Angel Exterminatus

by Graham McNeill

  ‘So do we have an agreement?’

  ‘We do,’ said Fulgrim, running his hands through his hair and giving his warriors a curt nod. The Trident released their charges, but instead of the expected posturing and threats, Fulgrim’s captains merely followed the Phoenician as he strode away. Perturabo watched him go, surprised Fulgrim had agreed so readily, but content he had shown his brother that he would not be so casually disobeyed.

  The encounter with Fulgrim had left him drained, and he let out a shuddering breath, rubbing his hand over his scalp. His eyes were gritty with exhaustion and he needed a drink. The violent urges of his triarchs were a potent cocktail of combat stimms and aggression pheromones, chemical precursors to a fight that hadn’t happened. Kroeger was disappointed more blood had not been shed, and Falk’s fists were still balled in anticipation of killing.

  Only Forrix looked uncomfortable at what had just happened, picking over the smashed remains of the broken Warhound.

  ‘Something troubles you, my triarch?’ asked Perturabo.

  ‘I don’t know why, but I’ve always hated this model,’ said Forrix. ‘Though I’m sad to see it destroyed.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Perturabo. ‘You think I was wrong to bloody Fulgrim?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are a poor liar, Forrix.’

  ‘I don’t think you were wrong to bloody him, my lord,’ said Forrix. ‘But did you have to humiliate him in front of his warriors?’

  ‘Fulgrim needed to be taught a lesson,’ said Kroeger.

  ‘That he did,’ agreed Forrix, lifting a tiny cog-toothed wheel and turning it in a slow circle between his thumb and forefinger. ‘But if you’re going to skin a cat, you don’t keep it around as a house pet.’

  Theogonies – III

  The ruined manufactory provided shelter from the wire storm, keeping the three of them alive while the razor-flecked particulates howled and surged beyond the irradiated skin of the building. Ptolea and Sullax had complained about the need to stop here, but what was the alternative? To suffer the ravages of a storm that could strip a man to the bone inside of a minute? Yes, the rad-counters were in the red, but Coryn knew the danger would pass before they’d suffer hazardous levels of exposure.

  People said that places like this had once been generating stations, that it had taken dangerous materials and employed forgotten technology to harness its power. Well that power had evidently turned on its makers, and laid waste to the planet, releasing toxins that had burned the atmosphere and boiled the oceans away.

  Their structures were irradiated and would remain so for thousands of years. That was the only reason they hadn’t been torn down and their materials reused.

  Everything was reused in Callax – the bleak, iron-walled fortress factory Coryn called home. Almost nothing was new, everything had once been something else. The planet’s only readily available water was what could be extracted from the air by the towering vapour mills, and the food was reconstituted from yesterday’s bodily waste. Coryn had never known anything different, but the chapbook his father had given him on his fifth birthday spoke of the ancient gods and their sumptuous banquets, tables groaning with endless goblets of pure water and rich food that hadn’t been scraped from recycling vats or processed a thousand times to remove any impurities.

  The book had belonged to Coryn’s great-great-grandfather, and its pages were brittle and thin, yet the inked pictures were still vivid and full of life. They were the only spots of colour in Coryn’s bleak, grey existence. They showed skies of blue and gold, with hundreds of lights that his father had told him were stars. His father said there were still stars up there, beyond the Umbral, but no one really believed that. His father said a lot of things, but no one believed much of what the old man had to say. His days were numbered anyway, his limbs too weak to work the forges and his mind too prone to straying to be of any use in the logistical executives.

  Coryn unzipped his padded jerkin and slipped the book from his shirt, taking great care not to damage its cover and whisper-thin pages. While the storm blew out the worst of its flensing rage on the building’s exterior, he read stories he knew by heart, but still enjoyed for the respite they provided from the miserable labours of daily life.

  ‘Still reading your children’s stories?’ said Ptolea, trudging into the room and wiping glittering flecks of steel wool from her padded jerkin. She sat down next to him with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up in front of her.

