The Damnation of Pythos

by David Annandale

  Vox-horns on the vehicles sent the captain’s voice out over the crowd. It was a harsh rent in the night air. He did not greet his listeners. He said, ‘We have entered a new stage of the war. A drastic step is required, which makes this plateau unsafe. You will be evacuated back to our base and its vicinity, until we find you a more suitable location. That is all.’ He was about to dismount from the tank, when the head priest approached. The man stopped with the barrel of the Vindicator soaring over his head, pointing towards his flock.

  ‘This location is most suitable,’ the priest said.

  ‘Not any longer.’

  ‘I’m sorry to irritate you, captain, but we disagree. We shall remain here.’

  Atticus was motionless. Galba wondered if he might crush the man’s head for his effrontery. He did not. ‘The decision is not yours to make,’ Atticus said. ‘It has been taken. You will be moved now.’

  ‘No.’

  The silence seemed to cut through the noise of the engines.

  ‘How, exactly, do you think you can defy us?’ Atticus asked.

  ‘Simply by doing so. We will not go.’

  Atticus reached down from the tank, grabbed the front of the priest’s armoured tunic and lifted him high. He held the man at arm’s length. The priest did not struggle. He held his dangling legs still. Galba was impressed by his self-control, even as his revulsion for the turbulent flesh rose afresh. Atticus said, ‘Do you defy me still?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Yet I can move you as I will. You are leaving.’

  ‘We are not.’ The priest’s voice was strained, but its pride was untouched. ‘You will have to kill us first.’

  ‘You will be killed if you remain.’

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘You do not know what is coming. You are a fool.’

  ‘I think not.’

  Atticus grunted. ‘No, you really don’t, do you? So be it.’ He dropped the priest. The man fell in a heap, but rose again with a sinuous movement. He stood as he had before, dwarfed by Engine of Fury and the dark colossus. ‘You wish us to leave,’ Atticus proclaimed. ‘So we shall. You do not wish our help. So you shall not have it. You wish to stay. So. You. Shall.’

  He pronounced the last three words with the slow beat and terrible emphasis of a tolling bell. ‘You are welcome, of course, to change your minds. Should you choose to flee into the jungle, and throw yourselves upon the tender mercies of the saurians, feel free to do so. We will not stop you. We will not interfere. We will not help. We will not be here. But you will know of us. At dawn, this plateau will cease to exist. The wrath of the Iron Hands will burn it from all living memory.’

  The last words of Atticus’s judgement echoed across the settlement. There was no murmur from the crowd. The priest remained where he was. His stillness rivalled the captain’s.

  ‘Legionaries,’ Atticus said, ‘we are done here.’

  The exodus began. As Galba watched the serfs climb into the transports, he caught sight of Kanshell. The man looked much worse than he had a few minutes before. Then he had been frightened, dazed, desperate. Now he looked sick, broken. His face was grey. It sagged with horror. Many of the other menials, Galba now saw, had the same look. Horror, not terror. They were not dreading the night on the base and the fearful thing that would come for some of them. They were shocked by the fate that loomed for their new friends.

  Galba felt a flare of sympathy. He crushed it. He had been pushed to the outside of the company. Since he was not a psyker, how had he been vulnerable? He could guess the answer: the flesh. He had not carved away enough of it. Its weakness had opened the door to the enemy. Well, he was back in Atticus’s confidence again. He would not betray that trust. He would not allow sentiment to get in the way of necessary strategy. The serfs lacked the discipline to see the world as it was. The Iron Hands should, he now realised, have been more vigilant and more ready to stamp out the magical thinking that had infected large numbers of the serfs. He should have been more vigilant. He should have been less lax.

  Less human.

  Burn it.

  He looked away from the shocked humans and walked over to Unbending where Atticus now waited. It was true that he had not imagined Atticus would punish the recalcitrance of the colonists with such finality. He could allow himself the luxury of being surprised. But he was wrong to feel shock, too, he told himself. There was no alternative to the current action, he told himself.

  And so he struggled to restrain his own mounting horror.

