Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  She denied them that satisfaction. She leapt at them. She fell hundreds of metres. She spat hatred and defiance all the way down.

  The final seconds of her life felt like a victory, and that was good enough.

  Regine Sorina crouched in the ventilation shaft. She saw three of the xenos rush down the corridor, passing just beneath her hiding spot. The entrance to the augur tower was ten metres to the left. She waited. She would be as much of a witness as she could for Sifry. She heard the old woman fall and the triumphant rage of her curses.

  She winced when she heard the impact and reminded herself that Sifry had volunteered for the mission knowing that this was the best ending it could have. We have struck a blow , Sorina told herself. It was possible that no one would receive the signal. But someone might , she thought. Even if no one did, the xenos had reacted to a danger. They could be threatened. That was a thought to carry with her through the days.

  She continued to wait and didn’t dare move until the xenos had moved on. Their senses were keen. They might hear her move. If they looked up, they might see her, though she had taken what precautions she could. She had used a broken fan blade to shear her hair down to stubble. All her exposed skin was covered in the grime of the ventilation system. She could not become a shadow like the enemy, but she could sink beneath the ship’s centuries of detritus, which no amount of maintenance could prevent from accumulating. When she didn’t move, she was just another bundle of litter, a collection of rags and sharp angles. Malnourishment was turning her body into bone covered by a creased leather of flesh. Cycle by cycle, there was less and less of her to see.

  After a few minutes, the trio walked by again. They were in no hurry. She held her breath. This was the closest she had ever come to the enemy. The xenos were morbidly beautiful. They were creatures of stories and hated myth. They were eldar. Their clothing had the precise elegance and lethality of straight razors. Their leader was the most beautiful and graceful of them all. Wherever she walked, terrible death followed. Sorina had only seen her once from a distance. She curled her lip as the memory intruded again. Weeks of the occupation had not blunted it, nor had the avalanche of new atrocities Sorina had witnessed.

  She had been in a shaft, as now, having fled there in the first hour of the invasion. She had crawled without purpose then, scrambling away from the sounds of one-sided combat and massacre. She had stopped by a grille that opened onto one of the great hydroponic tanks. The tank was over a kilometre long and was where the crops were grown for consumption and trade. The harvest was already burning, the smoke stinging her eyes as it spread through the shaft.

  Not far away, invaders on hovering jetbikes herded the workers together and presented them to the leader. She was a few centimetres taller than her escorts, and there was a dark power to her presence. A terrible gravity pulled all thought and light towards her. She stalked forward to the first rank of prisoners. Her movements were ballet and serpent strike. She pulled out a blade. It was narrow, curved, wrought with dark artistry. It was more than a weapon. It was an instrument. The eldar leader brought the blade towards the face of the nearest prisoner. She began to do things.

  Sorina had tried to look away. She had failed, and now the memory was an unwanted companion of her days.

  The echoes of the eldar’s steps faded. Sorina counted to a hundred, then started moving. As she crawled through the shafts towards the refuge, she sniffed the air. It was the habit of her entire adult life. For almost twenty years, she had spent eight hours of every cycle in Atmosphere Control, about a third of the way forward of the enginarium. It had been her duty to ensure the oxygen levels remained constant, and that the carbon dioxide and other toxic gases were scrubbed from the air. Servitors and cogitators did the work well enough most of the time, but it wasn’t enough. Even a minor lapse could kill thousands. The task had been a privilege. During her shifts, she had held the lives of the Absolution ’s citizens in her hands. That existence was in the past. The xenos had taken Atmosphere Control, along with all the other centres critical to the functioning of the ship. Despite their delight in prolonged murder, they also appeared to have every intention of keeping the population of the Absolution alive for further terrible delights.

