“Where did Bile send them?” demanded Noxx.
“I have an inkling,” Rafen returned, his expression grim. He looked at Turcio. “Brother. Tell the pilot to push this ship to the very limits, to fly it apart if he has to. No time can be spared. We must get back to the fortress-monastery.”
The teleportation flux tore the air from his lungs in the shattering moment of transition. The Flesh Tearer felt every atom of his body become fluid and ghostly, for one horrible millisecond existing as nothing but a mass of free particles in a sea of seething non-matter; and then suddenly Brother Roan was whole once again, the equilibrium of being restored as quickly as it had been taken.
The shocking transition was not new to him. Roan had taken part in teleport assaults on more than one occasion, but it was not something that he relished. He had seen brothers twisted inside by perturbations in the flux, and worse still the warpings of flesh and ceramite that resulted from an incorrect reintegration, that had to be put down like diseased animals.
His was not to share that fate, however. Fabius Bile was too accomplished a scientist to make an error of that stripe. No, the twisted genetor had led the Astartes to a wholly different manner of perishing.
Roan was barely aware of himself before he realised he was falling. Dark sky and black earth tumbled around him, exchanging places as he fell into the grip of gravity. The citadel’s teleport had sent them to the fortress-monastery, clear across the hemisphere, but not to a point within its walls. Roan, along with the snarling, roaring Bloodfiends, had rematerialised a half-kilometre above the central courtyard. The ground rushed up toward him and the Space Marine picked out the towers of the central block, the dome of the Grand Annex growing closer by the second. Death was spreading its arms wide to welcome him.
About him the mutant clones shuddered and wailed; for a moment Roan grinned, believing that perhaps Bile had made an error, positioning the re-mat point in the wrong place, condemning the Bloodfiends to share his demise. I will die, but so will they.
But that too was snatched away from him when the flesh across the backs of the freaks rippled and split, issuing out great sails of veined skin that caught the air and buoyed them like raptors.
Roan shouted out a curse in the old tribal tongue of his clan, damning the renegade Fabius to suffer death at the teeth of the terrasaurs that roamed the jungles of Cretacia.
He hit the ground and punched a shallow crater into the flagstones with his passing. The clone-beasts, unsteady but swift on their new mutations, dropped down around his corpse, some bending to lap at the puddle of blood and meat Roan had made.
The shuttle bearing Master Sentikan and the body of Brother Rydae back to the Unseen had barely become a glitter in the sky before Lord Seth rounded on Mephiston’s commander once again and reiterated his demands.
“This conclave of yours is fast becoming a disaster, Dante. You should have come to me first, alone. We could have discussed these matters, found a solution that we could impose together.”
“I will impose nothing,” Dante replied firmly. “I will ask my kindred to aid me, and trust in them that they will do as the Emperor wills.”
“And if the Emperor wills that you do not prosper, what then?”
Mephiston fought back the urge to speak; this conversation was not for men of his rank, but only between the masters.
And then came the pain. The touch of darkness. The silent knife of psychic shock being drawn across the surface of his soul. He faltered and heard his lord speak out to him. The Librarian hissed through clenched teeth. Before, in the annex, there had been the smallest of moments when he thought he sensed something, but it had vanished so swiftly that he could not capture it. This time was different. He tasted the brief musk of psi-spoor, sensed the impression of a roaring skull opening its mouth to swallow a man draped in an aura of death, then slamming shut.
Mephiston gathered himself to sift the moment for meaning, just as an emerald glow burst in the sky high overhead. A teleport discharge? He sensed the sudden emergence of new minds, feral and rage-driven.
“An attack!” he shouted, with abrupt force. “They’re here!”
First Captain Lothan died when the mutants came up from the service ducts beneath his boots.
