by Nick Kyme
Desperately Zeth brandished his sacrifice, ‘A kill… a kill for True Night!’ Hanging from his hand was the bloody rag of Haz’thur’s flayed face.
With a smooth gesture the lord silenced the psychic assault and leant forward. His handsome, bloodless features might have been carved from white marble, but they were pooled with shadows and his eyes were a lustreless black.
‘You claim to have killed a raptor?’ No anger in that voice, just an ancient bitterness that was somehow worse. To answer with anything less than excellence would be fatal.
‘He was… weak, lord.’ Zeth breathed, waiting for death. The moments stretched into a dark eternity beneath that withering gaze. And then the ancient nodded.
‘Yes, he was. And weakness is the only sin this galaxy truly despises.’ The lord turned to the sorcerer. ‘We will take this one.’ ‘It is dangerous.’ The words were a hissing, electrical buzz.
‘I would hope so, sorcerer.’ There was the faintest trace of amusement in that bleak voice.
‘Lord Vassaago, its essence has been tainted by… an element I am unable to quantify.’
Zeth fought down a wave of hatred for the faceless bastard. It had tasted the touch of the Needle on him and it was afraid, afraid of the power he would become…
‘We are all tainted, Yehzod.’ Zeth almost flinched at the acid in Vassaago’s voice. ‘It is the reason we must endure.’ ‘Lord, it is unpredictable.’ Yehzod urged. ‘We shall see…’ Vassaago answered, turning his back on them.
Yes, you will, the Needle promised.
ONE HATE
Aaron Dembski-Bowden
I am the future of my Chapter.
My masters and mentors often tell me this. They say I, and those like me, hold the Chapter’s soul in our hands. We wear the black, and we are the beating heart of a reborn brotherhood.
It is our duty to remember. We are charged to recall the traditions that came before the moment when our Chapter stood on the edge of extinction.
My name is Argo. In a Chapter with few remaining relics, I am blessed above my brothers in the tools of war in my possession. My armour was born when the Imperium was born – repaired, amended and maintained in the centuries since by generations of warriors, slaves, servitors and serfs. My bolter roared on the battlefields of the Horus Heresy, and has been carried in the red-marked hands of thirty-seven Astartes since the day of its forging. Each of their names is etched into the dark iron of the weapon, along with the name of the world that claimed their lives. The eyes of my helm have stared out onto ten thousand wars, and seen a million of Mankind’s foes die.
Around my neck is a gift from the Ecclesiarchy of Holy Terra: an aquila symbol of priceless worth and imbued with the warding secrets of a technology almost lost to time. My armour is black, for I am death itself. My helm is the skull of every man that died in every battle fought by my Chapter in the ten millennia since our founding.
More than that, my face is the victorious leer of the dying Emperor.
And why am I charged with this responsibility? Why do I wear the black?
Because I hate. I hate more than my brothers, and my hatred runs blacker, deeper, purer than theirs.
One hate stands above all others. One hate that burns in our blood and barks from the mouths of five hundred bolters when we stand together in war. It is a hatred with many names: the greenskin, the ork, the kine.
To us, they are simply the Enemy.
We are the Crimson Fists, the shield-hand of Dorn, and we have survived extinction when all others would have fallen into worthless memory. Our hatred takes us across the stars in service to the Throne.
And now it brings us to Syral.
SYRAL. A LONE orb around a diminutive sun, on the edge of Segmentum Tempestus.
The single celestial child of a red star that was taking thousands of years to die. The sun’s waning would take thousands of years before its eventual expiration, and the planet it warmed was still of great use to the Imperium.
Syral was an agri-world, with the globe’s landmasses given over to expansive and fertile continents of foodstuffs and livestock. Syral’s great oceans were similarly plundered by Imperial need. Beneath their dark surface, the tides concealed hydroponics facilities the size of cities, harvesting the edible wealth of the depths. As a planet, Syral had but one colossal purpose: to export a system’s worth of food ready for purchase by the worlds nearby that lacked such natural bounty. Syral fed three hive-worlds, from the spires of the rich to the slums of the destitute, as well as several Imperial Navy fleets and regiments of the Imperial Guard warring in nearby crusades.
