by Nick Kyme
Zytos’s reply was heartfelt and genuine. ‘It would be my honour, captain.’
Zonn pressed his gauntleted hand against the inner hull of the Charybdis.
‘The wounds run deep… Her spirit is a little raw, but she’s not done yet.’
Cracks and tears ran through this dermal layer of the ship’s superstructure, across the entire deck. Lamps strafed back and forth, revealing further damage. Bent stanchions, ruptured armour plating, fractured seals between sections, it all needed welding and making secure.
Dust motes, dislodged from the rafters by activity in the decks above, turned but otherwise drifted in apparent stasis in the hazy light. No life existed down here. Zonn had come to one of several uninhabited areas of the ship, sealed and shut off but still in need of repair.
Nothing could survive in these ghost halls. No heat, no light, no oxygen. There were bodies, and they floated without gravity to anchor them – serfs too afraid to leave their posts or trapped when the ship was sealed.
Zonn barely saw them. He only saw the Charybdis and her wounded flesh in need of tending.
‘Adyssian said she had a strong spirit.’
Gargo was standing nearby, piston-hammering a piece of ablative inner plating over a fracture in the hull.
Hordes of labour gangs toiled the length and breadth of the half-kilometre section performing similar repair work. They wore rebreathers and atmosphere suits. Unlike the legionaries, who had mag-locked their boots to the metal decking, the mortals used a cable rig to keep them from floating off into the dark to join the corpses unearthed by Zonn’s intrusion.
The abject dark of the long, broad sub-deck was lit by a profusion of sparks from arc-welders and plasma tools.
‘I thought this deck had been swept,’ said Gargo, nodding towards a body he had seen in the distance then reaching for an arc-welder proffered by a serf in grubby enginarium overalls. A cog tattoo circling the man’s right eye marked him out as having received some Mechanicum instruction from one of the enginseers aboard the ship. ‘They shouldn’t have been down here.’
Gargo glanced at Zonn as the Techmarine engaged a plasma torch to cut away a chunk of badly bent wreckage.
‘I detect the heightened emotion in your voice, brother. You feel for these poor souls, and regret their lives were ended in this manner.’
Shutting off the flare of his welder, Gargo turned to Zonn. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Where you see flesh and bone, I see cogs in the inner workings of this ship.’
Gargo shook his head. ‘Did the Martians strip your humanity as well as your humour, Techmarine?’
Zonn didn’t answer immediately, considering his response.
‘Engaged in a mechanised task, it takes an effort of will for me to see as you see,’ he admitted. ‘I regret the loss of my Nocturnean compassion and humanity, but I know my sacrifice is for the betterment of my Legion.’
Zonn gestured to the vast, expansive deck. His words would have echoed, and not resonated through Gargo’s vox, had there been air to carry them.
‘It is mundane work, but necessary. A gang of labour serfs could easily do it unsupervised.’
‘So what am I doing here then?’ asked Gargo, taking up the arc-welder again.
‘Ensuring the Charybdis doesn’t fall apart, as am I. Becoming a cog, my brother.’
Gargo went to work securing the bolts. He was done in seconds. The serfs worked more slowly, but exhibited signs of agitation and nerves.
‘This place scares them, I think. Something primordial about fear of the dark.’
‘And so you know the other reason for our presence,’ said Zonn.
Gargo smiled. Perhaps Far’kor Zonn had not lost his empathy after all.
‘Hardly the work of an artisan,’ said the black-smiter, leaving the sealed section he had just finished and moving on to the next.
‘I prefer durability over artistry in this regard, brother.’
Gargo set the arc-welder down, turning back to the piston-hammer.
‘I hope my presence down here is of some use at least.’
‘You would prefer the forge?’
‘There is much I would prefer, Zonn. But, no, the forge holds no refuge for me any more.’
Much had been lost in the betrayal at Isstvan V. Many in the Legion spoke of trust, of martial efficacy and the death of primarchs, but there were smaller, more personal losses too that were often overlooked.
For Gargo, it was his right arm.
