Bleeding Chalice Part 6

Governors rea.s.sured their people that the Navy and the Guard would soon blaze into the warzone and puncture the heart of Teturact's pestilent realm. They were also in the throes of preparing hermetically-sealed bunkers in case the plagues reached them.The Imperium was, in many ways, constantly at war - but around the empire of Teturact, war was a stifling, sinister shroud draped over hundreds of worlds and billions of people. Fear swamped the minds of billions. They said that Eumenix had fallen, so who knew where would be struck next?

Interstellar traffic was quiet and the s.p.a.ce lanes heavily monitored. Travel between systems had to be sanctioned by the Imperial authorities, with no exceptions. But there were always those who tried to make themselves exceptions - smugglers running supplies between quarantined worlds that they would sell for a huge mark-up, deserters escaping from the warzone, and the usual criminals and degenerates who fled from the Imperium during routine times. Most were picked up or destroyed, but some as ever got through.

And some were almost completely invisible. It was difficult enough to catch ma.s.sive cargo ships slipping in and out of the warp in the quarantined systems. It was next to impossible to see them when they were fighter-sized craft - a fraction the size of the smallest Imperial warp-capable ship. But the shoal of craft that slipped through the darkness around the Stratix warzone were not Imperial.

They were alien fighters; their faintly sinister organic lines contained powerful vortex reactors that could push them into and out of the warp. It was dangerous, there was no doubt about it. No one really knew which xenos species had built the fight-ers, and the handful of captured Navigators who directed the squadron through the warp were, through necessity, not the best. But it was worth it. If they achieved what they set out to do, the risk was worth it.

Sarpedon looked out on the star-scattered dark-ness from the first fighter's c.o.c.kpit. He wasn't even sure it was a fighter - when Techmarine Lygris had shown Sarpedon the fleet of bizarre craft on one of the Brokenback's many flight decks, the ships were empty of any ordnance or weapons save those that could be extruded from the ships' hulls. Instead, Lygris had fitted out the ships with grav-couches so each could carry a payload of Marines. It was an enormous risk, transporting almost the entire Chapter on ships that traversed the warp by means the Techmarines couldn't begin to understand. But it was the only way - the Brokenback couldn't have hoped to slip into the warzone.

Inside the fighter the cold, bulbous forms of the bridge were an odd silvery colour with a sheen of sinister purple. The Chapter serfs at the controls -some of the few survivors of the Chapter's break with the Imperium and the battle on the Brokenback - worked the fighter's instruments by moving their hands through pools of molten metal like strangely-hued quicksilver. The basic readouts had been translated from amorphous alien runes, but most of the information that ran across the irregu-larly shaped readouts was indecipherable. The ship was almost crushingly non-human - corridors twisted and the mysterious vortex generators were strange organic shapes like seed pods or the sh.e.l.ls of sea creatures. The air was only breathable because of the filters and purifiers that pumped oxy-gen through vents that had once held gases toxic to humans. The inhabitants had evidently been taller but thinner than humans, as the ceilings were high and everything was narrow.

'What are our coordinates?' Sarpedon asked the Chapter serfs.

The serf at the navigation controls didn't look round as he replied. 'We're on top of the meeting point, Lord Sarpedon.'

'Give me the fleet vox.' Another serf dipped a hand into a shimmering pool of metal and Sarpedon was connected to the other nine fighter craft. 'All craft, be on the lookout for Dreo. We cannot wait here long.'

Somewhere in that band of stars across the sky was the corrupt heart of Teturact's empire. Some-where far more distant was Terra, the equally corrupt heart of the Imperium. The galaxy out there was utterly immense, and beyond it was the warp, a whole dimension of horror that bled into real s.p.a.ce every time mankind jumped between the stars. Against it all the Soul Drinkers stood, utterly alone, a little less than seven hundred warriors who were, even after all their alterations and training, still ulti-mately men.

It was almost liberating for Sarpedon to look on the sheer vastness of the fight, and to know that he had made a conscious decision to go on fighting.

'Signals, commander.' came a voice over the vox. It was Techmarine Lygris, who had managed to acti-vate some of the strange sensor devices that jutted from the prow of his fighter. 'It's weak. They must be low on fuel.'

