by Guy Haley
‘Now, please, all of you, eat,’ said Corax.
Once more, Fenc wondered if he had made an error.
‘The problem with primarchs,’ his predecessor had said upon handing over command, ‘is that they are primarchs.’ Fenc thought that glib, but the old admiral had expanded his point. ‘They are better treated like the old gods, not like men. Each one is different, no one rule applies to all. What flatters one will insult another. They must be propitiated in the correct way, individual to the deity, in order for worship to be a success.’
At the time he had thought this a blasphemy against the Emperor’s secular creed, but over time he had learned how right the old man was. Like many nuggets of wisdom, it was all well and good in the abstract, thought Fenc, but the old religion dealt with rules that were drunk in with his mother’s milk and applied to gods who were graciously absent. The ways of this god Fenc did not know, and he sat at his table.
Under the cover of quiet conversation and the sounds of eating Fenc turned to the legionary sitting next to him, the Terran Soukhounou. There was one disquieting question he wished to tackle.
‘Tell me, captain,’ Fenc asked quietly, ‘where are all the Terrans? Most of these men are from Deliverance. The other Legions I have served with had a stronger presence of warriors from the Throneworld.’
‘What business is it of yours?’ said Soukhounou mildly.
Fenc was taken aback. Today seemed a day for faux pas, but he pressed on. ‘I wish to know what kind of man I am to serve under. Corax is my third primarch. Learning their idiosyncrasies was key to my success under the others,’ the admiral answered honestly.
Soukhounou glanced at his colleagues as they ate and talked. Fenc thought he might protest, and cursed his lack of subtlety, but Soukhounou dropped his voice, and smiled.
‘I’m toying with you, I’m sorry. You have looked a little uncomfortable since we arrived.’
‘Meeting the sons of the Emperor is never easy,’ said Fenc. He feigned relief. He was now on his guard.
‘If it were,’ said Soukhounou, ‘then they would not be as effective as they are.’ He crunched hard on a rare mollusc. ‘Let me tell you of my lord. Corax is the enemy of the oppressor. He is a friend of the people. He was raised among them, taught by them. There were many similarities between the warriors of the old Legion and the liberators of Deliverance in terms of tactical preference, but none of attitude. My lord thought the old Legion relied over much on terror and slaughter to ensure compliance. That is not his way. They were too much like the slavers he overthrew.’
‘Too much like the Night Lords.’
Soukhounou made a careful expression which could be read either way.
‘I noticed the primarch seemed at pains to distance himself from his brother,’ Fenc said.
‘There are similarities. But they are not the same. Most of the Terran officers have been banished.’
‘Banished?’
‘My word, not his,’ admitted Soukhounou. ‘Lord Corax did try, but the Xeric tribesmen who made up most of the old Legion were too wild to tame. There are few Terran commanders left in the main body of the Legion, like me. Those too high ranking to strip of command or too dangerous to remove were sent away into the predation fleets ahead of the main expansion. They wear our colours, but they are a Legion apart.’
‘But the Raven Guard were celebrated when they fought under Horus, from what I know. What made him harden his heart against them?’
‘Corax is anything but hard-hearted,’ said Soukhounou. ‘He removed those men because they could not follow his philosophy. Human life is sacred to him, as is freedom, and justice. He meant it when he said he would not kill the people of these moons, only their leaders.’
‘You are Terran though, and you remain in command.’
Soukhounou gave a dazzling white smile. ‘That is because I am not a Xeric tribesman. I hail from Afrik. I am no slavemaster, and was critical of the practices of my colleagues. That alone is why I have the primarch’s favour. He is no friend to tyrants of any kind.’
‘Then he prefers his own kind.’
‘One such as Corax has no kind. But if you mean he prefers the company of those from Deliverance, that is true. It is of all men. Corax is of Deliverance. Their ways are his ways.’
‘And the others, the woman. I have seen unmodified humans held in high regard by primarchs before, as friends, but always they have been blessed with many gifts. What is her talent? Playwright? Poet?’
