by Dan Abnett
Soneka slipped into the hot darkness of the habitent. Koslov sat at his camp desk, staring at Soneka in surprise.
‘Commander!’ Soneka whispered. ‘Emergency alert now!’
Koslov didn’t move. He continued to stare back at Soneka with the same look of mild surprise. ‘Commander Koslov?’
Koslov’s eyes did not follow Soneka as he moved forwards. They continued to stare at the tent flap where Soneka had entered. Koslov didn’t move at all.
Soneka threw himself sideways.
The falx swung by the echvehnurth concealed behind the inner tent flap missed the hetman by a matter of centimetres. The blade chokked through the groundsheet into the dirt beneath. Soneka rolled and came up on his feet. The Nurthene yanked his long blade free and charged him.
‘Alarm! Alarm!’ Soneka began to shout. ‘Enemy in the camp!’
He dived headlong over the desk to avoid the lunging blade, and fell into Koslov. Koslov toppled backwards off his seat, his camp table collapsing under Soneka’s weight. Blood ebbed slackly out of Koslov’s nose and mouth. He continued to stare, in mild surprise, at the roof of the tent.
Soneka rolled off the still-warm corpse, and fumbled frantically to release Koslov’s service pistol from its holster.
The Nurthene whirled his falx so high it ripped a slit in the tent roof. He swung it down. Soneka threw himself to one side. The descending blade cut clean through Koslov’s left shoulder.
‘Alarm!’ Soneka yelled again, diving away. Outside, he heard shouting, and the sudden, sporadic bark of las weapons.
Soneka threw a saddle bag at the advancing Nurthene, and the whispering falx struck it aside. He scrambled backwards, hurling a writing case. The falx splintered it, and a shower of pens, nibs and blotting patches spilled out. Soneka ducked again, and the falx tore a wide gash in the tent wall.
Geno training took over. As he landed, Soneka groped for a weapon, any weapon, and found a writing quill that had fallen out of the writing case. Soneka seized it, tested its weight automatically, and threw it like a dart, underhand.
It embedded itself, nib first, in the echvehnurth’s left cheek. The Nurthene yelped and lurched backwards. Soneka leapt up and grabbed the haft of the falx. He kneed the Nurthene in the groin. Now the bastard really staggered. He howled. His grip on the falx weakened.
Soneka tore the weapon out of the echvehnurth’s hands and swung it. The echvehnurth’s head rolled clean off his shoulders in a puff of blood. The body folded up, and the head bounced off the ground sheet beside it.
Gripping the falx, Soneka strode across the habitent to the master alarm control. He smacked it, and sirens began to wail all across the Visages post.
He walked back to Koslov’s body, staked the falx blade down in the ground, and pulled out the service pistol, a heavy las model.
Two Nurthene raiders burst in through the habitent mouth and Soneka shot them both in the face. They walloped over on their backs, their silver plates dotted with droplets of blood.
Pandemonium had erupted outside the command tent. The waking Imperial troops, roused by his shots and the blaring sirens, were scrambling to fight off the Nurthene intruders. The dawn air whizzed with gunfire and the sumkk of impacting blades. Soneka heard awful wails of pain.
With the pistol in his good hand, he went outside into the baking air. A Nurthene ran at him, falx raised. Soneka blew the man’s throat out with a single shot and dropped him on the sand. All around him, las carbines rattled on auto. The shouts and yells were deafening. He ran towards the cold store.
Bodies littered the ground outside the mud brick building: Imperial soldiers, mostly half-dressed, sliced into pieces. He went inside, and shot down the two Nurthene he found there. One fell forwards against the stacked, frozen bodies in their shrouds, and wrenched off his breastplate as he slid down. The breastplate landed in front of Soneka, rattling to a stop. He saw the engraved reed emblems and the snapping crocodilia.
‘Get. Out,’ a voice gasped. ‘Run.’
He turned. Medicae Ida stood behind him. She clutched at the falx that stapled her through the chest to the cold store wall. Her gown was soaked in blood. Her own, for the first time.
‘Medicae!’ Soneka yelled.
‘Too late for me,’ she wheezed, and died.
A Nurthene raider burst in behind them, and Soneka spun around, firing a shot that silenced the man forever.
