by Various
But while they were effective against conventional foes, the alien vessels were forged from synthetics beyond mere metal. Two of the ships managed to slide free, dragging their ruined carcasses away from the Imperial warship, their cores holed right through and open to space.
They were the lucky ones. The five eldar cruisers still impaled shook as they were dragged off-course, stalling in the void. Their engines burned in silent heat, but each of them remained anchored in place. The spears driven through their bodies were more than projectiles, lances launched to cripple. They were harpoons, fired to claim prey.
With malicious slowness, the Conqueror recalled its spears.
The lances began to ratchet back towards the vessel that fired them, dragged home on massive chains. Only the World Eaters would deploy something so barbarous and primitive on such a scale, and only the World Eaters would make such crude weaponry into something so efficient.
Link by link, the Conqueror dragged the five ships closer, its massive engines straining against their stagnant thrust. The other eldar raiders broke away, finding it increasingly difficult to fire at the Imperial warship now using five of their own ships as barriers to protect itself.
One ship sought to cut its flailing kindred free, focusing its weapons on the great chains reaching between the Conqueror and its prey. Diving close enough to fire brought it within range of the warship’s laser batteries, and the eldar raider’s shimmering shields collapsed in an anaemic sigh. A moment later, the vessel itself came apart under the Conqueror’s rage.
Angron watched all of this taking place, a smile on the slit of his lips.
‘Release the hounds.’
Boarding pods spat from the Conqueror’s hull, crossing the short distance in the blink of an eye, and disgorging World Eaters into the bowels of the impaled eldar vessels.
‘Retract the Ursus Claws that failed to strike. Khârn?’
‘Sire.’
‘Come with me. Let us greet these eldar.’
As he strangled the eldar warrior, Angron reflected on an unpleasant truth: perhaps Lorgar had been right.
The warrior kicked in the primarch’s grip, struggling against the one hand Angron had wrapped around his throat. A tightening of the fist ended all struggle with the muted wet crackle of ruined vertebrae. He cast the corpse aside, bashing its skull open against the sloping wall.
The eldar vessel sickened him. The sight and smell of it was an assault on the senses. As soon as he’d pulled his way from the boarding pod, chainaxe revving in his hand, the sheer alien foulness of the place set his mind aching. The bizarrely sterile, spicy scent that teased the nose. The odd angles of the walls, the twisting rise and fall of the deck, and the strange un-colours that seemed formed from a hundred shades of black. Beneath it all was the sickly-sweet smell of fear, and the copper tang of vein-fluid, leaking from broken skin. Even alien vessels could smell of blood, when their bellies were sliced open to reveal what lay within. There was purity in the smell – purity and purpose. He’d been born for such things.
Splinters of alien metal clattered against his armour, tearing fresh scars along what little of his skin remained exposed. But what was a scar, really? Neither evidence of defeat, nor a medal of triumph. A scar was nothing more than a mark to show that a warrior faced his enemies at all times, never once showing his back.
Angron shoved his own men aside as he chased the retreating eldar. Their crackable armour and stick-thin limbs had a perverse grace when they moved, but it was a sickening, alien thing. One could admire a snake’s lethality, but one could never be deceived into finding it beautiful, let alone worthy of emulation.
His axe fell without heed, without care, each of his merest blows slaying wherever it fell. Ahh, the Butcher’s Nails hammered into the back of his head were buzzing now. His muscles burned, and his brain boiled with them. All that mattered was keeping the feeling going. Each sensation was reddened by the delicious justification of honest anger. This was what it meant to be alive. Humanity was a wrathful species, and anger vindicated all of its sins.
Nothing was as honest as rage – throughout the history of the human race, what release of emotion had ever been more worthy and true than depthless anger? A parent confronting their child’s killer. A farmer defending his family against raiders. The warrior avenging the deaths of his brothers. In rage, anything was justified. It was the highest state of sentience. With rage came vindication, and with vindication came peace.
