Red Fury

by James Swallow

  And I? I am only Brother Turcio, a penitent and a line Astartes. No songs written about me. No remembrancers crafting poems of my deeds.

  Argastes threw him a nod and Turcio returned it, the two of them combining fire on a group of mutants storming the platform from the ramp’s edge.

  Perhaps on another day, he might have been saddened to think that he would die unsung if he fell at this moment; but he was fighting in the shadow of Sanguinius, the shimmer of molten gold playing around him.

  This is my duty; that is enough. “For the Emperor!” cried Mephiston, his words strong and clear.

  Turcio raised his voice to join him. “And the Great Angel!”

  Ajir followed a Bloodfiend down as it leapt from the curve of the ramp over his head, describing a swoop toward the floor of the platform. It let out a very human sob of agony as the Blood Angel’s rounds hit one after the other, each bolt impact punching a red fist of discharge from the mutant’s leathery skin. It landed hard and shuddered, trying to climb back to its feet, groping for a bolt pistol tethered by a lanyard to its thickset forearm. Ajir sneered and reset his weapon to full automatic fire. “You will not defile this place!” he shouted, and executed the clone with a burst-shot that churned the meat of its torso into blackened slurry.

  “Brother!” He heard the alarm in the cry and spun in place, instinct saving him from losing his life to the sweep of a clawed limb bristling with bony spines. The new attacker had come from nowhere; it was some error of replication still walking and breathing. The humanoid’s bone structure was grotesque, an overdeveloped thing covered in barbs and skin the texture of tree bark. Ajir fired at it and chips of ossified matter splintered away without apparent affect. Faster than it had any right to be, the creature’s drum-shaped fist punched him in the chest and his lungs emptied under the force of it. The Space Marine tasted metallic bile in his mouth, trying to shake off the shock of the blow.

  The mutant reeled back for another strike, and the daggers of pain across Ajir’s ribcage warned him that a second hit would break bone, likely crush vital organs. He brought up his hands to ward off the blow, but it never came.

  The braying of a chainsword cut through the cacophony of the battle and the mutant howled, falling to the floor. Corvus cut the beast down with savage, precise strikes, panting with effort. “Are you injured?”

  “I will live.” Ajir pushed him away, “I did not need your help!”

  Corvus scowled. “Because of this?” He pointed at the penitent brand on his cheek. “Can you not see beyond it? You should—”

  The barbed mutant lurched suddenly, rising again in some last spasm of hate despite the damage done to it. Before he could react, a claw ripped Corvus across the side, opening his arm and tearing his throat into a second, red-lipped mouth.

  Ajir’s trigger finger jerked reflexively, emptying the rest of his bolter’s magazine into the Bloodfiend, blasting it back across the flagstones.

  Corvus slumped, gasping, his eyes filled with agony.

  Ajir grabbed him. “Why?” he demanded. “You repentant fool, why did you do that?”

  The other Astartes looked up at him, blood forming a pink froth at his lips, clutching at his throat to hold it together. “You…” he rasped, confusion at the question there in his dying gaze. “You are my kinsman…”

  Ajir began an angry reply, but it was too late for Corvus to hear it.

  The sword was gone from his grip and still Seth’s pistol refused to obey him, the warp-cursed device spitting and fizzing. The Flesh Tearer made it a club, then, slamming the gun into the Bloodfiend’s head over and over. His blows crushed in the orbit of the sinewy clone’s skull, but it seemed oblivious to the pain. Talons curved in sickle blade claws raked over his armour with ugly squeals of noise, catching his neck ring and lacerating his face.

  The old scar on his cheek reopened and pooled with fresh, bright blood. The mutant chattered and pounded on him as Seth’s arm flailed, trying to find something to take hold of before he fell. Beneath his back, the Chapter Master felt the stonework around the lip of the pit fracture and give way.

  Seth discarded the plasma weapon and snatched at the Bloodfiend, digging his fingers into the flesh of his attacker; the armoured digits sank into the sallow meat, which parted like the thick rind of a cheese. If he were to fall to his death, than at least he would end his life by taking this monstrous affront with him. Seth had come to this place many times in his life, to the gates of his ending, and he did not fear it; but strangely, there was a new emotion that tightened inside him, so brief and so fleeting. Regret. He would not live to see a resolution to the events set in motion by his kindred.

