Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  ‘You are attempting to explain the inexplicable, a mistake made by philosophers and technologists alike throughout the ages. The warp cannot be explained,’ said Mathieu. ‘It is a realm unlike this, where dark powers clash with our most holy Emperor. It is the stage for the performance of gods.’

  ‘None of it is divine. There are things that call themselves gods. They are not. I have fought them. The Emperor fought them. The Emperor is a man. My lord Guilliman has told me so himself.’

  Mathieu closed his eyes against the radiance of his Emperor again, and laughed a little. ‘Do you know Yassilli Sulymanya?’

  ‘The Rogue Trader that serves Lord Guilliman’s Logos? I have met her. I do not know her well. Why?’

  Mathieu smiled and opened his eyes. ‘She would agree with you.’

  ‘The primarch brings those of like mind to serve him,’ said Sicarius.

  ‘He brought me into his service,’ Mathieu pointed out.

  ‘You are a necessary exception,’ Sicarius said.

  ‘An unwelcome one?’

  The way Sicarius moved his head made his opinion clear.

  ‘You find my faith objectionable, and that is understandable. But I am not guileless. The Lord Regent says he elevated me because the less exalted members of his crusade find me inspiring,’ said Mathieu. ‘The common soldiers, the lowest deck hand. I am glad. It is my vocation to serve the meek. But that is not the reason. The real reason is that having me in the role removes him from the influence of the high church.’

  ‘He is the primarch, he is not influenced by anyone.’

  ‘If only life were that simple,’ said Mathieu. ‘I do not think you are guileless either. You know life isn’t that simple, I can tell.’ Again, Mathieu abruptly changed the subject. ‘Why are you here, in this viewing gallery without a view?’

  ‘Not for the same reasons that you are here,’ he said.

  ‘You were lost in the warp for a while, were you not?’

  Sicarius gave him a sharp look. ‘You are well informed. Too well informed. That knowledge is not widely shared.’

  ‘I have the trust of high men. What was it like?’ asked Mathieu.

  Sicarius shook his head. ‘I cannot explain, and I do not care to try. I came back through secret ways to Macragge and returned to the service of my primarch. That is all you need to know.’

  Mathieu hugged his servo-skull close to his body. ‘This is an infernal age. We all have nightmares to contend with. You are not alone.’

  ‘I am alone in what I saw. You ask why I come here? Very well, I will tell you. I come to show I am not afraid, and that I will have my vengeance on the things that killed my men. If it takes me ten thousand years, it will be so.’

  ‘Is that why you come here unarmoured, in your robes, to show contempt?’

  Sicarius had had enough. ‘You pry too much, priest. My Lord Guilliman might indulge you, but I am not so inclined. Goodnight.’

  ‘They are right to fear you! You are right to show them contempt!’ Mathieu called softly after him. His voice shushed to one end of the gallery and back again. ‘Be not afraid, captain, be joyful! The Emperor protects!’

  Sicarius strode from the gallery. The Emperor had not protected his brothers, and no priest’s words would ever silence their screams.

  Chapter Nine

  Galatan moves

  Justinian worked in the arena alone. There were dozens of training facilities on Galatan, ranging from small gymnasia to full simulation combat environments and cavernous eco-halls where alien worlds were remade. But with the garrison on high alert the warriors stationed on the star fortress took as many additional training sessions as they could, and most were crowded. Justinian picked the facility he had because it was far from most barracks, and therefore little used.

  He wanted to be left in peace.

  The disrobing rooms were clean, and the lumens bright, but it had the feeling of benign abandonment. There were rows of lockers, all empty. He always took the same one. He pulled his name slide from his bag and pushed it into the bracket on the door. ‘Parris, J. Sgt. V Co., 6th Aux. Sq.,’ it read, plain bone within dark blue. On impulse he ran his fingers over it. He had been assigned to lead an Intercessor squad. The Primaris Marines were tacked on to the Fifth Company. They were, for the time being, outside both the normal strictures of the Codex and the organisation they had enjoyed in the Unnumbered Sons. It only added to his alienation. He and his men were outsiders in every possible way.

  He removed his robes, then his body glove, exposing a massively muscled body studded with neural interface ports. His black carapace showed as darker patches of skin, ridging his flesh where it ended at the base of his back, at the tops of his arms and on his legs. Under his skin moved his sinew coils, a network of supplementary muscles unique to the Primaris Marines. This was one of three differences between his implants – the Emperor’s Gifts, the older Space Marines called them – and those of the original Novamarines.

  Most Novamarines were of the older Adeptus Astartes type. They were present in Ultramar at nearly full strength, having kept recruiting the whole time they were engaged in the war. There were only a couple of dozen Primaris Marines in the Chapter at present, but he wondered how long it would be before every Novamarine was a Primaris Marine.

  He covered his nakedness with a pair of wide training trousers, leaving his chest bare, and went into the training hall.

  A row of tractoris dummies and combat servitors slept in upright glass coffins at the end of the gymnasium. He pressed his thumb to a panel. The coffin lit up. The dummy stood tall. Sensor lights winked behind the blank plastek of its face.

