War Without End

by Various

  I had time to think on that while I waited in the brig, imprisoned there amongst the others who had been too slow to agree or too forthright to cover their doubts. Looking back, I was furious with myself. How had I ever been so naïve to think that I could foster rebellion in that moment? I am no eloquent speaker who could rally men with a stirring speech. I was just a fool who disagreed openly, and paid for it.

  They were going to execute us. That was part of the new orders, but they found it hard to carry out the command. I think that was the last part of whatever resistance they had, slowly withering and dying beneath the Warmaster’s eclipse.

  At first I was frustrated and impotent with my anger. I cursed them all a hundred times for their weakness and trite duplicity, but eventually that rage was spent and I could do nothing but ruminate. Don’t assume that I came to forgive my former squad mates – far from it – but I did come to understand them.

  The young lieutenant who was the son of a great general, he who was always a friend to the line-officers like me, who never wore his braids with arrogance but managed to be one of the common men even though he was not like the rest of us – he said he would oppose, and yet he did not. Of all of us, he had the best chance to rally the men, but he kept his silence. He had so very much to lose, after all. He would have fallen so far.

  The braggart sharpshooter who always had the answer to any question, cocksure and handsome, never fazed by any challenge or upset. He carried himself with such utter confidence that I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t slice through any draconian edict like a sword point. He stood meekly, becoming a different, smaller man when the order came.

  And then the bluff sergeant who always raged louder than I ever could, her jacket scarred by the number of times her rank had been broken and then earned anew. Her voice was strongest by any lights, but silent too in that moment. She was a crèche-mother, with two battle orphans as her charges, and I think she saw their faces that day, feared how life would go for them if she were gone.

  It wasn’t hard for my comrades to find an excuse to hate me. By accident of birth, I had already given it to them. A handful amongst the platoon – the sergeant and sharpshooter included – knew I had a touch of the sight on me. In combat, you come to learn such things from the soldiers who fight alongside you, whether you want to or not. Before, I had seemed like a lucky charm to them, some of the men even coming to me, secretive and hushed, to ask for a look-see over their aura. I couldn’t work the gift like my mother had, but I tried, and it had been enough. In return, they had kept my secret from the Black Ships.

  But now it was the reason to disown me. Someone whispered the word ‘witch’, and I knew that I would be executed first. All my life I had lived with the fear that the Silent Sisterhood would come to spirit me away, but now I saw that death would be the more likely outcome.

  That night, I escaped the stockade with six others, and we found the resistance a day or two later.

  ‘You want to kill me,’ he said. There was no judgement in the words.

  ‘Yes.’ I could not, would not, lie. ‘Your kind brought horrors to my world. You destroyed everything I–’

  I ran out of energy, and clutched the lasrifle to my chest. A boiling, churning hatred rose through me, and it made me feel strangely free.

  The warrior smiled thinly. ‘Not I, Ruafe Hecane. Those who did those things are oath-breakers, and my brothers no more.’ He glanced at Breng. ‘You. You know ship-tech, yes? Your skills are needed.’ He walked back into the command centre and we followed him.

  The dead were everywhere here, suffocated by the decompression. I saw where a viewport had been blown out, now made safe by a blast shutter. Too slow to save the bridge crew, it seemed.

  Out of the windows there were alien stars and infinite blackness. Dallos’s cards had played true after all – our ship was alone.

  The legionary directed Breng to work at the drive control. ‘Your vessel suffered damage in warp transit. The rest of the convoy left you here, becalmed. I was summoned to see you complete the rest of your voyage.’ Again, there was the smile. ‘This ship carries precious cargo. I would warrant that none aboard know just how important you are.’

  ‘We’re just soldiers,’ offered Yao. ‘Soldiers and whelps. Fodder for the guns and cubs to be culled.’

  A shadow passed over the face of the Thousand Son. ‘Never say that. No one who fights in the Emperor’s name is without worth.’

  I glared at him. ‘The sons of Magnus march with Horus. I saw it. I saw the fiends and the freaks that your brethren conjured, the–’

  ‘Daemons?’ His utterance of the word seemed to instantly drain all heat from the chamber. ‘Yes, you saw those things. All of you have seen them.’ He shook his head, regretfully. ‘Do you not yet understand, soldier? You see patterns. Can you not see this one?’ He pointed with the silver staff, taking in all of the men. ‘Each of you has the beginning of a greatness. You may call it a sight, or a gift, even a curse.’ He walked forward and deftly plucked Dallos’s cards from the man’s trembling hands. ‘You know the touch of the warp. This is what makes you valuable.’ He glanced at Zartine. ‘That, and one other attribute.’

  ‘We have all seen them,’ said Yao. ‘The… horrors.’

  ‘Every wounded man on this ship has,’ said the warrior. ‘Why else do you fear sleep? But that fear can be taken from you, in time.’

  Breng stood up, nodding to the drive console to show he had done all that he could. ‘Ready.’

  ‘The Navigators still live, safe in their isolation.’ The legionary pointed out toward the ship’s bow. ‘We will set a course. The Regent of Terra, Lord Malcador himself, has need of those aboard this ship. He prepares, and you will all be part of his design. You… and the children waiting below.’

