Hammer and Bolter 7

by Christian Dunn

  A fractured skull, then. He had suffered that before. Not the worst. He could fight on.

  Iktinos strode forwards, crozius in his good hand. He swung it down at N’Kalo, who deflected it away with the greenskin blade he snatched off the floor at the last second. The blade shattered like glass and N’Kalo was driven onto his back by the force of the blow. He reeled, his good eye unable to focus, Iktinos just a black blur over him.

  ‘Iktinos!’ yelled Sarpedon. For a moment Iktinos thought that Sarpedon was the man attacking him, that he was back in the Eshkeen forests with his battle-brothers. Everything since then had been a dream and he had never left that stretch of marshland.

  But no. Iktinos was the enemy. Sarpedon was somewhere nearby. Iktinos dragged N’Kalo to his feet and wrapped an arm around his throat, hauled him into a corner and grabbed his bolt pistol off the floor. The muzzle of the pistol was against the side of N’Kalo’s head.

  Sarpedon stood in the middle of the gallery, unarmoured as he had been in the courtroom.

  ‘Iktinos!’ yelled Sarpedon. He could barely believe that the first Soul Drinker he had come across since his escape was engaged in fighting the one Space Marine who had stood up for the Chapter at the trial. Still stranger was that it was Iktinos, and that he had already found his armour and weapons.

  N’Kalo looked nearly dead. His face was barely recognisable as belonging to a human. One eye socket was a gory ruin. Iktinos had disarmed him, and now had him up as a human shield with a gun to his head.

  ‘Chaplain,’ called Sarpedon. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I am surviving,’ said Iktinos.

  ‘N’Kalo is my friend. Let him go.’

  ‘The Soul Drinkers have no friends. N’Kalo is coming with me.’

  ‘Hostages will do us no good, Iktinos! You know that!’

  ‘Then it is for the best that I have him, not you. Do not seek to follow, Sarpedon. There is only sorrow this way. Go to your brothers. They are rearming in the archives.’

  ‘What are you speaking of, Chaplain? Whatever fate waits for us here, are you not a part of it?’

  Iktinos dragged N’Kalo towards a pair of double doors at the far end of the hall. ‘Fight, Sarpedon! Fight on! That is what fate demands of you. Stand by your brothers and die a good death!’

  ‘I know that someone has guided us here without my realising. Someone has used me just as surely as Abraxes did. Is it you, Iktinos?’

  ‘Goodbye, Sarpedon. A good death to you, my brother!’

  ‘Is it Daenyathos?’

  Iktinos hauled N’Kalo through the doors. They boomed shut behind him. Sarpedon rushed forwards, trying to cover the ground to the doors before Iktinos could turn a corner and get out of sight.

  Sarpedon heard the tiny sound of the grenade hitting the floor. He threw his arms up in front of him, supernatural reflexes giving him the warning a split second before the grenade went off in his face. The doors were ripped off their mountings and slammed into him, throwing him back across the display room, crashing through captured arms and victory monuments.

  Sarpedon skidded along the floor on his back. When he came to a halt he brushed the debris from his eyes and saw the doorway was full of smoke and rubble. Sarpedon had no way of following Iktinos.

  Daenyathos. Rogal Dorn. The pilgrim ship’s suicide attack. Now Iktinos, with an agenda of his own. Everything Sarpedon had believed about the galaxy was falling apart, and he did not know how it could end but with his death and the deaths of every one of his battle-brothers.

  One thing that Iktinos had said made sense. Sarpedon had to fight. He had to win a good death, and help his brothers do the same. He owed himself that much. It was not much to fight for, but at that moment it was all he had.

  Sarpedon snatched up a sword from a fallen display behind him, and struck out for the archives.

  Sometimes a cold wind blew through the Phalanx. It was a trick of the ship’s atmospheric systems, or perhaps a random current created by the coolant pipes and superheated reactor cores of the engine sectors. It howled now through the science labs and triumphant galleries around the Observatory dome, strewn with wreckage. It picked up shards of debris and flapped the Imperial Fist banners that lined the way Chapter Master Vladimir had used to enter the now-ruined Observatory of Dornian Majesty.

