Scions of the Emperor

by Warhammer 40K

  He marched along the length of the blood-stained corridor, and with each footfall the reawakened memory retreated deeper into the darkness.

  Dorn could feel it fading. He knew that by the time he reached the end of the passageway, the totality of it would be gone. The truth he had glimpsed, hidden, revealed and now to be hidden once more, became transitory and ephemeral.

  He did not question what Malcador had shown him. Dorn knew his own mind, enough to be certain that the Sigillite had not projected some conjured illusion into his thoughts. Awakening from the induced reverie, barely seconds had passed, but for the primarch he felt the weight of days upon him. The Sigillite, for all his allusions, was nowhere to be seen when Dorn opened his eyes.

  There was still much that the psyker had said and done which the Imperial Fist did not accept, and although Malcador had professed to have been truthful with him, Dorn had doubts that would never ebb.

  But not in this matter. In this, he was certain.

  The lost were gone, and it was well that they were. The grand misfortunes that befell them crumbled in Dorn's mind, but they left behind certainty.

  What came to pass could overshadow everything. Dorn knew that now. The raw, hateful truth is clear to me. If they were here with us now… This war would already have been lost.

  He emerged into the false daylight and found Massak awaiting him. Behind the legionary, the rescue crews and the Arbites kept their distance, knowing that what had happened inside the tower was not for them to question. By tomorrow, none of them would remember what they had seen.

  'My lord,' began Massak. 'Forgive me, I was compelled—'

  Dorn waved away the apology. 'You did your duty, Yored.'

  Massak accepted that with a nod, then glanced back at the gaping crack in the minaret's flank. 'And with regards to the chamber? What are your orders?'

  The primarch paused for a moment, searching his thoughts for unanswered questions. The memory of what had been spoken of inside the minaret was already gone, faded to nothing. He found only a granite-hard determination of what needed to be done.

  'Bury this place,' he told Massak. 'It is only a tomb now. It will be forgotten.'

  The Nightsward's back was bleeding, torn along the spinal ridge with entire comms towers ripped from their foundations. The frigate's engines rattled arrhythmically, beating out a limp staccato that made the decks throb and shudder. Long scars ran down its outer flanks, each one the product of nightmare weapons still barely understood by the gunnery sergeants. For all that, it was still in service, still on duty, pushed out hard spinward of the main fleet deployment, just like hundreds of others. There was no alternative, this far out, and no complaints from those who had survived.

  Captain Arnaid stood on the strategium deck, surrounded by the staff of his tactical command, assessing the options ahead of him.

  'Not Rangdan?' he asked.

  The question was not superfluous - the Rangdan xenos, in addition to their many other abilities, had proven able to mimic the sensor profile of many Imperial warships.

  'No, lord,' replied Holfad, the master of signals. 'Absolute certainty.'

  'But not one of ours either,' said Arnaid.

  'Not this far out,' agreed Ertha, the ship's mistress. 'Unless a casualty.'

  Arnaid smiled darkly. 'Much like ourselves, then.'

  Ahead of the gathered officers and legionaries, over a black hololith column, spun the schematic representation of nearspace - a lattice of runes and trajectory skeletons. The image flickered from time to time, hit by the Nightsward's faltering power generators, but Arnaid could see enough to share Holfad's assessment. The ship on the scopes was Imperial, larger than they were, and heading on a corkscrewing course through the void that would eventually take it if not intercepted, under the plane of the main Dark Angels fleet. The ship did not appear to be hurrying which was unusual, for the northern fringe of the extermination zone was not a place to tarry without purpose.

  'Still no reply to hails?' Arnaid asked again.

  'Nothing,' confirmed Holfad.

  Arnaid weighed up the options. Their last encounter had left them badly damaged and with heavily depleted ammunition stores. Mounting any kind of assault, particularly against a larger vessel, would be difficult. The prudent option would be to report the sighting and then shadow, hoping that a Legion ship of the line could respond before the fleet perimeter came within range. Then again, the entire complement of Legion vessels was already accounted for and fully occupied, caught up in the punishing round of tit-for-tat brutality that had marked the six-year-long xenocide campaign. They would not want to be pulled from duty unless absolutely necessary.

