V3 Chapter 84: "The Fall of Kosorax" — A Worthy Addition to the Collection
Under Duvette's orders, every Astartes began advancing through the daemon ship in careful order.
The Conqueror's passages held great numbers of crew corrupted by Chaos. Some huddled behind pipework, others clung to the ceilings of crawlspaces on multiple warped limbs, only their facial features and the tattered remains of clothing left to prove they had ever been human.
Based on the Salamanders Apothecaries' preliminary assessment of some of them, certain lineages of these mutants might already have bred through more than three hundred generations aboard the Conqueror. Others were likely descended from slaves plundered from various worlds, worn down over long exposure to corruption until they became living components keeping the ship running.
As Duvette and the others passed by, the creatures simply watched from the shadows.
A dozen or so pairs of eyes, all different sizes, tracked the white-armoured giants as they moved, yet none of them broke from cover. They seemed to sense exactly how dangerous Duvette and his warriors were.
Duvette had no intention of dealing with them for now.
These twisted crew members were genuinely revolting, but they weren't the real threat right now. What could actually stand in the boarding force's way were the Oathbreakers still active aboard, the combat servitors, and the daemon-machinery fused directly into the ship's structure.
Gunfire echoed constantly over the comm.
The Salamanders Fourth Company had just entered a heavy transit hub when the passages around them sealed shut behind them fast. Flesh pushed out from within the bulkheads, trying to trap dozens of Astartes apart in separate pockets.
Duvette caught the shift on his strategic map at once.
"Harath Shen. There's a genuine passage behind the third bulkhead on your left."
"Burn through it."
The Salamanders did not hesitate.
The melta gun's devastating fire struck exactly where Duvette had indicated; flesh and metal alike melted away fast, exposing the transit corridor hidden behind it. Harath Shen led the Fourth Company breaking free of the encirclement, straight into a group of combat servitors already massed and waiting.
In another landing zone, the direction of gravity suddenly shifted beneath the Blood Angels' feet.
A dozen or so Astartes were flung against the bulkhead, and a mass of automated weapons opened fire from above at once. Before Cassian Villanos could give an order, Duvette's voice was already on the channel.
"Kill your jump packs."
"Move along the right bulkhead. Breach the wall after twenty metres."
The Blood Angels carried out the order at once.
By the time the flesh bulkhead closed again, they had already blasted a path through to the next deck with melta charges. The Conqueror's trap caught nothing but a few combat servitors that had trailed after them.
The ship made no attempt to hide its malice toward the intruders.
It wanted to kill them.
Airlocks, gravity systems, power conduits, every passage within the hull, all of it had become a weapon the Conqueror turned against its enemies. Even destroyed combat servitors would be dragged back into the dark by flesh-tendrils reaching out from the bulkheads.
Without the strategic map, the boarding force would very likely already have been cut apart.
They would have been trapped in endlessly looping corridors, swallowed by the flesh bulkheads, and finally overwhelmed by swarms of combat servitors. Even Astartes would struggle to escape a daemon warship actively rearranging its own interior against them.
But Duvette could see the true route.
Every false passage and spatial distortion registered as an anomaly on his strategic map. The Salamanders and Blood Angels followed his orders, burning through whatever structure blocked their path, advancing on their objectives by the most direct route possible.
Duvette himself led the thirteen Shadow Wolves of Luna straight for the command bridge.
Red markers on the strategic map kept converging on them. Oathbreakers tried to strike from side passages, and combat servitors massed ahead in numbers, but none of it could genuinely stop Markus and the others.
The thirteen Shadow Wolves of Luna held their formation intact throughout.
Markus led with his shield raised, his power sword cutting down anyone who came close. The white-armoured veterans on either flank kept the hidden passages clear, and any Oathbreaker trying to circle around behind them found himself surrounded well before he could reach Duvette, exactly as Duvette had intended.
A Chaos Astartes dropped from a maintenance shaft above.
Duvette didn't even look up.
A Shadow Wolf behind Markus had already turned and swung, cutting the Oathbreaker down along with the chain-axe in his hand.
More combat servitors surged in from ahead.
Their bodies had been heavily rebuilt with machinery, limbs fitted with power drills, cutters, and heavy weapons. Markus raised his storm shield to weather the first volley, then charged into the mass of them.
The power sword swept through in a horizontal arc.
Four servitors were severed clean at the waist, and the rest were soon torn down into scrap by the other Shadow Wolves.
The Blade of Glory stayed in Duvette's hand, Entropy's Song fixed at his belt. With two such weapons, and thirteen ten-thousand-year veterans fighting at a level near an Imperial honour guard's own, no ordinary garrison could hope to slow his advance.
Just then, a figure suddenly appeared in Duvette's field of view.
Blood-red mist rose out of the bulkhead and slowly coalesced into a woman in a white captain's uniform. She stood at the centre of the flesh-covered passage, watching the advancing Shadow Wolves with a calm, unhurried gaze.
"Ultramarines."
A commanding female voice sounded directly in Duvette's ear.
"You have courage, boarding the Conqueror. That much deserves respect."
Duvette came to a stop.
The woman within the red mist raised her head slowly.
"But you have clearly misunderstood something."
"You are not seizing my ship."
"You are only choosing to die inside her."
Duvette narrowed his eyes and turned to look at Markus, still finishing off the last of the combat servitors.
"Can't you see her?"
"See what, Commissar?"
