25 For 25

by Various

  With the same descending note from the engines on their backs, three more crimson-skinned gods dropped from the sky. While still at the height of the surrounding rooftops, they fired a volley of explosive shells at the remaining war machine. The shells ploughed up the ground around the monstrosity, whose own cannon had been cranked as high as possible and was returning fire. One of the invaders’ shots struck one of the gods high on the chest, causing his falling trajectory to spin out of union with his fellows. Struggling to regain control of his flight, the figure crashed through the roof of one of the surrounding warehouses and disappeared in a shower of timbers and rubble.

  The remaining three pumped round after round into the barrel-chested machine, which staggered back under the multiple impacts before crashing to the ground and lying still, smoke and oil pouring from cracks and punctures in its bodywork.

  Eyes flicking wildly around the scene, Brael saw that the survivors from his company were emerging from cover to watch as the gods landed and took up what Brael was surprised to recognise as perimeter positions. A warehouse doorway exploded outwards, causing the gods to shift their positions, ready to meet a new threat. When the god who had been hit by a cannon round emerged, they resumed their earlier stance.

  Brael was relieved to see Freytha among the survivors, though one side of her face was painted black by the explosion and red by the blood that ran freely from a long cut across her scalp. Seeing Brael, she shouted to the others who turned and saw him standing before one of the creatures from the sky.

  With a rasping, machine-quality, the star god spoke to Brael. Most of what it said was unintelligible, though Brael was amazed to discover he could make out two or three words. Then the metallic tirade ceased and the star god turned away, striding towards the others of its kind, over whom it appeared to have some authority.

  Freytha ran to him, as did many of the others, Tombek among them. The tall Vinaran paused briefly over Lollak’s corpse.

  ‘Are they? Are they really?’ asked Freytha, breathlessly.

  ‘Star gods?’ Brael replied, barely able to hold back tears, so powerfully did he feel Vika’s presence at that moment. ‘I... I think so.’

  ‘Did it speak to you?’ asked another of the recruits from the mines. ‘I thought I heard it speak to you. What did it say?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Brael tried to find some meaning in the few words he thought he had understood. ‘It sounded like our speech, but there was a lot I couldn’t make out. I think he said “High God’s Hunting Birds”.’

  ‘Could be their name,’ Tombek added.

  Others joined in the debate, but Brael suddenly felt light-headed, on the verge of tears. He waved what he hoped was a reassuring hand at Freytha, then walked slowly past Lollak’s corpse and the still-smouldering remains of the war machine the dead Terraxian had destroyed. He was dimly aware that the star gods were moving around the immediate area, making it secure, perhaps for the arrival of more of their kind – Vika’s stories told of whole armies of gods, all serving a god of their own, the high god.

  Vika. His dead wife seemed to walk before him, leading their son by the hand and telling him the stories he never tired of hearing. The memory of her voice, the sense that she was there, no more than an arm’s length away, was so powerful it threatened to crush him. For a moment, his vision was edged with grey. A high-pitched whining grew to fill his ears.

  Suddenly, Vika and Bron were gone. The high-pitched whine resolved itself into the sound coming from the last of the invaders’ war machines to fall. Brael had walked towards it unaware, following his wife’s ghost. Eyes refocusing on the machine, he saw that part of its upper structure had been torn away by a glancing impact. The eye slit had been torn open; Brael saw green skin and a glowering red eye.

  Its pincer arm was a ruin, but still sufficiently strong to enable it to right itself. One knee joint was locked solid. Apparently unaware of Brael’s presence, the invader within the barrel-like shell manoeuvred the machine with a dragging, shuffling gait until it faced the star gods, three of whom now stood in a group, while a fourth planted a device in the ground nearby. A light atop the device pulsed with a steady rhythm.

  With a distressed grinding, the war machine’s cannon was brought to bear on the crimson figures.

