by C Z Dunn
‘Zerek!’ Ladbon called out, rising from behind the rock formation where he had been observing the beast. Unable to see his brother through the fog that permanently blanketed Vostroya’s surface, he heard Zerek chamber another round. Raising his own weapon, an antique shotgun that had been passed down through generations of their family, he took aim, finger poised over the triggers.
Unbidden, the vision came upon him.
The blast of both barrels rings out, but the chemdog is already leaping. The spray of shot misses it entirely. It lands on top of Zerek, claws extended, and knocks him to the floor. It bares its fangs and silences his brother’s screams by tearing out his throat. It does not feed straight away, instead turning on Ladbon, who is in the middle of reloading the shotgun. Ladbon backs away from the beast but it is crouching ready to pounce. Through fear, Ladbon drops both of the shells he is attempting to chamber, fumbles the weapon, turns and flees. The beast launches itself at him, half a ton of corded muscle, teeth and claw dropping him to the cold, hard ground. Fade to black.
Ladbon fired, discharging only a single barrel. Unable to react to the shot, the thing jumped into the deadly cloud of steel, the force of the blast diverting it away from Zerek. It howled in pain as it crashed to the ground, blood leaking from dozens of wounds. Ladbon didn’t hesitate, covering the distance between him and his prey in seconds. After visually confirming that his brother was unharmed, he got his first good look at the thing that had plagued the denizens of Vostroya’s Hive Decius for the past few months.
That it had descended from the canids brought by the first settlers of Vostroya was obvious, but millennia of evolution and exposure to the chemical stew of the atmosphere had wrought it into an apex predator. Its dark fur covered four muscular legs that could propel it at pace across the ground and launch it high through the air when it came time to kill, while its body was lean and gaunt, developed for efficiency, to keep its overall weight down and maximise its speed. Large eyes, evolved to make the most of the gloom beneath the fog layer, looked up at Ladbon, primal malice still evident rather than the helplessness of a creature that knew its end had come.
Ladbon put the muzzle of his shotgun to its temple and emptied the other barrel at point-blank range, spraying the contents of its skull across the rocks and splashing blood and brain matter over his protective suit. The chemdog had shown no mercy after it had killed the meagre animal life forms in the toxic wastelands and started venturing into the hive in search of food, and thus Ladbon was not inclined to show it any either. No longer would it prey on the underhivers of Decius, and vengeance had been served for the seventeen children it had claimed.
After wiping the gore from the thick, airtight fabric of his trousers, Ladbon offered his hand to his brother, who was sat on the floor, his deep breaths amplified by the rebreather covering his mouth and nose. Zerek took it and hauled himself upright, the three years he had over his younger brother granting him an extra quarter metre of height. Soon Zerek would be of majority and the hunting rifle in his hands would be replaced by a standard Guard-issue lasrifle, his protective suit swapped for the uniform of the Vostroyan Firstborn. That day was only weeks away and both boys knew that this was likely to be their last hunt together.
‘How did you…?’ Zerek began before figuring out the answer mid-sentence. ‘You had another vision, didn’t you?’
‘Please, Zerek.’
‘I’m not going to be around to protect you soon. We’ve managed to keep it hidden for this long but I worry that without me to cover for you, people will get suspicious. If father found out–’
‘If father found out, he’d find a way to exploit it,’ Ladbon spat. ‘He’d have me go into trances to try to divine where the next sump rat infestation was going to break out, or where colonies of promethium leeches were going to make their nests – anything to gain an advantage over the other exterminators.’
‘Father…’ Zerek said, ignoring his brother. He crouched down by the chemdog’s corpse and inspected it.
‘What is it?’
Zerek continued to ignore Ladbon. He got up and ran over to take a better look at what the creature had been eating before they had come upon and ended it. ‘This is the offspring of one of those.’
‘So? What of it? They’re both dead now,’ Ladbon said, failing to grasp the meaning.
‘The thing you’ve just killed was a male.’
‘It’s a breeding pair,’ Ladbon said, realisation dawning. ‘The female is still out there.’
