Corax- Lord of Shadows

by Guy Haley

‘Then you can fight,’ said Branne. ‘You will either banish the condition through effort, or you will die in service.’

  ‘What do you want, Pexx?’ asked Agapito gently.

  ‘I do not know, my brothers.’ Pexx’s black eyes were haunted. ‘My dreams are full of darkness. My waking hours are chill. Greyness covers everything.’ He was ashamed. ‘My only comfort is the thought of death. All I want to do is kill.’ He looked in dismay between the two brothers. ‘I am a warrior of the Emperor. I have slain thousands in the name of the Imperium, but these feelings, my lord…’ He swallowed. ‘They appal me. I am no murderer, and yet why do I feel the need to rend at my brothers? Please, my lords,’ he said in tones of utter desperation. ‘What am I to do?’

  Ten

  an eye for destruction

  Phelinia’s natural intelligence was compromised by her desire for revenge. If she had been operating entirely from a position of rationality, she would have been nowhere near the bomb when it went off, but Phelinia was far too invested emotionally in liberty’s struggle for that. She wanted to see her tormentors suffer. She wanted to push the button herself and see the bright fires consume those she hated.

  A bureaucrat’s office high up a tower gave her an unparalleled view to the square. The staff of the building were out for the parade, so she would not be discovered. From the other end of the long street Corax’s statue stared at her knowingly, like he was in on her secret.

  Hundreds of thousands of people crowded the pavements and spilled into the carriageway. Traffic was suspended for the day. Work was restricted to a single shift for all but the most essential workers. At this little taste of freedom the people were ecstatic, waving their flags and cheering when there was nothing yet to see. Kiavahr and Deliverance had long been joyless worlds. Three decades on from the revolution, their peoples were only now learning to enjoy themselves. Their happiness was genuine but rooted in ignorance. They had nothing to be happy about, no real liberty, no real pleasures, no joy beyond waking to find they got to breathe for another day. They had been gulled by their masters with paper flags, promises of a future that would never be delivered and a moment’s release from the drudgery of work.

  ‘Pitiful,’ Phelinia breathed.

  Simplistic music bleated down the street canyons of Kravv and a swelling cheer greeted the approaching procession. Marching bands at the fore swung around the base of the statue and passed through Liberty Square.

  The bands turned onto the crowded road and headed directly towards her, their cheap, mass-produced instruments doggedly mangling a selection of Terran martial songs. Yet for all their pasteboard hats and cheap tawdry, they marched proudly down the road in tight formation.

  As the bands passed the crowds they cheered louder, all but drowning out the blare and thump of the music. Behind them walked Therion soldiers, and a contingent of Mechanicum cyborg troops, their scarlet uniforms and polished brass components bright in Kiavahr’s grey day. Phelinia didn’t care for them. Her eyes were fixed further down the procession, watching for the politicals.

  No tech-guilder of any real consequence took part in the parade. None of the ruling class was that stupid. The marchers were low-ranking officials, young guilders yet to gain good office, or the members of weaker families. Their lowly position was irrelevant to her. They were still guilders playing the game of power with other people’s lives.

  By now the front ranks of the guilders’ number were walking past the statue. Phelinia raised her magnoculars to get a better look. The guilders walked rather than marched, some of the younger ones tossing out strictly rationed handfuls of chocanade sweets from baskets carried by servants. They waved and laughed. She let them enjoy half a second more of their lives.

  ‘Detonate,’ she whispered into her collar.

  A long fist of fire punched out of the lumen tree. The metal shaft broke and the tree turned suddenly and heeled over, like a clown miming a fainting fit. She smiled at the dark shapes of bodies carried off in the blast. The explosion was an instantaneous pleasure, a singular, sharp release that was all too brief and gone as soon as the flames. A ball of smoke and dust rose over the square, borne aloft on the force of screams.

  There was no music now.

  A front of dust rolled down the road. Phelinia was left disappointed she could see nothing of the aftermath through its roil.

