Bleeding Chalice Part 16

The image froze, with Korvax's pict-recorder look-ing out on the destruction of the lab floor.

'This.' said Sarpedon, 'is all we have. Stratix Lumi-nae was closed afterwards and forgotten about. There are no plans or records within our reach. Cap-tain Korvax's record is the only visual of the facility that exists. So this is what we will use.'

Sarpedon stood on a pulpit looking out on the Marines of Squads Luko, Karraidin and Graevus. In front and below him was the focus of the briefing sermon - the projected pict-recording that Captain Korvax had taken during the first a.s.sault on Stratix Luminae. The image, and Sarpedon's voice, would be transmitted to the other ships in the tiny fleet, where the Soul Drinkers would be stood as here in the cargo bay of the alien fighters.

'It is a testament to the strength of your will, brothers.' continued Sarpedon, 'that you have fought alongside me though very few of you know our ultimate goal. The truth is, we are fighting for survival. We are fighting for the Great Harvest, when the Soul Drinkers will take novices and begin the process of transforming them into Marines. The Harvest should be underway already, with our Chaplain and our Apothecaries forging another generation to take the fight to the Enemy. It has not happened.'

Sarpedon spread his arms, indicating his mutated legs. This is why. There is not one Marine that has no mark of mutation upon them. Many are stronger because of it, as am I. But the blood of Rogal Dorn is poisoned.

'Our blood, the gene-seed taken from Dorn's own body, is corrupted down to its basest elements. The Chapter is a chalice of that blood, and each drop poured out is the seed of another battle-brother. But the chalice is bleeding dry of Dorn's blood and soon there will be only corruption left. Our gene-seed is tainted, it cannot be used to create new Marines.'

The image rewound suddenly, flitting through the moments of destruction as Korvax retreated. Then it paused again, looking out on the gla.s.s cylinders and their obscure contents, as Korvax saw them when he first entered the lower floor.

The adepts at Stratix Luminae were trying to con-trol mutation. They were growing mutated flesh and trying to make it whole again. I, and the highest officers of this Chapter, believe they succeeded. The evidence Korvax gives us shows that the experimen-tation was in its final stages and was only halted by the deaths of the adepts at the hands of the eldar. It is waiting there to be recovered and used. Used by us, brothers, to reverse the poison that is killing the Soul Drinkers.'

Karraidin stepped up to the pulpit, the boots of his huge Terminator armour clunking on the metal-lic floor.

The Soul Drinkers Chapter had never possessed many suits of the advanced armour and Karraidin's was one of the few left. He had earned it, though - a resolute and fearless a.s.sault leader he had proved himself capable of leading the hardest ship-to-ship attacks. He had joined Sarpedon in the heat of the Chapter war and there were few veterans in the Chapter that Sarpedon trusted more.

The first force will be under my command.' began Karraidin. 'Our objective is the lower floor of the facility. The force will consist of my squad along with Squads Salk and Graevus. The mission is to recover experimental material and data - Techma-rine Lygris and Solun and Apothecary Pallas will go in with us as support. You do not need to be reminded that whatever Korvax found may still be there.'

The second force,' said Sarpedon, 'will be com-manded by me. We will secure the surface and the exterior of the facility, and hold it until the a.s.sault force is extracted. Stratix Luminae is located in one of the most heavily enemy-infested systems in Imperial s.p.a.ce and we will be seen, if we have not been located already.

It is likely the facility will be attacked and we must ensure the facility and our landing zone remains secure at all costs. Luko, Kry-del, a.s.sault Sergeant Tellos and myself will be in command on the ground. All Marines not in the a.s.sault or the ground force will remain on the fight-ers as interception and reserve.'

Every Marine would know what that meant. Up until now Sarpedon had not risked the whole Chapter at once - Marines could not be replaced and there would be no edict from the Adeptus Terra to resurrect the Chapter if it was all but destroyed.

The mission was about survival, and the future of the Chapter could be risked because it was that futurethey were fighting for.

