The Death of Integrity

by Guy Haley

  Shrill cries carried down from on high, and Holos looked upwards to see the astorgai wheel around the pinnacle of the volcano. He was weary, nevertheless he quickened his pace; the position he was in was not favourable should they choose to attack.

  ‘What does he speak of, Reclusiarch, when he talks of Holos? I reach out for him with my mind and sense a great disturbance in him.’ Guinian pitched this question directly at the Chaplain, isolating their conversation from the brothers who marched with them. They had descended a further hour since the garden room oasis, passing through two more ships.

  ‘I am forbidden to talk of it, brother,’ said Mazrael. ‘It is the ultimate mystery of our order, and not one to be shared lightly, even with so mighty and honoured a hero as you. Only the Reclusiarch may know the whole truth of it, it is my burden. Be glad I cannot share it with you.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Guinian. In the Librarium of the Blood Drinkers the psychic brothers kept plenty of secrets of their own.

  ‘It is good that is so; curiosity is the downfall of wisdom.’ Mazrael’s tone lightened. ‘You are one of our Chapter’s mightiest sons; perhaps you will discover for yourself one day.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Guinian cast a sidelong look at Caedis. ‘Where is he? Is he here, or is he there?’

  ‘Here, there – what do these things mean?’ said Mazrael. ‘You of all the brethren should know that reality is more than it seems. Wherever he is he serves, and he walks by our side. Service is all that matters.’

  The Terminator brothers ahead, Quintus and Kalael, stopped. The corridor came to an unexpected end, sliced away by whatever disaster had caused the vessel to die and join the agglomeration, and was now pressed hard against a vessel of alien build in a frozen metal kiss. Quintus and Kalael’s suit lights illuminated a double circle of bulbous, greenish material. Mazrael stepped between them and ran his fingers over it. He pulled his hand back and looked for Guinian.

  ‘Brother?’

  Guinian nodded and replied, his voice characteristically lugubrious. ‘The entity lies within this ship.’

  ‘Then we go on. Sergeant Sandamael, organise your men.’

  Sandamael had Erdagon come up, for he carried a chainfist alongside his bolter. He set to work on the alien hull, then stopped. ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘this may take a while. The hull is composed of some kind of composite poly-laminate, very tough.’

  Mazrael glanced at their lord, who stood so still only the lights on his suit gave away the fact that it was occupied. ‘Proceed as quickly as you can brother. We have little time.’

  ‘The mind,’ said Guinian. ‘It watches us.’

  It took a long time, as these things are measured, for Brother Erdagon to carve his way through the spacecraft wall.

  A cliff many hundreds of metres towered over Holos. From the ledge he could not see to the top. As legend suggested, there was no ascent to the crater rim and thence the peak, only the cave of the astorgai offered a route.

  The mouth of the cave was a dark tube in red rock. Holos had cause to hesitate, this was the lair of the lord of the astorgai, Lo-tan, a great monster five times the size of his subjects. Four great heroes of the Chapter had set out to slay him, four heroes had died, their wargear and lives lost in his lair.

  Holos’s mind was clear on the matter. This was the only way to the top of the mountain.

  He drew his weapons and walked into the cave.

  Guinian shouted in exultation as he gathered the energy of the warp into his mind and cast it from his hand in the form of a bloody red spear. Guinian was renowned for his dour temperament. The other brothers said there was nothing that could make Guinian smile. And why should he? He, unlike them, felt the fear of those they killed to sate their thirst for blood. He felt their confusion as they were slain by their beloved angels, their sense of betrayal as they were destroyed by those that were supposed to protect them left a bitter tang in his mind.

  Isolation was the normal state of affairs for most Chapters; long wars against endless foes sent every order across the galaxy. And isolation could be a danger. The brothers within the Chapter had their purpose; they had their sense of belonging, reinforced by tradition and ritual thousands of years old. But they were separate from the run of the Imperium’s citizens, armoured by faith and technology that few others might ever see, and fewer yet understood. To an unenhanced human, a Space Marine was a creature of myth, a benevolent one at that – the sky warriors of the Emperor; the angels of death. Such separation and adulation could breed arrogance in those so separated and adored.

