“They lived in the same refuge. They sheltered the traitor.”
“You’re certain of that?” he demanded.
Noxx turned away, signalling to another of his men. “Can we really take the risk?”
Two Flesh Tearers turned toward the civilians and opened fire. In a brisk rattle of bolt shells, the group were gunned down.
Noxx looked back at Rafen, daring him to comment. “Forgive me, cousin, if our methods are less refined than you might be used to. I’m sure they lack the elegance and purity of the Blood Angels.”
He matched the other man’s challenging glare, unwilling to give an inch. “You ought to drill your men more closely, Noxx. A Blood Angel would not have wasted so much ammunition on a dispatch.”
“Perhaps,” Noxx allowed. “Next time, I’ll have Roan here demonstrate the use of a flaying blade for you.” He tapped the wickedly barbed longknife at his waist.
“I imagine that would be very educational,” replied Rafen. Barely a minute in his presence, and the sergeant’s patience with his opposite number was already running shallow; the days of aimless wandering in search of the Flesh Tearer forward command post, and then this blatant display of one-upmanship were grating on him. He glanced in the direction of his men and found them approaching warily. They walked in a combat profile, despite the fact that they were in the presence of what should have been considered their allies.
But then the Flesh Tearers were allies to no one, not the other Chapters of the Astartes, not even to those who shared a kinship to the primarch who gave them life and purpose, the Great Angel Sanguineus.
“Movement!” Turcio’s shout cut through Rafen’s musings and he spun around as sounds reached his ears; the rumble of shifting rock and a chorus of wailing voices, growing louder by the second.
The wreckage of the smoking tower trembled and moved, abruptly bursting open in a cloud of dust and fumes. A massive, headless humanoid form pressed itself out of the ruins. The wailing became screaming, the screaming became the maddened laughter they had heard inside the parking structure.
Rafen blinked through the smoke and saw the monstrosity clearly for the first time. It was no one being, but a mass of them. The form was an amalgam of the Companitas, hundreds of bodies all collected together, held in place by some arcane power; and all of them were hooting and chattering with their madness.
“Fire!” he shouted, and his squad opened up with their weapons. Noxx followed suit, bolt shells hazing the air around the collective creature.
Bodies were ripped apart and blown off in spiralling darts of blood, but the mass did not slow down. It seethed over the fractured stonework, one huge fist of flesh coming down like a hammer to crush a Flesh Tearer into a mess of ceramite and meat. When the fist came back up, the remains of the Space Marine were absorbed into the accumulation.
“This is the true face of the Companitas!” snarled Roan. “This is the warp-cursed unity they promise! Chaos whelps!”
Noxx shouted orders to the Whirlwind crew, commanding them to reload; but the speed of the thing was too great. It would be upon them before they could retaliate.
“Blood Angels,” Rafen called into his vox. “Grenades! Impact set!” He grabbed at the drum-shaped krak grenades clipped to his waist and thumbed the trigger from safe to armed, dialling the munitions to detonate when they struck their target. Around him, he saw Turcio, Puluo and the others doing the same. “Ready! Loose!”
A rain of the small bombs arced through the air and struck the Companitas amalgam in the centre of its mass, a chain-fire of explosions rippling through it. The fusion-body screamed louder and tore itself apart, falling into smaller pieces, corpses tumbling away.
“Flamers!” Noxx bellowed. “Forward and sweep! Nothing lives!”
A squad of Flesh Tearers advanced, casting whips of burning promethium over the writhing bodies. In moments, the intersection was a funeral pyre, tides of grey smoke billowing up between the towers.
Rafen shot a glare at the other sergeant.
Noxx ignored it. “We require no assistance from any other Astartes,” he sniffed, in complete disregard to what had just occurred. “My Chapter was ordered here to bring the Emperor’s bloody retribution to Eritaen. That mission need not be diluted by the addition of any more forces.”
Rafen felt a slow rise of understanding. Noxx was labouring under a misapprehension. The sergeant’s resentment for the most part stemmed from the age-old rivalry between the Blood Angels and their kindred, from the clash of methods between the blunt and brutal Flesh Tearers and the more studied way of Rafen’s Chapter; but his anger was also at the threat of diminishment. The Tearers were one of the smallest Chapters in the Adeptus Astartes, and their harsh reactions to any perceived slight upon them—real or imagined—were well documented. They more than made up in ferocity what they lacked in numbers.
