Bleeding Chalice Part 20

'Sister,' he said as he got close, 'we are done here.'

'I am pulling the troops out.' she replied. "We thought you were lost.'

'I was.' he replied. 'Teturact is dead, we have done enough here.'

'And the Soul Drinkers?'

Thaddeus reloaded his bolt pistol. Aescarion won-dered where he had got it, and the ammunition for it.

'Teturact's wizards are still in command here?'

They are. I have seen them, they are foul things indeed.'

They command this army now. They are our tar-get. Without Teturact they will have nowhere to flee to. If we can hunt them down quickly their armies will fall and the warzone will be cleansed.'

'But the Soul Drinkers will have to flee this planet too, inquisitor, surely we will never have a better opportunity to...'

Thaddeus blasted a volley of bolts into the closest few traitors as Rufilla's covering fire lanced down over his head and scoured a zone of safety around them. 'Aescarion, one day I will teach you about politics. But for now I must exercise my authority as an inquisitor and demand you do as I instruct. We can argue when it is all over.'

Rufilla yelled a final plea and Aescarion turned, leading Thaddeus back to the last Rhino where they clambered in beside Squad Rufilla and, still s.n.a.t.c.h-ing shots at the enemy through the firing slits and hatches, roared bruisingly across the battlefield towards the Crescent Moon.

The air was full of the stench of gunfire and rotting flesh, but Salk still gulped it down in relief as he led the bedraggled spearhead from the ruins of the facility. The sound of battle raged not far away and Salk knew that bitter close combat was waged just behind the facility, where the lives of Marines had bought the spearhead the time to s.n.a.t.c.h the Chap-ter's future. The facility smoked from thousands of small arms. .h.i.ts and the area around it was a dark twisted nightmare of wreckage and craters. Above, Salk could see the dark form of the battleship still ghosted against the sky, its skeletal frame disinte-grating.

Behind Salk and the survivors of his squad was Graevus, supporting Karraidin with his mutated arm. One of Karraidin's legs was gone at the knee and his storm bolter hand was a gleaming red ruin, but he was alive, and his squad formed a cordon around him. Pallas and Lygris were with them - they had tried to find Techmarine Solun as they charged through the mutant-infested laboratory level, but he was gone.

'Soul Drinkers, this is Sergeant Salk. Mission ful-filled, get us out of here.'

Static. Then - 'Salk, stay in cover we're coming in.'

The seconds were agonising. Lygris and Pallas car-ried the only chance the Soul Drinkers had of genetic survival. A single well-timed a.s.sault or lucky impact could wipe out the future.

With a roar of engines and a flash of silver a fighter shot down from above, impossibly bright against the darkening sky. The lower portals yawned open and the fighter dipped so low its belly sc.r.a.ped the piles of wreckage.

Pallas and Lygris went first, dragged into the pas-senger compartment. Somehow, Graevus got Karraidin onto the top of a pile of wreckage and purple-armoured hands reached down to haul the wounded old captain aboard. Salk covered Graevus as he and his men went next, and finally Salk boarded, bolterchattering to the last. The portal began to bleed closed and the last Salk saw of Stratix Luminae was a blackened ruin, a twisted metal h.e.l.l swarming with enemies that formed a writhing sea around an impossibly thin cordon of purple.

'Librarian Gresk to Commander Sarpedon.' some-one was voxing, and Salk realised it was one of the reserve fighters that had picked them up. Gresk - one of the Soul Drinkers' pyskers, a Marine who could throw fireb.a.l.l.s with a look - must have dropped off most of the Marines with him already as only his ret-inue and the survivors of the spearhead were in the pa.s.senger compartment. %Ve have the spearhead. Mission concluded. Repeat, mission concluded.'

'Understood.' came the reply vox, which Salk could just hear over the growing whine of the engines. 'All squads, fall back and extract. All squads...'

Salk fell back against the grav-couch. He ached all over and, as his metabolism came back down to near-normal, he would feel a dozen new injuries he didn't know he had.

