03 - Savage Scars (46 page)

Korvane’s joy at the arrival of his father was dispelled in an instant by the
sight of his stepsister, still alive, and at Lucian’s side. Bitterness and
hatred welled inside his heart, causing stabs of pain far worse than those
inflicted by Inquisitor Grand. She had tried to kill him months before, but
Korvane had thought her dead, as had everyone else. Now she was back, and it
would all start again.

But not if Inquisitor Grand killed her, Korvane thought as he slumped
backwards on the deck, allowing the pain of the psychic assault to wash over
him, to carry him away on the waves of a bitter, cold ocean of hatred.

Sarik drew his chainsword as he stepped onto the deck of the hangar bay, his
gaze settling on the wizened form of Inquisitor Grand. The floor all around the
inquisitor was slick with ice, and beyond it lay the barely conscious form of
Lucian’s son, Korvane.

Behind the traitor, for that was what Grand surely was, waited the
unmistakable form of the Exterminatus torpedo, sleek and black and held in place
by the claws of its launch cradle.

Sarik moved to the right as Lucian stepped to the left, aiming to encircle
the calmly waiting inquisitor. Lucian’s daughter came behind, and beyond her at
the head of the gunship’s assault ramp came Major Subad and Sergeant-Major Havil
of the Rakarshan Rifles.

“You named us traitors,” Sarik called out, shouting to be heard over the
Thunderhawk’s whining jets. “I name
you
traitor, Inquisitor Grand, and
you will face my judgement.”

Inquisitor Grand simply smiled grotesquely, and raised his wiry arms to his
sides. The air temperature plummeted and a patina of ice crept across the
decking towards Sarik’s armoured boots. He gunned his chainsword, but held his
ground. Grand was no fighter, Sarik judged, but would be deadly nonetheless.

“It is not within your power to judge me, Astartes,” Grand sneered, his
rasping whisper carried over the powering-down jets and directly into the minds
of all those present.

“I issue you this one, simple warning,” Grand continued. “Depart this place
now, before I freeze your blood in your veins.” Glancing towards Brielle, Grand
added, “But she shall stay, and face punishment for her assault on my person and
her consorting with xenos.”

Sarik growled, a curse forming on his lips. Lucian swore, but before either
could intervene, Brielle had stepped forwards and was pointing directly towards
the traitor.

“You remember this, gak for brains?” she spat.

Grand froze, staring at Brielle’s outstretched hand.

“Yes you do,” Brielle sneered. “Now shut the hell up.”

A sheet of liquid fuel surged out from the miniature flamer unit disguised as
a ring on Brielle’s index finger. The jet speared through the cold air and
ploughed into Grand’s chest, but truly the fates mocked Brielle as the chemical
failed to ignite.

The inquisitor grinned cruelly as he took a step towards Brielle, his arms
rising to unleash a lethal blast of psionic force.

As Brielle backed away from Grand, terror writ large on her face, Sarik drew
his bolt pistol. He fired, the bolt plunging into Grand’s form and finally
igniting the flamer’s fuel.

In an instant, the inquisitor was completely engulfed in flames, the
promethium fuel clinging to his body as it burned through his flesh. The robes
were seared away, their remains smouldering on the deck at his feet. Grand had
become a naked torch, his limbs wreathed in dancing fire, yet somehow, he was
still alive.

The human torch spun towards Sarik and threw a flame-licked arm out in a
violent gesture. The bolt pistol was struck from Sarik’s grip by an invisible
force and sent spinning across the deck.

“Abomination!” Sarik cursed, bringing his chainsword up to the guard
position. Others moved in around him, Lucian from the inquisitor’s rear, Subad
and Havil not far behind.

Seeing Lucian drawing his plasma pistol, Sarik bellowed “No!”, but too late;
Grand spun the other way and with another gesture sent a piledriver of invisible
psyker-force into Lucian’s chest. The armour buckled as Lucian was propelled
backwards. Brielle dashed towards her father’s prone form, and Grand tracked
her, girding his flaming, twisted body to leap forwards with supernatural force.

