Ekene’s tale was a grim one.
Their entire Chapter had landed here, but for the most remote uninitiated training forces, spread across the segmentum.
Before dawn over the Mannheim Gap, they had been on the surface for three months and sixteen days, defending Hive Volcanus on the west coast of Armageddon Prime.
In that span of time, all of which was spent bolter-to-blade in the city’s burning streets, they suffered casualties far, far in advance of any other Chapter. Everywhere they fought, the enemy struck back in overwhelming numbers. Countless times they were deployed to reinforce elements of the Imperial Guard that were already long dead by the time the Lions arrived, leaving the Space Marines deep in enemy territory without easy withdrawal.
On at least fifteen catalogued occasions, they were ordered to advance on specific critical objectives, only to find themselves alone without the planned support forces or the promised reinforcements.
Casualties mounted, operation after operation, day by day. Ambushes were common, even on routine patrols through pacified territory. The Lions were assigned to hold crucial districts and sectors, and accordingly moved in force to cover all necessary ground. Yet they found their patrols being hit harder than any orbital intelligence had predicted possible. The enemy would appear in numbers undreamed, rising from ambushes in sectors that were recorded as being most viciously cleansed beforehand.
They were granted orbital picts and auspex-scrye readouts from Hive Command, only to find their intelligence scarcely matched the embattled realities of their deployment zones. Time and again, the Lions jumped into the fire. What choice was there? They would not allow the city to fall. They could not allow the enemy to live.
It did not take long for them to rely first and foremost on their own scanners and Scouts, but their equipment suffered unexpected deteriorations and frequent jamming; their Scouts often fell silent while out in the city alone. Sometimes, the Lions would find their Scouts’ bodies. Usually, they would not.
Pict-feeds from their vessels in orbit were distorted from the void war playing out above, but those rare, wrecked visual clues were the most reliable intelligence they could muster. The Lions swore by them, thanking the thrall-captains of their warships for any and all devoted efforts. But these also grew more infrequent as their fleet was massacred in the sky. Less than a month into the campaign, rearming runs from orbit began to grow as rare as reliable intelligence. Celestial Lions drop-ships were destroyed high in the atmosphere on two occasions, and on another, Volcanus’s own wall-guns malfunctioned and destroyed an incoming shipment, blowing seven loaded Thunderhawks out of the sky.
Never once did Ekene’s voice crack as he told me of these misfortunes; never once did he sigh, or glance away, or lament at what had come to be. Contained within him was a deep, nourishing well of resolve that did credit to any son of Dorn.
It only made my blood run colder with each revealed betrayal, that such a fate had befallen my cousins.
My hands must have been clenched for some time, for Ekene hesitated in his retelling, gesturing to where I gripped the arms of the restraint throne.
‘Reclusiarch?’
I forced my muscles to unlock. ‘Continue.’
And continue he did.
Mere weeks into the war, half the Chapter lay dead, the names of the slain added each dawn to the rolls of honour. The survivors fought on.
Decades ago, in the Last War, Hive Volcanus fell quickly to the greenskin horde. Like carrion crows, the enemy picked over the city’s bones and went to war with the looted spoils of Imperial manufactories. There would be no repeat of such shameful history this time. The city’s lords and leaders made that clear at each command briefing, leaving the Lions to make their demands into defiant reality. All the while, the city burned. It burned but did not fall.
Then came Mannheim.
The Mannheim Gap was a canyon running through the mountains north of Hive Volcanus. A rent in this planet’s priceless earth, torn open by the slow, active dance of the world’s tectonics. Any who dwell here for more than a handful of weeks know that Armageddon is not a world that sleeps easy, whether due to groundquakes, dust storms, or yet another war.
The Lions were told the canyon had to be assaulted, for there lay a nest of mechanical heresy, where the aliens were forgebreeding their scrap iron god-machines. Volcanus’s forces had to strike before the alien Titans became active, or the tide would forever turn against the city’s defenders. The Guard could not be trusted to deal such a surgical strike, nor could the city organise a mass withdrawal and redeployment of its deeply entrenched Guard elements to make it a plausible option. It had to be Space Marines. It had to be the Lions.