  Corax’s bronze face looked blindly at the carnage. It saw nothing of the shattered bodies, nor the crowds stampeding in their panic. It did not see a woman leave an office building and slip away into the confusion.

  A perimeter of interlinked riot shields ringed the blast site, each backed by an anonymous shock trooper.

  Enforcer-Principal Diorddan Tensat halted before them. They stared resolutely over his head, shields locked. He frowned.

  Muttering blackly to himself, he fished out a double-headed eagle badge from his long coat and held it up to be scanned. The shock-group leader emerged from behind the wall of shields to inspect it. His high white helmet was already coated by the settling dust.

  ‘Enforcer-Principal Diorddan Tensat,’ said Tensat.

  A lens unit hovered up from the shock-group leader’s comms pack on the end of a flexible cable. Low-intensity las light stuttered and blasted the badge, activating the holo-glyphs within. Marks of authority scrolled sideways through the air partway between the two men, then coyly slid out of view.

  ‘My apologies for keeping you waiting, sir, security here must be tight.’

  Tensat grunted testily.

  The shock-troop leader stepped aside. His men opened up their shields and closed them smoothly as he passed within.

  The enforcer-principal glanced back. Idiots, he thought. His uniform, badge and face were known to all of them.

  The procurator mechanical was already there, his grav motors buzzing as he floated over the devastation and plucked at debris that caught his many glass eyes. Multi-jointed limbs darted down in undulating sequence, like a machine harvester, or a spider weaving a web.

  Tensat was restricted to the limbs he was born with. He relied on the time-honoured locomotion of boots pushing against the ground, and so was forced to pick his way through the ­gobbets of human flesh littering the blasted-up rockcrete like so many moist, red flowers.

  He got it on his boots. It clung to the soles. He was cursing and flicking off the remains of some poor low-rank guilder when the procurator floated over, the smell of hot metal gusting from the exhaust ports hidden under his robes.

  ‘Enforcer-Principal Tensat. You are finally here.’

  ‘I had a little difficulty getting through the cordon,’ Tensat grumbled.

  ‘They did not let you through?’ said the procurator emotionlessly. ‘They are your own men.’

  The procurator had no name and no gender. In fact, Tensat was not sure if it was always the same person – he used the term loosely. Its synthetic voice was so devoid of emotion it was impossible to tell what it was thinking. He hated dealing with the Mechanicum. Discourse with them was stripped of all subtext. It was worse than communicating by vox-text. He had decided to ascribe a smug, superior tone to it some time ago. It seemed to fit.

  ‘Having me flash my credentials was a show for the public,’ he said, defensive now his organisation was criticised by an outsider.

  ‘The site is secure. That is a positive input.’ Throughout their conversation the procurator continued to pluck repetitively at the ground. It had no staff, but was accompanied by a swarm of assistant servo-skulls. Tensat was alone. He preferred it that way, and would have been happier if the procurator were not there, but circumstances of government dictated their cooperation.

  ‘Too little, too late,’ muttered Tensat. ‘Where was security before the damn bomb went off?’

  ‘The area was swept one hour before the parade,’ said the procurator. ‘Nothing was found.’

  ‘
How well was it swept?’ asked Tensat.

  ‘Your men performed the duty, not mine.’

  Tensat shook his head. He hunched into his long coat and looked around the square. The power in that sector had been shut off and nearby manufactoria evacuated. Without the constant heat generated by Kiavahr’s industry, the planet’s natural chill was free to assert itself.

  ‘It was in the lumen tree,’ he said. He pointed at the space until recently occupied by the sculpture.

  ‘An obvious conclusion, but correct,’ said the procurator.

  ‘Wasn’t it inspected during the security sweep?’

  ‘I refer you to my earlier comment, enforcer-principal.’

  ‘It was checked though?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘And the last time?’ Tensat looked around the square. ‘By the Emperor’s coming, such devastation. This is military-grade explosives, has to be.’

  Something clicked in the procurator’s skull. ‘City cogitators record the last hatch opening to have been seventeen days, four hours and twelve minutes ago for routine maintenance. It is my hypothesis that the device was planted after this.’

