Tempestus Scions, or Storm Troopers in the Low Gothic, are perhaps the single most deadly infantry ever produced within Guard. They are the best trained, the best equipped, and the most vigorously tested of any other fighting force, specialists without compare. They are brilliant as they are potent, with a handful having become full-blown Inquisitors in their own right. (Though Silas has expressed a disinterest in the idea to me, over many cups of Gleece and amasec) The Inquisition also has its own detachments of Scions, often used for guarding key installations, and for offering further security to the Black Ships—I had had a few encounters with them during the latter, for instance.
Technically speaking, the Harakoni Warhawks, of which Luther Vaigg was a former member, are occasionally Tempestus Scions too, though the line is a little blurred there. The Harakoni serve a very specialized purpose in their mobility, and while they serve it well, they are not commonly deployed around armor, instead operating in quicker, lighter strike teams.
The same cannot be said of the 54th Psian Jackals, of which Silas Hager was a veteran. The Jackals have often been called upon for handling invasions of Xenos filth, most notably the Eldar, who are known for their farseeing abilities. The Jackals have not seemed to care that their opponents have been capable of seeing the future, as they are inherently so overwhelmingly capable that farsight has not been able to help the Xenos save themselves. And even among the Jackals, Silas Hager is an exceptional specimen.
There is a saying among the Chamber Militant Deathwatch Chapter of the Ordo Xenos that claims as follows: “Amongst a hundred men, there may be none fit for the Adeptus Astartes. Amongst a hundred Space Marines, there may be one fit for the Deathwatch.” I personally believe this can be said, contextually, of Silas Hager. I have not known another soldier like him, and expect I never will.
When Silas leapt from the main superstructure of Abseradon, he did so knowing three things: One, approximately where his target was, having followed the trajectory the Vindicare’s bullets were fired from. Two, that he had borrowed Luther Vaigg’s Grav-Chutes, but not his Jumpjets, meaning at best he could enjoy a slow descent, and not flight. Three, that the Vindicare had already shot Vaigg out of the air as it was. So as he glided down from Merek’s office toward an adjacent spire that protruded from the main superstructure, he did so whilst weaving back and forth to make it harder for the Vindicare to track him.
“Bird, Scion is airborne, I say again, Scion is airborne! Give him a wide berth!” I warned Mirena, which came through over Silas’s vox.
“What the frig is he doing?” Mirena shouted.
“Just getting some fresh air, Bird,” he replied, wind slamming through his vox. “Bit noisy out here though.”
“You’re telling me!” Mirena shot back. “Your vox is filled with hot air, and I don’t just mean your voice! Stay off until you land!”
“Bird, be advised, Command subgroup is flushing down from top,” I told Mirena. “Requesting support as available, over.”
“Copy, Command, wilco, over and out,” she replied. At around that time, a laser-like shot narrowly roared past Silas, which he was happy about—he had aimed for the correct spire. After a few more seconds of sailing, Silas thrust his legs forward and engaged impact suppressors strapped to his boots, along with turning his maglegs back on. A moment later, he landed feet-first against the side of the spire, about half a mile down from where he had traced the Vindicare to, magnetically locked into place without falling miles more to the surface. As his muscles contracted for the movement of one of his legs, that magleg would disengage, allowing him to ascend the spire up its side.
But he did not ascend without opposition. The Vindicare was not oblivious to Silas’s survival, and had one final trick up his metaphorical sleeves not unlike Vostroya. After a few moments of ascension, demolition charges blitzed out in sequence far above Silas, and a large metal ring about a hundred feet tall and thirty feet wide began sliding down the Vindicare’s spire. “Seriously?” Silas grumbled as the mountain of metal screeched toward him, but he was undeterred, instead merely reaching for another weapon while holstering his Hellgun. He got his melta into position just in time to carve a path through the metal hulk that was falling toward him, keeping his pace even then while doing so. After a minute of falling, the metal ring struck the side of the main superstructure where the spire originated from, shaking everything in view, but still not managing to shake Silas from his pursuit.