Soukhounou laughed slightly. ‘Ephrenia? You mistake our lord for another of the Emperor’s sons. She is a fine tactician and a bold fighter, but she is by his side because she has been with him since he was a child.’
‘Like a…’ Fenc frowned. ‘Like a sister?’
Soukhounou nodded.
‘I have never heard of such a thing,’ said Fenc.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Soukhounou took a large mouthful and waved his fork around until he finished it, ‘this is Corax’s family. Do you not understand? His concerns are human concerns, mighty though he is.’
‘I see,’ said Fenc. It did not make the Ravenlord any less intimidating.
‘Do not mistake his affection for common men as a weakness. He can be ruthless enough when he needs to be, as my colleagues discovered.’ Soukhounou glanced at his gene-father. ‘I’d advise you not to press him on his choice of methodology, and I would not voice whatever plan you were going to put to Primarch Curze. He’ll take these moons, you can be assured of that. Let him do it his way.’
Fenc nodded.
‘This is a fine meal,’ said Soukhounou. ‘I do not share my Deliverance-born brothers’ zeal for frugality. I thank you for it.’
Fenc chewed on a delicacy in demand across thousands of worlds. It was like rubber in his mouth.
Five
shadow bound
Phelinia Eftt waited for her next instruction in an isolated service stairwell. Metal stairs curled around dozens of times up to surface level, and below, downward to the tunnels riddling Kiavahr’s subsurface. A short landing lined with junction boxes broke the run of steps at her location. There were others similar below.
Many of the tunnels were mines sunk in the days when Kiavahr still had mineral resources of its own to exploit. Before the moon Lycaeus had been opened up for exploitation, the planet had been picked clean of everything useful. In places, the crust was so honeycombed with old workings that giant ferrocrete pilings were required to hold up the teeming cities above.
Where the caverns were not used for other purposes they were sealed off, as was the case with her current location. The stairs were caked with flakes of corrosion. The junction boxes were doorless, the gauges they had housed torn out. Lifeless wires poked from holes in the wall. Everything was rusty, russet coloured at the edges of Phelinia’s lamplight, bright orange at the heart of the beam. Water pattered down the centre of the stairwell, and had been doing so long enough to eat a jagged hole through the metal near Phelinia’s feet. Where the water splashed on the wall, furred deposits coloured brown and turquoise grew.
If one wished to run an insurrection, there were many places on Kiavahr to do it from.
She turned her stablight off. Velvety dark pressed against her face with physical intimacy. Phelinia was no claustrophobic and had little fear of darkness either. She waited patiently. Mould spores tickled her nostrils. The smell of damp was pervasive. Despite the wet, it was hot in the underworld.
After some time a spy drone hummed up the steps. Blue running lights pulsed, pushing back the dark, replacing it with a gloom two shades off midnight. The drone was Kiavahran-made, fist-sized and smooth like a bullet; it exhibited none of the mystical nonsense of the Mechanicum. A Martian machine would be housed in a skull, or some other morbid item. Kiavahrans felt no desire to fashion the remains of the dead into devices. Theirs was a purer technology.
The drone’s single eye blinked. It played a scan sweep up and down Phelinia’s body. She held still while invisible, infrared lasers measured various aspects of her body to verify her identity. Satisfied, it turned about, shut off its running lights and flew back down the stairs.
The stairs shook under the ascent of her contact from the underworld. Again it was totally dark. She estimated the man’s size, age and weight from his tread. He was very tall, heavily built, his gait suggesting he was probably at the end of middle age.
She had never seen his face. His name though, that she did know. He kept it from her as jealously as he guarded his appearance, and would kill her if he discovered she knew what it was, but she was not without resources of her own, and had found it out.
He was called Errin.
The last step. The landing shifted under his weight. He halted. He was completely silent – not even his breath was audible – but she could feel his presence, and almost fancied she could see him as a thickening in the dark.
