by Various
He remembered them all anyway. They came to him when he slept, whispering to him in old voices. He saw their faces, looming up out of the dark well of memory, their flesh still marked by tattoos, scars and studs. Sometimes they were angry, sometimes mournful. Their purpose in appearing, so he’d realised, was always the same: to urge him on, to stir him into action.
And so he never rested, not truly. He respected the demands of his vocation and kept moving. Oaths had been sworn, and they bound him more tightly than bands of adamantium. One world after another, blurring into a morass of sense impressions; some cold, some hot, all struggling, all playing their tiny part in the galaxy-wide war that had long since ceased to have boundaries.
It would have been easy to lose his sense of significance in all of that. It would have been easy, after twenty years of it, to give in to the darkness that lurked behind his eyes and forget the faces. He’d seen it happen to mortals. Their mouths drooped, their eyes went dull, even as they still clutched their weapons and made a show of walking toward the enemy. Then, as sure as ice follows fire, they died.
That was why he had the names put on his armour. The carvings would continue to fade or sustain damage, but some mark would always be there, some small impression to register what had once been lives as vital as his life.
And as long as there were marks to remind him, he would not slope off into despair. He would keep moving, seeking the final trial that would restore lost honour and still the whispers in the dark.
One world after another, blurring into a morass of sense impressions; some cold, some hot. None that made much of an impression on his sullen mind; since their wars gave no opportunity to achieve the goal he craved.
None, that was, until the last of them.
None of those worlds made an impression on Aj Kvara until, following the eddies of fate, he came to Lyses, and the raw beauty of it stirred even his old, cold soul.
Morren Oen shaded his eyes against the morning glare, squinting as the green light flashed from the waves. Fifty metres below him, the downdraft of the flyer’s four rotors churned the water.
There shouldn’t even have been water down there. There should have been several thousand tons of dirt-grey plasteel, designation Megaera VI, humming with life and machinery. There should have been lights blinking along the smoothly curved tidewalls to beckon the flyer down to land, and the low grind of algal processors working their way through the endless harvest.
Instead there was a thin skin of floating debris bobbing on the emerald water. He saw a plastic hopper tumble by, rolling amid a web of tangled fibres. Below the surface, there were dark shadows, perhaps the outlines the struts and flotation booms, still half-operative even after the main structure had gone down.
‘Emperor,’ he swore, sweeping the scene of devastation for something, some sign of resistance or survival.
Four other flyers hung low over the water, each one full of men with lasguns. They pointed their barrels uselessly down at the debris. Whatever had happened to Megaera VI had moved on long before they got there.
Preja Eim leaned a long way over the edge of the flyer’s open-sided crew bay and took a few more picts. Her auburn hair fluttered in the warm breeze, catching on the upturned collar of her uniform.
‘Have enough yet?’ asked Oen, turning away from the view and leaning back against the juddering metal of his seat-back.
Eim carried on clicking.
‘Information,’ she said, her face screwed up in concentration. ‘There might be something. Some clue.’
Oen looked at her wearily. She was so young. Her freckled skin looked healthy in the sun, almost translucent. Perhaps, once, he’d been as enthusiastic in his work.
For the first time since joining up, he felt too old. Forty years of service on Lyses, rising steadily through the ranks, had taken its toll. Rejuve was expensive, and he had other commitments that prevented him splashing out. And so he felt the skin of his jawline sag a little and his stomach bulge out over his heavy old regimental belt. Watching Eim made him feel worse. It reminded him of what he had been, and how long ago that was.
‘Snap away,’ he said. ‘Don’t think you’ll get anything we haven’t already scanned for.’
He looked out aimlessly, keeping his hand over his eyes. The curve of the ocean ran unbroken across the horizon, deep green and smooth. The pale rose sky shimmered above it, warmed by the diffuse light of both suns.
Oen was used to the view of open seas. All of Lyses was open seas. All of it, that was, except for the floating hubs, strewn across the endless ocean like motes of dust, separated by thousands of kilometres and gently drifting.
