“With respect, lord, those orders are open to your interpretation.”
The other Blood Angel frowned. “Captain, this is a direct command from a member of the Ecclesiarchy. We cannot simply ignore it.”
Simeon’s commander ran a hand over his chin; his eyes narrowing. “We risk contamination if we enter the craft,” he said, thinking aloud. “A great hazard.”
“There will be mutants on board,” Simeon added. He knew Tycho well, having served under him for many decades. He could almost see the turn in the captain’s mood as it rolled forth like a storm cloud across the sky. Moments earlier, Tycho had admitted to his distaste at a mission better suited to a picket ship of the Imperial Navy; Simeon did not for a moment believe that the rescue would be a hard sell to his commander. They were Blood Angels, after all. They craved the cut and thrust of close-in action, not this paltry stand-off battle. He pressed the issue a little more. If the vox-casts from the planet are anything to go by, organics and inorganics will be changing into predatory forms. “I would measure me inquisitor’s life span in minutes, lord.” A thin line of amusement pulled at Tycho’s lips, and his hand twitched. There; that was the choice made, then. “Perhaps we should respond. It is only right.” He stood up and strode away from his command dais, Simeon turning to watch him go. “Have a skirmish force of men meet me in the teleportarium. Tell them to arm for a close quarter engagement.”
Brother Simeon took a half step after Tycho. “Captain, there is no need for you to go in person. I would gladly take the—” Tycho silenced him with a look. “There is every reason for me to go.” The eagerness to taste battle, even something as brief as this, danced in the captain’s single human eye. “Tell this Inquisitor that his salvation is on its way.” A slight smile flickered on his lips and was gone. “You have the bridge, Simeon.”
Marain.
She could tell by the weakness of his mind-touch that Ramius was at the limits of his mental reserves. The telepathic message was a ghostly caress, and she almost missed it in the melee. She broke off the neck of a howling, eyeless mutant child with the butt of her gun as she fumbled out a fresh ammunition pack for the weapon. Marain ignored Stele’s entreaty as she reloaded, allowing him to see through her eyes. She gave him freedom to touch her surface thoughts; it was far easier than framing a verbal answer.
Attend me, quickly. The Astartes are coming. Leave these people they are already dead. Her face twisted in a grimace. “Get to the saviour pods!” she yelled at the untainted ones, “Leave everything and go!” Marain bracketed the shambling, warped things with gunfire, but the more she killed, the more they recruited from the ranks of the panicked Orilani. It was a losing fight.
She forced an elderly man into the nearest pod with an angry shout, trying not to dwell on the logic of her actions. Marain’s conviction was fuelled by guilt and responsibility, even as part of her tried to forget that the passengers were just as likely to mutate in the saviour pods as anywhere else. Even if the pods actually launched, what good would it do? Drifting in space, the escapees would suffocate or be shot down, and if by some miracle they made it down to the surface what would be waiting for them but more new kinds of death?
Ramius was still in her head, leafing through her thoughts as if he were thumbing the pages of a book. She showed him her intent to stay, at least until these poor wretches had escaped this death ship. Ramius tugged on her memories, on the threads of loyalty that she had for him; with a savage mental swipe she cut them off, heat building in her cheeks, hot tears prickling her eyes. Marain tasted his shocked understanding as he realised she had rejected her unswerving fealty to him. The guardian’s sense of duty had been outstripped by Stele’s perfidy.
He saw things he had never dared to search for, as she showed him her hidden self, the doubts and fears she had concealed from him. Her training had acquitted itself well, and never once had the Inquisitor suspected that Marain would harbour such ill will toward him. The woman had known all along about the nature of his research, the arcane prohibited experiments that he had been conducting. She had known and said nothing, such was her allegiance her dogged dedication to him.
But now that had changed: Stele had gone too far, and Marain would be silent no longer. He saw her intentions, to reveal him to the Ordo Hereticus, to disclose the whole sorry story of his transgressions. If she lived, she would expose him.
