Seventh Retribution

by Ben Counter

  In the remaining three were human bodies, suspended in viscous clear fluid. They were naked, and the flesh had become sodden and peeled away from the bones in scraps. Electrodes still clung to the remains of the scalps. Ribs and organs were visible through the rents in the skin.

  ‘These are sleep-teaching units,’ said Lysander. It was lost on none of the Imperial Fists that Space Marines were educated in similar units, filling their heads with principles of the Codex Astartes and battle-philosophy as they were converted from aspirants.

  ‘Open it,’ said Deiphobus. Sergeant Ctesiphon found a wheel lock on the base of one unit and hauled it open. The bottom of the cylinder swung open, dumping a foul sludge of flesh and organ onto the floor.

  ‘Cranial surgery,’ said Lysander, pointing towards the marks on the partially-fleshed skull. ‘The body Orfos brought in from the Battle Plains had the same scars.’

  Deiphobus knelt by the body. He placed a hand on its skull, just as he had done to Janeak Filthammer.

  ‘The dead,’ he said, ‘are always more difficult. The last thing he saw was… an orderly. A medicae’s smock. Bionic eyes. These units are all full. He flicked a switch and then all goes dark. Then this man died.’

  ‘Not much to go on,’ said Lysander. ‘What else can you see, brother?’

  Somewhere back in Deiphobus’s mind was a wall with a door set into it. The door was of solid steel with a lock that could not be picked or broken. Only Deiphobus himself could open it. Behind the door was the part of him that dealt with death. There was so much death around a Space Marine that this place had to be sealed off, partly by years of hypno-training and mental exercises, and partly by Deiphobus’s raw mental strength – to keep it from being overwhelmed.

  The door opened.

  The dead man’s memories flooded through. Like his body, they were decayed and fragmented. His brain had turned to mush and Deiphobus imagined himself standing knee-deep in it, scraps of sensations floating past in the gory soup.

  A recurring dream, something that surfaced again and again, was of drowning. Falling into a dark, cold abyss, and struggling for breath, then oblivion. Every time this man had slept, this was what he had seen.

  Another was of pain. Not in waves or great episodes of agony, but constant, a prickling, a direct stimulation of the nerves in what Deiphobus recognised as treatment to improve reactions as well as gauge resistance to pain. Deiphobus had gone through it himself early in the stages of his transformation into a Space Marine, though those memories seemed to belong to a different man now.

  And then there was…

  Nothing.

  Deiphobus sifted through the torn memories. There was just darkness. Endless tracts of darkness where a childhood should have been. Or an adolescence, or a career as the soldier this man clearly had been. All gone. Stripped out, painted over with nothing.

  Deiphobus reversed the flow of memories. They seeped back past the death barrier. He crammed them into the space beyond and shut the door.

  ‘We have found the source of the off-world troops,’ said Deiphobus. ‘They’re mind-wiped. Sleep-taught elites. They were programmed here.’

  ‘By whom?’ said Lysander.

  ‘That was scrubbed away,’ replied Deiphobus. ‘If this man ever knew in the first place.’

  Sergeant Septuron emerged from an archway leading into a side passage. Septuron was an assault veteran and looked it, his armour carefully painted with dozens of kill-markings, and trophies of fangs and jawbones hanging from the length of his chainsword. ‘The rest of this floor is barracks and training rooms,’ he said. ‘Nothing to kill.’ He sounded slightly disappointed.

  ‘Any more bodies?’ asked Lysander.

  ‘Not yet. But it goes down.’

  ‘Then so do we.’

  ‘Who do you think built this?’ said Deiphobus. ‘Who trained these men?’

  ‘I have my own opinions on that,’ said Lysander. ‘But I do not place any value in opinions. When it becomes a fact, then I shall act upon it. Septuron, what is on the lower levels?’

  ‘I know not, captain. But something down there is still drawing power.’

  Lysander led the way out of the chamber, leaving the sorry remains of the dead soldier spreading on the floor. Septuron and Deiphobus followed, training careful eyes on the shadows that clung everywhere. The light down here was dim, afforded only by a few glow-globes. The facility was powered down, running on minimum. The barracks rooms were devoid of decoration, of the signs that human beings had lived there, save for the inscriptions carved into the black walls.

