by Gav Thorpe
Agapito checked the chronometer. They had eighteen minutes remaining before the automatic teleport would take them back to the battle-barge.
‘We don’t have time to clear the upper decks,’ he told the others. ‘We’ll head directly to the bridge.’
‘Access steps, quadrant four,’ replied Corbyk. ‘I wouldn’t trust the conveyors, not with the state of everything else.’
‘Good point. We’ll take the stairs.’
The stairwell was made of solid ferrocrete, reinforced with a mesh of plasteel, strong enough to hold the weight of the Terminators – a benefit of boarding a Legiones Astartes ship. They had ascended two flights to the deck above when Jasson’s voice cut through the background hiss of the long-range vox.
‘No concentration of personnel, or force. Minimal readings from your objective, commander.’
‘Minimal readings? What does that mean, watch captain?’
‘Just background energy signature from the vessel itself, commander. I would say the bridge is inactive, if anything. There should be some kind of blip on one of the scales – vox-traffic, energy grid, life signals from the servitors. Nothing, commander, just the background noise of the ship systems.’
‘I hate Night Lords,’ muttered Chovani. ‘Cowards, all of them.’
‘At least Word Bearers just fight you,’ added Corbyk. ‘That’s the sort of despotic traitor I can admire.’
‘Focus, all of you,’ growled Agapito. ‘Jasson, you keep monitoring the surveyors. Anything spikes, anything looking like a reactor surge, any dip in beacon quality, you teleport us straight back.’
‘Yes, commander.’ Jasson did his best not to sound too put upon. ‘We’ll be monitoring for any threat.’
The stairwell was completely dark. The steps were heavily tarnished and a brief olfactory analysis confirmed the presence of dried blood.
‘Here,’ said Gal, his power fist pointing at a line of deep holes in the plastered wall. ‘Bolt impacts.’
‘We’re not the first friends to come calling,’ said Corbyk.
Their sensors flared with a renewed energy source a moment before Agapito heard boots on the steps above. A second later the walls echoed with metallic rings, their source revealed as several grenades bounded down the steps from the landing above.
‘Frag charges,’ Agapito said dismissively, recognising the pattern of the grenades. He continued up two steps before the grenades detonated with three successive cracks, the noise magnified by the confined space. Fire and shrapnel engulfed the massive greaves of his Tactical Dreadnought suit. The blast scratched and burned the black paint and gilding, but did no actual damage to the heavy gauge layered ceramite and adamantium.
‘Gal! Take the lead.’
The commander stepped aside as best he could, turning so that the heavy-flamer-armed legionary could fit past on the steps. Reaching the mid-flight turn, Gal raised his weapon and unleashed a burst of burning promethium around the corner, the wave of flame filling the space beyond.
Agapito pushed into the still-burning residue, armour capable of operating in magma vaults more than enough protection against the heat. Through the haze he saw two Night Lords, one of them slapping at a burning slick of promethium on the backpack of the other.
He burst from the flames at full speed, the elongated claws of his left gauntlet already in motion. The closest Night Lord had time only to half turn before the crackling fist connected with the side of his helmet. Ceramite and skull snapped apart at the touch of the gleaming energy field, component atoms scattered by the disruptive effect of the lightning claw.
The second traitor ducked beneath the swing, bringing up his bolter to fire a long burst into Agapito’s chest even as the commander’s momentum carried him directly into the Night Lord. Agapito stumbled as the traitor fell. The Night Lord’s leg armour buckled beneath the weight of the Terminator war-plate. Agapito’s second stride landed on the traitor’s arm and crushed the elbow into the edge of the reinforced ferrocrete step, messily severing the limb.
He turned, weight grinding the remains of the Night Lord’s arm to splinters of ceramite and mashed flesh, tearing forth a drawn-out bellow of pain, until Agapito dropped to one knee to drive the points of two claws through the eye lenses of the traitor. Sparks scattered like embers on a breeze when the claws speared from the back of the Night Lord’s head and earthed through the step.
