Betrayer

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  But what was done was done. The old Legion and the new were bonded by blood, no matter how many disparate worlds the warriors had been drawn from over the decades. Kinship flowed between them, whether he willed it or not. Blood, as so many of their parent cultures had said, was thicker than water.

  Lotara ordered the robed priestlings to upload a tactical feed of the Ultramarines boarding pod location points.

  ‘The what?’ Lhorke had asked. He turned from watching Neras undergoing the chanted Ritual of Reawakening, and looked down at Captain Sarrin’s tiny, tiny figure.

  ‘The Ultramarines,’ she replied. ‘The… Thirteenth Legion Astartes?’ She looked worried, as if he’d forgotten who the XIII actually were.

  Something rattled and clanked deep in his heavy metal guts. ‘You want me to kill Ultramarines.’

  ‘They boarded us!’ she insisted.

  Lhorke crouched down, his joints giving industrial-grade snarls as he did so. He brought his cranial input/output node, fashioned as an armoured helm, almost level with her face. A giant kneeling to address a child.

  ‘Why did they board us?’

  She was obviously worried now. ‘Can’t you fight other legionaries?’

  Of course he could. He’d fought the Wolves, hadn’t he? Sent them yelping back to their gunships after they came howling about the Nails, after Angron had assumed command over the Legion. As long as he lived within this foetid, cold coffin, he’d never forget Angron and Russ fighting in the amber light of that alien sunset. The battlefield had reeked of their godly blood.

  ‘What reason?’ he replied to Lotara. ‘Why are we at war with the Ultramarines?’

  ‘I… Because…’ She’d trailed off. That’s when she’d turned to a nearby priest, and ordered a further uploading of data.

  They weren’t at war with the Ultramarines. They were at war with half the Imperium. They were openly at war with the Emperor now, and they had been for over a year. Most of the time seemed to have been spent in warp transit, descending on unsuspecting worlds still blind to the unfolding war and massacring their populations wholesale.

  Angron, he thought. The sheer bitterness of the conjured name made his corpse tremble in the amniotic fluid of his coffin-cradle. He felt his own withered limbs tense and twitch.

  With that indecipherable dose of madness in mind, Lhorke had led his wounded and abandoned brothers back into battle.

  Discipline won wars. Fury won fights.

  Against the Ultramarines discipline, the only weapon that remained was fury. A fury beyond reason; a fury beyond containment. Fury so depthless it couldn’t be countered, because those possessed by it cared nothing for their own lives.

  When two warriors stood and fought, giving no ground, awareness of mortality couldn’t be banished from even the most dutiful and courageous souls. Soldiers defended themselves to stay alive. Training and instinct forced their hands – they ducked, they dodged, they weaved and blocked and parried. On a conscious level, this was skill. It was finesse. On an unconscious level, it was the reaction of training and simple, instinctive awareness of mortality.

  It was also the secret behind the World Eaters, how they won wars without the discipline so resplendent in other Legions. Fury won fights – win enough fights, and they’d still carry the war.

  The Nails weren’t implants as remembrancers and archeotechnicians understood the idea. The implants added nothing to a World Eater’s brain. Instead, they stole from it. They bleached a warrior’s mind of all reason, all caution, all mortality’s instincts. The Nails rewarded rage with spurts of electrochemical pleasure, tingling synapses and deadening enjoyment of everything else. No better machine had ever been contrived to encourage warriors into pursuing the dubious peace found in absolute, careless, guiltless fury.

  When Khârn hit the shield wall, he was barely Khârn any more. He was a shell of humanity stripped down to feverish rage, never thinking of defending himself, never responding to any threat of pain or danger. He ripped the boarding shield from his first foe’s gauntlets, spraying spittle-froth into the warrior’s faceplate as his axe cleaved down. He took blades and bolt shells against his armour without noticing, always attacking, always attacking, always attacking.

  A warrior who wants to live has no defence against one who doesn’t care if he dies. And Khârn, every warrior wants to live.

  The primarch’s words. Angron’s quietly growled wisdom, in the hour before Khârn became the first to accept the Butcher’s Nails in his brain.

  ‘Blood for the primarch!’ he screamed as he slaughtered the Ultra-marines, with his face painted red by dead men’s insides. ‘Skulls for the Twelfth Legion!’

