Pyriel removed his battle-helm, revealing a sweat-swathed face. His scalp was excessively damp. Only now was the cerulean fire in his ember-red eyes fading, such was the power he’d been forced to call upon. He delivered his answer in a low voice.
‘On this occasion, he could not.’
‘Saviour or destroyer…’ Vel’cona muttered. ‘Nocturne in the balance… A low-born, one of the earth, will pass through the gate of fire.’
Pyriel was confused. ‘Master?’
‘The Tome of Fire reveals much,’ said Vel’cona on his way out of the chamber. He had to use a bolt of psychic force to open the metal blast doors. They were fused together. ‘But it does not tell us everything. Who can say what the Ignean’s role will be in the turning tide? His flame may flicker and die, it may roar into a conflagration. Much is not yet known, but I sense a visitor approaching who may help us in our understanding.’
Pyriel had been hoping for a more straightforward explanation, but he had learned long ago not to question the vagaries of the Chief Librarian of the Salamanders.
‘What is your will, master?’
‘Keep training him.’
‘And if he loses control again?’
‘Do what you must,’ Vel’cona’s voice echoed from the darkness beyond the fire-smote room. ‘Destroy him.’
IN THE SHADOW OF THE EMPEROR
Chris Dows
‘Barrabas is dead. We need to go now.’
Commissar Abdiel shouted over the screaming hiss of air from a hundred ruptures leaking life from the Merciless Fist. Cleaved in two by the space hulk, any hope of repairing the venerable vessel was lost. If they didn’t act fast, this once-proud cathedral of destruction would be their tomb. Abdiel scowled at the impeccably dressed sub-lieutenant, the kind of irrepressible and inexperienced junior officer he loathed, waiting for him to do something.
‘He could have survived, sir. He should be back–’
The roof of the Dictator-class cruiser’s massive drop-ship bay emitted an ear-splitting crack, making the few surviving members of the salvage crew duck in unison with the two officers. All eyes darted upwards to search for the source of the dreadful sound, creating a second’s pause that they could scarcely afford. Recovering, they continued scuttling between the menacing silhouettes of a dozen Valkyrie assault carriers, desperately trying to get the battered drop-ship ready for flight. A score of bedraggled infantrymen looked on nervously in the middle of the deck, unsure what to do amongst the frenzied activity around them.
‘We have no time, Eutychus. Believe me, I’d rather have killed him myself but I’ll just have to live with the disappointment. There’s no one left outside this launch bay.’
As the amber emergency lighting continued to dim and cast ever-feebler shadows in the massive hangar, the young man realised that the commissar was right. Despite his lowly posting and rumoured fall from grace, Eutychus had to respect the fact that Abdiel was still the Word of the Emperor on the Merciless Fist, even though he was a spiteful, desiccated old bastard. And with Captain Barrabas missing, that put him, Alameth Eutychus, in charge of the evacuation. All the saviour pods had been deployed when the cruiser had been crippled in battle with eldar pirates, reducing her to the shattered state that this salvage force had inherited. This rapidly disintegrating launch deck was their only way off the ship. Clearing his throat, he shouted over to the portly form of Armsman Haddar, who was staring intently at the vaulted roof above.
‘How many Valkyries are serviceable, Haddar?’
The squat, once-muscular man snapped his gaze away, his jowly face wobbling with the sudden movement.
‘Well lad–’ The armsman caught his mistake as he saw Abdiel’s fist tightening on his chainsword hilt.
‘Apologies, sub-lieutenant. Five serviceable, but we’ve only got four pilots, including yourself.’ He paused and blinked. ‘That won’t get all of us out of here.’
‘How many is “all”?’ spat Abdiel.
‘Forty-four, commissar. Not including the infantry.’
Eutychus swallowed hard. Forty-four out of an original compliment of four thousand, and that was a skeleton crew for a vessel this size. He had to make a decision or Abdiel would take charge. Ship-wide vox was out and he could only hope the captain was on his way from the astropath’s chamber, but that would take at least twenty minutes. By his reckoning, they had five at the most. He could see the furthest Valkyrie powering up with a roar, its twin exhausts creating a furious brilliance behind it.
