by Ben Counter
‘I have nothing to say,’ said Sarpedon. ‘Certainly
nothing that will change any fate you have in mind for me.’
‘I could have executed you on Selaaca,’ said
Lysander. ‘Remember that the next time you bemoan your
fate.’
The window slammed shut. Lysander was correct. He
had defeated Sarpedon face to face on Selaaca and few
servants of the Imperium would have had any compunction
about killing him out of hand.
Sarpedon turned back to the desk and took up the
quill again.
I have seen, he wrote, that our present and future, the
mark we will leave on the galaxy, depends on the
insistence of one misguidedly honourable man to execute
us in accordance with the word of law.
Is this a mockery by the galaxy, to condemn us by
the virtues of another? I could decide it is so. I could curse
the universe and rail against our lot. But I choose to see
the Emperor has given us this – a stay of execution, a few
moments to have our say before our peers – as a gift to
those who served Him instead of the Imperium.
What can we make of this? What victory can we mine
from such a thin seam? It is the way of the Astartes to see
victory in the smallest hope. I shall seek it now. My
brothers, I wish I could speak with you and bid you do the
same, but I am isolated from you. I hope you, too, can see
something other than despair, even if it is only a thought
turned to hope and duty when the end comes.
Seek victory, my brethren. I pray that in your souls, at
least, the Soul Drinkers cannot be defeated.
‘THRONE ALIVE,’ HISSED Scout Orfos. ‘Such death.
Such foul xenos work.’
The surface of Selaaca rolled by beneath the
Thunderhawk gunship. Through the open rear ramp the
grey landscape rippled through ruined cities and expanses
of tarnished metal, obsidian pillars rising from deep valleys
choked with pollution and the shores of black, dead seas
lapping against shores scattered with collapsed buildings.
The human presence on Selaaca was now no more
than scars, the ruined crust of a long-dead organ. The
necrons had built over it, vast sheets of metal, pyramids,
tomb complexes and patterns of obelisks which had no
discernible purpose other than to mark Selaaca as a
planet that belonged to them.
‘Dwell not on the xenos,’ said Scout-Sergeant
Borakis. He was old and grizzled where the Scouts were
young, his voice gravelly thanks to the old wound on his
throat, his armour festooned with kill-marks and trophies
while the Scouts under his command were not yet
permitted to mark their armour. Borakis leaned towards the
open ramp, gripping the handhold mounted overhead. ‘It is
not your place to seek to understand the enemy. It is
enough to know only that he must be killed!’
‘Of course, Scout-sergeant,’ said Orfos, backing away
from the ramp.
The Thunderhawk flew down low over a range of hills
studded with obelisks and pylons, as if metallic tendrils
had forced their way out of the ground to escape the bleak
gravity of Selaaca. Patterns of silver like metal roads
spiralled around the peaks and valleys, and sparks of
power still spat between a few of the pylons.
‘We’re closing in on mark one,’ came the pilot’s voice
from the cockpit of the Thunderhawk. The crew were two of
the thousands of Chapter staff and crew who inhabited the
Phalanx, a vast support network for the Imperial Fists’
campaigns. Using star maps developed by the Adeptus
Mechanicus, the strike cruiser Mantle of Wrath had
penetrated further into the Veiled Region than any Space
Marine craft before it, to follow up the information extracted
by the Castellan during his interrogation of a Soul Drinkers
captive.
The ground rippled as the Thunderhawk hovered down
low to land. The landing gear touched the blasted earth
and Borakis led his squad out. Borakis and his four Scouts
deployed with the speed and fluidity that years of training
had given them, spreading out to cover all angles with bolt
pistols. Borakis carried a shotgun as old and scarred as
he was, and in his other hand checked the auspex
scanner loaded with the coordinates the Castellan had
given him.
‘Laokan! Take the point! Orfos, you’re watching our
backs. Kalliax, Caius, with me.’ Borakis pointed in the
direction the auspex indicated, over the dead earth.
Once, these hills had been forested. Stumps and
exposed roots remained, shorn down to ground level. Up
close the pylons looked like spinal columns worked in
steel, blackened by the haze of pollution that hung
overhead. The obelisks were fingers of a substance so
black it seemed to drink the light. A faint hum ran up
through the ground, the echo of machinery far below.
‘The xenos have not departed this place,’ said Orfos
quietly. ‘This world is dead, but these xenos never lived.’
‘It is an ill-omened world,’ agreed Scout Caius. ‘I hope
our work here is quick.’
‘Hope,’ said Borakis sternly, ‘is a poisoned gift, given
by our weaknesses. Do not follow hope. Follow your duty.
If your duty is to fight on this world for a thousand years,
Scout-novice, then you will give thanks to the Emperor for
it. Move on.’
