The Damnation of Pythos

by David Annandale

  The slaughter on the bridge lasted less than five minutes. The Iron Hands fell upon the Emperor’s Children like a moving wall and crushed them. When the last of the traitors fell, there was a moment of silence. Galba let himself savour the humiliation of the enemy. Then the next phase of the execution began. Atticus mounted to the command pulpit. With a snarl, he smashed its ornamentation. ‘Get me the coordinates,’ he ordered.

  While Techmarine Camnus took the helm, Galba consulted the vox. ‘A message has been sent,’ he reported.

  ‘A cry for help, no doubt,’ said Atticus. ‘Has there been a response?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then we will not tarry. Brother Camnus?’

  ‘It will be visible in a moment, captain.’

  Galba looked out through the forward oculus. The debris of the scattered disc floated past, the larger chunks of ice a faint grey in the void, the closer pieces picking up the violet glow of the Callidora.

  ‘There,’ Camnus said.

  In the centre of the oculus, there was a sphere of concentrated darkness.

  ‘Good.’ The single syllable was the toll of a bell.

  Camnus needed no further orders. Galba watched the ball of night begin to grow closer. He was seeing one of the few rocky planetoids of the scattered disc. It was large enough to have a name: Creon. Barely a thousand kilometres in diameter, it was an airless world of eternal night. It was a tomb. And it awaited its charge.

  The deck vibrated as the Callidora’s engines surged.

  ‘Full ahead,’ Camnus announced. ‘Coordinates locked.’

  ‘Good.’ Atticus said again. ‘Now, brothers, put an end to this obscene vessel.’

  They turned their weapons on the consoles, screens, cogitators and controls of the ship. In seconds, the bridge was in ruins. The Callidora’s fate was unalterable.

  ‘Do you feel that, brothers?’ Atticus asked as he descended from the shattered pulpit. ‘There is a stillness beneath the vibration of the engines. It is death. This ship is already dead, and our enemy knows it.’

  There was nothing the Emperor’s Children could do to prevent what was coming. But they tried. Atticus led his legionaries back to the boarding torpedoes, and as they passed the interdicted tunnels, they could hear the frantic sounds of the traitors trying to break through. The first of the torpedoes drew into sight, its drill projecting through the hull and deep into the accessway, when the warriors of the Callidora resorted to desperate measures.

  The breacher charge was powerful. It vaporised the metal blocking one of the primary arteries leading to the bridge. It was directly behind the Iron Hands. It was as if a solar flare filled the accessway. A heat beyond flame incinerated the rearguard. They fell to the twisted deck, their armour changed into blackened, molten sarcophagi. Galba was near the front of the line, and he was still thrown against the inner wall by the force of the blast. His auto-senses lenses lit up with warning runes. He kept moving, but he could feel his armour’s actuators catch and hesitate, breaking the cadence of his run. He heard Vektus cursing. They were having to abandon still more bodies of their brothers, their progenoid glands unrecovered.

  The roar of the explosion faded. Now came the sound of boots. An army was in pursuit.

  The instinct to stop and fight was strong. Then Atticus spoke over the vox. ‘There is no need to confront the enemy,’ he said. ‘The traitors have already lost. They are already dead. Humiliate them by leaving here alive.’

  The Iron Hands obeyed, and they ran. They were racing with their own victory, Galba now realised. The doomed masses of the Emperor’s Children were in futile pursuit, still unaware of the executioner’s blade descending upon them.

  The warriors of the X Legion boarded the torpedoes. Engines pulled the vehicles out of the flesh of the Callidora. They left gaping holes behind. Atmosphere rushed into the void, the gale carrying traitors with it until bulkheads sealed. The hull breaches were neutralised. The lives of those aboard were preserved for another minute.

  But not much more.

