The Solar War

by John French

  Two of Saduran’s squad-brothers reached one of the closing blast doors. They pulled melta charges from their backs, swung them into the ever-narrowing opening at the bottom of the doorway and leapt aside. The charges armed an instant before the descending door met them. Spheres of blinding light screamed into being. The lower section of the door collapsed in a wash of molten metal. Saduran was already running at the breach.

  A pressure wave almost knocked him off his feet as a second assault ram punched through the fortress’ skin. He kept moving forwards.

  Las-fire whipped down the corridor towards him. He could see a barricade slung across the passage, gun barrels jutting from above a slab of plasteel. A cluster of shots hit his left pauldron and forearm. Chunks of ceramite cracked and blew off. He heard shouts as his squad came through the breach behind him. Bolts flew past him and struck the barricade. Mangled Cthonian war cries rose above the sound of gunfire.

  There was no point in pausing to fire back; that would get him killed. He needed to be close enough that they would not be able to bring their guns to bear, close enough that the barricade did not protect them. The spear-strike doctrine, many of the other newborn would have called it, perhaps with a touch of reverence and pride in their words. Saduran could see the similarity, but for him it was nothing to do with the old Legion or aping its traditions. It was simply the best way to win.

  A las-bolt burned through exposed cable on his left thigh. A warning rune pinged in his sight. He felt the servos in his left leg stutter. He was ten paces from the barricade. There were more of his squad behind him. He exploded into the last few strides and leapt. He saw a trooper in a void-sealed dome helm jerk back, gun rising. The eyes behind the view slit were wide.

  Saduran felt time fill the instant, become liquid, become a promise of what was to come. His mind reached back across the short years to running across the chem-crags on the world of his birth, the howls of hunters behind him, the hunger in his stomach and the fear in his chest. That was what the rest of his siblings did not understand. The gang crests and kill marks, the Cthonian war words and titles – all of it was just a false skin over the true gift they had been given.

  He hit the top of the barrier and vaulted down into the space beyond. The nearest trooper turned to fire at him. Saduran fired first. The bolter kicked in his hand. The trooper exploded in a spray of blood and disintegrating armour. Saduran charged down the line of the barricade, bolt-rounds spearing ahead of him. A trooper, braver than the rest, stabbed at him with a chain bayonet. Saduran caught the rifle’s barrel behind the spinning blade and yanked it downwards. The trooper’s arms snapped, and his shriek rose and cut off as Saduran slammed the human into the barricade wall. Blood slicked the floor, gunfire pulsed in the smoke. Saduran felt his beating hearts and the roar of his blood in his ears, a roll of thunder rising from within.

  This was where they were truly reborn, where the skin of their pasts fell away. Not beneath the chirurgeon’s blades or in the gene-changes wrought on their flesh, but here in the heat and stink of battle. Here they were remade.

  An officer came at him out of the smoke, a glowing power sword in her hand. Saduran felt himself smile as lightning sheathed the human’s blade. This was joy, and glory, and life balanced on a razor edge. The officer lunged. He pivoted to the side, switching grip on his gun to fire point-blank into her gut. The bolter clacked empty. The blade stabbed into the air where he had been. She was fast – very fast – and dazzlingly fluid.

  Saduran punched forwards, but the officer’s sword flicked aside. The blade whipped across his forearm. Ceramite parted. Blood poured out, flashing to smoke as it met the blue haze around the cutting edge. Saduran felt the stimms thump into his blood as his physio­logy cut the pain away. He rammed his weight forwards. The officer moved aside, and her sword slashed across the plate under his arm…

  Fresh pain and the reek of burnt meat inside his armour.

  This was the gap between the old and the new. He had been a killer for most of his life, but a warrior of the Legion for only months. He was transhumanly strong and had all the skills that six months of battle hypnosis could give. But he, like his newborn kin, lacked finesse, the honed skill to match their ferocity and strength. This human was just a human, and legionaries should not bleed to the cuts of mortals. He was faster and stronger, but at some level he was still just a youth with the desire to kill, hot-housed into something more than human, but far less than a god.

