False Gods

by Graham McNeill

  Ing Mae Sing joined her, adding her own powers to Keeler’s assault on the monster. The air around the astropath grew colder and Keeler moved her hand close to the psyker in the hopes of cooling the blazing eagle.

  The monster’s internal light was fading and flickering, its nebulous outline spitting embers of light as though it fought to hold onto existence. The light from Keeler’s eagle outshone its hellish illumination tenfold and the entire corridor was bleached shadowless with its brilliance.

  ‘Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it!’ cried Ing Mae Sing. ‘It’s weakening.’

  Keeler tried to answer, but found that she had no voice left. The wondrous energy that had filled her was now streaming from her through the eagle, taking her own strength with it.

  She tried to drop the eagle, but it was stuck fast to her hand, the red hot metal fusing itself to her skin.

  From behind her, Keeler heard the clatter of armoured ship’s crew and their cries of astonishment at the scene before them.

  ‘Please…’ she whispered as her legs gave out and she collapsed to the floor.

  The blazing light faded from her hand and the last things she saw were the disintegrating mass of the horror and Sindermann’s rapturous face staring down at her in wonder.

  THE ONLY SOUND was that of the gate. Loken’s entire existence shrank to the growing darkness between its two halves, as he held his breath and waited to see what might lie beyond. The gates swung fully open and he risked a glance at his fellow Sons of Horus, seeing the same desperate hope in every face.

  Not a single sound disturbed the night, and Loken felt melancholy rise in him as he realised that this must simply be the automated opening of the temple doors.

  The Warmaster was dead.

  A sick dread settled on Loken and his head sank to his chest.

  Then he heard the sound of footsteps, and looked up to see the gleam of white and gold plate emerge from the darkness.

  Horus strode from the Delphos with his cloak of royal purple billowing behind him and his golden sword held high above him.

  The eye in the centre of his breastplate blazed a fiery red and the laurels at his forehead framed features that were beautiful and terrible in their magnificence.

  The Warmaster stood before them, unbowed and more vital than ever, the sheer physicality of his presence robbing every one of them of speech.

  Horus smiled and said, ‘You are a sight for sore eyes, my sons.’

  Torgaddon punched the air in elation and shouted, ‘Lupercal!’

  He laughed and ran towards the Warmaster, breaking the spell that had fallen on the rest of them.

  The Mournival rushed to this reunion with their lord and master, joyous cries of ‘Lupercal!’ erupting from the throat of every Astartes warrior as word spread back through the files and into the crowd surrounding the temple.

  The pilgrims around the Delphos took up the chant and ten thousand throats were soon crying the Warmaster’s name.

  ‘Lupercal! Lupercal! Lupercal!’

  The walls of the crater shook to deafening cheers that went on long into the night.

  PART FOUR

  CRUSADE’S END

  EIGHTEEN

  Brothers

  Assassination

  This turbulent poet

  SILVER TRAILS OF molten metal had solidified on the breastplate and Mersadie Oliton had learned enough in her time with the Expedition fleet to know that it would require the aid of Legion artificers to repair it properly. Loken sat before her in the training halls, while other officers of the Sons of Horus were scattered throughout it, repairing armour and cleaning bolters or chainswords. Loken was melancholic, and she was quick to notice his somber mood.

  ‘Is the war not going well?’ she asked as he removed the firing chamber from his bolter and pulled a cleaning rag through it. He looked up and she was struck by how much he had aged in the last ten months, thinking that she would need to revise her chapter on the immortality of the Astartes.

  Since opening hostilities against the Auretian Technocracy, the Astartes had seen some of the hardest fighting since the Great Crusade had begun, and it was beginning to tell on many of them. There had been few opportunities to spend time with Loken during the war, and it was only now that she truly appreciated how much he had changed.

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Loken. ‘The Brotherhood is virtually destroyed and the warriors of Angron will soon storm the Iron Citadel. The war will be over within the week.’

  ‘Then why so gloomy?’

  Loken glanced around to see who else was in the training halls and leaned in close to her.