  Atticus watched the battle-barge as the boarding torpedoes moved away. The departure was slow. The torpedoes’ propulsion systems were not designed for speed. They served to manoeuvre the vessels to a recovery point, and little more. The torpedoes could not perform evasive action, and they were vulnerable to the Callidora’s armaments. Their presence was no secret now. The Callidora had hundreds of cannons, turrets and missile launchers. Most of its crew was still alive. The damage to the ship was minimal. The Emperor’s Children could have vaporised the torpedoes, erasing the blemish from the perfection of the void.

  But for the first moments of the retreat from the Callidora, the Iron Hands still had the benefit of surprise. They had sown disorder on the ship. The enemy was scrambling to catch up. And when the surprise was no longer a factor, the Iron Hands were no longer of interest to the Emperor’s Children.

  Creon was.

  The Callidora approached the planetoid, bringing light to its darkness. Its course was direct, and it would not be changed. Every weapon on the battle-barge fired at Creon. Bombardment cannons pummelled the crust with magma bombs. That was an act of defiance, a defacing of an uncaring enemy whose trajectory would not be changed even by so devastating a weapon. Every turret, torpedo bay and lance was also unleashed. These were acts of desperation. They could add nothing to the blows of the cannons.

  Then the Emperor’s Children launched cyclonic torpedoes, and this was an act of madness. What were they dreaming? Atticus wondered. Did they imagine the planetoid vaporising before them, with the Callidora sailing safely through a cloud of debris? Had the traitors really fallen that far into utter dementia?

  What they thought did not matter, he decided. In this moment, the only action that mattered was his own. Everything now happening was a consequence of his will, and there was nothing that could alter its edict. The Callidora poured destruction upon Creon, and all it was doing was stoking the fires of its destined hell.

  The Callidora’s bow was trained on the centre of the planetoid. Creon’s surface turned molten under the fury of the bombardment. The epicentre of destruction glowed white, a terrible eye opening in the rock.

  The incandescence spread wider. It became a maelstrom of flowing stone hundreds of kilometres in diameter. The planetoid convulsed. The dead world of cold and darkness screamed, illuminated by pain. After billions of years of quiescence, Creon underwent a tectonic awakening. Fountains of lava shot up to celebrate the arrival of the Callidora. The ship did not slow, and its course did not falter. It flew on the strength of Atticus’s will into the heart of the fire. Its bow plunged into brilliance.

  The Callidora was still accelerating when it hit Creon. It vanished from Atticus’s sight, an arrogant violet tear swallowed by the inferno. Moments later, the cores of the plasma drives were breached. The flash filled the void with day. The shock wave raced around Creon, and it killed the planetoid. It split in two. The halves tumbled away from each other and the rage of destruction, falling back into frozen night.

  ‘Perfection,’ Atticus muttered.

  Seven

  The spirit of the age

  The abandoned hall

  Journey’s solitude

  ‘We have plenty of mines left,’ Darras said.

  ‘And they have plenty of ships,’ Galba countered.

  Atticus stood above them in the command pulpit of the Veritas Ferrum. The clean, impersonal lines of the bridge were soothing after the ornate perversities of the Callidora. Erephren, called away once again from the rest of the astropathic choir, was just behind him.

  ‘Mistress?’ Atticus asked.

  Erephren shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, captain. The clarity of my sight is a product of my proximity to the anomaly. I can tell you the size of the fleet that I saw before our journey here. As to how many of those ships are on their way here...’ She raised he
r left hand, palm up, knowledge flying away from her grasp. ‘I cannot say.’

  ‘But something is coming.’

  ‘Disturbances in the warp suggest as much.’

  ‘How much time do we have?’

  ‘That too, I cannot say.’

  ‘Brother-captain,’ Galba and Darras began together.

  Atticus held up a hand. ‘You are both correct,’ he told his sergeants. The icy metal face looked at Darras. ‘Do not think I am unmindful of our strategic advantages here. I know that this victory has only sharpened our thirst for revenge. But we have our limits. Though we do not like to admit this truth, if it were not so, we would have triumphed on Isstvan Five. We will quit the field.’ He leaned forwards. ‘I make you a promise, brother-sergeant,’ he said. His voice box struggled to convey his tone. His voice rasped over the bridge. It sounded to Galba like the angry hiss of a great, electronic serpent. Its promise of doom filled him with joy. ‘We will learn more on Pythos. We will strike again. And again. We will awaken the Emperor’s Children to the idea of fear. We will teach them to have nightmares.’ He swivelled his head to look at Galba. ‘You are correct, sergeant. We must choose our battles. And I choose to leave the foe one more gift before we depart. One more lesson.’

