The Flight of the Eisenstein

by James Swallow

  ‘No,’ insisted the Astartes, ‘Lord, please know, I did not choose this in order to undermine you! It was only… the right choice for Meric Voyen.’

  Garro was silent for a few moments. ‘We have been brothers in warfare for decades, over thousands of battlefields. You are a fine warrior, and a better healer. I would not have had you join my cadre otherwise. But this… you kept this from us all, and made our comradeship cheap. If you stay under my command, Meric, you will not find it easy to earn back the trust that you have lost today.’ He met the other man’s gaze. ‘Go or stay. Make the choice that is right for Meric Voyen.’

  ‘If I wish to remain, will my departure from the lodge be a condition of that, lord?’

  The captain shook his head. ‘I won’t force you to disassociate yourself. You’re still my battle-brother, even if your decisions are sometimes not in line with mine.’ Garro stepped forward and offered Voyen his hand. ‘But I will have a pledge from you. Promise me, here and now, that if the lodge ever compels you to turn from the face of the Emperor of Man, you will destroy that medal and reject them.’

  The Apothecary took Garro’s hand. ‘I swear it, lord. On Terra itself, I swear it.’

  THE MATTER DEALT with for the moment, Garro gathered his men back together and briefed them on the battle plans the Warmaster had outlined. By his example, not a single harsh word was said to Voyen, but the Apothecary kept silent and to the edge of things. No voice was raised in question as to why Voyen still stood with them, but Garro saw reservations in the eyes of Decius, Rahl and the others.

  When it was done, Garro left his dress wargear to Kaleb’s attention and took his own council. So many things had come and gone in so short a time. It seemed like only moments ago that he had been looking over attack simulations for the raid on the jorgall world-ship, now the Legiones Astartes massed for the first hammer-blow strike on Isstvan Extremis, and Garro saw conflict in the heart of his own company.

  Had he made the wrong choice in letting Voyen remain? His mind moved back to the conversation with Mortarion before the war council, where questions of the lodges had risen as well. It troubled the captain that he could not determine an easy path through these thoughts. At times he wondered if he were at fault, holding firmly to a conservative course, keeping the tradition and heart of the Legion alive while time moved on and things changed.

  Yes, things were changing. The shift of mood here on Endurance was slight, but visible to his trained senses, and aboard the Warmaster’s ship, it was more obvious still. Bleak emotions gathered at the edges of his thoughts like distant storm clouds. He could not shake the sensation that something malign was waiting out there, gathering strength and biding its time.

  And so Garro did what he had made into a quiet personal habit, in order to clear his mind and find focus for the coming battle. High up atop the Endurance’s dorsal hull lay the oval dome of the ship’s observatorium, a space put aside so that naval crew might be able to take emergency star fix sightings should the vessel’s cogitators become inoperative. It also served a purely ornamental function, although there were few among the Death Guard who ever used it for so trivial a purpose.

  Garro dimmed all the glow-globes in the chamber and seated himself at the control console. The operator chair shifted back and reclined on quiet hydraulics. Presently, the battle-captain was tilted so he could take in the unfettered sweep of the starscape.

  Isstvan’s blue-white sun was a bright glow off in the lower quadrant, attenuated by a localised polarisation in the augmented armourglass. He looked away from it and let the blackness surround him. Gradually, tension eased from the knots in his muscles. Garro felt adrift in the ocean of stars, cupped in the bubble of atmosphere. He saw past the silver flashes of ship hulls, out into the deep void, and not for the first time, he looked and wondered where home was.

  Officially, the home world of the XIV Legion was Barbarus, a cloud-wreathed sphere near the edge of the Gothic Sector. It was from that troubled world that most of the Death Guard’s number originated, men like Grulgor and Typhon, Decius and Sendek, even Kaleb. Garro had learned to have deference and respect for the planet and its testing nature, but it would never be home to him.