  IN OBEDIENCE, read one.

  IN IGNORANCE, read another. Each footlocker contained a single standard Imperial prayer book and nothing else.

  Below, the air was colder. The narrow metal staircase spiralled down to the level of the grinder. The floor here was open to the machine’s gnarled teeth. To Lysander’s eye, the grinding cylinders looked configured to shred flesh and crunch bone, but he could not be sure. They were clean – even the oil had been stripped away, and patches of the metal were faintly pitted as if by acid.

  A hatch in the floor was sealed by a wheel lock. Lysander knelt to open it.

  ‘Wait,’ said Deiphobus.

  Lysander looked up at him.

  ‘This chamber is shielded,’ said the Librarian. ‘But the sensations beyond are leaking out. Just enough to be sure.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘A moral threat.’

  ‘This world has enough of those,’ said Lysander. ‘We will destroy one more. Ctesiphon! Septuron! At the ready!’

  Septuron’s squad drew their chainblades. The chamber hummed with the whirring of the blades’ teeth. Squad Ctesiphon descended the stairs and lined up, bolters ready to cut down anything that got past Lysander’s hammer and Septuron’s blades.

  Lysander hauled the wheel round. The hatch swung open.

  The stench was appalling. The death above had been one thing. The death from below was a distillation of rot, a breath from hell. The dim light touched wet ridges of foulness.

  The chamber beneath the grinder was coated, walls and floor, in rotting gore. Some of it had dried to stringy, spongy masses of shredded flesh. Some was still oozing as if shed only moments before. The stench rolled up in thick, filthy waves.

  Lysander stared into the mass for a moment.

  ‘Deiphobus?’ he asked.

  ‘I can go on, captain,’ came the reply. ‘It is… painful, but I can go on.’

  Lysander swung down into the chamber. Bones crunched under his feet. He could see skulls, pelvises, ribs, femurs, half buried in the sludge.

  ‘How many legends are buried here?’ he said. ‘Tales of people gone missing from Opis’s cities. Snatched away by monsters or ghosts. How many ended up in this place?’

  In the middle of the chamber was a standing stone. Moss still clung to it, as if it had only just been ripped out of some forgotten forest. Chiselled into its surface were runes that would not be focused on. Lysander’s eyes slid off them, as if they were afraid of what would happen if he read them.

  Sergeant Septuron was next down. He could not keep the disgust off his face.

  ‘What were they doing down here?’ he said.

  ‘Sacrifices,’ said Lysander.

  ‘It’s a beacon,’ said Deiphobus from above. ‘It is calling out. Screaming. When this place was opened up and active… Throne alive, it is deafening to me even now. It must have reached out…’

  ‘Light years,’ said Lysander.

  The chamber shuddered. The gory filth squirmed like a mass of vermin. Septuron almost lost his footing as the floor shifted.

  With a cry of torn metal the walls parted. Lysander had the sense of space and depth beyond. From below and all around came the sound of stone against metal. The grinding cylinders overhead shuddered and scraps of flesh fell from between their teeth, where the cleaning above had missed them.

  ‘Hold on!’ yelled Septuron. The floor gave way beneath the
two Space Marines. Lysander grabbed a beam that pierced the wall as the chamber deformed, his legs suddenly kicking out over a great drop that fell away into darkness.

  The standing stone was the capstone of an enormous obelisk. The shaft to contain it speared down far below the facility. Rings of walkways were even now falling away with the shaking of the chamber.

  One wall fell in, revealing the stone wall of the shaft. Septuron went with it, falling into the blackness.

  Lightning crackled down there, illuminating Septuron as he slammed into one of the walkways. It held, just. Multicoloured fire swirled around the base of the obelisk, and Lysander could see the carvings that covered it, geometric patterns that broke into biological swirls and back again.

  Lysander could see shapes in the fire. They leapt and shrieked.

  Daemons. The predators of the warp, animalistic, always hungry. Unclean and damned.

  Lysander let go and fell, plummeting towards the daemons swarming up at Septuron.

  He hit one of the walkways hard. It parted under him but arrested his fall. He fell past Septuron and into the midst of the daemons.

