Sin of Damnation - Gav Thorpe Page 11

  ‘But not so,’ said Calistarius. ‘We must be aboard the Omen of Despair.’

  ‘Apparently so.’ There was a click as the sergeant changed his vox-channel, presumably to transit this message back to the battle-barge. A few seconds later the click sounded again as he returned to the squad address channel they had been using. ‘That answers one question, but it does not tell us what happened, or what we might expect to find. I would prefer not to share their fate.’

  Calistarius, armed with this new information as a guideline for his probing, turned his attention back to Vespesario. Everything dropped away as he lowered himself into the turbulence of the Blood Angel’s mind. Again the rasping hatred sawed at the Librarian, threatening to cut through his thoughts and infect him with its purity of purpose.

  Vespesario.

  He fixed on the name like an ancient navigator might choose a star to gain his bearing.

  It did not stop the flames lapping again at the Librarian’s defences, seeking a way into his inner thoughts, probing his mental strength even as he sought ingress to Vespesario’s memories.

  As before, there was an outer layer, an ashen, black crust formed from the gene-curse that was bound up in Vespesario’s every fibre, now unleashed.

  ‘Send rally signals. All Blood Angels to converge on my position,’ he commanded. The order came easily, the need for action sweeping away any vestiges of horror he might have felt. His words, his voice, settled those around him, giving them strength with his presence alone. The honour guard checked their weapons and fell in behind their lord as he surveyed the chamber more closely.

  The walls were like nothing he had seen aboard a battle-barge. The power of the warp was in them, creating curves and peculiar organic shapes even as spines of iron jutted with jagged edges and sheaths of plastek slid over light fittings like blinking eyes. The dimensions of the room did not quite fit each other, so that corners seemed higher than the ceiling and walls longer than the floor.

  He had not experienced the like on a ship, it was true, but he had encountered the power of the warp many times before, and he was reminded of Signus. Its effect was much reduced. He concentrated, pushing aside the impossibilities. There was a doorway ahead, open to reveal a grandiose hall beyond. He headed for it, calling his sons after him.

  There was movement ahead and a moment later the first of the daemons appeared.

  The staging ground is secure, but all contact has been lost with the strike cruiser. The sergeants are holding a brief conversation and soon they announce the outcome of their deliberations.

  ‘We have translated into the warp,’ Sergeant Commeos tells them. ‘Moments after we teleported aboard.’

  ‘How are we not dead?’ asks Geraneos.

  ‘A functioning Geller field,’ Vespesario answers, guessing. ‘Pure luck.’

  ‘Not so lucky that we are on our own in here,’ says Sergeant Adonius. The sensorium lights up with contact warnings. Something is closing on their position. ‘Ready your weapons, brothers.’

  For a split-second Calistarius was caught between three realities: the Omen of Despair in the present; the space hulk more than two centuries earlier; and Vespesario’s Black Rage-induced gene-memories of their primarch trapped aboard the Warmaster’s starship.

  ‘We have multiple incoming signals.’

  It took another three seconds for the Librarian to realise that the words were in his ear, not his mind, spoken by Sergeant Dioneas. He broke away completely from Vespesario, lifting his hand from the near-dead warrior’s cheek to check the auspex.

  Life signals, fore and aft of their position. They were still half a kilometre distant, approaching slowly but growing in number.

  ‘What are they?’ Dioneas demanded. ‘What is coming for us?’

  Calistarius did not understand why the question had been directed at him. How was he supposed to know what the others did not? Realisation dawned.

  Vespesario knew.

  He closed his eyes and this time pushed into the flames without wavering.

  At first the daemons were shifting, formless things, drawn to the Space Marines as wisps of bright energy. They circled and danced, never staying still, growing in strength and numbers, flitting past doorways and skimming overhead, not quite coming into the range of power axe or chainsword. A few of the Blood Angels opened fire with bolters and pistols, sparking bursts of detonations against warping bulkheads as they tried to track the flitting apparitions.

  ‘Cease firing, save your ammunition,’ he told them.

