Pharos

by Guy Haley

  ‘What do you think, Painted Count?’

  Kellendvar came up behind his brother, a display of support and discouragement. ‘Don’t do this now,’ he voxed privately.

  ‘My brother thinks I should do as you say. I don’t agree,’ Kellenkir said.

  ‘Carakon!’

  ‘Yes, claw master?’ The Dreadnought’s voice rumbled from chest vox-speakers.

  ‘If Kellenkir does not do as I order, kill him. Immediately.’

  ‘As you wish, claw master.’

  Carakon stepped around with difficulty. The Dreadnought could not stand up to its full height and came forward awkwardly, high shoulders scraping the ceiling down to raw metal. Carakon filled the corridor behind Skraivok.

  ‘You have your dog well trained!’ said Kellenkir. He looked to the others for support, but the warriors present were Skraivok’s most loyal, and they stood, crowding his back, staring back at him in silent hostility. They were all fools. ‘Very well. I shall obey.’ He saluted insolently. ‘My lord.’

  Kellenkir pushed his way out of the press of killers and made his way to the end of the corridor. Kellendvar went with him. Skraivok nodded at the door, and Carakon resumed his work.

  ‘Why do you provoke him?’ said Kellendvar.

  ‘Why not? Life is dull, he riles easily.’

  Kellendvar grabbed the rim of his brother’s pauldron, damaging the human skin pinned over it. ‘He will kill you!’

  Kellenkir grasped his brother’s hand. ‘I do not care,’ he said, wrenching it free.

  They passed down between the crucified prisoners. Their clothes and armour had been torn from them. All mark of rank and degree stripped away, the humans looked alike, while the Space Marines looked like over-muscled parodies of the human form. Their screams had quietened now all were nailed in place. They awaited their fate according to their character, the Space Marines in silent fury, the humans as stoically as they could manage. Some were resigned, others proud. Two were openly weeping in fear, many moaned and writhed at the pain of the spikes in their wrists and feet.

  ‘They care about their deaths,’ said Kellenkir. ‘They do not have the freedom I have found. They are in terror of what we are about to do to them, and so they should be, for the agonies of the flesh will be upon them soon. Pain is unpleasant, but it is fleeting. I am a master of my art, and I can keep a man alive in pain for only a few days. When the blackness of death takes them, then they shall be glad. That is the lesson all must learn. You will learn it, brother, and so shall Skraivok.’

  A muttering distracted him. He paused by a man whose lips danced over quiet words, his eyes closed. Fascinated, Kellenkir leaned in close, and the words tumbled out at greater speed at the Night Lord’s proximity. Kellenkir stood back and sneered. The man was praying.

  ‘See, brother, even here in the perfect kingdom,’ he said. ‘Hear the whimpering that reveals the truth of the lie. Even here, they secretly worship the False Emperor as a god. They are trying so very hard not to be frightened.’

  Kellenkir spat at the man, and acid hissed on his bare flesh. He grimaced but continued to pray.

  ‘Your Emperor cannot save you. He does not care,’ Kellenkir whispered close to his face. ‘He is a liar!’

  ‘Leave him,’ said an Ultramarine pinned up next to the man. His face was bloody, and a wide wound marred his stomach.

  ‘Or what? How can you possibly enact your threat? Threat is your implication, is it not?’ said Kellenkir. ‘Surely you should be applauding my challenge of this weakling’s delusion. He prays to the Emperor! That is wrong, even you can see that.’

  ‘He is in the hands of monsters,’ said the Ultramarine. ‘It is no surprise he prays.’

  ‘Aye, he is. And your turn will come, son of Guilliman.’

  ‘Your turn is not so far behind!’ snarled the Ultramarine. ‘My brothers will come to you and they shall destroy you. That is the only f–’

  Kellendvar’s axe flashed down onto the Ultramarine. The blade was sharp, but his head was obliterated by its power field rather than cleanly cut. A fine mist of atomised flesh settled over the two Night Lords. The Ultramarine’s lifeless body drooped forward, tugging at the curved bars that pinned him.