  He dropped his bolter and pulled the combat blade from his belt. The human officer was coiling back, spinning her blade to cut at the vulnerable join at the back of his leg. He reached for her, the fingers of his left hand open to grasp a limb, his knife coming up in his right hand to slam into her gut. Not fast, and not as elegant, but it would still spill her entrails onto the deck.

  He did not see the warrior in yellow come for him until it was almost too late.

  He caught a blurred reflection in the burnished dome of the officer’s helm and leapt back. That one moment saved his life. A chainsword churned sparks from his pauldron. He turned, catching a glimpse of a warrior in yellow battleplate with a plough-fronted helm. He did not have a chance to react other than to bring the combat knife up to jam the cutting teeth of the chainsword as it ripped up towards his gut. With a scream of shearing metal, the blade ripped from his hand. Adamantine teeth sprayed out as the chain track unwound. The warrior in yellow did not even pause but punched the guard into Saduran’s faceplate. Saduran staggered, hit the barricade wall behind him and cannoned forwards, dipping his shoulder to hit the yellow warrior – but his foe was no new breed. This was a veteran son of Dorn, seasoned both in war and in killing former brothers. The warrior stepped back, lightning-flash fast, brought a pistol up, and fired.

  Saduran fell backwards, pain exploding through him. A second shell exploded in the crater ripped by the first. Blood, black bone and shattered armour sprayed out. He fell, gasping, pain flooding his nerves and blood drowning his breath. The warrior in yellow had shifted his aim to pump shells into Saduran’s brothers as they came at the barricade. The human officer was moving towards Saduran, blade still ready. A ragged clutch of soldiers were at her back, firing. None of them were looking at Saduran. He was dead, a bag of meat in the shape of a legionary thrown aside by the tide of war. His world was a red-smeared blur.

  The officer stepped close to him, put a foot on his ruined chest and brought the point of her sword to his neck. He drew a bloody breath as she tensed to ram the blade tip up under his chin. His hand flashed out. She tried to stab, but his hand was already around her wrist, gripping and crushing. Bones shattered, and he yanked her off her feet. He turned the blade in her hand, breaking fingers like twigs and sawed it into her neck.

  He rose, roaring as the pain tried to pull him down. Blood and fragments of his blasted armour fell from him. The Imperial Fist turned, but too slow and too late. Saduran rammed the human officer’s powerblade up into the legionary’s gut.

  He heard shouts and the shrieking boom of a melta charge blowing a hole in the barricade, but his world was red, and smelled of iron, and the sound of his hearts beating in his chest drowned out the rest.

  Prison ship Aeacus, Uranus high orbit

  Mersadie awoke and came to her feet as the cell flooded with red light. Sirens howled. The floor was shaking. Everything was shaking. Gunfire and ricochets echoed through the cell door. She took a step back.

  The door slammed inwards. She had a second to see a guard in red armour and a silver mask, a gun rising in his hands. The holes in its black barrel loomed wide in her eyes. The deck pitched. Mersadie slammed into a wall as the room turned over. The guard’s gun fired. Shot and sound filled the air. She struck a wall, and felt the air rush from her lungs. The guard tumbled from the door, arms and gun flailing. The room spun over again. Mersadie rose from the wall, floating, scrabbling at air. The guard hit a wall and rebounded. Red pearls of b
lood sprayed out from the bottom edge of his mask. She crashed into him. The gun went off again, and the guard’s gun arm yanked him up with a crack of shattering bone. Shot ricocheted off the floor and walls. Mersadie screamed as she felt something punch into her back. The guard was spinning back, limbs slack, blood seeping from him in spheres. Mersadie was turning over and over, the open door, ceiling and walls flicking past.

  Gravity snapped back into force, and hauled her to the ground. The guard landed on top of her in a tangle of limbs. She gasped. The sirens screamed on, the world red. She tried to shove the guard off her. Muscles wasted by seven years of confinement in small spaces screamed. The guard spasmed. A wet gurgle came from his cracked chrome mask. Mersadie shoved up with all her strength and pitched him onto the floor. She scrabbled to the side. The guard was twitching, retching. She looked at the door, red light flashing beyond. She could hear shouts and screams over the alarms.