And they were being picked off, one by one. That thought, when he chose to entertain it, was quite thrillingly disquieting.
‘Procurator,’ came a voice over his earpiece.
‘Go ahead,’ said Oen, welcoming the distraction. Whatever news there was, it was unlikely to make him feel worse.
‘Grid Nine have a comm-signal. Ship entering the orbital exclusion zone. The hails all check out, but they thought you ought to know.’
‘Nice of them. Why, especially?’
‘It’s not in-system, nor Navy. They think it might be Adeptus Astartes, but they’re not sure.’
At the mention of the magic triplet of syllables, as-tar-tes, Oen felt his heart miss a beat. He didn’t know whether that was born of fear or excitement. Probably a bit of both.
‘They’re not sure? What are they not sure about?’
‘Perhaps you’d better get back to Nyx, procurator. They’re not going to try to stop it, and by the time you get back it’ll be in geostat.’
‘Fine. Keep them quiet until I get there. We’re just about done here.’
The link broke. By then Eim had stopped taking picts and was looking intently at the wreckage.
‘No signs of explosions,’ she murmured, watching the pieces float by. ‘It’s like some giant hand just… pulled it apart.’
‘Did you hear all that?’ asked Oen, ignoring her. ‘We’re going back in. You can take another flyer out here if you want to keep at it.’
Eim looked at him, and her freckled face was wide-eyed. There was a strangely childlike look of desolation in them.
‘What’s doing this, procurator? Why can’t we stop it?’
‘If I knew that, do you not think I’d have ordered something more potent than overflights?’ He smiled, trying to be reassuring, and knowing he’d probably failed. ‘Listen, the distress signals have been picked up. Trust in grace, Eim. There’s probably a whole company of Space Marines lining up on Nyx as we speak, and, believe me, there’s no more impressive sight in the Emperor’s own galaxy.’
He slumped in the chair in the reception chamber, leaning both hands on the only table, smelling like old meat. His scraggly beard spilled over the breastplate of his enormous armour, snarled and tangled. Grey streaks shot through it, making him look like an old, sick man.
Do they get old? thought Oen, observing him through the one-way plexiglass viewport in the corridor outside. Would they die of age, if given long enough?
Accounts of the newcomer’s landing from atmospheric control had been garbled. One transmission implied that the newcomer had blasted his way through the upper defensive cordon without warning, while another, from a low-order servitor-controlled station, indicated nothing but impeccable orbital manners.
One way or another, though, he’d gotten through, and his ship, now standing five hundred metres up on the landing stages, was like nothing Oen had ever seen – dirty, angular, covered in plasma burns and with a blocky aquila picked out in bronze on the sloping nose. It didn’t look big enough for inter-system travel, though it must have been, since its occupant certainly wasn’t from Lyses.
From the look of it the ship’s crew was entirely composed of servitors. They were strange looking creatures,
with clunking servos and spikes and animal bones hanging from their pearl-white flesh. They’d stayed on board the ship after the pilot had stomped down the landing ramp, which Oen couldn’t be too sorry about. Not that the pilot was any less strange.
‘I thought you said…’ began Eim, gazing through the viewer, fascinated. Her query trailed off.
Oen knew what she meant.
‘I’ve been told they vary,’ he said, rather stiffly. ‘The only picts I saw were from a rogue trader who’d run a squadron out through Ultramar. Those ones were… different.’
Eim nodded slowly, running her eyes over the bulky figure sitting at the metal desk on the other side of the viewport.
His head was bare and bald. A knotwork tattoo ran across the tanned flesh from behind one ear, over the skull and down toward one eye. His face seemed to have several metal studs in it, each one a slightly different shape. His armour was pale grey, like dirty snow, and had carvings all over it. The lettering wasn’t standard Gothic – it was angular and close-typed, covered in marks and bisected with slashes like those made by animal claws.
