Pharos

by Guy Haley

  Corvo linked to each of the other sergeants in the strike force in order of seniority. As he expected, all was satisfactory.

  The drop pod banged twice, its sideways motion stilled. With a jerk it descended. A steady rasping whispered through the hull as it was lowered into the tube.

  ‘These deck crew need better training,’ said Gollodon. ‘I had this pod painted yesterday.’

  They all laughed. The pod’s livery would be scorched nearly bare in the descent. Corvo did not join them. He was observing the situation outside. His view of the coming clash was reduced to the most rudimentary graphical representation on the limited space offered by his helm display – green arrowheads for his own fleet, red for the enemy. Both were heading off from the planet, already some way out from Sotha. Many more were still present around the dim blue circle denoting the world. Three red arrows were headed toward the Glorious Nova, the green arrow of Alcuis’ Watcher moving off to intercept.

  The drop launch officer spoke over the vox. ‘Thirty seconds to drop.’

  Red emergency lighting came on in the pod. A soft chime counted out the seconds. Corvo watched as Alcuis’ ship flew straight at the intercepting Night Lords ships. He brought up tiny data screeds. All three of the enemy’s ships were individually a match for the Watcher, and four more, smaller ships were coming over the pole of Sotha, down on the Watcher’s position.

  At times like these, Corvo wished there were a god to pray to. A miracle was required to save the Dark Angels ship.

  But thus far, its sacrificial run was working. Only one ship was making for the Glorious Nova, and it was far astern.

  All Corvo had to do was survive the drop.

  The chimes ended with a long, musical blurt.

  ‘Pod zero-one, release,’ said the launch officer.

  The bottom fell out of Corvo’s world as the pod’s dorsal engine roared, shooting them out of the tube. His spine pressed against the base of his skull, his stomach pushed up into his throat.

  Freefall through the void lasted seconds. Then their vessel bumped loudly, and the roar of atmospheric friction thundered through the pod.

  Every time Corvo had undertaken a drop assault, from the very first training drop, there was a chance he would not survive the experience. Drop failure was a small but ever-present risk. The enemy were often firing at him. That was not the case now – their attack was coming in well away from Sothopolis’ guns, if they still existed – but the Glorious Nova was going so fast they were being deployed at the absolute limit of the drop pods’ operating tolerance. The odds of a catastrophic break-up were higher than usual.

  The descent was rough for two-thirds of the way. Taking into account the bone-crushing forces involved, that was not an insignificant discomfort. Corvo’s brain felt as if it would be bashed to pieces on the inside of his skull. The pod rattled them about like dice in a tin. A smooth portion followed, giving Corvo a second to see that his feed with the Glorious Nova had cut out, and that a new signal pulsed insistently in the lower quadrant of his visor. This was the locator beacon of Dantioch’s people. The pod jerked as its limited thrusters nudged it onto an intercept course.

  Moments before impact, the main jet fired. The pod slowed from speeds that were fatal to those that were simply injurious. The craft crashed down into the earth with bone-jarring force. The doors blew open sufficiently hard to flatten anything outside, and the pale grey light of predawn and a sweet alien air tainted with smoke flooded the compartment. Corvo’s harness slammed up, and then he was running outside.

  Two pods were down already and his men were forming a perimeter. Whooshing roars and loud thumps announced the arrival of more. Trees cracked like whips as their trunks splintered under the weight of smoky re-entry vehicles. Fitful burning had taken hold in the rudely created clearing, but there was far more smoke on the air than their landing could have accounted for.

  Corvo risked a brief vox-ping with his ship, but got no reply. He scanned the skies. The blazing artificial starfires of low-orbit battle showed him the location of the Watcher. He looked to the east and was relieved to see a glowing delta of air, the hull of his own starship scraping the upper atmosphere as it made good its escape. Bright shapes chased it, but they would not catch it.

  The Watcher was another matter. Green aurorae like summer lightning flickered across the sky, the tell-tale of collapsing void shields at the edge of the atmospheric envelope. The fire between the ships increased.

