Hammer and Bolter Year One

by Christian Dunn

  ‘Come,’ said Kolgo. ‘Vladimir has called a council of war. We shall not have to settle for sitting and watching for much longer.’

  Aescarion followed the inquisitor through the darkness. On every side were Space Marines who had suffered wounds in the battle but returned to the fray. Many were missing hands or limbs, or had segments of their armour removed to allow for a wound to be cast or splinted.

  The most severely wounded were laid out in the Tactica itself, on or around the map tables. Apothecaries worked on chest and head wounds, with healthy brothers rotated in to serve as blood donors for transfusions. As Aescarion and Kolgo entered, another Imperial Fist was lifted off a map table by two of his battle-brothers and carried towards the archways leading to the building’s rear, where the dead were being piled up. A lectern-servitor with a scratching autoquill was keeping a tally of the dead in a ledger.

  Officers were gathered around one of the central tables, which represented the canyon walls and xenos settlement of some ancient battle. Vladimir was there, along with Lysander, Borganor and Librarian Varnica of the Doom Eagles. With them stood Captain Luko and Sergeant Graevus of the Soul Drinkers.

  Aescarion stood apart as Kolgo joined them.

  ‘Lord inquisitor,’ said Vladimir. ‘Now we are all present. I shall dispense with any formalities as time is not on our side. We must decide our next course of action, and do it now.’

  ‘Attack,’ said Borganor. ‘I cannot say why Abraxes withdrew his army, for it is unlike the daemons’ manner of war, but it is certain that we shall not get any such respite from them again. We must lead a counter-offensive as soon as we can, before they finish whatever infernal contraptions they are building. Therein lies the only chance of defeating them.’

  ‘I agree, Chapter Master,’ said Lysander. ‘We have borne the brunt of their assault with greater fortitude than Abraxes expected. They regroup and perhaps reinforce as we speak. Attack them and destroy them. It is the only way.’

  ‘They outnumber us,’ countered Librarian Varnica. ‘A full assault will result in defeat for us, every tactical calculation points towards it.’

  ‘Then what would you have us do?’ said Borganor. ‘Wait for Dorn’s own return? For Roboute Guilliman to appear amongst us?’

  ‘Attacking would make the most of what advantages we have,’ said Luko. ‘We are at our best up close, charging into the face of the enemy.’

  ‘So are daemons,’ said Graevus.

  ‘True,’ said Luko. ‘Very true.’

  ‘There must be other ways,’ said Varnica. ‘We fall back to a smaller, more defensible part of the Phalanx and force them to attack on a narrow frontage. Lure them in and kill them piece by piece.’

  ‘That would give them the run of the Phalanx,’ said Vladimir. ‘Abraxes would do with this craft as he wished. His daemons could surround us and perhaps render the whole section uninhabitable by introducing hard vacuum or radiation. With Abraxes in charge they certainly would.’

  ‘The question is,’ said Varnica, ‘does such a scenario promise our deaths with more or less certainty than walking across the barracks deck and into their arms?’

  ‘So,’ said Vladimir. ‘We give Abraxes my army or we give him my ship. Any other suggestions?’

  ‘There is one,’ said a newcomer’s voice. The officers turned to see Apothecary Pallas. He was attending to one of the wounded nearby, using a cautery iron to sear shut the stump of an Imperial Fist’s severed left arm.

  ‘Pallas,’ said Luko. ‘I had not realised you let lived. I did not think I would speak with you again.’

  ‘Chapter Master,’ said Pallas, continuing to work on the wounded warrior. ‘What was to be our manner of execution?’

  ‘We have not the time to waste listening to this renegade,’ said Borganor.

  ‘Execution by gunshot,’ said Vladimir, ignoring Borganor. ‘Then incineration.’

  ‘On the Path of the Lost?’

  Vladimir folded his arms and stepped back a pace, as if some revelation was growing in his mind. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘You were to walk the Path.’

  ‘It is traditional,’ continued Pallas, ‘that the condemned among the sons of Dorn be forced to walk the Path of the Lost. It runs from the Pardoner’s Court, just a few hundred metres from this very building, and across the width of the Phalanx along the ventral hull. It emerges near the cargo holds, where our incinerated remains could be ejected from the ship. Is this not correct?’

