Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  No voice of man nor sign of life bled from the capital world. Sensors reaching out to touch the surface threw back streams of data that were meaningless, unreadable gibberish, and even simple optical scopes brought reports that were confused or contradictory. The whole planet was buried under a sheath of thick, bilious cloud, and so it resembled a glass orb filled with yellowed, sickly smoke. Tumultuous storm cells were visible, moving in random patterns at odds with meteorological norms. Towering jags of lightning lit the night side, curving in purple-white slashes that mimicked the shapes of fanged smiles.

  The warships deployed in combat formation, squadrons of cruisers, carriers and destroyers forming their own battle elements, laying out screens of interceptors and picket gunboats. There was not a single degree of black, starless sky that did not have a weapon pointed towards it, a warrior’s attention aimed and ready. Too much had happened along the voyage to this place for any Blood Angel to take the endeavour lightly.

  In the Red Tear’s shadow, ships with histories no less storied than the primarch’s vessel moved in steady progression, waiting for the first hint of their shadowy foe. The Covenant of Baal and the Encarnadine, the Nine Crusaders and the Blood’s Son, Victus and Scarlet Liberty, Requiem Axona and Ignis; these and many more drew their guns and charged their void shields.

  Lead elements of the fleet – patrols of Ravens sent out in probing sorties – came back with gun-camera picts of what surrounded Signus Prime.

  The two moons of the third planet were gone. They had not been destroyed by any conventional means, for that would have left debris to settle into an accretion ring and the spillage of radiation and particle traces marking their points of obliteration. The satellites had simply been stolen from their orbits, lost to the unknown; and with them had gone shipyards, barracks and manufactories for the Signus Cluster’s defence forces.

  The fate of the defence forces themselves was much clearer. The shells of their fleet were adrift across the orbit of the planet in a thick, ragged shroud. A cowl of dense wreckage from countless obliterated vessels and orbital complexes hung close to the edge of the atmospheric interface – military and civilian ships alike, everything from suborbital wing-shuttles never designed to venture beyond the stratosphere to interstellar juggernaut haulers, all had been killed close to the capital world and left where they fell. Plasma fires still burned in the cores of some wrecks, leaving streamers of radiation in their wake. Great slicks of debris flowed from the insides of cracked hulls and thickened the stew of fragments.

  The dead ships were not just the fallout from the brutal beheading of an entire colony world. They were more than the spilled blood forgotten by a careless killer. They were more than grave markers. The silent ships had been turned into a barbed shoal of debris, which any who approached would be forced to penetrate if they meant to make planetfall. And more than that, they were there as a silent, monumental threat: vessels broken and skinned alive, hung dead in the sky like the bleeding trophies of a wild killer.

  The horror might have been enough to chill the heart of even the most experienced of space’s cold warriors, but this exhibition was not the end of the bleak, voiceless message. For where there were thousands of murdered ships there were ten thousand times that number of human dead drifting bloated and frozen in the vacuum.

  The pilots of the interceptors brought the images to the Red Tear’s command deck, and the primarch looked upon them without speaking, sorrow and anger robbing him of words. Others who saw the same picts were similarly silenced, unable to frame the grotesque reality of what lay before them.

  Each body had been brutalised in a way that went beyond understanding, their bones subsumed from the meat of them, stolen away like the vanished moons by the same unknowable process that had claimed lives on Holst and elsewhere. What remained in the airless void over Signus Prime had become clay for a psychotic sculptor. Millions of corpses floated in fusions of flesh, twisted into repulsive monuments, glossy with coatings of frozen blood. They had been compacted into dolmens and rings, carved like soapstone. Some of the shapes had rigid angles and toothed spires made of cut limbs; others were flattened into discs and wicked curves, meat-red and shimmering. The octal sign that had burned across Phorus was also repeated, over and over in that grisly tableau, like an offering that only something with eyes as large as mountains would be able to see.

  The vision came again, and as before in the meditation cell, Kano had no warning.

