[Caiphas Cain 03] The Traitor's hand

by Sandy Mitchell

  We moved forward again, hugging the edge of the thoroughfare from habit and sound common sense; just because the cultists we could see were in no fit state to fight it didn't mean that there weren't others, comparatively uninjured, lurking in ambush behind what remained of the barricade.

  'Clear,' Magot reported at length, having lobbed a couple of frag grenades over the barrier to make sure. We rounded it, and I found myself looking down into the face of another of the cultists. As Vorhees had indicated, he was still alive, but only just, and I was sure the detonation of Magot's grenades hadn't exactly perked him up. He twitched feebly, bits of metal stuck through parts of his anatomy which looked extremely uncomfortable clinking against the deck plating, and reached out a hand to grab my ankle.

  'She comes,' he said, an expression of imbecilic rapture on his face; by that point I don't suppose he had a clue who we were. 'The new world is at hand!'

  'Who's coming?' Beije bustled up, kicked the hand away and squatted next to the fellow. 'What are you talking about?' He aimed his laspistol at the man's stomach, which was a bit of a waste of time given the fact that most of his intestines were already spread around the floor, then evidently realised the fact as he switched his aim to the man's hand at the last minute. The gun cracked, blowing a hole through the palm. 'Tell me!'

  'Listen to you.' The cultist giggled, hoisting himself up Beije's chest with a sudden surge of strength which left the pudgy commissar gasping with surprise, and kissed him hard on the mouth. Beije leapt backwards, astonishment and outrage mingled on his face in a fashion which I have to admit struck me as extremely comical. Magot, Vorhees and a couple of the other Valhallans stifled audible snickers. 'You'll find out.'

  'Vile degenerate!' Beije spluttered. 'How dare you… I'm not that sort… Disgusting.' For a moment I thought he was going to shoot the man in a fit of pique, but the cultist saved him the bother, expiring before he could exact his petty revenge.

  'When you've quite finished enjoying yourself,' I said sarcastically, 'do you think we might get on? Planet to save, daemon-summoning to stop, remember?'

  'Do you think that's what he meant, sir?' Jurgen asked, hefting the melta as though it might actually be of some use against a hell-spawned abomination.

  'When he said she's coming?'

  'It's possible,' I said. My previous encounters with daemons had been mercifully brief, thanks to their inability to remain in the physical world for very long, and I'd had other things to worry about at the time than whether concepts such as gender had any real meaning for them. 'In which case he could have meant that the ritual has already started.'

  'We've no time to waste then, have we?' Grifen began rounding her squad up.

  'Move it people, clock's ticking here.'

  'Better do the same,' I advised the Tallarn sergeant. 'What's your name, anyhow?'

  'Mahat. Sir.' He saluted me, earning a black look from Beije, and turned away to follow Grifen's lead.

  All at once the apprehension I felt, which had become a dull ache in the pit of my stomach so familiar that I'd almost been able to ignore it, redoubled, shaking me with its intensity. Jurgen looked at me curiously for a moment, then rummaged in one of his pouches for a flask of tanna tea.

  'Bit of tanna, sir? You look like you could do with it.'

  'I could indeed.' I swallowed a couple of mouthfuls of the fragrant liquid, feeling it warm its way slowly into my stomach. 'Thank you Jurgen.' There was no point putting it off any longer; for if I was right about the summoning being underway there was no hope at all of survival if we delayed here. And everyone it seemed was ready, except for me. (And probably Beije, who was so far out of his depth it was a miracle he hadn't drowned by now, which just went to prove the truth of the old adage that the Emperor takes care of the feeble-minded, I suppose.) I nodded to Grifen. 'Move out, sergeant.'

  It wasn't even the thought of facing a daemon which had me so spooked, I realised, as we double-timed through the echoing passageways, heedless now of anything except the necessity of reaching our destination as quickly as possible. It was the dying cultist's other words. What was this new world he'd mentioned? Nothing good, I was sure.

  So it was, torn between the growing fear of what we'd find at the heart of this lair of iniquity and the cast-iron conviction that not to face it meant death or worse (and I've seen enough over the years to know that there are plenty of things worse than dying), that we hurried on towards a confrontation which would shape the destiny of not only a world, but the entire sector.

