Honourbound - Rachel Harrison

by Warhammer 40K

  He rolls the Fury, and even with his pressure suit compensating, it dizzies him. He tastes blood. The Fury shakes as lance fire from the Sword’s dorsal arrays track them. Toka sees it then, the gap in the Sword’s skin where her bones show through.

  ‘One shot,’ Evris says. ‘Now I see what you mean, Lam.’

  The Fury screams through the Sword’s voids, and into the space between her exposed bones. Automated turrets punch into her hull and clip her wings and knock out the telemetry. Toka tastes blood again as he cracks his head on the airframe, but they are inside. Going too fast to stop. Ironwork zips past.

  ‘Do it,’ he says to Evris.

  ‘Aye.’

  The last of their missiles streak from the Fury into the innards of the Starforged Sword. They fly through the fire of it. Toka’s instruments scream. Explosions trigger and catch and carry through the battleship’s bones. He hears Evris whoop like he always does and he can’t help but do it too. There’s a moment when they break through the fire and the destruction where it is silent save for the Fury’s engines and the hiss of air escaping from Toka’s suit.

  ‘Lam,’ Evris says, over the vox. ‘I’ll see you, alright?’

  Toka nods.

  ‘I’ll see you,’ he says, in his last instant.

  Daven Wyck can’t help closing his eyes in the instant that the assault craft drops from its mag-clamps in the Wrath’s hangar bay and starts to move for the shipyards. It knocks the air right out of his lungs, though not by the force of it. It’s because he feels the same way about the assault craft as he does about troop transports. About all ships. That they are just another kind of tin can, waiting to be torn open by fire. Wyck tries not to think about what’s outside. About lance fire, and venting air. The void-lost dead, and behind them, nothing. So much nothing.

  Wyck’s eyes snap open again as a colossal tremor shakes the assault craft. It creaks and howls around him, and he waits for it to happen, for the craft to tear open and spill the lot of them out into the void to die in the cold and the silence.

  But it doesn’t. Instead, the assault craft rights itself and the lumens flicker back up. Red, like the inside of something living.

  ‘Emperor’s bloody wounds,’ Crys says. ‘Thought that was it, there, sarge.’

  She is seated and harnessed like the rest of them. The rest of his Wyldfolk. Rom Odi’s Hartkin. Lara Koy’s Mistvypers. Hale’s lot. The commissar and Zane. The compartment is all body heat and the smell of cold metal and smoke and sweat. Hale had tried to make Wyck strap himself into a seat too for the launch and the breach. Said it was safer. Wyck wouldn’t do it because he never has. Not since Cawter.

  Not since he watched Keller and the others burn.

  ‘One minute!’ Hale shouts over the racket of the engines and the impacts and everyone praying and muttering. Over Zane, humming her damned atonal songs. Wyck hears everything loud and clear because of the dose he took before they boarded. He took double, because he knew it would be bad, and because of that bolt shell he carries.

  Wyck looks to his Wyldfolk, sitting there with their hands rolled into fists around their harnesses. Their spirits are lit. Their eyes too. Not like his, with violence waiting to be made and the push of stimms. His kin are fighting for the value of duty. For virtue and honour and all those things Wyck has never felt.

  But he’s not going to stop them feeling it. Not when it might be the last time.

  ‘Thirty seconds!’ Hale shouts, and the proximity alarms start to go.

  ‘You go fast, and you don’t look back,’ Wyck shouts to his squad, over the noise of the alarm. ‘Fight the Sighted until they are dead, or you are, but make sure you cut them before you go.’

  There’s a jolt that unsteadies him on his feet. He hears the magclamps fire. They all unclip their harnesses, get to their feet and draw their guns and knives.

  ‘Because we are Wyldfolk,’ Wyck continues. ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘Cuts from us always kill!’ they answer him, as one.

  And then there’s another boom as the breach charges go, blowing them a way into the shipyards. Air rushes into the compartment through the toothed hole it makes, cold and smelling of iron. Wyck sees the dark, strobing innards of the shipyards beyond and hears the chatter of gunfire and the scream of alarms.

  ‘Let’s go!’ Wyck shouts.

  They follow him, first up. First out. Running the edge, like always.

