by Marc
‘You were there at the start of this. Fate may well decide that you should be there at the end. This situation may require you to die alongside Castus. I am led to understand that you will accept this.’
Aescarion could feel shadow-hidden eyes examining her. In her mind, she could still see that foul stain of Chaos spreading across the map.
‘I could serve my Emperor in no greater fashion.’ she said quietly, ‘than by scouring Saafir utterly of the filth which infests it.’
ONCE AGAIN, CASTUS had changed. Standing there on the bridge of the Chaos vessel, Defixio, Aescarion could see the armour around his barrel chest breathing as he did. Where it had been scored it bled a green, brackish ichor. There were no longer eyes behind the helmet, just a single slash of malevolence. He moved, not like a man clad in armour, but like something wholly biological, primeval and strange.
Castus, for his part, knew that he should recognise her. He had seen her before, more than once, but he could not name her. The face had been younger, certainly, with fewer lines; the eyes brighter, the hair a deeper colour. He recalled dimly that age did these things to humans. But it was definitely the same person, the same black-armoured woman, the same symbol of the flaming chalice embroidered on her white robes. But her name… what was her name? Where had he seen her?
Aescarion had seen this moment a million times in her imagination. All around her lay the shattered wreckage of the Defixio’s bridge. The ancient computation banks were torn apart, spilling brass rods and gears onto the floor. The floor and walls were scarred with gunfire. The bodies of the ship’s crew lay all around, alongside the mangled corpses of Castus’s daemons. Great swathes of daemons’ blood spattered across the walls and pooled around the bases of the control consoles, still smoking and bubbling. None had given any quarter, and all had died for their devotion, either to the god of the Plague or to the purity of the Imperium.
Through the great observation port which served for a ceiling, the stars outside marked the fringes of Parmenides’s corrupt domain. The warfleet had barely entered the disputed space when the metal fangs of something alive had burrowed into the Defixio’s hull and disgorged a horde of Nurgle’s finest. One by one the ships protecting the Defixio had fallen to the same fate, their huge empty hulks drifting lazily through space like bodies in the water. Only the defenders aboard the Defixio had been able to stem the tide, and then only at the expense of their own lives. The two forces had ground each other down in the corridors and engine rooms of the ship, until only two stood.
Aescarion, whose axe blade still smouldered from the blood of a dozen daemons. And Castus, whose morningstar was heavy with gore and whose shield was blistered and slashed. So, as Fate and the Emperor’s divine will had decreed, they faced each other once again.
Wearily they began to circle once more, weighing their weapons in their hands. Aescarion knew her chances were slight. She was Castus’s match in skill but not strength, and she had none of his toughness. She had faced him twice before, and each time her broken body had needed the attentions of the Orders Hospitaller to heal. And Castus would be a greater warrior than he had ever been. He was wholly Chaotic in form, and lacked the weaknesses of humanity.
But, of course, he had not fought this duel out in full, in every waking second of his life, as Aescarion had done. She had mapped out the tides of the struggle, every move, every outcome. She had seen how he fought. She knew even before she had moved how he would react. Aescarion brought her axe down towards him. Castus thrust his shield in front of him but she knew he would. She drove the blade into the top edge of the shield and split it clean in two. Blood fountained from the torn panels, the warrior letting out a bestial roar of pain. His morningstar swept in a wide black path but the Seraphim ducked it, slicing upwards into his armoured torso.
The axe’s blade slashed again and again, a lightning bolt that struck in a dozen places at once, the energy field lashing against the armour so it split and buckled. The wounds were shallow but they were many, for Aescarion knew she could not fell him with one blow. He had to be ground down, whittled away until he could not resist, with blows his supernatural reflexes could not avoid.
My faith has taken me this far, Aescarion prayed as she sliced and circled the warrior. Now my hatred will take me through.
