by Various
The conversation had not lasted long, for Nisha had no answers to give her captain. The warp was rougher, the Emperor’s Light fainter, and she knew no reason why either was true, only that they were.
Lord Lorgar Aurelian came to her some time after. The Conqueror was slow, he told her. They were holding the fleet back. She had apologised to him, and he’d smiled with the radiance of his Imperial father.
There was nothing to apologise for, he had promised. Some lessons took time to learn, that was all. Then he spoke of other paths through the warp. Other illuminations, other lights to sail by. The Trisagion, he said, was guided not by the Astronomican, but by the songs of distant gods. And could she hear them? Could she, if she really tried?
His words were the soft tones of a teacher, but she saw her death waiting behind his kindly eyes.
‘Do you hear the gods’ song, Navigator Andrasta?’
‘Yes,’ she had said to the Bearer of the Word. Lord Aurelian left her in peace, but the Conqueror still struggled through the tides. Her lie would not last long.
In her palatial chambers within the Conqueror’s heart, she cradled the ornate laspistol in lace-gloved hands, keeping it hidden from sight. Her fingernails were pristine, brushed each morning and night by her attendants. Her slaves always kept her fastidiously clean; to prevent infection or to adhere to their ingrained courtly standards, she’d never been sure.
Her regal robes clung to her skin with a void sailor’s honest sweat. Her throne interpreted her silent impulses and the slightest of muscle twitches, forcing the ship to follow.
Through her bond with the Conqueror’s changing, mutating machine-spirit, she felt the rage of the thing chained in the ship’s deepest dark. The thing that had once been the primarch, and whose existence now reshaped the ship’s sacred metal into an image of Angron’s fury. What use was a Geller field when the warp already lived inside the Conqueror’s bones?
Through her third eye, she watched the Trisagion cutting ahead once more, already an infinity of distance away. The Conqueror moaned and laboured and slowed in the larger ship’s wake.
When she had been chosen by the Emperor – and not these monsters and men that now sailed to murder him – she had believed that she would pay any price to see stars and worlds never before witnessed by mankind. Time had made a lie of that belief. She wasn’t willing to betray the man that had chosen her.
She pressed the muzzle of the stolen pistol to her temple. Her attendants were running, shrieking, weeping.
‘For the Emperor,’ she told them.
Navigator Nisha Andrasta pulled the trigger and tore the Conqueror from the warp in a cascade of screaming, tortured metal.
Vhetok Raan sights the target through his scope, carefully angling the crosshairs over its back. There’s a strong side wind blowing that reeks of radiation decay, and he adjusts the aim to compensate when his spotter whispers, reading from a brass gauge.
‘Eighteen millimetres left, elevate three millimetres.’
Raan makes the adjustments without acknowledgement. He does not nod, nor even blink. It would spoil the shot and he knows he will only get one. Miss, and they will have to run. He doubts they would escape. He and Scarbek would be dead – or worse, left for dead for the Unburdened to feast upon.
The target is one of them. A genetically-enhanced killing machine, bent on revenge. Ever since the world burned under the light of its own sun, they have been out for blood. A humming power pack attached to the target’s armour creates a heat haze in the air above it. It feels close even through Raan’s rad-suit. He can practically taste it.
A smirr of rad-dust occludes his vision for a few seconds, his finger moist in his glove just caressing the trigger of his sniper rifle. The rebreather fastened to his face and neck starts to pinch.
Raan holds his breath. The target is crouched, barely moving, as though he might be patiently digging for something in the dirt. The sniper’s eye line is a tunnel, myopic and focused, and narrows just a fraction as the moment arrives…
Cobalt-blue flashes in the pre-dawn light, and the crouching figure shifts a little.
‘Now,’ Scarbek hisses through the vox.
Raan squeezes the trigger.
Like lightning on the sun, a heavy calibre shell scores the rad-hot air as a low cough escapes from the rifle. It seems to pass in slow motion. He fancies he can see the bullet turning, air particles dislocating at its passage through them, a faint and long-lived spark as it strikes metal and penetrates…
But there is no blood.
