A/N: Review Responses are in my forums as normal. Thanks to all who read and reviewed. We have this and one more chapter detailing Tayor's time during the heresy.
Chapter Thirteen: Maledicta Terra
There were no more lifts; no elevators.
Stein and Taylor made their way steadily down a seemingly endless array of steps and ramps falling deeper and deeper into the earth. He followed the Sigillite's map into the most ancient bowels of Terra.
"Are you sure transport's waiting?" Taylor's voice piped through the vox unit of his helmet as clearly as if she were speaking in the clear.
"So the Sigillite promised."
The walls around them rotted. It was the only way Stein could think to describe the dissolution and corruption that seemed to be seeping deep into the earth itself. In some spots he could see what looked like pulsing veins streaking through the ancient carved rock. In other places bulbous fungal growths sprouted from the walls or floor, moving almost as if they were more animal than fungal.
The air was thick with a miasma of spores and dust shaking free from orbital bombardment so powerful that even in these depths they felt it, each fleck glowing grotesquely in their artificial vision. The perversions of the Traitor Legions and their Chaos allies were destroying Terra itself.
He tried hard not to think about how bad things were on the surface, if the rot had reached so far down. The sheer length of their passage weighed on them. His knees and back ached from the constant stairs and downward spiraling ramps. His throat ached with thirst, and the first steps of hunger. They had been moving for hours since leaving the prison through the impossible maze. Without their power armor, he wondered how far they could have made it.
At first, they moved through heavily guarded areas, but Stein's warrant from the Sigillite gave them passage. None questioned them in their archeotech power suits. The quality of the suits might have been unique, but the nature of them was not. They saw many others moving about with their own Sigillite-given purposes and tools. But after a few hours, they left the panicked, grim masses behind and moved into eerie silence.
"Have you ever seen anything like this?"
It was a loaded question to someone who had seen so much.
"I've personally only left Terra once," came the answer after a long, thoughtful silence. "So I can't talk about any xenos races. But here? It felt like we were all going to perish during the height of the AI rebellions. Then again during the world wars that followed. Then the warring feudal states, and the techno barbarians. The first war that saw my first life end. But this?" She motioned toward one particularly horrid, pulsing pool of ooze on the floor before them.
"I've never seen anything like this before. The walls between the living and the dead have been ripped open. Violated. Nothing like that has ever happened here before, not like this."
Hours later, they reached the end of their open passage. Their helmets did not have lumens, instead they displayed their environment to them in a false light as if the sun were shining down through the earth. Under this artificial sight, they saw a narrow passage cut in the solid granite of the end of the larger passage. Where before a Leman Russ tank could have gone, now only mortal individuals could pass. It was too small even for an Astartes.
Stein stepped forward, having to turn side-ways, and began side-stepping through. Taylor followed immediately behind him.
If Stein were claustrophobic, the passage would have driven him mad. His own breath rang in his ears as he moved through the seemingly endless, cramped tunnel. Cold, unyielding stone pushed against him, but still he forced himself forward. For his own sanity.
For Taylor.
Abruptly they came into a new, larger space. Unlike the tunnel they left, this one was perfectly round except for the elevated floor, and if the auspex of his helmet spoke true, was twelve meters in diameter. An ancient, rusted rail ran down the center of it beyond the sensor capabilities of the helmet.
A single figure stood near the corroded rail, clad in carapace armor. He had a sealed environmental helmet, but he held it in his hands. Behind him were two relatively small jetbikes of a type Stein had never seen before.
"I am Khalid," the man said in greeting. "The air in this place is breathable for now."
Without prompting, Taylor removed her helmet and took a pull of water. Her long, curling black hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat. "Are you one of Malcador's?" she asked when she drank.
"I am," Khalid said. "You must be quick. Loyalist forces are in full retreat to the Palatine Walls. Traitor marines and…other things have penetrated deep into the inner rings. They are actively infiltrating even subterranean spaces."
