The Damnation of Pythos

by David Annandale

Charity

  There were over a hundred ships. Auspex readings were translated into a hololithic projection in the centre of the bridge. The image showed the vessels clustered so closely together, they resembled a swarm. Galba stared. The grouping made no sense. Then speed and tonnage data began to arrive. They puzzled him even more.

  ‘Captain?’ Eutropius asked.

  ‘Bring us closer. I want a better look at these intruders.’ Atticus sounded baffled. He had already had the klaxons silenced.

  ‘So ordered,’ the helmsman said. He sounded surprised.

  ‘Do you intend to engage?’ Galba asked.

  ‘Those numbers are beyond us,’ said Darras. Even his enthusiasm could not change the hundred-to-one odds.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Atticus answered. ‘Silent running,’ he ordered, ‘and there must be no fire except on my command. Am I clear? That is not a formation. It is a conglomeration. There is no order there. I see nothing tactical. The tonnage of these ships is eccentric. They are also moving slowly.’

  The Veritas Ferrum moved in from the edge of the system. It closed effortlessly with the trailing ships. The readings became more detailed. Their nature was as varied as their individual masses. Though there were a few Imperial transports, there were no combat vessels of any kind. Most of the ships were civilian, ranging from small traders to ancient, lumbering colonisers. Very few were of recent construction. All of them were limping, patched creatures. Some of the energy blooms indicated engines very close to explosive failure. It was surprising some of the vessels had survived travelling any distance at all. None of them appeared warp-worthy.

  ‘How did they make it this far?’ Galba wondered.

  ‘This far from where?’ said Darras.

  ‘From anywhere. They aren’t from in-system. We know that much. If these are the ships that survived the journey, how many did they lose along the way? It would have taken them a long time to reach Pandorax from the nearest inhabited system.’

  Atticus said, ‘That does not interest me half as much as why they are here.’

  Galba monitored the vox traffic between the ships. It provided few answers. The communications were primarily routine navigational messages. They showed a marked lack of discipline and form. The pilots were not military. They were not even professional. They had still not detected the Veritas Ferrum. As the fleet drew closer to Pythos, the transmissions became more excited. ‘Their presence here is no accident,’ Galba concluded.

  ‘Neither is ours,’ said Atticus.

  ‘You believe they were drawn here too?’

  ‘This system has precisely one feature capable of drawing attention beyond its boundaries.’

  Galba looked over the details of the patchwork fleet again. He could not imagine this ragged group of civilians finding any use for the anomaly. ‘What would they want with it?’

  ‘That is not my concern.’ The captain’s tone was flat and dark. ‘My concern is that they want it at all.’

  Galba exchanged a look with Darras. The other sergeant seemed uneasy, but kept his silence. I am not the captain’s conscience, Galba wanted to shout. Instead, he asked the question he wished had not occurred to him. ‘We cannot attack them, surely?’

  A terrible silence ensued. We can’t, Galba repeated to himself. These travellers were clearly non-combatants. They had committed no crime. They were Imperial subjects. No strategic consideration could justify a massacre. No application of even the coldest arithmetic could wash away the moral taint that would fall upon the clan-company if it committed such a crime. That is not who we are, Galba thought. That is not who we are.

  We must not become our enemy.

  ‘No,’ Atticus said at last. ‘That is not who we are.’

  Galba started. He had not spoken his thoughts aloud, had he? No. He released the breath he had been holding. He felt the first moment of peace he had experienced since the beginning of the war. With that one sentence, Atticus had reaffirmed that the honour of the X Legion still extended further than a battlefield victory.

  ‘We follow,’ Atticus ordered. ‘We observe. For now, that is all.’

  When the fleet reached Pythos, the largest ships anchored in geostationary orbit above the anomaly. The smaller ones began their descent to the surface. Lighters began to shuttle back and forth, transporting passengers from the ships incapable of making planetfall. There were accidents. The Veritas’s auspex banks picked up the heat signatures of explosions from those landings that ended in disaster. The individual tragedies did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm coming from the ever-more excited vox traffic. Galba heard the word ‘home’ become a refrain. He doubted that most of the ships making a landing would ever be able to leave again.