The squad regrouped at the next landing, one deck below the bridge entrance. Another quick consultation with the Shadowed Guardian confirmed that there were no new readings of note from the command chamber.
‘We hit hard, we hit first and last,’ Agapito told his warriors as they ascended the final flight of steps.
The stair brought them into an access passage about ten metres wide, some thirty metres from the armoured gate of the main bridge access. The portal was closed, an immense single plate that had been dropped across the doorway.
‘This might take a moment,’ said Corbyk. He hefted his thunder hammer meaningfully as he advanced. ‘Watch my back.’
He was a few strides from the portal, the others following close behind, when a hydraulic hiss resounded down the corridor. Gears rumbled in the depth of the wall and the portal rose up to reveal a hellish ruddy glow streaming from the interior of the main bridge. A crimson fog billowed around the Terminators, its touch registering freezing cold on their sensors.
They stood looking at the open gateway, weapons at the ready. No enemy emerged, and sensors detected no movement within the bridge.
‘Are we supposed to just step inside?’ asked Gal.
‘I really hate Night Lords,’ Chovani muttered.
Agapito forged forward, determined to show no fear.
‘Let’s end this.’
The red glow permeated the shifting cloud, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere when Agapito crossed the threshold. After two more paces he saw that in fact the ruddy aura came from nothing more unnatural than the console screens of several abandoned stations. Armoured figures lay slumped at each position.
The clumps of the others’ footfalls were muted as they followed, and the squad spread out to fill the twenty-metre broad semi-circular area at the centre of the command deck. Above was a small mezzanine shrouded with darkness. Steps descended into horseshoe-shaped sub-levels to the left and right, lit by fitful green flickering from malfunctioning displays. Here too the servitors had been removed and several key systems were monitored by legionaries, their armour leaning awkwardly where they had fallen.
‘What killed them?’ asked Corbyk as he approached the closest.
‘This is wrong,’ said Gal, panning his suit lamps through the murk.
‘Oh really?’ Corbyk replied sarcastically.
‘Look at them!’ insisted Gal.
Agapito examined the armoured forms. In the pale light of Gal’s lamps he saw that the war-plate was not dark blue as he had thought, but lighter in colour. As the Raven Guard played the beam of his lights onward he revealed a symbol on the closest body’s shoulder pad – an inverted omega on a white circle.
‘Ultramarines?’ whispered Agapito. ‘How did they...? What are they doing here?’
Corbyk reached out and moved a corpse. At least, he attempted to. At his touch, rather than falling away from his hand, it wobbled slightly and then turned.
The vox crackled into life, a cross-Legion frequency, and a nerve-jangling screech pierced Agapito’s ears. Judging by the shouts and swearing from the others, he was not alone in hearing it. After a moment the wailing dropped to a drawn-out hiss, which then turned into a whispered voice.
‘Flee...’
Agapito stepped back at another shout from Corbyk. The thing they had taken to be a corpse was rising up, pushing itself to its feet. Around them the other armoured forms were moving also. The red gleam of the monitors brightened, started to fluctuate with an arrhythm
ic pulsing.
‘Flee...’ insisted the vox-whisper again. ‘It devours…’
The Terminators unconsciously formed a circle. Back to back, weapons raised towards the apparitions lifting out of the gloom. Eight bore the livery of the Ultramarines, but two more of them, Agapito noticed, had the black war-plate and sigils of the Lion’s Dark Angels.
More lights flared into illumination as systems came online, their gleam like will o’ the wisps in the roiling smog.
‘Something, a kind of tether,’ said Corbyk.
Agapito couldn’t see at first to what the Raven Guard referred. When one of the Dark Angels swayed, turning slightly with a hand flapping uselessly at an empty pistol holster at its waist, the commander saw something connecting the Space Marine’s armour to the command station. It looked like coiled cable on first impression, but there was an altogether more organic slick to the fluid that dribbled from the crack in the legionary’s plastron, and the piping quivered with its own life; bulges travelled along its serpentine loops from the legionary to the console. There were bloody handprints on the runepad of the monitoring position.
