by Various
He halted, then flinched back.
He could see something through the tiny window his fingers had cleared in the ice.
‘What is this?’ Boreas’s voice seemed to rise and vanish into the dark.
Computations clicked through Crius’s mind, following paths of inference and possibility, forming conclusions.
‘This is a tomb,’ said Crius, his voice a dry whisper. Slowly he raised his hand again and scraped the frost from the glass. His eyes poured light into the space beyond.
An iron skull looked back at him.
Crius’s mind stopped dead. The data was still scrolling across his eyes but he was no longer paying even the slightest attention to it. A ringing filled his ears.
The frozen form of Athanatos looked back at him from its cocoon of ice.
‘How can you hope to do anything other than die here?’ He heard his own question resonate in his mind, and Athanatos’s reply from the pit of his memory.
‘This is no longer a war of hope brother – this is a war of vengeance and obliteration.’
And with the memory came the inescapable inference of the accumulated data.
Cybernetic resurrection, breathed the logic in his mind. Athanatos is dead. They are all dead. They came from this sleep to greet us when we arrived and then returned to its embrace. They have turned the Keys of Hel.
‘No.’ He heard the word come weakly from his own lips. ‘No, it is forbidden. Our father forbade us to open those gates.’
Ferrus Manus is dead.
Crius could not move. His thoughts were a spinning ruin, his eyes locked upon the caskets marching into the distance under their shrouds of frost. There were hundreds of them.
The deck shook beneath his feet. A spill of cracked ice fell from the ceiling, far above. The Thetis was within the battle sphere.
Death is all there is now, Crius.
The deck shook again. Blue lights were lit along the length of the chamber, and a dull crack echoed as the front of the casket split open. Gas vented from grilles and pipework. Crius stared, his eyes still blazing. Boreas’s sword ignited.
Another crack rang out, and Athanatos stepped free. The deck rang under his tread, pistons surging in place of muscle. His weapons shed their casings of ice as they armed. He stood for a second, his joints breathing steam, his servos clicking.
Then he looked at Crius. His eyepieces glowed blue.
‘You see now, Crius,’ rasped Athanatos in a voice like the shattering of frozen iron. His deactivated power fist reached out and plucked the sceptre from the dais. Crius could see Medusan runes running around it in rings, each one now glowing with faint light. He could almost taste the exotic energies bound within its core. ‘Now, you understand.’
Phidias could feel his flesh quivering in sympathy with the ship as his interface links fed him the Thetis’s pain. There was blood in his mouth and more blood clotting on the inside of his armour.
‘Weakness,’ he growled to himself and forced his mind to focus.
The Spear Strike and Wolf of Cthonia had shot past the Thetis and were turning hard, firing as they came around. Turbolasers began to score her back, cutting deep and burning into her guts. The Dawnstar and Death’s Child were closing, their prow and dorsal weaponry hammering the Thetis’s flanks. Phidias thought he could feel his own flesh cooking around his implant sockets.
Everything was as it should be, but everything was also terribly wrong.
The assault craft were ready, the boarding torpedoes poised to enter their launch tubes, but the wakened dead had yet to fill them. They should already be swarming into the lower decks of the XVI Legion ships. But they had delayed too long, or the wakening processes had failed. Athanatos should have called the rest from their sleep by now.
Phidias tried to signal him, but the only answer was the crackle of static. They needed to launch; they needed to strike at the ships attacking them now. They had no guns – all the power had been drained from them to keep the dead asleep and to push the Thetis into the battle.
Distortion washed across his vision. He fought down a sticky wave of mental fog. They needed time. If they could just survive a little longer…
‘Bring us above them,’ he ordered.
Reports began to cluster into Phidias’s awareness as the engines strained. If they could loop above the enemy’s plane of attack, then they could plunge back into the storm of fire when the wakening had completed. They could still have this moment of vengeance. His mind ran with recalculations. They could still do it. They could–
A synchronised spread of fire from the Dawnstar and Death’s Child hit the Thetis in her spine. The shock wave rippled through the superstructure. Domes across the outer hull shattered. Hundred metre-tall spires tumbled away into the vacuum like splinters from a shattered spear.