‘You can be the one who covers yourself in filth next time, agreed?’ Zerek said, picking his way through the rocky, mist-shrouded wasteland.
Their plan was bold if not entirely pleasant. Knowing that the mother would recognise the scent of her own young, one of them would cut open the pup’s corpse and cover themselves in the contents of its bladder, marking himself in the same way that a canid marks its territory. Thus scented, one of the brothers would act as a decoy while the other made the kill.
‘You may be older, taller and fatter than me, brother, but you never were very good at stone-parchment-shears,’ Ladbon said with a smug grin.
‘I know how your mind works, Ladbon,’ Zerek said. ‘If it had been best two out of three you would be the one standing here doused in animal piss.’
‘I don’t know why we bothered. You’re making so much noise that we might as well have just whistled for her to come to us.’
‘That’s not such a bad idea,’ Zerek said, calling his brother’s bluff. ‘We’re here! Come and get us!’ he yelled before issuing a long, loud whistle.
‘How have you survived for fifteen years with only the brains you were born with?’ Ladbon hissed, scurrying off behind cover. Zerek walked around in a wide circle waving his arms theatrically to waft the smell of urine. Ladbon kept his shotgun aimed close to his brother, the butt jammed hard against his shoulder to reduce recoil.
After about a minute Zerek stopped pacing and whistled again. Ladbon shook his head and threw him a disapproving look. Though Zerek was his senior and physically superior to Ladbon in every way, in terms of maturity the elder brother could easily be mistaken for the younger of the pair.
A scuffing noise from somewhere in the mist drew them both alert. Zerek gestured in the direction he thought it came from. Then he started growling and whimpering in imitation of what he imagined a chemdog pup would sound like. If he hadn’t been holding a shotgun, Ladbon would have put his head in his hands.
The noise came again, closer, louder now. Zerek raised the hunting rifle, pointing it slightly to the left of where he believed the previous noise had come from. His whimpering became more imploring.
That was when the second vision hit.
The shotgun blast from out of the mist hits Zerek in the chest. He falls to his knees. The second blast takes his head from his shoulders. His body falls backwards, blood pools beneath him. Yurri Sommletz, another of the exterminators from Decius, steps out of the mist, the shotgun in his hand still smoking from both barrels. He is horrified at what he has done, calls out. Gaspar Krum follows him, shakes his head in disbelief.
‘You’ve killed Oskar’s boy!’ he cries.
‘I didn’t mean to. I thought it was the beast,’ Yurri pleads.
Then the beast emerges from the fog and kills them all. Fade to black.
Ladbon was up and running the instant the vision passed. ‘Zerek!’ he shouted over the sound of a pump action shotgun cocking. Like the beast he had killed not an hour earlier, Ladbon thrust himself into the air, his shoulder connecting with his brother’s ribcage at the very instant the shot was fired. The side of his face felt as if it were on fire and his vision was impaired, robbing him of depth perception. As he landed hard on the ground he realised that he had been hit by the blast. He looked over at Zerek, who was lying next to him, and gave a pained smile at saving his brother, expecting one in return.
/> But Zerek didn’t return the smile.
What used to be his jaw was a bloody ruin, his throat now a wet, crimson mess. Ladbon looked into Zerek’s wide-open eyes but there was no life there. His brother was dead.
‘No…’ he whispered weakly.
Two figures emerged from the grey-green mist, weapons held limply by their sides.
‘They’re Oskar’s boys!’ said Gaspar Krum. ‘You’ve killed Oskar’s boys.’
Ladbon tried to speak.
‘The youngest is alive. Rest easy, boy. Yurri, go and fetch help.’
Ladbon found his voice. ‘The chemdog… The chemdog is coming…’ In response, a growl emanated from the murk. The two exterminators reacted instinctively, their weapons coming up in unison and aiming at the source of the noise. Boldly, defiantly, the female appeared, fangs bared, her growl a constant bass rumble. She stared down the three of them, asserting her dominance before turning her attention to the freshly killed corpse.
