[Grey Knights 02] - Dark Adeptus

by Ben Counter - (ebook by Undead)

  They hit the ground badly, the blade coming free as Alaric and the daemon cartwheeled across the rockcrete. For a moment everything was blackness and pain. Alaric’s head cracked against the rockcrete and broken teeth rattled around in his head, a gunshot of pain flaring from his broken arm. For a moment he wasn’t sure if he was alive or whether he was now tumbling towards one of the hells to which sinners were sent, to be punished for his failure.

  Alaric skidded to a halt. His vision swam back and he shook the pain from his head. He was alive. He rolled onto his front and grabbed the halberd that had landed next to him. Looking up, he saw the Castigator was already on its feet.

  The wound in its abdomen was a pulsing black mass. Bladed limbs reached out of the wound, grasping hands, writhing tentacles, the manifold form of the daemon taking hold. Alaric pulled himself up into a crouch and the pain was gone, replaced by the iron-hard discipline of a Space Marine. The two were twenty metres apart, close enough for Alaric to see every muscle in the Castigator’s mutating body bunch up ready to pounce. Alaric was the same, winding up for the strike, knowing that this was his one chance to take on the Castigator in the only way he could—up close, hand-to-hand, face-to-face, where his Space Marine’s strength and Grey Knight’s ferocity would count the most.

  For a moment they watched one another, man and daemon, each mind filled with nothing but the death of the other. Then, as one, they charged.

  Alaric sprinted. The Castigator thrust itself forwards on dozens of insectoid limbs, its drooling maw and limb-filled wound gaping to crush and kill. The two slammed into one another and the final murderous struggle exploded in a mass of stabbing limbs and slashing blades.

  Clawed hands reached out. Alaric cut them off with his first slash. His second bit deep through the Castigator’s corrupted mass even as it grew and flowed around him. The Castigator tried to drag him in and Alaric welcomed it, pushing into the lethal mass of bony blades and lashing tentacles.

  Alaric ripped one foot out of the mass and crunched it down through bone and gristle, forcing himself upwards towards the Castigator’s head. The Grey Knight yelled a wordless prayer of rage and pulled his halberd clear, switching the grip and driving it deep into the Castigator’s throat. The corrupted mass sucked the halberd out of his hand but he didn’t care, raising his fist again and punching the Castigator’s corrupted face.

  A Grey Knight was trained to act with deliberation and level-headedness and leave behind the heedless bloodlust that characterized some Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes. But they also knew that every enemy demanded a different type of fight. Some would be defeated with cunning and guile, others with strength of will, both things at which the Grey Knights excelled. But there were some enemies, some among the ranks of the daemon, that could only be defeated with good old-fashioned rage.

  It was rage that drove Alaric then. Again and again he slammed his fist into the Castigator’s face, into the lipless mouth-wound and the burning eyes. He felt the deaths of his battle-brothers, of Archis and Lykkos and of Archmagos Saphentis and the tech-guard. He felt Hawkespur’s savage wound and the breaking of Thalassa’s spirit. The suffering of Chaeroneia a thousand years ago, ripped into the warp where those who resisted were consumed by the dark gods, all for the satisfaction of an intelligence that should never have existed. He felt them all and welded them into a diamond-hard spike of hatred that he drove into the Castigator’s corrupted soul just as he drove his fist into its face.

  The daemon stumbled backwards on its many new limbs, reeling. Its face was a gory mess, green flames licking from dozens of cuts. Alaric reached into the gaping wound in its throat and pulled his halberd out, bringing a fountain of gore with it.

  “You should have picked an enemy,” said Alaric, “with less imagination.” He swung the halberd in a great arc and sliced off the Castigator’s head.

