Treacheries of the Space Marines

by Edited by Christian Dunn

  I suddenly felt cold, as if ice had formed inside my armour. I thumbed my vox-link, breaking through clearance ciphers until the voice of the invasion’s commanding officer spoke into my ear. General Berrikade had a thick voice that spoke of his ample waist and heavy jowls. He was no fool, though.

  ‘Lord inquisitor,’ he said, his voice chopped by static.

  ‘General, all troops are to be withdrawn from the city immediately.’ There was a pause, and I could imagine Berrikade staring incredulously at the vox-speaker in the strategium aboard an orbiting battleship.

  ‘Lord,’ he began, speaking carefully. ‘If I may ask…’ He never finished because at that moment Phocron answered the unspoken question. As the words left Berrikade’s lips, the city’s plasma reactors, promethium stores and chemical refineries exploded.

  Across the city, glowing clouds rose into the sky, their tops broadening and flattening as they met the upper air currents. The shockwaves broke buildings into razor-sharp fragments and clouds of dust. An instant later, concentric waves of fire and burning gas swept through the streets. The sound and shockwave reached me in seconds, flipping me through the air with a bellow of noise. I must have hit the ground, but I never felt it. The blast wave had already pulled me down into darkness.

  Later, while I healed, I was told that tens of thousands of Imperial troops had been killed, and hundreds of thousands more renegades and millions of civilians burned to nothing or crushed under rubble. The rebellion died, but the Imperium had taken a great wound and nothing was left but charred ruins. Only the Onyx Palace had survived. Its plasma reactors had not been overloaded, and that had saved my life. When I was told this, my first thought was that Phocron had wanted someone to survive to witness him rip another bloody chunk from the flesh of the Imperium. Then I thought again of the dark mouth of Phocron’s bolt pistol and the death that he had withheld. No, I thought, he did not want just anyone to witness his victory; he had chosen me to witness it. To this day I do not know why.

  A year ago

  The ship drifted closer. Through the polished armourglass of the viewport, I could see its crippled engines bleed glowing vapour into the vacuum. It was a small vessel, barely large enough to be warp-capable, and typical of the cutters used by traders and smugglers who existed on the fringes of the Imperium. The ship I stood on was massive by comparison, layered with armour and weapons bastions. It was a predator leviathan closing on a minnow. The Unbreakable Might was an Armageddon-class battle cruiser and mounted enough firepower to break other warships into glowing debris. Against the nameless clipper, it had barely needed to use a fraction of its might. A single, precise lance strike had burned the smaller ship’s plasma engines to ruin and left it to coast on unpowered.

  I turned from the view with a clicking purr of augmetics. My eyes focused on Admiral Velkarrin from beneath the cowl of my crimson robe. He was rake-thin, the metal flexes of command augmentation hanging from his grey-skinned skull in a tangled spill down the back of his gold-frogged uniform.

  ‘Launch a boarding party, admiral,’ I said. Velkarrin pursed his colourless lips but nodded.

  ‘As you wish, my lord.’ He turned to give an order to a hovering officer.

  ‘And, admiral…’ He turned back. ‘They are to observe maximum caution.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’ He gave a short bow. I could tell he resented my commandeering his command and his fleet. Hunting smuggler vessels and pirates while war washed across star systems must have galled him. Part of me was faintly amused by watching his pride war with fear of the Inquisition. The rest of me cared nothing for what he felt.

  ‘I will meet the boarding team personally upon their return,’ I told him.

  Velkarrin gave another curt bow in acknowledgement and stalked away, hissing orders at subordinates.

  I turned back to watch our latest prey draw closer, my eyes whirring as they focused. They had rebuilt me after Hespacia. My eyes and face were gone, replaced by blue-lensed augmetics and a mask of twisted scar tissue fused onto a ceramic woven skull. My left leg and a portion of my torso had been so mangled that they had been replaced. Ceramite plating, organ grafting and a leg of mechanised brass meant that I still lived and walked, even if it was with a bent back and the stutter of gears and pistons. For a while after the disaster of the Hespacia attack, I thought of my injuries as a penance for my lack of foresight, a price for ignorance written forever into my body.

