Like a planet.
Or another ship. The Irrevocable Fate finished its turn and approached the floating plasma refinery head-on.
‘Captain,’ Maro voxed.
‘I am aware of the risk,’ Hassarian sent back. ‘It will be a controlled collision. We have to force it back.’
Through Rogge’s eyes, Nessun saw what the Fate planned. In the Hall of Exaltation, his body’s lips twitched, and would have smiled. The reckless bravery was charming, and so futile. He had never planned for the In Excelsis to come any closer to Aighe Mortis. He still had need of the planet and its population.
The Imperial ships, though. They were a nuisance.
‘Now,’ he told Rogge.
The plasma refinery exploded.
CHAPTER 17
THE NECESSARY MONSTER
A supernova in miniature lit up the Camargus system. The energy released by the death of the In Excelsis was, for a fraction of a second, greater than the sun’s. The shock wave was a blinding sphere of superheated gas and dust. It expanded at a tenth the speed of light, hitting the Irrevocable Fate in less than a blink. The battle-cruiser vaporised, the sudden flash of its own death barely visible in the stellar apocalypse of the refinery. The wave hit the rest of the Mortisian fleet. Ships came apart and burned. Engines exploded, hulls were crushed, power systems surged and died. The craft that did not disintegrate became dead hulks, floating in listless orbits toward random collision or eventual destructive re-entry.
The Immolation Maw’s race to the proper firing angle had taken it further out from the Goliath than the fleet. It had, in Maro, a helmsman who had piloted the ship for centuries and knew it so well that he could, he had once boasted, make it dance a quadrille. He had foreseen what might happen, and had done his best not just to prevent the disaster, but get the Maw far enough away that it could survive if the worst happened. He was more successful than he could have hoped.
Less so than he could have wished.
The wave overwhelmed the void shields, popping them like gas bubbles. It took the strike cruiser in its jaws and worried it, trying to shake it apart. Explosions rocked the decks, engulfing servitors in flame. Power flickered, and then went down through much of the ship. Maro went blind as the ship’s sensors were shut down or destroyed. The interior and exterior of the ship became a foreign territory to him. The Maw’s body was horrifically wounded, and the spirit, howling in pain, lost all connections to its component parts. The ship’s agony flashed down the mechadendrites into Maro and he gaped in torment, his body arched beyond even Space Marine limits, blood pouring from mouth and nose and ears and eyes.
The Immolation Maw screamed and fell into a coma.
The shock wave reached Aighe Mortis. If the In Excelsis had been a few tens of thousands of kilometres closer, the explosion would have scoured the planet clean of air and life. Instead, the energy of thousands of atomic blasts was absorbed by the atmosphere. What had been torpid, weighed down by particulate matter into an oppressive, windless miasma of perpetual summer, now became a weather bomb. Vortices of hellish speed formed into hurricanes the size of continents. The furies had descended on Aighe Mortis, and none would stand before them.
On the ground, the furies first came as a light. It was a ripple, solar bright, that swept across the sky. In its wake, the clouds boiled. They became rage. Lightning exploded over the entire firmament, arcing from cloud to cloud to ground. It was electric judgement, come to condemn all. Thunder and wind were the same god-throat roar, so loud there was no room left in the world for the screams of the judged. The world’s fist slammed into Volos. He staggered, but grounded himself, sinking his weight through his feet to the centre of the earth. He was rooted like a mountain, and he did not fall.
Around him, the retreat became a scything of wheat. He saw the other Dragons remain upright, but all the humans were flattened by the wind. Some who were exposed on the summit, Guard and cultist alike, were picked up and thrown through the air to smash like dolls against the towers. Glass erupted from windows, and for a long, terrible minute, the air sang with a million killing shards. They were caught in a murder vortex, tiny glints reflecting the lightning as they lanced through air and flesh. A sandstorm of glass ticked against Volos’s armour.
As the atmosphere went to war, the battle on the ground paused. The humans were flattened, those who had tried to rise shredded by glass. This was a moment, then. The Black Dragons were the only ones standing. Toharan took it.
