Let The Galaxy Burn

by Marc

  Von Klas stood up once more, Verredaek’s limp body sliding off his shoulders and down the wall. The first eldar lay motionless against the back wall where he had been rammed. He might have been dead, but behind the lifeless jade of the alien’s helmet’s eyes von Klas couldn’t be sure. The second was certainly dead, though, his blood running down into the drain at the room’s centre.

  Verredaek shifted slightly and suddenly there was an alien gun pointing at von Klas, slender and strange, held in a gnarled blue-grey hand. Without thinking, von Klas slashed the torturer’s gauntlet downwards as the eldar turned his head to aim. The blades swiped cleanly through his face, slicing the withered skin to ribbons. The haemonculus slumped to the floor at last.

  He had been difficult to kill. But then so am I, thought Commissar von Klas.

  He considered taking one of the guard’s rifles, but he would have needed two hands to fire it and he wanted to keep hold of the razor-gauntlet. And the splinters that had hit him, though they were sending occasional flashes of pain through his muscles, had still left him alive. Not very efficient, he thought coldly. The torturer’s gun might prove more useful. He prised it from Verredaek’s dead hands. It was oddly light, and very strange to look at, with a barrel so slender only a needle, surely, could be fired out.

  He turned to the translator slave still cowering in the corner behind one of the hanging skins.

  ‘You coming?’ he asked. ‘We can escape from here if we hurry.’

  The translator didn’t seem to understand him, as if she wasn’t used to having Imperial spoken directly to her and wasn’t sure how to respond. She shook her head and redoubled her efforts to hide from him. Von Klas decided to leave her.

  The door through which Verredaek had entered opened with a simple touch of his hand on a panel set into the wall. Beyond it, the corridors were made of the same polished metal, but bent and buckled into strange shapes, as if the whole place had been picked up and twisted by a giant. Von Klas jogged down the corridor, mind buzzing, trying to work out if the place had a pattern to it, one part of his brain keeping watch for signs of more guards.

  He came to a row of cells, four of them, the doors again opening easily with a press of their inset panels. Behind the first was a human, an Imperial Guardsman, still dressed in his grime-grey uniform, his head shaved and his face aged beyond his years.

  The man blinked in the sudden light, for the cells were pitch black inside, and looked up at what must have been von Klas’s silhouette. ‘You’re one of us,’ he said, surprised into stupidity.

  ‘Come on. We’re getting out,’ von Klas replied.

  The Guardsman smiled sadly and shook his head. ‘They’ll be here any moment. We won’t stand a chance.’

  ‘That’s an order, soldier. I’m a commissar and I’ve got scores to settle. If I say we’re leaving then we’re out of here already. Now move!’

  The Guardsman shrugged and shuffled unsteadily out of the cell – prisoners weren’t manacled, Verredaek must have thought he was above that. Von Klas hurried to open the other three cells.

  ‘Sir! Trouble!’ yelled the Guardsman. A sketchy reflection of the approaching eldar warriors shimmered on the metal wall and splinters began shattering against the walls.

  As three other Guardsmen emerged, stumbling and confused, von Klas levelled Verredaek’s pistol to defend them. He fired at the first hint of purple and silver that came round the corner, tiny darts leaving a glittering trail as they raced for their target.

  There was a strangled cry and the first renegade eldar pitched forward, clutching at the shattered mask of his helmet. As his cries became garbled howls, the warrior convulsed, his body splitting and twisting as it was ripped apart. Hot blood and shards of bone spattered and ricocheted across the walls. The Guardsmen – two in sand-coloured uniforms, Tallarn maybe; the last in the remains of a dark red uniform that could have been Adeptus Mechanicus – ducked back into the cells for cover. Von Klas might not have understood the eldar tongue but he knew fear when he heard it, and that was what he heard now, as the remaining eldar guards howled in fright or pain and fell back.

  ‘Move!’ von Klas said quickly. ‘They’re scared of us now!’

  The first man he had released darted forwards and grabbed two rifles from where the guards had dropped them, throwing one to one of the Tallarn. After a moment to scrutinise the controls, they started pumping fire back down the corridor, before hurrying after the others.

