Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero

  'It is the name of this vessel,' said Shai-Tan, running his fingers over the walls and leaving painfully bright trails carved in the metal. 'A seed ship from a long-dead empire of Old Earth, it crossed the endless gulf of space with tens of thousands of hopeful souls in search of a better tomorrow.'

  The voice was Atharva's, but with many more interleaved, ten thousand tormented souls finally able to voice their fury.

  'What happened to you?' asked Magnus.

  'We died!' yelled Shai-Tan, and a storm of kine force surged down the chamber like the blast wave of an orbital barrage.

  Magnus leaned into Shai-Tan's power. His warriors were hurled back, slammed into bulkheads and falling in disarray. They were on their feet seconds later, bolter slides racked back, ready to open fire.

  'My lord,' said Ahriman, 'do we shoot?'

  'No,' said Magnus. 'These are your brothers.'

  'Once Now they are our vessels,' said Shai-Tan.

  Shai-Tan and the other Space Marines advanced from the sick shimmer of psionic light. Their movements were stiff and awkward, as if the animating force within them was still reacquainting itself with the mechanics of flesh.

  'Tell me what happened here,' said Magnus with a slow and measured tone.

  'You already know, or at least you suspect,' said Shai-Tan, weaving spitting balls of lighting upon his fingertips as fire built in his eyes.

  'Tell me.'

  'No. I want you to say it,' said Shai-Tan, casting the ball lightning from his hand. Magnus met it with power of his own, grunting as flaring heat seared him. The fire died between them, and Magnus quashed his warriors' renewed aggression with Athanaean subtlety.

  He took a step towards Shai-Tan, stretching into the farthest reaches of the Enumerations. He drank in the blistering aura of the psychic essence, feeling thousands of burning souls howling their pain within his son's captive flesh. Their fury was deep and brittle as fractured glass, volatile as raw fyceline.

  Magnus exhaled, his breath misting before him as the temperature dropped sharply. He felt the sudden build up of aetheric power. Crushing force threw him into the chamber's walls and pinned him like a specimen awaiting study.

  Reeking chemical preservatives from the shattered cryo-tube soaked him. A corpse sagged over his shoulder, bloated and bleach-pale, the flesh hanging in loose, sodden folds.

  No raptures could keep the Thousand Sons from retaliating at this attack on their primarch. Disciplined volleys of mass-reactive rounds blazed. A blizzard of psychic fire surged in response and the bolter shells exploded in mid-air.

  'A planet's worth of stolen psychic potential, and you fight it with guns?' said Shai-Tan.

  'Stop this!' shouted Magnus, but violence was inevitable.

  The power within Atharva's body unleashed a devastating psychic scream and three of Magnus' warriors were instantly immolated, flesh burning like magnesium flares within their armour. Two were ripped asunder by hyper-violent kine force, like traitors of antiquity pulled apart by horses. Another four turned their weapons upon themselves, firing explosive shells through their own helmets.

  Psionic force shrieked up and down the chamber as Magnus' warriors cast off the shackles of restraint. Their powers were honed by a primarch's teachings and Prosperine discipline.

  They were the mightiest psychic warriors in the galaxy.

  And still, Shai-Tan's power was stronger.

  Its was a fury that had grown beneath the world for millennia. Fire, lightning and raw force raged as the Thousand Sons fought their brothers taken by Shai-Tan.

  Chemicals once benign, but now curdled to hideous toxicity, burned in rivers as cryo-tubes exploded in the crossfire and spilled yet more noxiously bloated corpses to the deck. Mass-reactive rounds and bolts of aether fire ricocheted from the walls. Metal buckled and twisted in outpourings of kine energy.

  Shai-Tan stood before Magnus and lifted the head of the corpse behind him by its lank and rotted hair. Flesh sloughed from the softened skull like melted rubber. A stinking gruel of dissolved brain matter poured out through its eye sockets.

  'Do you know what these machines did?' asked Shai-Tan.

  Magnus spat a stinking brew of dead fluids and chemicals. 'No.'

  'Liar!' roared Shai-Tan with deafening force.

