by Marc
‘The ceremony iss complete. The sseed of Chaoss growsss here!’ Kargon announced, his armour sealed, his voice soft with satisfaction. Scoured clean of human life, Ilium was now the cradle for Chaos’ seed. In time, new life would grow: twisted, hideous, pliant to the will of Kargon’s masters – an infection waiting to spread.
‘OUR TASSSK HERE isss complete!’
Kargon’s words rang out across the glassy plain on which his entire force stood. They had travelled from every continent, every shattered city, every ruined sector of Ilium to gather on this patch of desert that had once been the control centre of the Imperial garrison. The sand beneath their feet had been scorched, melted and fused by a final, futile act of suicidal defiance: the detonation of the garrison’s remaining nuclear stockpile. Here and there, fragments of the garrison buildings protruded from the cracked surface like ancient standing stones, their original purpose erased by the blight of Chaos and already forgotten by the victorious invaders.
‘But there are other worldsss that long to bear the harshhh fruit of Chaosss! We shall journey to thessse worldsss, harrow their souls and make them fit to receive the sssseed of Chaos!’
Kargon gestured towards the Chaos Gate that had been erected on the plain. Though quiescent, its design would dizzy any human onlooker. The sigils etched on its surface glowed with a menacing, lambent radiance, awaiting Kargon’s command.
‘The command isss given!’ As he spoke, Kargon noticed the unusually restive atmosphere that permeated his troops. After such a complete victory, they would normally exhibit a stolid complacence. Having fed on a planet’s worth of souls, they would be satisfied, ready to move on. Instead Kargon sensed something that would normally accompany their arrival on a new world, one that promised a rich harvest of pain: hunger.
‘The command isss given!’ Kargon repeated. The gate should have already spun into life, the component parts of its multiple lattice structure turning in ways that violated every law of motion as it tore a new hole in material space. But the lattice remained stubbornly immobile, the tides of warp space beyond Kargon’s reach.
A puzzled shuffling rippled through the ranks of daemons. They, too, sensed that something was not as it should be. Kargon ignored them. Within his ancient helmet, supra-dimensional lenses realigned themselves over his multi-faceted eyes, focusing both inward, to the fluid shard of Chaos that burned at his heart, and out, beyond Ilium, where he found…
Nothing. A barrier beyond which he could not reach, beyond which there appeared to be nothing for his inhuman senses to grasp, no clue to the reason for this confounding turn of events.
‘There musst be a reassson!’ Kargon muttered, while an unaccustomed sensation gnawed at the edges of his awareness.
Hunger.
THE REASON SAT, blinking sweat from eyes that felt as if they had been seared by gazing into the very fires of Hell. Before him a periscopic sight hung from an articulated cradle. Each twist of its operating handles provided a new angle on Kargon and his troops or offered mind-numbing views of the planet-wide devastation. Along one wall of the small annex in which he sat, a bank of printers chattered out statistical assessments of the speed and efficiency of Kargon’s victory. His name was Tydaeus, instructor-sergeant of the Iron Hearts Space Marine Chapter, designated supervisor of the Mimesis Engine and, for the last hour, he had struggled to comprehend what he had seen.
Wrenching his gaze from the viewfinder’s binocular eyepieces, Tydaeus tore a strip of parchment from the nearest spool. The arcane sigils of the Adeptus Mechanicus gave the same answer to the question he had asked for the seventh time in as many minutes: Ilium was secure, isolated from every other system in the outpost. The only way to make it more so was to begin stripping gears and rods from the very guts of the Engine itself.
However, Tydaeus was a technician, not a tech-priest; this would have to do.
Tydaeus sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and tried to calm the hurricane of images that roared within the confines of his skull. Images of invasion, of merciless assault, death and desecration, of a vile act of planetary humiliation that no human had ever seen before and lived to report. None of which could be said to have truly happened at all.
Ilium was a fiction, one training ground of many that could be generated by a bizarre machine set deep in the bowels of a training outpost that was all but ignored, even by the Chapter to which it belonged. Ancient technology, old before the Emperor first ascended the throne, had been unearthed and used to create an addition to the training of Space Marine initiates: worlds on which initiates could fight, die and fight again, learning from their mistakes without paying the usual price for a failed strategy – their own death and the deaths of their fellow Marines.
