by Rob Sanders
Checking briefly on Rourke and the ham-fisted job Nashida was making of his field dressing, Klute jogged over to Torqhuil. As a member of the Adeptus Astartes, Klute well knew that the Relictor could weather even grievous injury with a greater chance of survival than his ordinary human counterparts. Torqhuil was now up on unsteady feet, with blood and blessed lubricants from his ruined suit of power armour dripping down his torso and spattering the reliquary floor. His left gauntlet sat on Czevak’s shoulder in an effort to steady his superhuman bulk and not topple over. Klute shook his head; this was beyond his talents. Torqhuil needed immediate surgery and the attentions of a full medical bay. Klute stared at Torqhuil but spoke to Czevak.
‘We need to get him out of here.’ It sounded like an accusation. ‘We need to get them all out of here.’
Czevak bit at his bottom lip. He knew what was coming.
‘Well our exit strategy’s a little compromised,’ Czevak replied.
It had always been a possibility but Czevak was still surprised when it actually happened. Klute might have been a man of medicine but he could still throw an angry punch. With a ringing jaw and mauled lip, the young inquisitor stumbled back and fell on his rump.
‘Well you’d better come up with another one fast,’ Klute shot back.
‘This won’t help,’ Czevak said, but Klute had already turned on him.
‘How could you do that?’ he growled, the tension in his voice climbing. ‘You knew what it would do to them.’
‘A calculated risk…’
‘You could have killed them.’
Czevak thrust a finger at the stasis casket he’d placed on a giant, toppled urn. ‘I used it to save them. Without it Torqhuil would be dead. We’d all be dead. I distinctly remember discussing collateral damage.’
‘Discussing?’ Klute marvelled. ‘How can we have a discussion when you only ever give me half of the facts? I had no idea how powerful that thing was. I had no idea where you were bringing us.’
‘You wanted to come to Nemesis Tessera,’ Czevak said, getting up and throwing his hands up in the air. ‘Congratulations, inquisitor, you’re home. How did you like your welcome?’
‘Thought you’d teach me a lesson, eh? This was not what I had in mind, and you know it,’ Klute said. ‘You wanted your little toy; you said you’d been here before. You intentionally brought Hessian along to trip the alarms and give you access to the other chambers. You gambled with our lives, again, for one of your damned trinkets.’
‘I deceived you, is that what you’re saying?’
Klute nodded savagely. The weary and wounded Relictors Space Marine watched the exchange of accusations and insults fly back and forth across his ruined chest. ‘Like you deceived me in bringing the Malescaythe to Nemesis Tessera? Didn’t have much choice in that, did I? Raimus, you are my brother inquisitor and my friend – probably the only one I truly have in the entire universe. But you can be both a hypocrite and pompous ass.’
‘And you, my lord, are death to all who follow you.’
The two men burned into each other with faces flushed with anger and disappointment.
‘It’s too late, Raimus. There’s no going home,’ Czevak told him with sudden tenderness. Klute looked on with glistening eyes. ‘The Inquisition will hunt us down as the renegades we ultimately are. You know we have all crossed a line. You must accept it, brother. I know that wounds you but it is simply a matter of perspective. We wouldn’t be the first innocents to suffer the persecution of the ordos, now would we? But where the Holy Inquisition in this matter are misguided and shackled to the inflexibility of their beliefs, we are free – free to act. Free to do the Emperor’s work. Korban Xarchos of the Thousand Sons will use the psychic energy created by his orchestrated massacres to realise the existence of Mammoshad – King of Kings, Enslaver of the Craven Worlds and Keeper of the Vault Abyssal. He will deliver this immeasurably powerful Tzeentchian daemon to his master Ahriman on Melmoth’s World. With Mammoshad, Ahriman could achieve the unthinkable. Whether we like it or not, Raimus, we have now made that possible.’
Czevak pointed once again at the ominous shape of the stasis casket. ‘With the right tools we can stop this. And it does fall to us to stop this. Because if not us, then who?’
Klute was silent for the longest time but as the seconds passed, the inquisitor’s hard face softened. He looked around the chamber at the dead, the injured and the shattered warp gate.
