Black Tide Read online

  “Look at him,” Bile said to his lieutenant. “So furious, so consumed with rage that he can barely restrain it.”

  “The Blood Angels are known for their reserve,” Cheyne replied, as if discussing the flavour of a fine wine. “Or perhaps it is just a reluctance to fight?”

  Rafen drew in a slow and steady breath, imagining the sound the androgyne would make when he strangled the life from it; but still he resisted the urge to attack with tooth and claw. He knew the character of these Chaos-kin; they adored their own arrogance, their convoluted schemes and their inflated sense of superiority. They could not be content with silence or letting their deeds speak for them. Men like Fabius Bile loved to gloat, to twist the knife before the final strike; and as much as he hated to stand here and endure insult after insult, Rafen knew he must if he were to learn the truth behind this hideous place. He quietly added each slur to the tally he would take.

  “I should thank you, Blood Angel,” said the Primogenitor. “You and your foolish kindred. You have helped me advance one of my greatest works by leaps and bounds, and all through the arrogance of one of your battle-brothers.”

  “Caecus…” The name slipped from his lips before he could stop himself from uttering it.

  Bile nodded. “A desperate man. Fearful for the future of his Chapter, but proud enough to believe that he alone could save it. Instead, he opened your secrets to me.” He smiled thinly. “He deserves your pity.”

  “He is dead,” Rafen snarled. “Dead by my hand. In the end, he understood the errors he had made. He died accepting that responsibility.”

  “How noble,” Cheyne tittered.

  I will be damned for my hubris. The Apothecae Caecus had said those words. Rafen remembered the weight of his bolter in his hand as he had pronounced a sentence of death upon his kinsman, and the echo of the single gunshot. The Blood Angel wanted to feel hate for the dead man, but he did not. Bile, rot his soul, was right; instead he felt pity for Caecus. In a vain attempt to bolster the numbers of the Blood Angels in the aftermath of the Arkio crisis, the senior Apothecary had dared to dabble in the arcane art of cloning. His failures ultimately led him to make a pact with a biologian who called himself Haran Serpens—fatally unaware that this identity had been usurped by Fabius Bile.

  Rafen’s voice was steady but loaded with menace. “You stole from us, traitor. You took a piece of our heart. I have come to reclaim it and see you pay for your crimes.”

  Bile laughed, and it was an ugly, grating sound. “My crimes? They are so many that you would perish of old age before you could list them all. And yet you, a mewling whelp suckling at your Corpse-God’s wizened teat, have the temerity to think you can judge me?” The scientist’s face stiffened, his eyes glittering like dark gems. “Tell me, is this what you seek, warrior?”

  A mechanical arm extruded itself from the tarnished brass exo-frame on Bile’s back, and dipped into the churn of the fluid-filled tank. When it returned there was a crystalline phial clasped in the manipulator claw at its tip.

  Rafen gasped; the sacred blood! He could almost see the crimson liquid within the tube, the measure of preserved vitae from the Lord Primarch kept alive by the sanguinary priests of his Chapter. His hand came up to reach for it before he could stop himself.

  Bile sniffed, and dropped the phial back into the tank, as if it meant nothing. “So much value ascribed to something that is, when all is considered, a trivial collection of protein chains, hydrocarbons and base molecular compounds. And yet, in the correct combination, a priceless thing.” He stepped back and with the sweep of his coat, the rest of the tank’s contents were revealed.

  Small knots of flesh hung in suspension, drifting in the sluggish flow. A faint haze of dilute blood marbled the liquid medium, and it was with building horror that Rafen recognised the shapes of the strange organs.

  “You know what these are, yes?” asked Bile.

  Rafen had come to this blighted world believing that the renegade was working some foul plan connected to his Chapter’s genetic legacy; but now he began to understand that the Blood Angels were not alone in this. The objects in the tank were harvested progenoid glands.

  Each Space Marine, regardless of Chapter or origin, carried such implants within them after their ascension to full brotherhood. Over time, the progenoids absorbed genetic matter and matured. New gene-seed grown within the organs could then be harvested and reintroduced to a Chapter’s genetic stock, to begin the cycle anew. The progenoids were the very lifeblood of the Adeptus Astartes, the raw material of generations of warriors to come. Some said they were the most precious of treasures, beyond holy relics and sacred lore, because they represented the future.

