The Bellus was solely his responsibility now, and he extended himself into the ship’s systems. His mind embraced the warship’s machine ghost like a trusted comrade-at-arms.
The rudimentary spirit of Bellus knew Ideon well and it welcomed him in, letting the Blood Angel move his consciousness from the fleshy form connected to the bridge throne deep into the barge’s command pathways. Ideon’s psyche sent out impulses that might normally have made fingers or toes flex gently; instead, they made etheric rudders twitch and retro-rockets spit in readiness.
From a great distance, he heard his own synthetic voice issue out from a throat voxcoder. “Set condition one throughout the ship, special alert status. All exterior running lights are to be doused. All hatches sealed. All zero critical systems are to be quiescent.”
“Confirmed,” Ideon was aware of his aide, the veteran sergeant Solus, as the Marine read the ship’s status from a pict-plate. “Silent running.”
Irritation underlined Solus’ words, and Ideon felt a swell of sympathy. Like every Blood Angel on board, Ideon’s heart raced at the prospect of action, and the stealthy, slow approach they were now forced to make chafed at him. Ingrained in every one of them was the appetite for combat—not the distant, ranged affair of some warfare, but the immediate thunder of close quarter fighting. Blood Angels lived for the scent of the foe’s open veins, the scream of the dying enemy and the hot rush of power that came from watching them perish, and feeling the blow of their last breath. Ideon knew that some of this brethren pitied him. They saw the crippled old warhorse bolted into his command chair, never to stand again or to rip the unholy apart with his bare hands. But here, in a sacred symbiosis with the Bellus, Ideon still knew the delirious, giddy rage of bloodlust—only now, his hands were energy lances and his fangs the fusion torpedoes eager in their launch tubes. When Bellus killed an enemy vessel, Ideon knew it as if it were he that cracked open the hull and sucked the adversary’s life into the void.
Sensing itself in his thoughts, the battle barge’s machine spirit growled softly at the edges of the captain’s mind. It too was impatient at such slow progress. Ideon calmed it as he did his own anger: he forced the need away. With the hundredfold eyes of the Bellus’s servitors, he watched the broken fuselage of a frigate drift past, bereft of life where some imprudent officer had let zeal outstrip intellect. Such a fate would befall Bellus if Ideon’s control slipped, even for a moment.
The mines were never still. As one, the huge flock of spheres rotated with Shenlong’s day and night cycle, gradually moving to remain equidistant to one another. An elaborate cognitive engine on the planet below monitored the weapons constantly, so Stele had said, and it randomly generated tubes of open space within the field to allow ships safe passage from orbit to surface, in order that Shenlong’s contribution to the Imperial war effort be maintained. But the cargo lighters that carried the tonnage of krak missiles, fusion charges and the giant Atlas- and Proteus-class warheads were either grounded or destroyed, and the manufactory’s mighty engines of creation were silent down there. Perhaps the Traitors intended to ransack Shenlong and steal every bomb and bullet upon it, or perhaps they wished to make the forge world their own; Ideon cared not. For now, his mind was engaged in the singular task of bringing Bellus to operational range of the surface. That this world had once been a shining jewel in the Imperium’s industrial crown was of no concern; Shenlong belonged to the Word Bearers now, and they had stained it black with their profane presence.
He was dimly aware of someone entering the command sanctum, and the Bellus obediently showed him a display of the upper tier. He saw his own body there, at rest in the throne as if in a light doze, Solus to his right. Then Inquisitor Stele came into view, accompanied by his lexmechanic and the ever-present servo skulls.
“Grave news, brother-captain.” Stele began, his face a grim mask. “The astropath Horin is no more. He fell from the Emperor’s light and forced his death upon me.”
“Horin?” Solus grated. “He has served this ship for three centuries!”
“How did it occur?” Ideon asked. His face remained immobile, but mentally he frowned. This was not a matter he wished to address while gently directing the helm-servitors on the course ahead. He turned a degree of his attention to the bridge and away from the ship’s navigation.
