Hammer and Bolter Year One

by Christian Dunn

  Bhehan straightened his shoulders and bent down to pick up the head of the kroot. Thanks to the Reckoners, such a thing would never come to pass.

  What heat remained in the day began to sap steadily as the suns continued their slow descent towards the horizon. The air was thick with heat stored by the trees and the rocks. This, coupled with residual moisture from the rainstorm, left the air feeling thick and greasy.

  The squad trampled through the trees for several more minutes, all senses on full alert. They had barely arrived at the extraction point when the general vox channel fizzed into life. The Thunderhawk would be in position in fifteen minutes.

  Nocturnal life began to flood the jungle with a discordant symphony over which the approaching whine of the Thunderhawk could swiftly be heard. Once in situ, there was a hiss of servos and hydraulics and the front boarding ramp of the vessel opened, the light from within spilling out and bathing the jungle.

  Gileas waited for the others to board before he joined them. He had always maintained that, as sergeant, it was his place to arrive first and leave last. He fired his jump pack, rose to the Thunderhawk and dropped to the floor with a clatter.

  ‘All on board, Correlan. Give us a few moments to ensure that our fallen battle-brother is secure.’

  ‘Understood. Good to have you back, sergeant.’

  Gileas removed his helmet and ran his fingers through his hair. Already the words for his report to Captain Meyoran were forming clearly in his mind. They had been sent down to this planet for one thing and yet had found something entirely different and unexpected.

  Bhehan remained standing at the edge of the landing ramp, staring down at the jungle. He reached into his pouch to draw a random rune and instead pulled out the eldar stone. Considering it thoughtfully, he indulged in a moment’s wild curiosity as to what sort of portent the Emperor was sending him.

  As his hand closed around it, he became aware of a strong push against the wards he had set in place, wards that had no doubt gone a long way towards allowing him to see through the kroot’s duplicitous scheming. This mental touch was no wild and instinctual thing, though. This press against his defences was nearly as disciplined and practiced as his own. A sudden flicker of movement caught his eye.

  At the jungle’s edge, barely visible in the dusk and what remained of the light cast by the Thunderhawk, Bhehan saw it. A solitary figure. Tall, seemingly all whipcord muscle and sinew, the huge kroot stood boldly in direct sight of the Thunderhawk. To all intents and purposes it was little different to its kin, but it was not difficult to surmise that it was a more powerful or at least a more evolved strain of these twisted xenos. A cloak of stitched animal hide was slung around its shoulders and in one hand it held a crudely fashioned staff, from which hung feathers and trinkets of decoration. A number of stones also dangled from the staff, stones that looked remarkably like the very one in the psyker’s hand.

  He felt its vicious touch against his mind again and clamped the wards down tighter. The lesser kroot had been disorganised and fierce. This though, was a calculated, scheming mind. This was a mind that would gladly extract the very soul of you and leave you to crumble to dust in its wake. It was barbed and brutal and uncannily self-aware.

  The crystals on his psychic hood flickered, attracting the sergeant’s attention.

  ‘Brother-Prognosticator?’ He moved to stand beside the younger Astartes and his sharp eyes quickly made out what the psyker had seen.

  ‘Throne of Terra!’ he exclaimed and drew his pistol, ready to fire it at the alien. But by the time the weapon was out of its holster and in his hand, the kroot had gone, vanished into the jungle. Gileas lowered his weapon, his disappointment obvious.

  Bhehan turned to the sergeant. His young face showed nothing of the vile revulsion he had felt at the kroot’s mental challenge.

  He felt one last, sickening touch on his mind and then the alpha, if indeed that had been what it was, let him go.

  ‘This place needs to be purified,’ said the psyker, fervently. ‘To be cleansed of this filth.’

  ‘It will be, brother,’ acknowledged Gileas with absolute sincerity. As the gaping maw of the landing ramp finally sealed off the last sight of the Anceriosan jungle, he turned to Bhehan. ‘It will be.’

  Phalanx

  By Ben Counter

  Chapter 1

  ITS LIKE HAD never been built before, and would never be built again. The secrets of its construction dated from before the foundation of the Imperium of Man, its immense golden form crafted by engineers dead long before the Emperor first united Holy Terra.

