False Gods

by Graham McNeill

  But greatest of all were the lander vessels of the Mechanicum.

  Vast, monolithic structures as big as city blocks, they resembled snub-nosed tubes fitted with a wealth of heat resistant technologies and recessed deceleration burners. Inertial dampening fields held their cargoes secure and explosive bolts on internal anti-motion scaffolding were primed to release on impact.

  In the wake of the militant arm of the launch came the logistics of an invasion, ammunition carriers, food and water tankers, fuel haulers and a myriad other support vessels essential for the maintenance of offensive operations.

  Such was the proliferation of craft heading for the surface that no one could keep track of them all, not even the bridge crew under Boas Comnenus, and thus the gold-skinned landing skiff that launched from the civilian bay of the Vengeful Spirit went unnoticed.

  The invasion fleet mustered in low orbit, orbital winds clutching at streamers of atmospheric gases and spinning them in lazy coils beneath the vessels.

  As always, it was the Astartes who led the invasion.

  THE WAY IN was rough. Atmospheric disturbances and storms wracked the skies and the Astartes Stormbirds were tossed like leaves in a hurricane. Loken felt the craft vibrate wildly around him, grateful for the restraint harness that held him fast to his cage seat. His bolter was stowed above him and there was nothing to do but wait until the Stormbird touched down and the attack began.

  He slowed his breathing and cleared his mind of all distractions, feeling a hot energy suffuse his limbs as his armour prepared his metabolism for imminent battle.

  The warriors of Nero Vipus’s Locasta squad and Brakespur squad surrounded him, immobile, yet representing the peak of humanity’s martial prowess. He loved them all dearly and knew that they wouldn’t let him down. Their conduct on Murder and Xenobia had been exemplary and many of the newly elevated novitiates had been blooded on those desperate battlefields.

  His company was battle tested and sure.

  ‘Garviel,’ said Vipus over the inter-armour link. ‘There’s something you should hear.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Loken, detecting a tone of warning in his friend’s voice.

  ‘Switch to channel 7,’ said Vipus. ‘I’ve isolated it from the men, but I think you ought to hear this.’

  Loken switched internal channels, hearing nothing but a wash of grainy static, warbling and constant. Pops and crackles punctuated the hiss, but he could hear nothing else.

  ‘I don’t hear anything.’

  ‘Wait. You will,’ promised Vipus.

  Loken concentrated, listening for whatever Nero was hearing.

  And then he heard it.

  Faint, as though coming from somewhere impossibly far away was a voice, a gargling, wet voice.

  ‘…the ways of man. Folly… seek… doom of all things. In death and rebirth shall mankind live forever…’

  Though he was not built to feel fear, Loken was suddenly and horribly reminded of the approach to the Whisperheads when the air had been thick with the taunting hiss of the thing called Samus.

  ‘Oh no…’ whispered Loken as the watery, rasping voice came again. ‘Thus do I renounce the ways of the Emperor and his lackey the Warmaster of my own free will. If he dares come here, he will die. And in death shall he live forever. Blessed be the hand of Nurghleth. Blessed be. Blessed be…’

  Loken hammered his fist against the release bolt on his cage seat and rose to his feet, swaying slightly as he felt a strange nausea cramp his belly. His genhanced body allowed him to compensate for the wild motion of the Stormbird, and he made his way swiftly along the ribbed decking towards the pilots’ compartment, determined that they wouldn’t walk blind into the same horror as had been waiting for them on Sixty-Three Nineteen.

  He pulled open the hatch where the flight officers and hardwired pilots fought to bring them in through the swirling yellow storm clouds. He could hear the same, repeating phrase coming over the internal speakers here.

  ‘Where’s it coming from?’ he demanded.

  The nearest flight officer turned and said, ‘It’s a vox, plain and simple, but…’

  ‘But?’

  ‘It’s coming from a ship vox,’ said the man, pointing at a wavering green waveform on the waterfall display before him. ‘From the patterning it’s one of ours. And it’s a powerful one, a transmitter designed for inter-ship communication between fleets,’

  ‘It’s an actual vox transmission?’ said Loken, relieved it wasn’t ghost chatter like the hateful voice of Samus.

