Rebirth

by Nick Kyme

  ‘I will hold them as long as I can,’ he called, wading in with the others as the bulkhead door slammed down, cutting him off from view and silencing the screams.

  Urgaresh saw the officer dragged off by his own men and knew the fight was theirs. It had been the moment Haakem had emerged amongst them, but with them now trying to save their leader it meant the mortals had all but accepted their fate.

  By his side were Thorast and Skarh, the latter firing off quick bursts from his purloined bolter to try to break up the wall of solid shot and las peppering the Black Dragons. There was no sign of Ghaan, but Urgaresh could not worry about that now. He had tossed his own bolt pistol when the mag ran dry and wielded the chainsword two-handed, leading into the charge with his shoulder. He was hurting. His eyes still burned from the blind grenade, despite the optical compensators in his battle-helm. Urgaresh knew Thorast and Skarh had felt it too. Both were seized by a feral rage.

  With Haakem at their backs, cutting flesh as he was born to, and Thorast, Skarh and Urgaresh pushing from the front, the fight was mercifully short. For what they had done to Zartath, Urgaresh wanted to punish the mortals more but was cogent enough to realise these wretched souls were not the true focus of his ire. He wanted the Salamanders.

  ‘Where are they?’ snarled Skarh, battering a man to death with the stock of his bolter. Ammunition was short, and now they were amongst the armsmen it made sense to try to conserve it. Urgaresh was surprised at Skarh’s restraint. Perhaps they were not as lost as the sergeant believed. ‘They should come. We slaughter their men.’ Skarh lifted a man by the throat, crushing the mortal’s larynx with a savage twist before dropping him and breaking another. ‘They should come.’

  Haakem met his brothers from the other side of the melee. Anointed with blood, there was something monstrous and unpredictable about him even to Urgaresh.

  ‘Well met, brother,’ rasped the sergeant, using the flat of his chainblade to swat a figure into the wall. Its face was crushed on impact, the armsman’s helmet splitting across the middle of the crown. Urgaresh barely registered it – the burring chainteeth of his sword were already cutting into more meat. In the carnage his enemies had ceased to be people anymore – they were just obstacles in his way, laid waste to by his wrath. The slaughter became mechanistic, almost perfunctory. A momentary flash of pain in his cheek brought him out of this murderous torpor, and belatedly Urgaresh realised he had been shot almost point blank in the face. He staggered, and felt the hot knives of the shotgun pellets where they had penetrated his helm and embedded into flesh. The vox-grille was wrecked, so he ripped it away with his free hand, warding off his attacker with his chainsword in the other.

  He was a skilled fighter, this mortal. Urgaresh recognised him from the Fist of Kraedor. Still fending off his attacker, Urgaresh tore off his battle-helm completely and swung. The blow came unexpectedly and struck the man across the torso and neck. He snapped back, disarmed. Urgaresh spared him no words and thrust the chainblade into the mortal’s prone body.

  It was over. The rest either died or fled. Urgaresh did not bother to give chase, nor did any of the ‘wrath’. They would get to them all soon enough. This had been the defenders’ best attempt to stop them, and it had failed.

  ‘Is this it?’ snapped Skarh, glaring at the spread of bodies lying beneath him in rapidly expanding pools of their own blood. He turned to Urgaresh, a savage look in his eye visible where one of his retinal lenses had been smashed during the fight. ‘My fury is not yet slaked, brother-sergeant.’

  ‘We aren’t done,’ said Urgaresh, largely ignoring Skarh’s minor tantrum while he inspected the chainsword. Some of the teeth were broken and its motor hardly purred anymore. Perhaps he had gone at the mortals harder than he first thought. In his peripheral vision, Urgaresh noticed Haakem. Drenched in blood and sweat, he released a cascade of mortal fluids as he shook his head. The act was not unlike that of a dog, and Urgaresh wondered again at where this road was taking them all.

  ‘I would have Salamanders blood for Zartath,’ hissed Skarh, gripping the edge of Urgaresh’s plastron.

  Urgaresh glared at him. ‘So would I,’ he calmly replied. ‘Now, release me.’

  Skarh obeyed, bowing his head in swift compliance as he realised his overstep.

