Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  ‘It cries out for blood. And there is never enough.’

  The Luna Wolf turned away, thinking. ‘How many times?’

  ‘Alotros is one of several that I am certain of. There may have been others who perished in battle without note of it.’

  ‘A handful, in two hundred years, from a Legion of one hundred and twenty thousand?’ Horus folded his armoured gauntlets together. ‘How can you be sure of–’

  Sanguinius held up his hand. ‘I am sure,’ he said gravely. ‘And the incidences are coming closer together. I fear that, in time, it will grow to encompass every one of my sons. In my meditation, I have seen such… possibilities.’

  His brother waited for him to continue. Each of the primarchs were touched by their father’s preternatural gifts in a different way, and for Sanguinius, part of that legacy was a certain kind of sight. A hazy, indefinite sense of foreknowledge.

  ‘The story is always the same,’ he went on. ‘A warrior in the throes of battle succumbs to a rage that builds and builds until his reason is lost. His humanity is stripped away until only a feral core remains. He kills and kills, seeks blood and more blood.’ He paled as he spoke. ‘And at the end, at the very worst of it, he loses every last piece of himself.’

  ‘Until death is a kindness.’ Horus nodded again. ‘Brother… I understand now. How long have you known?’

  Strangely, as Sanguinius had given voice to the words he felt the load upon him lighten, as if the act of confiding in Horus had indeed lessened his burden. ‘I have kept this from our father and brothers for several years. I am searching for a solution. Some among my sons have a measure of the truth. They are united with me in finding a way of undoing this flaw.’ His jaw stiffened. ‘My flaw.’

  ‘Brother…’ Horus began, framing his words.

  Sanguinius shook his head. ‘Don’t say it. You think that I blame myself for something I have no control over, but I do not agree. This is my legacy and I must account for it. A primarch…’ He faltered over the words, his voice thick with emotion.

  ‘A primarch is father to his Legion,’ said Horus, completing the thought for him. ‘I will not disagree or try to convince you otherwise.’ He paused again. ‘Who else is aware of the full dimensions of this?’ Horus glanced towards the entrance of the fallen empath-chapel.

  ‘Azkaellon, Captain Raldoron, my Master Apothecary on Baal… and a few others.’

  When Horus spoke again, his voice was low. ‘Why in Terra’s name did you not ask for help?’

  Sanguinius met his gaze. ‘Tell me, Horus. What is it that you are most afraid of?’

  The demand took the other primarch off-guard, and for a moment, the Luna Wolf was on the verge of dismissing the question; then his expression shifted and he gave the brutally truthful answer. ‘Falling short. Of failing my Legion, my Imperium… my Emperor.’

  ‘Something each of his sons shares, even if many of us would never have the courage to admit it.’ Sanguinius walked away, the shadows lengthening around him. ‘I could not speak of this to any of the others. You know as well as I do that it would diminish my Legion. Some of our brothers would see it as weakness and seek to turn this truth against me.’ He grimaced. ‘Alpharius, Lorgar… They would not be generous.’

  ‘But why have you kept this from father? If any living being could know the key to it, it would be him!’

  Sanguinius rounded on Horus, his seraphic features hardening. ‘You know the reason!’ he answered with a snarl. ‘I will not be responsible for the erasure of the Blood Angels from Imperial history. I will not have a third empty plinth beneath the roof of the Hegemon as my Legion’s only memorial!’

  Horus’s eyes widened. ‘It would not come to that.’

  Sanguinius shook his head once more. ‘I cannot take the risk. The Emperor has concerns that go far beyond the needs of his individual sons. You know that is so.’ He frowned. ‘We all know that is so.’

  Silence fell again, broken only by the hollow wind pulling at the ruined walls of the temple and the distant crash of metal as another nephilim praise-tower was cut down.

  Then, with grim finality, Horus offered his hand to the Angel. ‘I swore to you I would say nothing of this. I will keep that promise for as long as you wish me to.’

  Sanguinius accepted the gesture, their vambraces clanking together as they shook hands in the old pre-Unity fashion, palms grasping each other’s wrists. ‘I trust no one more than you, Horus,’ he said. ‘Your solidarity means more than I can express.’