  'Move to engage,' Arnaid commanded. 'Full combat order, make preparation for boarding.'

  The Nightsward swung around onto the intercept course, shifting with commendable agility given the state of the plasma drives. Soon the frigate was boosting through the void, tracing the geometry laid in by the navigation master.

  Arnaid reached for his helm. He was still in his armour - none of the Legion ever took it off any more - and felt the familiar suck-hiss as the atmospheric seal took. He walked down from the tactical bridge pulpit to meet the five surviving members of his command group. He could see from his helm's sensor-scatter that the remainder of his company - the 45th, of the Eighth Order, of the First Legion - were already racing to take up boarding positions. There were only a few torpedoes left, but they had Stormbirds in the hangars still, and the close-range broadside gunnery was in reasonable shape.

  'Not Rangdan?' asked Talladan, first squad sergeant, hefting his chipped bolter sourly and checking the ammo-counter.

  Arnaid could forgive the repeated query. They had been fighting the xenos for so long, with such sustained, attritional violence, that it had come to seem as if no other opposing force existed in the galaxy, and across the entire lifetime of the Legion there had never been an enemy that had tested them as much.

  'Not Rangdan, sergeant,' Arnaid said, reaching for Bloodspite, his power sword. The blade was Calibanite, expertly wrought from dark metal with a long snaking dragon etched along the facing edge. 'A conundrum, but the truth will out.'

  Proximity klaxons began to chime, and the close-range sensors began to display their quarry. Arnaid summoned a hololith cube and zoomed the focus.

  It certainly looked like one of theirs - Imperial, with that familiar dagger-prow, hunched back and heavy shielding. A Rangdan warship was all spines and flails and trailing metal tentacles, like an iron jellyfish cast adrift in the void.

  'Still no reply to hails,' reported Holfad, calling out from behind his nest of cables and picter lenses.

  Arnaid watched it come closer. 'Ready broadside,' he ordered. 'Athwartships, no damage-shot unless I so order.'

  'Damned fools,' muttered Talladan. 'Don't they know this is a warzone?'

  'I doubt they are unaware,' said Arnaid, observing the ship come into visual range. 'Sensor mimicking has cost us - they may be being cautious.'

  The details of the ship were obvious now. It was unmarked, dark-grey like unpainted ceramite, a slab of unvarnished metal hanging in the dark. It appeared undamaged, which was a rarity in this region of the galaxy, and powered along capably with its thrusters firing clean.

  'Ready warning shot,' ordered Arnaid. 'Maintain standard hail.'

  The interloper moved into the danger zone. There was no sign of its own weapons being run out, nor of gunship wings being loosed.

  Arnaid drew in the breath that would have given the order to open fire, when finally his sensor-arrays flooded with incoming data.

  'A transmission, my liege,' said Holfad.

  Talladan growled low in irritation, a sound that echoed darkly within his helm. 'What games are these?'

  'Show me,' said Arnaid to Holfad, taking his hand slowly from the hilt of Bloodspite.

  A hololith burst into half-scale instantiation, showing the ghostly outline of an Imperial Space Marine. His armour bore no ins
ignia, and looked as blunt and unadorned as the ship he came from. The armour mark was newer than Arnaid's - Mark IV rather than the First Legion's widespread Mark II - and, like the ship he came from, showed no sign of battle damage.

  'This the First Legion ship-of-war Nightsward,' Arnaid said, adopting the formalities. 'You are undeclared and entering the proscribed Rangdan extermination zone. Power down and prepare for inspection, or I shall be forced to engage.'

  'There will be no need for that, captain,' came the Space Marine's voice. It was an odd voice - lighter than the average for a Legiones Astartes warrior, though with the usual supreme self-confidence. 'We had to be sure we were in the right place. These xenos have proved adept at mimicry, we understand.'

  Arnaid's eyes narrowed. The subterfuge annoyed him. If this genuinely were an Imperial vessel, then without demonstration of a genuine cause the hide-and-seek felt pointless.

  'Declare yourself,' Arnaid said, blink-clicking an order to the gunnery captains to remain on alert.

  'A friend,' came the reply, with perhaps a hint of a smile audible in the helm-hidden words.

  'There are no friends in the void,' said Arnaid, initiating the pre-firing cycle and moving his gauntlet back to his blade-hilt. 'Your final chance.'

