‘Enough,’ says Vorx, steadying himself and brandishing Exact.
Xydias whirls to face the newcomer. The chamber floor around him is clustered with corpses, like some lost battlefield on some lost barbarian world. The few remaining lumens gutter and swing, fizzing with sparks. The destroyed doorway to the gene-seed vaults lies open still, and the Chapter Master stands before it. Kledo, what remains of him, twitches weakly.
Vorx can see that Xydias is exhausted. He has already killed so many, fighting for hours, standing before the combined power of two Legions and pouring all his defiance out at them. His weapon has been rendered defunct, his armour is pitted and broken, and still he walks, keeping himself erect, maintaining that rolling, menacing gait that is the natural consequence of so much remorseless physical conditioning.
‘Go back,’ Xydias threatens Vorx, raising the thunder hammer. His voice is cracking a little but still strong. ‘Go back to the hell you came from.’
That would not be difficult. The entire galaxy is now turning into that very same hell, in these regions at least.
‘Know this,’ Vorx says in his archaic Gothic, trying his best to be readily understandable. ‘Your Chapter’s gene-seed will be destroyed by my hand. None will be taken. None will be defiled.’
By now, Xydias is running. He throws himself, body and soul, into the first strike. His thunder hammer smacks hard into Exact, and the blow is shuddering, one that even Vorx has to work hard to brace against.
‘Traitor!’ Xydias hisses, his voice distorted by the distilled venom of the betrayed.
‘The bodies of your warriors will not be mutilated,’ Vorx continues quietly, throwing Xydias off and ramming the scythe’s heel at him. ‘Those taken alive will have honourable deaths.’
Xydias is fast. He is powerful, intelligent and precise. Another strike cracks Exact away, and the Chapter Master powers into the opened gap, landing a gauntleted punch on Vorx’s breastplate.
‘The Throne endures!’ Xydias roars. ‘Terra endures!’
Vorx has to battle harder now. Containing this inferno is difficult.
‘The names of the slain will be recorded,’ he says, straining to match the heft and velocity of the thunder hammer’s strikes. ‘That is a kind of immortality. A better kind than the one you were promised.’
They rock and swing around one another. Vorx is the greater in stature, a swollen creature of the god, and Xydias has to push himself to the limit just to make contact. The Chapter Master is already wounded from many earlier fights – Vorx can see the infections pulsing their way around his body – but somehow it doesn’t slow him.
‘The light will come again!’ Xydias thunders.
And that, of all that has been claimed or boasted, is a genuine sorrow. It will never come again. There has not been light, genuine light, for ten thousand years. Vorx should know – he witnessed it, the original blaze of hope, being extinguished by the Doomed Warmaster at the behest of gods he now serves.
So this pain must end. This delusion must end. Better to prosper in darkness than batter away at some false dawn like a shroud-moth on a lantern.
The final movement is neither fast nor deceptive – it is just unstoppable. Vorx thrusts his scythe point-first, turning his hands and wrenching the curved blade upwards. It hooks under Xydias’ breastplate, bites deep and keeps on going, bursting his primary heart and slicing open his lungs. Vorx heaves, and the Chapter Master is hoisted from his feet. Vorx twists, holding him up, feeling the blood gush down the shaft and splash on his gauntlets.
Xydias spasms, struggling to make his limbs work, to fight back, to control the hammer that he still grasps tightly. Unbelievably, for a moment he almost makes it. He almost gets in a final blow.
Then, inevitably, he fails. His arm goes limp at last, and the thunder hammer crashes to the ground. His helm is the last to drop, held shiveringly rigid to the end.
Gently, Vorx lets the body down. He pulls Exact’s blade out slowly, doing no more damage to the already ruined armour than necessary. Xydias collapses, his head lolling. Vorx bows stiffly over his corpse and offers him the old salute, the one that the Barbarans used to offer the honourable slain in the days before decay ate its way through all the old protocols.
