28a Luna Mendax

by Graham McNeill

  Peace. The word was meaningless to him. As far back as Loken could remember, he had never known any state of being that could equate to the concept as it was now explained to him. The word had served as a talisman once, back when the universe made sense, an ideal for which to strive towards. An end of war and the fulfilment of the task for which he and his brothers had been created. He was of the Legiones Astartes, a warrior born and bred, wrought in the Emperor's gene-labs with forgotten alchemy and unknown science.

  What could a being who knew only how to kill understand of peace?

  Yet here in the garden, Loken felt something close to it.

  Warm sunlight shone in a flickering blue sky, entoptically rendered on the curved inner face of the dome, yet no less pleasing for its artifice. Pictographic clouds drifted in a non-existent breeze, and birdsong chirped from artfully concealed vox-grilles worked into the garden's structure.

  The garden was composed of rough ouslite slabs laid like giant flagstones, arranged around a series of square, shallow basins of crystal-clear water. Lilies and bright flowers flourished in rock pools fed by a branch system hived from the brass tower's reservoirs. Ferns and weeping trees caressed the water's edge, and something in their placement stirred a long-buried memory, though one Loken found himself unwilling to examine too closely.

  He made his way through the garden, enjoying the quiet and the warm scents of living things. Water gurgled over an ornamented arrangement of smooth rocks, and fell in a spuming waterfall that tumbled into a miniature lake of glitter-gold koi. Curved steps led down to neat rows of planting beds, where the seeds Loken had planted were already beginning to grow.

  Clad in a long chiton of unadorned grey over a tan bodyglove with plastek-seals over his armour interface sockets, he was armed only with a few gardening tools hanging from a leather work belt. Loken walked with the heavy steps of a mourner at a memorial, his shoulders broad, but hunched, as though they carried the weight of the world upon them. His features were broad and flat, made blunt by war and drained of joy by betrayal.

  Yet as he surveyed the green shoots pushing their way out of the dark soil to the light above, the thinnest trace of a smile came to his lips. Bred to kill, not to care, it gave Loken a sense of the wonder of creation. By his hand was this universe in miniature flourishing.

  His eyes narrowed as he saw one corner of the planting beds green with an altogether unwelcome growth of weeds and enveloped with a spun sugar gleam of gossamer-fine spider webs. Loken unhooked a trowel from his belt, one that was entirely too small for his grip, but which he handled with surprising delicacy. He could have asked for tools better suited to his post-human scale, but the forges of the brass tower were tasked with the production of more important things than mere gardening implements.

  Like any warrior, he learned to make do with what he had.

  Loken knelt on the corner slab and swept away the spider webs with his hands. Arachnids emerged from hiding at the disturbance, and he flinched at the sight of them. The multi-limbed creatures sparked a memory fragment in Loken: a war of gruelling attrition, hard-fought victories and a glorious time when gods did not make war on one another.

  He couldn't place the memory, but that was nothing unusual. The madness that almost consumed him on Isstvan III had left scars that were slow to heal and quick to flare in jagged pain. The spiders contented themselves with baring their fangs then retreating into their subterranean lairs, and Loken felt an irrational hatred of the creatures swell in his heart.

  He dug into the soil with vicious jabs, laying the weed-roots on the slab beside him and seeking to drive the spiders out. This section was particularly overgrown with parasitic plant matter, which was in the process of draining the goodness from the soil and choking the life out of the crop growing here. The seeds had been sown before he had found the garden, and had withered once already, but with his patient attention, the garden had bloomed once again, brighter and more vital than ever.

  The previous custodian of this biodome had allowed it to grow wild, neglecting the task of prudent weeding and maintenance. He had since learned that Sister Elliana was long dead on Prospero, and no one had taken up her duties in the biodome. An understandable lapse. The maintenance of a space that existed for purely aesthetic reasons would be seen as wasteful.

  And in times of war, nothing wasteful could be tolerated.

