Knights of the Imperium

by Graham McNeill

  Leaping packs swarm and flow around and through the precincts of the temple, but we are shifted beyond their reach. They do not see or even know of our existence.

  I sense the impatience of my armour’s former wearers.

  I wait, letting the swarms fully take the bait of the servitor convoy. Right now, the beasts will be tearing open the vehicles and slaughtering the servitors. Only a few will have autonomy enough to fight back, but most will not have the capability to even raise a fist in their own defence.

  Their deaths will serve a greater purpose.

  A series of explosions from the upper reaches of the temple makes the decision for me. The ground shakes as buried reactors go into meltdown.

  ‘Knights of the Imperium,’ I shout. ‘We ride!’

  Gauntlet

  Cordelia walked with Assembler Thexton through the rebuilding work of Verdus Ferrox. Load-lifters, cargo-8s and flat-bedded material haulers brought fresh-forged steel and adamantium for the bulk servitors and Mechanicus construction engines to undo the damage Malcolm’s Knights and the vanguard organisms had wrought.

  The assembler’s face was pulled in a frown of confusion, and Cordelia had to hope her skill with the written word matched that of her oratory. She waited for Thexton to read her handwritten note a third time before speaking.

  ‘You understand what I am asking?’

  ‘Not clearly, my lady,’ said the head of House Cadmus’s Sacristans. ‘And I am not sure I want to.’

  Shaven-headed, and with only the most basic physical augmentations, Thexton was still more human than Mechanicus. A servant of House Cadmus, he had, nevertheless, been trained by the priests of Mars and approaching him was a risk.

  But it was a risk Cordelia considered worth taking.

  It had long been an open secret that the Mechanicus intended the Sacristans to be their eyes and ears among the knightly houses. Despite their vast knowledge, the lords of the Red Planet singularly failed to understand the bonds of loyalty between a Knight and those who worked to maintain his armour.

  Closer than an ancient chevalier and his squire, a Knight and his chosen Sacristan were bonded through the armour and the shared histories of those who had worn it. Though a Sacristan might never see real battle, he would have lived hundreds in his connection dreams.

  ‘You understand that you can’t just go looking for this, you have to find the absences,’ she said, stepping aside as a pair of lifter servitors stomped past on piston-augmented legs. They carried rebar stanchions for the viaduct Malcolm’s battle cannon had destroyed.

  ‘I have to look for what’s not there?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Then where would I begin?’

  Cordelia halted and pointed to a towering construction cradle, its rigs and assembly scaffolds waiting for a war engine that would never come.

  ‘Do you see that construction cradle there?’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Now, if I were to say there was a Reaver Titan berthed there right now, then your failure to see a Reaver would be good reason to think that there was no Reaver there, yes?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘But if I were to tell you there was, say, a grain of sand in the berth, then your failure to observe it wouldn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t there.’

  ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,’ said Thexton. ‘I am familiar with modus tollens, Lady Cordelia.’

  ‘Of course you are, my dear Thexton,’ continued Cordelia. ‘The important difference between these two scenarios is that in the one, but not the other, you would expect to see some evidence of the entity if, in fact, it existed.’

  Thexton looked down at the note again. Cordelia could see the urge to speak a question aloud.

  She shook her head. ‘Look for what’s not there.’

  And the light of understanding smoothed the frown lines from Thexton’s face.

  ‘Ah, of course, I see! Like detecting a planet in a distant galaxy, one not visible to conventional intergalactic auspex, but which we know is there by the level of light it blocks from its star in transit or the variation in a nearby celestial body’s orbital period.’

  Cordelia nodded, though she had no real understanding of what Thexton had just said.

  ‘Can you do it?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Thexton. ‘I believe I can.’

  ‘Then do it,’ said Cordelia. ‘And do it quickly.’

  I do not see the first of my Knights fall, but I feel them.

  Their deaths are a knife stabbing up into my gut. Monteil and Creig. Their bio-sign vanishes from my slate, but there is no time to stop.

  No time to mourn.