  The deck cracked beneath his feet and he stumbled. Beneath the metal floor plates, a depthless black abyss revealed itself, sucking the broken fragments of the world around him into its endless, inescapable gravity.

  Kano’s hands came to his face and he blotted out the image of it. Before, there had been nothing to stop the onslaught of the dream-sight, but this time he knew what to expect; he had the smallest measure of armour against it, and the former psyker marshalled his defences.

  Inside his thoughts, he threw up defensive walls of anti-power, drawing himself in, mentally planting his feet in the sand as a storm of sensation whirled up to engulf him.

  Kano heard it coming, the shrieking phantom rising up from the gloomy deeps, faster than death, sharper than night. A gale of reeking, charnel-house stench blasting the apparition towards him on its ghostly, dead wings.

  –a warrior, ironclad and daubed head-to-toe in crimson vitae, the glow of dead singularities and murdered stars enveloping him, nauseating light leaking from the joints and cracks in his sundered armour, ashen tresses stark about his howling, unknowable face, the skeletal wings of a carrion eater reaching from his back–

  ‘No…’ He put out his hand, his eyes shut tightly, denying it.

  –soaked to the core with polluted blood–

  The vision seemed to echo in the halls of his thoughts, as if he were witnessing it through the sight of another.

  –a screaming, red-stained angel–

  Kano was caught in a ripple of experience, a sense-memory radiating out across his mind. It was a precursor event; instinctively, he knew this with absolute clarity.

  –impossible to escape–

  Like ocean surf draining away before the impact of a tidal wave, the vision-echo was the warning of worse to come. It would be more powerful than before, he could almost taste it in the soiled air. The ex-Librarian had the sudden and total certainty of looking into the muzzle of the biggest gun in creation.

  –fear and hate and darker things–

  With monumental effort, Kano sealed his mind shut against the images and opened his eyes, finding himself in the corridor once more, the decks around him untouched.

  A legionary of the 170th in duty robes was at his side, reaching out a hand to him, concern writ large across his face. ‘Brother? Are you ailing?’

  Kano shoved him away, regaining his balance. He took a step, faltered, finding his direction. ‘The Angel,’ he muttered, shaking his head as if that would rid it of the remnants of the psi-effect. ‘This cannot be ignored… I must warn the Angel…’

  He rocked off his stance and broke into a sprint towards the nearest conveyor. The primarch’s sanctorum was far distant across the span of the Red Tear, but he could reach it if he was quick–

  But then the crew-serfs all around him began to scream, and he knew he was too late.

  The Blood Angels fleet was ready for every form of attack save one.

  With the planet Signus Prime at its core, a cry that went beyond voice and sound exploded out into space towards the assembled vessels of the IX Legion. A vast hurricane of psychic shock, created from the bottled murder-essence of millions of surrendered souls, resonated out from the shrouded world. It swept across the crimson starships in a shuddering, immaterial wave. Void shields could not halt the ethereal power of it, and the mere matter of adamantium hulls and plasteel bulkheads were penetrated as easily as if they had been made of paper.

  The terrifying distillation of pain and anguish had been weaponised by architects of grief w
ho knew no other joy than to conduct agony like music. They had sculpted it with tools made of delusion and paranoia, edited away any lasting traces of hope and goodness that might have clung to the edges of such dark and punishing emotions. The sheer, monstrous force of the shockwave battered at every living mind aboard the ships of the Blood Angels flotilla.

  The transhumans of the Legiones Astartes met it full and with their courage unencumbered. It bombarded them, took some to places of great pain and suffering; but they were the Emperor’s Angels and despite its raw power, no weapon of such indiscriminate attack could defeat them. The sons of Sanguinius weathered the blow and turned it.

  It was only later that the Blood Angels would come to understand that they had never been the intended targets. For this was not a force aimed at them, but a weapon of denial seeking the weakest links in their chain of war.

  Every human – every human but one – in the flotilla was united for a fleeting moment in a single, soul-tearing scream that burned through into their minds and beat them down. It killed many on point of contact, those who were utterly unready for such crushing, black despair. Some would live a little longer before their hearts gave out, some would walk into airlocks or use knives and lasguns upon themselves or others.

