Grey Knights: Sons of Titan

by David Annandale

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Maledictus

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

  True Name

  Incorruptible

  The Mourning Tower

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘The Emperor's Gift’

  Legal

  eBook license

  More Grey Knights from Black Library

  THE GREY KNIGHTS OMNIBUS

  Contains the novels Grey Knights, Hammer of Daemons and Dark Adeptus

  PANDORAX

  A Space Marine Battles novel

  THE EMPEROR’S GIFT

  MORTARION’S HEART

  A Space Marine Battles audio drama

  DREAD NIGHT

  More tales from the Sanctus Reach

  EVIL SUN RISING

  A novella

  BLOOD ON THE MOUNTAIN

  A novella

  KLAW OF MORK

  An audio drama

  ICECLAW

  An audio drama

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  CHAPTER ONE

  VOYAGERS

  Klas Brauner saw the contrails first. He and his crew had just moved another stone out of the way of the plough. He arched his back, working out the kinks, feeling every decade as hot coal on his spine. He looked up into the hot steel of the summer sky, and saw them: hundreds of streaks as the ships tore down through the atmosphere. Within seconds, the spreading cloud of the contrails dimmed the sun. The shadow fell over Brauner’s land, and everyone at work in the fields stopped to stare at what was coming.

  War was raining down on Squire’s Rest.

  Brauner traced the direction of the streaks. There would be no landings on his farm, nor on Elna Stumar’s. But the nearest wouldn’t be many kilometres away. And the rain of ships kept falling. These numbers would make distance meaningless.

  ‘Get everyone to the house,’ he told his foreman, Stellan Dietrick. ‘Shutters down. Distribute the weapons. Wait for me there.’

  ‘Yes, colonel.’

  Colonel. He hadn’t been one for twenty years. Dietrick hadn’t been a sergeant for just as long. They had fought their last official campaign with their fellow Cadians on Vhun. They had survived to retirement and earned their reward on Squire’s Rest. Brauner no longer held military rank over his employees. The old habits died hard, though. And the wars kept following them. In these last years, there hadn’t been a single month without at least one skirmish.

  Today was different, though. Today, he thought, their ranks would be needed again.

  He ran over to the battered Tauros. He drove the utility vehicle across his fields towards the Stumar farm, bouncing over the stones and ruts of the tired land. Squire’s Rest was held out to active troops as a promise of paradise. Perhaps it had been so, a few millennia back, but its Arcadian glories had passed. The agri world was still productive, but reluctantly so. Its fertility was being squeezed from it through overwork and the damage caused by the ork raids. Ten years of raids. Growing more aggressive, eroding the accomplishments of a world of veterans.

  Bastards.

  He drove for twenty minutes, jouncing straight through both farms, jouncing though crops of struggling maize, until he reached the bluff at the western edge of Stumar’s property. He’d guessed right. He saw her, a hard silhouette, watching the streaks of the invasion. He pulled up a few metres back from the cliff edge.

  She nodded once as he approached, but didn’t look away from the contrails. ‘Colonel,’ she said.

  ‘Colonel,’ he replied. He stood beside her. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘This isn’t a raid.’

  ‘Not this time,’ he agreed. The contrails now covered the sky. The orks were coming to take the planet. ‘They want it all. Any word from Ascra?’ The regional capital was over five hundred kilometres away. The population of Squire’s Rest was not much more than ten million, sufficiently spread out that the individual homesteads were largely autonomous. But the planet’s agricultural production needed to be shipped, and so there were spaceports and administrative centres. The Administratum gnomes at Ascra had been of little help during the raids. Brauner did not expect military aid now. But he did wonder if there was news about the rest of the Sanctus Reach.

  Stumar grimaced. ‘I did a vox scan a few minutes ago. Ascra is just sending out warnings about the obvious.’

  ‘Any off-world transmissions?’

  ‘Nothing from Malaghai Morca.’

  So the trading post had fallen. ‘And Ghul Jensen?’

  ‘A lot of screaming.’

  The hive world reacting as expected. ‘They’re hitting everywhere then.’

  ‘Seems like it.’

  They watched in silence for a few minutes. In the distance, the first booms of landing echoed.

  ‘So,’ Brauner said.

  ‘So,’ Stumar replied.

  ‘I never was much of a farmer.’

  ‘Know anyone who is?’

  They looked at each other then. Here we are, Brauner thought, two old war dogs who should know better than to be happy about this. They still had some iron in them. It hurt to stand straight, but he could do it. Stumar did too, and didn’t let on if the arthritis was gnawing at her back just as much as it did his. She had it worse with her hands, though, both of them hooked into permanent claws. White hair on both veterans, almost as many scars as wrinkles. Their skin was leather so tough it was almost wood.

