Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  Volos saw the bolter-rounds thud, ignored, into Toharan’s flesh. He didn’t appear to know he’d been shot. The Dragons weren’t going to bring him down through conventional projectile weaponry. But perhaps the monster could be cut down to size. Leaving the petrified corpse of Nessun, Volos leaped at Toharan and slashed him across the abdomen. His blade tore deep into meat, and the edge ground against a rib. Blood, thick and black, spat out at Volos, but the lips of the wound sealed as soon as he withdrew the blade. Toharan snarled and swatted at him. Volos dodged, but the tips of the growing fingers caught him and knocked him flying. He slammed into Nessun, reducing the body to dust.

  Toharan reached for Volos, but Nithigg landed on his back. Nithigg reached around the monster’s neck and sliced his throat with his forearm blade. More blood, and again the instant seal. The storm of flesh grew higher and higher. As Volos regained his feet, Toharan snatched Nithigg off his back. He held the Dragon Claw in a fist that was now as big as the Space Marine and squeezed. Volos heard the terrible crunching and saw Nithigg convulse. Volos hacked at Toharan’s wrist, but it became thicker faster than he could cut. His jump pack propelled him into Toharan’s face. He punctured an eye. His blade went deep. It should have killed Toharan’s brain. Either the brain healed too, or there was no longer enough there to matter. Toharan didn’t die, but he did feel pain. He shrieked and dropped Nithigg. Volos saw his old friend fall boneless to the ground. He yanked his blade out and jumped to the observation platform, bathing Toharan in flaming promethium exhaust.

  The monster howled at the injury and babbled incoherent rage. Toharan was regressing further and further as he grew. Language had abandoned him. He was little more than a pure loathing of flesh. Whether he knew who Volos was, or was simply focused on his tormentor, he followed, as Volos had hoped he would. Toharan pounded up the staircase, leaping over gaps with more power than grace.

  ‘Keryon,’ Volos voxed. ‘Come over the dome. Full Hellstrike barrage at what you see there. Do not hesitate.’

  ‘Acknowledged.’

  Toharan reached the platform. He lunged for Volos. The Dragon shot over him, landed behind and slashed at his legs behind the knees. The tendons healed immediately, but the second during which they were severed was enough to drop Toharan. He squirmed around, his flesh bubbling like boiling tar, and his arm was suddenly longer than it had been a moment before. Toharan caught Volos before he could step out of reach and flung him against the temple wall like a rag doll. Through the ringing in his ears, Volos heard the roar of the approaching Battle Pyre . Toharan didn’t let go. He smashed Volos against the wall again. Volos heard and felt his left arm break. Ribs were swimming in his chest. And he was flying again. He slashed with his right hand and parted enough of the wrist to make Toharan drop him.

  Volos limped back a few steps. Now almost ten metres tall, Toharan advanced on him. Volos stood his ground. He wanted Toharan to stay put for just a few seconds. He removed his helmet and showed the unwilling monster the face of one who embraced what he was. The mutation stared down at him. Toharan’s eyes were endless reservoirs of stupid hate, but buried deep in the cancerous instinct, Volos saw a spark of the personal. Toharan knew who he was. Some part of him was savouring this moment. Good , Volos thought.

  Toharan rose to his full height. His fists, big as pillars, came together. They began the descent that would smash his rival to nothing.

  Volos whispered, ‘Fire,’ as the Hellstrikes flashed down through the dome. Keryon’s aim was truer than he could have hoped. Toharan disappeared in the fireballs. Flames washed over Volos and the blast wave threw him to the wall again. His left shoulder popped out of its socket. But Toharan’s bulk shielded him from the worst of the explosions. The light and fire faded, and Toharan was still standing. He was sluggish, though, stunned and shrieking. His flesh was a flaking, blackened crust. Pink muscle showed through deep crevices. Ignoring his own injuries, Volos launched himself forward on his jump pack, right arm out, blade as spear tip. He hit Toharan in the chest. Toharan toppled like a felled oak. Flesh disintegrated and bones shattered inward. He started healing, but not fast enough. Not this time.

