Dark Adeptus

by Ben Counter

  The Chaos ships, on the other hand, were all in full working order. The Hellforger had a bloodied nose but nothing that would trouble it. The Desikratis had a hull as tough as kraken's skin and no mortal crew to kill, so the fire that reached it from the Exemplar had so little effect that the cruiser's piloting daemon barely noticed it. There were a few Vulture Wing pilots who would never fly again thanks to disciplined turret fire or collisions with the wreckage that flew thickly over Chaeroneia, but more than enough who came back to the Cadaver for fuel and ammunition to go out and kill again.

  The battle had been over before it had begun. Horstgeld had known it. All his officers who under­stood the composition of the Chaos fleet had known it. The Hellforger alone, a grand cruiser with a monstrous combat pedigree, could have broken the Imperial fleet with relative ease. The fighter-bombers of the Vulture Wing were just making the job quicker and the Desikratis was there purely for the joy of battle, maliciously pulling the Exemplar apart at long distance just because it could.

  It was just a matter of time. But then, it always had been. Very few Imperial servants in orbit were not praying to the Emperor for their lives. But a few, the ones who knew what was really happening, were praying for something else - a few more moments of that time they were dying to buy, minutes, sec­onds for Alaric on the surface below.

  ALARIC TOOK THE first step into the moat. It was full of a liquid like quicksilver - it was thick and heavy, one moment as fluid as water and the next solid as iron.

  The Grey Knights were the first in, as always. Alaric looked up at the watchtowers - there was no indica­tion they had been spotted, no klaxons or gunfire. That didn't mean anything, of course. The Dark Mechanicus might be waiting until they were vulner­able, wading through the middle of the moat, before opening fire.

  Alaric waded in, storm bolter ready. Brother Dvorn was beside him, with the other Grey Knights follow­ing close behind. The currents in the moat pulled at Alaric's legs like insistent hands. He went in deeper, up to his waist. The opposite shore was maybe a hun­dred paces away, the bank a solid slab of rockcrete that marked the edge of the titan works proper. There was some cover there around the base of the closest watchtower, where the black iron of the tower formed a giant claw gripping the rockcrete. But the moat was completely open.

  'Now this.' said Dvorn grimly, 'I don't like.'

  The quicksilver rolled in tiny shimmering droplets over the armour of Alaric's waist and abdomen. The ripples he sent out were slow and sharp, like tiny mountain ranges. He had to push forward, the quick­silver seeming to mass in front of him to slow him down.

  'Anyone else feel that?' asked Lykkos.

  'Feel what?' replied Archis.

  'Nobody move.' said Alaric, freezing. The feeling wasn't physical, but it was definitely there, beneath the surface of the moat. It was almost screened out by the sense of daemonic malice coming from the titan works themselves - another spark of the warp, quiet as butterfly's wings. The beating of a daemon's heart.

  'Contact!' yelled Alaric as he felt it lunge. The words weren't out of his mouth before the daemon ripped out of the quicksilver ahead of him, its mas­sive jaws yawning open, teeth like dripping silver knives.

  A data-daemon. Like the guardians of the data-fortress - but stronger, given form by the quick­silver medium and lying in ambush for the Grey Knights.

  Alaric didn't have time to fire before the daemon was on him. Its jaws closed over his gun arm and shoulder and its weight drove him down into the quicksilver on his back. It writhed on top of him down in the airless, crushing darkness, teeth pushing down through the ceramite into his shoulder. Alaric fought to reverse his grip on his halberd so he could stab into the thing's guts, but the quicksilver was crushing around him like a giant fist clenching.

  He couldn't see. He couldn't breathe. But that was the last of his problems. He tried to force his arm out of the daemon's jaws but it was clamped on too tight. He pressed the firing stud and felt bolter shells burst­ing in the quicksilver but the grip never let go.

  A bright white streak slashed down and the dae­mon convulsed as something hot and burning smashed through its grimacing, canine skull. In the brief moment of light Alaric saw a hand reaching down to grab him by the collar of his armour, pulling him up into the air.

  Alaric coughed up a gobbet of quicksilver and shook drops of it from his eyes. He saw that Brother Dvorn had saved him, smashing down through the daemon with his Nemesis hammer.