  It stirred the dust in the Atoning Halls, whistling between the frames of the wrecked torture racks and the bars of the empty cells. A few Space Marines lay there, Soul Drinkers who had been caught in the worst of the explosion and killed. Their battle-brothers had taken a few bodies with them but some still lay where they had fallen, their torn bodies still chained in their cells.

  It turned the pages that lay on the reading tables in the archives. The reading hall was held by only a handful of Soul Drinkers, among them Librarian Scamander, the pyrokine who had not so long ago served as a Scout. He crouched in the shadows cast by the dim light and the enormous parchment rolls, waiting with the Soul Drinkers chosen to stand watch with him. When the enemy came – for they had to be called the enemy now, no matter what they had once been – they would come through here, and in force.

  The enemy was now gathering in the crew mess hall, which Captain Lysander had designated as the staging post for the assault on the Soul Drinkers. The Imperial Fists and Howling Griffons made up the bulk of the force and Lysander had already had to deal with the competing demands to be the first in against the Soul Drinkers. The Phalanx was Imperial Fists ground and they had the say on who should have the moments of greatest honour in the fight to come, but Captain Borganor had demanded that his Howling Griffons be given the task of charging into the archives and letting the first Soul Drinkers blood. Lysander had agreed, for the Soul Drinkers were enemy enough and he did not need vengeful Howling Griffons facing up to him as well.

  Commander Gethsemar picked up a handful of rubble dust from a collapsed wall, felled by the shockwave from the Atoning Halls explosion. He let the dust drift on the wind, as if it was a form of divination and from the eddies of the wind he could read the pattern of bloodshed unfolding into the immediate future. His war-mask was a death mask of Sanguinius, cast from the features of the divine primarch as he lay dying, felled by the Arch-Traitor Horus ten thousand years before. Sanguinius was unspeakably beautiful, and even stylised in gold and gemstones the death mask cast an aura of supernatural majesty that the Sanguinary Guard used as one of their deadliest weapons.

  ‘What do you see?’ asked Librarian Varnica of the Doom Eagles.

  Gethsemar turned to Varnica but his eyes were hidden behind ruby panes set into the mask’s eye sockets and his expression could not be read. ‘Such fates that intertwine here, my brother, are beyond any of us,’ replied Gethsemar. ‘Long have our sages tried to unravel them. Long have they failed. They strive even now, knowing that the future will be forever hidden from them, but that to endeavour in such an impossible task is its own reward. Our immediate task here is far from impossible, but I fear a greater undertaking is revealed that will never end.’

  ‘Explain,’ said Varnica. ‘As you would to a layman.’

  ‘Think upon it, brother,’ said Gethsemar. ‘Here Space Marine fights Space Marine. There is nothing new about that. But will it be the final time?’

  ‘I think not,’ replied Varnica.

  ‘Then you begin to see our point. What is a Space Marine? He is a man, yes, but he is something far more. He is told that he is far more from the moment he is accepted into his Chapter, when he is little more than a child. His earlier memories may not even survive his training. He may conceive in his own mind of no time but one where he was superior to any human being. What might result from a mind so forged?’

  ‘He has no doubt and no fear,’ replied Varnica. ‘Such alteration of a man’s mind is necessary to create the warriors the Imperium needs. I see it as a sacrifice we make. We give up the men we might hav
e become to instead serve as Adeptus Astartes. If you believe this is a mistake, commander, then I would be compelled to differ with you.’

  ‘Ah, but there it is! Do you see, Librarian Varnica? It is true that what we do to our minds to make us Space Marines is as necessary as teaching us to shoot. But what sin is locked in to us through such treatment?’

  ‘Brutality?’ said Varnica. ‘Many times Space Marines have gone too far in punishing the Emperor’s enemies, and ordinary men and woman have suffered as a result.’

  ‘Brutality is a necessity,’ said Gethsemar. ‘A few thousand dead here and there mean nothing compared to the millions spared through the intimidation of our foes that our potential for brutality allows. No, it is a far deeper sin of which I speak, something not so far removed from corruption.’