  The screaming went on and on, and none would be unmarked by it.

  TWELVE

  Revealed

  Hell-Ships

  Collision Course

  Some might say that the most potent torment a man could experience would be to see into the beating, bloody heart of his darkest inner soul, to look upon it with perfect and unfiltered clarity. To know the rage, the hate and evil that he was capable of.

  That then, but in a torrent a million times more powerful, a flood of black emotion from not one but countless dead and corrupted souls, sacrificed for just such a moment.

  This was the force that swept into the psyche of the men and women who stood to serve the great fleet of the Blood Angels. Every heart and mind among them was tested to the limit, and many would break under the strain. The strongest would survive, scarred forever, tormented to their graves. The weakest became unhinged, seeing horrors wherever they turned, their minds fracturing like brittle glass.

  The opening shot had been fired.

  Captain Raldoron sprinted down the golden gallery towards the Sanctorum Angelus, his mien set and hard. The screams and the shrieks echoed off the walls of the ornate passageway, twisting his perception so that the statuary and great artworks took on a warped, threatening aspect.

  He made a snarling noise under his breath and beat back the sensation, blotting it out. Raldoron had been trained to weather attacks of insidious nature, but the common crew of the Red Tear had no such defence. He saw naval officers he knew well reduced to bawling children, some clawing red gashes over their faces, others struck dumb and staring into space, trapped in the prison of their own mind. It tore at him that he could do nothing for them, but this was battle now and they were casualties. His first deed was to see ship and primarch secure; once that was done, he could enact his vengeance upon the enemy who had struck at them.

  He was almost at the atrium when gunfire turned his attention. Raldoron skidded to a halt at the gallery’s balustrade and saw on the deck beneath him a mass of crewmen in a huge, furious mob. Dead bodies were strewn about, and to the far side of the compartment a handful of Blood Angels stood in a line, weapons in their hands. A figure in black armour, a crozius held out before him, was shouting orders.

  ‘You will stand down!’ Warden Annellus bellowed the command to the crowd. ‘Return to your posts or you will be shot!’

  ‘Belay that!’ Raldoron vaulted the railing and dropped the distance to the deck below, landing with a grunt. He turned on Annellus with cold anger. ‘In Baal’s name, what are you doing?’

  ‘This rabble attacked us.’ The Warden nodded to one of the battle-brothers, who bore fresh cuts upon his bare face, one eye a ragged, ruined pit. ‘They have turned on their masters!’

  ‘They are not rabble,’ Raldoron snarled. ‘They are our crew!’

  The legionaries had bolters raised; they could make short work of the serfs with only a moment’s burst of fire.

  Raldoron shoved Annellus aside and walked into the middle of the tormented crewmen. They parted around him, pushed back as if by his force of will.

  ‘Look to me,’ he shouted, glaring at them. ‘Look to me!’ The captain reached out and grabbed the nearest man, a gunnery lieutenant whose lips moved in a constant litany of mad panic.

  ‘The blood and the blood and the blood and the blood and the blood–’

  ‘You will silence your fears.’ Raldoron’s words were adamantium-hard. ‘All of you. The terror that attacks you now will gain victory if you submit. Do not! Remember who you are! Remember your oath to the Angel and the Emperor!’

  The lieutenant trembled in his grip. He looked up at Raldoron with imploring eyes. ‘It’s in my head, lord. I have to make it stop. The blood…’ Crimson matted the thin beard around his chin, streaming from his eyes, his ears, his nostrils.

  ‘By blood we are bonded and by blood we serve,’ said the captain, invoking the vow of duty. The words seemed to calm the mob’s anger. ‘We are the Legion, all of us.’ He shot an acid look towards the Warden. ‘Never forget that. Do not falter. Take strength from your comrades and brothers.’

  The other legionaries had already lowered their weapons. Raldoron let the man go and turned away. ‘What can we do?’ came the call, from among the crowd. ‘If the foe can cut into our minds, what can we do?’

