[Imperial Guard 07] - Cadian Blood

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  “Dying with dignity is awfully important to the Cap,” Darrick interjected.

  “Shut up, Taan.”

  “Shutting up, sir.”

  “Listen,” Jevrian said, reaching up to lower Tionenji’s pistol with his brutishly large hand. “It’s not frenzon or satrophine, we clear? Throne in flames, don’t we have a job to do? There’s still a war on, last time I checked. It’s just a cocktail of “slaught with a little downer to stay sharp. Reflex juice.”

  The captain let it slide. As the command team moved on, Jevrian walked next to Thade.

  “That was some fine loyalty you showed me there, hero. Next time the Garadeshi has his gun pointed at your face, I might not leap to your defence.”

  “Get over it,” Thade said. “You were in the wrong then, too.”

  “I’ll remember that.” Jevrian fell back into line with his Kasrkin. “I’ll remember that, captain.”

  Seth was hearing the voice with astonishing clarity now.

  And that was the problem. It was coming from everywhere now, from the dust on the ground, from the bloodstains on the walls, from the pores of his sweating skin.

  The inquisitor trailed his every step now. Seth knew what this was about — they needed him to find the source of the voice. It was obvious. But as Thade’s small army descended down the wide stone stairs into the undercroft, he knew they were setting their hopes on a false path. He couldn’t make out any sense of place or direction in the voice’s ululating scream. Even with his senses opened wide to the hidden world, all he could feel was the illusory sensation of unseen fingernails scratching lightly at his mind.

  He began to wonder after a while if the feeling was really just an illusion. A taste appeared in his mouth, raw and rancid and tingling on his tongue like burning copper. He was stronger than this. He knew it. He could listen for the voice and remain untainted. Caius did, didn’t he? Zaur had?

  Seth placed one foot in front of the other, at times shambling forward like one of the plague-slain and remaining upright only by gripping his black staff. He felt their eyes on him… Thade’s, Caius’, the bastard Jevrian’s.

  They didn’t care if he died. Whatever it took to get their prize. Whatever it took to reach the crashed ship. Here he was, swallowing the taste of blood and trying not to choke on it, while they silently willed him on with smiles on their faces.

  He could, he realised, kill them if he wished. Within that realisation was a flare of shame, quickly quenched in Seth’s rising anger. Cadian Blood, the fuel of the Imperium… Born to die in service to the Throne. It was laughable, Seth realised. Laughable and grossly wrong.

  Damn the Throne. The Throne was a meat-grinding engine feeding on the souls of those that wasted their lives worshipping it. Damn the Throne. To the Eye with all of them for wishing me dead.

  They were in a vault with a ceiling so low many of the taller soldiers had to slouch as they walked. It helped the popular opinion that the entire cathedral, raised over several decades of toil by tens of thousands of workers, was thrown together more by faith than sensible design.

  As Seth passed between rows of stone sarcophagi, each one adorned with golden decoration and bearing long-faded names carved into the stone, the Cadians detected a curious noise.

  “You hear that?” Thade asked Caius.

  The inquisitor nodded, gesturing to the sarcophagus closest to Seth’s trailing coat. As Thade passed it, he heard…

  — something inside, something made of dry bones, furiously scratching to get out —

  …something within. An eerie sound, like vermin running over stone.

  “Tell me that’s the rats,” he said to Caius, loudly enough for the men nearby to hear.

  “It’s the rats,” the inquisitor replied, not looking back.

  From that point on, Tionenji followed Seth with his laspistol drawn.

  The Cadians had been within the monastery for approximately three hours when the voice addressed Seth by name.

  “Why are you smiling?” Thade asked him immediately. Seth blanked his face and looked at the captain while they walked. The false pity on Thade’s face sickened him so powerfully he had to tense his stomach and force it not to rebel.

  “Nothing,” he said at last.

  “You’re looking bad, Seth. Do you need to rest for a while?”

  “No rest.” Caius shoved Seth forward with the palm of his hand on the psyker’s spine, right between the shoulder blades. Seth drooled as he staggered on. He’d been about to say yes. Been about to mention that the voice was calling his name now.