  With his good arm, Volos butchered his former friend, flaying open his chest. He stomped a boot through the ribcage and there, fire damaged but pumping madly, were the hearts. Toharan’s hands closed in on either side to crush him like an insect. Volos sliced through aortae and venae cavae, severing the hearts from the body.

  The hearts stopped beating. The hands fell back. Toharan breathed once, the air escaping in a sigh of fruitless denial, and he was dead.

  Volos did not look back at the corpse as he returned to the floor of the temple. He was exhausted, but he did not slow as, one-handed, he joined in the final slaughter of the remaining traitors. The Swords and Disciples had nothing left to fight for. The Black Dragons had the Emperor, and justice, and vengeance. They had more than enough.

  When it was done, Volos crouched over Nithigg. His armour had cracked like an eggshell, and there was very little left of his body. But he lived. One side of his face was a pulped ruin, but the intact eye fixed Volos with a desperate intensity. His lips moved. Volos leaned in, and heard Nithigg’s whispered prayer: ‘Let me serve.’

  ‘You shall,’ Volos promised, and didn’t move from his side until, days later, the Immolation Maw finally transited out of the warp and found them.

  EPILOGUE

  There was no end. Not yet.

  The grinder had missed Aighe Mortis by a precious few million kilometres. It ran out of energy partway out of the Camargus system, and drifted into an eccentric orbit.

  ‘It cannot remain here,’ Setheno told Volos when she met him aboard the Immolation Maw .

  There would be no end. Not yet.

  Volos stood in the reliquary, surrounded by holy silence and sacred history. Several decks up, Nithigg lay in sus-an membrane coma, waiting. Before Volos, the blessed coffin of the Dreadnought stood empty, sleeping, also waiting. Second Company’s losses were great. The Apothecary, Librarian and Chaplain were still in the death-sleep. There was no one with the skills and knowledge to do what must be done. ‘There will be,’ Volos promised. ‘Have patience, brother. You will serve.’

  ‘There must be an end to it,’ Setheno said.

  They were standing on a balcony of the Palace of Saint Boethius, overlooking the Grand Square. ‘And this is the price,’ Volos answered. He watched the tens of thousands of pilgrims pass through on their way to the starport. They chanted thanks and joy. Their robes were colourful sackcloth, fusing penitence and celebration.

  ‘It is. Victory always has a price.’

  Volos thought about his decimated company and said nothing.

  Setheno must have read his expression. ‘You have suffered casualties. Your numbers are reduced. This is temporary. You are stronger. That is permanent.’

  ‘Stronger?’

  ‘You are unified. You are purified. There has been a necessary purge.’

  A terrible suspicion dawned in Volos’s mind. ‘You planned this?’

  Setheno shook her head. ‘No. But a purge was coming, thanks to Inquisitor Lettinger and his political allies. Better this be the form it takes.’

  ‘So that we might be useful to you, instead of Lettinger.’

  ‘So that you might be useful to the Emperor. You are discovering the true potential of your Chapter.’

  ‘Necessity again,’ Volos said softly, but he didn’t disagree.

  ‘Yes,’ said Setheno. ‘You have felt it. We must do anything that will preserve the Imperium. What we will be called on to do will only grow worse. The future is desperate. The Golden Throne was built by human hands, captain. It requires endless care and repair. Do you imagine that it will last forever?’

  Volos’s eyes widened. He was staggered by the blasphemy. ‘You are without faith,’ he said.

  ‘You’re wrong. There is no greater faith than the faith in a lost cause. I will fight to preserve the spark of humanity in
the galaxy. The Emperor is our only hope, and I will give him my last drop of blood, and that of anyone else, should it come to that.’ She gave Volos a hard look. ‘So will you.’

  He nodded.

  There was the sound of footsteps on marble behind them. They turned to see Tennesyn approach. Standing with him was Jozef Bisset, now acting regent of Aighe Mortis. ‘Canoness,’ Tennesyn said. ‘My lord.’ He regarded them with a mixture of fear and resignation.

  ‘You are ready?’ Setheno asked.

  When Tennesyn nodded, Volos said, ‘Wait for us below.’

  Tennesyn withdrew. Bisset walked with him, a supportive hand on his shoulder, and cast an uneasy glance back at the two giants.

  ‘You are a monster of myth to them, too,’ Volos said to Setheno.

