by Various
He got up in the middle hours of the night, too restless and hungry for sleep. Stepping away from the fire, he clicked on his little battered torch, an old wind-up contraption he had had since he was a toddler. He walked out upon the rocky, blasted slope upon which the bodies of the dead lay contorted and rotting, and felt no fear, only a sense of wonder, and a profound restlessness. He picked his way down the slope and apart from his yellow band of torchlight there was no other radiance in the world save for the stars.
And one other thing. Off to his left he caught sight of something which came and went, an infinitesimal red glow. Intrigued, he made his way towards it, sliding his knife out of the sheath at his waist. He crouched and padded forwards, as quiet as when hunting in these same hills with his father’s old lasgun. Several times the light died altogether, but he was patient, and waited until he could see it again. It was at the foot of a looming, broken crag which stood up black against the stars.
Something half-buried in rubble, but still with a shine to it that reflected back the torchlight. It was a helmet, huge, fit for a giant. It looked almost like a massive skull. In the eye-sockets were two lenses, one cracked and broken, and the other with that flickering scarlet light oozing out of it. The boy knelt down and gently tapped the helmet with the butt of his knife. There was a hiss of static, and the thing moved slightly, making him spring backwards in fright. He saw then that it was not just a helmet. Buried in the fallen stone there was a body attached to the helm. Off to one side lay a massive hemispherical shape – the boy could have sat in it – and painted upon it in white was the symbol of a double-headed axe. A shoulder-guard made for a giant.
The boy scraped and scratched frantically at the stones, levering away the looser ones, uncovering more and more of the buried figure. There was a gleam of silver below the helm, and he saw that he had unearthed shining wings engraved upon a mighty breastplate, and in the centre of the wings, a skull emblem. He stared, open-mouthed. This was no Chaos fiend, no armoured heretic. He had found one of them, one of the Astartes his father talked about.
A fallen angel, he thought.
‘Pa!’ he shouted. ‘Pa, come here quick and see this!’
It took them most of the remainder of the night to uncover the buried giant. As dawn broke, and the relentless rain began again, so the water washed the mud and caked filth and blood from its armour, making it gleam in the sunrise. Dark blue metal, as dark as an evening sky, save for the white silver wings on the chest. The boy and his father knelt, panting before it. The armour was dented and broken in places, and loose wiring sprang out of gashes in the metal. There were bullet-holes in the thigh, and here and there plates had been buckled out of shape by some inconceivable force, bent out of place; the heavy dark paint scraped off them so they could see the bare alloy underneath.
The boy’s father wiped his brow, streaking it with mud. ‘Help me with the helmet, boy – let’s see if we can get a look at him.’
They felt around the helmet seal with their fingertips, that savage visage staring up at them, immobile. The boy’s quicker fingers found the two pressure points first. There were two clicks, and a hiss, then a loud crack. Between the two of them they levered up the mass of metal, and eased it off. It rolled to one side, clinking on the stones, and they found themselves staring at the face of an Astartes.
The skin was pale, as though it seldom saw the sun, stretched tight across a huge-boned skull, long and somehow horse-like. It was recognisably human, but out of scale, like the face of a great statue. A metal stud was embedded above one colourless eyebrow. The head was shaved, criss-crossed with old scars, though a bristle of dark hair had begun to regrow on it. The right eye was gone – he had been shot through the lens of his helmet – but the hole was already healed, a ragged whorl of red tissue.
Then the left eye opened.
The boy and his father tumbled backwards, away from the glare of the eye. The giant stirred, his arm coming up and then falling back again. A rasping growl came up from somewhere deep in the barrel-wide chest, and the legs quivered. Then the giant groaned, and was still again, but now his teeth were bared and clenched – white, strong teeth which looked as though they could snap off a hand. He spoke, a slur of pain-filled words.
The boy’s father approached the giant on hands and knees. ‘You’re among friends here. We’re trying to help you, lord. The fighting is over. The enemy is gone. Can you hear me?’
