He confessed that the Imperium had suffered a terrible setback, but sermonised that there were vital lessons to be learned from it: chief among them, a reminder of the importance of constant vigilance. ‘We must ever be alert for the signs of treachery,’ said the captain. ‘Yes, even and especially in those who are closest to us. Remember, to question is to doubt, and doubt is the bane of faith.’
They had also been reminded of the urgency of their own assignment, he said. No one knew how many feral orks infested the equatorial jungle. Their numbers only seemed to have grown in half a century, despite the best efforts of Armageddon’s ork hunters to control them. In a sense, these too could be called ‘the enemy within’.
More than one tribe, it was rumoured, had marched out of the jungle already. They had joined up with Warlord Ghazghkull’s armies, who had welcomed them into their ranks and equipped them for war. So long as the feral orks endured here, the invaders would always know where to look for reinforcements.
Tarryn couldn’t resist a sidelong glance at Baeloch, to see how he reacted to that news. He held his grizzled jaw clenched, his square face set into its habitual stony expression. If he harboured any doubts about what Captain Maegar was telling them, he had the good sense not to show it.
Inquisitor Halstron watched from the wings – which was something new.
His lips were resting in a genial smile that failed to reach his eyes.
Tarryn didn’t know what to make of his presence. Halstron had first appeared in the sky fortress, shortly after it had been dragged out of the warp and into the Armageddon System. Chapter Master Bardane had evidently been expecting him and had made a point of greeting this visitor himself.
Tarryn had seen little of the inquisitor since then. The word had been that he had attached himself to the First Company. He had followed them down to the planet’s surface and into the jungle, albeit in a transport ship rather than a drop pod. Tarryn had been secretly glad. Not even the most blameless individual could ever be completely comfortable under a witch hunter’s scrutiny.
A month ago, Halstron had turned up here without warning. Tarryn hadn’t been present to witness his arrival, but he had soon heard about it.
Unlike the inquisitors who Tarryn had seen before, this one had no retinue of which to speak. He had brought a single companion to Armageddon with him: a slight man of thirty years at most, with pallid skin and striking blue eyes that stared out from beneath a ragged blond fringe.
Nobody knew his name. They hadn’t heard the inquisitor use it, while the pale man himself whispered in his master’s ear and nobody else’s. He rarely ventured out of the inquisitor’s lander, and never without him.
He was swathed from neck to toe in dark, heavy robes and his pale face never seemed to betray an emotion, at least none that Tarryn could discern.
Something about the man – his very presence – made Tarryn feel uneasy. He knew that the others felt it too, though none of them could explain it.
Captain Maegar announced a change to the Relictors’ orders.
Their planned search pattern for the next ten days had been redrawn. Instead of heading to the north, Tarryn’s combat squad, and the others who were headed out alongside them, were to march to the south-east once more.
‘It must be because of the mad Guardsman, and what he told us,’ said Nabori, as they waited for Sergeant Juster to join them and lead them out.
‘Did you see Inquisitor Halstron watching us during the briefing?’ asked Baeloch. ‘He even brought his pet outside with him to observe us.’
‘If there is a Chaos cult operating in this jungle,’ Tarryn reasoned, ‘of course it would concern the Inquisition.’ It might even help to explain what the Relictors were doing here, he thought. Remember, to question is to doubt.
He wondered what was keeping Juster. As Tarryn turned to look for him, he bumped into a slight, robed figure. At first, he mistook it for a serf. He opened his mouth to issue a rebuke, but the first word caught in his throat.
The inquisitor’s aide – his ‘pet’, as Baeloch would have it – raised his chin and locked gazes with the looming Space Marine. Tarryn had that uneasy feeling about him again, even stronger than before, gnawing in the pit of his stomach.
The pale man’s face was its usual blank canvas. His eyes were glazed over as if no spectacle could possibly capture their interest, and yet… Was there something lurking in there? A treacherous glint in the depths of those bright blue orbs?
