Battle for the Abyss

by Ben Counter

  The Ultramarine captain wondered, for a moment, whether he had been wrong all along, whether the Imperial Truth itself was wrong, and that the hells of those primitive faiths really did exist to be given form in the lance decks. He dismissed his doubts as heretical, crashing them beneath his iron-hard resolve and his loyalty to Roboute Guilliman. Even still, what he saw warred with what he desperately tried to believe. Bodies were painted across the walls in ragged smears of skin and muscle. The faces of the gang ratings were ripped open in expressions of horror, and stared out from heaps of torn limbs. Flesh and viscera were draped across high girders ahead, or over the massive workings of the lances themselves. The focusing mirrors and lenses were sprayed with blood. The living writhed in a single mass, smearing themselves with gore and sinking their teeth into one another.

  Spectral threads of glowing black wrapped around the spines of the bleeding revellers. The threads led up to the ceiling of the lance deck where a titanic mass of darkness squatted, a seething thing of eyes and mouths gibbering and chuckling as it manipulated the lance deck’s crew into further depths of suffering.

  Cestus was an Astartes. He had seen extraordinary, horrible things: amorphous aliens that consumed their own to be ready for battle; insect-things that broke up into swarms of seething, biting horrors; whole worlds infected or dying, whole stars boiling away in the death throes of a species, but he had never seen anything like this.

  ‘Weapons free,’ he raged.

  A brutal chorus of bolter fire rang out to his order, puncturing the mass of flesh and exploding it from within. Thestor swung his heavy bolter around and added his own punishing shots to the salvo.

  Terrible screeching filled the tight space and resonated in his battle helm, auditory-limiters struggling to modulate the horrible keening of the damned ratings.

  The dangling threads held by the warp creature began to sever one by one as the munitions of the Astartes struck and detonated with fury. It snarled its displeasure, revealing row upon row of fine needle-like fangs and a slathering spectral tongue that appeared to taste their essence. Like a lightning strike, the tongue lashed out and speared Thestor through his cuirass. He bellowed in pain, heavy bolter fire flaring as he triggered the weapon in his death throes. The honour guard scattered as the errant shells strafed the deck, and Thestor shook and went into spasm as he was lifted into the air, impaled on the warp spawn’s tongue.

  ‘Burn it!’ cried Cestus in desperation. ‘Burn it all!’

  Morar stepped forward with his flamer and doused the tunnel in roaring, white-hot promethium. Thestor and the creature’s transfixing tongue were immolated in cleansing fire. The warp spawn reeled, shrieking in anger as it recoiled from the attack. Morar swept the cone of intense heat downward, cooking the conjoined mass of the dead ratings.

  As the warp spawn gave ground, Cestus noticed patches of ichorous fluid spattering the deck in its wake.

  If it can bleed, he thought, we can kill it.

  ‘Advance on me,’ cried the Ultramarine captain. ‘Courage and honour!’

  ‘Courage and honour!’ his battle-brothers bellowed in reply.

  BROODING IN THE temporary barrack room afforded to the Space Wolves onboard the Wrathful, Brynngar had heard the alert screaming through the ship and had mustered his warriors.

  Tracking the commotion to the lower lance decks, he and his Blood Claws were unprepared for the sight that greeted them as they descended into the gloom. It was a charnel house. Flayed flesh lined the walls and blood slicked the floor. Bones, still red with gore, lay discarded in mangled piles. Screams were etched upon the visages of skulls, locked in their last moments of agony.

  The bloody massacre was not, however, what gave the Space Wolf captain pause. It was the nightmare creature, tearing at chunks of flesh with its teeth. At their approach, the beast, a luminous, shark-like horror, turned, its lipless maw smeared with blood, its swollen belly engorged.

  ‘Here be monsters,’ Brynngar breathed and felt a quail of something unfamiliar, an alien emotion, trickle down his spine.

  He found his courage quickly, baring his fangs as he howled.

  The Space Wolves launched at the creature, blades drawn.

