by Various
Above the burning city sat a tiered mountain of pale stone the colour of dirty ice. A series of ascending domes and balconies, it glowed under the luminous haze of void shields, which flickered and sparked with the impact of munitions and energy blasts. This was the Onyx Palace, seat of governorship on this world and the heart of its betrayal. Phocron was there; it was his bastion. The layered shields sheltered him from the bombardment, but they would not deny us.
The Valkyrie hit the void shield envelope, sparks arcing across its fuselage and an electric tang filling the air. The tiered balconies of the palace rose before us, studded with dark weapon turrets that spat glowing lines of fire. We banked and tipped, rounds hammering into the armoured airframe. The engines howled as they thrust us towards the palace’s summit. Others came behind us, delta-shaped wings of Vulture gunships and more assault craft. The air shuddered with the rolling scream of launching rockets and the bellow of explosions. Domes and statue-lined bridges flicked past. I could see figures, some crouched behind sandbags, others already running from the detonations that walked up the flank of the palace in our wake.
As we crested the highest dome I saw Phocron for the first time, a figure in dark armour with a single, black-clad companion and a cluster of cowering figures in billowing silk robes. He stood close to the edge of the balcony as if he had been watching the ruin that he had forced the Imperium to bring to this world.
The Valkyrie pivoted, its engines screaming as it skimmed the stone slabs of the platform. My storm troopers were already dropping out of the door, hitting the ground one after another. Draeg gave me a grin, hurled himself out, and then it was me tumbling the few metres to hit the tiled platform. The world spun for a second, then I was up on my feet, training and instincts doing the work of thought. My armour responded to my movements, thrusting me forwards faster than muscle could. Behind me, more storm troopers spilled onto the platform.
The robed figures clustered around Phocron died, hellgun blasts burning through their silk finery. A few ran, swathes of coloured fabric spilling behind them, their bare feet slapping on the marble. Phocron stood impassively, his hands empty, the sword at his waist undrawn. Behind him, a figure in a black storm coat and silver domino mask stood equally unmoved. I fired, plasma hissing from my pistol. Others were firing too. Bolts of energy converged on the two figures, but splashed against a shimmering dome of energy.
Draeg and his squad were in front of me, sprinting towards Phocron and his aide.
‘Try and keep up in that armour, lord.’ I heard the sergeant’s grin over the vox. I spat back a very unlordly oath.
As the first shots hit Phocron’s energy field, Draeg drew his sword. Lightning sheathed it with a crackle. ‘Close assault, get inside the shield dome,’ the sergeant spat over the vox. The hammer in my hand sprang to life, its generator making it vibrate with straining power.
Draeg was the first through the shield dome, raising his sword for a backhanded cut, muscles ready to unfold the momentum of his charge into an armour-cracking blow. But Phocron moved at the last instant before the blow struck.
I have fought a lifetime of wars and met many enemies blade to blade. I have studied the business of killing, the workmanlike cut, the parry and riposte of a duel, the nicety of a perfectly timed blow. I have watched men kill each other in countless ways. The art of death holds no mystery to me. Yet I swear, I never saw death dealt with more malign genius than at that moment.
Phocron’s sword was in his hand. It was long, its double-edged blade damasked in a scale pattern. A saurian head snarled from its crossguard. It met Draeg’s sword in a thunder crack of converging power fields. Draeg was fast and conditioned from years of war to react to such a counter, but in this moment those instincts killed him. He shifted his weight to let the Space Marine’s blow flow past and open his enemy to another cut. He did not expect Phocron to drop his sword.
With no resistance, Draeg’s sword sliced down and cut air. Phocron turned around the sergeant’s sword, so close their armour brushed. The gauntleted hand slammed into Draeg’s armour at the throat. I saw the sergeant’s head snap back, his body rag-loose as he fell to the ground.
The rest of Draeg’s squad had not been far behind him and they opened up as they came through the shield dome. Phocron was already moving towards them at a flat run. The first died as he squeezed his trigger. Phocron’s hand closed over the hellgun, crushing the storm trooper’s fingers into the trigger guard. The man screamed. Phocron pivoted, the gun still spewing a stitched line of energy. The hellgun’s fire hit the next two storm troopers at point-blank range, burning through flesh and armour. With swift delicacy, the Space Marine looped an arm around the screaming man and gripped the webbing belt of grenades across his chest.
