The Death of Antagonis

by David Annandale

  The nightmare tingling in his fingers. Was this what his premonitions had foretold? No. This was only a start. There was worse to come.

  Volos shook himself. Enough. He had done what was needed, and however distasteful it might have been, he also knew it to be right. He was wallowing in a self-pitying resentment that the Emperor had marked out a difficult path for him to tread. Where was his sense of honour? Or did he believe himself unfit for the duty that lay before him? That thought almost made him laugh. If Setheno was to be believed, he was singularly fit for that duty.

  Breaking out of his reverie, he noticed that the canoness was watching him. She had removed her helmet, and stood a few paces away. She had given him space for his thoughts, but was unwavering in her scrutiny. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Was I a proper monster?’

  ‘You were. The people of Aighe Mortis fear you, and they fear the Emperor. That is as it should be.’ She cocked her head slightly, an expression of curiosity that was the closest thing to an emotion Volos had yet seen from her. ‘Tell me. Do you feel ashamed of the actions you took?’

  ‘No,’ he said after a moment’s thought. When he had told himself a minute ago that his actions had been right, he now understood that that had not been a rationalisation. It had been a simple acknowledgement of an absolute truth.

  ‘And did you enjoy what you did?’

  ‘No.’ Just as true.

  ‘Good.’ She nodded, and Volos sensed he had passed a test. He wasn’t sure whether to feel resentful or not about that.

  There was a metallic rattle off to his left. Volos turned his head. They were standing near the Concordat River, and a large chunk of discarded assemblage was tangled with some wreckage hanging into the effluent from the bank. Volos looked back up the rancid flow of water and filth to the industrial basilica at the top of the hill. The Concordat hadn’t so much as paused in production during the battle at its feet. ‘Is that what we fought to save?’ he asked, half-rhetorically.

  ‘Partly,’ Setheno answered.

  ‘Why?’ Volos was verging on heresy, but at this moment he didn’t care. He was staring at the wrecked bodies, allied and enemy, unknown and brother, that littered the hill and were stacked in mounds closer to the summit. ‘What is worth saving in that? Is it necessary too?’

  ‘In its function, yes it is. Or would you rather do without the bolter rounds that it produces? If a round from that manufactorum kills an ork warboss, would you still doubt the institution’s necessity? As for its form,’ she shrugged. ‘Who is to say? But if it is in that form that the Concordat fulfils its function, then yes, the form is necessary too.’ When she looked at Volos, he imagined that he saw a glint of regret somewhere in the void of her eyes. ‘There is no joy in necessity, sergeant. Not when all we know is war.’

  His reply was arrested by something new arriving on the soundscape of Aighe Mortis’s agony. Over the endless industrial chugging of the Concordat and the monotonous fanaticism of its vox-cast prayers, over the sluggish rush of the outflow river, over the periodic roar of the Basilisk gun, and over the more distant sounds of clashes and gunfire came the long blast of a horn. Volos parsed the sound with his enhanced hearing. The horn was many kilometres away, somewhere to the east, and its faintness was deceptive. Closer to the source, it would be deafening. It was a plaintive, mournful note that reached into the bone marrow. It was the sound of surrender. It announced not just the end of a fight, but the end of a dream. But it was also a siren call. It made a promise. Come to me, it said. Run to me, and you will find succour. You will find sanctuary.

  ‘What is it?’ Setheno asked.

  ‘A summons,’ Volos answered. One he would answer, to see who was calling and, he didn’t doubt, to slit the caller’s throat. He glanced back at Toharan. He was talking with a Mortisian Guard commander and gesturing at the hill. Giving orders for holding the territory, Volos assumed. Then he would be ready to move on with the Dragons and push the enemy even further back. If he had noticed the horn, he gave no sign.

  The horn sounded again, and Volos’s course was clear. The distant target required the rapid, deep strike of an assault squad. He voxed the other Dragon Claws, calling them to him. The penitents were legion, and would spread on their own. They could do without the supervision of monsters for now. Then he asked Brother Keryon for his services once more.

