Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

  The indefinable shadow of the ruinous powers — like a dark light — hardened every edge and bled the colours from every heraldic icon within the command deck. The power gauges shrieked as, deep in the machine’s generarium heart, colossal engines rumbled to life with a violet aura of crackling energies.

  “My child...” Siphistus crooned, a proud father.

  Tumorous energies blossomed hungrily on every deck, lights surging to full strength then dimming to a more acceptable half-lit gloom, waste energies venting deliberately into the corridors, filling the internal spaces of the warmachine with pungent fumes and the unmistakable miasma of decay.

  The Imperio Prince-Nebulae Draconis flowed through the titan’s ancient shell like a black cloud, oozing filth and decay from every bulkhead, staining its innards with putrid energies and releasing torrents of toxins into its cloister arteries. The titan mouldered from the inside.

  New name... the spirit hissed, naive gentleness replaced by a forceful strength, making Siphistus wince at the urgency of its thoughts. New naaaaaaame.

  “Yes, youngling yess...” he grinned, nodding. “For you, anything.”

  The spirit hissed its new name, ethereal words echoing massively inside his cancerous skull. “Captivating,” he grinned, “A fine choice, my child.”

  Siphistus returned his attention to the command deck. A small gaggle of Traitor Marines, varied armour styles colourfully declaring their different originator Legions, milled about with guns drawn, anticipating a fine view of the coming destruction. The Plaguelord recognised blood-red World Eaters and gaudy Emperor’s Children lurking amongst his own Plaguemarines, even an occasional blue-and-gold representative of the Thousand Sons, thrumming with arcane sorceries. Daemon things cackled and hissed, traitor priests slithering from console to console, two sleek-limbed Chaos Raptors perched loftily in the portcullis viewing bays, avian spines hunched. To witness them all together, bitter differences and rivalries disregarded, favoured gods collaborating with rare unity in a pantheon of insanity, warmed the plague lord’s long-rotten heart with a frail surge of pleasure.

  All of them were silent. Dumbfounded. Dwarfed by the monstrous power of this vessel, this living chaos-god, this titan-contaminator, this city-sized disciple of Nurgle.

  “Gendemen...” he gurgled, phlegmatic voice catching and rasping unkindly in his throat. The Machina Dragon-Bile salutes you!”

  The beast raised a limb and howled. The Marines clashed their weapons together and laughed and roared. Siphistus grinned and giggled and chuckled, and didn’t ever want to stop.

  Somewhere a gun opened fire.

  El’Lusha jumped a building distractedly and sent the combat drones ghosting along a side street, data feeds opening secondary windows on his HUD. A “target-acquired” tone rang out and he fired off a pair of missiles, turning away dismissively as the smoke trails corkscrewed away. Somewhere amongst the city wreckage the tiny drone-controlled stingers weaved and rushed amongst crumbled pillars and zeroed in on a group of twisted chaos-things efficiently. They were everywhere. A black tide, impossible to fully beat back.

  The battlesuit team pushed across the western districts, sensors carefully attuned to Aun’el Ko’vash’s precise biosignature. It was like seeking a t’repa in a gerosh’i.

  “This is a waste of time...” Lusha declared, distractedly sweeping his fusion blaster across an open-fronted building to smoke out a gaggle of winged daemonettes. Vre’Wyr and Vre’Kol’tae picked off the chittering fiends with cool precision.

  “You think we should try a different district, Shas’el?” Tong’ata commed, scouting ahead, his voice excited. The sky was a ploughed field of clouds and artillery detonations, long trails of smoke undulating vertically from countless fires throughout the city.

  “No point. There are other teams operating all across the city...”

  “You don’t think we’ll find him, Shas’el?”

  He sighed, feeling old. Listening to hunches, he remembered O’Shi’ur (who was more guilty of it than most) saying with a wry smile, was the first sign of madness.

  “I think... I think that all rotaa we’ve been bluffing and counter bluffing, and if this dirty little war has one recognisable feature, it’s expecting the unexpected.”

  “Shas’el?”

