Damocles

by Various

  ‘Is this necessary?’ said Skepteris as the delegation filed in. She glowered at the technicians aiming their picters at her.

  ‘The gesture must be seen if it is to serve,’ said the Thundercliff elder. ‘Or it will be as if it had never happened.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Skepteris.

  ‘You will need to let blood,’ said the elder. ‘Just a little. Blood is essential. Without it there can be no bond to the earth of Briseis.

  ‘That will not be a problem,’ said Skepteris. ‘My pain centres have been replaced with data storage.’

  ‘Then we may begin,’ said the elder.

  The picters began to whir as the delegation surrounded Skepteris in a robed circle. She was draped with garlands of braided snake skins and the elder pronounced a ritual in the native tongue of Briseis, the language with which its tribes had greeted the Imperial founders of Port Memnor. One of the ritual attendants rolled up the sleeve of the magos’s robes and, finding one of the few areas of skin that had not been replaced with data ports or radiation shielding, drew blood with a long golden needle. Drops of it were poured into a bowl made from an animal skull and the elder sang, the attendants taking up her song in the same sibilant language.

  ‘Briseis is cruel,’ said the elder now in Low Gothic as the singing continued. ‘Briseis thrusts us into her stony world and takes us out just as suddenly. But in the time between, she gives us the greatest gifts. Minds, that we may understand. Hands, that we may create. Souls, that we may join them in brotherhood. And she is not jealous. One may enter her embrace that was not born to her cruelty, to partake of her gifts yet not suffer a birth into the plains of slate and the forests of beasts. Blessed indeed is such a newcomer, and exalted indeed. This honour Briseis extends to Magos Skepteris of Mars, Priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and through our hands she welcomes her.’

  The picters focused in on Skepteris’s face, which was still half hidden by the cowl of her red robes. The ceremony paused and the ritual attendants turned to Skepteris expectantly.

  Skepteris glanced between them and the lenses of the picters, and seemed to realise that a speech was expected of her. Not being used to such things, she had not prepared anything.

  ‘I thank you,’ she said flatly. ‘The Adeptus Mechanicus thanks you. For this honour.’

  The silence that followed indicated that Skepteris was finished.

  ‘Then from this moment,’ said the elder, ‘you are a member of the Thundercliff tribe and a child of Briseis.’

  The attendants unravelled a bundle they had brought with them, revealing it to be a large expanse of animal hide, scaled and craggy with barnacles, exuding a strong smell of brine and faint decay. This mantle was draped over Skepteris’s shoulders, swamping her with its size and heaviness.

  ‘Sister,’ said the elder, placing a hand on Skepteris’s mantled shoulder.

  ‘Sister,’ said Skepteris.

  The picters zoomed in on the pair, and the ceremony was complete.

  The xenophile corpses had barely begun to turn cold when the broadcast began. Sergeant Seanoa had led his squad in at the first vox suggesting the safehouse location, and had shown no pause or mercy.

  The safehouse was three floors, two below ground, none free of corpses. They lay shredded by bolter fire or carved clean open by chainblades, killed in the bedlam of a predator’s feeding frenzy, the battle-trance that came over the Jade Dragons when the fight turned to wanton butchery and their way of war permitted abandonment of tactic and restraint.

  The Ultramarines could not fight like that. Their Codex Astartes did not acknowledge that Space Marines were predators, as surely as the ravenous hunters that drifted between the stars. It was a fine book, certainly, full of generations of battle-wisdom. But it was not the whole truth of war. The truth the Jade Dragons knew.

  Seanoa was on the upper floor, the one that resembled a workers’ dwelling with several rooms of bunks and communal kitchens. The Jade Dragons had fallen on the people here as they had everywhere else – those living there as camouflage for xenophile activities were as guilty as the xenophiles themselves, and had been exterminated. Torn bodies and severed limbs littered the floor and the instep-deep blood rippled with the footsteps of the Jade Dragons moving around on the lower floors looking for survivors. Outside, the street was overlooked by one of the district’s many enormous screens which broadcast civil information, prayer services and the recent exhortations to report xenophiles and suspicious activity. The screen was covered in a mesh of thin bars to protect it from missiles thrown by disgruntled citizens, and as Seanoa passed by the window the screen lit up.

