‘Just be ready,’ Lucius replied. ‘We will take the Talon Queen to them and parley. If the end they seek is treachery, be prepared to recover us and fight.’
‘Am I not always?’ Her smile flashed, the debacle at Cadia failing to dim her pride. ‘Master,’ said Clarion after a moment’s silence. ‘You never did answer my question.’
‘It is simple,’ answered Lucius as he strode from the bridge. He stopped as the bulkhead rumbled open to admit him into the corridor beyond, looking back at Clarion over his shoulder. ‘I know that I cannot.’
Every Space Marine of the Cohors Nasicae filed up the assault ramp into the crew bay of the Talon Queen. All save for two, as was always the case when the warband went forth from its ship. The Composer never left the sanctuary of his tower, nor did the Terminator Afilai, the sorcerer’s brutish protector.
In the scarlet light of the Thunderhawk’s innards, the legionaries settled into their restraint thrones. The Rypax crouched in the nose of the gunship, mag-locked to the ceiling and deck plating, ready to leap out at a moment’s notice and redden their talons with an enemy’s blood. Vispyrtilo was at their centre, his spear held in a loose grip, silent and implacable as ever.
Not a single one of the warband’s number stowed their weapons. They were walking into a gathering with those who also once sailed beneath the banner of the III Legion, but those bonds rang hollow in these times. Even if their erstwhile brothers’ intentions were pure, a show of strength was necessary. If their former kin sensed the slightest vulnerability from Lucius’ diminished party, their aims would shift towards blood.
Lucius knew this as an absolute truth. It was exactly what he would have done, had the roles been reversed.
The master of the Cohors Nasicae was the last of the warband to board the Talon Queen. His hooves rang from the assault ramp as he climbed. Instead of locking himself into a throne alongside his warriors in the crew bay, he ascended into the cockpit of the gunship.
Rather than a traditional pilot crew, or a team of specialised servitors, the Talon Queen was controlled by a writhing mass of flesh conjoined with esoteric machines. The bodies, minds and souls of twenty of the III Legion’s finest mortal pilots were fused together into a quivering lump of twitching meat, thrumming clockwork and jerking limbs, combining their skill and the ferocity of their spirits to control the ancient gunship through air and void. The pilots had duelled in sweeping aerial tournaments for such an honour, their apotheosis a gift from Olivaw, hierarch of the Diadem’s delegation from the Dark Mechanicum present aboard since the days of the Legion. The heretek had taken great pride in his creation, though many of the methods and equipment required to bring it about had come from the brother with whom Lucius was soon to be reunited.
Lucius placed a clawed hand upon the oily flesh of the Talon Queen’s pilot, stroking along a marbled seam where one body ended and another began. It shivered at his touch, rippling with uneven gooseflesh as he withdrew his hand with a smile.
‘We go,’ he said, feeling the gunship’s deck shudder immediately as the Thunderhawk’s main engine arrays spooled into roaring life. The gunship rose gracefully from the embarkation deck of the Diadem. Her landing claws sunk back into their oiled housings as she slowly spun to face towards the end of the bay.
Rumbling shutters peeled aside from the wall, revealing the open void across a crackling energy barrier. The noise of the Talon Queen’s engines reached a thunderous crescendo as she blasted forwards, knifing through the energy field and into the freezing black.
The Thunderhawk curled around the hull of the Diadem, rising over her spinal battlements as she vectored towards the other ship. The vessel’s flanks were misshapen and swollen with corruption. Dark flesh and throbbing organs coated her in place of armour. Banks of weapons batteries had morphed into glistening proboscises that crackled with clouds of unclean energies.
A puckered aperture on the ship’s port side wriggled and expanded into a wide sucking maw, roughly rectangular in shape. The Talon Queen pointed her razor beak towards it, and advanced to land.
A wave of dirty static popped and fizzed, washing over the Talon Queen as she passed through the ship’s own energy field and lowered to the deck of the docking bay. The gunship’s assault ramp descended as soon as she came to a halt.
