by Various
Roth lowered his weapon, breathing heavily. Bekaela was by his side, her silver glaive streaked with strings of crimson gore. She was terrifying. The paint on her face smeared with sweat and fury, a daemonic visage melting down her cheeks. At her feet the scion lay, a cloud of bright red hazing the water and forming a halo around its skull.
But the laughter did not abate. Long after the scion was dead, the laughter continued to toll through the chamber.
The annals of Imperial history would not be kind to Sirene Primal. It was recorded in M866.M41 that a xenos armada known collectively as a hive fleet entered the Orco-Pelica Subsector. On the most urgent warning of an Inquisitor Obodiah Roth, all senior officers and dignitaries were evacuated. The Imperial Navy was ordered to withdraw, regroup and re-engage. Sporadic reports from retreating Naval forces described the incursion as a seething wave of oblivion.
On Sirene Primal, seventy thousand Guardsmen of Montaigh, Kurass and Amartine dug in on the rugged Sephardi ranges to stall the xenos advance. It is said, that within three months the mountains had been transformed into a sprawling network of artillery palisades, tunnelled barbicans and interlocking firing nests. Once the xenos made landfall, the Guardsmen were expected to hold out for eight weeks. They lasted less than five hours.
The ensuing campaign to reclaim the subsector is itself a historic epic worthy of narrative, but of Sirene Primal there was no more. In the end, the lonely jewel on the Eastern Fringe became little more than a smudged ink record in the forgotten archives of Terra.
We Are One
John French
Victory and defeat are a matter of definition.
– from the Axioms of War,
Tactica Imperialis
I have grown tired in this war. It has eaten me, consuming everything I might have done or been. I have chased my enemy across the stars and through the decades of my failing life. We are one, the enemy and I, the hunter and the hunted. The end is close now. My enemy will die, and at that moment I will become something less, a shadow fading in the brightness of the past. This is the price of victory.
My fist hits the iron door with a crack of thunder. The impact shatters the emerald scales of the hydra that rears across their width. Inside my Terminator armour, enfolded in adamantium and ceramite, I feel the blow jolt through my thin flesh. Lightning crackles around my fist as I pull it back, the armour giving me strength. I bring my fist down and the metre-thick doors fall in a shower of splintered metal. I walk through their shattered remains, my feet crushing the scattered ruby eyes of the hydra to red dust on the stone floor.
The light glints from my armour, staining its pearl-white surface with fire and glinting from eagle feathers and laurels. The chamber beyond the doors is silent and creeps with shifting shadows. Burning torches flicker from brackets on jade pillars, the domed ceiling above coiling with smoke. Targeting runes and threat augurs swarm across my vision, sniffing for threats, finding only one. The shackled power in my fist twitches like a thunderbolt grasped in a god’s hand.
He sits at the centre of the chamber on a throne of beaten copper. Void-blue armour mottled with the ghost pattern of scales, swathed in spilling cloaks of shimmering silk; features hidden behind the blank faceplate and glowing green eyes of a horned helm. He sits still, one hand resting on the pommel of a silver-bladed sword, head turning slowly to follow me as I advance.
‘Phocron of the Alpha Legion,’ I shout, my voice echoing through the shadow-filled silence. ‘I call you to justice at the hands of the Imperium you betrayed.’ The formulaic phrase of accusation fades to silence as Phocron stands, his sword in his hand. This will be no simple duel. To fight the Alpha Legion is to fight on a shifting layer of deception and trickery, where every weakness can hide strength and every apparent advantage may be revealed as a trap. Lies are their weapons and they are their masters. I am old, but time has armoured me against those weapons.
He moves and cuts, his blow so quick and sudden that I have no chance to dodge. I raise my fist, feeling the armour synchronise with the movements of my ageing muscles, and meet the first strike of this last battle in a blaze of light.
Ninety-eight years ago – The Year of the Ephisian Atrocity
Knowledge can make you blind, some say, but ignorance is simply an invitation to be deceived. I can still remember the times when I knew little of the Alpha Legion beside a few dry facts and half-understood fears. I look back at those times and I shudder at what was to come.