  The journey through the ducts to the sanctuary was a long one. She passed by many ventilation grilles. Through each, she was given a glimpse of how the culture of the Absolution had been transformed. Sorina resisted the idea that the xenos even had a culture, but its power was everywhere to be seen. All of the eldar genius was devoted to the furthering of atrocity. The aesthetics that confronted Sorina strove towards the fusion of desire and pain. The xenos had not had the time to remove the Imperial iconography of the ship’s interior. Nor did they appear to care about its existence one way or the other. In the spaces where they chose to linger, they forced the enslaved humans to desecrate the holy images and statues. Sorina had long since realized that it was not the sacredness of the original artwork that displeased the invaders. Rather, it was the torment suffered by the humans who had been forced to deface it that they valued.

  And pain. Pain everywhere, spreading out in ripples from the bridge. The xenos took their victims singly or in groups, and made them the tribute to their appetites. The contortions of the flesh were art in its most obscene form. Sorina saw her comrades bent, twisted, broken, their ends as creative as they were prolonged. The sights were always new, the awful sounds always fresh. Even when she moved deeper into the ducts, away from corridors, the echoes of torment followed her.

  Working for Atmosphere Control had given Sorina an intimate knowledge of the ventilation system. That had been her salvation. She could still move around with relative ease. As far as she could tell, it was a small group of xenos that had seized the Absolution . An unarmed population could do nothing against them, but the ship was too vast for the invaders to patrol. They could hold the vital points, and do what they would to anyone they discovered, but that left vast gaps through which she could slip.

  For now.

  The refuge was a larger space at the centre of a tangle of shafts. The group that Sorina had joined was small. There were eight other members. They did not dare call themselves a resistance. The few attempts to mount a rebellion of any scale had ended in bloodbaths. Improvised weaponry and untrained fighters were taken apart by cool sadism. The xenos were far from being threatened, or even angered, by the revolts. Instead, they were entertained. They were amused. Sorina and her companions had learned from the mistakes of their fellows. They did not launch assaults. They sought to keep each other alive. They scavenged. They found new hiding places. They watched. They endured.

  But today, at last, they had acted.

  Vaelassa Kthanys sat on the command throne on the bridge of the Absolution , her fingers playing absently inside the skull of one of the mon-keigh. He was still alive and was no longer capable of the limited sentience of his species, but his sense receptors were still very active. There was no dulling of his pain. That was all that mattered. His shackled limbs vibrated from the intensity of the sensations. Kthanys tasted his pain. She ran her tongue over the edge of her teeth, savouring the nourishing nectar of agony. The mon-keigh’s mouth was open in a wracked scream, but it was silent. She had torn his vocal chords out a few minutes ago so she could listen to the incubus before her. ‘Then there are no challenges to our control of the ship?’ she asked. She made her scepticism clear.

  ‘None, archon,’ Nathar Desserel replied. He had removed his helmet, and stood with it under his left arm. The edges of his black armour glistened with the blood of newer victims. ‘None worth noting, at any rate.’

  Kthanys stored the qualification away for future use. Desserel no doubt thought he was protecting himself by avoiding a categorical assertion that could come back to haunt him as a lie, and thus a betrayal. Instead, he had opened himself up to the charge of weakness and incompetence should any of the thousands of mon-keigh still to be rounded up create even the slightest probl
em. Did he realize he had just put himself even more at Kthanys’s mercy? Likely not. Desserel was proving himself to be a poor game-player and Kthanys drove the point home for him. ‘Then how could a distress beacon have been activated?’

  ‘The signal was of very short duration. There will be no repetition.’

  ‘I see no reason to trust your judgement in this matter.’ She thought about killing him, then decided against doing so. He was a useful tool, not to be discarded unnecessarily. The raids had gone well. The ship was theirs. The beacon was the only event of any significance that had escaped their control.

  ‘How long until we re-enter the webway?’ she asked.

  Desserel hesitated. ‘Within a week of this ship’s time.’

  ‘What? ’ Her fist clenched, squeezing the prisoner’s brain to pulp, killing him. That was too long to spend in the materium, within range of systems controlled by the mon-keigh, especially after that signal. Its brevity was beside the point. Was Desseral truly that ignorant of the risks?

