Hammer and Bolter 11

by Christian Dunn

  The ground rose again as he reached the base. He approached the main gate, and he heard no singing. Before him, the wall was an iron shield fifty metres high, a sloping, pleated curtain of strength. A giant aquila, a darker night on black, was engraved every ten metres along the wall’s two kilometre length. Beyond the wall, he heard the diesel of engines, the report of firing ranges, the march of boots. The sounds of discipline. Discipline that was visible from the moment he arrived. If the sentries were surprised to see him, dusty and exhausted, arriving on a civilian vehicle instead of in his staff car, they showed no sign. They saluted, sharp as machines, and opened the gate for him. He passed through into Fort Goreck and the promise of salvation.

  On the other side of the wall was a zone free of art and music. A weight lifted from Corvus’s shoulders as he watched the pistoning, drumming rhythm of the military muscle. Strength perfected, and yet, by the Throne, it had been almost lost, too. A request had come the day before from Jeronim Tarrant, the base’s captain. Given the momentous, planet-wide event that was a new composition by Gurges Parthamen, would the colonel authorize a break in the drills, long enough for the men to sit down and listen to the vox-cast of the concert? Corvus had not just rejected the request out of hand, he had forbidden any form of reception and transmission of the performance. He wanted soldiers, he had informed Jeronim. If he wanted dilettantes, he could find plenty in the boxes of the Palace of Culture.

  On his way to the concert, he had wondered about his motives in issuing that order. Jealousy? Was he really that petty? He knew now that he wasn’t, and that he’d been right. The purpose of a base such as this was to keep the Guard in a state of perpetual, instant readiness, because war might come from one second to the next.

  As it had now.

  He crossed the parade field, making for the squat command tower at the rear of the base, where it nestled against the basalt wall of the Mesa. He had barely dismounted the bike when Jeronim came pounding out of the tower. He was pale, borderline frantic, but remembered to salute. Discipline, Corvus thought. It had saved them so far. It would see them through to victory.

  ‘Sir,’ Jeronim said. ‘Do you know what’s going on? Are we under attack? We can’t get through to anyone.’

  ‘Yes, we are at war,’ Corvus answered. He strode briskly to the door. ‘No one in this base has been in contact with anyone outside it for the last ten hours?’

  Jeronim shook his head. ‘No, sir. Nothing that makes sense. Anyone transmitting is just sending what sounds like music–’

  Corvus cut him off. ‘You listened?’

  ‘Only a couple of seconds. When we found the nonsense everywhere, we shut down the sound. No one was sending anything coherent. Not even the Scythe of Judgement.’

  So the Ligetan flagship had fallen. He wasn’t surprised, but Corvus discovered that he could still feel dismay. But the fact that the base had survived the transmissions told him something. The infection didn’t take hold right away. He remembered that the choir and the audience hadn’t responded until Gurges had completed a full refrain. The song’s message had to be complete, it seemed, before it could sink in. ‘What actions have you taken?’ he asked Jeronim as they headed up the staircase to the command centre.

  ‘We’ve been sending out requests for acknowledgement on all frequencies. I’ve placed the base on heightened alert. And since we haven’t been hearing from anyone, I sent out a distress call.’

  ‘Fine,’ Corvus said. For whatever good that call will do, he thought. By the time the message was received and aid arrived, weeks or months could have elapsed. By that time, the battle for the soul of Ligeta would have been won or lost. The singers would have starved to death, and either there would be someone left to pick up the pieces, or there wouldn’t be.

  The communications officer looked up from the auspex as Corvus and Jeronim walked into the centre. ‘Colonel,’ he saluted. ‘A capital ship has just transitioned into our system.’

  ‘Really?’ That was fast. Improbably fast.

  ‘It’s hailing us,’ the master vox-operator announced.

  Corvus lunged across the room and yanked the headphones from the operator’s skull. ‘All messages to be received as text only until further notice,’ he ordered. ‘No exceptions. Am I clear?’

  The operator nodded.

  ‘Acknowledge them,’ Corvus went on. ‘Request identification.’