  ‘You must reach him,’ Keeler’s voice hissed in her thoughts. She pushed herself up and took a step towards the door.

  ‘Pl…’ the guard wheezed. Mersadie hesitated, then turned. ‘Please…’ he said. She could hear the pain in his voice. She could see a sliver of his face through his broken mask: young, blood running from lips and grey eyes looking back at her. She took a step back towards him. His eye was steady on hers. The gun came up. It was a pistol, the barrel a black circle looking up at her. She had a frozen second to realise that he must have been working it free as she pushed him off. She saw the effort twist his face as he began to pull the trigger. She dived back at the door. A bullet struck the frame. She twisted and scrambled back as another bullet slammed into the wall just above her. She gripped the cell door by its locking handle and yanked it shut. Then she was up and running, bare feet thumping into the grated floor as bullets struck the plasteel behind her.

  She ran past more cells. Some were open. Bodies, red and wet, lay on the floor inside. She heard hands hammering and muffled shouting from others. The floor lurched again. She could see a sealed door across the corridor ahead, yellow and black chevrons painted across it. She was thirty paces from it. Her run faltered.

  The yellow-and-black door slammed open. Mersadie froze. Guards in red-and-black armour with silver masks came through, alarm lights flashing from their visors. Shouts filled the air. She could see a wider space beyond the door, metal, blinking light filling a wide, vaulted junction.

  ‘Help!’ The shout came from beside her. The first guard through the door had a quad-barrelled cannon braced in his arms. Mersadie had a second to see her reflection in the guard’s mask. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to run.

  The space beyond the yellow-and-black door vanished. The shriek of shearing metal tore through the air. The guard with the quad-cannon flew back through the doorway as though yanked by a rope. Mersadie lunged for an open cell to her left. A howling wind poured down the corridor. Her hand caught the edge of a door as the deck pitched down. She cried out as her full body weight wrenched her arm. Debris streamed past her. Where the end of the corridor had been, there was now starlight and flame. For a second she stared down at it, unable to look away.

  She could see the pale blue orb of a planet hanging against a field of stars. Shapes glimmered in the dark, light catching on the hulls and prows of ships, and the towers of void-stations. It was beautiful, a serene and terrifying image. Fire streaked across the view. Explosions burst into being. Lines of flame and energy latticed the void. A piece of debris spun across the view, blocking out the sight of the planet and stars. Dust scattered into the vacuum from the chewed metal.

  No, the thought flashed through Mersadie’s mind. Not dust. Those are people.

  An emergency blast door slammed shut over the breach. The howl of evacuating air stopped. The red alarm lights still flashed, their rhythm stuttering. The sirens had silenced. Ash drifted past Mersadie as she hung, panting, blood draining from the open cell doors in the corridor above to patter on the wall below like rain. Mersadie could suddenly hear her own heaving breaths. Gravity lurched again, and the corridor pitched back to near-true. She half fell to the floor and then pulled herself upright.

  The sudden quiet was somehow worse than the noise it had replaced – as if she had been plunged into water and was waiting for the air in her lungs to run out.

  ‘Help!’ The shout came again, louder now, echoing off the metal surfaces. She looked around. ‘Here! Over here!’

  She saw it then – an eye pressed against an open view hole in a sealed cell door.

  ‘Get me out!’ called the voice.

  She looked away, up at the other end of the locked corridor. Her mind was racing.

  ‘Listen, you have to get me out,’ said the voice, high with panic. ‘This ship is coming apart. Whatever air we have is not going to last.’

  Mersadie looked at the cell door. It was a rust-edged slab of metal. The lock control beside it was a cog-ringed set of slots.

  ‘Find one of the guards,’ called the voice, as though reading her hesitation. ‘There will be the corpse of one of those bastards somewhere. They had key medallions around their necks.’

  Mersadie did not move.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked, meeting the gaze of the eye looking through the view hole.

  ‘Who am I?’ said the voice. ‘I am like you – someone who has spent a long time locked up and doesn’t want to die.’