  ‘That will bring us to the nearest webway access wide enough to accommodate something of this size. Even that corridor will be strained to the point of near collapse.’

  Though the prisoner was dead, the massive spasm of pain in his final moment was nourishing and it calmed her. There was nothing to be done about the geography of the webway. The Absolution had passed within a breath of the portal used as an ambush point by the raiders of the Kabal of the Desolate Sigh. But the tendrils of the webway could be very narrow, and the Absolution demanded a major artery.

  The prize was worth the risk. With this ship in her possession, she had supply of slaves large enough to be self-renewing. The Absolution represented a massive increase in her material power, and therefore, more importantly, her influence in Commorragh. They had already survived a month without being detected. Another week, then, and the ship would be hers, beyond the reach of any mon-keigh retaliation. She could wait. There would be much to savour in the meantime. In the hundreds of thousands of lives at her disposal, there was so much potential pain to be consumed.

  ‘The engines will be ready for our use by then,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, archon, they will.’

  ‘That was not a question.’

  A week after the beacon, Sorina was alone, in the lower reaches of the ship, in a starboard access tunnel that ran next to the hull. She was on a food run, and it was not going well. The last several had not. They were all growing weak. She paused in the shadows between the lumen strips, knelt and prayed. She prayed for the strength to continue to struggle. She dared not ask for anything more.

  Her prayer was addressed to the Emperor but was answered by monsters. Their arrival was announced by a grinding vibration that seemed to Sorina to reach through the entire hull. There was a rising shriek of tortured metal on either side of her. She covered her ears, thinking that the destruction of the Absolution was upon her. She stared at the wall, waiting for it to vanish, and for the venting atmosphere to propel her to frozen death in the void.

  Instead, gigantic drill heads burst through the hull. Foaming sealant closed off the gaps between the ship’s hull and that of the boarding torpedo before the atmosphere had had more than a second to escape. Access hatches slammed down. The monsters emerged.

  Sorina cowered. She knew of Space Marines. She had never seen any of the Adeptus Astartes in person, though she had seen many representations in everything from lithographs to commemorative statuary. None of those images resembled the beings who confronted her. Their armour was void-black, emblazoned with a coiled silver dragon. The group that stepped out of the sternward torpedo, flanking the captain, seemed to have a variety of horns added to their helmets. But then the captain removed his helmet and everything was worse. The horns were real. And those eyes: a profound, glistening black, as if the void itself had arrayed itself in flesh and ceramite to walk the Absolution .

  The captain approached her. He was gigantic. From her perspective, his crescent horn seemed to graze the roof of the corridor. But then something even more immense emerged from the interior of the torpedo. This thing truly did fill the corridor, a behemoth on pillar legs. It was sarcophagus and tank. Three horns were affixed to the upper portion of the shell. Blades had been added to its arms, blades that looked a lot like bones. The organic artefacts were somehow more frightening than the formidable armaments at the end of the arms.

  Sorina looked up at the captain, her gut filling with ice. Another myth had come to the Absolution , more creatures from humanity’s collective nightmares, and she wondered if she had helped summon them. ‘You’ve come to kill us all, haven’t you?’ she whispered.

  The monster looked down at her.

  ‘We received a message from this ship,’ he said. His voice was huge. Though he spoke quietly, the tones rumbled in his chest. There was a hint of a snarl, too, in his sibilance. ‘Did you send it?’ he asked.

  She would not hide. Even now, as she thought that the signal had summoned more of the Emperor’s enemies, something from an even more fearsome hell than the eldar, she would not dissemble. Not in her final moment.

  ‘I did,’ she croaked.

  ‘Good. You will be useful.’

  She blinked. She wasn’t sure how to interpret that statement.

  The captain continued. ‘We saw a xenos raiding ship affixed to this vessel’s superstructure. What do you know of their numbers?’

  Her mind seemed to stutter as she tried to reconcile the monster’s words with his appearance. He wasn’t about to destroy her. ‘Who…’ she managed.