Sarpedon took out his battered, well-thumbed copy of Daenyathos's Catechisms Martial. 'Emperor, deliver us.' he began, 'so that we might deliver cre-ation from the Enemy...'

Together, solemnly and all aware that it could be for the last time, the Soul Drinkers began to pray.

Stratix Luminae was pale as a cataract stricken eye, several thousand square kilometres of frozen tun-dra broken only by rare rock formations and the single incongruous structure of the Adeptus Mechanicus Biologis installation. From above, it was barely a pinp.r.i.c.k of artificiality in an infuriat-ingly dead world. But Teturact could feel the life within, a life rather like himself that seethed with potential.

He pulled his consciousness back through the hull of the ship and into the ritual chamber. Deep in the heart of Teturact's ship, this was a secret place he had forbidden anyone to enter.

It was the only part that was clean and free of the corpses that littered the rest of the ship. Lacquered, decorated panels of exotic hardwood covered the walls and ceilings. Tapestries hung from the walls, covered in images of Imperial heroism that seemed desperate and comical now so much of that Imperium had turned into Teturact's nightmare. The floor was tiled with mosaics of devotional texts, and the air was perfumed by censers that swung slowly from the ceiling.

Glow-globes concealed in chandeliers produced a light that made the shadows harsh. The light glinted off relics a.s.sembled in alcoves set into the walls -the finger bones of a saint, the hereditary power axe of Stratix's priesthood chased with silver and set with gemstones, the furled banner of the Adepta Sororitas, sacred works of art from the distant Impe-rial past and powerful symbols that had seemed vital to its future.

Teturact had gathered them from Stratix itself and holy places his forces had conquered. Their influence was a painful veil over the brightness of his power, as if some new gravity was dragging his mind back down to mortality - it pained Teturact to enter the room, but it existed for a reason.

This was the only place that Teturact had ordered kept pure in his entire empire. Its components had been looted from luxurious upper spires and sacred conquered places, and a.s.sembled here into a place of purity that Teturact had ordered kept inviolate. The reason was simple - the most powerful magics required something to be defiled as part of the enactment, and nothing was so powerful as the defiling of purity.

Teturact's wizards were ranged before him, hooded and deformed, their heads hunched down in reverence because it was to him that they owed everything. This unholy nugget of purity must have been painful for them, too, a sharp painful obstruc-tion to the complete corruption of the ship, but they were bound to Teturact's will and took the pain as he demanded.

You know what you must do, he thought at them. Make it happen.

One wizard shambled forward. He pulled down his hood and Teturact saw he had not one face but several, melded together as if they had melted into one. Several malformed eyes blinked in the light of the chamber's chandeliers. One of its mouths opened and began to keen, a low, buzzing drone. Its other mouths joined in, weaving a grotesque har-mony that would have reduced mortal men to tears.

Gnarled limbs reached out from beneath its tat-tered robes, some arms, some pincers, some tentacles. Each hand made a different sign of blas-phemy in the air, trails of red light spelled out symbols of heresy.

The other wizards shuffled into a circle around the singer. Teturact's brute-mutants carried him back out of the circle and each mutilated mind began to enact a separate part of the spell. One was a pure stab of rage, a bright red spire of burning hatred that provided fuel for the ritual. Another took that hatred and wove it into a tapestry of suf-fering, the chamber resonating with psychic after-images of torture and despair.

The lacquer on the walls began to peel. Images of the Emperor's sacred armies tarnished and were obliterated. The tapestries began to unravel and a patina of age and corruption spread across the gleaming relics. Even the light changed, gradually becoming dimmer and yellower, making everything in the room seem older.

Shapes began to appear, broken spectres drawn by the ritual's power, shadowy forms that stood hunched over the circle. The magic was drawing curious warp-creatures like blood draws scavengers. Monstrous things were watching. Perhaps the G.o.ds themselves, who would look down on Teturact with jealously that he had achieved what they could not and built an empire of suffering in the heart of the Imperium.

He could taste it, like old blood. This was one of the oldest magics, and it was his to command.

