The killing began to slow. The Retribution Fleet was no more; only the crippled and dead remained. The Iron Warriors ships had stopped firing on their victims, as if the overwhelming firepower of the earlier battle had left them spent. Surrounded Imperial Fists remnants fired all they had into the face of their enemies. Some managed to strip the void shields off an Iron Warriors ship; some even put wounds into their hulls. But the Iron Warriors came on, shrugging off damage like a bull grox trampling a dog into the dirt. They swarmed their remaining enemies, their boarding pods clustering on golden hulls like ticks feeding on cattle. Their boarding parties struck plasma reactors, shutting them down and letting the ships choke to death without power. Life support systems, artificial gravity, and weapon systems went silent. Then the Iron Warriors left and the cold of the void reached into the lightless hulls to do its slow and silent work.
A few Imperial Fists ships remained, fighting to the last, a shrinking cluster of resistance that became smaller by the second. They fought to the death, firing on enemies with undimmed fury, covering limping comrades even as the Iron Warriors brought them down. When the Tribune exploded amongst the last Imperial Fists ships few of the Iron Warriors took note. Golg and the Contrador had their kill, and the primarch had the head of the Imperial Fist who had dared to stand against him. That the Contrador lingered at the site of its victory drew no suspicion.
In the navigation cupola of the Contrador, Navigator Primus Basus shifted against the unfamiliar hardness of the bare metal chair. The Imperial Fists had locked the previous Navigator of the Contrador in the deep holds of the battle-barge, but he could still feel her presence on the unadorned and functional equipment. Behind him his two secondaries fidgeted in their seats. The journey from the Tribune had done nothing to settle their nerves, and they knew what awaited them once they were in the warp. A storm navigation was a terrifying thing. Even if the clear passage was still visible they would have to rotate through shifts to avoid gaze fatigue, or worse. Basus flicked a switch on the console and spoke to the air.
‘Sergeant Raln?’ There was a pause, a clicking whir of white noise.
‘Yes, Navigator.’ The sergeant’s voice held none of its usual dry humour.
‘We are ready.’ He paused, sucked air through his teeth. ‘Our destination is still the same?’
‘Yes. Captain Polux’s orders still stand.’
Basus nodded to himself, closed his human eyes and ran his hand over the aperture on his forehead.
‘Very well, sergeant.’ He cut the vox, and turned to his secondaries. Their green-flecked amber eyes were a mirror of his own. ‘We make course for Terra,’ he said.
The Contrador’s engines fired to full life and it moved away from the debris of its battle with the Tribune. It bled as it moved, its wounds trailing gas and ribbons of burning plasma. Damaged inside and out, half its crew dead, and its command seized by its enemies, it was a crippled warrior picking itself up from the battlefield. But it could still run.
By the time the rest of the Iron Warriors fleet realised something was wrong the Contrador was already beyond their range. Its engines breathed comet trails as it made for the edge of the Phall system, deaf to the signals that followed its flight. The Iron Warriors pursued until the Contrador ripped a glowing hole in the starfield and dived into the storms beyond.
Perturabo watched the calculations of slaughter play across the screen. His gaze held no sign of pleasure or satisfaction. Nothing else moved in the throne room or the long chamber beyond the doors. The blood had already clotted to a sticky dark film on his armour. The broken bodies of Imperial Fists lay on the floor around him, their yellow armour so crushed and distorted that they looked like chewed lumps of metal and offal.
The Imperial Fists fleet was gone. Some had managed to flee and jump to the warp, but most now drifted in the void, shattered and blackened. The force that had boarded the Iron Blood was dead to a man. There was no enemy left to fight. The battle data scrolling past Perturabo’s eyes told of a sudden and total victory. It also spoke of the likely outcome before the Imperial Fists’ suicidal withdrawal. Perturabo let the truth cycle past his eyes once more.
The hammer blow reduced the screens to sparking wreckage, and the Lord of Iron stalked from the chamber in silence.