  ‘I knew it,’ Crys says, as they run.

  ‘What?’ Wyck asks.

  ‘That you had a good speech in you somewhere,’ she says, and she laughs. ‘Inspirational words.’

  Wyck doesn’t laugh with her. He can’t find the want to, because they don’t feel like inspirational words to him.

  They feel very much like last words.

  Twenty-one

  On the edge of the After

  Build Basilica Delphi is a colossal chamber built from black iron and pitted steel. Part-built pieces of starships hang overhead, casting long, dark shadows that fall across Severina Raine and the Antari of Grey Company as they make the push across the basilica towards the void-gantries that will lead them to the shipyards’ core. Raine’s boots ring off the grated decking as she runs to meet the enemy past the immobile shapes of lifters and heavy-duty machinery. Beside her, Tyl and Jeth run too. The Duskhounds are like two extra shadows, sticking close by. Raine looks left to see Hale and his command squad. On her right, Koy and her Mistvypers. Ahead, Wyck and his Wyldfolk. The rest of Grey Company are lost to smoke and distance and darkness, but Raine can hear them running and fighting. Las-fire strobes in the half-dark. Every breath Raine takes smells like stagnant water and blood. Like corruption. A constant, thrumming chant echoes through the shipyards’ vox-emitters.

  it says, in an atonal, machine blare.

  The Sighted are everywhere, pushing and pulling like the tide. Most are soldiers clad in blue and grey, with cloaks of mirrors, or feathers pushed under the skin and crystals set into the sockets where their eyes should be. But not all. Through the melee, Raine sees dockworkers and shipwrights too. Adepts and tech-priests. All with their loyalties torn away, and with red-raw fate-marks carved into their skin.

  For things to endure, they must change.

  Serek’s voice echoes in Raine’s ears as she plunges her sword into the chest of one of the Sighted. The traitor is wearing a red uniform that should be patterned with cogwheels and angular, runic text, but every one of those icons has been defaced and oversewn to create new, hateful shapes.

  ‘Only by Nine,’ slurs the Sighted, with blood bubbling over his blue, cracked lips.

  Raine pulls her sword free and he falls, dead.

  ‘Onwards!’ she cries into the vox. ‘In the Emperor’s name!’

  Along the line, Hale’s Grey Company roar a cheer as they break through the Sighted’s lines. The sound echoes around the basilica, right up to the part-built ships overhead. Over four hundred souls, spread out across the vastness of the basilica. Everyone fit enough to fight.

  Everything that Raine has left to her.

  echoes that machine voice.

  Ahead, dozens more of the Sighted flood through the massive door at the far end of the chamber that leads to the void-gantries. The heretics drop mobile cover as their weapons crews set up gun emplacements. Gunfire clatters against the decking and cuts the air by Raine’s head as she ducks behind one of the huge, immobile lifter machines on the deck with the Duskhounds at her side. Jeth keeps firing around the cover as solid rounds ring against the machine like a winter storm. Along the line, Raine can just about see Daven Wyck and his Wyldfolk through the smoke, holed up in the same way. She hears the distinctive, echoing boom of Yulia Crys’ modified grenade launcher firing.

  ‘More are coming, commiss
ar,’ Tyl says. Her voice is calm and steady as she checks her vambrace’s display, despite all of the running and fighting. ‘I’m picking up a lot of movement.’

  Yuri Hale drops into cover beside them with blood welling and soaking through the arm of his fatigues from where one of the enemy rounds caught him. His command squad are with him. He waves Lye away when the medic tries to take a look at the gunshot wound in his arm.

  ‘We have to break through now,’ Hale says. ‘If we let them slow us, we fail. We die. All of us.’

  He looks to Lydia Zane. The psyker is sitting with her back against the machine and her legs drawn up like a sorrowful child. Raine realises that, even now, Zane is barefoot. Her feet are black with blood that only mostly belongs to the enemy. Her face is bloody too. Almost animalistic. Zane hasn’t been the same since the Sanctum, and her time spent facing Cretia Ommatid in a space that only the two psykers could see.

  ‘Make us a path, Zane,’ Hale says.

  Zane blinks, and then looks at him.