Angron charged through another cannonade of splinter gunfire. Blood bathed his neck as he felt the stinging crashes against his head. A sudden nerve-sharp coldness made him wonder, just for the shadow of a moment, if his face was blasted open to the bone. No matter. It had happened before. It would happen again.
He charged on, screaming without realising it, hearing nothing and feeling nothing beyond the disgustingly pleasant whine of the Butcher’s Nails in his brain.
The wrath brought clarity. At last, with the spikes buried in the meat of his mind finally spitting their most waspish outpourings, Angron was allowed to drift, to dream, to remember.
Serenity. Never peace, no, never that.
But serenity in rage, like the calm at the heart of a storm.
Three months before, when they’d started this Shadow Crusade, Lorgar had asked him why he mutilated his own Legion. The Butcher’s Nails, of course. He meant the Butcher’s Nails.
‘Do you know what these things do to you? Do you know what they really do to your men?’ Lorgar had asked.
Angron had nodded. He knew better than anyone.
‘They let me dream,’ he admitted. It was one of the few moments in his life he’d ever risked admitting such a thing. He still wasn’t sure why he’d said it. ‘They make it difficult to feel anything except the most fierce righteousness.’ A headache thudded behind his eyes, coiling all the way down his spine. He wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have such a talk, but Horus had sent them into Ultima Segmentum to work together. At this stage, so early in their journey, the cracks of tension had yet to show.
Lorgar had smiled sadly and shaken his head. ‘Your Butcher’s Nails were not made for a primarch’s mind, brother. They steal the healing hours of sleep from you, not letting your brain process the day’s events. They also cauterise your emotions, feeding everything back into your basest urges. To kill. To fight. To slay. That is all that gives you pleasure, isn’t it? These implants, crude as they are, have remapped the cartography of your mind.’
‘You don’t understand.’ Perhaps they did do all those things, but they also brought a maddening peace that had to be chased, and the purity of absolute fury. ‘They are not simply a curse, though they may seem that way to you.’
‘Then enlighten me. Help me understand.’
‘You want to remove them. I know you do.’ He’d die before he allowed that. For all the pain, for all the twitches, tics, spasms and aches right to his bloody bones, the Butcher’s Nails brought clarity and purpose. He’d never sacrifice that. He was not weak enough to even feel the temptation.
‘Brother,’ Lorgar had sounded disheartened then, his eyes cooled by concern. ‘They cannot be removed, not without killing you. I had no intention of trying. If it is possible for us to die, you will do so with those wretched things still inside your skull.’
‘You know we can die. Ferrus is dead.’
Lorgar looked away, as if staring through the metal chamber wall. ‘I keep forgetting that. Events are proceeding so very quickly, are they not?’
‘Hnnh. If you say so.’
‘So why would you inflict this upon your Legion? Answer me that, at least. Why would you order your Techmarines to hammer these Butcher’s Nails into the heads of every warrior in your service?’
Angron hadn’t replied at once. He owed Lorgar no answers. But a thought took slow bloom in his mind – the idea that if any of his kindred could understand, it might be Lorgar. After all, the lord of the XVII Legion had inflicted punishments of his own
upon his favoured sons. Even now, the Word Bearers in the Gal Vorbak were severed beings, existing with daemons trapped in their hearts.
‘It is all I know,’ he admitted at last. ‘And it has never failed me. This is how I win my wars, Lorgar. You’ve done similar things to win yours.’
‘That is true enough.’
From there, the memory grew hazy and indistinct. The degeneration followed over the course of weeks, as the two Legions suffered the rise of their masters’ tension. Forty thousand warriors in Word Bearers crimson, and seventy thousand in World Eaters white, filling the decks and holds of a vast flotilla.
In the beginning, the clashes between Legion ideology had manifested in manageable ways. Word Bearers warriors had been honoured to be invited into the XII Legion’s gladiatorial pit fights, and World Eaters had been offered entrance to the XVII Legion’s training chambers. It was only as the primarchs’ discontent filtered down to their warriors that divisions arose.