'Do you have a visual?'

A few moments pa.s.sed, and then a film of liquid metal bled across the air and an image swam onto it. A shuttle limped painfully through s.p.a.ce, one of its engines flaring as it died. Its hull was pitted with corrosion and streaked with burns from laser fire. It was a private craft designed for short hops between planets - not agonising hauls between systems. It must have taken months to get this far from Eumenix. There was no guarantee that any normal human could survive such conditions.

'Lygris, direct us in. I'll dock with them.'

'Understood. You realise any one of them could be infected.''If they're infected then the prisoner will be dead, and we might as well be. Besides, I need to debrief them myself Lygris directed the serfs on Sarpedon's fighter to fly towards the battered shutde. A section of the fighter's hull bulged outwards and burst like an ulcer; glob-ules of liquid metal flowing into one another until they formed a smooth tunnel that latched onto the side of the shuttle like a hungry leech.

The metal formed a sharp, biting edge and began to bore through the hull of the shuttle.

A pressurised pocket formed in the hull of the fighter as the metallic bridge became airtight, and the wall formed an airlock. Sarpedon was there as soon as it had fully formed. 'Squad Hastis, Squad Karvik, meet me at the airlock. You too, Pallas.'

The smell of stale sweat exhaled from the flower-like airlock as it opened and the two Marine squads joined Sarpedon. The air inside the shuttle must have been barely breathable.

'Any communication from them?' voxed Sarpe-don.

'None.' replied Lygris from his own craft. They're not receiving, either. Their comms must have gone down.'

Sarpedon peered into the darkness at the end of the airlock tunnel. A figure moved from the shad-ows, and slowly limped into the tunnel.

It was Sergeant Salk. His face - usually youthful compared to the Chapter's battle-scarred veterans -was now sunken-eyed and emaciated. His armour was tarnished and he walked as if it weighed him down.

We lost Captain Dreo.' he said hoa.r.s.ely. 'Karrik and Krin made it. Nicias died in the shuttle. We lost Dreo and the rest on the planet.'

Sarpedon had seen dozens of good Marines die, but his heart still sank. Captain Dreo was perhaps the best shot in the whole Chapter, and a fine level headed soldier. It was his nerve that had held in the confrontation with the Daemon Prince Ve'Meth, and his command that had riddled Ve'Meth's host bodies with bolter fire. That was why Sarpedon had trusted him with the Eumenix mission. Now he was gone, and another Soul Drinker would never be replaced.

And the prisoner?'

'Survived.'

Salk waved forward another Marine - Sarpedon recognised it as Krin, who normally carried Squad Salk's plasma gun. Now he carried the sleeping body of a woman, tiny in his arms. Her clothes had once been the rust-red robes that signified the rank of a Mechanicus Adept but now they were charred and filthy. She was short and boyish with a square face mostly obscured by the pilot's rebreather unit she wore.

Apothecary Pallas took the limp body from Krin. He consulted the medical readouts on the back of his Narthecium gauntlet, the instrument that would enable a blood transfusion and, if necessary, administer the Emperor's mercy to those beyond help. Now it gave him an overview of the woman's condition.

'She's badly malnourished.' he said. 'Semi-conscious. We have enough of an apothecarion on Karendin's ship to help her.'

'Can she speak?'

'Not yet.' I________ Sarpedon recognised her as the much younger woman from the Stratix Luminae files. In them she could be seen ducking in fear from the bolter fire as the Soul Drinkers of a decade ago stormed the labs to drive out the eldar pirates. Now she was much older, with lines around her eyes and her hair shaven at the back of her neck to accommodate the sockets drilled into her skull.

Somewhere in Captain Korvax's mission reports there was a staff roster for the installation, and from these records Sarpedon had learned the woman's name - Sarkia Aristeia. She was then an adept infe-rior, just one step up from a menial but one of the only staff members that the Soul Drinkers could locate. It was strange to finally see her when acquiring her had cost so many lives - she seemed such a small and inconsequential thing. Sarpedon had fought dae-mons and monsttous aliens for over seventy years as a warrior, but she was a vital part of Sarpedon's plan, and without her the Chapter was lost.