  The Veritas Ferrum did not have unlimited supplies. Her stores had not been replenished since before the Callinedes pacification. The Iron Hands might find raw materials on Pythos, but eventually the ship’s manufacturing plants would no longer be able to churn out ordnance. Unless the tide of fortune changed, the time would come when the Veritas would no longer be able to wage war.

  That time had not yet come. And mines were plentiful.

  The Veritas Ferrum crossed and recrossed the close neighbourhood of the Mandeville point. It left a trail of mines behind it. Its route was a gradual weaving as helmsman Eutropius guided the ship past the scattered disc debris. Not all of the dead bodies were ice and rock now. There were small traces of the Infinite Sublime, larger ones of the Golden Mean. They were the tears of defeat, Galba thought.

  The strike cruiser passed a number of larger bodies. Some were big enough to damage a vessel. Others could smash a capital ship to dust. Galba glanced back and forth between the oculus and the captain. Atticus watched the major debris go by. The only sign of his hunger was a slight shifting of his grip on the pulpit.

  Darras picked up on it, too. ‘Captain,’ he began.

  ‘I know, brother-sergeant. I know. I’ll thank you not to tempt me. There is no time.’

  The trap with the mined ice chunk had worked before because the Veritas Ferrum had been there to control the moment of detonation and use the body as a missile. Its continued presence now was tactical madness. The Iron Hands would have to rely on chance to inflict harm on the arriving fleet. They could help chance along with the mines, but they had no alchemy that could transmute the chance into a certainty. The randomness was an offence to the Legion’s philosophy of war. The promise of the machine was the promise of the reproducible, the understandable, the unbending. It was the promise of control.

  But they were a different Legion now. Their control of the battlefield was doomed to be a transitory thing. Strike and fade, strike and fade. Was that, Galba wondered, to be the new piston movement of the Iron Fists’ war machine?

  If it kept them in the fight, and it hurt the enemy, then he could accept it, he decided. The limits of the strategy were the evidence of his Legion’s great wound. But he could adapt. He glanced again at Atticus. The captain had returned to his preternatural stillness. The iron statue was impossible to read. How was he adapting to this reality? Was he? Again he wondered whether Atticus had shed too much of the human.

  That he should think along these lines rattled Galba. The flesh is weak: that was a foundational tenet of the Iron Hands. Once more, he thought of how little Ferrus Manus had changed. Perhaps it was Galba’s own limited journey to the purity of the machine that lay at the root of these doubts. Perhaps doubt was inherent to the flesh itself.

  But perhaps so was adaptability.

  He wanted to hurt the Emperor’s Children as much as any legionary aboard the ship. He looked forward to the next time their craven blood slicked his armour. He also believed that foolish risks would bring an end to vengeance. Perhaps the mine-laying was a managed risk. He just was not sure how much the hope of accomplishing something was real, and how much the action was a flare of anger. How many ships could they kill this way? How many future actions of real worth were they risking by tarrying here?

  ‘You disapprove, Sergeant Galba,’ Atticus said.

  Galba turned and looked up. ‘It is not my place to question your orders, captain.’

  ‘And yet you do. I can see it in the way you are standing. Your displeasure is obvious.’

  ‘I apologise, my lord. I mean no disrespect.’

  ‘I am acting on a balance of probabilities,’ Atticus told him.

  ‘You do not need to justify–’

  Atticus raised a finger, silencing him. ‘We are more likely to cause injury than we are to be injured. Is that not so?’

  Galba nodded. He was not sure that it was, but he could not prove the contrary.