Argastes looked up to see Mephiston and Dante racing along the corridor toward them, with Seth at their side. Lothan had thrust a bolt pistol into his hand and bid the Chaplain to follow him, to find the Chapter Master and ensure his security. One of Lothan’s men, the honour guard Garyth, told Argastes of the energy-seers that had screamed as they detected the formation of a teleport bubble above the monastery. The elaborate sense-servitors were the fortress’ early warning system, but even their panicked reactions were not fast enough. There were creatures, the battle-brother told him. Creatures like the one from the arena, but dozens of them, and faster with it. Guard posts and serf barracks across the gothic complex had gone silent or reported glimpses of things that moved like Astartes but stank of mad blood-hunger.
But it didn’t seem possible. These things, like the one that Rafen had terminated in the pit, they were mindless flesh-proxies, little more than organic automata. Lethal, aye, but surely without true intellect…
Why then, could they not be caught? Where were they hiding? Argastes could see that Lothan had already asked himself the same questions and drawn the same answers. The beasts moved in hit-and-fade attacks, in battle-rote straight from the Chapter’s indoctrination tapes and the pages of the Codex Astartes. Striking and fleeing, taking kills and, if Garyth was to be believed, feeding upon them. Moments ago, Argastes had spied an eviscerated scroll-servitor heaped in an alcove off the sunward prayer halls. The stark, bloodless pallor of the dead drone’s flesh was not lost on him, and beneath his breath he spoke a verse of warding from the Litany Vermillion.
Ahead of him, Lothan was reaching out to beckon Dante toward him when it happened. The steel gutters over the ducts exploded and beasts that massed too much to fit inside so small a space extruded out and tore into him. The first captain spun about in a welter of blood, and he came apart.
Mephiston felt Brother-Captain Lothan’s mind die along with his body, the impact of it a discordant string amid a chorus of thought. The mutants spilled into the corridor, assaulting the men in Lothan’s squad, clawing and biting and slashing. Gunfire barked loudly inside the echoing companionway as the Lord of Death released a snarl and fell into the melee. He cursed himself for not having his force sword to hand—the Mindblade Vitarus was in his chambers, left behind at Dante’s behest for the duration of the conclave—but still the psyker had weapons in his employ no mere freak of nature could hope to resist. Mephiston released the psionic reservoir of his inner quickening, tasting the might of heroes as it lashed though him. He became fluid, faster than light, striking and tearing at the beasts.
He gathered up Lothan’s fallen chainblade and cut at a mutant with barbed fangs sprouting from all over its flesh. He slashed it down and ended it with cruel, unyielding blows, then went on to another, ripping a sinewy thing with rope-like arms off the Space Marine it was attempting to strangle, killing by cutting it in two.
Mephiston had flashes of the other men in the fight; there, his lord Dante with a rescued bolter in either hand, coldly blasting mutants into wet slurry; Argastes, beating an eyeless, entaloned man-beast with the crest of his crozius arcanum; Seth, choking another clone in the crook of his arm; and others, fighting and dying.
It was over swiftly. The mutants scored their kills and then fled, spattering blood from their wounds and their kills, fleeing in every direction, dragging torn meat behind them. Each moved like it had a purpose—as if, Throne take it, they knew the fortress. Knew it as well as Argastes and his brothers did, where every alcove and place of retreat might be among the kilometres of stone and steel and glass.
More than a hundred Blood Angels, alive and dead, have their DNA expressed within his physiology. Caecus’ pronouncement up
on the first replicae returned to him. The clone will be able to assimilate the muscle-recall and genetic memory of each one of them. Argastes shared a look with Mephiston and knew the Lord of Death thought the same thing. The Apothecae Majoris had not lied. These things are more than animals. It is as with the forsaken of the Raven Guard, but now within our Chapter.
He took a moment to moderate his breathing. The attack had been so quick, with such unbridled savagery that it left them reeling.
Dante was speaking into a vox-unit about his wrist. “This is the commander, to all posts and barricades. Sound the cloister bell and seal the fortress,” he ordered. “All gates barred, all barriers lowered. Nothing is to be allowed to exit the structure without my mandate.”
Seth had made a kill of his own, and paused in the business of clearing blood and particles of flesh from his tunic. “We should be driving those things out, not bottling them up.”
