Long have we known of the Devourer. While the majority of the necron race slept away the aeons, his great majesty Szarekh, the Silent King, journeyed far and wide beyond the borders of this galaxy. Such unspeakable things did he witness as cannot be adequately articulated in our noble language, nor any other.
The most dire of all these extragalactic enemies were the tyranids.
For countless cycles he has sought to repel this threat. In his wisdom he has observed them, studied them and committed them to oblivion in all but the final, decisive deed. He has brought them to battle on a hundred worlds, ravaged their slumbering fleets out in the cold, measureless void, and even united the more fractious, warring dynasties so that our mutual interests might be protected.
What, you ask, has this to do with an alliance between the living and the dead?
We will tell you everything, my lord. Perhaps then you will understand.
The world’s name is not important. Not to us. To the humans, though, it seemed to be paramount. For a species that would see themselves as the undisputed masters of this galaxy, they place so much emphasis on names, and the paradises and damnations that they imagine for themselves.
This, then, becomes a tale of angels and of devils, to use the crude, ancient terms.
The bloodiest of angels, fighting upon the Devil’s Crag.
And we were there. The three of us – Khatlan, Dovetlan and Ammeg, if you
will – and so many more. So many, many more.
While you travelled the stars, seeking tithes and tribute, we answered the call of our true master. The Praetorians can move in great numbers, quickly and quietly, when the attentions of the dynasties fall elsewhere for a time. So it is that we return to the court of the Silent King whenever he would wish it, to bring him new word of the Great Awakening. To the rest of the galaxy, we are his eyes and ears, as we are his right hand, and his only voice.
He does not speak. He will not speak. Not to you.
Not yet.
But he may, in time, if you prove worthy.
They had us, brothers. We were done for.
We had fought them hard. On Gehenna, those clanking mechanical xenos seemed to be without number. For three weeks, Dante had led the Third Company against their Legions – we in the assault squads would strike and fall back with the commander, over and over, while Captain Tycho directed the long-range engagement. It was a dry, dusty grind. The only blood that fell upon the barren wastes was ours.
That felt wrong. There was nothing to slake our thirst, no glorious crimson to bathe the armour of the damned.
Tycho was the Master of Sacrifice. That title seemed appropriate. We felt sacrificed.
Gehenna is nothing if not an altar upon which such offerings can be made, though the myriad alien races seem forever drawn to test the Imperium’s right to preside over it. A million souls more hallowed than ours had passed on the hive world’s plains, over the millennia. What more noble endeavour, what more glorious calling can there be than to defend such a place from the hordes of the restless xenos dead?
And so defend it we did, with every last ounce of our company’s strength.
We fell from the grey-streaked skies, the crimson of the Ironhelms assault squads like a bloodstain upon the pristine gold of the Sanguinary Guard.
Commander Dante was ever at the front, the tip of the blade thrust into the necrons’ flanks. The Axe Mortalis hewed left and right, cleaving through metal bodies as easily as it might through living flesh on any other battlefield, and in Dante’s divine shadow we were inspired. I led my squad in a freefall drop, the weight of our charge like the hammer of Sanguinius’ own wrath
against the enemy, their dully glowing eyes turned upwards in those last heartbeats before we were in their very midst.
No towering necron lords swathed in fuliginous silks, no insectoid sentinels lashing us with electrum whips. These were the poorest stock of the Legions that we now faced, the meagre revenants that seemed almost without number and whose only tactical use seemed to be that they absolutely would not die.
Exhorting my battle-brothers onwards, I drove into the necron warriors with my blade held before me. Speed, we had found, was the key – they simply could not track us quickly enough as targets if we kept moving, and they seemed incapable of firing their gauss weaponry without first taking careful aim. And so we struck them down by the dozen, taking heads and limbs and blowing out armoured torsos with point-blank pistol fire, and stamping their remains into the dust beneath our boots.
Yet for every necron we tore apart, three more would trudge forwards to take its place; or else the supposedly dead warrior would simply rise up again once we had passed by, wounds reknitting under whatever baleful technomancy powered them.
