Calgar's Fury

by Paul Kearney

  ‘Motion detectors are in place three hundred yards to our rear, sir. All clear,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, Kastiro. It would not do to be caught by surprise, not down here,’ Drake told him.

  Anger and despair, both of which can lead to the Path of Ruin. The Viridian Consuls had been consumed by them both as they undertook the Abyssal Crusade, peerless warriors wrongly accused, exiled, sentenced to a horrible end by those whose authority they revered and had been created to defend. They had been ripe for the Fall, on their entry to the Eye of Terror. No doubt they had fought for years, their valour never known, their bravery unrecognised, their dead mounting. How many had been left when they had finally succumbed to the lure of the warp? How many remained now?

  ‘We will move on,’ Drake said briskly. ‘Murron, lead out. Kastiro next, then myself. Regan, take the rear, and stay alert. We are in a place now where there is no safe station. The way may seem clear behind us, but all that could change in a moment.’

  He keyed up his hololith, and ran the blueprints and the maps he had augmented yard by yard. On the narrow-vox band he sent a swift, digitised code burst back to Marneus Calgar.

  Way ahead clear for point eight miles. Bearing one nine six, descent one nine three. Waypoints marked.

  Then he followed in Regan’s wake, his feet sucking in the glutinous muck of the passage floor.

  He was looking for evidence of control systems; some clues which would lead him to the true heart of Fury. He estimated that they were some eighteen miles into the heart of the hulk now, and the deserted nature of the structure made him uneasy.

  In the levels above him, the inquisitor’s party had discovered evidence of heavy fighting, so ancient that later accretions had almost obscured it. But they had found discarded weapons of Adeptus Astartes make, broken remnants of armour they could not place, and even the wreckage of one large tracked vehicle which could only be the carcass of an Adeptus Mechanicus kataphron, half buried in muck and the pale creepers which seemed to have a life of their own. It had been shattered by lascannon fire, so long ago that the strange half-life that existed on Fury had begun to work the huge mechanics of it apart, growing through the broken tracks, the holed chassis.

  So, Drake thought, we have the Dark Mechanicus – let us assume for now they are of the Dark, for even the vilest Adeptus Mechanicus renegade would hesitate before attacking the Ultramarines as they did Seventh Company. These are on the upper levels, and on the surface. But once, long ago, they came all the way down here, fighting their way into the guts of the hulk – for what?

  To gain control of Fury, of course. Their mission was the same as ours.

  But the Consuls, or what had once been the Consuls, stopped them, hurled them back to the higher levels – and there they stayed.

  The hulk had become a prison for these renegade Mechanicus adepts, and the Chaos warriors who had been the Viridian Consuls were their jailers. Not strong enough to wipe them out, but strong enough to hold them at bay, to protect the heart of the structure and ensure that they maintained control of its core systems.

  For Drake knew now that Fury was no ordinary space hulk, no random accretion of lost starships slowly growing over the centuries by luck and happenstance. There was a design to this thing. In the beginning it had been created with a purpose in mind.

  He had yet to divine that purpose.

  The passageway led to others, which branched out further; a labyrinth of dark, dripping, noisome tunnels which had become so changed by the passing of the years that it seemed they were not walking through a man-made artefact at all, but might have been exploring some subterranean jungle, fraught with pitfalls, bisected by streams of black, oozing liquid festooned with foetid growth. Here and there they found the minute gleam of a cogitator console, the lights of its systems glowing behind a carapace of slimy filth. These the inquisitor examined closely after his retainers wiped them down, and he began to build up a picture of what had been done down here, right in the steaming depths of Fury.

  The work was ancient, and it was systematic. It was earlier by far than the layers of filth that covered it, antique engineering overlaid by centuries, millennia of accumulated debris. Sometimes his men had to use flamers to burn off the clinging creepers and semi-sentient vines that clung to everything, and under their smoking remains Drake found evidence of a rational engineering layout. The broken, trapped ships that had congealed here in the heart of the structure had all been brought together into a semi-cohesive whole, new connective conduits laid down, power re-routed through them, atmospherics linked in. Someone had taken all the jigsaw pieces and made of them a completed puzzle, though it took all his training and experience to see it. The heart of Fury was an enormous void-going vessel, complete in itself. The upper levels were simply trash, though there had been an attempt to integrate even them into the design at one point.

