Age of Darkness

by Christian Dunn

  I have no mind-sight. I sense no souls nearby. For the first time since ascending into the ranks of the Legion, I remember what it is like to be alone with my own thoughts. At first, this is strangely comforting, like stumbling across a memento of a happy childhood.

  But I do not take comfort for long, since my non-psychic senses are not as truncated. As my body adjusts and my faculties return, I realise that I am not alone. There is someone in the chamber with me, invisible in the dark. I cannot see him, but I can smell him and hear him. There is blood on his hands, and it makes the air of this confined chamber sharp and unsavoury. He breathes in ragged, shuddering draughts, like a panting animal held briefly at bay.

  For the moment, that is all I sense. We sit in silence for a while longer, and I try to recall the events leading up to this moment. They come back to me only slowly, and in disconnected parts.

  It takes a long time for him to speak. When he does, the voice takes me by surprise.

  It is magnificent. There is tightly-contained savagery in that voice, a throat-wet growl that slips round the words and underpins each of them with a precise degree of mordant threat. I suspect this is no charade to make me uneasy, but simply the way my interrogator talks.

  So the process begins the way these things always begin, the way a million interrogations have started since the dawn of organised violence.

  ‘Tell me your name and company designation,’ he says.

  And for a moment, for a terrible moment, I realise that I cannot remember.

  The Geometric pulled into high orbit, running silent, hull-lights extinguished. Two hundred kilometres down, the planet was almost as dark. It was void-black, laced with cracks of angry red where magma, or maybe surface fires, scored the crust.

  Brother-Captain Menes Kalliston stood on the bridge of the destroyer and watched the approach through the realspace viewers. He was wearing battle-plate, but his head was bare. His dark eyes stayed fixed on the curve of the planet, now filling most of the plexiglass screens above him. His blunt, severe features were characteristically static. A slender patrician nose bisected rough-cut cheekbones. His flesh looked dry, like old parchment, and his burnt-umber hair was cropped close to the scalp. A single tattoo marked his right temple, an owl-archetype, symbol of the Athanaean cult discipline.

  His armour was a deep, glossy red. His shoulder-guards were decorated in white and gold, picking out the icons and numerals of the Fourth Fellowship of the XV Legion Astartes, the Thousand Sons.

  As he stood in contemplation, another figure came to join him. The new arrival had a stockier, shorter, more vigorous frame, and his features were closer to the Space Marine median – bull-necked, angular jaw, taut flesh over heavy bones. He might have been younger than the first, but the vagaries of gene-conditioning always made it so hard to tell.

  ‘No enemy signals?’ asked Kalliston, not turning.

  ‘None,’ confirmed Brother-Sergeant Revuel Arvida.

  ‘And you sense nothing?’

  Arvida, who was Corvidae, gave a rueful smile.

  ‘It’s not as easy as it used to be.’

  Kalliston nodded.

  ‘No. That it isn’t.’

  To Kalliston’s left, a control column blinked with several runes. A hololith emerged above it, a rotating sphere marked with precogitated atmospheric descent routes.

  ‘Landers are prepared, captain,’ said Arvida. ‘We can do this whenever you want.’

  ‘And you’re still not sure we should.’

  ‘You know I’m not.’

  Only then did Kalliston turn from the viewers and look his subordinate in the eye.

  ‘I’ll need you down there,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what the augur readings say, it’ll be dangerous. So, if your hearts aren’t in this, tell me now.’

  Arvida returned the gaze steadily, the ghost of a smile on his lips.

  ‘So I get to choose which missions I go on?’

  ‘I won’t force you to come on this one.’

  Arvida shook his head.

  ‘That’s not how it works. You’ll go, and I’ll follow, as will the rest of the squad. You’ve convinced them, at any rate.’

  ‘They needed little convincing.’

  ‘There are other mysteries to solve, and I don’t see how coming here helps with those.’

  Kalliston let a flicker of exasperation escape from the edges of his severe expression.