  Sixteen

  The Wrath

  Khi’dem did not restrain his horror at all.

  He stormed into the command centre just before dawn. Atticus had barred access to anyone other than his own officers until the last few minutes before the strike. By then, the Veritas Ferrum was in position. Helmsman Eutropius was on the vox, waiting for the command to unleash its wrath. Galba had stood by during all the preparations. He said nothing to sway Atticus from this course of action. He knew he should. He was convinced he should not.

  He could not think. Inside the centre, he could not hear the screams and moans of the serfs suffering at the hands of the shadows. He very likely would not have heard them even if he had been standing in the centre of the dormitorium. His head was tolling with the endless command to burn it, burn it, burn it, burn it. The trochaic metre of the urge beat at his mind as if it had taken over the pulse of his hearts. He managed to remain at attention. He was even able to pierce through the battering obsession when his captain spoke to him. He was able to listen. He was able to answer. But within seconds, he could not remember what he had heard or said. There was only the command. He would have ordered the strike in that instant if it had been left to him.

  The hour of Pythos’s mournful, grey dawn drew close. Galba greeted it with relief. The compulsion eased, transforming into a grim eagerness. Soon, the Iron Hands would act. Soon, the ruins would be no more, and the machine would be destroyed. Soon, the storm in his skull would cease.

  Soon, soon, soon.

  And yet, when Khi’dem arrived, his face contorted with fury, his intentions obvious, Galba was glad. The son of Vulkan’s protest was as necessary as the strike. Galba’s lips curled as the contradiction rippled from his temple to his gut. Once more, he blamed his flesh for trapping him in the paradox. He cursed it. He wished it gone.

  Soon.

  ‘This is murder,’ Khi’dem said.

  ‘It is not,’ Atticus replied, calm and indifferent to the other’s outrage. ‘We offered safety, and were refused. We have not trapped anyone in the target area. They are free to leave. They still have a few minutes to do so.’ He spoke without malice. Or pity.

  ‘You will be knowingly exterminating a civilian population, when no enemy is present. This is wrong. How can you still claim to be any better than the World Eaters or the Night Lords?’

  Galba tensed at the insult. Atticus did not react. ‘Ridiculous,’ was all he said. He seemed to have Khi’dem’s measure. An age ago, over Isstvan V, the situation had been different. Khi’dem had convinced Atticus to pick up the escaping Thunderhawks by appealing to something in the captain that went beyond the cold expediency of war. He was trying again, but his efforts were slamming into a blank wall. He was speaking to something in Atticus that was no longer there.

  Atticus leaned over the hololith table. The representation of the Veritas Ferrum was directly above the coordinates for the settlement. The dagger was about to plunge into the heart of the enemy’s campaign. ‘Brother Eutropius,’ Atticus voxed.

  ‘Your will, captain?’ Eutropius’s voice crackled with static, but it was clearer than surface-to-ship communications had been for days. The warp’s erosion of real space around Pythos could not stop the coming blow.

  ‘On my mark, the count is five hundred.’

  ‘So ordered.’

  ‘Captain At
ticus,’ Khi’dem pleaded, ‘please think about–’

  ‘Mark,’ Atticus said.

  ‘The count has begun,’ Eutropius reported.

  ‘Thank you, helmsman.’ Atticus shut the table down. The hololiths vanished with a flicker of harsh snow.

  ‘What have you done?’ said Khi’dem.

  ‘Do spare me the sentiment of your Legion. I find it of very little interest.’ Atticus headed for the command centre’s exit. ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘shall we?’

  Galba blinked. The compulsion had left him the moment Atticus had issued the command. His head felt clear for the first time in days. Nothing spoke to him. There were no warnings or refrains. The absences were a boon. The return to clarity was a sign, he thought. The strike was the right move.

  He followed Atticus outside. The sky was still dark, but when they climbed the wall and looked over the parapet towards the east, in the direction of the settlement, the contours of the jungle were beginning to distinguish themselves. A glow was slowly filtering in through the cloud cover. The navigation lights of Unbending were visible in the distance. Under Darras’s command, it was flying within sight of the plateau.