  The clone reared back, thick spittle flying from its pallid lips, eyes rolling to show the bloodshot whites. The thing was utterly insane, broken and burned, consumed by its obscene hunger.

  Gravity pulled at Seth and he lost his grip; and in that moment the light of a punishing, vengeful sun washed over him, a beam of blazing energy catching the wiry Bloodfiend in the fan of its full power. The creature twisted and became fluid, corrupt flesh sloughing from blackened bones, then the bones themselves turning molten and then to vaporous ash. Seth reached up to bat the cinders away and the rim of the pit collapsed in a snarl of broken rock, throwing him into the empty air.

  “Brother!” With the shout came a flash of smoke-smeared golden armour, and a hand reached out to grab him. Seth caught hold and his fall was arrested. The Flesh Tearer growled and hauled himself up to safety, blinking away streams of blood from his eyes.

  Dante released his grip and Seth spat out a mouthful of ruby spittle. The lord of the Blood Angels gave him a level look, the thickset shape of his Inferno pistol still smoking from the blast that had destroyed the mutant. Seth bent to recover his weapons.

  “Gratitude might be in order,” Dante said mildly.

  At last, the plasma gun had cooled enough to fire once again. “You called me brother,” Seth noted. “Not cousin.”

  “I suppose I did.”

  “Am I worthy of such address?”

  Dante smiled as the clones surged into the Space Marines lines again. “Am I?” he asked, and turned his weapon on the screaming horde.

  Seth let out a wolfish laugh and joined him in the battle.

  The pack alpha ignored the screams of its kindred as they died beneath the guns and the swords of the Space Marines. The Bloodfiend’s addled mind barely registered the sounds of murder and destruction. All that mattered was the colour, the red, the fluid ruby tears; the sweet perfect scent of wet copper, the dense perfume of the vitae, rich and succulent. Saliva flooded the beast’s misshapen mouth, ropey strings of discharge frothing at its lips. The kill it had recently made, the dead and old flesh from inside the machine-hulk, was weak and tasteless in comparison. It wanted more. It longed to be sated, even if on some level of barely human understanding it knew it could never be.

  The incredible, unstoppable need overwhelmed every other consideration, any question of the preservation of self. The mutants poured through the lines of the Astartes, killing as they went, roaring forward in a tide of ruddy flesh that flooded over the lip of the great pit, cascading through the stone funnel toward the prize at the sepulchre’s shining heart.

  On muscled legs as thick as support pillars, the eldest and most evolved of the twisted clone-Marines threw itself downward, leaping across the chasm from one side of the sloping walls to another, cuffing its smaller, slower cohorts into the paths of the lasers, dodging or shrugging off the glancing sparks of bolt fire that chanced to reach it. The pack alpha would not be denied its feast; ignoring the dead of its own kind and the bleeding bodies of fallen Astartes, it came down toward the sarcophagus, embracing the call of the Blood of Sanguinius.

  It would drink and drink until there was nothing left.

  Rafen saw the mutant coming, and a gasp caught in his throat. He knew at once that it was the same creature that had led the horde after the Thunderhawk had crash-landed in
the courtyard, the one that had fled before the Blood Angels could regroup and execute it.

  It was different now. Larger, and if anything more feral in aspect than it had been before. His thoughts returned to the clone he had dispatched in the arena once again; was this thing what it might have become, if allowed to run its course? Rafen shuddered at the thought, that such twisted atrocities as these could be spun from the gene-matter of a noble Space Marine. He fired, bracketing the Bloodfiend with bolter fire, but it was swift and powerful, matching his Astartes-strong senses point for point, always a heartbeat beyond his kill shot.

  The monstrous pack leader landed on the floor of the sarcophagus platform with a massive crash of displaced air, knocking the Chaplain Argastes off his feet with the shock of it. Without a second of uncertainty, the Dreadnought-tall Bloodfiend snatched at the black-clad warrior and hauled him up, a rag-doll in the hands of a hulking, brutal child. Rafen cried out as the creature threw Argastes across the span of the dais, the Chaplain pinwheeling through the air to collide with Mephiston, halting the psyker’s headlong advance, both men slamming into the walls so hard they made a shallow crater in the mosaic.