  ‘It is,’ replied Vladimir. ‘You know much of this tradition. So few executions have been held on the Phalanx that few give it any mind now.’

  ‘I read of the ways in which we would die after I refused to join my brothers in their breakout,’ said Pallas. ‘It seemed appropriate for me to do so, that I might counsel my brothers when the time for execution came.’

  ‘And what,’ said Borganor, ‘is your point?’

  ‘My point is that Abraxes has at his command more than a mere army,’ said Pallas. The cautery iron had finished its work in closing the wound and Pallas now wrapped the wound in gauze as he spoke. ‘He brought his army onto the Phalanx somehow, and he brings components for his war machines and no doubt reinforcements for his troops. He has a warp gate, a way into the immaterium, and it is stable and open. Only this explains his capacity to attack the Phalanx at all.’

  ‘And the Path of the Lost,’ said Luko, ‘leads from here to the region of the warp gate.’

  ‘Among the dorsal cargo holds,’ said Pallas. ‘A sizeable force could not make it through the Path, certainly not without alerting Abraxes to divert his forces to defending the portal. The majority of the force must stay here to face his army and keep it fighting. A smaller force, a handful strong, takes the Path of the Lost and strikes out for the warp gate’s location. As long as Abraxes possesses a gate through the warp any attempt to defeat him here is futile, for he will just bring more legions through until we are exhausted.’

  ‘Insanity,’ said Borganor.

  ‘Captain Borganor,’ said Vladimir. ‘I have no doubt that your hatred for the Soul Drinkers is well deserved, for they have done your Chapter much wrong. But what Pallas says has merit. It does not matter if we shatter Abraxes’s army, he still has a means to conjure a new one from the warp. Remove that, and we buy ourselves a thread that leads to victory.’

  ‘You are not seriously considering this?’ said Borganor.

  ‘I will go,’ said Luko. ‘The Soul Drinkers have suffered at the hands of Abraxes before. If we are to die on the Phalanx, then let it be in seeking revenge against him.’

  ‘And none but the Soul Drinkers have faced Abraxes before at all,’ added Graevus.

  ‘You will need a Librarian,’ said Varnica. ‘And since they are in such short supply, I had better go with you.’

  ‘Varnica?’ said Borganor. ‘You were among the first to condemn the Soul Drinkers!’

  ‘And if you are correct in your mistrust, I will be among the last to be betrayed by them,’ said Varnica. ‘But the Chapter Master is right. There is no other way. Thin as the thread is, unwholesome as the Soul Drinkers reputation might be, I must follow that thread for it is all we have.’

  ‘And I,’ said Sister Aescarion, stepping forwards. ‘The Inquisition must have a presence. My lord inquisitor is most valuable here, leading the defence of the Phalanx. In his stead I offer myself to accompany the Apothecary’s mission.’

  ‘I shall appoint an Imperial Fists squad to accompany you,’ said Vladimir. ‘I can spare no more. The rest of my warriors must remain to hold the line.’

  ‘I wish Apothecary Pallas given leave to join us as well,’ said Luko.

  ‘You have it. Kolgo, Borganor, Lysander and myself shall continue to command the defence. These are the wishes of Chapter Master Vladimir, and hence are the wishes of Rogal Dorn. Go now to fulfil your orders, brothers and sisters. Should I see you after the battle, then all shall be joyful. If not, I shall await you at the end of time, at the Emperor’s side, when w
e shall have our revenge for everything the enemy has done to us.’

  The officers departed to organise the defence of the Tactica and the Forge of Ages. Across the cavernous barracks deck, the war machines of the daemon army grew higher.

  SHADOW KNIGHT

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  The sins of the father, they say.

  Maybe. Maybe not. But we were always different. My brothers and I, we were never truly kin with the others – the Angels, the Wolves, the Ravens…

  Perhaps our difference was our father’s sin, and perhaps it was his triumph. I am not empowered by anyone to cast a critical eye over the history of the VIII Legion.

  These words stick with me, though. The sins of the father. These words have shaped my life.