Lexmechanics, artisans and logises had spent decades constructing the Mimesis Engine. Not only Ilium, but simulations of a thousand unreal worlds were created, amalgams of every planet on which Space Marines had fought and died. Doubts were raised about the sanctity of such an enterprise, the purity of any technology that set out to re-make the universe. Many were reminded of the foul desire of Chaos-cultists and the dark gods they worshipped to do exactly the same thing.
In the end, ecumenical concerns had little to do with the side-lining of the Mimesis Engine. No Space Marine worth his salt would waste more than a sneer on it. ‘A Space Marine prays for only one chance – the chance to die serving the Emperor!’ opined Primarch Rubinek, on hearing of the project’s completion. In the face of this opposition, the project’s supporters proposed that the Mimesis Engine be assigned to the Iron Hearts, to be used in the earliest stages of their initiates’ training. Lexmechanics would monitor the combat performance of these initiates and thus evaluate the Engine’s usefulness.
During the decades that followed, initiates had come and gone, climbing into the rod- and wire-strung battlesuits that enabled them to interact with the worlds generated by the Engine. Each exercise was preceded by ritual invocations of the Emperor’s protection from any possible taint of Chaos that might arise from contact with the Engine and would end with a Service of Absolution in the Iron Hearts’ Chapel of Martyrs. Over time, interest in its use dwindled, fewer initiates were sent to do battle with the generated simulacra of daemons, genestealers, orks and eldar and the maintenance team was reduced until only Tydaeus and a servitor named Barek remained.
‘They’re just waiting for it to break down.’ Tydaeus had complained to Barek on more than one occasion. ‘Then they’ll simply forget to repair it.’ Barek would nod or grunt, then go on about his business of climbing around and between the Engine’s cogs and gears to apply lubricating unguents to the fast-spinning components. Throughout the long hours they spent in each other’s company, Tydaeus was the only one who spoke. Hour after interminable hour, he would watch the Engine grind through one of its default settings after another, sink deeper into his chair and dream of the glory that should have been his.
This day had started as every other. Argos, Belladonna, Celadon – the unending cycle of worlds ran its course while Tydaeus, paying scant attention to the scenes being played out across the eye-sockets of the viewfmder, brooded over the opportunities for real combat on behalf of the Emperor which had been denied him by the very Imperium he longed so desperately to serve.
Evangelion. Fortelius. Galatea. Hyperious.
Ilium.
THE INVASION HAD already begun. Tydaeus stared in bewilderment at the figures on a tape scrolling from one of the tutorial calculators: a rout was in progress on a world primarily used to instruct initiates in the basic elements of planetary defence. Ilium’s default setting was one of the most boring of the entire catalogue. Jerking upright in his seat he pressed his eyes to the viewfmder, and manipulated its array of handles and dials. Unbelieving, he watched as a tide of daemons rampaged across the imaginary homeworld, putting its artfully-rendered citizens to the sword, axe and claw.
‘Maybe this is the breakdown they’ve been waiting for,’ Tydaeus muttered as he
tore off the most recent diagnostic print-out.
SIMULATION RUNNING: ILIUM
SIMULATION STATUS: STANDARD
OPERATING STATUS: NOMINAL
‘Your days are numbered,’ Tydaeus informed the Mimesis Engine. He felt a certain satisfaction at the prospect of it being junked and of his being re-assigned… but re-assigned to what? Weapons maintenance? Sub-technician in the map room? Every possibility held nothing but further humiliation for a Space Marine who had been deemed unworthy so many years before.
THE AMBUSH HAD been well set. Tydaeus’s team detected no trace of their quarry’s proximity until the jaws of the trap closed around them.
‘Stand and fight, Marines!’ the company’s leader cried, before a double hit from the merciless crossfire took him out of the fight.
‘For the Emperor!’ Tydaeus cried in an attempt to rally the company, which was already down to less than half-strength. He pumped shell after shell into the surrounding jungle foliage. Shadows moved among the thick-boled trees.
