The Damnation of Pythos

by David Annandale

  It was also the location of Hamartia’s Mandeville point.

  This was where ships travelling the empyrean would transition into the system. The point was a difficult one to negotiate. Many inexperienced pilots, and more than one veteran, had exited the warp only to drive their vessels into a chunk of ice the size of a city. No such accident could befall a ship of the Legiones Astartes, but even their crews had to proceed with caution. Their focus would be on the known natural hazards of the system. They would not, Atticus had said, be expecting, or be ready for, an attack. Not here, so deep within their own lines.

  On the bridge of the Veritas Ferrum, Atticus stood in the command pulpit and revealed to his legionaries the mechanics of the coming war. Opaque shielding covered the forward oculus, shutting out the toxic sight of the empyrean as the strike cruiser travelled its currents, making for Hamartia. The warp was in storm. Turbulence and navigational anomalies were to be expected this close to the Maelstrom, but the degree of violence was unprecedented. There was also the disturbing news about the Astronomican. Locating it was difficult. Navigating by it was impossible. But Bhalif Strassny had found an alternative, and was guiding the Veritas Ferrum with assurance. The anomaly on Pythos was so strong, it was as powerful a beacon for the Demeter Sector as the Astronomican was for the galaxy.

  The implications were dark. Atticus ignored them. Their contemplation would not help him with the mission.

  Atticus touched the control panel before him, and the oculus acted as a giant screen, projecting the schematics of the Callidora, the Infinite Sublime and the Golden Mean. Camnus had retrieved the information from the massive databanks of the Veritas’s cogitators. The Iron Hands’ prey appeared before them with every secret exposed. Camnus and his fellow Techmarines had analysed the schematics, and their work now displayed something more vital than secrets: weaknesses.

  ‘There is where we will strike them,’ Atticus said. ‘The escorts must be eliminated in the opening moments of the operation. When we remove them from the battlefield, the Callidora will be ours.’ He spoke in certainties. He had no doubts about this engagement. He did not pretend to himself that he was approaching it with dispassion. Though his tone was measured, there was a searing heat in his chest, and it had a name: vengeance. He wanted to find himself knee-deep in the blood of the Emperor’s Children. Beneath his boots, he would hear the crunch of the skulls of those aesthetes. There would be nothing but fury in the war he was bringing to the traitors. But he had gone over the plan of attack with a cold, unforgiving eye for flaws. He exacted the same discipline from himself as he did from the men under his command.

  He knew no plan was perfect.

  He knew his primarch had gone down to defeat while consumed by the need for vengeance above all things.

  He also knew that he would succeed. The data that Erephren had given him was so detailed, so precise, that only the worst fool could fail with it in hand. And this, too, Atticus knew: he was no fool.

  He changed the display to a map of the region around Hamartia’s Mandeville point. ‘And this,’ he said, ‘is how we shall strike them.’

  He could already taste the blood.

  The Emperor’s Children squadron translated out of the warp a full twenty-four hours after the Veritas Ferrum had reached the same Mandeville point. There was no delay between the arrival of the traitor forces and the launching of the Iron Hands’ strike. With a shriek of cancerous colours, a bleeding emanation from the immaterium where there had been only the void, there were three ships. The sudden presence of their enormous masses triggered the minefield that had been waiting for them. The trap was primitive in its simplicity. The usual configuration of a minefield was designed to interdict a wide area with the risk of a lethal collision, the mines a lurking possibility. But Atticus knew where his enemy would be. His mines were not a barrier. They were his closing fist. The passive auspex of each mine reacted to the ships and the explosives flew towards the monuments of iron and steel that had arrived in their midst. They descended on the ships like swarms of terrible insects. Their stings lit the void with dozens of flashes. Fireballs rippled along the lengths of hulls.