  They were something like wolves, something like lizards, something like shapes conjured by the mind’s eye from the random flickering of a flame. Their fur writhed like nests of worms. Their eyes rolled in pits along their necks, and their faces were nothing but a lopsided, circular maw, ringed with teeth like a deep-sea predator.

  Lysander swatted one against the wall – the stone wall, he saw now, carved with thousands of asymmetrical faces. He pivoted on his front foot and swept the Fist of Dorn around him, feeling the shock of impacts run up his arm. The space let one daemon in – Lysander stamped down on its neck and felt vertebrae shattering.

  Septuron vaulted down and landed next to him. His chainblade screamed as he plunged it down through the back of one daemon. He blasted holes in the torso of another with his bolt pistol – Lysander followed up and crushed its head into the floor with a downwards swing of his hammer.

  ‘In the name of the Emperor most high! In the name of Rogal Dorn! All the hate you have drunk from my people, all the suffering you have wrought, I now repay!’

  Lysander didn’t have to look up to know that Deiphobus had jumped down into the pit after him. Lines of white light scribbled across the floor, and the daemons’ flesh burned where the light touched them. The geometric wards taught to Deiphobus in the Chapter Librarium flared bright, and the daemons were thrown back.

  ‘I banish thee!’ yelled Deiphobus. He jumped down from the walkway above and landed beside Lysander. ‘To the warp! To oblivion! I banish thee!’

  ‘And that gate through which you may not return,’ yelled Lysander, ‘is manned by this Imperial Fist!’

  The daemons were shrieking and burning. Lysander waded into them, hacking left and right with the Fist of Dorn, feeling the hammer slamming the daemons aside at the apex of each pendular swing.

  Against one wall churned a mass of liquid rock, like bubbling mud, with the shapes of more daemons pushing against it from the other side. A clawed forelimb reached out of the wall, like the hand of a drowning man from the surface of quicksand.

  Lysander rammed his shoulder against the wall, driving the daemon back out of reality. Deiphobus was at his side, tracing glowing symbols in the air that scorched against the portal in the wall. Daemons writhed, trapped in the solidifying mass.

  The gnashing maw of a daemon pushed through the wall. Lysander slammed his storm shield into it, and Deiphobus traced the final syllable of the banishment rite. The portal solidified, encasing the daemon in stone, and the screams from the other side died away.

  Lysander stepped back, drawing in deep breaths. ‘Is there any place on this planet that is not rotten?’ he said.

  ‘If there is, Opis has hidden it well,’ said Deiphobus. Lysander saw the Librarian’s face was pallid and waxy, running with sweat. A Space Marine very rarely looked weak, but the effort of the banishment had taken most of what Deiphobus had.

  ‘Speak, brother,’ said Lysander, ‘if you wish.’

  Deiphobus shook his head. ‘We go on. There are answers here. I will not take a backwards step.’

  ‘Good. We are with you.’

  ‘And I with you, captain.’

  ‘Who do you think this was?’ said Septuron from the other side of the shaft. Against the wall hung the upper half of a man, bisected at the waist, and fixed to the rock with rivets through his elbows, wrists and collarbones. Into his chest was carved an intricate mass of runes and symbols.

  The other Imperial Fists were climbing down what remained of the ladders and walkways. They passed the whole length of the obelisk. The blood that ran down it had pooled in the incised runes and picked out its own language in rust-red.

  Lysander walked up to Septuron and the sorry, withered half-corpse on the wall. ‘Can you read this?’ he said to Deiphobus.

  Deiphobus peered at the incisions on the man’s chest. ‘I wish that I could not,’ he said. ‘But yes. It makes itself legible to the third eye, the sight within a psyker.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It is a contract.’ Deiphobus swallowed and ran a finger along the dried-out skin, following the lines of script. ‘Made by… the name cannot be read. It is probably a ritual name, used to conceal the author’s true name. That means the author was present when this pact was made. It says that under pain of the very worst of the warp, the very foulest depredations of the Dark Gods, the… the Six-Fingered One? Also named Karnikhal. This Karnikhal is bound by the threat of such punishments to serve the author in return for his existence being spared. The power to create this bond was through conquest. Karnikhal’s life was spared, and so that life belonged to the author.’ Deiphobus took a step back. ‘Karnikhal Six-Finger was at Khezal,’ he said. ‘He was one of the moral threats that attacked on K-Day.’

