by Rob Sanders
Part of this had been achieved by occupying the Word Bearers of the Barbed Oath with dark service. With considerable Ecclesiarchy forces alerted to the presence of renegades at Suspiria Proctor and Occam unable to take the daemon ship back to Ghalmek, the strike master had unleashed Goura Shengk’s Varga Rax upon several backwater shrine worlds in the outlying Tempora sub-sector.
First Acolyte Phel had been a constant irritation, pressing his master to return to Ghalmek or avenge the Word Bearers by hunting down the Emperor’s priests, operatives of the Inquisition or traitors of the Alpha Legion in equal measure. Occam knew ambition when he saw it. Blind ambition, at that. Phel, ignorant of the fate of Goura Shengk’s former acolyte, thought that he could taste opportunity in the Dark Apostle’s failure at Suspiria Proctor and ached to lead the daemon Space Marines of the Varga Rax. While the Barbed Oath boasted traitors whose flesh was still their own, Shengk’s Varga Rax were daemon-afflicted to a man. For Occam, this meant deploying all of the Alpha Legion warband’s skills and resources. The strike master had not just to maintain a deception that would convince rank and file Word Bearers but also the warp-sired entities that possessed them.
Occam found Host Captain Sor Vhorpall easier to work with, on account of the monstrous officer having little or no personality. The captain simply lived to lead the Varga Rax in slaughter and this Occam had indulged on Secratia IV, St Herod and now Procul-Sanctus. The shrine worlders were not indiscriminate victims of Occam’s disappointment or Captain Vhorpall’s rage. The strike master had spared Suspiria Proctor the wrath of Kar’Nash’gahar, Slayer of Worlds. The Ecclesiarchy still had to pay for costing Occam dearly, in their collusion with the Inquisition and the Angelbane – however unwitting.
‘Clear the bridge,’ Occam growled, dismissing First Acolyte Phel with an impassive sweep of his gauntlet. The strike master could feel Phel’s eyes burning into his back. ‘We are to be alone with our thoughts. Leave two guards.’
Phel left the bridge with the other daemon officers of the Varga Rax and a small army of cloaked cult minions manning the runebanks. Even the Dissolutio’s sorcerer-astropath and possessed Navigator vacated the fang-lined command deck. Beyond Quoda and Vilnius Malik, only withered corpse-servitors remained, their mummified remains interfaced with their cradles and core system consoles.
‘You think the xenos will come?’ Quoda asked.
‘He’ll come,’ Occam said, pulling the black cube of the Tesseraqt from his belt. ‘We have what he wants. What the Lord Dominatus desires.’
‘And he demands it now, fleshling,’ came the ageless metallic voice of Omizhar Vohk.
Occam allowed himself a snarl of satisfaction as the skeletal metal monster stalked out from shadows in the corner of the command deck. Vohk seemed to use the depths of such darkness to move from one place and moment to the next.
‘You took your time, xenos,’ Malik spat as the hunched Vohk stomped out onto the bridge, his footfalls heavy on the deck, the wicked metal digits of a claw extended.
‘The Tesseraqt,’ the creature demanded.
Occam nodded and both Quoda and Malik brought their plasma guns up. They were not the fine specimens of alien engineering they had left behind on the Iota-Æternus but warped and unreliable weapons taken from the Word Bearers armoury. They glowed and pulsed with an unhealthy energy while their scorched muzzles opened wide like jaws in the morphed semblances of dog-like daemons. Their presentation was still enough to stop the alien in his tracks. His optic glowed intensely at the black cube in Occam’s hand.
‘We do not have time for games, fleshling,’ Omizhar Vohk said.
‘The Alpha Legion play the long game,’ Occam told him. ‘For us, there is always time.’ He stepped forward angrily and landed a brutal kick on the alien. Stamping the sole of his armoured boot into the spindly thing’s midriff, Occam broke Vohk’s spine and sent the alien clattering back across a set of consoles. As the strike master moved forward, Vohk got back to his feet, his metal spine repairing itself before Occam’s very eyes. The act was impressive and the strike master nodded his approval. The creature’s optic blazed green with cold alien fury.
