Ultramarines Omnibus (warhammer 40000: ultramarines)

by Graham McNeill

  'Can I help you with something?' pressed Uriel as Pasanius rose to his feet and stood by his side.

  The man shook his head. 'No,' he cackled with a lopsided grin. 'Already dead am I. The Omphalos Daemonium comes! I feel it pushing out from the inside of my skull. He will take me and everyone else for his infernal engine. Deadmorsels for his furnace, flesh for his table and blood for his chalice.'

  Uriel shared a sidelong glance at Pasanius and rolled his eyes, realising that the cenobite was utterly insane, a common complaint amongst the more zealous of the Emperor's followers. Such unfortunates were deemed to exist on a level closer to the divine Emperor and allowed to roam free that their ravings might be grant some clue to the will of the Immortal Master of Mankind.

  'I thank you for your words, preacher,' said Uriel, 'but we have completed our devotions and must take our leave.'

  'No,' said the cenobite emphatically.

  'No? What are you talking about?' asked Uriel, beginning to lose patience with the lunatic priest. Like most of the Adeptus Astartes, the Ultramarines had a strained relationship with the priests of the Ministorum: the Space Marines' belief that the Emperor was the mightiest mortal to bestride the galaxy, but a mortal nonetheless, diametrically opposed to the teachings of their Ecclesiarch.

  'Can you not hear it, son of Calth? Juddering along the bloodtracks, its hateful boxcars jolting along behind it?'

  'I don't hear anything,' said Uriel, stepping around the cenobite and marching towards the chapel's iron door.

  'You will,' promised the man.

  Uriel turned as a monotonous servitor's voice crackled from the electrum-plated vox-units mounted in the shadows of the arched ceiling, announcing: 'All hands prepare for warp translation. Warp translation in thirty seconds.'

  The cenobite laughed, spittle frothing at the corners of his mouth as he raised his torn forearms above his head. Blood ran from his opened wrists and spattered his face before rolling down his cheeks like ruby tears.

  He dropped to his knees and whispered, 'Too late… the Lord of Skulls comes.'

  A spasm of sickness sheared along Uriel's spine as the last words left the cenobite's mouth and he stepped towards the man, ready to chastise him for uttering such blasphemies in this sanctified place.

  The lights in the chapel dimmed as the ship prepared for warp translation.

  Uriel dragged the young preacher to his feet.

  And the cenobite's head exploded.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Blood geysered in slow motion from the ragged stump of the cenobite's neck and Uriel pushed his spasming corpse away in disgust, backing away and wiping the sticky fluid from his face. The body remained upright, jerking and thrashing as though in the grip of a violent seizure. The cenobite's arms flailed wildly, yet more blood flickering from his opened wrists and spattering the statuary and altar.

  Even as he stared in horrified fascination at the corpse's lunatic dance, Uriel felt the familiar sensation of his primary stomach flipping as the ship jumped into the treacherous currents of the warp. He gripped one of the chapel's pews as he felt a sudden dizziness, which vanished seconds later as his Lyman's ear adjusted for the sudden spatial differentiation between dimensions.

  The hideous corpse continued to thrash and convulse, refusing to fall despite its lack of a head, and Uriel tasted the unmistakable sensation of warp-spawned witchery on the air. The man's fellow priests wailed in terror, dropping to their knees and spilling prayers of protection and mercy from mouths open wide in horror. Some, made of sterner stuff, drew pistols from beneath their robes and aimed them at the dancing corpse.

  'No!' shouted Uriel, drawing his sword and leaping towards the hideous revenant. It lunged towards him, arms outstretched, but a sweeping stroke of Uriel's blade clove it from collarbone to pelvis and the shorn halves of the man fell to the marble floor, twitching, but mercifully free of whatever monstrous animation had possessed it before.

  'Guilliman's blood!' swore Pasanius, backing away from the dead cenobite and making the sign of the aquila over his chest. 'What happened to him?'

  'I have no idea,' said Uriel, kneeling beside the corpse and wiping his blade on the cenobite's chasuble as the lights in the chapel began flashing urgently. Wailing klaxons and ringing bells could be heard from beyond the chapel door.

