Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘The gravitic well of the sun Jorso?’ said Clastrin.

  ‘Perhaps so, Forgemaster,’ said Nuministon.

  ‘Are we to retrieve the datacore, or are we to argue as the hulk breaks up around our ears?’ said Plosk. ‘I will explain all, but first we must gain entry.’

  Galt looked to the Forgemaster. The Techmarine chief gave a brief nod.

  ‘Very well, but be quick.’ Aftershocks troubled the chamber still.

  ‘The unbelievers must withdraw,’ said Plosk.

  ‘I see no door,’ muttered Tarael. ‘This is a waste of time.’

  ‘Where there is no way, there will be a way,’ said Nuministon. Galt was certain he was quoting something.

  Mazrael rejoined the other Terminators, Caedis’s armour clasped in his hand.

  Plosk’s servitors formed a semicircle about the magos, and began a low mumbling drone, thick with formulae and holy data.

  Plosk threw his hands wide and spoke over his choir. ‘Oh mighty vessel of the Omnissiah! We, the humble servants of He who made you, we who have searched for long eternities to find your like, we request access to your holy innards, and the information that you contain therein. Let us prove ourselves worthy to you and to our Lord, so that mankind might slip the shackles of ignorance, and learn anew the true runes of knowledge!’

  Nothing happened.

  ‘He has lost his mind,’ said Tarael drily. ‘He speaks to a wall.’

  Voldo made a noise of agreement. ‘Brother Gallio?’

  ‘Wait, my lords!’ said Samin, holding up a hand. ‘He only greets it as it should be greeted – he treats it with the respect it demands. To approach otherwise would be an affront to the vessel’s spirit and perilous to us all. Only now might he utter the codes of access.’

  Plosk began to speak rapidly in a language none understood. It was not the electronic chitter of binaric, but a true, spoken language of men. A chill went down Galt’s spine as the tech-priest went on; the language was foreign to him, but amid the babble were words that sounded half-familiar, as if Plosk spoke High Gothic distorted by a dream.

  And then the ship replied.

  The Terminators stepped backwards, weapons raised.

  ‘Hold!’ said Nuministon. ‘It is only a voice-activated ward, nothing more. The machine’s spirit has a voice as our servitors have a voice.’

  The ship’s voice was soft and emotionless; it too used the ancient tongue.

  Plosk’s hands dropped. The servitors sang on.

  The ship responded, and the way opened. A section of the hull glowed green, forming a solid square. The light receded, so that the square became a doorway with rounded corners, delineated by a band of brightness. And then there were steps, appearing in some manner Galt could not understand. The light dimmed, lighting the new doorway and stairs in soft lambency. The ship looked as if it had always been that way, as if there had always been a door and not been a solid wall of metal only seconds before. Data flooded into their sensoriums and auspexes as the inviolable skin of the craft parted for them.

  ‘Witchcraft!’ gasped Mazrael, tightening his grip on his crozius. The Space Marines backed up further. Mutters of alarm came from all of them.

  ‘No, my lords! Power, technology. Behold the true might of the Omnissiah revealed!’ Plosk said. He looked into the vessel. ‘And soon it will all be ours again, and mankind will rule the stars rightfully, totally, and alone. But as much as I long to enter, we must plan our escape. As Nuministon says, we do not have much time. Teleportation is our only hope.’

  ‘I have a clear reading from within the vessel now,’ said Eskerio.

  ‘As do I,’ said Curzon.

  ‘The energy fluctuations of the ship’s secondary reactor will not allow a firm pattern lock,’ said Clastrin.

  ‘We should turn back now,’ said Eskerio.

  ‘No!’ said Plosk. ‘There is a way. The reactor can be deactivated. Once it is, then we may be safely away with the ship’s secrets.’

  ‘What do we do, lord captain?’ said Voldo uneasily.

  ‘If the ship opened for us, it may have opened for my lord,’ said Tarael, taking a step forward. Mazrael said nothing.

  They all looked to Galt.

  ‘So be it,’ said Galt finally. ‘So be it.’

