Crusade & Other Stories - Dan Abnett Et Al.

by Warhammer 40K

  And so the alliance was accepted.

  Calm yourself, my Lord Anrakyr. The great Szarekh did not need the humans in order to defeat the tyranids.

  Consider the facts. Our fleet had transitioned out of range of their primitive sensors, but were at full battle readiness throughout our engagement with the Dante-Angel’s forces as well as afterwards. Similarly, we outnumbered them by many hundreds to one on the ground. A thousand or more, by the end, since it was they who made the greater sacrifice in battle against the tyranids.

  Consider the wisdom of noble Szarekh. He allowed the humans to believe that they alone held void-superiority over the hive fleet, and so they alone

  took damage in engaging the alien vessels as part of the allied offensive. Our ships remained safely out of the conflict. He also allowed the humans to mount what they considered a valiant and righteous defence of the larger city-structures – a manoeuvre that held little tactical merit or advantage, and a much higher likelihood of attrition. He maximised the effectiveness of the alliance entirely in favour of the necron forces, by giving the humans just enough hope for a brighter future, and just enough of the truth to commit them to our cause.

  Doubtless, they would have turned on us if the opportunity had presented itself, later. Most especially if they had learned the whole truth. That was a risk that wise Szarekh could not take.

  Even so, it was hard not to admire the conviction with which the humans fought. They may come to recognise in time the threat of the tyranids like we do. For that, we wear these trinkets and adornments to commemorate their sacrifice. We honour their dead, even if we do not mourn their loss.

  If you would review the specifics of the battle that the magnificent Szarekh fought that day, then I will bring you the accounts from the Praetorian archives. They are exhaustive.

  Do not be like the humans, my lord. Learn from the past.

  You will need allies if you are to prevail. Maximise the effectiveness of your alliances, and turn them entirely to your advantage.

  Prove yourself worthy in this, and the Silent King may speak to you as well.

  In time.

  It was only after the Gehenna Campaign was concluded that we realised how completely we had been deceived by those thrice-accursed xenos. But it was difficult to be truly bitter when we had intended to betray them from the start.

  When Commander Dante, Captain Tycho and I had returned to the Rhino to

  leave, we had carefully removed the remote triggers from our gauntlets, and disarmed the detonators under the tarpaulin. As I said, this had all been Tycho’s idea, and he had wanted to carry it out alone. He would have become the Master of Sacrifice, indeed.

  When Dante had realised that the Silent King – the Silent King – was present on Gehenna Prime, our duty to the Imperium was clear. This was the supreme ruler of the necron race, a being so legendarily elusive that even the most informed members of the Ordo Xenos doubted whether or not he even

  existed in a literal sense.

  We had to kill Szarekh, no matter what. He could not be allowed to leave this world.

  Concealed beneath the tarp inside the troop compartment was the warhead from a cyclonic torpedo. It had been carefully and painstakingly removed from the magazine on board the Bloodcaller by our company Techmarines, shuttled down to our encampment and hidden within the Rhino at Dante’s command.

  It was a planet-killer. An Exterminatus-grade weapon, the use of which could only be sanctioned by the Chapter Master himself.

  Each of us held a trigger in our open, gauntleted palm, and any one of us could have fired it in an instant. At ground zero, the nucleonic blast would have annihilated everything on the planet’s surface within a five hundred kilometre radius. The Silent King, the three of us, every single necron construct stationed at the Devil’s Crag, every last member of Third Company who remained in our own encampment, and the common citizenry of at least two major hive cities – all would have been evaporated in the space of a few heartbeats.

  It was a sacrifice worthy of Erasmus Tycho’s title, and his ambition.

  Dante, however, had refused to let him go alone. He schooled us in his reasoning around the strategium table.

  It would arouse the suspicions of the necron lords if the Blood Angels suddenly withdrew from the surface, leaving only a single, nihilistic warrior to approach their master. We could not risk ordering an orbital strike without first making visual confirmation of Szarekh’s presence, lest the necrons realise our duplicity with the bare, vital moments that they needed to pre-empt us.

