Rafen placed his helmet, weapon-belt and holster on the pallet, and took to one knee on the floor. There was a chapel a few levels above, as Krixos has informed him, and the offer had been made for him to remain there in prayer if he so wished it. Rafen did wish to pray to his Emperor and his primarch, but not in the sight of others. He wanted some privacy in which to consider the questions that plagued him.
There was nothing in the cell to mark the passage of time, only the Blood Angel’s internal reckoning, and he did not glance at the chronometer embedded in his helmet display. Instead, Rafen let himself come adrift from the moment. Minutes or hours passed as he tried to find a point of tranquillity from which to observe himself and weigh his own concerns. He had limited success.
His thoughts continued to return to Sabien, and before that the war-grave world of Cybele and the Forge at Shenlong. The blood that had been shed by him on those three planets seemed distant, the idea of it like a story that had been told to Rafen by someone else, by some other Space Marine who was him, who had experienced these things.
He reached for the memories, drilling down into his own recollection, but he was reticent. Did he really want to relive those moments, now that the threat to his Chapter was ended? Would it not simply be better to just… move on?
‘No.’ The word was raspy, and it sounded as if he had not spoken in days. ‘No,’ he repeated, with force, saying it aloud again for any ethereal beings who might be turning their eyes toward him. ‘I will not forget.’ Rafen would make sure that the brethren who would rather ignore the hard lessons he had bled through would not be given the chance.
It is not over. The shadow of blighted Chaos that dared to try and corrupt the Chapter had been purged by the light of righteous souls, but the wounds left behind had yet to heal. Many battle brothers had perished in the insanity of it all, lives snuffed out and glorious futures cut short – but the Chapter would ever endure, just as Rafen had told Krixos. In thousands of years of war and history, there had never come a time when the Blood Angels had been cut so deeply that they had faltered. Not at Signus Prime, when the treachery of the primarch’s errant brother Horus Lupercal had thrown the entire Legion into a meat grinder; not at Holy Terra during the final siege of the Heresy when Sanguinius himself had died and left his sons without their father; not in the wars at Al-Khadir and the Kursa Ranges, or even in the aftermath of the Secoris Tragedy centuries past, when the Chapter had been reduced in number to less than a hundred warriors after a catastrophic space hulk intervention.
The Blood Angels would never be allowed to die, and while Rafen’s existence and that of his brothers in arms would come and go across the march of time, the essence of the Sons of Sanguinius would endure until the day the final victory came. He nodded to himself, holding on to the insight, taking comfort from it.
‘Blood endures,’ he told the dry, silent air.
As he bowed his head, the sirens began to wail. Rafen reacted instantly, shaking off the drag of his inaction and springing to his feet. The weapon belt was first, secured and then checked, his bolt pistol cocked and loaded. He grabbed his helmet and wrenched open the cell’s steel hatch.
Out in the narrow corridor, chaser lights strobed red and white, extending away in to the distance. He saw figures moving along a junction to the right, Chapter serfs by the look of them, sprinting away.
‘You!’ he called. ‘Heed me!’
None of them stopped, and he wondered if they had heard him over the sirens. Frowning, Rafen donned his helmet and activated the power armour’s internal vox unit. The monitor glyphs returned a steady No Signal display, and the Blood Angel felt the first real inkling of genuine concern. The heavy rock and ferrocrete of the Regio was what made it virtually impregnable, but it also had the effect of making vox communications difficult. Still, even with the attenuation caused by the strata all around, Rafen should have been able to pick up another Adeptus Astartes nearby. He gave up the attempt and went to the closest intercom unit. Wired into the Regio’s grid, it should have been able to connect him immediately to the command centre. Nothing but dead static answered him.
He drew the bolt pistol and thumbed off the safety catch, and for the second time that day he heard the voice from the shadows.
‘Rafen.’ From ahead, a broad-shouldered figure was framed against the glow of the alert lights. Astorath advanced with urgency, and he had the Executioner’s Axe in his hand.
‘My lord.’ The Blood Angel’s hand tightened on the pistol grip. If the High Chaplain had come to take his head, Rafen would not go easily.