“I disagree,” came the growled reply. “These creatures cannot be allowed to roam unchecked. They will be corralled and then exterminated.” Dante’s eyes flashed. “I will see to it.”
The Flesh Tearer dropped into a crouch, staring at the corpse of one of the mutants with open fascination. “Curious. Such a blood-thirst and precision of brutality. These things are quite the monsters, aren’t they? I would not have thought someone like Brother Caecus capable of creating something like this.”
“Nor I,” agreed Dante.
Against his better judgement, Argastes too was drawn to one of the dead beast-men. “Only in the hosts of the Death Company have I witnessed such lust for blood, and even then only for the spilling.”
Mephiston nodded slowly. “They are driven by the Rage and the Thirst to a degree absolute, Chaplain,” he said. “It is to them what air to breathe is for you and I. These vat-grown freaks are us, stripped bare to the animal beneath the man.” The psyker spoke with the bleak candour of one who had seen such darkness in himself. “We have no choice. We must kill every last one of them.”
“If blood is what the seek,” said Seth, “then they may strike again to find it. Perhaps in the medicae complex, or elsewhere.”
A cold disquiet crossed Dante’s face. “Where is Brother Corbulo?”
There came a lowing toll at that moment, as the great cloister bell began a mournful peal through the halls and corridors of the fortress-monastery.
For the second time in the span of a single day, the sanguinary high priest followed a summons to the Chapel of the Red Grail. Corbulo’s stewardship of the holy artefact demanded that he dedicate his full attention to ensuring its safety; as such, when the cries of the servitors called warning of an imminent attack upon the fortress, the chapel was his first destination. He did not waste time upon thoughts of who or what the attackers could be; Corbulo did not allow himself to dwell on the fact that, in thousands of years, Baal had never been victim to such an invasion. He only turned himself to the defence of the Red Grail.
Gripping his chainsword in his hand, Corbulo took the steps to the chapel. Laser sensors hidden in the eyes of death masks upon the walls fanned him with red light and took his measure, opening the tiled floor above so he might enter.
He emerged and took stock; as always, his eyes were drawn at once to the copper chalice above the ruby dais, hovering in silence. A spark of irrational fear, that he might arrive and find it gone, faded—but only for a moment. Corbulo passed through the stone pillars toward the altar, and it was then he realised that the darkness outside the windows about him was wrong; not the depths of a Baalite night, but black as ink, and shifting. He heard the scrape of claws and drew the chainblade to him, his thumb resting against the activator rune.
There were forms outside, clinging to the marble and stone of the minaret, massing against the glass. With sudden violence, great cracks lanced from floor to ceiling and the ornate panes shattered with a thunderous report. Corbulo’s weapon came up to battle-ready as the mutants, all of them the duplicate of the Bloodchild in its last monstrous moments of life, forced their way inside, yowling and sniffing at the air.
The sanguinary priest felt his gut tighten; all at once, he knew exactly what it was the beasts wanted, and he bellowed out a denial, breaking into a run.
There were only a handful of them; one mutant, the largest of the group, grunted out something—a command, perhaps?—and made for the ruby dais. The others swarmed toward Corbulo, fangs out and talons wide. He met them with the chattering teeth of the chainsword, carving into them, but they were hard to hit, harder to kill.
Ahead, he saw the guardians rising from their rest and opening their hands to the large beast-done. It was easily the mass of a Space Marine in Terminator armour, perhaps more so. He saw light from the photonic candles blink off a looted ceramite shoulder plate about the monster’s body, a black curve of wargear spattered with colour. The brute threw itself over the line of glass tiles and the guardian fired. Bolt shells thudded home into the dense flesh, but to no apparent effect. The creature reached the gun-servitor and uprooted it from the tiled floor. Metal wings tearing, rounds still discharging, the mutant Bloodchild used the machine-helot like a massive club to knock down its twin.
Corbulo shook off his attackers and raced to the dais, anger fuelling his speed. The mutant’s crooked face showed red-stained teeth and it mounted the platform ahead of him, clawed fingers reaching into the glow of the suspensor field to grab at the relic.
