Lords of Blood, page 110
‘Brother Gawin, clear this block now,’ said Jadriel.
Gawin split off and began directing people outside. There were a few in there, either crazed or intoxicated, who seemed to find the situation funny. Gawin broke a few bones explaining the gravity of the situation.
Jadriel moved on with the remaining four warriors of the demi-squad. Ceramite struck iron stairs, making the tank toll. Metal creaked under the Space Marines’ weight. His battleplate cogitator trilled alarms warning of failing structural integrity. Jadriel responded by increasing his pace. They ignored the second and third floor, heading directly for their target.
On the ground floor Gawin loosed off a few shots. Screams followed. People began pouring quickly past the Space Marines to get out. Jadriel ignored their babbling queries and pushed on, oblivious to their cries of pain when his armoured body clipped them. The laser dot of his bolt rifle flicked over flaking walls and ancient rivets.
‘Up there!’ a female civilian said, pointing behind herself. ‘She’s sick! Something bad!’ She was away before Jadriel could question her further.
The floor cleared. There was a draught coming from somewhere; curtains closing off ramshackle rooms blew out into the corridor. Auspex revealed a larger space beyond. The target was in a dormitory on the other side of the wall. Jadriel peered through, but saw no one. The door was open but too low and narrow to permit them entry.
Jadriel signalled Brother Ulfius to wait. Ulfius knelt and raised his bolt rifle.
‘We’ll go through the walls. Wait for us to break in, then cover,’ he told Ulfius.
He sent Brothers Safir and Bors into another room ten yards back on the right. He and Brother Fedor went into the room on the left.
A man lying on a cot in the cramped space scrambled up and ran out when he saw his visitors. Jadriel let him go.
‘Krak,’ he said, pointing to the wall. Fedor and he clamped a grenade each to the wall, one at head height, another level with their hips. They turned away.
‘Ready,’ his other fire-team voxed.
‘Now,’ Jadriel ordered.
The krak grenades went off to a datapulsed command. Their implosion shattered the wall. A couple of strikes from Jadriel’s boots opened it up enough for them to burst through to the other side.
Opposite Jadriel, the second fire-team advanced into the area and surveyed the room. Smoke from the explosion turned over in the breeze. The far side of the tank looked outside: rough windows cut into the metal showed an expanse of leaden water lined by twisted black swamps in one direction, a blank white horizon in the other.
A buzzing filled Jadriel’s mind. Once more he saw a flash of a voidship interior, and smelled corrupted flesh. He squeezed his eyes closed until it passed.
‘Brother-lieutenant?’ asked Fedor.
‘It’s nothing. The psyker. We’ve found it. Stay alert – the witch is clouding our minds.’
‘Where are they?’ voxed Brother Safir.
He advanced. The usual junk of miserable living crunched underfoot. Scores of people must have lived in there. The dormitory extended outwards, wrapping around the inner core of smaller rooms that made up the rest of the floor. Jadriel turned to the left, sweeping his gun over a disarray of belongings and beds. Fedor flipped a few over.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Here,’ said Safir. He had gone the other way. There, a curtain divided the room. Bors ripped it down.
In the far corner a young woman sat with her knees drawn up under her chin. She looked up, startled by the intrusion. Jadriel judged her intoxicated, or she’d have run out with the rest before the grenades went off.
A second woman lay on a low cot, her head turned to face the Space Marines, her pupils dilated so widely her irises were compressed bands of colour around coins of black.
‘Life signs minimal,’ voxed Bors.
‘That’s our target. Get the other one out of here,’ ordered Jadriel. ‘There will be no more deaths than are necessary.’
Safir pulled the other woman to her feet as easily as if she’d been made of cobweb. She offered no resistance as he pushed her out of the room.
Bors and Fedor covered the girl as Jadriel approached.
Her filthy blankets were soaked with sweat. He estimated the girl to be in her late teens or early twenties – since his apotheosis it had become hard to tell the ages of common humanity apart, and her poor physical state made it harder. She was bone pale, her veins standing out against waxy skin. Strands of her hair lay around her head.
