If Holguin had not known it for a human ship, he might have assumed he was looking at the product of greenskin labour.
The sound of flapping feet from within the corridor drew his attention from the portals towards the ranks of armour that stood against the inner bulkhead. A shadow slipped behind the nearest. Holguin felt his mind buzz as he looked at it.
The armour was the dark, brutal green of Caliban’s forests, the plates fashioned with great care and cunning so as to give the appearance of their wearer’s limbs and torso being enfolded by rolled leaves. The suit was a relic, from before the Lion’s unification of the martial orders of Caliban. Holguin could not name the order to which it had once belonged. It had been years before his time, and records of the period were surprisingly thin on the ground.
Ice crept over the curve of the plates, although his auspex alerted him to no sudden drop in temperature.
Without thinking about it, he reached for his pistol.
‘Go back,’ the voice behind the armour said.
V
The Destroyers all recognised that sound. The percussive bang-bang caused by the firing of an Umbra-pattern bolt pistol, followed in split-second succession by the self-ignition of the shell’s rocket propellant. Redloss waited for the third explosion. It thundered out of the gloom half a second after the initial blasts.
‘Gunfire,’ announced Gawain.
‘You think?’ said Melwen.
‘Boarders,’ said Danaeus with grim satisfaction.
Redloss shook his head. If it was a hostile boarding party, then why just one shot? A single squeeze on the trigger of an Umbra could deliver four in under a second, and unless ammunition was low, even against an unarmoured baseline human target a warrior would want to be sure. Redloss would have been sure. He offered up no answers, however. It was not his place to provide them.
He was already running towards the sound.
VI
The Calibanite relic plate exploded.
From the original entry wound in the middle of the plastron, the ornate cuirass petalled outwards, the rerebrace and cuisse that had been fixed in position with pins and wire blowing out towards the four corners of the hall. The last piece to land was the helmet. It struck the ceiling, denting the elaborate bowering, and then came back down, clattering and rolling before bumping to a stop against an oak pilaster.
Holguin lowered his pistol.
He was breathing as though he had just fought a close duel and lost. His secondary heart hammered against his breast.
‘As the forests are green,’ he murmured.
The veteran warriors regarded him, aghast.
‘The Lion will be furious,’ said Samariel flatly, looking at the ruined armour.
Holguin, however, was not looking at the armour.
With the slow departure of the light cast by the burning voidwreck, the shadows cast by the armour displays, the tapestries and the Dark Angels themselves stretched, wheeling across the far wall. All except one. It was small, no larger than a mortal child, swaddled in blackness in the same way that an aspirant to the Legion wore his robes. Holguin knew – without knowing how – that it stared right back at him. He had a sense of rustling leaves, creaking bowers, the rumble of something malignant stalking between the tall, crowding trunks of shadow, and again Holguin felt a chill that his armour’s systems gave no credence to. The dissonance made him shiver.
It looked like…
But it couldn’t be. They had never appeared to him before. And what would they be doing here?
‘Sir?’
‘Watcher…’ he murmured.
‘Are you alright, sir?’
‘I thought… I thought I saw…’
Samariel took him firmly by the pauldron. ‘There have been no reports of boarders anywhere near this section.’
‘What did you see?’ said Valiel.
Holguin blinked. He shook his head to stop it ringing. His armoured boot crunched on a pin. ‘It was nothing, brother,’ he managed to say.
‘But–’
‘The voted-lieutenant has told you that it was nothing,’ grunted Kastael. The paladin gave no indication that he had personally seen or sensed anything untoward. He spoke in defence of his voted-lieutenant simply out of habitual reticence.
‘I am wound up tight, that is all,’ Holguin elaborated. ‘My humours are unbalanced. It is no secret that this is not the war I would have us fighting, but I would still rather be on the bridge or in a boarding tube fighting it than down here. I allowed the shadows to trick me into a glimpse of an enemy. That is all.’
‘Tricked by the shadows,’ Samariel echoed slowly, releasing him. ‘Yes, sir.’
It did not matter whether they believed the lie or not, only that they accepted it as though it were the truth.
