Its limbs were long and scaled, and they rippled with sinuous muscle. Its head was elongated and bestial, and the fires of hell burned in its hate-filled serpent eyes. It hefted its immense blade in one hand as it staggered drunkenly for a moment, getting a feel for its new, physical incarnation. The runes upon the hellblade’s blackened surface glowed with the heat of an inferno, and as the daemon steadied itself, becoming instantly accustomed to its new-found body and the rules of the material plane, it exhaled, breathing out a blast of sulphurous black smoke.
Then it roared, throwing its horned head back, the infernal sound ripping forth from deep within its tautly muscled chest with all the fury of its patron deity. It clenched its tall hellblade tightly, quivering in anticipation of the slaughter, and took in its surroundings with malevolent eyes.
It snarled, eyes narrowing as it looked upon the red-armoured figures of the Word Bearers. Its gaze met Burias-Drak’shal’s, and its muscles tensed as it prepared to hurl itself at the possessed warrior, the runes upon its brazen hellblade glowing like lava.
Marduk’s carefully weighted words stabbed at the daemon like intangible blades and it recoiled, swinging its heavy head towards the First Acolyte in hatred. It bared its teeth at its summoner, but Marduk’s mastery over it was complete, his will binding it more effectively than chains, and though it fought against him with every fibre of its being, muscles straining, it was powerless against him.
There was always an element of risk involved in summoning the infernal denizens of the ether, and Marduk would normally only beseech the warp for aid when he had the time to prepare the correct rituals. The tiniest mispronunciation, a slip of concentration, could have catastrophic and eternally damning results, and yet, the rewards were often worth the risk.
Eight of these bloodletters stood over the shattered corpses that had borne them. Eight was the sacred number of the blood god Khorne, and the muscles of the daemons in echo of their patson twitched with barely restrained rage as they waited for a command.
‘Well?’ asked Marduk, his voice infused with power. ‘Go.’
As one, the eight lesser-daemons of Khorne threw themselves into the corridor, like rabid pack-dogs unleashed from their tethers. They roared their daemonic fury as they charged into the massing genestealers, their hellblades carving burning arcs through the air.
The aliens leapt to meet the daemons head on, talons ripping and tearing at bodies formed of the stuff of Chaos, alien speed and strength pitted against the diabolical fury of the god of battle and murder.
His limbs quivering with the residual power of the summoning, Marduk swung around and stalked towards Darioq-Grendh’al, who had almost completed cutting his way through the bulkhead.
With a barked order, infused with the essence of the immaterium, Marduk forced the defiled magos aside and slammed the flat of his boot into the bulkhead. It buckled under the blow, and another kick sent it smashing inwards.
Marduk’s blood was up, and he stepped through the portal, brandishing his daemon blade, ready for anything.
A robed figure sat cross-legged on the floor, and it looked up as the First Acolyte stormed into the enclosed, darkened room.
Marduk crossed the distance in three steps, and grabbed the figure by the neck, lifting it a metre off the ground and slamming it back against the far wall.
‘Tell me you are the one I seek, and you shall live to draw another breath,’ said Marduk.
The figure’s legs kicked uselessly in the air, and Marduk peered closely into its round, hairless face. Neural implants bedecked its bald head like feral ornamentation, and a fist-sized, cog-shaped badge of the Adeptus Mechanicus was fused to its forehead, puckering the skin.
The figure struggled to draw breath.
‘Speak,’ commanded Marduk. ‘What is your name, dog?’
‘Daenae,’ came the gasped reply.
Marduk grinned within his skull-faced helmet. The figure’s kohl rimmed eyes bulged, and feminine lips grimaced beneath his torturous grip. Marduk released his crushing hold, and the explorator crumpled to the floor at his feet.
‘I do not know who you seek,’ gasped the woman, her voice hoarse, ‘but my name is Daenae, Explorator First Class Daenae of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and you are a traitor of the Imperium.’
‘You have no idea how pleased I am to have found you, woman,’ said Marduk.
