by Ben Counter
‘MOUNTAINS OF MACRAGGE,’ breathed Antiges.
The engine room of the Furious Abyss was like a cathedral to machinery. It was vast. The criss-crossing ribs of a vaulted ceiling reached through the gloom. The immense hulks of the cylindrical exhaust chambers were decorated with steel ribbing and iron scrollwork, and inscribed with High Gothic text running along their whole length. Multiple levels were delineated by gantries and lattice-like overhead walkways. Word Bearers’ banners hung from the web of iron above them, bearing the symbols of the Legion’s Chapters: a quill with a drop of blood at its nib, an open hand with an eye in the palm, a burning book, and a sceptre crowned with a skull. The metallic throb of the engines was like the ship’s own monstrous heartbeat.
The conduit in the labyrinthine ship had led the Astartes to this place and though the sounds of pursuit were distant and hollow, the enemy would not be far behind.
‘Find something to destroy,’ said Skraal. ‘Get to the reactors if you can.’
Antiges tried to take in the vastness of the engine room. Even with the munitions they had at their disposal and the fact that they were Astartes, they would still have a hard time doing anything that could cripple the Furious Abyss.
‘No,’ said Antiges, ‘we drive onwards. Look for ordnance or cogitators. We can’t sabotage this vessel attacking blindly.’
Skraal looked back at his squad. The last of them was being dragged up through the hatch. The coolant pipe they had entered through was one of many forming a tangle of pipes and junctions around the exhaust chambers. Between the pipes was darkness and there was no telling how far down it went.
‘We might not find our—’
‘We’re not getting back out,’ snapped Antiges.
Skraal nodded. ‘Forwards, then.’
Antiges led the Astartes up onto the nearest walkway, above the exhaust chambers. The immense shapes of generatoria loomed towards the ship’s stern, connected to the even larger plasma reactors somewhere below. Ahead of them, the walkway wound into a dark steel valley between enormous pounding pistons. Shapes were gathering on a walkway above them, hidden by the solid metal of a control deck. It seemed that the engineering menials had been ordered out of the chamber, which meant that the Word Bearers planned to stop them here.
‘Cover!’ shouted Skraal, but there was little to be had when the bolter fire from the Word Bearers hammered down at them. Rorgath returned fire with his scavenged bolter, but there was little the others could do with pistols and close combat weapons. One of Skraal’s battle-brothers was hit square in the chest and knocked over a guardrail. He fell onto the engine block below and was pounded flat by a piston hammering down on him. Orlak’s arm disappeared in a spray of blood and he fell to the walkway. Anriges hoisted him bodily to his feet and dragged him along as more gunfire streaked from above.
‘Break for it!’ Skraal bellowed, seeing a lull in the fusillade hammering them. Then he was on his feet and running for the cover at the far end of the engine block, where the walkway led up into a great wall of galleries and machinery. Even hurried by Antiges, Orlak lingered behind and was speared through the back by storm bolter rounds. Smoke poured from the backpack of his armour, mixed with a spray of blood.
Orlak: Skraal had led him through a dozen battlefields. He was a brother, as they all were.
The World Eater captain took that grief and locked it away beneath his consciousness, where it mixed with the pool of rage that he would call on again when the time was right.
Skraal reached cover. The Furious Abyss closed around him. He was in an equipment room, the walls covered in racks of hydraulic drills, wrenches and hammers. Human deck-crews fled in wild panic as the World Eaters burst in, followed by Antiges. There were just three left. It was hardly the raiding force they needed to bring the vast ship to heel.
Skraal noticed something inscribed on the ceiling of the chamber.
BUILD THE WORD OF LORGAR FROM THIS STEEL LIVE AS IT IS WRITTEN
‘Move! Move! They’re heading down after us!’ bellowed Antiges, demanding his attention.
‘We need to hold them up. No way we can dodge bolter fire and wreck the ship at the same time,’ said Skraal, slamming the portal shut behind them and using a stolen wrench to wedge it.
‘Three squads at least,’ Antiges replied, his breathing heavy, but measured. ‘No way we can beat them.’
‘I’ll slow them,’ said Rorgath, planting his feet and checking the clip in his bolter.
