Chapter 6
T-minus sixteen hours and counting ...
Clouds of choking smog parted for the Stormbird as it broke atmosphere, swirling in the jetfire of its engines. The vessel tore into the ash layer and, heedless of the toxicity, flashed its warning lights for mid-air deployment. Inside the hold, no warning klaxons sounded: this was not the way of the guardsman, or the ecclesiarch. The way of the Astartes was pitch black and timed bursts of red; it was silence, not chanted prayer or song; it was inhuman calm, the hundred thousandth time as matter of fact as the first; it was deadly stillness unbroken against the turbulence their vessel swam through.
All the servitors had been partitioned away in hermetically sealed charging pods. They were alone.
The ready-light quickened its intervals and Sabina held her gaze level with it, waiting for it. Unlike the three Astartes – or Alecto's adamantium body – she had struggled to maintain her footing at first. Remembering her wings had helped her find it far quicker than she'd at first thought she would, and now braced her with a shift or a small beat with each lurch and tumble as the Stormbird struggled to stay level. Among the ashes, any remaining SAM batteries or flak cannons would be unable to effectively lock on to them.
She tried to steady her breathing, readjusting to the respirator of her helmet. The servitors had done their job of repairing her armour well. Hopefully well enough to seal her against the coming storm. Though far from her first free-fall or jump-pack assault, the jump-pack was conspicuously absent and in lieu of her yet untested wings, naked against the hellish conditions just beyond the bulkhead.
The light flashed from red to green and the bay door hissed open.
Immediately ash billowed into the hold, rushing greedily to fill the space with its acid hot toxicity, followed by a blast wave of fresh turbulence. Her respirator clicked and began cycling filtered air, the heads up display spitting out temperature warnings (327º and climbing), CO2, methane, sulphur, and ammonia levels approaching tolerance limits.
JUMP, came the pilot's vox command, and the two Space Marines bounded out the hold – effortless against the force of the choking clouds – and activated their jump-packs in mid-air. Alecto lurched after them and simply dropped out of the Stormbird, lost in a swirl of ash below. Sabina looked at Malister, who gave her a single, fleeting glance before he too jumped out of the hold and activated his jump-pack.
Now or never.
With Alecto's psychic hand on her shoulder, she took a breath and ran, flexing her wings; the distance between the floor and mid-air closed rapidly, too rapidly, and with a great, struggling upbeat of her wings, Sabina launched herself from the Stormbird and into free-fall.
The wind sliced through her feathers, the searing heat reaching the bare flesh underneath where every exposed cell should have crisped and flaked away to join the leeching ash. It took all her psychic power to keep her wings beating, keep them protected against the heat and toxic clouds – it was just enough to slow her descent, not enough to soar. It was stretching her to her limits to keep from plummeting in a frightful tumble. And it was almost not enough. As her wing muscles trembled so too did her lips find themselves mouthing a silent prayer to the one figure who had always brought her through, no matter her fear, no matter the fire set against her:
Save me, please. If only to die for your will, later. Save me, please.
Around her she could just make out the glow of jump-pack jets. Something enormous whooshed past them all, dragging them all into the clearer vortex of its wake and clearing a path through the smog: Alecto, the Wings of Wrath, the crimson light of his psychic-wrought wings cleaving vast swaths through the clouds. Caught in his funnel, her wings felt the strain momentarily clear and she angled into a nosedive after her brothers.
As they cleared the ash layer, the spires of Gamma-Secundus loomed, peppered with smoke columns, over half smashed and topped beyond all hope of repair. The upper levels of the hive had become a grinding guerrilla war through the ruins, all the way down to the fires of the underhive. Craters had been blown clear through sections of the lower hive and surrounding country, exposing vast pipes and tunnels of the sprawl beneath. Intermittent explosions and streaks of rocket and mortar fire, the dull flashes of grenades ending pockets of streaking las-beams was the mosaic that rushed up to meet them.
"There!" She followed Malister's signal over her HUD to a ragged hole torn through one of the outlying lower towers. "Virgil's transponder signal cut off there: must have been his point of ingress."
New input flashed as they angled their descent toward the central cluster of ruined towers.
We breach there. A grav-ladder leads from the central spire to the underhive, mostly undamaged.
