Void Stalker

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Variel nodded, allowing himself the smallest of smiles. ‘Mature progenoids will always react with a subsistent level of activity – a base level of processing genetic matter, collating a biological record of the experiences and traumas of the warrior they serve.’

  ‘I know how progenoids function, brother.’

  Variel raised a hand to placate the prophet. ‘That is my point. Yours have always been overactive, as we already knew. Much too efficient. They rendered your physiology unstable and were, perhaps, the cause of your prophetic vision. Now, however, they are in rebellion. Previously, they were still trying to improve you, from human to one of the Legiones Astartes. But that development was a dead end. You could improve no more. You were already one of us. Their overefficiency has now passed a critical juncture. In many cases, the implanted organs would wither and die within the body. Yours are too strong. They are affecting the host, rather than withering themselves.’

  ‘As I said: pain while I still draw breath, but it is not terminal.’

  Variel conceded the point with a flash of thought in his pale eyes. ‘Perhaps. Either way, removal of the progenoids is no longer an option. It would make no difference, for your organs are already–’

  Talos interrupted with an irritated wave of his hand, as if giving the order to fire. ‘Enough. I can read the accursed hololithic. Come, Variel. Deal with the wounded, and let us retake Tsagualsa.’

  The Flayer exhaled slowly. The dim illumination of the side chamber painted the skinned faces across his pauldrons in a greasy, pallid light.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Talos.

  ‘Were you to die, and a suitable host be found for your gene-seed organs, there is a chance the new host would carry the same curse as you – but with the ability to control it. Your gene-seed is uncorrupted, but unsuited to you. In a better host, with true symbiosis, they would be…’

  ‘Be what?’ His dark eyes flickered with thought now, possibilities playing out in their depths.

  Variel was staring at the charts. ‘Powerful. Imagine your prophetic gift without the false visions that increase as time passes, or the headaches that drive you to your knees, or the unconsciousness that lasts weeks or months. Imagine it without the broken memory, or the other debilitating symptoms that plague you. When you die, brother, you will leave a powerful legacy for the future.’

  ‘The future,’ Talos said, his black eyes unfocusing. He almost smiled. ‘Of course.’

  Variel turned back from the hololithic. ‘What is it?’

  ‘That is why we are here.’ Talos tongued his split lip, tasting his own blood – a lesser reflection of Uzas and the dead primarch. ‘I know what I want from this world.’

  ‘I am pleased to hear it. I had hoped this discussion would have that effect on you. Am I to assume you have changed your perspective, or are you still content to allow the Legion to slip its leash and slaughter everyone on the world below?’

  ‘No. The pure war is not enough. This is Tsagualsa, Variel. The carrion world… now with life tenaciously clinging to its scabbed surface. We can claw more than some tawdry, bloodthirsty satisfaction from this.’

  The Apothecary disengaged the hand scanner, letting it power down. ‘Then what, Talos?’

  The prophet stared past Variel, stared past the chamber’s walls, looking at something only he could see.

  ‘We can reforge the Legion. We can lay down an example for our brothers to follow. We can cast aside the hatred between warbands, with these painful first steps. Do you see, Variel?’

  He turned at last, his black eyes shining. ‘We can make it glorious, this time. We can begin again.’

  The Apothecary wheeled several of his full-body scanners into place. Buttons and dials on his narthecium gauntlet activated the jointed arms reaching down from the ceiling. Chemicals sloshed in glass vials.

  ‘Lie down,’ he said.

  Talos complied, still staring with unfocused eyes. ‘Will I lose consciousness?’

  ‘Without a doubt,’ Variel replied. ‘Tell me, is Tsagualsa the right place to begin such a reforging?

  ‘I believe so. As an example, as a… symbol. Have any of the others told you what happened when we left this world?’

  ‘I have heard of the Tsagualsan Retaliation, yes.’

  Talos was seeing past him again, staring now into memory rather than the paths of possibility.

  ‘That makes it seem so placid. No, Variel, it was much worse than that. With the primarch gone, we’d been decaying for years – scattering to the stars, guarding our own supplies from the claws of our brothers as much as from the preying hands of our enemies. But at the end of it all, when the grey sky caught fire with the contrails of ten thousand drop-pods, that was the day a Legion died.’