  Since that lesson I had done much to address my failing. The war against the rebel worlds had grown many times over, sucking in armies and resources from across many star systems. The Imperium was no longer fighting a war of containment but a crusade of retribution. Under my authority, and that of the Adeptus Terra, it was named the Ephisian Persecution. I had watched our forces struggle for decades as more and more worlds had fallen to rebellion and the influence of the dark gods. It was a war we were losing because we were fighting an enemy for whom lies were both a weapon and a shield. Understanding that enemy had been my work in the decades since Hespacia burned.

  I had expended great energy in tracking down information on the Alpha Legion. From the sealed reports of Inquisitor Girreaux to half-understood accounts from the dawn of the Imperium, I had reviewed them all. I knew my enemy. I knew their nature, their preferred forms of warfare, and their weaknesses. Sometimes, I thought I knew them better than I knew myself.

  Their symbol was the hydra, a many-headed beast from legends born in mankind’s earliest days. It was both a mark of their warrior brotherhood and a statement of methodology. To fight the Alpha Legion was to fight a many-headed beast that would twist in your grasp. As soon as you thought you had a part pinned, another unseen part would strike. Should you cut off one head, two would grow to replace it. They wove secrets and lies about themselves, hoping to baffle and confuse their enemies. Subterfuge, espionage, ambush and the untameable tangle of guerrilla warfare were their specialities: wielded through networks of corrupted followers, infiltrators, spies and, on occasion, their own martial skill. They were wrapped in the corruption of Chaos, steeped in betrayal and bitterness ever since their primarch and Legion had betrayed mankind ten millennia before.

  The enemy I faced now was but a single scion of that heretic brood, but no less formidable for that. Phocron was a name that had infiltrated every theatre of the Ephisian Persecution like a silent, coiling serpent. I knew that even before we had learnt his name he had seeded a dozen worlds with insurgent ideologies and built up control over witch-cults and heretic sects. Now he moved from warzone to warzone, plunging worlds into rebellion, corrupting our forces and punishing the Imperium for every victory. The Ephisian Atrocity and the Burning of Hespacia were just two amongst the subtle and devastating attacks he had made on the Imperium. Throughout his coiling dance of destruction, he had stayed out of my grasp, a shadow opponent locked in a dual with me across dozens of worlds.

  Beyond the reflective layer of armourglass a shuttle boosted towards the crippled ship on trails of orange flame. Rather than follow Phocron’s trail I had decided to attack him where he was most vulnerable: his transportation. He had no fleet of warships for he did not take planets by orbital invasion or the threat of bombardment. He took worlds from within, moving from one to another unseen. That implied that he moved using pirate and smuggler craft; small ships that could pass unnoticed and unremarked through the wild borderland of the subsector. A scattered task force of Imperial ships had tracked and boarded nineteen vessels so far with no result. The ship I watched would be the twentieth.

  Two hours later, I stood amidst the promethium stink and the semi-ordered chaos of one of the Unbreakable Might’s main landing bays. Bright light flooded the cathedral-like space, gleaming off the hulls of lighters, shuttles and landing craft. Figures moved over them, working on the mechanical guts exposed under servicing plates.

  I stood with Velkarrin and a guard of twenty armsmen, their bronzed void
armour reflecting the bright light. The admiral stood a few paces away, consulting with two of his attending officers. The away team had reported that the vessel appeared to be nothing but a smuggler, crewed by deserters and outlanders. They had found a cargo of illegal ore destined for some pirate haven out in the Halo Margins. The lexmechanic who had accompanied them had drained the smuggler ship’s data reservoirs for later analysis. As on the nineteen previous occasions no connection with Phocron or his shadow network appeared to exist. Still, I wanted to meet the boarding party on their return, to search their accounts for details that they might have failed to report. Once that was done, the smuggler ship would be blasted into molten slag.