He was alive, and somehow it hardly seemed right. He could see Solun, as if he were there in front of him, lying crippled on the floor. He could see Marines pounded to bits by the tide of mutant flesh. He could see Captain Dreo lying mortally wounded in the Mechanicus lab on Eumenix, and he remembered the account of how Hastis had died on Septiam Torus. How many of the Chapter had died? He didn't dare think. Only the Chapter's true leaders, like Sarpedon, Karraidin and Lygris, would dare to comprehend the price they had paid, and Salk knew that it would weigh them down like death itself.

If it was worth it, though, if the Chapter had a future, then there was hope. Sarpedon had not cursed them with hope until he had known they had a real chance, and now that hope was all the Chapter had left.

The Marines struggled into their grav-harnesses and Gresk gave the order to the bridge. The fighter's engines kicked in and it shot through the atmos-phere, out into the hard vacuum and away from Stratix Luminae at last.

Three of the fighters were lost, the one that had crashed in the first moments of the a.s.sault and two more that had been brought down by fire from the ground as they swooped low for extraction. The rest picked up the Soul Drinkers even as they fought. With the squads of the cordon gone, the traitorous, leaderless hordes poured over the facility like a tide of hungry vermin, there to fight against the mutated inhabitants until there was nothing left at the facil-ity but death.

Iktinos was one of the last to be picked up. He and the squads with him were surrounded, and he was still battering traitors back from the lower hatch with his crozius as the fighter lifted off. The fighters broke formation and swooped out into s.p.a.ce, weaving through the remnants of Teturact's flagship and leaving the Stratix system far behind. They evaded the Crescent Moon as they went, as its weapons shot down the transports trying to leave Stratix.

As the squads counted off, Sarpedon estimated that about four hundred and fifty Soul Drinkers had got off Stratix Luminae, leaving the Chapter at less than half its original strength.

The last fighter, having picked up Iktinos and his men at ma.s.sive risk, made one last pa.s.s over the battlefield. Iktinos himself called out over the vox as the craft searched for Tellos and his a.s.sault Marines, last seen cut off and surrounded, taking on tens of thousands of mutants and traitors face-to-face.

The battlefield was in such chaos that it was impossible to find anything, let alone a last stand of so few men against so many. As the fighter was ordered to give up the search and escape before it was shot down, Iktinos found Tellos's vox-channel and tried to contact him one last time.

But all he could hear was screaming.

'Not one amongst you does not know fear. If you say any different, then you lie. You are terrified. You are a.s.sembled on a s.p.a.ce' hulk, surrounded by rebel s.p.a.ce Marines, being lectured by a mutant and a witch.

Yes, I am well aware of what I am, and I am also aware of what the Imperium would say if they knew what I was. They would find strong, young, free men like you and they would point me out as a warn-ing of what you might become. Traitor, they would say. Heretic. Unclean. And so another generation would be poisoned against freedom and become a part of the corrupt, crumbling Imperium, a breeding ground for Chaos, built on the backs of slaves.'

Sarpedon gripped the pulpit. He felt the burning of pride on the back of his mind, and though it was pride that had cost the Soul Drinkers so much in the past, he knew that here he had something he could truly be proud of. The novice candidates, three hundred of them, were stood in ranks on the gun deck of a battleship deep in the heart of the Bro-kenback. They were all towards the older end of recruitment age, beyond which the implants and operations that turned a man into a s.p.a.ce Marine would fail. All were strong and fit, not necessarily great warriors but - much more importantly -youths who had proved their bravery and their will-ingness to face any odds for what they believed in.Iktinos had selected them, with Sarpedon's approval. After Stratix Luminae the Soul Drinkers had taken back the Brokenback, taking their alien fighters close enough to activate the many com-bined machine-spirits and causing the hulk to break from its moorings and rendezvous with the fighter fleet again.

It had been the best part of a year since then, during which time the hulk had visited hotbeds of rebellion and secession, finding those who had banded together against the might of the Imperium and selecting the bravest of their young fighters.

Many who fought against the Imperium were just bandits and tyrants. But some were driven by an all-pervading hatred of oppression, and it was those that had provided the recruits Sarpedon now addressed. Chaplain Iktinos had selected them for courage, intelligence and dedication, and so the Great Harvest had begun again.