  Caedis passed through the hulk in Holos’s fugue, wandering deeper and deeper into the Death of Integrity . Sometimes he was Caedis, and on the edge of his perception he was aware that he was casting away his armour as he walked, an act that had lost any sense of importance. It must be done, so he did it. Then there were times when he thought he was Caedis but could not be sure, for the roar of his own blood in his ears was deafening. His twin hearts pounded like war drums, and the Thirst tore at his soul with dripping claws. Sometimes he was Holos, climbing metre by painful metre up the side of Mount Calicium. Sometimes he was neither. He, Holos and the other shades which climbed with him were sent tumbling into the distant past by Holos’s own Black Rage. Caedis suffered the Rage and through suffering it he suffered Holos’s own Rage, until the two multiplied each other into an infinite tunnel of dark memories of war. An eternity of slaughter and bloodshed and burning torment beckoned.

  Holos dragged himself along the lip of the volcano’s crater with his one good arm. The rim was narrow, no more than a few metres wide at its narrowest, and his movement sent rocks tumbling over the edge. They bounced higher and higher as they fell, towards the steaming, poisonous green lake at the centre. Holos had discarded what armour he could, but his chestplates and leg assembly would not come free. His hand and arms were bloodied from dragging himself along the sharp stone. The hypercoagulants in his blood sealed the wounds quickly, but each painful metre fresh wounds were torn into his flesh by the spines of the mountain.

  The smell of his own life fluids drove him deeper into insanity. He blacked out twice, finding himself soaring high in the air over a battlefield he did not recognise. The sensation of unaided flight was so intoxicating, he almost lost himself. Doubtless had he not had the will, Holos would have died raving upon the rim of the volcano, and the Blood Drinkers would have died with him. But Holos’s will to survive was mighty, and his pride in his Chapter mightier still. He dragged himself back to the present. Holos was aware of the others who climbed with him only fleetingly.

  Sometimes Caedis was aware that he was not Holos even as he experienced the hero pulling himself over the sharp rocks. At other times Caedis found himself crawling through wrecked corridors of spacecraft. He, unlike the ancient hero, could still walk, and he would become confused, then pull himself upright and stagger on. As Caedis, he went through places of intense cold, places with no air and no gravity, or choked with poisonous gas. He should have died, but something more than his engineered physiology allowed him to survive. Perhaps, like Holos, it was his will alone. Perhaps not. Fate has a way of saving those it values.

  He was Holos for a time, falling painfully back to the floor, and the peak of Mount Calicium was so far away. And then he was Caedis, naked, his armour all gone. He was in a ship that was lit and warm and full of air sweeter than any he had ever tasted, pure and untainted by volcanic fume, pollution, or the rot of old blood. He marvelled at the vessel; proportioned for men but not like any ship he had ever seen. He looked groggily for a crew, but found none.

  Time pulled him away to its own whims. He felt blood on his hands, the death of a genestealer; it passed. He went elsewhere.

  The slope of the peak rose steeply from the rim of the crater. Holos stared up at it. A lesser man would have stopped. Holos did not. Reaching out his good hand he hauled his battered body upwards. Betrayed by his armour, he proceeded by the dint of his will alone.

  The suns were rolling behind the horizon, taking day away with them, when he attained the summit.

  Holos rolled onto his back. He lay gasping, his great strength spent. The sky turned from orange to a deep purple, heralding the oncoming night. Ash clouds streaked the dome of heaven in herringbone pat
terns. The air at the summit was thin and full of poisonous gases. They burned his throat, his birth lungs. His multi-lung laboured to drag what little oxygen there was from the air.

  He wavered in and out of consciousness, back and forth in time; to the days of the primarchs, and far into the future.

  The first stars pricked at the sky, and it bled hard light.

  ‘There is no one here,’ Holos said, his voice strange in his ears, thick with exertion and dust. ‘The vision was a lie!’

  He fell into a dark sleep. Dreams of wings tormented him.

  He awoke with a start. The last hold of day was slipping. The shadows were as long as time, rocks moulded by the volcano burned orange again with the dying fires of the setting suns.

  Something had changed.

  He craned his neck, tilted his head backwards. His scalp grated against grit, but Holos was past the point of pain.

