by Guy Haley
The creature in the pod was autonomous in every way, except when it was not. It was natively cunning, an individual in its own right, but not a thing of will unless it was needed to be. Contradictions to the human mind, but not to the hive.
Moist sensor pits as sophisticated as any Imperial augur scried the Splendid Pinion. A calculating mind observed the ship in multiple spectra, and judged it a worthwhile target.
In truth it was all the subcreatures together – the pod, its subsystem beasts and the cargo it carried – that made the decision to vent a portion of the pod’s meagre stocks of propellant. Gas puffed from orifices along the pod’s flank, sending it spinning along a random-seeming trajectory resembling the tumble of harmless debris. Chromatic cells on the surface flickered to match the colour of the Red Scar void. Counter-augur creatures encysted in the pod’s skin digested themselves, their electromagnetic screams sending out a cloud of obfuscating radiation on all frequencies. Silently, stealthily, the pod moved towards the Splendid Pinion, tracking the metal ship as it pulled away from the debris cloud and made its way to safe translation distance.
The pod’s journey was a one-time chance, but it was one of millions. It was disposable, as all creatures in the hive fleets were. The mere act of fulfilling its purpose guaranteed its death. The component animals of the vessel did not care for themselves. Though several were capable of doing so, having been derived from sentient gene stock, their potential for self-preservation was suppressed psychically and chemically. They were mind-slaved, devoted to the Great Devourer in the same way a man’s fingernail is devoted to his hand.
Gunfire strobed the void as anti-missile batteries locked onto pieces of shell and muscle spinning through the void, atomising them in bright bursts of radiant particles. The pod corrected its course, moving away from the thicker clusters of wreckage, taking care not to move at all like the smattering of tyranid torpedo spines streaking directly towards the prey ship. Invisible behind its baffles, the pod sailed unharmed through soundless explosions.
A separate, distended brain-creature housed in a cyst deep in the pod’s bony armour calculated the precise speed needed to penetrate the ship’s void shields. Too fast, and the pod would trigger the displacement response in the energy field, and be sent into the warp where it would be annihilated. Too slow, and the pod would be outpaced by its prey. More precious propellant gases were expended. The pod slowed. Its path became more certain, a parabola that brought it up and under the vessel towards the crags of the ship’s keel towers.
A soapy ripple on the skin of space marked the pod’s position as it punched through the void shield. This was the point of highest danger. The vigilant machine-spirits of the vessel might note the anomaly. Now the pod’s camouflage was a liability. Not seeing what caused the disturbance in the field, the machines could alert the prey within their dead metal ship. Detection, if it occurred, could not be helped. Countless infiltration organisms had died performing the exact same manoeuvre, and countless more would. The hive fleet shed them like a human sheds skin cells. Successful infiltration was a matter of probability. It only took one to make it through.
The pod hurtled towards the Splendid Pinion unseen as the ship accelerated away from the growing debris field. A desperate venting had the pod match speed with its target. With a final eructation from the rear sphincters it came within grasping distance.
Bony plates blew from around the prow. Flailing tentacles burst from the cavities revealed, their broad, suckered ends slapping onto metal eroded by long exposure to the void.
Contact was made. The pod hauled itself onto the hull, its arrival so gentle there was not the slightest impact tremor. Once attached, the pod extruded a gummy foot and hauled itself along the plasteel in search of a crevice to hide within. It found one soon enough, slipping into a space between a turret base and the podium of an angelic statue made faceless by centuries of micro-meteor impacts. Once ensconced, it jettisoned tentacles blackened by exposure to hard vacuum, and withdrew its pseudopod into the safety of its shell. Sticky resins leaked from pores all along the pod’s length, bonding its chitin fast to the ship.
By the time the Splendid Pinion’s void shields dropped and were replaced by the eye-aching sheen of Geller fields, the pod was secure. The Splendid Pinion’s warp engines tore open the universal veil separating the void from the empyrean, and plunged into the maddening psychic currents on the other side.
As the Splendid Pinion cleaved the warp towards Zozan the occupant stirred, perfectly safe in the pod. Hormones and stimulant chemicals gushed into its body, bringing it to a higher level of wakefulness.
The lictor prepared for its mission.
Chapter Four
A greater darkness
Behind hex-warded gates lay the Diurnal Vault, the dread library of the Blood Angels where wonders languished in temporal prisons. Terrible science enslaved a star that powered this fortress within a fortress. Idalia, it was called, shackled by the will of the Emperor, and placed into the breast of a statue of Sanguinius that rivalled that at Angel’s Fall.
The vault was but the first hall of the librarius. Deeper within were other places, more secret, more dread, the archives of ten thousand years of war. Warded cells. Repositories for all the cursed artefacts the Chapter had gathered to itself. Depictions of all the foes they had bested. Far, far inside lay the Sepulcrum Maleficus, a place of such secrecy its existence was known only to the very highest officers of the Chapter. This was Chief Librarian Mephiston’s sanctuary.
It was the custom of the older Blood Angels to rest in the Hall of Sarcophagi where they were made, should time allow. Opportunity was limited in those dark days, but the rest was longed for.
