by David Guymer
The warrior of the Emperor's Children, Moses did not know, though given his current assignment he realised that he probably should. The warrior was an Adonis of hard muscle and calligraphic tattoos, his cream toga hanging over his cincture to give him a double-layered skirt and a bare chest. His hair was copper-gold, tied in a warrior braid wound several times around his neck. For a warrior of his apparent age, his physique was pristine. There was not a scar or a bionic graft on him. It was as though he had been sculpted from mother-of-pearl.
The Iron Hands legionary that opposed him could not have been more different.
The Avernii Clan veteran was a siege tank, a hulking agglomeration of rods, plates and stupendously enlarged musculature that glistened with oils. His face, ablatively reconstructed and slab-featured, was alight with anticipation.
Veneratii Urien, everyone knew.
Amongst the Vurgaan clan he had been a legend, a Terran, but the fiercest proponent of the clan's ancient credo of efficiency and power. There were plenty among the Clan Fathers who still resented the Avernii Clan for poaching their most celebrated captain. Moses had fought in several skirmishes and one pitched battle over the slight, but held no personal rancour towards Urien. A position with the Avernii Clan's First Order was what any warrior of Urien's status and ambition aspired to. Moses would have done the same. 'Are we wagering?' said Moses.
Vertanus laughed. 'You're one of us now, brother. We wouldn't do that to you.'
'Not so fast,' said Paliolinus. 'We may have just discovered an actual vice in our new brother. This needs to be nurtured and encouraged.' The wing commander's face was alabaster pale and without flaw, but for a tiny shrapnel scar that cleft the top of his cheek like a teardrop. His face was expressive, quick to smile, but there was steel there that only a fool could miss. His eyes, when they set upon a thing, were as piercing and as cold as diamond. 'If Urien triumphs then you can sit in that cockpit until Kama returns with us to the Pride of the Emperor. I promise no one will bother you.'
'And if yours wins?'
Something about that raised chuckles all around.
'Don't you even recognise Captain Akurduana?' Vertanus asked. 'It's not entirely surprising,' Edoran sniffed. 'He's a very arms-length commander.'
Moses frowned and looked again.
The cage was one of the smaller examples of the sparring rings that filled the Practice Hall. Barely big enough for two, it was built for grapples and throws, trials of balance and upper body strength at which the Iron Hands traditionally excelled and for which Veneratii Urien could have been custom-made. He was aware of Akurduana's reputation, but this contest was skewed against him. 'Agreed.'
'It's your coin,' Edoran snorted, turning to watch the fight.
Lord Commander DuCaine pushed through the crowd of eager spectators to thump his fists against the bars and bellowed, 'Fight!'
Urien and Akurduana were already close enough to taste the oils on the other's flesh. At the Lord Commander's shout Urien exploded forward like an armour-plated grox given an electric shock, intending to wrestle his opponent to the ground. Akurduana should have been flattened. Simple as that.
No matter how Moses tweaked his understanding of spatial geometry and bodily mechanics he could not understand how he was not.
Urien's face crashed into the bars. Akurduana was behind him, driving him to his knees with one of his own buried in a little-known pressure point under the oolitic kidney. Urien struggled for a moment, red-faced, but the effort clearly caused him pain. He winced, then finally grunted in surrender.
DuCaine was still getting his breath back.
It had taken about half a second.
'What just happened?' Moses muttered as DuCaine began to thump his hands together and encourage the stunned legionaries to cheer.
Vertanus had the good grace to look guilty about allowing a brother to take the wager, even as he clapped along approvingly. 'Victories to come, brother.'
THREE
Gardinaal was a solar empire of eleven worlds. From the ferocious hot Jupiter of Quintus to the sunless nitrogen glaciers of Undecimus, through several hundred moons and several thousand larger asteroids, the system was densely populated and hyper-industrialised. While the Gardinaal had retained a number of Dark Age technologies that had been lost to the Imperium, and vice versa, its claim to exceptionalism was its incredible population, and the societal structure that allowed it to be sustained. After five thousand years of exploitation, their sole resource was human. The jewel in the crown was Gardinaal Prime, so called for being the first of the Eleven Worlds to have been colonised. Once a paradise in a string of stars known to early wayfarers as Astrid's Necklace, it was home now to a hundred billion immiserated souls.
