Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  Kano jerked a finger at the veteran and one of his warriors came to the sergeant’s aid. ‘Captain!’ he called into his vox, looking away. ‘Status?’

  Through gaps in the wall of fallen stone he could see the flash of gunfire, hear the snarl of orks in their melee. Raldoron’s voice came back across his helmet speakers in tight chugs of breath. ‘Don’t wait for us, Kano! Get to the bridge!’

  He nodded; it would take several minutes to shift enough of the fallen debris to get through to where they stood, and that was time they could ill-afford to spend.

  Kano turned back to Orexis. ‘Sergeant, can you run?’

  ‘Yes,’ spat the veteran, but then he took a heavy step and faltered, hissing in deep pain. ‘Blood damn it! No.’

  Kano looked at the legionary closest to Orexis. ‘Help him.’ Then he beckoned to the other pair of Space Marines who stood nearby, two Baalites named Cador and Racine. ‘Come, we must not tarry.’

  More of the scrap-iron auto-turrets were waiting for the three Blood Angels at the terminus of the corridor, a line of them jerking the snouts of their guns back and forth on clockwork armatures. Cador bore a heavy bolter that made light work of them, sending a salvo of high-calibre rounds into the units that blew them apart in balls of red flame.

  Racine, armed with a standard bolter like Kano, came with him to the hatch that led into the command ship’s bridge deck, and together they hauled the door open just enough to admit a handful of blind grenades. Kano slammed the hatch shut again with the flat of his back and listened for the discharge. Then he had it open again and the three Space Marines burst into the nerve centre of the massive ork warship.

  They found it abandoned.

  ‘Throne’s sake…’ grimaced Cador, sweeping his big gun back and forth. ‘Where are the blighted things?’

  Kano advanced, finding a few ork corpses slumped on the deck plates or fallen over their clanking consoles. ‘All dead,’ he began, pulling one up by a wiry topknot on its scalp. ‘But let’s not be fooled again.’ He had his combat blade out and he stabbed the dead ork in the eye. It slid off the cutting edge without reacting. ‘Check them all, to be sure.’

  Racine was already doing the grisly deed, methodically knifing each corpse, scanning for booby-traps and the like. ‘Same as out in the passage. They killed each other.’

  Kano frowned, looking around the bridge compartment. The question as to why the aliens had gone on a fratricidal rampage would have to wait; even with his limited technological acumen, Kano could tell from the flickering gauges and livid lights across the control panels that the ork ship was about to discharge a great amount of power. That could only mean that the warp gate would soon be created. He took that on, realising what it meant – the other units had not been able to neutralise the reactors or engines. It was up to the three of them to stop the escape of the alien vessel.

  ‘We’re the only ones to make it up here?’ Racine asked, his thoughts paralleling those of the adjutant. ‘What about the other squads?’

  ‘Might be bogged down,’ ventured Cador. Other units deposited on the opposite side of the tower structure by their boarding craft would have been making their way to the same target point, and if the orks had left sentry turrets and set ambushes for Raldoron’s troops, it stood to reason their battle-brothers would have run across the same obstacles elsewhere on the ship. ‘We made it here first. We’ll remind them of that back on the Tear when this sorry business is all behind us.’

  Kano listened absently. The bridge was a circular, arena-like space with a podium in the centre, raised high so that any ork serving as its commander would be able to look down upon those ranked below it and bellow out orders as needed. Workstations ripped from human ships and other pieces of cobbled-together technology ringed the chamber, cables snaking back and forth underfoot like the taproots of an overgrown tree; there were a number of other hatches like the one they had entered through, but all were locked shut. Finally, Kano spotted what he guessed had to be a command input, a low podium with a hololithic projection orb suspended above it. The sphere of light was filled with vectors and dots of light that resembled star clusters.

  He raised his bolter. The time for a subtle, nuanced approach to the mission had long passed. If in doubt, he assured himself, destroy it.

  His finger was tightening on the trigger when it happened again. The same faint, sickly sensation deep in his gullet, like a sip of soiled water; the same unwanted presence slipping over the surface of his consciousness, even as he tried to forget how to feel such things.

