Abaddon watched the column ahead, where one of his Black Legion Astartes was dragging a screaming prisoner from the line. With a single swipe of a blade, the human’s head left his shoulders.
“He has been made to feel vulnerable, and his Legion looks even weaker in his eyes. The cracks already in his resolve will soon split wide. This was never about converting the puritan bastard in one fleeting moment. It was merely the first move in a much longer game of regicide.”
“Shall I inform the Exalted of our failure?”
Abaddon grinned. “Our failure?”
“My failure, Warmaster.”
“Better. No, I will speak with the Exalted myself and inform him that his pet seer survived untainted. Vandred was a fool to think it would happen so quickly.”
“Then I shall do as you bid, my Warmaster.”
Abaddon didn’t answer. Such an obvious statement needed no affirmation. Instead he turned, irritation touching his feral features for a moment.
“Did you at least kill the slaves?”
The Exalted had won the orbital battle for him in a fraction of the time Abaddon had planned for. The least he could do to repay the Night Lord commander was a little favour like that.
“Bleed the slaves on board the Thunderhawk,” the Exalted had asked. “But allow nothing to be traced to either Legion.”
“Whatever you wish, brother,” Abaddon had replied. “What reason do you have for making this look like some nonsensical accident?”
The Exalted had smiled to hear it described like that. “A petty reason, but a necessary one. Eliminating the allies of a potential rival. My prophet gathers his resources. He will not take my place as commander.”
Abaddon found that rather quaint. The Exalted’s claws had to be clean of this murder. Amusing to see how subtle these Night Lords could be when they chose.
“I sent fifty prisoners, my lord,” said Ruven. “Their Thunderhawk was overran, and the other Night Lords returned to orbit in one of our ships.”
“Fifty.”
“How amusingly excessive. Against how many?”
“Two slaves.”
Abaddon nodded, looking back at the columns of freed convicts. Fifty against two, and the crime apparently blameless.
At least something had been done right.
Talos had been unable to reach any of First Claw on the vox, nor had he made contact with Blackened or the Covenant of Blood. He suspected jamming, though to what purpose, he couldn’t begin to guess. Killing them all down here made no sense at all, for there would be no gain for the Black Legion. While Abaddon may have had a thousand faults, with overconfidence first among them, he was not a fool. His grasp of tactical insight had only grown stronger over the centuries.
Then again, nothing the Black Legion did was ever particularly predictable. Once, Talos thought, they were the best of us.
How the mighty are fallen.
As the lifter doors opened, he stared at the bodies spread across the landing platform. It took no time at all to see they had been sectioned by heavy bolter fire. Talos’ attention immediately fixed upon the Thunderhawk, silent on its grey clawed landing gear, its forward gang ramp lowered. Black streaks of burned and twisted metal showed on the blue hull where explosives had been employed to wreck the ramp’s hydraulics. The convicts had evidently been extremely well-equipped.
Talos was already walking forward, crushing meat and bone underfoot, his blade and bolter at the ready.
“Hnnngh,” one of the nearby corpses wheezed at him. Talos didn’t break stride. He glanced at the black-toothed, bleeding ruin of a man, and destroyed its head with a single bolt shell. The gunshot’s report echoed off the Thunderhawk’s hull.
“Septimus,” he voxed.
The answer he received did not please him.
X
THE HUNTERS HUNTED
They had taken her.
They had defiled Blackened with the foul mortal scent of panicked fear; they had torn Septimus to pieces, and they had taken Eurydice.
Talos sheathed his blade and locked his bolter to his thigh, kneeling by the command throne where Septimus lay unmoving. Dark smears of blood across the floor showed where the slave had dragged himself. He lounged in the pilot’s throne, sprawled like a puppet with cut strings, a mess of bloody bruises, broken limbs and shattered bones.
He still breathed. Talos wasn’t sure how.
