by John French
Kestros did not move, but Archamus could sense the sergeant tense with anger.
‘Peace, brother,’ said Archamus. ‘I am sure that she did not mean to imply an insult.’
‘Oh no,’ said Andromeda, silver teeth flashing in her mouth as she smiled. ‘I did not intend to imply an insult. I intended to say that you are stupid.’
Archamus ignored the words. There was something calculating behind the amusement in her eyes, something that was probing, assessing, judging.
‘I have come for you,’ he said, his voice low and controlled, ‘at the will of my lord, who is the guardian of the Throneworld, and the Emperor’s Praetorian.’
‘Irrelevant,’ snapped Andromeda. ‘All you can do is kill me, or subject me to pain, though the latter is unlikely given your Legion’s psychological pattern. This means you need to persuade me, and you are not going to succeed in doing that.’
‘Your Matriarch seems to be equally resistant,’ he said.
Andromeda laughed.
‘Your kind really are built along straight lines, aren’t they? She isn’t resistant. She is terrified. She pleaded and threatened me for hours when your message arrived, and she was as successful as you are being now.’
‘Terrified?’ he asked.
‘We are dying, Space Marine,’ said Andromeda slowly, as though extending her patience to breaking point. ‘We began dying when you first brought us to compliance. Our work for the Emperor bought us some time, but if I am not the last generation of my kind, then the next will be. The Matriarch does not want to see that fact. She still hopes that we might rise again. She will do everything and anything to preserve what remains.’ She opened and spread her hands, a cold grin on her face. ‘I, selfish child that I am, will not.’
Archamus waited a heartbeat, then gave a single, curt nod.
‘Very well,’ he said. He straightened and began to move towards the door. Kestros moved to follow.
‘Is that it?’ called Andromeda.
Archamus half turned and offered her a shrug of his own.
‘You might think us simple, but we are built to judge strength and weakness, and to know when a fight can be won and when it cannot. So, yes, that is it. There will be no retribution for your defiance.’ He turned and took a step towards the archway. ‘I am surprised, though.’
‘Surprised?’
‘I have never met one of your kind before,’ he said, throwing her own words back at her as he walked away. ‘Impressive in a way, to find that you do not even wish to know what would bring us here.’
‘A mundane matter of bullets and blood, I imagine,’ she muttered.
‘No,’ he said, pausing on the threshold. ‘I am hunting an enemy and a secret.’
‘What enemy?’
‘Not one I could tell you of, as you have not agreed to serve.’
Her eyes narrowed. The air of boredom had vanished from her.
‘It’s something you do not understand, isn’t it? Something that is opposite to your nature, something that you need me to understand...’
He allowed a breath of laughter past his lips and took another step towards the door. ‘Good fortune in whatever your life here brings.’
‘Wait,’ she called, and Archamus paused again. ‘You are manipulating me. It won’t work. I am in control of my nature. Though I must admit that was a good try.’
He walked slowly back towards the seated girl. When he was a pace from her, he squatted down so that his face was almost on a level with her own. His bionics clicked as they braced his weight. He looked into her eyes.
‘You must be mistaken,’ he said carefully. ‘Manipulation is something my kind are far too straightforward to attempt.’
She smiled.
‘Whatever it is...’ She shook her head again, silver teeth biting her lip. He waited. ‘It is something extraordinary, isn’t it?’
‘Would we have gone to the trouble of coming here otherwise?’ said Kestros from by the arched doorway.
‘Please don’t try to flatter me,’ snapped Andromeda. ‘Your master is barely competent at interacting with something that does not have a trigger, but at least he has identified that my weakness is curiosity rather than ego.’
Archamus ignored the rattle of words.
‘Well?’ he said, looking at Andromeda without blinking. ‘Will you serve?’
She shook her head and clamped her eyes shut, forehead creasing as though in sudden pain.
‘Yes,’ she said, and opened her eyes. ‘Yes. I will.’
Archamus stood up and walked from the chamber. Behind him Andromeda stayed seated on the floor, eyes now fixed on the black water of one of the pools.
‘Follow,’ he said, without turning.
‘That means you follow,’ said Kestros, after a moment’s pause. ‘There is nothing else that needs to be clarified further.’
Two
Qokang Oasis
The Imperial Palace, Terra
The mist from the falling water touched Armina Fel’s face, and she breathed in the smell of it. The sound of the torrent falling through the turbine sluices wrapped her, making her nearly as deaf as she was blind. She was not blind, though, not really, and while the crash of water smothered other sounds, she could still hear.
Her mind saw the world around her as though she were looking at a painting. The brush was the flow of the warp, ever-present and ever-changing under physical reality, and the inks were the resonance of thoughts and emotion. The stone balustrade she leant on was made real by the echoed emotions of everyone that had ever touched it. A man had stood here and thought of leaping to his death. He had left with the deed undone, but an imprint of his despair remained where his hands had gripped the stone. A trio of young serfs had sat here last night, their feet swinging in the air, their excitement at the risk they were taking bright and sharp. Long ago the being called the Emperor had stood just as she did now. The ghost of that presence was like heat still lingering in a banked fire. And beneath that–
‘You have news, mistress?’ Rogal Dorn’s voice reached her even through the roar of water. She turned, and his presence filled her mind’s eye, a diamond shining with the reflected light of the sun. Armina Fel shook herself. Her body ached from her scalp to the soles of her feet. She was weak, and getting weaker by the day. And she could not afford to be weak.