‘Eyes open.’ Holguin took a deep breath, injecting his voice with vigour and firmness. ‘We have half the deck to search yet.’
‘Sir.’ Somehow, Samariel managed to freight a simple confirmation with a whole train of anxieties and doubts. ‘If he didn’t know we were here before, then as sure as beasts lurk in the woods he knows now. I don’t think we’re going to find him if he chooses to be hidden.’
‘I will make that decision, brother. I will make it after we have searched.’
Samariel dipped his helmeted head. His mouth grille made a rough noise, as though he had been about to add something but thought better of it, when a heraldic portiere on the far side of the hall was ripped aside.
The Deathwing reacted with speed powered by extreme tension.
Actuated servos whined, boltguns and pistols rattling as Samariel, Valiel, Breunor and Holguin brought weapons to bear. Kastael drew his sword into a ‘fool’ guard, lowering the humming point to the ground and dragging one foot back.
Farith Redloss raised his hands to the array of I Legion guns.
‘Lion’s teeth, brother.’
VII
‘I think we want to take him alive, brother, don’t you?’ Redloss stepped through the portiere, hand still up, toeing aside the ornate Order helmet that lay on the deck as his own Knights followed through and fanned out behind him.
Nobody on either side seemed immediately inclined towards lowering their weapons.
‘Kastael,’ greeted Danaeus, his paired bolt pistols aimed at the paladin’s chest.
‘Danaeus.’ The old paladin offered a slight dip of the head, as though welcoming a promising squire to the tourney.
‘Is that your ugly face under that helmet, Samariel?’ said Gawain.
‘I earned this ugliness in service to the Emperor,’ Samariel retorted cheerfully, belying the deep, grinding modulation of his helm’s augmitter.
‘With weapons drawn,’ said Redloss. ‘In the primarch’s own sanctum, no less.’
‘Pistols and swords,’ Holguin snapped. His words, usually so measured, were unexpectedly short. There was hoarseness to their delivery as well, as though he had been shriving himself, depriving his body even of water. ‘We are in the middle of a void battle, as you should well know. This is precautionary.’ He nodded towards the Dreadwing Destroyers. ‘You look as though you are out to subjugate a small world.’
‘We are hunting a primarch, brother. I would counter that this is what precautionary looks like.’
‘He has not been the same since Chemos,’ muttered Gawain.
‘Since Davin,’ Danaeus corrected him.
‘We all heard what happened to Brother-Redemptor Nemiel,’ Redloss added. ‘For the crime of possessing principles and standing to them, the primarch took his head. I would not want to come across him in such a mood unprepared.’
Holguin laughed. ‘I see now.’ Redloss sensed a kind of despairing mania in him, as if he might almost welcome his brothers’ fire. Holding one hand up, he carefully lowered the other to holster hi
s pistol. ‘Were you hoping to press your case with him alone? Did you fear that he would react poorly to your arguments?’
‘I did not come here to argue anything,’ said Redloss, lowering his voice, speaking as one would to a spooked hound or a madman with a gun. He glanced pointedly to Danaeus and Werrin, and the legionaries reluctantly lowered their weapons. Kastael and Samariel lowered theirs in turn. ‘The primarch and I are in accord. As you should well know. I came only to fetch him for the strategium council, as did you.’
‘Opinions can change when circumstances force change on them,’ Holguin hissed. ‘They must.’
‘I think I understand,’ said Redloss.
‘Speak your meaning plainly, brother. If you have one.’
‘You would ask that of me with a gun aimed at my chest?’
Holguin looked at the Umbra-pattern bolt pistol in his hand as though surprised by it. He transferred it to his left hand and then presented the grip to Samariel. The veteran took it. ‘Speak, then.’
‘The Lion has chosen a course other than Terra,’ said Redloss. ‘It is time for you to accept it.’
Holguin was silent a moment.
‘Honour demands that I cannot,’ he said finally.
‘Will you tell me, then, that you are not here to do exactly as you would accuse me of attempting? You spent too many weeks on Macragge, brother. So noble of theoretical. So clandestine of practical. The Avenging Son would have been proud to call you one of his own.’
