My body cried out for sleep. I stood up, wavering. I staggered forward. The landing had been buckled by the explosion, and the door wrenched partly out of its frame. I could, I thought, just squeeze through the gap. I reached for my pistol. It was gone, lost in the rocket strike.
‘The Emperor protects,’ I whispered. ‘The Emperor provides.’ I had faith that He would. It was all that I had left, and it was enough. I leaned into the door, pushing the space between it and the wall open a few more centimetres. I crawled through.
Thraka was not waiting for me on the other side. No orks were. The room was large, but not as huge as the grandiose exterior had suggested. I was at the very peak of the temple. I had expected a shrine to the savage greenskin gods, perhaps some mark of Thraka’s command. Instead, I found command of a much more practical kind. I was in the control centre for the space hulk. I was surrounded by the ork version of consoles. They were massive, and risibly simple by human standards. Each console featured only a single button: huge, red, central. In the middle of the floor, a block of stone served as a dais. It was wide enough and massive enough to support the monstrosity of Thraka. He would stand there, I thought, and give his orders, which would be carried out from these consoles. No one was here now because the space hulk was not on the move. The tedium of remaining at an inactive station would have been beyond comprehension to the ork mind.
I was alone, but would not be for long. Between grenades and rocket, the way up to the nerve centre had been destroyed. But the temple was a fusion of ships, and thus a honeycomb of passageways. I could hear the orks forging a new path. The wall to my right reverberated with the shrieking of tearing metal and the crump of explosive charges. They would be here soon. What I would do, I had to do now.
One side of the chamber was given over to enormous windows. They were the eyes of the ork idol that glared over the wreckage-scape of the space hulk. As I thought about how the construct travelled, and what damage I might do here, I noticed for the first time what nestled between the clusters of upended ships: engines. Huge ones. None from anything smaller than a cruiser. Some belonged to ships that had been grafted nose-first to the planetoid. Others had been dismounted from their original vessel. They were all lower than the surrounding structures. I looked at the scattered disposition of colossal motive power, put it together with the consoles, and understood how the space hulk navigated: one button per engine, each engine propelling the hulk in a different direction. Simple to the point of imbecilic, too crude for any precision, but the orks had no need for precision.
The wall shrieked. The orks were on the other side. I heard the sound of chainaxe teeth grinding into metal. Behriman, Castel, Polis, Bekket, Trower, Vale: their sacrifices had purchased a few seconds. I owed them the honour of using that time well. I ran from console to console, slamming my fist down on all the buttons. I would destroy Thraka with his own weapon.
One after another, the engines blazed to life. Immense forces strained against each other. As the first punctures appeared in the wall, the shaking began. It was as if the space hulk were being hit by an earthquake, one that would not stop, and just kept building in strength. Thraka’s base became a perpetual collision between voidships. Stolen fusion reactors lit up the night of the void. Forces beyond the tectonic buckled and twisted the space hulk. Plumes of stolen promethium shot up from the multiplying breaches in the fuel lines.
The shaking grew stronger yet. It knocked me off my feet, and I crawled to the windows to look upon my work. The construct was starting to break up. Ship hulls wrenched free of their foundations. Some fell, crushing smaller structures, setting off more explosions, gouging open deeper wounds. Others were blasted away from the main body, re-launched into the void by a force more powerful than the construct’s artificial gravity. Twisting, rattling, whiplashing, the world was tearing itself apart with thunder and flame, and it was glorious.
There was an eruption at the base of the temple. A tower of flame roared skyward, all-consuming, all-purifying. The world beyond the windows disappeared in a glare of incandescent red. The structure groaned, dying, and it lurched to one side, as though trying to walk. The floor heaved.
The wall came down all at once, and the orks stormed in. But they were too late. I saw Thraka pound forward, trampling his minions. Then the floor heaved again, split, and collapsed. I fell, slipping from Thraka’s grasp as he lunged for me. I plunged into a chaos of flame and tumbling metal. In the last moment before I was battered into darkness, I saw Thraka, above, in the exploding ruin of his domain. He was roaring, arms raised high. He was raging, I thought.
But he looked exultant.
