One of the enemy darted along the corridor, ducking into a side cabin. Lysander barely glimpsed it as it shimmered past – it was something like a sea creature, something like a scrawny, wiry, elongated man, with a dash of spider or diseased fly. Lysander swept his bolter after it but it was gone. In its wake was a screaming that turned to a gurgling howl, and then was cut off. A spray of gore spattered from the cabin doorway.
By the time Lysander was at the door only the creature’s tail could be seen, sliding through the bloody steel of the cabin wall. The crewman who had hidden there had been dragged from under the bunk and ripped open, slit down the middle lengthways and almost turned inside out.
Lysander put a shoulder down and charged. He slammed into the cabin wall and it gave way, steel five thousand years forged buckling under his impact.
If the spirit could be said to have human emotions, it expressed surprise then, as Lysander burst into the mass of pipes and cabling inside the wall. It coiled back on itself and shrieked, its face opening up into a fan of extendable mouthparts coiled to strike.
Lysander took aim and fired, stuttering volleys of bolter fire into the spirit. Even halfway into the parallel world of the warp, the spirit’s flesh had enough consistency to be mangled and torn. Bolter fire ripped it open and it came apart, the scraps of its spectral flesh dissolving back into the warp.
Lysander kept moving, forging through the machinery into the corridor beyond. Screams were coming from everywhere, and isolated bursts of gunfire, but he couldn’t be distracted any further. He spotted the next stairwell and ran down the steps.
The deck below was clad in stone. It echoed the monastic cells that were a Space Marine’s home. The Imperial Fists were based on their fleet, and many of their ships were fashioned to recall a planetbound fortress such as those Rogal Dorn was famed for building. On the Breaker the decks were dark and gloomy, lit by ribbons of burning gas from concealed jets in imitation of torch or candlelight.
‘Lysander!’ called First Sergeant Kaderic. He carried his chainsword in one hand and a single-handed axe in the other, a sparring weapon from the deck’s training circles, and had donned his armour rapidly with the sketchiest of wargear rites. Kaderic was old, his face blunt and grizzled, the kind of man who served as the lynchpin of the veteran First Company. He was Lysander’s second-in-command in the First – technically. ‘The enemy cannot wait to die, they rush to meet us!’
‘Malodracians call them the Grey Hungers,’ said Lysander. ‘Predators, like animals. All but mindless. They wait for ships to wreck upon the reef, and feed on whatever is inside.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Kaderic.
‘Nothing more,’ replied Lysander. ‘They can be killed.’
‘That will be enough.’
The First Company of the Imperial Fists was ready to make war. The elites of the Chapter, the veterans and specialists entitled to wear the white trim of the First, were usually spread throughout the Chapter and the various warzones in which it fought, lending their expertise and steadfastness where it was most needed. For Malodrax two squads had been gathered together, along with support troops, into a single strike force, because this was not a war like any of the thousands being fought across the Imperium, where the Imperial Fists answered the call of the Imperium’s Warmasters. This was the Imperial Fists’ fight alone. This was revenge.
They had not expected to fight until the strike force reached the planet’s surface, but that did not mean they were not prepared. Already almost a hundred Space Marines were armed and ready training their bolter sights across the corridors and crossroads of the cell block, or clustered in the centre of the sparring circles covering every approach. The battle-brothers who specialised in close assault had their chainblades ready. Devastator Squad Gorvetz was gathered in the chapel beneath the black marble statue of Rogal Dorn, where their heavy weapons could fill the wide corridor leading to the chapel doors with chains of shrapnel and plasma fire.
‘A good fight, captain,’ said Kaderic. ‘You must have missed those.’
Before Lysander could reply, a screeching sound tore through the cell block from every direction. The artificial torches flickered and shadows leaped.
‘Break the foe!’ cried Sergeant Gorvetz. ‘Hammer and anvil! Thunder and sky!’
The Grey Hungers charged. They rose from the ground and descended through the ceiling. Others rippled along the corridors, lurching from cell doors, snuffing out the torch flames as they passed through the walls.
