THE HERACLITUS EFFECT

Graham McNeill

The monster with the patchwork face was right behind him. He could hear it crashing through the overgrown forest with bludgeoning force, trampling the fruits of their invention with every giant stride. He kept running. Running was all he could do. He couldn’t fight such a terrible thing, it was too much.

Magos Third Class Evlame fled through the forest in panicked flight, a forest that had once been a place of wonder and miracles, a place that had literally blossomed as a result of their labours. Every day spent here had been a day spent with the thrill of discovery and pride in their achievements, but now it was a place of horror, a blood-drenched nightmare of dismembered bodies and death.

Evlame’s breath came in sharp spikes in his chest, his overlarge frame unused to such exertion and his heartbeat pounding in his ears as he ran. Massively wide leaves and sharp branches whipped past him, cutting his face and hands as he pushed through the forest. The ripe smell of new growth filled his nostrils and ruptured fruits, larger than his head, hung dripping from branches shredded with gunfire.

The sweet smell of pulped vegetation was almost overpowering, catching in the back of his throat as his lungs heaved in panicked breath after panicked breath. Breathless, Evlame paused to get his bearings, seeking something familiar in the landscape around him.

Swollen trees with trunks thicker than a Titan’s leg surrounded him, their tops lost in the claws of mist that hung in the stagnant, moist atmosphere. Drooping branches laden with vivid growths in a rainbow of colours hung almost to the ground and gleaming chemical atomisers stood amongst the trees like the silver sculptures he’d seen in shrine parks, their waving, articulated limbs dispensing microscopic amounts of the Heraclitus strain into the atmosphere in controlled puffs of vapour.

A bright yellow generator hummed at the base of a towering, copper-barked tree laden with thick golden orbs that were wonderfully sweet and nutritious. The generator was stencilled with the number seventeen, which told him he was to the north of the Adeptus Mechanicus compound and home.

He heard the crunch of a heavy footfall beyond the limit of sight and froze in place as he tried to pinpoint the source. The reek of spoiled meat drifted on the wind, a rank, unpleasant odour after the fragrances he was used to in the forest. His eyes scanned left and right.

And then he saw it…

A glint of sunlight on armour, a reflection on dulled steel and a glimpse of his hunter’s grey, nightmare face. Though he had only the briefest flicker of the features, he wished for no more complete a view, for the dead face was the horror of a badly maimed mannequin, the bloody remnants of a bomb blast victim.

Evlame turned and ran, knowing the genhanced vegetation underfoot and rampant growth of the forest would make stealthy movement impossible. He fled south, following the route of ribbed copper cables as they snaked through the humid forest like indigenous serpents. Pungent mulch carpeted the forest floor and Evlame felt like he was running in some terrible nightmare, where the monster is forever at your shoulder and your feet move as though through the most viscous glue.

Tears and snot covered his face as he blundered onwards, praying to the God-Emperor and every saint he could think of to deliver him from this terrible killer. He risked a glance over his shoulder, but could see nothing behind him. His foot connected with something solid and his world cartwheeled as he tumbled to the ground.

Evlame hit hard, the breath driven from his lungs by the impact and bright light exploded before his eyes. The cloying texture of fruit mash filled his mouth, as well as a pungent smell of opened meat. He spat seeds and fruit flesh, shaking his head as he pushed himself upright.

He knelt in an open clearing of enormous, ovoid fruit, most reaching to his chest in height and at least as wide – their enhanced growth rendering them swollen and ripe.

A headless body lay beside him, the ragged stump of neck still enthusiastically pumping blood onto the dark, almost black, soil. Another corpse lay amid the dripping carcass of an exploded fruit, its chest cavity ripped open as though an explosive charge had detonated within. Other bodies lay in similar states of terrible ruin – heads crushed, limbs removed or torsos ripped apart.

Evlame’s mouth dropped open in mute horror, unable to take in such brutal, visceral evidence of murder. He pushed himself upright and set off towards the habitat domes, following the twisting cables like a lifeline. Rasping breath, like that of a consumptive, hissed behind him and he whimpered in terror, awaiting the blow that would split him open as surely as the ripened, overlarge fruits that surrounded him.

Such a blow never landed and he pushed his burning legs onwards, trampling through the soft mulch of pulped fruit and bloody earth. He sobbed with every step, his limbs flailing and his eyes streaming with tears of raw, unmanning fear.

Through his tears he saw the gleam of the silver-skinned habitat domes between the thick trunks of the towering forest and aimed his flight towards salvation. Surely Magos Szalin would know what to do? An entire company of cybernetically enhanced Tech-Guard were stationed at the Golbasto Facility and he began to laugh uncontrollably at the thought of reaching safety, his hysteria bubbling up like a geyser.

Evlame emerged into the open and stumbled across the automated firebreaks and pesticide barriers that protected the facility from the rampant growth of the genhanced forest. After the gloomy, spectral twilight of the undergrowth, the glare of the planet’s warm yellow sun was dazzlingly bright and he shielded his eyes as he staggered and swayed like a drunk towards the Adeptus Mechanicus experimentation facility, the domes blurred through his lens of tears.

He saw movement and heard voices. He wiped his sodden face with the sleeve of his robe and wept in joy as he saw scores of massively broad warriors in burnished battle plate, their bulk unmistakable as anything other than Adeptus Astartes.

The Space Marines had come!

Relief lent his battered limbs new strength and he ran towards the facility with fresh vigour, anxious to have these brave protectors of mankind between him and the monster that pursued him. Evlame ran like a man possessed, smelling an acrid chemical stink from the smashed domes and seeing flame-shot smoke as it billowed into the clear sky.

Bodies littered the ground and the skins of the domes were pocked with bullet holes.

Clearly the monster had not come alone…

But now the Adeptus Astartes were here, there was surely nothing to fear, for what could stand against such perfect warriors – their flesh enhanced by the artifice of the Emperor and fragments of His greatness encoded into their very bones. Such holy vision had served as the model for their work on Golbasto and Evlame longed to speak to these warriors of legend to tell them of the achievements wrought here.

‘Over here!’ he yelled, his voice hoarse and rasping after his lung-searing run through the forest. ‘Help! It’s coming after me. There’s another one in the forest!’

The armoured giants turned at the sound of his voice, their massive, oversized weapons trained on him in an instant. He saw a confusing mix of armour marks and colours and laughed as he shook his head at their mistake.

‘No, no! It’s Magos Third Class Evlame!’ he shouted, the brief vigour lent to his limbs fading and his steps becoming more uneven. He laughed and waved his arms like a madman, simultaneously amused and terrified at the irony of nearly being gunned down by his rescuers. ‘I work here, I minister to the atomiser machines of the forest! I…’

His words trailed off as he dropped to his knees, his strength spent. He sank onto his rump, head tilted to the sun and his chest heaving as he sucked in shuddering breaths.

Evlame heard crunching footfalls and a chill fell across him as he was enveloped in the broad shadows of the towering warriors. He squinted into the glare of the sky and wiped the back of his hand across his tear-swollen eyes.

A trio of cruel faces cut from cold steel stared down at him, scarred and battle worn. One warrior’s face was that of a killer, hostile and unforgiving. His skull was partly shaven and a ragged mohawk ran across its centre. Another warrior in dark plate wore his long black hair in a tight scalp lock, hooded eyes deep set in angular, pale features.

Half the final warrior’s face was a ruined, knotted fist of crude augmetics, a glowing blue gem where his left eye ought to have been. His other eye glittered with cruel amusement and his close-cropped dark hair was smeared with blood spatters.

The one with the killer’s face itched to do him harm and Evlame felt a burgeoning horror swell within him as the truth of the matter began to dawn on him.

No Astartes these, but…

‘You work here?’ said the warrior with the ravaged face, squatting down on his haunches before him. Evlame nodded, his jaw slack with terror and he felt himself lose control of his bodily functions. The warrior reached out and took hold of his chin. Even in his fear-demented state, Evlame was Mechanicus enough to notice that the arm was fashioned from shimmering silver, a prosthetic quite unlike anything he had seen before. The digits were cold and smooth and articulated without recourse to any joints he could see.

