by Paul Kearney
‘Believe the word of a false Saint over that of the Adeptus Astartes, and that is what happens,’ Calgar snapped, unwilling to be lectured in history by the inquisitor. ‘According to the records I have viewed, your own Ordos approved that blasphemy. Basillius worked hand in glove with the Inquisition.’
Drake bowed slightly. ‘I like to think if I had been alive at the time, I would have asked better questions. And stood over the truth of the answers.’ He sounded bitter, and Calgar believed him.
Drake collected himself. ‘But if we may return to more recent history, my lord, you will be pleased to know that Magos Fane has re-established vox links with his missing colleagues. They are on their way to rejoin us even now.’
‘Did they find anything worth their trouble?’
‘The magos refuses to say. If they were returning having recovered an STC I am sure we would hear of his triumph, so I doubt it.’
‘All that is meaningless now,’ Calgar said quietly. He looked up at the ruins that surrounded him. Once, this had been a structure to inspire awe, to engender faith – much like the Temple of Correction on Macragge.
For a terrible moment, he thought he could imagine that great dome broken, ruinous, left to the elements and forgotten, with mighty Guilliman’s bones lying at the heart of it, mounded in dust.
That would never be. Not so long as a single Ultramarine lived.
There is no need of temples, a faint whisper went in his mind, like a scarlet thread strung taut. Our deeds are worship enough.
He shook his head, banishing the gossamer voice. ‘As soon as we are organised, and Magos Fane’s party has rejoined us, we will move on,’ he said roughly. ‘The last attack was a mere probe. The next will be better coordinated. And the longer we wait, the heavier will be the odds. We must go deeper, Drake. We must smash a way to the heart of this place. It is the only way we will ever have a chance of surviving it.’
‘Agreed. But we need better intelligence. My lord, my men are well trained in subversion and infiltration. They are not Adeptus Astartes, but they are veterans, formidable fighters of their kind.’ The inquisitor looked up at the towering Chapter Master. ‘I intend to send out a scouting party ahead of your own brethren. In fact I would like to lead it.’
‘Getting bored of bringing up the rear, Drake?’
The inquisitor stiffened. ‘I would have you remember, Chapter Master, that we are, so to speak, on my territory now. I have spent decades cataloguing and destroying all aspects of Chaos. I flatter myself that I have a knowledge of the workings of the Great Enemy that rivals your own.’ He tilted his helm to one side. ‘Perhaps it even surpasses it.’ Calgar sensed the smile in Drake’s voice.
‘Well, you do not lack humility.’
‘Self-deprecation has its limits.’
‘Very well. But let us agree that there are no sidelines – no secret agendas. Find me a way to the heart of the hulk, Drake, and make sure it is a path we can all follow.’
The inquisitor bowed again, snow sizzling on the ionised lenses of his helm. ‘I shall leave in a few minutes, vox channel Orion.’
‘I do not need to tell you to be careful, do I, Drake?’
‘We are facing warriors who were once of your Adeptus,’ the inquisitor said gravely. ‘Debased, corrupted, but still formidable. I shall not underestimate them, never fear. I have faced their like before, as have you.’
‘Too many times.’
Calgar watched him go. His men followed him off without a word, and the little group climbed over the half-wrecked end wall of the cathedral nave and then disappeared into the falling snow.
The Ultramarines Chapter Master looked again at the ruined walls around him, thought of the faith they represented, the immense labour it must have taken to set them here. The Consuls had not been corrupted, they had not broken their oaths – not until they had been sent to their doom.
He bowed his head. It was his mission now to destroy them, these lost brothers who were now the worst of all enemies. He hated them. But in his hearts, there was room for a fragment of pity, also.
The missing Adeptus Mechanicus personnel rejoined them soon after. They were a skitarii short – one apparently had fallen into a pit too deep for hope of recovery.
The party had found little of interest, Magos Fane told Calgar, and the scrapcode that had been infesting the binharic aether around them seemed to have receded. The Dark Mechanicus was content to confine itself to the upper levels of Fury. It had engaged Seventh Company, been repulsed, and in the wake of the translation, had withdrawn.
There was more to it than that, Calgar suspected. He did not quite like Magos Fane’s absent manner, as if the tech-priest were only giving him half his attention. Nor did he care for the magos’ quick dismissal of his heretek kin. But there were too many other things to occupy his thoughts for him to dwell much upon it. The upper levels were behind them now – a sterner task lay ahead in the bowels of Fury.
He wondered especially about Brother Fortunus. The Dreadnought would have heard his evacuation order, but would he have had time to make it out? Calgar had ordered Seventh Company to flee the hulk, and Fortunus belonged to Fifth. But Fortunus had been stationed closer to the surface, above a pit he could not negotiate – wholly separated from his company. Calgar had reached out, in the past hours, to no avail. All vox links to the upper levels of the hulk were gone.
He hoped Brother Fortunus had made it out. The hope preyed on his mind, one more thread amid a thousand others.
