The Burden of Loyalty

by Various

  Alcavarn Salvador had been right. It should have been the dire duty of the Legiones Astartes to alert the Emperor to the threat of rebellion on Mars. They had failed, and no doubt Terra would discover the treachery of the Mechanicum in blood and fire. The Carrion could only hope that there were those who served the Omnissiah whose conscience would not allow such an atrocity.

  ‘The Fists will safeguard the Emperor,’ the Iron Warrior said. Given the historic rivalry between the two Legions, the Carrion reasoned that it could not have been an easy truth to admit. Many Iron Warriors, Aulus Scaramanca among them, thought that it should have been the IV Legion’s honour to accompany the Emperor back to Terra and fortify the capital of the glorious Imperium.

  ‘And what of us?’ the Carrion asked. Before them the great barrels of the gargantuan gatling blasters began to creak and turn in readiness for their firing protocols.

  ‘Like the Mechanicum,’ Aulus Scaramanca said, ‘the Fourth Legion live the harmony of flesh and iron. We were made for it. We are the strength of the land. The stone that shields, the ore that yields. Beyond the blood and rust-stained battlefields of Olympia, I can think of no better place for an Iron Warrior to rest his bones than in the red soil of mighty Mars.’

  With the thunder of colossal servos and giga-loading mechanisms building, the Iron Warrior turned his back on Tantus Abolitorus. He reached towards the Raven Guard. ‘The sons of Corvus Corax, however,’ Aulus Scaramanca said, ‘were forged to fly.’

  With those last, grim words trailing away on the Martian breeze, the Iron Warrior seized the Carrion’s arm and heaved the lighter legionary around, like a planet and its companion moon, and spun, pitching him with all his armoured strength off the edge of the landing platform. As the Carrion plummeted, rolling and tumbling through the thin forge world air, he saw the Iron Warrior watching his fall.

  And then, with a thunder crack that seemed to tear reality apart, the gargantuan gatling blaster fired the first of its monstrous shells.

  There was another crack, and then another, until the thunder became a continuous, roaring cacophony that almost split the ear. The tower’s top shattered. One moment it was there, the preceptory in which the Carrion, Scaramanca, Phylax, Salvador and Ventidian had trained, slept and toiled. Then it was gone, a shell-shredded blur of masonry and plasteel that fell with the Carrion down towards the unforgiving surface of Mars.

  With Tantus Abolitorus standing like a god in judgement before him and the blast-riddled tower-preceptory collapsing behind, the world became a kaleidoscope of brain-aching sound, the savage rush of air and grit through the Carrion’s long, black hair and the irrepressible plunge-dread that he felt in his pre-stomach. With his cogitator cutting through the confusion, coming to terms with Scaramanca’s sacrifice and what had to be done swiftly to honour it, the sizzling static of his silver-glazed infra-vision seared to vertiginous clarity.

  With his black robes whipping about him in the maelstrom, the Raven Guard used his training to break out of the tumbling roll and stabilise his descent. Without an actual jump pack he knew he had mere seconds to act. With arms and legs outstretched, the Carrion angled his heavy form at one of the rust-red assault carriers, as he spiralled towards the ground.

  Bracing himself, the Carrion hit the back of the aircraft like an adamantium cannonball. He bounced off the hull plating, the impact almost knocking him unconscious. The carrier was knocked off station, sounding several alarms in the cockpit beyond. Sliding and scraping across the hull of the corkscrewing aircraft, the Carrion clawed at the assault carrier’s spine, sliding down between the aircraft’s turbojet columns.

  Hooking his arm through the pipes and cables with a gauntlet, the Space Marine was slammed back and forth between the screeching engines. Engaging the magnetic plates in the crafted feet of his bionic legs and winding his arm further through the nest of heavy-duty cables running down the aircraft’s back, the Carrion straddled the assault carrier’s spine.

  With a grunt he slammed the palm of his hydraulic hand into the plating of the starboard engine. Drawing a raw torrent of power from a turbojet, he felt the assault carrier answer immediately. As he drained energy from the aircraft’s engines and systems, the Carrion allowed the skitarii craft to gently drift downwards under his control. Fearing that the carrier was going to put down beside the collapsing preceptory, the cockpit-wired pilot used the aircraft’s failing power to drift down through the labyrinth of the Novus Mons worker-habs.