Castus was forced back under her onslaught. For the first time he felt panic welling up through long-dead avenues of his mind. He fell to his knees, the blows battering his head now. The blade of bone lashed into his body, the flesh exposed, the armour falling away in chunks. He fell onto his back, his altered blood spurting all around, his blackened, dead flesh drying and contracting as it was exposed to the air. He waited for the final blow that would break him.
This was a feeling he had felt before, so many years before. This helplessness, being laid open before an enemy. This was what it had been like when his mind was flayed away. His faith blasted from him. His soul laid bare for Parmenides to corrupt. The heart-rending memories of that day bubbled up into his mind from the dark corner of his soul where they had festered, just as he had festered for all of these years. He had not always been as he was now. He had been changed. This woman! She had been there when it happened – and now she had come back.
Aescarion looked down at Castus. He was at her mercy at last. Now came the part that could so easily become undone. The speech she had rehearsed all these years.
‘It makes no difference if I kill you now.’ she spat. ‘You are bound to the Plague God. If you die, your soul will join a billion others in damnation. If I let you live, you might wait a thousand years more, and by then you will have no mind left to care what happens to my species. Parmenides offered you knowledge. Now you have it, from me. You have seen both sides of reality – you have served both the Imperium and Chaos. But there is one thing you don’t know, one fragment of experience you have not claimed. You do not know how it would feel to become righteous again.’
Castus looked up at her. He knew that he would not live for long, not with his stagnant blood running so freely onto the floor. He stared up at her lined face, and the strands of grey in the hair that he had once seen burning above him.
‘You are old.’ he whispered through his time-ravaged throat. ‘I did not realise it had been so long.’
Aescarion switched off her axe’s energy field. The air fell still. ‘You have all the knowledge you ever will. You are stronger than any man alive, than any Space Marine I have ever known of. But is it enough? It cannot get any better, Castus. It will only get worse. It might take thousands of years, but it will get so much worse.’
Castus felt his life draining away. He knew well, by now, the ways of death. He had minutes, not years. The words of this woman would not leave his mind. He had thrown everything he had believed in away to be one with the blessed Plague God. Surely he could not return?
Aescarion was virtually unarmed now, but she knew Castus was harmless. Even if he wasn’t dying, his thoughts were keeping him docile. There was a war going on in his mind of a kind she knew so well. ‘You may think that you cannot be forgiven, that you can never be a part of humanity again. But there is more than one path to redemption.’
More than one path. There is always another way. Castus had walked two paths in his life. He had abandoned one. Could he do it again, with the time he had left?
‘Look what the years have done to us both.’ Aescarion continued. ‘They turned you into an animal. They forced my faith away from the commands of my Order. But all that time has let me come to see that whatever happens here, you will never have the chance to change the galaxy again.
‘You have an imagination. Use it. Change your path once more before you draw your last breath.’
THE SICKENING FLASH brought him back into the cavern, returning him to the very place where his new life had begun, so long ago. The Chaos champion straggled, but struggled in victory. His steps were laboured as he dragged his bleeding bulk along the promontory once more to his position
above the roiling face of the daemon prince.
‘Castus, my boy!’ Parmenides had been waiting for his servant’s return. ‘I see it has been a taxing task I set you. But are you victorious?’
Castus nodded slowly, his last reservoir of energy draining dry.
‘The Exterminatus? Is it averted?’
‘Better… better than that.’ Castus croaked. ‘It is… unnecessary.’
The face reared up in its slow tidal wave, a kilometre-wide frown furrowing the cascade of reeking flesh. ‘Meaning what, my servant?’
Castus pulled himself up to his full height. With the force of sheer will he unclenched his altered hands. The fingers reluctantly peeled away, the crystal splitting, the morningstar falling from his grip and spiralling down into the corrupt sea.
He spread those fingers and, with what little strength he had left, plunged them into his breastplate. The metal split along the lines which Aescarion’s axe had scored, laying open the diseased torso which had been enclosed since he first set foot on Saafir.
The dead organs had been hollowed out and the rotting loops of viscera were gone. Now in his distended ribcage there hung a slim metal cylinder, harmless in appearance – until the daemon prince’s psychic sight perceived the gothic letters inscribed upon it:
IN EXTERMINATUS EXTREMIS.
