by Dan Abnett
NINE
The unthinkable
Spirits of the Whisperheads
Compatible minds
Two DAYS BEFORE the Legion's assault on the Whisper-heads, Loken had consented to another private interview with the remembrancer Mersadie Oliton. It was the third such interview he had granted since his election to the Mournival, at which time his attitude towards her seemed to have substantially altered. Though the subject had not been mentioned formally, Mersadie had begun to feel that Loken had chosen her to be his particular memorialist. He had told her on the night of his election that he might choose to share his recollections with her, but she was now secretly astonished at the extent of his eagerness to do so. She had already recorded almost six hours of reminiscence -accounts of battles and tactics, descriptions of especially demanding military operations, reflections on the qualities of certain types of weapon, celebrations of notable deeds and triumphs accomplished by his comrades. In the time between interviews, she took herself to her room and processed the material, composing it into the
skeleton of a long, fluid account. She hoped eventually to have a complete history of the expedition, and a more general record of the Great Crusade as witnessed by Loken during the other expeditions that had preceded the 63rd.
Indeed, the weight of anecdotal fact she was gathering was huge, but one thing was lacking, and that was Loken himself. In the latest interview, she tried once again to draw out some spark of the man.
'As I understand it.’ she said, 'you have nothing in you that we ordinary mortals might know as fear?'
Loken paused and frowned. He had been lapping a plate section of his armour. This seemed to be his favourite diversion when in her company. He would call her to his private arming chamber and sit mere, scrupulously polishing his war harness while he spoke and she listened. To Mersadie, the particular smell of the lapping powder had become synonymous with the sound of his voice and the matter of his tales. He had well over a century of stories to tell.
'A curious question.’ he said.
And how curious is the answer?'
Loken shrugged lightly. The Astartes have no fear. It is unthinkable to us.’
'Because you have trained yourself to master it?' Mersadie asked.
'No, we are trained for discipline, but the capacity for fear is bred out of us. We are immune to its touch.’
Mersadie made a mental note to edit this last comment later. To her, it seemed to leach away some of the heroic mystique of the Astartes. To deny fear was the very character of a hero, but there was nothing courageous about being insensible to the emotion. She wondered too if it was possible to simply remove an entire emotion from what was essentially a human mind. Did that not leave a void? Were other emotions
compromised by its lack? Could fear even be removed cleanly, or did its excision tear out shreds of other qualities along with it? It certainly might explain why the Astartes seemed larger than life in almost every aspect except their own personalities.
Well, let us continue.’ she said. At our last meeting, you were going to tell me about the war against the overseers. That was twenty years ago, wasn't it?'
He was still looking at her, eyes slightly narrowed. What?' he asked.
'I'm sorry?'
'What is it? You didn't like my answer just then.’
Mersadie cleared her throat. 'No, not at all. It wasn't that. I had just been...'
'What?'
'May I be candid?'
'Of course.’ he said, patiently rubbing a nub of polishing fibre around the edges of a pot.
'I had been hoping to get something a little more personal. You have given me a great deal, sir, authentic details and points of fart that would make any history text authoritative. Posterity will know with precision, for instance, which hand Iacton Qruze carried his sword in, the colour of the sky over the Monastery Cities of Nabatae, the methodology of the White Scars' favoured pincer assault, the number of studs on the shoulder plate of a Luna Wolf, the number of axe blows, and from which angles, it took to fell the last of the Omakkad Princes...' She looked at him squarely, 'but nothing about you, sir. I know what you saw, but not what you felt.’
'What I felt? Why would anyone be interested in that?'
'Humanity is a sensible race, sir. Future generations, those that our remembrances are intended for, will learn more from any factual record if those facts are couched in an emotional context. They will care less for
the details of the battles at Ullanor, for instance, than they will for a sense of what it felt like to be there.’
'Are you saying that I'm boring?' Loken asked.
