[Blood Angels 04] - Black Tide

by James Swallow - (ebook by Undead)

  “Brothers of the Imperium,” said the figure in black and ruby. “Stand to.”

  “Rafen’s comrades, I presume?” said Kilan, laughing.

  “The same. We thought you might appreciate some help with this matter.” The Flesh Tearer kicked at a dead minotal and then glanced around at the survivors. “Is this all that remains?” He removed his helm as he asked the question.

  “Aye,” said the Raven Guard. “A few others with Brother Rafen, but no more.”

  “And the arch-traitor?” This question came from a Blood Angel who stood nearby. “What of Fabius Bile?”

  “Unknown,” Kilan admitted.

  “I know you.” Tarikus studied the sergeant. “Noxx. It’s been a while since Merron.”

  “Brother Tarikus.” The Flesh Tearer gave him a wary nod. “It has. Still hold it against me?”

  The Doom Eagle shrugged off the question. “I’ll be generous if you tell me you can take us from this place.”

  A figure in indigo armour, his head crested with a psionic hood, moved into the cave, turning a penetrating gaze on every one of the freed warriors. “Our conveyance has been destroyed by the tyranids.” The psyker’s hard-edged glare passed over Tarikus and he felt the Blood Angel briefly turning a spotlight on his soul, seeking signs of weakness and taint. “We need to find another way off this blighted rock.”

  “Tyranids…” echoed Kilan. “The scream we heard…”

  “A clarion call,” muttered Tarikus.

  “They’re coming here,” continued the psyker. “All of them.”

  “Not the deliverance you were hoping for, I’ll warrant,” said Noxx. “My apologies.”

  “On the contrary,” Tarikus replied, thinking again of his prayer. “We are not dead yet.”

  Layko levered the hatch open and Rafen stalked through, with Nisos behind him. Climbing up to the gantry level where the traitor had entered, the three Astartes had been ill at ease to leave the Space Wolf’s body where he had fallen; lacking an incendiary grenade, they could not even grant him a funeral pyre. Rafen took a last look down at the Long Fang as the hatch slammed shut behind him. He resolved to find a way to make sure that every Space Marine who had died unremarked in this place would be honoured in one way or another.

  On the far side of the chamber, a heavy airlock was visible, bathed in sickly green light; beyond it had to be the place where Rafen had been interrogated by the renegade. “We’re close to the laboratory level,” he said, noticing the reflexive twitch on Layko’s face as he said the words. “Just beneath it.” His breath made clouds of vapour as he spoke. The near-polar chill of the dimly lit chamber leached the heat from his fingers and through the rags binding his feet.

  “What is this place?” said Nisos, squinting. The occu-lobe implants shared by the Space Marines gave them exemplary night vision, and by degrees the chamber appeared to lighten as their eyes became used to the dark.

  There were open-topped tanks crammed into multiple rows, filled with icy cryogenic slush, and overhead dozens of irregular shapes hung from black chains that vanished towards the ceiling. Rafen smelled the faint odour of blood, attenuated by the bite of the cold.

  “Dorn’s eyes!” cursed Layko. “This is a meat locker!”

  The Crimson Fist was not in error. Each of the objects were corpses—or at least, they were the parts of corpses, dangling like cuts of meat in the window of some hive city butchery. Rafen saw gutted modificates of various kinds and things that might have been the raw material for Bile’s monstrous New Men. In the tanks too, there were limbs and organs floating in suspension mediums, hearts and lungs connected to electro-stimulators that kept them beating and breathing without bodies.

  “Astartes,” said Nisos, in a dead voice. At first, Rafen thought the Tauran was calling them to attract their attention; but he was describing what he saw. Hanging in a line were the legless torsos of figures that could only have been Space Marines, blood still dripping slowly from their opened stomachs into a long fluid gutter below. Visible on the closest of them were the intricate war-tattoos of the Stone Hearts Chapter, each line of text the battle record of the dead man.

  Rafen was about to speak, but he glimpsed something that killed his words in his throat. He stepped closer to one of the bubbling tanks.

  The air in the chamber was freezing, but what he saw truly made his blood run cold. There, submerged beneath the mantle of slush, Fabius Bile lay naked and dead. His throat was an open, shredded ruin of meat.

