by Various
He knew what it all meant. He could almost feel it in his body. They were on the verge of death, inside and out. It did not matter now.
At the edge of his awareness, the voices of the dead rose – some in monotonous flesh-voices, some in mumbled machine code. The dead marched to war, and that was all that now mattered. Hundreds of them poured from the icy heart of the Thetis to fill the ramshackle assault craft and boarding torpedoes.
Phidias waited, the screams of his ship and the whispers of his brothers washing over him.
The Thetis cut between the Wolf of Cthonia and the Death’s Child. Fresh volleys of energy sliced out from both ships. The Thetis shook, and binaric screams filled the air, thick with the reek of burning metal.
In the cable-tangle of his throne, Phidias felt the ship’s systems pulse with rage. He let the feeling rise in him, shutting out all his other sensations. The enemy vessels were so close that if they fired now they would hit each other.
‘Launch,’ he said, and his ship answered.
The Thetis’s engines cut out. Retro thrusters fired, fighting against the ship’s momentum. Void locks opened along her flanks and gut, scattering craft into space on breaths of launch flame. They swarmed across the gap and found the hulls of their foes. Magma blasts boiled through bulkheads, graviton charges cracked armour, and the assault craft clustered around the breaches like flies on a bloody wound.
The first of the dead Iron Hands met the Sons of Horus on the gun decks of the Wolf of Cthonia. The corpses of gun crew littered the decks beneath the magazines, choked and crushed by explosive decompression. Oily flame-light shivered in the remaining pockets of atmosphere. The Iron Hands advanced, their weapons spitting death. The deck quivered beneath their slow tread.
Blast-doors down the deck opened with a rush of smoke-filled air. The Sons of Horus came through in tight wedges, heavy infantry shields held in a solid wall. They fired as they charged – bolt-rounds cut the air, slammed into armour and detonated. The first Iron Hands legionary fell, his re-forged body torn apart by multiple explosions. Then his brothers answered in kind. Volkite and plasma beams lit the darkness with neon light. Armoured figures vanished in washes of fire and false sunlight. Shields slammed into armour, sparks flew as chain-teeth scraped across ceramite. Iron Hands fell to blades, to hammers, to point blank blasts of energy and explosives. The dead died again in silence, the sounds of their ending stolen by the airless void.
And still the dead poured from the Thetis.
By the time the Iron Hands had taken the gunnery decks, a dozen other beachheads had formed across the Wolf of Cthonia. The Sons of Horus began to dwindle, falling back into close-pressed circles of defiance.
In the void, both the Death’s Child and the Wolf of Cthonia continued to slide through the vacuum on their original trajectories. Within the Death’s Child, the Iron Hands struck the ship’s command citadel, dozens of them breaking into the towers and bastions surrounding the domed bridge. The Sons of Horus met the Iron Hands advance with walls of suppressing fire and ground it to a halt before signalling their counter-attack. Terminators waded through spent shell casings and heaped bodies, muzzle flare and the light of power fields reflected from their sea-green armour. For a while it seemed certain that the Death’s Child would throw the dead back into the void.
Chance ended that hope.
Crawling with Iron Hands boarders and slewing in the void as she turned back towards the Thetis, the Wolf of Cthonia fired her torpedoes. Perhaps it was a mistake – perhaps panic, or a malfunction in a system on a ship that was being ripped apart from within. Launched blindly, the torpedoes streaked between the spinning vessels. One clipped the upper hull of the Thetis and spilled flame across her ruined towers. The rest hit the Death’s Child just fore of her engines and detonated next to a primary plasma trunking.
The explosion almost ripped her in two. She began to spiral, her engines pushing her on even as propagating explosions ate her insides. The Iron Hands pressed on as the ship they had conquered broke apart.
On the Wolf of Cthonia, the Iron Hands finally reached the reactor decks and quenched the warship’s burning heart. The Wolf of Cthonia became dark and silent. Faced with the death of her sisters, the Spear Strike ran for the system’s edge and dived into the warp. Deprived of the total annihilation of her enemies, the Thetis settled to stillness beside the dying vessels like a predator settling to feed upon its kills.
