The Imperial Truth

by Laurie Goulding

  You could see it in the eyes. Dallos and LoMund and the others here, every man we met along the way - I saw that same look staring back at me from the mirror. Not just the thousand-yard stare of a soldier, not just that. A shared burden that none of us could talk about, because we had all spent our lives denying it. Hiding it.

  'S-Six of Crosses,' Dallos stuttered, working the cards into a blur of movement. 'Ace. The Ace of D-daggers. The other ships are gone.'

  We had been climbing for the better part of a day, up from the amid-ships levels where the radiation shielding was heavy and immovable, locking us in. The lower decks, the engineering spaces, weren't connected to the wards, and there seemed little reason to seek a way to reach them. We numbered few and those of us who were mechanically savvy were far from enginseers. Breng was the closest thing we had to a technologian, being a ship hand and pilot-savant.

  It seemed more logical to head up, to find the flying bridge and command tiers. At first I insisted that we look to the youths in the other compartments, perhaps to lend them some courage... but there seemed little point to that. We had none to spare.

  Recall that I spoke before of the constants of sound, the moaning and the engines; I had woken the day before from a fitful sleep full of dream-colours, to a reality of cold silence from the warp motors. Without explanation, we were suddenly adrift. Malfunctions came soon after. Power gave out in sudden falls of darkness and creeping waves of hoarfrost. Air fouled and became still. Worse were the doors that fell like great blades guillotining down across the corridors, sealing off sections of the ship without warning.

  There had been nothing to suggest collision or impact by enemy weapons. After a few hours, when we were still alive and the corridors were not crawling with blood-hungry xenos, murderous traitors or... the other things, we drew plans to investigate.

  I saw patterns, but I hadn't seen any sign of this one forming. That's why I volunteered - that and the fact that I could hold a gun. The few that we had liberated from an emergency armoury, we clutched to us like talismans of protection. If the new enemy was out there, of course, I wondered how much use the guns would be to us. At best, they were a comforting illusion of strength.

  I remembered the streets of Nomeah running red. I remembered the giants slaughtering all who dared to stand or who did not flee fast enough. I remembered the horrors, but only as blurs of meat and talons and blood, as if my mind had smudged out the memory of them rather than know it with any clarity.

  I looked down at the hand with the missing fingers, and the echo of stark pain was there, cold and quick.

  'Hecane?' Yao was the one who eventually spoke. 'We move on?' He gestured towards the dim light ahead, asking the question of me, of all of us.

  I nodded. 'We move on.'

  I KNOW WHAT kind of war this is.

  I've fought on a dozen worlds in the Akarli Cluster and far beyond, on deserts and in oceans, through cloud-reaches and mountain passes, but Nomeah was my home. We always seemed to come back to there. A rough rabble of people we had been called, and that was right. Constantly infighting, each of our tribes nurturing grudges against the others like they were our offspring.

  What can you say of the Nomeahi? That we know how to hate. That we can find an insult in a bouquet of roses. Those things are true.

  But it is also true that we love our Emperor and we are proud of our Imperium. Perhaps that is why our petty little differences were tolerated by the bureaucrats of Terra - they let us bloody each other in our small rivalries because they knew that when the call came, we would pick up arms and march side by side without hesitation. All enmities forgotten for the moment, in the Emperor's name. Our contentious nature makes us good warrior stock. I'll point you to a dozen planets brought hard into compliance by regiments born of worlds in the Akarli sector. We did our part for the Great Crusade, that was never in question.

  Of course, in recent times, we started to trickle home and fight amongst ourselves once again, but never enough to make it an issue beyond our own borders. But then the change came, the rebellion, the insurrection - the heresy, as some of the more histrionic called it. Many didn't understand at first, and then they were dead. But I understood. I find patterns. I know betrayal when I see it.

  It runs like lifeblood through the veins of this war. It is what powers the will of the traitors, and the men who foolishly think that they can ride the edges of the bastard Horus's cloak. This war is not being fought for desire of power. It is not a just revolution against the yoke of an oppressor. Materiel and territory? Those are objectives of passing interest. No, what we face here is treachery for treachery's sake. I think I knew that from the first, but it is only now that I have the words to express the thought. Now that I have had the time to think on it.

