Battle for The Abyss (33 page)

The other Word Bearer, cowed by the tirade, retreated back into the shadows to let the chaplain work.

Skraal kept watching with abhorred satisfaction, but was intri-gued by the obvious dissension within the Word Bearers’ ranks.

‘Warrior’s hands,’ said Ikthalon, gauntleted fingers tracing Antiges’s palm as he resumed his morbid examination, ‘strong and instinctive, but I will need more.’ The chaplain gestured at the former Ultramarine’s torso. ‘Open it.’

One of the acolytes took a las-cutter from beneath the slab and sheared through the front of Antiges’s breastplate. The gilded decoration split off from the ceramite and clattered to the floor.

The Word Bearers ignored it. Once the acolyte with the cutter retreated, Ikthalon inserted his fingers into the cut. With a grunt of effort, he forced the Ultramarine’s chest open.

The complex mass of an Astartes’s organs was exposed. Skraal could make out the two hearts and third lung, together with the reverse of the bony breastplate that fused from every Astartes’s ribs.

The chaplain dug a hand into the gory dark and extracted an organ. It looked like the oolitic kidney, or perhaps the omopha-gaea. Ikthalon regarded it coolly, putting the organ down and yanking out a handful of entrails. He cast them across the slab, and stood for a long time peering into the loops of tissue and sprays of blood.

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‘Macragge suspects nothing,’ he hissed, discerning meaning from the act. Running a finger through the bloody miasma, he added. ‘Here, that’s our route. It lies open to us.’

‘What of Calth?’ Reskiel asked from the darkness.

‘That is unclear,’ Ikthalon replied. ‘Kor Phaeron has no ob-stacles, save any he makes for himself.’ The chaplain peered into Antiges’s open chest again. ‘There is veining on the third lung.

Guilliman is represented there as just a man. Not a primarch, just a man ignorant of his fate.’ Ikthalon’s voice dripped with malice.

The chaplain looked further, his gaze lingering for a moment on one of Antiges’s hearts before his head snapped up quickly.

‘We are not alone,’ he snarled.

Reskiel’s bolter swung up in readiness and he barked into the transponder in his gorget.

‘In the anatomy theatre, now!’

A troop of four Word Bearers barged into the room, weapons drawn.

‘Spread out,’ Reskiel bellowed. ‘Find him!’

Skraal backed out of the chamber. He forged back the way he had come and split off from the candlelit path, kicking open a maintenance hatch and dropping into a tangle of wiring and circuitry. He stormed ahead, relying on the ship to hide him for a little longer. He wanted to feel rage, and be comforted by it, but he couldn’t reach it. He felt numb.

VISIONS RACED INTO Cestus’s mind as he felt all of tangible reality fall away around him. At once, he was suspended in the depths of real space. Formaska rolled beneath, its laborious orbit somehow visible. Silvered torpedoes struck suddenly against its surface at strategic points across the moon. Miniature detonations were discernible as a slow shockwave resonated over it in ripples of destructive force. Cestus saw tiny fractures in the outer crust, magnifying with each passing second into massive fissures that yawned like jagged mouths. Formaska glowed and pulsed as if it were a throbbing heart giving out its last, inexorable beat.

The moon exploded.

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Debris cascaded outwards in shuddering waves, miniscule asteroids burning up in the atmosphere of nearby Macragge. A fleet suspended in the planet’s upper atmosphere was destroyed.

Impossibly, Cestus heard the screams of his home world’s inhabitants below as the detritus of Formaska’s death rained upon them in super-heated waves of rock.

Something moved in the debris field, shielded from the thundering defence lasers of Macragge’s surface. Getting ever closer, the dark shape breached the planet’s atmosphere. The vision shifted to the industrial hive of the cities. A cloud of gas boiled along the streets, engulfing the screaming populous.

The image changed again, depicting other ships, great vessels of the Crusade, held in orbit at Calth hit by an errant meteor storm. Cestus watched in horror as they broke up against the onslaught, the stylised ‘U’ of his Legion immolated in flame. The meteor shower struck Calth, forcing its way through the planet’s atmosphere to where his battle-brothers mustered below. Cestus roared in anguish, furious at his impotence, screaming a desperate warning that his brothers and his primarch would never hear.