  ‘Seems to be, but a ship’s vox unit that size shouldn’t be anywhere near the surface of a planet. Ships that big don’t come this far down into the atmosphere. Leastways if they want to keep flying they don’t.’

  ‘Can you jam it?’

  ‘We can try, but like I said, it’s a powerful signal, it could burn through our jamming pretty quickly.’

  ‘Can you trace where it’s coming from?’

  The flight officer nodded. ‘Yes, that won’t be a problem. A signal that powerful we could have traced from orbit.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you?’

  ‘It wasn’t there before,’ protested the officer. ‘It only started once we hit the ionosphere.’

  Loken nodded. ‘Jam it as best you can. And find the source.’

  He turned back to the crew compartment, unsettled by the uncanny similarities between this development and the approach to the Whisperheads.

  Too similar to be accidental, he thought.

  He opened a channel to the other members of the Mournival, receiving confirmation that the signal was being heard throughout the speartip.

  ‘It’s nothing, Loken,’ came the voice of the Warmaster from the Stormbird at the leading edge of the speartip. ‘Propaganda.’

  ‘With respect, sir, that’s what we thought in the Whisperheads.’

  ‘So what are you suggesting, Captain Loken? That we turn around and head back to Davin? Ignore this stain on my honour?’

  ‘No, sir,’ replied Loken. ‘Just that we ought to be careful.’

  ‘Careful?’ laughed Abaddon, his hard Cthonic laughter grating even over the vox. ‘We are Astartes. Others should be careful around us.’

  ‘The first captain is right,’ said Horus. ‘We will lock onto this signal and destroy it.’

  ‘Sir, that might be exactly what our enemies want us to try.’

  ‘Then they’ll soon realise their error,’ snapped Horus, shutting off the connection.

  Moments later, Loken heard the Warmaster’s orders come through the vox and felt the deck shift under him as the Stormbirds smoothly changed course like a pack of hunting birds.

  He made his way back to his cage seat and strapped himself in, suddenly sure that they were walking into a trap.

  ‘What’s going on, Garvi?’ asked Vipus.

  ‘We’re going to destroy that voice,’ said Loken, repeating the Warmaster’s orders. ‘It’s nothing, just a vox transmitter. Propaganda.’

  ‘I hope that’s all it is.’

  So do I, thought Loken.

  THE STORMBIRD TOUCHED down with a hard slam, lurching as its skids hit soft ground and fought for purchase. The harness restraints disengaged and the warriors of Locasta smoothly rose from their cage seats and turned to retrieve their stowed weaponry as the debarking ramp dropped from the rear of the Stormbird.

  Loken led his men from their transport, hot steam and noxious fumes fogging the air as the blue glow of the Stormbird’s shrieking engines filled the air with noise. He stepped from the hard metal of the ramp and splashed down onto the boggy surface of Davin’s moon. His armoured weight sank up to mid calf, an abominable stench rising from the wet ground underfoot.

  The Astartes of Locasta and Brakespur dispersed from the Stormbird with expected efficiency, spreading out to form a perimeter and link up with the other squads from the Sons of Horus.

  The noise of the Stormbirds diminished as their engines spooled down and the blue glow faded fro
m beneath their wings. The billowing clouds of vapour they threw up began to disperse and Loken had his first view of Davin’s moon.

  Desolate moors stretched out as far as the eye could see, which wasn’t far thanks to the rolling banks of yellow mist clinging to the ground and moist fog that restricted visibility to less than a few hundred metres. The Sons of Horus were forming up around the magnificent figure of the Warmaster, ready to move out, and spots of light in the yellow sky announced the imminent arrival of the Army drop ships.

  ‘Nero, get some men forward to scout the edges of the mist,’ Loken ordered. ‘I don’t want anything coming at us without prior warning.’

