by Ben Counter
‘He lives,’ Brynngar answered, ‘but, by the oceans of Fenris, he is tight-lipped. He has not even spoken his name.’
Cestus felt his spirit falter for a moment. Time was running out. How many more warp jumps until they reached Macragge? How many more opportunities would they get to stop the Word Bearers? It was irrational to even comprehend that one ship, even one such as the Furious Abyss, could possibly threaten Macragge and the Legion. Surely, even the mere presence of the orbital fleet above the Ultramarines’ home world would be enough to stop it, let alone Guilliman and the Legion mustering at nearby Calth. Something else was happening, however, events that, as of yet, Cestus had no knowledge of. The Furious Abyss was a piece of a larger plan, he could sense it, and one that posed a very real danger. They needed to break this Word Bearer, and quickly, find out what he knew and a way to stop the ship and its inexorable course.
Brynngar was possibly the most physically intimidating Astartes he had ever known, aside from the glory and majesty of the noble primarch. If he, with all his bulk and feral savagery, could not break the traitor then who could?
‘There is but one avenue left open to us,’ said Cestus, the answer suddenly clear, even though it was an answer muddied with the utmost compromise.
Brynngar held Cestus’s gaze, his eyes narrowed as he fought to discern the Ultramarine’s meaning.
‘Speak then,’ he said.
‘We release Mhotep,’ Cestus answered simply. Brynngar roared his dissent.
MHOTEP SAT IN quiet contemplation in the quarters made ready for him aboard the Wrathful. As ordered, he had not left the relatively spartan chamber since his incarceration after he had vanquished the Fireblade. He sat, naked of his armour, in robes afforded to him by attendant Legion serfs, long since departed, in deep meditation. His gaze was fixed upon the reflective surface of the room’s single viewport, poring into the unfathomable depths of psychic space and communion.
When the door to his cell slid open, Mhotep was not surprised. He had followed the strands of fate, witnessed and understood the web of possibility that brought him to this point, this meeting.
‘Captain Cestus,’ muttered the Thousand Son with an air of prescience from beneath a cowl of vermillion.
‘Mhotep,’ Cestus replied, taken a little aback by the Thousand Son’s demeanour. The Ultramarine wasn’t alone; he had brought Excelinor, Amryx and Laeradis with him.
‘The assault at Bakka Triumveron failed, didn’t it?’ said the Thousand Son.
‘The enemy obviously had prior warning of our intentions. It is part of the reason I came here to meet with you.’
‘You believe that I can provide an answer to this conundrum?’
‘Yes, I do,’ Cestus replied.
‘It is simple,’ said Mhotep. ‘The Word Bearers have made a part with the denizens of the warp. They forewarned them of your attack.’
‘There is sentience in the empyrean?’ the Ultramarine asked in disbelief. ‘How is it we do not know this? Are the primarchs privy to this? Is the Emperor?’
‘That I do not know. All I can tell you is that the warp is beyond the comprehension of you or I, and things exist in its fathomless depths that are older than time as we know it.’
Mhotep paused for a moment as if in sudden contemplation.
‘Do you see them, son of Guilliman?’ he asked, still locked in his meditative posture. ‘Quite beautiful.’
Cestus followed the Thousand Son’s gaze to the viewport and saw nothing but the haze of the integrity fields and the bizarre and undulating landscape of the warp.
‘Don’t make me regret what I am about to do, Mhotep,’ he warned, glad of his battle-brothers’ presence behind him. The Ultramarine captain had already dismissed the armsmen guarding the door, an order they responded to with no shortage of relief. It was a moot gesture, really; Mhotep could have left at any time, irrespective of their presence. The fact that he had not somewhat mitigated what Cestus was about to say.
That was, before Mhotep pre-empted him.
‘I am to be released.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘Yes,’ said Cestus, carefully. ‘We have a prisoner aboard and precious little time to find out what he knows.’
‘I take it conventional methods have already failed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Small wonder,’ said Mhotep. ‘Of all the children of the Emperor, the seventeenth Legion are the most fervent and impassioned. Mere torture would not prevail against such ardent fanaticism and zealotry.’
