Hammer and Bolter Year One

by Christian Dunn

  Which book (either BL or non-BL) do you wish you’d written and why?

  Harry Potter (Because I’d quite like a sprawling Edinburgh mansion with its own formal Renaissance garden).

  PHALANX

  Ben Counter

  Chapter 8

  Luko kicked in the door of the archive. Musty air swept out, mixing with the cordite and rubble dust that rolled off the Soul Drinkers. The archive was a high-ceilinged, dim and age-sodden room with rolls of parchment mounted on the walls for several storeys up, and huge wooden reading tables over which bent the archivists, who looked up in surprise as almost sixty Space Marines stormed into their domain.

  ‘Not too bad to defend,’ said Salk, taking in the sight of the archives. ‘Lots of cover, not many entrances.’

  ‘At least we’ll have something to read while we’re waiting,’ replied Luko.

  The archivists fled. None of the Soul Drinkers had any heart to pursue them. They would tell the Imperial Fists where the escapees had holed up, but the Imperial Fists would learn that anyway, and too many people had died already.

  ‘Spread out!’ ordered Luko to the other Soul Drinkers. With Sarpedon and Iktinos elsewhere, it had seemed a natural fit for him to take command. ‘Find something we can use! Weapons, transport! It’s too much to hope to find a shuttle that can get us off this can, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look.’

  ‘And get me something to take this damned thing off!’ Librarian Tyrendian was still wrestling with the inhibitor collar around his neck. ‘Until then I have to think down to your level.’

  Luko caught sight of movement and his eyes flickered to the dim interior of the archive. From the shadows shuffled an old, bent figure, wearing the same robes and symbols as the youth who had blown himself up to free the Soul Drinkers from the Atoning Halls. The archivists had all fled, but this man, who seemed more decrepit than any of them, showed no fear.

  ‘Hail!’ said the old man. Luko saw the rosarius beads and aquila icons of a pilgrim, and the symbol of the blinded eye embroidered on his robes. ‘Brethren of the Chalice! How my heart grows to see you at liberty!’

  ‘Who are you?’ demanded Luko. ‘One of your pilgrims died to free us, though we didn’t ask for it. What do your kind want from us?’

  ‘I want only for the path of fate to be walked true,’ replied the pilgrim. ‘Time has sought fit to grant me the title Father Gyranar. My brothers and I are the Blind Retribution, the seekers of justice, the instruments of fate, the Blinded Eye. For longer than I have been alive, fate has taught us of the part we are to play in the fulfilment of the Soul Drinkers’ destiny.’ Gyranar limped forwards and took Luko’s huge paw in his tiny, dry hands. ‘I rejoice that I have lived to see that time! When I drank from the grail, I dared not to beg of the fates that I witness the day the chalice shall overflow!’

  ‘Explain yourself,’ said Luko.

  ‘We are a long line of those who have been tasked with making this day happen,’ continued Gyranar. ‘The Black Chalice, the Silver Grail, and countless others, have all followed the same path, one that would ensure they crossed paths with the Soul Drinkers so they could help destiny become reality. You must go free, Captain Luko, you and all your battle-brothers! You must fight here, and see that what must be, shall be! I have broken your shackles, but only you can strike the blows!’

  ‘What fate?’ demanded Luko. ‘If we are here to do something, then it is news to me. We were brought to the Phalanx against our will, and at the risk of sounding ungrateful, our freedom was something equally unsought.’

  ‘But now you fight one last battle!’ said Gyranar. The old man’s eyes were alight, as if he was looking beyond Luko to some religious revelation. ‘Instead of a dismal execution, you die fighting, and in doing so your sacrifice will change the Imperium for the better! All human history hinges on this point, captain!’

  Luko pulled Gyranar close. The old man barely came up to Luko’s solar plexus. ‘He who longs for one last battle,’ Luko said darkly, ‘has never truly fought a battle at all.’

  ‘Fate cares not that its instruments are ignorant of their importance,’ said Gyranar. ‘I have been given the blessing of knowing what is to come. You, captain, are no less blessed for having it revealed to you at the moment of your glory.’