  Without power to lower the gears, the assault carrier spiralled into a belly-bounce: a spinning skid and wing-shearing stop short of a harsh landing. As the aircraft wrapped itself around the rockcrete corner of a worker-hab block, the Carrion was torn from his purchase and rolled across the assault carrier’s back into the side of the building. With blood in his eyes from a gash on the head, the Carrion shook off the impact. As the Space Marine clawed his way across the buckled hull and slid off the aircraft, he could hear the jabber-cant of corrupted constructs over the vox-hailer, screeching to get out. Landing on its belly had effectively sealed the troop compartment of the shattered aircraft.

  The Carrion stumbled away from the carrier, the static-laced insanity grating on the rawness of his nerves and the booming emptiness in his hearts. He decided that he wasn’t going to wait for the Phase-Fusilatrix inside to cut their way through to the cockpit and get out through the canopy. With his thin lips wrink­ling into a snarl, the Raven Guard thrust his palm at the downed craft. The scavenged energies surging through the strip-helix were hot where they wound their way through his engineered flesh. Blasting a stream of furious lightning at the assault carrier, he electrified the craft.

  The canopy lit up. Runebanks sparked. Systems sizzled. The flesh of the skitarii warrior-constructs inside spasmed and roasted. With his lightning spent, the Carrion sagged. The shattered shell of the carrier smoked and sparked. The ear-bleeding corruption pouring out of the warped thing was no more, and the quad between the sky-scraping worker-habs enjoyed a moment of silence.

  The great guns of the Titan had fallen silent. Through his augmetics and feet, the Raven Guard could feel the tower-­preceptory’s end. Thousands of tonnes of rockcrete and plasteel had tumbled down, blasted to crumbling masonry and sheared girders by Tantus Abolitorus. The assault carrier had come down a few blocks away but the Carrion could hear others descending – swooping in like vultures to finish any survivors. The Carrion couldn’t imagine anyone surviving such a catastrophe. Even if they had, he reasoned, what was left of them would be swiftly destroyed by the hordes of skitarii poised to swarm the mountain of rubble.

  The Carrion nodded to himself. It was time to rejoin his Legion, in spirit at least. He would need all of his skills in stealth and genetic talents to survive Mars at war with itself. There would be hell unleashed and battles to be fought, but the Carrion knew where he was going. He had to get off-world and back to Terra. While the Emperor’s loyal angels brought distant worlds to compliance, Mars had rebelled.

  The Carrion felt the wind on his face. The tower-preceptory and the Techmarines-in-training within were no more. A mountainous bank of rockcrete dust from the collapse billowed its way towards him, bathing the maze of quads and thoroughfares that weaved their way through the worker-hab blocks in a ghostly haze. Turning and walking away, his hydraulic legs crunching grit underfoot, the Carrion become one with the swirling murk.

  TERRA

 

  Implement

  The Carrion had never thought to see the Imperial Palace, let alone haunt its colonnades and corridors. With the hush of his black robes a perpetual reproach on the polished marble, the Raven Gua
rd moved through the hanging gardens of the Espartic Wall. Here, some of the most ancient and beautiful of Terran plants, shrubs and flowers had survived the ravages of time. Some had been preserved; others had been rediscovered on other worlds, and others still had been genetically engineered from fossil specimens. Beyond the shadows of long statue-lined aisles, courts displaying ancient relics and ornate gateways to grand halls and wards, the leaf-lined arboreta offered excellent concealment for any who desired not to be seen – or wished to be alone.

  The Carrion tried to resist the overlays, isolations and analyses of his cogitator systems and soak up the sounds, smells and artificial warmth of the environmental shielding: the buzz of large insects from the beginning of Terran history, the flutter of tiny birds with nectar-dipping beaks, and the sweetness of life on the air. It was literally a world away from Mars, where the Carrion had been many months before.