The Rypax disgorged from within the Thunderhawk. Two clawed their way atop the armoured prow of the gunship, while the other three, Vispyrtilo at their head, crouched at the foot of the ramp. Lucius stepped down next, the pittance of his warband following behind him, taking in their surroundings with weapons lowered, but drawn.
A scene of unadulterated horror greeted them. The walls were coated in semi-organic machines, the bare metal scarcely visible beneath the translucent skins of the bizarre, insectile things. Gunships, shuttlecraft and other vehicles were tended to by vat-grown abominations, amorphous creatures that rolled and lumbered and squawked. The deck itself was no longer metal, but rather a flexible chitinous material, like fingernail. In spite of it all, the overwhelming scent of the chamber was the acrid stench of counterseptic.
Amidst the stomach-turning display, Lucius could see nothing he would ever identify as human, let alone any of the Legions.
‘Be on your guard,’ he hissed over the vox. A squealing wretch stumbled past the swordsman’s boot. He gathered the creature up by the scruff of its neck, raising it to his eyes. The miserable thing flailed and cried, thrashing with useless limbs that left a briny translucent slime on Lucius’ war-plate.
The Eternal sneered with disgust, flinging the beast away. It crashed into a stack of cargo containers, its bones snapping as it writhed for a few seconds before voiding itself and growing still.
The boom of a heavy, ponderous tread turned Lucius’ head. A gigantic ape-like beast thumped a scaly fist against its chest, surrounded by a swarm of more of the mewling wretches. It glared down at Lucius with a cluster of beady compound eyes, baring a maw full of yellowed, tusked fangs.
The beast roared, stinking spittle spraying from its lips. The cloud of chattering lesser abominations cringed away from it, their numbers giving them the courage to slowly slink back into the monster’s shadow once its challenge had ceased.
‘Well,’ sighed Lucius as he drew the Laeran Blade, ‘I suppose now this is happening.’
The Cohors Nasicae brought up their own weapons, gripping swords and crunching bolters and needle rifles to shoulder guards. The Rypax hissed, lightning webbing their talons. The beast smashed its fists down against the deck, and leapt forwards to charge.
‘That will be quite enough, my boy.’
The voice stilled the milling squall of abused monstrosities to the closest they were capable of silence. The hulking colossus skidded to a stop, halting its advance immediately and lowering its head down to rest against the deck in submission.
A figure appeared from behind it, strolling casually through the sea of its deviant creations, which drew away or carpeted the deck beneath his boots to form his path. Ancient power armour that still bore traces of III Legion purple beneath a coat of flayed faces sparked and groaned with disrepair, yet the whirring arachnoid limbs of his chirurgeon backpack, ending in blades, surgical bonesaws and other cruel, less identifiable instruments, gleamed in the light with fresh oils, maintained with the utmost care and attention.
He approached bareheaded, an emaciated husk of a skull topped with wisps of stringy white hair. His face was sharp and gaunt, the same cruel face from the astropathic message Lucius had received. The figure patted the head of his monster with a paternal tenderness completely at odds with the lunatic’s haven he had built for himself, and looked at Lucius with eyes the Eternal knew all too well.
‘Well met, Lucius,’ said Fabius Bile, former Chief Apothecary of the Emperor’s Children and now the master of the Consortium of the Primogenitor. He favoured Lucius with one of the rarest gifts he had the p
ower to give in the entire galaxy.
A smile.
‘I have been expecting you.’
II.VI
The chamber was humid, and shrouded in soft amber light. At its centre, the pod hung in twitching repose, flanked by banks of thrumming, arcane machinery. Beyond the devices’ whirring bulk stood cylinders of crystal and armourglass. The medical pods were filled with twisted things that hung and thrashed in baths of milky amniotic fluids. Their forms appeared in half-glimpsed snatches out of the alchemical slurry sloshing within the caskets, revealing malformed limbs with extra joints, skin ridged with chitinous crests, and slack faces that stared out with too many eyes, or none at all.
