by David Annandale, Justin D Hill, Toby Frost, Braden Campbell (epub)
And Behriman had caught my leg.
He was heavy. But perhaps, despite the added strain, he would be the salvation of us both. ‘Climb up,’ I rasped through clenched teeth. If he could use me to reach the platform, then haul me up after him…
Behriman tried. But as soon as he moved, we started to swing, and my grip slipped. He stopped. His features seemed to relax. His gaze shone with gratitude. ‘We’ve taught them a thing or two,’ he said. ‘Commissar, will you finish the lesson?’
‘I swear I will.’
He nodded, satisfied. He let go, spreading his arms wide to embrace his flight. He smiled as he dropped into freedom.
I looked away from his fall. I focused all of my attention on my goal. I shut out the din of the orks, the whine of the stray rounds, the possibility of another rocket. I confronted the hopeless. I had only the fading strength of my one arm. There was no purchase for my legs. There was nothing for the stump of my right arm to lean on and give me purchase. I squeezed tighter on the strut, imagined my fist as welded to the metal. It could not let go, but by the grace of the Emperor. I did not just tell myself this. I knew this. And when I knew it, I began to lift.
One arm for the weight of a battered old man. The pain exploded from my shoulder and upper arm. I could not acknowledge it. I believed only in the simple fact that I could lift this one object. If I did so, I would not fail my Emperor. Desperation can grant miraculous strength, and I was well beyond desperation. I become nothing but will. My arm was folded now, and my head and upper chest were above the lip of the platform. I rocked forward before I could think of the risk. My chin smacked metal. My stump shoved against it, giving me that tiny bit more momentum. My fist turned around the strut, and my grip was suddenly something that could be broken. I pushed down, gasping agony. My strength fled, but not before I straightened my arm, propelling myself forward. I cried out as I let go. Gravity tugged at me. It failed. From the waist up, I was lying on the platform. I rested for a moment, then squirmed and scrabbled until I had pulled myself up the rest of the way.
My body cried out for sleep. I stood up, wavering. I staggered forward. The landing had been buckled by the explosion, and the door wrenched partly out of its frame. I could, I thought, just squeeze through the gap. I reached for my pistol. It was gone, lost in the rocket strike.
‘The Emperor protects,’ I whispered. ‘The Emperor provides.’ I had faith that He would. It was all that I had left, and it was enough. I leaned into the door, pushing the space between it and the wall open a few more centimetres. I crawled through.
Thraka was not waiting for me on the other side. No orks were. The room was large, but not as huge as the grandiose exterior had suggested. I was at the very peak of the temple. I had expected a shrine to the savage greenskin gods, perhaps some mark of Thraka’s command. Instead, I found command of a much more practical kind. I was in the control centre for the space hulk. I was surrounded by the ork version of consoles. They were massive, and risibly simple by human standards. Each console featured only a single button: huge, red, central. In the middle of the floor, a block of stone served as a dais. It was wide enough and massive enough to support the monstrosity of Thraka. He would stand there, I thought, and give his orders, which would be carried out from these consoles. No one was here now because the space hulk was not on the move. The tedium of remaining at an inactive station would have been beyond comprehension to the ork mind.
I was alone, but would not be for long. Between grenades and rocket, the way up to the nerve centre had been destroyed. But the temple was a fusion of ships, and thus a honeycomb of passageways. I could hear the orks forging a new path. The wall to my right reverberated with the shrieking of tearing metal and the crump of explosive charges. They would be here soon. What I would do, I had to do now.
One side of the chamber was given over to enormous windows. They were the eyes of the ork idol that glared over the wreckage-scape of the space hulk. As I thought about how the construct travelled, and what damage I might do here, I noticed for the first time what nestled between the clusters of upended ships: engines. Huge ones. None from anything smaller than a cruiser. Some belonged to ships that had been grafted nose-first to the planetoid. Others had been dismounted from their original vessel. They were all lower than the surrounding structures. I looked at the scattered disposition of colossal motive power, put it together with the consoles, and understood how the space hulk navigated: one button per engine, each engine propelling the hulk in a different direction. Simple to the point of imbecilic, too crude for any precision, but the orks had no need for precision.