  It showed the image of Magos Skepteris, surrounded by citizens in the dress of one of Briseis’s tribes. The ceremony proceeded and Skepteris was enrobed and pronounced a member of the Thundercliff tribe.

  Finally, the magos was draped in the skin of the Black Leviathan.

  And Seanoa of the Jade Dragons understood at last what he was on Briseis to do.

  Captain Devynius stood over the body of Brother Thaxos, lit by the harsh lights of the glow-globes in the transport hub. The back of Thaxos’s head was gone, the cranium missing behind the line of the ears. His face was mostly intact. His eyes, ruptured red by the bolter’s detonation, had been closed.

  ‘All the xenos on Agrellan are not worth a single Ultramarine,’ said Devynius. ‘Especially not Thaxos. His blood is on the hands of the water caste, and on those of every tau. If we did not have anything to avenge upon them before, we do now.’

  The rest of Devynius’s squad stood around the bench on which Thaxos’s body had been lain. The body’s armour had been removed, revealing the old scars of his augmentations and the new ones of battle. The squad had no Apothecary to remove Thaxos’s gene-seed – the body would have to be transported back to the Chapter for the organ to be taken out ready to be implanted into a novice, and for the flesh of Guilliman to pass on again.

  ‘If you wish to speak freely, brothers,’ said Devynius, ‘then now is the time. I give you leave.’

  ‘It was not a way for an Ultramarine to die,’ said Brother Venarin. Venarin had snapped the prisoner Kesseoth’s neck a second after the fatal shot had been fired.

  ‘And our mission has gone awry since the moment we landed here,’ said Brother Silen. ‘The massacre, then this. And the Jade Dragons are not allies I trust. We do not even know where they are right now, save that they are somewhere in the Chrono-Wrights’ District doing Throne knows what.’

  ‘Then we take the initiative,’ said Devynius. ‘Thus does the Codex Astartes state. We do not react, we act. The mission continues as planned. The early stages have not gone as they would, but the next will bring the Emperor’s will to Port Memnor. We cannot bring Thaxos back but we can avenge him with victory. The war effort on Agrellan relies on us. We shall not let them down.’

  ‘Pray, brothers,’ said Silen, who by unspoken assent was now Devynius’s second in command. ‘Take your own words from the Codex and the rites of Macragge, search your own soul for the armour of faith and the sword of hatred. But pray, for soon there will be no time for words.’

  The members of Devynius’s squad knelt one by one around Thaxos’s body as Devynius shrouded the body in a corpse-sheet. They all murmured their own prayer, some to the machine-spirits of their wargear, some to the long-dead heroes of the Ultramarines, some to the Primarch Roboute Guilliman himself. All of them asked for victory.

  All of them asked for revenge.

  The loss of the outpost in the tombs had been a blow, but it had been prepared for. Such assets were not essential, and in cases of aggressive persecution by an enemy could be considered disposable, obstacles for the enemy to overcome before he could make real headway. It was part of the water caste’s way of silent invasion, always evading instead of coming to battle, giving the enemy just enough to draw him on and commit his resources without
making headway into the core of the subversion strikeforce.

  A far more important installation was hidden among the shanties and rat-trap habs that adjoined the Chrono-Wrights’ District, far from the affluent districts around the palace. It was concealed among the labyrinth of hab-blocks, its entrances accessible only through camouflaged firing positions. It was not armoured, for its defence was secrecy, and it was not heavily staffed because numerous personnel would be a liability and not an asset. It was crewed by a handful of water caste interrogators and emissaries, an honour guard of two fire caste warriors, and a complement of Briseis’s most dedicated and trusted gue’la – the hateful Imperial term for these loyal humans was ‘xenophile’, but the tau took pains to educate them that they were valued and respected converts to the Greater Good.

  The shanty facility was the more important of the two major bases in Port Memnor. The conversion of the city could be achieved without the fire caste facility, but not without the intelligence base the water caste had built down amid the poverty that had turned so many Briseians to the Greater Good.

