‘This is Hyperion of the Karabela, requesting clarification of orders.’
‘You have your orders,’ replied the voice of Inquisitor Kysnaros over the bridge vox.
‘The orders from my Grand Master are to cripple the Imperial Guard troop transports.’
‘And the order from one who outranks your Grand Master is to destroy any ship that seeks to thwart the Inquisition’s justice.’
‘I am not opening fire on an Adeptus Astartes warship. Castor, hail the Runefyre.’
‘Done, sir.’
‘This is the Grey Knights warship Karabela. Acknowledge, please.’
‘I hear you, Bladebreaker.’
‘Rawthroat, you have to listen to me. This has gone far enough. The Inquisition will fire on you next. You’ve made your point, now back down.’
In the background, I could hear his bridge crew shouting orders and reports to one another. Our vessels were already firing, raining fusion on the Space Wolves ships to blast them aside.
He laughed. ‘We’re not making a point, Bladebreaker. We’re doing what’s right.’
‘You can’t know if every single one of these souls is free from taint.’
‘The jarl has spoken, grey one. You’re not allowed to massacre millions just in case a handful are corrupt. Look at yourself, knight, and tell me the Emperor wishes this of the Imperium’s protectors.’
‘Only a fool would threaten countless worlds in the name of optimism, Wolf.’ I was almost shouting at his stubbornness. ‘You’ll bring censure against your entire Chapter. You cannot trade fire with Inquisitorial vessels and escape retribution!’
‘Look to the skies around you, brother. Do you see us firing back?’
‘I…’
+He’s right,+ sent Malchadiel. +Look.+
‘Castor, give me a full view of the fleet.’
The occulus showed us ship after ship, separated by the distances of protracted void conflict, though the Guard vessels had no hope of outrunning ours. Grey Knights ships, along with those of the Inquisition, still fired weapon streaks across the span. Several were punching home into limping transports, but most were left as spreading oil-stains across the shielding around Wolves ships.
None of them fired back. Not a single one. The flagship Scramaseax endured a twin assault from the lances of the Ruler of the Black Skies and the Fire of Dawn. Its shields were already dead under the pressure, yet it sailed on, adjusting its bearing to keep guarding a round-hulled transport ship.
‘Hyperion of the Karabela,’ Lord Joros’s voice crackled over. ‘You are hereby ordered to destroy the Runefyre.’
‘At once, my lord.’
Annika was looking at me. Captain Castor was looking at me. Malchadiel was looking at me.
‘Target the Runefyre.’
‘Done, sir.’
‘Rawthroat, can you hear me?’
Either he couldn’t, or he chose not to answer. I drew breath to speak, without really knowing what I intended to say. Before a single word left my lips, the occulus exploded in light.
‘Warp breach!’ several crew called at once. The bridge vox bloomed into renewed life as a huge, battlemented war-barge knifed its way into reality through a hole in the universe. Great bronze emblems marked its armoured sides, each of them depicting a wolf howling high towards a black sun.
A fleet of frigates and destroyers bolted ahead of the main cruiser, contrails of fiery light streaming from their engines.
Annika laughed, throwing her head back and howling. Several servitors turned to regard her in lobotomised stupefaction.
Jarl Grimnar’s voice rumbled across the vox. ‘Lord Inquisitor, we invite you to welcome the Fenrisian battle-barge Gylfarheim and her fleet.’ His pause was just long enough to add to the mockery. ‘I assume you wish to cease firing at our vessels. Am I wrong?’
Another pause followed, this one significantly longer.
‘This is Lord Inquisitor Kysnaros to all Inquisition forces, break off the attack. Repeat, break off the attack.’
Across our fleet, every vox-channel died to sudden static, before breaking into a long, triumphant howl.
The attacking fleet slowed – at first to a crawl, then to sit dead in space. We watched the Wolves escort the troop transports away, engines flaring hot all the while.
