Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow

by Warhammer 40K

  They had been reduced to sifting through a detritus of information culled from sources so widespread and unreliable, that their veracity barely rose above the level of tall tales spun by tavern drunkards; and yet, as they had crossed the span of vacuum towards the hull of the drifting tau colony, something in Rafen’s spirit had resonated like the strings of an electroharp. The renegade was close. He felt it in his bones.

  Somewhere in this xenos warren, somewhere deep in the gloom, an arch-traitor, the self-styled Primogenitor of Chaos Undivided, former lieutenant of the Emperor’s Children, a twisted Apothecary, a murderer and torturer of men, was working his evil.

  Rafen glanced down at the oath of moment adhered to the vambrace of his power armour. The strip of sanctified parchment bore a spot of dark colour, a droplet of blood from the veins of Corbulo himself, the Master of the Red Grail and lord of the Chapter’s sanguinary priests. The oath-paper was Rafen’s vow, committed to words and sanctified in the sight of the God-Emperor of Mankind.

  A promise to find and to kill the man known as Fabius Bile.

  The voice told La’Non where to take the gue’la. After hours—or was it days?—of loping along the spiralling corridors, the tau brought the armoured humans to one of the largest of the colony asteroid’s interior spaces. An elliptical cavern tapering to a point, the bulk of the open void was taken up by a faceted orb built of the same bland polymetal that so much tau construction was made from. Thick rods extending from the floor, the walls and ceiling held the bone-white sphere in place. Fixed focus gravity generators made it possible to walk up and over the surface of the orb, as if standing on the face of a tiny moonlet. Inside it, La’Non knew, there were vertical floors stacked one atop another. It had once been the colony’s infirmary, now become a place of horrors.

  The gue’la who came after the storm had spat them out, the pain-bringer, he had made his home here. All the politic words and platitudes at first, all the masks he wore and the honest entreaties to help the lost colonists, his lip service about wanting to join them in the service of the Greater Good. All lies.

  La’Non heard the voice urging him on and he began to tremble and shiver. He felt the mind-force of the blue-armoured human at his back, making his legs move like stuttering pistons. Between the two opposing pressures, the tau felt as if his skull was about to burst. He whimpered, remembering all the things that had spilled from the infirmary. The pain-bringer and the great metal spider emerging from his back, the devices that cut and sliced and stitched. The monstrous pleasure he took in giving La’Non the limb.

  And then all the others. The hybrids he built from bits of diverse species, things that never should have shared flesh, melded together by means that were beyond the understanding of a common earth caste clerk.

  Another memory pushed itself forward, presenting itself to him as some horrific gift by the chattering voice. Recalling a moment when La’Non spoke, actually managed to utter a few words to the pain-bringer as the gue’la tethered him to an operating table.

  The tau had asked him why. What reason was there to come to this lonely knot of star-lost castaways, to give them false hope and then torment them so? What value could it possibly have to him?

  The pain-bringer had not lied then. He told La’Non he did these things not only because he could, but because it amused him.

  La’Non remembered nothing but the screaming after that. Stumbling along the curved floor, he heard the sound in his head again, the voice wailing in pain. The limb curled up and punched the tau in the face, staggering him, and the shock lit energy inside him. Without understanding, disconnected from himself, the tau began to echo the inner scream with his voice. He pulled at the skin of his face, but the sound would not cease.

  “The xenos!” Ceris snarled out a warning as the tau stumbled away, clattering heedlessly through piles of wreckage and alien debris. The creature was shouting into the air, babbling a tirade in its own sibilant, incoherent language.

  Rafen was already bringing his bolter to bear, sighting down the scope atop the weapon’s frame. Leading the target, he thumbed the selector to single-shot and began to apply gentle pressure.

  But in the next second a bolt of blue-white fire lanced through the sullen air and clipped the alien with a near-hit. The tau described a jerky pirouette and went down in a puff of thin blood. Rafen reacted as a second pulse beam went wide of him and cracked into a toppled heap of storage bins.

