Old Earth

by Nick Kyme

  The Bearer of the Word smirked, unimpressed. ‘Is this where you tell me I am the desolation, that the purpose you spoke of on the mountain will restore this city and somehow myself? I am not overly fond of metaphor. You may not have noticed, but I have a preference that leans towards killing, not poetry,’ said Narek, his hands unclenching. ‘I need no weapon to kill you. If this is indeed my mind, I imagine your forced removal from it would be painful. Tell me who you are.’

  ‘Your preference towards killing is precisely why I need you,’ the old man replied, stepping back.

  Narek snorted. ‘And this is where you throw off your cloak in a flash of–’

  The blow against Narek’s temple forced him to one knee. His vision blackened, and he gasped at the sheer strength of the old man. He rose swiftly, head throbbing, off balance but eager for retribution and found a sword at his throat. Runes glinted on the blade, inhuman, suggesting power.

  Narek pulled up short as a bead of blood materialised on the blade’s edge where it touched his skin. Mastering his anger, he looked up into the true face of his attacker and laughed aloud.

  ‘I knew it. The eyes gave you away… eldar.’

  Eldrad Ulthran regarded the beast he had heeled, knowing he would soon have to slip him from the leash.

  Sweeping aside his robes, he sheathed his witchblade. The act of drawing it had been a theatrical indulgence, more in keeping with the sons and daughters of the Laughing God.

  In this place where ostensible reality bent to his will, he had no need to draw his sword. Still, the point had been made.

  ‘I am a seer,’ said Eldrad, speaking to Narek through the mask of his Ghosthelm.

  ‘The armour you wear under those robes says otherwise,’ said Narek, rising to his feet and rubbing the side of his skull where Eldrad had struck him. ‘I suppose this isn’t real pain I am feeling.’

  ‘Oh, it is real. The pain is the mind convulsing.’

  ‘You struck my mind? That’s low, even for xenos.’

  ‘I do not care for that word.’

  ‘Then I shall employ it more often. You still haven’t told me who you are.’

  ‘I am a seer, one of Ulthwé. Eldrad. Eldrad Nuirasha Ulthran.’

  ‘Is that meant to mean something to me? I am unimpressed, witch. And what does a seer need with someone like me? A renegade, a zealot. A Bearer of the Word.’

  ‘And whose Word do you bear, Barthusa Narek?’

  Narek’s eye strayed to the sliver of fulgurite still nestled in Eldrad’s open hand.

  On the horizon a second sun began to dawn, more vibrant than the pale reflection hanging in the ethereal sky.

  ‘I warned you about that.’

  ‘And you now know my given name.’

  ‘Familiarity was contingent on it being reciprocal…’

  ‘Then I lied about not using it. Are you usually this petulant, ­Barthusa, or is it because your father called you by that name?’

  ‘I have no love for him, or you,’ Narek replied, and Eldrad could tell he was right.

  ‘But this is different, isn’t it,’ he said, holding the fulgurite sliver between thumb and forefinger. ‘You felt his power, didn’t you, his immortal nature?’

  The sun’s light brightened, touching Narek’s grey armour in gilded shafts.

  Through sheer will, Narek averted his gaze and Eldrad closed his hand, hiding the sliver like a conjurer vanishes a coin.

  ‘I am no pawn,’ said Narek.

  ‘I do not need a pawn. I need an assassin.’

  ‘And you think I am oathed to you, do you? Because I owe you my life?’

  ‘No, I think you will do it because you like killing, and because I can give you what you want.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘A means to reach him.’

  A nerve tensed along Narek’s jawline, visible under his scarred skin.

  ‘Don’t you eldar have killers, or don’t you believe in murder? Too cold for your xenos blood?’

  ‘I asked you not to use that word,’ Eldrad warned, but left it at that. ‘And, yes, we have killers. Many, and they are stunningly proficient. Alas, I only have you. This war is not the eldar’s. It is mankind’s. Most of my race has no wish to be involved, though some are entirely too involved. I wish to see mankind endure, others of my kind do not. You are crude, base creatures, barely primordial in their eyes, and doomed to repeat history.’

  Narek gave a wry smile. ‘Is this an eldar attempt at flattery?’ He leaned in closer, conspiratorially. ‘It has missed the mark, I am afraid. I have no stake in this war.’