Explorator Daenae was of stocky build and considerable girth. Her waist was thick and strong, and her bosom heavy. Even had Marduk been more familiar with mortals, or cared, he would have been unable to gauge her age, for she had been extensively altered by juvenat surgery, one of the only vanities in which she indulged.
Her body was not augmented to nearly the degree of Darioq’s, and what augmentation she had was relatively subtle. Both arms had been enhanced with mechanical bionics, though they had been fashioned such that their mechanised nature was not initially obvious, and she bore a slim-line power-source on her back that was a fraction of the size and weight of the immense generator that Darioq required to power his servo-harness and largely mechanised frame.
Power couplings linked her backpack to her bulky forearm bracers, within which were stored her tools. Neural implants allowed her to access these tools with a thought, extending lascutters, data-spikes or power drills behind her fist as required.
Her eyes opened wide as the bulky form of Darioq-Grendh’al entered the room.
‘Darioq?’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘By the blessings of the Omnissiah, is that you?’
‘Darioq is still here,’ said the magos, and Marduk smiled to see the explorator recoil from the voice, interlaced with the voice of the daemon Grendh’al.
‘He is pleased to see you, Explorator First Class Daenae,’ continued Darioq-Grendh’al, ‘originally of the Konor Adeptus Mechanicus research world of UL01.02, assigned to c14.8.87.i, Perdus Skylla, for recon/salvage of the Dvorak-class interstellar freighter Flames of Perdition, which reappeared within Segmentum Tempestus in 942.M41 and crashed onto the surface of c14.8.87.i, Perdus Skylla, in 944.M41 after being missing presumed lost in warp storm anomaly xi.024.396 in 432.M35.’
‘What have they done to you?’ asked the explorator in revulsion.
‘Enough,’ interjected Marduk. ‘I have it on the authority of the magos that you are in possession of knowledge that I would own.’
‘What?’ asked the explorator. ‘Me? You think I have knowledge that great Darioq, my master, does not possess? Surely you are mistaken.’
Her voice fairly dripped with scorn.
‘The knowledge I seek is in regard to a xenos artefact, an artefact taken from the necrontyr.’
‘I know nothing about any xenos tech,’ said the explorator emphatically. ‘Nothing.’
Marduk glowered at her, and then looked up at Darioq-Grendh’al.
‘A direct answer, magos,’ said the First Acolyte, empowering his voice with command. ‘Does she have the key to unlock the device?
‘She does,’ said Darioq-Grendh’al.
‘What?’ asked the explorator. ‘I don’t know anything! He lies!’
‘He cannot lie, not to me,’ said Marduk. ‘You are coming with us. Your secrets will be revealed. My chirurgeons can be very convincing when I need them to be.’
‘I do not lie! I know nothing!’ said the explorator fiercely as Marduk yanked her to her feet.
‘We have to move,’ said Kol Badar from the doorway.
‘You are certain that she has what we need?’ hissed Marduk to Darioq, shaking the explorator like a rag doll. ‘I sense no lie in her words.’
‘I am not lying,’ said the explorator emphatically.
‘Quiet,’ said Marduk, twisting her arm sharply, snapping the bone.
‘I am certain,’ said Darioq-Grendh’al, ‘but she speaks the truth.’
‘You dare speak in riddles to me, magos?’ growled Marduk.
‘Explorator Daenae speaks the truth because she does not know that the knowledge is locked within h
er brain unit. Magos Darioq implanted it within her sub-dermal cortex without her knowledge, for safe-keeping, before he ejected her from his service, and we do not need to take her with us to extract it.’
Marduk’s scowl changed to a smile.
‘Ah, Darioq-Grendh’al,’ he said, ‘I think I might be starting to like you.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The body of Explorator Daenae lay face down on the floor, in a pool of tepid blood. The top half of her head had been removed and cast aside and her skull cavity was empty.
‘You are done?’ asked Marduk impatiently.
Darioq-Grendh’al sealed the bell jar, which now held the explorator’s brain, joining the others that emerged from the back of his hunched, perverted body. Viscous, purple-hued liquid filled the receptacle, and dozens of needle-like proboscis connectors pierced the brain.