The first crack in the alliance had happened at the world of Turem, a planet loyal to distant Terra. The unified fleet had only dropped from the warp to resupply, refuel, and move on deeper into enemy territory. The Legions had cast aside the pathetic excuse for planetary defences with no effort at all, and ransacked the world’s refineries for everything they required.
Within a week, the Word Bearers had been ready to move on. The principal cities were put to the cleansing flame, and all icons venerating the Imperium were broken beneath ceramite boots.
But the World Eaters weren’t finished. What followed were the long days and longer nights of bloodshed and butchery, as the XII Legion, led by their primarch, pursued the ragged remains of the population across the globe.
Lorgar’s initial disagreement gave way to disgust, and in turn became the cold anger for which he was now becoming known. Angron couldn’t be summoned, couldn’t even be contacted, as he laid waste to what little life remained on the planet.
When the last World Eaters returned to their vessels, the flotilla was ten days delayed, lagging behind its targeted estimates.
Then came Garalon Prime. The first world of the Garalon System turned about its sun at the ideal distance not only to sustain human life, but to allow it to flourish. A rare jewel, a mythological Eden, Garalon Prime stood out as a beacon of Imperial compliance, providing vast numbers of men and women for the oh-so-glorious regiments of the Imperial Army.
After annihilating the modest orbital defences, Lorgar had ordered a portion of the population enslaved, and the world burned. He vowed to leave Garalon Prime as nothing more than a blackened husk, with his fleet’s indentured crew and servitor contingents swollen by fresh meat.
But once more, the primarchs’ desires diverged. Angron led the World Eaters down to the surface, ransacking the cities and destroying all hope of a cohesive assault. As ever, his tastes ran along bloodier lines. He had no desire to leave a charred cinder of a planet as an example to the Imperium. He would leave a grave-world, a planet of silent cities and a billion bones bleaching in the sun.
And so it continued. World after world, forcing the brothers apart through desire and ideology, bringing two of the Traitor Legions close to a civil war of their own. When Angron ordered his fleet to break from the warp to attack a fifth world, the primarchs at last came to the edge of violence.
‘If you seek to stop me, Lorgar, you and your deluded Legion die first.’
‘So be it, brother. We will not fire the first shot, but we will not allow you to pass us and waste lives and resources on worthless butchery.’
‘It is not worthless. They are the enemy.’
‘But not the true enemy.’
‘All enemies are true, Lorgar.’
Strange, how Angron could remember those words with such biting clarity, but not the look upon his brother’s face. It had only been a few hours ago, yet it felt as intangible now as a childhood dream.
‘Sire.’
The voice reached him from a great distance, faint through the coppery euphoria of absolute anger. Rage that deep left its taste on the tongue – something not far from fear or ecstasy, but sweeter than both.
‘Sire,’ the voice said again.
He turned, but for a moment he couldn’t see, until he wiped the blood from his eyes.
One of his warriors stood before him, carrying a black iron chainaxe, its teeth-tracks clogged with meat.
‘Sire,’ the warrior said. ‘It is done.’
Angron’s sigh released the last of his clinging fury. In its place, pain swept back into his skull, filling the void once more. The muscles of his right hand spasmed, and he almost lost his grip on his own axe.
‘You know I despise that title, even in jest. Hnnh. Back to the Conqueror.’ He hesitated a moment, looking about himself, at the dark walls streaked with blood dappling. ‘The ship is still. No movement. No shaking. No thunder.’
Khârn stood with his boot on a fallen alien’s breastplate. The dead warrior’s armour was sculpted in the image of the spindly, thread-thin musculature beneath.
‘The battle is over.’ He knew better than to ask if Angron had failed to hear the vox-net broadcasting the void battle’s resolution. The primarch never took kindly to reminders of his wandering mind. ‘The enemy flotilla disengaged. Our combined fleets were more than enough to break them.’
Angron watched the blood dripping from his chainaxes. ‘The battle made no sense from its very beginning. What did they hope to achieve?’
‘Captain Sarrin believes xenos witchery allowed them to foresee the moment that the Conqueror would be vulnerable, as it charged ahead of the fleet. Perhaps they sought to strike at us, kill the Legion’s command structure, and run back into the night.’