‘Brothers,’ Volos heard him announce on the comm-feed, ‘we have been betrayed, but the Emperor’s hand has shielded us. Take the hill. Slay the heretics.’
Volos turned around. Toharan was right, though there was little glory in this victory. This was simple butcher’s work, a massacre of the prone. All the Dragons had to do was walk into a high wind and kill whatever lay on the ground.
Then there was another voice, half-smothered in static, speaking to him. ‘Sergeant, I would speak with you.’ It was Setheno.
‘I have been given orders,’ he said.
‘This is of vital importance.’
He hesitated, then took a chance and listened to his instinct. ‘Where are you?’
‘Meet me at the base of the hill. Where the avenue is blocked. Bring your squad.’
‘Ormarr, on me,’ he voxed, and the Dragon Claws made their way down the hill. Volos didn’t have to specify that they be discreet about it. He left the main avenue, saw the others doing the same. But they were moving against the current, and it was less than a minute before Toharan was on the comm.
‘Brother-Sergeant Volos,’ he demanded. ‘Where are you going?’
‘A target of opportunity, brother-captain,’ Volos answered. Toharan said nothing in response. Volos was surprised. No further questions, no demands, nothing. He’s giving me rope, Volos realised. He had just acted contrary to a direct order. He was more than halfway to hanging himself.
Away from the crown of the hill, the wind dropped slightly. It shrieked as it was funnelled between the towers, but the hive blunted some of its force, too. The glass storm passed. Debris still flew, and Volos saw some metal shards sing by like guillotine blades, but the Guardsmen were struggling to their feet and resuming the push forward. Volos’s Lyman ear could just make out, over the wind, the sounds of war starting up again.
Setheno was waiting at the base of a mountain of rubble. Rather than stage a collapse along the main avenue, as the Dragon Claws death trap had done, the rebels had triggered a transversal fall. Volos was looking at a mountain chain of wrecked spire, stretching north and south for kilometres, blocking all roads back west to the starport. The retreat would have involved a slow, awkward climb over twisted metal and shifting rockcrete. Volos thought about how Squad Ormarr had lured the cultists into a concentrated area, and then dropped a chunk of city on them. The same stratagem had been used on the Imperial forces, only on a vaster scale. He had recognised the earlier flash as a high-atmosphere atomic blast. If it had hit as no doubt was intended, it would have eliminated the Dragons and a sizeable host of Mortisian Guard.
The rhythmic, pulsing lightning strikes cast conflicting shadows over Setheno. In her grey armour, she blended in with the dust and ruins, the shriek of her helm making her look like a gargoyle that had somehow survived its tower’s fall. Volos saw symbolism, not camouflage, in her appearance, and it was symbolism that chilled with its abyssal bleakness.
‘Sergeant,’ she began. She was addressing him, but using the squad channel. So she wanted them all to hear. ‘This is a crucial moment, and you cannot waste it. Captain Toharan’s action is necessary, but it is not sufficient to win the day.’
‘How do you suggest we seize the moment, then?’ Volos asked, wary.
‘By recognising it for what it is, and by embracing what you are.’
‘Go on,’ Volos said, though he more than suspected that he would regret listening to her.
‘Look at the skies. We stand on a cusp. The people of Aighe M
ortis are gazing up and experiencing the greatest terror in the history of their civilization. They will be desperate to ascribe meaning to what they see.’
‘That is not the function of the Adeptus Astartes. Our sole mission is to smash the Emperor’s foes–’
‘Using all necessary force,’ Setheno broke in. ‘One such application of force is the shaping of beliefs and fears, something that you are uniquely qualified to do in this moment. The opportunity will soon pass, and Aighe Mortis will be lost to the Imperium. I do not relish the thought of another Exterminatus so soon after the last.’
Volos shook his head. ‘We are here to fight the Swords of Epiphany, not engage in a propaganda campaign, which is what you seem to be suggesting.’
‘I am suggesting something far more lethal than that, sergeant. And tell me, where are the Swords of Epiphany? Why have you not been fighting them? This battle must still be a diversion. Nevertheless, the traitors have been very effective at creating a narrative for the population to believe in. We must take that weapon away from them if we are to save anything on this planet.’