  Along the front line, where legionaries in bloodstained white met those in cobalt blue, the same performance played out a hundred times. World Eaters too wounded to charge dragged themselves across the ground, screaming their hate, axes and swords still revving in their hands.

  Time meant nothing to the Nails-lost. Khârn sensed the escalation around him, the way a shark senses the ebb and flow of the tides without needing to really pay heed. In flashes of vision between the moving red-stained blurs of enemy limbs, he saw other warriors in white demolishing the Ultramarines ranks, as well as gunships brightening the sky on downturned thrusters. The headache-beams of lascannons lanced through the fighting crowds with resonant, waspish sounds, superheating the air around the growing hosts of warriors.

  Titan-tread shivered the ground, their towering forms visible through the dust, fighting their own godlike wars above the herds of mere mortals around their ankles. When they deemed the ground battle worthy of their attention, the screaming, crashing hordes would die in great swathes, disintegrated in sunflame or swept clear by withering volleys of massed vulcan bolter fire. Here and there, the pressurised clatter-rattle of ursus claws loosed at larger foes. At one point, Khârn thought he saw the silhouette of a Warlord-class Titan dragged almost to its knees by four Audax Warhounds, pulled down by their harpooning grip. He had a heartbeat’s span to see the great shadow kneeling, before the fight took him again.

  He was close, now. Close enough to smell their breath when he tore their helms free and broke their faces open with his fists. Close enough to hear the crackle of their own vox-network ordering full retreat.

  They wouldn’t flee. The Ultramarines fought back to back in ever-diminishing circles, refusing to run. They wouldn’t show their backs to the foe, and there was no way to retreat in good order, no matter what their commanders demanded.

  ‘Khârn!’ a voice cried above the battle. How it was magnified, the World Eater could only guess. He fought on in a frothing, panting fever, his hands numb from gripping the blood-slick axe haft. Everything existed in the flickering flurry of sword blades and shield edges and fists and boots and red-eyed bronze helms.

  ‘Khârn!’ came the voice again. ‘Face me!’

  He lashed out with his axe, its blade spraying sparks as it skidded across an Ultramarine’s breastplate. The teeth chewed and scraped, mangling the aquila emblazoned on the warrior’s chest. Not the royal Palatine Aquila, the Emperor’s own symbol borne among the Legions only by Fulgrim’s sons. This was the worthless mark of Imperial dominance that any warrior was free to wear.

  Khârn drew back for a second cleave. This time the spinning teeth bit into the legionary’s throat, chewing the softer armour there and into the flesh beyond. When the body dropped, Khârn hacked a third time, took up the helm by its sergeant’s wreath, and raised it in his fist as he screamed up at the choked sky.

  A shadow eclipsed what pathetic light the moon tried to bring. It struck the ground hard enough to crack stone, manifesting behind the World Eater – a presence formed of blackness and blades.

  He turned, lashing out.

  Argel Tal smashed the blow aside with his golden two-handed sword. The axe sparked and splintered in Khârn’s hands, falling t
o pieces as it met the Custodian sword.

  ‘Are you insane, brother?’ Argel Tal asked, his second, harsher voice dominating his human one.

  The Word Bearer’s armour was ridged by growths of dense, bleached bone forming the suggestion of an exoskeleton on the scarlet ceramite. His helm was crested by curving horns, and its silver faceplate warped into a wolfish maw. Veined bat’s wings, formed from some unnatural blend of fleshmetal and scorched ceramite, rose in a living cloak from his shoulders. Something divine, fallen into sin: an angel as envisaged by daemons.

  The sight of this creature was enough to pull Khârn back from the Nails’ edge. Without his axe, he used the chains that bound his weapons, slashing left and right with the iron whips.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he managed to shout, through teeth sticky with blood and thick spit. The Nails pushed his muscles into action, wanting him to strike the Word Bearer. They promised him another pulse of pleasure if he would only betray his brother.

  Argel Tal beat his wings, lifting off the ground long enough to deliver a kick to an Ultramarine’s throat. He landed with his blade en garde, deflecting a bolt shell from the side.

  ‘You weren’t the only ones in trouble,’ he replied. His human tone, lower and softer, was enriched with apology. The harsher voice, resonant and serpentine, spoke the same words at the same time, yet somehow implied amusement.