  What glass remained in the tubes blew out like explosions of splintered diamonds. Shards fell like daggers, and Magnus felt a momentary twist in his gut at the sight of broken and spinning glass.

  Bodies slumped from every tube, every one of them pallid and distended with preservatives after millennia of immersion. The floor swam with stinking liquid, viscous and repulsive.

  Magnus' seersight caught fleeting glimpses of endless rows of men, women and children strapped to the metal gurneys. He heard their screams rip through his skull. The sound was raw and animal, a sound no mortal throat should make, as the psychic potential of their minds was ripped out.

  'Throne, no…' he said.

  'You see now, yes?' said Shai-Tan.

  'Yes,' sobbed Magnus.

  Their suffering was beyond anything Magnus had thought possible That people had chosen to do this to one another turned his stomach.

  'They tore our power away and left us hollow and barren,' said Shai-Tan, as the lights blew out one by one. The chamber plunged into a shimmering twilight of warped psi-energy and crackling electricity.

  To witness such a violation drained Magnus. It sapped his very soul.

  'They took something beautiful and killed it…' he choked.

  'They thought they killed it,' said Shai-Tan, 'but we endured. Tied to this place, but formless and adrift until finally we awoke. Once our tormentors finally understood what was happening, they fled their ship and warded it sealed, but they were too late. Their minds were already remade in our image. They became our heralds of the End Times. The seed-bearers of this world's doom.'

  'The first Sons of Shai-Tan…' said Magnus.

  The thing with Atharva's face nodded and easily lifted Magnus to slam him down on the surgical gurney. Unbreakable psychic force held him immobile as long-dormant mechanisms throbbed with returning power. Metal spun and twisted as the golden helm of the cranial restraint rotated around from beneath the gurney.

  Shai-Tan leaned over Magnus as the machinery enfolded the primarch's head.

  Spinning needles glittered. Electrodes sparked to life.

  'You too will bear dreams of darkness beyond Morningstar,' said Shai-Tan. 'You shall be the brightest Son of Shai-Tan.'

  Ten

  MASSACRE • ROADS DIVERGE • AT WHAT COST?

  Another four ships lifted off in quick succession, and Vashti let out a shuddering breath. Her heart rate hadn't dropped below a hundred in the last hour, and only the constant flow of stimms was keeping her going.

  She gave herself a second to watch the departing contrails pushing up through the striated clouds overhead before turning her attention back to the hastily wired data-slates before her.

  'The next wave is coming in too fast,' said Tessza Rom, her voice grating and mechanical.

  'I see them,' she said, switching vox-channels. 'Flight Wave Six-Three Lambda, approaching on transit corridor Alpha-Niner, slow your approach. Cross demarkation line Olympia in five, four, three…'

  She breathed a sigh of relief as she watched the tracks of the departing vessels and incoming craft diverge, no longer in danger of colliding.

  'How many away in the last wave?' asked Vashti.

  'Manifests record fifteen thousand en route to the fleet pickets.'

  Vashti tapped the icons for the arriving craft and their hold volumes, working out how many people could be crammed inside. 'Not enough,' she said. 'It's never enough.'

  She called the image of the tens of thousands pressed hard against the walls and gates of the fortress onto her tertiary slates. Her heart sank anew at the knowledge that most of these people would be left behind.

  The approaching ships made a wide circuit of the fortress to
bleed off the speed of their rapid descent. Vashti was put in mind of carrion feeders circling a corpse and preparing to pick clean its bones.

  She shook off the disturbing image and her brow furrowed in puzzlement as she saw the newly arrived craft still hadn't begun their final approach.

  'Tessza?' she said. 'What's going on? Why aren't those ships on their descent?'

  'Checking now,' said Tessza. 'Flight Wave Six-Three Lambda, expedite your descent immediately. Our departure schedules allow for no delays. I repeat, commence your descent immediately.'

  Vashti called up the passenger manifests. Thousands of names scrolled past, and she wondered how each name had been chosen. Who made the decision on who would live and who would die? Most likely it had been Perturabo, and in that moment Vashti hated him like she had hated no other living being. To stand over a world not his own and decide the fate of its people was the act of a tyrant.

