Returning were as tedious as go o'er.'
- attributed to the Nameless Thane of Old Albia
The flagship was trying to kill them. There could be no other explanation.
Blearily, Lotara eyed the canteen that rested upon the arm of her command throne, thirst making her tongue fat and heavy in her mouth. She shook the tiny silver pillbox in her hand absently, and her last few analgesic tabs rattled within it. Her headache was a sharp, grinding reminder that she hadn't taken any liquid in nearly two days.
And, of course, she had nothing to wash the painkillers down.
The Conqueror was surely trying to kill them.
Her ship. Angron's ship.
Angron's prison.
Her first officer circled around behind the raised dais. Where once Ivar Tobin had been a model example of the Legions' naval officer class, now he would regularly pace the deck with the nervous agitation of an addict, his brow dull with dry, cold sweat.
He halted abruptly, covering his earpiece with one hand. 'The door is sealed from the inside, ma'am. They are sending for a cutter. Still no contact with Mistress Andrasta, or her attendants.'
Lotara frowned. Her thoughts continued to drift.
The bridge space felt stiflingly warm, though that was likely just another effect of the dehydration. The crew preferred to keep the lighting low, because the lumen sconces had begun to flicker randomly and buzz like angry hornets, and even the most void-seasoned among them could not last a whole watch without suffering migraines or waking nightmares. Lotara herself had ordered the air cycler vents blocked up, in an effort to keep out the slaughterhouse reek that clung to every fibre of their uniforms. In a space designed for three hundred souls and more, barely sixty had reported for duty that night, and many of them were red-eyed and stripped down to their stained fatigues. A few were sprawled at their posts, sleeping fitfully.
There was little she could do about that, beyond hauling them down to the brig one by one with her own two weary hands, and hammering on the doors of every bunk-room to find suitable replacements. All of her slavers - no, discipline masters, she corrected herself - were engaged elsewhere on the ship. The Conqueror had to keep moving, and her engines were thirstier even than her crew.
Tobin straightened, staring blankly past his commanding officer like a grimy parade-ground recruit. It was his new way of reminding her of her duty, her superior rank, without actually saying a word, and it irritated her immensely.
'Ma'am… You might ask the good captain to intervene,' he offered. 'Send a legionary or two down to the Navigator's chambers, perhaps? We're losing pace with the Trisagion and the rest of the Word Bearers fleet, and Lord Aurelian's patience is not without its limits.' Tobin paused just long enough to make it seem as though he might be waiting for an answer, then addressed the warrior directly. 'My lord, what say you?'
Kharn was the only legionary on the bridge, though that was nothing unusual. He stood, as he so often did, in the open space to the left of the dais, swaying slightly and pressing at his temples with raw knuckles. Lotara knew that his headaches were far more fierce than hers could ever be, worse still when they sailed the tides of the warp as the fleet did now, and nothing whatsoever to do with the amount of water in his bloodstream. She didn't remember him coming through the main doors, but he'd clearly been in the process of shedding his battleplate when the pain had driven him to start roaming the corridors of the flagship once again. The warrior's left arm was bare, and his right gauntlet hung from his belt.
He murmured a reply from between clenched teeth. He did not open his eyes, nor turn to face them, but continued to knead his scalp.
Tobin raised an eyebrow. 'My lord?'
'They called my father the Lord of the Red Sands…' he repeated, more loudly. A spasm flickered in his bicep, the outward sign of some deeper neural twitch.
Lotara glared at him. She attempted to swallow three times before she could actually manage to croak a reply.
'We all did.'
She rarely bothered to address him by name or rank any more. He didn't seem to notice.
'He was the Undefeated,' Kharn continued. 'His triumph rope grew long. He became the Slaughterer of Nations. The Eater of Cities, and then of Worlds, with us at his side. Some even dared to know him as 'the Red Angel'.'
