Sons of the Hydra

by Rob Sanders

  ‘Perhaps the Angelbane has succumbed,’ Carcinus Quoda said, looking out through the great lancet screens of the bridge. Occam joined the sorcerer there.

  ‘We should be so lucky,’ he said to the psyker. ‘Do you know something that I don’t?’

  ‘The sheer tonnage of what I know that you do not could stop a formation of Land Raiders in their tracks.’

  ‘Fair,’ Occam admitted to the sorcerer. ‘Now answer my damn question.’

  ‘No,’ Quoda said. ‘For now, the Angelbane lives.’

  ‘Encoded channel,’ Occam ordered, turning to Arkan Reznor. ‘Inform Lord Carthach that we have completed our mission. The Assiduous resides under the control of the Alpha Legion. Ground forces are shielded from attack. We await his orders.’

  Occam shrugged his pauldrons. It was a redundant communication. Carthach must already have known that the Redacted’s operation had been successful. The battle-barge’s bombardment cannon hadn’t fired. Still, the strike master expected the report might garner a response from madmen and deviants amongst the Alpha Legion ranks – Quetzel Carthach included – distracted by the opportunity to terrorise and torture the last remaining members of a decimated Chapter.

  The sons of Guilliman had a talent for attracting the Angelbane’s attention.

  Occam looked to Autolicon Phex, who was aiming his plasma cannon down into the depths of the pit melted into the deck. Phex had been a member of the Nova Legion – brother successors to the Crimson Consuls, Vindicators and Marines Mordant. A newly promoted Scout, he had possessed a talent for destruction and had assumed a position in one of the Chapter’s many Devastator squads. After Lord Carthach’s Sons of the Hydra had ended the Nova Legion at Scintil-Novax, Phex had been discovered in one of the Reclusiam penitoria-cells, where he had been punished for transgressions in his operational interpretation of the Codex Astartes.

  Initially slated for exile and to carry out a death oath by the Chapter’s Master of Sanctity, he instead became the last surviving battle-brother of the Nova Legion and a plaything for Quetzel Carthach’s amusement. Experiencing misery, persecution and torment at the hands of the Angelbane, including having his tongue cut off, Phex was perversely given to Occam to replace a legionnaire that the Redacted had lost during the hard battle to take the fortress-monastery on Scintil-Novax.

  As part of an insult Occam felt he had to endure, Carthach claimed that he would not tolerate a son of Guilliman in his own ranks. Since the Redacted were already made up of what he termed second-rate renegade pretenders – rather than truefoil Alpha Legionnaires like Carthach himself – it was decided that Occam was to carry the burden.

  As the artificial atmosphere was vented through the gun decks, taking thousands of serf crew members with it, Occam paced the command deck, waiting for Carthach’s response. The Angelbane was not wrong. The Redacted were made up of renegades who had joined the ranks of the Alpha Legion rather than those who bore the genic heritage of the Last Primarch. What they lacked in blood, they shared in the perversity of the Legion’s operational aspirations and myriad dark objectives.

  Occam wouldn’t have it any other way. While the Redacted fought with the zeal of converts – attempting to honour and harness some of the professional potency of the Legion’s past – Carthach’s Sons of the Hydra were, by and large, legionary butchers. Pirates. Madmen. Warp-tainted altereds. Quetzel Carthach was indeed the Master of Harrows. By joining disparate Alpha Legion warbands under his banner and throwing them into coordinated actions, he had succeeded in wiping out the successor sons of Guilliman on the rimward borders of the Maelstrom, and earned the title Angelbane.

  While the Angelbane was the puppet of his pathological hatred, Occam was driven by a harsh and uncompromising love of his Emperor. The priests of the Ecclesiarchy might have thought themselves austere and the agents of the Inquisition unflinching in their prosecution of His will, but none had the adamantium faith required to embrace the traitor and carry out the Emperor’s work from within the enemy lines. To be the true check and balance. To fan the flames of heresy and temper the resolve of a brittle empire.

  Such pursuits brought Occam into company with renegades like Quetzel Carthach. Carthach was both madman and genius. He was too dangerous for his bitter cause to be either ignored or fully embraced. Like many in the fragmented Legion, Carthach had long lost his way. An ancient lie twisted to the harshest of truths, the arch-lord had reputedly been present upon cursed Eskrador, the day the twin primarch fell. While Occam doubted this was true, Carthach lived for the suffering of Guilliman’s sons and devoted his considerable talents to their extermination, Chapter by successor Chapter.

