Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  They were red as blood, red as fury, and they carried company upon company of the warriors of the IX Legion Astartes. The speed of their assault was the key to victory; the alien invaders and their zealots had successfully been drawn out to confront the massed forces of the Luna Wolves, leaving the defences on their flanks thinned and permeable. But the xenos giants were not slow in their thinking, and the moment they understood that they had been duped, they would attempt to regroup and fortify.

  The Blood Angels would not allow that to happen. The nephilim would be broken and cut down, their cohesion shattered by the brutal deep strike that even now was moments from point of impact.

  The first skirling impulse of sonic power shot up past the descending assault force, energetic beams of oscillating air sparking spontaneous flashes of heat-lightning. Down in the desert, the quickest of the aliens were reaching their thick arms upwards as if groping for the high clouds, using the resonance of their glassy skeletons as waveguides for the shriek-attacks.

  Drop-pods clipped by the sound beams went off course, spiralling out of the landing quadrant towards the white salt erg; others not so fortunate ripped open or slammed into brutal collision with their fellows. The lead Stormbird, crimson like its cohorts but adorned with wings of gold, wove a course through the sonic barrage, guiding the flock into a blazing power-dive.

  Heavy lasers and missile pods about its nose and wings spat fire back towards the nephilim defenders, blasting black craters in the hard-packed sand. They were closing with each passing second, but were still too high for accurate targeting; instead, the Stormbird’s gunnery crews were suppressing the enemy far below, forcing them to open up the space where the warriors would make planetfall.

  And when the point of no return was crossed, the red and gold aircraft turned into a tight, descending spiral. Across the ventral hull, plates of metal unlocked and slid back along hydraulic piston-rails, allowing the howling air into the open compartment revealed behind them. Other aircraft in the formation did the same, hatches releasing to bare their interiors to the sky.

  From the lead Stormbird came a figure clad in armour the shade of the sun. A primarch, another demigod.

  An angel.

  He threw himself into the pale sky, embracing the pull of gravity like a lover, letting it speed him towards terminal velocity. Unmasked, his gallant face set in determination, a mane of flashing tresses snapping in the wind, he cried out his defiance.

  From his back there was an explosion of white as snowy pinions unfurled, great wings extending out in wide arcs to catch the flow of the air and effortlessly harness it. Gold trinkets, teardrops of precious red jade and ruby, silk tabards and chainmail of platinum ratt-led against a suit of ceramite and plasteel so ornate, so glorious that its artistry seemed better suited to a gallery of the highest reckoning. Against the drag of the airflow, he unsheathed a wicked red sword with a curved, barbed hilt; it was the cousin to the blade held by his brother Horus far below.

  With him were warriors no less determined, no less fierce in countenance. Assault legionaries of a dozen companies bore down with the snarling jets of jump-packs upon their backs, guns in their hands and retribution hard in their eyes. Leading them were the Sanguinary Guard, whose golden armour and white wings echoed those of their liege lord; but the wings that held the Guard aloft were made of enamelled metal, and like the assault squads their flight was powered by spears of orange flames from blazing fusion motors.

  The primarch landed with an impact greater than a point-blank barrage from a Vindicator, a perfectly circular ripple of shock resonating out from the crash of his boots upon the desert sands. Nephilim blues rushing to attack were blasted off their feet and they struggled to right themselves, only to be gunned down by the ornate wrist-bolters of the falling Sanguinary Guard and the fusillade of the assault squads.

  The angel Sanguinius drew up from the crater his arrival had shaped and met his first foe. A bellowing nephilim green came hurtling at him, shouting pulses of sonic disruption powerful enough to shatter bone and break rock; the alien towered over the primarch, and its lucent flesh was alight with violent, flickering speech-colour. There was a crackling cadence as it ran, the outer dermal layer of skin hardening into a natural sheath of misted, glassy armour.

  His sword-tip rose up in a bright arc of glittering metal and met the nephilim in the centre of its torso mass. The blade bit into the glass-skin and shattered it effortlessly, fragments pealing with tinny bell-tones as they ricocheted off the primarch’s battle plate. The weapon went on, deep and true, the monomolecular edge slicing through into gelatinous internals, breaking silicon bones and opening up the alien to the air. Bifurcated, the green-skinned creature came apart with a death-howl that ripped into the dust as it collapsed.