The eye, bloodshot and as blue as midwinter ice, came to rest on the boy’s father. ‘My brothers,’ the giant said. ‘Where are they?’ His voice was deep, the accent so strange that the boy could barely understand him.
‘They’ve gone. I saw the great ship leave orbit myself, six days ago.’
A deep snarl, a cross between rage and grief. Again, the helpless movement of the massive limbs.
‘Help me. I must stand.’
They tried, tugging at the cold metal armour. They managed to get him sitting upright. His gauntleted hand scrabbled at the rubble.
‘My bolter.’
‘It’s not here – it must be buried, as you were. We had to dig you out.’
He could not raise himself. The single eye blinked. The Astartes spat, and his spittle spattered against the rocks, bright with blood.
‘My armour is dead. We must get it off. Help me. I will show you what to do.’
The rain came lashing down. They struggled in the muck and gravel around the giant, clicking off one piece after another of the armour which enclosed him. The boy could not lift any of them, strong though he was. His father grunted and sweated, corded muscles standing out along his arms and chest, as he set each piece of the dark blue carapace to one side. The massive breastplate almost defeated them all, and when it came free the giant snarled with pain. As it fell away, slick, mucus-covered cables slid out of his torso along with it, and when they sucked free, the boy saw that his chest was pocked with metal sockets embedded in his very flesh. The armour had been part of him.
He had been shot through the thigh, but the wound was almost closed. It was a raised, angry lump, in the midst of which was a suppurating hole. The Astartes looked at it, frowning. ‘Something’s in there. My system should have fixed it by now.’ He probed the hole with one finger, teeth bared against the pain, and raised his bloody pus-covered digit to his face and sniffed at it. ‘Something bad.’ He put a knuckle to his empty eye-socket. ‘It feels hot. I have infection in me.’ His voice held a note of incredulity. ‘This should not be.’ He thought for a moment. ‘They used chemical agents in the fighting. Maybe biological too. It would seem my system has been compromised.’
The Astartes looked at the man who knelt by him. ‘I must rejoin my brethren. I need a deep space comms link. Do you know where there would be such a thing?’
The boy’s father tugged at his lower lip. ‘In the city, at the spaceport I suppose. But the city is pretty much destroyed. There may be nothing left.’
The Astartes nodded again. Something like humanity came into his surviving eye. ‘I remember. Our deep strike teams made planetfall not far from the landing fields. The Thunderhawks took out positions all up and down the pads. They had drop-ships there, three of them. We got them all.’
‘Who were they, lord, if I might ask?’
The Astartes smiled, though the effect was less humorous than ferocious on that massive, brutal face. ‘Those who brought us here were the enemies of Man – a Chaos faction my Chapter has been charged with eradicating for decades now. They call themselves the Punishers. They meant to take over your world and use it as a bridgehead to conquer the rest of the system. My brothers and I saved you from that fate.’
‘You destroyed my world,’ the boy said, high and shrill with anger. ‘You didn’t save anything – you burnt us to ash!’
The giant regarded him gravely. ‘Yes, we did. But I promise you that the Punishers would have done worse, had they b
een allowed. Your people would have been cattle to them, mere sport for the vilest appetites imaginable. Those who died quickly would have been the lucky ones. You will rebuild your world – it may take twenty years, but you can do it. Had it been tainted by Chaos, there would have been nothing for it but to scald it down to the very guts of the planet, and leave it an airless cinder.’
The man grasped his son’s arm. ‘He’s young – he knows nothing.’
‘Well, consider this part of his education,’ the Astartes snapped. ‘Now find me something we can use to splint my leg – and something to lean on that will take my weight. I must get mobile – and I need a weapon.’