  Vipus nodded and set about establishing scouting parties as Loken opened a channel to Verulam Moy. The Captain of the 19th Company had volunteered some of his heavy weapon squads and Loken knew he could rely on their steady aim and cool heads. ‘Verulam? Make sure your Devastators are ready and have good fields of fire, they won’t get much of a warning through this fog.’

  ‘Indeed, Captain Loken,’ replied Moy. ‘They are deploying as we speak.’

  ‘Good work, Verulam,’ he said, shutting off the vox and studying the landscape in more detail. Wretched bogs and dank fens rendered the landscape a uniform brown and sludgy green, with the occasional blackened and withered tree silhouetted against the sky. Clouds of buzzing insects hovered in thick swarms over the black waters.

  Loken tasted the atmosphere via his armour’s external senses, gagging on the rank smell of excrement and rotten meat. The senses in his armour’s helmet quickly filtered them out, but the breath he’d taken told him that the atmosphere was polluted with the residue of decaying matter, as though the ground beneath him was slowly rotting away. He took a few ungainly steps through the swampy ground, each step sending up a bubbling ripple of burps and puffs of noxious gasses.

  As the noise of the Stormbirds faded, the silence of the moon became apparent. The only sounds were the splashing of the Astartes through the swampy bogs and the insistent buzz of the insects.

  Torgaddon splashed towards him, his armour stained with mud and slime from the swamps and even though his helmet obscured his features, Loken could feel his friend’s annoyance at this dismal location.

  ‘This place reeks worse than the latrines of Ullanor,’ he said.

  Loken had to agree with him: the few breaths he’d taken before his armour had isolated him from the atmosphere still lingered in the back of his throat.

  ‘What happened here?’ wondered Loken. ‘The briefing texts didn’t say anything about the moon being like this.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘Didn’t you read them?’

  Torgaddon shrugged. ‘I figured I’d see what kind of place it was once we landed.’

  Loken shook his head, saying, ‘You’ll never make an Ultramarine, Tarik.’

  ‘No danger of that,’ replied Torgaddon. ‘I prefer to form plans as I go and Guilliman’s lot are even more starch-arsed than you. But leaving my cavalier attitude to mission briefings aside, what’s this place supposed to look like then?’

  ‘It’s supposed to be climatologically similar to Davin – hot and dry. Where we are now should be covered in forests.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Something bad,’ said Loken, staring out into the foggy depths of the moon’s marshy landscape. ‘Something very bad.’

  PART TWO

  PLAGUE MOON

  SIX

  Land of decay

  Dead things

  Glory of Terra

  THE ASTARTES SPREAD out through the fog, moving as swiftly as the boggy conditions allowed and following the source of the vox signal. Horus led from the front, a living god marching tall through the stinking quagmires and rank swamps of Davin’s moon, untroubled by the noxious atmosphere. He disdained the wearing of a helmet, his superhuman physique easily able to withstand the airborne poisons.

  Four blocks of Astartes marched, phalanx-like, into the mists, with each member of the Mournival leading nearly two hundred warriors. Behind them came the soldiers of the Imperial army, company after company of red-jacketed warriors with gleaming lasguns and silver tipped lances. Each man was equipped with rebreather apparatus after it was discovered that their mortal constitutions were unable to withstand the moon’s toxic atmosphere. Initial landings of armour proved to be disastrous, as tanks sank into the marshland and dropships found themselves caught in the sucking mud.

  Though the greatest of all the engines of war were those that emerged from the Mechanicum landers. Even the Astartes had paused in their advance to watch the descent of the three monstrously huge craft. Slowly dropping through the yellow skies in defiance of gravity like great primeval monoliths, the blackened hulks travelled on smoking pillars of fire as their colossal retros fought to slow them down. Even with such fiery deceleration, the ground shook with the hammerblow of their impacts, geysers of murky water thrown hundreds of metres into the air along with blinding clouds as the swamps flashed to steam. Massive hatches blew open and the motion resistant scaffolding fell away as the Titans of the Legio Mortis stepped from their landing craft and onto the moon’s surface.