Astorath did not seem to notice the gun. ‘My vox is nulled. Yours?’
‘The same.’
He nodded gravely. ‘They must have done something. Blanketed the zone with a jamming field.’ He looked back the way he had come. ‘I did not think there were any of us on this level. Follow me.’
But Rafen did not take a step. ‘They?’ he repeated.
‘You have been here all along.’ Astorath sounded it out. ‘Of course. Word did not reach you.’
‘I do not understand.’
The High Chaplain’s cold eyes studied him. ‘We are under attack, brother. I suspect that they came in under the cover of the razorwind storm.’ He looked away. ‘Raptors, brother-sergeant, by the hundredfold. Sent by the traitor Sons of Lorgar.’
‘The Word Bearers?’ It seemed like blasphemy to say the name of the Chaos warband aloud. ‘Here, on Baal? They would not dare to strike at our homeworld!’
And yet, even as he said it, Rafen knew that such a deed was not beyond them. He had fought the Word Bearers and seen the fury and insanity that drove their freakish, corrupted zealotry. But such an attack would be suicidal, and any gains they made would be wiped out once the shock of the surprise assault was dispelled.
‘I have heard no gunfire… and how could they reach our soil? Our battle barges are in orbit, our defence platforms fully manned…’
‘There is more than one way to thread the labyrinth,’ said the High Chaplain darkly. ‘Extreme-range teleportation from a stealth vessel in far orbit, a warp gate conjuring… an entire planet can never be completely secure.’
Rafen thought it through. Attacking the Regio from without was madness. The Raptors would dash themselves against the battlements and perish under hails of gunfire from the weapons at the walls…
Unless…
Astorath nodded again, pre-empting his train of thought. ‘They may already be inside. The doors may have been opened by treachery.’
A cold rush spread through Rafen’s blood. ‘Then the Word Bearers have come to loot this place, not to hold it. They must want–’
‘The spear, aye. No doubt to assuage the hurt that was done to them.’
Rafen’s heart was hammering in his chest. That could not be allowed to happen. ‘We have to protect the weapon. We have to get to the reliquary.’
Astorath beckoned him. ‘The inclinator is this way.’
The platform was in place in the throat of the shaft, and Rafen cast around as they crossed to it, looking for signs of life. Despite glimpsing the Chapter serfs moments earlier, there seemed now to be no sign of them. Perhaps they had gone to ground in one of the other chambers. He wanted to be sure, but the High Chaplain urged him on.
Astorath moved swiftly to the control podium on the far side of the platform, and Rafen looked up. The inclinator shaft stretched away above, rings of warning lights growing progressively smaller as they receded. He set his helmet’s audial sensors to maximum perceptive range, trying to filter out the sirens. Rafen listened for the sounds of combat, for gunfire or detonations, but he detected nothing.
‘We should try to find Brother Krixos,’ he said, turning back to the other Blood Angel. ‘If he-’
The rest of his words were lost in the flat report of an explosion, as a blast of smoke, fire and noise erupted out of the inclinator’s controls. Astorath caught the discharge at point-blank range a
nd it blew him back across the wide elevator deck, ceramite screeching on metal as the High Chaplain skidded and tumbled.
Rafen ran toward him, just as the platform gave off a howl of tortured metal. One of the roller guides stuttered and slipped, and suddenly the deck was canted at a steep angle. Untethered cargo modules spilled across the inclinator, and Rafen threw himself aside, narrowly avoiding a collision with a hulking steel crate the size of a Dreadnought. Grabbing at a guide rail for purchase, Rafen moved as quickly as could toward Astorath’s prone form. He saw the High Chaplain move, heard him groan. The chestplate of his armour was smoking but the damage seemed minimal.
Then all at once, the guide rollers holding the platform in place slipped their moorings, and the inclinator shuddered and fell. Rafen lost his grip and rolled out across the decking, slamming into a quad of heavy storage tanks. The decking vibrated like a drum skin and Rafen could not regain his balance or his footing. He experienced the giddy, vertiginous rush of the headlong fall, strings of warning lights flashing past, racing away as they plummeted into the deeps of the Regio. He saw the tier counter rotating wildly, wooden ticker slats turning inside a brass cage, moving so fast he couldn’t read them.
