What a stupid, stupid place to fall in love, she thought. If that’s what it even is.
As Octavia shuffled in her seat, her eyes widened in sudden shock. As if afraid to touch her own flesh, she rested a hesitant hand on her stomach, where for the first time she felt the new life moving within her.
When the shields died, Talos never moved in his throne. The crew – those standing, at least – were thrown from their feet in the sudden resurgence in violent shaking that gripped the ship. Two legless servitors fell from their installation sockets, mouths opening and closing as their useless hands worked at the floor, mimicking motions on consoles they could no longer reach.
‘Shields down, lord…’ called out one of the officers.
No, really? Talos thought.
‘Understood,’ he replied through gritted teeth.
‘Orders, sire?’
The prophet had watched the grey world grow until it became a swollen orb taking up the occulus with its dreary, pockmarked visage.
Close now. So very close.
‘Damage report,’ he ordered.
As if the ship’s heaving wasn’t report enough. As if he needed some other confirmation that they were being cut apart in record time by alien pulsar fire. This many eldar ships, with that much firepower… the Covenant of Blood had never had to withstand that much damage in its distinguished career. The Echo of Damnation was enduring it for the first, and the last, time.
The officer, Rawlen, couldn’t tear his wide eyes from the console screen. ‘There’s… Lord, there’s too much to…’
‘Are we in drop-pod range for a surface assault?’
‘I…’
Talos vaulted the railing and landed with a crashing thud next to the officer. He turned to the screen himself, calculating the scrolling runes into some semblance of sense. With a snarl, he turned to the vox-mistress.
‘Deploy the Legion,’ he growled over the chaos taking hold around them.
The woman, uniformed and branded in service to the Red Corsairs, started hitting key commands on her desk. ‘Legion deploying, lord.’
‘Vox-links,’ he demanded. ‘Vox-links now.’
‘Vox, aye.’
The voices of his brothers rasped their way across the shaking bridge, half-lost in the storm of noise and fire.
‘This is Talos to all Legion forces,’ he shouted. ‘Soul count. Report affirmative deployments.’
One by one, they called back to him. He heard the exultant yells of his brothers in their drop-pods as they reported back: ‘Second Claw away,’ ‘Fourth Claw deployed,’ and ‘Third Claw launched.’ The occulus re-tuned to show several Thunderhawk gunships blasting from the hangars for the final time, engines flaring white hot as they raced out into the stars.
Malcharion’s bass rumble heralded the war-sage’s departure.
‘I’ll see you on the carrion world, Soul Hunter.’
Three more confirmations followed, each with the same machine-growl voices. The occulus flashed back to show a scene from some mythical hell, fiery tides washing over the viewscreen like liquid flame.
‘We’re in the atmosphere,’ yelled one of the officers. ‘Orders?’
‘Does it matter?’ another screamed back.
‘Pull the ship up!’ one of the helmsmen shouted to the others.
Even Talos had to clutch at a railing as the Echo gave a horrendous kick, lurching into an uncontrolled dive. He didn’t want to imagine how little of the ship was still in one piece – not after running that insane gauntlet.
The western bridge doors opened on grumbling hydraulics, showing Cyrion silhouetted by fire in the doorway.
‘Are you mad?’ he voxed. ‘Hurry the hell up.’
Now or never, thought Talos. He sprinted up the dais to his command throne, needing to hold the armrest to stay on his feet. The melting view on the occulus showed thin clouds, then stars, then the ground, all in an endless, random cycle.
With his free hand, he pulled his sword from its place locked at the throne’s side, and sheathed it on his back.
‘You should be in the drop-pod,’ he voxed back to Cyrion.
‘I wish I was,’ his brother replied. ‘The ship’s backside just fell off.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘No engines. No joke. We’re in freefall.’ Cyrion was gripping the door frame, as human crew flooded around him, trying to flee the bridge. ‘Come on,’ he urged.