  The soldier did so. Corvus moved to the plastek window and looked out over the base while he waited. There were five thousand men here. The position was elevated, easily defensible. He had the tools. He just had to work out how to fight.

  ‘Message received, colonel.’

  Corvus turned to the vox-operator. His voice sounded all wrong, like that of a man who had suddenly been confronted with the futility of his existence. He was staring at the dataslate before him. His face was grey.

  ‘Read it,’ Corvus said, and braced himself.

  ‘Greetings, Imperials. This is the Terminus Est.’

  Typhus entered the strategium as the ship emerged in the realspace of the Ligetan system.

  ‘Multiple contacts, lord,’ the bridge attendant reported.

  Of course there were. The Imperium would hardly leave Ligeta without a defending fleet. Typhus moved his bulk towards the main oculus. They were already close enough to see the swarm of Imperial cruisers and defence satellites. ‘But how many are on attack trajectories?’ Typhus asked. He knew the answer, but he wanted the satisfaction of hearing it.

  The officer looked twice at his hololithic display, as if he doubted the reports he was receiving. ‘None,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘And how many are targeting us?’

  Another brief silence. ‘None.’

  Typhus rumbled and buzzed his pleasure. The insects that were his parasites and his identity fluttered and scrabbled with excitement. His armour rippled with their movement. He allowed himself a moment to revel in the experience, in the glorious and terrible paradox of his existence. Disease was an endless source of awe in its marriage of death and unrestrained life. It was his delight to spread the gospel of this paradox, the lesson of decay. Before him, the oculus showed how well the lesson was being learned. ‘Bring us in close,’ he commanded.

  ‘At once, lord.’ The bridge attendant was obedient, but was a slow learner himself. He was still thinking in terms of a normal combat situation, never mind that an Imperial fleet’s lack of response to the appearance of a Chaos capital ship was far from normal. ‘We are acquiring targets,’ he reported.

  ‘No need, no need,’ Typhus said. ‘See for yourselves. All of you.’

  His officers looked up, and Typhus had an audience for the spectacle he had arranged. As the Terminus Est closed in on the glowing green-and-brown globe of Ligeta, the enemy ships gathered size and definition. Their distress became clear, too. Some were drifting, nothing more now than iron tombs. Others had their engines running, but there was no order to their movements. The ships, Typhus knew, were performing the last commands their crews had given them, and there would be no others to come.

  ‘Hail the Imperials,’ he ordered. ‘Open all frequencies.’

  The strategium was bathed in the music of disease. Across multiple channels came the same noise, a unified chaos of millions upon millions of throats singing in a single choir. The melody was a simple, sustained, multi-note chord of doom. It became the accompaniment to the view outside the Terminus, and now the movement of the fleet was the slow ballet of entropy and defeat. Typhus watched a two cruisers follow their unalterable routes until they collided. One exploded, its fireball the expanding bloom of a poisonous flower. The other plunged towards Ligeta’s atmosphere, bringing with it the terrible gift of its weapons payload and shattered reactor.

  Typhus thought about its landfall, and his insects writhed in anticipation.

  He also thought about the simplicity of the lesson, how pure it was, and how devastating its purity made it. Did the happenstance that had brough
t Gurges Parthamen into his grasp taint that purity, or was that flotsam of luck an essential piece of the composition’s beauty? The composer on a self-indulgent voyage, getting caught in a localised warp storm, winding up in a near-collision with the Terminus Est; how could those elements be anything other than absolute contingency? His triumph could so easily have never even been an idea. Then again, that man, his ambition that made him so easily corruptible, the confluence of events that granted Typhus this perfect inspiration: they were so improbable, they could not possibly be chance. They had been threaded together by destiny.

  Flies howled through the strategium as Typhus tasted the paradox, and found it to his liking. Chaos and fate, one and the same.

  Perhaps Gurges had thought so, too. He had put up no resistance to being infected with the new plague. Typhus was particularly proud of it. The parasitic warp worm laid its eggs in the bloodstream and attacked the brain. It spread itself from mind to mind by the transmission of its idea, and the idea travelled on a sound, a special sound, a song that was an incantation that thinned the walls between reality and the immaterium and taught itself to all who had ears to hear.

