Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  ‘A way in,’ said Lukash.

  ‘A way in,’ Aximand agreed. Now fate was finally smiling his way.

  ‘Fire-team formation,’ he ordered. ‘Lukash, lead the way. Let’s get up there, secure that chamber, and locate our brothers.’

  ‘Lupercal!’ Lukash rasped.

  ‘For him indeed,’ Aximand agreed.

  Veterans all, Haemora moved quickly. Weapons ready, and with purpose, they began to clamber up the slump of broken stonework towards the light.

  * * *

  Bel Sepatus had kept his right hand raised, index finger extended, for nearly five minutes, maintaining, with that simple and commanding gesture, total silence. His elite squad, the exo-plated Paladins of Katechon, needed no greater urging to do this than their Keruvim sire’s slightest word, but Sepatus wasn’t sure about the others in kill team Brightest. Imperial Fists, a dozen Space Marines from shattered Legions and a squad of ill-mannered Blackshields. Not the brigade he would have chosen, for he would have selected exclusively from the high orders of the Blood Angels, but the one he had been given. The Praetorian had commanded him, and the Great Angel had approved that command. This was the Saturnine gambit, one that had astonished Sepatus with its daring. It promised unprecedented glory, the glory Sanguinius had said would be waiting for Bel Sepatus wherever he walked.

  Sepatus had not expected the first step towards that glory to be half an hour standing in an empty cellar, nor another forty minutes watching a hole in that cellar floor that had yawned open after some tectonic shudder. The datacast from Trickster spoke of pitiless executions taking place elsewhere in the zones, but zone mortalis Theta had offered nothing but a cursed hole and a slow waft of settling dust.

  Except now.

  Sepatus heard a minute skitter of rock. Then another. His auspex began to scroll contact icons across his visor: amber runes and place markers that grew red as they came closer.

  He saw every man in the kill team around him tense, their visors showing them the same thing. Their weapons came up ready.

  Sepatus reset his in-visor tally. The kill-counter, a small set of digits in the bottom left of his view, was logging one hundred and seventy-eight. He had left it running throughout the days of action at Gorgon Bar.

  He thought of the Bar. He prayed that it still held.

  His tally sat at zero.

  Rocks scraped. The icons glowed as red as blood.

  Something stirred in the hole. A black helm. A bound-up top-knot crest.

  A Son of Horus.

  Sepatus swept his right hand down.

  The kill team unleashed.

  * * *

  A blizzard of death poured down the hole, more lethal than the torrent of falling slabs that had opened it. Las-fire, bolter rounds, the twitch of yellow plasma beams, two searing exhalations of furnace-wrath from a flamer.

  Lukash was the first to die, his head and shoulders shot away. The leading squad of Haemora perished in the same fashion, their bodies tumbling, bringing loose rocks with them, and corpses and loose rocks alike struck down the squads behind, sprawling and sliding them, and making them easy targets for the weapons blasting down through the hole in the sky. Ten dead, sixteen, twenty-seven, thirty-one…

  Aximand stumbled down the halide slope, staring in dismay as Haemora Destroyer section met destruction first-hand.

  * * *

  ‘Cease!’ Sepatus yelled, and leapt feet first into the hole before anyone could advise him otherwise. The Katechon followed him, blades drawn.

  Sepatus landed hard in the blue gloom, sliding and skidding on the steep and loose incline. The air was wreathed in smoke, and black-plated bodies lay tangled on the scree. A few remained alive, struggling to move clear of the sinkhole base.

  He would not permit them to leave.

  Sepatus fired his jump pack, and fell upon them, his longsword rending armour and flesh. The Katechon, magnificent in their gold and cochineal-red warplate, arrived at his side, but there was no more killing left. The last of the gleaming black corpses lay on the halide slope, streaking the crystal white with streams of crimson.

  Sepatus turned.

  ‘Clear, lord?’ asked his second.

  The Paladin-captain scanned the area rapidly. His tally counter rested at seven. Forty-three other Sons of Horus lay dead on the sinkhole slope.

  Fifty total. A full section strength.

  ‘My lord?’ pressed his second.

  ‘One more,’ said Sepatus, looking around. ‘Fifty men. One leader. Where is the leader?’