  A constant moaning and screaming accompanied the party as they forged along a corridor of crystal walls, faceted to fragment and disperse the reflections of the legionaries. He glanced at one such image, seeing himself whole for a moment – tall, finely featured, eyes of deep blue, shoulder-length hair. But there was a cruel smile on his lips and wickedness in his gaze as something else looked back at him in mockery. A shift of view, another reflection, of lifeless eyes and half his skull missing, his throat slit. He moved his eyes again and this time saw himself in triumphant ecstasy, eyes filled with crimson, blood dripping from fangs that had split his gums.

  He knew nothing of what his companions saw but their disconcerted grunts and whispered curses told him that the visions were not welcome.

  The crystal passage brought them to a state room, furnished lavishly with a wood and leather suite of chairs and couches, bookcases on the wall lined with volumes and a table on which sat a decanter filled with a deep purple liquid.

  ‘Touch nothing,’ he warned, catching a glimpse of the spines of the books, marked with changing runes in a tongue that was anathema to sanity and reason. ‘Read nothing.’

  A book fell from a shelf to his right, opening at the image of a screaming child with tentacles erupting from her eyes. One of the Space Marines stooped to look at it and gave a disgusted snarl. As though prompted by this reaction, the image burst into life, tentacles uncoiling out of the pages, whip-fast, around the Space Marine’s neck and helm.

  Before a shot was fired, the legionary was dragged forward into a gnashing maw where the girl’s ruby lips had been, head bitten off by the fanged monstrosity. Tossing aside the decapitated remains, the book-pseudopods grew even longer, seeking a fresh victim.

  More books hurled themselves off the shelves, revealing pictures of nightmarish beasts with curling horns, cyclopean figures with ruptured skins and spilling guts, steel-clawed hounds and diamond-eyed succubae. The Blood Angels did their best but could not avoid seeing these demented pictures. Their instinctual fear and revulsion gave life to the magic within, drawing forth the daemons bound within the pages.

  In a few seconds the room was full of ghastly foes of mad proportion and terrible purpose. Wailing, screeching and howling, they fell upon the Space Marines with baroque curved blades and dagger-like talons. Battle-cries and shouts of alarm rang out, punctuated by the roar of bolters.

  He threw himself into the fray, sword glittering, pulses of plasma from his pistol incinerating the Chaos monsters. As he sliced a red-skinned creature with the head of a goat and the body of a dwarf, his stare fell upon the pages of a book depicting an infinitely deep maw. In a moment the air was being sucked from the room, books whirling, furniture upended by the all-consuming vortex.

  With a contemptuous snarl he fired his pistol, turning the book to a blackened mess that bubbled and steamed.

  ‘Press on,’ he called to the others, pointing his sword at the vast wooden door at the far end of the room. ‘We seek the Traitor.’

  Signals were clogging the sensorium data-feed, so that individual life readings were blurring together into a mass of returns a little more than two hundred metres from the perimeter. It was as though the hulk itself was coming alive, vomiting forth a stream of unidentified foes that were remaining just out of sight and out of reach.

  ‘What are they?’ asks Geran
eos. ‘Where are they coming from?’

  ‘Secondary ducting,’ Sergeant Adonius answers the second question. He offers no opinion on the first. ‘Air vents, cable tiers, maintenance access.’

  ‘Fast-moving,’ comments Vespesario. ‘Biding their time, not simply charging towards us.’

  ‘Perhaps they are afraid of us,’ suggests Brother Lucasi. ‘That is why they do not attack.’

  ‘What do we do?’ Brother Tarantus gives voice to the question that has nagged Vespesario for the last few minutes. ‘What is our mission here?’

  The silence of the sergeants is disconcerting. The Blood Angels had come to investigate the Omen of Despair and report back to their captain. Now they were trapped in the warp, most likely to die drifting on the immaterial tides.

  ‘If there are working Geller fields there could be a operational warp drive,’ Sergeant Commeos says eventually. ‘We should locate and secure the controls.’

