by Paul Kearney
He drew a breath, like a man laying down a heavy load.
‘But some of them, at least, may know it presently.’ From the sleeve of his habit the Chapter Master produced a coil of plasment. It quivered in his metal fingers as he held it out to Kerne.
Jonah bowed and unrolled the document. His face changed as he read; the muscles bunched along his jaw and his dark eyes glittered.
+++ Incoming transmission – Cypra Mundi Administratum – Felix Galerius – URGENT – attention of Kharne Al Murzim – Chapter Master Dark Hunters – Adeptus Astartes – Phobos System – Finial Sector: IMMEDIATE ACTION +++
Fleet belonging to Traitor Chaos faction known as Punishers sighted in Finial Sector, Kargad System: coordinates 22/394/J19. Fleet complement Dauntless class or lighter. Contact lost with Imperial detachments on Peronnen, Asranak and the Tellik Asteroids.
Intercept. Interdict. Destroy.
By the Emperor’s Will
Message ends
5.236.982.M41
‘Phobos!’ Jonah grated, using the nearest thing he had to profanity. He looked his Chapter Master in the eye. ‘This is all we have?’
‘All we have,’ Al Murzim said calmly. He resumed his pacing once more. The light was dwindling in the vast chamber and the votive candles flickered like the coals of little dying fires.
‘Dauntless class. Light cruisers then,’ Jonah said. ‘We still have heavier metal than that.’
‘We have the Ogadai,’ the Kharne said. ‘And it is close on four thousand years old.’
‘But still spaceworthy.’
‘Massaron assures me that is so. One Gothic class heavy cruiser – would that be enough, Jonah?’ Al Murzim smiled again.
‘I would take out a harbour scow to meet these scum in battle. In our own sector! And I thought we had seen the last of the Punishers. It’s been–’
‘One hundred and fifty-seven years,’ the Chapter Master interrupted him. ‘Over one and a half centuries since we threw them out of this system, and nearly destroyed ourselves in the process.’
‘I remember, lord.’
‘Of course you do. How many of us from Mortai Company were left standing when it was over?’
A cold light kindled in Kerne’s eyes. He spat the words out through bared teeth. ‘Eighteen.’
‘So you still dwell on it. As do I. Eighteen out of the ninety we numbered before the Punishers landed. You know better than anyone, Jonah, how dangerous these renegades are. They are our dark brethren, the shadow cast by our light. They are an abomination which cannot be allowed to exist.’
‘“The Great Enemy will be destroyed wherever he is found, hunted wherever he flees, and afforded neither pity nor quarter.”’
‘Quoting the Adeptus Terra at me? Not like you,’ Al Murzim said.
‘In this, I am one with the Administratum.’
‘As are we all. No matter how far we are from Earth, the Emperor’s Word will always reach us, and we will obey it.’
They paced in silence again. Jonah was afire with questions, burning to begin preparations for the mission that he was now sure was his. Tables and numbers filed through his brain: the roster of his company, the faces and names, the sergeants and the servitors.
He brought up the memory of the Ogadai, that vast starship which had been laid down before the Dark Hunters themselves had been founded. In its youth it had been part of the battle fleet of the White Scars Chapter. The Primarch himself, Jaghatai, had travelled in it, sanctifying the ship with his presence.
And ancient though it was, it still possessed enough firepower to lay waste to a planet.
Al Murzim spoke at last, in that quiet, even voice of his.
‘The last time they came, it was an invasion. They landed a quarter of a million in the first wave, and they had Emperor-class ships to back them up. It took the help of six other Chapters of our brethren to finally extirpate the Punishers from this system.’
‘Emperor bless them,’ Jonah said automatically.
‘Indeed. But for the Brazen Fists and the Dark Sons and the other four Chapters of our Adept, we would have been annihilated. As it is, even after a century and a half, we have not regained our numbers.’
Al Murzim sighed.
‘We are a poor Chapter, brother. Not for us the glorious campaigns of the Ultramarines or the Blood Angels. Three times in our three thousand years we have been reduced to a remnant.
