by Ben Counter
Lexinal, plasma gun cradled in his gauntlets, slid in beside Cestus.
‘What now, captain?’ he asked as the barrage above them intensified.
Cestus memorised an open stretch of deck and then the huge metal cliff face of the Furious Abyss’s prow, broken by the loading mechanisms and the torpedo tubes. He visualised an industrial tangle on the other side, including giant hoppers stacked with further munitions and the rearing masses of arming chambers where yet more ordnance was stored.
‘We have to clear the deck and then get to the munitions store and deploy our melta bombs,’ he replied.
‘What about Brynngar?’ Lexinal asked, using a break in the fusillade to fire off a snap shot that bathed the loading platform in super-heated plasma. The screams died in the raging battle din.
‘Once we take out the cyclonics, we link up with whoever is left and do what damage we can,’ said Cestus, once Lexinal had resumed cover.
The Ultramarine nodded his understanding.
Cestus relayed the same order through his helmet vox on a discrete frequency in Ultramar battle-cant to Pytaron and Excelinor. The two battle-brothers flanked the captain’s position, heavy-duty munitions crates in front of them being chipped apart by persistent fire.
Cestus glanced between the two bowsers. The Furious’s crewmen, in dark scarlet overalls and fatigues, had been hit hard by the shock of the assault. Dozens of them lay dead around the torpedo hatches or shot down from the gantries and cranes. The Astartes has exacted a heavy toll, but the enemy were regrouping and reinforcements covered their losses in short order.
There was no time to delay.
‘On me,’ Cestus cried, ‘battle formation theta-epsilon, Macragge in ascendance!’
He vaulted the bowser, bolt pistol flaring and lasgun impacts spattered his cuirass. Cestus held his sword in salute stance, in front of his face and the upright blade deflected energy blasts from his battle-helm. Twin bolters blazed, cross-shaped muzzle flashes glaring, as Excelinor and Pytaron moved in staggered battle formation to Cestus’s left. Lexinal took the right flank, firing his plasma gun in controlled bursts to prevent the deadly weapon from overheating.
Towards the last third of the deck, they broke up, each taking a channel into the industrial tangle of machinery. Troops of armsmen had mobilised and came at Cestus with shock mauls and lengths of spiked chain. The Ultramarine captain cut them down, Guilliman’s name a mantra on his lips. Amidst the killing, he noticed an access portal to the ordnance deck and wondered why the Word Bearers’ Astartes had not yet shown themselves.
‘Link up and force through to the cyclonics,’ Cestus ordered through his helmet vox as he moved into a labyrinth of munitions.
His battle-brothers obeyed and together they converged on a pair of cyclonics, still harnessed in their mobile racking.
Shots spattered from gantries above, most of the las-bolts and hard rounds smacking into cranes and clusters of machinery. Cestus saw a lucky shot ricochet from Lexinal’s breastplate and he staggered. A second burst from a heavy cannon somewhere above them raked his leg greave and he was down. Out of the corner of his eye, Cestus saw a group of armsmen converging on the prone Ultramarine. A las-bolt clipping his pauldron, Cestus twisted as he ran, slamming a fresh magazine in his bolt pistol and discharging a furious burst into the armsmen. Two disappeared in a red haze, another crumpled to the ground nursing the wet crater in his stomach. Cestus didn’t see the rest. Lexinal was getting to his feet when a round struck an active fuel bowser. The resulting explosion engulfed the Astartes in coruscating flame, the blast wave throwing him half way across the deck.
The Ultramarine captain averted his gaze, muttering a battle-oath, and refocused ahead.
‘Deploy incendiaries,’ Cestus ordered when they finally reached the first batch of cyclonics. Pytaron unclipped a melta bomb from his armour, disengaging the magna-clamp that kept it in place. Excelinor provided covering fire with his bolter.
‘Brynngar!’ Cestus shouted into his helmet vox, crouching beside Excelinor as he desperately tried to make contact. ‘Brynngar respond.’
Dead air came back at him. Either the wolf had been killed or he was in another part of the ship where they couldn’t reach him.
