Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow

by Warhammer 40K

  Rafen was a furious engine of destruction, a whirlwind of razors as he cut into a pack of Chaos Marines. As Alactus felled targets by plasma immolation, Rafen ran the monsters through with his combat knife and the shells from his trusted bolter. In the brilliant crimson heat of his fury, he sheared heads and limbs in clean strikes, and when the opportunity presented itself, the Blood Angel let his fangs rip into those who were fool enough to bare their flesh. The perfect sheen of his battle armour was streaked with gore, and he paused to spit out a glutinous flush of bile. His face soured. The blood of these mutant blackguards was of a poor vintage, thick with taint and worthy only for spilling.

  “Do you see him?” Alactus shouted over the crackling hiss of steam rising from his gun muzzle. “There, the great horned pestilent from Cybele!”

  Rafen looked, and in the middle distance saw the hulking shape of the Dark Apostle Iskavan, bellowing some foul cry with his dripping crozius raised high overhead. “Curse the warpspawn!” he retorted. “We could not be so lucky to find him dead, eh?”

  Alactus fired a few shots in Iskavan’s direction in reply. “No matter, we’ll gut him as we have the rest of his breed!”

  Rafen answered with fresh gunfire, but the rational, tactical part of his mind knew that the odds were thinning. Beyond Iskavan’s personal guard, Rafen could see fresh numbers of Word Bearers walking at steady parade ground pace, up from the mouths of the shell factories beyond the fortress proper. For a fanciful moment, he wondered if the fabricator plants were stamping new Word Bearers out of plate steel, just as they did stubbers, grenades and warheads, just then a lick of burning promethium from a Chaos flamer almost cut him down, and he fired blindly. The Emperor gave him his eye for that moment and a lucky round penetrated the Traitor Marine’s fuel canister. With a cough of displaced air, the flamer bearer turned into a torch and wailed, dying.

  Iskavan was drowned out by the roar of his men as he came to the last words of Lorgar’s great invocation. He felt their excitement ripple through him like a delicious wave. At his flank, Falkir spat harsh, clipped commands to his subordinates and turned to face the Apostle, an ugly grin on his shark-toothed features. He crowded out the torturer Tancred, who hung back and watched the unfolding melee with a grim countenance.

  “Master, I bring you my finest and most puissant warriors!” Falkir made a theatrical gesture with his clawed hand. “Behold, the vox baiulus obliterati!”

  Iskavan raised a pallid eyebrow. He was amused by the Castellan’s melodramatic presentation and favoured him with a flicker of his tongues. From the midst of the rank and file Word Bearers came a Legion of Chaos Marines unlike any that stood on Shenlong. These were no longer beings that could be called man or daemon, but some otherworldly union of the two. They came in a slow and purposeful march; the thick stocks of their limbs were as wide as tree trunks. It was difficult to see where the lustreless corpse flesh of their heads and arms ended and the bruise-coloured metals of their power armour began. Great pipes of horn or hollow cartilage undulated up from their spines and knotty ropes of sinew fat as telegraph cables webbed their arms. Perhaps at one point they might have had hands and fingers as Iskavan knew them, but now the great clubs of meat that were their forearms sprouted hooked blades and an organ-pipe profusion of gun barrels.

  “Obliterators!” Tancred breathed. “By the eye, they are magnificent!”

  Iskavan gave the torturer an arch look. “You think so? Then you may lead them.”

  Tancred hid his surprise. It was ever his way to remain within his master’s reach and it had been so for centuries of service together. The Apostle bore down on him and showed him a mouth of wicked fangs. “Do not tarry, Tancred,” he growled. “Go to the enemy and show your mettle. It has been too long since you tasted blood at the front.”

  The torturer was aware of Falkir watching him. He was ready to strike him down if he dared to disobey. Tancred’s tentacle hand betrayed him and twitched as he tried to formulate an excuse. “Dark one, I—”

  “You are favoured by me,” finished Iskavan. “Have you not foreseen victory for us, Tancred?” He pointed at the main body of the Blood Angels with his crozius. “Go now, and fetch it to me.”

  The Word Bearer priest’s death-vision glimmered at the back of his mind and he forced it away. To admit such a thing now, after he had concealed it for so long, would mean execution. He nodded and stepped into the horde of obliterators. “It is my honour to serve,” he said, unable to mask the bitterness in his tone.