  Thade moved closer to Caius as the troops walked through a tunnel lit by dim strip lighting running off one of the forgotten power generators in the city-sized monastery. This, too, was unnerving. The Cadians were used to Solthane as a city devoid of power.

  “This is killing him,” the captain whispered.

  “This will kill us all,” Caius replied in a tone that brooked no further comment. The inquisitor wondered if Thade had really considered the sanctioned psyker’s chances of survival after all. Either way, now was not the time for sentimentality. Now was the time to shut up and serve.

  From up ahead, where the tunnel branched into a T-junction, Lieutenant Horlan voxed back to the main force.

  “We’ve got some chanting up here. The tunnel splits north and south and leads into attached chambers. We’ve got chanting coming from the south side. Silence from the north.”

  Caius stared at the back of Seth’s head as the sanctioned psyker shivered in the cold air. He seemed to be listening to something only he could hear.

  “We go south,” the inquisitor said. Thade voxed the order to Horlan, and the units closed together once more, catching up with their scouts.

  The chanting turned out to be the dregs of some plague cult lost in the darkness of the catacomb maze. The 88th squads stormed in, opening fire and cutting down the handful of heretics as they crouched down for their evening meal.

  Several soldiers spat on the corpses as they passed on once the fighting was done, disgusted to see how the heretics had been feasting on the bodies of their own dead. They were but the first of several splintered, isolated gangs of mindless pilgrims lost down in the dark. Each one fell before the guns of the Imperials, and the 88th ventured deeper and deeper through subterranean burial vaults, storage chambers, habitation wings and abandoned ritual halls. None of these had been used in thousands of years except for the recent deprivations of the scavenging heretics.

  “We’re in the real catacombs now,” Thade said at one point, running his metal hand across the wall of a chamber.

  “How do you know?” asked Caius.

  Thade tapped the wall with his knuckles. “Stone. Not marble. This is cheap and serviceable, probably never meant to be seen by any pilgrims even when the temple was still growing. What? Don’t look at me like that. Just because I’m a soldier doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”

  “I’m beginning to forget what sunlight feels like,” muttered Darrick. He held a lamp-pack in one hand, panning it around the dark chamber. Power was sporadic in the undervaults, and the ceiling lightglobes were off more often than on.

  “It’s only been six hours,” Jevrian said. “Grow a backbone.”

  “It’s been nine,” Thade said, holding his wrist chronometer within Darrick’s circle of illumination.

  “I count seven hours and fifty,” Kel piped up. More responses came. Not a single chron agreed with another.

  “This can’t be good,” Darrick commented.

  “Move,” called Caius. “Time displacement is a common effect of warp distortion. Just keep moving.”

  “Oh,” Darrick muttered. “Well, that’s fine, then. Silly me for worrying.” Grin in place, Darrick expected Thade to tell him to shut up. He found the fact the captain remained silent to be more disconcerting than time itself playing around.

  Typhus wrenched his scythe clear and the Raven Guard sank to the ground. It had been a brief fight: brief but deliciou
sly satisfying. Blood hissed and bubbled on the Herald’s blade, cooking black on the surface of the psychically-charged metal.

  Brief. Satisfying. But costly. The Raven Guard had swooped down all too literally, striking from the air as they descended on jump-packs with howling thrusters. Chainswords sang and bolters barked at close range as the Astartes butchered one another in a savage brawl.

  The black-armoured Astartes had been outnumbered three to one, but the advantage of surprise counted for much. Typhus stared through the Y-shaped visor of his gory, horned helm. Death Guard, their cracked armour the colour of gangrene, lay across the landing site. Men (or beings that had once been men and still maintained roughly human form) that had stood alongside the Herald for millennia, lay cleaved by Imperial chainblades or burst open by bolter fire.

  Typhus felt no emotion at seeing this. He was capable of no emotional sensation that even vaguely approached something a human would comprehend. What he felt was hollow, the absence of emotion. His thoughts plumbed this vacant space within his mind, searching the void, finding it chilling and almost fascinating where his emotions once resided.