“No!” he shouted. “Damn you, no!” The priest lashed out just as the creature’s hand caught the chalice, his hand swiping through empty air.
The mutant swung the Red Grail at Corbulo and struck him across the face with it. Hot blood splashed from the cup across his eyes and nostrils, searing his skin, and the priest was thrown backwards, off the ruby podium, landing hard to skid back across the polished tiles.
Corbulo’s hand crossed his face and came away stained with the potent vitae, the mingled lifeblood of his fellow priests, of him even, in blend with the still-living essence of Sanguinius. The fluid was fiery upon his skin, and the power of it made his head swim.
But the warrior’s reaction became revulsion when the mutant tipped the contents of the cup into its open mouth and drained it to the dregs. Corbulo felt his gut rebel and he retched at the sight of such barbaric desecration.
The creature howled and laughed, laughed just as a man would. With a sudden shock of motion, the figure thickened and grew, muscles bunching and expanding, that ragged slit of a mouth widening to show new buds of teeth. The mutant’s mass increased by half again just from the draught it had taken. It threw back its head and roared, the cry a very definite, very clear word. “More?”
With a savage jerk of the wrist, the beast threw the grail away and Corbulo dived after it, scrambling to snatch the empty cup from the air. The Blood Angel caught the holy chalice before it could strike the ground. His hands trembled with fury at bearing witness to such an act in so holy a place as this.
Corbulo whirled about, his chainsword ripping at the air, ready to kill every mutant he could lay his hands upon in answer for their sacrilege; but they were already retreating, fleeing back through the broken window and dropping into the night winds.
Dante strode into the hall and Mephiston walked at his master’s side, entering a room filled with warriors in disagreement and ill humour. Seth came with them, and the Lord of Death noted that for once, the commander of the Flesh Tearers had left some of his usual swagger behind. The lowing of the cloister bell underscored everything; it seemed like only days since Mephiston had been in this chamber, listening to Dante eschew Caecus’ experiments and charging his men to seek out the successors for the conclave. Matters are not unfolding as my lord had wished, that much is certain.
Armis of the Blood Legion was the first to speak. “At last! What is the meaning of this? We are roused from the guest chambers and brought here under armed guard… Do you mean to compel us to your side at gunpoint, Dante?”
&n
bsp; “Don’t be so melodramatic, cousin,” Seth grunted, before the other Chapter Master could answer.
“Kindred,” Dante said firmly, “the fortress-monastery is under assault by malforms of as-yet unknown number and disposition. You have been brought here for your own protection.”
“The teleport flash,” said Orloc. “I saw it from the residence tower.”
Daggan’s metal fists rose. “What is the nature of the enemy?”
“It shames me to say, but they are of our creation.” Dante bit out the words. “The clone-Marine that Brother Caecus brought to us… These are more of the same.”
“They are better,” Seth broke in. “Faster and more lethal than the one culled by Noxx and Rafen.”
“How did this happen?” Armis demanded.
“It appears that Caecus was more industrious than he admitted,” Seth replied. “The Apothecae has broken with his brethren, quite possibly turned from the face of the Emperor into the bargain—”
“There is no evidence of that!” Mephiston said hotly, although with less conviction than he would have liked.
Seth went on. “These freaks are skulking in ever chamber of this building. They are feeding, cousins. Nourishing themselves on the very blood in our veins.”
“This is Baal. This is a matter for the Blood Angels to deal with.” Dante’s cold anger churned behind his flinty eyes, so strong that Mephiston could almost see it spilling into the psychic realm in a hazy red cloud. “You will be taken under escort to the flight bay and thence to your shuttles. I will ask all of you to return to your star-ships in orbit and allow my men to deal with this…infestation.”
Daggan gave a metallic grant. “Is this an insult? You ask us, a gathering of the heroes of Sanguinius, to flee in the face of some mutants?”
“This is my fault,” Dante admitted. “It is not upon any of you to shoulder that burden, nor shed blood for it.”
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 76