‘Insult me thus again,’ Holguin warned. His hand rested upon the grip of the giant executioner’s broadsword that was sheathed across his shoulders. ‘Only do it with the weapon of a Knight in your hands.’
‘It is no insult I give you. It is a reminder of your duty.’
‘I will hear no more. Samariel!’
‘Sir?’
The enormous length of forest-green steel emerged from its sheath on Holguin’s back with a long, drawn-out scrape that was almost a challenge in and of itself. ‘You will be my second. Watch these curs for perfidy as I give my brother a lesson in honour.’
‘In the Emperor’s name,’ swore Danaeus, stepping between the two voted-lieutenants. ‘The wrecks in the void are not yet cold and you would draw steel on Farith, here?’ As if to make his point, another light shield strike to the forward voids – if Redloss judged correctly – caused the chamber’s armour displays to tinkle on their podia. The voted-second glanced pointedly over the shattered pieces of armour that lay strewn across the floor. ‘Must I be the one to ask instead what happened here?’
Holguin’s body language turned suddenly cold, as if a sheet of armourglass had just gone up. He sheathed his sword. Behind him, the legionaries of the Deathwing closed ranks.
‘Nothing happened here.’
VIII
Stenius was in a good mood, not that it showed. The smoked silver of his augmented optics roiled like a storm cloud, returning the flashes and booms as they appeared in the Invincible Reason’s colossal oculus screen. The cortex region that still controlled his smile reflex sent a thin trickle of drool running down his chin.
Grey-brown hunks of planet tumbled and crashed through space.
The debris still occupied a basically spheroid shape, but that was slowly being dispersed, mountainous slabs of crust slamming together, crumbling apart, more massive pieces already feeling the drag of the system star on their orbits. The caustic atmosphere that had once made this world notorious was now the seeding element of a very small, very temporaneous gas cloud, one that Stenius looked forward to watching dissipate at his leisure as the world’s gravitational pull became increasingly fragmented over the next few hours. Naval duels continued to flicker and flare as I Legion attack frigates and fighter-bombers hunted down the clapped-out Skylance gunships and refurbished Destroyers that the Dark Angels had not already obliterated, but next to the act of cosmic annihilation that was their backdrop, every trifling explosion was an inconsequential, almost petty act.
Weird radiative effects – electromagnetic leftovers from the cyclonic warhead that had cracked the planet’s solid core – flickered through the cloud. Coruscating gyres of plasma. Ambient pulses of exoplanetary lightning. Out of a kind of morbid interest, Stenius had ordered ship vox to be opened to all incoming frequencies, and the shrieks and whines of the planet’s final emissions squealed through the bridge’s augmitter systems like steel claws running down the oculus screen. On the fore-station deck beneath him, the bridge crew plugged into their various stations worked in clenched-jawed silence.
‘Barbarus,’ he announced, with just the faint hint of a lisp. ‘You die well for a traitor world.’
Raising a trembling finger, muscle-embedded motor assists growling, he pointed towards a glacially spinning fragment that still bore a resemblance to one of the more recognisable continental plates. It had been described fairly prominently in the records that Stenius had dug out of the archives for analysis over the course of the long voyage from Luth Tyre. It had been, to all obvious intents, the only location of note on the feral world. The site of the Wall of Memory, where the name of every Death Guard slain during the Great Crusade had been carved in memoriam. Stenius felt gratified to have been allowed to see it for himself, if only to make his next task easier. Cued to his every gesture, the viewer placed a hovering green bracket exactly where Stenius had been pointing, isolating the immense fragment and dragging it onto a subscreen. The viewer systems enlarged the object, and Stenius could almost visualise the buildings still dotting the pulverised vista. Villages. Fortresses. Even a road.
‘Gunnery.’
‘Yes, captain.’
‘Anything above a million cubic metres is to be made into rubble. “No stone left standing atop another”,’ he finished, quoting back the Lion’s last command. ‘That piece must be twenty times that.’