Oen had imagined the armour of a Space Marine to be clean, polished and flawless, just like the ones in the devotional holos sent out by the Ecclesiarchy’s Office of Truth Distribution. He’d imagined bronze shoulder-guards and bright cobalt breastplates glimmering under the white lumens.
He hadn’t imagined the mess, and the dirt. He certainly hadn’t imagined the smell.
‘Finished gawping?’
Both Oen and Eim jumped. He’d spoken. The words were thickly accented, as if Low Gothic were a foreign language, and muffled by the dividing wall. He hadn’t looked up. His strange yellow eyes remained fixed on his loosely clasped hands.
Oen readied himself, shot Eim a reassuring glance, and went round the corner to open the door. As he entered the room, the newcomer looked up at him.
‘I’m sorry, lord,’ said Oen, bowing before taking a seat opposite. ‘Standard observational procedure. We have to be careful.’
The newcomer, massive in his armour, gazed at him with a profoundly disinterested expression on his savage face. He didn’t smile. His scarred and tattooed features looked almost incapable of smiling.
‘A pointless gesture,’ he said quietly. ‘If I’d wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already. But since you’ve started, observe away.’
Oen swallowed. The newcomer’s voice was worryingly deep, underlined with a permanent, breathy growl and made eerie by the unusual pronunciation.
‘Do you have, er, a designation? Something I can use for the reports?’
‘A designation?’
‘A title, lord. Something I can–’
The huge figure leaned back, and Oen could see the metal chair flex under the huge strain.
‘I am a Space Wolf, Procurator Morren Oen,’ he said. As he spoke, Oen caught sight of long, yellow fangs flashing out from behind the hairy lips. ‘Have you heard of us?’
Oen shook his head meekly. He felt his heart beating a little too quickly. Something about the man in front of him made it very hard to retain composure.
Except he wasn’t a man. Not like Oen was a man, anyway.
‘Good,’ said the newcomer. ‘Probably for the best.’
Oen cleared his throat, trying to remain something close to professional.
‘And your name, lord?’
‘My name is Kvara.’
Oen nodded. He was aware he was gesturing too much, but he couldn’t stop it.
‘I’d expected… more of you.’
That had come out wrong. Kvara looked at him with amusement. His eyes were circles of gold. Animal’s eyes, lodged in a lined, worn and battered face.
‘You do not need more of us. One of us is more than enough.’
Oen nodded again.
‘Quite so,’ he said, casting around for something more intelligent to say.
Kvara stepped in then, tiring of Oen’s stammering enquiries.
‘The data in your sending was clear,’ he said. As he spoke, he lifted a gauntlet and flexed the fingers of it absently. Oen stared at it, distracted by the casual, supple movement. ‘You’ve lost five of your harvester stations in five local months. No survivors, no readings. Nothing but debris. Something is coming out of the water. A beast.’
Kvara let his gauntlet fall to the tabletop with a dull clang.
‘I have hunted beasts before.’
‘We’ve men assigned to this already,’ Oen said. ‘I’d hoped that–’
‘That I might join them?’ Kvara shook his head. ‘No. Tell your men to stand down. In this, as in everything, I work alone.’
Oen looked up into the golden eyes, and thought about protesting. Perhaps this… Space Wolf didn’t know how big a hub harvester was. Anything that could take down one of those things must be massive, far bigger than the flyer he’d returned to Nyx in. The security detail he’d had on alert for three months consisted of nine hundred men, and he’d been considering expanding it.
‘I’m not sure–’
‘You’re not sure I can handle whatever it is you’ve got attacking your people,’ said Kvara. ‘You’re not sure something looking as dishevelled and terrible as me could do much more than get himself killed.’
He leaned forward, and the metal of the table bowed under the pressure of his forearms. Oen recoiled, feeling the hot meat-breath wash over him.
‘This is not about you, Morren Oen,’ whispered Kvara, taking a cold pleasure in running his tongue around the words. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’
Oen tried to hold the gaze from those animal eyes, and failed. He looked down at the rivets on the table, ashamed of himself.
