The Damnation of Pythos

by David Annandale

  ‘Wait for my word,’ Atticus said. The hololithic screens on either side of the command pulpit displayed the void on the ship’s flanks. ‘Sergeant Darras, I want to know the moment you receive sign of the enemy’s presence.’

  ‘Understood, captain.’ Darras did not look up from the repaired auspex bank.

  I think we’ll all know, Galba mused.

  He was right. The flesh of the void tore open not far to port of the bow. Nightmare unlight flashed from the rent. Colours that were sounds and ideas that were blood poured out. Behind them came the ships. The translation was endless. Vessel after vessel entered the system. The violet of the Emperor’s Children spread in all directions, a miasma of excess, as though the ships were forming their own diseased sun.

  ‘Go,’ said Atticus.

  The deck vibrated with the familiar rumble of the warp drive energies building to the critical point. The jump tocsins sounded. The forward elements of the fleet began to turn in the direction of the Iron Hands, but they would travel many lengths yet before they could complete the turn and engage in pursuit. By then, they would be in the minefield.

  ‘I regret that we cannot linger to see the fruits of our labour,’ Atticus said. Then a second wound opened, reality’s agony filling the span of the oculus, and the Veritas Ferrum plunged into the empyrean.

  ‘The question,’ Inachus Ptero said, ‘is not whether the Emperor’s Children have followed us. Of course they have. The question is whether they will be able to keep tracking us.’

  Khi’dem grunted. They were walking the length of a reviewing hall. It had been built to hold thousands: the full complement of the company along with any visiting squads from other Legions. It had not been used since Callinedes. Khi’dem doubted it ever would be again. The Veritas Ferrum had lost too much of its complement – first all of its veterans and senior officers to Ferrus Manus as he raced off with the elite of every company to the confrontation with Horus, then to catastrophic damage and the venting of entire sections of the ship during the battle in the Isstvan System. Any gathering in this space would be dwarfed by the vastness and rendered solemn by the echoes of absence. According to the ship’s horologs, it had only been a few weeks since the disaster of Isstvan V, but the hall already had the staleness of disuse. The steel chandeliers descending from the vaulted ceiling were extinguished. The only light was from parallel lumen-strips forming a wide alley down the length of the marble floor. The banners of triumphs hung in shadows. Soon after their arrival on the Veritas, the two legionaries had found that they and the rest of the handful of their surviving battle-brothers could walk and converse here at their leisure. Khi’dem had not seen a single one of the Iron Hands set foot in the hall.

  ‘Sergeant Galba tells me that the Navigator has plotted a convoluted route through the immaterium,’ Khi’dem told the Raven Guard. His voice bounced around the walls, the sound hollow. ‘Unless the enemy is also using the anomaly as a guide, which seems unlikely, we should lose them.’

  Ptero thought about this for a moment, then said, ‘The tactic seems sound.’

  ‘Agreed. But that is not the only question, is it?’

  ‘No. We remained in-system too long, and without good reason.’

  ‘We did not,’ Khi’dem corrected. ‘They chose to do so. You and I are barely tolerated passengers.’

  Ptero uttered a short, bitter laugh. ‘Do you think our participation on this raid was intended as a favour or an insult?’

  ‘Both, I suspect. It would depend on the moment you asked Captain Atticus.’

  ‘You don’t believe he knows his own mind.’

  Khi’dem deliberated for a dozen strides before answering. ‘I’m not sure what I believe on that count,’ he said.

  ‘Nor do I,’ Ptero said softly. He continued, ‘Regardless of the success in evading pursuit, I am troubled by the decision to lay the mines. That tactic was unsound. Atticus is right about the strategic advantage of Pythos. He risked losing something of paramount importance in order to engage in the trivial.’

  ‘His need for revenge is strong. It is for all of the Iron Hands.’

  ‘Ours isn’t?’ Ptero demanded. Even in the dim light, Khi’dem could see his face turning red. ‘Have we not lost as much as they have?’

