Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  Disappointing.

  His visor showed him target icons, though. A decent number. A moderate challenge to fill an afternoon. How many of them would be his?

  He considered, for a moment, resetting his tally counter. The number, a long one now, throbbed in the bottom left of his visor display. Most Astartes-pattern warplate had this function. Some called it a kill-counter. It had its uses, for making swift tactical assessments during a prosecution or an engagement. Khârn had never really bothered with it. His kind of warfare had little use for such fripperies. He’d just left it running, unmonitored.

  It had been running since the first day of his career. When the number started to get quite large, he had become fascinated by it. The counter held a fetishistic interest now, a simple reminder of his advancing unmatched progress. He wasn’t superstitious like some legionaries, but it seemed unreasonable to reset it. He wanted, privately, to see how high it could get. Did it ever reach a number it couldn’t surpass? Roll back over to zero and start again? Did it have a limit?

  It might, but Khârn believed he didn’t.

  No, resetting it to zero would be unreasonable, and he was still, just, a warrior capable of reason.

  Time to move. He shuddered as he let the Nails do their work. The berserk cloud descended upon him and scorched him with its exquisite agonies.

  Surrendering to the rage, he raised his axe, and began to run with the others.

  * * *

  Shiban Khan could hear the freight elevators rattling and banging. It wasn’t the elevator systems ascending. It was something in the shafts. Something clawing its way up the shafts.

  The World Eaters were swarming in. The World Eaters…

  If the World Eaters were in the pylon, then it was already too late. Nazira had been right. While they had been focused up here on the platform, catastrophe had swept over the curtain wall and Monsalvant Gard. He should have been down there. He should have been down there with the rest. He was a White Scars Space Marine. He would have stopped a few of them, at least.

  But now…

  The hatches of the freight elevators rattled and shook. The things coming up the shaft were getting close. How long did they have left?

  He walked towards the work crew. They had almost finished stripping out one of the tugs. He’d told them to concentrate on one. One finished in time was better than two finished too late. The crew members looked at him. They’d all heard the noises echoing up the elevator shafts. They were soaked in sweat, caked in dirt. They were too tired to show their fear, except in their eyes.

  ‘What do we do?’ Nazira asked.

  ‘Is this one ready?’ Shiban asked.

  Nazira nodded.

  ‘Then I need a pilot to help me get it down to the base pads,’ he said.

  ‘Still?’ one of the crew asked.

  ‘We worked hard,’ said Shiban. ‘You worked hard. If it can still do some good, yes. So I need a pilot.’

  A woman in a torn flight suit raised her hand. Her name, Shiban believed, was Marin. He hadn’t had long enough to learn all their names.

  ‘I’ll do it, khan,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Shiban. ‘I know it’s a lot to ask. Marin, correct?’

  ‘Nerie,’ the woman said. That’s Marin there.’

  ‘My apologies. You base-norm humans all look alike to me.’

  That made them laugh. All of them. Despite their fear.

  ‘The rest of you,’ said Shiban, ‘thank you for your efforts. Get aboard the other tug. All of you. Get higher up the pylon, a higher platform. Use the tug to keep ahead of them. Once you get the chance, run low, and try to get clear of the port area. It’s not much, but that’s the best chance.’

  The team members looked at each other.

  ‘Leave?’ asked one.

  ‘If you can,’ said Shiban. There are no longer other options.’

  Behind him, the elevator shutters rattled and shook in their frames.

  ‘So please, hurry,’ said Shiban.

  ‘I’m staying,’ said Nazira.

  ‘No-‘

  ‘I’m staying, khan, like it or not.’

  Shiban stared at Nazira. Captain Al-Nid Nazira wasn’t going to be told no. That’s why Shiban had picked him.

  Shiban nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Nazira, get these good people on that tug, and get them clear. Nerie? Get this one running.’

  The team began to move.

  Shiban turned back to face the freight elevators.

  He put on his helm.

  He unclamped his boltgun, and checked the load.

  * * *

  ‘Let’s run, you and me, boy,’ Piers said.