  ‘How?’ I asked, even as the pressure of an answer built itself in my mind’s eye. ‘What good are broken soldiers and war orphans to the Sigillite?’

  ‘Your wounds will be healed. Those fit enough, young enough to bear the glory, may aspire to see their bodies remade, as I once did.’ He touched his chest. ‘You… we can be reborn in new purpose.’

  ‘But why us?’ asked Dallos, his hands knitting.

  ‘You know why,’ said the legionary, his gaze returning to me.

  I don’t know if the words that came next were from some place in my own thoughts, or if the Thousand Son made me speak them for him, but they were true and undeniable. ‘Horus has brought a new kind of war to the galaxy. Bolters and lasguns won’t be enough to end it. A different kind of weapon is needed.’

  ‘Aye.’ The great figure nodded gravely. ‘And those who do not perish in the tempering will be those weapons. You, and hundreds of others – lost child, common man and legionary alike, gathered in silence and secreted aboard ships like this one. Each soul in this room, aboard this vessel, has been declared dead. The lives you lived before this are as dust. Malcador has commanded this. So shall it be.’

  Zartine was pale. ‘Wh-where are we going?’

  The legionary strode up to the navigation controls and laid his great hands upon them. ‘A moon orbiting a ringed world, in the light of Great Sol itself. A place called Titan.’

  In all things, readiness is the watchword. Always be prepared to act at a moment’s notice. Always be within a hand’s span of your weapon. Always be ready to make the kill if the prospect presents itself; but be certain of the opportunity. You will only have a moment to make that decision.

  It must be flawless.

  The pistol was much heavier than he remembered, in his rough, scarred hand. That was a strange thing to consider. He was intimate with this angular, unadorned gun in such subtle ways. He could tell exactly how many rounds were loaded by weight alone. There were six: five in the magazine and one in the chamber. There should have only been five – that was how his instructors trained him and that was the rote command the
y had taught. The extra round unbalanced the weapon, created unnecessary wear on the mechanism. They would say that there was no need for more than five shots. Who would require more than one?

  But they were teachers who were long since gone from the war zones of the galaxy, and they forgot that one extra bullet might be the line between living and dy–

  He was drifting. His thoughts were slipping into old memories and trivial minutiae. This was happening too often. Shake it off. He fought to stay in the here and the now. To maintain his focus.

  The gun, then. And the target towards which it aimed.

  Across the ragged, uneven floor of the hide, the little man was pressed as much as was humanly possible into the far corner. Hands with long, pallid fingers splayed over the metal pallets made into walls, knees bending and cowering on the scrap iron deck. Head bobbing. Those were tears rolling down the dirt-streaked face.

  A word. ‘Please…’ Then others. ‘Why would you do this now? After all this time, you want to end me? I thought we had… You and I…’

  ‘An understanding?’ He plucked the end of the sentence from the air – or was it the whispers that told him what to say? ‘You think you know me?’ His voice was coarse and alien in his own ears, the sound of it like the action of a device long out of use. ‘You do not know me.’

  ‘We kept each other alive!’ shouted the little man, finding something close to defiance.

  What does that mean? The words did not seem to connect to anything. His free hand, the one webbed with void burns, came up and ran over his face, catching in his oily beard and matted hair.

  It was not easy. The thing that he knew best, the way to pull the trigger and to kill clean and fast, that pushed at him to be done. He had no calendar to reckon how long it had been since he last took a life.

  He wanted to do it. He wanted the gunshot’s roar and the sweet silence afterwards. Not just because he feared that otherwise he might forget the taste of those things, but also because it was required. It is what had to be done to set the last kill – the greatest kill, the unforgotten mission – into motion.

  As he saw the shape of that deed in his thoughts, he could not help but look over his shoulder to the other wall of the hide, where his liberation waited wrapped in oilcloth and darkness.

  And so he took aim, putting aside the bits of broken memory that accreted in his thoughts.

  What are our tools? Rifle. Pistol. Mask. Suit. Cloak. What is not on that list? What do you carve from the landscape of the kill? What is the tool that is always the same but always unique? The hide. Plan as much as you can, but you will never really know the hide until you come to construct it at the site. Your hide may be as ephemeral as mist or as solid as stone. But if it is found wanting, then it will be your grave marker.

  What was left of the medicae kit was spent on healing the wounds from the serpent bites and bringing him back to some semblance of stability. He had lost much in the brief, brutal engagement with the foul bilge-predators, including the belt packs that contained his chronometer and data-slate, his primary ammunition pouch, the fluid purifier module and, worst of all, every last wrapper of freeze-dried rations.

  In the iron canyons where he found himself, there was nothing human-scale for him to investigate, no sign of habitat quads or barracks where he could conceivably have stolen some kind of sustenance. On a planet, he might have dug for grubs or found a river. Here, inside the endless metal spaces of this gargantuan starship, there was nothing of nature to plunder.

  Or so one might have thought at first.

  Unable to reckon the passing of ship-days and ship-nights by anything other than his own guesswork, he ventured onwards in fits and starts from the point where he had boarded, eventually leaving it far behind.