Antiges regarded the World Eater. The white and blue of his armour was already scored by bullet wounds and scorched by plasma burns.
‘Your sacrifice will be remembered,’ said Antiges, reverently.
No such sentiment was evident from the World Eater’s captain, who tossed Rorgath his bolt pistol.
‘Give them no quarter,’ he snarled, turning abruptly to lead what was left of the raiding party through the tangle of anterooms and corridors. The shouts of pursuers relaying their position followed them like hollow, ghost whispers, and the thud of armoured feet on the floor was dull and resonant in their wake.
Together, Antiges and Skraal moved swiftly across the hinterlands of the engine room and through a doorway in the bulkhead. Not long before they had left the chamber, the fierce bark of bolter fire erupted behind them.
It didn’t last long and deathly silence reigned for a moment before their relentless pursuers could be heard once more. Mangled with a cacophony of voices emitted from the ship’s vox array, it became obvious that a widespread search had begun. The Furious’s warriors were converging on the Astartes. They were getting closer every second.
Passing through an empty storage chamber, Skraal kicked open a door to reveal another corridor. The atmosphere was close and hot, the walls lined with burning torches. The sight was incongruous amongst the decks and trappings of a spaceship, but it also led downwards and prow-wards, in the direction where the Astartes guessed the primary ordnance deck would be.
‘What did they build in here?’ hissed Antiges, giving voice to his thoughts as they moved down the corridor. The Ultramarine got his answer as he emerged from the far end of the tunnel.
A vast plaza stretched out in front of them. Walls lined with baroque statues of deep red steel rose up into a domed ceiling. The vault at the apex of the massive chamber was hazy with incense and supported by dramatic false columns. Prayers were inscribed on the flagstone floor. An altar and pulpit stood at the far end of a central aisle. There was only one word to describe it: a cathedral. In the supposed age of enlightenment, when all superstition and religion was to be expunged from the galaxy to be replaced by science and understanding, all that the Emperor had decreed was dishonoured by the chamber’s very existence.
Antiges found that it left a bitter taste in his mouth and was ready to tear down the effigies and rend this temple of false idolatry to the ground with his bare hands, when a voice echoed out of the surrounding gloom.
‘There is no escape.’
The Ultramarine saw Skraal throw himself against a pillar. Antiges swiftly adopted a crouching position, bolt pistol outstretched in a two-handed grip, scanning the darkness. He could just make out the crimson armour at the far end of the cathedral. The speaker, his tone eerily calm and cultured, was sheltering behind the altar. The Word Bearer was not alone.
Booted feet clacking against the stone floor behind the Astartes confirmed the threat. Antiges and the World Eater were covered from both sides of the chamber.
‘I am Sergeant-Commander Reskiel of the Word Bearers,’ said the speaker, identifying himself. ‘Throw down your arms and surrender at once,’ he warned, all the culture evaporating.
‘After you fired on us and slew our brothers!’ Skraal raged.
‘This need not end in further bloodshed,’ Reskiel added.
Antiges felt the enemy converging on them, heard the faint scrape of ceramite against stone as they closed.
‘What is this place, Word Bearer?’ asked the Ultramarine, panni
ng his sights first across the pulpit and then further out until he had swept the gloom around them. ‘Such religiosity is not condoned by the Emperor. You openly defy his will. Have you reverted to primitive debasement and superstition?’ he asked, trying to goad them, trying to find time to devise a plan, expose a weakness. ‘Is all Colchis like this now?’
‘There is nothing primitive about the vision of our primarch or his home world,’ said Reskiel levelly, clearly wise to the Ultramarine’s stratagem. Stepping out from behind the altar, the sergeant-commander allowed the diffuse torchlight to bath him in its glow.
He was young, but highly decorated judging by the honour studs and medals on his crimson armour. The trappings of heroism and glory warred with strips of parchment and leaves of tattered vellum scripted in wretched verse.
A squad of Word Bearers emerged into the cathedral behind him, their bolters trained on the shadows where Antiges and Skraal were in cover.
‘Show yourselves, and let us speak brother to brother,’ said Reskiel, allowing his guardians to move in front of him.