  Sanguinius shook silvery, metallic blood off his blade and threw a nod to his honour host. Each of them looked back at him with the mirror of the primarch’s own aspect, their helmets sculpted into a noble ideal of his face. ‘First blood, Azkaellon,’ he said, addressing his words to the Commander of the Guard.

  ‘It is fitting, my lord,’ said the warrior, tense with the rush of imminent war.

  Sanguinius nodded once. ‘My sons know their mission. Strike hard and strike fast.’

  Azkaellon saluted, removing his helm to present the hard lines of his face to his master. ‘Your will.’ As he spoke, the rumble of the remainder of the landing Stormbirds was joined by the crashing impacts of the drop-pods. The ground quaking beneath them, the ceramite teardrops slammed into the sand and split open like the blossoming of lethal flowers. Line warriors emerged from each pod in combat-ready formations, alongside Librarians, black-armoured Wardens and battle Apothecaries. Azkaellon saw them all look to Sanguinius for their lead; like them, he was proud to be here, in the company of his progenitor and primarch. ‘No xenos will be spared,’ he promised.

  Sanguinius raised his sword in a return salute. ‘The others…’ The angel didn’t say the words, but the Guard Commander knew who he meant. The slaves. ‘Liberate as many as you can. They’ll fight with us now they know they have not been forsaken.’

  ‘And the conscripts?’ Azkaellon pointed towards a rough skirmish line of the masked human worshippers as they advanced warily towards the red-armoured legionaries. ‘If they oppose us?’

  A moment of sorrow passed over the great angel’s aspect, dimming his radiance for an instant. ‘Then they too will be set free.’ Sanguinius held up his blade and the gesture brought a roar from his assembled sons that beat at the sky.

  A cohort of lumbering blues crested a low ridge and the battle began in earnest for the Blood Angels.

  At the start, it had been Horus who called the tune of the battle plans. In the strategium of his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, the master of the Luna Wolves faced his brother across a wide hololithic display and showed him the plan he had conceived to break the will of the nephilim. It was shock and awe, an implacable and showy display of combat might, the kind that Sanguinius’s sibling had made his own time and again throughout the wars of the Great Crusade. In a sea of red and white, Horus wanted the Blood Angels to march shoulder-to-shoulder with their cousins, cowing the aliens with the sight of an army of thousands rolling without pause to the gates of their last bastion. And then through those gates, over the battlements, not stopping, not pausing to parley or hesitate. Like the ocean these things sprang from, Horus had said, we will roll over the aliens, drag them down and drown them.

  The sheer bombast of the plan was its greatest strength, but Sanguinius had not been easily swayed to it. Across the hololith, the two brothers had argued and countered, to and fro, one presenting obstacles and challenges to the other. To an outside observer, it might have seemed aloof, almost callous to see these two mighty genhanced soldiers talking over a monumental confrontation as if it were little more than a game of regicide.

  But nothing could be further from the truth. The Blood Angel looked into the panes of the holograph and saw the
countless icons representing civilian concentrations, the play of the geography, the deceptive desert landscape full of hidden chokepoints and kill-boxes. In his mind, Horus had already weighed the tactics of the engagement and made a regrettable, but necessary choice. He had made the difficult decision and then moved past it, ridden on. Not from heartlessness, but from expedience.

  Sanguinius could not do so as easily. The blunt, brute-force approach was better suited to their more intemperate kinsmen, to Russ or to Angron, and neither Sanguinius nor his brother Horus were so artless, so focused upon the target to the detriment of all else.

  But it was difficult not to allow the cold rage instilled by the actions of the nephilim to be given its rein. The alien giants, mocking humanity’s great dream with their talk of peace and unity, had left a trail of destruction behind them that had claimed a hundred worlds before they had come to rest upon Melchior.