Having abandoned warp technology during the anarchy of the Age of Strife, the Gardinaal had minimal aspirations beyond absolute dominion over their own stellar imperium. Only once in their long history had they been challenged by an extra-solar power, but the lords of the Gardinaal existed outside of death, or so the statemachine proclaimed, and forgot nothing. Their military was vast, effectively numberless, surpassing even the cumulative might of old Sol at its most warlike peak, before the ascension of the Emperor of Man. In five thousand years they had never known defeat.
As of 869.M30 that claim was dust.
But the Gardinaal had bodies to burn and no compunction about doing so if that was to be the price of victory. And if the Emperor desired the compliance of their world, then he would be made to pay for it in kind.
Fat sparks sprayed from the emergency bulkhead, hanging in null-G as though time had been locally flash-chilled and frozen. A hard smash of metal into metal and the illusion was broken. There was a shriek as a rectangular section came away, capturing the hovering sparks and shunting them down the hallway, only the meagre gravity of the ship's own mass and thin air to slow it before it hit the next bulkhead thirty metres on. The figure that emerged through the breach was indescribable.
He was two and a half metres of ornate ceramic war-plate, his passage through the ruined bulkhead bringing tearing squeals from the remnants of the frame. His helmet was frilled with rivets, and visored as though bearing a huge set of fangs. Eye lenses glowed In the dark, two sharpened triangles of watery gold. He surpassed anything that the curates of the Eugenics Ministry could have imagined by ten thousand years.
The last sparks from the carving of the bulkhead lied around the Immense curvature of his armour. Cobalt blue faded to nightshade as the embers burned out. Forcing the corridor, through more metallic scrapes, to accommodate his inhuman bulk, he brought up a weapon. The gun was no less gigantic. It looked as though it belonged to a mount at the front of a tank rather than the gauntlets of a living being. He aimed down the corridor.
The Imperial should have known better.
The Gardinaal attacked from above.
A torrent of gamma beams bracketed the Imperial in green light. With a shrieking effort the brute got its elbows under him to aim upwards and fire. The weapon roared like a beast in a cage A sustained burst of explosive shells tore into the piping that knotted the ceiling as the prehensile shadow scrambled into the ductwork. The Imperial lowered his weapon, a threatening sound growling from his helmet maw, and dragged himself side-on down the corridor. His armour glowed like a radioactive crystal. Not so much as a scratch.
No sooner had he cleared the bulkhead than a second giant pushed through behind him. He carried a weapon of a different kind. It was baffled and vaned, the muzzle shrouding itself in a heat haze, ribbed hoses of uncertain purpose floating in the null-G. His lenses flickered, strange runes displayed inwards to the giant's eyes. His weapon tracked along the ceiling. Waited. Waited. Pressurised gas vented from the mauled piping. A muffled clank sounded from one of the wall spaces. Like something soft hitting a pipe.
The muzzle of his weapon glowed white. There was no sound, no beam or projectile, but the section of wall he aimed at simply bubbled and dissolved.
Th
e warrior void-caste drifted limply from the crawlspace, metal droplets and bloody smears orbiting the remains of its body.
The lead Imperial sent it floating back with a prod of his heavy gun.
The void-caste was both more and less human than his killers, though it was clear they did not see it that way.
Its body was all muscle, but no bigger than a child's. Its eyes were evolutionary holdovers covered by a black film, its mouth small and ovoid for suckle feeding. Its skin was black, covered with a secreted body plastic to shield against cosmic rays. The coating would have served equally against the lingering dose of its gamma blaster, had it been able to down the armoured Imperial. Most perverse, however, were its limbs. All four terminated in long-fingered hands. The warrior void-caste were the most extreme branch that had emerged from the cultivated phyla of the Gardinaal, but so too was the environment they had been bred to inhabit.