  ‘I hope so,’ she answered. ‘You and I need reminders of that sort. We must know the atrocities we commit for what they are. And the next one is mine.’ She gave him a solemn nod. ‘Captain.’

  He returned the gesture. ‘Canoness.’

  She left. Volos watched the pilgrims a while longer, and accepted his responsibility for what was coming. Setheno was orchestrating it, but he condoned it. The millions of pilgrims thought they were travelling to the Gemini moon to pay due reverence to the site of the battle that had saved their planet. They were, but they would not be returning.

  Necessity: the grinder had to be destroyed, or the threat of its use would forever haunt the Imperium. It had to be driven one more time, into the heart of the star Camargus. So it had to be powered up again. One more monstrous burnt offering. And someone had to study the device, and learn how to steer it. Tennesyn, the xeno-archaeologist, had the turn of mind that made him the logical candidate to be given that mission. Volos hoped the old man would survive, but was already wishing him a swift flight to his reward at the Emperor’s side.

  The pilgrims marched endlessly through the square. Not a few of them danced towards their doom. Volos’s hands itched with the slick of innocent blood. The people sang. Their hymns were familiar ones, but sounded different to Volos’s ears. He knew why. The songs of joy were really the lamentations of victory.

  It would be wrong to say that he woke. That would imply that his prior state had been something as simple, and as human, as sleep. It would mean that he opened his eyes. Neither was true. He had not slept in the mortal sense of the word for centuries, and there was nothing peaceful about the sus-an membrane coma. It was not a restorative slumber. It was the last stand against death.

  Nor could it be said that he opened his eyes. Though he suddenly had sight, he did not know if he still had eyes.

  He did have a body. That much he knew, just as he knew the stars existed. It was a stranger to him now, a weak, shattered thing. He realized, as consciousness and full thought returned to him moment by moment, it was encased in something that was both his new body and his coffin. As he achieved complete awareness, he felt a sharp pang of gratitude and loss. He had asked for this and his wish had been granted. But at the cost of all flesh.

  He had known this would be so. Now he experienced the reality of his new being.

  ‘Are you with us, Brother Nithigg?’ Volos asked. Nithigg’s gaze focused. His first sight was his old friend. Volos looked different. He had new markings on his armour: the sergeant had become captain in name now, and not simply in action. On the left of his pauldron hung a new honour badge. It was the aquila framed in dragon’s flame. Nithigg wondered how long his coma had been.

  Volos also looked smaller. That was odd. He towered over all the other Black Dragons of the company, but for the first time Nithigg was looking down at him. It took Nithigg a moment to understand that it was his own perspective that had changed.

  He spoke. His brain sent the signals that would move lips and tongue, but the withered thing that had been his body did not respond. Instead, sounds emerged from the vox-casters. ‘I see…’ he began, then stopped. Is this me? Nithigg wondered. The words were his. But the voice belonged to thunder and iron. He tried again. ‘I see your actions against the traitors have been recognized, brother-captain.’ The reverberations in the chamber changed his jest into a god’s edict.

  Volos smiled. ‘Our actions,’ he said. ‘Our victory.’ And he added, ‘Brother Dreadnought.’

  Brother Dreadnought . The appellation was an honour. Nithigg wondered if he was worthy of it. The honour of the Second Company, and of the Chapter, demanded that he be so. He had never thought of himself as a suitable candidate to bear the mantle of a Dreadnought. But he remembered lying on the floor of the xenos temple on that cursed moon. He’d been dying. As he’d slipped towards darkness, he had pleaded with Volos, ‘Let me serve.’

  The decision to continue his service was not his to make. Nor was it Volos’s alone. And the use of the revival chamber in which they now stood would have been beyond the means of the depleted Second Company. ‘We have met with other companies,’ he realized.

  Volos nodded. ‘The Fourth and Sixth. Their fortunes have not been as hard as ours. Their aid was welcome. The Immolation Maw is renewed as are you. As are we all.’

  ‘Though reduced in numbers.’

  Volos’s horned head bowed to that truth. ‘But strengthened in purpose.’

