Heart of Rage

by James Swallow

In the blood-warm gloom, amid the shrouding, cloying thickness of the air, the heart beat on. A clock ticking towards death, a ceaseless rhythm echoing through his body. A cadence that inched him, pulse by throbbing pulse, towards the raging madness of the Thirst.

Engorged with vital fluid, the heart pressed against the inside of his ribcage, trip-hammer impacts growing faster and faster, reaching out, threatening to engulf him. His every sense rang with the force of it, the rushing in his ears, his arrow-sharp sight fogged and hazy, the scent of old rust thick in his nostrils… And the taste.

Oh yes, the taste… Congealing upon his tongue, the heavy meat-tang like burned copper, the wash across his fangs. The aching, delirious need to drink deep.

Clouds of ruby and darkness billowed about him, surrounded him, dragged him roaring into the void, damned and destined to surrender to it. These were the enemies that he and all his kindred could never defeat, the unslakable Red Thirst and its terrible twin, the berserker fury of the Black Rage. These were the legacy of The Flaw, the foes he would face for eternity, beyond all others, for they were trapped within him. Woven like threads of poison through the tapestry of his DNA, the bane-gift of his lord and master ten thousand years dead.

Sanguinius. Primarch and noblest among the Emperor’s sons. The Great Angel, the Brightest One. The shockwave of the master’s murder, millennia gone yet forever resonant, thundered in his veins. The power of the primarch’s angelic splendour and matchless strength filled him… And yet the other face of that golden coin was dark, dark as rage, dark as fury, darker than any hell-spawned curse upon creation.

Their boon and their blight. The malevolent mirror of the beast inside every brother of the Blood Angels Chapter.

Brother-Codicier Garas Nord knelt upon the chapel’s flagstones, the only sound about him the whisper of servo-skulls high overhead, watching the lone Space Marine with indifferent attention.

Hunched forwards in prayer, his broad frame was alone before the simple iron altar. Wan light cast by biolumes cast hollow colour over his face. It glittered across the sullen indigo of his battle armour and the gold chasing of the metal skull upon his chest. The glow caught the deep, rich red of his right shoulder pauldron and the sigil of his Chapter, a winged drop of crimson blood. It glittered upon the matrix of fine crystal about his bowed head, where the frame of a psychic hood rose from his gorget – and it caught in accusing shadows the faint trembling of Nord’s gauntleted hands, where they met and crossed in the shape of the Imperial aquila.

Nord’s eyes were closed, but his senses were open. His hands tightened into fists. The ominous echoes of the dream still clung to him, defeating his every attempt to banish them.

He released a sigh. Visions were no stranger to him. They were as much a tool to his kind as the hood or the force axe sheathed upon his back. Nord had The Sight, the twisted blessing of psionic power, and with it he fought alongside his brothers in the Adeptus Astartes, to bolster them upon the field of conflict. In his time he had seen many things, great horrors spilling into the world from the mad realms of the warp, forms that pulled at reason with their sheer monstrosity. Darkness and hate… And once in a while, a glimpse of something. A possibility. A future.

It had saved his life on Ixion, when prescience turned his head, a split second before a las-bolt cut through the air. He still wore the burn scar from that near-hit across his cheek, livid against his face.

But this was different. No flash of reflex, just a dream, over and over. He could not help but wonder – was it also a warning?

His kind… They had many names – telekine, witchkin, warp-touched, psyker – but beyond it all he was something more. A Son of Sanguinius. A Blood Angel. Whatever visions of fate his mind conjured for him, his duty came before them all.

If the spirit of Sanguinius were to beckon him towards a death, then he prayed that it would be a noble sacrifice; an ending not in the wild madness of the Black Rage, but one forged in honour. A death worthy of his primarch, worthy of one who had perished protecting Holy Terra and the Emperor himself from the blades of arch-traitors.

‘Nord.’ He sensed the new presence in the chapel, the edges of a hard, disciplined psyche, a thing forged like sword-blade steel.

The Codicier opened his eyes and looked up at the statue of the Emperor behind the altar. The Emperor looked down, impassive and silent. The eyes of the carving seemed to track Nord as he bowed before it. It offered only mute counsel, but that was just and right. For now, whatever troubled the Codicier was his burden to carry.

Nord rose to find Brother-Sergeant Kale approaching, his boots snapping against the stone floor. He sketched a salute and Kale nodded in return.

‘Sir,’ he began. ‘Forgive me. I hoped to take a moment of reflection before we embarked upon the mission proper.’

Kale waved away his explanation. ‘Your tone suggests you did not find it, Garas.’

Nord gave his battle-brother a humourless smile. ‘Some days peace is more difficult to find than others.’

‘I know exactly what you mean.’ Kale’s hand strayed to his chin and he rubbed the rasp of white-grey stubble there with red-armoured fingers. ‘I doubt I have had a moment’s quiet since we embarked.’ He gestured towards the chapel doors and Nord walked with him.

The Codicier studied the other man. They were contrasts in colour and shade, the warrior and the psyker.

Sergeant Brenin Kale’s wargear was crimson from head to toe, dressed with honour-chains of black steel and gold detailing, purity seals and engravings that listed his combat record. Under one arm he carried his helmet, upon it the white laurel of a veteran. He wore a chainsword in a scabbard along the line of his right arm, the tungsten fangs of the blade grey and sharp. His face was pale and pitted, the mark of radiation damage, and he sported a queue of wiry hair from a top-knot; and yet there was a patrician solidity to his aspect, a strength and nobility that time and war had not yet diminished.

Nord shared Kale’s build and stature, as did every Son of Sanguinius, the bequest of the gene-seed implantation process each Adeptus Astartes endured as an initiate. But there the similarity ended. Where Kale was sallow of face, Nord’s skin was rust-red like the rad-deserts of Baal Secundus, and the laser scar was mirrored on his other cheek by the electro-tattoo of a single blood droplet, caught as if falling from the corner of his eye. Nord’s hairless scalp was bare except for the faint tracery of a molly-wire matrix just beneath the flesh, implanted to improve connectivity with his psychic hood. And his armour was a uniform blue everywhere except his shoulder, contrasting against the red of the rest of his battle-brothers. The colour set him apart, showed him for what he was beneath the plasteel and ceramite. Witchkin. Psyker. A man without his peace.

Within the chapel, one might have thought they stood inside a church upon any one of billions of hive-worlds across the Imperium. If not for the banners of the Adeptus Astartes and the Navy, the place would be no different from all those other basilicas: sacred places devoted to the worship of the God-Emperor of Humanity. But this church lay deep in the decks of the frigate Emathia, protected by vast iron ribs of hull-metal, nestled between the accelerator cores of the warship’s primary and secondary lance cannons.

Nord left the sanctum behind, and – so he hoped – his misgivings, walking in easy lockstep with his sergeant. Half-human servitors and worried crew serfs scattered out of their way, clearing a path for the Space Marines.

‘We left the warp a few hours ago,’ offered Kale. ‘The squad is preparing for deployment.’

‘I’ll join them,’ Nord began, but Kale shook his head.

‘I want you with me. I have been summoned to the bridge.’ A sourness entered the veteran’s tone. ‘The tech-priest wishes to address me personally before we proceed.’

‘Indeed? Does he think he needs to underline our mission to us once again? Perhaps he believes he has not repeated it enough.’ Nord was silent for a moment. ‘I may not be the best choice to accompany you. I believe our honoured colleague from the Adeptus Mechanicus finds my presence… discomforting.’