  Three thousand years it had been since the Abyssal Crusade. And Fury had been ancient even then. The Consuls had become ensnared by the hulk, and after them the Adeptus Mechanicus. And now the Ultramarines.

  The thought gave him pause, and for a moment he wondered if he, Marneus Calgar and the much vaunted warriors of his Chapter would simply become another trapped element in the complex makeup of the ancient artefact. Another forgotten story, to be explored centuries hence by yet more trapped explorers who thought they were different, better than the rest.

  We are different. We are better, Drake told himself. I am an inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus, and Marneus Calgar is Chapter Master of the Ultramarines. Fury shall not absorb us as it has absorbed so many before. I will see it destroyed first.

  They descended by steep, slippery pathways that had been laid down in piles of welded wreckage, going ever deeper, the heat increasing around them and the atmosphere thickening until, by his own readings, it approximated some equatorial rainforest of old Terra, though with much higher levels of inert gases, and high background radiation; the drives which lay somewhere below them were not adequately shielded.

  And there was life here. It squirmed under their feet, watched them from the dark shadows their spotlights threw, lashed away into the far-flung darkness with sickening wails or shrill squeals. These were the offscourings of Chaos, the maggots of the warp. Lesser forms that nevertheless partook of that great evil, and that given time might evolve into upright enemies of baleful power, the spawn of the Archenemy. These levels of the hulk were a fructifying hothouse, an incubator of all that Drake had been trained to despise and destroy. That, too, was part of the thing’s overall design.

  The first attack came some thirty hours after they had left the Ultramarines. From a black side-passage there exuded a sickening stench and a great spray of stinking acid which sizzled on the plates of their armour. Then a huge, slimed bulk heaved itself out into the middle of them, glistening flippers smashing men aside. A head that was a tentacle-fringed steaming maw opened and it reared up, ten feet high, with its organs pulsing redly in the translucent flesh of its belly. It whipped out a series of muscular tentacles, caught Gort Steyler, one of Drake’s retainers, and drew him in, thrashing, then collapsed on top of the unfortunate man, all that was to be seen of him a gauntleted hand spasming in agony as the acid it secreted dissolved his armour and went to work on his flesh.

  They opened up on it with bolter fire, but the heavy rounds simply disappeared into the creature’s rubbery hide, raising bruised lumps as they exploded within its body, the damage absorbed. Then they hacked at it with chainswords, but the bright blades just churned up mucky gobs of steaming meat, the clogged sword-teeth sizzling as if red-hot. It was not until they brought in the flamers, and hosed the creature with blazing promethium that it reared up and let out a bubbling squeal of pain. Under it, Steyler lay already half-digested, a mound of bubbled, melting flesh in which his smoking armour plates floated like broken crockery.

  The beast tried to get away, its
rubbery bulk undulating like a flag in the wind, still burning. But the fire, while it pained it, seemed not to seriously cripple the thing; the layer of slime which covered it was a natural insulate, and it was not until Drake stepped up and threw a frag grenade into its shrieking gullet that it went down, the explosion blowing it clean in half, and spattering them all with its burning residue.

  The inquisitor’s retainers yelled and cried out as the acid in the thing’s sundered flesh ate at their armour, and they plunged into the putrid muck that covered the floor, rolling along it in an effort to quench the agony. Even so, two more of them died there within moments, eaten through to their vital organs, their vac suits pierced and corroding around them, their eyes burnt into steaming jelly.

  Another two who had been most splattered by the corrosive meat were in a pain that no medikit could ease. They lay writhing and screaming as the creature’s body fluids boiled into their flesh. Drake said a prayer over them, and shot both in the head with his bolt pistol, to end the hopeless agony.

