The First Heretic, page 17
The sound had been wet, strained – half-drowned by the blood filling Xaphen’s ruptured lungs.
The creature turned its head with a predator’s grace, stinking saliva trailing in gooey stalactites between too many teeth. No artificial light remained on the observation deck, but starlight, the winking of distant suns, bred silver glints in the creature’s unmatching eyes. One was amber, swollen, lidless. The other black, an obsidian pebble sunken deep into its hollow.
Now you, it said, without moving its maw. Those jaws could never form human speech. You are next.
Argel Tal’s first attempt to speak left his lips as a trickle of too-hot blood. It stung his chin as it ran down his face. The chemical-rich reek of the liquid, of Lorgar’s gene-written blood running through the veins of each of his sons, was enough to overpower the stench rising from the creature’s quivering, muscular grey flesh. For that one moment, he smelled his own death, rather than the creature’s corruption.
It was a singular reprieve.
The captain raised his bolter in a grip that trembled, but not from fear. This defiance – this was the refusal he couldn’t voice any other way.
Yes. The creature loomed closer. Its lower body was an abomination’s splicing between serpent and worm, thick-veined and leaving a viscous, clear slug-trail that stank of unearthed graves. Yes.
‘No,’ Argel Tal finally forced the words through clenched teeth. ‘Not like this.’
Like this. Like your brothers. This is how it must be.
The bolter barked with a throaty chatter, a stream of shells that hammered into the wall, impacting with concussive detonations that defiled the chamber’s quiet. Each buck of the gun in his shaking hand sent the next shell wider from the mark.
Arm muscles burning, he let the weapon fall with a dull clang. The creature did not laugh, did not mock him for his failure. Instead, it reached for him with four arms, lifting him gently. Black talons scraped against the grey ceramite of his armour as it clutched him aloft.
Prepare yourself. This will not be painless.
Argel Tal hung limp in the creature’s grip. For a brief second, he reached for the swords of red iron at his hips, forgetting that they were broken, the blades shattered, on the gantry decking below.
‘I can hear,’ his gritted teeth almost strangled the words, ‘another voice.’
Yes. One of my kin. It comes for you.
‘This... is not what... my primarch wanted...’
This? The creature dragged the helpless Astartes closer, and burst Argel Tal’s secondary heart with a flex of thought. The captain went into violent convulsions, feeling the pulped mass behind his ribs, but the daemon cradled him with sickening gentleness.
This is exactly what Lorgar wanted. This is the truth.
Argel Tal strained for breath that wouldn’t come, and forced dying muscles to reach for weapons that weren’t there.
The last thing he felt before he died was something pouring into his thoughts, wet and cold, like oil spilling behind his eyes.
The last thing he heard was one of his dead brothers drawing a ragged breath over the vox-channel.
And the last thing he saw was Xaphen twitching, rising from the deck on struggling limbs.
He opened his eyes, and saw he was the last to awaken.
Xaphen stood stronger than the others, his crozius maul in his hands. Through the blur of Argel Tal’s returning consciousness, he heard the Chaplain speaking orders, encouragement, demands that his brothers stand and pull themselves together.
Dagotal remained on his knees, vomiting through his helm’s mouth grille. What he produced from his stomach was much too black. Malnor leaned against the wall, his forehead pressed to the cool metal. The others were in similar states of disarray, hauling themselves to their feet, purging their guts of stinking ichor, and whispering litanies from the Word.
Argel Tal couldn’t see the daemon. He looked left and right, targeting reticule not locking on to anything.
‘Where is Ingethel?’ he tried to ask, but the only sound he made was a sick, thick drawl of wordless growling.
Xaphen came over to him and offered a hand to help him rise. The Chaplain had removed his helm, and in the chamber’s gloom the warrior-priest’s face was unnaturally pallid, but otherwise unchanged.
‘Where is Ingethel?’ Argel Tal repeated. This time, the words came forth. It was almost, but not quite, his voice.
‘Gone,’ Xaphen replied. ‘The vox is back online, and power has been restored to the ship. Squads are checking in from all decks. But the daemon is gone.’