  Garro had been born on Terra and drawn up into the Legiones Astartes before men had even known the name of Barbarus. In those years the XIV Legion had gone by a different title, and they had no primarch but the Emperor himself. Garro swelled with pride to remember that time. They had been the Dusk Raiders, so known because of their signature tactic of attacking a foe at nightfall. Then, they had worn armour without the green trim of the current Legion. The wargear of the Dusk Raiders was the dull white of old marble, but with their right arm and shoulders coloured in a deep, glistening crimson. The symbology of the armour showed their foes what they truly were – the Emperor’s red right hand, the relentless and unstoppable. Many enemies had thrown down their weapons the moment the sun dipped beneath the horizon, rather than dare to fight them.

  But that too had changed. When the Emperor’s clone-sons, the great primarchs, had been sundered from his side and scattered across the galaxy, the Dusk Raiders joined their brother Legions and their master in the Great Crusade that began the Age of the Imperium. Garro had been there, centuries past.

  It did not seem so long ago, and yet there were countless years of time measured by Terran clocks that he had lost in the confusion of the warp, in cryogenic stasis and through the strange physics of near-light speed travel. Garro had been there as the Emperor crossed the galaxy in search of his star-lost children – Sanguinius, Ferrus, Guilliman, Magnus and the rest. With each reuniting, the Lord of Mankind had gifted his sons with command of the forces that had been created in their image. When at last the Emperor came to Barbarus and discovered the gaunt warrior foundling leading its oppressed people, he had located the avatar of the XIV Legion.

  On Barbarus, where Mortarion had come to rest after falling through the chaotic turmoil of a warp storm, the boy-primarch found a planet where the human colonists were ground beneath the heel of a clan of mutant warlords. He grew up to fight them and liberate the commoners, creating his own army of steadfast warriors to lead the way into the poisonous heights where the warlords hid. These men Mortarion named the Death Guard.

  So it was written, that when at last the Emperor and Mortarion met and defeated the dark master of the warlords, Barbarus was free and the primarch accepted a place in his father’s Crusade at the head of the XIV Legion. Mortarion’s first words to his army were carved in a granite arch over the airlock gate of the battle barge Reaper’s Scythe in memory of the moment. He had come at the Emperor’s bidding with the elite of his Barbarun cohort at his side and hundreds more on the way. Garro had been there, as nothing more than a line Astartes, when he heard his new primarch speak.

  ‘You are my unbroken blades,’ he told them. ‘You are the Death Guard.’ And with those words the Dusk Raiders were no more. Things changed.

  On the day of Mortarion’s coronation as primarch, a good majority of the XIV Legion had been of Garro’s stock, men born on Terra or within the confines of the Sol system, but slowly that number had dwindled, and as new recruits joined the Death Guard fold they came only from Barbarus. Now, as the Thirty-First Millennium turned about its axis, there was only a comparative handful of Terrans in the Legion. In his blackest moments Nathaniel imagined a time when there would be none of his kinsmen left among the XIV, and with their deaths the traditions of the old Dusk Raiders would finally fade away. He feared that moment, for when it came to pass something of the Legion’s noble character would die as well.

  Memory was a curious companion. In some instances, Garro’s fragmentary reminiscences of his deep past were clearer than those of battles some months old, by a peculiarity of the Astartes implants in his cerebrum. He recalled a moment as a boy growing up in Albia, in front of a memorial to warriors that dated back beyond the Tenth Millennium, a great arch of white stone and figures made of black metal, the su
rfaces worn smooth but protected by a layer of synthetic diamond. And he remembered a night on Barbarus, atop one of the highest crags, peering into the sky. The clouds parted for the rarest of moments and Nathaniel’s eyes had found, as they did now beneath the glass dome, a lone dot of light in the great darkness.

  Now, as then, he looked to the distant star and wondered again if it were home. Could the Emperor, in his matchless capacity, be turning some small scrap of his towering mind towards him? Or was it vanity on Garro’s part to think he would even merit the notice of the Lord of Mankind?

  With the next heartbeat the captain’s breath caught in his throat as the light he watched glittered brightly, and then faded to nothing, dying before him. The blinded star vanished, leaving a dark pall over Nathaniel’s spirit.