Unlike the caskets on either side of it, the pod was flesh, of a kind. The glistening pinkish oval was marbled with dark networks of injection tubes and synthetic vein networks that joined it with the machines surrounding it. The pod twitched gently, its surface taut as a drum skin. It sweated and shivered, heat rolling from it as steam that coiled and billowed away into the air of the chamber, adding to the humidity.
An indistinct form was locked away beneath the skin, curled in foetal silence. It slept and grew, the same as it had every day since its conception. It was still, beyond irregular tics and spasms, like a child in a restless slumber. But today, its stillness ended.
The impression of short, slender fingers pressed against the skin of the pod, straining against its surface. Another hand joined it soon after, running along the inner wall. The barrier flexed, eliciting muted squeals as the fleshy material stretched.
A pinprick of oily fluid welled at the tip of one of the fingers as it breached the skin, trailing a brackish tear down the pod. The trickle became a stream, became a gushing flood as fingertips hooked around the small puncture in the pod and pulled it wider. The sound of wet sackcloth tearing filled the chamber as the pod ripped open, releasing a torrent of biological slime and the pale shuddering figure that was swept down with it onto the deck.
Klaxons gave voice to shrill alarms as diagnostic monitors lost the subject of their care. Banks of viewscreens stuttered to life, displaying the creature from multiple angles via security recorders as it shivered and struggled to breathe. Small insectile things scampered over the walls, keeping their distance as they examined the creature with clusters of compound augmetic eyes.
The newborn thing arched its back, trembling as it purged its airway of amniotic ooze in greasy mouthfuls of slime. For the first time in its life, it took a deep, wet breath beyond the womb of its creation. It drew in the cold, antiseptic air of the chamber, and spent the next minute violently coughing as lungs that had never functioned before fought to process the creature’s surroundings.
In time, after several such fits that left it exhausted and lightheaded upon the deck, the creature began to breathe normally. Such an achievement widened its focus, and soon the noise, the cold and the darkness filled its burgeoning mind with discomfort.
The creature whimpered softly, blind and unable to understand the blaring sounds filling the air. It flexed its fingers, working loose the amniotic afterbirth that clung to its flesh and had coagulated into a stiff, rubbery gel. Nervous hands quested out over the floor, finally pressing down onto its cold iron plates as the creature sought to rise.
The surface of the deck, slick with mucus and nutrient gruel, robbed the creature of traction, and it crashed down in a tangle of pale limbs. Pain stung its flesh, worse than the cold, and it cried out to the blackness, alone and afraid. After several moments passed, it swallowed, and tried again.
Three more attempts met with similar failure, before at last, after evenly distributing its weight across its hands and knees, it was able to rise to all fours. With a concerted effort, it pushed itself to its knees, holding its arms out reflexively for balance. Its head twitched from side to side, the face of a child obscured by a gelled mask of silver-white hair.
The child felt the distinct impression that he was being watched by countless eyes, though he had yet to open his own. He sank back on his heels, and brought his hands to his face. He clawed at the soaked mass of hair, scraping it back across his scalp. Light teased at him through eyelids gummed closed by filth.
Gooseflesh rippled across his lithe musculature. Again the feeling of being watched by a presence just out of reach crept up the child’s spine with icy claws. He dug his fingers into the slime encrusting his face.
If he could just open his eyes.
Finally, the sludge gluing the child’s eyes shut cracked. The scales of rubbery slime fell away and he looked up, seeing light and the world for the first time.
A sudden weight smashed into the child’s back, sending him crashing to the deck. The weight increased as it stomped down, pinning him. Bubbling mouthfuls of froth slithered from his mouth, muffling his voice as he cried out against the pain.
The child watched a presence materialise from the shadows, stepping forwards to advance upon his attacker. The sick feeling of paternal recognition surfaced unbidden in the child’s mind, and he reached a clumsy, anaemic hand out in its direction.
‘No more!’ The child’s attacker bellowed from above him, a warrior levelling a silver blade at the other figure. The blade shone despite the dark, hurting the child’s eyes as he looked upon it. The hunched form of the child’s creator took another step towards them, fully emerging from the shadow. He paused for several heartbeats, staring at the warrior, before a rattling sigh of bitter acceptance hissed from his scowl.
