by Nick Kyme
Shipmaster Reyne, having drawn up alongside the gargantuan vessel, had no time to withdraw when the immense defence laser had fired. The explosion had gored the Chalice of Fire all across its port flank, overwhelming the void shields almost instantaneously and savaging the armour beneath with a storm of debris, but the ship was spared any further collateral damage.
It had near-crippled the vessel, which could only limp away from the site of the Obstinate’s destruction under failing reserve power. It had taken days, not hours to get away. They had survived only to be doomed themselves.
The Salamanders had returned to one of the Chalice’s forge halls. A solemn brotherhood had gathered there, surrounded by eddies of smoke and tendrils of flame.
T’kell was dead, so too Zau’ull, Zandu, Varr and many more amongst the Unscarred.
The wounded had been saved, those sent by Saurian in the saviour pods, but it was bitter compensation.
Obek stood at the head of the throng. All was darkness and flickering shadow in the obsidian chamber. Gor’og Krask and the Terminators kneeled closest, Xen alongside them, the banner clutched in his left hand. Phokan knelt in front of those Firedrakes in the rear rank.
Fewer than half of those who had begun the mission remained.
Obek had sealed the artefacts, including the one taken by Zau’ull, in the deepest and hottest vault of the ship. It seemed fitting to keep them close to the heart of the forges.
He donned his war-helm and heard the last reports of Shipmaster Reyne as he counted down the seconds of power left in the engines. After that, they would drift with only the fathomless void before them.
‘It is ended,’ he told the Drakes, unscarred no more. ‘And we have found the final rest of our father’s legacy. It is here, with us.’
Though they kneeled, every Salamanders legionary met their captain’s gaze with fiery and stalwart determination. With their dying breaths they would protect the artefacts of Vulkan. They would hold the ship.
Obek looked to Xen, raising his sword. It gleamed in the firelight, polished to a mirror sheen.
‘What is the meaning of sacrifice?’ he asked.
‘To live when others died,’ Xen replied.
‘And what is our purpose?’
‘To be the wardens and protectors,’ answered the throng.
‘And who are we?’
‘Vulkan’s chosen,’ they said as one. ‘Custodians of his legacy.’
The vow had changed, Obek reflected, but their duty had not.
‘Vulkan’s chosen!’ he roared, and the hall shook to the echoes of impassioned affirmation.
Twenty-Eight
Stasis
Obek woke, wiping away the void-frost on his retinal lenses.
He had no idea how long he had been out. His feet were still mag-locked to the floor of the relic hall, his bolter and blade to either thigh.
Disengaging the armour lock, he felt a sudden lightness as the zero gravity leavened his mass. Motes of void-matter floated in the air, shimmering like languid stars in the light of his suit lamps. Bodies floated too, frozen in their death throes.
All was still. His brothers were beside him. He tried to check the status of Zau’ull’s casket but the ship’s cogitators were offline. Life support, weapons, shields, engines – all had redlined. The navigation cogitator still functioned. Obek accessed it through his helm and brought up their location on his retinal lens.
UNKNOWN…
The data scrolled across his vision in an endless stream of red.
UNKNOWN…
UNKNOWN…
UNKNOWN…
UNKNOWN…
UNKNOWN…
UNKNOWN…
UNKNOWN…
UNKNOWN…
He blinked to shut down the feed.
His internal chrono told him he had been in stasis for over a year. Longer than the last time. His suit systems were almost depleted, despite their low power setting. Partial sus-an meditation for so long had left him groggy, but something had woken him.
The others were waking too, alerted by the same instinct. Obek watched the dull flare of their retinal lenses as their power armour reactivated.
Then he felt it. A dull scratching against the hull. Distant. It must be inside the outer armour but close enough that the resonance of it had been picked up by his auto-senses.
Something was inside, and trying to reach further into the ship, slowly worming its way towards the core.
Obek had his back to the door of a second chamber, an inner sanctum close to the cold forges of the ship.
He reached for his weapons, shattering the void-frost encasing his armour in a slow cascade of ice crystals. His voice was no louder than a croak, but the warning still carried weight.
‘More are coming.’
The Broken Chalice
The squad moved slowly through the silent ship, their armour sealed against the vacuum and the slow return of their rebreathers audible in their helms.
Brother-Sergeant Ko’tan had been dispatched when Adeptus Mechanicus Explorators had found the stricken vessel drifting amidst a debris field of other broken starships. A degrading gravity well exerted by one of the moons on the Fringe, too weak to draw the ships down but strong enough to hold them in state for a while, had captured it, and upon discovering the vessel’s provenance, the magos in charge of the mission had immediately sent a message to Prometheus.
Ko’tan and his brothers had arrived a few weeks later, translating out of warp at the nearest Mandeville point and reaching the debris field a few days after that.
‘Evidence of prior incursion,’ Voskar’s voice hissed with static as it came across the feed.
A beacon signature, faint but readable was emanating from somewhere deep within the ship.
‘I have desiccated corpses here,’ answered Ko’tan as he entered a barrack hall, the tread of his Terminator armour strangely light in the zero-gravity conditions as he briefly released the mag-lock securing him to the deck.