  A deeper silence fell on the prisoners. A burst of laughter erupted from Kellenkir. ‘See, brother? They learn their lesson already. If only I had the time to teach you myself, but I have been given another task.’ He pointed with his chainglaive to the junction. There four Night Lords were unsheathing broad-bladed skinning knives, thin flensing blades and tendon hooks.

  Kellenkir and Kellendvar passed them and went to the junction. The melodies of battle rattled away in the depths of the station, increasingly isolated. Alarms sounded in a distant sector, but there on the main promenade around the command hub it was eerily quiet. The booming of Carakon’s fist against the door broke the silence into discrete sections, hushed as the spaces in a dying heartbeat.

  The Night Lords torturers set to work, and the screaming began in earnest, a horrendous bubbling cry of utmost agony. The Ultramarines tugged at their bonds and shouted impotently at their captors.

  A surge of ugly delight pushed up out of Kellenkir’s soul, and he slammed his chainglaive into the decking in salute of it.

  ‘Now they are afraid,’ he said to his brother.

  The Night Lords had accessed the internal systems. The lights were dying. The air recycling systems cut out. The human members of the command deck crew started to shiver as the station radiated heat slowly into space.

  The head of the orbital’s support systems went from station to station, angrily toggling dead switches. ‘It’s no use, my lord. We’re cut off.’

  ‘I cannot raise anyone on the Legion vox-network,’ said Genus. ‘We have been comprehensively jammed.’

  Adallus watched the door. The thin impressions of claw tracks distorted it from the other side. ‘They’re doing this to torment us, a cruel and unnecessary practical typical to their murderous breed. They will be through soon, and we shall demonstrate how a warrior should behave. Everyone, to your positions.’

  Humans jammed their hands under their armpits for warmth and went to their designated points of defence. Silently, the Ultramarines dispersed themselves around the octagonal deck, taking up station to maximise their firepower. The Night Lords would not be allowed to triumph without bloodshed.

  A dozen Space Marines waited at the opposite side of the room to the door. A handful were stationed on the gallery floor that circled the room alongside the ship’s human crew. There were fifty mortals, of whom ten were front-line troopers armed with high-powered lasguns and clad in form-fitting armour, but the rest were deck officers and carried nothing more than small-arms.

  The other eight Space Marines, along with Captain Adallus, Odillio and Genus, waited on the ground floor, bolters ready and close-combat weapons maglocked to their chests and thighs. Between the defenders and the door was a no-man’s-land of fizzing pict screens and dead operations stations.

  No one spoke as they waited. The humans fidgeted to fight off the cold, their breath freezing on metal or falling from the air in showers of tiny ice crystals. The Space Marines were statues, their limbs bereft of the tics and twitches of normal men and women standing still. The armoured door vibrated in its frame.

  The deck’s vox-system activated. Floating vox-horns and mouthpieces bumped into one another. More screaming came from them, a chilling orchestra which performed at the command of cruel conductors. At first Adallus and his men assumed it to be on a loop, but then the holo displays shuddered back into activity. The Space Marines reacted as one, training their weapons upon the image.

  The display showed the corridor and the prisoners pinned to the walls. It showed what the Night Lords were doing to them. Some of the humans turned away. One noisily vomited. From this festival of barbarity the screaming came. The
Space Marines let their weapons up, but could not tear their eyes away as the skin was ripped from a shrieking man’s chest.

  ‘Lord Guilliman should have put these scum down a long time ago,’ said Adallus. ‘Do not look at it. It is what they want. They wish to weaken our resolve, but we will not allow it to be weakened.’ He levelled his gun at the door. ‘None of us will live this day out. Let us ensure the enemy too do not see the dawning of another day. They call themselves the lords of the night, we shall cast them into it.’

  The metallic clicks of bolters being resettled against armour seemed a poor defiance against the deafening screams. All of them, human and transhuman, prepared themselves to die.

  The doors burst inward, the torn petals of the metal smoking with atomic dissolution. A Dreadnought helm fashioned into an imperious skull thrust through the gap, roaring metallic Nostraman war-cries from its vox-grilles. In the shadows it appeared a monster.

  It was a monster, Adallus told himself, of the worst possible kind. Many cultures had cautionary tales of fallen angels, and no wonder.