Stele described Horin’s falsification of a signal from Baal as an excuse to gain access to the inquisitor. He told of his sudden attack, and the astropath’s death at the hands of the Marines. “I took it upon myself to examine his body,” he finished, “and I found this.” Stele displayed a glass cylinder, within which floated a fat maggot nesting inside a diseased black organ. “In his heart is the pupae variety of some poisonous daemon. I suspect that it may have formed within him over a long period of time.” He held the jar close to his face. In truth, the corrupted flesh it contained had never been anywhere near Horin; it had been harvested instead from the corpse of the dead Chaos Marine Noro. This small piece of theatre would allow Stele to affirm his killing of the astropath.
“Have that pestilent object destroyed at once!” Ideon’s voice snapped with static. “Jettison it into the void, but I will not have such foulness aboard Bellus!”
“Your will, brother-captain.” Stele agreed. “I will attend to it.”
The inquisitor’s words had barely left his mouth before one of the servitors droned out a warning. “Collision alert. Incoming, port quarter, upper deck.”
Ideon resisted the urge to curse his luck and forced a hard turn from the rudder. The. Bellus showed him the object, a lone mine drifting silently toward the battle barge’s prow. The inquisitor’s arrival had been enough to divert his attention for a crucial second. Now the warship was within strike range of the weapon.
“Stand aside!” Solus yelled, anticipating the captain’s next command, and Stele obeyed. Although the inquisitor held sway over the mission of the Bellus, Ideon was still the ship’s commanding officer and in matters such as this, the superior voice.
As large as it was, and even with full reverse thrust the battle barge would take long minutes to negate its forward speed and come to a halt—and such an action would register like a flare on the sensor webs of the other mines. His dour face unchanging, Ideon ordered the helm-servitor to alter course and turn Bellus toward the approaching mine.
The ship’s machine spirit quarrelled and snarled, railing at Ideon for such a suicidal action. Now the device was seconds away from impacting the hull and nothing would stop it. The captain saw Solus’ knuckles turn white where he gripped a stanchion. The mindless servitor continued to obey, and Bellus presented her hammerhead bow to the bomb. There was a moment when it seemed that Stele was about to say something; then Ideon felt a dull ring from the ship’s outermost extremity.
“Impact,” the servitor reported tonelessly. “No detonation.”
“How did you know?” Stele asked, a half-smile playing on his lips.
Ideon’s body did not move, but the ersatz voice from his voxcoder belied his relief. “I served aboard the strike cruiser Fidelis at Armageddon. She was a mine-layer, among other things, and in my duties I learnt the limitations of that weapon.” He activated the holosphere, displaying the schematic of a mine. “It is my understanding that Shenlong-pattern warheads have a delayed fusing mechanism. I closed the distance to ensure that the mine did not have time to arm itself before it struck the ship, so it did not explode.” There was a sound like a sigh. “Such a tactic will not work twice, though. We were lucky… I estimated our success at only one chance in ten.”
“Sanguinius protects,” said Stele.
Sergeant Solus studied the new data as it scrolled across his pict-plate in thin lines of high gothic. “Brother-captain, the mine… It did not disintegrate when it struck us. The device remains lodged in the outer hull.”
“Dispatch a tech-adept to ascertain the weapon’s status.” Ideon replied. “Horin and that creature… There have been
enough unpleasant surprises this day. I’ll not brook another.”
Solus nodded. “I will send Brother Lucion.”
“He may need assistance,” the inquisitor broke in. “Perhaps Brother Rafen should accompany him?”
Solus looked to Ideon and the captain’s voice hissed from the speaker on his throat. “So ordered.”
With careful deliberation, Rafen placed his metal-shod feet on the exterior hull of the battle barge, one step after another. He was alert for the hollow thump as the magnetic adhesion pads in his armour held fast. A few feet ahead of him, Techmarine Lucion ambled easily across the ship’s fuselage as if it were second nature to him.