  Kano was so fixated on trying to banish the reaction that he was looking the wrong way when a sudden flare of emerald energy burst into life at the foot of the commander’s dais. The fouled air turned metallic and greasy with the discharge of warped energies, and from nothing came an ork that appeared to be a mutant cousin to those lying dead on the gore-streaked floor plates.

  It matched Kano’s height in full armour and its fanged skull was oddly misshapen. Sickly skin was drawn tight over its bones, but its sunken eyes blazed like golden embers, so bright that Kano couldn’t look directly at them. In the moment of hesitation before all hell broke loose, Kano saw the familiar phenomenon of psychic lightning dancing around the ork’s head. Little commas of light made a coruscating halo, and more motes of colour gathered at the creature’s hands, one of which held a tall copper staff.

  An orkish psyker; it seemed fanciful to conceive that the xenos brutes were anywhere near the mental complexity needed to engage with such extranormal powers, but the evidence was standing there before them. Through sheer force of mind, the alien had teleported itself into the bridge chamber. Perhaps it had been nearby in another compartment, telepathically scanning for an invader; it was of no importance. All that was required was to kill it.

  Cador opened up with the heavy bolter and his fusillade roared, blasting into the commander’s podium – but the ork wasn’t there any more, blurring across the bridge in an oozing flicker of warp-glow, too fast for the gunner to traverse his weapon. Racine had been caught with his bolter slung, the combat blade still in his mailed fist, and he feinted backwards, making space to go for the gun; but the ork was upon him.

  A fountainhead of green lightning erupted from the tip of the xeno-psyker’s metal staff, spilling out across the deck. The cascade rolled over the bodies of its dead comrades and the corpses twitched and writhed, almost as if the charge was trying to reanimate them. The wash of energy caught Racine and he snarled in agony, shocked rigid.

  Kano fired at the alien but it moved again, a blur like amber light refracted through a window streaked with rain. Then he felt it inside his head.

  What mental barriers he had were out of practice and slow to erect, and it wormed into him. Suddenly his nostrils were filled with a rancid shit-stink and he became dizzy. The ork psyker scrambled towards him, but then as quick as it had come, the mental invasion vanished as more heavy bolt shells sang through the air. Cador had his range and was bracketing the alien.

  Kano spun away, shaking his head to clear the ghost of the psychic assault, and he saw the ork answer Cador’s interruption with an attack of its own. A ray of bilious yellow fire burst from the ork’s eye sockets and swept the chamber like a searchlight, charring everything that fell beneath it. The psychic beam hit the Blood Angel and he was blasted backwards, the surface of his battle armour scorched from blood-red to soot-black.

  The bolter was in Kano’s hands and he pulled the trigger, unleashing a salvo of shots into the creature’s side. It hooted in pain and turned on him, the glow of its eyes dimming for a moment before blazing anew. The gun’s breech cycled open and locked, and Kano cursed inwardly; in the fog of confusion that came after the mind-strike upon him, he had lost track of the dwindling ammunition in his bolter’s clip, and now the weapon was dry.

  The alien raised the copper staff and gave a sing-song grunt, like a mantra, calling upon powers from the warp. Time slowed for Kano and he suddenly knew ex
actly, precisely, how the ork psyker was tapping into the mad telepathic churn of the immaterium. He could see it in his mind’s eye like a string of complex equations, or the stanzas of a poem. He knew how that power worked because he had experienced it himself, channelled it through his own fingers.

  And although it seemed like a lifetime ago, Kano knew with absolute certainty that he could do so again. His hands came up in a clawed fighting pose, the action trained into his marrow, and the alien saw it. The creature paused, and it knew it faced a being that understood.

  But then the air was shrieking with new bolter fire and the ork came apart under the force of a dozen guns. Kano spun about to see one of the other hatches hanging open and a squad of legionaries surging through it. Leading them was a figure in armour as dark as the void, face hidden behind a glowering skull-mask helm. He aimed with a short rod, the device tipped with a winged crest. ‘No trace!’ shouted a rough, rasping voice.

