Battle for The Abyss (6 page)

Usually, this area of the dock would be thronging with menials and engineers, but the rapid outflow of escape reactor radiation had prompted an evacuation alert. The Astartes had passed a number of fleeing tech adepts as they’d made their way down to the reactor. Those that were left were either dead or critically injured. The Astartes ignored them all, immune to their pleas for help with the safety of the entire dock at stake.

‘I am hoping a solution will present itself,’ Cestus replied as they made their way through the cramped tunnel. The corridor the Astartes were in spiralled around the main reactor shell down to the power source at the base of the station.

‘To think the Legion of Guilliman are regarded as master stra-tegists,’ said Brynngar with bellowing laughter.

‘Directness is a valid strategy. Space Wolf,’ Antiges reminded him, shouting to be heard above the horrendous noise of lurch-ing metal, as if an inner storm was at play within the conduit. ‘I would have thought one of the Sons of Russ would find it familiar.’

Brynngar’s amused response was raucous and deafening.

Shouldering past the last of the surviving crewmen and pa-nicked tech adepts as they fled, Cestus led the Astartes to the reactor chamber. Only one of the Emperor’s Angels, replete in his power armour, could hope to survive the reactor’s intense radiation at such close range. Like his battle-brothers, Cestus had donned his helmet before entering the tunnel. Extreme radiation
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warning icons flashed insistently in the lens display. Time was running out.

Atmospheric pipes fractured and sprayed freezing gas across a pair of gargantuan blast doors closing off the interior of the reactor shell from the rest of the station. Doubtless, they’d been activated as soon as the psychic power surge from the astropaths had hit. The servos on the massive door had shorted and were a tangled mass of wires and machinery.

‘Prepare yourselves,’ cried Cestus, ignoring the subzero gas. He seized the edge of the blast door in an effort to prise it open.

‘Stand back,’ snarled Brynngar, using his bulk to muscle the Ultramarine aside. He hefted Felltooth with practiced ease, sweeping the rune axe around in a lazy arc.

‘No sport when the enemy stays still,’ he growled and split the blast door in two with one mighty swing, sparks cascading from the blade.

Stowing the weapon, Brynngar peeled back the rent metal with both hands, making a space wide enough for the Astartes to enter.

The reactor was a swirling mass of glowing blue-green energy, rippling in on itself as it drew in power from the plasma conduits looping around it like eccentric orbits around a star. It pulsed, streaked with black and purple, and chunks of scorched machinery tumbled into it. A hot blast of air, tingling with radiation, washed over them in a back-draught. More warning runes flickered against Cestus’s helmet lens, transmitted through onto the display from the acute sensor readouts on his armour.

‘Now what?’ shouted Antiges above the howl of the reactor.

Cestus watched the writhing mass of energy, taking in the confines of the small chamber that housed it and the control console, all but destroyed by its wrath.

‘How many charges do you have?’

‘A cluster of fragmentation and three krak grenades, but I don’t understand, captain,’ Antiges replied, his perplexity concealed by his helmet.

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‘A full belt of krak,’ Brynngar growled. ‘Whatever you are planning, lad, we’d best be about it,’ he added. Being blown to smithereens by a malfunctioning reactor was not the death saga he wanted for his epitaph.

‘We prime the chamber with set charges, everything we’ve got,’

said Cestus with growing conviction, ‘and bury it.’

‘That would cause catastrophic damage to the station,’ Antiges countered, turning to regard his captain.

‘Yes, but it would not destroy it,’ said Cestus. ‘There is no other choice.’

Cestus was about to detach the grenades from his clip harness when the reactor abruptly collapsed like a dying star imploding into a black hole. In its place a glowing sphere of deep purple blossomed, flickering like an image on a faulty pict screen. Purple lightning licked from the surface, playing over Cestus’s armour. He took a step back.

Yowling static flared suddenly into life and the Astartes were floored by the wave of noise. A bright flash lit the entire chamber, overloading their helmet arrays in an instant. There, amidst the intense flare of light, Cestus saw an image, so fleeting and indistinct that it could have been an illusion from the overwhelmed optics in his helmet. He blinked once, seeing only white haze, and shook his head, trying to recapture it. The flare died down and when Cestus’s vision returned the afterglow haunted the edge of his retinas, but the image was gone and the reactor was dead. The core had turned dark. Cracks of static electricity glowed over its surface. It shrank and became abruptly inert. The warning lights inside the reactor shell dimmed and went out.

