47. Back in Black

There were very few seats in the known multiverse in which a Space Marine Primarch could sit comfortably. There were none in which he could sit comfortably whilst wearing full Terminator armour.

It was not, strictly speaking, necessary for Primarch Toji Suzuhara to wear the armour. He was in friendly territory, surrounded by his own side's soldiers, and generally as safe as anyone could be within Chaos's fledgling empire. Nevertheless, in the months since he'd taken command of the Bloodhaven facility, he'd developed an unfortunate itch between the shoulderblades whenever he went unarmoured… and when you were a three-metre-tall bioengineered colossus, that translated to a lot of itching.

So it was that several tonnes of adamantium-plated, gently whirring Primarch were squeezed into the crew compartment of one of the battleship New Syracuse's ground-to-orbit shuttles, the reinforced bench creaking ominously beneath him as the overhanging hunchback of the suit's powered exoskeleton scraped bright metallic trails in the paintwork of the ceiling. It was not a sight to encourage small talk, or indeed any activity unrelated to getting as much space between oneself and the big scary monster-man as was humanly possible… which was why the person sitting next to him was experimentally rapping on his left pauldron with her knuckles.

"Hey, is that real adamantium? For personal armour? Hot damn, chief, where'd you get enough power output to even lift that stuff?"

Toji looked down and to the side, meeting the keen, interested, and distressingly enthusiastic gaze of Admiral Rong-Arya. Ah, yes. That's why I was wearing the suit.

Toji was not especially prejudiced against daemons – he couldn't be, really, given that he was married to one. Furthermore, he was quite aware of the contributions that Rong-Arya in particular had made to their understanding of the multiverse – and, more recently, to shoring up their defences now that most of the rest of said multiverse was out to get them. Even so, he could not help but find her a bit… well… creepy, and spending the last few days in her company whilst they made the trip from Earth to Bloodhaven had not improved matters in the slightest. Spending the past fifteen minutes in a cramped, uncomfortable shuttle with her and a team of three Marines who didn't know how to keep their elbows to themselves had done even less to soften his feelings, and the generous dose of Warp-lag he was working off hadn't helped either.

"There's a pair of microfusion reactors in the backpack section," he explained, trying not to sound annoyed at the unwanted physical contact. "The techs wanted to try one of their new antimatter plants to cut down on the bulk, but I wasn't mad on having a three-megaton bomb strapped to my spine. Sorry, admiral. This armour's still too big to be anything other than a Space Marine exclusive."

The daemonhost shrugged. "Eh, no problem. So long as your lot ship out enough to keep my fleet plated up, I'm happy as a clam. Seriously, that stuff is amazing. We'd had it on the Stiletto when we ran into the Cylons, we wouldn't even have had a bit of suntan to show off to the folks back home. Guess that's how it goes when you're stuck with just the one measly little star system to poke around in. Still, we're almost done with that, right? Once the Stargates fire up – bam. No more C'tan, and we get our own universe back. Can't wait."

"Yep, should be nice," Toji replied, half-listening. "To explore strange new worlds, to discover new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no-one has gone before… who do you think they're going to ask us to backstab first, you reckon?"

The room went very, very quiet, the question hanging in the air like an orbiting warship. Oh shit, did I say that out loud?

"I… beg your pardon, sir?" Rong-Arya asked carefully.

Sod it, there's only five other people here. Two of those are servitors, and three are my very own brainwashed goons. At the end of the day, who's going to give a crap? "You heard me, admiral. In your professional opinion, which new civilisation we discover are my old buddies from Tokyo-3 going to want to betray first? It does, after all, seem to be our standard first-contact policy."

"Hey, we didn't do it to all of-" the admiral began.

"There's not much to do around here," Toji cut in. "Bloodhaven's a pretty quiet place, and stuff like processing adamantium shipments from the stealth miners, supervising defence construction, mapping the geography… that's mostly about sitting around waiting, with only an occasional bit of activity thrown in. So we get bored, and bored people get curious. We pick up a whole load of local transmissions, you know that? Told us a great deal. Like the funny little coincidence that someone leaked our technology to the Ori just after the orbital manufactoria back home went online, and we no longer needed to trade with the folks in this universe to arm ourselves. Convenient, wasn't it, that this place had the decency to only collapse into mayhem after it was no longer useful to us?"