  A brilliant orb appeared above, bathing Sotha in a premature dawn. It shrank a little, then burst outward, more brightly. A new sun shone in the heavens, bringing brief noon to the morning.

  Fiery debris fell away as the light contracted to nothing. The Watcher was gone. Alcuis was dead. He had died in the service of the Imperium, going to his doom knowingly and without complaint. There were those in the Ultramarines who mistrusted the secretive Dark Angels. Corvo would speak out against such opinions wherever he heard them, forevermore.

  The last pod thumped down. All of them had made it intact. There were no losses among his own men.

  ‘We owe the First Legion a debt of honour,’ he voxed. ‘Let the Nova Company ever remember it.’

  The locator beacon pinged urgently, a kilometre away.

  ‘They will come to us soon. Move out,’ he said.

  They ran through a thick forest. Their armour forced a path through the spongy, densely packed trees but in places the vegetation caught them as surely as a net, and Corvo’s progress was not so swift as he had hoped. The beacon sang, twenty metres, ten metres, then it stopped.

  The ground rose. Corvo advanced quickly. The environment made stealth impossible, and he burst unexpectedly out of the trees into a clearing at the top with a racket that made him wince.

  The top of the hill was bald. In the lee of a rock covered in thick orange moss, a scruffy-looking auxiliary trooper waited.

  Corvo levelled his gun. ‘In ultimate sacrifice…’

  ‘…is ultimate glory,’ the man responded. He was battle-worn, dirty, covered in sooty smears. ‘Not my choice of countersign, but I’m no Space Marine.’ He smiled widely. It vanished when Corvo did not lower his gun. He took in the captain’s great height.

  ‘Big and serious. My, you and Captain Polux are going to get on so well.’

  ‘Who are you?’ said Corvo. His men had surrounded the trooper. Others moved on, securing the base of the hill.

  ‘Sergeant Mericus, the Sothan Irregular Auxilia. Do you think you could move a little more quietly? You’re as clumsy as mating phantines, the lot of you.’ He was insolent, this one, but nervous. Corvo still did not lower his gun.

  ‘You are to lead us on your own to the Pharos?’

  ‘No,’ said the man. A red sighting dot appeared on Corvo’s chest, more on his lead men. The moss atop the rock moved. A Legion Scout emerged, his aim never wavering.

  ‘This is Acting Scout-Sergeant Oberdeii and his brothers from the Hundred and Ninety-Ninth Aegida Company. It’s him who’ll be your guide through the tunnels.’

  The sighting lasers blinked off.

  The scruffy man turned his back and sauntered off down the hill. He moved through the dense shrubs covering the hill top silently. Shortly before disappearing into the trees he turned back and winked. ‘It’s this way. My men are waiting near the tunnel entrance, don’t worry, not too near. We’re not stupid. We won’t give it away. Try to be a bit quieter though, or they might shoot you.’

  The Scout Oberdeii came over to the captain. He shouldered his sniper rifle and snapped a salute. ‘My lord Captain Lucretius Corvo, it is an honour to serve you in this duty.’ He looked over his shoulder to where Mericus had gone. ‘Do not be offended by Sergeant Giraldus. He means no disrespect.’ Oberdeii paused, rethinking his words. ‘Well, he does. He is not a warrior. Everything is like a game to him, but he is a good man.’

 
‘How close are you to brotherhood, neophyte?’

  ‘Final stage selection, captain,’ said Oberdeii sadly, then a spark of defiance entered his face. ‘But we stand firm in spite of our youth. We have proved our mettle against the Eighth Legion.’

  ‘I meant no ill by it, Scout. More information leads to more viable theoreticals, even if seemingly insignificant. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘You have done well. Now, lead the way. Your human companion has given us the slip.’

  Oberdeii motioned for his remaining Scouts to form up, assigning them to sub-groups of Corvo’s strike force in case they became separated.

  They came around the stones on top of the hill, and Corvo saw where the smoke was coming from.

