by Various
Laughter made an ugly sound through Nemiok’s battle-helm as he hailed the gunner’s kills.
‘Wipe them from existence!’ he roared, sighting a group of orks that had escaped the fusillade. He unclipped a grenade and tossed it towards them.
As the greenskins were engulfed by explosion, he called to Varik. ‘Brother, I wish to anoint my blade with their xenos blood!’
Varik nodded, his drawn chainsword burring in his iron grip.
Though battered, the orks charged, cleavers and cutters swinging. Varik sliced the head off one as his battle-brother impaled another. Nemiok then eviscerated a third before Varik finished the last, bifurcating the beast from groin to sternum.
Sheathing his chainsword, Nemiok headed down a narrow street that led into a larger plaza.
‘Hold!’ Varik’s cry fell on deaf ears as he rushed to catch his brother.
Emerging from between a pair of smouldering blockhouses, Nemiok drew a bead on a greenskin’s back. It was already wounded, missing half an arm and badly shot up. It was rushing at a kill the Marines Malevolent couldn’t see and didn’t care about. He scythed the ork down, opening up its back and spine as the mass reactive bolter shells exploded. As it fell, Nemiok saw two females he recognised through his blood-flecked crosshairs. He pulled his finger from the trigger, but it was too late.
Betheniel was dead. Her eyes were open as she lay on her back in a growing pool of blood. The shell shrapnel had only clipped her, but it was enough for a killing blow. Athena held the novitiate in her arms, muttering a prayer.
‘Saint Katherine, I beseech you, bring this faithful soldier to the side of the Emperor. Protect her soul for the journey to the Golden Throne…’
She did not weep. Her resolve was hard as marble. Athena tightened her grip around Private Kolber’s sidearm and stood up. She wasn’t unsteady, nor did she feel any fear or doubt as she approached the armoured giant in yellow and black.
‘You are a disgrace to the aquila,’ she spat, bringing up the laspistol.
The shot was almost point-blank. It made Nemiok grunt and stagger but otherwise left him unscathed. He tore off his helm, uncaring of the battle around them. Underneath, he wore a mask of pure hatred.
‘For that show of strength, I will let you see my face before I execute you,’ he snarled, letting the bolter drop to its strap and drawing his spatha. ‘This will really hurt,’ he promised.
The punch to his unarmoured jaw sent Nemiok reeling and the spatha spiralling from his grasp to land blade down in the earth.
‘You’ve shamed yourself enough.’
Nemiok looked like he was about to reach for another weapon but stopped when Varik shook his head.
‘Killing innocents in cold blood, there is no honour in that.’ Varik turned to Athena.
‘Get out of here. A warzone is no place for a sister of mercy,’ he told her. ‘Stay alive and do some good at least.’ He took the pistol, crushed it. ‘Draw on my brothers a second time and I won’t stay my hand.’
She nodded, realising what Varik had sacrificed so that she could live.
Athena rushed to Betheniel’s side. Another group of refugees had found them and helped lift the body onto an Imperial Guard half-track. They drove off south, away from Devil’s Ridge and the orks. There were still more greenskins thronging the edge of the camp, coming down from the mountains.
She didn’t know what had made Varik intercede. Perhaps there was more compassion in the Space Marines than she realised. It didn’t matter. Compassion wouldn’t win this war. Only Yarrick could do that.
Overhead the barrage began anew, stealing away her thoughts and keeping the orks pinned. It would be several hours before the battle was done. Many more civilians would die. Only a few would know the Emperor’s deliverance.
Varik kept his brother in his sights until he was sure his ire had cooled.
‘You’ll regret that,’ Nemiok told him.
‘You go too far.’
The dense throb of heavy engines interrupted and they looked up to see a squadron of gunships coming down to land in the distance.
‘Now there’ll be trouble,’ Varik muttered.
The gunships were forest green, emblazoned with the snarling head of a firedrake. They belonged to the Salamanders.