  ‘We stay together,’ Adonius adds. His voice gains confidence as he continues to speak. ‘We must consider all contacts to be hostile. Emperor alone knows how long this hulk has been drifting, picking up all sorts of infestations and stowaways. Orders are to terminate any life form on sight.’

  ‘My squad will lead,’ says Commeos. ‘Orthodox sweep pattern alpha. Serrajo takes rearguard.’

  The nominated Terminator accepts this duty with a grunt and turns aside as the others continue along the corridor.

  They come out in some kind of systems hub: a cavernous vault lined with pipes and cables, a plume of steam gathering around ruptured feedlines. The air is thick with vapour, which catches as droplets on their armour. In the light of the emergency lamps set into the bulkhead, they turn into rubies that slide down the painted ceramite, leaving glittering trails.

  The sensorium shifts focus as Serrajo directs his suit’s scanners to the rear. The life signs are on the move, gathering behind and to the flanks of the Terminators’ line of advance.

  ‘Trying to keep away from us?’ says Vespesario, but his question is answered by the readings on the sensorium. The life signs become bright signals of movement as the semi-circle of returns collapses towards the two squads.

  ‘Incoming enemies. Purge them swiftly,’ calls Adonius.

  The first of the signals reaches the chamber in a shockingly short space of time – scant seconds after the enemy began to close.

  ‘They were here already,’ barks Commeos. He lifts his storm bolter and fires up at the ceiling. ‘Dormant in the steam cloud!’

  A body falls out of the gloom, riddled with bolt wounds, trailing yellow ichor. It has six limbs: two legs, recurved and double-jointed; two upper appendages like tentacles, lined with bony spurs; two other arms each ending in three dagger-like claws. Its head is bulbous and mottled with lumps of moss growth from long hibernation; black, lifeless eyes above a flattened snout and a mouth filled with needle-like fangs. Under dark grey chitin marked with white tiger stripes is purplish flesh tight with muscle and tendons.

  Another of the creatures looms out of the darkness towards Vespesario, claws outstretched, mouth opened wide. A tubular tongue glistens with alien fluid.

  This one is alive.

  ‘Genestealers!’ Calistarius shouted the warning the moment he dragged himself free from Vespesario’s memories. ‘They are using thermal ducts and power exchanges to mask their hibernation areas. Watch for attacks from sub-ducting beneath the decks.’

  ‘Hold positions, defensive stance,’ ordered Dioneas. A click and a buzz heralded his switch to long-range transmission to the strike cruiser.

  Calistarius stood up, almost disappointed. Space hulks were known to carry all manner of potential threats, including orks and other aliens, adepts and devotees of the Dark Powers and even Traitor Space Marines. In the last few decades genestealers had become an increasingly prevalent peril, and the Blood Angels had encountered their fair share of the hideous xenos. Only a few years earlier Calistarius had been part of the boarding teams that had cleansed the Sin of Damnation of another swarm.

  ‘Standard infestation protocols,’ Dioneas continued, having received orders from Captain Raphael. ‘We will fall back to the insertion point and establish a breach-head for the incoming second wave. Estimated time to reinforcement is seventeen minutes.’

  ‘What about Vespesario?’ asked Calistarius. ‘We cannot leave him here.’

  ‘This area is too tight for a solid defensive cordon against a superior close assault foe,’ replied the sergeant. ‘We need to withdraw to the outer galleries where we have better lines of fire.’

  ‘And abandon one of our own?’

  ‘That is not a Blood Angel.’ Dioneas’s voice was harsh over the vox as he turned away. ‘It is a hunk of meat kept alive by a combination of sus-an membrane and barely functioning armour life support systems.’

  Calistarius was about to argue further but the sergeant cut him off, his tone more conciliatory.

  ‘When the secondary wave arrives we shall make this chamber a primary objective. We can secure the area with more warriors and allow the Apothecaries to do their work.’