  Khârn dragged a fallen gladius from the ground with one hand, and a chainsword with the other.

  ‘Valika.’ He spat the word, turning his focus to the fight. The brothers slammed back to back, duelling their foes at the heart of the battlefield. ‘We needed you at Valika.’

  Argel Tal’s wings should have been a burden in close quarters, but in the heat of the moment they became weapons as true as his stolen blade. He wielded them as shields, rippling like sails in the wind, yet as durable as ceramite. Blades clanged aside from them, he beat them to throw his foes off-balance, slamming them into their helms and deflecting their thrusts. All the while, the Custodian sword rose and fell in his scarlet fists, reaping life.

  The Word Bearer’s reply was a breathless growl. ‘Is this really the time?’

  Khârn bit back a reply as the vox seeped with unwelcome words. ‘This is Keeda Bly. Syrgalah down. Reinfor–’

  ‘Can you help them?’ he asked Argel Tal. Neither of them could see anything through the melee. Khârn stamped his boot down on a fallen warrior’s throat, and asked again, uncaring of the desperation in his voice. The Legio Audax’s command Titan was threatened. That took priority over all else. ‘Can you help them?’

  ‘I can try.’ The Word Bearer pulled his sword from an Ultramarine’s belly, twisting to rip the armour apart. Innards looped out in a slopping flood, and the Armaturan legionary still took another three swings before falling to his knees. These wretches took some effort to put down. ‘You never really get used to killing your own kind,’ Argel Tal breathed, and let the blade fall. The Ultramarine’s head rolled clear.

  ‘Stay alive,’ he told Khârn, and launched skywards – wings beating, dust swirling.

  Toth woke himself with a moan, though it melted into a scream when the pain hit. He thrashed in his throne, inhaling the copper-smelling smoke filling the cockpit, dragging on the emergency release and yelling that it was jammed.

  His thrashing cleared the smoke long enough to see that he was wrong. The release wasn’t jammed, he just wasn’t reaching it. The arm clawing for the emergency release lever ended at the elbow. Where his remaining organic forearm and hand had been, there was nothing but air and red ruin at the joint.

  The sight actually stopped his screams. He looked at what was left of his arm in numb, amused horror.

  ‘My arm’s gone,’ he said in a strangled whisper. ‘My bloody arm’s gone.’

  He tried to reach with his other arm, but the distance was too great. His fingers curled uselessly in the air before the lever’s shining iron handle. Shock and blood loss had him reeling, dizzy to the point of intoxication.

  ‘Keeda. Keeda, I’m trapped in my throne. Keeda.’ He rolled his head to the side, peering through the smoke. ‘Keeda, my arm’s gone.’

  He was confronted by the sight of her backside in standard-issue grey overalls as she crouched on the control console, facing Solostine in the princeps’s seat. He grinned drunkenly, though he’d never in his whole life felt an iota of attraction to her.

  Toth’s lolling head smacked against his headrest, against the iron edges where the support cushions had been before the crash. The entire cockpit was tilted halfway on its side, making it hard to keep his head up.

  ‘Keeda,’ he said to her backside. ‘Keeda, I’ve lost a lot of blood. I can’t… I don’t… Keeda. Keeda. I think my arm’s on the floor. Keeda. Find it, Keeda. Please.’

  She turned in the tight confines of the Warhound’s cockpit, swore more viciously than Toth had ever heard her swear, and left Solostine in his throne. Toth couldn’t really see through the smoke. The princeps looked asleep.

  Keeda – who even under these dire circumstances was sick to death of Toth mumbling her name – reached to pull the emergency release by the steersman’s throne. It clanked and clicked and gave a disappointing hiss. Nothing happened.

  ‘Marvellous,’ she said. ‘Just lovely.’ Her face was a soot-streaked mess. Toth watched her pull her service pistol, and dimly wondered why she would want to shoot him. She didn’t, of course. With a soft-spoken apology to Syrgalah’s machine-spirit, she shot twice – destroying both magnetic couplings sealing the roof cupola closed.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ she told Toth.

  ‘We crashed,’ he told her.

  ‘We most certainly did.’ She straddled his control panel, balancing precariously as she bound his severed arm in a tourniquet made from her sleeves.