  The sins of my father echo throughout eternity as heresy. Yet the sins of my father’s father are worshipped as the first acts of godhood. I do not ask myself if this is fair. Nothing is fair. The word is a myth. I do not care what is fair, and what is right, and what’s unfair and wrong. These concepts do not exist outside the skulls of those who waste their life in contemplation.

  I ask myself, night after night, if I deserve vengeance.

  I devote each beat of my heart to tearing down everything I once raised. Remember this, remember it always: my blade and bolter helped forge the Imperium. I and those like me – we hold greater rights than any to destroy mankind’s sickened empire, for it was our blood, our bones, and our sweat that built it.

  Look to your shining champions now. The Astartes that scour the dark places of your galaxy. The hordes of fragile mortals enslaved to the Imperial Guard and shackled in service to the Throne of Lies. Not a soul among them was even born when my brothers and I built this empire.

  Do I deserve vengeance? Let me tell you something about vengeance, little scion of the Imperium. My brothers and I swore to our dying father that we would atone for the great sins of the past. We would bleed the unworthy empire that we had built, and cleanse the stars of the False Emperor’s taint.

  This is not mere vengeance. This is redemption. My right to destroy is greater than your right to live.

  Remember that, when we come for you.

  He is a child standing over a dying man.

  The boy is more surprised than scared. His friend, who has not yet taken a life, pulls him away. He will not move. Not yet. He cannot escape the look in the bleeding man’s eyes.

  The shopkeeper dies.

  The boy runs.

  He is a child being cut open by machines.

  Although he sleeps, his body twitches, betraying painful dreams and sleepless nerves firing as they register pain from the surgery. Two hearts, fleshy and glistening, beat in his cracked-open chest. A second new organ, smaller than the new heart, will alter the growth of his bones, encouraging his skeleton to absorb unnatural minerals over the course of his lifetime.

  Untrembling hands, some human, some augmetic, work over the child’s body, slicing and sealing, implanting and flesh-bonding. The boy trembles again, his eyes opening for a moment.

  A god with a white mask shakes his head at the boy.

  ‘Sleep.’

  The boy tries to resist, but slumber grips him with comforting claws. He feels, just for a moment, as though he is sinking into the black seas of his homeworld.

  Sleep, the god had said.

  He obeys, because the chemicals within his blood force him to obey.

  A third organ is placed within his chest, not far from the new heart. As the ossmodula warps his bones to grow on new minerals, the biscopea generates a flood of hormones to feed his muscles.

  Surgeons seal the boy’s medical wounds.

  Already, the child is no longer human. Tonight’s work has seen to that. Time will reveal just how different the boy will become.

  He is a teenage boy, standing over another dead body.

  This corpse is not like the first. This corpse is the same age as the boy, and in its last moments of life it had struggled with all its strength, desperate not to die.

  The boy drops his weapon. The serrated knife falls to the ground.

  Legion masters come to him. Their eyes are red, their dark armour immense. Skulls hang from their pauldrons and plastrons on chains of blackened bronze.

  He draws breath to speak, to tell them it was an accident. They silence him.

  ‘Well done,’ they say.

  And they call him brother.

  He is a teenage boy, and the rifle is heavy in his hands.

  He watches for a long, long time. He has trained for this. He knows how to slow his hearts, how to regulate his breathing and the biological beats of his body until his entire form remains as still as a statue.

  Predator. Prey. His mind goes cold, his focus absolute. The mantra chanted internally becomes the only way to see the world. Predator. Prey. Hunter. Hunted. Nothing else matters.

  He squeezes the trigger. One thousand metres away, a man dies.

  ‘Target eliminated,’ he says.

  He is a young man, sleeping on the same surgery table as before.

  In a slumber demanded by the chemicals flowing through his veins, he dreams once again of his first murder. In the waking world, needles and medical probes bore into the flesh of his back, injecting fluids directly into his spinal column.

  His slumbering body reacts to the invasion, coughing once. Acidic spit leaves his lips, hissing on the ground where it lands, eating into the tiled floor.

