to save our lives,’ Czevak said then added darkly, ‘but I want you to prepare yourself, Raimus. Nothing is without risk and there will be collateral damage.’

  Klute snorted. ‘Look around you – this is all about collateral damage.’

  ‘You are more right than you know, my friend,’ Czevak said under the gunfire. Then to his former acolyte, ‘Last chance, you want me to save them?’

  Klute thought of the impaled Torqhuil, the savaged Hessian and the blind warp-seer; even Steward-Sergeant Rourke and his remaining Savlar Chem-Dogs, criminals and deviants all. And all moments from death.

  ‘Do it, if you’re going to,’ the inquisitor spat. Czevak nodded.

  Czevak held the bell jar stasis casket up in front of him. The casket was made of a thin, matte-black metal shielding that Klute had never seen before. The inverse horse shoe symbol struck through in gold adorned a sliding panel that the High Inquisitor thumbed aside. The casket looked like a dark lantern, an enclosed lamp with a single opening that could be opened or closed to reveal the light inside. Except there was no light. Instead, Klute was privy to the contents of the stasis jar – automatically released from its suspended state upon the sliding panel release. Inside, the inquisitor saw a simple embryo, cradled in a tiny gibbet throne. It looked human but Klute found that he couldn’t stand to look at it for too long. He instinctively backed away, almost taking him into the path of Grey Knight gunfire but settled for a stomach flipping wretch of irrational fear and loathing. The inquisitor vomited down the side of the Slaaneshi column before wiping the corners of his mouth with a lace handkerchief.

  ‘What is it?’ he croaked again.

  Czevak tapped his thumb against the inverse horse shoe symbol, struck through in gold.

  ‘An abandoned, heretical project – recovered from the Gorma moons by Inquisitress Perfidia Vong, no less,’ Czevak told him, clearly impressed. ‘Clone embryos, gene sequenced from blacksoul null-stock.’ Keeping his handkerchief across his mouth, Klute pointed at the symbol.

  ‘Assignment scale,’ Czevak said to the inquisitor, ‘Omega-Minus.’

  Klute’s eyebrows rose. The assignment scale determined the psychic ability of beings measured on a scale of psionic level and ability. Even seeming non-psykers like Klute himself registered as Pi on the scale, indicating some degree of ability – often manifested as luck or pretentions to a sixth sense. The more powerful the psyker, the higher up the scale they registered, terminating in Alpha and Alpha Plus individuals of freakish, world destroying power. The Inquisition preferred such individuals terminated upon sight. Klute knew that the scale continued well below his harmless level, however. The lower the assignment scale designate the greater the inert, negative psychic field generated by the individual. Some of these individuals had degrees of immunity to psychic powers and the energies of the warp; some – known as Untouchables or Blanks – had fields so powerful that their presence disrupted the powers of or wounded psychic beings. Czevak’s Atlas Infernal undoubtedly harboured the flesh of such an individual. Omega-Minus specimens were virtually unknown outside of the secretive temples of the Officio Assassinorum. Its awesome nullifying power could be felt even by Klute, who had no psychic talents. The inquisitor couldn’t imagine what it would do to an individual with such abilities. And then he realised he was about to find out.

  ‘Czevak…’ the inquisitor managed, coming out from behind his stained kerchief.

  It was too late. The closing Grey Knight was upon them.

  Light blazed through the phallic Slaaneshi obelisk as the Terminator cut the column in half with his Nemesis force halberd. The stone tumbled and crashed between Czevak and Klute, forcing both inquisitors back. The Grey Knight laid a colossal gauntlet on Czevak’s gaudy-patterned shoulder and the High Inquisitor turned to find himself looking into the twin barrels of the Space Marine’s storm bolter. Czevak swung the stasis casket around to meet his captor, holding it up at the Grey Knight Terminator helmet and allowing the full, unstoppable force of unbound psychic negativity to bathe the Adeptus Astartes warrior. The thick ceramite and adamantium of the Grey Knight’s Tactical Dreadnought armour had shielded the Space Marine for centuries from a myriad of devastating weapons and foes but could do nothing to protect the psychic battle-brother within from the null field of the delicate Pariah embryo.

  There was a momentary scream: unmanly and immediate. The blade of the warrior’s Nemesis force halberd shattered like a glass tormented by the highest of sung notes, the psi-matrix interwoven metal fragmenting explosively in all directions. Klute and Czevak could only suppose that the same had happened within the Grey Knight’s Terminator helmet because the huge suit sagged and became suddenly still.

  Slipping out of the Space Marine’s deathly grip, Czevak turned the stasis casket’s beam upon the Grey Knight standing over Saul Torqhuil. The Space Marine stumbled back as though caught in the shock wave of a distant but immensely powerful explosion. He brought up his force halberd only to have its flensing blade shatter like the first. The psyker dropped the shaft and fell backwards through the heretic collection of the reliquary before grabbing his helmet with both gauntlets and screaming his way to a swift death.