TWENTY-ONE
CONTAINMENT
I
Whether in matters of prevention, cure, or retribution, the Inquisition is nothing if not thorough. It also keeps deep and comprehensive archives on those who fall to its whims. Much of the aftermath of Armageddon I learned from sequestered Imperial records, hidden by virtue of their Inquisitorial seal; the rest I gleaned from the minds of my brothers or the inquisitors present at the time, who in turn had ridden inside the minds of those they were killing.
Annika often used a phrase that applied perfectly to the ordos’ reaction after the Wolves slipped through our fingers.
Spill enough blood and any secret will die.
This was what we did. This was how the Inquisition had worked for thousands of years. To banish all trace of sin, so that none would ever know of it.
Annika didn’t condone the massacres that followed Armageddon, but she was correct in her phrasing. No matter how far and wide something has spread, information can always be preserved in secret if the right number of lips are sealed. Containment is key. So said our masters.
The Wolves had thwarted us. You could look at that as the actions of a noble brotherhood, seeking to see the galaxy through a moral purity that simply didn’t exist, even if it deserved to.
It would be more realistic, if somewhat less kind, to remember that the Wolves must have known how we’d react. The Inquisition was never going to sit idle while such a horrendous secret spread through the Imperium.
The Grey Knights and our Inquisitorial masters pulled every trigger in the months that followed. I would never deny that.
But the Wolves must have known what we’d do. The Inquisition’s hand had been forced. It could be argued then, that the Wolves shared some of the blame for the billions of lives we ended after Armageddon.
I don’t blame them, myself. They are Adeptus Astartes, bred to be weapons first and reasoning souls second. They would consider it the coward’s way – the way of the immoral enemy – to prevent a greater evil by committing a lesser evil. There’s honour in that. There’s a simple, ignorant, honour.
They are, to be blunt, not pragmatic creatures. There’s no room for pragmatism in honour.
But we were born, schooled, trained and sworn to see a greater picture, beyond personal honour and the lives of a few million souls. Our mandate was to defend the species itself, and the lives of billions were always of greater value than the millions.
I admire the Wolves. I even forgive them for their narrow-minded, stubborn honour. I hold no grudge that their actions meant we were forced to silence ten billion innocent voices instead of a few million potentially corrupt ones.
But the Inquisition is not so forgiving.
II
The Ralas Meridian.
An asteroid belt, seven systems coreward from Armageddon and several weeks’ warp flight for standard Imperial jump drives.
The asteroid belt was a host of worthless rocks, possessing no value in minable metals, and circling an uninteresting sun. For the sake of completeness, it seemed to be all that remained of a world destroyed by natural forces thousands of years before mankind first ventured among the stars.
The system’s only value was to the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, serving as an astropathic relay station between worlds too remote for rapid or reliable transit.
Four days before its destruction, it tracked the Imperial Guard troop transports Mankind’s Birthright and Lucky Queen passing through its sphere of monitored space, fresh from a campaign on the world of Armageddon. It also recorded several vox-messages between the two vessels, as well as the impressions of communion between astropaths on board both ships.
&nb
sp; These recordings were archived and immediately forgotten, as meaningless and standard as they were.
On the night of its destruction, a single frigate appearing as a modified Adeptus Astartes Standard Template Construct pattern annihilated the lightly-defended relay station with a volley of broadsides. Afterwards, it hammered the asteroid base into gravel, all without even once broadcasting its intent.
Throughout the attack, the vessel refused all attempts to communicate, and matched no known transponder codes.
There were three hundred and forty-six residential staff and indentured servitors aboard at the Ralas Meridian station. None survived the assault.
With its duty done, the Grey Knights warship Armistice cut its way through the asteroid field and plunged back into the warp.
III
Jendara Quintus, in the Tremayne Sector, categorised by the Imperium of Man as a Gamma-class planet: civilised, but not teeming with the same masses of life that make up a hive world. Its main population centre was the city-state Illustrum (population: nine million) at the mouth of the Shuma River.