‘Grab him,’ Yurri said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘No,’ Ladbon said, but his voice had died back to a whisper. Gaspar and Yurri each put an arm under his shoulders, lifting him from the ground and dragging him away backwards.
The last Ladbon ever saw of his brother, his father’s firstborn, was the chemdog picking the meat from his bones.
Fade to black.
Part One
Chapter One
Danatheum brought up the psychic barrier just in time to absorb the burst of gauss that had been fired out of the darkness of the catacombs. Bright green energy clashed with a wall of purple aetheric unmatter, sickening pyrotechnics piercing the gloom.
The necron raised its weapon to fire a second time but a bolt shell was already clear of the Librarian’s pistol, racing unerringly towards the xenos’ metal skull. It impacted explosively, turning the thing’s ghoulish face into a void, and the necron fell backwards, attempting to regenerate. The Grand Master of the Librarius was on it in an instant, driving Traitor’s Bane down through its ribcage, twisting the blade and pulling it clear, entwined with sinew and circuit.
As he wiped the mechanical detritus from his sword, the hooded figure alongside him nodded in approval.
‘A fine kill, Grand Master. I look forward to rejoining the fray soon myself.’ The other Librarian’s voice was distant and reedy. Danatheum signalled and twenty black-armoured figures of the Ravenwing peeled themselves away from the dark and charged past him down the subterranean corridor. Moments later the catacombs lit up again with muzzle flare as the two squads engaged yet more necrons.
‘And soon you shall, Ezekiel, but not in the depths of Aryand. Your return to battle lies on a different field altogether.’
‘I do not understand, Grand Master. The Apothecaries have cleared me for combat and you yourself submitted me to psychic probing before you left on your mission, and declared me fully recovered.’ Ezekiel’s voice was noticeably raised, but it did not echo from the ancient stone tunnels, carved millennia before by the workers of the Nephrekh Dynasty.
‘None of that has changed. Rephial assures me that you have fully recovered from your wounds, and my assessment was sound. I believe you are fit to take your place alongside your brother Dark Angels, but you will not be joining me here.’
The two Librarians rounded a corner and Danatheum picked his way through the inert necrons carpeting the tunnel floor, burnished gold heads and limbs scattered around them, shorn off in the Ravenwing’s firestorm. Further ahead, the chorus of bolters struck up again as the brothers of the Second Company encountered yet more of the undead xenos.
‘Then I am to receive new orders?’
Unseen by either Librarian, one of the necron corpses they had passed by began to twitch, the gauss flayer in its hand glowing faintly as it powered up.
‘You are to take Fifth Company to a world called Honoria at the very fringes of Segmentum Obscuras. For millennia, the subsector it resides in has been cut off by warp storms, but now that they have abated a vast ork army threatens to overrun it. A score of worlds have already fallen to the greenskins, but Honoria must–’
Behind them, the darkness blossomed into green light as the necron discharged its weapon, the dank air of the tunnel crackling as it burned off under the immense heat. Danatheum reacted quickest, throwing himself against an immaculately hewn stone wall and bringing his bolt pistol to bear in a single, fluid movement. Ezekiel remained motionless, the necron’s shot passing harmlessly through his midriff before impacting against a wall further along the tunnel. The noise was swiftly drowned out by the report of Danatheum’s bolt pistol as it took the metal head from the xenos’ shoulders.
‘I do not understand, Grand Master,’ Ezekiel said, as if nothing had happened. ‘If the world has been cut off for so long then how did they know how to make contact with the Imperium?’
‘The request for aid came not from Honoria but Mars.’
‘The Adeptus Mechanicus? What interest do they have in this world?’
‘That I do not know, but it must be of the utmost import to them as they have invoked the Pact of Kulgotha to secure our aid.’
‘It has been less than a century since they last held us to our oath. Surely the sacrifices we made on Faze V released us from the Pact?’
‘I’m certain that we have repaid the Mechanicus tenfold in the eight thousand years since we made our bargain, but an oath is an oath and the sons of the Lion always pay their debts. I do not need your powers of foresight to see the darkness that lies ahead for humanity.’
Ezekiel blinked involuntarily.
