Legacies of Betrayal

by Various

  ‘Angron’s patience is wearing thin.’ He sounded calm, casual, almost resigned.

  ‘So is mine.’ Lotara narrowed her eyes. ‘And I don’t take kindly to threats, Khârn.’

  ‘That is one of the many reasons you were given command of the Conqueror. And it was not a threat. Merely an offer of information.’

  ‘He’s asking me to chase phantoms. Eldar ships leave no warp signature, so how am I to follow them? My Mistress of Astropaths senses nothing. My Navigator can find no warp-wake to pursue. The auspex sees nothing.’ She looked at Khârn, her own temper mounting. ‘With the greatest respect, what does he want me to do? Fly the ship around in wide circles and hope the enemy returns?’

  Khârn said nothing. He merely watched her impassively.

  ‘I have one idea,’ she confessed. Lotara reached back to tie her hair into a loose ponytail, keeping it from her eyes. ‘We can still punish the eldar. Angron wishes to see the enemy dead before him. I think I can arrange that.’

  ‘And how do you plan to do it?’ Khârn asked at last. ‘If you cannot chase them...’

  ‘They attacked when the Conqueror moved ahead alone, outpacing the rest of the fleet. Their target was us. More specifically, their target was our primarch. When they struck, they’d been waiting for the chance to catch us while we were vulnerable, and they were willing to risk a great many lives to see Angron dead. I’m betting they’ll run the risk again.’

  ‘I believe I see where this is leading.’

  ‘Sometimes it seems that Angron cares not from whence the blood flows. But he wants revenge, and I will give it to him. Order your warriors to battle stations, and ready your elite companies for when we prime the Ursus Claws.’

  ‘The Devourers will undoubtedly be ready, captain.’ He sounded amused, pleased with her plan. They knew one another well, for Lotara had served on the flagship as a helm officer for years before her promotion. Captain Sarrin enjoyed risks as much as any warrior in the Legion she served. ‘What brings that smile to your lips, Lotara?’

  ‘We’re about to prove the great truth of the Twelfth Legion, Khârn. No one runs from the Conqueror.’

  They sailed alone, deeper into the void, farther from distant Terra and away from their own fleet. Lotara didn’t know when the aliens would strike again, only that they would. Eleven hours into their sedate drift into isolation, she was still on the strategium, reclining in her throne and staring into the reaches of space. She ardently refused to give rest to her aching, bleary eyes. Not while there was a job to do.

  ‘Come on,’ she whispered, little realising the words had become a murmured mantra. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Captain Sarrin?’

  Lotara turned to her first officer. Ivar Tobin wore the same crisp white uniform as his captain, and looked considerably less tired. The only difference in their attire was the red palm print in the centre of her chest – a rare mark of honour awarded to the Legion’s most worthy servants. She’d earned this accolade from the Eighth Captain himself upon her ascension to the Conqueror’s command throne.

  ‘Something to report, Tobin?’

  ‘All auspex tracking shows nothing but dead space.’ He spoke again after a brief pause, unable to keep the concern from his voice. ‘You should sleep, ma’am.’

  She grinned. ‘And you should watch your mouth. This is my ship as much as the primarch’s, and I’ll not sail into the enemy’s clutches with my eyes closed. You know me better than that.’

  ‘When did you last sleep, captain?’

  Rather than admit the truth, she chose to hide behind a lie. Perhaps it would make Tobin leave her alone. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Then I will tell you. You last slept forty-one hours ago, ma’am. Would you not rather be well-rested when we engage the xenos?’

  ‘Your concern is noted, Officer Tobin. Back to your duties, if you please.’

  He snapped a sharp salute. ‘As you command.’

  Lotara breathed out, low and slow. She stared at the stars panning past the oculus, and let the hunt continue.

  Sixteen hours later, once the Conqueror was well and truly out of range of its support fleet, the bridge sirens began to wail again.

  Lotara sat forward in her throne, smiling despite her bone-aching weariness.

  ‘Let’s try this again, shall we? Voxmaster Kejic?’

  ‘Aye, captain.’

  ‘Open a focused pulse transmission to the largest eldar vessel, if you please.’

  ‘Opening, ma’am. Priming now. Transmission ready.’

