The huntress went by several names, some of which were affectionate, some of which were archival in nature, and some of which were curses as she cast her shadow over her foes.
In the various records kept by what remained of the 203rd Expeditionary Fleet, she was listed as L-ADX-cd-MARS-Quintessence-[Necare Modification]-I-XII-002a-2/98: VS/TK/K, which was hardly a name to strike terror into the enemy.
In the annals of the Dark Angels, she was known as the Ember Queen, remembered from the decades she’d served with the First Legion before finding herself sent with her sisters to fight alongside the Eaters of Worlds. A banner commemorating her victories with the Dark Angels had hung in the strategium of the Lion’s flagship, Invincible Reason, only to be torn down when it was discovered that she had turned traitor.
To the troops who fought at her feet, she was more often known as Jackal, or Howler. Her cry always had her little brothers roaring in reply. To those who knew her best, those who guided her movements and formed the biological components of her brain, she was Syrgalah, First Huntress of the Ember Wolves.
The command Titan, as with every war machine in the Legio Audax, sourced her name in antiquity, taking it from the Himalazian dialects of proto-Gothic that still existed in scraps of lore from the lost ages of Ancient Terra. Long ago, when Terra had been Old Earth – when the skies were blue heavens instead of grey iron – entire cultures spread across the planet’s largest continent. Now it was the site of the Imperial Palace, and echoes like Syrgalah’s name were all that remained of those near-forgotten souls.
Syrgalah moved forwards in a brutish hunch, her wolfish skull of iron-riveted ceramite angled down to stare along the road. Her weaponised arms tracked her gaze, panning left and right with each sweep of the cockpit sensor screens that served as her eyes. She stalked rather than walked, clawed feet crunching three-toed imprints into the rockcrete avenues, her gait making her lean side to side with every step.
A titanium plaque on the dense armour plating of her shin displayed the words ‘If wolves have a queen, this is she’, again in the Hindusian proto-Gothic that had given her a name. The Lion, Lord of the First Legion, had honoured her with the inscription decades ago. Years of war had left the plaque scratched, battered and warped, but the tech-priests always returned it to legibility. Who bestowed it upon her didn’t matter. The sentiment was all.
In her armoured skull, the three command crew were strapped into their restraint thrones. Venric Solostine was eighty, but rejuvenat surgery kept him looking fifty, at the cusp of the second renaissance of handsomeness some men were lucky enough to enjoy. Silvering stubble marked his jawline, surrounding an easy and frequent smile. Connective neural cables ran from his temples and the back of his head, linking directly to his leather seat. He looked through Syrgalah’s cockpit-eyes, at the artillery tank grinding its gears to reverse back down the avenue. The vehicle’s mounted cannon boomed with black smoke, and Syrgalah’s void shields lit up with the irritation of kinetic impact.
‘That Vindicator needs to die,’ Solostine said.
‘Aye, sire,’ Toth Kol called back from his throne. ‘Pursuing.’ The cockpit shook harder as the Warhound Titan started its lurching run. Grit rattled against its armour as it stalked through the dust clouds.
In the throne next to Toth, Keeda’s face was cast in unhealthy amber light; the false fire from her flickering targeting display.
‘I already have the shot, sire.’
In his command throne, Solostine pushed both his fists forwards, a slow and careful double-punch. Gears and hydraulics gave a heavy whine as Syrgalah mirrored his movement, its weaponised arms lifting and aiming in neural sympathy.
It was all the permission she needed; Keeda grinned and took the shot. Syrgalah’s left arm roared, the vulcan mega-bolters opening up with a deafening roar to obey the gunner’s trigger finger. Spent shells rained onto the road in a monsoon of smoking scrap.
‘Target destroyed,’ Keeda said.
‘The target is more than destroyed, my dear.’ Solostine’s approval murmured through the Titan, causing a shiver of pleasure through the old girl’s iron bones.
Toth walked Syrgalah around the avenue’s turn, marching into a side street. The Warhound gave the dead Vindicator a derisive kick as she passed by. The tank’s hull, chewed through by Keeda’s barrage, tumbled across the rockcrete road and into a wall.
