Corax- Lord of Shadows

by Guy Haley

  ‘Energy field!’ he said.

  The men finished their setup, and aimed the gun at the Raven Guard.

  ‘Everybody, down!’

  The gun was a larger version of the flechette rifles touted by the soldiers, and it did have enough punch to break ceramite.

  Magnetic impellers hurled javelin-sized slivers of metal down the length of the gallery. Supersonic whistling overwhelmed the constant rattle-bang of boltguns. Ferr was caught through the shoulder and spun about. Manno was slammed through the chest. Enough force was invested in the hit to hurl him backwards and pin him to the wall. Tenefer took a round through the faceplate. The angled front of his helm crumpled around the shaft. The point emerged from his backpack. Spewing coolant gas, he fell. Agapito saw little more. He sprinted forward to the first booth. The material was some kind of plastek, ­shattered into pieces and intermingled with the mashed flesh of the enemy. To his surprise, one of these soldiers lived and cowered in the well beneath the booth’s table. Agapito scrambled through the wreckage and smashed the man’s head in, helmet and all, with a blow from his left fist.

  The enemy were shouting to one another, pointing out his position. They had a bead on him from above. A shower of flechettes pinged into his battleplate. More alarms were ringing. The needles posed little threat on their own, but so many were hitting him it would not be long before they punctured something vital. He raked the gallery with fire, and turned around, but the bulk of his armour impeded him, and he could not see all of his men.

  ‘Status report!’ Agapito demanded.

  Apothecary Otaro answered. ‘Tenefer is dead. Ferr injured. Manno is dying. Three minutes, at the most.’

  ‘They are reloading,’ shouted Branco over the clatter of flechettes striking metal. He pointed at the heavy weapon. ‘The magazine capacity is limited. Twenty shots, high auto rate. They run through it quickly.’

  ‘That is not much use. We have minimal cover here!’ said Pexx. ‘The next burst will kill more of us.’

  ‘Just cut the damn thing and draw it out!’ Ferr snapped. To Otaro, Agapito presumed.

  ‘Options?’ said Agapito.

  ‘I hit them,’ said Kway. ‘You hit them. The shield’s too strong to get through with bolters. We cannot overload it.’

  ‘Get the windows,’ said Branco. ‘Blast them out. They have no breathing gear. Introduce these stubborn fools to the void they live in.’

  Agapito scanned the windows. His auto-senses gave him a rough breakdown of the composition. The material was similar to armourglass; though slightly inferior it was still too tough to shoot through.

  He slapped his side. The single melta charge he had brought aboard was still attached to a loop on his belt.

  ‘What is the status of the civilians?’

  ‘Most have fled. There’s an emergency blast door in the wall. It will shut when the breach is detected,’ Branco said. ‘We can vent this chamber, the other will stay pressurised.’

  ‘Then cover me,’ ordered Agapito.

  He leapt out from his hiding place. Aphelion-2’s meagre gravity worked in his favour, and when he pushed off with his legs they sent him bounding across the hall. Flechettes chased him all the way to the windows. The gunnery team hastily concluded their reloading and opened fire again. Their giant-sized needles shrieked at him, ricocheting with singing whines from the glass.

  Agapito hit the window. Firing his bolter one-handed to keep the enemy’s heads down, he slapped the charge in place and twisted the fuse dial to a two-second delay.

  It was already igniting when he threw himself aside and hurried into another wrecked booth.

  The glass melted through instantly. Air rushed out, sucking the melta bomb with it before it could complete its work. The windows remained in place with air hooting loudly through the hole.

  Agapito swore with a convict’s fluency.

  Alarms whooped around the hall. A decompression gale tore flinders of broken furniture out into the void. The enemy were in a panic. Some fell back, leaving themselves open to fire from the Raven Guard, but the gunnery team stood firm.

  The structural integrity of the window was weakened. Large cracks were creeping out from the breach.

  Agapito raised his gun to finish the job.

  Another salvo of macro flechettes shrieked at Agapito, forcing him down and his aim wide.