Green flashes cast the seemingly endless horde in silhouette, and I looked up to see more of the great, gravitic monolith structures gliding ponderously down the slopes from the crags beyond. Their energy matrices cast thumping charges into the melee, scattering golden-armoured Blood Angels like leaves in the wind. Maddening, squealing static cut through the inter-squad vox-channels, and suddenly we were cut off from Dante’s command entirely.
And more necrons came. And yet more.
The press of cold, lifeless bodies around us become entangling, and the warriors began to jab at us with their hooked bayonet blades. Brother Jophael tried to free himself from the horde’s grasp by launching back into the air, but metal claws pulled him down, jump pack and all, beneath the ambling tide.
His agonised screams were mercifully brief.
I planted a boot into the chest of the closest necron warrior and sent it sprawling backwards with a pair of frag grenades for its trouble. The blasts hurled a score more of them aside, but all that bought me was the space to truly see the inevitability and futility of our assault. We were outnumbered by hundreds to one, and hovering ark-transports would gather the xenos dead right out from beneath our feet to send against us once more. And on, and on, until we were buried.
We had been sacrificed. I did not know if Commander Dante had planned it that way, but I could no longer even see his Sanguinary Guard amidst the throng.
There would be no resurrection for us. Once fallen, the Angels of Death do not rise from the dead. There is purity in that – something that the necrons have failed to grasp in their eternal pursuit of… eternity.
Two more of my brothers fell. Then a third.
I don’t remember what it was that I screamed in that moment – likely it was something ignoble and suitably defiant. I struck a necron down with every swing of my blade, until it seemed that I could no longer even find room to draw it back between blows.
My pauldrons began to catch on the press of metal limbs. Unfeeling fingers clamped around my wrists, and my neck. My sword was pulled from my grip, and my plasma pistol too. I realised that I was being dragged over backwards, and I was no longer even screaming real words.
That’s when it happened.
The pause. The stutter.
As one, the necrons faltered. Just for a fraction of a second, their eyes dimmed.
Then, again as one, they put up their weapons and turned to withdraw. I crashed to the ground on my back, before scrambling free of my jump pack harness to see ten thousand immortal xenos warriors striding away from us as implacably as they had been advancing only moments earlier.
I snapped my pistol up and put down nine of them without thinking. I shot them through their retreating backs, hot plasma dashing their mechanical innards onto the ground. Others did the same, in futile impotent rage. Our blood was still up, and the wounded remnants of the front-line squads harried the enemy with frustrated battle cries still upon their lips. Necrons fell, and still the Legions did not pay us any more regard that day.
It was as though we had simply ceased to exist.
It made no sense at the time. Why would they suddenly give up, with certain victory within their unfeeling, iron grasp?
The answer was the result of
cold, mathematical logic. It would come to stun us all, and most especially Commander Dante.
We had misjudged them. We misjudged them so badly.
You understand, lord, that the angel-humans were never our real foe in this.
Mere happenstance it was that placed them in opposition to the Silent King’s plan. That, and their characteristic unwillingness to admit that they know nothing of the true nature of the universe.
For as much as the human empire considers itself the height of evolution and the antithesis of the tyranid race – if you can believe such a thing! – they are perhaps more alike than either of them can know. Dovetlan once likened the humans to insects. They swarm. They cannibalise. They live without real thought for the future or the past, beyond the propagation of their own brood.
And they build hives. Literally.
Teeming with human vermin and other, even more degenerate life forms, their settlements agglomerate around the points of industry and resource, openly abusing their worlds to feed the wasteful cycle of war and procreation.
Even their ruling classes may live out their entire organic lifespan within a ten-kilometre area, such is the self-contained and parochial nature of the hive cities.
In all our time, we have rarely witnessed such edifices constructed by a sentient race. They are stockpiles of humankind, in all its stripes.
Concentrated cells of organic filth.
Biomass.
Bait.
