Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  And recently, Baniol’s dreams had become a place he no longer wanted to visit. The pilot had been able to conceal the effect of stimms he used to stay awake, at least at first. But now he was afraid the others could see it. Baniol was afraid that the legionaries could smell it on him.

  He was afraid a lot of the time, in fact. Especially since the dreams had started to bleed into his waking life.

  Baniol made the mistake of looking out of the thick cockpit window beyond the helm and into the turmoil of the crackling plasma fires flashing over the Stormbird’s prow and canards. He saw things looking out at him from within the fiery discharges, things that knew his name and wanted to bite into him.

  ‘Hey!’ Tolens shouted at Baniol, in a way that made it clear he’d been doing it for a while. ‘Watch the separation! Are you listening to me? We’re drifting off the glide path.’ When the officer didn’t react, Tolens swore loudly and disengaged his straps, turning in his seat. ‘Baniol, are you asleep back there?’

  Something snapped in Baniol and he spun away from the controls, glaring at the engineer with such pale, sweating intensity that Tolens actually recoiled in shock. ‘You see them, don’t you? The faces? The faces in the fire!’ He jabbed his fingers at the windows. ‘Look! Look!’

  Tolens turned slightly, confused. ‘What are you talking about–’

  ‘You can see them!’ Baniol didn’t know where the sudden, explosive burst of violence came from, but abruptly he was out of his restraints, grabbing Tolens by the scruff of his neck. Catching the other man off-balance, Baniol rammed his face into the canopy beside the first helm-servitor. ‘Look!’ he shouted. ‘You see them!’

  Bone cracked, and blood spurted. The engineer went slack and collapsed across a console, eyes rolling back in his head.

  The flight officer whimpered and smacked at his head, panic flaring inside him. That was not what was meant to happen. He blinked through tears, watching the icy surface of Holst coming closer. Man-made structures – huge arcology towers and great earthworks cut into the permafrost – were visible through the constant snowstorm.

  He had made a terrible mistake, and now it had matured into murder. He couldn’t let the legionaries know what he had done. He couldn’t go back. Not now. Not ever. He had to make sure no one found out.

  Outside, the fires were screaming and giggling, watching as Baniol robotically drew his sidearm and aimed it at the back of the servitor’s head.

  The sound was distinct and clear. It could not have been anything other than the discharge from a narrow-bore laspistol. The muffled snap-crack of the shot turned Meros’s head.

  ‘I heard it too,’ began Sarga, looking up at him from his acceleration rack. He had more to say, but Meros didn’t hear it. Suddenly, the Stormbird’s nose fell and the drop-ship entered a death-dive, tumbling off course. Before he could stop himself, Meros was pitched away from the deck and down the length of the compartment, thrown into disarray like every other loose item on the ship.

  He shielded his head as he cannoned down the aisle and finally crashed to a halt against a heap of cargo pods at the aft of the bay. Meros struggled back to his feet, realising that his fall had been broken by one of the Word Bearers. Their commander, Harox, was already recovering, reaching for the hatchway that led to the flight deck.

  More crackles of las-fire sounded over their heads, sporadic and random.

  ‘Captain…’ Meros began. ‘Wait.’

  Harox ignored him and hauled himself up, fighting the g-forces with each step. The Word Bearer stabbed at the hatch control and the oval panel snapped back. Meros scowled and grabbed on to the handrail, following Harox through.

  The broad form of the captain’s head and shoulders were barely into the cockpit when las-bolts found their way to him. The flight officer shot wildly, pulses of yellow coherent light fizzing into Harox’s pauldrons, his torso plate and helmet. The laspistol wasn’t a battlefield-rated weapon, more a personal defence sidearm, and only a lucky hit to the eye lenses of the warrior’s helmet would have proven dangerous to him. The discharges from the gun cut burning divots in the thick outer layers of his ceramite armour but did not penetrate.

  Harox lurched forwards, the dark bulk of him filling the flight deck. Meros came through after him in time to see the Word Bearer slap the gun from the serf’s hand with a snap of breaking bones. The blow carried enough force to bounce the man off the inside of the canopy and back into Harox’s waiting grip.