The volley of bolter fire was so vicious that for a moment there was nothing but the roar of gunfire and the howl of shrapnel. A steel gale blasted through and the warp spirits were shredded. One spirit made it through, slithering to the feet of Kaderic. Its mouthparts shot out but Kaderic cut through them with his axe, driving the point of his chainblade down through its body with his other hand.
A fat bolt of plasma immolated one of the Hungers, dissolving it away into a spray of ash. Lysander snapped off a volley of shots of his own, and somewhere in the cauldron of fire another Hunger was destroyed, its head blown apart into a burst of translucent gore. All this seemed to take place in silence, the noise too brutal for any one sound to make it through.
But there was one sound. It wormed its way into the back of Lysander’s head, its fingers running up the inside of his skull.
It was laughter. A thin, reedy cackle, something between glee and the crazed laughter of complete terror.
Lysander grabbed Kaderic by the shoulder. ‘It’s the Widow!’ he shouted.
Kaderic dropped to one knee and leaned in close to hear. ‘The Widow?’
‘The Red Widow!’
‘Where?’
Lysander tried to pick out the strains of the sound. The gunfire faltered for a fraction of a second and he could make out the strains of it again, high and grating.
‘The apothecarion!’ he yelled.
The Breaker of Darkness had a sickbay for the crew, but the Imperial Fists had their own apothecarion equipped for a Space Marine’s unique physiology, and at that moment its treatment slabs were not empty. If the Red Widow was to feed, that was where she would find the most accessible meat among the Imperial Fists.
‘Hold fire!’ yelled Kaderic. ‘Hold fire! Moving!’
Kaderic’s squad halted firing long enough for Lysander and Kaderic to run past the chapel doors towards the apothecarion, situated at one end of the cell block. Ahead, bloodstained foot- and handprints glowed against the walls, iridescent drops of gore dripping from the ceiling. The door ahead was shut, banded iron sprayed with blood.
Lysander shouldered the door off its hinges. The shriek of laughter and the stench of spoiled blood hit him as hard as a bolter round.
A dozen treatment slabs were laid out in the apothecarion. Autosurgeons hung from the ceiling and glass cylinders of artificial organs and rolls of synthetic skin lined the walls. Medicae-servitors, their metal casings adorned with scalpel-tipped manipulators, were parked at recharging stations in the corners of the room. A chart of a Space Marine’s body, including the many additional organs that helped turn a man into one of the Adeptus Astartes, adorned the ceiling like a fresco in a cathedral, picked out in ivory and silver.
In the centre of the room stood the Red Widow. The illustration of her had not done her justice. She was tall and skinny, her limbs malformed, her fingers long and probing, lank hair hanging down over a pallid body covered in scars and open wounds. She had no face, and where a face should have been was a black void, like a window into space. She turned that face to Lysander as he tore into the apothecarion, and he felt himself falling into it, time and space rushing past him.
Nebulae and galaxies rushed past. Stars boiled into existence from the heart of incandescent stellar clouds. Solar systems were cracked and shattered to dust, and swallowed up by endless maws of nothingness that opened up to devour them.
The warp. It was the warp, the dimension that ran parallel to reality, the dwelling place of the Fe
ll Powers and the source of everything that was worst in this galaxy.
Lysander tore his eyes away. The laughter rang in his head. He shielded his eyes and tried to gauge what the Red Widow was doing without looking at her face.
In the Red Widow’s hand was an arm. It was the oversized arm of a Space Marine. Lysander recognised the recent blister scars and surgical marks around the ruin of the shoulder. The arm had belonged to Brother Skelpis.
‘This is your friend,’ hissed the Red Widow, and somehow the laughter was uninterrupted. ‘Your brother. Sworn to the same oaths. Born of the same battles.’
Lysander lunged with his chainblade. The Red Widow batted the blade aside with Skelpis’s arm.
Sergeant Kaderic ran past Lysander and slammed into the Red Widow. A hand, impossibly strong, closed around one of Kaderic’s legs and the Widow threw him aside. Kaderic crashed through one of the organ cylinders, falling to the ground in a heap of shattered glass and torn artificial flesh.
‘You chose the wrong ship,’ snarled Lysander.
‘You chose the wrong god,’ hissed the Widow.
