Angel Exterminatus

by Graham McNeill

  The speaker slid into the room, silently and without apparent locomotion. Cassander hadn’t heard his approach, and a primal sense for loathsome things raised the hackles on the back of his neck at the sight of the flesh-cloaked surgeon who drew level with his chest.

  The man was genhanced like him, but there the resemblance ended. Gaunt and hunched, his armour’s power unit clung to his back like a parasite, and clicking, wheezing armatures reached over his shoulders. Several of the organic-looking tubes had detached from the central apparatus and were busy suckling the bio-mechanical creation, retching gobbets of a foul-smelling black ichor into its veinous structure.

  The man’s lips parted, as though enjoying the sensation.

  ‘I am Fabius,’ he said, stroking Cassander’s scarred chest. ‘And this is my chamber of wonders.’

  ‘Wonders? It is a place of abomination,’ hissed Cassander, struggling once again at his bonds. ‘You are a madman, and I will kill you.’

  Fabius laughed, genuinely amused. ‘You would be surprised how often I hear that,’ he said. ‘But everyone who is transformed by my knives and nightmares soon learns to love the pain I give them. Pain leads to pleasure and pleasure can be such sweet suffering. I know you don’t understand that yet, but you will.’

  The intestinal tubing released the bio-mechanical contraption on the Apothecary’s back as he moved to the edge of the chamber with soft footsteps. Cassander followed him as far as his restraints allowed, but lost sight of Fabius as he busied himself in the shadows with apparatus that clinked with the sound of metal on glass.

  ‘So kind of the Lord of Iron to present us with flesh tributes,’ said Fabius as a number of lumen orbs spontaneously ignited. ‘Gifts from a vassal to a master, you might say.’

  Cassander now saw the full horror of the green glass dewars arranged around the room – a menagerie of body parts, harvested organs and preserved heads. Even in his horrified shock, the scale of these grim specimens told Cassander that they had come from the bodies of Space Marines. He saw markings denoting at least eleven Legions.

  ‘A hobby of mine,’ explained Fabius, relishing Cassander’s disgust. ‘I have viable tissue samples from all the Legions present on Isstvan V. Some given willingly, others… less so. But of all the samples I have in my collection, yours is the one I most anticipate unlocking. I imagine Dorn’s gene-seed is closest to the source.’

  ‘You would not dare tamper with the Emperor’s great work,’ said Cassander.

  ‘Dare?’ snapped Fabius. ‘I dare what even the Emperor fears to repeat. I have already learned much of His knowledge, and with every step I draw nearer to perfecting what He began in ignorance – the creation of the ultimate warrior.’

  Cassander struggled against the bindings holding him fast to the slab, but there was no give in them.

  ‘Don’t waste your strength,’ chuckled Fabius, leaning over him as a host of blades unsheathed from his gauntlets with a loud snick. ‘You’ll need it for screaming.’

  EIGHT

  Departures

  Little had changed in Perturabo’s command chamber since the Imperial Fists had boarded the Iron Blood. Its rivet-stamped beams arched up to a cross-latticed vault hung with empty bird cages, and the thrum of powerful machinery echoed in the depths of the walls. Dusty banners and tattered maps of Old Earth were hung with strips of oath paper, recording victories no one beyond this room could name and of which no remembrancer had ever taken note. The door would never be closed again and the bloodstains on the wall had dried to a sticky brown. A broken console on one wall still spat sparks whenever current surged through the local circuits.

  Only the fragmented corpses of the Imperial Fists had been removed, tossed from an airlock in the wake of the engagement at Phall like so much waste.

  Perturabo’s throne of cold iron, crafted from the molten remains of his adopted father’s treasury, stood empty at the far end of the chamber beneath high lancet windows of latticed armourglass that looked out onto the ruddy sphere of Hydra Cordatus. Reflected light from the system’s sun bathed the chamber in a cold, sepulchral light, and glittering points moved against the starfields, exposing the lie that they were stars themselves.

  A vast fleet of ships orbited at high anchor, the bulk of two Legions jostling for space, but Forrix paid the sight no mind. His entire attention was focused on Perturabo, who stood staring at the fleet as it prepared to break orbit.