Below, hundreds of men and women appeared, surging among the tangle of buildings, rubble strewn alleys and streets, uncovered maintenance and sanitation tunnels. No, not hundreds – thousands. Hundreds of thousands, and millions more beneath. Like ants, they tore at one another over the ruins of their little hill. One could scarcely discern faithful from heretic as waves of combat shifted in little tide pools, its currents as chaotic as the great Empyrean.
Steady.
The central spire loomed. A flash erupted from the great comet before her as Alecto unleashed a salvo from his plasma cannon at the structure, flash-melting a perfect circle through layers of rockrete and metal in an instant. The molten orifice opened to them, a dark portal ringed by oozing hellfire. A slight miscalculation and ...
No time.
Save me, please.
BREACH!
Alecto slammed through the gap, his bulking cleaving the breaching hole ragged, wider, and one by swift one, the Marines zoomed in after him. Her course locked, Sabina tucked her wings tight against her back – some instinct perhaps always there but heretofore untapped – braced, and cleanly glided through after them.
A half-second too late she realized she had made it as the bottom of the spire loomed. She swept her wings out to catch her fall, too little too late, and careened into an upturned wooden cart that burst into splinters upon impact with her power-armoured form. Managing to tuck her knees to prevent also shattering her legs, Sabina tumbled across the pavement in a ball of feathers and splinters, finally skidding to a halt a dozen meters from where she had demolished the cart. As her palms touched ground and she steadied herself on all fours, her first breath since the breach was to murmur:
"By His Grace I stand."
"Not quite," one of the Blood Angels cut in dryly. She hurried to her feet, finding – rather embarrassingly – that they were waiting for her, already positioned behind Alecto with their jump jets no longer firing and bolters at the ready. All around them the spire trembled and dust shook free from ruinous cracks in the structure. Intermittent shouting, echos of stubber fire, the louder crack of a grenade, the licking of flames, and the sounds of distant wailing formed the drum beat of war. Smoke swirled, greedily seeking the sky through every hole blown into the hive.
The stench of war filled her nostrils: still-burning promethium, the toxic vapours pouring off molten slag, trails of leaking plasma coolant, the ash of a hundred million souls intermingling with spent munitions powder and the afterburn of hotshot volleys ... and so much blood. She felt a pressure in her upper gums – painful, like teething, but not displeasurable – and her seeking tongue found the points of new fangs pushing their way to the surface, the autonomic response to a smell so powerful now she could nearly taste the coppery tones.
The grav-ladder is one-hundred and seventeen meters ahead,Alecto said. Internal vox communications hereon.
Do not let the Thirst distract you, he said inside her mind. Channel it, and if you must, take from the vial Versato gave you. Now, we descend.
T-minus fourteen hours and counting ...
After seven detours and clearing a collapsed tunnel until Alecto could shoulder his way through, they made it to the underhive. During their descent on the grav-ladder Sabina had tested and flexed her wings experimentally, turning over in her mind the sensation of her new musculature and bone density against the frantic plummet earlier. She practised pointing her flight feathers one-by-one and then in groups, rustling the softer down beneath.
They could not carry you without the Emperor's light within you, Alecto had told her. She had taken one sip of the vial just after exiting the elevator, having felt her nerves beginning to twitch at the edges of sensation, threatening to release their restless heat and turn her blood to magma. Now, a tingle began to spread from the tips of her extremities inward, filling those nerves with a sudden rush of euphoric ... power. It was in her very blood, pumped by both her hearts, swelling her muscles and deadening old wounds. The slight hitch in her left hip was gone. She no longer felt the scar tissue on her abdomen from an Ork's cleaver. Though even that seemed a lifetime ago.
Now, each individual dust mote seemed as clear to her as if it were under a micro lenser. She could see the vapour trails of evaporating ash in the air; she could feel the reverberations of footfalls from a running firefight three levels below, buried beneath tonnes of piping, mechanical lines, rockrete, and rubble; colour that had never existed to her before now pulsed, rippling on energetic tides before her.
And somewhere, down and amidst all the wanton chaos, a burning, furious heart – lonely, shattered – touched her third eye.
He's close.
I know, Alecto thought back. I can feel him too. Did Captain Ardos tell you the motto of the 7th Company, perchance?
Sabina allowed the minutest shake of her head. She hoped the others wouldn't notice, but if the senses of the Astartes were even a tenth of hers, her efforts were not nearly enough
Liberate tuteme ex inferis.
Save yourself, from Hell.
T-minus eleven hours and counting ...
