As if in answer, the figure in the message nodded to himself, becoming dour and serious. “I have said nothing of this to anyone. None of the other successors know of what has been under way, or of what has been stolen. I lay no blame upon you, Dante. I understand the import of this. I would have done the same as you do now, if I stood in your place.” He frowned. “But I want in. The Flesh Tearers will be a part of this. My Chapter will share in the glory of bringing the quarry to his ruin.”
Dante nodded slowly. “Ah, Seth. You know I cannot refuse you. Not now.”
The hololith continued. “I have already sent a ship to rendezvous with your lad Rafen and his band. The Gabriel. The warriors aboard know enough.”
Mephiston’s chest tightened at the mention of the vessel’s name.
“You need only tell Rafen to accept the help he is offered. And together, we will right this.” Seth bowed. “We both know the risk of standing alone, Dante. Our unity will make us strong.” With a final flicker of colour, the image became mist and dispersed, the glow from within the diamond fading to nothing.
The Master of the Blood Angels allowed the message box to close and weighed it silently in his hands, considering. Finally, he glanced at Brother Mazon and tossed the device to him. Mazon caught it easily, and said nothing, waiting.
Dante walked away a few steps, and Mephiston followed him. “The God-Emperor’s ways are sometimes opaque to us,” offered the psyker. “Perhaps we should accept that this turn of events is His hand at work.”
“Perhaps,” echoed Dante. “I wonder, should I be troubled that my cousin knows so much of our endeavours? This is not the first time the Flesh Tearers have shown such… insight.”
“Our search for Fabius cast a wide net, and quickly with it,” noted Mephiston. “These things could have become known to Seth.”
Dante’s patrician face stiffened. “A matter to be addressed. But first this.” He turned abruptly and crossed back towards Mazon. “Brother-sergeant. Consider your message delivered. You may leave.”
“Lord,” said the Flesh Tearer, “if you will. An answer will be requested.”
The commander shook his head, a grim smile playing on his lips. “You are mistaken, Mazon. Your Master knew my answer before he sent you to me.”
From a distance, both ships appeared almost identical. They shared the bladed prow, the orchard of crenulated minarets along the dorsal lengths of their fuselage, the hammerhead castle rising from their hull. Cannons in brassy, murderous array gave mute defiance to all enemies, engines flaring like captured suns at their backs; these were rapid strike cruisers of the Adeptus Astartes, ships of singular, swift purpose that could turn cities to slag or land armies if the needs of battle demanded it.
Their colours were all that separated them, that and the bold sigils upon their blade-sails. The Tycho, red as fury chased with brass and gunmetal silver, adorned with a winged droplet of blood shining bright in the void. Alongside, the Gabriel, black as rage, lined with sanguine among the ebon, with a razor-toothed wheel kissed by a tear of dark blood catching the distant solar glows.
In silhouette, both the same; in light of sun, their characters revealed. The Astartes aboard them did not differ from the ships in which they travelled.
“Cousin,” said Rafen, “well met.”
Brother-Sergeant Noxx gave a terse nod. A thin smile threatened to break out across his lips. “I’ll wager you didn’t think we would cross paths so soon again, eh, Blood Angel?”
Rafen allowed the other man a nod. “Just so, Flesh Tearer. I confess, I was surprised to see your ship out here. Is not your Chapter still engaged in the punishment of Eritaen?”
Noxx shook his head, making a show of looking around the Tycho’s audience chamber. The veteran and his squad had come aboard, claiming the right granted to any Astartes, to meet and speak in confidence with members of another Chapter. The Gabriel had left the Tycho little choice but to heave to, the Flesh Tearers’ ship venturing so close that its mass shadow would make any attempt to enter warp space a dangerous prospect. “That conflict is ended. But the rest of my kinsmen have been given a new battle to fight, against an ork horde in the Auro Cluster.”
“Such a fitting foe,” sneered Ajir. “I wonder which side is the more savage?”
Rafen silenced his man with a look, but Noxx seemed to enjoy the barb. “I only wish I could be there to find out. But sadly, instead I am here to help you where you have failed.”
“You dare—?” Kayne rocked off his feet, and this time Rafen had to take a step up to block the young Space Marine’s path.