  Lotara rose from her throne, moving to grip the handrail at the edge of her raised dais. ‘This is Captain Lotara Sarrin of the Twelfth Legion warship Conqueror to the miserable alien fleet ghosting into existence across our bow.’ She smiled, and felt her heartbeat quicken. This was what she lived for, and why she’d been given command of such a mighty vessel in the first place. Let the legionaries fight with axe and sword. Her arena was the void, and the ships that danced within it. ‘I wish to offer congratulations on the last mistake you will ever make.’

  To her surprise, a voice crashed back over the vox. Flawed by incompatible communication systems, the words barely emerged from a tide of churning noise.

  ‘Mon-keigh filth. You will bleed for the thousands of sins your mongrel breed has committed in its pathetic lifespan.’

  ‘If you wish to kill us, alien, you are more than welcome to try.’

  ‘Dog-blooded mon-keigh. It is a miracle you mastered even this crude speech. Your mutilated prince with the pain engine inside his skull must die this night. He will never be given the chance to become the Blood God’s son.’

  ‘Enough of your religious madness.’ She was smiling now, not bothering to hide her malicious amusement at their arrogance.

  ‘History will be so much cleaner when you are erased from its pages.’

  ‘Brave talk from a race on the edge of extinction,’ she replied. ‘Why not come closer? Bring those pretty ships in range of my talons.’

  With a shriek of wounded noise that may or may not have had organic origins, the eldar severed the link.

  ‘A charming species,’ Lotara gripped the handrail.

  ‘Enemy fleet inbound,’ Tobin called from across the strategium.

  ‘Deck Officer Tobin, prime everything we’ve got – all gun ports open, all weapons live, all engines burning hot. Tactical hololithics are to update in two-second pulses to compensate for the enemy’s speed. Gunnery, fix primary targets by threat level and assign secondary targets by range. Void shields to full layer extension. Helm, accelerate to attack speed, and be ready to kill thrust with inertial resistors when we fire the Ursus Claws. All stations, status report. Deck officer.’

  ‘Aye, ma’am.’

  ‘Tactical.’

  ‘Hololithics live, captain.’

  ‘Gunnery prime, secondary and tertiary stations.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Ready, ma’am.’

  ‘Void shields.’

  ‘Compliance.’

  ‘Helm.’

  ‘Aye, captain.’

  Lotara sat back in her ornate throne, feeling all traces of tiredness wash away with her racing heartbeat. She keyed in the eight-rune code to activate shipwide vox.

  ‘This is Captain Sarrin. All crew to battle stations. We are engaging the enemy.’

  The Conqueror cleaved through the alien flotilla, broadsides booming, stinging lashes of enemy fire dancing in mad colours across the abused void shields. This time, the warship focused its hunt on a single target, chasing it down with the lumbering inevitability of a mammoth’s charge.

  The enemy flagship was a contoured thing of arched wings and curving blades, all reaching from a lengthy, ridged hull – a torture device, given size and power enough to sail the stars. It rolled with insidious grace, dancing aside from the Conqueror’s dive. In its wake, its knife-winged support ships unleashed their crackling fire against the World Eaters warship’s shields. The
y sparked with unnatural fire, glowing as bright as Terra’s own sun, and burst with a brutal lack of ceremony.

  The Conqueror dived on, heedless, uncaring. It rammed one alien vessel aside, crashing into it amidships and sending the shattered hulk spinning away into the void. The raider vented air in a long, final breath, and spilled its crew into space as though they were drops of blood running from a wound.

  Still, the Conqueror dived. Its armour earned new scars, new burns, new injuries carved along the dense plating by the cutting kiss of alien lasers.

  The enemy flagship was running now. It recognised the warship’s intent: not to fight off the entire fleet, but to ignore the lesser craft in favour of crippling the only one that truly mattered. With impossible agility, the eldar cruiser banked and rolled away again, boosting away from its bulky pursuer.

  The Conqueror’s engines roared white-hot, wide open beast-mouths screaming into the silence of space. As the warship’s immense shadow eclipsed the fleeing raider, Captain Lotara Sarrin gripped the armrests of her shuddering throne, and through the smoke streaming across the strategium, she shouted a single command.