  Kano fell out of the line of fire and threw himself at his original objective – the command console. As he reached it he became aware of a bass rumble shaking him through his boots. The entire vessel was vibrating wildly as its power systems reached the terminal phase for translation into warp space.

  The Blood Angel didn’t hesitate, and he brought down his empty boltgun on the console, smashing the hololith projector, the controls, breaking it open to reveal crystalline circuitry within and an infinitely complex mesh of cross-connecting silver wires. Like a trip-hammer, Kano rained blow after blow on the machine until there was nothing but sparkling fragments and silence from the deck beneath his feet.

  After what seemed like an age, he turned away from the panel and found the warrior in black looming over him.

  The words that ground out of the skull-helm’s breather grille were not what Kano had expected.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ The tone was accusatory.

  He stiffened, defiance rising in his manner. ‘That black armour can only signify one thing. You are a Warden of the Legion.’

  The skull moved in a shallow nod. ‘Such is my burden and my honour.’

  Armoured fingers rose to remove the headgear, revealing a face like a block of carved marble, cold and pale. Hard eyes that knew little pity scanned Kano and the Blood Angel felt compelled to doff his helmet also. He resisted the urge to wipe the sheen of sweat from his dark skin. The other man’s comportment was already wearing on him.

  ‘I am Yason Annellus. Walk with me.’ It was a command, of that there was no doubt, and after a moment Kano obeyed, but he did so hesitantly. The post of ‘Warden’ was a relatively rare position among the Legion and the ranks of the men who held the office were open to interpretation. All that Kano could be sure of was that Annellus wore the laurels of a senior veteran embossed on his pauldrons and that, if nothing else, earned him a degree of respect.

  But only a degree, he reminded himself.

  Kano followed Annellus back through the second open hatch and into another wide corridor. He caught the odour of orkish blood and looked back, spotting the bodies of dozens of the dead aliens. The sorry remnants of another ambush, he guessed.

  Annellus rounded on him. ‘You are Mkani Kano, Baalite born of the Far Sear, legionary of the First Company.’

  ‘You know me?’

  ‘I know all of you.’

  Kano frowned at the strange emphasis on the Warden’s words, and a chill moved through him as he experienced the slow rise of understanding. ‘All of us?’ he echoed, working to maintain an even tone.

  Annellus placed the ornamental rod he carried in a skeletal holster at his hip. The device had a two-fold purpose: not only was it a mace-like power weapon, lethal in close combat, but it also served a ceremonial function. In the old tongue of Terra, the weapon was known as a crozius arcanum. It was the Warden’s badge of office, like the black armour, that set him eternally aside from his battle-brothers.

  The Wardens were the watchmen of the Blood Angels. In some ways they served as mentors for the younger legionaries, battlefield instructors and learned veterans who shared knowledge with the rest of their kindred; but they were also charged with sustaining coherence throughout the tens of thousands of warriors that filled the ranks of the IX Legion Astartes. That could mean anything from offering suggestions to a captain on a point of combat doctrine, to leading a ceremony of remembrance to the fallen. They were lore-keepers, counsellors, teachers. In the deep past, men who had served in similar roles in other militaries had been known as diaconus, zampol, chaplain or a dozen other names – some political, some religious, some secular. They existed outside the chain of command but still within its ranks, maintaining that most Imperial of ideals throughout the Legion; unity.

  And with that role came a sense of judgement.

  ‘How long has it been since the great conclave of Emperor and his sons on Nikaea?’ Annellus asked, and Kano knew his suspicions were correct.

  ‘Long enough,’ he replied, schooling his features. ‘I was not there to see the Angel and his brothers come before their father–’

  ‘But you know full well what was wrought in that place.’ It was not a question.

  Kano’s patience thinned. ‘Don’t be obtuse, Warden. Of course I know. The decree absolute. The Edict of Nikaea.’