  After the serpent attack he had briefly returned to the escape pod’s impact point, but found it subsumed under a gelatinous mass of metallic bio-foam where the vessel’s auto reactive systems had plugged the hull breach. Rather than remain in the area should servitors be sent to investigate the penetration, he hiked in the opposite direction for what felt like hours. The mechanical, repeating motion of that helped to calm his mind and make the vivid poison-dreams seem less overwhelming. He would not begin to think of it as a vision until much later.

  But in time he came to the canyon that could not be crossed, and although he would have never admitted it, he felt a horrible kind of fear as the view across the black metal abyss came into synchrony with the ghost images that he had seen in the dream.

  He stood on a narrow service walkway that had no handrail, following the metal cliff’s edge into infinity. The canyon itself might have run the entire length of the ship for all he knew – a long, echoing hollow buried in the deep bones of the great vessel. To the fore and aft, the chasm vanished into a distant orange glow of working machinery and churning fuel smoke. Looking up and down, there was only unfathomed darkness and, from the vantage where he stood, he hawked up phlegm and spat it out into the void. Cables strung along the length of the great gulf rattled and sang as trains of tethered container cars rolled back and forth below him, pennants of rich chemical smog billowing up from cargos of icy coolant slurry bound for the massive, city-sized reactor cores. Things that he first took to be great patches of rust and discolouration on the sheer iron crags resolved into odd patterns that were hideously familiar.

  Instead, he unwrapped the rifle with a lover’s delicacy and peered through the compact viewscope to scry the distance.

  His hands were shaking a little. Laser rangers picked out platforms jutting from the walls on either side, each made from a patchwork of metal sheets the size of a hab-block. Rarely, he saw bridges that spanned the full width of the canyon, but the nearest was hundreds of metres above and seamlessly welded into the walls. Without a crawler rig or mag-boots he had no hope of reaching it.

  Part of him wanted to put the rifle down and not to look any more. It was the effect of what he had seen when the venom was in him, the strange broken scenes that he had thought were just creations of his temporary fever. He was seeing them again now, for real. The chasm. The iron walls. The bridges and the–

  The dream-fear returned when the scope settled on the dais. There it was, as real as death, on the far side of the canyon. One-point-five-three-three kilometres away by reckoning of the rangefinder’s unblinking eye. An ornate, brassy observation platform upon which a ship’s commander might briefly alight upon a tour of the vessel’s lower decks.

  He had glimpsed it in the poison-dream and imagined standing upon it. In the storm of unreal images, he had turned as a great shadow fell across him and looked up at a dark figure towering high: a war god wrought of adamantium and black gold. Magnificent, and malignant.

  Horus. He has stood there. He will stand there.

  The tremors in his hands were such that he almost lost his grip on his precious, precious rifle, near to panic as the thought of seeing it tumble away into the dark crackled through him. He reeled back on the gantry, clutching the weapon to him.

  This was the moment when he started to believe that the nightmare the serpent venom had given him might not be a nightmare at all. Just for the briefest of instants, mind. The thought rose to the surface of his consciousness, then dropped away again.

  The need to act, to feel that he was doing something of worth, came next. Perhaps if he had stopped and asked himself why he did these things, the narrative that followed would have taken a different path. But he did not.

  A short distance down the service gantry was the skeleton of some sort of watchtower – just the base of it, jutting out over the abyss, ending in broken-tooth pieces of unfinished girders and half-welded panels. Left incomplete by some long-dead shipwright perhaps, or deemed useless in a revision of the warship’s designs centuries ago when the keel was still being laid… It mattered only that it could form the framework for a hide where he could perch and look
towards the distant brass dais.

  Over the next few increments – he decided to call them ‘days’ – he foraged pieces of scrap metal from a long-forgotten waste buffer and made a deck of sorts to lie upon, and walls behind which he could be concealed. In the shadows beneath the broken framework there were damp, rusty spaces where brackish moisture gathered, and in those he set up dew-catchers. The damp drew other things too, like fat crawling insects and doughy, spade-like blades of fungal growth that did not sicken him when he ate them.

  Truth be told, he had made camp in worse places than this, but never so deep in the enemy’s breast. He did not allow himself to think of such things as exit vectors and post-strike scenarios; to do so would be a delusion.

  This would be his last mission… but then he had never expected to live this long.

  If a man expects to die, hopes, knows that it will happen… Is he still really alive? If you have surrendered to such a thing, can you ever come back from it?

  Would you ever wish to?

  He pushed the troubling thought aside and started to build a plan of action.

  Of those whom you encounter as you execute your duty, there will only be two kinds of souls: Targets and Collaterals. Never forget that the latter can become the former with a word, a deed, a thought. The reverse is never so.

  The mind could play tricks down here.

  There were whispers in every passing moment at the old starship’s echoing core. Moans and whimperings of air forced through fractures in deck metal or over the surface of unseated plating. Vessels of this size frequently had their own microclimates, their mass so great that systems of wind and pressure came into play as hatches opened and closed, even as the throngs of their crews breathed in and out. On some craft, there might even be small clouds or rainfall. A fanciful thing.