  Once a cool, bleak place of dust and industry, the Red Planet was now a warzone of smouldering forges. The globe-carpeting network of hardlines and wireless transmitters had taken the corruption of the dark code to every construct that could receive it. That was how the Carrion had left the place after spending days being hunted through the habs, manufactoria and assembly yards across the deserts of the Invalis and mounts of silent volcanoes.

  It was clear to the Raven Guard, as he had moved across Mars, that some great schism had broken out in the ranks of the Machine-God’s servants. While many attempted to remain true to the Mechanicum and its allegiance to Terra, most had fallen to the code-plague that swept its way through the planet’s infrastructure, and soon there was not a polar meteorologist post, long-­forgotten orbital relay or deep infotomb that had not succumbed to the virulent datastream. Only the noospherics that blessed forge temples like Novus Mons and the Magma City seemed to resist, which merely prompted the corrupted constructs of the Martian schismatists to march on such doomed sanctuaries in screeching numbers and brute force.

  Untrusting of even the Machine-God’s seemingly loyal servants, the Carrion thought it best to keep his survival a secret until finally, over the Pallidus Ash Wastes, he had heard the roar of Thunderhawks overhead. By the time the Carrion reached Mondus Gamma, the Imperial Fists were evacuating with all the precious materiel of Mars they could transport. After presenting himself to a Captain Camba-Diaz, the Carrion had been taken to Luna for de-briefing.

  The Carrion waited under a lotus tree. The sun was rising and dawn reached over the crenellations in a zigzag of rosy light. He could hear the heavy footsteps of gold-plated sentinels walking the battlements of the Espartic Wall. Foot knights of the Legio Custodes walked by with shields and halberds. They did not even acknowledge the Carrion. He didn’t entertain the thought, even for a second, that they had missed him. He had passed isometrics and had cleared the security barbicans that had been built into the ancient beauty of the palace.

  Since learning of Horus Lupercal’s treachery at Isstvan – as the Carrion had done on Luna – the Imperial Fists and the Legio Custodes had been relentless in their improvement and fortification of the Imperial Palace. The primarch Rogal Dorn was overseeing the indomitable ugliness of the architectural enhancements, while his war mason, Imperial Fists and hundreds of thousands of indentured workers, were shattering the tranquillity of the place with round-the-clock labour. War was coming to the Solar System.

  As the Legio Custodes moved on, trailed by several servo-skulls wearing augur-crowns of aerials and antennas, the Carrion heard further footsteps on the marble flags. Three men approached from the upper ward, although all three would have tested the definition of the word ‘man’. Rogal Dorn’s armoured step drew eyes wherever he went. He was huge, like a roving fortification. The glorious gold of his artificer plate, the blood-red river of his cloak and the shock white of his hair. Few could stand the grim intensity of Dorn’s gaze, the darkness of his eyes and the tautness of his jaw inviting any who beheld him to share a tiny fraction of the burden the primarch of the Imperial Fists bore in having a care for the Emperor’s person.

  Beside him was the new Fabricator General, Zagreus Kane. The Mechanicum overlord had escaped the Red Planet with the Imperial Fists and, as the former Fabricator Locum of Mars, had been charged with coordinating the loyalist servants of the Machine-God across the galaxy. His hooded robes of ardent red and fine gold thread hid a form that was outwardly human, but the Carrion knew that Kane was more machine than he was. From the darkness of the Fabricator General’s hood, the Space Marine could see the blue blaze of his inset optics.

  Following, and seeming to take in the new day with ancient eyes, walked Malcador, the Regent of Terra. Whereas the Carrion felt the warm rays of sunlight through the sizzle of the environmental filters – a welcome change from cold, bleak Mars – the Sigillite gathered his hood and robes about him against the morning chill. A gnarled claw of a hand clutched a staff of office and the eagle headpiece smouldered with an unnatural flame that neither warmed the bone nor lit the way, for Malcador had been curse-blessed with many otherworldly talents.

  ‘Well, you know my thinking on this, Lord Malcador,’ Kane told the Sigillite. ‘The situation on Mars has been intolerable for some time now.’

  ‘I think Lord Dorn agrees with you, Fabricator General.’

  ‘Then why did he allow his legionaries to abandon the Forge World Principal to the enemy?’ the Martian asked, his optics searing from the darkness of his hood.