  Uriel smoothly rose to his feet, saying, 'But I have a feeling we'll find out soon.'

  He turned and ran back to the chapel door, grabbing his bolter from the gun rack beside the entrance to the vestry. Pasanius scooped up his flamer and followed him out into the corridor, drawing up sharply as he saw what lay beyond the chapel door.

  Both men stood transfixed as the arched passageway before them swelled and rippled, as though in a diabolical heat haze, its dimensions swelling and distorting beyond the three known to man.

  'Imperator!' breathed Pasanius in terror. 'The Geller field must be failing. The warp is spilling in!'

  'And Emperor alone knows what else,' said Uriel, his dread of the unknown terrors of the warp sending a shiver of fear along his spine. Without the Geller field to protect the ship from the predatory astral and daemonic creatures that swam in the haunted depths of the immaterium, all manner of foul entities would have free rein within the vessel's halls, ethereal horrors and shadowy phantoms that could rip men to shreds before vanishing back into the warp.

  'Come on,' shouted Uriel. 'The gymnasia. We need to gamer as many soldiers as we can before it's too late.'

  Uriel and Pasanius lurched their way along the passageway, stumbling like a pair of drunks as they fought to hold their equilibrium in the face of this spatial insanity. Screams and roars came from ahead, but Uriel found himself unable to pinpoint exactly where ahead was as sounds echoed and distorted wildly around him. The floors and ceilings of the stone passageways seemed to run fluid, swirling as though their very fabric was being unravelled before his eyes.

  The sound of a tolling bell rang out, ponderously slow and dolorous one second, tinny and ringing the next. Using the wall as a guide, though it was a treacherous one, the two Space Marines fought their way onwards, each step bringing fresh madness to their surroundings.

  Uriel thought he saw a tall mountain, wreathed in smoke, form from the floor before it vanished and was replaced by a roiling sea of snapping mouths. But even that disappeared like a fever dream as soon as he tried to look upon it. He could see Pasanius was having similar difficulties, blinking and rubbing his eyes in disbelief.

  A grainy static filled Uriel's vision and an insistent buzzing, like an approaching swarm of insects, filled his skull. He shook his head, trying to clear the distortion and unable to comprehend the things he saw before him.

  'How close are we?' yelled Pasanius.

  Uriel steadied himself on a bulkhead, grateful for its transitory solidity, and shook his head again, though the movement made him want to vomit. 'How can we tell? Everything changes the moment I look at it.'

  'I think we are almost there,' said Pasanius, pointing to where the passageway widened into a marble-flagged atrium, though at present, it appeared that the chamber had been inverted, its domed ceiling swirling below their feet, its dimensions skewed completely out of true.

  Uriel nodded and pushed himself forward, an intense and nauseous sensation of vertigo seizing him as they stumbled into the flipped atrium. Uriel's eyes told him he was crossing the floor, but he could tell that his every step found him crossing the shallow concave bowl of the inverted dome. His booted feet trod the shielded glass of the atrium's dome that was all that lay between him and the warp.

  Uriel looked down through the dome, the nauseous sensation in his gut surging upwards, and he dropped to his knees, vomiting explosively across the glass. A sickly mass of bruised colours foamed and swirled beyond the glass, the very stuff of the warp itself, noxious and toxic to the eye. Its bilious malevolence went beyond its simple hideous appearance, violating some inner part of the human mind that dared not comprehend its nightmarish pote
ntial.

  Uriel found his eyes drawn to a loathsome stain of the warp, a vile, filthy sore of ash-stained yellow, he was unable to drag his sight from. Even as he stared at it, the warp shifted, stirred into life by the mere attention and echoes of Uriel's thoughts. Vile, terrible things began shaping themselves from the foul soup of raw creation and Uriel knew that were he to see what horrific thing would be born from its hateful depths, he would go mad.

  Gauntleted hands gripped him and hauled him upright, and he could feel the warp's blind, impotent rage at being denied such a morsel as his sanity.

  'Don't look at it! Keep your eyes closed!' shouted Pasanius, dragging Uriel over the surface of the dome. Uriel felt its insistent call: the seductions of its fecundity and the promises of power that could be his were he but to surrender to it. His eyes ached to see the awful magnificence of the warp, but Uriel kept them screwed tightly shut, lest they betray his soul to the immaterium.

