Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow

by Warhammer 40K

  He heard the dull rattle of a servitor voice in the veteran’s helmet. “Confirm, Sergeant Koris. Your orders?”

  “Encryption protocol omnis maximus. Direction, to the high office of the Lord Commander Dante, Fortress Baal.”

  There was a pause, and for a brief instant Rafen thought he would be discovered. What he was doing now would be grounds for extreme sanction, at the very least. “Ready to transmit, Sergeant Koris,” came the voice. “Begin.”

  Rafen took one last moment to ensure that no one could see or hear him, and then he took a deep breath, tasting the ashen remains of the dead on his lips. “My Lord Dante, I must inform you of recent circumstances on the worlds of Cybele and Shenlong, and aboard your servant starship the Bellus.” Crouched over the corpse of his mentor, Rafen began to recount the turn of events that had brought him to doubt his faith itself, in urgent and hushed tones.

  Perhaps the astropath who carried his message was truly ignorant of Rafen’s deception, or perhaps he chose to send it anyway in some small act of defiance for the killing of Horin. Whatever the motive, the Marine’s imperative issued forth unchallenged into the void and raced away along invisible lines of telepathic force, leaping from beacon-mind to relay-psyker, and crossing the galaxy toward the Blood Angels’ monastery holdfast on Baal.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They came from everywhere: from hideaways in the warehouses, from inside inert furnaces and the basements of a thousand tenements. The people of Shenlong emerged into the light of the dawn blinking away tears and raising their hands in supplication. They had been delivered from the defiance of the Chaos demagogues that had stalked their streets promising them only death. The Emperor’s gaze had seen their predicament. He had answered the prayers they had whispered in the ruins of blasted churches. He had sent the Blood Angels to end the Word Bearers’ invasion with devout fire.

  Others did not rejoice. There were those who had been quick to accept the word of Lorgar, the ones who had torn down the icons of the Imperium and swiftly built Word Bearer temples in their place. These Shenlongi found themselves ripped from their beds and hung from the monorails, or thrown into the foundry flame-pits to choke on sheaves of infernal propaganda. Blood continued to flow in the ashen, rust-marked city zones, and old rivalries blossomed under cover of the liberation.

  Stele observed much of this from his vantage point on the plaza’s edge. The segment of the planet visible to him was a writhing microcosm of all of Shenlong. Word had spread quickly of Arkio’s deeds and since first light civilians had been arriving in ragged packs to see the Blood Angels with their own eyes. And the warrior who held the golden Spear. The inquisitor turned as the Marine approached him; even before he heard Arkio’s footfalls he could sense the humming power of the holy lance draw near. Stele’s gaze, like everyone else’s, was drawn first to the weapon, and then to the man who gripped it in his fist. The inquisitor had been the first human to touch the Spear of Telesto in centuries; he had torn it out of the claws of the ork warlord that stole it. The decerebrate beast had not even the slightest inkling of what the blade could do, only that it had value. Perhaps, if it had possessed a smidgeon of true intellect, the barbaric animal would never have dared to take it. But it had, and with the action, Stele’s intricate, clockwork plans had been set in motion.

  Still, the archeotech device had never revealed itself to him as it had to the Marine. Stele smothered a surge of jealousy. The spear might have kept its secrets, but it would still serve him. In fact, it would be a far better tool in Arkio’s hands than in his.

  The people who had made their pilgrimage to see the blessed one parted before Arkio like scythed corn. They were dazzled by the weapon’s radiance even in quietude. How typical of the Imperial citizenry, Stele reflected, So desperate in their bleak little lives that they accept any ray of divinity that shines upon them. He would make good use of that when the time came.

  “Lord,” said Arkio and nodded. He did not avert his gaze from the inquisitor’s eyes. Already, the potency of the weapon was manifesting through him in subtle, arrogant ways. I chose well, Stele told himself.

  “Comrade Brother Arkio. You performed flawlessly. Truly, you are the vessel for the power of Sanguinius.”

