by Paul Kearney
‘Aye sir. Sergeant Gaden, you’re up. One fireteam.’
Five Ultramarines trooped out into the chill darkness and disappeared. They had switched to preysight. One carried a flamer, the rest bolters.
‘Brother Ulfius,’ Calgar called up the Librarian, ‘I want you, Inquisitor Drake and Magos Fane to cooperate, and see if you can decipher any of the inscriptions on this structure. It looks as though someone took a great deal of trouble to set it here, and I want to know why – and if it sheds any clues as to what lies before us.’
Brother Tersius took up position to the right of his sergeant, and the rest of his team spread out, ten feet between each Ultramarine. They walked slowly across the vast expanse of nothingness which opened out before them. It was dark, and the temperature had plummeted to well below freezing. The moisture in the air had frozen into sifting veils of ice crystals, and dropping down on the Ultramarines were heavier flakes that built up grey on their armour; it was snowing.
Tersius looked up. The ceiling of the immense space above him could not be seen; it must be hundreds of yards away, and like the great dome of the Temple of Correction, the area it enclosed was of sufficient volume to create its own weather.
‘Atmospheric controls are off in here,’ Brother Darius said, hefting his flamer, the blue pilot light flickering under its muzzle. ‘It’s bitter as the Crown Glaciers.’
‘Quiet,’ Brother Sergeant Gaden admonished him. ‘No chatter. Spread out.’
The snow crunched underfoot, and it grew lighter, a livid paleness with shrouded shapes scattered across it, like mounds. They stopped at one, and Sergeant Gaden scraped the snow from it with the edge of his gauntlet. There was sere yellow grass underneath, and below it, arid black soil.
‘What in Throne is this place?’ the sergeant murmured.
‘Auspex is clear,’ Brother Unser said. ‘Nothing for two hundred yards. Nothing metallic, either, brother sergeant. We might as well be planetside.’
They moved on, leaving trails of dark prints in the snow, the ice accumulating on their armour. Tersius’s temperature reading gave fifteen degrees of frost, and the farther they advanced, the colder it grew. He felt his battleplate creak around him as the ceramite cooled.
‘Atmospherics improving,’ Brother Darius said. ‘Methane and sulphur levels dropping, carbon dioxide now within Imperium minimums. We could unhelm if we chose, and breathe good air.’
‘Nothing is good about this place,’ Brother Surus muttered. ‘Can you feel it, brothers?’
They all could, though no one replied. They felt like insects creeping across a vast empty amphitheatre, and in the wide space of it they could feel the currents of the warp working on their blood, as Luna worked on the tides of Terra. The Chapter Master had been wrong-footed – they all knew it, though no one would admit such a thing openly. And now they were adrift in the warp, perhaps forever.
But it mattered not, so long as they held true to their brotherhood.
‘Structure ahead,’ Brother Unser said, consulting his hand-held auspex continually. It had greater range and sophistication than the sensors embedded in their autosenses. ‘Fifteen yards, bearing six three.’
Sergeant Gaden bore off to the left, following the bearing, his bolter muzzle nosing to left and right in his fists. ‘Arrowhead, wide spacing. Vox silence.’
They moved on, the squad sergeant at the apex of the formation, flamer on the left, the five Ultramarines moving with a stealth that seemed remarkable considering their size and weight. They made no more noise than an unburdened man, despite their armoured bulk. The auspex pinged in Brother Unser’s ear.
‘Contact,’ he said in a low murmur. ‘Dead ahead, forty yards.’
They could see little in the shifting snow. The moving air drew great towering curtains of glistening hoarfrost across their path, and it hissed slightly as it fell, adorning them with a layer of shining ice until their Ultramarines blue was almost hidden. They were grey, silent shadows, no more.
‘Hold fire,’ Sergeant Gaden said. He blinked on the company vox. ‘Captain, we are four hundred yards in. Vox optimal. Possible contact ahead. Wait out.’
A rune flashed in Gaden’s display in silent acknowledgement.