  The death they brought was supposed to fall upon the xenos and the traitor, the mutant and the unbeliever. What then did the sons of man feel when a citizen was taken and bled like an animal for the sustenance of the Blood Drinkers? Guinian knew only too well. He was sensitive to the emotions of others, to subtle threads in the warp some of the other Librarians were not. He felt their pain and their terror. As a Librarian Guinian was also privy to things other brothers were not. The rituals of the Librarium concerned dark things not for the minds of non-psychic brothers. He knew fully of the daemonic terrors that lurked beyond the veil of real space, for he had to know them to resist the whispers they sent. He saw the bloodletting of his Chapter, the sense of righteousness in committing an evil to prevent greater evils. For all the prayers, and the guilt, and the Chapter’s focus on the safeguarding of life wherever it could, he saw in the harvesting of the unwilling hints of an arrogance that could lead to their downfall, an echo of the temptations that had led more than half the Emperor’s own, godlike sons from their chosen path in the time of the Heresy.

  This was why he rarely smiled.

  Nevertheless the others were wrong about him. He did smile. He smiled now as the bolt of ruby energy he cast from his hand jinked around Brother Quintus and speared a genestealer through the chest, knocking the creature backwards, arms and legs suddenly lifeless. It smashed into a wall and crumpled to the floor.

  Guinian laughed. He boiled with the power of the warp and the battle-joy combined. He sang the warding prayers of the Librarium as he drew on the immaterium. The uncanny energy quickened his mind and his hearts, and the effect was intoxicating. He raised his bolt pistol and loosed five rounds. His shots landed unerringly, stitching a line of craters in a genestealer attacking Brother Erdagon, culminating in the detonation of its head. A genestealer leapt from a low platform. Guinian took a half-step backwards and smashed the xenos to the ground with his force staff. He grinned savagely behind his Terminator helmet; blood ran down his chin where his lengthened canines punctured his own lips. Red light blazed around his fists. Another Blood Lance leapt from his outstretched hand.

  These xenos were bigger and faster than those they had previously encountered. Underneath the blind aggression of the battle-joy, Guinian suspected these creatures had not bred from human stock. Their lower arms had two elbows and terminated in jabbing points of bone, rather than the grasping hands of the others, and drooping frills of manipulative tentacles twitched all along their forearms. Their faces too lacked the slight echo of humankind many genestealers possessed. The ship they were in was not of human manufacture, the corridors were low and broad, with long ramps in place of stairs and elevators. The lights and gravity were on, but neither was of a quality comfortable to standard human beings. The light was purplish and dark, with much of the illumination at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, the air a choking mix of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen. Perhaps there was a vestige of the ship’s crew in these genestealers, perhaps not. In either case, these gene-stealers were xenos bred with xenos, and that made them all the more loathsome in Guinian’s eyes.

  He held out his hand, charging his mind from the depthless well of the warp. He lifted his hand to let fly once more.

  Pain assailed him as a great and powerful entity reached out from deeper within the ship. A cold, malevolent spirit touched his own, burning from the core of his brain outward, passing up his optic n
erves. Something gave in his left eye, and he felt a trickle of blood run down his cheek to join with that slicking his chin.

  He cried out, and sank to one knee. Just in time he raised his staff, blocking a wheeling blow from a genestealer. He tried to stand, but could not, the attack of the genestealer was too fierce. A flurry of blows from its four limbs drove him backward.

  Lord Caedis saved him. Gladius Rubeum shone with pure light, the victories of the past playing along its blade. A genestealer stepped in to intercept him. Caedis chopped diagonally down with the sword. The creature span around with the force of his blow, guts flung outward. Caedis moved with an agility that should not have been possible in his Terminator suit, and drove Gladius Rubeum through the neck of the genestealer attacking Guinian. He twisted the blade to free it, and the creature fell dead. Without acknowledging the Librarian, Caedis stalked away in search of more victims.