  ‘What is this?’ From behind his scowling breath grille, the Word Bearer’s voice was sonorous and fearsome.

  Meros processed the scene in a fraction of a second, the quickened accuitive processes of his transhuman mind picking out the dead flight engineer on the deck, the blasted servitors, the skirling alerts from the Stormbird’s warning systems. He saw that the auto-flight cogitator was a wreck, as were the thrust regulators and the long-range vox-unit.

  ‘It’s… suicide,’ he said. The word lay in his chest like the aftermath of a body-blow.

  ‘The faces, the faces!’ The serf’s eyes bulged and the muscles of his neck were corded like steel cables as he flailed at Harox’s helmet, scratching at the jade-coloured lenses. He tried in vain to unseat the captain’s headgear, desperately pulling at the neck-ring clasps. ‘I can see the faces, you have to see them too, the faces and the fire and the blood! The face, the face of the–’

  The man’s words ended in a wet crunch as Harox crushed his trachea and tossed the body away. The Word Bearer took a step forwards, peering out through the canopy at the fast-approaching ground. The sharp peaks of spindly ice mountains flashed past off the tips of the Stormbird’s wings. ‘Blood Angel,’ he said, without looking at Meros. ‘Can you fly this craft?’

  Meros pushed past him towards the auxiliary flight controls. ‘A question you should have considered before you killed that serf out of hand.’ Grimly, he settled into the chair and gripped the controls. They were small in his armoured hands, like something made for a child in the grip of an adult. ‘I suppose we’ll find out. Tell the others to strap in. We won’t have the opportunity for a second attempt.’

  Every one of the Legiones Astartes provided their warriors with a hypnogogic training programme that gave them a basic understanding of vehicle operations. Legionaries were imprinted with the knowledge of how to run groundcraft and common aerial units such as skimmers, gunship speeders and jetbikes – but piloting a Stormbird was at the limit of this teaching.

  Meros allowed himself to forget for a moment that he was an Apothecary, surrendering his reflexes to the ingrained muscle-memory programmes deep in his mind. He remembered how to the fly the Stormbird in a distant way, with all the clarity of a man singing back a half-heard melody.

  There was no time to conduct this cleanly or carefully. The Stormbird’s port wing clipped the apex of a blue-white ice pillar, blasting a sheet of snow and frost out around it, pulling the drop-ship off its heading. Holst-Prime Hive stretched out below the craft in a vast rockcrete sprawl, a dozen narrow triangular towers arranged around a single giant cone, cross-connected by hundreds of aerial viaducts and monorail lines at every level. The hive towers emerged from a low, flat geodesic dome that in turn lay over the junction of several multi-lane highways. There was nothing that looked like a landing pad visible at this altitude, and with all the damage to the controls it was highly unlikely that the Stormbird’s standard vertical touchdown mode would be operable.

  As the craft slid through the frozen air, crabbing into the hard crosswinds off the towers, Meros extended the landing skids from the underside of the fuselage.

  Under normal circumstances, the highways and the complexes of Holst were protected from the murderous weather conditions of the frigid planet by force walls. The invisible barriers would deflect the snows and cut the teeth of the winds, but it was clear by the almost uniform patina of grey-white over the roads that the system had been inactive for many days. Bulges beneath the metre-thick snowfall concealed the hulks of
stalled cargo trucks from the ice mines, abandoned to freeze in where they sat.

  Meros shouted a warning over the general vox-channel and activated the retro-thrusters, but the damage to the cockpit was too severe.

  Stormbird Delta-25 Blood’s Eagle dropped out of the hazy sky towards the highway, its crimson hull still sizzling with the displaced heat of orbital re-entry. It landed badly, ploughing into a snow bank and the obstacles hidden beneath, throwing up plumes of ice. Metal sheared and broke away; the port wing crumpled and the hull twisted onto its side. The drop-ship splayed into an uncontrolled skid that carried it down the frost-rimed road for another kilometre before velocity finally bled away to nothing.

  The ship’s hull groaned and ticked as plumes of steam puffed into the air, immediately freezing back into a fresh fall of metallic sleet.