  The hull of the ship was many kilometres long, triangular in cross-section with its upper surface bristling with weapons and sensorium domes. Two wings swept back from the hull, trailing directional vanes like long gilded feathers. Every surface was clad in solid armour plating and every angle was covered by more torpedo tubes and lance batteries than any Imperial battleship could muster. Countless smaller craft, repair craft and unmanned Scouts, orbited like supplicants jostling for attention, and the wake of the titanic engines seemed to churn the void itself with the force of its plasma fire.

  The fist symbol emblazoned on the prow was taller than the length of most Imperial spacecraft, proudly claiming that the ship belonged to the Imperial Fists Chapter, one of the most storied Space Marine Chapters in the history of the Imperium. The pale light of the star Kravamesh, and the lesser glow of the Veiled Region’s boiling nebulae, played across thousands of battle-honours and campaign markings all over the beak-like prow. The ship had carried the Imperial Fists since the Horus Heresy, and its eagle-shaped shadow had fallen across a hundred worlds that had later shuddered under the weight of a massed Fists assault.

  This was the Phalanx. Bigger than any ship in the Imperial Navy, it was a mobile battle station the size of a city that dwarfed any Space Marine Chapter’s mightiest battle-barge. It might have been the most powerful engine of destruction in the Imperium. It was a symbol of mankind’s very right to live in the stars. Its most potent weapon was the sheer awe that the golden eagle inspired when it appeared in the night sky over a rebellious world.

  The Phalanx at that moment was not at war, but it was there for a conflict just as bitter. It was to be the seat of a trial at which the soul of a Chapter would be weighed, a stain on the Imperial Fists’ honour would be cleansed and retribution would fall as sternly as if it had rained down from the Phalanx’s guns.

  There was no doubt among the Imperial Fists that their mission was as vital to the Imperium as any crusade. For it was on the Phalanx that the Soul Drinkers would surely die.

  ‘YOU WILL WISH,’ said the Castellan of the Imperial Fists, ‘that you still called us brother.’

  The Castellan seemed to fill the cell, even though it had been built to accommodate a Space Marine’s dimensions. Its walls were plated in gold, studded with diamonds and rubies in the shape of the constellations across which the Phalanx had carried its Chapter in countless crusades. The channels cut into the floor formed intricate scrollwork. Even the drain for bodily fluids was in the shape of an open hand, echoing the fist symbol that was everywhere on board.

  The Castellan nodded to one of the Chapter functionaries through the small slit window. The functionary, a shaven-headed, drab man in a dark yellow uniform, activated a few controls on his side of the wall and the Pain Glove apparatus shuddered as power flowed into it.

  Brother Kaiyon hung in the Pain Glove. He had been stripped of his armour, and the input ports set into the black carapace beneath the skin of his chest were hooked up to bundles of cables hanging from the ceiling. The Pain Glove itself resembled some strange mollusc, a lumpy, phlegmy membrane that covered Kaiyon from neck to ankle. It writhed against his skin, as if trying to ascertain the shape of its captive by touch.

  ‘This one,’ he said, ‘was one of the flock.’ The Castellan’s words were no longer directed at Brother Kaiyon. ‘He was broken-minded even before we brought them here. I think, my l
ord, that he will either tell all, or be broken to gibberish.’

  ‘You take eagerly to your task, noble Castellan,’ came a voice in reply from the room’s vox-caster. It was an old and experienced voice, almost wearied with knowledge. ‘So ready a hand at the tormentor’s tools would be a sin in any but one of your responsibilities.’

  The Castellan smiled. ‘That, my lord Chapter Master, is as high a compliment as I could hope to hear.’

  The Castellan’s armour was crenellated like the battlements of a castle around its collar and the edges of its shoulder pads, and the vents around his torso echoed tall pointed windows or arrow slits. He looked like a walking fortress, even the greaves around his shins resembling the buttresses of two towers on which he walked. His face was branded with a grid pattern – a portcullis, a forbidding entrance to the fortification he represented.