“Bird, what was that?” I asked Mirena, which again came through over Silas’s vox.
“Ask Scion,” she growled.
“I dropped something,” Silas replied. “Nearing target. Requesting silence.”
“Acknowledge. All groups, defer to priority Scion,” I ordered, granting Silas the silent vox he had asked for. He then made the final ascent around the rounded bottom of the spire’s peak, gingerly approaching the general vicinity he had gauged the Vindicare to be shooting from. He re-readied his lasgun, but also drew a Photon Flash Grenade from his waist, which, after arming, he tossed into the window from which he believed he had traced the Vindicare to.
Silas did not wait for the Flash Grenade to detonate before finishing his ascent; instead, and with the sort of timing that could only have been garnered from decades of service, Silas paced himself to scale the lip of the window the moment after his grenade had filled the interior room with light and concussive force. Despite this perfect timing, the shadows of the room seemed to lash out at Silas’s approach, and a near-imperceptible foot kicked Silas’s Hellgun from his hands. In the same motion, a suppressed munition flung wide past Silas’s head, missing him completely.
As his Vindicare opponent righted himself to a defensive stance within the shadows, Silas instantaneously understood two things: One, the Flash Grenade had impaired the Vindicare’s sensory equipment and ability to aim; Two, it had not impaired the Vindicare’s sense of balance or combat readiness. But Silas assumed that the first point should have been enough to bring Scayn’s assassin down, even if that advantage was likely wearing off to time. After all, Silas figured, a sniper—even a good one—was no specialist in hand-to-hand combat.
This assumption nearly cost my Scion his life.
When the Vindicare threw a haymaker toward Silas, my Scion thought to block it and move in for the kill himself. What he did not expect was the overwhelming force of the punch to swing him to the ground, tipping him over from head to toe on the axis of his blocking arms. Silas hit the ground with enough force to crack one of the eyepieces in his helmet, and instantly understood that there was vastly more power to his target than its slim build suggested.
Silas rolled to his side as what was surely a decapitation-capable kick was thrown his way, and reached a hand out to the Vindicare’s balancing ankle to try to trip his target to the ground as well. This attempt did not work either, and instead Silas pivoted around the Vindicare from his grip upon the Vindicare’s leg. But that sufficed for Silas’s purposes too, as he spun over his Hellgun once more. On instinct, he held the Hellgun close as the Vindicare descended upon him, the butt of his rifle next to his neck; this was all that saved him, temporarily, as the Vindicare lifted my Scion off the ground into a flawed chokehold. Silas had learned by now that the Vindicare was possessed of a strength that would probably break his weapon apart—and with it, his neck—after only a few moments, so he wasted no time in retaliating, pulling the trigger of his rifle with its barrel between his legs. Lasfire roared out of his weapon in far greater proximity than Silas would have liked, but the grip on his neck loosened, and he was able to fall forward, weapon still in his hands.
Silas did not bother with anything to do with grace. He tumbled out of the Vindicare’s arms and onto the ground, spinning around in a hurry to shoot the shadows that had just held him. Two beams of red hatred scorched the Vindicare’s torso, briefly pinning it to a statue of one of the Emperor’s saints before the assassin slid into its own collapse, one of its legs fried from Silas’s desperate attack in captivity. Silas paused a moment, then rose to his feet and took aim at the Vindicare’s head. A similarly-desperate hand got in the way of his aim, but the hand did not serve to protect the Vindicare’s face from the lasfire that erupted from the barrel of Silas’s weapon, then. Silas panted for a few moments as the Vindicare slumped over, and then shot his foe another three times. The Vindicare twitched and spasmed on the first and second shots, but not the third.
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Still panting, Silas reached for his vox communicator. “Silence lifted. Target eliminated,” he reported in.