‘How many escaped?’
‘Most of them. Once the ambush failed, they ghosted back into the void before our fleet could engage.’
Angron mused upon this, as he watched the red droplets fall from the edge of his axes. Each one bred tiny ripples in the pool of blood by his boots.
‘We will chase them.’
Khârn hesitated. ‘Lord Aurelian has already ordered the fleet to form up and proceed deeper into the segmentum as planned.’
‘Do I look like I care what he wishes, Khârn? No one runs from the Conqueror.’
He faced the hololithic image, doing all he could to bite back the pain and keep his temper in check. The Butcher’s Nails itched and thumped with their own pulse, and concentrating through their maddening beat was a trial in itself. They never ceased, for they were never appeased. Even with bloodshed so recent, they wanted more.
In truth, so did he. The Nails’ curse was to make him crave that serenity at the heart of rage.
Lorgar’s image wavered with distortion, crackling in the interference of his flagship readying its warp engines.
‘Need I remind you that our Legions were on the brink of battle before that pathetic alien diversion? Angron, my brother, this is our chance to reunite and let calmer thoughts lead us onward.’
‘I will pursue the eldar. Your consent is irrelevant to me. Once we’ve hunted them down, we will rejoin your fleet.’
‘Divided we fall,’ Lorgar sighed. ‘You are supposed to be the warrior between us, yet you ignore the most basic tenets of staying alive in battle. If you leave me with a third of my Legion at the edge of Ultramar, do you believe there will be anything left for you to rejoin after your idiotic void-dance is concluded? Do you think what remains of your World Eaters will be able to withstand a full assault if you are caught by the Thirteenth Legion? Or Russ? Or the Khan?’
‘If you fear being outnumbered, perhaps you shouldn’t have sent countless thousands into the meatgrinder at Calth.’ Angron sniffed back another trickling nosebleed. ‘Then they would be here with you now, instead of sailing towards death in the Ultramarines stronghold. Why not call them back before they strike? Perhaps they will hear you shouting from the moral high ground.’
Both brothers stared at each other’s holo
lithic images for a long moment. It was Angron who broke the pregnant silence, but not with another insult.
This time, he laughed. He laughed for a long time, until tears ran down the ruination of his statuesque face.
‘I fail to see what is so amusing,’ Lorgar spoke through the vox-crackle, more irritated than confused.
‘Have you ever considered the easiest way to resolve this, my priestly brother, might be to just come with us?’
Lorgar said nothing.
‘I am not making some foolish jest,’ Angron laughed again. ‘Come with us. We’ll crush these alien bastards beneath our boots, and burn their fragile ships from the inside out. Tell me, do your crusaders have no wish to punish the filthy aliens that dared attack us?’
‘We have a duty to perform here, Angron. A sacred duty.’
‘And we will perform it. Our duty is to bleed the segmentum dry, to cleave right into the heart of the Imperium’s far reaches. We will do it together. You, I and the Legions that follow us, but in the name of the gods you claim are real, let us spare no one. And let us begin with these foul eldar. Vengeance, Lorgar. Taste that word. Vengeance.’
And, at last, Lorgar smiled. ‘Very well. We will play this game by your rules, for now.’
Captain Sarrin had never tried to track an eldar fleet before. She was finding that it didn’t compare to anything else in her experience.
‘Warp signature?’ she asked.
‘Negative,’ came the servitor’s dead-voiced response.
‘Not even from a focused auspex sweep with the coordinates I gave you?’
‘Negative.’
‘Well... Try again.’
‘Compliance.’
She tried not to sigh. Lord Angron – her master and commander, whether he liked to be addressed as ‘lord’ or not – had demanded she lead the combined Legion fleet in pursuit of the enemy. The problem with that was simple: she had no idea how. The eldar hadn’t run. They’d vanished.
The keen rumble of active armour drew her attention to the side of her throne. Khârn was approaching, his features masked by his crested helm as usual.