Chapter III

AS LOKI walked briskly down the corridor leading out of the captain's quarters, his helmet's speakers hissed as Castellan Morris's voice came through.

"Marshall, we've received your coordinates. Should I tell the company to rendezvous?"

"Yes," said Loki. "Tell them to meet there within two minutes. I think I may have found something worth looking at."

"What is it?"

"Don't know yet, but the captain of this vessel thought it important enough to make sure to scribble it into his last log entry."

"Interesting. We'll meet you at the rendezvous point."

On Loki's HUD, the map showed that his men were converging on the hallways leading to the elevators. After several moments of walking through the long, empty hallways, he reached the elevator lobby. There were as many as five marines in front of the dead elevator awaiting him. The looked like giants cramped into this small space, and though Loki seldom ever thought about it, he now saw why the Space Marine Legions had been the most fearsome fighting force in the galaxy before their sundering. He focused his mind on the task at hand and set his pride for his Templars aside for the moment. Pride, after all, was one of the ways to the halls of Slaanesh. He checked himself and strode forward to the elevator console next to one of the doors.

Though the console glowed and was accessible. It showed that the connection to the elevator controls had been severed. Loki turned to one of the marines, a tech specialist.

"Can you bypass it?"

The marine shook his head. "No-go, sir. If the connection to the elevator was severed, I need to enter the shaft in order to get it running again, sir. It'll be faster if we find some stairs."

"Very well. Stairs it is."

The stairwell was a narrow passage, designed for normal humans. The huge bodies of the Adeptus Astartes barely fit in between the railings, but they made due. Loki descended in the middle of the line, protected by his marines. With every landing they came across on the way down, the Templars raised their bolters to cover all corners of the stairwell. As they moved lower and lower, there was less light with which to see. Their helmets immediately switched them over to infrared vision to compensate. They reached the bottom of the stair without any trouble.

As Loki and his company filed into the pitch dark hallway, his HUD told him that the mark was down this very hallway. They kept their bolters ready as they remained on guard for any heat signatures other than their own. Loki was wary when dealing with his fallen brothers. They were just as dangerous as he was, if not more so. If any of them remained on the ship, he wanted to be sure to take them out before they did the same to him or his men.

The hallway was eerily quiet as they made their way through the blackness. The only sounds came from the Templars' footfalls on the metal floor. Loki could hear his own hearts beating in his chest. Something about the quiet unsettled him. Loki simply couldn't shake the feeling that he was being watched. His armor picked up nothing but his fellow marines, but still he felt as though someone other than he and his men was there. At times he even swore he could see movement in his visor at the edges of his vision. When he turned to get a better look, though, everything appeared to be normal. It was nagging at him the whole way down the long hallway.

There was a sudden loud clang as something metallic fell and hit the floor.

"Did you hear that?" one of the marines suddenly asked.

"Stay focused, marine," said Lieutenant Morris.

Nothing out of place occurred from then on as the Templars slowly made their way down the corridor. There were no sounds, no disturbances coming from the darkness. Even that nagging feeling in the back of Loki's mind was gone.

Before long, they noticed a faint red light coming from the hall around the corner to their right. Two marines went ahead, bolters at the ready. They rounded the corner, looked around, and checked their weapons. They then waved on the rest of the company. Loki rounded the corner ahead of the others and found that he was standing in front of a great metal door. The light was coming from the overhead warning bulb as it flashed on and off.

The door itself seemed to be heavily damaged. There were deep gouges and dents in the metal. The wall was extensively cracked around the door's frame. Blood covered this corner of the hallway. It seemed to have splashed on the walls and ceilings as well as the door itself. Immediately to the right of the door, where the console had been on the wall, there were now only wires that sparked on occasion, throwing the Templar's' shadows against the walls. In the red light, the sight before them seemed even more menacing.

"Let's get this thing open," said Loki.

The Templars' tech specialist made his way through the hallway behind Loki and made his way over to the door. He kneeled down in front of the loose wires, his incredible height compacting so that he was eye-level with the console. The tech specialist touched several of the wires together and the door before them shot open. The two marines at the head of the line raised their weapons. The room beyond was as dark as the hallway behind them. Their infrared visors picked up the slack their eyes had given.

A quick sweep of the room proved to show them nothing different from what they had found on the upper deck. There was equipment scattered all around the room, and by the look of it, this room had once been a medical examination room. There were syringes, broken test tubes, deactivated data slates, and smashed monitors. Several examination tables lined the walls on both sides. Equipment lockers stood next to them, potentially hiding anything of value. It was a gigantic hall of a room, easily able to fit Loki's entire company.

"Templars," said Loki, "conduct a perimeter check. I want to know if there's anything in this room we can use."