‘Three times we have had to fight back from the verge of extinction. The Umbra Mortis, our battle barge, is at present nothing more than an orbital battery, stripped of parts and incapable of travelling the warp. The Ogadai is the only capital ship we have which is ready for immediate deployment, and it has been overdue a full refit for these last fifty years.
‘We have eleven Dreadnoughts left, and one of those encases Breughal Paine, our Forge-Master, who cannot leave this world lest his knowledge be lost forever. Even the Ardunai, our First Company, can clad barely half its brethren in the blessed relics of Terminator armour, and its captain, Ares Thuraman, is older even than I.’
‘He is a warrior beyond compare–’ Jonah said stoutly.
‘He is old, and his wounds trouble him without surcease. He will do his duty – he would even accept Dreadnought symbiosis if I asked him to endure it, but sometimes I believe what he really craves is the Emperor’s Peace.’
‘Thuraman has more ambition than that,’ Jonah said before he could stop himself.
The Kharne cocked his head, as if reconsidering something he already knew. ‘Say, rather, that others are ambitious on his behalf.’
‘Lord, what is it you are saying?’ Jonah asked quietly.
The Chapter Master checked, and looked his captain square in the face.
‘It may be this is a raid, no more. But the Kargad System is four months away.’
‘Not if one has recourse to the warp–’
‘The warp is fickle at best, and Isa Garakis has not travelled it in a long time. The Eye of Terror is waxing, we hear, and the warp is in flux. Half a dozen ships have been lost to it without a trace in the last year alone – an Imperial transport convoy with an entire Guards Regiment aboard is ten months overdue to Wendakhen.’
‘You do not trust our senior navigator?’
‘Say rather that in the current conditions, I will not trust to the warp.’
‘Four months! Lord, they could conquer half the system in that time, and be well entrenched by the time we arrive.’
‘Better than you not arriving at all, Jonah.’
As he saw the embattled frown upon his captain’s face, Al Murzim set one fleshless hand upon his shoulder again.
‘If we were at full strength, with a fleet worthy of the name, then I would send you into the warp. But I will not risk the loss of an entire battle company for the sake of a few months; nor will I risk losing you. The Chapter cannot afford that gamble.’
He paused. ‘One day, Jonah, I look to see you standing where I stand now.’
Jonah was stunned. ‘I am in no way worthy,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Oh, but you are.’ Al Murzim smiled. ‘And besides, there is no one else to whom I would trust this brotherhood, were it up to me alone.’
‘It – it is not up to you alone.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Parrik–’ It had been a long time since Jonah Kerne had called his Chapter Master by that name. Not many in the Chapter even knew what their lord’s name was, beyond the title. But Kerne had known Al Murzim in the long-ago days when they had both been young.
‘There is no call to begin talking about your successor.’
‘One never knows, Brother Kerne.’ The Kharne seemed uncomfortable, irritated even, at hearing the name he had been known under when he had been merely another battle-brother.
‘Forgive me. I am overfamiliar.’
‘No, not you. But times have changed, Jonah. There are undercurrents in the senior command that I have not quite fathomed.’ The Kharne collected himself
, frowning. ‘This is not your concern, at any rate. That last message from Cypra Mundi is.’
Then Kerne looked up. ‘Then you are sending me. You are sending out Mortai.’
‘I am. Can you guess why?’
‘I–’ Kerne hesitated. He thought he knew, but he was not sure he should say it.
‘Because you are the best strategist of all my captains. That’s one thing. And because you work best without supervision. That’s another. Others will say that I send you out of sentiment, my old company that I led for a century and which I still indulge from time to time.
‘Well, there may be something in that too. But you will not go alone. I will attach some heavy weapons from the Ninth, and Ambros will provide you with Scouts. It will be good for the Haradai to learn some new tricks at your hands.’
Jonah Kerne bowed, and on straightening said: ‘My Kharne, you say this has the hallmarks of a raid. What if it is more?’
The Chapter Master’s long face closed, until it resembled that of his granite-hewn forbears in the shadows around them.