‘A report from Phaeton, lord. Do you wish the direct linguistic rendering or the divined meaning?’
His presence drew closer. His Huscarl bodyguards remained distant, their minds tiny echoes of their primarch’s.
‘The meaning will suffice,’ he said, coming to a stop two paces from her. She bit her lip and let the tiny spike of pain trigger her eidetic recall. The words that came from her mouth were a dull drone of precise recollection.
‘All is silence. No ships come. No news comes. All is silence.’ Her voice stopped as the last syllables of the divination spooled out of her. She shivered as the memory faded.
‘That is all?’ asked Dorn after a second.
‘Yes, lord.’
‘And how current is the message?’
‘It is hard to say, but my feeling is that it is recent, sent in the close past or near future.’
‘And the other worlds, have they replied?’
‘No lord, but–’
‘They may not have received the message,’ Dorn completed her reply, ‘or we may not have heard the replies.’
‘Just so, lord.’
Dorn lapsed into silence. Armina Fel swallowed carefully. She could not see within the primarch’s thoughts, but the surface of his mind resonated in the warp like the sun radiating heat into the void. He was frustrated, she could tell, but more than that he was worried. There was a reason for his worry too, lingering in his thoughts just beyond her senses.
‘My apologies, mistress,’
said Dorn. ‘I must thank you for your service again.’
She forced what straightness she could into her spine and turned her face up to him.
‘We are all warriors in this war, lord. I give what I can.’
‘Well said.’
She thought she saw a glimmer of what might have been admiration in the crystal edges of his thoughts. She bowed her head. What moved within the mind of such a being? Rogal Dorn was not human. He was not even transhuman, as his gene-sons were. He was a different order of being, a being who moved and spoke like a man, but only shared those qualities with humans in the same way that fish and men both had blood and bones. He did think and feel, and those thoughts and feelings shared something of the shape of the human equivalent. They flowed and crackled and burned over the surface of his mind, their depth fathomless, and their subtlety impossible for her to grasp. But they were there: anger, sorrow, pain and hope, each of them a thunderbolt to the spark of a human’s emotion.
In many ways he was closer to a human than he was to the warriors of his Legion. They shared his blood, but their minds had been cut to their purpose, instincts sliced away, emotions selected, discarded and the remainder reshaped. They were limited creatures. Dorn was not; he was humanity expressed in grand and terrifying transcendence.
She had reflected that perhaps she alone of all mortals was in a position to understand that. She saw not with her eyes, but with her mind, and no others of her kind had stood so close, through so much, as she had to Dorn in the last years of darkness. Sometimes she wondered if it was the same for his brothers. If she looked at them, would she see the same power circling their souls like a crown?
She was about to speak when her mind froze.
She gasped.
There was someone there, reaching into her mind; someone whose own mind burned like a star, so bright that it stole her sight.
‘Mistress?’ said Dorn, but his voice sounded distant. Her mouth moved, and she felt the spit freezing on her lips as she spoke.
‘My apologies,’ she said, and inside her tumbling thoughts she heard an echo of the words. ‘You have been difficult to reach in recent days, and I am not able to come to find you in person.’
‘Release her, Sigillite,’ growled Dorn.
‘I will, but not yet. We must talk.’
‘There is nothing to discuss.’
‘No? An exploding ship burns the polar orbits, the planet comes to near full alert, Damocles Starport is a slaughterhouse waiting to be repopulated, there are riots still smouldering in the drift camps, and the Investiary is bare of all but the marks of battle. That seems worthy of more than silence, surely?’
‘It is in hand.’
‘I do not doubt that.’
‘Then there is nothing to discuss.’
‘The Alpha Legion, Rogal. Here on the soil of Terra, and here still if I understand matters correctly.’ Through the grey fog and fire pouring into her, Armina felt the primarch’s psyche shift subtly. The voice coming from her mouth seemed to soften on her tongue. ‘Do not be concerned, your veil of secrecy over their involvement is prudent and remains unbreached.’
‘Except by you.’
‘That is my duty, Rogal. This is a war with many battlefields. I fight the same war as you in ways and places that you cannot.’
‘And you believe this is your battle, not mine. A war of shadows and silence.’
‘Yes. At its simplest, that is exactly what this is.’
Dorn was silent, and after a moment Armina Fel felt her mouth and tongue move again.
‘I hear reports that worlds across the domain of Terra are becoming silent. The land beyond our walls is becoming dark. Our enemies draw closer. That should weigh on your thoughts more than this matter.’
‘You presume that the two are not intertwined,’ said Dorn.
‘That is a dangerous way to think. He has got you, Rogal. Alpharius has offended your pride and raised your anger. He wants you to dance with him into the dark, and that is not a place you should let him lead you, my friend.’