  “There!” shouted Kayne, the youth’s sharp eyes catching sight of the shooter. He pointed, and Ajir released a spray of bolt rounds into the low wall the other Blood Angel had indicated. With a cry, another tau exploded from the cover, brandishing a smoking weapon. The alien was clad in pieces of the sand-coloured armour Rafen recalled from hypnogogic training tapes, but the wargear was smeared with dark fluids and in poor order. Strangest of all, the tau warrior’s face was oddly proportioned; spindles and bits of chitin festooned the right side of the alien, and when it screamed, the noise from its mouth was a rattle of bones.

  Rafen put the xenos down with a single shot to the chest, and it blew backwards into wet rags. The dying alien had not finished twitching when more lines of blue fire probed out towards the Blood Angels. From heaps of wreckage and the shadowed doors of habitat pods, more of the creatures emerged. They hooted and roared, all of them bellowing a shared pain at the Space Marines. Rafen picked out one word being repeated, over and over. Gue’la. Gue’la. Gue’la.

  “The alien brought us to an ambush!” Ajir snarled, clear reproach in his voice.

  “No,” grunted Ceris. “I would have known it.”

  Rafen didn’t venture an answer; he only frowned, and began to fire.

  The ragged, screaming tau boiled out of the passageways and the fallen heaps of wreckage formed by broken habitat capsules. Some of them were soldiers—the so-called “fire warriors” of their kind, the line infantry in their strange rectilinear armour sheaths—but more were civilians, functionaries, non-combatants. Many of them bore weapons, doubtless looted from fallen members of their kind or the armoury of whatever xenos garrison had been stationed in the colony. The strident shrieking of pulse bolts echoed around the vast oval chamber, lines of perfect lightning blazing outward, hugging the ground.

  Rafen’s Blood Angels splintered, moving through cover, pacing up towards the enemy advance. They fell into battle routine with rote precision, ready and geared to give death to their attackers. The heavy crack of bolters warred with the screaming alien guns, and from the corner of his eye, the sergeant saw Puluo plant his boots, lean into his heavy bolter’s weight and unleash it. Flame gushed from the flash-hider of the weapon in cruciform flares, great brass casings launching from the ejection port in a fountain of metal, a punishing wave of rounds lashing out as the Space Marine turned slowly in place, tearing down everything in his arc of fire. Unarmoured tau caught in the midst of his kill zone lost limbs or exploded into flecks of meat, while the soldier-xenos went down, howling if they were not already dead.

  Puluo’s weapon alone should have been enough to put the fear of the God-Emperor into any enemy; but still the tau came on. Rafen had never fought their kind before, and what he knew of them came only second-and third-hand from other warriors, from his late mentor Koris and the indoctrination schema of his training. All of that had told him the tau were a clever foe, wily and careful in battle. That was not what he saw here.

  “Rage…” muttered Ceris, close at Rafen’s side. “Nothing but rage.”

  The psyker sensed the mindset of the aliens more clearly than the sergeant ever could, and saw what Rafen did. Fury was something the Blood Angel knew well—far too well, he admitted—and it was there before him in the tau. Their tactics were blunt and hard, with only the letting of blood on their minds. This was not the combat of a foe defending a location from an invader. It was anger, pure and simple. These xenos had been wronged, and they wanted someone to pay in kind.

  The leading edge of the
attack wave was downed, dead or dying, and Puluo found his pause, the heavy bolter’s muzzle running cherry-red and shimmering with heat. In the moment, the tau advance surged, pulse rounds converging on the Blood Angels in threads of icy energy.

  A figure mounted the curved roof of a collapsed habitat pod and flung itself at the sergeant. Rafen glimpsed dun-coloured armour and a curved helmet, featureless but for a peculiar mono-optic eye. The fire warrior led with a pulse carbine and the Blood Angel rocked off a fallen stone roundel to meet the alien in mid-leap. With one arm, Rafen forced the carbine away, shots screaming from it over his shoulder. In the heartbeat-fast pace, he was aware of a particle stream creasing the upper surface of his pauldron. The tau was smaller, lighter than the Space Marine, but its momentum was toppling Rafen backward.

  The world tipping about him, he jammed the muzzle of his bolter into the gap between the plates of the alien’s articulated armour and pulled the trigger. At point blank range, the tau was bifurcated, its legs and abdomen spinning away in one direction, the remains of the torso falling free, dragging wet ropes of intestine with it.

