Garro: Vow of Faith

by James Swallow

  Garro said nothing. Inwardly, he thought that it was Dorn who did not see clearly. It had been clear to him at their first meeting when he revealed Horus’ perfidy, and then again when he stole aboard the Phalanx on a mission to recruit one of the Fists’ psykers. The latter sortie had ultimately failed, but on both occasions Garro had known that for all his greatness, Rogal Dorn’s rigidity of mind was a flaw. As much as stone may endure, he thought, it cannot bend and so it may shatter. He only had to look Sigismund in the eye to see that truth reflected in the Templar’s troubled thoughts.

  ‘Keeler showed me a vision of arcane horrors,’ Sigismund concluded. ‘And I have since seen them with my own eyes. You have too.’

  ‘Aye.’ Garro nodded grimly. ‘That I have.’

  ‘Then you know her gift is not worthless.’ It was a hard admission for the Imperial Fist to make, to suggest that his liege-lord could be so mistaken. He took a long breath. ‘I do not profess to know how all… this… is supposed to work. But I know the woman is important. With that in mind, I have watched over her from a distance, as best I could. I have used the assets of my Legion and the Imperial Court to track her movements.’ He shook his head. ‘She and her devotees have not made it simple. There are many gaps, many unknowns. It speaks to a great network of believers in existence, far larger than any of us suspected.’

  Garro pressed him for more. ‘But you knew she would be here, or was here, at the sanctuary?’

  ‘Yes. As you surmised, I had the location monitored. One of many, in fact. When the call for help came, so did I.’ Sigismund paused. ‘Garro, you know how Horus’ turncoats operate. Like the hydra of myth, we sever one head and two more rise to take its place. For all that we root out, others still lurk unseen. I believe that Keeler may perish at their hands if we do not prevent it.’

  ‘The killings here, they show that the archtraitor is getting close to her…’

  He nodded. ‘She must be protected.’ The Templar rose to his feet. ‘But I have reached the limits of my agency. Tonight, I exceeded authority to come out here and Dorn will learn of it. He will be displeased once again. You see that the Imperial Fists do not have the freedoms of Malcador’s Knights Errant. I can go no further with this.’ He fixed Garro with a hard look. ‘But you can. It is clear to me now that you are the only option.’

  Sigismund reached down and took the auspex unit from Garro’s hand and raised it to his face, allowing a retinal aura-reader to scan his eye. ‘Identify me. Ex-load storage stack. Codeword Iconoclast. Unlock,’ he told it. The device chimed and he passed it back.

  Where before the unit’s memory had been almost empty, there were now dozens of other files revealed – surveillance intercepts, intelligence files and more.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ said Garro.

  ‘All that I have gleaned about Euphrati Keeler’s movements over the past months. You may be able to fill in the gaps. I believe it will help you to predict where she will go next.’

  ‘You are trusting me with this,’ said Garro warily.

  ‘We have to keep her safe, Nathaniel,’ Sigismund replied. ‘As much as I wish to, I can go no further. So the duty falls to you.’ Some of the chilly fire of his earlier manner returned to his voice, and his next words were very much a warning. ‘Do not fail.’

  The Imperial Fists called in a cohort of servitors to catalogue and then bury the dead, but Garro was gone before the first of them arrived. It took him the better part of a day to walk back across the scraplands, and the passage gave him the time he needed to digest the import of his conversation with the Templar.

  As he walked, he pored over the content of the auspex, using hypno­gogics to flash-read the vital data as a starving man might gorge himself on a banquet. As he expected from an Imperial Fist, Sigismund’s record-keeping was precise and bereft of anything but cold fact.

  The files tracked dozens of reports of illegal Lectitio Divinitatus gatherings, partial scans from sightings of women who matched Keeler’s description, and dozens of other vectors, collating them into something that resembled a pattern. He found strings of intelligence that connected with his own research, including the same blind lead that months before had sent him to the Riga platform on what turned out to be a fool’s errand. Although the journey to Riga led Garro to other things – and eventually to the uncovering of a secret the Sigillite had wanted to keep from him – the legionary found no traces of Keeler’s passage.