  ‘Fire the Ursus Claws!’

  No wide dispersal of fire, this time. No attempts to puncture several enemy vessels and separate the boarding forces. The Conqueror fired all eight of its forward-arc spears. Every one of them struck home, punching right into the body of the nimble enemy flagship. For a single second, it jerked the Conqueror ahead, before the Imperial ship’s thrusters asserted their greater, more stubborn strength.

  Like a bear gripping a wolf, the Conqueror began to pull, to crush, to heave. The immense chains ratcheted back, clanking link by clanking link, hauling the eldar flagship closer.

  Boarding pods were already spilling between the ships, pinpricking into the enemy’s hull.

  Lotara heard two voices crackle over the vox. Two brothers, fighting together for the first time.

  ‘We are in,’ Lorgar voxed. ‘The smell of these wretched inhumans is toxic to my senses.’

  Angron replied with a grunt. ‘Follow me, brother.’

  Few were the archives that could claim a legitimate record of two primarchs battling side by side. Even in an age of war and wonder, it was the rarest of events.

  Angron perceived all his actions through the wrath-haze of the buzzing Butcher’s Nails. In those long moments of berserk clarity, he saw his brother fighting for the first time.

  They couldn’t have been less alike in how they moved, and how they killed. Lorgar advanced in slow, driving steps, gripping his spiked crozius mace in two hands, and letting it fall in wide, sweeping arcs. Each strike tolled long and loud, as if some great temple bell heralded every death blow. When the maul crashed into packs of the slender, shrieking eldar, it sent their broken forms flying aside. These unfortunate wretches impacted against the ship’s curved walls, and slid down in the aftermath, like a horde of ruined puppets with cut strings.

  In contrast to Lorgar’s lucid, meticulous fury, Angron was lost to his emotions and the mechanical tendrils vibrating inside his brain. His twin axes, Gorefather and Gorechild, fell in frenzied, hacking chops, ripping his foes apart, killing through decapitation as often as by cleaving the enemies in twain. Blood misted around him in gouting sprays, flecking his bronze armour until it became a crimson akin to Lorgar’s.

  As the brothers advanced through a vast domed chamber, Lorgar drew alongside the Eater of Worlds.

  ‘You should just paint it red, brother.’

  Angron’s focus was on the flow of blood, the rending of meat, and the breaking of bone. It took him several seconds to tune back to being able to comprehend others’ words.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your armour,’ Lorgar paused, turning to hammer his crozius down at an eldar carrying a spear. He pounded the warrior almost flat, and crushed the remains beneath his boot. ‘Your armour. Just paint it red.’

  Angron felt a grin peeling his lips back from his replacement iron teeth. His brother was far from the first person to speak those words, but the fact Lorgar had actually been serious earned him a chorus of fraternal laughter.

  The World Eater kicked another eldar aside, and bisected a third with a backhanded swing of his chainaxe. He saw Lorgar at his side, slaying three aliens with a single swing.

  ‘You kill well now,’ Angron said. Saliva stringed between his teeth. Blood ran in hot, slow trickles from both nostrils, and his right eye was weeping red, making a mess of his cheek. ‘You’ve changed, Lorgar.’

  The Word Bearer took the compliment with silent grace, killing at his brother’s side, but he could only hold his tongue so long.

  ‘Those implants are killing you.’

  Angron roared in the same moment, surging ahead, butchering his way down the angular corridor and painting the walls red with the chemical stink of alien blood.

  ‘I know you hear me, brother,’ Lorgar said quietly, into the vox. ‘Those implants are killing you.’

  Angron didn’t even look back. He was a blur of gore-streaked bronze armour, both toothed axes rising and falling in efficient, rhythmless murder.

  Rather than defend the ship in hopeless desperation, the eldar captain awaited his uninvited guests in the comfort of the bridge. Angron came through the door first, after sawing through the xenos metal bulkhead with the snarling edges of Gorechild and Gorefather.

  A withering hail of splinter projectiles clattered and clashed against his ceramite armour, blasting chips and scraps from the war-plate. Venomous barbs sank into what little of his flesh was exposed, but Angron ignored the poison pumping through his veins, trusting his genhanced physiology to purify his blood.