When their task was done, the dead that still walked withdrew to the Thetis and the waiting embrace of cold oblivion.
The voice reached Crius through dreams of ice. ‘Waken.’
The pain came first, as it always did. It began in his chest and spread through his remaining flesh, burning with an acid touch. Then the iron awoke.
More pain came, stabbing through him, shrill and needle-sharp. For a long moment he could feel each piston, servo and fibre of his body but could not move them. He was trapped once more, held by the dead weight of the metal he was bound to. Blood pulsed through his flesh and power through his limbs, beating like a distant drum. Sounds swelled in his ears: the clatter of machines, the scrape of tools, the burbling of servitors as they went about their tasks.
More pain came, and it did not fade. The instinct to thrash, to shout, to break free of the iron rose in him until it took all of his will to remain still. Then the moment passed.
His body became his own again. Sight returned. First came a cloud of static falling from the blackness like snow. Then shapes, then colours, then a face that he recognised.
‘It is time,’ said Phidias.
Crius nodded. A stutter of pain ran up his spine.
Ferrus Manus is dead.
As always the truth rose in his mind as fresh and raw as the moment he had first heard it. First emptiness, then the sucking blackness of sorrow, then anger redder than blood, then at last the hatred came. Cold, limitless and as dark as quenched iron, the hate took shape and became a need, a drive. He cut away all other emotions and thoughts, disconnecting them from his mind like redundant systems. Only the hatred remained, bathing in the light of his pain.
He turned from Phidias to look at the ring of Iron Hands that stood before him, their weapons in their hands, their eyes cold when they met his gaze. He looked back to Phidias.
‘We are close enough to the Solar System,’ said Phidias.
Crius said nothing but began to walk, and in his wake the Iron Hands followed in silence.
Boreas looked up at Crius – the skin over the hard bones of the face was paler and the flesh thinner than when they had left Terra. The templar wore a black robe rather than his ruined armour, and chains linked thick manacles around his wrists and ankles to an adamantium collar which circled his neck. The links of the chains clinked together as he straightened. His wounds clearly pained him, but he would heal and live. Boreas’s face showed no emotion, but Crius caught a flicker in the depths of the eyes. His mind processed possibilities as to what that could signify: anger, pity, resolve, recognition? He dismissed them all as irrelevant.
The hangar was as silent as when they had arrived all those months ago. The looted carcasses of landing craft and gunships still filled the dark cavern, and the hot air still pressed close. The golden and black hull of Boreas’s Storm Eagle sat ready to launch, her lights creating a pool of light before the open embarkation ramp.
‘We are at the edge of the light,’ said Crius. ‘We will send a signal once we have left. Your brothers will find you here.’
‘You are… like them,’ said Boreas, his eyes moving from Crius to the rest of the Iron Hands.
‘They are my brothers,’ replied Crius.
‘There will be no end to this,’ said Boreas quietly. ‘All hope ends down the path you now walk.’
‘Hope was lost long ago, Boreas.’ Crius’s voice was a low rasp. In his chest he felt the beating of the machines that had replaced his hearts. ‘It was lost the moment our primarch fell, when our fathers became mortal in our eyes.
This war will not end as you think, Boreas, nor as your lord wishes.’ He paused and lifted his hands. The broken chains clinked where they still hung from his wrists. ‘But I will fulfil my promise even though I do not return with you. If you wish this bond, it is yours. When the time comes, then you may summon us.’
Boreas held Crius’s gaze for a long moment.
‘How?’
‘Ignarak. The silence of mountains that once burned, and will burn again. Send that message with one word bound to it. If we still endure then we will hear you, and we will answer.’
Boreas said nothing. His features had closed and hardened again, his expression unreadable. Crius took a step back, and made to leave the chamber. The two Iron Hands bracketing Boreas led him up the ramp of the Storm Eagle, and Crius heard the pilot servitors burble to their craft in the language of machines.
At the top of the ramp, Boreas twisted to face Crius again.
‘What word?’ he called back. Crius looked up at the templar. ‘In the summons, what word will bring you?’