Their search took much of the day, until finally they hit upon dismantling one of the discarded weapons lying on the battlefield and using the recoil rod within the firing mechanism to splint the Astartes’s thigh. As he tied it tight about his lacerated flesh with lengths of wire, the giant ground his teeth, and pus popped out of the hot red wound in his leg. The boy’s father retrieved the Imperium weapon his son had found the day before. The Astartes’s eyes lit up as he saw it, then narrowed again as he popped the magazine and checked the seat of the rounds within. ‘Maybe thirty, if we’re lucky. Well, a working bolter is worth something. Now hand me that pole.’
The pole was part of the innards of one of the great biomechanical carcasses which littered the field. The Astartes regarded it with disgust, wiping it clean with wet soil and sand. He used it as a staff, and was finally able to lever himself upright. In his free fist he held the bolter. He found its weight hard to manage in his weakened state however, and so fashioned a sling from more gleaned wire so that he might let it swing at his side. The wire of the sling cut into his shoulder, slicing the skin, but he seemed not to feel the pain.
‘It’ll be dark soon,’ the boy’s father said. ‘We should perhaps stay here another night and then set off at dawn.’
‘No time,’ the Astartes said. Now that he was upright he seemed even huger, half as tall again as the man in front of him, his hands as big as shovels, his chest as wide as a dining table. ‘I see in the dark. You can follow me.’ With that, he set off, hobbling down the slopes of the shattered hillside to the valley below, where the sun was setting in a maelstrom of black cloud and toiling pillars of even blacker smoke, still rising from the stricken city that was their destination.
They walked half the night. The ground they traversed was broken by great bombardments and littered with the wreckage of war machines, some tracked, some wheeled, and some it seemed fashioned with arms and legs. They stopped once beside a great burnt-out carcass which squatted as tall as a building. So shot to pieces was it that its original shape could hardly be made out, but the Astartes limped up to it and carefully, reverently clicked off a metal seal with a tattered remnant of parchment still clinging to it. He bowed his head over this relic. ‘Ah, brother,’ he whispered.
‘What is it?’ the boy asked, even as his father tried to hush him.
‘One of my battle-brothers; a spirit so bold, so fine, he chose to be encased in this mighty Dreadnought after his own body was destroyed, to carry on the fight, to stay with us, his brethren. His friends. His name was Geherran. He was with my company, and saved us from these–’ Here the Astartes gestured at the other wrecks which stood round about, evil, crab-like structures adorned with all manner of ordnance, emblazoned with sickening symbols, ‘–these defilers. Abominations of Chaos. He broke them, took their heaviest fire upon himself so we might bring them down one by one.’
The Astartes blinked his one eye, then straightened, and limped on without another word.
The boy and his father followed him through a graveyard of the great machines, awed by their size, and the way in which they had been blasted to pieces where they stood. As the planet’s two moons began to rise, it seemed they were in the midst of some ancient arena, where the dead had been left forgotten in mounds about them. But the dead were all twisted, snarling, white-faced and putrid. In the moons’ light, it did not do to look at them too closely.
They entered the suburbs of the city and began to encounter signs of life. Rats flickered and squealed amid avalanches of rubble, and here and there a dog growled at them from the deepest shadows, eyes alight with madness, luminous foam dripping from its jaws. Once, a stream of cockroaches, each as big as a man’s fist, went chittering across their path, dragging some unidentifiable chunk of carrion with them as they went. The Astartes watched them go thoughtfully, hefting the bolter.
‘Such creatures are not native to this world, am I right?’
The boy’s father was wide-eyed. ‘Not that I have heard.’
‘Something has been happening here. My brothers would not have left this world again so quickly unless there was a good reason. My guess is something called them out of orbit. A secondary threat of some kind.’
‘You think they destroyed all the enemy down here on the surface?’
‘We do not leave jobs half done.’
‘How do you know?’ the boy piped up. ‘You were buried under a ton of stone, dead to the world. They left you behind.’
The Astartes turned, and in his eye they could see a light not unlike that in the dog’s caught by lamplight. But he said nothing. The boy was cuffed across the back of his head by his father.