  “Yes,” agreed Iskavan. “It is.”

  The grotesque hulks of meat and metal lumbered onward, the line troopers falling aside as they continued their ponderous advance. Around Tancred, their arms merged and reformed into lascannon maws, the tines of radiating power mauls and meltagun muzzles. At his order, they began a constant stream of fire into the Blood Angels, and in their dozens Imperial Marines were cut apart by bolt and beam.

  Rafen poured rounds into the torso of the nearest obliterator and growled with frustration. The thing’s head retreated into the muddy pool of flesh-metal between its shoulders and howled back at him. He spat out an order and Turcio answered it with return fire from a missile launcher. Rockets looped and struck the Chaos puppet with bright orange impacts. The Word Bearer fell, and was ground underfoot by its inexorable brethren.

  “Is there no end to the blasphemies of the foe?” Alactus demanded. “What unholy fiends are these?”

  “Hybrids,” said Rafen. “A godless amalgam of human flesh, daemon and armour. Every breath they draw is an offence to life!”

  Alactus poured plasma flame at Tancred’s force. “We’ll end them, then!”

  “Aye!” Rafen joined him, and another obliterator sank to its knees.

  There came a pronunciation from every communicator in the Blood Angels’ line, strident and high, broadcast from the Bellus high above them. “Sons of Sanguinius! Stand to and hold the line!”

  Rafen recognised Sachiel’s voice and he grimaced. “What does he think we are doing?” he said aloud, low and angry.

  “The rout of the archenemy begins now!” said the Sanguinary Priest, his words bubbling over with ecstatic power. “As our liege lord did, so our vengeance falls from the sky on burning wings!”

  Deep in the mass of the Word Bearers’ advance, beyond the ranks of the advancing obliterator cult and the frothing gore-red waves of Chaos Marines, an actinic glitter of light unfolded out of the air. Hard jags of artificial lightning leapt from it to strike Traitors dead where they met its path, and the air went hot with ozone and the screams of tortured energy. Rafen instinctively knew what it was; the crawl of his skin and the sudden sympathetic lurch of his gut warned him of an imminent teleport arrival. The pinprick of light expanded and shuddered as the laws of matter and space were briefly circumvented in the halls of the Ikari fortress. A flat crash of displaced atmosphere echoed and sent a bow wave of spent energy across the decking. It scattered the Word Bearers in a perfect circle, and there, stood atop the bodies of a dozen Traitors twisted into warped slag, were ten figures.

  Seven of them were Blood Angels, and all but one of those wore the jump packs and polished gold helmets of the honour guard. Rafen saw Stele there among them, he held a vicious force axe in his right hand and his ornate las-gun in the left. Two gun-servitors, their forms not unlike the Chaos obliterators, flanked him and began to fire at anything wearing magenta. Sachiel’s voice rose in a screaming hymnal, the bronze grail in his hand raining hot blood about him. Each Space Marine was shocked by the sight of the warrior standing with the Spear of Telesto in his grip. Its shimmering colour wreathed its blade in an illustrious, ephemeral banner.

  “Arkio!” Perhaps Rafen said the name, or perhaps it was Alactus, it mattered not. The sight of the spear and the youth in the gold helmet was like the ignition of a flash-fire amid the Blood Angels, and as one they tore fire into the Word Bearers’ assault.

  Rafen was on his feet and surging up
over broken fragments of cover before he was even aware of his own actions. Alactus was steps ahead of him, the blue-white generator rings of his gun bright with discharge. Battered and injured, the Marines found their second wind and tore into the Traitors with hellish ferocity. Turcio rammed the mouth of his missile gun into the chest of a towering obliterator and blew it apart in a flaming discharge, spattering Rafen and Alactus with hot globules of daemon-flesh. Everywhere Rafen looked, he could see the divine radiance of the holy lance falling across the gore-streaked wargear of his battle-brothers, lighting them up with a righteous fury the likes of which even the Emperor himself would have applauded. Some part of the Space Marine wanted to rein his excesses in and exert control, but too much of him gloried in the bloodletting. It was not the black rage that consumed him now, but the desire for revenge: for Simeon, for Koris, for every Throne-fearing man, woman and child that had died at the hands of Chaos. Rafen longed to have the spear and see it cut the enemy to ribbons.