  ‘Skarh is right, brother-sergeant,’ said Haakem. ‘This is barely worth the effort. I joined a rescue mission that turned into one demanding vengeance instead. With that I have no issue, but slaughtering these dregs…’ he gestured to the bodies. ‘It’s butcher’s work, not worthy of us. We’re unscathed and yet they–’

  ‘No, brother,’ uttered the solemn voice of Thorast. The Apothecary was kneeling next to Ghaan, his reductor already unsheathed. ‘Not unscathed.’

  Ghaan was dead, his body slumped against the boarding shield but still more or less upright. He had died on his feet, which was little more than they could all ask. The shield had taken some grievous hits after all. There were gaps in the armour, gaps that Ghaan had stopped with his own body.

  ‘“Do not fail your brothers. Though their bodies die, their spirit must return to the Chapter. That is your charge.”’

  ‘So it was said,’ murmured Thorast, nodding at Urgaresh’s recitation of the Credo of Apothecaries.

  ‘So too shall be done,’ the sergeant concluded.

  All watched as Thorast took Ghaan’s gene-seed and added it to the rest from the Fist of Kraedor.

  ‘It’s done,’ said Thorast, turning to his sergeant. ‘What now?’

  ‘Are we monsters, brothers?’ asked Urgaresh.

  ‘We are what our masters on Terra made us to be,’ said Skarh.

  ‘Then we head to the bridge. If there are Salamanders here on this ship, that is where we will find them. I want to look them in the eye before we kill them, and ask why.’

  ‘What kind of answer do you want?’ asked Thorast.

  ‘It hardly matters, I suppose. I just want them to know what this has all been for, what they have forced us to do, to become… and what we must do next.’

  Without transhuman reinforcements, the ship was at the mercy of the Black Dragons. For what the Salamanders had done, Urgaresh would see it crashed on the dirty world below.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Sturndrang, the underhive of Molior

  Agatone found Zartath wandering alone at the edge of Kabullah’s border. The ex-Black Dragon looked punch-drunk as if he had just had a bout with Ba’ken in the practice cages and the hefty captain of Seventh Company had given him some brutal ‘instruction’. He almost staggered in Agatone’s direction when he saw him. Recognition was not instantaneous, either.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Agatone, wary, and kept his hand within reach of his holstered bolt pistol. There was something about the way Zartath moved, the blankness in his eyes, that gave the captain pause.

  Blinking once, Zartath nodded. He did it slowly, wearily.

  ‘Did something happen, brother?’ Agatone asked, approaching him but still alert. His eyes narrowed when he saw the blood stains only half washed off Zartath’s armour. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Zartath replied, and seemed to regain some of his senses.

  ‘Where, brother?’

  ‘I am my own man, brother-captain,’ said Zartath, only now understanding the level of caution Agatone was showing towards him.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Agatone pressed, and touched his fingers to the grip of his sidearm. He had known this day might come, that he might have to take Zartath to hand, the way a master deals with a feral dog. Agatone knew he might have to put the ex-Black Dragon down.

  Zartath raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, and stopped.

  ‘Needed time alone,’ he admitted, ‘away from the roar.’

  ‘You were supposed to maintain watch, brother. Were this a conventional mission–’

  ‘But it isn’t, brother-captain. Nothing about it is,’ Zartath replied, and lowered his hands. ‘Tell me som
ething, though. Have you heard it too?’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

  The drone, that strange keening that had persisted ever since the klaxons had first sounded for the so-called ‘vermin tide’.

  Agatone eased off a little but still kept his guard up. He gave one, slow nod.

  ‘So have I. It drums in my skull even now.’ Zartath took a step but no more than that. ‘I heard it at the sump pond, pounding through a waste pipe, coming up from below somewhere. There is something rotten here, brother-captain. It has tainted this place beyond the corruption of the flesh. It is tainting us, even now, as we hear it. Our helms, would that we wore them, would be no protection, either. It is within us.’