Marain felt him leave her mind in a gust of psychic cold, a melancholy, sad wind fading away.
Ramius staggered with the impact of what he had sensed and bumped into the cabin wail. He felt hollow. Marain, the one unchanging rock in the seas of his doubt, and she had elected to betray him. He shook his head. Could she not understand? He had never intended things to get out of control! He had only wanted to learn, to understand. Was that so hard for her to comprehend? Did the quest for knowledge make him a traitor? He felt sick inside as he realised that for Marain, the answer was yes.
The pilot slumped forward, dying along with his ship. Stele ignored him, ignored the growing wetness in the atmosphere as the shuttle’s metallic slowly turned into fleshy stomachs and stinking gut-chambers. He felt an overwhelming sense of despair that blocked out everything else. Everything was going wrong, and now she rejected him. As quickly as it appeared, the emotion in him became hot anger. How dare she? How dare a mere soldier sit in judgement of Ramius Stele?
That she has been his lover gave her no right to castigate him or his methods. So be it then. She had deserted hint and he would do the same to her. Let her stay on this ruined barge and die with the rest of these unfortunates.
Distracted by his own thoughts, Stele’s attention wandered and he did not see it until it was too late. Vonorof’s twitchy body did something unspeakable and lighting-fast bones snap-cracking as they reversed in their sockets, new lines of mouths opening in fanged maws. The pilot-mutant sprang at him, and Ramius drew back, but there was nowhere to go. The creature’s attack knocked the lasgun from his fingers, and before he could muster a spark of psyker force it was on him, battering his skull against the decking. It screamed and gibbered, words turning into a mush of slurred sound.
Spirals of colour lit behind Ramius’ eyes and the breath left his lungs, blood trickling into his vision. He was dimly aware of something else entering the cramped chamber, something larger and deadly. His mind briefly touched the edge of a cool killer’s intellect.
The chattering mutant reared up, ready to tear out his throat; and just as quickly it exploded in a wet gout of purpled matter.
Ears ringing, his vision tunnelling, Stele barely manage to slide free of the mutant’s steaming torso as a huge figure hove into sight. He wiped contaminated blood from his eyes to see shimmering greaves of brass and crimson filling his vision. Atop the tower of armour was a face that was half pale flesh, half gold mirror. A sneer coiled on the lips of the lofty figure. “Bring him,” it rumbled. “There are others still alive on the lower decks of the lighter.” The second voice came from a red giant standing at the hatchway. “What is to be done, lord?”
“Save what you can,” said the half-face, the words following Ramius into the darkness of unconsciousness. “Cull the rest.”
His mind floated in an ocean of crystal voids, sharp jags of memory and sensation ripping into him, needles of recollection tearing across the inquisitor’s psyche. On some level, he understood that his corporeal body was teetering on the edge of coma and within, his psionic essence was undirected and broken, wandering the caverns of his soul. He sensed the boil and churn of the empyrean out there just beyond the real, the realm of warp space where unknowable things lived. Even as he feared them, there was much of Ramius Stele that coveted the knowledge of these creatures, of how and what they were.
He knew that emotion all too well. It was this drive in him that had brought ruin to Orilan.
There was laughter. Cruel and mocking, amused at his plight. Stele tried to shy away from it, but it found him wherever he hid.<
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“Look what you have wrought,” The words were the breath of corpses. “Do not hide from it, Inquisitor. See it. Know it and own your deeds!”
Against his will. Stele’s mind reeled back to the library once more, forced down through the years to the point where it had all begun.
Always the library, the place where he had first glimpsed the great potential for himself. It had been on Ariyo, after the burning of the Simbasa Heretics; there as the guardsmen put the torch to the storehouse of unhallowed texts, Ramius had dared to read from a volume that fell open at his feet. It had been an accident just a small thing. He had looked, just dared to look. And what he read, glimpsed even…
What he saw there planted seeds of fervent interest nurtured by the radicalism already seated in his heart. As the years passed, as he grew more disenchanted with the decrepitude of the Ecclesiarchy and the lackwits among his superiors, Ramius concealed his disgust while he sought out more forbidden knowledge and plumbed the greater depths of psyker witchery.