  The order to withdraw from the planet’s surface had come swiftly, and he had broken down the circumvallation works in a matter of hours. Bulk lifters and siege-train workhorses had hauled the shaped ironworks and prefabricated elements back to the Legion freight ships, leaving the once-fertile valley an irradiated wasteland of churned earth, bare rock and iron-rich dust. Specialised bulk-haulers had dismantled the Cavea Ferrum in darkness and transported its component parts back to the Iron Blood under a shroud of secrecy. Barban Falk had once again made his boast that he would return and build here, but Forrix ignored his ingratiating words.

  Yet even as the last ship had climbed into orbit, Forrix had a powerful sense that perhaps Falk might not be the only one returning to this world. With the siege works removed, the fleet had assumed position ready to depart orbit, a graceful ballet of efficiency that cared not for which master it fought.

  The primarch stood on a raised dais, upon which sat his bloodstained throne, with the Legion’s senior warsmiths arranged before him in precise ranks, nearly two hundred warriors of superlative skill and genius. There at the front was Toramino, still eager to impress despite his earlier humiliation. Several of his fellow Stor-bezashk warsmiths gathered around in a show of solidarity, and Forrix again felt the stirrings of some vague unease at the sight of Toramino’s white hair and cold eyes.

  Perturabo stepped forwards to the edge of the dais. ‘We are done with this world. Its fortress is dust, and its defenders ash.’

  No cheer greeted Perturabo’s words, for he did not court the passions of his warriors, only their understanding.

  ‘We join our forces with that of the Third Legion, our mission to break open a xenos fortress and obtain weapons of such power that we will no longer need to take the metal to the stone. Win this war and our days of breaking earth will be over. We will be warriors again.’

  Before Perturabo could continue, Toramino spoke up. ‘My lord, do we now take our orders from the Phoenician?’

  Forrix held his breath and awaited violence, but Perturabo shook his head. ‘No, Toramino, we do not. Brother Fulgrim presented me with an opportunity to wipe away our failure to destroy the Imperial Fists at Phall, and I chose to take it. In the absence of orders from the Warmaster, we will seize the initiative and become stronger then ever before.’

  Perturabo shifted his focus from Toramino and said, ‘That is all. Return to your Grand Battalions.’

  The warsmiths snapped to attention, hundreds of booted feet slamming down in unison as they turned and marched from Perturabo’s chambers. Toramino and his cohorts were the last to leave, and Forrix watched them go with a mixture of trepidation and eagerness to achieve something worthwhile.

  With the warsmiths gone, Perturabo turned and sat upon his throne, sitting back and letting the echoing silence of the chamber settle upon him. Forrix, Kroeger and Falk moved to their allotted positions before the primarch, each at the tip of a trident blade carved into the iron deck plate.

  ‘Opinions?’ asked Perturabo.

  ‘I don’t trust… the Emperor’s Children,’ said Forrix.

  ‘Diplomatic,’ said Perturabo. ‘But I can be more honest. I don’t trust Fulgrim.’

  ‘My lord?’ said Kroeger. ‘Then why are we going along with his scheme?’

  Perturabo sighed. ‘Because we have no choice.’

  Barban Falk spoke up. ‘We always have a choice, my lord. We are not slaves to the whims of the Phoenician’s… questionable honour.’

  ‘Once I would have killed you for a remark like that, Falk,’ said Perturabo.
‘Now I think you are being too lenient on my brother.’

  ‘Then why do we trust him?’ asked Forrix.

  ‘We don’t,’ answered Perturabo, leaning forwards to rest his chin on his steepled fingers. ‘I don’t know what lies in the star maelstrom, whether it’s some dead eldar god, a stockpile of weapons or something else entirely. But there’s something valuable there, that’s for sure.’

  ‘How can you know that?’ said Kroeger.

  ‘Because my brother knows the best lies are the ones with a measure of truth at their heart,’ said Perturabo. ‘And if there are weapons there, I think Fulgrim intends to seize them for himself and claim the glory of their discovery as he presents them to the Warmaster.’

  ‘If he even hands them over,’ added Kroeger.

  Perturabo nodded. ‘Now you’re thinking like a triarch.’