  We go on or we die.

  Two dozen Knights is a force to be reckoned with, and the wedge of Cadmus’s charge has punched through the beasts milling at this flank of the forge-temple. Most have been lured by the sacrificial convoy of servitors, but not all.

  Cadmus battle cannons and thermal lances smash through the swarms of creatures, tearing a path for the others. In pulsing blasts of superheated lances and ground-shaking detonations we cut our way to the mountains.

  Were it just the Knights who were escaping, I would rate our chances of success as high. But it is not only Knights who must escape Vikara. For a vehicle so monstrous in size, the Capitol Imperialis is fast, and I dread to think what safeguards Vril has authorised his engineering crews to disregard.

  As fast as it is, it is still too slow.

  At least a thousand gaunts swarm its tracks and flanks. Point-defence bolter racks flay them from its sides and try to keep them at bay. Hawkshroud are tasked with close protection for the Capitol Imperialis. Bardolf’s Knights circle the lumbering vehicle within its void envelope, gunning down the endless tide of pouncing creatures seeking to climb its cliff-like flanks.

  Hurricanes of stubber fire pulp beasts seeking to foul its tracks with their bodies. Reapers tear those climbing its flanks. I know they will not stop them all. The best they can hope for is to stop enough.

  I turn my head and see thousands of xenoforms, everything from the smaller, hook-limbed creatures to the lumbering battering ram beasts with vast crab claws and bio-plasmic energies screaming in their jaws. Already my auspex cannot cope with the sheer volume of hostile creatures coming for us.

  Simian horrors with drooling orifices on their serrated backs vomit spiralling scraps of organic matter. Flesh-sacs filled with acid or poisons so lethal they could kill hundreds with a single drop arc through the air towards us.

  We intercept some with stubber fire. They explode in mid-air, showering the earth with toxic rain, but there are simply too many to stop.

  The progena of Scholam Vikara are fighting from the backs of their flimsy vehicles. They are armed with rifles and pistols and swords. Weapons so tiny and ineffectual that it takes my breath away that men still take to the battlefield with them.

  The courage it takes to do so humbles me.

  Three of their vehicles have already been overrun, reduced to blazing wrecks within the first hundred yards of our race to the city wall. A cargo-8 flips over in a seething explosion of jade-green bio-plasma.

  Burning bodies tumble from its rear. I cannot hear their screams, and I am thankful. I have heard men die as tyrannic poisons devour them, and it is a sound I wish never to hear again.

  A fleshy spore sac explodes above me. I throw up my shield as a spatter of hissing corrosives spray from its death. I clench my teeth in pain as acid eats at my shoulders.

  Another Knight dies. Rabert, a warrior of honourable pedigree from one of Raisa’s most ancient families. His consort, Valerie, is with child, and his loss is a terrible blow for her and Cadmus. Unlike Monteil and Creig, I see Rabert die. Acids have eaten away his ankle joint and though he limps onwards, still firing, still cutting with his reaper, he
has been slowed enough.

  One of the larger beasts intercepts him. It crushes his shoulder with a vast, serrated claw and tears it free with no more effort than I might rip a Raisan mutant in half. It spits a gout of seething bio-plasma in Rabert’s face and the convulsions wracking his armour tell me of his death agonies.

  Other beasts drag Rabert down, and his mount is overwhelmed by their alien bodies. Blade-limbs hack and talons rend his armour to reach the flesh within.

  A shell from my battle cannon obliterates Rabert’s screaming killer. I cannot yet mourn his death, but I can avenge it.

  Ahead, I see a host of beasts emerge from a disintegrating pile of tumbled blocks and twisted steelwork that was once a blockhouse on Vikara’s outer wall.

  Right away, I see there are too many for us.

  I ready my battle cannon, but before I can fire my auto-senses cut out for an instant as the thunder of something impossibly loud and blindingly bright overloads them.

  The swarms in front of me vanish in a wall of fire with a seismic thunderclap.

  The shockwave staggers me.