  The Angelbane favoured the old ways, reproducing in his own rancid fashion a ghostly shadow of the Alpha Legion’s infamous Harrowings. The culmination of many months of planning and preparation, Carthach and his gathered Alpha Legion warbands launched mass lightning attacks of synchronised force and unstoppable variety. Planetary assaults were complemented by piratical deceptions. Cultist mobs rose up amongst the populations of loyal Imperial worlds, while Assassins stalked planetary leaders. Psycho-indoctrination and orbital bombardments spelled doom in their different ways, while xenos mercenaries and daemonic allies were unleashed upon the Emperor’s servants. While the Tyrant of Badab had announced his hatred of the Imperium through a bombastic war that had dominated the coreward sectors, the Angelbane had been quietly snuffing out Adeptus Astartes home worlds on the other side of the warp storm.

  In doing so, Quetzel Carthach satisfied his cruel obsession and the Sons of the Hydra contributed to the Legion’s murky objective of further destabilising a tottering Imperium. The insurrectionists, monsters and piratical marauders placing themselves under the Master of Harrows’ command meanwhile prospered, pilfering victim Chapters of their finest plate, much-needed Adeptus Astartes weaponry and fleet assets. Occam knew not how many of the Ultramarines’ successors Quetzel Carthach had truly ended. The demise of the Crimson Consuls on Carcharias had been a crude kind of merciless artistry and the Redacted had taken part in the harrowing actions that had destroyed both the Vindicators and the Nova Legion.

  Still, Occam did not rate the Chaos lord. While he was a ruthless figurehead, driven by an ancient legionary hatred, Carthach’s strategies and those he committed the Redacted to were not half as accomplished as the Angelbane liked to think. Occam knew he could do better for his Emperor and that one day he might.

  ‘What do orbital captures show?’ Occam called across the command deck, as he paced between lancet screens. He was getting impatient. Arkan Reznor obliged his strike master. Superimposed on the arched bridge ports, Occam could see the dirty, white surface of Vitrea Mundi rotating slowly and silently. He could see that the vapour cloud that had risen from the soda lakes was now all but obscuring Salina City. It threatened to swallow the structure of the Bas-Silica fortress-monastery next.

  ‘And augurs?’ Occam asked.

  ‘Fires from terror attacks and detonations across the city and within the fortress-monastery’s perimeter walls,’ Reznor said, studying his runescreen.

  ‘Time?’

  ‘Nothing new.’

  ‘Small arms fire? Troop movements?’

  ‘Difficult to tell through the vapour cloud,’ the warpsmith said, adjusting magnifications and filters. ‘Beyond smoke trails and fires from recent detonations, the Bas-Silica looks quiet and still.’

  ‘What in the warp is going on down there?’ Occam said, almost to himself. ‘What can you tell me?’

  Arkan Reznor shrugged his plate.

  ‘I can tell you that most of the fortress-monastery’s void shields are back to full intensity,’ Reznor said, ‘and that I’m getting heat signatures from the defence laser automotives and battery silos.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Perhaps the Marines Mordant still hold the towers,’ Quoda hypothesised, looking out through the lancet screens.

  ‘Or the Angelbane ordered the surface-to-orbitals warmed
up as a defensive measure,’ Sergeant Hasdrubal pitched in.

  Occam looked at them and then back at the screens.

  ‘Defence against what?’ he said. ‘We’re the only ones up here.’

  Something wasn’t right. Occam might not have been a genic member of the Alpha Legion, but his instincts were still warning him there was something off. Lack of communications. Absent activity. Timing issues…

  The Angelbane’s plan had been proceeding right on time. Three days before – standing on the benighted strategium deck of Carthach’s ancient flagship, the Omega-Echidnax – the Sons of the Hydra, Legion operatives, cultist leaders and the arch-lord’s xenos advisors had gathered to make final preparations for the attack on Vitrea Mundi.