  They could hear a wave of carnage sweeping into the cage-ways and cargo ramps. Mass weapons fire was close and intense. The boom of the defence grid system was continuous. And they could hear screaming. So much screaming. A maelstrom of noise. It was War roaring out its one-word howl again, Hari thought, the way it had done down by the Pons Solar.

  But this was different. Piers had been scared then, but he was different scared now.

  ‘Where do we run?’ Hari asked him. ‘I thought… I thought the whole point was there was nowhere to run to.’

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ said the old grenadier. ‘Work me old magic. You mark my words. Mythrus will show me the way. Have a little faith, boy. Eh? Have a little faith.’

  * * *

  Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) and Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army) chose firing positions down the side of the ramps behind the cage-ways. Clouds of burning debris were spilling off the cargo tracks. The ground was shaking.

  The ramps afforded them some cover, and gave them a good angle on anything that came through the gate onto the cage-way approach. Willem had brought all the ammo he could carry, and they’d shared it with the rest. About forty people, a patchwork of different units, covering the cage-way access.

  Joseph glanced at his friend. They were both trembling.

  ‘Do you want to run, my friend?’ Joseph asked.

  ‘Nah,’ said Willem. ‘Not again. Bad habit. Didn’t we learn that already?’

  Joseph chuckled. ‘After the last port fell,’ he replied.

  ‘After the last port,’ Willem agreed. ‘Come on, think about it. The Praetorian. He won’t let two ports fall, will he? I mean, that’s why he sent the old man to us.’

  ‘The Lord High Primary?’

  ‘Yeah, him. I like him. Spoke to me personal. He knows what he’s doing.’

  Joseph stared at his friend’s face. He thought about the story of the convoy, and the other one about the banner. Miracles do happen. He thought about Lord Diaz on the bridge.

  He dearly remembered what Willem had said, that day; the day Lord Diaz had found them in the rubble. If I break, or you break, then everyone will break, one by one. If I stand, and you stand, we die, but we are standing. We don’t have to know what we do, or how little it is. That’s why we came here. That’s what He needs from us.

  ‘We all know what we’re doing,’ said Joseph.

  A gritty blast ripped across the mouth of the cage-ways. One of the freightyard gates, ferrosteel and eight metres square, cartwheeled through the air like a sheet of paper, and smashed into the cage railings.

  ‘Here we go,’ said Willem.

  * * *

  ‘I can no longer raise Custodian Tsutomu,’ said Cadwalder. The Huscarl had to raise his voice above the deluge of noise simply to be heard. ‘The hardlink’s burned.’

  He turned to look at Saul Niborran.

  ‘I’m sorry, lord,’ Cadwalder said.

  Niborran shook his head. He was busy reloading his rifle and his handgun. They had used up almost every mag just getting back across the Gard approach. Those things wouldn’t die. They just… They wouldn’t die. You hit them with everything, the full force of the defence network, and-

  There w
as no defence network any more. Nothing responded to Niborran’s Hortcodes. The towers were dead, the emplacements burning.

  Niborran got up. With a few quick gestures, the deft handmarks of a veteran squad chief, he signalled troopers to their places at the embankment wall and open doorways.

  Then he joined Cadwalder.

  ‘My lord-‘ the Huscarl began.

  ‘Don’t say it, Huscarl,’ said Niborran, with a sad smile. ‘You might enjoy saying it, but I won’t enjoy hearing it.’

  ‘What, my lord?’

  ‘Some variation of “I told you so”. Or “I tried to warn you”,’ replied Niborran. He adjusted the strap of his lasrifle. ‘You did. I decided I knew better. This is my decision. There. That’s an end of it.’

  ‘I… would not enjoy saying that,’ said Cadwalder.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t need to be said at all now,’ said Niborran. ‘But this does, Cadwalder. I’m very sorry.’

  ‘For what, general?’

  ‘You,’ said the old general, ‘are only here because of me. I’m sorry about that.’

  Cadwalder stared at him, though his expression was invisible behind his visor.