  “I killed him…” Rafen whispered. “In the laboratory…”

  Layko saw it too. “How is that possible?” he demanded. “I saw you blast his head from his neck with my own eyes, and yet there he is… No!” The Fist shook his head wildly. “This is a trick! Fabius Bile is dead!”

  Heavy, sullen laughter echoed across the chamber as a shadowy form detached from the depths of the gloom. “Am I?” His patchwork fleshcoat rustling as he moved, the traitor moved into the light. With a hissing, chugging whine, the chirurgeon upon his back unfolded its manifold arms. “You are mistaken.”

  No sooner had the renegade spoken, but another, identical voice issued out from the far side of the chamber. Another Fabius, almost identical but for the lack of a chirurgeon-construct, stepped out from behind a towering stanchion. “Very mistaken,” said the doppelganger, amused with himself.

  Nisos swore under his breath. “How many of him are there?” he demanded, unsure where to aim his las-gun.

  Rafen shook off the shock of what he saw, his hand tightening around the grip of the bolter. It made a horrible kind of sense; the manipulation of genetic material, the creation of replicae and mutant forms of life from nothing, all these things were the meat and drink of the renegade who dared to call himself “the Primogenitor of Chaos Undivided”. This was a madman who had dared to clone the arch-traitor Horus, who planned to rebuild the gene-code of the God-Emperor of Mankind—by contrast, cutting duplicates of himself, either from raw flesh or by alteration of living beings, would be well within his ability.

  “I have killed you twice already,” Rafen spat. “And if I must, I will cut my way through every single mirror of you until none remain!” He pulled the trigger and fire blazed. His target moved, and the shot thudded into a tank, letting a spurt of supercooled liquids jet into the air. Where the fluid landed, rimes of ice began to form in ragged patches over the walls and the floor.

  “You know what must be done!” the first of the duplicates shouted across the chamber to the second. “I will deal with these animals.”

  The other Fabius gave a harsh chuckle and threw himself at the airlock. Nisos fired, but the renegade-double was too quick, slamming the heavy door shut behind him.

  Rafen heard a whining grunt of noise, and saw the pistons on the chirurgeon rattle and shift. Oil-filled pods discharged into Bile’s spine and he released a hiss of pleasure; then, with jerky, birdlike motions, the brass construct detached from the renegade’s back and skittered away on spidery brass legs. It rattled across the metal decking, homing in on the Tauran.

  “Come kill me again, if you can, Blood Angel.” Bile goaded him, and with a flourish, the traitor drew a lengthy black rod from a scabbard on his belt, brandishing it like a sword.

  The enemy moved, keeping the hanging scraps of corpse-meat between himself and his attackers. Rafen fired on the ran, bracketing the traitor with each hit, attempting to drive him, knock him off-balance. The Blood Angel glimpsed the Crimson Fist threading low between the shapes of the fluid tanks and fired again, attempting to draw Bile’s attention.

  But Layko was too eager, too driven, too wild. The other Astartes burst from cover a moment too soon and struck out with his twinned combat blades, slashing hard and connecting with the traitor’s heavy coat. The leathery, tanned hide split and with it Layko carved through armour and into flesh—but the cut was a shallow one.

  Smiling, Bile hit back with the rod-weapon and creased Layko’s temple with the shimmering tip. The Crimson Fis
t reacted as if he had been doused in acid, throwing himself aside, his swords forgotten as they clattered to the deck. Every nerve in the Space Marine’s body was firing at once, blazing with pain; the smallest caress of Bile’s so-called Rod of Torment could magnify the slightest injury into a maelstrom of agony.

  Rafen chanced a look towards Nisos, and saw the Tauran engaged in a running battle with the chirurgeon device as it skittered back and forth, snapping at him with barbed injectors and blade-sharp claws. Then Bile was rushing into him, and he dodged with a heartbeat to spare. As the rod cut through the air past his arm, he felt the skin there go tight and stiff with the proximity of the weapon’s pain-field.

  The Blood Angel fired wildly, shots he knew would not connect, but close enough to keep Bile from grappling him. Following through with a spinning kick, Rafen connected solidly with the traitor’s ribcage; but the impact went into a plate of hard armour concealed beneath the flapping coat, doing little more than making his enemy grant in surprise.

