Battle for the Abyss

by Ben Counter

  ‘You’re alone,’ he said. ‘We’re pack animals all of us, but that’s just… that’s just on the surface. We cling to the pack because if we did not there would be no Legion. We are alone, all of us. There might as well be no one else on this bloody ship.’

  The Wulfen did not reply.

  ‘Just you and me,’ said Brynngar, huskily.

  The Wulfen shook itself, like a dog drying its fur. It growled powerfully and stood up on all fours. It was the size of a horse, its head level with the Space Wolf s.

  The Wulfen bowed down and picked something up off the floor with its jaws. With a flick of its head he threw it at Brynngar’s feet.

  It was a bolt pistol. The grip was plated with shards of the bone knife that Brynngar had been carrying when he arrived at the Fang after his Blooding. His fishhook hung from the butt of the gun on a thong made from animal tendon. Skyblade talons and frost lynx teeth decorated the body of the weapon in an intricate mosaic depicting a black wolf against the whiteness of a Fenrisian winter.

  ‘Ah,’ said the Wolf Guard, picking the weapon up, ‘that’s where it got to.’

  FATE WAS A lattice of interconnecting strands of potential realities and possible futures. Eventualities flowed in bifurcating lines and paradoxes. Destiny was unfixed, existing purely as a series of outcomes, and even the most infinitesimal action had consequence and resonance.

  Mhotep regarded the myriad strands of fate in his mind. Focusing on the silence and solace of the isolation chamber, visions sprang unbidden to his mind. Glorious mountains of power rose up before him. Galaxies boiled away in the distance, points of burning light on an endless silver sky. Infinite layers of reality fell, each one teeming with life. Mhotep’s concepts of history and humanity saw endless cities springing up like grass and withering away again to be replaced by spires greater than those on Prospero. Mhotep’s memories flared up against the sky and became whole worlds.

  Subsumed completely within the meditative trance state, he saw the magnificence of the Emperor’s Palace, its golden walls resplendent against the Terran sun. He saw the finery and gilded glory torn down, artistry and mosaic replaced by gunmetal steel. The palace became a fortress, cannons like black fingers pointing towards an enemy burning from the sky above. Driven earth and waves of blood tarnished its glory. Brother fought brother in their Legions and changeling beasts loped out of the dark at the behest of fell masters.

  War machines soared, their titanic presence blotting out the smoke-scarred sun. Thunder boomed and lightning split the blood-drenched sky as their weapons spoke. Laughter peeled across the heavens and the Emperor of Mankind looked skyward where shadows blackened the crimson horizon. Light, so bright that it burned Mhotep’s irises, flared like the luminance of an exploding star. When he looked back, the battlefield was gone, the Emperor was gone. There was only the isolation chamber and the escaping resonance of purpose drifting out of Mhotep’s consciousness.

  ‘Greetings Cestus,’ he said, noting the Ultramarine’s presence in the room as he shrouded the disorientation and discomfort he felt after leaving the fate-trance.

  ‘It is good to have you back with us, brother,’ said Cestus, who had lingered at the threshold, but now stepped fully into the chamber to stand in front of his fellow Astartes.

  Mhotep turned to face the Ultramarine and gave a shallow bow.

  ‘I see you still do not see fit to offer better accommodations.’

  Prior to the Thousand Son’s revival, Cestus had ordered that as soon as he awoke and his vital signs were confirmed, Mhotep should be taken at once to the isolation chamber. There existed no doubt of his abilities. It meant that he had defied the edicts of Nikaea, and it meant that he had a connection to the warp. Whether it was one he could exploit or would need to sever, Cestus did not yet know.

  ‘You come to learn of what I gleaned from Brother Ultis,’ Mhotep stated, content to guide the conversation.

  The Ultramarine found his prescience unnerving.

  ‘Don’t worry, Cestus, I am not probing your mind,’ added the Thousand Son, sensing his fellow Astartes’ unease. ‘What other possible reason could there be for you to have been summoned to my presence so urgently?’

  ‘Ultis: that is his name?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Mhotep answered, parting the robes he wore to sit upon the bunk in the chamber. The Astartes armour had been removed during his time in the medi-bay. There it lay still, with the rest of the Thousand Son’s accoutrements. Cestus noted, however, that Mhotep still wore the scarab earring, glinting in the depths of his cowl from the ambient light in the room, and remained hooded throughout the exchange.