Rong-Arya shrugged. "Yeah, that sounds like the gods' M.O., all right. Your point being?"

"Wait – you don't see anything wrong with that?"

"Not really." The admiral's expression softened. "Look, chief, this was your only intervention, right? First time you've seen what we generally do to a universe? Me, I've run two myself, seen the consequences of a couple more, and read the files on another three. As a good rule of thumb, if the gods want a civilisation destabilised, the bastards have it coming."

Toji simply raised an eyebrow.

"OK, so you don't believe me. Let's run down the list, shall we? First, we've got the Alpha Quadrant crowd. The Federation, the Cardassians, and so on. Now, I've gone on way the fuck too often about what happened to little Cassie's people, so let me switch gears and tell you about this world called Bajor. A few subjective decades ago, the Cardassians took over, and… well, you remember all those history lessons back in school, about the shit that Nazi Germany and your own delightful ancestors in Imperial Japan pulled in the twentieth century? They applied that on a planetary scale. The Bajorans were enslaved, forced to wait on their overlords hand and foot and asshole whilst dissidents, deviants, and anyone the Cardassian Union just plain didn't like were herded off to death-camps the size of cities. The resistance begged for the Federation to do something, anything, and what did the shining beacon of the Quadrant do? They sat around and passed the popcorn whilst stuff that made the Rape of Nanking look like a minor lovers' tiff was going down right in front of their eyes, and then when the Cardassians finally pulled out, they moved over to Bajor like nothing had happened. Hey there, see your civilisation's in shambles, now do you want to take a look at this nice, cheap, mass-produced dreck we scraped off the bottom of our replicators?"

A muffled, distant roar shuddered up through the deck, increasing gradually in volume as the shuttle breached Bloodhaven's rudimentary, physics-confounding atmosphere. The endless, swirling sea of polychromatic clouds beneath them took on a faint, reddish tint through the armaplas windows, wisps of fire flicking past in the blink of an eye.

"Or, hey, how about the Praxis? You know what they called one of their warships? There was this one ship, right, that had an all-human crew. They made especially sure of that, to make a point. And the captain – every captain, in this ship's century-long history – was Indian. Hand-picked for exactly that ship. Anyway, you know what it was called? The Bombardment of Delhi. It went around dropping antimatter bombs on rebels, and filming the after-effects for twenty-four-hour entertainment channels. I wish I was making this shit up."

"Even so-" Toji began.

"Even so what? There is nothing – nothing – that we have done to these people that they haven't either done or let happen a thousand times over. Even were we to burn their worlds to the bedrock, salt what is left of the earth, and erase every memory of their existence, it would still not be equal to the concentrated weight of their malice, apathy, and petty loathsomeness. We're just giving them a little taste of what they've been dishing out, that's all."

"Not everyone seems to agree with you on that," the Primarch pointed out mildly.

"The Bureau and their buddies? Don't make me laugh. You saw the intelligence reports – hell, I showed them to you. No, forget that, just look at those pompous assholes' title. They've appointed themselves the administrators of time and space in its entirety, and they've got the power to back it up. Their total fleet strength outnumbers ours a hundredfold. Their grunt soldiers can punch through walls with their bare hands, shrug off anti-tank rounds, and shoot energy blasts from their faces. So I ask you, what the fuck have they been doing with all of that? Where were they when the Cardassians were tearing Bajor a new rectum? When the Praxis were torturing entire populations to death on public TV? When a thousand other, worse atrocities were happening right in their own, self-appointed back yard? You ever want to know what's wrong with this multiverse? What's really wrong with it? Watch one of those smug, sanctimonious fuckwads claim to be the guardians of everything whilst shit like that is going on right under their noses. Don't kid yourself, chief – the reason the Bureau is after us has nothing to do with morality or ethics. We're a threat to them. That's it. Plain old rat-bastard self-preservation. And frankly, if that's the kind of enemy we're making here, I'm pretty OK with that."

