Traitor's Gorge

by Mike Lee

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  THE FARSEER RAISED the delicate wraithbone cup to her lips and sipped lightly of the quicksilver wine. Her two guests leaned forward slightly, robes rustling as they chose their own cups from the black lacquered table. Their movements were fractionally swifter and more direct than proper etiquette allowed, but they were wanderers, and had been a long time away from the craftworld, so a certain lack of decorum was to be expected. Hours of polite conversation and con­templative silences had worn their patience thin. They were ready to hear the reason for their summons.

  Sethyr Tuannan breathed deeply, her senses sharpening as the effects of the wine spread swiftly through her system. The three eldar sat in a secluded comer of a meditative garden within the outer precincts of the Dome of Crystal Seers, a refuge that encour­aged both contemplation and discretion. The farseer shifted her body ever so slightly away from the low table, towards the rushing waterfall that roiled the waters of the wide pool just a few metres to their left. Sethyr closed her eyes. The breath of the falls stirred the lush grass that bordered the pool, and plucked at the braids of hey long, dark hair. Intricate, shifting patterns of mist pressed like spider webs against her pale cheeks.

  'I have seen the doom of Alaitoc,' she said, her voice heavy with portent.

  The two rangers sipped their wine and made no reply. Doom stalked the eldar at every turn. Those that travelled the Path of the Outcast, as they did, knew this more than most.

  'Of late, your ranging has taken you through the Abraig an'athas,' the farseer said. 'What did you find there?'

  The more senior of the two rangers, a pathfinder named Shaniel, curled her lips in distaste. She wore her hair very short, and feath­ered in shades of sea green and sapphire. The tattooed rune of the Outcast stood out sharply beneath the corner of her right eye. 'War and desolation,' she answered softly. The humans know the region as the Loki Sector, and believe it to be theirs - but of late the orks of Charadon have put lie to their claim.'

  Shaniel's companion nodded in agreement. He was much younger, slender as a monowhip, with large agate-coloured eyes.

  'The greenskins have invaded in great numbers,' Teuthas added. 'Many systems were overwhelmed. Even Rynn's World, home to an order of human Aspect Warriors—'

  'Space Marines,' Shaniel corrected. 'Adeptus Astartes .' Her delicate features contorted as she struggled with the guttural, human words. 'They call themselves Crimson Fists.'

  Teuthas nodded respectfully. Yes. Just so. The orks destroyed their...' He looked to the pathfinder. 'Shrine?'

  'Fortress-monastery,' Shaniel said. 'Alike in function, if not in form.'

  'Ah,' Teuthas said. The ranger took a nervous sip of his wine. 'Well. At any rate, these... Crimson Fists... suffered grievously. Many hundreds were slain.'

  'The ork warlord had apparently singled them out for destruction,' Shaniel explained. 'Barely a handful survived, but by all accounts they fought well, holding out against the onslaught long enough for Imperial reinforcements to arrive. Now the orks have been driven off-world and are retreating back towards Charadon.'

  'No,' the farseer said. 'Not all. And therein lies our peril.'

  Shaniel's smooth brow furrowed ever so slightly in consternation. Sethyr Tuannan was the youngest and least experienced of Alaitoc's farseers, but like most who walked the Path of the Seer, she had already grown fond of speaking in riddles. The seers hold her in great esteem, the pathfinder reminded herself. And before she chose the Path of the Seer, she walked the path of the Dire Avenger, so she is well versed in war. Listen closely, and think on what she says.

  Young Teuthas, however, was less inclined towards contempla­tion. 'I don't understand.' The directness of the statement skirted the very edges of propriety. 'What does the aftermath of an ork invasion - on a human world, no less - have to do with us?'

  Shaniel replaced her cup on the table with a graceful sweep of her arm and sighed faintly, indicating deep disapproval of her com­panion's boorish behaviour. But the farseer smoothed the awkward moment away with a languid wave of her hand.

  'The skein of fate is comprised of a great many threads,' she said to Teuthas. 'Indeed, the threads of the galaxy's other races are far more numerous than our own. It is only natural that they would be caught up in the weaving of our fate, whether we desire it or not.'