  The hololithic head bowed a fraction. 'Your reputation for bravery is not misplaced,' he replied. 'Even given the odds here, the condition of your ship, I believe you might actually fire. Very well. This is the strike cruiser Perseus, nine weeks out of Raf Deep-Anchor. Forgive the lack of identity - we do not as yet truly have one. The Twentieth Legion will do, if you insist on such things. And as for me, Captain Arnaid of the Forty-Fifth Company of the Eighth Order of the First Legion, you may call me Alpharius.'

  He runs, body close to the leaf-matter, the stink of the mulch on his feet. The moonlight bars the ground faintly, for the clouds are running and the shadows are deep.

  He is panting. His body is superlative, a gift beyond price, but he has been running a long time and even he has limits. He remembers, dimly, a time before this one, when it was all the howl of another reality, of whispered voices and the echoing cry of the infinite. He does not know how he came to leave that place and enter this one, overlooked by these iron-hard trees and their nightshade canopies. He does not know his name, nor his past, only that he is here, on a world that carries death in the sap of every twig and pain in the cry of every beast.

  He runs harder now, letting the fatigue pull at him. It is as if he has to get used to having a body; as if, once, he was just an idea or a belief in another's mind. He is caked in dirt. He is latticed with scratches. One wrong turn, and you are up to your waist in sucking mud, or caught in briars with thorns the length of a thigh. This world wants to kill you. It wants to kill everything.

  He carries a weapon in his hand - a horn, discarded from the picked-clean corpse of another great beast. He has stabbed it many times into creatures that would have ended him, had he not got there first. He has plunged it into the flanks of the horrors of the wood, feeling the hot, black blood gush over his hands before it cut down into the bone. Now it is like a part of him, jabbing out from his fist, a mere extension of a body that does not belong in this place, that has been transplanted here and has to learn how to master its surroundings.

  The beasts are everywhere. They fight one another, they fight the weak, they fight the strong. They leap through the canopy, their leathery wings pinned tight. They lurk in the undergrowth, tiny eyes burning under the thick snarl of tortured growths. There are beasts at the roots of the world, curled fast around its snaggling tendrils in the ancient soil, too massive to move, too bloated to breathe. You could never kill them all, not if you had eternity to spare. A few must always linger, poisoning the black earth.

  He seeks higher ground, dropping to all fours to scrape his way up the bank. He is naked, but his skin has become very tough. He will have to find something to drape over himself - the flesh of another beast, a blood-flecked hide, pulled from the meat of something he kills. Until then, the wind flails him, cold as lies, dragging at his long hair.

  It will rain soon. The moon-silvered heavens will break, dousing the earth and the spear-sharp leaves until all is a foment of bubbling slime and filth. This world is always in flux, the bark creaking, the earth sliding, the night's gales shaking the boughs.

  He ascends with labour. He slips, and feels the catch of thorns on his calves. He staggers, and feels the cool mud well up between his toes. For a moment, he thinks that the dark and the clinging brambles will choke him at last, wrapping themselves around his neck and hauling him down, but then he breaks the rise, charging out and up, wrestling free from the clutch of the limitless forest.

  He is exposed then, upright against a churning sky. Black rocks jag into the racing air, whipped by the wind. He can finally see a long way, thrust up onto the outcrop that juts clear of the all-smothering canopy.

  The clouds are tearing, re-forming. The treetops shake, rustling like bags of snakes. Ahead of him is the great valley, delved like a wound in the world, twisted and gasping with its competing growths of grey, black and darkest green.

  He must go down there. The greatest beast of all is in that place, hunting him just as it is hunted. This one is the nightmare of the deep wood, the canker that turns this world against itself, the gall that has no salve. He cannot turn aside from it, for it knows of him as surely as he knows of it. He can smell it in the leaf-mould, and see its foulness in the oily pools that linger under the arched roots.

  He hesitates. There is a part of him that falters. He sees the cloud-barred stars again, just for a breath's intake, and knows that, once he ducks back into that light-gobbling netherworld, that he will never truly leave it. He wonders if there might be an escape, a place to hide, to wait until the storm has passed and the kills can be made by other, greater animals.