  Oh, how the Butcher’s Nails sang. They pounded at the core of his skull, as if drilling deeper into the brain-meat to avoid the caress of eldar venom.

  He endured this savage hail of fire, and amidst the second volley, he levelled his axe at the figure seated upon the throne of sculpted alien bone.

  Lorgar came through after him, a tepid disregard written plain across his golden features. The merest raising of his gloved hand formed a kinetic barrier around them both, psychically shielding them from the hail-fall of eldar splinter shells.

  ‘Have you ever set foot on the Nightfall?’ Lorgar asked, his calm eyes drinking in the foul scene. Corpse pits ringed the central throne, with the husks of men and aliens impaled on unclean spikes. Hooked chains dangled from the ceiling, many of them ripe with stinking fruit, in the form of inhuman bodies hanging without limbs or skin.

  Angron could barely reply. Wracking twitches pulled his features tight, and forced his fingers to gun the triggers of his chainaxes in muscular spasms.

  ‘No. Never been on the Eighth Legion flagship.’

  Lorgar’s lip curled. ‘This... This looks like Curze’s bedchamber.’

  The World Eater crashed his axes together. ‘Let this be done, brother.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  The primarchs raised their weapons, and charged as one. First, the white-masked wielders of klaive swords. Angron sawed his path through them, while Lorgar hammered them aside with his maul, or sent them reeling with bursts of psychic fire. For the first time in either of their lives, the two brothers fought in unity with another being. Angron turned, disembowelling a dark-armoured bladesman seeking to attack Lorgar from behind. In turn, the Bearer of the Word protected his blood-spattered kin, deflecting an eldar’s thrust with his maul’s head, and killing the warrior on the backswing.

  The union was effort to control and maintain, for it didn’t come naturally to either of them. But they held it until only one other soul remained alive on the bridge.

  ‘Any last words?’ Lorgar asked. The ship shook around them with greater force now. The Ursus Claws had bitten too deep. The Conqueror was pulling its prey apart purely by the strength of its grip.

  Angron staggered to his brother’s side, drooling and dizzy – a flawed statue of the perfect warrior, ruined by mistreatment. As bloodstained as the
y both were, they could almost have been twins.

  The alien prince was a thing clad in baroque, ceremonial armour; a creature of angelically consumptive features and the foul stench of impure blood beneath oiled skin. The eldar lord’s final words hissed into the air, spat from pale lips.

  ‘Two mon-keigh god-princes. There was only supposed to be one. The one to become the Blood God’s son. The pain engines bend the soul to the Eightfold Path. That path leads to the Skull Throne.’

  ‘The Blood God’s son...’ Lorgar’s focus drifted to Angron, as the possibilities played out behind his soothing eyes. ‘It cannot be.’

  Angron raised his axes. The raider didn’t move a muscle.

  ‘Wait.’ Lorgar reached for Angron’s shoulder. ‘He said–’

  But the axes fell, and the alien captain’s head rolled free.

  Three days later, the Conqueror limped back to its fleet. While its hull had sustained extensive damage, most of it was superficial. The real losses had been in terms of crew; fully half the indentured serfs and trained mortal adepts were dead. On a ship of such grand size, the several thousand that remained alive were almost counted a skeleton crew.

  Of the three thousand warriors Angron took with him aboard the flagship, barely a third had returned. The eldar reaped a bloody toll in their defeat, and the XII Legion’s funerary rites lasted day and night, while the ship sailed back to its kindred. The airlocks opened and closed, silent maws yawning into the void, exhaling the shrouded bodies of slain World Eaters and crew.

  Lorgar made ready to depart the Conqueror, and bid farewell to his brother on the embarkation deck.

  ‘It was good to purge some of the bad blood between us,’ Angron said. To his credit, he kept his rebellious muscles from twitching, no matter how the Butcher’s Nails stabbed at his nervous system.

  ‘For now,’ Lorgar agreed. ‘Let neither of us pretend it will last forever.’

  Angron wiped his bleeding nose on the back of his hand. ‘You said something on the enemy ship. Something about the Nails.’

  Lorgar mused for a moment. ‘I do not recall.’

  ‘I do. You said the implants were killing me.’