A rumble like distant thunder rolled through the floor beneath Artegall’s feet. Carthach seemed suddenly excited. “Do you know what that is?” he asked. The monster didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he activated the controls in the bone armrest of Artegall’s throne. The vaulted ceiling of the Tactical Chancelorium—which formed the pinnacle of the Command Tower—began to turn and unscrew, revealing a circular aperture in the roof that grew with the corkscrew motion of the Tower top.
The Alpha Legionnaire shook his head in what could have been mock disappointment.
“Missed it: that was your Slaughterhorn’s defence lasers destroying the strike cruisers you ordered back under their protection. Poetic. Or perhaps just tactically predictable. Ah, now look at this.”
Carthach pointed at the sky and with the Chaos Space Marine’s bolter muzzle still buried in the back of his skull, Artegall felt compelled to look up also. To savour the reassuring bleakness of his home world’s sky for what might be the last time.
“There they are, see?”
Artegall watched a meteorite shower in the sky above: a lightshow of tiny flashes. “I brought the Crimson Tithe back to finish off any remaining frigates or destroyers. Don’t want surviving Crimson Consuls running to the Aurora Chapter with my strategies and secrets; the Auroras and their share of Guilliman’s seed may be my next target. Anyway the beautiful spectacle you see before you is no ordinary celestial phenomenon. This is the Crimson Consuls Sixth Company coming home, expelled from the Crimson Tithe’s airlocks and falling to Carcharias. The battle-barge I need—another gift for the Warmaster. It has the facilities on board to safely transport your seed to the Eye of Terror, where it is sorely needed for future Black Crusades. Who knows, perhaps one of your line will have the honour of being the first to bring the Warmaster’s justice to Terra itself? In Black Legion armour and under a traitor’s banner, of course.”
Artegall quaked silent rage, the Chapter Master’s eyes dropping and fixing on a spot on the wall behind the throne.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Carthach informed him. “As I have all along, Crimson Consul. You’re pinning your hopes on Captain Borachio. Stationed in the Damocles Gulf with the Third and Fifth Companies… Did you find my reports convincing?”
Artegall’s eyes widened.
“Captain Borachio and his men have been dead for two years, Elias.”
Artegall shook his head.
“The Crimson Consuls are ended. I am Borachio,” the Alpha revealed, soaking up the Chapter Master’s doom, “and Carthach… and Alpharius.” The captain bent down to execute the final, astrotelepathically communicated move on Artegall’s beautifully carved Regicide board. Blind Man’s Mate.
Artegall’s legs faltered. As the Crimson Consul fell to his knees before Quetzal Carthach and the throne, Artegall mouthed a disbelieving, “Why?”
“Because we play the Long Game, Elias…” the Alpha Legionnaire told him.
Artegall hoped that the Black Legion’s attention span didn’t extend half as far as their Alpha Legion compatriots. The Space Marine threw his head back, cutting his scalp against the bolter’s muzzle. The weapon smacked the Chaos Space Marine in the throat—the Black Legion savage still staring up into the sky, watching the Crimson Consuls burn in the upper atmosphere.
Artegall surged away from the stunned Chaos Space Marine and directly at Carthach. The Alpha Legion Marine snarled at the sudden, suicidal surprise of it all, snatching for his pistol.
Artegall awkwardly changed direction, throwing himself around the other side of the throne. The Black Legion Space Marine’s bolter fire followed him, mauling the throne and driving the alarmed Carthach even further back. Artegall sprinted for the wall, stopping and feeling for the featureless trigger that activated the door of the Chapter Master’s private armoury. As the Chaos Space Marine’s bolter chewed up the Chancelorium wall, Artegall activated the trigger and slid the hidden door to one side. He felt hot agony as the Chaos Space Marine’s bolter found its mark and two rounds crashed through his ruined armour.
Returned to his knees, the Chapter Master fell in through the darkness of the private armoury and slid the reinforced door shut from the inside. In the disappearing crack of light between the door and wall, Artegall caught sight of Quetzal Carthach’s face once more dissolve into a wolfish grin.
