Up Against the Gates of Hell
Part I
By author Perfidious Albion
On the planet Melekis III, in the northwestern Perseus Arm, on the doorstep of the Eye of Terror
The year 689 of the 30th millennium
A bitterly cold wind howled across the glaciers, ice-fields and jagged mountains of Melekis III. It was a barren wasteland of a world. The cold was too biting for trees. Even the hardiest and most rugged of ferns had shrivelled up and died millennia ago.
Nothing green remained on this forsaken planet. Only layers of ice, yellowish from the taint of mud; white snow flinging through the air in a never-ending blizzard; fragmented faces of bare rock protruding from the ice here and there, like bones; and the ominous streaks of red and black and purple, ever-shifting and flickering above.
Whatever colour the sun of Melekis was had been long forgotten. No stars were seen at night here on this world, nor sun at dawn or dusk or day. Even at high noon the sun was obscured by swirling emanations of Chaotic energy—storms of dark power snaking through the sky.
From beyond that sky, a fleet of shining starships stepped out of the Warp in the outer reaches of the Melekis system and flew towards this frozen realm. They were gleaming, polished and proud, the product of men who took pride in their work. They were replete with arrays of bristling cannons. And their sleek metal sides were emblazoned with gleaming carvings of thunderbolts and double-headed eagles.
They did not pass unchallenged.
Deep in the darkness, perched on the icy asteroids of this star-system far in the shadow of the accursed, fell creatures awoke. Minds of inhuman and otherworldly malice gazed out at the intruders, and they scented foe.
Gargantuan wings unfolded themselves. Gigantic, cold claws tore out from where they had been resting, dug deep in ice and stone. And taking flight, in brazen defiance of the laws of reality, the abominations launched themselves into the void to meet their enemy in battle.
One could not come this close to the gates of Hell and expect not to be met by daemons.
The shining fleet responded. A hailstorm of torpedoes bombarded the hordes of huge daemonic creatures that rose to challenge them. Matter-antimatter explosions blossomed in the void. Though mighty, they were too often misaimed. The proximity fuses of the warheads went haywire in the Chaos-tainted space of a star-system where reality itself was twisting and tormented by the whims of the dark powers. All too often, furious energies that could vaporise cities and gouge kilometres-deep holes in continents were uselessly expended—fireflies briefly shining then going dark in the empty night.
The shining ships learnt quickly. Devoid of such complex armaments, they were forced to rely on their main guns. Fortunately, those main guns were formidable.
The voidborn daemons of Melekis struck cruelly. Entire warships were melted by fiery breath or torn apart by gargantuan claws, their crews dragged screaming into fanged maws and devoured alive.
But they did not have it all their way. Scythes of scarlet light slashed in twain the great voidborn beasts that came to assail them. Monster after monster shrieked its soundless rage as the burning Lances of the Emperor's starships cut hot wounds through its skin.
Here and there, a Thunderbolt struck. The Thunderbolt Cannons were ill-suited to such ethereal foes, in this corrupted space where spacetime itself was malleable and the otherworldly enemy could be in four places at once. Unlike a Lance, a Thunderbolt Cannon could not sweep across the sky in a continuous blast. It fired once at a time. But when they hit, they hit like the fist of an angry god. Even the greatest of Chaos's voidborn creatures feared to meet the shards of stone hurtling through the void at over nine tenths of the speed of light. Nothing survived an impact like that: nothing.
One mighty daemon with wings longer than skyscrapers came leaping impossibly through the void to slash its talons through the hull of an Imperial battlecruiser. Then a Thunderbolt smashed into it—just one, one blow from a battleship's cannon—and erased it in an instant. A burst of hypnotically swirling blue and purple, lighting up the void for just a few moments as the creature dissolved into Warp energy, was all to tell that it had ever been there.
And as the nightmares drew closer to the shining fleet, the range diminished. Targets became easier to find. And the shining fleet had Thunderbolt Cannons aplenty.
The Emperor's battleships retorted to the spawn of the dark with ordered lines of streaking thunder. Impact after impact, burst of light after burst of light, and the hosts of winged voidborn daemons that defended this outpost of Chaos's domain were undone.