‘Something’s happening to her,’ said Bors.
‘It does not matter. Whatever witchery is at play here, we are in time. Back out,’ said Jadriel. ‘I shall execute.’
The woman stirred. Her eyes looked through the red-and-white giants into a place where she saw only wonder.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ she whispered. ‘So beautiful.’
Jadriel pulled the trigger of his bolt rifle. The weapon kicked in his hands three times as bolts were forced into the firing chamber and their initiators set off. They raced down the barrel of the rifle and into clear space, where their rocket motors ignited and they accelerated again, speeding towards the girl.
He saw all this clearly. Time slowed to a crawl. The woman floated up from the bed, light shining from her mouth and her eyes. Her arms raised jerkily, hands hanging like empty gloves from the ends of her arms. Jadriel’s bolts slowed further, until they were stopped in the air. Their rocket motors continued to burn for a few seconds, then gave out, and the bolts died where they were, floating in a psychic field that prevented them from reaching their target.
‘Too late!’ Bors cried.
All of them opened fire. They emptied their magazines until the space between them and the woman was full of burning bolts, but all were stopped, becoming like a wall of candles.
The girl began to jerk. Her face distorted. Her bones cracked. Blood poured down her legs and from her mouth. Her chest convulsed, flexing inwards, then outwards, and with a final heave it burst open, spraying viscera across the room.
Her arms spread. Her body divided and stretched, flesh running and reforming into an arch. A skin of rolling warp energy formed in the gap. Her head, still alive somehow, lolled on a broken neck.
Something pressed against the skin of energy. It bulged. The woman’s head flopped forward.
A tentacle emerged from the energy field, tapping tentatively at the floor, wrapped itself around a bed, and heaved.
A wall of force slammed into the four Space Marines, upending everything around them and sending it smashing into the walls. Something vast was coming through the broken woman into the world of living, thinking beings.
Jadriel crashed into the wall, denting it. He fell down, breaking the floor and crushing everything beneath him. Bors and Safir were firing again. Outside people were screaming.
‘Captain Ares, the lieutenant is down. We have warp hostiles making material breach,’ Bors voxed.
Jadriel did not hear any of it. He was sinking away from time, rising into another. Black corridors of a daemonic ship passed by as he hurried to meet his fate. The gunfire he heard sounded from another millennium.
He did not see Bors and Safir firing wildly at the xenos emerging from the psyker’s body, or their bolts pass harmlessly through it. He did not see the woman’s used-up corpse fall in a wet ruin upon the ground.
‘Horus!’ he screamed. ‘Horus!’
Bors turned at the noise. A diaphanous tentacle reached for him, wrapping around his helm. Immediately, he switched target, bringing his gun to bear on his brother.
‘What–’ said Safir.
Bors emptied his bolt rifle into his brother’s chest. Safir danced back under the impacts, until one finally broke his chestplate, punched into his body, and destroyed his internal organs.
‘Stop!’ shouted Fedor.
Jadriel saw this through the haze of madness reaching for him from the deep past. ‘Traitor,’ said Jadriel, and charged at Brother Fedor.
‘Sanguinius preserve us!’ said Ares.
They were forcing their way through the crowd pouring out of the converted tanks when the upper floors blew out with a loud metallic ring, leaving the walls petalled outwards.
‘What was that?’ said Bedevoir.
‘The psyker,’ said Ares. ‘This one is powerful. Far more powerful than we expected.’
Bolt fire rattled out of the ruined building. Secondary explosions went off as cooking cylinders caught.
‘Captain Ares, the lieutenant is down. We have warp hostiles making material breach,’ voxed Bors.
‘Confirm. What nature?’
‘Throne of Terra, daemons,’ said Bedevoir.
Bors did not answer. Safir’s life blinked out to the song of a mortis rune.
‘Jadriel, Jadriel, come in!’
‘Traitor! Traitor!’