EPILOGUE
THE VALEDICTION
I woke, and I was complete. I knew, before I opened my eye, that what had been taken from me was mine again. My right arm felt heavy, lethal. I looked. My claw was there, as it should be. There was no power flowing to it, nor was there to my bale eye. Still, their presence was reassurance enough.
But how had I been rescued?
I sat up, taking in my surroundings. I was lying on an operating table filthy with blood and reeking with the stench of a thousand atrocities. I was in a medicae bay, but the tools that I saw would have horrified the most fanatical chirurgeon.
I had not been rescued. I was still on the space hulk. My claw and eye had been reattached. Correctly. The two realities were incompatible at so fundamental a level that their co-existence made my skin crawl.
I swung my legs over the edge of the table and stood. My injuries had blended into a general wash of pain. Nothing was broken, though. I was intact. I could walk. I approached the door.
It opened. I stopped. Beyond it, orks lined both sides of the corridor. They had been watching for me. The moment I appeared, they roared their approval. They did not attack. They simply stood, clashed guns against blades, and hooted brute enthusiasm. I had been subjected to too many celebratory parades on Armageddon not to recognise one when it confronted me. I went numb from the unreality before me. I stepped forward, though. I had no choice.
I walked. It was the most obscene victory march of my life. I moved through corridor, hold and bay, and the massed ranks of the greenskins hailed my passage. I saw the evidence of the destruction I had caused around every bend. Scorch marks, patched ruptures, buckled flooring, collapsed ceilings. But it hadn’t been enough. Not nearly enough. Only enough for this… this…
I was living an event that had no name.
At length, I arrived at a launch bay. There was a ship on the pad before the door. It was human, a small in-system shuttle. It was not built for long voyages. No matter, as long as its vox-system was still operative.
I knew that it would be.
Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka awaited me beside the ship’s access ramp. I did not let my confusion or the sense that I had slipped into an endless waking nightmare slow my stride. I did not hesitate as I strode towards the monster. I stopped before him. I met his gaze with all the cold hatred of my soul. He radiated delight. Then he leaned forward, a colossus of armour and bestial strength. Our faces were mere centimetres apart.
My soul bears many scars from the days and months of my defeat and captivity. But there is one memory that, above all others, haunts me. By day, it is a goad to action. By night, it murders sleep. It lives with me always, the proof that there could hardly be a more terrible threat to the Imperium than this ork.
Thraka spoke to me.
Not in orkish. Not even in Low Gothic.
In High Gothic.
‘A great fight,’ he said. He extended a huge, clawed finger and tapped me once on the chest. ‘My best enemy.’ He stepped aside and gestured to the ramp. ‘Go to Armageddon,’ he said. ‘Make ready for the greatest fight.’
I entered the ship, my being marked by words whose full measure of horror lay not in their content, but in the fact of their existence. I stumbled to the cockpit, and discovered that I had a pilot.
It was Rogge. His mouth was parted in a screa
m, but there was no sound. He had no vocal cords any longer. There was very little of his body recognisable. He had been opened up, reorganised, fused with the ship’s control and guidance systems. He had been transformed into a fully aware servitor. I promised myself he would be one forever.
‘Take us out of here,’ I ordered.
The rumble of the ship’s engines powering up was drowned by the even greater roar of the orks. I knew that roar for what it was: the promise of war beyond description. In silence, I made the orks a promise of my own. They were letting me go because I had lived up to my legend. I would do more than that when they came again to Armageddon. Legend would clash with legend, and I would bring them more than war. I would bring them more than apocalypse.
I would bring them extinction.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Since his Black Library debut in Hammer and Bolter, DAVID ANNANDALE has written a plethora of works set in the 41st Millennium, including the Space Marine Battles novel The Death of Antagonis and the novella Yarrick: Chains of Golgotha. By day, he lectures at a Canadian university on subjects ranging from English literature to video games. He lives with his wife and family and a daemon in the shape of a cat.
AN EXTRACT FROM THE DEATH OF ANTAGONIS BY DAVID ANNANDALE
On sale February 2013
Squad Pythios brought the survivors out of the bunker. They mustered in the square of the palace compound, then joined the waiting ranks of the Mortisians. The convoy moved out from the palace walls, out onto Admiral Kiershing Square, with the Space Marines taking point.
And the dead attacked.