‘Tydaeus! Down!’ A shout from behind, followed by a bone-jarring impact.
A charge detonated overhead, in the space he had occupied moments before. Half-rolling, half-sliding in the mud into which he had been pitched, he struggled round to face his saviour.
‘Seems I owe you, Christus!’ Tydaeus acknowledged. His fellow team-member flashed his familiar, gap-toothed grin. ‘Still got your bolter?’
‘Always, by the Emperor!’ Christus replied, patting the weapon.
‘Good.’ said Tydaeus, as he gathered his legs under him. Lewd sucking noises burst from the mud as he freed himself from its embrace. ‘Because there’s only one way out of this!’
Tydaeus sprang forward, his bolter dancing in his grip as he fired charge after charge into the foliage ahead. There was the dull thud of an impact, most likely on a breastplate. A body crashed into the undergrowth. A second thud – another body fell.
‘Right behind you, brother!’ Christus bellowed, sprinting after Tydaeus, his own bolter dancing in his hands.
Crashing through the cover behind which their attackers had lain in wait, Tydaeus paused. Two bolt rifles lay, abandoned, in the mud. With a crash and shout, Christus joined him.
‘These trees are thick enough for a battalion to hide behind!’ Christus commented as they scanned the immediate area. What light filtered down from the dense forest canopy served only to throw impenetrable shadows across the spaces between the immense trunks.
‘There!’ Tydaeus jabbed a gloved finger towards a gap between two trees. ‘Movement!’
Christus loosed off a volley. Tydaeus was about to join him in pounding the shadows themselves into submission, when a sudden nagging at the back of his head prompted him to turn.
The figure charged from behind a tree to Tydaeus’s right. Fast. Saw-toothed blade already descending. Too close to bring his bolter to bear.
A short step to the left and a twist of his body took Tydaeus out of the blade’s path. Another short step, this time towards the oncoming attack, and an abrupt, stiff-armed jab caught the attacker full in the face.
Tydaeus was well-braced for the impact, his attacker was not. Boots sliding in the mud, he sprawled backwards. The attacker’s helmet, jarred loose by the power and angle of Tydaeus’s punch, spun away into the shadows.
‘By the Golden Throne, that hurt!’ Initiate Caius declared, shaking his head, then prodding gingerly at his temple, over which a bruise was already beginning to form. ‘I was out of ammunition, so hand-to-hand was my only option. Should have known better when I saw it was you!’
Tydaeus stood over the fallen Initiate. Lifting his bolter, he casually drew a bead on Caius’s rueful expression.
‘Boom,’ Tydaeus said, as the siren indicating the end of the exercise stilled the sounds of combat in the clearing behind them. ‘You’re dead!’
TYDAEUS’S HAND HOVERED over the intercom, images of long-distant triumphs drifting through his mind. Caius, always too easy-going, never sufficiently focused on a task, had fallen during his first mission with the Scouts. Christus, the born warrior, was currently leading a company on the latest of a string of successful search-and-destroy expeditions. Every one of the initiates with whom he had trained had earned the right to receive the Space Marine gene-seed and had gone on to serve the Emperor in the front line of the crusade against the forces of Chaos. Many had perished, earning themselves a place in the Iron Hearts’ Chapel Book of Martyrs. The others continued to win glory for themselves and for the Chapter.
And what of Tydaeus? Tydaeus, Initiate of Honour. Tydaeus, of whom many had spoken as a potential company commander, perhaps even Chapter Master, given time.
Ah, yes. Tydaeus. What became of him?
‘YOUR BODY HAS rejected the gene-seed.’
Chapter Medic Hippocratus was blunt. Years spent in the field, dealing with the most appalling battlefield injuries and carving the invaluable progenoid glands from the bodies of fallen Space Marines, had blasted away any pretence of a bedside manner. Tydaeus sat across from him, stiff-backed, braced for the news but still unable to quiet the rage of his emotions or the flu-like palsy that had gripped him since the third and most recent attempt to introduce the gene-seed into his system.
‘As far as we can tell, there’s some problem with your DNA’s assimilation of the seed. Your body reacts to it as if to an invading organism. There’s nothing more we can do. Any further attempts to introduce the seed would ran the risk of producing intolerable mutations. Report to the Chapter adjutant for re-assignment. That is all.’
