by Guy Haley
‘Don’t know what’s got into you, old man!’ said Gideon as Bolus lunged towards him. He smiled widely. ‘You should calm down. Easy street for a month or so, before we’re back to the front.’
‘Fifteen!’ shouted Bolus. He pawed at the medicae’s faceplate.
‘Stand down!’ shouted the man. His colleague was reaching for a compact webber. It looked to Varens like the medicae were used to this kind of thing. He wasn’t surprised. The sights they’d seen were enough to drive anyone insane.
‘Hey!’ called Varens. He dropped his armour where it was and shoved his way back through the soldiers. A gaggle had stopped to watch, and it made the going tougher on the way back. He carved a path with his elbows.
Bolus had made no move to disrobe or remove his armour.
‘Put your armour and webbing in the green circle, uniforms in the blue!’ one medicae shouted. The webber was out now. Varens was afraid how Bolus would react if he were trapped again.
They grabbed at Bolus hard, making the man twitch and wail.
‘Leave him be!’ shouted Varens. ‘He’s not in his right mind – he’s suffering combat stress. Emperor’s teeth, I thought you were healers! Can’t you see? He’ll be alright soon, if you let him alone. Bolus, Bolus, hey!’
The medicae parted enough to let him near.
‘V-v-varens?’ spluttered Bolus.
‘Yes, my friend, it’s me. Do as the medicae say, do you understand?’
Bolus looked at the medical staff suspiciously.
‘Bolus! Come on, do you get it?’
The medicae still had his compact webber out. Bolus was oblivious to the device.
Hesitantly, Bolus nodded.
‘Strip,’ said the medicae. ‘Armour in the–’
‘Yeah, we get it,’ snapped Varens. ‘I heard you four times already. I’ll help him.’ He interposed himself protectively between his friend and the medic. ‘We’ve been together for the last two years, fighting on Espandor. Where’ve you been?’
‘I don’t have to answer you,’ said one medicae.
‘Here,’ said another one. ‘Only here.’
‘Then you don’t know what we’ve been through. Give him his due. If it weren’t for men like him, you and all this would be nothing but ashes and slime. Plague warriors, Heretic Astartes, the walking Emperor-damned dead – Bolus and I have faced them all, while you’ve been having a fine old time in your rubber suits.’
‘We’re saving lives here,’ said the first medicae. ‘By the grace of the Emperor. We all have our roles to play. We are here to help you, but you both need to be processed. If he won’t cooperate, he won’t make it.’
Varens grabbed Bolus by the shoulder a little too fiercely, making him flinch. ‘This man’s saved my life five times. You have a lot of catching up to do if you think I’ll let him die.’
‘Your choice, trooper.’ The webber came up.
Bolus calmed. Some of what had been said must have sunk in, because he was unclipping his combat webbing. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘No, Varens, no.’ His head jerked hard, barely under control. His armour slithered to the floor in a mess of straps. Mechanically, Bolus undressed.
Varens did the same, watching his friend warily, but no more outbursts came.
Bolus handed over his grubby white uniform. Varens bundled it up with his own. Their bodies, grimy and pale, were exposed to the unkindness of the autumn air.
The medicae finally holstered his webber and passed his auspex over Bolus. It burred to itself, and clunked. A green lumen shone from the top.
‘He’s clean, but keep him calm. This process takes time.’
‘He’ll be alright,’ said the kinder medicae.
‘I understand,’ said Varens. His anger drained away. He was on a hair trigger. Aggression had kept him alive, able to react quickly, effectively. Such an intense state of readiness didn’t suit a place like this. The whole thing felt surreal to him. How could the medicae understand?
The medicae waved his auspex over Varens. ‘What happened to you?’
‘Flesh wound. Got it fighting Heretic Astartes,’ he said flatly. ‘Don’t know how.’
The medicae wasn’t impressed by Varens’ claim. ‘If that’s the case, you should be dead.’
‘Are you calling me a liar?’ said Varens.
‘I’m calling you lucky.’ The auspex made an angry bleat. ‘The wound is infected.’
