[Warhammer 40K] - Legends of the Space Marines

by Christian Dunn - (ebook by Undead)

  Uriel stood motionless in the torch-lit gatehouse as the Masters of the Chapter circled him. Fully clad in his armour, his golden-hilted sword sheathed at his side, he felt a lightness in his heart he had not felt in many months. Though to journey into the Eye of Terror, that region of space where the madness and corruption of the warp spilled into real space, was as certain a death sentence as if had they been pushed from Gallan’s Rock, Uriel knew that this was somehow right.

  Pasanius stood beside him, also fully armoured, his customary flamer held tightly in his silver bionic arm. Chaplain Clausel read from an ancient leather-bound tome with gold edged pages and a musty aroma of a book that had sat unopened for many centuries.

  Verses from the Book of Dishonour, words that had not been spoken in over six thousand years, were uttered in time with the Masters’ footsteps as they removed everything that marked them as Ultramarines from their armour and weapons.

  His company tattoo had been burned from the skin of his left shoulder and the Chapter symbols of the Ultramarines had been painted over, leaving his shoulder guards an unblemished blue. The golden eagles were removed from his breastplate and waist and the purity seals and honour badges were unclipped and placed in a sandarac reliquary box.

  Learchus would lead the 4th Company in his absence and Uriel could think of no one he would rather have commanding his surviving warriors and rebuilding the company.

  Marneus Calgar watched them having their insignia removed from their armour impassively. Uriel knew Lord Calgar did not want to have to do this, but the Chapter Master had no choice but to place the Death Oath upon them. It had been that or an ignominious end on the rocks at the foot of Hera’s Falls.

  He remembered Agemman’s words, spoken in a calm and even voice in his cell as though they were being whispered in his ear even now. Agemman had spoken of the great and good name of the Ultramarines, a name that stood for truth, courage and faith in the Emperor. No truer Chapter of Space Marines existed, and to plant any seeds of doubt of that in the minds of its own warriors was to damn it as surely as if it were to embrace the Ruinous Powers. A Chapter’s strength came from its belief in itself, a power that devolved from the force of its Chapter Master and was embodied within those he appointed beneath him.

  The Chapter was held together by such valour and to allow any one man to undermine that was to erode the very foundations of the Ultramarines. Each warrior looked up to his superiors as embodiments of the Codex and to see a captain flaunt its teachings was to invite disaster.

  The rot of dissention had to be cut out before it infected the entire Chapter and brought about the ruin of the Ultramarines. There could be no other way. The strength in Agemman’s voice had cut through the bitterness and frustration consuming Uriel, and he had seen the ramifications should his methods and actions become widespread. The Ultramarines would become little more than roving bands of warriors, visiting such vengeance as they deemed appropriate upon whomever they chose. Before long, there would be little to distinguish them from the renegades who gave praise to the Dark Gods and Uriel was gripped by a horrifying vision of a future where blood-soaked Ultramarines were as feared and reviled as those who trod the path of Chaos.

  Agemman had not ordered either of them in what they must do, but had left them to choose the right path.

  Uriel had known what that choice must be: accept the judgement of Lord Calgar and show the Chapter that the way chosen by the Ultramarines was true. They must accept the Death Oath so that the Chapter might live on as it always had.

  At last, Clausel closed the book and bowed his head as Uriel and Pasanius marched past him towards the doors of the gatehouse.

  “Uriel, Pasanius,” said Lord Calgar.

  The two Space Marines stopped and bowed to their former master.

  “The Emperor go with you. Die well.”

  Uriel nodded as the doors swung open. He and Pasanius stepped into the purple twilight of evening. Birds sang and torchlight flickered from the high towers of the outermost wall of the Fortress of Hera.

  Before the door closed, Calgar spoke again, his voice hesitant, as though unsure as to whether he should speak at all.

