by Ben Counter
‘Captain,’ said Ucalegon. ‘Could there be secrets on this world to uncover that are not to anyone’s benefit?’
‘Quite possibly,’ said Lysander. ‘Many secrets bring only suffering. But that does not mean the truth should go on being hidden. The truth is its own justification, is it not?’
Lysander levered the top off the altar. The stone slab came away, revealing the hollowed-out interior of the altar, in which was a small decorated box. Lysander picked up the box – it seemed tiny and delicate in his armoured hand.
‘This is it,’ he said. ‘This is what Serrick hid here before she was caught. This is proof.’
Lysander carefully opened the box. Inside was a single bullet.
Lysander held the bullet up close to his eye.
‘What is it?’ asked Ucalegon.
‘I shall have to ask Serrick for confirmation,’ said Lysander, ‘but I suspect it is the bullet that killed Inquisitor Kekrops.’
<
‘What reinforcement have we en route?’ replied Lysander. He put the bullet back in the box and pocketed it in one of the ammo pouches on the waist of his armour.
<
‘Then we will hold,’ said Lysander. He closed the vox and turned to face the two squads of Imperial Fists at the chapel entrance. ‘Brothers! Hear your commander. We have struck a blow and the enemy is reeling. They are angry, and in their rage they will lash out at us for revenge. But we have with us the guns of the Imperial Fists, and the blade of the Emperor’s own champion! Then let the enemy come! We will bleed Rekaba white, and when the traitors around us can fight no more, we will hunt down their leaders and do to them what we did to Skarkrave. Prepare defences! Break down your zones of fire! This place will withstand as if its foundations were laid by Dorn himself!’
Sergeants Ctesiphon and Kirav began organising the Imperial Fists, sending the battle-brothers in twos and threes to cover the approaches to the temple. The Subiacan preachers began their order-sermons and the cogs of battle began to turn again. The killing was not yet done.
‘What is happening on this world?’ asked Ucalegon. ‘Truly, Lysander? What is happening?’
‘Set these questions aside, Ucalegon, and let Dorn’s ways of battle replace them. When the killing lets up, then we will find the answers.’
Already Lysander could hear the chanting from the canals, thousands of voices raised in celebration of the dark powers who had infiltrated their world. He could hear the engines of the vehicles the Deucalians were driving, too, and the distant screams of fighter-bomber engines overhead.
Another battle. One of a hundred opening up on Opis. Behind it all lay a pattern, maddening and elusive, that might stop the fighting or make it a hundred times worse. That would all have to wait until the Temple of the Muses was quiet again.
K-Day +11 Days
Overflight and interdiction missions in support of Operation Catullus
‘Every day,’ said the first soldier, ‘there are more. When will they stop?’
The first soldier took the feet of the next corpse, and the second took the arms. Together they heaved the body into the pit. It was a natural ravine, shaded by the jungle canopy so the darkness inside almost hid the heap of bodies that had already built up at the bottom. The insects, fat and bloated on blood and decaying meat, hung in a cloud over the hole. Both soldiers wore full hazardous environment suits, decorated with the heraldry of House Krix of Rekaba, to protect from the stench and infections carried by the insects. The first soldier was taller, with a long face and red hair visible through the suit’s faceplate. The second was darker and powerfully built, with meaty arms and hands that made light work of stocking the ravine with fresh dead.
‘There are only so many people in Rekaba,’ said the second soldier. ‘They’ll stop.’
‘When?’
‘When they run out, or when people learn.’
There were still a good thirty bodies heaped up beneath the trees. They had been dumped there that morning, as evidenced by the vehicle tracks still glistening in the jungle mud. They were traitors to the Aristeia. They were as varied as the living who now fought the invaders in the streets of Rekaba.
‘Could be worse, I suppose,’ said the first soldier. ‘Could be back in the city. Saints know what we might be turned into then.’ The two stooped and picked up another body. This one was a woman.
‘How old do you think she is?’ said the first soldier, looking at the relatively unblemished face. It was just possible to put aside the glassy eyes and thick bloodstain on the front of her dress, and imagine what she once looked like.
‘Does it matter?’ said the second, and hauled the body into the ravine by himself. He stood, arms out. ‘What does any of that matter? What do you think is happening on this planet?’
‘That’s the problem!’ retorted the first soldier. ‘No one knows! You have seen what they’re turning us into back in the city. Do you know what they’re saying about the people in charge? It’s not the Aristeia any more. They’re sorcerers and mutants! We don’t know who we’re fighting for. No one does.’
‘We fight because we fight,’ said the other soldier. ‘That’s the way it has always been. Every man has his place on Opis. Some fight, some work, some rule. We fight. We were born into it. When you question that, it all falls apart. That was why these people were executed. If it gets out of control it’s nothing but chaos.’
‘And those people who have been turned into something else? I saw them fighting at Daggerfall Park. They didn’t even know their own names. They were walking bombs, psychic bombs. What if that was us? Would you have been born for that, too?’
‘You think the Imperium is any different? Once we stop fighting they’ll seal off the cities and virus bomb us. That’s how they deal with anyone who doesn’t kneel to the Throne.’