The keening rose, becoming louder and higher. Another wizard entered the circle and drew a knife of blackened iron from its robes. This wizard was larger than the rest, broad-shouldered with a mus-culature that showed even through its robes. It threw its head back, revealing a face with shredded skin that hung like ribbons over the red wet features beneath, and plunged the knife into its stomach.

Ropy purple entrails slithered out and where they hit the floor a dark stain spread like rust, warping the mosaics until the devotional High Gothic texts were squirming symbols of diseaseand death. The wizard sank to its knees and sc.r.a.ped the point of its knife through its spilled entrails, divining the course of the magic now coursing around the room. It carved a final sigil in the floor and the symbol lit up.

The walls themselves were peeling away in layers, revealing what lay beyond. The room had been set up in one of the ship's fighter decks. Where once hundreds of attack craft had been parked on the wide expanse of rusted metal, now heaps of thou-sands upon thousands of bodies festered. Pasty, desiccated limbs lay across dead faces staring blindly. The heaps were dozens deep, mountains of death, harvested from the hives of Stratix and heaped as an offering to Teturact's mercy.

Teturact had been glad of them, not just as a sym-bol of his own power. They had a practical purpose, too, as did all the bodies crammed into every spare corner of the tombship.

The walls of the room fell away and its ceiling broke into flakes of rust that fluttered away. The spell was all but complete. The chanting grew higher and the air burned with power, black sparks leaping from the cowls of the wizards, half-formed shadowy observers flickering in and out of sight.

The first of the bodies stirred, dragging itself from the side of one of the corpse-mountains and tum-bling down the slope. It knocked other bodies down with it and they stirred, reaching out dumbly with gnawed fingers. Limbs reached from the slopes until whole mountains were stirring and the first of the bodies struggled to its feet and began to walk.

Teturact could feel the seething as the whole ship began to awaken. The people of Stratix had pleaded, begged, for him to save them from death, and he had done so in return for their souls. Now he was extending the bargain to those he had not saved the first time round, the dregs of Stratix's charnel pits. The tombship was more than a place of worship for Teturact - it was a weapon of war, the deadliest he could create. It was the vessel for an army that did not need to eat or sleep, that would follow unques-tioningly, that would never flee and could fight to the death because they were already dead.

Teturact's master plan, the infection and salvation of an empire, could only go so far. Sometimes, he had known all along, he would have to intervene directly and take the fight to the enemy. The tomb-ship was his means of doing so. Now his enemies had struck closer to home than even he had imag-ined, driving into the Stratix system itself, daring to defile Stratix Luminae - and Teturact had created the tombship for just such an offence.

The mountains were now shifting heaps of human beings, struggling to clamber from beneath one another, teeth and nails gouging, brackish blood running in streams across the fighter deck floor. Many of them shambled closer, dressed in the rags of workers' overalls, regal finery, soldiers' fatigues and everything in between. Teturact's brute-mutants raised him high and his vast mind took in the faint pinp.r.i.c.ks of guttering light that were the minds of the dead.

He took every one of those points of light and snuffed them out one by one, replacing them with the unblinking black pearls of his own mind. The final phase of the ritual was Teturact's own - to make these awakened dead answer solely to his will. They were now no more than his instruments, to be controlled as if they were his own limbs. He stretched his mind out and did the same to the bod-ies waking throughout the ship, until he felt tens of thousands of mind-slaves connected to him like parts of his own shrivelled body.

The pitiful resistance of the Imperium seemed more laughable than ever. How could anyone claim Teturact was not a G.o.d? He had created an army and controlled them utterly. He was master of billions and billions of worshippers. There was no greater calling. Soon, when his empire stretched across the stars, it would be complete and Teturact would take his place in the pantheon amongst the G.o.ds of the warp.

1 A tiny part of his mind reached out to the con-trollers on the bridge. His orders were the last they would ever receive.

