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Infernal Motives – Extract

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INFERNAL MOTIVES

Jude Reid

The Neverborn was close. The Daemonbreaker – who had once been Celestian Sacresant Aveline of the Order of the Sacred Rose – could feel the sour spirit-reek of it pervading every fibre of her being. It permeated the air itself, mixing with the stench of machine oil, fractionated promethium, and the copper tang of freshly skinned meat.

‘This is not the work of a warp entity.’ Mu-Theta-Mitros-Null-One spoke without turning away from the pile of dismembered remains, his words bearing no hint of emotion. ‘This flesh is all that is left of Squad Palmios. Mortal hands made these wounds, and robbed them of the Omnissiah’s gifts.’ The skitarius alpha rose on metallic legs until he towered a full head above her, the white trim on the hem of his scarlet robes stained dark with blood.

‘It has mortal servants, then.’ The Daemonbreaker glared at him, trying to read the expression in the green augmetics that served him for eyes, but found nothing there but the reflection of her own white Sabbat-pattern helm. She jabbed her finger towards the open factorum door, the pile of oozing flesh on the threshold, and the yawning darkness beyond. ‘The abomination they serve is inside this building.’

‘And yet our augurs report no such being is here.’

‘Then your augurs are deceived.’ The Daemonbreaker put her gauntlet to the hilt of Saint Arabella’s sword, swallowing down the white-hot anger rising in her throat. ‘The ways of the Archenemy are subtle. Surely you do not doubt the word of the God-Emperor, nor my own?’

The squad of skitarii bowed their heads in eerie synchronicity. ‘We do not doubt your word, Daemonbreaker,’ Mu-Theta said. ‘The Cicatrix Maledictum befouls and corrupts the firmament. The galaxy burns, and the Omnissiah sends His servants to make war in His name.’ Six pairs of augmetic hands made the sign of the cog. ‘Even here, the noosphere rings with the tales of your great deed on Orison VIII–’

She raised a hand for silence. ‘The deeds of the past are of no interest to me. I am here to slay the abomination that plagues and corrupts this world.’

A soft whirr of cogs came from beneath Mu-Theta’s crimson robes – a sound that might have been a laugh, or perhaps a sigh of resignation. ‘There is no shortage of enemies for you here.’

Had it not been for the holy vision that had struck her three Solar weeks ago like a shock maul to the skull, there would have been little reason for the Daemonbreaker to set foot on Skopelon-Tharsis. It was an isolated factorum world of little interest to the Imperium beyond its compliance and the payment of its tithe, though in recent years there had been precious little of either. The sorry state of affairs had been evident as soon as the Rex Bellorum entered orbit, the planet’s surface scarred by decades of war that showed no sign of drawing to a close. It was the old tale: a treacherous governor-fabricant declaring sole sovereignty over a world that was the God-Emperor’s by divine right, the forces of the Adeptus Mechanicus dispatched to bring the rebels to heel in a lightning strike soon ground down to a war of attrition. The magos domina in command had accepted the Rex’s offer of assistance with an unseemly alacrity that suggested reinforcements were a sporadic occurrence at best, and now here the Daemonbreaker was, on the battlefront with a single squad of uncooperative skitarii at her side – the sole unit the magos could spare – drawn to face an enemy that only she believed in.

You have set me another trial of faith, God-Emperor.

This was her life now, or so it seemed. Nothing but one lonely battle after another, haunted by visions of Neverborn that pulled her across the galaxy like a hook embedded in her throat.

Grant me the strength to do your holy work.

‘You are ready, Daemonbreaker?’ Mu-Theta’s voice brought her sharply back to the present; the skitarii were in formation around the factorum’s open doorway, galvanic rifles pointing into the darkness.

‘I am ready.’

A beam of green light shot from his eye-lenses into the passageway. Inside, the walls were set with pipes and cabling, the floor smeared with thick machine oil that dripped down from the ceiling like half-clotted blood. The Daemonbreaker stepped forward, and with a sudden hum that set her hand twitching on the hilt of Saint Arabella’s sword, a line of lumen-discs mounted in the walls flickered to life, lighting the path into the factorum with a sickly yellow glow. A prickle went down her spine. The daemon was waiting in the darkness beyond, its presence pulling her on to where it waited, vast and malign…

Enough.