As if in response the ship creaked and juddered. It was like a leviathan stirring in its sleep, drifting on the unseen currents of the aether beyond the shuttered viewports. Lotara rose unsteadily to her feet, sparing a concerned glance for the static-crazed oculus high overhead. She often felt that she did not know whether her once prized vessel was still ev—
Kharn whirled around, catching her in mid-step and making Tobin flinch. His face was contorted almost into the likeness of the Sarum-pattern helm he so favoured.
'Those are not his names!' he hissed, his eyes flashing in the dim light, and she could smell his rancid, unwashed transhuman stink. 'None of them. My father's name is Angron. That is all he has left.'
An awkwardly long moment passed between them. Kharn held the sleeve of Lotara's dress tunic with one increasingly shaky hand, but she kept his gaze. Tobin continued to stare past them both, pretending he couldn't see any of it.
Then the legionary's eyes fell to the Red Hand emblazoned on her chest - the untidy print that he himself had made in honour of her exemplary service, what now felt like a lifetime ago. His resolve seemed to melt away, and he turned his back on her once more.
'You should just drink it,' he muttered. 'You'll hardly even notice the taste after a while.'
She made to smooth out the wrinkles in her uniform, but found that she couldn't see any point. Instead, she picked up the canteen, unscrewed the top, and poured the contents out onto the deck.
'I won't do that, Kharn. You know I won't do that.'
It was blood.
In some grim parody of the ancient Terran faiths, the Conqueror turned every drop of water they could reclaim into thick, sticky, slowly clotting blood.
The warriors of the Legion seemed content to gulp it down when they had no alternative - especially the primarch's Devourers - though it heightened their manias, their rages and rivalries, and led to more deaths than usual in the fighting pits.
But it simply made the human crew sick. Of course it made them sick, even those most keen to impress their legionary masters. It was blood…
Was this what Angron wanted? It was impossible for anyone, even Kharn, to say.
Lotara's gorge rose, and she realised she was becoming dizzy with the effort of standing. She let the canteen slip from her fingers, still gently shaking the tiny pillbox in her other hand, and trying to think of something to say about the separation between men and beasts. But the words simply wouldn't come together in her foggy thoughts.
And that was when the warp rejected them.
Kharn evidently noticed something amiss in the split second before it happened, his head snapping around as he dropped into a reflexive, guarded crouch.
Then Lotara felt it - the dislocating reverse-yawn of an unexpected warp translation, the instant drawn out into eternity but crushed back to an instant against its will, the cold slither of the warp retreating from the hull, Geller fields straining with the almost infinite deceleration between the immaterium and reality…
The deck lurched. Sirens and alarms sounded. Lotara reeled, but kept her footing even in the slick of spilled blood. The older Tobin was not so nimble, and their skulls cracked together as he tripped over the corner of the dais. She fell, bright motes swimming at the corners of her vision, letting out a pained gasp an instant before her shoulder hit the metal-plated floor.
To their credit, and dazed as they were, the helm officers managed to bring the slewing motion of the stricken Conqueror under control as it tumbled back into real space.
His combat reflexes still heightened, Kharn glanced down at her.
He cocked his head. 'What—'
Another vessel, perhaps the escort frigat
e Metzgerei, slammed into the flagship's aft quarter.
The Conqueror howled in pain.
Kharn was hurled from his feet by the impact. Lotara saw him collide head first with the standing crystal-flex pane of a fighter-patrol tactical display, shattering it instantly. Tobin went skidding in the same direction across the deck, and tumbled down into the starboard sensorium bay.
The lumens blinked out across the bridge. The acrid stench of an unseen electrical fire quickly filled the air. Servitors spewed garbled half-words, their machine brains moving a few milliseconds faster than their augmitters could manage. Someone was screaming. A secondary explosion rocked the hull, probably a detonation in one of the lesser magazines.
Decompression warning beacons strobed in the enclosed space. The ship's superstructure groaned as it shrugged off the collision and limped clear of the growing debris field.
Lotara's ears were ringing. She couldn't tell where the deck alarms ended and her tinnitus began but, thankfully enough, it was drowning out the screams. Rolling onto all fours, smearing her uniform red in the process, she managed to scan the space around the command throne.