  ‘What else did you learn? What do the Word Bearers plan to do?’

  ‘Formaska is where it begins,’ Mhotep answered simply.

  Cestus made an incredulous face.

  ‘The second moon of Macragge. It’s a barren rock. There is nothing there.’

  ‘On the contrary, Ultramarine,’ countered Mhotep, lowering his head. ‘Everything is on Formaska.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Cestus.

  Mhotep lifted his head. His eyes were alight with crimson flame. ‘Then let me show you,’ he said as Cestus recoiled, lunging forward to thrust his open palm against the Ultramarine’s head.

  FIFTEEN

  Desecration

  Communion

  Visions of death

  SKRAAL SURGED THROUGH the dark and the heat, rising now, exploiting conduits and pipes and using any means he could to secrete his ascent up the decks of the Furious Abyss. Finally he arrived, incredulously, at the place where weeks before he had fled, leaving Antiges to his death. He had returned to the temple.

  Skraal found that Antiges remained, too.

  Dismembered in his armour, the dark blue of the ceramite almost hidden by the red sheen of blood, the World Eater could only tell it was Antiges by his Chapter symbols. Little more than a collection of body parts existed now. What lay before him on a pall, attended by silent acolytes could barely be considered a corpse. Antiges’s head was missing.

  Skraal had heard of the inhabitants of feral worlds who dismembered their foes or sacrificed humans to their heathen gods. The World Eaters had their own warrior traditions, most of them bloody, but nothing to compare to the religious mutilation he had seen among the savages. To see Astartes, especially the self-righteously sophisticated Word Bearers, doing thus, shocked Skraal as much as the moment that the Furious Abyss had turned on the Imperial fleet.

  The galaxy was changing very quickly. The words of Zadkiel, spoken so many days ago in the gallery, echoed back at him.

  The World Eater shrank deeper into the shadows as he saw Astartes entering the chamber. One, the warrior he had fought earlier in the temple during his escape, he recognised. It was not with a little satisfaction that he saw the metal artifice attached to the Word Bearer’s face where Skraal had broken his jaw and shattered his cheekbone.

  A darkly-armoured chaplain accompanied the warrior, Reskiel. One of the demagogues of the Legion, the chaplain wore a skull-faced battle helm with conjoined rebreather apparatus worked into the gorget and carried a crozius, the icon of his office.

  Silently, Reskiel gave the acolytes orders. As if understanding on some instinctive level, they bowed curtly and proceeded to lift what was left of Antiges on a steel pall. Together, they raised him up onto their shoulders and, led by the chaplain, left the room.

  Reskiel lingered in their wake, probing the shadows and, for a brief moment, Skraal thought he was discovered, but the Word Bearer turned eventually and followed the macabre procession.

  Loosening the grip on his chainaxe, the World Eater went after them.

  Tailing the enemy at a discrete distance, Skraal was led down a pathway lined with statues that flowed towards what he assumed was the prow of the ship. He had previously steered clear of the vessel’s forward sections, preferring to hide himself in the industrial tangle of the stern-ward engine decks, but a greater understanding of his e
nemy was worth the risk. Continuing his pursuit, the World Eater found himself in darkness, lit only by candles mounted in alcoves.

  Watching intently, Skraal witnessed the pallbearers saying a prayer at a set of blast doors – the exact words were indiscernible, but their reverence was obvious – before continuing into a dim chamber beyond.

  Using the shadows like a concealing cloak, Skraal moved into the room. As he got further inside, he realised that it was an anatomy theatre. A surgeon’s slab dominated the centre of the room, surrounded by circular tiers of seating, though they were not occupied. Whatever ritual or experiment was to be performed here was a clandestine one.

  The chaplain, the vestments he wore across his armour fringed with black trim, beckoned the acolytes forward.

  The debased creatures, hunch-backed and robed, slunk to the table as one. Sibilant emanations pierced the silence softly as they took the disparate sections of Antiges’s corpse and laid them out on the slab. Obscene and profane, the gorge in Skraal’s throat rose and his anger swelled at the sight of the act. Taken apart like that: it was as if Antiges was no more than a machine to be stripped down or meat cleaved at the butcher’s block.

