The data-daemons seemed to have been cowed by the deaths of Thalassa and Azaulathis. The Grey Knights made it across to the far bank, Brother Haulvarn pausing to haul Magos Antigonus’s shattered servitor body up onto the rockcrete. Cardios followed carrying the upper half of Archis’s smouldering body.
Alaric led the way to the foot of the watchtower, where massive claws rooted the tower into the rockcrete and provided cover between the black iron lengths. Hawkespur and Antigonus’s tech-priests followed and finally Archmagos Saphentis pulled himself up onto the bank, the quicksilver knitting itself back together behind him. Saphentis paused to pick something up as he headed for cover where Alaric waited.
Cardios ducked into cover beside Alaric. He was hauling Brother Archis’s upper half with him—a sorry, tragic sight, the brave Grey Knight’s body turned into so much wreckage by the daemon’s strength.
“Even if we could bury him here,” said Alaric, “we wouldn’t. Not in this tainted ground. Cardios, take out his geneseed and share out his ammunition. We will have to leave the body.”
Cardios nodded and began removing Archis’s helmet. Like all Space Marines, a Grey Knight’s many augmentations were controlled by twin master organs, the geneseed. Geneseed was almost impossible to create from scratch and so each Marine Chapter did its best to harvest the organs from their dead so they could be implanted into a new recruit and the Grey Knights were no exception. The Chapter’s geneseed was modelled after the genetic code of their primarch, the awesome warriors created by the Emperor to lead the Great Crusade more than ten thousand years ago. The donor of the genes for the Grey Knights’ geneseed was uncertain, however, since the Chapter had been founded amid the greatest of secrecy some time after the first foundings. Some said it was modelled after one of the primarchs who had left behind an unusually stable geneseed, others that the donor was the Emperor himself. No one knew for sure and most of the Grey Knights preferred it that way—they fought not for the ancestral memory of a primarch but for the Emperor first and the Ordo Malleus second and nothing stood in the way. Archis’s geneseed was sacred wherever it had originally come from and Alaric had a duty to bring it back to the Grey Knights fortress-monastery on Titan if he could.
Antigonus’s smoking, wheezing body scuttled into the shadow of the watchtower. He saw the body of Archis and paused for a moment in respect, then crouched down to conserve his servitor body’s dwindling energy reserves.
“You need a new body,” said Alaric.
“I know,” said Antigonus, the voice from the servitor’s vox-unit distorted with effort. “I’m surprised this one lasted so long.”
“You knew that daemon.”
“Scraecos sent it after me when I first came here to investigate. I was lucky not to end up like Thalassa. I recognised its voice. When you have something like that living inside you it must leave an impression on you.”
“You fought well,” said Alaric.
“So did you,” replied Antigonus. “All of you. Especially your battle-brother.” Antigonus indicated Archis’s body. Cardios had almost finished cutting the geneseed organ from Archis’s throat.
“We will all have to do so again, I fear,” said Alaric. “This planet crawls with daemons.”
“Someone would disagree with you.” Archmagos Saphentis drifted calmly through the machinery at the base of the watchtower. He held Thalassa’s severed head in his hand. “Explain,” he said to the head.
Thalassa’s eyes, now orbs of pure silver, opened. “Daemons…” she said, her voice a bubbling whisper through the blood running from her mouth. “No, no daemons… they are the hunter-programs, the servants of the archmagi…” The power that had held her together while she was possessed by Azaulathis was keeping her alive now, animating her with an echo of its dark magic.
“She’s insane,” said Antigonus.
“Maybe,” said Alaric. He turned back to Thalassa’s head. “How do you know?”
“The… archmagi told me… their many voices are one…”
“The rulers of this planet?”
“Yes. They showed me such things. I became lost, but they found me. I saw a world completely self-sufficient… master of the power of the warp… and I saw the face of the Omnissiah, I saw the Castigator, His knowledge made metal and flesh and sent to teach us… no, there are no daemons here, just knowledge made real, come down to serve us and show us the way…”
Alaric levelled his storm bolter and blew the head apart with a single shot. Saphentis looked down at his gore-splattered robes in mild surprise.