“We are not here to take this fight from you,” Rafen told him. “The Blood Angels have no interest in the punishment of Eritaen.”
For the first time since laying eyes on him, Rafen saw something close to doubt in Noxx’s expression. “Then why in the Throne’s name are you here?” All pretence at chill politeness dropped away and Noxx let his resentment show its colours. “Come to remind your poor kinsmen of their betters?”
“I don’t answer to you,” he replied. “I carry a message for Seth, your Chapter Master. You will take me to him.” Rafen beckoned Kayne closer, and the youth produced a sealed metal scroll-tube, locked with sigil of Lord Dante himself. “And by this authority, you will do it now.”
Noxx glared at the tube. The weight of a Chapter Master’s word was an inviolate command for a line Astartes, and not even a Space Marine with the ingrained arrogance of the Flesh Tearers would dare to deny it.
After a moment, the veteran sergeant gave a slow, sullen nod. Without looking at the Blood Angels, he walked back toward the Whirlwind. “This way, then. And try to keep up.”
Through the dust, they followed behind the Whirlwind in silence for another hour before they arrived at the Flesh Tearers’ field command post. At the point of the squad’s teardrop formation, Brother Kayne studied the gutted structure they had taken as their temporary base.
It was a thing of steel buttresses and stone walls, missing a glass roof that had doubtless been obliterated in the early days of the Eritaen rebellion. A squat colonnade at one end of the old building ended in a tall, spindly antenna tower that reached into the sky; it was wilting, as if the metal had been twisted in some fearsome wind. The structure stood atop a shallow hill, giving it good lines of sight down all the highways around it. Kayne glanced at a fallen sign as they entered the courtyard, seeing a name, a designation. Situa Alexandus Regina—Adeptus Telepathica. Of course; the meaning of the strangely-barbed antenna became clear; this had been a communications temple, the nexus for planetbound signalling via machine-call vox and astropathic transfer.
He caught a familiar, stale scent on the wind—old blood. On the walls of the building he spotted dark brown spatter-patterns and metal impact rivets driven into splintered brick. Bodies had been crucified up there, at some point. He wondered if they might have been the staff of the complex; and then he wondered what had become of their corpses.
The Whirlwind peeled away from the group and grumbled to a halt near a knot of Chapter serfs, under the watchful eye of a Flesh Tearer Techmarine. There were only a handful of vehicles in the parking quadrant, and Kayne frowned at the condition of them. A Rhino, a Baal-pattern Predator tank, a pair of land speeders, all of them had a grubby and ill-maintained look to them, as if they were held together by little more than steel hull patches and prayers to their machine-spirits. But then Kayne considered for a moment; the Whirlwind they had followed also bore the same scars and rough aspect, and yet it had moved with swiftness and ready purpose. Perhaps it was not that the Flesh Tearers cared poorly for their machines, but simply that they cared little for their surface appearance.
The youth turned tha
t thought over in his mind, his gaze moving across the other Astartes who paused in their devotions or tasks at hand to stop and watch the arrival of the Blood Angels. Their scrutiny was not kind, not indifferent, but wary, distrustful. He speculated on what they might think of Brother-Sergeant Rafen and his squad. Like their vehicles, the Flesh Tearers themselves did not display much in the way of ornamentation; the deep red of their armour, so dense that it strayed toward the purple, covered all except the helmet, backpack and shoulder pads. These were a hard, matt black that reflected no light. Kayne saw rank sigils, company badges and the like, but no decals or decoration beyond what was needed on the battlefield. In contrast, the red wargear of the Blood Angels sported fine filigree in gold across the wings on their chests, shimmering drops of ruby, elaborate votive chains and other symbology. The Space Marine felt overdressed alongside the successors. Some of the Tearers, the bolder ones, the veterans, arched an eyebrow and looked away. Perhaps they thought the Blood Angels to be peacocks; even Puluo, the least fetching of their squad, would have been considered handsome when placed alongside these scarred and hatchet-faced men.