Lysander slashed at her, the teeth of his chainblade shrieking. The Widow leapt up onto the ceiling, the joints of her elongated limbs cracking as they bent the wrong way and grabbed handholds in the image on the ceiling. Her face flared open, a great void threatening to drag Lysander’s consciousness into it. As long as she faced him, Lysander could not look directly at her – he would be paralysed by the warp’s assault on his senses and the Widow would tear him apart as she had done Brother Skelpis.
Nails as hard as diamond tore chunks from the fresco as the Widow scuttled across the ceiling, reaching down at Lysander’s throat. His chainblade flashed in his hand, guided by reflex rather than choice, and sawed through the Widow’s arm just below one of the elbows.
Blades of shadow slid from the torn stump. The light of distant stars bled from the wound, and the sound of colliding galaxies roared in Lysander’s ears. The stuff of the warp oozed from the Widow, pooling in masses of darkness where it touched the deck.
The Red Widow giggled, as if the severing of a limb was the most wonderful fun.
Lysander lost sight of her for a split second as darkness swirled around her. He heard her land on the deck behind him, and the shadow claws closed around his torso, grossly elongated. They dug in, biting through the ceramite of his breastplate and shoulder guards.
Lysander’s chainblade arm was pinned. He drew his bolt pistol with his free hand and aimed blindly over his shoulder, loosing off three shots at the place he guessed her head would be. The Widow’s other hand grabbed his wrist and wrenched it behind his back.
‘I saw your god die,’ the Widow whispered in his ear. ‘I lapped at the liquor from his corpse.’
A tremendous crash cut her voice off and Lysander was thrown forwards, face down onto the blood-slicked deck. He rolled onto his back and saw the Red Widow reeling, shards of glass impaling her ragged skin.
Behind her was a Space Marine, stripped of his armour and wearing the simple half-robes of an apothecarion patient. His skin had been dark, but now it was a patchwork of new scars and synthetic skin. He was holding the remains of the organ cylinder he had smashed into the back of the Red Widow’s head. His eyes were wide and wild.
Lysander stamped a foot down onto the Red Widow’s back and drew back his chainblade. He plunged the blade into the Widow, its chain teeth grinding through spine and rib.
Darkness sprayed out, miniature fragments of a mirror reflecting the warp. Sergeant Kaderic had extricated himself from the wreckage of the organ cylinders and brought his axe down, cutting off the Red Widow’s head.
A sudden flood of darkness blinded Lysander. He wrenched his chainblade free and stumbled for the door, finding the doorframe with an outstretched hand and making it out of the apothecarion. Kaderic followed him out, carrying with him the severed head of the Red Widow.
‘Halaestus!’ shouted Lysander. ‘Skelpis!’
Brother Halaestus, still holding the base of the shattered organ cylinder, emerged from the darkness clinging around the doorway. ‘Skelpis is dead,’ he said. ‘He was helpless on the slab. She killed him.’
‘He is avenged,’ said Sergeant Kaderic.
‘None of us are avenged,’ said Halaestus, ‘until Malodrax falls.’
Lysander put a gauntleted hand on Halaestus’s shoulder. ‘We will have our revenge,’ said Lysander. ‘I swear.’
For a moment Brother Halaestus just stared at Lysander, his eyes looking far away as if focused on the Red Widow’s glimpse of the warp. Then he refocused, and looked down at the head in Sergeant Kaderic’s hand. The head was sagging and limp, little more than a hollow mask of skin with the window to the warp gone.
‘That’s the Widow,’ said Halaestus.
‘Just as in the map,’ said Lysander. ‘We were ready for her.’
‘Not ready enough,’ said Halaestus. ‘You said you would lead us here, Lysander. You said you would be prepared for anything Malodrax had.’
‘I did not say there would not be losses,’ replied Lysander, his voice level. ‘It is a lot for me to ask you to have faith, I know that. But that is what I ask of you now.’
Whatever reply Halaestus had, he never made it. Chaplain Lycaon approached from the cell block, both barrels of the storm bolter in his hand glowing dull red, the head of his crozius arcanum still crackling with its power field. ‘The enemy is scattered, First Sergeant!’ said Lycaon. ‘What of the apothecarion?’
