[Blood Angels 04] - Black Tide

by James Swallow - (ebook by Undead)

  Rafen banged on the metal. “Vetcha! Vetcha, what is this?”

  Then he heard the sound of a breath, and a grim, humourless snort. “Don’t make a friend of him, cousin. He’s the worst of them all.”

  At the far end of the container, he defined a figure sitting against the wall; another Astartes, stocky but slump-shouldered. “Rafen, of the Blood Angels,” he offered.

  The other man shot him a doleful look. He was dusky-skinned and drawn. “Tarikus. Doom Eagles. Not that those names have any meaning in this place.” Misery laced every word.

  “How long have you been here?” Rafen asked, coming closer.

  “I think three years. Perhaps five. The passage of time here is difficult to reckon.”

  “Five years?” The Blood Angel was shocked.

  Tarikus looked away. “Others have been here longer. Vetcha claims he has been a prisoner for more than a decade, but I give no credence to anything he says.”

  Rafen shook his head. “Impossible. These brothers… if they were all missing, it would have been noted. Your Chapters would come looking…”

  The Doom Eagle looked back, and this time with cold anger. “Do they remember us, cousin?” He scrambled to his feet, suddenly animated, stabbing his finger at the ceiling, pointing towards the sky. “Do they remember? No! Because we are all dead!”

  Rafen stood his ground. “I do not understand. Why would that accursed traitor do this? Why gather battle-brothers as if they were tokens in a game of regicide?”

  “Now you are dead too.” Tarikus ignored his question, turning his back, stalking into the deep shadows. “You have fallen into this light-forsaken hell with the rest of us.”

  Rafen frowned. Tarikus’ Chapter were known for their dour and melancholy outlook on the universe, but even that ingrained character was beyond what he showed now. The man seemed drawn and haggard in a way that no battle could have wearied him. “What is Bile doing here?” Rafen insisted. “You, Vetcha, all the other Astartes… What does he want with you?”

  “To do what he does best,” grated the other man, reaching up to scratch at his shoulder. “To bring pain.” Rafen glimpsed a livid, deep burn on the warrior’s chest, wet with fluids. “We are his playthings. The raw fodder for his experiments.” He spat the last word with venom.

  “Tarikus, I must know,” he said. “Cousin, help me.” Rafen offered his hand. “If we are to share this cell—”

  Tarikus snorted. “This isn’t a cell, Blood Angel.”

  There was a grinding noise from beneath their feet, and suddenly the floor fell away and they were tumbling into blackness.

  He snapped back to awareness at the sound of the Doom Eagle screaming. Rafen tried to push forward, but gravity itself was turned against him. He lay sprawled against a canted platform, the humming murmur of a g-field generator whirring behind him.

  The Blood Angel blinked to clear his vision. He saw a space that was half cavern, half abattoir, lines of blood-slick chains hanging from a curved ceiling, tiles across the floor slick with jets of water sluicing remains down into drain gutters. He turned his head with effort and found Tarikus on another platform, three figures crowded around him. Two of them he knew—the strange hulking men that he had spotted as he arrived. The third was of the same mass and build, but oddly proportioned. It turned to him and he felt confusion.

  The face that looked at him was strangely beautiful, almost womanly, but with a cruelly masculine cast that could not be fully hidden. The androgyne moved its hand away from Tarikus’ chest, over the place where Rafen had glimpsed the bloody burn. A horrible thought occurred to him; the Doom Eagle’s wound had been self-inflicted.

  He blinked, unsure of the flash of something maggot-white he saw vanishing beneath Tarikus’ flesh. The other Astartes screamed again and tried to move, but like Rafen he too was pressed fast against a gravity frame, the power of a hundred times Terra-standard g-forces holding him like a butterfly pinned to a board.

  The androgyne came towards him, and it smiled. “I am Cheyne,” it told him. Its voice was high and musical, incongruous from such a towering figure. “I welcome you.”

  Another of the figures returned from a shadow cradling a squealing, doughy mass in his hands. The size of his fist, the thing resembled a mutant larva, one end a mouth of questing cilia ringed with black eye-spots, the undulating body wet with clear slime.