‘Charges deployed,’ reported Pytaron. As he turned to his captain, a heavy round struck him in the neck, piercing his gorget. He clutched the wound with one hand, the melta bomb detonator in the other, and fell to one knee as blood streamed down his breastplate.
Larraman cells within Pytaron’s body worked hard to slow the bleeding and speed up clotting, but the wound was serious. Even an Astartes enhanced physiology would be unable to save the battle-brother.
‘Take it,’ Pytaron said, gurgling his words through blood.
Cestus took the detonator, his hands around Pytaron’s.
‘You will be honoured…’ Cestus’s voice trailed away as the air around him suddenly turned cold, receptors built into his battle-plate registering a severe drop in temperature. For an awful second, he thought that the deck had de-pressurised and the void would claim them all.
With the cold came screaming: a thousand voices, echoing out from the inside of Cestus’s head.
It was not the void, reaching into the ship to freeze them solid. It was something far worse. Prickling talons probing his mental defences like ice blades reminded Cestus of his earlier encounter with Mhotep aboard the Wrathful.
‘Psyker!’ he hissed with sudden realisation. ‘Psyker!’ he shouted this time to get Excelinor’s attention. ‘We are under attack.’
One of the Furious Abyss’s crewmen stumbled out into the open. He clutched an autogun loosely in one hand, his arm hanging down by his side. With his other hand, he appeared to be trying to tear out his own tongue.
Cestus shot the man in the chest. He bucked violently and fell still against the deck. He then turned and saw Excelinor slowly raise his boltgun to his head.
‘No,’ Cestus cried, yanking his fellow battle-brother to his senses.
‘Voices in my head… I can’t stop them,’ whispered Excelinor through his vox, still struggling with his bolter.
‘Fight it!’ Cestus snarled at him, feeling the shreds of his own sanity slowly being devoured by the unseen force of the warp. They had to get out, right now. The Ultramarine captain seized Excelinor’s arm, the world starting to blur around him, and hauled him towards the access portal.
‘Come on,’ Cestus breathed as the floor shifted beneath him and the walls began to melt.
Try as he might, Cestus could not keep himself from falling into madness. The last thing he remembered was his fist closing on the detonator and the rush of fire.
‘THEY THINK IT’S alive,’ breathed Zadkiel, standing before his command throne. ‘This ship has been a part of them for so long that the supplicants regard it as an extension of their own bodies. No. It is a host, in which they are parasites. There won’t be a mind left intact among them. The enemy will be driven mad long before we kill them.’
‘Your orders, admiral?’ The voice of Sergeant-Commander Reskiel through the throne vox interrupted Zadkiel’s monologue.
‘You have gained the area outside of the ordnance deck?’ he asked, imagining the warriors of Reskiel looming in the corridor intersections.
‘Yes, my lord,’ Reskiel answered. Just prior to entering the ordnance deck, the sergeant-commander and his warriors had been ordered to secure the exits, Zadkiel having no desire for his forces to be caught up in the psychic attack.
‘Although, a massive detonation destroyed much of the tertiary access points, as yet, we have been unable to break through,’ Reskiel added.
‘Is it possible that the Astartes escaped the deck?’ the irritation in Zadkiel’s voice obvious, even through the vox link.
There was a short pause as Reskiel considered his response. ‘It is possible, yes.’
‘Find them, Reskiel. Do it or do not return to my bridge.’ Zadkiel cut the vox link abruptly.
The admiral turned to a secondary force of Word Bearers, who had assembled behind him.
‘Secure the ordnance deck, port and starboard access portals. Get in there and recover what is left of our cyclonic payload.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ said a chorus of voices from the assembled Word Bearers.
‘Do so, now!’ Zadkiel raged and the clattering sound of booted feet erupted behind him as the Word Bearers deployed.
The infiltrators had to be stopped. Despite the psychic assault, Zadkiel needed to be sure that any further loose ends had been tied up. Nothing must prevent the bombardment against Formaska. Without it, the rest of the plan could not proceed. He would not allow his soul to be forfeit from Kor Phaeron’s rage at his failure. Success was inevitable. It had to be. It was written.
