Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  Ahead, Signus Prime filled his vision.

  The battle-barge dived into the interface zone between space and world, and became a blazing crimson comet. The Red Tear was enveloped in a cowl of raging gas and torn plasma, flames longer than city blocks lapping at the dagger-tip bow and down the boulevards of vox-towers, gun batteries and warkeeps.

  Ablative armour across the outer hull was sacrificed in sheaves of glittering fragments, peeled away in fiery embers that broke apart and crumbled into white-hot dust. The insane heat flowed like water, peculiar convection currents washing it over the vertical planes of the flagship’s fuselage. Layers of space-hardened pigment puckered and boiled away, crimson sigils and proud etchings of name and purpose searing into blackened, meaningless streaks. Pennants made of flex-steel evaporated, becoming sketches of themselves, then nothing.

  Here and there on the outer surface of the hull there were things that had been deposited by the enemy’s intruder ships to wreak petty havoc on the vessel. These minion-creatures – simple-minded predator things from the warp-deeps brought into this reality – burned and shrivelled in the firestorm. The meat-puppets they were bound to turned to ash and their undying anti-souls shrieked back into the immaterium, banished and gone.

  Metal buckled and armourglass bubbles crazed and cracked as the heat grew more intense. The Red Tear was deep in the passing, committed to the full length of the fall. The firestorm of re-entry ripped at the ship in frenzy, peeling back long curls of heat-deformed plasteel like shavings of wood from a carpenter’s plane. Even as the blade-shape of the ship knifed through the outer atmosphere, the fires of the screaming sky gained entry to the inner decks and laid waste. Corridors that ran for kilometres channelled waves of burning atmosphere, pushing a shrieking roar of overpressure out before them. Legionaries and crew-serfs alike perished in the blaze; the latter died immediately, the former suffering a slower end thanks to the aegis of their power armour. Death-black cinders and roiling smoke followed the fires. Secondary explosions blasted craters in the surface of the deck, where volatiles or ammunition stores were touched by super-heated air and excited to combustion. Trains of fire burned all around the warship as its overtaxed systems struggled to lock down compartments and trigger suppression systems.

  The Red Tear broke through into the uppermost reaches of Signus Prime’s ionosphere and continued to fall. The flagship’s thrusters were dead, but autonomic systems in the vessel’s gravity control matrices managed a sluggish reaction to the descent. There was no way to stop the battle-barge’s plunge, but every iota of power in the system turned to arresting it as best it could. Great humming arcs of electrostatic energy flashed and snarled, fighting the immutable, inescapable pull of the planet below.

  Brief, brilliant aurorae radiated out from the winged metallic shape, forming patterns and colours that no natural event could ever hope to duplicate. Radiation scintillated and faded, unseen and unremarked. The air thickened and grew dense, the silence of space suffocated under a growing, thunderous bellow as the craft’s hypersonic velocity tore open the sky. Unnatural clouds that swirled like muddy water parted in a churning swell as the Red Tear broke into them.

  The haze that shrouded the planet clung to the world in a sickly cloak, wreathing it as the stink of death would adhere to the body of a dying man; but the Blood Angels ship was ripping it open, for the brief moment of its passage forcing the cloying yellow mist to branch around it.

  Such was the force and speed of the falling craft that in its wake the displaced air created instances of pressure inversion. The clouds rushed in to fill the emptiness and sounded great clarions of thunder, sky-quakes so loud that they carried to the surface far below. Micro storm cells were called into being all around the flagship as it blasted through the cloud deck and across the stratosphere. Here, windborne swarms of bat-winged daemons and other flying horrors spat and yowled as the falling ship blew through their aerial domain, buffeting them with the shock.

  The Red Tear’s path across Signus Prime was a burning line in the murky sky, marked by a rain of fragments torn from its hull. Like a behemoth avian of ancient legend, it exploded from the lower reaches of the turbid clouds and blazed over the tall mountain ranges of the planet’s single giant super-continent.

  Under a slaughterer’s sky weeping crimson and black, the fire-borne warship made its final descent. The starship’s burning shadow swept across denuded hillsides and over the husks of raped settlements, briefly eclipsing towers of smoke from kilometre-high funeral pyres and hellish monuments erected by fools unaware of what powers they were courting.