‘That is the final reason why I send Mortai, and not one of the other companies. Because I know that it is like its current captain – awkward, stubborn, and full of anger. Mortai Company gained its title long before you and I were born, but its character has endured.
‘If things go ill – if this is more than a mere raid – then you will send us word, and we will come to you. And in the meantime you and Mortai will endure, Jonah. Your people will hold their ground against the Great Enemy until we prevail once more. There is no other company in the Chapter that I trust more.’
Al Murzim stopped and looked across the austere vastness of the chamber. His gaze came to rest upon the statue named Lukullus. Then he raised his head and stared up at the opening in the great dome above. It was dark outside now, and the wind could be heard, a distant howling. Snow whirled in and vanished before it was halfway to the floor. In the red lights of the votive candles it looked like slowly falling blood.
‘It is for this and times like it that our kind were brought into being, brother.’
Jonah Kerne knelt before his Chapter Master and bowed his shaven head. ‘Lord, we will do your bidding, or we will die trying.’
Kharne Al Murzim raised up his captain and took his arm in the ancient warrior grip, cold steel and warm flesh meeting.
‘Umbra Sumus,’ the Chapter Master said.
‘Umbra Sumus,’ Jonah replied. And his black eyes gleamed bright.
TWO
Praeparatio
Darkness had come to Phobian, and the icefields and glaciers were blue under the pitiless stars.
High up in the savage peaks of the Argahasts, however, the shadows of the Dark Planet were rent asunder by clusters of magnesium-bright light. The fortress of Mors Angnar was come to life. It pulsed and rumbled and thundered until it seemed that the very roots of the mountains were set in tremor by subterranean activity.
The vibrations triggered a dozen great avalanches downslope, filling whole valleys. It was as though some buried god were struggling to wake from sleep.
The servitors had been labouring in their hundreds all through the night. For the first time in years the vault doors of the Arsenal had been thrown open wide enough for vehicles, and now heavy wheeled and tracked transports were thundering up and down the concentric access ramps to the deepest ammunition stores of the Chapter.
Outside, the landing fields were being bulldozed clear of snow and ice to allow the heavy shuttles of the fleet to land. These pads had been built into the very mountainside of Anghir-Adhon itself, the sheer-sided peak which formed the spine of the Dark Hunters fortress. They projected out like flat-topped fungi protruding from the trunk of a mighty tree.
Normally the inbuilt heating systems of the landing-pads would keep them clear, but at certain times of the year even they could not keep pace with the accumulation of ice and snow, and so the weariless servitors would man the dozers and attack the drifts, shunting them off so that hundreds of tons of frozen rock and frost-cemented snow tumbled to the valley three thousand metres below.
Already, in the gaps between the whipping clouds, stars brighter than nature were glittering and wheeling above the mountain; the heavy shuttles of the fleet circling in holding patterns high above, impatient to land.
Mortai Company’s first sergeant breathed the gelid air deep into his massive chest. Brother-Sergeant Fornix was dressed informally in the fur-trimmed hides many of the Dark Hunters donned when outdoors on their home world.
He had a long, narrow face with a beak-like nose. One eye glinted pale as a frosted stone. The other gleamed dull red, the ocular buried in a fist of scar-tissue. His black hair was shorn close to the scalp except where one lock had been grown long to dangle plaited in front of his right ear.
Only a few long-serving veterans of the Dark Hunters wore the scalp-lock which was a legacy of their savage Primarch, Jaghatai. It was considered old-fashioned, a throwback to forgotten times, like the ritualistic scarring which had all but died out in the Chapter in the last century.
The reinforced plascrete of the landing field quivered under the thunder of the heavy transports; and now something more, also. A giant stumped up behind Fornix, a five-metre automaton as broad as it was tall, steam billowing from twin exhausts on its back, and the gyros of its mighty arms and clawed hands whirring. Fornix turned and smiled at the monster.
‘Forge-Master! My lord, I trust you do not feel the cold too keenly.’
