Damocles
Page 22
After three tau’vyr waiting, I’m finally slated to have the surgery next week. The earth caste medics tell me it’ll be two tau’vyr until I’ll be able to speak, another one until I’m fit for duty, another five before I’ll have mastered Tau’noh’por to a sufficient degree to fit in with the higher command ranks. Almost half a tau’cyr. But if it all works, then I’ll be off back across the Damocles Gulf, leading the first frontline gue’vesa cadre from the new conquests to fight on behalf of the Tau’va. I don’t care that it will be against those who were my brothers. I relish it. Nothing’s perfect. The Imperium certainly is not. The commonwealth isn’t either, but it is less cruel. If for no other reason than that a lesser evil is better than a greater one, I have pledged myself entirely to the cause. You are five castes, one people, but you are also now a dozen species, half a thousand cultures. In spite of this, there remains, for now, one goal.
I will do my utmost to ensure that that goal is fulfilled, for I have wholeheartedly made your goal my goal.
Tau’va.
Recording 7-9998-14 Gue’vesa. Institute of Human Affairs, Lui’sa’loa, Bork’an. Retrieval code 14a-159. Personal memoirs of Gue’vesa’vre Dal’yth J’ten Ko’lin, Gue’vesa auxiliary diplomatic protection la’rua 8448. ENDS
Black Leviathan
Ben Counter
Chapter One
‘Where the enemy thinks himself strong, show him weakness. Where he thinks you weak, show strength. But beware all such perfidy, for every general may fall prey to believing his own lie.’
– Codex Astartes
‘We keep our secrets. Some of them, even from ourselves.’
The man who spoke had not removed the helmet of his power armour. His livery was jade and black with the stylised image of a dragon on one shoulder pad. Dense patterns of swirls and dots covered one greave and one forearm, giving the impression that they meant something that could only be deciphered with an understanding of their intricate code. In the dim light of the Polar Defiance’s map room, ebon eyepieces glittered in the faceplate.
‘So I understand,’ said Captain Devynius. ‘What little I have been told of your Chapter emphasises that above everything else. But the Ultramarines share their counsel with their allies and I expect you to do the same. Sergeant Seanoa, is that correct?’
‘It is,’ replied Seanoa.
‘Have you been briefed on our mission?’
‘The destruction of opposition to Imperial occupation in the city of Port Memnor,’ replied Seanoa bluntly.
‘That is one way of putting it,’ said Devynius. He tried to read some expression from the other Space Marine’s body language, but he found none. It was the custom among the Ultramarines to remove the helmet of one’s power armour when addressing another Space Marine away from the battlefield – perhaps this Seanoa’s Chapter did not share the same custom, or perhaps he was reminding Devynius that a Space Marine of one Chapter could not assume the subservience of another. He decided to give Seanoa the benefit of the doubt, for now. ‘I would rather avoid destruction as much as possible. Port Memnor is an Imperial city and one which has been loyal to the Emperor’s rule for thousands of years.’
‘One that requires subjugation now the alien has its claws into it,’ replied Seanoa. ‘This ship has orbital bombardment capability. Not equal to the Exterminatus but more than enough for our purposes. You realise, do you not, that this mission could be completed in a matter of minutes, with the push of a button?’
‘This mission, perhaps,’ replied Devynius. ‘But the occupation that follows will be ten times harder. The casualties among innocent civilians will set the population against us. The Imperial Guard would have to garrison the city in force if we were to use the spaceport, and that is manpower the war for Agrellan cannot afford to spare. We will do this my way, Sergeant Seanoa. The Ultramarines way, with honour and respect for the people whose Imperium we serve.’
‘You are in command, Captain Devynius,’ said Seanoa, and Devynius was sure both men understood how little that meant.
‘We are three days out from Briseis,’ said Devynius. ‘I need full mission parameters drawn up by then. It is time you saw the prisoner.’