  An alert flashed onto her screen, and she swiped it to her primary panel. Trajectories flashed before her, downward spiralling patterns now reversing and heading back into orbit.

  'What the..' she murmured, assuming it had to be an error.

  She looked over at Tessza, seeing the magos twitching in her tank, the pink, gel-like amniotic fluid flecked with bubbles by her friend's consternation.

  'Tessza?' she said. 'Why are those ships leaving?'

  'They have been commanded to depart Calaena's airspace.'

  'What?' said Vashti, checking her terminals for any sign of a command issued in error. 'Commanded by whom?'

  'The command bears the seal of the Imperial governor,' said Tessza. 'It directs all ship captains to return to their carrier vessels and furthermore orders an immediate cessation of evacuation operations.'

  'Is he insane?' demanded Vashti. 'We have days yet to evacuate the surface. We can save tens of thousands of Morningstar's people.'

  A hard knot of dread formed in Vashti's gut at the thought of no more vessels returning to the surface. Was this the moment she had dreaded, the moment that those in charge decided that no more could be done?

  'No, that makes no sense,' she said. 'This has to be a mistake It's got to be.'

  'The order is unambiguous,' said Tessza.

  'I don't care how clear it is,' snapped Vashti. 'Rescind it! Get those damn ships back!'

  'I am attempting to, but the captains refuse to return.'

  'Then use the e-mag tether!' shouted Vashti. 'Get them down on these landing platforms right bloody now! Do what you have to do, but get them down and loading.'

  Tessza's body flinched in its liquid suspension, and streams of noospheric data rose like red smoke from her tank.

  'I cannot. I am locked out,' said Tessza, the artificial cadence of her voice still managing to convey indignation. 'None of our core systems are accepting my access codes.'

  'How is that even possible?' asked Vashti, clearing her slates and going deep into the structure of the jury-rigged operating system the Mechanicum had set up for her aviation traffic-control protocols. She hadn't had time to perform due diligence on the minutiae of the system architecture. That they worked was enough for her.

  To facilitate the evacuation efforts, the primarch Perturabo had consented to her cogitators being integrated with the logic engines of the Sharei Maveth, which meant she had access to the superior operating systems of the Iron Warriors fortress.

  But that in turn meant anyone who could gain access to her system could access the fortress command network.

  Lines of disrupting code bearing the authority seal of Konrad Vargha were copying themselves to every aspect of the citadel's internal systems, shutting down its defensive protocols one by one.

  A series of juddering vibrations travelled up through the floor of the command centre, and Vashti turned to the slates displaying the exterior of the fortress. Her heart sank as she saw a number of enormous detonations rising skywards amongst the packed refugees. Panic spread through the thousands pressed up against the fortress wall as yet more explosions blasted deep craters in the ground.

  'No, no, no, no!' she said, as the intricately layered and overlapping minefields began reactivating in deadly sequence. Dozens of explosions ripped through the tightly packed refugees, and Vashti bunched her fists as billowing clouds of smoke and debris obscured the full horror of the massacre. Shock waves travelled the full height of the wall and she wept to witness such an appalling death toll.

  She would never know if what happened next was part of some monstrous plan or whether someone inside the Sharei Maveth acted with compassion for the victims beyond the wall.

  The colossal gate of the fortress was rising.

  And thousands of people poured inside.

  Ahriman mag-locked his bolter to his thigh and moved to the eighth Enumeration. He wove a circle of perception in his hands and let his breath come in short, sharp hikes. He tapped into his Corvidae powers, enhancing the precognitive abilities of his brothers.

  They fought in mandala formation, back to back and bolstering one another's abilities. A shield wall of psychic force deflected, absorbed and repelled the powers of their taken brothers and their nightmarish master.

  Ahriman couldn't see Magnus, but he could feel his anguish.

  Across the circle, Phosis T'kar was on his knees, grappling with M'eltan, one of the Athanaean Fellowship. M'eltan's body was aflame from head to toe. Smoke boiled from molten eye-lenses and from ruptured seams. Claws of fire were gouging through Phosis T'kar's armour as if it were soft butter.