The death of my ignorance began on the mustering fields of Ephisia.
Millions of troops stood on the dust plains in the shadow of soot-covered hives, rank upon rank of men and women in uniforms from dozens of worlds. Battle tanks and ground transporters coughed exhaust fumes into the cold air. Munitorum officers moved through the throng shouting orders above the noise, their breath forming brief, white clouds. Above it all transport barges hung in the clear sky, their void-pitted hulls glinting in the sunlight, waiting to swallow the gathering mass of human flesh and war machines. It was the mustering of an army to break the cluster of renegade worlds that had declared their secession from the Imperium. It was a gathering of might intended to break that act of folly into splinters and return billions to the domain of the God-Emperor. That was the intention, though perhaps ours was the folly.
‘Move!’ I bellowed as I charged through the crowd, shoving aside men and women in newly issued battle gear. Helena came with me, pushing people out of our way with her will. Grunts and oaths followed us, dying to silence as they saw the tri-barred ‘I’ engraved on my breastplate and the hissing muzzle of the inferno pistol in my hand. My storm cloak flapped behind me as I ran, the burnished adamantium of my segmented armour bright under the sun. Anyone looking at me knew that they were looking at an inquisitor, the left hand of the God-Emperor, one who had the power to judge and execute any beneath the Golden Throne. The crowd parted before me like cattle scattering in front of a wolf.
‘There!’ shouted Helena from a metre to my left. I twisted my head to see the dun colour of our quarry’s uniform vanish into a knot of troops. She was already moving before I had changed direction, confused-looking Guardsmen twitching out of her path as she ran through the parting crowd. I could feel the back eddies of the telepathic bow wave that she projected in front of her as she ran, hard muscles flowing under flexing armour plates, dark hair spilling behind.
I saw our quarry a second after Helena. A thin man in the ill-fitting uniform of an Ephisian trooper, his skin pale from poor nutrition and lack of daylight. He looked like so many of the rest gathered on that day, another coin of flesh for the Imperium to spend. But this man was no raw recruit for the Imperial Guard; he was an agent of rebellion sent to seed destruction at this gathering. We had been tracking him for days, knowing that there were more and that our only chance to stop them all was to let one run until he led us to the others. That had been the plan – my plan. But there was no more time. Whatever atrocity they intended was so close I could feel the cold fear of it in my guts.
‘Take him down!’ I shouted. Helena was raising her needle pistol when the man jerked to one side with the agility of a predator. He rolled and came up into a shooting crouch, lasgun at his shoulder. Helena dived to the ground as the lasgun spat bursts of energy in a wide arc across the space she had occupied. People dropped in the crowd around us, shouts of pain spreading like a tide. Dead and dying troops lay on the ground while their comrades formed a blind herd, scattering without direction or order.
Our man was already up and moving, weaving amongst the panicked troops, using the tide of confusion he had created as cover. I felt a twinge of admiration at the man’s ingenuity. He was good, I had to give him that: determined, ruthless and well trained.
I came level with Helena as she pulled herself off the ground.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘We will not outrun him. I will handle this, master.’ She bit off the last word.
I looked at her. She had a face that was too thin and pale to be pretty, and a Scholastica Psykana brand surrounded her left eye with a blunt letter ‘I’ and a halo of wings. She gave me a humourless smile. Helena was my interrogator, my apprentice in the duties of the Inquisition. We did not like each other. In fact, I was sure she hated me on some level. But she was a fine interrogator and a devoted servant of the Imperium. She was also a psyker, and a lethally powerful one at that.
I nodded in reply. She looked away, closing her eyes, and I felt the air around us take on a heavy, burned-sugar texture as she drew power to her. Our quarry had already vanished into the shifting forest of human bodies around us. Hundreds of troops jostled like frightened cattle, and I heard officers shouting for order and situation reports in the distance. There was a frozen moment, a sliver of time that for an instant was quiet and still. I saw a young trooper no more than a pace from me, his face expressing puzzlement, his tan-coloured uniform still creased from storage. I whispered a prayer for forgiveness in that moment.