  Agatone had suspected as much, but to hear his suspicions spoken aloud by Zartath gave them form and palpability. It also clarified them. He saw the truth of it now. The vermin that had attacked them were incubators for some pathogen, and the blood, their tainted blood had been a carrier that unlocked some deeper evil at large in Molior’s underhive. And they were hearing its siren call in the droning. For now, there was nothing Agatone could do about that. For the second time he wondered if Tsu’gan had run afoul of this ‘evil’, and tried to vanquish it. He hoped they were hunting for a living fire-born and not merely a corpse. Either way, none of it explained the blood on Zartath’s armour.

  ‘I need to know what you did, Zartath.’

  Zartath showed Agatone his palms again.

  ‘Would that I knew what that was. Something… attacked me, I think.’

  Agatone scowled. ‘You think?’

  ‘I ventured into the waters of the sump, drawn by the siren call in my head. I felt something wrap its jaws around my leg. The next moment, I awoke covered in blood.’

  ‘So you killed it, whatever it was?’

  ‘I would not be alive otherwise.’

  ‘A reflex then?’

  Zartath nodded mutely.

  Something was missing from Zartath’s testimony, Agatone was certain. What he could not be sure of was whether the ex-Black Dragon was deliberately hiding the truth of that, or whether the savage warrior simply did not know. Part of the reason Agatone had once stringently opposed his inclusion into the Chapter was on account of such murderous blackouts. Elysius had convinced him it was a worthwhile risk – the hunt for Tsu’gan demanded it – and for his part Zartath had performed well, proving a valuable asset, but frequently Agatone questioned his suitability. He did so again now.

  He scrutinised Zartath for a few seconds, hoping the silence might reveal something his questions had failed to, but found nothing new. In the end, Agatone beckoned him to follow.

  ‘Come on. Exor is awake, and we need to move out.’ He turned and led Zartath back, the ex-Black Dragon a few paces behind. ‘You need not walk at the back of me,’ Agatone called to him, tramping back to the muddy lights of the settlement.

  ‘It is my place,’ said Zartath, and the words gave Agatone renewed pause. The captain was wise enough to realise something had happened during the three hours he had been transfusing his blood to save Exor – it had left him a little weakened, but the effects would wear off quickly, a Space Marine’s Larraman cells more advanced than mortal blood cells. Regeneration and replenishment would be swift but he had neither the time nor means to interrogate Zartath further. Exor and, he hoped, Tsu’gan, were waiting.

  Issak was the one waiting for them when they returned to the settlement. He was standing at the bottom of the staircase to his surgery, armed and armoured with a pack on his back. Some of the natives, including the ageing but relatively well-attired alderman, lurked nearby, looking concerned.

  Agatone read their fear and anxiety immediately.

  ‘Going on a trip, medicus?’ he asked, and looked upwards in the direction of the surgery.

  Issak was wearing light flak armour with a mesh underweave. It looked old, but serviceable, clearly Militarum-grade. His pack most likely contained his med-kit, spare ammo and whatever provisions he needed. It too was Guard-issue. His boots were dark, functional, with visible metal toe-caps and he had a leather skullcap too. A combat shotgun and stubby autopistol on a leather strap across his back and hip holster respectively were the extent of his arsenal, barring any knives. A storm cloak completed the image of underhive gun for hire.

  ‘Your comrade has recovered to an extent,’ Issak replied, following Agatone’s gaze all the way up to the surgery. ‘He is upright and mobile, at least.’

  Agatone gave a slight bow of the head. ‘And for that you have our gratitude, but you didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘I suspect you already know the answer, along with my destination.’

  Agatone turned to Zartath who had just caught up to him. ‘See to Exor,’ he said. When Zartath was tramping noisily up the staircase, Agatone resumed his conversation with the medicus.

  ‘Craving the glory days, are we?’

  ‘Not exactly. I told you once I was a religious man. In coming here, I served the Throne and ministered to the faithless, preaching the Imperial Creed. I found the very worst hole of existence I could, and made it better. For the Imperium. For these people. I knew it would not be forever.’

  ‘I don’t need another gun – I have two already and others in the hive city I can call upon.’

  ‘With respect, lord, I believe the former but not the latter. You needed me to patch up your Techmarine because he’s the only one you’ve got. Vox-comms don’t work so cleanly in the underhive and where you’re going they will cease to function at all. The feral one and your wounded brother currently in my surgery are all the manpower you have at your immediate disposal.’