There were darker shapes ahead, a line of them. As tall as the Ultramarines who approached, they might have been nothing more than a serried line of staggered megaliths. Beyond them, there was an immense darkness, the loom of a structure of some sort rearing up tall as a cliff.
‘Guilliman’s blood,’ Brother Tersius said, startled into speech.
They were perhaps fifty feet away now, and the line of shadows had resolved themselves into a series of figures, half-buried in drifted snow.
They were Space Marines.
Fourteen
Magos Fane was running his clawed alloy hands over the stone of the gateway as though he could decipher its meaning through touch alone. Calgar stood behind him, flanked by his honour guards, and with him were Captain Galenus, Chaplain Murtorius, Librarian Ulfius and Inquisitor Drake. Just within the gateway, Starn’s Terminators stood watch, storm bolters poised, and with them, Techmarine Salvator.
‘Gaden’s squad is four hundred yards in,’ Galenus reported. His gauntleted fist tapped the grip of his plasma pistol where it was maglocked to his armour. ‘A chamber vaster than any we have yet seen. It is winter in there, like the Crown Mountains at year’s end.’
Calgar said nothing. He was watching the tech-priest and the inquisitor, each analysing the gateway inscriptions in their different ways. He reined in his impatience. He knew it was a fault of his, that desire to come to grips with things, the impulse to charge ahead. He had fought it his entire life. And now the knowledge that he had led his brothers to this pass seared a corner of his very soul.
‘The stone is basalt, igneous rock from a volcanically active world,’ Drake said, running the numbers on a hand-held cogitator slate handed to him by one of his retainers. The inquisitor had recovered from his earlier indisposition with admirable speed.
Calgar saw now the steel in the man, the ability to shrug off the calamity that had befallen them all. The inquisitor had kept his shrewd, sardonic mien intact as well as one of his own brethren might. He warmed to the fellow. Drake might be irritating, but he had the kind of cool courage even Calgar could respect.
‘Some three billion years old, quarried in the last ten thousand. By the residues I’m picking up, it has undergone warp translation hundreds of times. It registers with no known signatures in the Segmentum Ultima – nothing we have on file. But it does match a few from the Segmentum Obscurus.’ He looked up. ‘The closest match is archaic – the Dartaris system, not far from the Cadian Gate.’
‘And not far from the Eye of Terror,’ Chaplain Murtorius added grimly.
‘There are no Imperial installations in that system, and there have not been for thousands of years,’ Brother Ulfius said. He looked up at the gateway, the statues upon it broken and pitted. ‘This was deliberately done, this destruction. It is not the work of time – the heads of all the statuary have been broken off.’
‘A defilement then,’ Inquisitor Drake agreed. ‘I see what might be an Imperial aquila at the crux of the arch, though it’s hard to tell.’
‘Not Imperial,’ Calgar corrected him, staring hard. ‘That was once a skull in the middle, Drake, or I know nothing. This was an Adeptus Astartes aquila, the centrepiece of the whole arch. Our own kind built this thing, once upon a time.’
He thought of Tigurius’ findings in the Noctis Sanctorum. The Viridian Consuls were a Chapter of which the Imperium had almost no records remaining, and yet Brother Starn had found a helm of theirs here on Fury. Clearly, the hulk was tied into the fate of the Abyssal Crusade. And somehow the Adeptus Mechanicus had become embroiled in its millennia-old existence also. There were questions and riddles here that were baffling.
Momentarily, he wished that he had kept Brother Tigurius by his side. The Chief Librarian of the Ultramarines was one of the most potent psykers in the Imperium, and a master of historical lore. Calgar missed his counsel, his learning.
But it was bad enough that the Chapter Master was lost to the warp. For the Ultramarines to lose Tigurius also would have been a blow to rock the Chapter to its foundations.
No, he had made the right choice. Tigurius was where he ought to be, where he was needed most. Right now, Marneus Calgar and all those with him were as good as dead.
It was not a sentiment he would ever share with his brethren here on the hulk, but all logical analysis led to the same conclusion. The odds were that he and Fifth would share the fate of the Viridian Consuls and the other twenty-nine lost Chapters of the Abyssal Crusade. They were adrift in the warp, and it was unlikely that they would ever find a way out of it.