  “Varro Tigurius spoke with me last night,” he began. “He told me that he had been granted a vision of you and Pasanius upon a world taken by the Dark Powers. A world that tasted of dark iron, with great wombs of daemonic flesh rippling with monstrous, unnatural life. As he watched, fell surgeons—like monsters themselves—hacked at them with blades and saws and pulled bloodstained figures from within. Though appearing more dead than alive, these figures lived and breathed, tall and strong, a dark mirror of our own glory. I know not what this means, Uriel, but its evil is plain. Seek this place out. Destroy it.”

  “As you command,” said Uriel and walked into the night.

  Ahead was a wide, cobbled esplanade, two parallel lines of Ultramarines lining the route they would take towards the main gate of the Fortress. The entirety of the Chapter’s strength on Macragge awaited them, over five hundred Space Marines, their weapons clasped across their chests and heads held high.

  Uriel and Pasanius marched between the lines of fellow Space Marines, each warrior snapping to attention and smoothly turning his back on them as they passed. The outer wall of the Fortress towered above them and Uriel could not help but look over his shoulder at the glittering marvel of the Fortress of Hera as he strode from its majesty.

  The hundred-metre-high golden gate swung smoothly open, and Uriel felt a tremendous sense of stepping into the unknown seize him. Once they passed through that gate, they would no longer be Ultramarines, they would be stepping into the vastness of the galaxy to fulfil their Death Oath on their own, and the thought sent a realisation of what they had lost through him.

  As the gateway drew closer, he saw Learchus in the line of Space Marines ahead of him. He reached his former sergeant and saw that Learchus was not turning his back as every other Ultramarine had.

  Uriel stopped and said, “Sergeant, you must turn your back.”

  “No, captain, I will not, I will see you on your way.”

  Uriel smiled and held out his hand to Learchus, who shook it proudly.

  “I will look after the men of the company until you return,” promised Learchus.

  “I know you will, Learchus. I bid you farewell, but now you must turn from us.”

  Learchus nodded slowly and saluted before turning his back on his former captain.

  Uriel and Pasanius continued on their long walk, finally passing into the shadow of the massive wall and leaving the Fortress of Hera behind.

  And the gates slammed shut.

  THE LAST DETAIL

  Paul Kearney

  The monsoon rains came early that year, as if the planet itself were tugging down a veil to hide its broken face. Even cowering in the bunker, the boy and his father could hear them, thunderous, massive, a roar of noise. But the rainstorm was nothing to that which had gone before—in fact even the bellowing of the monsoon seemed almost like a kind of silence.

  “It stopped,” the boy said. “All the noise. Perhaps they went away.”

  The man squeezed his son’s shoulder but said nothing. He had the wiry, etched face of a farmer, old before his time, but as hard as steel wire. Both he and his son had the sunken, hollow look of folk who have not eaten or drunk in days. He passed a dry tongue over his cracked lips at the sound of the rain, then looked at the flickering digits of the comms bench.

  “It’ll be dawn soon. When it comes, I’m going to look outside.”

  The boy clenched him tighter. “Pa!”

  “It’ll be all right. We need water, or we won’t make it. I think they’ve gone, son.” He ruffled his boy’s hair. “I think it’s over, whatever it was.”

  “They might be waiting.”

  “We need the water. It’ll be all right, you’ll see.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  The man hesitated a second, and then nodded. “All right then�
��whatever we find out there, we’ll meet it together.”

  A summer dawn came early in the planet’s northern hemisphere. When the man set his shoulder to the bunker door only a few hours had passed. The heavy steel and plascrete door usually swung light and noiseless on its hinges, but now he had to throw himself at it to grind it open centimetre by centimetre. When the opening was wide enough for a man’s bicep, he stopped, and sniffed the air.

  “Get the respirators,” he snapped to his son. “Now!”

  They tugged on the cumbersome masks, and immediately their already enclosed world became tinier and darker still. They breathed heavily. The man coughed, took deep breaths.

  “Some kind of gas out there, a chemical agent—but it’s heavy. It’s seeped down the stairs and pooled there. We’ve got to go up.” He looked round himself at the interior of the bunker with its discarded blankets, the dying battery-fed lights and useless comms unit. A pale mist was pouring in through the opened door almost like a kind of liquid, and with it, the gurgling rainwater of the passing monsoon.

