What is it?
His first heart died by degrees, contractions diminishing in strength until it perished with a final spasm, its artificial counterpart accelerating its pulse to compensate. The overburdened organ’s hammering exertions made his head pound and his eyes ache, every throb tightening his blood vessels with a percussive roar. His legs wouldn’t work. He couldn’t even feel them.
He’d lost his gun in a slick of oily blood spill, lurching around when the... When the whatever-it-was had ripped from the wall hungrily.
“Ardias?” he tried again, voice weak. “Captain?”
More bolter fire. More death. Another scream as another shape blurred past. It was all happening in another world to someone else, as abstract as a cloud formation and just as unthreatening. He almost laughed.
A Space Marine helmet, lacerated head rattling inside, tumbled past him on the deck. Somewhere a plasma gun foomed breathlessly, destructive energy orb roaring its impact into the air. Delpheus blinked agonised tears out of his eyes.
A pair of sky-blue pillars stomped heavily from the pain haze beside him, cold hands cupping his head with a tenderness belying their brittle form. Captain Ardias glared down at him, concern etched incongruously on his grizzled face. He sounded choked.
“Delpheus? There’s help on its way. You’ll be fine.”
Delpheus smiled through the blood slick, hearing the concern in his captain’s voice. Ardias was a terrible liar.
“I was right...” he gurgled.
“You were right. We’re needed.”
Ardias looked away with a growl, bolt pistol tracking something across the periphery of Delpheus’s vision. It screamed and disappeared in a gout of ichor and light. And then there was a voice in Delpheus’s mind.
Twisting, probing. It was a cruel, venomous thing: slicing through his weakened defences and sinking claws of shimmering empyrean into his brain, ripping and stabbing. Playing him like a puppet.
“Nnnn...” he gurgled, fighting it. The look in Ardias’s eyes told him: You’ll be dead soon.
The thought fortress in his mind fell, once-impregnable walls sundered. The other mind, wherever it was, surged inwards, gripping at his lungs and larynx and manipulating his tongue.
“The bridge...” he hissed, unbidden. “Get to the bridge.”
Ardias nodded. “Of course. I’ll protect it with my life.”
“Stop the battle.” Not my voice! Not my voice!
“What?”
Delpheus tried swallowing, constricting his throat, biting his tongue— anything! It wouldn’t work. Weak and violated, his mind wasn’t his to control. He’d failed. He’d succumbed in his final moments. The shame overwhelmed him.
“Stop the battle,” his traitorous voice repeated. “The tau will parley. The new threat is more important.”
“They’ll cooperate? Just like that?”
“You must trust me.”
“I do, brother — I do.”
“The teleport arrays. They will take you to the bridge.”
“I understand.”
The shadows came down around his vision, like night drawing in. The controlling presence in his mind retreated stealthily, satisfied at its manipulations. Everything went cold.
The last vestiges of courage and honour inside Delpheus’s soul — a sputtering flame striving against the darkness — ripped forwards into the myriad skeins of possibility, crackling with psychic portent, and imparted one final warning, uncontrolled by whatever puppet master had spoken through him before.
“The... the rogue element. He lives on borrowed time. Seek him out. Find the warrior with the bomb in his head. Trust him.”
“What? Brother, I don’t understand...”
“Trust him...”
More gunfire. More screams. Delpheus gurgled.
The fog closed in, the blackness rolled over him, the Emperor smiled.
The world went away.
Severus smiled to himself, collecting his thoughts quickly.
The captain had looked so trusting — so sure of his dying comrade’s instructions. So much for the formidable defences of an Astartes Librarian! He’d played the fading fool like a rag doll — a brittle mask to be worn when required and cast away when redundant.
Not long now. The Ultramarines would intervene and stop the battle. All the pieces would gather together and he would take them all!
Ensign Kilson was sitting at his console aboard the bridge, unable to forget the hulking grey-green super-warriors he’d escorted through the vessel earlier.
