Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  From the moment the charge began, time had seemed to speed up. Diaz noticed that, as he gripped his blade and hoisted his shield. The experience of mass combat usually had the opposite effect. Time usually slowed to a dreaming ballet where battle became a detached eternity. But on the Pons Solar, time had run berserk, infected by the World Eaters’ mad urgency. It accelerated, almost comically, like a pict playback jammed on fast-wind, devouring seconds as greedily as the World Eaters devoured distance and pain. Time ate itself, gorging on moments with a maniacal appetite that matched the World Eaters’ deranged hunger to reach and obliterate their prey.

  Frenzy followed. Skill was banished. Lunatic, hyperactive time allowed no opportunity for technique. Camba Diaz was strong. As strong as any Imperial Fist. He judged that every single World Eater coming at him was stronger by far, enhanced by rage and the warp beyond even transhuman limits. His only real weapon of value was his mindset, the heritage of the VII, the unquestioning, indoctrinated will to stand and deny. That focus kept him planted like a rock. The discipline, that praetorian defiance, branded on his genetics and reinforced by decades of intense training and the voice of Rogal Dorn, stripped all fear from him, annihilated doubt and hesitation, erased any notion that what he faced was better or stronger or faster or bigger than him. The mindset fixed him. It anchored him like extreme gravity. It locked Bleumel and Thijs Reus too. It pinned them in place, though time around them had unhinged, and become a psychotic blur that permitted no skill.

  Diaz stood, in the name of his Lord Dorn. He brought his siege shield up. It held firm, absorbing the first impact, demolishing a roaring face. His sword swung, carving a World Eater through the chest and throat. A chainaxe struck his shield in a welter of sparks.

  He cleaved the face and shoulder of its owner. He hooked a keening goat-thing off its hooves, and cast it tumbling through the air. Blood sprayed. Torn meat spattered. In the name of his Lord Dorn, he shield-smashed a World Eater aside so hard it broke neck bones.

  His longsword speared into a howling maw, punching through the back of the skull. It tore free through cheek and ear and mastoid and occipital bones. Metal fragments spalled, glittering. A falx tore a chunk off his vambrace. A blade cut his ribs. He took a head off its shoulders, and sent it spinning like a ball. A piece of severed horn bounced off his visor. He broke a World Eater’s jaw with his shield rim, and gutted him as he staggered aside. He split a head down to the lower teeth. In the name of his Lord Dorn. A beam of pink plasma screamed past his ear. A Gehenned fell against him, his face bitten off, and slid down his hip and leg. Diaz kicked. He disembowelled. He broke a power lance with his shield, and scythed off the arms wielding it. Diaz hacked. He carried a charging World Eater over his head on his shield, and cast him off the bridge rail. He impaled. He chopped a darting witch-dog through the neck and spine. Blood and black ichor filmed his plate. He barely noticed the chainsword gash across his right thigh, or the broken spear-tip protruding from his hip Focus. Maintain focus. Diaz swung. In the name of his Lord Dorn. Broken teeth flew up, a cracked tusk, a whole eyeball ejected by crush-force. Chainblades screeched. Cinders. Arterial jets. A hoplite thrashed, burning alive. A plasma gun overheated, detonating. A dozen figures in the blast zone vaporised, or staggered, ablaze. Diaz struck off an arm. A face, on a downswing. Another head. A grasping hand. In the name of his lord. His Lord Dorn. Focus. A mist from steaming innards. Corpses lolled, still upright, unable to fall in the density of the press. An Excertus trooper flew overhead, flailing, eviscerated. Diaz swung. Blood erupted. The concussion of a mace. Unremitting impacts. Bleumel, at his side, mashed faces with his power hammer, swinging like a smith. Feet caught on unseen corpses. A carpet of bodies and parts of bodies. Diaz ripped his sword through ceramite and meat. Split a skull. Sliced a throat. Thijs Reus, in the name of his lord, struck with a captured falx, another falx impaled clean through his torso. The reek of death. Broken chainblade teeth pinged out like bullets. The stench of blood. The cloud of rage. A frenzy in him that matched the frenzy he fought. In the name of Dorn. Blurring violence. Diaz struck, sword buried deep in plate and black carapace. Thijs Reus on his knees, stabbing. A Gehenned screamed. A rotary cannon fired blind, point-blank. Blood on everything. Bleumel, one pauldron gone, drove his hammer into a monster twice his size, hair braids whipping and snapping at the impact. Diaz struck. He struck. Again. In the name of his Lord Dorn. Again. More. His longsword snapped. He drove the broken blade into a throat, to the hilt. He punched, empty-handed, breaking face bones. He killed a World Eater with his shredding shield, wrenching the purring chainaxe from the traitor’s hands, rotating it, making it his own. He swung. He struck. Thijs Reus knelt, headless. Diaz drove the squealing chainaxe through World Eaters plate. A fountain of gore. Thunder. Carnage. Time rushing, headlong. In the name of his lord. Blood flying. Bone snapping. Flesh tearing. Impacts. Collapses. Swinging. Striking. Pinned. The name of Dorn. Frenzy. Glory. Diaz. Smoke blind. Blood blind. Striking. Again. Camba Diaz. Thrusting. Cutting. Gutting. Striking. Slaying. In the name of his lord. Pinned. Unmoving.