  MHOTEP STAGGERED FROM the isolation chamber, not surprised to see that he was alone. He had broken the traitor, though it had not been easy. He felt the sweat of his exertions beneath his helmet and was breathing heavily as he stepped into the adjoining corridor. Of the subject known as Ultis, for he had given his name before the end, there was precious little left. A drooling cage of flesh and bone were all that remained. His conditioned defences, ingrained by years of fanatical indoctrination, had been tough to break, but as a result, when they had fallen, they had fallen hard. Only a shell remained, a gibbering wreck incapable of further defiance, incapable of anything.

  Exhausted as he was, Mhotep groaned when he detected the rogue presence onboard the ship. Mustering what reserves of strength he had left, he made for the lance decks.

  MORAR WAS DEAD. His bifurcated body lay in two halves across the deck. Amyrx was badly wounded, but alive. He slumped against an upright, beneath a metal arch, a chunk of flesh ripped from his torso.

  A dark mass was boiling down the corridor behind Cestus, even as the honour guard faced off against the first warp predator, torrents of semi-liquid flesh bursting through doorways in a flood. Eyes formed in the mass, focusing on the Astartes.

  The Ultramarine swivelled his body around, barking a warning before his bolter blazed, the muzzle flare lighting up the dark around him. A long tongue of dark muscle thrashed blindly past him from the creature’s gaping mouth, and Cestus threw himself out of its path. Laeradis, desperately ministering to the wounded Amyrx, was not so lucky. The membrane lashed around him, sending spines of pain throughout his body. The Apothecary screamed as the flesh suddenly dried and split open, fist-sized seeds spilling from the fibrous interior.

  The seeds burst into life, tiny buzzing wings shearing through the shells and long sharp mandibles splintering out. Laeradis was eviscerated in the storm in a bloody haze of bone, flesh and armour.

  Cestus cried out and swung his bolt pistol back around. He picked off the insectoid creatures with precise shots as they buzzed towards him, letting out his breath to steady his aim. He caught the last with his free hand. Cestus mashed it into the wall before it could chew through the ceramite of his gauntlet.

  With the two warp creatures on either side, the Ultramarines were being crushed into a tight circle.

  Even as he continued to pummel the second warp fiend with bolt pistol fire, he heard Saphrax bellow the name of Roboute Guilliman, punctuated by the retort of his weapon. The burning flare of expelled plasma lit the side of his face, and the Ultramarine captain knew that their other special weapon bearer, Pytaron, was still with them. Muzzle flashes blazing, Lexinal and Excelinor continued to fire their bolters, war cries on their lips.

  The chorus of battle raged as the warp predators closed, weaving and twisting impossibly from the worst of the Ultramarines’ fusillade, shrieking and screeching whenever they were struck and forced back.

  Cestus checked the ammo-reader on his bolt pistol. His remaining rounds wouldn’t last long. Divided as they were, he and his battle-brothers would be unable to destroy either creature like this. With little recourse left, he made his decision.

  ‘All guns with me!’ he cried. ‘In the name of Guilliman, concentrate fire.’

  With no hesitation, the Ultramarines turned their combined fire onto one of the warp creatures. Not expecting the sudden storm, the beast was caught unawares. Desperately trying to weave and jink out of harm’s way, it was struck by a barrage of bolter rounds. Super-heated plasma scorched its flank and a precise salvo from Cestus struck it in the eye. A keening wail emanated from the dread creature as it shuddered out of existence, expelled from the bubble of real space within the Wrathful. However, the victory proved costly, as the second creature surged, unhindered, to the Ultramarines’ posi
tion, suddenly buoyed by the presence of three more of its kin.

  Cestus and his battle-brothers turned as one, defiant war cries on their lips as they prepared to sell their lives dearly.

  The rending of flesh as their bodies were torn asunder, the stench of blood and the sound of shredding bone failed to materialise.

  Poised with jaws outstretched, ready to devour the Astartes, the warp creatures were assailed by a blazing crimson light that bathed the corridor in an incandescent lustre. The beasts recoiled and shrank before him, snapping ineffectually at the air as the building aura seared them.

  ‘Warp spawned filth!’ spat a voice behind Cestus, echoing with power. ‘Flee back into the abyss and leave this plane of existence.’

  Shielding his eyes against the brilliance of the light, Cestus saw Mhotep striding towards them, a cerulean nimbus of psychic energy coursing over his armoured body. He held a golden spear in his outstretched hand.