The icy grip turned his head left and right, as though he were being regarded like a specimen in a jar.

‘Ardaric,’ said the warrior with the strange arm, ‘has Cycerin got everything we need?’

‘He’s almost done extracting the information from the senior magos,’ answered the warrior in the black armour with jagged red crosses painted across his shoulder guards. ‘The cogitators were smashed before we got to him, but the fool didn’t think to wipe his own cranial memory coils.’

‘And the canisters we came for?’

‘Servitors are loading them onto the Stormbird as we speak.’

The killer with the mohawk said, ‘Kill this last one, Honsou, and let’s be on our way.’

The warrior named Honsou lifted his gaze to something behind Evlame. ‘Not yet, Grendel. I think I’ll let my new champion finish what he started.’

The warrior released Evlame and pushed himself to his feet. It took an effort of will for Evlame to tear his eyes from Honsou’s incredible silver arm.

He heard the whine of automatic targeting servos behind him and turned to see the incinerator units that had been used to contain the forest’s expansion aiming at a singular figure that marched across the scorched borders of the Mechanicus facility.

Evlame whimpered in terror as the patchwork-faced monster that had killed the rest of his colleagues walked towards him. Its pace was leisurely, though he could see a fire of agony in its storm-cloud eyes, as though its every step was painful.

Like most of the others in this terrible group, it wore Astartes battle plate the colour of bare metal with chevron trims of yellow and black. The closer it came, the more he could see its aquiline features were drawn in a mask of anguish.

Its skin clung to its skull but loosely, as though ill-fitting and not intended to clothe the skull beneath it. Wire stitching criss-crossed its ashen face and Evlame felt he was looking into the eyes of a madman staring through a mask of stolen flesh.

‘No…’ he whispered. ‘Please don’t… I never did anything to hurt you…’

The leathery-faced monster leaned down and said, ‘I live in pain. Why should you not?’

Travelling through the empyrean was something Honsou of the Iron Warriors never enjoyed, for the placing his fate in the hands of others and the lack of influence he could bring to bear should something go wrong was anathema to him.

The strategium of the Warbreed thrummed with noise, the pounding beat of distant hammers and far-off machines vibrating the deck plates with industrious motion.

The ship had belonged to Honsou’s former master and had been moored above Medrengard for a timeless age. Honsou and his few hundred warriors had travelled from the wrecked fortress of Khalan-Ghol to the impossible landmark of the Crooked Tower in order to claim the vessel as their own.

A twisted spire of jagged black rock, the numberless steps of the Crooked Tower spiralled downwards into the bowels of Perturabo’s deepest forges and soared to the lost stars that orbited the dead world of the Iron Warriors.

They had climbed for an age, each footfall a lifetime and a heartbeat in the same breath, and the blasted earth of Medrengard had fallen away until they climbed to the stars themselves. Blackness enveloped them and a host of starships surrounded them, drifting in the utter dark and still of space.

The sheer impossibility of their physical surroundings had not fazed Honsou, and he had not been surprised when the steep stairs had led straight to the open hatches of the Warbreed.

The mighty ship had once taken the fire of the warmaster to the followers of the false Emperor in days now ancient to those who had once defied them. Its guns had bombarded the last vestiges of life from Isstvan V and its orbital strikes had helped tear open the walls of the Imperial palace on Terra.

Its pedigree was mighty and its history proud, and Honsou could think of no finer vessel to take from the silent fleet berthed around the tower’s summit.

Hissing vapours billowed and mighty pistons wheezed and ground up and down at the edges of the vaulted chamber, its walls arched with great girders of brazen metal and hung with ragged war banners of gold and black.

Cabals of hardwired crew submerged in vats of oxygen-rich oils regulated the workings of the ship and hissing mechanical creatures with multi-jointed legs drifted over the glistening pools with crackling cables trailing into the fluid.

The strategium tapered towards its front, the deck crew stationed here and plugged into the ship’s vitals more like ordinary humans, tending to the ship’s needs as it negotiated a passage between the stars through the swirling maelstrom of the immaterium. At the apex of the strategium stood the hulking, purple-robed form of Adept Cycerin, his mecha-organic flesh and kinship with the raw matter of the warp making him the perfect steersman.

‘How much longer?’ asked Honsou, his voice easily carrying the length of the strategium.

Cycerin turned his massive, machine-bulk to face Honsou, his swollen head buzzing with living circuitry and organic techno-viral strains. Slithering, blackened arms writhed like snakes from the tattered sleeves of his robes, the flesh and machine parts running like waxen mercury to form withered digits like mechanised quills.

Cycerin’s green and yellow eyes brightened with a pulse of irritation as his hands described a series of complex motions in the suddenly misty air before him. Honsou stared at the plotting table before him as the adept’s angular script appeared on the hololithic slate.

As it was every time he asked, the answer was frustratingly vague, but then what had he expected? Travel through the warp was unpredictable, even aboard a ship with a pilot uniquely qualified to ply its treacherous depths and who possessed a sense for the currents of the immaterium keener than the most aberrant patriarch of the Navis Nobilite.

Once, Cycerin had been Adeptus Mechanicus, but following his capture on the far distant world of Hydra Cordatus, he had been elevated from his paltry hybridised form of man and machine to something infinitely greater. Strands of the Obliterator virus had been merged with his augmetics and his fundamental gene structure, rendering him into something post-human and far beyond simple cybernetics.

The techno-virus had made him superior, but it had also made him arrogant.

Honsou’s memories of the Hydra Cordatus campaign felt as though they belonged to a previous life. Much had changed since then and his remembrance of the bloody siege had blurred into one unending hurricane of battle that had fanned the smouldering coal of his resentment into a roaring inferno of ambition.

Schemes of murder circled like carrion birds in his mind, threads woven from fragments of his new champion’s fractured memories and the libraries worth of knowledge in Cycerin’s cybernetic brain coming together to set them on their current course of revenge…

Many aboard the Warbreed thought him mad to pursue such a plan so soon after the bloody battle against Berossus and Toramino, but Honsou knew he would not be satisfied until he had inflicted the most wretched humiliations on the one enemy to escape him.

‘If you want to hurt the fox, first strike at its cubs…’ he whispered.

He resumed his pacing of the deck, his bearing that of a caged predator, his face a mask of irritation and anticipation. It chafed him to have set such grand designs in motion, but then be forced to wait while such mundane concerns such as warp travel forced delays upon them.

‘Pacing won’t make us travel faster,’ said Cadaras Grendel, who stood behind him, his gleaming bolter held lightly in one scarred hand, an oiled cleaning rag in the other.

‘I know,’ said Honsou, ‘but it gives me something to do instead of just waiting.’

‘You mean instead of training with your new champion.’

Honsou stopped in his pacing and said, ‘I tasked Ardaric Vaanes with his training.’

‘And that’s the only reason you’re not down there in the battle deck?’

‘Of course, what of it?’

‘It’s not him,’ said Grendel at last. ‘It’s not Ventris. It has his likeness, but it’s not him.’

‘I know that,’ snapped Honsou. ‘I’m not stupid, Grendel.’

‘I don’t blame you for not wanting to look at him,’ said Grendel, wiping the cloth along the hard edges of the gun. ‘After all, he’s the spit of the only warrior to ever beat you.’

‘Ventris did not beat me!’ shouted Honsou, rounding on his captain of arms, a warrior who had formerly served his enemy, Lord Berossus. Honsou’s axe leapt to his hands, its edge lethal and hungry.

Cadaras Grendel didn’t flinch as the axe came up to his neck.

‘Whatever you say, Warsmith,’ said the warrior, pushing the blade of the axe away with the barrel of his bolter. The muzzle passed before Honsou’s face and he saw a smile crease Grendel’s face as he stared into it. ‘He didn’t beat you, but then… you didn’t beat him either. And it’s your fortress that’s a pile of rubble, eh?’