The Night Lord kicked a convict’s corpse aside, removing his helm and kneeling by his artificer. The rich scent of flowing blood and the reeking stink of recent death assailed his naked senses. Septimus coughed flecks of fresh blood to his sliced lips, turning to face the Astartes.
“They took her,” he said, his voice surprisingly clear. “Master, I’m sorry, I can’t see. They took her.”
Talos withdrew a syringe and a roll of self-adhesive synskin bandage weave from his thigh-mounted narthecium. The supplies he bore now were a hollow shadow of the old Apothecary tools he’d once carried, but those were lost an age ago, on a nameless world in the years after the Great Heresy split the galaxy.
The first thing he did was inject a cocktail of blood coagulant, painkillers and Astartes plasma into Septimus’ thigh. The second was to bandage what remained of his slave’s face.
“They took her,” Septimus said again as the weave was wrapped around his eyes.
“I know.” Talos rose to his feet again, after spraying disinfectant on the open wounds of the mortal’s legs, torso and arms. He tied off the worst gashes with tourniquets, and left the bandages within Septimus’ reach on the control console.
“You must use the rest yourself. The bandages are by the secondary thrust levers.”
“Yes, master.”
“They used explosives to breach the main ramp doorway.” It was not a question.
“Yes, master.”
“Understood. Rest, Septimus.”
“I can’t see,” the slave repeated. His voice was still strong, but his head lolled with the onset of both shock and the effects of the syringe’s contents hitting his organs. “They took my eyes.”
“They took one of them. The other is damaged, but not lost.” Talos was searching the corpses, each one felled by las-rounds or vicious hacks of Septimus’ feral world cleaver. The two serfs had fought like tigers before being overwhelmed—the evidence of their defiance was all around, mutilated and silent in death.
“If I can’t see,” Septimus rested his head against the rest of his throne, “I can’t fly us back to the Covenant.”
“That is not important at the moment. Do you know what happened to First Claw?”
The slave swallowed, the sound thick and wet. “Back in orbit. A Black Legion Thunderhawk.”
Talos breathed out through clenched teeth. An unsubtle trap that, nevertheless, they had all walked right into.
“Be silent,” he said to Septimus. “Do not move.”
“Are you going for her?”
“I said to be silent.”
“Hunt well, master.”
“Always.”
Talos, Astartes of First Claw, 10th Company, VIII Legion, stalked towards the cockpit doors. He gripped his stolen power blade in one hand, and with the other he replaced his helmet, blanketing his sight in the murder-red of his targeting vision. Over his shoulder, the inhuman warrior spoke four words to his wounded slave, the promise emerging from the skull helm as a mechanical snarl.
“Back in a minute.”
It had been a long time since the hunter had moved with such purpose.
Too long, he realised. He had lost grip of his own purity, ignored the simple power brought about from being true to one’s nature.
He found the instincts flared into life as soon as his twin hearts started beating faster. He ran, the boots of his ceramite second skin pounding on the metal decking. The sound was a welcome warning, a tribal war drum, the threatening heartbeat of an enraged god. The hunter would take no pains to mask his approach. Let the enemy know that death was
coming for them.
He moved through the prison complex, corridor by corridor, not trusting the lift to deliver him, placing his faith in the strength of his own renewed vigour. It dawned on him as he sprinted that in the hour since his poisoning and the awakening from his magus-induced vision, a thick sluggishness had settled into his bones. This weakness faded now, purged in the flow of honest adrenaline.
Eurydice. Curse them for taking her, and curse the Black Legion for engineering this petty little trap. She was to be the Covenant’s Navigator. Talos would stand for nothing else, not after seeing so clearly in his vision how she would be discovered on the surface of Nostramo’s remnants.
Lower and lower into the complex, he ran with unrestrained pleasure at the battle stimulants tingling through his blood. His war-plate’s machine-spirit wanted this hunt. Its dim sentience was alive and sharing his joy. They both needed this.