  It had been agreed that Carthach would lead the assault on the fortress-monastery personally, at the head of the Alpha Legion Terminators and the monstrous xenos mercenary hordes that usually accompanied his actions. The Master of Harrows favoured a variety of alien breeds for maximum strategic flexibility: Tarellian dog-soldiers, Morralian Deathsworn, Galg freedom fighters, Fra’al marauders, serpent warriors of the sslyth and eldar outcasts. Such xenos would ordinarily be an unwieldy rabble. They were united in one thing, however: their seething hatred of humanity.

  Accompanying Carthach by arrangement in his assault upon the Bas-Silica and the veteran companies of Marines Mordant that held the fortress was Vhospis Voyteq and his warband ‘the Kyndred’. Alpha Legionnaires grotesquely warped by the environs of the Maelstrom, Voyteq and his tainted warriors provided the Sons of the Hydra with the shock troops required for the inevitable hand-to-hand carnage to be undertaken in the fortress-monastery courtyards.

  It was the responsibility of another of Carthach’s captains, Sisyphon Vail, to dump chemicals in the soda lake upon whose shores Salina City rested. The poisonous cloud that Occam had seen rising up through the city and the coordinated actions conducted by both Vail’s warband ‘the Honourless’ and their Traitor Guard terror cells had worked perfectly – driving the city population towards the fortress-monastery. The moment that the Marines Mordant had opened the mighty gates of the Bas-Silica had been the signal for Carthach and Vhospis Voyteq to attack. While Voyteq was a twisted thing, Sisyphon Vail a soulless creature and the Angelbane a madman, Occam couldn’t help but admire the rank and file legionnaires of the Sons of the Hydra. In the quads and courtyards of the fortress-monastery, the fighting would have been bloody.

  While most of the Alpha Legion warbands under Carthach’s command had been given the dubious honour of facing what was left of the Marines Mordant with him down on the planet surface, warbands like The Chain Unbroken under Captain Naetrix Krayt and Occam’s own Redacted had been assigned supporting roles off-world. Occam was now questioning the motivations behind that decision.

  ‘Lord Occam,’ Mina Perdita called from beyond the pulpit throne. She had her ear to the bridge elevator doors. Withdrawing to one side, she rested the combat shotgun against one shoulder, aiming the barrel at whoever might venture forth from the magnelevator car. Their plasma weaponry priming with a hum, the Alpha Legionnaires took cover and aimed at the elevator doors.

  When the doors shuddered open, the Alpha Legionnaires could see that the sparking lamp in the car was out. The cycling filters of Occam’s optics picked out a hunched, skeletally-thin figure in a hooded cloak, haunting the car interior. As the figure advanced from the elevator, his footsteps thudded metallically and with unexpected weight on the command deck.

  The figure didn’t get far. Ramming the muzzle of the combat shotgun into the side of his hooded head, Mina Perdita pinned the gaunt face of the new arrival to the side of the wall. As the figure scraped his downturned head upwards, Occam heard the squeal of metal upon metal. A single, large optic, unnatural in its intensity, burned green from the depths of the hood. With the twitch of a snarl, Occam recognised the interloper.

  ‘You are not cleared to be here, abominable machine,’ he said with annoyance. Mina Perdita and the legionnaires of the Redacted took note of the fact that Occam hadn’t indicated they should lower their weapons. When the thing spoke it communicated in a stilted Gothic, as though it were always searching for the right words. Its alien voice sounded like arcing electricity.

  ‘I neither give nor take orders, fleshling,’ the xenos said. ‘Not from you. Not from my own kind. My counsel is given freely. My reasons, my own.’

  Carthach kept both the warped and the xenos within his close circle of advisors. One such alien wretch was Omizhar Vohk. The thing was a hunched nightmare of ancient xenos technology, its burnished silver frame draped in a ragged black cloak. A living artefact, Vohk’s cyclopean optic burned its ghoulish green light into all upon whom he turned his gaze.

  While repugnant to be around, his timely predictions had become valued by Quetzal Carthach. It was upon the ancient alien’s insistence that Krayt and the pirate flotilla of The Chain Unbroken had been despatched to delay the arrival of the Angels Eradicant and the Astral Fists. Vohk predicted that contingents from both Chapters would respond to astropathic calls for assistance from Vitrea Mundi unless intercepted and drawn away.

  The xenos advisor settled a metal claw on the barrel of Perdita’s shotgun and pushed it slowly away, freeing his gaunt machine head.

