by Various
Zavien could see why it was damaged – both eye lenses were cracked. He discarded the sergeant’s helm, and blink-clicked the runic icon that brought up the rest of the squad’s life signs on his own retinal display.
Varlon was dead, his suit powered down. The evidence of that was right before Zavien’s eyes.
Garax was also gone, his suit transmitting a screed of flat-line charts. The rangefinder listed him as no more than twenty metres away, likely thrown clear in the crash and killed on impact.
Drayus was dying, right here.
Jarl was…
‘Where’s Jarl?’ Zavien asked, his voice harsh and guttural through his helm’s vox speakers.
‘He’s loose.’ Drayus sucked in a breath through clenched teeth. His armour’s failing systems were feeding anaesthetic narcotics into his blood, but the wounds were savage and fatal.
‘My rangefinder lists him as a kilometre distant.’ Even with its unreliability compared to a tracking auspex, it was a decent enough figure to trust.
The sergeant’s good hand clenched Zavien’s wrist, and he glared into his brother’s eye lenses with a fierce, bloodshot stare. ‘Find him. Whatever it takes, Zavien. Bring him in, even if you have to kill him.’
‘It will be done.’
‘After. You must come back, after.’ Drayus spat onto his own chest, marking the broken Imperial eagle with his lifeblood. ‘Come back for our gene-seed.’
Zavien nodded, rising to his feet. Feeling his fingers curl in the need to draw weapons, he stalked from the cockpit without a backward glance at the sergeant he would never see alive again.
Jarl had awoken first.
In fact, it was truer to say that Jarl had simply not lost his grip on consciousness in the impact, for his restraints bound him with greater security than the standard troop-thrones. In the shaking thunder of the crash, he had seen Garax hurled through the torn space where a wall had been a moment before. He had heard the vicious, wet snap of destroyed vertebrae and ruined bone as Garax had crashed into the edge of the hole on the way out. And he had seen Zavien thrown from his restraint throne to smash sidelong into the cockpit bulkhead, sliding to the floor unconscious.
Enveloped in a force cage around his own restraint throne, Jarl had seen these things occurring through the milky shimmer-screen of electrical force, yet had been protected against the worst of the crash.
Ah, but that protection had not lasted for long. With the gunship motionless, with his brothers silent, with the Thunderhawk around him creaking and burning in the chasm it had carved in the ground, Jarl tore off the last buckles and scrambled over the wreckage of what had been his power-fielded throne. The machine itself, its generator smoking, reeked of captivity. Jarl wanted to be far from it.
He glanced at Zavien, stole the closest weapons he could find in the chaos of the crash site, and ran out into the jungle.
He had a duty to fulfil. A duty to the Emperor.
His father.
Zavien’s blade and bolter were gone.
Without compunction, he took Drayus’s weapons from the small arming chamber behind the transport room, handling the relics with none of the care he would otherwise have used. Time was of the essence.
The necessary theft complete, he climbed from the wreck of the gunship, vaulting down to the ground and leaving the broken hull behind. In one hand was an idling chainaxe, the motors within the haft chuckling darkly in readiness to be triggered into roaring life. In the other, a bolt pistol, its blackened surface detailed with the crude scratchings of a hundred and more kill-runes.
Zavien didn’t look at the smoking corpse of his gunship in some poignant reverie. He knew he would be back to gather the gene-seed of the fallen if he survived this hunt.
There was no time for sentiment. Jarl was loose.
Zavien broke into a run, his armour’s joints growling at the rapid movement as he sprinted after his wayward brother, deep into the jungles of Armageddon.
III
They call it Armageddon.
Maybe so. There is nothing to love about this planet.
Whatever savage beauty it once displayed is long dead now, choked under the relentless outflow of the sky-choking factories that vomit black smog into the heavens. The skies themselves are ugly enough – a greyish-yellow shroud of weak poison embracing the strangled world below. It does not rain water here. It rains acid, as thin, weak and strangely pungent as a reptile’s piss.
