Seventh Retribution

by Ben Counter

  Deiphobus held his hand over the Eversor’s mask. With the frosted glass gone the Assassin’s breathing was just perceptible, greatly slowed down.

  ‘Anything?’ asked Lysander.

  Deiphobus’s face creased in concentration. ‘He’s been… emptied out,’ he said. ‘Everything has been replaced with rage. I’ve never felt anything so pure.’ Deiphobus’s eyes opened. ‘There’s a name.’

  ‘Who?’ said Lysander.

  Deiphobus looked at the captain. ‘Legienstrasse,’ he said.

  K-Day +15 Days

  Operation Starfall

  A prophet, a hermit who had lived for the better part of a century in the wooded hills a thousand kilometres north-west of Khezal, emerged from his cave as morning broke.

  Streams of people were making their way across the trackless wilderness, through this bleak landscape where the temperate belt across the middle of the continent met the chill arctic climate and gave way to coniferous forests, then tundra, then snowy wastes. They had travelled from the towns and cities that owed their ancient allegiances to Khezal. They knew that the Imperium was killing everything in Khezal and in Rekaba across the sea. They knew they would be next, so they had gathered everything they could carry and left their homes.

  In ages past, their peoples had fled to hidden settlements in the north, nomadic towns that could move on horseback as the seasons and enemy attacks required. So they made their way there now, in their hundreds of thousands, then their millions, in ragged caravans trudging into regions where winter never lost its grip.

  The hermit found one such caravan. Three hundred men, women and children, trundling along in the few vehicles that still had fuel, with the stronger ones on foot.

  ‘My brothers and my sisters!’ he cried. ‘My sons and my daughters! It pains me so to see such misery on your faces! Ah, it was to escape such sorrow that I made this cave my home. Come, I have food and water, and the warmth of my fire. Enough for all of you. From the grief on your faces, I see you have already lost many loved ones. You need lose no more. Come, share in what little I have.’

  The prophet was happy to see them file into his cave, gratitude in their eyes. They had not seen a friendly face since they had abandoned their homes, and they had known nothing but misery since then. What made the prophet particularly happy was that a serpent had come to him two years before, a mighty crimson snake with scales that shone, and which sang in a beautiful voice about the gods who dwelt beyond the veil.

  The snake was always hungry, and the prophet clapped and wept with joy as he heard the sound of it feeding. The screams mingled with the sound of its jaws as it crunched through bone, and it made the most wonderful music.

  Finally the snake emerged.

  ‘You have done well,’ it said. ‘When I was brought to this world, I feared I would perish. Now I am strong. Now I can fulfil the purpose to which I am bound. War is coming, and I must fight.’

  Finally the Warp Serpent, as its worshippers had once called it, ate the prophet who had cared for it, and slithered its way across the wastes towards the coming battle.

  The concentric stone rings of Lhuur stood as the only memorial to a civilisation that was long dead when the Age of Imperium began, the foundations of a metropolis that had presumably thrived when the climate of the continent’s north was more hospitable. Now drifts of snow gathered among the stones, all but burying the outer rings where the paupers and foreigners had lived, and crowning the taller walls of the inner palace district.

  Lhuur provided rare shelter from the snows and chill winds. The western coast had few large settlements and those that existed were now empty, drained of their population by the decrees of the Aristeia that had given dire warnings of the Imperium’s impending attacks on that region. A colony of more than a thousand such evacuees had made it to Lhuur, setting up tents and makeshift dormitories among the low walls that remained of those ancient homes.

  The leader of the evacuees was an old man, a scholar of leadership and heredity who had been educated at one of the universities of Khezal. He accompanied the sturdy younger men and women who explored the interior of Lhuur, seeking better shelter, perhaps somewhere underground that could be used in the event of a blizzard.

  When they returned, only the leader remained. On his face was a brand with eight points, and three fingers had been severed from his left hand. He was singing as he walked through the snows, a dirge that rose and fell as he sang about beautiful creatures that roosted in a chamber of crystal, of a city in the sky carved from ivory, of silver towers standing against an endless black ocean.

