Let The Galaxy Burn

by Marc

  He pulled at one of the sharpened stakes which made the hedge bristle. It came out easily. Now he had a weapon. Silently, Imperial Guardsman Hartoum loped off into the lightless unknown, intent on retrieving the honour of the Aurelian IXth.

  ALL THAT NIGHT Floscan travelled, trying not to stray from his chosen direction, trying to suppress his fright. Clicking, buzzing, rattling noises sounded all around him. All too often he thought he felt a chill touch – a claw, a feeler, a rasp, a feathery antenna – causing him to lash out with the stake in a sidewise swipe or a jab with the point, often followed by the sound of something scuttling away. Dawn found him weary. Something else found him, too.

  He first became aware of it as a sharp, acid smell. Then it charged from behind a rock to attack him. It was about twice the size of a horse, but in appearance like a cockroach whose head was a mass of razor-sharp sword blades sliding in and out with a scything sound, rubbing against one another. At their full extent they were as long as his stake.

  He took a lesson from Ochtar. To retreat was death – therefore, attack! He ran at the animal, which in turn was scurrying towards him, eager to slice him to bits with its battery of blades. Go for the brain. Ochtar had taught him that too. A bubbling, whistling noise came from the creature as he pushed the stake in as hard as he could. Then it turned on its back, a dozen stubby legs waving in death agony.

  As he withdrew the stake, from which a purple goo dripped, a sensation of irresistible weight seized him. He looked at the icons, and groaned. The h-g suit had lost power.

  Floscan sank to his knees. Where was the village? The creature was but the first and smallest of the monsters that were likely to find him. Others would be gigantic, impossible to fight even with a fully functioning h-g suit. Abandoning the stake, he was reduced to crawling on all fours as his own weight settled on him, dragging him into a pit of despair. Soon even this was too much. He was forced to lie down and close his eyes in exhaustion.

  The sound of a human voice awoke him with a start. A quadruped stood over him, clad in a cloth tunic, lacking facial scars and tattoos, and with no claw-bearing helmet. One of Ochtar’s people! Floscan struggled to sit up. Had he made it out of the territory of the Blood God? Or were the Remembering One’s tribe looking for him after he had failed to return?

  ‘Ochtar is dead! Blood God! They have messenger from the Emperor! Going to kill him!’ Floscan pleaded. Had Ochtar been the only one understand Imperial Gothic? Had he taught it to any of the otiiers? The quadruped looked at him, frowning.

  ‘Blood God? Emperor? Blood God kill Emperor?’

  ‘Yes! Help Emperor!’

  For the first time he noticed a large curved horn hanging from the four-leg’s neck. The tribesmen raised it to his lips and blew a long, winding blast.

  More warriors appeared among the crags and began making their way down to them. Floscan’s guess seemed to have been correct: they were searching for Ochtar, and must already have been to the destroyed temple. The quadruped with the horn began bellowing commands, flinging out his arm in the direction Floscan had indicated. In moments a small horde was racing for the village of the Blood God. A hand came down, helping Floscan up and on to a sturdy back. Heart exulting, he hung on for all his worth – and realised that his limbs no longer seemed so heavy. Glancing at the h-g icons, he grinned. The suit’s photoelectric stripes had been soaking up sunlight. The h-g field was re-energised!

  For ferocity the assault on the village would have done the Imperial Guard credit. Taken by surprise, the devotees of the Blood God forayed through the gate at first, attempting to defend their settlement outside its bounds, but they were soon driven back. The attacking warriors swarmed up over the hedge and down into the compound, climbing it as Floscan had. He mounted it too and watched from the top as axes rose and fell, spears jabbed, blood flowed.

  The Blood God’s followers were fighting for their homes, fighting for their lives, fighting for their savage god, and they laid about them as if demented, their bestial roars filling the air. But Ochtar’s people were fighting for a god, too – the Emperor! It was hard to say who would be the victor at this stage; it was as if the butchery would continue until there was almost no one left. Floscan chose his moment to drop into the compound and dodge his way to the prison hut near the newly-constructed oven, which he was glad to see had not been used yet.

  In the dim interior, Leminkanen looked up at him in wonderment. He did not even speak as the Guardsman untied him and helped him to his feet, supporting his weight.