‘How does talk of stopping Ahriman, Xarchos and Mammoshad half a galaxy away help us? Melmoth’s World is on the other side of the Eye. We are trapped in a reliquary dungeon below a secret Inquisition fortress that is undoubtedly on the highest of alerts and about to come down on us with the wrath of the God-Emperor.’
Czevak smiled and clasped his former acolyte on the shoulder. ‘Grim odds, I grant you,’ the High Inquisitor admitted, ‘but I’ve beaten worse.’
A little of the excitement and enthusiasm returned and Czevak skipped across the mountainous corpse of a nearby Grey Knight Terminator and released the pressure clasps on his helmet. Fishing around inside the gore filled helmet, Czevak tore out the Space Marine’s vox-link. Shaking the blood from the headset, the High Inquisitor held it tentatively to his ear.
‘What’s happening?’ Klute asked.
‘Military traffic. This is not good,’ Czevak said, tuning into the encrypted vox-traffic on the daemonhunter’s comm-set. ‘Nemesis Tessera is in full lockdown. Every inquisitor and team have been alerted to our presence. Inquisitor Cyarro is in charge of our purgation.’
‘Cyarro is a Puritan pig,’ Torqhuil said, ‘but an effective one.’ Klute nodded his agreement. ‘He’ll send everything he has.’
Czevak moved around the chamber with a strange kind of aimless purpose, picking up artefacts from around the chamber with interest before tossing them over his shoulder to clatter and smash on the floor. He inspected the Tactical Dreadnought suits of the Grey Knights and the silent, sleeping forms of both Epiphani and Hessian. Finally he ran his palms up the wraithbone of the damaged webway portal, laying his hand on one of the protruding bulbs and pressing his ear to the osseous surface. Turning he looked vexed and shook his head, presumably to himself.
‘Well,’ Klute said to the High Inquisitor.
Czevak brought the Terminator headset back to his ear and trotted back over to them while new information came across secure channels.
‘Four full squads of Grey Knights mobilising. In the meantime Cyarro has ordered down the Thirty-second Royal Waspica Allegiants.’ Czevak frowned.
‘Inquisitorial storm troopers,’ Klute informed him. ‘Ordo Malleus chartered. How many?’
‘All of them.’
Klute nodded. ‘Of course, and your toy will be little use against them.’
‘So it seems,’ Czevak said, moving suddenly across the chamber to reclaim the stasis casket and drop it down into the bottomless pockets of his Harlequin coat.
‘How long?’
‘They’ve been rappelling down the cargo elevator deepshaft ever since we set off the purity alarms, so anytime now.’
‘You have a plan?’ Klute asked. Torqhuil fixed the High Inquisitor with a cynical stare.
‘Always,’ Czevak replied, unconvinced and mind elsewhere. He looked up at the cavern ceiling. The klaxons had desisted at some point during the chaos of the battle but the red ceiling lamps were still snapping on and off with silent urgency.
‘Sergeant,’ Czevak called. ‘Kill the lights and then your own, if you please.’
‘As you wish, High Inquisitor,’ Rourke acknowledged as he took an autorifle from the murderous-looking Jagger. ‘On three,’ the steward-sergeant instructed his remaining Chem-Dogs before the three of them went to work on the roof lamps, blasting them out with careful aim and a judicious mixture of las-bolts and auto fire.
As the chamber became darker and shadows closed in around them, Czevak motioned them all to follow.
‘The warp-seer had the right idea,’ t
he High Inquisitor told them, leading Klute and Torqhuil to where the inquisitor had left her with Father. Darkness stung the eyes as the Savlar Guardsmen finished off the last of the ceiling lamps with their target practice. As they pulled back, Jagger and Nashida carried Hessian on a makeshift stretcher and Rourke led the way with the beam of the lamp attached to his autorifle. As they all convened in front of the archeocrates, around the light of the sergeant’s remaining lamp and the cold blue orbs of Father, Klute looked up at Czevak for inspiration. He was standing by the shattered warp gate with the Terminator headset to his ear once more.
‘So?’
‘What?’
‘You said you had a plan.’
‘They’re here,’ Czevak told them in a hushed whisper, dropping the headset.
‘And the plan?’