  The armoured shuttle glided into the dock, its passive antigravity field filling the air with an ionised tang. It settled onto the deck with a hiss of hydraulics and a creak of ice-cold metal. The shuttle was a blunt block of grey armour the size of a mass ground hauler, its surface pitted and scored by atmospheric translation. Blast shields covered the armourglass of its cockpit. I heard the echoes of vox-chatter between the pilots and the deck crew as they moved in to attach power lines and data cables. The ramp under the chin of the shuttle hinged open, revealing a dark space inside. Velkarrin and the armsmen looked towards it, expecting the boarding team to appear from the gloom.

  Something was wrong. I reached for the plasma pistol at my waist, my hand closing on the worn metal of the grip at the same moment that the docking bay went dark. Complete blackness enfolded us. For an instant, there was silence, and then voices rose in confusion. The pistol was in my hand, its charge coils glowing as it built power with a piercing whine. In the direction of the shuttle, two eyes glowed suddenly green. There was a motorised growl as a chain weapon gunned to life, and then the shooting started.

  Our armsmen guard opened up, shotgun muzzles flaring as they fired into the dark. The noise was like a ragged, rolling bellow. In the jagged light of muzzle flare I saw my enemy standing on the ramp of the shuttle. His armour was dark, mottled by patterns of scales. In one hand he held a toothed axe, in the other a bolt pistol. He stood still for an instant as the shot rattled from his warplate, looking at us with glowing green eyes. Behind him stood a figure in a silver mask and storm coat. In that brief moment I thought that the empty eyes in the silver face were looking into mine.

  The armsmen had closed ranks around Velkarrin and I, forming a deep circle of bronze armour. I aimed and fired, but Phocron was already gone, moving through muzzle flash, a whirlwind of slaughter caught through blinked instants.

  He hit the first armsmen with a downward blow. I heard the scream of motorised teeth meeting metal and flesh.

  He was two strides nearer, an arc of dismembered dead at his feet. I heard a yelp of fear close by, recognising the admiral’s voice by its tone.

  The bolt pistol flared and roared, three armsmen dying in an oily flash of light. He was three strides away. There was a smell of offal and meat in my nose. Beside me, I heard Velkarrin turn to run and thud to the deck as his feet slipped on something slick and soft. The plasma pistol whined in my hand.

  I raised my pistol, lightning dancing across its charge coils. Phocron was above me, chainaxe raised, scale-patterned armour glistering with blood. He brought the axe down in a diagonal cut. I pulled the trigger and plasma flared from the barrel of my pistol.

  I missed, but the shot saved my life. Jerking aside to avoid my shot, Phocron missed his target. The teeth of the chainaxe met my gun arm just below the elbow, the back-swing slicing through Velkarrin as he tried to stand.

  The lights came on as shock hit me. Blood was spilling from the chewed stump of my arm. I staggered a step before my legs gave way, and I collapsed to the floor in a clicking whir of gears. People moved, shouting. I was aware of a lot of weapons surrounding me very quickly.

  I looked around, trying to focus through a pale fog that seemed to be floating across my vision. Blood glistened under the bright lights. The ramp of the shuttle was still open. Later, I would find out that none of its crew or the boarding party had returned from the smuggler ship; the voices in the vox-chatter and reports had been perfect mimicry. Of Phocron and the man in the silver mask, there was no sign.

  One month ago

  The war council overseeing the Ephisian Persecution gathered on board the Unbreakable Might. Generals, war savants, vice-admirals, magi, bishops militant, palatines, commissar lords and captains of the Adeptus Astartes; all came to my call. The strategium of the battle cruiser was a two-hundred-paces-wide circular chamber of raked seats carved from granite. I waited at the centre, under the eyes of the gathering worthies, and watched.

  They came in small groups, looking for faces they knew, judging where it was their right to sit, who they had to avoid and who they had to greet. It was like watching the shifting gears of Imperial politics and power play out in miniature. There a Sparcin war chief in burnished half-plate and white fur cloak, trailed by a clutch of tactical advisers. Here a psykana lord, a withered white face within a hood of cables, sat next to a spindle-limbed woman in carmine robes, the cog-skull of the Adeptus Mechanicus etched on the brass of her domino mask. Servo-skulls moved above the assembling throng, scanning, recording, sniffing the air for threats and spreading incense in thick breaths.