  Luko let Gyranar go. The pilgrim had no fear. A Space Marine knew no fear because he mastered it, broke it down and discarded it as irrelevant. Gyranar had no fear to begin with, as if even an angry Space Marine bearing down on him was a scene from a play which he had seen many times.

  ‘You remind me of someone I once knew,’ said Luko. ‘He was Yser, and much like you, a believer. He was the pawn of a power greater and darker than he could have imagined, and it killed him. You will find few friends among the Soul Drinkers, Father Gyranar.’

  ‘As I said,’ replied Gyranar, ‘there were others. I am merely the most fortunate.’

  ‘Captain!’ yelled Tyrendian from deeper within the archive, among the shadows that clung around the many archways leading out from the main chamber. ‘I’ve found something. You want to see it.’

  Luko followed Tyrendian’s voice. The Librarian stood in an archway leading into another chamber, this one lit sparingly by a few spotglobes that shone their shafts of light onto hundreds of exhibits, like the inside of a museum.

  Almost a hundred suits of power armour stood there, on racks that made it look as if their owners were standing there in ranks. The armour of the Soul Drinkers, still spattered with the mud and ash of Selaaca, still with the scars of necron weapons and the claws of the wraiths that had nearly killed so many of them. Sarpedon’s armour was there, battered by his struggle with the necron overlord. Luko’s own armour, too, with the haphazard heraldry of his career as a renegade painted over the dark purple of the Chapter’s livery.

  Beside the armour were the weapons. Boltguns racked up as if in an armoury. The Axe of Mercaeno, Sarpedon’s own weapon. Sergeant Graevus’s power axe and Luko’s lightning claws, the huge armoured gloves with their paint scorched and peeling by the constant discharging of the claws’ power fields.

  ‘The evidence chamber,’ said Tyrendian with a smile.

  ‘Arm up!’ yelled Luko. ‘Tyrendian, check around and find ammunition and power packs.’

  ‘Perhaps we can make a stand after all,’ said Salk as he saw the arms displayed before him. Several Soul Drinkers were already going for their armour, while Sergeant Graevus had gone straight for his power axe. With the axe in the sergeant’s mutated hand he suddenly looked more like a Soul Drinker, more like a warrior, and less like anyone who could have been held captive.

  Luko slid a hand into one of his lightning claw gauntlets. Its weight felt tremendous, and not just because Luko hadn’t yet donned the power armour that would help compensate for its size.

  ‘I used to dream,’ he said to Salk, ‘of all this ending peacefully. At least, I told myself, an execution is not a battle. But there is one last battle now. You would have thought I’d have learned by now that there is always one last battle.’

  ‘Captain?’ said Salk.

  ‘I hate it,’ said Luko. ‘Fighting. Bloodshed. I have come to hate it. I have lied about this for a long time, Sergeant Salk, but there hardly seems much point now.’

  ‘I can barely believe you are saying these things, captain.’

  ‘I know. I disgust myself too, sometimes.’

  ‘No, captain,’ said Salk. ‘You don’t understand. You hate war, but you fight it because you know you must. There is nothing to disgust in that. Sometimes I take pride, or even pleasure, in it, and I take that and carry it with me to bring me through the worst of it. But without that, I do not know how I could fight. You are braver than I, Captain Luko.’

  ‘Well,’ said Luko, ‘that’s one way of looking at it.’

  ‘Let’s make our execution a little more interesting, brother,’ said Salk.

  Luko clamped one of his greaves around his left leg. ‘Amen to that, bro
ther.’

  The commanders gathered in the Crucible of Ages, safe from the decompression zones around the Observatory. In the ruddy glow of the forges they first counted off their surviving battle-brothers, appointed officers to take note of the dead, and then turned to the task of recapturing the Soul Drinkers.

  There was no doubt that the Soul Drinkers had engineered their escape, with the use of accomplices among the pilgrims who had been allowed onto the Phalanx to observe the trial. Castellan Leucrontas had been silent as the commanders discussed their losses and the state of the Phalanx, for it was only a matter of time before his decision to allow the pilgrims onto the ship was examined.