  Horus, may he die a thousand deaths, is the very definition of traitor. The purest evolution of that idea made manifest. He's a son hating the father, a citizen betraying his state, a patriot burning his flag, a commander killing his soldiers. For all his gene-engineered origins, Horus is a human sacrificing humanity. He is the worst of us.

  I know this, not because I have seen the Warmaster, or spoken to him or anything like that; I know it because I have seen with these eyes the horrors that he has called to battle in his name.

  And fate take me, in my dreams I have stood upon the edge of the crumbling abyss that he seeks to plunge us into.

  IT WAS PERHAPS a day later when we finally made it to the command tiers. Many corridors up there were sealed by those thick drop-doors, and the ones with glassy portals allowed me to look through and see vacuum-bloated corpses in the compartments beyond, drifting in null-gravity. More life support failures, more unlucky dead, young and old alike.

  'Didn't live this long to be killed by bloody machines failing,' Chenec grated. 'Not burning my luck now!' He fingered a chain habitually worn around his wrist, a line of metal beads dull with age. I think he could hear something in the way they rattled, but if that were so, Chenec never sought to talk about it.

  I was going to answer him, but then I saw LoMund and Breng bringing up their guns. A heartbeat later, footsteps were coming toward us.

  I listened. You learn quick when the horrors are abroad. You learn how to hear for talons scraping and bones dragging. This was just the clatter of boots on metal plates, but I wasn't about to be casual. I've seen things that will look like men to your eyes, but with auras belonging to monsters that only the insane could imagine.

  A youth stumbled around the comer and we nearly shot him for his temerity. He saw us and almost fouled his britches in shock. 'Don't shoot!' he cried. The boy was barely a teenager, shaven-headed and dirty.

  'Who the blades are you?' demanded LoMund, pointing with his laspistol. 'Talk!'

  He did, collapsing and babbling all at once. He told us his name was Zartine, a foundling boy from a city orphanage on Zofor's World, bold enough to slip out of the lower wards to explore the ship and now regretting it. He was utterly terrified, and not just of us. I could see his colours flashing orange, out of control.

  I helped him up. 'Calm down, lad. What are you doing up here? Do you know what happened to the ship?'

  'I know!' Zartine snapped back. 'It's worse than you think. They're here, don't you see? Can't you hear them?' He waved at the air, hands clutching at nothing. 'Space Marines!'

  Breng made a noise like he was hawking up phlegm. 'No legionaries here.'

  'Wrong!' shouted the youth. He pointed over his shoulder. 'Down there. Saw him.'

  'He isn't lying.' It was a second before I realised that it was Dallos who had spoken. I turned and found him with the damned deck in his hands again, his rifle stowed.

  'Eight of Hammers.'

  He held up the worn card to show us all, as if it were a warrant of absolute truth.

  All of a sudden, I was incensed at his moronic little game, and I crossed the distance to Dallos in a rush, slapping the cards out of his grip with a savage backhand. 'You don't know!' I snarled,
fighting back a surge of panic. 'You can't know that!' Dread coiled inside me, icy and thick.

  Dallos wailed and immediately dived at the deck, snatching up the cards where they had scattered. He seemed so hurt by my action. My anger was strangled and guilt washed over me. Guilt and fear.

  LET ME TELL you how it happened on Nomeah. Let me show you the little war of my life, the microcosm of the greater treachery that even now writhes across the stars, writing itself into our history.

  You would think that because of who we were, the conflict would have come in blood and thunder from the outset. Man against man, neighbours fighting neighbours. Well, all that did come, but not at first. The start of it was insidious, and for that I hate Horus all the more. He didn't come to our worlds with warships and guns; he didn't even consider us worthy of those things. Nomeah and the worlds of Arkarli were set upon the path to dissolution and ruin by a handful of perfidious agents, less than a platoon's worth. Fifth columnists, interlopers and sneaks who turned us against ourselves.

