Agent John on the Move

Macragge.

Cabal agent John Grammaticus and the Word Bearer Narek moved through the intricate underground pipelines beneath the vast city.

This was also the only place where they had a chance of avoiding Ultramarines surveillance.

Using his psychic mind-reading ability, John had located Vulkan. The Lord of Drakes was currently inside a secret Ultramarines base, and judging by the feedback John received, he might already have been subdued by his brothers and placed within a stasis field.

"Vulkan’s mind is still in a crazed state. This is an opportunity, but how are we supposed to get past those Ultramarines?" John considered his options.

"I have to tell you, if we are discovered, thousands of Ultramarines will stop at nothing to kill us. Especially me, of course. After all, this armor of mine belongs to the Word Bearers Legion."

"Even if I am still loyal, before I can state my position, my cousins certainly would not mind grinding me to dust first."

The Word Bearer Narek wiped down his massive sniper rifle, utterly ignoring the foul-smelling sewage beneath his feet. As he answered Agent John’s question, he continued cleaning his weapon.

He hoped John would recognize the difficulty and abandon the foolish idea of assassinating Vulkan. Then they could go kill the great Word Bearer Lorgar together and put an end to the traitors who had betrayed the Emperor.

By their agreement, he would help John assassinate the Lord of Drakes, and afterward John would help him. But if they simply could not do anything to Vulkan, that would not count as breaking his word.

He had helped, even if he had failed. That still counted as help.

"Hm? Someone’s coming."

Narek’s psychic senses suddenly detected something unusual. In the dark, silent underground pipes, the footsteps of a stranger abruptly echoed.

He instantly slung his sniper rifle across his back, drew an adamantine tactical dagger from his waist, gripped a bolt pistol in his other hand, and concealed himself behind a pillar.

The Astartes’ superhuman senses sprang into action. His bolt pistol tracked rapidly through the darkness as he tried to determine the enemy’s location by sound.

There was only one set of footsteps.

At least the newcomer was not an Ultramarine. If those cousins from the XIII Legion had found him, they would never have come alone.

A sea of blue-armored warriors would have sealed off the entire area, then forced him to surrender—or simply destroyed everything.

Agent John realized something. He rose to his feet and approached the footsteps.

From around a corridor corner built of stone bricks and rock emerged a weathered middle-aged man at an unhurried pace. He wore a fur coat, with dense stubble along his cheek and jaw. Narek spotted the two Aeldari weapons in his hands.

They were Aeldari shuriken pistols. Narek immediately understood the man’s identity and origins.

Another Cabal agent.

Both sides drew their weapons at the same time, aiming them at one another in the dark, cramped tunnel.

Bolt pistol and shuriken pistol faced off, deadly weapons of humanity and the Aeldari trained upon each other.

"Stop! Both of you! Now!"

John immediately rushed between them, using his body to block their lines of fire.

Though neither bolts nor shuriken could possibly be stopped by a human body, John’s stance nevertheless calmed them both considerably.

"I heard you’d been taken hostage, so I came all this way to rescue you. Look what you’ve done. Move aside!"

The disheveled Cabal agent shouted, gesturing for John to come over.

"Damon, we’ve already reached an agreement. Your information is outdated," John explained, then turned to signal Narek to remain restrained.

The Word Bearer’s bolt pistol slowly lowered. Another Cabal agent—and apparently a Perpetual as well. Had those damned xenos learned how to manufacture Perpetuals?

He recalled his conversation with Eldrad Ulthran. The Aeldari had recruited him to fight the Cabal, those xenos who toyed with schemes in the shadows to achieve their disgusting ends.

Narek did not particularly like Ulthran either, but compared to these people, that Aeldari was tolerable enough.

Seeing that the black muzzle of the bolt pistol was no longer aimed at his head, Cabal agent Damon also moved his shuriken pistol aside. Given a choice, he truly did not want to fight a Space Marine in an environment like this.

Though he too was a Perpetual, death was still a thoroughly unpleasant experience.