  Shouting incoherently, Brael sprinted towards the war machine and threw himself into the air. He hit the machine just behind the shoulder joint of the shattered pincer arm. Digging into irregularities in the machine’s overlapping plate armour and scrabbling with his feet, he hauled himself more securely aboard and slid his hunting knife from his belt.

  The greenskin inside the machine was not about to be distracted by the surprise attack from the flank. It fired off two quick rounds at the armoured figures, determined to have blood, regardless of its own fate. But Brael’s cries had done enough. Alerted, the greenskin’s target group broke apart, two running to either side, the third taking to the air in a sudden rush of noise. All three of them brought their weapons to bear on the war machine, the suddenly airborne member of the group performing a mid-air pirouette to do so.

  ‘No!’ Freytha screamed and took off at a run towards the war machine. ‘Don’t shoot! You’ll hit Brael!’

  The war machine was jolting and swinging its body to left and right in an attempt to dislodge Brael, who clung tightly to the uneven, riveted surface with one hand as he held his knife in the other and worked his way towards the eye-slit and the section of the carapace that had been peeled back the way a man might peel back a fruit’s skin to reach the flesh inside.

  The greenskin inside the war machine must have realised this was his intention, as it threw the machine into ever more frantic jolts and jumps, made all the more irregular by the damaged knee joint. Brael felt one foot slip off the overlapped joint between two metal plates and knew he had only moments left before he was sent flying.

  Pushing off with his other foot and hauling with his free hand, he swung round the curve of the machine’s bodywork and plunged his knife-wielding hand elbow-deep through the split in its metal skin.

  The blade struck something and bit deep. A howl erupted from within the machine as Brael pulled back his arm and struck again. The machine went into paroxysms, mirroring the pain and outrage of its pilot. The pincer arm swung wildly, cuffing Brael across the temple. This, combined with a sudden reverse in the machine’s direction sent him tumbling through the air.

  The first of the star gods’ explosive bolts struck the war machine while Brael was still airborne. He hit the ground heavily, feeling something break as a sustained, ear-bursting volley from the gods’ weapons punched into the greenskin’s machine, first puncturing, then shredding its metal carapace and pulping the creature within.

  Lying on his back, Brael saw one of the gods above him, dropping towards him from the sky. The closer the descending figure came, the greater the pressure Brael felt inside his head. Blood burst from his nose in a rush and his head began to pound. There came a rushing in his ears as the star god touched down, then knelt closer to him. He had holstered his pistol and hung his sword from his belt. Armoured hands reached up to release catches around his neck and he lifted the red-eyed mask from his face.

  Golden eyes. Brael thought as darkness rushed in to claim him. Vika was there, with Bron. They were standing outside his farmhouse watching lights trail across the sky. The star god had golden eyes.

  PART FOUR

  ‘...in the name of the Emperor... in the name of the Emperor... in the name of the Emperor...’

  – Signal detected by Imperial Long-Range Cartographic Survey Ship Beacon of Hope. M41,791

  In the weeks he had been there, Brael had got used to the sounds of the physic station – nurses and sawbones moving between the pallets that were arranged in rows across the floor of what had once been a tannery. His bed was on the second floor of the tall, wide old building. Beneath him was a ward for the more seriously wounded. The operating tables were on the ground floor. Sometime
s, the screams were loud enough to reach his floor, where they would invade his dreams, and probably those of every other man in the ward.

  The scent of old leather and the animal waste-products used to toughen the hides still clung to the walls. It seemed to seep up from the floorboards at night. This didn’t bother Brael; it reminded him of home.

  The sounds of battle had faded. At first, the physic station had been a chaos of screaming wounded laid across the bare floor in pools of their own blood. Brael learned later that Costes had died here, his life seeping from his shattered knee. The sawbones and nurses could do little more than utter a prayer while applying a dressing. Whether they lived or died was in the hands of the gods.

  The star gods, Brael reminded himself.