Was Sarkia Aristeia worth the deaths of Captain Dreo, of Aean, Hortis, Dryan and the giant Nicias? If a hundred other vital victories were won, then yes. But there was so much still to do, and the hard-est fights were always ahead.

'Stabilise her and take her to Karendin.' said Sarpedon to Pallas. 'I need to question her as soon as possible.'

'Perhaps it would be wisest if Chaplain Iktinos...' began Pallas, with slight awkwardness.

'Of course.' said Sarpedon, realising the Apothe-cary's point. 'She must have seen enough monsters on Eumenix, there is no need for her to see another.' Sarpedon had been imposing enough before he had become a mutant and the sight of him now would probably have knocked Aristeia unconscious again. 'LetIktinos talk to her.'

Pallas carried the woman to the crew compart-ment so he could examine her properly. Karrik emerged from the shuttle, his armour charred black. His face was burned badly and, like Salk's, emaci-ated in a way that was uncharacteristic of a Marine.

'How was Dreo lost?' asked Sarpedon.

'Sentry gun.' replied Salk. 'He blew open the lower entrance of the outpost and was the first in. The Mechanicus had stepped up their security, the whole planet was on the slide by then.'

'And the others?'

'Nicias died on the way here. He had multiple internal injuries and there were only emergency medical supplies on the shuttle. We used those for the woman. Nicias went into half-sleep and never woke up. The rest were killed in the a.s.sault or lost when we broke into the s.p.a.ceport.'

'How long have you been adrift?'

'Three months. According to the mission plan it should have been longer, but Eumenix went downhill fast and we had to get off. Then again, I don't think she'd have survived the shuttle any longer. The food ran out a week ago. The air had been excessively recycled so she couldn't breathe properly and we were down to our last rebreather filter.'

'The astropathic traffic we have seen suggests there was a plague on Eumenix. Do you or your Marines show any symptoms?'

Salk shook his head. 'Nothing. The conditions were bad there but we haven't brought anything back with us.

And it was more than a plague, com-mander. It was something that rotted the mind. The whole hive had gone mad. Maybe even the whole planet. The dead were walking the streets and the living were butchering one another. It was as well we moved when we did. We would never have got Aristeia off the planet otherwise.'

'You have done well, Salk. With Dreo gone your chances were very slim.'

'I cannot help but feel his death was too high a price to pay, commander.'

'High, but not too high. I cannot tell you what we are fighting for, Salk, but you must trust me when I say it is worth anything we sacrifice. Dreo will be remembered for his part in our coming victory, but if we do not win it then none of us will be remem-bered. You and your men should transfer to Karendin's ship with the prisoner. He and Pallas will fix you up.'

The two squads returned to their quarters and the ragged remains of Squad Salk headed for the dock-ing bay where they, along with Aristeia would be transferred to the infirmary.

Maybe Salk was right. Perhaps Sarpedon's mission was impossible and he was throwing away the lives of his men. But he could not falter now, when so much was at stake. They trusted him completely, even when he could not tell them what they fought for. To give up would be to betray that trust, and with the whole galaxy intent on wiping out the Chapter their trust was one of the few advantages Sarpedon had left.

The next stage could be the riskiest of all. While Pallas and Karendin tended to Aristeia's health and Iktinos interrogated her, the makeshift fleet would have to puncture the dark heart that lay past the Imperial cordon. The Soul Drinkers would be lucky to ever come out again.

'Piloting?' he voxed.

'Commander?' came the voice of the Chapter serfs on the bridge.

'Wait until the transfer is complete, then take us to the next waypoint. Cut the shuttle free. Report any contacts and have the other fighters keep forma-tion.'

Sarkia Aristeia would have to know the informa-tion Sarpedon needed. The fleet would have to make it to the next stage and every Marine would have to fight harder than ever before. The Inquisi-tion would have to stay a step behind for just a little while longer. So much could go wrong, but Sarpe-don would have to accept those risks. It was enough that he would fight until the end and never turn his back on his mission. Everything else was down to the grace of the Emperor and the strength of his battle-brothers.