Daemon. Still so strange, to hear the word voiced out loud. A word from mythology, spoken as cold fact.
Argel Tal looked up at the glass dome ceiling, looking out into the void beyond. There was no space. Not true space, at least. The void was a swirling, psychotic mass of flensed energy and clashing tides. A thousand shades of violet, a thousand shades of red. Colours humanity had never catalogued, and no living beings had seen before. Stars, stained by the riot of crashing energies, winked through the storm like bloodshot eyes.
At last, in the window’s reflection, he saw himself. Pearls of sweat rolled down his face. Even his sweat stank of the daemon: bestial, raw, ripe – the reek of organs, failing to cancer.
‘We need to get out of here,’ said Argel Tal. Something moved in his stomach, something cold uncoiling within him, and he swallowed acidic bile to keep from throwing up.
‘How did this happen?’ Malnor groaned. None present had ever heard the stoic warrior so unmanned.
Torgal staggered over to them, rubbing reddened eyes in sallow sockets. His chestplate was painted with a messy scorch-streak of burned ceramite – the black acid-burn of his vomit.
‘We need to get back to the fleet,’ he said. ‘Back to the primarch.’
Argel Tal caught sight of his own broken blades, scattered in jagged pieces across the decking. Repressing the sting of loss, he reached for his discarded bolter. As soon as his gauntleted fingers touched the grip, an ammunition counter on his eye lenses flickered at zero.
‘First, we need to get to the bridge.’
Every human on board was dead.
This was something Argel Tal had first feared as he moved in a lurching stride from corridor to corridor. The fear became reality as more and more of Seventh Company’s squads voxed to report the same thing.
They were alone here. Every servitor, every serf, every slave and preacher and artificer and servant was dead.
Deck by deck, chamber by chamber, the Word Bearers hunted for any sign of life beyond themselves.
Smaller than De Profundis, the destroyer Orfeo’s Lament was an attack ship, a sleek and narrow hunter, not a line-breaking assault vessel like many Astartes cruisers. Its crew numbered just under a thousand humans and augmented servitors at full complement, in addition to the hundred Astartes – a full company’s worth.
Ninety-seven Word Bearers remained alive. Of the humans, not one.
Three Astartes had simply not awoken as the others had. Argel Tal ordered their bodies burned, with the remains to be blasted out of an airlock as soon as the ship managed to get clear of the warp storm.
When, and if, that would ever be.
Evidence of the human crew’s demise was everywhere to behold. Argel Tal, bred without the capacity to feel fear, was not immune to disgust nor shielded by his genes from feeling regret. Each corpse he passed watched him with a lifeless stare and open jaws. They screamed in silence. Shrunken, yellowed eyes accused him with every step he took.
‘We should have defended them from this,’ he murmured the words aloud without realising.
‘No.’ Xaphen’s tone invited no argument. ‘They were naught but resources for the Legion. We do the Legion’s work, and they were the price we paid.’
Not the only price, Argel Tal thought.
‘This decay,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’ The captain’s pace was increasing with each step he took, and the closer he came to the bridge, the nearer he found himself to running. Strength flooded him, its presence a welcome contrast to the weakness only minutes before.
The hallway was a major thoroughfare running along the ship’s ridged back like a spinal column. At all hours of day and night, it was busy with crew members going about their duties.
Except now. Now it was silent but for Argel Tal’s footsteps, and his closest brothers with him. Rotting bodies lay gaunt and withered along the decking, husked by the dry, stale air put out by the ship’s oxygen scrubbers.
‘These bodies have been dead for weeks,’ said Xaphen.
‘That’s not possible,’ Malnor said. ‘We were unconscious for no more than a handful of minutes.’
Xaphen looked up from where he knelt by the desiccated corpse of a servitor. Its bionics had shaken loose of the withering organic limbs, and lay pristine on the floor.
‘Unconscious?’ he shook his head. ‘We were not unconscious. I felt my hearts burst in that beast’s claws. I died, Malnor. We all died, just as the daemon said we would.’