  Purpose . As Nithigg raised an arm experimentally, listening to the whirr of his power fist, he thought about purpose, and what his would be. Before, he had thought of himself as the memory of the Second Company. He had spent every moment he could in the librarium, combing the histories, pursuing, among other things, those precious hints that might pierce the fog of the past and lead the Black Dragons to their home world. Now, he would not be able to fit though the librarium’s doors, much less move through the stacks without destroying the precious manuscripts.

  But I can fight .

  Before, his body had been integral to his identity as a Black Dragon. Bless the curse , went the prayer. So he had. His deformities had become weapons in the service of his company, his Chapter, and his Emperor. The three jutting horns on his forehead, the curved bone blade that extended down his forearm, never to be retracted. Gone now. And what of the war cry? What of ‘fire and bone’? There was no bone about him anymore.

  There is still fire . And this is a new curse to bless .

  Then he realized that a trace of his bodily identity still lingered. The weaponized sarcophagus that was his home and his self had received alterations of its own. His boneblades had been severed from his ruined body, and attached to the arms of the machine. His mutations marked the armour as himself.

  He took his first step as a Dreadnought. His massive foot struck the floor like the toll of a great bell. ‘Brother-captain,’ said Nithigg, ‘I hope you have found us a war.’

  The Universe-class mass conveyer Absolution plied the Maeror subsector on its own. This had not always been so. Once, it had had a twin: the Benediction . Together, they had been the pride of the fleet owned by a family of the merchant nobility on Supplicium Secundus. That family had fallen millennia ago. Its fleet had broken up, many of its ships being absorbed into other trading organizations. But the Absolution and Benediction had followed different destinies.

  The Benediction had, a century before, fallen into the grasp of the orks of Octavius. The Absolution had continued on its endless path, criss-crossing the subsector. Trade was no longer the gigantic ship’s reason for being. Rather, it was now the means to the end of supporting the community that it carried. Over dozens of centuries, the ship had become a world unto itself. It was twelve kilometres long. Its crew of sixty-thousand had become a city of eight times that population. Most of its inhabitants had never been planetside. Its culture had developed around a core theme of pilgrimage. Every cycle, and every leg from system to system, was part of the long journey to the ultimate light of the Emperor. Pilgrimage gave life on the Absolution purpose, and it gave it unity. Even so, like any city of its size, it knew strife. It experienced crime, feuds, and factionalism. But it did not know war.

&nb
sp; Until now.

  The weight of Hannah Sifry’s eight decades pulled at her. The gravity of age fought her with every rung that she climbed. She had never thought of herself as frail, but she had never tested her strength as she did now. The clarity of her situation burst upon her mind’s eye. She was an old white-haired woman bent on making the final minutes of her life as difficult as possible.

  She was inside the central tower of the midship augur array. She wore a rope harness, from which hung a generator. The device was barely portable and barely functional. It was jury-rigged, the product of desperation. Much had been risked in the theft of its components and much had been lost. There was as much blood as there was hope in the generator.

  She paused, resting for a moment. Another twenty metres to go. Her arms trembled.

  Hope. Did she feel it? Was it driving her climb? She didn’t know. Perhaps it wasn’t a question of hope for any of her fellow survivors. Regine Sorina’s face was hard with determination. That was what kept her going. Sifry grimaced and began climbing again. She didn’t feel determined. She felt angry. Spite was her ally. She knew she was going to die, but she would do all in her power to hurt the monsters who had taken over her home.

  It took her another half-hour to reach the top. She perched on a narrow ledge and hauled the generator up. Her breath rattled like stones on metal. Her arms were heavy, awkward, their cold ache the only sign that they were still part of her body. She clutched her spite close and squeezed a few more drops of strength from it. Her fingers were curled and shaking, but the cable attachments were simple. She fixed the generator to the array and threw its switch.

  The generator was really a battery with a single charge. It expended its power on a solitary burst from the signal beacon. The astropaths had all been crucified. Activating the beacon was the only way that the Absolution could cry out its distress. There were no sensors to tell Sifry whether the beacon had been activated. She knew it had been, though, when, a few minutes later, the enemy came for her. They raced up the shaft of the tower. She couldn’t tell if she was seeing their shadows or their bodies. Perhaps there was no real difference between the two. They climbed with all their malevolent grace, that perfection of movement that promised a perfection of pain.