Sarpedon turned on his eight chitinous legs and headed back towards the bridge. They were close enough now that the fleet would not have to make another risky warp jump. However in real s.p.a.ce there were sharp-eyed battleship captains and pirates to avoid.

The strange alien fighters lanced through s.p.a.ce in formation, carrying a cargo of the Emperor's finest warriors, with one of the most dangerous places in the Imperium as their destination.

Teturact's flagship was a vast flying tomb. Billions had died on Stratix before Teturact saved the sur-vivors and bound them to his will. That had left mountains of corpses heaped from the undercities to the palaces and cathedrals, a festering monument to the power of Teturact's disease and the fate of those who opposed him. Such a volume of death was an end in itself - a great and glorious reminder of how Teturact could wield death like a king's scep-tre. He wanted to surround himself with death at alltimes, to take it with him when he left Stratix so he would always be immersed in it.

The dark, heavy sensation of being drowned in death was an inspiration to Teturact and a reminder to all in his presence that he was not just their leader, he was their G.o.d. He decided who would die and who would live, and the form those lives would take.

The flagship itself had once been an Emperor-cla.s.s battleship, a wedge-prowed slab of a ship that had rained fire on the enemies of the false Emperor. It had been taken to Stratix for refitting and was a stripped-down hulk in the naval dockyards when Teturact saved the planet. It was as if the planet had presented the ship to its new lord as a gift, and Tetu-ract had accepted it. It had been refitted with ma.s.ses of weaponry and shielding devices, replacing the life support systems and accommodation decks that were of no use when the crew needed neither air nor rest.

Then the dead had come - wrapped in their shrouds. They were entombed in their thousands, along the walls of the corridors and the cavernous s.p.a.ces of the fighter decks. Teturact's loyal servants had broken bodies apart and used the bones to dec-orate the bridge and Teturact's own chambers. They had flayed skin off corpses to cover the walls and hang as curtains. The instrument panels were inlaid with human teeth. Columns of vertebrae ringed the bulkhead doors. The corridors leading to the bridge were paved with fragments of skulls. The ship was a magnificent monument to death, and death coursed through it like Hfeblood.

The circular hall in which Teturact now stood had once been a briefing theatre, where the ship's cap-tain would deliver his battlefield command to his underlings. Now it saw something far greater - a conclave of Teturact and his wizards.

Every system had its rogues. Amongst these were psykers, the witches and shamans that were hunted by inquisitors, Arbites, witchfinders and law-abiding Imperial weaklings. When Teturact's empire began to spread he had sought out these psykers and made them the most loyal of all his followers. Through them, his mastery of disease was complete. Their powers could let him raise a plague on a world light years distant - so it had been on Eumenix, where his touch had made the world ripe for conquest even while he was on dis-tant Stratix.

The wizards were from a hundred worlds and they now all wore the filthy robes of Teturact, and were cowled like monks of an order devoted to him. Beneath their robes their bodies had changed: some had become bloated, others emaciated, and many sported tentacles or segmented clawed limbs. Each one was a receptacle of immense psychic power, and they were so subjected to Teturact's will that they couldn't even remember what names they had carried before he found them.

The seating of the auditorium had been replaced with benches of carved bone. The spotlight that fell on Teturact at the centre was tinted yellow by the corruption that seeped through the ship. The wiz-ards were shambling, seeping things, and yet in the eyes that peered from underneath their cowls Tetu-ract could still see their devotion.

None of them dared to be leader, so they all spoke in turn.

'Eumenix is ready.' one of them slurred.

'We have seen it.' said another. 'The only living things are nomads in the wastes, and they will be gone soon enough.'

Have any others visited my world? asked Teturact, speaking with his mind rather than his rotted vocal chords.

'Few, my lord. There were some fanatics who came to spread the word of their Emperor, but they did not survive. There were others who looked like the Emperor's warriors, but they carried the taste of rebellion and anger with them. But there were few and they were the last to escape the world.'

Teturact plucked an image from the head of the wizard who had spoken. It had been gleaned by the wizard from the collection of dying minds of Eumenix. s.p.a.ce Marines had visited his world -probably to find out what was happening on the planet. He saw them sprinting across one of the s.p.a.ceports in Hive Quintus, swapping fire with the desperate citizens of the hive as they headed for the last off-world shuttle. They had fled like frightened children when they had seen the scale of death -such was Teturact's power he could even send the vaunted s.p.a.ce Marines running.