  The Infinite Sublime was hit by a cluster of mines amidships. Blast built upon blast. The void shields collapsed, their energy sparking over the ship like jagged aurora. The blows continued, punching through the starboard plating, reaching into the core of the ship, snapping its spine. The Infinite Sublime’s ammunition depots felt the kiss of flame and erupted. The ship broke in half. It hung there for a moment, its shape bisected but still distinct, the pride of its spires and the challenge of its prow untouched, as if the memory of centuries of victories would knit the vessel back together. Then it was swallowed by its death, a raging, squalling newborn sun bursting from the heart of its engines. Burning plasma bathed the eternal night of Hamartia’s cold frontier. It washed over the rest of the squadron.

  Flame followed the pressure wave, overwhelming the reeling defences of the Golden Mean. The other escort ship had begun a turn as soon as the mines had struck. It had been hit by almost as many as the Infinite Sublime, but they were less concentrated, spreading their wounds like a plague of boils over the full length of the ship’s body. When the death cry of the Infinite Sublime hit it, the Golden Mean shuddered, and its engine flare died. Its turn continued, the movement clumsy and slow, the stagger of a wounded animal.

  The stagger took it broadside before the sights of the waiting Veritas Ferrum. The strike cruiser announced its presence. Its lance turrets and batteries opened up. Energy beams shot across the void. They annihilated the Golden Mean’s weakening void shields. They cut the ship open, slicing through its plating. Then the shells arrived, delivering devastating blows of high explosives. The barrage was continuous. It was a judgement late in coming, an answer for the humiliation of Isstvan.

  Hell came to the corridors of the escort. A wall of purging flame raced down their lengths, consuming legionary, helot and servitor. All were reduced to ash. The Golden Mean never returned fire. An iron fist smashed it into submission, into silence, into oblivion. Its death was not an exultation of fire. It was a fall to ruin. Within minutes, the only light on the ship was from the dying flames. A battered hulk sank into eternal night. It shed wreckage as it drifted off in a slow, tumbling spin, just another dead chunk of flotsam entering its wandering orbit around distant Hamartia.

  That left the Callidora. The battle-barge was a leviathan. It was so covered in weaponry it resembled a spined creature of the oceans. But it was also a brilliant, crystalline city. It was a violet jewel, malevolent, illuminating the void with an arrogance of light. It was a celebration of excess. Its superabundance of guns was matched by a baroque profusion of ornamentation. The line between weapon and art was erased. Statues reached out to embrace the stars with arms that were cannons. Lances were incorporated into non-representational sculptures that resembled frozen explosions, or embodied the concepts of ecstasy, of extremity, of sensation.

  The mines struck the Callidora too. The battle-barge rode out the attack. Its titanic silhouette shrugged off the damage. Four times larger than its escorts, twice the size of the Veritas Ferrum, it would not be humbled by such petty means. The Iron Hands vessel bombarded it, but that would not be enough, either. The Callidora could be hurt, but it could not be killed by the weaponry available to the Veritas. Not before its own retaliatory fire reduced the strike cruiser to scrap.

  Atticus did not expect the mines or lance fire to kill his prey. He did not expect the battle-barge to be crippled. He did not even hope for a serious blow. He planned on a moment of blindness, of distraction. There was one way the forces of the weaker, smaller, battered Veritas Ferrum could kill the Callidora.

  Decapitation.

  At the moment of the squadron’s translation, the Veritas launched another barrage. This one travelled more slowly. It was still some distance from its target as the death of the Infinite Subl
ime broke over the Callidora. It approached from the starboard side of the bow, in the lee of the battle-barge as the great ship was rocked by the incinerating wave. On the port side, the bristling spines were sheared away by the blast. Energy surged over the hull. The jewel flashed a greater brilliance, then flickered, menaced by eclipse. Its void shields did not die, but they faltered, creating the opening for Atticus’s strike.

  The swarm of projectiles closed with the Callidora. They were boarding torpedoes. Dozens. They crossed the void like metal sharks. They were the dark, blunt, direct violence against the shining, exuberant glory of the Emperor’s Children. They were Atticus’s message to the traitors who had once been the Iron Hands’ closest brothers. They were justice, and they were vengeance, but they were also a lesson. He was about to repay humiliation with humiliation, and do so with interest. The traitors had triumphed on Isstvan V through the agency of surprise and vastly greater numbers. Atticus would show them the fatal truth that was the Iron Hands’ way of war. It had none of the ostentation practiced by the Emperor’s Children. It was not a display, but it was no less precise, no less finely crafted an art.