  Behind a disguised blast door at the back of a particularly filthy and ill-omened shanty, the salvaged boards and plastic sheeting gave way to the gleaming purity of tau architecture. Two of the xenos moved down a narrow corridor, past the choke point covered by a pair of gun drones mounted in the ceiling. One was a water caste ambassador, the same who had met with the Thundercliff elder in the tombs beneath Port Memnor. The second was a fire caste warrior, a shas’vre in command of this mission’s fire caste complement, squatter and more powerful in build wearing combat armour and armed with a rapid-firing pulse carbine slung at his side. The knife of the bonded ta’liserra was inscribed on his shoulder guard, marking him out as the leader of a squad whose members had sworn to fight and die together by the Greater Good.

  ‘I fear,’ said Ambassador O’Myen, ‘his mind has been picked clean. I have envoys working on him day and night. He will not last much longer.’

  ‘If you have indeed mined him dry,’ said Vre’Cyr, ‘then should the effort prove too much for him, we will not have lost anything much.’

  ‘True,’ said O’Myen. ‘What is it you hope to find?’

  ‘Anything will be useful to us,’ said Vre’Cyr. ‘Space Marines require a particular form of warfare. They are rarely encountered, and survivors to debrief are rarer still.’

  ‘Then have at it,’ said O’Myen.

  A door slid open to reveal the interrogation chamber. O’Myen’s envoys were monitoring the equipment keeping the captives alive. Most of them were Imperial spies or Port Memnor dignitaries, kept for what they knew about the defences and society of the city. An earth caste technician worked the controls of the medical gear and one of the dozen captives shuddered in his restraints as stimulants and metabolic balancing agents were pumped into him. The captive’s eyes snapped open and he stared down from his cage on the wall, convulsing with the effort of being woken once again.

  ‘Our data indicates that this is an older specimen,’ said O’Myen. ‘Lifespan extended with their rejuvenation technology. They are so obsessed with their lifespan, these creatures. It is one of the many factors that makes them exploitable. They fear death so. Without the Greater Good, there is nothing to fight for save for another day alive.’

  ‘They all look the same to me,’ said Vre’Cyr.

  The captive’s eyes focused again, and the confusion on his face was replaced with despair.

  ‘Is it the day?’ whispered the captive, his voice ruined by the tube in his throat. ‘The day when I am to die?’

  ‘What is your name?’ asked O’Myen.

  ‘Throne be damned, you know my name!’ gasped the prisoner.

  ‘What is your name?’ asked O’Myen again. ‘If you do not answer aversion stimuli will be applied.’

  The prisoner’s head hung. ‘Thelso DeNyre,’ he replied.

  ‘Your rank?’

  ‘Lord Archivist of the Librarium Penitentiam on Morkrut.’

  ‘The Lord Archivist here,’ explained O’Myen, ‘was quite the coup for the Second Phase Expansion intelligence corps. It seems we are more effective at sifting through the bureaucracy of the Imperium than the Imperium itself. The knowledge he has absorbed over a lifetime of labour is often lost to the Imperium at large. Thus in some respects we know more about them than they do. Lord Archivist, tell us of the Codex Noctis Verminion,’

  The archivist’s head lolled to one side and twitched.

  ‘It is accessing the data implant in the back of its cranium,’ said O’Myen. ‘Its purpose was a mystery when this one was first processed. Thankfully it was not removed immediately.’

  ‘The Codex Noctis Verminion presents a history of the hunt for the Infinity Wyrm,’ began the archivist. ‘Led by Lord Inquisitor Trentis Venn and…’

  ‘The Jade Dragons,’ said Vre’Cyr.

  ‘Two battle companies of the Jade Dragons Space Marine Chapter were present,’ said the archivist. A drop of blood ran from his eye down one cheek as the strain of repeated accessing of his datavault continued to damage his nervous system. ‘Led by Captain Nuufalao the Huntsmaster…’

  ‘Their way of war,’ said Vre’Cyr. ‘Their weaknesses. Will they fall prey to the Patient Hunter or the Killing Blow? The Seven Spears? The Final Shadow? Speak!’