  ‘They’re not children’s stories,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t see the point of them,’ said Ptolea, lighting a smoke that was mostly sweepings from a factory floor. The smell was terrible, but Coryn wasn’t about to deny his friend one of the few pleasures left to her. ‘What’s the point of reading about things that don’t exist?’

  Coryn turned the book around and showed her a page featuring a warrior in blue armour wrestling with a great serpentine creature with many arms.

  ‘Because they’re better than the things that do,’ he said.

  ‘Pretty,’ she said and reached out to take the book, but he pulled it back to his chest.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said by way of apology. ‘It’s delicate. Kind of a family heirloom. I always hoped I’d pass it on to my kids, you know, if I get permission.’

  Sullax stomped in from outside and also swept himself clear of wiry dust particles.

  ‘Won’t be any chance of children if we stay here much longer,’ said Sullax, cupping his groin. ‘Place is buzzing with radiation. Bloody stupid idea coming out here.’

  ‘You didn’t have to come,’ pointed out Coryn.

  ‘Course I did,’ said Sullax, as though he were being obtuse. ‘You’re my work-brother, and I need to keep you alive.’

  ‘Touching,’ said Ptolea.

  ‘Yeah – if he dies, I need to make up his quota,’ growled Sullax, only half-joking.

  Coryn didn’t answer, well aware that it was a risky venture they were on, but unwilling to admit that to his fellow scouts. He’d had to fight to persuade the executive to let him take the patrol out in the first place. The last thing he needed was to bring back dead bodies torn up by a wire storm or dosed with radiation that would make them infertile or, worse, unproductive.

  He wasn’t sure what had driven him to venture beyond the safety of Callax’s hermetic walls, but the sight of that violet cometary fall had struck a chord in him that was still thrumming with purpose. Coryn had to know what it was, and he’d managed to convey that passion to the grey-suited members of the executive. Perhaps it was evidence of another surviving world, a link to their lost history and the other planets that were said to have existed once beyond the Umbral. Perhaps it might be the remains of a satellite whose orbit had decayed enough for gravity finally to drag it down.

  Either reason was good enough to warrant a patrol, but the only resources the executive had seen fit to allocate him were two other scouts. Both of whom, they insisted, had to be volunteers. Naturally he’d picked his dwelling-sister and his work-brother. Neither believed this was a good idea, but neither had they liked the idea of him going into the chem wilderness alone.

  The comet had fallen no more than a couple of kilometres beyond the walls, but it was still a difficult and dangerous journey. They hadn’t been allocated any transport, and had been forced to trudge through the ash and rock on foot. Beneath the perpetually grey sky, they’d just about reached the haunches of the mountains that rose up behind Callax when the wire storm had set in and driven them to take shelter in the ruined power plant.

  ‘Looks like it’s dying down,’ noted Ptolea, leaning up to peer through a crack in the steel panelling. ‘It’ll be nasty and sore, but we can make good time and be back before next shift.’

  ‘Come on then,’ sighed Sullax. ‘Some sleep before shift would be good.’

  Coryn felt a surge of guilt and tried to keep it from his face. Shifts in the factories, reclamation plants and vapour mills were hard enough, n
ever mind trying to get through one without enough rest.

  They pulled their chem cloaks on and settled their masks in place before making their way back down to ground level and setting off into the blunted teeth of the wire storm.

  Ptolea had been right, its fury had passed its peak and the vortex at its centre was already moving on. He felt the stinging impacts of the sharp-edged particulate matter battering his heavy canvas trousers and padded jacket, knowing his skin would be dotted with tiny blood blisters when he removed his protective outer layers. But the farther they went, the less intense the surges and squalls became, until he could at last see the edges of the mountain.

  It wasn’t difficult to see where the meteorite had come down.

  A smoking furrow of rock had been carved from the low foothills, the edges sagging and molten-looking. Pyroclastic material fell like hot black rain, smelling of burned metal. Coryn let some of it settle on his gloved palm and held it out to the others.

  ‘Carbon re-entry burn residue?’ he asked. ‘From a starship?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Ptolea, but Coryn heard the excitement in her voice.