‘Jadriel! Squad, fan out,’ ordered Ares. ‘Cover the entrance. We are not entering this building until we are sure of what we are facing.’
‘Captain, look!’
Bedevoir pointed skywards. A huge, semi-transparent creature was squeezing its way out of a hole in the tank wall. Its body shimmered with bioluminescence, which continued to blink even as its body lost its translucency and began to take on a pinkish brown hue.
‘That’s not a daemon. What is it?’ said Bedevoir.
‘Have you not faced them before? It is a psyren, an enslaver, a xenos that lives in the warp. Bring it down! Bring it down now, or they’ll infest the entire planet,’ Ares ordered.
The Space Marines raced to take up better firing positions. Bolts streaked across the sky. Many hit the rising xenos, punching holes in its flotation sac and blasting off tentacles, but most passed through and it continued to rise, wounded but not seriously harmed.
‘It’s not dense enough to trip the mass detonators,’ shouted Brother Peilin.
‘If we hit it enough times, it will die,’ said Bedevoir. ‘Hope there is only one.’
The creature rose up into the sky, pulsing colours. It underwent a complex unfolding. The upper part detached, and the creature became two. Another convulsion, and it became three. They drifted apart from one another, buoyancy sacs convulsing.
‘It’s multiplying,’ said Brother Dindran.
‘No, it’s dividing,’ said Ares.
Caught on the wind, the creatures blew away towards the land, rapidly receding from the range of their bolt rifles. They were soon lost against the sky. Ares switched through various visual feeds.
‘I can’t get a tracking lock on them. Delgor,’ he voxed.
‘I am monitoring the situation,’ the Techmarine responded. ‘I am in pursuit but cannot gain solid target locks.’
‘This is a disaster,’ Ares snarled. ‘Jadriel. Jadriel, come in.’
The squeal of tearing metal sounded from the other end of the platform.
‘Captain, I am seeing more of the xenos,’ voxed Lamorak.
They turned to see another of the psyrens rising up from a hovel, already splitting into three as it ascended.
‘Blood of Sanguinius! The other psykers. How many?’ Ares voxed. ‘Delgor!’
‘I have these,’ Delgor replied.
The sky shook to the roar of the approaching Thunderhawk. Bright laser beams sliced across the sky, cutting through one of the rising psyrens. It fell down in drifting sheets of matter. But the other two seemed to fade out of being as they too were picked up by the wind and carried off.
Another screech of metal, then another. Three more clusters of the xenos emerged. It was then that the population turned on the Space Marines.
They came at the Red Wings in an uncoordinated wave, faces twisted in terror at what they were doing, but unable to stop themselves.
‘Halt! In the name of the Emperor, halt!’ Peilin shouted.
‘It’s no use,’ said Ares. ‘The xenos have them. They’re slaves. Open fire, or they’ll overwhelm us.’
Mind-slaved humans ran at the line. Dozens were mown down by bolter fire, their blood gurgling down the drains set into the ancient deck, but there were too many to kill, and they hurled themselves at the small group. Red Wings grabbed at men who wrapped their arms around their necks, wrenching them off their backpacks and throwing them as living missiles back into the seething crowds. A rain of tools and belongings showered the Space Marines. In their armour, the Red Wings were impervious to such primitive missiles, but the assault spoiled their aim.
‘Delgor, the situation here is beyond salvation,’ Ares ordered. ‘Collect Lamorak and extract us. We’ll deal with this from orbit.’
He checked his command network. Bors’ life signs beat weakly. Jadriel’s ran hot.
Ares had a terrible misgiving.
‘Jadriel,’ he shouted over the chatter of bolters and the ineffectual commands of his men that the crowd get back. ‘Jadriel, respond.’
Fishing and industrial equipment rained down around him.
‘Jadriel!’
He took a step back into the shelter of the building, running through all data channels until he had a firm hold on Jadriel’s battleplate systems. An override command activated his lieutenant’s vox remotely.
Ares’ blood ran cold at what he heard.