The first soldier pointed at the second, the work of dumping the bodies forgotten for the moment. ‘Maybe it would be better to die like that than live like those things in the city.’
‘Really?’ The second soldier drew his autopistol from its holster. ‘You can die right now if it’s all the same to you. Just stand at the edge and I won’t even have to bother throwing you in.’ He took aim at his fellow soldier’s chest.
The second soldier froze. The noise behind him had been barely enough to register, but it was enough. He looked slowly around.
The figure in the jungle had been trying to conceal itself, but it was far too big to be completely hidden. The sound had come from branches breaking as it crept forwards, again too big to be silent.
Its armour was gold, streaked with mud, and it must have been two metres high even half-crouched in the foliage. In the shadows, a face stained with mud stared out, eyes narrowed.
The second soldier aimed at the figure in the jungle. In the time it took him to bring the weapon to bear the armoured man had lunged from his hiding place and dived onto the soldier, tackling him to the ground and pinning him down in the mud. A massive armoured hand grabbed the back of the suit’s hood and ripped it open. His second hand grabbed the soldier by the face and snapped his head around. The sound of his spine coming apart was a sharp crack, like a distant gunshot.
The first soldier fumbled with his own autopistol. The catch on the holster was pinned closed, to keep the gun slipping out as he worked.
‘Don’t,’ said the armoured man.
The soldier got the gun out.
The armoured man took a combat knife from his waist. In anyone else’s hand it would have been as long as a short sword. With a smooth motion he drew and threw it, and the blade punched through the soldier
’s sternum. The soldier took a couple of steps back, gun still in his hand, and fell backwards as his brain caught up with the fact that he was dead.
Brother Gorgythion waited in the sudden silence for more men to emerge from the jungle. But they didn’t. He stood up, dropping the body of the soldier whose neck he had just broken. He looked down at the heap of bodies they had been disposing of. From their conversation, he guessed that the dead had been executed by the forces of the Aristeia – in the eyes of whatever ruled Opis through the Aristeia, they were traitors and deserters. They had bullet wounds in the backs of their heads.
Gorgythion took the autopistols from the dead soldiers and rifled through their pockets for extra ammunition. His own weapons had been lost when the Sanctifier crashed. Gorgythion himself had been forced to crawl from the wreckage, the cockpit crumpled around him and the fuel igniting as he struggled out. He had left Kebriones in the wreckage, and his body had burned. At least he had been dead before that. Kebriones’s gene-seed was lost, however, the organ that regulated his many augmentations and the symbol of the Chapter’s connection with their primarch, and it would be greatly lamented that it had not been returned for implanting into a new Space Marine.
Through the jungle canopy were just visible the towers of Rekaba. Gorgythion had only seen the city before from the air – its pale stone and red-tiled roofs leapt out from the jungle surrounding it, and the glittering ocean on which it sat. It was a place of antiquity and history, one of the historical power bases of Opis, and no doubt it was being torn apart by the Imperial invasion at that very moment. Gorgythion knew that Lysander had a force of Imperial Fists in there, somewhere, and that he had to get to them.
On one of Gorgythion’s greaves was inscribed a crude map he had scratched, showing the location of the installation whose defences had shot down the Sanctifier. The Imperium didn’t know it was there. Neither, judging by the destruction of the Aristeia fighter plane, did the natives of Opis. And someone was most determined to keep its location secret.
The jungle was darkening as the sun was dipping below green-covered hills. The noise of the jungle changed at night as the nocturnal creatures came out. Gorgythion had seen prowling lizard-like creatures that were rather larger than a man and could climb the trees, and aerial hunters that looked like bundles of stinging tentacles trailing from a series of delicate sails. The soldiers here had left a previous day’s work unfinished because they had been afraid to spend the night out here.
Gorgythion pulled the combat knife from the corpse of the soldier.
‘You don’t know,’ he said to the body as the blade came free. ‘You’re as blind as the rest of us. You are traitors and you must be fought. We will not relent. But we will also discover what turned you into this, before more are turned from the light.’
No reply came from the dead soldier’s mouth, which lolled open as Gorgythion let the body flop back down into the mud. Then Gorgythion turned to the outline of Rekaba, silhouetted in the silver-gold light of the dusk, and began the rest of his journey to rejoin his brothers.
K-Day +11 Days
Containment and interdiction overflights east of Khezal
Operation Requiem ongoing
The temperate plains had given way to the cold of the mountains. The air had dropped off quickly in oxygen levels and temperature as the squad had ascended into an intermediate layer of the atmosphere, for the richest air clung tightly to Opis’s surface as if afraid it would dissipate into space. A Space Marine’s lungs could cope easily enough, and his hyper-oxygenated blood was more than up to the task of keeping altitude sickness at bay. The cold did not bother him, either, for those same systems kept his extremities safe from numbness or frostbite.
But there was something still inhospitable about those ridges of reddish-black stone, the peaks and valleys like a great stony scab covering a wound in the planet’s surface. It was less easy for Scout-Sergeant Orfos to put his finger on just why it was such an unfriendly landscape in which to hunt, but its menace was still there.