  The beast bounded forward, each footfall cracking the stones beneath it, taking a direct line toward the shallow ziggurat of steps leading up to the copper halo, and the shimmering gold sphere. Rafen saw its eyes were solid panes of ruby, hazed by the full, unchained force of a red fury.

  Only Puluo and he stood between the Bloodfiend and the sarcophagus, the rest of the squad pinned down by hordes of smaller mutants or hobbled by injury and circumstance. The Space Marine showed his fangs and unleashed the whirlwind of his heavy bolter, each blazing shot from the man-portable cannon finding points upon the creature’s hide to cut flesh or rip open newly-scabbed wounds.

  The mutant roared and bit at itself where the searing shots fell, at one moment stumbling beneath the onslaught but never slowing. Puluo stood his ground, shouting out hate at the beast as it came upon him, still firing.

  In return, it swept out a thick arm and punched the taciturn Space Marine, striking the bolter cannon with such force that the weapon broke apart. The blow did not cease there, the power of it slamming Puluo down into the marble floor. Rafen saw one of his battle-brother’s legs twist and snap back against the line of the bone and Puluo fell in a nerveless heap.

  Rafen retreated, moving back toward the great glowing sphere. Steadying his hands with a grimace, the sergeant aimed down the iron sights of his bolter and began to fire, one shot at a time, directing each round toward the curdled, shifting mass of flesh that was the alpha Bloodfiend’s face. He aimed for the soft tissue of the eyes, seeking to blind the beast if his bolter could not kill it outright.

  It yowled and batted at its flesh as it came closer, clawing at the bolt rounds as if they were nagging insects. Rafen could see it was covered in hundreds of wounds, sword cuts, plasma burns and bullet impacts, none of which seemed to slow it. If anything, the pain appeared to drive the Bloodfiend on.

  The bolter’s breech clattered open on an empty magazine and Rafen’s ammunition was spent. He threw the gun at the mutant and it knocked it away, closing to the reach of its arms. The Blood Angel tore his combat blade from the sheath on his hip, the length of polished fractal-edge steel catching the amber luminosity dancing in the air around him.

  Digging the flattened heads of bolt rounds from its undulating flesh, the creature came on undaunted. The meat of its face was a shifting, twitching mass that seemed incapable of holding a single aspect, as if the bones and musculature beneath were struggling to define what it was; who it was. Its mouth hung open, and for the first time Rafen heard the disorder of its mewling, howling voice, the gurgles and grunts, the fractured and incoherent pieces of speech that might have been words.

  In the turmoil of its countenance, for one brief moment he glimpsed the pattern of a face familiar to him from years of comradeship, rising to the surface through the muddle of twisting, distorted skin. An old face, a trusted face, the aspect of a warrior who had been mentor and comrade to him, lost now as so many others had been.

  “Koris!” he spat, unable to believe what he had seen; and yet he knew it was no illusion. Caecus had taken the genetic material of dozens of Blood Angels, living and dead, and used that to forge the synthetic pseudo-zygotes that grew into these distorted malforms. The ideal that some element of his old tutor might be part of the Bloodfiend sickened Rafen to his core.

  Even as the twisted face flowed and changed, the creature swung at him—so fast, so horribly fast—and he ducked, slashing at the thick, leathery skin. It did little good, eliciting only snarls and pops of spittle as the monstrous freak tried to snare him, bite him, stamp him into the stones. The back stroke of a clubbed fist caught him off-guard and Rafen stumbled, bouncing off a wide curve of razor-edged steel.

  The wings. He spun, startled, as the great sculpted pinion creaked and raided under the force of his collision, the ancient metal feathers scraping against one another in discord. Rafen’s shock was so great that for an instant he forgot the enemy at his back; the Bloodfiend had pressed him to the very foot of the Golden Sarcophagus, into the corona of radiance that spilled across the chamber.

  Rafen’s gaze crossed the glittering sphere of churning liquid colour, and he saw something within the depths of the molten metal: the hazy ghost of a figure, perhaps a man with his head raised to the sky, his arms open and palms raised, the shadow of mighty wings to his back.