Stein followed Taylor's lead, removing his helmet, and took water. It might be their last opportunity for a time. Even by Jetbike, the Imperial palace was so huge it could take more than a day of constant travel to escape its perimeter. That was assuming they could do so unimpeded.
"Any intelligence on our path?" he asked.
"None," Khalid said. "I am sorry." Dark, intelligent eyes regarded Taylor intently. "He would not let the fallen saint go if things were not at an endgame. May the Emperor protect you both."
Taylor snorted at the idea. "He can't even protect himself now, much less anyone else. Even gods can be overcome."
Rather than argue, Khalid bowed. "Just so." Without another word, he turned and disappeared into the shadows.
"Do you know how to ride one of these?" he asked.
She walked over to the bikes. "One of my children used to ride professionally. Half the size of these, twice as fast. She showed me the basics."
"When was this?"
She glanced over her shoulder and smiled wryly. "A while ago. Eat one of your ration bars. It might be a while before we can stop to eat again."
He was about to say the very same thing, and he could see in her face before the lumens that floated over the bikes that she knew it. She was grinning at him as she followed her own advice.
He laughed and did what she said. It only made sense.
~~Revelation~~
~~Revelation~~
They made good progress for three hours.
The auspex sensorium in their helmets synched automatically to the more powerful sensor suite in the archeotech jetbikes. It was the only reason Stein was able to catch the anomaly ahead. The sound muffling systems on the bikes were designed to funnel the sound waves behind them–a stealth system for frontal attack. But if they moved too close, they would be detected.
"Do you see it?"
"Yes." Taylor slowed her jetbike down quickly, decelerating fast enough that they came to a halt within twenty meters. Both climbed off their bikes; Stein removed his long-las, but the scope could not penetrate the darkness far enough to detect what the bike's more powerful auspex could. The long-las was not archeotech, and its machine spirit could not mesh with that of his armor or the bike itself.
"We have to get closer," Taylor said.
She had her own more elegant weapon in her hands. She turned and in the shadowless gray of their artificial light, she looked slim and deadly.
"Ten paces back," he said.
She nodded, and together they started down the tunnel with Stein in the lead, and she ten paces back to cover him in the event of ambush. They stayed to one side of the tunnel, where the curving wall met the flattened, dust-covered surface.
What saved them from being detected even with the muffling system was a curve of the tunnel. It was gradual–something they would have noticed at speed, but on feet barely discernible. And yet that curve of the ancient tunnel with its time-rusted track was what kept them from seeing what awaited, but also kept what waited from seeing them.
Stein dropped silently to one knee; Taylor moved up close behind him to do the same. She rested one gauntlet across his shoulders as the two stared.
Giants clashed in a flurry of wildly slashing helmet lumens and power blades. Mass-reactive bolts sent billows of powdered permacrete into the air. There were at least ten giants. In the flashing lights, Taylor caught hints of beaten, filthy white armor, and on one pauldron the hint of the Vth legion iconography. There were only two of them, though.
They faced eight traitors, and the traitors looked horrific in the brief flashes of light. She saw their armor and winced. "Word Bearers," she muttered. "Hate those guys."
Though Stein felt the familiar adrenaline rush of fear, over it he also felt the forced calm of tactical training. He charged his long-las.
He didn't need to explain his reasoning or his actions. More than anyone else, Taylor understood exactly the situation they were in. She moved further out into the open with her own long-las, kneeling beside him to better steady herself.
One of the White Scars stumbled back from the three opponents he faced, while the other artfully but hopelessly held back five.
"Right," Stein whispered.
"Center," came the cold response. Taylor sounded furious.
"Fire."
The sniper rifles were not archeotech, but they were of the finest quality and manufacture available in the Imperium. Their targeting systems were unmatched amongst their peer weapons, and Stein was an accomplished shooter. His shot hit the targeted XVIIth traitor marine just below the malformed tusks of his helmet, but above the gorget of human skulls he'd adorned himself with.