  She moved from place to place, slipping in and out of hive cities and metroplexes, space stations and orbital plates, never once being captured despite the iron grip the Imperium kept on the Throneworld and its satellites. What did that suggest, Garro wondered? Did Keeler’s preternatural abilities enable her to weave through the security net that grew ever tighter as the Warmaster’s threat encroached? Or was the truth more prosaic than that, was it that her association of followers was so large that those devoted to her simply looked away as she passed?

  How far does the word of the Lectitio Divinitatus reach? Garro had no answer for that question, and it troubled him. The Imperium of Man was just that, and it had gone so far to stamp out the falsehood of religion, imposing secularity wherever its shadow fell – but what if that was impossible? What if there was something in the nature of humankind that meant they always needed something greater than themselves to believe in?

  He scowled and displaced the nagging thought. For the moment, he cared not for what other men might think, feel or believe. He only knew what Nathaniel Garro felt… and that was loss.

  ‘Where is this leading me?’ he asked the air. The winds gave him no answer.

  Garro returned to the data, moving from past records to present ones. According to Sigismund’s sources, there were rumours that Keeler had visited the sanctuary less than four days ago – the closest Garro had been to her in a long time. There were a dozen other possible locations that the Saint could have journeyed to on the next step of her endless pilgrimage, but he quickly considered and discarded all but one. The guess was part instinct, part calculation.

  Hesperides.

  Garro halted and looked up into the night sky, craning his neck until he found a particular shadow off toward the south-eastern horizon. From here, it was little more than a blue-black smudge against a rare starry evening, low against the sallow glow of Luna. The orbital plate was one of the older aertropolis platforms, and he recalled it was an insula minoris that served Terra as a dioxide refinery and tertiary shipping hub. It was an ideal place upon which to deliver a sermon; much of the population were transients, system crews and unskilled labourers who moved as needed on contract indentures to Venus, Mercury and the teeming null-grav work yards of the Belt. The kind of men and women, Garro reasoned, who would have empty lives overshadowed by the insurrection. The kind of people who, if so enticed by the Lectitio Divinitatus, could carry word of it to all corners of the Solar System.

  A day later, Garro dropped from the wheel well of an automated cargo barge and fell a hundred feet to a landing deck on the western arc of the floating city. At a distance, Hesperides Plate recalled the shape and form of a great pipe organ, buoyant on a cushion of dirty clouds and wreathed in grey haze. Up close, the imagined form gave way to a less attractive reality, a great convoluted knot of tarnished tubes and gargantuan bell-mouths that resembled the fatal collision of a thousand giant brass instruments, crushed into a clump by the hand of a mad god.

  Nowhere on Hesperides could one find silence. Every passage and walkway was walled in by lines of rattling, echoing pipes that hummed and gurgled with chemical reaction. Deep in the bowels of the platform, engines that had operated for centuries sucked in polluted air and fractioned it into its component elements, desperately trying to salvage some breath of purity from the wounded atmosphere of the planet.

  The constant noise made it difficult for Garro to extend his battle-senses to the full, and he mentally recalibrated
the parameters of his actions. A place like this would make it harder to see an enemy coming, and the confined byways were perfect territory for ambushes, choke-points and murder boxes.

  Pulling his hood down and his robes close, Garro made sure his sword was hidden where none could see it, and ventured deeper into the endless range of narrow alleyways.

  Hesperides had never been designed to be a city – it was a glorified atmosphere processor with a few support modules bolted on – but someone had neglected to reveal that to the people who lived there. Humanity crammed itself into every nook and cranny of the structure, with ramshackle hovels built around spaces between the great brass tubes that snaked this way and that. Parts of the makeshift city were permanently cold, platforms rimed with hoarfrost from the chilly aura of vast coolant towers. Others were always tropical-hot and damp from the steaming output of chemical fractionators. Frequently, both extremes could be found within a few hundred yards of one another.