  The Dreadnought withdrew. Grenades arced through the ragged hole, clatter-bumped across the deck and exploded. They did no damage, but forced the Space Marines nearby to duck back, allowing a pair of melta bombs to be hastily applied to the breach. The door were thick, proof against most things. Ceramite facings covered both sides, but the Dreadnought had burrowed through like a monstrous beetle, exposing the vulnerable plasteel within.

  ‘Servants of Ultramar! Cover your eyes!’ shouted Adallus. His own visor plate darkened as the fusion devices activated, burning themselves up with the ferocity of dying stars. They melted their way downwards through the metal and spilled out gluey tracks of red-hot sludge. The temperature in the room climbed briefly again.

  The Dreadnought burst in, kicking the ruins of the door aside with massive feet. It could not stand in the corridor, but the command deck was higher, and as it came through the gap it rose up to its full height. The skull was painted a shocking white, a death idol from a backwater world. Night-blue formed the bulk of its livery, but many of its larger panels incorporated pict-projectors. These displayed the most horrendous images imaginable, violent atrocities that would test the stomach of the most depraved warlord. There were so many, an endless parade of suffering. Trapped in the armour plates, the tortured, howling faces of the Night Lords’ victims seemed condemned to a two-dimensional hell, able to see the universe beyond, but unable to escape their pain into it.

  Adallus tore his eyes from the picts as the Dreadnought rushed through the gap. Upon its chest was a plain scroll, incongruously chaste upon the flickering torture show its projectors played. A name was graven into it, in the traditional manner.

  Carakon.

  This dissonance, a reminder of the machine’s noble origins and the terrible thing it had become, distracted Adallus dangerously.

  His men opened fire en masse. Muzzle flash striped the room. Bolt-rounds exploded harmlessly on the Dreadnought’s plasteel hide. In two strides the Contemptor was across the command deck, kicking operations stations to pieces as it charged, howling wildly. Odillio led three men at its side as it barrelled towards the captain. They had melta bombs at the ready, turning the flask keys to activate the fusion overload.

  Before they could slap them upon the machine’s legs, the Dreadnought’s torso spun around on its waist gimbal, arm out. One brother was smashed from his feet and lofted into a wall, his melta bomb detonating in his hands. A second found death waiting in the Contemptor’s claws. The machine drove its long steel fingers through the Space Marine’s chest and flicked the body aside before Carakon grabbed the third and squeezed hard, breaking his armour with a deafening crack. Blood and gore sluiced from the broken battleplate. Even as this last warrior died, Carakon was bringing up his other arm and gunning down a fourth. The ancient shook the crushed remains free, and turned upon Odillio.

  Odillio was on the floor, knocked down by the Dreadnought’s lightning response. Carakon lifted his foot. Overstressed muscle bundles and motivators buzzed loudly as it stamped down on the Ultramarine, crushing his head and shoulder flat. A blast from a melta gun slagged its right shoulder guard, but again Carakon turned. Roaring out his anger at this grievous hurt, he sprayed a wide arc of the command deck with bolter fire until his gun clicked empty. His assailant dived aside, but the Dreadnought’s shots went everywhere, punching through the armoured barriers of the gallery mezzanine and cutting down half a dozen human officers.

  The Night Lords came behind him. Gunfire from mankind’s most deadly technologies blazed back and forth across the room. The Ultramarines were quick with their shots, switching from target to target as soon as each was incapacitated. The Night Lords were less disciplined, pouring in with an unseemly eagerness. A number were blasted off their feet in a hail of mass-reactives. One was vaporised by a plasma blast, many more wounded.

  The Dreadnought turned its attention to the fire coming down on it and its brothers from the gallery. A ferocious short-ranged exchange of fire criss-crossed the narrow gap. Bolt-rounds hammered into its face, shattering its primary visual lenses and stripping paint from the skull. The Dreadnought lashed out, sweeping its arms side to side.

  Adallus was out from his hiding place, moving away from the Dreadnought’s stamping legs. Two Night Lords rushed through the doors, fighting as one – one armed with a massive power axe, the other wielding a chainglaive. The first was methodical, only striking when sure of a kill. The second was a maniac, helmetless, spinning a long Nostraman glaive over his head with little care for his comrades. Despite the glaive-wielder’s abandon, the fighting styles of the two meshed, the wildness of one supporting the restraint of the other.