‘Origin?’
‘Xenos. Eldar and greenskin.’
‘Genestealer?’
‘Negative.’
‘Be wary, brother. This is their habitat.’
Ko’tan sent an affirmative and moved on.
He passed through another corridor, partly laid open to the void. Parts of the ship were in dire need of repair but the superstructure was intact. All its systems were dead, and looked to have failed several years ago, but any accurate reading on that was impossible.
One of his squad from further back in the ship requested an interrogative. As he passed through the corridor and into a relic hall, Ko’tan panned his storm bolter across the darkness and blink-clicked an affirmative.
‘Metallurgy samples secured, brother-sergeant.’
Ko’tan paused in front of a great glyph of a drake that was staring down at him from the end of a vast hall. He knew the ship was old, but Ubon would know more.
‘Your findings, Techmarine?’
‘Cursory analysis puts the ship at almost ten thousand years old,’ Ubon replied.
K’o’tan’s breath caught for a moment, and he dared to hope. It was ornate, and unlike any vessel he had ever seen – and not on account of its age.
Something up ahead got his attention. Another door, immense and inscribed with the same drake sigil. It towered above Ko’tan, and he was still fifty feet away from it. They were deep in the bowels of the vessel now, near the extinct forges revealed in the initial scan before incursion.
A figure stood before the door.
As he drew closer, almost hypnotised by each fresh discovery, Ko’tan saw the door had been breached.
‘Squad Ko’tan converge on vanguard.’
More corpses littered the hall, a great many congregating outside the door in spite of the zero g
ravity. They floated in a strange swarm, a host of alien dead, but it wasn’t this which had drawn Ko’tan’s eye. Through the frozen bodies, their armour and void-suits torn open and gouged, he saw fireborn.
Their armour was old, far older than any he had ever seen. Even the captain’s artificer armour only dated back to the Arising. These suits were archaic.
They would need to reach the bridge and access the data-log to be certain, but as he gazed upon his long-dead brothers from another era, frozen solid in their armour, their defence having failed only when they had, he began to believe.
Ko’tan opened up the vox again.
‘Lord Vulkan…’ he intoned.
‘Speak.’
Dir’san’s icon put him in close proximity to the bridge.
‘I have found them, Forgefather.’
‘Hold position. I am coming to you.’
‘The second vault?’
‘Empty.’
‘This is the ship, Vulkan Dir’san,’ said Ko’tan. ‘It must be.’
‘Yes,’ said the Forgefather. ‘The Chalice of Fire and Eye of Vulkan are here. We have but seven more to find.’
About the Author
Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Deathfire and Vulkan Lives, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio drama Censure. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection, The Primarchs. Nick is well known for his popular Salamanders novels, including Rebirth, the Space Marine Battles novel Damnos, and numerous short stories. He has also written fiction set in the world of Warhammer, most notably the Time of Legends novel The Great Betrayal. He lives and works in Nottingham, and has a rabbit.
An extract from Rebirth.
Three contrails from a trio of gunships scored through the dark sky over Canticus.
The city was burning. Ash and smoke from the fires had brought on premature night. War had transformed this place. In the grubby brown half-light, once regal statuary writhed in imagined torment, proud temples hung open like cracked corpses and the gilded streets turned black with spilled blood. It was, in every respect, a haunted landscape. Death stalked the streets, death and the nightmares that brought death with them – a legion in black, a legacy most foul and one that still yearned for some scrap of its former power and prestige.
The Thunderhawks wove through the chaos, banking and turning to keep the buildings between them and the torrent of flak fire spitting from the gun emplacements entrenched somewhere below. They were snub-nosed, boxy-looking vessels, their Salamanders green begrimed by the war. And they were not alone. The polluted sky over Canticus was choked by more than smoke alone – a battle equal in ferocity to that being fought on the ground was being contested in the air. Stormtalon interceptors engaged in sporadic dogfights with the draconic, winged daemon-engines of the Archenemy, as they tried to shepherd the larger landers. The enemy vessels were more like beasts of ancient myth, steel and dark anima combined. Their name ‘Heldrake’ was well earned.
The Thunderhawks lost their last outrider when the Stormtalon was set upon from above, a daemon-engine seizing the interceptor in its claws and bearing it down into smoke and oblivion below.
Boosting their engines, the gunships increased speed, risking a more direct approach through the latticing flak fire to put some distance between them and the Heldrake. Wing-mounted bolters flaring, they strafed a landing zone ahead, committing to a rapid deployment dive.
From the roof of an old preceptory, an armour-clad warrior watched the gunships make their cargo drops into the heart of one of the city’s war zones. Seven identical drops had taken place in the last hour. More would follow. Each transporter went in hot. The first carried a single war machine – a hulking Redeemer-class Land Raider, named for devastating heavy flamers – for only in fire could true repentance be found. The others had two battle tanks apiece, Predators. Ubiquitous amongst the Adeptus Astartes’ armoury, these two were the less common Annihilators, armed with lascannons. In short, they were tank-killers.