  ‘We have to start somewhere.’

  ‘I know. And, like I said, if you’re sure about this, then I’ll be with you. Just be sure.’

  Kalliston looked back up at the vision in the realspace viewers. The planet had a deathly aura to it, one that would have been evident even to the most warp-blind of mortals. The gaps between the rivers of fire were a deep sable, like shafts opening out onto nothingness. Something vast and terrible had happened there, and the residues of it were still echoing.

  ‘I am sure, brother,’ he said, and his voice was firm. ‘We were preserved for a reason, and that gives us responsibilities. We’ll make planetfall on the night-side of the terminator.’

  His dark eyes narrowed, scrutinising the close view of the planet’s hemisphere. It looked like he was trying to conjure up a vision of something long gone, something destroyed beyond recovery.

  ‘Less than six months since we were ordered to leave,’ he said, talking to himself now. ‘Throne, Prospero has changed.’

  ‘Menes Kalliston, Captain, Fourth Fellowship, Thousand Sons.’

  I remember that after a few moments, and the words come quickly to my parched lips. That is what one is meant to say, I believe – name, rank and serial number.

  Perhaps I should resist saying more, though I feel strangely reluctant to stay silent. They may have injected loquazine into my bloodstream, but I doubt it. I see no reason not to talk for a while. After all, I have no idea why I’m here, or what’s going on, or how long I will be alive.

  ‘What are you doing on Prospero?’ he asks.

  ‘I could ask you the same thing.’

  ‘You could. And I could kill you.’

  I think he wants to kill me. There’s something in the voice, some timbre of eagerness, that gives it away. He’s holding himself back. He’s a Space Marine, I guess. There’s very little else like that voice, rolling up from those enhanced lungs and that muscle-slabbed gullet and that great barrel-chest like water from a deep mill.

  We are brothers then, of a sort.

  ‘What do you know of the destruction of this planet?’ he asks.

  His voice hasn’t been raised yet. He speaks carefully, keeping the tide of violence in check. It would not take much to break that dam.

  ‘We were ordered to leave orbit six months ago,’ I say. The truth seems the best policy, at least for now. ‘Some questioned it, but I did not. I never doubted the orders of my primarch. It was only later, when we could not make contact, that we realised something was wrong.’

  ‘How much later?’

  ‘Weeks. We’d been in the warp.’

  ‘Why did you not come back at once?’

  Ah, yes. I have asked myself that many times. As the questions come, I remember more of myself. I still cannot recall what led me to this place, though. The blank is complete, like a steel mask over the past. There is an art to making such a mask, and it is not easy to master. I realise the calibre of those who have me captive.

  ‘I wanted to. Others did not. We made enquiries through astropaths, but our battle-codes were rejected whenever we made contact. Soon after that, our ships were attacked. By you, I presume, or those in league with you.’

  Does my guess hit home? Am I nearing the truth? My interrogator gives no sign. He gives nothing away but the smell of blood and the hot, repeated breathing in the dark.

  ‘Did many of you survive?’

  ‘I don’t
know. Dispersal was the only option.’

  ‘So your ship came here alone.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Should I be more evasive? I really don’t know. I have no strategy, no objective. None of the information I give him seems important. Perhaps it would do, if I could remember more of the circumstances of my capture.

  My mind-sight remains dark. To be confined to the five senses of my birth has become crippling. I realise then that the withdrawal will only get worse. I don’t know whether it’s permanent, or some feature of the chamber I’m in, or a temporary injury. As an Athanaean, I have become used to picking up the mental images of others shimmering beyond their faces, like a candle flickering behind a cotton sheet.

  I’m handling its removal badly. It’s making me want to talk, to find some way of filling the gap. And, in any case, I don’t need psychic senses to detect the extremity of my interrogator. He’s cradling some enormous capacity for rage, for physical violence, and it’s barely in check. This is either something I can use, or it places me in terrible danger.

  ‘Even so, it took you a long time to come back,’ he remarks.

