The Persecution of Khymara

Sweat beaded the man’s forehead, veins bulging in his temples and the tendons in his neck whip-taut as he fought to contain the roiling energies of the warp that threatened to burst from his eyes, consuming those near him. Codicier Voll gritted his teeth as he held the man by the throat, a mighty effort evident within his eyes. Voll’s ceramite gauntlet was wrapped, vice-like, around the Deck Officer’s neck, his feet suspended fully half a metre above the deck plating of the bridge of the Godslayer, but it was not the effort of lifting the heavily-built Khazant native in such a fashion that was causing the Astartes such toil. No, the Codicier could have held the man in such a grip and position indefinitely, even without the strength-enhancing systems of his mkX Tacticus pattern power armour locking his arm in place. The effort expended was in holding back the immaterial energies of the warp that had found a gateway into reality through the man’s mind, preventing them from bursting forth and warping the man’s flesh into an unnatural form that would rip through the bridge crew and disable the Godslayer, leaving it helpless in the warp, drifting and destined to become nothing but a small part of some space hulk, an amalgamation of similar such lost vessels drifting aimlessly through the warp until they dropped back into real space, delivering their cargo of xenos lifeforms and daemonic entities into whatever solar system was unfortunate enough to be in their way.

The Godslayer was part of a hunter fleet dispatched by the Swords of Dawn to track down the arch-heretic Magnus, Master of the Thousand Sons Astartes and perpetrator of infinite wrongs upon the Imperium of Mankind. Their route took them from their home world of Khazant in the Jericho Reach and across the Ultima Segmentum, and while the transition into the immaterium had gone smoothly the anomalies had started occurring soon after. At first, things had been relatively mundane and harmless, crewmen reporting hearing whispered voices from corridors that were empty, shadows moving along walls where there were no lights and no people to cast them.

That had continued for several days, and then the incidents had taken a more sinister and significant turn. Crew had been reported missing, only to be found in unmanned sections of the ship, their insides painting the walls with viscera. At that point the ship’s most deadly payload, the brothers of Sabre Company, had left their monastic cells, ceasing their endless martial routines and donning their battle armour to patrol the corridors of the vessel, ever-alert for warp taint. Codicier Hexxon Voll had been assigned to the bridge, his psychic capability and his particular speciality making him the obvious choice to monitor and guard the most sensitive part of the ship’s operational systems and crew. Voll was a powerful psyker, but that was nothing unusual within the ranks of the Librarius of the Swords of Dawn, for all Astartes psykers were exemplars of both the martial traditions of their warrior brotherhoods, and also the iron will necessary to manipulate the powers of the warp without being tainted by its presence. His particular specialism however came in dampening and disrupting the powers wielded by other psychically sensitive beings. Voll was not a psychic blank, those rare individuals whose souls bore no presence in the warp, but he was able to somehow dissipate the power of the warp harmlessly, negating its deleterious effects on the ‘normal’ humans that crewed the Godslayer.

This particular event was stretching even his capabilities however, he had already detected and nullified several attempted breaches by creatures of the warp during their voyage, but this event was several orders of magnitude more dangerous than any of the previous attempts. This creature attempting to manifest within the bridge of the ship was incredibly powerful, and it was taking every ounce of his power and discipline to hold it in check.

“Get. Us. Out. Of. The. Warp!” he hissed to the bridge crew, bared teeth causing the crew to cower in awe, even though they were used to the presence of the transhuman brotherhood of warriors that called the vessel home.

Warning klaxons blared as the bridge crew snapped out of their shock and became aware once more of the present. The deck lights flashed red and the shipwide voxcasters began broadcasting their desperate cry to the crew.

“Warning, emergency realspace translation imminent, brace, brace. Emergency realspace translation imminent.”

Voll felt the pressure in his head ease as his stomach lurched, telling him of the ship being ripped unceremoniously from the immaterial realm and back into realspace.

“Translation successful Sir” called out a voice from across the bridge.

“Geller field generators have overloaded in some sections of the ship causing minor hull damage, but no significant breaches.”

The body in Voll’s grip went limp. The man had died the moment his mind opened to the warp, but it had remained animate due to the presence of the warp-beast trying to possess it whilst the ship had been traversing through that maddening alternate reality. Translating back into realspace had cut the entity’s connection to the body before it had managed to fully manifest and the creature had fled the flesh-sack, screaming in pain and rage at its failure to enter the material realm.

Voll spun on his heel to face the ship’s Captain, a figure barely human itself, so augmented was it that it could no longer leave the bridge, unnumbered cables and connections leading from the ships instruments into its cranial cavity allowing it to process the many thousands of tasks required to run a ship this size effectively and efficiently.

“Locate the rest of the fleet” he growled, “They will have detected us dropping out of the warp and will have followed our lead.”

The Swords of Dawn Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes was, in terms of the lifetime of the Imperium of Man, a recent creation, but its brothers had been fighting together in the Indomitus Crusade for in excess of a hundred years and knew enough to know that a single ship in the vastness of space was vulnerable. Consequently, the fleets of the Astartes used their navigators to not only find their way through the Empyrean, but also to ensure they kept as close together as was possible whilst they sailed that unnatural sea. The rest of the fleet would soon drop out of warp therefore, and although it may take some time for them to regroup under the power of their realspace engines due to the vast distances involved, it was certainly safer than trying to execute a manoeuvre in the warp that would see the fleets reunited.

“Where are we?” Voll growled, an unidentifiable feeling of dread seeping into his being as his warp sense slowly returned from the trauma of being within the Immaterium. “I sense that all is not as it should be in this system.”

That was an understatement. Ever since the Great Rift had torn the galaxy in two, all was not as it should be in virtually every star system within the Imperium, but something about this particular one sent subconscious warning signals racing around his nervous system.

“Somewhere in the galactic northeast Sir.” was the reply, “The augur array indicates the system is called Khymara. Only three planets with regular orbits, the system is named after the largest. It’s codified as a Death World Sir, formerly the site of a mining colony due to unusually high quality crystal deposits used in the manufacture of hot shot lasrifles for the Tempestus Scions. The deposits are indicated as having run dry approximately 30 years before the Great Rift."

Mission 1 - Retrieval

https://swordsofdawn.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-brother-lost-brother-found.html