  NINETEEN

  'The past is always with us.'

  - Gilbran Quail, Collected Essays

  THE DEEPER WE penetrated into that heart of darkness, the greater became the carnage we witnessed. The Slaaneshi cultists had obviously been intensifying their efforts to defend the site of their ritual, bringing in reinforcements from the perimeter in ever-increasing numbers, despite fatally weakening their defences there in the process. Detoi reported that all our squads were now making headway, and in a couple of places the barricades had fallen entirely.

  'We can get reinforcements to you in a matter of minutes,' he said, and despite the flare of relief which accompanied his words, I found myself demurring.

  'Better leave them to secure the perimeter for the moment,' I counselled.

  Tempting as the prospect of more troopers to hide behind was, if I was right about what was waiting for us in the desecrated chapel, they wouldn't make any difference anyway; numbers had meant nothing to the PDF troopers in the bordello in Skitterfall, and I had no doubt that the daemon, if it was allowed to materialise again, would slaughter our people just as easily. Our only hope against it was Jurgen, and the fewer witnesses to that the better.

  'If you say so,' Detoi replied, sounding vaguely disappointed, and I threw him a bone to cheer him up.

  'We've still got the Traitor Marines to consider,' I reminded him. 'I'd feel a lot happier knowing they're bottled up tight if push comes to shove.'

  It was at about that point we ran into one, almost literally. I'd noticed the scarring on the walls from weapons fire had grown more intense at the sites of the last couple of firefights we'd found the remains of, but quite how much firepower the heretics were able to bring to bear still hadn't consciously registered with me until I saw the wounded World Eater staggering along the corridor. His once-gleaming armour was pitted and stained by innumerable weapon impacts, and some had evidently taken their toll - his left leg dragged, the armour joint stiff, and he kept one massively-gauntleted hand on the wall for support, where it pressed dents into the steel every time he put his weight fully on it. His weapons had gone, Emperor knew where, and blood was leaking from several of the rents in his armour, forming sticky pools on the floor before hardening to the consistency of tar within seconds.

  'Don't touch it,' I cautioned, as one of Mahat's men bent to examine the patch ahead of him. 'It might be toxic.'[103]He sprang upright at once, looking alarmed.

  'Baseless superstition,' Beije scoffed, giving the patches a wide berth nevertheless.

  'If you say so,' I said, quite happy to let him be the one to find out. At which point the Traitor Marine seemed to become aware of our presence for the first time, turning aside from his dogged progress towards the desecrated chapel.

  'Blood for the Blood God!' he roared, lurching forwards, arms outstretched to grab and tear.

  'I'm getting really sick of hearing that,' I said, bringing up my laspistol and cracking off a few rounds. The troopers with me, Valhallans and Tallarns alike, followed suit, and the front of the giant's armour rang like a foundry with the impact of scores of las bolts. Nevertheless, on he came, swinging wild punches which caught a couple of unfortunate troopers, slamming them against the walls. I ducked a massive fist, shaking off a peculiar sense of deja vu as I did so, and stepped inside his guard, hoping Jurgen could get off a shot with his melta as he had before. But this time there were too many of us in the way, and my aide hovered indecisively.


  I had only one chance: my laspistol seemed useless against the giant, but by great good fortune my chainsword was in my other hand. Spying a rent in the ceremite armour, made by a krak grenade if I was any judge, I rammed the humming blade deep into the gouge, feeling to my intense relief the whirring teeth bite home on sinew and bone.

  The giant roared in pain, shock and fury, and I ducked another wild swing of those sledgehammer fists, driving the blade deeper with all my strength. Abruptly he fell, shaking the deck, enabling my aide to run in close and dispatch him by vaporising his head.

  'Two for two! Well done, commissar!' Magot shot me a wild grin and went to check on the wounded. Mahat stared at me, an expression I can only describe as awe on his face, as I retrieved the blade from the corpse (taking very good care to make sure none of the blood from it touched my skin). Beije simply stared, his jaw slack, as though unable to credit what he'd just witnessed.

