Old Earth

by Nick Kyme

  Sunk to one knee, also shooting from the hip and with one hand, Abidemi reached for Vulkan’s arm and helped him inside even as Gargo fed all power to the engines.

  They shot straight up, a desperate, dizzying acceleration that shook the hull. Grappling with the sheer, sudden ascent, Gargo took the ship around in a wide arc as the tempest hammered and pulled.

  ‘Into the tempest!’ shouted Vulkan, nodding to Abidemi. The ramp had barely closed behind him, sealing out the worst of the storm.

  The hull trembled, tortured metal screeching in protest. A bolt came loose. A piece of ablative ceramite stripped away, caught by the wind. More ferocious than the eldritch gate below Deathfire, this one threatened to rip them in two. A lightning strike sheared the barrel of the dorsal-mounted battle cannon in half. A second almost transfixed the right wing.

  ‘Now, Igen!’ roared the primarch. ‘Now, or this has been for nothing!’

  From the city, shapes were stirring, moving rapidly, visible through the fouled viewing pane. Not shadows, but skimmers, entire flocks of barbed skiff-like vessels thronged with the silhouettes of warriors.

  Ahead, the storm grew fiercer, jagged lightning coursing erratically from its eye.

  ‘Merciful Deathfire…’ breathed Gargo, and flew straight for it.

  Seven

  Either, Or

  Smoke trailed the battlefield, leaning against the wind, heady with the scent of death. The outpost had been well sacked. A broken crate crunched underfoot and the warrior looked down to investigate. Bolt clips, sickle magazines – an entire case of them, gone.

  ‘Not quite,’ he muttered, stooping to retrieve an errant shell missed in the thief’s apparent hurry. ‘You forgot this one.’ Rising, he tucked it into a belt pouch and carried on.

  ‘Tell me again, Kysen,’ said the warrior.

  ‘Once was not enough?’ asked Kysen Scybale, but took the data-slate from his belt.

  ‘Humour me,’ said the warrior, having stopped before the yawning gates of the Primus camp.

  ‘Very well.’

  They stepped through together, an honour guard behind them, silent but for their growling war-plate.

  The breach still burned, though the flames lapped gently rather than devoured now.

  ‘Looks like a blasting charge,’ said the warrior, running a gauntleted hand against the toothy hole in the camp’s overwhelmed defences. ‘Several charges,’ he mused, allowing a humourless smile.

  Scybale, a sergeant armoured in grimy sea-green, began.

  ‘Senthis, a refuelling station, lightly defended. Karobben Six, remote deep void augur, minimal Legiones Astartes presence. Vartak, shell manufactory, protected by thralled Mechanicum helots. The Ardunaak supply line, the Veniskae supply line. Augment and Umulent asteroid-depots…’ He paused to look up from the slate. The data-screed still had many more screens to spool through. ‘Need I go on?’

  ‘Yes, Kysen,’ said the warrior. ‘Continue.’

  He did, and the relentless report of guerrilla engagements, sabotage missions, infiltrations, feints, hit-and-run attacks and carefully planned ambuscades became a background drone as the small party toured the carnage.

  The entire camp – almost the entire camp, the warrior reminded himself – had been stripped of weapons, ammunition and war mat­eriel. Even most of the tanks had been taken. And what they could not carry, the thieves had spiked. Corpses of vehicles, reduced to empty black shells, still drooled smoke in some quarters.

  Bodies remained too but, the warrior noted, remained unmarked by anything other than their death wounds. Mutilation as an act of revenge or petty spite, or just the cathartic release of anger, had become commonplace.

  So, he still has honour then.

  No survivors though.

  He is ruthless too.

  The thought provoked another smile on a face ill-suited to mirth, a pugilist’s face, a ganger’s face, hair shorn down to the scalp.

  ‘…and Hamart Three,’ Scybale concluded, angry breaths sawing through his gritted teeth. ‘Am I to recite the full and complete works of the dramaturges of Old Albia next? Marlowe or Shakespire?’

  The warrior laughed, a deep throaty reverberation thick with Cthonian menace. It was a gutter tongue in many ways, bred to be hard, evolved to be forbidding.

