by Various
With a dull crump the speeding guntrukk exploded, obliterated by the massed barrage of heavy weapons that pounded it.
Standing side by side against the horde, the Dreadnoughts Jarold and Rhodomanus locked onto a new target and a warbike disintegrated into shrapnel.
Only a matter of metres away, Brother Huarwar died as he was decapitated at close quarters by a heavily mekanised ork. Roaring in grief-stricken pain, Jarold broke from the circle, advancing on the creature responsible, litanies of hate spouting from his vox-casters like bile as he shredded the alien’s augmented body with raking bolter and cannon fire.
‘Brother Isendur!’ he bellowed over the howls of the orks and the savage chatter of their guns, ignoring the succession of hard rounds that rattled off his own adamantium body-shell as if they were no more than the stings of rad-midges. ‘Give me some good news!’
‘I have subjugated what passes for the device’s machine-spirit, patching a link via one of my servitors and dominating it with a liturgical sub-routine, and, through its transmitter array, have located the fleet in orbit and Forgeship Goliath–’
‘Brother!’ Jarold boomed, bisecting an ork from midriff to neck with a barrage of bolter fire. ‘Is it ready?’
‘Aye, brother,’ Isendur replied. ‘It is ready.’
‘Then begin the evacuation.’
As the two Dreadnoughts held back the press of the ork horde with bolter and fist, cannon and melta, at Jarold’s command the strike force moved back beneath the beam emitter of the huge gantry, never once turning their backs on the enemy, claiming a dozen ork lives for every step they took in retreat.
It was not the Templars’ way to retreat in the face of greater numbers of the enemy. But for the brethren of the Solemnus Crusade, this was their last action. They could not afford to sacrifice their lives so freely, not when their holy work remained undone. They were yet to recover Brother Ansgar’s body and repay the warboss Morkrull Grimskar for all the monster had taken from them when the orks of the Blood Scar tribe razed the Chapter Keep on Solemnus.
They had all sworn it – every crusading battle-brother, from neophyte to initiate, Techmarine to Apothecary, Dreadnought to Marshal, Chaplain to Champion – and they could not relinquish the fight until their vow had been fulfilled, not when a way out of this impossible situation had presented itself.
So large was the ork teleporter – it having been intended to beam something as gargantuan as the stompa to another arena of battle – that the entirety of the survivors of Jarold’s battleforce could fit within the circumference of the projection plate beneath the enormous beam emitter.
They would go together. That was how Brother Jarold wanted it. Whether their plan worked, and the teleporter returned them to the Forgeship Goliath, or scattered their component atoms to the stars, they would go together. The only ones they would leave behind were one tech-servitor to initiate the firing sequence of the teleporter’s beam-gun, and Venerable Brother Rhodomanus of the Crimson Fists.
‘Brother Jarold,’ came Techmarine Isendur’s voice with something almost like urgency in his usually unexcitable tone. ‘Our departure now waits only on your presence upon the plate.’
Jarold turned to Rhodomanus, swivelling about the pivot of his waist bearing, as if he were about to address the venerable, blasting a leaping axe-wielding ork out of the air with a single, well-placed shot.
‘Go, brother,’ Rhodomanus said, before the other could speak. ‘Go to meet your destiny and leave me to face mine.’
‘It has been an honour,’ Jarold stated stoically.
‘Aye, it has been that,’ the ancient agreed.
‘Die well, brother. For the primarch.’
‘For Dorn. Now go.’
Rhodomanus directed another blast from his multi-melta into the press of the ork pack, the heat blast clearing ten metres around him in every direction.
Taking his leave, Brother Jarold defiantly turned his back on the orks and marched to join his battle-brothers at the heart of the humming teleporter, the venerable laying down covering fire behind him, like some colossal avatar of the Emperor’s retribution.
And as he did so, he began to intone Dorn’s litany of service.
‘What is your life?’ he began. ‘My honour is my life.’
An ork fell to scything fire from his storm bolter.
‘What is your fate? My duty is my fate.’
Another was impaled on the crackling blades of his power fist.
‘What is your fear? My fear is to fail.’
As he retreated behind Rhodomanus, Brother Jarold gave voice to the defiant battle cry in one last act of defiance directed at the alien orks.
‘No pity!’ Brother Jarold boomed.
‘No remorse!’ his battle-brothers responded, taking up his battle cry.
‘No fear!’ they bellowed in unison, clashing their weapons against their holy armour in a clattering cacophony of defiance.
Corposant crawled over and around the superstructure of the ork teleporter in writhing serpents of sick green light. With an apocalyptic scream like the sundering of the heavens, the beam-emitter fired.
Rhodomanus did not look back. He knew the Templars were gone.
‘And what is your reward?’ he asked, his voice rising like a challenge against the ravening greenskins. ‘My salvation is my reward!’
Three orks fell to a withering hail of bolter fire.
‘What is your craft? My craft is death!’
The multi-melta put an end to another ork bike.
‘What is your pledge?’
The venerable hesitated. He could see the stompa advancing on him now, and him alone, belching smoke into the air from its exhaust-stacks, its colossal mass shaking the ground with its every step.
‘My pledge is eternal service!’