The autonomic brakes finally snapped on, but it seemed to do little to slow them. Instead, great fountains of yellow sparks gushed from the smouldering rollers and the hot stink of burning metal filled Rafen’s nostrils. The platform crashed through ancient barrier plates erected to seal off lower levels, obliterating them in its headlong plunge. Some part of the Blood Angel’s mind was marvelling – how deep could this complex go? The indicator lights ceased, the last ring of them pulling away, and the inclinator dropped into a black chasm.
Then the impact. Rafen was thrown into the air, spinning through the darkness in the midst of the crash of splintering metal. His head smacked against the inside of his helmet and, mercifully, he fell again, this time into a different kind of void.
He dreamed of rain on his face.
Rafen dreamed of a ruined cathedral on a mausoleum planet, under weeping skies slashed by stark lances of lightning. He dreamed of falling without motion, of shadows and pain.
The scent of blood brought him slowly back to wakefulness. His cheek was wet, and he could feel fluid pooling. Rafen blinked, scanning the visible glyphs across the line of his field of vision. His helmet had been damaged, along with some of the actuators in his legs, but the cowl of ceramite and steel that surrounded him had taken the brunt of the crash.
He took stock of himself, feeling for injuries. Some minor breaks in his bones, contusions and the like, things that would have been deadly to a common human but little more than an irritant to a Space Marine. Rafen sat up and cast around. The preysight setting of his helm was non-functional, so with an exasperated grunt he removed it and secured it at his waist. The wetness on his face was blood from a wound across his temple that even now was staunching itself as the gene-engineered cells from his Larraman implant scabbed over the injury. He wiped the excess fluid away and peered into the gloom, shifting spars of twisted metal that had fallen across him. ‘Chaplain?’ he called into the shadows.
‘Here,’ said a voice close by.
Rafen rose to find Astorath standing behind him, his pale face corpselike in the dimness. ‘How long…?’ He winced at a jolt of pain from his scalp.
‘You can walk,’ said the High Chaplain. ‘So we walk.’ Astorath removed a chemical lumen stick from a pouch on his belt and waved it before them. ‘Look, there.’ He indicated a tunnel mouth not far from the wreckage of the inclinator platform.
Rafen took a step and then halted, looking up. Wreaths of smoke and wedges of debris made it hard to see far up the ascent shaft, but he estimated that they must have fallen several kilometres before colliding with the end of the passage. ‘What happened to the controls? The explosion?’
‘My armour protected me,’ said Astorath. ‘It was a small charge, less powerful than a frag grenade. Concealed inside the podium.’
‘Sabotage?’ Rafen scowled at the word.
‘It would seem so.’ The High Chaplain pushed past him. ‘Come. This way.’
The command came with such force of authority behind it that Rafen almost obeyed immediately and without question, years of ingrained training leading him to default to the orders of a senior officer. Almost.
He halted. ‘We should hold here. This is where our brothers will search for us.’
Astorath did not turn back to look at him. ‘This is where the Word Bearers will come looking when they learn their trap was sprung.’
The mention of the traitors made Rafen reach for his bolt pistol. By the Emperor’s grace, the gun was there and still intact. ‘Where are we?’ he wondered.
‘The deeps,’ Astorath replied. ‘The lowest levels of the Regio, isolated and left derelict.’
‘How do we get back?’ He looked up again.
‘As I told you,’ said the other warrior. ‘This way.’
Reluctantly, Rafen fell in step behind the High Chaplain, following him into the tunnel as his unease grew.
The warrens were cut from the living rock of Baal itself, reinforced by pillars of ancient ferrocrete that had become cracked and shot through with rust over countless centuries. The air was full of agitated dust particles, kicked up by the concussive arrival of the inclinator, and they filled Rafen’s mouth with a taste like bonemeal, sapping the moisture from his lips. Astorath deigned to give him one of his lumen sticks, and together the two of them navigated the aged corridors by the weak greenish light of the chemical lamps.