“Did you learn nothing from what has gone before?” said Rafen. “Stand down, boy. Keep your mouth shut.”
“Still has some fire in him,” Noxx nodded approvingly “I’m glad to see that’s not been lost.”
Rafen’s gaze dropped to the data-slate in his hand. The device had been presented to him by the runner from the astropath sanctum mere minutes before the cruiser’s scrying monitors had picked up the approaching vessel. “What do you know of our mission?”
“I know that an arch-traitor defiled Baal with his presence,” said Noxx. “I know you have not yet been able to find him and take recompense for that transgression.”
“You think you could do better?” Ajir grated.
“We could hardly do worse—”
“Enough!” snarled Rafen. “We are Astartes, Sons of Sanguinius all! We have not forgotten the threat we faced together and destroyed in our unity! I will not have us fall back into old rivalries like bickering children.” He turned and shot a hard glare at his warriors, each in turn, ending with Kayne and Ajir. “Are we so arrogant that we cannot take an offer of help from our kinsmen? I think not.” He was aware of Ceris watching him. Silently, the Codicier gave him a level nod.
Noxx’s expression shifted. “Every man under my command knows the import of this, Rafen,” he said. “And together, we will take the target we seek.” He nodded in the direction of the Tycho’s bridge. “Even now, the Gabriel’s navigators commune with yours, passing to them the data we have uncovered.”
“Good,” Rafen replied. “Once we set a course, we’ll convene to devise a plan for a joint sortie.”
“Brother-sergeant!” Ajir stepped forward and came across, shaking his head. “I cannot stay silent on this, even if you order me so!” He stabbed a finger at Noxx and the other Flesh Tearers. “This is not a matter for others. This mission is ours alone.”
“You’re wrong,” Rafen told him.
“Who decides that?” demanded the Space Marine.
Rafen didn’t answer him; instead, he thrust the slate into Ajir’s hand and let him read it. There, on the display, was the clear and unmistakable cipher of a message from Baal, appended with the highest priority suffixes. Ajir’s eyes widened as he realised that the communication had come directly from the Lord Commander himself.
“What does it say?” asked Puluo, speaking for the rest of the assembled warriors.
“Fight together,” said Ajir.
CHAPTER THREE
Turcio stood, and he was not at his ease. The two squads faced each other across the tacticarium chamber, and it might have seemed to a passing observer that they had gathered to do battle with one another. Blood Angels ranged to the starboard, the Flesh Tearers to the port, the armoured warriors sized each other up, as was their manner. Recent events on Baal had in some ways built bonds of comradeship between the diverse Chapters that drew lineage from the Primarch Sanguinius; but still the old contentions between the first founding and its successors could not be washed away in a single night.
And never could there be more polar an opposite to the Blood Angels than the Flesh Tearers. The former proud and noble in bearing, the latter feral and coarse—yet the same blood flowed in all their veins.
Outward character aside, they were all sons of the Great Angel, and beyond that they were Adeptus Astartes. Brothers in arms if not in true kinshi
p.
None of the Astartes spoke. Both squads had been ordered to rein in any comments that did not immediately benefit the discussion at hand. Brother-Sergeant Rafen had been blunt about that, and he imagined Noxx had said the same. Rafen had tired quickly of even the smallest hint of divisive behaviour, ordering Ajir and the others in no uncertain terms to direct their energies towards the mission. Our enmity, he had told them, has only one target today.
That target turned slowly in front of them, suspended in a vapour, conjured by hidden display beams in the base of an ornate, wrought-iron chart table. Rafen circled the table, glaring at the flickering image. Turcio recognised the face of Fabius Bile. It was an artist’s impression of the fiend, dispassionately constructed by some machine-slave fed a diet of security camera footage, faded portraits and research data.
