Battle for The Abyss (17 page)

Focusing his thoughts, Mhotep slipped into a meditative trance as he considered the events unfolding, drawing on the mental acumen for which his Legion was famed.

An anomalous flicker, something inconsistent and intangible, flashed into existence abruptly and was gone.

117

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

The Geller field,
Mhotep realised. It was the soft caress of the unfettered warp that he had felt, so brief, so infinitesimal that only one of Magnus’s progeny, one with their honed psychic awareness, could have detected it.

And something else...
Though this, for now at least, slipped beyond Mhotep’s mental grasp like tendrils of smoke through his fingers.

The Thousand Son broke off the trance at once and returned the wand-stave to its compartment in his armour. Donning his helmet, he headed for the
Wrathful
’s primary dock.

CAPTAIN ULARGO SAT strapped into his command throne as the warp breached the blast doors at the back of the
Fireblade
’s bridge. All around him was chaos as the hapless crew screamed and thrashed in terror as their minds were unravelled by the warp. Some were already dead, killed by flying debris or simply torn apart as the warp vented its wrath upon them. Ulargo’s calm in the face of certain disaster, with chunks of metal hull tearing away into nothing as his bridge was disassembled, was unnerving. The entire chamber was cast in an eldritch light and strange riotous winds buffeted crew and captain alike.

‘It goes on... it goes on forever,’ he said, his voice caught halfway between wonderment and fear. ‘I can see my father, and my brothers. I can hear them... calling me.’

They had entered the empyrean in the
Wrathful
’s wake in accordance with Admiral Kaminska’s orders, but upon the collapse of the Tertiary Coreward Transit, their Gellar fields had suffered catastrophic failure, leaving them undefended against the raw emotions of warp space.

It had already changed the place. The bridge shimmered with the skies of Io and the canyons of Mimas, the places where Ulargo had grown up and trained as a pilot in the Saturnine Fleet.

The corpses of the navigation crew, slumped over the sextant array, had sprouted into Ganymedian mangrove trees, twisted roots looping through the steel floor of the bridge that in turn was seething with river grass. Waterfalls ghosted over reality,
118

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

shoals of fish leaping through the shattered viewport. Ulargo wanted very much to be there, back in the places that lived on only in his memory, back when he had been a boy and the universe had felt so infinite and full of wonders.

He held out his hands and felt them brush against the reeds that grew by the River Scamandros on Io. Reptilian birds wheeled in a sky that he could somehow see beyond the torn ceiling of the bridge, as if the torn metal and loops of severed cabling were in another dimension and the reality in his head was bleeding through.

He stepped forwards. The rest of the crew were dead, but that did not mean anything any more. They were ghosts, too.

The stuff of the warp seethed through the blast doors and caught Ulargo up in a swirl of raw emotions. He filled up with regret, then fear, then love, each feeling so powerful that he was just a conduit for them, a hollow man to be buffeted by the warp: the way his father’s eyes lit up with pride when he received his first commission. The grief in his mother’s eyes, for she knew so many who had lost sons to the void. The fury of space, the ravenous vacuum, the thirsting void, that he always knew one day would devour him. In the warp they were ideas made as real as the mountains of Enceladus.

The side of the bridge gave away. The air boomed out and flung the corpses of the bridge crew out with it. One of the bodies was not yet dead, and in the back of his mind, Ulargo recognised that another human being was dying.

Then he saw the warp beyond the
Fireblade
.

Titanic masses of emotion went on forever, seen not with his eyes, but with his mind: rolling incandescent mountains of Passion, an ocean of grief, leading down to infinity through caves of misery, dripping with the poison of anger.

Hatred was a distant sky, heaving down onto the warp, smothering. Love was a sun. The winds that stripped away the hull of the
Fireblade
were fingers of malice.

It was wondrous. Ulargo was filled with the sight of it; no, not the sight, but the sheer experience, for the warp was not com-119

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

posed of light, but of emotion, and to experience it was to let it speak to the most fundamental parts of his soul.

The sky of hatred split apart and a yawning mouth opened up above Ulargo’s soul. Teeth of wrath framed the maw. Beyond it was a black mass, seething like a pit of vermin. It was terror.

