“No,” said Augustine. “I want that last convoy secured before I make the order.”
“Are the lives of those people down there worth risking the fleet for?” asked Gideon.
Augustine clenched his fists. Then he sighed.
“I’ll give it one hour,” he said. “Order the Implacable to disengage and swing around to the rear,
with its full escort. Order them to stand off, though. Let the Astartes make their move.”
Glowing runes flashed, appearing in the air above Marduk’s still chest, and the haemonculus’s
pitch-black eyes flashed towards them in alarm.
With a flick of his bloody fingers he banished the runes and brought another set up before him,
swiftly acknowledging the diagnostic reports. The mon-keigh’s secondary heart had failed to pick
up where its larger organ had failed. His subject was dead.
No! This could not be, he railed. There was no possible way that the subject’s heart could have
stopped, unless the creature had control of its functions, but such a thing was surely impossible in
one as lowly as this lesser being.
More glowing runes appeared, hovering in the air above the mon-keigh’s body, and Rhakaeth
frowned deeply as he pulsed a swift mnemo-command to the lesser talos-artifice hovering above
him. The creature’s spider limbs were twitching nervously, sensing the displeasure of it master. His
subject was not breathing.
Rhakaeth stabbed a needle into the Space Marine’s neck before dropping the syringe to a
waiting hover-pad, and summoning a breath-regulator to his side with a wave of his hand. Above,
the lesser talos-artifice sank low above the table at Rhakaeth’s mnemo-command, rubbing its
forelegs together. Blue electricity jumped between the two bladed limbs, and at Rhakaeth’s
command, it touched the tips of the blades to the subject’s chest.
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The subject jolted, his body arching as power surged through him, and the runic projectors
informed Rhakaeth that its twin hearts had recommenced their regular beat. Two heartbeats later,
they had stopped again, however, and the haemonculus realised that the being was resisting his
attempts to revive it.
Rhakaeth gestured, and additional hardware emerged from the underside of the operating slab,
hovering up to his side. It mattered not that the creature was attempting to kill itself. It had no choice
in the matter. He would keep it alive whether it wished it or not.
Leaning down low over the subject’s lifeless face, Rhakaeth hissed in the crude, human tongue.
“You will not escape me so easily,” he hissed, “and I shall make you pay for such disrespect.”
The subject’s dead eyes flickered suddenly, its primary heart lurching back into life. Rhakaeth
tried to pull back, realising that he had been tricked, but he was too slow, and the subject’s teeth
flashed for his throat.
It had not been hard to fool his torturer. The eldar were an arrogant race and Marduk had guessed,
correctly, that his captor would have no real understanding of Astartes physiology or what it was
capable of.
It had been a simple matter to activate his sus-an membrane and begin the process of entering
suspended animation, though it had taken more control to halt his primary heart completely.
Marduk bit into the eldar’s neck, his teeth gripping the jugular tight. The eldar’s flesh was dry,
like a desiccated cadaver’s. It would have been so easy to rip out its throat in one sharp movement,
but that would achieve nothing other than fleeting satisfaction. Instead, he turned his head to the
side, pulling the eldar across him, dragging its face towards one of the recurved, protruding calliper
blades positioned to the side of his face.
Bladed spider limbs stabbed into his flesh, straining to pull its master free, and he felt the scalpel
fingers of the eldar slashing frantically against his face and neck, but Marduk had no intention of
relinquishing his hold. With relentless strength, he pulled the eldar towards the blade, careful not to
tear its throat out. Still, the eldar resisted, but its body was weak in comparison to Marduk’s, even
restrained as he was, and the thick muscles of his neck bulged as he pulled the haemonculus onto the
point of the blade. The tip of the calliper pierced the dry, wasted skin of its cheek, and a trickle of
blood ran from the wound down the blade.
The eldar uttered something in its sharp language, and the blade-restraints were instantly
retracted, ensuring that the torturer was not impaled, but also freeing Marduk’s limbs.
The First Acolyte surged upright, tearing a chunk of dry flesh from the eldar’s throat. The
haemonculus fell backwards, gasping, hands trying to stem the blood flow gushing from the wound,
and Marduk swung his legs from the bladed slab hovering just off the floor.
