Hammer and Bolter 12

by Christian Dunn

  Luko’s foot disturbed a manacle set into the floor. It was one of dozens set in concentric circles around the central device.

  ‘Some enemies resist traditional interrogation techniques,’ said Prexus. ‘Psykers amongst them. The Panpsychicon was built to rid them of their mental barriers.’

  ‘It is a machine,’ said Sister Aescarion, ‘for grinding down men’s souls? The Inquisition makes use of such things, but with varying success. And never have I seen one on such a scale.’

  ‘These are matters of the past,’ said Prexus. ‘We must press on. We close on the cargo sections, but we must not allow ourselves to be slowed further.’

  The whole room shuddered. Handfuls of dust spilled from cracks in the ceiling and the mosaiced walls shed their tesserae. The Panpsychicon’s device shone and glimmered as its crystals shook and, with a grinding sound from beneath the floor, began to rotate.

  ‘How many died down here?’ asked Luko, crouching to keep his footing as the room shuddered with greater strength.

  ‘That depends,’ said Prexus, ‘on what you mean by “die”.’

  Shapes of captives, manacled to the floor, flashed in the strange colours of light emitted by the spirit-grinder device. Crackles of light played across the walls.

  ‘Go,’ said Luko. ‘Go, get through. Do not give it the chance to…’

  Luko’s sentence was cut off by the burst of energy that tore across the Panpsychicon. The Space Marines were picked off their feet and slammed into the wall, shattering the mosaics beneath them. Shackles of lightning held them there, struggling against the force. Graevus’s mutated arm pushed free of his restraints but the rest of him was held fast.

  Luko tried to shut his eyes, but the same force holding him in place was prising them open. He forced himself onto his side and pushed with an arm and a leg, feeling some give in his bonds.

  ‘Resist!’ he yelled over the growing sound, a rumble combined with a skull-shuddering whine, emitted by the spirit-grinder as it opened up into a mass of articulated arms dripping with shimmering crystals. ‘Resist it. Fight back!’

  Luko’s bonds snapped. He slid to the floor, still pushed back by the wall of psychic power pulsing from the centre of the room. He could see Sister Aescarion screaming as her body, without the strengthening augmentations of a Space Marine, was battered against the wall like a plaything in the hand of a spiteful child.

  Luko took a painful step towards the centre of the room. The apparitions manacled to the floor were writhing, contorted impossibly, as he stepped through them, forcing himself forwards.

  All I want is peace, said a voice in the back of his head.

  ‘No,’ said Luko. ‘No. Get out! Get out!’ He pushed forwards another step.

  He caught sight of his hands. The lightning claw gauntlets were gone. His hands were pitted and rotten, dead flesh peeling away from bone eroded by disease.

  He forced himself to see the gauntlets and they crackled back into view, the illusion banished from his mind.

  ‘Do not believe it!’ he shouted, not knowing if anyone could hear him. ‘We are Space Marines! We shall know no fear!’

  The force was gone. Luko fell to the floor. But it was not the deck of a spaceship – it was mud, wet and deep. The hand he threw out to steady himself sunk into the mud up to his elbow and he felt it cold against his face.

  Something whistled overhead. An artillery shell. Gunfire crackled from all directions.

  Luko was surrounded by war. Mud and trenches, battalions charging to their deaths, armies locked face to face in dense jungles and shattered cities. Burning fighter craft fell like comets overhead. Battleships overturned, spilling thousands into an ocean covered with burning oil.

  Luko had been in wars before. He had spent his life in them. But this was different. This was every war he had ever seen, every one he had ever heard of or imagined, all layered on top of one another in an awful mass of solid conflict and death.

  He could see billions dying. He could see the face of every man and woman, no matter how distant or confused the slaughter, as they died. They struggled along the gore-filled trenches holding their guts in, laser burns all over their bodies, begging for the Emperor to deliver them death. A legion of them crawled on their bellies, blinded by clouds of corrosive gas, vomiting up a bloody torrent as their insides were eaten away. They screamed in silence, the sound robbed from their voices as they fought against the mudslides and building collapses that entombed them, their lungs crying out for breath they could not draw, limbs and organs crushed. They fell from the sky and were driven mad by the blind horror of a thousand battlefields hurtling up at them. They drowned. They burned alive.