  ‘Tractoris servitor ready for instruction. State needs and training program.’

  ‘Standard martial pattern practice. Minimal violence.’

  ‘Compliance,’ said the machine.

  The door hissed upwards. The tractoris strode out. Justinian found these dummies eerie. They were unusually smooth for devices of this era, their bodies made up of padded, soft transplasteks, with faceless heads. Strictly speaking, they were an obscure form of servitor. There was a human brain buried somewhere within its chest cavity, but all evidence of the biological was hidden away. These things were designed to take a beating and get back into their coffins without the need for much maintenance.

  Tractoris dummies moved in a predictable series of combat routines. They were far less versatile than the true combat servitors, but combat servitors were lucky to last a month in the training cages. The tractoris’ intended use was for the reinforcement of muscle memory in the Space Marines to hone their abilities, for the practising of combat forms, light contact strikes and take downs, not full combat.

  Under most of their modes, fighting a tractoris took barely any mental power; indeed, the warriors were encouraged to think on other matters while they underwent their routines to help further bed their fighting skills into their subconscious – fighting as a physical meditation.

  Justinian had no argument with that. Sparring with the tractoris gave him solitary time he badly needed.

  ‘Program selection, pankration. Mode selection, mirror mode.’

  ‘Pankration mirror mode. Compliance,’ said the machine voice. It came from the wall, not the unit.

  The machine followed him to a padded wrestling square. Justinian moved in towards the dummy, arms up to protect his face in a posture any pugilist from human history would have recognised.

  Pankration was one of several martial arts Justinian had been instructed in. He could not tell reliably if the lessons he remembered were real or if they were the result of hypnomat memory implantation. His life before the Indomitus Crusade was an endless series of short activations for his body and mind to be tested, and lessons that may not have happened anywhere outside of his head. But for a few occasions, he was put back into stasis before he had time to come
fully awake. Intellectually, he knew these periods, some no more than ten or twelve minutes long, were separated by hundreds of years. To him they seemed like a series of repetitive days, as if he were constantly trying to focus on something, but was distracted before he could begin by the same questions and the same tests, or as if he had been ill for a very long time, never really sleeping, never truly waking.

  That had gone on for eight thousand years. It was a wonder he remained sane.

  Justinian was immensely grateful not to be in a box any more.

  After his Primaris cohort had been activated and added to a temporary Chapter in the Unnumbered Sons of Guilliman, Justinian had been trained by the older sort of Space Marine. The moves he had been put through were second nature by then, even though he had never physically performed them before.

  Justinian went through a series of punches that got faster and faster. As he shadow boxed, his fists made short, sharp noises in the air. He turned his exhalations into matching sounds, little cries that helped him add power to his blows. The machine copied him exactly, helping him pace himself and correct any mistakes. He made few. He was a well-honed fighting machine with millennia of training and a century of combat experience.

  But he did not know who he was.

  He remembered the day exactly when the men had come to his scholam on Ardium. He had made no attempt to join the Chapter. He had had no intention of doing so, in fact, but the men had come with Imperial writs that all the boys in his class were to be tested. He had no idea why. He had gone into the small, brightly lit medicae bay in the scholam not knowing if he were to be assessed for genetic deviancy, tested for thought crime, turned into a servitor, or prodded at to fulfil some health census for the inscrutable workings of the Adeptus Administratum. Anything was possible.

  He had gone in terrified. That day he had stolen a small toy from his brother. He feared he had been found out. In his young imagination, an eternity as a soulless cyborg awaited.

  The man who ran the testing was some sort of official. He had teeth so thin they were blue grey. His lips were very pink. Together blue teeth and pink lips made an insincere smile. The man gestured at a chair. Justinian sat down. Another man with metal eyes and a long, white plastek smock with a high collar placed a large device against Justinian’s arm. There was a sharp pain and a whir of internal mechanisms.

  An age passed before the light on the side illuminated with an audible click: a green light.

  That was that. He had gone to the scholam that morning expecting to go back to his family’s cramped quarters in the evening, to ask his father how his day had been in the manufactoria that filled the lower halves of all Ardium’s hives. He would have asked his mother’s permission to go into the sky parks where he could play with his brothers and sisters among the trees and look through the armourglass skin of the hive at the clouds below. Ardium was a hive world, but it was in Ultramar, and the lives of its people had been rewarding. Hard, but good.

  He was going to give his brother his toy back.

  A green light took all that away.

  He never saw his family again. He doubted his parents even knew what happened to him. The Primaris programme had been conducted in absolute secrecy. He wondered what awful lie his mother and father had been told to make his loss easier to bear.

  That was eight thousand years ago, a number so shocking he grunted it as he punched.

  ‘Eight. Thousand. Years.’

  It was petty to think so with the galaxy going to ruin, but somehow it did not seem fair.

  Inner pain made his muscles tense. The tractoris’ movements went awry in response. He forced himself to relax. He took a deep breath, turning his sense of dislocation into a steely determination. The machine mimicked him. He stood at ease, so did the machine. He went through the first of the eighty-seven patterns of engagement, working his way up through them to the end, then again, and again, until he had executed them all to perfection.