DOMINA, SALVE NOS.
Sergeant Castus of the Ultramarines looked Parmenides the Vile in the eye, and tasted joyfully the fear he saw there.
‘Damnatio tuum.’ he whispered, and the white light of purity blasted him clean for all eternity.
KNOW THINE ENEMY
Gav Thorpe
THE MASSIVE, SLAB-sided fuselage of the Thunderhawk gunship shook and rattled as it plunged through the upper atmosphere of the planet Slato. The roaring of its massive jets and the rumbling of the air against the armoured hull filled the interior with a deafening cacophony. The air glowed around the falling gunship as the armoured beak of its cockpit and the leading edge of its stubby wings glowed white-hot with the friction of its entry from orbit.
Brother Ramesis, chaplain of the 4th Company of the Salamanders Space Marine Chapter, felt the craft hit an area of low pressure and drop several hundred feet in a couple of seconds, pushing him up into the harness which secured him to the inner side of the gunship’s fuselage. As the Thunderhawk plummeted deeper into the thick cloud of Slato’s skies the passage became smoother, and half a minute later the pilot activated the standby lights. The padded restraints arched up into the wall above Ramesis’s head with a hiss of hydraulics and he stretched his arms, the servos within his powered armour whirring quietly as they matched the movement. He felt pressure on his back as the Thunderhawk’s machinery implanted his backpack into the socket along his armour’s spine, then dropped the ablative shoulder pads down on either side of his head. Now fully armoured, Ramesis stood up and walked steadily along the decking of the Thunderhawk, passing his gaze over the twenty-six assembled Space Marines. Each was conducting his own pre-battle rituals: checking weapons, comms or armour one last time, wishing each other the Emperor’s benevolence or just praying quietly.
Ramesis activated a rune set into a bulkhead and the door to the small chapel-room slid out of sight. Stepping inside, the chaplain lit an ornate brazier in the middle of the altar and then knelt on one knee before it, bringing his clenched fists to his forehead in a sign of worship. Standing, he took his rosarius, the Shield of the Emperor, from the reliquary to the left of the altar. Kneeling again, he cupped the great arcane device in both hands, running his fingers around its circular edge, seeing his face mirrored in the twelve gems set in concentric circles on its black enamelled surface.
‘Beneficent Emperor, who rules the stars and guideth mankind.’ Ramesis chanted as his thumbs gently pressed the jewels on the rosarius in the ritual pattern, ‘Cast thy divine protection over me, your eternal servant. Though I gladly shed my blood in your honour, keep me from ignoble death so that I might continue to serve thy greatness. I live that I might serve thee. As I serve thee in life, may I serve thee in death.’
As he completed his ritual, the rosarius hummed into life. Ramesis could feel the Emperor’s protective aura pulsing from its depths and it gladdened his soul. Hanging the rosarius’s heavy chain around his neck, Ramesis stood and turned to the reliquary to the right. From within the intricately carved wooden box, fashioned by his own hand during his time as a Chaplain Novitiate, Ramesis took out his crozius arcanum, grasping its two-foot haft tightly in both gauntleted hands. Again Ramesis knelt before the altar clutching the crozius to his chest, its eagle-shaped head resting against the similar eagle blazon embossed on the armoured plastron across his chest.
‘Beneficent Emperor, who ruleth the stars and guideth mankind. Guideth my hand that I might smite thine enemies. Invest this weapon with thine anger. Let mine arm be the instrument of thy divine wrath. As you keep me in life, let me bring death to thine enemies.’
With the invocation complete, Ramesis slid the firing stud in the haft of the crozius into its forward, active position. With a simple press of his finger, the eagle of the crozius would be surrounded by a shimmering disruption field, capable of smashing bone and shattering the thickest armour. Truly, the ways of the Machine God are miraculous, Ramesis thought.
