Slaves to Darkness

by John French

  ‘We answer the Warmaster’s summons and are blessed to do so,’ said Layak.

  ‘No,’ said Lorgar. ‘The message has not yet reached us, and will not arrive until after we are already at Horus’ side. That does not matter, nor is it why we go. We enter the crucible, my son. From here the outcome of all will follow. Time and destiny draw to a point, and the wheel of the universe waits to turn around it. This has been revealed. It is written in the voices of the storm and the blood of the dying. The fate of all is waiting to be born. Divine victory lies before us, before all humanity.’ Lorgar tuned his gaze on Layak. Reflections of screaming ghosts danced in his eyes. ‘Do you understand?’

  Layak bowed his head at the words, feeling his thoughts shake.

  ‘Most sacred lord, how may I serve?’

  Lorgar turned away again, and Layak felt the fire-glow of his primarch cool, as though it had been cast into shadow.

  ‘I hear the music of eternity, my son. Horus…’ He said the name slowly. ‘Something is… happening to Horus.’

  Volk

  ‘Commander, the flight is cleared to begin final launch preparations.’

  Volk did not answer the human serf. The words that the man spoke were a formality that he knew so well, their rhythms were like the beating of his hearts. He kept his gaze on the machine that lay on the rockcrete apron in front of him. Its burnished metal skin gleamed in the red glow of the hangar cavern. Yellow-and-black chevrons marked its tail fins and wing tips.

  ‘From Iron cometh Strength. From Strength cometh Will…’ said Volk, and watched the words spread in white clouds in front of him. The engines in his strike fighter lit. The air began to sing. ‘From Will cometh Faith…’

  A servitor began to unplug cables from sockets in the back of his armour. A tech-priest in purple-and-copper robes moved around the strike fighter, oil flicking from its brass fingers. An adept followed in the priest’s wake, pulling arming tapers from weapons and closing access panels.

  ‘From Faith cometh Honour.’

  Volk stepped towards his craft, moving slowly in his power-starved armour. He pulled himself up into the cockpit. The sockets in the back of his armour connected to the fighter’s systems.

  ‘From Honour cometh Iron.’

  The strike fighter woke fully. Volk felt the nerve connection tingle up the sockets in his spine. Muscles and bones ached as the sensation of iron and weapons blended with flesh. He breathed out as he felt the engine power surge down his back and the armed weapons prickle his fingers. It felt like becoming whole.

  The strike fighter had a number. That was the way amongst the IV Legion. Other Legions daubed their aircraft with names, like fools hanging bells from their ears. The Iron Warriors did not, and though the Lightning Crow had been Volk’s for four decades of war, its only honour was to bear the number after its unit designation: 786-1-1. The first craft of the first squadron of the 786th Grand Flight. What remained of it, at least.

  ‘This is the Unbreakable Litany, and may it forever be so.’

  Volk unfastened the helmet from his thigh and clamped it on his head. The canopy began to hinge closed above. Yellow light started to blink through the hangar cavern. Alert klaxons warred with the rising chorus of engines.

  He closed his eyes. The silver augmetic eyeball that had filled his right socket for the last three decades unfolded a crude topography of green lines across his sight. He opened his eyes. The green projection and the physical world meshed. Status runes began to flash across his cockpit systems.

  ‘All flight units,’ he said, keying his vox. ‘Flight readiness complete. On the count, brothers.’

  Numerals cycled down at the edge of his vision. The metal cavern wall began to slide down into the floor as the outer blast doors opened. Pulses of red light flared in the dark opening beyond as the light of battle beckoned. Snow and ash billowed in. Volk fed power to his craft’s thrusters. 786-1-1 rose from the cavern floor. It rocked in the gusting wind. Volk compensated without needing to think.

  Across the cavern, sixty-four other war machines began to lift from their stations – trios of Xiphon interceptors, Fire Raptors and Lightning Crows, all of them liveried in bare steel. It was still enough to be called a Grand Flight. Just enough. All of them would go into the air light by half of the payload required for the mission. Their ammo hoppers were almost empty, their lascannon capacitors barely charged, their fuel at the lowest margin possible for mission completion. Less than a decade before, going to war like this would have been unthinkable. Not now, though… Now they were warriors starving for the means to make war.