Who could dwell here? In such impurity? The air tastes of sulphur and machine oil. The sky is the colour of infection. The humans – the very souls we are fighting to save – are dead-eyed creatures without passion or life.
I do not understand them. They embrace their enslavement. They accept their confinement within towering manufactories filled with howling machines. Perhaps it is because they have never known freedom, but that is no true excuse to act as brain-killed as a servitor.
We fight for these souls because we are told it is our duty. We are dying, selling our lives in the greatest war this world has ever known, to save them from their own weakness and allow them to return to their lightless lives.
The jungle here… We have jungles on my home world, yet not like this.
The jungles of home are saturated with life. Parasites thrive in every pool of dark water. Insects hollow out the great trees to build their chittering, poisonous hives. The air, already swarming with stinging flies, is sour with the reptilian stench of danger, and the ground will shake with the stalking hunts of the lizard predator-kings.
Survival is the greatest triumph one can earn on Cretacia.
The jungle here barely deserves the name. The ground is clinging mud, leaving you knee-deep in sulphuric sludge. What ragged life breathes the unclean air is weak, irritating, and nothing compared to the threats of home.
Of course, the jungles here possess a danger not even remotely native to the planet itself. They swarm with the worst kind of vermin.
With the planet locked in the throes of invasion, I am all too aware of what brought down our Thunderhawk.
A pack of them hunted up ahead.
As soon as he heard their piggish snarls and barking laughter, Jarl’s tongue ached with a raw, coppery urgency. His teeth itched in their sockets, and he felt his heartbeat in the soft tissue around his incisors.
His splashing sprint through the jungle became a hunched and feral stride, while the chainblade in his grip growled each time he gunned the trigger. Small arms fire rattled in his direction even before he cleared the line of trees. They knew he was coming, he made sure of that.
Jarl ignored the metallic rainfall of solid rounds clanging from his war plate. The trees parted and revealed his prey – six of them – hunkered around a tank made of scavenged, rusted scrap.
Greenskins. Their fat-mouthed pistols crashing loud and discordant, their brutish features illuminated by the flickering of muzzle flashes.
Jarl saw none of this. His vision, filtered through targeting reticules, saw only what his dying mind projected. A far greater enemy, the ancient slaves of the Ruinous Powers, feasting on the bodies of the loyal fallen. Where Jarl ran, the skies were not the milky-yellow of pus, but the deep blue of nightfall on ancestral Terra. He did not splash through black-watered marshland. He strode across battlements of gold while the world ended around him in a storm of heretical fire.
Jarl charged, his scream rendered harsh and deafening by his helm’s vocalisers. The chainsword’s throaty roar reached an apex in the moment before it was brought down onto the shoulder of the first ork.
The killing fury brought darkness again, but the blackness now was awash with blessed, sacred red.
Zavien heard the slaughter. His pace, already at a breakneck sprint through the vegetation, intensified tenfold.
If he could catch Jarl, catch him before his brother made it to Imperial lines, he would avert a catastrophe of innocent blood and the blackest shame.
His red and black war plate – the dark red of arterial blood, the bla
ck of the void between worlds – was a ruined mess of burn markings, silver gougings where damage in the crash had scored away the paint from the ceramite’s surface, and mud-spattered filth as he raced through the swamp.
Yet when one carries the pride of a Chapter on one’s shoulders, necessity lends strength to aching limbs and the false muscles of broken armour.
Zavien burst into the clearing where his brother was embattled. His trigger fingers clenched at once – one unleashing a torrent of bolter shells at his brother’s back, the other gunning the chainaxe into whirring, lethal life.
‘Jarl!’
Treachery.
What madness was this? To be struck down by one’s own sons? Sanguinius, the Angel of Blood, turns from the twisted daemons he has slain and dismembered. One of his own sons screams his name, charging across the golden battlements while the heavens above them burn.
The primarch cries out as his son’s weapon speaks in anger. Bolt shells crack against his magnificent armour. His own son, one of his beloved Blood Angels, is trying to kill him.
This cannot be happening.
And, in that moment, Sanguinius decides it is not. There is heresy at work here, not disloyalty. Blasphemy, not naked betrayal.