Loki checked the map on his HUD. It showed that the coordinates pointed to this very room.

"The coordinates point to this room," he said. "Let's see if we can find out why this room was so important to the captain."

The Templars fanned out to all corners of the room and began to turn over cabinets, examination tables, and chairs, adding to the mess in the middle of the room. They reported, one by one, that nothing unusual had been found. With each report, Loki grew increasingly disappointed, and was beginning to think much less of the captain.

Loki suddenly jerked himself to the nearest wall, and, standing with his back against it, raised his bolter and brought it to point directly ahead of him. He looked around frantically. He was sure he had seen it this time, just on the edge of his vision. Movement in the shadows.

"All units on defense!" he yelled. Immediately the marines raised their weapons and began to search around for a target as they backed up against the nearest wall.

"What is it Marshall?" asked Morris.

Loki continued to look for it. "There's something here. I know I saw it. Be on your guard."

One of the marines was suddenly hauled off his feet and dragged up into the dense network of pipes and cables in the ceiling. The Templars heard their brother scream as they fired their weapons into the darkness.

The room was suddenly alight with bolter fire. Marines left their defensive positions to get a better shot on whatever it was that had gotten hold of their brother. Pipes exploded and cables snapped and sparked as bolts slammed into them and severed them. Loki aimed his weapon directly into the ceiling where the Templar disappeared and unleashed his entire clip. All at once the firing ceased. Smoking bolters and silence filled the room.

"Reload," said Loki. "I don't like this."

All at once time seemed to slow down. Loki was suddenly aware of two things. First the body of a Templar was falling from the ceiling rafters, the armor that once covered the Astartes was torn clean off. Loki could see that his throat had been slashed and the body was falling in a spray of blood. It splashed onto his visor as the body hit the floor. Something fell along with the body bounced on the floor next to the fallen Templar. Secondly, Loki knew that the door at the far end of the room had been blown off its hinges. Sparks flew from where it had once stood as the door bounced across the room and slammed into the wall where two Templars used their superhuman strength to knock it aside. The door fell to the floor with a loud clang. No time to worry about his dead brother, so he turned his attention, and his gun, to the door. He slammed the new clip in place and cocked the weapon. What he saw made him doubt everything the Emperor had ever told him of daemons and the Warp.

They wore the skin of a human but they crawled along the walls and ceiling with incredible speed. They hissed and howled as a whole horde of them broke into the room. Their skin was pale as skin is in death, and they reeked of it too. Their eyes shone brightly in the darkness as if they were lit from within, and they gave no heat signature, making their movement hard to track through infrared visors. Leaping from the walls and bounding through the door, they set themselves upon the Templars in the exam room. They were all wearing human clothing. Loki spotted lab coats and military uniforms as well. Some of them even wore the dregs of the Astartes Mark IV plate armor. One of them fell from the ceiling, Astartes blood still fresh on its lips.

"Fire at will!" Loki commanded. He pulled the trigger and sprayed bolts into the creatures as they shot through the door. The examination room had become chaos in a matter of seconds. Silence had been replaced by howls and roars, and the constant blast of bolter fire. Within seconds they were all over him, and Loki and the Templars missed most of their shots, only hitting the creatures once or twice.

"Are these daemons?" asked Morris.

"My visor turns up nothing about them in the Imperial Library, sir," said a marine.

"Stop your chatter and shoot, marine," yelled Loki.

They lunged at Loki with blinding speed, coming at him in groups of two or three at a time. Their eyes burned through him with red-hot hunger. Loki Sigismund leveled his pistol and pulled the trigger. Hard. The shells slammed into the creatures, sometimes directly in their ugly daemon faces. Still nothing. They just got back up and lunged faster, their skin already healing the very second they were wounded. Their mouths salivated as they lusted for his blood. Their snapping fangs came within inches of his throat before Loki batted them away or sprayed them with lead rain. In all his years, Loki had never seen a creature as threatening as these.

Throughout the battle, Loki's helmet was filled with comm chatter as Templar after Templar fell to the beasts.

"Templar down!"

"They're tearing into my -"

"Get them off me!"

Loki had never heard fear in the voice of an Astartes, not since the Imperial Civil War. But fear was there now. These creatures were not daemons. The captain was right. These things that bore human form were something completely different, for they lacked the very thing the Chaos gods were after: souls. They had no heartbeat and no heat signature, which even daemons of the Immaterium possessed. These things were dead. All dead, and yet they moved with more vigor and speed than anything living ever could.