‘Eftt,’ he said. He had a gravelly voice, pitched always low. There was a phlegmy click to some of his words, one of the reasons she thought he was getting old.
‘You’re late,’ she said.
‘I’m here now.’
‘If you’re late, I could get caught,’ she said defiantly. She had no real quarrel with him, but picked the fight to show her strength.
‘No one’s onto you,’ said Errin.
‘It’s a risk,’ she said.
Errin chuckled. ‘All we do is risk. I am sorry I was late. Unavoidable,’ he said. She didn’t ask for more information. He never elaborated unless he wished to. ‘You did a good job with Adrin,’ he continued. ‘You sent a fine message to those fat guild bloodsuckers. None of them are safe. They are beginning to get worried.’
‘They need to be punished,’ she said. ‘I am happy to punish them.’
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘Phelinia the killer.’ He spoke her name oddly. She was used to provoking strong reactions. The Children of Deliverance needed her skills. They had trained her, but they didn’t always approve of the ends she put their methods to.
‘They lied to us,’ Phelinia said. ‘I don’t like lies. Their lies took away my parents’ life. They nearly took mine too.’
‘With the Saviour away, the guilds have lost their fear and are abusing their position again,’ Errin said. ‘Obeying the letter not the spirit of the laws. Always twisting everything. We will stop it. Corax has to know.’
‘We should be moving faster,’ she said. ‘This is too slow. We should strike multiple targets, behead each guild house.’
‘That is not our strategy.’
‘You are too worried about what the primarch will think if you shed too much blood. You are not bold enough.’
‘I do care what the primarch will think.’ The landing shifted. Errin came closer to her. ‘I fought with him. I was at his side when Lycaeus was taken. I was there the day he ordered the atomic mines dropped upon this world. I know how he thinks. I know what he thinks. If we reduce this world to a state of war, then the people will suffer the Imperium’s reprisals.’
‘I disagree.’
‘Need I warn you again not to take your own actions?’ said Errin. ‘We don’t want to provoke an Imperial crackdown. We need to kill those oppressors the primarch missed, finish his work for him. When he comes back, he’ll realise what he needs to do. The end of all this injustice,’ he hissed the word, ‘starts with us, but it will only finish with him. Only he can set this world to rights. We have to make him notice.’
He said this to her every time. As always, Phelinia struggled to agree. She’d wipe them all out, if she could. ‘Clear,’ she said.
‘I have your next assignment for you.’ He paused. ‘If you think I am shy of bloodshed, this will change your mind. This is a big one. This will make a lot of noise. Soon after this event, we shall be pressing our demands.’
‘Good.’
‘There will be a lot of deaths,’ he said. ‘Many innocents, perhaps.’ He waited for her objection.
‘Even better,’ she said quietly.
He approved of her resolve, she could hear it in his voice. ‘Then listen,’ he said. ‘I won’t be repeating this.’ He paused. ‘The Saviour’s Day is in two weeks’ time. There will be a major parade through the centre of Kravv City.’
He paused again. She waited for her orders with a thrill of pleasure in her gut.
‘You are going to blow it up,’ he said, ‘and make Lord Corax pleased.’
Six
the fall of aphelion-2
Five of the artificial satellites were chosen for coordinated invasion. Several main criteria dictated their selection – the procession of their orbits relative to the other Thousand Moons; the weight of fire their guns could bring to bear in combination with their neighbours on eight key quadrants; the strength of their defences – those of medium potency were selected first, being suitable demonstrations of the Raven Guard’s power without posing too large a danger to the forward insertion teams; the size of their populations; and, finally, the intransigence of their rulers. Corax gave values to each factor, then used a formula of his own devising to ascribed scores to two dozen possible targets. Calculatingly, he selected the five of the Carinaean planetoids that would provide the greatest shock to the others while delivering the largest strategic gains to his armies.
