[Dawn of War 02] - Ascension

by C. S. Goto - (ebook by Undead)

  “Sister Meritia,” he called, drawing to a standstill outside the door to her chamber. If she had regained consciousness, he needed to consult the Sister about her thoughts concerning the mysterious wraithbone tablet and the tunnel network that seemed to run underneath the monastery itself. Jonas was already on his way down into the site, a new sense of urgency driving his scholarship.

  There was no answer.

  “Sister Senioris,” repeated Gabriel, rapping on the door.

  Still no answer.

  Pushing open the door and preparing an apology in his mind should he find Meritia in the room and conscious, Gabriel stepped into the small cell. It was neat and orderly, as he would have expected. The shelves supported a well-organised collection of tomes, together with tablets and scrolls. On the little desk, Gabriel could see an open adamantium scroll tube and the ancient document that it had once contained—clearly Sister Meritia had been working on it before her incident.

  Meritia herself was still lying on the tablet against the wall where Jonas had put her so carefully. She was perfectly still and utterly silent, one arm hanging casually down to the ground; for a moment Gabriel thought that she was dead. He had no idea what had happened in the tunnels under the monastery, but it was clear that Meritia was suffering. Jonas had voiced his suspicions about Ptolemea, but there would be little evidence until the Sister Senioris regained consciousness and could tell them what happened.

  Taking a couple of strides towards the Sister, a fluttering motion caught Gabriel’s eye and he turned to see a hanging tapestry flapping in the draft from the open doorway. Even from the centre of the room, Gabriel could see that there was an antique pistol hidden in a shallow alcove behind it, and he nodded to himself, silently approving of the Sister Senioris’ preparedness. Even the Ordo Dialogous should be able to enforce the Emperor’s will if necessary. Gabriel was aware that the Order of the Lost Rosetta had not always been so puritanical about being non-militant.

  He took another step and his boot crunched down on something on the floor; he felt its resistance collapse under the considerable weight of a Space Marine’s foot. Lifting his leg he saw the crumbled and powdery outline of what must have once been a pistol. Instantly, his head snapped back to the tapestry on the opposite wall. As it billowed out from the alcove, Gabriel could clearly see that the pistol hidden behind it was the pair of the one he had just crushed underfoot.

  “Sister Meritia,” he said for a third time, but now with more urgency.

  There was still no response from the unconscious Sister Senioris, but as Gabriel loomed over her he noticed a trickle of red running over her neck. He reached down and turned her face away from the wall, bringing it square with his own. Her thick, muddled, grey hair was matted in liquid and stuck haphazardly all over the side of her face, and there was the faint, ferrous smell of blood in the air. Pushing the hair away with his fingers, Gabriel saw the neat, cauterised entry wound that had punched through Meritia’s temple, killing her instantly. The grey and red liquid in her hair had gradually seeped out of the hole in her skull under gravity, as her head had slumped over to the side. The book on which she had rested her head as a pillow was soaked through.

  As he descended down towards the foundations of the monastery, the shadows seemed to grow longer and heavier until the corners of the corridors were all but invisible. Instinctively, Jonas whispered something inaudible and his force staff flared with light, pushing back the darkness as he rushed through the winding and labyrinthine passageways. Gabriel had been adamant that there was some kind of connection between the bizarre happenings on the battlefield and the unusual finds in Jonas’ dig. And Jonas had to concede that the appearance of ancient eldar artefacts under the monastery did not bode well. It was entirely conceivable that the conniving aliens could exploit some long-dormant technology as a weapon in the battles to come; it did not befit a Blood Ravens librarian to be ignorant of such risks. Knowledge is power.

  After a few moments lost in his thoughts, Jonas realised that the shadows in the old, vaulted corridor remained heavy and impenetrable despite the light spilling out of his staff. He paused, stopping in the middle of a long, high-ceilinged corridor, its walls punctuated with tall alcoves in which loomed the menacing visages of fallen Blood Ravens, their likenesses carved into the strange igneous rock so prevalent on Rahe’s Paradise.

