Battle for The Abyss (18 page)

BRYNNGAR SHRUGGED OFF a creature clinging to his arm and smashed it with Felltooth, the rune axe cutting through wasted bone like air. He thrust his bolt pistol into another and used the warp spawn’s momentum to lift it from the ground. Triggering
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the weapon, he blasted the creature apart in a shower of bone and viscera. Then the Space Wolf lunged and butted a third, almost dissolving its rotted cranium against his battle helm. Gore and brain matter spoiled his vision, and Brynngar wiped his helmet visor clean with the back of his gauntleted hand.

With the destruction of the physical body, the warp spawn appeared to lose their hold on the material plane and dissipated.

They were easy meat. Brynngar had fought far hardier foes, but in such swarms they were starting to tax him. Even his gene-enhanced musculature burned after the solid fighting. For every three the Wolf Guard slew, another six took their place, pouring like rancid ants from the docking portals.

Brynngar realised to his dismay, hacking down another spawn, that gradually he was being pushed back.

He caught sight of Skraal through the melee. The World Eater was similarly pressed, though a bloody mist surrounded him from the churning punishment wreaked by his chainaxe. He could not see Skraal’s fellow Legionaries; Brynngar assumed they had been swallowed by the horde.

A sudden tearing of metal, mangled with the sound of tortured souls, rent the air, and Brynngar felt the deck lurch from under him as it seemed to twist in on itself.

The integrity fields, which kept the dock pressurised when the dock ports were open, flickered once, but held. The physical structure did not. A huge chunk ripped out of the deck as if bit-ten by unseen jaws, three decks high. Debris was tumbling out into the ether. Brynngar looked away, for to do otherwise would be to comprehend the naked warp and embrace madness.

Something stirred beyond the breach, out in the infinite. Brynngar felt it as the hackles rose on the back of his neck and the feral nature of his Legion became suddenly emboldened. For a brief moment, the Space Wolf wanted to tear off his helmet and gauntlets and gorge himself on flesh like a beast of the wild. He backed away of his own volition, realising that something primal and terrible was with them on the dock.

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MHOTEP HAD FORCED his way to the docking portals, through a swathe of warp spawn. His armour was dented and scratched from their ether claws and his body heaved with exhaustion. It was not physical prowess that would save them here, but the discipline of the mind that needed to hold fast.

Mhotep had felt the presence, too, and standing before the docking portal he beheld it in his mind’s eye. It was dark and seething: a pure predator.

‘It has seen me,’ he said calmly into his helmet vox, the warp spawn hordes recoiling suddenly from the Thousand Son, regarding him in the same way a Prosperine spirehawk regards its prey. ‘I cannot hide from it now.’

BRYNNGAR WAS ALMOST back to back with Skraal, the two Astartes having been fought back to the blast doors, when he heard Mhotep through his vox.

‘Seen what?’ snarled the Space Wolf, gutting another warp spawn as Skraal cleaved the arm from another.

‘You cannot prevail here,’ the voice of Mhotep came again. ‘Get out and seal the doors. I will remain and activate the dock’s auto-destruct sequence.’

Many vessels of the Imperial Fleet came with such precautio-nary measures built in to their design by the Mechanicum. They were meant as weapons of last resort, should a ship be overrun and in danger of capture. If a ship could not be defended or retaken from an enemy then it would be denied to them utterly, although in this case, Mhotep’s sacrifice would not destroy the ship, only vanquish the foes that were besieging it.

‘Do so now!’ urged the Thousand Son.

Brynngar had lost sight of him, though his view was curtailed as he forced himself to look away from the tear into the naked warp beyond. Although it rankled, the Space Wolf knew when he was chasing a lost cause.

‘Come on,’ he snarled to Skraal who hacked and hewed with berserk fury, ‘we are leaving.’

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‘The sons of Angron do not flee the enemy,’ he raged in response.

‘Even so,’ Brynngar said, smashing a warp spawn aside. Ducking a blood-maddened sweep of Skraal’s chainaxe, he punched the World Eater hard in the chest with the flat of his hand. The stunned Astartes was lifted off his feet and sent sprawling through the open blast doors. Brynngar trudged after Skraal’s prone form, carving a path through the horde with Felltooth.