  ‘786-1-2 standing by,’ said the voice of Zarrak over the vox. Volk keyed a non-verbal acknowledgement to his wingman.

  ‘A little grim tonight, brother?’ The metallic rasp of Zarrak’s ruined voice could not hide the goading amusement in the words. Volk ignored it, though he felt his lips twitch into the shadow of a smile.

  ‘Mission patterns locked in,’ said Volk into the vox. ‘Onyx command, this is flight seven-eight-six, awaiting clearance.’

  Static hissed in his ears for a second. The diminishing count was racing down to zero.

  ‘Flight seven-eight-six, you are cleared for launch,’ came the voice of the officer. The man would be watching the data from Volk’s flight and matching it against the myriad other operations around the Onyx fortress. To that human, the war for Krade would only ever be numbers and signals shunting across his senses. Volk struggled to feel anything but loathing for such an existence.

  ‘Iron within,’ said the officer.

  ‘Iron without,’ replied Volk, and switched to the flight vox. ‘All weapons live.’

  Amber weapon runes flashed to green. Shackled power built in 786-1-1’s engines. The strike fighter was shaking around him as the thrusters fought to hold it in place.

  The count hit zero.

  786-1-1 shot forwards. Force slammed into Volk. Air gasped from his lungs. The wall of night and swirling snow raced to meet him, and then he was out, rising into the black sky. Behind him, his squadron brothers were flowing from the open cavern mouth, afterburners streaks of blue fire.

  Alerts began to scream as enemy targeting systems locked on to him. Tracer rounds and explosions boiled the night beyond the canopy. He triggered countermeasures. Flares and auspex lures scattered in 786-1-1’s wake. Volk slammed the strike fighter into a climbing spiral. His wingman followed him, holding in perfect formation. The rest of the Grand Flight scattered into the air from the hangar mouth, wheeling as fire reached for them. Beneath them, the Onyx mountain range extended away to the sky. Explosions pulsed across the ground, staining the underside of the clouds. Batteries dug into the mountain flanks blazed. Small-arms fire sparkled in a sea of light.

  Krade was a world on the boundary between the Warmaster’s domain and the vengeful wrath of Ultramar. The warp storms that had for so long split the galaxy had guttered. The screaming tides that had blinded the Ultima Segmentum had dispersed and with its ebb, the anger of Roboute Guilliman, and every scrap of might he could call on, had begun to move in the storm’s wake. The Shadow Crusade of Lorgar and Angron had wounded them, and the predations of the Night Haunter had bled them. But the Lord of Macragge had endured, and now his sons came in vengeance. Worlds held in the Warmaster’s name had come under attack – some had fallen, and the loyalty of others had begun to waver. All the while, words and rumours had come from the galactic south, first in whispers then in scattered reports, of retreat and disaster: the warriors of the XIII were coming.

  Across the path of this rising tide, the Iron Warriors stood. Worlds were burned, fortified or reinforced. Traps were laid in the path of the enemy. For every advance they made, the forces of the False Emperor paid and paid again. But advance they did.

  Remnants of Imperial Army conquest-echelons, Mechanicum Taghmata, rogue trader households, landless Knights and the shat
tered remnants of Legions thought broken at Isstvan V – all fought in the armies marshalled by the Ultramarines. They fought with discipline and a unity of purpose, and that purpose was retribution. Against them the Lord of Iron stood, unbreaking, never tiring, holding the line while the Warmaster opened the path to Terra.

  Krade was a keystone in that line, a world that controlled a system, and from that system projected power into other systems, without which the enemy could divide and slaughter. It had to hold, and hold it had for sixth months. Volk had been there since Perturabo had planted his banner on Krade’s northern mountains. He had watched as the pressure on the defences grew in the void, on the ground and in the sky. So far, the Ultramarines themselves had not reached Krade in force, but they would, and then the real fight would begin.