Many, many light years from Armageddon, the majority of its educated citizenry had still never heard of the distant world. The only souls to know of the planet’s existence were those who’d served there, and those they’d spoken to upon returning home.
Jendara Quintus was protected by a blistering array of orbital defences, none of which activated when the Grey Knights warships Ruler of the Black Skies and Fire of Dawn entered the world’s ionosphere.
The orbital defence array remained inactive even as the warships bombarded the cities from the heavens, never once replying to the screams for mercy rising from the surface.
Five days after its satellite defences failed to come online, Jendara Quintus was left alone in lifeless, silent peace. Beacons deployed in orbit warned any nearby vessels away from the dead world, citing the brutal xenos invasion that had swept the planet clean of all human life.
IV
Tybult – a world believed to be named for an ancient character from Eurasian legend. Despite its purpose as an agricultural supply world, it also provided huge tithes in the form of recruitment figures to the sector’s Imperial Guard levies. At the close of 444.M41, it was in the process of founding the Tybultian 171st Rifles.
It was common for vessels on long warp journeys on nearby transit routes to refuel and resupply at Tybult’s extensive orbital docks. Three ships were doing so on the eastern hemisphere morning of the planet’s death – one of which was the Imperial Guard transport Casus Belli.
The dockyard installation exploded under direct nuclear warhead strikes originating from deep space. All three of the docked vessels went down with the docking station, burning up in the atmosphere several hours later, when they fell to the surface.
The crews of the three vessels – almost entirely on shore leave down on Tybult’s surface – survived almost one hour longer than their ships. They died with the rest of the planet’s populace, when the warship Corel’s Hope, rearmed under Inquisitorial mandate, deployed air-bursting virus bombs above the main cities.
The virus matter contained within each globular incendiary was an artificial strain of cytotoxic agent, designed by ancient minds in service to mankind during the age of Imperial expansion. The merest contact ate all cellular life, in any organic form, from soil and trees to flesh, blood and bone – and the virus itself spread by damning everything it touched, even microbiotic life in the air.
The disease’s hunger ages everything it touches, breaking it down at the cellular level. The end result for most biotic substances is to become a flammable, chemical-rich residue – not entirely unlike organic slime.
Amazing to think that the architects of the Imperium would design an artificial disease that rots and melts all life, degrading it into inert sludge. What enemies did our ancestors face, to warrant such foul genius in the Emperor’s name?
Tybult burned that day. As the population corroded while still alive, along with the planetary ecosystem, the atmosphere thickened with volatile byproduct gases, as a result of dissolving matter.
A second bombardment, this time of the warship’s plasma batteries, ignited the planet’s turgid, poisonous air. Already a grave-world of biological ooze, Tybult was reaved clean of all life by the ignition of its atmosphere. A handful of hours after its arrival, Corel’s Hope turned away from the world it had slain, leaving nothing but superheated rock and silent cities.
V
The Adeptus Mechanicus outpost Priam Novus was nothing more than a listening post at the edges of the Armageddon Subsector, primarily charged with the recording of Imperial traffic through the region’s northern reaches.
Among its recent logs were notations relating to the journey of the bulk transport Yulacese, en route from Armageddon to the Helican Subsector.
Despite its modest role in humanity’s empire, the Priam Novus deep-space installation was defended by a task force of Fury-pattern Interceptors. The Cyrus Omega XA-II Squadron was well-trained and experienced at repelling the assaults of void pirates.
When the Grey Knights destroyer Flawless Reprieve broke from the warp and rained torpedoes upon Priam Novus, Cyrus Omega XA-II Squadron scrambled with all haste. They survived longer than any of the three thousand souls aboard the station itself, as the warship ignored them completely. Once the destruction was complete, the Reprieve turned and boosted back into the warp.