  It was always dark this far down in the monastery—there was no natural light and the passageways down there were hardly ever used, especially since the dungeons had been moved to higher ground. The main route down into the foundations was elsewhere, but this was the most direct path from the desert entrance into the monastery. The Chapter’s menials performed maintenance sweeps only twice a month, which was enough to keep the unfrequented passages respectable, but not enough to keep them shimmering and clean like the rest of the monastery. Nonetheless, there was no reason at all why the shadows themselves should be indelible marks against the floor and walls. They glinted faintly, as though they were merely mica glass.

  Jonas surveyed the corridor from the centre of the sphere of light that emanated from his staff. When he quietened his mind, he thought that he could hear the suggestion of whispers from the shadows, although he wasn’t sure whether the breathy, aspirated sounds were actually coming from inside his own head.

  There was something in the shadows at the feet of the statue of legendary Third Company Captain Trythos, further down the corridor, just beyond the reach of his staff’s radiance. Jonas held his staff in both hands, diagonally across his body, and took a couple of strides forward, watching the edge of the sphere of light gradually creep nearer to the shape. After a few steps, the mound on the floor resolved itself into the slumped figure of a menial. He was crumpled into a heap and clearly dead. Jonas knelt briefly, rolling the man onto his back with a touch of his staff; his eyes were wide open and bulging, but their irises had turned completely white. His mouth was open and a look of utter terror was etched across his features. It was as though he had been drained of his very life force. In some inexplicable way, the shadow in which he was laying did not vanish under the glare of the psychic light from Jonas’ staff. He was bathed in death.

  Rising back to his feet, Jonas jogged down the corridor towards the last flight of stairs that would lead him down into the excavation site. He vaulted the staircase in one bound, tucking in his legs and barrelling through the air like a cannon ball, flipping slowly through a single revolution. At the last moment, he untucked his legs and whipped his force staff into a whirl above his head, landing solidly in a crouch with his weapon poised and coruscating with blue energy.

  The excavation site was a mess. The carefully extracted Imperium artefacts had been smashed and scattered across the ground, and the painstakingly excavated features in the ground had been compressed and ruined by some form of pounding weight. Here and there, where Jonas and Meritia had uncovered eldar artefacts, the site was bathed in the bizarre, indelible, glassy shadows that Jonas had seen in the corridors of the lower monastery. The eldar items themselves appeared to have been incinerated and burnt beyond salvation, and the sandy ground around them had been rendered mica by the incredible heat. The effect appeared similar to what Jonas had seen outside on the battlefield.

  Jonas took it all in instantly as he strode through the site towards the hole that dropped down into the lower level of the dig. Without pausing at the edge, he brought his staff up vertically in front of him and dropped straight down into the chamber of petrified trees below, landing with a crunch on the stone floor, with his staff ablaze with light once again.

  The subterranean chamber seemed unchanged. It was shrouded in the same heavy darkness as before, but seemed to shimmer slightly, as though the darkness itself were a form of light. Over to one side, the faint, ruddy glow of Krax-7’s lava-flows edged its way into the chamber from the narrow tunnel in which Meritia had collapsed. The dim light was distorted and spiked with the shadows of the petrified roots that crisscrossed
the tunnel itself, but Jonas also noticed that a more substantial, humanoid shadow was cast into the tree-lined chamber in which he stood.

  Swirling his staff and sending little shards of radiant blue sparking through the gloom, Jonas strode down into the tunnel and brought the dazzling light into focus in front of him. About halfway along the tunnel, collapsed onto the floor, lay the lissom body of Ptolemea, face down on the rock. Without emotion, Jonas paused briefly, checking her body for breath, then stepped over her and increased the intensity of the light that now poured from his staff. He strode purposefully to the end of the tunnel and emerged into a wide underground cavern, run through with veins of molten lava. The walls were studded with caves and tunnels, too many for the librarian to investigate on his own.