  Fabius reacted faster than Rafen expected, and the rod spun around in his enemy’s grip like a baton. The tip of the weapon cut an arc downward and this time he was too slow to avoid the hit entirely. The rod connected with his forearm and he bellowed with pain; it was as if his hand had been plunged into a bath of molten metal. Rafen lost the barbed bolter he had taken from Cheyne; in a disconnected way, he vaguely registered it as it tumbled away, falling into an icy slush pool with a splash. The pain resonated through him, robbing his left arm of any function. The limb hung there on the end of his shoulder like a piece of dead meat, numb and useless.

  “Come, come!” snarled Bile. “I want my chance to kill you the same as all the others!”

  Others? Again, Rafen found himself wondering how many duplicates of this creature were stalking the stars. Was this the same man he had faced so briefly on Baal?

  He tried to work his arm, but nothing came of it. Nisos had his own enemy to fight, Layko was still struggling to regain control of his body; Rafen alone had to make this kill.

  Bile held the rod up, slashing it back and forth in the air. “Ready for another taste?” he asked, circling the Astartes.

  A smile as cold as the air in the chamber split the Blood Angel’s lips, as he made a daring choice. “Yes,” he replied, and flung himself at the renegade.

  His enemy was taken off-guard, surprised by the frontal attack. Still, the rod slammed straight into Rafen’s gut and flooded his body with a torture beyond his experience. He had endured so many different strains of agony, and each had its shade and colour, each a texture unique and equally dire. The power of Bile’s weapon was nova-bright and blinding, ripping through him like white fire.

  Such a hit would have put him to his knees, had he taken it standing. His headlong rush changed the equation; even as he collapsed, his body wracked with spasms, the force of Rafen’s impact against Bile sent the renegade stumbling backward—and there his heavy boots crossed the thick slick of ice across the steel floor. Without traction, Bile’s weight turned against him and he fell backward, shouting in fury. Unable to arrest his fall, the traitor crashed through a thin layer of frost atop one of the fluid tanks and plunged into the mix of sub-zero cryogens swirling beneath.

  Bile thrashed at the sides of the container, the rod rolling away across the floor, his extremities turning black as frostbite ate into them. The killing cold enveloped him, the freeze marching up his torso as a fungus would spread over the trunk of a tree. Choking, the traitor wrenched himself forward, desperately trying to drag himself out of the tank.

  He met the tip of the rod as Rafen, still shaking, blood trickling from his nostrils, ears and eyes, ran it into Bile’s chest with all the force he could muster. The renegade’s agonised body turned against him and he crashed back into the fluid-filled tank, sinking beneath the surface.

  Awareness fled, and the Blood Angel’s mind went dark for long moments. Finally, Rafen felt a hand on his shoulder and blinked back to wakefulness. Ice crystals fell from his face and he looked up from where he had fallen. Layko offered him a hand and he took it. His body ached inside and out, and a fatigue like he had never known lay heavy upon him.

  “Lost you for a while, Blood Angel,” said the Crimson Fist. He handed him a lasgun and Rafen’s brow furrowed as he registered the weapon.

  “Brother Nisos?”

  Layko nodded in the direction of the smouldering remains of the chirurgeon; beneath it, eyes wide open and sightless, the Tauran lay dead, pinned to the deck by a dozen of the hellish machine’s manipulators. “He didn’t sell his life cheaply.”

  “He was an Astartes. We never do.” Rafen began to walk stiffly towards the airlock.

  The Crimson Fist gathered up his swords and followed him.

  “This way,” said Ceris, pointing into the gloom of the rocky corridor. His voice sounded distant and hollow-over the vox link.

  Noxx shot him a look. Inside the warren of passageways within the walls of the fortress-prison, every hallway seemed much the same as every other. The crimson flashes from alert strobes impact-bolted to the walls lent everything a hellish, otherworldly air, and the keening sirens sounding down the tunnels were the voices of banshees. Every few feet there were hatchways made of dirty steel, and control lecterns protruding from the walls whose functions he could not determine. They had encountered a few of Bile’s New Men here and there, and together they had killed them; but Noxx’s skin was crawling with the ominous sense of a threat nearby, and it made him twitchy not to face it head on. “Rafen is still alive, then?”