  ‘We have been rescued, commissar!’ Floscan yelled. ‘By four-legged men who are loyal to the Emperor! Did I not tell you?’

  Leminkanen’s response was a look of sour disbelief and an emphatic shake of his head. Nevertheless, he allowed Floscan to guide him gingerly to the door.

  There, an extraordinary sight met their eyes. The fighting had all but stopped. Someming had wrapped itself around the village. It was like a millipede, many hundreds of paces long, which had coiled around the circular hedge-wall, though it overtopped it by nearly half its height again. From each of its countless segments sprouted a pair of tentacles tipped with eyes, lashing down into the compound to pick up defenders and attackers alike, whipping them over the hedge to be devoured.

  Perhaps the smell of blood from the battle had attracted it. The spectacle seemed to send Leminkanen into a frenzy. He pushed Floscan away from him and staggered through the doorway, forcing himself to stand erect.

  ‘I must make my report! Order the Exterminatus! Guardsman, if I am martyred you must deliver it into the right hands!’

  From within his greatcoat he whipped out a flat grey plate with a keypad. It was his personal log. Feverishly he began typing, oblivious of what went on around him.

  ‘Look out, commissar!’ Floscan lunged to knock the commissar aside, but it was too late. A slithering tentacle had seized him, pinning his arms to his body.

  With a barely heard gurgle, Leminkanen was gone.

  Floscan snatched up the log-plate as it fell to the dusty ground, nimbly avoiding a flailing tentacle as he did so. By now the tribesmen were dealing with the millipede in their own fashion. They had set the hedge alight, but so intent was the beast on its feeding that it ignored the flames until it was too late. It, too, caught fire, writhing soundlessly, crushing huts in its agony while an indescribably foul smelling smoke filled the air.

  Everything in the village was burning now, everything was being flattened as the blazing monster flexed and rolled, forcing villagers and invaders to flee as one for the exit or trample their way through the glowing cinders of the collapsing hedge, the battle forgotten. Floscan too was caught up in the stampeding rush.

  Out in the open the two sides drew apart, glaring at one another. It was doubtful if they even remembered what they were fighting over, but they were ready to begin again.

  Then a glinting movement high in the air made Floscan look up. His heart leaped. His prayer to the Emperor was answered. All around Floscan, four-legged men dropped to their knees. A large, shining metal shape was descending. It was an Imperial shuttle craft.

  ‘THE AURELIAN IXTH’S sole survivor handed this in, sir. It appears that Commissar Leminkanen was making his last report when he was killed.’

  In his brass-ornamented cabin, Captain Gurtlieder, commander of the battleship Ravenger, took the commissar’s data-slate from his officer’s hand. He noticed that the log was not closed. Leminkanen had not even had time to finish the report or key in his code.

  He tapped a key and began to read.

  Emergency report by Commissar Lemuel Leminkanen LX/38974B on unnamed planet in Cluster FR/891 in vicinity of Warp Gate 492.

  This planet is of no value to the Imperium. It is a feral world of the most extreme violence and would he very difficult to colonise. It contains a primitive semi-intelligent alien species unlikely to advance further. Recommend no action particularly on account of

  There it ended. ‘Who is this survivor?’
Captain Gurtlieder asked.

  ‘Just a regular Guardsman, sir. He was with Commissar Leminkanen to the end. He appears to have acquitted himself well in difficult circumstances. I shall recommend his promotion when he is reassigned.’

  The captain handed back the data-slate. ‘Very well, see that this is passed on to the Administratum.’

  DOWN IN THE crew quarters of the Ravenger, Guardsman Floscan Hartoum was feeling very nervous indeed. Once aboard the battleship, he had contrived to be alone for a while. He could not resist taking a look at Commissar Leminkanen’s open log.

  Leminkanen had opened the log using his personal code, but had got no further than the heading, stating time and place. The millipede-creature had eaten him at that point.

  So Floscan, appalled at his own audacity, had made an entry of his own. He couldn’t close the entry, of course, since he didn’t know Leminkanen’s code. So he had left it in mid-sentence, hoping that made it look all the more authentic.

  He dreaded to think what would become of him if it was ever discovered that he had made a false entry in a commissar’s log. But he had realised that neither Leminkanen nor any other agent of the Administratum would ever look favourably on the quadrupeds once their human ancestry was known.

