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, bioengineered 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 relearned. 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.
CHAPTER ONE
Some things do not die all at once.
Men. Daemons. Whole worlds. Sometimes, the fight bleeds them white and still they will not perish, moving as if they are alive, going through the motions of it, unaware that they are already ended. Such things are corpses, after a fashion, ashen and pallid, heavy with the musk of decay.
Eritaen was such a thing. An urbanised sprawl-planet, too far off the axis of the Imperium’s prime trade routes to be thought of as a hive-world, it had at one time thrived in its own, limited manner. But the rebellion had made all of that go away.
The people had been weak; it was a lament repeated across the galaxy. They had been weak and allowed the taint into their society. And this was the reward they reaped, to die slowly in the ruins of the cities that had birthed them, dying but already dead.
Rafen dallied beneath the arching hood of an ornate atrium, the entrance to a public kinema. Shattered glass lay in drifts around the ticket vendor kiosk and the flame-blackened stanchions. Broken displays advertising pict-dramas and out-of-date newsreels glittered in the dimness. Like everything he had seen in the city, the debris had a fine layer of powdery, dun-coloured dust across it. The sandy fines were everywhere, billowing through the streets, hanging in great cloudy knots in the sky making the blue daylight muddy and bland. The dust left an unpleasant taste at the back of his throat, like bonemeal.
A flickering dash of fire danced in the depths of the open doors leading into the picture palace, and presently Turcio emerged from the darkness with his flamer at a casual ready in his augmetic fist, the pilot light in the muzzle hissing quietly to itself. The Space Marine went unhooded, his clenched fist of a face tight and severe. Absently, Rafen’s eyes went to the penitent brand, laser-burned into Turcio’s brow above his right eye, and the scars where his service studs had been removed. Other men might have gone about with their helmets locked tight and faces hidden, the better to conceal their shame, but not Brother Turcio. He wore the marks boldly, like a badge of honour.
“Anything?” Rafen asked.
The Astartes nodded to his commander. “Brother-sergeant,” he began. “The same as before. The structure is empty. I found signs of our kinsmen’s presence, but they are long gone. I’d estimate a day, perhaps two.”
Rafen’s lip curled in disappointment. “This data they gave us is worthless.” He allowed himself to look up, along the long boulevard that stretched away to the north. The street was choked with rubble from fallen tower blocks and stalled vehicles abandoned in the madness of the rebellion. Like most of Eritaen’s municipalities, this conurbation was built on a grid of kilometre-long roads that crosshatched the landscape of the planet. The buildings that sprouted from each city block were sheer-sided and narrow, rising fifty to seventy levels high. All that differentiated them were the colours of the stone and the odd architectural flourish; by and large, they had the uniform cast of buildings thrown up by the dogged and uninspired colonial administrators of the Munitorum. Rafen imagined that it would be easy to become lost in such a place, if one did not possess the perfect sense of direction granted to an Adeptus Astartes.
Still, the city made him uncomfortable. Acres of blast-blown windows gaped toward him, each one a dark pit that even his helmet optics straggled to penetrate. Any one of them could conceal a sniper behind a lascannon or a missile launcher. He would have preferred to range above the city in a shuttle, find their objective and proceed directly to it; but the rules of engagement for Eritaen had been impressed on the sergeant with no small amount of emphasis. This battle zone did not belong to him, and as such it was not his place to question how war was fought here. Rafen turned to find the rest of his squad waiting in half-cover behind an overturned omnibus, their crimson armour glittering dully in the afternoon haze. The Blood Angels were in this place as invited guests. This conflict was not theirs to prosecute nor comment upon.
He switched his vox to the general frequency and cut through the air with the blade of his hand. “We move on,” he told them. “They’re not here.”
He heard the sneer in Ajir’s words as the tactical trooper emerged from behind the burnt-out vehicle. “Throne’s sake! Are they playing some kind of game with us?” As always, the cocksure Space Marine was the first into the open, as if he were daring the city to take a shot at him.
Rafen’s frown deepened. Ajir seemed to assume he was somehow indestructible, as if his bolter and a swagger in his step were all he needed to defend against the archenemy.
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” offered Turcio. “Our erstwhile cousins have never been ones to—”
“Enough,” Rafen silenced the other warrior with a shake of his head. “We have our mission and our message. That will be our focus.”
“Aye, lord.” Turcio’s head bobbed. “Of course.” He strode away, beckoning the largest of the squad toward him. The unit’s designated heavy weapons operator, the Space Marine differed from his brethren by his blue-coloured helmet and the massive, slab-sided shape of a belt-fed heavy bolter in his grip. Brother Puluo stepped up and nodded. The thickset, broad warrior didn’t seem to think that speaking was an important part of communication with his comrades, and for the most part that had proven to be true. Puluo brought new definition to the word “taciturn”, but Rafen had warmed to the silent man after he had been assigned to his squad. What he lacked in vocality he more than made up with martial prowess. “Watch the windows,” he told him, in a low voice. “I have an inkling…”
Puluo nodded again and thumbed off the bolter’s safety, stepping past to find a better vantage point.