Both Agrellan and its near neighbour Briseis, as far as any could tell, were settled during the Scattering at the same time. That ancient migration of mankind across the stars, to every edge of the galaxy, had placed on Agrellan and Briseis colonies of humans that could not support themselves on an alien world. Both colonies had collapsed and reverted to the savagery that now prevailed on countless such worlds across the Imperium.
Agrellan had rebuilt its society and come to prosper. In the age of the Imperium it was a hive-world, a vast population supported by many-layered cities devoted to industry, the tracts between the cities drained of resources so the planet had to be fed by nearby agri worlds. Briseis had stayed barbaric until thousands of years after Agrellan’s urbanisation and only comparatively recently, over the last two or three thousand years, had the Imperially-founded city of Port Memnor become the capital of the planet’s population and society.
Then the Damocles Gulf war had come, the second conflict over that reach of space between the Imperium and the xenos. And Agrellan had found itself the front line.
‘Open the shutters,’ came a voice piped in over the vox-casters. Two crewmen cranked the handle that raised the shutters covering the viewing windows, revealing the inside of the cell. The brig on the Polar Defiance resembled a dungeon of sweating steel, cold and functional, its locks and doorways hand-operated and mechanical to keep the place secure in case the power failed. Even the light came from torches burning in sconces on the walls.
Inside the cell was a single figure crouched on the floor, its long limbs folded up around it. The bed and ablutions vessel were the only furniture in there with it. Even before its face became fully visible, its proportions were clearly inhuman.
‘I faced the greenskins a dozen times,’ said Devynius’s fellow Ultramarine, Brother-Sergeant Thaxos. ‘Tyranids, too. Huge bloody monsters that would tear your face off without knowing you were there. This thing doesn’t look like much of an enemy.’
Thaxos wore the white trim of a veteran on his blue power armour, his dark and battered skin broken by the studs of silver implanted on his forehead to denote the length of service he had given as a sergeant of the Ultramarines. Devynius was well aware that Thaxos was older than he, and yet Devynius was of the higher rank. Thaxos served as much as an advisor to Devynius as the sergeant of his command squad. When Devynius had been told that he would have only one squad of Ultramarines with which to prosecute this mission, he had chosen Squad Thaxos.
‘An enemy need not hold a gun to threaten us,’ said Devynius. ‘More than most, this one’s weapon is cunning and lies.’
‘Our only weapon,’ replied the alien, ‘is the truth.’
Its voice was dry and sibilant, like the shifting of sand. It unfolded its long arms and legs and stood. It had been given a crewman’s blue jumpsuit to wear, the arms and legs of the jumpsuit barely reaching its knees and elbows but hanging baggily around its narrow shoulders and chest. Its face was far too long compared to that of a human, with an elongated hairless cranium, two huge pure black eyes, and a thin, wide mouth. It had no nose, instead breathing through a slit that ran from the middle of its forehead to level with the lower edge of its eyes. Its skin was blue-grey, though in the cell it had become paler and duller.
‘First one I’ve seen in the flesh,’ said Thaxos. ‘Not sure what the fuss is all about.’
The alien put a hand against the toughened glass wall of the cell. It leaned forward, peering at Thaxos as if he was the prisoner and the alien was the interrogator. ‘The first step is to think upon what you are,’ it said. ‘And what you are permitted to be. When you comprehend the gulf between them, then you will turn to the Greater Good.’
‘It can’t stop,�
� said Devynius, looking back at the alien. ‘Even when it is in chains.’
‘I speak only what you know is true,’ the alien replied.
Thaxos drew his combat blade. Its monomolecular edge flickered in the torchlight. ‘Would you like to hear my reply?’ he said.
A shutter on the wall behind Devynius rattled open, revealing Sergeant Seanoa. Two of his squad were with him and their armour showed the same tangles of symbolic designs, though less intricate than the sergeant’s.
‘A living tau,’ said Devynius, indicating the alien. ‘Not so rare in itself, but this one is of their diplomatic caste. The water caste, they call them. These are not so commonly taken alive.’