  The teeth of pinnacle peaks rose up to rake the underside of the vessel as the ground came ever closer. Obsidian mountains slick with the black blood of the earth crowded the ship’s glide path, the tallest of them clipping the great ventral sail extending down from the Red Tear’s underside. Stressed beyond all imaginable tolerances, the adamantium fin cracked along its length and spat flames. The cruiser bays were ripped apart under the trauma of the glancing impact and the sail ripped away. Thousands of tons of plasteel and ceramite became a torrent of burning wreckage, beheading the mountains beneath and laying a slick of debris across an area as large as a city.

  With a great and ragged wound bleeding fire across its belly, the flagship dropped towards a swath of long, low prairie that seemed to reach to infinity. Before the invasion came to foul this world, this place had been known as the Heartlands – a landscape of great natural beauty and endless abundance.

  There was nothing of that left now, only endless blasted wastes of blood-soaked mud, and the skeletal remains of petrified trees beneath a burning, ashen sky. These were the Plains of the Damned and they embraced the Red Tear’s violent arrival.

  The earth shook and cracked as the flagship slammed into the rolling desert. The bow was a sword point and it ripped open the dead ground, forcing hills of polluted mud and broken stone aside. Velocity bled away from the vessel in ripples of heat lightning, searing the landscape and igniting hundreds of fires. Cut in the path of its motion, a valley of blackened, seething sludge extended out behind the Red Tear, a terrible new scar opened across the face of the planet by the violence of the landing.

  And with a long, final howl of tortured metal, the flagship of the primarch Sanguinius came to rest in the blasted wilderness. In a cradle of flames and vaporous mist, the vessel groaned as it found balance under its own weight. Scattered out behind it for leagues were pieces of itself, lost in the fall or torn free in the final crash.

  Broken, fallen, but undefeated, the Red Tear had defied its enemy and honoured the wishes of the Angel.

  Raldoron blinked dust from his eyes and rose to his feet with a snarl, shoving aside a piece of adamantium plating that had crashed to the deck from the ornate ceiling above. All around him, metal moaned and cracked as it settled. The deck was canted at a slight incline, but they appeared to have made planetfall relatively intact. He smiled briefly at the cool estimation of the situation.

  He tasted the acrid stink of burned plastic at the back of his throat as he pushed through the debris that had come adrift in their plummeting descent from orbit. Here and there, his battle-brothers were picking themselves up from where they had fallen. The last, shuddering collision with the surface had thrown them from their footing, putting the sons of Baal down among the dead crew.

  All but one of them.

  The Angel stood before the compass podium, one hand upon the broken device, the other at his side. His wings jutted straight out from his back, furled like white sails. Sanguinius had ridden the ship all the way down, his feet set firmly, and never moved from his place, staring out through the great oval portal across the bridge as though he were daring fate to knock him down.

  Fate, it seemed, had not risen to the challenge.

  Azkaellon threw the First Captain a glance as he helped Zuriel to his feet; the look was unreadable. He turned away.

  The primarch’s hand lifted from the compass and
Raldoron saw that the metal there had been deformed by the Angel’s superhuman grip. His master strode towards the oval window. The eye of the bridge was cracked and broken, and a cold wind came stealthily through the gaps in the shattered armourglass, bringing with it the odour of death.

  Sanguinius stood at the portal and his lips moved. Raldoron did not catch the words, but he saw the intent in his master’s eyes. A question, he decided. But to whom?

  He drew a breath. ‘My lord. We live still.’

  ‘Indeed.’ The primarch’s manner shifted, and something troubling was pushed away from the surface, to be eclipsed by a strong and confident aspect. ‘It will take more than that to break us, Ral.’ He placed a hand upon the captain’s pauldron. ‘We are angels all; when we descend from the sky, worlds tremble to witness it.’

  Azkaellon, however, did not seem so convinced. ‘Master, the battle in orbit rages still. Without the Red Tear’s guns, the fight may not so easily go to our brothers.’

