[Dawn of War 02] - Ascension Read online

  Without any visible attack, Ikarus staggered back, pivoting on his knee as though some force had smashed into his right arm. Corallis could hear the librarian’s roar of defiance as he struggled to hold onto his staff, which spat and dripped with power despite the assault, but the sergeant could still not see the source of the attack. Whoever it was, it was clear that their target was Ikarus.

  The two other bikes came charging into the fray, skidding through the sand and coming to rest on either side of the beleaguered librarian, flanking him with their mechanical bulk and firepower. Without pausing, they opened up with their twin-linked bolters, perforating the desert clouds in both directions with long tirades of fire.

  A stuttering movement made Corallis turn. About thirty metres to the east, he could see a humanoid figure flick into visibility, a long, dull orange cloak fluttering in the wind behind it and a scarf wrapped loosely around its face. There was a flesh wound on one of its legs, and it was limping. Although the sand storm blurred the image, this was the best shot that Corallis had glimpsed all afternoon. Almost instantaneously, the sergeant tracked his bolter across and squeezed off two rounds.

  Ikarus had also sensed the movement, and a wave of psychic energy smashed into the eldar’s chest just as the bolter shells punched into the side of his head. The ranger’s incinerated and decapitated body dropped into a crumpled heap on the sand.

  After the exertion, Ikarus slumped forward, using both hands to support his weight on his staff. Corallis kept his bolter ready, unconvinced that there could have been only one. If the assailants really were eldar, it would be unprecedented for them to be alone. Even eldar pirates travelled in packs, and the long, cameleoline cloak worn by the dead one was not the kind of thing that he would expect pirates to wear.

  As he scanned the haze, Corallis heard Ikarus yell once again. Turning quickly, he saw the librarian lifted off his feet, thrown back between the two Blood Ravens’ bikes by an invisible blast. Before he hit the ground, another force seemed to strike at his side, spinning him in the air and severing his right arm in an abrupt fountain of blood. Ikarus crashed to the ground as the two bikes and Corallis opened up with their bolters, riddling the desert with explosive shells, strafing their fire across the vista in sweeping arcs.

  Then everything was silent. The Blood Ravens held their fire, although there was no evidence that their fury had hit anything. There was no movement in the desert as the clouds of sand began to settle back down to the ground. Ikarus lay motionless in the blood-stained sand, with his severed arm still clutching his force staff nearly ten metres away from him. When Corallis stooped down over the librarian, he saw that his armour was riddled with tiny holes, across his chest plates and helmet. All of the librarian’s major organs, including his brain, had been lacerated and pulverised.

  The Blood Ravens had been recruiting from Rahe’s Paradise for a long time before they finally set up a permanent base, and the sweeping, circular amphitheatre in which they conducted the Blood Trials was built centuries before the monastery-outpost. Its stone structure had survived more or less intact since it was first erected, until one of the local volcanoes, Krax-7, had erupted and spilt molten rock up against its north face, swamping the thick, curving wall in a lava-flow, making it look as though the edifice had been carved into the side of the volcano itself. An earthquake had then cracked straight through the arena, leaving a deep jagged ravine cut across the wide floor. The chasm dropped through the thin tectonic plate down into the liquid magma beneath, and thick sulphurous gases poured out of the rift continuously. The ravine had never closed again, and the river of molten rock had simply been incorporated into the trials that were hosted within the amphitheatre.

  Gabriel stood on the centre-stone of the great arch through which the crowd of aspirant warriors poured into the arena. His armour glittered in the red sun, glowing with life and tinted with gold. On either side of him rose the daunting statues of two of the first Blood Ravens chaplains to come to Rahe’s Paradise, Elizur and Shedeur, resplendent in their ornate death masks, each brandishing their staffs of office—the sacred Crozius Arcanum. The statues were nearly twice the height of Gabriel, and he was proud to stand between them, staring out into the volcanic mountains as the sun started to sink behind them.