‘Moderati Primus?’ Solostine called.
‘Aye, sire?’
‘The kick.’ He was chuckling. ‘A lovely touch. Auspex?’
Toth’s bionic eyes refocused on the display monitor to his left. ‘All formations holding within engagement parameters. Over half the Legio is embattled, the rest are moving up as planned. Loss ratio reported as one enemy engine for every one of ours.’
‘Tolerable,’ Solostine mused, ‘but hardly exemplary, given the circumstances. The Legio Lysanda hardly outclasses us.’
Toth watched the road ahead. ‘Lysanda fights in union with the Ultramarines.’
Solostine nodded. The implication need not be spoken clearer – the same thing happened every time the Legio Audax went to war. Where other Space Marine Legions would work in tactical conjunction with their Collegia Titanica forces, the World Eaters could never be trusted to keep their heads long enough to display such patience.
The Warhound lurched onwards, its rattling chassis plunging through the dust clouds strangling the city. They saw by auspex, moving towards mangled heat signatures and movement betrayed by wide-angle echolocation. Behind Syrgalah, the Warhounds Maakri and Kalla kept pace with their alpha. Their sombre armour plating showed the same abuses borne by the command Titan.
‘Incoming message.’ Toth was frowning. ‘The flagship is filtering it as best she can. It’s from the front line, to all outrider elements. They want us to converge on…’ He pressed his bionic palm to the vox-input augmetically attached to his temple.
Solostine tapped his fingers on the armrest of his throne, effortlessly leaning into the roll and rock of the old Titan’s tread.
‘To converge on…?’ the princeps asked. ‘To converge on what? Don’t tell me this will finally be the day the Twelfth Legion asks for our help.’
‘Shit,’ Toth said, releasing the curse in a slow breath. ‘The transmission is from Eighth Captain Khârn. He’s ordering all scout units back to the Valika Junction, and demanding immediate reinforcement.’
Solostine tutted at the swearing. ‘A little dignity goes a long way, Moderati Kol.’
‘My apologies, sire.’
‘Forgiven.’ Solostine was listening to the transmission himself, and his own smile dimmed. ‘We’ll have to fight across a quarter of the city to reach Valika. I… wait, wait. This can’t be correct,’ he said.
Keeda, without a link to the vox-net, finally looked away from her gunnery consoles. ‘What is it?’
‘Reports are coming in from half the junctions across the city,’ Solostine said. ‘The worst is at Valika: Lysanda’s engines are inbound. In addition, Lord Aurelian has made planetfall there.’
Keeda frowned, her orange glass targeting visor showing a continual scrolling data feed. ‘Why can’t that be correct?’
‘Not that,’ Solostine said. He keyed in a command to spread the vox-message to the cockpit’s primary speakers. ‘This.’
‘…lost contact with the primarch, repeat, this is Khârn at Valika. We’ve lost contact with the primarch, reinforcements are–’
Keeda’s frown went nowhere. ‘The World Eaters always lose contact with the primarch. They lose contact with everyone, once… you know…’ She tapped her fingers to her temple. ‘The Nails take over.’
Solostine looked through the Titan’s eyes, at the burning city beyond. ‘Apparently, something is different, this time.’
Khârn screamed, not from rage nor from his wounds, but because he was still alive. The soun
d was one repeated a thousand, thousand times across the city by men pushed to their physical limits and beyond, yet given no respite. He screamed to override the pain of his own muscles, fighting against the lactic burning of an exhausted body flooded by combat stimulants. He screamed and laughed as he killed, and as his axe fell, and fell and fell.
He’d not lied to Argel Tal. Some warriors enjoyed war, and he was one of them. Not the crushing press itself, but the primal exultation of breaking the enemy ranks and the dizzying laughter that came with it; the prickling pleasure of breathing as others broke open and died. There was such depthless joy in survival.
But war-scribes had been getting their trade wrong since the very dawn of language. Some things simply couldn’t be described, and war – true open war between clashing armies – was first among them. By the nature of perception, one man’s wisdom would always be another man’s lie.