  The Dies Irae led the Death’s Head and Xestor’s Sword, Warlord Titans with long, fluttering honour rolls hung from their armoured thorax. Each thunderous footstep of the mighty Titans sent shockwaves through the swamps for kilometres in all directions, their bastion legs sinking several metres through the marshy ground to the bedrock beneath. Their steps churned huge gouts of mud and water, their appearance that of awesome gods of war come to smite the Warmaster’s enemies beneath their mighty tread.

  Loken watched the arrival of the Titans with a mixture of awe and unease: awe for the majesty of their colossal appearance, unease for the fact that the Warmaster felt it necessary to deploy such powerful engines of destruction.

  THE ADVANCE WAS slow going, trudging through clinging mud and stinking, brackish water, all the while unable to see much more than a few dozen metres. The thick fog banks deadened sound such that something close by might be inaudible while Loken could clearly hear the splash of warriors from Luc Sedirae’s men, far to his right. Of course he couldn’t see them through the yellow mist, so each company kept in regular vox contact to try and ensure they weren’t separating.

  Loken wasn’t sure it was helping though. Strange groans and hisses, like the expelled breath of a corpse, bubbled from the ground and blurred shadow forms moved in the mist. Each time he raised his bolter to take aim in readiness, the mist would part and an armoured figure in the green of the Sons of Horus or the steel grey of the Word Bearers would be revealed. Erebus had led his warriors to Davin’s moon in support of the Warmaster and Horus had welcomed their presence.

  The mist gathered in thickness with unsettling speed, slowly swallowing them up until all Loken could see were warriors from his own company. They passed through a dark forest of leafless, dead trees, the bark glistening and wet looking. Loken paused to examine one, pressing his gauntlet against the tree’s surface and grimacing as its bark sloughed off in wet chunks. Writhing maggots and burrowing creatures curled and wriggled within the rotten sapwood.

  ‘These trees…’ he said.

  ‘What about them?’ asked Vipus.

  ‘I thought they were dead, but they’re not.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘They’re diseased. Rotten with it.’

  Vipus shrugged and carried onwards, and once again Loken was struck by the certainty that something terrible had happened here. And looking at the diseased heart-wood of the tree, he wasn’t sure that it was over. He wiped his stained gauntlet on his leg armour and set off after Vipus.

  The eerily silent march continued through the fog and, assisted by the servo muscles of their armour, the Astartes quickly began to outpace the soldiers of the Imperial Army, who were finding the going much more difficult.

  ‘Mournival,’ said Loken over the inter-suit link. ‘We need to slow our advance, we�
��re leaving too big a gap between ourselves and the Army detachments.’

  ‘Then they need to pick up the pace,’ returned Abaddon. ‘We don’t have time to wait for lesser men. We’re almost at the source of the vox.’

  ‘Lesser men,’ said Aximand. ‘Be careful, Ezekyle, you’re starting to sound a little like Eidolon now.’

  ‘Eidolon? That fool would have come down here on his own to gain glory,’ snarled Abaddon. ‘I’ll not be compared to him!’

  ‘My apologies, Ezekyle. You’re obviously nothing like him,’ deadpanned Aximand.

  Loken listened with amusement to his fellow Mournival’s bantering, which, together with the quiet of Davin’s moon began to reassure him that his concerns over their deployment here might be unfounded. He lifted his armoured boot from the swamp and took another step forward, this time feeling something crack under his step. Glancing down, he saw something round and greenish white bob upwards in the water.

  Even without turning it over he could see it was a skull, the paleness of bone wreathed in necrotic strands of rotted flesh and muscle. A pair of shoulders rose from the depths behind it, the spinal column exposed beneath a layer of bloated green flesh.

  Loken’s lip curled in disgust as the decomposed corpse rolled onto its back, its sightless eye sockets filled with mud and weeds. Even as he saw the rotted cadaver, more bobbed to the surface, no doubt disturbed from their resting places on the bottom of the swamps by the footfalls of the Titans.