‘Why? Why! Why, my brother? Why did you betray him?’
He silenced it, cutting it off from the others in case they heard.
Safir and Fedor were dead. Bors’ signum transponder showed him to be in the room the first psyren had come out of. Ulfius was close by. Gawin was missing. Peilin was running into the crowd. Dindran had vanished. Jadriel was moving away from the converted oil tanks, heading to the edge of the rig. He’d lost half a squad in a matter of moments.
‘Get up onto the roof,’ Ares said to Bedevoir. ‘Delgor is coming. Bors and Ulfius are still alive at the site of the emergence. Send someone to fetch them. I will find Jadriel. Track my signal, and take us out of here.’
‘I should come with–’ said Bedevoir.
‘I am going alone,’ Ares interrupted. ‘That is my command.’
Ares struck out through the building. His men fell back from the mind-enslaved crowd, firing as they went. The people were puppets, their morale was impossible to break under the influence of the xenos, and the going was hard. The squad was divided and scattered.
‘To the roof!’ he repeated. ‘Bedevoir, get them all up to the roof.’
He went deeper into the building, passing through the wrecked belongings of a hundred wretched existences. A door on the far side brought him out on the edge of the rig. There had been a barrier here, but many of the posts had rusted through and the railings were gone, leaving the three hundred-foot drop unprotected. The deck was corroded through with holes, and he tested the weight with his boot before proceeding.
On the far side of the converted tanks an unexpected calm reigned. Delgor continued to sweep overhead, strafing the psyrens with lascannon fire, but the engine roar was muted. The sound of the mind-slaved crowds was a soft rumble, barely louder than the slap of water on the rig’s legs. The boltguns of his men uttered sharp pops.
‘Jadriel,’ Ares spoke through his voxmitter. ‘Listen to me.’
Jadriel’s locator winked on the cartograph of the rig. He’d stopped heading forwards, instead moving erratically around a flat area crowded with ranks of water bowsers, their wheels removed and left up on iron stands for so long that repeated repainting and rust had welded blocks and axles together. Ares entered slowly, passing down an avenue between the tanks.
‘Jadriel, you are falling to the Rage. You must listen to me. Shake it off.’
He stopped. Jadriel was ahead. His shouting was muffled by his helm, his external voxmitter inactive.
There was a small square in the centre of the bowser range. Four large, square rainwater funnels covered it over, hiding the sky. Bundles of water pipes led from the undersides to feed the tanks. Jadriel was underneath, arguing with himself.
‘Jadriel,’ said Ares. He entered the space.
Jadriel stopped talking and turned to face his captain. He had lost his bolt rifle, but his power sword was out of its scabbard and in his hand.
His voxmitter popped and buzzed, and his voice came loudly.
‘Traitor,’ he said breathily. ‘You will not keep me from my appointed task.’
‘Listen to me. Think. Think who you are.’ Ares laid down his gun. His right hand itched to grip the hilt of his own sword.
‘It is over,’ said Jadriel. ‘Your treachery is done. I will end you.’
‘Jadriel, wait. Please. You are not Sanguinius. This is Dulcis.’
‘More lies from your mouth, Horus, but you will not stop me.’
Jadriel ignited his power sword and charged. Ares drew his own sword and activated it in time to meet the strike. Their power fields met with a boom that rolled out across the ocean. Their swords locked. Jadriel pushed hard, his face coming within inches of Ares’ own. Ares resisted with all his might, but Jadriel was Primaris, and had been stronger than him even before he gained the additional strength of the Black Rage.
‘Traitor,’ he said.
Bors and Ulfius fired from cover at Bedevoir and his squad when they went to fetch them.
‘Brothers! This is madness! Stop!’ Bedevoir voxed.
But they did not hear him, or they did not understand. They kept firing, spraying bolts down the corridor at their own brothers, roaring incoherently and driving them back.
‘We are going to have to leave them,’ Bedevoir told his remaining men. ‘Captain Ares, we are withdrawing.’