‘We require a different tack, one which I do not relish undertaking, but which I am compelled to employ.’
Mhotep stood, setting back his hood and turning to face Cestus.
‘Ultramarine, there is no need to convey your reluctance to me. I am sure the account of this day, if such records ever come to pass given our current predicament, will state that you acted under the most profound duress,’ he said smoothly, the trace of a smile appearing on his lips before it was lost in the mask of indifference.
‘I do not know what powers you possess, brother,’ said Cestus. ‘I had thought to make you stand trial and answer that question for me. It seems, however, that events have overtaken us.’
‘Indeed,’ answered Mhotep. ‘I am as moved by my duty as you are. Ultramarine. If I am freed then I will fight as hard as any and pledge my strength to the cause.’
Cestus nodded. His stern expression gave away the warring emotions within him, the abhorrence of flouting the Emperor’s decree matched against the needs of the situation.
‘Gather your armour,’ he ordered. ‘Brothers Excelinor and Amryx will accompany you to the isolation cell.’ Cestus about turned and was walking away with Laeradis when Mhotep spoke again.
‘What of the son of Russ? What does he make of my emancipation?’
The bellowing and violent protests of Brynngar were still ringing in the Ultramarine’s ears.
‘Let me worry about that.’
CESTUS AND LAERADIS were waiting when Mhotep, with Excelinor and Amryx in tow, reached them at the isolation cell. Brynngar and Rujveld had already stormed off in the wake of the Space Wolf captain’s explosive discontent.
Cestus nodded to his battle-brothers as they approached. The two Ultramarines reciprocated the gesture and fell in beside their captain.
‘The prisoner is within,’ the Ultramarine captain told Mhotep, who had reached the door and stood before it calmly. ‘Will you require Laeradis’s assistance?’ he added.
‘You can have your chirurgeon go back to his quarters,’ replied the Thousand Son, his gaze fixed upon the sealed portal as if he could see through it.
Cestus nodded to his Apothecary, indicating that his duty was done.
If Laeradis thought anything of the slight that Mhotep had delivered, he did not show it. Instead, he snapped a sharp salute to his captain and left for his quarters as directed.
Mhotep thumbed the activation icon and the portal slid open, showing the darkened cell.
‘Once it begins,’ he said, ‘do not enter.’ Mhotep turned to face the Ultramarine. ‘No matter what you hear or see, do not enter,’ he warned, and all trace of superiority vanished from his face.
‘We will be outside,’ Cestus replied, Excelinor and Amryx grim-faced behind their captain, ‘and watching everything you do, Thousand Son.’ The Ultramarine captain indicated a viewport that allowed observation into the isolation cell. ‘I see anything I don’t like and you’ll be dead before you can utter another word.’
‘Of course,’ said Mhotep, unperturbed as he entered the chamber, the door sliding shut in his wake.
MHOTEP STEPPED CAREFULLY into the gloom, surveying his immediate surroundings as he went. Dark splashes littered the floor and walls; even the ceiling was not devoid of the evidence of torture. A suit of armour had been thrown into one corner, together with the body-glove that went beneath it. This was not considered disrobing by a coterie of acolytes. No, this was frenzied: an attempt to get to the soft meat
of the flesh and exact pain and profound suffering. Mhotep’s expression hardened at such barbarism. Implements, crude and brutish to the Thousand Son’s eyes, lay discarded on a silver tray, also speckled in blood. Some of the devices even bore traces of meat, doubtless rent from the unfortunate subject when his tongue failed to loosen under the fists of the Space Wolf. The chirurgeon’s methods, then, had been equally ineffective.
‘You are quite tenacious,’ Mhotep said. There was a trace of menace in his calm inflection as he approached the metal cruciform frame to which the prisoner was affixed. The Thousand Son ignored the rapacious bruising, the cuts, gouges and tears that afflicted the subject’s battered body. Instead, he focused on the eyes. They were still defiant, albeit slightly groggy from the beatings the prisoner had been given.
