Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  ‘I read your book, Mathieu,’ she said. ‘I am a historitor. I am interested in what you are writing. I have to say that it’s a little over the top for my tastes. I prefer history to histrionics.’ She laughed at her own joke, her smile a perfect crescent moon in the dim chamber.

  ‘I am telling the truth of the matter. Someone must make a proper religious history of this war, or how are the faithful to be illuminated?’ he said tetchily.

  Around Sulymanya’s wrist was a small creature. Eight limbs clamped around her arm. There were no identifiable features beyond the limbs and soft grey fur that contrasted with the deep blue of her uniform. If it had a head, Mathieu could not tell at which end it was; both tapered into identical, prehensile cones that occasionally lifted up to twitch at the air.

  ‘Religion isn’t the truth, Mathieu, it’s the biggest lie there is. Your work will go down very well in the scholams, but it has no complexity, and that’s among a lot of other things it lacks,’ she added. She tickled the creature affectionately. It purred and wriggled. ‘My pet here knows absolutely nothing about the Emperor, or the dark gods, and worships neither, but he is at the mercy of them all. Faith is meaningless in his world. Is that fair?’

  ‘Fairness does not come into it. Just because he knows no better doesn’t mean that faith should not be part of your life,’ said Mathieu. He got up from his chair to face Sulymanya, resting against the edge of his desk, but he found it hard to look her in the eye. She had a lively face, and her eyes sparkled with intelligence that teased and tested him. ‘You are sentient, it is not. You can apprehend the majesty of the divine.’

  ‘I can understand that the universe is troubled by beings of stupendous power. It doesn’t make any of them gods.’

  ‘You deny the Emperor’s power as well as His divinity?’

  ‘I never said that, did I?’ she said. She held up her wrist, transferring the creature to her shoulder where it nestled into her epaulette. ‘In fact, if you think really carefully about what I did say, I said exactly the opposite. Power is easy to judge. My order delves into secrets beyond the history of our species. The older races understood what you call the divine far better than we ever have. There have been powerful beings before. I don’t think they were really gods either.’

  ‘The aeldari have so-called gods,’ said Mathieu.

  ‘You know, I speak a couple of aeldari dialects,’ she said, ‘as well as any human can. Their word for god is not the same as our word for god. It means god, but it also means about a dozen other things besides. You can’t call their gods so-called and yours real, then cite their mysticism as support for your case. You’re having it both ways.’

  ‘I am not. The Emperor is the one true God.’

  ‘That was my point,’ she said.

  ‘The divine infuses us all as the highest pinnacle of evolution. Even the Space Marines have a sense of the holy, though they deny it. This hall is enormous. Though for much of the last ten thousand years I’m sure there were never enough Ultramarines aboard this vessel to fill it, there have been recently. This fleet was stuffed to bursting with warriors when I came aboard, and yet they never did anything with this space. It hasn’t been properly repaired. Why do you think that is?’

  ‘I expect you will tell me,’ she said.

  ‘Reverence. Piety. Remembrance of the dead. They have their cults. We are all holy, and the Emperor is the holiest of us all.’

  Sulymanya ran a long finger down the heavy brow of a transhuman skull embedded in the wall. ‘If He is a god, He’s surrounded by a lot of other things with similar attributes. Just because something exhibits all the characteristics of a divine being, does not mean it is a god, nor that it should be worshipped as such. If that were true, we’d all be bending the knee to the Ruinous Powers.’

  ‘Blasphemy!’ spat Mathieu. ‘You are a heretic. Unworthy.’

  ‘By your terms, I am. By mine, you’re insane. Good luck finding anyone who’ll burn me as a heretic on this ship, priest,’ she said. ‘I don’t deny that the Emperor is powerful, nor that He watches over us, but it’s all simply a manifestation of extra-material physics. The psychic realm can be understood as a science, it doesn’t need your obtuse mumblings. Not that science is well favoured in this age,’ she added mildly.

  ‘Faith is more powerful than rationality.’