How long until my arrival 1 he asked.

'The warp looks on you with favour, my lord. Seven days more and we will return to real s.p.a.ce.'

Good. Make them seven days of very particular suffer-ing.

The wizards bowed as one. Then one of their number shambled forwards. It was a horribly mis-shapen, bloated creature with a bundle of dripping tentacles where its face had once been. The wizards began to chant, a low, atonal drone that filled their air with the sound of a billion plague-flies. The wiz-ard's body opened up, it was a hideous tentacled maw of miscoloured flesh, with internal organs pulsing. A thousandeyes were set into its innards and they rolled madly, seeing across the warp all the way to the depths of Eumenix.

As the wizards worked their magic, Teturact could see the images the central wizard projected. Endless layers of hive were knee-deep in gore. The dead had risen and were wandering, waiting for a purpose. The view panned across battlefields where factions fought in the vain hope of securing supplies or transport, or just to give voice to their horror through combat.

The wizards drew more and more dead from their graves. Whole mounds of mouldering bodies writhed like nests of worms as the corpses dug their way out. In the barren toxic wastes between the hives, nomads watched in horror as columns of the dead marched from the cities. Soon there would be no trace of life left on the planet to spoil the pure magnificence of death.

For a moment, Teturact could feel the whole planet simultaneously, projected into his mind through the wizards. It was a beautiful thing - it was as if the whole of Eumenix was composed entirely of suffering and fear, an imprint so intense that it still drove the walking dead to prey on one another in desperation. He had seen a hundred worlds reduced to such a state, but it still filled him with pride.

The images faded as the wizards finished waking all the dead they could muster. Eumenix seethed to new levels of horror as it disappeared from Tetu-ract's mind, and its aftertaste was like pure victory.

Teturact mentally ordered his bearers to take him back to his quarters to wait out the rest of the jour-ney.

There was much to contemplate before he became the G.o.d of yet another world.

The Inquisitorial fortress on Caitaran would, in saner days, have served to coordinate the efforts of the Ordo Hereticus for several sectors around, so the ordo could effectively face threats that spanned worlds and systems. But now it formed the wartime headquarters of the Inquisitorial effort against Teturact, with a quarantined halo around it. It was now the gathering point for information submitted by inquisitors and their agents throughout the war-zone.

Lord Inquisitor Kolgo had a.s.sumed overall authority, having rose to high favour after coordi-nating the Lastrati Pogrom decades before. Up to three hundred inquisitors and interrogators answered directly to him and his staff, with many more forming a secret network even the Inquisition itself could not unravel.

Many were embedded in the Imperial Guard units sent to claim back disputed worlds; others tried to determine which planets would be the next to fall. Some were even reporting back from worlds that now belonged to Teturact. They sent brief transmissions hinting at unimaginable horror, of the building-sized piles of corpses and plagues that rotted men's minds. The Ordo Malleus searched for daemons and the taint of Chaos amongst the thou-sands of reports from across the warzone. Even the Ordo Xenos, whose authority extended to the activ-ities of aliens within the Imperium, examined the possibilities of xenos technology in Teturact's methods.

The Inquisitorial fortress was carved into the peak of the tallest mountain on Caitaran, so high the clouds rolled past below the fortress's s.p.a.ceport. It was a remnant of a civilisation the Imperium had absorbed thousands of years before. It had been a martial society with kings, lords and barons, one of whom had expended untold fortunes to carve an impregnable palace from the mountains that no army could take. He was right - no invader took its walls, but the Imperium dropped a virus bomb on it when he refused to pay fealty to the explorator units that arrived on Caitaran when the world was on the frontier of Imperial s.p.a.ce. The planet fell almost overnight once word spread that the fortress was now protected only by a legion of corpses.

