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

  Sachiel reached for the velvet bag on his belt. “So ordered. I will take command of the strike team personally. Arkio, for your eloquence you will join me with Corvus and Lucion.” He turned to Koris. “Brother-sergeant, choose a squad of men to accompany us. You will lead the remaining troops to stage a diversionary raid on the perimeter once we are within the port’s confines.”

  Koris masked his ill humour at the orders with a salute; the veteran had clearly hoped to lead the team himself. “As you command.”

  As Sachiel stepped away, Rafen laid a hand on his commander’s shoulder. “Sergeant, I would have you choose me to go too.”

  Koris raised an eyebrow. “You want to keep a watch on the lad, eh? In case he has any other flashes of tactical brilliance or sudden urges for oratory?” The elder warrior gave a terse nod. “Very well. Take Alactus too, and draw full stocks of ammunition from what assets we have.”

  “Lord, that will leave the rest of you with next to nothing—”

  “Bah.” Koris waved him away. “We’ll beat them with stones and harsh language if need be. You take your brother’s plan and make it work, Rafen.”

  Rafen said no more, as a silence fell across the survivors. Sachiel held up a brass chalice and murmured a benediction. Each of the Blood Angels was drawn to the glittering replica of the red grail. The priest drew his combat blade across his bared forearm and let a thin stream of blood trickle into the cup. Then he handed it to Koris, who did the same. The chalice went from man to man until each of them had added a run of their own vital fluid to the mixture. The container had the same shape and form as the most sacred and ancient of the Chapter’s artefacts, the red grail that contained the blood of every Sanguinary High Priest. So the Chapter’s scripture said, these men—of which Sachiel was one—shared an iota of the primarch’s blood; it was injected into their veins in a sacred ritual. Now the priest took a draught from the cup. “By blood we are bonded,” he intoned, “and by blood we serve.”

  He passed the chalice back along the line of men, and each of them sipped from the dark, coppery liquid. “We drink deep of victory, and remember the fallen.” The cup, empty now, returned to Sachiel’s grasp. “For the Emperor and Sanguinius!”

  With one voice, the last warriors of the Imperium on Cybele took up the cry. “For the Emperor and Sanguinius!”

  The flood channel was a tight fit for the Space Marines, and it was a credit to their battle discipline that they moved quietly through the waist-deep water, never once brushing against the worn brickwork that closed in around them. The water-course was not the product of a single construction: over the centuries, the pipes had been extended and built over one another as more and more of Cybele’s surface had become a resting place for war dead. In some parts, the Marines were able to stand line abreast instead of single file, passing through the stone foundations of huge crypts and mausoleums. Alactus led the way with a faint biolume in his hand. The dull green glow from the lamp shifted and danced off the walls and the sluggish water.

  Rafen picked out the shapes of small vermin and carrion insects as they scattered from the light. Now and then, Alactus would pause and study the path ahead, the faint glow illuminating aged text in High Gothic on the subsided memorial stones. The Marine studied one such monument, canted at a wild angle, half buried in the earth. The names of hundreds of men were carved there in an endless train of letters; victims of some long-forgotten atrocity on a world that likely no longer existed. Since he was a child, there had always been something about tombstones that at once attracted and repelled Rafen; it was as if he sensed that one day he would discover a stone that bore his name. The moment of reverie broke as he became aware of Lucion behind him. Alactus had started forward again, and Rafen followed on.

  As they moved closer to the starport, the occasional breaths of night air along the tunnels became more frequent, and with them they brought disturbing sounds that were ghostly and incoherent. Rafen noticed that the water had changed consistency; it ran more sluggishly now, and it had a dark, oily sheen. Alactus paused again and made a quick set of gestures with his hand. Rafen showed him a slow nod to indicate he understood and relayed the signs to Lucion behind him. The Marine on point had found a place where the walls had partly fallen in, and they would need to drop to a crawl to pass it. Alactus slid into the thick waters and the light from the biolume vanished with him.