‘We would do well to placate what few allies we have left,’ Danatheum continued. ‘Master Serpicus travels with you, does he not?’
‘Master Serpicus forms part of the command squad, yes.’
‘Good. Perhaps his pleasant nature and boundless patience will help forge even stronger bonds between the Rock and Mars,’ Danatheum said dryly.
‘You have met Master Serpicus, haven’t you, Grand Master?’ Ezekiel replied with a smile.
Side by side, the two Librarians came to the end of the tunnel, where it opened into a high-ceilinged chamber. Bolter fire echoed from where the Ravenwing, reinforced by elements of the Fourth Company, who had taken a different route to the throne chamber, were now engaged with a host of Lychguard. Danatheum raised his bolt pistol and lent his firepower to the rapidly escalating battle. Ezekiel merely looked on.
‘There is another matter I would like you to attend to, Ezekiel,’ Danatheum said, drawing Traitor’s Bane and bifurcating a golden-armoured necron that had broken through the Dark Angels’ lines. The two halves clattered to the smooth stone floor, the Grand Master of the Librarius emptying an entire clip into the twitching corpse before it could repair and reanimate itself.
‘What is it, Grand Master?’
‘Seventh Squad of First Company is no longer at full strength,’ Danatheum said solemnly. ‘The time has come for another brother to ascend to the Deathwing.’
‘Brother Joadar…?’
‘Succumbed to his wounds three nights ago. The punishment his body endured on Korsh finally proved too much for him.’
Ezekiel closed his eyes briefly. He had led the mission to Korsh himself and barely escaped with his own life, and the lives of the Deathwing brothers he had taken into battle. The daemon he fought there had already taken so much from him personally and, nearly a year on, three Dark Angels still remained under the care of the Chapter Apothecaries.
‘Who does the Supreme Grand Master have in mind?’ Ezekiel said as he watched Danatheum carve through another necron.
‘Balthasar. He has an exemplary battle record and a keen mind. Azrael endorses him and he has already started asking questions.’
‘And is one of those questions, “Why do we tolerate psykers among our ranks?”’
‘We are
all shaped by our past, Ezekiel. You know that better than most. Balthasar and the world he grew up on suffered at the hands of the warp-touched. It is up to the likes of you and I to show him that our Emperor-bestowed gifts can be used for the benefit of the Chapter.’ To emphasise his point, Danatheum raised a psychic shield in front of a Ravenwing brother who was about to be ripped apart by a Lychguard’s scythe. The weapon bounced harmlessly off the aetheric wall, spinning the necron around and exposing its flank. The grateful Dark Angel revved up his chainsword and carved through the robot-like xenos’ torso the instant Danatheum dropped the shield.
‘I shall do my best, Grand Master, though I would prefer we waited until Fifth Company returns to the Rock so that you could carry out the assessment yourself. You have been the one to judge the worthiness of Deathwing aspirants for centuries, whereas I–’
‘Whereas you are the best among us, Ezekiel,’ Danatheum interrupted. ‘Though ours is a Chapter that values its secrets, it is a truth universally acknowledged that you are the most powerful psyker to have worn Dark Angels armour since the time of the Lion.’
‘Grand Master, you flatter me.’
‘No, I do not, Ezekiel. I am merely Grand Master of the Librarius by default. When I ascended from the Scout Company to the rank of Epistolary, there were close to thirty Librarians among the Chapter’s numbers, and now there are barely ten.’
Two more Lychguard overwhelmed their Dark Angels attackers and charged Danatheum, swords raised. Both blades elicited a shower of sparks as they connected with his hastily erected shield, which he dropped as swiftly as it was raised, simultaneously shooting one necron in the face at point-blank range and impaling the other on the tip of Traitor’s Bane.
‘I can raise an aetheric shield or conjure fire in the palm of my hands as well as any other brother who wears the blue armour of the Librarius.’ Another tall golden figure rushed him, but he met the same fate as the previous assailants. ‘But that is the limit of my powers. The fact of the matter is I only ascended to the mantle of Grand Master of the Librarius because I outlived all of my contemporaries.’