Early 36th Millennium, dawn of the Plague of Unbelief
Onboard the Fires of Purgation, Void Spectres strike cruiser
A blue haze filled the space, then went black.
A golden light ignited on the end of Basil's Singing Spear, allowing him to see. Three enormous reclining chairs, each molded to fit the body of an armoured space marine, filled the chamber. Basil and Siân stood on opposite sides of the middle chair which had a dark control panel built into its arms. The ceiling was low overhead, far too low to have allowed a marine to stand fully upright, and suspended from it were the three upper halves to the mold. Impact bracing. To Basil's left, beyond the feet of the three chairs, was an enormous hatch.
"We are in a life pod," Basil said to Siân, her grey featureless mask turning to the sound of his voice. "The Slann teleportarium contained some sort of Warp-tuned auspex that allowed me to visualize what I was searching for and find it. I felt such an arrival point would be most likely to have maintained a sealed environment as no more drop pods remain attached to the vessel."
"What sort of enemies might we encounter here?" Siân asked as she flexed her fingers on the long hilt of her Witchblade.
"I do not know," Basil answered. "Matthias told me that he believed a single Librarian, accompanied by a small number of servitors, guided the vessel here by Faith alone after it entered the Warp through a tear created by a Rift shell. It was a ruse to convince the Tech-Priests of Vichka that the vessel had been destroyed, along with the Condenser that they sought."
He pulled a rebreather from his pack and attached it to his helmet. Siân glanced at him from behind her featureless mask and merely shrugged. Perhaps she has some miniaturized Aeldari technology in that mask that acts like a rebreather, he suggested to himself with a shrug of his own.
"Ready?" she asked. Basil nodded, and she quickly spun open the hatch. There was a loud crack as the metal separated and the air seal broke. The hatch opened inward, revealing another hatch on the opposite side. One that opened to the interior of the Purgation. Siân opened it, like she had the other one, to similar effect. A light glow filled the escape pod from without.
Basil grasped the Warp and stepped through the second hatch. His helmet's occulum told him that atmospheric pressure had been properly maintained. He glanced at the dim fixtures spread along the grey bulkhead and ceiling. Emergency power still functioning, he realized. Is the reactor damaged or was it merely shutdown? Basil did not waste time searching for the answer and simply reached out with his psychic senses. He focused on what he knew of the Condenser from Ipabog's notes that Matthias had shared with him. It was a large hexagonal object fashioned from a black, psychically receptive material. Basil channeled a trickle of power, fashioning an external reservoir of his ability to read the past and the future.
A small ball of golden light appeared in the air before Basil and began to float down the corridor. He followed it, without hesitation, while maintaining his concentration. His feet left tracks in the fine layer of dust on the deck, a slow accumulation of all the particulates in the air after the life sustainers had shut down, and Siân carefully stepped in each print as she followed him. "Do you know where it is leading us?" Siân asked as she continued watching for trouble.
"I would guess the Librarium," Basil answered. "But I have no idea where that is."
They walked down the long corridors; dimly lit passages designed to handle the flow of large numbers of individuals at any given time but were deserted. Imperial cruisers typically had crews in the tens of thousands, although space marine strike cruisers had technological artefacts installed that allowed for much smaller complements, but the vessel was empty, a ghost ship. They walked in silence, broken only by the occasional hum of a hidden cogitator or aging light fixture.
The pair followed Basil's psychic locator until they came to a passage on the right marked with a peculiar symbol, two intertwined silver snakes facing each other at the top and with a pair of black wings outside their forms, the Caduceus. On the wall beside the passage was a simple inscription.
Medicae Deck Stowage
The glowing ball of light continued beyond the passage but Basil stopped. A moment later, the bulb stopped too, waiting on its creator. Basil glanced down the corridor for a moment and then stepped into the passage. The bulkheads were painted a pristine white, unlike the grey he had just stepped out from.
"Your psychic locator did not choose this direction, Basil," Siân said. "Why are you going this way?"
"I made a promise that I intend to keep," Basil answered over his shoulder and said nothing more. She asked nothing more and simply continued to follow in his footsteps.