'No, not at all,' she began, and then realised he was smiling. 'Some of the things you have told me sound like wonders, yet you do not yourself seem to wonder at them. If you know no fear, do you also not know awe? Surprise? Majesty? Have you not seen things so bizarre they left you speechless? Shocked you? Unnerved you even?'
'I have.’ he said. 'Many times the sheer oddity of the cosmos has left me bemused or startled.’
'So tell me of those things.’
He pursed his lips and thought about it. 'Giant hats.’ he began.
'I beg your pardon?'
'On Sarosel, after compliance, the citizens held a great carnival of celebration. Compliance had been bloodless and willing. The carnival ran for eight weeks. The dancers in the streets wore giant hats of ribbon and cane and paper, each one fashioned into some gaudy form: a ship, a sword and fist, a dragon, a sun. They were as broad across as my span.’ Loken spread his arms wide. 'I do not know how they balanced them, or suffered their weight, but day and night they danced along the inner streets of the main city, these garish forms weaving and bobbing and circling, as if carried along on a slow flood, quite obscuring the human figures beneath. It was an odd sight.’
'I believe you.’
'It made us laugh. It made Horus laugh to see it.’
'Was that the strangest thing you ever knew?'
'No, no. Let's see... the method of war on Keylek gave us all pause. This was eighty years ago. The keylekid were a grosteque alien kind, of a manner you might describe as reptilian. They were gready skilled in the arts of combat,
and rose against us angrily the moment we made contact. Their world was a harsh place I remember crimson rock and indigo water. The commander - this was long before he was made Warmaster - expected a prolonged and brutal struggle, for the keylekid were large and strong creatures. Even the least of their warriors took three or four bolt rounds to bring down. We drew forth upon their world to make war, but they would not fight us.’
'How so?'
"We did not comprehend the rules they fought by. As we learned later, the keylekid considered war to be the most abhorrent activity a sentient race could indulge in, so they set upon it tight controls and restrictions. There were large structures upon the surface of their world, rectangular fields many kilometres in dimension, covered with high, flat roofs and open at the sides. We named them "slaughterhouses", and there was one every few hundred kilometres. The keylekid would only fight at these prescribed places. The sites were reserved for combat. War was forbidden on any other part of their world's surface. They were waiting for us to meet them at a slaughterhouse and decide the matter.’
'How bizarre! What was done about it?'
'We destroyed the keylekid.’ he said, matter of factly.
'Oh.’ she replied, with a tilt of her abnormally long head.
'It was suggested that we might meet them and fight them by the terms of their rules.’ Loken said. 'There may have been some honour in that, but Maloghurst, I think it was, reasoned that we had rules of our own which the enemy chose not to recognise. Besides, they were formidable. Had we not acted decisively, they would have remained a threat, and how long would it have taken them to learn new rules or abandon old ones?'
'Is an image of them recorded?' Mersadie asked.
'Many, I believe. The preserved cadaver of one of their warriors is
displayed in this ship's Museum of Conquest,
and since you ask what I feel, sometimes it is sadness. You mentioned the overseers, a story I was going to tell. That was a long campaign, and one which filled me with
misery.'
As he told the story, she sat back, occasionally blink-clicking to store his image. He was concentrating on the preparation of his armour, but she could see sadness behind that concern. The overseers, he explained, were a machine race and, as artificial sentients, quite beyond the limits of Imperial law. Machine life untempered by organic components had long been outlawed by both the Imperial Council and the Mechanicum. The overseers, commanded by a senior machine called the Archdroid, inhabited a series of derelict, crumbling cities on the world of Dahinta. These were cities of fine mosaics, which had once been very beautiful indeed, but extreme age and decay had faded them. The overseers scuttled amongst the mouldering piles, fighting a losing battle of repair and refurbishment in a single-minded obsession to keep the neglected cities intact.
The machines had eventually been destroyed after a lasting and brutal war in which the skills of the Mechanicum had proved invaluable. Only then was the sad
secret found. The overseers were the product of human ingenuity,'
Loken said.
'Humans made them?'