Under-resourced, poorly supplied, the bionic was crude by even the basic standards of the Legion. From master artificer, Gargo had become little better than a cripple. At least, in his eyes.
‘By entering this ship and setting forth on this voyage, we all stepped into a crucible,’ said Zonn. ‘No one will emerge unscathed. Some of us will not emerge–’
Zonn stopped and turned his head.
Gargo ceased hammering and tried to see whatever had caught Zonn’s eye. ‘What is it?’
‘Something else down here.’ Zonn unclipped his bolt pistol.
‘Threat?’ asked Gargo, gesturing to an arming serf.
‘Movement where there should be none.’ Zonn glanced to an enginseer who was running the labour gangs. ‘Keep working.’ He then set off towards the source of the disturbance with Gargo behind him.
The black-smiter racked the slide of his bolter, slamming a shell into the breech, ready to fire. Lacquered black with a serpent-mouthed snout, a twin-nozzle flamer sat snug under the weapon’s main barrel and a chainblade bayonet hooked out from beneath the muzzle.
Gargo had named it Draaken after the fire-spitting wyrms of Themis, asserting it had both fangs and flame enough to match those brutal creatures.
Through his amber lenses, he calculated atmospherics, distance and spatiality, but he could find no bio-sign, nor any evidence of what had alerted the Techmarine.
‘It is anomalous,’ said Zonn, cautiously advancing and activating the servo-arm slaved to his power armour’s generator.
‘Death Guard?’
‘A kill-squad left behind after the previous invasion? Inconclusive…’
‘But it’s possible.’
‘If so, why have they not attacked yet?’
Gargo activated his helmet vox but nothing came back except static.
‘Link’s down.’
Zonn turned abruptly. Gargo could tell by the Techmarine’s expression that it should not be, even this deep in the ship.
‘Unusual.’
‘Could be a signal jam.’
Zonn looked back to where he had detected movement.
The deck was vast like a hangar, its echoing hallways long and deep. Bodies floated out in the gloom, clenched by rigor mortis and barely visible but for their frozen silhouettes.
‘Whatever it is,’ the Techmarine replied, ‘we must find it.’
Leaving the arc-flares and spark flurries of welders behind, Zonn and Gargo ventured into the dark, where nothing stirred but the dead.
Thirty-Seven
Turmoil
Battle-barge Charybdis, solitorium
Var’kir knelt in the soothing darkness of the ship’s solitorium. In one hand, he clutched the onyx pearls of his rosarius. The other clenched the haft of his dragon-headed crozius.
His head was bowed, a Chaplain at peace.
In truth, he was a son in turmoil.
Leaning forwards on his armoured haunches, he ignited the brazier pan in front of him and it flared into life, throwing off hot amber light and chasing back the shadows until they cowered at the solitorium’s ornate periphery.
Most vessels that served the Drakes had solitoriums for reflection and renewal. Fire-black walls, ash heavy on the stifling air, they were also where the branding of deeds would be made into flesh with a searing iron.
Ever since being reunited with his sons, Vulkan had espoused the virtues of sacrifice and self-sufficiency. Isolation to marshal thought and refocus purpose was a way of being to the Salamanders. It fell to Nomus Rhy’tan to instruct the Legion in this creed when the primarch could not.
How Var’kir wished for his mentor’s spiritual wisdom now.
Gently, he depressed the catches that locked his skull-helm to his gorget. The clamps disengaged with a hiss of vented pressure and the Chaplain slowly lifted off his helmet.
It took less than seconds for his senses to realign, all sights, sounds and smells recalibrated as part of an enhanced physiological response. As he stared into the flame, his eyes saw through the crimson of his sclera and not the deep amber of his lenses.
‘Father,’ he beseeched the fire, ‘help me see you.’
The flames flickered, roaring higher as the accelerant within the brazier pan caught and ignited, but nothing revealed itself.
‘My lord,’ he whispered, eyes watering as he glared without relenting, ‘please… show me what Numeon can see.’