  ‘Because this is a war we should not be fighting.’

  UPON HORUS’S RECOVERY on Davin, the fleet of the 63rd Expedition had paused just long enough to recover its personnel from the planet’s surface and install a new Imperial commander from the ranks of the Army. Like Rakris before him, the new Lord Governor Elect, Tomaz Vesalias, had begged not to be left behind, but with Davin once again compliant, Imperial rule had to be maintained.

  Before the fighting on Davin, the Warmaster’s fleet had been en route to Sardis and a rendezvous with the 203rd Fleet. The plan was to undertake a campaign of compliance in the Caiades Cluster, but instead of keeping that rendezvous, the Warmaster had sent his compliments and ordered the 203rd’s Master of Ships to muster with the 63rd Expedition in a binary cluster designated Drakonis Three Eleven.

  The Warmaster told no one why he chose this locale, and none of the stellar cartographers could find reports from any previous expedition as to why the place might be of interest.

  Sixteen weeks of warp travel had seen them translate into a system alive with electronic chatter. Two planets and their shared moon in the second system were discovered to be inhabited, glinting communications satellites ringing each one, and interplanetary craft flitting between them.

  More thrilling still, communications with orbital monitors revealed this civilization to be human, another lost branch of the old race – isolated these past centuries. The arrival of the Crusade fleet had been greeted with understandable surprise, and then joy as the planet’s inhabitants realized that their lonely existence was finally at an end.

  Formal, face-to-face contact was not established for three days, in which time the 203rd Expedition under the command of Angron of the XII Legion, the World Eaters, translated in-system.

  The first shots were fired six hours later.

  THE NINTH MONTH of the war.

  Bolter shells stitched a path towards Loken from the blazing muzzle of the bunker’s gun. He ducked behind a shell-pocked cement column, feeling the impacts hammering through it and knowing that he didn’t have much time until the gunfire chewed its way through.

  ‘Garvi!’ shouted Torgaddon, rolling from behind cover and shouldering his bolter. ‘Go left, I’ve got you!’

  Loken nodded and dived from behind the cover as Torgaddon opened up, his Astartes strength keeping the barrel level despite the bolter’s fearsome recoil. Shells exploded in grey puffs of rockcrete at the bunker’s firing slit and Loken heard screams of pain from within. Locasta moved up behind him and he heard the whoosh of flame units as warriors poured fire into the bunker.

  More screams and the stink of flesh burned by chemical flame filled the air.

  ‘Everyone back!’ shouted Loken, getting to his feet and knowing what would come next.

  Sure enough, the bunker mushroomed upwards with a thudding boom, its internal magazine cooking off as its internal sensors registered that its occupants were dead.

  Heavy gunfire ripped through their position, a collapsed structure at the edge of the central precinct of the planet’s towering city of steel and glass. Loken had marveled at the city’s elegance, and Peeter Egon Momus had declared it perfect when he had first seen the aerial scans. It didn’t look perfect now.

  Puffs of flickering detonations tore a line through the Astartes, and Loken dropped as the warrior with the flame unit disappeared
in a column of fire. His armour kept him alive for a few seconds, but soon he was a burning statue, the armour joints fused, and Loken rolled onto his back to see a pair of speeding aircraft rolling around for another strafing run.

  ‘Take those ships out!’ yelled Loken as the craft, sleeker, more elegant Thunderhawk variants, turned their guns towards them once again.

  The Astartes spread out as the under-slung gun pods erupted in fire, and a torrent of shells tore through their position, ripping thick columns in two and sending up blinding clouds of grey dust. Two warriors ducked out from behind a fallen wall, one aiming a long missile tube in the rough direction of the flier while the other sighted on it with a designator.

  The missile launched in a streaming cloud of bright propellant, leaping into the sky and speeding after the closest flier. The pilot saw it and tried to evade, but he was too close to the ground and the missile flew straight into his intake, blowing the craft apart from the inside.

  Its blazing remains plummeted towards the ground as Vipus shouted, ‘Incoming!’