  They gathered what they could from the dead, though there was little left of them that could be touched without incurring further injury, and then they went on their way once more. Almost half of them had fallen in five nightmarish minutes. But the inquisitor was not a man to be swayed from his path by death. He led them on again, and they followed him without protest. For as he told them – there was no place better to go. Death awaited them now around every corner.

  ‘Drake, do you read?’ It was Marneus Calgar’s voice on the vox. The inquisitor halted his surviving men and they went into all-round defence about him.

  ‘Yes, my lord. Vox is difficult but workable.’

  ‘We are some three miles behind you, following your waypoints. We have had to abandon the grav-sleds – they’re too big for these passageways. No sign yet of a control space, I take it.’

  ‘You shall be the first to know, my lord,’ Drake said wearily.

  ‘Problems?’ Even over a difficult vox link, Calgar could read his voice, Drake thought with a wry inward smile.

  ‘A few. But we are continuing. Beware of beasts that lie in wait, my lord. We are being ambushed by the filth of the immaterium as we advance. The hulk seems to be divided into a series of overlapping environments, all with their own denizens.’

  ‘I had thought there might be more than one influence at work here, more than one kind of evil in play.’

  ‘You are perceptive, my lord. I have made a similar conclusion.’

  ‘It would seem that the hulk is full of surprises.’ A pause. ‘Do not take unnecessary risks, Drake. Your death would present me with all sorts of tiresome complications.’

  Was that humour? Drake was unsure – too tired perhaps.

  ‘I shall do my best to stay alive, my lord,’ he said. ‘I would hate to inconvenience the Lord of Macragge.’

  ‘I have seen a lot of service, inquisitor, and the things I have felt here...’ Calgar caught himself like the man on the edge of an indiscretion.

  ‘I know. The malignity is intense, as deep as I have ever known it. We are proceeding with all due care, Chapter Master. Drake out.’

  He looked at his men as they crouched in firing positions around him.

  ‘I shall take the vanguard,’ he said, and led them off again.

  Groping in the dark, Drake thought. It comes to this. This darkness ahead of me, this stinking muck my feet sink into. The ooze which courses down the walls, and the hungry tendrils which infest it all.

  Whatever design had been set in place here, deep in the bowels of Fury, it had been swamped by the faecal decay of the eldest of the Ruinous gods, the deity of Death. This being drew its power from the mortal fear of death and decay. Small wonder that its influence had gained traction here, on an artefact from which there was no escape, no release except that of death itself.

  Drake could feel the hopelessness working in him, could see it in the eyes of his retainers. They did not believe that they would survive this mission. Conditioned by the Inquisition though they were, they were human after all. They held to their duty, and would no doubt fight to the end – but they believed that they had no prospect of escape from the nightmare they were plunging deeper into with every footstep.

  For himself, for the Adeptus Astartes, he knew it was different. The Ultramarines would fight to the last, partly because their own Chapter Master was with them – that hero of the Imperium, that paladin, Marneus Calgar – and partly because it was in their genes. In every member of the Adeptus Astartes there burned an infinitesimal genetic remnant of the Lord of Mankind himself. The Emperor had created them, and to this day, some fragment of that grace remained. It did not mean that they could not be corrupted, or seduced by despair. But it did mean that of all mortal men, they were most proof against such things.

  And yet, an inward voice told him, that had not saved the Viridian Consuls, or the other Chapters of the Abyssal Crusade.

  It had not. But all the evidence suggested that it had taken centuries for them to succumb to the lures of Chaos, to give in to hopelessness. To break their oaths.

  Drake was glad Marneus Calgar was here on Fury. He should not have been, because the Lord of Macragge’s presence on the hulk weakened the realm of Ultramar, that great buttress of the Imperium.

  He was glad for his own sake, for the sake of the mission he now knew he had to fulfil. With Calgar here he knew that the Ultramarines would fight with a savagery yet unknown to the inhabitants of the hulk, and the dark powers that watched over it.