He commanded that the tombship be taken into low orbit around Stratix Luminae. Then he *demanded that the shields be dropped and the hull of the tombship be allowed to disintegrate in the planet's atmosphere. He already knew how the ship would break up, the parts that would land intact and the remaining fighter craft and shuttles that would fly out of the wreckage. He knew which parts would split open and rain down an army on the frozen surface.

It was a beautiful thing, his tombship. But it was just a single building block in the immense cathe-dral of his empire. It was a small thing for it to be sacrificed, when the prize would be the sanct.i.ty of the world where Teturact himself was born.

ELEVEN.

'Emperor preserve us.' said Sister Aescarion. 'That's the ugliest thing I've ever seen.'

Inquisitor Thaddeus had to agree. The long-range sensors on the Crescent Moon were transmitting a visualcomposite directly onto the viewscreen on the bridge, and it was not pretty. Stratix Luminae was in the background, looking like a huge eye without a pupil. In the foreground hung a truly hideous thing, a ship that was as diseased as any of the unfortunates on Eumenix. Pustules the size of slands spat plumes of bile out into s.p.a.ce. Hull )lates oozed out of the superstructure, straining under the ship's corpulent ma.s.s. Lance batteries were rusted gun barrels sticking out of orifices ringed with scabs. The engines bled pus and the entrances to the fighter decks had deformed into lipless drooling orifices that mouthed dumbly and vomited clouds of debris, corpses and filth.

The ship was huge, larger by magnitudes than the Crescent Moon. It had to be a full-scale battleship -there might have been an Emperor-cla.s.s under there somewhere.

'Bridge, do we have this profile stored?' asked Thaddeus.

The servitors at the consoles spent a moment cal-culating, wire fingers clattering on the keyboards of their mem-consoles.

'Battlefleet Stratix had three Emperor-cla.s.s battle-ships.' came a tinny, synthetic voice. 'The Ultima Khan was recla.s.sified heretic and reported destroyed at Kolova. The Olympus Mons and the Dutiful are unaccounted for.'

'It doesn't matter what it used to be.' said Colonel Vinn unexpectedly. 'It's...o...b..t is too low. It'll be breaking up within the hour.'

'Maybe so, colonel.' said Thaddeus, 'but this is too much to be a coincidence. Bridge, what do we have following us?'

Another moment's pause. Then, 'Two light cruis-ers, designation unknown, heretic probable. Cobra-cla.s.s escort squadron, again heretic. Unknown attack craft and merchantmen.'

'If we're being trailed by that many and we're still this far out.' said Thaddeus, 'then the Soul Drinkers will have been spotted, too. They're on Stratix Luminae already and the Enemy is close behind them.'

'Let them fight one another?' suggested Vinn.

'Unless they're in league.' replied Aescarion with bitterness, spitting out the words as if she longed for the Soul Drinkers to be under Teturact's command so she could destroy them all the more justly.

Agreed.' said Thaddeus. We will not have another chance to bring them to bear. But we can't land right on top of them. If they're landing troops we'll be blown out of the sky even if this ship has broken up by then.

Bridge, get me landing solutions, far away from that battleship to get down in one piece. Colonel, how's our armour?'

'Enough APCs for the Sisters and remaining men.' said Vinn. Thaddeus felt the sting even through the man's expressionless voice - the best of his men were dead, shot or frozen stiff at Pharos. 'We weren't expecting to run a mechanised a.s.sault, inquisitor.'

'It'll do, colonel. We just have to get there, the rest we'll make up as we go along. Sister, colonel, you both understand the enemy we will be facing. The Soul Drinkers are probably under-strength but they are still s.p.a.ce Marines. We cannot destroy them all, but we have an advantage in that they want some-thing at Stratix Luminae and must make themselves vulnerable to get it. They will probably be engaged by other forces so we will have the luxury of picking our targets.'

The first of those targets.' came that familiar half-machine voice from the rear of the bridge, 'is Sarpedon.'

The Pilgrim emerged from the bridge entrance. Thaddeus didn't know how long he had been there - though every member of the strikeforce had to be fully briefed, he had privately wished to have this talk with Aescarion and Vinn alone. But the Pilgrim seemed able to shadow everything he did.