Kale’s lip curled. ‘That’s one reason I want you there. Keep the bastard off balance.’

‘And the other?’

‘In case I feel the need to kill him.’

Nord allowed himself a smirk. ‘If you expect me to dissuade you, brother-sergeant, you have picked the wrong man.’

‘Dissuade me?’ Kale snorted. ‘I expect you to assist!’

The gallows humour of the moment faded; to casually discuss the murder of a High Priest of the Magus Biologis, even in rough jest, courted grave censure. But the eminent magi gathered dislike to him with such effortless ease, it was hard to imagine that the man wanted anything else than to be detested. Scant weeks they had been aboard the Emathia on its journey to this light-forsaken part of the galaxy, and in that time the Exalted Tech-Priest Epja Xeren had shown only aloof disrespect for both the Blood Angels and the frigate’s hardy officers.

Nord wondered why Xeren had not simply used one of the Mechanicum’s own starships for this operation, or employed his cadre’s tech-guard. Like many factors surrounding this tasking, it sat uneasily with the Codicier; he sensed the same concern in Kale’s emotional aura.

‘This duty…’ said Kale in a low voice, his thoughts clearly mirroring those of his battle-brother, ‘it has the stink of subterfuge about it.’

Nord gave a nod. ‘And yet, all the diktats from the Adeptus Terra were in order. Despite his manner, the priest is valued by the Imperial Council.’

‘Civilians,’ grunted the sergeant. ‘Politicians! Sometimes I wonder if arrogance is the grease upon their wheels.’

‘They might say the same of us. That we Adeptus Astartes consider ourselves to be their betters.’

‘Just so,’ Kale allowed. ‘The difference is, where we are concerned, that fact is true.’

Emathia’s ornate bridge was a vaulted oval cut from planes of brass and steel, dominated by great lenses of crystal ranging down towards the frigate’s bow. Below the deck, in work-pits among the ship’s cogitators, hunchbacked servitors hissed to one another, busying themselves with the running of the vessel. Officers in blue-black tunics walked back and forth, overseeing their work.

The ship’s commander, resplendent in a red-trimmed duty jacket, turned from a gas-lens viewer and gave the Astartes a bow.

‘Sergeant Kale, Brother Nord. We’re very close now. Come.’ Captain Hyban Gorolev beckoned them towards him.

Nord liked the man; Gorolev had impressed him early on with his grasp of Adeptus Astartes protocol and the careful generosity with which he commanded Emathia’s crew. Nord had encountered Navy men who ruled their ships through fear and intimidation. Gorolev was quite unlike that; he had a fatherly way to him, a mixture of sternness tempered by sincerity that bonded his crew through mutual loyalty. Nord saw in the captain the mirror of brotherhood with his kindred.

‘The derelict is near,’ he was saying. Gorolev’s sandy-coloured face was fixed in a frown. ‘Interference continues to defeat the scrying of our sensors, however. There is wreckage. Evidence of plasma fire…’ He trailed off.

Nord sensed the man’s apprehension but said nothing, catching sight of a readout thick with lines of text in Gothic script. He saw recitations that suggested organic matter out there in the void. Unbidden, the Codicier’s gaze snapped up and he stared out through the viewports. The ghost of a cold, undefined emotion began to gather at the base of his thoughts.

‘Adeptus Astartes.’ The voice had all the tonality of a command, a summons, a demand to be given fealty.

Filtered and machine-altered, the word emitted from a speaker embedded in a face where a mouth had once been. Eyes of titanium clockwork measured the Blood Angels coldly. Flesh, what there was of it, was subsumed into carbide plates that disappeared beneath a hood. A great gale of black robes hung loose to pool upon the decking, concealing a form that was a collection of sharp angles; the silhouette of a body that bore little resemblance to anything natural-born. Antennae blossomed from tailored holes in the habit, and out of hidden pockets, manipulators and snake-like mechadendrites moved, apparently of independent thought and action.

This thing that stood before them at the edge of the frigate’s tacticarium, this not-quite-man seemingly built from human pieces and scrapyard leavings… This was Xeren.

‘Your mission will commence momentarily,’ said the tech-priest. He shifted slightly, and Nord heard the working of pistons. ‘You are ready?’

‘We are Adeptus Astartes,’ Kale replied, with a grimace. The words were answer enough.

‘Quite.’ Xeren inclined his head towards the hololithic display, which showed flickers of hazy light. ‘This zone is filthy with expended radiation. It may trouble even your iron constitution, Blood Angel.’

‘Doubtful.’ Kale’s annoyance was building. ‘Your concern is noted, magi. But now we are here, I am more interested in learning the identity of this hulk you have tasked us to secure for you. We cannot prosecute a mission to the best of our abilities without knowing what we will face.’

‘But you are Adeptus Astartes,’ said Xeren, making little effort to hide his mocking tone. Before Kale could respond, the tech-priest’s head bobbed. ‘You are quite right, brother-sergeant,’ he demurred, ‘I have been secretive with the specifics of this operation. But once you see your target, you will understand the need for such security.’

There was a clicking sound from Xeren’s chest; Nord wondered if it might be the Mechanicum cyborg’s equivalent of a gasp.

‘Sensors are clearing,’ noted Gorolev. ‘We have a clean return.’

‘Show me,’ snapped Kale.

Earlier during the voyage, just to satisfy his mild interest, Nord had allowed his psychic senses to brush the surface of Xeren’s mind. What he had sensed there was unreadable; not shrouded, but simply inhuman. Nothing that he could interpret as emotions, only a coldly logical chain of processes with all the nuance of a cogitator program. And yet, as the hololith stuttered and grew distinct, for the briefest of moments Nord was certain he felt the echo of a covetous thrill from the tech-priest.

‘Here is your target,’ said Xeren.

‘Throne of Terra…’ The curse slipped from Gorolev’s lips as the image solidified. ‘Xenos!’

It resembled a whorled shell, a tight spiral of shimmering bone curved in on itself. Coils of fibrous matter that suggested sinew webbed it, and from one vast orifice along the ventral plane, a nest of pasty tenticular forms issued outwards, grasping at nothing.

It lay among a drift of broken chitin and flash-frozen fluids, listing. Great scars marked the flanks of the alien construct, and in places there were craters, huge pockmarks that had exploded outwards like city-sized pustules.

There seemed to be no life to it. It was a gargantuan, bilious corpse. A dead horror, there in the starless night.

‘This is what you brought us to find?’ Kale’s voice was loaded with menace. ‘A tyranid craft?’

‘A hive ship,’ Xeren corrected. The tech-priest ignored the silence that had descended on the Emathia’s bridge, the mute shock upon the faces of Gorolev’s officers.

‘A vessel of this tonnage is no match for a tyranid hive,’ said Nord. ‘Their craft have defeated entire fleets and pillaged the crews for raw bio-mass to feast upon!’

‘It is dead,’ said the priest. ‘Have no fear.’

‘I am not afraid,’ Nord retorted, ‘but neither am I a fool! The tyranids are not known as “the Great Devourer” without reason. They are a plague, organisms that exist solely to consume and replicate. To destroy all life unlike them.’

‘You forget yourself.’ Xeren’s tone hardened. ‘The authority here is mine. I have brought you to this place for good reason. Look to the hive. It is dead,’ he repeated.

Nord studied the image. The xenos craft exhibited signs of heavy damage, and its motion and course suggested it was unguided.

‘My orders come from the highest echelons of the Magistratum,’ continued the tech-priest. ‘I am here to oversee the capture of this derelict, in the name of the God-Emperor and Omnissiah!’