  Loken had found the biodome by chance, staring vacantly through the armourglass window of the orbital shuttle bringing him back to Luna. He had spent the journey back from the Caliban fiasco in contemplative silence, isolating himself from the crew of the nameless vessel that crept into the Dark Angels domain before slinking away like a thwarted thief.

  The abject failure of the mission weighed heavily on Loken, and he had struggled with his part in it through the long, cold nights in the dark heart of the vessel. He was a warrior who had turned his back on war, a man without colours or a Legion to call his own. In the depths of his despair, he had believed himself to be a Legion of one.

  Nathaniel Garro had shown him that was no longer the case.

  He no longer fought alone, but he cared nothing for the warriors who stood with him. The brotherhood of his former life was no more than a ghost memory now. None of the easy banter he'd shared with Vipus and Torgaddon leavened the times between engagements, only cold hard mission briefings and grim talk of their shadow war.

  A shadow war in which he no longer wished any part.

  Seated in the back of the shuttle with Iacton Qruze, Loken had felt cramped and claustrophobic, deeply uncomfortable at sharing so confined a space with another refugee from his Legion. Qruze had sensed his discomfort and known enough not to intrude on Loken's solitude. Only as the shuttle banked during its crossing of the Sinus Honoris did Loken notice the glinting diamond of the biodome on the edge of the Mare Tranquillitatis. No sooner had he blink-clicked the selenographic coordinates than the dome was lost to sight as the shuttle spiralled in on its final approach to the Somnus Citadel.

  Built on the haunches of the Palus Somni, the fortress of the Silent Sisterhood rose from the uneven, rocky terrain on the north-eastern edge of the great basin. A soaring tower of brass and crystal, its myriad docking bays were arranged one atop the other like the lairs of undersea creatures in a spire of coral. Their scale was impossible to judge, but Loken knew each was large enough to accommodate the sisterhood's nigh-invisible black ships. Unlike the rest of Luna's surface, the surface of the Palus Somni was the shade of bleached tan, its hue different from any of the moon's other plains or mountain regions.

  Dorn had been waiting for them.

  Already appraised of the mission's outcome by astropathic means, the primarch of the Imperial Fists had, nevertheless, taken time from the dismantling of his father's bejewelled palace to hear the ill-news from Caliban first-hand. Loken had seen Lord Dorn's hope that the imperfect medium of astropathic communication had missed some subtle nuance to Qruze's report, some sign that the Lion's warriors of Caliban could be counted on to rally to the Emperor's banner.

  Dorn would return to Terra none the wiser, and Loken's heart had broken at disappointing him.

  Loken remembered the first time he had seen Rogal Dorn, deep in conversation with the Warmaster. He had seemed titanic then, a demi-god built to match the strength and prowess of Horus himself; no small admission for a warrior of the Luna Wolves to make. Clad in golden plate and seemingly carved from the solid core of a mountain, the primarch had made Loken feel like a specimen pinned to an examination table, scrutinised by a being who understood everything about him in a heartbeat.

  Dorn was still that demi-god, but Loken saw he was somehow... diminished, as though the burden he took upon on his shoulders was growing heavier by infinit
esimal fractions every second. Like the trickle of water that over millions of years splits the mountain, Dorn's role as Terra's Praetorian was one that would already have crushed a lesser being.

  How long might it take to crush a warrior like Dorn?

  That debriefing had been kinder than the first to which he had been subjected. He had been brought to the Somnus Citadel as a broken, wretched thing; a madman Nathaniel Garro had dug out of the ruins of Isstvan III. Loken now understood that he had been closer to death during that interrogation than any other time in his life, though those who wished him gone did not come with blades, bolts or orbital bombardments; they came with doubts and fear and suspicion.

  Was he to be trusted? Could anyone - even a Space Marine - have survived what he survived? Had he been left in the ruins by their enemies for Garro to find? Was Garviel Loken a ticking time bomb left by Horus, primed to inveigle himself into the Imperial ranks only to wreak untold havoc in the days to come?