  Arkio seemed weary. “In his name and in the Emperor’s. I only hope it was enough…” He glanced at the pilgrims, who shied away under such scrutiny. As an Adeptus Astartes, Arkio was conditioned to expect lesser men to fear him as one of the Emperor’s chosen, but the veneration these people showed was something else. It was something deeper and more primal. “Why do they watch me so?”

  Stele glanced at Sachiel as he approached. “It is my estimation that nothing as magnificent as the spear has ever been seen on Shenlong. These commoners see the radiance of the Golden Throne caught in the blade’s light. Is it any wonder they grovel before it?”

  Arkio studied the spear. It was dormant, but still it cast a directionless, honeyed glow. Gently, he returned it to the case brought forth by Stele’s servitors and closed the lid. As the container closed over it, a sense of uncanny warmth faded from the air and Arkio’s brow furrowed.

  Sachiel was animated. The Sanguinary Priest was wound tight with energy. His face was florid with delight. “I had never dreamed, in all my life that I would be witness to something such as this! Arkio, you prove the blessing for all to see!”

  “Aye.” The Blood Angel was introspective and sullen.

  Sachiel did not appear to notice. “The golden helm of the honour guard fits you well, Arkio! You seem born to it.”

  Arkio removed the headgear and studied it, as if seeing it for the first time. “Perhaps.” His voice grew distant. “I find it unsuitable.”

  “In what way?” Stele prodded gently.

  Watching the distorted vision of his own face in the amber mirror of the helmet, Arkio shook his head. “I have… grown beyond the crimson armour of my servitude. I fee I should greet the world clad in gold, yes?” He looked to Stele for some sort of confirmation, as if the thought had come to him from elsewhere.

  “You would wish to wear armour as our Lord Dante does?” Hesitation crept into Sachiel’s voice. “But…”

  “But what, Sachiel?” said Stele. “You yourself spoke of Arkio’s blessing. Should he not look the part if he is touched by grace?”

  The moment of doubt fled the priest’s face. The thought that such deeds might be sacrilegious lasted for less than a heartbeat. Sachiel smiled and addressed the other Blood Angels and any civilians in earshot. “You will be able to say you were here on Shenlong when Arkio the Blessed liberated the Ikari fortress! Today we walk on the pages of history!”

  “History?” Arkio’s voice was a sneer. “Today we walk on the ashes of the dead, the corpses of fallen heretics.” He looked across at Stele. “I have liberated nothing!”

  “You won a victory, lad,” said the inquisitor. “You, and your brothers.”

  A sudden, livid flare of anger broke over Arkio’s face. “There is no victory over the Word Bearers without extinction! Their Dark Apostle fled the field. I saw it with my own eyes! How can we lay claim to this world if that viper slithers in its streets? Answer me that!”

  Stele toyed with the purity stud in his ear. “Iskavan the Hated still lives and Arkio is correct. Shenlong will know no peace until we unite it under the banner of Sanguinius and kill every last Traitor.”

  “It is their way,” the Blood Angel added. “They turn worlds to their black cause and poison their peoples. If we do not drive them out now, we may never have the chance again… Less we raze this planet and be done with it.”

  Sachiel gasped at such a suggestion. “We came to return Shenlong to the bosom of the Imperium, not destroy it!”

  “Then what do you propose, high priest?” Arkio asked, and all trace of the Marine’s hesitance was gone. “That we wait and allow them to regroup for a counter-attack? We must not forget what we learned on Cybele.”

  The Bl
ood Angel absently stroked at a panel of his white and red armour, the bone-coloured sections were daubed with splashes of enemy gore. “Yes… Yes, you are correct.”

  “We must follow the path laid for us,” said Stele. The inquisitor was about to say more, but a cold breeze stiffened the air about him. From orbit, his personal astropath Ulan sent an impression of urgency and concern, a psychic summons. He forced a flat smile. “Brothers, I’m afraid I must return to the Bellus immediately. A matter of some importance requires my attention.” He signalled to the servitors to accompany him with the spear.

  “No,” said Arkio, without looking to see if his command was obeyed. “The holy lance should remain close to me.”