“Lies,” said Alaric. “About the daemons at least.”
“Then they are ignorant of their own corruption,” said Saphentis. “Interesting.”
“They all are at the start,” said Alaric. “Anyone who conjures daemons and does the will of Chaos goes to great lengths to convince themselves they are anything but corrupt. Chaos is a lie, archmagos. Most of all it makes the heretic lie to himself. The Dark Mechanicus are no different in that respect. What we know as Chaos, they see as some extension of technology.”
“It is a grave blasphemy indeed,” said Saphentis. “To turn the teachings of the Omnissiah into the justification for such corruption.” Saphentis sat down and for the first time Alaric saw tiredness evident in his bionic limbs.
“I was wrong to suspect you,” said Alaric. “About Thalassa, I mean. She must have got lost and captured. I thought you had killed her.”
“Because I had expressed admiration of this planet’s self-sufficiency?” If Saphentis could have been able to smile grimly, Alaric suspected he would have done. “I did not choose my words carefully. It was natural for you to think little of me, justicar. I wanted to understand this world, as well as carry out our mission, but it was unwise of me to do so. And I should have been more careful with Thalassa. She was not able to cope with the responsibilities I placed upon her here. Her loss was my failure. I can only hope the Omnissiah forgives me my weaknesses.”
“Then we’re on the same side?” said Alaric.
“The same side,” replied Saphentis.
“Now that’s sorted out,” said Hawkespur, “we need to keep moving.”
“Agreed.” Alaric looked back at Brother Cardios, who had finished removing the geneseed from Archis’s corpse. “We’ll have to leave him. There’s no other way. We can pray for forgiveness later. Dvorn, carry Antigonus if he breaks down. The rest of you, stick close and keep your heads down. At the moment we’re recon first, combat second.”
The strike force gathered itself, said a silent prayer for the dead and carried on into the titan works, skirting the base of the watchtower and skulking through the fleshy outgrowths and masses of corroded machinery that broke through the rockcrete surface of the works. And in front of them, now stretching between the horizons, were the Titans themselves—towering silent, brimming with destructive potential.
It was an army that could lay waste to worlds. An army just waiting to wake up.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Die in failure, shame on you. Die in despair, shame on us all.”
—The 63rd Terran Scrolls, Verse 114 (author unknown)
Rear Admiral Horstgeld was down on his belly, his Naval uniform torn and smouldering. He held a naval shotgun close to his body and tried to peer past the pew, through the smoke and burning wreckage that flittered from the ruined ceiling of the bridge.
Gunfire from the Hellforger had shaken the bridge but not destroyed it. Most of the bridge crew were still alive, crouching for cover as they had been since the last major bulkhead fell.
They had been boarded. The worst possible result when fighting the forces of Chaos. That was where the Enemy was strongest—face-to-face where foul magicks and mutations counted for the most and where the very presence of the corrupted could shake the faith of the bravest men.
“Hold!” shouted the bridge security chief, a squat and massively powerful man wearing full forced entry armour more normally used when storming decks hel
d by mutinous crewmen. There were no mutinies on the Tribunicia but Horstgeld had always insisted on full security details on his ships. From the speed with which contact had been lost with contested sections of the ship, though, the security crew had not made a great deal of difference. “Take your targets before you fire! Line up, then shoot!”
The rest of the bridge crew had hunted down whatever weapons they could as the Chaos boarding teams had spilled through the decks. Some had the naval shotguns of the kind Horstgeld now cradled, rock-solid weapons designed for filling cramped spaceship corridors with heavy, and mutilating slug shots. Others had the lasguns that the Imperial Guard carried and many had only been able to rustle up their personal sidearms—autopistols, laspistols, even a few slug guns, almost all designed for show and not combat. Horstgeld saw one of the communications crew holding a length of pipe that had fallen from the ceiling as the Tribunicia was rocked by broadside fire, another hefting a large steel spanner. “Steel your souls, faithful of the Emperor!” intoned Confessor Talas. “Make His will your shield and His wrath your weapon!” For the first time in their careers many of the bridge crew were actually listening to Talas, seeking some hope in his words.