Primitive void shielding protected the site from orbital bombardment. The Lions had to strike overland, without drop pods, marching into the ravine alongside their tanks, attacking in battalion regiments like some echo of the Heresy and the millennia of crude warfare before it.
The Lions reconnoitred, of course. They scouted and watched, deeming Imperial intelligence reliable. None of the alien god-walkers were infused with life.
But time was not on their side. Every hour they spent behind their fortress walls was another hour that brought the Gargant machines closer to awakening.
Five hundred Lions attacked. The last half of the Chapter went to war, knowing that the enemy numbers were beyond the capability of the Guard to confront. They chose to bring overwhelming force, to strike fast and hard, countering their crippling inability to strike from the skies.
Five hundred Space Marines. I have taken whole worlds with a quarter of that number. Even though human resistance and greenskin forces are impossible to compare, five hundred Adeptus Astartes warriors is an overwhelming weapon in any imaginable reckoning. The Lions commanders were right to commit their full fury. Any Chapter Master would do the same. There was no possible way the enemy could have known such a force was coming to destroy them, and there is simply no way to prepare for five hundred Space Marine warriors.
Strike with choking ferocity. Destroy the enemy. Fall back before getting entrenched in a full-scale battle. It should have worked.
The Season of Fire was still weeks away when they charged, but dragon’s breath in the air already heralded the storms to come. Gritty, stinking air howled down the canyon as the Lions advanced behind their Warleaders and Deathspeakers. I could picture it so clearly, down to their banners tearing in the wind.
Along the canyon’s walls, huge industrial rigging rose against the rock: great construction yard platforms, as the greenskin beasts built their iron avatars higher and higher. Hundreds of them, never of uniform size, each one a bloated, scrap-fleshed icon to foul gods, crawling with screaming aliens.
Still. Five hundred Space Marines…
‘When did you realise you had been betrayed?’ I asked.
Ekene took a breath before replying. ‘It did not take long.’
‘The Gargants,’ Cyneric interjected. ‘They were active.’
Ekene gave a bitter laugh, sharp as a gunshot. ‘If that was all we had to deal with, we might still have fought our way clear without being slaughtered. We might even have won, despite dying to the last man.’
He was more solemn as he continued, letting the tale reach its inevitable conclusion. The Gargants were not sleeping, they were waiting. Searing heat spread through the canyon from the solid fuel burners deep in the alien Titans’ bellies – beneath the crash of bolters and the cracking rattle of alien rifles, came the clank of gears, with the landslide grind of coal and scrap being fed into the Gargants’ heartfires. Great guns whined downward on protesting joints, while the ground shook with each newborn Gargant’s first steps.
The Lions gold battle tanks raged skywards, streams of lascannon fire bursting thin shields and scoring holes in the hulls of towering enemy war machines. Warleaders shouted orders, in control of their warriors even in the heat of the battle, establishing where to strike, where to push through the orks
’ lines, where to move in defence of tank battalions threatened by enemy infantry.
My heart soared at his words. Even when the Gargants awoke, Ekene and his brothers – the last half of a noble Chapter – were still fighting to win. They would purge the canyon at the cost of their own lives. Dorn himself would have stood with them that day.
But the tide truly turned. As Ekene described this latest twist of fate, Cyneric leaned forward in his restraint throne, scarcely believing what he was hearing.
The enemy ambush unfolded further. Greenskins spilled from the earth, pouring in hordes from warrens within the canyon sides and the rocky ground. Thousands of them, roaring beneath fanged war banners and standards made from crucified Lions taken in other battles. This fresh army surged into the ravine, filling it like sand in an hourglass, blocking all hope of withdrawal and eliminating any chance of victory.
‘They knew we were coming,’ said Ekene. ‘What other reason could there be to bury whole war-clans under the rock, waiting for such an assault? They knew we were coming. Their overlord was a beast clad in scrapwork armour – the biggest greenskin we had ever seen. He ate the dead: his own, and ours. Captain Vularakh buried the war-sword Je’hara in the beast’s belly and carved three metres of stinking alien guts free. It did nothing. We fought as we fell back, but we knew we were betrayed.’