It depicted a man with the dimensions of a Space Marine, three metres high and another across the shoulders. Pallid of face, his flesh was pulled tight on his skull and around the rim of a cranial cognition accelerator implant. Strings of white hair fell down upon shoulder pauldrons of bloodstained bronze, blurred where the display engine’s self-censorship subroutines masked the eightfold stars etched there. He wore a long coat over his wargear, a patchwork thing made of human skins with screaming faces sewn into the pattern of it. A brass mechanism of limbs and manipulators—a device of mysterious origin known only as “the chirurgeon”—was attached to his back; skull-topped valves and reservoirs of black fluids, oil-thick and sluggish, chugged as they worked. The functions of the chirurgeon could only be guessed at. Several learned scienticians of the Imperium had attempted to divine its capabilities, suggesting it might be some sort of life-support mechanism, or perhaps even a semi-sentient servitor device. It reminded Turcio of the servo-harnesses worn by the technical adepts of his Chapter, but in a more bloated, grotesque design.
He was considering this as his gaze found one of Noxx’s warriors, standing slightly askance from the rest of the Flesh Tearer squad. The warrior had a single servo-arm folded discreetly at his back, and upon his shoulder pad the cogwheel trim of a Mars-trained Techmarine. An angled face robbed of one human eye, sporting an augmetic replacement with a sapphire lens, met his look and gave him a respectful nod.
The fact that Noxx had been allowed to bring a Techmarine with him spoke volumes; the Flesh Tearers, a small Chapter made up of only a handful of companies, had little resources to squander idly—and that included warriors gifted with some fraction of the knowledge and training of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Techmarines were a rare breed among the Adeptus Astartes, inducted into their Chapters in the same fashion as every other initiate, but then trained on Mars to commune with machines… and so some would have it said, never again to be counted as truly trustworthy on their return.
Turcio had never held to that suspicion. He found it hard to believe that an Astartes would ever find something more divine than the God-Emperor of Mankind inside the cogs and coils of a machine, no matter what spirituality the tech-priests of the Mechanicus claimed.
He saw Rafen turn to Noxx. “I’m eager to see the gift you’ve brought us, brother-sergeant.” His commander gestured at the viewing table. “If you will?”
Noxx glanced at the Techmarine. “Mohl,” he said, “show them.”
Brother Mohl stepped forward and his servo-arm unfolded with a fluid, almost elegant motion, in the manner of a courtly noble offering his hand before a dance. The movement seemed strange coming from a machine-limb that could crush a man’s skull like an egg. The arm presented a mnemonic cylinder to the table and the viewer accepted it with a whine of small motors.
Lenses clicked and chattered inside the table, and the image of Fabius Bile shifted. Particles of magnetic sand inside the viewer’s core moved, clustering around the projector head to give out a new, compelling image. The form of a tech-priest shimmered into being before them. A hooded human—but only by the loosest of definitions—the figure wore the familiar robes of the Adeptus Mechanicus and a skull-and-cog sigil denoting the exalted rank of Magos. Turcio caught a glimpse of the priest’s face and realised that his head appeared to be entirely coated in chrome. Perhaps it was some sort of mask.
“This is the Magos Minoris Matthun Zentennigan Eight-Iota Zellik,” said Mohl. The Flesh Tearer’s voice was quiet, but it carried across the chamber. “A ranking tech-lord of the Magos Technicus of Mars, he is listed in the rolls as an adept-without-portfolio, with letters of marque from the Fabricator-General to conduct independent operations beyond the Segmentum Solar.”
“In other words, he’s a law unto himself,” muttered Kayne.
“Zellik’s rank and position allow him a great deal of liberty,” Mohl agreed. “We believe that the Ordo Xenos have been watching him for some time for overt signs of contamination, but no evidence has been forthcoming.”
“They believe he’s treating with aliens?” said Ceris.
“Possible,” came the reply. “Not confirmed. Zellik’s connections have so far enabled him to remain outside the grip of the ordos. But what has been determined, by agents in our employ, is that Zellik is indeed operating outside the letter of Imperial law and Mechanicus doctrine. He fancies himself as something of a collector, inclined to hoard items he considers precious rather than turn them over to his masters. Apparently, he maintains an extensive private museum… In addition, he has been trading in proscribed and rare technologies.”
“The cog-boys would go wild if they knew that,” said Ajir.
Noxx shook his head. “Don’t be so sure. The Adeptus Mechanicus are quite happy to bend the rules if it lets them gather up another dusty relic from the days before Old Night.” He glanced at Mohl and the Techmarine’s head bobbed in agreement.