“Do you remember the day I spoke to you?” The voice was enthralling just as it had been the first time. “You thought I was a dream. But I was the wind of change upon your limited mind. I opened you, Ramius. You welcomed me.”
Perhaps this was an illusion, he wondered, some product of his injuries. “You know better than that!”
And then he tasted the name of the creature in his mind. Malfallax.
“Yes.” A hot pressure shoved Stele’s memories to the secret chamber beneath the old temple on Orilan. To the place where the death of the world had begun, hours ago now, days past.
“You were unready. Too eager. Look what it brought you.”
The inquisitor watched the events unfold as if he were a passive observer, merely an audience member at some gaudy theatre play; he struggled fruitlessly, as if he could somehow throw a warning back in time to himself not to begin the Rite of Binding. He had made a mistake. It was so clear to him now in retrospect; one single ritual syllable spoken incorrectly, the emphasis on the rising glottal stop instead of the failing fricative…
A small thing. But enough to uncage the Tzeentch-thing he had called to the chamber.
Stele watched it happen again, sensing his tormentor taking amusement from his squirming. He saw himself walk through the drawing of the circle and the eightfold star within. Then, the lengthy and brutal murder of the vagrant to grant the blood sacrament. At last, the coming of the funnel of swarming shadow shaping into form in the middle of the stone basement. His rapt expression of delight—and then the sudden turn to terror as it struck out, metamorphosing the rock and metal into gnashing teeth, ripping out past the feeble wards he had been sure would hold it. Into the city, hungry for sustenance.
Screaming.
Fading.
Free.
Weak denials formed in Ramius’ mind. How could I have known? It was an accident! He had never intended to unleash the thing, only to capture and study the monstrosity so he ought gain insight into the nature of the Change Lord.
Malfallax smiled. “You delude yourself, Stele. Deep in your heart, you wanted to let it go. There is a part of you that hates the old order, the staid and the static. You lust for change and metamorphosis.”
When he tried to find a way to frame a retort, Ramius discovered his thoughts frozen by the damning truth in the warp creature’s words.
“If this is not what you wanted, you could have stepped back from the brink. You chose not to. The willingness to sacrifice the woman is all the proof I require. You want this. You desire to know the way in which Malfallax overpowers you.”
Stele’s psyche recoiled beneath the awful, unstoppable reality. “And with your own longing you make yourself my willing cohort.”
The laughter faded and he let the blood-warm darkness swallow him.
The Blood Angels marched the survivors into the frigate’s launch bay, forcing them into a huddled group in the middle of the deck. Medicae servitors probed and examined them while Space Marines with loaded bolters walked in steady watchful orbits around the poor wretches. They had all expected to die on the shuttle, but to be rescued by these crimson-sheathed giants was like the hand of the God-Emperor himself reaching down to scoop them from the jaws of death. Panic and terror had been replaced with a different breed of fear, one borne of reverence and a lifetime of awe.
A hatch in the wall irised open to admit one of Simeon’s officers, a taciturn codicer in blue armour, his grizzled face lined with age. The Space Marine took a few steps and stumbled to a sudden halt, his jaw dropping open.
One of the Blood Angels guarding the refugees caught sight of his reaction and approached him. “Brother Varon? Is something wrong?”
“Daemon!” Varon suddenly shouted the word, his finger stabbing out at a nondescript woman in a tattered evening dress, rocking gently side-to-side amid the rescued. Corded muscles stood out on the psyker’s neck as his preternatural senses tasted the psychic stench of something monstrous hidden inside the cowl of her flesh.
The other survivors threw themselves aside as the woman sighed, each of them all too familiar by now with the ways of the change.
