GRIM REVELATIONS
Fortress Sixth West
Allhallow, Scorpid Cluster
Sergeant Moricani sprinted hard up the stairs, his plasma incinerator’s recharge coils lighting the stone corridor’s walls a strange undersea blue.
‘Time to die in flames, heretics,’ he called into the shadows. There were sounds of battle in the distance, coming from the top of the keep, by his reckoning. No doubt Zaeroph and his veteran Dark Angels were up there already, having all the fun.
The Hellblaster sergeant reached a long stretch of tunnel and ran down it, Lenkatz and the rest of his men hard on his heels.
‘No signal on this level,’ said Darrodan, his forearm auspicator pinging. ‘All this firepower, but no one to use it on.’
‘So we go onward,’ said Moricani. ‘And up.’ He ran up another flight of stairs, heavy footsteps pounding on the flagstones, and emerged on the top of the battlements. He checked down the line of his gun for signs of life, but saw nothing – the defenders of this section of the castle had been killed, and less than a minute ago by his reckoning.
‘Energy weapons,’ he said, looking down at a cadaver with a fist-sized hole in its chest. ‘Plasma, by the look of it. Perhaps our Ravenwing or Deathwing brothers got here first.’
‘Bit small for a plasma gun shot,’ said Darrodan.
‘I was thinking that too,’ said Moricani. ‘Pistol, maybe.’
Leaping the corpses of slain mutants, he ran over a hardwood scaffold to reach the keep beyond. ‘Do keep up,’ he called back to Lenkatz and the others. They redoubled their pace, gathering around Moricani with their bulky incinerators aimed to cover all possible entrances.
Ahead of them was a large iron door, banded with sacred texts and info-locks. It was Proteus-pattern, by Moricani’s estimation, and therefore proof against even a hydraulic battering ram array.
‘Right,’ said Moricani, holding his gun to his lips for a moment. He took a step back and aimed at the lock.
There was a high whine as Moricani ran his gun’s plasma coils to maximum. It was followed by a searing bang, and a flash of painfully bright blue light. A wide hole appeared where the door’s info-lock had been a moment before, the choking fumes of vaporised metal filtering through the Primaris Marines’ helms to sting at their nostrils.
Moricani kicked hard just below the hole, and the door flew open with a loud clang. The sergeant was the first through, charging up a long spiral staircase that ringed the inside of the cylindrical keep.
High in the interior was an enormous bell, so thick with dust and guano it had to have been silent for decades. The sounds of explosions and gunshots came from high above, and the giant bell rang dully on the cusp of hearing with the reverberations.
‘Those are storm bolter rounds,’ said Lenkatz. ‘Double detonation. My money’s on the Deathwing.’
‘Then let’s get up there!’ Moricani shouldered his plasma incinerator and ran up the stone stairs three at a time, taking care to stick close to the wall as he made his way up the inside of the tower.
The sergeant heard the thunder and crack of battle much clearer as he got closer to the top of the tower, so clear he could make out the weapons being discharged. He could feel a glorious thrill of anticipation coursing through his veins.
Underneath his jests, he had often wondered what it would be like to fight alongside the finest warriors in the First Legion, to actively wage war shoulder to shoulder with the heroes of the Dark Angels. The thought made his blood pump far more than he would ever publicly admit.
Moricani reached the top of the stairs. A stout hardwood trapdoor barred their path. He put his shoulder to it and pushed hard, but the whole structure was reinforced with three-inch straps of iron. With only the smallest fraction of give, it felt as if it had been slab-bolted from the other side.
‘A little room, please,’ said Moricani. ‘I am about to offend Phobossian’s machine-spirit for a second time in as many minutes. If I have to have my name etched on the pillars of the Hall of Fire as a result, I would rather yours were not below it.’
Moricani retreated a couple of steps, kneeling and raising his gun to an almost vertical angle before taking his shot. The trapdoor’s right-hand side disintegrated in a shower of molten metal and burning flinders. He stood tall and put his shoulder to it once more, this time pushing it ajar as he brought his gun up with him, and fought his way up and out as best he could.
The sergeant had been trained for years to take in a battle situation, assess the best route to victory, and act decisively in the same moment. Yet the sight that greeted him on top of the vast bell tower was so unexpected it left Moricani all but dumbstruck.
The bone-coloured armour of the Deathwing stood stark against soot-black battlements. Nearby were the forbidding figures of Company Master Gabrael, Epistolary Dothrael and Chaplain Zaeroph standing with legs braced as they took killing shots with their plasma pistols at anything that came within range. Together with the veterans of the First, they were hammering fire into not one, but two breeds of enemy.