The last member of Cyrus Omega XA-II Squadron to die was Wing Commander Falana Deshivan. She, like the rest of her squadron, asphyxiated inside her cockpit when her oxygen reserves at last ran out, days later. It could be argued that was a mercy, as had any of the fighter wing survived a further three days, their deaths would have come in the form of freezing to death when their fighters’ power cells were finally depleted.
VI
The troop transport Maerlyn’s Run was safe once it reached the warp. Its captain, Argan Valoy, had thanked the Wolves for their timely assistance and breathed a sigh of relief as the warp drive whined its way to consciousness. In a burst of chaotic light, they were under way, safe from whatever madness had infected half the fleet in orbit around Armageddon.
Five weeks into their flight, their Navigator reported sighting silhouettes in the turmoil of warp space – impossible shapes cutting through the tides nearby. Captain Valoy was a careful man. He believed in all necessary caution, better safe than sorry. In this instance, he ordered Maerlyn’s Run to drop from the warp and give time for the Navigator to rest, before pushing on.
As the enginarium decks began the process of balancing power within the warp engines to breach back into reality, the silhouette that Valoy’s Navigator had seen made itself known. Protected by superior shielding and hexagrammic insulation against the horrors of the warp, the Grey Knights vessel ploughed through the filthy tides, ramming the transport amidships and buckling its hull.
With the ship open to the void the venomous matter of the warp spilled into the Maerlyn’s Run, as the crew’s nightmares became manifest among them. Those that weren’t immediately killed by giving birth to daemons inside their own skulls were pulled apart in the following minutes by Neverborn rampaging through the ruptured decks.
The Maerlyn’s Run returned to real space thirty-three nights later, several subsectors spinward from where it had first entered the warp. An Inquisitorial purge-team found no survivors on the wreck, and the hololithic records of the crew’s final moments were locked away under the highest authority, given over to our Titan monastery for safeguarding.
VII
The Wolves couldn’t be everywhere at once. Perhaps they underestimated the Inquisition’s true fervour, leaving so many possible targets outside their web of protection. I can’t say, for I’ve never had the chance to ask.
But when they did defend their interests, they showed up in overwhelming force. Corel’s Hope broke from the Sea of Souls on the outskirts of the Porphyr System, under Lord Inquisitor Kysnaros’s orders. We w
ere with the Hope, Malchadiel and I, and still in acting command of the Karabela.
Since Galeo and Dumenidon fell, entire worlds had burned or been put to the sword, all to preserve the secret of what we’d all witnessed on Armageddon. We’d attacked convoys ourselves, and destroyed void stations, all for the sin of overhearing the wrong vox-message, or positively identifying a ship that should never have left Armageddon. Never before had a duty felt so hollow. Righteousness without morality is a sour victory, no matter the necessity.
Primarch. Such a word, laden with the resonance of mythology. Angron. Lord of the Twelfth Legion. The wider Imperium could never be allowed to know the Emperor’s own sons turned against him, nor that the Grey Knights existed in the empire’s shadows, fighting a war against creatures that couldn’t be real. We spent so much sweat and effort ensuring even the most minor sins never reached the eyes and ears of Imperial citizens; the greatest heresies of all had long since passed into apocryphal legend.
Where they belonged.
Aboard the Karabela, I spent more time than I should standing in the medicae bay, speaking to the cryo-coffins of my dead brothers. Their sarcophagi were mounted and locked in the storage bays, yet I still found myself returning to them time and time again. Sometimes I’d apologise. Sometimes I’d ask for advice. Mostly, I’d just dwell upon the lessons I’d learned under their guidance, and wonder how in the infinite hells I was supposed to live up to such warriors.
More often, I’d speak with Enceladus. Once cut from his armour, he was an emaciated, broken thing of ragged flesh and wiry sinew. He drifted in an amniotic tank, breathing into a face mask, his eyes curdled in his skull. Even if he woke, he’d never see again. Armageddon had killed him, he just hadn’t got round to dying yet.
+Wake up,+ I sent endlessly into his floating corpse, limbless with the removal of his bionics.
The Emperor's Gift Page 27