  Kaiyon’s face was scarred, too. The Space Marine seemed unconscious, but he proclaimed all his allegiances in the chalice symbols he had carved into himself. His scalp was red with raised channels of scar tissue. Though the rest of his body was hidden in the Pain Glove, the Castellan knew that the rest of Kaiyon told the same story. Kaiyon was a Soul Drinker. He had written that fact into his flesh.

  ‘I know,’ said the Castellan to Kaiyon, ‘that you are awake. You can hear me, Kaiyon. Know, then, that nothing you do here, no token effort of resistance, will gain you anything whatsoever. Not even the satisfaction of delaying me, or frustrating my intentions to break you. These things mean nothing to me. The mightiest of fortresses will fall, though we can chip away but a grain of sand at a time. The end result is the same. Your Chapter has secrets. The flock of Iktinos has secrets. I will have those secrets. This is a truth as inevitable as your own mortality.’

  Kaiyon did not speak. The Castellan walked right up to Kaiyon, face to face.

  The Soul Drinker’s eye was slitted. He was watching the Castellan, and even in that tiny sliver of an eye, the Castellan could see his hate.

  ‘What,’ said the Chapter Master over the vox, ‘if this one does not talk?’

  ‘There are others,’ replied the Castellan. ‘More than twenty of the Soul Drinkers’ surviving strength are members of this flock. I’ll wager you’ll have your answers with twenty renegades to break.’

  ‘So long as Chaplain Iktinos himself is not reduced thus,’ replied the Chapter Master. ‘I wish him in possession of all his faculties for the trial. Justice is a mockery when it is administered on one already forsaken by sanity.’

  ‘Of course, my lord,’ said the Castellan. ‘It will not come to that.’

  ‘Good,’ said the Chapter Master. ‘Then proceed, Brother Castellan.’

  The vox-link went dead. The Chapter Master, as was traditional, need not witness this least delicate of the Castellan’s duties. The Castellan gestured to the crewman at the controls, and a metal panel slid shut over the slit window.

  ‘You have,’ said the Castellan, circling Kaiyon, ‘one final chance.’

  Kaiyon’s hate did not falter.

  ‘You understand, I must make this offer. I know as well as you do, between us two Astartes, that it has no meaning. There are traditional forms that must be followed.’

  The Castellan flicked a few switches on the control console mounted on the wall, one from which snaked the wired now hooked up to the interfaces in Kaiyon’s body. The Pain Glove slithered over him as if agitated.

  The Pain Glove was a complex device. Controlling its many variables was akin to directing an orchestra, with great skill required in keeping every variable in harmony. Just a taste of the Pain Glove was enough to break normal men. A Space Marine required far more finesse – the Pain Glove was even used as a conditioning tool for the Chapter’s novices in its less intense configurations.

  The Castellan was a maestro with the device. The membrane excreted chemicals that laid open every nerve ending on every millimetre of skin. The pulses of power humming through the cables stimulated every one of them into extremity.

  Brother Kaiyon, in that moment, discovered just how much it took to make a Space Marine scream.

  WHAT WILL THE universe remember of us?, wrote Sarpedon.

  What does it matter our deeds, the principles of our character, if it is the memory of the human race that matters? The future for us, when we are gone, is surely determined not by our deeds but by what is remembered of our deeds, by the lies told about us as much as by the truths of our actions.

  Sarpedon put the quill down. The Imperial Fists had taken his armour and his weapons, and even the bionic which had replaced one of his eight arachnoid legs. But they had left him with the means to write. It was a matter of principle that this cell, even though it was windowless and cramped, and allowed him no communication with his fellow Soul Drinkers, had a quill, a desk and a pot of ink. He was to defend himself before a court of his peers. He was at least entitled to the means to prepare his defence. They had left him his copy of the Catechisms Martial, too, the manual of the Soul Drinkers’ principles and tactics authored by the legendary philosopher-soldier Daenyathos.

  Sarpedon thought for a few long minutes. The pages of parchment in front of him were supposed to hold every argument he might make to justify his actions. Instead, he had poured out every thought into them in the hope that at least he would understand what he thought.

  The galaxy will not think well of us, he wrote. We are traitors and heretics. We are mutants. Should truth have any value in itself then it will do us no good, for these things are true. My own mutations are so grotesque that I wonder if there will be anything thought of me at all, for there is little room in any man’s recollection for anything but this monstrous form.