  A stream of bolts whooshed over his position.

  A creaking preceded the window blowing out with a thunderclap bang.

  The breach enlarged and air vented into space with brief violence. Men wheeled overhead, blasted out by the decompression. Agapito was dragged across the floor, his armour squealing on the synthetic stone paving. His feet met the bottom of the window casement, and he braced himself until it was over.

  Devoid of air, the room was silent. Armoured doors had shut automatically over the chamber’s ingress points. Men clawed feebly at them, their skin inflating as the gases in their blood boiled.

  Agapito rejoined his squad. He passed a man coughing up blood from his ruptured lungs. He clutched his throat as he suffocated. Agapito watched him die curiously. He wondered when sights like that had begun to fail to move him.

  ‘Brother-commander?’

  Kway’s gruff voice broke his concentration.

  ‘This door will take ten minutes to cut through.’ Kway rapped the blast door that had closed over their entrance to the hall. ‘By the time we are out, we will be surrounded. If they get enough of those gun carriages against us…’ He let the thought hang.

  ‘There is another route,’ said Agapito. ‘Otaro, salvage the gene-seed of our brothers, then let us be on our way.’

  As Otaro prepared his reductor, Agapito looked out of the window to the ocean four hundred metres away.

  ‘Who wants to go for a swim?’

  Getting through the void without specialist void jets was a knack that all Agapito’s men possessed. Though their armour was not void hardened, and therefore vulnerable to attack in space, all Space Marine battleplate was proof against the vacuum. They sealed off their cooling ports before leaping out through the broken window. Short bursts from their stabilisation jets were more than sufficient to get them across open void to the ocean.

  They slipped through the containment field with no more resistance than a brief, electric tingle, and passed into the water. Odd sea beasts swam close to investigate them, darting away when Agapito waved his hands in their direction. Bubbles billowed from his jets as he pulsed them quickly to force him down through the water. There was a centre to the sphere of sea, and a gravity there, but merely sinking took far too long.

  The sea went black for a while. Agapito passed through darting shoals of fish. Then light returned beneath his feet. Pipes rose up to greet him and he broke through a second containment field, and dropped down onto a platform a hundred metres across that was crowded with machinery.

  The surviving Raven Guard followed Agapito. They landed quietly.

  ‘I expected something a little more picturesque,’ said Otaro.

  ‘Me too,’ said Agapito. ‘Maybe a park or a viewing gallery.’

  ‘Never judge divergent populations by Imperial values,’ said Branco. ‘Though I admit it is very clever.’ He looked up at the pipes snaking into the water. ‘They are using the ocean as a heat exchange. The water cools these cogitation units, and the heat they produce warms the ocean. I imagine the sea would support little life without it.’

  ‘Can you shut it down?’ asked Agapito. ‘These units look important. There is the potential to sow disruption here, but it would be better to take as much of the city’s infrastructure intact as possible.’

  Eldes was fiddling about with a console. He had the guts of the machine spilled on the floor. Lights inside the casing winked in silent dismay at the insult. ‘Not on the timescale we have. There is not much point i
nterfering with it. From what I can tell, all the systems in the city are semi-independent. The network’s got scores of nexus points. This is only one.’

  ‘There has to be some kind of command centre here! Let us cut this short. Find it! We have been too slow.’

  ‘I am doing my best. Whatever coding these people use, it does not speak Imperial Gothic,’ said Eldes quietly.

  ‘You got the doors open all right,’ said Branco.

  ‘A simple electronic bypass. Not a direct interface,’ said Eldes.

  ‘Let him do his work!’ Pexx snapped. His mood was swinging up and down. Agapito made a mental note to talk to the warrior after the battle.

  ‘We will cut the head off the military here personally. Find their commanders.’ Agapito was about to continue when a high-priority vox chime interrupted him on the Legion command channel. He switched from squad comms.

  ‘How is it going in there, brother?’ Lieutenant Arikk’s cheerful voice filled his helm. ‘The primarch wants this over with. He is keen for me to commit my forces.’