Elsewhere on the station, secondary and tertiary reactors, registering the loss of the primary reactor, diverted power to the dock, allowing the tech-seers time to make the necessary repairs. The storm had howled itself out.

‘What in the name of Terra just happened?’ asked Antiges, a cluster of frag grenades still in his hand.

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‘Mother Fenris,’ Brynngar breathed at what he had just witnessed.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Cestus. ‘Did you see it in the blast flare?’

‘See what?’ Antiges replied, relieved that they didn’t have to collapse the reactor chamber after all.

Cestus’s posture displayed his shock and disbelief as sure as any facial expression disguised by his armour. ‘Macragge.’

SHARDS OF BROKEN images flashed on the psy-receiver, what was left of the astropathic transference from the psychic scream.

Falkman, looking gaunt and haggard from his earlier experience, but otherwise intact, pored over them, running analysis protocols and clarity procedures with what little machinery still worked in the hub. Saphrax stood pensively beside him, awaiting the return of his captain.

‘Brother-captain!’ he said with no small amount of relief as Cestus and the others emerged from the tunnel, their armour scorched black in several places.

When Cestus removed his helmet, his face was ashen and a cold sweat dappled his brow.

Saphrax was taken aback; he had never seen a fellow Astartes, certainly not his captain, look so afflicted.

‘The astropathic message,’ Cestus stated coldly, going to the psy-receiver before Saphrax could verbalise his concern. ‘What’s left of it?’

‘All is well, brother,’ said Antiges, following in his captain’s wake and placing his hand on the banner bearer’s shoulder, though his tone was anything but reassuring.

Brynngar waited further back, deliberately distancing himself, and stony silent as if processing what had happened in the reactor. He touched a fang totem attached to his cuirass with an inward expression.

‘There is little left,’ confessed Falkman, who, though he had managed to restore lighting and some of the basic functions of the hub, had failed to recover the entire astropathic message. ‘I
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need to get one of the logic engines functioning if I’m to decipher it with any degree of certitude, but this is what we have.’

Cestus glared at the pict-slate of the psy-receiver as the broken images cycled slowly: a gauntleted fist wreathed in a laurel of steel, a golden book, what appeared to be the hull of a ship and a cluster of indistinct stars. Cestus knew of a fifth image. Though his rational mind told him otherwise, in his heart, the Ultramarine knew what he had seen – the range of mountains, the lustr-ous green and blue – it was unmistakable. He also knew what he had felt: a sense of belonging, like coming home.

‘Macragge,’ he whispered, and felt suddenly cold.

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FOUR

Divine inspiration

A gathering

Contact

MHOTEP STARED INTO the water, so still and clear its surface was like silver. The face that stared back at him had hard and chiselled features with a handsome bone structure, despite the vel-vet cowl that partly concealed it. Hooded eyes spoke of intelligence, and skin, so tan and smooth that it was utterly without imperfection, suggested the nature of his Legion: the Thousand Sons.

Mhotep was dressed in iridescent robes that pooled like deep red liquid around him as he knelt with head bowed. Stitched in runes, his attire suggested the arcane. He was at the heart of his private sanctum.

The ellipse-shaped chamber had a low ceiling that enhanced the sense of claustrophobia created by the sheer volume of esoteric paraphernalia within. Stacks of scroll cases and numerous shelves, replete with well-thumbed archaic tomes, warred for space with crys-glass cabinets filled with bizarre arcana: an ocu-lum of many hued lenses, a bejewelled gauntlet, a plain silver mask fashioned into an ersatz skull. Upon a raised dais, there was a planetarium in miniature, rendered from gold, the stellar bodies represented by gemstones. Gilt-panelled walls were swathed in ancient charts in burnished metal frames, cast in the azure glow of eldritch lamps.