  ‘A path,’ she says, absently. ‘A path to truth.’

  Jeth curses loudly and ducks back behind the cover. His carapace armour is chipped and smoking from impacts.

  ‘They are advancing,’ Jeth growls. ‘Whatever you’re going to do, do it now.’

  ‘I did not know then the power of dreams,’ Zane murmurs, as if she has not heard him.

  Raine moves to stand in front of her. ‘Lydia,’ she says.

  Zane’s head snaps up at the mention of her given name. Her lips are parted like an animal breathing under stress, exposing blood-pinked teeth. Bolts start to turn in the machine frame at Zane’s back. Raine keeps her pistol pointed at the deck, ready to raise and fire in an instant if she has to.

  But only if she has to.

  ‘Control,’ Raine says. ‘You are Lydia Zane. Primaris psyker. Graded Epsilon.’

  A thin line of blood runs from Zane’s nose. The psyker touches her hand to her face and then looks down at her bloodied fingertips. She nods, as if in understanding.

  ‘Eleventh Antari Rifles,’ the psyker says.

  Detonated rounds paint the air gold around Lydia Zane as she makes a path to the vaulted doorway, and through the Sighted defending it. The deck creaks under Zane’s feet in the wake of her telekine shield, and her power. Her two birds sit on her shoulders and cry joy as she claps her hands together, and the closest of the Sighted snap and break and turn to meat and bone and nothing more. The enemy start to scream, and then to run, but there is little point in running from gifts like Zane’s. She raises her hand and turns it and tears a hole in the plating of the deck for those who run to fall into. Some she pins with twisted spars of metal. Some she throws against the armourglass viewports. Some she tears limb from limb, and that is easiest of all, because there is little resistance to be found in flesh and bone. Emotions soak into the air, and into her skin. Fear and anger and hatred that crash against her as if she is walking into an ocean tide.

  They only seek to use you until there is nothing left to use.

  Cretia Ommatid’s words echo in Zane’s mind, as they have been doing since they spoke in the Sanctum. Since Ommatid tried to tempt her.

  Think of what you could be.

  ‘No,’ Zane snarls, through her teeth.

  Her concentration falters and a stray round breaches Zane’s kine-shield and clips her thigh, spraying blood. Zane falls to her knees and she does not think, then. She just acts, with her birds crying loudly in her ears and her mind.

  FREE.

  FALL.

  Zane cries out and slams one closed fist onto the floor. A spear of telekinetic force lances out from her, tearing a furrow through the deck, and through the Sighted. There are screams and pops and flashes as guns detonate in hands, and bones break, and dozens of souls are unmade in an instant. Blood-mist hits Lydia Zane’s skin like ocean spray, and all falls finally, blessedly quiet, save for that machine voice coming from the vox-emitters over her head.

  it says.

  As if in answer, Cretia Ommatid’s voice rises up inside Zane’s head again.

  Think of what you could be.

  And Zane kneels there and looks at what she has wrought. At the blood and the mess and the ruin and at her birds, flitting from corpse to corpse.

  The Nine await.

  Ommatid’s voice is a test, just like the night Zane spent alone in a circle of salt under Antar’s dark sky. Just like the commissar’s questions, and the two birds that follow like shadows. She must never stray from the path towards the light. Never place one foot on the spiral.

  ‘I am Lydia Zane,’ she murmurs to herself, over and over. ‘I am Epsilon. I am Antari.’

  And with great effort, she gets back onto her feet.

  On the shipyards’ void-gantries, with the stars hanging all around her, Raine learns exactly why it is that the Sighted call Axhon-Pho That Which Creates.

  The creations the magos sends to kill Raine and Grey Company are part-mechanical horrors. There are dozens of them, some crawling on multi-jointed arms and legs and some running upright, with awkward, juddering spasms of their limbs. Each of Axhon-Pho’s creations are built of dead flesh that clings stubbornly to iron and adamantium and bone. Multi-coloured crystal shards jut from their bodies, and their hands and feet are bladed. Where they should have faces, they just have silvered mirrors set with vox-grilles that broadcast the magos’ ceaseless preaching.

  they blare.

