by Nick Kyme
‘And what of his mind?’ asked Pillium. ‘Is he fit for the mental rigours? Words have been spoken against it.’
‘My words are all you need listen to, brother,’ Sicarius replied with a measure of steel in his voice. Pillium backed down at once, the change obvious even in his subtle body language. ‘This must be done. There is simply no other choice. We shall protect this ship and this crew. It is all that matters now. We must survive. We must go on. And so we shall… at any cost. Measures will be taken. Defences readied. After that, we break warp and embrace our fate.’
The hall fell silent, all within determined to do their duty.
Vedaeh saw it in their eyes, in their postures. These men would die for him, and he for them. That was fortunate, then, for death was close. She felt it in her bones as she closed her book, leaving the last pages unfilled.
OUR LAST HOURS
Reda had fixed it on the chrono. Less than four hours until they attempted warp breach. She knew little of this arcane science, but enough to realise that trying to pull out of the warp whilst adrift and without certainty of safe harbour was akin to pushing one’s self naked and blindfold through a maze of razor wire. And that not only the flesh but also the soul would be exposed to the barbs. Worse, without the light of the Emperor, navigating such volatile tides would be beyond dangerous and approaching suicidal. In all likelihood then, these would be their last hours, and so Reda decided they should at least be good ones.
‘Are you alright?’ She reached over to run her fingers down Gerrant’s scarred back. He still had a mark around the neck and shoulders where the chain had bitten as he was slowly being strangled.
‘Vanko?’ she asked when he didn’t answer straight away, rising slightly from her bunk and clasping the rough blankets to her chest.
Gerrant was sitting on the edge of the bed, naked and with his back to her. He stared into the darkness, unmoving but cold to the touch.
‘I was just thinking about my father,’ he said at length, his voice little more than a murmur. ‘He was a soldier too. Not aboard a ship. He served in the Militarum.’
‘I know, Vanko. You’ve told me this before.’ Reda slipped behind him, gently wrapping her arms around his body and placing a soft kiss on the back of his neck. ‘Come back to bed. We can just lie here.’
‘I never knew how he died, you know,’ Gerrant went on. ‘A mortar shell, a bullet, trenchrot… was it something heroic, did he die fighting or was it a mundane end? Something pointless and unremarkable?’
‘You shouldn’t torture yourself.’ She tried softly stroking his hair, but he was like stone. Unfeeling and unyielding.
‘I do not think our deaths will be good deaths, Arna.’ He turned to face her, eyes full of questions and regrets.
‘No,’ she said, her voice low, ‘no, I don’t think they will be either. We will probably die on this ship, and I am afraid of that, Vanko. I do not want to die here, in this way, torn apart, burned, suffocating in the void.’ She tapped the chrono, and it flickered. ‘But that’s not now.’ Reda gently caressed his stubbled chin and held it, the palm of her hand resting upon his face. ‘We are just mortals amongst gods, so let us take what mortal pleasures we can, even if it is the simple comfort of companionship. If these are to be our final moments then I would have a little peace from them, wouldn’t you?’
He smiled, but there was something missing in his eyes. He hadn’t been the same since they had apprehended Barthus. Then she felt his hand upon her skin, warmer than his body, and her concerns melted away. They gently fell into each other’s arms and back onto the bed as the chrono ticked on.
In the Reclusiam Vedaeh bowed her head before the shrine. The muttered words of a prayer passed her lips, asking the Emperor of Mankind to protect them from whatever darkness would come, to gird their souls against corruption, to light their way out of shadow.
She said these words and heard them echoed back. Her own voice, not the Emperor’s.
And in that moment of revelation, surrounded by the cold stone of this place, and her hollow books and scraps of vellum, Vedaeh felt utterly, utterly alone.
The vambrace clanged loudly as it hit the armoury floor. Iulus scowled at the sudden clamour.
‘How many times have you done this unassisted?’ he asked, setting down his detached right shoulder guard and placing it with his helmet, gauntlet and arm greave. The bionic scraped and squealed as he flexed it, testing the automated joints.