  The two remaining Grey Knight Daemonhunters were rapidly coming to the conclusion that they were trapped with something far deadlier than Hessian in the chamber. Turning ponderously, the Adeptus Astartes warriors left the daemonhost to scream and smoulder against the cavern wall. Aiming the long shafts of their force halberds at Czevak, they found h
im theatrically stepping and skipping between dead bodies and wreckage. The Grey Knights intended to lance the man in the ridiculous coat with a full stream of warp-conjured soul lightning. Their powers failed to manifest however, and this gave Czevak the opportunity to turn his new toy upon them. The nearest simply fell to his armoured knees, put one gauntlet to his helmet before arching his inflexible suit and vaulting backwards – as though shot in the head from an execution pose.

  The final Grey Knight abandoned the shattered stump of his force halberd and took solace in his training and his storm bolter’s unimpaired ability to blast the High Inquisitor apart. The Space Marine also held his gauntlet to the side of his helmet but it was difficult to tell whether this was from pain or a gesture of vox contact with the Inquisitorial fortress above. The storm bolter’s aim was wild, however, evidenced in the way it shredded the ancient artefacts about Czevak, suggesting that the psyker was suffering.

  Blasting blindly at the pursuing Czevak, the Grey Knight staggered away, smashing his heavily armoured way through relics and damned archaeotechnology. An explosive miasma of boltfire flew randomly at Czevak, catching the pursuing High Inquisitor by surprise. Half skidding, half falling, Czevak went down on his backside, holding the stasis casket up out of harm’s way. The path of the negative psionic beam’s influence bounced haphazardly about the reliquary chamber, shattering cursed items and psychically charged materials. These small nullifications and detonations were dwarfed by an explosion beyond. A portion of the ancient, wraithbone warp gate shattered as it turned from a dilapidated structure to a supernova of rocketing dust. Getting a grip on the rocking stasis casket with a second hand Czevak held the Pariah embryo still.

  As the cloud of desiccated wraithbone drifted back to the floor of the reliquary chamber, Czevak turned to an aghast Klute, still leaning against the base of the obelisk. One entire quarter of the webway portal was missing. The segment connecting the top and left hand bulbs and previously afflicted with the spiral crack was gone.

  ‘Oops,’ was all Czevak had for him at that moment.

  Both men turned back to the remaining Grey Knight, who was beating a half-stumbling retreat back towards the fully retracted bulkhead. It was humbling to watch one of humanity’s finest shamed by such an action. Klute and Czevak watched the mighty Adeptus Astartes scream his way up the chamber before slowing to a standstill, which almost immediately became a topple forward, the deep, colossal thunk of adamantium and dead weight reverberating around the cavern.

  With the Grey Knight psykers dead but the screams continuing, Klute dashed across the chamber at the High Inquisitor.

  ‘Czevak!’ he called and he slid down onto the floor beside the High Inquisitor and snapped the opening on the stasis casket shut. The screams continued. As Klute scrambled to his feet and threw himself across the chamber in the direction of the torment, Czevak slowly stood up. Nearby lay Saul Torqhuil. The Relictors Space Marine was a mess. His armour was rent, sliced and buckled and doused in blood and hydraulic oils. His servo-harness was a tangled nightmare of decapitated tools and sparking stumps while the right arm he clutched to his ruined chest was missing his actual hand. This half masked his most grievous wound, a gaping hole in his fused ribcage in which sat a butchered heart. Czevak watched like a morose ghoul as the Relictor’s second heart kept the Techmarine alive. The High Inquisitor found that Torqhuil was looking right back at him. His ebony face was caked in his own blood, which cracked under a grim acknowledgement from the Space Marine.

  ‘Thanks,’ the Relictor said, which at first the High Inquisitor failed to understand, but the bodies of the Grey Knight Terminators said it all. Czevak had vanquished Torqhuil’s mortal enemies and had saved the Relictor’s life. Czevak’s victorious euphoria was fading. He wasn’t in the mood for congratulations and settled on an equally grim nod.

  Klute reached Epiphani first. Father had descended from the safety of the cavern ceiling and was hovering above a collection of large storage crates near to the shattered webway portal. The warp-seer had crawled inside one of the archeocrates and was screaming to herself in the clutter and darkness. Creaking open the door Klute watched the girl feverishly scratching at the floor of the crate. The inquisitor gently grasped the prognostic’s hand. She was like a small child, hiding from a monster. Pulling her into the light he saw that her face and body were splattered with rich, thick blood. Streams of the stuff had flooded from her nostrils and ears. Her hair and clothes were matted with gore and her cheeks were striped with tears of blood. The inquisitor sat, drawing her into a paternal embrace. Her red eyes were uncomprehending and her mouth wide open in a perpetual scream. Holding her to him, Klute fished around in his medicae satchel for a heavy sedative, which he administered immediately.