The King of Crows must have been desperate indeed to flee through here. Orfos had followed a trail that consisted mostly of the dead – members of the plague procession who had broken limbs in falls or succumbed to the conditions, and been left to die. They had no sign of any plague upon them. Indeed, many had the manicured nails and fine teeth of the Aristeia. A few even had jewellery they could not bear to part with. Orfos had been right. Someone powerful and dangerous had escaped Imperial forces via the Emperor’s Embrace refugee camp, and the Aristeia were helping him do it.
At that moment Orfos lay on the reverse edge of a ridge that formed part of the downward slope of the last mountain his squad had negotiated. The mountain fell away below into a deep valley in which the ice had not thawed from that winter – perhaps it had never thawed down there, where the sun could not quite reach. He scanned for movement, letting the superior peripheral vision of a Space Marine cover the whole valley.
‘Anything?’ Orfos asked.
The surface of the rock beside Orfos shifted, revealing the face of Scout Enriaan where it had been hidden by the cameleoline cloak lain over him. Enriaan wore a magnocular visor, which let him focus on specific areas as Orfos scanned the whole valley. ‘There’s another body down there,’ he said. ‘Robed, like the procession. Decent boots, though.’
‘They are shedding members more quickly,’ said Orfos. ‘How many is your count?’
‘They have lost twelve,’ replied Enriaan. ‘They have nine left.’
<
‘My kind of fight is the one where we take the enemy alive before anything can do for them,’ replied Orfos. ‘I want the King of Crows, brothers, and I do not mean as a trophy to take back to the Wings of Dorn.’
A long, low sound raked across the mountain peaks, changing pitch as it approached. A flight of two Imperial Navy fighters ripped across the sky overhead, leaving white contrails against the vivid cold sky.
‘If Tchepikov thinks the enemy are using these mountain passes, they’ll bomb them,’ said Orfos. ‘We might never find the King.’
<
‘You believe there isn’t?’ said Orfos.
<> replied Geryius, <
‘You certainly gave them enough to flee from, brother,’ said Orfos.
‘Refugees with electoos that cost more than a commoner is worth,’ said Enriaan. ‘And xenos-hide hiking boots.’ If he intended any humour or sarcasm, it did not touch the inflection of his words.
<
‘Move up,’ said Orfos. ‘No silhouettes. Enriaan, watch behind us.’
Orfos kept his cloak wrapped tight, its brown and grey colours shifting to mimic the pattern of the stone around him. Enriaan snapped his visor up and shouldered his sniper rifle, walking carefully backwards to keep watch to the rear. The squad moved down the valley, Orfos keeping them moving quickly. Even though they moved as quietly as they could Orfos winced at the sound of stones falling down the valley sides as they walked. He saw Vonretz up ahead, moving between the fallen boulders, keeping ahead of them.
Orfos felt the blast a moment before he heard it, and his muscle memory was already throwing him down to the slope beneath without thinking. The side of the valley just ahead erupted into a great reaching claw of darkness, the concussion slamming against him. Orfos tumbled, deaf and blind, sharp rocks lashing at him as he tumbled down the slope.
He fought the ringing in his ears. A deep rumble reached t
hrough the shock and Orfos knew the side of the valley was coming down. The soldier’s instinct, both sleep-taught and hammered into him on the battlefield, took over and he was running. Rocks fell on a tide of shattered scree that flowed like liquid down the valley. Orfos was scrambling away from the collapse, and more by instinct than choice he grabbed a handful of Enriaan’s cloak and dragged the Scout behind him.
The collapse was knee-deep when it was spent. A thick plume of smoke and dust rolled over it, and the valley darkened as if the sun had gone down.
‘Report!’ shouted Orfos into the vox. ‘Report!’
‘I am unhurt,’ said Enriaan beside him.
<
‘Privar!’ voxed Orfos. ‘Vonretz!’
The shape of Scout Privar emerged from the swirling darkness, clutching his left arm. ‘A broken humerus, sergeant,’ he said. ‘Nothing more.’ Orfos saw Privar was dark grey from head to toe with dust and grime from the explosion.
‘It’s an ambush,’ said Orfos. ‘Be ready, brothers! Eyes everywhere! Vonretz, report, brother!’
Geryius half slid down the intact slope and ran to where Vonretz had been, which was now deep in pulverised rock.
Orfos drew his bolt pistol and scanned the valley ridges. ‘How in the hells did they get around us?’ he growled. ‘They knew we were here. All the way, they knew.’
The first gunshot fell among them before the dust had cleared enough for a decent aim. A bullet pinged among the rocks, followed a second later by the report from high up.
‘I am on it,’ said Enriaan, rolling onto his front with his rifle in front of him.
Orfos ran up the slope towards the source of the shot, keeping low, using the folds and breaks in the rock for cover. He wiped a hand over his eyes to get the worst of the grime out. He half spotted movement on the ridge above, and the corresponding shot from Enriaan’s rifle. He could not tell if his fellow Scout had hit anything.