Blood Angels: The Second Omnibus by James Swallow

Author:James Swallow [Swallow, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The Black Library
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THREE

Turcio stood, and he was not at his ease. The two squads faced each other across the tacticarium chamber, and it might have seemed to a passing observer that they had gathered to do battle with one another. Blood Angels ranged to the starboard, the Flesh Tearers to the port, the armoured warriors sized each other up, as was their manner. Recent events on Baal had in some ways built bonds of comradeship between the diverse Chapters that drew lineage from the Primarch Sanguinius; but still the old contentions between the first founding and its successors could not be washed away in a single night.

And never could there be more polar an opposite to the Blood Angels than the Flesh Tearers. The former proud and noble in bearing, the latter feral and coarse—yet the same blood flowed in all their veins.

Outward character aside, they were all sons of the Great Angel, and beyond that they were Adeptus Astartes. Brothers in arms if not in true kinship.

None of the Astartes spoke. Both squads had been ordered to rein in any comments that did not immediately benefit the discussion at hand. Brother-Sergeant Rafen had been blunt about that, and he imagined Noxx had said the same. Rafen had tired quickly of even the smallest hint of divisive behaviour, ordering Ajir and the others in no uncertain terms to direct their energies towards the mission. Our enmity, he had told them, has only one target today.

That target turned slowly in front of them, suspended in a vapour, conjured by hidden display beams in the base of an ornate, wrought-iron chart table. Rafen circled the table, glaring at the flickering image. Turcio recognised the face of Fabius Bile. It was an artist’s impression of the fiend, dispassionately constructed by some machine-slave fed a diet of security camera footage, faded portraits and research data.

It depicted a man with the dimensions of a Space Marine, three metres high and another across the shoulders. Pallid of face, his flesh was pulled tight on his skull and around the rim of a cranial cognition accelerator implant. Strings of white hair fell down upon shoulder pauldrons of bloodstained bronze, blurred where the display engine’s self-censorship subroutines masked the eightfold stars etched there. He wore a long coat over his wargear, a patchwork thing made of human skins with screaming faces sewn into the pattern of it. A brass mechanism of limbs and manipulators—a device of mysterious origin known only as “the chirurgeon”—was attached to his back; skull-topped valves and reservoirs of black fluids, oil-thick and sluggish, chugged as they worked. The functions of the chirurgeon could only be guessed at. Several learned scienticians of the Imperium had attempted to divine its capabilities, suggesting it might be some sort of life-support mechanism, or perhaps even a semi-sentient servitor device. It reminded Turcio of the servo-harnesses worn by the technical adepts of his Chapter, but in a more bloated, grotesque design.

He was considering this as his gaze found one of Noxx’s warriors, standing slightly askance from the rest of the Flesh Tearer squad.

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