I remember the Colonel’s words. We can’t save lives. The mission is everything.
He’s already passed me, firing his pistol repeatedly into a blood daemon crouched over the corpse of a hiver. The intervox howls into life, but it’s not the voice of the pilot. Hideous laughter and mind-numbing screeches fill the air, loud enough to stun. I flounder after Schaeffer, giving up the instinct to fight, heading for the small pool of sanctuary around Oahebs.
As I stumble, I catch a glimpse of the weirdboy. Two red eyes glare back at me with raw alien malice.
Oahebs realises what’s happening just about the same time as I do. He makes a lunge for the warphead as a muscular green arm sheathed in crackling energy rips out of the strapping. The fronds of psychic power gutter and die as Oahebs grabs the creature’s arm. The weirdboy yells, a bellow of frustration, and tries to throw Oahebs back.
The Colonel and I reach the ork together, hurling ourselves onto it just as Oahebs loses his grip and tumbles backwards.
For an instant I stare into those red eyes, sparks of green spiralling around them. It washes away the throbbing of the warp, pushing aside the lingering images of the bloody battlefield on the other side of the rift.
Instead I see a vast horde of green-skinned warriors. No, not a horde. An army. This isn’t a massive rabble without thought or purpose, it’s a conquering force advancing with one mind, towering leaders and immense war machines breaking the carpet of alien soldiers. Somehow I know that this is Armageddon. Everything is green, shimmering with the energy of the orks and suddenly Nazrek makes sense.
Armageddon is green. It will always be green.
The connection breaks as Oahebs recovers, throwing himself over the warphead. A clawed fist catches me in the side of the head, clubbing me down to the deck again.
‘Get it into the airlock,’ gasps the Colonel, hitting the activation switch on the bulkhead beside the weirdboy.
I make the mistake of glancing back. The compartment is in total anarchy, a half-real storm of las-fire and bloody-coloured daemons. The fuselage is melting away, showing glimpses of the impossible, eternal battle within the warp.
‘We’re in the rift,’ I shout to the other two, focusing back on the task in hand. ‘We can do this!’
Just then a las-bolt hits the back of Oahebs’ head. Brain matter explodes over us and the warphead. I look on in horror as the null slumps to the floor, blood leaking from the hole in his skull.
Forks of green lightning crawl up the warphead’s arms. With a bestial roar, it tosses the Colonel and me away, tearing out of the last of its bonds. It shudders, sparks leaping from its skin while copper bangles and necklaces boil away to nothing, unable to contain the energy coursing through the ork.
A blood daemon leaps at the warphead, black blade leaving a smoking trail as it cuts towards the ork’s throat.
With a snarl the warphead brings up a clawed hand, smashing the blade aside. Splinters of black scatter into the ceiling from the ruptured blade. Growling, the warphead thrusts its hand into the chest of the daemon, blasting it apart with green flames.
The flames turn to arcs of lightning, leaping from one daemon to the next, the weirdboy lifted from the deck by the power that envelops it. The whole compartment fills with corkscrewing emerald energy, crawling over hull and bulkheads, turning daemons to bloody vapour.
Then it stops.
There’s a few awful, pregnant heartbeats as the energy swirls into the warphead. It glows from within, veins standing out like cords beneath the skin, rivers of green light coursing along them.
Instinct propels me through the gathering halo of green energy, into the airlock beyond the bulkhead. The Colonel glances at me and then follows. I want to take a second to call the others. I see Nazrek, body quivering as the power of the green snakes from it into the warphead. Sister Aladia, blade slicked with daemonblood, turning to look at us.
The warphead vomits out a beam of zigzagging energy, letting loose a concentrated scream of psychic power. The blast rips along the seats, turning them to slag, and punches out the front bulkhead.
For an instant I stand there looking down the length of the drop-ship, out through the devastated remains of the cockpit, into the maw of the rift itself. I hear again the thunder of guns and braying of war-horns.
Decompression rips through the compartment.
Feeling sick, I slam my hand against the airlock activation panel, the door crashing down an instant later. Face pressed to the glass I see the contents of the chamber explode out into the nothingness of the void. Bodies, human and daemon, spinning into each other. Nazrek goes, still shooting, Grot clutching the larger alien’s ankle, mouth in a silent screech. Aladia too, becoming just a silver flash against the whirling red wound in reality.
The warphead follows, arcing power surrounding it as it flies into the break in space like a green rocket. The flares of energy grow larger and brighter, a roiling storm in a matter of seconds. Undulating waves of emerald power wash back over us, becoming visible ripples tearing through reality and unreality. Like a plasma charge they chew along the fuselage, seeming to devour everything in their path.
The green washes over me, bringing a deafening roar of bestial defiance that throws me across the airlock. Everything feels like it is unmade, every piece of me coming apart in the fury of a heartbeat that never ends.
Epilogue
Reality returns. Nothingness is preferable to the agony that burns through my head for an impossibly long moment.
My senses stop spinning out of control, reassembling the world around me like a static-filled hololithic display gaining focus. My ears won’t stop hissing and my skin feels like it wants to crawl off somewhere dark to die, stretching away from the flesh beneath.
