Atlas Infernal Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Prologue

  Act I Canto I

  Act I Canto II

  Act I Canto III

  Act I Canto IV

  Act I Canto V

  Act I Canto VI

  Act I Canto VII

  Interregna

  Act II Canto I

  Act II Canto II

  Act II Canto III

  Interregna

  Act III Canto I

  Act III Canto II

  Act III Canto III

  Interregna

  Act IV, Canto I

  Act IV, Canto II

  Interregna

  Act V, Canto I

  Epilogue

  About The Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  The Dance Without End: The Ruins of Iyanden

  ‘…befell the mighty eldar craftworld of Iyanden in the Galactic East. During my days as guest and observer in the shattered halls I came to learn the tragedies of the Second Tyranid War and the alien eldar’s part in the defeat of the tyranid foe.

  Our hosts also shared with us a rare gift, an experience of which few humans have been deemed worthy. We were present while the Iyanden craftworld received an unexpected visitation from a troupe of their Harlequin brethren. Farseer Iqbraesil arranged our inclusion in the audience, in no little way, I suspect, to impress upon us the solidarity of their ancient race. The Harlequins, as you may or may not know, are a faction of the eldar race to whom the responsibility of remembrance falls. They travel from craftworld to craftworld, keeping the legends and ancient history of the eldar race alive through their dance, drama and martial performance. The Harlequins are both servants of the Laughing God – the only deity of their race to survive the mighty Fall – and custodians of the hallowed Black Library of Chaos. The Black Library is a dark craftworld hidden within the webway and is the eldar’s shrine and repository of forbidden lore regarding the Ruinous Powers of the universe.

  For the Harlequins there is no distinction between art and war; they are the archetypal warrior poets, travelling the labyrinthine expanses of the webway, bringing enlightenment to their audiences and certain death to the servants of darkness. The Harlequin troupe presented for the Iyanden the Dance Without End, which I’m told dramatises the inevitable Fall of the eldar civilisation. While the Mimes performed the roles of the epic piece, Shadowseers launched hallucinogenics about the chamber and unleashed their potent tele-empathic abilities upon the audience. What the words and actions of the Harlequins suggested, the hallucinogens and psycho-emotional manipulations of the Shadowseers realised. We were completely immersed in the actuality of the piece, in a way no human work of art could hope to reproduce. We were one with the tale.

  The Harlequins’ works are myriad and diverse, however, and afterwards Farseer Iqbraesil told me that the events depicted in the Harlequins’ performances – events significant to the destiny of their race – were not always historical. Some were actually happening as performances unfolded and some, he said, had yet to happen at all.’

  Inquisitor Bronislaw Czevak Letters to the Casophilians

  Prologue

  Uthuriel craftworld crash site, Darcturus proto-world, Moebius subsector

  CHORUS

  ‘Perhaps if you spent more time studying the xenos and less time burning them, Inquisitor Malchankov, you would be better equipped to understand the import of my meaning, sir,’ Interrogator Raimus Klute heard his master suggest.

  Dipping his hand in the stoup and with his fingers moistened, Klute made the sign of the aquila. Adjusting the line of his Manteau cloak about his immaculate carapace, the young interrogator pulled the thick curtain aside, passing through the black-out canvas of his master’s improvised chambers. His ancient lord was holding conference in the centre of the vaulted tent, surrounded by a small crowd of dead-eyed servitor nexomats. Each monotask drone stood flesh-plugged into the next, nests of vox-lines and cables dangling between their automatronic bodies. Through each, a dread member of the Holy Inquisition spoke. The Moebius Conclave was in subsector-spanning congress.

  Czevak stood at the pulpit, ancient and irascible, as if daring the frayed and knotted thread that was his artificially elongated life to snap. The plasglass of his blister-helmet clouded with light breath, obscuring the bruised sockets of his eyes. The hairless crimp of an age-spotted scalp and the deep lines of his collapsing face marked an eternity of study and engagement. The bulk of his cryogenic suspension suit sighed and hissed nitrogen from under the liver-brown shag of his Fenrisian mastodon-hair coat.

  A nexomat stood before him crucified – his tormented, vat-cultured frame shot through with aerials and antenna, the telescopic tips of which extended from his fingers and the base of his neck. Into his chest was crafted a system of loudspeakers and from these Inquisitor Malchankov’s savage syllables reverberated.

  ‘And if you spent less time searching for corrupt wisdom in the embrace of the alien and more time searching your soul, High Inquisitor, then you would come to realise how far from the God-Emperor’s true path you have strayed.’

  Klute watched his master erupt in an apoplectic storm of brittle words and confounded curses. The interrogator shook his head. Before he had been Bronislaw Czevak’s acolyte, Klute had been the venerable High Inquisitor’s chirurgeon. Klute had advised Czevak a thousand times to keep his anger in check. At over four hundred years old, the inquisitor’s rising choler alone could kill him.

