Prospero Burns

by Dan Abnett

  ‘I had the honour of rationalising the invasion scheme on behalf of the Expedition Commander,’ said the khedive.

  Ogvai nodded. He looked at the Jaggedpanzor officer.

  ‘Can you kill a man with a rifle?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said the man.

  ‘Can you kill a man with a spade?’ Ogvai asked.

  The man frowned.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  Ogvai looked at the G9K man.

  ‘You. Can you dig a hole with a spade?’

  ‘Of course!’ the man answered.

  ‘Can you dig a hole with a rifle?’

  The man didn’t reply.

  ‘You’ve got to use the right tool for the right job,’ said Ogvai. ‘You’ve got a big, well-supported army, and a world to take. It doesn’t automatically follow that throwing the former at the latter will get you what you want.’

  Ogvai looked over at Bear.

  ‘Like you wouldn’t try to hunt an urdarkottur with an axe, eh, Bear?’

  Bear laughed a wet leopard-growl.

  ‘Hjolda, no! You’d need a long-tooth spear to get through the fur.’

  Ogvai looked at the Army commanders.

  ‘The right tool for the job, see?’

  ‘And are you the right tool?’ the khedive asked.

  Hawser heard the Jaggedpanzor officer gasp and recoil slightly.

  ‘Don’t push it,’ Ogvai said to the hologram. ‘I’m trying to help you save a little face here. It’s you the fleet commander is going to drag over the coals if this situation doesn’t start to improve.’

  ‘We are very grateful for any advice the Astartes can offer,’ the field marshal carrying the hololithic plate suddenly said, holding the platter to one side in case his distant, holoform-represented master said anything else provocative.

  ‘That’s why we sent the request to you,’ said the G9K man.

  Ogvai nodded.

  ‘Well, we all serve the great Emperor of Terra, don’t we?’ he said, flashing a smile that showed teeth. ‘We all fight on the same side for the same goals. He made the Wolves of Fenris to break the foes that couldn’t otherwise be broken, so you don’t have to ask twice, or even that politely.’

  Ogvai looked at the projected, slightly shimmering face of the khedive.

  ‘Though a little basic respect is always good,’ he said. ‘I want to be clear, mind. If you want us to do this, don’t get in the way. Go back to your superiors and make sure they send official communiqués to the Commander of the Expedition Fleet that my Astartes have been given theatre control to end this war. I’m not moving until I get that confirmed.’

  Why did he want me to see that, Hawser wondered? Does he want me to be impressed? Is that it? He wants me to see him intimidate and bully senior and serious Crusade commanders. And he wants them to see he can do it stripped to the waist like he’s relaxing.

  The meeting began to disperse. Ogvai wandered towards Bear and Hawser.

  ‘You see?’ he asked, in Juvjk.

  ‘See what?’ Hawser replied.

  ‘What I brought you here to see,’ snapped Bear.

  ‘That everyone fears you?’ asked Hawser.

  Ogvai grinned.

  ‘That, yes. But also that I abide by the codes of war. We abide by the codes of war. The Vlka Fenryka abide by the codes of rule.’

  ‘Why is it important to you that I understand that?’

  ‘The Sixth Legion Astartes has a reputation,’ said Bear.

  ‘All the Legions Astartes have reputations,’ replied Hawser.

  ‘Not like ours,’ said Ogvai. ‘We are known for our ferocity. We are thought to be feral and undisciplined. Even brother Legions consider us to be wild and bestial.’

  ‘And you’re not?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘If we need to be,’ said Ogvai. ‘But if that was our natural state, we’d all be dead by now.’

  He leaned down towards Hawser like a parent addressing a child.

  ‘It takes a vast amount of self control to be this dangerous,’ he said.

  Hawser requested permission to stay in the Army encampment for an hour or two more, until it was time to depart. Ogvai had already wandered off. Bear gave Hawser a small homer wand and told him to return to the dropsite the moment it chimed.