  ‘Sensors can be deceived.’

  ‘So can your men,’ said the procurator.

  Tensat scowled. He ducked a servo-skull. Delicate metal pincers jutted out where once a human tongue had spoken, bearing a bloody sample bag. He picked his way across the ground to the edge of the crater. The bottom of the lumen tree had been atomised. The hole left was two metres deep and steeply conical. Carbonised material and chunks of rubble were laid out in neat radii around the hole. Close by, the material was pulverised. Larger pieces lay around it, mainly slabs of rockcrete heaved up by the blast, then fist-sized lumps scattered from the hole, graded by distance down to the fine dust plastering the facades of the buildings around the square. The debris field was roughly elliptical with ragged edges, the result of differing densities in the material destroyed, or maybe evidence of a shaped charge. But it was regular. Physics was remarkably fastidious.

  Tensat peered into the crater. The city foundation was thick. Kravv was built on a floating skin of rockcrete over ancient mining pits, and the blast had done no more than dent the substrate. Fused optical fibres still glowed in the pit, the light intended for the lumen tree bleeding off into dusty air.

  ‘From the look of it, the bomb was pushed into the optics piping, out of sight but within reach. Didn’t they think to check deeper inside?’

  ‘Negative. Cursory would be my definition of the security sweep,’ said the procurator.

  Tensat twisted his mouth. Today he would not rise to the procurator’s jibes. ‘A metre down. Perhaps more. A powerful bomb. It’s a deep hole.’

  ‘It is my opinion,’ said the procurator, ‘that the perpetrator wished to inflict maximum damage while avoiding large amounts of incidental casualties.’

  ‘Fifty-six people died in the crowd,’ said Tensat. ‘That is the definition of a large amount.’

  ‘Nevertheless, the target was the guild marchers. There are a number of alternative placings for an explosive device in this area. All would have increased the casualty rate significantly.’

  ‘It’s all murder.’ Tensat scanned over the ruined flesh stuck to the ground. ‘I don’t know why they’re gunning for the likes of them. These poor bastards are the lowest of the low.’

  ‘I surmise that the suspect would regard them as a valid target. The guilds are the target.’

  The procurator chugged away and began plucking at another area.

  ‘Why?’ Tensat called after it. ‘Why don’t they bomb you? There’s more than a few people believe that the Mechanicum is responsible for their misery.’

  The procurator swivelled serenely on the spot, its ribbed arms still snatching at the ground and secreting pieces of the truth about itself. Flinders of bone and rubble went into pouches brought by its grisly servants.

  ‘We seek maximum efficiency. Happiness is not a relevant calculational factor.’

  ‘There are other parties who believe your priesthood is destabilising the guilds itself,’ said Tensat.

  ‘That is nonsensical. If Mars wished to be rid of the tech-guilds, there are other ways. If the people seek blame, they should look to the primarch. The Imperial Hegemony, at Lord Corax’s request, granted suzerainty over Kiavahr to the Mechanicum only if the existing power structure were retained beneath our governance. It is an arrangement that suits us well. The guilds are native. We are not. Smooth interfacing of Mechanicum/non-Mechanicum peoples is better assured by continued guild presence. Though inferior in most capacities, the guilds have access to technology we lack. We do not wish to lose it through purge.’

  Tensat walked over the uneven ground. ‘Yes, but they are not sharing that technology.’

  ‘Are you accusing the Mechanicum of impropriety?’ queried the procurator. ‘Actions of this sort are a breach of our treaty terms for overlordship of this world.’

  ‘I’m not accusing you of anything,’ said Tensat. ‘For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s your kind, priest. This is something else. There’ve been a dozen murders–’

  ‘I suggest assassinations,’ said the procurator. ‘The motive here is political.’

  ‘Assassinations, then. A dozen of them. Sabotage of guild holdings, remote attacks on datanets. This is a campaign. Why aren’t there any demands?’