Fear was an indulgence she could no longer afford. She drew the holy blade, and stepped through the doorway. The sooner both she and the sword were put to use, the better.

The skitarii had known the attack was coming before she did, moving silently into formation before the sound of metal rattling on metal had reached her ears. Saint Arabella’s sword burst into glorious flame almost of its own volition, and the Daemonbreaker stepped forward to meet the enemy as they charged, the blade’s holy light picking out a swarm of twisted figures in rotting black robes.

‘Death, in the God-Emperor’s name!’

She carved the flaming sword into the first of the enemy and sent it spinning to the floor in a heap of smouldering robes. The newcomers shared superficial similarities with the skitarii – powerful augmetic limbs and oversized glowing eyes – but it was there the resemblance ended. Their faces had been replaced by gleaming silver skulls, their bodies reshaped into new and blasphemous configurations. Some had too many legs, jointed like those of some monstrous metallic arthropod, while others eschewed limbs entirely in favour of sparking conduits that kept them hovering above the ground.

The Daemonbreaker sliced another in half without drawing breath, then sidestepped as an eight-limbed horror lunged towards her and stabbed the blades of its forelegs at her chest. She stepped inside its reach and brought Arabella’s sword up in a well-placed strike that ignited the rotting robes, a blow that would have eviscerated an enemy of mere flesh and blood. A fountain of sparks burst from the damaged metal of its chassis, singeing tiny holes in her vestments where they landed, then faded to nothing as the ruptured heretic fell to the ground.

The kill brought her no respite. A scorpion-like figure with too many eyes dropped from the ceiling above her. It turned its skull-face to look at the Daemonbreaker with eyes burning with hatred, its tail curling over its back, venom dripping from its barbed tip. She took its head from its shoulders with an easy flick of her sword, but the creature barely seemed to notice.

‘Skitarius! What are these things?’

The monster reared back on its four hind legs, the forelimbs stabbing towards her with mindless ferocity. She parried the blows, but there was no gap through which she could attempt a riposte, the onslaught forcing her to concede ground step by step. The tail lashed down, missing its mark by inches but leaving a trail of viscid purple ooze across the ceramite of her pauldron.

‘Traitor skitarii,’ Mu-Theta replied. A beam of green energy from his galvanic rifle punched a glowing-edged hole through the creature’s metallic body. ‘The cogitator-brains are in the torso. The heads are’ – he fired another shot, the enemy visibly staggering as foul-smelling hydraulics poured from the hole in its chest – ‘purely decorative.’

Even mortally wounded the heretic skitarius was quick. Its right foreleg slashed out in a desperate arc, but rather than parry the blade, the Daemonbreaker used the attack’s momentum to spin in a quick half-circle before plunging Saint Arabella’s sword through the abomination’s severed neck stump and into its armoured torso. The dying skitarius thrashed all eight limbs, sparks spraying from its neck, but the fight was over. One by one the flailing limbs went slack, until at last the monstrous body slipped to the ground and lay still.

‘God-Emperor, I give thanks.’

She pulled her sword free, ready for the next enemy, but the battle was already over. Around her, the ground was littered with the misshapen bodies of the Heretic Mechanicus, the sea of rotting black robes unbroken save for a single patch of red. Mu-Theta was bent over his fallen companion, his long metal fingers raising the motionless head with incongruous tenderness.

‘We have no time for sentiment,’ she said. The Neverborn was closer now. She could feel its presence still, even stronger now, reeling her in, but to her surprise the skitarius alpha made no effort to rise. ‘Did you not hear me?’

‘I hear you, Daemonbreaker.’ Something clicked beneath Mu-Theta’s hands, and a moment later he raised a thumb-sized metal cylinder into the light. He regarded it carefully, then tucked it into the pouch on his belt. ‘On this world, we do not leave such things for the enemy.’

‘What things?’

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