  No Angels Sanguine had been lost, added to which Commander Gethsemar and his Sanguinary Guard seemed completely unblemished by the carnage. Howling Griffons had died. Imperial Fists, present in the greatest numbers, had lost correspondingly the most. One Silver Skull and two Doom Eagles were missing, presumed dead and cast into the void by the explosive decompression. Crewmen in void suits were already taking their first steps into the Observatory dome, to hunt for the fallen among the torrents of scorched wreckage, but hopes were not high that survivors would be found.

  ‘Brothers!’ came a shout from the entrance to the Crucible of Ages. Reinez, severely battered and bloodied, walked in, dragging an unarmoured Space Marine behind him. Reinez’s armour, which had been in poor repair when he had arrived on the Phalanx, was now so filthy with blood and scorch marks that the colours of the Howling Griffons were barely discernible. ‘Are you looking for answers? Perhaps a few explanations? I have done what you cannot do by bickering among yourselves, and found you some!’

  Reinez shoved the Space Marine into the centre of the Crucible. The captive showed no resistance, and fell to his knees.

  ‘It is good that you are alive, Reinez,’ said Chapter Master Vladimir. Siege-Captain Daviks stepped forwards and lifted the bowed head of the Space Marine.

  ‘He’s a Soul Drinker,’ said Daviks, pointing to the chalice symbol that marked the centre of the surgical scars on the Space Marine’s chest. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Apothecary Pallas,’ said the Soul Drinker.

  ‘One of the accused,’ said Vladimir. ‘You were to be executed. Why did you not flee with the rest of the condemned?’

  ‘Because we are not free,’ said Pallas. ‘I do not know why we were released, or who is responsible, but we did not seek it. I have been manipulated before, by Abraxes when our Chapter first turned from the Imperium, and I will not be used like that again. If I am to be executed here then so be it. I do not care about that any more. But I will not be a pawn in the scheme of another.’

  ‘Then who?’ demanded Daviks. ‘Who committed this outrage? My battle-brothers died because someone set the Soul Drinkers loose. Answer me!’

  ‘I don’t know!’ retorted Pallas. ‘Someone who benefits from a battle on the Phalanx. Someone who wants a last laugh from the Soul Drinkers before we are gone. Your guesses are as good as mine.’

  ‘They have left this one behind to sow confusion,’ said Daviks to the other Space Marines. ‘Recall the strategies of cowardice, as recounted in the Codex Astartes!’

  ‘There has been dissent in the ranks of the Soul Drinkers before,’ said Vladimir. ‘They turned on one another at Nevermourn. Reinez, you witnessed that, I believe. That this Apothecary chose not to follow his brothers in evading justice is not impossible.’

  ‘Dissenter or not,’ said Reinez, ‘we should get everything he knows out of him.’ Reinez took a tool from the closest forge – its metal prongs glowed from the heat. ‘I suggest we not delay.’

  ‘There will be no need for that,’ said Vladimir. ‘If he is here to misinform us then he will be prepared to spread lies under duress. If he is not, then there is no need for the infliction of suffering.’

  ‘Then what are we to do with him?’ sneered Reinez. ‘Give him a commission?’

  ‘He is an Apothecary. He can help tend to the wounded,’ replied Vladimir. ‘Apothecary Asclephin, you will oversee his work once he has answered one question.’

  ‘Name it,’ said Pallas.

  ‘Where is Sarpedon?’

  Pallas looked up at Vladimir. ‘The last I knew of it, he was in the courtroom. You are in a better position to know his whereabouts than I.’

  ‘Space Marines died in his escape’ said Vladimir. ‘You understand that justice will fall on him sooner or later, and that your own manner of death will depend on how satisfied we are with your part in that justice.’

  ‘I barely care for life or death any more, Chapter Master,’ said Pallas. ‘I do not know where he is. Decide among yourselves if I speak the truth, but I know that I do.’

  ‘Another question, with which our Soul Drinker friend may not be able to help us,’ said Gethsemar smoothly, ‘is the location of Captain N’Kalo.’

  Instinctively, the Space Marine officers looked around the Crucible. They were all there save for N’Kalo. His Iron Knights were present, but not their commander.

  ‘He made it out of the dome,’ said Daviks. ‘I saw him.’

  ‘But he did not make it here,’ answered Gethsemar.