Throwing himself across the darkness of the armoury floor, the felled Crimson Consul heaved himself arm over agonising arm through the presentation racks of artificer armour: racks from which serfs would ordinarily select the individual plates and adornments and dress the Chapter Master at his bequest. Artegall didn’t have time for such extravagance. Crawling for the rear of the armoury, he searched for the only item that could bring him peace. The only item seemingly designed for the single purpose of ending Quetzal Carthach, the deadliest in the Chapter’s long history of deadly enemies. Artegall’s master-crafted boltgun.
Reaching for the exquisite weapon, its crimson-painted adamantium finished in gold and decorated with gemstones from Carcharias’ rich depths, Artegall faltered. The bolt-rounds had done their worst and the Chapter Master’s fingers failed to reach the boltgun in its cradle. Suddenly there was sound and movement in the darkness. The hydraulic sigh of bionic appendages thumping into the cold marble with every step.
“Baldwin!” Artegall cried out. “My weapon, Baldwin… the boltgun.”
The Chamber Castellan slipped the beautiful bolter from its cradle and stomped around to his master. “Thank the primarch you’re here,” Artegall blurted.
In the oily blackness of the private armoury, the Chapter Master heard the thunk of the priming mechanism. Artegall tensed and then fell limp. He wasn’t being handed the weapon: it was being pointed at him through the gloom. Whatever had possessed the minds of his Neophyte recruits in the Carcharian underhive had also had time to worm its way into the Chamber Castellan, whose responsibility it was to accompany the recruitment parties on their expeditions. Without the training or spiritual fortitude of an Astartes, Baldwin’s mind had been vulnerable. He had become a Regicide piece on a galactic board, making his small but significant move, guided by an unknown hand. Artegall was suddenly glad of the darkness. Glad that he couldn’t see the mask of Baldwin’s kindly face frozen in murderous blankness.
Closing his eyes, Elias Artegall, Chapter Master and last of the Crimson Consuls, wished the game to end.
HEART OF RAGE
James Swallow
In the blood-warm gloom, amid the shrouding, cloying thickness of the air, the heart beat on. A clock ticking towards death, a ceaseless rhythm echoing through his body. A cadence that inched him, pulse by throbbing pulse, towards the raging madness of the Thirst.
Engorged with vital fluid, the heart pressed against the inside of his ribcage, trip-hammer impacts growing faster and faster, reaching out, threatening to engulf him. His every sense rang with the force of it, the rushing in his ears, his arrow-sharp sight fogged and hazy, the scent of old rust thick in his nostrils… And the taste.
Oh yes, the taste… Congealing upon his tongue, the heavy meat-tang like burned copper, the wash across his fangs. The aching, delirious need to drink deep.
Clouds of ruby and darkness billowed about him, surrounded him, dragged him roaring into the void, damned and destined to surrender to it. These were the enemies that he and all his kindred could never defeat, the unslakable Red Thirst and its terrible twin, the berserker fury of the Black Rage. These were the legacy of The Flaw, the foes he would face for eternity, beyond all others, for they were trapped within him. Woven like threads of poison through the tapestry of his DNA, the bane-gift of his lord and master ten thousand years dead.
Sanguinius. Primarch and noblest among the Emperor’s sons. The Great Angel, the Brightest One. The Shockwave of the master’s murder, millennia gone yet forever resonant, thundered in his veins. The power of the primarch’s angelic splendour and matchless strength filled him… And yet the other face of that golden c
oin was dark, dark as rage, dark as fury, darker than any hell-spawned curse upon creation.
Their boon and their blight. The malevolent mirror of the beast inside every brother of the Blood Angels Chapter.
Brother-Codicier Garas Nord knelt upon the chapel’s flagstones, the only sound about him the whisper of servo-skulls high overhead, watching the lone Space Marine with indifferent attention.
Hunched forwards in prayer, his broad frame was alone before the simple iron altar. Wan light cast by biolumes cast hollow colour over his face. It glittered across the sullen indigo of his battle armour and the gold chasing of the metal skull upon his chest. The glow caught the deep, rich red of his right shoulder pauldron and the sigil of his Chapter, a winged drop of crimson blood. It glittered upon the matrix of fine crystal about his bowed head, where the frame of a psychic hood rose from his gorget—and it caught in accusing shadows the faint trembling of Nord’s gauntleted hands, where they met and crossed in the shape of the Imperial aquila.
