The Flight of the Eisenstein

by James Swallow

  In that moment, Garro tapped a final reserve of mad, desperate strength. By Terra’s will, he told himself, in the name of my home world and the Imperium of Man, I will not perish!

  New energy flooded through him, hot and raw. Garro reached deep into himself and found a well-spring of conviction, steeling himself against the xenos’s murderous embrace. The captain felt warmth spread into his agonized muscles as he pictured Terra’s majesty in his mind’s eye, and there with his hand cupped beneath it, holding it safe, the Emperor. In the Emperor’s name, I will not fail! I dare not fail!

  He unleashed a wordless, furious snarl of defiance and fought back against the alien coils, putting every last ounce of power he could muster into Libertas. The power sword’s blade met jorgall steel and parted it, screeching through artificial nerves and mechanical cabling. The cyborg faltered and stumbled as Garro cut his way free, fragments of cracked ceramite shedding from his armour. The captain’s burning lungs drank in ragged gulps of air. He pressed forward even as the machine-form tried to shove him away, bringing up the glowing tip of the blade.

  Garro saw emotion flutter over the trembling mouthparts of the jorgall as Libertas touched the crown of its glass pod. Unlike the xenos, the captain did not linger for the sake of cruelty. Instead, he pressed his entire weight behind the sword and shattered the capsule, forcing the weapon into the fleshy torso of the alien until it burst from the cyborg’s back in a rain of crimson.

  The jorgall collapsed with a thunderous crash, tearing down a stand of trees as it fell. Half-finished things erupted from eggs, mewling and spitting, to be met by the guns of the Death Guard and the witchseekers.

  Taking back his sword, Garro dropped to the ground as the cyborg’s last nerve impulses fluttered through its limbs. Its burden, the shape in grey muslin, was released and rolled to his feet. The captain knelt and unwrapped it with the tip of his blade.

  Inside there was an immature jorgall. What surprised him was not that the xenos hatchling was completely free of any mechanical augmentation, but the freakish mutation of the tripedal being. It was conjoined, a malformation of two aliens that had somehow become merged during growth. Its skull was enormous, a bloated thing with four distinct chambers, quite unlike the ovoid heads typical of its species. Legs and arms twitched towards him, milky eyes swiveled and narrowed in Garro’s direction.

  Without warning, the air around him changed. The atmosphere became greasy and slick on his skin, suddenly scratchy with the sharp stench of ozone. He had felt such things before, on other battlefields, in other wars for the good of humanity. Garro’s mind screamed a single word, and he understood exactly why the Sisters of Silence had come to this place.

  ‘Psyker!’ He drew up the sword in an arc, ready to take the creature’s head from its shoulders.

  Wait.

  The word struck him like a cold flood, making his arm go rigid. The ozone stink enveloped him, clouding his thoughts and tightening on his mind just as the cyborg had coiled around his body. It reached into Garro, searching through him as easily as he might have leafed through a book.

  Death Guard, it whispered, amusement in its words, so confident of your tightness, so afraid to see the crack in your spirit.

  Garro tried to complete the killing blow, but he was locked tight, trapped in amber.

  Soon the end comes. We see tomorrow. So shall you. All you worship will wither. All will—

  The mutant’s torso burst in a welter of blood and bone fragments as a single bolter round tore a hole through it as big as a fist. Suddenly the haze was gone and Garro blinked it away, as if waking from a deep sleep. He turned and found Sister Amendera Kendel at his shoulder, smoke curling from the muzzle of her gun. Her dark eyes studied him from the vision slits of her helmet. The captain stood carefully and duplicated her gesture from the lakeside, touching his armoured fingertips to his heart and his brow.

  He became aware of a sound reaching through the wooded ranks of the hatchery, a whistling, a keening that was quickly growing in volume. The sound was atonal and harsh on his ears. It was a lament, a cry from the unhatched.

  ‘Look!’ shouted Hakur. ‘In the trees! Movement, everywhere!’

  Every egg-orb that Garro could see was trembling as the jorgalli things inside thrashed and tore at their confinement, frantic in their need to escape. He flicked a look to Kendel, as the Sister directed her cohorts to gather the dead mutant into a chainmail sack. She glanced up at him and nodded. Perhaps Voyen had been correct, perhaps the cyborg had been some kind of guardian protecting the psyker child, and now it was dead, its siblings were enraged.