  Behind Gabriel, inside the amphitheatre, standing on a stone pedestal at the opposite end of the arena, lit by a conical beam of red sunlight that shone through the arch below Gabriel’s feet, Prathios held his own Crozius into the air for the assembled crowd to see, and silence fell. He was bedecked in full battle armour, complete with his own ceremonial death mask—the contorted and tortured face of a beast half man and half bird. The sudden silence made Gabriel turn away from the mountainscape outside and look back at the scene, casting his own long shadow across the crowd towards his chaplain. For as long as there were Marines like Prathios, he reflected, the future of the Blood Ravens would be secure.

  The arena was full of warriors already, pressed in next to each other like cattle in a corral. Their clothes were poor, worn, and ripped, and Gabriel could hardly identify their various political and familial allegiances from their ragged attire. However, although they were all pressed in so intimately, there was no jostling and no antagonism—these were men who would not hesitate to kill each other if they met outside this amphitheatre, and their restraint spoke eloquently of their awe for the Blood Ravens. Despite their ragged and ramshackle appearance, Gabriel was pleased to see the glints of finely honed and immaculately polished blades throughout the throng. These were warriors, after all, and they seemed to have their priorities right.

  As the Blood Ravens captain stared down into the crowd, with the blood-red sun at his back, the bursts of light from the well-kept blades of the aspirants seemed to flicker and flash like tiny explosions in the throng. He saw them as starbursts of light, surging with bloody colours, and for a moment he was transfixed.

  Then the lights began to blur together, pulsing as though driven from a common source, casting a haze of red over the scene and taunting Gabriel’s senses with dizziness. He reached out a hand to steady himself against the statue of Elizur, shifting his weight against the heavy stone monument in an attempt to prevent himself from falling forward into the arena. As his hand punched into the image of the great chaplain, it seemed to fall through the carved rock, plunging into the material as though it were little more than a viscous liquid. As Gabriel slumped over to the side, his body crashed into the statue, which now seemed cold and hard.

  Without his helmet, Gabriel’s head smacked into the rock and then scraped down it as he slid to the ground. Even in his half-conscious state, he could feel the tear of pain as the skin on the side of his face was grazed and ripped by the impact and abrasion. Blood ran down his cheek and neck, and he could taste its metallic tang in his mouth.

  For some reason, Gabriel’s Larraman’s organ did not seem to activate and blood continued to gush out of the wound on the side of his face as he lay on top of the arch between the feet of Elizur and Shedeur. It felt as though his eyes were filling with blood, and the scene within the auditorium below was cast into a deep red hue, as though viewed through a bloodied lens. Just at the edge of his awareness, Gabriel thought that he saw Prathios glance up towards him as he addressed the crowd, explaining to them that most of them would die over the course of the next few days. Even more vaguely, Gabriel was aware that a number of faces in the arena had turned towards him. They did not point or cry out. They drew no attention to him, and their faces seemed awash with compassion.

  As he struggled to bring the faces into focus, one of them spiralled up out of the crowd towards him—its clear green eyes and braided blonde hair fixing themselves into Gabriel’s mind. At the same time, a choir of voices started to chant into his ears, beginning with a single, soaring note of silver purity. The music began to swirl in sweeps of stereo as it grew louder and more voices joined the first, making Gabriel’s mind spin in his head and bringing the gut-wrenches of
nausea. For a moment, he thought that the aspirants were singing, but he quickly realised that these voices were from somewhere else entirely.

  After a few seconds the voices reached a sickly crescendo, always verging on cacophony and then finally succumbing to it. Together with the music, the spiralling face of the blonde boy spun faster and faster until its flesh started to contort and twist, finally ripping and being torn from a rapidly disintegrating skull. As the head collapsed into sprays of pulp, the whole amphitheatre seemed to be screwed into a giant spiral, curdling the entire scene as though it were painted on a vortex of oil.