  ‘Tens of thousands of years of human stupidity tells us that is so. It doesn’t mean faith is right,’ she said. ‘You should listen to the primarch some time. He has taught me so much. You will be happy to hear I was going to be executed for what I believe. Even my own family couldn’t stop it from happening. Guilliman did, and he saved me for the reasons people like you would condemn me. Don’t you think that’s a little ironic?’

  ‘Has he sent you to spy on me?’

  Sulymanya’s eyes widened in mock surprise. ‘Now why would he do a thing like that?’

  Plenty of reasons, thought Mathieu.

  ‘Then you come here to bait and tempt me because you feel you are free to do so. You don’t understand, Sulymanya. I wouldn’t burn you, I would try to save you.’

  ‘You’d probably do that by burning me,’ she said. ‘What am I supposed to be tempting you with?’ She gave him a look that made him feel deeply uncomfortable. He fought away a blush.

  ‘Abandoning my faith for reason,’ he said, though that was not the principal temptation. He could still not meet her eyes. ‘You must hate me. You want to see me destroyed.’

  She laughed at him. His bashfulness soured to anger which melted back to embarrassment again when she came up to him and laid a delicate hand on his shoulder. The roughness of his robe’s material came to sensuous life under her touch.

  ‘I like you, Mathieu. I want to understand you, truly. You are a good man, but your efforts are misdirected.’

  ‘Have you finished?’ he said brusquely. ‘The watch change sounded minutes ago and I will be late for my ministrations. Those coming off shift will be exhausted and eager for the benedictions of the Emperor before their sleep cycle. More conflicts await us, but I place attending to the spiritual needs of the menials aboard this ship far above the glory of battle. There is a larger war to be won than that which the pri­march fights, one waged in the hearts of every man, woman and child. You forget this vessel was held by the enemy for some time. Their taint may linger. We must be vigilant. In this theatre of war I am the general, the soldier, the armour and the voidships. I must not shirk my duties.’

  ‘Watching the primarch’s spiritual back?’ said Sulymanya. ‘That’s a high opinion you have of yourself.’

  ‘That’s why he employed me.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Ask the Imperial Regent if you think my efforts worthless.’ He remained calm in the face of her impudence.

  ‘I never said they were,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he doesn’t think so either. They’re only misdirected,’ she repeated.

  The klaxon blared again, three short blasts signifying the turning of the watch. A subtle vibration spread through the ship as tens of thousands of men and women left a day of pitiless work for four brief hours of rest and others took their places.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘V. Activate.’ He moved away from Sulymanya and busied himself gathering his effects.

  The dormant servo-skull bleeped and jerked to life. With a whirr of powering repulsors it lifted unsteadily into the air.

  ‘I always thought it was morbid, having the skulls of your mentors following you around like that,’ she said, her eyes following the skull.

  This was too much for Mathieu, and he struggled with his temper. ‘There is nothing wrong with it! It honours the servants of the Emperor. It honours all she gave up for me.’

  Sulymanya tilted her head in interest. ‘She?’

  Mathieu had given too much of himself away. He turned his back on the historitor and departed, V
buzzing along behind him.

  Sulymanya watched the militant-apostolic until he vanished into the dark.

  ‘She,’ she said, drumming her fingers against the wall. She had probed a nerve there, though not any she had intended to touch. She sat in thought a moment, then stood up suddenly. She touched a brass pip at her shoulder, activating the vox-bead within. A channel opened to Logos headquarters a hundred decks above her. ‘Please inform Lord Guilliman that I wish to speak with him soon. I will be departing after we break warp.’

  Without waiting for a reply, she shut off the link. Mathieu had not extinguished his candles, and they wafted slightly in the wake of her departure, turning the dour skulls cemented into the walls into brief, jerky facsimiles of life.

  Chapter Three

  Novamarine

  The galaxy was littered with the relics of enterprise and war. Across the cosmos gargantuan structures swung about stars, in some cases all that remained of the people who had built them. Artificial platform worlds, hollow spheres large enough to accommodate planets of a hundred thousand Terra-mass, rings that bracketed suns in metal, and in instances where such constructions had died, glittering metal belts of artificial asteroids. Many were made for peaceful purposes, but outnumbering them a hundred times over were those made for war.

