C. Goto - Dawn of War

“So, the good inquisitor senses no taint of Chaos here. How fortunate for the Imperium that such keen-eyed eagles stand vigil over her gates,” said Gabriel, shaking his head and laying his hand onto Isador’s shoulder.

The decapitated body of an Imperial Guardsman still lay across the face of the altar, with his head visible in the swampy ground a stone’s throw away. As Matiel surveyed the territory surrounding the crater, casting his intricate and suspicious gaze over the mess of dead greenskins, Isador made his way down into the pit, letting the force of gravity ease his weight down the crater walls in a smooth landslide.

Satisfied that the pit was secure, the Marines broke away from their vigil around its lip and followed Matiel’s lead, stalking between the corpses of the orks and prodding them with blades and gun barrels. The orks might not be the smartest race in the galaxy, but even animals could play dead when it suited them. But these orks really were dead. Some of the them had been shredded by thousands of tiny projectiles, others had been felled by a single, precise shot through the soft tissue just below their jawline, and some had simply been sliced into pieces.

Stooping to pick up a fallen weapon, Matiel gasped audibly. It was a boltgun-the distinctive weapon of the Space Marines. But the designs etched into the material of the gun were not very clear-the ork had obviously tried to scratch them away in an attempt to make the weapon his. Deep grooves and scars were dug into the metalwork, wrought by claws or teeth, but they could not fully obscure the markings that were set into the weapon when it was first made. Wriggling out from under the clumsy marks of the ork were the points of a star, each at the end of an axis that bisected a smaller circle. The eight-pointed star, thought Matiel: the mark of the Traitor Legions and the forces of Chaos.

He turned the weapon in his hands; he was repulsed slightly by the touch of a weapon that had been twice damned: once by the unspeakable evils of the heretic Marines that had turned their backs on the Emperor himself during the galaxy-shattering horrors of the Horus Heresy, and once by the taint of grotesque xenos savagery.

The metal was cold, and it lay just out of reach of the ork that had fallen next to it. Inspecting it more closely, Matiel realised that the gun had not been fired. The trigger-happy orks had been slain almost instantaneously, and it looked like most of them had not managed to get off a single shot. Not even the Blood Ravens would hope to kill a pack of orks so efficiently, reflected Matiel, his opinion of the eldar teetering perilously close to admiration.

Meanwhile, Gabriel was watching Isador climb down into the pit and approach the altar. He turned as Matiel approached him from behind, and took the weapon held out in the sergeant’s hand.

“A boltgun,” said Gabriel with mild surprise. “So we were right about the presence of a Traitor Legion here on Tartarus,” he added, pressing his thumb against the markings on the weapon’s hilt, as though trying to divine their origin.

“It has not been fired, captain,” explained Matiel. “The eldar must have laid an ambush for the orks, and then slaughtered them like animals before they even had chance to react.” A mix of repulsion and admiration were evident in his voice.

“They are animals, sergeant, so that is only fitting. We would do the same,” said Gabriel, drawing an un-self-conscious comparison between the Blood Ravens and the eldar, “if we could.”

Matiel nodded, acknowledging Gabriel’s shared admiration for the mysterious aliens, realising that respecting the skills of another warrior, even an alien warrior, did not necessarily make you a heretic. “Perhaps there is something that we can learn from them,” ruminated the sergeant, almost to himself.

“Yes indeed,” replied Gabriel confidently “Knowledge is power-we must seek it out. From this,” he said, casting his hand around the remains of the ork mob, “we learn not to underestimate the potency of an eldar ambush.” There was a smile on the captain’s face as he turned back to watch Isador in the crater.

“What dark crafts have these eldar invoked?” asked Matiel, following Gabriel’s line of sight.

“I do not think that this is the work of the eldar, Gabriel,” said Isador, looking up from the remains of Guardsman Tavett. “I am reasonably sure that it was the eldar who removed the man’s head, but he had already been dead for some time by then. For one thing,” he added, “this man had already been shot through the brain with an Imperial issue laspistol.”

“So, did the Tartarans sacrifice this man themselves?” asked Gabriel, walking around the altar and inspecting Tavett’s remains for himself. Despite the evidence, Gabriel could not quite bring himself to believe so little of the Imperial Guardsmen of Tartarus. Most of them had fought valiantly at the side of the Blood Ravens, and some had died as heroes of the Imperium. In the main, the Tartarans were a credit to the spirit of the Undying Emperor, and this was such an epic betrayal that Gabriel refused to make the logical leap. Whatever his personal feelings about Brom and the smattering of cowards in his regiment, he should not prejudge them.

“No, I’m not sure that they did,” replied Isador thoughtfully. “It looks as though the shot was designed to kill this man before the sacrifice was complete. Perhaps the Guardsmen interrupted the ritual.”

Chaplain Prathios was stooped over the altar, staring into the stone where the Guardsman’s head should have been. He seemed transfixed, and almost motionless, as though watching something complicated and partially hidden.

“This man was not the first sacrifice on this altar today,” said Prathios, lifting his head and looking at Isador. “You should take a look at this.”

The Librarian stepped over to the position indicated by Prathios and looked down into the slick pool of blood. Tiny little stalagmites of red poked up through the blood and, for a moment, Isador thought that they were merely small spikes designed to prevent the victim from slipping off the tablet during its agonies. But then he saw them move. They vibrated and pulsed microscopically, swaying like a miniscule forest.

Looking back along the stricken figure of the Guardsman, he could see that these tiny tendrils had worked their way into his flesh. They appeared to be dragging him down into the stone itself, drawing him bodily into the material of the altar. In a sudden moment of understanding, Isador realised why the Guardsman looked so odd-he was not all there. Crouching down to look at the side elevation, Isador could see that the prostrate trooper, lying on his stomach, was half absorbed into the altar-his chest had already been assimilated, as had his thighs and feet.

In horror, Isador drove his staff under the body of the man and levered him off the tablet, ripping the tendrils free of his body as it slipped from the altar and squelched to the ground in a bloody heap. The man’s body looked as though it had been sliced roughly in two, parted lengthways to separate front from back. All that was left was the bloody pulp of his headless back.

The tendrils on the altar shot out after the falling body, questing blindly for the source of their sustenance before shrinking and slurping back into the surface of the tablet. Where the threads of blood touched it, Isador’s staff flared with power, spitting sparks of blue fire into the coagulating pool on the altar. The pool hissed and steamed as the righteous energy spilled into it, but Isador pulled his staff clear and peered into the fizzing surface.

Beneath the sheen of slick rock, Isador could see the suggestion of a face wracked with agony, a flock of swirling daemonic forms tearing at it from all sides. A number of the curdling images seemed to be reaching for the surface with immaterial claws, scraping at the substance of the altar from within, as though swimming through an impossibly dense medium. The face pulsed and oscillated, thrashing from side to side in death pains, or birth pains. Then it stopped abruptly, spinning round and resolving into focus in an instant, staring straight into Isador’s soul.