  The psyker nodded, throwing a glance back at Ajir and Turcio as they flanked the rag-tag group of escapees. “He is. With the psychic distortion dissipated, I can read him more clearly. He’s angry.”

  “Aren’t we all,” Noxx retorted. “How far?”

  “He’s in the tower.”

  “And Bile?”

  Ceris paused, and Noxx could hear the deep frown in his words. “Difficult to tell. I sense death, and yet…” He trailed off.

  “Sergeant.” Eigen, holding the rearguard, was speaking over the general vox channel. “Do you hear this?”

  Noxx held up his hand and gave the battlesign gesture for “halt”. Immediately, every Astartes froze in place and fell silent. The Flesh Tearer toggled the gain on his helmet’s audial sensors and the noise Eigen had detected became a rushing hiss in his ears. The helm’s simple machine-spirit pinpointed the source of the sound within seconds; behind them, closing quickly.

  “Like water,” offered Tarikus. “Could the sea be flooding the lower levels?”

  Noxx drew a photon flash grenade and threw it down the corridor, back along the path they had travelled; set to impact-detonate, it immediately blasted a wave of harsh white radiance that illuminated everything as if it were bright daylight.

  The floor was a rippling, chittering wave of dark-eyed shapes, serpentine things with massive jawed mouths slithering across the stone towards them. Cracks in the ceiling were allowing streams of them to slip through, more and more of them cascading into the chamber with every passing second.

  “Rippers!” shouted Sove, opening fire with his bolter.

  “Fall back!” shouted Noxx. “If we stop to engage them, we’ll be engulfed!”

  The Astartes obeyed, but one of the prisoners—a young Ultramarine scout—stumbled and fell. The advancing mass rolled over him and began to feed. Noxx fired and moved, the others staying with him.

  “We can’t outrun these xenos,” shouted Kilan. “Cover me!” The Raven Guard vaulted to the wall, to one of the control lecterns.

  “Do as he says!” Noxx ordered, and the other warriors laid down a fan of fire from bolters and lasguns as the Raven Guard worked. Kilan pulled a set of levers and Noxx saw something move along the walls—metal nozzles at ankle-height, folding out of hidden housings. A familiar smell touched his nostrils through his breath filter: promethium.

  With a hissing thump of displaced air, the Raven Guard triggered
the mechanism and a wall of flame blasted upward, rising to curl along the top of the tunnel. Trapped on the other side, the ripper eels shrilled and died in the hundreds as they were caught by the flames.

  Kilan coughed and spat, staggering back to the group. “Flame jets,” he explained, “The splices used them to torch the tunnels clean… and to burn the dead.”

  “The fire won’t last long,” said Tarikus. “The tanks that feed the nozzles were ruptured in the breakout.”

  Ceris pointed again, along a branching corridor. “This way,” he repeated.

  “Where is he?” said Layko, glaring into the corners of the laboratorium. Rafen stalked forward, the lasgun held out in front of him. It felt small and delicate in his grip in comparison to the bolt weapons he was used to; he had his doubts it would be enough to kill Fabius.

  Kill Fabius. The Blood Angel considered the oath he had made, back in the Chapter Master’s sanctum, the promise to his battle-brothers and the spirit of his primarch. How many deaths would it take, he wondered? How many good and loyal Space Marines murdered and dissected like animals, how many bullets expended and gallons of blood shed? How much would it take to end this?

  “Not here,” Rafen said, finally answering the Crimson Fist’s question. Casting his gaze across the chamber he saw a hatchway hanging open, weak yellow light emerging from it in an invitation. “There.”

  “Another horror show?” Layko grimaced.

  “A trophy room,” Rafen explained. “Bile’s prizes.” He frowned and gave the Crimson Fist a look. “I know you want him dead as much as I do, but I ask you to hold your temper, kinsman. We must attack together.”

  For a second, Layko’s face coloured with annoyance, and he seemed on the verge of decrying the Blood Angel’s demands; then his eyes narrowed and he nodded. “Aye, kinsman. Together.”

  “You will not like what you see in here,” Rafen said, making for the open hatch.

  Layko followed him in and halted with a jerk on the threshold. Rafen glanced at the other Astartes and saw a series of powerful emotions cross his face—anger, sadness, resignation, horror. The Blood Angel imagined the same expressions had shown on him when Cheyne and the New Men had forced him into this place.