Brothers of the Snake

by Dan Abnett

  That is shown to be a lie, and the deployment of the Dark Tusks to bolster the cult's troops now makes sense. There is something valuable to the Ruinous Powers here. Some artefact, perhaps, some icon, some thing of power, perhaps even an entity, buried deep below in the lightless lakes of oil.

  Damocles has won: won the facility, discharged its mission at great cost. And yet it has lost. They have won a place that is worthless, seized back precious Imperial territory, only to find it now tainted and despoiled. If they had known, from orbit, they could have...

  Priad pauses. He clears his mind with slow intonations of the focus chant. Disappointment is a mind poison. So is the thought of failure or the loss of belief in either cause or purpose. Calignes knows it too and follows Priad's lead, casting out the negative senses of loss and error gnawing at him. He needs no cue or command to do this. They are Adeptes Astartes, Iron Snakes Chapter. There is no failure, there is no defeat. There is only victory and death, and both are to be savoured when they come.

  Priad looks around, imagining the moment when the refinery first spewed up the taint from deep below. He feels a tiny stab of pity for the workforce, men he has helped slaughter this day. Loyal servants of the Emperor turned to the ways of Darkness by something that they began to exhume from the depths. There is no choice now. They must do what should have been done first of all.

  Priad orders Natus to stop work on the reconfiguration of the pipeline pumps. He summons Pindor and Xander, and makes them assemble all the explosives they can find. They take the full complement of grenade munitions from each Space Marine, then search the weapons stocks of the enemy for more.

  Memnes enters the gantry and Priad quietly tells him of the discovery. Memnes thumbs open the neck seals of his helmet and removes it. His scalp is shaven and beaded with sweat. He wipes a gloved hand right back across its stubbled dome, his old face dark and serious.

  'Your decision is correct. You do as Raphon would have done.' Though second in the chain of command under the squad leader, the old Apothecary has seniority on his side and his assent is always noted by the leader. Memnes knows that is what Priad, a Marine barely half his age, is looking for.

  'We have not failed. It is simply that the nature of the victory has changed.’ Memnes says.

  'I know it. We will make true victory from this spoiled triumph, and celebrate both in the Emperor's name.'

  Pindor reports that the munitions are collected. They load them into a cargo cart and push them to the well-head. Natus and Andromak take drill weights off one of the main bores and strap the explosives into place, lashing them into mesh ore sacks.

  They are half-finished when the counter-attack comes: a bombardment from the east that fractures the perimeter wall and flattens two derrick towers in a frenzy of sparks and shrieking metal. Roses of fireballs bud into the sky. Priad has signalled their egress to the east and now he countermands, asking for a western extraction. The change will add four minutes to the Thunderhawk's flight-time.

  Pindor works to complete the stowage of the explosives. He is stripped down to the waist to allow him access to the cramped space under the bore-head, his armour stacked nearby. Fluid-heavy feed lines cross his naked carapace from the belt mount, held in place by flesh staples. His shoulders bear the old scars of punishment rituals carried out on Karybdis. Pindor always scored low on morning firing rites, but his expertise at close-fighting and explosives have made him indispensable. Scar tissue, puffy and pink as coral, bunches and twists as he works.

  The enemy advances from the east. More long-range bombardment, and then the first signs of troops. Dark Tusks, in two assault teams, with Razorbacks in support.

  Damocles have no long-range weapons, nothing with reach like the Razorbacks. Resistance at this point would be futile. Priad orders midday prayers, and they circle around him, kneeling, helmets off, heads down, as he chants the litanies of devotion, the psalms of destruction and fortitude. He does it so they will not even consider the idea they have failed. No one voices such a thought. He asks each man in turn to speak a word for the fallen.

  Calignes remembers Chilles, a moment of bravery on Paradis Antimony. They all nod, remembering. Xander shows a scar that would have killed him on Basalt Ignius III, but for Maced. Maced is remembered too. Natus celebrates Brother-Sergeant Raphon's tactical skill and his bravery. Andromak recalls the day Chilles slew a water-wyrm on beloved Ithaka. Naked on a rock-tower, with a sea-lance braced. He took the horn-hide. The polished scales were still looped in his belt when he died. Memnes speaks well of Maced, reminding them of his brute strength against the grisly H'onek on Parlion One-Eleven. Chapter legend, a legend that has died today in flesh but which will live in memory. And not, Priad reminds himself fiercely, in vain.

