Chapter 189 - Causal Loop
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"Do you remember the Tuchulcha Engine, brother? That xenos artifact with its peculiar grip on space and time. I believe you used it yourself."
At the Great Angel's words, the Lion's pupils contracted. A shadow sealed in his mind for ten thousand years rose back to the surface.
The Tuchulcha Engine.
He had seized the thing personally in the Perditus System, after the Thramas Crusade.
To be precise: he had wrested it from the Death Guard's Typhus. The one who now called himself Typhus.
The Lion remembered exactly what it did.
Precise spatial translocation, its accuracy surpassing anything the Imperium's technology could match at the time. But even then he had sensed the artifact's potential went much further than that. If someone pushed deeper, kept pushing, they might unlock something far more terrifying.
He had not continued. The Lion never gambled with xenos artifacts. As the Horus Heresy ground toward its end, he led the Dark Angels back to Caliban, and fell into a coma fighting his foster-father Luther.
What happened to the artifact after that, he didn't know. But he trusted his gene-sons to keep it safe.
"Yes. I know of it."
"Though I never went deeper into it. And besides..." The Lion's brow creased. He looked at Sanguinius. "I trust my gene-sons to keep both the secret and the artifact secure. It could never have fallen into enemy hands. So tell me — how did Caliban's destruction actually happen?"
"Impulse."
The Great Angel let the word fall slowly.
"Your gene-sons were far too impulsive."
"The Dark Angels Chapter Master, Azrael."
"And deception."
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The Caliban System.
A jagged temporal rift stretched across the void like an old wound torn open by force, suspended among the drifting debris of a destroyed world.
Two fleets faced each other across it. The Dark Angels' warships and Typhus's Plague Fleet, locked on one another, neither firing. The silence between them felt wrong. The Warp pulses surging from the rift's depths unsettled every soul on both sides.
Typhus stood in his flagship's command chamber. Behind his rotting breath-mask, his breathing came in slow, labored rasps.
He was afraid. He had once scorned his Gene-Sire Mortarion, that obstinate fool who kept making trouble for Grandfather Nurgle. And now he found himself walking the same road.
He could feel it. Something ancient was waking on the other side of that rift.
Aboard the Dark Angels flagship, Azrael had made his deployment. The objective: destroy the Ouroboros, one of the three great artifacts waiting on the other side of the temporal rift.
He had dispatched the previously captured Lord Cypher and four Ravenwing members. They would cross the rift and finish it.
But deep in the Rock, in a secret chamber sealed behind layer after layer of locks, the Tuchulcha Engine was whispering.
The servitor it controlled drifted in midair, mechanical eyes flickering with a sickly light. Its voice threaded directly into Azrael's communication channel.
"Do you not wish to save your Gene-Sire?"
"Do you not wish to rewrite the beginning of that tragedy?"
"Cross the rift. That is all it takes. Cross it, and all of this becomes possible."
"Do it, Azrael. Your father will be proud of you."
Azrael's focus blurred for just an instant.
He saw it. The young Lion. Caliban whole and unburned. A time before the betrayal, still within reach, close enough to touch if he only stretched out his hand.
The next second, the servitor came apart in two pieces.
Ezekiel, Chief Librarian of the Dark Angels, retracted his power sword. Metal fragments and machine oil scattered across the floor. He turned on the Chapter Master, his face beneath the Librarian's hood tight with urgency, almost frantic.
"Do not trust it! It is cursed! We cannot save the Lion — have you forgotten, Azrael? The words you brought back to us—"
He was nearly roaring.
"THE LION SHALL RETURN!"
"Do not be impulsive!"
"We have to stop Astelan's scheme! We cannot let thirty thousand Fallen Angels from Caliban cross into the present age!"
Azrael snapped back. Those words were his own, he had spoken them to the entire Dark Angels Chapter himself. The most precious promise he had carried back from Terra.
He drew a slow breath. Reason reclaimed its ground.
The Tuchulcha Engine's whisper still curled at the edge of his hearing. He stopped listening.
On his order, the Black Talon squadron launched on emergency deployment.
Their objective was not to cross the rift. It was to destroy it.
They had to move fast, before the Plague Planet that Typhus had dragged into the system could close the distance. The world reeked of Nurgle's corruption, and it was drifting steadily toward the rift. If it resonated with the Ouroboros on the Caliban of 10,000 years past, Astelan would receive the support of thirty thousand Fallen Angels from that lost age. A full Legion, reborn in the present.
That could not be allowed.
All of it, every step, was within the Tuchulcha Engine's calculations.
The Black Talon squadron screamed toward the rift's edge.
In the cockpit of one of the fighters, a warrior named Anael made his decision.
He overloaded his fighter's Warp energy array. The instrument needles lurched wildly. Every warning light burned red.
Anael knew exactly what that meant. He didn't hesitate.
In the last seconds of his life, he fed everything into the cannon and pulled the trigger.
A Warp Rift Cannon beam tore free from the fighter, ripped through the dark void, and drove straight into the temporal rift's core.
In the instant before the light took everything, Anael saw what lay at the rift's end.
A planet, blazing with a brilliant flash.
Caliban.
He saw Caliban.
Then the Warp energy swallowed his fighter, and him with it, and there was nothing left.
The rift collapsed.
Destructive Warp energy erupted outward from the collapse point in every direction, a supernova detonating in the void. The storm of energy swept the entire star region. Every temporal fissure in the Caliban System tore apart and dissipated in its wake.
The Plague Fleet was flung wide. The Dark Angels' warships shuddered and groaned, fighting to hold together against the shock.
Inside the Rock, Ezekiel went still.
His psychic perception had caught something in that single instant, something that should not exist. The energy wave from the rift's collapse had blown past every predictive model's limit. The direction of the shockwave. Its scope. The causal resonance it carried, threading back 10,000 years.
An invisible hand closed around Ezekiel's heart and squeezed.
He stumbled back one step, his face white as bone.
A single thought detonated in his mind.
"We bombed Caliban?"
➤ Next: Dragon Forest Star
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