  ‘I will do all I can to help you deal with this matter,’ said the Luna Wolf. ‘However long it takes.’

  Raldoron barely covered his shock when not one, but two primarchs exited the ruined building. Without a word to any of the assembled warriors, Sanguinius and Horus walked away across the silver sands, each turning from the other to make for the lines of their Legions’ forces.

  At his side, Azkaellon was as rigid as a statue, and the First Captain had no doubt that the leader of the Sanguinary Guard was silently furious. Horus’s appearance could only mean one thing. He knew.

  Sensing his scrutiny, Azkaellon shot Raldoron a hard look. ‘Your warriors are ineffective.’

  ‘Watch your damned tone, bodyguard.’ The captain’s answer came back through gritted teeth. He pointed out beyond the ring of his troops. ‘Your second-in-command is slinking around out there, and he didn’t catch the primarch either.’

  ‘Zuriel will be reprimanded for his error, have no doubt of that.’

  Raldoron didn’t. Azkaellon was so severe in his manner that sometimes it seemed he was utterly inflexible on anything. It was a frequent cause of friction between the warriors of the First Company and the Sanguinary Guard. Raldoron’s fluid, adaptable command style was at odds with Azkaellon’s aloof, rigid comportment, and the two of them reflected that down to the bone.

  ‘I have work to do,’ said the Guard Commander, striding away from the ruins. ‘I hope I can leave the rest of the details to you without fear of further error.’ Before Raldoron could retort, the flight pack on Azkaellon’s back spat flame and his sculpted wings unfurled. In a flash of gold, the warrior was gone.

  The First Captain’s grimace deepened and he dismissed his warriors with a sharp gesture. He gave one of them a glare. ‘Where is the Apothecary? I called for a savant an hour ago!’

  ‘Here, lord,’ said a voice behind him.

  Raldoron turned and found a legionary marching towards him across the rubble-strewn square, emerging from the smoke. The warrior’s crimson armour bore the white trim of a sanctioned Legion medicae, and from his battle plate hung narthecium packs, drug flasks and other flesh-cutter’s tools. His left gauntlet was heavily modified from the standard Mark II Crusade-pattern unit, bulky with the protruding barrel of a reductor. He wore the badge of the Prime Helix and there was a skull sigil on the brow of his helmet showing his status as an Apothecae Minoris, the most junior rank. A labour-servitor ambled after him, listing as it clumped over the uneven ground. The captain studied the Apothecary; he would have preferred a veteran to assist in this matter, but to re-task a more seasoned officer from their duties would have drawn undue attention.

  The new arrival gave a salute. ‘Reporting as ordered.’ He gave no sign of having witnessed the departure of the two primarchs, which was just as well. Fewer questions for him to dwell upon, thought the captain.

  ‘You will follow me,’ ordered Raldoron, ‘and say nothing.’

  They entered the fallen chapel and the Apothecary activated the illuminator mounted on his backpack. The cold ray of white light searched the chamber, picking out thousands of motes of rock dust suspended in the heavy air, before shimmering off the great liquid pool in the slumped spaces of the nave. Raldoron saw the beam venture towards the shadowed forms of the dead and he called out, dragging the young Apothecary’s attention and the light to the podium where Alotros’s body lay. The captain grimly stripped the dead battle-brother’s armour of all company marks and personal icons,
until there was nothing to show who this warrior might have been or where he had served.

  ‘The progenoid glands,’ said the captain. ‘Remove them.’

  There was a moment of hesitation on the part of the other Blood Angel, but the faceless helmet showed no expression, and soon he was at work. The reductor gave a high-pitched buzz as it bit through exposed flesh, the tip digging into the corpse before it splayed open and snipped out the gene-rich knots of meat. Each progenoid was a collection of DNA metadata expressed in organic form, the raw code of the Blood Angels physiognomy rendered as flesh; similar organs were implanted in every legionary, each tailored to the particular traits and quirks of their brotherhood. They were the most precious resource of a Space Marine Legion, for each progenoid recovered from a fallen warrior would find new life in the body of the next generation of recruits. In that way, they would maintain a genetic lineage with those who came before them and those who would come after, as the organs manifested within them.