  Stele’s flicker of annoyance went unseen. “Quite so. How foolish of me to suggest otherwise.” The inquisitor revised his estimation of Arkio again; he had expected such defiance to manifest, but not so soon. But it would not suit his plans to countermand the Marine in front of his battle-brothers. Better to let them believe that Arkio held authority over the weapon. Stele strode past Sachiel and threw a compelling glare at the priest. “I will return as quickly as I can.”

  One of the veteran sergeants approached Sachiel and bowed as the inquisitor vanished into the ashen mists. “Eminence, what are your orders?”

  Sachiel gave him a brief nod and the priest indicated the fortress. “Sweep the tower and locate a suitable base for an operations centre—”

  “Perhaps we will require a chapel as well,” said Arkio, offhandedly.

  “—and a chapel as well,” finished Sachiel.

  In the web of sewer tunnels and decrepit flood chambers beneath the manufactory, the Word Bearers walked in silence. They moved in tight lines through pools of tainted, cadmium-laced water and trickles of thin oil that leaked from machines above. Here and there among the groups were packs of feral daemon predators, furies and flesh hounds that lowed, their animal intellects too dull to comprehend what had happened. Falkir followed in the footsteps of Iskavan, with only the Dark Apostle’s back for company, as he led them deeper into the network of tunnels. The warlord was heedless of direction; he seemed to take turns at random. The only sounds were the constant footfalls of their boots across the flowing effluent and the faint hum of Iskavan’s unquiet crozius.

  Falkir wanted to question the Apostle, to seek some sense of his plan, but the first Word Bearer that had dared to speak to Iskavan had found eightfold blades buried in his neck, sucking the black blood from him. The Castellan nursed his anger. He had made a good show of his capture of Shenlong, and the forge world was well on the way to becoming a stronghold for Chaos before the Dirge Eterna had arrived. Temples and cursed monuments had sprouted across the planet, forced indoctrinations were taking place everywhere, and Falkir had dared to allow himself a moment of pride. But barely a day had passed since Iskavan the Hated had set foot on the world that Falkir had claimed, and now the Word Bearers were routed, driven into the tunnels by the Blood Angels and that weapon. His hand closed on his chain axe and the Castellan considered burying it in the Apostle’s skull.

  Iskavan came to a halt and turned. Falkir was startled. Had the warlord sensed his disloyal thoughts?

  “This will suffice.” The Apostle gestured ahead with the crozius toward a large open flood chamber, pitted with rust and slurry. It was large enough to hold a thousand men, but Falkir found himself wondering whether there was even a fraction of that number of Word Bearers still alive. “We hold here. Send scouts to locate any other survivors and regroup.”

  “Your will.” Falkir replied tersely.

  Iskavan eyed him. “You have something to say to me?”

  Falkir teetered on the edge of open rebellion, and it was only with a supreme effort of will that he kept himself from decrying the Apostle as a fool. “No, Great One. I am merely… fatigued.”

  The Word Bearer warlord snorted. “You are a poor liar.” He hefted the crozius. “Search for nine humans. Gather them and bring them here, unharmed.”

  “What purpose will that serve?”

  Iskavan replied, but he seemed to be speaking to himself more than Falkir. “My laxity toward Tancred has cost me dearly, and now I pay the price. His vision was a lie…” The Apostle stroked the weapon. “I shall cast for my own. I will summon judgement for these Astartes filth. I will bring forth a bloodthirster and pay them back in kind.”

  Ulan was waiting for him when he docked at Bellus’s secure airlock. The discreet hatch was a fixture on all Imperial ships above a certain tonnage, regardless of their shipyard or force of origin. Uniquely coded to protein-chain code strings implanted in the skin of inquisitors and their agents, the so-called secret gates could only be opened by those sanctioned by the ordos—or those with a plasma torch and several days to waste. The secure hatch allowed men like Stele to come and go at will, without clearance from a vessel’s main docking pulpit. The inquisitor had barely used the gate on Bellus, however. He made it a point to mingle with the Blood Angels to earn their trust and respect An inquisitor who skulked forever in hidden chambers aboard ship would soon arouse suspicion in even the slowest of minds.