  And here stood Fabius Bile, smugly exhibiting a collection of these priceless elements that he had ripped from the corpses of the warriors he had murdered.

  “I have gathered these for many years,” he was saying, smiling at the sound of his own voice. “At first I stole them or bartered for them from the warriors of the legions that had broken with the Emperor to follow the eightfold path… But I could salvage little. The power of our new gods is so strong that it altered the nature of the Emperor’s Children, the Death Guard, the Night Lords, Word Bearers and all the others—”

  “It corrupted you!” Rafen spat. “Poisoned you!”

  “If you wish,” continued the scientist. “For what I had conceived, admittedly, you might be correct. I needed to find a more… stable source of genetic material. Something closer to the source.”

  “We’ve been collecting for a very long time,” sighed Cheyne.

  Bile went on, in the manner of a teacher addressing a student. “It isn’t an easy prospect.” He walked back towards Rafen, bearing down on him. “It’s difficult to appreciate the amount of effort I have put into this work.”

  A sickened, horrified sensation built up inside the Blood Angel. Part of him wanted to remain ignorant, to never know the scope of whatever scheme Bile had designed; but this was why he was here, to know the truth. The renegade was enjoying this moment, knowing what Rafen needed to ask even as the question appalled him. “What… work?”

  “I have made so many great things,” Bile said, inclining his head towards Cheyne and the other New Men. In turn, Cheyne made a winsome face that seemed oddly feminine. “You were on Baal. You saw my Bloodfiends.”

  Rafen shuddered to recall the monstrous vampiric beasts rendered out of Astartes gene-matter. The business of killing the creatures had been hard-fought and bloody. “I did. All of those vile abortions were destroyed. We burned every one of them.”

  Bile’s nostrils flared with annoyance. “Great art so often fails to find an audience with the intellect to appreciate it. Sometimes I am filled with woe to think that no one in this blighted millennium has the wit to see the scope of my brilliance.” He advanced towards the Blood Angel. “I am the Lord of Life, Astartes. Primogenitor and master of the flesh. Not like your silent Emperor, dead-alive behind his army of lesser men, all of them picking at the decayed carcass of the galaxy.”

  “You are less than nothing compared to Him!” Rafen snapped. “You would be ashes and dust if not for His touch upon you! The Emperor made your turncoat Chapter along with all the rest, from the raw stuff of His own flesh!”

  “I have done the same,” Bile said, his mood shifting again. “Built life from fractions into living, breathing magnificence. I brought back the greatest warrior of all time from thousands of years of death…”

  Cheyne gave a breathy sigh. “Great Horus…”

  Bile nodded. “I made him anew. Gave life to our warmaster once again—”

  Rafen had heard the dark rumours of the Reborn Horus during his time as a Scout Marine, but he had always thought them to be propaganda stories seeded by the archenemy. It seemed he had been mistaken. “You created an abomination! A monstrosity so foul that even your own allies could not stomach it to live!”

  “It is a regrettable truth,” agreed the renegade. “That ungrat
eful thug Abaddon should have welcomed my replicae with open arms… But instead he sent his Black Legion lapdogs to kill it and raze my laboratoria to the ground. He called it ‘blasphemy’, as if such a thing can exist.” Bile snorted. “Codes, morality, principles, ethics, call them what you will. These things are only abstract constructs invented by weaker men who do not have the courage to forge their own path!”

  The Blood Angel turned slightly, stiffening. The renegade was close to him now. He felt a tingling in his fingers as a very real possibility became clear. I can attack him. Another step closer, and Cheyne will not be able to stop me in time. Rafen licked his lips, and his tongue touched the tips of his fangs. What would this fiend’s blood taste like, he wondered?

  “I have known many weak men,” Bile continued. “Many men who believed they had vision, but who were limited by the petty bonds they put upon themselves, of so-called virtue… Your Emperor was one of them.”