  It had always been a desperate scheme, with only a slim chance of success.

  But for that slim chance, Dante was willing to sacrifice himself.

  I claimed the honour of the third position within the emissary group. My familiarity with the local terrain made me the obvious choice.

  It was only Szarekh’s mask, and the insinuation that Lord Sanguinius himself might have once been on the verge of an alliance with the necrons, that stayed Dante’s hand. Was it even true? Had Szarekh ever looked upon the face of our primarch? It did not appear to matter.

  As the Rhino had bumped and rolled over the plains back to the

  encampment, Tycho had voiced the question that was at the forefront of my mind, too.

  ‘So we are taking his… word… for it, my lord? We will knowingly and willingly enter an alliance with our hated xenos enemies, with the view to some possible future reconciliation?’ He rubbed at his good eye. ‘No one will believe this. Chapters have been excommunicated for less.’

  Dante narrowed his eyes. ‘We serve the Imperium. We protect its people when they cannot protect themselves. If we do this, then we will save at least a portion of Gehenna Prime. If we do not, then the world will fall to the tyranid advance, and the nucleonic fire of Szarekh’s murder.’

  Before Tycho could reply, Dante had raised up the Death Mask of Sanguinius and gazed into its lifeless eyes. Appraising. Reconsidering.

  ‘And when the war against the tyranids is won, I will slay Szarekh myself.’

  It had seemed like the perfect solution: we would use the necrons to ensure an Imperial victory first and then strike down their king once we had secured his confidence. But we had misjudged them. We misjudged them so badly.

  They had deceived us.

  As the campaign against the foul hive-spawn drew to a close, we began to notice strange things – the bodies of our fallen brothers were being looted, our supplies raided. Was it the tyranids, you ask? Unlikely.

  We realised that fewer and fewer of the necron lords and elite guard were making each successive rendezvous with us as planned. We had not heard from the Judicator-Prime or his Praetorians in days.

  We were being frozen out of the final stages of our combined victory.

  By the time we stood upon the killing fields in the shadow of Hive Sendeep, our rent armour and notched blades caked with more xenos blood than we could ever have asked for, we were reduced to a handful of survivors from the Ironhelms and the Sanguinary Guard. The Fratrem Pugno had been gutted by plasma fire, and it would be many more months before she was warp-capable again.

  Wounded, Captain Tycho had instead been evacuated up to the Melech to coordinate the last stages of the void-war. It was I alone who stood at Dante’s side, and the grim realisation came upon us both as our battle-brothers led teams of ragged local militia in heaping up the bodies of slain tyranids for the cleansing pyres.

  He leaned heavily upon the Axe Mortalis, his breath coming like a gasp

  through the gaping mouth of the Death Mask.

  ‘We haven’t seen any necrons in over twelve hours, my lord,’ I muttered.

  ‘Szarekh isn’t coming back, is he?’

  Dante did not answer, but stared hard at the setting sun over the distant mountains. His rage was spent. It was the same for all of us.

  I wiped xenos foulness from my combat blade, and sheathed it at my hip.

  ‘Do not concern yourself with thi
s, Lord Dante. I will have the official records amended to state that you allowed the xenos to depart as a gesture of respect for their unexpected assistance in the campaign. We will catch him eventually, and you will have vengeance.’

  At this, the Chapter Master shook his head, and pulled his helm free.

  ‘No, Sergeant Machiavi. We will never have this chance again. I doubt whether any warrior of the Imperium will ever again lay eyes upon the Silent King.’ He sighed. ‘If that is even who he was…’

  We remained there for another hour or so, watching in quiet contemplation as the pyre flames began to spring up in the dusky twilight.

  I thought back to the moment that we decided to spare Szarekh from the fire, and I am ashamed to say that the most impertinent question sprang unbidden from my lips. In fact, brothers, I am still amazed that this moment of indiscretion did not cost me my eventual succession to command of Third Company.

  ‘What did the Silent King say to you?’

  Dante’s weary gaze rolled to me, and he stiffened slightly.

  ‘He said… something that I no longer think I understand.’

  The commander paused. I waited expectantly, almost now dreading to hear

  the answer.

