by Ben Counter
Kirav saw Lysander emerging from the bay and left the fire-team running through sprint and target stance drills.
‘Captain!’ said Kirav. ‘It is good that you are well. We did not think to see you on your feet this day.’
Lysander looked down at himself. He was without his Terminator armour, and wore simple fatigues. The back of one hand was pink and puckered – a makeshift skin graft, to repair his burns. By the tightness of his torso and face, similar grafts covered a good percentage of his body. They stung, but that was good. The nerves worked. It was better than having no feeling at all.
‘At first, we thought you dead,’ said Kirav.
‘They thought the Emperor dead when he lay struck down by Horus,’ said Lysander. ‘Dorn knew better.’
‘And so we went into the fuel lines and brought you back,’ said Kirav. ‘Death will have a damned time getting to Lysander, we said. We might yet reach him first.’
‘And Legienstrasse?’
‘Fled,’ said Kirav. ‘She left plenty of herself behind in the fire, but we think she got away with all her crucial parts.’
‘Karnikhal knew she would survive,’ said Lysander. ‘He set the fire.’
‘We did not find him, either.’
Lysander pushed his chest out and stretched. His new skin complained. Some muscle had also been replaced with hasty nerve-fibre bundle implants between his ribs and the tops of his thighs. ‘We kept her on Opis, and we drove her away. Legienstrasse will be more desperate now. She will take ever greater risks. We might not have won the laurels of a victory, but we did not fail.’
‘None of us,’ said Kirav, ‘have suggested that we did.’
‘That is not what I see in this place,’ said Lysander. ‘Not what I feel. I know the spirits of my battle-brothers, sergeant. I know their minds. Perhaps none have voiced the belief that our brothers are falling in a war which achieved little, but that belief lurks in them. What were our losses at Krae?’
‘Assault-Sergeant Septuron,’ said Kirav. ‘Brothers Tisiphorn, Kreuz and Euskelos from his squad. Skaen from Squad Ctesiphon. Lady Syncella fell, as well.’
‘I saw her die,’ said Lysander.
‘Few of us miss her,’ said Kirav. ‘That sentiment, at least, has been voiced. That they died fighting a war she created, to hunt down the Assassinorum’s mistake… it has angered them.’
‘And I,’ said Lysander. ‘But my anger cannot decide how I lead my fellow Imperial Fists. Sometimes it is a weapon, to be deployed in the pursuit of victory. But sometimes, it leads us astray, and I must swallow that holy rage that so many Space Marines pursue to their own destruction. That is what it means to command. I must make decisions my brothers cannot, such as to follow Syncella against Legienstrasse. Sometimes those decisions cost us the lives of those we call brothers. I know well the anger that will engender in the hearts of those same brothers, but I must command them nonetheless.’
‘I understand, commander.’
‘No, Kirav. You do not. Where is my battlegear?’
Kirav pointed at the Thunderhawks. ‘Still on board the Gilded Pyre, captain. That was how we brought you back here.’
‘And the Fist of Dorn?’
‘Recovered alongside you.’
‘That is good. It is a relic of the Chapter. An Imperial Fist might well lay his life down to bring it back. I give thanks that such was not required.’
‘Captain!’ said Sergeant Ctesiphon, emerging from the bunker used for housing prisoners – where Lysander had spoken with Serrick before. ‘Praise to the primarch that you wake. There is something you must see.’
‘Have you activated it?’ said Kirav. ‘I had assumed it was protected by machine-cipher.’
‘Not so,’ replied Ctesiphon. ‘Or if it was, such safeguards were deactivated with her death.’
‘What do you speak of?’ said Lysander.
‘It is best that we show you,’ said Ctesiphon. ‘It is inside.’
Inside the bunker, one of the cells stood open. An operating table from the Apothecary’s suite had been set up in the cell. On the table lay several chunks of scorched flesh, still smelling of cooked meat and fuel.
