by Braden Campbell, Mark Clapham, Ben Counter, Chris Dows, Peter Fehervari, Steve Lyons
As one traitor fell away, another lunged at him, a huge metallic mass crushing him against the wall, pinning the wrist of his flamer hand. A hateful voice blared out of a speaker grille at him.
‘You should have found a dark corner to crawl into, and waited to perish with the rest of them. You would have suffered less.’
Antor’s right arm and chainsword were trapped between them. He gunned the blade anyway, cutting into his own armour as well as the traitor’s. But he had no hand left free to deflect his foe’s pistol, and its muzzle was pressed against his eye lens. A bolt-round at this range would pulp his brain.
The killing shot never came. Instead, the traitor stiffened as blood crested his helm and rolled down his face in rivulets. Lokar had found the strength to stand, somehow, and had buried his blade in the back of the Black Legionnaire’s head.
It had taken all the strength he could muster. The Space Wolf swayed for a moment, then crashed to the deck plates again.
‘No!’
Antor didn’t recognise the shouting voice – not until he realised that his throat was raw, and that he was still roaring.
No longer were there three enemy warriors in front of him. There were twice, three times, maybe ten times that number – ghosts picked out in crimson, indistinct. He launched himself into the midst of them with his chainsword grinding and Ignatus flaring, determined to deal out as much pain as he could to them before… before they could…
Pain. Sadness. Loss. The infinite void…
The next thing he knew, he was running. Casella was beside him, supporting him, urging him to hurry. ‘Don’t look back!’
‘L-Lokar?’ Antor stammered. He was trembling, ineffably cold inside his armour.
Casella shook his head. ‘He was still clinging to life by a thread. He said… no, he ordered us to leave him.’
Antor’s auto-senses warned him of more armoured figures ahead of them. They turned back, but footsteps were approaching behind them too. Casella kicked open a hatchway and pushed them both through it.
They were in a tiny maintenance bay. Casella wrenched a grille from the wall. He sucked in air between his teeth, and Antor realised for the first time how injured the other Space Marine was. He was limping, and his left arm, already hurt, appeared to have been dislocated from his shoulder and was mangled besides. He had lost his bolter.
He wanted to ask about Sanctimus. He vaguely remembered the Ultramarine falling…
They had won the battle, but at too high a price.
‘The service ducts. Go.’ Casella helped Antor clamber into the hole in the wall. Then he replaced the grille between them.
‘What about you?’ Antor protested, through the steel mesh.
‘They know we’re here. We can only hope they don’t know how many of us there are. We must scupper the ship. If I stay behind and engage them—’
‘No!’ He surprised himself with the vehemence of his outburst.
Casella turned away with a wry smile and headed out into the passageway. Then he was gone, a war cry ringing from his throat. ‘There is only the Emperor! He is our shield and protector!’
He was greeted by the sounds of chainblades and bolter fire.
Under the cover of that noise, Antor crawled away through square metallic ducts, scraping his knees and shoulders against the sides.
Casella was right, he told himself. One of us had to stay, and he was injured. The thought gave him cold comfort. It didn’t slow his pounding heartbeats.
Did he already know, back then? Did he understand – on some level, at least – what had begun to happen to him? Looking back, from a distance of years, it was impossible to say.
Perhaps he had simply pushed the thought out of his mind, afraid to face it.
Did I not have the right to be angry?
He had emerged from the ducting into a small, empty crew cabin.
The door was locked, but torn from its mountings: evidence that the traitors had already searched in there. He removed his helmet and doused his head in the sink. He gargled to cleanse the iron taste of blood from his tongue.
He lowered himself uneasily onto the bunk, too small for his armoured frame. He tried to blink away the red shapes that still writhed behind his eyes. They filled him with a sense of dread. He didn’t dare look at the shapes directly. He was afraid he might see too much.
He had to try to clear his mind. He remembered…
‘You should have found a dark corner to crawl into,’ the Black Legionnaire had snarled, his helmet pressed up to Antor’s face. His eyes had blazed dark red behind his retinal lenses.
‘They want our ship. Or any ship, perhaps,’ Antor had mused.
‘You should have found a dark corner to crawl into…’
‘It is our ship they want – and they want it in working order.’
His eyes snapped open in surprise as the deck plates lurched and then thrummed beneath his feet.
‘The engines…’ he breathed, and in that moment it was as if a prism had suddenly shifted in his mind and made everything crystal-clear to him.
‘Do these savages not even come back for their own dead?’
Perhaps not, thought Antor, if they intend to cremate them…
‘You should have found a dark corner to crawl into… and waited to perish with the rest of them…’
He knew why the Black Legion wanted the Incontrovertible Truth now. They wanted it for the one thing it could do that their own grand cruiser could not: approach the Deathwatch facilities unchallenged. They had been bound for the Erioch System. Some of Antor’s brothers were to begin a tour of duty there.
Watch Fortress Erioch!
It was one of the Deathwatch’s most important outposts. It served them as a command centre, a garrison, an armoury, a place of study and training, and a repository for holy texts and relics. It was home to the Jericho Reach’s Watch Commander – the Master of the Vigil – and the sector’s first line of defence against any xenos threat.