Mouths were opening up everywhere. Mindless things, like sharks made of malicious glee, slid between the thunderheads of passion. They snatched at the soul-specks of the
Fireblade
’s crew, teeth like knives through what remained of their minds.

Even love was turning on them, filling them in their last moments of existence with a horrendous longing for all the things they would never have, and appalling, consuming grief for everything they once had, but would never see again.

The maw bore down on Ulargo. Teeth closed in on him, an appalling coldness sheared through him and he knew that it was the purity of death.

The boiling mass seethed. The last vestiges of his physical self recoiled as worms forced themselves into a nose and mouth that no longer existed.

The warp turned dark, and Ulargo drowned in fear.

ADMIRAL KAMINSKA REACHED the bridge to find an ashen-faced crew before her. Cestus had just arrived, his countenance stern and pensive as the distress signal emanating from the
Fireblade
repeated on the ship-to-ship vox.

‘This... Ulargo... Fireblade... damaged in transit... request dock... repairs...’

‘Impossible,’ said Kaminska, feeling all colour drain from her face as she heard the voice of a man she thought was dead. ‘Vox traffic is rendered null whilst in warp transit.’

‘Admiral, the
Fireblade
claims to be abeam to our port side,’ offered Helms-mate Kant as he monitored further communications.

Kaminska looked instinctively over to the viewport and, despite the shimmering interference caused by the Geller field, she could see Ulargo’s ship, a little battered by the initial sortie against the
Furious Abyss
, but otherwise fine.

120

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

Common sense warred with the emotions of her heart. Ulargo was a comrade in arms. Kaminska had thought him lost and now she had an opportunity to save him.

‘Guide them in to make dock at once.’

HUNTSMAN HAD CHASED the elusive figure to a dead end in the complex of corridors aboard Aft Deck Three of the
Wrathful
.

Doors punctuated the apparently endless passageways that led into more barrack rooms and occasionally isolation cells.

As he approached slowly, drawing the lume-lamp across the figure’s body, he noticed that his quarry faced the wall. He also saw the fatigues it was wearing more clearly. It was the deck uniform of the
Fireblade
.

‘Halt,’ he ordered the figure sternly, with a quick glance behind to ensure that his armsmen were still in support.

From the back, he judged the figure to be male, but a scraggly wretch to be sure with unkempt hair like wire and a stench that suggested he hadn’t washed in many days.

Huntsman activated the vox-bead.

‘Bridge, this is Officer Huntsman. I have detained a male deck crew in Aft-Three,’ he said. ‘He appears to be wearing a
Fireblade
uniform.’

Helms-mate Kant’s response came through crackling static.

‘Repeat. Did you say the
Fireblade
?’

‘Affirmative – a deck hand from the
Fireblade
,’ Huntsman replied, edging closer.

‘That’s impossible. The
Fireblade
has only just docked with us.’

Huntsman felt a cold chill run down his marrow as the figure turned.

Somehow, the light from the lume-lamp wasn’t able to illuminate a belt of shadow across the top of the figure’s head and eyes, but Huntsman saw its mouth well enough. The deck hand made a wide, gash-like smile with rotten lips caked in dry blood.

‘In the name of Terra!’ Huntsman screamed as the figure’s jaw distended impossibly wide and revealed dozens of needle-like teeth. Fingers lengthened into talons, nails drenched in blood
121

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

and razor-sharp. Eyes flashed red in the darkness, like orbs of hate. Huntsman fired.

ON THE BRIDGE, rending screams and scattered gunfire emitted from the vox followed by an almighty static discharge that ended in total silence.

‘Raise the Officer of the Watch at once!’ Kaminska ordered.

Kant worked at the array, but looked up after a few minutes.

‘There is no response, admiral.’

Kaminska snarled, hammered an icon on her command throne and opened another channel.

‘Primary dock, respond. This is Admiral Kaminska. Disengage from the
Fireblade
at once,’ she said, shouting the orders.

Nothing. Communications were dead.

A warning klaxon sounded on the bridge. Seconds later, the
Wrathful
shook with external hull detonations.