  Sagan, the DeCora Spine, Orpheo Minoris, Beta Rigel II. These planets had been denuded of all human life, populations herded into empath-chapels as big as mountains and then slowly consumed. The true horror of it was that the nephilim used those they preyed upon to do their soldiering for them, snaring the pliant, the lonely, the sorrowful with their ideal of an attainable godhood. They plied them with stories of eternal existence for the faithful, of endless sorrow for the agnostic; and they were very good at it.

  Perhaps the xenos really believed that what they were doing was somehow taking them closer to a form beyond flesh, to an afterlife in an eternal heaven-state; it did not matter. With their technologies they implanted bits of themselves into their thralls to further their communion, they cut their own flesh and made the masks to mark their devotees. The nephilim controlled minds, either through the transmitted power of their will or through the weak character of those they chose.

  They were an affront to the Emperor’s secular galaxy, not only an offence to the purity of a human ideal but in their insidious cuckoo-nest displacement of those who foolishly gave them fealty.

  For what the aliens fed upon, what the scouts of the Blood Angels and Luna Wolves had seen and reported back, were the very lives of those who cherished them. The empty chapels were piled high with stacks of desiccated corpses, bodies aged years in hours as all living essence was siphoned from them. It had sickened the primarchs as the true understanding of the enemy they faced was, at last, revealed.

  The nephilim fed on adulation.

  Thus, Sanguinius would deny these repellent xenos their sustenance and defeat their arrogance in the same blow. The invaders believed that the Emperor’s sons would never starve them by resorting to the murder of the humans they took as their cattle, and that was so. Yet what the nephilim considered a weakness, the Angel made a strength. So confident were they of their unassailable position, they had met Horus’s arrival with almost the full might of their forces, daring the Luna Wolves to strike at them.

  And with the aliens turning their backs, their belief in their victory already blinding them to the unbreakable strength of intent within the warriors they now faced, the true angels fell in fire on Melchior and became the hammer of the Emperor’s wrath.

  Running at a charge, the primarch was a hurricane, racing into the thick of the nephilim lines and taking to the air in deft, agile moves. With his sword and the shorter blades of a glaive built into his vambrace he made kill after kill, shouting down those who tried to deafen him with their dirge-waves. Flanking him, Azkaellon and Zuriel, first and second of his personal guard, used their wrist-mounted Angelus bolters to pour cascades of fire into the enemy line. With each hit, the warheads of the mass-reactive bloodshard rounds exploded into hundreds of magno-charged monofilaments; every concussive impact upon the skin of a nephilim caused bloody detonations inside the torsos of the alien creatures. Lakes of bluish, shimmering internal fluids littered the battleground, shrinking slowly as the silver sand absorbed them.

  At the heels of the Guard came the captains leading their assault companies. Raldoron, the Blooded of the First, hurled bolter fire from the weapon in his steady hand, his elite veterans emblazoned with ebon fetishes carved in the fashion of the hunter tribes on the Blood Angels home world of Baal. The First Captain was joined by elements of Furio’s Ninth Company shield-bearers, Galan’s men of the 16th with their favoured blade-staves, and Amit with the Fifth, every one of them bearing boltgun and flaying knife.

  Heavy weapon barrages concentrated on the copper towers and the walls of the empath-chapels, denying the nephilim the infrastructure of their haven, forcing them to engage head-on. To the south, where Horus had drawn his feint, the great tide of battle was shifting and breaking. The Luna Wolves had first dug in, block-ading any progress or escape by the xenos, and now they advanced. Extending into a wide arc, the line of Horus’s soldiery forced the varicoloured giants back, pressing them on to the blades and the guns of the Blood Angels. With brutal inevitability, the trap the Emperor’s sons had devised aboard the Vengeful Spirit closed like a vice. With each passing minute, they left the aliens less and less room to manoeuvre. Many of the nephilim’s converts began to surrender, droves of them crying out in pain as they tried to peel off the bonded masks; while those too far along the road to worship spent their lives for their masters in a vain and fruitless attempt to slow the pace of the Space Marines.

  Sanguinius had no pity for these dupes. They had allowed themselves to be drawn in by pretty words, let themselves be ruled by their fears instead of by their hopes. And in much greater measure, he had only anger for the nephilim themselves.