  Loken turned to rebuke him for stating the obvious when he saw that his friend wasn’t talking about the remaining flier. Three tracked vehicles smashed over a low ceramic brick wall behind them, their thick armoured forward sections emblazoned with a pair of crossed lightning bolts.

  Too late, Loken realized the fliers had been keeping them pinned in place while the armoured transports circled around to flank them. Through the smoking wreckage of the burning bunker, he could see blurred forms moving towards them, darting from cover to cover as they advanced. Locasta was caught between two enemy forces and the noose was closing in.

  Loken chopped his hand at the approaching vehicles and the missile team turned to engage their new targets. Within seconds, one was a smoking wreck as a missile punched through its armour and its plasma core exploded inside.

  ‘Tarik!’ he shouted over the din of gunfire from nearby. ‘Keep our front secure.’

  Torgaddon nodded, moving forwards with five warriors. Leaving him to it, Loken turned back towards the armoured vehicles as they crunched to a halt, pintle-mounted bolters hammering them with shots. Two men fell, their armour cracked open by the heavy shells.

  ‘Close on them!’ ordered Loken as the frontal assault ramps lowered and the Brotherhood warriors within charged out. The first few times Loken had fought the Brotherhood, he’d felt a treacherous hesitation seize his limbs, but nine months of gruelling campaigning had pretty much cured him of that.

  Each warrior was armoured in fully enclosed plate, silver like the knights of old, with red and black heraldry upon their shoulder guards. Their form and function was horribly similar to that of the Sons of Horus, and though the enemy warriors were smaller than the Astartes, they were nevertheless a distorted mirror of them.

  Loken and the warriors of Locasta were upon them, the lead Brotherhood warriors raising their weapons in response to the wild charge. The blade of Loken’s chainsword hacked through the nearest warrior’s gun and cleaved into his breastplate. The Brotherhood scattered, but Loken didn’t give them a chance to recover from their surprise, cutting them down in quick, brutal strokes.

  These warriors might look like Astartes, but, up close, they were no match for even one of them.

  He heard gunfire from behind, and heard Torgaddon issuing orders to the men under his command. Stuttering impacts on Loken’s leg armour drove him to his knees and he swept his sword low, hacking the legs from the enemy warrior behind him. Blood jetted from the stumps of his legs as he fell, spraying Loken’s armour red.

  The vehicle began reversing, but Loken threw a pair of grenades inside, moving on as the dull crump of the detonations halted it in its tracks. Shadows loomed over them and he felt the booming footfalls of the Titans of the Legio Mortis as they marched past, crushing whole swathes of the city as they went. Buildings were smashed from their path, and though missiles and lasers reached up to them, the flare of their powerful void shields were proof against such attacks.

  More gunfire and screams filled the battlefield, the enemy falling back from the fury of the Astartes counterattack. They were courageous, these warriors of the Brotherhood, but they were hopelessly optimistic if they thought that simply wearing a suit of power armour made a man the equal of an Astartes.

  ‘Area secure,’ came Torgaddon’s voice over the suit vox. ‘Where to now?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ replied Loken as the last enemy warrior was slain. ‘This is our object point. We wait until the World Eaters get here. Once we hand off to them, we can move on. Pass the word.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Torgaddon.

  Loken savored the sudden quiet of the battlefield, the sounds of battle muted and distant as other companies fought their way through the city. He assigned Vipus to secure their perimeter and crouched beside the warrior whose legs he had cut off.

  The man still lived, and Loken reached down to remove his helmet, a helmet so very similar to his own. He knew where the release catches were and slid the helm clear.

  His enemy’s face was pale from shock and blood loss, his eyes full of pain and hate, but there were no monstrously alien features beneath the helmet, simply ones as human as any member of the 63rd Expedition.

  Loken could think of nothing to say to the man, and simply took off his own helmet and pulled the water-dispensing pipe from his gorget. He poured some clear, cold water over the man’s face.

  ‘I want nothing from you,’ hissed the dying man.

