Fear provoked denial. And denial brought anger into the words of others.
“Do you ridicule this council, Mantis Warrior?”
Do you find us unworthy even of your words?
“Do you hold us in contempt even now?”
The voices and thoughts swirled around him, challenging his pride, daring him to break his silence and to attempt to argue. The psychic interrogations probed at his mind, making him dizzy and nauseous. His soul cried out in anger and horror, demanding that he turn the indignance back at his accusers but simultaneously pleading for them to stop asking for words and to simply condemn him. He had nothing to say to them. There was nothing that words could undo.
The silent Chapter Master meant no further offence to this revered and ghostly council, and he refused to be drawn into a contest of words. His crimes were clear for all to see; he had denied nothing. He would not make things worse for his battle-brothers or for the honour of the Mantis Warriors by engaging in the cheap competition of excuses and explanations. He was Adeptus Astartes, one of the Emperor’s chosen servants, and he would not play the grubby word-games of servitors, Arbites or inquisitors. History would judge him harshly for his silence, but nobody could judge him more severely than he judged himself. For history, he cared not one iota. For himself, he had given up all hope of salvation—he had taken steps from which there was no returning, and he would not shame his name further by scrambling hopelessly for the last pathetic phantasms of deliverance. He accepted his damnation, and so the condemnation of this revered council held no greater horror for him. Once the fall begins, there is only flame and sword.
“You must help us to understand, Mantis Master.”
Your crimes are heinous beyond our understanding.
“If you say nothing, we can offer no mercy.”
Will you say nothing, Neotera? Will you not help us?
There was a long, resigned silence as the judges waited without hope of hearing a response. The hearing had been in session for three days already, and the Mantis Warrior had not yet spoken, other than to acknowledge his name and rank when he had first been brought before the council. He had not even taken advantage of his right to know whom he faced; which great Chapters the Masters and senior Librarians had been drawn from to compose this Council of Judgement. For three entire days, he had not moved, not a finger or a flicker of an eyelid, and a fine sprinkling of dust had settled out of the air onto the broad, emerald shoulders of his ceremonial armour. He was a statue, the very icon of the immaculate and devoted warrior. And yet he stood before a punitive court that had not been convened for countless centuries; he stood with no defence against the charges and no hope of emancipation. He was guilty.
For the last three days, his mind had gradually turned in on itself. A question spiralled and spun through his thoughts, but it was not one of those thrown at him by his judges.
How had it come to this?
The question obsessed him, as though it had woven itself into the very fabric of his being. He had been sure. He had been right. And yet, how had it come to this? Not for the first time in his long and brutal life, Neotera recognised the potential of his soul to embrace the kind of fanatical focus and devotion of the Mantis Religiosa. He could feel how easy it would be to release the last vestiges of his sense of self, undeserving as it was, and to lose his will in the vast and blinding brilliance of the Emperor’s terrible magnificence. The Religiosa lived as the lost and the saved, having no sense of their own needs and only a pure devotion to the Imperial Will.
The intrepid and pious Captain Maetrus of the 2nd Company had only recently discovered a possible source of this tendency in some Mantis Warriors; he hypothesised that it was connected to a uniquely altered neuro-toxic function of the preomnor implant in the Chapter’s gene-seed. However, rather than seeing it as a curse that condemned its victims to the life of fanatical devotion of the Mantis Religiosa, Maetrus argued that it was a reward for faithfulness. The heightened sense of focus and the contracted perception of space and time that accompanied it sharpened a Space Marine’s reflexes to an unprecedented degree, sometimes even giving the impression of mild precognition. During the last years of the war, Maetrus had sought Neotera’s permission to develop a specialist cadre of Space Marines able to harness this blessed curse, claiming that they might tip the balance in the seemingly interminable battles with the Star Phantoms and the Novamarines. He had wanted to call them the Praying Mantidae, but the demands of the war had stretched resources to breaking point—before they had finally broken in such spectacular fashion—and Neotera had not been able to spare the Space Marines that Maetrus requested.