‘To me!’ Inquisitor Halstron barked, and the pale man bowed his head and followed his master. The inquisitor led him away impatiently, without so much as a glance in anyone else’s direction.
They joined Captain Maegar and, a moment later, marched into the jungle alongside the captain and his command squad. It was the first time either of them had joined a search party – the first time they had left the safety of the camp at all, to the best of Tarryn’s knowledge – which provoked some comment from the others.
Tarryn didn’t join in the speculation. He tuned out his battle-brothers’ voices. He was thinking about the inquisitor’s mysterious aide.
When the two of them collided, his auto-senses had detected a jangle of metal. Where the fabric of the pale man’s robes had been flattened against his body, the outlines of stout chains underneath it had been betrayed.
The pale man had been shackled, beneath his robes. So, he wasn’t Inquisitor Halstron’s aide, after all; or, if he was, that was only a part of the story. He was also the inquisitor’s prisoner.
Three
They heard the orks before they saw them.
Their guttural voices, the harsh and repetitive consonants of their underdeveloped language, were unmistakable. It was early afternoon, and this was the third nest their combat squad had discovered today. This time, however, there was something new about those voices, something strange.
Tarryn tuned his auto-senses to amplify the distant sound and realised what it was. This time, the voices had a lilting, almost rhythmic quality to them.
It didn’t seem possible. Brother Baeloch, however, had discerned it too and was first to voice the inescapable conclusion. ‘They’re singing – or trying to.’ The orks were chanting, at least, and it sounded like a drum was being beaten.
On Sergeant Juster’s cue, the Relictors tightened their formation and marched towards the source of the sounds.
The sergeant had led them to a fresh sector of the jungle, just a short way to the south-east of where they had searched yesterday. He had told them nothing of his meeting with Inquisitor Halstron, so clearly there was nothing they needed to know.
The chanting/singing ceased abruptly and an ominous silence descended. ‘They’ve heard us,’ said Tarryn over the vox-link.
‘They aren’t trying to run, though,’ said Baeloch. The Relictors would have heard any such attempt. ‘They’re waiting to see what we are.’
They’re growing bolder, Tarryn’s brother at the camp had told him. The orks are congregating in ever larger groups and have taken to lying in wait for us.
They had long since moved out of vox-range of the camp. They could pick up other squads, occasionally, but none were close by at the moment. Tarryn wasn’t worried, though. Five Space Marines had been more than a match for anything the jungle had thrown at them – so far, at least.
‘Sounded like a bigger group than normal,’ Kantus noted.
They were close now, enough to hear the furtive growls and muffled snorts of the creatures waiting for them. Suddenly, a squig let out a piercing squeal, but it was silenced by the impact of a heavy, wooden object.
The first feral ork – more impatient than its fellows – sprang out of the foliage in front of them. If the creature was startled to find itself so badly outnumbered, it didn’t show it. It drove its spear towards Brother Nabori’s stomach. Nabori thumbed his chainsword into life and sliced through the weapon’s haft before it could touch him.
His battle-brothers surged forwards, with their we
apons screaming.
They erupted into a small clearing. Several squigs scattered in front of them: undersized, malformed creatures, with heads too large for their squat bodies and too many teeth in their gaping maws. The squigs were also born from alien spores: another, even less developed form of orkoid life. It was said that, despite their shared genetic origins, the feral orks cultivated the squigs as food animals.
At one end of the clearing, another animal – a large local beast – lay gutted. A stone slab had been hammered upright into the ground, smaller stones piled around it. The dead creature’s entrails were smeared across the stones, and a familiar stylised-skull symbol was scrawled upon the slab in its blood.
It was an altar, Tarryn realised.
An arrow clattered uselessly off his helmet. Its stone tip was glistening, coated with some kind of venom. His auto-senses picked out four archers at the far side of the clearing, lurking among the trees there. The majority of the feral orks, however, were armed with close-range weapons. They fell upon the intruders in their midst, bellowing a collective war cry.