  But now expediency overrode his carefully constructed appearance of congeniality. His astropath rose to her feet and the hood about her head slipped back a way to reveal a scalp as hairless as his, ringed with an intricate brass circlet. Ulan was a failed experiment that Stele had rescued from an ordos laboratory. She was a psyker tool with a strong, if erratic, ability. The ornate device about her head held her power at bay until he had need of it.

  “Speak,” he demanded. The jumble of emotional cues the astropath had sent him earlier made it clear that it would have to be relayed in clumsy words, not the strident colours of her mind-speech.

  She kept pace with him as they walked along the isolated tunnel that led directly to his sanctum. “Honoured lord, in the ninth hour I sensed a taint, a backwash, a touch in the empyrean. The echo of a message.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Another signal from Baal, so soon?”

  “Not from Baal, lord. To Baal. Sent from this ship.”

  “What?” Stele’s face tightened with sudden anger. “Who broadcast it? What was the message?”

  “I know not. The ship’s telepathic choir detests me, eminence, and they do not allow me to commune with them in the mindscape of the warp. It was only my chance sense of the echo that alerted me to this occurrence.”

  The inquisitor’s nose wrinkled as if he had smelt something foul. “Bring them to me, every one of Ideon’s astropaths!”

  Reaching the iris hatch, Ulan’s dead face contorted in the rictus that was her version of a smile. “If it pleases the lord inquisitor, I anticipated your demand.” The woman’s spidery hand worked the hatch control and Stele entered his chambers. There before him were the three surviving astropath adepts who until recently had served Bellus under the guidance of the late Master Horin.

  Stele did not need to tell Ulan to lock the hatch behind them. He reached out a hand and pulled down her hood, revealing dead eyes cut from black crystal. The inquisitor touched a sequence of jewelled controls on the mechanical crown about her skull, releasing her to unleash her null gift. She closed her eyes and opened the place inside her psyche that held the mindcloak. Ulan fell to the floor in a heap, twitching and weeping, dying by inches as her aberrant power flooded the room. She would perish if Stele used her in this fashion for too long, but he had brought her close to the brink before and she had always survived it.

  The astropaths all reacted in the same way—with utter shock. Ulan’s ability cast a bubble of void about the chamber, suffocating the application of any metapsychic phenomenon. The duration of the effect would only last as long as poor Ulan could stand it, but in Stele’s experience most psykers folded like decks of tarot cards within moments of being struck psi-blind by her.

  Drawing his lasgun, he wasted no time and spoke to the first astropath. “The signal to Baal. Did it come from the ship? Who sent
it?” The psyker pressed at his face, as if that would somehow summon back his powers. “You all know I killed Horin. Do you wish to join him?”

  The astropath licked corpse-grey lips. “I was in a dormant cycle. I know nothing of—”

  Stele frowned, and fired a point-blank shot. The corpse fell, joining the whimpering Ulan on the floor. Stele shrugged off his battle-coat and with it, any pretence at civility.

  “Talk, witch!” He forced the hot pistol barrel into the fleshy wattles of the next telepath’s neck, relishing the scent of cooking meat.

  The astropath tried and failed to summon help with a mental yelp. And when it was clear that none was forthcoming, it began to whimper. The psyker gave a nod of its jowls to the last of the adepts. “He was the duct. I overheard him.”

  “Good,” said Stele, and pulled the trigger again.

  The last adept was Horin’s protégé, and he tried to cover his terror with a facade of cold indifference. Stele rested the gun on his forehead. “Who sent the message?” He leaned closer and played a guess. “Someone on the surface, yes?” A tiny twitch of the eye answered him as well as any confession. “What was said?”

  One of Ulan’s moans punctured the air and it emboldened the astropath. “Whatever you plan, inquisitor, Lord Dante knows what has transpired. Your machinations will be brought to light.”

  The imperious look on the astropath’s face was enough; Stele shot him. He let the body fall then in a sudden fit of fury he tore a dozen more blasts into the corpse, spitting and cursing the psykers.

  After a while he calmed himself and brought Ulan out of her trance, reactivating the circlet. She was weak and blood issued out of the orifices in her face. Removing a vial of a xenos medicine from a concealed chest, Stele injected it into one of her skull sockets. After a while, she began to recover.