MACRAGGE’S NATIVES, THE people who had been there before the Emperor’s Great Crusade had rediscovered them, had believed in a hell that was very specific in its cruelties. Its circles each held a certain breed of sinner, all suffering punishments appropriate to their misdeeds. The further in a dead man went, the more horrible and varied his punishments became, until the very worse of the worst – traitors to Macragge’s Battle Kings, and those who had betrayed their own families – were held in the very centre in a series of torments that a living mind could not comprehend and upon which the legends refused to speculate.
Those beliefs had survived alongside the Imperial Truth, as folk tales and allegories. Macragge’s circles of hell were the subject of epic verse, cautionary tales and colourful curses.
Cestus was, at that moment, in the circle of hell reserved for cowards.
‘Run!’ shouted the taskmaster. ‘You ran from everything! You sacrificed everything to run! Run, now, as you did in life! Never stop!’
Cestus was blinded by tears. His hands and feet screamed at him, cut to tatters. Behind him, a miniature sun rolled towards him, blistering the skin on the back of his torso and legs. It was relentless, never slowing, as it ground its way along the vast circular track, bounded by walls of granite, its light flickering against the stalactites hanging from the cave ceiling overhead.
The floor was covered in blades, swords dropped by failed soldiers as they fled the battlefield. As the ball of fire approached, the sinners fled, tearing themselves on the blades to escape the fire. Their punishment was to flee forever.
Cestus remembered being told of this hell by drill sergeants on Macragge, in the half-remembered time before Guilliman’s Legion had taken him from among hundreds of supplicants to be turned into an Ultramarine.
This hell was halfway through the levels of hell, for while cowards were despised on Macragge theirs was a pathetic sin, a sin of failure, and not comparable to the treachery of murder punished closer to hell’s heart. It compounded the punishment, not only to suffer, not only to know the weight of failure, but to be reminded that even in sin a coward was lacking.
Cestus stumbled and fell. Steel bit into his hands, his knees and his chest. A blade slid through the softer skin of his lips and he tasted blood. He coughed, desperate for it to end. It felt like he had been there for years, the relentless sun driving him on.
The taskmaster was a drill sergeant of Macragge, the same kind of man who had ordered him to march and fight and strive as a child. Cestus remembered the fear of failure, of letting his betters down. He got to his feet and somehow the flesh was still screaming.
‘I am not a coward,’ he gasped. ‘Please… I am not a coward.’
The taskmaster’s whip lashed down. It was a tongue of flame from the sun, scoring a red-black line of agony against Cestus’s back. ‘You all but murdered your battle-brother because you feared to take his place!’ the taskmaster shouted. You doomed your fellow warriors because you feared failure! And now you beg for your just punishment to end! What are these but the actions of a coward? And you wore the colours of Guilliman! What shame you have brought to your Legion!’
‘I have never run!’ yelled Cestus. ‘Not once! I never backed down! I never turned from the enemy! Fear never made my choice!’
‘Do you deny?’ shouted the taskmaster.
‘I deny! I deny you! The Imperial Truth has no room for hells! The only hells are those we make for ourselves!’
‘Another lifetime, Lysimachus Cestus, and you will break!’
The sun roared closer. It swelled up, angry and orange. Dark spots flared on its surface. Flaming tongues licked out at Cestus, searing the soles of his feet, the backs of his legs. One wrapped around his face and he moaned as it burned through his skin, his cheek and nose, his ear. Cestus fought to escape, but the blades snagged him. One leg was trapped by hooks between the bones and he felt steel scraping along his shin, flaying skin and muscle away. One hand was stuck, too, pierced through by the barbed head of a spear.
‘I am not a coward!’ yelled Cestus. He tore himself free of the bladed ground. Muscle and blood sloughed away. ‘I know no fear!’ He turned around and walked on what remained of his feet, into the heart of the sun.
ADMIRAL KAMINSKA SAT in her command throne in front of the blast doors leading to the bridge of the Wrathful. The doors were closed, the bridge sealed off against the secondary explosions wracking the ship. Another huge explosion thundered up from the generatoria deep in the stern. The Wrathful was breaking up. Formaska’s weak gravity well was slowly dragging it into a death spiral. There, upon the barren rock, they would be broken. That was, if a catastrophic reactor collapse didn’t destroy the ship completely first.