  A plague on these accursed sons of Corax in their black armour. Their guerrilla assaults had held the Death Guard’s advance for too long.

  The momentary introspection passed, and Typhus took a Raven Guard head with a sweep of his scythe. Picking up the black helm, he shook the head free and stamped on it, crushing it to blood-and-bone paste under his boot.

  “We honour our enemies,” the Herald growled, and vomited a stream of bloated, sticky flies through his narrow visor into the empty helmet in his hands. He tossed the writhing mass onto the headless corpse at his feet, letting the flesh-eating flies spill across the body and seek openings in the deactivated power armour.

  The final insult. The gene-seed of these fallen Astartes could never be recovered by the Imperium. This last thought stirred something deep and sludge-thick within the recesses of the Herald’s mind. The Raven Guard still suffered today from their near extermination ten thousand years before. To deny them the genetic legacy of their primarch now brought a smile to the Herald’s lips. His emotions might have decayed long ago, but he was forever delighted by both vengeance and cruelty — especially when the two mixed.

  The Death Guard, minus half their initial landing force, moved on shortly after, leaving the flesh-flies of the Destroyer Hive to finish their meal.

  The vessel, what remained of it at least, was an Astartes battle-barge. This ancient spaceborne fortress lay in pieces, the largest sections of hull still bone white and emerald green in the XIV Legion’s original colours, unstained by the years of warp-corruption that had tainted the Terminus Est and the armour of the Death Guard themselves. The taint was insidious rather than obvious, but no less true.

  Here and there on ridged sheets of exposed hull metal, black marks showed where the ship had ploughed through the atmosphere on its death dive, before gouging this savage cleft in the rock of the world soon to be named Kathur.

  Silence reigned within the shattered ship. The crew, Astartes, servitors and Legion serfs alike, had long since mouldered to bone and dust.

  Only a single soul claimed anything akin to life here.

  It waited in the silence, screaming soundlessly, knowing its hour of freedom had finally come.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Cadian Blood

  Beneath the catacombs

  It defied their expectations.

  Seven hours of trekking through the monastery, and they’d found it. Seth no longer even needed to lead the way; Caius was all too aware of the force of the voice’s pull as he made his way through the catacombs. Impossible to ignore, its intensity made it increasingly difficult to reach out of his own mind, and he felt inexorably drawn deeper into the subterranean labyrinth.

  All notions of needing excavator equipment were banished from thought. All images of the great ship blown to a million pieces and seeing the impressive wreckage in an underground cavern were purged from imaginations. The truth was both much more logical to understand and much more uncomfortable to behold.

  The Aggrieved wasn’t buried in the rock of Kathur’s crust beneath the foundations of the monastery. It was the foundations of the monastery.

  The Cadians became aware immediately when the deepest tunnels of the catacombs all appeared to be walled with metal instead of stone. It was strikingly obvious, as the carved rock passageways gave way to corridors of riveted iron and black steel; it was clear to all who laid eyes upon it that they were entering the halls of an Imperial ship.

  A very old Imperial ship, it had to be said. But one of Standard Template Construct design, and therefore, timeless — the design still in use in new vessels today.

  Osiron could scarcely believe what his photoreceptors were showing him.

  “They made the lowest levels of their fledgling cathedral link to these corridors,” his metallic voice rang out, echoing weirdly down the spaceship’s wide hallways. “This is… blasphemous. Such a violation of the Mechanicum’s treasured lore. Such an unholy waste of power and knowledge.”

  “The blasphemy was committed before the vessel even crashed, tech-priest,” Caius said softly. “And after.”

  “The blasphemy against the Emperor, yes. I speak of blasphemy against the Cult Mechanicus of Mars, and the Omnissiah.”

  “The Omnissiah? I thought your Machine-God was the God-Emperor,” Darrick cut in. “You just dressed him differently.”

