by John French
‘Does it still trouble you?’
Cyrus looked up at Phobos, seeing the look of friendly concern on his brother’s face.
‘This?’ Cyrus winced as the servitors pulled the blood-streaked greave from his leg. ‘It will not slow me.’ The flesh underneath was livid, black veins crawling out from a suppurating wound.
‘No, not that.’ The sergeant frowned. ‘You are brooding on something; you have been since you decided to come here.’
A servo-skull drifted close to Cyrus’s wounded leg, extending a red-hot cauterising blade. Cyrus nodded and the blade lanced into his flesh. He did not make any expression as the smell of burnt flesh sizzled into the air.
‘You said before that there was nothing we could do even if this place was attacked. That it would burn anyway.’
Phobos shook his head gently. ‘I misspoke. I spoke as I felt I must, but you lead us and you led us here, and here we have an enemy to stand against.’
Cyrus was suddenly aware of how worn his friend looked, his face weathered by war and framed by white armour older than memory.
‘You were right, old friend,’ breathed Phobos heavily. ‘You were right. Don’t let my words weaken you for what we must do now.’
Cyrus shook his head. Beside his temple a servo-skull buzzed as it unlinked the crystalline mesh of his psychic hood from his scalp. There were blisters and lesions in places where it rested on his skin.
‘The signal and the omens worry me. They are why we are here and I still understand neither fully. That…’ He paused sifting through words to sum up his worry. ‘That makes me wonder if it was not bait, if I have not led us into a trap, if I should not have chosen differently.’
It was Phobos’s turn to shake his head, armoured shoulders turning his chuckle into a ripple of armour. ‘The enemy did not come here for us; they came here for the light of the astropaths and the souls on the station. If we weren’t here they would already have fallen. And we are not here for omens, brother. We are here to fight and to win.’
Cyrus frowned. ‘And we bear the price of that chance for survival?’
Phobos grinned, his scarred face splitting with grim humour. ‘That, brother, is why we were made.’
It began with one man.
Guardsmen crowded the vaulted chamber that ran down the centre of the fourth wing of the station. They had been there for several rotations, not sleeping, just looking nervously into the shadows. No one had explained what was happening. Station command had said only that the station was under attack, and that they were a primary reserve if the enemy broke through from other sections. No one had said who the enemy was, and that only made things worse. Rumours of attacks in other areas had come some hours earlier, but the lack of details created spaces filled by fears and rumour. No two rumours agreed on anything other than a single fact: it was bad. The lack of any solid information only confirmed it.
Private first class Ramiel straightened up from his crouched position and flexed his shoulders under his bronze-plated armour, trying to work the tightness from his back. Over a decade ago he had been a gang boss, lording it over his own chunk of the Vortis underhive in the distant Mandragora sector. He had killed how he liked, and who he liked. It had been a good life. Bad luck had seen him lose that life and gain a rank of flat nothing in an Imperial Guard regiment that went on to lose ninety per cent of its numbers in its first campaign. Ramiel had survived though, he always did.
He had been watching a sealed door that led off the broad colonnade for over four hours. It was supposed to lead to an unshielded section, whatever that meant. Nothing had happened and nothing was going to, just another waste of time. Sure, he had been jumpy when the alarm had come through and they were deployed on maximum alert. They said there were Space Marines on the station, that the station had already been attacked. With every hour spent crouched watching the unmoving door he had believed it less and less. There was no attack, no Space Marines. It was just a drill, a waste of time, and the more he thought about it the more it had started to piss him off.
‘Get back on post, Ramiel,’ the sour voice of the sergeant spat from a few yards behind him.
Ramiel ignored it; the sergeant was a straight-backed son of a bitch who scared most of the squad. Not Ramiel, though. He knew that the sergeant was a nothing, no real fight in him. Let him shout, he thought, let him try whatever he liked. He pulled his helmet off and dropped it next to his lasgun. He rotated his neck stretching out his muscles as he reached into a pouch and pulled out a lho-stick. He heard the sergeant marching up behind him as he lit the tip of the stick.