  Turning on his heel decisively, Jonas strode back towards Ptolemea and picked her up, swinging her body over his shoulder easily and stalking back up into the foundations of the Blood Ravens’ monastery. Captain Angelos would want to deal with Ptolemea immediately, then he would return to explore the caves.

  The armoured doors to the Implantation Chamber hissed open smoothly, sucking a gust of fumes and smoke out into the corridor. The mist was heavy and pungent, tinted green with noxious chemicals, but it was carried out of the ceremonial chamber on a choral wave of harmonies, as the Chapter priests of the Third and Ninth Companies chanted litanies of purification.

  Captain Ulantus strode into the ritually cleansed space, his polished armour glinting with its own purity seals. The Blood Trials on Trontiux III had been conducted with more haste than he would have liked; he had condensed the week into only two days. The landing party had returned with three successful aspirants, all of them strong and resilient, all of them slightly too old to be ideal. The course of the trials had made Ulantus even more conscious of the importance of Ckrius—not only as an individual neophyte undergoing the sacred transformation, but also as a test case for the ascension of older aspirants. It was never something that a Space Marine Chapter liked to do—the results could be unreliable, unpredictable and occasionally abhorrent—but in times of need even the most pristine of the Emperor’s servants had to compromise. Above all other things, the Chapter’s gene-seed had to survive. If Ckrius’ travails were to fail, Ulantus would not hold out much hope for the others.

  While he had been down on the planet’s surface, Ulantus had received another message from Imperial Guard Captain Sturnn of the Cadians 412th on Lorn V, reiterating his request for assistance from the Blood Ravens. It seemed that the situation on the ice-world was becoming desperate, and Sturnn was not confident that he would be able to hold off the ork warhost for much longer. The relay stations around the Lorn system were also reporting signs of an approaching alien fleet. The signatures of the vessels did not support the conclusion that they were reinforcements for the orks, and tentative intelligence suggested that it may be an eldar force en route to Lorn V. Sturnn had been reluctant to hypothesise about why the eldar and the orks might both be interested in that particular planet, but it was clear that he knew more about it than he was admitting. The Cadians were not local to Lorn, and they must have been briefed on the situation before they were dispatched. Whatever the case, Ulantus was fully aware of his duty—if the aliens were threatening an outpost of the Imperium and if the Emperor’s Imperial Guard required the support of the Adeptus Astartes, then he would do everything he could, short of jeopardising the survival of the gene-seed of the Chapter by failing to recruit more aspirants. His compromise seemed reasonable: finish the Blood Trials on Trontiux III, but finish them quickly. He hoped that Gabriel would be willing to make a similar compromise on Rahe’s Paradise, since the Litany of Fury was greatly weakened by the absence of its main Battle Company and its venerable captain. However, there was still no word from the Commander of the Watch, despite numerous attempts to raise him. Ulantus was considering dispatching Saulh in the Rage of Erudition to take the message to Gabriel personally.

  As the Litany of Fury cruised through the outer reaches of the Trontiux system, leaving the third planet as a rapidly diminishing dot on the rear view screens, Ulantus had returned to the Implantation Chamber to check on the progress of Ckrius. It would not be long before the Litany would have to make the transition into the warp, and the captain wanted to ensure that Ckrius was as stable as possible before that happened. Although the geller-field around the Litany was powerful, it had been breached before, and a neophyte in Ckrius’ weakened and susceptible condition would be even more vulnerable to the whispered temptations of the daemonic host in the warp than the rest of the human crew. It would be wholly unacceptable if Ulantus had to execute the young neophyte because of any suspected corruption during the journey through the warp, especially after all the time and effort that had been expended on him already.

  Ckrius was still laying on the tablet in the middle of the chamber with his limbs bound under adamantium shackles. The egregious wounds that had been hacked into his chest had healed completely over the last couple of days, leaving long ugly scars running down his sternum—his Larraman’s organ was clearly functioning efficiently.