  Teuthas leaned forward, thin lips compressing in a thoughtful frown. 'Well, all right,' he allowed. 'But I still don't see how—'

  Sethyr silenced the ranger with a single arched eyebrow. Chastened, Teuthas sat back and contemplated his wine.

  The farseer let go of her cup. It hung in the air next to her, spin­ning slowly, its delicate surface glowing from within. Sethyr opened her other hand, revealing a trio of gleaming rune stones. They were the foundation of the seer's art, acting as a kind of lens through which they could focus their awareness and unravel the complexi­ties of the skein. As she concentrated on the stones, they stirred to life, rising into the air like leaves whirling in a gust of wind. 'Twenty-five passes hence, a great shadow will fall upon the Abraig an'athas,' the farseer intoned. 'The orks will come howling out of Charadon in numbers unheard of, led by a warlord greater and more terrible than any we have known before. They will lay waste to the worlds of humankind, and then fall upon the maiden worlds, further to the galactic south, which the Biel-tan call the Tuagh an Gwyl.'

  Shaniel nodded to herself. 'The Jewels of the Night,' she said. 'I know them well. Of all the maiden worlds, the Biel-tan love them most. They would fight to the last breath to protect them.'

  'And so they will. But even the valour of the Biel-tan will not be enough,' Sethyr replied. 'In their darkest hour, they will invoke the ancient ties of honour between Alaitoc and Biel-tan, and call to us for aid. And we will go to them. We will gird ourselves in our war-masks, and our battle-harnesses, and hasten to our doom.' Shaniel's hand strayed to the spirit stone that hung on a chain around her neck. A chill had crept into her heart. Even Teuthas had grown sombre, his wine cup cradled in his hands.

  'The war will be long and terrible. Our blood will flow across the maiden worlds, and the greater our loss, the more stubborn our leaders will become. And once our strength is spent, the orks will unleash their fury upon our
craftworld. Alaitoc will burn.'

  Teuthas gasped in shock. He had forgotten himself entirely, but for once, Shaniel could not fault him. 'Impossible!' he said.

  Sethyr glanced at the young ranger. Her expression was bleak. 'I have seen it, Teuthas. Broken domes and lifeless bodies, tumbling into the darkness. Fire and blood. The infinity circuit will resonate with the screams of the tortured and the dying, until finally it will shatter from the strain.' Tears glimmered in the farseer's eyes. The orks will make a lair out of our beautiful home for nearly a hundred passes, until finally it is destroyed. Only then will the war end, and our people pass into memory.'

  For a moment, neither of the rangers could speak. Shaniel fought against a rising tide of despair. With an effort, she pushed the dark thoughts aside and composed herself.

  'What can we do?' she asked calmly.

  The farseer considered her reply carefully. 'Perhaps nothing,' she said. 'Orks are such impulsive creatures that their fates are almost too chaotic to follow. I have sifted through countless different threads, searching for a better outcome, but to no avail. Once the war begins, all paths eventually lead to our defeat.'

  'And before then?' Teuthas asked. 'Can we stop the ork rampage before it starts?'

  Sethyr shook her head. 'I have contemplated every possibility, from assassinating the ork warlord to launching a pre-emptive invasion of Charadon,' she said. 'The attempts fail. Worse, they accelerate the ork invasion of the Abraig an'athas.'

  She sighed. 'We cannot prevent this. But perhaps, with your help, someone else might.'

  Teuthas straightened, shaking off his own dark musings. 'Tell us,' he asked, his expression intent

  The farseer studied the whirling rune stones. 'A great many catas­trophes begin with a single, seemingly unrelated event,' she said. 'The fall of Alaitoc begins on Rynn's World, just a few dozen cycles from now. The ork who will, in passes to come, supplant Snagrod as the Arch-Arsonist of Charadon, will begin his rise to power with the death of the human warrior called Pedro Kantor.'