A few of the warp spawn had found their way through to the other side of the blast doors that led from the Primary Dock.

Brynngar was about to hunt them down when a barrage of bolter fire scythed through them like wheat.

Inside his battle helm, the Space Wolf grinned as he saw the battered forms of the Ultramarines.

‘Down!’ cried Cestus who was leading the group, and Brynngar hit the deck as a fusillade of fire erupted overhead.

Arching his neck, the Space Wolf saw the smoking bodies of more warp spawn fall into a heap at the dock threshold. Swinging out a hand, he thumped the portal icon and the blast doors slid shut with a hydraulic pressure-hiss.

‘We must seal the doors,’ he snarled, rolling on his back as Antiges, Morar and Lexinal charged past him to guard the portal.

STRIPPING AWAY THE verisimilitude of the warp spawn crew, Mhotep saw that they were not separate entities at all. They were the extension of a single conjoined conscious, raw emotion given form. Tentacles snaked from three gaping maws lined with cruel teeth that had once been the docking portals, and flesh sacks like finger puppets danced along them.

As he stepped forward, he brandished his scimitar, a power sword engraved with hieroglyphics: the old tongue of Prospero.

Mhotep was acutely aware of the blast doors shutting behind him, though the sound was far off, as if listened to in a separate dimension from the one he currently inhabited. Realising he was alone, the Thousand Son tapped into the innate power of his Legion, the psychic mutation common to all sons and daughters of
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Prospero that had earned Magnus the condemnation of Nikaea.

Mhotep’s power, like that of all the Astartes of his Legion, was honed to a rapier-like point and when properly channelled could be deadly. The nay-sayers of Nikaea had been right to fear it.

Mhotep stowed his bolter, for it would not avail him here, and drew forth the wand-stave. Inputting a rune sequence, played out in the jewels along its short haft, the item extended into the length of a staff. Holding the weapon up to his helmet lens, Mhotep peered through the speculum at the tip. The tiny, silvered mirror became transparent and, through it, the Thousand Son saw the entity for what it was.

The warp had been cruel. It had taken the ship and its crew and transfigured it into something wretched and debased. Tiny black eyes rolled in the armoured carapace and the bodies of its crew writhed all over the surface of the ship, trapped within a translucent membrane that sheathed it like living tissue. They were deformed, fused together with their tortured expressions stretched out as if melted. These were the souls of the
Fireblade
’s crew and they were lost to the warp forever.

The portion of the escort ship that had penetrated the cargo hold eked from the belly of the ship like an umbilical cord, the tentacle strings spilling from the maws at the end of them revealed to be tongues. The sound that emanated from them was appalling. The warp screamed from the
Fireblade
’s throat, a screeching gale that threatened to knock Mhotep off his feet. He stayed upright, however, and found what he was looking for in the partly insubstantial hull of the former Imperial ship.

The Thousand Son intoned words of power and an ellipsis of light burned into the deck plate. The Prosperine hieroglyphics on his staff flared bright vermillion. Spinning the staff around, Mhotep drove the scimitar into it pommel first and it became a spear.

‘Back to the deeps!’ bellowed the son of Magnus, his aim fixed upon the warp-entity’s tainted core. ‘There will be no feasting here for you, dead thing! By the Silver Towers and the Ever-Burning Eye, begone!’

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Mhotep flung the spear just as the tentacles closed on him, a burning trail of crimson light following its psychic trajectory. It struck the
Fireblade
in the heart of its central maw and a great explosion of light detonated within. Spectral blood fountained and the reaching tentacles withered and burned.

The illumination built, blazing out of the maw and Mhotep was forced to look away from its brilliance. The scent of acrid smoke filled his nostrils, penetrating his helmet filters, and raging flames engulfed his senses together with the primordial scream of something dying in the fathomless ether.

IN THE CORRIDOR beyond the Primary Dock, ceiling plates fell like rain as the walls of the
Wrathful
shuddered with fury. Cestus and Antiges fought to get to the doors as the tremors hit. The rippling shock waves were coming from the Primary Dock.