  ‘The losses,’ replied the warrior when he had done with Scybale’s questionable wit, ‘give me those next.’

  Another data-screed, the same slate, and Scybale began a second recitation as the war party slowly made its way to the core of Primus camp.

  The tally of men and materiel continued as they entered a municipal building, partially fortified, its barricades scattered and broken with the force of an overwhelming insertion.

  The warrior looked up at the shattered ceiling, the dull light bleeding in from the outside together with the faintest stirrings of rain.

  By the time they reached the body of Karbron Velx, it was pouring. It tinkled against metal armour plate, almost tuneful, utterly unremitting. Some of the dirt fallen on the warrior’s armour had washed clean, revealing kill-markings. Sea-green paint emerged, worn down to gunmetal-grey in places. Rivulets ran down a stylised eye engraved into the breastplate. The rain couldn’t do much about the craters and gouges in both the warrior’s greaves and pauldrons though.

  ‘Seems they got to Velx,’ he said idly.

  He almost heard the raised eyebrow in Scybale’s reply. ‘What makes you say that?’

  The warrior turned to regard him. ‘Flippant today, aren’t you, Kysen? Why do they always cut off our heads, brother? I wonder if it’s some petty act of retribution?’

  ‘I’m wondering why we are here, captain,’ answered Scybale.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ said the warrior, their captain, and gestured to one of his hulking honour guard, a company champion who had yet to loosen his grip on a deadly mortuary sword. ‘Cyon… if you wouldn’t mind.’

  The warrior glanced at a vault sunk into the floor of the half-destroyed building.

  Cyon Azedine nodded curtly, and swept the sword from its sheath to split the vault lid in two.

  ‘Empty, captain,’ he said in a grating voice, made grittier by his helm.

  ‘You’re grinning, Marr,’ said Scybale. ‘Why are you grinning? That bastard Meduson has taken everything.’

  Tybalt Marr nodded. As the captain reached out he took his proffered helm from one of the silent honour guard.

  ‘He has,’ said Marr, donning the helm, the transverse crest sat proud across the crown. ‘Indeed, he has.’

  They did not linger after that. The small war party, just a handful of the Sons of Horus, left Hamart III to burn. A prowling Stormbird came to retrieve them, its hot jet wash stirring the reek of slow decay that had settled on the ransacked supply dump. From there, the Lupercal Pursuivant beckoned.

  Throughout transit, Tybalt Marr grinned to himself.

  Yes, he thought, Meduson has taken everything.

  ‘We cannot do both,’ said Kernag flatly.

  His words echoed around the sepulchral chamber, one of old Nerro­vorn. A shrine built to honour the dead of Nerrovorn’s wars, it had, ironically, survived the world’s annihilation. No use in killing what has already died. Ranks of tombs lined the walls, one upon the next, stretching all the way to a vaulted dome ceiling. Constellations had been painted across it, truly artisanal, but faded with age and neglect. No one lived to restore them now, and so they would diminish into obscurity and extinction just like the rest of Nerrovorn, and without a single blow struck.

  A statue, exquisitely detailed and three times the height of the Iron Fathers, stood in the middle of the mortuary chamber, a broad circle of flagstones radiating around it creating a communal plaza. Whether it depicted a general, a politico or an artist was no longer clear; the man’s life, celebrated in dark marble, had become as irrel
evant as the death of his civilisation. Like so much else in the galaxy, war had erased it.

  ‘We cannot do both,’ Kernag repeated, a strong and certain determination in his eyes.

  He and his cohorts stood in the shadow of the statue, on one side of the plaza. Their voices carried, outwards and upwards across the shrine, the only structure on a remote moon with an atmosphere dense enough to support life. Too small for any other use, its purpose had been given over to that of a mausoleum.

  ‘Either we serve Meduson’s vainglory or we pledge for the Legion’s survival,’ Norsson agreed, his voice affected by the ever-present undertow of cold anger. ‘This Shadrak Smyth does not speak for Medusa.’

  Raask Arkborne nodded, the implanted servos in his neck grinding noisily. He stifled a mechanised tremor in his damaged bionic arm, the effort visible on his severely battle-scarred face.