Neotera wanted to close his eyes and swim in his regrets and laments. How had it come to this?
The temptation to surrender himself to the light was almost overwhelming. He had felt it before, and it had helped him in situations even more lethal than the one he was in now. For the tiniest and most horrifying moment, Neotera wondered whether this descending battle-haze would be enough for him to unleash the Venom of Tamulus on those who sat in false judgement over him. There were only twelve of them—he had beaten worse odds before. Perhaps it was they who sinned against the Emperor? Perhaps he had been right after all—it was his righteous duty to cut down these heretics and hypocrites who dared to stand in judgement over him.
But the moment passed in a heartbeat, and then the appalling shame of the thoughts crashed even more weight into his overburdened soul. He knew he had been wrong, that his war against the agents of the Imperium had been mistaken, that his own judgement had failed him, and that in his failure resided the damnation of all his battle-brothers. It was he, and he alone, who should bear the fury and the agony and the shame. Clinging to even the faintest hope that he had been right and that the edifice of the Imperium of Man itself was mistaken just compounded his crimes with egregious arrogance. He could not even stand to let the idea enter his head; it violated the very foundations of his being.
Even hidden within the confines of his own thoughts, Neotera felt his crimes worsening and his soul screaming in anguish. Yet, to the judges around him, he was a statue of control and composure. His eyes unblinking and his breath all but indiscernible. The certainty of his guilt hardened in his resolve, and his jaw clenched imperceptibly.
How had it come to this?
While his eyes kept Neotera crisply and painfully in the spotlight on the aquila, his thoughts searched desperately for answers. He didn’t want explanations for the Council, but part of him needed to know when it had all gone wrong. Why hadn’t he seen it?
He realised that Maetrus had seen the truth first. The brilliant captain had sent a communiqué to Neotera just before the Star Phantoms had finally broken the defensive barricade around Badab itself. Even as the Phantom drop-pods thundered down into the Palace of Thorns, Maetrus had known that Huron’s heart was black and filled with the taint of Chaos. At the same time, Neotera was fighting desperately to hold position in his battle-barge, engaged in the endgame of the war against the Astartes coalition that had turned on Commander Huron’s Astral Claws. Neotera had watched Maetrus break formation and turn the guns of his cruiser, Tortured Soul, against the ships in the collapsing defences of the Astral Claws. Maetrus had turned his fire against his own allies, breaking the Mantis Warrior formation in two by joining his guns with those of the Star Phantoms and breaking open a corridor for their drop-pods. And Neotera had only been able to bellow his disbelief at this insubordination and treachery—he had not seen the truth even then. In the heat of the battle, Maetrus had offered no explanation but had simply said that he trusted that Master Neotera would do the same.” Finally, when Lord Huron’s own cruiser punched out of the atmosphere and cut through the Exorcists’ blockade, Neotera had watched with slowly dawning understanding as Maetrus threw the Tortured Soul into pursuit and charged into the Maelstrom with guns blazing in the tyrant’s wake. It was then, and only then, that Neotera understood what he had done. The horror had been
beyond his capacity to comprehend, as though the galaxy had suddenly collapsed around him, leaving him standing alone and desolate in the ruins. He had fallen to his knees and gazed up into the heavens to see the constant, brilliant light of the Emperor, but he had seen only darkness.
The exit-ramp crashed down to the ground, kicking up a great cloud of dust from the moon’s surface. As the mist of dirt billowed around him, Shaidan stood on the ramp and scanned the scene, his doubled-bladed Mantis Staff held vertically in one hand by his side. He had not been back to this place since the forging of his staff in the hidden and half-forgotten furnaces of the moon’s core. But this was not the return he had expected.