  No one knew for certain, but powerful men had spoken for him: Garro and Malcador for certain, and - Loken suspected - Lord Dorn himself. But others - he never knew their identities - declared him a danger, a potential spy or worse. What followed was an indeterminate period of pain and misery, inflicted on his body and the depths of his mind to seek answers to those questions.

  That he still lived was not seen as definitive; merely that his interlocutors hadn't found anything damning enough to go against the wishes of the Regent of Terra and the Emperor's golden-armoured Praetorian.

  The Caliban mission had been authorised by Lord Dorn and was... what? Penance? A test of his loyalty? At every stage of that mission, Loken had the sense of a pistol being aimed at his head. He had understood in the way that only men of violence know, that Qruze was to be his executioner had his fealty been proven false.

  With statements delivered to Dorn and numerous faceless functionaries, Loken had followed his snapshot coordinates to the biodome, taking the rusting hulk of a Cargo-5 onto the Lunar surface, past ancient ruins of the first colonies to spring up on Terra's moon and a site marked with an eagle banner that commemorated some great achievement of a distant age.

  That the dome was still functional was Loken's first surprise. That life still flourished within was his second. Overgrown to the point of needing a slash and burn campaign to return it to any form of order, Loken had felt a measure of calm in the flickering light of the glitching entoptics. Blue skies shimmered above, broken by portions of starlight and tantalising hints of the iron-clad world above. The riotous foliage grown to gigantic size reminded him of a world he had once trod, a place of blistered skies and thick bladed stalks of fibrous material. It was a world that bore a name of violent death, but he found he could no longer remember it.

  Loken had taken it upon himself to restore the garden to its former grandeur.

  Kill for the living and kill for the dead...

  Those had once been the words by which he had lived.

  He thought he might even have sworn an oath to that effect once. He'd seen that moment as if from the point of view of an observer, though he didn't know how that could be possible. Had he experienced that moment at all or was it a phantom pseudo-memory?

  A name sighed upwards into his consciousness at the thought of that moment - Keeler - but it held no meaning for him anymore. Was it a person or a place?

  Loken no longer knew and, in truth, no longer cared.

  Once a killer, now he would be a custodian of living things.

  Spiders crawled from the dark earth, and Loken crushed them where he saw them. Some, the smarter ones, kept out of the light and dug down deeper, but Loken's trowel scooped them from their hiding places and killed them anyway. There would be nests beneath the soil, and he needed to kill the offspring of the spiders too. Anything less than total extermination would simply allow the canker beneath the surface to grow unseen until it was too late to stop.

  'You know that if you kill all the spiders, you'll just inherit their work, yes?' said a voice drifting across the koi lake.

  Loken looked up, instantly alert. The speaker stood thirty metres away in the shadow of the weeping trees at the lakeside, but his powerful voice had not diminished in the intervening distance.

  'Why do you say that?' he asked.

  The figure stepped from the shadows to kneel at the water's edge, and Loken saw he had the bulk of a legionary, though not one he recognised. These days, most faces were a blur to him, an assemblage of features that held no meaning, bereft of the visual cues that could differentiate them. He had taught himself mnemonics to recall the people that now mattered in his limited sphere of existence, but this warrior conformed to none of his self-imprinted memes.

  And yet there was something maddeningly familiar to this figure.

  The entoptics woven into the dome's structure flickered and a perfectly circular reflection of Terra glimmered in the black mirror of the water. Loken felt his hostility at this intrusion into his domain lessen at the sight of the planetary bauble, as though it reminded him of a once perfect moment never to come again.

  'Spiders kill the aphids and other pests that devour the plants,' said the man, skipping a flat stone across the lake and grinning broadly as it smacked on a rock on the other side. The reflected image in the water broke into splinters of pale light. 'You might not like the look of them - they're not too pretty after all - but they're waging a war for you even if you can't see it.'

  The man's tone was laconic, but Loken saw past it to the dangerous core beneath, though, oddly, he felt no threat from him.

  'Do I know you?' asked Loken, rising from his labours and wiping his knees of dirt.