‘Capture…’ Kale echoed the word. Nord saw the veteran’s sword-hand twitch as he weighed the command.

‘Consider the bounty within that monstrosity,’ Xeren addressed them, Adeptus Astartes and officers all. ‘Nord is quite correct. The tyranids are a scourge upon the stars, a virus writ large. But like any virus, it must be studied if a cure is to be found.’ A spindly machine-arm whirred, moving to point at the image. ‘This represents an unparalleled opportunity. This hive ship is a treasure trove of biological data. If we take it, learn its secrets…’ He gave a clicking rasp. ‘We might turn the xenos against themselves. Perhaps even tame them…’

‘How did you know this thing was here?’ Nord tore his gaze from the display.

Xeren answered after a moment. ‘The first attempt to take the hive was not a success. There were complications.’

‘You will tell us what transpired,’ said Kale. ‘Or we will go no further.’

‘Aye,’ rasped Gorolev. The captain had turned pale and sweaty, his fingers kneading the grip of his holstered laspistol.

Xeren gave another clicking sigh, and inclined his head on whining motors. ‘A scouting party of Archeo-Technologists boarded the craft under the command of an adept named Indus. We believe that a splinter force from a larger hive fleet left this ship behind after it suffered some malfunction. Evidence suggests–’

‘This Adept Indus,’ Kale broke in. ‘Where is he?’

Xeren looked away. ‘The scouting party did not return. Their fate is unknown to me.’

‘Consumed!’ grated Gorolev. ‘Throne and Blood! Any man that ventures in there would be torn apart!’

‘Captain,’ warned the brother-sergeant.

The tech-priest paid no attention to the officer’s outburst. ‘It is my firm belief that the hive ship, although not without hazards, is dormant. For the moment, at least.’ He came closer on iron-clawed feet. ‘You understand now why the Adeptus Mechanicus wish to move with alacrity, Blood Angel?’

‘I understand,’ Kale replied, and Nord saw the tightening of his jaw. Without another word, the veteran turned on his heel and strode away. Nord moved with him, and they were into the corridor before the Space Marine felt a hand upon his forearm.

‘Lords.’ Gorolev shot a look back towards the bridge as the hatch slammed shut, his eyes narrowing. ‘A word?’ Suspicion flared black in the man’s aura.

‘Speak,’ Kale replied.

‘I’ve made no secret of my reservations about the esteemed tech-priest’s motive and manner,’ said the captain. ‘I cannot let this pass without comment.’ His face took on the cast of anger and old fear. ‘By the Emperor’s grace, I am a veteran of many conflicts with the xenos, those tyranid abominations among them.’ Gorolev’s words brimmed with venom. ‘Those… things. I’ve seen them rape worlds and leave nothing but ashen husks in their wake.’ He leaned closer. ‘That hive ship should not be studied like some curiosity. It should be atomised!’

Kale held up a hand and Gorolev fell silent. ‘There is nothing you have said I disagree with, ship-master. But we are servants of the God-Emperor, Nord and I, you and your crew, even Xeren. And we have our duty.’

For a moment, it seemed as if Gorolev was about to argue; but then he nodded grimly, resigned to fulfilling his orders. ‘Duty, then. In the Emperor’s name.’

‘In the Emperor’s name,’ said Kale.

Nord opened his mouth to repeat the oath, but he found his voice silenced.

So fleeting, so mercurial and indistinct that it was gone even as he turned his senses towards it, Nord felt… Something.

A gloom, stygian-deep and ominous, passing over him as a storm cloud might obscure the sun. There, and gone. A presence. A mind?

The sense of black and red clouds pressed in on the edges of his thoughts and he pushed them away.

‘Nord?’ He found Kale studying him with a careful gaze.

He cleared his thoughts with a moment’s effort. ‘Brother-Sergeant,’ he replied. ‘The mission, then?’

Kale nodded. ‘The mission, aye.’

The boarding torpedo penetrated the hull of the tyranid vessel high along the dorsal surface. Serrated iron razor-cogs bit into the bony structure and turned, ripping at shell-matter and bunches of necrotic muscle, dragging the pod through layers of decking, into the voids of the hive ship’s interior.

Then, at rest, the seals released and the Space Marines deployed into the alien hulk, weapons rising to the ready.

Sergeant Kale led from the front, as he always did. He slipped down from the mouth of the boarding torpedo, playing his bolt pistol back and forth, sweeping the chamber for threats. Nord was next, then Brother Dane, Brother Serun and finally Corae, who moved with care as he cradled his flame-thrower. The weapon’s pilot lamp hissed quietly to itself, dancing there in the wet, stinking murk.

The Codicier felt the floor beneath his boots give under his weight; the decking – if it could be called that – was made up of rough plates of bone atop something that could only be flesh, stretching away in an arching, curved passageway. By degrees, the chamber lightened as Nord’s occulobe implant contracted, adjusting the perception range of his eyes.

Great arching walls that resembled flayed meat rose around the Blood Angels, along with fluted spires made of greasy black cartilage that drooled thin fluids. Puckered sphincters lay sagging and open, allowing a slaughterhouse stench to reach them. Here and there were the signs of internal damage, long festering wounds open and caked with xenos blood.

Nord picked out glowing boles upon the walls arranged at random intervals; it took a moment before he realised that they were actually fist-sized beetles, clinging to the skin-walls, antennae waving gently, bodies lit with dull bio-luminescence.

There were more insectile creatures in the shadows, little arachnid things that moved sluggishly, crawling in and out of the raw-edged cuts.

‘Damage everywhere,’ noted Serun, his gruff voice flattened by the thick air of the tyranid craft. ‘But no signs of weapons fire.’

‘It appears the tech-priest was right.’ Kale examined one of the walls. ‘Whatever fate befell this ruin, it was not caused by battle.’ He beckoned his men on. ‘Serun, do you have a reading?’

Brother Serun studied the sensor runes on the auspex device in his hand. ‘A faint trace from the adept’s personal locator.’ He pointed in an aftward direction.

‘That way.’

Kale’s gaze drifted towards Nord. ‘Is he alive, this man Indus?’

The psyker stiffened; warily extending his preternatural senses forwards. He could discern only the pale glitters of thought-energy from the spider-things and the lamp-beetles; nothing that might suggest a reasoning mind, let alone a human one. ‘I have no answer for you, sir,’ he said at length.

‘With caution, then, brothers.’ Kale walked on, and they followed him, silent and vigilant.

The corridor narrowed into a tube, and Nord imagined it a gullet down which the Adeptus Astartes were travelling. He had encountered tyranids before, but only upon the field of battle, and then down the sights of a missile launcher. He had never ventured aboard one of their craft, and it was exactly the horror he had expected it to be.

Tyranid vessels were not the product of forges and shipyards; they were spawned. Hive ships were spun out of knots of meat and bone, grown on the surface of captured worlds in teeming vats filled with a broth of liquefied biomass. They were living things, animals by some vague definition of the term. Electrochemical processes and nerve ganglions transmitted commands about its flesh; pheremonic discharges regulated its internal atmosphere; exothermic chemistry created light and heat. Its hull was skeletal matter, protecting the crew that swarmed like parasites inside the gut of the craft. Together, the hive was a contained, freakish ecosystem, drifting from world to world driven by the need to feed and feed.