“Good work, Scion. I owe you a drink. Do not touch its weapons,” I replied.
“No?”
“Gene-coded. I don’t know if they’ll explode in your hands, but they certainly won’t function. Don’t risk it.”
“Shame, I quite like the look of his rifle,” Silas sighed. “What’s my next op?”
“Hold your position. I don’t want that equipment—or its body—laying around for anyone to stumble upon. I’ll have the Arbites seal the area when we’re done and get the body back to Sicarius,” I explained. “Thank you, Scion.”
“Wasn’t anything, Command,” Silas said, and then fell to his knees—then his hands—and fought to catch his breath.
***
The trek to the Cryo facility was a long one, but mostly empty thanks to Mirena blasting apart what few platoons remained, and what few mercenaries we did encounter were easily dispatched. But I knew, from Merek’s description, how the heretics were planning to kill me. What I did not know was how I was going to prevent it, as the mind of the creature Merek described would have been that of a lunatic, and not one I could easily enter. Likewise, the creature was not one I could outright kill myself without my psyker abilities. To their credit, it was a decent plan the heretics had.
But I had Penitent, and the heretics could not have known of her talents. Even so, and while I was certain no ordinary human could match her, the monster I expected to face was far from ordinary. “It’s quite likely you and I are marching to our deaths,” I warned her.
“If that is true, then at least you and I have not erred from the Throne’s path,” she replied. “At least, not since I joined your services, that is.”
“Should we survive, Penitent, I will want to speak of that,” I said. “But worry about that later. The thing Merek described is, if I am correct of its identity, as close to evil incarnate as can be found within the Imperium. And a traitorous one is something else altogether. I do not approve of its existence.”
“Then we shall remove it from existence,” Penitent declared confidently. “Anything I should know?”
“If any of its armaments touch you, death is guaranteed. And if we happen to kill it, get away from its body. Unlike the thing Silas killed, this one will explode on death,” I warned her. “Furthermore, though I will do so if our lives depend on it, I do not intend to wield my mind against this foe. I nearly exhausted myself protecting myself from that which Silas just killed, and want something left to handle the heretics. They are our targets today, not their minions.”
“Understood,” she nodded. We spoke no more of it on our journey, and the rest of our journey went unopposed. I was warning Penitent of an Eversor Assassin, even if not by name. Such was the only thing that would have fit Merek’s description and been capable of the wanton carnage that had terrorized Scayn’s habblock. Penitent and I should not have been much of a match for an ordinary Eversor, but I had hopes that the Eversor had seen too much action outside cryostasis and that its innards were beginning to melt. Eversor Assassins needed to be kept in cryostasis between operations, lest the volatile drugs they pump themselves full of kill them before they finish a mission.
I do not know how or why these Assassins, if my suspicions were correct of them, had defected to the Phaenonites, but I was willing to bet that in their defection, they did not receive the proper care and treatment that the Assassinorum traditionally gave their agents. Our only hope, in descending toward the Cryo facility, was that the blessed Emperor had denied this defector that which would keep its bodily functions intact. Slowed reactions, sluggish (for an Eversor) movements, and dulled combat senses would be our only chance not only for survival, but for victory.
Our journey lead us into a large, circular room, where large columns reached to the ceiling. They were not support columns, rather, they were reaching down into pools of coolant beneath the thin steel floor we entered onto. The coolant reflected through glass survey windows, creating a blue shimmering hue throughout the room. At the far end of this room, the Eversor, clad in a turquoise bodyglove and bonemeal-colored skull, stood waiting. Behind him stood a Mechanicus tech, hunched over and clad in grey robes with gold trim, unlike the red silk the Adeptus Mechanicus frequented. The Heretek also wore an inhuman, clearly-Xenos skull over his face, unlike the usual techmasks of the Mechanicus. “Ah, Inquisitor Blackgar, we meet again,” the Heretek called to me. Its voice was that which I referred to as being the ‘creature’ during my interrogation from the Four. “That’s a crude augmetic you’ve found, but at least it’s better than the flesh you first presented with.”