  ‘Negative! Hold off,’ said Agapito. ‘He cannot be so impatient or he would have contacted me himself.’

  ‘You are so confident of your bond with the saviour, brother-commander,’ said Arikk. There was a laughter behind his words. It was often mocking if rarely scornful, but Agapito detected impatience in it today. ‘He is busy. What are your orders?’

  ‘Have any of the rest of the cities fallen into our hands?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then you and the rest of the Chapter can wait. I will need half an hour. In the meantime, order our boarding parties to advance deeper into the city, so you do not accidentally kill any of them when you come in to land.’ He cut the feed before Arikk replied.

  ‘We must hurry. Corax is pushing to unleash the full invasion,’ he said.

  ‘You do not want that?’ asked Kway. ‘Surely our brothers have the gun batteries out of action by now.’

  ‘I do not want these people dead,’ said Agapito. ‘If Arikk comes in with his guns spewing fire, it will make a lot of corpses.’

  ‘You don’t want your brother to take his target by stealth while you have to call in the big guns, I think,’ said Pexx.

  ‘Watch your speech, Pexx,’ said Agapito tersely. The others laughed quietly. Agapito was annoyed, because what Pexx said was true. If Branne pulled off a victory according to Corax’s Maxims while Agapito was flailing about in some cogitatorium, he’d be insufferable. ‘Let’s get on with it. We have half an hour.’

  ‘I have it. A major command centre, four levels up, half a kilometre back that way.’ Eldes pointed.

  ‘Good work,’ said Agapito.

  ‘A stroke of luck, nothing more,’ Pexx responded dourly.

  ‘Then if good fortune smiles on us, maybe you’ll leave off with the talk of bad fortune, Pexx,’ said Eldes defensively.

  ‘Half an hour is not long. We better run,’ said Kway.

  Agapito looked around the room. ‘Eldes, disconnect. Then frag the lot. They are obviously not looking for us here. Destroying this facility is a shame, but we need a diversion. Let us be where the enemy do not want us to be.’

  A rolling fanfare of explosions played them out of the ocean chamber. Alarms sang. As they ran along the neck of the pier into the deeper station, men were shouting and running for the dome. By the time they got there, Agapito and his brothers were gone.

  Kway dealt with the sentries at the command centre door. They died within half a second of each other, silently, and without registering the presence of their killer until it was too late.

  ‘Thick door. Not thick enough,’ said Branco, running his hand over the metal. ‘I do not think this civilisation has heard of portable fusion devices.’ He placed a melta bomb on the door near the armoured lock. Three more were set at intervals around the outside.

  ‘You better be right – that is the last of our melta stocks,’ said Otaro.

  ‘Activate,’ said Agapito.

  The bombs went off simultaneously. The door collapsed into sheets of sagging, white-hot metal as pliable as sodden paper.

  Gunfire blasted from inside.

  Kway and Branco swung themselves around the door, taking a shower of flechettes to the front of their armour. They fired bursts into the room, bolters moving smoothly from target to target.

  Agapito stepped inside. Unlike on some stations made by standard humans, there was no need for him to duck the door lintel. The low-G-dwelling Carinaeans were as tall as the legionaries. Craters smoked in the walls. A wide display dominated the space, now shattered and sparking. The command guard were dead, scattered in pieces about the room in that thorough, grisly way that was the hallmark of bolt weaponry. Several of the command staff were also dead. The rest stood by their machines, frozen in shock, their tan uniforms spattered with their comrades’ blood.

  A young man in a peaked cap gaped at Agapito, then made an indecisive lunge for a large red button.

  ‘Stop where you are,’ said Agapito. ‘I will not kill you if I do not have to.’

  The man didn’t understand Gothic, but the meaning of the bolter trained upon him was clear enough. He put his hands up.

  ‘Pexx, Branco, shut down the power to the main weapons batteries. Drop shields,’ Agapito ordered. The legionaries shoved aside operators and began deactivating defences. ‘Otaro, see if you can save any of these wounded men. Anyone here speak the Emperor’s language?’ he bellowed.