  Breathless and disgusted, Uriel and Pasanius clambered from the atrium and crawled away from the false seductions of the warp, the feelings of sickness diminishing the further they went.

  Uriel looked up, coughing stringy, vomit-flecked spittle and said, 'Thank you, my friend.'

  Pasanius nodded and said, 'There. The entrance to the gymnasia should be through that cloister!'

  'Aye, it should be,' agreed Uriel pushing himself weakly to his feet. 'Let's just hope it is still there.'

  Uriel stumbled through the cloister and turned towards the entrance to the gymnasia.

  'Oh no…' he whispered as he saw what lay before him.

  Where he had expected to find the carven marble archway of the gymnasia, there was now a gargantuan gateway of brazen metal: bronze and laced with razorwire that led into a rectangular, earthen arena which was fully a kilomette wide and twice that in length. More incredible still, there was no roof to this arena, simply a lacerated crimson sky, flecked with cancerous, melanoma clouds. What new madness was this?

  Screaming, mad and insane like the wails of the damned in torment, echoed from within and pierced Uriel's skull with lancing, glass shards of pain.

  His stomach knotted in horrified disgust as the overpowering reek of fresh blood filled his senses.

  The soldiers of the 808th Macragge they had come to find were still here, but where there had once been a proud regiment of men and women ready to fight for the glory of the Emperor, there was now nothing more than the screaming, bloody shreds of those yet to die.

  Hundreds of soldiers writhed on the ground, splashing great gouts of blood around them as though fighting some subterranean attacker. Fleshless, bony hands reached up through the dark earth, clawing and grasping at their bodies and dragging them below the surface. Uriel ran through the gate, sword in hand, and felt his boots sink into the soft and loamy ground, crimson liquid oozing from the waterlogged earth.

  Bones and grinning skulls gleamed whitely through the red earth and Uriel saw that the ground was not waterlogged at all, but flooded with fresh-spilled blood.

  His mind reeled at the prospect. How many must have been drained of their life's blood to irrigate such a vast space so thoroughly? How many arteries had been emptied to slake the vile thirst of this dark, dark earth?

  Uriel was shaken from his disgust by the nearby screams of a man half submerged in the earth and weeping tears of agony.

  'Help me! For the love of the Emperor help me!' he shrieked.

  Uriel sheathed his sword and ran over to help the man, who reached up with pleading arms. The man's gore-slick hands slid from his gauntlets, but Uriel gripped his tunic and hauled him clear of the ground, staggering back in horror as he saw that the man had been stripped of flesh below the waist, his entire lower body flensed of muscle, meat and blood. Even as he watched, the hungry earth swallowed what remained of the dying man, unwilling to be cheated of its fleshy morsel.

  A sense of utter helplessness filled Uriel as he watched men and women devoured by the bloody ground, the monstrous sound of marrow being suckled from the bone echoing from the monolithic sides of this gory arena.

  'Blessed Emperor, no!' wailed Pasanius, fighting to save a howling woman from a similar fate. Laughing shadows ran like black mercury along the walls of the arena, a capering dance of souls that flared into the blood-red sky as the slaughter of thousands concluded.

  A sudden silence descended upon the arena as the last of the bloody ground's helpless victims were dragged beneath its thirsting depths. No sooner had the last body vanished from sight, when a throaty gurgling erupted from the centre of the arena and Uriel saw a long strip of rockcrete slowly rise from the soaking ground. Dull, bloody rail tracks arose with it, running across the middle of the arena and ending at opposite walls.

  The hateful silence was broken by a sibilant moaning, as of a thousand voices trapped in a nightmare they know they will never wake from.

  'Holy Emperor, protect us from evil, grant us the strength of spirit and body to fight your enemies and smite them with your blessing,' prayed Pasanius.

  'Too late,' whispered Uriel, drawing his sword and standing ready to fight whatever new monstrosity the warp might unleash. 'We failed.'

  No… you have not yet begun…

  Both Uriel and Pasanius spun, searching for the source of the voice.

  'Did you hear that?' said Uriel.