  The Apothecary reverently placed Alotros’s gene-seed in a hermetic capsule, but before he could drop it into a seal-pouch at his hip, Captain Raldoron reached out and took it from him.

  ‘What is your name, Apothecary?’ asked the officer, forestalling any reaction.

  ‘Meros, sir. Of the Ninth Company.’

  ‘Captain Furio’s command.’ He nodded. ‘A fine warrior. A company of regard.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. But–’

  Raldoron went on as if Meros had not spoken. ‘The men of the Ninth know how to follow orders. So I have no doubt you will follow this one.’ He fixed the young warrior with a steady glare. ‘Never speak of this moment. You and I were never here.’ He held up the capsule. ‘This does not exist. Say it.’

  Meros hesitated again, then spoke. ‘You and I were never here. That does not exist.’

  ‘This is our liege lord’s wish.’

  The other Blood Angel saluted again. ‘So ordered.’ He backed away a step as Raldoron beckoned the servitor to come forwards, making ready to gather up the corpse.

  But before the machine-slave moved in to do his bidding, the First Captain removed an object from his belt pack. It was a slab of inkstone from the night deserts of Baal Primus, and with quick motions, Raldoron passed it over the dead warrior’s armour, blotting out the crimson with a layer of glistening, smoky black. The action had a strange, ritual quality to it, a finality that deadened everything. However this battle-brother had met his end, it was in a manner that would be forever lost to the Legion’s chronicles.

  The captain whispered something, and Meros barely heard him.

  ‘Rest, brother,’ he told the fallen warrior. ‘You are in the company of death. I hope you find peace there.’

  ONE

  Rocks and Shoals

  Silent Weapon

  A Favour

  Kano watched the stones fall through the dark towards him, looming larger and larger through the armourglass of the viewport. Pinnacles of rock larger than mountains wheeled and turned in the vacuum, surrounded by shaggy clouds of smaller particles that varied from the size of starship hulls to specks of dust. Tiny flakes of grit rattled off the hull of the Pugio-class boarding transport as it rumbled its way closer to their target, and close by he could see other craft of the same design moving in loose formation. Trailing behind were a squadron of Caestus assault rams, the thrusters of the winged bludgeons flaring bright yellow as they manoeuvred for terminal approach.

  Their crimson hulls caught the cold and distant light of the bloated blue supergiant many light-seconds away across the vast span of the Kayvas Belt. What had once been a system of several rocky planets was now nothing but a colossal aggregation of asteroids. Some great cosmic cataclysm had shattered the planets aeons ago, and strewn their remains in the plane of an accretion disc hundreds of millions of kilometres across. Knots of gravitation around the biggest, continent-sized planetoids struggled to gather enough mass to reform, eternally failing. Kayvas was doomed to never evolve beyond rubble and debris. Its chaotic, unmappable environs made it an ideal hiding place for those too foolish or too desperate to be discouraged by unpredictable gravitic tides and constant asteroidal collisions.

  The orks had made this place their refuge. Many tribes of the greenskin xenos, scattered and leaderless after the hammerblow they suffered at Ullanor, had fled to the points of the etheric compass – and many had come to rest in the Kayvas Belt, where they carved new outposts out of the drifting, mineral-rich rocks, licked their wounds and re-armed.

  The aliens had already begun to put their heads above the parapet, striking out at nearby Imperial systems and newly compliant daughter colonies, and it was the duty of the Legiones Astartes to reinforce the lesson of Ullanor again. Over and over if need be, to exterminate every last one of the marauding, verminous savages.

  The Alpha Legion had tracked them to their lair and petitioned Horus for the reinforcements required to prosecute their plan of annihilation, but after the war at the world called Murder and the disastrous engagement with the civilisation known as the Interex, the Luna Wolves had been reluctant to commit ships to Alpharius’s campaign.

  In the end, it was the Blood Angels who agreed to assist their cousins in the XX Legion, with Sanguinius himself marshalling a sizable intervention to support the ships of the 88th Expeditionary Fleet. The mission, Alpharius said, would be five years in execution. The Angel rejected that statement and promised it would be over in one, committing vessels from every active Blood Angels expedition to the cause.