Then he turns to Kledo. By the time Vorx lowers himself cumbersomely over the prone form of his Surgeon, Kledo is struggling hard to breathe.
‘What… kept you?’ Kledo rasps.
Vorx dips his head closer. He sees that Kledo will live, if he is allowed to. The old resilience, the mark of the Legion, runs through all of them. You have to deal out so much punishment, so much extravagant violence, to end the Death Guard.
‘I know,’ says Vorx, allowing himself at last to shoot a little poison into the words.
Kledo has the gall to look bewildered. His bloodshot eye flickers; the red saliva at his ruined mouth foams. ‘What do you know?’
Vorx bends a little lower, so that his helm’s crusted grille is next to Kledo’s ear.
‘I know it was you,’ he hisses. ‘You bastard, Kledo. I know it was you who moved the ship.’
VIII: Iron Shades
Chapter Twenty
The strike cruiser is coming in fast, piloted with its owners’ habitual controlled aggression. Vorx watches it smash through the half-hearted cordon of two World Eaters frigate-class haulers and make directly for Solace. Its sable flanks glint from the flash of explosions on all sides, but it is being threaded with a determination that marks it out and sets it apart.
‘Come about,’ Vorx orders, gauging how prepared they are for this. ‘Ready for defensive broadside.’
Many look up at him, but only Hovik, poor ruined Hovik, dares to speak. ‘Lord, we are vulnerable,’ she says carefully. ‘Lances burned out, damage taken on both flanks.’
It only takes a second for Vorx to see that she is right. He allows himself a moment of self-reproach – he had enjoyed the destruction of the nova cannon and has let that colour his judgement. After so long, he ought to know better.
‘Well observed,’ he says, bowing to acknowledge the correction. He is not a vindictive commander. ‘Move us away, then. Just a little time, to get things in order.’
The orders pass down the chain again, barked with somewhat greater urgency. They are being assailed from many directions, but it is the strike cruiser that causes the most consternation. It is powerfully armed for void combat, enough to trouble Solace in its temporarily diminished state, but in truth that is not the principal cause of concern. There will be Space Marines on that ship, all itching to board Solace and start doing what they were built to do. If enough were landed, given all else that they have to contend with, serious and lasting damage could be caused.
So they will run, for now. They will pull clear, letting the ship recover and the crew restock the guns. A little distance is called for, after which this threat can be dealt with decisively.
Solace pivots somewhat clumsily, then boosts hard for the battlesphere’s edge. The manoeuvre costs it more las-strikes along its back, and a row of bio-vents takes a raking, but then it is picking up speed.
Vorx watches the augurs closely. The Iron Shades strike cruiser is in full pursuit, its thrusters burning white, and it will be in bombardment cannon range shortly.
‘Gallowsman,’ he voxes. ‘What state the guns?’
Dragan does not reply immediately. Over the link, Vorx hears the discharge of a weapon, followed by what might have been a wet thud. ‘Starboard broadside operational in twenty minutes,’ comes the voice eventually, sour as ever. ‘Damn sloppy.’
Vorx winces. He does not quite approve of Dragan’s robust attitude to the crew, who will be doing their best. ‘Very good,’ he replies. ‘Inform when ready to fire.’
They keep running. The battlesphere is still crowded, still perilous. They take more las-strikes, scattering across the rear void shie
lds in kaleidoscopes of thrown neon. Solace knocks away a little, straining against the hits, and the deck lets out shrieks of stressed metalwork.
Far below, the landings are beginning on Agripinaa. Kossolax has launched the planetary assault early, while the orbital zone is a long way from being secured. Vorx catches a glimpse of the big landers being disgorged from the carriers, lines of them, tumbling out of their holding cages and burning away into the forge world’s methane-rich atmosphere. This is a gamble. Such impatience could deliver a hammer blow to the enemy, silencing the fixed defence lasers and opening the floodgates, or it could deliver a reprieve, if too many transports are destroyed and the focus of the fleet is diverted.