Talos ran to him, keeping his balance despite the humans falling underfoot and the deck seeming to disregard all pretence of physics.
Their swords didn’t stay sheathed for long. As they forced their way through corridors turned thick with the press of panicked human bodies, both blades fell and carved, hewing a way through the living forest. Blood joined the sweat-stink and fear-scent, aching in Talos’s senses. Through the screams, he was dimly aware that he was butchering his own crew, but what did it matter? They’d be dead in moments, anyway.
Cyrion was breathing heavily, kicking out at the humans to break legs and backs as often as he lashed out with his gladius.
‘We’re going to die,’ he breathed over the vox, ‘and it’s your fault for waiting so long.’
Talos cleaved his sword through a mortal’s body, splitting the human from neck to pelvis and shouldering through the falling pieces.
‘You didn’t have to come back just to whine at me.’
‘I didn’t have to, no,’ Cyrion allowed. ‘But no one should die without being reminded of their mistakes.’
‘Where in the infinite hells are you?’ came Mercutian’s voice over the vox.
Talos disembowelled one of the fleeing crew from behind, hurling the biological wreckage aside. He was sweating beneath his armour, already feeling the strain of the endless chopping through the panicked humans blocking the tunnels. A horde of them, hundreds – and soon to be thousands – were fleeing for the escape pods. Exhaustion wasn’t a factor; he could carve all day and all night without rest. The problem was purely one of time.
‘Launch the drop-pod,’ Talos voxed. ‘Mercutian, Uzas, get down to Tsagualsa.’
‘Are you insane?’ Mercutian’s strained reply came back.
‘We’re closer to the command deck’s escape pods. Just go.’
Cyrion pulled his gladius from the spine of a uniformed deck officer, his own breath starting to come through ragged. ‘If there are any escape pods left after these vermin have run away, that is.’
‘Ave dominus nox, Talos. We’ll see you in the catacombs.’
Talos heard the massive grind of the drop-pod’s clamps disengaging, and Uzas’s joyful howling. Their descent through the atmosphere carried them out of vox range in a matter of heartbeats, silencing Mercutian’s curses and Uzas’s laughter in the same second.
Talos and Cyrion butchered their way onward.
The whispering continued. A chorus of soft voices exchanged words and laughter, each of them like silken mist on the ears, even through the hiss of vox distortion.
Variel had been listening to it for almost half an hour, his casual interest becoming keen attention, quickly evolving into rapt focus. Septimus watched the Apothecary more often than he watched the hololithic now. Variel’s colourless lips never stopped moving, softly mouthing the alien words as he translated them in his mind.
‘What are–’ Septimus tried again, only to be silenced by a raised fist. Variel made ready to backhand him if he spoke again.
‘Deltrian,’ the Apothecary said after several heartbeats had passed.
‘Flayer,’ acknowledged the adept.
‘The game has changed. Get me within vox reach of Tsagualsa’s surface.’
Deltrian’s eye lenses rotated and refocused in their sockets. ‘I request a reason for a course of action in utter opposition to our orders and planned processes.’
‘The game has changed,’ Variel repeated. ‘How could we have known? We couldn’t. We could never have guessed this.’ He turned around the humble command deck, his ice-blue eyes looking through everything, alighting on nothing.
Deltrian was unfazed by Variel’s distant murmurs. ‘I restate my request, altering the terms to make it a demand. Provide adequate reasoning, or cease your vocalisation of orders you have no authority to give.’
Variel finally fixed his gaze on something – specifically, Deltrian, in his red robes of office, with his chrome skull face half-hidden in the folds of his hood.
‘The eldar,’ said Variel. ‘They whisper of their own prophecies, of the Eighth Legion bleeding them without mercy in the decades that follow. Do you understand? They are not here because of Talos’s psychic scream. They have never once spoken of it. They speak of nothing but our foolishness and their need to sever the strands of an unwanted future from the skeins of fate.’