With those words and a wave of his gnarled right hand, the grey-haired apothecary brought Tydaeus’s life to an end.
‘RE-ASSIGNMENT…’ THE WORD surprised Tydaeus even as it passed his lips. His hand still hovered over the intercom. He should contact Tech-Priest Boras, inform him of the Mimesis Engine’s aberrant behaviour and accept the inevitable: the Engine’s shut-down and his re-assignment. Ahead of him stretched a future spent watching initiates prepare for their own moment of glory: their assimilation of the gene-seed and their acceptance into the Brotherhood of the Marines.
Not yet. Eyes still pressed to the viewfinder, Tydaeus re-focused his gaze on Ilium. There was something about the invaders, about the way they moved as they piled one atrocity after another upon the surface of the unreal planet. The Mimesis Engine was able to generate the apparent form and behaviour of a vast array of life-forms, but, over years spent squinting through the viewfinder, Tydaeus had come to recognise small, apparently insignificant deficiencies in its creations.
Just as a portrait of a man might capture his appearance, hint at the manner of his movements, but fail to record the particularities of his personality, so the Mimesis Engine could not, to Tydaeus’s eyes, produce entirely convincing simulacra. Every ork, genestealer or bloodletter an initiate met on one of the generated worlds was just an approximation of the truth, inevitably – perhaps fatally – incomplete.
As he continued to watch the Chaotic hordes slash their way across the monitors, Tydaeus saw the very inconsistencies of manner and action that he would not expect to see in the artificial enemies of one of the prescribed exercises. A certainty – an impossibility! – began to grow in his mind that these invaders were real.
The outrageousness of the notion warred with his understanding of the relationship between warp space and the material universe. The Mimesis Engine was a part of the material universe and so, too, were the worlds that it generated. Was it so unreasonable to suppose that a confluence of currents in the warp tides could allow a cadre of daemons access to one of those worlds? The longer he pondered the question, the longer he watched Ilium drown in the blood of its unreal inhabitants, the more certain Tydaeus became of the answer.
Ilium had been subjected to countless imaginary assaults by aliens and demons, but this time the daemons were real.
For a moment, a figure appeared, then vanished as Tydaeus panned across yet another scene of utter carnag
e. Not a bloodletter. Taller, broader, wearing a more individual suit of encrusted armour. Tydaeus’s worked the viewfinder’s controls, panned back across the scene, until…
There! Half as tall again as the tallest Space Marine, encased in a suit of cracked obsidian from which hung the trophies of a campaign of unspeakable horrors. From its gestures, it appeared to be directing the actions of the other daemons. From the crown of its helmet’s shallow dome spewed a sheaf of living tentacles. In one claw-gloved hand it held an axe whose shaft would stand higher than any Marine.
Taking his hands from the viewfinder’s controls, Tydaeus stabbed sigil-etched buttons, yanked at toggle switches. A low rambling shook the floor of the annex as whole systems of gears were thrown into reverse, connecting rods withdrawn and re-aligned. It verged on the blasphemous but, if he could trap the daemons within the Ilium simulation, he could…
He could what? The answer was already there, in the shadows cast by long years of frustration, but he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge it. Not yet.
A printer spool chattered. Ilium had been isolated. Tydaeus ordered another print-out, then another. In the time it took the printer to deliver each new screed of parchment, whole continents went black, overrun by the invading daemons.
Tydaeus returned his gaze to the horde’s foul commander, drawn to the inhuman efficiency of his progress across Ilium, apparently still oblivious to the world’s unreality, of the trap that had already shut around him.
As he watched the horde assemble on the desert plain, a new certainty grew in Tydaeus. Here was a province of Hell, trapped within a machine-turned cage of unreality. Here was his chance for glory.
All thoughts of glory were blasted from his mind by the spectacle of the Ritual of Seeding. Had every world that fell before this creature been subjected to this last act of violation? To defeat him would be to exact holy vengeance on behalf of every such planet. A righteous fire blossomed in Tydaeus’s chest that could only be quenched by the annihilation of this daemonic abomination.