As the stompa closed on the teleporter at last, with heavy, purposeful steps that sent tremors skittering through the bedrock that lay beneath the glacier, an inescapable fact wormed its way into the spirit-linked mind of the ancient. This was to be his last stand, but even the glorious sacrifice of a venerable Dreadnought might not be enough to stop the stompa.
Rhodomanus and his brother Fists had been unable to destroy it fifty years before, during the Second War for Armageddon, only managing to delay the inevitable by trapping it within the glacier. And now, fifty years on, what hope was there for him as he stood before the devastatingly powerful war machine?
But still he kept firing, directing blast after blast of his multi-melta at the gun emplacements that bristled from the effigy’s carapace, at the stompa’s armour itself, and its crew, when his spirit-linked targeter could lock onto them.
The stompa loomed before him, blocking his view of the crater and the rest of the horde, the macabre god-machine filling his world. Nothing else mattered now. There was only the ancient and the idol, two relics from another battle for Armageddon, ready to make the final moves of a power play begun five decades before.
Sparkling emerald flame consumed the ork teleporter once more, power relays humming as the device came online again. Rhodomanus’s optical sensors homed in on the roasted remains of the tech-servitor fused to the esoteric device by its last firing. The servitor was dead, so how was it that the teleporter was powering up to fire at all?
It was only then that Rhodomanus realised that in his face-off with the stompa he had backed himself onto the empty platform and now stood directly beneath the beam emitter.
A nimbus of actinic light formed at the centre of the teleporter, also directly beneath the focusing beam of the vast construction, surrounding him with its suffused essence. Something was being beamed back to the teleporter.
He felt the tingle of it at his very core, in every fibre of his body that was still flesh and blood. And the machine-spirit of his Dreadnought body felt the exhilarating rush of a trillion c
alculations as the impossible machine read and recorded the position of every atom within his body, the connection of every synapse, the binary pattern of every recollection-code stored within his memory implants. He was beaming out.
Framed by the skeletal structure of the alien device, the stompa seemed to peer down at him with the telescoping sights of its cannon-barrel eyes.
Through his one remaining mortal eye Rhodomanus saw adamantium, steel, ceramite and flesh become first translucent and then transparent. At the same time he saw something else taking shape within the sphere of light with him, becomingly steadily more opaque as it solidified around his departing form.
For the briefest nano-second he and the object shared the same space – his machine-spirit merging with its primitive programmed consciousness. Fifty metres long and weighing a hundred tonnes – the energy build-up already taking place within its plasma reactor perilously close to the point of critical mass and detonation – the torpedo was capable of blowing a hole in the side of an ork kill kroozer with armour plating several metres thick. The venerable’s own machine-spirit continued the countdown to destruction.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
Suffer not the alien to live, he thought.
And then actinic light blinded his optical sensors and the bleak white wastes of the Dead Lands, the collapsing structure of the teleporter and the impotently raging stompa. Everything vanished, melting into black oblivion, and Brother Rhodomanus was gone.
The battle-barge Pride of Polux hung in high orbit above Armageddon’s second largest landmass.
All was still within the reclusiam. Captain Obiareus, Commander of the Crimson Fists Third Company, was alone with his thoughts and his strategium. There were not many minutes in the day when he could say that, and he savoured those times when it was the case. But such precious moments made all the difference to his command. They were those times when he could step back, reflect, consider and plan.
He sat, the elbows of his power armour resting on the cuisses of his armoured legs, gauntlets locked together before his face. His lips touched the reliquary that hung from his neck on its golden chain and which he held within his hands as reverentially as he might a newborn. He stared out of the roof-high windows of the reclusiam at the silent void beyond, pondering again his Chapter’s gains and losses on the planet below, alone with his thoughts and the stars.
Footsteps disturbed the captain’s contemplations, the sound of ceramite ringing from the stone-flagged floor shattering the silence of the reclusiam. Obiareus looked up in annoyance.
Brother Julio approached the strategium, head bowed respectfully.
‘What is it?’
‘My lord,’ Julio began. ‘We have received a hail from Marshal Brant of the Black Templars Solemnus Crusade. He wishes to speak with you, my lord.’
‘The Templars wish to speak with us?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Regarding what matter?’ Obiareus probed further.
‘They have news, my lord.’ Brother Julio faltered, as if hardly able to believe what he himself was saying.
‘Yes? What news?’
‘News of Venerable Rhodomanus,’ Brother Julio said hesitantly.
‘Brother Rhodomanus?’ Now it was Obiareus’s turn to express his disbelief. ‘Brother Rhodomanus lost to us these fifty years past since the Second War fought against the xenos for this world?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ Julio confirmed, ‘but lost no longer. Venerable Rhodomanus has returned.’
Faces
Matthew Farrer
In the end Jann couldn’t stay away, and so here she came again creeping back into the tower’s red-blurred shadow, hunched over with a rusted torque-stave in her hand. The shouting, drumming storm was two days gone now, and no matter how hard Jann listened all she could hear was the soft crackle of her footsteps in the sandflake drift and her own breathing, dry and frightened. At this hour, at this angle, the depot tower was a lightless block of black against the blood of the sky behind it. No movement, no voices. Even the great metal bulk of the pipeline was inert.