The walls were thick with oily lichen that seeped out of every crack, and in the midst of the fungal masses he saw tiny grubs writhing. There were shapes that fled before the edges of the lumen-glows, into boltholes and broken pipeways, and here and there thick curtains of web dangling from the ceiling, woven by fat, pale arachnids. An entire food chain of scavengers existed down here, living in the gloom.
The tunnel emptied out on to a rusted metal gantry and Astorath halted, sniffing at the air like a hunter canine.
Rafen eyed him. ‘You know where you are going. How is that so?’
The High Chaplain spared him a glance. ‘The accessways are all linked, Rafen. There are exhaust shafts sunk into the desert that reach down this far. All we need do is find the closest one and ascend… If we do not tarry, we could make the surface by daylight.’ He moved to walk on.
‘You are well informed, my lord,’ Rafen added.
Astorath made a noise in his throat that might have been a growl of irritation. ‘I was not always Astorath the Grim, brother-sergeant. There was a time, before my calling took me to other duties, that I served the Chapter as a line warrior in a tactical squad.’ He gestured at the walls, the lumen stick in his hand casting warped shadows. ‘I stood upon the battlements of the Regio as a sentry many times. I learned of its lore and history from men like Krixos.’ He gave Rafen a hard look. ‘By all means, if you wish to question everything I say, continue to do so. But you may find my answers become sparse as I direct my attention towards our egress.’ He strode away and did not wait for Rafen to go after him.
The Blood Angel grimaced and fell in step again. The shock of the alarms, the fall, all that was fading away now, and in its place remained Rafen’s growing disquiet. He could not shake a sense of wrongness about everything that was happening around him.
They navigated fallen sections of the rusting gantry, collapsed by the weight of time and neglect. In places where the path was broken, Rafen was forced to leap into the dark, praying to his Emperor for the certainty of a platform on the other side. Astorath navigated the hazards in silence, with only grunts of effort as he helped Rafen shoulder aside rubble or slice away debris with a swing of his axehead.
But for all his indifference, the High Chaplain was not ignoring Rafen. In fact, the reverse was true. Rafen slowly realized that the other warrior was scrutinising him at every turn, but tak
ing great pains not to be seen to do so.
When a moment of pause came, as they stood at the bottom of a catchshaft damp with brackish moisture, Rafen’s patience reached its limit. ‘What do you wish to say to me?’ he demanded, squaring off before the High Chaplain. ‘I grow tired of your pretence.’
‘Do you?’ The reply was hard and brittle. ‘Perhaps I should ask if that blow you took to the head knocked the respect out of you, sergeant. Remember who it is you address.’
‘I know who you are,’ Rafen shot back. ‘There is no Blood Angel, no Son of Sanguinius that draws breath who does not know the face of the executioner!’
Astorath’s eyes narrowed. ‘That is my burden. And if you dare to think you could judge me for it, I will bleed you for your audacity.’ He pushed past and kept moving, stepping up on to a walkway that circled the inside of the vertical shaft like the thread of a screw.
Rafen’s temper flared. ‘Answer me! It was not fate that brought us together in this! Why else would you have been down on the habitat levels? Were you there for me? Or for some other reason?’
‘Do not ask questions you do not wish to have answered.’
The catchshaft joined an angled tunnel that rose up at a steep slant, and they began to ascend. Rafen advanced after the High Chaplain. ‘This is about the weapon. The spear.’
It was a long moment before Astorath replied. ‘It is so much more than that.’
‘I have nothing to hide,’ said Rafen.
When the High Chaplain spoke again, there was a challenge in it, his words severe. ‘You took the Spear of Telesto. You, a common Adeptus Astartes. You took up a weapon forged for a primarch’s hands and made it live. Such a thing should not have happened.’
‘It did,’ Rafen admitted. ‘I do not know how.’
‘A lie,’ snapped Astorath. ‘Who held the weapon before you, Rafen? What was his name?’
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 55