Scipio unbuckled one side of his chestplate, venting a plume of pressure that had built up in his armour’s systems. ‘It’s been a while,’ he said.
‘You never had to refit and repair your own armour on campaign?’
‘I was always moving. Perils of a reconnaissance cadre, fast and light.’
‘Not so light now…’
Scipio grunted as he removed his main arm greave, machining it loose with an auto-drill and carefully uncoupling the connection ports that linked it to the black mesh layer beneath, and to his actual body.
It was quiet in the armoury, a small dark chamber that smelled of oil, lapping powder and cooling metal.
‘Your arm,’ said Scipio, ‘it’s failing, isn’t it?’
Iulus turned the mechanised rotator cuff. It jerked and stuck, emitting a low metallic groan before it managed to free itself. ‘Like everything, brother. The power is bleeding away. I can feel the interface fraying. It’s sluggish, heavy. Soon it’ll be dead weight.’
‘And then?’
‘Then we’ll either be ripped apart on the Sea of Souls or I’ll have to get used to fighting one-handed.’
Scipio laughed. ‘I expect so, but that’s not what I meant. Sicarius is arming and armouring the brotherhood in preparation for what comes next. The power will last, hopefully just long enough for it to matter. All will fight… and die if needed. But after? I have seen our end, Iulus, and it wears the same armour and bears the same sigil as us.’
Iulus sighed, letting his bare hands fall onto his lap. He straightened his back, bending his neck to work out the kinks.
‘After Black Reach, what then? Damnos… and then? The Damocles Gulf. And then, and then, and then. I trust Sicarius. He has led us for decades, Scipio. I grieve for our dead brothers. I grieve for Praxor most of all.’
Scipio nodded at that. The three of them had been friends, and had fought together since their early days in Second.
‘They will not be the last.’
‘What happens when the last Guardians of the Temple fall?’ asked Scipio.
‘Atavian may yet live.’
‘Scant comfort. So few of us remain. It was a lucky chance that the Devastators ended up on another ship of the fleet. He will likely be absorbed into another company, and with him the last of the old legacy.’
‘You are uncharacteristically maudlin, brother. If we fall then others will take our place.’
‘And you feel nothing for that? With every death here in the void, the reality of it comes closer.’
Iulus smiled sadly. ‘Do not concern yourself with how our end will come. Ours has always been a violent, glorious life. Revel in that, and if it is our time to die, know that I salute you, brother, and it has been my honour to fight by your side all these many years.’
Scipio gripped Iulus’ outstretched hand, and felt the strength and determination there. ‘And mine, Iulus.’
The mesh of the cage crosshatched his skin with shadow scars. Pillium stood alone, drinking in the darkness and the quietude, his mind in turmoil.
He stood with a spear in his hands, leaning on its haft more than he wished he needed to. His wounds had healed, the skin and bone stitched with the miracle of his genetic enhancements, but they had left a mark. He felt… weaker, and that confession to himself felt as anathema as reneging on an oath to his Chapter.
A sword lay before him, a beautiful artisan’s weapon that had no place in a training cage. It was Gaius Prabian’s sword, the one that now had a crack running down the blade from where it
had duelled the beast.
‘I wish I could have fought him,’ he said.
‘Oh?’ replied the warrior behind him. ‘And do you think you would have bested him?’
‘I do not know,’ Pillium admitted, ‘but I would like to have found out. Aside from Sicarius, he was their best.’
‘Their best? Are we not also of the same creed, the same brotherhood, then, Pillium?’
Pillium knelt to retrieve the sword, wrapping his hand slowly around the hilt the way one might choose to pick up a venerable relic.
‘We are as unalike to them as they to us, Argo. They believe we are their end, and it is true. Our strength, our endurance, every sinew, every fibre of muscle. It is superior. We are superior.’
‘And what of experience, of courage and honour?’ said Argo Helicos, stepping into Pillium’s eyeline. He was not wearing his glorious war-plate but a suit of training armour, like the sergeant. ‘Are they not worthy attributes?’