  I crash into an adjacent wall, gyros fighting to keep me upright. Fire and smoke mushroom skyward from a titanic detonation.

  A five hundred metre length of the city wall has vanished, taking with it the swarms gathered to block our escape. All that remains is a vitrified crater of smoking, glassy rock.

  Only one weapon has the power to wreak so much destruction.

  ‘The way ahead is clear,’ says Magos Vril. ‘You’re welcome.’

  I do not waste the path the doomsday gun of the Capitol Imperialis has carved us. I push hard through the raging vortices of searing thermals, low-grade e-mag pulses and surging smoke banks.

  My auspex distorts, but then I am through.

  I see the jagged peaks of the mountains ahead, like a wave of rock crashing on the horizon.

  Three kilometres distant.

  So close I can almost touch them.

  The Capitol Imperialis crunches over the scorched wasteland its weapon has wrought. Hawkshroud’s Knights keep close, as though it is a livestock animal being kept safe from predator packs. The trucks and cargo-8s of Scholam Vikara bounce over the shattered landscape, and I dread to think of the pain they must be feeling driving through the firestorm of the macro cannon’s aftermath.

  The beasts do not pursue. A collapse of the overmind’s control? Or animal instinct, making them fearful of the macro cannon’s wrath?

  It will not take long for the crushing will of the hive to smother that fear with blind fury.

  But in that time we run.

  Nemonix sat cross-legged in his featureless, data-tight cell at the heart of the forge-temple. Myriad means of information-gathering had provided him with tens of thousands of hours of vox and twice that in pict-feeds, spread across the hundreds of sealed-off data-slates spread on the floor of the cell.

  Specialised neural augmentation processed the swathes of information in the time it took to look at each one.

  Collected from all across Vondrak, Nemonix had secrets enough to bring down the planetary nobility a hundred times over, to blackmail a dozen senior Guard officers and see the name of a decorated Space Marine blackened for all time.

  None of that was of any interest to Nemonix.

  All that mattered was Cadmus.

  His gambit to have their Sacristans killed by allowing infiltrating vanguard organisms into Verdus Ferrox – thereby forcing Cadmus to fall upon the mercy of Mars or suffer a slow extinction through obsolescence and battle damage – had failed, but he had learned a great deal of the knightly house’s internal politics over the last few days.

  Not enough to bring them crawling back to the Mechanicus just yet, but Nemonix was playing a long game. And stripped of mortal concerns of the flesh, he had patience enough to wait.

  The hologram of his earlier self paced restlessly around him. An affectation, he knew. It had no capacity for boredom and no need for so overt a display of disinterest.

  ‘I wish you’d stop that,’ he said.

  ‘Why are we still here?’ said the hologram. ‘Malcolm is on the hook, and it’s only a matter of time until he challenges Roland. And with the technology you can provide, his mastery of House Cadmus is a certainty.’

  ‘I want to be sure,’ said Nemonix.

  ‘How much surer can you be?’ said the hologram. ‘You heard them talking in the repair hangars. His consort has already lied to Lady Cordelia. You saw his naked ambition. It’s done.’

  ‘I want to be sure,’ repeated Nemonix.

  ‘Then don’t let Roland and any of his Knights back in the city,’ said his hologram, stopping in front of him. ‘Take control of Rukanah’s guns and shoot them down before they’re even in sight of the walls. Blame a malfunction, bad code, whatever. You want sure, that’s sure.’

  Nemonix looked up from the hundreds of slates.

  ‘You know, sometimes I forget what a ruthless man I was.’

  Sacrifices

  The run to the mountains has been swift and unrelenting. Two of Bardolf’s Knights died moments ago, holding a narrow pass while the rest of us continued uphill. Packs of airborne predators swarm us in slashing flocks, but massed stubber fire and flailing reaper blades are keeping them at bay for now.

  Behind us, Vikara is an atomic wasteland, a seething nightmare of fire and radiation. A thick column of lightning-shot smoke claws its way skywards from the destruction of the forge-temple.