  The endless battlefield spread out as far as Luko could comprehend in every direction, and some monstrous trick of dimension told him that it went on forever. It was above him, where the embrace of the void snatched the breath and life from crewmen thrown from ruptured spacecraft. It was below him in the intense heat and pitch darkness where armies fought like rats, ignorant of friend or foe, reduced to terrified animals murdering one another with bare hands and teeth.

  The weight of it, the certainty of its unending malice, slammed down on Luko and he could not get to his feet. He was in a filthy trench choked with bodies, a carnivorous jungle humming with disease and the bloating foulness of the dead, a ruined city where men died over a bullet-ridden room or a deathtrap crossroads, the hull of a dying spacecraft where all was darkness and fire. He was at the heart of every war that had ever been fought or ever would, and before him was played out every violent death that the galaxy would ever see.

  His body was rotting away because he was dead, and yet he could not die. Death itself was not an escape. He would be here, witness this, forever.

  It was not real. Luko knew it was an illusion. But it was not something projected into his mind – it came from inside him.

  ‘Captain!’ yelled someone very far away, with the unfamiliar cadence of a woman’s voice. ‘Captain, focus! Drive it out! Hear me!’

  A hundred layers of war were piled up on top of one another. Luko forced himself to look at the bloodshed and the suffering, to go through every incarnation until he found one that didn’t fit. A single circular room, haunted and tortured, on a spaceship. He saw himself lying on the floor, convulsing at the mercy of the Panpsychicon’s spirit-grinder. He pushed himself to his knees, and so did the Luko he saw. He looked around and saw the face of Sister Aescarion ghosted over the trenchworks and burning fortresses.

  Luko lunged drunkenly towards the spirit-grinder. His lightning claw sliced through the tangle of struts and wiring. Crystals rained down and shattered.

  Sister Aescarion followed him in destruction. She buried her power axe deep in the machine’s core, and grimaced as she tried to wrench it out. Luko was unable to judge distance or direction properly and slashed around him with abandon, scattering components of the psychic machine.

  The thousand wars peeled away and fell apart. Fortresses turned to dust. The mud dried and blew away, leaving a desert devoid of battle. The Panpsychicon became the dominant reality, then the only one, and Luko was able to shake the confusion from his mind.

  The Space Marines lay in various stages of consciousness. Varnica was on his feet, too. The Imperial Fists were scattered, groaning and shifting as their own realities returned to them.

  One did not move. Pallas, holding his own head in pain, knelt beside the Imperial Fist and read his lifesigns off the fallen warrior’s armour.

  ‘He is gone,’ said Pallas.

  ‘What was his name?’ asked Graevus, who forced the words out in between coughs as he knelt, bent double.

  ‘Gorvan,’ replied one of the other Imperial Fists.

  ‘Prexus?’ said Luko. ‘Sergeant?’

  Aescarion tapped Luko on the shoulder guard and pointed to the wall near the cell block warren. Prexus sat against the wall, his bolt pistol in his hand, his chainsword discarded on the floor. His head lolled, revealing the m
assive exit wound in the back of the skull. Prexus’s brains were spread up the wall behind him, thrown across the mosaic in the characteristic pattern of a bolter wound.

  No one said that Prexus had shot himself. They didn’t need to.

  ‘What must he have seen?’ said Pallas.

  ‘Think not on it,’ said Varnica. ‘Let us move. Sister, commend their souls.’

  The strikeforce crossed the Panpsychicon, armoured feet crunching through the remains of the psychic machine. Aescarion, head bowed, followed the Space Marines towards the double doors at the far side of the room, murmuring a prayer for the departed.

  Sarpedon braced his remaining talons against the floor and put all his strength into forcing the bridge doors open. The blast doors, automatically sealed in the event of boarders entering the Phalanx, creaked and gave way a little. Hydraulic lines split and the resistance lessened, and the door slid open wide enough to admit the bulk of a Space Marine.

  ‘Daenyathos!’ shouted Sarpedon as he stepped onto the bridge of the Phalanx.