A pause, and then there was what might have been termed a metallic grunt, echoing deep in the massive sarcophagus that was the chest of the Dreadnought.
‘The last time I felt cold, whelp, the Imperium was a lot younger, and full of better men than you.’
‘I’m sure it still is full of better men than me,’ Fornix grinned. ‘But I have yet to meet them.’
Again, the massive snort from the machine, like a backfiring engine. The Dreadnought raised one huge clawed arm and playfully set it down on Fornix’s shoulder for just a second, raising it as the Space Marine’s legs began to buckle.
Fornix rubbed his shoulder. ‘Your touch is as light as ever, Breughal.’
‘And your mouth never sleeps, Fornix.’ This time the lightness of something like a chuckle echoed from the towering figure, cold and strange out of that metallic heart.
They stared together at the endless convoys passing over the ramps before them, and Fornix raised his head to catch the distant lights among the night clouds that looked like stars, and yet were not.
‘It is about time,’ he breathed. ‘Nigh on two years it has been, since my bolter was aimed at anything more than a target drone.’
‘In those two years we have brought forty-six more battle-brothers into the Chapter, refitted the frigate Temujin, and restored the Land Raider Mindarion to holy function,’ Breughal said. ‘You must think of the long game, brother, as your captain and the Kharne do. What are two years, when we have the millennia-old war to fight?
‘We cannot all undergo symbiosis, brother,’ Fornix said, his grin fading. ‘For some of us there is a window of years during which we must have our strength set to use. I am no longer young, even by the standards of our Adept. I would not live my life in endless training for wars that pass us by. I thank the Emperor, our bright lord, that we have this chance now once more to seek redemption in battle.’
The Dreadnought whirred and wheezed above him. ‘Well said, brother,’ Breughal told him. ‘You sound almost like Jonah,’ he added.
‘Well don’t ever tell him that, for Phobos’s sake. He’ll think I’m becoming sane and sensible at last.’
‘Sanity comes to us all in the end.’
Fornix thumped the ceramite kneecap of the Dreadnought. ‘What think you, Breughal; is this just a raid, or are the Punishers set on conquest? The Cloisters are high with speculation.’
‘And envy, Fornix, that Mortai has been chosen for this mission. The Chapter’s captains say that
the Kharne indulges his protégé. Jonah Kerne takes the spearhead once again, when by rights it should be Thuraman.’
‘Jonah is the best we have, Breughal – you know that.’
‘Apart from you?’
‘Apart from me,’ Fornix grinned.
‘They say that when Kerne itches, you scratch, Fornix.’
‘Let them say that to my face, just once, and we shall see who does the scratching.’
There was a moment of almost silence about them, a sudden emptiness to the air itself. Then directly overhead it seemed, a roar exploded about the landing fields, so loud that Fornix’s eardrums felt it as a pressure on the reinforced membranes within his skull. He looked up, to see a bright, blaring light. His eyes, organic and mechanical, adjusted almost instantly, resolving it into the fiery circles of afterburners.
The angular shadow of a heavy shuttle grew around them, and the pad lights flickered as a thousand-ton spacecraft settled down three hundred metres away with a low, sonorous boom, sinking on its landing gear like some immense, tired animal easing its weight upon the earth.
The silence again, almost a kind of reverence. Then ramps whined and creaked open from the shuttle sides, each tall enough to admit a Dreadnought.
Light spilled out, illuminating the falling snow in staircases of bright blizzard. There was a revving and snorting of powerful engines, a few shouted commands from the senior servitors and auxiliaries, and the assorted vehicles gathered around the rim of the landing-pad began to inch forward in sequence, while from the sides of the shuttle crane-arms extended from their niches, each thirty or forty metres long, and began to reach out for cargo-loads like the grasping legs of a bulbous spider.
Fornix heard the muttering datastream of the servitors as it was run through Breughal’s interior vox-channels. The Forge-Master shifted slightly on his gargantuan chassis and issued orders in binaric – a tongue that only a very few in the Chapter still understood. A carmine gleam came and went in what passed for the Dreadnought’s eyes.