Some tale-tellers focused on the moment-by-moment action and reaction of a warrior in the heat of the fight, describing the motions of mortality. Others focused on the atmosphere of the wider conflict, and the press of emotions on those involved within it.
The truth was both, and neither. Khârn knew it well.
No universal truth of battle existed. Sometimes he’d fought and never been able to recall a single axe-fall, nor the face of a single slain enemy, despite them crying out before his eyes for hours on end.
He’d also fought on battlefields where every contorted face clung to his memory for hours afterwards, and he remembered each and every nuanced tilt of his axe, as well as the exact tune it made shearing through armour and meat and bone.
Battle was a matter of endurance, the passing of time marked only by his own aching muscles and breathlessness. Front-line warfare – from the warbands of Ancient Terra to the grinding of vast hordes in the Great Crusade – was a war against the self. Skill meant nothing, while brotherhood and endurance meant everything. Every warrior in the 31st millennium who picked up a rifle, pistol or blade was duelling against their own reserves of courage, strength and endurance. They were duelling against their own brothers’ and sisters’ courage; their capacity to stand and hold the line.
After thirty thousand years, warfare had come full circle.
The sheer scale of humanity’s conflicts disregarded the corrupt reliance on automation as seen in the Dark Age of Technology. Mankind was back down to swords beating against shields and men entrenched with their rifles, where the gods of myth were Titan war machines and Baneblade tanks.
In his calmer moments, Khârn felt honoured. He was living through a second age of legend, where the future’s mythology was being written around him with each new victory. The World Eaters were the descendants of ancient phalanxes; the spiritual sons of shield-walls in lost kingdoms. They were echoes made manifest, conjured from battles that broke down into bronze-bladed duels between a thousand heroes, once formation was forgotten in the blood, the sweat, and the curses of two armies grinding.
They weren’t soldiers, fighting in packs through conquered streets. They were warriors, drawing blades to fight in the moments where courage and endurance threatened to meet madness. Those moments never made it into the sagas.
But he saw no great art to warfare. At least, not beyond the momentary aesthetic pleasure inherent in a sight so unbelievable that it drowned the senses: a city aflame, perhaps, or an orbital pict-view of armies so colossal they blackened the very land over which they were killing each other.
And yet, he loved war. He loved the brotherhood, fighting side by side and back to back with warriors he’d die for, and who would die for him. He loved the momentary surge of life he felt each time a foe fell before his axe. And, as proud as any man without ever tainting himself by vainglory, he loved war because he had a gift for it.
The true strength of the Emperor’s Space Marines was in their genetic coding. Not their strength, mighty though it was; not their discipline, for many lacked that virtue almost entirely; not in the armoured fist of their massed armour battalions, which in truth could be crewed by lesser men with little difference.
No, their strength was a testament to the Emperor’s shrewd foresight for conflict, for he made warriors that could endure more than any other mortal. Secondary organs compensated when primary hearts and lungs grew tired. Wounds that would leave a man or woman stunned or crippled scarcely slowed a legionary at all. They were children harvested from a natural life, grown purely into creatures that were able to tolerate pain and damage beyond measure, and still keep going.
The Emperor, for all his supposed faults, understood war had come full circle. In his Imperial wisdom, he’d bred soldiers to win those ancient wars that would be fought again in the future.
So Khârn screamed. He screamed as he severed the head of a defiant, uniformed Academy Guardsman, and he screamed as he tore a female officer in half on the backswing. He screamed as he felt exhaustion that would cripple a human, and he pushed through it, again and again. An Ultramarine rose up before him, bolter and gladius ready. Khârn took the legionary’s arm off with a chop, kicked his chestplate hard enough to send him sprawling, and looped a weapon chain around the wounded warrior’s throat. He strangled the Ultramarine, embracing him from behind to throttle the life from him, roaring and howling and frothing all the while.
And the Nails sang. They pulsed hatred through his head, promising an end to the pain and never delivering.
Shadows darkened the day as enemy Titans passed, focusing their eardum-bursting weapons on the World Eaters battle tanks. The hammering crash of vulcan mega-bolters was loud enough to be Armatura’s own heartbeat. Firesprays from discharging cannon arms lit up the dust in flashing hazes, their weak light backwashing to paint the Titans themselves as towering things of iron and shadow.