  ‘So,’ Brauner said again.

  ‘So.’

  ‘How are we going to fight them?’

  Stumar kicked a stone off the top of the bluff. ‘Like we always do.’

  ‘Las and piss it is, then.’

  ‘Greenskins won’t
know what hit them.’

  They grinned at each other, but Brauner felt something clutch in his chest. It wasn’t the coming of war that bothered him. It wasn’t the thought of dying. It was the knowledge that Stumar was going to die too.

  They were all going to die.

  The orks would make sure of it.

  ‘We’re ten minutes from the Sanctus Reach Mandeville point, justicar,’ Hadrianna Furia said as she walked into the Chamber of Militant Quiet.

  Justicar Styer looked up from the hololith of Squire’s Rest that dominated the projection table in the centre of the room. ‘Thank you, inquisitor.’ The Grey Knight did not resent the arrival of an unannounced presence into the room, intrusive though it was. The space was meditative and tactical, a sanctuary for prayer and war. Situated one level above the bridge of the Tyndaris, it provided a valued retreat for Styer while giving him rapid access to the strike cruiser’s nerve centre when necessary. It was circular. The adornment of its dome was simple. The ribs were carved into the representation of spears, in alternating orientation. Between them was the darkness of obsidian. When he gazed upward, Styer found he could empty his mind of the extraneous and concentrate on the absolute necessity of the moment. What was even more crucial: he could bear down on the problem that faced him and strip it of its inessentials, unearthing the true core of the challenge. On the walls beneath the dome were shelves holding texts that were devotional, military, and arcane. As a librarium, the Chamber of Militant Quiet had a small collection, but it was a powerful one.

  Furia looked at the projection of the world. ‘Any luck?’

  ‘No.’ Styer had been going over everything in the Tyndaris’s data banks about the planet during the strike cruiser’s journey to Sanctus Reach. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘The world is innocuous.’

  ‘It is in the path of a massive ork force.’

  ‘And its inhabitants have my sympathy.’

  ‘Do they?’ Furia asked.

  Was she testing him? Styer wondered. For what? Necessary signs of humanity, or extraneous ones? Or was her purpose less well defined, a question of probing him from different angles, looking for the weakness that would explain his scepticism about the mission? He shrugged off the questions. They weren’t useful ones. ‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘I am not unmoved by their plight. But I will not waste time or energy mourning what a single squad cannot prevent. Nor do I find any records,’ he waved his hand at the data-slates fanned across his side of the table, ‘that point to the work of the Ruinous Powers. What purchase would they find in a population composed of retired Imperial Guard who have been rewarded for loyalty and service? If the fall of Squire’s Rest is a concern for the Inquisition, I would think it falls within the purview of the Ordo Xenos, not the Ordo Malleus.’

  ‘Nevertheless, those are the coordinates the prognosticators gave us. A major daemonic incursion is imminent.’

  Styer grunted.

  ‘You doubt the prognostication?’ Furia sounded surprised. She shouldn’t. He hadn’t made his reservations a secret. But this was the first time they had discussed the matter directly.

  ‘About its accuracy, yes.’

  ‘That is a highly unorthodox attitude, justicar.’

  ‘And a sound one. I have no wish to suffer further pointless losses.’

  The last mission had savaged his squad. The prognosticators had forecast an incursion in the Angriff System. Situated in the Finial sector, Angriff was close enough to the Eye of Terror for warp distortions to be expected. Still, all information had pointed to Angriff Primus’s moon as the site of the attack. The planet was a miserable forge world, but it was in the moon’s mining colonies where the Ordo Malleus and the Ecclesiarchy had already been combating a growing cult whose conception of the Emperor was a dangerously extreme deviation from the orthodoxy of the Imperial Creed. The Tyndaris had arrived, preparations had been made, and the cult’s centres of activity assaulted. But the daemons had appeared on Angriff Primus itself. Styer’s squad had had to fly into battle with no time to formulate a proper strategy. They had managed to contain the infection to a single manufactorum. In the end, they had destroyed the plant and every soul, possessed or innocent, inside.

  Two battle-brothers had been lost. Erec and Morholt, their centuries of battle deeds brought to an end by the abominations that should never have been given the chance to enter the materium. Styer didn’t know when his squad would be back to full strength. He bore a new set of scars: huge claw slashes, two sets of three parallel gouges that ran down either side of his face from his temples to his chin. The raised flesh of the wounds’ ridges reminded him of how badly they had been blindsided. If the prognosticators had sought deliberately to mislead his squad, he thought, they could not have done better. He kept these musings to himself. He would never accuse another Grey Knight of treason or corruption. Those were impossibilities. But what he saw on the table before him made him question the accuracy of the prognosticators even more.

