by Ben Counter
trial. Your presence here, however, must be at the
sufferance of the Chapter Master. I permit you entrance,
but only he can permit you to stay, and should he
withdraw my decision of welcome then you will be ejected.'
'We understand,' said the leader of the Blind
Retribution. 'And we will obey. Might we beg of your crew
some place to stay?'
'I shall have the crew find you lodgings,' replied the
Castellan. 'You can expect no more than an unused cargo
bay. The Phalanx is large but it has no shortage of
population.'
'We would ask nothing more,' said the leader. 'Ours is
a way of poverty and denial. Indulgence dulls the sharp
edge of justice, and luxury dims the focus. Now we take
our leave, lord Castellan. There are prayers and devotions
to be made before our souls are fit to look upon the
business of the Emperor's justice.'
Leucrontas watched as the pilgrims finished filing into
the docking bay. They took loops of prayer beads from
their robes and spoke droning prayers of thanks and
humility.
The pilgrims were a small matter. The crew officers,
who maintained the day-to-day workings of the Phalanx
while the Imperial Fists attended the matters of war, could
deal with them. Leucrontas had many more duties he had
to see to before he could give the Blind Retribution another
thought. Soon the Soul Drinkers would be in the dock, and
many more powerful observers than the Blind Retribution
would be watching the results closely.
THE FIRST SIGHT Sarpedon had of this place was of the
hands over his face, clamping the mask down.
Even then, barely conscious, the soldier's part of his
mind demanded to know how he had been taken. Nerve
gas, pumped into his cell? A rapid, merciless assault?
Some drug administered by a sly needle or dart? He was
angry. He wanted to know. His memory of the last few
hours was a dark fog.
He thrashed. The hands clamping the mask to his
face snapped away. They were not the gauntlets of
Astartes - Sarpedon was in the custody of Imperial Fists
functionaries, unaugmented men and women who served
the Fists as spaceship crew and support staff. The
Phalanx was full of them. Somehow it was a greater insult
that it did not take Space Marines to hold Sarpedon down.
Sarpedon struggled. He was held so fast he would
have snapped his limbs before he loosened them.
Incoherent voices shouted, medical code words barked
between the staff of the Phalanx's Apothecarion. Cold
rivers wound through his body as sedatives were pumped
into his veins.
Sarpedon was being wheeled on his back through a
corridor with a ceiling that looked like the negative cast of
a giant spinal column. The walls were webs of bone.
The sedatives took hold. Sarpedon couldn't even flex
the muscles that had forced uselessly against his bonds.
His eyes still moved - he looked down at his body and saw
metal clamps around each of his limbs, holding them fast
to the metal slab on which he lay. The Phalanx's crew
must have had to make the restraints specially to fit his
six remaining legs.
Sarpedon was also aware of a constriction around the
sides of his head. No doubt it was an inhibiting device to
dull his psychic powers. His cell had been fitted out to hold
a psyker - the wards and anti-psychic materials built into
its construction had rendered him completely blunt, unable
to even taste the psychic resonance of his surroundings.
The hood holding back his head made him similarly
useless psychically. Not that he would have needed his
psychic prowess to kill every one of the crewmen dragging
him through the Apothecarion, if only he could get free.
But they were just ordinary men and women,
Sarpedon told himself. They believed as much as he did
that their work was the work of the Emperor. Perhaps they
were right.
Sarpedon passed through into a hall where the gnarled
walls were lined with ceiling-high nutrient tanks, each with
cultured organs suspended in viscous fluid. Gilded
autosurgeons were mounted on the ceiling.
The next face that loomed over him was that of an
Astartes - close-cropped hair, hollow cheeks and a sharp
chin and nose, with a bionic like a miniature microscope
mounted over one eye. An eyebrow arched up.
'Behold the enemy,' said the Space Marine. It was an
Imperial Fist by the symbol on his shoulder pad, and an
Apothecary by the white panels of his armour. 'What
manner of creature has the galaxy placed this time upon
my slab? Many foul things have I seen, and some of them
once human in form. But this! Ah, this shall be a challenge
and a privilege. The imager!'
An ornate piece of machinery, like an arch of inscribed
panels, was slid over Sarpedon. Sarpedon wanted to
speak, if only to tell the Apothecary that he was no
enemy, but a Space Marine as the Apothecary himself
was. But his tongue was as paralysed as the rest of him.
He had only his senses.
Speckles of light played against Sarpedon's retinas as
lasers measured every aspect of him. A screen unfolded
from one wall, in glowing green lines displaying Sarpedon's
skeleton and the complex pattern of a Space Marine's
organs.