  Von Klas and his men – they were surely his men now, his unit – hurried away from the cells, von Klas leading, the two armed men jogging backwards with their rifles ready to offer covering fire. All the while von Klas could hear voices, the guards calling for help, trying to organise a pursuit, or perhaps just cursing the Guardsmen in their vile alien tongue.

  The labyrinth of prison corridors rolled out in front of them in ever more tormented designs. As they stumbled along, von Klas was beginning to believe that surviving might be impossible after all, even for a commissar. But no more guards came. It was not the guards that were supposed to stop prisoners escaping – it was the torment and brutality that were meant to break their will. Von Klas and his men passed the threshold of scarred iron, and emerged, breathless, bloody and exhausted, hearts racing, into the open air, the bowels of Verredaek’s torture machine behind them.

  But von Klas knew with an officer’s instinct that they were not safe. Because they had only freed themselves in order to enter the dark eldar world-city of Commorragh.

  VERREDAEK LOOKED OLDER, thought Kypselon, older even than the shattered, wizened specimen that first came into the archon’s employ. But, of course, it could just be the vile old creature’s shredded face. It had been a long time since Kypselon had seen Verredaek – not since the haemonculus had first retreated into his underground complex to pursue the art of torturer at his command, in fact.

  Verredaek shuffled pathetically across the floor of Kypselon’s throne room, across the milky marble shot though with amethyst veins. He looked small and feeble under the gaze of the three hundred or so eldar warriors who stood around the room’s edge, weapons held ready, constantly at attention.

  ‘Fallen One’s teeth, what happened to him?’ slurred Exuma, Kypselon’s dracon, who was lounging in a seat held aloft by anti-grav motors so he didn’t have to walk anywhere. A quietly gurgling medical array pumped a steady stream of narcotics into Exuma’s blood.

  ‘He failed.’ Kypselon replied with feeling. When he rose from his black iron throne, the wide window behind him cast the shadow of his shoulder guards across Verredaek in two great crescents. The torturer seemed to shrink, and though his eyes were hidden, Kypselon could detect fear in the dark sockets.

  ‘Verredaek, you will recall that when you first entered my services, I had my servants take a little of your blood.’ Kypselon’s deep voice echoed faintly off the high, vaulted ceiling and purple-draped marble walls.

  ‘Yethhh, archon,’ Verredaek replied, his speech impeded by his newly-forked tongue.

  ‘I still have what I took. The reason I keep it, and that of all my followers, is to make real the notion that I own you. You are mine, you are a part of my territory, just like the streets and palaces. Just like my temple. The price of belonging to the Broken Spine is total subservience to me. Yet you failed to carry out my commands.’

  Verredaek tried to speak, but he too had been alive longer than most on Commorragh, and he knew that words would not save him here.

  ‘I ordered you to bring the human here, skinless and broken, so I could watch him die. This you failed to do. The reasons are irrelevant. You failed. By definition, being a possession of mine, you must be discarded.’

  Kypselon shot a glance at the front row of warriors and four of them strode forwards, grabbing Verredaek and holding him fast.

  The haemonculus didn’t struggle as Yae flipped her lithe body from the shadows into the centre of the room. Her eyes and smile flashed, as she drew twin hydraknives. They turned to l
ightning bolts in her hands as she danced – and killed.

  As Yae twirled and slashed a thousand cuts into Verredaek’s body, Kypselon turned to his dracon. ‘What is the situation with the Blade’s Edge?’

  Exuma looked back with glazed eyes. ‘Little has changed, my archon. Uergax has the mandrakes, and the incubi favour him as well. Some remain loyal to us, but what Uergax lacks in territory he makes up for with most admirable diplomacy.’ The dracon paused to gasp with pleasure as another bolt of drugs shot through his veins.

  Kypselon shook his head. ‘It is not good. Uergax may soon crush us as I would wish to crash him. The Blade’s Edge covets our corner of Commorragh and if incompetence like this persists he will get it. Yae!’

  The wych span to a halt and let her lacerated handiwork collapse to the floor. ‘Archon?’

  ‘The human we wished to see dead is more resourceful than we thought. It is now loose on Commorragh. Find it.’

  Yae smiled with genuine relish. ‘It is a great honour to perform a task that would give me such pleasure in the name of one so great.’