‘One moment, while the neural pathways connect,’ said Darioq-Grendh’al. The gently waving mechadendrite tentacles attached to the corrupted magos’s spine quivered, and the magos’s head twitched to one side. Darioq-Grendh’al uttered a low, mechanical groan, and a shiver ran along what flesh remained of his once-human body as the explorator’s brain connected.
A veritable tidal wave of information flooded through Darioq’s consciousness as the neural connections fired. Memories, emotions and thoughts that were not his own flickered through his consciousness.
Neural pathways in the explorator’s brain that had been dead for almost forty seconds during the transplant reconnected, and Darioq-Grendh’al plumbed their depths, driving towards the secrets that he had locked there decades earlier. Daemonic tendrils burrowed through the brain, re-forging the severed brainstem, and the knowledge was released in a wave of data.
Eight hundred years of knowledge deemed unfit for study by the High-Magi of the Cult Mechanicus: necrontyr, hrudd, eldar, borrlean. Knowledge of xenos tech that had been lost for eight hundred years was recovered in an instant.
Unannounced, a yearning dredged from the locked away depths of his brain-core resurfaced, dragged from beyond self-imposed restraints: a yearning, a thirst, a need for knowledge, a yearning that had long been restrained, castigated and repressed within the constrictive bounds of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
The quest for knowledge and understanding would begin afresh, this time with willing, supportive patrons that would not tether him/them with rules, regulations, outdated morals and archaic beliefs.
‘It is done,’ said Darioq-Grendh’al.
‘Good. You have what you need to continue your study of the Nexus Arrangement?’ asked Marduk hungrily.
‘It has all become clear to us,’ agreed Darioq-Grendh’al. ‘We have what is needed to unlock the xenos tech device.’
‘Then let us get the hell off this damnable moon,’ said Marduk.
Kol Badar took point, leading the bloodied warriors through the labyrinthine corridors of the Flames of Perdition towards their submersibles. The Word Bearers moved swiftly, not wishing to linger within the xenos-haunted wreck any longer than necessary.
Distant daemonic roars filtered through the darkened hallways as the bloodletters continued their frenzied rampage. Such summoned daemons had only a finite existence in the material plane. If their physical bodies were not killed, they might last a day before their substance unravelled. They were tools for the First Acolyte to use and discard as he saw fit, and they had served their purpose.
Twice, the Word Bearers were ambushed en route, genestealers launching blinding attacks that saw two more warriors injured, one sustaining a deep wound in his side that would have killed a mortal man, and the other, one of the last members of Khalaxis’s coterie, had half his face ripped off. He stoically continued on, hurling aside his sundered helmet and gritting his teeth, refusing to succumb to the pain in front of such vaunted warriors as his champion, the Coryphaus and the First Acolyte. Marduk had nodded his respect to the warrior, who had puffed out his chest and struggled on, pushing through the pain, at the unexpected acknowledgement.
They had not encountered any enemy for more than fifteen minutes, and they picked up the pace as they closed on the location of the submersibles, keeping a wary eye on the throbbing blister screen of their tainted auspex.
The Flames of Perdition shifted suddenly, the prow of the massive ship dropping as it tore loose from the submerged cliff. The entire ship tilted, and Marduk lost his footing as the floor tipped beneath him.
The Word Bearers were thrown to their left, smashing into the side wall of the passage as the immense freighter lurched. One of them tumbled down a side-corridor that was more like a vertical shaft, fingers scrabbling vainly for purchase. Marduk flailed for a handhold amidst the piping on the left wall, but found none, and began to slide down the corridor-shaft behind the power-armoured brother Space Marine.
Burias-Drak’shal held out his icon, his other hand grasping onto a side-rail as other Word Bearers tumbled past. Marduk reached and grabbed the proffered icon, fingers locking around its barbed haft, and Burias-Drak’shal hauled him to safety. With a nod of thanks, Marduk pulled his body over the lip of the shaft, dragging himself forward on his belly.
The ship rolled onto its side, its nose still tipping, before it finally came to rest, settling into its new position.
Outside, rocks dislodged from the chasm walls by the immense weight of the freighter dropped down into the abyss, tumbling down into the darkness.