As they moved through the shattered ruins of a hab-block, the many leaflets and graffiti marring the walls and support struts became ever more apparent.
DEATH TO THE FALSE EMPEROR!
THE IMPERIAL TRUTH IS A LIE
And, perhaps most telling of all:
HE LIED TO US
Distress creased her brow, and Sabina stopped in her stride to pluck a tattered leaflet from a crumbling, blackened, barrier, to read.
TAKE BACK YOUR POWER
The Truth you have been told your whole lives is a lie. He lied to us, and his servants lie to us. They live off our labour, they break our backs and feed upon our sweat. They have made us cogs in a great machine, and lied to tell you they do this to keep you free. They do this to keep us subservient, to never question the truth.
The truth is that you are a slave. You have always been a slave. You were born a slave, and you will die a slave to the Tyrant Emperor and his cronies. They steal our children and lobotomize our brothers and sisters.
But here, the Emperor has forgotten us! He has turned his uncaring gaze away from us, and we must sieze this chance – this one chance – to take back the freedom he stole from us. Fight back with everything you have! For now, they have only our souls left to take, and shall we let them? Nay, I say we fight! And free ourselves from this Tyrant!
Fight for your soul!
Your soul ... Sabina mused. But the Emperor had not lied – he protected, he gave graciously. Why, he had even brought her back from the brink of death that she might better serve his will. What was that, if not grace and love? It seemed the soul of Ido's people was indeed being fought for, the life of the war-torn hive world long since spent, held taut between the truly faithful and the ungrateful who allowed Chaos to afflict their sensibilities. How could they turn against Him so virulently, so passionately? Had He not given them all He could – even His own life for them?
But it was not enough for them, never enough. They wanted more than what was given by their station, and deep within her mind, something stuck, fetched up, the gears grinding to a halt.
Why? How could they betray their Emperor this way?
She let the leaflet fall from her hands as she walked side by side with the Astartes, drifting to the ground like the rose petals in her youth. Yet the question remained a splinter in her mind, refusing to let go with the paper.
Do not let yourself become distracted, Alecto cautioned in her mind. We have an objective, that is our only concern. The other path leads to dark places, where the servants of the Dark Gods dwell.
She was not entirely sure of this, but his advice was otherwise sound. This was not the time for philosophical musing.
As they moved beyond the ruins of the hab-block into a cavernous open square, a major crossroad and thoroughfare of the hive, the sounds of combat echoed ever closer. Alecto held up a massive power fist and the Astartes slowed their swift march to a whispering power-walk, fanning out as they approached the flashes of lasgun fire and dirty thuds of mortars. She and Alecto, the largest and most obvious of the party, respectively, continued straight on, while Malister and Dorian split off to the left and Marius surged to the right, flanking.
As they neared the din of battle, the rear line of a makeshift barricade and swiftly dug trench emerged from the smog. Alecto slowed, priming his plasma cannon, and boomed out at full volume:
Stand and make your allegiance known!
Loose shells at her feet rattled at his thunderous vox, and as the first few human faces appeared in view – shocked, battered, and filthy – she could see the men and women hunkered in the trench turning to see the Dreadnought and winged Sister of Battle striding out of the fog of war, and beyond the awe in their gaze she saw hope.
"We are the faithful!" Many cried out, their voices reaching over the staccato drumming of mortar fire that kept them pinned to their trench. Most sounded afraid. "We serve the Emperor!"
Malister and the others vectored in and joined them in their straight path to the cover of the trench barricades. A mortar whined past Alecto's chassis, and the Dreadnought simply lowered his suspension with a hiss of hydraulics until he came to a squat of sorts behind a rockrete fixture, hiding his mechanical bulk from the firing lines at the other end of the no man's land.
Sabina counted a ragged fifty or so people, a mix of PDF soldiers and desperate refugees, taking shelter against the storm of mortar fire.
"We should continue, we don't have time to linger," said Malister over their private vox channel.