  Raine plants her feet as another of the creations comes for her, its bladed feet clattering against the bloody, oil-fouled decking. There is no cover to speak of on the gantries. No option other than to fight their way through. Around her, Hale’s command squad engage with the creations. The Duskhounds’ hellguns light the gantries with fully-automatic las-fire. Shouts and curses come from Wyck’s Wyldfolk. Everywhere, the clash of blades and the smell of blood.

  ‘No backwards steps,’ Raine cries, as she meets the creation’s blades with her own sabre. ‘Do not falter!’

  Her powered blade severs one of the creation’s four arms at the elbow. It does not recoil, and the blaring of Axhon-Pho’s words continues uninterrupted.

 

  Raine catches a glimpse of herself in the creation’s mirrored face as it lunges for her. Of bruises and cuts and hollow eyes.

  She looks so much like Lucia did, that day in the cell.

  Raine shouts, wordlessly, as she turns aside one of the creation’s grasping, bladed hands with her sabre and fires her bolt pistol point-blank into the creature’s mirrored face. The silvered mask shatters, covering Raine in shards that cut her face, bloodying her further. One of the creation’s remaining bladed arms snags her as it falls twitching onto the deck, cutting Raine deeply across her sword arm. With her arm burning and her fingers trying to go numb, she severs what is left of the creation’s head with her sabre, and it finally shakes itself still.

  But there is no respite.

  Raine gets moving again, firing the last round in her pistol’s magazine at another of the magos’ creations. The bolt-shell’s detonation shatters what passes for its ribcage, but the creation does not stop until Lydia Zane forces it to. The psyker disassembles it violently, shearing joints and pulverising flesh with a clap of her thin, pale hands. Zane’s breathing is rapid and shallow and blood is soaking through her slate-grey robes where she was shot, despite Nuria Lye’s field treatment. Ahead, Cassia Tyl kills another of the creations with precision fire from her hellgun, putting a smoking hole straight through its mirrored mask, even as Jeth is slammed against the armourglass of the gantry wall by a third. The Duskhound yells and punches his combat blade over and over into the back of its neck, as it tries to claw through his carapace plate and his mask. The company vox is loud wit
h chatter.

  ‘They’ll have us for dead! Push through!’

  ‘I need a medicae here!’

  ‘Hartkin, acknowledge. Mistvypers requesting aid!’

  ‘I can’t get to you, Lara.’

  Then there is an agonised shout that Raine catches even over all of that noise.

  ‘Ari!’

  The cry comes from Makar Kayd. Grey’s vox-operator charges with his lasgun raised at the monster that has Ari Rath pinned on the decking, but he is not quick enough to prevent Axhon-Pho’s puppeted creature from opening the banner bearer’s throat with its claws. Raine sees blood mist the air. Hears Hale shout too. Kayd gets knocked onto his back, and the creation rears. Raine runs to intervene.

  And then a massive tremor runs through the void-gantry that nearly knocks Raine from her feet. The overhead lumens cut out, replaced with red emergency lighting. Axhon-Pho’s preaching falters, becoming an enraged, atonal scream. His remaining creations crash to the ground, as if their minds have abandoned them. Tyl and Jeth make sure that they will not wake again with bursts of hellgun fire, while Wyck orders his Wyldfolk to secure this section of the gantry. Raine ejects her pistol’s spent magazine and reloads, ready for the next fight.

  ‘Getting comms, sir,’ Makar Kayd says, to Hale.

  The vox-operator sits himself up, winded and bloody, and Hale takes the handset from him. Raine drops to one knee beside them so she can hear it. Kayd’s eyes stray to Ari Rath’s dead body as he adjusts the vox-set’s dials. He shakes his head even as the connection stops hissing and becomes clear.

  ‘This is Gold, checking in. Auxiliary power is down,’ Karin Sun says.

  There is a pause and another hiss of connection.

  ‘Good work, Kar.’ Devri’s voice over the long-range link is undercut by las-fire and screams, but he still sounds as though he is smiling. ‘You got to blow something up, after all.’

  ‘We’ll see you at the core, Karin,’ Hale says.

  ‘Understood, Yuri,’ Sun says. ‘Though the bloody magos has us locked out of the gantries. We are–’