Phidias dug his fingers into the arms of the throne, refusing to fall. He could taste burning. Something deep within his body had burst and was cooking in the heat of his machine links. His eyes focused on the holo-projection of the battle sphere, on the pulsing green marker of the Oathbound hiding in the shadow of the planetoid, seemingly forgotten by all.
They needed time, no matter what the cost, or their deaths would serve nothing.
With a grunt of effort, he opened a long range vox-link.
‘Help us,’ he croaked through bloody lips.
For a second nothing changed. Then the Oathbound began to move. Reactor readings flared to full life, pushing it out into the edge of the battle sphere. It accelerated, engines burning like captured suns.
Phidias saw all of this, and yet he knew that it would not be enough. The Oathbound’s guns were still out of range. Even as he thought it, the Spear Strike came around, momentum making her skid across the void as her guns fixed upon the Thetis.
Lances burned into the rear hull. Molten metal wept from the wounds, and the armour plating began to glow as the fire ate deeper and deeper.
‘What have you done?’ Crius’s voice rang clear in the icy air, even over the thunder of the battle beyond.
Athanatos did not answer but turned to look at the rows of ice-covered caskets. Then Crius felt it – a shiver in the air, like a breath edged with static.
He opened his mouth to speak again, but Athanatos spoke first, the bulk of his body clattering with pistons and gears.
‘The logic fails after a while. Have you noticed that? The pure flow of data and reason – after a while it just runs out. You keep trying to understand, to bargain with the reality of what has happened, but there is no understanding to be had, no bargain to be made.’
‘You have–’
‘The way of iron, the logic of the machine – it was meant to make us strong, to raise us above flesh.’ Athanatos paused, and when his voice came again there was rage in the dead, electric drone. ‘But it was a lie. Iron can shatter, logic can be flawed and ideals can fail.’
‘What are you?’ Boreas demanded, and Crius glanced at the templar. He had not moved, but there was a bound fury in his stillness. Slowly Athanatos looked at him.
‘I am the dead of Isstvan. A Word Bearers legionary took half my skull with a claw. I fell, like so many of us. Phidias took me from the battlefield – me and as many more as he could manage. Our flesh had failed, and our gene-seed rotted in our corpses, but enough of me remained.’ Athanatos raised the sceptre and watched the data runes run across its surface. ‘He knew the secrets of the Aegisine Protocols and the Scarcosan Formulae, the devices and processes from Old Night that our father placed out of our reach. Phidias remade me and gave me a second life, a life of ice and iron. For a long while I could not remember who I had been, but eventually some of the past returned. That is rare. Most of those wakened remember little.’ Athanatos looked towards the caskets lining the chamber. ‘But all remember what it is to hate.’
‘The primarch forbade what you are,’ growled Crius. ‘Ferrus Manus–’
‘Fell,’ said Athanatos softly. ‘I saw it, brother. I watched
our father die.’
Crius felt cold spill through him. His mind was no longer functioning properly. He could not reason – he could only feel the ice forming splinters in his flesh and augmetics.
Ferrus Manus fell.
He failed.
Blackness rolled through his thoughts, spreading like a thunderhead, boiling with anger.
He left us. What remains of his authority, now?
Athanatos was looking at him, nodding. His eyes were blue suns in his iron skull.
‘Yes,’ Athanatos said. ‘You see it now. That is what our father left to us, then. Not logic, not reason, but hatred. That is the lesson of his death. This will be the last war, fought for vengeance rather than reason. There is nothing else. No orders or oaths mean anything any more. You know this is true, Crius. You cannot deny it.’
‘I call it betrayal!’ roared Boreas. Crius saw a blur of lightning and polished metal as the templar’s sword whirled. The blade struck Athanatos’s hand, bit deep, and scattered blood and oil. The sceptre fell to the deck. Boreas cut again, his blade spinning low to slice into the Iron Hands legionary’s leg.
