The Damnation of Pythos

by David Annandale

  And now Galba understood why the carpet felt wrong. It was a kindred atrocity to the tapestries. Flesh, muscle, sinew and tendons had been turned, by a hand as gifted as it was monstrous, into textile. The pile was deep. What should have felt like tanned leather had been rendered, thanks to the addition of hair, so fine that it had the soft give of cotton, yet it retained the wet-silk smoothness of tissue. Its pattern was abstract, its shades and flows suggesting music that was the origin of all screams. It was the work of many hands, and Galba had no doubt that the owners of those hands had been, one by one, incorporated into their work. Their bodies had become the ultimate signature. These artists would be forever present with their masterpiece.

  Surely the dead could not feel pain. So why did it seem, as the Iron Hands thundered along the length of the gallery, that the carpet writhed? It was the material, Galba told himself. It was the terrible genius of the craftsmanship. Any other explanation was impossible, a sign of reason being contaminated by fantasy. He would give the traitors and their ship no such victory.

  Instead, he brought annihilation. He and his brothers would end this violence with another: the cleansing, pure violence of the machine. His bionic arm felt like a bulwark against a plague of insanity. His bolter was more than an extension of his body. It was the lodestone of his journey, pulling him towards becoming the most perfect weapon of war.

  For his Emperor, for his primarch, his every act on board this ship would be the promise of that perfection. A clean perfection, untouched by the insanity of the flesh around him. A perfection that would destroy the illusion worshipped by the Emperor’s Children.

  ‘What happened to this Legion?’ Vektus wondered.

  ‘Nothing compared to what we are about to do to it,’ Galba answered.

  ‘We cannot ignore this,’ Khi’dem put in. ‘I have never seen such madness. There is more than simple treachery at work.’

  ‘There is nothing simple about treachery,’ Galba snapped. ‘And there is no greater crime.’

  ‘What I mean,’ Khi’dem said, ‘is that there are terrible implications in what we are seeing. Your brother is right to ask what happened. Something did. We turn from that question at our peril.’

  ‘Once we have killed them all, there will be all the time you would like for questions,’ Galba said. His answer rang hollow and insufficient in his ears.

  They were now only a few hundred metres from the bronze doors. The relief work was coming into focus. Even from this distance, it was clear that it was composed of bodies that had been covered in molten metal. From the other side of the doors came the sounds of battle: the deep drumming of bolter fire, the bone-sawing shriek and growl of chainblades, and the cries of rage of clashing legionaries. Rising above the white noise of shouts came a louder, hectoring voice, though its words were still indistinct. Then the volume of the roar rose like a cresting wave, and the doors opened with a deafening boom. The Emperor’s Children rushed through the doorway. They were here to repel the transgressors of their domain.

  They ran headlong into Galba’s welcome.

  The sergeant was at the head of the arrowhead rush. The gallery was wide enough for the entire squad to spread out, giving every battle-brother a clear field of fire. They opened up with their bolters before the doors had finished opening. The Emperor’s Children charged. They were not wearing helmets; whether through arrogance or surprise, Galba neither knew nor cared. The skulls of the front-rank warriors exploded like overripe fruit when hit by the mass-reactive shells. The legionaries who followed on had their own weapons up. They returned fire, breaking the momentum of the Iron Hands’ advance.

  ‘Evade,’ Galba voxed. ‘But keep closing.’ There was no cover. The only way to avoid a slaughter was to reach with the enemy and smash him in close quarters.

  The wedge lost its clean symmetry as the legionaries began to zigzag at random. They ran forwards still, jerking left and right to deny the enemy a clean shot. They fired to suppress. There was no way of targeting with any precision in these conditions. But the spray of rounds was still deadly. Galba saw another enemy choke as his throat disappeared.

  The Iron Hands’ fire bought them a few precious seconds and several more metres. They were that much closer to the foe when the return fire began in earnest. But the Emperor’s Children seemed just as eager for the violence of melee. They did not stop to aim. They charged, and their voices were raised in shouts of delight as much as they were in howls of rage.