  Cheyne flicked its wrist and a wide push-dagger emerged from a slide holster. “This gift,” it said, “this is for all our guests.” The androgyne glanced at Tarikus. “You may think you can divest yourself of it. You are mistaken.”

  Rafen pressed with all of his might, struggling to push away. Cheyne seemed amused by the strain upon his face, and ripped open the Space Marine’s undershirt, enough to reveal the flesh of his breast. It drew a curved blade and spun it about playfully.

  “Welcome,” Cheyne repeated, and slashed a deep cut down the Blood Angel’s chest. Before he could react to the shock of pain, the other hulking man rammed the maggot’s head into the new wound and let it wriggle into the incision.

  Rafen felt the thing burrowing into his flesh and cried out, echoing the Doom Eagle before him.

  TEN

  Sweat drenched Rafen’s body and he reached up, pushing matted, slick threads of hair away from his face. The inside of his cell reeked with perspiration and stale seawater. Outside, night had fallen and the constant, chilling winds were howling around the prison complex, but in here, the air was thick and heavy from Rafen’s exhalations.

  In the gloom, he gingerly probed the great scab across the wound on his chest where the maggot-thing had dug deep; the shock of pain that hit back at him struck the breath from his lungs and made him dizzy. It was a searing agony, but it was an improvement. After Cheyne’s thugs had thrown him into this iron box, he had tried to dig the parasite out, finding bundles of milk-white threads already worming into his chest and towards his primary heart. He pulled at them and then remembered nothing. So great was the pain that came in the wake of that action, it hammered him into a daze.

  The thing moved beneath his skin and the feel of it made the Blood Angel retch. This violation sickened him beyond words, and all he wanted was a blade, even a dull sliver of metal, something, anything to cut it from him.

  Panting, he took in a shuddering breath. He wanted to believe that the powerful Larraman cells coursing through his bloodstream from his bio-implants would reject the parasitic organism, but he did not expect the agents of Fabius Bile to be so easily thwarted by such a well-documented factor of Astartes physiology. Bile had been an Apothecary of high rank to the Emperor’s Children in the age of the Great Crusade, long before the heresy of the arch-traitor Horus; what he knew of the intricacies of the gene stock of Space Marines could doubtless fill libraries.

  Rafen felt cold, even in this heat. His captors had given him shapeless, rough-hewn robes, and now he gathered them in. The warrior had stripped lines of cloth from them to fashion bindings for his feet and hands. The hooded mantle smelled of other men’s deaths.

  A sound reached him. A tapping, metal upon metal, issuing out from the plasteel mesh bonded over the vent channel in the corner of the cell that served as a waste channel. Rafen slid closer to it, his nose wrinkling at the stink, and listened. After a few moments he recognised the pattern of the noise. A regular series of short and long reports, like the ancient Orskode battle language. Some Chapters still used the cipher, and it was known to him. He tapped out a return, and presently a low voice threaded out to him.

  “Still alive, Blood Angel?” Rafen had to strain his ears to capture the whispered words beneath the sombre howl of the winds outside.

  “Tarikus?” He hadn’t seen the Doom Eagle after Cheyne’s warriors had dragged him away into the darkness. “Where are you?”

  “A few cells down. The waste feeds drain into a common channel. Too small for anything larger than a rodent, but enough to carry a voice.”

  Rafen settled to the floor,
resting against the wall. He felt as if the parasite was sapping all his energy. It seemed an effort just to stand on two feet. “No prison can hold an Astartes…” he said, with more bravado than he felt.

  Tarikus was silent for a moment. “And now you will ask me how I plan to escape, is that it?” The Doom Eagle snorted. “Does Bile think that because we shared a little pain, we can now be confidantes?”

  “I do not doubt that there is a machination to every deed done by that traitor scum. Everything I have seen since I came to this island has likely been some kind of lesson for me.” He winced as the maggot shifted in his breast.

  “I won’t trust you!” Tarikus snapped, the sentiment coming out of nowhere. “Kelleth escapes and perishes on the rocks, and you arrive to take his place only moments later? Does Bile think us all fools?”

  “Kelleth…” Rafen weighed the name. “He was the one who died under the sentry guns?”

  “A battle-brother of the Stone Hearts,” came the reply. “Shattered now.”