  The people heard the song. Through its tune and its words, the creature that had laired in Lhuur made its way into their minds. It had abandoned its body a long time ago, finding a physical form a tiresome liability, and existed only as thoughts. It had been worshipped once by a cult of intellectuals and artists who sacrificed what they created to it. Now these ragged, desperate men and women would have to do. It divided itself into a thousand fragments, each with a hunger equal to the whole. Those people, huddled screaming in Lhuur as their minds disintegrated, felt their flesh burning as eight-pointed scars rose on their skin. Black tears ran from their eyes. They shuddered and thrashed, bones cracking under the strain.

  Then they walked off into the snows. They were hungry. The creature who had laired in Lhuur had not drunk of any souls for almost five years, since it had been torn from its native steppes of the warp and plunged into Opis. Some of their memories were delicious – terror, love, abandonment, betrayal, joy. But they were never enough. They still hungered, and many lost souls were wandering those wastes, eager to band up with other survivors of the walk north. And so a thousand Walkers of Lhuur spread out, all eager to propagate the seeds of the creature they carried inside them.

  The Aristeia had their hunting lodges and hideaways. Some of them had even made it from Khezal or Rekaba, or all the way from Makoshaam, in defiance of the Imperial attempts to round them up, and were now lying low in those secret places. But none of them now maintained the pretence that they had any real authority over the millions of people filtering up from the southern regions and the coasts. That honour belonged to the recent visitors, the usurpers.

  They were everywhere. They had laired here, in the seemingly lifeless regions of the continent, knowing all along that they would have millions of refugees to use. They were witches and the daemon-possessed, sorcerers and arch-mutants. The Aristeia hated them, those who still had their own minds, not because they were heretics and daemons but because they were new. They had no thousand-year family tree to look back on. They had no history of conquest and superiority to justify their power. But no one dared voice their hatred. Fully one-third of the Aristeia had disappeared in the five years since the invasion had begun. Another third were not themselves – brainwashed, possessed, or mad. The remainder stayed silent and cowered where they could. The ones who had made it out of the cities told themselves they were lucky, but they did not believe it.

  The armies of the north were gathering whether the Aristeia wanted it or not. A mighty mountain range, the Thornholds, broke down into valleys and ranges of foothills in which hundreds of thousands could hide. Legends told of how the Thornholds held up the sky, or how they were the petrified remains of a race of giants who built Opis. Now their shadows concealed the champions of Chaos as they stood, surrounded by haloes of crackling power, drawing towards them the vast hordes who had headed here seeking survival and freedom.

  ‘Seek liberation in blood!’ cried the Warp Serpent, crimson jaws and golden teeth snapping as it spoke. ‘Sweep down and put the invaders to the sword! Only in death can the Imperial yoke be cast off!’

  ‘We are one,’ said a thousand Walkers. ‘We are you, and so you are one. In unity we shall triumph. The Imperium believe they face a million individuals, to be lined up and murdered one at a time. But they face one being, one mighty, infinitely powerful warrior, and they will be crushed.’

  �
��To arms!’ bellowed Karnikhal Six-Finger, surrounded by a veil of mist as his molten armour met the freezing air. ‘To war! In malice bathe your hearts! In rage cleanse your souls! In war alone, honour your gods!’

  At the same moment, well south of the Thornholds, Operation Starfall was in effect. A line of Imperial Guard, from the Kar Dunaish Obsidian Legion on the extreme left to the 90th Algol Siegebreakers anchoring the right, was strung across a region of broken river deltas and coniferous forests where the temperate region met the tundra. The open areas, flood plains between river tributaries and rocky near-deserts, were overlooked by the Basilisks and Griffons of the Lord Governor’s Artillery and the flight paths of the Navy’s Starfall Flight Group. Hundreds of thousands of men were committed, almost as many again as in Khezal and Rekaba, and the majority of the strike force’s vehicles and aircraft.

  Operation Starfall could not fail. Khezal might hold out. Rekaba might refuse to break. Either eventuality could be dealt with in the long term, even if both cities had to be bombed into dust. But if the battle here was lost, the whole strike force could be driven off the planet by an army sweeping south.