There should be blood, even through all that armour, a sign that his shot was a mortal one.
He’s turning, mouth opening in a half-shout, world slowing further as if in partial suspended animation.
No blood, he tries to shout. No–
A cold ball of pain flares in Raan’s back. Then Scarbek’s throat is bulging open like a burst water main and gushing red all over his rad-suit, soaking the robes beneath.
Cobalt-blue flashes again. Only this time it is behind them, around them, stabbing into them.
In his eye line, which is no longer confined by the rifle scope, but myopic all the same and ever shrinking to black, Raan sees the target still crouched down, as lifeless as it has been ever since they first sighted him.
Now there is blood. Lots of blood, but it is all theirs.
Darkness rolls in, incongruous during the rad-scarred day, and Vhetok Raan realises – too late – that they have been tricked.
Aeonid Thiel takes an ankle of each corpse in either hand and starts to drag. He has slung the guns across his body already, widening the straps so they will fit his broader and more heavily armoured frame. He doesn’t enjoy this grunt work, but it is the practical thing to do. Hide the bodies, bury them in the sun-bleached desert.
Finding a good spot, he starts to dig. Gauntleted hands make for surprisingly good shovels. Bury the dead deep enough and even the Unburdened can’t sniff them out. Thiel suspects the radiation is fouling their senses, just as it is fouling his. Auspex, scanner, even his closed helm’s retinal display are all unreliable in Calth’s scorched atmosphere.
Graves dug and then covered back up, a chrono warning flashes up on his left lens. It is brief and marred by visual static, but about the only thing actually working that provides him with useful information. Radiation levels are spiking. A fresh solar event blazes on the horizon. Burn-up is due in eight minutes, eighteen seconds and counting.
‘My gratitude for your assistance, Brother Akanis,’ he says to the distant, blue-armoured corpse, ‘but I must be on my way.’
No need to bury him – the Unburdened hollowed Akanis out days ago. Only armour and bone remains. There was a time when Thiel would have been reprimanded for such disrespect, using a dead battle-brother as a lure, but Thiel is no stranger to censure. He still wears the red proudly across his battle-helm, though it no longer means what it once did. Had he not defied his superiors, then Marius Gage and even Lord Guilliman might be dead. As it is they live, but they have left Calth behind.
Thiel thought that he had too, but now he is back. Another act of insubordination on his part.
It isn’t that Aeonid Thiel lacks respect, he simply acknowledged more quickly than his brothers that the rules of engagement had changed. Old tactics laid down in his primarch’s Codex, as it is being called, were not always practical. Thiel wears the practical upon his armour, a ceramite and battle-scarred treatise of all the ploys and stratagems he has utilised in this most unconventional underworld war.
One more stretch of hardline cable to check for this tour. He marks it upon his armour with a short stylus, including coordinates, depth, and time. Thiel runs, staying low, away from the dead Akanis.
Reaching the dig site, he pulls a seismic stave from his equipment belt, plants it deep and activates the subterranean mapping pulse. Takes a few seconds to kick in. Checking the countdown in his left retinal lens, he realises he has but a few to spare.
‘C
ome on, come on…’
Radiation levels are rising faster, a red and fatal dawn is already burning the horizon in a shimmering line of fire. Thiel feels the temperature increase, even as he shuts down the warning chime in his battle-helm to silence his armour’s plaintive urging.
‘Not yet.’
If he finds the break in the hardline cable, he will have to come back. No way he can dig now – the ambush took up too much time. That particular stratagem is written on his left shoulder guard. It is not the first time he has employed it, nor will it be the last.
Seismic stave comes back negative.
‘Damn.’
Thiel tweaks the depth gain and boosts the signal pulse, knowing that radiation and several metric tonnes of earth, stone and steel will be clouding any weak returns.
Another few seconds lapse, and the chrono goes from amber to red. Time is running out.
Stave beeps again.
‘Negative… damn it!’