Erioch was well defended. Any single hostile ship approaching it would be atomised before it could get close. One of their own strike cruisers, however – clearly wounded in battle, limping home, its communication systems crippled – might give the gunners pause for a moment.
Too long.
If the Incontrovertible Truth made it into a docking bay, or even just dive-bombed the parapets with every warhead in its missile tubes armed…
Antor’s temples throbbed. He massaged them with ceramite-clad fingers. He had to think clearly, to reason. He was the only survivor of his impromptu kill team, perhaps of the entire ship’s complement. There was no one else to tell him what he should do.
Sanctimus was right, he thought, we ought to have defended the engine rooms. Better yet, damaged them beyond repair. Too late for that now, though.
He had come too far. It would take him too long to get back to the engines now, with the ship already underway again. He was closer, far closer, to the bridge. So, that was where he had to go. He wondered how many of the traitors he would have to face there. How many came aboard? How many had died?
It occurred to him, suddenly, that this was a suicide mission for the Black Legion. So, there would be no more left aboard than they might need. The rest would likely have abandoned ship, having ensured – so they thought – that the last of its rightful owners were dead. How many might they have left behind?
Too many…
But only he could prevent what was about to happen. The responsibility was his. He levered himself to his feet, but felt a familiar knot tightening in the pit of his stomach again. ‘There is no cowardice in conviction,’ he recited, seeking solace in the Emperor’s wisdom, ‘and there is nothing… there is nothing to fear but… failure…’
He was almost there when it hit him.
Antor couldn’t breathe. His vision had tunnelled, dark red, until he could hardly see. He clung to a bulkhead for support.
For a moment that felt like a year, he was elsewhere, another t
ime, in a place of never-ending pain and terror. It felt almost like a premonition… and when it ended, when he finally managed to get a hold of himself, it left him with a dark, sick feeling that he couldn’t swallow down, no matter how hard he tried.
‘There is no cowardice… in conviction…’ he repeated through clenched teeth, willing himself onward.
He had encountered no enemies in the passageways thus far, which suggested that his suppositions had been accurate and few traitors remained. He had been lucky, too, that nothing – no decompressed areas – had blocked his route. He had found more bodies, though – more Deathwatch battle-brothers slain.
The hatch that led to the bridge had been blown open. The gaping hole was unguarded, a sign of the traitors’ conceit. Antor flattened himself against the wall beside it, waiting to be certain that they hadn’t detected his approach.
Lokar should be here instead of me, he thought. He was the stealthiest of us.
He gathered information through his auto-senses, without showing himself. He pinpointed three traitors on the bridge: more than he had hoped, fewer than he had feared. One stood at the captain’s command post, while the others had taken the strike cruiser’s controls. They had lain down their weapons and stripped off parts of their battleplate, and howled accursed hymnals as they prepared to meet their dark gods in death. They don’t trust their slaves to do this for them, he realised. There were too many traitors for Antor to fight alone.
Grennon should be here instead of me, he thought. He was the strongest of us.
He felt the engines stepping up a note. Assuming that the traitors would be momentarily occupied, he stole a glance through the open hatchway. The first thing he saw was a vast, cathedral-like structure, bristling with spires and towers. It filled the forward viewport, rotating languidly against a velvet backdrop.
Erioch! It was close enough that he could make out the devotional statuary upon its ramparts. He had to act now.
His mind was racing, but he had a plan. He would tackle the traitor helmsman from behind. He would only have a second before the others reacted, but it might just be long enough.
Casella should be here instead of me, he thought. He was the boldest of us.
He didn’t have to beat the traitors. He only had to wrench the helmsman’s hands away from the controls for an instant. He couldn’t vox the watch fortress – he could see that the console had been wrecked – but he could send them a message nonetheless. He could throw the Incontrovertible Truth off-course – he only had to make it dive, bank, spin or just falter in its approach, and they’d know something was wrong.
There would have been no response to the fortress’ hails, no advance warning of their arrival.
He knew that he could trust his battle-brothers to do the rest.
A suicide mission for me too, then, Antor thought, and for a moment, the magnitude of what he was facing overwhelmed him…
He was in that place of pain and terror again. Its blood-red shadows were more distinct than ever; he even thought he recognised some of them, although he couldn’t be sure of it…
He clawed his way back to the here and now. He focused on another thing he had seen on the bridge: the bodies of the crew, heaped unceremoniously in a corner. They may only have been Chapter serfs and servitors, but still they had died for the Emperor.
Antor felt his gorge rising and, this time, he welcomed the anger as an antidote to his fear. He let it blaze inside him, let its heat suffuse him, energise him. Someone has to make the traitors pay, he told himself. No amount of suffering could ever be enough to punish them for their manifold sins.
So, Antor let the anger take him. He rode onto the bridge on its crest, his chainsword screaming, the battle cry of his parent Chapter bursting from his lips.
‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius! Death! Death!’
Antor remembered.
Blood rushing in his ears, his temples pounding. He remembered battlements framed in the forward viewport, a flash-frozen image steeped in red.