  Unmovable.

  The line he had sliced in the rockcrete of the bridge between the lion plinths still lay behind him.

  * * *

  Piers held Hari Harr by the wrist so tightly it felt as though he was trying to twist his entire hand off.

  ‘Move your feet! Move your feet! Move your feet!’ the old grenadier kept saying, as if it was some charm or mantra that would make them invulnerable.

  ‘We can’t-‘ Hari yelled.

  ‘Exactly!’ Piers replied. ‘Exactly. Now you get it, boy. Now you’re grasping it.’

  Hari wasn’t grasping anything. Nothing had prepared him for this level of confusion, not even the horror of the fight at the convoy. That had been branded on his brain since it happened, a traumatic scar he thought he’d never lose or ever really get over. Now, it seemed like nothing. A vague memory, a trivial anecdote that might slip his mind… Oh yes, I remember that. Rockets. Fire. Witch-dogs. When was that again?

  What was happening to him now made everything distant and incidental, every single scrap of his life, all the things he had once regarded as important, all the things he had ever valued and treasured. His grandfather cooking pok h’chal with too much fish sauce and tamarind. The noteslate and stylus his aunt had given him when she heard he wanted to be a writer. Prize day at the scholam in Tunzho, and the certificate for prose merit. The face of the first person he had kissed. Blue kites flying off the jetty of the old shipyards. His first meeting with Sindermann. Memories were calmly and silently snowdrifting in his head, piling up at their own pace, but they weren’t his memories. They were things that had happened to a young man called Hari Harr, and that didn’t seem to be him, because he seemed to have become a moaning, wide-eyed animal in filthy, sweat-drenched clothes, trying to hide, trying not to lose control of his bowels, trying to remember how to move around without falling down.

  Piers slapped him hard.

  ‘Move your feet!’ the grenadier yelled into his face.

  Hari blinked. He had no idea why soldiers lied. If this was war, the actual inside of war, then why did they make shit up? No tall tale, not even one spun by a skilled, serial liar like Oily Piers, could ever hope to match the astonishing truth of war. Lies were smaller than war. No lie, no matter how cocky and outrageous, was ever going to take war on and win.

  War was a scream in capital letters. It was a noise. It wasn’t even words. It had no syntax, no adjectives, no subtext, no context. It communicated itself as suddenly, simply and unequivocally as a punch in the face. It was a thing, not a story.

  Then maybe that was why. That was why soldiers lied. It was the only way, the only meagre, insufficient way they could talk about what they had endured. It was the only way they could give voice to something that defied articulation. War was so big, soldiers needed to get it out of themselves, spew it out, purge themselves, and lies were the only things that worked. It was eit
her that, or punch someone else in the face.

  Unless…

  Hari blinked again. Now he grasped it. The lies weren’t exorcism. At least, not completely. They were protection. After the fact, after the brute scream of war, the lies weren’t a means to talk about something that defied words. They weren’t approximate expression. They were curative. They were comfort. The lies were lies of glory and heroism, achievement and success. They weren’t born out of arrogance or boasting or self-aggrandisement. They were just ways to talk about something that was otherwise unbearable. They were coping strategics to insulate survivors against the madness and the punch in the face. They were ways to make war feel like it had some point, some value, some lasting worth. Lies made war better for those unlucky enough to survive it.