‘Where did you get it?’ asked Seanoa. Even with his face hidden beneath his helmet, his disdain was clear – no, thought Devynius, not disdain, not the contempt a Space Marine should feel for the xenos. It was a detachedness, like that of a scientist examining something on a slide or performing experiments on something he had long since stopped thinking of as a living creature.
‘Inquisitorial agents brought it out of the Chrono-Wright’s District of Port Memnor,’ replied Devynius. ‘It’s a tau emissary, primed to create sedition and defection among Imperial citizens. Its Low Gothic is perfect. It has knowledge of Imperial history and institutions, too. They have been watching us, these xenos.’
‘What has it told us?’
‘All about the Greater Good,’ said Devynius. ‘And about how a Space Marine can become all that his Emperor intended him as a part of the Tau Empire.’
‘It does know what we are?’ said Seanoa.
‘If they don’t know now, they soon will,’ said Brother Thaxos. ‘The Raven Guard and the White Scars are fighting them across Agrellan. They’ll have to learn a whole lot more about the Space Marines if they want to take one of the Emperor’s worlds from us.’
‘We will not take anything,’ said the alien, which had not flinched even to be confronted by five Space Marines. ‘Agrellan will join us as surely as the day comes to join the dawn. Its people will decide your battle, not your soldiers or ours, and they will choose the Greater Good.’
‘What is this Greater Good?’ asked Seanoa.
‘Whatever benefits the tau,’ said Devynius.
‘Thus do small minds speak of it,’ interjected the alien. ‘When they do not have the strength to understand.’
‘The corruption you have brought to Agrellan means millions of people will die,’ retorted Devynius. ‘That does no good for anyone.’
‘Would that the Greater Good could exist without conflict, and that all would walk into its embrace without resistance,’ said the tau, its voice almost hypnotically level. ‘But it is a good greater than the lives of those who must be lost to see it become reality. It is worth the bloodshed. It is worth anything, for it is to the betterment of all.’
‘Their fire caste warriors are on Agrellan fighting for its hive cities,’ said Devynius, ‘but on Briseis, this is the enemy. Words and lies. Already Port Memnor has been compromised and there is no way we can guarantee its safety for Imperial use if we do not weed out the xenophile faction first. That is the mission for which we have been chosen. We are stretched too thin to take Port Memnor and the spaceport by main force so we must do it with guile and swiftness instead, with our two squads and a devotion to honour and victory. That is why I have shown you this alien, Sergeant Seanoa. This is our enemy, not the people of Briseis.’
Seanoa regarded the xenos for a moment longer. The alien finally fell silent and backed down when confronted with Seanoa’s eyepieces, as if it could see through to the pitiless face underneath.
‘What will you do with it?’ Seanoa said at length.
‘Keep it,’ said Devynius. ‘As long as it is useful.’
‘When it learns what befell its brothers on Briseis,’ said Seanoa, ‘it will envy them that the end came so quickly.’
At an invisible signal, Seanoa’s two squadmates marched out of the brig, the shutter clattering down behind them. Devynius pressed a control stud on the wall and the shutters fell down over the cell walls, too, and the alien was hidden from view again.
‘Jade Dragons,’ said Thaxos, an impressed note in his voice. ‘I never thought I’d see them in the flesh, either.’
The defence laser batteries surrounding the spaceport of Port Memnor could not be trusted. They were ostensibly still in the hands of the Imperial government of Briseis, but every strata of the city’s society had been compromised by the tau water caste emissaries and it was too great a risk to bring a spacecraft within reach of them. If the Polar Defiance attempted to make low orbit to drop transports that could land at the spaceport, xenophiles hidden among the gun crews could shoot the transports down and have a good chance of bringing the cruiser itself down after them. Devynius therefore took his small force of Space Marines down to the surface of Briseis by shuttle, landing beyond the city’s outskirts – a cumbersome way of making landfall without the swiftness and shock the Space Marines normally made use of, but better than having the mission end before it began in a rain of burning wreckage.
