‘My counsellor told me you wished to speak to me,’ the Khan said, standing before Malcador and folding his arms.
‘Jaghatai,’ said Malcador the Sigillite, right hand of the immortal Emperor. ‘A pity we did not do this earlier. They tell me you will be back in the void within days.’
‘That is what He made me for, is it not?’
‘You could stay longer. Others have. Your brother Vulkan spent many years here, and I came to know him well before he left for Nocturne.’
‘I have already given the order.’
The Sigillite nodded. ‘And that, too, was how we made you.’ He limped towards the primarch, skirting around a long stone sarcophagus and trailing his fingers along the dusty top. Then he drew himself up to his full height, pushed his cowl back from a withered brow and looked at the Khan carefully. ‘I never know what we’ll see when you come back. All of you surprise us.’
‘And yet you still press on.’
‘Of course. Everything rests on you.’
‘He said the same thing.’
Malcador leaned back against the sarcophagus edge, letting his staff rest on the stone. ‘Do you doubt it?’
‘I don’t know. You were strangely careless with your special project.’
‘We could not have expended more care. The power that took you from Terra was beyond imagination.’
The Khan remained static, like one of the age-darkened statues that stalked the shadows of that place. He saw rows of them against the far wall, each cowled and bearing a staff, mirror images of the living fossil that addressed him now.
‘I have conquest in my blood,’ the primarch said. ‘I have always hungered for it. Only now I know that you planted that desire there. You made me as an instrument of your own designs.’
‘We are all instruments.’
‘Except for Him.’
‘Oh, no – very much Him.’ The Sigillite placed his thin hands together. ‘Listen, I understand the problem. You were monarchs of your worlds, and now we ask you to fight for this one. You were never given the tutelage we had planned, and so the wrench is sudden. If we could postpone the Crusade for a hundred years in order to prepare you adequately, we would do so, but we cannot, for we race against the closing door of fate. All must be gathered in. But remember this – you are a son of Terra. You were made here.’
‘I was made on Chogoris.’
The Sigillite smiled. ‘I should put that keening self-pity behind you if you wish to earn the allegiance of your new army.’
The Khan turned on him, unclasping his arms as if he wished to draw his blade. ‘It is all a lie,’ he said fervently. ‘Every part of it. We’ll be burning their temples and executing their priests in return for a million worlds, all as ignorant as beasts. Is that what you wanted?’
‘It is necessary.’
‘We could tell them the truth.’
‘Do not be foolish.’
The Khan’s lips curled in disgust. ‘So much contempt for your own species.’
‘Yes, contempt!’ snapped the Sigillite. ‘If you had seen what I have seen, watched what a human may become when left alone in the dark, you would share it.’ He collected himself. ‘You were lucky, Jaghatai. Your world was no Caliban. We tell you of Old Night and you barely believe us, but that is not how most places were. The lie is noble. It is there to protect, to guard, not to deceive, for they are not ready.’
The Khan turned away, stalking further into the shadows. There were other tombs there, smooth with age, the names on the surfaces impossible to read.
‘I have heard this before,’ the primarch said. ‘There were empires on my home world that offered freedom to their slave castes, but only when they were ready. That moment, strangely enough, never came. In the end they had to take it for themselves, to die for it, and even then there were some who said the day had come too soon.’ He looked back at the Sigillite. ‘The truth will come out. You won’t be able to hold the blindfold in place, and once it slips, the fury of those you deceived will be limitless.’
Malcador nodded. ‘Which is why we rely on you – on your exceptional power, on your tactical genius. It is not enough to conquer the galaxy. You must conquer it swiftly, bring all under the rule of the Throne before the patterns of fate change and we lose this one chance. I tell you no falsehood when I say that this is everything. All depends on this. We have mere decades remaining, just the blink of an eye set against aeons, to accomplish it.’
The Khan smiled cynically. ‘And when all is finished, then we will revisit the lie.’
‘When all is finished.’
The primarch laughed, but there was no mirth in it. He tapped an armoured finger idly on the lip of one of the tombs. ‘I wonder some days why you gave us minds at all. Machines would have given you less grief.’