  'Aye,' nodded Pasanius, 'I think so, but it felt… felt as though it was inside my head. Something terrible is coming, Uriel.'

  'I know. But whatever comes, we will fight it with courage and honour.'

  'Courage and honour,' agreed Pasanius, firing the igniters on the nozzle of his flamer.

  'Let's go,' said Uriel grimly, nodding towards the dripping platform in the centre of the arena. 'Whatever is coming, we'll meet it head on!'

  Pasanius followed his former captain as they made their way across the hideously squelching ground towards the platform.

  As they mounted its steps, the source of the sibilant moaning was finally revealed.

  Each sleeper laid between the rail tracks was a jigsaw of bodies and limbs, writhing in agony and knotted together by some dark sorcery. They screamed in lunatic delirium, their voices piteous and heartbreaking. Though he knew none of the faces, the cast of their features told Uriel that they were of the stock of Ultramar and that the souls of those consumed by this abominable place were suffering still.

  Eyes and mouths churning in the fluid matter of each sleeper gave anguished voice to their suffering before being forced from form to formlessness that another soul might vent its endless purgatory.

  Uriel's hatred swelled within him at such horror and he closed his eyes…

  Splintering crystals of alternate existences clash and jangle, detaching from the walls of one plane and shifting their position to resonate at a different frequency. Echoes in time allow the planes to shift and change: altering the angles of reality to allow the dimensions to unlock, dancing in a ballet of all possibilities.

  …then opened them as he felt a sickening vibration deep in his bones and a restlessness ripple through the air. The jagged stumps of bone jutting through the ground retreated into its sanguineous depths and the moaning sleepers wept with renewed anguish.

  Where the rail tracks vanished into the walls of this vast courtyard, streamers of multi-coloured matter were oozing from the stonework.

  Rippling spirals of reflective light coiled from the mortar, twisting the image behind like a warped lens. The walls seemed to stretch, as though being sucked into an unseen vortex behind, until there was nothing left but a rippling veil of impenetrable darkness, a tunnel into madness ringed with screaming skulls sent out to die.

  Warped realms, a universe and lifetimes distant, flow together, joining all points in time on the bronze blood-tracks. On a journey that leads everywhere and begins nowhere, the Omphalos Daemonium pushes itself from nothingness to form. Snaking from its daemonic womb and leaving nothing but barren rape and death in its wake.

  And the Om
phalos Daemonium came.

  Though the cenobite had raved of the might and power of the Omphalos Daemonium's evil, they had been but the merest hints of the thing's diabolical majesty. Roaring from the newly formed tunnel mouth like a brazen juggernaut of the end times, the Omphalos Daemonium shrieked along the bloodtracks towards the horrified Space Marines.

  Vast bone-pistons drove it forward, iron and steel flanks heaving with immaterial energies. Bloody steam leaked from every demented, skull-faced rivet as wheels of tortured souls ground the tracks beneath it to feast on the oozing blood of the dead earth.

  Deep within its insane structure, it might have once resembled an ancient steam-driven locomotive, but unknown forces and warped energies had transformed it into something else entirely. The thunder of its arrival could be felt by senses beyond the pitiful five known to humankind, echoing through the planes that existed and intersected beyond the veil of reality.

  Behind it came a tender of dark iron and a juddering procession of boxcars, their timbers stained with aeons of blood and ordure. Uriel knew without knowing that millions had been carried to their deaths in these hellish containers, carried to whatever loathsome destination this horrifying machine desired before finally being exterminated. The vast daemon engine slowed, the sleepers driven beyond sound in their torment as the towering machine halted at the edge of the platform.

  Uriel thought he heard booming laughter and the grinding squeal of warped timber doors sliding open on runners rusted with gore.

  Gusts of blood-laced steam hissed from the armoured hide of the Omphalos Daemonium and malevolent laughter rippled through them as they writhed on evil business of their own. Each tendril thickened and became more solid as they wormed towards the Space Marines and Uriel said, 'Stand ready.'

  The tendrils of smoke vanished without warning and in their place stood eight figures, each wearing a featureless grey boiler-suit and knee-high boots with rusted buckles along the shins. Each carried a fearsome array of knives, hooks and saws on their leather belts.