  It had been a long time since Hawser had been around regular humans, a lifetime in which he had been reborn as something that was not entirely human any more. After waking, he’d lived in the fastness of the Fang with the Rout for the best part of a great year, acclimatising, learning their customs, learning their stories, learning his way around the gloomy vaults of the Aett.

  In all that time, three things had been kept from him. The first was the person of the Wolf King. Hawser didn’t even know if the Sixth Primarch was actually on Fenris during that period. He doubted it. The Wolf King was more likely upp, leading companies in the service of the Emperor. Hawser reconciled himself to the fact that Skarssen and Ogvai would be the most senior Wolves he would have access to.

  The second thing was a secret, something about Hawser himself. It was hard to say how Hawser knew this, but he did. It was a gut response, an instinct. Wolves often described to him particular moments in combat in such terms: visceral stimuli felt in their living bowels that made the split-second difference between living and dying. They always sounded proud of being sensitive to them. Hawser flattered himself that his immersion in their society was teaching him to recognise the same trick.

  If it was, then it was telling him something. The Astartes and their thralls were withholding some details from him, one thing in particular. It was an intensely subtle thing. There were no crass signs like conversations abruptly halting when he entered rooms, or sentences suddenly trailing off when the speaker thought better of them.

  The third thing was Imperial human company.

  Towards the end of his first great year, Dekk Company returned to the Aett from a long tour of service in the Second Kobolt War, and Tra found itself rotated into the line, with instructions to shadow and support the 40th Expedition Fleet in the Gogmagog Cluster.

  There never seemed any question that Hawser, as skjald, would go with them. He was part of their portage, part of company support, along with the thralls, the armourers, the pilots, the servitors, the musicians, the victuallers and the butchers.

  They embarked onto Nidhoggur, one of the grim, comfortless warships that served the Sixth Legion, and made the translation to the immaterium with a flotilla of service tenders in support. Nine weeks later, at a mandeville point shy of Gogmagog Beta, they retranslated and made contact with the 40th Expedition Fleet, which was, by then, pressing fruitlessly into Olamic Quietude territory.

  ‘What sort of thing are you?’

  Hawser looked up from the strategium desk and found he was being addressed by the G9K Division Kill combat master who had been in conference with Ogvai.

  ‘Do you have clearance to be here?’ the man asked, clearly emboldened now that the brute Astartes had gone.

  ‘You know I do,’ Hawser replied with a confidence that surprised even him. The man was prepared to argue the toss, so Hawser brushed back his hair, which had grown long during the great year spent at the Aett, and properly revealed his gold and black-pinned eye.

  ‘I am a watcher, chosen by the favour of the Sixth Legion Astartes,’ said Hawser.

  The combat master’s expression registered distaste.

  ‘But you’re human?’

  ‘Generally speaking.’

  ‘How can you live with those beasts?’

  ‘Well, I watch my tongue, for a start. What’s your name?’

  ‘Pawel Korine, combat master first class.’

  ‘I get the distinct impression that no one here is comfortable having the Wolves as allies.’

  Korine studied Hawser uncertainly.

  ‘I’ll watch my tongue, I think,’ he said. ‘I don’t want them looking at me through your eyes and deciding I need to be taught a lesson in obed
ience.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Hawser smiled. ‘I can be discreet and selective. I’d like to know what you think.’

  ‘So you’re some kind of… what? Chronicler? Remembrancer?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Hawser. ‘I make accounts.’

  Korine sighed. He was a heavy-set man with Prussian ethnic traits, and he carried himself with the manner of a career soldier. G9K had a considerable reputation as a front-line force. It famously maintained an archaic performance-based pay and advancement model that was said to have its origins in the prediluvian traditions of mercantile-sponsored mercenaries. For Korine to have achieved the post of combat master first class, he had certainly seen some considerable active service.

  ‘Tell me what you meant,’ said Hawser.

  Korine shrugged.

  ‘I’ve witnessed plenty,’ he said. ‘I know, I know, that old soldier routine. But trust me. Thirty-seven years non-adjusted, that’s what I’ve spent in this Crusade. Thirty-seven years, eight campaigns. I know what ugly looks like. I’ve seen Astartes fight four times. Every time, it’s scared me.’