  Spatters of yolk rained down from the trunks. Kendel flicked out harsh gestures to her Sisters and the women moved off, turning their flamers on the foliage. Garro saw the merit in her action and called into his vox-link. ‘Deploy grenades and explosives. Follow the Sisterhood’s example. Destroy the trees.’

  The fibrous matter of the egg-trees was dry and made excellent tinder. In moments, the alien woodland was burning, the grey sacs popping and boiling. Many of the enhancives made it to the ground, mad with fury, and they were put down with detached precision.

  Garro watched the blue-tinged flames sear and dance as they spread, murdering the world-ship’s dormant and newborn. All across the bottle, the jorgall were perishing beneath the hand of the Death Guard, making a lie of the mutant child’s final words. ‘A lie,’ said Garro aloud, watching the poisonous smoke turn above his head.

  THREE

  Aeria Gloris

  A Poisoned Chalice

  Put to the Question

  IN THE RUINS of their enemy, the Death Guard task force regrouped and surveyed the breadth of the destruction they had wrought. The wreckage of the jorgalli picket fleet was a cloud of crystallized breathing gasses, hull fragments and the dead. Some of the teardrop-shaped xenos vessels were still relatively intact. One by one, these were being scuttled with atomic charges, reduced to sun-hot balls of radioactive plasma. In less than a standard Terran day, there would be nothing recognizable left to show the face of an enemy that the Death Guard had obliterated so utterly.

  Out there in the shoal of destruction, Stormbirds on funerary details scoured the engagement area for Astartes who had been blown into the dark during boarding operations. Those found would be interred as heroes, once the progenoid glands in their corpses had been harvested. The precious flesh-matter from the dead would serve the Legion in their stead, passing on to strengthen new initiates when the next round of recruitment began. Once in a while, a lucky find would bring the recovery crews a live battle-brother, dormant inside his armour beneath the lulling pressure of his susan membranes, but that happened very rarely.

  Beyond the zone where the Death Guard fleet gathered like carrion birds around a corpse, the jorgall bottle was executing a slow, wounded turn to sight down into the ecliptic plane of the Iota Horologii system. Drifts of wreckage and broken panels from the construct’s vast solar panels floated behind it in a faint cometary tail. The main drives blinked out of sequence as the fusion motors worked the colossal mass of the world-ship about. Dissenting voices from the Mechanicum contingent aboard the warship Spectre of Death had petitioned Mortarion for a few days in which to loot the alien craft of technology. The primarch, as was his prerogative, refused the request. The letter of Lord Malcador’s orders – and therefore, by extension, those of the Emperor himself – was that the jorgall incursion into the sector was to be exterminated. The master of the Death Guard clearly saw no point of confusion in those orders. There was to be nothing left of the aliens.

  And yet…

  Nathaniel Garro watched the play and turn of the fleet from the gallery above the Endurance’s main launch bay, above him a span of thick armoured glass and space beyond it, below, through skeletal brass frames and grid-cut decking, the expanse of the flight platform. Gradually, his gaze dropped.

  Down among the sleek Stormbirds and heavy Thunderhawks was a single swan-like shuttlecraft, the spread wi
ngs of the ship detailed in gold and black. It stood out among the white and grey Astartes craft, a single bright game fowl nestled in a flock of pale raptors.

  Aboard that vessel, a sole tangible remnant of the assault would remain after all the works of the jorgall were erased from this sector of space. He found himself wondering what other orders the Sisters of Silence had, orders that were unbound even in the face of a primarch’s countermand. It was not defiance on their part to go against Mortarion’s wishes if it was the Emperor’s will to do otherwise, surely? This was not disobedience. This was a trivial issue, a small thing of little consequence. Garro had never known of and could barely envisage an instance when the commands of primarch and Emperor would not be in harmony.

  An oiled hiss signaled the opening of the gallery’s hatch and Garro looked to see who had come to interrupt his customary moment of solitude after the battle. A small smile curled at his lips as two figures entered the echoing, empty colonnade. He gave a shallow bow as Amendera Kendel approached him, a younger woman in a less ornate version of a witchseeker’s robes walking at her heels.