  ‘This tide will not turn against us,’ Sanguinius insisted. ‘I need not dream that reality to know it. Raise the vessels above, name the Covenant of Baal as the new command ship and tell them to fight on.’ He closed his golden gauntlet into a fist. ‘I want the skies of Signus to be ours.’

  ‘And this, my lord?’ The Guard Commander gestured out at the desolate lands ranged out around the crash site.

  The Angel’s face broke into a smile. ‘This? My son, the winds of war have delivered us to the heart of our enemy. This place will be our beachhead. Our castle keep from which to strike at the fiends who dare oppose the Imperium!’

  The hard edge of sheer will in the primarch’s words made new steel grow inside Raldoron’s heart. He felt his hands contract into fists, heard the distant rush of blood in his ears.

  ‘For days now we have walked with caution across the Signus Cluster, encountering the inexplicable and the monstrous,’ said Sanguinius, and it was as if the words came from Raldoron’s own thoughts. ‘The creatures infesting these worlds have toyed with the Blood Angels for long enough. My patience is at an end.’ He looked down at the fallen crewmen. ‘They struck at the weakest of us, the ones who gave their lives to serve the Legion even though they were not fortunate enough to be remade by my father’s gene-tech. This tactic is a coward’s mark, my sons, and it will not endure.’ The primarch pointed out into the blasted distance. ‘They wait for us in that wilderness. They believe they have cut us deeply, that we are unprepared for whatever foul manner of warfare is ranged against us.’ Then he laughed, strong and powerful and daring. ‘They do not know us.’

  Within hours, the Red Tear was no longer a starship. The battle-barge became a fortress, a vast island of burned red metal in the middle of the dead lands. The warriors of the Legion secured the vessel and assessed the damage. What could be used for war was made priority, and what could not be saved was discarded. The survivors of the human crew were few; many had died in the fires and the impact, but more from the ultimate effect of the psychic malaise that had infiltrated their minds. They simply died of fear, hearts seizing in their chests as they crossed into the dark shadow of this forsaken world.

  Signus Prime’s sky seemed to hate the very idea of the Blood Angels daring to set foot upon its blighted surface, and a slow, steady rain of burning brimstone fell from the pregnant clouds above. Sulphur stench and hot, searing winds raged across the landscape, carrying needle-sharp grains of abrasive sand.

  The word from orbit came sporadically at first. Cruisers and frigates were lost up there, unseen by the eyes of the primarch. The hell-ships were met in force and the line of attack broken; the mutant craft fled back to the safety of the thick debris belt. So began a game of strike and counter-strike, strike and fade, as Imperial ships hunted the turncoat barges in a sky full of razors.

  A message from the Ignis told them that the fleet had begun a systematic barrage against the shoal of wreckage, intent on grinding it all into radioactive dust. Nothing would be allowed to escape Signus Prime.

  The Angel had smiled coldly; he knew that the creature Kyriss and its minions did not wish to leave this place. Their wish was to have the Legion come to their gates, and now it had been granted. It mattered not if Athene DuCade, in her last panicked moments of life, had been directed by their sinister hand or by the madness that had infected her. The sons of Sanguinius were here, and war like no other would walk with them.

  Meros felt an odd, uncomfortable sensation at the back of his skull. A faint loss of balance, although it could never have been that; no, more that now-familiar sense of wrongness that sat poorly with him.

  He looked up at the dark, seething clouds and felt it keenly. The planet did not seem correct, and in a manner that was not easy to put into words. It was as if he were looking at the creation of a crazed artist painting in shades of blood and fire across a sallow canvas, an image born of fantasy rather than reality.

  The great open arena where he stood only compounded the sense. Gathered in a loose formation, dozens of legionaries in full battle armour cast their faces to the alien sky, looking out across the towers and crenellations of the grounded starship. All of them were armed and ready – no, eager – for combat.

  It seemed strange to be here, atop one of the warkeeps along the spine of the Red Tear. Meros had never stood upon the hull of the great ship before, and to do so under this sky instead of the black, airless void of space was stranger still. Already a sprawl of defensive revetments and trenches was being cut around the ship’s girth. Landers had been deployed, along with lines of the ground vehicles that remained operational. The IX Legion was digging in.

