Age of Darkness

by Christian Dunn

  If anyone had been in the room with Mendacs, as he moved they might have briefly glimpsed an icon tattooed on the inside of his forearm; in green ink, the symbol of a mythic hydra, its tail raised and three heads rearing back in fanged defiance.

  +++Broadcast Plus Eleven Hours [Solar]+++

  A dust storm was brewing far out on the plains, and while it was too distant from Forty-Four to cause any damage, the trailing edges of it were brushing the outskirts of the town, darkening the sky and pushing ripples of grit down the streets.

  Some of the people who assembled outside the telegraph station had goggles and masks dangling about their necks in readiness; others already wearing them. Along with the masks, there was a ready profusion in the number of weapons that were being worn openly. Mostly, they were low-calibre stubber rifles and shot-rods used for keeping down the population of grain vermin. Some had farming implements, although what enemy they hoped to defend against was unclear. It was more a matter of the weapons being there to soothe the ones who carried them, rather than being of any actual use in a confrontation.

  Dallon Prael had the only thing that could be considered a ‘modern’ weapon, and even that definition stretched credibility. The laslock rifle he held tightly was over a hundred and forty years old, bequeathed to the Prael family by a great-great-grandmother who had served with honour in the Imperial Army. The relic gleamed in the lamplight, and the fat man carried it as if it were his badge of office.

  Town Forty-Four had never had a constable; there had never been the need, what with a circuit lawman from Oh-One passing through once a lunar. But Prael fancied himself as some kind of just man, as if the owning of the rifle made him heir to that office.

  He glanced at Ames Kyyter, who stood with his perpetually grim expression glaring hard over his folded arms. The dormitory owner gave a sullen nod. ‘Is there a purpose to this gathering?’

  Prael cast around. No one had made any announcement, but still the majority of the township was represented here, faces from almost all the families that lived inside the dominions. Those that were not here were being debated on by the rest of them, their names taken in vain. After all, if you didn’t stand up and be counted, then you had to be hiding something, didn’t you? You had to be afraid to take a side.

  Nobody had done anything so foolish as to lay a blow on another or rattle their weapon, but it was getting close to that. Questions and disagreements were reaching a head, fierce discussions building into simmering rage. Prael listened, venturing an interruption when he thought he was in the right and likely to be agreed with. All the talk broke down into two opposing viewpoints and the schism was growing larger with each passing moment. Rather than building consensus, the impromptu town meeting was widening the cracks.

  If the Emperor was truly dead, so some were saying, then what did that mean to the people of the colony, of this township? What did it really mean?

  Prael had no doubt in his mind that the message on the telegraph was authentic. After all, there were mechanisms in place to make sure that the astropathic signals from the Sol system and the core worlds were immune to distortion. He had been told this by other broadcasts and he believed it. He didn’t need to know how that worked, only that it did. Although he disliked the religionist nature of the word, he had faith.

  The message said the Emperor was dead; so he was. And where did a man like Dallon Prael go from there? Horus would be on the throne of Earth now, and he would be gathering his new empire to him. They all knew the stories of the worlds razed to ash for daring to show defiance to the Warmaster – like the planets of the Taebian Stars and other nearby sub-sectors, burned and left as dead balls of stone.

  Some voices called for submission, for the intelligent, logical course of action. They wanted to put up the flag of the Warmaster, fly the Eye of Horus on every pennant. What other way was there to save themselves, if not declaring their loyalty to the new Imperator Rex? If they chose otherwise, when the Legiones Astartes finally arrived, they would be put to the sword en masse.

  Others showed disgust at such an idea. This was an Imperial world, after all. Founded by Terra and the Emperor, brought to life by Imperial will, from the sweat of the brow of Imperial citizens and in service to the Imperium of Man. A loyal world of loyal colonials who should rightly spit hate in the eye of a turncoat murderer like Horus Lupercal.

  Prael listened to the arguments fly to and fro, and held his own tongue. The Virger-Mos system was so very far from Terra, so isolated and remote that it was barely part of the Imperium, just in name and manner only. He dared to ask himself the question – would it matter?

