The Death of Integrity (33 page)

‘It cannot be active, surely, lord captain,’ said Brother Militor. ‘It is at the heart of this hulk. It must have been here for thousands of years.’

‘And the lights, cousin, and the energy emanating from the vessel?’ said Sandamael. ‘I do not like this, lord captain, it has the stink of corruption to it.’

‘It is a vessel from the Dark Age of Technology,’ said Plosk. ‘From a time blessed by the Omnissiah himself, before those who wielded His powers were adjudged unworthy and had His light withdrawn from them. It functions, oh it functions!’

‘And the warp engines, do they function too? Damn you, mage priest, what more are you concealing from me?’ shouted Galt.

‘The warp fields are generated by the hulk, not this vessel. Once an agglomeration has sailed the tides of the warp, its fabric develops a sympathy for it. Any perturbation in the veil between real space and the empyrean can drag it back.’

‘The gravitic well of the sun Jorso?’ said Clastrin.

‘Perhaps so, Forgemaster,’ said Nuministon.

‘Are we to retrieve the datacore, or are we to argue as the hulk breaks up around our ears?’ said Plosk. ‘I will explain all, but first we must gain entry.’

Galt looked to the Forgemaster. The Techmarine chief gave a brief nod.

‘Very well, but be quick.’ Aftershocks troubled the chamber still.

‘The unbelievers must withdraw,’ said Plosk.

‘I see no door,’ muttered Tarael. ‘This is a waste of time.’

‘Where there is no way, there will be a way,’ said Nuministon. Galt was certain he was quoting something.

Mazrael rejoined the other Terminators, Caedis’s armour clasped in his hand.

Plosk’s servitors formed a semicircle about the magos, and began a low mumbling drone, thick with formulae and holy data.

Plosk threw his hands wide and spoke over his choir. ‘Oh mighty vessel of the Omnissiah! We, the humble servants of He who made you, we who have searched for long eternities to find your like, we request access to your holy innards, and the information that you contain therein. Let us prove ourselves worthy to you and to our Lord, so that mankind might slip the shackles of ignorance, and learn anew the true runes of knowledge!’

Nothing happened.

‘He has lost his mind,’ said Tarael drily. ‘He speaks to a wall.’

Voldo made a noise of agreement. ‘Brother Gallio?’

‘Wait, my lords!’ said Samin, holding up a hand. ‘He only greets it as it should be greeted; he treats it with the respect it demands. To approach otherwise would be an affront to the vessel’s spirit and perilous to us all. Only now might he utter the codes of access.’

Plosk began to speak rapidly in a language none understood. It was not the electronic chitter of binaric, but a true, spoken language of men. A chill went down Galt’s spine as the tech-priest went on; the language was foreign to him, but amid the babble were words that sounded half-familiar, as if Plosk spoke High Gothic distorted by a dream.

And then the ship replied.

The Terminators stepped backwards, weapons raised.

‘Hold!’ said Nuministon. ‘It is only a voice-activated ward, nothing more. The machine’s spirit has a voice as our servitors have a voice.’

The ship’s voice was soft and emotionless; it too used the ancient tongue.

Plosk’s hands dropped. The servitors sang on.

The ship responded, and the way opened. A section of the hull glowed green, forming a solid square. The light receded, so that the square became a doorway with rounded corners, delineated by a band of brightness. And then there were steps, appearing in some manner Galt could not understand. The light dimmed, lighting the new doorway and stairs in soft lambency. The ship looked as if it had always been that way, as if there had always been a door and not been a solid wall of metal only seconds before. Data flooded into their sensoriums and auspexes as the inviolable skin of the craft parted for them.

‘Witchcraft!’ gasped Mazrael, tightening his grip on his crozius. The Space Marines backed up further. Mutters of alarm came from all of them.

‘No, my lords! Power, technology. Behold the true might of the Omnissiah revealed!’ Plosk said. He looked into the vessel. ‘And soon it will all be ours again, and mankind will rule the stars rightfully, totally, and alone. But as much as I long to enter, we must plan our escape. As Nuministon says, we do not have much time. Teleportation is our only hope.’

‘I have a clear reading from within the vessel now,’ said Eskerio.

‘As do I,’ said Curzon.

‘The energy fluctuations of the ship’s secondary reactor will not allow a firm pattern lock,’ said Clastrin.