‘What compromise you force us to endure,’ he whispered to himself, drawing close so that their faces almost touched. ‘Tell me, what secrets do you possess?’
The response came stuttering through blood-caked lips.
‘I… serve… only… the… Word.’
Mhotep reached for the scarab earring and removed it. He manipulated the small object with his thumb and forefinger, and placed it upon his forehead, where it stayed affixed in the shape of a gold eye, the symbol of Magnus.
‘Do not think,’ he warned, placing his fingers against the prisoner’s skull and pressing hard, ‘that you can hide from me.’
When Mhotep’s fingers penetrated the flesh, the screaming began.
TWELVE
Sirens
Screams and silence
Here be monsters
CESTUS’S TEETH CLENCHED at the horrific noises emanating from within the isolation chamber. Excelinor and Amryx followed their captain’s example, stoically bearing the sounds of psychic torture, secretly glad that they were not the subject of Mhotep’s attentions.
Through the viewport, the isolation cell was shrouded in shadow. Cestus could see Mhotep from the back only. The Thousand Son moved almost imperceptibly as he stood before the prisoner who, by contrast, spasmed intermittently as his mind was ransacked.
On several occasions, when the screaming was at its height, Cestus had wanted to go in and end it, abhorred at the mental damage being inflicted on what was once a brother Astartes, but he had stopped himself every time, even warning off Excelinor and Amryx from taking action. Instead, the two battle-brothers had turned away from the viewport, leaving Cestus alone to observe the imagined horrors of the Word Bearer’s torture.
Twice already, he had angrily ordered worried arms-men away, after they had come to investigate the sound, fearing another warp attack as they patrolled the decks.
As the shipboard vox crackled, issuing a warning, obliquely, they were right.
‘Captain Cestus, come to the bridge at once. We are under attack!’
LOATHE AS HE was to leave Mhotep, albeit with Excelinor and Amryx, Cestus had little choice but to do as bidden. He reached the bridge quickly and Saphrax quickly apprised him of the situation.
The alert had come when several unknown projectiles had been expelled from the vicinity of the Furious Abyss, and were snaking across the warp towards the Wrathful. At first it was believed that the missiles were in fact torpedoes launched in a punitive attempt to dissuade pursuit. That assumption was crushed in the moment when Admiral Kaminska’s helmsmistress, Venkmyer, had identified their erratic trajectory and the truth had been revealed.
‘Sirens,’ Kaminska breathed, looking up at the tactical display before her that showed the inexorable advance of the creatures. A dark atmosphere seemed to pervade the bridge, and the admiral looked uncomfortable because of it. Her uniform was in slight disarray – she had clearly been roused from quarters when the alert had come in – and only added to her apparent sense of unease. ‘I had thought such things were void-born myths.’
‘They are the denizens of the empyrean,’ Cestus told her, the disquieting mood affecting him less acutely.
Something was awry. The Ultramarine captain put it down to the sudden appearance of the warp beasts. ‘Can we avoid them, admiral?’
Kaminska’s face was grave as she considered the path of the warp creatures on the tactical display in front of her command throne.
‘Admiral,’ Cestus said sternly, snapping Kaminska free of the dark mood that had suddenly ensnared her.
‘Yes, captain?’ she gasped, face pale and unsteady in her command throne.
‘Can Orcadus find a way around these creatures?’
Kaminska shook her head. ‘We are on a collision course.’
Cestus turned to Saphrax.
‘Ready the honour guard and have them gather on the assembly deck at once; Amryx and Excelinor, too.’ He didn’t want to leave Mhotep alone, but the warp creatures threatened the safety of the ship and he would need all of his battle-brothers to defend it. On balance, it was a risk worth taking.
‘Captain,’ said Kaminska as the Ultramarine was leaving.
Cestus turned and looked at her, noticing that Helmsmistress Venkmyer had moved to her aid. Kaminska warned off her second-in-command with a glance.
‘What is it, admiral?’ Cestus asked.
‘If these creatures are indeed native to the warp, how are we to stop them?’
‘I don’t know,’ answered the Astartes and then left the bridge.
