by Various
‘Built to last,’ he muttered. He closed his eye, and then began tapping down on the device. A high series of clicks and tones was audible. He adjusted the frequency with an ancient circular dial, and there was a faint crackle.
The two of them were so intent, the boy turning the handle on his creaking torch, the giant tapping away on the strange device, that they were almost oblivious to the grinding and banging at the room’s door.
‘Is it working?’ the boy asked.
‘The signal is going out. The code is ancient; a relic of old Earth, but we still use it in my Chapter, for its simplicity. It is elegant, older even than the Imperium itself. But like many simple, elegant things in this universe, it has endured.’
The Space Marine stopped his tapping. ‘Enough. We must see if we can get you out of here.’
‘There’s no way out,’ the boy said.
‘There’s always a way out,’ the Astartes told him. He turned and fired at the plexi-glass of the control tower. It shattered and cascaded in an avalanche of jagged shards. Then he reached into the console drawer with a fist and produced a long coil of dull coppery wire.
‘It will slice your hands as you go down,’ he said to the boy, ‘but you must hold on. When you get to the bottom, start running.’
‘What about you?’
The Space Marine smiled. ‘I will be on the other end. Now do it.’
The door burst open, and was flung back against the wall with a clang. A huge figure loomed out of the darkness, and more were behind it.
The Astartes was slumped by the huge broken maw of the plexiglass window, a glint of wire wrapped round one arm, disappearing into the smoky vacancy beyond. He bared his teeth in a rictus.
‘What kept you?’ he asked the hulking shapes as they advanced on him. Then he raised his free arm and fired a full magazine from the bolt pistol into the intruders. Screams and yowls rent the air, and the foremost two shapes were blasted off their feet.
But more were behind them. The howling mob in the doorway poured into the room, firing bolters as they came, the heavy rounds blasting everything to pieces.
Away from the tortured little world, the vastness of hanging space was utterly silent, peaceful, but in the midst of that peace tiny flowers of light bloomed, white and yellow, lasting only an instant before lack of oxygen snuffed them out. From a distance – a great distance – they seemed minute and beautiful, brief jewels in the blackness. Closer to, the story was different.
There were craft floating in the blackness, immense structures of steel and ceramite and titanium and a thousand other alloys, constructed with an eye to utility, to endurance. Made for destruction. They looked like vast airborne temples created for the worship of a deranged god, kilometres long, their flanks bristling with turrets and batteries. About them, smaller craft wheeled and dove like flycatchers on the hide of a rhino.
Within the largest of these craft an assemblage of giants stood clad in shining dark blue armour, unhelmed, their pale faces reflecting back the distant infernos that were on the viewscreens to their front. All around them, travesties of man and machine worked silently, murmuring into their stations, hands of flesh working in harmony with limbs of steel and muti-hued wiring. Incense hung in the air, mixed with the unmistakable fragrance of gun-oil.
‘You’re sure of this, brother?’ one of the giant figures said, not turning his head from the scenes of kinetic mayhem on the screens about him.
‘Yes, captain. The signal lasted only some forty-five seconds, but there was no doubting its content. Several of my comms-techs know the old code, as do the Adeptus Mechanicus. It is a survival from ancient days.’
‘And the content of the message?’
‘One phrase, repeated again and again. Captain, the phrase was Umbra Sumus.’
At this, all the standing figures started and turned towards the speaker. They were all two and a half metres high, clad in midnight-blue armour. All had the white symbol of the double-headed axe on one of their shoulderguards. They carried their helms in the crook of their arms, and bolt-pistols were holstered on their thighs.
‘Mardius, are you sure – that is what it said?’
‘Yes, captain. I have triple checked. The signal was logged and recorded.’
The captain drew in a sharp breath. ‘The motto of our order.’
‘We are shadows. Yes, captain. No Punisher would ever utter those words – the hatred they feel for the Dark Hunters is too great. It is my belief one or more of our brethren sent it from the surface of the planet; he was contacting us in the only way he could. Or warning us.’
‘The signal cut off, you say?’
‘It was very faint. It may have been cut off or it may merely have passed out of our range-width. We are too far away to scan the planet. The signal itself took the better part of ten days to reach us.’
‘Brother Avriel,’ the captain snapped. ‘Who was unaccounted for after we left the surface?’
Another of the giants stepped forward. ‘Brother Pieter. No trace was found of him. We would have searched longer, but–’
‘But the Punishers had to be pursued. Quite right, Avriel. No blame is attached to my query. It was the priority at the time.’ The captain stared up at one of the giant screens again. Within the massive nave of the starship, there was almost silence, except for the clicks and muttering of the adepts at their posts.
‘No other communications from planetside?’
‘None whatsoever, captain. Their infrastructure was comprehensively destroyed during our assault, and it was a backwater to begin with. One spaceport, and nothing but suborbital craft across the whole planet.’
‘Yes, yes, I am aware of the facts of the campaign, Avriel.’ The captain frowned, the studs on his brow almost disappearing in the folds of scarred flesh there. At last he looked up.