The reversed displays in the lead Imperial's lenses danced, too quickly to be read, as it examined the hanging corpse. Growls of noise emerged from their grilles, but they spoke on a closed network that did not carry beyond the confines of their war-plate.
'Go closer.'
The observing projection obeyed.
'This ship was not made for humans, never mind Legiones Astartes,' the leader complained to the melta-warrior.
'Just keep forward. Amar is adamant that one of their psykers is aboard, and—'
Alerted by something, some phantom noise perhaps, or by an innate sixth sense, the second Imperial snatched up his melta-weapon and aimed it down the corridor.
Sylvyn Dekka's eyes widened as he found himself staring down the hissing bore of the Imperial device. The Imperial looked equally astonished. The old man opened his mouth to scream as…
…his mind snapped back into his body. His thoughts sank. Like light hitting mud. A pressure built in his chest as he felt his spirit shrink, his skin withering, vertebrae fusing and causing his spine to curl, as though his spirit had aged fifty years in a fluttering squeeze of a living heart. He heard his own scream. A ragged thing, quickly wheezing to nothing at all as his body crumpled. Had he been still on Undecimus then he would have folded to his knees and, even on that tiny world's meagre gravity, most likely broken them. As it was, his knees folded in to him and he pitched awkwardly forward. The joints all down his arm popped in protest as he drew it between his face and the incoming metal decking.
As a younger man, he might - if he had spared the thought - have considered null-G a natural equaliser for the elderly and frail.
It was certainly easier to move about on the void-caste frigate than on a planet, but the danger of accidental self-harm on a bulkhead or piece of equipment never went away.
With shaking hands he guided himself back along the decking and into a corner where he could catch his breath in some safety.
His cellmates watched him. There were three of them in the double bunk and the single wall-integrated chair, hair lank and unwashed, kitted in featureless black jumpsuits: a subaltern of the vox caste, a tertius adjutant of the famulus caste, an unranked young woman of the pacifier caste. The state departments of Undecimus had designated them all as 'Expired': old age, old age, and some kind of inflammatory bowel condition. Their return to Gardinaal Prime would see the institutes of Human Resourcing ensure that their stripped flesh and ground bones provided one final service to the state. That he should know so much about his cellmates and not their names did not strike him as odd. Their psychic auras were sterile to him; their faces bore the patient docility of thoroughbreds, but they were afraid. He saw it in the tension with which they gripped the foot of the bunk and the rivet-holds on the bulkhead.
A distant rattle of bolter-fire shredded the empyreal phantom he had set to walking about the ship, and he rubbed at the projected pain in his chest with a shudder. The others murmured fearfully. 'What did you see?' The young pacifier leaned forwards.
Eyes in the dark. Sharpened triangles. Watery gold.
He shivered, and not with the frigate's usual cold. 'Boarders.'
A hard bang against the door brought startled noises from them all.
'High Consul Dekka.' The voice from the other side of the cell door was hollow, blank as a sheet of glass. Nothing at all like the Imperials he had followed. He allowed the scraps of power he had been hoarding to dissipate back into his psyche. His body might have been old, but his mind was strong, and although the abilities of the consular caste were not geared directly towards combat he believed he could disable one Imperial warrior if it came to it. Maybe two. 'The interment manifest lists this as your cell. Were you injured during the attack?'
The locking spirit bleeped and the door irised open.
The man in the corridor was a supercilious-looking official in his late teens, hairless and wan as most of the lower-status castes of Gardinaal were genetically predisposed to be. He was garbed in a mass-printed green jacket and trousers, exactly the same as a billion others like him from Central Processing. The light of a human soul barely penetrated the skin, as if provisioned from the same servo-line as his sanctioned attire. His expression was even, his eyes blank, any recessive alleles of individualism or empathy that had leaked through the generations thoroughly suppressed by conditioning and psychotropic treatments.
The hollowness of his voice, the non-existence of his soul, only served to further upset the loosened ties between Dekka's own soul and his body. He felt himself separate… Eyes in the dark. Sharpened triangles. Watery gold… before pulling himself back together with an effort of will.