‘You are no brother of mine!’ shouted Skraal.
‘Get ready,’ Antiges hissed to his ally as Reskiel raised a hand. The Ultramarine knew, with an ingrained warrior instinct, that he was about to give the order to open fire. He trained his bolt pistol on a cluster of Word Bearers at the front of the advancing guards.
Skraal roared, surging out of cover and throwing his chainaxe. He thumbed the activation stud as it left his hand and the weapon shrieked through the air. With a scream of ceramite on metal, the axe bypassed the guards and sliced clean through Reskiel’s wrist, embedding itself in the altar. Shield upraised, a war cry on his lips, the World Eater charged.
Antiges cursed the son of Angron’s impetuous battle lust and triggered the bolt pistol, running forward as the muzzle flare gave away his position. Bolt rounds hammered into the approaching Word Bearers and three of the warriors collapsed in a heap against the fury.
Bedlam filled the cathedral. Skraal covered the distance between him and his enemy so fast that none of the opening bolter shots hit him.
Antiges followed, acutely aware that he had foes behind as well as in front. An errant shot clipped his pauldron, another chipped his knee guard and he staggered briefly but kept on into the maelstrom, the name of Guilliman in his furious heart.
‘This is sacred ground!’ wailed Reskiel, clutching the stump of his arm as blood spurted freely from it. Skraal battered the Word Bearers in his path aside and when he reached the sergeant-commander, backhanded him across the face with his shield by way of a reply, and wrenched his chainaxe from the altar. He spun and slammed the head of the axe into the head of a red-armoured warrior charging behind him. The Word Bearer was thrown off his feet and skidded along the floor on his back, his face a red ruin of bone and shattered ceramite.
The ambushers from behind the two Astartes fell into the fray.
Skraal fought as if possessed by the spirit of Angron, slaying left and right as a terrible bloody rage overtook him. He embraced the cauldron of fury within and used it to kill, to ignore pain. Word Bearers fell horribly before his onslaught, so fierce that those surrounding the assault gave ground and retreated to the cathedral door. The one who called himself Reskiel was dragged out by one of his battle-brothers, the blood clotting on the stump of his wrist as he screamed his choler.
Bolter fire was hammering away towards the rear of the cathedral. Antiges could hear it echoing loudly inside his helmet as Skraal turned from the carnage he was wreaking to look at him.
A line of pain sketched its way down the Ultramarine’s back and he realised he’d been hit. This time the shot pierced his armour. Something warm welled in his chest and Antiges looked down to see a wet ragged hole. As his mind suddenly made the connection to what his body already knew, he slumped against a pillar, spitting blood. Lungs heaving, he tried to force his augmented body back into action and cranked another magazine into his bolt pistol. One hand clamped over the wound, the other triggering the bolter, Antiges resolved to go down fighting. In the distance, vision fogging, a shadow fell.
White spikes of pain were flashing before his eyes as he turned to look back at Skraal amidst the bloodbath at the altar.
‘Go,’ gasped Antiges.
The World Eater paused for a second, about to run back in and rescue the Ultramarine. A thrown grenade exploded near the pillar and Antiges’s world ended in a billow of smoke and shrapnel.
SKRAAL DIDN’T WAIT to see if the Ultramarine had survived. One way or another, Antiges was lost. Instead, he ran from the cathedral, storm shield warding off the worst of the bolter fire hammering across the cathedral towards him.
As he fled into the endless darkness, the shifting of the vessel’s hull echoing as if venting its displeasure, a thought forced its way into his mind in spite of the battle rage.
He was alone.
ZADKIEL WATCHED THE battle unfolding through the docking picters mounted along the hull of the Furious Abyss.
Baelanos had fallen, yet his inert body had been recovered and lay in the laboratorium of Magos Gureod.
He would serve the Word, yet.
Baelanos’s dedication to the Word was that of a soldier to his commander, and he had never appreciated the more intellectual implications of Lorgar’s beliefs. Nevertheless, he was a loyal and useful asset. Zadkiel would not throw him away cheaply.
Ultis was doubtless buried beneath the rubble of Bakka Triumveron 14. In that, Baelanos had served Zadkiel too. It was another thorn removed from his side, the potential usurper despatched.