There were close to a score of them. Two of them came at Tarryn. One swung a stone-headed axe in each hand while the other strained to wield a massive club, in which numerous sharpened stone splinters, and a few of metal, had been embedded.
They seemed to have a leader: a larger ork than the others, with tusks that were longer and sharper. It was hanging back, snarling out orders. The dyed patterns on the leader’s face were more elaborate than those of its underlings, and it clattered with bone-carved jewellery.
It held a more advanced weapon too, a rusted shotgun. It must have salvaged it – or even won it in combat – from an Imperial soldier, perhaps another lost Guardsman like the one they had found two days ago.
The ork fumbled clumsily with its trophy. It found the trigger, but neglected to brace itself for the shotgun’s recoil. It only succeeded in pumping a slug into a luckless squig as the weapon bucked out of its hands.
Nabori had already dispatched his first opponent – the hasty one – and he joined his brothers in the clearing. His arrival balanced the odds against them somewhat, and allowed Sergeant Juster to disengage from the melee momentarily.
He set his sights on the ork leader as it scrabbled in the dirt.
Juster’s chainsword was his most prized possession. Its first owner had been the legendary Captain Bylar, who had wielded it during the Blood Star campaign. It was imbued with three centuries’ worth of proud history.
The ork leader’s hand tightened around its fallen weapon – as the chainsword severed that same hand neatly at the wrist.
Tarryn’s weapons were newer, his own blade barely five decades forged, but he hoped that one day they might have a history too. He was writing a chapter of that history now, in ork blood. One of his attackers – the club-wielder – had recoiled from a burst of bolter fire. That freed him to focus on the other, and his chainsword gouged a scarlet trench across its stomach. The feral ork staggered. Tarryn thought it was going to fall, but then it came at him again, spitting gobbets of blood.
He parried the first of its stone axes, and twisted so that the second glanced harmlessly off a pauldron. He flung his opponent away from him, but another ork was coming at him from the right. In turning to deal with this new threat, he had to leave his left flank exposed. Tarryn felt the massive, studded club smashing into his side and a jagged metal splinter embedded itself in his armour.
These feral orks were bolder than he had seen before, he thought. They were bolder and stronger, more vicious and better equipped. Even their squigs had rallied from the Relictors’ arrival and were snapping viciously at their heels.
Their leader was the strongest of them. Even without its purloined shotgun, it was giving Juster a good fight. It was wrestling with him, strong fingers locked about his armoured wrist, denying him the chance to swing his venerable blade.
As the contest began to swing the Relictor’s way, the ork leader barked out another order. Tarryn couldn’t translate the ugly words, but one of the archers set down its bow in response to them. For the first time, Tarryn glimpsed a crude wooden cage standing beside it, inside which something was moving.
He claimed his first kill, slicing his opponent from hip to throat. He rounded on the ork that had damaged him, but found that he had been beaten to it. He was just in time to see the tip of Kantus’s chainsword emerging from the startled creature’s chest.
He levelled his bolter at the ork with the axes instead. It was struggling to stand, until Tarryn put a bolt-round through its left eye, into its tiny brain. At the same time, he stamped on one of the squigs underfoot for good measure.
Almost half the feral orks were down by now, dying or dead. Their leader found itself on its back again, sprawled at Juster’s feet. Juster raised his chainsword and struck downwards at its exposed neck.
Baeloch had made it deeper into the clearing than any of them. He parried an axe with his chainsword, while snapping off shots at the half-hidden archers. His ranged weapon of choice was a meltagun; its concentrated beam of heat burned through the flora effortlessly and turned ork flesh into slag.
Reaching the altar, he turned his fury upon it, scattering its stones with his whirling blade. A sharp blow from his heel broke the upright slab in half, while a melta-beam liquefied its blasphemous inscription.
