The First Heretic

Stay back, Word Bearer. I sense your rising wrath. Do not assume I am the only one who is capable of feeling it. Strong emotion will also alert the Anathema.

Argel Tal leaned closer to the pod. His fingertips brushed frost from its surface.

‘Guilliman,’ he whispered.

The child slept on.

Xaphen moved away from the others, coming to the pod etched with XI. Rather than peer into its depths, he looked over his shoulder at Argel Tal.

‘The eleventh primarch sleeps within this pod – still innocent, still pure. I ache to end this now,’ he confessed.

Malnor chuckled from behind the Chaplain. ‘It would save us all a lot of effort, wouldn’t it?’

‘And it would spare Aurelian from heartbreak.’ Xaphen traced his fingertips over the designating numeral. ‘I remember the devastation that wracked him after losing his second and eleventh brothers.’

Argel Tal still hadn’t left Guilliman’s pod. ‘We do not know for certain if our actions here would change the future.’

‘Are some chances not worth taking?’ asked the Chaplain.

‘Some are. This one is not.’

‘But the Eleventh Legion–’

‘Is expunged from Imperial record for good reason. As is the Second. I’m not saying I don’t feel temptation creeping over me, brother. A single sword thrust piercing that pod, and we’d unwrite a shameful future.’

Dagotal cleared his throat. ‘And deny the Ultramarines a significant boost in recruitment numbers.’

Xaphen regarded him with emotionless eyes, seeming to weigh the merit of such a thing.

‘What?’ Dagotal asked the others. ‘You were thinking it, too. It’s no secret.’

‘Those are just rumours,’ Torgal grunted. The assault sergeant didn’t sound particularly certain.

‘Perhaps, perhaps not. The Thirteenth definitely swelled to eclipse all the other Legions around the time the Second and Eleventh were “forgotten” by Imperial archives.’

Enough of this insipid conjecture, came the disembodied voice again.

Argel Tal looked below the platform, where the scientists laboured at their stations. Most were dealing with bloodwork, or working on biopsies of pale flesh. He recognised the extracted organs immediately.

‘Why are these men and women experimenting on Astartes gene-seed?’ he asked. The other Word Bearers followed his gaze.

They are not experimenting on it. They are inventing it.

Argel Tal watched them work, as Ingethel’s voice hissed on. He saw several of the workers nearby slicing open the pale organs with silver scalpels. Each of them bore the numeral I on the back of their environment suits.

Your Emperor has conquered his own world with the proto-Astartes created in far inferior conditions. Now he breeds the primarchs, and in their shadow, he breeds the warriors he needs to lead the Great Crusade.

He watched them work, but the sight of his genetic genesis left his skin crawling.

These are the prototypical organs that will become the gene-seed for the first true Astartes. You know them as–

‘The Dark Angels,’ said Argel Tal. ‘The First Legion.’ Below him, the biotechnicians scalpelled through malformed organs, threaded veins, analysed with microscopes, and took tissue samples for further testing. The progenoid glands implanted in his own throat and chest throbbed with sympathetic ache. He lifted a hand to rub at the sore spot on the side of his neck, where the organ hidden beneath the skin did its silent work – storing his genetic coding until the moment of his death, whereupon it would be harvested and implanted within another child. The boy would, in turn, grow to become a Word Bearer. No longer human. No longer Homo Sapiens, but Homo Astartes.

It will be many Terran years before the organs below are ready for implantation in human youths. This is early in the process. Most of the flaws in gene-seed structure will be written out in the course of the coming decades.

The captain didn’t like the creature’s tone. ‘Most?’

Most. Not all.

‘The Thousand Sons,’ said Xaphen. ‘Their genetic code was misaligned. The Legion was afflicted by mutation and psychic instability.’