  He winced, half turning at the sun, rising fast.

  ‘I doubt you even convinced yourself of that. You have a stake. It is personal, yes, but a stake none the less. Fate, Barthusa Narek, is of great concern to you, I think. Your own, that of your brothers, your father’s…’

  A tremor below Narek’s eye betrayed him.

  ‘Yes, I thought so,’ said Eldrad, seeing all. ‘Fate is occluded to me. It is important for you to understand how absurd this notion is. I am not merely a seer, I am a farseer, and can discern the skeins of fate as easily as the scars upon your brutish face. It is a litany of suffering, Barthusa Narek. A map of your pain.’ Eldrad shook his head, almost surprised at the alliance he was trying to forge. ‘You are indeed an ugly beast.’

  Narek weighed that up in the expression on his face, and deemed it fair.

  ‘Closer to the mark that time, xenos.’

  Glad that his helm hid the scowl on his face, Eldrad went on.

  ‘Your primitive mind would baulk at the sheer immensity of the skeins of fate, so think of them as a web, intersecting, overlapping, myriad in complexity. A mind such as mine can navigate this web, cutting some strands, preserving others. A cohort of creatures, a cabal – some of whom are my kin, others… older – seek to manipulate fate. More than that, they have done so on several occasions. I desire to redress the balance.

  ‘They have certain agents, remarkable individuals who can cheat fate. Immortals of a kind. Persistent. Each strand of fate attached to such a being vibrates. It moves so fast that even for a mind as accomplished as mine the skein becomes obscured. Fate literally blurs. I must prevent such vibrations. Only then can I set matters upon the proper path. You, Barthusa Narek, are precisely who I need to still the skeins of fate, to still the web.’

  ‘Kill these immortals?’ said Narek. ‘How? If they are what you say they are, then how can one even as accomplished in killing as I murder them?’ He sounded rueful, but distracted.

  The light burned. Smoke rose in uncoiling tendrils from Narek’s armour.

  ‘What is–’ he began.

  A distant figure stood surrounded by the light of that golden sun. He carried a flaming sword and wore a laurel crown.

  Eldrad smiled, as a master would to his hound. ‘You are amusing to me, Barthusa Narek.’

  ‘I will be markedly less so when we are face-to-face. I have killed witches before – your kind, others. It matters not. You will use the fulgurite, or I will.’

  The light overtook them, but not just light, fire too – a storm of it, heralded by the rising sun.

  ‘Ever surprising are you, Barthusa Narek,’ Eldrad said calmly. ‘Yes, though not all will require it.’

  ‘It proves the Emperor’s divinity.’ Narek had to bellow against the roaring firestorm. His skin prickled. What little hair he possessed began to burn.

  ‘And as such it has divine power,’ Eldrad replied without concern, seemingly heedless of the purifying flames, ‘His power,’ he said, and acknowledged the conflagration coming towards them for the first time. ‘And you know that with it even gods, or those claiming to be gods, can die.’

  ‘How do you know I’ll help you?’ Narek shouted, trying to turn, but the light blinded, and Eldrad knew he would barely
be able to hear his own voice; that searing heat would be coursing down his throat, burning his lungs…

  Untouched by fire, Eldrad smiled one last time.

  ‘Fate.’

  And the fire crashed against them both, drowning the ruins of the perfect city in immolation.

  Far from sight, far from notice, cloistered away most safely, a farmer tended to his fields.

  He had done so every day since he had come to the farm. He had basked in the low, warming sun; he had breathed deeply of the air. He had listened to nature, and he had gratefully accepted the aches and pains of his labours at the end of each day.

  But as he stood amongst the crops for harvest, an expansive yellow belt of wheat akin to that which might still be found on Iax, he stopped sharply and looked up.

  He felt something. A change in the wind. A presaging of inclement weather, perhaps. A hunter hiding in the crop in search of food, for there were herd-beasts on the farm too.

  No, not a hunter.

  The farmer’s gaze strayed to the man sitting on the stoop to his agri barn. A thin trail of blue-grey smoke escaped in the parting of his lips. He watched the farmer ceaselessly, waving his hand in a dismissive manner.

  All is well. Carry on.

  The sense of change lingered. The farmer went back to his crops.