Basil opened a door and glanced within and then closed it. Then a second, and a third. He passed several more doors without bothering to open them as he made his way along the corridor. Finally, the passage came to an end where another passage crossed it, and Basil stopped.
Directly across from him was an armoured bulkhead with no visible door.
An unmarked medicae stowage compartment protected by an armoured bulkhead. And no visible door. Basil knew what must be inside. He grasped the Warp and felt the edges of the compartment, searching for what was within, and then he felt it. A ward? Of course, the Void Spectres placed a psychic ward here. He chuckled to himself. Mistress Ilronanna spent months instructing me on how to create and unwind wards…and said I was her best student. Basil quickly analyzed the ward, finding each deceptive ploy, until he finally teased forth the threads he needed, and unwound it.
A loud thump announced the lock's disengaging as a previously not visible door opened wide. Basil glanced over his shoulder to see Siân's featureless mask staring at him. She quickly turned away and began guarding against trouble again.
Basil stepped through the open door and into a small compartment. The room was well-lit, no dim emergency power, with white walls and a white floor. And in the middle sat a single device, a black case, with a small keypad on its surface. A stasis box, Basil quickly concluded, and within it…His thought froze as he touched the box.
The chamber was large and well-lit, with white walls. And filled with countless tables, each with an immobile human body sitting atop it. And beside each table was a tall medicae device with countless dials and tubes connecting it to the bodies. Test subjects, Basil realized. Subjects sacrificed to reproduce the geneseed used to create the Void Spectres. Build a reservoir of genetic material large enough to found a chapter of space marines.
Two individuals walked into the chamber, one vastly larger than the other. The larger individual had much of his body replaced by a mechanical chassis with countless mechadendrites protruding from it and he was adorned with an enormous red smock. A Tech-Priest, a genetor to be more precise, Basil realized. But his attention was quickly drawn to the smaller individual who was dressed in a simple white coat with short black hair. Matthias! The Inquisitor appeared much younger than the time he had spent with Basil. He not only took part in the Exorcisms of the Void Spectres' First Company, he took part in their genetic creation.
"Did you recheck the results?" Matthias asked. "I need to know there are no anomalies. We can have no mistakes with this endeavour. Problems will lead to questions we need to be not asked."
"There are no anomalies," answered a mechanically generated voice from the Tech-Priest. "I have checked and rechecked the specimens as I always do, absent your instructions," it said. "I have assured you that the source is perfectly pure, with no known defects, and unusually potent, like the Primarch from which it was taken. You know this to be true. That is why you requested this source."
What is the source? Who is their Primarch? Basil asked himself. Not the Exorcists. Dorn was their Primarch, and it is known their geneseed no longer produces the Betcher's Gland and the Sus-an Membrane. Basil tugged at the Warp, manipulated it to reach back farther, but the Warp caught him, took him for a ride. He reached back much farther than he intended.
There were no markings of place, but Basil intuitively knew where he was. Luna, the satellite of Holy Terra, in an ancient Selenar gene-lab vault. Before him were countless coffers built into the grey vault wall. Countless drawers waiting for contents to be added or removed. And each drawer was labeled with three sets of hexadecimal numbers separated by hash marks. Basil instinctively recognized what each stood for as he viewed it. The last two sets were the batch number followed by the sample number from that batch, and scanning the drawers told him those samples numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Samples of cultivated genestock. But his mind rested on the first hexadecimal number, the legion number. A one followed by a zero, the hexadecimal number system representation for the decimal number sixteen. The Sixteenth Legion of space marines. The legion which, at that time, had earned its first moniker for the pacification of Holy Terra's satellite at the start of the Great Crusade, the Luna Wolves. The legion which would later assume another moniker, the Sons of Horus, in honour of their Primarch. The Sixteenth Legion's gene-father, and those of the Void Spectres, was the Primarch Horus, the Arch-Traitor.
Basil pulled back from the stasis box and reality crashed back around him. He was again in a small chamber with Siân guarding the door. He took a deep breath before speaking. "We will take this with us." Basil entered a couple strokes into the keypad and the box lifted off the ground. "Now, we must find the Condenser." Siân simply nodded, then exited the compartment and began back down the corridor when whence they came. Basil followed her with the floating stasis box following him.