His stomach was still sliced open, and four of the spider-like legs of the eldar-machine hovering
above him still pierced his skin. They slid from his flesh, and all twelve of the slender, powerful
limbs descended towards him, stabbing and cutting. Marduk grabbed the spiked, gun-like instrument
from the floating tray to his side, and with one hand holding his organs in place, he rolled himself
off the bladed slab.
Marduk hit the ground hard, his intestines bulging from between his fingers. He rolled under the
hovering slab, narrowly avoiding the stabbing legs of the spider-being that smashed down to impale
him.
The haemonculus was crawling away, one hand clasped to his throat, blood gushing across the
floor. He was trying to call for aid, but all that came from his mouth was a gargle of blood and froth.
Praying to the gods of Chaos that it would work, Marduk pulled the flaps of skin across his
abdomen and pressed the bladed tip of the surgical instrument against the join. Its trigger was too
small for his large fingers to easily operate, and they slipped off the slender trigger rune twice. The
spider-creature wrapped its limbs around the bladed, hovering slab under which Marduk lay, and
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with a surge of power it hurled the table aside, throwing it into the wall, which shuddered and
cracked beneath the impact.
Marduk managed finally to squeeze the trigger, and with a swift, painful movement, he roughly
sealed the incisions. A pair of glossy black spider-limbs stabbed into his shoulders, and he howled
with pain as the slender limbs passed through him, impaling his body on their lengths, and the
wound-sealing implement fell with a clatter from his hands.
The First Acolyte was lifted into the air, still impaled on the two limbs, and was hurled away
from the frenzied spider-creature. He struck the wall heavily, sending a ripple of cracks arcing out
across its surface, and slid to the ground.
The spider-being disengaged from the ceiling, dragging its cabling and wires with it, and hit the
ground, its bladed, slender limbs scrabbling for purchase. It launched itself at the First Acolyte, its
forelegs rising to impale him once again.
Rolling beneath the stabbing limbs, which smacked into the wall behind him with colossal force,
Marduk came up underneath the vile creature. He threw his body against the joint of one of the
beast’s back legs, which buckled under his sudden weight, and it stumbled.
Marduk grasped the slender limb with both hands and pushed his knee against the joint, grunting
with the effort. The muscles of his arms and back strained, and he felt the limb bending beneath his
force, until with a final, sickening crack, he sheared the limb in two.
Black fluid ran from the hollow limb, and the creature sprang away from him, scrabbling and
sliding on the smooth floor.
Holding the bladed limb in both hands like a sword, Marduk waited for the creature to spring.
He risked a glance behind him, and could see no sight of the haemonculus, though a telltale trail of
blood was smeared across the floor and past the strips that led into an adjoining room.
Sensing movement, Marduk ducked and rolled to his right, narrowly avoiding being impaled on
two barbed forelimbs. He slashed with the hollow limb, shearing through two of the creature’s legs,
which dropped to the floor, and more hissing, black fluid seeped from the creature’s wounds. It spun
to face him and thrust the rear of its bloated abdomen forwards, stabbing it towards him from
beneath its body. Liquid squirted from its grotesque spinnerets, and although Marduk managed to
avoid the worst of it, a line of the foul substance sprayed across his right shoulder. His flesh began
to hiss and bubble, but he stood before the creature with his makeshift blade in both hands, ignoring
the pain.
The creature’s eldar torso writhed in obvious torment as ichor dripped from its severed limbs. Its
blank face snapped towards Marduk, and it launched itself at him once more, bladed limbs flailing
frenziedly.
The First Acolyte leapt to meet the beast, spinning the bladed limb around in his grasp so that he
held it over his head like a spear. With a roar of animalistic fury, Marduk slammed the blade into the
twisted eldar, the tip of the weapon piercing the flesh of its throat and driving on into its body
behind its ribcage.
Bladed limbs hacked at his arms, tearing bloody strips of flesh from his bones, but the force of
the creature’s momentum was its death, for it continued to push forward, impaling itself further onto
its own bladed limb.