  “I am no spy.” Rafen bristled at the insult. “Believe me, Doom Eagle, there is no man in this blighted place who wishes that bastard Fabius dead more than I!”

  The other Astartes fell silent again, and after a while Rafen began to think that Tarikus had no more to say; but then he spoke again. “How did they take you?”

  Rafen hesitated. Fabius had to be listening to every word they said. He was a thorough and calculating man, and even though this makeshift prison was built from salvage and ruins, the Blood Angel did not question that the so-called Primogenitor would have wired it with scrying tools and monitors of every kind. Then there was the chance, a notion so loathsome that he hated to even consider it, that there was an insider secreted in the prisoner populace—and worse still, that the turncoat could be Tarikus. He sighed; he had been here less than a day and already the place was bleeding the trust from him.

  He picked his next words with care. “I was aboard a ship of the Adeptus Mechanicus. I had infiltrated it by stealth… I knew the vessel’s master had dealings with Bile, but I did not reckon on his folly. The ship was destroyed attempting to attack the planet. I escaped in a saviour pod, and the splices dragged me from the ocean.”

  “You came here deliberately?” Tarikus asked.

  Rafen nodded. “For my sins. And you?”

  “I was captured in the void. A medicae cutter was taking me back to my Chapter’s throne world, Gathis… I had been injured fighting the Necrontyr. The ship was snared and obliterated.”

  The Blood Angel thought about the Doom Eagle’s earlier words. “Your Chapter believe that you were lost with the cutter.”

  “Aye.” Tarikus sighed. “Every man here has a story of a similar stripe. Bile’s agents picked us off: the injured, the lost, the isolated. Brought us here, and made certain that no one knew of it. We are the vanished, Rafen. The forgotten. The dead still awaiting death.”

  The maggot moved again, and Rafen hissed in pain. “Rot this thing! Is it some slow murder, this parasite?”

  “No.” Tarikus seemed weary as he explained. “Kelleth believed they are a kind of xenos, or perhaps even a minor phylum of warp-creature. Bile and his New Men use them to regulate us. There is no greater fetter than the one that lives within a man’s flesh.”

  “New Men…” Rafen echoed the term. “I have heard that name before.”

  “Cheyne and the others,” said the Doom Eagle. “The results of more of Bile’s unbound experimentation on human beings. Imagine the inverse of the noble ideals that created we Astartes. Bile’s monstrosities are psychotics with prowess and strength that rival ours. But they are our antithesis, gene-adapted killers without souls, without conscience or morality…” Tarikus paused again. “You asked a question in the chamber, do you remember? You asked what the renegade is doing here.”

  Rafen crouched down, speaking in muted tones. “You know the answer?”

  “I have an idea,” came the reply. “You must have seen the tower, up above the ridge. Inside that building there are… chambers. Places of such horror and pain.” Tarikus’ voice took on a dire timbre. “Some of us taken from the cells never return. Others are tortured for days at a time and are brought back as shadows of their former selves. As warnings to the rest of us.” He took a slow breath. “Imagine a gifted child studying the complex weave of a tapestry. He wants to both know it and destroy it. He takes it apart, thread by thread. This is Bile’s game with us, Blood Angel. He dismantles men as if they were puzzles made for his amusement.”

  Rafen’s hands tightened into fists. “If he is there, then I will find my way to him. We have unfinished business.”

  “Pray that you do not,” Tarikus retorted. “Slow death and debasement are all that await you.”

  Rafen glanced at his dirt-streaked fingers, thinking of the crystal vial. “I have no choice,” he whispered.

  The other Space Marine continued, voicing his thoughts. “We are kept isolated from one another. Months can pass and we never see the face of another Astartes. Bile knows that keeping us apart prevents us from plotting… But I think he may allow us to talk just so he can mock us from his aerie.” He sighed. “No man has ever escaped from this place.”

  “I do not seek escape—” began the Blood Angel; but then, in the distance, Rafen heard an abrupt rattle of bone on metal. It was coming closer.

  “The guardians approach,” hissed Tarikus. “If they catch us speaking to one another, they will flood our cells with rot-bane and scour our lungs.” The chemical gas was potent and could kill a Space Marine in large enough doses.