More followed, falxes raised. Soneka began to shoot. By his weapon’s digital display, he had twenty shots left. Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen…
BRONZI BROUGHT THE Scarab to rest and hit the dampers. The sun was up, fierce and bold.
‘Wake up,’ he told Shiban as he unstrapped his harness. Shiban groaned.
Bronzi jumped down out of the speeder and looked around. His stomach was grumbling. Where the hell was Honen’s promised cavalry? The cratered desert spread out all around him in the burning light of the rising sun.
He saw a figure toiling up the trail towards him, a tall figure wobbled by the heat haze. Bronzi waited, two minutes, three. The figure came closer, becoming properly visible.
It was a Space Marine in full battle plate. The armour was purple, trimmed in silver, with green markings on the immense shoulder plates.
‘Great god,’ Bronzi murmured.
The towering Astartes came to a halt ten paces from Bronzi and the speeder. Soft red light glowed like embers in its eye slits as it read and targeted him.
‘Bronzi, we meet again,’ the helmet speaker crackled.
‘Sir?’
The Astartes held its massive boltgun close against its armoured chest.
‘I warned you. You really do know how to stir up trouble, don’t you, Hurtado?’
Bronzi blinked. ‘I don’t understand. This is important! This is—’
‘None of your business, but you’ve made it your business, which is a colossal mistake, and a shame, because you’re a decent fellow. There’s only one option.’
‘What the fug are you talking about?’ Bronzi cried, wishing, very suddenly, he’d brought a weapon with him.
‘Back right off, you son of a bitch,’ Shiban declared, moving out from behind the cover of the hovering tank, his double-carbine raised to his shoulder and aimed squarely at the armoured figure.
‘Dimi, don’t!’ Bronzi yelled.
‘No one threatens my friends,’ Shiban growled back. He edged forwards, his weapon fixed steadily on the figure in purple armour.
The Astartes turned its visor slowly to regard Shiban. The soft red ember-light flickered in its eye slits.
Far too fast for Bronzi to follow, the Astartes wheeled and fired its bolter. Dimitar Shiban, who remembered his dreams word for word, left the ground and exploded as he travelled backwards, showering blood and meat in all directions. His twisted carcass hit the ground and lay still.
‘Oh god! Oh Terra! No!’ Bronzi yelled.
The Astartes switched its aim back to Bronzi. Bronzi sank to his knees in the dust.
‘Please…’ he murmured.
‘As I said,’ the Space Marine remarked, stepping forwards, its bolter aimed, ‘there is only one option.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ Bronzi pleaded.
‘For the Emperor,’ the Astartes replied.
THREE
Mon Lo Harbour, Nurth, two days later
THOUGH JOHN GRAMMATICUS was over a thousand years old, he had only been Konig Heniker for eight months, and he was still getting used to the idea.
According to his file, and as far as any Imperial methods of scrutiny were concerned, Konig Heniker was a fifty-two year-old man from a region of Terra known as the Caucasus, and he served in the Imperial Army as an intelligence officer attached to the Geno Five-Two Chiliad.
Grammaticus still thought of himself as essentially human. He had been born human, raised as a human, and he had been human when, to all intents and purposes, he had died for the first time. Definitions became a little more complicated after that. One thin
g was certain: at some non-specific point after his first death, probably as the result of a slow process rather than a sudden change of heart, he had stopped being quite so steadfast in his devotion to the interests of his birth species.
He was still unashamedly fond of the human race, and was a stout apologist for its less edifying qualities, but he had been with the Cabal for a long time, and they had shared the Acuity with him, at least in part. These days, he saw what his birth race had once been wont to call ‘the long view’.
Grammaticus was one of the last few humans still working as an agent of the Cabal. Over the centuries, the Cabal had recruited a good many human go-betweens, but most of them were long dead, forgotten or disavowed.
The Cabal had been recruiting human agents for as long as there had been humans to recruit, a fact Grammaticus always found particularly hard to reconcile. At the very start of human history, before writing, before Ur and Catal Huyuk, before Mohenjodaro and Thebes, before the construction of the lost monuments, the Cabal had visited Terra and encountered a breed of unprepossessing, unpromising mammalian hominids busy making its first axe marks on the trunks of ancient woodland trees to mark out its first boundaries.