In the Long Sleep infusions of sacred blood carried out all impurity from the body, and spiritual communion with Sanguinius was a tantalising possibility. Some held that the Long Sleep staved off the progression of the bloodline’s curse. Others, fewer in number, decried the practice, seeing it as an exchange of duty for dreams of the past. Both parties were right, in their own way.
Mephiston slept as often as he could. When awake, he secreted himself in the Chemic Spheres, his self-imposed prison. When he slept, he slept among the dead. There were places in the librarius that defied all known laws, being neither of the universe nor the warp. The strictures of the material plane relaxed. The Sepulcrum Maleficus was one such location.
The Hall of Sarcophagi was a place of life, the Sepulcrum Maleficus was a place of death. It was fitting that Mephiston made his abode there.
In form the sepulcrum was a deep shaft, its bottom, if it had one, lost to the dark. Much of its volume was taken up by moving platforms. Coffins were mounted singly upon the platforms’ decks, which moved in circular motions like a vast, stacked orrery. Articulated stairs linked them, their steps hissing as they whirled around and around, constantly changing shape to accommodate each other, in a giant, deadly puzzle of shifting gears. Somehow, the stairs passed through one another when they met, intersecting with the sound of swords sharpening on whetstones.
In each ivory casket was preserved the body of a Chief Librarian of the Blood Angels. Regular infusions of blood kept their bodies fresh. Although they were long dead and their gene-seed removed, around many hovered shreds of consciousness, spirits that a being as psychically gifted as Mephiston might commune with and seek guidance from.
At the centre of all this was a greater platform, and upon that a singular incongruity: a room with no walls, being bounded like all the other platforms in the space by a sheer, unfathomable drop. It was furnished as a study, with a rich rug carpeting the metal. A table and chairs of artistry befitting the Chapter occupied the centre. A single bookcase crammed with rare treatises on war and the empyric arts stood off to one side.
Being at the centre of the sepulcrum, the room’s orbit was smaller than the rest of the platforms’, but it moved like they all did, always in diz
zying progress, never stopping, a whirling, automatic motion that suggested life where there was none.
Other staircases led off from Mephiston’s study to subsidiary platforms. Upon one of these Mephiston’s personal artificer dwelt, rendered blind and condemned to live there until old age took him. On another was the Lord of Death’s armoury. There his grisly armour hung upon an arming stand. Over it, hovering in judgement within a shaft of ruby light, was Vitarus, the Chief Librarian’s ancient force sword.
The armoury platform rotated away to the grinding of metal on metal. A third presented itself, and it was there that Mephiston rested.
Mephiston’s sarcophagus was indistinguishable from those of his predecessors. Like the others, the platform was made of iron chased with Theldrite moonsilver in designs that grew in complexity towards the central point, where the casket was set. The sarcophagus was made of a single, giant piece of ivory carved with cartouches and esoteric Blood Angels symbology. Nestled between stylised representations of a Space Marine’s pauldrons was a blank-eyed sculpture of Mephiston’s visage. In these details it was no different to its others. Though the precise style of the caskets varied according to the whims of differing eras, in form they were the same.
But where the coffins of the dead were inert, Mephiston’s glowed with caged power, its etched lines gleaming with ruby light. About it a dozen brass rods topped with silver skulls were arrayed like guards around a prisoner. A nimbus played around the casket’s rounded head and shoulders, and from this glow occasional bursts of power cracked loudly into the creaking of the sepulcrum, striking the brass rods and leaving them smoking.
Inside the sarcophagus, Mephiston dreamed, and that was most unusual.
The Lord of Death thrashed against the silk padding lining the interior, ripping free the lines purifying his blood. An unbidden vision had him under its spell, pulling his soul half from his body and thrusting him unmanned into the floods of time.
‘At Diamor, it will begin,’ said a voice.
A sense of foreboding – a tragedy overtaking his brothers fighting with Astorath – gripped him. He sensed despair, and loss, and bent his mind to see.
Grey and green smeared across the dark, a reflection in a pool whose surface was broken. This was no material reflection, but the mirror of the warp. Empyric ripples quieted, leaving Mephiston looking not upon the Diamor system but on a world he knew well: Cadia, the gateway to the Eye of Terror.
His brothers were there, fighting alongside millions of others. The muster was thousands of times the size of that taking place on Baal, but it was immediately apparent it would not be enough. From the wide cosmic road of the Cadian Gate came a procession of unending violence. Thousands upon thousands of ships emerged from the Eye of Terror. They bore old hatred out of the past, determined to overthrow the present in a welter of blood. Billions of daemons accompanied hundreds of thousands of Heretic Astartes. The Black Legion, the Iron Warriors, the Emperor’s Children… All nine of the Emperor’s fallen Legions and their lords had come out from their strongholds to rekindle ancient war.
All this Mephiston apprehended in a kaleidoscopic flurry of images spread across a single instant. There was no time in the warp. Then the Lord of Death was speeding through vortices of thought, and the vision burst into an infinity of individual pieces. Through fragmentary possible futures, Mephiston witnessed countless acts of heroism, but the end was inevitable.