  At one point, she saw his arm on the floor by his boots. He’d guessed right, it was down there.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, as she started lifting him.

  Shock was on her side; he was compliant, despite his ceaseless mumbling. ‘Keeda,’ he said again. ‘What about the old man?’

  ‘He’s dead.’ And she didn’t have tears in her eyes. If she did, it was the smoke. Just the smoke.

  ‘Keeda. He’s not dead. Is he? Keeda?’

  Good question. Unless you could live with half the avataric interface console rammed through your chest, he was most certainly dead.

  ‘He’s gone, Toth. Keep climbing.’

  She was pushing him up through the cupola now, getting him out first. ‘If you say my name once more, you delirious bastard, I’ll shoot you.’

  Other hands reached in, frantic hands, grabbing at Toth’s half-limp body and pulling him away from her. ‘No!’ she screamed, and pulled back with one hand, scrabbling for her gun with the other.

  ‘Be peaceful, Moderati Bly.’ She knew that voice, its emotionless, vox-ish tone. ‘It is me. Only me.’

  She looked at the reaching hands, bionic in crude rendition of human musculature, yet strangely beautiful for that fact. Burnt scraps of red robe hung through the open cupola.

  ‘Ninth?’

  ‘Affirmative. It is me. The Ninth.’

  ‘Have you got Toth?’

  ‘A second and subsequent affirmative.’

  ‘Keeda.’ Toth was drooling in his rebreather, still mumbling. ‘Keeeeeda…’

  ‘Hush,’ she told him, not unkindly. ‘Pull him up, Ninth.’

  ‘A third and most welcome affirmation.’ The tech-priest’s augmetic arms heaved, cylinders and pistons and little gears tightening as he lifted Toth clear. She heard the moderati say Keeda yet again, followed by the Ninth muttering something about exsanguination and the radial and ulnar arteries.

  Crouching by the slumped form of Princeps Solostine, she closed his eyes with a stroke of her fingers.

  ‘Thank you,�
�� she told him. A moment later, she was hauling herself up in Toth’s wake.

  The Ninth supported Toth, the former with his Martian red robes left in tatters, seeming naked without the shroud or the servo skulls that usually orbited him in antigravitational diligence. Most of his body was given over to articulated armour, unusually slender and carefully contoured compared to the dense plating of battlefield enginseers. She’d had no idea his augmetics were so artful beneath the robe.

  The Ninth, without his hood, revealed a shaven head marked by augmetic nodes, and a heavy visor in place of his eyes. A scarab of round iron replaced his vocal chords; from this tiny speaker came his tinny vox-voice. All else above the neck seemed human.

  ‘The princeps?’ he prompted.

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘There will be a grieving process, involving rituals both mournful and sincere. Come, Moderati Bly. We must get clear.’

  Easier said than done. Keeda usually stood above the ‘groundwork’, where infantry duelled in Syrgalah’s shadow. Now Syrgalah had fallen, leaving her crew stranded in the thick of it. Warriors in white and blue battled and screamed around the toppled Titan. For several mute seconds, she wasn’t even sure what to do, or where to run. The pistol in her hand was useless – a toy against any member of the Legiones Astartes.

  ‘Moderati Bly–,’ the Ninth began. The sentence ended in a smothered cry as the tech-priest was thrown forwards, nailed by a bolt shell in the back. Keeda saw him crawling on the ground, his legs severed, dragging himself to get back to her. No hope of that; she and Toth still stood atop the Warhound’s grounded skull. She grabbed Toth before he could fall, pulling him close.

  ‘Traitors.’ The vox-voice was low and very, very sure of itself. She turned and fired at the Ultramarine below, her shots deflecting from his armour, leaving tiny, insipidly worthless burn marks where they managed to bite. He and three of his battle-brothers lifted their bolters. In the same second, a shadow danced above her.

  It landed with a brutal crunch, eclipsing the light of the XIII Legion’s muzzle flashes, and taking the worst of the gunfire in a storm of cracks and crashes against its scarlet ceramite. A figure. A thing. One of the Word Bearers, one of their maddened Gal Vorbak creatures. He pulled the two humans against his scorched armour, shielding them both, folding his bleeding wings around them.