"The God-Emperor sends one of his Living Saints to deliver us!" One of the soldiers cried. Hushed jubilation and excited questioning exploded among the awed and muddy men and women: Was it true? Had the Emperor sent one of his Angels – a winged, guardian spirit? She forced her third eye away from the mind-static of so many thoughts that had grown into an uproar in her head. A Living Saint? Sabina had seen reliefs and monuments to Saint Celestine and her glorious countenance, but could scarcely find any kinship in such a figure of legend, hymn, and prayer. They had feathered wings in common, certainly, but the gold-armour soaring above battlefields, halo wreathed in holy fire, was a far cry from her own dented armour and tattered, second-hand cloak. In his own way, of course, the Emperor had returned her from death as He had for every one of his Saints. What should have been impossible had become possible. The thrumming of her new second heart told her as much. But the grand, cosmic designs of the God-Emperor were for Him, and Him alone, to understand. It was not her place to question His gift.
Now, her duty was to these people.
"We are wasting time," Malister curtly reminded. Steadfast, she shook her head.
"We won't make it fifty meters past the barricade unless we galvanize them into a proper fighting force. Just ... ten minutes. Allow me that."
He shrugged, agitated, but capitulating nonetheless.
The whine of artillery shells, capped off by blasts of dirt as each impacted in the cratered ground before the trenches shook them. The Astartes were implacable, still as granite. Alecto fired a wide volley of smoke grenades to further cover their position as Sabina hopped atop an unoccupied fire bay and turned to face the desperate mass of soldiers who had turned their shell-shocked faces to her. Steadying herself with a deep inhale, she addressed them:
"Have any of you heard the tale of Saint Fernando?"
They looked back and forth to one another questioningly – a few shrugs and utterances passed between them – but it seemed no one had. Sabina smiled.
"He was once a man, just like you. Not an officer, or commissar, or guardsman, but a simple man holding his planet against the forces at his door. His is a story of glory in defeat."
A great tremble went up among the assembled soldiers, but Sabina shook her head quickly, continuing on before fear could take root. Another artillery shell impacted, closer this time.
"Not just glory!" she insisted. "True grace! What is grace, if not to stand for your loved ones, to fight to protect your homes and way of life? To stand for those unable to stand for themselves?"
Malister shot her a glare. The last line had been for the Astartes, and he knew it. They had forgotten, it seemed, in their desperate battles trapped in time, the compassion of the Blood Angels. All of them knew they could have easily flown over the battlefield and beyond the enemy mortar line, skirting any needless combat. Some of the more grizzled of the PDF seemed to know it too, for the way they shot nervous and knowing glances at the Astartes' jump packs. But some sense of virtue that had not been stamped out in the gruelling war of attrition, and had driven their squad to approach the line in the first place.
"There is no greater virtue in His eyes than to stand tall with your brothers and sisters, even in the face of death. That is to be human."
A murmur of confusion arose. It was not unlike the words they had heard from the rebels themselves: transcendence, grace; but unlike their proselytizing, hers radiated something ineffable that existed through and behind all the edifice of even the Imperium itself, and the one thing that all found awe in, however momentary. A true believer.
"Can you hear them?" She asked. "The drums?"
Malister cocked his head, quizzical.
"It's a hymn my Sister Superior taught me when I first earned my place as a battle sister."
And she began:
"Can you hear the drums Fernando
I remember long ago
another starry night like this."
Alecto whirred, rising up from his squat as he fired off a second volley of smoke grenades to cover him. Dorian and Marius racked the slides on their bolters, and Malister's chainsword revved.
"In the firelight Fernando
You were humming to yourself
and softly charging your lasgun," she sang, drawing her power sword in one hand and plasma pistol in the other, smiling down at man as he checked his lasgun battery.
"I could hear the distant drums
And sounds of Orkish cries were coming from afar."
She hopped up over the trench wall with a flourish of her wings, and stepped out boldly into no man's land, never breaking her hymn.
"They were closer now Fernando
Every hour every minute seemed to last eternally
I was so afraid Fernando
We were young and full of life and none of us prepared to die!"
Mortar shells whined past and an explosion to her right sent clumps of dirt and mud cascading over her, but she held her sword out, unfazed.
"And I'm not ashamed to say
The roar of guns and chainswords almost made me cry,"
And, with a furious grin that only came to her before the moment of battle, she pointed her sword at the enemy line, and charged.
"There was something in the air that night
The stars were bright, Fernando!"
As she ran, she felt the footfalls of men and women scrambling up over the barricade behind her, following her into the field of fire.
"They were shining there for you and me
For liberty, Fernando!"
A well placed mortar took six down in a flash of grit and gore, showering others with flecks of bloody mud. Another two beside her were clipped by lasgun fire and dropped into steaming rag-dolls. And yet she ran on heedless, signing at the top of her lungs. The thunderous footfalls of Alecto resounded behind her as the Librarian Dreadnought took up the charge as well.