Endless flame, a rolling conflagration that stretched to the limits of his mind’s eye was Var’kir’s reward.
‘Is this my trial?’ he snapped at the shadows, suddenly angry, as if Vulkan watched from the smoky penumbra. ‘Am I to be the doubter whilst others believe? Must I take that role in all of this?’
No answer came, and Var’kir shut his eyes before his proximity to the flame seared them.
‘I don’t wish to be blind any more,’ he said in a quiet voice, his rage spent, desolation absolute.
And in his despair, Var’kir failed to realise he was not alone after all.
A lonely figure watched him in secret, his grey armour the perfect camouflage.
As he watched, Kaspian Hecht slowly drew a short spatha blade from its scabbard.
Rek’or Xathen had wanted to die on Isstvan V. As the betrayal was revealed and the bombs arced down in earnest, he had been trapped in the Urgall Depression with the rest of his brothers.
Eighteen line companies, almost a thousand Aethonion Pyroclasts, hemmed in and butchered with scarcely a reply. After the initial devastating salvo, order mainly broke down. Xathen fought alongside remnants of other Realm companies and scattered survivors from the Raven Guard, whose lines had buckled and spilled over into the fracturing Salamanders advance.
He reached the Urgall foothills to find an implacable martyr’s wall of Death Guard, rigorously drilled and marshalled by heavily armoured section leaders.
He had seen the XIV fight. They were tough. Heavy Imperial armoured battalions were more yielding. Between the terrain, the razor wire and the dense war-plate of the Death Guard, the Aethonion Pyroclasts were crushed.
Salamanders specialised in asymmetric tactics but here on the black, blood-churned sand they were outgunned and outmanoeuvred. No strategy, no ploy existed to overcome such deplorable odds.
Survive or die. Kill or die. Die.
Die.
Die.
Xathen went down under a sprawl of bodies. He screamed. In rage for the treachery of those he considered kin, and anguish for the brothers cruelly slain. It was an affront to honour, to brotherhood, to everything the Legiones Astartes had once stood for.
His flame-projector long since spent, he reverted to a combat blade, saw-toothed and razor-edged. And stabbed. The blood of Barbarus drenched his Mark III plate, flooding his breather-grille and gumming the soft joints between the armpit and greaves.
Something flashed, a dark blade reflecting off the slowly blackening sun. A searing jag of pain coursed from the base of Xathen’s left ear, across his nose, fractionally missing his eye, before it terminated at his right temple.
His helm was gone, split in half, the scale mask torn to pieces by the savage kukra held in an officer’s blood-black hand. It flecked Xathen’s cheek, still warm, as the Death Guard raised it up to strike.
A bolt-round took him in the neck, blasting apart the gorget and ripping out most of his throat. The warrior died choking on his own blood. Xathen finished him with a heart thrust, ramming his combat blade two-handed.
Carnage reigned, coming together in a mosaic of pain and abject suffering.
War made by the Legions was unlike anything previously known to man. It levelled cities, turned skies to fire, oceans to steaming vapour and rendered civilisations to dust. It brought worlds to ruin. War made by Legions against other Legions was magnitudes worse.
Tanks burned in squadrons, heaped together like animal carcasses. Contemptors crawled on their bellies, legs severed and drooling smoke. A Raven Guard reached for the sky, but was brought down with his exhaust jets still burning, and stabbed to death by six other legionaries. A captain, clutching his company banner, was decapitated by a las-beam. His headless corpse stood for a few seconds before a Proteus ground him down beneath its armoured hide.
Clouds of acidic gas and other deadly chemical weapons surged voraciously through swathes of tightly packed legionaries, corroding armour and melting flesh.
Above, Stormbirds striving to reach the upper atmosphere were picked apart by flocks of Fire Raptors. Shrapnel descended in a lethal rain. One of the heavy gunships came down with it, crushing a troop of Sicaran Venators attempting a counter-attack. Their resistance ended before it ever really began.