  ‘Defy them,’ Raldoron said, without turning. ‘Until they die of it. Or we do.’

  He reached the primarch’s sanctum without further interruption, and as he strode across the atrium before the great brass and gold doors, Raldoron felt the subtle shift in the deck through the ceramite soles of his boots. The Red Tear was turning, and steeply enough that the massive flagship’s gravity plates were labouring to compensate.

  As alarms keened all around, he wondered what was out there, forcing the vessel to change course. The next attack was imminent, he knew it in his marrow. His only uncertainty was from where to expect it. Raldoron’s hand fell to the hilt of the power sword sheathed at his waist. Part of him welcomed the joining of battle, while another dreaded it.

  ‘First Captain.’ At the doors, the Sanguinary Guard Sergeant Zuriel led a barricade group at the ready, the blade of his glaive encarmine shining. ‘The vox-net has collapsed. We’re getting intermittent signals from other commanders, other ships. There’s no pattern to the disruption, only random blackouts and the voices…’

  Raldoron had suffered the same loss of signal, but nothing else. ‘What voices?’

  Zuriel gestured to the captain’s vox-bead. ‘Listen. Hear for yourself.’

  Raldoron tabbed his vox-relay. For a moment, there was only the bray of static; but then, faintly, he picked out words, a sing-song pattern of them in an unsettling language.

  Nearby, Mendrion frowned. ‘I heard those voices before, but it seemed to fade from my memory…’

  Raldoron snorted, cutting the signal dead. ‘To hell with these shadow games.’

  Zuriel opened the door and allowed him entry. ‘Indeed, brother-captain.’

  Raldoron entered the primarch’s sanctorum and gave a bow that earned him a brief gesture of acknowledgement from the Angel. His master was before a fizzing, barely stable hololith in the middle of the chamber, the display showing Admiral DuCade’s head and shoulders. The shipmistress looked worn and old, the bright spark of vitality that the captain had always associated with her doused by pain and distress. Like the rest of the human crew, she would not have been immune to the psychic shriek from Signus Prime. He thought of the maddened lieutenant that Annellus had been ready to kill; that DuCade had weathered the same mind-terrors and still maintained her command spoke greatly to her fortitude.

  ‘The disorder is widespread,’ she was saying. ‘Deck officers are
reporting in sporadically, but there have already been deaths and some… vandalism. I believe, for now, that the flagship is in no immediate danger from within.’ The admiral paused, as if she was finding it difficult to breathe. Over the open channel from the bridge far above, Raldoron could hear other voices, many tight with panic, as DuCade’s officers tried to maintain control.

  Sanguinius’s expression was grave. ‘The other ships?’

  At these words, Raldoron looked out past the holographic image and to the great armourglass portal that showed the void beyond. He picked out fleet cruisers, some of them moving in chaotic patterns, a few of them apparently damaged.

  ‘The few intelligible contacts we have made report similar incidents,’ said the woman. ‘Crew-serfs acting erratically. Violence and panic.’

  ‘Contain it,’ said the Angel. ‘If my sons are forced to fight their own crews for control of their starships, we will do the bidding of our enemy for them.’

  ‘I will–’ began DuCade, her voice rising an octave, becoming a shrill, drawn-out squeal. The hololith juddered and burst into a cloud of photons, but the high-pitched whine did not cease. The projector matrix in the deck overloaded with a screeching howl and exploded in a flare of smoke and burned metal.

  Raldoron drew his pistol, fearing that this was the precursor to another psychic attack, and nearby the Guard Commander Azkaellon raised his arm, the Angelus bolter on his vambrace locking.

  The other members of the Sanguinary Guard in the chamber pulled their blades. ‘That noise!’ cried Halkryn. ‘Where is it coming from?’

  The primarch turned, glaring up at the ceiling, a thunderous cast to his face as his eyes darted back and forth in search of something only he could see. ‘No…’ he whispered.

  There were a handful of servitors in the chamber, helots for minor duties and administrator functions. As one, they stumbled from their sleep alcoves and joined in the keening chorus, puking blood and processor fluids onto the mosaic floor.