Honsou turned away from the confrontation, irritated that Grendel had managed to rile him with such ease. Ever since the destruction of Khalan-Ghol on Medrengard, Honsou’s temper had been on a short fuse. The merest slight against his victory over the combined armies of Berossus and Toramino filled his blood with a surge of killing rage.

In any case, Grendel was right.

Each time he looked upon the face of his new champion (the newborn as it insisted on being called) he could see the features of the warrior who’d defied him and then thrown his offer to join him back in his face.

Uriel Ventris and his companion were of the Ultramarines Chapter, but what crime they had committed to be banished to a daemon world in the Eye of Terror he didn’t know. However they had come to Medrengard, they had proved to be resourceful enemies.

They had survived the Halls of the Savage Morticians and freed the Heart of Blood, the mighty daemon imprisoned within the heart of Khalan-Ghol.

Honsou took a deep breath and said, ‘By all the twelve sigils of the Rapturous Ruin, you almost make me wish Forrix and Kroeger weren’t dead.’

‘Who?’

‘Former captains who also commanded elements of the Warsmith’s grand company back on Hydra Cordatus,’ said Honsou, before adding pointedly. ‘They’re long dead now.’

‘Did you kill them?’

Honsou shook his head. ‘No, though I would have if they hadn’t managed it themselves.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘Forrix went up against a Titan. He lost,’ laughed Honsou, his good humour restored at the memory of his rival’s obliteration by the great war-machine’s guns.

‘And Kroeger? What did he take on?’

‘I don’t know,’ admitted Honsou. ‘Forrix told me he vanished through some kind of warp rift, but when we broke down the siege works, we found a body in his dugout.’

‘Was it Kroeger?’

Honsou shrugged. ‘Maybe, I didn’t bother to find out. Kroeger was gone, what did I care where? With them both dead, the Warsmith’s army and his fortress were mine.’

‘Until Toramino blasted it from under you,’ reminded Grendel with a viperous smile.

Honsou smiled grimly. ‘Aye, he did, but he hadn’t reckoned with the Heart of Blood.’

‘No one did. Not even you,’ said Grendel, his normally gruff voice hushed at the mention of the ancient daemon. Honsou could well understand Grendel’s tone, shuddering as he remembered rousing the daemon by kicking its head in rage at Ventris’s escape.

‘No,’ he said, ‘not even me.’

Fortunately, the creature had sensed that his flesh had once briefly hosted a creature of the warp and ignored him, instead wreaking its bloodlust on Toramino’s army beyond the walls.

The slaughter and destruction the daemon had unleashed was unlike anything Honsou had ever seen before, its ancient fury deeper than the darkest chasm in Perturabo’s lair. It had reduced everything before it utterly to ruin and Medrengard’s blazing black sun had gorged on the souls released into the dead sky.

‘Let’s hope you haven’t overlooked anything this time, eh?’ said Grendel.

‘I haven’t,’ promised Honsou.

‘We’ll see.’

‘One day I’ll kill you for your presumption,’ said Honsou. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

‘You’ll try,’ replied Grendel. ‘Whether you succeed… well, that’ll be an interesting day.’

Honsou ignored Grendel’s challenge and asked, ‘The newborn? You said it’s with Vaanes?’

Grendel nodded. ‘Aye, he and his misfits are training it on the battle deck below.’

‘Good.’

‘No,’ chuckled Grendel. ‘There’s nothing good about that thing at all.’

Three warriors surrounded the crouching figure in the centre of the chamber, their weapons raised before them. If their victim felt threatened, he gave no sign, his posture relaxed and his mien unconcerned at the potential violence to be unleashed against him. The three attackers were clad in armour, though no one suit resembled another in colour or repair.

One suit was a battered grey, another a faded white and the last a gleaming black. All that bound the three in any visible form of confraternity were the red crosses painted on their shoulder guards, but even those unifying marks had largely disappeared as paint flaked or was scraped away by battle damage.

Though there were no visible signs of rank, it was clear that the leader of the three was the tall warrior in black armour: Ardaric Vaanes, formerly of the Raven Guard. Vaanes was tall and slender, his bulk massive compared to a mortal, but slight for a Space Marine. Possessed of the strength to shatter bones and bend steel, his speed and poise marked him as more than a simple weapon of brute force.

The warrior to his left, Jeffar San, had once been of the White Consuls, though he now reserved his most bitter hatred for his former battle brothers. Vainglorious masters had stripped his honour from him, yet fierce warrior pride had kept him alive through their attempts to destroy him. Proud and haughty, Jeffar San was a warrior who embodied what it was to be cast from superior clay, his elegant, rapier-like sword held in the guard position.

To his right, Svoljard of the Wolf Brothers – an ill-fated Chapter from the beginning – bounced impatiently from foot to foot, his axe gripped tightly in his meaty fists. Where Vaanes exemplified the swift and sure strike, Svoljard was the wild blow that cut a man in two with a flurry of wild slashes.

All three were killers of men and xenos, warriors whose craft had been honed on a thousand battlefields under a thousand suns and who had faced the darkest horrors of the galaxy.

Yet none could quell the loathing each felt for the crouching figure between them.

The newborn squatted on one knee, his head bowed as though in some meditative trance and his grey flesh reeking of spoiled food. Unlike the warriors around him, the newborn was unarmoured, clad only in the flesh sutured to his muscle and bone.

His fists were clenched at his side and his every breath fought for existence.

‘Begin,’ said Vaanes, twin lightning claws unsheathing from his gauntlets.

Svoljard moved first, howling with an ululating war cry and slashing his axe towards the newborn. His target moved without warning, the newborn leaping from his crouched position to somersault backwards over the blow. Vaanes moved to the side, his claws raised as the newborn landed. Svoljard was exposed, his reckless attack overbalancing him, but the newborn spun away from him and batted away Jeffar San’s swinging blade with the flat of his palm.

Vaanes saw his opening and thrust with his claws, the crackling energy that normally sheathed his blades deactivated for this training session. The newborn swayed aside from the blow and pistoned the flat of his palm towards Vaanes. The former Raven Guard threw himself back to avoid the blow, but was too slow, the spoiled-meat smell of the newborn’s flesh nauseatingly strong as it hammered into his chin.

Even as he reeled from the blow, he knew it had been pulled at the last moment. He shook his head clear of the newborn’s stink, wondering briefly what Svoljard’s preternaturally sharp senses must be enduring. Perhaps that was why he was fighting with such reckless abandon, the better to end this session quickly…

The Wolf Brother howled as he attacked, his axe slashing in complex arcs as it sought to find a home in the newborn’s body. Vaanes cursed as he saw that Svoljard’s wild blows had allowed the newborn to break from being surrounded. Jeffar San fought with precise skill, but his thrusts were being hampered by Svoljard’s frenzy.

The newborn ducked a decapitating sweep of the Wolf Brother’s axe and hammered his elbow into his attacker’s side. Had any normal enemy struck such a blow, it would have barely registered on Svoljard, but ceramite plate cracked under the force of it and sent the Wolf Brother crashing to the floor.

Jeffar San had pulled back to marshal his next attack and Svoljard was completely exposed, his throat there to be ripped out.

But the newborn ignored his fallen enemy and spun to face Vaanes as the lightning claws descended to slash him open. Too slow, the newborn threw up his forearm to block the blow, and Vaanes’s claws tore down his chest, opening his sheath of flesh and laying bare his glistening musculature.

The newborn howled in agony and dropped to his knees as Jeffar San lunged and thrust his blade between his ribs from behind. The tip of the weapon punched through the newborn’s chest and a froth of stinking blood washed down his opened chest.

Svoljard rolled to his feet with a roar of anger and swept his axe high to cleave the newborn from top to bottom, but Vaanes retracted his claws and thundered his fist into the charging warrior’s face. Svoljard crashed to the deck, his face a mask of anger and blood where Vaanes had broken his nose.

‘Enough!’ shouted Vaanes. ‘It’s over.’