I could not argue with that. A traitor, somewhere, had fed word to the enemy, and the orks made the most of their ambush. Five hundred Space Marines could take a star system. At Mannheim, they had barely been able to escape alive. It was difficult to imagine the sea of alien flesh necessary to butcher so many of mankind’s finest, but having seen the ocean of greenskins spilling over the plains towards the walls of Helsreach only months before, I had a fairly clear frame of reference.
‘That is not all.’ Ekene gave a grim smile. ‘Sniper fire, brutally accurate, rained down from the canyon walls. I am not speaking of the solid shell rattle of greenskin projectile throwers. I know how these aliens fight, Reclusiarch. This was viciously precise laser weaponry, knifing through our officers’ helms from above. Warleader Dakembe, shot through the throat. Spiritwalker Azadah, taken before he could unleash his powers, his skull blown open by two crossing las-shots an arm’s length away from me. Deathspeakers, Warleaders, Spiritwalkers… even Pride Leaders, cut down with fire too precise, too clinical, to be the enemy.’
He paused, and I could see in his eyes that he was no longer seeing the gunship bay around us. He was seeing his brothers die at Mannheim – some to crude iron blades rending through ceramite, others to spikes of white-hot las-fire lancing down into the ravine.
‘It took four hours to fight free. We carved our way back the way we came, abandoning a sea of dead tanks, slain brothers and butchered enemy bodies. The gene-seed of half our Chapter lies rotting at the bottom of that canyon, unharvested by our Apothecaries and defiled by the thousands of foes we left alive. We fled,’ he made the word into a spat curse, ‘from the field, and the most valiant battle the Celestial Lions ever fought was in that retreat. Never had we faced such odds. The last of us cut our way free, pulled our brothers from the storm of blades and fell back to our fortress with the enemy at our heels.’
‘The fortress fell,’ I said quietly.
‘That implies we even had a chance to defend it.’ Ekene shook his head. ‘The xenos flooded it before most of our survivors had even arrived. We had to fight just to escape our own falling fortress. Even then, for every gunship that raced free, another two were shot down in flames.’
‘Throne of the Emperor,’ Cyneric swore softly.
Ekene nodded. ‘Our survivors returned to Volcanus. We had three officers left at dusk of that day, three officers above the rank of Pride Leader. Deathspeaker Julkhara, who called you a brother, Reclusiarch; Warleader Vakembei, the last captain; and Lifebinder Kei-Tukh, our last Apothecary. The Chapter’s future rested on his skills. And can you guess the final insult, Reclusiarch? The last gasp in this drama of shame and treachery?’
I wanted facts, not my own speculation. ‘Say it,’ I said.
Ekene smiled. ‘Our territory inside the city walls was a cold foundry, nearly lightless, with a perimeter of rockcrete patrolled by our remaining warriors. Kei-Tukh did not survive the first night. We found him at dawn, slouched against our last Land Raider, shot through the eye-lens. The gene-seed he had carried was gone, and he would harvest no more. So now you see the depths of our plight, Reclusiarch. We have lost our fleet, our armoury, our officers and almost all hope of rebuilding our Chapter. We cannot even cling to pride, after the shame of retreat. All that remains to us is the truth. We must survive long enough to speak it. The Imperium must know what happened here.’
I wanted to tell him the Imperium would know. I wanted to reassure him that his entire bloodline had not died in vain. I meant to say it, yet the words that left my lips were more instinctive, and somehow more honest.
‘You mean to die on this world.’
Ekene’s dark lips curved into another sickle-smile. ‘Of course. We will die alongside our brothers, as it should be. Deathspeaker Julkhara wished you to know the truth behind our coming last stand, and ensure those that share our primarch’s blood never speak ill of our fall.’
I said nothing. They had asked me to come, but I would decide just what my involvement would be.
Cyneric leaned forward, and his helm’s vox-speakers couldn’t quite steal the passion from his voice. ‘You have to return to Elysium. Endure the shame if you must, as the Crimson Fists endured their shame. You have to rebuild your Chapter – the galaxy must not lose the Lions forever.’
