Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Read online

  The inquisitor stepped around the inert lexmechanic and recovered a dull metallic object from a secret inner pocket of his cloak. He did not grace the Word Bearer with an answer.

  The prisoner had fouled himself in fright. Mad alarm shone bright in his reddened eyes. “No human could…”

  Stele walked back to the torture chair, concealing the thing in his hand. “What are you babbling about, creature?” he asked idly.

  Noro indicated the lexmechanic, the hatchway and the world outside it with spastic jerks of his head. “They can’t see it…” The Word Bearer suddenly broke into hysterical laughter, “but I can!”

  “Be silent.” Stele’s hand came around to Noro’s throat. In a blur of motion the weapon in his hand cut cleanly across the thick meat of his neck as if it were passing through thin air. Thick blood flooded out in a gush, choking the Word Bearer into stillness. After a moment, the inquisitor began the careful task of cleaning the stiletto molly-knife he had used to dispatch it. The weapon’s fractal blade was so sharp that the task of wiping blood from it took slow and careful deliberation.

  When he was done, Stele spoke the command word again. The lexmechanic and servo-skulls returned to wakefulness with no perception of missing time. He was halfway to the door when the servitor remarked. “The specimen… He appears to have taken his own life…”

  “Yes.” Stele noted absently. “You saw it happen, didn’t you?”

  The lexmechanic gave a slow blink, as if the progress of that thought was particularly sluggish in its mind. “I saw it happen,” it replied, after a lengthy pause.

  “Have it dissected,” said the inquisitor, and then as an afterthought, he added, “and the heart and the skull—have them sent to my quarters.”

  Rafen found the veteran in heated debate with Sachiel as he entered the Bellus’s tacticarium. Normally, a rank-and-file Space Marine of his standing would have been denied access without the permission of a senior battle-brother, but his connection to Arkio suddenly made such concerns trivial in the eyes of the men-at-arms who guarded the hatchway.

  “Why ask my opinion if you do not heed it?” Koris was saying. “Or do you merely wish me to tell you what you want to hear?”

  Sachiel’s face hardened. “Your words are always noteworthy, Brother Koris, but that does not guarantee I must follow them. Do not forget yourself, sergeant!”

  Rafen noticed Arkio standing to one side, back-lit by the glow of a hologrammatic display tank. His sibling caught his eye and nodded a greeting. Rafen saw the mirror of his own face there, drawn by fatigue. Perhaps the “miracle” had been harder on his brother than he suspected.

  “I have conferred with the inquisitor and I concur with his recommendations. Bellus will withdraw from orbit and set out for Shenlong with all alacrity,” said the priest. “It is only fitting that we take the Word Bearers the reprisal they are so richly due.”

  Koris snorted. “What does a torture-master and questioner know of Space Marine tactics? Think, Sachiel! Shenlong sits amid an ocean of nuclear void mines that an Imperial grand fleet would have difficulty in destroying! I would never deny that the Chaos rabble deserve to drown in their own blood, but Bellus is just one ship—how can we hope to penetrate such defences?”

  The priest flicked a glance at Arkio. “Sanguinius will provide the means,” he snapped.

  “Really?” Koris arched an eyebrow, and looked at the young Marine. “Tell me, will he reach out and sweep the mines from the sky for us?” He snorted. “I have been a son of Sanguinius for twice your life span, Sachiel, and I know that he helps those who help themselves… And without help we cannot crack Shenlong!”

  “The inquisitor has secured the secret approaches to the planet.” Arkio said quietly. “The way through the mines is known to him.”

  Sachiel smiled thinly. “You see, Koris? Your concerns are unfounded.”

  “Are they? Suppose we do make it to strike range of the surface, what then? With our losses on Cybele, this battered company is well below full strength.”

  Rafen spoke for the first time. “The Word Bearers’ forces on Shenlong will be superior in numbers,” he said, announcing his presence.

  The priest eyed him. “A single Blood Angel inspired by the righteous power of the Emperor is worth a dozen Traitors! We do not fear them!” He rounded on Rafen. “You lack faith in the decisions of your superiors, Rafen, I see it in your eyes! We must strike while we have the element of surprise… Every day we tarry, the corrupted reinforce themselves on a world they stole from the Imperium!”

