Battle for The Abyss (28 page)

The gang chief was in no hurry to see what had become of the fallen ganger. Deaths meant hassle. The gang would be one short, so someone would have to be drafted from somewhere else on the ship and the
Wrathful
had lost plenty of men already, and they were in the abyss.

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For a man to die in the abyss was bad luck. Some said if you died in the warp you never got out, and even with the suppres-sion of religions in the fleet you couldn’t stop a void-born superstition like that.

The dead man, however, was not dead. When the gang chief reached the body he saw it mewling like a drowning animal, writhing around on its back with its wrists and ankles shaking as if it was trying to right itself.

The gang chief expressed displeasure that the man was still alive, since he would undoubtedly die soon and carting him off to the sick bay was another inconvenience the gun crews didn’t need.

The dying man’s body distended with the cracking of ribs. One side of his body split off from the other, organs separating as his pelvis split. His sternum snapped free and false ribs pinged against the laser housing beside him. His body rippled up from the floor into a writhing, pulsing arch of flesh and bone, drizzling blood onto the gunmetal deck. The crewman’s head lolled to one side, its jaw wrenched at an angle, its eyes still open.

The space within the arch twisted and went dark. The predator forced its way through, spilling out onto the floor like the contents of a split belly, feeling blindly, eyes blinking as they evolved to absorb light.

Then the screaming started.

IT WAS CARNAGE IN the lance decks, absolute carnage.

The warning icons had blazed through the ship, coupled with frantic vox chatter about monsters and the dead coming back to life, before it cut off ominously. Reconnoitering with his battle-brothers on the assembly deck, Cestus had led the honour guard, fully armed, to the lance decks and there they stood to bear witness to the horror.

The Ultramarine captain wondered, for a moment, whether he had been wrong all along, whether the Imperial Truth itself was wrong, and that the hells of those primitive faiths really did exist to be given form in the lance decks. He dismissed his doubts as
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heretical, crashing them beneath his iron-hard resolve and his loyalty to Roboute Guilliman. Even still, what he saw warred with what he desperately tried to believe. Bodies were painted across the walls in ragged smears of skin and muscle. The faces of the gang ratings were ripped open in expressions of horror, and stared out from heaps of torn limbs. Flesh and viscera were draped across high girders ahead, or over the massive workings of the lances themselves. The focusing mirrors and lenses were sprayed with blood. The living writhed in a single mass, smear-ing themselves with gore and sinking their teeth into one another.

Spectral threads of glowing black wrapped around the spines of the bleeding revellers. The threads led up to the ceiling of the lance deck where a titanic mass of darkness squatted, a seething thing of eyes and mouths gibbering and chuckling as it manipulated the lance deck’s crew into further depths of suffering.

Cestus was an Astartes. He had seen extraordinary, horrible things: amorphous aliens that consumed their own to be ready for battle; insect-things that broke up into swarms of seething, biting horrors; whole worlds infected or dying, whole stars boiling away in the death throes of a species, but he had never seen anything like this.

‘Weapons free,’ he raged.

A brutal chorus of bolter fire rang out to his order, puncturing the mass of flesh and exploding it from within. Thestor swung his heavy bolter around and added his own punishing shots to the salvo.

Terrible screeching filled the tight space and resonated in his battle helm, auditory-limiters struggling to modulate the horrible keening of the damned ratings.

The dangling threads held by the warp creature began to sever one by one as the munitions of the Astartes struck and detonated with fury. It snarled its displeasure, revealing row upon row of fine needle-like fangs and a slathering spectral tongue that appeared to taste their essence. Like a lightning strike, the tongue lashed out and speared Thestor through his cuirass. He bellowed
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in pain, heavy bolter fire flaring as he triggered the weapon in his death throes. The honour guard scattered as the errant shells strafed the deck, and Thestor shook and went into spasm as he was lifted into the air, impaled on the warp spawn’s tongue.

‘Burn it!’ cried Cestus in desperation. ‘Burn it all!’