‘Lady Syncella,’ explained Ctesiphon. ‘This is all of her upper half we recovered. Whatever organ Legienstrasse was using to digest her, she abandoned it in her flight. The Chapter serfs recovered something from her remains.’ Ctesiphon picked up a small metallic device, no longer than a man’s finger. ‘This,’ he said. ‘It was buried in her spine. Possibly there were other such devices, but they have been lost. It’s a datavault.’
Ctesiphon turned to the back of the cell block, where a holomat servitor lay curled up against the wall. It was a simple, rugged device, used for displaying tactical maps and important communications. Its biological components were hidden somewhere in a base that supported a long projector arm, now retracted.
Ctesiphon plugged the datavault into a socket on the holomat. The servitor’s arm unfolded, reaching up to the ceiling and projecting down a cone of flickering greenish light.
The image picked out in three dimensions was grainy, but clear enough to show that it was a soaring vault, a mighty temple of shadows and granite. Freezing mist coiled in the air as a procession of adepts, their hoods and robes not quite enough to hide their ungainly bionics, tramped towards an altar surrounded by braziers belching incense smoke.
Someone sang, a low voice in a mournful dirge, like something from a primitive funeral rite. Each adept carried a body part – a hand, a thigh, a section of ribcage – contained in transparent cylinders filled with fluid.
On a balcony overlooking the great temple chamber stood a lone figure in polished black armour, as bulky as full plate from a feudal world, but which moved with every breath as fluidly as water. The armour’s helmet was a skull, and on one hand the figure wore a gauntlet with blades for fingers.
‘Eversor,’ said Lysander. ‘A Grand Master, perhaps. And that is a suit of Shadowplate armour. Its like has not been replicated for a thousand years and the last suits were lost when the forge world Lumias Vex fell. This recording is old. A thousand years or more.’
The adepts took the body parts from their containers and began to assemble them on the altar. The adepts had long given up their humanity. Their limbs were wrapped with ribbed bundles of artificial muscle and their grainy grey skin was stretched over long, equine skulls that grinned as they went about their work. Servo-arms tipped with syringes injected each part as it was laid on the altar and gradually a naked human form took shape. It could have been male or female – it was like a doll or a mannequin, without any features that might give it an identity. The head held the only distinguishing features, for the nose was long and straight, the eyes small, the mouth a thin severe line.
The eyes opened. They were black. A hand shot out and grabbed an adept round its neck. The fist closed and the neck snapped, the adept’s head lolling to one side.
The figure sat up and sank its teeth into the adept’s throat, tearing out a greyish mass of muscle. It gulped it down and suddenly another limb was unfolding from its back, a lashing spiny tentacle that wrapped around another adept’s torso and whipped it up into the air, slamming it down against the altar.
Tendrils shot from the body’s mouth and pulled the skull of a third adept apart. Brain matter spilled out. Three had died in as many seconds. The other adepts fell over one another in a panic, robes and hoods pulled aside to reveal the biomechanics of their bodies.
‘Enough!’ yelled the Eversor. Instantly great billows of white gas sprayed from hidden vents in the floor and frost suddenly covered everything. The adepts fell, their artificial muscle freezing, and the naked figure was hidden in the white mist.
The image shuddered and was lost in static.
It shifted, this time showing a fighter deck on a spacecraft. Huge blast doors sealed off the deck from the vacuum. The viewer, presumably a servitor recording proceedings, stood aside and an airlock door was slammed shut. The
viewer continued to watch as several dozen figures ran for the airlock door. The first to reach it wore the rust-red uniform of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Through the porthole in the airlock Lysander could see it was a woman, one arm replaced with a bulky servo-lifter, her shaved cranium plated with circuitry.
‘If I must die,’ she cried, her voice muffled through the door, ‘then let me know! I must know! Knowledge is why I am, it means more than life! Give me this, at least, before I die!’
Warning lights flashed around the blast doors behind the tech-priest. Others, some tech-priests, some menials in simple labourers’ uniforms, were rushing in every direction, looking for a way out.
