Dan Abnett - The Beast Arises

The doors opened, releasing more methalon fumes into the room. Water vapour condensed in the chilled air, cloaking everything with a dense, freezing fog. The warriors around Thane disappeared into coils of white. Thane activated false-colour heat vision. He saw his men. The Eversors were as cold as the gas, and he did not see them coming.

Boltguns went off all around him; somewhere he heard Vangorich’s insane laughter.

The fight that followed was one of the hardest of Thane’s life. Black-suited killers reared up in the mist, moving too fast for him to hit easily. The shouts of battle-brothers rang in his helmet. Space Marines came into sight, only to be cut down by the flashing finger blades of Temple Eversor’s crazed killers.

‘Fall back to the door!’ ordered Thane. ‘Defensive cordon!’

His dwindling men formed up around the entrance, back-to-back, boltguns blazing. A handful of Eversors got behind them, causing great loss before they were cut down. Casualty screed scrolled endlessly on Thane’s faceplate display. Black, skull-masked Assassins darted in and out of view, clawing men down. In their turn, the Assassins died messily, blasted apart by mass-reactives or detonated by uncontrollable bio-feedback when their hearts stopped. Such was the force of their explosions that Space Marines went down, battleplate holed by fragments of hyper-velocity bone shards and armour.

‘Keep them back!’ yelled Thane. ‘Keep them back!’

Executioner pistols fired, loud brazen boltguns one moment, silent toxin needlers the next.

The Eversors pressed nearer. Fighting became close and desperate, and the firing discipline of the Adeptus Astartes collapsed. The group disintegrated into individuals fighting for their lives in melee. At close quarters Vangorich’s killers excelled. The warriors fighting at his side became fewer, going from one hundred, to seventy-five, to fifty, to twenty, to ten.

Thane battled on, his power sword the flaring dividing line between his life and death. He parried and cut, but his blows cleaved only the mist. The Assassins were faster than the wind, near impossible to hit. They fought in a frenzy that appeared at first to lack control, but after a time Thane discerned a pattern to their combat, and was awed by their skill.

His actions became reflexive, time blurred. Only rarely had Thane fought so hard. As a Space Marine he regarded himself as the pinnacle of the transhuman type. The Eversors, though unstable mentally and physically, challenged that belief.

Thane fought with a dancing monster with a blue death’s head for a face. It leapt around, howling like an animal. After minutes of duelling, Thane spotted a weakness in its attacks and brought his sword up, hilt first, swinging the point up and through the Eversor’s stomach wall and gutting it. Before it died, it slashed down with its neurogauntlet. Monomolecular blades sliced through ceramite and plasteel, biting into Thane’s flesh. Toxins surged from micropores all up the blades, pumping into the Chapter Master’s body.

He roared in agony. He had never felt such pain. He stumbled and fell to his knees, paralysed by the poison.

When his body had purged the toxins sufficiently for him to move, he looked up, his eyes streaming with tears. The mist was clearing. He heard a final round of gunfire, a scream, and the clash of power armour falling to the floor.

A dark shadow fell across Thane’s face. An Eversor stood over him, ready to deliver the final blow.

‘Halt!’ called Vangorich. He walked through the last dispersing tendrils of mist. ‘You have lost, Chapter Master Thane, and it is your life that is forfeit.’

‘No,’ said the Eversor, and stood back. Trembling with the effort of disobeying its programming, the killer pulled its skull mask from its face. Yanking cables from its head, it cast the mask aside. Most of the flesh of the face beneath had been peeled away, replaced with close-fitting augmetic devices. Elsewhere there was naught but shining, polished bone inscribed with devotional text. But there was just enough of the features left for Thane to recognise him.

‘Krule!’ he said.

Through a mutilated mouth, Krule managed to speak.

‘My name is Esad Wire,’ he said.

He stood aside, leaving Thane a clear shot at Vangorich.

Thane raised his bolt pistol.

Vangorich’s eyes widened. He held up his hands. ‘Wait! Did you ever hear the story of the end of Konrad Curze?’

‘No more stories, Drakan,’ said Thane, and ended Vangorich’s life with a single bolter shell.

Swaying, feeling nauseous from the residue of the poison in his blood, Maximus Thane stood. He gripped his wounded arm. He was alone amid a carpet of broken bodies, Space Marine and Assassin alike. He called out for survivors, but no voice answered. Relief flooded him when he voxed the Thunderhawks and found all was well outside.

‘Send the Apothecaries. They have a harvest of sorrow ahead of them,’ he said. He turned away from Vangorich’s broken corpse. Too weary to raise his sword, he dragged it across the ground as he walked unsteadily back towards the stairs and the daylight beyond.

Of Esad Wire, there was no trace.

To the psychic sight of Eldrad Ulthran the skein was a living being, a complicated braiding of the life threads of every living thing in the galaxy. The main flow of fate resembled the corded trunk of a tree. From its mighty sides grew innumerable branches. Most were small, looping back to rejoin the main course of destiny; many more withered and died before long, the potential choices that predicated them so unlikely they would never come to be, or the creature intended to set those events in motion meeting its end before it could. Others branched many times into complex networks of possibility all their own. A few of these split the skein, forming mighty boughs upon the tree of fate. Sometimes a single choice could dictate a different future entirely.

It was upon these that Ulthran dwelt as his bodiless mind flew along the twisting ways of the future. Farseers were consumed utterly by the drive to preserve their craftworld, but Eldrad Ulthran’s calling was higher. He ignored the fates of maiden worlds, crone worlds, true stars, exodite clans, pirates, dark kin and craftworlds. Planets burned and kindreds were snuffed out in myriad futures. These extinctions pained him, but they were only a small part of the game and he could not afford to be distracted. He played at fate because he saw a greater prize than simple survival. Eldrad Ulthran would have the glories of old restored and Chaos’ influence banished from the material realm. There was no other goal worth aiming for; all others led ultimately to death and damnation.

A cracking roar announced the splitting of the skein. A new forest of possibilities grew rapidly out from the trunk. Familiar as he was with the skein, like no other being in the galaxy, Ulthran rarely saw such a dramatic reconfiguration of potentiality born before him and he followed it eagerly. Tendrils of individual fates, vanishingly small, sprouted from the main path, growing long with incredible velocity, wrapping around each other, twisting themselves into thicker and thicker ropes of complex interaction. These came together, and again, until the fates of worlds and sectors were bound up with one another, all generated from the actions of the galaxy’s uncountable creatures.

The wave front of possibility and its fronds of maybes raced away from Ulthran. Beneath him, more cords were being joined, wrapping around each other in tight embrace until in their coilings Ulthran descried the fates of entire species. A moaning rolled through the timeless spaces of fate. The other half of the fork, the original from his perspective, blackened and died, its unformed might-bes disintegrating into unrealised motes of chance and fragments of unfulfilled cause and effect.