From space, Syral was the blue-green of mankind’s ancestral memory, as if drawn from an artist’s imaginings of the impious ages of Old Terra. However, the face of a world can change a great deal in a year.
‘THE FISTS ARE back.’
Lord General Ulviran looked at Major Dace, who had spoken those words. With his thin face, ice-blue eyes and aquiline nose, the lord general was a natural when it came to bestowing withering looks on those among his staff that disappointed him. He gave one of those glances to Dace now. The major looked away, suitably chastised.
The gunship sat idle, as it had for several minutes now, its landing stanchions and velocity thrusters still hissing with occasional jets of steam as they released flight pressure and settled into repose. Across the side of this midnight-blue vulture of a vessel, an engraved symbol stared back at the horde of Guardsmen that waited. A clenched fist, as red and dark as good wine.
The gunship’s forward ramp lowered like a mouth opening. Ulviran was put in mind – as he always was when seeing an Astartes Thunderhawk – of a great steel bird of prey. When its forward ramp lowered, just beneath the cockpit window, the bird seemed to roar with the sound of whining hydraulics.
‘I count four,’ Major Dace said, making this his second most obvious observation that day. Four armoured forms, each more than a head taller than a normal man, tramped down the clanking ramp.
‘Just four…’ the major added a moment later. Ulviran would gladly have shot him, had he been able to think of a reason to do so. Not even a good reason, just a legal one. Dace was an asset on the battlefield, but at staff meetings his dullard observations were a tedium his fellow officers could easily do without.
The Astartes made no move to approach the crowd of Guardsmen. They stood as still as statues, monstrous bolters held to their eagle-emblazoned chests. Ulviran took stock of the situation. The Astartes were back, and it was not the time to stand around gawping. Control. The scene warranted control. Maybe there could be some dignity salvaged from this whole tawdry development. Having the Astartes arrive would be a cause for celebration right enough, but Ulviran recalled every single word in the missive he’d composed to Chapter Master Kantor of the Crimson Fists. Begging was the only word for it, really. He’d begged for aid, and here it was: deliverance once more. He was not a man who enjoyed resorting to begging. It had galled him even as he’d dictated the distress call.
Ulviran strode forward to meet the giants as they stood stone-still in the shadow of their avian gunship. He noted with unnoticeable displeasure that the heavy bolter turrets on the Thunderhawk’s wing tips panned across the camp, as if seeking threats even amongst Imperial forces. Did the Fists not even consider the Guard capable of holding their own base camp secure against the enemy? In that moment, deliverance or not, the lord general hated their damned arrogance.
‘Welcome back,’ he said to the first of the Astartes, who was undoubtedly the commander of this small team.
The warrior looked at the lord general, his snarling visored helm turning down to regard the human. This close, no more than an arm’s length from the towering warriors, Ulviran felt his gums ache from the pressuring hum of the squad’s power armour. The whine of energy was more tactile than audible, making his eyes water and prickling the skin on the back of his neck. He swallowed as the Astartes made the sign of the aquila, the warrior’s gauntleted hands f
orming the salute and banging against his armoured chest. Even the smallest of movements made their armour joints purr in a low mechanical snarl.
Ulviran returned the salute. His neck hurt a little, looking up like this, and he unwillingly flinched when the Astartes spoke. ‘With all due respect,’ the voice was a crackling, vox-distorted growl, far deeper than a normal man’s, ‘why are you addressing me?’
Ulviran hadn’t expected this level of disrespect, nor this degree of informality. He was a lord general, after all. Planets lived and died by his tactical expertise.
The general took in the details of the warrior’s armour. The suit was the blue of a starless midnight sky, trimmed in places with a bold red, nowhere more noticeable than the clenched fist on the warrior’s shoulder pad. A scroll detailing oaths and matters of unknowable honour was draped from the warrior’s other shoulder pad, moving slightly in the gentle wind. Hanging from a thick chain that had been made into a bandolier, oversized, misshapen skulls knocked quietly together as the Astartes moved. From the pronounced lower jaws and brutish bone structure, Ulviran knew they were the skulls of orks. In life, they’d been big orks, most likely leaders among their bestial kind. In death, they were impressive trophies.