“So, Kayne was correct, then,” offered Rafen. “This Magos Zellik is operating on his own… Perhaps at the behest of Mars, perhaps only to enrich himself.” The Blood Angel folded his arms. “What does that have to do with our hunt?”
“One of the names connected to his trade will be familiar to you,” Mohl explained. “A Magos Biologis by the name of Haran Serpens.”
“Bile’s alias…” Puluo’s craggy face hardened. “This wastrel cog is in league with Chaos?” He spat on the deck.
“We suspect he is unaware of the lie of the Serpens identity. Knowledge of what took place on Baal has yet to filter out into the greater Imperium—”
“It filtered out to you, didn’t it?” interrupted Kayne darkly. Turcio found himself nodding in agreement. As much as he knew he should trust the Flesh Tearers, he still found it hard to.
Mohl ignored the comment and kept talking. “It is likely Zellik has no idea who he was really dealing with.”
“What was the nature of his trade with Bile?” Turcio spoke for the first time. “Do we know that?” The metallic fingers of his augmetic arm drummed on his vambrace, an unconscious tic he could not seem to excise.
“Unclear,” replied Mohl.
“It is my Lord Seth’s suggestion that we approach this Zellik and ask him to tell us all he knows of the whereabouts of one ‘Haran Serpens’…” Noxx made the statement sound almost playful.
Turcio considered this. “The Mechanicus are a rule-bound lot. I don’t doubt our errant Magos will have chapter and verse on every trade he’s ever made, from bolt-screws to battleships.”
“He won’t just give it up for the asking,” said Ajir. “And if he has indeed been dealing off-book, with xenos or any other enemies of Terra, then he knows his life is forfeit.”
Ceris peered at the image. “Are we to simply confront him with this? Impose the Emperor’s authority and arrest him?”
“He’ll flee the moment he sees our ships,” added Kayne.
“Perhaps not,” said Noxx. “Not if he only sees my ship.”
Rafen eyed his opposite number. “What do you mean, sergeant?”
The Flesh Tearer’s thin lips parted, revealing his teeth. “Brother Mohl must take credit f
or this idea.” He patted the Techmarine on the shoulder. “We’ll bring the Gabriel in to his complex at quarter speed, contact Zellik and tell him we want to make a trade. Weapons or vehicles, or some such.”
“You’re Space Marines. What makes you think he’d believe that you are interested in an illicit deal with him?” Turcio frowned at the Flesh Tearer. “It’s a lie a child could see through.”
“If it were you making the approach, Blood Angel, I would concur,” Noxx replied. “But we are the Flesh Tearers.” He took in his squad with a sweep of his hand and gave a chilly grin. “And as I am sure you know, people are always willing to think the very worst of us.” Noxx glared at Turcio, daring him to disagree; and in all truth, he could not.
The Space Marines were silent, each of them considering Noxx’s words. Finally, Rafen spoke. “Brother Mohl is to be commended. This has the makings of a good plan. So good, in fact, that I find myself wondering why Lord Seth did not simply send you to prosecute it alone, without the involvement of my Chapter at all.”
“Ah,” said Noxx, “there’s more to it than that.”
“There always is,” Puluo said dryly.
“Zellik’s base of operations is a mobile platform… It would be a misnomer to consider it a ship or a space station. The Archeohort is neither one nor the other.”
“Archeohort?” The word was unfamiliar to Turcio.
“Show them,” Noxx told Mohl. The Techmarine touched a luminous keypad and the lens viewer shifted again. The new shape was hard to grasp, and for long moments Turcio stared at it, trying to draw meaning from what appeared to be a collection of gigantic derricks clustered about an egg-shaped core. It reminded him a little of the fat dust spiders that lurked in the sublevels of the fortress-monastery. The scale was hard to reckon from the image, however.
“The construct is essentially a mobile processing facility, dedicated to the recovery of lost scientific relics. It moves from star to star, sifting planets for archeotech. Zellik has a small army of skitarii and savants, and the construct is well armed. A single vessel would not pose a serious threat to it.”
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 86