It was hard to believe these Astartes stemmed from the same noble gene-seed that gave rise to the Blood Angels, and yet the Flesh Tearers were as much a legacy of the primarch Sanguinius as Kayne and his battle-brothers. In the aftermath of the Horus Heresy ten millennia past, when the Emperor of Man ascended to the Golden Throne and the galaxy reeled from the newborn war with Chaos, the great Legions of the Adeptus Astartes had been split off into smaller successor Chapters, and the Blood Angels had been no exception. Among others, the Flesh Tearers were spawned from that great Second Founding, set loose to range to the edges of human space in order to punish worlds who had given loyalty to the Arch-traitor Horus; but it was said that they had taken something dark with them, some black and vicious skein previously buried deep in the Great Sanguinius’ spirit. Their manners in battle were spoken of in the halls of Baal’s fortress-monastery with censure and cold reproach.
Kayne wondered how much of the rumours about their cousins were true, and how much were myth and obfuscation. He knew full well that other Chapters, like the stoic Ultramarines or the Iron Hands, said similar things of the Blood Angels; but meeting the hard eyes of the Space Marines who watched them walk by, he found it difficult to be generous with this understanding.
Every Son of Sanguinius, no matter if his Chapter was from the First or the last of the Foundings, shared the same gene-taint, the twin maladies of the Black Rage and the Red Thirst. The psychic echo of the death of their liege-lord, the dark potential to lose one’s mind to the berserker rage of bloodlust lurked in all of them. It was a curse the Blood Angels fought against each day of their lives; but so it was said, the blight of the Rage and the Thirst was something the Flesh Tearers embraced. Such a thought sickened Kayne. To tap into that wild fury during the melee of battle was one thing, but to surrender to it? That was to willingly allow oneself to become nothing more than an animal.
“Kayne,” Ajir said quietly, so his voice did not carry beyond them. “I’d advise you not to stare at them so much. They may take it as prelude to a martial challenge.”
He bristled. “Then let them. I am confident in my skills.”
He heard the grim amusement in his comrade’s tone. “That much is certain. But remember, this is not a combat mission. Mind yourself. There’s no need to start fires where there are none.”
“I bow to your superior knowledge, brother.” Kayne nodded reluctantly. “But I find it is best to treat every mission as a combat mission. It lessens the opportunity for unpleasant surprises.”
“Less talk,” snapped Puluo, as the group came to a halt before the building proper.
The Tearer sergeant was speaking to Rafen. “Your men will remain here.”
Rafen nodded and glanced at Turcio. “Stand down. I’ll proceed alone.”
“Aye, lord.”
Without waiting to be asked, Kayne recovered his burden from the pouch on his belt and once more gave his commander the sealed scroll-tube. As the two Blood Angels moved closer, Kayne lowered his voice, the question that had been pressing upon him since the day they left Baal finally falling from his lips. “Will that be enough, brother-sergeant?”
Rafen took the tube and the youth saw the shadow of a deep hurt pass over his squad leader’s face. “For Baal’s sake, I hope so.” His fingers closed around the golden rod. “Or else our Chapter may be lost.”
Noxx continued as he had before. He did not wait to see if the Blood Angel was following him, he simply walked away and expected Rafen to keep pace.
Inside the walls of the building there were no interior partitions, nothing but stanchions spaced at regular intervals holding up the broken frame of the roof. The wide, echoing space resembled an aircraft hangar, but for the stubs of felled walls and the sprawl of temporary tent habitats dotted around. Chapter serfs, servitors and the occasional Space Marine moved between them, intent on their duties. Rafen glanced up and saw adaptive camouflage netting ranged over everything. The watery blue sunlight was attenuated even more by the nets, casting hazy shadows everywhere. The dust was in here with them as well, gritty across the cracked marble flooring.
“Inside,” said Noxx, indicating a circular enclosure.
Rafen eyed the vac-slit door warily and pushed his way through, the tough cloth tugging at his wargear as he did so. Within, the tent had a lamp casting a warm yellow glow about the temporary shelter. A ragged battle standard sat furled in one corner, fixed in a stand next to a mobile shrine. By reflex, Rafen bowed slightly to the small brass idol of the Emperor within it and made the sign of the aquila over his chest. Behind him, Noxx did the same.