  We gave them fertile ground, idiots that we were. A web of old jealousies, lines of distrust that were ripe for exploitation. Where the Emperor's light of illumination had united us, the Warmaster's shadow divided.

  And the cleverness of it was the perfect, fractal nature of the deceit. It scaled up and down, using the same tools to embellish ingrained hatreds between whole worlds, nations, cities. All the way down until it was street against street, house against house, brother against brother.

  We all hated so very well on Nomeah and, directed by callous hands, that hatred ripped us apart.

  But not all at once. It was subtle, careful.

  I remember with blinding clarity the day when the poison of it bubbled to the surface in my platoon. Note that we were nothing special - just a division of riflemen with no great laurels and banners to carry before us. No impressive name or clever sobriquet. There was a force number attached to our division and nothing else. In the scheme of the Emperor's Great Crusade, we were quite ordinary. But that was not enough to protect us.

  For months, almost a solar year, things had been changing at far distant command. Directives would come to Nomeah and we would be told that new rules were in place. Each was presented to us like a gift, not as a demand, but if one resisted then the velvet fell away to reveal iron beneath. Refusal was not encouraged.

  Soldiers and officers alike were simply told that things had changed, that this was the way of it now. As much as we grumbled and sneered, as much as those angry thoughts became angry words, nothing was undone. Piece by piece, the line of loyalty began to move. We tipped towards the edge by degrees, though the motion of the gradient seemed insignificant each time.

  The observance of a festival day was cancelled. Weapons of a certain type were recalled. Uniform colours adjusted. Liberty rearranged. Regulations altered in subtle ways with the core purpose left unclear. One tiny thing after another. Each of small weight of consequence, so much so a man might feel almost churlish to question each openly. But measured again in their collective...

  Imagine the navigation of a sail-foil flyer in the cloud-reaches. She moves under the breath of wind toward tree north, straight and true.

  But the hand upon the tiller turns a degree off the line. The sails are angled, oh-so-gently, first by one turn and then another. If no man watches the path of the suns over the bowsprit, in time the flyer finds herself turned to due south and into the teeth of an oncoming storm. And all escaping the notice of the crew asleep below decks.

  I recall the day when the words were finally said out loud. 'Today we affirm our loyalty to his highness the Warmaster Horus, in defiance of an aloof and uncaring Terra.' They never used the words Emperor or Imperium, because to do so would confuse the people they sought to assimilate into their acts of treason. I watched the new flags unfurl, the noble aquila replaced in favour of an unblinking, slitted eye.

  We knew it was coming of course. In the barracks, after lights out, it was all that men spoke of. In those hushed conversations, there was much talk of defiance. I wonder where it went in the cold light of day.

  Here then, was the moment of both my greatest courage and my greatest stupidity. When the words were said, I spoke out - and when I looked across the hall to find the faces of my comrades, the ones thatI knew agreed with me, there was only silence and eyes turned away. Dark auras burning in my gaze.

  I knew then the true nature of this war, and the lifeblood of it.

  THERE WAS A lot of talk about what we would do. We had come a long way, too far just to timidly retreat back to the ward decks and wait for an uncertain fate. Don't mistake what we did for courage, though. I think all of us were long past those kinds of ideals. I learned that we shared... things, all the adults on this barge. Not just our shared secrets, but a shared experience.

  Not one of us had been spared a brush with the horrors. Some had fought them, most had run from them. All knew that whatever they were, wherever they came from, the monstrosities that Horus had unleashed upon the galaxy were unlike anything we had ever fought before. In a way, we were all caught by our own natures; the pure animal part of us wanted to flee from them, while the rational, hateful, human part would have given anything for a weapon big enough to kill those fearsome things.

  And so we went on, Zartine joining us, trailing at the back with Yao. The boy might have had some kind of gift too, I think. He kept talking about music when no one else could hear it.