  But there was never that choice, not really. The nightmare is calling him, beckoning him down into the valley, waiting to test him. Mastery of a world like this belongs to those who can stare into the abyss.

  So he coils, he hunches, and then he is running again, down, down, down and into the dark.

  The stranger was brought over to the Nightsward. He came without an escort. A counterpart team led by Talladan travelled to the Perseus. It felt like a hostage-exchange. After the transfers, the two ships lay immobile in the void, waiting for clearance to proceed.

  Arnaid took Alpharius to his own chambers. He did not request that he remove his weapons. By the same token, he kept his own within reach.

  On the way from the shuttle hangars, the newcomer looked around carefully, drinking in the surroundings. 'I heard you take your homeworld with you,' Alpharius said, staring at the carved stonework over the bulkhead lintels, the lanterns burning softly in their alcoves.

  'All Legions do,' said Arnaid. 'Even yours, I imagine.'

  Alpharius smiled. His shaven head was elegant, with a bronze-edged hue to his skin. His armour was dull and blank, though it clearly worked well enough - in comparison to Arnaid's battle-ravaged plate, he looked as if he had just stepped off the forge production-line.

  'You have very many questions, I expect,' Alpharius said.

  'It matters not what I wish to know,' Arnaid said, reaching the doorway to his chambers and extending a hand. 'If you are who you say you are, the Invincible Reason will have the necessary records.'

  Alpharius hesitated on the threshold. 'You're not even slightly curious?'

  'Curiosity is not much prized, here.'

  'Interesting. With us, the opposite is the case.'

  They went inside. The space within was all Calibanite orthodoxy - stone walls and floors, naked flames in braziers, weaponry hung on iron racks next to battle-records and embellished lists of the dead. It had a sombre kind of beauty to it, redolent of the draughty war-keeps of the forest world, and Alpharius seemed to be observing it all carefully.

  'Tell me of the Rangdan,' he said.

  Arnaid sealed t
he door behind them. 'They are an abomination,' he said, flatly. 'The end is in sight now, thankfully.'

  'It has been a hard campaign.'

  'As all are.'

  'Not like this one, I think.'

  Arnaid found that he did not like Alpharius much. There was a distinct sense of superiority in his manner - nothing overt, but there nonetheless, as if he were young and fresh and clever while all about him was mouldering in the past, exhausted and ready to fade into obscurity.

  'They have proved hard to wear down,' Arnaid admitted. 'We have never truly been able to neutralise their ability to foil our tactical instruments - every fight is unbalanced, fought on terms that are seldom of our choosing. At the start of this, the difference was the Emperor. Now, it is the primarch. I would swap all their subtle devices for his presence. He has been their destroyer.'

  'Yes, that is what they are saying on Terra.'

  'We have not had word from Terra for a long time.'

  'It's still there. But how stands your Legion, after six years?'

  Now it was Arnaid's turn to smile. 'You wish me to give out details of our deployment? To you, who do not even wear a company badge?'

  'Forgive me. Curiosity, like I say. But this ship has taken serious damage.'

  'We fought a Rangdan Harp-ship, off the Uriba Angle. Two of ours were lost, we scraped out intact. A high toll, but every one of those we end, the closer this thing comes to completion.'

  'And you are still on patrol.'

  'None can be spared. Not now.'

  'Doing your duty,' said Alpharius. 'That is important to you.'

  'Of course. As to you.'

  'You are a serious Legion. You do not laugh, you do not boast. You are here, on the edge of the known, bleeding for the Imperium. I wonder how many of the worlds you protect know that.'

  Arnaid shrugged. 'Few of us would care.' He moved across to a low stone altar, over which a secure comms station had been erected. He activated the link with a gesture, waiting for the coils to warm. 'I am a Terran,' he said. 'But I spent time on Caliban, and that is all you need to do, to understand this Legion. On that world, the darkness is always creeping back. You torch the forest and it comes back. You cut the trees down, and they rise to smother you again. So they ride out, again and again, striking down into the defiles, hunting for the worst beast in the worst brake. They slay it, and then they may have an hour, or a day, or a week. But something will come back again. So you are always riding. You do not expect thanks. You do not think of it as duty. It is life, and to live it is the source of all honour.'