‘We should turn back now,’ said Eskerio.

‘No!’ said Plosk. ‘There is a way. The reactor can be deactivated. Once it is, then we may be safely away with the ship’s secrets.’

‘What do we do, lord captain?’ said Voldo uneasily.

‘If the ship opened for us, it may have opened for my lord,’ said Tarael, taking a step forward. Mazrael said nothing.

They all looked to Galt.

‘So be it,’ said Galt finally. ‘So be it.’

Caedis passed through the hulk in Holos’s fugue, wandering deeper and deeper into the
Death of Integrity
. Sometimes he was Caedis, and on the edge of his perception he was aware that he was casting away his armour as he walked, an act that had lost any sense of importance. It must be done, so he did it. Then there were times when he thought he was Caedis but could not be sure, for the roar of his own blood in his ears was deafening. His twin hearts pounded like war drums, and the Thirst tore at his soul with dripping claws. Sometimes he was Holos, climbing metre by painful metre up the side of Mount Calicium. Sometimes he was neither. He, Holos and the other shades which climbed with him were sent tumbling into the distant past by Holos’s own Black Rage. Caedis suffered the Rage and through suffering it he suffered Holos’s own Rage, until the two multiplied each other into an infinite tunnel of dark memories of war. An eternity of slaughter and bloodshed and burning torment beckoned.

Holos dragged himself along the lip of the volcano’s crater with his one good arm. The rim was narrow, no more than a few metres wide at its narrowest, and his movement sent rocks tumbling over the edge. They bounced higher and higher as they fell, toward the steaming, poisonous green lake at the centre. Holos had discarded what armour he could, but his chestplates and leg assembly would not come free. His hand and arms were bloodied from dragging himself along the sharp stone. The hypercoagulants in his blood sealed the wounds quickly, but each painful metre fresh wounds were torn into his flesh by the spines of the mountain.

The smell of his own life fluids drove him deeper into insanity. He blacked out twice, finding himself soaring high in the air over a battlefield he did not recognise. The sensation of unaided flight was so intoxicating, he almost lost himself. Doubtless had he not had the will, Holos would have died raving upon the rim of the volcano, and the Blood Drinkers would have died with him. But Holos’s will to survive was mighty, and his pride in his Chapter mightier still. He dragged himself back to the present. Holos was aware of the others who climbed with him only fleetingly.

Sometimes Caedis was aware that he was not Holos even as he experienced the hero pulling himself over the sharp rocks. At other times Caedis found himself crawling through wrecked corridors of spacecraft. He, unlike the ancient hero, could still walk, and he would become confused, then pull himself upright and stagger on. As Caedis, he went through places of intense cold, places with no air and no gravity, or choked with poisonous gas. He should have died, but something more than his engineered physiology allowed him to survive. Perhaps, like Holos, it was his will alone. Perhaps not. Fate has a way of saving those it values.

He was Holos for a time, falling painfully back to the floor, and the peak of Mount Calicium was so far away. And then he was Caedis, naked, his armour all gone. He was in a ship that was lit and warm and full of air sweeter than any he had ever tasted, pure and untainted by volcanic fume, pollution, or the rot of old blood. He marvelled at the vessel; proportioned for men but not like any ship he had ever seen. He looked groggily for a crew, but found none.

Time pulled him away to its own whims. He felt blood on his hands, the death of a genestealer; it passed. He went elsewhere.

The slope of the peak rose steeply from the rim of the crater. Holos stared up at it. A lesser man would have stopped. Holos did not. Reaching out his good hand he hauled his battered body upwards. Betrayed by his armour, he proceeded by the dint of his will alone.

The suns were rolling behind the horizon, taking day away with them, when he attained the summit.

Holos rolled onto his back. He lay gasping, his great strength spent. The sky turned from orange to a deep purple, heralding the oncoming night. Ash clouds streaked the dome of heaven in herringbone patterns. The air at the summit was thin and full of poisonous gases. They burned his throat, his birth lungs. His multi-lung laboured to drag what little oxygen there was from the air.

He wavered in and out of consciousness, back and forth in time; to the days of the primarchs, and far into the future.

The first stars pricked at the sky, and it bled hard light.