  THE GREENSKIN WAS a towering brute, two-and-a-half metres tall and broad as a bull grox. Clad in patchwork armour made from scavenged steel plates, and brandishing a massive cleaver and a huge, belt-fed gun in its knobby fists, it lurched from the darkness of a decrepit shack into a storm of smoke and full-auto fire. Mass-reactive shells were rip­ping through the squalid, ork camp, clawing apart their sheet metal huts and scattering piles of refuse, or kicking up geysers of mud and fluid from steaming cesspools. Greenskins charged about in confu­sion, roused from their night-time stupor by the sudden onslaught and blazing away with their own weapons at anything that moved. Streams of green and red tracers sprayed in every direction, buzzing and snapping down the narrow lanes or ricocheting wildly from the armoured flanks of ork bikes and war buggies. Coals scattered from the greenskins' many bonfires had set a number of trash piles alight, deepening the murk and adding to the chaos.

  The ork brute breathed in the reek of burning trash and the stink of spent propellant. Its beady eyes narrowed, and a toothy grin spread across its scarred face. A stray round spanged off its left shoulder plate and went howling off into the darkness. Filling its lungs with smoky air, the greenskin raised its weapons, threw back its horned head, and roared.

  'Waaaaaaaa—'

  A figure reared up out of the smoke. A giant of a man, clad in battered armour of midnight blue and hammered gold. A winged skull in silver, covered in bright scars from the bite of bullet and blade, was emblazoned across his breastplate, and golden laurels of valour were fixed to the warrior's pauldrons and greaves. A fifth laurel wrought in dark grey metal and humming with untapped power, rested upon the brow of the giant's scratched and pitted helm. Ragged stubs of parchment, fixed to the warrior's armour by huge wax seals, fluttered at shoulder and knee, and a tattered crimson tabard hung from his armoured waist. The giant's fists were painted the colour of blood, and the right one, outsized and crackling with fearsome energies, was raised to strike.

  Pedro Kantor, Chapter Master of the Crimson Fists, reached the ork in a single stride and slapped the brute across the face with his power fist. The fist's power field met flesh and bone with a sizzling crack, bursting the greenskin's head apart.

  'For Dorn and the Emperor!' Kantor roared, his war cry ringing from his helmet's speaker grille and across the combat patrol's vox-net. 'Death to the xenos!'

  Guttural roars and furious, bloodthirsty shouts echoed from the darkness in answer to Kantor's challenge. Hobnailed boots pounded over the barren ground as the greenskins came charging down the camp's filth-strewn lanes towards the sound of the Chapter Master's voice. Within moments, they were upon him, charging out of the murk from ahead and to either side; a dozen, perhaps more, brandishing a wicked array of cleavers, axes, prybars and oversized spanners. They fired on Kantor as they charged, filling the air with burning streams of lead. Their battle-cries shook the air, reverberating against the thick ceramite plates of his armour.

  It was a vision of hell that would have tested the courage of any mortal, but Kantor was a Crimson Fist, first among the shield-hands of Dorn, and he knew no fear. The Chapter Master answered the orks' war cries with a furious shout of his own and waded into the storm. Heavy shells buzzed past his helmet, or caromed off the curved surfaces of his ancient battle armour. One round flattened against his chest with a dull clang, leaving a shallow, circular dent just over his primary heart. Kantor shrugged off the impacts as though they were little more than raindrops. His left gauntlet came up in a sweeping arc, trailing linked ammunition feeds that fed the relic weapon mounted on his forearm. Dorn's Arrow thundered, the twin barrels of the venerated storm bolter glowing red as it unleashed a withering burst of mass-reactive shells into the ranks of the charging orks. The burst scythed into the oncoming greenskins, the explosive rounds burying themselves deep in the xenos's dense flesh before blowing apart. Four of the onrushing orks toppled to the ground, their smoking corpses trampled in an instant by the onrushing mob.

  A warning icon flashed in Kantor's helmet display. Dorn's Arrow consumed ammunition at a prodigious rate, and it had been eighty-seven days since the patrol's last resupply. The Chapter Master reckoned that he had one or two bursts left before the weapon ran dry.