This Astartes was clearly the leader of the squad. None of the others wore trophies to match.
‘I am addressing you because I assumed you were in command.’ He adopted the tone of one speaking to a small child, which his men would have found both laughable and insane had they heard. The thrill of authority over these giants rushed through the lord general’s blood. He would, after all, brook no disrespect.
‘Do I look like a brother-captain to you?’ the Astartes asked, and Ulviran wondered if the warrior’s vox-speakers made his voice into a growl, or if it was naturally that low.
Ulviran nodded in response to the question. He was determined not to be intimidated.
‘To my eyes, yes, you do.’
‘Well, I’m not.’ Here the Astartes looked to his fellows. ‘Not yet, anyway.’ Ulviran heard something at the edge of his hearing – a series of quiet clicks coming from the helms of the armoured men. He assumed, quite correctly, that they were laughing with each other over a private vox-channel.
The Astartes draped in skulls, chains and scrolls detailing his many victories inclined his head at one of the others. ‘He’s the sergeant.’
Ulviran turned to face this next one, making the sign of the aquila once more.
Before the lord general could speak, this next Astartes – who was clad in a blood-coloured toga draped around his armour – shook his helmed head.
‘No, lord general,’ the Astartes intoned, his voice as much a mechanical ramble as the first one’s had been. ‘You do not address me, either.’
Ulviran’s patience was reaching its end.
‘Then who am I to address?’
The robed warrior nodded in the direction of the Thunderhawk, at the newest arrival striding down the ramp. This Astartes was clad in plate of charcoal-black, and even without much knowledge of Astartes technology it was clear to Ulviran that the dark suit of power armour was an antique, dating back centuries – probably even millennia. The black warrior’s helmed face was a grinning skull, the red eye lenses lending it a daemonic cast as he looked left and right, surveying the landing site.
Ulviran swallowed, unaware of how his Adam’s apple bobbed and betrayed his nervousness. Throne, he thought. A Chaplain. The Astartes in the red toga offered the lord general a slight bow.
‘You address him.’
IN PRIVATE, THEY discussed Syral. The Chaplain stalked around the large table with its map-covered surface. Here in the lord general’s command room, aboard his personal Baneblade, The Indomitable Will, the human and the Astartes shared words away from the ears of others.
‘We handed you this world four months ago.’
Those words chilled the lord general’s blood. They were an insult, certainly, but they were also an unarguable truth. ‘Circumstances change, Brother-Chaplain.’ And they had. Ork reinforcements had come in flooding waves, washing the western hemisphere in a tide of greenskin invaders. The Imperium’s easy victory, largely bought by the surgical strikes of the Crimson Fists four months before, was nothing more than a pleasant memory and a tale of what might have been. The Imperial Guard had been falling back ever since.
The Chaplain’s vox-voice was edged by growls, as if the man spoke at an octave almost too low for words. ‘You are losing Syral,’ the Astartes said. His skullish face stared at the human across the room.
‘I know better than to argue that assessment,’ came the lord general’s reply. ‘I’d wager that I see it clearer than you, for I’ve been watching it happen for months.’
Ulviran watched as the Chaplain reached up to his helm and pulled the release catches on his armoured collar. With a serpentine hiss of venting pressure, the locks disengaged and the Astartes removed his skulled helmet, reverently lifting it then laying it on the table before him. Its red eyes were dimmed now the helm was detached from the armour’s power supply, but they still glared at the lord general in dull accusation.
‘I am not here to chastise you, lord general.’
Ulviran smiled to hear the warrior’s true voice. It was deep and resonant, but with a gentility shaping the words. The Chaplain was, by the lord general’s best guess, close to thirty years of age, but with the Astartes it was almost impossible to tell. He didn’t even know for certain if they did age; he’d always taken the trope for granted that one determined a Space Marine’s age by the scars on their flesh and the inscriptions etched into their armour.