Morar stepped forward with his flamer and doused the tunnel in roaring, white-hot promethium. Thestor and the creature’s transfixing tongue were immolated in cleansing fire. The warp spawn reeled, shrieking in anger as it recoiled from the attack.

Morar swept the cone of intense heat downward, cooking the conjoined mass of the dead ratings.

As the warp spawn gave ground, Cestus noticed patches of ichorous fluid spattering the deck in its wake.

If it can bleed, he thought, we can kill it.

‘Advance on me,’ cried the Ultramarine captain. ‘Courage and honour!’

‘Courage and honour!’ his battle-brothers bellowed in reply.

BROODING IN THE temporary barrack room afforded to the Space Wolves onboard the
Wrathful
, Brynngar had heard the alert screaming through the ship and had mustered his warriors.

Tracking the commotion to the lower lance decks, he and his Blood Claws were unprepared for the sight that greeted them as they descended into the gloom. It was a charnel house. Flayed flesh lined the walls and blood slicked the floor. Bones, still red with gore, lay discarded in mangled piles. Screams were etched upon the visages of skulls, locked in their last moments of agony.

The bloody massacre was not, however, what gave the Space Wolf captain pause. It was the nightmare creature, tearing at chunks of flesh with its teeth. At their approach, the beast, a luminous, shark-like horror, turned, its lipless maw smeared with blood, its swollen belly engorged.

‘Here be monsters,’ Brynngar breathed and felt a quail of something unfamiliar, an alien emotion, trickle down his spine.

He found his courage quickly, baring his fangs as he howled.

The Space Wolves launched at the creature, blades drawn.

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MHOTEP STAGGERED FROM the isolation chamber, not surprised to see that he was alone. He had broken the traitor, though it had not been easy. He felt the sweat of his exertions beneath his helmet and was breathing heavily as he stepped into the adjoining corridor. Of the subject known as Ultis, for he had given his name before the end, there was precious little left. A drooling cage of flesh and bone were all that remained. His conditioned defences, ingrained by years of fanatical indoctrination, had been tough to break, but as a result, when they had fallen, they had fallen hard. Only a shell remained, a gibbering wreck incapable of further defiance, incapable of anything.

Exhausted as he was, Mhotep groaned when he detected the rogue presence onboard the ship. Mustering what reserves of strength he had left, he made for the lance decks.

MORAR WAS DEAD. His bifurcated body lay in two halves across the deck. Amyrx was badly wounded, but alive. He slumped against an upright, beneath a metal arch, a chunk of flesh ripped from his torso.

A dark mass was boiling down the corridor behind Cestus, even as the honour guard faced off against the first warp predator, torrents of semi-liquid flesh bursting through doorways in a flood. Eyes formed in the mass, focusing on the Astartes.

The Ultramarine swivelled his body around, barking a warning before his bolter blazed, the muzzle flare lighting up the dark around him. A long tongue of dark muscle thrashed blindly past him from the creature’s gaping mouth, and Cestus threw himself out of its path. Laeradis, desperately ministering to the wounded Amyrx, was not so lucky. The membrane lashed around him, sending spines of pain throughout his body. The Apothecary screamed as the flesh suddenly dried and split open, fist-sized seeds spilling from the fibrous interior.

The seeds burst into life, tiny buzzing wings shearing through the shells and long sharp mandibles splintering out. Laeradis
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was eviscerated in the storm in a bloody haze of bone, flesh and armour.

Cestus cried out and swung his bolt pistol back around. He picked off the insectoid creatures with precise shots as they buzzed towards him, letting out his breath to steady his aim. He caught the last with his free hand. Cestus mashed it into the wall before it could chew through the ceramite of his gauntlet.

With the two warp creatures on either side, the Ultramarines were being crushed into a tight circle.

Even as he continued to pummel the second warp fiend with bolt pistol fire, he heard Saphrax bellow the name of Roboute Guilliman, punctuated by the retort of his weapon. The burning flare of expelled plasma lit the side of his face, and the Ultramarine captain knew that their other special weapon bearer, Pytaron, was still with them. Muzzle flashes blazing, Lexinal and Excelinor continued to fire their bolters, war cries on their lips.