'Sarpedon is the key.' continued the Pilgrim. He walked slowly up the bridge until he stood between Aescarion and Vinn, and Thaddeus saw the repul-sion pa.s.s over Aescarion's face. 'Sarpedon is their weakness, and he knows it himself. Without him there will be no purpose. Without him, even if he is the only one to die here, the Chapter will fragment to be hunted down one by one. All other targets are secondary.'

'I have command here, Pilgrim.' said Thaddeus sternly, more as a show to the others than in any real hope of reining in the creature. 'We know there will be other key Marines. Any specialists or officers are to be considered vital targets. But agreed, Sarpe-don is high on that list. At least he should be easy to spot.'

Pict-recordings from House Jena.s.sis had been issued to every Sister and storm trooper -every one of them knew that amongst the Soul Drinkers was a monster with spider's legs who was to be destroyed at all costs.

There is a good chance the Soul Drinkers will be fighting another enemy when we engage.' repeated kaddeus. This is the best advantage we have, and "j. will use it. They will not know we are coming and we will strike as hard and fast as the Soul Drinkers themselves. Have your troops pray, both of you, and neverforget we are here to do the Emperor's will.'

The strikeforce's leaders left the bridge and sud-denly the whole area was bathed in a red glow. The engines below roared into life, immense plasma turbines grinding into action as the primary engines fired.

v The motley flotilla tracking them was left behind as the Crescent Moon powered away from them. The thruster solutions took over and the ship began the descent to Stratix Luminae.

The fighters screamed into the planet's upper atmosphere, the surface a frozen desolation beneath them, Teturact's flagship a still vaster slab of pure rotting malice above them. The xenos fight-ers slid through Stratix Luminae's atmospheric envelope like knives through silk, forewings flowing into shining blades that cut through the strong, freezing air currents.

The ship - and it had to be Teturact's flagship, nothing else could radiate that aura of corruption and evil - didn't fire on them. Perhaps its crew and systems were too far gone to be able to track them jand fire effectively But it had certainly seen them - levery Marine, even those with no psychic ability, felt the dark eye of something within focusing on them as if they were samples on a microscope slide.

The ten fighters carried the whole of the remain-ing Soul Drinkers Chapter, down to barely six hundred Marines and a handful of Chapter serfs. Sarpedon along with Squad Krydel and Squad Luko were in one crafty with one given over entirely to Tellos and his a.s.sault Marines who Sarpedon sus-pected wouldn't follow anyone else. Another carried the force that would strike directly into the facility - Squads Karraidin, Graevus and Salk along with Techmarines Lygris and Solun and Apothecary Salk.

Apothecary Karendin and the Chapter Infirmary took up a fighter craft along with Techmarine Varuk.

Chaplain Iktinos had a craft of his own along with those Marines whose squads had lost their officers and chose to follow the Chaplain into battle. One fighter held Tyrendian, the Librarian who was effec-tively the Chapter's chief psyker after Sarpedon himself. The remaining three contained the squads earmarked to form a mobile reserve - Sevras, Karvik, Corvan, Dyon, Shastarik, Kelvor, Locano, Preadon and the Librarian Gresk.

When a.s.sembling the force it had been brought home to Sarpedon just what a state the Chapter was in.

Less than half the Marines were still organised into squads along the old Chapter lines - Marines whose squads had lost their officers joined other squads or formed around leaders like Iktinos, Tellos or Karraidin. The Chapter had always had a more fluid organisation than the Codex Astartes had set out but it was now in a constant state of flux. There had simply not been enough time to organise it properly, not when every pa.s.sing hour made their irretrievable genetic corruption more likely. o It was Techmarine Varuk who noticed the disinte-gration first. The scanner signature of the flagship above began to become more indistinct, as if there was some kind of interference covering it. Rapidly the truth became apparent - the ship was coming apart, shedding hull sections like scabbed skin. Whole decks peeled away and began to fall into the atmosphere, bloated hull sections rupturing and spilling clouds of debris. The rearmost fighters began to report near-collisions with chunks of debris streaking down from above. The scanners on the fighters, even though they were advanced xenos tech, were quickly blinded by the ma.s.s of signals suddenly pouring into orbit.