‘Held, Chaplain!’ announced Kaderic. ‘The Red Widow it was, and this is what remains of her!’ Kaderic cast the Widow’s head onto the deck at Lycaon’s feet. ‘But one brother, Skelpis, was lost here. The daemon was vanquished by the captain and myself.’
‘Rejoin your brethren,’ said Lycaon. ‘Sweep the cell block and launch patrols to clear the rest of the ship.’
‘Of course, Chaplain,’ said Kaderic.
‘And captain, sergeant,’ said Lycaon, ‘and you, Brother Halaestus. Well fought.’
Usually the crew of the Breaker worked in two shifts, changing every fourteen hours. For the next twenty hours both shifts were awake and at station, guiding the Breaker around the Red Widow’s lair of treacherous orbital currents and jagged masses of coral. Two thrusters were torn off the ship’s stern, and a hole torn in her flank a hundred metres long that bled three decks’ worth of air into the void. More died, added to the tally taken by the Grey Hungers and the Red Widow a few hours before. But the crew of the Breaker had known that they would not all make it home, not from this journey. They worked to exhaustion until the ship emerged from the reef into the relatively clear high orbit of Malodrax. They would have leave to mourn their dead when the mission was done.
In the new quiet that had fallen on the ship, Chaplain Lycaon was able to return to his art. In his fingers was a small piece of bone, and in his other hand a miniature drill with which he was inscribing illustrations onto the bone. Around him were mounted the arms and armour of a senior Chaplain of the Imperial Fists, a tattered banner stained with smoke from an old battlefield, shelves of books of battle-lore and a polished stone Crux Terminatus mounted on the wall like a plaque. His armour, painted in the black of a Chaplain instead of the gold of an Imperial Fist, hung from a rack against the wall.
Lysander watched Lycaon work. The Chaplain’s hands were those of a Space Marine, huge and powerful even without gauntlets, but he worked with the fine dexterity of a watchmaker.
‘Dorn himself scrimshawed the bones of the dead,’ said Lycaon at length. ‘He wrote that pursuits such as these separate us from other soldiers. Any savage can swing a club or fire a gun. But a Space Marine is better than that. He can turn his mind inwards, and channel what lies there into focus as well as rage.’ The Chaplain blew dust off the bone, revealing the finely cut detail. ‘I hope Brother Skelpis would agree, having unwittingly donated his finger bone.’
‘He would consider it an honour,’ said Lysander.
‘Good.’ Lycaon gave the bone a few more strokes with the drill, and held it up to the light of the cell’s glow-globe. Dense knotwork wound around the clenched fist symbol of the Chapter, and through the wings of the Imperial aquila beside it. ‘Brother Halaestus has lost his focus.’
Lysander did not answer for a long moment. Lycaon put Skelpis’s scrimshawed finger bone on the table in front of him, and turned his gaze up to Lysander for the first time since the captain had answered the summons to Lycaon’s cell.
‘He has gone through much,’ said Lysander. ‘He wants revenge.’
‘Every Space Marine wants revenge,’ said Lycaon. ‘All the time. With every breath. He wants revenge against the galaxy for daring to be so full of enemies. Revenge is not an excuse to lose one’s focus.’
‘Do you intend to leave him on the Breaker when we go down to the surface?’ asked Lysander.
‘I am not such a fool to shun the use of an able-bodied Space Marine when we face an environment like Malodrax. No, my concerns lie deeper. A man driven to extremes by rage might be just what this strike force needs. But it is not what the Chapter needs.’
‘Brother Halaestus will be rehabilitated. What he underwent on Malodrax could never leave a soul unmarked, but he is an Imperial Fist and he is strong. The apothecarion and the help of his battle-brothers will fix him.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Lycaon. ‘But I have another concern.’
‘Chaplain?’
‘Brother Halaestus is not the brother who compels the greater part of my attention. I had heard much of you, Lysander. Your loss was the cause of great sorrow. Even amidst the tragedy of the Shield of Valour, the death of Lysander was mourned most keenly, for they spoke of you as a Chapter Master of the future. When you returned to us, it was with great joy that we learned you lived, but among the Chaplains there was concern. A thousand years had passed and the men you fought alongside are not those who serve the Chapter today.’
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