  Klute could hardly imagine the agony the warp-seer was in. The inquisitor had seen the close range effect of Czevak’s Omega-Minus experiment directly on the powerful Grey Knights. With the stasis casket’s directed influence shone upon them, the psykers hadn’t stood a chance. The unimaginably intense field of psionic nullity would have spread across the reliquary chamber, however, soul scorching those psykers and immaterial entities not even in the path of the Pariah’s negativity.

  As the screams continued and Klute’s faith in the sedative waned, he saw what the warp-seer had been scrabbling for. She had been looking for her snuff box but in her half-mindless state had been sitting upon the object. Leaning over and scooping the tiny box up, Klute flicked open its lip and dabbed the tip of his finger in the jade crystalline powder of the Spook. Klute shook his head. The warp-seer was beyond instructions and her nostrils were still streaming with thick blood. Hooking her bloody top lip with the digit he proceeded to rub the psychic drug into the warp-seer’s gums. Such intimacy would have ordinarily bothered Klute, but he was a doctor as well as an inquisitor and the professionalism of medical necessity saw him through the uncomfortable episode. Not a specialist in psykana medicine, it was all Klute could think to do.

  The girl’s response was almost immediate, the Spook’s psychoactive properties cushioning the crippling blow the stasis casket’s inhabitant had dealt her psychic being. The screaming stopped and the girl’s eyes closed, the sedative finally having chance to take the soul-soothed warp-seer to unconsciousness. Checking her vitals, Klute laid her head down, satisfied. Father’s missing lower jaw unspooled vellum. Standing, Klute tore off the scribbled message. He looked into the empty sockets of the servo-skull. The long, hang-dog skull that had belonged to Phalanghast – his mystic and Epiphani’s actual father.

  ‘She’ll live. I think,’ the inquisitor half-reassured the familiar. ‘Watch over her,’ he ordered the drone before moving onto Hessian.

  On the way, Klute came across Steward-Sergeant Rourke and the paltry remainder of his regrouped Savlar penitents. Only two Chem-Dogs had survived the massacre. Now that the battle had passed, the Guardsmen had preoccupied themselves with scavenging and stripping down the bodies of their fallen comrades for anything valuable or useful. The two ruffians looked up at Klute from behind their nitro-inhalers. The first was a shaven, thick-set brute that was more scar tissue than man; the second wasn’t a man at all, but a sour-faced woman sporting a smashed targeter on a pair of half-goggles for what could only be sentimental reasons. The two were draped in recovered weaponry, hanging off their shoulders in the form of lascarbines, shotguns and autorifles.

  Rourke, who was leaning against a smoked-crystal display case ordered, ‘Jagger, Nashida, assist the inquisitor.’ As they moved aside Klute could see that the steward-sergeant had taken frag through the gut. During the battle, the Grey Knight storm bolters had shattered the damned artefacts of the chamber, showering the Guardsmen with cursed shrapnel. Rourke clutched the ragged wound with one hand while holding onto an effigy of the aquila he carried on a cord around his neck with the other.

  ‘Assist your sergeant,’ Klute returned and tossed the penal legionnaire he assumed was Nashida a field dressing and saniseptic wash
.

  ‘Don’t worry about me sir,’ Rourke insisted through clenched teeth. ‘I have my faith to sustain me.’

  ‘We might need a little more than that today, sergeant,’ Klute informed the Guardsman before moving across to Hessian.

  The daemonhost’s unnatural state, in the main, kept the thing from serious harm. Hessian, the daemonic entity, and the body of Phalanghast’s boy-vassal were two separate parts of the same damned monstrosity. Bound as it was, the creature’s powers protected its host’s body from molestation from weaponry and environmental hostility. Klute fancied that this might even have included the soul lightning that he had watched the daemonhost endure from the tips of the Grey Knights’ Nemesis force halberds. Already weakened, the daemon’s defences dropped as the null shock wave of Czevak’s ‘solution’ crippled the warp entity. Without its defences, the soul lightning torched the vassal-host’s fine flesh.

  Black and burnt, Hessian’s body stank and smouldered against the coolness of the cavern wall. Everywhere flesh was raw and crisp. Gone was the daemon’s unhealthy glow and doll-dead, oily eyes. Instead, the uncomprehending agony of a host back in control of a torture-wracked body caused eyeballs to writhe around in sickly, silent torment. Where Hessian exactly was, Klute could not know. The inquisitor assumed that the trauma of the Pariah’s presence had driven the entity to some dark corner of the host’s soul to recover, but for all Klute knew the beast could have been banished back to the warp.

  To prevent the vassal-host going into shock and to alleviate the poor unfortunate’s suffering, Klute shot him up with enough sedative to drop a grox. As the boy both burned and shivered into a coma, Klute directed Guardsman Jagger to improvise a drag-stretcher from what he could scavenge from the reliquary chamber – scavenging being the Savlar’s particular speciality.