  Galatan was the greatest of the Ultramarian star fortresses. It was a hundred kilometres across. Its population ran into the millions. Its manu­factoria rivalled the shipyards of Luna. Its weaponry was the equal of an Imperial sector fleet. Large enough to raise its own regiments for the Ultramarian Auxilia, it maintained a garrison of specialised void troops tens of thousands strong, supplemented since the days the Plague Wars began with hundreds of Space Marines and other, more secretive, operatives.

  Galatan was a world unto itself, with the power to destroy a planet. Mightier by far than the other five void bastions that had guarded the space lanes of Guilliman’s realm, it had proved too daunting a target even for the pride of Typhus, whose lamentable speciality of late had been the reduction of Ultramar’s stellar castles.

  It was to Galatan, and the Novamarines who guarded it for the primarch, that Justinian Parris, Primaris Space Marine, was sent.

  ‘These are the Peaks of the Titans. Here we commemorate the heroes of our Chapter. This is Honourum, this is our home. These are the Peaks of the Titans. Honour the statues of the heroes, for they are brothers as we are your brothers.’ A soothing voice played over a highland scene unlike any other.

  Justinian stood upon the flat summit of a mountain. Hundreds of statues fifty metres tall had been laboriously carved from the rock, leaving them rooted by the feet to the stone while the rest of the peak had been chipped away around them. They were Space Marines, tall and proud. The most ancient ringed the edge of the plateau, so old the sharpness had eroded from the edges of their armour plates and their faces were lost. The newest were towards the centre, though these too had suffered the effects of the weather. By the look of them the mountain had been carved a long time in the past, the sculptors moving on to the next summit when all the space was used up. Then on to the next, then the next.

  Every mountain in the range, as far as Justinian could see, was carved this way. Horizontal rain lashed the statues in a freezing wind.

  Under each statue squatted a human youth, many of them resting against their spears. They were shapes in the shadows of glory. Lightning lit them up, then cast them back into dimness again. They watched other youths guarding other statues with murderous eyes.

  ‘Here, the tribes of Honourum prove their worth,’ said the voice in Justinian’s head. ‘They watch and guard the heroes of the past. This is one path to the Trial. If one among them should falter in his self-appointed duty of wakeful watch, then he will be challenged, and in this way a potential aspirant might come to guard a hero of greater rank. Rank is determined by age. Rank is determined by valour. Serve long, serve well, and you shall have high rank. You too shall be so commemorated. These are the Peaks of the Titans. This is Honourum, this is our home. Honour the dead.’

  The youths did not see Justinian. They were data ghosts, conjured by cogitator and data crystal for his instruction. Or was he the phantom? He was entranced by technology. The effect was disturbingly real, like nothing he had experienced before in a hypnomat. The ersatz memories implanted by other machines in his long life had felt real in retrospect, so real he could rarely tell them from genuine recollection, but the experiences they recalled were never directly undergone, only remembered, and by careful examination their falseness might be discerned. This was different. He felt like he was upon the home world of the Nova­marines and not in an isolation tank. He had been told that as time went by he would not need the tank or the hypnomat, but would learn to enter this state at will, and commune with the dead of Honourum in something the Chaplains called the ‘Shadow Novum’.

  It sounded dangerously like witchcraft, and he had said so. He had been assured it was but a mental exercise made possible by a Space Marine’s gifts and careful meditation.

  His mind wandered. His own memories fought with those of the machine. In his suggestible state, he experienced them afresh, images and sounds overlaid on the soothing lector voice. Flashes of the evening of the Triumph of Raukos, when the Indomitus Crusade was dissolved and all of his brothers from the Unnumbered Sons awaited their orders. Most prominent was poor Bjarni’s face at the moment he found out that he and the other sons of Russ remaining in the crusade were to form the core of a new Chapter to guard the Pit. Bjarni was not to go home to Fenris after all. All his fears had been realised.