To the men and officers of his Legion and their allied fleet and army personnel, the reasons for his choices were moot. The primarch’s word was absolute. The list went unquestioned. Target satellites were assigned at Chapter level. Strategies were formulated, mission goals within each city given to individual companies, and tactical objectives devised, planned for and briefly rehearsed at squad level. Atomisation of authority was one of the Raven Guard’s greatest strengths.
While the Imperial fleet held off the Sodality’s collected armada, duelling for the most part at arm’s reach, ten Raven Guard attack cruisers sailed to war under the cover of reflex shielding.
Agapito’s strike cruiser, the Black Wing, coasted to within eighty kilometres of the city moonlet Aphelion-2 undetected. No massed boarding torpedo assault or waves of gunships delivering troops under fire for the Raven Guard, but a silent stiletto strike of black-armoured troops on low-powered insertion vehicles. From the Black Wing’s hangars a stream of whispercutters issued. The light skimmers were unique to the Legion. Manufactured on Kiavahr by the guilds only for Corax, they were little more than skeletal airframes with hand and footholds for eleven legionaries. A repulsor grav array powered them over a world’s surface, but as the craft were regarded as disposable, these valuable engines were removed before void operations. A single omnidirectional plasma jet at the rear provided forward propulsion. These burned bright one after another to accelerate the craft on to the city, then cut out. After this, the pilots fired their jets sparingly, timing bursts to coincide with weapons discharge from Aphelion-2 to mask their approach. The legionaries kept their armour systems running on minimum power. In the hugeness of a void alive with electromagnetic backwash, the whispercutters were to all intents invisible.
Agapito led his company personally, coasting in under zero power with his command squad. The eleven of them clung to the cutter’s spare frame. A faint shimmer across the surface of the stars revealed the Black Wing curving away from the target. Agapito only saw it because he knew what he was looking for. It flew well clear of the salvoes streaking from Aphelion-2’s guns towards the main body of the fleet, threading the tiny spaces between the city’s remote weapons satellites.
‘Any closer, and the ship could caress those kill-sats,’ said Vey Branco. A proven warrior, he was nevertheless the youngest member of the squad and newest to its ranks. Because of this the others forgave his breaking silence. His vox was broadcast at minimum power. It would spread itself into the cosmic background s
tatic before it got anywhere near the enemy’s receptors, and so Agapito did not scold him.
‘This is close enough,’ said Fedann Pexx, Agapito’s signifier. ‘Any nearer and we are dead.’
Like command squads from any Legion, Agapito’s bodyguard had armour festooned with honours, embellishment and crests. They had specialist equipment that denoted their roles and rank, flags and vox-arrays of astounding potency and other tools of command.
They hardly ever used the bulkier equipment. Most of their actions were raids, and as on any other strike all were garbed in the same Mark III power armour, free of gaudy display, painted midnight-black with minimal ident markings in white that they changed frequently.
‘Emperor alone knows what kind of scanning equipment they have,’ Pexx went on. ‘We are taking a risk coming in this close.’
‘I don’t know about you, Pexx, but I want to get there this week,’ said Panar Kway, the sergeant, a grizzled killer who took on the piloting of the whispercutter from its single, small seat.
‘We’ll be there soon enough,’ said Agapito. He was concerned by Pexx’s defeatist attitude. It wasn’t like him.
They slid between the trajectories of gunfire. Giant shells hurtled soundlessly past. Las-beams strobed the void, striping their armour with neon bands.
‘That’s a fine light show they are putting on for the primarch,’ said Gudrin Ferr, the unit second. ‘If they try any harder they might actually hit something.’
Corax had led his fleet to coordinates where a commander whose bluff was called might conceivably head to puzzle out a new approach. A stream of projectiles hurled towards his vessels from the cities. Las light stirred iridescent swirls from void shields, but their fire was as yet uncoordinated, and lacked the power to break through.
‘Maybe they will,’ said Branco.
‘Don’t even say it,’ said Pexx, and made a pass over his face with his free hand to ward away bad luck. The gesture was a relic from his prison days. Not a superstition exactly – the inmates of Lycaeus were born of rational stock – but close enough.