"Though I never thought that we could lose
There's no regret!"
Malister joined pace at her side suddenly, chainsword purring in his hand while his bolt pistol barked, spewing mass-reactive rounds at the silhouettes beginning to emerge at the enemy line. Above them, Dorian and Marius zoomed at the artillery embankments, jump-packs carrying them far beyond the ability of the heavy ordinance to track them. A heavy bolter tore another dozen charging men and women to pieces around them.
"If I had to do the same again
I would, my friend, Fernando!"
The man she had smiled at took a slug round to the face, his head simply vanishing in a fine mist. Grimly, she carried on.
"If I had to do the same again
I would, my friend, Fernando!" She cried as she took flight, launching herself over the arc of a mortar that would have hit her square in the chest, and sword-first straight into a heretic who had popped up with his lasgun to take aim at Malister. The force of the impact rent the man into pieces as her power armoured form surged through him and skidded to a halt in the middle of their trench.
In the old days, her reaction times were just slightly better than most other baseline humans: honed from years of training and fighting war after war. Now, it was almost curious as her gene-enhanced senses took charge of their own volition. The man closest to her took a half-step back in shock, too slow to avoid the point of her sword slicing through his head and out the other side of his skull. She watched another lift his lasgun with the fluidity of syrup, and was able to spin and cleave both his arms off with her sword before blasting a hole in another heretic with her plasma pistol, in the space of a half blink. Another tried to spear her with his bayonet, only for a chainsword to tear through his torso as Malister swept into the trench.
The apothecary had mag locked his bolt pistol to his hip once more, simply hacking and sawing his way through the trench; at that close range, there was little the mortals could do stay to his fury. She watched him grab a fleeing man by the back of the head in one huge fist and simply crush his skull.
Dorian's bolter spat out focused bursts of mass-reactive rounds, while Marius flanked the artillery emplacement and tossed a handful of grenades in their midst. The two swept away before the first explosion set off a chain reaction of fire that engulfed the traitor mortars and their munitions. By then the PDF, their numbers cut in more than half by their charge, swarmed into the trench as well. Alecto, she noticed as she plunged her sword into another traitor's throat, was using his immense size to screen fire away from the PDF soldiers, crushing traitors underfoot, and bisecting heretics by the handful with swipes of his enormous power halberd.
A las burst narrowly missed her left wing, clipping her pauldron instead, and with a furious cry she unleashed a blast from her plasma pistol back down the path the las burst had come from, burning a crater through her attacker's chest. In moments it was over, Dorian and Marius landing next to Alecto and Malister wrenching his chainsword free from another heretic's skull. As the roar of battle quieted and she felt the stirring heat of blood fury in her veins quiet to a background hum, Sabina took stock of the survivors scattered about the remains of the enemy fortifications.
Fourteen left alive, and one who would not make it more than a few hours, given the nastiness of his wounds. Fourteen out of over fifty.
"Are we done here?" Said Malister, dry as ever.
Grimly satisfied, she nodded. Fourteen was better than zero, as would have been the case if they had been left to be hammered by the mortars.
She turned to the ragged survivors, sheathing her sword.
"Go now," she told them, "find what faithful survivors you can, and leave this place before the whole Hive comes crumbling down atop you. You cannot follow us from here on. Go! Now!"
She fought the urge to go with them, to shepherd them, and instead turned away without a further word, following the Astartes as the continued on, leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces and scurry away from their hard-won battlefield.
T-minus nine hours and counting ...
Virgil's transponder signal was close. They has passed through the hab section, down a further two levels into a ruined manufactorum. More leaflets and graffiti extolling the lies of the God-Emperor met them as they continued, and even further signs of riots, of violent worker strikes, and disunity. The air reeked of chemical runoff and burning promethium. Great gouges had been torn in rockrete; a transport repurposed as a fighting vehicle had been cloven in several pieces and thrown through an empty vat, where it lay in a heap of twisted metal, wheels still spinning on.
"Eagle 1, Eagle 1," Dorian chanted into his long-range vox-caster, "we are approaching target, begin descent vector."
"Copy, Strike Team," crackled the reply after a lapse for signal delay. "Beginning descent vector, t-minus twenty-seven minutes to teleport range. Out."