An actual wave of fire is boiling across the surface of Calth, once a shining frontier of the Ultramar Empire, now rendered into endless desert. Numinus City is a husk, inhabited by corpses and predatory shadows. Gone are the Dera Caren Lowlands, their forests turned to ash. Above, Veridia blazes, not so beautiful now. She is a harbinger, a pearl transformed into a fiery coal of hellish retribution.
Aeonid Thiel was marked for censure, but now Veridia seeks to mark him anew. She has marked him for death, her paint a solar flare that will burn away the red and blue, and leave his armour black.
Leaving the stave and much of his equipment behind, Thiel runs.
Narrowed, bloodshot eyes watch the Ultramarine’s flight. Even with flare dampeners dialled to maximum, the warrior is still a haloed silhouette through the scopes, with the hell-sun burning bright behind him. Though, not so bright that the eyes don’t see him crouch and activate a panel obscured in the dirt. A few seconds later a crack opens in the desert, prompting a cataract of sand to roll over and into an expanding black chasm.
Ignorant of being watched, the Ultramarine hurries into the darkness of the hidden shelter, smoke rising in grey whisps from his battleplate.
Kurtha Sedd cuts the visual feed, retracting the periscopic viewer back into the cavern where he and his cohorts are waiting. His power armour growls as he turns, and he regards the seven cult warriors before him. Even in the low light of phosphor-lamps, the sigils carved into their bare arms shimmer and coil.
Not Unburdened, not yet. But soon. It has been pledged. Promised.
‘Well?’ asks one of the cult, speaking roughly through his battered vox-grille.
Lorgar left these men to die on Calth, loyal servants of the Word who chose the wrong demagogue to follow.
Sedd rasps, the smile in his voice easy to detect, ‘By Erebus’s blood, we have him.’
Cracking ceramite cooling in the subterranean air interrupts the silence of the underground world that now exists beneath the surface of Calth. That was close. The readings on Thiel’s armour went below the red-line, and his radiation levels are perilously close to acceptable maximums.
After the gate, he kept running. Down into the bowels of the earth, where a new and entirely more ugly world awaits him. This is Calth now, cavernous arcologies, no better than tombs.
At the bottom of the tunnel, Thiel slows to a walk and then stops. He slumps down onto one knee to catch his breath. Already battered from the fight aboard the Macragge’s Honour almost two years ago, he balks at the additional damage inflicted upon his war-plate by the solar flare, imagining the many minute fissures reducing its combat efficacy.
‘Every time you leave the compound,’ a stern voice echoes from the darkness, interrupting Thiel’s thoughts, ‘you risk our secrecy and safety.’
Wearily, Thiel reaches for the seals affixing his battle-helm to his gorget, disengages them and lifts it away to breathe fresh air.
He is youthful, but has a face with hard edges made that way by war. Sweat lathers his forehead and temples, sheening his short blond hair. His eyes are blue, like bright sapphires and they find the speaker in the darkness at once.
‘And each second we remain isolated and alone, we risk annihilation. Are you keeping such a close eye on my movements now, Captain Vultius?’
An Ultramarine steps from the shadows into the light of a single hanging phosphor lamp. He is gilded, a laureled helmet in the crook of his right arm, a gladius sheathed upon his left hip. Three platinum service studs shine, embedded in a forehead like a granite cliff. Vultius has closely cropped dark hair, and wears full battleplate. His wargear is pristine but betrays the battles he has fought, despite his artificer’s best labours. A short, crimson cape extends from his power generator, ending just below the joint at the back of his knees.
The eyes of Captain Vultius are emerald green, cold and unforgiving as the sea.
‘Do I need to, sergeant?’
‘Practical – the longer we go without further reinforcement, the greater the chance we will be overwhelmed. The communications hardline is our only means of signalling the fleet. With it severed, the command hub is cut adrift. I cannot help but wonder what broke it, sir.’
‘That’s not your concern.’
‘It’s my only concern, sir. As I believe it should be yours.’
‘Were you this obstreperous before Lord Guilliman?’ Vultius snorts derisively. His question, Thiel realises, is rhetorical. ‘I can see now why you still bear the old mark. It was always a badge of honour for you, wasn’t it? To be defiant, insubordinate.’