Teturact's flagship was coming apart above them. Varuk voxed Sarpedon to tell him, and Sarpedon knew better than to a.s.sume the death of the ship was good news.

Teturact watched his ship rupture and it tasted good. The ship had once been a mighty battleship, carrying enough firepower to raze a city to the ground. Teturact had not only corrupted it until it served him, but had proven he could destroy such a thing with a thought. A symbol of Imperial might had been captured, deformed, and then destroyed, all because Teturact wished it.

If anyone had needed proof that Teturact was a G.o.d, this was it.

He felt the plasma reactors overloading and breaking up, sending Shockwaves through the hull that fractured the stern and sent the engines spi-ralling downwards towards the surface. The tang of escaping fuel plasma was a metallic, chemical taste of Imperial doom.

Already sections of corridor and gun deck were falling, packed with the living dead. Some would not make it to the surface intact but enough would to disgorge an army onto the ground. He reached out with his mind and felt the wizards, held in a near-indestructible plasma conduit, waiting in the belly of the ship to be vomited onto Stratix Lumi-nae. Teturact, as was proper for the master of the dying ship, waited on the bridge. The bulkheads nearby had already failed and hard vacuum had turned the slave-bodies beneath his feet rigid and cold, but Teturact kept himself and his brute-mutant bearers intact with a barely-consciouseffort. The hardness of s.p.a.ce was a reminder of the purity of death he would leave at Stratix Luminae.

The G.o.ds were watching. Teturact could feel their eyes on him, both curious and jealous, and fearful that he would rise and join them. The G.o.ds were no more than ideas made real in the warp, and Teturact 1.

had created ideas of his own - servitude through death, purity and corruption made one, the subju-gation of souls through suffering and deliverance. Those concepts would be coalescing in the warp even now, and when they became strong enough Teturact's mind would be divorced from his body completely and he would join the kingdom he had created in the warp as its G.o.d.

He could feel the universe flickering at the edges of his consciousness, like an endless harvest of souls begging to be enslaved, delivered from their suffering by the servitude and oblivion Teturact offered.

1 But there were matters closer at hand. He drew his mind back in, the sensation almost painful. He watched the first wave falling towards Stratix Lumi-nae and the hard bright darts of the intruder craft flying through the first curtain of debris.

His army would be on the ground waiting when the intruders landed. If they ever got to land at all.

The fighter lurched suddenly, throwing Sarpedon against the curved metal wall. The instrument pan-els flared brightly as damage signals from the fighter's systems flooded into the controls. The viewscreen flickered and was suddenly full of debris shooting down past them, chunks of blackened metal and showers of torn corpses.

'Keep us straight!' yelled Sarpedon to the serfs wrestling with the alien controls. 'Get us down!'

Comms runes flickered on Sarpedon's retina. Sev-eral Marines were voxing him at once.

'...Karvik's down, sir, lost its engines...' the voice was Lygris, whose craft was closest in the formation to the fighter carrying Squads Sevras and Karvik.

There were thirty Marines on the fighter. They would not be the last to fall - Sarpedon could see the life sign monitors going haywire in the confu-sion and guessed that the falling storm of wreckage was Teturact's way of landing an army.

'Sarpedon to all squads.' he voxed. 'Break forma-tion and take evasive action. Do whatever you have to.'

He turned to the serfs at the controls of his fighter. 'Find Karvik's fighter, I want to know if any-one could have made it.'

Another jolt and the fighter banked to avoid a falling torrent of wreckage, slabs of hull plate streaking past the viewscreen. Karendin's craft, which housed the infirmary, would be busy even before the fighters landed, guessed Sarpedon.

'Crash us if you have to.' said Sarpedon to his crew. 'Just bring us down.'