‘Hide,’ Czevak said, sidling into a nook in the wraithbone architecture of the ruined portal. Klute looked to Torqhuil and the Chem-Dogs and then straight back at Czevak.
‘Hide. That’s your plan?’ Klute hissed in disbelief.
‘And wait for the signal,’ Czevak added in a light-hearted, sing-song tone. He slunk down inside his Harlequin coat, the garment’s alien Domino field helping to melt the High Inquisitor into the silky darkness.
There was no time for the further questions Klute had about the nature of Czevak’s signal and what they were supposed to do upon receiving it. As the inquisitor crept into the empty gloom of one of the archeocrates – as Epiphani had done before him – he hoped that both would become obvious when the time came. In the meantime, like his companions, he had to content himself with cradling his sidearm and thumbing fresh shells into the breach in the eerie darkness of the crate interior.
A seeming age followed. An indistinct period of time in which all Klute could hear was the shuffling of boots and the occasional chirp of a vox-bead. Klute could sense bodies everywhere but could see nothing. The 32nd Royal Waspica Allegiants were devout soldiers of the Imperium and were infamous for carrying out their duties with absolute conviction and surgical precision. The Seven Star Hegemony, the Vilo Rouge Twist Cleansings and the Decromunda Hive Holocaust were all the work of the Waspica Allegiants. Their service record and iron faith had earned them the prestige of a garrison rotation, a five hundred year charter to secure and defend one of the most secret of the Holy Inquisition’s strongholds. They were unlikely to allow them to escape.
Klute suddenly became aware of something in front of his archeocrate. Blinking through a crack in the lid he saw the blackness outside move. One form of darkness usurped another as a figure passed before him. Willing even his heart to stop beating in case it alerted the Inquisitorial storm trooper to his presence, Klute heard the scrape of grit under lightly stepping boots and the hum of nearby weaponry and equipment. How the storm troopers could be moving throughout the chamber without lamps and lights Klute could hardly guess.
As the seconds passed, several more dark figures drifted by the archeocrate, drawn to the area despite their best efforts to disguise their location. Klute’s fingers sank into the grip and lever action of his shotgun pistol. Upon detection, the inquisitor wanted to be able to announce his discovery with a blast of silver scatter shot and Saint Vesta’s salts.
Klute blinked. And almost missed the signal.
From the deepest darkness erupted eye-searing light. A momentary crack of warp energy, leaping from one side of the webway portal to the other, instantly followed by a billion blinding others. The gate opening assumed the choppy, glassy, jigsaw reality of its former function – unaffected by the accidental damage and missing section. It blazed interdimensional illumination across the reliquary chamber like a newborn sun.
The silhouette of a Royal Waspica Allegiant stood framed in the portal’s brilliance. Barging out of the archeocrate with his shoulder, Klute brought the barrel of his Cadian street silencer around to meet the threat. Pent up tension led the inquisitor to fire early, Klute having little idea of the storm trooper’s orientation. The Allegiant had turned to face the warp gate in understandable surprise and Klute’s close range scatter shot only served to blast the storm trooper’s backpack. Spinning in his black Waspica leathers and greatcoat, the storm trooper instinctively turned his hellgun on the inquisitor and would have despatched him with an economical headshot had it not been for his shot-riddled power pack. The Ordo Malleus storm trooper’s telescopic psyoccula goggles bounced around ridiculously on his head as he abandoned his dead rifle and went for his hellpistol instead. Klute thrashed the lever action and hammered the storm trooper again, this time tearing up the black carapace on his chest. A third blast lifted the Guardsman off his feet and a fourth smashed the psyoccula goggles off his face.
As the storm trooper hit the cavern floor and remained still, Klute stared around the reliquary. The impossible activation of the warp gate had thrown light and shadow all around. Plain to see now were the midnight black figures of the Royal Waspica Allegiants, swarms of them, spread out among the artefacts in a sweep pattern. All had hellguns already up with stocks snug into shoulders and some were even firing but most had their leather-gloved hands up in front of their telescopic psyoccula goggles. As an Ordo Malleus chartered sentinel force, Klute guessed that the storm troopers had been issued with exotic equipment to detect warp traces and immaterial entities hiding in plain sight, witches and daemons like Hessian that nestled in human form. This explained why the storm troopers had not required torches, a reliquary chamber of damned artefacts, through the psyoccula goggles, would be lit up like the galaxy across a clear night sky. The warp brilliance of the activated webway portal would have momentarily blinded them however, explaining to Klute why he hadn’t already been blown apart by a combination of supercharged las-bolts and expert marksmanship.