  ‘He said, “They are the rising storm, and you must become the shield.”’

  THE DEVASTATION OF BAAL

  by Guy Haley

  Baal is besieged. The alien horror of Hive Fleet Leviathan has

  reached the Blood Angels home world, and their entire existence is

  under threat. As the sons of Sanguinius gather, the battle for the

  fate of their bloodline begins…

  Find this title, and many others, on blacklibrary.com

  EXTINCTION

  AARON DEMBSKI-BOWDEN

  Legions die by betrayal. They die in fire and futility.

  Above all, they die in shame.

  Kallen Garax, sergeant of Garax Tactical Squad, Sons of Horus 59th Company. His armour is wreck-blasted and cracked, gunmetal-grey with the sea-green paint scorched away into memory. Across his helm’s left side, image intensifiers refocus with smooth whirrs, miraculously undamaged from his fall.

  His men are in pieces around him. Medes is a dismembered ruin, his component parts scattered over the rubble. Vladak is impaled through the chest, decapitated by junk, twitching in a spread of bloodstained sand. Daion and Ferac had been closest to the defence turrets’ power generator when their length of the wall exploded under a gunship’s strafing run. Kallen has a flash memory of both warriors covered in chemical fire, burning as the shock wave sent them sprawling. Their scorched remains scarcely resemble anything human. He doubts they were alive when they hit the ground.

  Smoke rises all around him, though the wind steals the worst of it. He can’t move. He can’t feel his left leg. Jagged wreckage lies strewn in every direction; a particularly sharp chunk of it impales his thigh, pinning him to the charred ground. He looks back at the burning stronghold, with its remaining turrets firing at the gunships strafing the battlements, and an entire wall broken open to the enemy. Across the desert, the enemy come on in a dusty horde, half occluded by the dirty smoke thrown up by their bike tyres and smoking engines. Dirty silver on a dull, desecrated blue: the Night Lords, riding in wild unity.

  He keeps his calm, speaking over the vox, demanding Titan support that he

  knows isn’t coming, despite the princeps’ promises. They are betrayed, left here to die under VIII Legion guns.

  Kallen looks at the plasteel bar driven through the meat of his leg, and gives it an experimental tug. Even with pain nullifiers flooding his bloodstream, the grind of metal against bone peels his pale lips back from his teeth in a snarl.

  ‘Tagh gorugaaj kerez,’ he calls out in Cthonic. ‘Tagh gorugaaj kerez.’

  A howl sounds closer, mechanical and full-throated. Jump-jets, whining to a close.

  ‘Veliasha shar sheh meressal mah?’ asks a vox-voice in a language he doesn’t speak. He knows the sound of Nostraman, tongue of the sunless world, but speaks none of it himself.

  A shadow eclipses the world’s poisoned sky. It isn’t one of his brothers. It doesn’t offer a hand to help him rise. Instead, it aims a bolter down at his face.

  Kallen stares into the gun barrel, dark as the nothingness between worlds.

  His eyes flick left, where his own bolter lies in the rubble. Out of reach. With his leg impaled, it might as well be half a world away.

  He unlocks his helm’s seals and pulls it free, feeling the desert wind on his bleeding face. He wants his killer to see him smiling.

  Sovan Khayral, Techmarine, bound to the Sons of Horus 101st Company.

  The bridge burns around him, shrouding his vision with greasy smoke the ventilators have no hope of scrubbing into something breathable. To compensate, his eye-lenses cycle through filters: thermal sight reveals nothing but smears of migraine heat; motion-sensing tracks the crew staggering and suffocating on the deck, and slouched in their seats.

  The ship dying around him is the Hevelius, a destroyer of some renown in the Sons of Horus fleet. Like so many of the Legion’s ships, she was at Terra when the Throneworld burned. The last sight Khayral had of the auspex display showed the flickering runes of the Death Guard fleet closing into killing range, herding the outnumbered and outgunned Sons of Horus vessels into showing their bellies. The Death Guard meant to finish this up close and personal. They’d get their wish, in a matter of moments.

