‘The one who prophesies his innocence?’
‘Yes. He still maintains his loyalty to the Emperor.’
‘Lies. He is a son of Magnus, a traitor.’
‘It has been months. My testing of his flesh unrelenting. How can you be so certain?’
‘Because I am.’
Zophal studied the pitiless depths of Amit’s eyes and chose his words carefully. ‘The universe is not as simple as it once was, brother.’
‘You think me blind to that?’ Amit swallowed a knot of anger. Had it been anyone but Zophal stood before him, he would have struck them. ‘Even now, amidst this lunacy, some things are still certain. It is blood that binds us and the spilling of it that frees us. Treachery flows in Omari’s veins. He can no more turn from it than we can abandon our own curse. He is a coward and a traitor, and I will kill him last.’
Zophal sighed. ‘And what then will you do when he is dead? When they all are?’
‘They die too easily.’ Amit grinned in an effort to ease the tension but he could not shake the seriousness of the Chaplain’s question. ‘I will find more of them, and I will continue to kill them until there truly are none left.’
‘And then?’
‘Let us worry about that if I still number among the living.’ Amit removed his gauntlet and pressed his hand to the wall panel on his right. The sheet of adamantium hummed softly as its bio-scanner read his genetic imprint. He withdrew his hand as the panel chimed once before sliding away to reveal a thick-set handle. He grasped the bar, feeling a surge of excitement as he twisted it. Unseen gears ground against one another, drawing away the wall section to grant him access to the cell behind.
‘If I am not back in seven minutes, purge the chamber.’
Zophal nodded, summoning the status of the chamber’s failsafe measures onto his helm display. The heavy flamers mounted in the chamber’s four corners were fuelled and primed for firing. On his command, they would dose the chamber in liquid fire, scrubbing it of life and all else. ‘There are only two of them,’ said Zophal, his voice heavy. ‘I will see you in three.’ He disappeared, slipping back into the gloom of the corridor.
Amit stepped to the cell door as the wall shuddered closed behind him. Replacing his gauntlet, he slid free the deadbolts and opened the cell. The beating of his twin hearts seemed to merge to a single, deafening pulse as he entered. Guilliman. Amit’s hearts roared at the thought of the Ultramarines primarch, but Guilliman had not taken everything from him.
Before him, mag-shackled to the wall, were two Space Marines. Traitors, filth-scum captured after the Siege of Terra.
‘Blood Angel,’ the first rasped. ‘I wondered when you would come.’ He spoke with the sibilant consonant sounds of a serpent. His armour was scorched black, scoured of insignia so that only a hint of its purple heraldry remained. His face was narrower than Amit’s – an artist facing a thug.
‘No, son of Fulgrim,’ Amit said closing the door. ‘I am no angel.’
‘You… your soul is as dark as mine, cousin.’
The words were thick on the second’s tongue, his voice subsumed by the guttural snarl that lived in his throat. Dried blood caked his armour, his Chapter symbol, a set of jaws worked into his pauldron, only just visible under the mire.
‘The World Eater is right – there is no place for you in Guilliman’s new age. You will be cast aside. Join us. Let us finish what Horus started.’
‘Perhaps.’ Amit spoke low. Whatever truths lay in the traitor’s words, he would not allow them to cheat him of his focus. ‘I did not come here to contemplate the future. I did not come here as part of Guilliman’s plan.’ Amit depressed a section of his gauntlet, and the restraints locked around the traitors’ wrists and ankles opened, dropping them to the floor. ‘I came here to embrace the now, to answer the call of my father’s blood. I came here to kill you.’
Shipmistress Ronja Nokkan had served the fleets of Baal since before the Great War. Plucked from among the throng of surviving Naval officers, she now stood in command of the battle-barge Victus, flagship of the Flesh Tearers. Yet to those she served, it was more than a mere vessel. It was their home. A space-borne fortress clad in kilometres of layered ceramite and bonded adamantium, it bristled with enough weaponry to conquer a sector. The ship was a spiritual refuge studded with cathedral-like spires that stretched out to bring the Emperor’s word to the heavens. Like the Space Marines who dwelt within its armoured hull, the Victus was both a beacon of hope and a harbinger of doom.