The blast burned through the creature's lightly armored neck sufficiently to remove his head.
Taylor's shot struck her target's helmet, shattering the ceremite helm and exposing the marine's mutated, snarling face below. Her second shot finished him.
The wounded White Scars Astartes did not hesitate to take advantage of the sudden change in circumstances. As his third attacker looked up right to where Taylor and Stein knelt, the Loyalist marine stabbed up with a powerful swore right into the seam of ceremite plates and into the traitor's groin. Nor did he stop, plunging the sword to the hilt and discharging its power deep within the traitor.
The corrupted creature's howls distracted his companions.
"Right," Stein called.
"Center left," Taylor echoed.
Their sniper rifles were near silent, and were shaped with Martian techcraft such that neither had noticeable recoil. Stein's shot once more took a traitor in the neck. Taylor's shot again shattered a helmet. However, this time her second shot missed because the traitor marine fell back when his helm shattered.
For the traitor marine's quick thinking, he avoided Taylor's second shot, but received in its stead a sparking, White Scars plasma blade across his neck. Suddenly it was not eight on two, but four on two. And though the Word Bearers were mutated, fierce and horrifying, the White Scars fought with such grace and skill that the four traitors could not gain the advantage.
"Right," Taylor called first. "Just to shake things up."
"Try for the neck," Stein advised.
"I am."
She fired, and once again wasn't able to connect where she wanted. But this time her second shot did the job. Stein actually missed his third shot, but their combined efforts turned the tide for the two loyalists, changing it from four on two to two and a half. And then one on two; and finally the end.
"Identify yourselves!" The White Scar's Gothic sounded thickly accented.
"Imperial agents!" Stein called back. "We were passing through and saw you."
"Then be quick! The dead do not always remain so!"
"That doesn't sound good," Taylor muttered.
They locked their rifles to their back pack and ran back to their jetbikes. In moments the two machines hummed back to life and began hovering forward at half speed. They made the last stretch of the curve, both expecting the two White Scars to wave them on.
Taylor cursed in a half-scream as a white-armored body, cloven apart almost like a slaughtered food animal, flew right at her. With reflexes born of terror and augmented by armor, she jumped free of her bike seconds before the dead White Scars marine body, itself almost half a ton fully armored, crashed into the machine.
Stein brought his bike to a halt. He didn't call her name because doing so wouldn't help. Instead, he pulled his Vulkite pistol and took aim.
Blood sprouted from his nose and his vision filled with odd floaters as he beheld something that should not have existed.
It bore vestiges of the XVIIth traitor marine whose body it inhabited, but only in so far as the occasional plates of broken ceremite armor that clung to its body like scabs. It filled the entire oval tunnel, and seemed made not just of one body, but several. It wielded five arms, three of which wielded two bolter guns and a power maul.
The remaining White Scars marine fought valiantly, but his blows seemed almost childish against the sheer bulk of the writhing horror.
Exoplanar. That was the official term, Stein knew. But it was a lie meant to sanitize the horror. This was not an extradimensional xenos. This was a demon–a demon from hell itself.
He fired his weapon. The Vulkite beam burned easily through the demon's body, but the creature didn't even notice. It spoke with multiple voices, teasing the lone White Scars.
"Join us, brother! Give praise to Lorgar, the Bearer of the Word!"
"Worship him, the most favored son of Chaos!"
"Gift us with the Boon of Pain, to turn the Galaxy red with blood, and feed the hunger of the true Gods!"
The words echoed in Stein's mind like hammer blows against his helmet. He could feel blood seeping from his ears as the utter violation of the demon's presence burned the world around them.
The loyalist marine never had a chance, but neither did he stop fighting until he lost his head to the traitor's power blade. As the body fell, six sets of glowing, sickly green eyes latched not onto the man shooting it with a Vulkite weapon, but onto where Taylor was slowly picking herself up from her fall.