  Amongst the crowd I saw some of my own kind, inquisitors or their representatives, moving amongst the rest like imperious masters, or remaining still and silent on the edges. I had invited none of them but they came anyway, my reputation enough to bring them. Some even called me ‘lord inquisitor’. Rank within the Inquisition is a complex matter. No formal structure exists amongst this shadow hand of the Imperium that answers to none but the will of the Emperor. Lordship is a matter of respect, a title of acknowledgement granted by peers to one who has earned it by the power of their deeds. My war against Phocron had pulled respect and renown to me like a flame gathers insects. As the greatest masters of war in this volume of space gathered at my call, I could see why some might call me lord.

  I sat on a high-backed chair at the centre of the chamber. A symbolic hammer rested beneath my left hand, my right on the black iron of the chair’s arm, fingers of polished chrome clicking softly on the dark metal. It had been a year since I had lost my right arm in the ambush that had killed Admiral Velkarrin and nearly claimed my life. The bionic replacement still ached with phantom pain.

  In that year, I had not been idle. Following his attempt on my life, Phocron had simply vanished. No trace of him could be found on the ship or on the smuggler vessel. This, and the sudden loss of light at the moment of attack, could only mean that his network of traitors extended deeper and higher in our forces than I had considered possible. Trusted acolytes and agents of my own had gone to work, and now I gathered together the leaders of the Persecution to share what I had found. A few knew what was about to happen, most did not.

  I watched as black-visored troopers sealed the doors to the chamber and waited for the grumble of conversation to fade. When it had, I stood.

  ‘There is much to speak of,’ I said, my voice carrying up the tiered seats. I saw some shift at the lack of formal greeting or acknowledgement of the honour and position of those gathered here. I let myself smile at the thought. ‘But first there is a matter that must be dealt with.’ I gave a slight nod as if to emphasise the point, and those waiting for that signal acted as one.

  Even though I was prepared for it, the psychic shockwave made me stagger. On the tiered seats, a dozen figures convulsed as the telepathic and telekinetic power enfolded them in a vice-like grip. I felt an oily static charge play over my skin. There was a sound like wind rustling through high grass. The needle slivers hit the convulsing men and women, and one by one they went still as the sedatives overrode nerve impulses. There was an instant of shocked silence.

  ‘Do not move,’ I shouted as the black-visored troopers moved through the crowd. They clustered around each of the stricken fig
ures. Null collars and monowire bindings were slipped over necks and limbs, and the bound figures were dragged across the stone floor like sacks of grain. The shock in the rest of the crowd was palpable; they had just seen a dozen of their senior peers, men and women of power and distinction, overcome and dragged away. You could almost feel the thought forming in all their minds; traitors in our midst. The pale-faced psykana lord nodded to me and I favoured him with a low bow of thanks. A murmur of anger and fear began to build in the chamber.

  ‘Our enemy is among us.’ I raised my hammer up and brought its adamantine head down on the granite floor. Silence gathered in the wake of the fading blow. ‘It walks amongst us, wearing faces of loyalty.’ My voice was soft but it carried in the still air. ‘Our enemy has used our strength against us, directed us into traps, mired us in blood and shackled our strength with lies. A year ago, on this ship, that enemy came close to ending my life with his own hand. That such a thing was possible is a testament to his ability and audacity.’ I paused, looking around at the faces watching me, waiting to see what would come next. ‘But I survived, and in that attempt he exposed the extent of the treachery within our forces.’ I pointed to the dozen spaces on the tiered seats. ‘Today I have removed the heads of the hydra from among us.’ I paused as murmurs ran through the audience.

  The traitors had been difficult to find without arousing their suspicion. It had been delicate work to find them, and more delicate still to prepare to remove them in a single instant. The twelve taken in the chamber had been the most senior, the most highly placed of Phocron’s agents and puppets. Some, no doubt, had not known what end they served; others, I was sure, were willing traitors. There had been generals amongst them, senior Munitorum staff, an astropath, a confessor and even an interrogator. At the moment they had been taken, parallel operations had gone into action throughout the Persecution’s forces, cutting the corruption out from among us. Most of the infiltrators would be killed, but many would be taken and broken until their secrets flowed from them like blood from a vein.