The swarm of hellish beasts that infested the asteroids of the Melekis system were many, and fearsome indeed. They were more than enough to defeat and terrify any lesser foe who, in his hubris, dared to venture this deep, this far into the dominion of the dark. But this was no lesser foe. This was the 1st Expeditionary Fleet, the most famous fleet of the Great Crusade, the personal war-fleet of the Emperor of Mankind, immortal lord of the Imperium of Man. None could stand against them and prevail.
The Melekis system lay under the shadow of Chaos. They were not precisely in the great Warp Storm that dominated the northwest of the galaxy, what the Imperium called the Abnormality. They were not precisely outside it either. Chaos was not prone to clear and strict distinctions between reality and unreality. Certainly there were star-systems where reality was overwhelmed and spacetime was the plaything of the Dark Gods. Certainly there were star-systems which, while tainted by the Abnormality's closeness, were largely free of it. This star-system was somewhere in between: far enough under Chaos's fell influence that such monstrous beasts as the Imperials had just fought could exist, in spite of the laws of physics that ought to forbid them, but not so totally overcome that reality did not hold any sway. And as far as reality held sway, its golden wardens could march, pushing the boundaries of its dominion forward. Reality and unreality were at war; and the Emperor did not intend to lose.
Victors of the void, the shining fleet descended upon the frozen hell of a planet. Icy, rocky and barren as it was, many would have thought it must be bare of life, or at least anything resembling human. The men and women of the 1st Expeditionary Fleet knew better. Human ingenuity was incredible; the potency of Chaotic powers' corruption was incredible as well. Both had their footholds here.
Under the surface of Melekis III, men and women lived still, dwelling in deep and well-lit caverns, carved out amidst the earth by the ancients as a surety in case of xenos incursions. Those ancient minds had not nearly foreseen the full horror of what would come to pass: the Cybernetic Revolt, the Eldar's Warp Storms, the Age of Strife and the fall of the Terran Federation, let alone the apocalyptic opening of the Abnormality that tore spacetime asunder. But their wisdom had well served their many-times-great-grandchildren.
So well-built were the designs of mankind's brightest minds in the lost Golden Age of Technology that these redoubts of Man still endured even now, after five-thousand years of wear and tear and ceaseless living. The Terran Federation built things to last, and last they did.
Yet these brave few million souls, stubbornly eking out a life for themselves from a world fallen near utterly from civilisation's light, were not Melekis III's only inhabitants. The frozen planet was also home to crueller, darker things.
Twisted beasts in crude mockery of the human form roamed Melekis III's surface. No amount of fur could be enough; but the burning power of the Warp had bequeathed to them fire in their bellies to withstand the deathly touch of the cold.
These mutants were the foulest, vilest and ugliest form of life: the Warp-tainted beasts known as Chaos Spawn. No two were wholly alike. Even parent and child would rarely have the same number of arms and legs. They all were different and bewildering combinations of fangs, fur, maws, claws, suckers, spikes, stings and tentacles.
Perhaps their greatest tragedy was that they, too, had once been human. They even knew it themselves, somewhere deep down in their ruined, tormented minds. One often thinks that, to ugly beasts, their own kind must look grand and normal people would be the ugly ones. This was not so with these mutants. Their vile bestial bodies still retained human senses, perhaps as a cruel jape by the Ruinous Powers at their servants' expense. They were as ugly and disgusting to themselves as they were to everyone else in the galaxy. Some part of their minds understood the extent of their own degradation. They hated it, hated the entire universe, and most of all hated that other people could be human while they had to be monsters like this. They took out their hatred on the pure humans—hunting them, tormenting them, ripping and tearing their flesh and eating them alive.
The power of Chaos ran through them, and they were entirely enthralled to it. No kindness did any of them know. No innocence, no selflessness, no hope, no love. Only hatred, murderous rage, lust, ambition, cruelty, spite and despair were in their souls. For they belonged to Chaos, mind, body and soul; and that was the way of Chaos, now and forever.
The shining fleet descended from the sky and fell upon them without mercy. Monsters fought with fang and claw against soldiers armed with lasguns, tanks, bombs and shells of artillery.