  An expression passed over the captain’s features. Sorina found it hard to read the face of a being so far removed from the human, but it seemed to her that she had just witnessed pity. ‘I am Volos, Captain of the Second Company of the Black Dragons, and we have come to purge this ship of xenos filth.’

  It took another few moments before the woman understood that the Black Dragons had come to save her and her kind, not destroy them.

  ‘I’m sure she would be much more reassured if we were Ultramarines,’ Liscar said over the vox channel.

  Volos shot him a look but said nothing. Liscar was probably right. We are never wanted , he thought, but we are just as necessary . He felt no resentment over the mortal’s fear. The emotion was the natural reaction to all Adeptus Astartes, though the terror he and his brothers inspired was of another kind. It marked the difference between gods and monsters. It had its uses. He had always known this. But only recently had he come to accept the extremes of some of those uses.

  He waited, and when the woman realized he wasn’t going to kill her, she stood. ‘What is your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Regine Sorina, lord,’ she answered.

  Good. She was speaking. She had moved past the shock of the Black Dragons’ arrival.

  ‘Tell me about the enemy,’ he ordered.

  Stumbling through her words, still frightened, she described the situation aboard the Absolution . When she had finished, Volos said, ‘Go to your companions. Tell them to stand ready.’

  ‘Yes, lord. We will follow you.’

  Volos curled a lip as he donned his helmet once more. ‘You won’t find us hard to find.’

  They could have set up an ambush for the eldar. The corridor was barely wide enough for Nithigg to move. It would have restricted the movement of the xenos, diminished their advantages of speed and agility. But the position was too far from the command and control centres of the ship. And an ambush was not what Volos had in mind. It would not be a punishment brutal enough for the invaders.

  The Black Dragons moved sternward, and upwards, heading for the bridge. There were two squads: Ormarr and Pythios. Volos had made the Dragon Claws of Ormarr the core of the new command squad. Such a shift in rank for a tactical squad was a far cry from the orthodoxy of the Codex Astartes. But Second Company’s numbers were badly reduced after the schism triggered by the corrupted Toharan, and the Black Dragons had never been Codex-compliant. There wer
e strategic considerations: the brothers of Squad Ormarr knew each other’s combat rhythms perfectly. It would be foolish to break apart a war machine that powerful. There were other reasons, more intangible, but even more compelling. Toharan’s heresy had begun as an attempt to bring the Black Dragons into compliance with the Codex. He had rejected the mutations of his brothers, condemning the very definition of the Chapter’s identity. So when Volos assumed command of a company battered by treachery, but strengthened in unity by the purge of war, moving the most heavily mutated warriors to its heart was a statement. Second Company blessed its curse with renewed fervour.

  On this mission, Squad Ormarr was joined by Apothecary Urlock, Epistolary Rothnove, and Chaplain Massorus. They had at last emerged from their comas. They were hungry to taste once more the honour of war. They were also showing their support for Volos, and their acceptance of the changed face of the company. Volos was grateful on both accounts.

  The Black Dragons travelled hundreds of metres, climbed dozens of levels, and their advance was uncontested. They crossed the paths of many humans, all clearly continuing a round of assigned duties. It was clear that they were slaves now, not crew. They regarded the Black Dragons with startled mixtures of fear and hope. They rushed to either side of the corridors, parting like wheat in a gale, before the march of the Space Marines. Volos noted the ornamentation on the ship’s walls and ceiling. Friezes stretched the length of the halls and extended up and down levels. They were intricate, looping meditations on pilgrimage. No matter what direction the viewer was heading, the designs were pointing towards the greater light of the Emperor. None of the friezes that Volos saw ended with arrival in His presence. Rather, it was the striving that was celebrated. Or it had been. Most of the friezes were damaged. The desecration was not spiritual in nature. There were no Chaos runes. Their damage was more secular, though no less cruel. It was too extensive to have been perpetrated by the invaders themselves. Volos realized that the inhabitants of the Absolution had been forced to do the blasphemous work themselves. He thought about what that would to the spirit of the slaves. He began to long for the honest brutality of the orks.