Even in this half-dead state, Nord could taste the echo of that aching, bone-deep craving, as if it were leaking from the twitching walls. The fleshy wattles that dangled from the ceiling, the corpse-grey cilia and phlegmy deposits around his feet, all of it sickened him with its dead stench and the sheer, revolting affront of the tyranids’ very existence. This xenos abortion was everything that the Imperium, in all its human glory, was not. A chaotic riot of mutant life, disordered and rapacious, without soul or intellect. The absolute antithesis of the civilisation the Adeptus Astartes had fought to preserve since the days of Old Night.

Nord’s hand tightened around his pistol; the urge to kill this thing rose high, and he reined it in, denying the tingle of a building Rage before it had freedom to form.

The chamber broadened into an uneven space, dotted with deep pits of muddy liquid that festered and spat, gaseous discharges chugging into the foetid air. Mounds of fatty deposits lay in uneven heaps, the ejecta from the processes churning in the ponds.

Serun gestured. ‘Rendering pools. Bio-mass is brought here to be denatured into a liquid slurry.’

Corae spoke for the first time since they had boarded. ‘To what end?’

‘To feed the hive,’ Serun replied. ‘This… gruel is the raw material of the tyranids. They consume it, shape it. It is where they are born from.’

Kale dropped to his haunches. ‘And where they kill,’ he added. The sergeant picked something metallic from the spoil heaps and turned it in his fingers. A rank sigil of iron and copper, a disc cut to resemble a cogwheel. Upon it, the design of a skull, the symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Corae turned his face and spat in disgust. ‘Emperor protect me from such a fate.’

‘More here,’ said Brother Dane. With care, he drew to him a twisted shape afloat on one of the pools. It was a man’s ribcage and part of a spine, but the bone was rubbery and distended where acidic fluids had eaten into it. It crumbled like wet sand in the Blood Angel’s grip.

‘Adept Indus, perhaps, and his scout team…’ Kale suggested. He turned to face Nord and saw the psyker glaring into the dimness. ‘Brother?’

The question had barely left his lips when the Codicier gave an explosive shout. ‘Enemy!’

The shapes came at them from out of the twisted, sinewy ropes about the walls. Three beasts, bursting from concealment as one, attacking from all sides.

Corae was quick, clutching the trigger bar of his flamer. A bright gout of blazing promethium jetted from the bell-mouth of the weapon and engulfed the closest tyranid in flames, but on it came, falling into the red wave of death.

The second skittered across the ground, low and fast, dragging itself in loping jerks by its taloned limbs and great curved claws. Dane, Serun and the sergeant turned their bolters on it in a hail of punishing steel.

The third found Nord and dove at him, falling from the ceiling, spinning about as it came. He flung himself backwards, his storm bolter crashing, his free hand reaching for the hilt of his force axe.

The tyranid landed hard and rocked off its hooves; Nord got his first good look at the thing and recognition unfolded in his forebrain, the legacy of a hundred hypnogogic combat indoctrination tapes. A lictor.

Humanoid in form, tall and festooned with barbs, they sported massive scything talons and a cobra-head tail. Where a man would have a mouth, the lictors grew a wriggling orchard of feeder tendrils. They were hunter-predator forms, deployed alone or in small packs, stealthy and favoured of ambush attacks. Unless Nord and his brothers killed them quickly, they would spill fresh pheromones into the air and summon more of their kind.

He reversed and met the alien with the flickering crystal edge of the axe, reaching into his heart and finding the reservoir of psychic might lurking within him. As the axe-head bit into the lictor’s chest, Nord channelled a quickening from the warp along the weapon’s psi-convector and into the xenos’s new wound. Its agonised shriek battered at him, and he staggered as it tried to claw through his armour. Nord’s bolter crashed again, hot rounds finding purchase in the pasty flesh of its thorax. He withdrew the axe again and struck again, over and over, riding on the battle-anger welling up inside him.

The Blood Angel was dimly aware of a death-wail off to his right, half-glimpsing another lictor fall as it was opened by shellfire and chainblade; but his target still lived.

A talon swept down, barbs screeching as they scored Nord’s chest plate; in turn he let the axe fall again, this time severing a monstrous limb at the joint. Gouts of black blood spurted, burning where it landed, and the Codicier threw a wall of psionic pressure outwards, battering at the wounded creature.

The lictor’s hooves slipped on the lip of a bio-pool and it stumbled backwards into the lake of stringy muck; instantly the churning acids ate into the tyranid and it collapsed, drowning and melting.

Nord regained his balance and waved a hand in front of his visor as oily smoke wafted past; the third tyranid was also dying, finally succumbing to Corae’s flamer and the impacts of krak grenades.

A mechanical voice grated through his vox-link. ‘Kale. Respond. This is Xeren. We have detected weapons fire. Report status immediately.’

Ignoring the buzzing of the tech-priest, the psyker approached the last dying lictor as Corae took aim with his flame-thrower, twisting the nozzle to adjust the dispersal pattern. The force axe still humming in his hand, his psychic power resonating through him, Nord caught the sense of the tyranid’s animal mind, trapped in its death throes. He winced, the touch of it more abhorrent to him than anything he had yet witnessed aboard the hive ship.

Yet there, in the mass of its unknowable, alien thoughts, he glimpsed something. Great swirling clouds of red and black. And men, robed men with skeletal limbs of metal and copper cogs about their necks.

Corae pulled the trigger and laid a snake of fire over the beast, boiling its soft tissues beneath the hard chitin armour. Nord sheathed his axe and heard the voice again. Xeren seemed impatient.

‘Perhaps you should not engage every tyranid you see.’

Kale was plucking spent flesh hooks from the crevices of his armour with quick, spare motions. ‘The xenos did not offer us the choice, priest. And I remind you who it was that told us this ship was dead.’

‘Where the tyranids are concerned, there are degrees of death. The ship is dormant, and so the majority of the swarm aboard should be quiescent. But some may retain a wakeful state… I suggest you avoid further engagements.’

‘I will take that under advisement,’ Kale retorted.

Xeren continued. ‘You are proceeding too slowly, brother-sergeant, and without efficiency. Indus is the primary objective. Divide your forces to cover a greater area. Find him for me.’

The sergeant holstered his gun, and any reply he might have made was rendered pointless as the tech-priest cut the vox signal.

Serun’s hands closed into fists. ‘He dares bray commands as if he were Chapter Master? The scrawny cog has no right–’

‘Decorum, kinsman,’ said Kale. ‘We are the Sons of Sanguinius. A mere tech-priest is not worth our enmity. We’ll find Xeren’s lost lamb soon enough and be done.’

‘If he still lives,’ mused Corae, nudging the powdery bones with his boot.

Reluctantly, Brother-Sergeant Kale chose to do as the tech-priest had suggested; beyond the bio-pool chamber the throat-corridors branched and he ordered Dane to break off, taking Corae and Serun with him. Brother Dane’s element would move anti-spinwards through the hive ship’s interior spaces, while Nord and his commander ventured along the other path.

The psyker threw the veteran a questioning look when he voiced the orders; in turn Kale’s expression remained unchanged. ‘Xeren and I agree on one point,’ he noted. ‘We both wish this mission to be concluded as quickly as possible.’

Nord had to admit he too shared that desire. He thought of Gorolev’s words aboard the Emathia. The ship-master was right; this monstrous hulk was an insult every second it was allowed to exist.

Dane’s team vanished into the clammy darkness and Nord followed Kale onwards. They passed through more rendering chambers, then rooms seemingly constructed from waxy matter, laced with spherical pods, each one wet and dripping ichor. They encountered other strange spaces that defied any interpretation of form or function; hollows where tooth-like spires criss-crossed from floor and ceiling; a copse of bulbous, acid-rimed fronds that resembled coral polyps; and great bladders that throbbed, thick liquid emerging from them in desultory jerks.

