ORFOS WOKE, AND realised that he had been knocked out. He cursed himself. Even if only for a moment, he should fight for awareness at all times. He had no bolt pistol in his hand, either. He had dropped his weapon. Borakis would assign him field punishment for such a failing. But Borakis, recalled Orfos with a lurch, was dead.
Orfos could still see nothing. He fumbled with the tactical light mounted on the shoulder of his breastplate. The light winked on and fell on the face of another stone Space Marine, far larger than in the alcoves above – twice life-size. Orfos read the inscription on the storm shield carried in the statue’s left hand, a counterpart to the chainsword in its right. It read APOLLONIOS. Orfos recognised the trappings of a Chaplain among the weapons and armour of an assault-captain. Beside the statue was another of a Chaplain, this one inscribed with the name ACIAR.
‘Brother,’ said Orfos. ‘Brother, what of this place? What have we found?’
Laokan did not reply. Orfos looked for his brother, who must have also been knocked out in the fall.
Laokan lay a short distance from Orfos, next to Orfos’s bolt pistol. Laokan’s body was gone from the mid-torso down, and trails of organs lay behind him in bloody loops. Laokan was face down, nose in the dust.
Orfos knelt beside Laokan’s corpse. ‘Forgive me, brother,’ he said, but the words seemed meaningless as they fell dead against the chamber walls. ‘I can pray for you later. I will, brother. I promise I will.’
Orfos picked up his bolt pistol and let the light play around the chamber. A third statue was mounted high up, above the lintel of a doorway framing a pair of steel blast doors. This statue, again of a Space Marine Chaplain, bore the name THEMISKON. Orfos recognised the chalice symbol on the statue’s shoulder pad, echoing the statues in the alcoves above. It was the symbol of the Soul Drinkers.
Another crime laid at the feet of the Soul Drinkers – this death trap, laid out to claim the lives of good Imperial Fists. Orfos spat on the floor. Whatever holiness this place might have had for the Soul Drinkers, Orfos wanted to defile it. Whatever it meant to them, he wanted it made meaningless.
Orfos looked up. The walls of a shaft rose above him. The carvings were probably deep enough to climb, but it would not be easy, and another fall might break a leg or an arm and render him unable to escape that way. He turned his attention to the door.
The metal was cold, drinking the warmth from Orfos’s hands and face from a good distance away. A control panel was set into the stone. Orfos was not in enough of a hurry to press any of the buttons. He put a hand to the metal – it was freezing, and this close Orfos’s breath misted in the air.
The doors slid open. Orfos jumped back, bolt pistol held level. Beyond the doors was darkness – the light on Orfos’s armour glinted off ice and played through freezing mist that rolled from between the doors.
Orfos stepped slowly away from the doors. ‘Whoever you may be,’ he called, ‘whatsoever fate you may have decided for me, know that I will fight it! I am an Imperial Fist! Die here I may, but it is as a Fist I shall die!’
The doors were open. The lump of ice inside, hooked up to the walls by thick cables hung with icicles, shuddered. An inner heat sent cracks blinking through its mass. Chunks of ice fell away. Orfos glimpsed ceramite within, painted dark purple under the frost.
The ice crumbled to reveal a shape familiar to Orfos. A massive square body on a bipedal chassis, squat cylindrical legs supported by spayed feel of articulated metal. The blocky shoulder mounts each carried a weapon – one a missile launcher, the other a barrel-shaped power fist ringed with flat steel fingers.
It was a Dreadnought – a walking war machine. All the Dreadnoughts of the Imperial Fists were piloted by Space Marines who had been crippled in battle, who were kept alive by the Dreadnought’s life-support systems and permitted to carry on their duties as soldiers of the Emperor even after their bodies were ruined and useless. The Dreadnought’s sarcophagus was covered in purity seals and the symbol of a gilded chalice was emblazoned across the front.
Orfos’s bolt pistol would do nothing to the Dreadnought’s armoured body. The power fist could crush Orfos with such ease the pilot, if there was one, would barely register the resistance provided by Orfos’s body before his armour and skeleton gave way.
It would be quick. An Astartes did not fear pain, but Orfos did not see the need to pursue it as some Imperial Fists did. He had made his stand. He had not run, he had done his best to keep his battle-brothers alive. His conscience was clear. He told himself he could die. He tried to force himself to believe it.
The Dreadnought shifted on its powerful legs and the fingers of the power fist flexed. Flakes of ice fell off it. The cables unhooked and fell loose, showering the chamber floor with more chunks of ice. Lights flickered as the Dreadnought’s power plant turned over and the chamber was filled with the rhythmic thrum of it.