  ‘And he was summoned here,’ said Lysander. ‘And bound into service by whoever built this obelisk.’

  ‘Filthammer arrived under his own power,’ said Deiphobus, ‘but he was afraid of someone, maybe someone he was forced to serve.’

  ‘I would wager,’ said Lysander, ‘that there was once a soul hanging here with a contract binding Filthammer into service, too.’

  ‘There’s another way out here,’ said Sergeant Kirav. He had made it to the bottom of the shaft along with his fire-team, and was examining a sealed door set into the wall.

  ‘Open it,’ said Lysander. ‘Be ready to fight.’

  Kirav kicked the door open. The door sheared off its hinges and boomed as it landed flat on the other side.

  There was no other sound, save the hum of power cabling.

  Beyond was a medical facility. Three autosurgeons were fixed to the ceiling, their scalpel-tipped limbs folded up and indicator runes dark. Several autopsy slabs were fixed to one wall, and in the dimness Lysander could make out cabinets of medical implements and monitoring equipment.

  In the middle of the room was a cabinet surrounded by thick ribbed piping, from which issued a freezing haze that clung to the floor. The cabinet was the size and shape of a coffin with a glass lid, but it was frosted over. Lysander walked up to it, trying to see what was inside.

  He wiped a gauntlet across the lid. The frost was cleared. A skull stared back at him.

  Not a real, human skull. A mask shaped like a skull, with intricate targeting lenses in the eye sockets and an armoured collar around the neck giving way to black synskin with hexagonal armoured scales.

  Kirav stood just behind Lysander. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Eversor,’ said Lysander. ‘It’s an Eversor.’

  ‘An Assassin?’ said Kirav.

  ‘Have you ever fought alongside an agent of the Officio Assassinorum?’ said Lysander.

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘It is like death itself is on your side. Like the enemy’s shadow has come alive and turned on him. I have never seen such death as that dealt out by an Imperial Assassin. That is what lies
here, my brothers. Death incarnate, harnessed as a weapon of the Imperium.’

  Deiphobus had entered the chamber, and held a hand over the coffin. He shook his head, as if greeted only by silence. ‘What is one doing in this place?’ he said.

  ‘It’s in storage,’ said Kirav. ‘This is an Officio Assassinorum facility. They must have built this place.’

  ‘And the obelisk?’ countered Deiphobus. ‘Did they build that, too?’

  Lysander stood back from the Assassin’s coffin. ‘They have done more than that on Opis,’ he said. ‘Here.’ He took from his belt the fragment of metal that he had recovered from the Temple of the Muses, the item stored there by Acolyte Serrick. ‘This is the bullet that killed Inquisitor Kekrops. I last saw its kind being loaded into an Exitus longrifle, the weapon of a Vindicare Assassin. It is a Shield-Breaker round, doubtless employed in case Kekrops was protected by a personal energy shield. Only the Vindicare Assassin has access to such rare technology.

  ‘The Officio Assassinorum started this war when one of their agents shot down Kekrops. This war, the moral threats that infest Opis, the Officio Assassinorum is at the heart of it all. Serrick’s bullet placed the suspicion in my heart, but it was not enough. This place… this place is enough.’

  ‘Could they have Assassins operating on Opis now?’ asked Deiphobus.

  ‘At least one,’ said Lysander. ‘This bullet matches the fragments pulled out of Scout Geryius and Sergeant Orfos’s arm. It was probably fired by the same Vindicare who killed Kekrops.’

  ‘And to think,’ said Deiphobus. ‘We came here to find answers. I do not hear the answer to anything. What does it benefit the Assassinorum to have a war on Opis? What could be worth the heresy of trafficking with daemons?’ He looked down at the Eversor’s skull-mask. ‘We must open this.’

  Kirav held up a hand. ‘That would be…’

  Lysander hefted the Fist of Dorn and smashed the coffin’s lid. Freezing vapour poured out and rolled across the floor. ‘If it stirs,’ said Lysander, ‘we must kill it before it can strike. The Assassinorum designed the Eversor as a spree-killer. It will attack without pause until it is destroyed.’