An invisible shockwave tore out from Helena, ripping bodies from the ground and tossing them into the air like debris in a cyclone’s path. Bodies fell, broken, screaming as the telekinetic storm followed our quarry. It reached him, fifty paces from us, and flicked him off his feet. He hit the ground with a crack of bones. When I got to him he was sucking in air in wet gasps, his mashed fingers scrabbling at the lasgun just beyond his reach. I raised my inferno pistol and burned his reaching hand to a charred and blistered stump.
I did not bother to ask him how many other saboteurs were hidden in the mustering, or what their target was. I knew he would not give me an answer. It did not matter. He would tell me what I wanted to know anyway.
‘Take it from him.’ I flicked my pistol at the broken man on the ground. ‘We need to know how many of them there are and what targets they are intending to bomb.’ Helena took a deep breath, closing her eyes for a second before looking down at the man who twitched and gurgled at our feet. He went still, and I could feel the cold witch-touch on my skin. Helena’s eyes were closed, but as I looked at her she spoke.
‘I have him, but…’ her voice quivered and I saw she was trembling. ‘There is something wrong.’
‘Get the information,’ I snarled. ‘We are running out of time. How many have infiltrated the muster? Where are the bombs?’
‘They–’ she began, but was cut off by a laugh that bubbled up from the man on the ground. I looked down. He was staring back at me with corpse-white eyes. In that moment I knew I had made a mistake. We are cautioned that assumptions are worse than ignorance, and looking at the man I knew that my assumptions would see me dead. This was no saboteur ring bent on a mundane atrocity. This was something more, something far more. Icy fear ran through me.
‘We are many, inquisitor,’ he said, his voice a racking gurgle of blood and shattered ribs. Beside me Helena began to spasm, blood running from her mouth and eyes. Her mouth was working, trying to form words.
‘Witches. They are witches…’ she gasped, her hand reaching to grip my arm, as the psychic storm built around us. ‘I can feel their minds. There are more, many more.’ I felt a greasy charge lick my skin and detected a stink of burned blood on the air. The broken man laughed again, his skin crawling with lurid warp light.
‘We are many,’ he screamed, and he was still screaming as I vaporised his head. The sound did not end, but filled my head, getting louder and louder. I looked up from the dead man and saw the extent of my mistake.
Across the plain, figures rose into the air on pillars of ghost light, their limbs pinned to the air, arcs of lightning whipping from one to another, connecting them in a growing web. Dark clouds the colour of bile and dried blood spilled into the sky. Across the mustering fields, hundreds of thousands fell to their knees, moaning, clawing at their skin, blood dribbling from their eyes. Some, with stronger will, had been able to arm their weapons and fire at the witch-chorus. Some found their mark and sent psykers to their death. But there were many, and the witch-storm rose in power with every heartbeat. I could feel the unclean power crawling over me like insects and the witches’ voices pulling my thoughts apart. All I could hold on to was anger, anger that I had failed, that an enemy had fooled me. All the while their voices grew louder and louder, spiralling around each other as a single word emerged from the telepathic cacophony.
Phocron.
Dozens of minds screamed the name and the storm broke in an inferno that washed across the mustering fields. It turned flesh to ash and scattered it on a superheated wind. Hundreds of thousands died in a single instant, an army to conquer worlds reduced to twisted metal and dust. I watched the fire come for me, and felt something enfold me like a cloak of ice. I realised that Helena still gripped my arm as I fell into darkness.
I woke on a plain covered in ashes. Helena was next to me, her exposed skin burned and blistered, her breathing so shallow I thought she was dead until I saw her eyes twitch open. The energy needed to shield me still lingered on my skin as a cold shroud. I know now that she had saved us both, but at a price. The power she had channelled to shield us had almost burned her psychic talent out. She lived, but she was a shadow of what she had been and never became an inquisitor. Amongst an overwhelming tragedy, her sacrifice still lives in my memory like the ghost touch of a lost life.