‘Confirmed, captain. Targeting.’
‘Coordinate with your counterparts aboard the Silent Kill, the Lady Densenoor and the Last Beast.’
‘Yes, captain. Firing now.’
Stenius watched with something more than professional satisfaction as the intersecting tracers of macro-fire slowly smashed the stubborn planetoid to pieces. It still massed several thousand times the tonnage of the Invincible Reason, but it was eggshell brittle, its cohesion stressed beyond all natural endurance by the cyclonic forces unleashed against its mantle and core, and conventional ordnance was more than adequate to the task now. It was ready to die.
The rock shattered, filling its sub-display with blizzarding pieces of siliceous crust and navigational hazard markers.
‘Hah!’
Stenius brought his hands together in a single, dully metallic clap that had the ratings in the crew pit immediately below the command dais looking up over the rail in surprise.
Unexpected outbursts of joy were hardly what he was best known for.
But he was in a good mood.
This made what they had done to the Shield Worlds look like a slap on the wrist. He wiped the thread of drool from his chin on his finger, remembering the moment, years past, when an exploding console and a freak nerve injury had ended his crusade. The Gordian League had declared for Horus almost as soon as the Dark Angels ships had broken orbit of their worlds. Stenius did not blame them for that. He would have spat on the turned backs of his conquerors in exactly the same way in their place. But that understanding did not equate to forgiveness.
If the Lion sought further targets before turning his great fleet towards Colchis or Cthonia or even the Throneworld itself, then Stenius could oblige him.
He would say this for the Dark Angels – they remembered.
With a magnetic whine the polarity clamps on the bridge doors behind him disengaged. Stenius turned with difficulty, the monolithic blast doors still sliding into the receiving blocks as Redloss, Holguin and two squads of armoured legionary warriors st
rode through, staggering the plate-wire of the ascent ramp with their tread.
At first glance, the two groups of warriors were similarly outfitted and attired. The complicated hierarchy of symbols on their armour, with obtuse and often contingent meanings that could be interpreted only by the initiated, made actual squad designations difficult to define. Even for an officer of Stenius’ powers of observation and experience – most of that admittedly as an officer of a pre-Calibanite Legion – the best marker of differentiation was the weapons at their hips. Those trailing Holguin came with an assortment of pistols and knives. Those strung out behind Redloss boasted more of an arsenal: volkite and flamer weaponry, and even a missile launcher (strapped across the back of young Gawain), on naked display. Stenius gave the inappropriate weapon a hard frown, but Redloss and Gawain simply strode past him as though he were part of the furniture of the bridge, deck plates and weaponry rattling as the rest of the squad followed their lead.
No. Forget that. The best marker of differentiation was the obvious antagonism they shared.
There was something feral about the Destroyers of the Dark Angels. With their helmets off, they looked drawn, almost animalistic, like something that had pulled itself upright and walked out of the Death World forests they called home before anyone had had the chance to interrogate them too closely. Not that they would ever hear such an opinion advanced by Captain Stenius. Holguin’s Knights, on the other hand, thick of muscle and grey of beard, were almost as old as Stenius, a striking contrast in martial bearing and pride.
Not that they would ever hear such an opinion advanced by Captain Stenius either.
‘You made no mention of the fact that Redloss was hunting the Lion as well, brother,’ Holguin murmured, drawing up onto the dais to watch the Dreadbringer depart.
Redloss was already halfway towards the strategium suite that annexed the bridge’s medial tier on its starboard side. Its reinforced hatches were nothing like as tough as the main bridge doors, but they were still as thick as the glacis plate of a Predator tank, enough to take a hit from a multi-melta and still function afterwards. To the credit of the bridge crew, most of them Stenius’ own hand picks, no one looked up as the lieutenant and his entourage stomped along the servitor aisles between them. Transhuman dread, the awe felt by the unaugmented human psyche at the presence of something indefinably altered and other, was a very real physiological phenomenon, one that the Legion’s Apothecaries had gone to great lengths to understand, and one that Stenius had gone to equal extremes to root out of his senior officers.
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