They moved on, more slowly now, for the Astartes was straining to keep his massive firearm at the ready. An ordinary man would struggle to lift, let alone fire it. His metal staff clicked against the plascrete underfoot, and stones skittered aside as his feet found their way. Watching him, the boy realised that the giant was near the end of his strength, and now he noticed also that the Astartes was leaving a thickly stippled trail of dark liquid in his wake. He was bleeding to death. He pointed this out to his father, who grasped up at the giant’s arm.
‘Your leg – you must let me look at it.’
‘My systems should have taken care of it. I am infected. Some kind of bio-agent. I can feel it in my skull, like red-hot worms writhing behind my eyes. I need an Apothecary.’ The Astartes was panting heavily. ‘How far to the spaceport?’
‘Another four or five kilometres.’
‘Then I will rest, for now. We must find somewhere to lay up until daylight. I don’t like this place, these ruins. There is something here.’
‘No bodies,’ the boy said, making his companions stare at him. He shrugged. ‘Where are all the dead people? There’s nothing but vermin left.’
‘Lean on me,’ the boy’s father said to the ailing giant. ‘There are houses on our right, up ahead, and they look more intact. We’ll find one with a roof.’
By they time they bedded down for what remained of the darkness the Astartes was shivering uncontrollably, though his skin was almost too hot to touch. They gathered rainwater out of puddles and broken crockery and sipped enough of the black, disgusting liquid to moisten their mouths. The air was full of smoke and soot which left a gritty taste on the tongue and there were sparks flying in the midst of the reek.
‘The fires are up north, towards the spaceport,’ the boy’s father said, rubbing his aching shoulder.
The Astartes nodded. He stroked the bolter in his lap as though it comforted him. ‘It may be best if I go on alone,’ he said.
‘My other shoulder is still good enough to lean on.’
The giant smiled. ‘What are you, a farmer?’
‘I was. I had cattle. Now I have rocks and ash.’
‘And a son, who still lives.’
‘For now,’ the man said, and he looked at the filthy, pinched face of his son, who lay sleeping like an abandoned orphan, wrapped in the charred rags of a blanket on the floor.
‘Think of him, then – you have accompanied me far enough.’
‘Yes,’ the boy’s father said dryly. ‘And you are in such tremendous shape. You want rid of us because you think something bad is up ahead, at th
e spaceport, and you want to spare us.’
The giant inclined his head. ‘Fighting is my life, not yours.’
‘Something tells me this thing is not over. Your brothers overlooked something when they left. This is my world we are on – I will help you fight for it. There is nothing behind me but burnt earth, anyway.’
‘So be it,’ the Astartes said. ‘At daybreak we will walk out together.’
Daybreak did not come. Instead there was only a slight lightening of the darkness, and in the sky ahead, a glow which had nothing to do with the colour of flame. The two moons were setting amid oceans of smoke, and the smoke itself was tinted on its underside, a colour like the underbelly of a maggot.
The Astartes rose unaided. His remaining eye seemed to have sunk into his skull, so that it was but a single gimlet gleam in his soot-blackened face. He cast aside his iron staff and stood upright as the pus ran yellow and pink from his swollen leg. The agony of it brought the sweat running down his forehead, but his face was impassive, at peace.
‘The Emperor watch over us,’ he said quietly as the boy and his father rose in turn, rubbing their smarting eyes. ‘We must be quick and quiet now, like hunters.’
The three set off.
The scream burst ahead of them like a fire in the night, a tearing shriek which rose to the limits of human capacity, and then was cut off. There was a murmur, as of a distant engine, heavy machinery moving. And when it stopped they heard another sound, murmuring through the heavy smoke and the preternatural darkness. Voices, many voices chanting in unison.
The three of them went to ground in a burning house as the gledes and coals of the rafters spat and showered them. Some hissed as they landed on the sweat of the Astartes’s back, but he did not so much as twitch.