  More of the crimson-armoured deities had landed, Tombek had told him during a visit. They were faster and stronger than any single man and the armour they wore was more war machine than mere protection. The awe-struck Vinaran spoke of vast flying machines that sounded like approaching thunder, spewing more and more of the gods from their bellies, along with smaller flying machines that skimmed over the rooftops, raining bolts of fire upon the greenskins in the streets. On foot, they moved through the city like a cleansing fire, rarely uttering a word, but working together as if they had spent their whole lives dedicated to war.

  As he listened to Tombek – and to Freytha and even to Fellick, who had survived the attack, leading a scratch company of walking wounded in the streets around the physic station he had been carried to after the attack in the mines – Brael’s broken legs and ribs ached to heal faster. He learned to be let out of the ward so that he might see these wonders for himself. He wondered at night, when sleep eluded him, or during the day, when boredom hovered nearby: was this his punishment for refusing to believe in the star gods?

  The greenskins had retreated from Mallax, leaving their corpses for the pit or the pyre (Mallaxian engineers were already speculating on how much energy a burning greenskin might generate) and their damaged war machines for scrap or salvage (there were already plans to create a trackless iron caravan). If not for the countless lives lost, the invasion might have been counted a windfall.

  The Imperial Hawks’ first wave secured several key points throughout the besieged city. Navigational beacons were placed at the most suitable locations and further units of Space Marines were despatched from their battle barge, The Carmine Talon. My party had docked with the Talon while en route to Samax IV and I was able to observe the operation from the barge’s bridge chapel.

  The Imperial Hawks specialise in fast attack from the air, utilising high-altitude, jump pack-assisted assaults, followed by reinforcement sorties from squadron-strength units of land-speeders, often dropped at altitude and at high-speed from Thunderhawk drop-ships. The effect upon unsuspecting enemies can be spectacular – as was the case in Mallax.

  After a year of virtually unobstructed movement south along the length of Samax IV’s single main landmass, the invaders had grown complacent, their discipline (always a weak point) lax. Though the defence of the besieged city had been tenacious and impressive by the standards of the native inhabitants, it had presented little real challenge to the aliens. The sudden arrival a company of Space Marines – the Imperial Hawks’ Fourth Company – was enough to shock their campaign into reverse. Less than a week after the Imperial Hawks’ first assault, the invaders were in full retreat and, as I write, the Hawks are readying themselves for a series of lightning strikes behind the retreating alien line, to capitalise on their disarray and to sow more confusion.

  At this juncture, it seems germane to acknowledge that a dispassionate observer might have expected the invaders to make far shorter work of the conquest of Samax IV, given the lack of technological resources and the low level of cultural sophistication on the part of the natives. This may serve to support Harkness’s Theory of Orkoid Relativism (cross ref. 999/xeno-anthropology/heretical writings/Harkness, V. [excom. M41,665]) which states that the motivation and tactical sophistication exhibited by this xeno-type may be influenced by the level of resistance offered by their target species. We can assume that the invaders didn’t consider the inhabitants of Samax IV much of a challenge.

  It is also possible that they had expected resistance on a similar level to that found on reconquered Imperial worlds, given that, in all probability, they had picked up the same Gothic-encoded transmission (albeit using a long-obsolete cipher) as did the survey ship, Beacon of Hope. Whether the aliens detected the signal later than the survey ship, from closer proximity to the planet, will probably remain an unanswered question.

  The discovery that Samax IV was unprotected, primitive and ripe for the picking is likely to have served to further encourage a complacent attitude to the inevitability of its conquest.

  By this time the troop transports carrying regiments of the Ibrogan Guard had arrived in orbit, diverted at my request from their homeward journey after the suppression of the cultist uprising on Oestragon III. The regiments were set down in the wake of the advancing Imperial Hawks and most were tasked with securing the re-conquered ground. A number of sergeants from the Ibrogan 9th were assigned the task of recruiting and training a local militia to bolster the Ibrogan effort and to act as scouts in their northward progress.

  – Extract: ‘Inquisitorial communiqué 747923486/aleph/Samax IV’ Author: Inquisitor Selene Infantus. M41,793

  ‘The star gods aren’t alone,’ Fellick told him during a visit. ‘There are others. Others like us.’