'The weapons carried by an Astartes begin with those
augmentations within him,' said the Apothecary. 'All are
present. Evidence here of extensive wounding and healing
internally, as typical of a veteran Astartes. Most recent are
extensive fractures to the skull and ribs. Note the abnormal
shape of the omophagea, typical of this Chapter's geneseed.'
The crewmen, the orderlies of the Phalanx's
Apothecarion, were scribbling down the Apothecary's
pronouncements with autoquills.
'And he is awake,' continued the Apothecary, noticing
the movement of Sarpedon's eyes. 'We have an audience!
What think you, Lord Sarpedon, of the hospitality aboard
the Phalanx?'
The imager moved down over Sarpedon's body. The
orderlies had to manoeuvre it past Sarpedon's restrained
legs.
'The mutations,' said the Apothecary, 'are implicit
throughout. The subject's musculo-skeletal strength is at
the top end of Astartes maximum. I doubt there is any
man-mountain of a Space Wolf who can match him.
Material mutations begin with the thickened lumbar spine
and the pelvis.' Again the Apothecary addressed
Sarpedon. 'And what a pelvis! All the scholars of Mars
could not machine such a hunk of bone! I have no doubt
the strengthening properties of its shape shall make it a
classic of its kind. I shall have it preserved and gilded, I
think, and keep it here among my most prized samples.
Perhaps the Mechanicus shipwrights can use it to develop
some new form of docking clamp. Certainly I shall not
permit i
t to be incinerated with the rest of you.'
The imager moved lower. Now on the screen were the
muscle-packed exoskeletal segments of Sarpedon's legs.
'The subject's legs number six,' said the Apothecary.
'These are the most significant material mutations.
Originally they numbered eight; note the remnants of the
bionic joint around the centre left and the recent partially
healed damage to the rear right socket. The structure of
the legs is roughly arachnoid but has no direct analogue.
The uncleanliness of such deformities is profound. I have
no interest in these. They can burn after the execution.'
The imager was withdrawn. Now Sarpedon found
points of pain all over his body as the orderlies worked over
him. They were looping wires and thin tubes around him,
fixing them with needles in the gaps around his black
carapace and in the muscles of his abdomen. One was
slid into a vein in his neck, another on the underside of one
wrist.
'Begin,' said the Apothecary.
Sarpedon was bathed in pain. It was a pure, unalloyed
pain. It was not like a blade in his skin, or scalding-hot
liquid, or any other pain he had suffered. It was completely
pure.
Sarpedon's mind shut down. Nothing in his
consciousness found purchase in the endless, white
landscape of pain. Time meant nothing. He no longer felt
his restraints, or his anger at the arrogance of the
Apothecary in dissecting him like any other specimen. He
no longer felt anything. He was made of pain.
The sensation of tearing ligaments loomed through the
pain. It was subsiding, being replaced with the normal
input from his senses. His legs had forced against the
restraints. His neck muscles had almost torn against the
psychic inhibitor holding his head in place and his lungs
burned against the breastplate of fused ribs in his chest.
He gasped, unable to control his body's reactions to the
onslaught.
'Note the reaction to pain,' the Apothecary's voice
continued. 'It is within normal tolerances. So we see the
core of an Astartes is present, but much embellished by
corruption. I have no doubt that this subject can be
considered a Space Marine by most definitions and can be
tried as one.'
One of Sarpedon's legs hurt more than the others. It
hurt more because it had some freedom of movement in
the hip joint. The restraint holding it just above the talon
was coming loose.
And he could move. Just a little, but he could do it.
The sedatives were wearing off. The dose was too low. He
had greater body mass than a normal Astartes thanks to
his mutated legs, and the less obvious mutations inside
him had changed his metabolism. He was getting
movement back.
Sarpedon fought against it. The Apothecary was
describing the results of some blood and tissue sample
tests to the orderlies. Sarpedon ignored them. The
restraint was working loose. With the greater range of
movement afforded to his other limbs, he could gain more
leverage against their restraints and they, too, were giving
way.
Sarpedon took in a breath. He forced his chest
upwards and dug his talons into the slab, trying to level
himself off it.
The ping of snapping metal alerted the Apothecary,
who broke off his talk mid-word.
Bolts sheared. Metal bands fractured. Sarpedon's
lower body ripped itself free. He thrashed one arm free in a
matter of seconds, the orderlies starting back at the sight
of their captive's lower limbs slashing around him.
Sarpedon reached up to the head restraint and tore it
off its moorings. He rolled off the slab and sprawled on the
floor. The drugs in his system were still powerful enough to
rob him of his coordination and he could not get all his legs
moving him in the same direction at once. He yanked the
remaining arm free just as the Apothecary drew his plasma
pistol.