  How would it matter to a world like this one who ruled from a distant Earth? Horus or the Emperor? What possible difference could it make? They would still grow their grain and ship it out, they would still be born and toil and die under the shadow of the Skyhook. The only change would be the colours on the flag and the voice on the broadcasts.

  So, was his fealty that cheap? Was the loyalty of a single colony to its birthworld so fragile and meaningless, that it could be broken by some lights in the sky and the phantom threat of a reprisal?

  ‘We can’t just roll over like dogs!’ Prael startled himself by letting the thought take voice in a sudden outburst. His eyes misted with the force of his emotion, suddenly given a release. ‘Are we that weak?’

  ‘It’s not weakness, it’s pragmatism!’ Ames Kyyter shot back an angry retort, backed by a handful of nodding people. ‘It means nothing to us whose backside lies on the Throne of Terra! So we say a different oath, so what? At least we live! I’m not going to lose all I have in the name of someone I have never seen, someone who doesn’t even know this planet exists!’

  Prael took a threatening step towards the other man. ‘You don’t understand!’

  ‘It might not even be Horus, did you think of that?’ Ames retorted. ‘Maybe it’s the remnants of the Emperor’s stalwarts, come here to make planetfall!’

  Behind them, the door to the telegraph office slammed open and Oren Yacio came out, moving woodenly, his face drained of colour. He still had the complex set of headphones in his hands, the ones he wore while he worked at the telegraphic console. A loose wire trailed after him, dangling from an implant in the back of his neck.

  No one spoke as Yacio took the steps down to the road, blank-faced and sweaty. The only sound was the rattle and twang of the cables over their heads as the touch of the distant storm-winds brushed over them.

  Finally, the telegraphist spoke, raising his voice to be heard. ‘On this day, news from… News reaches the colony...’ He was trying to keep a professional tone to his words, but he failed. Yacio swallowed and began again, eschewing his normal air of formality. ‘A fragmentary broadcast has come across the wires. It was piecemeal and it took me many hours to reassemble it. Sporadic reports from Oh-Nine, One-Five and the capital.’

  ‘The drop-pods,’ asked a woman. ‘Is it the Sons of Horus?’

  A torrent of other questions erupted after her, and Yacio waved his hands and let out a screech. ‘Quiet! Quiet! Listen to me!’ He shivered despite the warmth of the night air. ‘It is my duty to tell you all that his honour Esquire Lian Toshack, Imperial Governor-Select of the Virger-Mos colony, took his own life this day in his chambers. There… There is confusion about how next to proceed.’

  A ripple of reaction crossed through the small crowd. Prael said nothing, his sweaty fingers kneading the frame of the laslock. Toshack had killed himself rather than face the invasion. How many others would do the same, too terrified of the Warmaster to even bear the thought of facing his Legions?

  ‘There’s more,’ Yacio went on, shaken by the portent of his news. ‘Other townships are passing on unconfirmed reports of… of sightings.’ He licked his lips. ‘Massive figures in dark armour have been seen advancing from town to town. Those settlements that sent such reports have all gone off the wire shortly
afterwards.’

  ‘Space Marines,’ breathed Ames. ‘Throne and blood, they’re really here.’ He nodded to himself with the bleak solemnity of a man standing before the executioner’s block. ‘I knew it.’

  ‘No!’ Prael snapped. ‘No, we don’t know!’ He grabbed Yacio’s arm. ‘You said “unconfirmed”. That means this could be some kind of mistake, or–’

  ‘Open your eyes!’ screamed the woman. ‘We are invaded, you idiot!’ Her words were like a match to kindling, and everyone on the street was shouting and wailing.

  Panic hit Prael like a wave, and he felt the mood of the townsfolk crumbling. He knew that if he didn’t act now, the whole settlement would fall apart. With a grunt of effort, he hauled himself up onto the hood of a parked trailer and waved the laslock in the air, filling his lungs to shout.