Calgar clenched his fists. Ever since he had arrived on the hulk he had felt that his normal thought processes were being slowed, prescribed. As though some evanescent force, too nebulous to be grasped, were at work to confuse him. He was missing things, he was sure of it, but the realisation of that fact did not mean that he could refute it. And the anger which burned steady at his core was part of the problem. He knew that too.
Within an hour, the column was ready to move on again. Brother Starn led out, followed by Calgar, his honour guards and Librarian Ulfius. Then came Galenus and the main body of Fifth. The Adeptus Mechanicus and their cargo sleds brought up the rear. On the sleds now were six sets of empty power armour which had been stripped from dead Ultramarines. Their bodies had been laid in a row in the nave of the cathedral and then set alight with promethium fire, as Chaplain Murtorius intoned a Te Deum above the burning corpses. Some rituals had to be maintained, even in straits as desperate as these.
It was by the flickering flames of this pyre that the Ultramarines left the great ruin, and all the while the snow continued to fall silently upon them, mixed with the drifting ashes of their fallen brothers.
Magos Fane walked along amid his followers, leaning on his cog-headed staff of office, his scarlet robe powdered white with snow. He had no features to speak of that could give away his thoughts, nor did his bionic limbs falter as they propelled him onwards. But inside his cybernetically bonded mind, there was a struggle beating as violent as any he had ever known.
They came to the far end of the massive cathedral-chamber at last, and here the wall of it reared up a mile high, with a great rent torn through the middle. It was possible to see now that the chamber walls were the hull of a starship, the ablative armour lying in mounds all around them, along with staggered piles of cabling, rat’s-nests of tangled conduits and masses of smashed plasteel girders that stood up like the ribs of a vast skeleton, three hundred feet high.
‘Chapter Master,’ Drake said over the vox. ‘There are a series of power relays leading off to your left, some forty-eight degrees. Follow them downwards. We are approximately a mile and a half ahead of you. No sign of the enemy. There are a lot of ship systems embedded in the substructure, and all are now active and running. Environmental and gravitic controls for the most part. I see no sign of overwatch cogitators.’
‘Acknowledged, inquisitor,’ Calgar said. ‘Vox is optimal. We will follow your trail. If you meet resistance, do not attempt to fight through it. Exfiltrate at once and rejoin the main body.’
‘I will exercise my own judgement, Lord Calgar. Drake out.’
The column found itself back in the maze of tunnels once more. The temperature rose, and moisture dripped off the armour of the Space Marines as the snow which had accumulated on them melted. The air was thicker, and radiation levels had spiked. Somewhere not too much deeper, a drive system of some sort was operating, and it was running hot, leaking radiation into its surroundings. The readings grew as they advanced.
They had been descending steadily for some hours when Brother Ulfius suddenly tensed, and stood stock-still.
‘My lord,’ he said quietly. ‘I sense something.’
‘What is it?’ Calgar demanded.
Magos Fane came striding up the column, his artificial legs eating up the distance in seconds.
‘Chapter Master, my adjuncts have detected a sudden upsurge in the hulk’s binharic activity. The drives have now powered up to full capacity and the Geller field has been strengthened. It is my opinion–’ he stopped. ‘Can you not feel it?’ he asked softly.
‘He’s right,’ Brother Ulfius said. ‘The immaterium is... thinning – we are pushing at the envelope of its existence. I can feel the hammering of it. The warp claws at Fury, and the hulk is fighting through it, trying to break free.’
‘We are about to re-enter normal space,’ Calgar surmised. On the vox he said, ‘Brothers, prepare for warp translation. Drake, do you read?’
‘I was about to inform you. Radiation levels in the lower levels are now hazardous. If they rise much further they will be too much even for our armour. The hulk will translate in the next few minutes.’
‘Stand fast, and give me a status report once it is done.’
‘My lord, in courtesy I will do so.’ Drake sounded as though he were biting back an angrier retort. Phlegmatic as he was, he did not appreciate taking orders, not even from the Lord of Macragge. Calgar smiled inside his helm. He liked this man, not that he would ever show it. As an inquisitor, Drake held rank close to his own and was no subordinate, but he did not stand on protocol the way others of his kind did. It made him oddly effective.
And then he felt it himself. The onset of the translation, the currents of the warp picking up in tempo, shuddering through his bloodstream, bringing a glow of pain to his temples.
The entire structure around him, the enormous crushing mass of the hulk, seemed to suddenly bear down, to close in and squeeze his perception into a narrow pinpoint of pain.
It passed in a few seconds, but raised the beat of his two hearts until they thundered in his massive chest. Looking around, it seemed for a moment that Librarian Ulfius had moved hundreds of yards away, and was an attenuated silhouette glowing with blue light. The magos elongated into a leaning beanpole of scarlet, the gleam of his alloy knuckles each a tiny sun as they gripped his cog-headed staff.