At John’s signal, the three slowly approached one another, though Narek and Damon still remained wary of each other.

"What are you doing here? I’m carrying out my mission." John asked with a deep frown.

"What am I doing here? You’re asking why I’m here? Don’t you know? Your progress has been so slow that the Cabal’s masters have grown concerned. They sent me to watch and hurry you along."

Another half-breed who had betrayed humanity, the Word Bearer silently thought, suppressing the urge to kill him.

"They asked me to tell you this: for the future of the galaxy, Vulkan must die. In our prophecies, Vulkan returns to Terra and becomes the final defender of the Throne World. We cannot allow that to happen. Events must proceed according to the course we have set," Damon said.

He pointed at the black bundle in John’s arms. Concealed within was a weapon capable of killing a Perpetual—the fulgurite spear, infused with the psychic power of the human Emperor.

"With it, you can kill Vulkan permanently and ensure that he can never revive again. Then what we saw in our prophecies will not come to pass."

Damon scratched at his scalp, his messy hair full of dandruff. He seemed confused; the situation differed from what he had been told.

"Originally, our plan was to give this thing to the Night Haunter and have him kill Vulkan with his own hands. We foresaw him carrying out a great slaughter on Macragge, creating immense chaos. But after arriving here, I discovered that everything was different from what the seers told us."

John naturally knew what he meant. Konrad Curze had only stirred up a brief storm before Guilliman and the Lion suppressed him together. Even now, no one knew where the Night Haunter was imprisoned; not even John’s mind-reading powers could sense the slightest trace of him.

"Why do you want to kill Vulkan rather than the other Primarchs, such as the great Word Bearer Lorgar?"

Narek’s voice came through his tactical helmet’s vox, as he wanted to know why Vulkan was their target.

"To ensure Horus wins this war, Vulkan’s existence is tied to Terra’s fate. In the prophecies, he becomes the human Emperor’s contingency. We do not know what that tyrant is plotting, but sabotaging his plans can never be wrong."

"We must make humanity’s war of betrayal even more brutal—ideally, bring the human species to complete extinction. Once humanity is gone, without the vast emotional output of living beings to sustain it, the Warp will be unable to interfere with the material universe on a large scale."

Damon spun his Aeldari shuriken pistol and spoke indifferently.

"Young man, I wonder whether you have ever put out a fire. To extinguish a forest fire, one method that defies conventional thinking is to fight fire with fire. Horus wins, humanity goes extinct—this will become the blaze the Cabal needs, burning Chaos away at the height of its power."

"If sacrificing humanity alone can save the galaxy, that is not a bad bargain."

Narek narrowed his eyes beneath his helmet. He could not tolerate this human-looking creature casually sentencing his own species to death.

Had a xenos spoken those words, he would not have felt such absolute fury, because they naturally stood on entirely different sides. But Damon was human—or at least, he looked human.

Upon hearing Damon’s words, John clenched his teeth. An intense struggle raged within him, the tearing pain twisting his expression into a grimace.

He remembered what the Aeldari named Eldrad Ulthran had said to him when he had first arrived on Macragge’s surface.

Ulthran had hoped he would stop serving the Cabal and, in his pitiful life, do something he genuinely wished to do—something beneficial to his species.

I don’t want to kill Vulkan. He is a Primarch. At this perilous moment for humanity, he should be playing his part. A Primarch is more important than an ordinary man, no matter what.

I have to awaken Vulkan, at least bring him back from his madness. A deranged Primarch is no different from a dead one.

And if I defy the Cabal’s will, those damned xenos will surely kill me completely—the kind of death that even my Perpetual nature cannot save me from.

John silently recited these thoughts. It might cost him his life, but did that really matter to him?

He had lived for far too long. When he had fought on Iwo Jima during the Second World War, he had encountered aliens calling themselves the Cabal. They had recruited him and taken him from Earth. Thirty thousand years had drained away every trace of his passion for life.

If he could contribute something to humanity in the final moments of his life, that did not sound so bad.