‘Who have we lost?’ growled Kol Badar, picking himself up from the ground, ripping his power talons from the wall, which had been the ceiling.
‘Darioq-Grendh’al?’ said Marduk in concern.
‘He’s here,’ said Burias, pushing the daemon back within him as he picked himself up.
The corrupted magos’s mechadendrites had shot outwards, clamping to walls like the legs of a spider, halting his fall.
‘Rhamel is gone,’ growled Khalaxis.
‘Is he the only one?’ asked Marduk.
‘Yes,’ said Kol Badar, looking around, ‘but the ship could fall at any moment. We have to get out of here.’
‘Where is he?’ asked Marduk, looking down over the lip of the corridor-shaft. It extended some fifty metres before disappearing into the gloom that even his augmented sight could not penetrate.
Khalaxis cursed. ‘The auspex is gone,’ he said.
‘Brother Rhamel?’ asked Kol Badar through the inter-vox.
A static-filled voice came back, though it was distorted and patchy.
‘…amel… broken arm… faulty…’ came the response.
‘His vox is damaged,’ said Marduk.
‘He is not getting up there with a broken arm,’ said Burias, assessing the climb. ‘You want me to go get him?’
‘We don’t have the time,’ snapped Kol Badar.
Burias looked over at Marduk, who reluctantly nodded his head in agreement. Khalaxis stared down the vertical corridor, his hands clenched around the hilt of his chainaxe. Rhamel was Khalaxis’s blood-brother, having come from the same cult-gang on Colchis before the hated Ultramarines’ cyclonic torpedoes had destroyed the Word Bearers’ home world ten thousand years earlier. Together, they had been amongst the last batch of aspirants taken from the obliterated world.
‘Brother Rhamel,’ said Kol Badar, ‘proceed to the rendezvous point. We will meet you there. Repeat, proceed to the rendezvous point.’
‘…cknowledged… phaus,’ came the stilted reply.
‘Come,’ said Kol Badar to the rest of the dwindling group of warrior brothers. ‘If he makes it, he makes it. If not, then it is the will of the gods,’ he said mockingly, with a nod towards Marduk.
Khalaxis stood stone still, looking down into the darkness.
‘May the gods be with you, my brother,’ said Khalaxis, before turning away.
The Word Bearers renewed their advance. With the ship on its side, the way they had come was foreign. What had been familiar was now strange, and where before they had advanced easily, they were now for
ced to half-climb through doorways that were horizontal, and half-leap across vertical corridors shafts that fell away below them.
The power-armoured warrior brothers leapt these expanses with ease, but the progress was not so easy for the bulky Terminator-armoured Anointed warriors, and Marduk ground his sharp teeth in frustration at their slow progress, drawing blood.
Burias ripped a pair of thick support girders from the walls, and dropped them over one of the expanses, and Kol Badar and his Anointed shuffled across them, though the girders strained beneath their weight.
Last to come was Darioq-Grendh’al, and Marduk swore.
‘They will not take his weight,’ hissed Kol Badar.
The corrupted magos, with his full servo-harness and plasma-core generator attached to his back, weighed almost twice as much as one of the Terminator-armoured Anointed warriors, and Marduk swore again, knowing that the Coryphaus was correct.
‘We’ll have to find another way round,’ said Marduk, his voice terse with frustration.
‘Wait,’ said Burias, a smile playing on his lean face.
Marduk looked up to see the magos traversing the gap, his mechanical legs hanging beneath him in mid-air. Half-mechanical, half-fleshy mechadendrite tentacles punched through the panels in the ceiling, gripping tight as the corrupted magos’s four immense servo-arms extended out to either side at full stretch, gripping the girders there. With a surprised barking laugh, Marduk watched as two of the servo-arms released their grips and reached forwards to grasp the girders further along, before releasing its other arms, and repeating the manoeuvre. Mechadendrites pulled free overhead before punching through the ceiling panels further along.
It was like watching some multi-armed, mechanical ape making its way through the treetops, and even Kol Badar was taken aback by the bizarre spectacle. The magos lowered himself safely to the floor once more, his daemon-eye glinting.
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