‘You don’t say,’ said Varens. ‘If a dozen screening processes hadn’t told me that, the burn in the skin does.’
‘The wound looks nastier than it is. It is not serious – the infection can be treated.’ The green light shone, and the medicae took the auspex away. ‘Main tent.’
‘Emperor, we know. We could do with a little empathy here. Get us inside out of the cold, or we’ll catch our deaths. We’re men, not munitions pallets.’
‘You’re not a man until you’ve been checked and triple cleansed, trooper. Until then, you’re a vector of infection that endangers this whole world. Now, keep your friend under control or we’ll have to give him the ultimate sanction.’
‘We’re here for Guilliman’s mercy,’ said Varens.
The medicae laughed behind his mask. ‘Mercy’s in short supply. Dump your kit, and proceed to decontamination.’
The man was already waving his auspex over the next trooper.
‘A disease vector, is that right?’ called Varens after the medicae. ‘I’d check out trooper Gideon, then.’ He pointed out the other man to the medicae. ‘Bolus and I have been fighting the plague lords for so long, he’s developed a nose for disease.’
Varens helped Bolus put his uniform and equipment onto the right piles, then joined the line of shivering men heading into the tents. None of the auxiliaries were in a good way. Without exception, the naked bodies around Varens bore traces of past disease and trauma. A lot of them had passed this way before, as shown by the way they were lining up and doing what was required without being told, stoic throughout. Varens was cold, strung out and exhausted. Only the discipline instilled in him by the auxilia kept him from snapping, and that was close to wearing out.
He still had space for a smile when he heard Gideon cursing and the auspex binging angrily.
‘Ship lice,’ the medicae said. ‘External parasites, nothing serious, get him into tent three, triple-plus decontamination protocols.’
Varens’ turn came. He pushed his way through three sets of plastek strip doors and into the fuggy air of a decontamination chamber. Chemical steam filled his nose and made his eyes water. His wound stung. Whatever awaited Gideon in tent three, Varens hoped it was less fun than this. He deserved it.
‘Fifteen!’ cackled Bolus, as if sharing a special joke. ‘F-f-fifteen!’
Varens’ brief humour blew away like the steam billowing from the pipes. The counting thing was new, and he didn’t like it one bit. It was another manifestation of Bolus’ shattered mind. Varens hoped a respite from the war would help his friend’s mind heal, but he wasn’t confident. He had seen battle shock before. The only cure that was sure to work was a mercy bullet. He never thought Bolus would fall prey to it, and that made him angry. Bolus had been so brave, so unshakeable. If he could lose his mind, then anyone could.
‘Come on, old man,’ Varens said. He took hold of Bolus’ arm again. His skin was damp and loose on wasted muscle, his regimental tattoos distorted by the sag. ‘Time for a bath.’
Under Bolus’ armpit, there was a brief squirming, maggoty motion. If Varens had seen that, he would have known that battle shock was the least of what ailed his friend.
The thing turned and vanished into the cage of Bolus’ ribs, undetected.
Chapter Six
The Battle of Raukos
The high officers of Guilliman’s crusade gathered on the command deck of the Macragge’s Honour. They clus
tered around the dais occupied by the primarch and his closest aides, crowding the command throne of Shipmaster Brahe that was set before it.
Astra Militarum generals rubbed shoulders with the sister superiors of three battle convents. Adeptus Mechanicus Domini stood in clusters of orange, rust and blood-red robes. Space Marine lords waited with commissars, inquisitors and the barons of knightly courts. Princeps had come down from their Titans’ steel skulls, ill at ease at being surrounded by so many people. There were Naval wing commanders and captains of capital ships. Sisters of Silence stood aside from everyone else, their disquieting auras eliciting shudders from those nearest. The augments of skitarii clade commanders buzzed. Departmento Munitorum officials talked in low voices. Historitors recorded the occasion discretely.
Every branch of the Imperium’s forces and those who supplied, directed and supported them were represented there, whether in person or as one of the ghostly hololiths projected by the servo-skulls swarming above the throng.