‘I’ll kill you!’ snarled Svoljard, spitting a wad of coagulated blood from between his fanged teeth. ‘You shame me in front of his… pet.’

‘You shame yourself with your anger,’ spat Vaanes. ‘Now clean yourself up before we go again.’

Svoljard spat more blood on the deck, but turned and stalked off to the benches at the side of the deck. Vaanes let out a relieved breath as he watched Svoljard’s retreating back. Without the discipline he had been used to in his time with his Chapter, the Wolf Brother was becoming more feral and uncontrolled, his anger making him more of a liability than an ally.

‘Be careful, Vaanes,’ warned Jeffar San, appearing at his side and running a hand through his long blond hair. ‘One day he will not hold his rage in check.’

‘I know,’ replied Vaanes sourly, ‘but I have you to watch my back, don’t I?’

The White Consul nodded stiffly and sheathed his sword in one smooth motion. ‘I swore an oath to do so on that dead world, did I not?’

Vaanes gave a short bark of bitter laughter and said, ‘We all swore oaths a long time ago, my friend and look where it’s got us.’

Jeffar San did not reply, but bowed stiffly before turning on his heel and marching towards his weapon rack. Vaanes sighed and hung his head as the last of his surviving warriors took his leave.

‘You antagonise the warriors who follow you,’ said a thick voice behind him. ‘I do not think that will foster their loyalty, or is there something I am missing?’

‘No,’ said Vaanes, turning to see the newborn standing behind him. A raw, sucking sound rippled from his flesh as the dead skin that clothed the newborn reknit itself whole once more.

A crawling yellow glow, like the last light of a wounded sun, seeped from the wounds he and Jeffar San had caused, the warp-born energies that had fuelled this… creature’s unnatural growth, keeping him alive despite injuries that would have killed a normal man thrice over.

Such grievous wounds would have put down even one of the Adeptus Astartes, but the newborn barely registered them now.

The newborn followed his gaze and said, ‘We travel through the realm of my masters. Here I heal quicker.’

‘And you already heal fast,’ said Vaanes.

‘The power of Chaos is everywhere and grows stronger every day.’

‘Spoken like a true pupil.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked the newborn, his curiosity genuine.

‘I mean that sounds like something someone told you rather than something you know.’

‘Is there a difference?’

‘Of course there is,’ said Vaanes, his patience wearing thin at the newborn’s insatiable curiosity. He had joined Honsou to train the newborn to fight, not to be his teacher of ethics and knowledge.

‘Tell me the difference.’

‘It means that you are being told a lot of things, but are learning very little,’ said Vaanes.

The newborn considered this for a moment, cocking his head to one side and chewing its bottom lip like a child thinking hard. Vaanes let his eyes drift away from the creature… he still couldn’t think of him as a person, not when he had been a child mere months ago.

The fact that he so closely resembled a man he hated didn’t help much either.

The last he had seen of Uriel Ventris had been in the mountains of Medrengard as the fool had been about to attack Honsou’s fortress with a pack of rabid, cannibalistic monsters at his heel. Though Vaanes had been sure Ventris would perish within the fortress, it appeared that the resourceful captain had prevailed and helped bring down Khalan-Ghol.

‘Do you hate me?’ asked the newborn suddenly.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Do you hate me?’ repeated the newborn. ‘I think you do.’

‘Hate you? I don’t even know what you really are or what to call you.’

‘I don’t have a name,’ said the newborn. ‘I have not earned one yet.’

‘You don’t earn names, they’re given to you when you’re born.’

‘I remember my birth,’ said the newborn.

‘You do?’

‘Yes.’

‘What… what was it like?’ asked Vaanes, curious despite himself.

‘Painful.’

Vaanes knew little about how creatures such as the newborn were created, save what Ventris had told him when he had sold the lie of honour to his warrior band at the Sanctuary. But he had learned enough to know that the newborn had been little more than a child when the transformation of his entire flesh had begun.

Biological hot-housing, daemonic magic and debased techniques of genetic theft had accelerated his growth with strands of geneseed ripped from the meat and bone of Uriel Ventris. Diabolical suckling within the womb of a daemonic host creature had nourished it and sagging skin carved from the bodies of slaves had clothed him.

Though he had the flesh and physique of a Space Marine, he had the mind of a neophyte.

‘Painful…’ said Vaanes. ‘I imagine it was.’

‘Was?’ said the newborn, shaking his head. ‘It still is. My every waking moment is pain.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Vaanes.

‘No,’ said the newborn, stepping close to him with its teeth bared. ‘You don’t. I am the broken shards of a human being, Ardaric Vaanes. My every breath is pain. Every beat of my heart is pain. Everything is pain. Why should I be the only one to suffer like this? I want everyone to hurt like I do.’

‘And you do a good job of that,’ said Vaanes, meeting the angry stare of the newborn, and remembering the horrific, mutilating death of the magos on Golbasto.

‘It is all I have,’ spat the newborn. ‘You have your name and a lifetime of memory, all I have are nightmares and the stolen memories of another.’

‘You have Ventris’s memories? I didn’t know that.’

‘Not memories really,’ said the newborn, his anger diminishing. ‘More like fragments of half-remembered dreams. The world we travel to is one I see in those fragments.’

‘Do you know this world’s name?’ asked Vaanes, intrigued.

‘No,’ said the newborn, ‘but I know it is precious to him. An army of great and terrible hunger came here, but it was defeated.’

‘Is that all you know?’

‘I think so… I… I… know things of him and I feel the soul of his flesh within me, but…’

‘But what?’ asked Vaanes.

‘But everything I am taught by my masters of the power of Chaos tells me to reject such feelings. I am an instrument of the will of gods that were and ever shall be, a weapon to be used in their service and nothing more.’

‘Aren’t we all…’ said Vaanes, beckoning Svoljard and Jeffar San back to the centre of the battle deck. ‘But it does explain something.’

‘What?’

‘Why we keep beating you,’ said Vaanes. ‘It’s Ventris. Everything about him is part of you. The things that make him who he is are imprinted in your very flesh and as much as Honsou and Grendel try to beat that out of you, it’s always going to be there.’

‘Are you saying I am imperfect?’

Vaanes laughed. ‘That goes without saying, but Ventris’s childish sense of right and wrong, good and evil… they’re pulling you apart from the inside. You fight fair and that’s not how we do things around here.’

Svoljard and Jeffar San rejoined Vaanes and he jabbed his finger into the newborn’s chest as he said, ‘We fight again and this time no pulling of punches. You had Svoljard at your mercy and you didn’t finish him. Don’t make that mistake again. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ growled the newborn, casting a hostile glance at the Wolf Brother.

Once again, the three warriors surrounded the newborn and made ready to fight.

‘Now–’ began Vaanes.

Before he could finish, the newborn was in motion, his fist smashing into Svoljard’s jaw and tearing it off in a shower of blood and splintered bone. The stricken warrior dropped his axe and clutched at his ruined face. Blood jetted from the wound and a horrific, wet scream gurgled from Svoljard’s throat.

The axe fell and the newborn swept it up, spinning on his heel to smash it into Jeffar San’s breastplate. The blade clove through ceramite plate and ossified bone to lodge deep within the White Consul’s chest cavity. Jeffar San’s legs buckled and he collapsed to his knees, an awful mask of shock and pain twisting his proud features in horror.

Even as Vaanes registered the speed with which the newborn had moved, he leapt upon him, his bloody fists reaching for his neck.

Vaanes moved in tune with the newborn’s attack, swaying backwards and buying himself precious moments of life. He twisted his body along the direction of its lunge.

Razor claws snapped from his gauntlets.

He punched up into the newborn’s belly and heaved.

The impaled newborn sailed over him, landing in a crumpled heap on the deck.

Vaanes rolled to his feet as the newborn wailed in pain and Jeffar San fell forwards onto the deck with a solid thump.

Had the fight taken so short a time?

Vaanes drew back his lightning claws into a fighting posture and activated the crackling energy sheath with a thought. The newborn was in killing mood and Vaanes could afford to take no chances.