The scene changed once more as the void of real space became metal. As if propelled at subsonic speed, Cestus flew through the tunnels and chambers of a ship. Through conducts, across heaving generators, beyond the fire of immense plasma-driven engines, he came at last to an ordnance deck. There, sitting innocuously amongst the other munitions, was a lethal payload.

Though he could not explain how, he knew it at once to be a viral torpedo and the effective death warrant of Macragge.
World killer.

The words resolved themselves in the Ultramarine’s mind, taunting him, goading him.

Cestus railed against the sense of doom, the fathomless despair they evoked. He bellowed loud and hard, the only name he could think of to repel it.

‘Guilliman!’

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Cestus was back in the isolation chamber. He saw Mhotep sitting across from him. The Thousand Son’s face was haggard and covered in a sheen of sweat.

Cestus staggered backwards as recall returned, wrenching his bolt pistol from its holster with difficultly and pointing it wave-ringly at Mhotep.

‘What did you do to me?’ he hissed, shaking his head in an effort to banish the lingering images and sensations.

‘I showed you the truth,’ Mhotep gasped, breathing raggedly as he propped himself up against the wall of the cell, ‘by sharing my memories, the memories of Ultis, with you. It is no different to the omophagea, though the absorption of memory is conducted psychically and not biologically,’ he pleaded.

Cestus kept his aim on the Thousand Son.

‘Was it real?’ he asked. ‘What I witnessed, was it real?’ he demanded, stowing the bolt pistol in favour of grabbing Mhotep by the throat.

‘Yes,’ the Thousand Son spat through choking breaths.

Cestus held him there for a moment longer, thinking that he might crush the life out of the fellow Astartes.

Exhaling deeply, Cestus let Mhotep go. The Thousand Son doubled over coughing as he gasped for breath and rubbed his throat.

‘They do not plan to attack Calth, or destroy Macragge. They want to conquer them both and bring the Legion to heel or vanquish it if it does not yield,’ said Cestus, his thoughts and fears coming out in a flood.

Mhotep looked up at the frantic Ultramarine, and nodded.

‘And the destruction of Formaska is where it will begin.’

‘The ship,’ Cestus ventured, beginning to calm down. ‘That was the
Furious Abyss
, wasn’t it? And the viral pay-load is the method of extermination for the people of Macragge.’

‘You have seen what I saw, and what Ultis knew,’ Mhotep confirmed, regaining his composure and sitting up.

Cestus’s gaze was distant as he struggled to process everything he’d learned, together with resisting the urge to vomit against
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the invasive psychic experience. He looked back at Mhotep, a suspicious cast to his eyes and face.

‘Why are you here, Mhotep? I mean, why are you really here?’

The Thousand Son gazed back for a moment and then withdrew his hood and sighed deeply.

‘I have seen the lines of fate, Ultramarine. I knew long before we made contact with the
Furious Abyss
, back when we were on Vangelis, that my destiny lay with this ship, that this mission,
your
mission, was important.

‘My Legion is cursed with psychic mutation, but my lord Magnus taught us to harness it, to commune with the warp and fashion that communion into true power.’ Mhotep ignored the growing revulsion in Cestus’s face as he spoke of the empyrean, and went on. ‘Nikaea was no council, Ultramarine. It was a trial, not only of my lord Magnus but of the entire Thousand Sons Legion. The Emperor’s edict wounded him, like a father’s disap-proval and chastisement would wound any child.

‘What I told you at Vangelis, that I sought to improve the reputation of my Legion, in the eyes of the sons of Guilliman if no other, was in part true. I desire only to open your eyes to the potential of the psychic and how it is a boon, a ready weapon to use against our enemies.’

Cestus’s expression was stern in the face of Mhotep’s impassioned arguments.

‘You saved us all in the lance deck,’ said the Ultramarine. ‘You probably did the same when we fought what became of the
Fireblade
. But, your ambition overreaches you, Mhotep. I have stayed Brynngar’s hand, but from this point on you will remain here in isolation. If we are successful and can reach Macragge or some other Imperial stronghold, you will face trial and there, your fate will be decided.’