  'You don't recognise me?'

  Loken hesitated before answering. 'I might if you came closer.'

  'I think I'm fine as close as we are for now,' said the man, circling around the pool. He bent to choose another flattened stone from the lakeside and turned it over in his hands. Satisfied with its heft, he skimmed it across the water towards Loken. The stone bounced and skipped across the surface of the lake before striking an angled rock and arcing into the air.

  Loken reached up to catch the stone, but it smacked into his palm and bounced away before he could close his fingers over it. The pain was momentary, but it galled him that he'd failed such an easy feat of dexterity. A dirty purple bruise formed on his skin.

  'You used to be quicker,' said the man.

  'I used to be a lot of things,' replied Loken.

  'Very true,' agreed the stranger.

  'You know me, but you still haven't told me who you are,' said Loken. 'If you're another of Malcador's "counsellors" then you should turn around and leave. I owed it to Lord Dorn to go to Caliban, but I've no time for the Sigillite's half-truths and subterfuge. I no longer want a part in his schemes within schemes, so he should stop sending his lackeys for me. Though I should be grateful that at least he's sent a legionary this time.'

  'He sends mortals to try and understand the mind of a legionary?' said the man, with a shake of the head that conveyed his amusement at such an idea. 'They really don't understand us at all, do they? But to set your mind at ease, I'm not here to summon you and I'm no counsellor, though I've dispensed my share of battlefield wisdom. Bolter bon-mots, you might call them.'

  The quip seemed to amuse the man and he laughed aloud, though Loken was beginning to tire of the stranger's obtuse answers. He hooked the trowel to his belt and followed the path that led to the steps cut into the rocks by the waterfall.

  'Leaving already?' asked the man, moving along a parallel path.

  'If you won't even tell me your name then I have no interest in continuing this discussion.'

  'Is my name really that important?'

  Loken paused at the bottom of the steps. He felt that he should know this man's name, and that, yes, it was important he know it. It felt as though much depended upon that revelation.

  'How can I trust you if I don't know your name?'

  'You alr
eady know it. Why should I tell you it again?'

  'I don't know it,' spat Loken, his hands curling into fists. He was unarmed, but a warrior of the Legions had no need of weapons when it came to killing.

  You do,' said the man. 'You've just forgotten it.'

  'Then I've forgotten it for a good reason.'

  'No,' said the man. 'For all the wrong reasons. It was the only way to survive on Isstvan III, but you're not on Isstvan III anymore. The Warmaster tried to kill us there, but he failed. Well, for one of us at least.'

  The entoptics flickered again, and something on the underside of the dome's cupola blew out in a shower of sparks. They rained down onto the water, fading as they fell, and once again the reflected image of Terra appeared on the lake's surface as the skin of the dome became transparent.

  You were on Isstvan III?' said Loken as the figure emerged into the glow from the lake's surface.

  A cold hand clenched his heart as the man's previously unknowable features resolved into those of a brother from a previous life.

  'I still am,' said Tarik Torgaddon.

  They sat on the ridge overlooking the lake, two brothers separated by a yawning gulf of regret and mortality, yet Loken felt as if no time at all had passed since last they had spoken. Torgaddon reclined upon an upright flat stone topped with a crescent arch and toyed with a loose thread on his robes that frayed the more he pulled at it.

  'How are you here?' asked Loken.

  Torgaddon shrugged. 'You tell me.'

  'I saw you... I saw you die,' said Loken. 'Little Horus killed you.'

  'Aye, I think he did,' said Torgaddon, pulling down the collar of his robes and probing his neck with his other hand. The fingertips came away red, and Torgaddon licked the blood away. 'Still, could be worse.'

  Loken wanted to laugh at such a ridiculous statement.

  'How,' he said, 'could it be worse?'

  'Well, I'm here, aren't I?' said Torgaddon. 'Talking to you.'

  'And how exactly is that possible? The dead don't rise from their graves.'

  'I seem to recall something of that on Davin's moon,' pointed out Torgaddon.