Sparks showered from the main bridge doors. Something was cutting through.
“Right!” shouted the security chief, unhooking the power maul from his belt and lowering the visor of his helmet before hefting his riot shield. “Stay tight, stay covered, mark targets and never forget who—”
A massive armoured fist punched through the door and the gunfire began. Blazing, intense, a wall of fire and white noise that sheeted across the bridge from both sides. The viewscreen shattered in a white star-burst and the golden statue of the Emperor toppled. Gunfire chewed through the hardwood pews and the fluted stone columns. Horstgeld yelled and fired almost blind, the shotgun kicking in his hands. He saw silhouettes of crewmen flailing and in the flashes of fire made out the deformed, oversized humanoid creatures forcing their way through the breach. They died in their dozens but more came, toppling over the bodies of their dead, a few making it to the rearmost pews and returning fire with their crude weapons.
A massive speargun shot a barbed javelin that impaled the chief navigation officer. The severed head of the security chief smacked off the column next to Horstgeld. The pew in front of Horstgeld cracked as if something huge had landed on it and Horstgeld scrambled out of the way, feeling hot blood on the floor. Spinning fragments of shrapnel were burning pinpoints on his skin and hands. He frantically reloaded as the return fire thudded heavier across the bridge.
Horstgeld had been in sticky situations before. He had been in boarding actions, even, as a young lieutenant in a boarding party that stormed an ork-infested space hulk. He had seen violent mutinies and pirate raids and had been on more than a few ships wrecked in accidents or under fire. He had seen many men die. He had killed a few up close and countless more from afar as master of the Emperor’s warships. But this was the worst. This was the worst by far.
Something was ripping up the pews at the rear of the bridge. Something else flapped overhead and Horstgeld shot at it, blowing a chunk out of one leathery wing and seeing it spiral into the ordnance helm, all slashing claws and teeth. Someone was screaming. Someone else yelled in anger, the cry cut brutally short.
The gunfire was dying down. Now the din was cracking bones and the thud of blades into flesh, the scrape of blades on the floor. Screams and sobbing. Roars from once-human monsters. The killing was close and bloody and getting closer. Horstgeld backed up against the pew and finished loading his shotgun.
The killing was nearly done. Most of the bridge crew were dead, the rest dying.
Horstgeld heard heavy, armoured footsteps, coming closer.
“Captain,” said a voice, deep and thick.
Horstgeld peeked out through the planks of the broken pew. He could just make out a massive armoured form, similar to one of Alaric’s Grey Knights but more hulking and malformed, wreathed in greasy smoke.
A Space Marine. Dear Emperor, it was a Space Marine from the Traitor Legions, the arch-betrayers of mankind. So dangerous that most Imperial teachings maintained they didn’t even exist any more, because the very idea of a Traitor Marine was deadly to a weak mind.
Horstgeld held his shotgun tight. He was supposed to be brave. To die in the grace of the Emperor. And it wasn’t supposed to be easy.
“Rear Admiral,” he shouted in reply, correcting the Marine.
“Ah. Good. A worthy prize, then.”
Horstgeld could see the Marine walking towards him, kicking dead crewmen out of the way. Horstgeld could make out the ancient, tarnished black armour, with the symbol of a single unblinking eye wrought onto one shoulder pad in gold. The Marine held a huge power sword in one hand, its blade writhing as if it housed something alive. His face was old and malevolent, the skin drawn tight, the eyes glinting black, the teeth pointed. An eight-pointed star was branded onto its hairless scalp. Steam spurted from the joints in the armour, which seemed crude and mechanical compared to the ornate armour of the Grey Knights—because this was a Marine from the days of Horus, a link to the Imperium’s darkest and most shameful days. Chaos incarnate. Hatred made flesh.
“See!” called out a wavering voice, which Horstgeld realized belonged to Confessor Talas. “See the form of the Enemy!” Talas pulled himself to his feet, still inside the bridge pulpit. “See the mark of corruption upon him! The stink of treachery on him! The sound of…”
The Traitor Marine took out a bolt pistol and put a single round through Talas’s head. The old confessor thudded to the wooden floor of the pulpit and one of the boarding mutants scampered over. The wet crunching noises that followed could only mean the confessor’s body was being eaten.