Through the grand oculus, the plough-blade prow of the Macragge’s Honour pointed in challenge at the Pit of Raukos. A huge, lazily turning interface between the warp and realspace wreathed in the luminous gases of a dying star, it was a place where nightmares might easily walk clothed in flesh.
The Pit of Raukos was an anomaly set apart from the main storm front of the Great Rift which divided the Imperium in two. It was an isolated wound, but a deep one. It punched a hole through space time and ran far into the heart of the warp. It was an area of bruised void millions of kilometres across, glowing a sickly purple. Towards the middle, its colouration tended to putrid yellow-white, and at the very centre a vast, dark orb – striated like the iris of an eye – rotated with the speed and ferocity of a pulsar.
At the edge of this blot on reality languished a star system. It had never been settled or given a name by mankind, but bore the Adeptus Astra designation of 108/Beta-Kalapus-9. The sun was a medium red star dwarfed by the Pit. Gravitic shear drew long plumes of incandescent gas from the star towards the anomaly. In the years since the Great Rift had opened, the sun had shrunk by a tenth. The planets that orbited it were going dark.
Tendrils of glowing matter twisted out from the fringes of the spinning eye, merging with and bending the surrounding star gas into looping whorls that reached towards the greater slash of the Cicatrix Maledictum like parasitic worms migrating from their host.
Such breaches between dimensions were once terrifying anomalies. In these dark times, they had become commonplace. Whereas before there had been the Eye of Terror and the lesser Maelstrom, now the Great Rift split the galaxy side to side, its depths interfacing directly with the immaterium, and a thousand places like the Pit of Raukos pierced the flesh of reality, disgorging unnatural energies.
The Pit was named after a daemon prince Guilliman had slain. From its churning depths came unnatural plagues and fleets of half-mad sentient vessels crewed by children’s nightmares. Ghostly armies of impossible monsters spilled gibbering into realspace. Things spawned by the collective horrors of all history’s thinking beings emerged from dark corners on worlds for light years around it. Most of these things only had a brief foothold in reality, and the more esoteric types dissipated as soon as they were birthed, smeared to glowing corposant by the laws of material physics. But nature’s iron grip had loosened. The Pit of Raukos was an open gate to the daemonic legions of the greater powers. Empowered by the wills of their Dark Gods, and sustained by the unnatural energies of the rift, armies of fell entities emerged from Raukos. The terror they generated fed them further, and so the cycle of horror continued.
Guilliman stared unflinchingly into the unclean cyst of the Pit.
‘Another lost system.’ Tribune Maldovar Colquan of the Adeptus Custodes spoke angrily. Five others of his order stood guard behind the primarch. When he spoke, and it was not often, it was as if every affront to the Imperium he saw compounded his shame. He was well aware that for ten millennia the Emperor’s bodyguard had done nothing. All he had to offer in response was gall.
Guilliman privately agreed with this damning assessment. When he had returned to Terra, he had discovered a warrior brotherhood blinded by grief, uninterested in anything that happened beyond the walls of the Imperial Palace. Crisis after crisis had battered the foundations of the Imperium, and the Adeptus Custodes had retreated further from view with each one.
They had finally come out from behind the palace walls. Small groups of them operated the galaxy over, but the pendulum had swung too far the other way. The golden warriors of Terra were in danger of being blinded by rage.
‘It was not lost, because it never belonged to the Imperium,’ said Guilliman. ‘This target is nevertheless worthy, and we shall claim it as our own. See how the enemy gather around it. Their temple nears completion.’
A hololithic strategic display showed the system and its monstrous parasite as a series of neutral graphics tagged with data signifiers. It looked so bland rendered that way, an innocuous nebula. The Chaos fleet around 108/Beta-Kalapus-9.2 was invisible to the unaided eye, but clear enough to the augurs of the Macragge’s Honour, and bright dots of light tagged with datascreed swarmed at high anchor around a single point: the orbital fane of the Word Bearers.
The primarch’s voice needed no amplification to reach all of his commanders. His words carried into the furthest reaches of the command deck. When he spoke, all stopped to listen.
