Ultramarines

by Graham McNeill

  I was sweating, but Daceus returned to the initial engagement position and did not dishonour me by offering me a hand up.

  ‘That’s two,’ he said with the barest hint of a smile.

  Now I was burning with shameful anger. Returning to position, I adopted a ready stance. ‘Again.’

  This time I swept in low, beneath the crossways slash crafted by my opponent and went in under Daceus’s guard. He stabbed downwards, a makeshift block, and our blades clashed. But the force pushed his sword hand outwards and I used the weakness to hammer my shoulder into his solar plexus. Daceus reeled, staggering back to regain footing, but I pressed my attack, first using an overhead slash to break open his flailing guard, then delivering a diagonal uppercut that put a groove in his plastron and pulled him to the ground.

  We went again, this time exchanging a flurry of blows, feints and blocks. Our blades became a blur of clashing steel and I began to feel like my old self again. After a brutal riposte, I swapped hands mid sword flourish and smacked the flat of my gladius against Daceus’s gorget.

  He gasped as the blade came close to his neck: a foul stroke.

  I ignored his slight shock and returned to position.

  ‘Evens, two hits apiece. Again.’

  As I moved through the blade disciplines, the finely crafted sword strokes, I felt a background pulse directly behind my eyes. It was like an intense headache, a drum inside my skull, pounding in time with my heartbeat.

  Shadows flooded the arena that housed the battle cages; it had been this way since I had entered. But now, the darkness began to coalesce and I felt it close around me like a slow clenching fist. A silent predator lying in wait, it crouched at the edge of my vision and from somewhere distant I felt a chill enter my bones.

  It was snowing, the battle cage far away and forgotten as an arctic tundra overwhelmed it in my senses. At the edge of a frost-encrusted ruin, the veil of darkness persisted. Through the black fog, an enemy emerged.

  ‘I am doom…’

  Beneath my feet, the ice trembled like the beating of some immense heart.

  The king had returned, in all his gilded and terrible majesty.

  We clashed, I with the Tempest Blade crackling in my gauntleted fist, the primarch’s name on my lips like an unsheathed sword.

  The king swung his war-scythe around, the great reaping edge like a crescent moon cut from the bleakest night and fashioned into a weapon. Our blades struck together in a cascade of sparks and we broke apart. I took a moment’s respite but the necron king needed none, his anima fuelled by some ancient will and driven by the machine he had surrendered his mortal flesh to become. Massive, overpowering, he loomed over me in seconds.

  ‘Not again!’ I roared. ‘I am a Lion of Macragge, I am Master of the Watch. A slayer of kings!’ With fury born of desperation and hate, I hurled myself at the necron. His scythe haft shattered, sheared in two by my blade and I battered his weary defence as he threw up his arms in surrender.

  ‘No mercy for you,’ I vowed, raining down blows until my shoulder ached and my lungs were fit to burst.

  Breath did not come. I was drowning again and the veil of darkness crept into my field of vision, smothering and denying me my prey.

  ‘No! I will not be cheated of my victory. Not again, not–’

  As I collapsed, retching what I thought was fluid from my chest but bringing up only air, I saw Daceus.

  His gladius was broken, split along the blade. His vambraces were hacked apart, his face awash with shock and anger.

  ‘My brother…’ I struggled to gasp, falling. Daceus, despite my wounding of him, rose up to catch me.

  At the doleful clang of our power armour meeting, I resurfaced from the dream and the pool of dark imaginings that choked me.

  ‘Brother-captain…’ He sounded panicked. I waved his concern away, and stood up unaided.

  ‘I am all right. And you?’ I asked, gesturing to his battered war-plate.

  ‘A scratch,’ he lied, then frowned. ‘What happened?’

  I saw no sense in hiding the truth, so I told him of what I had seen, of my slayer reborn, of the duel I thought I was fighting against him.

  ‘I could have killed you, Daceus.’

  ‘But you did not.’

  But I could have. I almost did.

  A remnant from Damnos, some revenant I had brought with me, lingered. I felt the chill of it in the air around me and the dull pain in my side. I saw it in the shadows, the veil of darkness which harboured monsters of cold steel and viridian fire.