  ‘Listen to me!’ he bellowed, drawing their attention. ‘I have lived my life in this township, just like all of you! And the blight can take Horus Lupercal for all I care!’ He shook the rifle, finding a new reservoir of will inside himself. ‘I will die before I allow that traitor bastard and his turncoat whoresons to take my home from me! I’d rather burn than surrender!’

  His blunt, forceful oratory got him a ragged chorus of cheers from those in the crowd who felt the same, but there was still a sizeable number who looked on, sneering at his words.

  And just then, from his higher vantage point, Prael saw something coming. Lights, bobbing as they moved, and the sound of an engine behind them. Something dark and large caught in the nimbus of the storm, coming down the mainway from the edge of town.

  ‘It’s them!’ screamed a voice. ‘They’re already here!’

  The crowd scattered, some of them stumbling over one another in wild haste, others fleeing to find anything that approximated cover.

  The motions of his hands were automatic; Prael found the laslock coming up to his shoulder, his eye peering down the iron sights. The training and the days of vermin-shooting with a slug-thrower snapped back to him. The old laser rifle warmed up and went live. His finger was on the knurled trigger-plate.

  The dark shapes were closing in, riding on a plume of windborne dust. Prael wondered what was out there, behind those lights. An armoured tank, a cross-terrain vehicle? Perhaps lines of Legiones Astartes walking single file? He’d heard they did that to hide their numbers.

  ‘Prael!’ Ames was shouting at him, trying to pull him off the trailer. ‘Get down from there, you worthless idiot! You’ll be the death of us all! Put down the bloody gun before they see you!’

  In all his life, Dallon Prael had wanted to be something. To be more than just a solarman, to have his existence matter. No, more than that. He wanted to be a hero.

  His finger tightened on the trigger-plate. He would be a hero. Even if he had to die to do it. He would teach these invaders a lesson.

  The laslock released a pulse of brilliant red light with a shriek of split air, and the shot hit the mark Prael had made for it.

  He let out a breath and felt suddenly dizzy. He waited for the reprisal. And waited.

  The wind and dust went on and brushed past him with a crackle of grit, and Prael stumbled down, advancing towards his aim point. Acrid smoke curled in the air and he smelled burned flesh.

  He stopped, and found himself looking at Silas Cincade’s corpse, lying where the body had been blown out of the saddle of an idling rover trike. A good quarter of the mechanic’s face was a blackened ruin of meat, where the las-bolt had hit just above his right eye.

  Prael started shaking, the rifle falling from his nerveless fingers.

  In the end, it fell to Yacio to approximate something approaching organisation. While Prael went to pieces, weeping like a child, the telegraphist called on the townsfolk to find whatever they could to barricade the roads in and out of Town Forty-Four. They obeyed, mostly out of the need to feel like they were doing something that mattered instead of just waiting to die.

  Cincade’s body was taken, and somebody got the laslock away from Prael. The mechanic had ridden to Oh-One in search of information, and now they would never know what he had to tell them; most of the town had already assumed Silas to be dead anyway, fearful that the wandering invaders out there in the fields would have killed him before he ever reached the capital beyond the horizon.

  Yacio warned them that the Legiones Astartes would come here. It was inevitable. The Skyhook was here, and that made it a tactical location. They had to protect it – either from an invading army come to plant its flag or for a brigade of defenders come to protect them from a heartless dictator. The space elevator was all they had that might be able to keep them alive.

  What troubled Oren Yacio the most was the question of what he would do when he finally learned who had arrived on Virger-Mos II. The forces of the Emperor, or the Legions of Horus?

  Did it actually matter?

  +++Broadcast Minus Two Weeks [Solar]+++

  The title of the book was Insignum Astartes: The Uniforms and Regalia of the Space Marines, and it was a real tome in the traditional sense of the word. Not a pict-book to be read by a data-slate, but a physical object made of plaspaper, like the ones his mother had always favoured.

  Leon took great care with it, as the binding was old and the pages uneven where the glue holding them in place had yellowed and gone to powder.