Ronja felt her chest fill with pride as she thought of her charge. She knew that she had not been Lord Amit’s first choice for the posting. Shipmaster Ivar had more experience, and Yelst was said to have been held in high regard by Lord Sanguinius himself.
In this life, only the kill is certain. Ronja smiled as she remembered her mother’s words.
Ivar was dead, immolated when the shuttle transferring him to the Victus lost engine containment. Yelst was gone too. She had taken her own life, unwilling to sully her honour by serving under Amit and his killers.
Ronja was not deaf to the rumours, the hushed mumblings that drifted from the other shipmasters like dark secrets. She served a bastard Chapter, and its master was the maddest of butchers. The nobility of Baal did not follow the Flesh Tearers to battle. Whether such things were true or not mattered little. The Flesh Tearers were Space Marines, warrior gods. It was not her place to judge them, and she would not defy the fates. The winds of chance had carried her through the war and favoured her now with this honour. She would not disappoint either of them.
‘Emperor’s teeth,’ Ronja cursed, forced to grip the armrest of her command throne for balance as the Victus shuddered violently. ‘Surveyor, status?’
‘We’ve struck a warp current head on, mistress. The Geller field is taking a lashing. Possible…’ The surveyor paused as he studied the bank of cogitators chattering around him. ‘Possible weakening in sub-deck one hundred and eighty-three, annex seventeen.’ The surveyor slowed as he spoke, each word quieter than the last, his voice thick with fear.
‘Elaborate.’ Ronja fought to keep her voice level. Warp travel offered a shortcut through the universe but was among the most dangerous things man could attempt, and safe passage was far from assured. Even the great certainties of time and death were undone within the folds of the warp’s tides. It was not a natural realm, if indeed it was a realm at all. There were none who understood its vagaries. To even attempt such an understanding would be to condemn oneself to madness. Some believed it a mirror for all man’s emotions, a maelstrom of passion and violence. Others believed it a place where nightmares were made real. Ronja knew it as the Sea of Souls, a place where the spirits of all raged against eternity. She swallowed hard. The warp was eternity and it was nothingness. The Geller field was all that protected the Victus and those aboard her from the raging energies enveloping them, and from the daemons that dwelt within the warp’s malevolent swell.
‘There was a flickering breach, a puncture in the field for the briefest of instants.’ The surveyor regained his composure.
‘You are certain it is sealed?’
‘Yes, mistress. The field is intact.’
‘Thank the Throne.’ Ronja took a breath, rubbing her thumbs together the way her grandmother had shown her. No matter how small the breach, a single lapse in the field could have doomed them to an eternity of torment. The ship should have been shattered, torn apart as the daemons rushed in to feast on their souls. Nothing but chance and fortune had saved them. ‘Who was in that section?’
‘Checking.’ The surveyor cast his gaze over a series of control panels as the rattling click of the cogitators intensified. ‘A few dozen serfs on sleep rotation, mistress. No essential personnel.’
Steeling herself, Ronja opened a channel to Chaplain Zophal.
‘Report.’ The Chaplain’s voice was a guttural rumble.
Despite herself, Ronja flinched. ‘Forgive the interruption, lord.’ She felt her throat burn dry as she swallowed the urge to beg for forgiveness. ‘The integrity of one of the sub-decks was momentarily compromised. There was–’
Zophal snarled. ‘Is it sealed?’
‘Yes, lord. We–’
‘Send me the deck location. I will ensure none have been tainted.’
‘Should I–’
‘Do nothing.’
Ronja winced at the static in her ear as Zophal cut the comm-feed. She steadied herself and tapped a series of buttons on her console, transferring details of the breach to the Chaplain’s helm. If a single serf had been exposed to the warp, corrupted by its touch, then daemons would be free to walk aboard the ship. Whether the serfs had been exposed or not, she knew they were dead. In this, there was no room for laxity or mercy. Zophal would kill them to be sure. A fact she was glad of.