  The death-scream was the loudest sound Alaric had ever heard. The Castigator howled in binary as it died, its information bleeding out of it in zeroes and ones like machine gun fire. Pure information shot from the Castigator’s ruined body like fireworks and among them Alaric glimpsed its thoughts. He saw endless legions of Castigator Titans marching on the Imperial palace on Terra, standing in ranks of thousands on the surface of Mars. He saw destruction, so absolute the very stars were burned out by its ferocity, leaving behind a black and dead universe where the Castigator’s purpose had finally been realized. But then they were gone and without the Castigator’s will to hold it together the mass of information became a shower of meaningless fragments, spiralling scraps of light that died as the Castigator’s own life flooded out of it in a pool of corrupted gore.

  The daemon’s head thudded wetly onto the ground. Alaric took a couple of steps away from its hissing oozing corpse and sunk to his knees, exhausted. The Castigator’s body slumped to one side—it was the size of a tank, swollen with corrupted growths, dry and tattered now the information that fuelled it was gone. Its skin began sloughing off and the body started to melt.

  Alaric looked round to the Castigator’s Titan, dominating the forest of Titans. One of its eyes exploded, the green flame exploding out to be replaced with a plume of wild plasma.

  The reactor was critical. The plasma was boiling over as it approached catastrophic mass. Haulvarn and Dvorn had succeeded.

  Alaric picked up the battered head of the Castigator. The green flame was just a faint flickering now, barely reaching past what remained of its eye sockets. Its vertical, gaping mouth was dumb. Alaric held up the head so it could see the Titan.

  Slowly, the shape of the Titan’s torso sagged. Its face began to melt, the immense heat of the plasma boring through its layers of armour. Even the Titan’s miraculous self-repairing facilities could do nothing against power of that magnitude.

  “See?” said Alaric. “You wanted destruction. Here it is.”

  A white light burned out through the Titan’s chest as the plasma vessel failed completely. The Titan rippled as if suddenly liquid and then it was consumed in an expanding ball of hot, unbearable light, so bright it melted the surfaces of the Titans that stood nearby.

  A hot wind blasted across the titan works, bringing with it the death-scream of the father of god-machines.

  As the flare of the explosion died away, Alaric looked down at the Castigator’s head. The flame finally flickered out and the crushing pressure on Alaric’s mental shield eased. The Castigator was dead.

  “No,” said Urkrathos. “No.”

  The sensor-daemon gleefully replayed the image. The Titan, built from a pure Standard Template Construct, from which could be copied the ultimate weapon—melting into slag and then exploding, right beneath the Hellforger as Urkrathos looked on.

  “This… this is an insult!” Urkrathos slammed a fist into the sensor-daemon, shattering the pict-screen and sending the daemon recoiling in pain. “To entreat upon Abaddon himself, to lure me here… and now this! What insubordination is this, to defy a chosen of Abaddon?”

  Urkrathos turned to glare at the rest of the bridge. The daemons were silent, for they knew one of Urkrathos’s killing rages when they saw it. “The Despoiler was promised a tribute,” said Urkrathos, anger dripping from every word. “And a tribute he will get. A tribute in blood! In death! In fire! Close the ports and move to mid-atmosphere! All power to the lance batteries!”

  Silhouetted against the afterglow of the Titan’s death, two figures approached. Alaric knew them even before his vision compensated for the glare—Brothers Haulvarn and Dvorn, scorched but alive.

  “Well met, brothers,” said Alaric bleakly. “I see you were successful.”

  “Well met, justicar,” said Haulvarn. “Dvorn found a maintenance run down to the knee, so we threw a couple of melta-bombs into the core and got out, I was wondering if it would work.”

  “And I was wondering,” said Dvorn, indicating the quickly decaying mass of flesh that had been the Castigator, “if you would leave anything of this creature for me.”
<
br />   “Sorry to disappoint you, brother. The daemon and myself had matters to settle.”

  Haulvarn’s head snapped round at the sound of tracks approaching. Alaric followed his gaze and saw one of the steaming, beweaponed engines from the earlier battle, the size of a Rhino APC and bristling with guns and blades. The last Alaric had seen they had been running rampant around the titan works after Scraecos had died—now one was heading straight for them. The Grey Knights took aim with their storm bolters as it approached, backing off before it opened fire.

  “Hold!” shouted Alaric as he saw the limp body held in the claws jutting from the engine’s front armour. “Hold fire!”