  With Calgar here, he still held out a flicker of hope.

  He was still not prepared for what confronted him next, however. The passageways in this region of Fury all drew down in one direction, like rivulets seeking the sea. They converged on a single area, and the limited auspex readings lit up like a flare as the inquisitor’s party drew near.

  He had not been boasting idly when he had told Marneus Calgar that his men were well versed in infiltration and subversion. His seven remaining followers were all veterans of the Astra Militarum, the Adeptus Arbites, and in one case, the hive gangs of Peloris II. They occasioned no notice as they slowly approached an archway which loomed up before them, unguarded, open, carved it seemed out of some kind of red-tinted stone. It was immense, perhaps two hundred feet in height and almost as wide. Runes marked it, and there were skulls adorning it, thousands of them. A cursory examination by Drake, and he saw there human, eldar, ork, T’au and the large craniums of Adeptus Astartes, decorating the entranceway like polished pale stones.

  But that was nothing, compared to what awaited them on the far side of the arch.

  There was light here, a baleful grey-green glimmer, like the sun shining through algae-clotted water. And there was water ahead, and from it the light rippled in pale snakes.

  A lake. And it sat in a chamber whose vastness made the inquisitor’s party stop a moment and stare, open-mouthed.

  It was three miles wide, at least, and its ceiling was half that above them – solid rock, interspersed with the embedded plating and keels of myriad long-lost ships, the metals in them gleaming like stars. A landscape in itself, like a hollow world.

  Drake had not seen its like in scale before. Even the greatest chambers in the interior of Imperial battleships were not as gargantuan as this phenomenon at the heart of the hulk.

  He consulted his readings. They scrolled in green lines down his interior helm display. He and his men were within two miles of Fury’s innermost core, over twenty from the surface of the hulk. The radiation levels were now high enough to be harmful with even a moderate exposure length. A few days standing here without their armoured void-suits, and they would all be seriously ill. A week, and they would be corpses.

  But that was beside the point. Drake and his retainers crouched behind a low tangle of wreckage, like a surf of debris, that was thrown up in a wave all around the outerm
ost rim of the great chamber. As they stared out at the spectacle before them, Drake saw Regan, that hardest of men, make the sign of the Imperial aquila with both gauntleted hands against his chest. Two of the others lowered their helms as if they could not bear to look.

  It was a sight to unnerve the bravest man.

  Before them was a grey strand of shattered stone and machine parts, stretching some half a mile wide in a great circle around the circumference of the chamber for as far as the eye could see. Dotted across this beach of debris were tall crosses of welded girders and stanchions, embedded in the trash and dirt of the chamber floor.

  And crucified to these structures were Space Marines.

  Drake counted fifty nearby, but there were many more – scores, perhaps hundreds, out in the distance. They were still clad in fragments of power armour, which might have originally been green, but now were so stained and pitted that they had descended into a bilious pink-grey. The Adeptus Astartes had all been unhelmed, and were bolted to their scaffolds through every limb. Their agonies were written across their faces; these paragons of courage were shrieking with silent mouths.

  Some had been disembowelled, others dismembered and then nailed back together. Many had had their eyes and tongues torn out. Most had the eight-pointed star of Chaos carved on their foreheads, the flesh sliced so deep as to reveal the glint of bone.

  Others had undergone mutation. They had tentacles for arms, horns arching out of their skulls, nests of snakes squirming in their exposed bellies. Still more were being gnawed on by the shining pink slugs of Chaos spawn, which infested the ground around them like maggots in a gangrenous wound.

  And the worst thing of all; most of them were still alive.

  Their eyes moved, wide and white – those who had them. They quivered in their impalement, their flesh trembling, exposed organs pulsing dark and gleaming. They dripped blood, but the blood was black, and it seethed with bubbling life even as it left their veins. Their bodies had become incubators of teeming foulness, and they knew it; it could be seen in the glittering madness of their gaze.