Soon the humans underground espied the attack, informed by electronic signals from their auspices. Hope burnt in their hearts, and with it came a renewed resolve. Weary as they were from long generations of battle, they did not hesitate. They would not be found wanting at the long-hoped-for coming of their kin.
In a storm of las-fire (for they had long ago run out of shells) the Melekians rose from their fortresses and hidden bastions under the earth. They threw the fullness of their strength to aid their liberators in the battle for their homeworld.
Foremost of those liberating soldiers, ever in the fiercest of the fight, swept out a tide of golden warriors with red cloaks and Guardian Spears, proud and tall.
And at the head of the tide was a giant, glowing, godly figure more than thrice the height of a mortal man. His eyes were golden as the sun. His armour was shining. His flaming sword severed steel, stone and flesh with stunning ease. His enemies smoked and withered even before he laid a hand on them; for his presence was light and law and re-establishing reality. That light was poison to them. The foul creatures of Chaos screeched at the nearness of it.
The Emperor of Mankind had set foot on Melekis III. And he could not be withstood. Dark things wailed, fled and burnt before him. Armies of abominations perished in the fire of his eyes. He scoured the planet with cold fury and relentless focus. Wherever he stepped, mutants died.
The Melekian people beheld him with awe and happiness. This was to them a dream come true, the freeing of their home. The Imperials were welcomed as liberators.
As the battle drew to a finish, as the last mutants were purged and the reports came in, as the soldiers of the Imperium congratulated themselves on yet another victorious campaign, the luminous figure of fire and thunder closed his eyes and sank his head into his hands.
He murmured: "Not this one."
All in the 1st Expeditionary Fleet knew that their Emperor was here because he was mapping out the boundaries of the Abnormality, this gigantic new Warp Storm that had burst suddenly into existence in the year 287 of the 30th millennium. Thus it was unknown to mankind's ancient data-banks from the lost Golden Age of Technology, on which the Imperium's astrographers often relied. Was it stable? Was it shrinking? Was it growing like a cancer on the galaxy? Five-millennia-old wisdom would not know.
Only the folk of the Bucephelus, the Emperor's own mighty starship, knew better—the spacemen and spacewomen of her crew and the soldiers who had the rare privilege to travel on-board. For they could see which worlds the Emperor chose to set his feet himself. There was a pattern there. Ice World after Ice World, hellish pit after hellish pit… all of them frozen Death Worlds overrun by hideous mutants, near the Abnormality and its corruptive touch…
Though they would sooner die than spill his secrets, they knew that their Emperor was searching. None, save for the Emperor himself, knew what the Emperor was searching for.
OVER TWO DECADES BEFORE
What this? a small, bright, cheerful voice piped up in his thoughts.
They were pointing at the great spiralling hulk of plastics, metals and more exotic things that lay in front of him, being busily worked on by hundreds of scurrying technicians and labourers, eager to perform well before their liege.
The old scientist's lips turned upward slightly. The men and women around him had no clue as to why.
That is a superconducting coil of the thermonuclear reactor core of a starship, little one, he replied.
What do? asked the tiny voice, bubbling with bright-eyed curiosity.
Nothing yet. It is not finished, said the old man. He slipped easily into the familiar cadence of a lecturer. He had been an academic and a teacher for much longer than he had ever been an emperor, after all. When it is done, it will serve as an electromagnet. Its field, which affects charged particles, will confine the hot, high-pressure plasma struggling to escape, so that the power it generates can be controlled and utilised to help us.
Oh.
The little voice thought for a moment.
The Emperor held in a chuckle. He was fairly certain his interlocutor had not understood a tenth of what he said.
Then, irrepressibly cheerful: What this?
…The oil drum?
No!
She pushed a mental image at him, of one of the things his eyes could see: a thin man with three augmetic legs and a number of mechadendrites.
What machine this do?
The Emperor tried not to laugh. That is Senior Technician Compuculus Vatter, said the old scientist. He is not a machine.
No!
said the little voice firmly. Silly Daddy. Not person. Not look person. See! Machine. What do?