  Stele was lost in the tumult; he was surrounded somewhere by packs of snarling furies and the helldog forms of flesh hounds. He let his servitors make short work of them, as he channelled his mind-essence through the force axe. Nothing stood to fight where the inquisitor walked, and even as he killed and killed, his psyche ranged above the battlefield, prowling like a hawk. Sachiel, his guardsmen tight about him, led the new arrivals into the thick, shredding Word Bearers.

  Without reason or conscious choice, Rafen found himself leading the charge across the metallic decks. In that moment of ellipsis something chose to push him to the head. Without pause he took the chattering bolter in his hand and struck an obliterator where its lascannon arms were bleeding coolant and oily fluid. The thing spun and gave out a thin scream, disturbingly childlike for something so huge. He sprinted and leapt over the corpse with a war cry on his lips—and there he saw the face of the torturer from Cybele.

  Tancred had his vibra-stave gripped in his nest of tentacles and a lasgun in the near-human talons of his other limb. A panicked beam shot scored a finger-wide gouge in Rafen’s vambrace but it did not stop the Blood Angel. His combat knife flashed and Rafen cut the torturer’s hand off at the wrist, gun and all falling away in jets of adulterated blood. Tancred rammed the stave into Rafen’s side and the sparking tip skittered off his inviolate armour. The Marine’s mind possessed the strange clarity of pure fury, as if seeing everything through some perfect lens of hate. He caught Tancred’s stave in his free hand, and instinctively forced it back at the torturer’s face. The Word Bearer saw then the instrument of his own death: the ghost-shape from the blood augury resolving into his weapon, and it was gripped in the hand of a crimson assassin. Rafen drove the vibra-stave up through Tancred’s jaw and out through the top of his distorted skull.

  Iskavan felt Tancred’s ending and cursed. On some level he sensed regret, but only for a brief moment. He roared at Falkir and the rest of his troops, pointing at Sachiel’s honour guard. “This is their reinforcement? Ten men? By Skaros, we’ll make flutes of their bones!” His accursed crozius hummed in mad rage. “Destroy them!”

  The Spear of Telesto worked and Arkio felt as if he were merely a vessel for the weapon, like the igniter for an explosive power so far beyond him as to be unimaginable. And yet, every second the weapon sang in his grip, and the teardrop blade brought ruin to hundreds of Traitor Marines, he felt himself changing. Power the likes of which he had never dared imagine coursed through Arkio, and his mind struggled to grasp it. The closest thing he could approximate it with was his rebirth when he left the sarcophagus on Baal for the first time, but even that was a pale shadow compared to the majestic force running through him now. He was a hundred feet tall. He could see the passage of bolts and laser blasts as if they were suspended in the air. He was invincible. By the lords, he was godlike.

  Arkio counted the Word Bearers in an eye-blink. There were too many, the spear told him. Their numbers must be thinned, and not at the sluggish pace of gun and chainsword. The Blood Angel saw it clearly: action and reaction surfaced in his mind as if he had always known precisely how to wield this weapon. Arkio swung the spear about him and drew in energies untouched since the heresy. He gathered them effortlessly at the tip of the teardrop blade. In the golden backwash of light, he felt the bones of his face altering, becoming the mask of someone else, someone unaccountably older and wiser.

  Now! Mellifluent flame spilled forth from the holy lance in a wide fan and washed over the battle like a flood. Every Word Bearer it touched caught fire and burned alive, and ahead of the wave rode a psychic storm of absolute terror. Those Chaos Marines not kindled into powder ran screaming in fear. Iskavan himself pitched his own men into the fire’s path and broke, all sign of his unstoppable resolve shattered before the might of the spear.

  The firestorm lapped over the corpses of the dead and engulfed the Blood Angels. Rafen saw it coming. His body froze at the sight of it; he was unable even to throw up his hands and cover his face. He saw himself dying along with the rest of his brethren as his sibling’s uncontrolled release of the lance’s power killed enemy and ally alike. But the gold flames crashed over them leaving nothing but a surge of adrenaline as their primarch’s legacy brushed past. The uncanny sophistication of the Telesto weapon saw the markers of Sanguinius’ own bloodline in all the Blood Angels and turned its power from them.