Vinyar yanked off a gauntlet as he reclined on his throne in the Marines Malevolent barrack house. It was gloomy within the boxy ferrocrete structure, furnished with all the austerity expected of his puritanical Chapter. The captain kept banners and trophies close at hand. It was the only ornamentation he allowed in the stark chamber, except for a broad strategium table where a host of maps and data-slates were strewn.
He reviewed one, a report of the bombing at Emperor’s Deliverance, not deigning to look at the two warriors standing silently in his presence.
‘How many human casualties?’
‘Around four thousand, sire.’
‘And the orks?’
‘Total annihilation.’
Vinyar set down the slate, smiled at the two warriors.
‘Acceptable losses.’
‘There was also significant structural damage.’
‘Negligible,’ Vinyar waved away any concerns. ‘The greenskins are in retreat, the Marines Malevolent are victorious.’
‘What of Armageddon Command? I have heard talk of sanctions against us.’
Vinyar’s laugh was derisive. ‘Destrier has been reminded of his place and purpose in this war, Brother Varik. There’ll be no further repercussions from him.’
The warriors lingered, prompting the captain to ask, ‘Was there something more?’
Varik awaited Nemiok’s damning account of what had happened with Sister Athena, but his response was surprising.
‘No, sire,’ he rasped, jaw tight.
‘Then you’re dismissed.’
Both warriors saluted, turned on their heel and left.
Vinyar was poring over the maps on his strategium table, planning the next assault, when he heard the barrack house door opening again.
‘Changed your mind, Nemiok?’ he asked, looking up but finding someone else in his chambers. Vinyar sneered. ‘You.’
An onyx-skinned warrior was standing before him, armoured in forest green. A scaled cloak hung from his broad shoulders, attached beneath gilded pauldrons. Iconography of drakes and fire, hammers and anvils emblazoned his battle-plate. His voice was abyssal deep.
‘I have spoken with Colonel Destrier,’ he said. ‘I have also witnessed the excessive force used at Emperor’s Deliverance and been told of the civilian casualties.’
‘There is collateral damage in any war,’ protested Vinyar. ‘If I had not acted as punitively as I did, there would still be orks roaming that camp. Besides, cowards are unworthy of being spared.’
The green-armoured warrior had unhitched a thunder hammer from his back and slammed it on the strategium table, cracking data-slates and tearing maps. He was unbuckling a holstered pistol when he said, ‘You misunderstand the purpose of my visit, Vinyar.’ He looked up and his eyes flashed fire-red. ‘This isn’t a discussion.’ He glanced at the gauntlets the Marines Malevolent captain had discarded. ‘Put those back on. I want this to be even.’
Vinyar was belligerent, but reached for his gauntlets anyway. ‘What are you talking about, Tu’Shan?’
‘Penance and restitution,’ said the Chapter Master of the Salamanders. Bones cracked in his neck as he loosened them.
‘I’ll give you one piece of advice,’ he added, clenching and unclenching his fists to work the knuckles. ‘Don’t go for a weapon.’
Then he closed the barrack room door.
The Last Detail
Paul Kearney
The monsoon rains came early that year, as if the planet itself were tugging down a veil to hide its broken face. Even cowering in the bun
ker, the boy and his father could hear them, thunderous, massive, a roar of noise. But the rainstorm was nothing to that which had gone before – in fact even the bellowing of the monsoon seemed almost like a kind of silence.
‘It stopped,’ the boy said. ‘All the noise. Perhaps they went away.’
The man squeezed his son’s shoulder but said nothing. He had the wiry, etched face of a farmer, old before his time, but as hard as steel wire. Both he and his son had the sunken, hollow look of folk who have not eaten or drunk in days. He passed a dry tongue over his cracked lips at the sound of the rain, then looked at the flickering digits of the comms bench.
‘It’ll be dawn soon. When it comes, I’m going to look outside.’
The boy clenched him tighter. ‘Pa!’
‘It’ll be all right. We need water, or we won’t make it. I think they’ve gone, son.’ He ruffled his boy’s hair. ‘I think it’s over, whatever it was.’
‘They might be waiting.’
‘We need the water. It’ll be all right, you’ll see.’
‘I’m coming with you.’
The man hesitated a second, and then nodded. ‘All right then – whatever we find out there, we’ll meet it together.’