Stomping, screaming, running in every direction were misshapen mutants still clad in scraps of the fortress garrison’s livery. Some of them were twice the height of a man, nests of tentacles thrashing from their necks and armpits as strange crustacean claws snapped and bulging eyeballs burst with the sheer intensity of the mutative energies wracking their bodies. They fought with no finesse or direction, bellowing like wounded bulls as they stormed through plasma shot and bolter salvo to fall upon those Dark Angels they could reach.
The other breed of foe atop the parapet was sleek, sophisticated and highly advanced, almost clinical in its attack. Moricani recognised the towering shapes of t’au battlesuits – not the near-invisible stealthers they had faced upon Saltire Vex, but gun-limbed giants twice the size of a Space Marine. They laid down pulsing bursts of fire into Deathwing Terminators and fleshy mutants alike.
The ancient, bone-coloured Tactical Dreadnought armour of the First’s veterans was living up to its reputation; Moricani could only see two of the Deathwing that had gone down, and even they were firing their storm bolters from their slumped positions.
The same could not be said for the mutant creatures. Every volley of pulse rifle fire that struck one of them seared it to the bone, leaving deep red wounds in its flesh. The scent of sizzling, tainted meat hung in the air so strong that Moricani felt his diaphragm twitch and his gorge rise with the need to gag. He had heard tell of the stench of Chaos, but to feel it in the back of his throat was another matter.
He fought his horror back down, taking a deep breath through his mouth to re-establish his battle focus. A three-legged, slavering hulk with the lower jaw of a crocodile scrambled past, intent on the Deathwing behind. Moricani took a shot at its flank, blasting it away. It landed ten feet away amongst the steam of its own atomised flesh.
Another mutant was quick to replace it, a slender thing scrambling forth on all fours with its back arched high. It gave a thin, keening scream as a trio of Deathwing bolt rounds thudded into it and detonated in a spray of blood and bone. Each left a massive hole right through the creature, but somehow it kept on.
The thing’s shrieks seemed to come from everywhere at once, from beyond the battlements as well as atop them.
Several more of the mutants joined in the din, voices raised in madness and despair. The sound cut right through Moricani, as if thin needles of sound were piercing his soul. He shot a winged freak with too many fingers as it reared to pounce, blasting it over the battlements.
The ravaged quadruped nearby shook as if in the grip of a palsy, howling. White fire burst from inside it, pouring out from its eyes, its mouth, and the entry and exit wounds in its flank. Moricani ducked as one of the white beams seared overhead to strike a hovering t’au warsuit in the chest. He glanced back; the beam had cored it from front to back.
Incredibly, the xenos machine fought on for a few seconds, discharging more pulse shots into the spasming mutant before boosting backwards to slam into a battlement wall. The warsuit fell amongst toppling crennelations before becoming still.
Where the xenos gunner’s beams had put holes in the creature, more white fire gushed out. Some of it struck other mutants, and they too shuddered, the strange effluvium shooting from their mouths and eyes to cascade across the ranks of the Deathwing. Moricani took one down, Zaeroph another, but the chain reaction was already out of control.
One of the veteran Dark Angels was hit in the thigh, and Moricani’s breath caught as he saw the beam burning through to the flesh beneath, felling the bone-armoured giant. He had seen Tactical Dreadnought armour turn aside even a lascannon blast, but the psychic ectoplasm had melted it as if it were wax.
What manner of phenomenon was this?
‘Sergeant,’ came the voice of Nenst Lenkatz from below, ‘permission to join the fray?’
‘Get out here,’ said Moricani, sending a blast of plasma into the nearest mutant before clambering out onto the parapet’s flagstones. Lenkatz’s head and shoulders emerged from the trapdoor, his heavy incinerator carried up and over as he came. ‘But stay low,’ said Moricani. ‘This is a far cry from the battles we fought on Mars.’
‘I can see that,’ said Lenkatz, looking in awe at the surreal struggle unfolding around him. He raised his gun, overcharged it with a piercing whine and took a shot at the nearest t’au battlesuit. It hit the xenos machine under the arm, ripping the limb free in a spray of molten alloys and gobbets of alien plastek to expose the pilot inside.
The xenos warsuit crouched for a moment before boosting away into the air. Another giant machine thumped down from the skies to cover his retreat, streams of energy pulsing from its quad-barrelled cannons.
To the north, a squad of Deathwing stood over their fallen comrade, their storm bolters ripping apart the mutants that flailed towards them. Another clutch of the vile things were throwing themselves towards a trio of t’au warsuits to Moricani’s left. Those that survived the xenos team’s punishing firepower charged physically into the alien suits.
One of the giant machines kicked its assailant square in the chest with its hoof-like foot, sending him tumbling away to crouch low and vomit blood onto the flagstones. At the same time, another warsuit batted a mutant aside with the long-barrelled weapon system attached to its forearm. The mutant creature, its gangling limbs grasping, bounded back up again to grab for the t’au warrior’s box-like head. It hung from the warsuit’s neck like a jungle felid trying to bring down an ogryn.