  He had been given great power. It was an honour, he reminded himself. Rather than living an unremarkable life, he had been given the chance at heroism. He would be among the few who would save the many, so that other little boys might go to school, and while away the day dreaming about playing in woods under glass skies.

  He had come to terms with that. He had come to terms with the changes that time had wrought on the Imperium, and the war he must fight. If he did not fight it, his species – the whole galaxy – would be lost to Chaos. No man could turn away from that.

  What he could not stomach was the loss of brothers for a second time at the behest of those beyond his influence.

  He began to kick and punch again, adding twists and grappling moves from other disciplines to create a freeform routine. In a few hours the star fortress would leave the orbit of Drohl and head to Parmenio to support the primarch’s battle there. The station was alive with preparation. Its halls shook to the growing power of its reactors. He should have been excited. He enjoyed fighting. It was his purpose.

  He remained distracted.

  A glorious brotherhood a hundred thousand in number was no more. A future in the Ultramarines had beckoned. It had not come to pass.

  Every certainty he ever had was confounded, every time.

  He was not the only one to be dissatisfied. He remembered Bjarni, red-faced and angry that he would not return to Fenris. Kalael, close-mouthed as always, had accepted his secondment without revealing it.

  Though Felix was a tetrarch now and an Ultramarine, he must have felt the same dislocation, Justinian was sure, when the Unnumbered Sons were divided. They all did, to a lesser or greater degree. Such was the importance of the fraternal bond to a Space Marine. If the bond were not a certainty, or if it were poorly expressed, there was space for doubt. A Space Marine knew no fear, but he was not an emotionless automaton.

  His own assignment was a gut punch revelation. Justinian presented a reasonable face to the world. He was liked for it, trusted. Every man hides pain beneath the surface. This was his.

  He finished his routine with burning muscles. Sweat ran over his skin in rivulets.

  Justinian showered, his allowance of three bursts of scalding hot water blasting his sweat away. Hot air from the same nozzles dried him. He retrieved his body glove and name slide and took a monotrain to his company’s arming chambers. Though he had purposefully chosen the training facility for its remoteness, nothing was conveniently placed on vast Galatan. Everything was a journey away.

  The Novamarines Fifth Company barracks were temporary – this was an Ultramarines star fortress – but there was plenty of room in the craft to accommodate them. Like most things in this era, it had a massive overcapacity. There was space for the Novamarines, the hundred or so Deathwatch, all thirty thousand of the Ultramarian Auxilia, and all the rest with space to spare.

  Who knows how long his barracks had lain empty before it had been given to the Novamarines Fifth Company? It could have been forever. Centuries in stasis had given Justinian a weird sense for neglected spaces, as if he could sense the moribundity beneath vitality. He was attracted to such places. He liked them.

  He padded down the central aisle of the company arming hall. There were a few others in their cubicles, quietly working on their weaponry. It was so subdued compared to the raucous chambers of the Rudense. He exchanged short greetings with his would-be brothers, and entered his own cubicle. His armour hung on its stand, his weapons on their racks. His workbench was clean and tidy. He had not left it in such good order. The Chapter was well served by its serfs.

  The light bone and dark blue quarters of his armour challenged him. A Space Marine could not help but identify with his battleplate. When donned, it moved with him. It became part of him. He saw his brothers armoured more often than he saw their faces. They lived in their armour. Out of it, he was two halves of one being. He briefly felt vulnerable, threatened almost by his own w
arrior aspect hanging so blunt and brutal on its stand, as if it would reach out and crush him for his weakness.

  The feeling fled. He reached out for the armour, and unclicked the right gauntlet.

  No imagination could have predicted how his life turned out. He had been many things in a short space of time spread over millennia. Little of it seemed plausible, if he thought about it. But if he did not know who he was, he knew what he was. No matter how awkward he felt, the sense of displacement did not change that.

  He was Sergeant Justinian Parris, Primaris Space Marine, a loyal servant of the Emperor.

  But he was no Novamarine.

  With this sentiment held firmly in his heart, he reached for the buzzer on the wall, and called for the arming serfs.

  Galatan was the largest of the star forts of Ultramar. Since before the Horus Heresy it had stood guard over the space lanes of the Five Hundred Worlds. It was a relic of a time before recorded history, when mankind’s first galactic empire had risen to heights of technology and power never again attained.

  Galatan was no mere battlestation, but a city in space, a hundred kilometres across, as large as the lost orbital plates of Terra. Its weapons bays bristled with machineries of destruction potent enough to see off a fleet of ships. There had been six similar star fortresses in Ultramar. For ages they had been sentinels in deep space. Only during times of the greatest need did they move. During the First Tyrannic War half their number had been redeployed from their strategic points, but that was a rare instance.

  That had changed with the coming of the Great Rift, and Nurgle’s assault on Guilliman’s home. Now they went where they were needed, and they were needed everywhere.