I was a pace from the edge of the shield dome when I realised what was about to happen. Phocron turned and threw the screaming man at the rest of the storm trooper squad. The force of the throw broke the man’s back with a sharp crack. I could see the pins of the grenades glinting in Phocron’s fingers. The dead man hit the platform in front of his comrades and exploded.
The blast sheared through the rest of the squad in an expanding sphere of shrapnel. Fragments of metal, flesh and bone pattered off my armour. I could see Phocron and his storm-coated henchman through the pall of smoke and dust. They were running.
‘Target is moving,’ I shouted across the vox. ‘Close and eliminate.’
I fired, plasma burning ionised trails through the dust cloud. I ran after the two figures. Behind me, the rest of the strike force advanced. I reached the edge of the dust cloud. The fleeing pair were at the edge of the platform. Behind them, the city burned. They turned and looked back at the force running past the bloody remains of Draeg and his squad. They ran without looking at Phocron’s sword, left forgotten on the ground.
The plasma charge concealed in the blade detonated, unfolding into a glowing sphere of sun-hot energy. I felt the heat through the skin of my armour as the blast tossed me into the air and slammed me into the paving. Warning chimes sounded in my ears as my armour’s systems sensed damage. Something wet moved in my chest as I sucked in a breath and found I was alive. For a few seconds, I could see nothing. I tried to raise my head and found that my vision was smeared with blood. I blinked until I could see. Bright light shone from behind me where the sphere of plasma still burned. Phocron stood, his blue armour black in the glare of the plasma bloom.
I pulled myself to my feet with a flare of pain and a grind of servos from inside my armour. My hammer was gone, scattered across the platform by the explosion. Two storm troopers who had been close beside me began to haul themselves up. Phocron shot them before they could stand, the guttural bark of the bolt pistol almost lost in the sound of the battle raging in the city. I was standing, my plasma pistol whining in my hand as it focused its power. The muzzle of Phocron’s pistol pointed directly at me, a dark circle ready to breathe fire.
A Valkyrie crested the edge of the platform with a wash of downdraft. Its hull was painted in the storm-grey of Battlefleet Hecuba. I could see the worn kill marks and unit tags under the cockpit. For an instant, I expected it to open up with its chin weapon, for it to rake Phocron and his companion with fire. Then it spun, drifting down until its open side doors were level with the platform. A crewman in an Imperial Navy uniform reached down to help the storm-coated figure into the side door. Phocron vaulted after and the Valkyrie swooped away. I fancied that the Alpha Legionnaire was looking at me with his emerald eyes until the craft was lost amongst the hundreds of others that swarmed above the dying city.
I breathed, letting pain and frustrated anger spill out. Something did not fit. It had seemed as if Phocron had anticipated our attack, that he had waited for it to come so that he could slaughter us. No, it was not just a slaughter. It was a demonstration of superiority. I can defeat you in a thousand ways, I can kill you as I choose, it had said. Then this sudden ret
reat. It did not fit. His forces were being overwhelmed, the city filling with thousands of Imperial troops – but then why not withdraw as soon as this became clear. Unless…
I suddenly felt cold, as if ice had formed inside my armour. I thumbed my vox-link, breaking through clearance ciphers until the voice of the invasion’s commanding officer spoke into my ear. General Berrikade had a thick voice that spoke of his ample waist and heavy jowls. He was no fool, though.
‘Lord inquisitor,’ he said, his voice chopped by static.
‘General, all troops are to be withdrawn from the city immediately.’ There was a pause, and I could imagine Berrikade staring incredulously at the vox-speaker in the strategium aboard an orbiting battleship.
‘Lord,’ he began, speaking carefully. ‘If I may ask…’ He never finished because at that moment Phocron answered the unspoken question. As the words left Berrikade’s lips, the city’s plasma reactors, promethium stores and chemical refineries exploded.