  'How are the wounded?' I asked, more to keep up appearances than anything else, but acutely aware that if I didn't find something else to concentrate on I'd end up undermining the moment with some snide and petty-seeming aside to the little weasel about his scepticism over my previous clash of arms with a World Eater.

  Magot shook her head. 'Not going anywhere, that's for sure.'

  The Chaos Marine's berserker charge had incapacitated three of the Valhallans (although they'd all be up and around again after the medicae had finished with them, a fact I could only attribute to the World Eater's astonishing degree of debilitation) and one of the Tallarns. There was only one thing for it; I detailed the squad medic to look after them and we proceeded as rapidly as we could towards the objective.

  As we moved on, with a final glance back at the casualties and a call to Detoi to send someone in to collect them, I took in our diminished band with a sense of foreboding I tried very hard to hide. Apart from me and Jurgen, there were only five of us left now: Grifen, Magot, Vorhees, Drere, and Revik, a trooper from Magot's team I knew little about as he'd joined the regiment in the last batch of replacements and had so far committed no serious infractions. (Although with Magot as a role model, that happy state of affairs was unlikely to continue for long.) The Tallarns and Beije I more or less discounted, despite Mahat's obvious confidence in my leadership I couldn't bring myself to trust them, and the thought that we were now outnumbered should they stoop to some form of treachery was far from comforting.

  So you'll understand my mind wasn't exactly easy as we hurried along in the wake of the World Eaters, afraid to get too close in case we attracted their murderous attention, but also acutely aware that time was of the essence if we were to stop the cultists at the heart of this web of corruption from completing their blasphemous task.

  'Almost there,' I told Detoi, my knack for finding my way in enclosed spaces proving as reliable as ever, which the captain acknowledged with audible relief.

  'We're still holding the perimeter,' he reported. 'All the defenders have withdrawn to meet the Traitor Marines. We could move in and mop up at any time.'

  'Stay put for now,' I told him, not wanting his understandable eagerness to get in the way at this late stage. 'We'll vox you as soon as we know for sure what's going on down here. I'd hate to blow this by falling for a feint just when we're so close.'

  'That would be a shame,' he agreed, almost managing to hide his disappointment.

  'Listen.' Grifen held up a hand, and we paused, trying to distinguish the sound she'd heard. The dredger was full of background noise, of course, most of it barely noticeable - the hum and clangour of distant machinery, the moaning of the wind through the interstices of the vast structure, and, rather more obtrusively, the reverberations of weapons fire and dying screams as the Khornate Marines went about their butchery. I tried to filter them all out, along with the continual hiss of Drere's augmetic lungs, and after a moment I nodded.

  'I think you're right,' I said grimly. It was a low, droning sound, which I felt as a vibration through the deck plates as much as I heard it directly. Chanting, which rose and fell in cadences no human throat should have been able to produce, and which raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

  The troopers, Valhallan and Tallarn alike, looked uneasily at one another.

  'What?' Beije asked, looking baffled.

  'Come on.' I broke into a run, quickly, before my resolve could evaporate. 'We don't have much time.' How I knew this I couldn't tell you, not even after all these years, but my survival instinct had kicked in with a vengeance, and I trusted it. If we didn't face the enemy now we'd be too late, and death and damnation would follow. I knew that as unarguably as I knew that a dropped object would fall to the floor, or that Beije was an idiot. To my bemused surprise I found myself out in front as the Valhallans fell in behind me, and registered their presence with relief.

  'Don't just stand there, get after him!' Beije shrilled. 'Can't you see he's trying to get away?' The Tallarns followed close on our heels, though more from the prospect of getting to grips with the enemy than because they believed a word of his idiotic accusations, I'm quite sure. The pudgy commissar huffed in their wake, his face crimson.

  Up ahead the sounds of combat grew louder, and a confused melee was filling the street-sized passage ahead of us.