  “Consider. These warriors. These ‘Chaos’ creatures. They seem to me as near to Mont’au as it is possible to be... Do they strike you as rational beings?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “So, answer me this... Where does an irrational force conceal its prisoners? Rationally, the ethereal would be well guarded — held wherever the enemy numbers are thickest. Here in the city, correct? But irrationally...”

  “Outside the city?”

  “Hmm.”

  The drones returned from the side streets silently, one of them venting smoke from a lucky bolter shot. It wobbled erratically, as if embarrassed, before regaining balance. Lusha chewed his lip before opening a channel to the Or’es Tash’var.

  “Ui’Gorty’l here. How goes the hunt, Shas’el?”

  “Listen to me, Kor’ui. I want you to expand the survey drones’ target areas.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t care how you do it. Use every drone you’ve got, if you have to. I want sensor checks for energy readings, lifesigns, weaponsfire, comm-frequencies... everything.”

  “Shas’el, a planetwide survey would take rotaas!”

  “Then I suggest you get started. Start outside the city. Work outwards. They won’t be far away... supplies, reinforcements, that sort of thing... It’ll be close...”

  “What will?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “But—”

  “Skip it, Kor’ui. Get to it.”

  The voice on the comm was quietly surly. “Of course, Shas’el.”

  “Good. Is there any other news on La’Kais?”

  “We lost the reading. It was probably just a sensor fault.”

  Lusha shook his head, ignoring his team’s weapons-fire from further along the street. “Kor’ui — how long since you graduated from ’saal rank?”

  “W-what?”

  “You heard me. How long?”

  “Seven tau’cyrs...”

  “And in all that time, how many ‘sensor faults’ have you encountered?”

  “Uh...”

  “Quite. Keep scanning for him. If he’s alive, I want to know it. Lusha out.”

  He cut the channel before the crewman could respond, and bounded into the air with unnatural lightness to assist his team.

  He trod the path.

  A sword-edge trail, bordered by the abyssal depths of madness.

  The bloodlust threatened to overwhelm him again, red mists descending in a carefree melange of blood-snarled, wet-lipped violence. It whispered and trilled hungrily: a song of killing and unstoppability. You can’t die, it grinned. You’re a god!

  It was lying. The rational part of him knew it, digging its fingertips in and clinging to the tenets of the sio’t grimly. No compromise. Equilibrium above excess. Unity above unrest. Altruism above egotism.

  The choice seemed a cruel one:

  Machine or beast.

  Soulless efficiency or primitive savagery.

  T’au’va or Mont’au.

  Was there no middle ground?

  Kais gritted his teeth and squeezed the trigger over and over again, punching gore holes through black and red armour, boring glow-edged craters into daemon flesh, lancing black blood wounds with perfect, silent, recoilless efficiency. A bolter shell blasted open what little remained of his torso guard in a spray of shattered fio’tak and he stumbled into the shadows with a strangled yelp. The roaring of the Marine throng eclipsed even the chattering of their weapons, and he realised with a momentary rush of astonishment that, in their haste to confront him, they were casually blasting each other aside.

  The titan had been an almost impossible obstacle. He’d risen through its crawl spaces
like a parasite, planting a trail of bombs as he clambered ever upwards, losing all sense of time and scale somewhere within its buttressed midriff. Already its interior was changing: the inelegant lines and angles of gue’la construction softening with moist organic corruption, green hazes filling the air and a bitter patina, like oil-black rust, creeping stealthily across the gloomy bulkheads.

  His legs ached, head throbbing with the physical exertion of the climb. He remembered once — what seemed like an age ago now, but in fact only that morning — being physically sickened by the idea of gue’la blood staining his hooves. Now the matted gristle and filth of humans, tau and, worse, the stinking black fluids of Chaos, were drying and glistening across hooves, ankles, legs... He looked liked he’d waded through a sea of blood, and, terrifyingly, he couldn’t bring himself to care.

  The wound on his leg was infected, he knew, seeping with ineffectual antibodies and crusted by an ugly series of lesions. He’d paused to apply fresh medipacks twice during the ascent, squatting in shadowed recesses and biting back on the screams of pain welling in his throat.