‘Get those troops onto that ship. The separator bulkheads have gone, so we’ll have to launch together. Tell–’
A chest-thumping bang pounded through the air and the deck dropped, sending men sprawling and Valkyries sliding with a painful squeal towards the sealed launch doors. Eutychus was up first, and made the mistake of attempting to help Abdiel to his feet. Even in the fading light he could see the telltale stretched skin from a dozen basic juvenat treatments on the sinewy neck, a vein throbbing with fury as the old man’s coal-dark eyes burned into his.
‘Save your help – and your prayers – for your absent captain,’ growled the commissar.
Nothing less than a catastrophe would compel Jahath Barrabas to set foot inside an astropathic sanctum, but the current situation fitted that description perfectly. The first space hulk had appeared out of warp with no warning, its random jagged mass instantly annihilating three of the five cruisers in this Emperor-forsaken salvage fleet. The second hulk just missed them, but Barrabas knew the capricious and cruel nature of the warp and there might well be more on the way. Eutychus could organise the evacuation; Barrabas needed to get an emergency message out. For that, he had to endure this dank, stinking cavern and its babbling occupant.
The sinewy hands of Astropath Transcendent Sharah gripped the arms of his elaborately carved wooden throne, his sunken eye sockets eerily lit by the hundred burning incense orbs surrounding his wizened form. Huge metal support beams arced upwards in the domed interior, reminding Barrabas of a starving man’s ribcage, mirroring the psyker’s emaciated carcass. Blood began to run from Sharah’s cadaverous nose, a scarlet line on parchment skin staining his filthy green cloak.
‘Clouds darken folding in blackness. Deep. Too deep. Salvage convoy two-three-ten reports three cruisers destroyed. The Genocide and the Merciless Fist survive. My soul is bound to His. No clarity to send. Repeat. Attempt.’
Barrabas had seen astropaths get twitchy before, and while he didn’t pretend to understand the workings of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, he knew enough about the massive upheaval caused by sudden translation from the warp to know it was the source of his confusion and agony. Sharah had cast his voice into the void and Barrabas was just wasting his time now. As he turned to go, the ghastly creature’s voice dropped an octave.
‘The Emperor’s tears wash our sins. The weight of House Barrabas is mighty, captain of the lost. Living in His shadow. Crawl into the Emperor’s light. Into the light.’
Barrabas was mesmerised. Sharah was talking about him, his family, his shame. The contorted skeleton of a face turned and spoke in a barely audible whisper, its body unmoving in the massive wooden chair.
‘My darkness gathers. The maelstrom awaits. Habitable planet in range. Arboreal. Barrabas… wait. Something stirs in the scarlet dawn.’
Shadows danced from the glowing braziers as the deck began to vibrate, many shaking themselves free of their rusting chains and crashing to the floor in a bloom of fire. The throne shook violently on its dais, yanking the astropath’s heavy hood loose. Grasping desperately at his skull, the psyker doubled over and vomited blood onto the floor. The Merciless Fist pitched to starboard as if swatted by a giant hand, throwing Barrabas towards the disgusting, screaming creature.
Barrabas retreated over the raised deck plates as the spasming Sharah clawed wildly at his face, blood pouring from his nostrils and eye sockets. He’d never seen the like and felt in his gut that it was the prelude to something truly horrific.
H
e was right.
The astropath’s head exploded, spattering slippery gore over the captain’s filthy uniform. Fragments of bone lanced into Barrabas’s stubble and he wiped them away as he stumbled into the corridor. The scene of carnage that met him took his breath away. The Merciless Fist was mortally wounded, the shriek and scream of men and metal from a dozen decks uniting ship and crew in their death throes. Another space hulk had appeared, not close to the ship, but inside it – structural integrity was collapsing on both of the parted sides, pressure bulkheads and blast doors vainly trying to slow its inevitable end. Miraculously, the space hulk’s randomly shaped protrusions provided a fast, precarious short cut straight down to the launch decks. Barrabas lost no time in clambering onto its shuddering surface, praying to the Emperor that the Merciless Fist wasn’t torn asunder before he reached his goal.