  ‘They’re designed to be scary. They wouldn’t be effective if they weren’t.’

  Korine didn’t look especially convinced.

  ‘Well, that’s a whole different issue,’ he replied. ‘I say if man’s going to take back this great Imperium, he ought to do it by the sweat of his brow and the strength of his arm, and not build damned supermen to do the work for him.’

  ‘I’ve heard that line of argument before. It has some merit. But we couldn’t even unify Terra without the Astartes to—’

  ‘Yes, yes. And what will we do when the work is done?’ Korine asked. ‘When the Crusade is over, what will we do with the almighty Space Marines? What do you do with something that can only ever be a weapon when the war is over?’

  ‘Maybe there will always be war,’ said Hawser.

  Korine crinkled his thin lips distastefully.

  ‘Then we really are all wasting our lives,’ he replied.

  His wrist-mounted communicator, thickly cushioned in black rubber, beeped, and he checked the display.

  ‘Six hour evacuation has just been posted,’ said Korine. ‘I have to see what’s going on. You can walk with me if you wish.’

  They went out, back into the open and the roasting sunlight. Hawser felt the artificial atmosphere sleeve pop around him and replaced his rebreather. Activity levels in the camp had risen. Out in the rainbowed band of vapour beyond the camp edge, lifter craft were queuing out across the ice desert in a wavering, hovering line as they waited their turn to swing in and load up. The distant ones crinkled in an eerie heat-haze.

  ‘You don’t approve of Astartes then, combat master?’ Hawser asked as they strode through the camp.

  ‘Not at all. Extraordinary things. Like I said, I’ve seen them fight four times.’

  They entered the combat master’s command post, a large enviro-tent where dozens of G9K officers and technicians were already dismantling the site for withdrawal. Korine went to a small desk and began to sort through his personal equipment.

  ‘The Death Guard, once,’ he said, holding up a finger to begin a tally. ‘Murderous efficiency with such small numbers. Blood Angels.’ Another raised finger. ‘A firefight gone bad in a casein works on one of the Fraemium moons. They arrived like… like angels. I don’t mean to be glib. They saved us. It was like they were coming to save our souls.’

  Korine looked at Hawser. He raised a third finger.

  ‘White Scars, side by side, for six months on the plains of X173 Plural, hosing xeno-forms. Total focus and dedication, merciless. I cannot, hand on my heart, fault their duty, devotion to the Crusade cause, or their supreme effort as warriors.’

  ‘You said four times,’ Hawser pressed.

  ‘I did,’ said Korine. He raised a fourth finger in a gesture that reminded Hawser of surrender.

  ‘The Space Wolves, two years ago non-adjusted. Dekk Company, they called themselves. They came in to support our actions during the Kobolt scrap. I’d heard stories. We’d all heard stories.’

  ‘What kind of stories?’

  ‘That there are Space Marines and there are Space Marines. That there are supermen and there are monsters. That in order to breed the Astartes perfection, the Emperor Who Guides Us All has gone too far once or twice, and made things he should not have made. Things that should have been stillborn or drowned in a sack.’

  ‘Feral things?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘The worst of them all are the Space Wolves,’ replied Korine. ‘They were animals, Great Terra, they were animals those things that fought with us. When you have sympathy with the enemy, you know you have the wrong kind of allies. They killed everything, and destroyed everything and, worst of all, they took great relish in the apocalypse they had brought down upon their foe. There was nothing admirable about them, nothing rousing. They just left a sick taste in the mouth as if, by calling on their help, we had somehow demeaned ourselves in an effort to win.’

  Korine paused and turned to hand out instructions to some of his men. They were obedient, well-drilled, attentive. Hawser could see that Korine was a soldier who expected an army to be supremely disciplined in order to function. One of his men, a burly second-classer with a chinstrap beard, brought a data-slate over for Korine’s review. He glared belligerently at Hawser.

  Korine handed the data-slate back to his officer.

