The Emperor's Gift

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Our salvation lay in the Archenemy’s innate corruption. Even as it descended upon us, it was killing its kin more decisively than even we could.

  In the bluntest terms, the Daemon of Wrath butchered its lesser spirit brethren in its bid to reach us, but its presence alone was enough to diminish them. Such a beast’s very life force is a bane to its lesser kindred. Away from the warp, creatures of raw Chaos suffer in the physicality of the material realm, and the greater daemon’s dominance sucked at those weaker bodies, siphoning from them in order to continue manifesting in our reality.

  Around us, the lesser things withered and crumbled in the shadow of their sire. In their maddened spite, several even struck at their colossal overlord, hating it for the affront, despising their master for its theft of their incarnated lives.

  It roared, somehow bellowing air and boiling spittle through the vacuum. But for the dubious security of our mag-locks, we’d have been hurled back against the hull and pulped against the dark iron.

  The creature would reach the ship’s wreckage in moments, and be on us a heartbeat later.

  A second, even weaker tide of lesser devilry made its last bid to bring us down. A spindly thing of bladed limbs and leathery flesh scrabbled onto my back, and its knuckly stabs dug into the joints where my armour plating overlapped. Queasy recollections of burrowing parasites came to me, digging between the scales of a reptile’s encrusted skin. I’d seen such insectile things in the monastery’s archives, populating great underground hives on distant death worlds.

  Another of them attached itself to my stave arm, dragging at my hand even as its flesh blackened in the weapon’s aura. Warning runes flashed across my eye lenses, agitated by my labouring life signs. In a strangely cold, distracted sense, I felt knives of black bone puncturing my armour joints, digging into my body. They brought pain with each push, mostly focused behind one knee and in the base of my spine. Something scraped against my backbone, setting my nerves aflame. It wasn’t such a distant feeling then.

  ‘Mal,’ I voxed through clenched teeth.

  My brother was no help to me – he’d lost his magnetic grip on the ceiling. I saw him through the boiling melee, as embattled and buried in these wretched leathery scavengers as I was. His swords rammed over his shoulders to impale the horned things on his back.

  Pounding a fist into the creature reaching around my shoulder did nothing of any use, beyond feeding it my fist. My hand stuck fast in the thing’s jaws, adding a nasty scraping from its teeth breaking on the ceramite. It took all my strength to turn, to see the daemon trying to eat my arm.

  Its distended maw wrapped my hand to the wrist, tongue coiling all the way to my elbow. It even wrapped the storm bolter mounted on my forearm, little realising it would need to eat a holy weapon if it ever intended to swallow the limb.

  Idiotic creature. I closed my fingers, a bloom in reverse, and as my fingertips touched the trigger-plate in my palm, the daemon’s head blew apart.

  II

  Bolters in the void.

  A vacuum blunts the teeth of our sacred shells, but they are far from worthless. The biggest change isn’t in what they do, but in how their rendering judgement appears.

  In an airless void, the explosion of live shells against armour and flesh is the briefest flicker of light, gone in the shadow of a second. The explosion’s dispersing force encounters no other forces to oppose – not air, not heat, simply nothing at all. Unaugmented eyes cannot grasp the subtle beauty of a void explosion, for despite the perfection of the human form, the physics at play occur too fast for the eye to follow.

  Our eye lenses were a different matter. Each bursting shell bred a spherical afterimage of expanding light from their impact points, a visual echo on our reactive visors to show the impact points of gunfire. My brothers deactivated the feedback from registering on their retinas, finding it a worthless distraction. I kept it active, though I was never certain why. In a way, it always reminded me how far I’d come, from whoever I’d been before this.

  I still recall the first time I trained in the void, wearing a featureless, honourless suit of thin ceramite only barely approximating a knight’s true armour. To look down was to see the nickel-dull skin of the strike cruiser Unforsaken; to look up was to stare into the far reaches of absolute space, where distant stars winked in reply to my silent stare. I hadn’t been human in some time – the Emperor’s Gift wrought too many changes in me even then – but such a sight couldn’t fail to move me. Nothing prepared me for it. And how could I be ready? I’d seen little beyond my cell within the monastery and our fortress’s great stone chambers, forever ringing with the sound of crashing weapons even when all voices fell to whispers.