  Khi’dem remained calm. ‘I did not mean that,’ he said.

  They reached one end of the hall and turned around. They moved down the centre of the floor, the walls so distant that they seemed insubstantial.

  Ptero mastered his temper. ‘Forgive me, brother,’ he said. ‘You are not the source of my frustration.’

  Khi’dem waved off the apology. ‘Your anger reassures me,’ he said. ‘It tells me that your worries are mine.’

  ‘And they are?’

  ‘That the Iron Hands have changed at a fundamental level. The death of their primarch has done something dangerous to them.’ He allowed himself a sorrowful smile. ‘Perhaps we flatter ourselves that we would not have made the same reckless decision. I don’t think we would have.’

  ‘Their anger is becoming toxic.’

  ‘Yes. To them.’

  ‘And to us?’ Ptero asked.

  ‘Our fates are slaved to theirs,’ Khi’dem said.

  ‘They are,’ Ptero agreed. They walked in silence for a short while. In the centre of the hall, where they were most isolated by gloom and space, the Raven Guard spoke again. ‘So the true question is what we should do.’

  ‘I would welcome your thoughts.’

  Ptero laughed again, with no more humour than the last time. ‘And I yours. Our options are quite limited, it seems to me. The decisions that will govern this campaign are not ours to make, but we are subject to them. And we can hardly depose Captain Atticus.’

  Khi’dem gave Ptero a cold stare. ‘I know you are joking, brother. But I will not have even the idea of treachery discussed in my presence.’

  Ptero sighed. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. For a moment, Khi’dem saw his own exhaustion reflected in the Raven Guard. ‘I’m sorry,’ Ptero said. ‘I spoke without thinking. I was wrong.’ He looked up. ‘We are living in strange times, though, brother. We have witnessed the impossible. We have been its victims, in no small part because what happened on Isstvan Five was, until that very moment, unimaginable.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘We cannot afford to view anything as impossible. We must imagine everything, including the worst. Especially the worst.’

  Khi’dem raised his eyes to the ceiling. The gloom was almost physical. It clung to the banners, obscuring the victories, casting them into a meaningless past. They seemed to hang limply, made heavy by the weight of tragedy. He found himself thinking of the monstrous gallery on the Callidora. It had been the perversion of the Emperor’s Children made physical. This space, he realised, was just as metonymic of the damage to the Iron Hands’ psyche. Something dire had happened to the X Legion, something that went far beyond a military defeat, beyond grief, beyond loss. He knew those emotions. He lived with them. They had been the painful bedrock of his existence since the massacre. Not knowing the fate of Vulkan had him trapped in an eternal pendulum swing between hope and mourning.

  What was happening to the Iron Hands was wholly other. It was a change. It was also, he worried, permanent.

  He faced Ptero again. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Where does that leave us?’

  ‘We watch. Closely.’

  ‘Do you think Atticus’s strategy is madness?’

  ‘Do you?’

  Khi’dem shook his head. ‘It is risky, certainly. I do not agree with all of his decisions.’ He shrugged. ‘But it is not mad.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Not yet. So it falls to us to try to be the voice of sanity?’

  ‘I fear so.’

  Now Khi’dem laughed. It was either that or despair. ‘And who will hear our voices?’
/>
  ‘Sergeant Galba for one, I think.’

  ‘He may well be the only one.’

  ‘Better than none.’

  Khi’dem sighed. He had not trained for this kind of war. He knew senior officers who had an instinct for the political. He had never possessed it. War was war, though. Whatever mission lay before him, he would not shy from it. ‘Atticus might not listen, but he will hear me,’ he said. ‘I will see to it that he has no choice.’

  Ptero nodded. ‘We are agreed, then.’

  They started walking again, heading for the great archway of the hall’s entrance. Still fifty metres from the doors, Khi’dem came to a sudden halt. He felt breathless, a sensation he had not experienced since his elevation to the Legiones Astartes.

  ‘Brother?’ Ptero asked. ‘What is it?’