Malik and the sorcerer closed in with their humming plasma guns while Occam stormed on. Jumping down from the other side of the console bank he seized the skeletal menace and heaved the weight of his metal form off the deck, smashing him back into the runebanks lining the bridge wall. Occam brought the Tesseraqt back in his other fist.
‘You want your precious artefact, do you, xenos? I don’t think I’ll ever be convinced that you didn’t have something to do with the Angelbane reappearing at Suspiria Proctor.’
‘I did not,’ Omizhar Vohk told him.
‘You serve your master well, xenos,’ Occam said, ‘and if he is who I think he is then telling me is more than your miserable existence would be worth.’
‘You think that the Lord Dominatus is–’ Vohk began.
‘I know he is,’ the strike master said.
‘He is not.’
‘Spoken like a true servant of the true Legion,’ Occam said. ‘I would expect no less of you. Of him.’
The gaping jaw-barrels of Malik’s and the sorcerer’s plasma guns moved in close to the alien’s gaunt metal face as Occam held him against the wall.
‘What do you want?’ Omizhar Vohk said at the prospect of his skull being melted from his shoulders.
‘I want you to take me to our leader,’ Occam said, ‘whereupon I shall turn over his prize personally.’
‘Impossible,’ Vohk told him. He flashed the green of his optic about the bridge of the Dissolutio Perpetua and specifically at the sorcerer Quoda. ‘Just as I could not venture into the riftspace of the Maelstrom, this is a place you cannot go.’
‘We’ll risk it,’ Occam the Untrue determined. He dropped the Tesseraqt on the deck and hovered an armoured boot over it. ‘And so will you. We have all sacrificed so much for this cube and the Lord Dominatus’ wishes that we might as well sacrifice a little more.’
‘Don’t,’ Omizhar Vohk said in a metallic hiss.
‘Make me, xenos.’
‘Why is this so important to you?’ Vohk asked.
‘Because this is a test to be passed,’ Occam told him. ‘Because, like all in my Legion, I have questions that demand answers. Because if the Lord Dominatus is who I believe him to be, then he is the living answer to all such questions and like me, serves the God-Emperor still. Take your pick, xenos.’
With a clatter, Omizhar Vohk seemed to sag.
‘Then however unadvised this course of action,’ the alien said, his metallic hiss resigned, ‘I shall honour our arrangement and take you to your Lord Dominatus.’
‘Where is he?’ Occam demanded.
Omizhar Vohk told him.
Releasing the alien, the strike master picked up the Tesseraqt and moved over to a bridge console. Quoda and Malik still kept their plasma guns on the xenos. Occam punched in a sequence of studs, opening a vox-channel.
‘Send word to First Acolyte Phel,’ Occam commanded. ‘He is to return with Captain Vhorpall and the Varga Rax. We are done with the shrine world. Also, have the Navigator attend us on the bridge and set a course for the Galactic Core.’
It was like nowhere Occam had ever seen. The strike master had operated in the various segmentums of the Imperium, across alien empires and even the riftspace of warp storms. The Galactic Core had a strangeness all of its own. Whereas the empires of galactic species had their own characters and the Maelstrom was perversity incarnate, the Core was like the end of the universe. It was where the void was lost and stars – impossibly ancient – went to die.
The Dissolutio Perpetua had entered the immaterium and had plunged on further towards the Core than the daemon ship’s twisted Navigator had ever travelled. Further than the details of his bloodstained maps showed, into regions without names and zones unknown. When the daemon ship had gone as far as it possibly could, it dropped out of the warp without warning. When Occam, sti
ll masquerading as an imperious Goura Shengk, demanded an explanation, the Navigator had nothing for him but the insistence that the warp was fading, that it was no longer with them – that they had reached the shores of the Sea of Souls.
Pushing on, with the Dissolutio’s sub-light engines roaring through the ship, the daemon vessel entered a realm of light. Here the darkness of the void shrank away and crowded clusters of ancient stars stained everything with a glowing light. Everywhere, stars burned their last and fed upon one another. Dust and debris cloaked the Core while systems, old beyond reckoning and unvisited by all but the most enduring of races, were stellar carousels of primeval catastrophe. Planets were little more than shattered remnants, boasting but the ash and dust of long perished civilisations.