QUITE WHAT THE warp looked like was a question that could never be answered. The human mind was not designed to comprehend it, which was why only specialised mutants like Orcadus could look upon it, and even then with a third eye that did not truly perceive it, merely filtering out the parts that would otherwise drive him mad.
Certainly, there was something ophidian or shark-like about the creatures that closed in on the Wrathful. In truth, they neither intercepted nor followed it, but stalked it from all directions at once, creeping up from the past and gliding in from the future to converge on the point of fragile space-time that held the Wrathful in its bubble.
They had eyes, lots of eyes. Their bodies were writhing strings of non-matter, which could take on any shape, because they had no true form to begin with, but there were always eyes. They had wings, too, which were also claws and fangs, and masses of pendulous blubber to keep them warm against the nuclear cold of the warp’s storms. They burned and shimmered with acid, and shed daggers of ice from their scales. They had been born in the abyss, and had never been forced by the tyranny of reality into one form. To stay the same from one moment to the next would have been as alien to them as the warp was to a human mind.
Lamprey mouths opened up. The predators made themselves coterminous with the Wrathful, forcing themselves into unfamiliar frames of logic to avoid annihilation by the protective energy fields that surrounded the ship.
The minds inside were brimming with the potential for madness, delicious insanity to be suckled upon. The predators fed normally on scraps: moments of emotion or agony, powerful enough to bloom in the warp and be consumed. Here there were lifetimes worth of sensation to be drained, enough for any one of the wraiths to become bloated and terrible, a whale drifting through the abyss big enough to feed upon its own kind.
Thousands of bright lights flickered in the ship, each one both a potential feast, and a gateway for the non-physical predators.
One of them found an unprotected mind and, easing itself painfully into the rules of reality, forced its way in.
THE SCREAMS WERE the first signs that anything was wrong on the lance deck.
The lances, immense laser cannon hooked up to the plasma reactors in the ship’s stern, had been silent since the duel with the Furious Abyss outside the Solar System. The gun gangs still tended to them, because lasers were temperamental, especially when they had to funnel the titanic levels of power that could surge through a laser lance, and the gun gangs were constantly busy hammering out imperfections in focusing lenses and cleaning the laser conduits, which could misfire if any blemish refracted too much power in the wrong direction.
&n
bsp; One ganger fell from his perch high up on the inner hull, where he had been aligning one of the huge mirrors. He hit the ground with a wet crump that told the gang chief that he was most certainly dead. It was a sound he had heard many times before.
The gang chief was in no hurry to see what had become of the fallen ganger. Deaths meant hassle. The gang would be one short, so someone would have to be drafted from somewhere else on the ship and the Wrathful had lost plenty of men already, and they were in the abyss.
For a man to die in the abyss was bad luck. Some said if you died in the warp you never got out, and even with the suppression of religions in the fleet you couldn’t stop a void-born superstition like that.
The dead man, however, was not dead. When the gang chief reached the body he saw it mewling like a drowning animal, writhing around on its back with its wrists and ankles shaking as if it was trying to right itself.
The gang chief expressed displeasure that the man was still alive, since he would undoubtedly die soon and carting him off to the sick bay was another inconvenience the gun crews didn’t need.
The dying man’s body distended with the cracking of ribs. One side of his body split off from the other, organs separating as his pelvis split. His sternum snapped free and false ribs pinged against the laser housing beside him. His body rippled up from the floor into a writhing, pulsing arch of flesh and bone, drizzling blood onto the gunmetal deck. The crewman’s head lolled to one side, its jaw wrenched at an angle, its eyes still open.
The space within the arch twisted and went dark. The predator forced its way through, spilling out onto the floor like the contents of a split belly, feeling blindly, eyes blinking as they evolved to absorb light.
Then the screaming started.
IT WAS CARNAGE IN the lance decks, absolute carnage.
The warning icons had blazed through the ship, coupled with frantic vox chatter about monsters and the dead coming back to life, before it cut off ominously. Reconnoitering with his battle-brothers on the assembly deck, Cestus had led the honour guard, fully armed, to the lance decks and there they stood to bear witness to the horror.