A summer dawn came early in the planet’s northern hemisphere. When the man set his shoulder to the bunker door only a few hours had passed. The heavy steel and plascrete door usually swung light and noiseless on its hinges, but now he had to throw himself at it to grind it open centimetre by centimetre. When the opening was wide enough for a man’s bicep, he stopped, and sniffed the air.
‘Get the respirators,’ he snapped to his son. ‘Now!’
They tugged on the cumbersome masks, and immediately their already enclosed world became tinier and darker still. They breathed heavily. The man coughed, took deep breaths.
‘Some kind of gas out there, a chemical agent – but it’s heavy. It’s seeped down the stairs and pooled there. We’ve got to go up.’ He looked round himself at the interior of the bunker with its discarded blankets, the dying battery-fed lights and useless comms unit. A pale mist was pouring in through the opened door almost like a kind of liquid, and with it, the gurgling rainwater of the passing monsoon.
‘This place is compromised,’ he said. ‘We have to get out now, or we’ll die here.’
They pushed together at the door. It squealed open angrily, until at last there was a kind of light filtering down on them from above. The man looked up. ‘Well, the house is gone,’ he said calmly.
They clambered over wet piles of debris which choked the stone stairs, until at last they stood at the top.
Inside a ruin. Two walls still stood, constructed out of the sturdy local stone, but that was all. The rest was blasted rubble. The clay tiles of the roof lay everywhere, and the boy saw his favourite toy, a wooden rifle his father had carved for him, lying splintered by what had been their front door. The rain was easing now, but he still had to rub the eyepieces of his respirator clear every few seconds.
‘Stay here,’ the man said. He walked forward, out of the shadows of their ruined home, his boots crunching and clinking on broken glass and plastic, splashing through puddles. Around them, the pale mist was receding. A wind was blowing, and on it the rain came down, washing everything clean. The man hesitated, then pulled off his respirator. He raised his face to the sky and opened his mouth, feeling the rain on his tongue.
‘It’s all right,’ he said to his son. ‘The air is clean now. Take it off, boy, but don’t touch anything. We don’t know what’s contaminated.’
All around them for as far as the eye could see, the countryside which had once been their farm, a green and pleasant place, was now a stinking marsh of shell-holes. The trunks of trees stood up like black sword-blades, their branches stripped away, the bark burnt from their boles. Here and there, one of their cattle, or a piece of one, lay bloated and green and putrid. Smoke rose in black pillars along the horizon.
Such was their thirst that they had nothing to say, but stood with their tongues out trying to soak up the rain. It streamed into the boy’s mouth, reinvigorating him. Nothing in his life had ever felt so good as that cold water sinking into his parched mouth. He opened his eyes at last, and frowned, then pointed skywards, at the broken wrack of clouds which the wind was lashing across the sky.
‘Pa, look,’ he said, eyes wide with wonder. ‘Look at that– it’s like a cathedral up-ended in the clouds.’
His father looked skywards, narrowed his eyes, and curled a protective arm about the boy’s shoulders. Many kilometres away, but still dominating the heavens, a vast angular shape hung shining above the earth, all jagged with steeples and adornments and improbable spikes. It broke out in a white flash as the sun caught it turning, and then began to recede, in a bright flare of afterburners. After a few seconds they caught the distant roar of its massive engines. As the sun rose higher, so they lost sight of it in the gathering brightness of the morning.
‘It’s moving out of orbit,’ the man said.
‘What is it – is the God-Emperor inside it, Pa?’
‘No, son.’ The father’s arm curled tighter about his son’s shoulders. ‘It is the vessel of those who know His face. It is the Emperor’s Angels, here in our sky.’
The man looked around him. At the reeking desolation, the craters, the puddled steaming meres of chemicals.
‘We were their battleground,’ he said.
They ranged over what was left of the farm during the next few days, setting out containers to catch rainwater, gathering up what remained of their canned goods, and throwing away anything which the man’s rad-counter began creaking at. At night they made camp in the ruins of the farmhouse and coaxed fire out of the soaked timbers which had once upheld its roof.