  Rogal Dorn slowed and turned, his armoured form like a wall of adamantium.

  ‘Simple, General Kane,’ the primarch said, his voice resembling the splitting of rock. ‘Supply and demand. You are familiar with the concept, I trust?’

  ‘Now my lord mocks the very principles upon which the Martian-­Terran concord historically exists.’

  ‘Then you understand,’ Dorn continued, bulldozing his way through the Mechanicum overlord’s indignity, ‘that the forces of the Legiones Astartes are already stretched. That war of an unprecedented scale sweeps through the galaxy – converging, intensifying, growing in its power to decimate and annihilate. Intent on sating itself – as all wars do – on the innocent and the unprepared.’ Dorn looked to the sun, rising above the walls, citadels and bastions of the transforming palace. ‘Every one of my Imperial Fists will be needed to stand before such a ravenous monster and the living treachery that is my brother Horus. Throughout the Solar System. Across Terra. On the walls of this very palace. I thought not to waste such a precious resource in holding a handful of forge temples against the mighty and collective constructs of all Mars. Supply and demand, Fabricator General.’

  Zagreus Kane felt like he was standing on the slopes of a rumbling volcano.

  ‘Supply and demand,’ the Fabricator General repeated back to the primarch. ‘Is that why you came for your armour and munitions?’

  ‘I can hardly be expected to fight such a war without them.’

  ‘What about the citizen constructs of Mars, my lord?’ Kane shot back at him. ‘What about the lives of the priests, artisans and temple thralls who laboured to forge your weapons and equipment?’

  ‘You demonstrate a surprising amount of passion for a subject of the Machine-God,’ Dorn said.

  ‘The right to life is the same,’ the Fabricator General said, ‘whether your wondrous workings hang on bone or a construct’s chassis. Now, my lord, if you please. What about the lives of my people?’

  Dorn looked to the Sigillite who gave him the unreadable look of a man unwilling to answer to or judge the impossible choices of another.

  ‘They died so that their fine works might reach hands that would turn such craft into instruments of avenging death,’ Rogal Dorn told Kane finally. ‘Warriors who would use such wonders to bring justice to the fallen and punish those who had truly condemned Martian innocents to a disposable fate.’

  The three men didn’t speak for a moment. The sun bled through the distant clouds of
a morning sky. Custodians passed, silent and vigilant, through the hanging gardens.

  ‘Then you agree with Malcador and myself that it is high time to return to the Forge World Principal?’ Zagreus Kane asked. ‘To take back Mars?’

  Again Dorn looked to the Sigillite, and again the First Lord of Terra pursed his unsmiling lips.

  ‘No,’ the primarch answered simply. Such a decree was considered a living law, unbroken among most that had occasion to disagree with Rogal Dorn.

  ‘No, my lord?’ the Fabricator General asked. ‘You said it yourself. Supply and demand. Consider the resources and legionary assets it requires to blockade Mars presently. Allies arrive daily in-system, driven here by the vagaries of war. Your brother primarchs come and go with the Legiones Astartes at their disposal.’

  ‘I fear Lord Dorn does not advocate a forge by forge re-taking of Mars at all, Fabricator General,’ the Sigillite spoke up.

  Kane looked from the primarch to Malcador, and back to Dorn.

  ‘You are right about the situation on Mars being intolerable,’ Rogal Dorn admitted. ‘The blockade of Mars cannot go on. I need those vessels and the legionaries that crew them elsewhere. Malcador assures me that there is loyal resistance on Mars – a guerrilla war, if you will – yet there is little evidence of it. The Red Planet has been taken by the enemy. We have lost Mars and we must accept that. It’s time to consider other options, Fabricator General. In the past, when worlds have been so thoroughly infested with xenos, for example – when an expeditionary action to retake lost ground has been deemed too costly in life and materiel – we have looked to other solutions. Drastic solutions to impossible problems.’

  ‘Now, wait a second,’ Zagreus Kane blurted, the blue blaze of his optics intensifying. ‘Malcador, he can’t be serious–’

  ‘When has Rogal Dorn ever been known not to be serious, Fabricator General?’ the Sigillite returned.