  The bridge was a palace, built to glorify the captain who had once held court there – Rogal Dorn, primarch of the Imperial Fists Legion, the first master of the Phalanx. Under him, this ship had darkened the sky of Terra herself when Horus laid siege to the Emperor’s Palace. A mighty throne, three storeys high, dominated the bridge, plated with gold. The flight of steps leading to the oversized pulpit-throne was flanked with displayed weapons captured from enemies or discovered during the Great Crusade.

  The vast viewscreen facing the throne, taking up most of the curving from wall of the bridge, showed a panorama of the Veiled Region, with the star Kravamesh glowing along one edge. Kravamesh had turned dark and smouldering, black swarms scudding across its burnt orange orb, as if the star was drained of power to fuel the gate across to the warp that had brought Abraxes into realspace. Below the screen were dozens of command helms, each controlling one of the Phalanx’s many vital systems, and even when stationary they should have been bustling with crewmen and Imperial Fist overseers. Now, only a few slumped dead crewmen remained, felled by bullet wounds where they had sat.

  One body was piled on the floor beside his chair. In the chair, at the communications helm, sat a hunched elderly figure, bony fingers playing across the controls. The man turned at Sarpedon’s voice, revealing an ancient, lined face broken by a smile.

  ‘Lord Sarpedon,’ said the old man. ‘For so long I have waited for this. Of all the pieces of Master Daenyathos’s future, you are the one that shines the brightest in his plan. I am Father Gyranar, honoured to lead my congregation.’

  Sarpedon stalked warily through the bridge, casting his eyes over the monumental sculptures looming in the shadows around the edge of the bridge, the suits of ancient armour gleaming and polished around the foot of the throne-mount. ‘Where is Daenyathos?’ he said.

  Gyranar stood up, his bent frame meaning he was barely taller than when he sat. A trembling finger pointed as the old man took a few steps towards Sarpedon. ‘So blessed am I that I lived to see this. I dared not hope it might be during my lifetime that the threads would come together, that the one Daenyathos wrote of would lead his Chapter to the fulfilment of our dreams. But you stand before me, Lord Sarpedon. And we all stand at this confluence of fates.’

  Sarpedon hefted the Axe of Mercaeno and scuttled within a lunge and a strike of Gyranar. ‘I said, where is Daenyathos?’

  ‘Threaten not those who are merely carried on the eddies of the fates we weave,’ came an artificial voice, amplified from somewhere behind the throne-mount. ‘Men like Father Gyranar are ignorant of their fate and impotent to change it. But you and I, Sarpedon, we are different. We are the authors of our fates. It takes men like you to forge the channels into which the future will flow. And men like me to decide what that future is.’

  The shape of a Space Marine Dreadnought stomped from behind the throne-mount. The colours and heraldry of the Soul Drinkers were polished and gleaming now, as if it had just stepped from the forges of the old Chapter. A missile launcher and a power fist were mounted below its massive shoulders and purity seals fluttered from the blocky mass of the sarcophagus.

  ‘Iktinos told me everything,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I know why you are here. You will take the Phalanx across the galaxy and disgorge Abraxes’s armies everywhere you go.’

  ‘That is true,’ said Daenyathos. ‘But did he tell you why?’

  ‘He tried,’ said Sarpedon. ‘But I could not believe such a thing spoken from the lips of a Space Marine, even one as corrupted as Iktinos. So I would hear it from you first.’

  ‘It is simple, Sarpedon,’ said Daenyathos. The chassis pivoted so that the dreadnought’s head, shaped like an oversized Space Marine helm, looked up at the huge viewscreen and the stretch of void it showed. ‘The galaxy is corrupt. Its people are damned and its rulers are cruel. This is the same conclusion as yours, is it not? The Imperium is a dark and savage place, a breeding ground for the desperation that gives the forces of the warp the chance to do their wickedness in our universe. It is through suffering that the Imperium will be remade. Great suffering, on a scale beyond the imaginings of lesser minds. Thanks to the plan crafted by me and executed by many, including you, Abraxes and the Phalanx will combine to spread such suffering that the Imperium will be remade stronger and more just.’

  ‘And you will rule it?’ said Sarpedon.