‘I need a flyer,’ said Kvara, sitting back. ‘Fastest you have. Then you can forget about me, and forget about your problem.’
Oen nodded for a third time. Being in the presence of Kvara was intensely tiring. He found himself happy to do almost anything to get the encounter over with.
‘It will be done, lord,’ he said, knowing that, whatever he’d expected to get out of that first meeting, he’d failed badly. ‘I’ll get straight on it.’
Eim looked sympathetic as Oen emerged from the room. She placed a hand lightly on his shoulder.
‘How’d it go?’
Oen shrugged and smiled wryly.
‘Not what I expected,’ he said, shaking off the hand and walking down the corridor. He went quickly, keen to be out of there. ‘Though I don’t really know what I thought would happen.’
Eim trotted after him, looking up anxiously.
‘How many of them have come?’
‘Just him.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘No.’
Eim snorted.
‘I’ll get the ’paths sending again.’
‘That may not be necessary.’
‘Of course it’ll be necessary,’ said Eim, scowling. ‘We need men. There must be Guard somewhere within range – they’d send a whole company soon enough if they thought tithe production was about to fall.’
Oen halted, looking thoughtful. Now that he was out of Kvara’s intimidating presence, he was beginning to think more clearly.
‘He doesn’t think he needs help.’
‘That’s his problem. I mean, did you see what he looked like?’
‘Right up close,’ said Oen, ruefully. ‘It wasn’t pretty.’
Eim shook her head irritably.
‘One!’ she snorted. ‘I didn’t think they ever worked on their own. I thought they came in squads – you know, like you see on the holos.’
Oen shrugged.
‘So did I,’ he said. ‘Maybe different types have different ways. He’s a Space Wolf. Heard of them?’
Eim shook her head.
‘Nice name,’ she said. ‘Suits his
looks.’
‘Careful what you say,’ warned Oen, looking over his shoulder and back down the corridor. ‘His hearing’s very good.’
‘Okay, okay.’ Eim sighed, and ran a weary hand through her hair. ‘But, procurator, this is the last thing we needed. We lose another hub, and we’ll miss the next quota even if I keep the crews on triple rotation. For a minute there I was daring to hope we’d find a way out of this.’
This time it was Oen who put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
‘You never know,’ he said. ‘He may be more impressive than he looks.’
He leaned closer to her, and lowered his voice.
‘He’s taking a flyer out, soon as I can requisition one,’ he said, covering his mouth. ‘And, whatever he says, I want it tracked and a team placed ready for rapid deployment, just in case he finds anything. Can you do that?’
Eim shot him a tolerant, affectionate look.
‘Sure I can,’ she said. ‘Just in case.’
The flyer skimmed low over the ocean, casting a deep green shadow on the waves. Kvara drove it hard, irritated by the lack of the explosive speed he was used to. One engine was already burning close to capacity, and the dashboard in front of him was active with red warning runes.
Kvara ignored them and concentrated on the view from the cockpit. Lyses stretched away in every direction, formless and empty, a wasteland of pure water and pure sky. The first sun was up, and the arc of the atmosphere was bleached salmon pink. The ocean was calm, veined with lines of white where the massive swells rolled under him.
It was pristine. In an Imperium where the hand of man fell heavily on everything it touched, Lyses was a rare jewel. In its inviolability it reminded Kvara of Fenris. On the death world, everything below the Asaheim parallel was barely touched by humanity. Lyses was more benign, but had the same vast, untouched quality.
Despite everything, that spoke to his soul. It had been a long time since anything had done that, and he found the experience, on the whole, uncomfortable.
There is one objective left, one mission, one task. Remember it.
He pushed the flyer down further, skimming it barely a man’s height above the waves. Spray flashed down the sleek flanks of the machine, spinning and frothing as he banked around in a long arc. Then he powered it up, sweeping along the trajectory the procurator had given him. For a moment, just a moment, he could have been back on a drekkar, relishing the steep pitch and yaw of the heavy wooden hull as it ploughed through the endlessly violent seas of his home.