The wall shrieked. The orks were on the other side. I heard the sound of chainaxe teeth grinding into metal. Behriman, Castel, Polis, Bekket, Trower, Vale: their sacrifices had purchased a few seconds. I owed them the honour of using that time well. I ran from console to console, slamming my fist down on all the buttons. I would destroy Thraka with his own weapon.
One after another, the engines blazed to life. Immense forces strained against each other. As the first punctures appeared in the wall, the shaking began. It was as if the space hulk were being hit by an earthquake, one that would not stop, and just kept building in strength. Thraka’s base became a perpetual collision between voidships. Stolen fusion reactors lit up the night of the void. Forces beyond the tectonic buckled and twisted the space hulk. Plumes of stolen promethium shot up from the multiplying breaches in the fuel lines.
The shaking grew stronger yet. It knocked me off my feet, and I crawled to the windows to look upon my work. The construct was starting to break up. Ship hulls wrenched free of their foundations. Some fell, crushing smaller structures, setting off more explosions, gouging open deeper wounds. Others were blasted away from the main body, re-launched into the void by a force more powerful than the construct’s artificial gravity. Twisting, rattling, whiplashing, the world was tearing itself apart with thunder and flame, and it was glorious.
There was an eruption at the base of the temple. A tower of flame roared skyward, all-consuming, all-purifying. The world beyond the windows disappeared in a glare of incandescent red. The structure groaned, dying, and it lurched to one side, as though trying to walk. The floor heaved.
The wall came down all at once, and the orks stormed in. But they were too late. I saw Thraka pound forward, trampling his minions. Then the floor heaved again, split, and collapsed. I fell, slipping from Thraka’s grasp as he lunged for me. I plunged into a chaos of flame and tumbling metal. In the last moment before I was battered into darkness, I saw Thraka, above, in the exploding ruin of his domain. He was roaring, arms raised high. He was raging, I thought.
But he looked exultant.
Epilogue
The Valediction
I woke, and I was complete. I knew, before I opened my eye, that what had been taken from me was mine again. My right arm felt heavy, lethal. I looked. My claw was there, as it should be. There was no power flowing to it, nor was there to my bale eye. Still, their presence was reassurance enough.
But how had I been rescued?
I sat up, taking in my surroundings. I was lying on an operating table filthy with blood and reeking with the stench of a thousand atrocities. I was in a medicae bay, but the tools that I saw would have horrified the most fanatical chirurgeon.
I had not been rescued. I was still on the space hulk. My claw and eye had been reattached. Correctly. The two realities were incompatible at so fundamental a level that their co-existence made my skin crawl.
I swung my legs over the edge of the table and stood. My injuries had blended into a general wash of pain. Nothing was broken, though. I was intact. I could walk. I approached the door.
It opened. I stopped. Beyond it, orks lined both sides of the corridor. They had been watching for me. The moment I appeared, they roared their approval. They did not attack. They simply stood, clashed guns against blades, and hooted brute enthusi
asm. I had been subjected to too many celebratory parades on Armageddon not to recognise one when it confronted me. I went numb from the unreality before me. I stepped forward, though. I had no choice.
I walked. It was the most obscene victory march of my life. I moved through corridor, hold and bay, and the massed ranks of the greenskins hailed my passage. I saw the evidence of the destruction I had caused around every bend. Scorch marks, patched ruptures, buckled flooring, collapsed ceilings. But it hadn’t been enough. Not nearly enough. Only enough for this… this…
I was living an event that had no name.
At length, I arrived at a launch bay. There was a ship on the pad before the door. It was human, a small in-system shuttle. It was not built for long voyages. No matter, as long as its vox-system was still operative.
I knew that it would be.
Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka awaited me beside the ship’s access ramp. I did not let my confusion or the sense that I had slipped into an endless waking nightmare slow my stride. I did not hesitate as I strode towards the monster. I stopped before him. I met his gaze with all the cold hatred of my soul. He radiated delight. Then he leaned forward, a colossus of armour and bestial strength. Our faces were mere centimetres apart.
My soul bears many scars from the days and months of my defeat and captivity. But there is one memory that, above all others, haunts me. By day, it is a goad to action. By night, it murders sleep. It lives with me always, the proof that there could hardly be a more terrible threat to the Imperium than this ork.
Thraka spoke to me.
Not in orkish. Not even in Low Gothic.
In High Gothic.
‘A great fight,’ he said. He extended a huge, clawed finger and tapped me once on the chest. ‘My best enemy.’ He stepped aside and gestured to the ramp. ‘Go to Armageddon,’ he said. ‘Make ready for the greatest fight.’
I entered the ship, my being marked by words whose full measure of horror lay not in their content, but in the fact of their existence. I stumbled to the cockpit, and discovered that I had a pilot.
It was Rogge. His mouth was parted in a scream, but there was no sound. He had no vocal cords any longer. There was very little of his body recognisable. He had been opened up, reorganised, fused with the ship’s control and guidance systems. He had been transformed into a fully aware servitor. I promised myself he would be one forever.
‘Take us out of here,’ I ordered.
The rumble of the ship’s engines powering up was drowned by the even greater roar of the orks. I knew that roar for what it was: the promise of war beyond description. In silence, I made the orks a promise of my own. They were letting me go because I had lived up to my legend. I would do more than that when they came again to Armageddon. Legend would clash with legend, and I would bring them more than war. I would bring them more than apocalypse.
I would bring them extinction.
There was a jitter in Bekket’s eye that I didn’t like. We were trained at the Schola Progenium to watch for the early signs of political deviance or dereliction of duty. That meant being able to read all the nuances of body language. Hans Bekket was no traitor, and he was no coward. But the time of our imprisonment was eroding him, physically and spiritually, as surely as the sands of Golgotha had eaten away at the metal and flesh of our forces.
I had been watching him for several shifts now. How many days those were, I had no way of telling. The concept of time as a series of moments arriving from the endless potential of the future to become a distinct and defining past was a luxury denied to the slaves on Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka’s space hulk. We had only the grinding scream of an eternal present. Existence was labour, whips, agony, death. I had tried, early on, to gauge the length of the shifts, but the orks made even that effort futile. They simply worked us until the numbers collapsing from exhaustion became annoying. Then they bundled those of us who were still alive back into our cages. There we slept as best we could, waiting to be turned out to suffer again.
Bekket and I were hauling salvage. It was junk of every description scavenged from the ships that, along with a central asteroid, made up the hulk. We dragged heavy, clumsy carts full of the stuff to a massive depot, where the orks’ grotesque versions of enginseers pawed through the material. We pulled the carts with chains, but we weren’t chained ourselves. The orks didn’t bother. Where could we go? And what fun would there be in beating stragglers to death, if there were no stragglers to be had?
Bekket’s eyes flicked back and forth as if he were a malfunctioning gun servitor seeking targets. He was unconsciously looking for an excuse to strike out. When he did, he would believe he was acting out of rage and honour, but he would be wrong. Impulsive rebellion in this terrible place was an act of despair. It had only one possible outcome.
I would not have it. There were so few left of the men who had come with me to Golgotha. And our mission was unfinished. Thraka still lived.
Bekket was a few metres ahead of me. Beyond the strain of pulling his cart, there was an extra tautness in his shoulder blades. He was on the verge. I tried to get closer. It was difficult. I only had one arm with which to pull the chain. My battle-claw was long gone, my trophy now Thraka’s. And I wasn’t a young man. All the same, I managed to draw within two metres before I risked speaking.
‘Trooper Bekket.’
‘Commissar?’