  He was surprised that Furia didn’t share his mistrust. She had been on Angriff Primus too. She had fought, and she had been wounded. Badly. Most of the left side of her body was augmetic. Arm and leg were bionic. Anyone who saw her in profile saw one of two different people. On the right, there was the flesh of a mid-career inquisitor. Juvenat treatments preserved something that could not be said to be youth – her eye was too hard for that – but was the prime of strength. The left side of her face was a bronze mask, just as stern and remorseless as the flesh, the red lens of her eye a piercing judgement, but the time and the expression were frozen. The right side of Furia was capable of expressing kindness. It could laugh. The left was frozen in unending purpose.

  ‘Our losses on Angriff Primus were not in vain,’ she said.

  ‘True,’ Styer replied. ‘But neither were they necessary. If we had been looking in the right place from the start, they would not have happened.’ He stabbed a finger at the hololith of Squire’s Rest. ‘And this is the wrong place. Again.’

  ‘The coordinates were specific. One of the moons, perhaps?’

  ‘Doubtful. They’re just fragments. Nothing larger than a mountain. No mining operations on any of them. They’re dead rock.’

  ‘Then there is something that we’re missing. Just as there must have been something we missed on Angriff Primus. We were in error, not the prognostication.’

  ‘If we go into battle second-guessing our strategy, we deserve defeat.’

  ‘Then we will make certain we are not in error,’ Furia said, and turned to go. ‘I think we should be on the bridge, Justicar Styer.’

  He grunted and extinguished the hololith. He was dissatisfied with his session in the chamber. He had come to no resolution. He left with as many doubts as he had entered. But Furia was right.

  The Grey Knights were about to arrive on their field of battle. Time to lead the charge.

  As he and Furia stepped outside the chamber, he saw Vohnum waiting for him. ‘I’ll join you in a moment, inquisitor,’ he said.

  Furia glanced at Vohnum, nodded to Styer, and walked on.

  ‘You wanted to see me, brother?’ Styer said.

  ‘I was wondering whether you had found greater clarity with regards to our mission, brother-justicar.’

  Styer didn’t care for the ambiguity of Vohnum’s phrasing. It could be read as a helpful expression of concern. It could also be a veiled criticism. Vohnum might be implying that it was Styer who lacked clarity, not the mission. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have not.’ He waited for a moment, then said, ‘Why? Do you see something I don’t?’

  Vohnum was the most senior of the warriors who served with Styer. It was he who commanded the other combat squad when they split their force into two on the battlefield. They had fought side by side for over a century, and they had done so well. But Angriff Primus had driven a wedge between them. Vohnum didn’t doubt the prognosticators. His faith in ever
y aspect of them was absolute. If something went wrong, the blame fell with the decisions made in combat. Following that logic, Styer knew that his battle-brother was looking at his leadership critically.

  ‘It is not for me to engage in exegesis,’ Vohnum began.

  ‘Why not? An interpretation that would make sense of the contradictions before us would be helpful.’

  ‘I see nothing to interpret. The prognosticators have foreseen a daemonic incursion at these coordinates. So we have come to defeat it.’

  ‘Indeed we have.’

  Vohnum grimaced in frustration. ‘Forgive me, brother-justicar, but that is not the impression you are giving.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘You have not made a secret of your questions about the prognostication.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I believe doing so is detrimental to the spiritual health of our squad.’

  Styer bristled, but he made himself calm down before answering. Honest debate was part of the mortar of trust between battle-brothers. But not when disagreement crossed over into dissension. ‘After Angriff Primus, I have questions. The current situation makes them even more urgent. I will not conceal my doubts from the rest of you.’

  ‘I expressed myself badly,’ Vohnum said. ‘It is not your honesty that troubles me. It is the questions themselves.’

  ‘Are you questioning my leadership?’

  ‘I seek reassurance about the soundness of your judgement.’

  ‘Then be assured,’ Styer said, and the air filled with ice. ‘Any question I ask is for the benefit of our squad, and for the fulfilment of our duty and our oaths.’ He leaned in towards Vohnum. ‘Have no doubt of that.’ He was not reassuring the other Grey Knight. He was giving him a direct order.

  ‘The landings are still ongoing, inquisitor,’ Lowell Montgelas said.

  Malia Orbiana stifled the worst of her impatience. ‘I can see that very well, shipmaster.’ The primary oculus of the Scouring Light displayed the long rain of ork landings. ‘The bulk of the ork fleet is moving on though, is it not?’

  ‘It is,’ Montgelas admitted.