  ‘I made a decision too,’ Cadwalder replied. ‘It was my own. I chose to step forward onto the deck of a Stormbird, and not step backwards off its ramp. What I was going to say, my lord, was stay behind me. They are closing very rapidly. My visor is crowded with contact icons. They are accelerating. Please, stay behind me.’

  ‘Like hell,’ said Niborran. ‘None of that. I’m not your Praetorian, and you’re not my bodyguard. I’m Niborran, of the Saturnine Ordos, and I have zone command here. I’m not getting behind anybody.’

  He looked up at the Huscarl.

  ‘Right here, right now, Cadwalder, you and me, we’re the same.’

  They stood in the mouth of the gate, side by side, human and transhuman, and began to fire as the World Eaters swept in.

  * * *

  Shiban could hear them clearly. Hear their claws scraping on metal. Despite the rising whine of the tug’s thrusters behind him, he could hear the scaling hooks and talons shredding their way up the elevator shafts.

  ‘Go!’ he instructed.

  ‘Come on!’ Nazira yelled.

  Shiban looked over his shoulder. The stripped-down tug was stirring on the pad, eager to lift. Through the beak canopy, he could see Nerie at the helm, holding the powerful tug’s urge to rise in check a moment longer. Nazira was half-hanging out of the open side hatch, beckoning to Shiban frantically.

  ‘Come on, damn it!’ Nazira yelled.

  ‘Go,’ Shiban repeated. He looked back at the elevator bank. Two of the hatches were beginning to buckle, battered and savaged from inside. He raised his bolter, and look aim.

  One hatch shredded out onto the platform, then two more. The World Eaters, thrashing and jockeying to be first, spilled out, clawing and striking each other like disputing alpha rivals in an animal pack.

  Shiban’s first burst dropped one. Another burst felled the second. A third burst threw a charging World Eater off the edge of the platform.

  Too many. Too many. And it took several bolts to stop even one of them.

  ‘Khan! Come on!’ Nazira yelled.

  The tug still hadn’t left the pad, though Nerie had it hovering now, drifting on a scream of thrust. Nazira was still in the open hatch.

  ‘Now!’ he was yelling.

  No backward step. That was Shiban’s Tachseer’s mantra. No backward step. He prided himself on that. But Nazira was risking his life. And maybe they could still put the tug’s grav-systems to work. Kill many more of these monsters than he could with his last mag-loads of shells.

  Shiban blasted on full-auto, obliterating the nearest three World Eaters in a blitz of blood and armour fragments. More were rushing him, pouring out of the torn elevator hatches.

  Shiban turned, ran.

  Nerie began to pull away. The tug was two metres up and swinging sideways on the pad when Shiban, leaping at full stretch, clamped his hands around the hatch rail.

  The tug cleared the pad. Shiban hung for a moment, his legs dangling over empty air. The clawing, howling World Eaters reached the edge of the platform, packing in and raging up at the tug that had just – and only just – escaped their clutches. They gathered with such an enraged frenzy that several at the platform lip tottered and plunged, pushed off by the frantic surge of those behind them.

  Nerie tried to keep the tug level. Nazira tried to haul Shiban into the cabin. Shiban Khan tried to hold on.

  On the landing platform below them, the World Eaters, driven into even deeper frenzy at being cheated of their prey, started to shoot.

  Bolter fire went wide, then bolt shells began to slam into the tug’s hull, blowing out panels and side fairings in thumps of flame. Shiban, clinging on, saw mangled debris tumbling away below him. The tug began to yaw badly, trailing a thin plume of dirty smoke. Shiban exerted maximum effort and, despite the torque generated by their ugly, slewing track, managed to haul most of himself over the frame of the side hatch.

  More shots hit them. Dull bangs against the hull. Loud booming explosions all around him, sprays of plastek and metal fragments. Al-Nid Nazira fell past him out of the open hatch.

  Shiban tried to catch him, but he wasn’t fast enough.

  And Nazira was already dead. A bolt-round had hit him. The inside of the cabin was painted with his blood. Shiban watched his friend’s exploded corpse drop towards the port’s ground docks far below.

  The tug was spinning even more severely. Shiban had to crumple metal to maintain his grip.