  ‘My lord, we are being hailed,’ said the attendant.

  Typhus laughed, delighted, and the boils on the deck quivered in sympathy. ‘Send them our greeting,’ he ordered.

  Now he had an enemy. Now he could fight.

  Corvus rejected despair. He rejected the odds. There was an enemy, and duty demanded combat. There was nothing else.

  Corvus stood at the reviewing stand on the parade grounds, and, speakers turning his voice into Fort Goreck’s voice, he addressed the assembled thousands. He explained the situation. He described the plague and its means of contagion. And he laid down the rules. One was paramount. ‘Music,’ he thundered, ‘is a disease. It will destroy us if it finds the smallest chink in our armour. We must be free of it, and guard against it. Anyone who so much as whistles will be executed on the spot.’ He felt enormous satisfaction as he gave that order. He didn’t worry about why.

  Less than a day after his arrival, Typhus witnessed the apotheosis of his art. The entire planet was one voice. The anthem, the pestilence, the anthem that was pestilence, had become the sum total of existence on Ligeta. Its population lived for a single purpose. The purity was electrifying.

  Or it would have been, but for the single flaw. There was that redoubt. He had thought it would succumb by itself, but it hadn’t. It was still sending out desperate pleas to whatever Imperials might hear. And though Typhus could amuse himself with the thought that this one pustule of order confirmed the beauty of corruption, he also knew the truth. Over the course of the next few days, the song would begin a ragged diminuendo as its singers died. If he didn’t act, his symphony would be incomplete, spoiled by one false note.

  So it was time to act.

  The attack came on the evening of the second day. Corvus was walking the parapet when he saw the sky darken. A deep, unending thunder began, and the clouds birthed a terrible rain. The drop-pods came first, plummeting with the finality of black judgement. They made landfall on the level ground a couple of kilometres from the base. They left streaks in the air, black, vertical contrails that didn’t dissipate. Instead, they grew wider, broke up into fragments, and began to whirl. Corvus ran to the nearest guard tower, grabbed a marksman’s sniper rifle and peered through its telescopic sight. He could see the movement in the writhing clouds more clearly. It looked like insects. Faintly, impossibly, weaving in and out of the thunder of the pods and the landing craft that now followed on, Corvus heard an insidious buzz.

  The darkness flowed from the sky. It was the black of absence and grief, of putrefaction and despair, and of unnameable desire. Its touch infected the air of the landing zone, then rippled out towards the base. It was a different disease, one Corvus had no possible defence against. And though no tendrils of the black itself reached this far, Corvus felt something arrive over the wall. The quality of the evening light changed. It turned brittle and sour. He sensed something vital becoming too thin, and something wrong start to smile.

  All around him, Fort Goreck’s warning klaxons sounded the call to arms. The din was enormous, and he was surprised and disturbed that he could hear the buzzing of the Chaos swarms at all. That told him how sick the real world was becoming, and how hard he would have to fight for it.

  The drop-pods opened, their venomous petals falling back to disgorge the monsters within. Corvus had never felt comfortable around Space Marines, his Ligetan inferiority complex made exponentially worse by their superhuman power and perfection. But he would have given anything to have one beside him now as he saw the nightmare versions of them mustering in the near distance. Their armour had long since ceased to be simple ceramite. It was darkness that was iron, and iron that was disease. They assembled into rows and then stood motionless, weapons at ready. Only they weren’t entirely still. Their outlines writhed.

  Landing craft poured out corrupted infantry in ever greater numbers. At length, the sky spat out a leviathan that looked to Corvus like a Goliath-class transport, only so distorted it seemed more like a terrible whale. Its hull was covered with symbols that tore at Corvus’s eyes with obscenities. Around it coiled things that might be tendrils, or they might be tentacles. Its loading bay opened like a maw, and it vomited hordes of troops and vehicles onto the blackening soil of Ligeta.

  The legions of plague gathered before Corvus, and he knew there was no hope of fighting them.