There was one other Astartes in the tent, his face lit from below by the colours of a hololithic chart table. Rafen glimpsed a tactical plot of the city, with shifting arrows floating in the air above it. The live feed from the orbital scrying drones mentioned by Noxx’s second.
The Space Marine—a captain, by the rank tabs on his armour—sub-vocalised a command word and the battle data on the map dissolved, leaving only the bare framework of buildings and streets.
“Ave Imperator,” said the Blood Angel. “I am Brother-Sergeant Rafen. I have come with a message for his Lordship Seth.”
“I know who you are. And why you are here.” The Flesh Tearer officer stepped around the table. “I am Brother-Captain Gorn, adjutant to the Chapter Master.” He nodded to the scroll-tube. “You will disclose your message to me and in due time I will present it to my Master for his consideration.”
Rafen stiffened. “With respect, brother-captain, I will do no such thing. And this is not a matter to be dealt with ‘in due time’. It comes directly from my Chapter Master.”
Gorn seemed unconcerned by Rafen’s retort. He moved into the light and the Blood Angel got a better look at him. Like Noxx, he had a hard face and an aquiline jaw that betrayed the passage of a hundred battles.
“What is it?” he asked casually, moving to a cabinet in the corner. “The message, the contents therein. What does it say?”
“I… I do not know.” Rafen held up the cylinder. “These words are for the eyes of our Masters alone, lord. It is not my place, nor yours, to read them.”
“Of course,” Gorn allowed, removing a seal-bottle and a goblet. “But I suspect you already know the scope of what the message will say, if not the letter of it. Perhaps you could illuminate me?” He opened the bottle and poured himself a half-glass.
Rafen’s nostrils twitched as the scent of the liquid reached him. Coppery, with a sickly-sweet thickness. He swallowed, banishing the aroma of it.
Gorn went on. “I find it hard to believe that Dante would—”
“Lord Dante,” Rafen corrected firmly.
“Of course, pardon my error. I find it hard to believe that Lord Dante would send a warrior out here, all the way from Baal to the edge of nowhere, and have him be little more than an ignorant errand boy.” He to
ok a sip of the fluid, savoured it. “Is that all you are, brother-sergeant?”
And once more, the voice at the back of Rafen’s thoughts spoke the mantra that had kept him in line these past few weeks.
The mission. The mission first and foremost, Rafen. Mephiston had said those words to him, the hard and unyielding gaze of the Lord of Death burning into him. There has never been a moment more deadly to our brotherhood than this one.
“I will speak to Seth, Chapter Master of the Flesh Tearers, or I will not speak at all,” he told them, iron in his tone. “Take me to the presence of your lord, or else I will find him myself.”
Gorn put down the goblet. “How predictable of you, Blood Angel. How predictable of your master, to simply drop in upon us without invite or regard and expect your cousins to bend the knee and show obeisance.”
Rafen felt his temper rising again. “We have done nothing of the sort. We only require the respect that one Chapter of the Astartes ought to show another, and as the Emperor is my witness—” He nodded toward the shrine, “—your men have given precious little of it, brother-captain!”
A feral smile split Gorn’s face. “Ah. Some fire in your blood. Perhaps you don’t all have adamantium rods up your backsides, then.” The officer threw Noxx an amused look.
Belatedly, Rafen realised that he was being deliberately provoked. He ground out his next words between gritted teeth. “Where is Lord Seth?”
“I am here,” said a careful voice from behind Gorn, as a new figure emerged from a concealed slit in the far side of the tent. Rafen caught the glitter of muted steel plate across a shorn scalp and a face tracked by great claw-scars. Stern, deep-set eyes fixed him with an unwavering stare, and at the corners of his sight he saw Noxx and Gorn instantly change in manner, heads bowed and all trace of cold humour gone. “I am Seth,” said the Chapter Master, extending a hand. “You have something for me.”
Rafen nodded, and bowed his head as well. “Aye, lord.”
Seth took the rod and with a twist of his wrist, snapped it in two, discarding the casing on the floor and plucking the curl of photic parchment from inside. “Shall we see what my cousin Dante has to say?”
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