‘An orbital temple is under construction here. It must be destroyed. This is a staging post for our enemies, but it is for no mundane resupply that they come to the Pit of Raukos.’ He pointed directly at the black eye in the anomaly. ‘They come here to make blood sacrifice, and call upon their diabolical gods to favour them with aid from their servants. From this rift, daemons walk and lend their power to the traitors. Such doorways need closing.
‘The ability to do so eludes us for now, but they will be closed, all of them. I swear this in my father’s name. Until then, the monsters that come from within them will be beaten back, and the thresholds guarded by the mightiest warriors the Imperium can spare. So we shall divide the mortal servants of Chaos from their unnatural allies. The Indomitus Crusade has swept from one end of the galaxy to the other, bringing retribution to our foes. I propose we add one further victory to our tally!’
The crowd cheered loudly. Booming transhuman voices joined with chittering data augmitters.
The Pit grew quickly in the oculus as the fleet accelerated towards its target. The Indomitus Crusade was vast in size. Dozens of capital ships led many sub-fleets. The artificial stars of their engine stacks flared brightly as they manoeuvred into attack positions. Guilliman had the armada arranged like a five-toed claw. The long talons were individual battlegroups, arrayed in lines to pound the enemy as they passed. The palm was a wall of ships, with the Macragge’s Honour at its centre. The primarch intended to trap the foe against the mobile fortress of the palm as the fingers of the claw slowed and closed, as surely as a clenching fist, around the rear of the enemy fleets.
A further battlegroup ran outwards from the main line of advance towards the Pit. Within the knot of vessels at its centre, the Null Ships of the Sisters of Silence flew protected by three battleships. Kilometres long, the battleships were cathedrals of war, unused to escort duty, but the move was justified: for the foe they faced, these mighty vessels were not the battlegroup’s deadliest weapon. The ships of the Sisters – large, black and swift – were the key to success.
The command crew of the Macragge’s Honour were a mixture of standard human, Space Marine and Primaris Space Marines. Humans predominated. Though they wore the uniforms of Ultramar, they had been gathered to the Indomitus Crusade from all across the Imperium. Their diverse origins had been no barrier to Guilliman forging them into an effective unit.
Above the vox pits, the Master Divulgatus swung his command pulpit around. Tall banks of organ pipes, each one
a powerful voxmitter, hid him from the neck down. His head was encased in a bulky communications unit. Only his mouth was visible. ‘The Null Ships will be in position in an hour, my lord.’
‘Seconded,’ said the Master Augurum from his own station high up on the stepped walls of the command bridge, a sub-kingdom of screens and hardwired servitors.
Runic icons blinked on the hololithic tacticarium orb, dotted lines flickering into being, describing their trajectory and ultimate position.
Before the crusade, the Macragge’s Honour had undergone an extensive refit in shipyards of the Ring of Iron around Mars, and the command deck had been entirely reconfigured from Guilliman’s day. Archmagos Cawl’s stamp was on everything. New machines and unheard of configurations of old devices replaced equipment that had been in use for tens of centuries. The tech-priests had been outraged, but Guilliman had silenced them, and Cawl had had his way.
The result was worth upsetting the Adeptus Mechanicus’ religious sensibilities. The machinery still had the ugly look of 41st millennium technology, but Guilliman reckoned there was a ten per cent increase in tactical responsiveness alone. Multiple redundancies and newly integrated systems allowed for better survivability. Dozens of tech-priests from Cawl’s faction laboured to keep the archmagos’ finely balanced design working, but it did work, and excellently so.
‘My lords and ladies,’ said Guilliman, ‘today will be a great day for the Imperium. I commend you to the protection of the Emperor, the lord of mankind. Now go – to your vessels and war machines! To your transports! To war!’
‘War! War! War!’ they responded.
The majority of the commanders left quickly. Hololiths blinked out. Soon the command deck was empty but for Guilliman’s core command staff and the ship’s bridge officers, though that still amounted to almost four hundred people.
About the graphic of 108/Beta-Kalapus-9.2, the dull red signifiers of enemy craft began to move.