And there were the creatures. The first time they came across the alien forms, Nord’s axe had come to his hand before he was even aware of it; but the tyranids they encountered were in some state that mirrored death, a strange hibernative trance that rendered them inert.

They crossed a high catwalk formed from spinal bone, and Kale used the pin-lamp beneath the barrel of his boltgun to throw a disc of light into the pits below. The glow picked out the hulking shape of a massive carnifex, its bullet-shaped head tucked into its spiny chest in some mad parody of a sleeping child.

The rasping breaths of the huge assault organism fogged the air, bone armour and spines scraping across one another as its chest rose and fell. Awake, it could have killed the Blood Angels with a single blast of bio-poison from its slavering venom cannons.

Around the gnarled hooves of the slumbering carnifex, a clutch of deadly hormagaunts rested, shiny oil-black carapaces piled atop one another, clawed limbs folded back, talons sheathed. Nord gripped the force axe firmly, and it took a near physical effort for him to turn from the gallery of targets before him. Instead they moved on, ever on, picking their way in stealth through the very heart of the hive’s dozing populace.

‘Why do they ignore us?’ Kale wondered, his question transmitted to the vox-bead in Nord’s ear.

‘They are conserving their strength, brother-sergeant,’ he replied. ‘Whatever incident caused this ship to fall away from the rest of its hive fleet, it must have drained them to survive it. I would not question our luck.’

‘Aye,’ Kale replied. ‘Terra protects.’

‘I–’

The force axe fell from Nord’s fingers and the impact upon the bone deck seemed louder than cannon fire. Suddenly, without warning, it was there.

A black and cloying touch enveloping his thoughts – the same sense of something alien he had felt aboard the Emathia.

A presence. A mind. Clouds, billowing wreaths of black and red, surrounding him, engulfing him.

‘There… is something else here,’ he husked. ‘A psychic phantom, just beyond my reach. Measuring itself against me.’ Nord’s heart hammered in his chest; he tasted metal in his mouth. ‘Not just the xenos… More than that.’

He grimaced, and strengthened his mental bulwarks, shoring them up with raw determination. The dark dream uncoiled in his thoughts, the rumbling pulse of the Red Thirst in his gullet, the churn of the Black Rage stiffening his muscles. All about him, the shadows seemed to lengthen and loom, leaking from the walls, ranging across the sleeping monsters to reach for the warrior with ebon fingers.

Nord gasped. ‘Something is awakening.’

Across the plane of the hive ship’s hull, Brother Dane brought up his fist in a gesture of command, halting Corae and Serun. ‘Do you hear that?’ he asked.

Corae turned, the flamer in his grip. ‘It’s coming from the walls.’ They were the last words he would utter.

Flesh-matter all around the squad ripped and tore into bleeding rags as claws shredded their way towards the Astartes. With brutal, murderous power, a tide of chattering freaks boiled in upon them, spines and bone and armoured heads moving in blurs. They were so fast that in the dimness they seemed like the talons of single giant animal, reaching out to take them.

Gunfire lit the corridor, the flat bang of bolter shells sounding shot after shot, the chugging belch of fire from the flamer issuing out to seek targets. In return came screaming – the blood-hungry shrieks of a warrior brood turned loose to find prey.

The horde of tyranid soldier organisms rolled over the Space Marines with no regard for their own safety; mindless things driven on by killer instinct and a desire to feed, they had no self to preserve. They were simply the blades of the hive, and the very presence of the intruders was enough to drive them mad.

Perhaps beings with intellect might have sensed the hand of something larger, something at the back of their thoughts, compelling them, driving them to destroy. But the termagants knew nothing but the lust to rip and rend.

Symbiotic phero-chemical links between the tyranids and the engineered bio-tools in their claws sent kill commands running before them. Like everything in their arsenal, the weapons used by the warriors were living things. Their fleshborers, great bell-mouthed flutes of chitin, spat clumps of fang-toothed beetles that chewed through armour and flesh in a destructive frenzy.

Numberless and unstoppable, the brood swallowed up Corae and Serun, opening them to the air in jets of red. Dane was the last to fall, his legs cut out from under him, his bolter running dry, becoming a club in his mailed fists. At the end of him, a storm of tusk blades pierced his torso, penetrating his lungs, his primary and secondary hearts.

Blood flooded his mouth and he perished in silence, his last act to deny the creatures the victory of his screams.

Brother Nord stumbled and fell to one knee, clutching at his chest in sympathetic agony. He felt Dane perish in his thoughts, heard the echo of the warrior’s death, and that of Corae and Serun. Each man’s ending struck him like a slow bullet, filling his gut with ice.

Nord’s heart and its decentralised twin beat fast, faster, faster, his blood singing in his ears in a captured tempest. The same trembling he had felt back in the chapel returned, and it was all he could do to fight it off.

He became aware of Brother-Sergeant Kale helping him to his feet, dimly registering his squad commander guiding him away from the hibernaculum chamber and into the flesh-warm humidity of the corridor beyond.

‘Nord! Speak to me!’

He tried to answer but the psychic undertow dragged on him, taking all his effort just to stay afloat and sensate. The shocking resonance was far worse than he had ever felt before. There had been many times upon the field of combat where Nord had tasted the mind-death of others, sometimes his foes, too often his battle-brothers… But this… This was of a very different stripe.

At once alien and human, unknowable and yet known to him, the psychic force that had compelled the termagant swarm reached in and raked frigid claws over the surface of his mind. A part of him screamed that he should withdraw, disengage and erect the strongest of his mental barriers. Every second he did not, he gave this force leave to plunge still deeper. And yet, another facet of Nord’s iron will dared to face this power head-on, driven by the need to know it. To know it and destroy it.

Against the sickness he felt within, Nord tried to see the face of his enemy. The mental riposte was powerful; it hit him like a wall and he recoiled, his vision hazed crimson.

With a monumental psychic effort, Nord disengaged and slumped against a bony stanchion, his dark skin sallow and filmed with sweat.

He blinked away the fog in his vision and found his commander. Kale’s pale face was grave in the dimness. ‘The others?’ he whispered.

‘Dead,’ Nord managed. ‘All dead.’

The sergeant gave a grim nod. ‘The Emperor knows their names.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘You felt it? With your witchsight, you saw… the enemy?’

‘Aye.’ The psyker got to his feet. ‘It tried to kill me. Didn’t take.’

Kale stood, drumming his fingers on the hilt of his chainsword. ‘This… force that assaulted you?’

He shook his head, ‘I’ve never sensed the like before, sir.’

‘Do you know where it is?’ The veteran gestured around at the walls with the chainsword.

Nord nodded. ‘That, I do know.’

He heard the hunter’s smile in the sergeant’s voice. ‘Show me.’

At the heart of every tyranid nest, one breed of creature was supreme. If the carnifexes and termagants, ripper swarms and biovores were the teeth and talons of the tyranid mass, then the commanding intellect was the hive tyrant. None had ever been captured alive, and few had been recovered by the Imperium intact enough for a full dissection. If the lictors and the hormagaunts and all the other creatures were common soldiery, the hive tyrants were the generals. The conduit for whatever passed as the diffuse mind of this repugnant xenos species.