  The Callidora’s long-distance ordnance roared in answer to the Veritas Ferrum. The strike cruiser began to take damage, but it was already in retreat. It maintained its attack, drawing the rage of the Callidora. The battle-barge pursued, bringing it closer to the rain of boarding torpedoes.

  Bringing it within range of another move in Atticus’s lesson.

  The orbits of the scattered disc objects were a study in lethal chance and unpredictable intersections. Travel from the Mandeville point was dangerous for any ship until reaching the frontier cleared of debris by the immense gravity of Polynices. There were too many bodies, too many trajectories that might change through random collisions. There was always the risk of catastrophe.

  Sometimes, risk could be turned into a certainty.

  Wandering though the battlefield was a chunk of ice the size of a mountain. Of irregular shape, and several thousand metres wide, it was large enough to be a threat to ships, but it was also highly visible, even in this dark quarter, shining a dull blue-white in the cold light of the sun. Its journey was also angling it away from the void war. The Callidora passed it on the starboard side in pursuit of the Veritas Ferrum.

  Aboard one of the leading torpedoes, Atticus looked through the forward viewing block. He saw the blinding amethyst of the Callidora put the dim pearl of the debris to shame. He thought, Now.

  As if obeying the order, the fusion charges planted on the ice chunk went off. Searing light flashed. The explosion broke the body in half. One piece went spinning off into the black. The other was propelled towards the Callidora. The frozen fist was a third of the ship’s size. The battle-barge’s engines flared with the urgency of its manoeuvre. The bow lifted as the vessel tried to climb out of the threat’s path. The starboard weapons were brought to bear, stabbing at the oncoming mountain with lance and cannon and torpedo. The ferocity of the bombardment punched craters into the ice and boiled the surface. Debris and vapour streamed off it in a tail. A ship would have been destroyed, its crew incinerated. But there was no crew, and this was a solid mass. Its course was unalterable. The Callidora did nothing except turn it into a comet.

  The comet struck the bow. The hit was not direct, and the ship was strong. Even so, the ice crumpled the forward plating like parchment. It crushed the prow, obliterating the golden-winged emblem. Weapons systems vomited arced plasma auroras as they died. The explosions engulfed a thousand metres of the ship’s length. A hundred spires disintegrated. For a few moments, the battle-barge resembled a torch, driving into its own flame. The Callidora went into a forced spin. The surge from the engines only pushed it further out of control. The lights flickered. For the length of a full revolution, the glittering arrogance of the Emperor’s Children went dark.

  The boarding torpedoes were on final approach. Atticus watched the Callidora’s slow tumble. The ship was so huge, its helplessness seemed impossible. It was like seeing a continent knocked adrift. He drank in the view of his enemy turned briefly into dead metal framed by the glow of its pain. One full turn, bereft of all power and control. Then the power returned. The void was lit once more by the Callidora’s pride. The ship arrested its spin. It came around to its pursuit heading. It was wounded. It was still trembling with secondary explosions. It was also angry, and it was seeking the target of its fury.

  The torpedoes passed over the shattered, smouldering bow. They flew over the length of the battle-barge. Below them was a jewelled city of towers, an artist’s tools of destruction. Ahead was the command island, a massive, crowned structure built up over the stern. And now, only now, the veil was lifted from the eyes of the Emperor’s Children, and they realised the true threat. Turrets changed orientation. Cannons trained their fire on the boarding torpedoes. Some were hit. Atticus saw fireballs he knew to be the pyres of legionaries. But he did not see many. The attack ripped through a paltry defensive net.

  In the last seconds before impact, Atticus spoke over the vox to all the torpedoes. ‘The Emperor’s Children worship perfection. Let them behold our gift to them, brothers. We are bringing these traitors the perfection of war.’