Nord’s eyes were closed, but his senses were open. His hands tightened into fists. The ominous echoes of the dream still clung to him, defeating his every attempt to banish them.
He released a sigh. Visions were no stranger to him. They were as much a tool to his kind as the hood or the force axe sheathed upon his back. Nord had The Sight, the twisted blessing of psionic power, and with it he fought alongside his brothers in the Adeptus Astartes, to bolster them upon the field of conflict. In his time he had seen many things, great horrors spilling into the world from the mad realms of the warp, forms that pulled at reason with their sheer monstrosity. Darkness and hate… And once in a while, a glimpse of something. A possibility. A future.
It had saved his life on Ixion, when prescience turned his head, a split second before a las-bolt cut through the air. He still wore the burn scar from that near-hit across his cheek, livid against his face.
But this was different. No flash of reflex, just a dream, over and over. He could not help but wonder—was it also a warning?
His kind… They had many names—telekine, witchkin, warp-touched, psyker—but beyond it all he was something more. A Son of Sanguinius. A Blood Angel. Whatever visions of fate his mind conjured for him, his duty came before them all.
If the spirit of Sanguinius were to beckon him towards a death, then he prayed that it would be a noble sacrifice; an ending not in the wild madness of the Black Rage, but one forged in honour. A death worthy of his primarch, worthy of one who had perished protecting Holy Terra and the Emperor himself from the blades of arch-traitors.
“Nord.” He sensed the new presence in the chapel, the edges of a hard, disciplined psyche, a thing forged like sword-blade steel.
The Codicier opened his eyes and looked up at the statue of the Emperor behind the altar. The Emperor looked down, impassive and silent. The eyes of the carving seemed to track Nord as he bowed before it. It offered only mute counsel, but that was just and right. For now, whatever troubled the Codicier was his burden to carry.
Nord rose to find Brother-Sergeant Kale approaching, his boots snapping against the stone floor. He sketched a salute and Kale nodded in return.
“Sir,” he began. “Forgive me. I hoped to take a moment of reflection before we embarked upon the mission proper.”
Kale waved away his explanation. “Your tone suggests you did not find it, Garas.”
Nord gave his battle-brother a humourless smile. “Some days peace is more difficult to find than others.”
“I know exactly what you mean.” Kale’s hand strayed to his chin and he rubbed the rasp of white-grey stubble there with red-armoured fingers. “I doubt I have had a moment’s quiet since we embarked.” He gestured towards the chapel doors and Nord walked with him.
The Codicier studied the other man. They were contrasts in colour and shade, the warrior and the psyker.
Sergeant Brenin Kale’s wargear was crimson from head to toe, dressed with honour-chains of black steel and gold detailing, purity seals and engravings that listed his combat record. Under one arm he carried his helmet, upon it the white laurel of a veteran. He wore a chainsword in a scabbard along the line of his right arm, the tungsten fangs of the blade grey and sharp. His face was pale and pitted, the mark of radiation damage, and he sported a queue of wiry hair from a top-knot; and yet there was a patrician solidity to his aspect, a strength and nobility that time and war had not yet diminished.
Nord shared Kale’s build and stature, as did every Son of Sanguinius, the bequest of the gene-seed implantation process each Adeptus Astartes endured as an initiate. But there the similarity ended. Where Kale was sallow of face, Nord’s skin was rust-red like the rad-deserts of Baal Secundus, and the laser scar was mirrored on his other cheek by the electro-tattoo of a single blood droplet, caught as if falling from the corner of his eye. Nord’s hairless scalp was bare except for the faint tracery of a molly-wire matrix just beneath the flesh, implanted to improve connectivity with his psychic hood. And his armour was a uniform blue everywhere except his shoulder, contrasting against the red of the rest of his battle-brothers. The colour set him apart, showed him for what he was beneath the plasteel and ceramite. Witchkin. Psyker. A man without his peace.
Within the chapel, one might have thought they stood inside a church upon any one of billions of hive-worlds across the Imperium. If not for the banners of the Adeptus Astartes and the Navy, the place would be no different from all those other basilicas: sacred places devoted to the worship of the God-Emperor of Humanity. But this church lay deep in the decks of the frigate Emathia, protected by vast iron ribs of hull-metal, nestled between the accelerator cores of the warship’s primary and secondary lance cannons.