‘Ensign Mikko.’
‘Yes, mistress?’
‘Inform the Gangmaster that we have a lost a full shift’s complement of labour.’ Ronja knew that there would be no time to rouse and ready a third shift until after they had translated and secured entry back into real space. ‘There will be no rotation for the next cycle. Have him double the stimms and endurance enhancers.’
Mikko nodded and carried out her order.
Ronja knew she was consigning the current work crew of serfs to death. When the stimms wore off, the serfs’ bodies would collapse into shock. They would die in agonised withdrawal.
‘Mistress Nokkan, Navigator Calix has signalled. We are approaching our exit.’
‘Very well. Have all weapon-servitors stand ready. Prepare sensoria for system-wide sweep. I want to know everything worth knowing within five minutes of translation.’
‘Aye, mistress.’
The background thrum of cogitators rose to an industrious clatter as Ronja’s orders were enacted. Below her, the rows of data-servitors, who stood ten abreast, shackled in the shallow trench that flanked both sides of the bridge’s main walkway, began to chatter incessantly, the metal studs of their teeth hammering out code onto bands of filament ribbon spilling from their mouths. Attendant serfs tore off the ribbon at regular intervals and passed it to the cohort of tech-adepts who shared the lower portion of the bridge chamber.
Ronja observed everything.
Sailing in the immaterium was never smooth but this journey had been more tumultuous than most. Even as the blast shields had closed over the occulus, and the engines had built power to translate them into the warp, the void shields had begun flaring, rippling with serpentine energy. The crew thought it to be an ill omen, a sign that the jump was cursed. Ronja had silenced such whispers and put such superstition from her mind. Only a fool worried about that which he could not affect. She had been vigilant and done her duty, and that had been enough. But now, on the brink of translation back into real space, the Victus was at her most vulnerable. A single mistake and the ship would be rent apart by the warring energies of her engines and the warp. Worse, if they rode the wrong current, even clipped it, just for an instant, they would be ripped along its path, tossed across space and time, lost in the truest sense of the word.
Ronja listened to everything. The pulse of the sensorium banks as they built power, the clamour of booted feet striding across the deck, and the metallic thunk of the door behind her as its mag-locks engaged, securing the bridge. She heard it all, everything, and then nothing, silence. She gripped her armrest, knowing the stillness to be a trick of her mind; the calm before the storm. The activity on the bridge reached a crescendo. The light above the occulus shone crimson.
Ronja opened the vox-link to the bridge crew. ‘Brace.’ She tensed.
The deck shuddered beneath her. The screech of ceramite, of a vessel tortured and stretched to the limits of its design, burned in her ears as the Victus tore back into real space.
‘Report.’ She touched her face with the back of her hand, wiping away a drop of blood from her nose, and cast her gaze over the bridge crew.
She knew that each of them experienced the shift in a different way. For her, it was always the same: a thousand children screamed, crying in anguish as fire consumed them. Yet never once had her jaw trembled or her eyes wept. Those who could not defend themselves had no place in the Imperium. Weakness, she had been taught since birth, was a cancer that would see all endeavours undone. The elders of her tribe had ruled by three simple maxims: those who did not hunt, starved; those who could not construct a dwelling, froze; and those who could not fight, died. Ronja felt the warming embrace of reassurance as she remembered the truths she had been raised on.
‘Translation complete. All ship–’ the comms-man began.
‘No! The flesh! The flesh hides the truth!’ One of the junior surveyors interrupted him, shrieking as she clawed at her face, peeling the skin from her cheeks. ‘We must look deeper. We must–’
Ronja drew her pistol and shot the women in the head. The charged round cut a neat hole through the woman’s eye socket, boiled her brain and left her body to slump to the ground.
‘Get her off my bridge,’ Ronja snarled. Weakness – there would be no salvation for the weak.