‘Frag me, I’m alive,’ I whisper, trying to absorb the coolness of the metal under my hands, willing it to spread to the inferno inside my gut and lungs.
‘We both are.’
I groan and fall to my back at the sound of the Colonel’s voice. Prising my eyes open with a force of will that could have lifted a Battle Titan, I see him slumped against the wall of the airlock. There’s dried blood under his eyes, nose and mouth. I figure I’m the same by his look of concern.
‘I really thought this would be the last time,’ he says, inspecting a shaking hand as he lifts it from his lap. It’s like he’s looking at something he doesn’t recognise.
Through the thick armourglass of the door window I can see a little of the ship. Against the harsh void the contorted hull spirals outwards, as though the fuselage has been flayed open by some obscenely massive whip. The surface of the metal is whorled with indentations that look like they are melted into its material, reflecting the erratic starlight. Blood smears decorate what remains of the mangled ceiling.
Inside, the airlock seems untouched; though the walls look a little twisted, the doors are intact.
We spend a few minutes in silence, just drifting across the void. Through the outer door I can see nothing but stars.
A shadow eclipses the light of Armageddon’s star, plunging us into a gloom, the internal lumens a dull orange. A clang echoes through the ship, vibrating along the walls and floor. With moans and grimaces, we both push ourselves up, drawing weapons as we expect the worst. Another bang reverberates through the airlock, this time more localised, from the exterior door.
The panel next to it springs into life, digits scrolling across its screen as someone enters a code from outside.
The door hisses up into its recess to reveal three armoured figures. Space Marines. A lack of spikes and skulls tells me they are probably loyal to the Emperor, but in the brightness of their suit lamps it’s hard to make out a colour. Then the lights dim, revealing dark green war-plate and lizard-scale loincloths.
‘Afahiva?’ I say, unable to believe it.
The Space Marine Librarian steps
into the airlock and removes his helm. His face looks more lined than I remember, and metal studs hold a plate in place on the side of his skull.
‘I thought you weren’t coming?’ I say.
‘We did not,’ the Salamanders Librarian replies, looking from me to the Colonel and back again with something akin to amazement.
‘Did we succeed?’ the Colonel asks sharply. ‘The ritual, did the World Eaters finish it?’
‘They did not,’ Afahiva tells us with a smile. ‘Whether your efforts or ours, I could not say.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘How can you have finished your attacks, we can’t have parted company more than half an hour ago?’
His expression turns sombre.
‘The World Eaters attack was just the beginning of Armageddon’s fresh woes. A horde of the blood-made overran much of the world. We had to leave – it was impossible to hold it any longer. Our deaths would have been pointless. Now we have returned with a miracle to reclaim this world. Our warp jump must have pulled you back into real space. I have never heard of anything like it.’
‘A miracle,’ mutters Schaeffer. ‘Another damn miracle.’
‘You’re not making sense,’ I say, thinking perhaps the after-effects of my exploits are even more serious. It sounds like he’s talking as though everything is in the past.
‘What happened to us?’ the Colonel says slowly. ‘How long were we in the warp?’
My gut turns to ice as he asks the question. I’d assumed that since we’d survived we had just been dumped back into real space. The temporal dilation effect of the warp hadn’t even occurred to me. Hours could have passed on the surface below while we entered the outskirts of the rift.
‘You know well that time does not work that simply, Colonel Schaeffer.’ Afahiva looks at us again and strokes his chin. ‘A whole generation has been born and died in the time since you set off on your insane mission.’
‘Fifty years…’ mutters the Colonel.
‘Longer, most likely,’ says the Librarian.
One of the other Salamanders turns his head to Afahiva, bolter raised towards us, speaking across their vox-link. The Librarian’s eyes move from me to the Colonel slowly, regarding us with some care. He gives the other Space Marine a nod and steps towards us, staff tip dipping to point in our direction.
‘Though you have not felt it, you have spent a long time in the warp, my companions of old,’ Afahiva says heavily. The lizard skull on his staff gleams with psychic power, entrancing as it swirls blue and white across my vision. ‘There is every chance such exposure has corrupted you. Perhaps you have survived because of some infernal bargain made with the powers of the warp.’
The other Space Marine clearly addresses him again, as Afahiva frowns, shaking his head.
‘That is not our way, brother,’ Afahiva replies, returning his attention to us. ‘You have seen that which is not allowed to be seen. You have gazed upon the works and servants of Chaos.’
The word is unfamiliar to me but it sends a shudder of apprehension up my spine all the same.
‘The wasters had a story,’ I say. ‘I think the Inquisition wiped out all record of the daemons coming to Armageddon before.’
‘That is very likely,’ says Afahiva. He darts a look of reproach at his companion. ‘But we are not inquisitors. We do not kill out of hand those that have had the misfortune of exposure to the worst foe.’
He takes a step closer before I can breathe a sigh of relief, the nimbus of the staff enveloping my head. I feel needles pushing down into my thoughts, peeling them apart for examination. It lasts just a few seconds but sends me falling to my knees, vision spinning, ears ringing. The Colonel suffers similar examination and collapses next to me.