Naturally enough the command deck was in a state of barely restrained anarchy, ranking officers screaming furiously at ensigns and servitors, apparently holding everyone but themselves responsible for the destruction of the main engines. Kilson did his best to allow it to wash over him, too experienced in the field of delegated blame to feel personally put out by the shrieked accusations.
A little part of him was thinking: we’re crippled. We’re under attack. They’re coming for us here and now and soon, without warning or mercy, we’re all going to die. The whole bloody lot of us.
But mostly he was too busy remembering the tremulous impact of the Space Marines’ footsteps, their glowering yellow eyeslits sweeping left and right, their weapons clashing against their breasts. He felt like a child again, back in the uptiers of CaerParav Hive, dreaming of meeting that season’s premier gladius fighter or collecting wafer engrams of the sector’s most renowned commissars.
He’d met them, those graceful grey-green brutes. He’d spoken to them, by the throne! A little part of him, detached from the termite nest madness of the bridge, felt like somehow, in a small way, it had touched divinity.
When the xenogen invader crept into the bridge and liquefied his body in a gust of thermal energy, Ensign Kilson was smiling serenely.
The bridge died.
“Intruder!”
“Get it!”
“Cover the officers! Cover the off—”
“Watch the instruments, damn you! Keep working!”
The meltagun was heavy in Kais’s grip, a blocky cumbersome thing that lacked the lightweight grace of his carbine. When he’d prised it from the mutilated grip of a dead Space Marine in the chapel below, he’d inspected the various coils and switches that clung like scales to its base. Eventually he decided that the trigger was the only control he really needed to understand and, leg wound still aching uncomfortably, had climbed the twisting staircase towards the bridge.
“Ensign! Get down! Get down!”
“Servitors to the front!”
“Mechserv #34 respo—”
“Emperor’s mercy!”
It didn’t shoot so much as dissolve its victims. He stood with legs planted sturdily, arm muscles bunched to support the growling, churning weapon. A splayed column of superheated air roared from its rounded muzzle; a devastating horizontal fountain that blasted flesh and bone apart like ash in a gale. The armsmen, supposedly guarding the bridge, were the first to go, shotguns igniting in their hands before they could even be brought to bear. Brass-mounted consoles slewed away in a waxlike sheen of melted surfaces and burning components, drizzling liquid metals across the room.
“Deck officer! Deck officer! To me!”
“—aaaaaaaaaaa—”
“—sweet mercy my foot’s gone oh Living God—”
“killitkillitkillit!”
A trio of servitors, blade-limbs grasping out for him, slunk away like snow devils in the sun. Their flesh peeled off in a second, leaving asymmetrical frames to twitch and shudder as their lubricants ignited and their strut supports melted to nothingness. The last few gue’la, hair singed and clothes scorched, exchanged terrified glances and sprinted clear. He enveloped them in the fusion stream and watched, heart racing, as they floundered and flapped and became part of the deck.
“—aaa—”
“—gkkhh—”
And then there was silence. He might as well have been the only living being in existen
ce, in that moment. A solitary figure, exhausted and wounded, death clinging to his limbs like a black shroud. The enormity of the command deck wrapped him in a bubble of solitude and silence, even the clicking, whistling gauges and controls faltering away into an aural smog. From the vast viewing dome set above the room, the infinite reaches of the void peered down upon him— transforming him into a solitary bacterium staring in wonder from its perch on the back of a great, dead whale. The meltagun slid from his hands with a clatter that he didn’t even notice.
Somehow he felt... cheated. He hadn’t yet resolved his feelings. Hadn’t passed or failed his Trial by Fire with any certainty either way. He could still feel the Mont’au devil lurking below the surface of his mind, hungry to escape and flex its bloody claws again. He felt prematurely amputated from his rightful resolution — a quest that had neither ended in glory or ignominy, but rather fizzled out before its true conclusion.