  “This place is compromised,” he said. “We have to get out now, or we’ll die here.”

  They pushed together at the door. It squealed open angrily, until at last there was a kind of light filtering down on them from above. The man looked up. “Well, the house is gone,” he said calmly.

  They clambered over wet piles of debris which choked the stone stairs, until at last they stood at the top.

  Inside a ruin. Two walls still stood, constructed out of the sturdy local stone, but that was all. The rest was blasted rubble. The clay tiles of the roof lay everywhere, and the boy saw his favourite toy, a wooden rifle his father had carved for him, lying splintered by what had been their front door. The rain was easing now, but he still had to rub the eyepieces of his respirator clear every few seconds.

  “Stay here,” the man said. He walked forward, out of the shadows of their ruined home, his boots crunching and clinking on broken glass and plastic, splashing through puddles. Around them, the pale mist was receding. A wind was blowing, and on it the rain came down, washing everything clean. The man hesitated, then pulled off his respirator. He raised his face to the sky and opened his mouth, feeling the rain on his tongue.

  “It’s all right,” he said to his son. “The air is clean now. Take it off, boy, but don’t touch anything. We don’t know what’s contaminated.”

  All around them for as far as the eye could see, the countryside which had once been their farm, a green and pleasant place, was now a stinking marsh of shell-holes. The trunks of trees stood up like black sword-blades, their branches stripped away, the bark burnt from their boles. Here and there, one of their cattle, or a piece of one, lay bloated and green and putrid. Smoke rose in black pillars along the horizon.

  Such was their thirst that they had nothing to say, but stood with their tongues out trying to soak up the rain. It streamed into the boy’s mouth, reinvigorating him. Nothing in his life had ever felt so good as that cold water sinking into his parched mouth. He opened his eyes at last, and frowned, then pointed skywards, at the broken wrack of clouds which the wind was lashing across the sky.

  “Pa, look,” he said, eyes wide with wonder. “Look at that—it’s like a cathedral up-ended in the clouds.”

  His father looked skywards, narrowed his eyes, and curled a protective arm about the boy’s shoulders. Many kilometres away, but still dominating the heavens, a vast angular shape hung shining above the earth, all jagged with steeples and adornments and improbable spikes. It broke out in a white flash as the sun caught it turning, and then began to recede, in a bright flare of afterburners. After a few seconds they caught the distant roar of its massive engines. As the sun rose higher, so they lost sight of it in the gathering brightness of the morning.

  “It’s moving out of orbit,” the man said.

  “What is it—is the God-Emperor inside it, Pa?”

  “No, son.” The father’s arm curled tighter about his son’s shoulders. “It is the vessel of those who know His face. It is the Emperor’s Angels, here in our sky.”

  The man looked around him. At the reeking desolation, the craters, the puddled steaming metes of chemicals.

  “We were their battleground,” he said.

  They ranged over what was left of the farm during the next few days, setting out containers to catch rainwater, gathering up what remained of their canned goods, and throwing away anything which the man’s rad-counter began creaking at. At night they made camp in the ruins of the farmhouse and coaxed fire out of the soaked timbers which had once upheld its roof.

  “Is the whole world like this?” the boy asked, gazing into the firelight one night, huddled under an old canvas tarp that the rain beat upon.

  “Could be,” his father said. “Perreken is a small place, not much more than a moon. Wouldn’t take much to trash the whole thing.”

  “Why would the Emperor’s Angels do this to us?” the boy asked.

  “They do things for reasons we can’t fathom,” his father told him. “They are the Wrath of the Emperor made real, and when their anger sweeps a world, no-one escapes it, not even those they are sworn to save. They are our protectors, boy, but also, they are the Angels of Death.”

  “What are they like—have you ever seen one, Pa?”

  The man shook his head. “Not I. I did my spell in the militia same as most, and that’s as far as my knowledge of things warlike goes. I don’t think they ever even came close to this system before. But that was a big Imperial ship in the sky the other morning, I’m sure of it—I seen pictures when I was your age. Only they ride in ships like that—the Astartes—the Angels of the God-Emperor.”