A red marble floor stretched across the entire room, engraved with myriad paths of interlocking and concentric circles. Runes
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of onyx and jet, etched into the stone, punctuated the sweeping arcs without regularity. Mhotep was at the nexus of the design, at the point where all of the interweaving circles converged.

A chime registered in a vox-emitter built into the sanctum’s entry system, indicating a guest.

‘Enter, Kalamar,’ said Mhotep.

A hiss of escaping pressure accompanied the aide as the door to the sanctum opened and he shuffled into the room.

‘How did you know it was I, Lord Mhotep?’ asked Kalamar, his speech fraught with age and decrepitude.

‘Who else would it be, old friend? I do not need the prescience of Magnus to predict your presence in my sanctum.’

Mhotep bent towards the bowl, plunging both hands into the water to lightly splash his face. As he came back up, he withdrew his cowl and the lamp light reflected from his bald scalp.

‘And I need no sophisticated augury to divine that you bring important news, either,’ Mhotep added, dabbing his face with his sleeve.

‘Of course, sire. I meant no offence,’ said Kalamar, bowing acutely. The serf was blind, and wore ocular implants; the augmetic bio-sensors built into his eye cavities could not ‘see’ as such, but detected heat and provided limited spatial awareness.

Kalamar supplemented his somewhat unorthodox visual affliction with a silvered cane.

‘My lord, we have docked at Vangelis,’ he added finally, confirming what his captain already knew.

Mhotep nodded, as if possessed of sudden understanding.

‘Have the Legion serfs prepare my armour, we are leaving the ship at once.’

‘As you wish,’ Kalamar said, bowing again, but as he was retreating from the sanctum he paused. ‘My lord, please do not think me impertinent, but why have we docked here at Vangelis when our journey’s end lies at Prospero?’

‘The paths of destiny are curious, Kalamar,’ Mhotep replied, looking back down at the bowl.

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‘Yes, my lord.’ Even after over fifty years in his service, Kalamar did not fully understand his master’s cryptic words.

When the Legion serf had gone, Mhotep rose to his feet, his vo-luminous robes gathering up around him. From within the folds of his sleeves, he produced a stave-like object, no longer than his forearm and covered in arcane sigils.

Stepping away from the circle, a single eye was revealed at its centre as he took a bizarre course through the labyrinthine design of the room. It represented the wisdom of Magnus, Primarch of the Thousand Sons Legion and gene-father to Mhotep. Locked in his cabalistic route, Mhotep arrived at an ornate, lozenge-shaped vessel and reverently placed the stave within it. The vessel was much like a gilded sarcophagus, similar to that in which the rulers of ancient Prospero had once been entombed. The item secured, Mhotep sealed the vessel shut, a vacuum hiss of escaping pressure emitting from its confines, and inputted a rune sequence disguised within the sarcophagus’s outer decoration.

‘Yes,’ uttered Mhotep, the task done, absently caressing a scarab-shaped earring, ‘very curious.’

‘IT IS A low turn out,’ muttered Antiges beneath his breath.

Within the stark, grey ferrocrete austerity of the Ultramarines muster hall three Astartes awaited Cestus and his battle-brothers.

The three were seated around a conference table inset with a single arcing ‘U’. A huge tapestry, depicting the auspicious day when the Emperor came to Macragge in search of one of his sons, framed the scene. Clad in glorious armour of gold, a shining halo about his patrician features, the Emperor stretched out his hand to a kneeling Roboute Guilliman, who reached out to claim it.

That day, their primarch had been truly born and their Legion’s inception cemented.

Even now, and rendered as mere artistry, Cestus could not help but feel his heart lift.

‘With such short notice, I had expected less,’ the Ultramarine confessed, approaching the gathering with Antiges. Cestus’s battle-brother had briefed his captain on the attendees. Brynngar he
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knew, of course, but the two others, a Thousand Son and a World Eater, he did not.

Cestus and Antiges were joined by four more of their brothers –

Lexinal, Pytaron, Excelinor and Morar, for the sake of appearances. The rest, Amyrx, Laeradis and Thestor, were with Saphrax on a separate duty. The Ultramarines had called the gathering, so it was only proper that they arrived at it in force to show their commitment.