‘You are wrong. I know my brother and his Legion. Lies within lies and secrets hidden by secrets. This is not a simple incursion into our defences.’
‘It is something more? Something grander and greater? Listen to those words. He has you already, even if you have attempted to pass your burden to Archamus. The greatest danger here is to let the Alpha Legion lead us down the path that they have chosen for us. Have you considered that their target is you? Not your life, but your control, your judgement?’
‘I have considered it,’ said Dorn. ‘You might know the shadows, but you do not know him. And this is not what you believe it to be.’
Armina felt the pause form in her mind. There was now frost over every inch of her skin. She could taste smoke in her mouth.
‘I hope you are right, my friend,’ said Malcador. ‘For all our sakes, I hope you are right.’
The presence vanished from Armina Fel’s body and mind. She had a single instant of blankness, and then she was falling to the ground, and pain and nausea were spinning through her, the sound of falling water the only thing in her world.
Warship Lachrymae
Trans-Plutonian region
Sigismund pulled the helm from his head, and folded it into the crook of his arm. The bridge’s blast shields were open, and the light of stars and warship engines filled the dark beyond the viewports. The Lachrymae’s sister ships, the Ophelia and Persephone, were close enough that he could see the gleam of their golden prows. Roboute Guilliman had given all three as a gift to Rogal Dorn as a sign of brotherhood. The three frigates always fought together, a trio of blades cutting fire in the dark. There were larger ships under Sigismund’s command, but few faster. The bloated shape of a supply barge hung beside them now, pouring fresh fuel and ammunition into them via vast umbilical bundles and docking gantries. Normally such tasks would occur in dock, but that was not a possibility on the outer wall of Terra’s defences.
‘You are tired,’ came a growling voice from behind Sigismund. He did not need to look to know who it was. That voice had become so familiar it might have been the voice of his thoughts. Fafnir Rann, captain of the assault cadre, halted beside Sigismund. There were fresh cuts on his scarred face, and his black hair was plaited and coiled against the base of his skull. Yellow lacquer clung to his armour amidst a sea of dented and grey ceramite. He had shed his helmet and shield, but his paired axes still hung from his waist. A reek of blood, sweat and gunfire hung about him.
‘Two hours and we will be back to full readiness,’ said Sigismund, taking a data-slate from a deck officer.
‘Two hours to resupply a ship, to scrape the blood and soot from armour and thread rounds back into magazines... And then?’
Sigismund raised his eyes to Rann, careful to keep his face still.
‘Something troubles you, brother?’
Rann shook his head.
‘Five years,’ he said quietly. ‘Five years of battle without victory. This is not true war, brother. They come without cease, but this is not and never has been battle. It is winnowing.’
‘This is our duty. My duty. And I will see it done.’
‘This is not work for the likes of you,’ said Rann, and then gave a grin. ‘For a dog like me perhaps. Hacking through corridors and feeling the rounds ring on the plate, that is my life. But not yours. You should be at the primarch’s side. You should speak with him. Your presence out here is not the optimal use of resources. Hacking through madmen and chasing down rogue ships? Indulge my candour, but that is work for an axe, not a sword.’
Sigismund felt cold rope knot in his guts. He gave a single shake of his head.
‘It is as it must be.’ He looked back at the data-slate and ignored Rann’s stare. That the assault captain was right was irrelevant. ‘My father has put me here, and here I will stand u
ntil he wills it otherwise.’
Rann watched him for a second and then shrugged.
‘Of course.’ He nodded and began to turn away. ‘As you will it, Lord Castellan.’
Battle-barge Alpha
The interstellar gulf beyond the light of Sol
The master of the Alpha woke the first hundred of the serpent’s children. They had waited for him, long lines of armoured figures lining lightless holds. They were the Lernaeans, Terminator-executioners of the Legion. They were destroyers of civilisations, the Legion’s killing edge, and now they were returning to the light of the Solar System. They had not passed the months in stasis – only he had that honour. For them it had been the coma of sus-an hibernation. It took twelve hours from when he triggered the resurrection equipment to the moment when the first warrior shivered awake and spoke.
‘How close are we, lord?’ he asked, bowing his head.
‘Close, and so far undetected.’
The Lernaean nodded and gave another shiver. His Terminator plate growled.
‘I am yours to command, lord.’
‘Wake the others,’ he replied, and left the lightless hold.
He climbed back up through the silence of the ship and took his command throne again. He keyed a series of commands into the few controls with power, and a murmur of information passed to the signal arrays on the outside of the hull. Short-range signals whispered to the other ships tumbling beside the Alpha. On each of them, a handful of awakened crew replied, and began to wake their brothers from the dark.
Three
Scavenger vessel Wealth of Kings, Messalina debris drift
Near-Terran void
The hatch in the cargo container was a metre thick and hinged outwards. Myzmadra had felt the pull of gravity return after the walls had stopped ringing. A minute later a series of blows had rung on the hatch. To reach through the metal the impacts must have been powerful enough to dent a tank. Phocron had looked at Incarnus, and the psyker had nodded.