Vorx sees that the Blood Angels are already responding, hurtling towards the iron-black continent below, as eager to get into close combat as the World Eaters are. How enthusiastic they all are. How willingly they succumb to those indulgent rages.
Something feels strange about the ship. Solace is shivering as it runs.
Vorx glances up at the forward viewports. He can see the press of ships thinning, the open void beckoning. They just need that small window of recovery, a moment’s pause to gather Solace’s enduring capacity for revival.
One, two, three, say Vorx’s silent lips.
Kledo moves. This is the moment – this is the chance.
The entire ship is in confusion. The Population runs from station to station, thrown from their feet and sent clattering across the decks. The Unbroken are striding out to their assigned locations, preparing for imminent boarding actions. The ship itself, that giant sleeping consciousness, is fixated on itself, on repairing what has been damaged.
He goes swiftly, hugging the dark. He has rehearsed the route many times, knowing where to avoid, whom to elude. It would be noticed, even in this madness, that the Surgeon is not in the apothecarion, and so he has only a little time.
Kledo is thrilled. His hearts are beating harder, just as they do when he is trying out something new with the needles. In the normal run of things, he would have no chance of leading a warband this size. He is not enough of a battlefield warrior, and such things still matter to those of the old Legion. Two things, though, have given him the chance. The first is Vorx’s weakness. The siegemaster has been locked in his own obsessions for too long now, neglecting the first business of his calling. He has grown soft, melancholy, wrapped up in arts best left to the Tallyman. And there is Mortarion too. Kledo is of the same view as Dragan, who has made his displeasure with the primarch’s call evident. The great warrior-monarchs of the past should have stayed in the past. This is a new age now, one in which new weapons will be needed.
The second reason is all around him. All know that Solace is changing. All remark on it. All step around the changing deck layout and push aside the throbbing arterial cables. It has become commonplace, something to smile at as they idly muse on how things will end.
Kledo knows very little about the mechanics of starships, but he knows very much indeed about the living body. He knows how to dominate the will and shrive the flesh into submission. He knows how to make all sentient creatures his own, to cause them agony and dole out relief in such exact processions that soon they only live to serve, to administer his desires and further his goals.
Solace is becoming alive now. Solace is something he can control, and if he controls Solace, he controls the Lords of Silence.
His armour is festooned with the instruments of his profession. Needles dangle from loops of tubing; drills swing from prehensile mechanical arms. His back is weighed down by heavy canisters, all full of the choicest tinctures from his hidden vaults. Philemon likes to think of himself as a master of the occult arts, and Slert believes himself the most creative of alchemists, but Kledo, overlooked Kledo, can match them both. They have all been consumed by their own long games and shifting allegiances. Dragan will sulk and plan and Garstag will champ at the bit for freer slaughter, but they do not have the resolve to act decisively, not like he does.
He slips down further, finding his way through paths few of the Unbroken know exist. The air becomes hotter, wetter, closer. His boots sink deep into spongy matter, and liquid pushes up to glisten on the surface. The pipes are thickly clustered here, running in bound parallel courses, throbbing with a semi-consistent rhythm. It is so much like a heartbeat now.
This is where it begins. Kledo has studied these chambers over many years, probing and measuring. The walls are no longer orthogonal – they curve and sweep, they tremble when touched.
He goes further, pushing against curtains of pale-grey organics, and the touch leaves a sticky residue of bile against his gauntlets. The pipework is covered in threads of dark veins. The floor is sodden and bubbling. The noise of the engines has long gone, replaced by the muffled boom of that echoing proto-heart’s rhythm. Flies are everywhere, instinctively drawn to the truth that Vorx has yet to acknowledge – that sentience has done more than taken root here. It has flourished and extended, burrowing tendrils of awareness throughout the entire structure of this ship until iron is turned to flesh and adamantium to bone.