Its front legs collapsed beneath it, and Marduk stepped back, breathing heavily, blood running
down his arms. The loathsome creature fell headfirst into the floor, its greyish lifeblood running
from its wounds. It tried piteously to lift itself up again, but its legs gave way beneath it, and it
crumpled in a heap on the floor at Marduk’s feet. He spat down onto the dying beast, and wrenched
the bladed limb from its neck. Reaching down, he retrieved another of the creature’s severed, razor
sharp limbs from the floor, and so armed, he followed the trail of blood left by the haemonculus.
With the tip of one blade, Marduk parted the strips of heavy, semi-transparent material that hung
from the doorway leading from the circular room that had been his entire world for the gods knew
how long. He moved cautiously forwards, eyes darting around him, seeking any threat or movement.
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This room was larger than the first, and circular, and half a dozen chambers led off it, each
partially hidden behind hanging, translucent strips. He could hear groans and muffled shouts from
within those rooms, voices crying out from raw throats whose owners had clearly heard the sound of
Marduk’s escape. Some of them sounded familiar, but Marduk ignored them, focusing his senses on
finding the whereabouts of his twisted captor.
The centre of the room was bare except for a torturous bladed slab akin to the one he had just
escaped from, with pale, thin lights shining down upon it. This table had a score of bladed arms
extending from beneath it, but they appeared lifeless, or at least dormant. The room had dozens of
hovering shelves and tables around its circumference, each one with strange perverse implements
and objects arrayed upon it. The light was dim, pulsing faintly from the floor and the ceiling, but he
could see the trail of blood on the floor clearly, and he quickly saw his wasted torturer crawling
away from him, one hand still clamped around its bloody throat.
With a roar, Marduk leapt forwards, ignoring the pain in his tortured limbs. One of the eldar’s
wasted, skeletal hands was reaching up towards a flickering rune that hovered before what Marduk
took to be a sealed, circular portal, but before it could activate the doorway, Marduk stabbed one of
the slender blades down into the back of its thigh and dragged it backwards. It gave a wet, gargling
cry of pain as it struggled futilely against him.
Marduk knelt over his eldar tormentor, twisting the blade ruthlessly, feeling it grinding against
the bone, and smiled.
“How do you like the feel of that, xenos filth?” he snarled.
The eldar did not answer, but the bladed arcs of the circular portal slid aside soundlessly, and
Marduk shifted his attention to the new threat, leaping forwards and spinning the twin blades in his
hands before he even saw what was coming.
There were two creatures, vaguely eldar in appearance but altered, like mutant versions of the
slender xenos. One was a woman, her body covered in tiny scales that flushed an angry red, and the
other was almost reptilian in appearance, with hundreds of shivering quills inserted into its flesh.
The first blade struck the woman in the side of the neck before she could react, nigh on
decapitating her, and his second blade stabbed towards the other creature’s gut. Spines emerged
from its wrists and it deflected the blow with a circular sweep of its arms. Then it threw its arms
towards Marduk.
The First Acolyte swayed backwards, moving his body out of range of the creature’s touch, but
the spines in its wrists shot forward. Marduk twisted, but even so one of the spines sliced a shallow
graze across his side, shooting pain blossoming from the scratch.
The female creature was on its knees, holding its head in place so that it did not flop to the side.
Its scaled body was covered in rich, hot blood.
Marduk backed towards the centre of the room, stepping over the prone form of the
haemonculus, which had managed to knock a surgical implant to the floor and seal its neck wound
with a spray of a synthetic skin.
The spined abomination, enraged by the harm done to what Marduk guessed was its mate, threw
itself towards him wildly. Marduk’s blade swung up, swatting aside a pair of spines that were shot
towards him. He rammed his weapon deep into the creature’s side, wrenching the blade up under the
ribs to pierce the heart. It slumped to the ground, hissing in hatred and scrabbling at his flesh as it
died.
Moving to his torturer, which stared up at him venomously, Marduk hauled it to its feet. Holding
it upright by the scruff of its thin neck, Marduk moved towards the circular portal, intending to step
into the corridor beyond.
Claws dug into his shoulders as the female creature, its horrific neck wound all but healed with
astonishing swiftness, landed on his back. It bit deeply into his neck, and Marduk dropped both his
captor and his weapon.
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Reaching over his back, his hands brushing past something cold and smooth attached to the back
of his neck, he grabbed the feral creature in his crushing grip, and threw it over his head towards the