Her mouth fell open.
It was Kharn. He was on his knees.
He was screaming.
With one hand the captain clutched at the ruin of his face; it was little more than a wet, crimson flap hanging from his left eye socket to the open slash of his mouth. Teeth, gums and cheekbone glinted back from the bloody mess, under the bridge's emergency lighting.
With the other hand, he gripped what was left of Ivar Tobin by the neck.
In his insensible agony, Kharn had torn the man apart.
They called my father the Lord of the Red Sands. For a time, they loved him.
He was the Undefeated. His triumph rope grew long. He became the Slaughterer of Nations. The Eater of Cities, and then of Worlds, with us at his side. Some even dared to know him as 'the Red Angel'…
But those are not his names. None of them. He was little more than a slave who became a butcher, but a butcher who was crowned a primarch, and a primarch who was turned into a monster.
In spite of it all, we loved him too. For a time.
My father's name is Angron. In these increasingly rare moments of clarity, between the blood-rages and the infinities of pain that seem to burn his skull from the inside out, the name of Angron is all that he has left. That and nothing more, for I suspect he no longer recognises the creature he sees reflected in the pools of spilled blood around the creaking shifting throne that we built for him.
We have only his pious, self-righteous brother Lorgar to thank for that.
And one day, we will.
Blood. Drink it down. The taste is…
Once Terra has burned and the Warmaster's claim to the Throne proven just, the XII Legion will festoon the new Imperium with the skulls of Lorgar's sons, the treacherous Word Bearers. We will kill them, maim them, and burn what remains. Perhaps then, our father can find some small measure of peace to carry him through eternity.
Am I like him? Do we walk the same path?
Maybe. I know that I am marked by… something.
Its eye is upon me, the same sleepless and unwavering eye that has watched my father all his life, no doubt. I can feel its malignant glare, burning unseen in the heavens with the intensity of a supernova, the eightfold heat washing through the base of my skull, prickling the flesh between my shoulders whenever I rest, the echoes of its half-remembered name ringing inside of my skull.
It watches everything. It sees all that I am, and everything I can never be.
Khârn. Khârn. Khârn. Betrayed.
Kill them. Maim them.
Would that I were judged for my atrocities. I could answer to those in a heartbeat, and spit upon any who would say that a legionary's rightful role is not that of an attack dog.
Rather, I know that I am to be condemned for whatever vestige of mercy and sane thought I can still muster, when the killing is done and the Butcher's Nails are sated. Such things as 'mercy' and 'sanity' are of no interest to whatever it is that lurks beyond.
And peace for my father's soul is not something that concerns it one bit.
Burn them. Burn them.
The darkness retreats. The brain-fire cools. What—
Blood.
Blood, and pain, and nothing more.
The XII Legion fleet closed around its foundering leader, for the most part. The Conqueror's principal battlegroup had prepared to break from the warp as soon as they detected the fluctuations in her engine patterns - with the exception of the Metzgerei, whose prow was shattered, they made a relatively ordered translation and fell into a standard picket around the Gloriana-class beast. Other groups, those of the Red Hound, the Merciless and the Rohimnal in particular, continued their voyage for an hour or more before realising that anything out of the ordinary had even transpired, and were forced to double back.
Several other ships powered on into the aether, heedlessly. Whether they intended to keep pace with the Word Bearers or had decided to carve out their own destinies elsewhere in Ultima Segmentum, it was impossible to tell.
'Hang the lot of them,' Lotara muttered under her breath, reaching an unmarked hallway junction. 'Let the disobedient curs lose themselves and call it freedom.' She paused to orient herself. The agreed dock was one of three in this low section, and it rarely saw any traffic other than inter-group supply runs. She punched the number she had scribbled on the back of her hand into the keypad beneath a dead manifest screen, then cleared her throat and composed herself as best she could.