The four shuttles made landfall in a forest of cairns, tumbledown dry-stone structures where ancient chieftains and kings were buried. It was a sacred place, a shallow bowl in the landscape formed by the low shale-covered hills surrounding it and the course of a long-dried river that had left its chemical stains on the rocky ground. Iridescent blue and green riddled the ground like alien blood trails, weaving around cairns and low tombs of shale slabs. The few plants that found purchase there shuddered in the downwash of the shuttles’ retro engines, flinty shards scattered by the impact as they touched down.
Each shuttle disgorged five Space Marines, spread out among the craft to minimise the crash risk. The jade and black armour of Seanoa’s squad stood out against the stony slopes. The Ultramarines gathered around Devynius as he jumped from the gunmetal shuttle and set foot on the planet Briseis for the first time.
‘Cheerful place,’ said Brother Thaxos as he jumped down behind Devynius. ‘Lovely view.’
‘A place the people of Briseis made their home for tens of thousands of years,’ replied Devynius. ‘They were nomads before the Imperium founded Port Memnor. They followed the seasons and came by here once a year, to bury their dead.’
‘You are quite the historian, captain.’
‘I read my intelligence, Thaxos,’ replied Devynius.
‘I’m amazed the sky didn’t drive them mad first,’ said Thaxos, looking upwards.
Briseis had a breathable atmosphere, but it clung to the world in a thin and precarious layer. Light from the system’s star did not have to pass through the many layers of gas and dust of a deeper atmosphere and as a result the sky was permanently the black of the void, scattered with stars and including the hot bright diamond of the Dovar System’s sun. Agrellan itself hung among the stars, the blue-green of polluted oceans blooming out from continents as grey as ash or brown as dirt, blistered with the radiating black tendrils of the planet’s hive cities.
On the horizon, past the slate hills sharp as knives, rose the spires of Port Memnor. The generatorium exhaust towers spewed grey smoke, between them the wider squat coolant towers rippling heat haze up past the stars. Hab-towers and communication masts were dark grey against the black. Somewhere below that skyline was a nest of xenophiles, heretics who had forsaken the Imperium of Man in favour of easy answers promised by an alien. Devynius’s duty was to root them out, and the demand of his honour as an Ultramarine was to do so with a minimum of violence to the innocent and loyal who made up the majority of the city’s population.
Devynius took out the auspex scanner and activated its screen, displaying the many maps of the city that Imperial intelligence had provided. He selected one of the outskirts, a tangle of sewers and processing plants that siphoned off the by-products of Port Memnor’s industries.
‘I would take the fight to the xenophiles,’ said Seanoa. ‘It is not the way of my Chapter to wait in reserve for the enemy to make his move.’
‘This operation will be conducted my way,’ replied Devynius, the tone of his voice aimed at cutting off any argument. ‘You have your orders, sergeant.’
Seanoa did not reply but turned back to his men and, with a gesture, set them off on the quick march towards scree-sloped hills and the port city beyond.
‘I don’t like him,’ said Thaxos over the Ultramarines squad vox, watching the Jade Dragons blend in and almost vanish among the rocks of Briseis’s wilderness.
‘Do you like anyone?’ asked Devynius.
‘There are some I tolerate,’ said Thaxos.
The Ultramarines were already moving, heading for a cleft in the hills. The trickle of a foul effluent river glittered there, a mix of industrial chemicals. The river’s source was the processing district of the city, where the Ultramarines would enter Port Memnor.
‘In through the bloody sewers,’ said Brother Merovos, who carried the squad’s plasma gun in its sling at his side.
‘That’s what you get for being the saviours of mankind,’ said Thaxos cheerfully. ‘You have to cover yourself in ordure before you can cover yourself in glory.’
‘Conduct yourselves like Space Marines,’ voxed Devynius sharply, and the squad moved off towards the city.