He has mechanical components attached to him, but he is not, in fact…
On and on she kept asking him questions: What this? And this? Why? Why? Oooh what this? The Emperor answered her, while simultaneously conducting his duties—inspecting, planning, inventing and governing an empire that had taken over most of the world—with impressive attention, ability and focus. His superhuman mind was an extraordinary thing.
The crowned ruler of Terra carried out his duties, uplifting his subjects, consolidating power, finishing off the Unification Wars and setting the foundations for the Great Crusade to come. Meanwhile, at irregular intervals, his tiny child whispered questions in his ear, and he whispered answers back to her.
She did not understand most of what he spoke. Her mind was too underdeveloped for that. Her words were half-formed wisps of thought. She was still small. She would not be small forever, though, and he knew that speaking in front of babies helped them learn and grow. So when his little daughter asked him questions through the psychic connection they shared, he answered them. While he did, she cuddled up to his psychic aura, pressing herself close. When they were like this, her mind was an open book to him. He could hear the soft hum of her thoughts as they pressed gently up to his. He could feel that she was brimming with happiness.
The baby Primarch snuggled up to the light of her father's presence, utterly happy with life. In her young mind, the calculus was simple: he was there, so everything was good and nothing would ever hurt her. Instinctively the baby nuzzled into the great glowing presence—like hers, but bigger, much much bigger; so big! so warm! so strong!—and she felt safe, protected and loved.
Half-way through an explanation, the Emperor paused, smiling. His baby daughter had stopped listening. In her lifepod on the opposite side of Terra, she yawned, gave a happy little sigh, snuggled herself up against the edges of his mind, and fell asleep.
The Emperor wanted to make time to cease in his duties and spend some of the day talking to his children in their lifepods. They were still gestating, true, still infants not yet born; but this daughter reaching out proved that they were not incapable of some measure of understanding. He wanted to spend time with them. He wanted to get to know his little daughters and sons.
He could not. The demands upon an emperor's time were relentless. Agriculture, ecosystem repair, architectural reconstruction, roadmaps for Terra's economic recovery, rebuilding a sense of community and social trust on a planet that had known the chaos and barbarism of the Age of Strife for five-thousand years, housing provision for the homeless, education for the young, care for the old and sick, technological uplift and restoration, overseeing the secret agents stamping out the vile pawns of Chaos, and of course the never-ending call of war… all of it required the personal attention of the man in charge.
The Emperor of Terra was ruler of tens of billions of souls and he would soon be ruler of trillions more. He was a busy man. And he was only getting busier. As the Unification Wars drew near to their close, the preparations were intense and frantic for the Great Crusade that was extremely imminent now.
There were quadrillions of families he had to save. He could not sacrifice them and their needs, just to have a bit more time with his own.
No—his duties were too demanding to let him spend hours each day in the nursery of the infant Primarchs, whispering to his children. No matter how much he wanted to, he could not. Even every week was a long way out of reach.
He could not give his children the time he wished to. In the Great Crusade to save the human species, everyone had to make sacrifices, even—or perhaps especially—the man who led the whole thing. Many men and women served and died in his name. He had to do his part.
But if one of them reached out to him… well, why should he reject that? What good would it do to anyone for him to say no? And his little daughter did keep reaching out, her tiny mind reaching plaintively for his across the psychic connection that she shared with him. The Eleventh, Fifteenth and Twenty-First Primarchs, who shared connections to him likewise, reached out also to him sometimes. They too were capable of it. But his fifteenth-born daughter was fiercely proud and independent even then, when she was just a babe. She came to him rarely. And his twenty-first-born son and eleventh-born daughter, though they did reach out sometimes, did not choose to as often.
All his little daughter wanted was her father—to ask him her endless curious questions, cuddle and press herself up to his huge shining psychic presence, full of light and warmth.
So he allowed it. He did not desire to push her away. The Emperor's duties kept him from getting to spend as much time with his children as he wanted to, but he saw no reason not to allow this. It did no harm to anybody, and it did often make him smile.
The Emperor had thought that once his tenth child was born he would name her Athene, for her boundless curiosity.