But it seemed the fight had gone out of the newborn as he pushed himself painfully to his knees. Blood and the familiar oily, yellow glow oozed from the mortal wound at his belly as it closed, but he seemed not to care.

‘Was that better?’ hissed the newborn, grinning at the suffering he had caused.

‘Much better,’ said Vaanes.

The Imperial battleship sailed away from the Warbreed, its enormous bulk a slab of bristling, ancient metal as it plied its stately course through the stars, oblivious to the enemy that passed beneath it. Its name was a mystery, but the threat it represented should any of its surveyors, auspex or escorts discover them was very real indeed.

Ever since Cycerin had brought the ship through the gates of the empyrean, they had followed a stuttering course towards their target, avoiding patrol flotillas, system monitors and listening posts scattered throughout the system.

Now the image of the planet filled the viewing bay, a frigid white orb with ugly blotches of unnatural colour spread over its surface like liver spots on the skull of a withered old man. Honsou neither knew nor cared for its name. That it was known and valued by Ventris was all that mattered.

Honsou smiled as he watched the image of the battleship recede on the plotting table, his fear that the ship would discover them diminishing along with its engine signature. The strategium of the Warbreed was subdued, as though their Imperial enemies might somehow hear them from so far away.

‘They’ve missed us!’ breathed Cadaras Grendel, gripping the edge of the plotting table with white knuckled hands. ‘I don’t believe it…’

Honsou nodded and said, ‘That was the last one. We’re inside their patrol ring now.’

Grendel smiled a predator’s grin and shook his head in disbelieving amusement. ‘Now all we have to do is worry about the planetary monitor ships. All it’ll take is one of them to get so much as a sniff of us and we’re dead.’

‘That’s why we have our guide,’ said Honsou, nodding towards the strategium’s prow.

Adept Cycerin stood before his iron lectern as always, his hands clasped either side of the newborn’s head, who knelt with his back to the monstrously transformed magos. Ardaric Vaanes stood a little to one side of the lectern, grimacing in disgust at the sight of the organic plugs Cycerin’s hands had become as they slithered within the back of the newborn’s skull.

The newborn’s skin rippled with a grotesque undulant motion as the bio-dendrites rooted around in his brain for the information they needed to survive this journey. His eyes fluttered behind tightly squeezed lids and his lips moved in a soundless mantra.

‘Does that hurt it?’ wondered Grendel.

‘Does it matter?’ countered Honsou. ‘Ventris was here and he knows the deployment protocols of the ships and that means the newborn knows them. Maybe not consciously, but the deployments, the Veritas codes, everything. They’re all in there. We need that if we’re to get close enough to do what we planned.’

‘True enough,’ agreed Grendel. ‘I’m all for whatever gets us out of here in one piece.’

‘Likewise,’ said Honsou. ‘Though a little risk is never a bad thing, eh?’

‘Sometimes I think you like risk too much.’

Honsou nodded and said, ‘You might be right. I remember Obax Zakayo said the same thing when we attacked the artillery battery in Berossus’s camp.’

‘Sensible man,’ said Grendel.

‘Not really, he betrayed me.’

‘He’s dead then?’

‘Yes, very dead,’ agreed Honsou. ‘You could learn from him.’

‘I learn quick,’ said Grendel, ‘but you’ll bite off more than you can chew one day.’

‘Maybe,’ shrugged Honsou with a grin. ‘But not today.’

Ardaric Vaanes marched towards them along the central nave of the strategium, his attention switching between the image on the viewing bay to the pain of the newborn.

Honsou and Grendel looked up as he approached.

‘Well?’ asked Honsou.

‘Cycerin says that one will do,’ he said, pointing to a flicker of light above a point on the planet’s equator. ‘It’s furthest from the ships and is above the largest concentration of xeno vegetation.’

Honsou nodded and fixed his attention on the light, knowing it meant the first step to wreaking a great and terrible vengeance upon Ventris. What he did here would be a blatant challenge, a call to arms that a stickler like Ventris would not be able to resist answering.

The three warriors watched the pinpoint of light grow from a speck in the darkness to something more angular and blocky. As the distance lessened, the shape resolved into a gently spinning orbital defence platform, though the majority of its launch bays were angled towards the planet’s surface.

The defence platform hung in geostationary orbit above the planet’s equator above a loathsome stretch of purple that spread across a wide, ochre landmass.

‘Tell me something,’ said Vaanes, turning from the image of the orbital station. ‘Once you’d defeated Berossus and Toramino, why did you not stay on Medrengard?’

‘Khalan-Ghol was ruined, there was nothing left of it.’

‘You could have built another fortress. Isn’t that what you Iron Warriors do?’

‘I could have,’ agreed Honsou. ‘But fortresses are static and when everyone on the planet has armies geared for siege, it’s only a matter of time until someone attacks you. I made a mistake going back to Medrengard. I should have stayed out in the galaxy and carried on the Long War.’

‘That war was ten thousand years ago,’ said Vaanes.

‘To you maybe, but to the Iron Warriors it was yesterday, the blink of an eye. You think the passage of years matters to something as powerful as vengeance? When you dwell in a place where time itself is a meaningless concept, the defeats and glories of the past are only a heartbeat away. I fought alongside warriors who once bestrode the surface of Terra and marched with the primarchs at their head, and it galls me to see the pale shadows the great Astartes have become. You are weaklings compared to what those warriors achieved.’

Honsou felt his anger threaten to overcome his composure and forced himself to calm down as he pondered the strength of his fervour. Before the battles on Medrengard, he had no such high notions of the warriors who had fought in Horus’s war, openly mocking Forrix and Kroeger for their misty-eyed reminiscences of a campaign he had not taken part in.

He took a deep breath and looked back to the glinting form of the orbital platform.

‘Cycerin!’ he shouted. ‘Give them something to worry about.’

The magos withdrew his crawling plugs from the back of the newborn’s head and turned to face him. The newborn slumped forward, supporting himself on his forearms as his breath came in ragged, wheezing gulps.

Without answering Honsou, the magos slid his morphing limbs into the lectern and a pulsing hum travelled the length of the strategium. The lights dimmed as the magos became one with the Warbreed and bent his unknown powers to the misdirection of their enemies.

‘What’s he doing?’ asked Ardaric Vaanes.

‘Watch and see,’ said Honsou.

The image on the viewing bay remained much as before, the station gently spinning before them as the Warbreed drifted closer, unseen and unknown. Then, slowly, the station’s guns and surveyor arrays came to life, swivelling in their mounts to train on a distant portion of space.

Honsou glanced down at the plotting table as a flickering icon appeared, representing the location the nameless Imperial servants had just targetted.

As they watched, the platform came alive with vox-chatter, the words of its occupants crackling the length and breadth of the strategium as they barked from a freshly formed amplifier unit on Cycerin’s chest.

The words were scratchy and overlaid with static, but the panic in them was unmistakable.

‘…tress one, three omega! Contact in grid delta-epsilon-omega! Auger signatures indicate hostile xenos life form! Request intercept. On present course, contact will be in range in two hours. Any ships capable of rendering assistance please respond!’

Vaanes watched as the phantom icon drifted slowly across the plotting table towards the platform and said, ‘That’s nowhere near us.’

‘Exactly,’ said Honsou. ‘And thanks to Cycerin’s deceptions, that’s where the planetary monitors will head. By the time they realise there’s nothing there, we’ll be long gone.’

Honsou turned from the image of the orbital platform and lifted his bolter.

‘They’re looking for help,’ he laughed. ‘So let’s go give them some.’

Alarm bells echoed along the bare metal corridors of Defence Platform Ultra Nine, ear-splittingly loud as First Officer Alevov raced towards the embarkation deck. Calling it a deck gave it a sense of scale it did not possess, the pressurised chamber where crew transferred onto docked ships simply a vaulted chamber with bare bronze walls and numerous pipes and locking wheels that led to the various umbilicals.