Khârn saw Lorgar’s silhouette in the dust, hurling great rocks and slabs of fallen architecture aside with telekinetic fury. The primarch was digging deep, well below street level, leaving the air tense with a pall of psychic resonance sharp enough to breed migraines and toothaches among those nearby. Any Ultramarine descending into the hole died without Lorgar even sparing a glance; mirage-waves of kinetic pressure slammed into whole squads, hurling them away to die against the rocks. The human soldiers caught in those careless expulsions of force flew even further, pulping against the rubble where they landed. Lorgar kept digging.
A Warhound Titan, hunched and hungry, stomped its way through the dust cloud, bringing its weapons to bear on the primarch. Khârn drew breath to shout a warning, exhaling in wordless shock a second later.
Lorgar, his gauntlets rimed with psychic hoarfrost, lifted a chunk of broken masonry the size of a Rhino transport and hurled it across the avenue. Such was its speed that dust-waves parted in its wake. With the majestic toll of a ringing bell, it collided with the Titan’s armoured wolf-head cockpit, flattening the crew chamber and sending the Titan slowly, so slowly, toppling onto its side. The few World Eaters still sane enough to bear witness cried out with laughter and renewed their assault.
More Ultramarines poured into Valika, leading squads of human soldiers fresh from other fights. Others fell from the sky on growling jump packs. Still others dropped from gunships, descending through the dust on rappelling cables. Cobalt-blue tanks roamed inwards, grinding over the rubble, weapon mounts blazing.
‘Where are our reinforcements?’ Khârn demanded over the vox. ‘Where are the bastard Word Bearers?’
Kargos and Skane fought with him, as did Esca and Jeddek. The Librarian threw himself into the fight, violet lightning dancing in blinding arcs between his axes. Jeddek was one of the oldest living Eaters of Worlds. He’d crusaded across the stars from the Legion’s founding, long before they rediscovered the primarch’s homeworld, or started recruiting from worlds beyond Terra. He held the Eighth Company’s heraldic banner aloft, the great woven flag showing the fanged, 8-marked skull devouring a red, dead world.<
br />
Khârn fell back to stand with his banner bearer. ‘What happened?’ he shouted above the storm of sound.
Jeddek lifted the stump of his other arm. It ended at the elbow. ‘The Ultramarines happened.’
Kargos crouched to reload his bolter. ‘They’re still happening, in case you haven’t noticed.’
A bolt shell spat from the dust, crashing against Jeddek’s chest and driving him to one knee. The banner wavered, dipping, falling.
Skane fired his pistols back, killing the hazy figure of an Ultramarine ascending the rubble slope towards them. ‘You’re avenged, Jeddek,’ he voxed.
‘I’m not dead yet,’ the veteran growled. He hauled himself to his feet, raising the banner again. Blood marked the ruination of his chestplate. Khârn could see the hint of an organ quivering within the mess of cracked ceramite and sundered ribcage.
‘Where is the cursed Seventeenth?’ Kargos spat the words. ‘Where are they?’
Skane – wasn’t it always Skane? – voiced what was on their minds. ‘Betrayal. They’ve left us to die in some great and holy joke, mark my words.’
Khârn looked at his chainaxe, toothless and warped from overuse. He looked at his plasma pistol, thirsting and weakened from overheating, venting pressurised steam in protest.
‘They wouldn’t abandon us.’
Skane grinned. ‘You actually believe what you’re saying? Tell them Lorgar is here, and then they’ll come running.’
Khârn’s answering smile was a bleak, thin thing indeed.
‘This is Captain Khârn of the Twelfth Legion to any Word Bearers forces close to Valika. We’re overrun, and need immediate reinforcement. Your primarch is here. Do you hear me, cowards? Your primarch is here.’
A reply crackled back at once, violated by vox-distortion. ‘Confirm.’
Khârn laughed, sheathing his pistol and lifting a discarded Ultra-marines bolter from the rubble.
‘I’m looking at Lorgar as I speak, you cur. It’s not just us you’ve abandoned here.’
Betrayer Page 8