I had his attention, but then the man in front of him stumbled. He was another Guardsman, wearing the rags of a Mordian uniform. I didn’t think he’d been with us on Golgotha. He looked like he’d been here for much longer. And still, he didn’t fall or drop his chain. He just stumbled. That was enough for the nearest ork guard. The greenskin roared and lashed out with its whip. The weapon was a length of flexible metal cable embedded with jagged bits of blade. It wrapped around the Mordian’s neck. The ork yanked hard. The coils tightened, constricting and severing. The man’s head flew off. The ork roared again, this time with delighted laughter.
There was a heavy piece of piping in Bekket’s cart. I had seen him eyeing it earlier. Now he grabbed it, letting his chain drop to the ground.
‘Bekket, no,’ I shouted, but he was already lunging at the ork, swinging the pipe at the monster’s head. The ork swatted him down. The spikes on the back of its wrist-guard tore his cheek open, and I heard the crunch of his nose breaking. He spun as he fell. The ork put an iron boot on his chest. It stowed its whip and pulled a massive axe from its belt. It raised the blade high, the stupidly glowering eyes under its thick brow fixed on Bekket’s skull.
I stepped forward. I locked gazes with the ork.
‘No,’ I said again, but I said it to the guard, I said it with ice and I said it in orkish. It disgusted me to use that obscene tongue, but it startled the guard. The ork hesitated.
I held the monster’s eyes with my single one. I peered up with my head tilted slightly down, so there would be more shadow, more mystery, in my empty socket. I was a one-armed, one-eyed human past his prime making direct eye contact with an ork. I should have been dead, my guts strewn all over the ground. But I was Yarrick, and I had the evil eye. I killed orks with a look. The brute in front of me knew this. At that moment, so did I. With Bekket’s life dangling by a frayed thread, I channelled all of my faith in the Emperor and my hatred of the orks into the crystalline, adamantine belief that my gaze was a greenskin’s doom. I was what they believed me to be.
The guard’s axe wavered. The ork looked away from my eye and my dangerous socket, and glanced around, uncertain. It seemed to notice something on the gantries in the gloom high above our heads. Then it lowered the blade. It took its foot off Bekket, gave him a kick in the ribs, and stalked away down the line of slaves, snarling to itself.
As I helped Bekket up, the back of my neck prickled. I looked up into the shadows. I sensed the massive presence. He was up there, watching. The ork. Thraka.
I coul
dn’t see him, but I hoped he saw the look in my eye.
I hoped he saw the lethal promise that lay within.
The true measure of my enemy’s threat isn’t just in the brute force at his disposal. Nor is it fully captured in the tally of victories and defeats. What lies behind events? Why are some actions taken and others not? The answers to those questions can reveal a power even more deadly than armies of millions could imply. Ghazghkull Thraka had annihilated our forces on Golgotha. What that showed of his means and ability was bad enough, but that he released me had even worse implications.
Sometimes questions alone point to dark revelations.
I was in Anaon, south of Hive Tartarus. It was a smaller hive on the coast of the Tempest Ocean. I had come for two reasons. One was to inspect the maritime defences. The fate of Helsreach still hung in the balance, and we had to prepare against the possibility of a second invasion from the water. The other reason was symbolic. That had always been an integral part of my duties as a commissar: to represent something more important than the individual in the uniform.
I never meant to become an icon, but circumstances were circumstances. The Second War for Armageddon had changed the meaning of my name. ‘Yarrick’ now meant ‘the Saviour of Armageddon’. My thoughts about the truth of the matter were irrelevant. The legend existed. And now the Third War had come. My duty was to use every weapon at my disposal against the enemy. So if my presence was enough to motivate a population to a greater effort, then I would make sure I was seen. The people of Anaon had to be willing to sacrifice everything, down to their lives. Every single one. No one person, group or hive was more important than Armageddon.
So I flew in from Tartarus. I made my inspection. I met with the commanders of the military forces charged with the hive’s defence. I made myself visible. Anaon had suffered a few bombing raids, but had been spared a major assault. The people felt safe enough to take to the streets. I spoke to them. I exhorted. I made sure of their commitment to the war.