Deltrian made an error-abort sound, in his equivalent of a dismissive grunt. ‘Enough,’ the adept said. ‘Alien witchery is irrelevant. Xenos superstition is irrelevant. Our orders are all that remains relevant.’
Variel’s eyes were distant again. He was listening to the aliens’ sibilant voices sing in their whispery tongue.
‘No.’ He blinked, staring at the adept once more. ‘You do not understand. They seek to prevent some future… some event yet to come, where Talos leads the Eighth Legion in a crusade against their dying species. They chant of it, like children offering prayers in the hope of a god taking pity upon them. Do you hear me? Are you listening to the words I speak?’
Septimus backed away as Variel walked to stare down at the seated adept. He’d never seen Variel’s blood up like this.
‘They fight to prevent a future that frightens them,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘One they cannot allow to come to pass. These ships… This is a vast risk for them. A colossal gamble. They’ve backed us into a corner, using ships crewed by spirits, saving their precious alien lives for the final blow. That is how much they need Talos dead.’
Deltrian repeated the negative sound. ‘Purely supposition based on xenos whisperings.’
‘And if they’re right? The Prophet of the Eighth Legion will rise at the end of the Dark Millennium and bleed the Ulthwéan eldar far beyond what their dwindling population can sustain. Are you so blind and deaf to everything outside your work that you can’t hear my words? Listen to me, you heathen warlock: in these futures they’ve seen, he brings the Legion itself against them. These alien dogs believe he unites the Eighth Legion.’
Loader Primaris Marlonah secured herself in the restraint throne, shaking hands fumbling with the buckles. Click, went the first lock. Click, went the second. She didn’t know it, but she was mumbling and swearing to herself as she worked.
Dumb luck had found her on the primary crew decks rather than at her station when the battle took a turn for the worst. She’d been on her way back to the starboard tertiary munitions deck, after an emergency discharge from the apothecarion in the wake of another malfunction in her augmetic leg.
The limb itself was still a bit of a bitch. She doubted she’d ever get used to it, no matter what the sawbones said.
The sirens screamed before she’d even managed to hobble halfway back to her duty shift. These weren’t the rapid pulses of a call to battle stations, or the long caterwauling of pre-warp flight readiness. She’d never heard this siren before, but she knew what it was the moment it started screaming.
Evacuation.
Panic flooded the decks, with crew running in every direction. She’d been close enough that even her limping run kept her ahead of the pack, but the corridors leading to the pod bays were choked by the many dozens of souls that had been even faster, even closer, or even luckier.
When her time had come, she was a trembling, sweating wreck that fairly spilled into the last throne inside the pod. Outside the pod’s closing doors, people were shouting and beating on the walls. Some were trampling each other. Others were stabbing and shooting, desperate to get to the pods before the ship’s remains made one brutal bitch of a crater in the grey landscape.
Even through her relief as the last buckled click, she felt the ache of sympathy for those still trapped outside, hunting for pods. She couldn’t look away from their faces and fists, pressed to the dense glass.
As she watched, mouthing the word ‘sorry’ to each pair of eyes she met, the clamouring faces were swept aside in a blur of cold blue and wet red. Blood smeared across the viewing glass, while shadows danced beyond, just out of sight.
‘What the…’ one of the other crew members stammered from his seat in the opposite restraint throne.
The door shuddered in a way no amount of beating fists and yelled curses had managed to inflict. The second time was worse: it shook to its reinforced hinges.
It came away the third time, letting in a burst of sickeningly hot air, and revealing a scene from a carcass pit.
Two of the masters stood outside, ankle-deep in the dead, their blades dripping with blood. One of them hunched down to enter the confines of the pod. No thrones remained untaken, and even if they had been free, none of the Legion could fit their bulky armoured forms into a human restraint throne.