  The figure was Hawkespur. Through her faceplate, Alaric could see her skin was almost white.

  “She’s still alive,” said a distorted voice from the engine.

  “Antigonus.” Somehow, Alaric wasn’t surprised Magos Antigonus had made it. He had taken a thousand years of what Chaeroneia could throw at him—he was the toughest of them all in his own way. When the Warhound had died he must have leapt into the closest machine, which apparently happened to be one of the Dark Mechanicus war engines.

  “Your battle-brother Cardios is dead,” said Antigonus, his voice warped by the crude vocabulator unit on the engine. “The tech-guard too. They were taking stray fire from the Titan and they threw themselves on her to protect her.”

  Alaric sped to the engine—Hawkespur’s breathing was shallow and though her wound had been crudely dressed, she was still bleeding. “She won’t last long,” he said.

  “Neither will we,” replied Antigonus. “The sensors on this thing aren’t good but it looks like there are Mechanicus troops approaching from the direction of the city and the spaceship above us is rising to firing altitude. Get yourself and your brothers on board, justicar, this machine can go faster than you can on foot.”

  “Then we will pray for Cardios later.” Alaric turned to Haulvarn and Dvorn. “Get on board. Stay alert and hold on.”

  “And make it quick,” added Antigonus. “I think there might still be something in here with me.”

  The three surviving Grey Knights swung themselves onto the spiked body of the war engine, Alaric feeling the full extent of his injuries for the first time. But his own wounds didn’t matter. The Castigator was destroyed, the power that ruled Chaeroneia was broken and there were many prayers to say for the dead. Antigonus gunned the engine’s tracks and it tore rapidly towards the closest edge of the titan works, leaving the melting slag of the Castigator’s Titan behind. And above them, the Chaos grand cruiser was rising through the layers of pollution, massive laser lance projectors emerging from its underside.

  The collective mind of Chaeroneia’s tech-priests was at an utter loss. The sequence of events had been so rapid and unexpected that they could not make sense of them. The Castigator’s awakening and destruction, the Chaos spacecraft hanging above them, the death of Scraecos, the battle in the fallen Titan, the awesome psychic force that had exploded from the Castigator Titan and had been cut short. There were thousands of explanations being bounced between the ruling minds of Chaeroneia, none of them satisfactory, many of them heretical.

  The laser lances being readied by the Chaos grand cruiser were just one more complication. They were added to the confusing mess of contradictions and absurdities and were barely remarked upon by the tech-priests right up until the moment they fired.

  The hot ash wind whipped past Alaric as Antigonus drove the war engine across the dunes. He looked back towards the receding titan works, still dominating the ash desert with their watch-towers and legions of Titans, crowned by the central spire and still under the shadow of the Chaos spaceship.

  A finger of hot ruby light slashed down, punching through the disk at the top of the central spire. White flickers of explosions ripped through the structure. Then another beam fell and another, edging the towers of the titan works with crimson. Suddenly, every weapon on the Chaos ship opened up as one, bathing the titan works in red laser fire. The central spire exploded, the raging finger of flame quickly swallowed by plasma explosions as the lances punched down through the assembled Titans and penetrated the fuel reservoirs beneath the surface.

  The destruction of the titan works took just a few minutes, the awesome weight of lance fire from the Chaos cruiser supplemented by orbital bombardment shells and weapons batteries. The watchtowers shattered and the moat boiled away. The Titans fell like executed men and the surrounding dunes were washed with waves of heat and flame.

  Antigonus kept control as the ground shook. Alaric held on as the Shockwaves died down and the fires continued to burn, consuming the lower levels of the titan works and finishing the destruction of the Castigator’s lair.

  The shadow slowly lifted off the desert as the Chaos ship rose into higher orbit, ready to return back to the vacuum of space. Abaddon’s tribute had not been delivered and the Chaos ship had exacted revenge for the failure.

  The ash clouds slowly blotted out the sight of the shattered titan works and the engine ground further into the desert, away from Manufactorium Noctis.