  ‘Corruption is a strong word,’ said Varnica, folding his arms and straightening up. The threat was clear. ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘It is pride,’ replied Gethsemar. ‘A Space Marine does not just think he is superior to the ordinary citizens of the Imperium. He thinks, whether his conscious mind accepts it or not, that he is superior to other Space Marines, too. We all have our way of doing things, do we not? Would we all resist any attempt to change us, though violence may be the only route doing so can take? So prideful we are that Space Marines will never stop killing Space Marines. For every Horus Heresy or Badab War, there are a thousand blood duels and trials of honour brought about by our inability to back down. That is the real enemy we face here. The Soul Drinkers were turned from the Imperium by pride. It is pride that motivates us in destroying them, for all we talk of justice. Pride is the enemy. Pride will kill us.’

  Varnica thought about this. ‘Throne knows we all have our moments,’ he said. ‘But the mind of a Space Marine is a complicated thing. Can such a simple thing as pride really be its key? And from the way you speak, commander, I would imagine you have a solution?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ protested Gethsemar. ‘The Sons of Sanguinius all accept that we are doomed. A Space Marine’s destructive pride is the only thing keeping us all fighting, and we are the only thing keeping the Imperium from the brink. No, it is our way to observe our in-fighting for the death throes they are, to understand what we truly are before the end comes.’

  Varnica smiled grimly. ‘For all your gilt and finery, Angel Sanguine, you are a pessimist. The Doom Eagles seek out the worst atrocities the galaxy commits because we want to put things right. It will not happen in any of our lifetimes, but it will happen, and it is the Space Marines who will do it whether we are too prideful for our own good or not. Why fight, if you believe all is lost no matter what you do?’

  Gethsemar shook out his hand, and the dust drifted away on the thin wind. ‘Because it is our duty,’ he replied.

  Lysander stomped past, hammer in hand. ‘Daviks and the Castellan are in position,’ he said. ‘Make ready. Two minutes.’

  Gethsemar and Varnica broke away to join their own squads. The main assault force, gathered in the mess halls, consisted of the Ninth and Seventh Imperial Fist companies and the Howling Griffons’ Second. Varnica and Gethsemar’s squads were to follow the Griffons in and, if Borganor was to be believed, clean up the mangled remnants of the Soul Drinkers the Howling Griffons were sure to leave in their wake. Lysander was walking the lines, inspecting the Imperial Fists ranked up along the width of the crew mess hall. The rooms had been built for the normally proportioned crew of the Phalanx and the Space Marines could barely stand upright in it.

  Whole planets had been broken by fewer than the two hundred Space Marines that the Imperial Fists fielded for this battle. The Howling Griffons were impatient, broken up by squads to be spoken to in turn by Borganor. Lord Inquisitor Kolgo was there, too, at the back of the hall with his Battle Sisters bodyguard, looking more like a battle observer than a combatant in spite of his Terminator armour.

  Varnica returned to his squad. Sergeant Beyrengar, who had been elevated to squad command after Novas’s death, had gone through the pre-battle wargear rites and prayers already. There was little for Varnica left to do.

  ‘This is where the solution to that puzzle box lies,’ he said. ‘We have pursued the Soul Drinkers, though we did not know it, from the moment the heretic Kephilaes made the mistake of drawing our attention. What we began then, we finish here. We know what the Soul Drinkers are, and more importantly, we know what they are not. They are not our brothers. When you face one of them through a haze of gunsmoke, do not see a brother. See one more symptom of corruption, and excise him as you would any cancer of the human race.’

  ‘Borganor!’ came Lysander’s yell from the Imperial Fists lines. ‘The honour is yours!’

  ‘Gladly taken!’ cried out Borganor in reply. ‘Howling Griffons! Roboute Guilliman looks on! Let us show him a fight he will not forget!’

  The deck of the Phalanx shuddered as the Howling Griffons advanced.

  Scamander almost raised the alarm, but he realised that the silhouette entering the reading room was multi-legged. He stood and saluted. ‘Commander!’ he said. ‘We did not know if you were still alive.’

  ‘I had plenty of opportunities to die,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘I failed to grasp any of them.’ He shook Scamander’s hand. ‘How long do we have?’

  ‘Not long,’ said Scamander. ‘The Imperial Fists are gathering to attack us even now. They know we are here.’