Yes, thousands of years ago, perhaps even during the last Age of Technology. Dahinta had been a human colony, home to a lost branch of our race, where they had raised a great and marvellous culture of magnificent cities, wim thinking machines to serve mem. At some time, and in a manner unknown to us, the humans had become extinct. They left behind their ancient cities, empty but for the deathless guardians they had made. It was most melancholy, and passing strange.'
'Did the machines not recognise men?' she asked.
'All they saw was the Astartes, lady, and we did not look like the men they had called master.’
She hesitated for a moment, then said, 'I wonder if I shall witness so many marvels as we make this expedition.’
'I trust you will, and I hope that many will fill you with joy and amazement rather than distress. I should tell you sometime of the Great Triumph after Ullanor. That was an event that should be remembered.’
'I look forward to hearing it.’
There is no time now. I have duties to attend to.’
'One last story, then? A short one, perhaps? Something that filled you with awe.’
He sat back and thought. There was a thing. No more than ten years ago. We found a dead world where life had once been. A species had lived there once, and either died out or moved to another world. They had left behind them a honeycomb of subterranean habitats, dry and dead. We searched them carefully, every last cave and tunnel, and found just one thing of note. It was buried deepest of all, in a stone bunker ten kilometres under the planet's crust. A map. A great chart, in fact, fully twenty metres in diameter, showing the geophysical relief of an entire world in extraordinary detail. We did not at first recognise it, but the Emperor, beloved of all, knew what it was.’
"What?' she asked.
'It was Terra. It was a complete and full map of Terra, perfect in every detail. But it was a map of Terra from an age long gone, before the rise of the hives or the molestation of war, with coastlines and oceans and mountains of an aspect long since erased or covered over.’
IThat is... amazing,' she said. He nodded. 'So many unanswerable questions, locked into one forgotten chamber. Who had made the map,
and why? What business had brought them to Terra so long ago? What had caused them to carry the chart across half the galaxy, and then hide it away, like their most precious treasure, in the depths of their world? It was unthinkable. I cannot feel fear, Mistress Olitan, but if I could I would have felt it then. I cannot imagine anything ever unsettling my soul the way that thing did.’
UNTHINKABLE.
Time had slowed to a pinprick point on which it seemed all the gravity in the cosmos was pressing. Loken felt lead-heavy, slow, out of joint, unable to frame a lucid response, or even begin to deal with what he was seeing.
Was this fear? Was he tasting it now, after all? Was this how terror cowed a mortal man?
Sergeant Udon, his helm a deformed ring of bloody ceramite, lay dead at his feet. Beside him sprawled two other battle-brothers, shot point-blank through the hearts, if not dead then fatally damaged.
Before him stood Jubal, the bolter in his hand.
This was madness. This could not be. Astartes had turned upon Astartes. A Luna Wolf had murdered his own kind. Every law of fraternity and honour that Loken understood and trusted had just been torn as easily as a cobweb. The insanity of this crime would echo forever.
'Jubal? What have you done?'
'Not Jubal. Samus. I am Samus. Samus is all around you. Samus is the man beside you.’
Jubal's voice had a catch to it, a dry giggle. Loken knew he was about to fire again. The rest of Udon's squad, quite as aghast as Loken, stumbled forward, but none raised their bolters. Even in the stark light of what Jubal had just done, not one of them could break the sworn code of the Astartes and fire upon one of their own.
Loken knew he certainly couldn't. He threw his bolter aside and leapt at Jubal.
Xavyer Jubal, commander of Hellebore squad and one of the finest file officers in the company, had already begun to fire. Bolt rounds screeched out across the chamber and struck into the hesitating squad. Another helmet exploded in a welter of blood, bone chips and armour fragments, and another battle-brother crashed to the cave floor. Two more were knocked down beside him as bolt rounds detonated against their torso armour.
Loken smashed into Jubal, and staggered him backwards, trying to pin his arms. Jubal thrashed, sudden fury in his limbs.