  Guinian struggled to his feet. The battle was going poorly. Mazrael was backed into a corner by two of the creatures, his crozius arcanum flashing brightly as its disruptor field met the creatures’ arms. Brother Kalael was slumped upon the floor. His torso was torn open. He held at the wound with his hand. Suit sealant mixed freely with blood, and he muttered the Sanguis Moritura over and over again. Quintus let out a roar as a genestealer jumped onto his back, ripping at his helmet. Metrion and Sandamael fought side by side, power fists sweeping. A genestealer reared up in front Sandamael, half as tall as the Terminator was again. Recovering his wits, Guinian blasted it from behind with his bolter, the litanies of hate on his lips.

  Quintus howled as his helmet was torn free. His blows turned frantic as he sought to drag the genestealer from his body, his face reddened as he fought with his breath held. The battle hung at a pivotal point, for a brief half-second, Guinian saw the room with his warp-sight, something that only every happened to him under moments of extreme stress. The chief of the Librarium did not quite understand this ability of his. Every psyker’s gifts were slightly different, granted by the Emperor himself. It was a form of blood divination, an ability to see the future when the blood flowed thickly. When this occurred to Guinian, movements tracked into time and future, blurring into multiple possibilities. He saw the Blood Drinkers triumphant, but in the main he saw them all dead. He saw them all dead many times over.

  And then Caedis was striding through the battle, smiting all about him. A genestealer jumped for him, bone spikes and claws raking down his arm and bringing sparks from the metal. Caedis smashed it backwards with his forearm and caught it by the throat. With superhuman strength, he lifted it into the air and with a jerk of his wrist snapped its neck. Guinian gasped. Caedis cut only one path into the future, and as he walked time reordered itself until there was only victory.

  Caedis howled with the blood-rage, his emotions boiled like the lava of Mount Calicium. Guinian was staggered by the psychic impact of it. He sensed many things, he saw many things. He saw, for a moment, a cave and a man in power armour facing a winged astorgai. Holos, it could only have been Holos himself. He saw, beyond and beneath that, a third vision. The interior of a hellish vessel, gripped by Chaos, two brothers fighting, one winged, the other a traitor.

  Then it was gone. The faint second vision collapsed into the vision of Brother Holos, and then he too faded from view until there was only Caedis and bloodshed and death.

  The psychic backwash of Caedis’s Black Rage energised all in the room, none more so than Guinian. He threw his head back, his hymns disintegrating into a long and joyous whoop. The pain in his eye disappeared. His mind roared with power. He pushed away the pernicious influence of the xenos mind and fell upon the genestealers with euphoric zeal.

  Holos slew the astorgai. Brothers fought by his side, but although they wore the blood-red and badges of his Chapter, he did not know them. Caedis would have recognised them as Guinian, Mazrael, Sandamael, Quintus, Kalael, Erdagon and Metrion. There were others there with them that he would not, others who fought alongside the seventeen other heroes who had joined Holos’s climb and now relived it again. To Holos these men were phantoms, tricks played by the Thirst torturing his body. It is doubtful his mind would have been able to grasp the truth. They wheeled in and out of visibility, all engaged in the silent dance of death. Snatches of sound from seventeen battles reached out to him, scintillas of battlefields chased the now of the cave away. He fought them off as efficiently as he fought the astorgai.

  His sword, Encarmine Dread, flashed in his hand, darting swiftly into flesh. The astorgai came at him from burrow entrances all around the chamber. They spread their wings and glided down at him, they bounded along the floor; wings, dexterion-claws and single feet propelling them. Their blasphemies and taunts tainted the air along with the stink of their dung.

  Holos was undaunted. He cried out as claws raked his arm. A flicker in time – he saw a tentacled bone spike, turned it aside with a sword that was not his own, then it changed, and he saw the pinion-claw sweeping back for another strike. Encarmine Dread met it, parting the hardened feathers and flesh of the creature’s wing as it would part silk.

  There were so many, but Holos fought like a man possessed, the shades of Blood Drinkers not yet born fighting their own, unknowable battles alongside him. And then there were no more.

  Holos panted in the midst of ruin, his blood mingling with that of the slain astorgai.

  ‘My lord.’

  Holos’s head rose slowly. Two brothers were before him. They shimmered as a mirage over the lava traps, and vanished. A Chaplain stood in their stead. It was he who had spoken. Holos thought it was Reclusiarch Shanandar for a moment, but no, he did not know this man.