  Pindor joins them, still half-stripped, dripping sweat and oil. He kneels and tells a short, gutsy story of Raphon at the gates of Fewgal, blinded by mud and killing all the foe he could find, cursing all the while for 'a good sea-lance' to test them. Pindor draws their laughter: honest, forthright, uplifting. No hint of defeat or failure in them now.

  As is should be, thinks Priad. We have won; the Snakes have won, no matter what.

  'I have done the work.’ Pindor tells Priad as the laughter subsides.

  They help Pindor redress his armour, while Calignes cycles the rock-bore to dig and sends it down. Oil waste flushes up around his feet like a black tide and then seeps away down through the mesh of the gantry deck.

  The foe is at the gates. A tumult of voices and gunfire. Helmets in place, the seven Iron Snakes withdraw in close file down the main cargo avenue, under the shadows of lifters and skeletal cranes. They fire as they go, lacing bolt-traces and plasma fire into the buildings and niches.

  At the west cargo gate, they form into a spearhead as the Tusk advance guard rushes them down the avenue. Blisters of light mark the air, exploding metal bulkheads, breaking girders and digging white powder from the ground. A descending hellstorm, chasing after them. The Snakes drop two of the foe with concentrated fire before Priad orders them out of the gate. He himself pauses in the archway long enough for the first Tusk to reach him. Priad disembowels the disgusting creature with the lightning claw.

  In Raphon's name.

  A saved grenade brings the cargo gate down after him and they are moving into open desert away from Rosetta Excelsis with the Chaos advance momentarily halted. The stark light of the midday suns burns the landscape white and shadowless, and there is no longer a horizon between bleached land and colourless sky.

  The gunship awaits, hazed by heat and dust, in a narrow arroyo. Its entry ramp is down like a tongue in the soft dust. Bolter rounds whine after them as they board. The Dark Tusks have broken through in pursuit. Memnes and Priad, in the rear, turn and engage for one last time, killing as if to underline the undeniability of their victory.

  IV

  From space, the surface of Rosetta is hard and white and sharply scored, like the back of a dry skull. They are just making transitory orbit when the munitions fire, nine hundred metres down in the oil reserves. There is no visible sign from up here. Almost an hour later, the surface turns dark and puffy, like wet-rot, the patch extending for three thousand square kilometres around the focus of the refinery. Sub-crust fires, linked to magmatic disruptions and fuelled by some unknown source of exploding power, burn out Rosetta a day later.

  In the dank belly of the gunship, their discarded helmets rolling on the metal floor in little circles as the ship pitches and yaws, the survivors of Damocles sit in silence. They are tired, blank, parched. They mourn. Now, and only now, do they allow themselves the thoughts. They have lost. Yet they have won. They have taken a victory, the right victory, but not one they expected or were sent to achieve.

  Memnes takes out his flask. It is tubular, copper banded with straps of dull zinc. He draws it from a sheath on the thigh of his armour.

  This is the Rite of the Sharing of Water, and none will look away. Six armoured forms, the remains of t
he assault squad, watch as Priad takes the flask. He wants for cool, slaking water, but he knows this must come first. A sip of the salt water of Ithaka. He swigs it. It is sharp, warm, saline, bitter.

  He looks up at them all and they pound their thigh armour in approval. The ceremony is over but the bitterness in his mouth remains.

  Whether it's from the water of his homeworld or the mission, Priad isn't sure.

  Part Three

  White Heat

  Undertaking To Eidon

  I

  Green rock, amber sky, white heat. It was all revealed in a lurid glare that slanted in through the widening aperture of the whining hydraulic landing ramp.

  The tip of the armoured ramp crunched into the mica glass dust of the landing circle. The oily piston struts hissed to a halt. Steam dissipated, and there it was. Eidon. A precious, ancient world, and one possessed of a savage, natural beauty.