  Poverty was rife here. The legionary saw no souls who were not clothed in shabby, grimy cuts of worker garb, and their hollow faces and averted gazes spoke to him of people who were beaten down, who hung on by their fingertips. Unseen, he grimaced in the shadows of his hood. It seemed wrong that here, above the planet that was the bright heart of the Imperium, citizens had no taste of the glorious future the Emperor wanted for them all.

  Garro pushed the thought away as he came upon what he was looking for – a ‘village square’ for want of a better term, a larger open space between two towering smokestacks that the locals had repurposed into a marketplace and meeting point. The legionary found a shaded perch above from which he could observe the area and scanned the milling crowd for his targets.

  The group were dressed no differently than those around them, but to a warrior’s trained eye they stood out like magnesium flares on a dark night. A trio of earnest-looking men, two keeping watch while the third carefully offered slips of paper to anyone who would take one. Garro saw red ink on the paper, text he could not read from this distance and the shapes of icon-symbols to aid any illiterates to understand the leaflet’s intent.

  He smiled thinly. The followers of the Lectitio Divinitatus were becoming bolder, and that would give him what he needed. Garro planned to wait for them to finish their proselytising and then track the men back to their point of origin. Somewhere amid this hissing, clanking mess of conduits there was a clandestine church, and if he found it…

  A low cry came to him, arresting his train of thought. Four more figures had emerged from the passers-by – rough types with the build of Imperial Army troopers about them, although none of the quartet wore anything approaching a uniform. The new arrivals were haranguing the believers, and Garro speculated on what was happening below him from body language and the snatches of snarled words captured by his augmented hearing.

  The four were members of the group in charge of this part of Hesperides. Garro had not seen a single Arbites officer since he arrived on the orbital plate, not even a monitor drone. He guessed that whichever member of the Tech-Barony was charged with rule of Hesperides had little interest in the people who lived in between the air machines, as long as the processors kept working. In this kind of environment, thugs of a certain stripe flourished where law enforcement was absent and weakness was rife.

  Demands were being made. From his vantage point, Garro glimpsed the flash of silver from Throne coins as the larger of the thugs – a broad barrel of a man with a wild beard – pulled tribute from the hands of one of the believers. It clearly wasn’t enough, because the thug produced a push-sword from under his coat and ran through the man who had been holding the leaflets. It was a basic but efficient kill, up under the ribcage. The victim went down, dead before he hit the platform, the papers he had been clutching scattering like windblown leaves.

  There were shouts and screams, and the two remaining believers exploded into panicked motion, bolting through the crowd, heading toward rat-runs on the western side of the marketplace. One of the thugs stayed behind to pick over the dead man’s corpse, but the bearded killer led the other two on a chase.

  Garro cursed silently. If these fools killed his only leads, he would be stymied. All the members of Keeler’s church would draw back and hide themselves, and the Saint – if she was here – would be spirited away by nightfall.

  Moving as quickly as he could without drawing attention, Garro went after them, leaping from one cluster of conduits to another. The terrain became increasingly difficult, as his elevated path was blocked at random intervals by outcrops of machinery or shrieking steam grilles. Twice he lost sight of the fleeing believers and the men in pursuit, but their shouts allowed him to zero in and keep them from vanishing into the complex root system of brassy tubes.

  The legionary heard the bass cough of a heavy-calibre gunshot and a wail of pain. Away from the crowds, the thugs were happy to start shooting where collateral damage would be minimal. Garro’s enhanced senses smelled fresh blood, and plenty of it. The injured believer was bleeding badly.

  He managed to get ahead of the thugs, closing the distance to the running men below along a high maintenance walkway. Amid the constant background chorus of rattling apparatus and clanking vents, Garro’s heavy footfalls went unnoticed. Forced to a halt as the walkway came to a sudden dead end, he paused to take in the scene.

  Fifty feet beneath him, the uninjured man was struggling to help his wounded comrade stagger forward, but the slick of blood that trailed behind them was enough for Garro to know that one of them would be dead in minutes.