Faces he saw of import included a monstrous Mechanicus priest, an inquisitor out of time, a Space Marine in the armour of a Black Templars marshal. There was another, faceless presence. A snatch of laughter, and the flash of a silver mask accompanied the touch of an aeldari mind. The presence was gone before he could strike it.
War and death had come to Cadia on unprecedented scale, and still that was not the sum of the horror approaching the Imperium.
Time blinked. Mephiston walked moorland battlefields between the howling sons of Fenris. Daemons died under their blades and bolts, but the Space Wolves were weary, rank with the sweat of days of battle. Their armour was cracked, their weapons blunted. In the distance a fortress burned in an unnaturally coloured inferno. The sky was a livid bruise, neither warp nor void nor cloud, but a seething mess of energies that cast spears of lightning into the ground with explosive force.
Daemons saw his soul. They snarled at Mephiston as he shadow-walked across the broken moors. He held up his hand and pushed them away with his mind. Once past them, he faded from their minds like the ghost he was.
The scene rippled away into another. Cadians fought from behind barricades of their dead. Silver machines chased through the sky.
The Necrons, thought Mephiston. The first warriors in the endless war had returned to finish it. Three times over the last months the Necrons had aided the Imperium. He did not trust their motives at all. Metal minds and soulless intellects prevented his reading their intentions, but their arrogance betrayed the danger they posed.
There was something else, something closer in time and nearer to his blood. He searched for it, seizing upon possibility’s cloak, but fate shook him free. Time skipped. Tall, alien pylons crashed down in flames onto the plains of Cadia. With each toppling structure the purpled sky twitched expectantly.
‘Doom!’ roared a voice that no mortal could hear.
More pylons fell, collapsing like tall trees burned up in forest fires.
‘Doom!’ The voice was made of many.
The death screams of a million human soldiers were drowned out by the triumphal howl of daemonkind. Blood scent thickened the air with copper and iron.
‘Doom!’ screamed the voice one final time.
Reality convulsed. Mephiston’s soul reeled, struck a metaphysical blow that dented the inviolable energies of his spirit.
The sky peeled open. The madness that lurked beyond the veil of the universe was revealed. Mephiston looked into it unblinkingly. He understood what few did. This roiling, limitless ocean was true reality, not the sluggish skin of matter men walked across and fought over, but the endless hells of warp space.
He snarled in defiance, preparing to die far from home and out of time.
A cool hand touched his spirit lightly, steadying him. A musical, female voice spoke from behind a silvered mask.
‘Hail, oh Lord of Death.’
The aeldari. This creature was not part of his vision, but impinging on it. He prepared for battle, for the ancient race were skilled walkers of the psychic veil, witches all, but no attack came.
‘We shall not fight, angel of death, for I bring tidings. ‘Ware, son of blood! The time comes when all will change, some for the better, some for the worse.’
‘Begone from my mind!’ Mephiston said. As he pushed back he gained a greater sense of the alien. It was one of their dancer caste, the Harlequins.
‘You see me!’ she laughed, and skipped away through the raging battle, trailing motley diamonds in her wake.
The combatants fought on, though the end was coming. The garish sky fell in. Fire and death washed over the landscapes of Cadia, blasting all to pieces.
A racing pyroclastic cloud engulfed Mephiston. Had he been there in the flesh, he would have died instantly, no matter his power. It burned his soul, hurling his spirit from one level of being to the next.
His vision was enwrapped in shadow, constricted like a corpse in winding sheets. He struggled against its cold press, lying on his back, unable to move. Darkness burst asunder, and he rose up over burning sands to hover in a fiery sky over a hellish land. Mountains of skulls soared to infinite heights. Rivers of blood and fire carved canyons through white deserts of ground bone, while the sky rained thick ash: fragments of souls still hot from the forges of the gods.
Horned daemons fought one another in every place, their battle older than time itself.
For all its seeming solidity, this was no place native to the
realm of flesh. To be there was a grave peril to the soul for he was deep in the warp, in the lands of blood. Had another psyker ventured into Khorne’s domain even in vision form, they would have been consumed by rage and hatred, and their souls torn apart. The risk was especially great for the sons of Sanguinius.
These things did not happen to Mephiston. His soul was a pillar of ice in a world of fire. He had no fear. Instead, he thought.
How am I here?
Because you must be,+ whispered the aeldari into his mind.
Mephiston passed unseen over a world of ceaseless war. Daemonic creatures and the souls of damned men battled furiously against one another. Armies clashed. Lone warriors duelled. He witnessed a force in the throes of disintegration, comrades turning on each other before the pulses of their vanquished foes had stilled.
Onward,+ said the eldar. +Fear not, you are guarded, for a time.+ Silky laughter, cruel as the void, caressed his being.
Mephiston’s spirit approached mountains made of skulls so big he could not conceive of any creature that might have produced them. The mountains were close to one another, and Mephiston flew between them through a narrow defile whose walls were riddled with eye-socket caves and nostril gullies wherein brutish, winged creatures fought over scraps of mortal souls.