  A mutant is a mutant. They had altered themselves too much. Well, now they would be registered as aliens and left alone. Floscan had already heard that Warp Gate 492 was to be marked as unusable on the charts, a deadly trap now that it had been discovered by the orks, who must have been lurking nearby waiting for Imperial vessels to emerge. The planet would receive no more visitors.

  For the hundredth time, he wondered if it was true that the Emperor saw everything. Did He know what Floscan had done? And did He approve or abhor Floscan for it? Floscan took it as a good sign that no one had questioned why he was wearing an h-g suit.

  A war between good and evil was shaping up on the quadrupeds’ planet. He hoped, of course, that the Blood God would be defeated. But whatever the outcome, it was going to be settled by the quadrupeds themselves. Though sadly, outside of the family of man.

  DEUS EX MECHANICUS

  Andy Chambers

  THE SCREAM OF the engines fought against the howling winds in a terrifying crescendo of doom. Hyper-velocity mica particles skittered across the hull of the ship like skeletal fingers as it wallowed in the storm, shuddering and dropping by steps as the pilot struggled for control. In the midst of the tumult, Lakius Danzager, tech-priest engineer, Votaris Laudare, illuminant of Mars, adept of the Cult Mechanicus was struggling to open up the skull of that failing pilot, and cursing in a distinctly un-priestly fashion as he struggled to find the right tools for the job.

  ‘Dammit! Osil, find me a hydro coupling, my boy. We’ll need one if I can free these accursed fasteners. Look in the vestibule.’ He tried to keep his voice calm so as not to frighten his acolyte, but Osil’s face was pallid in his cowl as he nodded and hurried out through the rusty bulkhead hatch.

  The ship’s rattling, brassbound altimeter showed them at a height of nearly seven kilometres above the planet. They had already been dropping out of control for twelve. As Lakius turned back to the rune-etched panel enclosing the ship’s pilot, another violent lurch smashed his shaven skull against it, triggering an emgram patch he had only recently divined from his auto-shrine. It was about their too-rapidly approaching destination, and ran in confusing counterpoint through his right optic viewer as he tried to focus on repairing the nav-spirit.

  NAOGEDDON IS A DEAD WORLD.

  The ringing impact of Lakius’s metal-shod head had partially freed the rusting key-bolts. With a whispered prayer for forgiveness from the already distraught machine-spirit, he bent to the task. He carefully unscrewed the panel, murmuring the rite of unbinding and ensuring that he removed the keys in the correct cardinal directions. The ghostly image of a dun-coloured sphere hovered in his right eye. Red text scrolled past it.

  Orbital distance: 0.78 Alt.

  Equatorial Diameter: 9,749 km.

  Rotation: 34.6 hours.

  Axial Tilt: 0.00.

  As he’d feared, the coupling between the augur spike and the pilot-stone had ruptured, blinding the pilot to its landing beacon. He checked the altimeter as he began the ritual of dislocation to remove the charred remnants. Less than two kilometres of howling winds now lay beneath their rocking hull.

  Weather: See storms*.

  ‘Osil! Where’s that coupling, boy?’

  ‘Here, father. The first one was faulty and I had to go back for another.’

  0% Precipitation. Wind speed: Constant 24 kts, Variance 76 kts.

  Lakius took the twist of hydro-plastic without comment but silently gave praise to the Omnissiah that the lad had been attentive enough to spot the difference. Under current circumstances, a normally forgivable sin of oversight could prove fatal. Lakius took a breath to steady himself before beginning the ritual of insertion.

  Lifeforms: Autochthonic: None.

  Introduced: None.

  Less than a league of free air remained before they would hurtle into solid rock. His servo-hand shook as he tried to apply the proscribed number of half-turns to the coupling mounts. He yearned to simply call the rite finished and resurrect the pilot. But years of discipline and doctrine drove him on as he completed the benediction against failure, applied the sacred unguents and retrieved the panel so he could begin the final rites of protection and sealing.

  Archaeotech Resource: Limited.’Xeno artifacts*. ± 600,000,000 yrs (pre.GA) Class: Omega.

  ‘Father, I can see dust dunes below us. I think we’re going to crash.’