  That estimate fell to zero when the thugs emerged from a side-passage, and the one with the gun put a second round into the bleeding man. The hydrostatic shock of the impact parted the two believers, sending the injured one over a safety rail and into oblivion. Garro glimpsed the body spinning away toward the filthy clouds.

  The one with the beard shouted something about being owed more money, about promises made, and the dimensions of this sordid drama became full and clear to the legionary. The thugs ran this part of Hesperides Plate, and they were letting Keeler’s followers have a safe haven here in return for hard currency. But belief alone was not enough to mint coin, and the greed of men like these had few limits. He imagined that no matter what they had been given, it would not have been enough. They were going to kill all three of the believers to send a message.

  What other reason was there to have committed brutal murder before so many eyes, if not to sow fear? For a brief moment, the Warmaster’s snarling aspect rose and fell in Garro’s thoughts. He shook off the memory.

  Out came the push-sword again, still red with the gore of the man it had killed. The last of the believers was looking back and forth between the killers and a narrow passage ten yards away. Asking himself if he could make it there before a bullet buried itself in his back.

  Garro had seen enough. He stepped up and over the edge of the suspended walkway and dropped the distance to the deck below, hitting with the impact of a demolition hammer. The metal flooring flexed under the force of his arrival, putting the thugs and their would-be victim off their feet. The panicked believer was quick to recover, however, and scrambled away toward the gaping alley.

  Furious at the interruption, the three thugs turned on Garro and fear was not what they showed him. He was so used to seeing that barely-controlled terror on the faces of common humans that it struck him as odd to find it absent. Without his power armour, they must have thought Garro was some kind of mutant affected by gigantism. It never occurred to them that he was a Space Marine; after all, why would one of the Emperor’s Angels of Death ever come to this light-forsaken place, much less so without armour or fanfare?

  ‘What are you?’ spat the one with the pistol, taking aim. ‘Go away, freak.’

  The bearded man hesitated – perhaps he had some clue about Garro’s actual origin – but his rat-faced cohorts were too snappish and blood-hu
ngry to think twice about what they were facing.

  ‘Y’heard him,’ bellowed the third member of the group, whose mouth was full of teeth filed to points and whose flesh was a canvas for dozens of obscene electoos. ‘Piss off!’

  Garro took a step forward and met four bullets fired in quick succession by the gunman. The shots hit him in the chest and belly, breaking the outer layer of his epidermis but penetrating no deeper. He grunted with irritation and reached into each of the wounds with thumb and forefinger, pulling out the flattened heads of the kinetic rounds and flicking them away. Blood, thick with gene-engineered Larraman cells, was already clotting the trivial wounds.

  The one with the gun was clearly an imbecile. Instead of putting distance between himself and Garro, he came closer, aiming the heavy pistol up to target the legionary’s head.

  Garro stepped in to meet him. With a lazy backhand, he smacked away the weapon, shattering the bones in the gunman’s forearm. He could have left it there, but there was a lesson to be taught, and so he put what he considered to be a light punch into the squealing gunman’s chest. The blow caved in the thug’s ribcage, collapsed his lungs and stopped his heart.

  The man covered in phosphor-glowing tattoos cried out the dead man’s name, and turned tail and fled back in the direction of the marketplace.

  The thug with the beard and the push-sword yelled and slashed at the air before Garro, attempting to force the legionary back with a wild, uncontrolled feint. He was trying to put Garro on the back foot, perhaps so he could extend away and flee as well.

  The warrior watched the criminal’s pattern, saw it, and in the next breath he grabbed the razor-sharp blade and yanked it forward. A seasoned swordsman would have let go of the handle, but the thug’s best challengers had only been untrained civilians with no grasp of bladecraft, and he had no more moves to make. Ignoring the distant sting of pain as the push-sword cut into his palm, Garro twisted his wrist and disarmed the bearded thug, the motion breaking fingers in his opponent’s hand.