‘Less grief, surely. Less joy, too.’ Malcador sighed, and wrapped his cloak tighter around his whip-thin body. ‘You have found it hard to understand your Father. You wish Him to be more… intelligible. I understand that. But do not be seduced by the scale of His power – He has sacrificed more than any of us, and He does not use it for Himself. A man may pursue a single goal and become the master of that endeavour, only to find himself weakened in all other pursuits. The Emperor battles daily with forces beyond understanding, yet you expect Him to retain a mortal sympathy.’ The Sigillite shook his head. ‘He walks the paths of eternity. Be thankful He is able to converse with you at all.’
The Khan thought on that, staring pensively at the tomb. ‘And what is gained,’ he said, eventually, ‘if we lose what we are? What victory is that?’
‘The only one possible,’ said Malcador.
‘I cannot believe it.’
‘Then stay. Speak to Him again. Listen to what He has to say.’
The Khan’s eyes never left the tomb. His gaze, sharp as the raptor that had given him his moniker, seemed liable to bore into the granite. A tense silence fell across the chamber, broken only by the dull hum that always came up from the distant foundations, the one that made the earth tremble and the atmosphere feel thicker than soup.
‘I suffocate in this place,’ he said at last. ‘More words won’t change that.’ He looked up. ‘We already have our destination – the world He chose for us. There are enemies I will gladly slay for you. Perhaps, when the hunt is underway and I have prey under my blades, I will see the truth of what you say.’
‘There is no truth out there that cannot be perceived from here,’ warned Malcador.
‘Then I will have to come back,’ said the Khan, already restive, already moving. ‘Some day, when the moment is right. Not before.’
HOADH
M30.884
FOUR
The grey world was on fire, burning from equator to pole, kindled in a chain reaction of exploding gases and whipped up further by the encircling winds. Its orbital zone was a buffeting debris heap, testament to the system-class weapons used to break open the planetary defences. A few strangely ovoid ships still endured, their scorched flanks venting badly, all pursued now by vengeful packs of hunter-killers. Arcs of energy shot through the void, spat from the mouths of battleship lances and buttressed by the solid-round devastation of synchronised nova cannons.
Six separate Imperial Army battle groups were making their final landings. Troop carriers headed down through the inferno, shepherded by flights of atmosphere-capable gunships. Thousands of haulers had already made planetfall, disgorging regimental troops into the filmy miasma of world 90-2-12, otherwise known as Hoadh, otherwise known as the origin world of the xenos race who had taken to calling themselves, either in misplaced blasphemy or poorly aimed mockery, the nephilim.
The Imperial forces deployed were enormous, equipped with every conceivable item of wargear forged in the white heat of humanity’s most obscenely productive era – crawling squadrons of battle tanks, phalanxes of grav-flyers, rank upon rank of mechanised walkers spitting las-fire from heavy cockpit emplacements. Drop-capsules delivered infantr
y squads into a splattered semi-liquid terrain, each soldier equipped with gas masks, lasguns and full environment suits. Lumen beams pierced the gloom at ground level, and thick crawler tracks sucked in the mire, grinding their way through swampy approach lanes towards towering clusters of glistening, vine-straggled praise towers.
Hoadh was a sinkhole for the soul, a sump of despair, an entire planet lost in a dreamy stink of misplaced devotion. The atmosphere was an indeterminate soup of spores and drifting gas plumes, while the terrain was a slough of vegetative mats and boiling stagnant pools. Enormous kelp-like forests swayed amid lazy columns of hazy precipitation, black-leaved against a dull grey bloom of ever-discharging rain clots.
To keep it burning required exceptional effort. Everything was saturated to the core, existing between the solid and the dissolved, and so promethium lines were thrown down in pipes six metres in diameter, the flamers emptied into that maw of dreary slime until even the sap-soaked branches began to crisp.
