The Beast Arises

Something inside Zerberyn snapped. He shoved Kalkator back from the command console.

‘You quote the Codex to me? You are a traitor, Kalkator. Legion Excommunicatis. By Guilliman’s laws I should kill you now, and then deliver myself to the Inquisition in chains for allowing this travesty to have continued for so long.’

‘But you won’t. Not yet. Your Imperium needs us. It needs this.’

Zerberyn clenched his fists and forcibly lowered them.

Kalkator was right.

The same infernal logic that had led to the creation of the Last Wall led now to this. It felt inevitable, and no more wrong now than it had been amidst all the good intentions and necessary evils at Phall.

A pained laugh, the bubbling hurt-filled revelation of a man who had just witnessed the dark side of the universe and returned not quite sane, pulled their focus from one another.

Unnoticed, Bryce had slipped away from Reoch and had a hellpistol in each hand. One aimed between Kalkator’s eyes. The other at the dented ceramite providing incomplete coverage of Zerberyn’s primary heart. There was no indication that he faced down lords of mankind whom he had fought alongside bare moments before. He knew only conviction, the galaxy partitioned clearly into that which fell within the Emperor’s light, and all else.

Zerberyn wondered if any Exemplar had ever thought that way.

‘Move away from the controls, my lords,’ said Bryce. The honorific emerged like a term of disparagement, a placeholder that he had yet to consider an alternative to.

Zerberyn noted the other Tempestus Scions staggering out along the companionway above, groggy but disciplined. And with no uncertainty whatsoever in their aim. One of the Chosen reached for his mag-locked combi-bolter, but a wave of Bryce’s hellpistol across his warsmith’s eyes persuaded him to move his hand away.

‘Don’t fire,’ Zerberyn ordered the Iron Warriors, raising his empty hand, and turning back to Bryce.

‘Traitor,

is it? Your Imperium, is it?’ Bryce laughed again, humourless, and tightened his grip. ‘What is an Imperial world filled with the Emperor’s subjects to such as you?’

‘I am no traitor,’ Zerberyn snapped.

Bryce’s burnt mouth became a disbelieving sneer.

‘One minute to mark.’

‘I am an Exemplar,’ Zerberyn shouted. ‘My word is that of Rogal Dorn himself. This is the only way.’

Zerberyn saw the man respond to his words, watched the expression on his face change as he tried to process the complex variables. He saw the expression set. He saw the tension that gripped Bryce’s trigger finger, and reacted on instinct.

Zerberyn’s gauntlet snapped out faster even than he could think, enclosing Bryce’s augmeticised right hand. A slight squeeze crushed the Scion’s bionic up to the wrist. Bryce closed his eyes and screamed, dragging his second shot wide of Kalkator’s shoulder.

‘Please, major—’

The Scion’s skull detonated before his eyes, plastering his face in sticky red gore. Half a second later, the arm went slack and slumped in Zerberyn’s grip, but he did not think to let go. Stunned, he stared past the headless corpse. Kalkator was there, his bolter up and hot.

‘No!’

Hot-shot lashed the command hub with the savagery of truth. Wires were shredded and housings scorched, thousand-year-old cogitator units going up in fountains of sparks. The Chosen stepped past Zerberyn and opened up with a thunderous outpouring of explosive rounds.

‘No!’ Zerberyn yelled again, louder, caged by red spears and noise.

Antille jerked as though electrocuted. A searing lance angled across his back spun him half around and threw him into an interface that exploded underneath him. The veteran flew back on a nimbus of charge, rolled over the outer rail and, a minute later, splashed into the super-cooled heavy water.

‘Mark.’

The announcement was a death knell.

‘No.’

Kalkator pushed his unarmoured palm to the interface and spoke a command in a language that Zerberyn had never heard. The timbre of the deeply submerged atom engine plunged, felt through longwave vibrations in the gut rather than heard. The grinding sound of deep, mechanical reconfigurations reverberated from the walls of the spherical chamber, amplified by its acoustics so that, standing there at its core, it sounded like being inside a mechanical chronometer as it geared up to strike a long-awaited millennial bell.

The gunfire ceased. Even the Iron Warriors held their bolters close and looked around with unease.

The last surviving Scion took advantage of the lull to look down over the companionway handrail to the bubbling water below. Zerberyn felt he recognised him— the vox-officer on Bryce’s command squad during the agri-plex raid.

Horror dawning, the Scion dropped back, raising a hand to the vox-boost selector behind the cheek-guard of his omnishield. ‘Sergeant Jaskólska, Menthis. Evacuate now. Now! Raise the Commissariat and tell them that the Fists Exemplar have—’

A tight burst of bolter fire drowned out the rest.