Aaron Aaron Dembski-Bowden: Cadian Blood

Typhus felt no emotion at seeing this. He was capable of no emotional sensation that even vaguely approached something a human would comprehend. What he felt was hollow, the absence of emotion. His thoughts plumbed this vacant space within his mind, searching the void, finding it chilling and almost fascinating where his emotions once resided.

A plague on these accursed sons of Corax in their black armour. Their guerrilla assaults had held the Death Guard’s advance for too long.

The momentary introspection passed, and Typhus took a Raven Guard head with a sweep of his scythe. Picking up the black helm, he shook the head free and stamped on it, crushing it to blood-and-bone paste under his boot.

“We honour our enemies,” the Herald growled, and vomited a stream of bloated, sticky flies through his narrow visor into the empty helmet in his hands. He tossed the writhing mass onto the headless corpse at his feet, letting the flesh-eating flies spill across the body and seek openings in the deactivated power armour.

The final insult. The gene-seed of these fallen Astartes could never be recovered by the Imperium. This last thought stirred something deep and sludge-thick within the recesses of the Herald’s mind. The Raven Guard still suffered today from their near extermination ten thousand years before. To deny them the genetic legacy of their primarch now brought a smile to the Herald’s lips. His emotions might have decayed long ago, but he was forever delighted by both vengeance and cruelty—especially when the two mixed.

The Death Guard, minus half their initial landing force, moved on shortly after, leaving the flesh-flies of the Destroyer Hive to finish their meal.

The vessel, what remained of it at least, was an Astartes battle-barge. This ancient spaceborne fortress lay in pieces, the largest sections of hull still bone white and emerald green in the XIV Legion’s original colours, unstained by the years of warp-corruption that had tainted the Terminus Est and the armour of the Death Guard themselves. The taint was insidious rather than obvious, but no less true.

Here and there on ridged sheets of exposed hull metal, black marks showed where the ship had ploughed through the atmosphere on its death dive, before gouging this savage cleft in the rock of the world soon to be named Kathur.

Silence reigned within the shattered ship. The crew, Astartes, servitors and Legion serfs alike, had long since mouldered to bone and dust.

Only a single soul claimed anything akin to life here.

It waited in the silence, screaming soundlessly, knowing its hour of freedom had finally come.

It defied their expectations.

Seven hours of trekking through the monastery, and they’d found it. Seth no longer even needed to lead the way; Caius was all too aware of the force of the voice’s pull as he made his way through the catacombs. Impossible to ignore, its intensity made it increasingly difficult to reach out of his own mind, and he felt inexorably drawn deeper into the subterranean labyrinth.

All notions of needing excavator equipment were banished from thought. All images of the great ship blown to a million pieces and seeing the impressive wreckage in an underground cavern were purged from imaginations. The truth was both much more logical to understand and much more uncomfortable to behold.

The Aggrieved wasn’t buried in the rock of Kathur’s crust beneath the foundations of the monastery. It was the foundations of the monastery.

The Cadians became aware immediately when the deepest tunnels of the catacombs all appeared to be walled with metal instead of stone. It was strikingly obvious, as the carved rock passageways gave way to corridors of riveted iron and black steel; it was clear to all who laid eyes upon it that they were entering the halls of an Imperial ship.

A very old Imperial ship, it had to be said. But one of Standard Template Construct design, and therefore, timeless—the design still in use in new vessels today.

Osiron could scarcely believe what his photoreceptors were showing him.

“They made the lowest levels of their fledgling cathedral link to these corridors,” his metallic voice rang out, echoing weirdly down the spaceship’s wide hallways. “This is… blasphemous. Such a violation of the Mechanicum’s treasured lore. Such an unholy waste of power and knowledge.”

“The blasphemy was committed before the vessel even crashed, tech-priest,” Caius said softly. “And after.”

“The blasphemy against the Emperor, yes. I speak of blasphemy against the Cult Mechanicus of Mars, and the Omnissiah.”

“The Omnissiah? I thought your Machine-God was the God-Emperor,” Darrick cut in. “You just dressed him differently.”

Osiron’s crimson hood moved in a gesture that may or may not have been indicative of a nod. “All this knowledge,” he said again, stroking metal fingers across the vessel’s internal skin. “All this stolen power.”

“Tainted by heresy,” Caius said.

Now Osiron definitely nodded, conceding the point. The vessel may have been close to the peak of Mechanicus ingenuity, but the tech-adepts of forge world Mars wished no truck with the touch of Chaos. Tainted was tainted. Lost was lost.

“I’d expected an Archenemy vessel to be more… obvious,” Darrick said. “This is bad enough—and how in the Great Eye are these wall lights still on?—but it looks just like one of our ships.”

“We are in the upper decks and have not penetrated far,” Osiron reminded them all. “And when the Aggrieved fell to the surface, its corruption from its crew’s heresy was still fresh. This ship died before Chaos could worm all the way through it.”

“No,” Caius said, goading Seth forward. “This ship is riddled with the Archenemy’s touch. I feel it clearly.”

“As do I,” Seth spoke for the first time in hours. His tongue was thick in his mouth, and slimy strings of saliva stretched between his chattering teeth.

“Seth,” Thade began.

“Seth,” the psyker replied, “has been dead for some time now.”

The entity dwelling within the wreckage of the Aggrieved had reached out to the sanctioned psyker as the Cadians descended. It was a trifling matter to stir Seth’s thoughts into dwelling on rebellion, bitterness and disloyalty.

At least, at first. Before the final blow that killed Seth and allowed the entity to wear the psyker’s body, there had been much to do and a surprising amount of resistance to doing it.

The entity had stirred these dark thoughts within the thin, weak, mortal soup that formed Seth’s consciousness. And at first it had been easy, the suggestions of emotion and thought blending seamlessly with Seth’s own brain function. He was an outcast among his people—thoughts of this forever rode high in his consciousness—and amplifying his loneliness and hatred of rejection was a simple matter, the merest of psychic tweaks. The entity probed with invisible fingers, tasted the surface pain, and flavoured it a touch darker, a touch angrier, minute by minute.

Disguising this gentle manipulation from the other psychically-gifted member of the Imperial coterie was no difficult feat. The entity at the edge of Seth’s mind knew that its own psychic beacon, the endless silent scream, was clouding the other human’s perceptions.

It did not know Caius was an inquisitor, and had no frame of reference for the term, as the title had not been coined in any significant way in the age when the entity had truly existed in the flesh. Even had it known the meaning of the title and the formidable skills of those that bore it, the entity would not have been troubled. Its powers far eclipsed those of the approaching mortals.