But that did not mean that they would stop trying. Even here, on the dark side of the universe, their faith held, their oaths bound them.
He wondered if the Consuls had thought the same, and if so – for how long had they preserved their allegiance to the Emperor in the madness that had engulfed their Chapter?
‘What in the Eye is something like this doing here?’ Drake broke into his thoughts. ‘It looks like it has been transplanted from some planetside installation.’
Chaplain Murtorius was looking closely at the mounded wreckage round the base of the structure, walking under it, Starn’s Terminators making way for him. Rubble streaked with ice that continually melted and refroze lay around their feet. The Chaplain bent and retrieved a dripping fragment of debris. His skull helm dipped. His fist tightened on his crozius. ‘Chapter Master.’
He tossed it to Calgar, who examined it in his turn. It was a stone-carved hand, and it grasped what might have been a bolter. A scroll was sculpted flowing from the muzzle of the weapon, and in good Gothic, the runes spelled Imperator Fidelis.
‘Not words the Ruinous Powers would ever suffer to have uttered.’
‘No.’ Murtorius answered. The Bull seemed grieved. ‘This was once a place revered by those who bore allegiance to the Emperor. I am sure of it. There is a piety here still, like the last echo of a song. Something terrible happened to those who raised this thing, my lord. I feel it in my bones.’
‘The runic inscriptions above are later work, more crudely engraved,’ Magos Fane said, leaning back and letting his limbs fold themselves back within his red robe. ‘They are not in any tongue extant in the Imperium today.’
‘It makes my skin crawl to look at them,’ Murtorius said. ‘I can damn near taste the taint that lies upon them. The inquisitor is right. This place was deliberately defiled.’
Calgar turned away from them and stepped through the gateway. Once again, he felt the impatience rising in him, the desire to confront whatever was at the heart of Fury. For all the subtlety of his mind, he wearied of the speculation. His fingers twitched in the mighty engines of destruction that were the Gauntlets of Ultramar. He longed to light up the mighty fists, and rend some charging enemy limb from limb.
And as he did, he wondered if the impatience and the anger were not wholly his own. There was an unreasoning aspect to them that disturbed him. As though some part of the warp had lit up the fires of his anger and was stoking them.
Throne forbid.
The high-velocity crack of bolter fire lit up his mind as it burst out, shattering the quiet, banishing all his doubts away.
Brother Tersius took up a firing position as Brother Sergeant Gaden examined the inert corpses that stood upright across their path. But though he covered his arc as he ought, he could not help but look across every now and again at Gaden and Unser – the second most senior of the squad – as they examined their dead brethren.
They were eight Adeptus Astartes in antique battleplate, unarmed, simply standing there frozen solid in close-packed drifts of mounded snow and ice. Tersius saw the bonding studs that dotted their armour, the Corvus helms which many of the Chapter veterans of the Ultramarines still sported. But the frozen figures had no power packs on their backs. They had stood here until their armour’s power had run down, and then they had died, still standing, without so much as a knife between them.
It looked like an execution, but the strangest that Tersius had ever encountered. The gelid forms had experienced no violence; their armour was pocked by no bullet hole. It was as if they had simply opted to stand there and die.
Brother Sergeant Gaden was chipping ice from the pauldrons of one of the figures. He stared closely at the result, then Tersius saw his helm shake in puzzlement. He watched his own arc again, angry with himself for his own curiosity, for the snow that degraded the efficiency of his tactical readouts, for the entire foul structure in which his company was now buried. He felt oddly like pulling the trigger of his bolter, merely to have the weapon jump in his hand. To see the fire and light of the muzzle leaping up in his grasp. He blinked inside his helm, fighting the impulse, ashamed of himself for almost having succumbed to it.
And then he saw the shape moving slowly towards him through the shifting curtain of the falling snow. It was large, by human standards and it had an odd, crabwise movement to it. His aiming reticule shot up in his display and automatically locked on at the same time as his eye took it in, and he shifted the muzzle of his bolter slightly to bring it to bear.