'You will not all survive.' continued Sarpedon. Three hundred pairs of eyes watched him intently. 'The implant procedures alone will account for some. Training will account for more. But those who survive will be ready to under-stand some of the truths about mankind and the threats it faces. The Imperium is one of those threats, for it is too obsessed with its own tyranny to face what is truly dangerous to humankind.

Daemons, powers of the warp, dark magics and G.o.ds you will be forbidden to name - these are the enemies we fight against. These, and no other. For this is the will of the Emperor untainted by the ambitions of the power-hungry. I can offer you a lifetime of battle and pain and the promise of a violent death, and I demand of you your every waking moment. But you will die knowing you have lived fighting for what the Emperor stands for, and that is more than anyone in the Imperium can claim.

'Soon the blood of Rogal Dorn will run in your veins and you will learn of your place in the unend-ing defence of mankind. Until then, think on the unforgiving future I am showing you. If it was easy, it would not be worth doing. I trust that when you take on the mantle of novice and eventually the armour of a battle-brother, you will understand some of what I have told you, and the legacy of the Soul Drinkers will live on in you.'

They were afraid, and they had every reason to be. They were facing the long and trying process of becoming a s.p.a.ce Marine, and Sarpedon could not properly explain to them the constant hardship and pain combined with the ever-present fear of failure. But Iktinos had chosen well, and Sarpedon felt that few of them would fall before they took up the armour and boltgun of a Soul Drinker.

It was a miracle they were here at all. The existing mutations of the Soul Drinkers, including Sarpe-don's arachnoid form, could not be reversed, but the accelerating mutation had been halted thanks to the tireless efforts of Pallas and the apothecarion, using the information they had found on Stratix Luminae. The gene-seed organs recovered from the many dead had been stored and eventually their mutations had been regressed, to the stage that they could now be implanted into the recruits who pa.s.sed the first stages of their training. The carnage that culminated on Stratix Luminae had been for one reason, and that was to purify the Chapter's gene-seed and make the Great Harvest possible again - it would take a long time before the Chap-ter approached full strength again, but it would happen, and of that Sarpedon was proud.

Under Iktinos's gaze, the novices filed off the gun deck towards their first training sessions. Graevus would teach them hand-to-hand fighting while Karraidin, who could do little else until the tech-marines and apothecaries fashioned some bionics to replace his lost hand and leg, would school them in the ways of Daenyathos and the sciences of war. Sarpedon wished Dreo was still there to teach them marksmanship, but there were enough crack shots still alive in the Chapter to do an admirable job. Sarpedon himself would have a role schooling that handful of recruits who showed some psychic potential, testing their mental resilience and train-ing them in the use of their powers. And, of course, he would regularly expose all the recruits to the horrors of the h.e.l.l, so they would be able to face their fears and keep on fighting.

Sarpedon knew the Soul Drinkers were utterly alone, surrounded on all sides by those who hated them. The Inquisition would not give up hunting them and the daemonic foes they faced would only get more savage.

There were doubtless forces more deadly even than Teturact out there, and the Soul Drinkers would have to seek them out and face them if they were to stay true to their purpose. But in spite of it all, Sarpedon knew how grateful he should be. How many men in the galaxy could claim they were truly free? Sarpedon could, and so could his Marines, and in time so would his novices.

In the end, there was nothing else that mattered. The Emperor's message was one of freedom - from the warp-sp.a.w.ned and the tyrannous alike.

mankind was in chains all across the galaxy, and Sarpedon swore to himself that the Soul Drinkers would free it.

Sarpedon stepped down from the podium and began the long walk through the body of the Bro-kenback towards the bridge. The hulk was to head for a silent sector, light years from habitation, where the trainingand slow rebuilding of the Chapter could begin.

Freedom. It had taken Sarpedon so long to find out that it was the only thing worth fighting for. Freedom was what both the Imperium and the warp feared more than anything. It would take thousands if not tens of thousands of years but if Sarpedon could wield that freedom like a weapon to destroy the enemies of humanity, then the Soul Drinkers might truly be victorious and the Emperor's will might at last be done.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Ben Counter has made several contributions to the Black Library's Inferno! magazine, and has been published in 2000 AD and the UK small press.

An Ancient History graduate and avid miniature painter, he is also secretary of the Comics Creators Guild.