  Alaric didn't have time to thank him. Gunfire was streaking everywhere. Daemons like dripping silver dragons were wheeling through the air, diving in and out of the moat, snapping at the Grey Knights. Brother Cardios was wrestling with a daemon wrapped around him like a single metal tentacle, try­ing to free the arm that held his Incinerator. Autogun and lasgun fire spattered from the near shore as the tech-priests added their efforts but there was nothing they could do.

  Daemons. There was nothing worse in the galaxy. But daemons Alaric understood.

  He tore his halberd arm free of the quicksilver, lunged forward and beheaded the daemon trying to drown Cardios. He pivoted and stabbed the halberd like a spear, transfixing a daemon through its snaking body. It screamed at him as he reversed his grip and plunged it into the moat, pinning it against the floor. Brother Dvorn took a step back and brought his hammer down through the quicksilver again, shat­tering the daemon's head in a burst of light.

  Haulvarn brought another one down with storm bolter fire. Lykkos battered another two back with psycannon shots, the ensorcelled bolter shells leav­ing massive smoking wounds in their bodies. The Grey Knights backed towards one another until they were back-to-back, a tight knot of men, an island of Space Marines in the moat that no daemon could approach without being carved up by Nemesis blades or shot out of the air by storm bolters.

  'We can get across!' shouted Alaric above the screeching of the daemons. There must have been thirty of them, wheeling and diving, snapping at the Grey Knights. 'Stay tight and pray!'

  The Grey Knights waded across the moat step by step, the quicksilver reaching chest-height. The dae­mons had learned from the deaths of their brothers at the data-fortress and dared not close completely, darting in and snapping, then jerking away before a Nemesis blade could cut them in two.

  'Enough,' said a voice so deep it sounded like an earthquake.

  The surface of the quicksilver boiled and some­thing erupted from below the ground, bursting up right through the middle of the Grey Knights and throwing them aside. Alaric felt a force slam into him so hard it almost knocked him out, throwing him on a wave of quicksilver against the rockcrete bank. He lay for a moment gathering his senses, the floor beneath him splintered by the impact, a sickly purplish light bleeding onto him from the creature that had burst up from the moat.

  It was floating in the air surrounded by a nimbus of purple fire, sparks arcing off its outstretched fin­gers and bleeding from the burning pits of its eyes. Its skin was so pallid it was translucent and pat­terns could be seen writhing beneath it, strange squirming shapes as if there was something just inside the creature's body that was about to burst out.

  The creature was human. The patterns were cir­cuitry. It was Tech-priest Thalassa.

  'Scraecos knew you would come.' she said in a voice that Alaric knew wasn't hers. She rotated slowly, turning to face Alaric. 'Especially you. I told him how strong you were. How I admired you and was also afraid. He showed me what true strength was, Justicar Alaric. I saw it on this world and when Scraecos's servants found me I finally understood it.'

  It was Brother Archis who found his feet first. Drag­ging himself up from the churning quicksilver, he sprayed a chain of storm bolter fire at Thalassa's head. The shells burst like multicoloured fireworks against Thalassa's skin. She turned her head towards Archis, gestured regally towards him and a tendril of pure blackness lashed out. It snared Archis's neck, lifting him up into the air above Thalassa's head. He slashed out with his halberd but another tendril s
naked out from Thalassa's other hand and caught hold of his halberd arm. More tendrils snaked from Thalassa's eyes and from beneath the silvery robes that flapped around her as she floated.

  Alaric could feel the heart beating somewhere in that body. The heart of a daemon. He forced himself to his feet, fighting against the current in the quick­silver that swirled around Thalassa's feet. He stamped down and jumped, halberd stabbing up towards her body.

  Data-daemons lurched from the quicksilver, snap­ping at him, suddenly emboldened by Thalassa's appearance. Alaric shouldered them aside and drove the halberd blade deep into Thalassa's torso. He felt the daemonic flesh underneath spasming as the blade passed through it, then reform around the blade to yank it out of his grasp. Thalassa descended to his level and a second pair of arms unfolded from her robed chest - and beyond them a face, utterly bestial with burning purplish eyes, because there was something inside Thalassa and it was coming out to fight Alaric.

  The daemon's arms had too many joints so that they wound like serpents and were tipped with claws that snagged Alaric's neck and chestplate. The daemon threw Alaric down, pitching him back into the quicksil­ver with a howl, the halberd blade coming free in a spray of glowing purple blood.