  He looked over age-dulled images of armoured warriors, captured by picters or rendered in artwork as they strode battlefields like mythic storm-lords. He knew the representations intimately, every shade and line and colour. He knew every word in the book by heart. The careworn pages showed details of Legion sigils, banners and insignia, basic facts on the nature of the Legiones Astartes and their battle doctrines. The book smelled of age and solemnity. At his feet, hand-drawn sketches that were full of painstaking detail, rendered on scraps of butcher’s paper, lay in an untidy pile beneath his bed.

  Leon’s scribblings were crude in comparison to the illustrations in the book, but still he poured his full measure of intent into them. The best of his work – such as it was – was pinned to the walls of his small, narrow bedroom, along with yellowing newsprint clippings and pages kept from leaflets provided by the colonial authorities. The rest of his books and spools of picts lay on plastic shelves above his bed. They jostled for space with a collection of figurines, some stamped from metal and brightly painted, others formed from off-cuts of wood that Leon had carved himself. The youth’s room was, in its own way, a dedication to the great dreams of the Emperor and his warriors, to their glory and the glory of humanity.

  Pride of place went to a single cylinder made of heavy-gauge brass, polished to a bright sheen: the spent casing of a bolt shell. He put down the book and reached for it, taking the case between thumb and forefinger, turning it so it caught the light. Not for the first time, Leon wondered where the shot it contained had been fired. He tried to picture the mass-reactive shell head and the damage it would have wrought on impact. Who died for the sake of this? He asked the question in silence. Leon tried to imagine himself there in that moment, looking on as the round took the life of an enemy of the Imperium.

  The door to his room opened and Leon jerked, startled from his reverie. He’d been so engrossed in his own thoughts he hadn’t heard his father’s approach; certainly the man would never give him the grace to knock before entering.

  Immediately, he saw the shell casing in Leon’s hand and his expression soured. ‘I can see you’re busy.’

  Leon coloured, feeling foolish. ‘What’s wrong?’ He fumbled with the casing, unsure where to put it. The man who sold it to him had taken a high price for it, and Ames had beat him when he learned how much scrip he had ‘wasted’; but the casing had fallen from the ejection port of a Space Marine’s bolter, and owning it made Leon Kyyter feel somehow connected to the warrior kindred he saw in the books.

  ‘It’s worthless, you know that, d
on’t you?’ Leon’s father pointed at the brass cylinder. ‘It was probably picked from the mud beneath the boots of some idiot in the Imperial Army, if that. That shell’s never been within a light-year of a Space Marine.’ He glanced around the room disapprovingly, as he always did.

  Leon kept his silence. He didn’t care to believe what Ames said. In his eyes, the casing was real and true, and that was all that mattered.

  ‘I’ll never comprehend why you hold so much interest for…’ He sneered at the crude drawings on the walls and the metal figures. ‘For all this.’ Bitterness clouded his father’s tone. ‘The Space Marines, the Emperor, all of them… They don’t care about you as much as you care about them. Terra thinks nothing of Virger-Mos or the people who live here. I keep wondering

  when you’re going to grow up and realise that.’

  Still, Leon said nothing. He didn’t want to repeat the same pointless argument they had fought a hundred times over.

  Ames tapped a picture of the Imperial Palace cut from a pamphlet, the edges of it curling inwards. ‘I know you think that one day you’ll go see this for real. But sooner or later, you have to learn that won’t happen. It’s a fantasy, son. You were born here, and you’ll die here. And the Imperium will go on without you. It won’t care.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Leon said, at last.

  His father frowned and turned away. ‘Do something useful. Take the kitchen remains to the burner.’

  Leon waited until he was gone, and then replaced the shell. He put the copy of the Insignum Astartes back on the shelf, where it would be pressed flat and kept safe, and then dolefully took up the duty he had been given.

  He walked across the dusty patch of grass behind the dormitory house to where the maw of the burner protruded from its underground hollow, and kicked the grate open with his feet. Leon let his mind wander, pretending instead he was on Terra, walking the halls of the Emperor’s Palace; but then the stink of the burner reached him and the pleasant illusion was destroyed. Scowling, he poured the pail of slops into the drop tube and let the furnace start its work.