  The swarms surrounding it are ash, and even those that survived the temple’s destruction spent precious minutes milling in confusion.

  And with those minutes we may just have bought our lives.

  Incredibly, around half of Scholam Vikara’s progena are still with us. Raym Bartaum shouts at the youngsters riding the damaged vehicles with smoking sides and tracks shredded with chitinous spines. Many of the progena are badly hurt, but they make no complaint as Bartaum and another drill abbot all but drag them onto the least damaged trucks and transports.

  The exit Hawkshroud’s guns tore in the mountainside is nowhere near large enough for the Capitol Imperialis, but our battle cannons are tearing it wider in a cacophony of thudding, rocky detonations. Rubble falls from the mountain in a thunderous avalanche.

  ‘Its macro cannon could widen this with one shot,’ says Tellurus, the rear of his armour belching smoke. Its exhaust vents glow cherry red, the power plant in imminent danger of a catastrophic meltdown.

  ‘But would likely collapse the tunnel entirely,’ says Bardolf, hacking away boulders with his reaper. ‘It’s too much of a risk.’

  Bardolf is probably right, but I wonder if it might not be worth the risk to see this opening widened quicker. After what is probably only moments, but feels like hours, the entrance is finally cleared enough for the Capitol Imperialis.

  ‘Must hurry,’ says Bardolf, walking his Knight around the back of the descending Capitol Imperialis. I follow his gaze and see monstrously large, spider-like beasts on the horizon.

  Titanic bio-killers with vast, chitinous legs and thousands of scuttling brood hordes clinging to their distended bellies. Bio-plasmic energies flicker between the bio-titans’ legs and in their flanged jaws. Drooling sphincter cannons smoulder with toxins. Barbed tongues lash the air.

  A Knight is a powerful war machine, but even we are no match for such a monstrous biological engine of destruction and consumption.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Must hurry.’

  We are in darkness again, following the subterranean rail network back to Vondrak Prime. A parting shot of the macro cannon has demolished the entrance behind us.

  Nothing now will be getting in that way.

  Ten hours have passed since we descended into the death-choked tunnels once more. We are making good time following the route mapped by the auspex on our way to V
ikara. For all that the uncertainty of our path has been removed, none of the horror at what those trapped here suffered has lessened.

  The fire-blackened walls still echo with the screams of those trapped when the tunnels were sealed against the tyranids. Their bodies are all around us, dead in their vehicles or sprawled where they clawed at the rock in futile hope of escape.

  There is no need to hunt for gaps in the abandoned vehicles. Vril’s Capitol Imperialis simply crushes them beneath its enormous weight.

  ‘Forgive us,’ I say, hearing the squeal of crumpling metal and imagining the crack of splitting bone and snapping sinew.

  Bardolf and I lead the way through the tunnels, giant arc lights on the cliff-like frontis of the Capitol Imperialis piercing the darkness ahead. The shadows of our armour stretch out before us.

  Moisture drizzles my canopy like tears.

  I keep my attention focused on the auspex. The naked eye sees too many shadows, too many places to hide. I move mechanically, pushing my Knights on as fast as I can without leaving our fellows behind.

  The clamour of the armour’s previous occupants is growing painful. It will be good to be divested of them for a time. Until the void they leave in my soul drives me to reconnect once more.

  All I want is to get out of these damned tunnels.

  I want to return to Cordelia.

  Each step I make, every turn I take, each passageway that brings me closer to Vondrak Prime serves that one aim. I cannot help but let out a shuddering breath of relief when the auspex confirms what I now see with my own eyes.

  We have reached the widest tunnel, the main arterial that leads back to the surface. Is that a tiny spot of light I see in the distance? Or is it simply wishful thinking to imagine we have reached our ingress point?

  The auspex screeches a warning, and my vision veils in red.

  Chittering beasts swarm the walls, pouring from sundered vents and ruptured ductwork all around us.

  Stablights reflect from innumerable hardened carapaces and bulbous, hairless skulls. Multiple limbs are wet with secreted mucus. Razored claws glitter in the beams.