  Variel felt his skin crawling. He loathed being near any expression of emotion, even the bitterness of old memory. But curiosity forced his tongue.

  ‘Who came for you?’ he asked. ‘What size was the force to dare attack an entire Legion?’

  ‘It was the Ultramarines.’ Talos lowered his head, surrendering to the memory now.

  ‘A thousand warriors?’ The Apothecary’s eyes widened. ‘That’s all?’

  ‘You think in such small terms,’ Talos chuckled. ‘The Ultramarines. Their sons. Their brothers. Their cousins. The entire Legion, reborn after the Heresy, wearing hundreds of icons proclaiming their new allegiances. They called themselves the Primogenitors. I believe their descendants still do.’

  ‘You mean the Ultramarines’ kindred Chapters?’ Variel could almost picture it now. ‘How many of them?’

  ‘All of them, Variel,’ Talos said softly, seeing the sky once again on that distant day. ‘All of them.’

  XII

  THE PRIMOGENITORS’ RAGE

  He knew he was dreaming.

  It didn’t help. It didn’t make anything less real. The smells were no weaker, the pain was no fainter.

  ‘Get to the ships,’ he said aloud. He could sense Variel moving around the chamber, though he could see nothing outside the pictures his mind was painting. The tests being run on his blood, on his brain, on his heart… none of it meant anything, for he felt nothing at all.

  ‘Get to the ships.’

  ‘Peace, Talos,’ came Variel’s voice, from a great distance. ‘Peace.’

  He couldn’t remember a time of peace. There had never been peace in the purgatory of Tsagualsa.

  His first memory of the last day was the sunrise.

  They came for vengeance as the weak sun rose.

  Tsagualsa’s star was a cold heart at the system’s core – a source of anaemic, thin light that scarcely brightened the lone world in its care. Its pale radiance spread across the planet’s lifeless surface, at last painting bleak illumination across the battlements of a black stone fortress. On the plains, a dust storm was brewing. It would crash over the fortress within the hour.

  Before Mercutian, before Variel, before Uzas – there was Sar Zell, Ruven, Xarl and Cyrion.

  Sar Zell was the one to come running. His boots pounded across the battlements as the heavens caught fire.

  ‘They’re here,’ he voxed to Talos. ‘They’ve come at last.’

  In a moment of divine atmospheric poetry, it started to rain from an amber sky.

  In the years following the primarch’s death, more and more warbands cut loose from Tsagualsa’s skies and took their raiding deeper into the Imperium. Many were already carving out havens in the Great Eye with the other Legions, spending as much time waging war against former kin as against the minions of the False Emperor.

  A battlefleet of staggering size rested above the grey world’s barren face, each warship marked by the winged skull of the Eighth Legion. Here was a fleet that could devastate entire solar systems. It had done so before, many times.

  Across the Tsagualsan System, rifts in
reality tore open in the silence of the void. They bled foul, daemonic matter into the clean silence of real space, while shuddering battleships strained their way back into the material universe. As with almost all warp flight, there was little cohesion, no alignment of arrival vectors and formations maintained through the rage of empyrean flight. Instead, one by one, the invaders burst from the warp and powered towards the grey world.

  At first, they matched the Night Lords’ numbers. Soon, they overshadowed them. As the battle began, by the time the skies of Tsagualsa started to burn, they eclipsed the Eighth Legion fleet completely. More warships arrived with each passing minute, vomited from the warp and streaming trails of poisonous mist.

  They needed no formation. They needed no strategic assault plan. That many ships needed nothing else to win a war. The Primogenitor Chapters, the Thirteenth Legion in all but name, had come to end the cancer of heresy once and for all.

  Captains and commanders filled the vox-net with recriminations; with orders no one else was following; with tactics few souls were willing to hear.

  Talos remained on the battlements, listening to the thousands of screaming voices. Always in the past, the screams were those of their prey. Now the cries were torn from the mouths of brothers, brothers that had survived the Heresy and the two centuries of warfare since.