Imperial Guardsmen raced to prearranged choke points, ready to defend the orbital platform against boarders, though Alevov knew such precautions were likely unnecessary. Given the heightened state of alert the fleet had maintained since the initial invasion, it was unlikely that the lone enemy contact would reach the platform intact.

Even so, it had been a stroke of luck to have the nearby monitor on station. They hadn’t detected it, but as it was engine-on to the sun’s corona that wasn’t surprising. The Veritas codes were old ones, but were still genuine and permission had been granted for it to dock.

The captain’s offer of assistance had been gratefully accepted, for, as much as the soldiers on the platform seemed to know what they were doing, more bodies wouldn’t hurt in case something unexpected happened.

Alevov passed the turn in the defensive architecture leading to the embarkation deck and pushed past two blue-jacketed soldiers fixing a gun with a long, perforated barrel to a bipod.

He felt his ears pop as he entered the bronze chamber, making a mental note to have the enginseers check the pressure seals. A green light winked into life above a thick blast door and he breathed a sigh of relief.

The clank of metal on metal sounded from beyond the door as he took hold of the locking clamp and turned the wheel. Jets of stale atmosphere gusted from the door seals as air from different worlds mingled.

‘Glad to have you aboard,’ said Alevov as the door swung open. ‘Probably a bit unnecessary, but you can never be too careful, can you?’

‘No,’ said Honsou, stepping from the airlock, ‘but apparently you can be too stupid.’

Honsou raised his bolter and shot First Officer Alevov in the face.

The headless body slammed against the bronze walls of the airlock and the gun’s report echoed deafeningly in the confined chamber. Honsou moved swiftly forward, seeing two open-mouthed soldiers at the chamber’s exit with a heavy calibre weapon.

Shock and horror had paralysed them for a moment, but it was all Honsou needed. His bolter roared again and the soldiers were torn in two by a sawing arc of bolter shells.

‘With me!’ he yelled, slamming his back into the wall at the chamber’s door. He ducked his helmeted head through the doorway, seeing more of the blue-jacketed soldiers manning defended positions further around the curving corridor.

Honsou rolled around the door; his bolter raised to his shoulder and pumping out lethally aimed shots directed by his augmetic eye. Three soldiers flopped back, their chests pulped to ruptured craters by three shots.

Iron Warriors moved past him, deploying with grim, wordless efficiency to secure the passages leading to the platform’s hub. Honsou was pleased at the accuracy of his shots, for it had taken him a little time to retrain his body to fire the bolter left-handed and sync it to his newly grafted eye, but the results spoke for themselves.

Cadaras Grendel and Ardaric Vaanes moved past him, moving anticlockwise around the rim of the orbital and firing as they went. Grendel’s underslung melta gun trailed smoke and Vaanes’s lightning claws threw off arcs of blue lightning, making the air taste of ozone.

He smelled the newborn before he saw it, despite the case of armour it wore about its body. Even his own helmet’s filters couldn’t keep the stench of it from him.

‘Stay with me,’ ordered Honsou. ‘Kill anything that isn’t ours.’

The newborn nodded and they set off after the sound of gunfire.

Cadaras Grendel grinned like a madman as he charged down the curving corridor, his teeth bared and his heart beating wildly in his chest. It had been too long since he had killed something and he itched to fight something worthwhile, though he suspected there would be precious little sport on this grubby little platform.

But Cadaras Grendel wasn’t fussy; he’d kill whatever came his way.

He and Vaanes pounded down the corridor, its walls strobed by red warning lights and ringing with blaring klaxons. It was the symphony of battle and needed only the bark of gunfire and the screams of the dying to make it complete.

As if in answer to his thoughts, a ragged squad of soldiers rose from a defensive position before him and opened fire. Their weapons spat bright bolts of energy, daggers to fight a Titan, and Grendel laughed as he opened fire, the vox-unit on his armour broadcasting his demented, psychotic amusement as a howling yell of rebellion.

One soldier crumpled, his shoulder blasted away and his face shredded by exploding fragments of bone. Another ran screaming from the barricade, while the rest stood with grim stoicism in the face of Grendel’s onslaught.

Las-fire spat, the impacts against his armour insignificant. His bolter fired again, a bark of shots that cut down a handful of the men in sprays of blood and shattered armour.

Vaanes had eschewed his jump pack for this close and dirty fight, but Grendel had to admit his speed was impressive nonetheless. The former Raven Guard was faster than Grendel and reached the barrier first, leaping forward in an arcing dive that took him over the barricade and into the midst of the soldiers.

Actinic blurs of silver steel flashed and squirts of blood sprayed the walls as Vaanes rolled to his feet, striking left and right with his lightning claws. Arms flopped to the metal decking and torsos sheared from bodies as the energised edges cut through armour, meat and bone with an electric hiss and spit.

Screams of pain and terror echoed from the walls, and in seconds the skirmish was over.

Grendel nodded in approval as he rounded the barricade to see Vaanes standing in a circle of blood, chuckling as he found it impossible to tell how many had died given the profusion of dismembered body parts.

His amusement turned to glee as he saw a pair of soldiers huddled in the shadow of the barricade, clinging to one another and weeping in terror. Their blue uniforms bore the wreckage of their fellow soldiers’ deaths and they were little more than mindless sacks of blood and pain now.

Grendel reached down and hoisted one of the soldiers from the ground, letting him dangle above the deck as his wrist was slowly crushed.

‘Don’t seem like much, do they?’ he asked.

Vaanes didn’t answer immediately, his helmet fixed on the carnage his deadly claws had wrought. For all the motion Vaanes displayed, he might as well have been a statue.

‘Vaanes?’

‘I heard you.’

Grendel shrugged and dropped the wailing soldier, who crawled away holding his shattered wrist close to his chest. Grendel let him get a few metres away before turning his weapon on him and unleashing a superheated blast of energy from the underslung melta gun.

The protective senses of his helmet dimmed momentarily as the white-hot blast engulfed the soldier and Grendel laughed as the glow faded and he saw the stumps of feet and charred skull lid that was all that remained.

He turned to Vaanes and said, ‘I’ll leave the last one for you.’

Fighting alongside the newborn was much easier when it wore a helmet, for Honsou was not forced to look upon the face of Ventris in the midst of a battle. The fight for the outer ring of the orbital platform was virtually over, the soldiers defending it no match for the relentless ferocity of an assault of the Iron Warriors.

Few soldiers were.

Honsou watched his champion kill their enemies without mercy, fighting with a skill and familiar style that took him a moment to recognise. The blows it struck were practiced and precise, the very image of those taught to the Adeptus Astartes… exactly how a warrior of the Ultramarines would fight.

The challenge of killing mortals with his bolter had grown stale, and Honsou now fought with his axe, cleaving a screaming path through his enemies. Truth be told, there was little more challenge in fighting them in close quarters, but it had the virtue of being bloody.

Honsou’s axe growled as it slew, the monstrous entity within it feeding on the souls of the dead even as it feasted on the blood of their burst bodies. His blade reaped a fearsome tally, the blue-jacketed soldiers fighting on despite the impossibility of their victory. Honsou admired their courage, if not their ability.

He wrenched his axe from the golden breastplate of some kind of officer, the axe protesting with a ripple of dead eyes across the blade’s glossy surface. A tremor of rage passed along his arms from the weapon and Honsou snarled as he exerted the force of his will to quiet the daemon within.

The sounds of battle were diminishing throughout the station and Honsou knew the battle was almost won. Even as he relished the victory, he saw a ragged scramble from the end of one of the spoke passageways that led to the central hub. One soldier carried a stubby tube on his shoulder, into which another man stuffed a finned missile.

Honsou wanted to laugh at the desperation of the weapon, before realising that the detonation of such a missile would explosively decompress the entire outer ring and send everyone within hurtling into space.

He tried to move, but his limbs would not obey his commands and he looked down in anger at the axe that shuddered in his grip, its will to dominate pushing back against him.