  Sudden tears streamed from the Blood Angel’s eyes and he shook them off, the moment of timelessness snapping like a broken thread. The beast advanced, slowing, savouring the moment. A toothsome grin, a maw crowded with fangs opened to him. Curled hands, fingers distending into needle-mouthed tentacles, reached toward the sphere. A rabid hunger leaked from every pore of the mutant.

  And he was all that stood before it, the last line of defence between this abomination and the flesh of his primarch, between the vampire and the last vestiges of his Chapter’s purest blood.

  Rafen raised the combat knife and grinned back, baring his own teeth. “This is as far as you go,” he spat.

  The Blood Angel threw himself at the mutant, leading with blade point-forward. The creature reacted, the sudden attack unexpected, but too slow to stop Rafen finding his target. He pressed the knife into a ragged chest wound already thick with clotting fluids, felt the tip slice through muscle and scrape over the dense bones of the ribcage. Ignoring the bellow of pain from his target, he turned and pushed the weapon home until it punctured the Bloodfiend’s heart, burying the blade to its hilt in the folds of fibrous skin.

  The mutant stumbled back from the sarcophagus, tearing and clawing at the Astartes even as thick, oily blood pulsed from the cut. It staggered and snarled, finally knocking Rafen away to the floor.

  Liquid streamed over the red flesh, pooling around the beast’s feet, and still it did not falter. It took a slow, painful step toward him, back toward the sarcophagus.

  A sudden flash of understanding struck the sergeant. The heart… But this is a replicae, a genetic duplicate of a Space Marine…

  And in the mirror of every Adeptus Astartes, the Bloodfiend had a secondary heart, just as the Blood Angel did.

  Rafen.

  A guttural voice came to him, not through the chaos of the battle-thick air but hammered directly into his thoughts, bright as diamond. He turned and through the melee saw Mephiston across the chamber, his force sword in his hand. There was a firm understanding in the psyker’s eyes.

  Finish it.

  Mephiston’s arm came up in a sweeping motion and the Mindblade Vitarus left his hand, wheeling and spinning about, carving through the air toward Rafen. He reached for it, something preternatural guiding him. The lengthy, barbed blade turned along its own span and fell into his grip, as easily as if it had been made for him.

  Without the incredible power of a psyker behind it, the crystalline metal of the weapon could not channel the ethereal f
orces of the warp, but even robbed of that, it was still a sword of near-matchless quality. And it was more than enough for Rafen to do what was needed.

  Turning the weapon about, Rafen shouted and charged the Bloodfiend. “For Sanguinius!”

  The mutant hesitated on the edge of the steps, angered at another interruption. It saw the sword coming and animal panic lit across its expression. It clawed at the blade, desperate to stop it. Rafen denied the creature and pressed Vitarus into the blood-flecked torso, piercing the skin above the knot of pulsing flesh that was its secondary heart. The inert force sword whispered through the dense meat as if it were vapour, slicing the organ in two, pressing onward until it erupted from the Bloodfiend’s back in a welter of black fluid. It staggered, pain squeezing the air from the beast’s lungs, and collapsed atop the steps beneath the copper ring.

  But some things do not die all at once.

  Life leaking from it in sluggish pulses, the clone made a last, desperate attempt to claw itself closer to the sarcophagus, reaching out, raising itself up to feel the warmth of the golden glow upon its trembling skin.

  Rafen took the hilts of the sword and the knife in either hand and gave both a savage, final twist.

  A last rasp of breath escaped the lips of the Bloodfiend as death finally claimed it. For a man standing close by, for a man who turned the blades that killed the accursed creature, that breath could have been a single word.

  “Brother?”

  EPILOGUE

  From the battlements of the fortress-monastery’s shield wall, the broad scope of the Oxide Desert could be seen stretching away into the wilderness, toward the Chalice Mountains. In the warm light of the day, the towers of black smoke from the death pyres extended upward into the clear sky, tilting to the west with the motion of the winds that carried them. Rafen could see the red slabs of Rhino transports dallying at the points of each smoke trail, and on the air he tasted the faint tang of burning flesh and spent promethium.