  Something in the gloom around us caught my attention and I seized the Tempest Blade, throwing a fresh sword from the rack to Daceus at the same time.

  ‘What is it?’ The sergeant caught the blade easily and swung around, trying to follow my gaze.

  I whispered, ‘Are we alone?’

  Daceus nodded slowly and I eased open the door to the cage.

  ‘Not any more…’ I told him.

  Together, we crept from the battle cage and spread out. My eyes never left the exact spot where I had seen movement, and I battle-signed the enclosing manoeuvre to the sergeant.

  As well as the battle cages themselves, the arena had a servitor rack. It was an automated station where deactivated combat-servitors yet to be invested with sparring protocols would wait until called upon. Some sixty of the automata were currently in the rack in three rows of twenty, one surmounting the other.

  More machines. More cold steel.

  In the dingy arena hall, they did not look so dissimilar from the necrons displaced around the east wing armourium.

  Daceus and I closed on the servitors’ dormant forms. One in particular had drawn my eye. On Damnos we had seen necrons that clothed themselves in the rancid flesh of the dead, using their skins as a crude and scarcely effective form of camouflage.

  I could almost swear the eye sockets of this one were aglow…

  Not waiting for Daceus, I thrust with my blade, releasing an actinic blur of fused steel and energised brutality.

  Impaled on my sword, I wrenched the interloper from the servitor rack and with a grunt threw it down for us to finish off.

  Daceus stopped me.

  ‘Brother-captain…’ He sounded concerned, but was looking at me and not our enemy. ‘It is just a servitor. Not even active.’

  ‘Strength of Guilliman…’ I breathed, before letting the Tempest Blade sag down by my side. He was right. It was just an automaton. Nothing more. No assassin clothed in flesh. ‘Perhaps I left the care of Brother Venatio too soon.’

  To his credit, Daceus tried to reassure me.

  ‘You were in a suspended animation coma, brother-captain. Some… side-effects are to be expected.’

  I grunted, the equivalent of a vocal shrug, and heard the chime of choral bells echo throughout the arena.

  ‘Has it been that long?’

  Daceus’s eyes narrowed in confusion. ‘Long for what?’

  ‘I am to stand before Lord Calgar and be judged for my command on Damnos. I had thought I had longer to prepare.’

  ‘It would be my honour to accompany you to the Hall of Ultramar, my lord.’

  ‘Aye. Agreed.’ I clapped Daceus on the shoulder. He was as good and loyal a soldier as any captain had a right to have in his service. ‘Gratitude, brother.’

  We left for the Hall of Ultramar and an audience with its regent and most august lord.

  Replete in his war panoply, the Lord of Macragge was seated upon a throne like a battle king of old, and my heart both swelled with pride and trembled with awe at the sight of him. He wore his formal battleplate, a ceremonial suit festooned with laurels and awards. A pair of hefty power gloves clothed his hands, which he rested regally on the throne arms. His hair was white as hoarfrost, and he glowered at me through one organic eye. The other eye was a bionic, and
even less welcoming.

  ‘Brother-captain,’ he said, radiating authority. ‘Come forward.’

  Here in the Hall of Ultramar, the great and noble were personified in statue form and shadowed me as I walked the long processional to a place before my lord. I saw Invictus, Helveticus and Galatan, Titus, all measuring my worth with the weight of their marble stares. I would not be found wanting.

  Daceus had come with me as far as the great bronze doors, and there I had bid him stay, despite his offer to the contrary. I didn’t want him caught up in this. Any judgement would be my burden to carry.

  As I walked, I passed under great looming archways and saw again the shadows within the chamber’s lofty vaults. I tried to avert my gaze, turning my mind to the matter at hand, but when my eyes alighted on Lord Calgar I saw a strange halo encircle his head. At first I continued with the slightest break in step, aware of not only Calgar’s eyes upon me but Severus Agemman’s too and the honour guard of Macragge. Then, as I drew closer, I realised that what I believed to be a trick of the light was an actual glow. No, not merely a glow, a mark. It was viridian green, and I saw a fraction too late what it portended.