‘My hearts beat now,’ the sergeant replied. ‘As do yours.’
Argel Tal saw the same. Retinal displays didn’t lie. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘is not the time. We need to get to the bridge.’
The warriors moved again, stepping over the dried corpses that grew more frequent as they neared the command deck.
Eighty-one dead bodies waited for them on the bridge.
They lay sprawled or sat hunched, with several locked foetal on the floor, while others were cringing, curled, in their seats.
‘They knew what was happening,’ said Xaphen. ‘This wasn’t fast. They felt something as they died.’
Argel Tal hesitated by the twisted figure of Captain Janus Sylamor, curled in her throne as if she sought, in her last moments, to escape something that prowled nearby. Her sunken features, almost mummified, told him all he needed to know.
‘Pain,’ he said. ‘What they felt was pain.’
Dagotal was already by one of the drive consoles, dragging an officer’s body off the controls. The cadaver slumped to the decking, only to find its rest further disturbed by Xaphen, who set about examining it – carving into it – with his combat blade.
Dagotal swore in back-alley Colchisian. ‘I drive a jetbike, sir. I can’t fly an Imperial warship, even if we had the slaves necessary to feed the engine furnace.’
Argel Tal turned from the ship captain’s husk. ‘Just give me an overview.’
His voice still didn’t sound, didn’t feel, quite right. As if someone nearby was speaking the words in unison with him, in mocking chorus.
‘We’re dead in space,’ Dagotal adjusted more controls to no effect. ‘Power hasn’t been restored to all systems. Not even close. The Geller field is enabled, but we lack void shields, plasma propulsion, energy weapons, projectile weapons, and life support on half the decks.’
‘Manoeuvring thrusters?’
‘Sir,’ Dagotal hesitated. ‘We’ve drifted significantly in the storm’s tides from where we came to all stop. Taking that into account, and lacking warp flight... On manoeuvring thrusters it will take us at least three months to break clear of the... nebula.’
‘It’s not a nebula,’ Xaphen murmured. ‘You’ve seen what’s outside. It’s not a nebula.’
‘Whatever in the name of hell it is,’ Dagotal snapped back.
‘Hell is a good enough word for it,’ Xaphen muttered, still distracted in his work.
Argel Tal lifted the body of Captain Sylamor from the oversized Astartes command throne, laying her to rest at the edge of the command deck. When he returned, he took her place, his armour clanking against the metal of her seat.
‘Fire the thrusters,’ he ordered. ‘The sooner we begin, the sooner we’ll be back with the fleet.’
‘Bloodless,’ Xaphen announced. He rose from his knees, blade in hand, the grisly dismemberment complete at his feet. Vox-officer Amal Vrey’s autopsy would never enter any official record, but it was unarguably thorough.
‘The bodies,’ Xaphen said, ‘they’re bloodless. Something leeched the blood from their veins, killing them all.’
‘Ingethel?’
‘No, Ingethel was with us. Its kin did this.’
Its kin. The daemon’s words resurfaced in Argel Tal’s aching mind. Yes. One of my kin. It comes for you.
He felt something slither within him. Something stirring, wrapping around the bones of his arms and legs, coiling in a tight spiral around his spine.
‘Summon every warrior to the bridge,’ he ordered, hearing his own voice echoing in his mind, a silent chorus twinned with his words.
‘And Dagotal,’ said Argel Tal, ‘get us out of here.’
The ship that limped its way from the warp storm was a far cry from the noble Imperial vessel that had cut its way in. It trailed psychic fog around its membrane-thin Geller Field, turning in a slow roll that spoke of flawed guidance systems and damaged stabilisers.
Pulsing from its mangled communications towers was a repeated message, the Colchisian words rendered into fuzz by detuned vox.
‘This is the Orfeo’s Lament. Critical casualties sustained. Grievous damage. Requesting extraction. This is the Orfeo’s Lament...’
‘Contact re-established with Orfeo’s Lament,’ called out one of the bridge crew.