He remembered hurling himself forwards, yanking, wrenching, smashing at whatever came to hand. He remembered black-gauntleted fingers grasping for him, tearing him away, still kicking and screaming.
He remembered a power sword battering at his chest, slicing into his hip, and yet he hadn’t felt the blows. He remembered battering at thick, heavy armour plate, making only the slightest of dents. And then…
Then, he was elsewhere. It felt like something else was working his muscles, bearing his pain, screaming in his voice, but he was only distantly aware of it.
He was fighting red shadows, wave after wave of them. He had thought they would never stop coming.
The darkest, most terrible shadows.
Fire.
Spinning metal teeth.
His fists and feet thundering over and over into a bloody, quivering mass.
And then…
He had removed his helmet and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
Something sticky. Something red. Something that tasted like… his deepest fear made manifest. He had tried to deny it for four years since then, told himself it couldn’t be true, but… like iron and…
It wasn’t real, he tried to tell himself every time the thought came to his mind.
It wasn’t real.
For a long time, Antor Delassio had dreamed, and his dreams had been drenched in shades of red.
His eyes had opened upon a vaulted ceiling, and dust motes dancing around bas-relief sculptures. Reverberating footsteps and the ticking of machinery had filled his ears. An Apothecary’s white mask loomed over his bunk.
‘Don’t try to sit up,’ he had cautioned.
Memories rushed back into Antor’s head and, with them, a stab of dismay. His throat was unaccountably dry.
‘You are in the medicae ward,’ the Apothecary told him. ‘You were critically injured, but we reached you. Your hibernator implant did its job. You have spent two months, one week and three days in suspended animation under our supervision.’
‘The watch fortress,’ Antor croaked.
The Apothecary nodded. ‘This is Watch Fortress Erioch,’ he said.
As he became stronger, over the next few days, he asked more questions.
The Incontrovertible Truth had indeed been on a collision course with the watch fortress. Then, even as Erioch’s gunners realised what was happening – too late to do anything about it – it had suddenly veered away from them. They had held their fire.
They had despatched Thunderhawks instead. The strike cruiser had been found drifting at the edge of the system, and had been boarded. The hull had already been holed in several locations by improvised breaching charges, the great engines stalled.
There were questions for Antor too. During his recovery, he was visited by several watch captains, an inquisitor and, once, even the Master of the Vigil himself. They had pieced together much of the story, but needed to hear the rest from him. No one else could tell them what had happened aboard that ship, on that fateful day.
No one but Antor Delassio. He was the sole survivor.
They had found him, barely breathing, on the bridge. He had been surrounded by black-armoured corpses, each of them badly mutilated.
The inquisitor, in particular, wanted to hear the details many times over. Antor couldn’t answer him. Squirming under a beady-eyed, suspicious glare, he had mumbled excuses: ‘I took them by surprise. They were trying to regain control of the ship, they’d been in a fight already, they were wounded, and I… I don’t remember…’
The Apothecary came to his patient’s aid. ‘After such action, some loss of memory is only to be expected. Even Space Marines have their limits.’
He had wanted to tell them the whole truth – as far as he knew it – but he couldn’t. He felt ashamed. He remembered the faces of other Blood Angels contorting with madness. He remembered their eyes ablaze with hatred and their screams of primal rage. He remembered thinking it could never happen to him.
He could still feel it stirring inside him, two months later. He could still taste the faintest tang of blood on his tongue. He knew that it was a part of him now.
They were calling him a hero. There was even some talk of awarding him the Iron Halo, for what the Master of the Vigil described as ‘exceptional initiative’.
He had prevented an attack that would have left the Deathwatch crippled in the local region. He had avenged his slaughtered brethren, and enabled the gene-seed of some to be salvaged. That ought to have calmed his righteous anger.
But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.
There were traitors out there still, in their massed legions, revelling in their depravity, scars across the face of the galaxy. They had to suffer for their sins against the Emperor, every one of them.
Until they did – until the very last traitor was destroyed – the rage that boiled in Antor Delassio’s veins would never be satisfied.
His hatred of the heretic weighed as heavy as his hatred of the xenos.
Perhaps it was being on board the Incontrovertible Truth again. That might have been why he couldn’t clear his mind, couldn’t help but remember.
Antor detached himself from his machinery. He washed out the vials that his tainted blood had touched. He had just finished secreting the machine’s components in his armoured backpack when there came a knock at his door. He summoned his team of serfs into the cabin, and they helped him into his armour.
His kill team was due to assemble. It would be led by an inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos, so Antor would be under constant scrutiny. He knew what was expected of him. He only prayed he would be strong enough to serve. He could feel the Red Thirst stirring inside him again, despite his precautions.
The Cursed Young Prince…
Three times now, since that day, he had succumbed to the curse. He was fortunate that, each time, his battle-brothers had been able to coax him back from the brink. He had told them there was something in his blood, but he had declined to talk about it. He knew that he should have been honest with them, warned them of the danger he posed to them.
They hadn’t yet seen him at his worst. Nobody had.