“I have little to say to you, Heretek, save for asking where the others are,” I called to him, and then motioned for Penitent to break away from me, to try to get a flank on the Eversor which would undoubtedly be set loose upon us soon.
“Oh, they’re just through here,” the Heretek replied, gesturing to a gateway behind himself with one of the many Mechadendrites on his back. “We intend on listening to your cries of agony on our way out while this fine specimen guts you. I am told its toxins are quite…biologically destructive.”
“Silence vox,” I voxxed in, again telling my group to keep to themselves. Penitent and I were going to need every conceivable advantage against this thing. “Your appearance, Heretek—you are not an isolated agent, are you? You seem too…devoted to your heresy.”
“Your inquisitiveness and deductive skills astound, Blackgar. Of course, it’s why your lively termination is so required. But yes, I came here to fulfill another’s goal, and the Phaenonites and Vostroyan—as you’ve also correctly identified—are the means of achieving that vision,” the Heretek answered.
“And who is that other?”
“I think not,” the Heretek shook his head, denying me that info. “Goodbye, Inquisitor. If this specimen leaves anything of you remaining, take solace in knowing that I will salvage you to a higher calling,” he added, and then tapped the Eversor on the shoulder twice before turning away. I got a single snap shot off with my bolt-pistol, trying to blow out the Heretek’s legs, but it was blocked by the power sword of the Eversor, who sprang into action at last.
The Eversor was fast, but from firsthand experience, not quite as fast as Penitent, who herself was not nearly as fast as the puppet-Astartes. That was mildly encouraging, but the Eversor’s mastery of lethality was not something one could afford complacency to face. In any event, the Eversor stomped toward me in a methodical but hastened pace while blasting away with its Executioner pistol. That it did not close the gap in an instant suggested, indeed, that damage had been done to its internal organs. I dove aside from its shots to take cover behind a coolant column, though I knew such a thing would not be sufficiently protective against a Bolt weapon for long. The Eversor buried two more explosive Bolts into my cover before I knew I needed to move again, but my cover had served its purpose in buying time for Penitent to close the distance to our foe. I heard the revving of her Eviscerator clash with the Eversor’s power sword, which meant it was my time to spring back into action.
I emerged from cover and took a few shots at the Eversor myself, but needed to take the time to aim in such a way as not to hit Penitent even if the Eversor dodged—which he did, in part due to that hesitation of mine. But in dodging away from Penitent, he allowed me to fire off the remainder of my clip more liberally, pressuring the psychotic assassin into a retreat of its own. And when I finally did need to reload, Penitent was back upon him again. Our pressure and the Eversor’s weakened state were keeping him from killing us, it seemed, but we were only accomplishing that much. Putting an end to the traitorous Eversor’s existence in a manner timely enough to catch up to the fleeing heretics was another matter altogether, and one that I did not know how to approach.
Penitent must have come to the same conclusion, as after pressuring the Eversor across a half-dozen attacks in the blink of an eye and drawing the assassin to a standstill, she called out to me. “Go, Cal! You said yourself that everything other than the heretic is a distraction. Go and end them!” she shouted.
“That will not be allowed,” the Eversor growled, its voice distinctly human but somehow less emotional than even the Heretek’s. He surrendered his footing to Penitent’s strength as he reached one hand from his power sword for his pistol, intending to train it on me as I hastily made for the exit at Penitent’s behest. She, however, did not allow him to get a shot on me, as ever shielding me to her fullest.
“Live, Penitent,” I messaged her as I left the cryo facility, the Eversor raving intelligibly at my escape whilst being fended off by my bodyguard. I did not stick around long enough to scan her mind for a reply, instead putting my faith in her and the Throne that she could secure my flank without losing her own life in the process, impossible a task though that seemed.