  Khayral’s dense ceramite acts as a heat shield against the fires consuming all life around him. Retinal displays mark the temperature close to melting flesh and muscle from the bone. Sirens wail without respite, never needing to

  pause for breath in the choking smoke.

  He hurls himself at the control throne, throwing aside the slack corpse-to-be of the Hevelius’ asphyxiating captain. Through the smoke, he keys a code into the console built into the armrest. Shipwide vox comes alive with a nasty, wet crackle. Circuits are melting all across the ship, diseased and rotting and burning.

  ‘All hands,’ he says through his helm’s mouth-grille speaker. ‘All hands, abandon ship.’

  Nebuchar Desh, captain of the Sons of Horus 30th Company. He exhales a rancid coppery breath from his lungs, feeling bloody spit stringing between his teeth. One of his hearts has failed, now a cooling dead weight in his chest.

  The other beats like a heathen war drum, overworked and out of rhythm. His face is on fire with the pain of the lash wounds tiger-striping his flesh. The last whipcrack stole one of his eyes. The one before that opened his throat to the gristle.

  He raises his sword in time for the whip to lash back, wrapping his fist and the hilt in a serpentine rush. A sharp pull tears the weapon from his grip.

  Disarmed, half-blind, breathless, Desh falls to one knee.

  ‘For the Warmaster.’ With his ravaged throat, the words are as strengthless as a whisper. His enemy answers with a bellow, loud enough to shake Desh’s remaining eye in its socket. The wall of sound hits him with rippling physicality, denting and bending his armour plating in a series of resonating clangs. He stands against the wind for three erratic heartbeats until it breaks his balance, hurling him down and sending him skidding across the landing platform with a squeal of ceramite on rusting iron.

  As he tries to rise, a boot presses down on the back of his head, grinding his mutilated face into the iron deck. He feels his teeth snapping in their sockets, gluing to the inside of his mouth with thick, corrosive saliva.

  ‘For the–’

  His benediction ends in a voiceless gurgle as the blade slides lovingly home into his spine.

  Zarien Sharak, brother of the Sons of Horus 86th Company. A seeker, a pilgrim, a visionary – he seeks out the Neverborn, surrendering his flesh to daemons as a statue of meat and bone offered up for reshaping. He pursues

  them, proves himself to them with sacrifices of blood and souls, forever seeking the strongest to ally with him within his own skin.r />
  He no longer recalls how long he’s been on this world, nor how long the World Eaters have been chasing him. He isn’t here to run from them, he’s here to stand and face them. They chase him now, laughing and howling up the side of the mountain. Sharak can hear the mad wetness in their words, and pays their frothing laughter no heed. His muscles burn; the last daemon to dwell within his flesh was cast out seven nights before, leaving him drained and anaemic in search of another. Soon, he knows. Soon.

  His gauntleted hand grips the rocky ledge above. He has the briefest moment to smile at the bolt shells bursting stone into fragments nearby before he hauls himself up and out of the World Eaters’ line of fire.

  The shrine awaits him, as he knew it would, though it resembles nothing he’d expected. A single sculpture, weathered by mutable time, reduced to something stunted, formless, vague. Perhaps it had once been an eldar, in the era when this entire region of space had been the domain of that sick and weak alien breed.

  You have found me, comes the voice in his mind. Sharak sweats at the silent sound. He turns, seeing nothing but the deformed statue and the endless expanse of glass desert in every direction.

  Sharak, it beckons. Your enemies draw near. Shall we end them, you and I?

  Sharak is no fool. He’s whored his flesh as a weapon to devils and spirits alike, but he knows the secrets most of his brothers lack. Discipline is all it takes to maintain control. Even the strongest of the Neverborn is no match for the strength of a guarded, warded human soul. They could share his flesh, but never dominate his essence.

  This daemon is strong. It has demanded much of him these last months, and here at the precipice, it offers everything he needs to save his life. But he is no fool. Caution and care are his watchwords when dealing with this realm’s creatures. He’s seen too many of his brothers become scorched husks, home to daemonic intelligence, all trace of themselves scoured and scraped away from within.