Eutychus squirmed inside the open cockpit of the battered Valkyrie, readying it for take-off. Three fully loaded, and equally decrepit, attack craft waited for his signal. Out on the deck behind, Abdiel gravely murmured the commissar’s benediction to the nine crewmembers who were staying behind. He was shadowed by the stocky form of First Mate Barat, the closest thing to an ally the commissar had. The crewmen crouched and prayed in near-darkness, gripping metal aquilas on filthy neck lanyards or loose in their bloodied hands, accepting their fate as the Emperor’s will. His duty over, Abdiel turned to leave, but was blown off his feet by a massive explosion in the hangar’s rear wall. A ragged tear of light and heat exposed the deck’s vast central corridor. Staggering to his feet, the old man squinted at what he saw and muttered a curse. Barat shook his shaven head in disbelief.
The smouldering form of Barrabas gesticulated towards the fifth Valkyrie’s open hold as he ran for it, ignoring them both.
‘Come on lads, no time to sit around. Let’s get off this wreck.’
Scrambling to their feet, the once-condemned men threw themselves at the drop-ship’s underbelly. Barrabas felt his way into the open cockpit of the Valkyrie pilot’s seat, detached his sword and dropped it to one side. Pulling on his helmet, he met Eutychus’s open-mouthed stare through the filthy glacis canopy with a thumbs up. He reached for the closing handle, but Abdiel’s gnarled hand stopped his downward tug and the commissar climbed into the co-pilot’s seat behind him.
‘Glad you could join us, commissar,’ he muttered. Abdiel merely growled in response.
Powering up the engines, Barrabas initiated an emergency depressurisation of the bay and immediately realised his mistake. The weakened inner frame buckled and the cavernous interior’s roof creased downwards, flattening the outmost Valkyrie, pressing it into the bay floor. The massive launch doors ground open with painful slowness, sucking the inferno from behind them into space along with countless spinning bodies. With just a hair’s-breadth clearance, the four remaining Valkyries roared into the void as the Merciless Fist was torn apart.
‘I have to hand it to your family, Barrabas, when you destroy a vessel of the Imperial Navy, you are very thorough.’ Abdiel wrung out every drop of sarcasm from the venomous jibe, but Barrabas was too busy navigating the massive chunks of twisted metal spinning and wheeling around them. Flicking from internal to ship-to-ship vox, Barrabas calmly spoke into the headset.
‘Single file behind me. Eutychus at the rear. Lock onto my approach vector.’
Jahath Barrabas was a brilliant flyer, one of the main reasons he’d been allowed to join the Imperial Navy despite his family history. Had he stayed a pilot, things might have worked out significantly better but, in his younger days, Barrabas had been determined to prove he wasn’t cut from the same genetic cloth as his disgraced grandfather, whose actions as a Naval captain had led to the destruction of an Emperor-class battleship and most of its complement. Unfortunately for him, one of the few survivors was the man directly behind him. Because Abdiel hadn’t immediately countermanded his grandfather’s disastrous orders and executed him, the Commissariat had found him guilty of gross negligence. Little wonder he had held a grudge for all these years.
A blossom of flame caught Barrabas’s eye and he instinctively took evasive manoeuvres. With every muscle tensed, he shrank into the pilot’s seat as the engines of the Merciless Fist’s amputated aft section roared overhead, a rainbow arc of fire pushing debris away behind them. Instantly changing course, he headed for the torn-off stern, to Abdiel’s alarm.
‘What in the Emperor’s name are you doing? We’ll be incinerated!’
Barrabas gritted his teeth and hit the thrusters, ducking and weaving through the shower of debris. Smaller pieces thumped into the nose plating and leading edges of the wings. It was only a matter of time before a chunk went straight through one of the engines, so the perfectly clear pathway created by the dying cruiser’s engines was their best – their only – way out of the maelstrom. Barrabas saw a tide of wreckage smash into the Genocide’s port side, gas erupting from several burning fractures. No ships left its bays.
He looked back to a sea of frozen bodies appearing as if from nowhere. They careened off the nose and hull, like rag dolls thrown by an angry child. Grief at the loss of his crew and command would have to wait. Grimly, he ploughed straight through them.
Curving upwards, the line of Valkyries banked as one and skirted the rapidly fading tip of the Merciless Fist’s dismembered exhausts before turning hard to starboard, using the wreck’s wake as a passage into open space.