  The two forces closed with each other, and Galba could see the faces of the traitors more clearly. The transformation his former brothers had undergone was at least as disturbing as the art they now celebrated. They had attacked their own flesh. Galba saw runes made of wounds. He saw scalps turned into flaps, pulled away from skulls by metal armatures. Spikes, barbed wire, twisted bits of sculpture and other painful detritus of a depraved imagination disfigured the legionaries. They were laughing at their own pain.

  Rushing towards Galba was a grim mockery of his own Legion’s fusion with the inorganic. Where the Iron Hands replaced the weak flesh with the strength of metal, the Emperor’s Children used each to ruin the other. The Iron Hands sought purity. These creatures were lost in a hellish revel. There was no reason here. There was only sensation, more and more and more sensation. To resort to these mutilations, to exult in agony, could only mean a hunger that could never be appeased. The Emperor’s Children now worshipped sensation, and its absolute condition tormented them by remaining just out of reach.

  These thoughts flickered through Galba’s mind as he stormed towards the killing. They were not conscious reflections. They were instinctive, recoiling knowledge, an atavistic response that the appearance of the Emperor’s Children summoned from depths that an earlier, benighted time would have called his soul. To the rage of betrayal was added disgust. Honour demanded the slaughter of the traitors. Something less rational needed all trace of them expunged.

  For a few more seconds, bolter fire criss-crossed the space between the two forces. Legionaries on either side staggered. Galba saw two more of the Emperor’s Children fall to head-shots. All of his own brothers were still at his side, the fist of vengeance unbroken. Then the warriors of the two Legions met. They were two waves smashing into each other. The gallery resounded with thunder built of armour against armour, blade against blade, fist against bone, and the throat-tearing roars of giants at war.

  In the last moment before the collision, Galba mag-locked his bolter to his thigh and took up his chainsword. He swung it over his head with both hands, bringing it down with all the momentum of his charge. The nearest of Fulgrim’s sons tried to counter the attack. Too caught up in the ecstasy of the rush to battle, he had not yet switched to a melee weapon. His bolter was a poor defence against the force of Galba’s blow. The teeth of the chain whined as the sword swatted the barrel aside. The chunk of the blade digging into the skull of the traitor was wet, grinding, satisfying. Galba drew his first blood of the war. The debt had been owed him since the Callinedes betrayal. At last he could strike with his own hands in the name of his fallen primarch.

  He saw his enemy’s eyes widen in agony. But they also shone with excitement at the extremity of the experience as Galba sawed the legionary’s head in two. Then the eyes dulled with death, and that was all that truly mattered. Galba yanked his chainsword free of the corpse and parried a strike by the Space Marine who leapt over his fallen comrade’s body, swinging his own revving blade for Galba’s throat. Galba ducked low and barrelled into the traitor, knocking him off balance. Galba followed up with the chainsword against the foe’s cuirass, cutting deep.

  Iron Hands and Emperor’s Children tore at each other. Galba was submerged in a maelstrom of clashing ceramite and gouting blood. His consciousness shrank to the scale of mere seconds. He knew nothing except the need of each moment. He moved forwards step by step, kill by kill. His armour was gouged by dozens of blows, b
ut he shrugged them off and struck home again and again. He pulverised faces to slurry. He hacked his way through armour and reinforced ribcages to black, beating hearts, and he silenced them.

  A new noise grew in volume, cutting through the thunder, demanding his attention. It was a voice, amplified by vox-caster to deafening levels. The voice was that of a machine. There was nothing human in its rigid, unchanging inflection, yet it was preaching, and its words conveyed a ghastly passion.

  ‘There are no limits,’ it declared. ‘Live the truth of the senses. Their reach must be infinite. Extend your own grasp, brothers. Plunge it deep into the perverse. All sensation is the fuel of perfection. The more extreme the sensation, the closer we come to perfection. The more debased the act, the greater the sensation. What is the command? That everything is permitted? No! Everything is compulsory!’ The volume spiked on the last word. ‘What the pallid would forbid, we must embrace to the end. Live the words of the prophet Saad! The only good is excess! The only true knowledge lies in sensation!’ The voice launched into a litany of obscenities. It seemed to be reaching for the greatest atrocity that could be committed by words alone. It drew closer, and so did a steady, hammering beat of a great weight slamming against the deck. When he heard the boom, boom, boom closing in, Galba realised what was coming.