  ‘They have come to stay,’ he said.

  Atticus made no reply.

  The Thunderhawk gunship Iron Flame left the base and flew low over the jungle. The tree canopy was as opaque from above as it was below. At first, there was little of the ground that Atticus and his sergeants could see from the air. Even so, there was still more open to their gaze than during the initial foray. During the construction of the base, flights of Thunderhawks and Storm Eagles dropped dozens of payloads of incendiary bombs along the route from the promontory to the column. The jungle was put to the torch. The way cleared, Vindicators finished the job. Their cannons blasted into bloody mist any saurians who ventured within range. The huge siege shields scraped the smouldering ground raw and flat. There was now a scar twenty metres wide leading to the anomaly. The stream had been bulldozed underground. The swamp was drying mud. The moss was ash.

  Already, the jungle was gnawing at the edges of the route, seeking to reclaim its domain. It would be a matter of weeks, Galba thought, before the bombing would have to recommence. He wondered how long the Iron Hands’ store of incendiary munitions would hold out.

  The state of the ground route was not the concern of the legionaries in Iron Flame. They had come to see the fate of Pythos’s new arrivals.

  The civilians had landed over an area of several square kilometres, with the column at the rough centre. Black, oily smoke billowed skywards from numerous locations. These were the pyres of dead ships. Some had broken up at high altitudes, killed by failing heat shields and weakened hulls. Others had slammed into the ground like meteors. Still others had missed the land entirely, plunging past the dark cliffs and into the restless ocean. There were also those ships whose deaths could not be explained. Whether through human incompetence, structural inadequacy or both, they exploded as they were touching down. While Iron Flame was being prepped for the mission, Galba had watched the last of the orbital descents. He had listened to the engine roars punctuated by the periodic, stuttering thunder of destruction. He wondered how many lives had ended in those few minutes. Many hundreds, certainly. A loss of that number of mortals was insignificant on the battlefield. For an unopposed landing, it was obscene.

  Still, for every crash, there were ten successful landings. At least, that was what Galba had guessed from what he could observe from the base. Now, as the gunship reached the landing region, he took in the volume of smoke and frowned. ‘There are too many fires,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Atticus asked.

  ‘There have not been this many crashes.’ The sky over this region was changing from filthy grey to choking black.

  ‘I see no intact ships at all,’ said Sergeant Crevther.

  ‘There.’ Darras pointed. ‘At two o’clock.’

  The vessel was a mid-sized colony ship. Its design was ancient, far older than the Imperium. That it had left its home berth at all, never mind survived a crossing of the void and a landing on hostile terrain, was miraculous. The last of its passengers were streaming down its disembarkation ramps as Iron Flame hovered overhead. They gathered around the ship, clambering over the trees that the ship had flattened on its descent. The transport was so old, its o
riginal name had been eroded away. A new one, Great Calling, was crudely emblazoned on the stubby bow.

  The ship shuddered like a struck bell. Fire billowed from the open bay doors. A cascade of explosions at the stern built to a massive fireball that engulfed the engines.

  ‘They’re dancing,’ Atticus said. He was standing at the open hull door of the troop compartment. The wind roared at him. His feet wide apart, arms folded, he was as steady as if welded to the deck.

  The crowd, thousands strong, was capering around the stricken ship as if it were a community bonfire.

  ‘They’re mad,’ said Darras. ‘If they breached the plasma cores…’

  ‘They appear to know what they’re doing,’ Atticus said. ‘Otherwise that would have happened to at least one of the ships, and this entire region would be gone. These demolitions are being carried out with care.’

  ‘But why?’ Sergeant Lacertus demanded.

  ‘Because they don’t ever plan to leave,’ Galba said. ‘They kept referring to Pythos as “home” in their transmissions. Now it is. They are making it impossible to leave.’ He eyed the burning colony ship, and thought that it had remained true to its first purpose all the way to the end. These people were not just civilians. They were colonists.