It was here, in this barren place of blinding desolation where time had run its course, that Omizhar Vohk insisted the Lord Dominatus could be found. So Occam pushed on. He pushed the Redacted on. He pushed the Word Bearers, enslaved to his deception, on, on and on.
Here they found worlds long dead. They encountered the ruins of once civilised worlds and the same structures over and over again. Rocky moons, radioactive ghost worlds and the cracked shells of planets that had suffered some ancient, apocalyptic fate – all boasting the same strange alien architecture. Colossal pylons, like bristling nests of needles reaching up from the surface of planets, seemed to afflict the worlds of the Core. The Dissolutio Perpetua found them everywhere as the daemon ship moved from system to system, working its way towards the sterile centre of the galaxy. Some were impossibly old, while others appeared to be fairly recent constructions amidst the dereliction of dead worlds.
Quoda, between periods of feverish malaise, had hypothesised that the pylons were of ancient alien origin and said he had seen them on the worlds of the Cadian Gate in the Eye of Terror. They appeared to have a calming effect on the warp but here in the Galactic Core and in such concentration, they nullified the warp entirely – making immaterial travel and astropathic communication impossible. When Occam questioned Vohk about the pylons the alien said little but that it was a project beyond human supremacy that had been started by ancient races long ago and continued even to this day. The strike master noted that corruption was being driven from the daemon Word Bearers and the sorcerer Quoda could barely call on a fraction of his powers.
All but Malik, Omizhar Vohk and the strike master suffered.
The warp was almost gone. It took all of Quoda’s effort to maintain his manipulations and even the blurred semblance of the legionnaires’ Word Bearers appearance. This didn’t seem to matter. The Word Bearers themselves were changing. They suffered torments both physical and spiritual. All but cut off from the pollution of the warp, the warped brothers of the Varga Rax were driven from their daemons. Their bones untwisted, their daemon brawn shrank and their minds achieved an agonising clarity. Undergoing such dreadful torture and disorientation, Phel, Captain Vhorpall and the brotherhood of the Barbed Oath saw in Occam the Untrue what they expected to see: their Dark Apostle – strong, unswerving and intent upon oblivion.
The possessed cultists that manned the daemon ship went mad without the comfort of their polluting entities. This was nothing compared to the sufferings of the daemon ship itself. So far from the ritual nourishment of Unholy Ghalmek, the Maelstrom’s boon or even Imperial space – where the warp was but a thin veil away – the Dissolutio Perpetua underwent a monstrous exorcism. Like the Word Bearers and its crew, it became largely separated from that which had corrupted it. The infernal beast that squirmed within its superstructure, roared through the ship’s gunfire and warped the architecture to reflect its monstrous will, was now but a ghost of itself. A thing that whimpered in the static of voxmitters and haunted the darkness of the dungeon decks. It retracted the fangs that framed lancet screens, bulkheads and blast doors. It bled foul ichor that flooded the keel, frothed and rose periodically up through the lower deck mesh like a tidal misery.
‘How much more do you think they can take?’ Malik asked his strike master on the bridge. They listened to the moaning of Word Bearers, the insanity of their cultist crew and the dread suffering of the daemon ship about them.
‘Do we care?’ Occam said, staring out into the blinding light of stellar death flooding in through the lancet screens.
‘What about him?’ Malik pressed, indicating the feverish Quoda, who sat on the deck, leaning his pauldron against the wall.
‘He’s Alpha Legion,’ Occam said, his voice like steel. Omizhar Vohk gave a sneer of contempt from the shadows.
‘You are flesh,’ the alien told them, ‘and you are weak.’
The strike master walked dangerously towards the xenos abomination as it skulked in the shadows.
‘How long do you think you’ll last if I shoot you from our torpedo tubes into one of these stars?’ Occam put to him.
Omizhar Vohk moved into the brilliance flooding the bridge and became a silhouette against the lancet screens.
‘My brothers grow tired and I am impatient, xenos,’ Occam told him, backing the creature up to the armoured plas. ‘How much further? Where is the Lord Dominatus?’
‘He’s been with us for a while,’ the alien told him, tapping a metal knuckle against the glass. Occam peered out into the blinding light.
