A return home. To Terra.
To be one with the creator-Emperor.
The sensation fills Vespesario, fulfilling every desire, his own gene-seed aching to be united with the primogenitor, the Master of Mankind. The brood feels it too, the bond singing like a choir in their minds, calling him to come with them, to guide them to the paradise they seek.
The thought terrifies him. It terrifies Vespesario in a way that no mortal danger ever could. The idea that he might bring this unholy infection to the doors of Terra itself fills him with a grief and dread so grave that if he could have willed himself dead at that moment his hearts would have stopped.
And greater still is the fear that he will not be able to fight the urge much longer, the knowledge that he will succumb. A physical foe he can face, but a psychic attack will eventually wear down even the defences of a Space Marine.
In reaction to this hopelessness, rage erupts. A rage burned into the gene-seed he carries, a psychic after-echo of a disastrous fate that still echoes down the millennia. The rage gives him strength, shattering the bond of the patriarch-navigator, granting him a moment’s clarity as battle-hormones surge through his system in unprecedented quantity, awakening every cell in his body to the latent strength encoded within.
The brood recoils from the gene-rage, sickened by its touch.
He has but a moment and strikes, firing his storm bolter to gouge a wound in the patriarch’s flank. It is not enough, not nearly enough to slay such a beast, but he senses that it is all he has the strength remaining to do.
It is not enough to die here. Like moths to a flame, others will be drawn to the space hulk, feeding the brood’s gene-hunger for another generation, bringing the Omen of Despair a few more light years closer to the heart of the Imperium, a grotesque spider in the guise of a resplendent butterfly.
The rage gives him strength to fight the brood but duty, honour, sacrifice, these are the qualities that bolster the courage he needs to run, to flee, to protect himself so that he might carry a warning.
Adonius is dead at the door but the brood do not attack when he emerges, still confused by the conflicting psychic signals and pain emanating from their patriarch. Vespesario breaks into a lumbering run, heading into the depths of the ship, closing doors and bulkheads behind him, forestalling pursuit until even he does not know where he is.
His wounds are great. Only the madness of the Black Rage sustains him, and he knows that his sanity will not last much longer. He wants to turn and face his foes, to cut them down with storm bolter and rip them apart with his power fist.
A deeper goal flares inside, just long enough to find the small magazine chamber, just long enough to open the locks and step inside the closing door, breaking the mechanism to seal himself into a living tomb. He hears them scratching and battering the door but the ammunition storage cell is designed to withstand starship bombardments. On the verge of death he waits, praying for calm, for peace, and for the strength to survive.
And the cold comes as his life leeches away, hearts slowing, breaths becoming shallower, the sus-an membrane flooding his system, becoming one with the rage and hatred, sealing the truth inside a coffin of flesh.
With Calistarius leading the charge, the Blood Angels punched through the gathering genestealers. The aliens had not been expecting an attack and were caught unawares by the sudden offensive. Spurred on by desperation, Calistarius hurled psychic blasts as much as he used his pistol and sword, incinerating the genestealers. The storm bolters of his brethren finished off the survivors of the psychic assault.
‘Why do we not wait for the second wave?’ asked Sergeant Dioneas.
‘As soon as reinforcements land, the navigator-beast will activate the warp engines.’
‘So why did you call them in?’ the sergeant demanded. ‘Have you not doomed the whole company?’
‘I am sure the creature knows we are just a scouting force. If it judges we are going to leave, I think it will simply take us into the warp. It must be able to detect the incoming boarding torpedoes and so it will wait. We have to kill it before they arrive.’
‘If we fail?’
‘You must send the abort signal before the second wave makes contact. They must not set foot on the Omen of Despair or we shall all be lost. Better that we are taken than the whole of the First Company.’
‘That is a terrible gamble, brother, I hope you know what to do.’
Calistarius said nothing, but the piece of memory stuck in his mind from Vespesario was more than enough to give him confidence.
The truth lay in delusions, oddly enough. Everything Vespesario had witnessed, everything he had experienced on board the Omen of Despair had been translated into his rage-fevered hallucinations as Lord Sanguinius.
A febrile creation, not memories at all.
The Librarian could feel its presence even now, lingering in a corner of his mind like a smouldering ember, ready to ignite again if he gave it a chance. For most the Black Rage was a curse but for Calistarius and his companions it had become a blessing, the last chance for Vespesario to give them his warning two centuries after his doom.
‘Get me to the bridge, that is our only objective,’ the Librarian told his battle-brothers. Dioneas was content to comply, despatching the squad to create a breach-head around the command deck. It took several minutes to push back the lingering genestealers with storm bolter and flamer, but eventually the cordon was secure enough for Calistarius to make his last move.