  Volk was iron in blood and bone. He would fight until there was nothing left for him to fight with, and then still fight on. But sometimes, in the first moments of battle, he wondered if there was victory waiting for them.

  ‘Incoming enemy interceptors,’ called Zarrak.

  Volk slammed the strike fighter into a spin before the auspex began to shriek the lock warning. Red runes flowed across his display. A stutter of autocannon fire lit up the night.

  ‘Breaking left!’ shouted Zarrak.

  Volk pulled 786-1-1 out of its spiral and flooded power to the engines. Fuel warnings pulsed to amber. He rose, feeling the acceleration punch him with bone-breaking force. He did not have the time or fuel for an air duel. In his half-machine sight, he could see that his flight was with him, each craft following its own weaving path as munitions exploded in their wake. The enemy were there too, pairs of red markers converging from below and above. They would outrun them, though. Volk had seen and run the calculations; his forces would reach their objective. They would succeed.

  ‘What–’ called Zarrak across the vox, and then cut out.

  Volk’s auspex fuzzed, static squawked.

  A missile plunged down from the cloud layer above them and struck Volk’s wingman. Fire roared out. Volk twitched aside on instinct as a pulse of las-fire burned through the space where he had been.

  A shape was falling from the dark clouds about him. The night had stolen the colours from its wings, but even in the split-second glimpse he caught, Volk recognised it. It was a Xiphon-pattern interceptor, kin to those that flew under his command. It was a predator of the skies, designed to kill its own kind. And it was not a machine that could be flown by human hands.

  Volk rolled. Lascannon bolts kissed the air he passed through. Warning alarms were screaming in his ears. The vox was a static-ruined squall of signals as the rest of the flight met the enemy descending on them.

  Volk blinked the automatic targeting system off as he kept rolling.

  The enemy interceptor was plunging down at him like a dagger, its lascannons turning the night to strobing day. Volk triggered a burst from his thrusters. His roll stopped dead. The manual targeting rune centred on the interceptor for an instant. He touched the fire stud. A single pulse of white brilliance lanced out from his wings. It was a shot that no mortal could have made and few amongst the Legions would ever have attempted. It struck the enemy interceptor’s tail and vaporised it.

  Volk had two heartbeats to watch the burning craft tumble past him. In those brief moments – while half of his awareness was marking the position of the rest of his flight and their opponents – he saw the colours of his enemy lit by the fires of its death.

  Blue.

  Sapphire-blue. The colour of the sea under the sun at noon. And on its wings, the symbol of Ultramar painted in stark white.

  So, they are here, thought Volk.

  He keyed the vox.

  ‘Onyx command, this is 786-1-1. Priority alert to all command echelon.’

  His hands moved, and the fighter banked and cut down through the night towards where his brothers spun above the battle-lit land.

  ‘Go ahead, 786-1-1,’ said a voice that was too deep to be human.

  ‘Forces of the Thirteenth are in the battle space,’ he said. Beneath him, he saw a flash of white fire. A green marker blinked out on the flight status display. ‘The Ultramarines are here.’

  Horus the Warmaster, injured upon his throne

  Two

  Maloghurst

  ‘It is the Warmaster’s command,’ said Maloghurst. The ghost image of Mortarion shimmered in the air above the burning body of the metatron. The Death Lord’s eyes were hollows above his high gorget. Fumes hissed from the vents in his armour. Looking at him, Maloghurst felt his skin prickle and sweat. On the floor, the splayed body of the metatron twitched. Blisters bubbled across its flesh. It would not survive the audience; a waste, but that could not be helped.

  The warp had gifted Horus’ forces with many things, not least of which were means of navigating and communicating across the vast distances of space. While they still used Navigators to guide most of their ships, and astropaths to send messages between dispersed forces, the subtle arts and secrets had given them greater precision than those still loyal to the Emperor could ever dream of. Through the binding of souls and the entreating of daemons, they could bring ships through storms that would break the mightiest of fleets. They could speak as though they were standing in the same chamber while half a galaxy away. But, like all powers that involved the denizens of the warp, there was a price – a truth the metatrons exemplified.