  ‘Get down!’

  Agemman reacted first to my warning, putting himself between me, as I ran down the processional, and Calgar, who was at the other end of it. He thought I had lost all sense and was preparing to knock some back into me. I had drawn my pistol, prompting the honour guard to draw arms also. Five bolt weapons were trained on my chest in an instant. My gaze went to the eaves above us, the shadows in the vaulted roof, and I pointed to get my brothers’ attention and stop them from executing me.

  ‘Up there!’

  Agemman saw it too, crouched like an iron gargoyle, the darkness as its cloak. A single eye betrayed its position, but we would be far too late to prevent it achieving its goal. In truth, the optic was a targeting matrix and Lord Calgar was in its crosshairs.

  A long, slim rifle slid into its grasp. I watched it shoulder the weapon and aim it. Reality slowed, as if the assassin were chronologically a few seconds ahead of us and functioning in a different time stream.

  A plume of viridian gas expelled from the rifle’s vents like a breath. There was no recoil, only the expulsion of a missile that raked through the air. I followed the missile’s trajectory in my peri­pheral vision, triggering my pistol in the same moment and setting the vaults alight with a pulse of energised plasma. The others had seen the danger now and were discharging their own weapons into the time-shifted assassin above us.

  Calgar grunted, the sound someone makes when they’re gut punched and the air is blasted from their lungs. Having got to his feet when the interloper had been discovered, he fell back and clattered into and then out of his throne, half rolling down the steps that led up to his seat.

  We destroyed the archway where the assassin had made his nest, ripping up the shadows with streaks of blinding muzzle flash and plasma and bringing down a cascade of debris. This was the Hall of Ultramar and we had wrecked it like a band of careless thieves.

  Time resumed, our weapons fell silent again, but the quarry was gone, slipped back into whatever darkness had spawned it. The assassin hadn’t merely escaped, it simply wasn’t there anymore, phased out like the necrons too badly damaged to self-repair. Only we hadn’t destroyed it. Not even close.

  With the immediate danger passed for now, Agemman was at Lord Calgar’s side. The honour guard closed around them protectively like an armoured cocoon.

  ‘Stay with the Chapter Master…’ I was running back down the processional, the vaunted marble heroes urging my every step. Every footfall I took was punctuated by a glance above me, back into the shadowed roof and searching for my enemy.

  Bursting through the bronze doors, I met Daceus.

  The brother-sergeant was armed, having clearly heard the gunfire from within.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  I didn’t linger, but kept on down the corridor, intent on reaching the east wing of the armourium where I knew an answer would be waiting. Daceus kept step.

  ‘Our enemy is in the Fortress of Hera,’ I told him. ‘They have just tried to assassinate Lord Calgar.’

  ‘Blood of Guilliman! Is he–’

  I spared the brother-sergeant a stern glance. ‘He lives. He will live.’

  Daceus would chastise himself for his doubt later; now we had to reach the armourium.

  I was about to raise Vantor on the vox to get a warning to the Techmarine when the shrieking alert sirens told me I was too late. Light from the lumens and glow-globes shrank to an amber wash that overlaid the halls of the fortress-monastery in sickly monochrome.

  I activated the vox in my gorget. ‘Agemman.’

  His reply was a few seconds late in coming.

  ‘We’re headed for the apothecarion. Brother Venatio awaits us.’

  ‘The alert?’

  ‘Is coming from the armourium in the east wing.’

  All my fears suddenly crystallised. The memory of the necron ‘corpses’ returned, those that were too badly damaged to self-repair but unable to phase out. Only they weren’t damaged. It was a ruse and in our ignorance we had invited them into our bastion, our home.

  I wanted to hit something, but instead I bit back my anger and answered Agemman.

  ‘Sergeant Daceus and I are on our way there now.’

  I cut the link – the First Captain had enough to deal with.

  As we entered the east wing, the corridors strangely abandoned, I saw the veil of darkness. Something writhed within it, something of cold steel with viridian eyes like balefires.