Another ork had stumbled blearily into the clearing, from the direction of the cage. It had the appearance of a shaman, with black and red feathers on its head. It brandished a large wooden staff topped with a skull, and it was shaking – trembling in terror, Tarryn thought at first, but he soon realised his mistake.
The newcomer dropped to its knees, clutching at its head in abject agony, and suddenly Tarryn knew what it was. A weirdboy, as its brethren would have called it – a greenskin psyker – and it was shaking not with fear but with the pent-up energy of the warp itself.
The other Relictors saw what was coming too. They loosed off as many shots as they could at the newcomer, even when it meant turning their backs on their own opponents. They riddled the convulsing psyker with bolter fire, hoping to kill it before it could utilise the energies building inside it.
The weirdboy jerked and thrashed beneath the sustained onslaught. Then its head snapped back, it threw open its mouth, wider than Tarryn would have thought possible, and it spewed out wave after wave of sickening force.
Tarryn found himself lying on the jungle floor.
The blast had thrown him over fifty metres. He felt as if the inside of his head had been scoured by fire, and his stomach was churning. He checked his internal chrono. He had been unconscious for a moment, no longer – long enough, all the same, for an enemy to ensure he never woke again.
He hauled himself to his feet. His eyes were blurry. He heard movement ahead of him, from the clearing. The rest of his squad were back there. He was relieved to find his battle-brothers unharmed; self-conscious too, at being the last of them to recover.
The ork weirdboy was dead.
It had been killed by their bolters, after all, but the unholy energies seething within its mortal frame had still demanded their release.
Nor had those energies distinguished between friend and foe. At least two feral orks had been cut down by them, or disoriented enough for their enemies – those who had weathered the blast better than Tarryn had – to finish them off. An archer was just coming to its senses beneath the trees, blood trickling from its snout. Brother Kantus’s chainsword decapitated it before it could stand.
The clearing and the undergrowth around it were littered with squig corpses.
There was a silence too that felt unnatural. Tarryn realised, eventually, why that was. He had learned to tune out the ubiquitous sounds of their environment, among them the droning of insects. He hadn’t immediately missed that sound, once it was gone.
Aside from the five Space Marines, in this part of the jungle, for now, no other sentient life survived.
Priority level: Magenta Alpha
Transmitted: Imperial Command HQ, Hive Infernus, Armageddon Secundus
To: Adeptus Astartes battle-barge Blade of Vengeance, Armageddon High Orbit
Date: 3014999.M41
Transmitter: Astropath Prime Rankor
Receiver: Astropath-terminus Xhian-Ji
Author: Commissar Marco Rickarius, 93rd Armageddon Steel Legion
Thought for the Day: Step not from the path of the Emperor.
I regret to report that the defence of our city is failing. Our watch spires have sighted a fresh force of orks marching across the ash wastes from the Pallidus Mountains. They number in the tens of thousands and have great engines of destruction among them. They will join the attackers at our gates within days. We request the assistance of Adeptus Astartes forces as a matter of urgency. You are our only hope.
Four
Decario had had the vision again.
He hadn’t been seeking it, this time. It had come to him unbidden, as he had trodden the walkways of the fortress-monastery between his solar and the Librarium.
The image had smashed its way into his mind, through the barriers he had erected over a lifetime. It had blinded his eyes to all else, so intense had it been. Had he not been wearing his armour, he would probably have fallen.
He had come back to his senses, to the real world, with a headache, a dry mouth and a deep-rooted sense of foreboding.
A passing Chapter-serf had looked at him askance, and Decario had realised that he was leaning against a wall for support. He had straightened up and forced himself to walk on. It wouldn’t have done for someone in his position to show weakness.
Decario was one of the most important members of his Chapter, a peer of the Chapter Master himself. It wasn’t pride that made him believe this; the Emperor knew, he had wished it were not so often enough. He was the Chief Librarian of the Relictors, however, and the Chapter Master did as his Librarians advised him.
It behoved Decario, therefore, to advise him wisely.
Angron's Monolith - Steve Lyons Page 2