  Mersadie held the gaze. No matter where she was now, the Nameless Fortress that had been her prison had held people who for one reason or another were too dangerous to set free.

  A shiver ran through the deck. Metal creaked. Mersadie looked up as the sound ran up and down the passage.

  ‘This ship won’t last long,’ called the voice. ‘That explosive decompression meant that it’s already taken a heavy hit or been ripped in two. What’s left of it is going to shear apart.’ Mersadie took a step away from the cell door. ‘I can help get us both out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I know ships. This is a Promitor-class transport. We are in a sub-level two decks down from a hangar bay. I can get us there.’ Another creaking shiver echoed down the passage. ‘Do you want to live or not?’ Mersadie held still for a second, and then she was moving along the tilted corridor, looking in the open cells.

  ‘Quickly, quickly!’ called the voice from behind her.

  There were corpses and bits of corpses in every cell: limbs and bodies piled at the lower edges of the sloping floor. She found the body of a guard wedged in a cell doorway. The heavy hatch had clanged shut like a mouth when the gravity had pitched, mashing the guard against the door frame. She pushed the door wide, and began to feel for the lock medallion around the corpse’s neck. A raw-meat reek was rising in the remaining air. Mersadie tasted bile as her mouth ran with saliva, and fought to keep herself from vomiting. The scars of point-blank shotcannon blasts marked the cell walls, and the body of another prisoner lay sprawled close by.

  She stopped, the facts piling up to conclusions in her mind. The guards had been going down the cells, executing the prisoners when the ship was hit. They had been making sure that no one got out, that no one fell into… enemy hands.

  ‘How long until Horus comes?’

  ‘He is already here.’

  ‘Faster, faster!’ came the voice down the corridor. The walls were creaking. A pipe burst beneath the floor grating. Steam billowed into the corridor. Her hand found the medallion on a plasteel chain, wrenched it free and ran back to the closed cell door. The medallion was slick with blood, the edges toothed like a cog. ‘Come on, come on!’ She slotted the medallion into the lock. It turned. The door released with a thump of bolts and pistons. ‘Yes-yes-yes!’

  A figure came through the door as it hinged wide. He was tall, very tall, and rake-thin, grey-white skin pulled taut across his bones, jumpsuit hanging like a sack from his frame. Mersadie looked up at his face, and froze. A
band of metal circled his skull, riveted in place, holding a thick disc of iron across his forehead.

  ‘You are a Navigator…’ she breathed.

  ‘Well observed,’ he said, glancing around as a fresh tremor shook the deck. The Navigator hissed an expletive and began to run with long, loping strides. Mersadie followed.

  The corridor pitched and twisted, throwing them into a wall as they reached a sealed hatchway barring their path.

  ‘Gravity systems are failing,’ said the Navigator. Mersadie pushed herself up and tugged him back onto his feet. His arm felt almost fragile in her grasp. ‘Structural collapse won’t be far behind.’

  ‘How far to the hangar?’ asked Mersadie. Her head was spinning.

  ‘Ten minutes, maybe,’ said the Navigator, starting off again. ‘If it is there at all.’

  ‘You said–’

  ‘I said that I knew ships. If this death-hulk has a standard layout, and if the decks beneath this one have not been flooded with fire or reduced to slag, then there should be a hoist shaft a few turns beyond this door.’

  Mersadie slotted the key medallion into the hatch lock, and hoped that whatever luck had smiled on her so far would do so again.

  Lights flashed a dim green on the lock console, and the hatch opened a crack, then the green lights faded. Mersadie shoved and felt the power-drained servo hinges give. A narrow gap opened. She squeezed through, the Navigator following.

  Fading yellow emergency lights filled the wide passage beyond. Mersadie could smell smoke and burnt plastek. She moved forwards, matching the Navigator’s loping strides. ‘Of course, I’m presuming that there is nothing that’s going to try to kill us between here and there,’ he said.

  Gunfire laced from the dark. Mersadie ducked against a wall, bracing as a shape scuttled into view, hugging the ground on chromed spider legs, a gun mount on its back. Blasts of las-fire burned from the thing as it came forwards. The Navigator was curled against the passage wall, hands pressed against his ears.