The squad moved down the hillside into a narrow
valley where mist coiled around their ankles and the valley
sides rose like walls of torn earth. The auspex blinked a
path towards a formation of rocks that would have been
completely uninteresting if it had not corresponded to the
location given by Brother Kaiyon under interrogation. On
closer inspection the rocks formed two pillars and a lintel,
a doorway in the valley wall blocked by a tangle of fallen
stone.
‘Charges,’ said Borakis.
Brother Kalliax crouched by the rocks, setting up a
bundle of explosive charges. The cog symbol on his right
pauldron signified his acceptance as an apprentice to the
Techmarines of the Imperial Fists.
‘What do you see, Orfos?’ said Borakis.
‘No movement, sergeant,’ replied Orfos, scanning the
crests of the valley ridges for signs of hostiles.
The intelligence on Selaaca’s hostiles was sketchy.
The Imperial Fists had fought the necrons before, but their
inhuman intelligence made the xenos impossible to
interrogate and their goals could only be guessed at.
Selaaca’s necrons were, according to the interrogated
Soul Drinkers, a broken and leaderless force, but there
were certainly necrons still on the planet and no telling
how they might have organised themselves since the
Imperial Fists had captured the Soul Drinkers there.
‘Ready,’ said Kalliax.
The Scout squad backed away from the entrance and
Kalliax detonated the charge, blowing the blockage apart
&nbs
p; in a shower of dirt and stone. The blast echoed across the
valley, shuddering the valley walls and starting a dozen
tiny rockfalls.
‘Move in,’ said Borakis.
Laokan moved through the falling earth, his bolt pistol
trained on the darkness revealed between the lintels. The
darkness gave way to dressed stone and carvings inside.
The walls of the passageway were carved with
repeating chalices, intertwined with eagles and skulls. The
squad shadowed Laokan’s movement as he crossed the
threshold into the passageway.
The floor shifted under his feet. Laokan dropped
instinctively to one knee. A line of green light shimmered
over him and a camera lens winked in the ceiling as it
focussed on him.
‘Bleed,’ said an artificial voice.
Laokan backed away slowly. The lens stayed
focussed on him.
‘Bleed,’ repeated the voice.
‘Stand down, Scout,’ said Borakis. He walked past
Laokan and drew his combat knife. The blade was as long
as the sergeant’s forearm, serrated and etched with lines
of Imperial scripture. Borakis’s Scout armour, much less
bulky than a full suit of power armour, had an armoured
wrist guard that Borakis unbuckled from his left arm. He
drew the knife along his left wrist and a bright scarlet trail
ran down his hand.
Borakis flicked the blood off his hand into the
passageway. It spattered across the walls and floor.
‘Astartes haemotypes detected,’ said the voice again,
the lens this time roving over the sergeant.
Light flickered on along the passage way, lighting the
way deep into the hillside.
‘We’re in the right place,’ said Borakis. ‘Follow me.’
Borakis and the Scouts entered the hillside, pistols
trained on every shadow.
The Mantle of Wrath had two missions over Selaaca.
The first was to deliver the Scout squad to follow up the
Castellan’s intelligence. The other was to begin the
destruction of the Soul Drinkers.
The Mantle was one of the better-armed ships in the
Imperial Fists fleet, but for this mission its torpedo bays
had been stripped out and replaced with high-yield charges
normally used for orbital demolitions. The Mantle did not
have long to wait in orbit over Selaaca before its target
drifted into view, its massive bulk darkening the glare of
Selaaca’s sun.
Few Imperial Fists would ever need more proof of the
Soul Drinkers’ corruption than the Brokenback. Many a
Fist had fought on a space hulk, one of the cursed ships
lost in the warp and regurgitated back into realspace
teeming with xenos or worse. The Brokenback was as
huge and ugly a space hulk as any had seen, hundreds of
smaller ships welded into a single lumbering mass by the
tides of the warp. Imperial warships ten thousand years old
jostled with xenos ships, vast cargo freighters and masses
of twisted metal that bore no resemblance to anything that
had ever crossed the void.
Thousands of crew on the Mantle prepared the torpedo
arrays as the strike cruiser manoeuvred into position.
Damage control crews were called to battle stations, for
while the Brokenback was unmanned no one could be
sure of what automated defences the hulk might have. As
the Mantle approached firing position, the Imperial Fists
officers and the unaugmented crewmen waited for the
space hulk to leap into life and rain destruction from a
dozen warships onto the Mantle of Wrath.
The hulk’s weapons stayed silent. A spread of
torpedoes glittered against the void as they launched from
the Mantle, leaving ripples of silvery fire in their wake.
Defensive turrets, which would normally have shot down
every one of the torpedoes, stayed silent as the first
spread impacted into the space hulk amidships.