The old wanderer held a certain fascination for Ancient Graecia's myths, despite his disdain for the foul ways of god-worship. No wonder, then, that he had named many things in the Imperium for them. The Graecian legends were not like the stories of the later, crueller monotheistic faiths, which revered human inferiority and subjugation to God—urging their listeners that humans should see themselves as wretched sinners, beg for mercy and obsessively abase themselves before a supposedly superior non-human entity. The Graecians told more heroic tales, of brave men of courage and wit who went out and did mighty deeds and battled monsters. That was better-suited to the bold, confident and humanistic spirit he hoped to encourage for the new Imperial age.
The Emperor had thought to name all of his children for figures of legend, before the schemes of Chaos and the treachery of Erda Broutik tore his hopes and plans asunder. His first-born son, he had meant, once, to name Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. After the other Primarchs had been stolen, the boy had instead been named Ozymandias, a name from an ancient and long-forgotten poem telling of a ruler's hubristic grand ambitions, thwarted, failed and swept away. It suited his melancholy mood.
She who should have been Antheia—goddess of gardens, the repairer of ruined worlds to make them prosper and bloom—had instead become Nyx, the Queen of the Night, a silent sentinel of cold vengeance. The first-found of his scattered daughters was a tormented figure, so damaged by her harsh, traumatic childhood that she would not even speak. The Emperor did not know how to help her.
As for Athene, she was a Graecian goddess of courage, wit, wisdom and war. Athene's was the analytical, strategic side of war, much unlike bloody-handed Ares, who embodied war's mad violence and impulsive savagery.
War, yes; for the Emperor had always known that all his children would have to be warriors. That was the nature of the galaxy in which they dwelt. But he had not anticipated them needing to be warriors quite like this.
It was a cold night on a frozen plain. A war-party of men and women armed with lasguns crouched behind a rocky outcrop. They were clad in ugly furs and hides of ugly animals, worn over sleek, high-tech rad suits. It was so cold their breath turned instantly to steam inside their helmets. Even aided by those furs, the rad suits had to work overtime to keep them warm and alive.
The sky was black and blue and green and purple, swirling in unearthly and intoxicating patterns above their heads. None of them looked up. Not one, not once. With millennia of cultural experience, they all knew better than that by now.
Their leader, through whose eyes the Emperor saw, was taller than the others—much taller. He pressed himself fully against the ground while the others crouched or knelt.
"Keep low. Keep quiet," he hissed, his voice barely over a whisper. The voice was not his own. The Emperor's usual voice was a rich bass, deep and firm with command. This was a sweet, lilting, lyrical soprano.
There came a great bellowing roar and gnashing of teeth. A horde of hideous mutants charged through the glacial valley underneath. They were ugliness incarnate: three arms, eight legs, two heads, twelve eyes on stalks, wolves' fangs, snakes' scales, bears' claws, lions' manes, crabs' feet, bats' wings, insect-like exoskeletons, octopi's suckers, and every crazed combination of any of them. Many of them, the Emperor saw, bore lasgun scars, burns where entire limbs had been vaporised away by those powerful weapons. Many others bore the serrated bloody marks of chainsword blades. And they were clearly gripped with rage.
He felt himself smile ferally in anticipation.
"They took the false trail," said one of his daughter's companions, a young man who looked at her with admiring eyes. "Rora, you're a fucking genius. Yet again."
"Thank you. Very soon now," murmured the cool and confident soprano.
A stout, grey-haired woman checked a watch. "Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One…"
KA-BOOM!
A massive, deafening noise in the distance, on the opposite mountainside. The pre-laid mine detonated at a carefully chosen bit of ice and rock, on the sharp cliff edge, slightly thinner and more breakable than the thick main rock face.
Shards went flying in all directions. Some went up. A series of rocks went down. They were just, just enough to dislodge a larger boulder, a ball of half-rock half-ice, dug into the mountainside by some long-ago glacier. That boulder fell onto another. That other boulder fell, too, and fell into another, which also fell. Another. Another…
Then half the rocks on the mountainside were coming down, and down, and down. It was a landslide. And it was coming straight for the army of mutants.
The mutants shrieked, screeched and chittered with alarm. They rushed for the nearest exit to the valley that was not too steep or too slippery and treacherous ice to be traversed. That took them to a narrow passage of ice, which lay directly under the outcrop where his daughter's band of warriors were waiting.