  Coldness smothered the anger and bile within Skraal, as if his blood had been drained away and replaced with ice. It was as if a film of dirt overlaid him, and choked him all at once.

  Skraal had done terrible things. At the Sack of Scholamgrad and the burning of the Ethellion Fleet, innocents had died. Even at Bakka Triumveron, he had killed in cold blood for the sake of slaking his thirst for carnage, but this was different. It was calculated and precise, the systematic and ritual dismemberment of another Astartes so invasive, so fundamentally destructive that his essence was forever lost. There would be no honours for him, no clean death on the field of battle as it should be for all warriors; there was dignity in that. No, this was an aberration, soulless and terrible. To think of a fellow Astartes being so shamed and by one of his battle-brothers.. . it took all of Skraal’s resolve not to wade in and kill them all for such defilement.

  Stepping forward, the chaplain approached the table, the acolytes retreating obsequiously as he picked up one of Antiges’s arms to inspect it.

  ‘There is no head?’ he asked, setting the limb back down as he turned to his fellow Word Bearer.

  ‘Wsoric required it,’ replied Reskiel.

  ‘I see, and now our omniscient lord would have us yoke this body for further favours of the warp.’ There was an almost contemptuous tone to the chaplain’s words.

  ‘You speak out of turn, Ikthalon,’ Reskiel snapped. ‘You would do well to remember who is master aboard this ship.’

  ‘Be still, sycophant.’ The chaplain, Ikthalon, fashioned his retort into a snarl. ‘Your allegiance is well known to all, as is your ambition.’

  Reskiel moved to respond, but was cut off.

  ‘Hold your tongue! Think on the fate of those left at Bakka Triumveron. Think of Ultis before you speak of whom is master. In this place,’ he said, spreading his arms to encompass the macabre surgery, ‘you supplicate yourself to me. Zadkiel’s wizened astropath has had his turn and sealed the pact with Wsoric, now I will divine what I can from what remains. Speak no further. I have need to concentrate, and you try my patience, Reskiel.’

  The other Word Bearer, cowed by the tirade, retreated back into the shadows to let the chaplain work.

  Skraal kept watching with abhorred satisfaction, but was intrigued by the obvious dissension within the Word Bearers’ ranks.

  ‘Warrior’s hands,’ said Ikthalon, gauntleted fingers tracing Antiges’s palm as he resumed his morbid examination, ‘strong and instinctive, but I will need more.’ The chaplain gestured at the former Ultramarine’s torso. ‘Open it.’

  One of the acolytes took a las-cutter from beneath the slab and sheared through the front of Antiges’s breastplate. The gilded decoration split off from the ceramite and clattered to the floor. The Word Bearers ignored it. Once the acolyte with the cutter retreated, Ikthalon inserted his fingers into the cut. With a grunt of effort, he forced the Ultramarine’s chest open.

  The complex mass of an Astartes’s organs was exposed. Skraal could make out the two hearts and third lung, together with the reverse of the bony breastplate that fused from every Astartes’s ribs.

  The chaplain dug a hand into the gory dark and extracted an organ. It looked like the oolitic kidney, or perhaps the omophagaea. Ikthalon regarded it coolly, putting the organ down and yanking out a handful of entrails. He cast them across the slab, and stood for a long time peering into the loops of tissue and sprays of blood.

  ‘Macragge suspects nothing,’ he hissed, discerning meaning from the act. Running a finger through the bloody miasma, he added. ‘Here, that’s our route. It lies open to us.’

  ‘What of Calth?’ Reskiel asked from the darkness.

  ‘That is unclear,’ Ikthalon replied. ‘Kor Phaeron has no obstacles, save any he makes for himself.’ The chaplain peered into Antiges’s open chest again. ‘There is veining on the third lung. Guilliman is represented there as just a man. Not a primarch, just a man ignorant of his fate.’ Ikthalon’s voice dripped with malice.

  The chaplain looked further, his gaze lingering for a moment on one of Antiges’s hearts before his head snapped up quickly.

  ‘We are not alone,’ he snarled.

  Reskiel’s bolter swung up in readiness and he barked into the transponder in his gorget.

  ‘In the anatomy theatre, now!’

  A troop of four Word Bearers barged into the room, weapons drawn.

  ‘Spread out,’ Reskiel bellowed. ‘Find him!’