Athanatos fell, and Boreas raised the blade above his head for a killing blow. Crius moved before he could think, his hands locking around Boreas’s forearms. The Imperial Fists templar did not even pause but turned, whip-fast. The twist of force lifted Crius from his feet, and he was spinning through the air, crashing to the ground, rolling, coming up to meet an armoured boot descending towards his chest.
‘Heretic,’ spat Boreas. Crius heard the word, felt it cut even as Boreas’s boot crashed into his breastplate. The shock rippled through him, but out of the corner of his eye he saw Athanatos rise to his feet, reaching for the sceptre.
Boreas was turning, his sword dragging lightning in his wake.
‘No!’ screamed Crius, and launched himself up. His shoulder stuck Boreas, and they fell together. Crius felt the field of Boreas’s blade char the lacquer from his armour. They hit the deck with a dull crack. Boreas was already twisting beneath him, still holding on to his sword.
The deck was shaking. The whole room was shaking.
Boreas hammered his free hand up into Crius’s face, and the metal socket around his left eye crumpled. Crius’s sight crazed. Boreas struggled free, then rolled and rose up, the edge of his sword alight.
I fall here, thought Crius. Like our father, I fall under the blade of a lost friend. He looked into Boreas’s cold, merciless eyes and felt relief flood his flesh. In his mind, the broken cogs of logic were still.
Boreas’s sword crackled with an executioner’s hunger. It rose high above Crius, shining like a sliver of a storm, and stabbed down.
Athanatos came out of the fog with a scream of pistons, striking Boreas across the left shoulder. The templar spun with the impact.
Crius felt cold spread through him, as though the chamber’s melting ice was reaching into his body. Time seemed to slow to a trickle, to a fading pulse. Crius watched as Athanatos stepped in for a second blow, and realised that – dead or not – his Legion-brother would not survive this.
Athanatos was fast as only a Space Marine could be, but Boreas was faster.
The Imperial Fists legionary turned his stagger into a cut, and the edge of his blade sawed through the cables and pistons under his opponent’s arm. Crius saw liquid glitter black in the blue light. Athanatos began to turn, but Boreas was already pulling his sword back for a kill stroke.
Crius rose to his feet. Pain dragged at his limbs. Blood cascaded from him. Cold was spreading through his chest. He advanced one step, his hand pulling the hammer from his back.
Boreas lunged. The tip of the sword met the already weakened armour under Athanatos’s arm.
Crius felt his hammer activate in his hand. Darkness clouded his vision.
Boreas pulled his blade out through the front of Athanatos’s chest.
Crius roared.
Boreas turned, and their eyes met.
Crius’s hammer blow shattered Boreas’s plastron and lifted him from his feet. The templar hit the deck and did not rise.
Swaying with a hiss of complaining servos, Crius looked at Athanatos. The other Iron Hands legionary lay on the deck, his torso split open to show the metal components clicking amidst the ice-burned meat of his chest. Blood and oil formed a dark mirror sheet around him. Crius heard his own eyes whirring as they tried to focus. The deck trembled, and suddenly the numbing cold in his chest was all around him. He looked down at the dark fluid covering his torso and legs, pulsing from a wide wound in his ribs.
The deck came up to meet him as he fell to his knees. He met Athanatos’s dying gaze. There was no sorrow or pity in those eyes.
‘The dead must walk,’ croaked Athanatos. ‘For vengeance. We remember. The dead remember…’
His voice trailed off, static bubbling in his breath. His eyes dimmed, a final flicker of defiance in their depths, and then they were empty.
Crius turned his head slowly. His vision blurred into pixelated blocks. He could feel the void within him, the void that had been there since he had heard that his father was dead. It opened wide to greet him.
Pain and numbness ground together with each slow movement. The sceptre lay on the deck where it had fallen from Athanatos’s hand, blood smearing the glowing runes. Crius reached for the device, grasped it and lifted it from the floor. It felt like clutching a lightning bolt.
Ferrus Manus is dead.
His eyes would not focus anymore, but his fingers found the runes cut into the sceptre’s length.
And so are we all.
He twisted each ring.
We are wraiths that remain in a dying land.
His fingers found the trigger stud.
And all that is left to us is vengeance.