  ‘Warp storms held us. They were impenetrable for months.’

  My interrogator laughs then, a horrifying sound like throat-cords being pulled apart.

  ‘They were. Surely you know what caused them.’

  I sense him leaning forwards. I can see nothing, but the breathing comes closer. I have a mental image of a long, tooth-filled mouth, with a black tongue lolling out, and have no idea how accurate it is.

  ‘You were either blessed, or cursed, that you made it through,’ he says, and I feel the joy he takes in the control of my fate. ‘I have yet to determine which it will be, but we will come to that soon.’

  There were no Stormbirds left in the hold, and the Geometric had never carried Thunderhawks, so the descent had to be in a bulk lander. The destroyer’s crew had been whittled down to a bare skeleton – a couple of hundred mortals, some still in Spireguard livery. In times past they would have looked up at their Legiones Astartes masters in awe as they worked to prepare the lander, but the events of the last few months had shaken that hold. They had seen the ruin of Prospero for themselves, and it had crushed what spirit remained in them.

  Many, perhaps, had had family still on the planet when destruction came. Those connections, Kalliston knew, were important to mortals. He himself couldn’t remember what it was like to find such things significant, but he felt the loss in other ways.

  After launch, the lander fell through the thickening atmosphere clumsily, responding to the pilot’s controls like an over-enthusiastic steed. The control column had been designed for smaller hands than a Space Marine’s, and the atmosphere was still clogged with clouds of ash, blown across the charred terrain below by the angry remnants of continent-wide storms.

  The lander made planetfall hard, jarring the crew against their restraint-cages as the retro-burners struggled against the inertia of the plummet. None of the squad members spoke. The cages slammed up, freeing them to take up their weapons. Kalliston, Arvida and the other battle-brothers in the load-bay mag-locked bolters and power-blades smoothly before the rear doors wheezed open.

  The air of Prospero sighed into the load-bay. Kalliston could taste the afterglow of the furnace through his helm’s rebreather. The atmosphere was still warm, still bitter with floating motes of ruin.

  Night had fallen. The sky was the dark red of an old scab, broken with patches of messy shadow where the smog-clouds raced. Ruined buildings broke the horizon in all directions, skeletons of libraries and treasure houses, armouries and research stations. There was no sound save the winding-down of the lander’s twin engines and the enervated brush of the hot wind.

  Kalliston walked down the ramp first. His boot crunched as he came off the end of it. He looked down. The earth of Prospero glistened. A carpet of glass fragments lay there, as deep and smooth as a dusting of snow.

  Everything was glass, once. The pyramids, the libraries, the galleries. Now, it is our dust.

  ‘Sweep pattern,’ he ordered over the vox. ‘Ranged weapons. Rendezvous point Aleph.’

  The remaining Space Marines spread out slowly from the embarkation point. The two who’d piloted the ship during the descent remained to guard it, stationed at the end of the ramp under the shelter of the rear fuselage. The seven others lowered bolters and walked as stealthily as they could across the glittering glass-dust. They organised themselves into a rough semi-circle, each brother heading for a different point in the line of buildings ahead. They stayed within a hundred metres of one another, opening out into a wide net. Steadily, they began to sweep though the devastated streets ahead.

  Kalliston blink-clicked a rune to enhance his night vision lens-feed. The terrain around him shimmered into false colour contours. There were no target runes, no life-signs, no proximity warnings. The sterile bones of the shattered buildings loomed up towards him from the heat-hazed dark.

  There was no chatter over the comm. The battle-brothers went reverently. They were treading on the tombs of their home world.

  Kalliston raised his head fractionally, watching as a tall spur of metal emerged from the dark. It was over a hundred metres tall, but as thin as a burned-out tree-trunk. It had once supported a much bigger construction, but now tottered alone, a rare survivor of the firestorms that had raged through Tizca.

  The City of Light. The home of our people.

  ‘Are you getting anything, brother-captain?’ came Arvida’s voice over a private channel.