She fished a cigarette out of her jacket pocket, held it into the sorcerous fire emanating from her eyes until it caught alight, and took a long, slow drag.

"'Sides, I don't see why it matters much either way. I mean, all of this is temporary. That's why you're here, right?"

"Wait – what do you mean by that?"

This time, it was Rong-Arya's turn to look surprised. "Wait, you don't know? They never told you what the Stargate Project's all about? Warp's teeth, aren't you supposed to be running that thing?"

Toji's lip curled. "'Supposed to be' is exactly right. Ever since they set up the labs around that gate, information's been strictly need-to-know – and apparently, I don't. Even Alicia clams up every time I ask."

His daemonhost companion's eyes narrowed. "Well, that's not exactly fair, is it? Ye gods, chief, did you actually think we were planning on leaving those universes we've hit the way they are? No wonder you've been having second thoughts. I doubt it's a big deal, though – probably just an administrative oversight. I mean, they told me, after all."

"And would you care to share?" Toji asked drily. Gods, just how far out of the loop am I?

"Sure thing." She glanced over to the shuttle's other passengers. "Protocol Alpha-Twelve. You guys, you heard nothing."

The Marines twitched in their seats, eyes rolling back and faces slackening as the implanted trigger-phrase took hold. Rong-Arya took another puff of the cigarette, and then stubbed it out against the nearest super-soldier's knee-pad.

"Got those from a Mislaatite pleasure-cult on the New Syracuse. Not normally my kinda thing, but they're pretty more-ish. Also utterly lethal to any unaugmented human within five metres, but hey, that's not a big deal for folks like us, right? Yeah, yeah, I know, the Stargate thing. OK, here's what I remember. Our primary objective's to get rid of the C'tan, yeah? Can't fight them as we are, so we have to… ah… borrow stuff from other universes to stand a chance. Thing is, when me and the Stiletto set out, it soon became apparent that the rest of the multiverse is in a bit of a state. Kicking the C'tan's metal asses is all well and good, but if we have to ignore the shit that everyone else is in to accomplish it… nah. Not going to happen. And guess what? The gods agreed with me."

"Go on."

"The problem is, though, that most of these universes… they've been like they are for a long time. The corruption, the cruelty, the injustice… it's all rooted in pretty deep. Trying to work within the system and use the existing tools to fix the problem won't work, because the system is part of the problem. To achieve real, lasting change, you have to burn it all down and start again."

"Well, I'm seeing a lot of burning down," Toji said. "Not so much of the second bit."

"Precisely, and that's because the second bit is the tricky bit. The expensive bit. To rebuild an entire universe, better than before… you're going to need divine intervention. And that's where the Stargate Project comes in. The precise metaphysics escape me, but basically, it's a power source, designed to channel energy from hundreds of universes straight to the gods, giving them enough juice to usher in a new golden age of humanity wherever we've prepared the path for them. That's what you're building, chief – a tool to reshape the multiverse. Cool, huh?"

The Primarch was silent for a moment. "You're… sure about this?"

"Completely. Got it right from the horse's mouth soon after I came back. Lord Tzintchi was absolutely delighted with what I'd been doing. Couldn't wait to tell me." She looked almost indecently pleased at this.

One of the side-benefits of being a Primarch was a certain affinity for sorcery, and under Alicia's slightly scatter-brained tuition, Toji had picked up a few tricks. One of them was empathy – the ability to detect minds within a certain area, to read surface emotions, and, most importantly, to tell whether someone was lying to him. Rong-Arya was not. Holy hell.

Toji stared out of the window. The cloud-layer had reacted to their presence, splitting apart and reaching long, probing tendrils upwards to brush at the interloper. Daemons swarmed around the brightly-coloured ribbons of vapour, underlit by the clouds' gentle glow. A broad swathe of dull, red earth was visible through the breach, and, at its centre, a broad, shallow crater thirty kilometres across, ringing a ten-kilometre-wide mass of low, armoured buildings, the twin spires of their void shield generators probing up into the heavens.