‘How?’ Volos asked, curious in spite of himself, and feeling still that mounting dread. His hands began to tingle, and he was suddenly thinking of blood dripping from them.
‘How can the rage of the skies appear as anything other than judgement? We must use that. You must be the incarnation of the Emperor’s wrath.’
He began to see where she was going. A beat of denial began to pulse in his head. He did not want to hear her words, he did not want to follow her logic, and most of all, he did not want her to be correct. The Black Dragons were not uncaring of the civilians they encountered, whether in the course of prosecuting war, recruiting initiates, or engaged in the salvage and trade that kept Second Company functioning on its homeless crusade. There were Chapters who barely acknowledged the existence of unaugmented humans beyond the abstract awareness that this was, after all, the Imperium of Man. There were others who regarded civilians as a barely tolerable nuisance. But the Black Dragons did not. They knew for what and for whom they were fighting. They knew that destroying enemies wasn’t enough: this was also a war to preserve something.
‘You must embrace who you are,’ Setheno said, and Volos now understood why he had always thought she was more dangerous than Lettinger. The inquisitor only wanted to destroy the Black Dragons. Setheno was here to mould them, to unleash their dark core. ‘You must embrace what you are.’
What he was? He was defined by his actions. He always had been, and had always lived by the catechism taught by the Chaplains. The mutations of his body, however much they enhanced his abilities as a killing machine, were also a warning. There had been so many Adeptus Astartes, from the terrible genesis moment of the Horus Heresy onward, who had fallen from grace, descending into monstrousness because they believed themselves to be gods. The Black Dragons had the daily, inescapable, physical reminders that they were not divine, and Volos had absolute faith in the lesson: the impurity of the body was a goad to find purity of soul through purity of action. Every act had consequences, for oneself and for others. That was not a platitude; it was a profound statement of reality that was forgotten by too many, too often.
‘Take us over these ruins, sergeant,’ Setheno said, her voice as calm as it ever was, and as implacable. ‘Remove your helmet. Let the traitors and heretics and the fools beyond see what must be seen. Do what must be done, sergeant. Become what you must be. You are the Emperor’s monster. And you are necessary.’
The wind was the gale of the planet’s agony, but it had dropped enough that Bisset was able to emerge from the doorway in which he had taken shelter during the first moments of the horror in the sky. If he leaned into the wind and walked carefully, he could move without being blown off his feet. He looked down the road to where rubble filled the rockrete canyon, and cursed himself as a waste of oxygen. After speaking with the Black Dragon, he had asked to join in the assault on Concordat Hill. All he wanted was to be put in contact with the Guard, to be given a gun and marching orders. But the Black Dragon sergeant had asked him to remain here, with the rebels, to be the eyes and ears of the Imperium. He had seen and heard much since the Black Dragons departure. He had heard the boom of explosives and the collapsing-mountain crash of the falling hive towers. He had seen the laughter and dancing of the gathering crowd as they imagined all their opponents boxed in and about to be removed forever from their lives. He had heard, as the celebrations began, that this outcome had been promised by the ‘other’ Space Marines, the ones who looked like angels and wore armour of gold, not menacing black.
Bisset had seen and heard all these things, and been helpless to do anything about them. He had been given a vox unit, but he’d been unable to raise anyone in the combat zone or back at the starport. Communication was reduced to barely more than line of sight. The only person within the reach of his voice who would be concerned with what he had to say was himself. He was stuck in limbo once again. He seemed fated to be the man with the important information that he could do nothing about.
Now he saw a new sight, as did everyone filling the cramped and serpentine streets. At the crest of the rubble barrier, some thirty metres up, figures appeared. They were silhouetted against the maelstrom clouds by lightning so constant and so pervasive, it was as if the sky burned with electric fire. They were massive, hulking, horned beings clad in armour the black of hell, except for one in the grey of the shroud. The black ones began a steady descent of the slope. The grey one remained at the summit and spread its arms.