  ‘No time for blandishments, Yae. Uergax is bleeding us dry and I do not need this creature running loose to complicate matters. I fully expect you to succeed.’

  Yes, lord.’

  ‘And be wary. This one has a colder heart than most. You may go.’

  Yae flitted away, as only a wych could, to fulfil his commands. Kypselon turned to the great window behind him. It was a view of Commorragh, a riot of dark madness and broken spires, bridges that crossed to nothing, mutilated cathedrals to insanity and evil, a planet-wide city at once unfinished and ancient, swarming beneath a glorious swirling thunderstorm sky. And in the centre, obscene, bleached and pale, was Kypselon’s temple. A temple to him, because living so long and rising to such power on Commorragh was such an impossible task it might as well be that of a god. A thousand pillars made of thigh bones held up a roof tiled with skulls. Whole skeletons acted out scenes of violation and murder on friezes and pediments.

  ‘Every eldar, human, ork, every enemy I have ever killed stands there, Exuma. Every one. My temple is a testament to the fact that I will not give up, not ever. I have carved a path for myself through the very bodies of my foes.’

  Exuma allowed himself to drift back into lucidity long enough to reply: ‘Archon, none can say that you have failed in anything you have attempted.’

  ‘That is the past. I have risen to power and I will not relinquish it to a boy like Uergax. I am not ashamed of fear, Exuma, even though young upstarts like Uergax and yourself are. And I feel fear now. But I will use that fear, and my temple will grow.’

  Outside, the cancerous rain of Commorragh began to fall.

  ‘IN THE CITY, you need those who want your money or your honour. On the plains, in the desert, you need brothers.’ Rahimzadeh of Tallarn was a wiry, intense man, not long a soldier but already well versed in the hot fear and desperation of war. ‘Though there are only two of us left, we are brothers still.’

  Ibn, the second Tallarn, looked up from the ornate eldar splinter rifle he was examining. ‘You would not understand. On your Hydraphur, a million men live within sight of one another. No room for true brothers.’

  Von Klas winced as Scleros, the lexmechanic, pulled another shard from the commissar’s raw shoulder. It felt like the razor-sharp crystals were doing as much damage coming out as they did going in. ‘Brothers or not, we still have a chain of command. I am a commissar and you are now my men.’

  ‘Why?’ Ibn asked with a sneer. ‘What good can orders and rank do here?’ He waved an arm to indicate their surroundings – a shattered shell of a building, the carcass of some vast cathedral of soaring flutes and arches, now gutted and decrepit. It was deserted, which was why they had stopped here, but they all knew that there were malevolent eyes everywhere on Commorragh and they could soon be found wherever they hid.

  ‘We can get out of here.’ the commissar replied. ‘There’s a spaceport nearby, close to the temple.’

  ‘Temple? This place has no gods.’ Rahimzadeh said. ‘Even the Emperor’s light is faint upon us here.’

  ‘It is consecrated to the foul leader of this part of the planet. The scum raised a temple to himself. The spaceport’s nearby but it’s garrisoned. We’d have to occupy the temple, draw in the garrison troops and make a break for the spaceport.’

  ‘Death would claim us all before we reached it.’ said Ibn.

  ‘Not all of us. Not if there were enough. Would you rather let them recapture you? They wouldn’t let you run away twice. If we try to escape we’ll either make it or die trying. Whatever happens then, it’s better than skulking here until one of them finds us.’

  Rahimzadeh thought for a second. ‘What you say is true. I think you are a good man. But we need others.’

  ‘We’ll need a whole damn army.’ Ibn said.

  Von Klas turned around. ‘Scleras?’

  The commissar had been right – the tattered dark rustred uniform was that of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Scleros was a lexmechanic, his brain adapted to allow him to absorb a huge amount of information, produce calculations and battlefield reports. His augmentation was belied by the intricate web of silver tracery surrounding his artificial right eye. ‘You said there is a chain of command. As commanding officer, the decision is yours.’

  ‘Fine. And you?’

  The fourth Guardsman had said little. His head was shaven and he wore the grey uniform that could be from one of a thousand regiments. ‘Sure. Whatever. As long as I get a shot at some of those freaks.’