  ‘There are,’ said a deep, inhuman voice. A legionary stepped out of the shadow around Corax’s statue. One moment, there was nothing there. The next, two metres of transhuman warrior clad in ceramite was bearing down on him.

  Tensat started. His shock would have been profound had he not witnessed the Raven Guard’s uncanny stealth many times before.

  His unobtrusive rank badges suggested this was no line trooper, but someone of importance. Bad news. Tensat shut his mouth before he could be accused of gawping. ‘I was about to say we need to sort this out before the Legion gets involved.’

  ‘I would say that it is too late for that,’ said the legionary.

  Eleven

  another way of war

  The Raven Guard attacked Zenith-312 in full battle array. Lines of cruisers sailed forward of the main advance openly, took up position and methodically annihilated Zenith-312’s swarms of kill-sats. The sidelined Fenc watched helplessly from the command deck of the Song-he, his fleet reduced to providing a protective umbrella to the Raven Guard ships against the weapons fire of other cities. The Thousand Moons would not reach optimal positions for cooperative bombardment for weeks. The projectiles they shot out by the thousand were easy to track and down before they came anywhere near either Imperial fleet, but the particle, graviton and las-beams snapping out from their energy weapon arrays struck instantly, playing in flickering tongues of man-made lightning all over the fleets’ formations. Interposed between the cities and the Legion, the Twenty-Seventh Expeditionary Fleet took the worst of it. Coruscating void shields formed an arc of purple, green and yellow field glare that lit up the black of space for hundreds of thousands of kilometres.

  There was little for Fenc to do but observe and prepare for an enemy breakout. His gunnery captains put out an endless stream of anti-munitions missiles and pinpoint las strikes. Tocsins rang out the depletion of ammunition. The officers had everything in hand, redirecting resources as necessary, ordering minor shifts in fire corridors to compensate for turrets that needed to cool down or required resupply. On fifty other ships, the same was occurring, bold shipmasters stood in inactivity while their crews performed their duty. The engagement lighting was active, red and threatening, but the steady murmur of orders and requests was calm. Despite the roiling storm of light across the voids, there was no immediate danger.

  Fenc had two hololiths active before his command throne. One showed a representational system view, the other a true-pict feed of Corax’s atta
ck. Within the representational orb, the Thousand Moons tracked through space, the ellipses and circles of their usual orbits spiralling out of shape as they repositioned. The Sodality ships held back, waiting to ­redeploy should Fenc’s fleet launch an attack on a second moon. The Twenty-Seventh faced them in stalemate. Fenc could not do anything or the Sodality would bring pressure to bear on the primarch’s Legion. The Sodality vessels could not advance without presenting themselves to the Twenty-Seventh’s guns.

  The admiral imagined his opposite numbers on the Carinaean warships staring at similar displays and thinking similar thoughts. Thousands of years of divergent development separated their cultures, but it was amazing how little most human civilisations had drifted from their roots. There were extremes, but though in absolute terms wildly divergent branches of the human family tree were numerous, they were a small percentage of Terra’s far-flung seeds. Most men were recognisably men. They felt, thought and fought like any human being. There was commonality between them. Empathy was inevitable.

  Fenc willed Corax’s plan to succeed. It would be far better if the fleet of the Sodality were to enter the service of the Emperor rather than be reduced to debris. Like Corax, he would prefer the Carinaeans be breathing Imperial citizens than dead enemies.

  For the same reasons, Fenc knew the plan would not work. Corax’s awesome display of power was intended to show stealth was not his sole ability. It would only stiffen the resolve of their enemies. For Corax, the benefits of the Great Crusade were self-evident. The Ravenlord had been brought up by political dissidents. He was an idealist. He could not comprehend why these people would hold out in the face of overwhelming odds when there was a self-evidently better way of life available. He saw only the Emperor’s Truth. Fenc had a sense Corax found it hard to engage sympathetically with enemies who thought differently. He did not understand that truth is subjective, not an absolute. It was the primarch’s weakness. There was no way that the rest of the Thousand Moons would surrender, whatever happened to Zenith-312.