  Alaric looked up before the quicksilver closed over him to see Brother Archis's body coming apart, the Grey Knight torn in two at the waist. Archis, who had prayed for all of them at the data-fortress, who had learned the parables of the Grand Masters at the feet of Chaplain Durendin.

  Alaric yelled a formless battle cry and fought the quicksilver current that tried to drag him away. He wrestled the daemons out of his way and fought himself upwards to the surface. This daemon had taken one of his own. The Grey Knights always avenged their dead.

  'Azaulathis!' yelled a voice. Alaric fought to his feet in time to see the daemon inside Thalassa turn its baleful eyes towards the source of the voice - someone had spoken its name. Someone who should not be there.

  Magos Antigonus's spidery servitor body landed heavily on Thalassa, his jointed metallic legs scrabbling for purchase. The pure red light of a las-cutter flared as Antigonus tried to carve through Thalassa's body to get at the daemon inside.

  Brother Haulvarn was there, too, fending off the data-daemons that tried to tear chunks out of Antigonus. Brother Cardios fell against Haulvarn for support and sprayed fire from his Incinerator over the surface of the moat in a wide arc, scorching the silvery skins off more daemons who were looming from the quicksilver.

  Thalassa's tendrils ripped off one of Antigonus's spindly legs and the daemon inside her reared out of her torso to yank off another. Its eyes dripped with power and hate and its mouth was a pulsing, alien thing with a long lashing tongue and teeth like black knives.

  Antigonus held on. Alaric stabbed up at the dae­mon, feeling the wards in his armour burning him as they reacted to its presence.

  The daemon howled a long, low, discordant note and the whole moat quivered like the sea in a storm, throwing the Grey Knights off their feet. Alaric was almost swamped.

  'I beat you once,' came Antigonus's voice, the vox-unit of his servitor body cranked up to maximum. 'I can do it again!'

  The daemon's eyes flashed. 'You,' it growled, paus­ing for a split-second in recognition.

  Antigonus punched the las-cutter deep through Thalassa's body. The daemon screamed and so did Thalassa and the two fell down into the quicksilver, almost landing on Alaric. Antigonus leapt off and landed somewhere in the body of the moat. Alaric forgot about trying to shoot the daemon or cut it up and grabbed Thalassa instead, wrapping his arms around her and trying to wrestle her to the floor of the moat. She spasmed with unholy strength, almost throwing Alaric off.

  Someone else joined in. Another Grey Knight, Alaric thought - but then he saw his own face, reflected hun­dreds of times in the multi-faceted eyes of Archmagos Saphentis. Saphentis had waded through the quicksil­ver, electric pulses flowing off him to part the quicksilver in front of him. His two normal-shaped bionic arms pinned Thalassa's arms to her sides and the tips of the other two reconfigured, twin spinning saw blades emerging from the machinery. With a swift and brutal motion, Saphentis beheaded Thalassa.

  Thalassa's head was shot to the far side of the moat on a burst of dark energy that spurted from the stump of her neck. Azaulathis the daemon extruded itself from the neck, Thalassa's body falling limp in Alaric's arms as the daemon freed itself and soared above the moat. Azaulathis's body was a twisted nightmare of information made flesh, a ring of eyes surrounding its great howling maw, many smaller mouths gaping all over it. Black tendrils uncoiled from wet orifices all over its corrupt body, lashing in every direction as power burst off it like purple-black fireworks. Forced out of its body, it gibbered in pain, the harshness of real space burning off flakes of its luminous skin.

  Chains of storm bolter fire smacked into it, shower­ing the moat with burning chunks of its flesh. More fire thudded up from the Grey Knights and then a burst of flame from Brother Cardios, singed the skin off half its face to reveal a glowing melting unnatu­rally twisted skull that writhed in pain.

  On the outer shore, Alaric spotted Hawkespur. She had taken her marksman's autopistol out and was taking careful aim. She put a single shot through the daemon's burning eye socket, blowing out the back of its head. It stopped moving for a moment as it reeled in shock and that was all the time the Grey Knights needed to shred its body with bolter fire.

  'Go,' said Saphentis, his body spattered with Tha­lassa's corrupted purple blood and rolling droplets of quicksilver. He was holding the quicksilver apart and Alaric could see the other Grey Knights struggling through it into the gap.