The command deck of De Profundis was alive with activity – a hive of officers, servitors, analysts and crew members of every stripe, all working around a central platform that rose above the consoles. On the platform, a golden giant in robes of grey silk watched the oculus screen. His face, so close to the face of his father, was softened in a way the Emperor’s never was: Lorgar was both curious and concerned.
‘Already?’ he said, glancing to the officers at the vox-console.
‘Sire,’ the Master of Auspex called from his bank of flickering monitors, ‘the ship is... horrifically damaged.’
The bustle of the bridge began to quieten, as more and more crew members watched the oculus, seeing the Orfeo’s Lament in its powerless drift.
‘How can this be?’ Lorgar leaned on the handrail ringing the raised podium, his golden fingers gripping the steel. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘Receiving a distress pulse,’ said one of the vox-officers. ‘Sire... My primarch... The Orfeo’s Lament has suffered critical casualties. We’re getting an automated message.’
Lorgar covered his parted lips with a hand, unable to conceal his unrest where another primarch might have stood stoic. Worry was etched onto his handsome features, replacing the confusion that had taken hold moments before.
‘Play the message, please,’ he asked in a soft voice.
It came through in a crackle of vox, grating across the bridge speakers.
‘...the Orfeo’s Lament. Critical casualties sustained. Grievous damage. Requesting extraction. This is the Orfeo’s Lament...’
‘How can this be?’ he asked again. ‘Master of Vox, get me a signal to that ship.’
‘By your word, sire.’
‘Argel Tal,’ Lorgar breathed his son’s name. ‘I know his voice. That was Argel Tal.’
At his side, Fleetmaster Baloc Torvus nodded, his stern features emotionless where his primarch’s were tormented. ‘Aye, sire. It was.’
Contact took three and a half minutes to restore, during which the rest of the 1,301st Fleet had raised its shields and armed all weapons. Tug-ships sailed from the flagship’s docking bays, ready to drag the limping Lament back to its sister vessels.
At last, a picture resolved on the oculus, showing the other vessel’s bridge. Audio contact filtered back a few seconds afterwards, heralded by a burst of static.
‘Blood of the Emperor,’ Lorgar whispered as he watched.
Argel Tal wore no helm. His face was gaunt, a pathetic wraith of his former vitality, with his eyes ringed by the dark smears of countless restless nights. Speckles of old blood decorated the left side of his face, and his armour – what was left of it – was pitted and cracked, devoid of any holy parchment.
He rose from his command throne on unsteady legs and saluted. There was the softest bang as his fist hit his breastplate.
‘You’re... still here,’ he rasped. All strength was gone from his voice.
Lorgar was the one to break the silence. ‘My son. What has befallen you? What madness is this?’
Behind Argel Tal, other figures were moving into view. Word Bearers, all. They were just as weak, just as ruined, as their commander. One fell to his knees as Lorgar watched, praying in a senseless stream of conflicting words. It took several moments for the primarch to realise it was Xaphen, recognisable only because of the broken black armour.
Argel Tal closed his eyes, letting out a breath. ‘Sire, we have returned, as ordered.’
Lorgar glanced at Torvus, before turning back to Argel Tal. ‘Captain, you’ve been gone no more than sixty seconds. We just witnessed the Lament enter the edges of the storm. You return to us less than a minute after your departure.’
Argel Tal scratched his ravaged face, shaking his head. ‘No. No, that cannot be.’
‘It can be,’ Lorgar stared hard at him, ‘and it is. My son, what happened to you?’
‘Seven months,’ the captain sagged, leaning on the arm of his throne to keep standing. ‘Seven. Months. There are barely forty of us left. No food. We ate the crew... hateful mouthfuls of leathery flesh and dry bones. There was no water. Water tanks ruptured in the storm damage. We drank promethium fuel... weapon oils... engine coolant... Sire, we’ve been killing each other. We have been drinking each other’s blood to stay alive.’
Lorgar looked away only for long enough to address one of the vox-officers. ‘Bring them in,’ he said, pitching his voice low. ‘Get my sons off that ship.’