"Oh! My brothers, do you see?" The demon called out gleefully. "Do you see the corpse emperor's kin? We remember you, Whore of Telos! We remember you! You were there when the Emperor betrayed the true gods! You will come with us! You will join us!"
Stein waited for her to shout her defiance. To pull her weapons and shoot the monster. Instead, she just turned the face of her helmet to him and stood waiting silently as the demon tried to approach.
It couldn't. Stein watched, astonished, as the demonic collage of dead traitors pushed toward her, only to scream and jerk back violently. "Anathema! Anathema!"
"I'm not a blank," she said, though Stein couldn't tell if she were speaking to him, the demon, or fate itself. "I'm just a part of a lost whole."
"If you will not join us, then you die!" the demon roared. "And you will be reborn in the embrace of our most blessed father!"
Stein kept firing, screaming as the demon lifted its bolter guns toward his ward. Taylor just stood, waiting.
A wall of gold saved her; saved them both.
In the artificial light of his helm, with his eyes still obscured by the psychic shock of the demonic apparition, he couldn't not tell which of the Emperor's companions had descended with such cold fury, but it didn't matter. Even towering as the gold-clad giant did, the demon rose still higher and bulked far more.
Like the White Scars marine, the size of the enemy did not give the Custodes cause for hesitation. But unlike the White Scars, the Emperor's companion was stronger and faster and bore a magnificent archeotech spear longer than Stein was tall.
He drifted closer to where Taylor stood watching, and instinctively reached his gauntlet out for hers. She gripped his back and together they watched as demigod fought demon, as if out of the depths of earth's mythos.
The demon fought in a disjoined fashion, as if each of its three stolen traitor bodies were trying to exert itself over the others. But its bulk alone made it dangerous. Even so, the Custodes easily parried its power blade, reposting with such strength it took the whole arm off. Bolter guns fired, but the golden warrior batted the arms off target, all the while slicing and wounding the large collection of stolen flesh.
Heads and limbs were taken off, until finally the monster succumbed with an echoing scream. Stein suspected if he hadn't been next to Taylor, the sound alone would have killed him. But within the psychic null of her presence, his helmet filters were enough to dull the sound to a tolerable roar.
The silence that followed left a ringing in the helmet auditory filter.
Under the artificial light of their helms, the Custodian glowed in a halo of golden power. He turned and stepped toward them, standing almost twice Taylor's height. With the whir of servomoters and actuators in armor as exquisite as had ever been made, but now battered and scared with unceasing battle, he knelt down until he could look them in the face.
"I should kill you where you stand," a deep, utterly calm voice said.
"You're still a dick, Valdor," Taylor said without missing a beat. "What do you think that spear would show you if you killed me? Do you really want to know your Emperor that well? Would you still be loyal if you knew what you were?"
"My loyalty is built into my very genecraft," came the response. Now the giant sounded… amused?
His ears still ringing, Stein broke his silence. "Lord, how could the enemy be so deep?"
The glowing lens-plates of the armor turned to face him. "They hunt. They hunt the Sigillite's pet, just as I hunt them. They likely don't even know what directs their steps."
Taylor removed her helmet–blood trickled down the side of her face from her crash. "Show me," she said firmly.
"Why?"
"I was there when you were created, Valdor. You don't remember, but I was there. I want to see your face."
To Stein's genuine surprise, Valdor complied. The massive domed helmet, itself the size of a child, came away with a sucking sound of escaping air. The face under it was broad and beautifully handsome. Not like Sanguinius or his sons, but rather a brutal, broad perfection.
"I do remember," Valdor admitted. "In my dreams. You held my hand during the first rituals. And then you left."
Taylor wiped away a drop of moisture. "I didn't leave, I was escorted out. Because he killed you. Your birth name was Adanel. He promised he would make you a warrior and a prince. It was the last time I ever believed him. He killed you. He killed my son and made me hold his hand while he did it. He used the corpse of my child to fashion you. Gods damn him, I can still see Adanel in your eyes."