  “If it pleases the high priest, all I suggest is that we seek reinforcements from Baal,” retorted Rafen. “We should remain at Cybele until Commander Dante can send us more ships, then we can leave a holding force here and sortie to Shenlong in good order—”

  Sachiel silenced him with a shout. “No! We have the blessing of the primogenitor on our side and our victory is assured! Look around you, Rafen!” He cast his arms wide to encompass the other Blood Angels in the room. “Your brothers are blood-hungry! They do not wish to wait for reinforcements; they want to make the Word Bearers pay! Pay for every soul taken and inch of earth soiled with their worthless lives!”

  Rafen felt a light touch on his arm and looked up into Arkio’s eyes. “Trust me, brother, when I promise you we can succeed.”

  Sachiel turned his back on Koris, dismissing him, and called to the serf attending him. “Pass the word to Captain Ideon. Under my orders, the command is given! We weigh anchor and warp for Shenlong!”

  Koris stalked from the room without another word, leaving Rafen to watch his old mentor go.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The warp boiled at the edges of Ramius Stele’s mind. The hot touch of the raw, inchoate energies licked at his soul in searing, unearthly caresses. And yet these were merely faint ghosts of the true power of the empyrean, refracted through the ever-present barrier of the ship’s geller field. The inquisitor delighted in it. He was alone in his private chambers aboard Bellus, and he had the freedom to direct himself into the trance-state where his mental vigour had free reign. As the battle barge carried itself through the trackless gulf of the empyrean, Stele willingly relaxed the complex psionic shields that guarded his mind and allowed himself to hear the babbling screams and entreaties of the things that lived in the non-space realm. Giddy with it, he let himself teeter on the edge of the psychic abyss, excited by the danger and the adrenaline rush like a climber atop the highest mountain. Only he had the power of will to hold himself back from the brink of madness where other men would have faltered. Only Ramius Stele was possessed of such mental strength as to resist the siren call.

  Life moved out there, not the shapes of organic substantiality that lived in the material domain, but constructs of pure thought and raw, raging emotion. He listened to them as they cut invisibly past Bellus, rode their wakes and took the smallest morsels of mental sustenance from their passage. This was Stele’s most secret vice, the sin that he hid deep in his soul, far from the casual telepathic probes of the few Blood Angels Librarians that still served aboard the ship—and for that, it was made all the more sweet. Each time it became a little harder to reel himself back into the world of crude matter, each time he dallied a little longer than before. But he revelled in it, even though he knew it might destroy him.

  When Bellus made the transit from the Immaterium and into the void at the edge of the Shenlong system, Stele gave a wan sigh and gathered himself together. The inquisitor observed a minor engagement from the window of his chamber, as Bellus caught a Word Bearer Iconoclast-class destroyer on picket ship duty. The vessel’s commander had been hideously inattentive, and barely had half his void shields been raised before the battle barge’s main guns had ravaged the knife-blade hull. Burning like an oil-soaked rag, the slaughtered destroyer tumbled away into space. Stele gave a nod of approval. The quick killing of the Chaos starship guarding the warp point would allow Bellus to continue its approach to
Shenlong undetected. If his schemes fell into place as he had foreseen, the Blood Angels would be well within strike range of the forge world by the time the Word Bearers knew they had intruders.

  He mumbled a short prayer of petition to the hololithic display tank in his quarters, and the device obeyed. It projected an image of Shenlong from the ship’s long-range sensor pits. Hazy and indistinct, the unremarkable planet drifted with vast bands of tiny spheres girdled about it. Stele extended a finger into the hologram and ran it over the floating dots. Each one was a compact thermonuclear charge, a city-killer warhead riding a thraster nest with a simple logic engine to command it. As the planet turned, so they communicated with one another to form a perfect, impenetrable net about the manufactory world. The inquisitor dragged up a fragment of memory from the stores of hypno-taught facts impressed into him as an initiate of the Ordo Hereticus. Shenlong had been a weapons fabricator since the Dark Age of Technology, here they built shells and bombs for a billion little wars in continent-sized production plants. The secrets of the minefield that shrouded it were, like so much in the Imperial era, lost to terra’s tech-magi. Stele gave a slight sneer. The curtain of atomic death had not stopped the archenemy from perverting men in positions of power, to grant them the secret corridors through the ever-shifting field of weapons. And now he had done the same, ripping the way from the memories of the dead beast Noro. Still, it would be a slow and dangerous approach. They would have to avoid other Chaos patrol ships and hold fast to a course that was as reliable as the mind of a maddened killer.