Truth be told, it was Lorgar's flight that troubled her more. The Trisagion and the Blessed Lady had not even paused when the Conqueror dropped out of the warp. A single crimson-hulled destroyer, its name purposefully blanked on auspex data returns, emerged only minutes after the collision, circled the picket once with gun ports open, then jumped away again. No vessel of the World Eaters had been able to raise the XVII on any medium- or long-range vox in all the hours since, nor had their astropathic calls received any kind of reply.
It was clear enough that the Word Bearers had deliberately abandoned them.
The heavy pneumatics of the voidlock hatch squealed as it opened before her, to reveal a handful of armsmen from the battle-barge Scathlocke, descending the ramp of their shuttlecraft. She was somewhat relieved to find they looked as disorganised and slovenly as her own crew, but received their half-hearted salutes with as stern a glare as she could manage.
Advancing somewhat cautiously, they moved aside to reveal their charges: a most peculiar specimen of a man, with a gaggle of courtly sycophants fawning about him.
'Shipmistress Sarrin,' he said, ambling forwards with his astrolabe staff. 'You bring none of the Legion to greet us, on board the flagship?'
He was tall and wiry, bedecked in an outrageously long brocaded coat, tailored to make him look taller still. A velvet cap was pulled low over his brow. He stood a moment and peered down his nose at Lotara, sipping from a silver flask while his attendants whispered deviously to one another.
She wondered how long it would be before the contents of that flask, too, would redden.
'That's Flag-Captain Sarrin, good sir,' she replied, clicking her tongue. 'There is another master of this ship. You may have heard of him.'
The man nodded in contrition. 'Forgive me, flag-captain. We mean no disrespect. We are Navis Scion Ramosz, of the House Tevu.'
'What, all four of you?'
Ramosz's lip curled. 'We… We would be most honoured to answer Lord Angron's summons, and offer our services aboard the mighty Conqueror. We are merely surprised that not even any of his centurions deign to present themselves at this momentous occasion. The fickle and unreliable House Andrasta have failed the Twelfth Legion, and the primarch, and the Warmaster's new Imperium, for the final time, and House Tevu will—'
Lotara stepped aside, inviting him onto the ship with little more than a sigh and a shrug.
'A wo
rd of advice, sir,' she said. 'I'd keep all those sorts of thoughts to yourself.'
Somewhat deflated, the Navigator reached the end of the ramp, but halted suddenly as his foot touched the deck beneath it. He shivered, his skin paling, and his attendants pawed at his coat sleeves in concern.
'Oh, this is a strange thing,' he murmured. 'A strange thing indeed.'
'Sir?'
Ramosz gripped his staff tightly. He took another step. 'The Conqueror is… She is not as we remember her. There is… something else… here. We can feel it all around, even in her iron bones. It thirsts for blood, truly, and it yearns… to be… free. And it does not like us.'
He pulled a worn lace handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the sides of his neck.
'No, it does not like us one bit.'
One of the armsmen had lit up a lho-stick in the empty corridor beyond the hatch. Lotara slapped it out of his mouth as she passed.
'Just wait until you meet Kharn,' she called over her shoulder. 'He's going to hate you too.'
Ramosz and his coterie struggled to keep up with her, though the swaggering guards fell into an easy step around them all, cradling their las-carbines with the safeties off. Occasionally, she would see a dejected crewmember or Legion serf steal a look at them from up ahead, before darting back into the shadows. The Conqueror continued to grumble and groan around them - back here, closer to the midship battery sections, it sounded disconcertingly like a vast, empty stomach.
Lotara held out a hand and Ramosz duly supplied her with his flask. She was disappointed not to taste the cool water she so longed for, but some manner of decadent, spiced wine.
For now, at least.
'I'd like to tell you that you will get used to that uneasy feeling you describe,' she sighed. 'But you won't. Take solace from the fact that you'll be somewhat shielded from it, in the Navigator chambers. I gather they are most comfortable.'
They passed a corpse sprawled out on the deck plates. The young man had been dead for some weeks, and his tattered uniform had been stripped of all rank and insignia pins. His sidearm was also missing, and so too were his boots.
Ramosz covered his mouth. His attendants were completely silent for the first time since they had arrived.
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