  But he would. Down to the last man. And though there might no chance of survival, there would, he now realized with a stir of joy, be the hope of glory in the heroic last stand.

  Night fell, and the forces of the Terminus Est grew in numbers and strength. The host was now far larger than needed to storm Fort Goreck, walls or no, commanding heights or no. But the dark soldiers didn’t attack. They stood, massed and in the open. Once disembarked, they did nothing. Heavy artillery rumbled out of the transport and then stopped, barrels aimed at the sky, full of threat but silent. The rumble of arrivals stopped. A clammy quiet covered the land.

  Corvus had returned to command centre. He could watch just as well from there, and the subaural buzzing was less noticeable on this side of the plastek.

  ‘What are they waiting for?’ Jeronim muttered.

  The quiet was broken by the distant roar of engines. Corvus raised a pair of electro-binoculars. Three Rhinos were moving to the fore. There were rows of rectangular shapes on the top of the Rhinos. They were horned metal, molded into the shape of screaming daemons. Loudspeakers, Corvus realized.

  Dirge Casters.

  If the Rhinos broadcast their song, Fort Goreck would fall without a shot being fired.

  Corvus slammed a fist against the alarm trigger. The klaxons whooped over the base. ‘Do not turn these off until I give the order,’ he told the officers. Still not loud enough, he thought. He turned to the master vox. He shoved the operator aside and flipped the switches for the public address system. He grabbed the mic and ran over to the speaker above the doorway to the command centre. He jammed the mic into the speaker. Feedback pierced his skull, mauled his hearing and sought to obliterate all thought. He gasped from the pain, and staggered under the weight of the sound.

  The men around him were covering their ears and weaving around as if drunk. Corvus struggled against the blast of the sound and shook the officers. ‘Now!’ he screamed. ‘We attack now! Launch the Chimeras and take out those vehicles!’

  He would have given his soul for a battery of battle cannons, so he could take out the Rhinos from within the safety of the noise shield he had just erected. But this would do. He didn’t think about how little he might gain in destroying a few speakers. He saw the chance to fight the opponent.

  He saw the chance for glory.

  He took charge of the squads that followed behind the Chimeras. He saw the pain of the men’s faces as the eternal feedback wore at them. He saw the effort it took them to focus on t
he simple task of readying their weapons. He understood, and hoped that they understood the necessity of his actions, and saw the heroism of their struggle for the Emperor. Gurges had been a fool, Corvus thought. What he did now was worthy of song.

  The gates opened, and the Chimeras surged forward. The Rhinos had stopped halfway between their own forces and the wall, easily within the broadcast range of the Dirge Casters. The song was inaudible. Corvus felt his lips pull back in a snarl of triumph as he held his laspistol and chainsword high and led the charge. The courage of the Imperium burst from the confines of the wall. Corvus yelled as he pounded behind the clanking, roaring Chimera. The feedback whine faded as they left the base behind, but the vehicles had their own din, and Corvus still could hear no trace of the song.

  Something spoke with the voice of ending. The sound was enormous, a deep, compound thunder. It was the Chaos artillery, all guns opening up simultaneously, firing a single, monumental barrage. The lower slope of Fort Gerick’s rise exploded, earth geysering skyward. A giant made of noise and air picked Corvus up and threw him. The world tumbled end over end, a hurricane of dirt and rocks and fire. He slammed into the ground and writhed, a pinned insect, as his flattened lungs fought to pull in a breath. When the air came, it was claws and gravel in his chest. His head rang like a struck bell.

  When his eyes and his ears cleared, he saw the wreckage of the Chimeras and the rout of his charge. The vehicles had taken the worst of the hits, and were shattered, smoking ruins of twisted metal. Pieces of men were scattered over the slope: an arm still clutching a lasgun, a torso that ended at the lower jaw, organs without bodies, bodies without organs. But there were survivors, and as the enemy’s guns fell silent, the song washed over the field. Men picked themselves up, and froze as the refrain caught them. A minute after the barrage, Corvus was the only man left with a will of his own. He picked up his weapons and stumbled back up the slope towards the wall. As he ran, he thought he could hear laughter slither through the ranks of the Chaos force.