It was the perfect setup: the enemy forced into a tight killing zone where their numbers would not matter, they could not fire back and they were perfectly exposed to fire.
His daughter's companions ruthlessly took advantage. They opened fire, scouring the mutant horde with beams from their lasguns. Crimson scythes of las-fire slashed out into the army of monsters and reaped a murderous toll. The humans ducked behind their outcrops whenever their foes spat acidic, radioactive sludge back at them.
Even with all these advantages, the humans could not hold them back forever. There were just too many of them. Luckily they did not need to. With a roar that would set a thousand lions running, the avalanche struck. The mutant beasts disappeared in a thunderous crash of rock and snow.
The humans threw themselves to the ground and clung on for dear life. Miraculously, none of them fell—or not so miraculously; his daughter had chosen her place carefully.
A scene of devastation was left behind. Scattered arms and legs stuck up over a white mat of snow, tainted green, blue and purple with inhuman blood. These were the gruesome mementoes testifying to the tens of thousands of bloodied mutant corpses that lay unrecognised and buried underneath the field of fresh-fallen snow.
But not all of them had perished. Whether by sheer good luck or (in many cases) by climbing over the corpses of their comrades, a few thousand mutants had made it away from the avalanche's path. And they knew now where their enemies were.
Thousands of vengeful, hungry monsters charged towards the small group of human friends.
"Scatter," the Emperor's daughter said sharply to her companions.
"But—"
"Now. Flee. Don't argue. Follow the signs I laid."
"But Starchild," said a young man, looking distraught, "we can't leave you—"
"Do as she says!" said an older man.
They did.
Alone the Starchild turned downhill to face the beasts that were rapidly scaling the cliff up towards her.
They made a terrifying sight and sound, with baying maws, spiderlike legs and pincers, teeth wet with venom and shrieks of otherworldly hatred.
And she laughed at them.
"Come on then, you ugly mugs!" she cried. "You think I fear dying here? Nobody lives forever!"
She bent her legs, took a running jump and leapt off the mountainside. It was hundreds of metres' drop, straight down off a mountain, onto treacherous ice in the dead of dark. She did not for a moment hesitate.
She whirled through the air, her whole body flipping half a dozen times over, thanks to the angular momentum she had accrued. Nonetheless she landed perfectly on both feet, elegant as a cat. And like a big cat, she roared her challenge to the mutant menace.
So eye-catching was the leap and roar that she drew every monster's eye. Her companions were forgotten. The thousands of surviving beasts all charged at her. Baffled, the monsters reversed course and went downhill to go at her.
The Emperor's daughter drew a chainsword and flicked a switch. It whirred noisily to life. She adopted a swordswoman's stance with her legs, sword held out mockingly with one hand; and she waited.
The mutants rushed down in a rage, and suffered for it. The ground was slippery ice and snow over jagged rock unstable enough that it had already undergone one avalanche. And it was dark as night. A sudden pivot from running uphill to downhill was dangerous. Many of the beasts trod in the wrong place and broke legs or worse, went flailing down crevices to their doom.
Thousands, still, made their way down successfully.
Then they came up against his daughter.
The very first mutant that approached her was a great fanged hairy thing, twice her prodigious size, with legs like a spider and seven heads, each with dripping snake-like fangs. It moved shockingly fast for such a titanic thing. It was not nearly fast enough. It lashed out with its eight legs; the Emperor's daughter ducked, twisted like a gymnast and somehow glided between all eight of them. Then, from underneath the abdomen, her sword flashed up. She carved open its fleshy underbelly. It gushed black blood and was dead in an instant.
The whole thing had taken a fraction of a second.
The second sought to entrap her with a dozen tentacles while it brought her closer to its long-toothed stomach-face. His daughter's chainsword severed through them and cut it in half a millisecond later. Then five huge wolf-like things sought to corner her while a trio of smaller, vicious mutants nipped at her heels so she could not run or dodge with fancy footwork. His daughter twisted off the ground entirely, clung on to one of the big mutants' backs with one hand and used it to propel herself away, in the process killing it with an almost casual sweep of her chainsword. Two strokes more, blurring-swift and murderously efficient, and the whole lot of them lay dead at her feet.