'What are you?' slurred Sarpedon. He clawed at the
inhibitor device still clamped around his temples. 'What
can you claim to be that you judge me? I am not some
xenos thing on a slide! I am Astartes!'
'You are a traitor,' said the Apothecary. He had his
plasma pistol levelled at Sarpedon's head. 'The dignity we
give you in trying you before true and loyal Space Marines
is more than you deserve.'
'But try me for what?' demanded Sarpedon. He lost his
footing and crashed into one of the specimen tanks. The
glass broke and the thick, cold nutrient fluid washed out
over him, lapping around the feet of the orderlies who
cowered against the far wall. 'How many enemies of man
have fallen to the Soul Drinkers? How many catastrophes
have we averted?'
'And how many Space Marines have fallen to you?'
retorted the Apothecary. 'Our brethren in the Crimson Fists
and the Howling Griffons could attest to that. If you had
lost as many of your own to an enemy as mankind has to
you, you would not hesitate to seek that enemy's death!'
Sarpedon tried to get to his feet, leaning against the
wall behind him to force himself up. He tried to find a
weapon among the debris around him, a shard of glass or
a medical implement, but his head was swimming and he
couldn't focus.
'If you had seen,' he said, 'what we had seen, then you
would cross the galaxy to join us, though a legion of your
own stand in your way.'
'Had I my mind, traitor,' said the Apothecary, 'I would
have had you executed as soon as Lysander had brought
you in, as a mercy to the human race so that you would
be excised like the cancer you are. But the Chapter
Master has said you must stand trial. He has more mercy
in him than I, or any battle-brother I know. You should be
sobbing your gratitude to us. Enough of this.'
The Apothecary operated a control on a unit attached
to the waist of his armour. A white, dull sensation throbbed
through Sarpedon's head, conducted from temple to
temple by the inhibitor. Then Sarpedon was falling, his
mind ripped free of his body. His sight failed and everything
went white as he fell, and he did not stop falling until he
could feel nothing at all.
THE FIRST TO arrive to take their part among a jury of the
Soul Drinkers' peers were the Crimson Fists. On their
strike cruiser Vengeance Incandescent, the whole Second
Company attended their representative to the Phalanx. The
Crimson Fists, a brother Chapter to the Imperial Fists just
as the Soul Drinkers had once been, claimed a special
place in the forthcoming trial, for they had suffered more
than most at the hands of the renegades.
Chapter Master Vladimir had left his usual place
among the tactical treatises and fortification maps of the
Librarium Dorn, to welcome Captain Borganor as he
boarded the Phalanx. Attended by the ninth company's
honour guard, Borganor descended the embarkation ramp
of his shuttle with a slight limp given him by the bionic with
which his right leg had been replaced. His quartered yellow
and red was swathed in the deep blue cloak embroidered
with his personal heraldry, an image in gold and black
thread of a Howling Griffon with his head bowed in shame
and his hands at prayer. Borganor was as blunt and crude
as his gnarled features suggested, and with a clap of his
hand against his gilded breastplate he acknowledged
Vladimir's salute.
'Chapter Master, it is an honour,' said Borganor.
'Would that I stand in your presence on a happier
occasion, and without the stain of failure that still lies upon
my Chapter.'
Vladimir Pugh of the Imperial Fists nodded sagely. He
was, above all other things, a master tactician, a man of
solemn and slow manner with a habit of dissecting a
situation as cold-bloodedly as he weighed up potential
recruits. The golden yellow of his artificer armour was
polished to a mirror finish, and the red closed fist symbols
on his shoulder pads and breastplate shone as if they were
cut from rubies. The intelligent face beneath his closeshorn
hair suggested something more than a mere soldier.
'Long have I lamented the loss of Lord Mercaeno at the
hands of the renegades,' he said to Borganor. 'It is an ill
that will surely be repaid when justice is pronounced upon
them.'
Discomfort broke through Borganor's features for a
moment. Librarian Mercaeno was the greatest Howling
Griffon hero of the current age, the slayer of the daemon
Periclitor and avenger of Chapter Master Furioso's death.
Mercaeno had fallen in battle with Sarpedon, and a
thousand oaths had been sworn to see Sarpedon dead
before the pain of his loss could begin to subside.
Borganor, who had taken over the depleted company, bore
no little responsibility for Mercaeno's death and the escape
of the Soul Drinkers.
'No doubt,' said Borganor. 'I wish to request one favour
from you, however, before proceeding on.'
'Name it, brother-captain,' said the Chapter Master.
'That before Sarpedon is executed, I am first given
liberty to remove his limbs, and leave him with a single leg,
as he left me.' Borganor's eyes flitted to his bionic leg.
'Mercaeno's death is shared by all Sons of Guilliman, by
every Space Marine, and so vengeance for it shall belong