And indeed, it probably was. Rafen’s years of fighting experience as a Blood Angel had taken him to dozens of different environments, from ice worlds like Tartarus to the Zaou marshlands, but his company had fought in the vacuum of space on rare occasions. Lucion, by comparison, had been billeted aboard Bellus since his passage from initiate status, and he knew the outside of the massive battle barge as well as the corridors within it. Rafen listened to the echo of his own breathing and warily followed the Techmarine. Something about the dead silence of space unnerved him and made him feel vulnerable; he preferred to walk in places where the sound of an enemy’s approach could be heard.
The Techmarine’s gait was that of an experienced spacer, he reflected. Every one of the machine-adepts that served the Adeptus Astartes seemed a breed apart in many things, not just such small details as this. While his power armour was no more powerful, Lucion seemed to be able to move more easily in it, and Rafen found himself wondering if the Techmarines used their superior skills with such things to enhance and alter their own wargear.
Indeed, Lucion’s armour was already heavily modified as that of all his kindred were; from the backpack power unit that supplied energy to the sealed suit, the tech-brother sported the folded metal sculpture of a servo-arm. Collapsed now, the additional limb ended in a deceptively large gripper, which the adept could operate like an extension of his body. Rafen had seen Techmarines use the devices to tear bolts from a stuck land raider hatch or to manipulate eggshell thin circuit plates. Not for the first time, he considered the rumours that shrouded the way of the tech-adepts. Some said that during their apprenticeship to the Adeptus Mechanicus they were altered in some fashion, their loyalties split from their mother Chapter. Did the quiet, affable Lucion conceal some other agenda? Rafen shook the thought away, dismissing it; recent events were making him see contrivance in everything around him.
“Hail, Brother Rafen.” Lucion called over the vox. “To the starboard, do you see it?”
Rafen followed Lucion’s outstretched hand and saw the distended sphere embedded in the fuselage. “Is it active?”
“Let us pray not.”
They approached the weapon and Rafen kept a respectful distance from the device. Lucion threw him a look and beckoned him closer. “It won’t bite, brother.”
Rafen was not so sure, but he stepped over all the same. In the silence, the Techmarine’s servo arm quivered into life, opening to its full length. With all three of his limbs, Lucion made a complicated sign in the space above the device, and Rafen caught the faint whisper of a secret litany in his ear-bead. With deft, economical movements, the adept set to work removing rune-engraved screws from the mine’s outer casing, placing each one in a drawstring bag tethered to his waist so that they would not float away in the zero gravity. “Maintain a close watch,” said Lucion, his helmet inches away from the blackened exterior of the mine. “If I am distracted by some enemy, we may both die because of it.”
In actual fact, it was highly unlikely that the Traitors even knew that Bellus was here. And it was even less likely that they knew what was transpiring on her hull—but the sacred edicts laid down in the ashes of the Heresy epoch, committed to the codex Astartes, the Space Marines’ war book of tactics and conduct, demanded that no Marine ever set foot outside an airlock alone. Rafen wondered why he had been chosen to stand guard over Lucion. It was not a task without risk; if the adept made an error or did something else to displease the mine’s machine spirit, their proximity to the resulting detonation would turn them both to wisps of plasma. A sobering thought, he reflected.
The Techmarine’s actions held Rafen’s attentions, but only for a moment. He had never been one to wonder about the intricate working of the machines that powered the might of the Imperium. Beyond his typical training in the maintenance and operation of his weapons, Rafen simply accepted that the Chapter’s technology served him and fulfilled its purpose, just as he did for the Emperor. He had no desire to steep himself in the doctrines of the Machine God, the divergent aspect of the divine regent that the Adeptus Mechanicus paid fealty to. He heard Lucion give a brief prayer of thanks to the Omnissiah as the warhead’s access panel slid open on century-old hinges.
Rafen cast a glance over his shoulder, back along the hull of the Bellus. Dark and dormant, the massive starship seemed less like a vessel ready for battle than a broken piece of pitted landscape, cast off the surface of a world to float as a cold island in the void. The vessel’s angular conning tower rose over the plain of the mid-decks, as broad and threatening as a thunderhead. Not a single sliver of light escaped the shutters sealed over all the windows and vents; nothing betrayed the battle barge’s intent to pour red death on Shenlong’s cursed overlords.