  Detoi had been right, I could see; every cultist on the dredger had apparently converged on this one place with the evident aim of defending the chamber ahead of us. The cogwheel sigil of the Adeptus Mechanicus was embossed, taller than a man, on a pair of vast brazen doors beyond the mass of struggling bodies, and with a thrill of horror I realised that the sacred symbol of the priesthood of the machine had been profaned, lines added in a substance I didn't care to identify to warp and pervert it into the symbol of the unholy god of sensuous excess.[104]That was undoubtedly our goal, but reaching it would be more easily said than done: the full might of the Adumbrian cult of Slaanesh had been mobilised to defend the objective from the remaining World Eaters, and neither side expected or was capable of giving quarter.

  For a moment, it seemed, even those superhuman warriors had met their match. The sheer weight of numbers ranged against them seemed to be telling; there must have been over a hundred of the cultists still on their feet, and at least half as many again already wallowing in their own blood. I've seldom witnessed carnage on such a scale, at least in a skirmish, and the sight affected even the veteran warriors with me.

  'Emperor on Earth,' Grifen said. 'Where did they all come from?'

  I presumed the question was rhetorical, as we'd already established that some at least had fought their way in from the boat dock, but it was plain that many had been part of the dredger's crew. Some were still in their work clothes, contrasting bizarrely with the outlandish costumes of their perverted confederates, and hard though it may seem to credit I even glimpsed the white robes of a tech-priest or two among their number.

  Their victory over the tainted Marines should have been assured, their numbers telling against even so doughty a foe, and no doubt had they been Guardsmen or PDF troopers they would have prevailed without taking a tenth of the casualties they had. However, these were civilians, not warriors, and barmy to boot. They threw themselves heedlessly at the armoured giants without the faintest hint of coordination or tactics that I could see, and consequently died in droves. Worse, they got in each other's way, so half the shots aimed at the Traitor Marines killed or wounded their own.

  Not that the Khornates were getting it entirely their own way. Even as I watched, one was seized from behind by a cargo-handling servitor fully as large as he was,[105]its metal hands closing relentlessly on his helmet. For a moment, augmented muscle strained against ceremite, then the armour gave way under the pressure, bursting like a ripe molin. The thing's victory was short-lived, however, as the two surviving Marines turned on it as one, tearing it apart with their chain axes.

  Incredibly, the remaining pair of World Eaters managed to break through the line of foes opposing them, so drenched in the blood they'd
shed that it was impossible to tell now which parts of their armour had once been red and which originally black, to slam against the great bronze doors with an impact so great as to reverberate even over the screams and weapons fire. However strong and impressive that stout portal had seemed, though, it was no match for the accursed axes they bore; ceramite teeth squealed against metal, fountaining sparks like a firework display, and bronze tore and twisted like tissue paper as they ripped away at it with their gauntlets.

  'What now?' Mahat asked, and with vague surprise, not to mention a certain degree of self-satisfaction, I realised he was addressing me directly, effectively ignoring his own commissar.

  'We have to follow them,' I said. 'No matter what.' The Tallarn sergeant nodded grimly, reflecting the expression of the Valhallans, who seemed equally determined to see our errand through to the end (which looked uncomfortably close about now, let me tell you).

  'That lot'll take some breaking through,' Grifen replied, hefting her lasgun and snapping a fresh power pack into it with practiced precision. Most of the others followed suit, no doubt reflecting that the middle of a glorious banzai charge was a pretty bad place to run out of ammunition.

  'Maybe not,' I said, motioning Jurgen forward and acutely aware that the World Eaters had disappeared inside the chapel by now. Most of the surviving defenders attempted to pile in after them, choking the portal and getting in each others way, looking about as coordinated as a bunch of drunken orks. 'They're all bunched up and looking the other way.'

  'Traki[106]shoot,' Magot said happily. 'I love it when the enemy's on our side.'

  With a suitably dramatic flourish of my chainsword I rushed forward, making sure a couple of the troopers outpaced me a little, and we fell on our unprepared foe like the wrath of the Emperor himself. Jurgen's melta ripped a ragged hole through their lines, vaporising flesh and bone, to leave a narrow corridor of flash-burned victims writhing and screaming on either side where the air around the superheated plasma burst had scorched and seared them, and the rest of us opened up on the survivors to widen it. The first wave fell, barely aware of our presence, and we had almost made it to the ravaged portal before they began to turn and regroup.