  Justinian was not to return home either, or at least, not for long. He had hoped that he would be chosen for the founding Chapter. He had wanted the honour of serving in Ultramarines blue. He had unrolled the order scrip from the capsule with shaking hands. The details were sparse, but clear: he was to join the Novamarines, a storied primogenitor Chapter of Guilliman’s line, founded by a great hero.

  But they were not the Ultramarines.

  Justinian was of Ultramar. The culture of the Ultramarines was his own. That of the Novamarines was alien to him, bizarrely mystical, the ways of Ultramar taken, changed, and twisted about, like a familiar tune played on an alien instrument.

  The hypnomat tapes were for neophytes chosen to reinforce the Novamarines’ roving companies. As much as the Chapter tried to source all of its members from their cold, barren home world, it was a mobile brotherhood, and fragmented. Their battle forces could be away from the fortress monastery for centuries, and so the Chapter often recruited from wherever it found itself.

  The image wavered. Justinian was losing the machine’s false reality. He had been told to concentrate – ordered to, in fact – and he was not. Cursing, he fought his way back into the phantasmal world.

  When he opened his mind’s eye again to the hypnomat’s lies, he found himself stopped dead at the foot of a mountain carved all around with a single relief depicting the Novamarines in battle. The story proceeded as a ribbon spiralling all the way to the peak, where a Chapter Master from times past held aloft a broken sword, his other fist raised in victory.

  ‘Let us see the glory in full, for this is Honourum, and it is the most beautiful of worlds,’ said the voice.

  With a lurch more sickening than the roughest combat drop, Justinian’s consciousness was cast high upwards. The Peaks of the Titans shrank, becoming part of the massive Heavenward Mountains that divided Honourum’s sole continent of Honourius in two. From the inhabited part of the Fortress Novum at the centre of the massif, statuary spread out in all directions. All but the furthest reaches of the range had been refashioned into enormous statues. Gigantic aquilae opened screaming beaks at the stars, the individual feathers as large as voidcraft and visible from space. One entire sub-range had been carved into busts of the Novamarine’s Chapter Masters. The most modest was that of Lucretius Corvo, their founder.
It had probably all started there, an honour that became a tradition, inflated by repetition into obsession. Beneath the surface it was the same. Honourum’s mountains were riddled with chambers plunging into the deep heats of the world. The mountains were the fortress-monastery. The Chapter had been adding to its home since its inception. They could have housed a hundred Chapters in there.

  It seemed like a ridiculous waste of time to Justinian.

  Honourius clamped itself to the western hemisphere of the planet as if afraid it would fall off. Honourum was a world of grey, black and white. A grim, monochrome lithograph of a place. The tops of the mountain statues were crusted in snow. Much of the rest of the land was inhospitable highland; brown moors riven with dark valleys, or plateaus of cracked stone pavement. Giant storms, born over the huge ocean, rolled in relentless succession to batter the continent. Wetter, colder, bleaker; it was even more like Macragge than Macragge. Macragge Ultra, he thought. The Chapter must have selected it on purpose for its similarities. A pious choice, part of their need to retain their home culture at the breaking of the Legion. It had not worked. The Novamarines had drifted and drifted from their roots until they had become a parody of the Ultramarines.

  ‘This is the Rounding Sea, our ocean. It is customary for our new initiates to prove themselves in the deep hunt under its surface.’

  The ocean was flinty black. Only on the continental shelf was the sea a different colour, peat brown with the run-off from a million small rivers that tore away what little fertility the land had. The waves upon the Rounding Sea were inconceivably huge, and it was cold, he could feel it in his bones. There is something about cold water that gives it a frigidity worse than the void. A magos would say it was because of the thermal conductivity of water, whereas vacuum is a perfect insulator. That was trite. Justinian’s uneasy reaction to the ocean was a primal thing; an ancestral mistrust, born of mankind’s terror of Terra’s long-lost seas.