He supposed, abstractly, that he should contact El’Lusha. He’d cleared the bridge. The Or’es Tash’var was defeated. The ethereal would want to know. Instead he found himself wishing for more, glancing about in the hopes of finding another enemy to fight.
So, like a light splitting through tormented clouds, like the impossible surreal luminosity of the tau’va, radiant and glorious at the termination of a long, snaking pathway, fate conspired to fulfil his request. An elevator grumbled nearby, rising with frozen slowness.
The doors began to slide open. Kais drew his knife.
* * *
Constantine burst from the officers’ lift in a black mood.
He’d wasted at least half an hour on some damn fool meeting requested by Severus, the preening bastard. Evidently the governor was either missing or dead, conspicuous in his absence at the boardroom. As a result of the unnecessary diversion Constantine had been unavailable to command his vessel in its moment of need, its engines had been systematically destroyed and now who knew what xenogen devilry the tau were planning to inflict upon his crippled vessel? Rushing back to the bridge, he was unable to contact his command crew for a status update, and, to top it all, had found himself confronted by a grisly abattoir of ruptured Space Marines in the chapel outside his command deck. The Raptors had failed.
An imperial warship, Constantine believed implicitly, was impregnable. The religious certainty of the Navy’s dominance, of their ships’ deific majesty, had been drilled into him since his youth, years before. For his command to irrevocably collapse in such a short period of time; for his god/ship to be so crippled and sundered in his absence and beyond his control, it was a feeling not unlike falling. Everything he’d ever known, everything he’d ever been certain of and taken for granted, fell away from beneath him in a rush of flame and debris and blood.
Fine. Let it fall. But let it not be said that in his most testing hour Lord Admiral Benedil Constantine had shirked his duty as a leader.
He would have Severus executed for ineffectual command, the time-wasting fool. He would dispatch messages conveying his great displeasure to the Administratum and to the Raptors’ fortress-monastery on Cortiz-Pol. He’d regroup the Fleet Primus, file an immediate request for backup from the Secundus and Tertius armadas, then obliterate every last one of the grey-skinned abominations currently wreaking havoc aboard his vessel. Heads, he decided furiously, would roll.
Besides, there were still the Ultramarines. He’d drawn upon the Raptors to guard the vessel’s principal sections at Severus’s demand, aware that Captain Ardias and his men might well regard the choice as an insult. Well, it couldn’t be helped; the governor’s Administratum documents had given him implicit command over the situation, and if he chose to snub the warriors of Ultramar then there was nothing Constantine could have done about it. At least now, in the midst of this madness, he had an entire company of the Imperium’s finest warriors to assist in his liberation.
With that thought in mind, he stamped from the elevator and found a long, wickedly sharp blade pressed against his throat.
“Nk,” he said.
“Be quiet, you.” Gloved hands gripped him from behind and the voice was thick with an unknown accent. An exotic, unrecognisable odour assaulted his senses, its explanation startling him.
“X-xeno!” he flinched away from the contact, gasping. Briefly he was struck by the insanity of finding himself more terrified of contamination than of physical death, but the thought was quickly chased away by added pressure upon the knife. He almost choked. The figure behind him pulled him into the shadows, like a spider seizing its prey.
“I said, be quiet,” the voice insisted, three-fingered hand gripping his shoulder. “Who are you?”
“No-hkkk-nobody.”
“Lies.”
“What?”
“The colours and the metal circles. You’re important.” The hand tapped pointedly upon the constellation of medals pinned to Constantine’s chest, making them sway and jingle prettily. The alien’s words were recognisable but clearly strained, impeded by a limited Low Gothic vocabulary. Constantine was briefly impressed that a mere warrior could speak an alien tongue at all (after all, could he, an admiral, speak tau?), but recognised it at once as a dangerously heretical thought and purged it from his mind.
“No...” he hissed. “J-just an ensign—”
“Lies. Who are you?”
“Nobo—”
The xenogen cut his throat. It was white fire — a single burning ribbon of pain beneath his chin that sliced open with dreadful slowness.