'Samus!' he yelled. 'It means the end and the death! Samus will gnaw upon your bones!'
They crashed against a rock wall together with numbing force, splintering stone. Jubal would not relinquish his grip on the murder weapon. Loken drove him backwards against the rock, the drizzle of meltwater spraying down across them both.
'Jubal!'
Loken threw a punch that would have decapitated a mortal man. His fist cracked against Jubal's helm and he repeated the action, driving his fist four or five times against the other's face and chest. The ceramite visor chipped. Another punch, his full weight behind it, and Jubal stumbled. Each stroke of Loken's fist resounded like a smith's hammer in the echoing chamber, steel against steel.
As Jubal stumbled, Loken grabbed his bolter and tore it out of his hand. He hurled it away across the deep stone well.
But Jubal was not yet done. He seized Loken and slammed him sideways into the rock wall. Lumps of stone flew out from the jarring impact. Jubal slammed
him again, swinging Loken bodily into the rock, like a man swinging a heavy sack. Pain flared through Loken's head and he tasted blood in his mouth. He tried to pull away, but Jubal was throwing punches that ploughed into Loken's visor and bounced the back of his head off the wall repeatedly.
The other men were upon them, shouting and grappling to separate them.
'Hold him!' Loken yelled. 'Hold him down!'
They were Astartes, as strong as young gods in their power armour, but they could not do as Loken ordered. Jubal lashed out with a free fist and knocked one of them clean off his feet. Two of the remaining three clung to his back like wrestlers, like human cloaks, trying to pull him down, but he hoisted them up and twisted, throwing them off him.
Such strength. Such unthinkable strength that could shrug off Astartes like target dummies in a practice cage.
Jubal turned on the remaining brother, who launched himself forward to tackle the madman.
'Look out!' Jubal screamed with a cackle. 'Samus is here!'
His lancing right hand met the brother head on. Jubal struck with an open hand, fingers extended, and those fingers drove clean in through the battle-brother's gorget as surely as any speartip. Blood squirted out from the man's throat
, through the puncture in the armour. Jubal ripped his hand out, and the brother fell to his knees, choking and gurgling, blood pumping in profuse, pulsing surges from his ruptured throat.
Beyond any thought of reason now, Loken hurled himself at Jubal, but the berserker turned and smacked him away with a mighty back-hand slap.
The power of the blow was stupendous, far beyond anything even an Astartes should have been able to wield. The force was so great that the armour of Jubal's
gauntlet fractured, as did the plating of Loken's shoulder, which took the brunt. Loken blacked out for a split-second, then was aware that he was flying. Jubal had struck him so hard that he was sailing across the stone well and out over the abyssal fault.
Loken struck the arching pier of stone steps. He almost bounced off it, but he managed to grab on, his fingers gouging the ancient stone, his feet swinging above the drop. Meltwater poured down in a thin rain across him, making the steps slick and oily with mineral wash. Loken's fingers began to slide. He remembered dangling in a similar fashion over the tower lip in the 'Emperor's' palace, and snarled in frustrated rage.
Fury pulled him up. Fury, and an intense passion that he would not fail the Warmaster. Not in this. Not in the face of this terrible wrong.
He hauled himself upright on to the pier. It was narrow, no wider than a single path where men could not pass if they met. The gulf, black as the outer void, yawned below him. His limbs were shaking with effort.
He saw Jubal. He was charging forward across the cavern to the foot of the steps, drawing his combat blade. The sword glowed as it powered into life.
Loken wrenched out his own sword. Falling meltwater hissed and sparked as it touched the active metal of the short, stabbing blade.
Jubal bounded up the steps to meet him, slashing with his sword. He was raving still, in a voice that was in no way his own any longer. He struck wildly at Loken, who hopped back up the steps, and then began to deflect the strikes with his own weapon. Sparks flashed, and the blades struck one another like the tolling of a discordant bell. Height was not an advantage in this fight, as Loken had to hunch low to maintain his guard.