  ‘Down, now!’ he cried and the Ultramarines hit the floor with a crash of ceramite.

  The spear arced over their heads like a divine bolt of lightning and pierced the first warp beast, tearing through its slithering flank and slathering the deck with dark grey, spilling gore.

  Its death cry reverberated in the confines of the vaulted tunnel, the metal uprights screaming before it. Then it was gone, leaving an actinic stench in its wake.

  The kindred beasts came at him, enduring the furious energy that the Thousand Son had unleashed, but were driven back as Cestus and his honour guard crouched on their knees and delivered a punishing salvo.

  ‘Blind them,’ Mhotep cried, plucking his spear from the air as it returned to him as if magnetised to his gauntlet.

  The Ultramarines obeyed, aiming for the hideous black orbs that served the shark-like predators as eyes. More screeching filled the corridor as the shots found their marks, rupturing the glassy orbs. Mhotep cast his spear again and another of the creatures was thrust back into the immaterium.

  The last predator turned in on itself and re-formed. It grew fresh eyes, dripping with glowing ichor. It extruded a frill of tendrils from what Cestus assumed was its head end, and they became tough jointed limbs tipped with claws. Snakelike tongues whipped from its mouth.

  A hail of fire struck it and it was blasted into a gory mess upon the deck.

  Curious, ringing silence filled the void where the eruption of bolters and the bark of shouting had been. Red-tinged gloom from the emergency lights drifted back into focus after the monochromatic battle flare of muzzle flashes and psychic conflagration.

  Cestus surveyed his battle-brothers. Amyrx lay still against the upright, injured but alive. The service of Laeradis and Morar, though, had ended, their final moments awash with blood and pain. The rest had survived. A weary nod from Saphrax confirmed it.

  Breathing hard, a strange, subdued exultance at their victory sweeping over him, Cestus looked back around at Mhotep.

  The Thousand Son staggered, the crimson light extinguished.

  ‘They are gone,’ he breathed and fell hard onto the deck.

  THIRTEEN

  Legacy of Lorgar

  Proposition

  Honour duel

  AS SKRAAL DELVED deeper into the Furious Abyss, the world around him got stranger. The ship was the size of a city, and just like a city it had its hidden corners and curiosities, its beautiful clean-cut vistas and its dismal bordellos of decay.

  Though supposedly newly fashioned, the vessel felt very old. Its concomitant parts had spent so many decades being built and rendered in the forges of Mars that they had acquired a history of their own before the battleship was ever finished, let alone launched. It had a presence, too, a kind of impalpable sentience that exuded from its steel walls and clung to its corridors and conduits like gossamer threads of being.

  Skraal passed under a support beam, his chainaxe held out warily in front of him, and saw the signature of a Mechanicum shipwright inscribed in binary. The passageway of steel looked like an avenue in a wealthy spire-top, the low ceiling supported by caryatids and columns; a nest of shanties, perhaps the lodgings of the menials, who had once laboured to build the ship, their ramshackle homes abandoned between two generatorium housings: the vessel was intricate and immense. The World Eater saw chambers he could only assume were for worship, with altars and rows of prayer books etched in the Word of Lorgar. A temple, half wrought in stone and symbiotically merged with deep red steel, was housed in a massive false amphitheatre, its columned front and carved pediment providing a medieval milieu. The wide threshold was lit by braziers of violet fire. Skraal thought he had seen something moving inside and took care to avoid it.

  The World Eater had no time for distractions. The denizens of the Furious Abyss hunted him, and even in a ship as vast as it, the chase would not last indefinitely. Melta bombs and belts of krak grenades clanked against his armour as he moved, reminding him of their presence and the urgency with which he needed to put them to some use.

  In a fleeting moment, when Skraal had paused to try and get some kind of bearing, he thought of Antiges.

  The Ultramarines believed themselves to be philosophers, or kings, or members of the galaxy’s rightful ruling class. They did not appreciate the purity of purpose that could only be found in the crucible of war as did Skraal’s Legion. They were most concerned with forging their own empire around Macragge. Antiges had demonstrated his warrior spirit, though, fighting and dying in the cauldron of war, driven by simple duty.