‘Pick up your gun and get back into position, soldier,’ growled the sergeant next to Ramiel’s ear.
Ramiel turned and looked the sergeant in the eye. A reckless anger was coursing through him now. He did not know where it had come from: he just knew it felt good. He took a long draw of the lho-stick and grinned at the sergeant.
‘Pick it up or–’
Ramiel’s fist slammed into the sergeant’s guts and he brought his knee up hard as the man doubled over. The sergeant went down with a wet noise and lay on the floor, blood pooling around his mashed face. There was a soundless pause; men were staring from other positions across the colonnade.
‘Well you’re down there now, sergeant. Why don’t you pick it up?’ He smiled and took another drag of his lho-stick.
The sergeant came to his feet faster than Ramiel could blink. There was the polished glitter of a knife in his hand. Ramiel jumped back but the tip of the blade stabbed up under the edge of his armour. Suddenly there was blood splattering the floor. Ramiel lashed a kick at the sergeant, ignoring the pain flaring in his guts. People were running towards them. Suddenly all Ramiel wanted was to see the sergeant’s blood pulse away, to see his head become a skinless skull. He came forwards fast and the sergeant lunged, the point of the knife scoring across Ramiel’s breastplate. His hand went to the sergeant’s face, fingers finding the softness of the eyes. The sergeant screamed. There were others around Ramiel, other people shouting, but he did not care. He pulled the knife from the sergeant’s fingers and rammed it up under the man’s chin. Blood gushed over him. He was laughing. There was a hand on his shoulder, pulling him. He turned and sliced a face from eye to chin.
A red haze formed in the air. Angry cries spread around Ramiel, figures bunching into knots of sudden violence. Someone opened up with a heavy weapon, hard rounds pulping through the growing crowd. The stone-tiled floor was slippery with dark fluid. There was a stink of offal in the air.
Ramiel kept moving, kept cutting and stabbing. His skin and armour glistened crimson. Around him fallen bodies began to twitch, dead fingers spasming, muscles bunching. Flesh twisted, bursting skin and venting fresh, bright blood. Ramiel could feel the murder hunger inside him like a beast. He raised his hand to cut again, to feed the beast.
Something sharp rammed through Ramiel’s chest. He looked down at the black blade tip projecting from his ribs. He grinned a dead man’s grin, swaying where he stood. Ramiel’s mouth began to open wider and wider. With a sound of ripping sinew the form of an impossible thing pulled itself from Ramiel’s skin. The creature sloughed off the sleeve of loose flesh. It was slick with blood, its tongue flicking out to taste the air. Its eyes were pits of reflective darkness in a long skull. It stepped forwards, its black jointed legs shaking with the freshness of its birth, its flesh a raw meat red.
A man who had been firing his lasgun into the fight looked at the newly born daemon and opened his mouth. The daemon bounded forwards, the black blade in its hands leaving a trail of smoke as it cut. The man never had a chance to scream.
The daemon looked around seeing more waiting kills, hearing the pulse of the living calling to it. More of its kin came, pulling themselves from the bodies of the dead and the pools of blood. Lifting the severed head of its first kill the daemon raised its flayed skull face and howled.
It had been the wrong way to clear his mind, thought Cyrus. Walkin
g the station had seemed like a good way to work out troubling thoughts. Armoured in cleaned plate he had paced through the silent halls and the service tunnels where the station’s population sheltered as far from the outer areas as possible. They looked at him and he could feel the fear in their eyes. People crowded the service tunnels: menials, prefects, techno-mats, and their families. They formed tight clusters, huddled around a few possessions, talking in low voices as if the sound of raised voices were indecent.
There was a tension in the close atmosphere, panic held just below the surface. He had hoped to gain some clarity of thought, but the atmosphere seemed to infect him with a mixture of fear and caution. He tried to let his thoughts unknot, tried to focus on presenting a soothing presence to the people that looked at him. It was not working. In no small part that was the fault of Hekate.