Had this Astartes been allowed to grow as a normal man, he might have been considered handsome. Even as the product of intensive genetic enhancement since puberty, the Chaplain was a fair example of his kind. The Astartes was almost two heads taller than a normal man, with features and body mass to match, but Ulviran saw something undeniably human within the warrior’s dark-blue eyes and the half-smile he wore.
The lord general liked him immediately. For Ulviran, who prided himself on being a fine reader of men, this was a rare development.
‘Brother-Chaplain—’
‘Argo,’ he interrupted. ‘My name is Argo.’
‘As you wish. I must ask you, Argo, how did you respond so quickly to our…’ he didn’t want to say to our plea, ‘…to our request for reinforcement?’
Argo met his gaze. The half-smile left his face, and the warrior’s eyes narrowed. The silence that followed the general’s question bordered on becoming awkward.
‘Just good fortune,’ the Chaplain said at last, the smile returning. ‘We were close to the system.’
‘I see. And are you alone?’
The Chaplain spread his hands in beneficence. One gauntlet was the same coal black as the warrior’s armour. The other, his left, was painted blood red in keeping with the traditions of his Chapter.
‘I bring with me the brothers of Squad Demetrian, of the Fifth Battle Company.’
‘Yourself and four others. Nothing more?’
‘The Chapter serfs and servitors responsible for the flight and maintenance of our Thunderhawk.’
‘No more Astartes.’ It was a statement of resignation, not a question.
‘As you say,’ the Chaplain offered a shallow but sincere bow, ‘no more Astartes.’
Ulviran was noticeably ill at ease. ‘As much as I thank the Throne and your Chapter Master for any assistance the Fists offer, especially so quickly, I had hoped for a… bolder show of support.’
‘Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. Four months ago, we broke the Enemy’s back here. I assume you recall the date.’
‘I do. The men still speak of it. They call it Vengeance Night.’
‘Very apt. We left the enemy reeling, lord general. We left them bloody, their armies shattered from our assaults across the globe. I was at the Siege of the Cantorial Palace. I was part of the strike force that destroyed th
e palace itself, and I was there when Brother Imrich of the Fifth took the head of Warlord Golgorrad in the battle amongst the smoking rubble. We are back, lord general, and I humbly suggest you be grateful for even the small blessing one squad of our Chapter represents.’
‘I am grateful, to you and your Chapter Master.’
‘Good. I apologise for any harshness in my tone. Now, let us talk of strategy.’ The Chaplain pointed with his red hand at the largest map spread across the table. ‘South-spire, the capital city, unless I am mistaken.’
‘You are not.’
‘And, according to the sensor sweeps made by my Thunderhawk as we broke orbit, the city – and the site of the Cantorial Palace at the city’s heart – is once more in the hands of the enemy.’
‘It is.’
Argo’s blue eyes met Ulviran’s, drilling into the officer with an unblinking lack of mercy. ‘So when do we take it back?’
THE INTERIOR BAY of the Thunderhawk echoed with Argo’s footfalls, his clanking tread ringing from the iron skin of the inert machinery stored there. Chapter serfs in robes of deep blue stepped aside, making the sign of the aquila as he passed. Argo nodded to each one in kind, whispering benedictions for them all. They thanked him and moved about the business of attending to the gunship’s innards and readying the stored machinery. Argo’s eyes raked along the heavy digging equipment stored in the hold, and his mood turned black.
Squad Demetrian was training. He heard them long before he saw them. Climbing a ladder to the next deck, Argo thumped the door release to the communal “quarters”, a room where Astartes remained strapped in flight seats when the gunship took to the skies. In the small usable space between the twin rows of seats, two of Squad Demetrian duelled in full armour.
The two warriors could not have been less alike. His armour draped in scrolls of his deeds, bone tokens of fallen foes, and the skulls of seven orks hanging from his chain bandolier, Imrich was a whirlwind of movement. Kicks, punches, elbow thrusts, headbutts – all thrown into a duel with shortswords, added between the moves of the clashing blades.