Bright explosions blossomed against the void, flashes
of energy robbed of power an instant later by the vacuum.
Shattered chunks of hulls floated outwards in clouds of
debris, leaving open wounds of torn metal in the side of the
Brokenback.
The space hulk was too big for a single volley, even of
the high-yield demolition charges, to destroy. The Mantle
of Wrath pumped out wave after wave of torpedoes. One
volley blew an Imperial warship free of the space hulk’s
mass and the ship span away from its parent, trailing coils
of burning plasma and revealing the twisted steel
honeycomb inside. Ruined orbital yachts and xenos fighter
craft tumbled out of the rents opened up in the hull.
Moment by moment, the whole Brokenback came
apart. Selaaca’s gravity drew the fragments down and the
whole hulk rotated. The volley had opened up a weak point
in the depths of the hulk’s mass and an enormous section
of the stern bent away from it, dragged down towards the
greyish disc of Selaaca.
The Brokenback could not resist orbital decay any
longer. Its idling engines, which did the bare minimum of
work to keep it in orbit, failed as plasma reactors collapsed
and power systems were severed. Over the course of the
next few hours the stern of the hulk was scoured by the
upper atmosphere and broke away entirely, followed by
millions of chunks of debris raining down onto the planet.
Like a dying whale the rest of the Brokenback lolled over
and fell into the gravity well of Selaaca, gathering speed as
it fell, its lower edges glowing cherry-red, then white, with
friction.
The Brokenback disappeared into Selaaca’s cloudy
sky. Most of it, the Mantle’s augurs divined, would come
down in one of Selaaca’s stagnant oceans, the rest
scattered over a coastline.
The Mantle of Wrath had fulfilled one of its duties. The
space hulk Brokenback was gone, and no renegade would
ever use it to resurrect the Soul Drinkers’ heresies.
The only duties keeping the ship over Selaaca was the
Scout squad currently deployed on their service. Soon
they would return, and the Mantle would leave this forsaken
place behind forever.
BROTHER CIAUS DIED first.
The walls folded in on themselves, revealing rows of
teeth lining the inside of a vast bristling throat. Caius had
been the slowest to react. The rest of the squad threw
themselves into the alcoves along the tunnel, which each
contained statues of Space Marines with their armour
covered in the ornate chalice of the Soul Drinkers. Caius’s
leg had snagged on the spikes and he had been dragged
down the throat as it rippled and constricted, the sound of
grinding stone competing with the tearing muscle and
bone.
Caius did not scream. Perhaps he did not want to
show weakness in his final moments. Perhaps he did not
have time. When the corridor reformed, Caius’s vermillion
blood ran down the carvings and no other trace of his body
remained.
winked out on his retinal display.
‘Caius!’ shouted Orfos. ‘Brother! Speak to us!’
‘He is gone, Scout,’ said Borakis.
Kalliax held his bolt pistol close to his face, his lips
almost touching the top of the weapon’s housing. He
crouched in the alcove opposite Borakis. ‘Repaid in blood
shall every drop be,’ he said, face set.
‘First, your duty,’ said Borakis. ‘Then let your thoughts
turn to revenge.’
‘This place was a trap!’ replied Kalliax. ‘I should have
seen it. By the hands of Dorn, why did I not see it? Some
mechanism, something that should not be here, it should
have been obvious to me!’
‘If you think you killed our brother,’ said Borakis
sternly, ‘then take that pistol and administer your
vengeance to yourself. If not, focus on your duty. This
place was a trap, but it was not placed here in isolation. It
protects something. That is what we have come here to
find.’
The sound of breaking stone came from the alcove in
which Brother Laokan had taken cover. The remnants of
the alcove’s statue toppled into the tunnel and smashed on
the floor.
‘Speak, novice!’ ordered Borakis.
‘Through here,’ said Laokan. ‘This is a false tunnel.
Behind this wall is another way.’
Borakis braced his arms against the alcove walls and
kicked hard against the statue. The wall behind gave way
and the statue fell into the void beyond, revealing long, low
space lit by yellowish, muted glow-globes set into the
walls.
‘Follow, brothers!’ said Borakis.
Kalliax and Orfos kicked their way through the false
wall and followed the sergeant into the hidden space. They
had not yet completed their transition into full Space
Marines but their strength was already far beyond that of a
normal man.
Up ahead of Borakis was a chapel with an altar, at the
far end of the long room. The ceiling loomed down low,
hung with stalactites that had formed from water dripping
down. The altar was a solid block of grey stone topped
with a gilded triptych depicting Rogal Dorn standing in the
centre of a battle scene.
Borakis took the point himself this time. Now he knew
there was danger here, he had a duty to place himself in
its way, for part of his duty was to see his young charges
safely back to the Chapter.