‘Yes, mistress.’ A hunched Chapter-serf detached himself from one of the bridge’s many alcoves and dragged the corpse from the chamber. Another crawled along behind him, mopping up the trail of blood with the slack of his tunic.
‘All ships accounted for, mistress,’ the comms-man finished his report, as the strike cruisers Shield of Baal and the Bleeding Fist blinked onto the central tactical hololith. They were joined a moment later by their escorts – the Merciless, the Butcher and the Redeemer. The three Gladius-class frigates fired boosters and spread out in standard tactical formation, covering the fleet’s perimeter in a wide sweep.
‘Surveyor, positional report.’ Ronja snapped the command as the Victus’s sensorium reached out to detail their surroundings.
‘All known system maps cross-referenced. Distance from Terra established,’ the surveyor said in clipped idiom, twitching as he processed the raft of data flooding through the data cable welded to the base of his skull. ‘Confirmed. We are in the Zurcon System.’
‘Inhabitants?’ Ronja regarded the hololith as the sector’s seven planets resolved into focus.
‘Three worlds are inhabited.’ The images of the three planets closest to the system’s centre began to pulse as the surveyor relayed the information.
Ronja manipulated the hololith, bringing the planets into sharp relief. ‘Ident-tag them – Primus, Secundus and Tertius.’
‘Aye, mistress…’ The surveyor paused. ‘Warships detected in Primus high orbit.’
‘How many?’ The Zurcon region hadn’t been charted since long before the Great War, and it had been a calculated risk to exit the warp so close to the system’s heart. Ronja had set the sensorium to fire staccato ranging pulses, starting with larger masses and scaling down. Although the information was staged, it came faster and provided a more comprehensive picture than a proximity burst that highlighted near objects and moved outwards.
‘Sixteen vessels in all. Five warships and a shoal of smaller craft.’ One by one, the ships appeared on the hololith. Clusters of information nodes hovered by each image as the Victus’s sensorium began gathering data on their class and armament.
‘Open the occulus.’ At Ronja’s command, the vast blast shield bordering the chamber’s prow edged up into a recess in the ceiling, revealing the metres-thick, reinforced armourglass that allowed them to peer out into the void. Ronja pulled a short-framed monocular from a pouch on her waist and pressed it to her eye. Twisting it clockwise, she felt her face twitch as the device locked to her bionic. She knew of Naval officers who had taken their own lives after their eyes had been replaced with such augmetics. Unable to recognise themselves in the flat grey of
the pupils that stared back at them in the mirror, they had descended into madness, cutting into their own flesh with a cruelty and vigour normally reserved for a foe. Ronja smiled as she looked out into the void, the cogitators in her eyes allowing her to see every particle of space dust. She focused the lens towards Primus and saw the faint flare of engines powering up. ‘Range?’
‘The ships will be in comms range within three minutes. Weapons range in a further seven.’
‘Mistress,’ said another of the surveyors. ‘There are two more vessels moving in from the system’s edge.’
‘Classification?’
‘A pair of light cruisers burning at attack speed.’
‘Hail them.’
‘No response.’
Ronja stared at the blips on the hololith as they closed on the Victus and the Flesh Tearers fleet.
‘Mistress.’ The surveyor turned in his chair to face Ronja, his augmented eyes wide, blinking red in alarm. ‘They are charging weapons.’
‘Which ships?’
‘All of them.’
Ronja looked to the tactical hololith as the ships bordering Primus flickered red. A moment later, an innumerable number of klaxons began wailing as they called the Victus to battle.
They shall know no fear.
The Emperor ordained it, and so it is.
He cast us from iron and muscle, and loosed us upon the stars.
He clad us in armour, and cut weakness from our souls.
He made us angels.
But we are angels born of blood. Anger simmers in our core, a fire kindled within our hearts. It is a beast bred for destruction, nurtured by the blood in our veins. It begs to be unleashed, and threatens to consume us, lest we allow it to burn.
Rage.
It is the cruellest of ironies that the Great War took everything from us but this.
We are burning avatars of death, and we care not who we claim.
Sons of Wrath - Andy Smillie Page 3