Calgar saw his own brethren as mere stumps of shadow, hundreds of feet below his gaze, and looking down he saw that he, too had been stretched beyond rational perception, his feet as far away as though he were looking through the wrong end of a binocular lens. It lasted only the blink of an eye, a heartbeat, but the effect made him briefly gag. He bit down on the pain and nausea, this time disdaining the analgesics his battleplate wished to inoculate him with, and stood stone-still until the thing had gone, like a dark cloud passing over, and then it was done.
But something was not right. Though the world seemed a rational place again, and all three dimensions now stood in their proper place, he could still feel the currents of the warp, faint now, but ever-present. The hulk had undergone a translational shift, but they were not yet in real space, not entirely.
‘Brother Ulfius,’ Calgar said, ‘tell me what you sense.’ The Librarian ought to have some idea of what had just happened.
‘We are in something approaching the void, my lord, but we are still so close to the warp that its effects remain. I have not felt this before. It is as though we were balanced between the two.’
‘A border,’ Calgar said.
‘Yes, something like that.’
‘I know where we are,’ Magos Fane said. His voice was dull – different somehow. Were it possible, Calgar would have said that the tech-priest was utterly weary, like a man exhausted by hard labour.
‘I have been in such a place before, many years ago on another mission for my Adeptus. These conditions correspond to those which exist on the rim of the Eye of Terror. The hulk has returned to its origins.’
Calgar absorbed this. If it were true, then the translation had taken them across half the galaxy in an astonishingly short time. And it had placed them on the edge of ruin.
Sixteen
Brother Fortunus let the last remnants of the translation wash over him. He barely registered it in an organic sense, for there was little that was organic remaining to him. The body of the Ultramarines captain that he had been was now a foetal husk cocooned within the sarcophagus of the mighty war engine that stood guard in the access tunnel near the surface of Fury. A Mark IV Castraferrum-pattern Dreadnought, some thirteen feet tall and weighing over a dozen tonnes.
His original orders had been to stand here, and he would do so now until he was told otherwise. When the evacuation order for Seventh had been given, himself included in it, he had tried to obey, hard though it was to walk away from his brothers trapped deep in the core of Fury – even in his previous life, he had always followed his orders to the letter. But he had been too slow. By the time he had marched to the surface entrance of the tunnel, the last Thunderhawk was already soaring into the void. All vox frequencies had died with the departure of the fleet from close orbit.
He was here to stay, like his Chapter Master far below. The only useful thing left for him to do was to follow his last instructions to the letter.
And so he stood here now in the darkness and the dust-tainted thin air of the hulk, waiting for what was to come.
There was movement in the tunnel leading up to the surface. He knew what it was he was facing. He felt no fear – even alone. He had not known it as a captain of the Adeptus Astartes and it was even more foreign to him now, encased in the massive hull which had become his own body.
He loved his Chapter, and he loved his brothers in it. He had not been dead so long as to forget them, and he knew that he was lucky in that. There had been no long, slow sleep for him, before an awakening to a world that had changed beyond recognition. The battle brethren he had commanded in life were still here, still needed him, and he would lie in ashes before he let them down.
The Codex spoke of loyalty as one of the great binding forces of the Imperium, perhaps the greatest, and Brother Fortunus, who had once been captain of Fifth Company, had
no quarrel with that.
So when the enemy came advancing down the tunnel that he occupied, swift in their arrogance, moving fast with little thought as to what might lie ahead, he planted the splayed feet of the great war engine he inhabited on the plating beneath him, took stock of the tactical readouts that lit up his mind, and uttered a swift prayer to the Emperor, and to Roboute Guilliman, his long-distant genetic father.
Into thy hands, I commend my spirit.
Then he let them come close, and opened fire.
The skitarii burned up first, a whole maniple of them chopped to pieces by the storm bolter in the palm of his left hand. He laid down a barrier of fire from his flamer, then shifted location as the Codex taught, backing up the tunnel fifty yards, in time to avoid the frag grenades and the following missiles from the sagitarii. He felt the concussion as they went off, as a man might feel the wind on his bare skin, and held fire in the smoke and the billowing dust, knowing that their auspex must be as blind as his own. When the melta-gun streaked out its beam of molten annihilation he was already twenty yards beyond, backing up steadily. He threw out a couple of heavy smoke grenades from his launchers, then waited. The seconds ticked past.
There is no courage without honour. There is no honour that can be bought without courage.
The tunnel he was in creaked and shifted under his great weight. Sometimes it was almost possible to forget that the hulk was not an asteroid, complete of itself, but a mere conglomeration of broken ships. It was fragile, in a sense. It groaned and moved the way an ancient wooden vessel might, sailing on the seas of old Terra. It had endured for thousands of years, but that did not mean that it was entirely stable. Brother Fortunus factored that into his tactical appreciation, and took up his second position.
A noise ahead, the rattle of tracks on the plating of the floor, like heavy vehicles. The auspex reached out and was largely foiled by the silken metal dust that choked the air, but for a second it managed to light up an image of things moving that were broad and heavy, their weight creaking the deckplates of the tunnel.