  Kendel looked to Garro as he assumed he must have looked to her: fresh from the battlefield, fatigued, but content that the fight had gone well. ‘Sister,’ said Garro, ‘I trust the outcome this day was satisfactory to you.’

  The woman signed a few words and the girl at her side spoke. ‘Battle-Captain Garro, well met. The goals of the Imperium have been ably served.’

  Nathaniel raised an eyebrow and looked directly at the girl. He saw her more clearly now, noting that she had no armour or visible weapons as Kendel did. ‘Forgive me, but it was my understanding that the Sisters of Silence are never to speak.’

  The girl nodded, her manner changing slightly as she answered. ‘That is indeed so, lord. No Sister may utter a word, unto death, once she gives the Oath of Tranquillity. I am a novice, captain. I have yet to take the vow and so I may speak to you. Sisters-in-waiting such as I serve our order when communication is needed with outsiders.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Garro nodded. ‘Then may I ask your mistress what she wishes of me?’

  Kendel gestured again, and the novice translated, her voice taking on a formal tone once more. ‘I wished to speak with you before we departed the Endurance, on the matters to which you and your men were party aboard the jorgall cylinder. It is the Emperor’s wish that they not be spoken of.’

  The captain absorbed this. Of course, why else had Kendel killed the alien psyker with a shot to the chest instead of a round through the skull? To preserve whatever secrets it held inside that misshapen head. He nodded to himself. The Lord of Man’s great works into the understanding of the ethereal realms were beyond his grasp as a mere captain, and if the Emperor required the corpse of a dead xenos mutant to further that understanding, then Nathaniel Garro had no place to contradict it. ‘I shall make it so. The Emperor has his tasks and we have ours. My men would never question that.’

  The Silent Sister came a little closer and watched him carefully. She signed something to the novice and the girl hesitated, questioning her mistress in return before relaying the words. ‘Sister Amendera asks… She wishes to know if the child spoke to you.’

  ‘It had no mouth,’ Garro answered, quicker than he intended to.

  Kendel placed a finger on her lips and shook her head. Then she moved the finger to her temple.

  Nathaniel looked at his hands. There were still flecks of alien blood on them. ‘I am clean of any taint,’ he insisted. ‘The thing did not contaminate me.’

  ‘Did it speak to you?’ repeated the novice.

  The moment became long before he spoke. ‘It knew what I was. It said it could see tomorrow. It told me all I worship would die.’ Garro sneered. ‘But I am an Astartes. I worship nothing. I honour no false god, only the reality of Imperial truth.’

  His answer seemed to appease Sister Amendera, and she inclined her head in a bow. ‘Your fealty, like that of all Death Guard, has never been in doubt, captain. Thank you for your honesty,’ relayed the novice. ‘It is clear the creature was attempting to cloud your intention. You did well to resist it.’ The Oblivion Knight made the sign of the aquila and bowed.

  The girl mirrored Kendel’s gesture. ‘My mistress wishes you and your company to accept the commendation and gratitude of the Sisters of Silence. Your names will be presented to the Sigillite in recognition of your service to Terra.’

  ‘You honour us,’ Garro replied. ‘If I might ask, what was the fate of your comrade, the Null Maiden who was unhooded in the fighting?’

  The novice nodded. ‘Ah, Sister Thessaly, yes. Her injuries were serious, but she will recover. Our medicae aboard the Aeria Gloris will heal her in due course. I understand your Brother Voyen saved her life.’

  ‘Aeria Gloris,’ repeated Garro. ‘I do not know of that vessel. Is it part of our flotilla?’

  A smile crossed Kendel’s lips and she signed to the novice. ‘No, captain. It is part of mine. See for yourself.’ The woman pointed out through the glass dome and Garro followed her direction.

  A piece of the void moved slowly across the prow of Endurance, passing between the bow of the warship and the distant glow of the Iotan sun. Whereas conventional vessels of the Imperial fleets ran with pennants and signal lamps to illuminate the lengths of their hulls, this new arrival, this Aeria Gloris, came in darkness, arriving out of the interstellar deeps as an ocean predator might slip to the surface of a night time sea.