  The Immolation Maw was slow in waking. The ship had been brutalised by the explosion, its machine-spirit battered by shock and damage. The Imperial Navy fleet was destroyed. Many of the ships were gone as if they had never existed, reduced to a stream of atoms. The rest were pitiable debris. The Maw was the only ship still to hold its shape. But it was dark as a tomb. A trail of wreckage drifted behind it. From shattered, pierced decks, puffs of vapour emerged as the last of the atmosphere from those levels leaked out. The ship was a long, silent ruin floating in the void.

  Maro regained consciousness, and his immediate sensation was pain. It wasn’t so much his own, though his body had been damaged when the shock wave hit. The painkillers flooding his system blocked the worst of his own injuries from his consciousness, but they couldn’t block his sense of the ship’s pain. Every hull breach, every tortured system, every blown bulkhead was as real to him as his own nerve clusters. As the ship revived, it screamed. Maro whispered to it. He repeated litanies of healing, doing everything he could to soothe the wounded spirit.

  The ship calmed. One by one, support systems came back on line. Assessor servitors sent in damage reports, while their repair-tasked counterparts and serfs went to work. The data streamed in to Maro, and most of it was bad. The engines were down. They could be saved, and the efforts could be speeded up considerably if the resources of Aighe Mortis were available. Most of the habitat compartments had survived, though there were losses. Maro would mourn those brothers later. Shields were depleted, and would need time to power back up. The good news boiled down to two things: the Immolation Maw was not about to die, and most of the weapons systems were intact.

  ‘Approaching contact,’ a bridge servitor reported.

  ‘Analyse,’ Maro ordered.

  The report came back: an Apostate-class heavy raider.

  Maro ran scenarios through his head. There weren’t many. The Maw was dead in the water, but she still had her teeth. ‘Brother Ydraig,’ he voxed.

  ‘Yes, helmsman,’ the Techmarine answered.

  ‘We have a hostile contact.’

  Ydraig cursed. ‘The shields won’t have a fraction of their force back in time. He’ll cut us in two.’

  ‘Then we will have to encourage him to take another course of action. We will be running dark. All available power to be routed to the weapons.’

  ‘Understood, brother. The Emperor protects.’

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ Maro repeated, thinking, Now would be a very good time for Him to do so. He sent out a general order: ‘Full dark. Vox silence.’

  The Immolation Maw drew back into the shadow of the grave.

  On the Metastasis, Captain Meliphael watched the Immolation Maw arrive within easy firing range. Impossible to miss at this distance, and the ship immobile, too. The execution was so easy, his father’s gift was almost an insult. He eyed the growing dark bulk of the cruiser. For a moment, as the Metastasis had first closed in, there had been a flicker of lights aboard, as if the ship were grasping at a fitful spark of life, but that ember had dimmed to nothing again. An idea occurred to Meliphael, a way of transforming the cardinal’s gift into a boon. ‘One shot,’ he commanded. ‘To the engines.’

  The Maw shook, its agony spiking, as the lance strike punched another hole into the engine room. Metal groaned in sympathy with the machine-spirit. Maro whispered to it, soothing, promising relief and retribution, entreating the beast to be patient just a little bit longer.

  No response from the Black Dragons. Meliphael’s lip curled, and the daemon inside him squirmed in anticipation. ‘Close in,’ he ordered. ‘Prepare boarding parties. We will be adding a new con
vert to our Father’s cause.’

  Tennesyn groped to consciousness. He was ensnared by grav-webbing in the simple quarters he had been given since his arrival on the ship. He had retreated to the acceleration couch when the action against the In Excelsis had begun, and blacked out when the plasma refinery had gone nova. Now he fumbled through darkness, clawing at the webbing, frightened by the silence that surrounded him. The normal sounds of a ship were absent. There was no thrum of engines, no marching back and forth of men. Instead, there was a deep nothing.

  He worked free of the webbing, and felt his way to the chamber’s viewport. He looked out. The heavy raider he had first seen when he had fled Aighe Mortis was lining up broadside with the Immolation Maw. From this distance, even Tennesyn’s unaided eye could see the torpedo tube hatches opening.