  I looked into the dark for a long time, hearing nothing but the slow, uneven rhythm of my own two hearts. Never had I felt so alone, so unsure of my worth in the endless, hostile expanse of mankind’s galaxy.

  Saturn was a tilted orb to my left, oppressively vast despite its distance, its curdled skies making my stomach coil. I remember how I raised my hand to it, as if it were a bauble to be drawn from the night sky. From so far away, it looked no larger than my palm.

  Deep below the cruiser’s hull, I could make out the curvature of Titan itself: milky with poisonous cloud cover, yet the only home I knew. To fall from my footing would be to plunge through its rancid atmosphere, ending my training as ashen particles caught by the nitrogen winds.

  I looked away again, out into space. Far, far beyond Saturn lay the sun itself, and even with its corona crown it was no more than a remote, pulsing speck.

  Just one star among millions.

  In that moment, I felt what ancient generations must have felt when they first sailed into the sky. Should we ever have come here, so far from humanity’s cradle? Was this manifest destiny, to reach out into the black and carve an empire upon the rocky bones of conquered worlds?

  Our masters tell us that to consider every perspective is a dangerous virtue. On that night, I learned why. Blessed is the mind too small for doubt. Humanity’s champions should never question mankind’s right to own the stars.

  I carried that lesson with me when I first swore to serve the Inquisition. I carry it with me now, as a knight in the war our species must never see.

  III

  Against my better instincts, I released the warding stave. Surrendered to the airless void, it floated untouched, anathema to the beings dragging us down.

  I drew my pistol the moment my hand was free, opening up at intimate range with the storm bolter on my left arm and the bolt pistol in my right fist. Firing with two weapons was no easy feat if accuracy was a concern, and when every shell you carried had been ritually forged, consecrated and blessed by the Imperium’s holiest hands, it was a grave sin to miss the foe.

  Of the many martial disciplines all knights must learn, there were few in which I excelled above my brothers. I was worthless with twin blades compared to Sothis, and a failed long-blade duellist by Dumenidon’s standards. But marksmanship was one aspect of our secret war I’d long-since mastered. My retinal display bisected, offering me the separate views of both weapons. My senses melted into the familiar cadence of glance-aim-fire, glance-aim-fire, firing both weapons at once, never slowing, never ceasing.

  The storm bolter bucked on my arm, bellowing twin bolts at the skittering creatures furthest away. The pistol shots were saved for the clutching, crawling things scratching at my armour. Within a handful of seconds, my retinal display was bleached by the calculated pyrotechnics of shell impacts.

  Everything I struck burst apart into sizzling viscera, dissolving from the material universe in acidic spurts. Around us, the air thickened with black mist.

  The daemon-sire was almost upon us, and still we struggled with lesser vermin. I couldn’t shoot them off Malchadiel; the risk to his armour’s integrity was too great. Instead, I sent him reeling with a compacted, kinetic wave of force. Daemons fell and scattered as he tumbled through the chamber. Several left scr
atches on his unpainted ceramite. To arrest his drift, he plunged both falchions into the roof, and relocked his boots to the metal.

  Through ragged breaths, he voxed two words. ‘Behind you.’

  Both guns rose to follow his warning. All three barrels spat out in the same moment, pounding three shells into the chest and wings of a leaping, scarlet-skinned creature resembling a cathedral gargoyle granted poisoned life. I had the briefest glimpse of bronze bone in the rare-steak pink of its internal meat before it lost all grip on our reality. Dissolving blood stained my armour, but the creature was gone.

  Twin runes, the Trecenti script for hollow, flashed on my eye lenses, warning me to reload. I holstered the pistol and summoned my stave, pulling it through the air to land in my palm.

  To pull itself into the severed chamber, the daemon was forced to furl its immense wings against its back. Metal corroded at its very presence. I watched the walls rust in the wake of its rippling pinions, and steel rotting in the shadowed mist rising from them.