Behind him, another casket opened with a crack of shattered ice; then another, and another. Figure after shambling figure stepped onto the deck. Crius felt the sceptre pulse, before it slipped from his fingers. The darkness reached up to meet him.
It felt warm and tasted of iron, like metal taken from a fire, like flesh and blood.
The last thing he saw, before night closed over him, were his dead kin marching to war, ice falling from their tread.
The Thetis rolled, her engines clawing the void for control. Close behind her, the enemy vessels closed in upon their prey. The dark mouths of launch bays opened across their hulls, but while their sisters closed into boarding range, the Dawnstar and Death’s Child kept firing. Macro-shells cracked the Thetis’s outer hull, and plasma widened the wounds, preparing the way for the warriors waiting in the Dreadclaw pods and assault craft. They were close now, the whole engagement crammed into a battle sphere no more than a thousand kilometres in diameter. To the Sons of Horus, the Thetis’s death seemed inevitable, but even as they gave the order to board the wounded ship, the situation changed.
The Oathbound plunged in like a thrown dagger. A sheet of light reached from the Imperial Fists ship and struck the Dawnstar. Void shields collapsed, popping like oily water bubbles. The Oathbound fired again, accelerating hard. Plasma relays within the enemy vessel’s hull burst, flooding compartments with sun-hot energy. In her engine spaces, thousands screamed as their skin burned in the heat.
The Dawnstar shook. Smearing fire across the dark, she turned to bring her guns to bear. Half drained of power, the Oathbound had one weapon still to fire.
High in the tower of her bridge, Shipmaster Casterra nodded to a servitor cradled in a knot of cables.
‘Launch torpedoes.’
The missiles slid into the void, their internal thrusters igniting as they met the vacuum, powering them ahead of the Oathbound. Each was the size of a hab-spire, its warhead an artefact gifted to Rogal Dorn by the Adeptus Mechanicum priesthood of Mars.
A wall of interceptor rounds rose from the stricken Dawnstar. Torpedo after torpedo exploded before they could find their target.
Then one slipped through and struck the Dawnstar high o
n her flank, driving deep into the warship’s guts.
The ship continued to turn, surrounded by a haze of debris and the flicker of failing void shields. Then the torpedo’s vortex warhead detonated in a spiral of neon light and roaring darkness. The Dawnstar practically vanished, her hull fragmenting as unnatural forces pulled her apart from within. In the space where she had been, a glowing wound remained, howling with impossible sound before collapsing to emptiness.
The remaining XVI Legion ships faltered. The Spear Strike broke from her interception course with the Thetis and turned towards the Oathbound. The others cut their speed as they diverted power to shields and weapons.
The respite was enough. The Thetis pushed beyond her attackers, curving above them in a burning loop, and plunged back into the inferno-stained void between her enemies.
From his throne, Phidias watched the enemy ships rise to meet them. The Wolf of Cthonia and the Death’s Child spun as they tried to bring their weapons to bear. The Thetis plunged on. Shards of armour the size of Battle Titans ripped from her flanks, liquid fire and burning gas billowing in her wake. The enemy spun and fired as they came about, peppering the Thetis with explosions.
On the edge of the engagement, the Oathbound turned as the Spear Strike closed. The Imperial Fists ship came around, lining up with her enemy. Both ships fired, their prows blistering with fire as their shields burst. Then they hurtled past each other, raking with rolling volleys. The Spear Strike’s belly was torn open by macro-cannon shells, ripping away gantries and sensor dishes in a ripple of detonations. The Oathbound took the return fire across her unshielded hull – a blaze of plasma found the yawning barrel of a battery cannon, detonating a shell in the breech, and suddenly explosions were ripping down the ship’s entire flank.
She began to spiral, her engines pushing her on even as deck fires ate her from within.
On the Thetis’s bridge, Phidias listened to the Oathbound’s last signals in silence. Around him the servitors and crew bent to their tasks, murmuring in impassive binary and Medusan cant. Deep within the folds of his thoughts, he watched the data from his ship shining clear and bright. Damage indicators were a squall of deep red. Engine output markers flashed insistently.