Kledo reaches his destination – a big chamber, many metres high and wide, though the precise dimensions are lost in a haze of drifting corpuscles. Something vast and flabby trembles here, suspended on bowing sinews and lost amid the curls and snags of gristle. It has chambers of its own, mottled sacs that heave and relax.
He gets to work. He prepares the vials and links up the various canisters. The shots will travel down his arm, into the injectors that he has mounted on the back of his hands for greater control. The quantities to be employed are prodigious – Solace is a big creature – and so will have to be administered with finesse.
The air changes. Flies buzz closely around him, mobbing him, crawling over the instruments. He swats a few away, feeling their fat bodies splat against his palms, and carries on. From above, he can just about detect the ongoing noises and movements of void combat, the impacts that send shockwaves travelling down deck after deck before being baffled in the sumps.
Kledo is ready. He takes a breath. His two hands bristle with injectors the length of a child, each one linked up to the cocktail of neurotoxins strapped to his back.
It is rare that Kledo prays. He has so little faith. This time, though, he whispers just a fragment, just in case anything is listening.
‘Guide this,’ he breathes, ‘and I shall create such carnage in your name that the heavens will weep from it.’
Then he thrusts the needles in, right up to the hilt, and the plungers slam home.
Dragan is shouting. He is striding, moving up and down the long gun-lines.
Hundreds of crew struggle to get the machinery operational again. Some howitzers have been completely destroyed, blown into lumpy towers of molten metal and entombing their operators. Others are merely out of alignment, and their gangs haul on the rust-thick chains to bring them back onto the slide-rails.
Every surviving gun angles steeply upwards, rooted in the deck of the ship and pointing up to the gaping gunwales. A filigree of void shields glistens across the apertures, and it suddenly looks fragile. In combat, the gun-deck is a very dangerous place to be – it is one of the primary areas targeted by the enemy, and given the need for firing orifices, a catastrophic hit will punch the atmosphere out into the void here more rapidly than almost anywhere else.
This has to be done quicker. This recovery has to be more effective. Dragan has access to tactical data the Unchanged do not, and he sees the incoming predators on the long-range scans. They are already firing, sending off range-finding bow-chasers, and they are gaining. Right now, Solace is toothless, slow and vulnerable.
Dragan surprises himself with his vehemence. He had never intended to work this hard for Vorx, not in this battle. It was hard to forget Typhus’ injunction, and still the words ring in his mind, but combat has a way of reinforcing loyalties. This
is about survival now, and he will do nothing to jeopardise it – not here, not yet.
He sees Kodad, the gunnery captain, and shoves his way over to him, pushing aside a tilting ammunition scaffold.
‘We need to fire now,’ he growls.
Kodad nods, his face awash with muck and sweat. Bodies toil in every alcove and under every arch. From somewhere Dragan can hear the bovine bellows of plague ogryns being goaded into action.
Kodad gives the order, no doubt earlier than he’d have liked. Shouts ring out, bells clang, chains yank tight. Bulky shells slide down the runnels and clatter into the breeches. An old klaxon sounds, though it is washed out and croaky from neglect. The deck judders, throwing up its slops and scraps.
Dragan wheels away as the first reports ring out. The immense barrels slam back into their housings, filling the gun-deck with smoke. Spent casing fragments fly out, spinning across the deck and rocking to a halt. The crew scrambles to collect them up, to spray thick coolant onto the glowing bracings, to prepare for reload.
It is impossible to know how effective the shots have been – Vorx will have a better vantage from the bridge. Dragan moves up the line, spying a crew working a little less hard than the others, its numbers thinned by earlier explosions. He draws his pistol again, preparing to apply motivation.
He never gets there. Solace swings around violently. The lumens crash into nothing, then flicker on again, then out for good. Huge crashes – almighty crashes – swell up from below, making the guns shiver in their stocks.
For a moment he thinks the reactors have been hit, maybe gone critical. He has never experienced such wild dislocation, and he struggles to keep his feet. The rest of the crew are less agile and are thrown around like chaff in a thresher.
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