  “You have no right to speak of Him!” Rafen could not help himself; it was impossible for the Astartes to hear his god disparaged and say nothing.

  “No?” Bile studied him. “Unlike you, whelp, I once walked the same ground as your idol. I breathed the same air as him. And I tell you this, without lie or artifice. He never wanted to become what you have made him! He did not wish to be your god-thing. He abhorred such ideals! The slavery of your crippled, blind Imperium would sicken him, if he had eyes to see it.” He folded his arms across his barrel chest. “You may call me traitor, and be right in it, but I have never betrayed what I know to be true. I have never betrayed myself. You, Astartes, and all your kin, betray your Emperor with every moment of your worthless lives!”

  “Your words are worthless to me,” said the Blood Angel.

  Bile continued as if he had not spoken. “And yet… He taught me a lesson that for many years I did not understand. In a way, Abaddon brought it back to me.” The renegade seemed as if he were thinking aloud, almost as if he were alone in the room, voicing his musings to empty air. “The lesson is this. The only real crime for those of superlative intellect and great prowess is to allow one’s self to become shackled by mediocrity. The crime is to let your grasp be less than your reach.” He nodded to himself. “To aim low.”

  Something in Bile’s tone made Rafen hesitate. “What in the name of Terra are you talking about?”

  “I am a patient being. I have worked long and hard, and I know the hardest toil is yet to come, but I embrace it. I know it will be worth the struggle. When I made my New Men, I duplicated the works of Chapter Masters and Primarchs.” He looked at Cheyne once again. “But it was not enough, and so I sought to go beyond that, to clone Horus Lupercal, to echo the work of your Emperor and create a Primarch.” Bile smiled. “But even in that, I was wrong. For, I realised, my destiny is not simply to rise to the level of the Emperor’s skill and duplicate his works, oh no…” He took a step towards Rafen, and the Astartes could smell rust and the fetor of old, decayed flesh. “My destiny is to eclipse him.”

  The sheer conceit of the scientist’s words bared Rafen’s teeth in a sneer. “Your hubris is vast enough to shroud the sky! And your madness dwarfs even that!”

  “You don’t understand. Of course you don’t. You are limited and without vision!” He tapped his brow. “Think, Space Marine, think! If I could hold the skeins of DNA from an entire Chapter in my hands and mould them like clay, what could I create? A Primarch? Now imagine what I could do with the genetic legacy of not just one, but hundreds of Chapters!”

  “No…” The beginnings of comprehension crowded into the edges of Rafen’s thought, and he gasped, for the enormity of the ideal was so vast and so horribly monstrous that he could scarcely contain it. “No!”

  “Oh, but yes!” Bile roared, grinning as wide as his wolfish mouth would allow. “I am assembling the disparate genetic strains of every single Adeptus Astartes, teasing out the threads of inherited gene-matter that tie them to their Primarchs, and their Primarchs to their creator! The greatest puzzle of them all, Blood Angel! I am going to reassemble the genetic code sequence of the ur-source for all Space Marines! The progenitor of our kind, the father of us all!”

  “The Emperor…” The atrocity of Bile’s scheme defied dimension. “You will build a replicae… of Him?”

  “Can you imagine that?” Cheyne offered. “The most powerful human psychic in history, reborn under the allegiance of the Ruinous Powers!” The androgyne’s eyes were shining with tears of joy.

  “And you have helped me prepare, Blood Angel,” said Bile. “There are a great many voids in my map of the Imperial genome, but the pure blood of a direct-line son of the Emperor… say, that of the Primarch Sanguinius… will go a long way towards correcting those errors.” He laughed to himself. “And one day soon, when I have gathered enough progenoids and tortured enough of your errant kindred, a child will take its first teetering steps from out of a gene-engine tank, and call me father! A child who will remake the galaxy! A Prince-Emperor free to rule, not hobbled and confined—”

  The dazzling magnitude of this horror seemed to dislocate Rafen from the here and now; he felt as if his mind were being pulled away, sucked into the undertow of this gargantuan, hideous concept. The shock of it was almost too much to conceive, as if he were trying to imagine the size of the universe. Could such a thing be done? He had seen much in his service to the Golden Throne, horrors and spectacles of near-infinite scale. Cold crept into his veins as it came to him that of all the minds in the galaxy who might be capable of this sacrilege, Fabius Bile was foremost among them.