  Tchepikov appointed the Lord Colonel of the Obsidian Legion, Ladislaus Kudelbrecht, as the commander of Operation Starfall. Kudelbrecht had earned his stripes in the crushing of the prison world rebellion on Dorrholtz, and was said to be a man who engendered greater fear in his troops than the enemy. His first act was to set up gibbets all along the front line, standing proud of the trenches and gun emplacements, where field punishments could be enacted in the full view of as many Guardsmen as possible. Starfall would not fail while Kudelbrecht still had living men to throw into the fight.

  Regimental battle-scribes began naming potential battles in anticipation. Many features of the region didn’t even have names, and received them then only so the Guard regiments stationed there might have a name to embroider on their standards. Skistalmein Hills. The Blutwald, Greenfire and Lower Manse forests. The River Expiatus.

  Recon fighters made flyovers and brought back news of vast, ragged columns openly led by moral threats. Half a million men were making their way through the passes of the Thornhold foothills. Two hundred thousand were following the rivers that flowed southwards from the mountains, and met the strongpoints in the Guard line head on.

  Imperial preachers set up chapels among the trenchworks. There was not one single Guardsman or Naval airman who did not kneel and hear a sermon. Kudelbrecht himself took confession, and needed four straight hours before he was ready to be ritually scourged. There were no atheists in Operation Starfall.

  The first sighting shells from the Imperial artillery fell. They landed some way short of the main column, some way to the right of the Imperial centre, on an enemy force assumed by all to be led by the Traitor Marine known as Karnikhal Six-Fingers. The second shot was a bolt of crimson lightning that fell from an ice-clear sky, incinerating more than forty men of the 90th Algol Siegebreakers.

  The hundred battles of Operation Starfall had begun.

  K-Day +15 Days

  Operation Requiem

  Tchepikov was accustomed to keeping abreast of everything that happened in his war. Some commanders delegated such tasks, trusting senior officers under them to filter through the bedlam and bring them only what really mattered. Not Tchepikov, not now, when any one of three fronts might seal victory or collapse at any moment. He knelt at that moment in prayer, a selection of Imperial prayer books laid out in front of the prayer cushion. In the velvet dark of the prayer dome the Emperor felt close, as if His hand hovered over Tchepikov, His eyes watching from whatever plane of existence He now ruled.

  A hundred pict-screens carried images from the war for Opis. Some were juddering images transmitted from pict-stealers on tanks or fighter craft. On one screen the ocean churned, waves lashing at the ruined defences of Khezal’s harbour. On another the Rekaban jungle jerked past, as seen by an intelligence observer embedded in Imperial forces trying to crush the guerilla fighters mounting raids from the jungle around the city. Grainy monochrome images from an artillery spotter showed the opening salvoes of Operation Starfall dropping Castellan missiles loaded with mine clusters across an expanse of barren plain.

  The cogitators of the Merciless transmitted any audio which met the criteria of importance and urgency.

  <> shouted an officer, relaying his orders through a vox-operator’s rig. <

> In the background was gunfire and shrieking, as his force closed in around a concentration of crazed enemy militia in the ruins of a palatial Aristeia courthouse in Khezal.

  <> The voice was of a junior officer who had found himself in command of a pioneer unit building barricades and strongpoints in the wake of a Deucalian advance through the streets of Rekaba. That advance had halted and the foremost units had gone, vanished into a labyrinth of pitfalls and open sewers infested with mutants. That assault, then, had failed, and it would be only luck that saw more than a handful make it back to Imperial-held territory. But it was only one of dozens of probing attacks. Some would succeed, some would fail.

  <> More reinforcements, part of the steady tide of men and armour on which the battles for Opis relied.

  More voices. More good and bad news. More death, defeat and triumph. Tchepikov absorbed it all, seeking the overall truth of Opis’s war that would help him sift out the truth from the platitudes when his intelligence officers briefed him on the day’s events.

  The screens flickered. One by one they went dark. The audio feeds distorted, then died.