Pillium raised an eyebrow but made no other comment on the lieutenant’s chosen attire.
‘Of course,’ he uttered instead, ‘but it does not change the fact that they are the weaker iteration. Just because it has taken ten thousand years for evolution to catch up to them does not make it any less true.’
‘Some deplore that arrogance, Pillium.’
‘Such as you, brother-lieutenant.’
‘I find it unbecoming.’
‘But do not deny it, either.’
Argo’s expression hardened then. He had also brought a blade into the arena, and its edge shone in the failing light.
‘Choose,’ he said.
Pillium looked from sword to spear.
‘It is a relic, nothing more,’ he said, putting down the sword. ‘I would no more wield it than I would wield a tapestry. It did not serve Prabian in the end, so I doubt it would serve me either.’
‘Spear it is then,’ said Argo. ‘In this, I am Argo and you Justus.’
Pillium nodded. ‘I mourn them all,’ he said, seconds before they were to begin. ‘Prabian, Secutius… In the end, we all die the same, but we are still their betters. Let none say otherwise.’
‘Let’s see, shall we,’ Argo replied, ‘if your wounds are healed.’
‘Is it a lesson you wish to impart then, lieutenant?’ asked Pillium as he moved into a fighting stance, the spear held at half-haft and balanced over the outstretched forearm of his empty hand.
Argo gave a curt salute. ‘A long overdue one,’ he said, and attacked.
The armour felt like an anvil on his back, a tangible reminder of the weight he carried for his brothers. The warp siphon had bled them almost dry, and these last few hours were all that Haephestus could give, and no canticles to the Omnissiah would change that. They were almost spent. Soon, what little power remained would be gone. The mortal crew would die first, through the cold of the void, or the hunger in their bellies, or the slow asphyxia of oxygen deprivation, or from madness as the light failed and endless darkness fell, or a dozen other different ways. And then the Adeptus Astartes would follow, the heavy burden of failure and the ignominy of a bad death hanging about their necks like a gravestone, left to simply expire, to fade and not flare brightly in the conflagration of a last war.
In the solitude of the catacombs, Haephestus stood before the ship’s dying power core and could do nothing more but watch its final embers burn down to ash.
‘Captain…’ he uttered, using the ship’s vox, ‘if we are to do this, it must be now.’
Sicarius stood upon the bridge, one hand resting on the Tempest Blade’s pommel, the other loose by his side. He spent little time here, trusting in Shipmaster Mendace to perform his duties to the exceptional degree expected of a voidfarer with a Jovian heritage. For the last five years, there had been precious little to tax a man of his talents. Adrift in the warp, a ship’s captain has no agency and must trust to those who know the arcane, who can see the Emperor’s will made manifest, a guiding light in a sea of storms. But that light had become a spark, and now not even an ember. Darkness shrouded them, and rocks lay all about.
What little hope remained rested with Barthus, and the Navigator’s recent history could best be described as patchy. Something had happened to him, a psychic spoor that he had detected during the corruption of the Mordian 45th and the subsequent manifestation of the beast. It had driven him to madness and murder. The remorse he felt at these events had been evident in his face as Venatio had declared him at least physically able for the feat ahead. It was a dire task, Sicarius knew that much.
Barthus had gone to his post on the bridge, a sealed antechamber in which he could look upon the warp without fear of condemning anyone else to insanity or death, with the determined look of a man prepared to meet his own death. It might yet come to that. Without him, should they even survive the ordeal of breaching out of the warp, there was no way they could traverse the empyrean tides again. Unguided, they would certainly perish, but that was a problem for another day. All that mattered now was survival.
Closing off the vox, Sicarius thanked Haephestus and regarded the ship.