‘It was only the first, and the weakest, attack that we will see.’ Hekate’s harsh voice rang out. She had chosen this time to impart her thoughts on the situation, following him as he walked the station, staff clicking on the deck in time with her steps.
Hekate had not been present at any of the two assaults on the station. She had been noticeably absent, only appearing afterwards to question survivors and make dire predictions. Cyrus pursed his lips. He could almost hear the look of superiority on her face.
‘We held the breach,’ growled Cyrus.
‘No, we did not,’ she spat. ‘You held the breach. If it had not been for you and your brothers the enemy would have forced through our defences.’
People were looking up at the raised voices, the air tightening. Cyrus had nearly reached the end of his patience. A thick ache had begun to spread across his head. All he could think about was the holographic image of a blind face repeating a single word just beyond hearing again and again.
He stopped and turned, looking down at the woman, catching the surprised look in her eyes, anger slipping his control.
‘Are you not a primaris? What is it that you fear? You have lent no aid to the defences apart from your observations. Is there something that keeps you in the shadows?’
‘I–’ she began, but Cyrus was in no mood for what she might have said. He leant forwards.
‘You may speak the truth and know much, but you seem blind to the fact that we either stand together or we die. The enemy we face will destroy us from within as easily as it will from without.’ He looked around at the people huddled and silent at the edge of the passage. ‘You do not see this? You know much of the enemy that faces us, more than Rihat, more than I. But you do not see this?’
He looked at the marks of the Psykana tattooed on her scalp and woven into the cloth of her storm coat. An expression that he could not place ghosted across her face. ‘Is there something you fear, mistress? Something you know of this enemy that makes you afraid?’ She held his gaze and a previously unformed question dropped into his mind. ‘What is your purpose here?’
‘I cannot say.’ There was a low almost fearful note in her voice that surprised Cyrus. ‘I tell you the truth that I see. That is what I am here to do. That is the help I give.’
Cyrus gazed at the woman, a suspicion forming in his mind. The Inquisition had servants in many places and drew its acolytes from many quarters. Did such a secret servant stand before him now? There was a regal surety about her that made him wonder what she really was. ‘How long have you been here, Mistress Hekate?’ he said quietly.
‘A little over a month, Brother-Librarian,’ she replied, her voice brittle.
‘And before that?’
‘I cannot say.’
Cyrus smiled but it did not reach his eyes. He was thinking of executed worlds, and the hand that wielded that final judgement. What was she?
Hekate looked away, suddenly appearing hunched and tired as she leant on her staff. ‘Another attack will come,’ she said without looking at him. ‘You should know that the varieties of daemons that attacked were of many orders. Such creatures only overcome their own rivalries when great powers turn them to a single purpose.’
The image of an astropath speaking a broken plea for help flashed through his mind, and a word came to Cyrus’s lips. ‘Fateweaver,’ he said.
Hekate shot him a hard look. For a moment he thought he saw surprise and fear in her blue eyes.
‘That is a name that should be spoken with care,’ said Hekate with careful control.
Cyrus was about to speak but the ache in his head suddenly blossomed to press against the inside of his skull. The crystals of his psychic hood were sparking. He blinked, opening his eyes to find red light flooding the passage. Alarms filled the air. His vox-link was screeching with panicked voices. He heard the word ‘incursion’ spit from the static and started running. He had ordered Phobos to be ready as a counter-attack force. The sergeant and his Terminators would reach any breach first.
‘Phobos,’ he shouted into the vox. As the sergeant replied Cyrus thought he could hear a whispered word repeated again and again.
Overwhelmed. It was not a word Phobos had often needed to contemplate. Layers of ceramite and adamantium, crafted at the birth of the Imperium, and his skill as a warrior made the word as irrelevant to him as a blow from a flint axe. But the word rang in his mind: undeniable, certain.