  He returned to the present with a jolt, the chatter of chaotic gunfire suddenly conspicuous in its absence. He risked a glance over the obsidian console and withdrew into cover with a hiss.

  The Chaos filth on the command deck had calmed, resolving themselves with some loosely organised sense of purpose. Stepping over the mangled shells of their comrades, several had taken up firing positions and were waiting with unnatural concentration bent upon the second that he revealed himself, guns with jagged toothed maws trained unwaveringly.

  “Come out come out come out come out, little piggy...” something giggled, its voice a singsong shrill.

  A grenade skittered into the recess beside him. He stared at it for long raik’ans with an incomprehensible feeling of indignation, reviewing his choices: remain where he was and die; dive out of cover and die.

  Not really thinking, acting on adrenaline-wired instincts more than rational thought, he scooped up the grenade and bowled it back towards the Marines, fully expecting his hand to detonate in bone-flecked cyan madness. He just made it, withdrawing himself behind the console as it arced away to erupt in mid-air. A tumult of fire and shrapnel peppered the outward surfaces of his cover.

  He leapt into the blastwave without waiting, ignoring the agony of his wounded leg as he pushed down on it and surged forwards. A greasy smoke patch occluded his advance, tumbling shapes half seen through the haze shouting and bickering. Some peripheral part of his mind registered the bloodslick across the floor with a surge of triumph, as shrapnel-diced bits of power armour crumpled like paper.

  And then he was through the smoke and amongst them, a tawny blur barely reaching chest height on these daemonic hulks, which spun and fired and cleaved with growling blades, just missing their elusive prey. More often than not they impacted cruelly against their comrades, close confines turning every carefully executed lunge into a brawler’s hack, every well-aimed shot into a point-blank bloodsplatter disaster.

  Kais kept low, fighting back on the sickly sweet Mon-t’au whispers, and sowed madness throughout the command nave.

  Keraz the Violator vented his frustration joyously.

  He’d been denied his rightful butchery upon the orbiting vessel, commanded to escort the prisoners down to the planet. Him, Champion of the Blood God, on escort duty like a novice pup! The indignity made him shriek.

  He’d been ordered and commanded by the sneering governor, unable to hack the smug head from its over-pampered shoulders by the sorcerous bindings protecting it. He’d been dispatched to Lettica to oversee the battle, travelling instantaneously through the last crumbling fragments of the eldar’s warp-prison as it shook itself apart. Then, diverting to the eastern districts with news of the titan’s discovery, he’d anticipated a spectacle worthy of a Lord of Destruction.

  He’d spent an hour and a half milling about in tedious expectation as the plaguelord in the pilot’s chair coaxed power from the war machine’s engine.

  He was bored. He was blood-thirsty.

  And finally, like an offering from the Throne of Bone itself, like a ray of darklight penetrating the interminable clouds of tedium, a morsel of prey flesh had come his way A beige blur to his right sent him spinning hungrily, daemon axe laughing and delighting in its red and gold arc. It bit flesh, wailing its song of cleaved bone and armour, and Keraz gloried in the destruction.

  Abruptly the prey morsel was at his left, ducking beneath a hail of bolter fire from some other idiot Marine. Keraz, grateful for the prey’s hardiness (protracting his moment of grisly pleasure), backstepped and cleaved leftwards, and again to the right, then a downward chopping blow, a spinning orbit slice, always chasing the elusive beige and tawny shape—

  Every time he turned the xenogen helmet ghosted past his view, lost in a boiling sea of battle lust and bloodsplatter. In no time at all the rage came upon him, the berserker fury turning his muscles to fire and his mind to steam, and he gave up on any logical means of bonehewing the shadow-quick enemy in a whirlwind of undirected insanity. Flesh gurgled, armour parted, bones shattered—

  Blood for the Blood God!

  When finally the fit abated and he glanced about himself, the slow realisation of something being wrong stole upon him. Jellylike lumps of meat, encased in spine-tipped, chain-festooned armour, cluttered the deck. A dozen Chaos Marine bodies, dejointed in thoughtless butchery, reduced to stinking black charnel and dusty necrosis. Axe wounds on every surface. Nothing moved in the command nave.