‘Now is really not the time!’ he snarled through gritted teeth, fighting to force the essence of the daemon back into the darkly shimmering depths of the blade.

A bloom of noise, light and smoke erupted from the soldiers and, though it was surely impossible to see such a fast moving object, Honsou saw a needle-nosed missile streaking towards him.

Honsou felt the daemon withdraw into the weapon and end the battle for control, but knew it was far too late to avoid the missile. He threw his arm up before him in an instinctive gesture of defence.

The force of the impact hurled him from his feet and he felt a terrible, leeching power within him, as though a loathsome, dark force tapped into his life-force. His head slammed against the wall and he looked down to see the smoking, hissing fins of the missile embedded in the rippling silver of the arm he had taken from the Ultramarines sergeant.

Light pulsed in the depths of the arm, flitting fireflies of energy that spoke of technology wrought in an age long forgotten and a race of such malice that his own petty evils were insignificant when measured alongside theirs. Even as he watched, a fiery orange line hissed around the circumference of the portion of the missile that protruded from his arm and it fell to the deck with a clatter of metal.

Honsou stared in wonder at the unblemished surface of his arm, looking up as the equally astounded soldiers reloaded the weapon.

He scrambled to his feet, but quickly saw there was no need for haste as the newborn launched himself towards the soldiers and began their butchery. Until now, Honsou had only seen the newborn kill with the mechanical precision of the Adeptus Astartes, albeit employed with a vicious joy no Space Marine would condone, but his champion now fought with brutal savagery, every blow excruciatingly mortal and delivered with fluid economy of force.

No movement was wasted, no blow more powerful than required and no opening left unexploited. Within seconds the soldiers were dead and the battle over.

Honsou joined the newborn at the scene of the slaughter as more Iron Warriors secured the spoke corridor. Specialists with shaped charges moved down its length and prepared to blow the doors to the central hub. Within moments, the orbital platform would be theirs.

Honsou put a hand on the newborn’s shoulder, feeling his hostility towards his new champion diminish in the face of the obvious relish taken in causing death.

‘Ardaric Vaanes is training you well,’ he said.

Ardaric Vaanes inclined his head to the last trooper. The man’s face was a mask of tears and blood, his eyes glazed as his head shook back and forth in terror. Cadaras Grendel stood with his shoulders squared, the threat and challenge of his body language plain.

‘He’s dead already,’ said Vaanes.

‘What?’

‘I said he’s dead already. He’s no threat to us anymore.’

‘So? What’s that got to do with anything?’ said Grendel, moving to stand inches in front of him. ‘You not got the stomach for killing a man unless he’s got a gun pointed at you?’

‘I just don’t see the need anymore.’

‘The need?’ said Grendel. ‘Who said anything about need? Kill him. Now.’

Vaanes met Grendel’s angry stare, the challenge and hostility evident even through the masks of ceramite that separated them. The sound of battle surrounded them, the fighting pushing ever closer to the hub of the orbital platform, but Grendel was ignoring it, intent on pushing Vaanes and seeing what he was made of.

‘I don’t think you’ve got the guts, Vaanes,’ said Grendel. ‘I think maybe you’re still working with the Imperials. Honsou thinks so too, I can tell he doesn’t trust you.’

‘He doesn’t trust you either,’ pointed out Vaanes.

‘No, but I don’t try and pretend like I won’t betray him someday. He and I, well, we got ourselves an understanding.’

Grendel turned away from Vaanes and scooped up the last surviving trooper. He held him up before Vaanes and said, ‘Go on. Kill him. Kill him or I’ll kill you, I swear.’

Vaanes took a breath, wondering if he would have to fight Grendel now. The warrior had been spoiling for it ever since he had joined Honsou’s band, but as he tensed his muscles in readiness for action, his eyes caught a glint of silver on the dangling trooper’s uniform.

An honour badge pinned to his collar.

Droplets of blood had stained the uniform around it, but not a single drop sullied the badge itself and the image of a stylised silver ‘U’ upon a rich blue background was unmistakable…

Ultramarines.

Picked out in gold behind the symbol of the Ultramarines was the numeral IV, and Vaanes felt a surge of anger as he realised the meaning of the symbol. It was a campaign badge awarded to those who had fought alongside the Fourth Company of the Ultramarines.

Vaanes leaned down and said, ‘How did you get this?’

The soldier didn’t answer, his mouth working in a monotone wail of pure terror, his eyes squeezed shut as though he could escape the terror of his situation by keeping it from sight.

‘How did you get this?’ shouted Vaanes, gripping the soldier’s jacket and tearing him from Cadaras Grendel. Hysterical babbling was his only answer and Vaanes screamed his question again, his right fist pulled back and ready to strike, the fizzing crackle of the lightning energy loud in his ears.

‘Do it…’ hissed Grendel, and the urge to kill this man, to hurt him, to maim him and inflict suffering beyond measure was greater than anything Vaanes had ever known. Vaanes heard a sibilant whisper in his ear as though an unseen speaker’s voice was hidden in the rising buzz of his lightning claw, a voice only he could hear.

The sensation was not unpleasant, a silent urging and a silken pressure on his mind that promised new wonders, pleasures undreamed of and the ecstasy of experience. All this and more were encapsulated in the wordless whisper and Ardaric Vaanes knew without understanding that this was the offer and the price of the bargain he had struck with Honsou on Medrengard.

His vision narrowed until all he could see was the Ultramarines honour badge, the winking silver and gold mocking him with their purity and lustre. The face of Uriel Ventris appeared in the forefront of his mind and he cried out in anguished rage.

The lightning claw slammed forward, punching through the trooper’s chest and exploding from his back. The blow continued and his fist followed the claws through the man’s torso, pulverising bone, heart and lungs on its way through the substance of his body.

Vaanes tore at the body until his hissing claws had reduced it to scraps of torn meat, a ruined gruel of smashed bone and offal. The breath heaved in his lungs and he stepped back from the wreckage of the man’s remains and felt a wave of acceptance pour through him, his limbs filled with energy and exhilaration.

He heard Cadaras Grendel laughing and felt the killer’s gauntlet slap him on the shoulder guard. Words were spoken, but he didn’t hear them, too caught up in the wonder he had just experienced.

Vaanes stared down at what he had done, the bodies around him so torn that their very humanity was obliterated. Finally, he understood the lie he had been living since the shame that had driven him from the Raven Guard.

There was no self-delusional status he could impart to salve his own conscience and no middle ground between loyalist and traitor. In the Long War, such labels were meaningless anyway – there were only victors and defeated.

At last, the truth of what he had become was apparent in this baptism of murder and blood.

Ardaric Vaanes welcomed it.

The central control room of Defence Platform Ultra Nine reeked of blasting charges and blood. With the doors blown, the men inside had no chance of life and had made the best job they could of disabling the systems and calling for reinforcements, but Honsou knew the nearest Imperial ship was many hours distant.

Adept Cycerin stood before the smashed consoles, a morass of writhing cables snaking from the cavity of his bio-mechanical chest to mesh with the inner workings of the smashed consoles.

The doomed mortals had been thorough in their vandalism, but Cycerin had made swift work in undoing the damage, and his unique talents allowed him to coax the required life from the smashed systems without difficulty.

‘Is everything ready?’ asked Honsou, impatient to see the results of his labours bear fruit.

Cadaras Grendel shrugged as he ran his eyes over the buckled and las-shot console. Red lights winked on surviving, brass-rimmed dials and sparks fizzed and sputtered.

‘Hard to say for sure, but we swapped over the missiles’ payload,’ said Grendel. ‘All but one is loaded up with the stuff we took from Golbasto. It’s up to Cycerin now.’

‘Why all but one?’ asked Ardaric Vaanes and Honsou caught a subtle change in the warrior’s voice, a shift in tone of a warrior who has at last come to know himself.

‘The last one is a message to Ventris.’

‘What does it say?’

‘It’s not what it says,’ said Honsou, ‘it’s what it represents.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘That you don’t walk away from a fight with Honsou without paying a price.’