  ‘They want to stay here that badly?’ asked Darras. ‘Then they are ignorant, stupid or mad. All three, I suspect.’

  ‘They can’t be ignorant,’ said Atticus. ‘Not anymore.’ He pointed.

  The saurians had come. The call of abundant, easy prey had gone out to them on the breezes of Pythos, and they had answered. They were arriving in much larger packs than before, and there were many more species. They descended upon the colonists. They tore into them.

  The dance ended. The celebrants struggled to defend themselves. They were carrying nothing. They had no firearms. They bunched together, and fought back with punches and kicks. Some of them had swords of some kind. The blades only enraged the animals they struck. The colonists’ defence was a farce of the most tragic kind. The saurians feasted well.

  ‘Circle around,’ Atticus voxed Brother Catigernus, who was piloting Iron Flame.

  The Thunderhawk flew from landing site to landing site. The same scene was repeated at every location. The ships were burning. The clearings created by their descent were filled with crowds defending themselves with poles, improvised clubs, and more of those swords. Now and then, Galba saw a flash of lasfire. He did not think there was more than one rifle for every hundred colonists.

  Many people had congregated on the land cleared by the Iron Hands. More and more joined them, fleeing the steaming slaughter of the landing sites. Galba found it hard to gauge numbers. There were people in the tens of thousands, shoulder to shoulder in the space around the column and along the wide trail leading back toward the promontory. They were a giant herd. They were the tragic righting of the ecological imbalance that so troubled Ptero. Pythos finally had its herbivores, and the predators rejoiced. The front lines of the herd fought desperately, protecting those further back. Galba knew he was looking at acts of enormous heroism, but from above, all he saw was the ugliness of the deaths. The edges of the crowd turned into a swamp of bloody mud and mutilated bodies. More reptiles were arriving all the time. Pythos was unveiling the monstrous variety of its fauna.

  The outcome of the struggle was preordained. It would take days, but in the end, the road to the column would be a lake of gore.

  ‘Take us back,’ Atticus told Catigernus.

  ‘We aren’t going to open fire?’ Galba asked.

  ‘At what?’ Atticus snapped.

  Galba did not answer. Atticus was right. The gunship was a blunt weapon. Its missiles and guns would kill more colonists than saurians. The reptile kills would be a drop in the ocean. The only result would be a speeding up of the inevitable.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ said Darras, expressing a mixture of disbelief, bafflement and contempt.

  ‘I do.’ From Atticus, there was only contempt.

  Galba heard it now. Rising above the cries of the dying and the roars of the saurians, audible even over the roar of the Thunderhawk’s engines, was the sound of joy. The crowd was singing. The people were a gigantic choir. They gave voice to a triumph. Even as their fellows were being devoured, they were celebrating their arrival. Galba could not make out the words, but the mood was unmistakeable. The tune soared, a crest of victory and strength. Whatever happened to them now, these people felt they had accomplished a great task.

  To have travelled to this system in craft that looked rescued from the scrapyards, that was a feat. To have landed most of them was, too. But why such a struggle to reach this death world? Galba suspected he would never know. When the celebration was over, there would be no celebrants left to explain it.

  ‘Idiots,’ Atticus muttered, dismissing the song. He continued to watch, though, and did not look away from the struggling colonists until they were out of sight.

  ‘They fight with spirit,’ Galba offered.

  ‘Their fight is pointless. They cannot win. They are too weak. They came here to die, and I will not admire that.’

  Iron Flame returned to the base and the rest of the company. Khi’dem and his fellow Salamanders stood at the edge of the landing pad. They walked forwards as the Iron Hands disembarked from the starboard access hatch. Ptero and the Raven Guard were present, too. They advanced close enough to hear what was said, but remained in the background.

  ‘What can you tell us, Captain Atticus?’ Khi’dem asked. Tone and words were respectful, Galba noted. Even so, there was an expectation of confrontation in the air.