  A trembling officer stepped forward.

  ‘I do. A little,’ he said. His accent was atrocious.

  ‘Do you understand “surrender”?’ Agapito asked.

  The man nodded.

  ‘There are other command centres?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘Then I advise you to tell your generals to surrender. We will move on them when we are finished with you. None shall escape. Or you can all live. You have five seconds. After that, we start shooting.’

  The man did as he was asked. Men huddled together, whispering fiercely.

  Agapito ejected his bolt and racked a fresh one into the firing chamber, just to make the point. The mechanical clatter nudged the men in the right direction. They gabbled into silver vox-tubes jutting from a comms desk.

  Within twenty seconds, Aphelion-2 was in the hands of the Imperium.

  ‘Lieutenant Arikk,’ Agapito voxed. ‘We have the city. You may begin landing suppression and garrison forces now. Stand down our assault units.’ He grinned. ‘Now, my brother Branne – tell me how he is doing with Aphelion-7.’

  Seven

  vengeance delayed

  Phelinia scouted out her target from a nest of coolant vanes jutting out over Liberty Square. Behind her was a warren of poky offices where hundreds of Terran bureaucrats worked, monitoring Kiavahr and Deliverance for the Imperium. She enjoyed the irony of planning a bombing while only metres away from the agents of galactic government.

  Liberty Square occupied the intersection of five roads in the Kravv administration centre. It was a good choice for the Children of Deliverance’s latest statement. A big space, difficult to police, but small enough that the force of the bomb would be contained and thus redoubled. Collateral casualties were ­unavoidable, but those standing on the parade route would be sycophants, she reminded herself, cheering on the tech-guild representatives. Some people had short memories. A statue of Corax looked north from the centre. In a sense, he would bear witness to the act of defiance. She hoped it would please him when he heard about it.

  She identified precisely four places that the bomb would have the most effect in terms of display. She was a killer at heart, and her overriding goal in life was to make the tech-guilds bleed. She had to remind herself often that the main purpose of the coming action was not death, but propaganda. The explosion had to be bloody. It had to kill as many
of the tech-guilders as she could manage, but more than that it had to be spectacular.

  The guilders had to be afraid, just like her ancestors had been afraid, and her parents were still afraid.

  Phelinia had been born six years after the coming of the Emperor. Following the liberation of Deliverance her family had relocated to Kiavahr. Her parents had expected a new, fairer world, but a stigma attached itself to the ex-prisoners and followed them at every turn. A few fine sentiments from a primarch were insufficient to overcome centuries of cultural prejudice. Her people were pariahs, even among the workers of Kiavahr, who were almost as oppressed.

  Maybe this she could have borne, were it not for the fact that those responsible for generations of suffering remained in power. The Mechanicum ostensibly ruled Kiavahr, but the guilders were still in control of everything beneath regional government level. They chafed under the rule of the Priests of Mars, and vented their frustrations against those still beneath them. The Lycaeans – they were still called that by the guilders – were particularly abused. Jobs were impossible to come by. Accommodation, food, medicine – for everything needful to life, the once-Lycaeans were at the back of the line.

  Her own privations were nothing compared to the stories of how much worse things had been. At first her parents had spoken of their suffering proudly. In those naive days of hope their memories were a mark of indomitability and righteousness, when deliverance from injustice was fresh, and the people looked to a bright future with Corax as their ruler.

  Then Corax had been taken away by the greater war. The Mechanicum had come and settled over the existing power structure like a red robe. The body beneath remained the same. As the years went by and the injustices piled up, the stories of Lycaeus were told with increasing bitterness. Phelinia was born into a world of disappointment. Her governing emotion had been anger. A youth of petty resistance led to time in detention; at least the prisons were gentler than they had been. When the Children of Deliverance had come calling for her at the age of seventeen, she’d joined without a second thought. She took to their training well, so well she had never done anything else in her life but rebel. The Children of Deliverance provided everything she needed to do so.