‘Captain, I’m venting air from–’
Barrabas and Abdiel grimaced at the shouting sub-lieutenant.
‘Calm down, Eutychus. We all are. These crates are barely fit for atmospheric flight, let alone any extended time in space. Reduce the oxygen supply by twenty per cent to the hold and use your rebreathers. If there aren’t enough, then they’ll have to share. Get scanning for a habitable landing zone.
A third voice crackled into their headsets, the low tones of Tug Pilot Zebah. Barrabas was glad to hear his voice. Zebah had been with him since the beginning of his illustrious career as a salvage captain. He trusted him with his life. Like the majority of the senior crew he’d carefully assembled over the years, Zebah would joke that they lived on their bellies, crawling from one battered wreck to the next, but their gallows humour and dishevelled appearance didn’t stop them yearning for the glory of battle and a chance to prove themselves to the Emperor – despite what Abdiel thought.
‘Sir, I’ve detected a possible landing zone. It’s close.’
Barrabas could feel the commissar’s eyes burning into the back of his head. He allowed himself a sigh of relief.
‘Take us in, Zebah. I’ll lead upon planetfall. Activate the automated distress beacon with the coordinates. There may be survivors from the fleet able to rescue us.’ The lack of response in his headset was telling.
Alternating the vox-switch, he spoke to his passengers.
‘It’s going to be an uncomfortable ride, gentlemen. Prep any weapons or equipment you can find. We’re going to need them.’
Despite having no real idea where they were going, Barrabas knew that it was infinitely better than where they had been and at least offered some feeble ray of hope.
The howl of wind and turbines combined to pummel Barrabas’s hearing as the Valkyrie plummeted across the blood-red sky of the planet. His hands were numb and his knuckles burned with pain as he gripped the violently shaking control stick between his tensed legs. As they descended, Barrabas cast about for a suitable landing spot between breaks in the low, wispy cloud, but the surface was a maze of differing levels, some little more than corridors of black soil on top of crumbling stone projections, forming gaps too narrow for the unpredictably responding drop-ship to navigate. Finally, a wide, open plateau came into view and, while there were ranges of raised columns in the distance and elevated embankments on either side, it looked like their best bet.
‘All ships, try to remember as much of the geography as you can.’
Easing the nose down, the ship dropped sha
rply to the right as the starboard engine exploded. Alarms wailed and warning runes flashed, but he didn’t need any reminding of his situation. The drop-ship fell into a shuddering dive and he levelled off just in time for the underside of the Valkyrie to plane away beneath his feet and a small boulder make short work of the port wingtip. As the nose dug a furrow into the ground he tried to compensate with the single engine but the Valkyrie rammed headfirst into a raised bed of rust-coloured rock, pitching him upside down. His sword fell onto the roof of the canopy and, absurdly, he feared he might become the first ever captain to be decapitated in such a way. Abruptly the ship stopped and, once the soil-muffled whine of the dying engine had subsided, there was dark silence.
Barrabas heard voices, rattling and hammering, and was suddenly aware it was brighter behind his closed eyes and colder around his ringing ears. Eager hands clawed at the straps holding his body into the seat, and he dropped with a thump. Then he was on his back, looking up at broiling sepia clouds and the bloody, frowning faces of Armsman Toah and First Mate Barat. They were dressed in infantry fatigues salvaged from the hold and had a variety of small arms dangling from hastily-attached webbing.
‘Report,’ he croaked.
‘We’re all alive, captain, although Mortok’s broken his arm. Narris and Lubek are working on a short-range transmitter they found, and the others are gathering up ammo from the hold.’ Barat wiped blood from a gash in his sweating head as he spoke, while the reedy form of Toah helped Barrabas to his feet.
Straightening his tunic as best he could, Barrabas clenched his fists to coax sensation back into his shaking fingers and retrieved the dirt-covered sword at his feet. His next question was drowned by the shriek of three Valkyries, in far better shape than his, which touched down forwards and to the left of the rocky plinth on which they stood, skilfully avoiding the raised ridges that flanked their position.
‘Get the commissar out,’ said Barrabas.
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