  Over the bodies of the alien dead, the crimson legionaries and their golden warlord turned fury upon the giants. The whickering music of the aliens’ strange songs became an atonal scale of panicked noises punctuated by chugging snarls of aggression. Horus’s landspeeder squadrons raced overhead, bracketing a phalanx of blue-skins with salvoes from their graviton guns and multi-meltas, punching through curls of smoke as the outer rings of the encampment burned.

  Galan’s war-cry drew the primarch’s attention and he spared the captain a glance. There was such ferocity, such resolve in the face of the warrior, and Sanguinius felt a surge of pride to be fighting alongside his sons. Legionaries born of Baal and Terra alike, united many years earlier by the Angel himself under a banner of incarnadine, these were his sharpest blades, his brightest minds. In battle they were unparalleled, and for a moment the primarch allowed himself to feel the pure, wild joy of the fight. They were going to win; that had never been in doubt.

  The enemy was in disarray, and their villainy was unquestioned. This was a righteous battle, the victory of the Imperium as inevitable as the rising of Melchior’s sun. Sanguinius and Horus would win this day, and a lost world would be brought back into the fold once more. This would be done, by battle-brothers and brothers in blood, by primarch and legionary alike. He could taste the victory on his lips, sweet and dark like good wine.

  And so there, on Melchior’s shining sands, the nephilim were put to the sword.

  In the aftermath, the freed slaves were isolated from the converts who still remained alive for fear that revenge killings would explode from a mob mentality. Horus took on this deed, in no uncertain terms drilling those who claimed to lead the liberated that justice would be delivered to all turncoats – but it would be Imperial justice, right and true and conducted to the letter of the law.

  In the meantime, the convert prisoners were given back-breaking menial work, overseen by troopers from the Imperial Army brigades that had come to support the Legions. The converts carried the dead nephilim to great pyres set about the desert and were made to burn the corpses of the aliens they had worshipped; others were formed into work gangs whose task was to dismantle the copper devotional towers they had forced their fellows to build only days earlier.

  Sanguinius stood atop a shallow hill of pale rock and watched the sun dropping towards the distant horizon. His wings were pulled close, and the xenos blood shed upon him as he fought was gone, cleanse
d from his armour. He nodded to himself. Melchior was safe, the victory secure. Already his thoughts were moving towards the next battle, the next world in need of illumination.

  A smile grew on his lips as he sensed his brother’s approach, but he did not turn to look at Horus. ‘There is a question that concerns me greatly,’ said Sanguinius, with false gravity.

  ‘Oh?’ The lord of the Luna Wolves halted at his side. ‘That sounds troubling.’

  Neither of them paid heed to it, but directly below in the shallow canyon beneath the rise, many of the common soldiers, prisoners, even their own legionaries, paused to watch. It was a sight to see a single primarch in the flesh; to behold a pair of these gene-forged transhumans at once was something that many of those watching would remember for as long as they lived. For many different reasons.

  ‘How can I ease your disquiet, brother?’ Horus went on, affecting a serious mien.

  The Angel eyed him. ‘If the grey had done as you asked, if it had set the thralls free… Tell me, would you really have let the aliens go?’

  Horus nodded, as if the answer were obvious. ‘I am a man of my word. I would have let them leave the planet’s surface, make for orbit…’ He cocked his head. ‘But when they met your ships up there, well…’ He gave a small shrug, the huge shoulders of his battle plate exaggerating the motion. ‘You’ve never been as agreeable as I.’

  The smile became a moment of laughter. Sanguinius gave a slight, mocking bow. ‘So true. I must content myself with merely being the better warrior.’

  ‘Don’t make me pluck those wings,’ Horus retorted.

  ‘Perish the thought!’ said Sanguinius. ‘Without them I’d only be as handsome as you are.’

  ‘That would be tragic,’ Horus agreed.

  The moment of levity passed and in the next exchange they had gone from the easy humour of a pair of siblings to the manner of two allied generals. ‘What ships have you chosen to remain to administrate the compliance?’