  Rafen let his helmet visor adjust to the darkness, rendering the channel in a monochrome grey. He felt a pat on his back and he went down to his knees, then his chest, and into the liquid embrace. Submerged, the Marine moved forward by touch, letting his fingers lead him through the heaps of rubble and thick slides of disturbed earth. Once, his hand traced over the shape of something that felt suspiciously like a human femur, but then he was past it and rising up from the viscous grip of the run-off. Alactus pulled him to his feet and Rafen reflexively drew his hand across his faceplate to wipe off the oily matter. The red ceramite glove came away with purple-black clots of coagulated fluid glistening on it. Rafen realised that he had been holding his breath, even though the sealed Adeptus Astartes power armour had its own internal oxygen supply. Toggling a vent in his gear, he allowed himself to sip at the air in the flood channel, and a million scent-tones raced through his sense memory.

  The channel was knee-deep in blood, and he did not need to look at the other Marine to see that he knew it too. As the other members of the squad emerged, Rafen looked up to take in the place where they had risen.

  They were inside the perimeter of the starport now. By Rafen’s reckoning they were quite close to the place where the first Thunderhawks from the Bellus had touched down. The narrow pipe had given way to a tall, vaulted run-off chamber where other, smaller effluent channels converged. Some six metres above his head, set in the landing field’s surface, was a long slot that showed dark sky beyond, barred by thick rods of steel grille.

  In the rainy season, water would sluice off the ferrocrete pads and through those grids, but what fell from them now was something quite different. Irregular shapes were heaped over the drains above, piled in discarded heaps. They were bodies and there were countless dozens of them, some still clad in broken pieces of Blood Angel armour. A continuous rain of blood was falling, the vital fluid of their dead brethren greeting them like some arcane shower of anointment.

  Beyond the mournful patter of the dead men’s blessing, there were other noises that merged into one rolling thunder of sound. Demagogues and mechanised loquitur-drones led the massed ranks of Word Bearers above them in thanksgiving for their victory. Rafen resisted the urge to spit and turned away. Arkio stood close by, his helmet turned to the sky, his expression hidden behind the fearsome mask.

  “Brother?” Rafen’s voice was a whisper. “Do you see something?”

  With a near-physical effort, Arkio broke away from the sight. “Only the dead.”

  The Word Bearers had made camp amid the port’s broken structures. Tancred found his liege-lord picking at a heap of soft, fish-belly white meat. He appeared deceptively languid in his auto-throne with one hand cupped under a Space Marine helmet. Iskavan eyed the torturer as he approached and held the helm to his lips, licking cold blood from it.

  “Speak.” Iskavan grunted. Tancred knew instantly from the tone in his voice that the Dark Apostle was annoyed, even though they had won the day against the Blood Angels.

  “News from orbit, master. The Dirge Eterna has located the human ship in the atmosphere of the gas giant world and commenced bombardment from low orbit. Guided by the ruinous powers, we will force them from their hiding place or destroy them.”

  Iskavan spat harshly. “A fine victory indeed,” he said with leaden sarcasm. “But no amount of holy murder will lessen my disgust!”

  Tancred’s tentacle-hand shivered, as it always did when he was concerned. “Lord, what ails you? You have taken this world in the name of the blight but yet you stand aside from our victory revels. I would kno
w why.”

  In answer, Iskavan drained the last draught of blood from the Astartes helmet, then pitched it away into the chanting crowds of his own soldiers. “You were there, Tancred. You saw it as well as I did.” He shook his head. “By the order of our warmaster, we fell back. We retreated.” Saying the word made the Apostle twitch with anger. “What orders are these that a Word Bearer must step back from an enemy?” With that he was on his feet, kicking over the food tray. “Ever forward, never back! That is our creed, by Lorgar’s eyes!”

  Tancred stood his ground. “Above all others, we are bound to serve the word of Lord Garand…”

  Invoking Garand’s name had the desired effect: the Apostle’s mood softened—but only a little. “There is more at work here than we know, Tancred,” he hissed. “Garand moves us about like regicide pieces on a hooded board and grants us the merest slips of information, but Iskavan the Hated is the pawn of no one!”

  “But what choice do we have, dark one?”

  “What choice?” Iskavan snorted. “What—” Without warning, the Chaos warlord’s voice choked off in mid-sentence and he licked at the air. When he spoke again, all trace of his previous mood was gone. “Do you taste that, Tancred?”

  “My lord?”

  The Apostle jumped down from the makeshift dais where his throne sat and beckoned a warrior to him. “You! Give me your name.”