  Nine

  Opening salvoes, well met

  Possessed of either arrogance or sheer stupidity, the cruiser’s crew took the bait.

  A modest-sized ship, Dauntless-class, its name was the Cthonic Blood. A sea-green livery and the eye emblazoned on its hull left its allegiance in no doubt.

  Sons of Horus.

  Every ship in the flotilla flew the Warmaster’s colours, rigid in the airless void. Brutish, ugly vessels, they nonetheless looked capable and bristled with guns. But the Cthonic Blood had strayed, reacting to a faint signal return. Another ship, a known vessel of a war cell belonging to Shadrak Meduson had appeared on long-range augur. So the Cthonic Blood had decreased engine speed and begun to come about. Interference from the sporadic solar flares in this region of space was fouling ship-to-ship vox, but the ship’s captain had every reason to feel confident. He had a pair of heavily armed destroyers to port and starboard, hovering in the upper and lower battlespheres relative to the Cthonic Blood.

  He would eliminate this errant vessel and return to the flotilla in short order.

  Or so Nuros imagined.

  On the bridge of the Saurod, the Salamander gave a feral grin beneath his helm’s faceplate. A pugnacious vessel, the Saurod had no voids, instead relying upon an all-encompassing sheath of adamantium armour plate. Scarred and pitted along both flanks, ventral and dorsal aspects, it had the demeanour of a hoary old drake too stubborn to die.

  Nuros liked it very much. It wasn’t his vessel, in that he was not its captain, but it represented that last shred of Nocturne, a world he expected never to see again. A shame that it would have to earn more scar tissue. Wounds upon wounds, he thought, and supposed the Saurod was not so unlike everyone in Meduson’s company.

  ‘What about Bloodtooth?’ he said across the vox, taking his leave of the bridge and signalling the warriors in his retinue to follow. More awaited him in the launch bays. Pyroclasts. Last of a dying breed, he thought.

  ‘Is something wrong with just “sword”?’ Lumak’s voice replied from another ship, the Gorgon’s Will, several hundred kilometres away in the Warleader’s fleet.

  Nuros scowled, running along one of the spinal corridors that led down to the launch bays. At least the Saurod was a relatively straightforward ship, he reflected, as the first salvoes from the Sons of Horus cruiser smacked against the hull. ‘No art, you Medusans. No poetry. Too prosaic, my iron-hided brother. I shall suggest another.’

  Armour shook, so did the corridor, but the worst of the broadsides was absorbed. The Saurod’s engines burned hot, much like the blood of its warriors. Before Vulkan, the XVIII Legion had been a self-destructive breed. No matter the odds, no matter the cost, they fought every war as though it were a war of attrition. Retreat would not be countenanced. Death was preferable. Extinction had loomed, genuinely. Only with their primarch’s tempering influence had the Legion survived, and learned to fight a different way.

  Nuros wondered if, with Vulkan’s death, they were destined to backslide towards self-annihilation again. He smiled sadly. At least that notion had some poetry to it.

  ‘Vanquish, that’s a good name,’ he said, barrelling through the last ventral corridor, hunched against the close confines of the ship. Emerging through a blast door, the space opened out at once into a frenetic launch bay. Sirens blared, warning of the imminence of attack and of repeated damage sustained. Announcements crackled over the vox-casters, broken and indistinct.

  ‘A tad presumptuous, perhaps,’ conceded Nuros, ‘but all the best names are. Hyperbole, that is what you need to reach for, Lumak.’

  The Avernii captain grunted with disdain, and severed the link.

  ‘Do I hear reluctant agreement?’ the Salamander asked, feigning surprise, speaking to static. Lumak had his own battles to fight. Time Nuros went to his. He had reached the launches, a battered quartet of gunships readying for his and his warriors’ departure. Servitors and dirty deck crews scurried.

  Four partial squads of Pyroclasts stood ready too, their flame gauntlets unlit but eager. The remnants of a tactical support squad made up the rest of the complement, two carrying breacher shields. It was an uneven but battle-hardened party. Even with Nuros and his men, they numbered less than sixty. Only one amongst the boarders eschewed drakescale-green, and Nuros nodded to him as the ramps of the gunships opened in needlessly dramatic unison.

  ‘Are you here to keep me alive, son of Corax?’