  Gathered from the scraps that had fought their way out of the killing ground of the Urgall Depression on Isstvan V, the crew and command structure of the Sisypheum was ad hoc at best. It was an Iron Hands strike cruiser, but that distinction had meant nothing when the bloodied survivors of the massacre had staggered back through the firestorm of betrayal in search of escape. Iron Hands and their mortal serfs formed the bulk of the crew, for most legionaries attempted to reach their own craft, but warriors of the Salamanders and a single Raven Guard were counted among its number.

  In the wake of the slaughter, escape from the Isstvan system had been a nerve-shredding series of mad dashes under fire and silent runs through the traitor blockade, culminating in a final sprint to the gravipause, the minimum safe distance between a star’s mass and a vessel’s ability to survive a warp jump.

  The Sisypheum had escaped the trap, but not without great cost.

  The months that followed saw the Sisypheum embark on a series of hit-and-run attacks on traitor forces on the northern frontiers of the galaxy, wreaking harm like a lone predator swimming in a dark ocean. Traitor forces seeking flanking routes through Segmentum Obscurus were their prey; scout craft, cartographae ships, slow-moving supply hulks heavily laden with mortal troops, ammunition and weapons. Disruption and harassment were their main objectives until contact had been established with fellow survivors.

  A series of coded astropathic blurts were detected on a shifting cycle of frequencies that matched up to numerical codes relating to the orbicular structure of a particular type of igneous rock found only on Medusa. Frater Thamatica had decrypted the message, and contact was established with disparate groups of loyalist forces that had escaped the massacre, and a stratagem of sorts agreed upon. With the X Legion too scattered to function in a traditional battlefield role, its surviving commanders found their own way to fight back: as the thorns in the flanks of the leviathan that distract it from the sword-thrust to the vitals.

  Nykona Sharrowkyn was one of the stragglers swept up by the Sisypheum, Atesh Tarsa another. Neither was an Iron Hand, but such a distinction had become largely irrelevant in this arena of shadow war. Both had proven instrumental in allowing the Sisypheum to function and remind the traitors that the Emperor’s loyal warriors were far from out of this fight.

  Around the moons of Ophiuchus they had ambushed a gaggle of bulk haulers filling their cavernous holds with weapons looted from its polar manufactories. Ten ships had been crippled or punched into the gravitational clutches of the planet, and another two forced to flee with their hulls trailing fire, spilling their cargo into the void.

  When a squadron of Death Guard escorts had paused in their pursuit of an Imperial vessel to refuel, the Sisypheum had fallen upon them like a raptor at the hunt. With Sharrowkyn’s unparalleled knowledge of ambush tactics, they had caught the enemy ships at their most vulnerable and destroyed all three, never knowing if the naval crew ever learned of their mysterious benefactors.

  At Cavor Sarta, Wayland and Sharrowkyn had captured an Unlingual Cipher Host – one of the so-called ‘Kryptos’ – a hybrid abomination creature of the Dark Mechanicum that had previously kept the enemy’s code network a cryptographic impossibility to break. With the Kryptos, loyalist commanders could now access the traitors’ coded communications.

  And with that knowledge, Captain Ulrach Branthan had ordered the Sisypheum to make the circuitous journey to Hydra Cordatus and a meeting of traitor primarchs.

  As Guilliman had once said of the XIII Legion, if you must fight an Ultramarine, pray you kill him. If he is still alive, then you are dead. The same could be said of the Iron Hands, and never more so than when they had suffered such inconceivable loss. If the heresiarch Warmaster expected the X Legion to crumble and fall apart with the death of Ferrus Manus, then it only went to show how fundamentally he had under-estimated his brother’s Legion.

  To allow grief, no matter its cause, to abrade the fighting heart of the Iron Hands would be to admit weakness into their ranks. If anything, the awesome, unimaginable scale of their pain had hardened their resolve and made them even more dangerous.

  They had turned grief into hatred.

  Ulrach Branthan was a revered captain of the Iron Hands, but Wayland always felt a great sadness each time he went to the chamber. Together with Nykona Sharrowkyn, he made the approach to the captain’s sealed quarters under the watchful gaze of two Morlock warriors.