  Cynthis-Six dutifully approached the interrogator, more spindly machine than woman, handing him scroll after data scroll, which Klute unravelled and handed back to the calculus logi with disinterest. Unwilling to disturb the High Inquisitor during the lengthy congress, she presented Czevak’s acolyte with the logistical nightmare of the High Inquisitor’s manpower and operation. As part of his duties Klute routinely waded through a daily mountain of minutiae and force management. The God-Emperor might be in the detail but this little interested Bronislaw Czevak and the High Inquisitor left his young apprentice to handle the strategic and organisational reality of running the Ordo Xenos
operation on Darcturus.

  ‘Take this down,’ Klute instructed her. ‘Send messengers to Confessor-Militant Caradoq and Lieutenant Colonel MacGrellan. The good confessor needs to order his frater digteams in Zones Omicron through Omega East back to the camp perimeter. Colonel MacGrellan needs to do likewise with his engineers. Have him organise Gorgons for the transportation of the Death Korps and frater militia alike and riders to escort. Make sure that the colonel is aware that eurypterids have recolonised the abandoned trenches on the peninsula. If they try to walk out of there, they’ll be cut to pieces.’ The calculus logi simultaneously scribbled messages for both men, before skittering away to summon messengers.

  In the background, Czevak continued to spit venomous accusations while the unfortunate nexomat vox-relaying his message bore the full brunt of the High Inquisitor’s ire.

  ‘How long?’ Klute put to a pair of figures standing in the shadows of the tent-chamber. They were watching their inquisitor in debate with the Moebius Conclave.

  ‘Sixteenth hour,’ Sister Kressida confirmed. She was wreathed in the spectral smoke of her lho-stick, its tapered holder clasped between her perfect teeth. The medicae devotions of her hospitaller order – that of the Eternal Candle – were plain to see on her slender vestments. She leaned on Czevak’s ornate walking cane – a ferrouswood stick with an eldar spirit stone decoratively embedded in its pommel like a sceptre. She was holding it for the inquisitor during the subsector conference. ‘I’ve tried to get him to rest, but he won’t have it.’

  ‘You impudent cub…’ Klute heard the High Inquisitor shout between torrents of heated words. While Czevak and Malchankov raged at one another, the chatter of servitor vox-traffic and garbled static filled the chamber; the Moebius Conclave in uproar.

  Arch Magos Phemus Melchior towered beside the sister – his hairy arms and hunched back glistening with the forge-sweat of his labours. He looked like some kind of chthonic deity, with his beard of mechadendrites and his remaining eye magnified to grotesqueness through the lens array bulging out of the side of his face. He had been with Czevak ever since the inquisitor’s tour of the Iyanden craftworld – the Xenarite Diagnostic Coven at Vulcraetia volunteering the arch magus’s services as a gift to a kindred spirit. Melchior had been a gift indeed to Czevak, assisting the High Inquisitor with his many techno-spiritual projects and designing for Czevak the cryogenic suspension suit that not only preserved his body, but allowed the movement of muscle-wasted, decrepit limbs through the aid of a mind-impulse link in the back of the inquisitor’s skull.

  ‘He’s been hammer and tongues with Malchankov for a while now,’ Melchior boomed, ‘– that Monodominant hellraiser. The High Inquisitor won’t appreciate the interruption, lad.’

  ‘He’ll appreciate this,’ the interrogator insisted, flashing a data-slate at them. Taking the ferrouswood cane from Sister Kressida he strode out across the conference space.

  Cabled to the antenna-wracked servitor in the fashion of a chain gang was another nexomat, from which another inquisitor had intervened in the war of words crossing the chamber. The drone had a crate torso and no legs and was built into a half-track chair. His box-body was a bank of sockets into which the nexomat compulsively plugged vox-cables, while extracting and exchanging others. Half of his head was dominated by a bell-box and cradle arrangement upon which sat a manual vox-unit.

  ‘Perhaps what our Ordo Hereticus colleague is suggesting,’ a voice rattled through the nexomat, ‘is that before we authorise further resources, you take some time – may I suggest Saint Ethalberg of Bona Phidia – praying for guidance in this matter. Utilising the spiritual technologies of the xenos, even in the Emperor’s good name and interest, is not to be undertaken lightly – if undertaken at all.’

  Klute heard Grand Master Ephisto Specht’s brazen diplomacy through the servitor’s grille speakers, cutting through the dissent and discussion in the chamber. Specht was an Amalathian to the core. If it were not for Czevak’s more radical views, his clear seniority would have made him subsector Grand Master long ago, Klute reasoned, and he wouldn’t be debating details with conservatives like Specht.

  ‘Ephisto – is this really what you think the Emperor would want?’ Czevak asked his master. The inquisitor didn’t wait for a reply. ‘For us to wait – to maintain a deteriorating status quo? Should we not do everything – everything in our power to ensure his return, back where he belongs, leading his Imperium, not only spiritually, but physically in these uncertain times?’