‘Admiral,’ cried Helmsmistress Venkmyer, ‘I’m reading armour damage to the port side, upper decks. How is that even possible?’

‘The
Fireblade
is firing its dorsal turrets,’ she answered grimly.

‘It seems Ulargo’s ship survived after all,’ said Cestus, donning his battle helm, Antiges following his lead, ‘only not in the way we had hoped.

‘All Astartes,’ he barked into his helmet vox, mercifully unaf-fected by the radio blackout, ‘convene on Aft-Three, Primary Dock, immediately.’

A LONG, LOW scream keened through the
Wrathful
, vibrating through the hull, then another and another until a chorus of them was shrieking through the ship. It sounded like the death screams of hundreds of terrified men.

Mhotep lowered his smoking boltgun once he had dispatched the creature back to the ether. He had arrived too late to save the Officer of the Watch and his armsmen who lay eviscerated on the floor and part way up the blood-slicked walls.

122

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

The thing had been warp spawn, that much was apparent, wearing a shadow form of one of the
Fireblade
’s crew rather than inhabiting a body directly. The momentary breach in the
Wrathful
’s Geller field had allowed it aboard ship. Mhotep’s instincts told him that it was just a harbinger, and he headed off quickly to the Primary Dock.

Crewmen were hurrying down the
Wrathful
’s corridors, and they struggled to get past the bulky armoured Astartes as he fought to gain the Primary Dock. The engine sections started just stern-wards of the shuttle decks and the ship was getting up to full evasion power.

Shouldering past the frantic crew, Mhotep saw another figure impeding his progress, but one of flesh and blood, standing rock-like in grey power armour.

‘Brynngar,’ said the Thousand Son levelly at the Space Wolf who had just emerged from an adjacent corridor.

The World Eater, Skraal, with two of his Legion brothers appeared suddenly alongside him from the opposite corridor.

Standing at the intersection of the crossroads, a strange sense of impasse existed for a moment before the Wolf Guard snarled and turned away, heading for the Primary Dock.

THE FIVE ASTARTES emerged into chaos.

Men and women of the
Wrathful
fled in all directions, screaming and shouting. Some brandished weapons, others sought higher ground only to be torn down and butchered. Blood swilled like a slick on the dock as the attendant deck crews of the
Wrathful
were torn apart by fell apparitions dressed in the garb of the
Fireblade
. The crew of the lost escort ship had changed. Their mouths were long and wide as if fixed in a perpetual sadistic grin. Needle-like fangs filled their distended maws like those of the long-extinct Terran shark, while long, barbed fingers curled like claws tearing at skin, flesh and bone.

They fell upon the human deck crews with reckless abandon and were devouring them, the bloodied rotten faces of the gruesome predators alive with glee.

123

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

‘In the name of Russ,’ Brynngar breathed as he saw the docking ports that joined the two ships disgorge numberless hordes of twisted
Fireblade
crew.

‘They are warp spawn!’ Mhotep told them, drawing his scimitar, ‘wearing the bodies of our allies, whose souls are now hell-bound, lost to the empyrean. Destroy them.’

Brynngar threw his head back and roared, the sound eerie and resonant from within the confines of his battle helm. With Felltooth in one hand and bolt pistol in the other, he charged into the fray.

Skraal and the World Eaters followed, brandishing chainaxes and bellowing the name of Angron.

A TRIO OF vampire-like warp spawn fell under the withering report of Mhotep’s bolter as he trudged across the Primary Dock and through the visceral mire sloshing at his feet. The copper stink assailing his nostrils would have overpowered a normal man, but the Thousand Son crushed the sensation and closed with the enemy.

Barks of bolter fire were tinny and echoing through his helmet as he cut down an advancing warp spawn, parting its sternum and decapitating it with the return swing. The hordes were everywhere and soon surrounded him. The muzzle-flare from his weapon illuminated the grim destruction he wrought with flashing intermittence, the keening wail of his scimitar a high-pitched chorus to the din of explosive fire.

He felt something trying to push at the edges of his mind, testing his psychic defences with tentative mental probing. Slogging through the despicable horde, he was drawn closer to the source of it, even as it was drawn to him, and he felt the pressure on his sanity increase.