Some even said that the tyrants were only a sub-genus of something even larger and more intelligent; a cadre of tyranid capable of reasoning and independent thought. But no such being had ever been seen by human eyes – or if it had, those who had gazed upon it did not live to tell.

It was the hive ship’s tyrant that the Blood Angels sought as they entered the orb-like hibernacula, the tech-priest’s objective now ranked of lesser importance. If a tyrant was awake aboard this vessel, then none of them were safe.

‘It’s not a tyranid,’ husked Nord. ‘The thought-pattern I sensed… It wasn’t the same as the lictor’s.’ He paused. ‘At least, not in whole.’

Kale eyed him. ‘Explain, brother. Your gift is a mystery to me. I do not understand.’

‘The mind that touched my thoughts, that rallied the creatures who attacked us. It is neither human nor xenos.’

The sergeant halted. ‘A daemon?’ He said the word like a curse.

Nord shook his head. ‘I do not sense the taint of Chaos here, sir. This is different…’ Even as the words fell from his lips, the psyker felt the change in the air around them. The wet, damp atmosphere grew sullen and greasy, setting a sickly churn deep in his belly.

Kale felt it too, even without the Codicier’s preternatural senses. The sergeant drew his chainsword and brandished it before him, his thumb resting on the weapon’s activation stud.

A robed figure, there in the dimness. Perhaps a man, it advanced slowly towards them, feet dragging as if wounded. And then a voice, brittle and cracked.

‘Me,’ rasped the newcomer. ‘You sense me, Adeptus Astartes.’ The figure moved at the very edge of the dull light from the lamp-beetles. Nord’s eyes narrowed; threads of clothing, cables perhaps, seemed to trail behind the man, away into the dark.

Kale aimed his gun. ‘In the Emperor’s name, identify yourself or I will kill you where you stand.’

Hands opened in a gesture of concession. ‘I do not doubt you already know who I am.’ He bowed slightly, and Nord saw cords snaking along his back. ‘My name is Heraklite Indus, adept and savant, former Magis Biologis Minoris of the Adeptus Mechanicus.’

‘Former?’ echoed Kale.

Indus’s shadowed head bobbed. ‘Oh, yes. I attend a new master now. Let me introduce you to him.’

The strange threads pulled taut and lifted Indus off his feet, to dangle as a marionette would hang from the hands of a puppeteer. A shape that dwarfed him lumbered out of the black, drawing into the pool of light.

White as bleached bone, crested with purple-black patches of armour shell, it bent to fit its bulk inside the close quarters of the hibernacula; a hive tyrant, in all its obscene glory.

Two of its four arms were withered and folded to its torso, the pearlescent surface of their claws cracked and fractured. The other arms ended in ropey whips of sinew that threaded across the floor and into the adept’s flayed spine, glittering wetly where bone was revealed beneath his torn robes.

And yet… The towering tyranid’s breathing was laboured and rough, and from its eye-spots, its great fanged jaws, its fleshy throat-sacs, thin yellow pus oozed over crusted scabs. For all the horror and scale, the tyrant seemed slack and drained, without the twitchy, insectile frenzy of its lessers. A stinking haze of necrotic decay issued from it; Nord had tasted the scent of death enough times to know that this alien beast was mortally wounded.

‘What have you done, Indus?’ demanded Kale, his face twisted in disgust. In all his years, the veteran sergeant had never seen the like.

‘Neither human nor xenos.’ Nord repeated his earlier statement, the words suddenly snapping into hard focus. With a whip-crack thought, he sent a savage mental probe towards the adept; Indus spun to face him with a glare and the telepathic feint was deflected easily.

The adept nodded slowly. ‘Yes, Blood Angel. We are the same. Both blessed with witchsight. Both psykers.’ Indus cocked his head. ‘Xeren never told you. How like him.’

‘No matter,’ growled Kale. Without hesitation, the sergeant opened fire and Nord followed suit, both Space Marines turning their weapons on the ugly, abhorrent pairing.

The hive tyrant shifted, drawing Indus close in a gesture of protection, shielding the adept from the bolt-rounds that whined off its chitinous armour. Its head lolled back and a high screech issued from between its teeth; in reply there were hoots and howls from all around the Adeptus Astartes.

In moments, sphinctered rents in the hibernacula walls drew open, spilling dozens of mucus-slicked hormagaunts into the chamber. The chattering beasts rose up in a wave and the Blood Angels went to their blades. Kale’s chainsword brayed as it chewed through bone; Nord’s force axe cut lightning-flash arcs into meat, as barbed grasping claws dragged them down.

Nord caught a telepathic spark as blood from a cut gummed his right eye shut; he drew up his mental shields just as the hive tyrant released a scream of psychic energy upon them.

The wave of pain blasted across the chamber and the Codicier saw his battle-brother stumble, clutching his hands to his head in agony. Nord fared little better, the tyranid’s telepathic onslaught sending him spinning. For long moments he waited for death to fall upon him, for the mass of hormagaunts to take the opportunity to rip him apart – but they did not.

Instead, the hissing monsters retreated, forming into a wall before the Space Marines, shielding Indus and the tyrant.

Nord went to Kale and helped him to his feet. The sergeant had lost his bolter in the melee, and he still shook from the after-effect of the psychic scream.

‘We could have killed you,’ said Indus. ‘We chose not to.’

‘You speak for the xenos now?’ spat Nord.

Indus gave a crooked smile. ‘A soldier’s limited mindset. I had hoped for better from one with the sight.’ He came forwards, the shuffling tyrant at his back. ‘I found this creature near death, you understand? Too weak to fight me. I pushed in, touched its thoughts…’ The adept gave a gasp of pleasure. ‘And what I saw there. Such riches. The knowledge of flesh and bone, nerve and blood, an understanding! More than the scribes of the Magis Biologis could ever hope to learn. Race memory, Adeptus Astartes. Millions of years of it, to drink in…’

‘Fool,’ replied the Blood Angel. ‘Can you not see what you have done? The creature is near death! It used what strength it had to lure you in, place you in its thrall! It uses you like it uses these mindless predators!’ He gestured at the hormagaunts. ‘When it is healed, it will reawaken every horror that walks or crawls within this hive, and turn again to the killing of men!’

‘You are wrong,’ Indus retorted. ‘I have control here! I spared your lives!’

‘I?’ snapped Kale. ‘A moment ago you said “we”. Which is it?’

‘The hive answers to me!’ he shouted, the warrior creatures howling in empathy. ‘I gave myself to the merging, and now see what I have at my hands…’ Indus drew in a rattling breath. ‘That is why Xeren sent you here. He is like you. Afraid. Jealous of what we are.’

‘The priest knew of this?’ hissed Kale.

Indus chuckled. ‘Xeren saw it happen. He fled! He sent you to find us, praying you would destroy us so his cadre could take this hive for itself.’

Nord nodded to himself. ‘Aboard a ship filled with killing machines, a deed only an Astartes could do.’

‘You’ve seen the power of these creatures,’ said the adept. ‘This is only a tiny measure of what the swarm is capable of.’ He extended a skeletal cybernetic arm towards the psyker. ‘There is such majesty here, red in tooth and claw, Blood Angel. Come see it. Join me.’ New, fang-mouthed tentacles issued forth from the tyrant’s stunted arms, questing towards the Codicier. ‘Our union is vast and giving, for those with the gift…’

His eyes narrowed, and with one sweeping blow, Brother Nord sliced down with his axe, severing the probing limbs in a welter of acidic blood. The tyrant screamed and rocked backwards.

‘A grave mistake,’ snarled Indus. ‘You have no idea what you have denied yourself.’