  Shipmaster Godolfan leaned forwards in his command chair and peered across the bridge, glaring at the sight off the bow of the Helios as if he could intimidate it into giving him answers. He rubbed his clean-shaven chin. ‘This is damned peculiar,’ he said, his Enigman accent turning the statement into a studied drawl.

  As the cruiser closed the distance towards the dark barrier surrounding the Signus Cluster, the mood on Godolfan’s bridge had become muted. Slowly, his people fell silent and the usual sense of professional focus had given way to something else. It wasn’t fear; he refused to call it that. Awe, perhaps.

  It was hard not to look out into that fathomless wall of black smoke and not feel something had gone deeply awry in the universe. Godolfan’s six decades of service with the Imperial armed forces had shown him many things and taken him to many places, but the sheer wrongness of the strange shroud affected him in a way he found hard to articulate.

  By right, it should not have been so disturbing; it was just darkness. Nothing but some strange stellar phenomenon, a great cosmic blind called into being by the enemies of humanity. Troubling, indeed, even formidable. But nothing to hobble a man’s will.

  ‘Distance to the inner edge?’ The question came from Captain Reznor, a lieutenant-commander from the 164th Company. The hulking legionary stood close to the gunnery alcove, his hawkish face framed by long black hair. Reznor was part of a force of fifty Blood Angels on board the Helios, in line with the primarch’s orders to investigate and report back on what the crew-serfs were calling the veil.

  When the reply didn’t come at once, Godolfan glared at his sounding officer. ‘Answer him, Lieutenant Dequen!’

  The young woman worked her console with a building sense of agitation. ‘I would if I could, sir…’

  Godolfan’s face twisted in a grimace and he rose from his chair, stalking across the room. The shipmaster had been born on Enigma’s orbital plexes, and he had the spindly, long-legged gait typical of his low-grav upbringing. ‘Explain it to me,’ he demanded, craning over Dequen to stare into the depths of the holograph showing her sensor reads.

  ‘Sir, I can’t give a sounding because the auspex grids refuse to settle.’ She pointed at a pane of gibberish data on the display. ‘One moment I have a null, almost as if the sensors have been disconnected. Then the scans appear to be reflecting back to us, phase-shifted out of synchrony. At other times, I detect energetic constructs that match nothing on record…’ She frowned. ‘Just now I got a return showing organic matter out there.’

  ‘Organic?’ echoed Godolfan with incredulity.

  ‘Aye, sir,’ said Dequen.

  The shipmaster turned away. ‘We must be close, Captain Reznor. These effects may be an artefact of the barrier’s creation.’ He glanced back at the main viewport.

  The dark vapours billowed through the vacuum, and the motion and shape of them was like no nebulae or dust cloud. The veil moved in a way that could convince a man it had intent, coils of it seeming to reach out hesitantly towards the Helios like the fingers of a curious child, furtively shrinking away before making contact.

  ‘Best guess,’ Dequen offered. ‘Ten kilometres and closing.’

  ‘Helm,’ ordered the shipmaster, ‘hold station here.’ The officer at the navigation console replied in the affirmative, but the motions of the cloud did not recede. ‘I said hold!’ Godolfan snapped.

  ‘The phenomenon is in motion, not the ship,’ said Reznor.

  Godolfan glared at the black mass, his annoyance rising. He was a man of rationality and cold certainties, and he disliked anything that defied his attempts to classify it.

  Shapes were moving out there, behind the outermost layers of the veil. Ghostly forms that were too regular to be swirls of cosmic dust or radiative energy. The shipmaster’s gaze picked out eyes and mouths, the silhouettes of great faces brimming with tusks and fangs, black upon black, all of them grinning back at him.

  They assembled beneath the Stormbird’s intact starboard wing. With the drop-ship on its side, the massive aerofoil curved up over the heads of the legionaries, shielding them from the ceaseless snowfall. Fluid dripped from cracks in the fuselage, unspent fuel spilling out of punctured tanks to pool on the highway. The puddles were already turning to ice around their edges, Holst’s incredible cold powerful enough to freeze the liquid promethium.