  When he wakes, hours later, he feels the sockets running down his spine. The scars, the metallic nodules…

  In a universe where no gods exist, he knows this is the closest mortality can come to divinity.

  He is a young man, staring into his own eyes.

  He stands naked in a dark chamber, in a lined rank with a dozen other souls. Other initiates standing with him, also stripped of clothing, the marks of their surgeries fresh upon their pale skin. He barely notices them. Sexuality is a forgotten concept, alien to his mind, merely one of ten thousand humanities his consciousness has discarded. He no longer recalls the face of his mother and father. He only recalls his own name because his Legion masters never changed it.

  He looks into the eyes that are now his. They stare back, slanted and murder-red, set in a helmet with its facial plate painted white. The bloodeyed, bone-pale skull watches him as he watches it.

  This is his face now. Through these eyes, he will see the galaxy. Through this skulled helm he will cry his wrath at those who dare defy the Emperor’s vision for mankind.

  ‘You are Talos,’ a Legion master says, ‘of First Claw, Tenth Company.’

  He is a young man, utterly inhuman, immortal and undying.

  He sees the surface of this world through crimson vision, with data streaming in sharp, clear white runic language across his retinas. He sees the life forces of his brothers in the numbers displayed. He feels the temperature outside his sealed war armour. He sees targeting sights flicker as they follow the movements of his eyes, and feels his hand, the hand clutching his bolter, tense as it tries to follow each target lock. Ammunition counters display how many have died this day.

  Around him, aliens die. Ten, a hundred, a thousand. His brothers butcher their way through a city of violet crystal, bolters roaring and chainswords howling. Here and there in the opera of battle-noise, a brother screams his rage through helm-amplifiers.

  The sound is always the same. Bolters always roar. Chainblades always howl. Astartes always cry their fury. When the VIII Legion wages war, the sound is that of lions and wolves slaying each other while vultures shriek above.

  He cries words that he will one day never shout again – words that will soon become ash on his tongue. Already he cries the words without thinking about them, without feeling them.

  For the Emperor.

  He is a young man, awash in the blood of humans.

  He shouts words without the heart to feel them, declaring concepts of Imperial justice and deserved vengeance. A man claws at his
armour, begging and pleading.

  ‘We are loyal! We have surrendered!’

  The young man breaks the human’s face with the butt of his bolter. Surrendering so late was a meaningless gesture. Their blood must run as an example, and the rest of the system’s worlds would fall into line.

  Around him, the riot continues unabated. Soon, his bolter is silenced, voiceless with no shells to fire. Soon after that, his chainsword dies, clogged with meat.

  The Night Lords resort to killing the humans with their bare hands, dark gauntlets punching and strangling and crushing.

  At a timeless point in the melee, the voice of an ally comes over the vox. It is an Imperial Fist. Their Legion watches from the bored security of their landing site.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the Imperial Fist demands. ‘Brothers, are you insane?’

  Talos does not answer. They do not deserve an answer. If the Fists had brought this world into compliance themselves, the Night Lords would never have needed to come here.

  He is a young man, watching his homeworld burn.

  He is a young man, mourning a father soon to die.

  He is a traitor to everything he once held sacred.

  Stabbing lights lanced through the gloom.

  The salvage team moved slowly, neither patient nor impatient, but with the confident care of men with an arduous job to do and no deadline to meet. The team spread out across the chamber, overturning debris, examining the markings of weapons fire on the walls, their internal vox clicking as they spoke to one another.

  With the ship open to the void, each of the salvage team wore atmosphere suits against the airless cold. They communicated as often by sign language as they did by words.

  This interested the hunter that watched them, because he too was fluent in Astartes battle sign. Curious, to see his enemies betray themselves so easily.

  The hunter watched in silence as the spears of illumination cut this way and that, revealing the wreckage of the battles that had taken place on this deck of the abandoned vessel. The salvage team – who were clearly genhanced, but too small and unarmoured to be full Astartes – were crippled by the atmosphere suits they wore. Such confinement limited their senses, while the hunter’s ancient mark IV war plate only enhanced his. They could not hear as he heard, nor see as he saw. That reduced their chances of survival from incredibly unlikely to absolutely none.