  The firefight slackened as close melee was joined. Adallus’ men killed more than their enemy, but the Night Lords were numerous.

  Adallus threw down his bolter and plucked his power sword from his leg. The Dreadnought roared behind him, staggering as it was caught by another melta blast in the knee. Adallus ignored it, thumbing the activation stud of the sword. The energy field sparked into life. The two warriors saw him, pointing through the smoke and reek of battle. Adallus’ centurion’s crest made him an obvious target.

  He saluted the pair as they came at him. The warrior with the axe inclined his head. There was no such indication of mutual respect from the glaive-wielder.

  Buzzing teeth sawed through the air. The warrior gripped the haft of his glaive near the head and at the centre, swinging in sharply then jabbing at the captain. Adallus moved away from the feint. The axeman came in quickly in the footsteps of his brother, his axe already descending. No doubt he sought to capitalise on his comrade’s distraction of their foe, but Adallus did not take the bait. Sword met axe-head, blade to blade. There was a blinding, actinic flash and a bang so loud that his aural dampers engaged. Adallus stepped back under cover of the explosion, sweeping his sword around to catch the blow he knew would be coming from the glaive. Teeth sheared off the chain track as they encounted his power sword’s destructive bite, and the bearer cursed in ugly Nostraman. The glaive-wielder’s battle stance became more considered, and he backed away, weighing his opponent more carefully.

  Night Lords gained the gallery. Fierce fighting broke out there as the final few Ultramarines sold their lives as dearly as they could. Their hatred for the traitors outdid the grim enjoyment the Night Lords felt at the battle, and for a moment they cast the invaders back. A final victory that could not last.

  Many of the human crew opted to shoot themselves rather than be taken alive. The last Ultramarines were smashed down and speared by saw-toothed weapons, or flanked and shot down. Blood slicked everything. The previously frigid room was hot with the fighting, clamorous with the racket of potent weaponries, suffocating with fyceline smoke.

  Adallus fought on. He had drawn his bolt pistol. Night Lords gathered in a circle around them, those that w
ere not dragging screaming captives out of the room. One raised his boltgun to shoot Adallus in the back. Adallus saw this, but could do nothing to counter as he was occupied with the mismatched warrior pair. He awaited the final shot as he fought off his paired foes, but a warrior in the ornate armour of a claw master shook his head, tapped his own weapon, and the warrior lowered his bolter.

  Adallus was to be permitted to die with honour, at least.

  The two came at him again and again. His bolt pistol shots went wide. The few that impacted did not bring either down, but drove one or the other back, until there were no rounds left in its magazine and he tossed the weapon away.

  He went for the glaive-wielder. Adallus was renowned for his speed, and he had a fine control of his blade that had often bested his brothers. Never had it been employed in such earnest before.

  The glaive-wielder wavered, and Adallus switched attack, bringing the weapon around to batter back the axeman. The axeman caught the blow with a tight flick of his axe-head, giving Adallus enough time to step between them, too close for their larger weapons to be used effectively. He elbowed the axeman hard in the gorget, sending him backward, and drove his sword point at the other’s chest.

  The blade never hit. A white sheet of light obscured the warrior, and then Adallus saw that his hand had gone. The mangled remains of his sword hit the floor.

  Their leader put up a smoking volkite serpenta.

  ‘Bravo,’ said the captain, ‘but we must hurry things along. It was getting boring, and I have a schedule to keep.’ He had a supercilious manner that made Adallus loathe him. ‘Kellenkir, Kellendvar – finish him.’

  The glaive-wielder swung the shaft of his weapon around, catching Adallus above the ankles and slamming him to the floor. ‘I will take him.’

  The axeman stared down at him, axe held across his stomach. ‘He deserves a clean death, he fought well.’

  The warriors looked at their leader expectantly.

  The claw master shook his head. ‘Not this one. He had his chance. Kellenkir, do with him as you will, but remember you owe me twice. Once for your life, once for his death.’