A hololithic representation of the Emperor’s Will floated in the air before him. Inhabited areas of the ship had been highlighted, white as opposed to the grey of sealed-off decks. Strategic positions, those that must be defended in the event of an attack, glowed red. Even with so much of the ship now out of bounds and shut down, his warriors were still spread painfully thin. For decades, there were those who decried his tactical plans as reckless or vainglorious, and others who vaunted him for his strategic acumen. None of these commentators, regardless of their leaning, could dispute his results. The Second Company had more laurels and victories to their name than any other in the Chapter, but this was a challenge unlike any that Sicarius had faced. Survival itself was at stake, against an unknown enemy in uncertain territory with any and all tactical and technological advantages almost completely stripped away. It was, to put it mildly, unenviable. But the moment had come and there was no other choice but to seize it.
Let us at least drive our own destiny.
He turned to his Lions, all watching silently, their faces half-lit by the hololith’s spectral radiance.
‘The Rubicon is before us, brothers. Shall we cross it?’
‘As you will it, my lord,’ answered Venatio, a measure of starch in his tone as was the Apothecary’s way.
Vandius raised his chin a little higher, his pride in his captain ever the shining beacon in his eyes and bearing.
Daceus had known Sicarius longer than the rest. A rugged equerry, in the manner of the old Legions, he merely nodded. ‘Aye, Suzerain,’ he said, using Sicarius’ more archaic title. ‘Let’s see it done.’
Sicarius turned to the shipmaster.
‘The honour is yours, Mister Mendace.’
Seated in his baroque command throne, Mendace gave a tight nod and saluted. The lights were dimmed as a ship-wide alert rang out.
‘All hands,’ he began, opening up the vox, ‘this is your captain. Prepare for warp breach, and may the Emperor protect your souls.’
The final message he gave to Barthus, switching to the Navigator’s private channel.
‘All is in readiness, Barthus. We place our faith and hopes in you now. The Emperor protects.’
There was a momentary pause, the Navigator’s response presaged by a little static and heard by only a few on the bridge.
‘Let us pray He watches us all, captain. It has been my honour.’
The vox cut out and there was nothing left to do but brace.
STORM WRACKED
Hell came for the crew of the Emperor’s Will, just as Sicarius had predicted it would. Across the entire ship, the denizens of the warp both mortal and unnatural descended in untold hordes. Whether they had been waiting for this moment, or whether the ship crashing out of the immaterium had forced their hand or offered opportunity, a brutal struggle unfolded.
The strain upon the Geller field could be
felt throughout every deck, a cacophony of screeching and scratching as if something lurked on the other side of a closed door and was trying to get in. Lesser warp entities were able to make passage as the protective aegis thinned with the extreme rigours placed upon it, and all too soon the corridors and chambers rang to the sounds of desperate battle.
The breaches in the hull came swiftly and in such number they were impossible to effectively defend against. Hordes of slave warriors – mutants, witches and debased mortals alike – spilled into the ship with the virulence of a contagion. Renegades came in their wake, archaic weapons chattering, their ages-tarnished armour cut with sigils of Ruin. They still fought the long war, once-proud warriors brought low by their many sufferings, only driven now by hatred and bitterness. Unlike the slave hordes, these warriors were not so easy to kill. Sections of the ship, bottlenecks and choke points were quickly overrun and taken.
The Ultramarines engaged in a fighting retreat, holding on to what they could for as long as they could before falling back to the next bulwark. And the next. And the next.
At the main enginarium, thousands of crew toiled in the shrieking darkness, feeding the heart fire that would keep the ship alive. It had been sealed off, a cohort of Space Marines at its aft and prow ends. The upper and lower decks that abutted it had been cut off and flooded with lethal toxins. A few breaching parties came this way, but found only death as armour seals corroded and flesh followed. But these were minor victories in a wash of defeats.
A warhost surrounded the warp engine, led by Argo Helicos himself. Here, the Primaris Marines stood shoulder to shoulder, glorious in royal-blue battleplate. Unlike many of the other defenders, Helicos’ men had nowhere to retreat. They would hold or they would die. The hordes fell hard upon this part of the ship, and brought wretched engines and beasts into the fray. Helicos slew the first of these abominations, a grotesque arachnoid machine. His sword rang out like summer lightning, splitting the beast from crown to groin. Mounting its corpse in one swift leap, oil and blood still spitting from the egregious wound, Helicos cried out, ‘Guilliman!’