  ‘Nerie!’ he yelled. ‘Nerie! Stabilise us!’

  The spin grew worse. Everything outside – the sky, the docks, the pylon and the soaring face of the great Eternity Wall that enclosed the north-eastern side of the port and gave it its name – everything whirled past. A rotating panorama, the view from a demented carnival ride.

  ‘Nerie!’

  Shiban clawed forward. Nerie was dead in her seat, slack across the helm She’d been destroyed by a bolt-round. She’d been dead since the shooting began.

  The world whirled.

  Shiban lunged forward to get a hand on the helm controls.

  The impassive face of the Eternity Wall met him coming the other way.

  * * *

  If stories ever have ends, then this story ends here. It ends with the totality of Angron’s wrath.

  I think, though it is not my field of specialisation, that some stories end, but others carry on. They are eternal. They secretly carry on after the story appears to be finished, continuing in silence. These stories do not talk. They are never heard. I think my story may be like that.

  If I could, I would ask the young man, the historian boy. Stories are his field, so he may know something of these secret stories that continue on after words end.

  But I do not think I will get that chance. I think the boy is already dead.

  And I think my story ends here too. Soon.

  I would have liked to tell it to someone. Share it. But that sort of connection is something I have never been allowed.

  Here are the things I would have said.

  I am fighting to the end in a battle that cannot be won. I am fighting to the end in a battle that I knew could not be won before it even began. I have done this, not because I am brave, or because I am foolish, but because it was the only thing to do. If we give up on the doomed, we give up on ourselves.

  My presence, the curse of my company, has kept the doomed souls alive a little longer than fortune had planned. I have not driven off the daemons or the night, for they are too strong for even me to banish. But I have held them at bay for a while. I have made the daemons wary.

  And I have killed. I have killed many, many World Eaters.

  I have killed Ekelot of the Devourers and Centurion Bri Boret at the curtain gate. I have killed Centurion Huk Manoux on the curtain wall para
pet. Barbis Red Butcher, Herhak of the Caedere, Menkelen Burning Gaze: those I killed at the foot of Tower Two. Vorse and Jurok of the Devourers: those I killed in Western freight, with Tsu-tomu at my side. I killed Muratus Attvus in the cage-ways. I killed Uttara Khon of III Destroyers and Skalder in the cage-ways, because they had killed Tsutomu. It took sixteen of them to kill the Custodian, all at once. I could only avenge myself on two.

  I killed Sahvakarus the Culler in the second yards. I killed Drukuun in the gully by the fitting shops. I killed Malmanov of the Caedere and Khat Khadda of II Triari beside the ground-side landing pads.

  I have just killed Resulka Red Tatter.

  I have killed or driven off a host of Neverborn beastkin. My curse is a weapon.

  At the Eternity Wall space port, late in a very long life, I have discovered to my joy that my presence, the curse of my company, can also be a blessing. This is new to me, and unfamiliar. I have fought to protect these people, who cannot see me, but the mystery of me – for it appears it can be a mystery as well as a curse – has inspired them. The fact of my absence is a place they cannot explain, so they have filled it with stories and ideas, and those stories and ideas have given them strength and hope and courage.

  I never planned for that. I did not set out to do it. It simply happened.

  These are strange times.

  I will confess, now, because no one is listening, that this has been the greatest accomplishment of my life. It is completely unexpected. My whole life, I have stood apart, and wherever I have gone, I have spread only fear and discomfort. But here, briefly and unexpectedly, I have affected people in another way. I have been an unlikely conduit for strength and unity. I have been a mystery that has compelled them to stand tip and believe, not cower and shrink in fear.

  I have been able to touch them.

  This is my fortune. It is all I have ever wanted.

  I wish it could continue, but it will not. As I have said, this is a story that is reaching its end.

  So I stand, and I kill. I kill as many of the foe as I can before the end comes.

  As I pass across the battlefield, my sword in my hand, I see the ruination that the uglier face of fortune has wrought. I see things that should be noted down for history, so that they can be remembered. But they will not be. The young man, if he is not already dead, will not survive this blizzard of destruction. So his story ends here too.