  Von Klas studied the Imperial Guardsman: his hollow eyes, his scowl, the nose that had been broken two or three times. ‘What’s your name, soldier?’

  ‘Kep. Necromundan Seventh.’

  Ibn let out a short, barking laugh. ‘Lucky Sevens? The sands do not lie so much. You are penal legions, my friend. The tattoo at the top of your arm, they can read it. You have the scar on your wrist where the machine makes your blood mad.’

  Kep shrugged and held up his hand. Von Klas could see the scar where a frenzon dispenser had once been implanted. ‘Guilty. I am from the First Penal Legion.’

  ‘The First?’ Rahimzadeh said with a hint of awe in his voice. ‘The Big One?’

  ‘What’s your crime?’ asked von Klas, his words straining as Scleros removed the last of the eldar shrapnel.

  ‘Heresy. Third class. Standard practice – if eldar pirates show up you feed them the penal legion. They get their slaves, the Imperium ditches a few more scum, everyone’s happy.’

  The bruise-coloured clouds above had coagulated. Large, filthy grey raindrops started to fall, grey with pollutants. Kep and the Tallarn ran, hunched, into a corner of the old cathedral, where some of the roof remained and there was cover.

  Von Klas looked round at Scleros, the remaining soldier. The lexmechanic, as he expected, had no expression. ‘You had the surgery?’

  The thick rain sent strange trails across the circuitry on Scleros’s face. ‘Emotional repression protocol, sir. It allows me to deal with information of an ideologically sensitive nature.’

  ‘Thought so. Scleros, you realise that we’re never going to get off this planet, don’t you?’

  ‘I was unable to understand how we could escape through a spaceport. We would not be able to use a spacecraft, even if we were able to understand eldar technology. We would be shot down. We can not escape this place.’

  ‘I trust you not to tell the men. This mission’s objective does not allow for our survival.’

  Scleros held out a hand and let a little of the rain collect in his palm. It swam with grey trails of impurity. ‘We should get out of the rain. This could infect us.’

  The two headed for shelter, while all around them, the soul of Commorragh seethed for their blood.

  SYBARITE LAEVEQ GAZED down from the gantry at the immense metallic beast, powered by the exertions of the many hundreds of deliriously emaciated human slaves that were chained to its p
neumatic limbs. Great clouds of acrid smoke and steam from the huge cauldron of molten metal obscured their faces, and Laeveq felt as if he were striding in the clouds, a god looking down upon the wretches who both feared him and needed him to survive.

  The eldar guard watched as another of them fell, limbs flopping loose as the clanking, screeching steel mill machinery carried on without it, head snapping back and forth as the machinery threw it about blindly. Soon Laeveq’s eldar would go onto the factory floor and take away the battered corpse and replaced it with another faceless barbarian.

  ‘Sybarite Laeveq.’ a hasty voice came through his communicator. ‘A problem has presented itself.’

  ‘Elaborate, Xaron.’

  ‘It’s Kytellias. She didn’t call in on her patrol so we went to find her. Her throat had been slit, ear to ear. Very pretty. Very clean.’

  Laeveq cursed his fortune. ‘Fugitives. Bring every armed eldar to me, on the gantry above the main hall. We will sweep this entire factory and disembowel them on top of the machinery so all these brute animals will see the cost of denial.’

  ‘It may not be that simple, sybarite. Lady Yae has sent word of dangerous escaped arena slaves.’

  ‘Then we will take much reward for bringing them in. Send everyone here. Is that understood?’

  There was no answer. A dim static crackled where the warrior’s voice should have been.

  ‘I said, “Is that understood?” Xaron?’

  Nothing. Laeveq looked around him at the web of gantries spanning the great space of the main factory hall. Through the billowing sheets of steam, he could see nothing. He felt suddenly alone.

  When Laeveq caught sight of the human figure running towards his position along the gantry, he was sure he could take him. It was a tall and strong man, to be sure, with hair cut close and a muscled torso riven with many old scars. It had found a scissorhand and a stinger pistol from somewhere, too, but it would not be skilled with them.

  Laeveq whipped out his own splinter pistol and took pleasure in the aiming, fancying he could take the animal in the lower abdomen, and watch it squeal in bestial pain before taking its head.