Markus cut down the last servitor with his power sword, then looked in the direction Duvette was watching. There was nothing there but the pulsing flesh bulkhead and the filth of old blood pooling on the floor.
Only he could see her.
Duvette looked back at the figure shrouded in red mist.
He drew Entropy's Song in a sudden motion and fired an entropic beam straight at the woman.
The entropic beam tore down the passage.
The figure within the red mist scattered instantly, and the flesh bulkhead behind it crumbled under the beam as well. Yet the woman's voice still echoed in Duvette's ear.
"You will regret this, Ultramar man."
The red mist vanished entirely.
Duvette frowned, sifting back through everything he knew about the Conqueror, and then something surfaced in his mind.
A mortal ship's captain.
A woman respected by Angron, by Kharn, by the entire World Eaters Legion.
Lotara Sarrin.
If Duvette's memory served, she had never left the Conqueror in the end. Her body, her consciousness, and the ship itself had become entirely entangled through ten thousand years of corruption, until at last she'd become part of the vessel's own warped machine spirit.
That projection formed of red mist just now was very likely Lotara's consciousness, now bound up in control of the Conqueror.
Her true, physical body still existed somewhere.
That body should be seated on the command throne of some hidden bridge, serving as the critical anchor point between Lotara and the Conqueror's core machine spirit. Find that place, and Duvette might have a chance to sever the link between them, and unleash Purification on both her and the core spirit at once.
Duvette kept moving, checking his strategic map as he went.
Before long, he noticed something wrong.
There were two bridges aboard the Conqueror, each holding supreme command authority.
One sat within the ship's ordinary structure, and the thirteen Shadow Wolves of Luna were closing on it fast. The other lay hidden deeper within the hull, its surrounding spatial structure utterly chaotic, a region that couldn't possibly fit within the ship's real dimensions at all.
So there really were two.
Duvette did not change course.
Kosorax's bridge was already close, and seizing it would grant control over part of the ship's real systems, while establishing a stable foothold for Guilliman's second wave.
Lotara and the true core machine spirit could be dealt with afterward.
"Keep moving."
Duvette holstered Entropy's Song.
"If there are two, we take them one at a time."
Kosorax watched the shifting images within the Blood Mirror, still utterly unable to make sense of what was happening.
The Imperial Astartes were advancing through the Conqueror.
The Salamanders and the Blood Angels kept cutting down Oathbreakers and combat servitors, while the thirteen white-armoured giants under Duvette drove straight for his bridge along the shortest possible route.
Why?
How did they know the true paths through the Conqueror's interior?
The Lady had already begun working against them, hadn't she?
Over the centuries, Kosorax had sent out slaves and tech-adepts again and again to chart the ship's interior. He'd even sent Oathbreakers of his own deep into the Conqueror, trying to find the hidden core sections.
But few of them ever came back.
The Conqueror had devoured their lives and imprisoned their souls. Some of the dead even reappeared in the passages, still endlessly repeating the mapping and exploration they'd failed to finish in life.
No one had ever been able to escape the Conqueror.
And yet these Imperial dogs knew exactly which paths were real.
They knew which passages had warped, and which hatches hid traps behind them. Those Astartes kept tearing through the hull with thermal weapons, closing on the ship's core with a straight-line efficiency that bordered on absurd.
Kosorax let out a roar.
The Butcher's Nails drove pain and fury into his mind once more.
There wasn't much strength left for him to call on. Shalok was fighting on Badab Prime, and the remaining three members of "the Four" had all been sent to different passages to hold off the enemy.
And still, none of them had managed to slow the Imperium's advance.
Very well, then... Kosorax raised the chain-axe in his hand. He felt his primary heart quicken, his secondary heart pounding hard right behind it, as though after so many corrective gene-surgeries, this was the only way left for his body to answer the fear he felt.
Even as his heartbeat raced, his muscle-enhancement organs began flooding his blood with hyper-adrenaline.
He let out a roar, and readied himself to fight to the death—
"Excellent."
It was the last thing Kosorax heard before his mind froze in place.
"Fury. Failure. And an ambition that refused, right up to the final moment, to admit defeat."
"The posture is exquisite. Complete."
Everything around him froze in that same instant.
A green phase-light kindled in the shadows, and a tall, silver skeletal figure slowly resolved into solid form. No one knew when this Necron had entered the Conqueror, nor how long he had already been watching.
Trazyn stepped forward to stand before Kosorax.
The Chaos warlord, moments from defeat, held his chain-axe raised high, his face fixed with equal parts refusal and rage. The wreckage of Oathbreakers, slaves, and daemons lay scattered around his armoured form.
"A failure, admittedly."
Trazyn studied Kosorax's pose closely.
"But well suited as the centrepiece of a Twelfth Legion exhibit."
He considered for a moment.
"I could call it..."
Before Trazyn finished the thought, he turned his head toward the warped corridor not far off.
Heavy footsteps were closing fast.
"Quite fast, aren't they."
A tesseract labyrinth unfolded in Trazyn's hand.
Green light enveloped Kosorax, drawing him in along with his weapon and the section of bridge deck beneath his feet. Trazyn then raised his other hand and recorded the position of the surrounding wreckage and blood.
A proper exhibit needed its complete historical context.
Collecting a failure alone would lose most of its value.
With that finished, Trazyn stepped back once more. The green phase-light faded away, and his form slipped back into the shadows along with it.
"A most worthy piece for the collection. Hm... I'm satisfied."
The hollow voice faded slowly away.
The bridge fell silent once more.