The Traitor Marine stomped round the pew that Horstgeld was hiding behind. “You. You are in command.”
Horstgeld nodded. He had to be brave. He had never run before. He would not run now, not give this creature the satisfaction of breaking him.
The Marine slid his writhing sword into a scabbard he wore on his back. He reached down with his free hand. Horstgeld levelled the shotgun but the Marine batted it away before Horstgeld could fire it—the Traitor Marine’s reactions were lightning-quick. He was still a Space Marine, with all the conditioning and augmentations that went with it.
The Traitor Marine grabbed Horstgeld round the throat. His armoured fingers easily circled Horstgeld’s pudgy neck and lifted him clean off the ground. The Traitor Marine held Horstgeld close to his face. Horstgeld could smell blood and brimstone on his breath. Those gem-like black eyes peered right through him.
“A long time ago I fought your kind,” said the Marine. “Horus led us. He told us you were all weak. That you deserved to die. And every time I face you, you prove him right. You become more pathetic every time I sail out of the warp.”
Horstgeld would have spat in the Marine’s face, but his mouth was dry. “Horus was a traitor. He was corrupt. A daemon. We beat you.”
“No. We defeated you. We killed your Emperor. And then the conspirators closed ranks. The primarchs. All the bureaucrats and the profiteers. They wrote our triumph out of your history, they branded us failures, when all the time we were just waiting to return. And now that time has come, slave of the corpse-god. The Eye of Terror has opened. Cadia will fall. Look at yourself and ask who is stronger? Who deserves this galaxy?”
“But… you fear us! Why else are you here? If we are so weak, why did you have to come?”
The Marine dropped Horstgeld onto the floor and stamped down on his leg. Pure red pain slammed up from the wound, almost knocking Horstgeld out as the bones of his legs shattered.
“Enough of this,” said the Marine. “I am Urkrathos of the Black Legion, Chosen of Abaddon the Despoiler. I will kill you and everyone on this ship. Death is merciful. Those who anger me are taken back to my ship and cast into the pit of blood where their souls are made fuel for spells and fodder for daemons. That is
the fate I am giving you the chance to avoid. I am not merciful by nature so this offer will not be repeated. Do you understand?”
“Frag yourself,” gasped Horstgeld.
Urkrathos crushed down on Horstgeld’s leg again. Horstgeld couldn’t help from screaming.
“Where is the tribute?” Urkrathos demanded.
“What… what tribute?”
Urkrathos lifted Horstgeld up again, slammed him against the closest pillar and drew his sword. He stabbed the sword through the meat of Horstgeld’s shoulder, pinning him to the pillar like an insect on a board.
“Do not make me ask again, rear admiral,” spat Urkrathos. “You’re here for it just as we are.”
“I don’t know,” said Horstgeld, coughing up a gobbet of blood. He could barely see through the pain. The world was a mass of pain with only the face of Urkrathos showing through, his snarling, fanged mouth, his burning black eyes. “We… we didn’t find out…”
“Where is it?” bellowed Urkrathos. “Where is the Castigator?”
Horstgeld tried to speak again, to curse the traitor. But he couldn’t get the words out. His throat was full of blood and he couldn’t even breathe.
Urkrathos wrenched the blade out of the pillar and caught Horstgeld as he fell. He lifted the rear admiral’s limp body and dashed his brains out against the floor, cracking the man’s head over and over again into the flagstones.
He flung the corpse to the floor. His sword had been drawn and it had not drunk deeply enough yet, so Urkrathos stabbed it again into the corpse and let the daemons imprisoned in the blade lap up the man’s warm blood.
There had not been nearly enough blood. Every time it got easier to break them. Every ship, every battle—the Imperium had only spared a pathetic parody of a fleet to oppose Urkrathos. It was an insult. It seemed all the best battles were in the past now.
A thought came unbidden into Urkrathos’s mind. It wasn’t his own thought—it was a transmission from the communications daemon back on the Hellforger.
[Grey Knights 02] - Dark Adeptus Page 22