  ‘Solemnly, I must,’ Kaylar Norn replied. He wore the prime helix on his left kneepad and had a red stripe bifurcating the conical nose of his war-helm. Unlike some of the Apothecarion, Norn maintained his Legion’s forbidding heraldry.

  Nuros laughed, derisive, but clapped Norn on the shoulder guard as he passed by.

  ‘To death then?’ he said, nonchalant.

  ‘Yours or mine?’ asked Norn, his mood as black as his armour.

  Nuros just laughed louder.

  Of all the Legions sundered at Isstvan, the Salamanders had suffered the worst. Not least of the harm done was the irreparable damage sustained by their Apothecary cadres, which had resulted in a severe shortage of battlefield surgeons and a grim cessation of the collecting of gene-seed from the dead or mortally injured.

  Considering the latter, the prognosis for the Legion was bleak, but at least Norn’s presence could help to redress the former. He followed Nuros up the ramp. As it closed behind him, the darkness of the hold engulfed them both.

  Shadrak Meduson watched the hololith, his right hand on the pommel of his Albian sword.

  A formation of red icons rendered up as basic battleship outlines was strung out across the battlesphere, the three-dimensional region in which void combat took place. With the rest of the Iron Heart’s bridge in darkness, the hololithic display lit the hard contours of the Warleader’s armour in washed-out grey, emphasising the lines.

  Somewhere in the shadows, the bridge crew silently toiled, hunched over consoles, waiting, as pensive as their captain.

  Another group of icons, this time in green, lurked at the periphery of the image. Except for one.

  The ironclad known as the Saurod burned hard towards a light cruiser at the rear of the flotilla. A data-feed to the right of the illuminated field of engagement showed that the Cthonic Blood had already changed course and launched an attack. A salvo of plasma torpedoes struck the Saurod’s heavy armour, their trajectories each marked by a broken parabolic line to varying degrees of curve.

  At present, only a pair of destroyers had joined the larger ship. The rest of the flotilla carrie
d on, unaware that their befouled communications had been caused by design, not solar radiation.

  This region was known as the Zanaeh Gulf, an unimportant part of the void but one fraught with celestial phenomena anathema to the unimpeded function of both sensors and long-range vox.

  Meduson had chosen it deliberately for an ambush only made possible by the intelligence gleaned from Hamart III.

  ‘I think our Nocturnean cousin enjoys taking a beating,’ said Mechosa, coming to stand beside his Warleader.

  Meduson blinked and felt the sting of his dry eyes. He grimaced, prompting a mildly concerned enquiry from the Sorrgol captain.

  ‘Just a little retina burn,’ said Meduson. ‘But you’re right,’ he added, gently kneading both eye sockets with thumb and forefinger, ‘he does enjoy a beating. Proves he’s still strong.’

  ‘He’s a masochist,’ Mechosa replied.

  ‘Aren’t we all, brother?’

  It had been a labour of extreme proportions preparing for and executing this attack. Days had gone into sounding out tactics and ship dispositions; the gauging of martial strength, both allied and enemy; assessing the proposed expenditure of ammunition and fuel; and estimating casualties. It had been a careful and meticulous balancing of effort against reward.

  It had been arduous both gathering the various war cells and then convincing them of the sense in this endeavour, especially the Iron Fathers. But the battleships of Atraxii, Felg, Raukaan and Garrsak had all joined the fleet.

  Fleet? Meduson laughed to himself at the word. Not yet, but soon.

  Autek Mor, at the helm of the Red Talon, commanded a size­able number of ships and warriors, and Meduson harboured faint hopes that he would be willing to conjoin their resources. Mor had an independent streak, a warrior both arrogant and egotistical. He might just as easily stay to reap the battle spoils and then depart to wherever he saw fit. So be it, thought Meduson; his grand cruiser alone would be a great asset in the fight to come.

  The flotilla outnumbered them and contained a host of frigates, but several cruisers too, the largest vessels to the front and rear of the formation. Smaller, more heavily armed destroyers roamed like outriders. These ships would have to be dealt with first. Meduson’s plan relied on the masters of the flotilla being overconfident and spread across a vast distance. They would be slow to manoeuvre, and take time to react – and react they would. He needed a way to split their forces, to deal with the flotilla piecemeal. Only the destroyers had the necessary speed to complicate that plan.