Not deep, he prayed, shaming himself with his own cowardice, not deep enough to kill.
He whimpered as the pain continued to blossom, warmth pattering serenely across his collar bone, soaking into his robes. The xeno replaced the knife centrally and pushed harder, tensing for another slow, surgical slice. This time, Constantine could tell, the cut would be deep.
“Admiral!” he groaned, begging the Emperor’s forgiveness, knees almost buckling. “I’m the admiral! In charge! Commander!”
“A kor’o?”
“What?”
“You command the vessel?”
Yes!
“And the fleet?”
Emperor’s undying mercy yes!
“Then listen. You... just listen.”
Constantine had the distinct impression that the alien was confused, thinking hard about what to do. He began to wonder at the possibilities of somehow exploiting the situation when full pressure was reapplied to the knife, making him gag.
“You contact the rest of your fleet. You tell them—”
“Warp take you! I’d rather die!”
“You tell them to fall back. You tell them to leave.”
“You’re pathetic!” Constantine fought to bring a cold laugh to his voice, breaking through the quaver of fear and hoping the creature was convinced. “They won’t listen. They’ll know I’ve been compromised.”
“We have your ship. We have you. It is best that they leave. There will be no more conflict.”
“The Emperor doesn’t compromise, xeno.”
The knife bit into this throat again, nicking at his skin. “Where is this Emperor now when you have need of him, human?”
Constantine suddenly felt a long, long way from home.
Cut him cut him cut him cut him—
It hissed and raged in Kais’s mind, a song of blood and anger and violence.
Make him bleed cut him cut him—
It was a killing lust born in frustration. Everything had seemed so simple before, killing and destroying anything that moved, cleansing the bridge of all life, capturing this quivering, whimpering kor’o. He’d felt like he could do anything, overcome any obstacle, crush any enemy.
But there were objectives here. Diplomatic outcomes.
The comm-link with the Or’es Tash’var was still down. He’d tried it twice, desperation mounting. So he’d tried to consider, just as before in the stygian gloom of the prison compound. He’d felt like he owed it to the tau’va to think — to force a c
onclusion to this conflict that didn’t rely on the squeeze of a trigger or the slash of a knife. To end it in blood, he felt, would surely be to allow the Mont’au devil its victory.
The personal glory of single-handedly forcing the gue’la fleet to withdraw, he had to admit, was alluring. Would it elevate him to hero status? Would it secure his promotion? Would it...
Don’t even think it.
...would it have made his father proud?
It was selfishness of the highest order, he saw with a guilty wince, imagining Ju shaking her head and patiently reading out another patronising meditation upon... upon the essence of humility, or the righteousness of unity, or something like that. Still, the image was hard to shake: cheering crowds, grateful ethereals...
But of course it wasn’t that simple, and his clumsy threats and attempts to control this tall, grey-haired human were going badly awry. He thought back to the por’vre from the expedition to Queh-quih and for the first time saw beyond the bumbling enthusiasm and almost comical attempts to placate the natives, appreciating instead the merchant’s grasp upon linguistics, his subtle words and hints, his mastery of interpersonal communication. Kais solemnly wished for a water caste diplomat now.
“Tell them to withdraw,” he shouted, pushing down on the blade.
“I’m-hekkgh-telling you... it won’t work!”
“Then you die.”
“Fine! Do it, abomination! I die in the knowledge that your race is doomed! They’ll be crushed underfoot! Kill me and have done with it — I won’t sully myself for you!”
Kais wanted to growl, enraged by the futility of his threats. The gue’la started to laugh madly — an hysterical cackle with more fatalism and terror in its tones than any great sense of amusement.
The rage shivered in Kais’s belly, widening its pin tooth grin and flooding his blood with fire. His arm muscle tensed. He closed his eyes and concentrated, fighting for control.
Focus focus focus focus—
Cut him cut him cut him cut him—
Calm. All you need is calm and balance and equilibrium and unity and—
Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000) Page 19