  Arvida had moved slightly ahead of the others, and his route had taken him out of formation. On another mission, Kalliston might have rebuked him for that.

  ‘Negative,’ replied Kalliston, keeping any emotion out of his voice. He could sense Arvida’s scepticism even from a hundred metres distant. Back on Prospero, Kalliston’s mind-scrying abilities had returned to their peak, and the moods of his squad were transparent to him.

  ‘There may be nothing left to get,’ said Arvida.

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘So how long are we going to look?’

  ‘I’ll determine that. Reserve your energies for the hunt, brother.’

  Kalliston cut the comm-link.

  The squad pressed on, passing deeper into the shattered city. Darkness clung to the bases of the ruined walls, squatting in the eaves of plasma-charred doorways that led nowhere.

  Kalliston felt his boot crunch through something fragile, and looked down. A ribcage lay there, shattered by his heavy tread, as brittle and black as coal. It wasn’t big enough to be an adult’s.

  He looked further up the street. Bones were strewn everywhere ahead, all of them human-sized.

  Briefly, something flickered on his helm-display. Kalliston was instantly alert, though the signal, a threat rune on the edge of his armour’s detector range, disappeared as soon as it had come.

  ‘Captain,’ voxed Phaeret, one of his squad members. ‘You’ll want to see this.’

  Kalliston blink-clicked an acknowledgement. The threat rune didn’t make another appearance on his display. Possibly a false reading, or some malfunction in the long-range augurs in his armour.

  Both those possibilities were unlikely. Kalliston kept his boltgun muzzle in firing position as he walked towards Phaeret’s location marker, and his senses remained alert. He was perfectly aware of the danger, and perfectly aware of the opportunity.

  Something else was alive on Prospero.

  ‘So how did you feel, seeing the destruction of your home world?’

  The question surprises me. What does it matter, what I feel about anything? If this is an interrogation by a member of the forces occupying the planet, I would have expected questions on the disposition of the remains of my Legion, on the lingering capabilities of the survivors – something, at least, about military matters.
<
br />   But then, there is much that is strange about this interrogation. I have the overwhelming feeling that I am not just here for the information I can provide. No, this unseen questioner wants something else.

  ‘Uncomfortable,’ I reply. ‘But nothing more than that. We knew something of what to expect. My deputy is a seer, and he had made us aware of what had happened in its broadest outline.’

  At the mention of Arvida, I wonder if he still lives. Perhaps he is being questioned in a cell like this too, or maybe he lies dead in the glass dust of the city.

  ‘Uncomfortable?’ he repeats.

  The word seems to irritate him, and the breathing becomes more erratic.

  ‘You were spineless,’ he says, and the voice is harsh and accusatory. ‘You come back here, like damned reclamators, picking through the rubble of what you let be destroyed. If this had been my world I’d never have left it. I’d have killed any invader who dared come close to it, and damned be my primarch’s orders. You were weak, Captain Kalliston. Weak.’

  He insists on the term, spitting it out. I sense his body coming closer. He is looming in the dark now, just beyond the ends of my chair-arms. Exhalations brush against my face, hot and caustic, like the breath of a dog.

  ‘If we’d known–’ I begin, starting to defend myself. I don’t know why I feel the urge to do this. It doesn’t matter what the questioner thinks of me, for my own conscience is untroubled.

  ‘If you’d known!’ he roars, cutting short my half-hearted response. Droplets of spittle hit my face. For a moment I think he’s flown into a rage, but then I realise he’s laughing. ‘Listen to yourself, Thousand Son. You’ve always been so proud, strutting across worlds conquered by the prowess of other Legions, glorying in your superior understanding of what we uncovered for you. Not for you the dirty work of fighting with your hands. Oh, no. There were always other fighters to do that for you, to take on the danger at close-quarters, freeing you up to spend those hours in your libraries. Did you ever guess how much we all held you in contempt?’

  ‘We knew well enough,’ I say.