‘Tell me!’ the tech-priest cried. ‘The samples! The first templates! They were xenos, weren’t they? Tell me! Before I die, tell me!’
A black-gloved hand slammed down on a control stud. The blast doors boomed open and sudden silence flooded the fighter deck. The tech-priest was yanked backwards as the air rushed out and her body was lost in the blackness of the void revealed beyond the blast doors. If she had time to scream, the sound was lost in the vacuum.
‘How did Syncella find all this?’ said Kirav.
‘Throne knows what cunning a Grand Master of the Assassinorum must possess,’ said Lysander. ‘Perhaps it was her mission alone to find Legienstrasse, and she pieced together the evidence herself. And she left it to make sure that someone would complete the task if she failed.’
The next image was one of confusion. Light strobed and distant klaxons sounded. It could have been a scene from a spacecraft or a space station, or some industrial facility. Skulls grinned from the false pillars lining the walls and the faltering light fell on fresh bloodstains on the metal plating of the floor.
Troops were running in every direction. They resembled the mind-wiped soldiers the Imperial Fists had encountered on Opis, but their armour revealed their bare arms, which were covered in scrollwork electoos, and each man sported a bionic eye linked by a bundle of cables to his hellgun.
‘Move!’ someone was yelling. ‘It’s behind us! It got around us! Keep moving!’
‘How could it get behind us?’ someone else cried.
The image shuddered and became almost unreadable. Whoever was filming it was running through corridors and labs, at every turn blinded by warning lights or plunged into darkness as power failed.
Bodies lay torn and broken. Troops tried to force open bulkhead doors that were sealed tight.
‘Emperor preserve,’ someone panted, their voice shaking. ‘Emperor preserve. Salve nos, O Imperator.’
A soldier screamed. He stumbled back, clutching at his face. A mass of pulsing, bloody flesh clung to him, devouring him even as the trooper fell to his knees. His scream choked off into a gurgling rattle. Las-fire pulsed and the trooper’s body vanished in a spray of blood and fire.
‘More of them!’ came a voice. Everything was motion and noise now, yelling, las-fire, boots on metal and panicked screams.
For a moment the viewer paused at an intersection of corridors. Fleshy masses, about knee-high, were oozing across the walls and floor. Mewling, fanged mouths opened up as they dragged themselves along. With a spasm of muscle one leapt, shooting past the viewer. The viewer spun and saw another trooper fall back, the pinkish mass latched onto his chest. Las-fire streaked into him, punching through his body. He fell, lifeless, the thing that had attacked him now a blackened, quivering lump.
The image focused on the face of one trooper. His helmet was off and aside from his bionic eye he looked too human – covered in grime and spattered blood, and afraid. ‘They budded off her,’ he said. ‘Record that. You hear that? When they cart our bodies back to the Temple, tell them that. They… they hatched. Dozens of them. And every one of us they kill, they grow. Understand? Got that? Is that what you wanted to know? Is that why you sent us in here?’
Confusion again. Screaming and howling, not all of it human. The trooper who had just spoken running away from the viewer, shooting as he did so. The viewer was on the ground, looking down the corridor as more of the fleshy young crawled towards him. And behind them, through a tear in the wall, walked a thing with many limbs folded up around its oversized torso, multiple hoofed feet carrying it forwards. The most appalling thing about it was not its alien form, or even the way its young were writhing in translucent sacs hanging in the hollow formed by its extended ribcage. It was the unmistakably human face, the woman’s face, looking completely calm as it lumbered towards the fallen soldier who was recording all this.
The young leapt at him. The image cut out.
Static filled the holo-image for a few seconds. Then the image went blank and the holomat’s projector arm folded back up.
‘So,’ said Lysander. ‘She breeds.’
‘That is why the Assassinorum wants Legienstrasse dead?’ said Kirav. ‘Because she can create more?’