  The peak ended in a spur, a weirdly sculpted branch of stone that stood out over the steep sides of the cone. A vertical ellipse of blinding light shone at the top of this spur. Within it, a figure was waiting, the figure from his dream.

  Holos’s battered body filled with adrenaline. His feet scrabbled at the stone as he righted himself. The armour was as heavy as sin. He got to his knees and, cradling his injured arm against his chest, crawled slowly to the foot of the rock spur.

  The figure waited. It was impossible to make out its features. A silhouette attenuated by the glare was its body, its face a shapeless blur. Only its broad wings, feathers shimmering with iridescent colours, were clear.

  With great effort, Holos got himself into a kneeling position. He was afraid, for this was something beyond the material world. This was not something that would yield to the bolter or the sword. He stared nevertheless into the light. It seared his retinas, but he felt the Rage retreat within himself, and he felt the blessed return of sanity.

  ‘I am Holos, son of Dolkaros of the tribe of Sumar, Initiate of the Blood Drinkers Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. I am a warrior of the Emperor, and I would save my kin from the madness that afflicts us. I have come,’ he spoke boldly. ‘I have followed my dream. I have passed the test given me. Tell me how to save my brothers, as was promised,’ he said, his voice quavered. Emotions long suppressed broke through his conditioning.

  ‘You have come,’ said the figure. ‘You have passed the test. You are worthy of what I must tell you. Hearken, hearken to the secret that will save your brethren.’ Its voice was old and harsh as dry parchment, the sibilants hissed, tailing off into half-heard words that meant something quite different to what the figure seemed to say. The conversation between Holos and the figure continued, but muted. Other conversations began to overlay it, one at a time, as Caedis became aware of himself as separate to Holos. The conversations overlapped each other like ripples in a pond, and Holos’s exchange with the saviour of the Blood Drinkers became unintelligible.

  ‘Welcome, Caedis, Lord of the Blood Drinkers. You too have been proven worthy.’

  ‘Worthy enough to join Holos on his endless climb,’ said a second voice from the light. It was raspier and less wholesome than the first.

  Then Caedis was on the mountain, not Holos. How it came to be, he could not say. The scene had a hyper-real clarity. If it were a vision, it seemed more real than life.

  Caedis shaded his eyes. He got a fleeting impression of a pair of heavy heads moving on sinuous necks before his vision blurred, disarmed by the light around the figure. This was not how he imagined Holos’s visitor, or was it how he had imagined it all along, and was unable to capture the figure in glass because his mind would not accept the truth of it?

  ‘Why am I here?’ said Caedis. ‘Why do I not suffer the Black Rage as my brethren do, reliving the last hours of Sanguinius? Who are you?’

  The figure shifted, as if it leaned upon a staff. Caedis glimpsed a large, inhuman hand tipped with claws.

  ‘You are worthy,’ repeated the second voice.

  ‘I am he who gave to Holos the secret of how to preserve your Chapter. I am the saviour of the Blood Drinkers. You do not suffer as other sons of the Blood Angels do because I have decreed it to be otherwise. Would you know the secret? Would you know what I told Holos?’

  Caedis did not answer. The thing in the light went on anyway.

  ‘I told him to embrace change.’

  ‘Embrace it!’ said the other voice.

  ‘Only through change can one survive, only through evolution is there life. Your gene-seed is corrupt, you are changing. You try to deny it, and that is why you were dying. But to embrace it… Ah!’

  ‘To embrace change is to live,’ said the thing’s other voice. ‘Reject it and die.’

  A sense of terrible horror gripped at Caedis’s hearts. There were things few men knew of; things that made the most degenerate xenos creatures in all the galaxy seem benign. All Space Marines had some knowledge of the Ruinous Powers. Few among their number were fully aware of the Dark Gods’ actual influence on the material universe, or the nature of their servants, or how those servants could manifest themselves.

  But Caedis knew. Caedis was a Chapter Master, and thus the most awful secrets of the universe had been laid open to him.

  Before him was a Chaos daemon.

  ‘What do you want of me?’ he said, determining to say as little as possible. Some of the daemons were master tricksters, and would bend his own words against him.