Behind them, young Kayne was hesitating, scrutinising the auspex in his gloved hand. “No change in readings, sir. There’s more cloud across this screen than a Secundus dust storm.” Kayne was the tallest of them, rail-thin and whipcord-strong in comparison to Puluo’s densely muscled form. He also went bareheaded.
“Atomics.” Brother Corvus was the last to emerge, panning his bolter back and forth in a wary arc. “Residual radiation from airburst detonations. It’ll fog everything out beyond a half-kilometre.”
“Aye,” Kayne agreed, a sour tone in his voice, and he bolstered the device, somewhat awkwardly. Rafen saw that Corvus
noted the motion too, but neither said anything. The young Astartes was still finding his feet; only a scant few weeks ago, Kayne had been a Scout in the tenth company, and his promotion to the rank of full battle-brother was still fresh in his manner. The Mark VIII Imperator power armour he wore was new to him, and to the trained eye of a line warrior, it showed.
Rafen looked away. He had chosen the youth for the squad for several reasons, but largely because of his superlative marksmanship skills; however, in all truth the sergeant would have preferred to spend more time drilling and training his unit so that they meshed like finely-machined gears before they embarked on this sortie. Small things like Kayne’s unease should have been smoothed out by now, along with the other, less obvious rough edges—he glanced at Turcio and Corvus, thinking again of the penitent marks that both men shared.
But the Will of the Emperor and the Chapter did not move to the clock of a mere brother-sergeant. Commander Dante had given him his orders, and he had left the home world the very same day, his small concerns paying no coin against the word of his sworn lord, the master of the Blood Angels. There had been time aboard the frigate that brought them to Eritaen, but not enough. Never enough. His gaze found Turcio once again; of all of them, only he had served with Rafen for any length of time, before the incident on Cybele and the madness that had followed afterward…
Rafen shook off the moment; that path of reverie would serve only to dilute his focus. Although the rebellion on Eritaen had been crushed, it would not do for the sergeant to have his thoughts elsewhere. The city-sprawls still contained pockets of resistance that might be foolish enough to prey upon a squad of Adeptus Astartes, alone and unsupported. On some level, he hoped they might try; battle practice in the fortress monastery and aboard the frigate was fine as far as it went, but there was no substitute for the real thing.
The mission, though. The mission and the message came first.
They moved on, shifting into and out of the long, angular pools of shadow cast by the tower blocks. The glass, the dust-dulled shards of colour and light, lay everywhere. It was impossible to move without grinding them beneath their ceramite boots. At the base of some buildings, the glittering debris lay in mantles that were knee-deep even for the tall forms of the Space Marines. Once or twice, they caught the distant snarl of bolter fire, echoing and distorted down the concrete canyons of the city.
Rafen paused at an intersection, scanning the paths open to them. A hard, heavy breeze was moving east-to-west. It carried light debris in the air over their heads, scraps of paper, bits of torn cloth and the like; closer to the ground, it pushed the thick dust in sluggish waves that curled around their ankles. The sergeant dialled the filters on his breath grille to maximum and peered into the distance, watching for any sign of movement.
He found it.
“There,” said Rafen, pointing with a gauntleted finger. “Do you see?”
Ajir nodded. “Aye. Someone inside the groundcar?” The Blood Angel frowned inside his helmet. “I think… I think he’s waving to us.”
At his side, Puluo made a grunting sound that was his equivalent of amusement. Kayne was sighting down the scope atop his bolter. “I can’t get a good angle from here. Brother-sergeant, perhaps I should find another vantage point?”
“No,” Rafen replied. “It could be a ploy to draw us out.”
Ajir studied the intersection. Beneath the dust were the remains of what must have been a horrific road accident. Several groundcars, a cargo hauler and two rail-trams were snarled together in a mess of metal and plastic. The Space Marine imagined the component parts of the collision separating, mentally tracking them backward to their points of origin.
“The highway governance system’s machine-spirit died,” said Corvus, clearly thinking along the same lines. “The vehicles collided at high speed.”
“They were trying to flee the city,” offered Turcio. “You agree?”
Ajir didn’t meet the other warrior’s gaze. “I suppose so.” He found it difficult to converse with Turcio or Corvus and not see their penitent brands, not dwell on what they signified. For what must have been the hundredth time, Ajir found himself wondering what had possessed Brother-Sergeant Rafen to have the two men in his squad. They had proven themselves flawed, had they not? The very idea that the Blood Angels were in the business of giving those who failed the Emperor second chances was hard for him to swallow.
“Teardrop formation.” Rafen gave the order quickly and firmly. “Watch your sightlines and be ready”
“We approach?” said Kayne.
“We do,” said the sergeant. “If it’s a trap, then we’ll trip it.”