  The feeling passed. His skin prickled in its wake. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’ It could not be anything. The Imperial Truth forbade any other possibility.

  There was no such thing as a premonition.

  The Veritas Ferrum followed a route that twisted through the empyrean. The ship raced down currents of dementia, shifting from one tributary to another, never staying with one flow for long. There was no reason to its movements. In the realm where directions had no meaning, the strike cruiser fled as if panicked and lost.

  It was neither. The beacon on Pythos called it back. The anomaly was insistent. It would not tolerate an escape. For Bhalif Strassny, it was as clear a marker as the Astronomican had ever been. But rather than a lighthouse beam, it was present to his psychic eye like a scratch on a retina. He saw through the warp to the anomaly, much as he would the Emperor’s beam. But this was no illumination. It was a stable, jagged slash in the warp. As the endless death of the real and cauldron roil of thought washed over his consciousness, the Navigator experienced one concept after another clinging briefly to the manifestation of the anomaly before being swept away. At one moment he was seeing a trace, and then a crack, and then a fracture. Once, and only once – and for this he was grateful – he saw it as a door. Its meaning was in perpetual flux, for meaning was forbidden by the warp. Its presence, though, was steady, and grew ever stronger.

  Rhydia Erephren also knew its growing strength. She experienced it as the returning clarity of her dark sight. She and her choir braced themselves as best they could as the warp unfolded its nature before them. It seemed to her that her vision was growing sharper, and reaching father, than on the ship’s first approach to the Pandorax System. Something like the whisper of serpent tongues caressed her mind. It insinuated the possibility of perfect clarity. It threatened absolute vision. She shuddered. She accepted the knowledge as she sank deeper and deeper into the razored river. She worked on her defences so that she would not drown, so she would not bleed. The duty of mission granted her breath. She spoke to her charges, reassuring as she could, imposing discipline as necessary. In this way she held together a group of fragile, tormented humans. Not all of them were able to grasp the strength she offered. One man died of heart seizure. After the gasps of agony, his final sigh sounded like thanks. Just before the Veritas reached Pandorax, a second man started screaming. He could not stop.

  It was necessary to have him shot.

  In the serf quarters, Agnes Tanaura sensed this journey through the warp was different. Everyone did. Tanaura had been glad that her duties to the captain meant that she had left Pythos behind. She would have preferred never to return. There was a word for that planet, a word that officially had no place in the Imperium, because it was meaningless. The word was unholy. She was not afraid of using the word. She knew that it had a great deal of meaning. Accepting the divinity of the Emperor meant acknowledging the existence of dark forces. The reality of a god implied the reality of His enemies. If the sacred existed, then there had to be words to describe that which was utterly removed from the light of the Emperor. Unholy was a good word. A strong word. It was not just an epithet. It was a warning.

  She had heard the warning on Pythos. She wished the demigods she served had heard it, too.

  She had always found the journeys through the warp troubling. No matter how deep in the ship she was, no matter how thoroughly shielded from the madness of the immaterium, she felt its tendrils. Even when there were no storms, there was a latent charge to the ship’s atmosphere.

  This time was different. The tendrils reached deeper. They were stronger. She believed something had followed them from Pythos. That, or they had picked up a taint on that world. She knew something was wrong. The voices of the serfs in the great hall were subdued. People spoke quietly, as though they were listening for something. Or they were afraid something would hear them.

  Tanaura wanted to hide. She wanted to find a small, safe corner in which to curl up and clutch her faith close. She also knew that her duty lay elsewhere. So she walked into the centre of the hall. She held the Lectitio Divinitatus in her right hand. She spread her arms, lifted her head, and smiled. ‘I have words of hope,’ she said. ‘I have words of courage.’

  People gathered to hear.