  ‘And your gun arm will tip the odds back in my favour, will it?’

  ‘I don’t offer it… at least, I don’t offer it alone. Finding Seven Points is easy if you know your way around. It’s also a lot safer if you’re familiar with our hazards.’

  It made sense. Issak had decided he had been given a sign from the Emperor, that the Salamanders coming presaged a calling of sorts. A guide would make the journey to Seven Points easier, but Agatone struggled with the morality of putting the human’s life in danger, especially as he had just, in all likelihood, saved Exor’s.

  ‘I can’t guarantee your safety,’ Agatone told him.

  Issak laughed. It was a warm, genuine sound that smacked of his natural beneficence.

  ‘Had I not walked these treacherous roads for years before your arrival, and not ventured from Sturndrang’s surface to this sub-strata, I might find a warning note of caution in those words, Agatone. Alas…’ he concluded, and opened his arms wide as to suggest the decision was already made.

  ‘Well then,’ said Agatone, first seeing Exor then Zartath emerge at the summit of the stairway, but his eyes falling on Issak last of all. ‘Seems your duty to the Throne is not yet done. Take us to Seven Points.’

  Seven Points, or the ‘cross’ at it was sometimes known on account of the seven interlocking and divergent paths that led to this nexus point, was in ruins. Granted, most of Molior’s underhive had a broken down, dilapidated appearance but even for an arena this was a war zone.

  ‘A battle was fought here…’ hissed Zartath. He stated the obvious, not with the intention of drawing his companion’s attention to it but rather as part of his internal process of deconstruction. The four of them, three Adeptus Astartes and one missionary-turned-medicus, approached the battlefield along one of the seven paths. Stretching out in front of them was a scene of carnage, but of a battle already fought and ended. Judging by the amount of bodies, it was a conflict with few victors.

  Zartath went on ahead, weaving amongst the corpse-strewn wreckage and still-smoking fires. He kept low, even though there were no obvious signs of life. More than once, a careless scout had toured the aftermath of a battle believing all threat ended, only to find enemies alive with their blades still sharp, their desire for vengeance even sharper.

  ‘F
ive distinct groups fought here…’ Zartath went on, beckoning the others as he stopped at intervals to examine any sign or spoor.

  Smoke hugged the ground in a thick veil. Broken limbs and weapons stuck out from it, breaching the surface like flotsam on a beach exposed by retreating surf. Heat haze still wavered the air from conflagrations that had diminished into mere blazes since their ignition. The shells of burned-out buildings hung open like old, blackened wounds yet to heal.

  ‘I see only four,’ Exor replied. He moved tentatively, without the confidence of full fitness, but was as battle-ready as Issak could make him. To Agatone’s mind, it would have to do.

  ‘As do I, Zartath,’ the captain agreed with his Techmarine.

  Exor had said little during the journey from Kabullah to Seven Points, which had been made mercifully short thanks to Issak’s knowledge of these depths. The Techmarine had kept a wary eye on his auspex at all times, which Agatone deemed as normal behaviour for one schooled by the Martian adepts, so left him alone. Exor’s anvil would come later when he was pressed into the fires of battle again. Then Agatone would see the true measure of his readiness. But as of right now, all they had was the hunt and that was Zartath’s area of expertise.

  The ex-Black Dragon scurried through the ruins, amongst the bodies. Some he stooped to examine, others he left alone. His level of scout-craft was, admittedly, a mystery to Agatone.

  ‘Where is the fifth, brother?’ Agatone called, eyeing the high gantries above where the smoke was rising with suspicion. Below, the dead were all underhivers, variously gang affiliated.

  ‘Close and few in number,’ Zartath answered cryptically. ‘There are many signs.’

  Some of the bodies had the trappings of gladiators, escapees from the arena or perhaps even unleashed by their masters. If what the alderman had told Agatone was true, then two gang lords ruled this quarter. Their men would be amongst the dead.

  With Zartath so engrossed in his task, Agatone turned to Issak. ‘You know the markings of the local gang lords here?’