  The far-distant part of his reeling mind understood this; the more base, animal will within him reacted in a manner in keeping with its nature.

  Moving without conscious thought, Rafen leapt at the renegade and slammed into him with such impact that Bile crashed bodily into one of the trophy racks, scattering relics across the metallic decking. Fuelled by a rage as primal as it was potent, the Astartes tore into his enemy, shredding open his skin-coat.

  Bile’s hands came up, and the metallic claws of the arcane device on his back exploded outward; but Rafen was already upon his bared throat, his jaws wide. The Blood Angel sank his fangs into the leathery flesh of the renegade’s neck and bit down hard, ripping skin, puncturing veins, crushing cartilage.

  A torrent of oil-thick liquid jetted outward in a spray, and Bile’s cry of shocked alarm was a wet, strangling gurgle.

  Limbs of flesh and metal stabbed and punched at Rafen’s torso, but he blotted out the pain; all he wanted was the kill, the blood—as foul-tasting and polluted as he had expected it to be—washing down over his chin and his chest. Bile tried to cry out, but his throat was a collapsed ruin.

  The New Men were on him now, electro-halberds spitting blue fire that surged agony along his every nerve-ending, but still he ripped at his foe, feeling the meat of Bile’s throat shred to rags in his teeth. The twisted scientist stumbled and lost his footing, crashing to the floor, and still Rafen did not release, slashing and tearing. It was only when Cheyne began to sing the pain-prayer once more that the Blood Angel’s frenzied attack ceased.

  The parasite turned over and over, pouring boiling hot agony into Rafen’s chest. Drenched with blood, he screamed and fell away from his prey, doubling up in pain. All the other injuries and hurts topped the dam of his will and flooded in to follow. Rafen reeled and gasped, clinging to the edge of awareness.

  “Get him out of here!” Cheyne was screaming, its voice pitched high and shrill. “Don’t let the whelp perish! He will live to pay for this! Take him away!”

  Darkness closed in on Rafen, billowing out from the shadowed corners around him, colour leaching from everything in his vision as his wounds sang with agony. The last image he carried with him into the black was of Fabius Bile twitching and dying, blood still emerging in arcs of brown-red fluids as his ruined throat lay open to the air.

  With one last effort, he swilled a mouthful of foul matter and spat it from his lips, eject
ing it across the faces of the New Men. The exertion drained him, and he lost his grip, the light breaking into shards that faded like smoke.

  TWELVE

  A wave of brackish, icy water brought Rafen reeling back to wakefulness, and he spat and flailed, his fists coming up to fight off any attack. Blinking, he could make out only dim shapes. His face was swollen from impact and blood gummed one of his eyes shut.

  The mist over his vision began to dissipate, and he determined he was in another of the metal cells, shafts of dull yellow daylight slicing in through vertical gaps in the walls. There were no exits other than a heavy steel door on thick hinges.

  “On your feet, boy,” said a gruff voice. He heard the clank of an empty bucket as a slump-shouldered figure discarded the container.

  “Vetcha,” said Rafen, wiping back his unkempt, blood-matted hair. When he looked at his fingers they came away a dirty red. “I expected to wake up dead.”

  The old Space Wolf gave a wheezing laugh. “Thought you’d see the Emperor’s face next, did you? Find yourself in Elysium?” Vetcha spat. “You don’t have the luck, Blood Angel. No man here does. Too easy a way out.” The blind veteran reached out a gnarled hand and helped him stand. Vetcha’s fingers were bony but strong like rods of iron.

  Rafen looked around, his brow furrowing. He could hear a noise coming from beyond the walls of the metal cell; a clashing, banging rhythm of impact after impact. “Where have you brought me now, Wolf?”

  “Not I,” said Vetcha, moving into the shadows to stoop down for something. “The New Men dragged you here.” He chuckled again. “My, but you must have angered them to a great degree. I’ve rarely seen them take such delight in kicking a man while he could not fight back.”