  All of them had once been astropaths, before their minds and souls had been split by sorcery and their souls conjoined with creatures of the warp. Through them, the voice of the Warmaster could be heard by his servants as long as they also had a metatron. But that connection cost blood and lives. In many cases the creatures would not survive fulfilling their purpose. Maloghurst had already burned through three of his metatrons in the course of a single night.

  ‘If it is the Warmaster’s will then he can speak it to me with his own tongue,’ said Mortarion. The primarch of the Death Guard was leaning on his scythe, his armour shifting as he breathed.

  ‘I am the Warmaster’s voice, and you will heed me.’

  ‘You are a mouth that opens but makes no sound, Twisted One.’

  ‘He trusts and values you above all, lord. This honour is one that he would give to no other, and he would see no other claim it from you.’

  ‘Yet he does not do me the honour of telling me that I will be the first to fling my Legion at Dorn’s walls. You are a flatterer, Maloghurst, but that can only be called an honour when the command comes from the master, not his dog.’

  ‘You will do this, Mortarion. He orders it so.’

  ‘Then he can order me to see it done.’

  The scythe spun and cut so swiftly that Maloghurst could see it only as a blur. The image vanished. The reek of sulphur and burning sugar rolled through the air. On the floor, the metatron writhed, flesh splitting. Blood gushed from the blind creature’s mouth. A high, keening wail rose in Maloghurst’s mind. He held his gaze on the empty air for a second, then drew and fired his boltgun. Blood and bone sprayed out. Silence settled in the reeking air.

  ‘To waste such material so freely…’ came a purring voice from behind him. ‘That says something.’

  Maloghurst turned, pistol rising, his eyes finding their target in a fraction of a heartbeat. Twisted he might be, but his flesh was still transhuman. He stopped, finger hovering over the trigger.

  ‘What does it say?’ he asked.

  Nine lenses looked back at Maloghurst from beneath a black cowl. They rotated slowly as he held his aim and trigger finger steady.

  ‘Maybe it says that you are merciful,’ said the voice. It was female, sibilant and wet-edged.

  ‘How did you get in?’ he said slowly.

  The figure drifted silently closer. It was tall, or rather it seemed as though something tall had been folded under the swathes of fabric. Maloghu
rst’s armour tingled with static as he looked at it. He held his aim.

  ‘Maybe it says that you are angered.’

  ‘You will comply, Sota-Nul, or I will rip you apart and have what remains fed to the Luperci.’

  ‘Maybe it says that you are cruel.’

  His finger pulled tense. Inside the casing of his bolt pistol, the firing mechanism was poised on the edge of ignition.

  ‘It says that if something is of no use, I am willing to discard it.’

  Sota-Nul tilted her head.

  ‘Is that so? I will record that fact for truth analysis.’ Despite all he knew of her, it was always Sota-Nul’s voice that made him want to burn her where she stood. It was not like most tech-priests’: too emotive, too… fleshy.

  ‘How did you enter these chambers?’ he growled.

  ‘As the representative of the Fabricator General, I pass where I may.’

  ‘Not on this ship.’

  ‘Wherever the wheel turns, so may I go.’ The tech-witch tilted her head briefly. ‘Though if my intrusion has caused you emotional discomfort, I tender those apologies that will cause your humours to rebalance.’

  Maloghurst lowered his weapon. He took a careful breath and forced his mind to stillness. Anger had its uses – all emotion had its uses – but no matter how much his instincts told him to shoot the tech-witch, he could not listen to them. Sota-Nul was a disciple of Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator General of the new Mechanicum. Maloghurst was not sure what she was – human, machine or neither – but he could taste the warpcraft threaded through her. Just as he was Horus’ equerry, so Sota-Nul was Kelbor-Hal’s factotum at the court of the Warmaster. He could no more shoot her than she could kill him. If either tried and failed, they would be starting a second civil war while the first was still burning. One day that war might have to be fought but not before Kelbor-Hal and his Dark Mechanicum had helped set Horus on the Throne of Terra.