  The Blood God, upon reflection, would not celebrate his name this day.

  The xenogen stepped out of the shadows, head tilted in disbelieving gratitude. It shot him twice in the chest, and Khorne the Butcher God guzzled his soul with relish.

  Kais approached the vile creature in the throne, watching him with a silent glare of hate. It was powerless, nauseous power armour bound to the chair with thick cords and safety straps, head encased within a weird profusion of cables and gadgetry. Apart from Kais, it was the only thing still alive in the command nave.

  The red-armoured devil had brutalised everything that moved, carving a gruesome path through its protesting comrades. If ever Kais was confronted by the reality of the Mont’au, it was in that moment of orgiastic carnage; without target or rationality or reason. Killing the butcher had felt like cauterising a wound.

  The diseased figure in the throne gurgled quietly. Thick sludge dribbled obscenely from its mouth, curled into a dour sneer of defiance. Its bright eyes, arctic blue irises glimmering in the half light, tracked him as he moved.

  “Here,” he said, placing the final auto-deploy charge in its pus-flecked lap.

  Then he turned and stalked out.

  VII

  18.37 HRS (SYS. LOCAL — DOLUMAR IV, Ultima Seg. #4356/E)

  The cavern, its subterranean walls damp with sweat, echoed to a chorus of ugly words and unformed gurgles. Governor Lord Meyloch Severus paused in his chanting, drawing a breath and licking his lips. Too many of these alien phrases and litanies — transcribed long ago by servitors procured secretly from the Adeptus Mechanicus — required an intolerable abundance of uncomfortable syllables that dried out his mouth and made his throat ache. A small price to pay, he supposed. The servitors had lasted about a month each, he recalled, carefully attuned minds quickly succumbing to the burden of xenoheresy and shutting down in smoke-belching frenzies. One had bitten off its own fingers in a last-ditch attempt to arrest its writings, mutilated digits squirting blood and lubricant feebly across the imprint wafers it perched over, stylus clattering to the floor. Had it not been for his impatience to finish translating the eldar text, Severus would have found the entire episode highly comical.

  As it was, the cartouche that had sealed the entrance to the temple-pit had been of negligible value, simply heroic accounts of the warlocks who’d wrought the warp prison and their leader, Farseer Jur Telissa. Severus often found himself dreaming at night of th
e fluted psych-helm of the alien sorcerer, enjoying the sensation of obliterating the figure’s pale, serene features in an imaginative variety of ways. On those nights he awoke in disappointment, knowing that Telissa was far, far beyond his vengeful reach and feeling somehow, strangely, as though the bitterness and anger weren’t his own.

  Still, the sensation of a second voice in his mind had become an entirely routine phenomenon over the years, a manifestation — he had long ago assumed — of his innermost instincts and desires. He recalled wondering briefly — years ago — whether everyone enjoyed the same inner monologue of lusts and ambitions, like a whispered mantra in their skulls, then decided quickly that he didn’t give a grox’s-arse what anyone else felt or thought. He was above that.

  If the cartouche was of little practical use, then at the very least it had awoken within him an interest, a grim appeal to study and unravel the legend of Tarkh’ax which, through the years, manifested with burgeoning strength until he’d plundered every resource; collected a secret library of material including even a skin-bound copy of the Liber Maelignicus; opened paths of communication with black astropaths across the galaxy that left his own message-dispatching psykers gibbering and deranged; and made contact with every dubious cult and coven within the system. At some point academic interest became professional obsession, and without even recalling the moment that spiritual inertia had been overcome, he was plunging headlong towards realigning his worship and becoming deeply embroiled in the plan to release Tarkh’ax from his torment. The eldar, it transpired, had overestimated the morality of Dolumar’s eventual settlers.

  He returned his mind to the present.

  The cowled things to either side of him, twisted forms only vaguely suggested by the awkward shadows of their robes, continued their chanting without hiatus. If they were aware of his pause, or even of his presence, they gave no indication of it, heads bent downwards and voices thick with the effects of physical mutation. Each one stood upon a major apex of a seven-pointed star— the fifth extremity of which he himself occupied — surrounded by an ocean of inscriptions and runes on the floor.