Beyond the rim of the crater that provided cover for his Thunderhawk, Shaidan could see flashes and streaks of bolter fire and energy discharges. Explosions shuddered through the shifting dust, making the ground ripple like a grey, liquid desert. Giant plumes of powder erupted into the thin atmosphere, obscuring the stars, marking impacts over the tightly arcing horizon. Banks of Space Marines were dug into cover in improvised bunkers to the right, forming a steadfast siege of the obscured Astartes facility in the cave at the foot of the mountain to the left. Above the trenches in the plain, standards of quartered blue and bone shook erratically in the airless atmosphere as the ground trembled beneath them. Icons of the Novamarines’ twelve-pointed star were clear to see, proudly and defiantly planted on this husk of a moon orbiting Badab Prime.
As his gunship had descended towards the moon, Shaidan had quickly identified the heavily camouflaged entrance to the cave, which had long ago been blown into one of the volcanoes that peppered the surface of the perpetually dark side of the moon. Despite the efforts of the Astral Claws to keep the location of their base hidden, Shaidan’s keen eyes could detect the dull red light and the constant wisps of heat that seeped out of the cave mouth. The tunnels ran straight through to a lattice of magma chambers, from which the base and the mine beneath it had drawn its power for centuries, and then down into the bowels of the moon and the now-abandoned mines. The Mantis Librarian could remember the labyrinth of red-shadowed passageways from all those years before. And now a barrage of fire hailed in and out of the cave mouth, transforming it into a vision of a flame-breathing dragon emerging from the ancient and fiery depths, lighting the entrance to the secret base like a beacon.
Three squads of Mantis Warriors charged out of the Thunderhawk, filing past Shaidan on either side and fanning out to make a line along the lip of the crater. As Shaidan himself stepped off the ramp into the wake of the Space Marines, the engines of the Thunderhawk roared and the gunship pivoted as it rose out of the crater, bringing its main guns around to cover the Mantis Warriors. Great gouts of fire erupted from the Thunderhawk’s lascannons and heavy bolters, spraying the ground around the dug-in formations of the siege forces of the Novamarines, forcing them into cover for just long enough for the Mantis Warriors to crest the crater and begin their charge.
As Shaidan clambered over the lip of the crater, with threads of bolter fire searing over his head, he saw the Mantis Warriors already braced into formation. They had come to this little moon for a rendezvous with a detachment of Astral Claw allies, who had assured them that Badab Prime was being virtually ignored by the coalition arrayed against them. Back on the Tortured Soul, Captain Maetrus had been characteristically suspicious and had dispatched Shaidan with three heavily armed squads; they would not be caught unaware because of the naiveté or over-confidence of their allies.
For a moment, Shaidan watched the Devastator squad brace themselves in the low gravity for heavy fire from their missile launchers and plasma cannons, throwing force into the mix of shells and las-fire from the Thunderhawk and rendering the makeshift barricades of the Novamarines into banks of flame and raw energy. As the torrent of fury pounded the enemy line, the two Mantis assault squads blasted off the ground, spilling flame from their-jump packs as they screeched over the lunar surface, spluttering staccatos of bolter fire and hurling grenades over the barricades into the trenches beyond. In the thin atmosphere, the assault squads seemed to flash with unnatural speed, and they were over the battered siege line in an instant.
But something was wrong. The attack of the Mantis Warriors had been smooth and by the book; they had hit the formation of Novamarines with sudden and overwhelming force, and they might have expected to be mopping up the fringes of the skirmish by now. Instead, there was an eerie quiet in the theatre as the assault squads hovered over the barricades, their bolt pistols silent and their chainswords still holstered.
From his position on the edge of the landing crater, Shaidan could see Sergeant Treomar of the first assault squad drop out of the sky into the unseen trench. A few seconds later, the sergeant reappeared above the barricade, hovering easily, and turned to face Shaidan. The vox-unit in his ear hissed.
“Librarian Shaidan. The trench is deserted. The treacherous Novamarines have fled.”
Shaidan turned on his heel, immediately realising what had happened. “The mines! This moon is riddled with tunnels just under the surface; they’ve dropped into the mines!”