Moricani took a shot, the sphere of superheated gas blasting the mutant apart and slamming into the torso of the battlesuit behind with force enough to send it toppling over the battlements in a crackle of energies.
‘Good shot,’ said Lenkatz.
‘Thank you, Nenst.’ Moricani stood up to his full height, deftly tripping up a rushing mutant only to stamp its distended head into the stone floor of the parapet a moment later. ‘Though this is what you might call a target-rich environment.’
There was a muted bellow as a mutant with a pair of limbs jutting from its distended maw strode confidently towards Moricani, its halberd thrusting towards him. Moricani backhanded the flat of its blade, swatting aside the blow as his incinerator recharged. The mutant was quick, though, and spun the halberd in a full circle before thrusting once more. Moricani dived aside to avoid the risk of being spitted. Dropping his still-charging plasma gun, he drew his bolt pistol from his hip and put a round between the creature’s mouth-arms before holstering it again in one smooth motion.
The mutant fell back as its head burst wide open. Then the screams that Moricani had registered on the cusp of hearing suddenly grew loud. They were so piercing they hurt the soul, but he still managed to scrabble up his plasma incinerator and whisper appeasement to its machine-spirit.
A swarm of strange fish-like creatures, much like the giant remora saprays Moricani had spotted in Saltire Vex’s oceans, burst up from behind the battlements and soared into the air. They shimmered in the light, their bodies glistening as if covered in multi-hued oil. They were at once dark blue and all the colours of the spectrum.
Daemons. Not the red-skinned fiends Moricani dimly recalled fighting at Terra, thank the Omnissiah, for those creatures of blood and hatred had come on by the thousand. Even with a single glance, he could tell they were not of the natural world. They seemed somehow super-imposed over the reality of their surroundings, and the patterns of their flight emanated a raw otherness that made the sergeant’s skin crawl.
One of the creatures suddenly burst apart into gobbets of what looked like quicksilver. A lash of emerald lightning crackled over Moricani’s head – the work of Epistolary Dothrael. The rest of the creatures suddenly turned in mid-air, their previous upwards momentum into a steep downwards dive, then a swoop. Where the creatures plunged into the melee, their wings slashed limbs from torsos and heads from necks. With each pass they cut down mutants, t’au warsuits and Space Marines alike.
Moricani tracked one of the things as it rose back up, leading his shot a little before letting fly. The beast veered at the last minute as if it had known the attack was coming, turning its upward flight into a spiral and avoiding a salvo of bolt shells from the Deathwing below.
The sky-shark creatures winging behind it gave a triumphant shriek as they peeled away, swiftly coming back around to whip their mace-like tails at the heads of those Deathwing desperately trying to shoot them out of the sky. One of the Space Marines was bowled over, his helm crushed so badly the head inside must have been caved in. A pair of mutants fell on him to rip and tear at his neck.
More of the fiendish creatures slashed through the skies, screaming as they spun in strange helical patterns that dipped down to mutilate and slice those below. Moricani’s plasma incinerator indicated it was at readiness, and he took another shot, this time singeing the tip of the leading daemon’s wing. It corrected its flight and flew on with strange grace.
A salvo of t’au energy pellets hurtled up to meet the creatures, the bright little beads appearing in such profusion the leading daemons could not avoid them. They pierced the first two creatures through in a dozen places, their shimmering non-flesh quivering like jellyfish hit by a shotgun blast. A moment later, they discorporated in clouds of droplets. The ichor spattered down as acid rain to hiss and smoulder on the parapet, and the rest of the daemons dispersed through the morass, their piercing shrieks tearing at the mind.
‘Audio dampeners to full,’ said Moricani, drowning out the sound of that infernal screaming as best he could. He sent his next shot at the intersection where two daemons were likely to cross flight paths. He had read their movements well; one of the beasts took a direct plasma blast. It burst into a cloud of what looked like tiny silver fish spasming as they scattered in all directions.
‘Farren,’ said Moricani, ‘if you can hear me, you’re missing out on some weapons-grade strangeness up here.’
The sergeant dimly heard a shout of rage. He half-turned at the last moment to see a monstrous mutant with a bull’s head and tentacle-fingered hands slam into him, lifting him off his feet with the impetus of its horned headbutt. Thinking quickly, he thumped it between the eyes with the butt of his recharging incinerator, then reached around for his bolt pistol. The creature’s presumption in thinking it could gore him, especially when clad in the Cawl-marked miracle that was Mark X armour, was sorely misplaced.
With a cold shiver of apprehension, Moricani realised it did not intend to gore him after all.