  ‘How can a Terran dictate our Legion’s future?’ he said. ‘His boldness is dangerously pugnacious.’

  ‘His emotions and desires cloud his good sense,’ said Rawt, folding his powerful arms. ‘The flesh is weak, Fraters.’

  They nodded, this clandestine gathering, those whose battleships awaited the return of the escorts sent to retrieve them, a minor delay that would raise no suspicions.

  ‘The flesh is weak,’ the others chorused, a grating monotone that spoke of cold, repressible logic.

  ‘What, then, can we do?’ asked another voice, and Jebez Aug leaned forwards into the light. His form shimmered with projection distortion, the natural communications rebuff of the region fouling the hololithic link. ‘I share your concerns, Fraters. Shadrak Meduson never wanted this burden. It has fallen to him, and I take a measure of responsibility for that. He finds himself in unfamiliar waters.’

  ‘He is not nearly flesh-spare enough,’ said Arkborne, his own misfiring bionics hardly a testament in favour of mechanised substitution. ‘If that could be remedied…’

  ‘I doubt he will submit to further augmentation without just cause,’ said Norsson, fists clenched.

  ‘He won’t,’ Aug agreed. ‘And even if he did, his humours run too hot these days.’

  ‘What is your belief then, Frater?’ asked Kernag.

  Aug’s expression, his true expression, remained utterly cold.

  ‘That we must secede from the war, but to do that Shadrak Meduson must be overturned as Warleader. If we are to survive as a Legion then that is our only logical course.’ He turned to regard a looming shadow, a figure much larger than the others sitting at the edge of the plaza next to the tombs. The figure did not move, but its armour and bionics gave off a low machine purr. A phalanx of silent Immortals stood guard, also hidden in shadow.

  ‘Meduson must embrace the way of the machine,’ affirmed Rawt, ‘or he must be removed. For the sake of the Iron Tenth. Is this the will of the Gorgon?’

  ‘We are the Gorgon,’ said Aug, ‘his cult, his machine cult. From flesh are stronger bonds formed in iron.’

  The Immortals slammed down their breacher shields as one, raising a discordant chime.

  Kernag, Norsson, Rawt and Arkborne all turned, but it was Aug who addressed the enthroned king in their midst.

  ‘Is this your will?’ he said. ‘Is this the Gorgon’s will?’

  The figure’s right hand lifted slightly. One of the fingers was missing.

  The Fraters took this as confirmation, and bowed as one.

  Eight

  Fates, yet obscured

  Barthusa Narek stood alone in the ruins of a city. He could not remember how he had arrived here, and did not recognise his surroundings. He knew it wasn’t Nocturne.

  He considered he might be dead, and this some pale and unimpressive aftermath, a purgatory that he knew he deserved.

  Endless destruction stretched in every direction. Collapsed habitation blocks sat forlornly in rubble-strewn heaps, upper floors entombing the lower. Devastated commercia districts spoke of sundered merchant houses and ruined trade posts. Streets and avenues, broken and split underfoot, led to chasms and dead ends. Communal gardens burned, statues well felled, fountains befouled. Culture and reason and prosperity, all laid to waste. Old lives lingered still, at least their shells and trappings did, like shadows reluctant to fade at the passing of the sun.

  Narek stooped to run his hand through the dust blowing across the desolate landscape. His finger came back white and he detected ash as he put it to his tongue. Human remains, burned pure in the fires of immolation.

  Old lives, he reminded himself.

  The manner of the city’s demise he did recognise. Such utter annihilation could only have come from Legiones Astartes weapons, a devastating lance strike from high orbit akin to the birthing of a nascent sun. All would look upon it and despair, before darkness robbed their sight forever.

  Narek wandered on, not knowing where he was going or even why, save that any warrior worthy of the name who finds himself in unfamiliar environs will scout out the territory. It appeared deserted. He tried to find a vantage from which he might get his bearings, but the city had been all but flattened.