Yes, for that deed you will receive eternal service to the Legion.
‘We’re breached.’ Sergeant-Commander Reskiel’s voice came through on the vox, down where the engines met the main body of the battleship.
‘How many?’
‘Only one remains, my lord,’ Reskiel replied. ‘They made it in through the coolant venting ports, open for the re-supplying.’
‘Hunt him down with my blessing, sergeant-commander,’ Zadkiel ordered, ‘but be aware that you will be making your pursuit under take-off conditions.’
Another thorn, thought Zadkiel.
‘Sire, there are still warriors of the Legion fighting on the dock,’ countered Reskiel at the news of their imminent departure.
‘We cannot tarry. Every moment we stay to fight is another moment for the Wrathful to reach strike range or for our stowaway to damage something that cannot be replaced, not to mention the fact that the dockyard’s defences might be brought to bear. Sacrifice, Reskiel, is a lesson worth learning. Now, find the interloper and end this annoyance.’
‘At your command, admiral. I’m heading into the coolant systems now.’
Zadkiel cut the vox and observed the viewscreens above his command throne. A tactical map showed the Furious Abyss and the complex structure of the orbital docks around it. Crimson icons represented the Word Bearer forces still fighting and dying for their cause.
Zadkiel reached back for the vox and gave the order to take off.
ULTIS WATCHED FROM the rubble of the collapsed observation platform as the Furious Abyss begin to rise.
The engines of the battleship threw burning winds across the dockyards. Docking clamps and supply hangars melted to slag. Gantries burned and fuel tankers exploded, blossoms of blue-white thrown up amidst the firestorm. Fiery gales whipped around the open metal plaza, cooking cohorts and Astartes alike in the burgeoning conflagration surging across Bakka Triumveron 14. Scalding winds singed his face, even shielded by the wrecked chunks of ferrocrete. He saw the crimson paint on his armour blistering in the backwash of intense heat.
The maelstrom engulfed the bodies fighting outside it and they became as shadows and ash before it, as if frozen in time, eternally at war.
This was not the future he had envisaged for himself as he watched the Furious Abyss rise higher from the deck with a blast from its ventral thrusters.
He had been betrayed: n
ot by the Word, but by another on board ship.
A shadow eclipsed the stricken Word Bearer, prone in the rubble.
‘Your friends desert you, traitor whelp,’ said a voice from above, old and gnarled.
Ultis craned his neck around to see, vision hazing in and out of focus, dimly aware of the blood that he had lost.
A massive Astartes in the armour of Leman Russ’s Legion reared over him like a slab of unyielding steel. Bedecked in trophies, pelts and tooth fetishes, he was every inch the savage that Ultis believed the Space Wolves to be.
‘I serve the Word,’ he said defiantly through blood-caked lips.
The Space Wolf shook the blood out of his straggly hair and grinned to display his fangs.
‘The Word be damned,’ he snarled.
The Space Wolf’s gauntleted fist was the last thing Ultis saw before all sense fled and his world went black.
ELEVEN
Survivors
Aftermath
I will break him
BUOYED UPON HOT currents of air vented by the Furious Abyss, what was left of the assault boats carrying the Astartes strike force made their escape from Bakka Triumveron 14 and back to the Wrathful held in orbit around the moon.
Cestus was waiting for the atmospheric craft in the tertiary docking bay when a single vessel touched down. Its outer hull shielding was badly scorched and its engines were all but burned out as it thunked to an unwieldy stop on the metal deck.
One assault boat, thought the Ultramarine captain, waiting with Saphrax and Laeradis, the apothecary ready with his narthecium injector. How many casualties did we sustain?
Engineering deck-hands hurried back and forth, hosing down the superheated aspects of the boat with coolant foam, and brandishing tools to affect immediate repairs. One of the officers stood at a distance with a data-slate, already compiling an initial damage report.
Cestus was oblivious to them all, his gaze fixed on the embarkation ramp as it ground open slowly with a hiss of venting pressure. Brynngar and his Blood Claws stepped out of the compartment.
The Ultramarine greeted him cordially enough.