The bull mutant had its tentacle-talons wrapped around him tight, and was about to bowl him over the edge of the precipice-like battlements and down to the rocks two hundred feet below.
There was a rush of hot air from above. One of the t’au warsuits dropped down to stamp on the horned creature’s shoulders and neck. The creature crumpled into the flagstones, knocked cold.
Moricani fell backwards, catching a crennelation in the small of his back as he rebounded from the castle wall. He rolled away from the shimmering jet turbines of the xenos warsuit suddenly in front of him as the t’au warrior poured a stream of glowing energy beads into the fallen mutant.
Flat on his back, Moricani saw one of the sky-sharks diving down fast, its wings extended to slash at the t’au warsuit from above. He pulled his incinerator in close and fired vertically upwards, the plasma bolt vaporising the thing in a cloud of multicoloured mist.
‘I owe you nothing,’ he told the warsuit’s back. It moved away without a word, driving back a pair of mutants with a focused inferno from its cylindrical flamer weapon.
At some unheard command, those t’au warsuits still aloft turned their guns on the daemons swooping overhead. Flickering streams of plasma fire and energy beads shot diagonally upwards to intercept the flying, swooping sky-sharks.
As Moricani got to his feet, he saw the earthbound t’au were focusing their fire on the mutants, sending columns of flame and heat-seeking missiles to incinerate and blast apart those fleshy creatures that still fought back. Together with the Dark Angels and Primaris Marines, they were regaining control of the fight.
To the west, Company Master Gabrael vaulted up onto a rampart, and from there onto the control revetment of an emplaced Icarus quad-gun atop the parapet. He swung it round with practised ease, hammering autocannon fire up at the swooping daemons in long streams of solid shot that glowed in the darkening sky. Three came apart in the space of as many seconds. The Deathwing added their own firepower, and the skies were soon clear.
As one the t’au began to pull back, firing their jetpacks to jump over the battlements and drift away. Many were still pouring firepower into the daemons and mutants alike as they neared the canopy of the trees.
Moricani and Lenkatz shared a glance, then both took aim at the nearest t’au warsuit. Their double volley caught the xenos warrior full in the chest, dropping him like a stone.
‘Primaris contingent!’ came the voice of Chaplain Zaeroph. ‘Leave the t’au to flee. They are no longer a priority.’
‘They are xenos, sergeant,’ came Lenkatz’s voice over the Primaris brethren’s closed comms line. ‘They must be annihilated. This rebellion is their work.’
‘Obey your orders,’ said Moricani, turning to Darrodan as he pushed up from the trapdoor to join the fight. ‘Confine your fire to the rebels.’
With the t’au moving out of the fight, Moricani and the Deathwing brought their firepower to bear on the remaining mutants and daemons with terrible effectiveness. Now the Space Marines had the room to pick their targets at will, storm bolter shots shredded hideous grotesques and sailing sky-sharks left and right with methodical, contemptuous efficiency.
Moricani moved to fight alongside the closest Deathwing Terminator, kicking a half-dead mutant in the throat as he shot another in the back. Nearby the Librarian, Dothrael, made short work of those daemons that came too close with his crackling force sword, each carving blow cutting a swooping sky-shark apart. Those that kept out of reach he blasted apart with crackling arcs of bio-electricity that erupted from his eyes to whip left and right.
‘Dothrael,’ shouted Moricani as a knot of mutants, previously playing dead amongst the corpses, surged up to lunge for the Librarian’s back.
Suddenly, Company Master Gabrael was at his fellow officer’s shoulder. He cut down the mutants as if he was born to it, impaling and bisecting and lunging again and again with the ease of a Chapter champion in a practice cage. Each blow sent welters of blood sizzling to thicken the scent of cooked meat that hung in the air. Chaplain Zaeroph waded through the corpses to join him, simply bludgeoning those mutants that came within arm’s reach. Each swing of his crozius arcanum snapped a spine or caved in a skull in a flare of actinic blue light. In a matter of moments, the fight was over.
‘Moricani,’ came a familiar voice from the sergeant’s left. It was Darrodan, at the trapdoor with Lenkatz. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Go back down below,’ said Moricani, motioning to Darrodan as he made to approach. ‘You too, Lenkatz. Something is going on here. I’ll debrief you once I’ve gained a clearer picture.’
‘If you are sure,’ said Lenkatz.
‘I am extremely sure,’ said Moricani seriously. ‘Given present company, Primaris troopers will not be welcome. Neither will our officers, come to that, but someone has to fill in for Farren.’
‘Acknowledged,’ said Lenkatz, following Darrodan as he climbed back through the trapdoor and onto the spiral staircase beneath it. Moricani heard Darrodan’s voice as they went below.
‘No jokes? It must be bad.’