With a crackle that startled Agapito, the main display burst into brightness, obscured by the bank of mist. The internal speakers boomed into life with a fierce growling while an impression of a monstrous face started to coalesce on the crystal panes of the screen. Agapito was filled with an impression of something unnatural, something immensely powerful coming closer, like the bow wave of a huge ship coming to a quayside. A leviathan surfacing.
‘Get us out of here, commander!’ snapped Corbyk. ‘This place is warp-touched!’
‘Not yet,’ Agapito replied. He calmed himself with a deep breath and aimed his bolter at one of the Ultramarines. ‘First we give these poor servants of the Emperor the peace they’ve earned.’
He opened fire, and his bolts split open the helm of his target. The others joined in, pouring their fusillade into the juddering legionaries. A howl of pain and rage echoed from the address system. Gal opened up his heavy flamer with a long burst, turning in a broad arc to engulf the consoles with burning promethium. Circuits exploded and screens cracked while Agapito’s suit registered the swiftly rising temperature. He looked around the blazing bridge space to assure himself that everything was alight. Nothing mortal would survive the growing conflagration.
Pooling promethium crept towards his foot as Gal fired again, his grunts of satisfaction audible across the vox. Agapito looked down into the crawling fire and thought of the phosphex missiles that the Night Lords had unleashed at the Dropsite Massacre...
The flame was almost at his foot, mesmerising him.
‘Commander!’
He was not sure who had shouted but the call broke him out of his distraction. Not yet time for his end, his peace. The war was not over. Not yet.
‘Shadowed Guardian, emergency recall teleport. Now!’
A second and a lifetime later, the commander’s atoms reconfigured on the pads of the teleport bay. As soon as he had regained his equilibrium, a matter of a couple of seconds, Agapito checked the chronometer. Twenty-three minutes until the pursuing ships were at extreme range.
‘Command, full bombardment of the target.’
‘What about our supplies, commander?’
‘Damn the supplies, Jasson. Fire everything we have and keep firing until that ship is vapour!’
Two
Corax waited in his personal chambers and took the opportunity to review the last crew strength and munitions reports from Branne. It was not pleasant reading. Waiting for the victualling convoy had been a calculated risk, tying the Raven Guard to a single system for several weeks. That it had been delayed – intercepted by the Night Lords, Corax believed in retrospect – should have been a warning. But the parlous state of the Raven Guard’s non-legionary strength and supplies had forced Corax into the elongated stay.
That they had not been able to resupply at all verged on disaster. Choosing a near-dead system like Rosario had advantages in stealth, but, since the alien intervention that had befallen the system years earlier, its facilities to deal with a war fleet were severely limited.
A chime turned Corax in his chair, and he activated the door controls. It slid open to reveal Balsar Kurthuri, the blue blazon of the Librarius once more breaking the black of his armour on the right shoulder. He wore no helmet; the cables of his psychic hood framed a face that was drawn, the skin hanging a little loose, eyes deeply sunken and underlined with darkness. His gaze flitted around the chamber for several seconds before it settled on Corax, who bid the Librarian to enter.
‘A communication, your message said.’ Corax invited Kurthuri to sit in one of the chairs set before his table but the Librarian declined with a gentle shake of the head. ‘A warp dream?’
‘Something more directed, my lord. The warp has been settling for some time now and our broadcasts have been reaching further and further. Two hours ago I felt a presence, another ship in the warp with us. I consulted with the Navigators and they confirmed that they could see something else sharing the same current. An hour ago I felt a direct contact.’
Corax leaned forward, hands resting on the table top.
‘What sort of contact?’
‘A message. A request. The other ship belongs to the Iron Hands. They have asked that we drop from warp in the Ukell System a few light years from here.’
‘To what end? I have no reason to trust that this is anything but an attempt to lure us into a trap.’