  One order was damning in its repetition. He heard it over and over again, screamed and cried and yelled. Get to the ships. Get to the ships. Get to the ships.

  ‘We have to defend the fortress,’ Talos voxed back to his commander.

  The Exalted’s voice was a bass drawl, rasping and wet over the scrambled vox. ‘You do not see the madness taking place up here, prophet. The Thirteenth Legion will crucify us if we remain.’

  ‘Vandred, we cannot abandon all of the fortress’s resources…’

  ‘There is no time for this, Talos. Dozens of our warships are already running. We are more than outnumbered; we are at risk of being overwhelmed. Get back to the ship.’

  The prophet activated his narthecium gauntlet, tracking First Claw’s armour runic signifiers. Xarl and Cyrion were close, perhaps in one of the armouries nearby. Sar Zell waited only a few metres away, listening in to the vox-chatter. Ruven was deeper in the fortress, doing the gods only knew what.

  ‘Vandred,’ said Talos. ‘We are already seeing drop-pods coming down. The sky is aflame with engine wash.’

  ‘Of course it is. They outnumber our ships five to one. We can barely keep them from orbital bombardment, do you think we have any chance of preventing them making planetfall?’

  Talos watched the pods raining down, trailing fire from the sky.

  ‘This is Talos to all Tenth Company claws.’ His voice was merely one of many, strangled in the miasma of conflicting vox traffic. ‘All claws, get to the gunships. We have to reach the Covenant.’

  ‘As you command, Soul Hunter,’ replied several squad leaders.

  Soul Hunter, he thought, with a cringing sneer. The name given by his father, for the killing of a single soul – avenging his primarch’s murder. Talos earnestly hoped that the ludicrously theatrical title would fade out of use in the years to come.

  The fortress was not without defences. Even as enemy gunships shrieked over the battlements, even as drop-pods plunged through the scorching atmosphere and impacted in the ash wastes, along the walls, and in the courtyards – the fortress itself resisted the assault.

  Anti-air turrets spat hard shells into the sky, hurling Thunderhawks to the ground in flames. Servitor-manned weapons platforms aimed at the landers coming down on the ash wastes, launching missiles and eye-aching streams of laser fire at the vehicles grinding their way overland towards the high walls.

  Talos ran across the battlements, Sar Zell a step behind. As they passed turret platforms, their helm’s audio sensors parsed down the crashing chatter of autocannon fire, as well as the strangely monotone shouts of gun-slaved servitors mumbling their aiming vectors aloud. The black stone beneath the legionaries’ boots shook with the rage of the fortress’s response.

  ‘The gunship is in the western quadrant, secondary hangar,’ Sar Zell voxed. ‘That’s if it’s not stolen by another company before we reach it.’

  ‘I–’

  The explosion from nowhere hurled them from their feet. Talos stumbled forward, smashing headfirst into the rampart wall. Sar Zell tumbled across the stone, slipping over the battlement’s edge.

  Chunks of servitor and weapon battery rained down, clattering off Talos’s armour as he hauled himself back to his feet. Above them, the enemy gunship – its hull painted in royal blue and clean, imperial white – angled away as its rocket pods reloaded. A thunderclap of thrust sent it streaking through the sky again, seeking more turret platforms to destroy.

  ‘Sar Zell,’ he voxed, blinking to clear his senses. His retinal display re-tuned to pierce the smoke, but a more tellingly mundane disorientation clouded his eyes for a moment.

  The only reply he received over the vox was a grunt of effort. Talos saw the hands gripping the battlement’s lip. He offered his own, as his brother hung there two hundred metres above the desert below. The weight of the immense lascannon chained across Sar Zell’s back prevented the warrior from pulling himself up with ease.

  ‘My thanks,’ Sar Zell voxed back, as his boots thudded on the cold stone again. ‘That would have been a singularly ignoble way to die.’

  ‘Perhaps you should leave the cannon,’ Talos said.

  ‘Perhaps you should stop speaking madness.’

  The prophet nodded. Hard to argue with that.