Bisset knew, at the rational level, that he was looking at the Dragon Claws and Canoness Setheno. But the atavistic part of his brain reacted with bowel-loosening terror. These were not humans. They were nightmares from an afterlife of punishment. Then the voice spoke. The rational Jozef Bisset, late of the insufferably rational Departmento Munitorum, realised that Setheno’s armour must have the capability to tap into any vox-caster within reach of her signal. The frightened primitive, who had regressed to little Jozef hiding under the blankets from thunder and monsters, reacted to a woman’s voice that did not shout, but that made itself heard over the gale. The voice came from all sides, and it was a voice so shorn of pity, so closed to any form of human entreaty or emotion, that simply to hear it was to know one was damned.
‘Oh faithless of Aighe Mortis,’ proclaimed the cold saint. ‘You have abandoned your God-Emperor, turned your face from his light, and made covenants with the archenemy. And behold.’ She raised her arms, and her hands appeared to grasp the convulsing heavens. ‘The Emperor sends his judgement with fury. You are vile, you are doomed, and you will know such agony that the world will crack with your screams.’
And it seemed that the world might, because the crowd began to scream. The sound was a duet with the wind, a howl of despair and too-late repentance, for as the sky above them exploded and the air itself attacked, how could the misguided, manipulated, desperate people of Aighe Mortis not believe every word the terrible woman said? How could they believe anything else but that at long, long last, after millennia of being ignored and left to suffocate slowly in their industrial filth, they had the undivided attention of the God-Emperor, and did so to their woe?
The voice spoke again. It cut through the shrieks, and though the people wanted to run and hide from the face of their god, they were held, rooted as stone, by the creature who bore the flesh of a woman, but who had long ago ceased, by any sane measure, to be one. The Gorgon had not finished with them yet. ‘Seek forgiveness. Seek it now or die unshriven. Prove yourselves worthy of a return to the light of the Emperor, if only after your final breath. Find the heretic. Slay the heretic. Stamp him into the mud and perhaps your deaths will be a release, and not the promise of torment unending. Kill the heretic now because the Emperor’s vengeance will be at your heels.’
As she finished speaking, the descending figures in black shot into the air on comets of fire. They came down at the front of the crowd with the
boom of a deity’s hammer. They roared, the speakers on their armour turning their voices into the metallic rage of machines. Then they removed their helmets. Bisset was less than a block away, so he saw what they looked like clearly. They had all been wearing their helms when he had spoken to them earlier, and fearsome as the red eye lenses and snarling mouth grilles were, he had been around just enough Space Marines to know the general form of their armour. He had seen the horns, but had thought they were ornamentation on the helms. Now the faces were revealed and the horns slid through openings in the helmets because they were not ornaments at all. They were part of the monsters. The one in the middle, the biggest one, was one whose name Bisset knew but could not think of because right now his brain would say nothing but Dragon, Dragon, Dragon, Dragon. The monster with reptile skin and obsidian eyes bared his fangs, and raised his arms, and bone, sharp as wrath, shot out. He looked down at the man before him. Sergeant Karl Feher trembled and took a step back. The monster reached out a massive hand and closed it over Feher’s head. Bisset could not hear the crunch-crack of skull, but he felt it in his chest and gut. As blood and brain matter ran down the monster’s gauntlet, he gutted Feher with a bone-blade then threw the mangled corpse at the crowd. The Dragon roared, and with a voice that was deep and hissing and loud enough to be heard without speakers, he shouted, ‘People of Aighe Mortis! We are the Adeptus Astartes! We are the Black Dragons! We have come to purge your heresy with fire and with bone!’
CHAPTER 18
TAINTED
The necessary monster. Necessary. Necessary. Volos thought the words again and again as he slipped into a rage of herding, roaring, beating, and killing. Killing the weak and the fleeing. But killing traitors, he reminded himself, and he clung to more words Setheno had spoken: All rebellion is heretical. She was right. Curse her for what she was making him understand, and for what she was making him do to himself, but she was right. Toharan’s lost sheep who needed only good role models to come around had tried to exterminate them all. All heresy must be punished, so all rebellion, whatever its initial justifications, must also be punished. In the final analysis, there were no justifications for turning against the Emperor. And so Volos and the Dragon Claws swam in the waters of damnation together and taught themselves another form of purity: the purity of terror.
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