The Cabal had seen some particular quality in those mammalian hominids. They had recognised that the hominids would one day rise, inexorably, to play a pivotal role in the scheme of all things. Mankind would become the greatest weapon against the Primordial Annihilator, or it would become the Primordial Annihilator’s greatest weapon. Either way, the Cabal decided that the unprepossessing mammalian hominids developing on that backwater world were not a species to be dismissed.
Grammaticus knew that this fact frustrated most of the Cabal’s inner circle. They were Old Kinds, every damn one of them, and regarded all the upstart species of the galaxy as inferior ephemera. It pained them to accept that their destiny, all destinies, lay in the purview of creatures that had been simple, single-cell protocytes when the Old Kind cultures were already mature.
Gahet had once told Grammaticus that the Cabal had made its first subtle advances towards the human species long before the advent of the Age of Terra. Gahet had said this bitterly, and more bitterly still had admitted the Cabal’s repeated failure to apply influence on human development.
‘You’ve always been feral, stubborn brutes,’ Gahet had said, ‘shockingly dogmatic in your self-worth. We tried to direct you, and influence your course. It was like…’
Gahet had paused, allowing his mind to select an appropriately humanocentric simile. ‘It was like commanding a tide to turn back,’ he finished.
Grammaticus had smiled. ‘We are a headstrong people, aren’t we?’ he had replied, with no little pride. ‘Did you not think it might have been easier to cull us before we grew teeth?’
Gahet had nodded, or at least, he had flexed his secondary nostrils in a mannerism that equated to a nod. ‘That was not our way then. We all deemed such notions as gross barbarism. All of us except Slau Dha, of course.’
‘Of course. And now?’
‘Now I regret we did not abort you when we had the chance. Destruction has become our only tool in latter days. I miss the subtle methods.’
Almost all of the humans recruited down the years had proved to be unviable or flawed. Most had been disposed of. Grammaticus believed that he had succeeded where so many others had failed because of his gift.
John Grammaticus was a high-function psyker.
‘THE UXOR WILL see you, Het Heniker,’ the subaltern in the fur shako announced.
‘Thank you,’ John Grammaticus replied, and got up off the wooden chair at the end of the corridor. He walked down the hall towards the briefing room door, straightening his double-breasted jacket and cape. He undid the collar buttons of his shirt. It was almost noon and the terracotta palace was sweltering. Situated fifteen kilometres outside Mon Lo Harbour, the palace had been commandeered as a control station for the advance. Its ancient walls held the day’s heat like an oven. Reed screens soaked in water had been fixed over the windows to keep the palace interiors cool and fresh, but they were beginning to dry out.
John Grammaticus had no physiological need to perspire, but he permitted his body to do so. Every other human around was sweating freely, and he didn’t want them to notice that he wasn’t like them.
He knocked at the door.
‘Come!’
He went in. The chamber was long and broad, with pillars flanking the walls to support the tiled ceiling. The tops of the pillars had been carved to resemble the fronds of reeds, or snapping crocodilia, both common features in Nurthene architecture. A folding steel table had been set up in the centre of the room, and Uxor Rukhsana stood at the head of it, her four aides ranged on either side of the table beside her.
‘Uxor,’ Grammaticus said. ‘Good to see you.’ He tapped his throat. ‘I apologise for the unbuttoning, but this objectionable heat.’
‘Quite all right, Konig,’ she replied. Her aides all nodded accordingly. They were all female, all aged between thirteen and sixteen, uxors in waiting. Their ovaries had already been harvested for the Geno Five-Two Chiliad stock banks. They were now honing their ’cept powers, and acting as a support buffer for their assigned uxor.
Grammaticus found the operational structure of the Geno Five-Two Chiliad quite fascinating. Formed during the savage continental wars that had engulfed Terra at the end of the Age of Strife, the geno had proved to be a most effective and adaptable force. No wonder the Emperor had permitted them to endure after Unification. No wonder he had looked upon their system and stolen from it.