  All along the parapet, the warriors of the X Legion had gathered to witness the great fire. The Salamanders and Raven Guard were there, too. Atticus nodded to them. Galba saw Khi’dem exchange a look with Ptero. ‘Do you agree with this?’ Khi’dem asked.

  ‘The structure must be destroyed.’ Ptero answered.

  ‘At this cost?’

  Ptero seemed pained. ‘I don’t know. Is there an alternative? I can’t think of one.’

  ‘This is a crime,’ Khi’dem insisted.

  ‘What news, Sergeant Darras,’ Atticus asked over the company vox.

  ‘There is a gathering,’ the answer came back.

  ‘At their lodges?’

  ‘No. They have formed a circle around the target site.’

  ‘Suicidal idiots,’ Atticus commented. ‘Thank you, brother-sergeant.’

  ‘What are you going to use?’ Khi’dem asked, his voice dull. ‘Cyclonic torpedoes?’

  ‘Far too destructive. We must preserve the warp-anomaly. The strike must be very precise. Sergeant Galba’s insight has proven vital.’

  ‘It has?’ Khi’dem gave Galba a sharp look.

  ‘The captain gives me too much credit,’ Galba said.

  ‘You said we must burn it,’ Atticus said to him, then turned back to Khi’dem. ‘So we shall. A concentrated lance salvo, strong enough to punch through the earth and destroy every trace of the structure beneath. We will cauterise the landscape.’

  Khi’dem rounded on Galba. ‘This was your idea, then? I thought better of you.’

  ‘Then you, also, give me too much credit,’ he muttered. He watched the lights of the Thunderhawk, and waited for the great illumination of the strike. He was filled with disgust. It was directed at himself, at the colonists, at the imminent slaughter, and at all the confusing, contradictory, maddening weaknesses of the flesh. He wished the cauterisation would extend to him.

  ‘The count approaches one hundred,’ Atticus said. ‘Sergeant Darras, let the mortals know. We will do them the courtesy of giving them a final warning.’

  ‘There is no need, captain,’ Darras responded. ‘They know.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They are looking up. All of them. They are waiting for it.’

  ‘Thank you, sergeant. Pull back to a safe distance.’ To Khi’dem, Atticus said, ‘Be at peace, Salamander. This is not murder. It is suicide.’

  Khi’dem glared, but did not answer.

  Atticus looked up to the sky. The cloud cover was just beginning to be discernible. ‘We are not responsible for the lunacy of the weak. We are sworn and duty-bound to crush the Emperor’s enemies. That is our task. All else is luxury.’ Then he said, ‘Time.’

  The wrath pierced the clouds. The lance fire from the Veritas Ferrum slashed down. For several seconds, a pillar of fire linked earth and sky. The thunder of its strike reached the base a few moments after its light. The world shook with the crackle of energy and the deep bass rumble of purified destruction. This was war at one remove: the iron hand of the X Legion reaching from the heavens to smite the weapon of the enemy.

  The salvo ended. The fire vanished, leaving a fading glare like a livid scar on the dawn. The thunder, however, did not stop. It built. The sound grew until it was a towering wave. Galba frowned. Was he hearing the sound of the ruins collapsing? No, the sound was too big. And the crackle of energy had not ceased. The air became supercharged with the smell of ozone.

  ‘Darras?’ Atticus’s voice was clipped, urgent. ‘Report?’

  Static from Unbending. Galba could see its lights, though. It was still airborne.

  The sound grew louder yet. The wave crashed down. Galba staggered. He wasn’t wearing his helmet, and there was nothing to shield his senses from the overload. Then the light returned.

  Burn it.

  Fire erupted from the jungle, a return volley from the location of the plateau. It was all the devastating power of the lance strike concentrated, transformed and amplified into the realm of the transcendent. It was a retaliation so immense, it was as if the planet’s molten core had lashed out. As focused and narrow as it was intense, the incandescent scream speared the clouds. The sky glowed ferocious orange. The clouds boiled with exultant anger.