They looked to Alecto, who pointed his mechanical finger beyond the production lines to the smelting floor. The Librarian spoke to the group telepathically, laying out the plan a final time.
Canoness, I want you out of sight until we signal you. Take to the rafters. We will approach him head on.
She nodded, launching herself into the air and onto a catwalk suspended from the ceiling – one of the few still in a stable enough piece, at least – to follow their progress from above.
And at last, standing atop a mountain of pulverized heretics and defenders alike, they saw the great Dreadnought, Virgil. He turned to them as they moved beyond the ruined conveyors, his gore-drenched blood talons clasping and unclasping, madness burning through the lenses if his skull-faced sarcophagus.
My sons, he boomed, vox-amplified voice furious and metallic, to me! We will slay the Arch-Traitor on his command deck! For the Emperor!
They did not move. Curious, Virgil took a thundering half-step back as he regarded them one by one. First, he took stock of Alecto: the great Librarian whose own Dreadnought shell was nearly twice Virgil's size, based on some eons ago forgotten pattern. Then the Sanguinary Priest, Malister, a head taller and broader than any of his brothers. He studied Brother Marius, then Brother Dorian, and their strange jump packs and chainswords.
Malister stepped forward, slowly outstretching his free hand as his other flexed at the throttle of his chainsword.
"Brother," he said slowly, "we have come to take you home."
If implacable ceramite and adamantium could emote, Sabina was certain she could almost see the carved sarcophagus frown in confusion. Undaunted, Malister crept forward.
"You are not our father," he said. "You are Virgil, my brother, whom I have fought beside for over a century. Return to us, brother."
Virgil's blood talons scissored anxiously.
No my son, there is no time! We must take the fight Horus! With me!
"He's too far gone," said Marius over private vox.
Sabina, now, commanded Alecto. With a steadying breath and a flex of her flight feathers, she launched herself from the catwalk and soared through the space, gliding down on thermals now visible to her, and landing between Malister and Virgil. She flapped once, then twice, spreading her wings to their fullest and standing tall to face the dreadnought in all his terrifying glory.
"My son!" She shouted. "You have been lost! Return to me."
Something seemed to break within the great Death Company dreadnought then. His blood talons ceased their restless motion and her peered down at her queerly, his immense mechanical legs shuffling back ever so slightly. The mass of bodies beneath him squelched and new blood ran, pooling in the gaps between shattered limbs and mashed organs. He said nothing.
"You are my son, Virgil," she reiterated. "Return to me."
What ... what is this? What sorcery? Vigil cried. A hallucination from Magnus, come to tempt me?
"No," said Sabina, steeling herself against the cold dread awash in her veins, "it is truly I, Sanguinius."
One swipe from his blood talons and she would be rent to pieces in an instant. Yet still she took another step towards the Emperor's wayward son. "Return to me, my child, and step once more into the Emperor's light."
She held out her hand, stepping forward once more until the gore was about her ankles and Virgil loomed. She felt the rage boiling away into confusion as he reached out a dripping talon to her, and ever so gently, ran her fingers along the bloody adamantium blade. With an incredulous look back and forth between each other, as if surprised it had actually worked, the Astartes then moved in, with Malister removing a leather-bound book from his belt-pouch emblazoned with the symbol of the Mechanicus: Virgil's command shutdown protocols. As he began the binaric chant she kept her hand steady upon Virgil's talon, even as the Dreadnought shifted his bulk as if to bow.
"We should prime the beacon," Dorian said to Alecto, but this was not to be. For at that moment, Hell was unleashed upon them.
It began as a screech that echoed in the higher decibels of detectable range and rose to a great, warbling noise that reverberated the very foundations of the manufactorum. Plasteel girders began to warp and shudder against the cacophonous racket; Sabina felt her brain rattling in her skull and imperceptible fire shot through each nerve ending at the hell-spun note, falling to her knees as she clapped her hands over her ears, to no avail. The sound permeated everything, enveloping, surrounding, becoming – it was far more than just a note, far beyond just sound. It was the laughter of Chaos, the raging sound of the Sea of Souls itself that threatened to tear through their strike team.