  Inquisitor Nyxos paused over the large leather-bound book, quill in hand. The reports given by Alaric and the other Grey Knights would take some time to write up and the implications were extraordinary. Someone would have to explain to all authorities concerned how the mission to Chaeroneia had found a hallowed Standard Template Construct and then destroyed it. And Nyxos knew that someone would be him.

  Nyxos’s quarters on the Exemplar were in one of the few undamaged sections of the ship. The Mechanicus cruiser had been shattered by fire from the Chaos ship that had duelled with it, and would have surely been destroyed had the Chaos fleet not broken off and headed down to the planet’s surface. That fleet was now long gone, having moved with all haste to jump distance and disappeared into the warp. The Exemplar had been in no shape to follow and was still in high orbit around Chaeroneia waiting for a Naval ship to reach it and evacuate the survivors of the Mechanicus crew. The quarters were cold and cramped, but Nyxos did not mind a little hardship when he had so nearly died along with countless crew in the battle above Chaeroneia. It had only been his augmentations and redundant organs that had kept him alive when the verispex decks had depressurised and as far as he knew no one on the same deck had been so fortunate.

  There was a knock at the door. “Enter,” said Nyxos.

  The door slid open and Justicar Alaric walked in. Even without his armour he was huge, almost filling the room. The candlelight glinted off the dried blood that edged the scars on his long, noble face and there were livid bruises around his eyes. Normally they were expressive and inquisitive, especially compared to most other Space Marines—now they were just tired.

  “Ah, justicar. I am glad you could see me,” said Nyxos, looking up from his report. “I hope I have not intruded on your prayers.”

  “There will be plenty of time to pray, inquisitor.”

  “Regretfully so. I will join you and your battle-brothers soon, I would say some words for them myself. We might never fully understand how greatly their sacrifice protected the Imperium. Please, sit.”

  Alaric sat down wearily on the chair opposite Nyxos. It took a lot to tire out a Space Marine, but Alaric had clearly been through enough on Chaeroneia to kill most men a dozen times over. “I was concerned about the interrogator,” he said.

  “Hawkespur is stable,” replied Nyxos. “She is very badly injured. She lost a lot of blood and the pollutants affected her gravely. Perhaps she will live, perhaps she will not. Magos Thulgild has made her care the highest priority and she will have a good chance if I can get her to Inquisition facilities before she deteriorates. In truth, I am surprised she made it back at all. I was certain I would never see her again.”

  “And Antigonus?”

  “Still in quarantine. Thulgild is fascinated that Antigonus seems to have survived in information form alone. It is alarming to me, too, but Antigonus has submitted to all Ma
gos Thulgild’s tests and there is no indication of corruption. He requests to be taken back to Mars and Thulgild has agreed.”

  “It was his mission,” said Alaric. “To investigate Chaeroneia and report back to the Fabricator General. He wants to make sure he fulfils it.”

  Nyxos sat back in his chair and sighed. So many were dead and so many more questions had to be answered. “Meanwhile, justicar, my mission is to tell the Ordo Malleus what happened down there. And I admit I do not fully understand it myself. This creature, this Castigator. It was a daemon, you say?”

  “Yes. I do not know when it entered the Standard Template Construct, or how, but it seemed to have been there so long it had forgotten what it really was. Until I… reminded it.”

  “And it was a daemon all along?”

  “Of course. How could it not be?”

  “No one knows what form the Standard Template Constructs originally took. Who is to say they did not have machine-spirits of their own, true intelligences far more powerful than anything that survives today?”

  “No, inquisitor. I fought it. I felt it. When it realized what it was, it rejoiced in it. It might not have been a daemon the Ordo Malleus would recognise, but the shapes of the Enemy are many. Evil takes an infinity of forms, but justice is constant.”

  “Very well. If you are certain, justicar, then so am I. When I can get an astropathic message to the Ordo, there will be one more entry in the Liber Daemonicum.” Nyxos took up his quill again. “Thank you, justicar. I have kept you from your prayers for too long.”