  Six

  Philosophy in the abattoir

  Decapitation

  Creon

  The boarding torpedoes hit the command island and bored their way into it. They were multiple stab wounds, gladius jabs into the throat of the Callidora. Atticus’s decapitation strategy called for the torpedoes to strike the upper quadrant of the structure in what amounted to a cluster. They would overwhelm the defences by hitting the Emperor’s Children with too many attack vectors. And they would be close enough to each other that the squads could link up quickly. Atticus was not interested in the seizing of the enginarium or the hangars. He wanted the bridge. The goals of the mission were simplicity itself, which was its own form of perfection: kill everyone, destroy everything.

  Galba’s torpedo chewed its way through the Callidora’s plate one level below most of the others. Its hatch hissed open and, past the drill head heated almost to incandescence by the violence it had inflicted, the Iron Hands poured out. With them were Khi’dem and Ptero. Atticus had bent this far to allow the Salamanders and Raven Guard a measure of restored honour. But no further: only one representative of each Legion had been granted passage to the field of vengeance.

  The space that Galba led the way through was a gallery. It was lit with the same amethyst glow as the exterior of the ship. Now that he was surrounded by the light, it seemed to him that the hue was less that of a precious stone, and more that of a bruise. The marble of the decking was carpeted, and the material felt strange beneath Galba’s feet. There was something wrong with the texture.

  The gallery ran to port. It was twenty metres wide and over a thousand long. It was designed to hold visitors by the hundreds, that the wonders on display should be seen by as many eyes as possible. Two massive bronze doors, four times the height of a Space Marine, stood at the far end. The squad moved towards them, passing beneath banners hanging from the ceiling and tapestries draped on the walls. Focused on the doors, alert for incoming threats, Galba gave the art only the smallest splinter of his attention. He registered its presence, nothing more. The Emperor’s Children’s mania for painting, sculpture, music, theatre and literature did not interest him. In the days of brotherhood with the III Legion – how long ago? Weeks? An eternity? – Galba had spent some time aboard the vessels of Fulgrim’s legionaries. He had always found the opulence suffocating. Everywhere he had looked, there had been some masterpiece calling for his attention. It had been too much, a clamouring of sensations that was a threat to the clarity of thought. It was on those occasions that he had come closest to understanding Atticus’s systematic stripping away of all that made him human. There was a purity to the machinic. It was a bracing tonic against the indulgence of the Emperor’s
Children.

  In those days, Galba had thought of the difference as little more than an aesthetic parting of the ways. Now he felt an instinctive distaste for the art around him, and he refused it notice.

  But the carpet still felt wrong.

  ‘Brother-sergeant,’ Vektus said. ‘Do you see what the traitors have wrought?’

  So he looked. He saw. He had supposed the banners to be commemorations of battlefield triumphs. They were emblems of a kind, but there were no flags, coats of arms or symbols of any kind that he recognised. Runes proliferated, their shapes and angles alien to him, their meaning beyond comprehension, yet squirming just beneath the thin ice of reason and denial. Two configurations kept repeating. One resembled a group of spears crossing to form an eight-pointed star. The other resembled a pendulum crowned by sickle blades. It made Galba grimace in distaste. He could not put aside the sensation that the symbol was smiling at him, and doing so with the most obscene eagerness. It was an abstraction of perversity, and all flesh that fell beneath the curve of its grin was soiled. Galba was seized by the wish to purge all that he still possessed of the organic. Only then would he be rid of the taint that tried to creep deeper into his being.

  He ripped his gaze away from the banners. Still moving forwards, he took in the truth of the rest of the art. The Iron Hands were running down a gallery devoted to corruption, delirium, torture and the most exquisite artistry. The tapestries were narratives of butchery rendered as the luxury of the senses. Figures that might once have had a relation to the human sank fingers into the organs of their victims, and into their own. They devoured living skulls. They bathed in blood as though it were love itself. Worse than what the tapestries portrayed was what they were. They were silk and skin interwoven. They were the very crimes they celebrated. They were hundreds of victims turned into the illustrations of their own deaths.