  The Doom Eagle spoke quickly, suddenly intense. “Listen to me, Blood Angel. You must not sleep! Do not allow yourself to dream! They peer into your mind and forge nightmares… Bile has servants cursed by witch-sight. They exert their will upon us as we rest. Do not dream!” Tarikus’ voice began to fade. “And the food… Cheyne laces it with potent, insidious drugs that soften the will! Find protein elsewhere… The lichen on the iron walls. Some even take the meat of a servitor if desperation comes—”

  The sound of clawed footsteps clattering over the tops of the cells echoed loudly, and Tarikus said no more. Moving quickly, Rafen slid across to the flat panel of a sleeping pallet that was the chamber’s only furniture. He drew himself upon it as capering shadows moved past the armourglass window, dwelling for a moment to glare at him before moving on. He could make out only shadows.

  Then there was only the howl of the wind, rattling loose rivets in the walls and pushing scours of gritty sand through the passages of the gaol. With effort, Rafen worked to push his thoughts away from the burning, unremitting pain in his breast and tried to find a moment of focus; but he could not.

  His mind remained clouded with a churn of emotions, at once eager to find his prey, but sickened by what he had experienced and tormented by the hollow eyes of the others imprisoned with him.

  They gathered in the makeshift arming chamber, the hull of the Neimos creaking gently as it knifed through the waters of the sea. They all went unhooded, but only Eigen was without the rest of his wargear; the injured Flesh Tearer was stripped to the waist, his torso wrapped in diagonal bands of bio-active bandages. An auto-doser clung to his bare right arm like a fat brass tick, slowly administering supplemental anti-venoms to counteract the effect of toxins left in his system by the talons of the tyranid kraken. He sat upon an ammunition crate, his gaze scanning the rest of the Astartes.

  “This has not become a democracy,” Brother-Sergeant Noxx was saying, addressing the psyker Ceris. “We are not a petty council of civilians arguing over every tiny decision. This is an order. I am in command, and so will it be.”

  Ceris’ face was set in a grimace. “I respectfully offer an alternative.”

  The cleric-medic Gast shook his head. “Did you do so when Rafen was commander of this mission? I saw no questioning of orders when a Blood Angel called the shots. Now it is a Flesh Tearer at our lead, you are unhappy?”

  Ceris shot Gas
t a hard look. “Just because you did not see me sound out Sergeant Rafen does not mean I did not challenge him.” He looked away. “This mission is too important to be prosecuted with high emotion. Choices must be made with cold logic, or else we will fail.”

  On the other side of the room, Ajir gave a sullen nod. “If I have learned anything about my witch-kin brother, it is that Ceris would say these things even if the Lord Sanguinius himself were to command us.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” said Noxx. “And I welcome your input.” He said it in a way that seemed casual, and yet a threat all at the same time. “But I choose not to listen.”

  Puluo, the burly, taciturn warrior with the heavy bolter across his back, spoke for the first time since they had gathered. “You are certain he is dead?”

  None of them spoke for a long moment. Then Ceris let out a slow breath. “Certain… is not the word I would use. The ways of the warp do not often lend themselves to certainties. It is the nature of the immaterial realm to forever be in flux.”

  “Then what are you certain of, psyker?” demanded Kayne. The younger Space Marine came forward in two angry steps, ignoring Turcio as the other Blood Angel reached out a hand to stop him. “Tell us!”

  Ceris met Kayne’s fuming glare. “I sense no hint of Brother-Sergeant Rafen’s mind-trace. In the wake of the kraken’s attack, there was pain and anguish from the animal, and there was confusion after the destruction of Zellik’s psi-gem… When the mists cleared and I had a moment to focus, I could not sense him. Rafen may be outside the range of my awareness, or he may…” Ceris paused. “The oceans may have taken him to the deeps.” He gestured at the air. “I have tried to spread my senses thinner, wider, but beyond there is only a telepathic thicket. The closer we get to the fortress, the more clouded the warp becomes.”

  “Bile’s island is protected from the tyranids by more than material means,” said Turcio darkly.

  “Nothing new is brought to this,” said Noxx, his irritation showing through. “We talk in circles.”