  ‘And the plan?’

  ‘Hold the library stacks. Don’t die. Circumstances demand our tactics be simple.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We have your armour, and the Axe of Mercaeno.’

  ‘Then at least I will not die here unclothed! That would be too humiliating a way to go.’

  Scamander smiled. For all the battles he had fought and the dangers his psychic powers posed, he was still a youth. By the standards of the Soul Drinkers, he was just a boy.

  Sarpedon headed through the reading room to the archway Scamander had indicated. It led to a maze of bookcases and tables, shelves of volumes stacked high to the ceiling, a thin layer of dust covering everything disturbed by the armoured footprints of the Soul Drinkers. Sarpedon glanced at the books – histories of Imperial Fists actions, battle-philosophy, stories of individual Imperial Fists and their deeds. Sarpedon was reminded of the chansons the Soul Drinkers had once written, epic poems to glorify themselves. Sarpedon had abandoned his own chanson when he had thrown Michairas, his chronicler, out of an airlock during the First Chapter War. The thought gave him an unpleasant taste in his mouth.

  Soul Drinkers saluted as he passed. He saw battle-brothers he had fought alongside for years. Some had argued against him, some had sided with him in everything, but they had all followed him into the Veiled Region. They had all accepted capture by Captain Lysander and the Imperial Fists without a fight, because he had ordered it. And they would die here, ultimately because he had ordered it.

  ‘Commander,’ said Sergeant Graevus as Sarpedon walked past. Sarpedon returned his salute and noted the Assault squad that Graevus had assembled from the Chapter’s survivors. He had picked veterans, bloody-minded Space Marines who could be trusted to give each centimetre of the stacks in return for buckets of blood shed by their chainblades. Sergeant Salk was instructing his squad, and paused to nod his own salute to Sarpedon. Sarpedon scuttled over makeshift barricades of upturned tables, and squeezed through the bottlenecks formed by the chaotic layout of the stacks. In the centre of the book-lined labyrinth, he found Captain Luko standing at a reading table.

  Luko grabbed Sarpedon around the shoulders. ‘Good to see you, brother,’ he said. ‘I thought the festivities would begin without you.’

  ‘I would not miss it for the galaxy,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘How many of our brothers do we have here for the celebration?’

  ‘A little under sixty,’ said Luko. ‘A few were lost in the escape. Pallas stayed behind. And others have
gone missing. It is to be expected, I suppose, but it is strange…’

  ‘Iktinos’s flock,’ said Sarpedon.

  Luko took a step back. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Iktinos is not with us,’ said Sarpedon. ‘His flock must have joined him.’

  ‘Not with us? What do you mean?’

  ‘Iktinos brought us here. He has been doing it for years now, manipulating us towards this place and time. Why, I do not know. Probably it is at the behest of Daenyathos. Whatever the reason, he has his goals and we have ours, and they do not coincide.’

  ‘The Chaplain has betrayed us.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarpedon. ‘He has.’

  Luko’s customary joviality was gone. ‘I will kill him.’

  ‘There will be a queue,’ said Sarpedon. ‘Focus for now on your survival. You have picked a good place to make our stand, brother. I would think twice before attacking such a place.’

  ‘We have your armour, and your axe,’ said Luko. ‘They are stored behind that bookcase. We could not find the Soulspear among the evidence, though.’

  ‘Then I shall do without. The Axe of Mercaeno is weapon enough for me.’

  ‘You know, the Howling Griffons would want that back.’

  ‘Then Borganor can take it from my dead hand,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘I have no doubt he will be seeking just that chance. Many stories will end here, captain. Borganor and I is just one of them. If we can give those stories endings worthy of these histories, then we will have won our victory.’

  Scamander’s voice reached them over Luko’s vox. ‘Captain! The Howling Griffons are advancing! I’m falling back towards Graevus’s position!’ The deep spatter of gunfire sounded over his words, and Sarpedon could hear the thuds of bolter impacts through the walls of the library.

  ‘Then it is done,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I shall arm. To the end, Captain Luko.’

  ‘To the end, Chapter Master,’ replied Luko. ‘Cold and fast.’