A figure appeared between the inquisitor and Lucian’s daughter, a power
cutlass raised high. It was Major Subad. He moved with the lightning speed of
years of training with his blade. Subad darted in, delivering a vicious slash to
Grand’s stomach that should have spilled his guts across the deck. By sheer
force of will, Grand was defying death even as the raging flames consumed his
flesh.

Sarik took advantage of the distraction Major Subad was providing, working
his way around behind Inquisitor Grand. Subad dodged aside as Grand lashed out
with flaming claws, searing a smoking wound across the Rakarshan’s right arm.

Subad tossed the blade to his other hand without breaking stride, and lunged
forwards again.

The curved sword scythed towards Grand’s head, but the inquisitor moved left,
a tail of flame and roiling embers trailing behind him like a ragged cloak. He
swept around the torpedo, moving in towards the launch cradle’s command terminal
hanging down on a sheaf of cables.

Sarik saw what Grand intended and moved in, his chainsword screaming.
Rounding the launch cradle, Sarik closed on Grand, and saw that his body was
disintegrating in the heart of the conflagration that still engulfed him.
Slivers of smoking, charred meat were sloughing from his bones with his every
step, yet still, his bitter, indomitable will drove him on well beyond the point
of death.

Grand was bent over the command terminal, and as Sarik approached he turned,
his charred face a black coal in the heart of a furnace. His eyes, mouth and
nostrils were lit from within, the fire so consuming him that he was no more
than a hollow skeleton of blackened bone.

The inquisitor brought his flaming, skeletal hand down and punched the
command rune. A klaxon wail started up, low at first, but rising to the banshee
dirge that announced the death of worlds. The illumination in the hangar
suddenly changed to strobing red as the alert lumens flashed into life.

Through the crackling of flames and the howling of sirens, Sarik heard
distant, echoing laughter. Grand stumbled backwards, away from the launch
cradle, as hydraulics engaged and white gases hissed from purge vents.

Grand lurched, what was left of his body losing form and stability in spite
of the staggering power of the mind that sustained it. As the traitor fell,
Sarik charged in, his chainsword ready to deliver the killing blow.

An arm looking more like the blackened branch of a lightning-struck tree was
raised. The air rippled and an invisible hammer pounded into Sarik’s chest,
driving the air from his lungs and cracking the plate wide open. He staggered
back, fighting to remain standing as the rapidly failing systems in his
war-ravaged power armour flooded his body with combat drugs and stimms. He rose
on one knee, to see Sergeant-Major Havil appear behind the inquisitor, his
massive ceremonial power axe raised in a double-handed grip.

The sirens reached a deafening crescendo, and the torpedo’s plasma thruster
ignited. The launch cradle lurched violently, and the cantilevered arms
depending from above flexed and shivered as the thruster built power.

Havil’s blade swept in across the horizontal, as sure and true as the
executioner’s axe… then melted into splattering lava mere inches from Grand’s
blazing form, orange gobbets scattering across the deck. Grand struggled to his
feet as he turned fully to face the sergeant-major, who was joined a moment
later by Major Subad.

Sarik forced himself to his feet as the inquisitor raised both hands towards
the two Rakarshans. The air twisted and distorted around him, the fabric of
reality sucked into a swirling maelstrom centred on the inquisitor. Havil raised
the haft of his ruined weapon before him, while Subad made ready for one final
lunge with his curved blade. The air seethed and screamed, as if the universe
were drawing breath, then exploded outwards in an unstoppable tsunami that
propelled both Rakarshans backwards and out of Sarik’s line of sight.

The torpedo’s thruster reached full power, and the launch cradle’s arms let
it go. Instead of dropping, the torpedo hung in the mid-air for a moment. Like a
predator scenting its prey, the torpedo blasted forwards, through the void-seal,
and began its hell-dive towards Dal’yth Prime.

Sarik was consumed by grief. He had failed.

Grand’s back was still turned on the White Scar. Even through the pain and
rage threatening to consume him, he saw his opening, and took it.