Cestus got to his feet and turned. As he was about to leave the room, he paused.

‘If you ever invade my mind like that again, I will execute you myself,’ he added and left, the cell door sliding shut behind him.

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‘How narrow your mind is,’ Mhotep hissed, focusing at once on the reflective sheen of the cell wall. ‘How ignorant you are of what is to come.’

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SIXTEEN

Fleet

Kor Phaeron

A storm breaks

‘THAT,’ SAID ORCADUS, ‘is Macragge.’

The Navigator had received instructions from his admiral that whilst they were still in the warp he should make regular reports of their progress. The appearance of the Ultramarines’ home world, albeit through the misted lens of the empyrean, was worthy of note and so he had summoned her.

The observation blister was a chamber on the same deck of the
Wrathful
as the bridge and within walking distance. The room was usually reserved for formal gatherings, when officers came together to formalise some business within the Saturnine Fleet.

Its grand transparent dome afforded a view of space that lent gravitas to the matters at hand. In the warp, of course, it was strictly off-limits and its eye was kept permanently closed.

The eye was open, but the dome was masked with heavy filters that kept all but the most mundane wavelengths of light out of the blister.

Admiral Kaminska faced away from the Navigator and actually followed Orcadus’s gaze through a mirror screen that offered a hazy representation of what he was seeing. To look at the warp, even filtered as it was, would be incredibly dangerous for her.

‘If you could see it as I can,’ Orcadus hissed, allowing a reverent tone to colour his voice. ‘What wonders there are out in the void. There is beauty in the galaxy, for those who can but see it.’

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‘I’m happy staying blind,’ said Kaminska. The view through the filters and reflected by the mirror screen was heavily distorted, but she could make out a crescent-shaped mass of light hanging over the ship. Though she had no frame of reference, she had an impression of enormous distance.

‘Macragge,’ muttered Orcadus. ‘See how it glows, the brightest constellation in this depth of the abyss? All those hard-working souls toiling at its surface; their combined life-spark is refulgent to my eyes. Ultramar is the most heavily populated system in the whole segmentum and the minds of its citizens are bright and full of hope. That is what I mean by beauty. It is a beacon, one that shines amidst the malice and bleakness of the empyrean tide.’

Kaminska continued to regard the dim mirror image of the warp through the minute aperture offered by the filters. Old space-farers’ tales were full of the effects the naked warp could have on a human mind. Madness was the most merciful fate, they said: mutation, excruciating spontaneous cancers and even possession by some malfeasant presence all featured prominent-ly. Kaminska felt a flicker of vulnerability, and was glad that on-ly the Navigator was there with her.

‘Is this why you summoned me?’ she asked, having little time or inclination for a philosophical debate concerning the immaterium. Her mind was on other matters, namely the sudden revival of Mhotep and Cestus’s meeting with the Thousand Son. She hoped it would yield some good news.

‘No,’ Orcadus answered simply, puncturing the admiral’s introspection, and pointing to a different region of the warp. It was a dim mass of glowing bluffs, like the top of endless cliffs reaching down into blackness. Above the cliffs was a streak of red.

‘I am not well-versed in reading the empyrean tides, Navigator,’ she snapped, weary of Orcadus’s eccentricities, which were ubiquitous amongst all the great Navigator houses. ‘What am I looking at?’

‘Formations like these cliffs are common enough in the abyss,’

he explained, oblivious to Kaminska’s impatience. ‘I am steering
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us well clear of them, and I am certain that our quarry has taken the same route. The formation above them, however, is rather more troubling.’

‘Another world, perhaps?’ ventured Kaminska. ‘There’s plenty of new settlement out here near the fringe.’

‘I suspected that, but it is not a planet. I believe it is another ship.’ ‘A second vessel?’ ‘No. I think it is a fleet.’

‘Are they following us?’ asked Kaminska, a knot of dread building in her stomach.

‘I cannot tell. Distance is relative down here,’ the Navigator admitted.

‘Could it be the Ultramarines? Their Legion was heading for Calth.’

‘It is possible. Calth could be its destination, I suppose.’

‘If not, then what is the alternative, Navigator?’ Kaminska didn’t like where this was going as the knot in her stomach became a fist.