  A Dreadnought.

  Galba had been confused by the voice’s preaching. There was a hunger in the words, an extolling of the flesh in all the worst contortions that he would never have imagined a Dreadnought uttering. The voice went on and on, urging itself to ever deeper abysses of depravity. With his physical self all but annihilated, the Dreadnought had only language and thought as the means by which he could join his brothers’ frenzy, and so he ranted as if he might articulate the ultimate perfection of violation, and so find the supreme, transcendent experience.

  The press of Emperor’s Children suddenly diminished. Their ranks parted. Galba knew better than to press forwards. Ahead, the doorway was filled by a colossal shape. The Dreadnought had arrived. He advanced with words to damage the mind. For the flesh, he had many more tools. There was the weight of his tread, the grasp of his claw and the final illumination of his twin lascannons. The Ancient moved down the gallery towards the Iron Hands, never pausing in his black gospel. Gold filigree had spread over the violet of his armour like a disease. Its arabesques threatened meaning. They twisted into shapes whose trailing ends seemed to move with the pulsing of veins.

  Even with the new, grotesque ornamentation, Galba recognised the figure. Ancient Curval. He had once been a philosopher of the war, one who spoke of perfection and loss in equal measure. Now his vox-casters greeted the Iron Hands with grating, monotone hunger. He had become a walking altar, an icon of demented worship. ‘I seek the boon of your extremity,’ he said, and fired.

  The crush of the melee had pushed the Iron Hands close together again. They all saw the danger as soon as it appeared, and threw themselves to either side. The squad escaped extinction by lascannon barrage, but on the command display of Galba’s helmet lenses, the runes of three brothers flashed red and vanished.

  Flanked by his fellow legionaries, Curval marched forwards. He strafed the gallery left to right to left with a steady fire. The foul tapestries and carpet vanished, seared to ash. Galba dropped and rolled, the barrage passing just over him, charring the top of his power pack. Another battle-brother was incinerated.

  They did not have the numbers or the weapons to fight Curval head-on. Galba had to remove him from the battlefield. From his belt clip, he grabbed a melta charge and hurled it at the Dreadnought’s feet. ‘Drop him,’ he voxed.

  The squad responded before he had finished his order. The warriors of his command had seen what he was doing, and understood. They were all the lethal components of a single engine of war. Four more grenades landed before Curval within a second of Galba’s. The Dreadnought slowed, trying to arrest his next step. He paused with one foot suspended in the air. Shutters dropped before Galba’s eyes as the grenades went off. The flare was a light so bright it made everything vanish for an instant. The heat was so intense, it made the deck vanish forever. Stone and steel turned molten, and a gap two metres wide opened in front of Curval.

  The Dreadnought fought gravity and momentum. He lost. His foot came down over nothing. He pitched forwards and vanished, dropping twenty metres to the deck below. He landed with the crash of a meteor. His howl of rage had the same flat tone as his sermon. A handful of the Emperor’s Children fell with him.

  ‘The flesh is weak!’ Galba roared as he rose to his feet and charged. The battle-cry of the Iron Hands was a riposte to the debased ecstasies of the foe. Galba’s squad raced forwards to either side of the hole. Curval was firing wildly upwards, blasting further chunks out of the deck. As they passed the gap, Ptero dropped another melta charge. In the hissing blast that followed, Curval’s raging cut off with an electronic squeal. His firing became even more erratic, the lashing out of a wounded beast.

  The Emperor’s Children tried to regroup. Their lines were broken, and they could not maintain a defensive position with the random destruction slashing upward through the gallery from their tormented Ancient. The Iron Hands had speed with them. It became force. They reforged the wedge on the other side of the gap and rammed their way through the ragged defence of the traitors. Galba tore into the foe. Warriors fell before him. Corrupt as they had become, they were still Legiones Astartes in form and strength. But Galba’s arm struck with the might of justice, of vengeance. The purity of the machine devastated the monstrosity of the flesh.