‘All this talk of death,’ came the Dreadnought’s voice, a synthesised bass rumble issuing from the vox-units mounted on the hull. ‘Such morbidity. I have no wish to disappoint you, novice, but you will not die here.’
Orfos swallowed. ‘What are you?’ he said. ‘Why lie you here, in a place designed to kill?’
‘Your obtuseness has not yet been trained out of you,’ said the voice again. Orfos looked for some vision slit so he might glimpse the pilot inside, but he could find none. ‘My tomb was built to ensure that none but an Astartes could make it this far. So sad the Imperial Fists chose to send Scouts to do the work of a full battle-brother. But you have made it, and I have no intention to see you go the way of that unfortunate brother who lies behind you.’
‘That is an answer to only one question,’ said Orfos. ‘I asked you two.’
‘Then I shall introduce myself,’ said the Dreadnought. ‘I am Daenyathos of the Soul Drinkers.’
Phalanx
By Ben Counter
Chapter 2
'GREETINGS, GREAT ONE,' said the lead pilgrim, his head bowed. Behind him snaked a chain of fellow pilgrims, decked out in sackcloth and jangling with the symbolic chains around their wrists.
'I am Lord Castellan Leucrontas of the Phalanx,' replied the Castellan. The cavernous docking bays of the Phalanx were Leucrontas's domain, just as the brig decks and Pain Glove chambers were his, and in spite of the high ceilings and enormous expanse of the docking chamber his stature still seemed to fill the place. 'Wherefore have you come to this place? You have not been asked, nor has your arrival been announced beforehand. I must warn you that accommodating your ship was a courtesy extended only in the light of it not being armed, and such a courtesy is mine to withdraw.'
The pilgrim's head seemed to bow even lower, as if his spine was permanently bent in an attitude of prayer. 'I would ask forgiveness, great one,' he said, in a rasping voice shredded by years of thunderous sermons, 'but it is not mine to offer apologies in the Emperor's name. For it is to do His work that we have come to this place.'
Castellan Leucrontas regarded the pilgrims emerging from the airlocks. Their ship, a converted merchantman, was a sturdy and ancient vessel, essential qualities for a craft that had evidently made it to the Phalanx's isolated location at short notice. Nevertheless, there had been great risk in taking them so close to the Veiled Region, with its pirates and xenos, in an unarmed ship. The pilgrims had clearly been willing to court death to make this journey, and still more to risk the chance that the Imperial Fists would refuse them a berth and leave them to drift.
'Then you represent the Church of the Imperial Creed?' said Leucrontas. 'That august congregation has no authority here. This ship is sovereign to the Imperial Fists Chapter.'
The lead pilgrim pulled back his hood. The face inside was barely recognisable as a face - not because it was inhuman or mutilated, but because the familiarity of its features was almost entirely hidden by the tattooed image of a pair of scales that covered it. The image was an electoo, edged in lines of light, and the two pans of the scales flickered with intricately rende
red flames.
'We come not to usurp your rule, good lord Castellan,' said the pilgrim. 'Rather, we are here to observe. The standards, my brothers, if you please.'
Several other pilgrims jangled to the front of the crowd. Altogether there must have been three hundred of them, all hooded and chained like penitents. Several of them unfurled banners and held them aloft. They bore symbols of justice - the scales, the blinded eye, the image of a man holding a sword by the blade in a trial by ordeal. Other pilgrims were bent almost double by the loads of books strapped to their backs, each one a walking library. Still others had spools of parchment encased in units on their chests, so they could pay out a constant strip of parchment on which to write. Some were writing down the exchange between their leader and the Castellan, nimble fingers scribbling in an arcane shorthand with scratching quills.
'Our purpose,' said the pilgrims' leader, 'is to follow the course of justice. The Emperor Himself created the institutions that see justice called down upon His subjects and His enemies. We are the Blind Retribution, and whenever the process of justice is enacted, we are there to observe. It has come to the notice of the Blind that a Chapter of Astartes is to be tried here, for several charges of rebellion and heresy. And so we are here to watch over this process and record all the matters of justice therein. This is the will of the Emperor, for His justice is the most perfect of all and it is to His perfection that we aspire.'
The Castellan gave this some thought. 'It is true,' he said, 'that the Phalanx is to see these renegades put to 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 gene-seed.'
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 it 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 t
hey 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.
Hammer and Bolter - Issue 1 Page 16