  ‘The God-Emperor has already shown us what he wants,’ Malchankov interrupted. ‘The Great Crusade was his Holy Mandate to claim the galaxy in humanity’s name. He did not bargain and ally himself with the xenos, as faith-traitors like you do, Czevak.’

  ‘I think it unwise to debate what his Beneficent Majesty would want in such circumstances,’ Grand Master Specht called out.

  ‘The eldar are an ancient race who have forgotten more about ressurrective incarnation and soul transference technologies than humanity is ever likely to know–’ Czevak said, his insistence a grizzled wheeze.

  ‘Heresy!’ Malchankov screamed.

  ‘Especially if Puritan anarchists hold court with their own self importance,’ the ancient Czevak seethed. He turned on the crucified nexomat. ‘You – witchslayer and propagator of thaumaturgicide – your tyranny would put to flame those who feed the Astronomican and the Navigators that guide the ships of the Imperium by its light; you would end half your brother-inquisitors for their talents and the telepaths that carry your own authority across the stars. Malchankov – I have no doubt that your brand of lunacy would have put our beloved Emperor to the stake, for his own burgeoning, superhuman abilities.’

  ‘Monstrous schismatist,’ the Monodominant called back.

  ‘Inquisitors, please!’

  ‘I claim your blood, Czevak. Do you hear? I’m coming for you, High Inquisitor…’

  Malchankov’s nexomat servitor suddenly gave a violent shudder before reporting in a flat voice, ‘The vox-link is broken.’

  Nobody in the chamber doubted that the nexomat on the other end of the communication was dead.

  ‘Gentlemen, please!’ Grand Master Specht insisted. ‘This is not how the Holy Ordos conduct themselves.’

  Bowing before the pulpit and beneath Czevak’s crabby eyes, Klute passed the inquisitor the data-slate. Snatching it irritably, Czevak peered through a magnified section of his blister-helmet at its contents.

  ‘He’s gone, Ephisto,’ Czevak told the Grand Master, and then, satisfying himself as to the contents of the slate, said to himself, ‘and so am I.’ Slicing a suited finger across his neck at Arch Magos Melchior, Czevak climbed down from the pulpit. The congress was at an end. For a moment, Klute thought he saw his master betray a giddy excitement.

  ‘Captain Quesada?’ the High Inquisitor asked, handing back the slate.

  ‘The Deathwatch are on site and await your orders, my lord.’

  Czevak strode out of the canvas chambers, tearing the curtain aside, his fur coat hunched around him. As he followed, he tossed Sister Kressida the data-slate.

  ‘They found it?’ Melchior asked, ready to follow.

  ‘Omega West,’ Klute told them. ‘Arch Magos, ready your team; you’ll go in with the second wave. Sister Kressida, we have no idea what we are going to find in there, a eurypterid nest if we’re lucky. Report to the sanitarium station and ready the High Inquisitor’s personal surgical bay.’

  ‘Be careful,’ Kressida cautioned, sliding Klute’s medicae satchel from her shoulder and hanging it on the young interrogator’s own.

  ‘Klute!’ Czevak called from the Death Korps Salamander Command Vehicle waiting outside.

  ‘Send for the Idolatress,’ Klute said to Kressida and Melchoir, ‘and be ready.’ With that he disappeared through the curtains after his master.

  Klute held on tightly to the guardrail as the Salamander blasted between the tents of the Ordo Xenos encampment. Slipping on a plas-mask,
the interrogator breathed deeply.

  Darcturus was a young world. Although its atmosphere could support human life, the air was thin, reedy and low in oxygen. Without the mask, Klute would be fatigued within seconds and on his knees within minutes, not to mention the splitting headaches that seemed to incapacitate anyone attempting to walk unmasked between their billets. The skies were the yellow of old bruises and the surface largely covered by an inky, black ocean. Czevak had had the 88th Force Engineer Regiment of the Death Korps of Krieg make camp on one of the miserable, featureless archipelagos that reached out into the dark sea. When Czevak had discovered the ancient crash site of the Uthuriel craftworld, spread out across the sink-sands of the archipelago and shallow ocean basin beyond, he had Confessor-Militant Caradoq from the nearby cardinal world of Bona Phidia raise a frater labour militia. The Lesser Procta Cenobists, as they were called, all wished to do good, simple work in the Emperor’s name. They were rewarded for their faith with the task of digging the expanse of archaeological trenchworks – under the professional eye of MacGrellan’s Death Korps engineers – which Czevak required to locate fragments of the colossal crashed eldar craftworld. The physical effort alone was worthy of legend – not to mention the shifting wet sands and mud holes that cursed the frater militia’s efforts and the eurypterids that scuttled onshore to tear Death Korps Guardsmen limb from limb.

  As the Salamander blasted along the sandy mire that was the track to Zone Omega West, Guardsmen in gasmasks and muddy trench wear bled from their billet tents. They were joined by off-shift Cenobists, away from their prayers, all of whom went down on one knee in the waterlogged sand in the presence of the High Inquisitor. Czevak seemed not to notice them, his mind elsewhere.