‘Filters,’ the strike master ordered. The warped servitors and cultist crew had become useless in the warpless intensity of the Core. Malik pulled one of them back from where it was lying wasted across a console and manually altered the screen filters. As the light was dialled back, Occam saw the hazy outline of a vessel some way distant but running parallel to their course. Occam looked at Omizhar Vohk. The alien pointed to starboard. Walking across the bridge, Occam joined Malik in staring out of the screen on the other side of the command deck. She was a light cruiser with distinctive lines and piratical augmentations.
‘I know that ship,’ Malik told him. ‘I’ve been aboard her. Reznor even did some work on her. She’s the Sigma Sophistra, flagship of The Chain Unbroken. That’s Naetrix Krayt’s ship. I’d bet my life on it.’
Occam turned back towards Omizhar Vohk.
‘Your brothers come from far and wide to serve the Lord Dominatus,’ the alien said in his metallic hiss. ‘These vessels have been given instructions to escort us in.’
‘In?’ Occam said. ‘Where?’
The alien gestured forward. Through the glare of several nearby stars, raging brilliantly in their death throes, Occam could make out the hazy outline of a planet.
‘Filters,’ he said again and Malik cycled further filters across the lancet screens. There, before the daemon ship and its Alpha Legion escorts, and almost invisible in the combined glare of three suns, was a planet. It roasted in radioactive glory and appeared urchin-like, its cracked and baked surface covered in needle-like pylons across its entire surface.
‘Where are we?’ Occam demanded.
‘Royal Belphagar,’ Omizhar Vohk told him. ‘One of the earliest home worlds of my race. Once, my own home world. Now it is but a shell of ancient glories, used by your Lord Dominatus as a base for his operations. Come, he awaits both you and his prize. Your army brothers shall take us in.’
Krayt’s pirate ships escorted the Dissolutio Perpetua towards a chasmic crack in the planet’s surface about the equator. With ancient pylons rising up above them the daemon ship plunged slowly into the planet. Under Krayt’s guns the daemon ship glided silently down through the abyssal crack with the rocky mantle of the planet passing on either side.
Quoda groaned as they passed within the planet and the intensified influence of the surface pylons. He could no longer exercise his powers of manipulation and the three members of the Redacted now appeared to all in the glory of their scaled plate and legionary colours. The deck servitors and cultist crew cared little for the change; they appeared barely aware of it.
Occam expected to find cavernous darkness within the planet but was surprised to see light ahead. Royal Belphagar was
no ordinary planet. Incredibly old and adapted with the ancient and powerful technologies of some elder race, the world was full of surprises. As the daemon ship moved slowly inside the planet, Occam stared out of the lancet screens in silent wonder. It was a world of strange reversals. The planet was hollow. While its radiation-baked shell had been bare but for thousands of alien pylons, the interior of the hollow planet boasted cities, preserved in silent perfection. The ancient civilisation that made the planet interior their home were long gone, however, and the cityscape of alien monuments, black pyramids and grand architecture had the feeling of a planetary tomb buried deep below the ground.
Suspended in the centre of the hollow space raged the planet’s metal core. It sat there like some kind of sun, held in place by gravitational technologies advanced and ancient. It swirled and rotated, glowing like an abandoned furnace that cast the xenos cityscape in the grim red light of a dying fire. Cast in silhouette against the core and holding station far above the cityscape, Occam saw a flotilla of vessels. They were all fast and stealthy specimens, frigates, armed freighters and light cruisers favoured by the Alpha Legion for their dread work. Some no doubt belonged to Captain Krayt’s The Chain Unbroken, while others were pledged in service to other Alpha Legion warbands, units and harrowmasters.
Slowly, the Alpha Legion escorts brought the Dissolutio Perpetua in line with the flat top of a colossal black pyramid. It seemed clear from the slowing craft that the daemon ship was to hold station there.
‘What now, xenos?’ Occam said, but ominously the skeletal alien had gone – once more disappearing into the shadows and making use of his strange teleportation technology. Occam cursed under his breath before turning to Vilnius Malik. ‘Phel? Captain Vhorpall? The Word Bearers?’
‘The cultist crew are afflicted. I’ve secured the Word Bearers on their temple decks as ordered,’ the former Night Lord told him. ‘They are severely weakened by the effect of this alien technology and are indulging in their rancid rituals. They barely know where they are, let alone where we are.’