In the corner of his visor, a rune burned its way into his sight. The Nostraman numeral 8. It pulsed with a heartbeat of its own, listing life signs and distance from his position in urgent red lettering. The surgery that blocked Eurydice’s warp eye with a small iron plate was not the only modification the Legion’s servitors had made to the Navigator. Implanted in her throat was a locator beacon, ticking its position to any Night Lords tuned to its frequency. A standard implantation for the slaves of the VIII Legion.
It took exactly six minutes and thirty-one seconds to reach the basement generatorium chambers. Almost seven minutes of running through stilled, lifeless corridors, past empty cells, and an equal number of hallways still dense with the sweating mortal flesh of convicts waiting to be loaded into slave ships. Some of them had reached out to him, mistaking him for one of their Black Legion saviours. The hunter answered their worship with swings of his blade as he ran, not allowing himself to slow down even to end their irritating blasphemies. Angry, scared cries followed in his wake each time the sword sang. These grunts and bestial shouts of animals herded for the slaughter, panicked by a larger predator, almost brought a grin to his lips. The hunter tried not smile, though their very existences amused him. So weak. So scared.
Six minutes and thirty-one seconds after he had left the Thunderhawk on the landing platform, Talos reached the basement. Able to survive the drop, he’d fallen the final three floors by tearing open a sealed elevator chute door and leaping into the darkness. He landed with an echoing thud that rang out throughout the prelim chambers of the generatorium floors.
Wasting no time, Talos resumed his sprint, running headlong through the empty control room. Great windows took up one wall, facing out into a vast domed cavern, housing the grinding, clanking generators powering the sprawling prison complex above. Each of the twenty generators stood five storeys tall—edifices of hammering pistons, whirring cogs and thrumming power cell units wedged into their sides like the scales of some caged reptilian beast. Between this miniature city, walkways and gangways were illuminated by the flashing red of emergency lighting.
His vision wavered, rippling lines of distortion dancing across his lens displays. Runes warped and cancelled. Electrical distortion. A great deal of it. It was killing his helm’s input receptors.
So much power. Talos scanned the control room, large enough for a staff of thirty or more, though devoid now of all life. Void shields? This much power couldn’t be purely for lighting the multi-towered spire above. These generators must also power the prison’s void shields, preventing orbital bombardment or meteor strike.
Defending a fortress full of criminals from death, though they were slated for execution anyway? Ah, the wasteful ignorance of the Imperium of Man.
Anathema boomed out a volley of bolt shells that hammered in a wide spread across the control consoles before him.
His vision cleared. Darkness fell. Silence, at last, followed.
It was not an immediate process. At first the darkness was broken by the crackling death rattles of the destroyed consoles, lighting the blackness like bolts of lightning. When the ruined control consoles spat their last, his vision stabilised just as darkness fell. True, absolute darkness, imaginable only by those who lived life without ever seeing the sun.
Next came the silence. The twenty generator towers took almost a minute to die. Great hulks, strangled of attention and starved of willpower without the guiding signal of the control consoles. Within the observation room, failsafe systems roared into life with flashing red sirens. Talos emptied the rest of his magazine into the failsafe station, turning his head from the resulting explosion.
Once more, there was darkness. The generator towers rattled and clanked and whined down into stillness over the course of another forty-six seconds, and then, blessedly, there was silence over the self-contained generatorium city.
Talos crashed through the control room windows, falling twenty metres, landing smoothly on the ground floor’s decking with a tremendous bang of ceramite on iron. He looked into the darkness, listened to the silence, and breathed a single word.
“Preysight.”
Indriga wasn’t spooked.
He was, however, losing his temper. The others were getting twitchy with the lights going out and the generator towers dying. The girl wasn’t struggling anymore, but that was hardly any reassurance. She’d already bitten and clawed chunks out of Edsan and Mirrick, and Indriga had a feeling lurking at the back of his mind that the dangerous bitch was just waiting for the right moment to lash out again.
Between two powering-down towers, the four men froze in the darkness. The crash of destroyed glass had reached them even over the towers’ death whines. Handheld lampsticks speared into life as Indriga and Edsan turned on the shotgun-mounted lights they’d taken from slain prison guards.
