Great gash marks rent the shoulder plates and armour fragments open, brittle edges awash with lubricating fluids and thick pulses of blood, running together in colloidal swirls. Kais found himself running a gloved hand in morbid fascination along one such tear, wondering what manner of blade could have so neatly parted such powerful armour.
There was no sign of a culprit, only a shredded perimeter of bolter craters, plasma-scorched metal and smoothed puddles of solidified melta-damage to attest to these abstract chunks of armour and flesh ever having lived.
Kais swallowed hard and let his eyes wander upwards to the red carpeted staircase that rose from the airy centre of the chapel. Somewhere above this bloody grotto was the bridge.
He looked back down at the fleshy detritus and stooped to pick something up.
Delpheus, sprawled on the deck, gnashed his teeth together and fought to stay conscious. It was happening. It was all happening. The masked fiend, inverted. All coming true.
Bolter fire hammered at the air, a furious staccato making his ears ache. Phosphorescent light blossoms capered across his eyesight, amorphous puddles of purple and blue left hanging nebulously in their wake.
Something screamed. He felt his first heart, punctured cleanly with a single razor-sharp blow, palpitating faintly and beginning to die. He expelled a gurgled lungful of air and was unsurprised to taste a thick syrup of blood and bile pooling from his mouth.
“A...” His voice was a lugubrious swamp croak, bubbling pathetically. He spat a gobbet of filth and tried again. “A... Ardias...”
Something blurred above his head, a crackling haze of form and light, rocketing across his vision with a hyena’s giggle. Bolter fire chased it and it was gone, a scampering shape swallowed by the shadows. Nothing he was seeing made any sense.
“What’s...” he mumbled, brain too detached to operate. He wanted information, wanted to cry out for a weapon so he could help his comrades fight back this... this...
What is it?
His first heart died by degrees, contractions diminishing in strength until it perished with a final spasm, its artificial counterpart accelerating its pulse to compensate. The overburdened organ’s hammering exertions made his head pound and his eyes ache, every throb tightening his blood vessels with a percussive roar. His legs wouldn’t work. He couldn’t even feel them.
He’d lost his gun in a slick of oily blood spill, lurching around when the... When the whatever-it-was had ripped from the wall hungrily.
“Ardias?” he tried again, voice weak. “Captain?”
More bolter fire. More death. Another scream as another shape blurred past. It was all happening in another world to someone else, as abstract as a cloud formation and just as unthreatening. He almost laughed.
A Space Marine helmet, lacerated head rattling inside, tumbled past him on the deck. Somewhere a plasma gun foomed breathlessly, destructive energy orb roaring its impact into the air. Delpheus blinked agonised tears out of his eyes.
A pair of sky-blue pillars stomped heavily from the pain haze beside him, cold hands cupping his head with a tenderness belying their brittle form. Captain Ardias glared down at him, concern etched incongruously on his grizzled face. He sounded choked.
“Delpheus? There’s help on its way. You’ll be fine.”
Delpheus smiled through the blood slick, hearing the concern in his captain’s voice. Ardias was a terrible liar.
“I was right...” he gurgled.
“You were right. We’re needed.”
Ardias looked away with a growl, bolt pistol tracking something across the periphery of Delpheus’s vision. It screamed and disappeared in a gout of ichor and light. And then there was a voice in Delpheus’s mind.
Twisting, probing. It was a cruel, venomous thing: slicing through his weakened defences and sinking claws of shimmering empyrean into his brain, ripping and stabbing. Playing him like a puppet.
“Nnnn...” he gurgled, fighting it. The look in Ardias’s eyes told him: You’ll be dead soon.
The thought fortress in his mind fell, once-impregnable walls sundered. The other mind, wherever it was, surged inwards, gripping at his lungs and larynx and manipulating his tongue.
“The bridge...” he hissed, unbidden. “Get to the bridge.”
Ardias nodded. “Of course. I’ll protect it with my life.”
“Stop the battle.” Not my voice! Not my voice!
“What?”
Delpheus tried swallowing, constricting his throat, biting his tongue— anything! It wouldn’t work. Weak and violated, his mind wasn’t his to control. He’d failed. He’d succumbed in his final moments. The shame overwhelmed him.
“Stop the battle,” his traitorous voice repeated. “The tau will parley. The new threat is more important.”
“They’ll cooperate? Just like that?”
“You must trust me.”
“I do, brother — I do.”
“The teleport arrays. They will take you to the bridge.”
“I understand.”
The shadows came down around his vision, like night drawing in. The controlling presence in his mind retreated stealthily, satisfied at its manipulations. Everything went cold.
The last vestiges of courage and honour inside Delpheus’s soul — a sputtering flame striving against the darkness — ripped forwards into the myriad skeins of possibility, crackling with psychic portent, and imparted one final warning, uncontrolled by whatever puppet master had spoken through him before.
“The... the rogue element. He lives on borrowed time. Seek him out. Find the warrior with the bomb in his head. Trust him.”
“What? Brother, I don’t understand...”
“Trust him...”
More gunfire. More screams. Delpheus gurgled.
The fog closed in, the blackness rolled over him, the Emperor smiled.
The world went away.
Severus smiled to himself, collecting his thoughts quickly.
The captain had looked so trusting — so sure of his dying comrade’s instructions. So much for the formidable defences of an Astartes Librarian! He’d played the fading fool like a rag doll — a brittle mask to be worn when required and cast away when redundant.
Not long now. The Ultramarines would intervene and stop the battle. All the pieces would gather together and he would take them all!
Ensign Kilson was sitting at his console aboard the bridge, unable to forget the hulking grey-green super-warriors he’d escorted through the vessel earlier.
Naturally enough the command deck was in a state of barely restrained anarchy, ranking officers screaming furiously at ensigns and servitors, apparently holding everyone but themselves responsible for the destruction of the main engines. Kilson did his best to allow it to wash over him, too experienced in the field of delegated blame to feel personally put out by the shrieked accusations.
A little part of him was thinking: we’re crippled. We’re under attack. They’re coming for us here and now and soon, without warning or mercy, we’re all going to die. The whole bloody lot of us.
But mostly he was too busy remembering the tremulous impact of the Space Marines’ footsteps, their glowering yellow eyeslits sweeping left and right, their weapons clashing against their breasts. He felt like a child again, back in the uptiers of CaerParav Hive, dreaming of meeting that season’s premier gladius fighter or collecting wafer engrams of the sector’s most renowned commissars.
He’d met them, those graceful grey-green brutes. He’d spoken to them, by the throne! A little part of him, detached from the termite nest madness of the bridge, felt like somehow, in a small way, it had touched divinity.
When the xenogen invader crept into the bridge and liquefied his body in a gust of thermal energy, Ensign Kilson was smiling serenely.