  ‘Of course,’ replied Daenyathos, the green-lensed eyes of the sarcophagus focusing on Sarpedon again. ‘Who else could?’

  ‘You understand,’ said Sarpedon, ‘that I must try to stop you. I may die, for no doubt you have included this very eventuality in your plan. Nevertheless, if there is the smallest chance that the people of the Imperium can be spared that fate, then I must take it.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Daenyathos. ‘I would expect nothing less. You have been a loyal servant to me, Sarpedon, though you played your part unknowingly. It pains me not a little to have to kill you. But you will fight to the death to protect the same Imperium you profess to despise, and so I must ensure you hinder me no further.’

  ‘It is the Imperium I hate. Not its people. Its people are innocent.’

  ‘Innocence is a falsehood created by weak and fearful minds,’ said Daenyathos.

  ‘Well, then. I do not think there is anything more to say.’

  ‘Indeed, Chapter Master Sarpedon. I would finish this without delay.’

  ‘And I would oblige you.’ Sarpedon crouched down on the five legs he had left, Axe of Mercano held low ready to charge.

  Daenyathos’s targeting auspex flickered as it registered Sarpedon, feeding information into the dreadnought’s internal cogitators.

  Sarpedon yelled and sprang to one side as a volley of missiles shrieked from Daenyathos’s launcher, and the bridge of the Phalanx was suddenly full of fury.

  PHALANX

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ben Counter

  The scouts brought back word that the daemons were loading their war engines with ammunition, heaps of smouldering skulls and ballista bolts of ensorcelled brass. The scorpion machine was being filled with boiling venom, biomechanical poison sacs swelling in billows of steam, daemons scrambling across its lacquered carapace.

  Word reached the Imperial Fists lines. Chapter Master Vladimir made his decision instantly, for there was, in truth, no decision to be made.

  Lord Inquisitor Kolgo stood proud of the defences, his Battle Sisters gathered around him, the fires of the daemons’ forges flickering against his polished Terminator armour. He watched the daemon masses swarming into formation in response.

  ‘Lackeys of the warp!’ yelled Kolgo. ‘This is what you begged for. This is why you were spewed from the guts of the Immaterium. To face us, the Emperor’s own, the shield of Mankind! Well, now you have your wish. Rejoice as we cleave you apart. Give thanks as we shoot you down. This is what you wished for. Come, rush onto our blades!’

  The daemons leapt over the barricad
es of wreckage, shrieking in response. The heralds of their gods bellowed and keened the songs of the warp, and darkness gathered around like the eclipse of a distant sun.

  Into the darkness charged the Imperial Fists.

  On the map tables of the Tactica Sigismundi were dozens of battlefields rendered in stone miniature, some of them depicting meticulous surgical strikes with every element of an Imperial Fists force working in harmony, perfectly coordinated, each squad shielding the next while catching foes in a lethal crossfire. Others were battles of attrition, the Imperial Fists relying on their enhanced bodies and wargear to keep them fighting when the enemy were breaking down. But some of them, the fewest, were headlong charges, frontal assaults into hell which only a Space Marine could hope to survive. It was written in the Codex Astartes that a Space Marine should never be used in such a way, that his value to the Imperium was too great to be thrown away in a pell-mell slaughter in the teeth of an entrenched foe.

  But the Codex Astartes could not cover every possible battle. It could not predict that one day the Phalanx itself would be invaded, and that between its survival and its destruction stood a last-ditch battle where the enemy could only be fought face to face in the open, with no strategy in the Chapter Master’s arsenal to change it into anything other than a pitched battle, a duel to the death.

  Vladimir and Kolgo led the charge. The weapons already operating on the daemon engines opened up and flung burning comets into the midst of the Imperial Fists, throwing armoured bodies into the air. Daemons surged forwards, heedless of organisation or rank, overcome with a lust for the fight that spread like a fire.

  This was the way it had to be. Vladimir drew the Fangs of Dorn and dived into the mass of daemons. Kolgo followed him in, rotator cannon hammering, the barrels glowing hot.

  The rest of the Imperial Fists crashed into the enemy. If they were to die, it would be in defence of their Chapter. Few of them gave any thought to the chance they might live.