  Floating and twisting in his tank, Strassny called out his guidance. Helmsman Eutropius received the directions, and steered the ship as the Navigator desired. Eutropius could not read the warp. He was suspicious of any being who could. It was a domain that made a mockery of the Emperor’s reason. Linked by mechadendrites to the magnificent machinic existence that was the Veritas Ferrum, he resented the absurdity of the warp, even as he relished the triumph over irrationality represented by the Geller field. Even though the ways of the empyrean were a resented mystery, he could tell that Strassny was taking them down a route bereft of any logical pattern. It was the most labyrinthine journey he had ever taken through the warp. He understood its tactical necessity. He mistrusted the fact that Strassny maintained that they were not lost. He knew the Navigator was not lying. It was the truth itself that he did not like. It had implications that were best ignored. If only they could be.

  And in the command pulpit, Atticus stood motionless. He appeared impassive. He was not. He was impatient to reach Pythos. He wanted the knowledge Erephren would find for him, so he could strike again. Frustration gnawed at him, too. He burned to know what damage his minefield had caused the Emperor’s Children. He needed it to have been considerable. He needed confirmation of the validity of his strategy.

  He could, at will, sense the condition of any component of his bionic frame. In this moment, through no choice of his own, he was conscious of his human eye and its island of flesh. He could have replaced the eye years ago, and completed his journey to the machine. He had not. He had not felt worthy. The body, he believed, should not outstrip the mind. He kept his last vestige of the flesh to remind himself of its weakness, a weakness that was more than physical. He felt that weakness now. The flesh sat against his skull, itself now mostly metal, like a chink in his power armour.

  No, he thought. Like a cancer. That was what the flesh was. It was a cancer that ate at the pure strength of the machine. It introduced doubt through the toxins of the emotions. He did not resent his rage. That was the necessary passion, the only just reaction to the supreme crime of treachery. It was the servant of war. Yet it could cloud judgement, too. He had seen its corrosive work on the World Eaters. That was a Legion whose betrayal, in retrospect, seemed inevitable. Its anger was a madness.

  Was his? Was he harming his company by indulging in his wrath?

  He was not. They had struck. They had drawn blood. They had done real harm to the Emperor’s Children. The loss of the Callidora alone would sit heavily. And now the Veritas Ferrum was free to strike again. This was all the proof he needed that he was right to follow the rage. If he had his will, his consciousness would be reduced to fury and calculation. The fury would fuel the drive to war. The calculation would produce the tactics to prosecute it.

  The stubborn humanity of the flesh would not res
pond to his will. It tainted the rage with grief and reflexive mistrust. He resented even the awareness that there were members of other Legions aboard. He felt that the Iron Hands could count on no one but themselves. Those who had not betrayed Ferrus Manus had failed him. Those were simple facts. Universal suspicion was the logical, reasoned response. Or so his instincts would have him believe. Yet under the same rules of logic, he could not find anything to condemn in the comportment of the Salamanders and Raven Guard he had rescued. They had fought well on Pythos. And on the Callidora, so had the two he had allowed on the mission.

  Contradictions. No distinguishing true reason from what he wished to believe. No way of purging the irrational from belief. And so another poison entered his system: doubt. His evaluation of the other legionaries was suspect. What else might be?

  The look on Galba’s face during the mine laying. The uncertain result. The close escape of the Veritas. The ship prolonging its stay in the immaterium in order to evade pursuit.

  Where was his judgement now?

  Eutropius interrupted his musing. ‘Captain,’ he said. ‘Navigator Strassny informs me that we are about to translate back to real space.’

  ‘Thank you, helmsman.’ There was the answer he sought. He had followed his anger to a limit his reason had set. The mines had been laid, and they would plague the fleet of the Emperor’s Children. With that concentration of ships, damage was inevitable. The Veritas had escaped. It had returned to safe port.

  He had been correct. His judgement was sound. So he was able to purge some of the wasteful doubts.

  This was what he told himself.

  The shields pulled back from the oculus as the ship returned to the physical plane. At the same moment, the tactical screens flashed red. Threat klaxons began to sound.

  ‘Battle stations,’ Atticus ordered, swallowing a curse.

  There was a fleet in the Pandorax System. A large one.

  Eight

  Travellers

  The price of innocence