  Since early yesterday, Fellick reported, more of the thundering machines had dropped from the sky. Coming to rest outside the remains of the city walls, they had disgorged hundreds, maybe thousands of uniformed men and women. They bore arms similar in kind to those used by the star gods and spoke the same language – a tongue that seemed familiar, though was also very different. If you listened hard, Fellick said, it was possible to get a sense of what they were saying.

  ‘It’s as if we all spoke the same language once,’ Fellick added. ‘Only some of us forgot it and made up bits of our own. One of them showed me a map. There are other worlds like ours, too many to count. These people come from one of them.’

  Brael struggled to take it in and longed to see it for himself. The itching beneath the tightly bound splints drove him to distraction, reminding him that it would still be a while before he could join one of the new companies that were being formed from those who had survived the defence of Mallax. Tombek had joined up immediately and, to his immense embarrassment, had been appointed a platoon commander. Freytha had also enlisted. She told Brael that she wanted to lead her unit into Grellax.

  ‘Thank you for finding me there,’ she said, before embracing him and kissing his cheek. ‘Thank you for giving me a reason to stay alive.’

  First Tombek, then Freytha. Karel the Mundaxian also came to say his goodbyes.

  ‘Hope I have half your luck,’ he said as he left.

  Watching him go, Brael hadn’t felt very lucky. While the others went north, to homelands they all thought were lost to the invaders forever, he had no choice but to lay on the pallet like one of the dead.

  My party made planetfall aboard the drop ship assigned to the Mechanicus support unit attached to the Imperial Hawks Fourth Company and set up an Inquisitorium and Chapel of Penitence in a temple in the old quarter of the city. There the Hawks had discovered the remains of a pre-Heresy pattern vox unit, which we believe was the source of the signal detected by the Beacon of Hope. The ancient device had evidently become an object of veneration and had been maintained in weak, though working order by a cadre of priests upon whom the mark of the mutant was writ clear and unambiguously.

  The priests’ cyclopean disfiguration was but the first of a host of mutations, great and small that have since been uncovered and catalogued by my party and myself. If we wish to make Samax IV fit to return to the bosom of the Imperium, our work here has only just begun.

  ‘There’s one,’ Br
ael nodded towards a figure standing at the far end of the ward, where there were no windows. A man, he was dressed from head to toe in black, which made him difficult to make out in the flickering candlelight that lit that end of the room.

  ‘See him?’ Brael asked Fellick, who had come to tell Brael that he too was to join a new company.

  ‘They’re trying to make me an officer,’ he had laughed. ‘Seems they’re unwilling to take “No” for an answer.’

  Fellick shifted on the end of the pallet casually, as if stretching a cramped back.

  ‘I see him,’ he said. ‘There are others, some in black, who’ve been paying the new companies a visit. And there are others in red. They’ve moved into the manufactoria. Some who’ve seen them say they’re actually machines that look like men. Others say they’re men who are wearing machines like the greenskins wore those walking war engines. They’ve got bodyguards of their own and they’ve forbidden anyone to enter the manufactoria, even those who used to work there. Nobody in their right mind would want to get too close to them, anyway.’

  ‘I’ve only seen the ones like him,’ Brael said. ‘They just seem to walk around. They don’t talk to anybody and they don’t actually do anything.’

  ‘Probably just checking to see there aren’t any malingerers,’ Fellick suggested.

  ‘That’s what I’m hoping,’ said Brael. ‘A sawbones said the splints could come off soon – in a day or so.’

  ‘Now that’s good news,’ Fellick grinned. ‘Get you back up on your feet and put a rifle in your hand. Maybe I’ll have you in my company, if you’re up to it!’

  They both laughed, then talked for a while about the past, about the men and women they had fought alongside – Tombek still kept an eye out for Massau – but neither of them talked seriously of the future. So much had changed in the past year and had changed again with the arrival of the star gods, the soldiers from other worlds and the unnerving strangers in black and in red.