The hot air of the hangar billowed as the Storm Eagle’s engines began to keen with power.
‘Waken,’ said Crius.
On the ramp, Boreas stood for a moment in the rising wind and then turned away.
Where there had once been many sons of Nocturne, now there were only four – Brother Jo’phor, grim Hae’Phast, the young neophyte Go’sol, and the ever-silent Donak. They crouched among the rocks above the trail. None knew the others well, and that they had come together at all amidst the turmoil of the massacre was as great a miracle as any.
They spoke in whispers. They had not dared use the wider vox-net for days. Their voices barely carried above the wind and Donak’s repetitive sharpening of his combat blade. Go’sol flexed his shoulders, stretching his numbed limbs.
‘When will they come?’
Jo’phor quietened him with a raised hand. ‘Patience, neophyte.’
‘And stay still,’ Hae’Phast added. ‘Your motion will betray us to the enemy.’
Go’sol’s face reddened at Hae’Phast’s words.
‘I am sorry, masters.’
‘Do not be sorry,’ said Jo’phor. ‘This is not how your training should be, but you will be stronger for it.’
The Scout nodded. Hae’Phast grunted bitterly. ‘If we live...’
The old warrior had no patience with the youth – whether that was his nature or merely anger at the recent atrocities they had witnessed, Jo’phor could not yet tell.
‘Brother, mind the spirit of the neophyte,’ he urged him.
‘And what of our spirits? My dreams are tapestries of gross betrayal, our brothers slaughtered by those they once called friend.’
‘Just have a care for the lad.’ Jo’phor sighted down his weapon to where their improvised explosives had been planted. ‘I worry more for Donak. He has not spoken at all since we found him. The flames of his eyes are low. The forges of his hearts have been quenched.’
Hae’Phast looked at him. ‘You see? There are things too great for even a Space Marine to bear. Tell me you are untouched by it.’
Jo’phor spoke so quietly, his voice was barely audible.
‘I am not untouched, brother. My hearts ache. My mind cannot contain the enormity of the slaughter. My eyes are sore with sorrow.’ He turned to Hae’Phast. ‘But my rage outmatches it all. We four are of different companies within the Legion, granted, but all of us were born of the fire and fury. Our brotherhood is unshakeable. There is succour for me in that, and power. Let all the other Legions turn upon the sons of Nocturne, for nothing can break the bonds between us. There will come a reckoning. That is what I say to any who doubt us.’
Hae’Phast nodded solemnly. When he spoke, he was calmer.
‘And that is why we follow you, brother.’
‘All is not lost,’ said Jo’phor. ‘That the traitors spend so much time scouring this particular area gives me hope. I do not believe that we are the last servants of the Emperor on Isstvan Five.’
Behind his visor, Hae’Phast chuckled. ‘And if we are?’
Jo’phor shifted.
‘Then we will fight to the very end. Silence now. The Night Lords are coming.’
They all held themselves as still as the rocks around them. They waited until the faint sound of engines reached their enhanced ears. Go’sol looked up.
‘Do you hear that?’
‘Bikers,’ said Hae’Phast. ‘Do we withdraw?’
Jo’phor shook his head.
‘Too late. Look!’
A figure came around the curve in the track. He was clearly a legionary, but unarmoured and with welts criss-crossing his pale flesh. He staggered towards the defile where the Salamanders’ booby traps waited.
‘Now?’ Go’sol produced the detonator switch, but Jo’phor held up his hand urgently.
‘Wait. That is no traitor who runs before them...’
The sound of bikes built to a roar as a figure in night-blue armour veered around the mountainside. He rode the narrow, uneven path with breathtaking skill.
He chased the stumbling figure, lashing him with a cruel whip, harsh laughter grating from his stylised helmet augmitters. Four other bikers followed, the lightning marks on their battleplate sullied with dry blood.
Hatred boiled up in Jo’phor’s hearts. He looked at Go’sol – the Scout’s face was flush with excitement.
‘Wait for their captive to get clear.’
The lone legionary was still within the blast zone, but the bikers were gaining on him. Any longer and they too might escape the worst of it.