  ‘This is an act of reason, sergeant. Everything we do in this new war will have an element of desperate risk that is unpleasantly novel to us. We have always been strong. We still are. What we are no longer is an overwhelming force. We are assassins. We are saboteurs. We must think like them.’

  Then we should have melted away. Galba said nothing. He tried to shift his stance to something more neutral, but he did not know what that would be. Atticus watched him a few seconds longer. There was a cold glint in his unblinking human eye.

  Unwelcome revelation crept up on Galba: that glint was the light of Atticus’s rage. The fury had been kindled over Callinedes IV. It had been stoked to a holocaust in the Isstvan System. Perhaps Atticus believed he had damped it to a controlled, imperious anger. But his eye betrayed him as Galba’s body language had. Atticus had not mastered his rage. It had mastered him. It did more than distort his thoughts: it shaped his reason. It determined his existence.

  Atticus had, over time, removed all but the most vestigial traces of humanity from his being. He was a weapon, only a weapon, and a weapon directed by the master passion of rage.

  It occurred to Galba that Atticus might agree with this judgement. He might even take a certain pride in it, should the rage grant the pride room enough to exist. He would consider himself a gun, aimed at the heart of the enemy.

  But bombs were weapons too.

  Galba felt sick. He wanted to look away. He wanted to deny his insight. He wanted to scrape the human from his own identity, the human that was responding to its near-total lack in the massive warrior looming above. What good was this epiphany? None. Yet it filled his consciousness. He had no choice but to accept it, just as he had to accept how pointless it was. There was nothing to be done.

  He had his own share of Atticus’s rage.

  The captain straightened, returning his attention to the oculus. Galba faced forwards again. He looked at his battle-brothers. He saw the rage in all of them. It was a freezing passion. It took hope, compassion, the dream of a just galaxy, and even the desire for such a thing. It made them brittle, fragile. It turned them into the thinnest of ice, then shattered them. Galba’s gaze settled on Darras. There was more of the human in his face. It revealed more of what the immobile impassivity of Atticus’s features concealed. It showed the rage-fashioned hunger.

  The destruction of the Callidora had done nothing to appease that hunger. It had given the Iron Hands their first taste of revenge. It was a sensation as new to the Legion as defeat. Born of that defeat, the hunger was as ineradicable as the anger, the shame, the hatred. It was more than a symptom. It was more than a developing character trait. Galba knew what it was, and he wished he did not. He wished to be wr
ong. He wished that he was still capable of wanting something more than the brutal deaths of the betrayers of the Imperium.

  He could not. He was not wrong.

  This thing that permeated the air of the bridge, and threaded through his hearts and bones, and thrummed in the decks and walls of the ship, this rage, it was the new spirit of the Legion. This, Galba thought, is who we are now. He was human enough to feel regret. He was distant enough from the human condition to know the feeling would pass.

  When two hundred mines had been sown in the night of Hamartia, Atticus declared the mission complete. ‘Take us down the safe channel,’ he told Eutropius. ‘Get us up to speed for the translation.’

  ‘So ordered,’ said the helmsman.

  The Veritas Ferrum accelerated. The warp engines powered up. When the urgent signal came from the astropathic choir, Galba was not surprised. Neither, he suspected, was Atticus.

  No one was.

  ‘Captain,’ Erephren’s voice emerged from the primary vox-caster in the centre of the bridge. ‘There is a massive displacement in the warp. It is very near.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Atticus said. ‘Navigator, we are in your hands. As interesting an experiment as a mid-translation collision would be, I would prefer not to subject my ship to it.’

  ‘Understood, captain,’ Strassny broadcast. He was floating in his tank of nutrients, deprived of all sensory input, in a blister at the peak of the strike cruiser’s command island. The black plasteel dome that covered him was shaped like an echo of his psychic eye. So long attuned to the Astronomican, that eye would be seeking the anchor of the Pythos anomaly. Right now, its quest was an entry into the nexus of the Mandeville point that was not about to disgorge an enemy fleet.

  Eutropius responded to the coordinates relayed by Strassny. The Veritas Ferrum picked up speed, leaving the minefield at its stern.