  They met Xarl and Cyrion in the armoury level of the closest spire. The walls shook around them as the tiers of autocannons rattled and banged, filling the air with noise. Gunships whined overhead, several ending in the piteous wails of engines spiralling down to the ground.

  Xarl wore his wing-crested ceremonial helm, in the midst of looting the armoury. A crate of replacement chainsword teeth-tracks was weighed against one hip.

  ‘I can’t find any melta charges,’ he told Cyrion, without looking away from his plundering.

  Cyrion nodded to Talos and Sar Zell. ‘Tell me you have a plan.’ The chamber gave a horrendous shudder in time to the tectonic thunder of battlements giving way nearby. ‘And tell me it doesn’t involve fighting our way across half of the fortress to get to Dirge. These Imperial dogs are inside the walls; we won’t survive a long journey.’

  Talos drew his chainsword. ‘In that case, I think it best if I remain silent. Where is Ruven?’

  Xarl finally turned from his looting. ‘Who cares?’

  Get to the ships. The vox-chatter was a repetitive storm of voices all saying the same thing. Get to the ships. Get to the ships.

  ‘With the Legion scattered, the fortress will fall,’ said Sar Zell. ‘We were fools not to remain united.’

  Talos shook his head. ‘The fortress was always going to fall one night. Unity was never an option with the primarch gone. We are fools, but only for still being here when so many of our brothers have already taken to the stars.’

  They met resistance three levels down, as their boots hammered across the black stone floor of a primary thoroughfare corridor. Dead slaves lined the walls, some wearing the Legion’s blue uniform, others in the rags that made up their only remaining possessions. Each of the bodies lay in burst repose, broken apart by bolter shells. Blood lined the walls in an uneven layer of greasy, stinking paint.

  Talos held up a fist and opened his fingers, making the hand signal to spread out. As his armour’s kinetic systems recognised the gesture, corresponding runes flashed on First Claw’s retinal displays, relaying the order.

  ‘The invaders decorate the same way we do,’ Cyrion noted, eyeing the bodies as the squad moved apart.

  ‘Focus,’ Xarl grunted in reply. Cyrion lowered his bolter and withdrew his auspex
. It crackled as it tuned into their surroundings.

  ‘Contact,’ he announced. ‘Dead ahead, and moving back this way. They’ve either got scanners, or they heard us coming.’

  Talos checked his bolter as he crouched by a gore-streaked wall. ‘Sar Zell,’ he said.

  Without a word, the warrior braced against the weight of his lascannon and lifted it to aim down the corridor.

  ‘Are we shooting this out?’ Xarl asked.

  ‘No.’ The prophet listened to the approaching bootsteps. ‘Charge after the initial burst.’

  Talos felt his teeth itching, alongside the telltale ache in his tongue and gums as the lascannon drew in power. The consistent thrum made the hair on the back of his neck rise, despite the sanctity of his armoured suit.

  Their foes were disciplined veterans, too canny to fall prey to easy traps. They fanned out at the corridor’s junction, taking cover where the hallway joined a large chamber beyond.

  Both squads immediately started the crashing exchange of bolter fire. Chunks of stone flew through the dusty smoke of shell impacts.

  ‘They’re bringing up a heavy bolter,’ Cyrion voxed, his autosenses filtering through the smoke. ‘He’s moved behind the left wall.’

  ‘Sar Zell,’ Talos said again.

  The lascannon drew in one final exhalation of energy before roaring down the corridor with a discordant freem of unrestrained blue-white power. The blade-beam of crisp, sun-bright force burned through one of the stone walls, disintegrating a hole clean through the torso of the warrior taking refuge behind it.

  ‘They’re not bringing up a heavy bolter anymore,’ Cyrion noted.

  ‘Until someone else picks it up,’ Talos replied. ‘Another volley, then charge.’

  The lascannon shuddered in Sar Zell’s hands, rattling and steaming with the expulsion of force. Another of the distant enemies clattered down in a heap of ceramite-clad limbs.

  First Claw drew their blades and started running.

  No more than three minutes later, they almost ran headlong into another enemy squad. Another Claw was pinned down at the far end of a sparring chamber, returning a decreasing level of fire as the Imperial Space Marines gunned them down.