‘I know full well,’ came the reply. ‘My blood stays pure, by the Emperor’s grace and the might of Sanguinius! You have willingly defiled yourself, debased your humanity… For that there can be no forgiveness.’

‘We are not monsters!’ shouted Indus, amid his howling chorus. ‘You are the destroyers, the disunited, the infection! You are the hate! The rage and the thirst!’

Too late, Nord’s mind sensed the build of warp energy once more, resonating between the tyrant and the Mechanicum psyker. Too late, the cold understanding reached him. ‘No…’ he breathed, staggering backwards. ‘No!’

‘Nord?’ The question on Brother Kale’s lips was suddenly ripped away by a new, thunderous shockwave of dark power.

Perhaps it was the hive tyrant, with its hate for all things alien to it, perhaps it was Indus in his crazed fury. Whatever the origin, the burning blade of madness swept across the Blood Angels and ripped open their minds.

Nord held on to the ragged edge of the abyss, as once more the red and black clouds enveloped him. The dream! The vision in his roaring heart was upon him! His moment of foresight damning and terrifyingly real.

The strength of the psychic blast tore away any self-control, burning down to the basest, most monstrous instincts a man could conceal; and for an Adeptus Astartes of the Blood Angels Chapter, the fall to such madness was damning.

The gene-curse. The flaw. The Red Thirst’s wild and insatiable desire for blood, the Black Rage’s uncontrollable berserker insanity. These were the twin banes Nord fought to endure. Fought and held against. Fought… And finally… resisted.

But Brother-Sergeant Brenin Kale had none of the Codicier’s psychic bulwarks. His naked mind absorbed the power of the tyrant’s fury… and fell.

The man that Nord’s comrade had been was gone; in his place was a beast clothed in his flesh.

Kale threw himself at the Codicier, his chainsword discarded and forgotten, hands in claws, his mouth wide to release a bellow of pure anger. The Blood Angel’s fangs glittered in the light, and darkness filled his vision.

Nord collided with Kale with a concussion that sounded across the chamber, scattering dithering hormagaunts, crushing others with the impact. Kale’s mailed fists rained blow after blow upon Nord’s battle armour, the crimson tint of fury in the sergeant’s aura stifling him.

He cried out the other man’s name, desperately trying to reach through the fog of madness, but to no avail. Nord fought to block the impacts as they struggled against one another, locked in close combat; he could not bring himself to hit back.

His skull rang with each strike, his vision blurring. There was no doubt that Kale could kill him. He was no match for the old veteran’s strength and prowess, even in such a state. Kale’s frightening speed and instinctive combat skills would overwhelm him. He had little choice. If he could not end this madness quickly, Kale would tear open his throat and drink deep.

He glimpsed a rent in Kale’s armour, a deep gouge that had penetrated the ceramite sheath. ‘Brother,’ he whispered, ‘Forgive me.’

Nord’s hand closed around the hilt of his combat blade, turning the fractal-edged knife about. Without pause, he buried it deep in his old friend’s chest, down to the hilt. The blade penetrated plasteel, flesh and muscle; it punctured Kale’s primary heart and the veteran’s back arched in a spasm of agony.

Nord let him fall, and the other man dropped to the bony deck, pain wracking him, robbing him of his rage.

A different kind of fury burned in the psyker. One pure and controlled, as bright as the core of a star. Blue sparks gathering around the crystal matrix of his psychic hood, Nord turned and found his force axe, sweeping it up to aim at Indus.

‘You will pay in kind for this, adept,’ he snarled. ‘Know that. In the name of Holy Terra, you will pay.’

Nord closed his eyes and let the power flow into him. Blazing actinic flares of warp energy sputtered and flew around the Blood Angel’s head as the hormagaunts shook off their pause and came at him. Channelling the might of heroes though his bones, through his very soul itself, he unleashed his telepathic might through the force axe.

The blast turned the air into smoke and battered away the xenos beasts, sending them shrieking into the dark. Indus bellowed in pain as his flesh was wracked with agony, and the tyrant hooted in synchrony with him.

It took unbearable minutes for the psychic blast to dissipate, for the adept’s crooked mind to shake off the aftershock.

Finally, through the myriad senses of the howling, confused tyranids, he saw only the scorched bone deck of the hibernacula.

The Adeptus Astartes were gone.

With Kale’s body across his shoulder, Brother Nord ran as swiftly as the bulk of his battle armour would allow, always onwards, never looking back. His storm bolter ran hot in his hand as the Codicier placed shots into any tyranid that crossed his path. He did not stop to engage them, did not pause in his headlong flight.

Nord could feel Indus reaching out, probing the hive ship for him, drawing more and more of the sleeping xenos from their hibernation with each passing moment. He crossed the high bone bridge above the pits and saw the carnifex stirring, moaning as it rose towards wakefulness.

The psyker understood a measure of what had transpired here; Indus or the hive tyrant – or whatever unholy fusion of the two now existed – must have sensed him for the very first time as the Emathia made its approach. Hungry for another thrall, the hive mind allowed Nord and Kale to approach the core of the ship, while dispatching Dane and the other battle-brothers. He suppressed a shudder; it wanted him. It wanted to engulf him, subsume him into that same horrific unity.

Nord spat in loathing. Perhaps a weakling mind, a man like the bio-adept, perhaps he might have fallen to such a thing… But Nord was a Blood Angel, an Adeptus Astartes – the finest warrior humanity had ever created. Whatever dark fate awaited him, his duty came before them all.

His duty…

‘Brother…’ He heard the voice as they came to the chamber where the boarding torpedo had made its breach.

Nord lowered his comrade to the ground and he saw the light of recognition in the sergeant’s eyes. The mental force Indus had turned on Kale was, at least for the moment, dispelled. ‘What… did I do?’ Kale’s voice was a gasp, thick with blood and recrimination. ‘The xenos…’

‘They are close,’ he replied. ‘We have little time.’

Kale saw Nord’s dagger deep in his chest and gave a ragged chuckle. ‘Should… I thank you for this?’

The psyker dragged the injured warrior into the boarding capsule, ignoring the question. ‘You will heal, sir. Your body’s implants are already destroying infection, repairing your wounds.’ He stood up and punched a series of commands into a control panel.

Kale’s pale face darkened. ‘Wait. What… are you doing?’

Nord didn’t meet his gaze. ‘Indus will find us again soon enough. He must be dealt with.’ The psyker scowled at the vox-link and gave a low curse; the channel was laced with static, likely jammed by some freakish tyranid organism bred just for that task.

Kale tried to lift himself off the deck, ignoring the pain of his fresh, bloody scars, but the acid burn of tyranid venom in his flesh left him gasping, shaking with pain. ‘You can’t… go back. Not alone…’

The other warrior reached into a weapons locker, searching for something. ‘I beg to differ, sir. I am the only one who can go back. This enemy has already claimed the lives of three Blood Angels. There must be payment for that cost.’ He glanced at the veteran. ‘And Xeren’s perfidy cannot stand unchallenged.’

Through his blurred vision, the sergeant saw the Codicier gather a gear pack to him, saw him slam a fresh clip of bolt shells into his weapon. ‘Nord,’ he growled. ‘You will stand down!’

The psyker hesitated at the airlock, looking back into the gloom of the hive ship beyond. ‘I regret I cannot obey you, brother. Forgive me.’

Without another word, Nord stepped through, letting the brass leaves of the hatch close behind him. Then the razor-cogs began to turn, the boarding torpedo drawing back into the void amid gushes of outgassing air.