  Passing into what used to be a large esplanade, a dirty river flowing along one side, he noticed the fragments of an archway, perhaps a gate. It had been finely wrought once, bright and golden, celebratory. Statues had lined it, standing tall at the summit of marble columns, their wings outstretched, their holy visages…

  ‘Angels?’ murmured Narek, initially alarmed at the flat, echoless sound of his voice. Some of the fragments of marble were shaped like feathery wings. As he regarded them more closely, he noticed the odd washed-out hue and thought at first the mason’s stone had simply been bland. Then he looked across at the river and found the same bleached appearance. His own armour looked similarly drained.

  He held up a gauntleted hand to the pale sun, disturbed by the faintest glow of light shining through it, as if metal, flesh and bone had become translucent. The entire city, despite its sights, its smells, had an unreal lustre.

  Pyres stood on the horizon, distant enough to be indistinct, close enough to taste the burnt dead heaped upon them.

  Someone lived though, slowly walking through the wisps of ­fading smoke.

  Narek went to draw his blade, but found he had none. He had no bolter either. No matter. Even unarmed, he could kill this cur if he proved to be a threat.

  An old man dressed in rags, holding a gnarled staff, resolved through the smoke and dust. Narek’s face soured further as he recognised him.

  ‘You old bastard,’ Narek called, starting towards him. ‘Did you bring me here? Are you a witch? Is that how you did it?’ he asked, and then in a quieter voice, ‘Or are you some Neverborn thing?’

  His earlier confidence diminished a little at the thought.

  ‘I am neither, Bearer of the Word,’ the old man replied, though he had not moved his lips.

  ‘You are a sorcerer, then,’ accused Narek, and wished he had a blade. ‘Or I am dead. Either way, consider me displeased.’

  ‘You are not dead, Bearer of the Word, though you would have been had we remained on Nocturne.’

  ‘Then I owe you a debt, do I?’

  ‘Perhaps…’

  Narek looked around, then back to his hand again and the light shining through it.

  ‘Well, this is unsettling.’

  The old man smiled, as an elder might to a child in need of encouragement.

  ‘I have never been in a psyker’s mind before,’ said Narek, before eyeing the old man shrewdly. ‘It is a wretched vista, thin and unconvincing. Even the stink of the dead is lacking.’

  ‘It is not my mind, Barthusa,’ said the old man, who was suddenly standing next to him. ‘It is yours.’

  Narek fought every instinct not to react. Instead, he looked down.

  The old man held a rifle, and proffered it to Narek.

 
‘So is this. A Brontos-pattern.’

  Narek gently took the weapon and felt the markings he had made there. He knew every curve, every piece of it. The bolt-action reload for specialised ammunition, the cored barrel, the well-worn rest, the iron sights, the precision targeter, the short clip, and its sheer killing potential.

  A sniper’s weapon. His weapon.

  Or, at least, a memory of it.

  ‘Impossible…’

  ‘Actually,’ said the old man, ‘obtaining that was comparatively easy.’

  ‘And unreal.’ Narek snapped the rifle across his knee, the two halves splintering down the middle before collapsing into the same dust that plagued the sundered cityscape. ‘Easy compared to what?’ he asked.

  The old man smiled again, but evinced little warmth or humour.

  ‘You are a brutal instrument, Barthusa.’

  ‘And you smile overly. It is irksome.’ Narek took a forward step, his demeanour calm but menacing. ‘Twice you have used my given name, and I am none the wiser as to yours. Mindscape or not, I warn you, don’t do it again.’

  The old man nodded, unperturbed, unconcerned.

  ‘As you wish. I have need of you, Bearer of the Word,’ he said, and held out his hand.

  Resting in the palm, a small stone sliver gave off a faint aura that drew Narek’s eye.

  His voice came out as a breathless rasp. ‘How did you get that?’

  ‘With considerably more difficulty than your rifle.’

  Narek met the old man’s gaze, and found a pair of eldritch eyes peering back.

  ‘Who are you? What is this place?’

  ‘It is the Quami district, it is Tophet, and it is Gulshia.’

  Narek’s eyes became slits. ‘The perfect city… How?’

  ‘You called it Monarchia.’

  ‘I never went there,’ said Narek, curt, dismissive.

  ‘Then I wonder why it lingers in your mind? Have you seen it, seen the devastation your kinsmen inflicted upon it? It was razed to ash. Curious that you chose to only partly restore it.’