In a corner, Navarra’s mangled body lay in a fold of shadow. His armour had mashed into his flesh, and his legs were gone below the knee joint. Inside the ruin of his helmet, Navarra’s eyelids trembled and snapped open.
Epilogue
[time/location unclear]
We have been falling for an eternity, falling into icy darkness, blood and the shouts of despair following us into oblivion. Perhaps it has only been hours, perhaps years. I cannot tell.
The storm cradles us, its frustrated fury raging at the hull of the Contrador. Some of the human crew have died. There has been violence. Some of the crew still hold loyalty to their Iron Warriors masters. It is to be expected. Others seem to have died of hunger, their bodies withering away to nothing. Perhaps it has been years. Perhaps we will fall through the storm forever.
‘Captain Polux?’ It is Basus. The Navigator looks even more thin and pale than normal. Sweat beads his grey skin and red sores rim his true eyes. I look little better. The wounds are healing, but they still weep pus. Tubes attach me to a mass of machines and fluid-filled vials that follow me on suspensors. I wear a red robe darkened in places by blooms of dried blood. They had to cut me from my armour.
‘Yes, Navigator?’ My voice is cracked and dry. A thick tube sucks yellow liquid from my chest as I breathe.
‘I have seen it.’ His voice shakes as he speaks. ‘It is there, just visible, faint but steady.’ I think that I know what he means, but I will not hope. I flex the fingers of my left hand as I listen, then I realise that my hand is gone and that I am clasping a phantom memory.
‘What have you seen?’ I say.
‘The light of Terra,’ he says. ‘The Astronomican. The storms are still strong but we can steer a course.’ I hear the hope in his voice alongside the fatigue. He and his secondaries have been steering us through the storm currents for as long as we have been here within the warp. Hope, though, is a fragile skin over the truth of pain and sacrifice.
‘Do it. Take us home.’
I stay awake until we complete the course. A command throne of dark metal dominates the Contrador’s bridge. It remains empty; I stand as I did on the bridge of the Tribune.
The crew move around me. Time passes, perhaps hours, perhaps months, perhaps years. My lost hand glows with ghost pain. The Apothecaries tell me they can modify the doses of nerve suppressors to remove the pain until I heal. I told them not to. The pain is reassuring, a rock to cling to as we fall.
At last the journey is over. Raln stands with me as we prepare to see the lights of Terra again. I nod slowly, and Raln gives the order. Our stolen ship shivers as the curtain of the warp parts before it and we slide out into the light of a bright sun.
The screens suspended across the bridge flicker to life, showing us the world that has waited for our return.
I frown. Beside me Raln makes a sound like a snarl.
The planets turn under the light of their sun, half wrapped in darkness, half in stark light. Weapon platforms and void stations ring them in heavy chains. Ships move through the void. Some turn towards us even as we look at them. I feel shock and awe. The forces gathered here are the greatest I have ever seen. It is a star system made into a fortress, a seat of power and unbending might. It is a place I have seen before, long ago. Now it is changed. It has become something more, something that I do not understand.
I look away from the screen.
‘This is not Terra,’ I say.
Somewhere within me I see Helias fall again from my hand into the night, and hear my scream lost on the ice wind.
Where before there had been light, now there was
only darkness. The hot, urgent pulse of near death surged in his veins, the bitter flavour of betrayal fully expected, yet wholly unwelcome. This was what it would come to, he knew, this was the inevitable result of naïve belief in the goodness of the human heart. Death filled his senses, blood coating his teeth and the sharp reek of it thick in his nostrils.
As though it were yesterday, long buried memories of years spent on the night world of Nostramo emblazoned themselves on the forefront of his thoughts: haunted darkness punctured by stuttering lumen strips that fizzed in the shimmering, rain-slick streets and the stillness of a population kept quiescent with fear.