  DECIUS TURNED HIS hand over and held up his palm to the air, catching some of the fat, lazy flakes of snow drifting down around him. In the low gravity of Isstvan Extremis, the powdered shavings of nitrogen ice floated in slow motion towards the monochrome grey of the mottled surface. He smiled at the moment in self-amusement and turned the open palm into a ball. It was the match of his right hand, but nowhere near as large as the monstrous power fist lined with green enamel and patient little ticks of lightning. He flexed the heavy fingers experimentally. Decius’s control over the glove was so deft that he could pick a flower or crush a skull with equal ease.

  Not that there was flora of any kind on this dead ball of ice and stone. But there were plenty of heads to break. That was certain. The thought made Decius’s smile widen into a cocky grin. He glanced back over his shoulder, across the rippling, crater-pocked plain of the western approaches. Death Guard waited in every shadowed lee, behind every rock and outcropping, silent and ready. The dull colour of their armour was nearly a match for the grey landscape, and it was only the lines of jade trim around their shoulders and breast plates that broke up the camouflage.

  They were quiet, like their namesake, and prepared for the moment. Decius saw a glint of gold. Captain Garro was speaking into the helmet of Sergeant Hakur. In turn old Hakur moved and passed the order on to Rahl, then to another man, on and on, the command spreading in a whispering ripple.

  The Seventh Company had observed vox discipline since the Thunderhawks had set them down over the horizon of the planetoid, out of sight of the monitor station’s sensor towers. They communicated by hushed words or by battle-sign, advancing with stealth towards the shield wall protecting the west face of the enemy dome complex. This had been done to ensure that all the attention of the Isstvanians would be turned elsewhere, out to where the brightly armoured and very visible Emperor’s Children advanced. Now they were close, and all the waiting – hours, so it seemed to Decius – was done. The attack was at hand.

  Sendek leaned close and spoke into Decius’s audio pick-up. ‘Be ready for the word.’

  He nodded in acknowledgement and passed the command on to the Astartes at his side, a warrior with the cobra-head shape of a missile launcher on his shoulder. The thin atmosphere of Isstvan Extremis did not carry sound well, but such was the cacophony coming from the far side of the rebel complex that it still reached them. Decius could pick out the strained rattle of combi-bolters, the smack-thud of krak grenade detonations. The noise made his palms itch with anticipation.

  Then, over the general vox-channel, he heard Garro break radio silence. ‘Seventh. In position.’

  The battle-captain’s voice was grim and heavy. Decius’s commander had not been himself since he returned from the Vengeful Spirit, and once more Solun found himself thinking about what might have gone on aboard the Warmaster’s barge. And then this business with Voyen… He shuttered the thoughts away.

  Decius watched the battlements of the west wall through the magnifiers of his optics, studying the motion of the black figures patrolling up there. They were milling around, unsure of where they were meant to be. The attack by the Emperor’s Children was doing its job, drawing the concentration of the defenders. ‘They’re good for something, at least,’ he murmured to himself. Decius had always thought the III Legion to be more self-indulgent than the rest of the Astartes.

  A voice came back over the general channel, a single word loaded with the ready glee of battle. ‘Execute!’ shouted Eidolon, and as one the Death Guard surged up from their concealment in a heavy wave of storm-grey armour.

  ‘Count the Seven!’ cried a voice, and Decius repeated the call, hearing it over and over down the line of advance. The men of the XIV Legion were done being quiet.

  The guards on the battlements were already red ruins, falling from their perches to shatter on the rock floor, cored by bolt shells sniped from the middle distance. Small-gauge missiles from man-portable launchers lanced out in a wave over Decius’s head, converging on points in the wall where auspex scans had discovered weaknesses. The Astartes saw motion at the foot of the barrier. There were self-contained bunker pods strung out there, each equipped with pintle-mounted lasers. Thread-thin lines of crimson blinked, joining the ovoid pods to running men. Burns scored across ceramite and a few unlucky ones caught a charge in the face, blinded by the beams.

  The defence did nothing to slow the Death Guard advance. Once their blood was up, it was simply impossible to halt them, the crushing infantry charge boiling over stone and broken sheets of gas-ice, guns crashing out into the thin air. Decius gave a full clip of bolter rounds to the closest pod and reloaded on the run, his pace never faltering. He heard a strangled cry issue out from the gun slit.