  ‘Don’t speak,’ said Loken. ‘It will be over quickly.’

  But the man was already dead.

  ‘WHY SHOULDN’T WE be fighting this war?’ asked Mersadie Oliton. ‘You were there when they tried to assassinate the Warmaster.’

  ‘I was there,’ said Loken, putting down the cleaned firing chamber. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget that moment.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘It’s not pretty,’ warned Loken. ‘You will think less of us when I tell you the truth of it.’

  ‘You think so? A good documentarist remains objective at all times.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  THE AMBASSADORS OF the planet, which Loken had learned was named Aureus, had been greeted with all the usual pomp and ceremony accorded to a potentially friendly culture. Their vessels had glided onto the embarkation deck to surprised gasps as every warrior present recognized their uncanny similarity to Stormbirds.

  The Warmaster was clad in his most regal armour, gold fluted and decorated with the Emperor’s devices of lightning bolts and eagles. Unusually for an occasion such as this, he was armed with a sword and pistol, and Loken could feel the force of authority the Warmaster projected.

  Alongside the Warmaster stood Maloghurst, robed in white, Regulus – his gold and steel augmetic body polished to a brilliant sheen – and First Captain Abaddon, who stood proudly with a detachment of hulking Justaerin Terminators.

  It was a gesture to show strength and backing it up, three hundred Sons of Hours stood at parade rest behind the group, noble and regal in their bearing – the very image of the Great Crusade – and Loken had never been prouder of his illustrious heritage.

  The doors of the craft opened with the hiss of decompression and Loken had his first glimpse of the Brotherhood.

  A ripple of astonishment passed through the embarkation deck as twenty warriors in gleaming silver plate armour, the very image of the assembled Astartes, marched from the landing craft’s interior in perfect formation, though Loken detected a stammer of surprise in them too. They carried weapons that looked very much like a standard-issue boltgun, though in deference to their hosts, none had magazines fitted.

  ‘Do you see that?’ whispered Loken.

  ‘No, Garvi, I’ve suddenly been struck blind,’ replied Torgaddon. ‘Of course I see them.’

  ‘They look like Astartes!’

  ‘There’s a resemblance, I’ll give you that, but they’re far too short.’

  ‘They’re
wearing power armour… How is that possible?’

  ‘If you keep quiet we might find out,’ said Torgaddon.

  The warriors wheeled and formed up around a tall man wearing long red robes, whose features were half-flesh, half machine and whose eye was a blinking emerald gem. Walking with the aid of a golden cog-topped staff, he stepped onto the deck with the pleased expression of one who finds his expectations more than met.

  The Auretian delegation made its way towards Horus, and Loken could sense the weight of history pressing in on this moment. This meeting was the very embodiment of what the Great Crusade represented: lost brothers from across the galaxy once again meeting in the spirit of companionship.

  The red robed man bowed before the Warmaster and said, ‘Do I have the honour of addressing the Warmaster Horus?’

  ‘You do, sir, but please do not bow,’ replied Horus. ‘The honour is mine.’

  The man smiled, pleased at the courtesy. ‘Then if you will permit me, I will introduce myself. I am Emory Salignac, Fabricator Consul to the Auretian Technocracy. On behalf of my people, may I be the first to welcome you to our worlds.’

  Loken had seen Regulus’s excitement at the sight of Salignac’s augmetics, but upon hearing the full title of this new empire, his enthusiasm overcame the protocol of the moment.

  ‘Consul,’ said Regulus, his voice blaring and unnatural. ‘Do I understand that your society is founded on the knowledge of technical data?’

  Horus turned to the adept of the Mechanicum and whispered something that Loken didn’t hear, but Regulus nodded and took a step back.

  ‘I apologize for the adept’s forthright questions, but I hope you might forgive his outburst, given that our warriors appear to share certain… similarities in their wargear.’

  ‘These are the warriors of the Brotherhood,’ explained Salignac. ‘They are our protectors and our most elite soldiers. It honours me to have them as my guardians here.’