Farren felt like his head was going to split in two. His helm was cratered so badly he could feel the wound pulsing in his scalp. He had rolled as fast and as far away from the source of the shot as he could, bolt rifle pulled in tight, and shook his head to clear it, but it had almost made him pass out instead.
Already he could feel his system pumping invigorating chemicals into his body to compensate. His Belisarian furnace had not triggered, thankfully, but he still felt like the inside of his cranium was on fire. He pushed to his feet, unsteady for a moment before steeling himself.
Muscle memory took over as he slid into a loose gunner’s crouch. He submerged the splitting pain in the calm waters of the back of his mind, years of battle trance meditations pulling his focus together despite the ringing disorientation of the ambushing t’au’s headshot.
Around him his squad had formed a tight perimeter, fighting against some unknown enemy. Their tight volleys were sent in staccato profusion, and the pain in Farren’s skull flared a little with every bolt loosed from their rifles. Without his helm, the syncopated, percussive din of war would have been almost deafening. But the pain was ebbing, and his focus was coming back.
Around him was a scene of utter carnage. The wide, hardwood platform they had burst out onto reverberated beneath him, shaking under the armoured feet of a strike force of Angels of Redemption.
Dozens of their fellow Space Marines fought back to back, side to side, bolters hammering at the ghost-like forms that Farren dimly recognised as t’au stealthers.
He raised his bolt rifle and took a shot of his own at a chameleonic blur, missing his target by a hand’s breadth.
‘Cog damn it,’ said Farren under his breath. ‘Waste of a bolt.’ Ducking, he forced his frustration down and took stock once more.
The platform was slick with blood, the gory remains of the keep’s garrison spread liberally from one side of the scaffold to the other. Here and there the power-armoured forms of slain Angels of Redemption were strewn amongst the carnage, laid low by sustained plasma volleys or cored through by the same intense psychic discharge that had claimed Vesleigh. Some of them had eyes that were glowing white, a ghostly corposant playing around their sockets.
Farren shook his head and stood once more, hands automatically checking his bolt rifle. His helm recalibrated, presenting firing solutions on the nearest enemies.
Still plenty of xenos left for him to kill. A slowly rising lust for revenge swelled in his chest, demanding to be quenched in blood. He took a bead.
Then, in the space of less than a second, the t’au stealthers under his crosshairs disappeared from his helm display. Farren cast around, seeing strange ripples in the air for a moment. Then the xenos were gone completely.
‘What in the Omnissiah’s name,’ said Enrod, the barrel of his gun panning left and right. Thrunn, too, had stopped.
‘Where did they go?’ he said, looking around in puzzlement.
Parvell was still firing. ‘They’re right there, lackwit!’ he shouted. A pulse shot came from the shadows and hit him in the midriff. He cried out as the impact sent him clattering back into Farren. Parvell’s bald head bounced off Farren’s pauldron, hard enough to elicit a stagger, but Farren caught him and pushed him back into the fight. The t’au shot had been stopped by the layered ceramite of his Mark X armour, and he would shake off his disorientation fast. Farren loosed a double shot straight past Parvell in the direction he had last seen the stealthers.
‘They’re right there!’ screamed Parvell, shooting his bolt rifle into the corner of the keep. ‘Why aren’t you firing?’
‘Xenotech has attacked our machine-spirits,’ shouted Farren.
A volley of pulse rifle fire came in from a nearby battlement, lancing in to strike Thrunn hard in the shoulder and burn his Chapter iconography down to the bare ceramite. He went down to one knee before getting back to his feet.
‘Get in cover,’ said Farren. ‘We need to rethink this.’
His squad ducked back into the lee of a stone buttress, shoulder to shoulder as they reloaded and checked their rifles. Enrod primed a pair of frag grenades, hurling them out to cover their retreat. Thrunn slung his weapon and made to take off his helm.
‘No,’ said Farren, putting his hand on the younger warrior’s arm as the grenades went off with a double explosion. ‘I won’t risk you taking a head shot.’ He unclamped his own helmet with a hiss and mag-clamped it to his belt. ‘Let Parvell and I tackle this.’
‘That’s ironic,’ said Parvell. ‘Considering your orders during the Glitchwar at the Noctis Labyrinthus.’
‘That was during our training wars, Parvell,’ said Farren. ‘Against most xenos forces you expose yourself to needless danger.’
‘But back on Mars you insisted all of us wear our helms, and in doing so you took us effectively out of the fight. Five of our brothers died.’
‘This is not the time to bring up old ghosts,’ said Farren tersely. ‘In my experience nothing short of a headshot will convince you to value a piece of equipment designed to keep your brains inside your thick skulls. At least cover me, and cover your profile with a pauldron where you can.’
‘Aye,’ said Parvell, ‘that’s what I’ve been doing for the last sixteen months.’