Carmine Hollow. An impregnable fortress. The staging ground for every excursion from inside the Wall since the fall of the Suzumiyaverse. Home to over a million mortal souls, plus twenty Evangelions, two thousand Space Marines, and innumerable daemons and clone-bred servitors, with more arriving every week. And also, apparently, the salvation of the multiverse.

Shinji, you've got a lot of questions to answer.

He leaned back in his seat, ignoring the screech of his armour as it scraped against the ceiling again. "By the way, admiral, I was meaning to ask. After we pulled our TSAB recruits from active duty, didn't you request that some of them be handed over to you? What happened to them?"

Rong-Arya's fangs gleamed in the alien light. "Education."

He could have used his truthsense then. He chose not to. There were some questions in the multiverse that he wasn't too keen on getting the answers to.

Her smile broadened, and he knew she thought him weak.


The shuttle's ramp settled into the firm, spongy surface of the landing pad, a slight bruise spreading across the ground. Bloodhaven had been more active lately, sculpting its own surface to better defend its inhabitants, and the side-effects were still visible. The reddish-brown soil had taken on a distinctly fleshlike tone, droplets of blood welling out whenever a Chaos earth-mover cut into it, whilst the distant ridge of the crater's rim gleamed pale and bright in the clouds' weird alien light, resembling polished bone as much as rock.

Toji stepped out, Rong-Arya and the Marines following a moment later. The entire First Company of the Sons of Toji were waiting for them, their black armour shining like the carapaces of a hundred oversized, heavily-armed beetles. Leading them were the four Marines comprising the Primarch's honour guard, heads bowed and weapons presented for inspection.

The honour guard were signs of the gods' favour, hand-picked from each of their patron Chapters. Anatole Gianakopulos of the Bearers, tall, spindly, and insectile, with the long-handled flail that appeared to be part of his arm, Pyotr Nureyev of the Whips, barely visible behind the cloud of living incense that coiled tightly around him like a blanket, Zhang Liu of the Heralds, the ward-parchments on his armour rustling in a nonexistent wind… and Sophie Deneuve of the Reavers, her blunt features reshaped a dozen times over by her Chapter's ritual scarring.

No one knew why the Emperor of Mankind, the brilliant 41st-milennium bioengineer who had created the Marines, had decided that they should all be male. Theories ranged from Master Fleshcrafter Tikolo's staggeringly complex exploration of irreconcilable biological differences, which drew upon evidence like the different ways in which high levels of oestrogen and testosterone interacted with geneseed secretions, to Admiral Rong-Arya's elegantly simple 'he was a misogynistic fuckwad' thesis, which drew upon evidence like the original Marines' companion organisation, an all-female anti-psyker unit who wore impractically figure-hugging armour, preferred to be seen and not heard, and had a distressingly high mortality rate.

Whatever the truth, Asukhon had decided that this state of affairs was unacceptable, and set an extraordinary number of scientists towards finding a way for female recruits to join her Reavers. The project had apparently not been quite as successful as they might have hoped, which was why the other Space Marine Chapters remained all-male, but Toji had certainly found nothing to complain about in the combat performance of the Reaver battle-sisters under his command. He did sometimes wonder why Deneuve insisted on lugging around her enormous sniper-pattern rail rifle when her Chapter was so monomaniacally fond of close-quarters combat, but after seeing her pick off the targets on the Hollow's firing ranges from the parade ground four miles away, it wasn't something that he considered especially relevant.

He looked out over his assembled subordinates, and started counting down in his head.

"Primarch," Deneuve said in her flat, nasal voice, "welcome home. We await your command."

"At ease, lieutenant. Anything interesting happen whilst I was away?"

"We've picked something up on the long-range sensors," Liu replied. "Could just be another Warp-storm, but-"

"TOJI!"

Something small and pale in a long, black cloak barrelled into his midriff, his armour's shock absorbers squealing at the impact. He reached down, scooping it up with one massive arm. Five. Earlier than I'd expected.

"Morning, Alicia. How's it going?"

"Toji I've missed you so much it was so boring around here but we're almost done and did you get me any presents did you-"

"Hey, slow down there, we've got plenty of time to chat about stuff. No need to get it all out at once." He frowned. "Wait, what happened to your face?"