Across the city, glowing clouds rose into the sky, their tops broadening and flattening as they met the upper air currents. The shockwaves broke buildings into razor-sharp fragments and clouds of dust. An instant later, concentric waves of fire and burning gas swept through the streets. The sound and shockwave reached me in seconds, flipping me through the air with a bellow of noise. I must have hit the ground, but I never felt it. The blast wave had already pulled me down into darkness.
Later, while I healed, I was told that tens of thousands of Imperial troops had been killed, and hundreds of thousands more renegades and millions of civilians burned to nothing or crushed under rubble. The rebellion died, but the Imperium had taken a great wound and nothing was left but charred ruins. Only the Onyx Palace had survived. Its plasma reactors had not been overloaded, and that had saved my life. When I was told this, my first thought was that Phocron had wanted someone to survive to witness him rip another bloody chunk from the flesh of the Imperium. Then I thought again of the dark mouth of Phocron’s bolt pistol and the death that he had withheld. No, I thought, he did not want just anyone to witness his victory; he had chosen me to witness it. To this day I do not know why.
A year ago
The ship drifted closer. Through the polished armourglass of the viewport, I could see its crippled engines bleed glowing vapour into the vacuum. It was a small vessel, barely large enough to be warp-capable, and typical of the cutters used by traders and smugglers who existed on the fringes of the Imperium. The ship I stood on was massive by comparison, layered with armour and weapons bastions. It was a predator leviathan closing on a minnow. The Unbreakable Might was an Armageddon-class battle cruiser and mounted enough firepower to break other warships into glowing debris. Against the nameless clipper, it had barely needed to use a fraction of its might. A single, precise lance strike had burned the smaller ship’s plasma engines to ruin and left it to coast on unpowered.
I turned from the view with a clicking purr of augmetics. My eyes focused on Admiral Velkarrin from beneath the cowl of my crimson robe. He was rake-thin, the metal flexes of command augmentation hanging from his grey-skinned skull in a tangled spill down the back of his gold-frogged uniform.
‘Launch a boarding party, admiral,’ I said. Velkarrin pursed his colourless lips but nodded.
‘As you wish, my lord.’ He turned to give an order to a hovering officer.
‘And, admiral…’ He turned back. ‘They are to observe maximum caution.’
‘Yes, my lord.’ He gave a short bow. I could tell he resented my commandeering his command and his fleet. Hunting smuggler vessels and pirates while war washed across star systems must have galled him. Part of me was faintly amused by watching his pride war with fear of the Inquisition. The rest of me cared nothing for what he felt.
‘I will meet the boarding team personally upon their return,’ I told him.
Velkarrin gave another curt bow in acknowledgement and stalked away, hissing orders at subordinates.
I turned back to watch our latest prey draw closer, my eyes whirring as they focused. They had rebuilt me after Hespacia. My eyes and face were gone, replaced by blue-lensed augmetics and a mask of twisted scar tissue fused onto a ceramic woven skull. My left leg and a portion of my torso had been so mangled that they had been replaced. Ceramite plating, organ grafting and a leg of mechanised brass meant that I still lived and walked, even if it was with a bent back and the stutter of gears and pistons. For a while after the disaster of the Hespacia attack, I thought of my injuries as a penance for my lack of foresight, a price for ignorance written forever into my body.
Since that lesson I had done much to address my failing. The war against the rebel worlds had grown many times over, sucking in armies and resources from across many star systems. The Imperium was no longer fighting a war of containment but a crusade of retribution. Under my authority, and that of the Adeptus Terra, it was named the Ephisian Persecution. I had watched our forces struggle for decades as more and more worlds had fallen to rebellion and the influence of the Dark Gods. It was a war we were losing because we were fighting an enemy for whom lies were both a weapon and a shield. Understanding that enemy had been my work in the decades since Hespacia burned.
I had expended great energy in tracking down information on the Alpha Legion. From the sealed reports of Inquisitor Girreaux to half-understood accounts from the dawn of the Imperium, I had reviewed them all. I knew my enemy. I knew their nature, their preferred forms of warfare, and their weaknesses. Sometimes, I thought I knew them better than I knew myself.