The storm’s trailing winds had smoothed out the ground, and the only footprints in front of the south door were Jann’s own. They staggered and lurched out from the little storm-hatch and disappeared behind one of the giant pipeline buttresses, the spot where she had crouched and shivered all through the night at the mercy of strange, taunting dreams. Now the slower, softer prints stalked back out of hiding and up behind her, padding steps, trying for a stealth that she knew would make no difference. She would have to go in there and find them, all of them. She would have to show her…
…face.
She took light steps towards the hatch, holding the stave this way and that, trying to think how she could best swing it if one of them were waiting just inside. It would be dark. The only parts of the tower that were ever properly lit were the control room at the top and the living deck. For a moment that thought almost soothed her. She thought of the dark rooms and halls, dark country she had never seen, riding high and quiet over it, and strange mountains kissed with silver light, but that image split and twisted her thoughts and her strength fled her for a moment. She moaned, softly, and craned up to the sky, but there was no white moon there to help her. There should have been a white moon. Jann had never seen a moon, not of any colour, but there should have been a white moon.
She dropped her eyes from the sky and stood swaying in the doorway for a moment. It seemed as though she were about to break through to some understanding of what was happening to her, but a blink and a breath and it was all gone like
(moonlight)
smoke through her fingers and she found herself stepping through the storm-hatch, breathing hard, trying to force her eyes to dilate, gripping the stave so hard that the corroded texture of its haft bit into her palms. She held it closer to her, like a walking-staff, and found a little comfort in that. No moon-gems, but it would do.
The engines embedded in the tower’s thick foundations sent their rumbling beat through the walls. A deep beat, a walking-beat, for a slow promenade before the dance began. The implications of that thought gave her chills but her steps, already in time to the engines, began to quicken. The emergency lights shone in their little cages high on the rockcrete walls, red like blood that washed from the sky, yellow like the sparks flying up from an anvil. Jann didn’t know whose thoughts these were any more.
Staring into the light, she thought she heard a movement somewhere in the dimness, but the accessway behind her was empty. Jann turned her
(or was it really her)
face inwards towards the red-lit corridors, and pressed on.
She found Gallardi in the machine-shrine, as she had expected to. He had broken the bright blue-white floodlamps that Tokuin had always kept bathing the hall, and now worked only in the same dim red emergency light that Jann had walked through. He had thrown open the maintenance shutters to the enginarium crypt below them and the machine-noise was louder here, a furnace roar. Conduits and energy sinks glowed cherry-red and added their light and heat. The air was clear, but Jann’s senses brought her the faint touch of smoke.
‘Brother?’ she whispered. Gallardi was standing with his back to her, his slabs of shoulders working, his thick body swaying and folding where the fat overhung his belt. From the other side of him came the ring of metal on metal.
‘Brother?’
In the racket of the shrine, the engines below and half a dozen of Tokuin’s workshop machines running, there was no way the sound of her whisper could have reached him. But his body shivered at the murmur of her voice and he turned. Good Gallardi with his callused hands and soft voice, who’d liked to watch the sunset with her from the tower’s roof. He’d sung songs with her (but what songs? Why couldn’t she remember them?) and… and danced… under six wh
ite moons…
There was no white moon. Jann had never seen a moon. She sobbed and took a half-step forwards. She wanted her friend, so blessedly familiar. His thin legs, of which he was so self-conscious. His belly, with the old runnelled scar from the solder-splash accident years before they had met. His grizzled, shaven head and his, his…
…face.
There was a hammer in his hand, and he raised it.
‘I can’t greet you the way I want to, my beautiful little sister,’ he said. Was his mouth moving? One moment Jann thought so, and then thought not. ‘You’re welcome and safe in my home, always, you know that. But I must work.’ There was a shrieking hiss from behind him. The steelcutting press, left to run unsupervised, had overheated and was trying to shut itself down.
‘We aren’t safe, brother, either of us!’ Now she found proper voice, although her words sounded strange to her own ears, high and singsong, almost not her own. ‘It’s happening again. I heard them fighting up on the operational deck.’ Her memories seemed to float and split. The brawl between her crewmates splayed out and overlapped itself like a pict-screen trying to show half a dozen images at once. But every image horrified her. There was nothing she wanted to see. ‘He knows! He…’ She stumbled over the name. Crussman. He reared up through every one of her memories, stinking of lho-smoke and of the blood that slicked the front of his coveralls and dripped from his hand. The simple picture of him sent a killing scream through her thoughts, and still she stumbled over his name, because couldn’t she also remember…
(Crussman twisted around the edge of the driver’s seat in the high, cramped little cabin of the crane-rigger, looking down at them. ‘Lifts like a dream!’ he shouted over the engine and the winches. ‘Easy to see how beat-up it got. Who knows how far the storm threw it to get to here?’ There was a huge, cheerful grin on his face. This was the best bit of storm-scrap they’d ever…)
‘Crussman,’ she managed to say, although somehow she thought she had mangled the word again, made it something shorter, guttural. ‘He knows about… about you. He knows you’re here. He knows…’