Her body twitched and deflated, crumbling in on itself. A swarm of black motes issued from her eyes, her nostrils, ears and mouth. The Blood Angels opened fire on reflex, cutting down those too slow to get out of the way, laying a spread of bolt shells into the host-corpse. The dead woman flew apart in wet hanks of fast-decaying flesh, but the dark-thing was already free. It looped around like a streamer of liquid shadow and threw itself at the psyker Space Marine becoming a glistening spear.
Varon marshalled all his ability at once and channelled his Quickening into a mental shield; for an instant he thought it might have been enough.
The force of the daemon’s murderous attack shattered his ephemeral defence like brittle glass, melting into the ceramite armour protecting his chest and tearing him inside out like a long and bloody streamer of meat. The shade came around, trailing Varon’s blood and viscera, and beheaded a screaming Chapter serf with callous abandon, playing with the disorder it was creating.
In the frigate’s chirurgery. Stele bolted awake. He reeled up from the examination table where he lay, scattering trays of instruments and knocking aside the medicae servitors tending.
“It’s here,” he spat, “aboard the ship!”
The shadow-creature warped the flesh of human and Astartes alike murdering them by forcing unholy new shapes from their bodies. Some perished as their bones and organs were forcibly altered into eight-pointed stars and hate glyphs. The daemon enjoyed this recreation, but it was secondary to the real reason it had come this far.
With a breathy sigh, it left its toys behind and the creature gathered up enough sustenance from the shrivelled dead. It surged down the corridors of the frigate painting taint and corruption where it passed. It left a few survivors here and there to speak of what it had wrought; there was no sense in creating such great an if no one lived to witness it.
Down through the deck shunting and flickering dodging through barricades and the hastily-erected psyker wards of Tycho’s librarians, it fell through microscopic cracks in the metal and ceramite tasting power in the air, moving toward it.
In the beating heart of the ship, past the locks made of heavy, poisonous phase-iron and the pitiful spirit deflectors, the shadow at last entered the holy chamber of the frigate’s stardrives.
Tech-priests who had never ventured beyond the confines of the drive core scattered, babbling prayers to the Omnissiah or weeping blood. Enginseers brandished tools as weapons and died screeching where they stood.
The daemon made itself into a vague man-shape and drifted to the huge cylinders of the warp engines, stalking forward on pointed, glassine legs.
Beneath the casings of the mighty drives, technologies almost akin to magic seethed and roiled, great powers capable of remaking the laws of the universe barely held in check by weakling orga
nic men with little comprehension of their true potential. The creature smiled and spread itself thin, touching the matter of the engines and changing them by degrees. Slowly it gathered in flesh and metal, and began to build itself a nest.
Captain Tycho came to him eventually, as Stele knew he would. He watched the sullen light of the floating glow-globes caress the finely-tooled mask across Tycho’s cheek and he wondered about what the Astartes hid beneath it. He had picked rumour and hearsay from the minds of the Chapter helots in the medicae chamber—something vague about a disfigurement caused in combat with an ork psyker. If it were true, then little wonder that the brother-captain hid his mutilation. The aesthetic sensibilities of any Blood Angel would be offended by such a sight. On another day, if Stele were not so fatigued from all that had transpired, he might have been able to pluck the whole story from Tycho’s mind itself; but Ramius was unwilling to risk such an intrusion, not when his life depended on the goodwill of the Sons of Sanguinius.
The captain wasted no time with preamble and fixed him with a hard eye. “What is this monstrosity that has come aboard my ship, inquisitor? Tell me what madness unfolded on Orilan that it could spawn something so aberrant?” His face—what Stele could see of it—was locked in a hard grimace.
Ramius measured his every gesture with the skill and care that had been drilled into him since his days as an interrogator-apprentice. One hint of a lie and he knew he would be vented to space Tycho would be able to do it and claim Stele was consumed by Chaos; he doubted any of the captain’s men would leap to the defence of a servant of the Ordo Hereticus. They respect only brute strength, he reminded himself. I will have to display some measure of that in order to sway them.
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 27