It was a fortuitous coincidence that placed a world such as this in the path of the Silent King’s quarry. After his great victory over the tyranid beasts in the dimensional anomaly at Anjac, he had pursued a splinter fleet through the void entirely undetected for almost three cycles. He observed their movements. He studied their reactions to external astral stimuli.
And then he began to calculate ahead.
None but he, in his majestic wisdom, could have accomplished such a feat –
but even the magnificent Szarekh could not deny the providence that brought them hence afterwards.
Our cold bodies hold little interest for the Devourer. At best, they might be drawn to the more physical power sources utilised by our technologies, or defend themselves when we strike them. But fodder for their living ships, we are not.
The hive worlds of the humans shine like beacons in comparison. The tyranids are drawn to such banquets with a singular, predatory hunger.
The Silent King knows this.
The beginnings of a plan began to form in his mind, as he later told us.
He would lay a trap for them, and he would bait it with the humans.
The seven of us stood around the hololith table – the five surviving squad sergeants, battered and bloodied, shielded from the worst of the commander’s wrath by our noble captain Erasmus Tycho. Though he was similarly armoured in golden plate, the two of them could not have appeared more different in that moment.
‘Answer me this,’ Dante growled. ‘How did they know? How can the necrons scan the interstellar void more accurately than the long-range sensors of the Bloodcaller?’
The Chapter Master had set his death mask upon the surface of the table, and I could scarcely take my eyes from it. The play of light over the angelic, sculpted features of our Lord Sanguinius lent the helm an even more numinous aspect, beyond even the polished golden halo that encircled the crown.
From behind his own half-mask, Tycho spoke carefully.
‘I’m not sure they can, commander. It is possible that they already knew the tyranids were approaching before the hive ships crossed the system’s heliopause. Our sensorium officers’ report did cite multiple objects “of unknown origin” in their initial tactical sweeps, but you and I both bade them turn their full attention towards the necrons. We simply perceived a greater threat on the ground.’ The corner of his mouth flickered with an involuntary tic. ‘We were watching the pageant when we should have been scouting the hall.’
Dante glowered up at his protégé, gauntleted palms resting on the table’s edge, and a grim smile creased his dour features. ‘Aye, perhaps.’
Between the two of them, the lambent silhouette of Gehenna Prime turned slowly in the tactical hololith projection. The planet was bracketed by the battle-barge Bloodcaller and the twin strike cruisers Melech and Fratrem Pugno at station in high orbit. Of the necron cairn-ships that had apparently retreated from the system more than a month earlier, there was still no sign.
Instead, from the galactic south-east had come the tyranids.
Xenological identifiers marked them as a splinter of the defeated Behemoth fleet, or possibly cousins of little-known Dagon. Regardless of their origin,
the four great hive ships had already spawned a veritable multitude of lesser craft and begun to move into a splayed formation that bypassed the outer worlds entirely. Tiny numerals rolled down the hololith next to each sensor contact as the telemeters updated their distance and relative speeds.
There was no mistaking it – this was a standard xenos attack vector. The tyranids had set their ravenous gaze upon Gehenna Prime.
‘What would you command of us, my lord?’ asked Phanuel, turning away from the dire tableau. The devastator squads had been furthest from the necrons’ front wave, and so were the least mauled by the weeks of attrition that the rest of us had suffered.
Dante gestured to the approaching hive ships. ‘We are about to be caught between our chosen foe on the ground and a new one in the heavens, brother-sergeant. Our victory over the necrons was already far from assured. Now we face an even more overwhelming force – one that could take an entire world on its own.’
The weight of that truth hung in the silence for a moment. Tycho nodded slowly, presumably at the prospect of a swift and glorious end for his battle company. ‘The presence of the tyranid fleet does at least go some way towards explaining why our astropathic calls for reinforcement seem to have fallen upon deaf ears, Chapter Master,’ he offered with a shrug. ‘Nonetheless, the Ironhelms are with you to the very last.’