  Rafen landed hard and rolled, coming up in time to see Ceris deploy his force mace in a glittering arc. The blunt-headed weapon grew spikes made of psionic energy, and the Codicier used it in an upward swing that batted another half-armoured fire warrior into a fallen wall. Wreathed in crackling energy, the tau vomited blood and perished.

  Nearby, on a low mound of debris, Kayne and Turcio engaged a group of frenzied xenos at close range. The youth brought forward the crest of his helmet and put down a bulky male with a strike against its skull. Rafen’s eyes narrowed as he watched the alien fall; like the one he had seen moments before, this tau’s body seemed deformed, strange spines sprouting from its back, one arm folded up in a withered curl of bone and talon.

  Turcio made a kill with his boot, grinding an armed creature in torn robes into the rock, dodging as its hands flailed at him. In a fluid motion, the Blood Angel followed through and put two more tau to death as they came at Kayne.

  On the vox channel, Rafen heard a concussive grant of anger and moderated pain, and immediately knew it was Ajir. Swinging about, he found the other Space Marine where he had fallen to one knee, the black streaks of pulse hits marring the crimson perfection of his battle armour. The sergeant thumbed his bolter’s fire-select to fully automatic and lent his battle-brother support, blazing back towards the trio of fire warriors moving and shooting as they closed in. One went down, then another, bolts slamming through polymer and into meat and bone.

  The last round belonged to Ajir, who made the engagement’s final kill from where he crouched, taking off the top of the last fire warrior’s skull in a low-deflection shot. The alien staggered closer before gravity finally captured it and dragged the corpse to the bloody ground.

  Rafen extended a hand to Ajir, but the other Space Marine did not acknowledge it. Instead, he righted himself without assistance and got to his feet. The Blood Angel removed his helmet and spat into the dust. Rafen saw red in the spittle but did not remark upon it.

  “Lord,” called Turcio, who stooped to poke one of the corpses with his gun barrel. “You should see this, I think.” The penitent brand on his cheek was livid with his exertions.

  Rafen left the glowering Ajir to his own devices and crossed to where Turcio’s kill lay in a crumpled heap. Another anomaly, he noted. This tau bore odd fleshy wattles that spilled out of places beneath its clothing, as if they had burst through like tumours. In patches, the characteristic grey-toned skin veered towards pink. The dead alien had a piecemeal look to it, as if swatches of flesh had been cut from a human and merged with the tau’s own skin. But there were no sutures, no marks where differing organic matter had been conjoined. There were simply spaces of meat where tau ended and human began. The sergeant felt his lip curl in disgust as the scope of the discovery became clear to him.

  He nodded to himself. The other fire warrior, the one Kayne had killed… The spines upon it could so easily have been from a kroot organism, or perhaps even a tyranid. Here then was the signature of Fabius Bile, the callous experimentation on these pitiful xenos the detritus he had left behind him.

  “This is the renegade’s work,” he told his squad. “These are the spoil.”

  “Brother-Sergeant!” Kayne called out across the killing field. “The xenos… The prisoner? It’s gone!”

  “Must have slipped away during the engagement,” muttered Turcio.

  All eyes turned to Ceris, who accepted the unspoken question with a nod. He hesitated, his hooded gaze turning inward for a moment. The force mace, the tip still shimmering with tics of ethereal energy, rose to point towards the sphere-construct. “In there.”

  The tau, the one that called itself La’Non, was not difficult to find. At first, they followed the regular spatters of thin blood that the xenos had left behind it, as it staggered its way up into the construct; but once inside the building proper, the trail of fluid became lost in the layers of older and darker vitae, dried out in a cracked layer over the floor like a coat of ancient varnish. The xenos blood left splash patterns up against the walls that became more pronounced the deeper the Astartes ventured, high-water marks that showed where some vast reservoir of the fluid had been emptied heedlessly into the corridors and left to find its own level.