  So thought Petrok, Chapter Librarian, as he stepped down out of his landing shuttle and surveyed the open majesty of the land. He was framed for war, bareheaded and clean-shaven, his black locks bound up behind his deep skull, a towering form tall and broad even for a Space Marine. The edges of his gunmetal grey power armour were lined with white and red.

  But he did not lack a soul. Eidon was starkly beautiful. The rocks in the landscape around the blasted landing circle were vivid green, semi-crystal, glittering in the warm, clear air. Along the skyline, jagged vents spat white fire into the air. The phosphor fires, burning up from deep seams and faults in the earth beneath, powered the foundries and smithies of venerable Eidon City.

  White heat, the flames that kept the smelters and manufactories of Eidon turning in the Emperor's name.

  Petrok remarked upon the majesty of the place to his lexicanium, Rodos, as they walked together down the cinder path from the landing circle, under shattered rockcrete arches, towards the main Imperial staging post, their bearers in procession behind them. Rodos looked at him as if uncertain as to whether Petrok was joking or not.

  Petrok decided to drop it. If the man couldn't see it, then there was no point explaining. Some Ithakan hearts, he knew, were too ironclad to see anything but war. Petrok wondered if the fact that he could see the beauty was his weakness or his greatest strength.

  Doom had come to Eidon the year before, when the dark eldar had taken it in a single night. The action had marked the start of a renewed period of primul raids, as the foe launched out of their shadowy fastnesses and hiding places to strike into the Reef Worlds. Due to the strategic position of its base world, it was the Chapter's blood privilege to bear the brunt of all incursions into this part of the Imperium, and it had been so since records began.

  Imperial Guardsmen – a massed force of three hundred thousand, mainly Leoparda stormtroops and Donorian light armour -had been deployed to Eidon in the first months to effect a liberation. They had failed, ground to a standstill.

  Freeing six squads of the phratry from the ongoing reprisals against the dark eldar incursions elsewhere in the Reef Worlds, mighty Seydon, Master of the Chapter, had sent his Snakes to succeed on Eidon where the Guard had foundered. The force was led by the veteran Hero-Captain Phobor, and by Librarian Petrok.

  Petrok's landing had been delayed by an orbital bombardment. By the time he and the young, tonsured lexicanium marched into the Imperial staging post, Phobor was already leading an assault on the southern walls of Eidon City.

  Petrok could hear the crack and volley of the distant fighting rolling across the gritty, green slopes, and he could see the smoke pall rising, three kilometres away. The white phosphor vents on the skyline continued to rasp and blur the amber sky with their primordial heat.

  The staging post was all but empty. Half a dozen sculptural white awnings, discoloured slightly by months of exposure to the heat sear, swayed in the breeze. There were rows of smaller habitents made of a darker, coarser canvas, and stacks of munitions under netting in sandbagged dugouts. Several armoured vehicles were parked nearby. They had been painted with a lime overcoat to mask them in the green landscape. Behind the main command tents, on the lee of the hill, rows of infirmary tents stood all the way down to the roadway in the valley. Petrok could smell the rot and disinfectant drifting up from them.

  Guardsmen in the livery of the Leoparda saluted as the great Librarian approached, his quite formidable lexicanium a step behind, carrying the casket containing the Librarian's holy tarot deck on a padded, satin rest. Behind them came the bearer of Petrok's ornate helmet and the bearer of the power sword Bellus. Behind that strode two more bearers swinging censors and holding fluttering pennants of the Karybdis phratry aloft. And behind them walked four more, carrying the sacred Book of Lives in its litter-like hardwood chest. All the bearers were robed, hunched homunculus figures.

  One of the Guardsmen pointed at the main tent. Petrok saw how he was trembling, his face pallid and dank despite the midday heat. Without speaking, Petrok advanced towards the tent. His bearers snuffled and growled sidelong out of their cowls at the Guardsman, making him dart back.

  'Enough of that!' Rodos barked at them.

  Inside the tent was a vast, round table, the surface of which was a glass plate illuminated from beneath by moving lights that showed the contours and arrangement of the city and the disposition of the troops. Guard officers stood around it, and they all looked up and stepped back solemnly as the distinguished warrior and his retinue entered.