  Kano found Meros attending to one of the tactical squad. The Apothecary’s unexpected turn at the drop-ship’s controls had brought them all down safely – although safely was a relative term. None of the Blood Angels or Harox’s Word Bearers had perished in the crash landing, but there had been a few minor injuries. Sergeant Cassiel was currently taking stock of their condition; for all intents and purposes they were fully operational and their deployment had commenced.

  Kano almost smiled at Cassiel’s stoic, direct reading of the situation. The Stormbird would never fly again, but that would only be a problem if they needed it to.

  ‘We’re here, we are ready to proceed with the mission,’ Cassiel was saying. ‘Meros, can Brother Xagan fight?’ His helm nodded towards the injured warrior.

  Before Meros even had the chance to answer, Xagan pushed the Apothecary out of his way and stepped forwards. ‘It’s no concern of mine if someone wanted to fly the Stormbird like a drop-pod, brother-sergeant. On your orders, sir.’

  ‘That’s a yes,’ Meros added wearily.

  ‘I don’t consider it wise to move off from the crash site.’ Captain Harox and his two men were unharmed, and they had flatly refused any offer Meros made to examine them for injuries. ‘The actions of your serf, the man Baniol… We cannot simply ignore them.’

  ‘He lost his mind,’ Cassiel replied. ‘He stranded us here. Might have killed us into the bargain. It’s troubling, but forgive me, captain, I fail to see how that incident prevents us from setting out on the mission my primarch gave us.’

  ‘We have no ship, sergeant! No vox with which to reach the Hermia!’

  Cassiel accepted this with a nod. ‘Aye, both true. And when we do not make our first scheduled report, they will know something is amiss.’ He kept his gaze on Harox, but his next question was directed to Kano. ‘Brother, how long after we go vox-silent will a condition for concern be declared?’

  ‘Ten hours standard.’ Kano glanced up. ‘Just around local nightfall.’

  One of the other Blood Angels shot a look into the dark sky. ‘This is daytime?’

  ‘Try to keep up, Leyteo,’ said the sergeant. He went on. ‘Ten hours, sir. More than enough time for us to explore the outer wards of Holst-Prime Hive.’ Cassiel paused, and at last the question that they all expected came to the fore. ‘Unless, of course, you wish to exercise your rank and relieve me of operational command of this mission. Then you can do whatever you want. Sir.’

  Harox said nothing from behind the mask of his helm, and Kano wondered if he was speaking privately to his comrades. Then his gruff tones returned to the general comm-channel. ‘Captain Furio’s orders were quite clear, Sergeant Cassiel. This sortie is under your command. My men and I will follow your lead.’

  Cassiel nodded. ‘Here’s how we will run this, then – stagge
red skirmish line, fifteen-metre separation. Vox check every ten minutes.’ He turned to point down the highway. ‘According to the maps on the signum, this road leads into the main atrium of the upper city, so all we need to do is follow it. Set all thermodynamic and infra-red sensing to maximum acuity. If there is anything even remotely alive on this ball of ice, we will either kill it or rescue it. Clear?’

  The legionaries nodded in silent assent.

  ‘Then move out. Xagan, as you are so eager to prove yourself, take the lead with one of Captain Harox’s trackers.’

  Kano unlimbered his bolter and took his place in the formation, pausing to throw a look back at the fallen Stormbird. A layer of snow was already settling over it.

  ‘Give it a couple of hours, and it will be buried,’ said Meros from nearby. He looked back along the line in the ice that marked their landing.

  ‘My thanks for not killing us,’ Kano returned, trying to shrug it off. ‘Does that make us even now?’

  Meros saw through the lightness in his tone. ‘Baniol was trying to kill himself. Like the others. He was screaming, raving. What he said made no sense.’ The Apothecary relayed what he could remember of the dead pilot’s words. ‘Is that what happened to the others, to the astropath?’

  Kano shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’ A creeping sense of cold played over his skin – a physical impossibility, given the airtight seal of his power armour and the controlled climate maintained by its life-support systems. ‘But these things are connected. There’s no other explanation.’