‘The Maerorus Temple is based around a cycle,’ said Lysander. ‘As Syncella explained it, Legienstrasse was created to kill whole groups of targets. When one is dead, its biomass can be used to create new weapons to kill more. And so on, each kill making the Maerorus a more effective killer. A cycle that goes on until every target is dead. It seems the Assassinorum neglected to make sure the cycle ended there. One Maerorus they could contain and bring back to the fold, especially once there is no more biomass available. But a dozen more like her, that can harvest their own biomass? That can spread and breed themselves? Worlds could be lost. Sectors. If Legienstrasse breeds, she will become more than a killing machine. She will become a plague, an intelligent plague that kills because it wants to.’
‘No wonder they wanted her dead,’ said Kirav.
‘And no wonder they failed,’ replied Lysander. ‘They should have exterminated her. These recordings were ancient, they knew long ago how dangerous one such Assassin could be. But they kept her alive. They lost control of her the moment they decided to let her live. Everything that followed was inevitable. Fate had written this story’s end a thousand years ago.’ Lysander looked at Kirav. ‘Have we news from Tchepikov?’
‘But little,’ said Kirav. ‘Just what is distributed to the other commanders. Starfall is a catastrophe. The right flank fell and the Imperial army is fighting to keep from being encircled. Fighting is back and forth over Rekaba and Khezal. There is talk of a fourth front to surround Makoshaam and cut off the other moral threats Tchepikov is certain must be there.’
‘The war spreads and continues,’ said Lysander. ‘As it always will. And it will not end until there is no Opis to fight over. That was what the Assassinorum put in place, to give them the best chance of catching Legienstrasse.’
Lysander’s vox chirped. The sound was mostly static.
<
‘Barely,’ said Lysander, hurrying out of the cell bunker in the hope of a better signal.
<> said Sthenelus. <
‘Where are you?’
<
Sthenelus’s voice broke up into waves of white noise.
‘Sergeant! Squadron commander, come in! We have lost you! Come in!’
<
‘Sthenelus, stay fighting and have faith,’ said Lysander. ‘You are a beacon to the Guardsmen around you. They will
not fall while you stand. Do you understand, brother?’
There was no reply. The vox was a howl of static and feedback. Lysander listened for another few seconds, then cut the link. ‘Keep monitoring that channel,’ he said to Ctesiphon. ‘Kirav, make your fire-team ready. Are the brothers of Septuron’s squad reassigned?’
‘They are, captain, and they have made their oaths of retribution to me.’
‘Good. Have Gorgythion make the Thunderhawks ready for flight. We must go to Khezal.’
‘That is where we began,’ said Ctesiphon, with a faint air of humour. ‘We took the long way around to go back.’
‘Khezal is where our brothers need help,’ said Lysander. ‘And if she really is as desperate as we hope, it is where we will find Legienstrasse, too.’
K-Day +18 Days
Operation Requiem
The Raging Sky, and the cult placed among its crew, represented one of several dozen contingencies put in place by Legienstrasse. There were many other choices.
She had been trained to adapt to her situation. More than any Temple Assassin, a Maerorus had to be prepared to work with whatever was to hand, for it was assumed that she would enter the target zone unarmed, with only her altered physiology to give her the edge over her first kill. Whatever might surround her would have to be her weapon. Thus to Legienstrasse, Opis itself – its society, its Aristeia and its cities teeming with commoners – were weapons.
Before war had come to Opis, as the subjugated servants of Chaos seeded the planet at the behest of the Officio Assassinorum, one of those weapons had already been put into action in the foulness and filth of Khezal’s underbelly. Below the commoners, below the debt-prisoners and the madmen, seethed society’s lowest stratum that no right-thinking citizen of Opis would have the poor taste to mention. They writhed through the remnants of the city’s siege-filled past, in the burned shells of buildings now buried beneath the grand works of the Aristeia. They were human, but they were not, for when one emerged into the light its worm-like pallid skin and milky eyes were things of horror.