  Garro had never laid eyes on a Black Ship before. These were the mothercraft of the Silent Sisterhood, carrying them back and forth across the galactic disc on the Emperor’s witch hunting missions. It was hard to make out anything more than the most basic details of the ship’s design. Framed against the solar glow of Iota Horologii, the battle cruiser was at least a match in size for the Death Guard capital ship Indomitable Will. It lacked the traditional plough blade prow of most Imperial vessels, ending instead in a blunt bow. A single, knife-edge sail hung below the stern and on it was an aquila cut from shimmering volcanic glass. Where Endurance and the ships of the Astartes flotilla were swords against the enemies of Terra, Aeria Gloris was a hammer of witches.

  ‘Impressive,’ rumbled Garro. There was little else he could say. He found himself wondering what it would be like to wander the decks of the vessel, at once attracted and repelled by the idea of what secrets the craft must hide.

  Sister Amendera bowed again and nodded to her novice. ‘We take our leave of you, honoured captain,’ said the girl. ‘We are to make space for Luna by day’s end, and the warp grows turbulent.’

  ‘Safe journey, sisters,’ he offered, unable to tear his gaze from the dark starship.

  KALEB GUIDED THE cart across the length of the armoury chamber, taking care to stay to the outer walkway around the edges of the long hall. His master’s bolter lay across the trolley, the weapon’s usually flawless finish marred by lines of damage from the engagement on the jorgall world-ship. As Garro’s housecarl, it was Kaleb’s duty to see the gun to the arming servitors and ensure that the weapon was returned to its full glory as quickly as possible. He intended not to disappoint his captain.

  He passed knots of Death Guard as they debriefed and disarmed, men from Temeter’s company in animated conversation about a daunty moment during the boarding of a xenos destroyer, and Astartes of Typhon’s First in bellicose humour. Across the chamber he spied Hakur talking with Decius, as the younger man relayed a moment from the battle with an enthusiasm that the dour veteran clearly did not share.

  The men of the XIV Legion were not given to raucous celebration in their victories – such displays, Kaleb had heard it said, were more in the character of the Space Wolves or the World Eaters – but they did, in their own fashion, salute their successes and give honour to those who fell along the way.

  The Death Guard cultivated an image that other Legions were only too quick to accept: that they were brutal, ruthless and hard-hearted, but the reality had more shades to it
than that. That these Astartes rarely made sport of their warfare was true, but they were not so bleak and stern as some would have believed.

  Compared to the stories Kaleb had heard of stoic and dispassionate Legions like the Ultramarines or the Imperial Fists, the Death Guard could almost be considered willful and disorderly.

  Rounding a stanchion, the housecarl’s train of thought stalled at the sound of harsh laughter from a figure before him. He hesitated. Commander Grulgor stood in his path, speaking in muted, amused tones to an Astartes from his Second Company. The two men clasped gauntlets in a firm, serious handshake and in spite of the dimness of the ill-lit walkway Kaleb was still able to make out the shape of a disc shaped brass token held in Grulgor’s fingers before he passed it into the other man’s grip.

  He understood immediately that he had intruded on a private moment, something only Astartes should share, something that a mere serf like him was not to be privy to, but there was nowhere Kaleb could hide, and if he turned around, the clatter of the cart’s wheels would reveal him. In spite of himself, he coughed. It was a very small sound, but it brought with it a sudden silence as the commander broke off and noticed the housecarl for the first time.

  Kaleb was looking directly at the decking, and did not see the expression of complete contempt Grulgor turned upon him.

  ‘Garro’s little helot,’ said the commander. ‘Are you listening where you should not?’ He took a step towards the housecarl and against his will, Kaleb shrank back. Grulgor’s voice took on the tone of a teacher lecturing a student, making a lesson of him. ‘Do you know what this is, Brother Mokyr?’

  The other Astartes examined Kaleb coldly. ‘It’s not a servitor, commander, not enough steel and pistons for that. It resembles a man.’

  Grulgor shook his head. ‘No, not a man, but a housecarl.’ The emphasis he put on the title was scornful. ‘A sad bit of trivia, a dusty practice from the ancient days.’ The commander spread his hands. ‘Look on, Mokyr. Look at a failure.’