A lattice of fire overlaid the scene before him, spitting from his storm bolter, interweaving with that of his brothers. Four of them; there were four of them to turn the tide. A killing rage had engulfed the troops in the fourth wing of the station. Hundreds of Helicon Guard had become a churning sea of hate and murder. They stabbed and hacked at anyone in reach, shouting vile words through torn lips. Amongst the men the daemons moved: black iron blades sizzling as they cut through the press of bodies.
Phobos and his three brothers had pushed into the carnage, hurling the mob back with a torrent of explosions. For a few moments the bloody tide had faltered. Then it had enfolded them like closing jaws.
Phobos’s shoulders almost brushed those of his brothers, his eyes flicking from target to target, as he aimed, assessed and fired. His mind was focused solely upon the tactical data, which told him that they could not win. But this wing of the station was close to falling, and if it did the murderous tide would spill past all of their defences. He had made an oath that he would stand against this enemy: that he would not let them pass.
‘Nevra, firestorm pattern,’ said Phobos calmly. He remembered the hundreds of oaths he had made over decades of war. He had never failed to honour a single one and he was not going to do so now.
A clutch of Helicon Guard came towards them, eyes white, screaming in rage. There was no sanity left in them, no perception of what they had been, only a lust for death and blood.
‘By His will,’ came Nevra’s stony voiced reply. The missiles shrieked from the Cyclone launcher on his shoulders. The first missile hit, then the second, then the rest, each overlapping blast growing into a shrapnel-laden fireball. For a moment the murderous tide seemed to ebb. Phobos smiled grimly to the inside of his helmet as a black cloud mushroomed up to spread dirty smoke and yellow tongues across the ceiling far above. The floor shook and his armour whined as it compensated.
They came out of the fire in a wave of serrated blades and howling faces marked with jagged cuts. Men ran amongst the daemons, their flesh charring as they danced in the flames, howling triumph into the torched air.
‘Close formation,’ said Phobos. His brothers closed on him, shoulder to shoulder, a white armoured diamond amongst the slaughter. ‘Fire on all targets,’ he shouted, his storm bolter already roaring as the tide closed over them.
It was close now. Alarms blared as it walked down the passage through pulsing red light. Clusters of flesh-born in red and ochre uniform rushed past. It could taste the fear in their thoughts. The children of slaughter had begun their work. Perhaps they would succeed, but it doubted they would; they were so unsubtle, only useful in creating terror and spilling blood. It had masqueraded as such beings many times, had mimicked thei
r blink-quick reactions and their death thirst. It understood them from within and without. They would kill and glory in their massacre, but powerful enemies stood against them: the strongest of the flesh-born, the Space Marines. They had the strength to perhaps stand even against the Taker of Skulls’ children. But whether their attack succeeded or not was no matter. Within its multi-faceted mind it smiled. Fear and confusion filled the station and that made the fulfilment of its bargain all the easier. As it had intended.
The hurrying flesh-born passed, paying it no attention. It had chosen this face carefully. The person it had stolen it from was a functionary of modest authority, not high enough to draw too much attention, not so lowly that anyone would question that it walked alone against the flow of movement. It was its third face since it had entered the station, and it hoped that it would need no more.
Turning into an arched door off the main passage it raised a cipher talisman to a sensor panel. A heavy blast door pealed back into the oily walls. It had taken the talisman from the owner of the face it wore. Functioning technology was one of the few things it could not imitate. The passage beyond was quiet and bathed in cold light. It could feel the presence of what it sought. It was close, so close now. Behind it, the armoured door ground shut as it walked into the electric twilight.
‘Phobos?’ Cyrus said in his ear.
Phobos sent a burst of shells into the face of a creature of glistening muscle. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye as a blow flicked towards his shoulder. He brought his sword around to meet it. The power field crackled and spat sparks as it met a blade of smoking black iron.
‘Yes, Brother-Librarian,’ said Phobos, voice straining, muscles and armour bunching as he forced against the inhuman strength of the creature. It opened its mouth and its pink tongue tasted the air. He brought the muzzles of this storm bolter up under the creature’s face and fired.