  Sanguinius had been right – more or less. Just over thirteen months after the commencement of the Kayvas initiative, the orks were almost totally annihilated, but like animals backed into a corner they were fighting harder than they ever had before, and the battles came thick and fast. Kano struggled to remember a day over the past few weeks when he had not heard the skirl of alert sirens and the rumble of massive guns through the deck of the Red Tear, the Legion’s flagship battle-barge.

  But if he were to be truthful, he would admit that this campaign had been unsatisfactory from the very start. Indeed, many among his brothers lacked Kano’s circumspect nature and had said so openly, and often. The game was the Alpha Legion’s, so in deference to them the Blood Angels had followed their lead. But the promise of a glorious battle became a very different kind of engagement.

  The 88th Expeditionary Fleet took their warships into the Kayvas Belt and vanished from sensors, leaving the Blood Angels flotilla at the edge of the system to wait; and soon it was clear that the mission Alpharius had been so eager to secure support for was little more than picket duty.

  First one at a time, then in squadrons and finally in fleets, the orks began to flee from Kayvas. Each time they bolted for open space beyond the mass shadow of the supergiant sun and asteroid belt, the Blood Angels were waiting for them. Starships and ork cruisers engaged in deadly games of cat-and-mouse that lasted for weeks on end, threading in and out of the dense dust clouds at the periphery of the system, mercilessly hunting each other. Mighty vessels clashed again and again, but months of protracted ship-to-ship engagements and naval warfare made the sons of Baal restless. They were bred for battles where they could face their foes, not ranged conflicts conducted over huge spans of empty vacuum.

  The chance to fight blade-to-blade did come, eventually. The behaviour patterns of the ork crews began to change. They eschewed what little animal cunning they had and made mistakes. Instead of showing the brutish slyness they were known for, the xenos exhibited conduct that more closely resembled panic. They would take chances, running the gauntlet of the Blood Angels blockade when the odds were stacked against them. It was almost as if there were something at their backs that they feared far more than the guns of Sanguinius’s Legion.

  Over and over, the orks were driven into the teeth of the Blood Angels, like rats fleeing a sinking ship. They fought with great violence, even attempting doomed tactics such as direct assaults on Legion starships or the initiation o
f warp engines while still deep within the gravimetric danger zone. The outer edges of the belt were littered with the corpses of countless ork ships, many of them left to smoulder like burning rags as their dying power cores bled out volatile streams of plasmatic gas.

  No one knew what the Alpha Legion had done to make the orks run. Kano was adjutant to Captain Raldoron, and so often in a position to hear fragments of the information that passed though the highest levels of the Blood Angels command structure, but even he knew little. All that was certain was that the Alpha Legion had gone dark, only rising to send regular communiqués out to the blockade fleet that contained little more than a message to ‘maintain the line’. The handful of orks that were captured alive gave incomprehensible answers under interrogation that muddied the waters still further. As the fleet stood and held the barricade, patrols scanning deep into the belt picked up all manner of hectic alien transmissions, and scry-sensors showed definite evidence of ork-versus-ork battles taking place closer to the blue sun. Then, several months into the campaign, ships in the spinward quadrant detected the destruction of a massive, moon-sized planetesimal by unknown means. Sanguinius himself sent queries to the 88th and the response was that the event was ‘of no concern’.

  Finally, the primarch tired of Alpharius’s evasive manner and sent a frigate in past the outer marker, in defiance of the rules of engagement the two Legions had agreed upon. When the frigate returned weeks later, the crew reported that they had come across no signs of their allies, only the wrecks of ork vessels and the bodies of dead aliens. The 88th Expeditionary Fleet comprised hundreds of warships, and yet no trace of them was sighted.

  Now the tempo of the Kayvas campaign was reaching a terminal pitch. The final remnants of the ork forces were taking flight from the belt in a disordered exodus, and perishing in the flashes of lance cannons and torpedo barrages as they crossed the sentry line. At last, Alpha Legion ships were appearing at the very edge of scanning range, apparently moving in a wall to herd the enemy towards the fringes of the system.