A burst of plasma shot in, smacking off Farren’s gorget and scalding his jawline. ‘Gah!’ he said, turning his shoulder and leaning out to return fire. He could see something shimmering out there now, standing in the lee of a stone tower. He put a bolt right in its centre and leaned back again, narrowing his eyes in satisfaction as he heard the muffled boom and patter of an armour piercing round doing its job in spectacularly gory fashion.
A dull murmur behind Farren grew to a shouting crescendo. The lieutenant spun on his heel, grabbing a frag grenade from his belt and priming it in one smooth motion. Sprinting towards them up the stairs from the courtyard was a motley throng of twisted, hideous mutants, still clad in the ragged scraps of the garrison’s chainmail. Many were armed with a sword and shield in the ancient feudal fashion. Farren made out snatches of slurred war cries amongst the gibberish shouted by the rest.
‘Destroy the traitors! Rush them!’
‘Cast them back into the darkness!’
Farren’s lips pulled back into a snarl as he lobbed the frag grenade. It bounced with a pair of solid thumps, its passage timed to perfection so that it reached the clutch of mutants just as it was about to detonate.
The foremost mutant, a bulging sack of meat and ragged chainmail, threw himself atop the grenade with a plaintive cry that was far too high-pitched for such a massively built frame. He flew apart a moment later as the fragmentation device detonated with a wet thump, its killing force choked by the rebel’s sacrifice.
The creature’s fellow mutants, coated with their comrade’s remains, scrambled onwards. As they passed through the shadow of a circular tower Farren noticed there was something different about them – a light that set their eyes and mouths aglow in the gloom. Three white witchfires glimmered in each fleshy head. Whatever was causing the garrison’s mutation and orchestrating the rebellion was likely down there, in the dark of the keep’s dungeons.
Farren raised his bolt rifle once more and set it to full yield, planning to shoot his way through the wall of transmuted freaks to the truths that lay beyond. He had a lingering feeling of uncertainty in his gut.
He was beginning to think it was not flesh and blood they fought this day, but something far deadlier.
Moricani closed the trapdoor behind his men, and turned back to the Dark Angels atop the parapet. Chaplain Zaeroph, Dothrael and Gabrael were standing in the middle of the circular tower, talking amongst themselves. Four hulking Deathwing Terminators stood in a rough semi-circle behind their officers. Two of their fellows were on one knee, having sustained serious wounds during the fight, but the barrels of their guns did not waver as they panned slowly across the canopy beyond the battlements. Moricani made out their words as he moved closer.
‘What word from the Ravenwing, Interrogator-Chaplain?’ said the Deathwing sergeant, a giant with a thunder hammer and two stylised wing-pennants curving from his shoulders.
‘The quarry is contained,’ said Zaeroph tersely. ‘We still have the best vantage point up here. For now, we remain alert.’
The Deathwing sergeant saluted. He and his squad were surrounded by the strewn remains of dozens of mutant corpses, the scene reminiscent of some demented abattoir. The air smelled strongly of burning flesh, scorched bone, gaseous plasma residue and vaporised plasteks. Liquid ectoplasm still drooled from several of the mutant cadavers, glowing as it pooled beneath their shattered bodies.
The fifth Deathwing Terminator, his leg half-severed from his body by the beam of white psychic discharge, was shuddering as if in terrible pain. His eyes were glowing slightly – not the red of a battle helm in low light, but the same white as the unnatural effluvium.
Moricani was on the brink of saying something when one of the Deathwing stooped and, coils of energy wreathing his power fist, wrenched opened a fallen t’au warsuit that had been breached by the same psyker-stuff. He yanked away the multiple layers of the suit’s outer armour with a series of loud metallic screeches, dismantling the warsuit’s chest section to reveal the pilot inside.
The alien being within was comatose, but still breathing. He looked frail and malnourished, especially next to the Space Marine examining him. Moricani nodded to himself. No wonder the xenos race put so much stock in the technology of war, compensating for their physical weakness with the most impressive battleplate they could devise. But what were they without their suits? And what manner of soul could thrive inside such a paltry physical shell?
The thought of a xenos spirit did not sit well with Moricani, and neither did the idea of them carrying some manner of psychic curse. He saw traces of the strange ectoplasm that had blasted open the suit in the heat of battle, spattered across the inside of its control hub. He had half expected the t’au pilot to have glowing eyes like the Deathwing veteran, but to his surprise, the pilot seemed to be unaffected by whatever ague had claimed the Space Marine.
‘Well?’ said Dothrael.
‘It’s inert,’ said the Terminator. ‘As you surmised.’ He reached in with his power fist, its fingers closing around the xenos’ head. With a hum of servomotors, it closed until the t’au pilot’s skull cracked, then collapsed in a revolting morass of bone and red flesh.