'I recognise you,' he said hoarsely, holding onto the cold metal wall behind him as if it were all that kept his mind from fleeing back into the empyrean. 'Tobris Venn. The state attache. You clerked me in when I was brought aboard on Undecimus.'
The junior administrator reacted neither positively nor negatively to Dekka's recognition. He stared through the cell as if Dekka's existence was equally ambiguous. 'You need to come with me, sir.'
'Where?'
'Shortly before our ship attempted to run the Imperial blockade, I transmitted the interment manifest to Human Resourcing.' As protocol dictated. 'I then awaited confirmation while we engaged the hostile battleship.' As only a true slave to routine could. The nameless frigate currently commissioned to transport eight hundred and eleven elderly and infirm Expired was almost two hundred metres in length, protected by ablative hull armour and partial void shields, and boasted an aggressive armament of particle beamers and shield-battering macrobatteries. The greatest void-caste warships could reach double that displacement. The larger Imperial vessels exceeded them by a factor of five. 'After the shields went down and the warrior void-caste were dispatched to repel the intruders, I received priority instructions from the High Lords.' His featureless expression somehow achieved a further slackening. Awe, perhaps? 'They included launch codes for a shuttle pod and an order to return with you immediately to the surface.'
Dekka scratched his bearded cheek. The smell of burnt hair where the expiry 'X' brand had gone in came off under his fingernails. There must be a mistake.'
Venn's unblinking stare conveyed absolutely the vanishing possibility of such an occurrence arising from the High Lords. 'I have received documents granting you a temporary stay of termination, sir. Most of the consular caste perished in the Imperial reprisals.'
Eyes in the dark.
'You mean after our negotiators failed.'
'After our negotiators were slaughtered by the Imperium's so-called envoy, sir, yes.'
So unflinchingly polite, even with an Expired. 'So now I am not such a burden on the state?' Dekka surprised himself with a sardonic chuckle. 'Would you believe, I had hoped my achievements would have been sufficient for interment in the body of a High Lord myself.' He knew, of course, that the clerk would have harboured no such ambition. He was incapable of the dream, even if his caste had been high enough to justify it. 'Instead, my fate is termination. No different from these.' He waved to his cel
lmates.
They gave no reaction. All of their lives, and for the lives of two hundred generations before them, they had known their place.
'Such opportunities are rare,' said Venn, immune to Dekka's bitterness. 'That is the nature of immortal lords.' He stepped back and gestured down the left-hand arm of the corridor. 'If you would follow me, sir.'
Dekka closed his eyes, more than a little tempted to see the High Lords spited by allowing himself to be killed here. But obedience to the state had been bred into the consular gene-line as indelibly as it was in the lesser castes. His had simply retained the freedom of thought to realise it. With a sour taste in the back of his throat, he pushed off against the wall.
The locking spirit issued an aggrieved blurt of code as he approached, transmitting a warning shock to the electro-cue implanted into his branded cheek. Electric current jagged through his jaw and into his shoulders. He gasped in pain and shock, but Venn casually input an override code to quell the door's antipathy towards Dekka's expired status. Easy for him, to be casual about it now.
Dekka's cheek muscle was still twitching furiously as he bumped painfully out of the door and into the bulkhead opposite.
His hands were walking him down towards the deckplates as the hostile echoes of bolter-fire rang through the ductwork concealed behind the bulkhead. His fingertips trembled with it. Eyes. He looked right. The opposite direction to the launch bay. The orbital lighters on a void-caste ship were seldom used. The void-caste rarely left their home ship and never ventured lower than a planetary orbit, while cargo - even human cargo - would conventionally be transferred to dedicated bulk landers for the final descent. As such they were sensor-dark. Only when the proper code incant awakened its spirit core would the shuttles become visible to a standard surveyor sweep. Without physically breaking into the launch bay and seeing one, the Imperials would have no way of knowing they were aboard.
'What about us?' said the pacifier from inside the opened cell. Unlike the other internees, she had been bred to keep her wits together in hazardous situations. Though obviously not to think for herself.