Before the commander could reply, the hololith flickered and a shriek of white noise cut through the embedded audio feed. We all recoiled, startled but ready to react.
Then the display blinked out, along with every visual feed, lumen and powered system in the strategium chamber, plunging us into darkness.
‘Generatorium!’ Dante roared. ‘Restore the–’
Static seeped through the dead channel, bleeding in and somehow multiplying in the air before us. Motes of greenish light ran upwards from the table’s surface, though this time it cast no reflection in the Death Mask of Sanguinius.
The rasping un-sound built upon itself, pulsing in strange, eddying waves.
‘Listen to that,’ whispered Gaius, reaching for his bolt pistol but finding the holster empty. ‘It’s a voice.’
I spat, my hands bunching into fists as I scanned the room for any threat.
‘That’s no voice. It’s artefacting from an incompatible signal source. Nothing
more.’
The motes of light began to swirl and gather above the centre of the table, blocking out some new shape in the space where Gehenna had previously hung. The emerald glare grew in intensity, rising with the crackling, maddening howl of the–
‘HUMANS.
PROSTRATE
YOURSELVES
BEFORE
OUR
MAGNIFICENCE.’
Turning slowly in the shimmering field, a gaunt necron visage with a high crest stared out at us, its eyes blazing almost white and casting tiny arcs of energy before them. Tycho and two of the others moved quickly to place themselves between Dante and the xenos avatar, but the commander barged
them aside, a look of disbelief upon his face.
‘I AM THE JUDICATOR-PRIME. I AM CHARGED WITH SECURING
YOUR COOPERATION. YOU WILL NOT RESIST.’
With a snarl, Phanuel drew his combat blade and slashed at the thing’s face, but the weapon passed cleanly through and left him
only with a tracery of greenish sparks dancing over his gauntlet and vambrace. The necron either did not notice, or did not care.
‘WHO AMONG YOU HOLDS AUTHORITY?’
Dante scowled, and stepped forwards. ‘I am Dante,’ he said from between clenched teeth, ‘Master of the Adeptus Astartes Chapter the Blood Angels.
Who are you to address me and my officers in such a manner?’
The avatar regarded him with its blazing white eyes. ‘I AM THE
JUDICATOR-PRIME. I AM CHARGED WITH SECURING YOUR
COOPERATION. YOU WILL NOT RESIST, DANTE OF THE BLOOD
ANGELS.’
Reaching out to the table controls, Gaius warily mashed the keypad with his palm, hoping to sever the connection. It did not have any effect. Commander Dante looked back to the Judicator.
‘Cooperation in what, xenos? Until mere hours ago, our forces were locked in mortal combat. Now you are fled to the empty plains, awaiting our inevitable vengeance. There is no matter in which we or you will ever cooperate.’
‘YOU ARE INCORRECT. OUR SUCCESS HAS ALREADY BEEN
CALCULATED. THE CONFLICT BETWEEN US WAS AN ERROR.’
Rage boiled up inside me at the thing’s brazen insolence. I bared my teeth
and bellowed back at the projection. ‘Silence! Let us end this on the field of battle. You will not strike at the worlds of the Imperium and then run for cover when a greater enemy rears its foul head!’
The Judicator’s gaze swept over me. ‘THE CONFLICT BETWEEN US WAS
AN ERROR,’ it repeated.
Tycho raised his voice, then. ‘Who decides that? You?’
‘NO. IT IS THE DECISION OF MIGHTY SZAREKH, LAST AND
GREATEST OF THE SILENT KINGS. PROSTRATE YOURSELVES
BEFORE HIS MAGNIFICENCE.’
An uneasy silence fell over the seven of us. I turned to my brothers, unsure how to react.
Dante narrowed his eyes. ‘The Silent King… The Silent King?’
‘MIGHTY SZAREKH, LAST AND GREATEST OF THE SILENT KINGS.’
‘The Silent King is… here, on Gehenna?’
The Judicator’s head twitched. ‘I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE
Crusade & Other Stories - Dan Abnett Et Al. Page 15