  ‘Fast assault and shock tactics,’ droned the archivist. ‘Evidenced by the landings at Fedoran IV. Suitable for morally deniable operations… Ecclesiarchical oversight denied, suspected… suspected deviant ritual faith…’ The archivist coughed and spat gobbets of blood down his front, splattering the clean floor.

  ‘I can be certain you know everything the archivist has divulged about the Jade Dragons,’ said O’Myen. ‘They were a subject of the first interrogation cycle, especially when it became apparent knowledge of them was not available in the Imperium at large.’

  ‘Then the Ultramarines,’ said Vre’Cyr.

  ‘Among these creatures,’ said O’Myen, ‘the Ultramarines are preceded by great fame. You will be here some time, shas’vre.’

  The archivist spooled out tale after tale of the Ultramarines. They concerned endless battles, tactics first written in the Codex Astartes and preserved in fragments the archivist had crammed by their thousand into his datavault. O’Myen had no interest in them. He had plumbed the archivist’s mind for everything he cared about – the way the Ultramarines thought, the weaknesses among their beliefs and worldview. Humanity had been conditioned to think the Space Marines invincible and without flaw, but they had more than enough failings to be exploited by a veteran of the water caste. Pride was among them, as was their adherence to the Codex Astartes and the teachings of their long-dead Primarch Roboute Guilliman.

  ‘Where will they strike next?’ demanded Vre’Cyr. ‘Where on Briseis will they make their move?’

  Archivist DeNyre stared blankly up at the fire caste leader. There was only confusion and fear in the human’s face.

  ‘It matters not,’ said O’Myen. ‘There is no action the Space Marines can take for which I have not laid the groundwork.’

  ‘I can only hope you are correct,’ said Vre’Cyr, ‘for the sake of my fire caste brethren. The Space Marines are few in number but when they strike, they strike hard, and focused for the maximum impact. The hunter cadres have few counter-tactics to the Space Marines – it has been one of our greatest setbacks in the Third Sphere Expansion. If we do not respect them, we are done for.’

  ‘I respect them well enough, shas’vre,’ said O’Myen. ‘It is for that reason I was sent to Briseis. We knew the Space Marines would be here. My task was to observe the city and all the possible paths a Space Marine operation in this city could take. Thus far the Ultramarines and Jade Dragons have followed those paths as surely as if I myself was leading them. And I will lead them to the end of whatever path they will take, a path that leads only towar
ds the Greater Good.’

  ‘You make a tool of everything around you, ambassador,’ said Vre’Cyr. ‘Enemy and ally. It would not surprise me to learn that your fellow tau were just instruments to you, to be used and disposed of as you will.’

  ‘Not as I will,’ said O’Myen smoothly. ‘As the Greater Good demands of me.’

  The tau re-attached the archivist to his life support systems, ignoring his weak cries for mercy and death. Soon the pipe was slid back down his throat and he was silent. As O’Myen and Vre’Cyr left the place, the silence was broken only by the ticking and bleeping of the machinery.

  The Codex Astartes was obscure on some points, ambiguous on others, but on the subject of surprise it was clear. Tactical surprise is the greatest advantage any fighting force can have in war. An enemy fights two battles when he is taken by surprise – he must fight his own inertia, the chaos of sudden assault, the ancient instincts to flee or hide, even before he can take up arms and face any enemy.

  A Space Marine was not ideally suited to stealth, which any other soldier might use to claw back an edge of surprise. A Space Marine’s sheer bulk made it almost impossible for him to hide or creep in silence, and the pride he took in his Chapter meant that, with few exceptions, he would not cover his colours with camouflage. The Codex therefore endorsed surprise by means of a rapid and furious assault from an unexpected angle, achieving with speed and suddenness what could not be achieved with silence. The Space Marines made use of the drop pod and gunship assault, the boarding torpedo, the armoured spearhead to snatch up the initiative and plunge an enemy into battle before that enemy knew it was being fought.

  Captain Devynius knew the Codex well. No Ultramarine was ignorant of Guilliman’s masterwork. And so it was that he crouched alongside the battle-brothers of his squad on the lev-train as it thundered along the track, passenger stations and loading docks hurtling past through the strobing darkness.