  The inquisitor turned as the faint taste of a psyker reached his telepathic senses. Smothering his disdain, he gestured to a machine-bound servitor and it released the seal on the door to the chamber. The hatch dilated to reveal a pair of Blood Angels and a hooded figure trailing a train of mechadendrites behind him.

  The aged Master Horin. Stele knew the astropath before he saw him. After all this time, he could mark the mind-scent of every psyker on board Bellus with perfect accuracy—and this one he found particularly objectionable. The bony old fool was a stubborn creature, and far less susceptible to subtle coercion.

  “Lord inquisitor,” began the telepath, “as your orders command, I bring you a communication of the utmost urgency. A message arrived after our emergence from the warp.”

  Stele studied the stunted man-thing. Vitae tubules and connectors that webbed Horin into his machine pulpit trailed across the floor behind him, drooling out watery nourishment fluids. The astropath had forcibly extracted himself from his console and come to Stele’s chambers, rather than dictate the signal to his coterie of quill-servitors.

  Did he detect some faint irritation in Horin’s sibilant voice? A glimmer of resentment at being forced to take the message he carried not to Captain Ideon, but to Stele for first approval? The inquisitor gave a slight smile. It was difficult to read the emotional states of an astropath—if they even had them at all. “Warriors, you are dismissed,” he said. “Wait outside.”

  The astropath gave the slightest sideways glance at the Space Marines as they left him alone. It was irregular that a command-level communication would not be voiced within earshot of a senior Blood Angel. Stele watched him intently. The inquisitor’s mental feelers wove invisible patterns in the air, seeking some sense of the moment.

  “You have news from Baal.” Stele said slowly, the smile fading. “You have told no one else?”

  “Your orders demanded nothing less,” said the astropath. “I have not spoken the signal until now.”

  The inquisitor came closer, the action deceptively casual. “Then speak.”

  Harmonics inside the astropath’s augmented throat resonated for a moment, and then it uttered a string of numbers. “Cipher, omnis secunda. Directed to Ideon, brother-captain commanding warship Bellus. Telepathic duct, Astropath Horin. Penned by his High Lord Commander Dante of the Blood Angels.”

  Stele frowned at the mention of Dante’s name and began formulating the steps he would be forced to take.

  The timbre of the astropath’s voice took on a more husky tone, but the words came in faltering starts. Horin carefully reconstructed the message, careful to speak it in the order that it had been written. His words were Dante’s, parroted from across the void. “Honoured Captain Ideon, and the Lord Stele, my greetings to you… The Celaeno’s call for succour has reached us and we are gratified that Bellus may come to the aid of our brethren.” Horin licked his dry lips. “It is my decree that Bellus remain on station and assist in holding the Cybele outpost. Secure the planet and communicate your status with haste. A relief force will be dispatched on receipt of your reply.” There was a moment’s pause, and Stele wondered if the astropath was eyeing him, “This is my command, for the glory of the Emperor and Sanguinius. Dante, Chapter Master of the Blood Angels.” The psyker twitched, and punctuated the ending of the message with a quiet cough of sound.

  Stele was quite close to him now. “Thank you, Horin,” the bald man said, using the astropath’s given name for the first time in ten years.

  He nodded. “By your leave, then, I will inform Captain Ideon that we must return to Cybele.”

  “No, that won’t do.” Stele said conversationally. “That won’t happen.”

  Horin’s mechadendrites stiffened. “The message stated—”

  Stele shook his head. “There was no message. You came here to kill me.”

  The astropath’s hood jerked, as if the statement had been a slap in the face. “What is the meaning of this?”

  The inquisitor cocked his head to get a look at Horin’s hidden face, and from nowhere, hot sparks of colour began to lick around his fingers. Stele’s eyes flashed with witch-fire. “Dance for me,” he whispered.