‘Is the whole world like this?’ the boy asked, gazing into the firelight one night, huddled under an old canvas tarp that the rain beat upon.
‘Could be,’ his father said. ‘Perreken is a small place, not much more than a moon. Wouldn’t take much to trash the whole thing.’
‘Why would the Emperor’s Angels do this to us?’ the boy asked.
‘They do things for reasons we can’t fathom,’ his father told him. ‘They are the Wrath of the Emperor made real, and when their anger sweeps a world, no-one escapes it, not even those they are sworn to save. They are our protectors, boy, but also, they are the Angels of Death.’
‘What are they like – have you ever seen one, Pa?’
The man shook his head. ‘Not I. I did my spell in the militia same as most, and that’s as far as my knowledge of things warlike goes. I don’t think they ever even came close to this system before. But that was a big Imperial ship in the sky the other morning, I’m sure of it – I seen pictures when I was your age. Only they ride in ships like that – the Astartes – the Angels of the God-Emperor.’
Three days later the boy and his father were trudging through the black shattered crag north of their farm which had once been a wooded hillside, looking to see if any of their stock had by some chance survived the holocaust. Here, there had been a rocky knoll some two hundred metres in height, which gave a good view down the valley beyond to the city and its spaceport. It seemed the hill had been bombed heavily, its conical head now flattened. Smoke still hissed out of cracks in the hillside, as molten rocks cooled underground. Out towards the horizon, the city smoked and flickered with pinpoints of flame.
‘Pa! Pa!’ the boy shouted, running and tumbling among the rocks – ‘Look here!’
‘Don’t touch it!’
‘It’s – it’s – I don’t know what it is.’
Looming over them was a hulk of massive, shattered metal, a box of steel and ceramite broken open and still sparking and glowing in places. It had legs like those of a crab, great pincers, and the barrels of autocannon on its shoulders. Atop it was what might once have been a man’s h
ead, grotesquely attached, snarling in death. It was a machine which was almost an animal, or an animal which had become a machine. Carved onto the bullet-pocked carcass of the thing were unspeakable scenes of slaughter and perversity, and it was hung with rotting skulls, festooned with spikes and chains.
‘Come away,’ the man told his son hoarsely. ‘Get away from it.’
They backed away, and were suddenly aware that all down the slope below them were other remnants of battle. Bodies, everywhere, most of them shaven-headed, snarling, mutilated men, many with a pointed star cut into their foreheads. Here and there a bulkier figure in heavy armour, horned helmets, dismembered limbs, entrails underfoot about which the flies buzzed in black clouds.
‘They fought here,’ the man said. ‘They fought here for the high ground.’
The boy, with the curiosity of youth, seemed less afraid than his father. He had found a large firearm, almost as long as himself, and was trying to lift it out of its glutinous glue of mud and blood.
‘Leave that alone!’
‘But Pa!’
‘That’s an Astartes weapon.’ The man knelt and peered at it, wiping the metal gingerly with one gloved hand. ‘Look – see the double-headed eagle on the barrel – that’s the badge of the Imperium. The Space Marines fought here, on this hill. These are the dead of the great enemy lying around us, heretics cursed by the Emperor. The Astartes saved us from them.’
‘Saved us,’ the boy repeated grumpily. He pointed at the burning city down in the valley. ‘Look at Dendrekken. It’s all burnt and blown up.’
‘Better that than under the fist of the Dark Powers, believe me,’ the man said, straightening. ‘It’s getting dark. We’ve come far enough for one day. Tomorrow we’ll try and get down to the city, and see who else is left.’
That night, shivering beside their campfire amid the bodies of the dead, the boy lay awake staring at the night sky. The clouds had cleared, and he was able to see the familiar constellations overhead. Now and again he saw a shooting star, and now and again he was sure he saw other things gliding in the dark between the stars. New constellations glittered, moving in formation. He found himself wondering about those who lived out there in that blackness, travelling in their city-sized ships from system to system, bearing the eagle of the Imperium, carrying weapons like the massive bolter he had found upon the battlefield. What must it be like, to live like that?