  Then, through the cover, another flash, a point of supreme brilliance, the message of a terrible explosion beyond the atmosphere. Galba knew what it was. His frame was wracked by a silent howl of denial, but he knew what he had seen. The thunder continued to crash over the base, and it was now the sound of mockery, the laughter of the burning sky.

  Galba knew. He knew. He knew. But no no no, he thought, all the strength of his will pushing back against what had happened, against the sight that was sure to come. Something scratched at his ear, barely perceptible through the roar of the world. At the back of his mind, he registered that it was his vox-bead. There was a voice there, the voice of his captain, calling to the helmsman of the Veritas Ferrum, demanding an answer, demanding a reality other than the one that was upon them. Then there was another voice, Darras, somehow breaking through the static long enough to shout, ‘What have you done?’ The fury there was directed at Galba, and at him alone.

  The blast ended, its work done. The rage in the sky dimmed to the red of flaming blood. Then the clouds writhed as an immense shape descended through them. The presence resolved itself into several distinct masses. They carried with them the searing glow of renewed fire.

  No no no, Galba still thought, but the iron truth was deaf to his entreaty. The shattered bulk of the great strike cruiser came into view. The Veritas Ferrum dropped like a rain of broken cathedrals. The blasted sections glowed from the heat of re-entry and the mark of the dismembering wounds. The ship had been smashed into chunks hundreds of metres in length. They were so huge, they seemed to float towards the ground. The sight was so powerful in its malevolent grandeur, it paralysed time. Galba had lived through page after page of the 111th Clan-Company’s blackening history, but these moments were the darkest. They were the death of hope. They were the final fate of the company scrawled across the sky in words of metal and fire.

  The fragments of the ship struck the earth. None fell on the plateau or on the base, as if tyrant destiny had decreed that all should witness the despair to come. They hit on all sides, the nearest barely a kilometre away. The impacts were the hammer blows of doom, the drumbeat of a judgement beyond the will of any human.

  The ground shook, and kept shaking with each cratering strike. Galba crouched and grabbed the top of the plasteel parapet. The world tried to hurl him off his feet. Hurricane winds blew from every direction. They screamed over the base. They warred with each other. Any serf caught outside was battered to the ground. The leg
ionaries kept their feet by tucking low and holding on. Only Atticus remained standing, defying the fury that tried to uproot the base. He was immovable. Even in the grip of cataclysm, he stood against the very idea of defeat.

  The strikes, the winds, and now the fires and the dust. A cloud was hurled skyward at each impact site, and the dawn fell back into night. Waves of flame rippled out across the jungle. The promontory was an island rising above a blazing ocean. The death of the Veritas Ferrum thundered on in a shriek of wind and a roar of firestorm. Dust and smoke and ash choked the air, spreading across the sky, killing day forever and slamming down a sarcophagus lid over the land.

  And through the raging clash of the end, through gale and rage and holocaust, reaching into Galba’s head with sickle claws, came the laughter, and it was laughter in the shape of damnation, laughter in a shroud of words, laughter that was a repeating, monotonous, cackling chant.

  Laughter that would be his eternal companion.

  Burn it.

  Seventeen

  Reckoning

  A miracle

  The faces of truth

  ‘We will die here,’ Atticus said.

  His words, Galba knew, were not a lament. They were a statement of fact, one that stripped away all useless, comforting illusion. It was a truth that the entire company must process.

  The captain stood on the landing platform, before Unbending, which had managed to stay aloft in the blast winds and return to base. His legionaries stood at attention in rows before him. Diminished rows. In the front rank, Galba could still feel the strength of brotherhood, sense the might of the wall of armour. But the memories of the Veritas Ferrum’s full complement were still vivid. He could picture the absent brothers, officers, veterans. Of the Dreadnoughts, only the Venerable Atrax remained. The Iron Father was gone. So many gone. So many hundreds. Their absence was a phantom limb. It ached.

  We are still strong, he thought. They were. Then the sight of the shattered Veritas rose before his inner eye. Not strong enough, came the doubt, and he could not blame it on a malign intelligence whispering in his head. The thought was his own.