  Septus Thoic and Ignatius Numen stood at the end of the wide corridor. Both were warriors who had seen the very worst the galaxy could throw at them and had spat back in its face. Fellow survivors of Isstvan V, they had been amongst the very first Iron Hands to make planetfall, marching alongside the best and bravest of the X Legion. Like all those who had escaped the massacre, they had cut their warplate with the names of the fallen, but these warriors had a name acid-etched on their shoulder guards that marked them out as special even in a brotherhood of remarkable warriors.

  They had seen Ferrus Manus die.

  The lights were low, for power consumption was rigorously controlled by Cadmus Tyro, the de facto commander of the vessel in the increasingly extended times between Ulrach Branthan’s moments of wakefulness.

  The black armour of the two Morlocks was inscribed with intricate scriptwork, each name inscribed over the cuts, tears and burns inflicted on Isstvan V. Like other veterans, they had refused to repaint or repair their armour until the traitor who had murdered their primarch was dead.

  Thoic’s face was bisected by a curling series of scars inflicted by a laughing swordsman of the Emperor’s Children, while Numen’s features had the plasticised sheen of synth-skin after a close-range plasma detonation had seared his battle helm to his skull. His flash-burned eyes had been replaced by simple targeting optics, but his hearing was almost entirely gone.

  Wayland nodded to the Morlocks.

  ‘Iron Father,’ said Septus Thoic. ‘Good to have you back aboard.’

  ‘It is good to be back,’ responded Wayland. Sharrowkyn simply nodded.

  ‘Did you see him?’ asked Ignatius Numen, too loudly, each word carefully enunciated.

  Wayland didn’t need to ask who Numen meant.

  ‘We did,’ said Wayland, turning to Sharrowkyn.

  ‘What did he look like?’

  Wayland wished he could tell them that he had seen a monster, a creature of ultimate evil, but that would be a deception, and any Iron Hand would prefer the truth over glossed fiction.

  ‘He looks unchanged, my brothers,’ said Wayland, signing his answer for the virtually deafened Numen. ‘He is the Phoenician.’

  Seeing their disappointment, he added. ‘But he is no longer handsome. Our Raven Guard brother shot him in the head.’

  ‘Did you kill him?’ cried Numen.

  ‘He fell,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘I can say no more than that.’

  Septus Thoic at last looked directly at Sharrowkyn. ‘You and I do not see eye to eye, Raven Guard, and we never will, but I thank you for that shot.’

  ‘Pay Septus no mind,’ said Ignatius Numen loudly, gripping Sharrowkyn’s hand and shaking it hard enough to hurt. ‘An
yone that spills that bastard’s blood is a brother of mine.’

  Sharrowkyn nodded his thanks, but kept silent.

  ‘You’ll be needing to speak to the captain?’ asked Thoic.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Frater and Captain Tyro are in there with Tarsa.’

  ‘Apothecary Tarsa,’ said Wayland. ‘He has a rank and you will use it, regardless of his Legion. Is that understood?’

  Morlocks were the veterans of the Legion, but even they had to respect the word of an Iron Father. Both warriors nodded and made a fist of their iron left hands.

  ‘Enter, Iron Father,’ said Thoic, placing his fist against the lock plate and making a complex series of micro-movements with his fingertips. The cog-toothed mechanisms securing the door hissed open and a wave of cold, static-charged air washed over Wayland and Sharrowkyn. They passed through the door and into Captain Ulrach Branthan’s cryonic sanctum, a place of sterile white and silver. A laboratory, a sepulchre, a shrine to mortality and the defiance of time’s passage all in one.

  The chamber was an insulated blast-chiller, lined with machinery and floored with thermally shielded cabling, power sources and frost-limned lights that cast their illumination in anti-senesence frequencies. Four figures filled the space: one standing apart with his arms folded across his broad chest, two working on the guts of a machine that even Wayland struggled to understand.

  And the fourth…

  The standing figure was Cadmus Tyro, a captain and former equerry to Captain Branthan. His hairless head was tanned walnut brown, one eye a cold green augmetic, the other an equally cold haze orb, and his half-mechanised, half-human face was pulled in a permanent grimace of ill-temper. A golden-winged eagle, beyond the ken of the Mechanicum adepts who had studied it, perched on one shoulder, preening its glitter-sheen wings with its razored beak. The mechanised creature had been with Branthan since a foolhardy expedition into the Land of Shadows as a youth, but had since attached itself to Tyro, faithfully watching over its new master.