The chorus of battle raged as the warp predators closed, weaving and twisting impossibly from the worst of the Ultramarines’

fusillade, shrieking and screeching whenever they were struck and forced back.

Cestus checked the ammo-reader on his bolt pistol. His remaining rounds wouldn’t last long. Divided as they were, he and his battle-brothers would be unable to destroy either creature like this. With little recourse left, he made his decision.

‘All guns with me!’ he cried. ‘In the name of Guilliman, concentrate fire.’

With no hesitation, the Ultramarines turned their combined fire onto one of the warp creatures. Not expecting the sudden storm, the beast was caught unawares. Desperately trying to weave and jink out of harm’s way, it was struck by a barrage of bolter rounds. Super-heated plasma scorched its flank and a precise salvo from Cestus struck it in the eye. A keening wail emanated from the dread creature as it shuddered out of existence, expelled from the bubble of real space within the
Wrathful
. However, the victory proved costly, as the second creature surged, un-202

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hindered, to the Ultramarines’ position, suddenly buoyed by the presence of three more of its kin.

Cestus and his battle-brothers turned as one, defiant war cries on their lips as they prepared to sell their lives dearly.

The rending of flesh as their bodies were torn asunder, the stench of blood and the sound of shredding bone failed to mate-rialise.

Poised with jaws outstretched, ready to devour the Astartes, the warp creatures were assailed by a blazing crimson light that bathed the corridor in an incandescent lustre. The beasts recoiled and shrank before him, snapping ineffectually at the air as the building aura seared them.

‘Warp spawned filth!’ spat a voice behind Cestus, echoing with power. ‘Flee back into the abyss and leave this plane of existence.’

Shielding his eyes against the brilliance of the light, Cestus saw Mhotep striding towards them, a cerulean nimbus of psychic energy coursing over his armoured body. He held a golden spear in his outstretched hand.

‘Down, now!’ he cried and the Ultramarines hit the floor with a crash of ceramite.

The spear arced over their heads like a divine bolt of lightning and pierced the first warp beast, tearing through its slithering flank and slathering the deck with dark grey, spilling gore.

Its death cry reverberated in the confines of the vaulted tunnel, the metal uprights screaming before it. Then it was gone, leaving an actinic stench in its wake.

The kindred beasts came at him, enduring the furious energy that the Thousand Son had unleashed, but were driven back as Cestus and his honour guard crouched on their knees and delivered a punishing salvo.

‘Blind them,’ Mhotep cried, plucking his spear from the air as it returned to him as if magnetised to his gauntlet.

The Ultramarines obeyed, aiming for the hideous black orbs that served the shark-like predators as eyes. More screeching filled the corridor as the shots found their marks, rupturing the
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glassy orbs. Mhotep cast his spear again and another of the creatures was thrust back into the immaterium.

The last predator turned in on itself and re-formed. It grew fresh eyes, dripping with glowing ichor. It extruded a frill of tendrils from what Cestus assumed was its head end, and they became tough jointed limbs tipped with claws. Snakelike tongues whipped from its mouth.

A hail of fire struck it and it was blasted into a gory mess upon the deck.

Curious, ringing silence filled the void where the eruption of bolters and the bark of shouting had been. Red-tinged gloom from the emergency lights drifted back into focus after the monochromatic battle flare of muzzle flashes and psychic conflagration.

Cestus surveyed his battle-brothers. Amyrx lay still against the upright, injured but alive. The service of Laeradis and Morar, though, had ended, their final moments awash with blood and pain. The rest had survived. A weary nod from Saphrax confirmed it.

Breathing hard, a strange, subdued exultance at their victory sweeping over him, Cestus looked back around at Mhotep.

The Thousand Son staggered, the crimson light extinguished.

‘They are gone,’ he breathed and fell hard onto the deck.

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THIRTEEN

Legacy of Lorgar

Proposition

Honour duel

AS SKRAAL DELVED deeper into the
Furious Abyss
, the world around him got stranger. The ship was the size of a city, and just like a city it had its hidden corners and curiosities, its beautiful clean-cut vistas and its dismal bordellos of decay.