There were still thousands more…
More slaughter, and then it ended. The Starchild stood alone on a new hill, panting heavily. A comically enormous pile of corpses lay under her. Her rad suit was absolutely drenched from head to toe in gore and blood.
She bent over, panting, hands resting and clutching her knees. She took many deep breaths. Then she rose and turned off the chainsword with a little click.
It was a long way's walk back home today. And she would have to do the same again tomorrow.
For years the Emperor of Mankind searched desperately for his tenth-born daughter. He knew she was in danger, terrible danger indeed. He saw it often through his daughter's eyes.
Two other daughters and a son had had such psychic connections to him at first. But one daughter had had hers severed by a vile, disgusting, child-thieving Eldar spawn, decades ago. He knew little to naught of what had become of her. As for the Fifteenth and Twenty-First Primarchs, their connections to him endured, but he knew less of their whereabouts. His fifteenth-born daughter seemed to spend her every waking hour cloistered indoors in some halls of scholarship, perhaps a monastery, a prospect which of course concerned the Emperor; and his twenty-first-born son was roaming the halls of a Space Hulk or a space station, or maybe even just a vast network of tunnels underground on some distant planet. It was difficult to be sure. Scholarly halls were common in the galaxy, and so were old space stations and tunnel networks. Seeing through their eyes had not enabled him to find out where exactly they were. Fortunately, neither of them seemed to be in immediate danger. The xenos and mutant beasts of the Space Hulk—most of them hunting alone, not in thousands-strong armies of darkness—were quite clearly no match for the prowess of his son. And the old tomes of lore and philosophy were not going to attack his fifteenth-born daughter.
The tenth-born was another tale. She was in immediate danger. His daughter was leading a small, scrappy bunch of humans—living in bunkers below the ground that was too cold and too toxic for humans to live on it—to take on an entire planet full of grotesque, Warp-tainted, radioactivity-twisted mutant monsters that outnumbered her human forces by a ludicrous degree. And every single day, his tenth-born daughter—a woman with a more powerful connection to the Warp than any living thing in the galaxy, matched only by three of her siblings and exceeded only by himself—was on a planet right on the doorstep of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos.
He dreaded what effect that might have upon his bright, curious little daughter, still young and malleable.
Seeing through her eyes gave him some useful information to locate her. The place the Ruinous Powers had cast her was a Death World—that beyond doubt. A frozen planet, poisoned by nuclear fission fallout and deeply corrupted by the Warp. To be as deep in Chaotic corruption as he had seen, it must be very, very close to the Warp Storm of the Eldar's folly. Right up at its edge, if he were any judge.
He did know what name its people gave to their star-system: 'Sheol'. Unfortunately that was of no use to him. Virtually every people in the galaxy had a name for their star-system that sounded totally different to anything written in the Terran Federation's star charts, thanks to five-thousand years of linguistic evolution.
He had seen glimpses of Sheol IX's skies through the eyes of his daughter. But the skies were too clouded with snow and radioactive ash for him to see the stars and thus find out where they were.
A deathly cold, nigh-uninhabitable, frozen, radioactive, Chaos-tainted Death World on the corner of the Abnormality. That was a start. He did not know which one. Normally, the Emperor's psychic link to her would have given him a sense of direction, albeit only a vague one. But this close to the Abnormality, things were different. The power of the Dark Gods warped even the Materium here. The Immaterium, of course, far more so. The swirling storm of Chaos nearby distorted all signals else. He could still receive the 'signal', so to speak. He knew his tenth-born daughter was alive. But he could not find which planet, which star-system, or even which sector of many star-systems this 'Sheol' system lay in.
The only recourse was to search. So the Emperor searched. He checked world after world, like Melekis III.
Time fed fear and fear fed growing desperation. This was a race he could not afford to lose. He had to get her or Chaos would get her first, and the consequences of that would be terrible.
World after world, he scoured the Abnormality's boundaries with shining fleet and shining sword.
And world after world, he kept failing to find her.