Their symbol was the hydra, a many-headed beast from legends born in mankind’s earliest days. It was both a mark of their warrior brotherhood and a statement of methodology. To fight the Alpha Legion was to fight a many-headed beast that would twist in your grasp. As soon as you thought you had a part pinned, another unseen part would strike. Should you cut off one head, two would grow to replace it. They wove secrets and lies about themselves, hoping to baffle and confuse their enemies. Subterfuge, espionage, ambush and the untameable tangle of guerrilla warfare were their specialities: wielded through networks of corrupted followers, infiltrators, spies and, on occasion, their own martial skill. They were wrapped in the corruption of Chaos, steeped in betrayal and bitterness ever since their primarch and Legion had betrayed mankind ten millennia before.
The enemy I faced now was but a single scion of that heretic brood, but no less formidable for that. Phocron was a name that had infiltrated every theatre of the Ephisian Persecution like a silent, coiling serpent. I knew that even before we had learnt his name he had seeded a dozen worlds with insurgent ideologies and built up control over witch-cults and heretic sects. Now he moved from warzone to warzone, plunging worlds into rebellion, corrupting our forces and punishing the Imperium for every victory. The Ephisian Atrocity and the Burning of Hespacia were just two amongst the subtle and devastating attacks he had made on the Imperium. Throughout his coiling dance of destruction, he had stayed out of my grasp, a shadow opponent locked in a dual with me across dozens of worlds.
Beyond the reflective layer of armourglass a shuttle boosted towards the crippled ship on trails of orange flame. Rather than follow Phocron’s trail I had decided to attack him where he was most vulnerable: his transportation. He had no fleet of warships for he did not take planets by orbital invasion or the threat of bombardment. He took worlds from within, moving from one to another unseen. That implied that he moved using pirate and smuggler craft; small ships that could pass unnoticed and unremarked through the wild borderland of the subsector. A scattered task force of Imperial ships had tracked and boarded nineteen vessels so far with no result. The ship I watched would be the twentieth.
Two hours later, I stood amidst the promethium stink and the semi-ordered chaos of one of the Unbreakable Might’s main landing bays. Bright light flooded the cathedral-like space, gleaming off the hulls of lighters, shuttles and landing craft. Figur
es moved over them, working on the mechanical guts exposed under servicing plates.
I stood with Velkarrin and a guard of twenty armsmen, their bronzed void armour reflecting the bright light. The admiral stood a few paces away, consulting with two of his attending officers. The away team had reported that the vessel appeared to be nothing but a smuggler, crewed by deserters and outlanders. They had found a cargo of illegal ore destined for some pirate haven out in the Halo Margins. The lexmechanic who had accompanied them had drained the smuggler ship’s data reservoirs for later analysis. As on the nineteen previous occasions no connection with Phocron or his shadow network appeared to exist. Still, I wanted to meet the boarding party on their return, to search their accounts for details that they might have failed to report. Once that was done, the smuggler ship would be blasted into molten slag.
The armoured shuttle glided into the dock, its passive antigravity field filling the air with an ionised tang. It settled onto the deck with a hiss of hydraulics and a creak of ice-cold metal. The shuttle was a blunt block of grey armour the size of a mass ground hauler, its surface pitted and scored by atmospheric translation. Blast shields covered the armourglass of its cockpit. I heard the echoes of vox-chatter between the pilots and the deck crew as they moved in to attach power lines and data cables. The ramp under the chin of the shuttle hinged open, revealing a dark space inside. Velkarrin and the armsmen looked towards it, expecting the boarding team to appear from the gloom.
Something was wrong. I reached for the plasma pistol at my waist, my hand closing on the worn metal of the grip at the same moment that the docking bay went dark. Complete blackness enfolded us. For an instant, there was silence, and then voices rose in confusion. The pistol was in my hand, its charge coils glowing as it built power with a piercing whine. In the direction of the shuttle, two eyes glowed suddenly green. There was a motorised growl as a chain weapon gunned to life, and then the shooting started.