‘I am neither, sir. This is an unconventional war, requiring unconventional tactics to wage it.’
‘Surely you mean win it?’
‘May I speak freely, sir?’ Thiel sighs.
Vultius cocks his head to the side, incredulous. ‘Are you not already, sergeant?’
Thiel answers the previous question.
‘No, sir. I do not mean “win it”. There is no winning Calth. It has no strategic significance beyond propaganda. Calth is already lost.’
Now Vultius scowls, his patience having reached its end. ‘Perhaps you should have stayed on Macragge.’
‘Perhaps, sir. Thought I could be more use here.’
‘You were wrong, sergeant.’ Vultius is already turning his back, moving from the glow of the phosphor lamp and disappearing into the shadows again.
Thiel nods. ‘Seems I was.’
‘Get yourself rad-scrubbed, and I’ll come to debrief you in an hour.’
‘I’ll try not to be late, sir.’
Vultius pauses, perhaps about to fashion a fresh reprimand, but decides against it.
‘See that you’re not.’ He waits a few more seconds, half swallowed by the dark, ‘I thought Lord Guilliman sent you here as a punishment for defying his will, but I see now that I was wrong.’
‘How so, sir?’
‘Because it feels very much like I am the one being punished.’ Vultius walks on, his footsteps echoing away as he leaves Thiel to the darkness.
Sitting on a bench in a post-purification cell, Thiel watches two servitors through dirty armourglass as they scrub his war-plate. Radiation cleansing is painful, long, but necessary. Ever since the enemy attacked Calth’s sun, any trip to the surface brings with it the hazard of radiation poisoning. Even the Legiones Astartes are not immune, but can withstand greater and more prolonged exposure than their ordinary human counterparts.
Thiel’s last trip would have killed a normal man several times over. As it is, he will live and overcome the effects of Calth’s radiation.
Dressed only in partial undermesh and a white training vest, he still dwarfs the lone trooper standing beside him. The trooper’s uniform jacket identifies him as Rowd, in the colours of the old Numinus regiment. Of course, there is no Numinus regiment anymore, nor any battalion for that matter. The survivors of Calth’s old Army divisions were subsumed together into a guerrilla force, supported by the legionaries of the XIII where possible.
‘H
ow much longer, trooper?’ Thiel asks.
Rowd turns, shocked at first. Thiel gestures to the servitors through the dirty glass.
‘My armour, how long?’
He knows the answer, but the silence underground bothers him, and allows his mind to wander.
The trooper checks his chrono. He’s wearing a partial rad-suit, gaiters and boots but with his jacket unzipped to reveal his old Army designation. A rebreather and concomitant face-mask hang around his neck on a loose strap. A hood gathers over his shoulder blades.
‘In a moment, sergeant. The servitors are just finishing up now.’
Thiel nods as though this were news.
‘Tell me, trooper – are you supposed to be my keeper?’
Rowd is aghast for a moment. ‘I… uhh… No, sergeant. Captain Vultius asked that I ensure you remain here until he can return.’
Thiel gets to his feet, a simple act that sees him loom over the trooper.
‘You are my keeper then.’
‘Sergeant, I’m just–’
Laughing out loud, Thiel waves his hand in apology.
‘You may relax, trooper. I am only joking with you. Just a little humour to help pass our time together.’
Trooper Rowd relaxes. He tries a smile, but his fearful eyes give away his game. Before he can reply, a klaxon sounds, accompanied by a flashing strobe lamp above the door to the scrub chamber. Seconds later, a hiss of pneumatic pressure presages the door opening, and a servitor appears with Thiel’s rad-scubbed war-plate. He’s pleased to see that his improvised markings are still engrained upon it.
Rowd sees them too.
‘What are they?’ His eyes narrow, scrutinising – trying and failing to discern their meaning.
‘The Legion would call them practicals. I use them as a record of every tactic, every stratagem and ploy I have utilised on Calth since my posting.’
‘Doesn’t your suit have internal systems for that?’
Thiel smiles, taking a vambrace proffered by the servitor.