  What does it matter what the galaxy thinks of us when we are gone? It is the only thing that matters at all. For we will surely die here. There is only one sentence that our brethren can lay upon us, and that is death. I must take what solace I can from what we will leave behind, yet there can be no solace in the story the Imperium will tell of the Soul Drinkers. Those who can will forget us. Those who cannot will hate us. Though I seek some victory for myself and my battle-brothers even in this, I can find none.

  Perhaps one of my brethren can draw something other than defeat from our situation. I cannot. I look deeper into my heart than I have ever done, and I find nothing but failure and desolation.

  Sarpedon looked over what he had written. It disgusted him. He screwed up the parchment and threw it into a corner of the cell. A Space Marine did not succumb to self-pity, no matter how true his failure seemed to him. He would lie to himself if that was what it took.

  A gauntleted hand boomed against the cell door. Sarpedon looked round to see a window being drawn back to reveal a face he had last seen on the surface of Selaaca, looming over him as he lost consciousness. It was the face of Captain Darnath Lysander of the Imperial Fists First Company, a legend of the Fists and the man who had bested Sarpedon to take the Soul Drinkers into custody.

  ‘I trust,’ said Sarpedon, ‘your captive is a wretched as you hoped.’

  ‘Bitterness becomes not an Astartes,’ replied Lysander. ‘I take no joy in the fall of another Space Marine. I have come not to gloat, if that is how low you think of me. I have come to give you the chance to confess.’

  ‘Confess?’ said Sarpedon. ‘With no thumbscrews? With my skin still on my frame?’

  ‘Do not play games,’ snapped Lysander. ‘We took those you call the flock, those who follow your Chaplain Iktinos. Their minds were broken before we ever took them in. Whatever influence your Chaplain had on them, it changed them. One of them has broken in the Pain Glove, and told us everything. Brother Kaiyon is his name. He thought the Lord Castellan was Rogal Dorn himself, and spoke your Chapter’s secrets to him as if the primarch had demanded it.’

  ‘I have heard of your Pain Glove,’ said Sarpedon.

  ‘Then you know it is a part of the initiations every Imperial Fists has undergone. I myself have been subject to it. It served no
more than to shake Brother Kaiyon out of the fugue the flock have fallen into since their incarceration here. He is insane, Sarpedon. He spoke through madness, not pain, and that madness was not our doing.’

  ‘Then he could have spoken lies in his madness,’ retorted Sarpedon.

  ‘He could,’ replied Lysander. ‘My Chapter is even now ascertaining the truth of his words. This is why I have come here. If you confess, and that confession matches what Kaiyon had told us and can be proven true, then there may be some leniency won for your compliance.’

  ‘Leniency?’ Sarpedon rose up on his haunches. He had originally had eight legs, arranged like those of an arachnid, spreading from his waist. He had lost one on an unnamed world, ripped off by a champion of the Dark Gods. Another had been lost on Selaaca, mangled in his fight with the necron overlord of that dead world. He still had six, and when he rose to his full height he still towered over even Lysander. ‘You talk to me of leniency? There is not one Imperial Fist who will abide anything but our execution! Our death sentence was decided the moment we surrendered!’

  ‘Ours is a Chapter with honour!’ shouted Lysander. ‘Your trial is more than a mere formality. It is our intention to see every correct procedure and tradition adhered to, so that no man dare say we did not give you every chance to redeem yourselves. You will die, yes, I cannot lie to you about that. But there are many ways to die, and many matters of honour that can accompany your death. If you deserve a good death then you and your battle-brothers shall receive it. You can win a better death if you tell us now what we shall soon discover. Deceit, however, will win you nothing but suffering.’

  Sarpedon sank back down to his haunches. He could not think what Kaiyon might have told the Imperial Fists interrogators. The Fists knew the Soul Drinkers were mutants – one glance at Sarpedon was enough to tell them that. The Fists had collected evidence of the Soul Drinkers’ deeds, including many that had pitted them against the forces of the Imperium from which the Soul Drinkers had rebelled. He could think of nothing more damaging than any of that.