The girl moaned, coughing loud enough to make Indriga jump.
“Shut her up,” he whispered. “And keep your damn light on the ground.”
Edsan obeyed, lowering his stolen gun so the beam was no longer lancing off into the avenues between the towers. “You just messed your pants, Indri. I saw you jump like you were shot.” It wasn’t mockery in Edsan’s voice. It was something not far from panic.
“I ain’t spooked,” Indriga whispered back. “Just lower your Throne-damned voice.”
Edsan didn’t reply at first. Indriga sure looked spooked, and that meant bad things. Indri was a hive ganger like most of them, but his skin was black with tats listing his kill counts and blasphemous beliefs. You didn’t get that big without being vat-grown or significantly cut up and put back together by some augmetic-hungry doc, that’s for sure.
When his nerves got the better of him, he said, “Indri. There’s four of us, right? That’s good, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Edsan had the distinct feeling Indriga wasn’t listening to him at all. That was nothing new—Indriga was big news in R Sector, he’d never had time for small-time players like Edsan—but this time, it wasn’t like Indriga was brushing him off out of disrespect. This time, Indri just looked like he could smell fire around the corner and was thinking about making a run for it.
It was weird. Looking at him now, he was like one of the beefy attack dogs Edsan’s boss used to use in pit fights. Gene-changed to be hulks of slab-like muscle and wide jaws, and before a dog fight they’d be tense and shivering, staring off at stuff only they could see. They were glanding stimms, sure, but it was still weird to see an animal so… focused. Indriga looked like that now. Shivering but rigid, staring at… Well, that was the problem. Like those ugly dog-things, he was staring at the Emperor only knew what.
“You see something?” Edsan whispered.
“No. Can hear it, though.”
And then, just like that, Edsan heard it, too. Maybe the girl did too, because she moaned again, earning a slap from Mirrick, who was still bleeding, still back there with her. A new noise blended with the fading howl of the generators. Something rhythmic, like the metal thunk-thunk-thunk of… of… of something. Edsan didn’t even know what it sounded like. H
e’d never heard it before. His slippery mind fixed on the only comparison it could hold on to in his rising panic. Like the footsteps of a giant. When he would learn the truth of the matter less than a minute later, he’d be horrified to see how accurate he’d been.
Indriga raised his shotgun. “Someone’s coming.”
“For her?” Edsan swallowed. Indriga’s slow caution was shredding his nerves. This was bad. Maybe they could leave the girl and get out of here. “Indri… Are they coming for her?”
Eurydice spoke for the first time since she’d been taken. Through swollen lips, she sneered the words, “No. He’s coming for you.”
Of the Emperor’s sons, one had always stood apart from his brothers.
Through a twist of fate that would herald the human race’s eventual unmaking, the twenty progeny of the Emperor were stolen from their father. As vat-grown infants—who had been painstakingly flesh-forged as biological masterpieces in the labyrinthine gene-labs beneath the surface of Terra—they were engineered to be all that was idyllic and noble in the human form. Avatars, as it were, of mankind’s perfection.
Their exaltations and degenerations are chronicled in numerous tomes of mythology and factual record, variously forgotten by most mortals of the Imperium in the ten thousand year span, sequestered by the Inquisition, or so distorted by the passage of time as to barely resemble the truth.
Though all twenty sons would one day be reunited with their sire as the Emperor reached out to conquer the stars in His Great Crusade, nineteen of these sons were raised, for better or worse, by surrogate mentors. Their incubation pods plunged from the skies of twenty worlds, and twenty planets played home and paid homage to godlike beings that would rise to shape the destiny of each world as they grew to adulthood.
On Chemos, a world of manufactories and pollution so thick it blanketed the sky in a drape of vile orange mist, the primarch Fulgrim rose through the ranks of drone workers and executives to become the lord of the fortress-factories, heralding in a new age of resource and prosperity for his people.
[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter Page 17