  Skraal backed out of the chamber. He forged back the way he had come and split off from the candlelit path, kicking open a maintenance hatch and dropping into a tangle of wiring and circuitry. He stormed ahead, relying on the ship to hide him for a little longer. He wanted to feel rage, and be comforted by it, but he couldn’t reach it. He felt numb.

  VISIONS RACED INTO Cestus’s mind as he felt all of tangible reality fall away around him. At once, he was suspended in the depths of real space. Formaska rolled beneath, its laborious orbit somehow visible. Silvered torpedoes struck suddenly against its surface at strategic points across the moon. Miniature detonations were discernible as a slow shockwave resonated over it in ripples of destructive force. Cestus saw tiny fractures in the outer crust, magnifying with each passing second into massive fissures that yawned like jagged mouths. Formaska glowed and pulsed as if it were a throbbing heart giving out its last, inexorable beat. The moon exploded.

  Debris cascaded outwards in shuddering waves, miniscule asteroids burning up in the atmosphere of nearby Macragge. A fleet suspended in the planet’s upper atmosphere was destroyed. Impossibly, Cestus heard the screams of his home world’s inhabitants below as the detritus of Formaska’s death rained upon them in super-heated waves of rock.

  Something moved in the debris field, shielded from the thundering defence lasers of Macragge’s surface. Getting ever closer, the dark shape breached the planet’s atmosphere. The vision shifted to the industrial hive of the cities. A cloud of gas boiled along the streets, engulfing the screaming populous.

  The image changed again, depicting other ships, great vessels of the Crusade, held in orbit at Calth hit by an errant meteor storm. Cestus watched in horror as they broke up against the onslaught, the stylised ‘U’ of his Legion immolated in flame. The meteor shower struck Calth, forcing its way through the planet’s atmosphere to where his battle-brothers mustered below. Cestus roared in anguish, furious at his impotence, screaming a desperate warning that his brothers and his primarch would never hear.

  The scene changed once more as the void of real space became metal. As if propelled at subsonic speed, Cestus flew through the tunnels and chambers of a ship. Through conducts, across heaving generators, beyond the fire of immense plasma-driven engines, he came at last to an ordnance deck. There, sitting innocuously amongst the other munitions, was a
lethal payload. Though he could not explain how, he knew it at once to be a viral torpedo and the effective death warrant of Macragge. World killer.

  The words resolved themselves in the Ultramarine’s mind, taunting him, goading him.

  Cestus railed against the sense of doom, the fathomless despair they evoked. He bellowed loud and hard, the only name he could think of to repel it.

  ‘Guilliman!’

  Cestus was back in the isolation chamber. He saw Mhotep sitting across from him. The Thousand Son’s face was haggard and covered in a sheen of sweat.

  Cestus staggered backwards as recall returned, wrenching his bolt pistol from its holster with difficultly and pointing it waveringly at Mhotep.

  ‘What did you do to me?’ he hissed, shaking his head in an effort to banish the lingering images and sensations.

  ‘I showed you the truth,’ Mhotep gasped, breathing raggedly as he propped himself up against the wall of the cell, ‘by sharing my memories, the memories of Ultis, with you. It is no different to the omophagea, though the absorption of memory is conducted psychically and not biologically,’ he pleaded.

  Cestus kept his aim on the Thousand Son.

  ‘Was it real?’ he asked. ‘What I witnessed, was it real?’ he demanded, stowing the bolt pistol in favour of grabbing Mhotep by the throat.

  ‘Yes,’ the Thousand Son spat through choking breaths.

  Cestus held him there for a moment longer, thinking that he might crush the life out of the fellow Astartes.

  Exhaling deeply, Cestus let Mhotep go. The Thousand Son doubled over coughing as he gasped for breath and rubbed his throat.

  ‘They do not plan to attack Calth, or destroy Macragge. They want to conquer them both and bring the Legion to heel or vanquish it if it does not yield,’ said Cestus, his thoughts and fears coming out in a flood.

  Mhotep looked up at the frantic Ultramarine, and nodded.

  ‘And the destruction of Formaska is where it will begin.’

  ‘The ship,’ Cestus ventured, beginning to calm down. ‘That was the Furious Abyss, wasn’t it? And the viral pay-load is the method of extermination for the people of Macragge.’