  'Make for the shore!' ordered Alaric. 'Cardios! Find Archis if you can! And Hawkespur, bring the others across! Quick!'

  The data-daemons seemed to have been cowed by the deaths of Thalassa and Azaulathis. The Grey Knights made it across to the far bank, Brother Haulvarn pausing to haul Magos Antigonus's shattered servitor body up onto the rockcrete. Cardios followed carrying the upper half of Archis's smouldering body.

  Alaric led the way to the foot of the watchtower, where massive claws rooted the tower into the rock­crete and provided cover between the black iron lengths. Hawkespur and Antigonus's tech-priests fol­lowed and finally Archmagos Saphentis pulled himself up onto the bank, the quicksilver knitting itself back together behind him. Saphentis paused to pick something up as he headed for cover where Alaric waited.

  Cardios ducked into cover beside Alaric. He was hauling Brother Archis's upper half with him - a sorry, tragic sight, the brave Grey Knight's body turned into so much wreckage by the daemon's strength.

  'Even if we could bury him here.' said Alaric, 'we wouldn't. Not in this tainted ground. Cardios, take out his geneseed and share out his ammunition. We will have to leave the body.'

  Cardios nodded and began removing Archis's hel­met. Like all Space Marines, a Grey Knight's many augmentations were controlled by twin master organs, the geneseed. Geneseed was almost impossi­ble to create from scratch and so each Marine Chapter did its best to harvest the organs from their dead so they could be implanted into a new recruit and the Grey Knights were no exception. The Chapter's gene­seed was modelled after the genetic code of their primarch, the awesome warriors created by the Emperor to lead the Great Crusade more than ten thousand years ago. The donor of the genes for the Grey Knights' geneseed was uncertain, however, since the Chapter had been founded amid the greatest of secrecy some time after the first foundings. Some said it was modelled after one of the primarchs who had left behind an unusually stable geneseed, others that the donor was the Emperor himself. No one knew for sure and most of the Grey Knights preferred it that way - they fought not for the ancestral memory of a primarch but for the Emperor first and the Ordo Malleus second and nothing stood in the way. Archis's geneseed was sacred wherever it had origi­nally come from and Alaric had a duty to bring it back to the Grey Knights fortress-monastery on Titan if he could.

&nbs
p; Antigonus's smoking, wheezing body scuttled into the shadow of the watchtower. He saw the body of Archis and paused for a moment in respect, then crouched down to conserve his servi­tor body's dwindling energy reserves.

  'You need a new body.' said Alaric.

  'I know.' said Antigonus, the voice from the servi­tor's vox-unit distorted with effort. 'I'm surprised this one lasted so long.'

  'You knew that daemon.'

  'Scraecos sent it after me when I first came here to investigate. I was lucky not to end up like Thalassa. I recognised its voice. When you have something like that living inside you it must leave an impres­sion on you.'

  'You fought well.' said Alaric.

  'So did you.' replied Antigonus. 'All of you. Espe­cially your battle-brother.' Antigonus indicated Archis's body. Cardios had almost finished cutting the geneseed organ from Archis's throat.

  'We will all have to do so again, I fear.' said Alaric. 'This planet crawls with daemons.'

  'Someone would disagree with you.' Archmagos Saphentis drifted calmly through the machinery at the base of the watchtower. He held Thalassa's sev­ered head in his hand. 'Explain.' he said to the head.

  Thalassa's eyes, now orbs of pure silver, opened. 'Daemons...' she said, her voice a bubbling whis­per through the blood running from her mouth. 'No, no daemons... they are the hunter-programs, the servants of the archmagi...' The power that had held her together while she was possessed by Azaulathis was keeping her alive now, animating her with an echo of its dark magic.

  'She's insane.' said Antigonus.

  'Maybe.' said Alaric. He turned back to Thalassa's head. 'How do you know?'

  'The... archmagi told me... their many voices are one...'

  'The rulers of this planet?'

  'Yes. They showed me such things. I became lost, but they found me. I saw a world completely self-suffi­cient... master of the power of the warp... and I saw the face of the Omnissiah, I saw the Castigator, His knowl­edge made metal and flesh and sent to teach us... no, there are no daemons here, just knowledge made real, come down to serve us and show us the way...'