The geno practised gene mustering. Grammaticus had been thoroughly briefed on this. Gene mustering had been an essential tool during those caustic years of atomic hurricanes and drifting rad clouds. The core of the regiment was the uxors, a bloodline of latent psychically sensitive females. The females had their eggs harvested at puberty, and from them the heavy-built uterine soldiery of the unit were vat-grown, using the genetic codes of several proven, robust agnate gene-pools notorious for their martial merit. The geno grew tough warriors, but they complemented their brute strength and kept the pool clean by importing smart, proven field commanders from other forces. The hetmen were always non-stock individuals who excelled at tactics and strategy.
The uxors, at the top of the Chiliad’s command tree, were no longer capable of carrying children of their own to term. This, in ways not entirely understood, freed their minds, and allowed them to operate as perceptives, operational coordinators who could appreciate, as Gahet had put it during the briefing, ‘the behaviour of their children’.
At best, the uxors were weak psykers. Each one was capable of a rudimentary talent known as the ’cept, enough to enable their forces in the field and supply them with some insight. They burned out quickly. By twenty-six, twenty-seven, they were done as uxors, and restricted to other duties. During their active phase as perceptives, they were always accompanied by aides, uxors in training, whose raw psychic talent bolstered the ’ceptive power of their uxor even as they learned from her.
None of the females in the chamber possessed a fraction of John Grammaticus’s talent.
As he sat down at the end of the table opposite Uxor Rukhsana, he reached out. Instantly, he tasted feeble, immature ’cepts, chitter-chatter minds, the moist, unwholesome mental architecture of the pubescent aides. The technical inability to conceive made most uxor-aides gruesomely promiscuous. Grammaticus was repelled by the lurid, shallow thoughts that washed towards him. The aides were all thinking about the next soldier boy they’d hump, or how fabulous it was going to be to become an uxor.
Rukhsana was different. Grammaticus looked down the table towards her. For a start, she was a woman, not a girl; a startlingly appealing woman. Her lips were full, her long, straight, blonde hair centre-parted, her eyes heavily lashed and exotically grey. A master sculptor could not have improved upon her cheek bones. She was also twenty-eight, and at the end of her uxor service. He could feel that she
hated this fact. She was broken by the thought that she would soon be something else: a medicae, a Munitorum commander, a cartomancer, an uxor emeritus.
Her powers were ebbing. Her ’cept was waning and weakening.
‘What do you have for me, sir?’ she asked.
Quite a voice. Even the aides took notice. Husky. No, silky, like honey. Grammaticus knew he was a little in love with her, and allowed himself to relish the fact. It had been a long time, seven hundred years, give or take, since he had permitted himself to respond to a human female in any way other than physical need.
‘Well, I have plenty, uxor,’ he replied, taking out the document case from under his arm and opening it.
‘You’ve actually been in Mon Lo Harbour?’ asked one of the aides, looking right at him. Grammaticus felt a wash of admiring lust.
‘Yes… what’s your name?’
‘Tuvi, sir,’ the girl said. She was the most mature of Rukhsana’s aides, about nineteen. Tuvi clearly found the idea of a daring intelligence officer quite intoxicating.
‘Yes, Tuvi. I made cover as a merchant called D’sal Huulta, and spent the last four days gathering evidence in the inner quarters of the town.’
Amongst other things, he thought.
‘Wasn’t that terribly dangerous?’ asked another of the aides.
‘Yes, it was,’ said Grammaticus.
‘How were you not unmasked by the infidel enemy?’ asked Tuvi.
‘Be quiet,’ Rukhsana told her girls. ‘Intelligence operatives are hardly required to give away their tricks.’
‘It’s all right, uxor,’ Grammaticus smiled. He looked at Tuvi and said, ‘El’teh ta nash el et chey tanay.’
‘What?’ Tuvi replied.
‘It means,’ Grammaticus told her, ‘I speak the local language as a native does, in Nurthene.’
‘But—’ Tuvi began.
‘My dear, I’m not going to tell you how, so please don’t ask. If I might continue?’
Tuvi looked as if she was going to say something else.
‘Let the man speak, Tuvi,’ Rukhsana snapped. ‘Heniker?’
‘Oh, of course. Well, the location itself… as we know, the Nurthene have no orbital or interplanetary technology, nor have ever possessed such means. However, the area known as Mon Lo Harbour, though flooded and used for maritime shipping, was originally constructed as a setting down point for starships.’