Fuming, Kale dragged himself to the viewport, a trail of dark blood across the steel deck behind him, in time to see the hive ship’s hull falling away.

The capsule turned away to find the Emathia hanging in the blackness, and with a pulse of thrusters, it set upon a return course towards the frigate.

Nord threw himself into the melee, storm bolter crashing, his force axe a spinning cascade of psychic fury. ‘Indus!’ He cried, ‘I am here! Face me if you dare!’

In the confines of the corridors, he fought with termagants and warriors, stamped ripper swarms into paste beneath his boots, killed and tore and blazed a path of destruction back through the hive. Nord became a whirlwind of blade and shell, deep in the mad glory of combat.

His body sang with pain from lacerations, toxins and impacts, but still he fought on, bolstering himself with the power of his own psionic quickening. The shadows of the Rage and the Thirst were there at his back, reaching for him, ready to take him, and he raced to stay one step ahead. He could not be consumed: not yet. His heavy burden rattled against his chest plate.

Soon, he told himself, sensing the red and the black. Very soon.

Crossing the bone bridge once more, he shouted his defiance – and the tyranids replied in kind.

Winged fiends and fluttering, gas-filled spores fell around him, the gargoyle broods tearing through the air, daring him to attack. He unloaded the storm bolter, tracer shells cutting magnesium-bright flashes in the dark; but for each he killed there were five more, ten more, twenty. The spores detonated in foetid coughs of combustion and without warning the bridge was severed.

Nord fell, his weapons lost, down into the pit where the carnifex lurked. Impact came hard and suffocating, as the Blood Angel sank into a drift of soft, doughy matter collecting around the hive’s egg sacs. Tearing the sticky strings of albumen from his armour, he tore free–

And faced his foe.

‘You should have fled while you had the chance.’ Indus’s voice had taken on a fly-swarm buzz. ‘We will take you now.’

Flanked by mammoth thorn-backed beasts, the hive tyrant bowed, as if mocking him, allowing Indus to dangle before Nord upon his tendrils. More tentacles snaked forwards, questing and probing.

The aliens waited to taste the stink of his fear, savouring the moment; Nord gave them nothing, instead bending to recover his axe where it had fallen.

‘This will be your end, adept,’ he said. ‘If only you could see what you have become.’

‘We are the superior!’ came the roar in return. ‘We will devour all! You are the prey! You are the beasts!’

Nord took a breath and let the dark clouds come. ‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘perhaps we are.’

The Black Rage and the Red Thirst, the curses that he had fought against for so long, the twin madness at the core of his being… The psyker let his defences fall before them. He gave himself fully to the heart of the rage, let it fill him.

Power, burning nova-bright, swept away every doubt, every question in his mind. Suddenly it was so very clear to him; there was only the weapon and the target. The killer and the killed.

The aliens charged, and Nord ripped open the gear pack at his belt, drawing the weapon within, running to meet them, racing towards the hive tyrant.

Indus saw the lethal burden in the Blood Angel’s hand and felt a cold blade of fear lance through him; the tyrant shook in sympathetic panic. ‘No–’ he whispered.

‘In the name of Sanguinius and the God-Emperor,’ the Codicier snarled, baring his fangs. ‘I will end you all!’

Captain Gorolev jerked up from the console, his expression set in fear. ‘The cogitators register an energy increase aboard the hive ship!’

Xeren’s head turned to face him atop his snake-like neck. ‘I am aware.’

Gorolev took a step towards the Mechanicus magi. ‘That ship is a threat!’ he snapped. ‘We have completed recovery of the boarding torpedo, and your scouts are lost! We should destroy the xenos! There is no reason to let them live a moment longer!’

‘There is every reason!’ Xeren’s manner of cold, silky dismissal suddenly broke. He rounded on the frigate’s commander, his mechadendrites and cyber-limbs rising up behind him in a fan, angry serpents hissing and snapping at the air. All trace of his false politeness faded. ‘You test me and test me, ship-master, and I will hear no more! You will do as I say, or your life will be forfeit!’

‘You have no right–’ Gorolev was cut off as Xeren reached out a hand, showing brass micro-lasers where fingers should have been.

‘I have the authority to do anything,’ he grated. ‘That hive is worth more than your life, captain. More than the lives of your worthless crew, more than the lives of Kale and his Space Marines! I will sacrifice every single one of you, if that is what it will cost!’

A silence fell across the bridge; Gorolev’s eyes widened, but not in fear of Xeren. He and his officers stared beyond the tech-priest, to the open hatchway behind him.

There, filling the doorway, was a figure clad in blood-red. Xeren spun, his limbs, flesh and steel, coming up before him in a gesture of self-protection.

Brother-Sergeant Kale entered, carrying himself with a limp, his pale face stained with spilled vitae and smoke. His eyes were black with an anger as cold and vast as space.

Armour scarred from tyranid venom and claw, blemished with bitter fluids, he took heavy, purposeful steps towards the tech-priest. ‘My brothers lie dead,’ he intoned. ‘The blame is yours.’

‘I… I was not…’ Xeren’s cool reserve crumbled.

‘Do not cheapen their sacrifice with lies, priest,’ growled Kale, his ire building ever higher as he came closer. ‘You sent us to our deaths, and you smiled as you did it.’

Xeren stiffened, drawing himself up. ‘I only did what was needed! I did what was expected of me!’

‘Yes,’ Kale gave a slow nod, and reached up to his chest, where the hilt of a combat knife protruded from a scabbed wound. ‘Now I do the same.’

With a shout of rage and pain, Kale tore the knife free and swept it around in a fluid arc. The blade’s mirror-bright edge found the tech-priest’s throat and cut deep, severing veins and wires, bone and metal. The Blood Angel leaned into the attack and took Xeren’s head from his neck. The cyborg’s body danced and fell, crashing to the deck in a puddle of oil.

‘Energy surge at criticality…’ Gorolev reported, as alert chimes sounded from the cogitator console.

Kale said nothing, only nodded. He stepped up to the viewport, over Xeren’s headless corpse, and watched the hive ship. His hands drew up to his chest in salute, taking on the shape of the Imperial aquila.

‘In His name, brother,’ he whispered.

He was falling.

Somewhere, far beyond his thoughts in the world of meat and bone, he was dying. Claws tearing at him, serpentine tendrils cutting into him, cilia probing to find grey matter and absorb it.

Nord fell into the cascade of sensation. The blood roaring through him. The flawless, diamond-hard perfection of his anger driving him on, into the arms of the enemy.

He had never feared death; he had only feared that when the moment came, he would be found wanting.

That time was here, and he was more certain of his rightness than ever before.

The clouds of billowing crimson, the swelling mist of deep, deep night; they came and took him, and he embraced it.

Somewhere, far beyond his thoughts, a bloody, near-crippled hand curled about the grip of a weapon, tight upon a trigger. And with a breath, a slow and steady breath, that hand released. Let go. Gave freedom to the tiny star building and churning inside.

The fusion detonator Nord had recovered from the weapons locker, the secret burden he had carried back into the heart of the hive ship. Now revealed, now empowered and unleashed.

The new sun grew, flesh and bone crisping, becoming pale sketches and then vapour; and in that moment, as the light became all, in its heart Brother Nord saw an angel, golden and magnificent. Reaching for him. Offering his hand.

Beckoning him towards honour, and a death most worthy.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Hardy Fowler

© Games Workshop Limited, 2011. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-0-85787-204-3

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