‘This engagement here is almost concluded. The Punisher flotilla has been crippled and well nigh destroyed. As soon as we have finished off the last of their strike craft we will turn about, and set a course for Perreken.’
‘Go back?’ one of the Astartes said. ‘But it’s been weeks. If it was Pieter–’
‘Avriel,’ the captain snapped, ‘What is our estimated journey time to the planet?’
‘At best speed, some thirty-six days, captain.’
‘Emperor guide us, that’s a long time to leave a Brother Marine alone,’ one of the others said.
‘We do this not just for our brother,’ the captain told them. ‘If any taint of Chaos has remained on the planet then it must be burnt out, or our mission in this system will have utterly failed. We return to Perreken, brothers – in force.’
The ceremony was almost complete. For weeks the cultists and their champions had danced and prayed and chanted and wept. Now their mission was close to its fruition. Across the plascrete of the landing pads, a dark stain had grown. This was no burn mark, no sear of energy weapon or bombardment crater. Within its shadow the ground bubbled like soup left too long on a stove. It steamed and groaned, cracking upwards, segments of plascrete floating on the unquiet surface. The screaming chant of the cultists reached a new level, one that human ears could barely comprehend. Hundreds of them were gathered around the unquiet, desecrated stain of earth.
‘Hold your fire until I give the word,’ the boy said, and up and down the line the order was passed along. In a series of impact craters to the east of the spaceport scores of men and women lay hidden by the broken rubble. They were a tatterdemalion band of ragged figures weighed down by bandoliers of ammunition and a bewildering assortment of weaponry, some modern and well-kept, some ancient and worn-out. Once, a long time ago it seemed now, they had been civilians, non-combatants. But now that distinction had ceased to exist on Perreken.
A black-bearded man who lay beside the boy was chewing on his thumbnail nervously. ‘If we’ve got this wrong, then
all of us will die here today,’ he said.
‘That is why I didn’t get it wrong,’ the boy said. He turned to stare at his companion and the black-bearded man looked away, unable to meet those eyes.
Almost three months had passed since the boy had slid down a piece of wire held by a dead Space Marine. In that time he had broadened, grown taller, and yet more gaunt. The flesh of his face had been stripped back to the bone by hunger and exhaustion, and his eyes were blank with the look of a man who has seen too much. Despite his youth, no one questioned his leadership. It was as if his fellow fighters recognised something unique in him, something none of the rest of them possessed.
The boy held an Astartes bolt pistol in his hands, and as he lay there in the crater with the rank sweat of fear filling the air around him, he bent his head and kissed the double-headed eagle on the barrel. Then he fumbled in the canvas satchel at his side and produced a mess of wires and a little control panel. A green light burned on the heavy battery still in the satchel.
‘Send it,’ he said to the black-bearded man. ‘It’s time.’
His companion began tapping clicks out on the elderly wired contraption. ‘May the Emperor smile on us today,’ he muttered. ‘And may His Angels arrive on time.’
‘When the Astartes say they will do something, they do it,’ the boy said. ‘They gave their word. They will be here.’
Across the landing fields, the cultists were dancing and stamping and screaming their way into a frenzy. Some of the madly cavorting figures had once been smallholders and blacksmiths and businessmen, friends and neighbours of the ragged guerrillas who lay in wait among the craters to the east. Now they had been turned into chattels of the Dark Gods, worshippers of that which drew its strength from the warp. And now the warp had stirred them into a kind of ecstasy, and it fed off their worship, their blood-sacrifices. The patch of ground which they circled darkened further, popping and undulating as though cooked on some great invisible flame.
And inside that roiling cauldron, something stirred. There was a momentary glimpse of something breaking the surface, like the fin of a great whale at sea. The earth spat upwards, as though trying to escape whatever writhed beneath it. The cultists went into paroxysms, prostrating themselves, shrieking until the blood vessels in their throats burst and sprayed the air with their life fluids. Farther back from the edge, the armour-clad champions of their kind stood and stamped and clashed power swords against their breastplates. The darkness thickened over them all like a shroud.
The boy lay and watched them with his face disfigured by hatred and fear. Up and down the line there was a murmur as his fellow fighters brought their weapons into their shoulders. Some were priming homemade bombs, others were checking magazines. They were an underfed, rancid, ill-equipped band, but they held their position with real discipline, waiting for their young leader’s word.
I did that, the boy thought. I made them like this. I am good at it.
He could barely remember a time now when he had been a mere farm boy, living on a green planet where the skies were blue and there was fresh food to be had, clean water to drink. He could barely even remember his father. That boy who had known a father was someone else, from another time. All he could remember now was the endless smoke-shrouded landscape, the constant fear, the explosions of bloody violence, the carnage. And the face of the Astartes who had died while helping him to live. That, he could not forget.
Nor could he forget the moment of sheer bubbling joy and relief when the ancient comms device he had found in the city had proved to work as well as that which they had found in the control tower. One of the older men knew the ancient code by heart and taught it to him. When the first message had come clicking back at them from a far-flung starship on the other side of the system it had seemed like a benediction from the God-Emperor Himself. It was enough to engender hope, to help him recruit fighters from the shattered survivors of the population. They had lived like rats, scavenging, scurrying for weeks and then months in the ruins of their world. Until today. Today they would stand up and take it back.