  The greenskin mob was growing by the moment, as more and more of the xenos were drawn to the sound of battle. They came at Kantor in a howling tide of muscle and iron, their beady eyes glint­ing with bloodlust. The Chapter Master raised his crackling power fist in reply - and orange tongues of flame stabbed from the dark­ness at his back.

  Sergeant Edrys Phrenotas and his Sternguard veterans fired as they advanced, ripping into the ork mob with precise bursts from their drum-fed Phobos-pattem boltguns. In better times, each of the Sternguard would have been armed with an array of special ammu­nition, from searing Hellfire rounds to armour-piercing Vengeance bolts, but the stores of those rare and prized shells had long since been used up. The veterans were reduced to using common bolt-gun rounds; nonetheless, every shot found its mark in the head or chest of a charging ork, hurling the corpses of the front rank back upon the mob and causing them to falter. Phrenotas took position at Kantor's right, firing his combi-bolter one-handed at the xenos. Blood and bits of green flesh sizzled from the knuckles of the sergeant's power fist.

  'Now, Artos!' the veteran sergeant commanded.

  To Kantor's left, one of the Sternguard took a step forwards and levelled the hissing projectors of a heavy flamer at the mob. There was a draconic roar of superheated air as twin streams of searing promethium engulfed the tangled mob. Bellows of rage turned to shrieks of agony as the liquid fire ate through flesh and bone. Ammunition in the orks' guns cooked off in the intense heat, filling the air with shrapnel and adding to the carnage. The momentary pyre lit the night like a flare, casting ghoulish shadows against the sides of the orks' ramshackle huts and painting the canted belly of the crashed transport ship that loomed above the south end of the camp.

&
nbsp; Kantor tasted the acrid, earthy stink of burning ork through his helmet's olfactory receptors. The few greenskins that had escaped the flames had been driven back the way they had come. One of the Sternguard to the Chapter Master's right sighted down the scope mounted on his boltgun and snapped off a single shot at a retreat­ing ork. A moment later the crump of the exploding round and a harsh, gurgling scream told that the veteran's bolt had found its mark.

  More sounds of boltgun fire thundered off in the darkness to the Chapter Master's right, forming a wide arc to the east and south-east. The far end of the arc was anchored by Sergeant Victurix and his Terminators, with the ten Space Marines of Sergeant Daecor's. Tactical squad in the centre. Kantor had decided to strike the ork camp from three sides, to sow confusion and force the greenskins to fight on a broad front. Now it was time to drive the xenos into the trap.

  The Chapter Master keyed his vox-link. 'Squads Daecor and Victurix, begin your advance,' he ordered. 'Keep moving. Don't give the beasts time to react.' He glanced to his right. 'Phrenotas?'

  'Right flank is clear, my lord,' the veteran sergeant answered sharply. The Stemguards' armour, like their Chapter Master's, was battered and scarred from nearly two years of relentless combat against the ork invaders of Rynn's World, but their hearts were hard as iron. They were among the finest of the Chapter's elite Crusade Company, and they lived and died at their Chapter Master's com­mand. 'Awaiting your order.'

  Kantor took a bearing on their objective, just a few hundred metres north-west, and nodded. 'Fire pattern epsilon! Follow me!'

  The Chapter Master pressed onwards, his armoured boots scattering red-hot fragments of metal and bits of blackened bone as he tramped through the remnants of the pyre. Beyond, the narrow lane wound past another cluster of rusting, sheet metal huts before curving sharply to the south. Kantor followed the path only as far as it led towards his goal, then raised his power fist and ploughed on ahead, smashing through a reeking hut made from scavenged deck plate and bits of refuse. The Crimson Fists burst through the far side into a small cleared area that was crowded with the skeletons of derelict ork bikes. A pack of vicious, diminutive greenskins scattered like rats at the Space Marines' sudden appearance, brandishing oversized pistols and knives as they took cover behind and beneath the bikes. Kantor and the Sternguard scarcely broke stride, kicking over the derelict vehicles and crushing the screeching xenos beneath their boots. A handful of the creatures escaped, firing wildly over their knobby shoulders as they fled along another crooked lane to the south-west, towards the crashed transport.