  Our justicar faced it first, and he faced it alone. Galeo made his wrath a weapon, distilling it into a blade of psychic sound and hurling it from his throat as a spear leaves a fist. When he shouted at the daemon-sire, teeth broke in the daemon’s mulish maw, and its right eye ceased to exist in a black blood rupture.

  +I will deal with this,+ Galeo pulsed to us. Already, he was charging. The remaining daemons parted before him, staggering, thrown away in a burst of force. In the lack of gravity, his charge ended with a leap. The force sword in his hands was a crescent of burning white light.

  ‘Focus,’ Malchadiel voxed. I turned in time to catch one of the weakening daemons’ blades with my stave. As Mal impaled it from behind, I broke its neck with a backhanded blow.

  I never saw Galeo’s first strike land, but I most definitely felt it. The blade meeting daemonic armour bred a feverish buzz in all our minds, thickening my tongue and itching my gums. The sudden, severest need for a chemical purification shower overtook me, to cleanse this mission from my body.

  ‘We have to help him,’ said Sothis. ‘These wretches are finished.’

  ‘Go,’ came Dumenidon’s reply. ‘Together now.’

  Malchadiel turned to follow them. I kicked my last attacker away, incinerating him in a second of uncontrolled anger. The contrails of fire lashed over the daemon, melting its wings from its shoulders even as it burned.

  Mal called my name, yelling for me to hurry. I killed the flame stream with a whipcrack of effort, and followed my brothers into madness.

  IV

  A battle with a greater daemon occurs in two realms. There’s the physical aspect: the world of numbing blows, sweating hatred, and the breathless release of energy that lesser minds would call sorcery. And then there’s the spiritual side: a duel of prickling wills and jagged thoughts, where even standing in the enemy’s presence causes a spiritual sickening.

  A greater daemon of Sanguinary Unholiness is, quite literally, the negative emotion of war given form. Take the emotion of every human ever to pick up a sword and rifle, blended together in the poisonous realm behind reality’s veil: every agony suffered by a gutshot soldier crying for his comrades; every dehumanising flush of hate felt in that grotesque intimacy of stealing another man’s life; each and every nightmare suffered by a crusade’s survivor; or the crippling fear of facing down an outnumbering horde when there’s nowhere to run…

  All of this, and more, radiated from the creature in a seething wave. Truly, mankind’s sins returned to plague us.

  It was said that upon their vulgar warp-worlds, each of these avataric warlords reigned over legions of the lost and the damned. Even the Inquisition’s archives were vague about such things. Few could stare into hell and retain presence of mind enough to meticulously record what one saw within its tides.

  The daemon drew back from our Aegis, but it knew nothing of retreat. Pain only drove it to frustrated anger. As we drew near, my first instincts faded. Revulsion gave way to realisation.

  ‘I know this creature.’ I had no idea if I spoke the words with my mouth or my mind. ‘Justicar…’

  +Speak.+ Galeo stood before it, his long blade shedding sparks as it ground against the beast’s axe. I was glad I couldn’t hear the strained thrum in the vacuum – the sound of blade on blade always set my teeth on edge. Strange, the things that we can never quite get used to.

  But the image from my memory was as clear as if I had the book in my hands. On the fourth row of the Aventinus Juncture of the Librarium Daemonica, contained within the texts detailing the Juruga Uprising almost three thousand years before, a stylised etching showed the daemon that now stood before us.

  Malchadiel, always the closest of my brothers, knew my thoughts as easily as he felt his own.

  ‘I am so glad you study these things,’ he whispered over the vox.

  +I know its name.+

  As we ran, I reloaded my storm bolter. We were close, but the daemon gave no ground. Its wings, cobwebbed by juicy veins along the leathery membranes, rattled and flapped in the haze of smoke. Rather than a chest protected in a breastplate of bronze, its bones had pushed through the bristled skin to form overlapping plates of mouldering yellow armour. The beast’s body still bore a dozen spears and swords impaled deep in its flesh, the legacy of failed executions in generations past.