Loki was suddenly thrown to the ground, armor and all, by a force so powerful, it felt like a bolt from his own gun slamming into his chest. In an instant one of them had climbed on top of him, fangs bared and eyes burning, and began to actually rip his Mark IV plate armor off! The fiend pulled away chunks of metal weighing hundreds of pounds and threw them to the side as though they were nothing. It's grimy fingers closed around Loki's throat and its black, oozing nails bit into his flesh. It was then that Loki's life flashed before his eyes.

The thing lowered its wet lips to his exposed throat, and just as the creature was about to bite into his flesh, there was a loud crash. A round of bolts tore through the creature, sending it barreling away. To Loki's horror, the mass of flesh it had been beaten into stood up and began to reshape itself! Castellan Morris stood over Loki and pointed his bolter at the glob of flesh and fired. His bolter clicked empty as the creature went down and began to slowly reform itself again.

"I don't know what these things are," said Morris, "but I'll be damned if we lose this fight here." He extended a hand to Loki, which Loki took.

Loki stood up and noted the damage done to his armor, which was extensive to say the least.

"At least we know what happened to the crew of this ship," he said.

"I'm out," said Morris. He threw the bolter to the floor and unsheathed his chainsword. Loki did the same. They stood back to back and waited for the creatures to make their attack on them.

Loki's comm system cracked to life. "Permission to speak, Marshall."

"Go ahead," said Loki.

"Sir I think we may have a shot."

"Spit it out marine."

"These bastards seem to be afraid of something we found, sir. We can't guess why. If you can, try to make your way to our position. We might be able to hold them back."

Loki looked around the room and found the corner where a sizable number of his company was hacking a group of the creatures. Behind them lay an open medical locker. Loki couldn't see what was in the locker that was making these things stay back, nor did he care. He and the Lieutenant began to slowly move toward the group of Templars.

"Cover us," said Morris.

"Roger."

Bolter fire sprayed around Loki and Morris as they moved over back-to-back. The creatures, with a complete disregard for themselves lunged at them. Loki batted his chainsword at them as they came, but wasn't fast enough. His armor bore the brunt of their attacks as they clawed and snapped their teeth at him. Eventually, Loki found himself standing in the midst of the Templars as they continued their defensive assault on the beasts. Morris took a bolter from a deceased Templar and fired into the creatures along with the others.

"Now let's see what's been keeping them back," said Loki.

As he made his way to the locker he found it to be mostly empty, except for a waist-high golden object. Loki grew increasingly puzzled. It didn't answer the question that now burned inside of him. Why were these things afraid of it?

No matter, he thought. He gripped the object tightly and, lifting it, moved toward the creatures. They immediately retreated from him and gave him a wide berth.

"Herd them!" yelled Loki. "We'll trap them back in the corridor through which they came. I'll set this down at the door frame."

As Loki moved forward, carrying the large, golden object, the Templars kept the creatures tightly together with their remaining ammunition, their swords, and their lives. As the Templars surrounded the beasts, armor was torn off, throats were slashed, and Templars fell. The monsters moved back, however, away from the object in Loki's arms. Even their incredible power seemed to wane in the presence of this one object, and Loki found himself wondering what it was that was making this thing hold so much power over the creatures.

Eventually, they reached the end of the room where the Templars herded the last of the creatures through the door. Hissing and howling, the creatures shrank into the darkness beyond the examination room. Loki set the object down right in front of the door. He stepped back and took a deep breath. Though there was still the occasional hiss as one of them tried to reenter the room, the battle was for the most part over, at least for now.

Loki surveyed the damage. "Templars report," he said.

"Considering all the factors," said Morris, "I'd say that roughly half our force remains, Marshall."

"Half." Loki sighed. The bodies of dead Templars were everywhere. Blood covered the walls and floor of the room. Loki could barely contain himself. Never before had he known such an emotional test. So many thoughts rushed through his head at once. It felt as though his skull would crack from the pressure. For an instant, a single dismissible instant, Loki was at a complete loss. For that one instant a wave of exhaustion rushed over him. In that instant he saw the battle's start. He saw one of his men dragged off their feet into the ceiling rafters. He saw the body fall, battered and bloody. In that instant he remembered the object that fell with the body and landed on the floor next to hit.

Loki could almost hear the sound it made when it fell as he rushed over to the spot where the dead marine still lay. There on the floor, unmoved during the carnage, was the object. Loki picked it up and discovered it was a small silver medallion. On one side he saw the visage of the creatures that attacked them. It had the same red eyes and the same fanged mouth. Loki turned it over, and was puzzled by what he saw. The other side was blank, except for a few letters etched in the metal that puzzled him as to their meaning. They were written in the language of the Imperium, and that puzzled him even more. When read, the letters simply spelled:

VON CARSTEIN