Sarik drew the chainsword back over his shoulder, then swept it down hard.
The whirring teeth shattered Grand’s hollow, flaming skull and cleaved downwards
through his torso, shattered ribs exploding outwards along with a fireball of
foul gas.

The swirling psychic maelstrom still raging in the air exploded outwards,
unleashed and unchannelled without the inquisitor’s fearsome will to focus its
impossible energies. The air twisted around itself, turning reality inside out
as dimensions converged and lines of psychic power burned through the aether.

Sarik threw himself clear as the vortex expanded, rolling across the hard
metal deck towards Brielle, who was kneeling over the barely conscious form of
her father. He rose to his knees as the vortex buckled the deck panels behind
him. He grabbed Lucian’s armour by its neck collar with one hand, and Brielle’s
arm with the other and hauled them both backwards towards the inner hatch, the
maelstrom chasing them all the way.

At the last, Sarik pounded the hatch release, and the blast door crashed down
behind him as the vortex engulfed the hangar. Witch-fire ravaged the bay, bolts
of aetheric vomit splashing through the void-seal in a slow-moving fountain of
impossible energies.

The maelstrom churned outwards from the portal, spewing across the void in a
rapidly expanding aetheric blast wave. The
Blade of Woe
slewed and listed
slowly as the energies spat from her midsection, a thousand klaxons sounding as
emergency retro thrusters coughed into life to correct the sudden and drastic
course deviation. The very void of orbital space rippled and buckled, the globe
of Dal’yth Prime appearing like a reflection in rippling water.

Then the leading edge of the maelstrom overtook the Exterminatus device as it
plummeted downwards, hungry to consume the cells of every living thing of an
entire world. The torpedo quivered, its shark-form length elongating as if
caught at the event horizon of a black hole. Black ripples passed along its
length, and then it detonated, a million shards of metal streaking through the
heavens trailing searing white contrails behind.

A trillion murder-cells died in the furnace of re-entry, seared from
existence by the elemental nucleonic fires.

On the surface of Dal’yth Prime, a new sun appeared briefly in the jade
skies, then winked out of existence once more, its passing marked by a slowly
descending shower of meteors.

“Questions?” said Lucian, slowly scanning the crowded council chamber.

The crusade council had convened for one last session, but such a weight of
business lay before it that the conference had ground on throughout the night. A
million details had to be thrashed out, from the embarkation of thousands of
ground troops to the distribution of millions of tons of capital munitions.
Several hundred motions had been proposed, debated and passed in an effort to
tie up every possible loose end. The treacherous, insane Inquisitor Grand had
been replaced on the council by a Munitorum Plenipotentiary Delegatus by the
name of Captain Palmatus. Lucian had never met Palmatus before, but found him
capable and shrewd, and the council’s business had been conducted with a speed
and efficiency not seen throughout the entire crusade.

With all of the council seats occupied for the first time in what seemed like
months, the chamber had filled with other officials, many of whom had a
statement or request to make. Master Karzello, the crusade fleet’s senior
astropath, came before the council and told of the alien snarls and screeches
resounding through the minds of the astropathic choirs, driving some insane and
others to take their own lives. Interrogator Rayne confirmed the phenomenon as
the gestalt echo of a trillion xenos minds, howling their hunger into the void.
Pator Ottavi, the Navigator Korvane had brought into the council, described the
shadow that had settled over the warp, even blocking out the light of the sacred
Astronomican which shone from distant Terra and guided the Imperium’s vessels
through the benighted void.

Others too had spoken. The Ultramarines sergeant Arcan had told of his urgent
need to return to his home world, and requested the aid of his brother Chapters.
Arcan was scarcely recovered from the wounds inflicted on his body when his
Rhino had been struck by fusion blaster fire, and both of his legs had been
replaced by heavy augmetics. Despite his injuries, the Ultramarine’s words had
stirred the hearts of those present, and all who had the authority to do so had
pledged their aid in the defence of Ultramar.