Staying on his feet, Cestus drew his power sword and was about to beckon forward a group of engineers, who were lingering behind them, to fuse the blast doors when the horrific din emanating from within stopped. Smoke and faint, white light issued through the cracks.

All was quiet and still for a moment.

‘Where is Mhotep?’ the Ultramarine asked, sheathing the blade.

He’d been monitoring the helmet vox transmissions and knew that the Thousand Son had been at the Primary Dock. During the warp phenomenon, battles had erupted all across the
Wrathful
, and the secondary and tertiary docks had also come under attack. Reports were flickering past on Cestus’s helmet vox that the warp spawn had abated abruptly for reasons unknown, dissolving back into the ether.

Skraal was still out of it on the deck, babbling in enraged delirium, so Cestus turned to Brynngar for his answer.

‘He made a noble sacrifice,’ intoned the Space Wolf, as he got to his feet.

‘That almost sounds like respect,’ Cestus said, his voice tinged with bitterness.

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‘It is,’ growled Brynngar. ‘He gave his life for this ship and in so doing saved us all. For that he will have the eternal gratitude of Russ. I am not so proud to admit that I misjudged him.’

Whining servos and the hiss of released pressure made the Space Wolf turn with bolt pistol raised as the blast doors ground open. Cestus and the other Astartes joined him with weapons levelled at the flickering dark beyond.

Mhotep emerged from the scorched ruin of the Primary Dock, staggering, but very much alive. Tendrils of smoke rose from his pitted armour and he was drenched in viscous, translucent gore.

In spite of his appearance and obvious injuries, he still retained his bearing, that nobility and arrogance so typical of Prospero’s sons.

‘It is not possible,’ Brynngar breathed, taking a step back as if Mhotep were some apparition from the fireside sages of Fenris.

‘None could have survived in such a conflagration.’

Cestus lowered his bolter cautiously and then his hand in a gesture for the other Ultramarines to do the same.

‘We thought you were dead.’

Mhotep unclasped and removed his helmet, breathing deep of the recycled air. His eyes were black orbs and a riot of purple veins wreathed his face, but was slowly disappearing beneath his skin.

‘As... did... I,’ gasped the Thousand Son, helmet clattering to the deck as it fell from nerveless fingers.

Cestus caught his fellow Astartes as he lurched forward and bore him down to the floor, half-cradled in his arms.

‘Summon Laeradis at once,’ he told Antiges, who was stunned for a moment before he came to his senses and went off to find the Ultramarine apothecary.

‘He lives, yet,’ Cestus added, noting Mhotep’s fevered breathing.

‘Aye,’ Brynngar muttered darkly, having overcome his superstition, ‘and there is but one way that could be so...’ The Space Wolfs lip curled up in profound distaste. ‘...Sorcery.’

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EIGHT

Nikaea

Advantage

Bakka Triumveron

IN HIS PRIVATE quarters, Zadkiel regarded the pict screen on the console before him with interest. The room was drenched in sepulchral light, the suggestion of idols and craven icons visible at the edge of the shadows. Zadkiel’s face was bathed in cold, stark light from the pict screen, making him appear gaunt and almost lifeless.

Battle scenarios were displayed on the surface of the screen. An astral body, the size of a moon, exploded moments after being struck by a missile payload. Debris spread outward in a wide field, showering a nearby planet with burning meteors. An icon in the scenario represented a ship, the
Furious Abyss
, as it moved through the debris field. Trajectory markers with distances indicated alongside were displayed, originating at the ship icon and terminating at the planet’s surface. The image paused momentarily and then cycled back to the beginning again.

Zadkiel switched his attention to a vertical row of three supplementary screens attached to the main pict screen. The upper-most one was full of streaming data that bore the Mechanicum seal. Calculations concerning armour tolerances, projected orbital weapon strengths and extrapolated endurance times based upon the first statistic versus the other scrolled by. Angles, probable firepower intensities and shield indexes were all considered in exacting detail. The middle screen contained four stage-by-stage picts showing the effects of a particular viral strain upon human
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beings. A time code at the bottom right corner of the final pict displayed 00:01:30.