  All around Mount Pharos, the forests were burning.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Forest fire

  The courage of shepherds

  Into the labyrinth

  Flights of gunships roared over the mountain, dropping promethium bombs that kindled blazes even in the wet wood of the quicktrees. Teardrops of blackened forest limned by fire crawled along before the wind.

  ‘You are still offering resistance,’ stated Corvo.

  Mericus was surprised by Corvo’s words. The captain had said very little to him. Everyone was preoccupied nervously watching the trees.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, we are. The situation isn’t quite so bad as it looks from the outside, maybe. They’ve taken the top of the mountain, but the lower chambers are still ours, and we’re operating out of some of the more obscure caves.’

  Corvo’s helm swept back and forth as he examined the mountain battlefield. ‘It cannot last.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Mericus. ‘It can’t.’

  ‘You are remarkably relaxed.’

  ‘You expect me to be gibbering in terror?’ Mericus snorted. ‘We’re not all cowards. Damn few of us are. These men here,’ he waved his hand back at his depleted command. ‘They’ve been fighting hard. They’ve killed a few of you legionaries, do you know that? They’re braver than your lot, if you ask me.’

  ‘They fear, and they conquer it,’ said Corvo. ‘That is worthy of respect.’

  ‘But they’re not frightened, they’re terrified, captain. They know what the Night Lords will do to us if they catch us. We know the stakes, but we won’t give up. None of us expect to live very long.’

  They took to a phantine road, a track of smooth earth smashed through the trees by the great beasts and pounded rock hard by generations in their passing. The quicktrees were not entirely defeated and curved over the way, enclosing it in a tunnel of green.

  ‘We’ll go quicker here, and we’ll be harder to track,’ said Mericus.

  ‘This is not a human path,’ said Corvo. ‘What manner of animal made it?’

  ‘Big ones,’ said Mericus. ‘This area’s far out from the city, and thick with them any other time, but they’ve been driven off by the fighting. Be glad of it. They’re short-tempered.’

  On the road, the going was easier. Out of the woods the disparity between the Space Marines’ and the Sothans’ ability to march became apparent. Mericus sensed the frustration of the Space Marines at having to move at a human pace, but they did not abandon the Sothans. Mericus wondered if such mercy would cost them the war in the end.

  Soon they were climbing the mountain’s foothills through choking spirals of smoke. They left the road and the danger from the fires grew. It was only the blindest chance that did not see the men obliterated directly by the fires creeping through the forest. Several times they had to alter their route to avoid the conflagration. They could see very little, and the auxiliaries struggled to breathe in the fumes rolling out of the burning woods. Quicktree wood was wet and did not readily combust, and the smoke it put out when it did was thick and white with steam. Ash drifted down, grey and white and black, thick as drifting snow in places.

  Presently, Oberdeii called a halt in a clearing before a point where the hillside reared up, its gentle slope becoming precipitous where a cliff tore through the ground. The rock of it was covered in vegetation, and Mericus could see nothing on its eroded face except dark green foliage and the occasional patch of mossy stone, but his men were pointing out something in the leaves.

  ‘The triple cave,’ said Hasquin. ‘The furthest entrance into the mountain that’s been found. Back in the old days, before the city, the further herders used it as shelter. Phantines wouldn’t go near it.’

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ said Mericus. The cliff was so choked in swiftvine it resembled a hoary old face, a forest god out of time, rather than a rock formation.

  ‘There,’ said Hasquin. He rested his arm on Mericus’ shoulder and pointed out three darker patches set at staggered intervals in the vines. Mericus squinted.

  ‘You move well, sarge,’ said Tiny Jonno, ‘but you gotta be Sothan born to see the caves in the trees here.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth,’ said Dorican. He and Chelvan set down Domitia. The day was hot, the fires made it hotter. They were streaming with sweat, but they had not complained at the weight of their gun.

  ‘This is our way in,’ said Corvo. ‘Sergeant–’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ said Mericus. ‘You need to leave us behind. We’re slowing you down.’

  Corvo’s expression was hidden by his helmet, but he bowed slightly in the affirmative.

  ‘I advise you to scatter. Head upwards. The Night Lords will be following us by now, and they will catch you if you linger nearby.’