From out of this foetid darkness had come illumination and hope, the promise of a better future. But now that hope was dashed as the bright lance of the future seared itself into his thoughts…
…the death of a world and a great eye of black and gold watching it burn…
…legionaries fighting to the death beneath a red-lit sky…
…a golden eagle cast from the heavens…
He screamed in pain as images of destruction and the end of all things paraded before his mind’s eye. Voices called out to him. He heard his name, the name his father had bestowed upon him and the one his people had given him, in the fearful watches of the dark.
He opened his eyes and let the visions fade from his mind as the sensations of the physical world returned to him. Blood and salty tears stung his eyes and he looked over to the sound of voices calling his name.
Horrified faces stared at him in fear, but that was nothing new. Babble spewed from their mouths, but he could make nothing of it, the sense of the words lost in the screaming white noise filling his skull.
What sight could be so terrible? What could evoke such horror?
He looked down as he realised he squatted atop another, living, breathing figure.
A giant in torn golden robes, his bone-white hair spattered with gleaming ruby droplets.
A mantle of red velvet trimmed with golden weave spread out beneath him like a bloodstain.
Tanned, iron flesh. Opened and bleeding.
He took in the destruction wrought on the body beneath him, raising his hands, balled into fists. Blood dripped from his fingertips and he could taste the warm richness of the genetic mastery encoded into every molecule upon his teeth.
He knew this giant.
His name was legendary, his stony heart and mastery of war unmatched.
His name was Rogal Dorn.
He looked up again as he heard his own name, given voice by a warrior in the golden plate armour of the Imperial Fists who bore the black and white heraldry of its First Captain.
He knew this warrior too…
‘Curze!’ cried Sigismund. ‘What have you done?’
The emptiness of space shimmered in the glow of distant suns beyond the armoured glass, faraway planets and unknown systems turning in their prescribed arcs without thought for the dramas being played out on the stage of human endeavour. What did those who lived beneath these suns know of the Cheraut system and the blood that had been shed to pacify it in the name of the emergent Imperium of Mankind?
Curze stifled the anger such questions provoked, staring into his reflection with cold, obsidian eyes that resembled empty sockets in his pallid, sunken features. Lank hair hung to his neck like black ropes and spilled across his wide, powerful shoulders. He turned from his reflection, uncomfortable with the dreadful disappointment he saw there.
Glinting metal caught his sullen gaze: his armour, standing in a shadowed alcove on the far wall. He crossed the chamber and placed his hand on the skull-faced helmet. The gem-like facets of its lenses winked in the low light and the sweeping dark wings rose from its sides like the pinions of some avenging angel of night. The burnished plates were dark, as befitted the primarch of the Night Lords, each one contoured perfectly to his form and worked with gold edging that caught the starlight.
Turning from his battle armour, he paced the hard, metallic floor of the gloomy, cavernous chamber that confined him. Thick steel columns supported a great vaulted ceiling, its upper reaches lost in shadow, and the hum of the mighty starfort’s reactor beat like a pulse in the metal.
This aesthetic of functional austerity was typical of the Imperial Fists, whose artifice had constructed this mighty orbital fortress as a base of operations with which to begin the compliance of the Cheraut system.
The Emperor’s Children had held their traditional victory feast before the first shot had been fired and together with Fulgrim’s Legion and the Night Lords, Rogal Dorn’s Imperial Fists had broken open the defences of the belligerent human coalition that resisted the coming of the Imperium. Within eight months of hard, bloody fighting, the eagle flew above the smoking ruins of the last bastion, but where Dorn lauded Fulgrim’s Legion, the conduct of the Night Lords had earned only his ire.
Matters had finally come to a head amid the silver ruins of Osmium.
Pyres of the dead stained the skies black and Curze had watched his Chaplains orchestrating the executions of defeated prisoners when Dorn marched into his camp, his lean face thunderous. ‘Curze!’
Never once had Rogal Dorn called him by his forename.
‘Brother?’ he had replied.
‘Throne! What are you doing here?’ demanded Dorn, his normal, affable tone swallowed in the depths of his outrage. A phalanx of gold-armoured warriors followed their lord and Curze had immediately sensed the tension in the air.