  'I am Petrok of the Iron Snakes,' he said, as if any here could not know who he was.

  One, a Leoparda general by his sleeve bars, stepped forward. 'Major General Corson. Welcome, great sir. Your worthy commander has already begun his assault. He requests that you make your strategic assessment as soon as possible, so that-'

  Petrok held up one huge, armoured hand. 'I am well aware of what my commander expects of me. Show me the dispositions.'

  Corson led Petrok to the table. The Librarian looked down at it, his sharp eyes clicking as they took in every detail, every flickering unit light-point, every drifting rune. Those eyes fed the data back into his brain, his greatest weapon, where they could be composed, considered, analysed, dissected.

  He smiled.

  'Master?' Rodos asked, noticing the expression.

  'Three point fluid dispersal along two insertions. Typical of dear Captain Phobor. Just as he did on Tull.'

  Rodos gazed at the tabletop for a moment, trying to discern the pattern. 'I see,' he said.

  He did not, and Petrok knew it. Rodos had a long way to go before he would master the techniques of memory and comparison that allowed a great tactical mind to take in all battle assessments at a glance.

  But the real reason Petrok had allowed himself to smile was not his immediate recognition of Phobor's favourite tactic. It was a simpler thing. The table reminded Petrok of the strategium board where he had learned his craft long ago from his old, beloved master, Nector. It was a whimsy, but it pleased him to enjoy it. He had, as he liked to remind himself, a soul.

  'These here?' he asked, tapping the table-plate with his fingertips.

  'Three battalions of Leoparda, in reserve.' The major general's voice was hollow and scared.

  'Why?'

  'Y-your brave captain wanted them... out of the way. He was quite insistent. He didn't want them to... to...'

  'Confuse his aim.’ said a Donorian officer smugly from behind, clearly enjoying the Leoparda's discomfort. Petrok smiled again. He could just imagine how Phobor had roared in here, accusing the Imperial Guard officers of weakness, cowardice, incompetence, and every other sin under the suns. They had failed to discharge the holy liberation, and Phobor would make them sweat now and repent in punishment details later. No wonder the camp was terrified.

  There was some muttering in the officer ranks, and Petrok frowned, still looking at the table.

  'Silence!' Rodos growled, noticing his Librarian's furrows. Hush fell again. Even the bearers had stopped their growling. Petrok put his hands on the
tabletop and leaned down, looking deeper, no longer making a tactical, forebrain assessment. He was reaching out with the darker, more profound parts of his mind. He was using his gifts to see beyond the now, into the when and the if, to sense the fortunes of the battle.

  A chill fell on the tent enclosure. Frost formed on the tabletop glass around Petrok's hands. One of the junior Guard officers fainted and was bustled away out of sight. The bearers began to murmur and bark, until Rodos quieted them with a savage look.

  Petrok ignored them all. He was locked with the patterns of past, present and future. He was seeing behind reality, watching the way the structures moved and meshed.

  It was... perfect. Phobor's ploy had been entirely appropriate. The vanguards and support lines were placed correctly. Eidon City would fall within four hours, with minimal losses on their part. His report would convey little to Phobor except to bolster his confidence.

  Except... something. Something small and awry. Something persistent and nagging. Like a tiny pebble lodged inside the cuff of a Terminator glove, niggling away. What? What? 'Master?' Rodos asked. Petrok stood back.

  'This,' he said, pointing to one light on the eastern side of the illuminated chart.

  Rodos consulted the key. 'Damocles squad, master. Captain Phobor sent them round to ensure the foe would not break from the city when it fell.' 'A sound move, but it troubles me. There is heavy fighting there.' The chart doesn't show it.'

  'I feel what glass and electrocrystal patterns do not. Damocles is in danger.'

  They're but one unit,' said another Leoparda general, speaking up. 'Surely the overall victory is paramount? None can be spared or freed from the main assault to support them. Losses are... inevitable.'

  The general fell silent as he realised he had said too much.

  Petrok looked up, but there was compassion in his eyes. He knew how hard the Guardsmen had been driven to conquer the superior foe, and he knew how bitterly Phobor had railed at these men.