  They marched into the newly created valley, its sides glassy and vitrified by the passage of whatever had carved it. Sheltered now from the last remnants of the storm, Coryn lifted his mask, and took a breath of air. It was utterly still and calm and smelled sweet and fragrant, free of the toxins he’d expect to taste, more like the oils rubbed on newborn babes.

  ‘Still think this was a waste of time?’ he asked Sullax.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ said Sullax. ‘Depends what’s at the end of this.’

  ‘Better this than a shift at the fans,’ said Ptolea, moving on.

  Coryn and Sullax joined her and they moved deeper into the slice cut in the rock. A hundred metres or so away, a shimmer of light lit the far end of the furrow. Clearly whatever had fallen here was still white hot. They approached cautiously, but as the distance closed, Coryn began to realise that what he was seeing was not the remains of a crashed satellite or a downed spaceship.

  He didn’t know what it was.

  It was light, a cohering illumination that filled the end of the valley with its brilliant glow. Coryn stared at it, trying to pin some kind of form upon it, but all he could see were fleeting images and shapes: eyes, golden wings, a thousand wheels turning like the heart of the mightiest machine, multiple impossibly latticed genetic helices interleaving in a billion times a billion complex ways.

  ‘What the bastard hell is that thing?’ demanded Sullax, unlimbering the single-shot rifle he carried. ‘Is is dangerous?’

  ‘I don’t know what it is,’ said Coryn. ‘But I don’t think it’s dangerous.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Ptolea.

  ‘I just do,’ said Coryn, and he did. Though he did not know how he knew, he appreciated that whatever this light was, it had not come to harm them. He moved towards the light as it began to coil into itself, reshaping its form into something wondrous, a being reborn in its own self-immolation.

  He felt something brush his mind, a presence greater than anything he could possibly have imagined. Everything he was, it knew. Everything he knew, it knew. He felt no violation at this, the presence was wholly benign. Tentative even, like a hand offered in friendship to a beautiful stranger.

  As the light was pulled into itself, a shape began to form, and Coryn gasped as he saw what lay at its heart.

  A baby boy, as perfect as any born to one of the gene-pure hermetics.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Sullax.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ added Ptolea.

  ‘No,’ said Coryn, kneeling beside the baby. ‘It’s the miracle we’ve been waiting for.’

  The child’s skin was radiant, as though the light that had surrounded him had been somehow incorporated into his very flesh. The baby gurgled happily at the sight of him and reached up to him with a smile that seemed far too knowing for something that had only just come into being.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ warned Sullax. ‘It could be dangerous.’

  ‘It’s only a baby,’ said Coryn. ‘Babies aren’t dangerous.’

  ‘You don’t know what it is,’ said Sullax. ‘We should kill it and be done.’

  ‘Kill him?’ snapped Coryn. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Sullax drew his knife. ‘It’s an orphan, and you know the rules about orphans. They don’t get to be a burden on the rest of us.’

  ‘We’re not killing him,’ said Coryn, lifting the baby into his arms. The child’s flesh was warm to the touch and that warmth spread into every cell of Coryn’s body in a fiercely protective surge.

  ‘Put the knife away,’ said Ptolea.

  ‘Trust me, I’ll be doing us a favour if I take the knife to its neck,’ said Sullax. ‘Who’s going to raise it? You? Him? You don’t need that extra burden when it’s not blood of your blood.’

  ‘I said put the knife down,’ said Ptolea as the light of the baby spread over her face.

  ‘No,’ hissed Sullax, reaching to snatch the baby from Coryn’s arms.

  Ptolea’s bullet punched out through the back of Sullax’s head, and he dropped to his knees before toppling onto his side. Blood pooled at their feet, and though Coryn knew he should be shocked at the killing of his work-brother, he felt nothing.

  Sullax’s death left him cold.

  He saw that Ptolea understood, her face radiant and free of any guilt at taking the shot.

  Sullax had threatened the perfect child and had suffered accordingly.