Even as he spoke, he saw a great plume of moon dust erupt into the sky from the crater behind him, directly beneath the low-hovering Thunderhawk. A hole opened suddenly in the ground and a squad of Novamarines stormed out, their bolt pistols coughing and their chainswords brandished. As Shaidan spun his force staff and vaulted down into the crater to check their advance, he saw a team of Novamarines, carrying missile launchers, emerging behind the vanguard. Behind them, labouring through the dust, came the trundling weight of a Thunderfire cannon and the elaborate profile of a Techmarine in its wake. Despite himself, Shaidan found himself admiring the execution of the Novamarines’ plan.
With just a few strides and one low-grav leap, Shaidan was down amongst the Novamarines. Immediately his Mantis Staff ignited with corruscating force as the Librarian spun it in a smooth arc around him, slicing one of its twin blades through the abdomen of one Space Marine while punching a burst of lightning from his other hand into the helmet of another. The two Novamarines recoiled under the assault, their bodies suddenly sagging as they tumbled backwards in the faint gravity, crashing into their battle-brothers, who brushed them aside and took their place between the Librarian and the emerging Devastator squad.
Meanwhile, the Mantis assault squads roared into view over the edge of the crater, charging back from the abandoned barricades in the plain. They opened fire with their bolt pistols but were unwilling to throw grenades while Shaidan remained engaged. But the Novamarines had moved with great efficiency. The Thunderfire cannon was firmly planted on its tracks and its quad-barrels were already fully adjusted, angled down into the curving walls of the crater. There was a sudden and abortive blaze from the barrels and then silence; for a moment it seemed that the cannon had misfired. But then the ground convulsed and shuddered, as though the moon were suddenly wracked with agony, and a huge subterranean detonation shattered the side of the crater and the landscape beyond. The lip of the crater crumpled and collapsed beneath the hovering figures of the assault squads. Great cracks ripped into the lunar surface around the Mantis Devastator squad in the plain, swallowing three Space Marines whole, as clouds of dust were ejected into the atmosphere and jets of lava pulsed up from the ruptured magma chambers beneath the volcanic region.
Under cover of the tremor shells, lines of missiles streamed out of the Novamarine launchers and punched into the underbelly of the Mantis Thunderhawk as it banked and pitched in an attempt to get clear of the crater. The missiles punched relentlessly into the gunship’s armour, one after another slamming into the same spot beneath the engine block. The armour was not designed for such extreme, close-range punishment and Shaidan could actually see the crack open in the adamantium just before the next flurry of rockets split the armoured panel away and crashed into the engine.
For a long, agonising second, the Thunderhawk shook and started to pitch. Tendrils of smoke escaped
from the stern and intensifying flickers of flame started to lick out from between the cracking armoured panels. Then the gunship pitched abruptly and rolled sharply to the side; it lost its altitude in less than a second and crunched into the lunar surface just beyond the crater, smashing down next to the Mantis Devastators. The impact shook the already unstable ground, and the landscape convulsed. After a fraction of a second, the downed Thunderhawk shifted and seemed to settle, but then the ground beneath it collapsed and it fell a hundred metres down into roiling lava streams below, bringing half of the remaining Devastators with it. As it sunk into the pyroclastic flow, the heat finally detonated the engine core, and the Thunderhawk shattered into an explosive ball of fire.
From the bridge of the Tortured Soul the atmosphere of Badab seemed to be on fire. The planet blazed like a small star as the oxygen in the ozone layer raged with flame. Captain Maetrus watched the ships that vied for superiority in different levels of orbit. His own cruiser was caught in between two banks of blockades: the defences of the Astral Claws in low orbit, barely above the thermosphere and supported by volleys from ground-based artillery on the planet below, and the siege line of the Exorcists that sought to cut Badab off from the rest of the segmentum. The two massive bulks of tonnage unleashed constant broadsides across the intervening space, lacing the fire-tainted darkness with searing lines of lance-fire and torpedo trails. Rapid strike vessels and destroyers darted through the theatre, manoeuvring around each other and attempting to approach enemy cruisers closely enough to launch boarding actions.
[Warhammer 40K] - Legends of the Space Marines Page 29