  Silence fell across the Ikari fortress as the last flickers of light died out around the spear. Slowly Arkio removed his golden helmet to drink in the destruction he had wrought. Across the carnage, his gaze met Rafen’s and the smile on the younger man’s face was a warped mirror of the sanguine angel himself. But instead of nobility and purity dancing there, Rafen saw an aspect as cruel as a razor’s edge and his heart froze in his chest.

  Winds of ash blew across the plaza before the fortress, billowing in great, silent wreathes. The atomised remnants of Word Bearers, the cinder gathered in drifts of grey snow, pooling in the lee of revetments and towers. Rafen left boot-prints in the matter of the dead as he crossed the broken square, to wind a course around the wrecks of burnt-out Blood Angels’ Razorbacks and Chaos defilers; the latter were surrounded by wards made from tapes of parchment shot through with holy text, in order that the unhallowed influence be held at bay, even in death. At the edge of the plaza, Rafen found Brother Delos supervising the Chapter’s serfs in the collection of the deceased.

  The Chaplain gave him a solemn nod. His face was streaked with soot. He did not need to ask what Rafen wanted. “Over there.” He gestured toward a line of canvas bags, each dotted with purity seals and generic prayers in high gothic. Delos turned his back and gave Rafen the privacy he needed. Although the bodies of the honoured dead would be properly venerated in ceremonies aboard Bellus in the days to come, he knew from personal experience that some men needed a moment of solitude to bid their comrades farewell.

  When he was sure he was unobserved, Rafen gently opened the canvas to reveal the face of Koris’ corpse. The pain the veteran’s face had displayed in the moment of death was mercifully absent, and the Blood Angel found himself heartened that his old mentor was at peace now, sitting at the Emperor’s right hand.

  “Rest now, my friend,” he whispered. But as he spoke Rafen’s heart felt hollow. Koris’ last words were burnt into his mind like a livid brand. The sergeant’s gaunt face implored him: Be wary of your sibling, lad. He has been cursed with the power to destroy the Blood Angels! What was he to make of such an avowal? What glimpse of truth had Koris been granted as his soul briefly merged with that of Sanguinius?

  That Koris had not trusted the Inquisitor Stele was a matter of course, but in his dying breath he had cursed the ordos agent, and blamed him for his fall to the black rage. Perhaps it had been some final spite of the bloodlust madness that had consumed the veteran, striking out even as he died. Yet Rafen could not shake the sense of utter wrongness that surrounded him. Sergeant Koris fell to the flaw too quickly, too easily. How convenient
it was that one of the most respected—and outspoken—elders in their warband had died, leaving Stele’s influences unopposed.

  Rafen was shocked at his own defiance, and the thoughts that came to mind—thoughts that some would name as heresy of the highest order. He shook his head. These matters, of Arkio’s changed ways, of Sachiel’s ruthless commands and Stele’s manipulations, they ranged beyond Rafen’s experience as a warrior and a servant to the Throne.

  He placed a hand on Koris’ chest, in a spot where a laser had burnt off the black paint of his Death Company colours to reveal the crimson teardrop beneath. “Help me, teacher. For the last time, show me the path.” In that moment, Rafen saw the head of the sergeant’s vox transmitter, sheared away from his neck ring. The youth bent down and carefully pulled the wire-thin apparatus free. It was a command-level contact rig, capable of sending messages directly to upper echelon units and to ships in orbit. Unlike the unit in Rafen’s armour, Koris’ gear was encrypted with codes and machine keys that gave him access to all facets of the Blood Angels’ command structure—and in an emergency, even to the homeworld itself.

  Cold clarity descended on Rafen as he understood what he was honour bound to do. These matters can only be settled by one man, he told himself. The Marine spoke into the transmitter.

  “Bellus, respond. Telepathic duct protocol required, expedite immediate.” The device tingled in his fingers as it sampled his genetic imprint, attempting to verify his identity as a Blood Angel. It would be a gamble, but it was likely that the Bellus crew did not yet have a full accounting of those killed in battle and so the dead man’s cipher clearances would not have been cancelled.