‘Possible target, on the move, eighty-six degrees. Watching,’ he said quietly on the squad vox.
His brothers were lying in the snow on either side. At once, Gaden and Unser dropped to the ground.
‘Hold for my word,’ Sergeant Gaden said. ‘We are not to engage unless it is unavoidable.’
The pressure to fire grew in Brother Tersius as he watched the shadow flounder towards them out of the drifts. It disturbed him, this sudden urge to throw up his years of training, his long experience of war. He had seen some neophytes do so in their first battle, but he had years of combat behind him, and he shook his head in his helm, baffled by the impulse, beating it down.
Throne, guide me. Emperor, watch over me. Great Guilliman, let me do thy will, here, now and always.
The prayer steadied him. He drew a breath, and watched as a fellow Space Marine limped into his targeting array, the reticule landing scarlet on him. One of his own – a brother of his own Adeptus. Tersius bit down on the glad laugh that filled his chest.
And, again, he found himself distrusting the emotion – it was as though there were something outside himself leaning on levers which sparked up the key reactions of his psyche. It took all his training to beat them down. He breathed out, steadied his aim, and waited for orders, praying again as he had not prayed since he had first donned battleplate.
The strange Space Marine limped closer. He was dragging one leg, and cradled one arm in the other as though it were injured. His helm was half shattered on his head, the muzzle broken off and dangling by a few wires. His armour was a bleared green colour, faded and pocked with holes and scars, and rimmed with red, the red of fresh-gutted intestines. On one pauldron there was a symbol, hard to make out, but there was a sword emblazoned in the middle of it.
‘Brother,’ Sergeant Gaden called out, ‘hold there and speak to us. Identify – company and Chapter.’
The unknown Space Marine did not halt, but continued to lurch towards them. He let go of his injured arm, and as it fell free of his grasp so the vambrace that covered it fell off into the snow, revealing a glistening, suckered tentacle which writhed up like the head of a snake, dripping green ichor.
‘He is no brother of ours,’ Unser spat.
The approaching figure raised his shattered helm and a tongue licked out of it, a foot long and black. From the steaming hole which might have been a mouth a high, piercing moan issued, one that made Brother Tersius’ blood run cold as it pulsed through his twin hearts. There was in th
at sound such despair, such lost hopelessness, and a hatred beyond madness.
‘Abomination!’ Brother Sergeant Gaden cried, and he opened fire, the bolter leaping up in his fists, the muzzle-flare of the weapon illuminating his snow-covered armour.
A five-round burst peppered the mutant Space Marine’s armour, two rounds whining as they glanced off, but the other three went home, in through the shattered helm. The head of the creature was blown to pieces, the black tongue flung, severed, through the air.
The thing’s tentacle came up and touched the place where its head had been. It limped forward one step, two.
‘Brother Darius,’ Gaden said. ‘Cleanse this thing.’
‘Gladly.’ Brother Darius stood up and aimed his flamer. The jet of promethium spurted out in a stream which thickened as it drew clear of the weapon, bright and boiling. The fire of it slammed into the target, and the headless foe now was a pillar of bright flame, writhing. It staggered forward a few more steps, and then toppled into the snow, casting droplets of burning promethium across the frozen ground. At last its feeble thrashings stopped. There was no sound but for the crackle of the sinking flames.
Something sounded out, high above the heads of the Ultramarines. A piercing wail which echoed even through the falling snow, and seemed to be recast and repeated by the unseen roof of the immense chamber high above them. But it was not one voice alone. Others joined it now in a savage chorus, and the collective keening thickened, becoming a howl which might almost have had words in it, before descending into a bellowing snarl.
‘I have contacts on auspex,’ Brother Unser warned. ‘Multiple contacts two hundred yards to our front. Brothers, we have company, and they are moving in fast.’
‘Captain,’ Sergeant Gaden called up the company vox, ‘One enemy down, and many others converging on my location. We are withdrawing to the entry point, and may need support.’ He paused, and the disgust was thick in his voice. ‘The Great Enemy is here.’