The change was instantaneous. The random wandering, despairing moans and acts of self-destruction turned into a furious charge. Five great avenues fed into the square, and from all of them came a storm surge of bodies. The dead ignored the Space Marines and slammed into the Guard. The Mortisians were fast. A wall of bolter and las-fire met the onrushing dead, but the momentum of tens of thousands of bodies wasn’t going to be halted. Five collective battering rams struck, and the Imperial lines buckled. Toharan turned, and saw the impossible. Already, within the first second of the battle, as the Mortisians found themselves in full melee, men were changing, their eyes blanking into mindless hunger and rage as they fell on their comrades.
‘Diamond,’ Toharan voxed. ‘Out then in.’ Squad Pythios plunged into the fight. They scythed through the dead with chainblade and fist, decapitating and crushing. It was like wading through molasses. The dead were so focussed on clawing past the Mortisians to the civilians that they barely reacted to the Dragons’ advance.
Toharan forced a reaction. He and his brothers became the moving rocks against which the death tide broke. They split into two groups and worked their way around the defensive island of the Guard. They slashed across the flow of the dead, hundreds falling before them like threshed wheat. Halfway around the Mortisians’ perimeter, the Dragons split again, with one half of the squad moving to the rear lines, and the other heading back to the front, tearing apart another rank of the enemy. The momentum of the dead stalled. There was a pause while the flood of reinforcements continued to pour in from the avenues, and the charge built up its strength again.
The Mortisians had the measure of their opponents now, though Toharan already had his doubts about what difference that would make in the long run. The reality of twelve million damned souls was sinking in. But for now, the massed power of the Imperial Guard unleashed a horizontal rain of projectile and las-fire. The barrage was continuous, and it pushed back the army of the dead before it could surge again.
Breathing space. Time to move.
‘Go!’ Toharan shouted over vox-link and speaker, and the caravan took its first, lurching steps. The Dragons moved to the interior perimeter. Toharan disliked not being on the front lines, but he had his orders, and the mission dictated strategy. It was not the Dragons’ remit to take on an entire city. Their battle, in this moment, was to save as many civilians as possible. The people would be needed after the next stage of the war, after the Black Dragons and the other vectors of Imperial might had purged Antagonis of its taint. There had to be a population to reclaim the planet, to celebrate the victory and prove that it was not pyrrhic. So Squad Pythios moved to protect the unarmed. As big as the area was that the thousand civilians took up, it was one whose bounds the Dragons could keep patrolled. The refugees marched, and the Space Marines circled them at a constant run, bringing bolter and chainblade to bear wherever the Mortisian defences needed shoring up.
Toharan paused in his run to jump up on the lead vehicle, a Hellhound. Colonel Burston Kervold, heading the joint command of the Fourth and 25th companies, rode standing in the roof hatch, magnoculars around his neck. His chin was a steel prosthetic. It was scratched and pitted as if he really did lead with it. Kervold’s cap perched on a head that was a phrenological map of his tours of duty. His eyes were narrowed flints, staring at the dead with a contempt so strong it should have blasted a path clear to the outskirts of the city. But when Kervold turned his head to face Toharan, the Space Marine thought he saw the tightness of fatalism in the officer’s gaze. Kervold had seen and noted the same things, then. The behaviour of the dead was unusual, unlike any plague of undeath Toharan had fought before. Even more than the speed of the dead, it was their focus that was alarming. There wasn’t just hunger in their frenzy. There was anger. There was passion. And then there was the rapidity of the contagion.
The elements were all wrong. Vital information was missing. The mission had the earmarks of a disaster.
‘If we stop,’ Kervold yelled over the roar of the inferno cannon’s spray of ignited promethium, ‘we’ll be finished.’ Ahead of them, the dead looked like a solid mass.
‘Then we don’t stop,’ Toharan replied. ‘Not for any reason. How is our route?’
‘We’ll stick to the big avenues for as long as we can. But once we’re into the hab zones…’ Kervold’s shrug was humorous in its understatement of despair.
Toharan nodded. ‘Then we fight harder. And we still don’t stop.’ He dropped back to the ground and resumed destroying. Already the defences were being strained again. Already Guard lines were thinning.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
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Cover illustration by Phrolian Gardner
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