  There was no clear track. The long halide slope and the darkness seemed empty.

  ‘Brightest, this is Brightest,‘ said Sepatus. ‘Trickster, are you there?’

  ‘Acknowledged, Brightest.’

  ‘Zone Theta is clear. Enemy eradicated. One possible evader, attempting egress through the subfloor collapse. I am pursuing.’

  ‘Negative, Brightest. You’re needed in the zones. And sealing has begun.

  If you remain below the subfloor, you will be engulfed.’

  ‘Acknowledged, Trickster,’ Sepatus replied. ‘Back above!’ he said to his men. He followed them towards the spoil slope.

  He took one last, frustrated look back.

  * * *

  Aximand moved through the darkness along the crest of the vast halide slope. His breathing was ragged… breathing in the dark…

  He wrenched off his helmet, and sucked in cold air.

  They were all dead. The whole thing, the whole operation, it was lost.

  He was lost.

  He considered picking his way back down to the wrecked Termite. It was buckled scrap, and he’d killed the Mechanicum crew for their incompetence, but from its position he could work backwards, perhaps find the cored tunnel his vehicle had bored through the flaw, and follow it back outside.

  A long walk. A long, long walk, but better than his other options.

  He started to slither down the slope, scurfing up flurries of crystal.

  He heard a sound. Lapping. A river flowing. How could there be-

  He saw the river below him. A river of viscous grey ooze, flowing like magma. It was rising with extraordinary speed. He edged towards it. It stank. A synthetic, a polymer or some industrial form of ‘crete. Liquid rockcrete, or something like it. It was filling the cavity. The loyalist bastards were sealing the flaw.

  That was no way to die. Sealed eternally in rockcrete like a fly in resin, alive? That was his entire nightmare.

  He scrambled back up the slowly vanishing slope. There had to be another choice.

  The massive river of liquid rockcrete was disturbing the precarious structure of the cavity. He saw outcrops of halide sagging or being carried over into the flow. Rockfalls slumped down the cavity walls, the tumbling boulders squirting gloopy sprays as they vanished into the river.

  More landslides. More sinkholes. If more of the subfloor gave way…

  Aximand moved higher, as high as he could go.

  * * *

  The Plutona drivers had advised Lev Goshen that they were two minutes from the target point, but those two minutes seemed to have stretched. The craft was floundering. It felt as if they were in the belly of a dying fish that was too weak to swim against a current. Everything swayed and pitched. The screeched roar of the drill heads had become a muffled splutter. The motivators were straining, finding nothing to bite. It sounded as though they were gurgling uselessly through mud instead of rock.

  ‘We’re moving backwards,’ said Goshen. ‘How can we be moving backwards?’

  ‘My lord-‘ said a tech-priest.

  ‘Tell me!’ Goshen snapped.

  ‘The indicator systems, lord, they show we are submerged,’ the magos said.

  ‘In what?’

  ‘A flow of viscous fluid,’ said one of the drivers.

  ‘Like what?’ Goshen demanded. ‘Magma? Mud?’

  ‘Sensors read an artificial substanc
e,’ the magos said. He had come to the prow to work at a cramped technical station beside the helm positions. His dentritic fingers had conjoined with the stations ports, and he was reading data off the inside of eyelids that had been sutured shut. ‘Analysing structure, composition, properties…’

  ‘I don’t need a scholam thesis, you turd,’ said Goshen. ‘I require immediate delivery to the target vector.’

  ‘That is not possible,’ said the magos. ‘We are immobilised.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what’s possible,’ warned the captain of the 25th Company.

  ‘We are immobilised,’ replied the Mechanicum adept. ‘We are suspended in a body of composite material similar to liquid-form rockcrete. Our motivators and drill heads cannot gain traction. It is fast-setting.’

  ‘Get us free!’

  ‘That is no longer possible, my lord.’

  ‘Then open the damn hatches-‘

  ‘We will flood. We are submerged. I refer you to my earlier answer.’

  Goshen tried to think of another question, another demand he could make. He couldn’t think of anything. The walls of the compartment seemed very tight suddenly. He was enclosed with fifty battle-ready Space Marines and a Mechanicum crew. Craft capacity. There was barely enough room to move as it was.