Long, curling scars trailed across Alicia's cheeks and forehead, describing intricate, regular patterns across her too-white skin. As Toji looked more closely, he saw more of them coiling up her arms into the short, baggy sleeves of her Barrier Jacket, seeming to writhe and undulate before his eyes.

"Oh, those? Neat, aren't they?" The child-mage giggled. "I was going to show you. The Stargate stuff was getting really complicated, and I was kind of falling behind. It wasn't my fault – fabricating trans-dimensional energy matrices is really tough, and Papa Tzintchi says I'm better at it than anyone – but I didn't want to let him or Mama Asukhon down, so I asked Lieutenant Liu what sorts of tricks he's learnt to boost his spells. You see those parchments he's wearing? They're runic scripts to store and focus Warp-energy. Really cool, but I thought he was making it too complicated. Don't scold him, Toji, it's what Papa Tzintchi's people are supposed to do, right?" She smiled at the Marine sorcerer, who managed to twist his mouths into something resembling a nervous grin. "I mean, why bother with armour and paper when you can just carve it into your skin?"

Why indeed. Toji shot a baleful gaze at Liu, who looked appropriately shamefaced. Alicia didn't notice.

"So yeah, it hurt, but I felt sooo much better afterwards. It's the blood, you see? Mama Asukhon was right. It all comes down to blood in the end. I wonder if I should show her? What do you think, Toji?"

To Toji's infinite relief, it was then that the base's alarms went off.


The blowfish glared at Toji accusingly as the hatch descended between them, its bulging eyes promising an eternity of torment for his sins against fishkind. There was a horrible, organic sound, and the device's screen flickered into life.

"You're sure, then?" he asked.

The senior tech-priest nodded, his bionic eyes dilating. "It's why we rang the bell, sir. See that big red blotch in the top-left corner? Look closer – it's granular, lots of little dots all clumped together. If it were a natural anomaly, like a Warp-storm, we'd see a blurred, unified mass. Spilled milk, not sugar, if you follow me. Those dots are engines, thousands of them. It's an invasion fleet, the biggest I've ever seen, and it's headed our way."

Toji peered at the screen. Guess you can't see the torches and pitchforks at this distance. "We got an ETA?"

"Two weeks, give or take time-distortion effects from the Warp. One week until we can start picking out and classifying individual ships. I've been meaning to say, sir, this is some amazing tech. We really appreciate having it to play around with."

The Primarch shrugged tectonically. "Whatever gets the job done. Hey, Nureyev, how long until we can pick up intel from our agents on that fleet? The gods' purges didn't get all of them, right?"

"You'd be correct, sir." The Mislaatite lieutenant's silken voice positively flowed down the line. "By our estimates, the Bureau complement alone has over two dozen Divine Assassins on board, plus a hundred or so suborned operatives smart enough to figure out a basic messenger ritual. We think most of them are still loyal, too – either Lord Tzintchi's daemons missed them altogether, or they just aren't holding a grudge. Normally, we'd be able to call them right now, just like our embedded agents back in enemy territory, but Warp-travel cuts down the range of our communications somewhat. Should be hearing from them in two days."

Two dozen? We sent hundreds of Divines to Bureau space. Warp's teeth… Toji wasn't sure why the gods had decided to exterminate the Divine Assassin and Hellhound agents they had seeded in enemy territory. He just hoped they'd had a good enough reason to warrant crippling their foreign intelligence network. Sighing inaudibly to himself, he re-opened his armour's comm-link with a thought.

"Nureyev, I'm heading over to Ops. We've only got fourteen days left, and I want to make sure that we give our new friends a nice, warm welcome."

Even if I can't blame them for what they're doing.


Author's Notes: Yes, the Doorstop is back, in the colour of your choosing. You may detect a certain theme in this new block of chapters, and it's here to stay for the remainder of the Bloodhaven arc, because I just can't resist a terrible pun. Or, for that matter, poking the notorious 'female Space Marine' anthill – as a member of the old Black Library forums, I have fond memories of the screaming matches that caused.

And no, no blowfish were harmed during the making of this chapter. Well... maybe a couple.