A salvo of sixteen orbital torpedoes surged from the planetside launch bays, followed by another rippling salvo seconds later. Another three salvos launched until all but one of the platform’s entire payload of missiles was expended. Each missile dropped away rapidly from the platform, the blue-hot coals of their engines firing for long enough to put them in a ballistic trajectory towards the planet’s surface.

They swooped downwards like hunting raptors, their formation breaking up as the spread pattern implanted into each warhead by Adept Cycerin took hold of each one. The missiles diverged until their contrails were spread around the planet like a glittering spiderweb.

Heat shields burned with conical fire as the missiles plunged through the atmosphere, emerging into the crystal skies of the planet. Hurried defences scrambled to lock onto the missiles, but launched from low orbit, they were already travelling too quickly and were too close to be engaged with any hope of success.

As the missiles reached a predetermined altitude over the planet’s surface, each one exploded and spread its viral payload into the air. Vast quantities of the experimental Heraclitus strain were released into the atmosphere in doses billions of times greater than had been employed on Golbasto.

All across the planet, a terrible rain fell, the genius of Magos Szalin of the Ordos Biologis wreaking terrible damage as it went to work on the indigenous and xenos vegetation.

A few short years ago, this world had suffered the horror of invasion, monstrous swarms of ferocious alien killers rampaging across its surface. A great war had been fought; in space, in the air, on land and finally in the very bowels of a living spacecraft that had travelled from another galaxy for uncounted aeons.

Though the invasion had been defeated, the dreadful legacy of the alien invaders remained to taint the planet’s ecology forever. From pole to pole, horrific spires of dreadful alien vegetable matter towered over the landscape, slowly choking the life from the natural landscape.

The alien flora had subsumed entire continents, a rapacious instinct to devour encoded in every strand of its genetic structure. Nutrients were leeched from the soil and used to create hyper-fertile spore growths that drifted on the heated currents of the air to seed new regions and pollute yet more land.

Only rigorous burning policies ensured the planet’s survival – for a world of the Imperium could not simply be abandoned, not after all the blood that had been shed in its defence. The shining steel cities, islands in a sea of alien growth, still produced masses of munitions and armoured vehicles for Imperial wars throughout the subsector.

Salvoes of anti-plant missiles, slash and burn pogroms and pesticide overflights were a matter of routine since the defeat of the invasion.

Such things were thankless tasks, but necessary for the planet’s continued survival.

But all that was rendered moot in the face of Magos Szalin’s creation.

Developed from a partial fragment of ancient research conducted by Magos Heraclitus, the bio-toxins were intended to increase the growth rate of crops on agri-worlds. Magos Szalin had taken the next step and pioneered techniques designed to increase the productivity of such worlds a thousand fold.

Now that work was put to the ultimate test, mixing its monstrous potential for increased growth with an alien organism that was at the apex of its biological efficiency.

Within seconds of the Heraclitus strain being released into the atmosphere, the alien growths reacted to its touch, surging upwards and over the planet’s terrain. Slash and burn teams were instantly overwhelmed by mutant growths, poisonous plant life expanding kilometres in seconds as the virulent growth strain sent its metabolism into overdrive.

Huge amounts of nutrients were sucked from the ground and released as enormous quantities of heat, raising the ambient temperature of the world in a matter of moments. Oxygen was sucked greedily from the atmosphere by horrifyingly massive spore chimneys and the planet’s protective layers were gradually stripped in unthinking biological genocide.

This was not the rapid death of Exterminatus, but ecological death of worldwide proportions.

Panicked messages were hurled out into the immaterium and only those with the money, influence or cunning escaped on hastily prepped ships that fled the planet’s destruction.

But these were few compared to the billions left behind and, weeks later, as the last of the planet’s atmosphere was stripped from it by the hyper-evolved alien biology, stellar radiation swept the surface, killing every living thing and laying waste to all that remained.

Months after the launch of the missiles, nothing remained alive, the deadly alien vegetation killed by lethal levels of radiation and the frigid cold that gripped the planet without its protective atmosphere.

All that now remained of the planet was a dead, lifeless ball of rock, its surface seared and barren, with only the skeletal remains of its blackened cities left as evidence that human beings had once lived upon it.

The silver-skinned drop-ship fell through the airless vacuum of the planet. A host of Marauders and Raptors followed it down, though nothing lived here now. The drop-ship’s retros screamed as the pilot brought it in on final approach, the skids deploying just before it landed in the midst of dead plant matter and scorched alien trees.

A drogue arm deployed to test the external environment and once it retracted, the pressure door on the side of the craft opened and a heavy ramp extended to the surface.

Cautiously, for none aboard truly felt safe, a squad of Adeptus Mechanicus Tech-Guard clad in heavy environment suits – similar in function and design to the Terminator armour employed by the Adeptus Astartes – emerged and descended to the planet’s surface.

Following the group was a figure whose heavy armour was swathed in vivid red robes emblazoned with the black and white cog symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

His name was Magos Locard and this was not the first time he had come to this world.

With quick, precise gestures, Locard directed the Tech-Guard to collect samples of the dead plants and the underlying strata. Diggers and corers rolled down from the drop-ship and Locard watched them as they gathered information that might offer some clue as to what had caused this catastrophe.

Despite the many augmentations applied to his flesh, Locard was not so far removed from humanity that the fate of this world did not cause him great sadness. Like many others, he had fought to save it and had been instrumental in what he had thought was its salvation.

Now all that was ashes and Locard felt a great anger build within him.

Whoever had done this would pay.

A Tech-Guard soldier approached Locard and said, ‘My lord, we’ve found it.’

Locard followed the man as he waded through thick piles of ashen vegetation to the source of what had led them to this exact place. Though the planet was now bereft of life, a constantly repeating signal had reached into space, its plaintive voice almost lost in the void, but shrill and insistent, demanding attention.

The vegetation thinned and Locard realised he was walking in a deep trench carved by the impact of something that had fallen from the skies.

‘Here, my lord,’ said the Tech-Guard, backing away from Locard.

Locard saw a battered silver tube, perhaps ten metres in length – an orbital torpedo, though his exo-armour’s auspex told him there was no ordnance or explosives loaded in the warhead. This was the source of the signal and Locard knew that someone had wanted them to find this.

He walked along the length of the torpedo towards the payload bay and deployed bolt-clasps from the forearm of his armour. One by one, he removed the bolts of the payload bay and hurled it aside when he unscrewed the last one.

The inside of the bay was dark, but his enhanced ocular implants could easily make out what it contained. He frowned and reached inside the bay to remove its contents.

He turned to the Tech-Guard next to him and handed him a cracked helmet, the paint chipped and one eye lens missing. The helmet was a deep blue and bore a symbol on the forehead that was known to Locard.

The inverted omega of the Ultramarines Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes.

‘I don’t understand,’ said the Tech-Guard, turning the helmet over in his hands.

‘Nor I,’ said Locard, turning and marching from the missile. ‘Not yet.’

As the Tech-Guard followed Locard he said, ‘What happened to this place?’

‘This place has a name, soldier,’ snapped Locard. ‘Imperial citizens died here.’

‘Apologies, my lord, I meant no disrespect,’ said the Tech-Guard. ‘What was it called?’

Locard paused, casting his gaze across the blasted wasteland that was all that remained of a once proud Imperial world that had stood defiantly before the horror of a Tyranid invasion.

‘It was called Tarsis Ultra.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GRAHAM MCNEILL

Hailing from Scotland, Graham McNeill worked for over six years as a Games Developer in Games Workshop’s Design Studio before taking the plunge to become a full-time writer. Graham’s written a host of SF and Fantasy novels and comics, as well as a number of side projects that keep him busy and (mostly) out of trouble. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Graham lives and works in Nottingham and you can keep up to date with where he’ll be and what he’s working on by visiting his website.

Join the ranks of the 4th Company at www.graham-mcneill.com

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2008 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by John Blanche

© Games Workshop Limited, 2008, 2011. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-0-85787-452-8

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