‘What foulness grips you!’ the Angel cries at his false son. ‘What perversion blackens the soul of a Blood Angel and warps him to serve the Archenemy?’
‘Sanguinius!’ the traitor son screams. ‘Father!’
Zavien roared Jarl’s name again, not knowing what his brother truly heard. The cries that returned from his brother’s vox-amplifiers chilled his blood – a bellowed, clashing litany of archaic High Gothic and the tongue of Baal that Jarl had never learned.
Surrounded by the ravaged bodies of dead greenskins, the two brothers came together. Zavien’s first blow was blocked, the flat of Jarl’s chainblade clashing against the haft of his axe. Jarl’s armour was pitted and cracked with smoking holes from the impact of bolt shells, yet his strength was unbelievable. Laughing in a voice barely his own, he hurled Zavien backwards.
Unbalanced by his brother’s insane vigour, Zavien fell back, rolling into a fighting crouch, shin-deep in marshwater.
Again, Jarl shouted in his unnerving, ancient diction – words Zavien recognised but did not understand. As with Jarl, he had never learned Baalian, and never studied the form of High Gothic spoken ten thousand years before.
‘Let this not be your end, my son. Join me! We will take the fight to Horus and drown his evil ambitions in the blood of his tainted warriors!’
Sanguinius removes his helm – a sign of honour and trust despite the war raging around them – and smiles beneficently at his wayward son. His benevolence is legendary. His honour without question.
‘It need not be this way,’ the Angel of Blood says through his princely smile. ‘Join me! To my father’s side! For the Emperor!’
Zavien stared at his brother, barely recognising Jarl’s face in the drooling, slack-jawed grin that met his gaze. His brother’s features were red; a shining wetness from eyes that cried blood.
A meaningless screed of syllables hammered from Jarl’s bleeding mouth. It sounded like he was choking on his own demented laughter.
‘Brother,’ Zavien spoke softly. ‘You are gone from us all.’
He rose to his feet, casting aside the empty bolt pistol. In his red gauntlets, he clutched the chainaxe two-handed, and stared at the brother he no longer knew.
‘I am not your son, Jarl, and I am no longer your brother. I am Zavien of the Flesh Tearers, born of Cretacia, and I will be your death if you will not let me be your salvation.’
Jarl heaved a burbling laugh, bringing bloody froth to his lips as he wheezed in a language he shouldn’t know.
‘You disgrace my bloodline,’ the Angel said with infinite sorrow, his godlike heart breaking at the blasphemy before his eyes. ‘The Ultimate Gate calls to me. A thousand of your masters will fall by my blade before they gain entrance to the Emperor’s throne room. I have no more patience for your puling heresy. Come, traitor. Time to die.’
Sanguinius unfurled his great white wings, pearlescent and sunlight-bright in the firestorm wreathing the battlements. With tears in his eyes, tears of misery at the betrayal of one of his own sons, he launched forward to end this blasphemy once and for all.
And I realise I cannot beat him.
When we are shaped into what we are, when we are denied our humanity to become weapons of war, it is said that fear is purged from our physical forms, and triumph is bred into our bones. This is an expression, an attempt at the kind of crude verse forever attributed to the warrior-preachers of the Adeptus Astartes.
It is true that defeat is anathema to us.
But I cannot beat him. He is not the warrior I trained with for decades, not the brother whose every move I can anticipate.
His chainblade, still wet with green gore, arcs down. I block, barely, and am already skidding back in the sulphuric mud. His strength is immense. I know why this is. I am aware of the… the genetic truths at play. His mind cannot contain his delusional fury. He is using everything he has, everything, powering his muscles with more force and expending more energy than a functioning mind can allow. I can smell the alkaline reek of his blood through the damage in his armour – combat narcotics are flooding his system in lethal quantities. In his madness, he cannot stem the flood of battle narcotics fusing with his bloodstream.
His strength, this godly power, will kill him.
But not quickly enough.
A second deflected slice, a third, and a fourth that crashes against my helm; a blocked headbutt that crunches into my bracer and dulls my arm; a kick that hammers into my chestplate even as I lean aside to dodge.