  The astropath froze, he had been granted one terrible moment to understand just what Stele’s intentions were. Then his muscles rebelled against all conscious controls and the elderly psyker’s mind-barriers shattered. Unable to stop himself, he launched at the inquisitor with clawed fingers and bared teeth. “Nuuuuhh—”

  Stele worked a bore of mental energy into the centre of Horin’s mind and twisted it. The astropath spat and hissed like an animal. His eyes revealed the terrified truth that he had no command over his own flesh. “Guards!” Stele shouted at the top of his lungs. “Help me!”

  The two Blood Angels raced into the room to see the inquisitor wrestling with Horin. “The astropath is tainted! The warp has poisoned him with madness!” Stele gave the old man a vicious shove and he stumbled back a few steps.

  The Marines needed no further prompting. They tore Horin apart with snap-fire bursts from their bolters. Shells ripped exotic metals and bionics from age-spotted skin and brittle bone.

  Stele slumped to the ornate tiled floor, and one of the Blood Angels came to him. “Lord, are you injured?”

  He made a play of weariness. “Terra be praised, I am unhurt. If you had not been so quick, the turncoat could have killed me…”

  The other Marine nudged Horin’s corpse with his boot. “It is dead,” he pronounced, somewhat redundantly. “Another warp-witch too weak to resist.”

  “Yes.” Stele agreed, rising to his feet, “the siren call of the empyrean is strong enough to exploit even the smallest deficiency in the servants of the Emperor.”

  The grand chamber was dark now, each of the biolumes and braziers that had glowed with light during the remembrance ceremony were now dull and black. The only illumination came from infrequent clusters of candles dotted here and there inside the wrought-iron frames of devotional sub-shrines. Rafen savoured the smell of the hot wax as he passed them, the scent of the pungent Kolla tallow bringing sense-memory of valleys on Baal Primus to mind.

  The thoughts fell away as he approached the head of the chamber, his boots tapping on the stone flooring. A knot of silent Marines parted to let him through, and there at the foot of the altar knelt his brother. Arkio completed the last few words of the prayer of the red grail, and the
n looked up at him. Rafen was struck by a sudden sense of distance in Arkio’s eyes.

  “Brother,” he said. “You are still troubled.”

  Rafen knelt alongside him and made the sign of the aquila. “By a great many things.”

  “And am I one of them?” When Rafen hesitated, Arkio continued, “Do not be concerned, kinsman. I do not fear, and neither should you.”

  “I… Saw something, a light, when you touched the holy lance…”

  Arkio nodded, and turned his eyes up to the glass portrait of Sanguinius. “That was his blessing, Rafen. On me… On all of us. Do you recall the lessons when Koris told us of the Emperor’s divine weapons? Did we ever dare to dream we would one day see such a thing?”

  Rafen gave a slow nod. The legendary armaments from the rise of the Imperium were spoken of in hushed reverence. Weapons like the Spear of Telesto and its cousins the Frostblade Mjalnar and the Soul Spear, the great Blade Encarmine and the Black Sword of the Templars, all of them forged in the fires of the Emperor’s righteous fury. Any one of the blades would elevate a man to glory, if he had the will to wield it.

  Arkio’s elder brother struggled to find the right words, but every sentence that came to his lips felt clumsy. Emotion and thought churned inside Rafen. Where was the bright, dauntless young novice Marine that he remembered from their days of training on Baal? How had his sibling changed from that to a taciturn and introspective man, heavy with the weight of dogma? “This miracle,” he said carefully. “It has altered you…”

  A rare smile escaped Arkio. “How could it not, Rafen? I felt him touch me, brother, I felt the primarch’s hand across my brow, and the bequest of his inheritance.” He looked away. “I am changed, of that there is no doubt. The boy who joined you at Angel’s Fall is gone now.”

  Rafen suddenly felt alone. “And yet, I remember that time as if it were yesterday.”

  On the day they arrived, the blood-red sun was at its apex above the stone floor of the amphitheatre at Angel’s Fall. The red giant cast a punishing heat across the length of the arena, beating down on the crowd of aspirants gathered there. Like all the other trials they would face, it was one more test to weed out the weak of heart and impure of soul. They were a rough and wiry bunch; muscles honed in the hard way of life that Baal’s worlds forced upon its people. None of them were more than fourteen summers old, but to call them immature would have been a grave misnomer. There were no children here.