‘They would likely be ideal,’ said Dothrael.
‘Ideal for what?’ muttered Moricani to himself. As the Terminator finished his lethal examination and stood up to rejoin his fellows, Moricani noticed Gabrael move to stand over the injured Deathwing warrior. The company master seemed small in comparison to the fallen giant, especially without his trademark cape. He drew a power sword, an ornate broadblade with a black sheen.
‘In the name of the Lion,’ said Gabrael, ‘I bring you deliverance.’
‘Wait,’ said the wounded Terminator, going rigid in an attempt to keep the spasms wracking his body under control. ‘I can assist with–’
Gabrael’s broadblade came down in an arc of hyper-disruptive energies. The powered edge, designed to cut through even layered ceramite, neatly took the warrior’s head from his neck in a brief crackle of energy and a puff of atomised flesh.
‘May he be cleansed in death,’ said Gabrael, burning off the residue of the kill before sheathing his sword once more.
Unnerved, the Hellblaster sergeant made his way over to the officers beyond. ‘An execution? Had he been tainted?’
‘Yes,’ replied Zaeroph.
Moricani thought of Farren’s psy-wound, then, and felt his mind recoil from the implications. He approached the Dark Angels to find out more, expecting to feel the full force of their disapproval. Instead, he saw them all raise their eyes to look at something above and behind him.
Dothrael and Gabrael put their hands to their weapons, even as the Deathwing raised their storm bolters and assault cannons to a firing stance. Moricani turned, his plasma incinerator humming in readiness, to see what they were looking at. Zaeroph waved their weapons down, putting them on guard.
‘Not yet. Just keep watch, inside and out.’
Descending from the skies was a xenos warsuit so large and statuesque it made even the hulking Deathwing look like children by comparison. It had an honour guard of its own – eight of the contoured stealther warsuits that Moricani and Farren had faced on Ferro-Giant Omicroid.
Amidst a dull thrum of xenos jetpacks they alit upon the battlements behind the white warsuit, taking position in a loose group around it. Their multi-barrelled gun-limbs were studiously pointed at the flagstones, a gesture of parley that even a peasant could understand.
Where the Dark Angels were spattered with blood, stained with soot and wreathed in the smoke of spent bolter shells, the giant xenos suit before them was spotlessly white. Its helmet had cleanly delineated red markings, and its primary, quad-barrelled weapon system hummed in an almost pleasing chord of energy discharge.
‘We have a common enemy,’ said the warsuit in perfect Low Gothic. Moricani recalled from his learnings after Saltire Vex that the t’au had excellent facility with language, and even had a whole caste of their society dedicated to such matters. ‘Let us not waste our resources in destroying each other,’ it continued, ‘thereby allowing the infection to spread further.’
‘They would be resources well spent,’ said Company Master Gabrael, placing his hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘Your destruction is only a matter of time. But we’ve already lost three men to this curse. Whatever is causing this white fire to spread, it is rapacious.’
‘Not for us. Nonetheless, we do not know its nature. We are concerned as to that which it represents,’ said the warsuit. ‘It must be addressed.’
‘Why are we treating with this xenos scum, master?’ asked one of the Deathwing. ‘And why is this one privy to it?’ He motioned dismissively towards Moricani. The sergeant smiled without mirth by way of reply.
Zaeroph and Gabrael both ignored the Terminator veteran, instead giving their attention to the giant white battlesuit. ‘When your kind are struck by this psy-product, you are unaffected. Just as was the case upon Saltire Vex. Why is that?’
‘It is Humanity’s disease, not ours,’ said the warsuit. ‘Are you not more concerned about eradicating the cause of this plague, rather than examining its effects upon more civilised races?’
‘Knowledge is there to be seized,’ said Gabrael.
‘How interesting I find your choice of words,’ said the xenos warsuit.
‘The curse must be expunged,’ growled Zaeroph, ‘and the vector that carries it obliterated. Do not stand in our way.’
‘I concur. However, for the vector to have taken such a toll on this site’s inhabitants, it must have lingered here for some time. The entire planet may be compromised.’
Zaeroph looked at Gabrael. Moricani could tell an exchange passed between them without either of them saying a word.
‘I fear he is right,’ said Dothrael quietly. ‘But as we discussed, we cannot level the blade against our own flesh and blood. Let alone bring it down.’
‘We face a similar dilemma,’ said the xenos. ‘The ocean world is still compromised. Yet it is our allies that bear the infection, and we cannot openly fire upon them. The dictates of honour trouble our warrior caste as well as yours.’
‘You have no conception of how honour works,’ growled Gabrael, ‘nor how insignificant you xenos are in the face of the Imperium’s might. What do you know of our travails, insect?’
‘We know that your race corrupts everything it touches, and perverts everything that seeks to realign it for the good of all. That has been made abundantly clear, both here and on the ocean world of Saltire Vex.’