The hulking, shambolic form of an injured Torqhuil lurched towards the warp gate with a blissfully unconscious Epiphani over one smashed shoulder. Lucky hellshot pranged with lethal insistence off the Techmarine’s ruined power armour and Father zigzagged behind through the optimistic fire. The Savlar Chem-Dogs unfortunately did what they were trained to do rather than what they were supposed to do. Like Klute and Torqhuil they should have run; instead they fought. Rourke, Nashida and Jagger engaged their blinded opponents, allowing their advantage and swift kills to draw them into a firefight.
‘Come on!’ Klute screamed as he ran at the interdimensional brilliance.
The Chem-Dogs had proudly taken down three nearby storm troopers but the remaining legion of Royal Waspica Allegiants almost immediately responded to their training and turned on the ragged trio of Guardsmen. Like a powerful magnet, the Savlar Chem-Dogs drew las-bolts down on themselves. Nashida had the back of her skull burned out by a precision shot, while Jagger was cut up in the converging path of las-fire. With his flesh still alight from the glancing wounds and rifle clutched in one hand, the struggling brute dragged Hessian’s limp body out of the stretcher and up towards the glowing gateway. As Steward-Sergeant Rourke soaked up the worst of the barrage, the Guardsman span and tumbled into a pile of ancient Chaos relics.
‘No,’ Klute bellowed at Jagger as the Chem-Dog dumped Hessian’s body and ran back for his sergeant and warden. Storm troopers were closing on the portal, yanking up their psyoccula goggles as they neared and showering the edifice with snake-eyed firepower.
‘Go!’ Rourke gargled through blasted lungs. Jagger seemed to change his mind and turned. The Chem-Dog would have made it but for the Royal Waspica Allegiant stepping out from behind the warp gate where he’d been carrying out his sweep for the heretics. At almost point-blank range the storm trooper blasted a hole through Jagger’s throat before turning the muzzle of the hellgun on Klute who had snatched Hessian’s dumped body up by one wrist and was dragging him up to the portal. Klute just gaped up at the merciless storm trooper and waited for an execution-style death.
Czevak was suddenly beside the Allegiant. Unsnapping the storm trooper’s chin-clasp, the High Inquisitor knocked the helmet
off the side of his head. Czevak brought the gilded cover of the Atlas Infernal smashing down on the soldier’s crown. The Waspica Allegiant dropped like a corpse and could well have been one. As Czevak stepped out of his hiding place in the portal’s osseous architecture he grabbed Hessian’s other black and bloody wrist and helped Klute drag the torched body of the daemon’s unfortunate host through the blaze of interdimensional static.
What Klute noticed immediately was the silence. The webway was strange and alien enough but the transition was like being submerged in another medium. Torqhuil was already through, having laid Epiphani’s body down to attend to further wounds of his own. Father hovered above the unconscious warp-seer and Czevak fell immediately to closing down the webway gate now that they were on the other side. Sealing the portal was not instantaneous however, and the Waspica Allegiants had time to funnel their firepower directly after the escaping renegades, prompting Klute to fall down beside the comatose daemonhost to avoid the hail of las-bolts lucky enough to make it through the fragmented reality of the eldar gateway.
One insane storm trooper, not content with sending his firepower through the crackling egress, threw himself through. The Allegiant might have killed a stunned Czevak or one of his team but for the fact that the Guardsman was so distracted by the unique, alien nature of another dimension that he had little choice but to stare rather than fire. With one meaty, remaining gauntlet, Torqhuil grabbed the storm trooper by the back of the skull and pulled him violently towards his armoured chest. After slamming him senseless against the ceramite, the Relictor flung the Inquisitorial storm trooper back through the sizzling gateway. Seconds later the agitated space solidified, confirming that the gateway had been dimension locked and their reality was sealed off from the danger beyond.
‘One for promotion, methinks,’ Czevak observed, half-serious.