That was the plan.
The boy clambered to his feet just as the battery-fed contraption in the satchel clicked by itself in a sharp staccato final message.
An incoming message.
The boy smiled. ‘Open fire!’ he shouted.
And all around him hell erupted.
The chanting of the cultists faltered. They looked up, distracted, angry, shocked. The first volley cut down almost a hundred. Then the ragged guerrillas followed the boy’s lead and charged forward across the broken plascrete of the landing field, firing as they came and yelling at the top of their voices.
The ring of cultists opened up, fraying under the shock of the assault. But there were many hundreds more of them further west by their drop pods. These now set up a cacophony of fury, and began running eastwards to meet the attack.
The boy went to one knee, picking his targets calmly, firing two or three rounds into each. The enemy formation had splintered – they were confused, scattered, but in their midst their champions were restoring discipline quickly, shooting the more panicked of their underlings, roaring at the rest to stand fast.
Now, the boy thought. It must be now.
In the sky above the spaceport, eye-blinding lights appeared, lancing even through the heavy smoke and the preternatural night. With them came a sullen, earth-trembling roar.
In an explosion of concrete and soil, a behemoth thundered to earth. It was dozens of metres tall, painted midnight blue, and on its multi-faceted sides was painted the sigil of the double-headed axe. It scattered the cultists through the air with the force of its impact, and in its wake came another, and another, and then two more. It was as if a series of great metal castles had suddenly been hurled to earth.
With a scream of straining metal, long hatches fell down from the sides of these monstrous apparitions, as though they were the petals opening on a flower. These hatches hit the ground and buried themselves in earth and shattered stone and the bodies of the screaming cultists, becoming ramps. And down the ramps came an army, a host of armour-clad warriors blazing a bloody path with the automatic fire of bolters, meltaguns, plasma rifles and rocket launchers. In their midst hulking Dreadnoughts strode, picking up the cultist champions in their clawed fists and tossing them away like discarded rags. They belched flame as they came, incinerating the cultists, boiling their flesh within their armour, making of them black desiccated statues.
And overhead the engines of destruction swooped down to unloose cargoes of bombs on the unholy stain which the Chaos minions had inflicted upon the tortured planet. As they went off, so in their brilliant light something bestial and immense could be seen twisting and thrashing in its last agonies. It sank down below the level of the plascrete launch pad as though below the surface of a lake, bellowing, and as the missiles rained down on it, so the blackened earth became solid again, and the stain became that of normal charred earth and stone, the desecration lifted before it could be consummated.
The boy stood with his bolt pistol forgotten in his hands, staring at that great storm of fire, a scene like the ending of a world. He felt the concussion of the shells beat at the air in his very lungs, and the heat of them crackled the hair on his head, but he stood oblivious. Tears shone in his eyes as he watched the obliteration of those who had destroyed his home, and in that moment there was only a single thought in his mind.
He stared at the massive, fearsome ranks of the advancing Space Marines, and thought: this is me – this is what I want to be.
Thus did the Dark Hunters Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes return to the planet of Perreken, to save a world, and to retrieve the remains of one of their own.
Master Imus’s Transgression
Dan Abnett
‘I suppose,’ he sniffed, ‘you get a lot of cases like mine.’
The officer d
id not reply. In the ten minutes since Master Imus had been received, the officer had made very few remarks, except to announce his credentials and ask a few general questions.
Master Imus had presented himself, of his own free volition, at the portico of the dark, unfriendly building late that afternoon. He had been invited to wait in an anteroom off the inner yard.
The anteroom was cold and forlorn. The fretful fingers of individuals previously invited to wait there had marked the white plaster with a greasy patina, and pacing feet had worn the wooden floor. There were no windows, but light poked in through a trio of dingy filters. From outside, faraway, Master Imus could hear the street noises of workers flooding home to their habs and their evening meals.
Master Imus sat in one of the old wooden chairs provided.
A clerk attended him first. The clerk led Master Imus through to a side office panelled in dark wood, and sat him at a small desk. The clerk was hunched over with the weight of the stenogram built into his chest. He sat on a stool, handed Master Imus a form, and told him to read out the questions printed on it and answer them in his own words. As Master Imus spoke, haltingly at first, the clerk’s bird-foot hands pecked over the keys of the stenogram and recorded his comments. The stenogram clattered like an adding machine, a sound that made Master Imus feel exceptionally sad.
When the form was completed, the clerk left the office, and was replaced, after a few minutes, by a second clerk. The second clerk led Master Imus into a chamber that smelled of machine heat, and was cluttered with banks of whirring cogitators.
The second clerk examined Master Imus’s papers, and copied them on one of the cogitators. Several versions of Master Imus’s biographical particulars flashed up on the multiple screens for a moment and then faded into a dull, green glow. This slow, silent dissolution of all he was seemed unpleasantly symbolic to Master Imus.
He was taken back to the anteroom, and left alone again. The daylight was ebbing. A small lamp had been lit in his absence. Master Imus waited for twenty minutes, and then the officer arrived.