  ‘Full withdrawal from the surface,’ he said. He sounded broken. ‘All forces. We’re to stand down and get clear so the Wolves can take it on alone. Shit. This assault has cost us thousands of men, and we’re just scrapping it.’

  ‘Better that than thousands more.’

  Korine sat down, opened a haversack, and pulled out a slightly battered metal flask. He poured a generous measure into the cap and passed it to Hawser, and then took a swig from the flask.

  ‘When the 40th discovered that the Wolves were the only Astartes in range who could help us tackle the Quietude, we almost cancelled the request. I heard that as a fact from one of the senior men close to the fleet commander. It was a genuine consideration that we didn’t want to involve ourselves with the Wolves again.’

  ‘You’d rather face defeat?’

  ‘It’s about ends, and the means that get you there,’ Korine replied. ‘It’s about contemplating the question, what are the Wolves for? Why did the Emperor make them like that? What purpose could he possibly have for something so inhuman?’

  ‘Do you have answers to any of those questions, Combat Master Korine?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘Either the Emperor is not as perfect an architect of this new age as we like to suppose, and he is capable of manufacturing nightmares, or he has anticipated threats we can’t possibly imagine.’

  ‘Which would you prefer?’

  ‘Neither notion fills me with great confidence about the future,’ replied Korine. ‘Do you have an answer, as you keep their company?’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Hawser. He’d finished his drink, and Korine refilled the cap. It was a strong spirit, an amasec or a schnapps, and there was a flush on Korine’s cheeks, but Hawser felt nothing except the slightest burn in his throat. Life on Fenris had evidently bred a stronger constitution into him.

  ‘The things we fought in Kobolt space,’ said Korine quietly, ‘they were lethal and proud. They had no interest in human ways or human business, and they were quite capable of fighting us to a standstill. They had mighty vessels, like cities. I saw one of them. I was part of an assault against it. Someone called it Scintilla City because it sparkled like it was all made of glass. We later found out it was called Thuyelsa in their language, and it was a structure they called a craftworld. Anyway, we never worked out why they were fighting us or what they were trying to defend, except perhaps that they were trying to keep us at bay, or keep for themselves whatever it was they had, but you knew, you just knew inside yourself they had something worth defending. A legacy
, a history, a culture. And it was all lost.’

  Korine looked down into his flask, as if some truth might lurk inside in the dark. Hawser suspected he might have been looking in that very same place for an answer for quite some time.

  ‘At the end,’ Korine said, ‘they began to plead. The Wolves were upon them, and the city-vessel was shattering around them, and they realised that they were going to lose everything. They began to plead for terms, as if anything was better than losing everything. We never really understood what they were trying to tell us, or what kind of surrender they were trying to make. I personally believe that they would have given all of their lives if Scintilla City had been allowed to survive. But it was too late. The Wolves couldn’t be called off. They sacked it. The Wolves destroyed it all. There wasn’t even anything left for us to salvage, no treasure for us to plunder, nothing of value to claim as a prize. The Wolves destroyed it all.’

  Korine fell silent.

  The homer wand Bear had given to Hawser gave out a little beep.

  Hawser set the cap down and nodded to the combat master.

  ‘Thank you for the drink and the conversation.’

  Korine shrugged.

  ‘I think perhaps you malign the Wolves a little,’ Hawser added. ‘It may be that they are misunderstood.’

  Korine made a sound, possibly a laugh.

  ‘Isn’t that what all monsters say?’ he asked.

  Hawser left the G9K enviro-tent. All around him, personnel were busy dismantling the encampment for surface departure.

  He stood for a moment, consulting the homer’s direction indicator. Behind his back, someone cursed him.

  He swung around.

  Korine’s second-classer, the man with the chinstrap, and several other G9Kers were loading impact-resistant crates onto a flatbed truck.

  ‘Did you speak to me?’ Hawser asked.

  Chinstrap’s glare was toxic. He set down the crate-end he had been lifting, and walked towards Hawser. His men looked on.

  ‘Sack of shit animal,’ Chinstrap hissed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go back to the filth you run with. You should be ashamed. They’re not human. They’re animals!’