‘I have... touched upon the mind of the other Librarian. Or, I suppose you might say, the ripples of our thoughts have crossed. He is genuine, in my opinion. Certainly from the Iron Hands.’
‘The Iron Hands have no Librarians, Balsar. My brother, Ferrus Manus, was not overly keen on the use of warp-born powers. I am surprised you do not recall as such. That skews the matter, does it not?’
‘The Gorgon founded no formal Librarius, my lord, but his Legion does have psykers trained in our methods. I attest that he is loyal.’
‘Would you wager our lives on such vouchsafe?’
Kurthuri hesitated and then nodded.
‘Very well,’ continued Corax. ‘What did this Iron Hand desire of us?’
‘His commander wishes to speak with you, to exchange intelligence.’
‘Why can you not do this through your “contact”?’
Kurthuri shrugged. ‘It is warp-thought, not a precise system for communicating, my lord. I do not think there is any harm in diverting to Ukell. We are one ship. Easy enough to disengage and break back to warp if there is trouble.’
Corax considered this for a few moments, weighing up the potential for fresh reinforcements against the possibility of attack.
‘I will defer to your counsel, Balsar.’ He nodded and gestured for the Librarian to leave. ‘Inform them we will rendezvous at Ukell, but nothing more. Pass the order to Branne to tell the Navigators to re-plot our course.’
When Kurthuri had left, Corax sat for some time in thought. The restored Librarius had been essential for the vetting of new arrivals to his ad hoc force, and Kurthuri had been at the heart of that. Yet the powers of the warp were so fickle. He had seen first hand what a corrupting influence they could be. Years of war against traitors that had bargained their lives away in return for the power of the immaterium had taught Corax to be cautious in dealing with such matters. Though practical necessity required the Librarians to be active again, the primarch could not shake the feeling that the Emperor’s decree to cease their use could not be ignored entirely.
The Emperor had warned against their use for a reason, and perhaps the treachery of Horus and his allies was the proof of that warning.
The Light of Battle was a small patrol cruiser, dwarfed by the Avenger as the Raven Guard battle-barge moved within a few thousand kilometres to welcome aboard the Iron Hands delegation.<
br />
‘They can’t be carrying more than fifty legionaries,’ observed Branne as a pair of Thunderhawks left the patrol ship’s flight bays. ‘How have they survived alone all this time?’
‘You think they have sworn for another master?’ said Corax, standing beside the commander in the flight deck chosen to welcome the arrivals. He looked at their escort. A hundred Raven Guard, clean-limbed Raptors from Branne’s company, waited along the sides of the aircraft deck, bolters and heavy weapons at the ready, their black Mark VI armour shining in the docking lights. ‘Are there other precautions you wish to have taken?’
‘I’d prefer you not to be here, my lord,’ said Branne. ‘What if they have brought charges to detonate? They could fly their gunships directly into us, use them as missiles.’
‘You have become inventively suspicious of late, Branne.’
‘Not really, my lord. I’m just remembering how we rigged shuttles to drop atomic charges on Kiavahr...’
Corax did not reply. It was an unwelcome reminder of another dark time that had necessitated extreme actions. Would such ruthless measures be needed again before Horus was defeated? Very likely.
‘Kurthuri assures me that he and his Librarius-brothers detect no malignant intent,’ he said, trying to lighten his own mood as much as reassure Branne.
‘And you trust that against all risk, my lord?’
Corax looked sharply at his commander. ‘You have firm reason not to? Am I to fear all encounters from now on, based on nothing greater than the fact that we have enemies?’
This time it was Branne who chose to remain silent. He did not meet his primarch’s gaze, but stared intently out through the docking screen that shimmered across the open wall of the flight bay.
Soon enough the glimmers of plasma engines resolved into the shape of two metallic-and-black painted Thunderhawks, their blunt noses adorned with the badges of the Iron Hands Legion. They slowed and passed through the navigational shield, turning flankwards to the primarch as they settled on bursts of landing jets.