  Lies gave soldiers something to think about, and talk about, and cherish, so they would never have to… never, ever have to think about the truth.

  ‘It’s a stupid bloody time to figure that out…’ Hari murmured to himself. He laughed, for want of anything else to do.

  ‘What?’ Piers yelled. ‘What did you say?’

  Hari looked at him. Oily Piers, shako on crooked, meal-tin spills down the front of his coat, rancid of breath, half-covered in dirt and grease, too old by far to be having to do this all over again. What a horrible life you must have lived, Piers, to have become such a magnificent liar. What terrible things you must have seen to make you need to lie so much. That’s what you were telling me all along, and I was too stupid to comprehend. I had no frame of reference.

  I have it now, thought Hari. I wish I didn’t. I would give anything not to have had this experience, and not to be here. There is no truth here, no story, no words. There’s nothing to take from this of any worth, and all my high-minded ambitions to come along and brave the dangers in order to capture something valuable were bullshit.

  There is nothing here to cherish. Nothing here to learn. War is noise, sensory overload, pain, terror, horror. That’s it. It’s an inarticulate obscenity. It can’t be communicated, and even if it could be, it shouldn’t be.

  Hari looked around. The sky was on fire. The barricade was on fire. The invincible column of tanks had long since vanished into the smoke. Things that looked a bit like crows circled overhead. Mutilated and disfigured men wandered past them, with no idea where they were going. There was a constant background roar coming through the rippling clap and thunder of explosions and gunfire, and it wasn’t a human roar. Hari was almost one hundred per cent certain he was hearing War itself, roaring the one, wordless word it knew.

  ‘I have to get you out of here, boy,’ Piers said. ‘We can’t stay here.’

  ‘You’re lying again,’ said Hari. ‘You want to get out of here, and helping the non-combatant idiot is a good excuse.’

  Piers slapped him again. ‘You little shit,’ he said.

  Then he reached out, and clamped Hari by the side of the head with one big hand. He was shaking. The remorse in his eyes was unbearable.

  ‘Everyone’s going to die,’ he said. ‘The World Eaters, boy, they-‘

  ‘I know,’ said Hari. ‘Let’s just go. Run. No lies. Just go.’

  He turned and started walking.

  Crossfire had mown across the trench ahead of them. The banner had fallen. Three of the bearers were dead. The remaining two were trying to get the banner upright again, but the task was beyond them.

  ‘Or we could do something,’ Hari said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Tell a lie.’

  Hari grabbed one of the banner poles, and began to help the two men raise it. The pole was wet with blood. Piers joined him.

  ‘This isn’t a lie, boy,’ he said.

  Hari wasn’t sure what it was, except that it seemed to have some purpose. A way to reclaim some sense from a senseless, insensible event. He could run, or he could die, or he could do this – and this, like all the best lies old soldiers told, offered a shred of meaning to something that was otherwise meaningless. It was so foolishly insignificant, but he’d take insignificant over no significance at all.

  The four of them got the banner upright. It swayed in the smoke. Las-shots had cut several holes in it. It was ridiculously heavy and cumbersome. Two more soldiers ran up to them, and helped them steady it. One of them was Joseph Baako Monday. He seemed unscathed, but he was weeping so desperately he couldn’t talk.

  ‘Hoist it up! Up now!’ Piers was shouting. ‘For the Emperor! Upland Tercio, hooo!’

  Others had joined them, closing on the flag because the flag was the only landmark that wasn’t on fire.

  ‘We’re all dead!’ someone wailed.

  ‘Shut your noise, we’re not!’ Piers bellowed. ‘He’ll protect us! He will protect us! Show a little bloody faith, boys, and gather around Him! Terra! Throne of Terra!’

  A few took up the chant. Hari was one of them. The more troopers gathered, the lighter the banner became. Hari was able to take one hand off the pole, and lock it around Joseph’s shoulders, keeping the shuddering, grieving man upright.