‘There is no one here,’ Holos said, his voice strange in his ears, thick with exertion and dust. ‘The vision was a lie!’

He fell into a dark sleep. Dreams of wings tormented him.

He awoke with a start. The last hold of day was slipping. The shadows were as long as time, rocks moulded by the volcano burned orange again with the dying fires of the setting suns.

Something had changed.

He craned his neck, tilted his head backwards. His scalp grated against grit, but Holos was past the point of pain.

The peak ended in a spur, a weirdly sculpted branch of stone that stood out over the steep sides of the cone. A vertical ellipse of blinding light shone at the top of this spur. Within it, a figure was waiting, the figure from his dream.

Holos’s battered body filled with adrenaline. His feet scrabbled at the stone as he righted himself. The armour was as heavy as sin. He got to his knees and, cradling his injured arm against his chest, crawled slowly to the foot of the rock spur.

The figure waited. It was impossible to make out its features. A silhouette attenuated by the glare was its body, its face a shapeless blur. Only its broad wings, feathers shimmering with iridescent colours, were clear.

With great effort, Holos got himself into a kneeling position. He was afraid, for this was something beyond the material world. This was not something that would yield to the bolter or the sword. He stared nevertheless into the light. It seared his retinas, but he felt the Rage retreat within himself, and he felt the blessed return of sanity.

‘I am Holos, son of Dolkaros of the tribe of Sumar, Initiate of the Blood Drinkers Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. I am a warrior of the Emperor, and I would save my kin from the madness that afflicts us. I have come,’ he spoke boldly. ‘I have followed my dream. I have passed the test given me. Tell me how to save my brothers, as was promised,’ he said, his voice quavered. Emotions long suppressed broke through his conditioning.

‘You have come,’ said the figure. ‘You have passed the test. You are worthy of what I must tell you. Hearken, hearken to the secret that will save your brethren.’ Its voice was old and harsh as dry parchment, the sibilants hissed, tailing off into half-heard words that meant something quite different to what the figure seemed to say. The conversation between Holos and the figure continued, but muted. Other conversations began to overlay it, one at a time, as Caedis became aware of himself as separate to Holos. The conversations overlapped each other like ripples in a pond, and Holos’s exchange with the saviours of the Blood Drinkers became unintelligible.

‘Welcome, Caedis, Lord of the Blood Drinkers. You too have been proven worthy.’

‘Worthy enough to join Holos on his endless climb,’ said a second voice from the light. It was raspier and less wholesome than the first.

Then Caedis was on the mountain, not Holos. How it came to be, he could not say. The scene had a hyper-real clarity. If it were a vision, it seemed more real than life.

Caedis shaded his eyes. He got a fleeting impression of a pair of heavy heads moving on sinuous necks before his vision blurred, disarmed by the light around the figure. This was not how he imagined Holos’s visitor, or was it how he had imagined it all along, and was unable to capture the figure in glass because his mind would not accept the truth of it?

‘Why am I here?’ said Caedis. ‘Why do I not suffer the Black Rage as my brethren do, reliving the last hours of Sanguinius? Who are you?’

The figure shifted, as if it leaned upon a staff. Caedis glimpsed a large, inhuman hand tipped with claws.

‘You are worthy,’ repeated the second voice.

‘I am he who gave to Holos the secret of how to preserve your Chapter. I am the saviour of the Blood Drinkers. You do not suffer as other sons of the Blood Angels do because I have decreed it to be otherwise. Would you know the secret? Would you know what I told Holos?’

Caedis did not answer. The thing in the light went on anyway.

‘I told him to embrace change.’

‘Embrace it!’ said the other voice.

‘Only through change can one survive, only through evolution is there life. Your gene-seed is corrupt, you are changing. You try to deny it, and that is why you were dying. But to embrace it… Ah!’

‘To embrace change is to live,’ said the thing’s other voice. ‘Reject it and die.’

A sense of terrible horror gripped at Caedis’s hearts. There were things few men knew of; things that made the most degenerate xenos creatures in all the galaxy seem benign. All Space Marines had some knowledge of the Ruinous Powers. Few among their number were fully aware of the Dark Gods’ actual influence on the material universe, or the nature of their servants, or how those servants could manifest themselves.

But Caedis knew. Caedis was a Chapter Master, and thus the most awful secrets of the universe had been laid open to him.