  ‘Then locating him is a priority,’ said Vladimir, ‘but not one as high as locating Sarpedon and the Soul Drinkers who broke out of the cell block. If they have a plan then it most likely involves them staying together. If we are to break them with a minimum of losses, we must do so quickly, before they dig in. Lysander!’

  ‘Chapter Master?’ said Lysander with a salute.

  ‘You will lead the hunt. You have our three companies at your disposal. Officers, I ask that you cede command to Lysander in my name, and that he send your battle-brothers as he sees fit. I need no reminding of the protocols it breaks to request you place yourselves under the command of another Chapter, but this is not the time to dally over such things.’

  ‘I will kill Sarpedon,’ said Reinez.

  ‘You will not put the lives of my battle-brothers at risk,’ said Vladimir. ‘If it is expedient, another will eliminate Sarpedon, not wait for your permission.’

  ‘My oath of revenge is more important than life.’ Reinez shoved Pallas aside as he took a few steps closer to Vladimir. ‘Even the life of a brother.’

  ‘And delivering Dorn’s justice upon the Soul Drinker is more important than either,’ said Lysander, putting a hand on Reinez’s shoulder pad. Reinez shrugged it off angrily.

  ‘For one who despises time wasted in talking,’ said Gethsemar, ‘Brother Reinez does enjoy his little speeches.’

  Reinez gave Gethsemar a look that could have killed a star, as the officers rallied their Space Marines for the hunt.

  Captain N’Kalo forced off the slab of wreckage that pinned him down. His ears rang and the world was painted in blotchy blacks and reds. He was somewhere in one of the Phalanx’s tribute galleries, the deck divided into displays of art, standards and captured arms evoking the history of the Imperial Fists.

  The ceiling had collapsed on him as he fled the dome. The galleries had sealed behind him before they were decompressed, but the shockwaves of the pilgrim ship’s suicide attack had caused enough damage of their own. N’Kalo saw he had been trapped beneath a spiderlike carapace, complete and preserved in a transparent layer of resin, which had been mounted on the ceiling to give the impression it was about to ambush visitors to the galleries from above. The carapace was that of a creature with ten legs and a span of four or five metres across, and still bore the charred bolter scars that had felled it. It was the relic of a battle millions of miles and probably thousands of years distant.

  On one side of N’Kalo was a mural of Imperial Fists dragging the enemy dead from sucking tar pits on a primeval world of volcanoes and jungle. The enemy had the blue-grey skins and flat features of the tau, xenos who had tried to expand into Imperial space and been fought to a stalemate at the Damocles Gulf. On the other side were armour plates torn from a greenskin vehicle, a strange, brutal majesty in the
savage simplicity of their skull and bullet designs and the blood that still stained the lower edges of a tank’s dozer blade.

  N’Kalo tried to get his bearings. He did not know if he was alone. He looked and listened around him, trying to find crewmen or Space Marines through the displays and sculptures.

  The hiss of a nerve-fibre bundle reached his ears. The clicking of one ceramite plate on another.

  ‘Brother?’ called N’Kalo. ‘Are you hurt? Speak to me!’

  There was no reply.

  N’Kalo tensed. Perhaps Sarpedon had survived the attack, and was free. Perhaps the other captive Soul Drinkers were free, too. He could not afford to think of the Phalanx as safe ground any more. For all he knew, this was enemy territory.

  N’Kalo drew his bolt pistol. He wished he had his power sword with him, but he had stowed it in his squad’s cell-quarters when he had exchanged it for the executioner’s blade in the duel.

  On the wall next to the vehicle armour plates hung a bladed weapon shaped like a massively oversized meat cleaver, with teeth and jagged shards soldered to its cutting edge. A greenskin weapon. N’Kalo felt distaste as he lifted it from its mountings and tested its weight. A xenos weapon, and one that no Iron Knight should ever use, but circumstances were extreme.

  A shadow upon a shadow, through arches between the trophies and memorials, coalesced into the shape of a power-armoured figure. N’Kalo ducked out of sight, behind the mural of the Imperial Fists’ victory over the tau.

  ‘I spoke for you,’ said N’Kalo. ‘No one else would. I spoke up for your Chapter! Do what the court did not and listen to me.’