Kaminska felt curiously calm as they drifted through the void, completely at the whim of gravity. There was still a trace of underlying disquiet at the edge of her senses, however, as if the feeling she had experienced before had remained, but she’d become inured to it.
She had known when Cestus proposed his plan and spoke of sacrifice that this would be her last mission. She wore her full admiral’s regalia and had instructed all of her bridge staff to do the same. There would be honour in this final act. They had fought a giant in the form of the Furious Abyss, and they had lost, but like the fly irritates the bison, perhaps it would be enough to distract their enemy long enough for the Angels of the Emperor to do what they must.
‘Helmsmistress,’ said Kaminska, her eyes on the forward viewscreen and space as scattered debris from her ship spiralled slowly past, ‘dismiss the bridge crew, yourself included. You are to evacuate the Wrathful at once and take the saviour pods. May fortune favour you in the void.’
‘I’m sorry, admiral. I cannot speak for the rest of the crew, but I will not obey that order,’ answered Venkmyer.
Kaminska whirled in her command throne and fixed her helmsmistress with an icy glare.
‘I am your captain, and you will do as I bid,’ she said.
‘I request to remain onboard the Wrathful and go down with the ship,’ Venkmyer responded.
For a moment, Kaminska looked as if she were about to erupt into a fit of apoplexy at such insubordination, but the determined expression on her helmsmistress’s face made the ice soften and melt.
Kaminska saluted Venkmyer and her bridge crew.
‘You do me great honour.’ Kaminska was about to smile proudly when the feeling of unease intensified and she realised it was emanating from her helmsmistress.
‘No, admiral,’ Venkmyer replied, and from the obvious demeanour of the crew around her, they were all in agreement. ‘We are honoured.’
Venkmyer raised her hand to return the naval salute when she suddenly clutched her stomach. She grimaced in pain and fell to the deck, convulsing violently.
Helms-mate Kant, standing close by, went immediately to her aid.
‘Officer Venkmyer,’ shouted Kaminska getting off her throne to go to her helmsmistress’s aid. She stopped short when she saw her breath misting in front of her. A profound chill filled the bridge as if it were suddenly converted into a meat locker.
Eyes wide as Venkmyer bucked and thrashed, she drew her naval sidearm.
Armed or not
, it wouldn’t matter. It was already too late for them all.
MHOTEP WAS MEDITATING in the isolation chamber, his gaze fixed on the reflective surface of the speculum in his wand. Abruptly, his glazed expression bled away and he was at full awareness again. It was time.
The Thousand Son got to his feet. His gaolers had allowed him to wear his battle-plate and the heavily armoured boots resonated against the metal floor. He approached the locked cell door and raised his hand. Chanting eldritch words in a sibilant tongue, the door dissolved before Mhotep’s open palm, disintegrating back into atoms. The Astartes stepped through and was struck immediately by a profound sense of emptiness. The corridors were utterly bereft of life. He knew the Wrathful had only a skeleton crew, but this was something else: an absence of existence that smacked of the otherworldly. Mhotep drew the psychic hood over his head, securing it firmly to the scarab-shaped clasps on his gorget. He drew the wand out before him and activated it. The small stave extended into the spear again and a small crackle of energy played down its length as if reacting to the air around it. This ghost ship in which he walked had a phantom. Mhotep knew it for certain.
Calmly, the Thousand Son walked down the narrow passageways that would lead him to the bridge, where he knew his destiny awaited. The lines of fate had been very specific. This was the path he had chosen, despite the efforts of the other to try and change his mind, to will him into divine madness.
Mhotep reached the bridge without encountering a single soul. It was as if the crew had been devoured utterly. He moved his hand in a swift chopping motion and the sealed blast doors opened, venting a small cloud of pressure.
Carnage greeted him as the Thousand Son stepped into the chamber. It was as if the bleeding heart of the Wrathful had been laid open upon the surgeon’s slab.
The heart of the ship, of course, was its crew. Their blood and viscera painted the walls, an incarnadine portrait rendered by an obscene and demented artist. Skin was flayed from bone, organs eviscerated.
A bizarre skeleton ribbed the walls and ceiling, the concomitant elements harvested from the slain crew members, changing the bridge into a macabre ossuary.