Dismembered, quartered, butchered, impaled, skinned, flensed, gutted, incinerated, loyal sons of Throne and Emperor were slain by the thousand. Isstvan V had become a hecatomb beyond reckoning, where even deiform beings were not spared the executioner’s axe, as the Iron Hands would soon learn.
Proud warriors had become cattle led to the slaughter.
The roar of death screams and weapons discharge merged.
Xathen sank to his knees, overwhelmed, his transhuman fortitude nearing its end.
When he looked up, a phalanx of Destroyer legionaries was already bearing down on him. Drakes and Ravens lay split and bleeding in their wake. Some were being mutilated. Skulls and fleshless torsos had been raised up as grim trophies. The rad-scarred gaze of the Destroyers alighted on Xathen and what remained of his decimated company.
Staggering, bleeding, he struggled to his feet and wished for death. To die standing, blade in hand and cursing the turpitude of those he had once called allies.
It was not to be.
A low whine cut above the roar of the battle, so low Xathen almost missed it. The explosion hit hard, throwing the Salamander off his feet.
Heat washed over Xathen, felt through the slowly cooking bodies of those who had landed on top of him. Shouts, heard distantly through the fog of war, resolved on a breeze tainted with heat and the acerbic reek of metal.
He was dragged from the field, scarred, half dead, into the belly of a Stormbird. Xathen had been only partially aware of his surroundings. He remembered Gargo clutching the ruined stump of his shoulder and the Raven Guard Apothecary ministering to a stricken Salamander before a sniper took him in the back. His armoured form rolled limply off the entry ramp before disappearing back into the chaos below as the vessel achieved loft.
Xathen had blacked out after that. It was his last abiding memory of Isstvan V.
Aboard the Charybdis, descending to the cargo decks, the treachery felt that day still burned in the Pyroclast.
Xathen had not fought in the same battalion as those he now kept company with, but he knew these four raged as he did. They wanted revenge, but ever since the massacre they had been running. Defeated. Shattered. Pathetic. It all ended now. With or without Vulkan, Xathen was determined to take some measure of vengeance against the Death Guard Legion, against all the damned traitors who had ever turned on the XVIII.
They had barely been below d
ecks for half an hour when Zadar’s voice brought Xathen back from his dark reminiscence. ‘Up ahead,’ the legionary growled through the scale mask hung across his mouth-grille.
Kur’ak took up position ahead of the squad as scout. He moved slowly but steadily, flame-projector out in front, the igniter giving off a rasping burn.
‘What did you see?’ asked Xathen, curt. He saw nothing on his retinal display and cycled through the visual spectra to make sure he wasn’t missing anything Zadar had picked up.
‘Something…’ replied the other Pyroclast. ‘A shadow, a form.’
‘Both or either?’
Zadar shook his head. ‘It was there.’
Xathen grunted, irritated. ‘Kur’ak.’
Kur’ak had advanced fifty paces ahead of the rest of the patrol.
‘Coming back around! East!’ He suddenly burst into a laboured run, fuel tanks clanking against the reinforced promethium hose that fed his flamer.
The other four turned as one, Xathen shouldering himself in front.
Between Kur’ak at its back and the rest of the Pyroclasts ahead of it, whatever Zadar had seen was trapped.
‘I have no line of sight,’ hissed Mu’garna, stalling to scan the shadowy corridor with his eyes.
‘Nothing,’ Baduk agreed, shaking his head.
Xathen scowled, annoyed. ‘Did you see someone or not, Zadar?’
‘A form, as I already said.’
The cargo hold was a mess of tunnels and narrow conduits, chambers and storage alcoves. Some areas of below decks were vast, hangar-like lofts where the near-fully assembled chassis of gunships could be stored for spare parts; others were little more than crawl spaces.
In such warrens, it was all too common for mortals shirking their duties or stowaways to seek refuge, believing themselves forgotten by their overseers. A refugee, a lost serf – it could easily be one of them that Zadar had seen.
But Xathen knew different. His instincts were never wrong. Even before Isstvan V, he had known something was out of alignment. Only his fraternal bond with those he thought were his fellow Legions had blinded him to the truth. Not any more.