  ‘We’ve nowhere to go, not really. What if you fail?’ said Mericus.

  ‘We may, but it is not your concern. You have played your part. Depart with your lives,’ said Corvo.

  ‘We can do better than run off and hide and wait to die, burned up or hauled off,’ said Mericus. ‘We’ll cover you, buy you some time. We’re tough to spot from the air, but you – no offence – once they find your drop pods, the trail you left will be all too easy to follow. I thought quicktrees were pretty robust, but you’ve made a sight of a mess.’

  Corvo made a disapproving noise that came out of his vox-grille as a metallic buzz. ‘It is not necessary for you to risk your lives.’

  ‘Oh, but it is,’ said Mericus. ‘This beacon, it’s a big thing. The fate of the galaxy, all that, but this is about more than the end of the universe for us, this is our home.’

  ‘You are a very flippant man.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Mericus.

  ‘I did not mean it as a compliment.’

  ‘I know. It’s just the way I am. I wasn’t born here, captain, but this is where I belong. We’ll fight for Sotha, we’ll fight for our home.’

  The Sothans formed up behind Mericus, the remains of the three squads that had set out on patrol what seemed like a hundred years ago. Hasquin, Chelvan, Dorican, his dour persona unruffled by the conflict. Pontian was dead, Morio still wounded and succumbing to infection, Hanspire gone, most of Bolarion’s men too. Govenisk was with them, but had withdrawn into himself, relinquishing all authority to Mericus. Vitellius lived, cooped up in the mountain with the three of his men who knew the passageways best.

  There were fourteen of them with Mericus, that was all. Men who expected to do their yearly tour of duty then go back to their jobs and families. Their uniforms were so dirty that the original colours were unidentifiable, and their faces weren’t much cleaner. They were a ragged tribe in the face of the Ultramarines captain in his pristine armour.

  But they stood tall, and proud.

  ‘So we’ll stay here, thank you very much,’ said Mericus, ‘and do what we can.’

  ‘I acknowledge your previous efforts, but a large force will come after us, not a patrol, or a handful caught by surprise. Your weapons are not well suited to fighting the Legiones Astartes,’ said Corvo. ‘Your courage is praiseworthy, but
you would serve better by fleeing and living to fight under better circumstances.’

  ‘These torches?’ Mericus touched the stock of his lasrifle. ‘They’re not the best, but they’ll still put a Night Lord down if you hit him enough times in the right places. And you are forgetting Domitia and her sisters. We still have them.’

  He pointed at Dorican, who slapped the side of his heavy bolter emphatically.

  ‘Three heavy bolters will make them stop and think,’ said Mericus.

  ‘We are the shepherds of Sotha. They will never see us,’ said Hasquin. ‘Not until it’s too late.’

  ‘These crags are a good position for an ambush, you reckon, Mericus?’ said Govenisk. He pointed to a vine-choked shelf about halfway up. ‘Their firing angles will be poor, we’ll be difficult to get at. We should take a fair tally of them.’

  Oberdeii, who had been waiting by the side of the captain, bent low and scooped up a large rock. He tossed it without effort to where Govenisk pointed.

  ‘Imagine that is a grenade. You have to get higher,’ he said.

  ‘We can get higher,’ said Mericus.

  ‘With heavy bolters?’ said Oberdeii sceptically. ‘Listen to the captain, please. Hide somewhere, do not throw your lives away. That’s sheer rock. One of your quarians might do it, but can you?’

  Mericus grinned solemnly. ‘Where a quarian can go, a Sothan can go. And where a Sothan can go, he can drag a gun.’

  The last of the Space Marines came through the cave entrance. The swiftvines creaked shut behind them, cutting what little light came inside to a murky green.

  Tolomachus and Solon took five men each into the other caves and had them stamp about in the leafmould. As was the norm with the tunnels of the Pharos, debris from the outside world gave out dramatically quickly, and the treated black stone that made up the tunnels was impervious to the Space Marines’ ceramite boots. With false trails laid, it would take more than a cursory examination for the Night Lords to discern which way they had gone.