‘Elysium? Brother-knight, the Chapter is savaged beyond resurrection. Men, materiel, knowledge… All of it is gone. We have nothing to hand down to any generation that would follow us. You advocate cowardice to fuel false hope?’
‘I advocate survival.’ Cyneric snarled the words. ‘Survival to preserve precious blood, and to rise again to fight another day. I hope to die in glory, as any son of Rogal Dorn. But even in our legends of the primarch, when he bled his warriors to purify them, he never let them taste annihilation. Sometimes, the more virtuous path is to carry the shame and survive.’
I looked between them both. The truth was that there was no wrong answer here. No right answer, either. A glorious last stand was no more or less respectable than preserving the infinite value of a Space Marine Chapter. One would earn more glory, no doubt. The other would better serve mankind. I appreciated Ekene’s zeal to finish what he began, and die with unbroken loyalty alongside his brothers.
But I also appreciated Cyneric’s surprising wisdom, to preserve the Chapter’s soul at the cost of carrying personal shame. Few Templars would commit to such a burden. It spoke well of him that he had the insight to consider both paths, but I wondered if he would advocate shame if he were the one facing the prospect of so glorious a last stand. Easier to speak of shame than to survive it.
In the minutes of silence that followed, we touched down in Hive Volcanus. Whatever solution arose from all this had to appease the Lions’ hot-blooded need for vengeance at Mannheim, as well as their cold-blooded need to be vindicated by spreading word of their betrayal. Both were essential, and both would see the Celestial Lions wiped clear from the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes.
And yet, the Chapter also had to survive.
As we disembarked, Cyneric opened a vox channel, speaking so the Lions would not hear.
‘One question plagues me, Reclusiarch.’
I could guess. ‘You would ask how this all began – what the Lions did in the past to earn this fate.’
‘Every vendetta has a source, does it not?’
‘True. And the truth here is a bleak one, dating back decades. The Lions are being punished now for trying to tell the truth fifty years ago.’
‘I do not understand.’
We made our way across the landing pad, and how glorious it was to see a city skyline that was still intact. Volcanus ha
d endured a lesser siege than Helsreach, with many more defenders manning its walls. The central spire was an ugly monolith that lived up to the name hive, with anaemic industrial sectors and transit stations spread around its wide foundations. Most of the city’s manufactories were protected in the hive tower’s shell, making life wretched for its citizens who were forced to live shut inside with the fumes of their own forge fires eternally tainting the ventilation. It meant, however, that the city was monumentally harder to take than Helsreach, and with no central highway, the enemy could not simply run free through the city’s core.
‘Every Chapter carries a thousand secrets of past wars, unabsolved shames and slights against its honour. This is not the first time that the Lions have dealt with the Inquisition.’
‘Julkhara’s recording,’ Cyneric replied. ‘He spoke of the “echoes of Khattar”.’
‘Khattar is the world where this pathetic grudge began. It is where the Inquisition first betrayed the Celestial Lions.’ I finally turned from the Volcanus skyline, watching the Lions unloading their gunships. ‘You could argue, as other Chapters have argued upon hearing this rumour, that it was also where the Lions damned themselves by their own naivety.’
That gave Cyneric pause. ‘You admire them, but consider them naive?’
‘Anyone who trusts an agent of the Inquisition has earned the right to be named naive, Cyneric. There is a reason the Adeptus Astartes stand apart from the Imperium – autonomous; loyal to the empire’s ideals, but rarely its function. The Lions’ most grievous error was forgetting that.’
IV
Stories at the Fire
The Inquisition does not exist.
It does not exist in the sense many Imperial citizens believe – as a cohesive, interlinked cobweb of organised power. Individual men and women are granted immunity from all persecution and autonomy from all law. They are granted that most nebulous of virtues: authority. Everything else comes down to what they achieve, and what personal power they amass. When an inquisitor calls upon Imperial resources, he or she relies on the threat of authority, rather than any real organisation lending support to their needs. Their power is both utterly real and a cunning illusion, all at once.
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