  ‘Am I imagining that?’

  Shaking his head, Daceus racked his bolter slide and took aim at the mechanised horrors emerging from the shadows.

  The Tempest Blade is a relic of Talassar, and I am a descendent of that world’s noblest household. I honoured my ancestors by bringing its fury to my enemies. A necron exoskeleton is formidable but no match for a power sword such as this. They were warrior-caste, the foot soldiery of their darkling empire. The first I vaporised with a ball of incandescent plasma, the second I beheaded. My armour was impervious to their beam weapons and I was barely slowed as I hacked the arm off a third and then bifurcated its torso. Three necrons phased out in a cascade of howling energy.

  Daceus neutralised three more with precise burst-fire from his bolter. Even when one of the mechanoids was a handspan from his face, the sergeant was unflinching and maintained strict fire discipline. He tore the thing apart almost point-blank and let the frag pepper his armoured form.

  When we were done and the necrons vanquished, we waded into the darkness looking for more but the veil was thinning by then and disappeared entirely in a few more seconds.

  Daceus scowled. ‘How many of these things are we dealing with?’

  ‘Judging by what I saw dissected in Vantor’s workshop, dozens.’

  ‘Could they gain a foothold here, a means of bringing greater forces directly into the fortress?’

  I clapped my sergeant’s shoulder guard to reassure him.

  ‘We won’t let that happen, brother.’

  Ahead of us, the east wing of the armourium beckoned. Its entry gate was open and a flickering light from within threw syncopated flashes into the gloom.

  Inside, the armourium was a charnel house. Blood streaked the walls and machineries. It mingled with oil from the drones. Every serf, servitor and enginseer was dead. Their bodies lay strewn about the workshop, eviscerated and impaled. The luminator rig above had been damaged during the commotion and threw sporadic light across the grisly scene. Every flash revealed a fresh horror: faces frozen in terror and death. But there was no sign of the necron, none at all. The limbs, torsos, skulls and weaponry were all gone.

  Then I saw Vantor, and my grief redoubled.

  The Techmarine was dead, split fro
m groin to neck by an energised blade. It had cut through his artificer armour like tin. Biological entrails entwined with cables and wires as all that comprised Euclidese Vantor was vented out and strewn like offal. It was no way for my brother to meet his end. His murderers had robbed him of glory.

  I placed my gauntleted hand upon his face to close his still-staring gaze. Even the dishonoured dead should be allowed eternal sleep. Such was the damage done, even his gene-seed could not be recovered.

  For a moment I shut my eyes, marshalling my anger, turning it into something useful.

  The sensation of drowning came back, and the darkness in my mind’s eye returned with it. I fought it down, clenching a fist to stay focused. Whatever trauma I was experiencing would have to wait. I was determined to master it.

  I addressed Daceus.

  ‘A deadly enemy is at large in these halls, brother. It has already laid low our Chapter Master and now it seeks to end us into the bargain.’ I gritted my teeth. ‘We will not yield to it. We must rouse our battle-brothers, hunt this menace down and exterminate it.’

  Daceus nodded grimly and we left the armourium as we had found it. No time to mourn or bury the dead. More caskets would line the Fortress of Hera’s funerary chambers if we did not act.

  ‘Brother-captain!’ Daceus stabbed out a finger, and was already raising up his bolter as the veil of darkness returned. It was real this time, not a shadow creeping across my subconscious.

  I fed a surge of energy down the Tempest Blade and it crackled into an azure beacon.

  It was the assassin, his cyclopean eye aglow.

  ‘By Guilliman’s blood,’ I swore. ‘I will have that bastard’s head…’

  But he wasn’t alone, as three bulky warriors stomped up alongside him bearing twin-barrelled cannons. A trio of muzzle flares roared into being.

  I got off a single shot, and took the one-eyed assassin directly in his glowing orb. Unprepared to engage his chronometric defences, his head exploded in a pulse of scorching plasma. As the corridor lit up with the flare of a necron cannonade I had the satisfaction of seeing Calgar’s shooter crumple and phase out.