  Skraal mourned his passing with a moment of silence, honouring his valorous deeds, and, in that moment, he made a promise of revenge.

  A great set of double doors carved from lacquered black wood blocked the World Eater’s path. Skraal could not turn back from the barrier, incongruous like so much of what he had witnessed on the Furious Abyss. Instead, he pushed the door open. There was light inside, but still the silence persisted, so, he entered into what was a long, low chamber. Beyond it was a gallery full of artefacts. Tapestries lined the walls, displaying the victories and history of the Word Bearers. He saw a comet crashing down to their native earth of Colchis and a golden child emerging from the conflagration left from its impact. He saw temples, their spires lost in a swathe of red cloud, and lines of pilgrims trailing off into infinity. It was a world stained with tragedy, the gilded palaces and cathedrals tarnished, and every statue of past religious dynasts missing an arm or an eye. In the middle of this fallen world, like a single point of hope, was the smouldering crater of their saviour’s arrival.

  The ceiling was a single endless fresco depicting Lorgar’s conquest of Colchis. Here it was a corrupt place cleansed by the primarch, whose image shone with the light of reason and command as robed prophets and priests prostrated themselves before him. Armies laid down their arms and crowds cheered in adulation. At the far end of the museum the story ended with Colchis restored and Lorgar a scholar-hero writing down his history and philosophy. This epilogue ended with a truth that Skraal knew, the Emperor coming to the world to find Lorgar, just as he had come to the World Eaters’ forgotten home world to install Angron as the Legion’s primarch.

  The paintings, frescoes and tapestries gave way to trophies displayed on plinths and suspended from the vaulted ceiling. Skraal ignored them and pressed on.

  ‘You look upon the soul of our Legion, brother,’ boomed a voice suddenly through the vox-casters in the gallery.

  Skraal backed up against the wall, which was painted with an image of Lorgar debating with a host of wizened old men in a Colchian amphitheatre.

  ‘I am Admiral Zadkiel of the Word Bearers,’ said the voice, when the World Eater answered with silence. ‘You are aboard my ship.’

  ‘Traitor whoreson, does your entire Legion cower behind words?’ Skraal snapped, unable to contain his anger.

  ‘Such a curious term, World Eater,’ the voice of Zadkiel replied, ignoring the slight. ‘You dub us traitors, and yet we have never been anything but loyal to our primarch.’
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br />   ‘Then your lord is also a traitor,’ Skraal growled in return, hunting the shadows for any sign of movement, any hint that he was being stalked.

  ‘Your own lord, Angron, calls him brother. How then can Lorgar be regarded as a traitor?’

  Skraal cast his gaze around, trying to locate the picter observing him or the vox-caster broadcasting Zadkiel’s voice. ‘Then he has betrayed my primarch and in turn his Legion.’

  ‘Angron was a slave,’ said Zadkiel. ‘The very fact shames him. He despises what he was, and what other men made of him. It is from this that his anger, that the anger of all the World Eaters stems.’

  Certain that there was no one else in there with him, Skraal started moving cautiously through the gallery, looking for some way out other than the double doors at either end. He would not be swayed by Zadkiel’s words, and focused instead on the hot line of rage building inside him, using it to galvanise himself.

  ‘I saw the echo of that anger at Bakka Triumveron,’ said Zadkiel. ‘It was enacted against the menials that drowned in their own blood at the hands of you and your brothers.’

  Skraal paused. He had thought no one knew of the slaughter he had perpetrated at the dock.

  ‘Angron sought to bring his brothers closer to him in that aspect, did he not?’ Zadkiel was relentless, his words like silken blades penetrating the World Eater’s defences. ‘It was the Emperor’s censure that forbade it, the very being that holds you and your slave primarch in his thrall. For what is Angron if not a slave? What accolades has he won that the Angel or Guilliman have not? What reward has Angron been given that can equal the empire of Ultramar or the stewardship of the Imperial Palace granted to Dorn? Nothing. He fights for nothing save by the command of another. What can such a man claim to be, other than a slave?’

  ‘We are not slaves! We will never be slaves!’ Skraal cried in anger and carved his chainaxe through one of the museum’s stone pillars.