  Stepping into the chamber to permit the great doors to hiss and clunk sealed behind him, Ulantus watched the apothecary manoeuvring a large, hemispherical device into place above Ckrius’ face. The inside of the machine was bristling with projections, syringes and blades. They were focussed into bunches that approximately coincided with the positions of the neophyte’s eyes and ears as he lay on the tablet beneath it.

  Even from his position next to the doors, Ulantus could see the settled horror on the youth’s face as he realised what was about to happen to him. For a fraction of a second, Ulantus felt a surge of sympathy for the boy, wondering whether it might not be more humane to perform some of these operations whilst the aspirants were unconscious. Immediately, he threw the thought aside, berating himself for his own weakness in the face of pain. Without pain the Adeptus Astartes would be nothing—how could they prove their worthiness of the Emperor’s blessing? The wash of sympathy was instantly replaced by a wall of resentment: pandering to this youth was delaying the insertion of the Litany into the warp and jeopardising the Blood Ravens’ capacity to fulfil its duty.

  His resentment was misplaced, and Ulantus regretted it almost as soon as he felt it. Ckrius and others like him were the future of the Blood Ravens. Without him there would be nobody left to fulfil the duties of the Chapter. As his mind calmed again, Ulantus realised that the real source of his resentment was Gabriel and his apparently cavalier disregard for both Ckrius, the Blood Trials and now the developing crisis on Lorn V. It was not his place to question the dignity of the Commander of the Watch, but Ulantus was concerned and infuriated by his recent conduct—he seemed obsessed by the eldar and by that cursed, manipulative farseer.

  As the thoughts raced through Ulantus’ mind, the apothecary slowly lowered the machine over Ckrius’ head, obscuring his horrified features inside the dome. A series of whirring noises and cracking sounds told Ulantus that the boy’s ears and eyes were being removed by the device so that the occulobe and Lyman’s ear implants could be inserted into the brain stems behind them. After a few minutes, the dome stopped clucking and lifted clear of Ckrius’ head, leaving him blinking with sustained trauma, terror and awe at the new world which was suddenly revealed around him, through his now highly enhanced senses.

  Her face was pressed against cold, moist stone floor and her head was aching. It was as though she had fallen and knocked herself out. For a few moments, there was only darkness as her eyelids refused to respond to the nerve impulses that commanded them to open. There was a dull, unspecific pain all over her body, making her muscles rebel against her will as she tried to move them. She lay motionless, her back twisted against a rough wall behind her, with her neck angled uncomfortably around to the other side. In the featureless black before her eyes, Ptolemea struggled to remember what had happened.

  She remembered colours more than anything else. Lu
sh and vibrant greens riddled her memory, swamping specific shapes with the overwhelming presence of generalised, verdant life. Her eyes flicked back and forth, as though her brain had not yet properly registered that she was gazing at images in her memory. As her eyes twitched, the green wash started to resolve itself into distinct shapes. Here and there she could see the outlines of trees, dozens of trees, hundreds of trees, trees beyond counting stretching out into the furthest reaches of her mind. It was an epic jungle, covering the surface of an entire planet, swamping it in life and fecundity.

  But just as the green resolved itself into a worldwide canopy, a burst of fiery orange erupted near the equator, like a flaming hurricane. The patch of dazzling colour flared and whirled like a maelstrom, eating into the jungle that surrounded it on all sides. And as it gyred and spun, the firestorm seemed to burn itself out—it became speckled with flecks of black, like moments of darkness in the inferno. Soon, before the raging torrent of fire could spread out into the forests, the moments of darkness expanded and commingled, consuming the radiant, orange flames in a wash of black. And the darkness continued to expand, overflowing the perimeter of the maelstrom and spilling out into the jungles, where its growth accelerated and proliferated, rushing around the entire planet in little more than an instant, until there was not a shred of green left to be seen.