  The Plutona had stopped moving. The silence was the worst thing Goshen had ever heard.

  ‘How long?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘How long for what, lord?’

  ‘Until it sets?’

  ‘It is already setting, my lord.’

  ‘Then… when it’s set, when it’s solid, we can dig our way through it.’

  The magos turned to look at him with stitched-up eyes.

  ‘The material is inside our farings, our drill cases and our engine assemblies,’ he said. ‘It is set solid, so those things are solid, like rock. The beautiful mechanisms will never run again. The material has not penetrated this compartment, because this compartment is a sealed unit. We cannot open the hatches. We cannot dig out. We will never move again.’

  And no one can dig us out, and no one is coming, and almost no one knows we’re even here…

  Lev Goshen couldn’t process what he was being told. He sat down in his arrestor seat. He started with the basics.

  ‘How long?’ he asked.

  ‘Lord?’

  ‘Will our power last?’

  ‘One hundred and ninety-six days,’ said the magos.

  ‘Air?’

  ‘With recirculation, and given your gene-bred biology,’ said the magos, ‘effectively indefinitely.’

  Goshen nodded.

  ‘How long do your kind live?’ the magos asked.

  ‘Why?’ asked Goshen.

  ‘Because that is how long you will be here,’ said the magos.

  * * *

  Tormageddon, saying nothing, fought Loken backwards into the empty arena of zone mortalis Mu. Outside the fortified archway, Naysmith kill team was meeting Vincor Tactical head to head, exchanging torrents of heavy fire along the length of the hallway.

  Through his link, Loken could hear scattered scraps of frantic vox: cries of pain and death, Leod Baldwin rallying the men, fragments of tactical exchange.

  But Loken had no time to listen, or concentrate on the words, or offer orders of his own.

  Tormageddon was fast. His huge, daemon-bloated frame looked ponderous, but he threw blows with unnatural speed. Twice already, his whirring chain weapons had almost torn Loken open.

  Loken read the fight as it began to flow, and saw that his only advantage was accuracy. Tormageddon was all force, but his angles of attack were awkward and relatively clumsy, as though some immortal power was channelling its entire strength through a body that was too mortal to cope with it.

  Like a primarch, Loken thought, trying to fit his hand into a legionary’s gauntlet.

  Loken kept moving, swinging his long-pattern chainsword and Rubio’s dead blade in a furious rhythm to deflect blows and block strikes. Tormageddon pressed in relentlessly. When their chainswords met, teeth sheared off in a screech of sparks.

  The ruined Sons of Horus legionary was an empty husk. His strength, prodigious in its magnitude, flowed from a warp-seated spring. Tormageddon wasn’t poor Tarik, or even Grael. He wasn’t a man, or a gene-son. He wasn’t even a he, he was an it, and it was a slab of mindless muscle and meat, animated by aetheric powers unaccustomed to physical nuance. It was a sheer killing strength locked in an unfamiliar form, and that form was broken and slow-witted. Whatever sentience lingered in Tormageddon’s shell, it was too dull, too damaged to guide its power, too wasted to draw on decades of honed skill, too burned out to do anything except drive strike after strike after strike.

  But it was more than capable of killing him.

  Loken had put down World Eaters less berserk, and Night Lords less energetic. Tormageddon was more tireless than Iron Warriors he had slain, more rapid than Emperor’s Children he had duelled. It was blunt trauma like a Salamander’s warhammer, cold fury like an Iron Hand’s mind, seething rage like a Wolf of Fenris, zealous hatred like a Bearer of Words. It was the terror of the shining Angels, it was the unknowability of their darker cousins, it was the invincibility of Ultramar, it was the swift death of Deliverance.

  It could not be trusted, like a Son of the Hydra; it could not be bargained with, like a sorcerer of Prospero; it was rotting inside, like Mortarion’s wights.

  Like a rider of the Khan’s pack, it was in constant motion.

  And like an Imperial Fist, it could not be pushed back.

  It was an Angel of Death.

  But it was not a Luna Wolf.