  A cross-section of officers and battle-brothers from the Three Hundred had gathered, some from contingents already aboard the flagship, others newly arrived aboard Stormbirds and Hawkwings from the fleet elements in orbit.

  Meros felt out of place, and for the second time. If anything, this was more extreme than the moment when he had been brought forward in the lithocast chamber to present himself to the captains and commandery. He was truly walking among the most lauded heroes of the Blood Angels, and it was done without circumstance or ceremony. For a moment, the Apothecary dared to think of the officers at his side as no more than fellow warriors, Baalite and Terran-born sons united in their fealty to the Angel and the Emperor… But he could not.

  In all his life, Meros had never felt so inconsequential. The armour and weaponry of the warriors around him was magnificent with honour sigils and marques of tribute. Even in their regular battle plate, they walked like champions out of high legend.

  The moment passed; it was difficult to maintain the emotion after what he had witnessed, and the grim mood that clouded his thoughts as the black stormheads clouded the sky returned once more. A bleak temper was cast across the face of every Blood Angel assembled. The others had heard only fragments of what had transpired in orbit, and the primarch had gathered them so that they might know the fullness of it.

  The Angel wanted his sons to hear him speak, not through the haze of a hololith but in person where they could look upon his face and know it to be true.

  Armour-clad, his golden gauntlet cast into amber by the morose light of Signus, his master pointed at the Apothecary. ‘Tell them, Brother Meros,’ he commanded. ‘Tell them what you saw.’

  Meros hesitated, and his gaze found Kano, who stood at Captain Raldoron’s side. His friend gave a slight nod, encouraging him to speak; but the reaction was not kind. With care and clarity, he relayed what he had seen from the portal gallery aboard the Red Tear in the moments before the enemy horde had boarded the flagship by brute force. It was not the description of the freakish monstrosities that the legionaries had dispatched which caused disquiet, but the actions of Tanus Kreed and the Dark Page.

  ‘Did you witness Kreed’s vessel firing on the attackers?’ The question boomed from the vocoder block of Brother Cloten, a Dreadnought warrior from the 88th Company.

  ‘No,’ Meros told him. ‘I saw only th
e heels of his ship as he turned and fled.’ It was impossible to keep the bitterness from his voice. ‘The retreat of the Dark Page left the Red Tear vulnerable. There was no mistake about it.’

  ‘This medicae was not on the vessel,’ Cloten grated. ‘He does not know what took place there!’

  ‘The cut-flesh speaks the truth.’ Helik Redknife stood, arms folded across his chest. ‘I saw it too. Kreed ran from the field of battle.’ The Space Wolf turned his hard eyes on Azkaellon. ‘Tell me that is not so, Guard Commander.’

  Azkaellon’s hard, hawkish face stiffened. ‘It is as Brother Meros says. The Dark Page deserted us in our moment of need. The Encarnadine tracked the ship into the debris zone and lost sight of it. They did not answer any communications. At no point did Kreed’s vessel trade fire with the enemy.’ He frowned. ‘The foe ignored it completely.’

  Harsh words were exchanged; many of the assembled warriors found it difficult to accept that a brother Space Marine – even one from another Legion – would so blatantly abandon another.

  ‘There are dark works at hand here, my sons.’ Sanguinius said, his voice carrying over the keening winds. ‘And they seek to challenge us.’ He spoke to them of the creature that called itself Kyriss, of how it had dared to manifest in the Angel’s sanctum and offer him battle, posturing and goading. ‘We will make war across this tormented world, if we must. And this being I will see to its grave. We must cut off the head of the snake, kill this abomination Kyriss and end its reign.’

  ‘Still we speak of “abominations”...’

  The words were a low growl, and some of the warriors moved aside to see who had spoken. Captain Amit stepped forwards into the middle of the arena to face his primarch. ‘Why do we not call it what it is, my lord? Can we not say the name?’

  ‘Remember your place, Flesh Tearer,’ warned Azkaellon, but Amit did not acknowledge him.

  ‘I will say it if you will not,’ he continued, his eyes never leaving those of the Angel. ‘Daemon.’