There was no debate, no hesitation. The Night Lord rammed his golden sword through the chest of the closest human, ending any resistance, and dragged the spasming body from its seat. The harnesses snapped as the Legionary pulled with one, hard tug, before hurling the body outside into the corridor to lie amongst the slain.
The second Legionary entered, his armour joints snarling as he mimicked the first murder. The second man to die shamed himself by weeping and begging before he was cut apart. Two of the restraint thrones followed, torn from their moorings and hurled out into the corridor. The towering figures meant to empty the pod in order to create the room they needed to stand within it.
Marlonah was scrambling to unlock her restraints when the third man was killed and thrown outside.
‘I’ll get out!’ she was yelling. ‘I’ll get out, I’ll get out – I swear I will.’
She looked up as the hunched shadow fell across her, blocking out the dim red illumination from the central emergency light.
‘I know you,’ the master growled in his vox-voice. ‘Septimus argued with one of the human surgeons to grant you that leg.’
‘Yes… Yes…’ She thought she was agreeing. In truth, she had no idea whether she was even speaking aloud.
The Night Lord reached to slam the reinforced door closed, leaving the bloodbath on the other side.
‘Go,’ he growled to his brother.
The other warrior, who was forced to stand stooped in the same half-crouch, reached to the central column and pulled the release levers – one, crunch; two, crunch; three, crunch.
The pod lurched in its cradle, and the whine of its propulsion systems became a forlorn roar.
When the escape pod fell, Marlonah felt the floor drop out from under her in the same moment that her stomach tried to find a new home in her throat. She wasn’t sure if she was screaming or laughing as they rattled their way down to safety, but in actuality, she was doing both.
Deltrian had to admit, he was struggling to make a decision. Talos had demanded a set process of actions from him, but the Apothecary (while grotesquely emotional) made a persuasive case.
And yet it still came down to practicalities and probability. Deltrian knew this better than anyone.
‘To process the odds of this vessel surviving a direct engagement with the enemy fleet requires a calculation few biological minds would be able to compre
hend. Suffice to say, in terms you will understand, the odds are not in our favour.’
Had he been able to smile sincerely rather than as a natural by-product of a metallic skull for a face, Deltrian would probably have grinned in that moment. He was extremely proud of his mastery of understatement.
Variel wasn’t moved, nor was he amused. ‘Focus the cogs and gears that rattle behind your eyes,’ he said. ‘If the eldar are so fearful of this prophecy coming to pass, then it means there’s a chance Talos does survive the war down there. And we are that chance. My brother has a destiny beyond a miserable death in the dust of this worthless world, and I mean to give him the chance to seize it.’
Deltrian’s emotionless facade didn’t even alter. ‘Talos’s final orders are all that remain relevant,’ he stated. ‘This vessel is now the gene-seed repository for over one hundred slain legionaries of the Eighth. This genetic material must reach the Great Eye. That is my oath to Talos. My sworn promise.’ Those last words made him acutely uncomfortable.
‘You run, then. I will not.’ Variel turned back to Septimus. ‘You. The Seventh.’
‘Lord?’
‘Ready your gunship. Get me down to Tsagualsa.’
XXIV
CATACOMBS
Ten thousand years ago, the fortress stood defiant as one of the last great bastions of Legiones Astartes invincibility in the material universe. The coming of the Primogenitors made a lie of that claim. The centuries since had been no kinder. Jagged, eroded battlements thrust up from the lifeless earth, broken by ancient explosives and the bite of a million dust storms.
Little remained of the fortress’s great walls beyond hills of rubble, half-swallowed by the grey soil. Where the battlements still existed, they were toothless and tumbledown things, devoid of grandeur, brought low to the ground with the passing of the years.
Talos stood in the grey ruins, watching the Echo of Damnation die. Grit in the wind crackled against his armour as he stood in the open, surrounded by defanged, fallen walls. The warship made an agonisingly slow dive towards the horizon, shedding wreckage as it burned, trailing a thick plume of smoke.
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