  And then we were upon it, with no time to do anything but fight. The link to my brothers gave me insight into their movements. Galeo stood facing the daemon like a champion of old, sword raised as he duelled a creature ten times his size. Each impact of axe against blade seemed to slow time, as even enhanced human senses struggled to process what we were seeing. Sothis and Dumenidon joined the justicar, adding their blows and blocks to his. Without even communing, Malchadiel and I shared another idea.

  We disengaged from the ceiling, kicking off to launch onto the daemon’s back. To grip the thing’s wings was no different from clutching at the billowing sails of some primitive oceangoing ship, thrashing in the wind. Malchadiel struck first, carving cuts of stinking meat from the creature’s flesh. I felt a burst of emotion from him, of vicious eagerness as he sought to cut one of the wings from the beast’s back.

  I landed higher, my boots thudding into the creature’s shoulder and clutching at the thing’s greasy, battish ear for something to hold onto. The storm bolter clicked on my arm. The two shells hammered into the beast’s temple, blasting a hole in the bestial skull, making a flapping ruin of the leathery flesh that remained.

  As it reached for me, writhing to throw me off, I sent a focused pulse right into its mind, aiming for the quivering ridges of brain-meat visible through the skull’s breakage.

  It wasn’t a word – it wasn’t even language – I forced an amalgamation of sounds and concepts into its bared brain. Imagine a hundred bronze bells ringing out over a deserted city; the scream of falling timber in a burning church; the prolonged agony of an untreated amputation; and a man breathing through lungs that bubbled with blood.

  I shouted that into the daemon’s mind.

  And nothing happened.

  The fist hit me with the force of being trapped beneath a tank’s treads. Before I could react, the daemon-sire threw me from its back. I saw motion blurs, but nothing more. My armour’s auto-senses sang out in alarm.

  Even post-human reflexes have their limits. Before my hearts could beat twice, I struck the chamber wall at an angle bad enough to wrench my spine into a crackling twist. The metal was too smooth for a grip, and my velocity stole any chance at punching a handhold. After that single impact, I skidded along the wall, shedding sparks in my wake.

  I clawed at the metal with a single scrape, all I had time for. It didn’t even slow me down.

  A moment later, I was out in the void.

  The runes scrolling down my faceplate flashed warnings I evidently needed to know. Yes, I was aware my armour’s integrity was breached in several places. Yes, I knew I was venting air in a hissing slash of uncontrolle
d gas from a rent in my chestplate. Yes, I was aware the stabilisers and power conduits in my left leg were in need of immediate attendance. A thought cancelled the information feed, leaving me looking around as I fell for anything to catch my bearings.

  I was drifting fast, falling through the dusty void, deeper out into space. Grit rattled against my armour as I tumbled through the directionless expanse. I could barely even see the ship’s hull through the dust, shrinking every second.

  This was going to be a humiliating way to die.

  +That… was extremely… foolish,+ Galeo sent to me. He sounded strained, almost to the point of collapse.

  Runes flickered in response to my thoughts. I watched my armour’s power displays struggling against the damage. The warp alignment nodes jutting from my power pack started their bass rumble. I had to confess, even to myself, that this probably wasn’t going to work.

  +Hyperion?+ Malchadiel’s voice was weak. It always cost him to speak telepathically, for his own talents were so different from mine.

  +I’m jumping back,+ I replied.

  +It will come for you. It will come for the warp pulse.+

  +Only one chance. Watch for me.+

  +I ca– +

  V

  I held my breath this time.

  The warp embraced me, squeezing at my armour in the hope of cracking it apart. I felt hands, or something close to them, scrabbling at the joints of my warplate. I couldn’t run, though I gave it my all. Charging forwards was no different from pushing through tar.

  Power gauges drained with malicious speed, and more runes flashed warnings I couldn’t heed. I had one chance at this, one chance to teleport back to the ship before my armour’s jump-systems failed. If I missed it, I was as good as dead. The Karabela could cut through this dust for an eternity and never get a teleport lock on my armour.

  Something wrapped my throat. I felt it seeping into my armour with all the insidious, wet chill of a melting icicle held to my neck. Blind-firing achieved nothing: the storm bolter belched its payload into the thick muck, and the shells immediately froze in the tidal winds, all momentum stolen.