‘No sign of taint at all,’ says Afahiva with some disbelief. His staff dims as he draws it back to his side.
I pull myself upright. The Colonel stands next to me, hand raised to his temple, one eye still closed.
‘Why are you here?’ the Colonel asks.
‘The forces of darkness have torn apart the Imperium with a warp storm so vast it splits the galaxy. Many worlds are dead, others lost beyond the curtain of the Cicatrix Maledictum. The realms of the Emperor stand upon the brink of annihilation and we have returned to Armageddon with the primarch to do what we could not do before.’
‘Primarch?’ I mutter. With all the recent talk of saints and warp powers, I shouldn’t be surprised at the mention of one of the Emperor’s sons, the last of whom was lost to the Imperium thousands of years ago. ‘There’s a primarch?’
It’s a lot to take in, and I stand there swaying for a while just trying to keep upright. The Colonel clears his throat and wipes blood from his face with his fingertips. He looks at the red for a moment, and then at me.
‘That sounds very bad, Librarian Afahiva,’ he says. ‘Very bad indeed.’
My thoughts come back together from their various confusing journeys, forming a concerted idea in my head. I meet the Colonel’s gaze.
‘Sounds to me like the Last Chancers are needed more than ever.’
About the Author
Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novels The First Wall, Deliverance Lost, Angels of Caliban and Corax, as well as the novella The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs, and several audio dramas. He has written many novels for Warhammer 40,000, including Ashes of Prospero, Imperator: Wrath of the Omnissiah and the Rise of the Ynnari novels Ghost Warrior and Wild Rider. He also wrote the Path of the Eldar and Legacy of Caliban trilogies, and two volumes in The Beast Arises series. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Warhammer Chronicles omnibus The Sundering, and recently penned the Age of Sigmar novel The Red Feast. In 2017, Gav won the David Gemmell Legend Award for his Age of Sigmar novel Warbeast. He lives and works in Nottingham.
An extract from Fifteen Hours by Mitchel Scanlon,
from the Warhammer 40,000 anthology Shield of The Emperor.
The sun was setting, its slow descent reddening the vast reaches of the westward sky and bathing the endless wheat fields below it in shades of gold and amber as they stirred gently in the evening breeze. In his seventeen years of life to date, Arvin Larn had seen perhaps a thousand such sunsets, there was something about the beauty of this one that gave him pause. Enraptured, his chores for the moment forgotten, for the first time since his childhood he simply stood and watched the setting of the sun. Stood there, with the world still and peaceful all about him, gazing toward the gathering fall of night as he felt a nameless emotion rising deep within his heart.
There will be other sunsets, he thought to himself. Other suns, though none of them will mean as much to me as this one does, here and now. Nothing could mean as much as this moment does, standing here among these wheat fields, watching the last sunset I will ever see at home.
Home. The mere thought of the word was enough to make him turn his head and look over his shoulder across the swaying rows of ripening grain toward the small collection of farm buildings on the other side of the field behind him. He saw the old barn with its sloping, wood-shingled roof. He saw the round tower of the grain silo; the ginny-hen coops he had helped build with his father; the small stock pen where they kept the draft horses and a herd of half-a-dozen alpacas.
Most of all, he saw the farmhouse where he had been born and raised. Two-storeyed, with a low wooden porch out front and the shutters on the windows left open to let in the last of the light. Given the unchanging routines of his family’s existence, Larn did not need to see inside to know what was happening within. His mother would be in the kitchen cooking the evening meal, his sisters helping her set the table, his father in the cellar workshop with his tools. Then, just as they did every night, once their chores were done the family would sit down at the table together and eat. Tomorrow night they would do
the same again, the pattern of their lives repeating endlessly day after day, varying only with the changing of the seasons.
It was a pattern that had endured here for as long as anyone could remember. A pattern that would continue so long as there was anyone left to farm these lands. Though, come tomorrow night at least, there would be one small difference.
Come tomorrow, he would no longer be here to see it.
Sighing, Larn returned to his work, turning once more to the task of trying to repair the ancient rust-pitted irrigation pump in front of him. Before the sunset had distracted him he had removed the outer access panel to reveal the inner workings of the pump’s motor. Now, in the fading light of twilight, he removed the motor’s burnt-out starter and replaced it with a new one, mindful to say a prayer to the machine spirit inside it as he tightened and re-checked the connections.
Taking a spouted canister from beside the foot of the pump he dribbled a few drops of unguent from it into the workings. Then, satisfied everything was in order, he reached out for the large lever at the side and worked it slowly up and down a dozen times to prime the pump before pressing the ignition stud to start the motor. Abruptly, the pump shuddered into noisy life, the motor whining as it strained to pull water up from aquifers lying deep below the ground. For a moment, Larn congratulated himself on a job well done. Until, just as the first few muddy drops of water emerged from the mouth of the pump to stain the dry earth of the irrigation trench before it, the motor coughed and died.
Armageddon Saint - Gav Thorpe Page 27