Around us there was nothing but a landscape of desolation beneath a bruised sky. It was quiet, but in my mind echoed the name of he who had perpetrated this atrocity.
Eighty-four years ago
We came out of the iron-grey sky on streaks of blood-red fire. Staccato lines of flak and the bright blooms of defence lasers rose from the fallen city like the claws of a dying god raking the sky. Landing craft and assault carriers were punched from the air. Burning wreckage fell in oily cascades of smoke amongst the city’s glittering domes and spires. The air rang with shells fired from orbit and the howl of attack craft engines. The wrath and might of the Imperium fell on the city, and it screamed as it burned.
In the gloom of my Valkyrie’s crew compartment, we felt the ferocity of the invasion as shuddering blows that shook the frame around us. It was close inside the assault carrier, the air tinted red by the compartment’s tactical lights and spiced with the smell of sweat. Even in such a confined space, my storm trooper detail kept their distance, even if that distance was only centimetres. I knew each of them by name, had fought beside all of them and personally selected them as my guard during this invasion. We had bled and struggled side by side, but I stood apart from them. To feel the power of the Emperor in your hand is to know what it is to be alone. It is a fact that I had long ago accepted.
‘Lord?’ The voice was raised against the thunderous sound of the battle outside. I looked up from the holographic map to see Sergeant Draeg looking down at me, his face framed by oil-black armour. ‘Theatre command wishes to know where you intend to make your landing.’
I smiled, letting careless humour wash over my face. ‘Do they indeed?’ I asked.
Draeg grinned back at me. ‘Yes, lord. They say it is so that they can coordinate to properly support your operations.’
I nodded, pursing my lips in mock consideration. I am not given to humour, but to lead people to death, you must wear many masks. Something exploded close by and the Valkyrie bucked. I felt my back pressed against the hard metal of the flight bench as the pilot banked hard.
‘Little late in the day for a coordinated strike, don’t you think, Draeg?’ I gave a small shake of my head. ‘Tell them I will update them shortly.’
‘Yes, lord,’ nodded Draeg. ‘And our actual target?’
I looked back to the holo-display, coloured runes winking in clusters over a plan view of the city, shifting with objectives and tactical intelligence. The city was called Hespacia, a glittering jewel that had fallen to greed and lies and pulled the rest of its planet with it. The ruling guilds had overthrown
the Imperial government and given their souls, and those of their people, to the Dark Gods. This, though, was not why I had come to see it fall beneath the hammer of Imperial retribution. I had come not because of Hespacia’s heresy but because of its cause.
‘The Onyx Palace.’ I handed the sergeant my holo-slate. ‘Assault position marked.’ I watched the thinnest cloud of fear pass over the sergeant’s blunt features. We were heading into the heart of the corruption, and we were doing it alone, without support.
‘Very good, my lord,’ said Draeg and began to bark a briefing to the other storm troopers. I checked my own weapons: a blunt-nosed plasma pistol, holstered on the thigh of my burnished battle plate, and an eagle-headed hammer, which lay across my knees.
The Valkyrie bucked again, shaking from invisible blows. We were close. I did not need to see the tactical data to know it; I could feel it in the shuddering metal around me. In the decade after the burning of the Ephisian mustering I had changed much and learnt more. Suspicion is the armour of the Inquisition, and I had come to appreciate its value. Rebellion had spread, pulling a dozen worlds into heresy and corruption, and with it had come a name, a name I already knew: Phocron. Arch-heretic and puppet master of betrayal, his agents and traitors spread through our own forces like a contagion. Even with the might of a crusade at our backs, we bought every victory with blood. Ambushes, sabotage and assassination ate our strength even as we advanced step by bleeding step. So I came to this damned city to cut off the rebellion’s head, to kill the enemy I had never seen. I came to kill Phocron.
The side doors of the Valkyrie peeled back, and the burning stink and howl of battle flooded over us. Beneath us buildings flicked past, aflame and so close that I could see the patternwork on the blue-green tiles that covered so many of their domed roofs. In the streets, figures moved from cover to cover, the sound of their small battles lost amongst the roar as fire fell from the sky in an unending rain.