‘I knew he would send you,’ said the creator. ‘As he had before. The eager sycophant. You were always so desperate to please him.’
The child writhed beneath the warrior’s boot, but his assailant’s eyes, and the radiant sword, remained unmoving.
‘And what would that make you?’ the warrior sneered. ‘You, who ignores his law? You believe that you can defy him, time and again, and not pay the price for it?’
The warrior looked down. The child coughed, clearing enough of the amniotic fluid from his lungs to loose a cry so pure, so heart-achingly beautiful, so like that of their father, that a single tear of blood slid down the warrior’s face.
He looked back up at the creator. Anger, disgust and sick pride mingled and burned in his eyes. ‘I am that price, Fabius.’
Fabius Bile gave another death-rattle sigh. ‘There are times when I truly regret saving you, Lucius.’
The warrior, the one the child’s creator had called Lucius, would not be goaded. ‘Our father forbade this.’ He glared down at the child. ‘This madness. You knew he would discover it again, and you knew what he would do. Did you truly believe he would not send me, as he has before? Did you truly believe you would not arouse his wrath with this incessant blasphemy?’
Fabius remained silent for a moment.
‘Sometimes,’ he mused, ‘I consider whether the Emperor hated the primarchs the way that Fulgrim hates us.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ countered Lucius. ‘Our father does not hate us.’
Fabius gave a dry chuckle, barely above a gasp. ‘Of course he does. From afar, you feel the lie of his warmth, the false affection you all so urgently crave. And he gives it to you, but always from pity. You are his champion, yet still you cannot see it? You will never be as close to him as I was. You never see the way he really looks at us.’
Lucius blinked, an unwelcome shiver of instinct creeping up his spine. He could not help but sense other eyes upon him, as if their father were there with them at that very moment. Fabius pressed forwards.
‘Never seeing the wonders we wrought, only the limitations. Not our triumphs, just our flaws. He hates us, Lucius, because to Fulgrim, we are not his sons. We are a mirror, holding up an image before him that he can never do anything other than hate. We are his own failure made manifest, the miscarriage that comes about when a father tries to mould his children into something better than himself.’
Fabius scowled as he levelled a finger at Lucius. ‘And you fools have proven him right at every opportunity. You, as you collapse into existences whored away in worship to alien intellects and devoted to nothing more than satisfying your base, devolved appetites.’
Fabius stepped closer, nearly touching his throat to the tip of Lucius’ blade. ‘But I can succeed where all the others, even our father, have failed. I can create something new, Lucius, something better. Something that will survive the cataclysms that are sure to come, and rise from the ash to rebuild the galaxy anew.’
Silence stretched for a handful of heartbeats. Lucius studied Fabius, his lacerated face grim and devoid of the sadism that had so completely come to define him. Slowly, the former Chief Apothecary of the III Legion reached out, placing his hand over Lucius’ blade.
‘It’s enough,’ Fabius whispered. ‘Our future does not have to continue down the path we have been walking. I have found another way.’
Gently, he pressed his hand down. The tip of the sword lowered. Fabius grinned.
Lucius searched his brother’s eyes, before shoving him back. A cruel glee crept across his face.
‘There is no other way than mine.’
Anger soured Fabius. He gestured to the mewling clone of Fulgrim pinned to the deck by Lucius. ‘See what I have done.’ Fire ignited in the sunken pits of his eyes. ‘See it! Witness it and know that this is only the beginning.’
‘No, Fabius,’ smiled Lucius, gripping the blade in both hands as he drove it down into the deck. The cries of their father’s clone cut out abruptly as his head rolled from his shoulders in a twist of matted platinum hair. Fabius’ grin turned to ashes as his finest achievement stared unblinking up at him, spilling out its life onto the iron plates at their feet.
‘This is where it ends.’
Lucius blinked away the memory, pushing the past from his mind. Indeterminate centuries had passed since that night, when he had still carried out the mandates of Fulgrim as his champion. Before the primarch had chosen to ascend into the great game with his brothers, and abandon his Legion.
Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 14