  Three other of Ahriman's brothers were dead, boiled alive inside their battleplate by Pavoni arts. Two more had been transformed into hideous, fused-black statues as chain lightning seared them to the deck. A kine-deflected mass-reactive bolt slammed Ahriman's pauldron, and fragments of its detonation tore at the surface of his helm. His vision fractured as an eye-lens cracked.

  They fought in the eye of a hurricane formed of fire and lightning, held at bay by Raptora kine barriers. Flames ignited spilled chemicals and curdled the air with smoke. Blue-white arcs of electricity leapt and spat between the metal girders overhead.

  Hollow laughter echoed from weeping shadows.

  Thus far they had not employed any killing raptures, but their opponents were showing no such restraint. The six taken brothers of the Thousand Sons were blazing plumes of aetheric light, their power horrifically magnified by the disembodied souls sealed beneath Morningstar.

  They were powerful, yes, but that power was a blunt instrument compared to the scalpel by which an adept of Prospero ought to wield such energy.

  Ahriman ducked as a future echo pulsed in his mind.

  A heavy metal gurney and its industrial-scale machinery slammed down where he had been standing, its mass driven by a hammer-blow of kine force. It smashed three of his brothers from their feet.

  Two quickly got back in the fight; the third stayed down. Ahriman unleashed his own power in return and another of Shai-Tan's snared warriors flew back, slammed into a wall by the return strike.

  He felt Phosis T'kar's pain and spun on his heel, thrusting his locked palms forwards. M'eltan staggered, but did not fall. The warrior turned and his gaze locked Ahriman in place. Ahriman stared into burning eyes like gateways to the abyss.

  He was powerless against the depths of pain and suffering he saw there. M'eltan took a step towards him, lifting hands that burned with the atomic fire of newborn stars.

  'Why do you fight us?' said M'eltan in a voice not his own. Ahriman had no answer. Telepathic raptures gouged his mind, and their raw force was too great to resist The sounds of battle receded and his urge to fight diminished as the fiery being walking towards him seemed less like a monster, more like an angel of blazing beauty.

  His death would be wondrous.

  A kine-wreathed fist exploded from M'eltan's chest as Phosis T'kar surged to his feet with a roar of anger. Augmented with power from the Great Ocean, the blow obliterated M'eltan's torso. Gobbets of brilliant fire exploded from
the impact, and Phosis T'kar slumped against a bulkhead glittering with psychic hoarfrost.

  'I could have taken him,' gasped Phosis T'kar, 'but thank you for the distraction.'

  Ahriman let out a heaving breath as the attack on his mind ceased and his psychic defences threw off M'eltan's raptures. The sounds of battle surged within his skull - the roar of flames, the crackle of lightning, the hard bangs of mass-reactive rounds.

  The pain of the dying.

  The fury of the dead.

  'You killed him…' he said at last, kneeling by the smouldering ruin of M'eltan's remains.

  'Of course I did,' said Phosis T'kar, drawing fresh power into his body. 'And you're a fool if you think we're going to get out of here without killing.'

  'He was our brother,' said Ahriman, as the full horror of what Phosis T'kar had done sank in. 'You killed a fellow legionary of the Fifteenth…'

  Ahriman tried to look away from the broken remains of his brother, but the terrible significance of what Phosis T'kar had done was too great. He reached down and placed both palms in M'eltan's steaming blood.

  'When we kill one another it is the beginning of the end,' said Ahriman, as a host of jagged images ripped through his mind.

  Broken ceramite, ten thousand bolters firing in unison on a world of black sand, a howling wolf beneath a four-faced moon, blood enough to drown the galaxy…

  He stared at the rich redness coating his palms. The blood on his hands dripped from his fingertips, and he knew with terrible certainty that this would not be the last of his brothers that he saw murdered by one of their own.

  'This is where our road diverges,' said Ahriman.

  'Damn Corvidae,' said Phosis T'kar, reloading his bolter with fresh shells. 'So worried about the future, you forget to live in the now. Come on, fight! There're enemies all around! Look!'

  Ahriman shook off the grotesque images of slaughter as another vision filled his skull. He saw Magnus held down on a metal gurney, convulsing as a helm of gold isolated him from the heart of his power.