Kais didn’t look.
Smoke and dust circulated all around, an opaque fog bisected neatly by the burning gas. He scrabbled beneath the flamespout on all fours, patting out the glowing speckles of singed fabric on his arms and legs. The door, absorbing the full force of the detonation, had ceased to exist.
Kais’s triumph was short-lived; he leaped into the boardroom with a shout, gun brandished hungrily before him, to find blood. Nothing but blood. Limbs off, heads removed, bodies slumped. Goggle eyes and gaping mouths, like fish.
El’Yis’ten stared at him reproachfully from a heap of flesh in one corner. Her body was on the other side of the room. Gue’la and tau, so scattered together that the bloodslick was a pale violet, a swirling galaxy of red and cyan running together. Here a tau arm lay, knuckles clenched, beside a de-limbed human corpse.
There was a symbolism here, perhaps. A sense of unity, a sense of physical sameness. Given a talented enough por’hui journalist, this scene might mean something. “In death, we’re all the same”, perhaps.
But it didn’t.
All it meant to Kais was a furious scrabble to remove his helmet, a bulge-eyed moment of staring around, unshielded by the layer of artificiality his HUD provided, and then a bilious surge of nausea from his guts to his mouth. This time he couldn’t keep it down.
His mind tumbled upside down, the whispering clogged his senses like mud and reality shifted like a compass.
Ardias stared at the madness around him, acquainting himself with the extent of the situation. That things had gone catastrophically wrong was undeniable: the peace negotiations were ruined and the hidden evil, Delpheus’s “masked fiend”, was exposed. Still, despite it all, despite the horror and the death, despite the utter collapse of events, Ardias entered the fray with an air of professional relish. He had been born and moulded to fight, and in so doing he justified his existence. It was a strangely reassuring notion, and he could see no point in denying it.
With a chattering bolt pistol in his hand, with a snarling chainsword cleaving the skulls of his enemies, it was difficult to appreciate the wider calamity — the physical realities were too close at hand to ignore. Ardias killed and shouted orders, commanding a meticulous purge, flanked by his indomitable, unwavering brethren.
Governor Severus had invited Chaos onto the Enduring Blade.
Chaos. The antithesis of order. The “Great Terror”. To investigate too far into the whys and wherefores of the Dark Power was to become clouded and tainted by it, so great was its potency. The mysterious agents of the Inquisition’s Ordo Malleus spent centuries struggling to bind and purge the madness, fully aware of the futility of conventional sciences and technologies. Instead the Taint, the very concept of Chaos, was embroiled behind a paradigm of religion and occultism, a stringent galactic code that stated clearly: the Emperor’s light is pure. All else leads to Chaos.
It was bound to the warp. It was bound to the real and the unreal together, it was bound to those things invisible in the mundane colours and clamours of materiality: thoughts, feelings, spirits and souls and angels and devils.
Chaos was a thing of division and conflict and contrast, a thing of anarchy and insanity. It would pull down the structures of humanity; of the universe; of time itself. It would shatter the galaxy for the reward of a pretty noise or murder a million billion men just to appreciate the hue of their fluids. It came from nowhere and went to nowhere.
It was everything the Ultramarines were not. Ardias exploded a chittering daemon thing, fluttering at him with hooked teeth bared, and thanked the Emperor for this holy opportunity to cleanse the taint. There were mistakes to be rectified here.
Ten millennia ago the Emperor’s glorious crusades to reunite humanity faltered and crumbled. The Space Marine legions, deified avatars of retribution and human endeavour, infallible in their purity and steadfastness, shining icons of strength and wholeness, had rotted from within. Like a worm ceaselessly and blindly hunting for a vulnerable entry point, Chaos had writhed its way into the very heart of the Imperium. Half the Space Marine legions were seduced and corrupted. Humanity held its breath. The Emperor all but died, sacrificing himself to save his race.
The Dark Legions scattered.
Ancient history, of course. Whispered lessons from the Librium at the Fortress of Hera. Arcane heresies guarded and studied by lexicaniums and codiciers and epistolaries. A blot on the data sheet, a stain on the purity of mankind. But the Legions were still out there, biding their time, murdering their way closer and closer to the heart of the Imperium. Who knew where they lurked, where they would strike next, where their shadow would fall?
Ardias snarled and swiped at a horned helmet so hard it exploded, unable to restrain the unnatural hatred and fury that rose in his gut, guiltily aware of the deviation of his thoughts from the measured approach that the Codex counselled.
The shadow had fallen across the Enduring Blade and he vowed silently to grapple against it until the last of his energy was spent; a loyal servant of the Emperor could do no more, and was expected to do no less. These ancient warriors, blackened with evil, who had once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Ardias’s ancestors, these fallen angels; they must be punished.
“Preserve your ammunition!” he voxed, firing off a short burst at one bellowing Chaos thing. A cackling daemon formed from a warp portal at his side and was efficiently cleaved in half by Sergeant Mallich’s chainsword. Ardias nodded gratefully and moved on.
“Brother-captain? This is Sergeant Larynz.”
“Report.”
“I have the third tactical squad, two decks above your position. There are incursions at all points. These portals, brother — have you ever seen their like?”
“Negative. Some dark sorcery lies at their heart, Larynz, you can be certain of that. Courage and honour!”
“Courage and honour!”
“Regroup on my signal, sergeant. I fear we must sacrifice this vessel.”
“Sir? You can’t mea—?”
“Regroup on me, Larynz. No questions.”
“Of course, brother.”
Ardias barged onwards along the corridor, swatting drooling daemonettes like flies. This far into the ship, the walls themselves seemed corrupted— structural damage and ancientness combining with some indefinable alteration to make everything seem organic and twisted. Not for the first time Ardias felt like he was walking in a peristaltic gut, wet walls shivering with hungry villi around him.
“Captain!” the vox chattered, urgently. “I’ve located a communications chamber.” The rust-red shape of Tech-marine Achellus waved to him along a side artery, prominent mechanical appendages emulating the movement of his arms. The figure beckoned into one of the innumerable chambers that lined every corridor, where Ardias could see lights blinking and brass-bound gauges fluttering. In a vessel as ancient and labyrinthine as an Emperor-class battlecruiser, subsidiary control rooms and communication hubs lurked in myriad corners. Given enough time, a seeker could locate any resource aboard a ship of such magnitude.
Ardias strode into the room, nodding at the cob-webbed controls.