Nord left the sanctum behind, and—so he hoped—his misgivings, walking in easy lockstep with his sergeant. Half-human servitors and worried crew serfs scattered out of their way, clearing a path for the Space Marines.
“We left the warp a few hours ago,” offered Kale. “The squad is preparing for deployment.”
“I’ll join them,” Nord began, but Kale shook his head.
“I want you with me. I have been summoned to the bridge.” A sourness entered the veteran’s tone. “The tech-priest wishes to address me personally before we proceed.”
“Indeed? Does he think he needs to underline our mission to us once again? Perhaps he believes he has not repeated it enough.” Nord was silent for a moment. “I may not be the best choice to accompany you. I believe our honoured colleague from the Adeptus Mechanicus finds my presence… discomforting.”
Kale’s lip curled. “That’s one reason I want you there. Keep the bastard off balance.”
“And the other?”
“In case I feel the need to kill him.”
Nord allowed himself a smirk. “If you expect me to dissuade you, brother-sergeant, you have picked the wrong man.”
“Dissuade me?” Kale snorted. “I expect you to assist!”
The gallows humour of the moment faded; to casually discuss the murder of a High Priest of the Magus Biologis, even in rough jest, courted grave censure. But the eminent magi gathered dislike to him with such effortless ease, it was hard to imagine that the man wanted anything else than to be detested. Scant weeks they had been aboard the Emathia on its journey to this light-forsaken part of the galaxy, and in that time the Exalted Tech-Priest Epja Xeren had shown only aloof disrespect for both the Blood Angels and the frigate’s hardy officers.
Nord wondered why Xeren had not simply used one of the Mechanicum’s own starships for this operation, or employed his cadre’s tech-guard. Like many factors surrounding this tasking, it sat uneasily with the Codicier; he sensed the same concern in Kale’s emotional aura.
“This duty…” said Kale in a low voice, his thoughts clearly mirroring those of his battle-brother, “it has the stink of subterfuge about it.”
Nord gave a nod. “And yet, all the diktats from the Adeptus Terra were in order. Despite his manner, the priest is valued by the I
mperial Council.”
“Civilians,” grunted the sergeant. “Politicians! Sometimes I wonder if arrogance is the grease upon their wheels.”
“They might say the same of us. That we Adeptus Astartes consider ourselves to be their betters.”
“Just so,” Kale allowed. “The difference is, where we are concerned, that fact is true.”
Emathia’s ornate bridge was a vaulted oval cut from planes of brass and steel, dominated by great lenses of crystal ranging down towards the frigate’s bow. Below the deck, in work-pits among the ship’s cogitators, hunchbacked servitors hissed to one another, busying themselves with the running of the vessel. Officers in blue-black tunics walked back and forth, overseeing their work.
The ship’s commander, resplendent in a red-trimmed duty jacket, turned from a gas-lens viewer and gave the Astartes a bow.
“Sergeant Kale, Brother Nord. We’re very close now. Come.” Captain Hyban Gorolev beckoned them towards him.
Nord liked the man; Gorolev had impressed him early on with his grasp of Adeptus Astartes protocol and the careful generosity with which he commanded Emathia’s crew. Nord had encountered Navy men who ruled their ships through fear and intimidation. Gorolev was quite unlike that; he had a fatherly way to him, a mixture of sternness tempered by sincerity that bonded his crew through mutual loyalty. Nord saw in the captain the mirror of brotherhood with his kindred.
“The derelict is near,” he was saying. Gorolev’s sandy-coloured face was fixed in a frown. “Interference continues to defeat the scrying of our sensors, however. There is wreckage. Evidence of plasma fire…” He trailed off.
Nord sensed the man’s apprehension but said nothing, catching sight of a readout thick with lines of text in Gothic script. He saw recitations that suggested organic matter out there in the void. Unbidden, the Codicier’s gaze snapped up and he stared out through the viewports. The ghost of a cold, undefined emotion began to gather at the base of his thoughts.
Victories of the Space Marines Page 15