  ‘Malik,’ Occam said. The xenos had an unsettling habit of appearing and disappearing as he pleased. He would skulk around corners and back into shadowy alcoves, vanishing like some kind of feudal world conjurer. No one among the Legion, including the warpsmith Reznor, understood the powerful technology that allowed such movement. Vohk had been reticent about discussing such secrets. He was much more interested in the Legion’s own.

  ‘In my sights,’ the legionnaire said, the muzzle of his long-shot plasma gun following Vohk across the room.

  ‘You are a violent Legion, amongst a violent race,’ the xenos machine told them, stepping through bodies.

  ‘Don’t flatter us,’ Occam said. He had little time for the advisor’s games. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Omizhar Vohk stomped his hunchbacked way across the command deck. From behind, Occam could see that the metal vertebrae of his curved spine had punctured his ragged cloak and hood, creating sail-like spines.

  ‘I bring word from the surface,’ Vohk told him. ‘From your arch-lord. Not mine. Yours.’

  ‘Why hasn’t Lord Carthach answered our communications?’ Occam put to the metal nightmare. ‘Has something gone wrong?’

  ‘You might say that,’ Vohk said cryptically.

  ‘I did,’ Occam replied. ‘What do you say, xenos?’

  Vohk peered out of the lancet screens and down at Vitrea Mundi with his green optic. He turned to face Occam with a flourish of his rags.

  ‘The fortification of your genic enemies has been taken,’ Vohk told him finally. ‘The Angelbane is once again victorious.’

  ‘That sounds like a good thing.’

  Vohk nodded his narrow cranium, his features like a mirror-polished skull. Occam could see himself in the horrific visage.

  ‘All who call the galaxy their home define themselves by what they are not,’ Vohk said. He gestured at the strike master with a wicked claw. ‘Human, alien. Those that fight for the Primordial Annihilator, those that do not. Victor, victim. Binary oppositions. Choices, if you will.’

  ‘The Alpha Legion prides itself on resisting such narrow interpretations,’ Occam hissed. ‘For us, there is always another way.’

  ‘That remains to be seen, fleshling,’ Omizhar Vohk said. ‘Let us see what you do with this choice. You are monitoring the fortification below, no?’

  Occam looked to Arkan Reznor, who looked back at his rune screen. Like everyone else on the command deck, he had been distracted by the alien’s arrival. Occam heard the warpsmith curse under his breath.

  ‘The defence lasers have powered up,’ Reznor confirmed, ‘and the emplacement is reorientating.’

  ‘Talk,’ Occam said to Vohk.

  ‘You
need not me to tell you what you already suspect to be true,’ Vohk said. ‘What you have always suspected to be true.’

  ‘The Bas-Silica is going to fire upon the Assiduous?’ Occam asked, but the question came out more like a statement.

  ‘Almost certainly.’

  The Alpha Legionnaires unconsciously took several steps towards the xenos advisor, while Mina Perdita slipped into the elevator car, her finger hovering over the button.

  ‘At Carthach’s order?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What reason does he need?’ Vohk put to the strike master. ‘The Angelbane’s gift has been in bringing the lesser-race scum of the galaxy together, so that he might drown the sons of the Eastern Primarch in your myriad talents and motivations. He is, however, a being driven by hate. The Primordial Annihilator has long had its hooks in him – drawing him on. And he hates you, Occam – ‘the Untrue’. He hates you, what you fight for and those who choose for their own reasons to fight with you.’

  Vohk gestured at the legionnaires of the Redacted.

  ‘Why?’ Ephron Hasdrubal demanded, closing in with his bolt pistol clutched in his gauntlet.

  ‘Because we are different,’ Quoda the sorcerer said, ‘and we define ourselves by what we are not.’

  ‘The Alpha Legion has made an art out of pretending to be something they are not,’ Vohk told them, ‘but you aren’t pretending. Your primarch isn’t your own. Your blood betrays you. The least treasonous thing about you all is the paint on your plate. At least that can claim to belong to the Legion. Your arch-lord employs renegade Space Marines, but you are the only ones in his ranks to desecrate the colours of his Legion by wearing them.’

  ‘The defence laser array?’ Occam put to Reznor, turning away from the alien advisor.