  It was hard for Calistarius to step away. He had shared Vespesario’s thoughts and knew that there was something of the Space Marine still inside the broken body and shattered armour. He had made a connection with his battle-brother, though separated by centuries, and owed it to a fellow Blood Angel to ensure the best chance for survival. Vespesario had done all that he could, sealing himself inside this room, and somehow he had endured. Now that the Blood Angels had breached the door there was nothing to stop the genestealers finishing what they had begun so long ago.

  Calistarius was also prepared to admit to himself that he was intrigued by the potential of examining the mind of a Black Rage victim in more detail. Normally delving into the thoughts of one of his brothers so deeply would be taboo, especially those beset by the blood curse. It was a unique opportunity to gain an insight into what the victims of the Black Rage experienced and, perhaps, a chance to ease the suffering of others or maybe even take a step closer to a cure.

  ‘Wait, brother-sergeant,’ said the Librarian as he was about to step across the threshold. Dioneas was heading away down the corridor and did not stop. ‘Why did he lock himself away like this? We have to find out.’

  ‘An easily defensible position to make a last stand against the genestealers,’ replied Dioneas, still advancing along the passage. ‘Little mystery to be explained, I think.’

  ‘A remarkably rational decision for one gripped by the madness of the Black Rage.’

  Dioneas stopped at a junction a few dozen metres ahead and turned back to face the Librarian. ‘Your meaning?’

  ‘No plainer than what I have said,’ continued Calistarius. ‘I do not have an answer to that, but from everything we know he would not retreat and he certainly would not have had the presence of mind to close and seal the bulkhead. Something strange happened here two centuries ago.’

  ‘I agree, and we shall uncover the truth of such events once we have properly secured a breach-head and expanded our cordon.’ Dioneas turned away. ‘We must withdraw, Brother-Lexicanium.’

  Captain Raphael had made it clear before Calistarius had departed that battlefield command fell to Sergeant Dioneas, a veteran of several centuries more than the Librarian. Chapter law demanded that Calistarius obeyed the direct command of his superior, but his every instinct was warning him otherwise. As a psyker, he knew instinct was often an indication of some deeper sense.

  When Dioneas realised that the Librarian was not following, he stepped back into view.

  ‘Your orders are clear, brother. The warriors of the Librarium at not immune to censure and punishment. Follow me.’

  Calistarius used a sub-vocal command to switch to the command hail channel.

  ‘Captain Raphael? This is Lexicanium Calistarius. I must speak wi
th you urgently.’

  ‘Calistarius?’ Raphael’s voice was deep and rich, and he spoke calmly despite the unorthodox nature of Calistarius’s communication. ‘This is the command channel. What has happened to Sergeant Dioneas? His transponder reports normal vital signs.’

  ‘The sergeant is unharmed, captain. We cannot withdraw. Not yet. I must continue my psychic scan of Brother Vespesario. Abort the reinforcement wave until I have completed my probe.’

  There was a long pause before Raphael replied.

  ‘Second wave is being despatch in forty seconds. You have thirty to convince me.’

  Calistarius quickly told the captain of his suspicions concerning Vespesario’s behaviour. Raphael listened without interruption and when the Librarian finished asked a simple question.

  ‘Are you willing to stake your honour and good name on this… instinct?’

  There was no doubt in the Librarian’s mind. It was some unfocused warning from his psychic sense, a warp-powered intuition that made it more than a simple hunch. ‘Absolutely, brother-captain. Delay the reinforcement wave for five minutes, that is all I ask.’

  ‘Very well, you have five more minutes.’

  The vox-link broke into static for a couple of seconds and then went quiet. Another few seconds passed before Dioneas spoke up, during which the sergeant received fresh orders from the captain.

  ‘You circumnavigated the chain of command, brother,’ the sergeant growled, advancing back along the corridor towards Calistarius. ‘You are placing yourself and our battle-brothers in great danger. We cannot hold this position for five minutes if the genestealers attack. I urge you to reconsider.’

  ‘I will not, brother-sergeant,’ said Calistarius. ‘I cannot. I am prepared to wager our six lives against the ninety more that will be risked should the second wave be launched.’