Virgil shuddered and began to bellow, his blood talons once more scissoring furiously. One bounding step took him sailing over Sabina as she lay prone in the pile of dead. Malister side stepped, narrowly avoiding being barrelled over by the charging, maddened dreadnought, his jump pack snagging on the armour plates of Virgil's leg. The Sanguinary Priest went sprawling into the dirt, his jump pack crumpled with the force. Dorian was not quite as fast as his brother, and took the Dreadnought's right blood talon straight through his chest and out the other side before Virgil was tackled by Alecto's furious bulk.
Dorian's body flopped to rest among the other dead.
Alecto leveraged his superior size to keep Virgil pinned, stamping on the smaller dreadnought's leg and dodging a swipe from a claw. Bolter shells impacted against Alecto's chassis as he grabbed Virgil's arm in his power fist, trying to angle the underslung storm bolter away from his sarcophagus, while the dreadnought screamed and thrashed and kicked. Adamantium claws raked his surface as they rolled about in the dirt and oil and gore, as all about them the noise intensified.
The Librarian was holding back, trying to subdue his opponent, but it was all he could do to keep the fury of his brother's Black Rage at bay. Sabina felt blood trickling from her nose, mingling with the blood all around her. Her world had become awash with blood and agony.
As Marius helped Malister to his feet, a melta beam lanced out from a concealed position, slamming into Alecto's exposed back and turning his engines to molten slag. With a great shudder, he went slack at once and Virgil's claws tore into him with abandon. Throwing off the dead weight, Virgil tried to stand, only to have a hail of plasma fire burn his already damaged legs out from under him. He fell in a pile of screaming, twisted metal, arms windmilling wildly as he spat and cursed at hallucinated traitors.
By now, the two remaining Astartes had steeled themselves against the onslaught of sound. Tracing the path of the melta beam, Marius let loose a flurry of bolter shells before another beam vaporized his head. A final burst of plasma blasts turned Virgil into a smoking wreck, and another lancing melta-beam finished him for good.
Finally, the sound ended, and Sabina was able to gasp for breath as she lay curled in the fetal position. Malister was backing up towards her, chainsword in one hand, bolt pistol in the other, his ruined jump discarded. The shadows all about them seemed to deepen as their unseen attackers finally stepped out from their hidden positions, the garish pink and purple of Slaaneshi Noise Marines leaping out amidst the dull earthen metal and blackened ruins of the manufactorum. They were surrounded on three sides: the two warriors flanking them with smoking plasma pistols, clutching obscene sonic weapons, remained partially concealed, sights trained on the Sanguinary Priest. The one before them strode boldly out into the open, his ornate Terminator armour shrugging off the impact of Malister's mass reactive shells. In one hand he held a viciously curved power halberd, and in the other a combi-melta that grinned at them from a dozen graven images of daemons on its surface.
With a haughty laugh the figure tossed his combi-melta to the ground and continued forward, tanking shot after shot until finally Malister's bolt pistol clicked empty. The figure laughed again, his cloak almost blinding in its scintillating patterns and cosmic swirls.
"Let us do this the old way, little one," the figure cackled.
Malister was larger than any Space Marine she had ever seen, his power armour making him squarely a head taller than his brothers with arms like a Terminator. Next to this purple and golden warrior, he was as a mouse to a cat. The Chaos Lord – for surely only such a title could describe the unholy power of him – wore sleek Terminator armour of a design she could barely recognize as such, twisted with glittering veins of fell energy and chaos icons. Still living faces stretched and mounted to his great pauldrons leered on and laughed while their eyes betrayed the horror frozen of the consciousnesses locked, sunken behind them. Faster than she would have ever expected, the Chaos Lord closed the distance and with an almost playful backhand slap sent Malister's bolt-pistol sailing away into rubble unknown before he could reload or toss it away. Without time to rev his chainsword, Malister simply swung to deflect the upward swipe of the bladed counterweight of the Chaos Lord's power halberd, managing to leverage the blow to skitter back a pace.
Rather than press the attack, the Chaos Lord took a step back as well, spreading his arms wide as if to some grand audience out in the burning ruin of the hive. Though he wasted no time to rev his chainsword and steady himself against the numbness in his other hand – at least two broken fingers – he let the heretic speak. Astartes honour, Sabina supposed.
"I am Morias Enfrite, Phoenix Guard to Fulgrim himself! Chosen of Slaanesh, and Lord of Huntsmen! My boots and the boots of my brothers broke the back of Terra itself when we plundered all those millions you could not protect. I laid siege to the palace of your Emperor back before he was a corpse, boy. I have killed you eighty-seven times, in eighty-seven ways, and I look forward to making our eighty-eighth particularly special."