  Gabriel couldn’t move. He just lay at the feet of the chaplains and closed his eyes, waiting for the confusion to pass; he had suffered from visions before—scenes of hell and chaos afflicting the people of Cyrene—the imploring face of Isador as he died at the end of Gabriel’s own blade. But closing his eyes brought no respite, and the heinous choir seemed to sing with increased vigour in the sudden darkness, bringing a sickly red light into his thoughts with each glorious note. For a moment, Gabriel reached out for the choristers, realising that they were a beacon of sorts, that there was something pure, silver, and pristine hidden beyond the nausea. But then he lost consciousness altogether.

  Sleep had been the neophyte’s only solace, and now the Blood Ravens were about to take that away from him too. Ckrius had been pushed rapidly through the first five phases of the implantation process—a process that would normally have taken several years. During the process, he had experienced precious few moments of sleep, in which pain, surgery and transformation could be forgotten, but they had kept him relatively sane. Of course, the apothecary was not overly concerned about Ckrius’ sanity or his state of mind during the first five phases—strength of mind was essential, but sanity was a relative concept and not necessarily an asset to a Space Marine. In any case, phase six would begin the process of eradicating any significant personality flaws. After its initial implantation, the catalepsean node would deprive Ckrius of sleep, thus preventing his brain from launching its automatic defences of his personality whilst a programme of hypnotherapy fashioned him into a Marine. Later on, the implant would enable him to regulate his own circadian rhythms by isolating different sections of his brain and letting each sleep in turn—at no stage in the future would Ckrius dream in the way that he did before. He would become able to sleep while he was still awake.

  Over the course of recent centuries, there had been some whispered rumours that the phase six zygote had suffered a slight mutation in the Blood Ravens. In response, the librarian fathers of the Chapter had made some slight alterations to the long-term programme of hypnotherapy that all Marines continued to receive, even after they completed their ascensions into the Adeptus Astartes. It was hypothesised that the Blood Ravens’ catalepsean node continued to interfere with the ability of Marines to sleep normally even after the implant was fully embedded and control of its functions should have become voluntary. The result appeared to be that some Blood Ravens never had any dreams of any kind, and the Chapter’s leaders were concerned about the effects that this might have on their Marines’ states of mind. Nonetheless, the zygote continued to be implanted in every initiate because, without it, it would be impossible to conduct the intravenous hypnotherapy required to alter the nervous systems of neophytes to sustain the other implants. And, in the final analysis, the Chapter maintained its faith that the node functioned as it should.

  Standing in the observation gallery of the Implantation Chamber, Captain Ulantus was struck with a mixture of surprise and admiration for the youth: after all, he was still alive. If he had to be honest, Ulantus had thought that Gabriel had made a mistake to try and put someone so old through the process, no matter how much need there was for new initiates. It was dangerous for the boy and potentially a tremendous waste of resources for the Chapter. However, not for the first time, Gabriel had proven Ulantus wrong—although he would never admit it in public.

  The apothecary’s mechanical, skeletal, metal arms were twitching away feverishly under the adamantium slab on which the wide-eyed Ckrius was strapped. The piercing sound of drilling cut through the chamber as the device started to cut up through a hole in the table into the occipital bone in the back of Ckrius’ skull. The horror on the neophyte’s face was absolute as his body struggled and knotted against his restraints, desperate to yank his head away from this egregious invasion. His eyes bulged in unspeakable, reflexive panic, as though this were the worst of all the tortuous procedures that he had endured.

  Ulantus watched the boy’s face with something approaching sympathy; he had once been the man lying on that tablet with a shrouded, augmetic, inhuman-human drilling into his head, and he knew the horror of it. However, he also knew that if Ckrius survived this phase, he would do so by convincing himself that it was the worst thing that he would ever have to endure. His mind would be screaming that he just had to hang on for a few more minutes, then he would be able to sleep and prepare for the next implant, which couldn’t be as bad as this one. Hence, Ulantus knew that Ckrius would only survive because he was ignorant: there would be no sleep and the procedures still to come made this one seem like nothing. In the captain’s eyes there was sympathy, pity and disgust in equal measures, but his heart was burning with pride that all Blood Ravens had made it through this terrible ordeal. If he survived, Ckrius would also learn to despise the weak-minded optimism that got him through this day: hating who he once was would help him to forget it. If he didn’t, he’d be dead.