  The Word Bearer bowed to his master. “I am Xanger FellEye, if it pleases great Iskavan.”

  “I scent men hereabouts. Gather your most zealous and search the perimeter.”

  Without another word, the Chaos Marine turned and ran to his task. Tancred watched him go. “Lord, surely no more than an insignificant few of the man-beasts remain alive? Our puppeteers saw to that.”

  Iskavan’s hideous mouth split in a too-wide smile as he recalled the injured Blood Angels murdering one another in frenzy. “Yes. If Garand had granted us more of those precious psyker-helots, then this world would have been subdued in an hour, not a day.” He dismissed the thought with a blink of his yellow eyes. “How many are left does not matter. It only matters that they are left.” Iskavan drew himself up to his full height. “Tancred, when the dawn rises on Cybele I will erect the first great obelisk to the glory of Chaos undivided, and mark me, I shall have it made from the fresh-hewn bones of the Adeptus Astartes.”

  The edge of the sprawling Chaos encampment seemed close enough to touch through the optics of the gun’s target scope. “I have a target, sergeant,” Turcio sub-vocalised, the sensor pickups in his throat relaying the words as clearly as a shout. The Marine held his aim steady on the Word Bearer guard post; he was still carrying the laser that Rafen had pressed into his grip in what seemed like an age ago.

  “Hold your fire, lad,” the veteran replied. “We’ll go just as soon as the priest says so.” The remnants of his unit lay in wait, spread out behind him and hidden in the lee of a hill. All of them were burning for revenge.

  Turcio watched the Traitor Marine pause at the door of the ruined hut. One squeeze of the trigger plate and its head would pop like an overripe fruit.

  “Wait for the word,” Koris repeated, as if he read his mind. “It’ll come soon enough.”

  FellEye found his thoughts wandering as he approached the edge of the landing fields. Under other circumstances, he might have called it a blessing that he had been selected for a mission by the Dark Apostle himself—but the events of the day on this blighted corpse-world had left him, like many of his comrades, disturbed. Of course they had routed the hated Blood Angels—and Xanger had never doubted that would take place—but Iskavan’s confused orders during the initial assault had left the Word Bearers under his command wary. And now there was this, the sudden demand to search for survivors. FellEye was torn between his desire for the raucous cacophony of the victory carousal and his duty to his lord. Hushed whispers that Iskavan’s mind was unsettled had long been spoken of in the Legions of the ninth host, and many of the men blamed the Apostle for their poor victories of late—but until today the veteran Word Bearer had never given them any credence.

  He sniffed the air. The Dark Apostle said he smelled man-flesh out here, but then so could Xanger. The whole moon was a repository for rotting human carcasses, after all, and the earth was churned to mud where bright rivers of enemy blood had pooled. FellEye shook off the thought. It was not his place to question the orders of an exalted one. Not yet, anyway.

  One of his men grunted through his tusks. “I saw movement.” The other Word Bearer pointed at a metal grate in the ferrocrete.

  “Open it.” Xanger commanded, gesturing to the rest of his patrol with the flat of his hand.

  The tusked Marine bobbed his head in a bow and tugged the covering off with a squeak of complaining hinges. He dropped into a crouch so he could see clearly into the flood channel.

  Sachiel’s chainsword entered the Word Bearer’s flesh just above his sternum and sank into the meat of him, before ripping back out in a wound that opened his skull from the inside. The Traitor fell away as the Blood Angels erupted from their concealment, boiling out of the vent in a burst of red.

  Xanger fired wildly. Bolter rounds from his skull-mouthed weapon skipped across the runway as he walked his fire into the mass of emerging enemy bodies. The other Word Bearers in the patrol reacted a spilt-second slower than he; they were surprised by the sudden appearance of the foe in their midst. These men paid for their laxity with their lives. FellEye’s shots clipped a figure and one of the Blood Angels tumbled back the way he had come. Just as suddenly the guns of every Space Marine converged on him and Xanger’s millennia of service to Chaos ended in a screeching whirlwind of agony. The warrior’s corrupted form came apart in chunks of decayed flesh and ceramite.

  “The word is given.” Sachiel hissed into his throat mike as the other men dispatched the rest of the patrol. “Commence attack!”