Her words seemed impossible. This woman spoke of a warrior who helped the Emperor of Mankind unify Terra centuries before. And yet, the giant, ancient Custodies did not dispute the words.
"He did what he felt had to be done," he said.
"But he chose to do it with my son."
"If not yours, then it would have been someone else's."
"Oh, it was. And still more sons were stolen to make his Thunder Warriors. And then his Astartes. All to do what he thought must be done. To create his vision. He's powerful, Valdor. Gods above and below, he's powerful. Like no gods seen since before the human disaspora. Not since Telos herself. But he is not omnipotent. He's not omniscient. And he's murdered the galaxy in his arrogance."
Stein had seen people executed for saying less. Her words were sedition bordering on heresy. And yet Valdor just smiled thinly.
"He calls you Eve when he speaks to me in my dreams," Valdor said. "The mother of humanity. It is, I think, why the Sigillite seeks your survival. Go now, mother of humanity. Go with your mortal guardian and leave this dead world. Perhaps you will bring future champions into the galaxy to help save it."
He stood, rising like a leviathan to his full height before pulling on his helmet. He took his massive guardian spear in hand and turned to leave, but she called out.
"Lower your spear, Valdor."
He turned, helmet back on, and stared with odd silence. Again, to Stein's surprise, he complied. Taylor undid the seal of her armor to expose the left cup of her shoulder of her bare shoulder. Taking the the tip of the massive, deactivated spear, she stepped forward until it's curved tip touched her skin.
"What do you wish to accomplish with this?" Valdor asked.
"You have a right to know the truth, even if your master took away your ability to act on it." With that, she pushed forward just enough to draw her own blood. She didn't wince or show any sign of pain, and when she stepped back, she righted her armor.
The golden-armored giant stood in absolute silence for a long time before turning and striding away without a word.
"Valdor Constantine is your…"
"Shut up, Renold." She looked down at the floor. "Please," she added a moment later.
"Let's clean that," he said, desperate for something to say. He turned her gently and accessed her medpack, opening it to remove simple sterile gauze. She said nothing as he patted it over the pressure cut on her temple, careful of the bruised flesh.
When he was finished, he found himself reluctant to go back to their bikes. Seeing she was safe, he removed his own helmet. The air smelled of rotting flesh, but he'd smelled worse. "This isn't Imperial architecture." It was the equivalent of talking about the weather.
She chose to play along. "It's one of the old trans-Eurasion vac tubes."
"The what?"
"Mid M3, if I remember correctly. Back when they still cared about the biosphere. They created high-speed vac trains that ran through the continental shelves to cut down air and suborbital traffic. The system was functional for almost fourteen thousand years, on and off."
She had a faint smile as she looked around them. "Terra was beautiful once, Renold. You could walk in natural forests, and the only sound would be the wind or insects. There were arid regions that you could step away from a road and hear nothing at all save the wind. Children played outside and wild animals still had a place to live. It was so beautiful. All gone."
The last was spoken with a raw grief, as visceral as anything from destroyed the demon nearby.
He stared at her in the dim glow of remnant lumens from the dead White Scar's helmets. "Taylor…you've seen so much misery. Why do you have children with each life?"
She blinked a moment before staring at him. "I don't, you know. With some lives it's too dangerous. Some lives I just don't ever meet the right partner. But when I can…I was raised an only child, Stein. My fate was forced on me when I was only fourteen. I have families when I can because I love families. I love raising children–watching them grow and mature into new human beings, just like my mother did with me. It's the only act of divine creation that I'm capable of anymore, and I cherish it."
Again, he had to force himself to think about the words she said. Divine creation. Anymore.
"And will you again?"
Her stare seemed to drill down into his very soul. "I suppose that depends on if there's any life left after all this."