  Battered, reduced, defiant, his squad punched through and emerged from the gallery. Beyond it was a wide space, a radial node for half a dozen other major arterial passages through the battle-barge. At the centre was a wide spiral staircase. There was more marble here, veined with the purple of the Emperor’s Children. It made Galba think of rotten, aristocratic blood showing through pale skin. Legionaries battled up and down its upper half. The Callidora’s defenders were attempting to reach the next level to repel the invaders gathered there.

  Galba led his warriors up, taking the steps three at a time. With their brothers above, they trapped the Emperor’s Children in a vice. The staircase was wide enough for two legionaries to stand abreast. Galba stopped a few steps away from the enemy. He and Vektus crouched out of the line of fire of the warriors behind them. Their bolters hammered the enemy with concentrated hell.

  The vice closed.

  Most of the boarding torpedoes had drilled into the deck immediately beneath the bridge. Galba’s squad was one of the last to join up with the gathered force. By then, the demolition charges had been set. As the siege of the bridge began, the explosives went off. Corridors and stairwells collapsed, sealing off the top decks, buying time for the Iron Hands. For the moment, they had the numerical superiority. Throughout the ship, there were many hundreds more of the Emperor’s Children. But if the reinforcements’ access could be blocked, even temporarily, the numbers would become irrelevant.

  After the blasts, the boarding torpedo that had carried Galba and his brothers was inaccessible. So were three others. Those numbers, too, the Iron Hands knew, were irrelevant. The grinding truth of war was its power to cull. Many legionaries had already been lost. There would be more than enough room in the torpedoes that were still reachable.

  While two squads remained to guard the exit point, the door to the bridge was breached. Galba joined in the push to the interior. There was no time for anything except a great storm of an assault. As the Emperor’s Children had rushed the gallery, so the Iron Hands took the bridge. Theirs was the greater fury, and they attacked with the largest part of their forces.

  The vital heart of the Callidora was well defended. The Emperor’s Children fought hard. They fought with skill. They fought with desperation, knowing what defeat here would mean. And their struggle was futile. Atticus had come to kill their ship. Th
ey could not stop him. Nothing could. He was an engine of fate.

  As Galba fought, emptying his bolter clip into the traitors before him, he saw Atticus take the upper level of the bridge. The captain moved with lethal economy. He swung his chainaxe with a grace that should have been foreign to the weapon. In Atticus’s hands, the blade was not the messy butcher’s tool of the World Eaters. The master of the Veritas Ferrum carved the air as if he were conducting an orchestra. Swing and blow flowed into one another. Chain snarling, the weapon never paused. Even when it was cutting through armour and bone, it did not seem to stutter in its graceful arc from kill to kill. It was an extension of the machine-warrior who wielded it, as much a part of his arm as his hands. And though there was the perfection of art in its death-dealing, there was not a single superfluous movement. There was no display. There was the murderous regularity of a piston. Atticus destroyed in the name of his primarch. He fought as iron, and flesh was in eclipse.

  The captain of the Callidora met Atticus at the pulpit. Galba’s peripheral vision caught flashes of the duel. The captain was named Kleos. The noble warrior of refined tastes now had, draped over his armour, robes of human silk. His face was an intricate cross-hatching of burns and deep cuts held open so they would not heal. He attacked Atticus with a charnabal sabre. The weapon was art transmuted into pure, press-folded steel. In Kleos’s hands, it could almost draw blood from the air. The captain struck with such speed, the blade was invisible.

  Atticus did not block it. It sliced through the seam of his armour beneath his left arm. Kleos paused for a moment before the lack of blood. His blow had been for a being of flesh, but this foe was metal and war. Atticus turned into the cut, forcing the blade deeper, trapping the sabre against his ribcage. Kleos tried to tug the sword free. Atticus brought the chainaxe down on his skull.