  Tchepikov knelt up, looking around him.

  ‘What has happened?’ he demanded. ‘Where are my comms?’

  The door to the prayer dome boomed open. Unwelcome light flooded in, silhouetting a shape far larger than a man.

  ‘Damn it, Deiphobus!’ barked Tchepikov. ‘I told you to get off my ship. Have the Imperial Fists come back to the fold? Has Lysander accepted my command?’

  Deiphobus walked into the dome. In one hand he was dragging the sagging form of a Naval soldier, part of the intelligence support battalion who provided the security on board the Merciless. The Librarian dropped the man, who curled up and moaned. ‘The Space Marines have not abandoned ten thousand years of independence at your request, commander,’ he said. ‘And as for staying off this ship, if you want to keep an Imperial Fist away you should step up your security. To their credit, I almost broke a sweat disarming them.’

  ‘Have you not antagonised this command enough?’ retorted Tchepikov. ‘I have a war to run. I cannot spare the attention to answer these insults.’

  Deiphobus took two long strides to where Tchepikov stood, and before the Imperial commander could move Deiphobus’s gauntlet was around his neck. ‘Insults?’ said Deiphobus in a low, dangerous tone. ‘I speak of death. Guns raised against my brother Imperial Fists. Mind-wiped troops, under the orders of the Officio Assassinorum. Speak, Tchepikov. Tell me all you know.’

  Tchepikov did not back down. His capacity to do so had been killed off some time ago, as he ascended the ranks of the Imperial Guard. If fear flickered in his eyes, he forced it back down a split second later. ‘I need explain nothing,’ said Tchepikov. ‘I do not answer to the Imperial Fists. I do not respond to those who threaten and defy me. Go back to your own war, Deiphobus. You have made it clear you will not fight in mine, and I have no reason to assist in yours.’

  ‘I said talk!’ yelled Deiphobus. He threw Tchepikov to the floor. ‘Do you think this a game? My battle-brothers have died at Imperial hands! The Assassinorum has men and agents on this planet, and they see fit to take the lives of Imperial Fists to fulfil their mission! You are the lord of the Imperial forces on Opis. You cannot pretend you kno
w nothing of the Assassinorum’s aims here. We have seen the facility in the Rekaban jungle. We know how Kekrops died. Lest you become an enemy of the Imperial Fists, Tchepikov, tell me everything.’

  ‘I am the Lord Commander of this world!’ yelled Tchepikov, picking himself up from the floor, one hand holding his throat. ‘I answer to none but the God-Emperor Himself!’

  A pistol was in Tchepikov’s hand. Deiphobus saw it was an inferno pistol, a miniaturised melta-weapon of ancient design, its barrel inlaid with golden scrollwork and its handle encased in pearl. It was a duellist’s weapon, rare and valuable, with which a nobleman could cut through the armour that a dishonourable opponent might wear.

  It could cut through power armour.

  Deiphobus leapt on Tchepikov and batted the commander’s gun hand away with his own. The pistol fired, a fat, deep-red bolt of power punching through the prayer dome’s wall. Deiphobus lifted Tchepikov off the floor, snapped his wrist with a twist of his hand, and threw the commander into the bank of pict-screens.

  Screens shattered. Sparks burst around Tchepikov as he tumbled to the ground.

  The clattering of boots on the deck caught Deiphobus’s attention. Naval troopers were gathering at the door, lasguns in hand.

  ‘Fire!’ shouted Deiphobus. ‘Try to shoot me down, I beg of you! I yearn to kill an honest foe!’

  None of the troopers pulled the trigger. The barrels of their lasguns lowered, and they seemed to shrink as Deiphobus stared them down.

  ‘For the last time,’ said Deiphobus, turning to Tchepikov. ‘Speak.’

  Tchepikov struggled into a seated position. His hand hung awkwardly, wrist wrenched at an unnatural angle, and the colour had drained from him. He, too, looked like he had shrunk, now swamped by his uniform coat. Tiny cuts on his face from the shattered pict-screens were starting to bleed.

  ‘They will kill me,’ he gasped.