  There were forty or more of them now, survivors from different units. Others were approaching. Some helped with the banner, others formed defensive lines, weapons ready, anchored on the rally point of the flag. They would defend that, at least. The bridge was lost, the bankside emplacement overrun, but they would defend that at least, because it was the only thing left in the hellscape of Pons Solar that had any value. When they died, they would die knowing it had been for a reason, however trivial. If they lived, their lies would be the best lies ever spun.

  Piers was full-throated, leading the chant.

  ‘Throne of Terra! Throne of Terra!’

  For a very short time, probably no more than five minutes, though it felt like the entire lifespan of the universe, two heavy, notched poles and an old piece of embroidered cloth defied the utter meaningless of roaring war, and gave what was left of their lives the semblance of a purpose.

  The chanting faltered.

  The first true monster had emerged from the smoke, striding past the ruined barricade and the blazing hulls of once-invincible tanks. The World Eater, from its immense horned helm to its giant steel boots, seemed like a statement of fact, as though war had sent them an undeniable truth to negate their fragile, hopeless lie.

  It saw the mass of them, sixty terrified troopers, huddled around a tatty banner. It roared, louder than the screaming chainaxes in its fists.

  A megalodon grin snapped open. Megalodon teeth gleamed in the firelight. Head down, it charged them.

  ‘He will protect us!’ Piers yelled. ‘He will, boys! If we protect Him!’ The soldiers started to shoot.

  * * *

  There is no hope. I am running headlong into what is now clearly a catastrophe. The bridge is lost. The east bank is lost. Archenemy strengths, worse than anything we predicted, and amplified by the toxic lire of the Primordial Annihilator, are swarming into the East Arterial and the edges of Western Freight. We will be lucky to hold them at the barrier wall, or at Monsalvant.

  We will probably not be lucky. I am painfully aware of Rogal’s strategic intention with regards to Eternity Wall Port. His tactical calculations are seldom marred by errors, and he has a low opinion of luck. I call luck fortune. Fortune is fickle and unreliable, but I believe it does exist, and when it is present, it can act like oil to unmesh gears that were thought to have jammed. Fortune sometimes alters the inevitable.

  But loss here is more than inevitable. It has already occurred. We need to pull back, to redeploy along the barrier wall, and save as many assets as we can for the coming repulse. Hundreds of troops are already dead, but those that have survived must be re-instructed. They are fighting a futile battle that will end only in their slaughter. At the barrier wall, and at Monsalvant, they can fight more usefully and not be wasted.

  There is no one to issue those orders. As I track through the smoke and the carnage, I see no leaders. No officers. No
sign of the lord castellan or any of the legionaries posted on this flank. High Primary Niborran, may grace preserve him, is not yet arrived, and all comms are degraded and dead.

  I have authority. But I am unseeable, unknowable. Tsutomu has not arrived. No one can communicate my will for me.

  My presence has some effect, at least. As I run forward, my cursed aura comes with me. I am null, and the Neverborn cringe at my arrival. Flocks of crow-spawn turn and wheel away, like vultures driven from a kill by an approaching lioness, or pigeons chased off crops by a gamekeeper’s scattershot. Witch-dogs, bounding ahead of the mam assault, come up short, whining. They sense me, or the lack of me at least, and turn tail, craven, whimpering as they gallop back towards the Pons Solar where the air is more to their liking.

  The beast things, goat-faced and cloven-hooved, are more resistant. They cower, unnerved, but do not flee.

  I kill them. Veracity cuts matted fur and horns and fat throats. My blade runs with their poison blood. It is not worthy work, but any kill made in the name of the Emperor counts. Any dent we make in their numbers and their strength inches us closer to triumph.

  I leave their carcasses in my wake.

  Not far short of the bridge, beyond a mass of burning tanks, I see the banner. I see His face first, through the smoke, and for one foolish moment I think He has come. I believe, just for a fleeting second, that He has finally joined us on the field of war, and that everything is about to turn. It will be like the days of the Great Crusade again, when victory followed sweet victory, and He, shining like a star, led us from the front.

  But it is just a banner. There are shot holes in His face.

  There are some three score soldiers gathered around the banner, the largest gathering of survivors I have seen. Three score who could make a true difference somewhere else, if they survive.

  But they will not.

  As I close in, I see the World Eaters. They are bounding past the barricade. One has crossed the approach road, and is bearing down on the huddled survivors.