  ‘My lord, we must go on.’

  Holos swayed on his feet. A flash of a leering face, mocking him as it broke his wings. He screwed his eyes shut, bit the insides of his cheeks raw until it departed. ‘The Black Rage,’ he said, not knowing to whom he spoke, for surely he was alone, ‘It takes me. I do not have much time.’

  Caedis looked into Mazrael’s skull-mask. Dead genestealers were scattered all over the alien chamber. Alarms rang in his helmet, the sensorium warning him that more were on the way. Caedis was deaf to them.

  ‘How do I speak with you? I am alone.’

  ‘A brother of the Blood Drinkers is never alone, Lord Holos.’

  Caedis appeared to understand this.

  ‘Lo-tan, it is he I must slay if I wish to gain the peak of Mount Calicium. I must go on!’

  Mazrael nodded. ‘I will take you to him, my lord.’ He took the lord of the Blood Drinkers by the arm.

  ‘This way,’ said Guinian. ‘He is waiting for us.’

  Chapter 17

  Blood is Life, Life is Duty

  Voldo had his squad arrayed in a staggered line, enabling as many weapons to come to bear as possible. They had gained an intersection forming the shape of a ‘Y’ before stopping, judging it a good place to fight. The corridor broadened slightly where the corridors met. Lockers for equipment that had rusted to nothing were set into its wall, but the intersection was cramped with enough room only for two Space Marines to fire down each of the corridors. Twin lines of red dots were converging on their position.

  ‘We cannot destroy them all, brother-sergeant,’ said Alanius.

  ‘We cannot escape them,’ said Voldo. ‘We make our stand here.’

  ‘While we fight, the main body of xenos is free to attack our brothers!’ said Azmael. Emotion was thick in his voice.

  ‘What choice do we have?’ said Voldo calmly. ‘We will do what we were born to do, fight the Emperor’s enemies. He will know whether we are to be successful or not already, and those of us who fall have already been judged.’

  ‘Brother-sergeant!’ shouted Eskerio. ‘They are coming.’

  ‘And now from three directions,’ said Voldo. ‘Militor, cover Sergeant Alanius.’

  Alanius nodded. ‘Tarael, join our brother Novamarines.’

  The Space Marines shuffled around one anot
her into the prescribed position.

  ‘Brother Astomar, let fly at twenty metres range. If necessary, down both corridors to our front,’ said Voldo. ‘Then retire and let Tarael through.’

  Azmael and Alanius stood shoulder to shoulder, both twisted slightly to the side so that Militor could fire down the narrow corridor forming the stick of the ‘Y’. A minute passed. The Space Marines watched the red dots move around out of range; their motion detected by Eskerio’s advanced auspex and fed into their sensoriums.

  ‘They seek to delay us further, by delaying their own attack,’ said Azmael frustratedly. ‘Come to us, come to us now!’

  ‘That cousin, or they marshal their forces to destroy us more efficiently,’ said Voldo.

  ‘Be glad, Blood Drinker, they come now,’ said Eskerio.

  ‘Brothers! Prepare!’

  Bolters were brought up. Prayers of good function and true ranging were voiced. Silence.

  In a rush the genestealers came, a huddle of them down both of the corridors in the sticks of the ‘Y’ at once. Bolters fired, the distinctive double crack of weapon discharge and the propellant ignition of the bolts as they left the barrel followed by their delayed explosion as they penetrated flesh or metal, all doubled again by the storm bolters. Storm bolters were boltguns with two barrels and sophisticated fire control, capable of a withering rate of fire, and the Novamarines used them well.

  Genestealers fell, dropping under the feet of those that followed. The gravity here functioned, but the genestealers used every surface, scuttling along the ceiling and walls as well as the floor. In the short-ranged illumination of the suit lights, the corridors were full of aliens. The boltguns spat their peculiar explosive song, every round finding a target. The xenos were tough, some requiring several shots to bring them down. Every dead genestealer was one less set of rending claws to trouble the Space Marines, but every death brought them two or three footsteps closer, and the genestealers were in seemingly endless supply.