  Osiron’s crimson hood moved in a gesture that may or may not have been indicative of a nod. “All this knowledge,” he said again, stroking metal fingers across the vessel’s internal skin. “All this stolen power.”

  “Tainted by heresy,” Caius said.

  Now Osiron definitely nodded, conceding the point. The vessel may have been close to the peak of Mechanicus ingenuity, but the tech-adepts of forge world Mars wished no truck with the touch of Chaos. Tainted was tainted. Lost was lost.

  “I’d expected an Archenemy vessel to be more… obvious,” Darrick said. “This is bad enough — and how in the Great Eye are these wall lights still on? — but it looks just like one of our ships.”

  “We are in the upper decks and have not penetrated far,” Osiron reminded them all. “And when the Aggrieved fell to the surface, its corruption from its crew’s heresy was still fresh. This ship died before Chaos could worm all the way through it.”

  “No,” Caius said, goading Seth forward. “This ship is riddled with the Archenemy’s touch. I feel it clearly.”

  “As do I,” Seth spoke for the first time in hours. His tongue was thick in his mouth, and slimy strings of saliva stretched between his chattering teeth.

  “Seth,” Thade began.

  “Seth,” the psyker replied, “has been dead for some time now.”

  The entity dwelling within the wreckage of the Aggrieved had reached out to the sanctioned psyker as the Cadians descended. It was a trifling matter to stir Seth’s thoughts into dwelling on rebellion, bitterness and disloyalty.

  At least, at first. Before the final blow that killed Seth and allowed the entity to wear the psyker’s body, there had been much to do and a surprising amount of resistance to doing it.

  The entity had stirred these dark thoughts within the thin, weak, mortal soup that formed Seth’s consciousness. And at first it had been easy, the suggestions of emotion and thought blending seamlessly with Seth’s own brain function. He was an outcast among his people — thoughts of this forever rode high in his consciousness — and amplifying his loneliness and hatred of rejection was a simple matter, the merest of psychic tweaks. The entity probed with invisible fingers, tasted the surface pain, and flavoured it a touch darker, a touch angrier, minute by minute.

  Disguising this gentle manipulation from the other psychically-gifted member of the Imperial coterie was no difficult feat. The entity at the edge of Seth’s mind knew that its own psychic beacon, the endless silent scream, was clouding the other human’s per
ceptions.

  It did not know Caius was an inquisitor, and had no frame of reference for the term, as the title had not been coined in any significant way in the age when the entity had truly existed in the flesh. Even had it known the meaning of the title and the formidable skills of those that bore it, the entity would not have been troubled. Its powers far eclipsed those of the approaching mortals.

  What it needed now was flesh. It could not rebuild itself without flesh; lots of flesh, blood, sinew and the other meats that made up the human form. It had woken, and the psychic pangs of its rebirth manifested as the plague, a cry for aid from its distant brethren. But now… now it needed flesh. Birthing the curse had left it weak and lingering on the edge of slumber. Finally, after weeks of regeneration, it was ready once more.

  Yet its manipulations of Seth’s mind began to snap back, repressed and refused by the mortal whose skull the entity was trying to claim.

  What are you doing? the mortal had asked. Seth melted back into his own thoughts, reaching for the cancerous taint taking hold behind his eyes.

  What intrusion is this? Who are you?

  The entity saw how the mortal manifested itself out of its meaty shell; a being of silver light with eyes of violet fire.

  “I am the death of Kathur,” the entity had replied. It also took psychic form now, within the human’s psychic perception. A bulky, swollen figure with white armour that somehow writhed in a million little movements. Seth looked closer — the armour, despite being Astartes in shape and style, was formed of fat, wriggling maggots.

  You are Death Guard, Seth had said.

  “I was. For my loyalty to the Grandfather and the pain I inflicted upon the servants of the False Emperor, I was raised above the Legion.”

  As was the Traveller. Seth was serene as he spoke, as though he were idly contemplating some matter of minor curiosity rather than the presence of a daemon within his mind. You are kin to the Traveller.

  “I know no Traveller,” it said.