It was a good story, the sort told to initiates in the Adeptus Terra about how a concentration of effort on one selected target could do more than a mas-sive a.s.sault on all fronts. Perhaps it was even true, and it was certainly relevant here - the majority of the Inquisitorial effort was devoted to locating Tetu-ract and killing him so that, just like the indigenous primitives of Caitaran, the empire of pestilence would crumble in short order. Unfortunately no one knew who, what or where Teturact might be, let alone what might kill him.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't Thaddeus's problem. He was lucky Lord Inquisitor Kolgo had given him use of the facilities on Caitaran. Thaddeus had little more than pure instinct to suggest that the Soul Drinkers might be in the warzone, or at least head-ing for it. The Soul Drinkers had been on Eumenix, of that there was little doubt, but Eumenix had only recently become off-limits through the plague and there wasn't even definite proof that Teturact was involved - worlds had fallen to disease before with-out agents of Chaos being responsible.

But it made a strange sort of sense in Thaddeus's trained mind. The Soul Drinkers might even be serving Teturact. But perhaps it was more compli-cated than that since the forces of Chaos fought one another as often as they fought the Imperium. Though the Soul Drinkers could be anywhere, there seemed a likelihood that they were tangled in the hideous mess of Teturact's fledgling empire. So that was where Thaddeuswould look for them.

Thaddeus would soon try to push his luck by receiving an audience with Lord Inquisitor Kolgo himself. But for the moment, he was just trying to eke some comfort out of the quarters the fortress staff had given him.

The outer parts of the fortress had not been modernised and the mountain cold blew through them with little resistance. The fur-nishings were spa.r.s.e and the floor freezing. The view across the mountains was extraordinary, though, and Thaddeus had been lucky to requisi-tion quarters for himself. The storm troopers and Sisters were in the s.p.a.ceport barracks, and he had obtained an infirmary suite in which he could examine what Sister Aescarion had brought back from Eumenix.

It had been six months since he had landed on Koris XXIII-3, believing that he had run out of leads on the Soul Drinkers. Now he had part of one of their corpses, and the chalice symbol on the dead Marine's pistol was testimony to his allegiance. Along with the reports from the survivors at House Jena.s.sis, he had found the first concrete proof of the Chapter's activities since the Cerberian Field. To find it, he had paid with the life of Interrogator Shen and several dozen Arbites at House Jena.s.sis. The inquisitor in him said that the trade had been worth it - he was surprised to find that the man in him agreed.

Thaddeus opened up the trunk at the foot of the chamber's four-poster bed. Inside was the meagre collection of hard evidence he had acc.u.mulated - a datacube and viewer containing a copy of the pict-file from the Brokenback, a charred volume of Daenyathos's Catechisms Martial salvaged from the Soul Drinkers' scuttled fleet, and data-slates con-taining transcripts of witness interviews. The bolt pistol lay on top in its holster.

Thaddeus picked it up - the weapon was so huge Thaddeus could only hold it in two hands, but a s.p.a.ce Marine carried it as a sidearm. It had an ammunition selector and twin magazines, and its casing was chased in gold. The chalice symbol of the Soul Drinkers was stamped on the handle.

'A fine weapon,' said a grimly familiar, grating voice. 'Terrible that it should be used for such evil.'

Thaddeus looked round to see the Pilgrim enter-ing the chamber. Instantly the bare stone of the room seemed to darken and the air became even colder. The Pilgrim bore such strong determination to see the enemies of the Emperor dead, that its hate infected everything around it.

'The medicae are ready.' the Pilgrim said, and left the room. Thaddeus dropped the pistol back in the trunk, and followed.

The Officio Medicae personnel stationed at the Caitaran fortress had been seconded to the Inqui-sition to study the various plagues that sprung up wherever Teturact cast his gaze. Thaddeus had secured the services of the Medicae pathology team consisting of two orderlies and an Adeptus Mechanicus Biologis adept. These individuals were waiting in the small infirmary when Thad-deus and the Pilgrim arrived, the faceless orderlies standing as if to attention. The adept - a stocky middle-aged woman with a very serious face and wearing a white lab suit - stood with folded arms at the head of the slab of polished granite that served as an operation table. There was a s.p.a.ce Marine's battered head lying on it like an offering on an altar.

'I apologise for the delay, inquisitor.' said the adept in a clipped, no-nonsense voice. We had to ensure the specimen was fully irradiated and quar-antined.'