  The high-pitched whining of the drill abruptly changed into a crunch and then it growled as the bit sunk into something moist and soft, before accelerating into a shrill whir as resistance to its motion vanished. Ulantus saw a wet deposit fall under the table and then watched the apothecary’s mechanical arms twitch with renewed motion as it manoeuvred the tiny implant into place.

  Despite his well-practiced scepticism about Gabriel, Ulantus found himself hoping that the young neophyte would pull through. He had been less than impressed when the Commander of the Watch had decided to take his strike cruiser off to the other side of the segmentum on what appeared to be a whim, leaving Ulantus and the Ninth Company to complete the recruitment sweep of the Trontiux and then Lorn systems, as well as leaving Ckrius in his hands. But Ulantus took to responsibility well, which was why he had been made captain at such a young age, and it hadn’t taken him long to adopt Ckrius as his own. It had only been a matter of hours after the Ravenous Spirit had departed that he had made his way down to the Litany of Fury’s Implantation Chamber to check on the boy’s progress.

  As he watched, the heavy doors to the chamber slid open with a hiss of decompression, letting a beam of light into the dimness inside and sucking a jet of noxious gas out into the corridor beyond.

  “Captain, I thought that I might find you here,” bowed Sergeant Saulh.

  “Sergeant—you were right. What news?” asked Ulantus, stiffening his posture into an affectation of formality.

  “News from the Lorn system, captain. It seems that the local regiment of guardsmen is under attack by a horde of orks,” reported Saulh.

  Captain Ulantus nodded his head. “Understood,” he said. “Have they requested our aid?”

  “No captain. They have made no such request,” replied Saulh. “The report suggests that they are confident that they should be able to bring the situation under control by themselves.”

  “Very well. Tell them that we will be there presently, but that we will first continue to the Trontiux system as planned. In the absence of Captain Angelos and the Third Company, the Litany of Fury is not in a position to split its forces at the moment. Tell the guardsmen of Lorn V to keep us appraised of the situation there.”

  With that the sergeant nodded and withdrew from the chamber, leaving Ulantus with his thoughts. Trust Gabriel to be off gallivanting around Rahe’s Paradise when the green-skins decided to invade Lorn. He shook his head and sighed audibly. Casting his eyes over at Ckriu
s once again, he turned and strode out of the chamber, heading for the command deck.

  Just on the edge of hearing, Gabriel could sense voices speaking in hushed tones. His eyes were closed and his head was throbbing with a numbed, dull pain. As he lay there, memories started seeping back into his mind. He could remember organising the Blood Trial ceremony with Prathios. He could remember climbing up onto the apex of the great arch to watch the long procession of warriors making their way into the amphitheatre, and he could remember standing proudly between the magnificent figures of Elizur and Shedeur. Then things became a bit hazy. There were some images of a blonde haired man with green eyes, who may have been one of the aspirants. There had been an abrasive blow against his head, and he remembered the sensation of heavy bleeding down his face, which explained the pain now. But the details were vague.

  Opening his eyes, Gabriel saw the familiar shape of Prathios standing in the doorway to his cell in the monastery. He was talking to somebody in the corridor outside, saying something about Cyrene and psychological traumas. From where he was lying, he couldn’t see to whom the chaplain was talking. “Prathios,” he said experimentally. “What happened?” Gabriel reached his hand up to his face and pressed his fingers against the side of his head, where the fresh wound should have been. His fingers quested across his skin for a few seconds, searching for dried blood or even fresh scar tissue, but there was nothing. His skin was laced with scars, but they were the old marks that he had earned over the course of long service with the Blood Ravens. Nothing new.

  The chaplain nodded quietly to the invisible figure in the hallway and then turned into the room to face Gabriel. He walked slowly over to his old friend.

  “Gabriel, you fell.” Prathios’ face was lined with concern.