  Three days later the boy and his father were trudging through the black shattered crag north of their farm which had once been a wooded hillside, looking to see if any of their stock had by some chance survived the holocaust. Here, there had been a rocky knoll some two hundred metres in height, which gave a good view down the valley beyond to the city and its spaceport. It seemed the hill had been bombed heavily, its conical head now flattened. Smoke still hissed out of cracks in the hillside, as molten rocks cooled underground. Out towards the horizon, the city smoked and flickered with pinpoints of flame.

  “Pa! Pa!” the boy shouted, running and tumbling among the rocks—“Look here!”

  “Don’t touch it!”

  “It’s—it’s—I don’t know what it is.”

  Looming over them was a hulk of massive, shattered metal, a box of steel and ceramite broken open and still sparking and glowing in places. It had legs like those of a crab, great pincers, and the barrels of autocannon on its shoulders. Atop it was what might once have been a man’s head, grotesquely attached, snarling in death. It was a machine which was almost an animal, or an animal which had become a machine. Carved onto the bullet-pocked carcass of the thing were unspeakable scenes of slaughter and perversity, and it was hung with rotting skulls, festooned with spikes and chains.

  “Come away,” the man told his son hoarsely. “Get away from it.”

  They backed away, and were suddenly aware that all down the slope below them were other remnants of battle. Bodies, everywhere, most of them shaven-headed, snarling, mutilated men, many with a pointed star cut into their foreheads. Here and there a bulkier figure in heavy armour, horned helmets, dismembered limbs, entrails underfoot about which the flies buzzed in black clouds.

  “They fought here,” the man said. “They fought here for the high ground.”

  The boy, with the curiosity of youth, seemed less afraid than his father. He had found a large firearm, almost as long as himself, and was trying to lift it out of its glutinous glue of mud and blood.

  “Leave that alone!”

  “But Pa!”

  “That’s an Astartes weapon.” The man knelt and peered at it, wiping the metal gingerly with one gloved hand. “Look—see the double-headed eagle on the barrel—that’s the badge of the Imperium. The Space Marines fought h
ere, on this hill. These are the dead of the great enemy lying around us, heretics cursed by the Emperor. The Astartes saved us from them.”

  “Saved us,” the boy repeated grumpily. He pointed at the burning city down in the valley. “Look at Dendrekken. It’s all burnt and blown up.”

  “Better that than under the fist of the Dark Powers, believe me,” the man said, straightening. “It’s getting dark. We’ve come far enough for one day. Tomorrow we’ll try and get down to the city, and see who else is left.”

  That night, shivering beside their campfire amid the bodies of the dead, the boy lay awake staring at the night sky. The clouds had cleared, and he was able to see the familiar constellations overhead. Now and again he saw a shooting star, and now and again he was sure he saw other things gliding in the dark between the stars. New constellations glittered, moving in formation. He found himself wondering about those who lived out there in that blackness, travelling in their city-sized ships from system to system, bearing the eagle of the Imperium, carrying weapons like the massive bolter he had found upon the battlefield. What must it be like, to live like that?

  He got up in the middle hours of the night, too restless and hungry for sleep. Stepping away from the fire, he clicked on his little battered torch, an old wind-up contraption he had had since he was a toddler. He walked out upon the rocky, blasted slope upon which the bodies of the dead lay contorted and rotting, and felt no fear, only a sense of wonder, and a profound restlessness. He picked his way down the slope and apart from his yellow band of torchlight there was no other radiance in the world save for the stars.

  And one other thing. Off to his left he caught sight of something which came and went, an infinitesimal red glow. Intrigued, he made his way towards it, sliding his knife out of the sheath at his waist. He crouched and padded forwards, as quiet as when hunting in these same hills with his father’s old las-gun. Several times the light died altogether, but he was patient, and waited until he could see it again. It was at the foot of a looming, broken crag which stood up black against the stars.