A thunderclap. My vision spins. Fire in my spine.
I think my back is broken. I try to say his name, but it comes out as a scream.
Rage, black and wholesome, its tendrils bearing the purest intent, creeps in at the edge of my vision.
I hear him laughing and damning me in a language he shouldn’t know.
Then I hear nothing except the wind.
Sanguinius lifts the traitor with contemptuous ease.
Held above his head, the blasphemer thrashes and writhes. The Angel of Blood stalks to the edge of the golden battlements, laughing and weeping all at once at the carnage below. It is a tragedy, but it is also beautiful. Mankind using its greatest might and achievements as it attempts to engineer its own demise. Titans duel in their hundreds, with millions of men dying around their iron feet. The sky is on fire. The entire world smells of blood.
‘Die,’ the Angel curses his treacherous son with a beauteous whisper, and hurls him from the battlements of the Imperial Palace into the maelstrom of war hundreds of metres below.
Freed of his burden and his bloodline’s honour restored, the Angel in gold makes haste away.
His duty is not yet done.
IV
Consciousness returned with the first impact.
A jarring crunch of armour against rock jolted Zavien from his lapse into the murky haze of near-unconsciousness. Feeling himself crashing down the cliff side, he rammed his hand down hard into the rock – a claw of ceramite clutching at the stone. The Astartes grunted as his arms snapped straight, taking his weight, arresting his tumbling fall.
Damage runes flicked up on his retinal display, a language of harsh white urgency. Zavien ignored them, though it was harder to ignore the pain throughout his body. Even the injected chemical anaesthetic compounds from his armour and the nerve-dulling surgery done to him couldn’t entirely wash it away. That was a bad sign.
He clawed his way back up the cliff, teeth clenched, gauntlets tearing handholds into the stone where nature hadn’t provided any.
Once at the top, the Flesh Tearer retrieved the chainaxe that had flown from his grip, and broke into a staggering run.
He almost killed me.
That is a hard truth to swallow, for we were evenly matched for
all of our lives. My armour is damaged, operating at half capacity, but it still lends me strength as I run. Behind me, the wrecked greenskin tank remains alone, its crew slain, the rest of its missiles aiming into the sky with no one to fire them.
Curse those piggish wretches for bringing down our gunship.
I run on, gathering speed, slowing only to hack hanging vegetation from my path.
I recall the topography of this region from the hololithic maps at the last war council. The mining town of Dryfield is to the east. Jarl’s rage-addled mind will drive him to seek out life. I know where he is going. I also know that unless something slows him down…
He will get there first.
Sister Amalay D’Vorien kissed the bronze likeness of Saint Silvana, and let the necklace icon fall back on its leather cord. The weak midday sun, what brightness penetrated the gauzy, polluted cloud cover, was a dull presence in the heavens, only occasionally reflecting glare off the edges of Promethia, the squad’s Immolator tank.
Her own armour was once silver, now stained a faint, dull grey from exposure to the filthy air of this world. She licked her cracked lips, resisting the desire to drink from the water canteen inside the tank. Second Prayer was only an hour before, and she’d slaked her thirst with a mouthful of the brackish water, warmed as it was by the tank’s idling engine.
‘Sister…’ called down Brialla from the Immolator’s turret. ‘Did you see that?’
Amalay and Brialla were alone while the rest of their squad patrolled the edges of the jungle. Their tank idled on the dirt road, with Amalay circling the hull, bolter in hand, and Brialla panning her heavy flamers along the tree lines.
Amalay whispered a litany of abasement before duty, chastising herself for letting her mind wander to thoughts of sustenance. Her bolter up and ready, she moved around to the front of the Immolator.
‘I saw nothing,’ she said, eyes narrowed and focused. ‘What was it?’
‘Movement. Something dark. Remain vigilant.’
There was a tone colouring Brialla’s voice, on the final words. A suggestion of disapproval. Amalay’s laxity had been noticed.
‘I see nothing,’ Amalay spoke again. ‘There’s… No, wait. There.’