  Coryn looked down as he heard a gurgle of something liquid at his feet and saw a trickle of water running from a crack in the ground where the baby boy had lain. That trickle grew to a steady flow, until crystal-clear water was pouring from the depths of the earth in a river. Water flowed around them, washing the blood and chem-dust from their boots and filling the air with its purity.

  ‘He brought the waters,’ said Coryn, handing the baby boy to Ptolea. She cradled his tiny body with a love the equal of any new mother holding her child for the first time. Coryn took the chapbook from his shirt pocket and flicked through its pages, heedless of the paper fragments that fell from its crumbling spine and disintegrated in the water.

  ‘Look,’ he said, tears flowing down his face as he held the book out to Ptolea.

  The pages depicted an ancient creation myth, a purple-hued god rising from primordial waters to bring life to a barren world where nothing ever grew, but which was now reborn as a fertile paradise.

  ‘Who is that?’ asked Ptolea.

  ‘It’s the water-bringer,’ said Coryn. ‘Fulgrim.’

  EIGHTEEN

  See it Done

  Crone World

  City of the Dead

  Exacting attention to detail had served Perturabo well in his centuries of life. In war and at peace, he revelled in the minutiae of any given task, be it reducing an alien fortress to rubble or establishing the golden ratio within every portion of a theoretical design. Angron had berated him for wasting time on irrelevant details, while Guilliman had lauded him for his thoroughness.

  Two very different characters, two very different opinions.

  Both were correct in their own way, but neither fully appreciated his methodology or the bitter drive behind his exacting preferences. The need to be better, the urge to prove his worth beyond taking the metal to the stone.

  Perturabo was a craftsman, and to be worthy of the appellation, every piece of work that bore his name must be judged for as long as it stood. His legacy was to leave no undertaking unfinished.

  Every task was approached as though it might be his last, and this was no different.

  His sanctum was draped in shadows, the grand designs and priceless artworks hung on the walls kept hidden from sight. The automatons were slumped and silent on their shelves, with only the rustle of stacked weapon schemata on curling wax paper to disturb the silence. Not even the distant throb of the Iron Blood’s engines intruded upon his in
trospective isolation.

  Spread before him like components of the most intricate chronometer imaginable, were the pieces of the smashed Warhound automaton. Fulgrim’s head had broken it into fragments, and Perturabo was painstakingly repairing it. It had been an act of impulse to destroy the Warhound – one calculated to drive a point home, but impulsive nonetheless.

  Bent over his workbench, Perturabo gently teased out a bend in a cogwheel, using the microscopic tines of precision callipers to realign each miniature tooth. It would be the work of months to repair it fully, but Perturabo had always believed that once a task was begun, only a lesser man would fail to see it through to the end.

  Ten days had passed since his assault on his brother.

  Perturabo did not regret the act, but Forrix’s words had struck a chord within him. It was foolish to trust to the word of a narcissistic egomaniac. The Trident had urged him to lead the Iron Warriors fleet from the Eye of Terror – his newly chosen name already gaining currency – and return to the Warmaster’s side, but he had given Fulgrim his oath that he would see this to the end and that was that.

  Perturabo knew his brother would betray him. He was resigned to its inevitability. Such individuals could never be relied upon to do anything other than further their own interests, and Fulgrim was no exception. The only question was when the betrayal would come.

  Speculation was pointless. It would happen, and he would be ready for it.

  Part of him looked forward to it.

  At least then he would be freed from his obligation to Fulgrim.

  Satisfied that the cogwheel was returned to its original form, Perturabo carefully placed it back where it had come from and slotted the tool into its compartment. He straightened and rubbed the heels of his palms over his face. His eyes were heavy and felt gritty, as though he had not rested or had slept badly.

  Perturabo sat back and poured himself a heavy goblet of wine from a bronze ewer. Bitter and flavoured with almonds and gene-recovered spices from Terra, the beverage was one fermented by a son of the Crimson King. Thinner than the robust Olympian wines, but exciting and full of interesting contradictions.