But in the end, it was only the wind they found ranged against them. In the lee of the largest groundcar was the waving figure; the corpse of a man perhaps three or four days dead, fallen at an odd angle that let the hard gusts move him to and fro. The breeze gave the illusion of movement, of life.
“He’s wearing remnants of a uniform,” noted Kayne, nudging the body with the toe of his boot. “A local branch of enforcers, I’d warrant.”
“More here,” called Turcio, shifting a stalled vehicle with a shove of his shoulder. “Civilians?”
Rafen’s eyes narrowed behind his visor. “Difficult to tell.” He came closer. The lay of the dead seemed incorrect. Bodies had a way about them when they fell in battle or from injury. He didn’t see it with these. “They weren’t killed here.”
“Not in the accident, lord, no.” Turcio gestured to the vehicles. “I would say they were executed elsewhere and then dumped here.”
“In the middle of a debris pile?” Ajir sniffed. “To what end?”
Kayne spat on the highway. “Who can fathom the purpose of anything the arch-enemy does?”
“True enough,” admitted Corvus.
Rafen’s paid little heed to the words of his men. He knelt by the body of the enforcer and cradled the dead man’s head in his palm. The corpse-flesh was so very white, almost a translucent colour against the bright crimson of his gauntlet. Eyes, sightless and cloudy, stared back up at him. The body felt strangely light.
With care, Rafen pinched a piece of flesh between the fingers of his glove.
Turcio followed his commander’s scrutiny. “What is it, brother-sergeant?”
Rafen let the dead man fall away. “There’s no blood. Look around, do you see any? Not a trace of it.”
Kayne sniffed the air. “No… No, that’s right. I didn’t even notice…”
Corvus drew his auspex and spoke a quick invocation, setting it to a biological scan mode. He waved it over the body of another civilian, this one a woman. “They have been exsanguinated,” he reported. “All vitae taken from their bodies.”
Rafen pulled at the collar of the dead enforcer and found a large puncture mark just above his clavicle. “Here. I imagine we’ll find the same wound on all of them.”
Kayne spat again and made the sign of the aquila. “Emperor protect their souls. It’s not enough they were killed, but something did that to them.”
“The Emperor has no mercy for these fools,” said Corvus. He turned the dead woman’s face so that they could all see the line of rings and arcs tattooed along her jaw line. “Companitas. The mark of the rebellion.”
The dissenter movement on Eritaen was not a product of that world alone. If anything, the Companitas were one of many minor factions that crawled and hid in the cracks of the Imperium’s monolithic culture. Rafen knew only the surface details about them, only the information that was of tactical value. Outwardly the Companitas preached unity, freedom and comradeship between all men; behind closed doors they were said to engage in acts of wantonness that most decent folk would think shameful, if not utterly repugnant. The hand of Chaos was at their backs; Rafen did not doubt it. Perhaps not in the rank and file of misguided fools like these, but certainly elsewhere, in their upper echelons.
“Perhaps they did this to themselves,” offered Turcio. “The Corrupted have been kno
wn to do the like.”
Kayne shifted. “There may be other cause,” he said darkly. “The taking of the blood… Perhaps it was a prize.” The young Astartes gestured toward the wreckage and the corpses. “Perhaps we have come upon some sort of… warning. A message left here for the rebels.”
“Why take the blood, then?” demanded Ajir.
The younger warrior shot his commander a wary look, uncertain if he should speak further. “You know where we are, on whose battleground we walk. We’ve all heard the stories,” he said, after a moment.
Rafen’s men exchanged loaded glances, and he did not need the preternatural insight of a psyker to know the thoughts they were sharing at that moment. He drew himself up to his full height and spoke firmly, breaking the sudden, new tension. “Whoever was the architect of this grisly scene, it matters nothing to us. They are long gone by now and lay outside our concerns.” He stepped away from the wreckage. “We tarry too long in this place. Gather yourselves, we have a—”
His words trailed off, and the other men came instantly to alert. Rafen froze, staring down the roadway. Something was amiss.
“Sir?” said Turcio.
Puluo had seen it too. The heavy bolter’s feed belt creaked as he turned the gun toward a building at the south-western point of the intersection.
“Auspex,” ordered Rafen.
Corvus still had the unit in his hand and studied it, tapping at the large keys on the surface, conjuring information from the device’s machine-spirit. “Motion detection read is inconclusive. You saw something?”
Puluo nodded gently toward the tower block. “Movement,” he said.
“Rebels?” asked Ajir.
Rafen hefted his bolter. “Likely.” From the corner of his eye, he had glimpsed the very smallest flicker of colour at one of the windows; the watery-blue daylight cast across something shiny and green, like an insect carapace. A man in combat armour. He had only the very quickest impression of shape and form, but hard-won experience had taught the sergeant to trust his instincts, to let the enhanced elements of his Astartes physiology bring the sense of his world to him, raw and unfiltered.
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