The door of the bridge was still rent asunder from Vespesario’s attacks. Calistarius hardened his thoughts, both to the vile scene that awaited him and to the psychic attack that would surely come. He stepped over the threshold, sword at the ready, and confronted the genestealer patriarch.
It was even more horrendous than Vespesario’s memories had conveyed. It had expanded, filling half the bridge now, disgusting sub-growths of soft flesh and chitin suspended by wires, sustained by pulsing feed tubes that filled the air with the stench of decay. Calistarius’s olfactory filters were almost overwhelmed by it.
The third eye had become a semi-autonomous appendage, jutting from the bloated face of the patriarch on a long stalk, pierced by clips and hooks linked by coiled cables to the warp engine console.
The eye swung toward Calistarius even as the navigator-patriarch’s clawed hands reached for him. Rather than trying to avoid its otherworldly stare he met the alien’s gaze full-on, allowing the Black Rage of Vespesario’s memories to flow forth.
He felt the same timeless void of the brood, as old as the stars, impossibly distant and ancient, reborn through a million generations since a beginning in another galaxy, the tiniest fragment of a much greater whole yearning to be reunited, forever devoured by inner emptiness.
The rage boiled up inside him and he seized hold of the psychic connection, pouring wrath and scorn into his foe without relent.
Psychically and physically the patriarch thrashed to break free, emitting an unearthly wail as ten thousand years of grief and desire for vengeance were made manifest in its mind. It burned like fire, turning alien intelligence to ash, searing through the hypnotic lure of the brood, leaping from one genestealer to the next like a plague, infecting their thoughts with alien anger and hatred so intense that they fell upon each other in their desire to rend and kill.
Claws as hard as titanium closed on his armour, cracking ceramite, puncturing fibre bundles, pushing closer and closer to his gene-enhanced flesh and bones.
He saw not a bizarre hybrid of alien and machine but the very image of treachery – the thrice-cursed Warmaster, Horus the Betrayer, the Architect of Ruin. Calistarius lunged as Sanguinius had lunged, reincarnated as the Lord of the Blood Angels, the Saviour of Baal.
His sword passed into the wound caused by Vespesario’s storm bolter, sliding deep into the patriarch’s innards, parting nerve bundles and piercing it
s pulmonary organs.
With a last twitch of muscle the patriarch tossed Calistarius across the bridge. The Librarian lost his grip on his sword, leaving it lodged in the thorax of the alien monster. Ichor spewed from the wound, splashing onto the deck, bubbling with escaping air.
The patriarch-navigator’s third eye flopped to its face, the psychic light within dimming to nothing. Its chest collapsed with a wheeze of expulsed breath, and it fell still.
In disarray at the loss of their brood-leader, the genestealers were easy prey for the vengeful Blood Angels. Calistarius was content to let the First Company purge the Omen of Despair and allowed himself to be escorted back to the breaching zone by Sergeant Dioneas.
‘I would think you would be in a more celebratory mood,’ the sergeant said as they arrived at the outer perimeter and were met by an Apothecary and a Techmarine ready to tend their wounds and damaged armour.
‘I’m tired, very tired,’ explained Calistarius.
It was true. He felt a fatigue the like of which he had never known before, drawn out by physical exertion, psychic combat and, most of all, the harrowing ordeal of sharing Vespesario’s Black Rage-induced warp-memories.
But it was more than exhaustion that quietened Calistarius. Something altogether more disturbing occupied his thoughts. It was a moment, a passing vision that had entered his mind at the instant he had unleashed the Black Rage into the thoughts of the patriarch. He was not sure if it were one of Vespesario’s cursed hallucinations, an actual memory from the Terminator’s ordeal two hundred years before, or something else far more dangerous: a glimpse of something yet to happen.
His instinct told him it was the latter.
For a fraction of a second, Calistarius had felt himself entombed, buried in a vast mausoleum, gripped by a terrible thirst for blood, shrieking for release, enslaved to the curse of the Black Rage.
About the Author
Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Deliverance Lost, as well as the novellas Corax: Soulforge, Ravenlord and The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs. He is particularly well-known for his Dark Angels stories, including the Legacy of Caliban series, and the ever-popular novel Angels of Darkness. His Warhammer 40,000 repertoire further includes the Path of the Eldar series, the Horus Heresy audio dramas Raven’s Flight and Honour to the Dead, and a multiplicity of short stories. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the Time of Legends trilogy, The Sundering, and much more besides. He lives and works in Nottingham.
For Richard Haliwell
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Sin of Damnation first published as Space Hulk: The Novel copyright © 2009, Games Workshop Ltd.
‘Sanguis Irae’ has not previously appeared in print.
This edition published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
Cover artwork by Adrian Smith.
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