CONFRONTATION
Saltire Nearspace
Approaching Kroot Warsphere
The Executioner’s Blade
A servo-skull drifted into the communal space where the Primaris Marines sat around their mess table, its spinal cord waving like a tentacle.
‘Lieutenant Farren,’ came Apothecary Vaarad’s tinny voice from its augmitter. ‘Sergeant Parvell. Brother Gsar. Brother Thrunn. Brother Enrod. Please report to the apothecarium immediately for routine psy-scan.’
Farren took a deep breath, sharing a look with his brothers. Even Enrod cast him a glance, his usual studied indifference replaced by genuine concern. It had not been long since the lieutenant had visited them in their cells and passed on what he had learned from Moricani.
‘Here we go, then,’ said Thrunn.
‘Yes,’ said Farren. ‘Time for the routine procedure we discussed.’
‘Is there no way around this?’ asked Parvell.
‘Sadly not. We cannot afford to lose that which we worked so hard to gain.’
The lieutenant turned to go, and as one the Primaris Marines filed out behind him. Nothing of their usual surety remained in their step, only a profound unease. To Farren, their expressions were those of condemned men going to the gallows.
‘This shouldn’t take too long,’ said Farren. ‘Gsar, you have what we discussed?’
‘Aye,’ he said, rapping his knuckles on the combat knife under his robe. The amount of anger and disappointment the Repulsor driver managed to convey in that single syllable was impressive.
They followed the servo-skull with its weird, dangling spinal cord for a full fifteen minutes, passing through vaulted corridors and echoing munitions halls as they made their way from one side of the Executioner’s Blade to the other. Not another word was spoken until they reached the apothecarium.
The smell of counterseptic reached them before the med-suite’s caryatid servitors came into view at the end of the corridor. As Farren recalled, there was a small vestibule area off to the side, an area where those who were yet to seek the Apothecary’s services were encouraged to wait in meditative contemplation of the procedures to come.
‘In here,’ he said, motioning for his brothers to go inside. They filed in wordlessly.
The macabre servo-skull drifted in after them, its flickering azure lumen dimly casting a pool of illumination across the floor.
‘Procedure imminent,’ it buzzed.
‘Kindly inform Apothecary Vaarad we are here,’ said Farren, ‘and relate to him that we are finding a constant bio-rhythm in preparation for his procedure. It is a Primaris-specific ritual. We will be ready for psy-scan in precisely six minutes.’
The servo-skull nodded in mid-air. ‘Six minutes. Acknowledged,’ it said, turning to slide away with a soft hum of anti-gravitic motors.
‘Is that enough to fire it up?’ asked Enrod once the apothecarium’s door had slid closed behind the floating skull.
‘Trust me,’ said Farren. ‘I am well aware of the timescales here. Gsar, your combat knife please. We need to make this quick, and subtle.’
Gsar unclipped the combat knife – sixteen inches of razored hypersteel so sharp it could saw through an iron stanchion – and flipped it, proffering it hilt-first to the lieutenant.
‘No,’ said Farren, pushing the blade back towards Gsar. ‘We each deliver the wound to another.’ He raised his arm and pointed to the dent beneath. ‘Through the armpit into the heart. Close it quick, so it has time to clot. By my calculations, that will be easiest to conceal.’
He looked at Enrod, expecting him to call out the plan as madness, or even denounce it altogether as he strode out with not so much as a backwards glance. His battle-brother simply met his gaze, and nodded. Parvell, to his left, crossed his forearms in the Primaris salute.
‘Gsar,’ said Farren, turning his flank. ‘Do it.’
The tank driver lunged.
‘Hnnngh!’ Farren felt a blinding white pain burst in his mind as the long-bladed dagger sank to the hilt in his armpit. It scraped bone before pricking his primary heart.
Gsar took the dagger out, slicked red from hilt to tip with the lieutenant’s blood, and passed it to Thrunn. As the big warrior took it and lined up the point under Gsar’s raised arm, Farren could already feel the chemicals pulsing through his bloodstream from his Belisarian furnace. They were pushing his system into overdrive, a rapid response to the blade’s intrusion into the meat of his heart.
Thrunn put the heel of his hand against the blade’s hilt and pushed it home into Gsar’s chest. The tank driver grimaced and breathed quickly in and out, his eyes watering and tendons standing out on his throat as his ribcage was penetrated and his heart was pierced. He shook, as if in revulsion, but he still stood. The combat blade slid out of his torso, then Thrunn passed it to Parvell.
The bald sergeant nodded solemnly as Enrod raised his arm and turned his head away. ‘This is a true bond of brotherhood, you realise,’ said Parvell as he placed the tip against Enrod’s bare flesh. ‘This is different from the kin-lines of the Chapter, or even of loyal allegiance to the primarch. This bond is ours, and ours alone.’