The forests were smouldering down to the roots now. The entire world had become a furnace through which the vengeful sons and daughters of Terra stalked in lumen-spotted ranks. Tracts of contested territory were blasted with heavy flamers and then scoured with follow-up las-barrages, a bludgeoning tide of flame that boiled off massive thunderheads and turned the atmosphere into a continental maelstrom of driven steam.
And that assault was enough, most of the time. It could do the job; it could hurt those the Imperium had come to purge. Most of the time – as ever, there were redoubts. There were places where the masters of that world, the cetacean-faced xenos who had enslaved and mind-gobbled billions, had chosen to make their last stands. Even as their fleets burned in the void above them and their great hydroponic vats were punctured and drained, the last of the nephilim had grimly retreated to their last city, clustering amid its greasy domes and condensate towers alongside the remnants of once extravagantly plundered slave races.
It had been Horus who had discovered the true nature of this xenotype. For a while, Imperial explorators had taken the nephilim to be a mid-tech-level species with a relatively benign profile, sluggish in their reaction to the expansion of the upstart Terran star empire – not a civilisation worth expending vast amounts of effort to subdue. That, it turned out, was a mistake. The diplomatic embassies sent in those early days were discovered years later, their husked bodies bolted to the interior of the nephilim’s empath chapels. Estimates of the population of enslaved or suborned humans ran into the billions – entire worlds, entire systems, dragged into the horrific embrace of a race so squalid that their only purpose, their only desire and their only industry, was to be adored.
The fanaticism they inspired was strongest in the weak and the exhausted, and so in the turmoil of the Age of Strife the nephilim had prospered, cooing words of soft comfort to the desperate while gently ushering them under the portals of their empath chapels. Here the humans were shackled to psychic manifolds and made suitable for the needle-tipped matrices that would be quietly slipped under their cranial folds, primed to slowly drain the vitality from them. The xenos’ warrior caste would even shed their own skins and drape them over mute slave-troops, augmenting them and mutating them, blurring the lines between species until the oldest and the most corrupt of their servants were hardly human at all, but a gene-spliced and flesh-stretched amalgam of supine domesticity.
To destroy the heart of this faith-generated culture, more strenuous methods were required. The nephilim’s great cathedrals – organic, bulbous and slimy with the long fronds of Hoadh’s foul vegetation – were guarded by the oldest and the mightiest of the xenos warriors, each taller and broader than a Dreadnought walker, armed with flesh-popping sonic weaponry and metamorphic armour hides. They lurched out from the murk, streaked with long trails of steaming moisture, their pulsating skins strobing with watery points of light, their smooth, expressionless faces somehow more nightmarish than if they’d broken into roars or leers.
The ultimate tendril hub rose out of grey-misted jungles, tier upon tier of organic ridges, thrusting into the clouds as high as humanity’s own hive-city spires. Buried within that almighty hulk were the first and the oldest of the praise cathedrals, stained black with the blood of the absorbed, their walls a maze of spines and crusts and seeping moisture vents. The air above them rang with weird sonic reverb, dragged up from the souls of the ecstatic dying and repeated by the eerie screech-organs of their masters.
But this was no longer a war. The real fighting, the only stage of this xenocide that deserved the status of a contest, had ended weeks ago with the breaking of the nephilim fleet and the initial Legion shock-attack landings. This was the final strike, the coup-de-grace, the severing of the enemy’s jugular.
In later centuries, remembrancers would speculate about the details of this campaign and its bloody conclusion, and remain frustrated that so little was known and would ever be known. But that day did enter the annals, with as much accuracy as was ever achieved in those confused, fast-moving times, on the strength of one incontrovertible fact.
When Hoadh died – its jungles burned and its cathedrals broken into slag – it marked the first great victory for the Legion now calling itself the Horde of Jaghatai, but which would thereafter be known to the Imperium by a simpler title, a fused corruption of a Chogorian tribe name and a reference to the distinctive livery that they had worn since their primarch had taken command.