The tracks of the five vehicles were already rolling at combat speed before touching down, weapon-targeting systems active and tracking movement. They hit the ground running with no break between landing and combat, before the Thunderhawks pulled away sharply, banking around with throaty pulses from their engines and disappearing intermittently behind great plumes of smoke.
Of the Heldrake, there was no sign. Perhaps it had been destroyed in the crash, or perhaps it had simply found other prey.
Drakgaard’s focus was elsewhere, on the tanks and their mission. It had been a sacrifice to redeploy the armour. They would pay for that, and lose some of the bitter ground they had gained with blood and sweat. Canticus, even the world of Heletine itself, was demanding like that. She was a warren, a dark labyrinth. Little was taken for granted in such theatres of war, save for the vastness of the death toll.
Despite the massive destruction already wreaked against it, a proud and pious city stretched out in front of Drakgaard. Temples stood silhouetted against the gloom, and beneath their columnar and statued glory lurked a sprawl of streets and avenues. If the monolithic temples and shrineholds were the flesh, then the streets were its veins and arteries. Though those arteries were shedding freely and spilling lagoons of blood, there was still artistry to the city’s claustrophobic design.
Possessed of a grim mien, the brother-captain seldom found much to enjoy in beauty. Some in the Chapter had whispered an iron hand would suit him better than a drake-scale mantle, but Drakgaard was Salamander from skin through to marrow. Yet, in spite of his quiet detractors, Drakgaard did wonder at what Canticus would have looked like before war had engulfed it.
With the fires that had broken out, very little remained of the city’s geography that wasn’t contested. Much of it was now in ruins, partly from brutal urban engagements and partly from the preliminary bombardment that had lasted four days and yielded little in the way of tactical traction for the allied Imperial commander.
Drakgaard looked upon his works from his vantage on the roof and saw only a long war of attrition ahead.
He had committed almost all of their strength to the taking of Canticus and the driving out of an entrenched enemy. Sixth Company’s entire complement as well as assault elements from Fourth made up the Salamanders infantry and Sergeant Zantho had assembled a sizeable division of battle tanks to neutralise the heretics’ heavy armour. Yet despite all of this formidable strength, the war was still a bitter grind.
It suited Drakgaard, it suited the Chapter. Meet them eye to eye and burn them out of their holes. The Salamanders had waged this way of war for centuries. None were as tenacious or as committed as the sons of Vulkan. He had been at Badab and Armageddon, Drakgaard knew the full meaning of ‘attrition’ – his body bore the scars in testament to the fact.
Were he able, Drakgaard would have smiled at the thought of past glories but his face was drawn up into a permanent snarl because of old injuries. He had several, and wore them proudly, more proudly than the many honours he had received in a long and distinguished career. A warrior was measured by his scars not his medals, or so the captain of Sixth believed. It was a trite belief, but one he clung to when the ache of old wounds became pronounced. Much like this day.
A three-dimensional representation of Canticus projected from a hololithic device revolved in front of Drakgaard. The transmission was poor, which made the image grainy and prone to breaks in resolution, but the story it told was clear.
Five major war zones across the world of Heletine, all being fought with fang and claw. To the equatorial south a predominantly Cadian force fought a guerrilla war for dominance of the Centari Mountains. Drakgaard had lent the Astra Militarum forces several squadrons of Stormtalons to leaven their war burden. Judging by the skies over Canticus, he might need to recall them soon. In the east, at Veloth, Sergeant V’reth of Third Squa
d held the fringe of the barren desert region and its few remote temples, supported by some minor Cadian armour and Sentinel squadrons. The city of Solist was all but destroyed, and only a token force skirmished over its remains now. Escadan was firmly in Imperial control and served as a muster point for the other major cities. An industrial region in the main, the heretics had paid it no mind, presumably deeming it of little tactical significance.
The rest had come to Canticus. It was here, Drakgaard was convinced, that the deadlock would finally break. He had but to find a way. He accessed a dispositional feed from his battle-helm prompting force organisational data to scroll down his left retinal lens.
The Cadian 81st were almost down to bare bones after being first responders to the crisis and bearing the brunt of the heretics’ wrath and martial strength. The local defence forces were all but depleted or had defected. Drakgaard had witnessed sixteen separate firing squads that morning as the dogmatic Cadians sought to excise further traitors from the allied ranks. A thankless task, but one that fortunately did not burden the brother-captain.
The Salamanders held firm. They did so with honour, and according to the Promethean Creed. As commanding officer, it was Drakgaard’s opportunity to expunge the stain on the Chapter’s glory brought about by the troubled Third. Agatone had not taken kindly to his warriors being taken off the frontline. It had been five years since Nocturne, five years since a Lexicanium named Hazon Dak’ir had nearly destroyed them all. After the deaths of two captains and a verified record of renegade defections coming from within the ranks of the company, Drakgaard was not surprised when Chapter Master Tu’Shan had demanded a period of investigation and spiritual restoration.
It was the fire-born way, and now Drakgaard’s star was in the ascendency. He resolved to conduct himself with honour, and bring glory back to the Salamanders. First, he had to win the war on Heletine.
His thoughts were disturbed by the sound of heavy boots tramping up the stairwell behind him.