  The Battle Pyre skimmed over the rooftops of Aighe Mortis, keeping just beneath the volcanic clouds. Keryon was following the coordinates of the last horn blast. The call had stopped about an hour ago, but had gone on long enough for Keryon to triangulate the location. Far below the racing Thunderhawk, Volos could see columns of ants charging down the streets between the buildings and along the connecting walkways. Repentance was a grass fire, almost outpacing the Battle Pyre.

  They were just reaching their target, and Volos could see nothing unusual about the location, when the Thunderhawk’s sensors started picking up the horn again, still to the east, and many kilometres distant. ‘It’s a lure,’ Keryon announced. ‘We’re being led to a trap.’

  Volos thought for a moment. A lure, yes, but… ‘I don’t think it’s meant for us,’ he said. It was too clumsy, too basic, and the first horn had cut off long before any Black Dragons might have been able to make it on foot. The idea that the bait would be exclusively for vehicles struck him as too much effort for too specific a target.

  ‘For whom, then?’ Nithigg asked.

  ‘Get us to the next one,’ Volos told Keryon. ‘If we can reach it before it shuts off, I think we’ll have our answer.’

  They didn’t catch that horn, but they were almost in time for the one after that, close enough to tell which building had been broadcasting the call. It was the Palace of Saint Boethius, and here they did find the answer. The Grand Square was filled to capacity, and every member of the crowd was pushing in the same direction. The rush was to the east, and the currents in the mob looked like wind over a field of wheat.

  ‘I want a closer look,’ Volos said.

  ‘You want me to land in the square?’ Keryon asked, incredulous. He would foul the Thunderhawk’s landing gear with bodies.

  ‘Get me low enough for a jump, then circle back. Look for me on the palace roof.’

  Keryon clicked compliance over the vox-net and dropped the nose of the Battle Pyre. Volos slid back the door, and the storm blew in the interior of the ship. He hung on to the bulkhead, steadying his footing as the wind slammed against the Thunderhawk. Keryon plunged down one of the straighter canyons leading toward the square, and Volos took the jump, his pack pushing him away from the backwash of the Battle Pyre as it sped past him.

  Volos landed on a walkway about ten metres up from the street level. He looked down into the Grand Square at the flood of humanity, and realised that, at least in part, this was his work that he was seeing.

  Below him were not the penitent, but refugees. He saw cultists, distinguishable by their ritual scarification and the Chaos runes drawn onto their clothing. He saw traitor Defence Militia and Guard elements. But he also saw civilians, entire families with belongings tossed hastily into sacks. And when some of these saw him, they screamed and made the sign of the aquila, as if this would ward him off. The terrible truth sank in: here was Chaos so complete that large numbers of Mortisians didn’t even know which forces were which. Perhaps, by the time the gospel of penitence had reached these ears, all that remained of the story was a tale of daemons pursuing the fearful. It was no longer about the wrath of the God-Emperor. These people, mixing and fleeing with the traitors, believed themselves to be faithful. And by his actions, Volos was sending them into the waiting arms of whatever was sounding the series of horns.

  His fingers tingled with the phantom slick of blood.

  Using large jumps, he made his way to the palace and up to its roof. He saw the Battle Pyre heading for him, and he concentrated on getting back on board. He tried not to think about the implications of what he had just seen.

  He failed. Miserably.

  The Metastasis’s boarding torpedoes were beginning their launch sequence when the Immolation Maw fired. The Space Marine cruiser was crippled, motionless before its predator. But Ydraig gave Maro all the power he needed, and the machine-spirit, raging with the fury of an injured animal, was eager to lash out. The entire starboard flank of the Maw lit the void with turret, lance and torpedo fire. The Metastasis was a much smaller ship, and it had just presented its length to the Maw. It didn’t stand a chance. Its void shields collapsed beneath the overwhelming barrage, and its port side lit up even more brilliantly as explosions hammered its hull open. Secondary blasts rocked its interior, and it drifted off its orientation.

  There was no return fire.

  The top of the stern cathedral was spared the worst of the devastation. The space of the bridge was intact, but all power was gone. Malformed servitors continued their duties, even though the cogitators they operated were dead. Meliphael screamed orders, smashing to pulp any helot or servitor within reach. His demands were met with silence. His ship was dead. He was alone.