The Star Hunters were falling out of existence, that name becoming a piece of scholarly ephemera that would be forgotten long before the Great Crusade itself was declared formally over. When Hoadh fell in the year 884 of the glorious thirtieth millennium of mankind – so the archivists scratched on their sheets of vellum – it had been comprehensively destroyed by the remoulded and revivified Legion the galaxy was already beginning to refer to, with a moderate degree of wariness and a considerable degree of uncertainty, as the White Scars.
‘Hai Chogoris!’ roared Hasik, driving his Scimitar jetbike several points beyond its design tolerance and into combat.
His squadrons came with him – fifty warriors on jetbikes, sweeping and diving under the hanging vines, their profiles a blur of speed against a steaming backdrop of superheated swamp matter.
Sonic blasts shuddered at them from the walls, crystallising the air and making it punch and wobble. Three riders were caught by the impacts, hurled from their seats in a rain of blasted armour, their jetbikes’ crumpled chassis spiralling over and over before smashing into the ridged flanks of the city walls. The rest whooped and cried out, swerving low and fast, tracing arcs like knife cuts through the air.
Hasik pushed his mount lower, flicking the apex of some grasping xenos plant crown, before boosting into the open. The attack squadron came with him, streaking out towards the eastern walls of the nephilim’s citadel.
At precisely the same moment across fifteen other locations, more squadrons shot from cover and raced into range, strafing the walls from all angles. Dozens of drop pods burst through the roiling cloud cover, each aimed for a strategic position within the tangle of organic xenos architecture below. Pulse-artillery response was drowned out by the combined fusillade from both orbital and atmospheric Legion assets, detonating in a ruthlessly dense carpet of pinpoint explosions that pulverised fixed enemy positions and scrambled the defence comms grid into a perma-hiss of blown static.
Hasik’s unit powered up the incline of a long causeway, terminated by the soaring overhang of a processional gateway and flanked by powerful sonic augmenters. Above them swooped a trio of incoming Stormbirds, laying down an aegis of support fire. Everything was choreographed, backed up, overlaid. An enemy would lock on to a Legion warrior only to find six more targeting signals closing in. The attack was remorseless, overwhelming, sense-shredding – just too fast.
Hasik closed on the gate, laughing hard, and unleashed his own weapon – a heavy bolter protruding from the curved prow of his thundering mount. Over forty identical counterparts
opened up simultaneously, smothering the defensive return fire and drilling into the gateway beyond. The portal splintered, reeled, then exploded into a cloud of flying debris, and the jetbikes blazed through the still-tumbling remnants. Once inside, they roared up through narrow capillary ways, burning and blasting inside a web of grease-streaked buttresses.
The nephilim were individually powerful, but slow to react. Watching them move was like watching a human wade through water, and they struggled to mount a defence against such targeted brutality. Indentured slave-troops, many wearing the epidermis armour of their xenos masters, returned fire from defensive lines, bringing down a few of the jetbikes before being wholly overrun. Flesh-machine fusion constructs, some as big as knight walkers, waded into view, but they were obliterated before getting into fire range.
Over to the north, heavy Legion landers descended, surrounded by flickering las-fire, their energy cannons cycling up for block-scale devastation. Assault tanks were dropped from the claws of Thunderhawk transporters, splashing heavily into the mire and gunning forwards, their secondary weapons already letting loose as their main guns swung ominously towards designated targets.
Always moving, Hasik mouthed, pushing his jetbike so hard it shook from the extreme velocity. He barely noticed the kills his heavy bolter racked up as the eerie alien constructs swayed and smeared around him. The blade moves, the limbs move, the centre of balance moves. Tilt, swing, push harder.
Over on the western rim of the city, a large empath chapel was taken apart by incendiaries, folding in on itself in a rumple of atomised brace beams. Screams reverberated from the exploding maws of the praise cathedrals, ripped from semi-sentient minds as neuro-energy coils were crunched apart. By now the air itself had ignited, the ash blown across helm faceplates and engine intakes combusting in rolling waves. The Legion warriors punched through it, protected from the shaking heat-walls by their superlative armour, their jetbikes threading long spear-lines through the boiling clouds and leaving contrails of living flame behind them.
JAGHATAI KHAN WARHAWK OF CHOGORIS Page 4