  At last we reached the great crenellated entrance vestibule to the ship's command centre, and Breng gingerly worked the controls to retract the hatch. For a moment, nothing happened, and then, in the blink of an eye the great iron door dropped open, slamming into the deck.

  A hard-edged shadow, so large that it filled the open hatchway, loomed inside. I think that if I had been quicker of mind, I would have run. Instead, I raised the lasrifle as the shape shifted its bulk to pass through a gap built for men of my stature.

  Into the light it came, and Zartine was proven right.

  A single warrior of the Legiones Astartes came out to meet us. Heavy boots of ceramite clanged against the deck plates, making the floor jump beneath our feet. In aspect, the Space Marine was a giant: I saw a broad chestplate emblazoned with the Imperial Aquila; arms thick as the trunks of great trees; a scowling, beaked helmet that resembled the skinned skull of some giant raptor. The eyes in that face glowed red with combat auto-senses, auspex returns and scrolling data feeds. The warrior's armour was strangely bereft of any iconography, plain in a hue alike to cut slate. He moved with a fluidity more akin to an apex predator than anything born of humanity.

  At his back, a hood-like construct framed his helm, built more to resemble the archway of some long-lost devotional chapel than any battle mechanism. It was dark, heavy iron studded with crystals that burned with blue light. It drew my sight like gravity pulling upon me, and I glimpsed an aura there made of colours that did not exist in the common world. For my sins, I had seen those shades before.

  The warrior was armed with a massive boltgun, but it remained maglocked to a holster pad on his thigh. In his other hand he held a staff of polished, flawless silver. I remember thinking that it seemed an odd affectation. With his free hand, he reached up and removed his helm, pressure seals hissing into the cold air.

  A war-god looked back at us, scalp shorn of hair, tattoos of intricate nature adorning his cheeks and throat, scars like red trophies upon his flesh. His eyes - his true eyes - startled me with their jet depths. I saw something in them, something I had often seen in the mirror.

  Our weapons were aimed at his chest. He did not order us to lower them, but passed a solemn, measuring gaze over each man before him.

  The muzzles of the lasguns dropped away without a spoken word.

  When his gaze reached me, I knew that he was taking my measure with senses that I could only guess at. Secretly, I had always thought myself special, better than the rest because of my dash of the sight. I believed that th
ings were open to me in subtle ways, things that ordinary men could not perceive, but now I understood that what I lauded in myself was a fraction of what this giant could call upon.

  'Ruafe Hecane,' he intoned, his voice low and booming. 'You have come a long way.'

  He knew my name. He knew us all, every single man on the ship, I have no doubt of it. I opened my mouth to speak, but then he raised his head and there I saw the twinned sigils branded into his flesh.

  On one side, a design like a scarab beetle. On the other, a circular star surrounded by a nimbus of rays.

  The grey armour did not hide his true nature from me. The legionary that stood before me was a warrior of the Thousand Sons - the sons of the mage-king Magnus. He was the scion of a traitor Legion. The last time I had seen his kind, their wargear red as madness, it had been at the head of an army of horrors laying waste to my home world.

  ***

  THE SOLDIERS I had called my comrades did not turn to Horus's banner from cowardice, know that. The reasons are far more complex. They all turned upon pretexts that to them seemed reasonable. I do believe this.There was no mass mind control, no drugging and warping of self. That happened later, with the arrival of the horrors.

  I had time to think on that while I waited in the brig, imprisoned there amongst the others who had been too slow to agree or too forthright to cover their doubts. Looking back, I was furious with myself. How had I ever been so naïve to think that I could foster rebellion in that moment? I am no eloquent speaker who could rally men with a stirring speech. I was just a fool who disagreed openly, and paid for it.

  They were going to execute us. That was part of the new orders, but they found it hard to carry out the command. I think that was the last part of whatever resistance they had, slowly withering and dying beneath the Warmaster's eclipse.

  At first I was frustrated and impotent with my anger. I cursed them all a hundred times for their weakness and trite duplicity, but eventually that rage was spent and I could do nothing but ruminate. Don't assume that I came to forgive my former squad mates - far from it - but I did come to understand them.