  ‘What do I want of you?’ the thing’s voices spoke as one, the harmonies between the two carrying another layer of meaning. ‘I would ask you a question, that is all.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why would I not wish to? All change is Chaos, all Chaos is change. Change is inevitable, and so Chaos is inevitable. I ask you, will you embrace change? Will you embrace Chaos?’

  ‘Never!’ Caedis shouted as loudly as he could, his spirit crawling in revulsion within his skin. What had Holos done? What diabolical pact had he made to save the Chapter? His mind rebelled against it. All his life’s work, his service, a lie!

  ‘You fight the war of the mountain against the rain and the wind. The mountain seems strong, but in the end, the rain will win,’ said the other voice.

  ‘I will never submit to a power that is not the Emperor of mankind!’

  ‘Who says you have any choice, Chapter Master? Does the pawn choose whether it is black or white? Does it have a say in its movement across the board?’ said the first voice.

  The creature’s other voice spoke. ‘You oppose change, and yet you are the epitome of change yourself, altered by the weak science of your kind, you are far more than that which you once were.’

  ‘And far less than you were intended to be.’

  ‘You are not untouched by Chaos,’ the thing was staring at his lengthened teeth. ‘Yet you are weak still. You are weakened by your loyalty to the corpse that is your lord. Cast aside your loyalty.’

  ‘It is a chain that weighs you down as your armour weighs Holos down.’

  ‘That strangles and binds.’

  ‘A chain of servitude.’

  ‘I should cast aside the service to which I have sworn myself, to serve a daemonic master?’ said Caedis. ‘And what will be my reward? Betrayal of my kind? Eternal torment? My soul fed to the creatures of the warp? I am no fool. Our struggle is daunting, but I will not abandon it!’

  ‘The warp will prevail. The long war has been waged for far longer than you reckon it, and soon it will be done. Follow me, bring your warriors to fight. Victory is pre-ordained. I will make you powerful.’ The thing was beguiling. Caedis fought its promises with all his might.

  ‘Go back and eternal suffering awaits you. There will be no respite,’ said the other voice.

  ‘No rest.’

  ‘You will not die, we will not allow it.’

  ‘You will experience the depths of the Black Rage. You will suffer what Holos prevented. You will see the depths of your monstrous nature. Your humanity will burn in its fires, and
you will be powerless. Your Emperor made you as you are, not we. What then is just?’

  ‘Change, change is Chaos. Change is inevitable. Chaos is inevitable. Embrace Chaos, or be consumed by it. Embrace change!’ the second voice shrieked.

  Caedis stood and stared into the light unflinchingly. He drew himself up to his full height. His voice was firm as he replied.

  ‘No. I defy you. My soul remains my own. If I must suffer the torments of hell itself in order to serve the Emperor, then I will. Service is life.’

  ‘Blood is life, is that not how your ritual goes?’ said the first voice mockingly.

  ‘No. The blood is a means, it is regrettable, but it is the road to service. All is done in the name of service. I do not know what Holos agreed with you, but we defy you still, two thousand years on. Can you not see? We will never turn to Chaos. It is we who have tricked you.’

  The creature shifted in the light. Its form wavered, flickering through a myriad other indistinct shapes before settling back upon the form it had before. Caedis was sure he could make out two heads now, heavy and beaked, not unlike the astorgai, held upon long necks.

  ‘And you think this a secret, this dealing of Holos with we?’ said the first voice. Wisdom and wickedness were at one within it.

  ‘Shanandar was the name of the Reclusiarch, it was he to whom Holos told the whole truth,’ said the second, and listening to its voice, one became aware that death and life were the same.

  ‘From Shanandar to Melios, Melios to Dravin. Down the line of your skull-masked priests, to Gurian, Canandael, Solomael and Curvin,’ said the first voice.

  ‘From Curvin to Doloros, from him down to Quiniar, and from Quiniar to…’

  Caedis spoke the last name, his voice a deathly hush. ‘Mazrael.’

  Caedis got the impression of a head turned sideways, a laterally mounted eye, bird bright and calculating, regarding him. ‘My master’s brother has his warriors of blood, though they know it not,’ said the daemon’s first voice. ‘I will bring my own to present to my master in time for the final war. You will submit, and if you do not submit, one of your predecessors will,’ said the first voice.