If the dorsal fuselage of Bellus was his point of reference, then Shenlong itself floated like a gargantuan rising moon, slowly advancing up and over the ship. Badelt, the forge world’s actual moon, was invisible from this angle. The vessel’s orbit had been carefully plotted by Ideon’s navigators to ensure that sunlight reflected by the lone natural satellite would not illuminate Bellus in any planetside optical telescopes. Rafen watched the lazy progress of the planet; it was turning into night as it rose, the hazy grey of the Terminator crossing the surface as it banished day. The Blood Angel studied the darkening world and saw the glows of cities engulfed in flames, and the curls of cloud lit from within where tactical nuclear bombs had cut radioactive scars in the earth. Even in the hard light of day, little of Shenlong’s true face could be determined; millennia of combustion and fumes from factory cathedrals as big as nations had long since cloaked the industrial world in dirty smoke.
Rafen felt the familiar twitch in his fingers again. Down there, uncounted numbers of Word Bearers were casting the Emperor’s likeness down in flames, and erecting their own foul temples and tormenting the populace. Even though the rational, logical part of his mind knew that the enemy forces were vastly superior, the passionate energy in his blood boiled for a chance to kill and destroy the Chaos filth. As he and Lucion had made their way to the airlock, both the Blood Angels had sensed anticipation in the atmosphere. All about them, warriors drilled and prepared for combat, or armed themselves. Some were sitting at the feet of battle Chaplains, their heads bowed in war prayers. It was almost a palpable thing, like a faint musk upon the wind. The tethered might of Sanguinius’ bloodlust was straining at the leash to be free, free to unleash a crimson hell on all those who dared oppose the God-Emperor of mankind. Rafen’s lips drew back from his teeth in anticipation, his fangs drawn with predatory desire. It was almost enough to distract him from his deeper, more troubling concerns. Almost.
He looked to the place on Shenlong’s dark surface where, by his rough reckoning, the planet’s capital city stood—and at its heart, the ferrocrete edifice of the Ikari fortress. Rafen had heard tell that the fortress was a twin to any of the great monastery citadels of the Adeptus Astartes, an enormous strongpoint from which Shenlong could be governed. The history books said the Ikari fortress had been inspected by no less than Rogal Dorn himself, the primarch of the Imperial Fists Chapter. Dorn had apparently declared the fortress to be “adequate”, high praise indeed from the dispassionate lord of the Imperium’s greatest siege masters. Rafen’s doubts reasserted themselves, as he understood just how hard the
Blood Angels would be tested to break such a fortification.
He looked away from the planet, and blocked out the misgivings that rumbled at the back of his mind. These distractions were cancer to a member of the Legion Astartes. The smallest seed of a doubt could bloom into hesitation that could cost him his life on the battlefield. The fight for Shenlong would be difficult enough without him letting his concentration go elsewhere. These thoughts played on him as Lucion did something to the mine, and the limpid green glow from within the warhead’s workings faded out to nothing. The Techmarine’s task complete, he stepped back from the inert munition and once more sang a short, quiet litany of thanksgiving. Lucion’s speech was soft in Rafen’s helmet, but he caught the words of respect paid to Sanguinius, to the Machine God—and to his brother.
He spoke Arkio’s name in the same breath as our liege lord and the Emperor. Rafen could hardly believe such a thing. What insanity is this?
Lucion turned to face him, and something about the Techmarine’s body language told Rafen that he knew he had been overheard. “The weapon’s ghost has been silenced,” he said carefully. “It sleeps now.”
“We just leave it there, then?” Rafen was surprised at the annoyance in his own voice. “Lodged in the hull like a tick?”
The Techmarine’s head bobbed. “It cannot explode now, brother. Not even a lightning bolt from the Omnissiah himself could return it to life.”
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 15