Malister braced, revved his chainsword, and said, "I don't care."
With a roar, the two collided: chainsword to halberd, in a flurry of sparks and snapping energy. The duel underway, the two other noise marines approached as Sabina attempted to struggle to her feet.
"Look, Leandro," said one in a horribly distended, watery voice, "this is new! A plaything!"
The other noise marine did not reply, but simply turned a dial on his Blastmaster and fired another psychosonic wave at her. It was like being electrocuted: every nerve ending caught fire once more and she fell into a quivering pile of feathers, her limbs unwilling to respond.
"That means an extra variable," said Leandro, "and extra variables are troublesome. That should keep it down for a while. Just long enough for Morias to have his fun."
And indeed, Morias seemed to be having the time of his life. He laughed with each parry or evade, dancing about Malister's blows with a practised ease.
"Too familiar, little priest," he snickered, as he sidestepped a blow, whirling about and blocking the return strike with the blade of his halberd. Malister made to lunge, but feinted and surged to Morias's left, but the Chaos Lord was already waiting for him, leaping back instead of taking the bait, and using his weapon's superior range and Malister's own momentum to slice him at the hip joint of his armor. And Morias danced back yet again, dodging and weaving.
Sabina felt a boot come to rest on her head as she lay shivering, helpless. The noise marine had planted a foot on her face like a colonizer in a new land, pressing her into the blood soaked ground, and forcing her to bear witness.
The dance wore on, cut after cut, blow after blow, Morias Enfrite laughing and cavorting as Malister's desperation and fatigue intensified. With each moment, his defence weakened, his reaction time slowed, worn relentlessly by the Chaos Lord's assault. Cut after cut, he kept on. A lost pauldron. His helm split. Teeth chipped and flew from his chainsword. His enhanced physiology worked overtime to clot the dozens upon dozens of wounds he sustained, combat stims flooding his system to keep him at fighting peak, but it was too little. Another cut. A strike from the haft of the Chaos Lord's halberd that cracked his bracer and fractured his ulna. Another cut.
Malister stumbled, his boot fetching on the slick, uneven ground, and Morias Enfrite knocked his helm clean off with a two-handed blow, sending the priest sinking to his knees, utterly spent. Sabina could almost hear the pounding of his two hearts, the heaving of his extra lung, the frantic pace at which is body tried, in vain, to expunge the building fatigue toxins.
"Silly little priest," Morias chided as he circled him, for the first time removing his own helm and tossing it to one of the noise marines. "Can you feel that? That coldness in your gut? That warning tingle in your joints? That's helplessness."
He rounded on Malister, turning his power halberd over and over in his hands.
"It's closing in around you, little priest. How long have you and your brothers fought and died here in despair? Oh, you must be aware of the temporal loop, by now," he said, gripping Malister by the hair as he squatted down beside him. Malister, despite his weakness, struggled and punched, but Morias deflected his weakened blows and slammed the half of his halberd into his throat. Malister fell back coughing and sputtering as Morias let go of his head; a kick to the chest pushed him into the dirt where he lay, choking.
"Don't worry, I didn't crush your windpipe, just dented it," said Morias. "I told you I wanted to make our 88th dance a special one, and just as the Grandfather wishes, you die slow." He turned to the noise marine with his boot on Sabina's head, for the first time scanning her still-quivering and unresponsive form.
"I see you found a plaything, Targanon," he said. "Just make sure you do not forget the mission in your debaucheries."
The Chaos Lord held out his hand and space seemed to bubble and twist around his palm, a sickly odour pouring from malignant tear in reality, and Morias pulled from nowhere what looked to be a pulsing, green mortar shell: some perverse melding of machine and unlife, rank with disease and stagnation. Her body tried to retch at the sight of it, but her nerves were still unresponsive. Morias strode forward and traded the Chaos artifact for his helm from Targanon, placing it back on his head and turning away with a brilliant swirl of his cloak. Leandro fell into step beside him.
"We will take down their Stormbird, and then make for Echo. Join us there after you have given this world to Nurgle."
The last thing Sabina saw and heard before Targanon blasted her into unconsciousness with his Blastmaster, was the Eye of Terror staring at her from Morias Enfrite's cloak, and the echoes of the Chaos Lord's laughter.
Countdown elapsed.