  The battle-brother with the missile launcher was still with him, sporting the ugly singe mark from a glancing shot on his torso, but otherwise untouched. He saw the Astartes drop to one knee, and then with the ammunition carousel chattering, the missileer released a four-shot salvo at the bunker. The rockets hit in a perfect cluster and tore the pod open, the roof peeling back as a fireball forced its way out. Incredibly, figures in black stumbled from the smoking ruin, some of them on fire, all of them brandishing weapons.

  Decius fired from the hip, killing a handful, and stormed in to take the last survivor by hand. Decius punched the Isstvanian squarely in the chest and the power fist cannoned him back into the bricks of the shield wall. The enemy soldier fell from a ragged impact crater and dropped at Decius’s feet, a boneless rag-doll.

  A hissing sound reached his ears and the Astartes crouched to investigate. The man had lost a vox headset in the impact and it lay on the dirt next to him. Decius gathered it up and listened. Suident noise came from it, a disharmony of raw screeching tones that clawed up and down the chords. He tossed it away and stood up again.

  Decius glanced around, seeing the other bunker pods all burning or shattered, then nudged the corpse with his boot. A face bloated with new death looked back up at him, one eye peering through the shattered red lens of an aiming reticule. ‘You won’t be my last today,’ he told the dead man.

  ‘Fall back to a safe distance,’ Garro’s voice shouted. ‘Charges to detonate!’

  The Astartes with the launcher tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Brother, come. They’re going to blow the wall.’

  Decius sprinted back a few hundred metres to where the Death Guard was massing in good order. He saw Tollen Sendek at his heels, a sapper-command signum unit in his grip. ‘Ready!’ snapped Sendek.

  Garro’s helmet bobbed. ‘Do it.’

  Sendek stabbed at a glowing key and Decius heard a sharp, fizzing report from the stone fortification. Then, in the next second, tortured air molecules screamed aloud and a great length of the stone wall became rubble and powder.

  ‘Take the dome!’ Garro drew his power sword and cut the air with it. ‘For Terra and Mortarion!’

  Decius ran at the battle-captain’s flank and plunged into the roiling clouds of rock dust, his helmet optics automatically rendering the terrain before him in grainy wire-frames over the standard visual spectrum display. Sendek had, in defiance of conventional battlefield doctrine, used powerful hull-cutter charges designed
for starship boarding actions instead of standard krak munitions. The resultant overpressure from detonation in an atmosphere – even one as thin as that of Isstvan Extremis – had blown down a large part of the west wall and gone on to cut a bite from the central dome beyond it. Decius didn’t need to look up to remember the form of the target facility. He had committed it to memory on the journey from the Endurance, fixing in his subconscious the shape of the oblate hemisphere and its forest of odd, pipe-like towers.

  His boots crunched on the bodies of dead men pulped by the breaching charges. Lines of twisted metal rebar crowded in around the Astartes, with bits of dangling ferrocrete strung along them like dusty pearls. Garro drew back his sword arm to cut through them, but Decius stepped in before him. ‘No, lord, allow me.’ Decius struck out with the power fist and hammered it four times against the stone, the final blow clearing the last of the blockage before them. He grinned to himself. It wasn’t every battle where a man would find himself punching a building.

  The Death Guard spilled through the breach and into the dome proper, figures in off-white armour filling up the space inside. Decius saw hooded figures in black swarming like maddened ants through the smoke and dust, and beyond them… He blinked, drinking in the sight of the peculiar structure that dominated the dome. The briefing had told the Astartes to expect a standard Imperial sensor platform, perhaps with some recent modifications, but nothing more. Decius imagined they would penetrate the dome and find banks of cogitators, wave-monitors and the like. He could not have been more wrong.

  Every tier of the dome’s inner levels had been removed, making the entire space wide open. In the middle of the smoke-wreathed chamber there was a construct that seemed to be made of stone, but not the local variety of grey rock shot with mica. It was a rough-sided ziggurat hewn from different slabs of minerals in a panoply of colours. The stones could only have come from other worlds, that was obvious, but why? What possible reason could there have been for something like this, in a place this remote, where no one but a few hundred traitors would ever see it?