‘Punishing the guilty,’ he had answered coolly. ‘Restoring order.’
The Primarch of the Imperial Fists shook his head. ‘This is not order, Curze, it is murder. Command your warriors to stand down. My Imperial Fists will take over this sector.’
‘Stand down?’ said Curze. ‘Are they not the enemy?’
‘Not any more,’ said Dorn. ‘They are prisoners now, but soon they will be a compliant population and part of the Imperium. Have you forgotten the Emperor’s purpose in declaring the Great Crusade?’
‘To conquer,’ said Curze.
‘No,’ said Dorn, placing a golden gauntlet on his shoulder guard. ‘We are liberators, not destroyers, brother. We bring the light of illumination, not death. We must govern with benevolence if these people are ever to recognise our authority in this galaxy.’
Curze flinched at the touch, resenting the easy friendship Dorn pretended.
Bilious anger bubbled invisibly beneath his skin, but if Dorn was aware of it, he gave no sign.
‘These people resisted us and must pay the penalty for that crime,’ said Curze. ‘Obedience to the Imperium will come from the fear of punishment, you know that as well as anyone, Dorn. Kill those that resisted and the others will learn the lesson that to oppose us is to die.’
Dorn shook his head, taking his arm to lead him away from the curious stares their heated discussion was attracting. ‘You are wrong, but we should speak of this in private.’
‘No,’ said Curze, angrily shrugging off Dorn’s grip. ‘You think these people will bend the knee meekly to us because we show compassion? Mercy is for the weak and foolish. It will only breed corruption and eventual betrayal. Fear of reprisals will keep the rest of this planet in check, not benevolence.’
Dorn sighed. ‘And the hatred planted in those you leave alive will pass from one generation to the next until this world is engulfed in a war the cause of which none of those fighting will remember. It will never end, don’t you see that? Hate only breeds hate and the Imperium cannot be built upon such bloody foundations.’
‘All empires are forged in blood,’ said Curze. ‘To pretend otherwise is naïve. The rule of law cannot be maintained by the blind hope that human nature is inherently good. Haven’t we seen enough to know that ultimately the mass of humanity must be forced into compliance?’
‘I cannot believe I am hearing this,’ said Dorn. ‘What has got
into you, Curze?’
‘Nothing that has not always been there, Dorn,’ said Curze, striding away from the mighty, golden figure and hauling one of the few remaining prisoners upright by the front of his tunic. He scooped up a fallen bolter and thrust the heavy gun into the prisoner’s trembling hands. Curze leaned down and said, ‘Go ahead. Kill me.’
The terrified man shook his head, the oversized weapon shaking in his hands as though his limbs were palsied.
‘No?’ said Curze. ‘Why not?’
The prisoner tried to speak, but was so awed by the terrifying proximity of the primarch that his words were unintelligible.
‘Are you afraid you will be killed?’
The man nodded and Curze addressed his warriors, ‘No one harms this man. No matter what happens, he is not to be punished.’
Curze turned and walked back towards Dorn with his arms stretched out to either side of him, presenting his back to the prisoner.
No sooner had he turned away from the armed man than the gun had been raised and the hard crack of a bolter shot split the air. Sparks flew as the explosive shell ricocheted from Curze’s armour and he spun on his heel to smash the prisoner’s skull to splinters with his fist.
The headless corpse swayed for a moment before dropping slowly to its knees and pitching onto its chest.
‘You see,’ said Curze, his fingers dripping blood and bone fragments.
‘And what was that supposed to prove?’ asked Dorn, his features curled in distaste.
‘That any chance mortals get they will choose the path of dissent. When he thought he would be punished, he dared not shoot, but the moment he believed himself free from consequence, he acted.’
‘That was an unworthy deed,’ said Dorn, and Curze had turned away from him before he could elaborate, but the Imperial Fists’ primarch caught his arm.
‘Your warriors will stand down and withdraw, Curze. That is an order, not a request. Leave this planet. Now.’
Shadows of Treachery Page 10