Parvell pushed the long knife hard, its impossibly sharp tip slicing through sinew coils and black carapace alike. Enrod stifled a cry, biting his knuckles so hard they bled, but he kept silent, only gasping when the blade came out once more. Then it was Thrunn’s turn to have the blade push into his heart, and finally Parvell’s, with Farren wielding the knife.
The five Space Marines stood with blood dripping down their flanks. Their chests were heaving as if they had each gone twenty rounds in the practice cages as their Belisarian furnaces pumped a heady mix of stimms around their bloodstreams. Farren could already feel the veins in his arms and thighs pulsing, becoming acutely aware of blood clotting under his arm as the hypercoagulant chemicals of his haemostamen went to work.
‘Five minutes,’ he said. His jaw clenched involuntarily. ‘Clean up any blood splatter before that cog-damned skull comes back. And keep your bio-rhythms from spiking, if you can. Just ride it out.’
The Primaris Marines went to work, each one dabbing at the clot where Gsar’s blade had gone into their flesh. So sharp was the combat knife, so resilient their flesh, that the wounds were all but invisible when their arms were lowered, just as Farren had hoped. Yet the operation had not been a precise science; none of them were apothecarium trained. By the blood trickling from his armpit, the combat knife had severed one of Thrunn’s major veins.
‘Just hold it tight,’ said Farren, his vision pulsing slightly in time with his heartbeat as his furnace went to work. ‘We only have to get in there.’
Even as he spoke, he knew it was a lie. How did they ever hope to disguise all the blood from a trained Apothecary, especially one as adept as Vaarad, less than a minute away from examining them? Four of the wounds had clotted, but the fifth…
‘Six minutes,’ came a metallic voice from behind Farren. He spun, almost knocking into the floating skull and spinal column that formed Vaarad’s med-familiar. ‘The apothecarium is ready to heal you.’
Farren cast a glance back at Thrunn. The big warrior took his hand from his armpit, the rich red of fresh blood still obvious in his palm.
‘No choice,’ he mouthed.
The five ventured into the apothecarium, Farren at their head. He could feel his blood thundering in his veins as he saw the berth where Moricani still lay, a dark velvet curtain drawn across it. No doubt he was being kept on the threshold of consciousness until the time was right to use him as a weapon once more.
Apothecary Vaarad was at the far end of the chamber, bent almost double over the corpse of a dead Space Marine. He was suturing closed the hole where the progenoid glands had been; as he finished, he placed a full gene-flask carefully on the desk.
‘Back to the Chapter,’ he said in his strange rasp, his augmetic jaw glinting as he turned. ‘The ultimate fate of us all.’
‘Just so.’
‘Just so indeed, Lieutenant Farren. Though in the fullness of time you will undergo a similar procedure, today you and your brothers are here for a psy-scan. It is a routine procedure after exposure to an unsanctioned psychic presence. There is nothing untoward about it.’
‘I see,’ said Farren, fighting to keep his tone level. ‘Brothers, to the slabs.’
Wordlessly the Primaris climbed onto the level berths, one in each alcove. Farren felt his pulse thunder all the harder as he saw Thrunn trailing bright spots of blood in his wake.
‘You are wounded, Battle-Brother Thrunn,’ said Vaarad, kneeling to examine the blood. His servo-skull flew in close, its azure light turning the spilt vitae black.
‘My fault,’ said Enrod, holding up his knuckles. They were red with blood, flesh peeled back where he had gnawed on them to stifle the pain of their furnace-triggering pact. ‘A slight disagreement, settled in the warrior fashion. The others broke it up, but I proved myself to have the more compelling argument.’
Vaarad hissed through his teeth, turning away in disgust to run his hands over a tray of syringes. He selected one, attaching it to the primary manipulator arm of his servo-skull. ‘You will keep that temper in check,’ he said, his voice passionless as that of a Kataphron battle servitor, ‘if you wish to earn your true place in the Dark Angels Chapter.’
‘Of course,’ said Enrod, his tone contrite. Farren caught his eye; there was something unfamiliar there, under the too-wide stare of one whose furnace burned hot.
Collusion, perhaps.
‘A little cortex sedative, now,’ said Vaarad, ‘administered to prepare you for the psy-scan.’
Vaarad’s servo-skull hovered in close to Farren, the syringe glinting in the bluish light of its lumen. He bared his throat, knowing that in doing so he approached the precipice of amnesia. Furnace or not, there was a distinct possibility he would forget everything, waking once more in the hold of the Night Harrower with his hands checking his bolt rifle for the hundredth time.
‘Just let yourself relax,’ buzzed Vaarad as azure light shone brightly into the lieutenant’s eyes. ‘This will not take long, and then everything will be as it should.’
Inside, the beast caged behind Farren’s heart raged wild.