  ‘The situation is as anyone would expect.’ Atticus did not answer Khi’dem directly. His voice was raised. He was speaking to the ranks of his legionaries who lined the landed pad. ‘These travellers are essentially unarmed. They will not last long against the saurians.’

  ‘What do you plan to do?’ Khi’dem was almost whispering now.

  Atticus continued to address the wider assembly. ‘Mistress Erephren is reading the immaterium once more. She will find us a target, and we shall strike again.’

  ‘What do you plan to do about the people of the fleet?’ Khi’dem insisted, as softly as before.

  Atticus at last turned his cold gaze on the son of Vulkan. ‘Do?’ he asked. ‘There is nothing to do.’

  There was a pause. The warrriors behind Khi’dem stirred. He blinked a few times, but remained calm. ‘I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘And I find your confusion surprising. Within a few days at most, the situation will be resolved.’

  ‘Resolved…’ Khi’dem repeated. He was unable to keep the mounting horror from his voice.

  ‘There will either be some survivors who have learned to fight back, or there will be none.’

  ‘You do not believe the outcome to be any of our concern?’

  ‘Why should I?’ It was Atticus’s turn to sound puzzled. ‘Whatever happens, these colonists are not a threat to our position. They have destroyed their means of departure. If there are any survivors, it will be a simple matter to stop any communications they attempt to make with elements outside the system. Though I think that is highly improbable.’

  ‘I was not thinking about this mission’s integrity,’ Khi’dem said.

  ‘That is regrettable.’ Atticus’s voice was becoming almost as quiet as Khi’dem’s. The more softly he spoke, the more anger hissed from his vocaliser.

  ‘I was thinking,’ Khi’dem continued, ‘about our responsibility to the colonists.’

  ‘We have none.’

  ‘They are being slaughtered.’

  ‘I am aware of that, brother. I have seen what is happening. You have not.’

  ‘Then how can you stand by and do nothing?’

  ‘They have made their decisions. They are celebrating their chosen path in song as we
speak. We are Legiones Astartes. Our duty is to the defence of the Imperium. It is not the policing of mortal stupidity.’

  ‘Nor is negligence taken to the point of murder.’

  Silence descended. It was thick with potential violence. It smothered the sounds of the jungle. Atticus remained motionless. Galba checked his impulse to raise his bolter. A ripple spread through the Iron Hands. A word from Atticus, and the legionaries would avenge the honour of their captain.

  He did not give the word. When he spoke, it was as if he were shaping the cold silence into words. ‘Explain yourself, and do it well.’

  The warning was given. Feeling sick, Galba braced for combat. Withdraw your insult, he willed Khi’dem. They must be spared the tragedy of bloodshed between loyalist Legions. Withdraw. Withdraw.

  Khi’dem did not stand down. ‘What are we, Captain Atticus, if we do not check the annihilation of a population of civilians? What are we defending? If the citizens of the Imperium count for nothing, then what is our purpose?’

  ‘The Emperor created us to defeat the enemies of mankind. We are weapons, not nursemaids.’

  Galba breathed a bit more easily. Atticus was debating Khi’dem. The moment of rage had passed. The sergeant was glad. Khi’dem’s words were eating at his conscience.

  ‘That is mankind dying out there,’ Khi’dem cried, pointing in the direction of the butchery. ‘Here, now, those animals are the enemy. To what principle are you being loyal, if not that?’

  ‘They are nature,’ Atticus replied. ‘They are a test. If the colonists are strong, they will survive. These are the lessons of Medusa. Have you forgotten those of Nocturne?’

  ‘No, I have not. The people of Nocturne do not abandon each other. Do the people of Medusa?’ When Atticus was silent, Khi’dem pressed on. ‘You say that these people have embraced their lot with song. Are they fighting back?’

  Atticus’s hesitation was not hostile this time. ‘They are.’

  ‘They are not suicidal, then. They are in the struggle to the end. Surely that is not dishonourable, even if, in your eyes, they are merely flesh. There are some battles that no amount of will or ability can win. You know this. We all know this, to our cost.’