‘A world you claim to have saved. Yet you systematically attacked those people you once sought so hard to bring into your empire.’
‘Those tainted by the mind-science plague must be burned from the T’au’va like a canker. Must we bear the burden of that truth alone when it is your kin who spreads it?’
A pregnant silence hung in the air. Moricani found his thoughts turning to Farren’s psy-wound. The lieutenant had seemed unaffected by the psychic element of whatever had struck him – perhaps he had some natural resistance to it, or perhaps he had just been lucky.
‘This is not over,’ said Zaeroph. ‘We have much to discuss, and will speak again, at the largest derelict in low orbit, once the immediate matter is resolved. For now, you will leave the demise of this site to us, and us alone.’
‘If that is the only way we can work together against the greater threat,’ said the warsuit. ‘But this infection of the mind must be eradicated. Quarantined.’
‘It will be scoured from the face of the galaxy,’ growled Chaplain Zaeroph, the eyes in his skull-masked helmet glowing like red embers. ‘That I assure you.’ The skull-faced officer cast a glance sideways; for a moment, Moricani caught his visage full on before the Chaplain turned back to the xenos. ‘And we will find you, when this is over,’ he continued, levelling his crozius arcanum at the giant warsuit. ‘We will find you, and we will extract the knowledge of how to defeat your entire race from your worthless minds. By the Lion, I promise you that.’
‘Surely you have more pressing business than making unrealistic threats to potential allies,’ said the xenos leader. ‘Finding the traitor in your ranks seems a logical first priority.’
The Dark Angels did not reply, but Moricani felt their loathing for the xenos nonetheless.
‘We will establish a perimeter one Imperial mile from this locale,’ said the t’au leader, ‘and eliminate any of the genetically aberrant creatures that cross it. The infection will be contained, for the greater good of all.’
Gabrael turned to Zaeroph, a moment of silent accord passing between them.
‘We have not seen him make his move yet, even from here,’ said Zaeroph quietly. ‘He is likely still in the depths of the complex, burrowed as deep as a tick, much like on Saltire Vex. He sends his flock against us whilst he knows we are distracted. We must join the Ravenwing and bring this matter to a close.’
The company master nodded and turned away from the xenos as he made for the edge of the keep’s battlements, the Deathwing close behind.
‘You will leave unhindered,’ said the Chaplain. ‘Our interests align, for now. We will ensure the tainted ones are annihilated. We have business on the lower levels.’
The white t’au warsuit crossed its weapons in front of its torso in what Moricani thought was uncannily like a Primaris salute. It boosted away as smoothly as it had descended, the air shimmering behind its jetpack as it disappeared behind the battlements with its stealther escort in tow.
For a moment, Moricani felt Zaeroph’s gaze upon him once more. It was an intense sensation, the glowering orbs of the Chaplain’s skull-like faceplate etching themselves into the sergeant’s mind.
‘Epistolary Dothrael,’ said the Chaplain. ‘Accompany the Primaris sergeant here to his men. Link up with Lieutenant Farren, and from there descend into the lower levels. Aid them in finding and capturing the leader of this rebellion, no matter his nature or station.’
‘Aye, Chaplain. It will be done.’
‘Ensure any and all radical elements are dealt with accordingly,’ continued the Chaplain. ‘Then meet with Apothecary Vaarad and employ whatever assets you need to in order to bring the matter to a close.’
‘Acknowledged, Chaplain,’ said Dothrael, striding past Moricani with the heel of his ornate psyker-staff tapping on the flagstones.
Moricani turned and walked after him, wrong-footed by the events he was witnessing, but eager to rejoin his brothers. There were still sounds of battle from the courtyard.
‘Inbound, Farren,’ said Moricani over the Primaris level vox. ‘We’re to cleanse the lower levels.’
‘We’re already on our way down there,’ came Farren’s reply, tinny and crackling.
As Moricani neared the trapdoor Dothrael slowed. ‘On reflection, you should first rejoin your squad, sergeant,’ said Dothrael, gesturing for him to go through first. ‘It is not ideal for us to assume leadership of a Primaris contingent. Doubtless you have your own protocols and war-cants that your brothers will respond to.’
Moricani raised his eyebrows in puzzlement as he slung his plasma incinerator and made to push himself back through the narrow aperture. ‘My thanks,’ he replied quietly. ‘It will be an honour to fight alongside you, even at arm’s length.’
As he turned to the trapdoor and began to pass back through to the stairs beneath, Dothrael placed a hand gently upon his plasma incinerator and muttered something under his breath.
‘Epistolary?’ said Moricani, half-turning.
‘A blessing upon your wargear,’ said the Librarian, inclining his head. ‘I feel we will have need of it.’