  Loken tried to force it into errors. He was spurred by an overwhelming desire to purge the beast he was fighting. It was more intense than his urge to survive. I he fire of his vengeance had guttered out. With the others, like Marr, Loken had shown only cold rage, and he had delivered it with clinical ferocity. Revenge, revenge upon the Sons of Horus for the sins of Horus. That urge was all Loken had known for a long time, it was what he had become, and the Saturnine ruse had finally given him a chance to fulfil it.

  Then Tormageddon had spoken his name with Tank’s voice. One word.

  Loken knew he couldn’t save Tarik, or in any way bring him back, but he wanted to honour him. He wanted to honour Tarik, and Nero Vipus, and Iacton, and all the other beloved brothers who had been betrayed by heresy and lost to horror. He wanted to release the pitiful traces of Tarik Torgaddon from their enslavement, and lay them to rest.

  Grant Tarik absolution. Give his soul peace from torment. Cast the daemon out, back into hell, and free the abused bones and defiled flesh. In memory of the Luna Wolves, Loken would wrest this Astartes corpse back for burial. He would not allow it to remain the cadaver-puppet of some repellant corpse-god.

  He ducked a whirring blow, blocked a purring blade, sidestepped, turned, denying brute power, and using Tormageddon’s lack of spatial awareness against it. He forced it into overstretch, lured it into overstep, drew its reach too long and skewed its balance.

  His chainsword locked with Tormageddon’s, both screaming as they sheared and mangled into each other. Loken took his chance, and thrust straight in under Tormageddon’s blocked guard.

  Rubio’s dead blade struck the dead centre of Tormageddon’s chestplate.

  And slid aside.

  It left nothing more than a chipped dent. Even with all his force behind it, Loken hadn’t been able to penetrate. Every shred of his skill had won Loken that split-second chance. Every ounce of his strength had not been enough to make it count.

  Tormageddon smashed Loken backwards, and tore the sword block aside. Loken tried to keep his guard, but their locked chainswords had become hopelessly enmeshed, and all he managed to do was tear the weapons out of both their grips. Tormageddon hit him again, and Loken went down.

  He tried to rise.

  The beast grabbed him by the head, and pi
cked him up off the ground.

  Tormageddon’s screeching chainfist was clamped around Loken’s helmet, shredding its plating, buckling his visor, and shaving flakes of ceramite and steel into the air as it began to squeeze. Loken flailed, choking on his own throat seal, feeling the neck rings mangle and snap, the crumpling faceplate crushing in against his cheeks and teeth, the vicing pressure increasing to burst his skull.

  I will not die this way. He wanted to scream that into death’s face, but he couldn’t even move his mouth inside the compressing helm. He willed it instead, in fury, and stabbed.

  And fell.

  He sprawled, blind. He could hear the angry crackling of the fused chainswords nearby. He tore the broken pieces of his mined helmet off, spilling blood. The bones of his skull felt impacted.

  Tormageddon lay flat on its back, Rubio’s old sword impaled through his heart. The dead, dull blade was pulsing with a fading flicker of pale light. Trace veins of energy, like cobwebs made of miniature lightning, played across the palm and fingers of Loken’s hand, the hand he had used to drive home the blow.

  The little flickering traceries of light died away, and vanished as he stared at them.

  He got up, flexing his aching jaw. Blood dripped from his nose. He wrenched Rubio’s sword out of the corpse. The blade was dead and cold again, as dead and cold as the Mournival Son at his feet.

  Tormageddon was lifeless. The infernal power that had inhabited the legionary corpse was extinguished, or had fled, the broken vessel abandoned.

  Loken wanted to gather the body up and carry it to a bier where it could lie in silence, but the fight beyond Mu’s archway was still raging.

  He left the killing floor.

  * * *

  The fierce contest between Naysmith and Tormageddon’s Vincor Tactical had rolled to the far end of the hallway. Baldwin had driven hard, pushing Vincor backwards into Mortalis Omicron, but it had been at a cost. The hallway, scorched and peppered with blast holes, was strewn with dead, friend and foe.

  Loken hurried to join his own rearguard. He paused to scoop up a chainsword from one of the fallen Imperial Fists, thanking the dead man for the gift, and promising to use it well.