Jo’phor felt his guts twist. ‘Now! Go’sol, now!’
There was a terrific explosion, the blast of multiple charges erupting out of the lengthening shadows. The leading Night Lord was hurled from the track like a rag doll, his bike plunging end over end down the steep mountainside.
His followers skidded to a halt, frantically scanning through the clouds of obscuring dust to see who had attacked them. Jo’phor surged forwards, aiming for one traitor who had removed his helmet. He would pay dearly.
A boiling jet of promethium from Jo’phor’s flamer engulfed the warrior. He fell screaming from his mount, his burning flesh sloughing from his bones.
The others spun their bikes and opened fire. Treachery had left their skills undimmed, and bolter shells tore up the rocky terrain, but Hae’Phast and Donak fired with impunity from cover. One Night Lord raised a plasma pistol, before a bolter shot took him in the chest and he slumped over the handlebars.
There were two of the traitors left. One gunned his engine as his comrade intensified his fire, rearing up onto the hillside. Fishtailing madly, he rode his bike up the incline towards Jo’phor. He brought a chainsword down at the Salamander’s head, but his bike slipped sideways on the scree-covered slope and he reached out to stay his fall.
His hand never touched the ground. A bolt exploded within the traitor’s gauntlet, spraying ruined flesh and metal.
As the warrior fell, Jo’phor looked to his left; Brother Donak strode forwards, his weapon held level in both hands. He advanced calmly on the fallen Night Lord, putting a single shot through his eye lens.
The last traitor swung his bike around again to bring its twin bolters to bear, but Hae’Phast brought him down, blowing out his chest plate along with the ribcage it shielded.
The silence was sudden and horrifying. The air stank of propellant and murder. Jo’phor wrinkled his nose.
‘Well fought, brothers. By a thousand pinpricks must we bleed them.’
‘They died more easily than they deserved,’ Hae’Phast muttered, advancing warily between the bodies. Then he turned to Go’sol. ‘Quickly now, young Scout – “strike and fade”. Let’s strip the bodies.’
He went down to the dead, and Donak and Go’sol followed him, rifling through the saddlebags of the nearest bike.
Hae’Phast halted suddenly, doubling back towards them. ‘What have we told you, lad? Leave the gun! Tak
e nutrient packs, ammunition...’ He stopped to put a bolt in the head of a traitor who stirred. ‘Night Lords bolts fit a Salamander’s gun. A Night Lord’s water bottle will quench a Salamander’s thirst.’
Go’sol seemed unsure. ‘It feels wrong.’
‘These warriors were our cousins. They were raised up by the Emperor alongside us – their cause has been our cause, their lord brother to our lord. But now we are opposed. They are the enemy, and we are the righteous.’
Jo’phor did not hear his brother’s words. He knelt beside the Night Lords’ fallen captive and his hearts sank when he saw a fist-sized hole in the legionary’s back. He rolled him over, seeing the emblem of the Raven Guard tattooed on his shoulder.
The legionary’s eyes fluttered. Jo’phor took him in his arms.
‘I have killed you, kinsman,’ he murmured.
The Raven Guard’s eyes focused. ‘No, brother. You have saved me. Do not weep.’
‘I would weep for us all, my friend – loyalist and traitor alike. To slay our own kind is no small thing, no matter the enormity of their crimes.’
‘They are our own no longer. Darkness has overtaken them.’ The legionary was wracked by a bloody cough. ‘Listen to me. You must fight on. Fight and survive...’
‘And you, survive with us!’ Jo’phor urged.
The Raven Guard smiled and weakly shook his head. His eyes closed. Jo’phor stayed with him, until the weak beating of his hearts had ceased.
When his brothers approached, Jo’phor pointed to the mountain peaks high above the trail. He did not speak, for in that moment he did not trust the authority of his voice.
As they made their way from the ambush, he went to one of the Night Lords corpses. With his knife, he scratched the mark of his Legion into the warrior’s greave. The work was rapid, but fine – a dragon’s head of pure, silver scores roaring outrage against betrayal.