  There were, of course, bodies. Scattered remains of tau and some of their servitor races—the feral kroot and the insectoid vespid—some of them in states of death that defied explanation, others killed in more commonplace ways by shot or blade, or each other. A cloying stink that recalled rotting flowers permeated everything, and presently Rafen replaced his helmet and let the breathing filters do their work. They forded an inner barrier of tightly knit binder fungus, cutting through with swords and knives, boots sinking into the mushy flooring where accursed symbols had grown out of the damp mould. Ajir murmured a litany of protection beneath his breath, and Ceris echoed him on each word; the other Blood Angels kept their own prayers mute.

  Kayne pointed out strange capsules lined up on stands through the next ward they entered, their skirmish line moving with steady care. Rafen examined one and found soft cloth bundled within; it was a natal clinic, he realised, and the pods were support units for tau newborns. All were empty, and he did not dwell on what the layer of white ash that lay at the bottom of the pods might have been.

  When La’Non’s blood trail ran out, they sought him in another fashion. They followed the sound of his lament.

  The iris doors were open and sagging, bent outward as if by a powerful pair of hands. The keening of the sorrowful tau echoed out to them, and Kayne led the way in, taking point. The pin-lamp atop his bolter searched the damp, close gloom, picking out stone tables coated in cracked enamel, angled to allow fluids to gather in clogged blood drains beneath. Pieces of corpses dangled from makeshift meat hooks on the ceiling—objects Rafen identified as parts of an ork, a human female, tau and orubon and xexet and other species he could not place. Kayne’s torch found the corner of a strange design upon the wall and it was only when the youth recognised the sigil of the Eightfold Path of Chaos that he let out a curse and turned away.

  The place had the sense of a work interrupted, and Rafen’s heart sank. It was Nadacar Hive all over again. Fabius had been here, in this very room, conjuring his horrors, and then fled them.

  This thought foremost in his mind, he found himself at one of the tables. Upon it, the tau called La’Non sat, legs dangling like those of a child in an adult’s chair. Its shoulders were stooped and it moaned. He saw it had a heavy blade in one hand, almost a cleaver of the kind a butcher might use to cut a carcass. The tau was sawing back and forth at the place where the strange distorted arm had been connected to its body. Blood emerged in rivers, but the alien was making little headway in severing the alien limb. The blade was too dull, too broad, ill-suited for the task.

  The xenos looked up at him, as if noticing the Astartes f
or the first time. “The voice, gue’la,” it sobbed. “I can still hear it. It will not be silent.”

  “Where is the pain-bringer?” He met the alien’s watery gaze. “Where is Fabius Bile?”

  “All around you!” came the shouted reply. “His lies, his works, all here. All here!” The tau showed him the distended, muscular arm, and the limb flailed weakly, as if it were trying to escape. “He lied, made us promises. And look what he did!” The creature’s reedy, emotion-choked voice was rising. “Everything is madness, yes? That is true, but all else is lies! Lies!” It rocked forward and tapped a thin finger on Rafen’s chest, blinking away tears. “You lied just as he lied!”

  Rafen shook his head, a grim certainty gathering in his thoughts. “I did not lie to you, xenos,” he told it. “I said I would end your agony. I will.”

  With a swift motion, the sergeant drew his combat knife and buried it in the alien’s chest. The tau heart, as he recalled from his training, was in the centre of their torso, beneath a dense, bony plate in the middle of their ribcage. The fractal-edged blade slid easily through La’Non’s flesh and resisted a little as it bit into bone; Rafen applied even pressure and the weapon went in to the hilt, the very tip emerging from the alien’s back. The incision was clean and fast, cutting the heart in two. La’Non died silently, and Rafen allowed the body to fall off the edge of the knife.

  Turcio watched him clean his weapon. “I didn’t know they could weep,” he noted.

  Kayne gestured at the room, and his answer was Rafen’s. “Look around, brother. Any creature would weep to have such horrors forced upon them—”

  He never finished his words; Puluo, on guard at the door, gave a sudden shout and dragged his cannon up to firing position. “Movement!”

  Rafen’s gun came to his hand as a shape shuffled into the chamber from the far side of the room. In the shadows, it was a hulking humanoid form the equal of a Space Marine in stature and breadth, shoulders broad and heavy, a shorn scalp with a halo of long white hair, and raising hands; hands that were fine and clever and capable of such horrors.