As the final part of the Consecration to Battle, Ramesis hung his crozius from his belt and took his golden, skull-faced helm from its position in front of the flickering brazier.
‘Beneficent Emperor, who rules the stars and guideth mankind. Let mine eyes look upon your magnificence. Let mine eyes see truly all things fair and foul. Let mine eyes tell friend from foe that I might know thine enemy.’ Ramesis placed the helm over his head, twisting it slightly so that the vacuum seals clamped into place. He turned a dial on his left wrist and the helmet pressurised with the rest of the power armoured suit.
‘Tactical display.’ the chaplain commanded his armour, and his vision was filled with an enhanced image of the outside: details of temperature, atmospheric pressure, light density and other factors were superimposed over his sight. As he rolled his head left and right to check the suit’s calibration, Ramesis swiftly completed the other pre-battle procedures, double-checking the suit’s power and exhaust assembly, the internal environment monitors, targeting crosshairs and myriad other systems that would keep him alive in the midst of battle, even in the depths of space.
The comm-speaker inside Ramesis’s helmet chimed and the pilot informed him they were soon to land.
Ramesis strode out into the main chamber, where the other Space Marines of his force waited for him, their quietly sincere conversations showing they were eager for battle too. At his approach, though, they fell silent.
‘Today we are joined by Brother Xavier, who has proved himself worthy enough to move on from his initiation.’ The Space Marines raised their fists in praise of the newcomer, who bowed his head in thanks.
‘Brother Xavier has served in Tenth Company for twenty-five years, and many are his battle honours.’ Ramesis informed them. ‘I am pleased to welcome him to our company and this, his first conflict as a full battle-brother, is indeed an honourable and auspicious one. We have come to this world to fulfil our duty as the protectors of mankind., There is no mission more sacred or righteous in its cause.
‘Several weeks ago an expedition from the newly founded colony on this world discovered something ancient and terrible. Their explorers found an alien device, a thing of great evil – for it has been placed here by the eldar.’
The Salamanders hissed and snarled in anger, for their Chapter had a long history of fighting eldar pirates. Their home planet of Nocturne had been plagued by the alien corsairs for millennia before the Emperor had arrived to bring them salvation. Ramesis himself had fought against the eldar on numerous occasions and was unreserved in his loathing of the capricious aliens.
‘We have been told by the worshippers of the Machine God that this device is a gateway, a portal to the Immate
rium.’ the chaplain continued solemnly. ‘Soldiers from the colony’s garrison were despatched to guard this portal while it is investigated, to ensure that the eldar did not attempt to use this gateway to attack Slato. However, they are few and our divine claim to this world, as well as the lives of two hundred thousand colonists, requires that we aid them. We have learned in the last few hours that the eldar have indeed attacked Slato. Even as we descend, their warriors are assaulting the Emperor’s servants at the portal. Our augurs and surveyors tell us that they are relatively few in number at present, but if they gain access to their gateway then they will be able to bring on untold numbers of reinforcements. If that happens, our fight to protect this world will be all that much harder.’
Ramesis allowed a moment for his battle-brothers to digest this news. He was glad to be facing the eldar again, for the deaths of many of his ancestors stained their hands and he looked forward to every opportunity to repay the blood-debt.
‘Let us pray!’ Ramesis commanded the assembled Space Marines. They turned to face him and bowed their heads in acquiescence. As Ramesis spoke he walked along the two lines of warriors, touching each on the chest with the palm of his hand, passing on the blessing of the Emperor and their primarch.
‘May the Emperor look kindly on our endeavours today.’ he chanted. ‘May his eternal spirit steer us ever on the path of light. May revered Vulkan, primarch of our Chapter, watch over us. May we have the strength and wisdom that we will not fail them in honour and duty. Praise the Emperor!’
‘Praise the Emperor!’ the Space Marines replied in a deep chorus. At that moment a siren sounded twice and the pilot’s voice sounded over the comm-net.
‘Alien interceptors on an attack approach.’ the pilot said hastily. ‘Assume battle positions.’