  ‘A command from the Emperor of Mankind himself,’ Annellus went on, his words taking on a lecturing tone. ‘A warning about the dark potential of the powers of the warp.’ The Warden turned back to face him. ‘A command Sanguinius echoed, to forbid the use of preternatural powers within the Legiones Astartes. A command the Blood Angels accepted without question.’

  He said nothing, waiting for the indictment to surface. Despite his role as Captain Raldoron’s adjutant, in the strictest sense Kano was of no greater rank than that of a veteran Space Marine sharing the same number of duty studs in his brow. He was a warrior of the line, one among one hundred and twenty thousand such souls; but before the decision at Nikaea, Kano had been so much more.

  Then he had been Librarius Minoris Kano, sanctioned psyker and warrior of the mind. Not an unregulated witchkin of the backwater worlds, but a finely-honed weapon in service to the Blood Angels and the Imperium. He had been proud to focus the turmoil of the warp’s great energies against his Legion’s enemies. Kano’s honour roll included many battles where he had helped turn the tide for his primarch.

  But after Nikaea, all that had changed. He remembered the day as clearly as if it had happened only hours ago. Raldoron coming to him with word from Sanguinius, the captain standing there with another figure in black armour at his heel, arms outstretched to take Kano’s crystalline psychic hood as he removed it from the gorget of his battle plate.

  Raldoron’s hand upon his shoulder. His words. ‘This does not lessen you, Kano, none of you. It is only a single facet of your arsenal that has been taken away. Like thousands of your brothers, you are still the greatest soldiers that mankind has ever mustered. And for now, that will be enough.’

  ‘The Emperor did not make his decision lightly, Kano,’ Annellus was saying. ‘But after the actions of Magnus the Red and his Thousand Sons, there was little choice. I know you understand that.’

  Still Kano kept his silence. It would be anathema for him to ever consider turning against the will of the Emperor and Sanguinius, but he could not deny that a tiny kernel of doubt had lodged in his spirit on that day. Until the passing of the edict, there had never been a moment when Kano had felt distrusted by his battle-brothers. But now he wondered if that had only been naïveté on his part. There were always those who looked unkindly upon the powers of the mind and saw only the hazards that they encompassed. The great psyker-primarch Magnus had brought all that to a head with his reckless exploration into the deeper, darker places of the warp, drawing his father’s great displeasure and this draconian response.

  Kano thought of his abilities as alike to a boltgun or a sword; a dangerous thing in the hands of fools and the undisciplined, but a fine weapon when wielded by
one who had mastery of it. Perhaps, somewhere in the secret and unspoken places of his heart, he almost resented being told he was not capable of controlling his abilities. He dismissed the thought with a frown, watching Annellus and waiting.

  ‘Our Imperium is a place of united resolve and collaboration,’ the Warden insisted. ‘We will reach utopia under the Emperor’s guidance at the end of the Great Crusade, each human playing their part in the whole just as we serve the Legion and the Angel. But for that to be so, no one person can defy the greater will.’ He came closer. ‘Those who believe that the collective’s conventions do not apply to them, even if they are a being as great as Magnus the Red, are sorely mistaken. We all march together, Kano. We all must play our part.’

  He held his silence no longer. ‘I have never done otherwise. I am a dutiful son of Sanguinius. Are you suggesting that is not so, Warden? I would prefer directness rather than a lecture more suited to a neophyte recruit.’

  Annellus folded his ceramite-plated arms. ‘You have very good instincts, Kano.’ The Warden made the word sound somehow immoral. ‘It has been brought to my attention. And then I found myself arriving on the bridge of this alien monstrosity to see you engaged in battle with a xenos mind-witch. An interesting coincidence.’

  ‘Your help was appreciated in dispatching the ork.’

  The other Blood Angel kept talking. ‘Your gun was empty, yes? Tell me, if I had not arrived with the other squad, how were you going to fight it?’ He gestured at Kano, mimicking his earlier attack pose. ‘I saw you raise your hands.’

  ‘With tooth and nail, if that is what I was left with.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  Kano’s jaw set. ‘With all due respect,’ he began, his tone making it abundantly clear he meant none, ‘if you have an accusation to voice, then speak it. I’m in no mood for games.’