  “Lord, please.” Tancred said, a lilt of concern in his voice, “I fear you may be allowing your mind to play tricks—”

  “Silence!” Iskavan cuffed him to the ground with a cursory flick of his wrist. “Rally the men! Don’t you hear it? Gunfire!”

  Tancred struggled to recover his dignity, fuming inwardly. “Perhaps you are mistaken, dark one. All I hear is the popping of human bones on our pyres, the spree of our warriors.” But just as he spoke, the torturer caught the distinctive snap-crack of a laser discharge on the wind. Rising to his feet, he looked to the western edge of the starport and saw beams flaring there and the hot globes of grenade detonations. “Forgive me, lord! You are correct!” He bellowed commands to the soldiers around him and wrapped his tentacles around his plasma pistol. He was not aware that Iskavan was looking in the opposite direction.

  “Where are they?” the Dark Apostle asked, turning to study the distant flares of Sergeant Koris’ attack. Iskavan’s eyes narrowed. “An echo, then,” he told himself, dismissing his suspicions.

  Cowering in case he might be struck again, Tancred held up his master’s crozius. “Your weapon, lord…”

  Without another word, Iskavan took up the device and strode westward, eager for battle.

  “They’re taking heavy fire,” Lucion said, his face implacable as he listened to the signals from Koris and the Marines at the diversionary front.

  “Then let us make use of every second they give us,” Sachiel snapped. The priest looked up. Just as they had planned, Alactus had led them to the shadow of the four great defence cannons that loomed over the starport in stubby, sharp-edged ziggurats. Thick tubes emerged from the capstones of each construction, tilted at steep angles toward the sky. Inside those imposing structures were mechanisms and conveyers that fed shells as big as Thunderhawks into gaping, hungry breeches.

  “We’ll need to pass the gate…” said Rafen, considering the doors that blocked the firing bunker from the outside world.

  Arkio smiled. “I have an idea.” A vehicle, far enough away to miss them as it r
aced toward the attack on the perimeter, rumbled by in the mists. Arkio filled his lungs and shouted, his voice carrying. “Hail!”

  Alactus grabbed his arm, a second too late. “You fool, what are you doing?”

  The running lights on the vehicle twitched and grew as it turned and approached them. The shape of a Word Bearer tactical Marine was visible, half out of the roof hatch. He threw a chest-beating salute at them as the tracked machine slowed in jerks and fits.

  “A Rhino,” whispered Rafen. “One of ours…”

  The transport was indeed of Blood Angels’ issue, but as it came closer it was clear that a glancing melta-blast had ripped most of the port armour away. The old Imperial or Blood Angel sigils had been painted over with crude Chaos symbols. Rafen could see three more Word Bearers through the hole in the hull.

  “Hail!” the Traitor called, as the Rhino skidded to a halt. “Host-brothers! Will you come join our hunt for the men-prey?” In the darkness, with their wargear coated by blood and detritus, the armour of the Blood Angels appeared the same shade as the gore-red the Word Bearers wore themselves; it was enough for the enemy to lower their guard.

  “I think not,” said Arkio, and opened fire. Rafen and the other Blood Angels did the same, killing everything inside the Rhino before they could even draw a weapon.

  “Good thinking.” Sachiel commented, striding over to the idling vehicle. “Get these unblessed monstrosities out of this machine. Lucion!” He addressed the Techmarine. “Take the wheel.”

  “Idiots!” said Noro, his one organic eye squinting through the fire-slot. “The Rhino is returning.” The Chaos Marine gave his comrade a quick look of confusion. “What now?” The other Word Bearer shrugged, the gesture magnified tenfold by the bulk of his armour. “Be wary,” he hissed through blunted snake’s teeth. “I will meet them at the gate.”

  Noro watched him turn the crank that released the iron doors to the firing bunker. Typically, it was he who had been left behind when the humans started shooting and the other Word Bearers in his squad wanted to go and join the battle. Noro shook his head in disgust. Dropped from the Ogre Lord in the very last wave, Noro’s unit had missed every moment of the fury, and then they’d been ordered to guard the defence battery instead of taking part in the communion. He hadn’t even seen a single live Blood Angel all day. Noro cursed his luck and spat hissing acidic phlegm on the stone deck.