  Notes:

  First Catalogued: 7.’243.751.M32, Rogue trader Xiatal Parnevue. Orbital Augury Only*. Annexus lmperialus.

  ‘Mechanism, I restore thy spirit! Let the God-Machine breathe half-life unto thy veins and render thee functional.’ Lakius firmly depressed the activation rune on the pilot’s casing and prayed.

  Landed: 6.’832.021.M35. Explorator Magos Dural Lavank. Expedition Lost.

  Landed: 7.’362.238.M37. Explorator Magos Prime Holisen Zi. Expedition Lost.

  The ship’s engines rose in a triumphant scream to drown out the rushing winds and skittering dust. Lakius and Osil felt the heavy weight of high-G deceleration as the ungainly craft steadied itself and slowed. Lakius could see dust dunes too now, through the curving port in the ship’s prow, but the dunes with their trailing streamers of blowing dust were dwarfed by the serried ranks of sharp-angled black monoliths which rose up around the ship as it dipped between them. Osil let out an involuntary gasp as the scale of the structures became apparent. The monoliths were mountain-sized edifices of harsh, alien rock cutting the horizon into sawtooth edge, or a predator’s maw.

  Landed: 6.’839.641.M41. Explorator Magos Prime Reston Egal. Surface Survey*. Xeno Structures Catalogued*.

  The ship changed course, angling towards a vast dark triangle which blotted out half the sky. The pilot-spirit was faithfully following the beacon, bringing them in towards a tiny ring of light in the shadows below it. There lay the Explorators’ camp.

  GRITTY SAND CRUNCHED underfoot and a cold, stinging wind blew more of it into their faces as they stepped down to the landing ground. Patchwork figures of steel and flesh were rolling towards them on armoured treads; Lakius and Osil waited by the ship and made no sudden moves.

  ‘See there, Osil: the Explorators have invoked a laser mesh for the protection of the camp. How powerful would you say it is?’

  ‘I see three transformation engines on this side of camp. Assuming the same number on the far side I would estimate 10 to 20 gigawatts, father.’

  The figures came closer. They were Praetorians, bionically reconstructed warrior-servitors of the Machine God. Their cadaverous faces gazed stonily from a nest of targeting scopes and data-wires, gun barrels and energy tubes tracked Lakius and Osil until they halted. A chest-mounted speaker on one crackled into life.

  ‘Two lifeforms identified. Class
ified non-hostile. Please follow, Father Lakius, Acolyte Osil.’

  They followed a pair of the heavy servitors between low buildings of pre-fabricated armourplas panelling towards a central command sphere. Osil pointed to one of the smaller structures which had its panels folded back to create a workshop lit from within by welding arcs and showers of sparks.

  ‘What works are being undertaken here, father?’

  Lakius repressed a chill sensation of foreboding ‘They are re-initiating servitors, Osil. Evidently there has been some accident or mishap which has rendered the units non-functional.’ He forbore to comment on the row of ready caskets outside the workshop, containers for tech-priests whose biological components were fit only for incorporation into new servitors. Several priests must have died here already.

  The Praetorians motioned them into the command-sphere and remained on guard outside. Inside was a scene of barely organised chaos. Wiring cascaded from panels and conduits, devices of a hundred types thrummed, buzzed and sparked, screenplates flickered and scrolled through endless lines of scripture. A robed priest detached himself from a group clustering around the central dais and addressed Lakius.

  ‘Adept Danzager, your arrival has been greatly anticipated. I am Adept Noam, Lexmechanic Magos Tertius. I have the honour of analysing and compiling data on this expedition.’ Noam was gaunt and emotionless, only his lack of bionic enhancement and priestly robes marking him apart from the servitors. Two other priests gathered behind him. Noam pointed to each in turn and pronounced their roles with toneless efficiency.

  ‘Adept Santos, artisan, responsible for camp construction and maintenance.’ A rotund man nodded. He was heavily rebuilt with a subsidiary lifting arm at his shoulder and a mass of diagnostic probes in place of his left hand and eye.

  ‘Adept Borr, rune priest, extrapolation and theory.’ Borr was slight and nervous-looking, and seemed to be on the edge of speaking when Noam cut him off. Noam and Borr evidently didn’t get along. Noam gestured to the other robed figures within the chamber.