  The horn was still blowing, and they were coming close to its source. They were catching up with the relay of calls. Each time the blast sounded, the fleeing millions below answered with their own cry of fear and hope. Volos heard the call-and-response when he made another jump and gauged the composition and mood of the crowd. That had been enough. He was just as glad, now, that the roar of the Thunderhawk’s engines shielded his ears and conscience from the inarticulate prayer below.

  They had travelled hundreds of kilometres from Concordat Hill, always moving east, the migration of refugees only growing larger. There was a detached part of Volos that was fascinated by how quickly the exodus had developed. The people they were passing over now would never have seen any actual conflict between the penitent and the heretics. But words and ideas spread faster than any physical virus. That was, he reminded himself, how doubtworm had infected all of Antagonis in a matter of days. Between the tale of terror and the call of sanctuary, a compulsion had been born throughout this sector of Aighe Mortis.

  ‘We’re coming up on another starport,’ Keryon reported. ‘That’s where the sound is coming from.’

  ‘Slow and careful,’ Volos told him. ‘Let’s not announce ourselves before we know what’s going on.’

  Keryon took the Battle Pyre within a kilometre of the starport’s perimeter, then cut the Dragon Claws loose. They jumped the rest of the way from rooftop to rooftop until they were overlooking the open expanse of the port. What they saw made Volos snarl.

  There was only one ship present, and it was impossible to miss. It was two kilometres long, a bulky, clumsy, fat-bodied avatar of hate. It had once been an Imperial transport, but that was a memory so old it had been forgotten. The superstructure seemed to have both melted and grown, spreading spines and strangling vines of metal around the hull. Iron excrescences had formed immense runes over which the air turned brittle and fragmented into buzzing black swarms. Loading ramps gaped like open jaws, and into the ship’s belly streamed the refugees in the tens of thousands. A large detachment of Swords of Epiphany guarded access points, backed up by Rhino armoured transports and Predator tanks.

  ‘Soulcage,’ Braxas muttered. ‘Foretold Pilgrimage,’ he said, reading the molten Gothic letters on the hull. He spat the taste from his mouth.

  ‘Brothers, we are witnessing a historical first,’ Nithigg said with bitter humour. ‘Have you ever before seen Traitor Adeptus Astartes acting as crowd control while people fought
to get on a Soulcage?’

  Volos hadn’t. But he’d never seen people brandish the aquila against him, either. Even in the face of military defeat, Chaos still controlled the narrative of Aighe Mortis, and by the light of its inside-out non-logic, what was happening made a ghastly kind of sense. The slaveship was the same gold as the Swords’ armour. It was the gold of grasping, greedy ruin, the gold of blasting knowledge. Light was damaged by it, and reality in its vicinity took on a greasy sheen. But it was still gold, and meant to be seductive, and to the panicked and the fearful, it might well seem more inviting than the unyielding black of the Dragons.

  ‘Why is it,’ Volos demanded, ‘that we are winning every battle, but losing the war?’

  The other Dragon Claws didn’t answer. Abruptly, the ship’s horn stopped sounding. The Swords and their vehicles began to withdraw inside the ship. The refugees continued to pour into the starport, rushing to be granted sanctuary from the anger in the heavens and the monsters at their backs. There was no room for the Swords to push through, so they went over, trampling people beneath their boots, crushing bodies to smeary pulp with the treads of their tanks. The screams of the dying travelled back to the Dragons, but still the crowd pushed forward. They had already walked over so many of their own, a few more smashed skulls and broken spines were not going to dissuade them from struggling to reach the ship.

  ‘What do we do?’ Vasuk asked. ‘Do we attack?’

  Volos felt the call of battle. He wanted to rend the Chaos Space Marines into slabs of meat. But to engage now would be to throw his brothers’ lives away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Our battle isn’t here.’ He watched the loading ramps begin to close. The rumble of the ship’s engines powering up shook the building beneath his feet. The crowd screamed, hands beating at the hull, desperate for the salvation of the slaveship. ‘How much human cargo can that ship carry?’ he asked Braxas.