Khârn: Eater of Worlds

by Anthony Reynolds

  In between the scratching fuzz of static bursts, the image showed a binary star system. Two suns of comparable mass revolved in an elliptical orbit around each other. Five planets of various size and aspect orbited the twin giants, and an array of asteroid belts, moons and other nebulae completed the system. The twin suns were unusual but not overly rare. In every other regard, the system was utterly unremarkable, little different to millions of others that made up the galaxy.

  ‘How is that possible?’ said Brond. ‘We are in the warp.’

  ‘We are within the Eye,’ said Stirzaker. ‘Reality and unreality blend together.’

  With a mental impulse and the widening of his talon-like fingers, Stirzaker zoomed the three-dimensional image out. Now it showed the system as it was in relation to its surroundings – a perfect sphere amid the writhing madness of the aether.

  ‘Something holds the warp at bay, here,’ said Stirzaker. ‘It would appear to be a safe harbour in a furious ocean.’

  ‘Are there habitable worlds here?’ said Dreagher.

  ‘It would seem so, yes. One of the worlds, at least,’ said Stirzaker.

  ‘Is it stable?’ said Brond.

  ‘As far as can be told,’ said Stirzaker. ‘It is intriguing.’

  ‘A safe harbour,’ mused Dreagher. ‘This could be where we rebuild the Legion.’

  ‘Incoming transmission, sir,’ called out the ship’s first mate. ‘It’s an open vox-hail, transmitted to the whole fleet.’

  ‘Bring it up,’ said Stirzaker.

  The image of a figure stepped forward from nowhere, moving into the area occupied by the three-dimensional system chart, which fractured and dissipated in response. This new image showed a massive Cataphractii-armoured World Eater, his slab-like plates hung with skulls and adorned with spikes. His helm was brutish, jutting forward aggressively from between his shoulders. Long curved tusks extended from either side of his grilled vox-grille.

  ‘Goghur,’ said Argus Brond, his lip curling in distaste.

  Once the immense warrior had been one of the primarch’s elite bodyguard, the Devourers. By the end, they had acted as little more than his gaolers. It was an ignoble task for what should have been the Legion’s most vaunted warriors.

  The Devourer removed his helmet with a burst of crackling static-steam. He shook his head, releasing his dreadlocked power couplings from their confinement. His face bore angular tattoos. His mouth was drawn in a deep scowl.

  His image flickered and shorted. For a blink of an eye a sinuous beast stood in his place, its elongated head framed by curving horns. It looked onto the Defiant’s strategium, and bared its fangs. Fire flickered in its eyes and a tongue of flame licked out from between its teeth. An immense fiery blade appeared in its hands, and it took an aggressive step forward. Then the image shorted again, and Goghur stood there once more.

  ‘Brothers,’ he said. His voice was a distorted crackle, underscored with distant roars. ‘No doubt you all see this system. It is ripe for the slaughter. We attack. Blood for the Blood God.’

  With that, the image of the Devourer crackled and disappeared, leaving the strategium shrouded in shadow.

  ‘He thinks to command the Legion now?’ said Argus Brond. ‘He is not even a captain.’

  ‘None stepped forward to challenge him,’ said Dreagher, shrugging.

  ‘Shall I plot a course into the system?’ said Stirzaker. His crew of officers was looking to him, awaiting his orders. ‘The fleet is turning towards it.’

  ‘Do it,’ said Dreagher.

  He turned to leave the strategium, but Argus Brond caught his arm, arresting his movement. He looked down at the gauntleted hand holding him. The Nails tick-tocked in the back of his head.

  ‘We do not have to do this,’ hissed Argus Brond.

  ‘Remove your hand,’ said Dreagher, his voice hard.

  ‘Listen to me!’ Brond said. ‘Goghur seeks to fill the power vacuum in the Legion. Already he has considerable support.’

  ‘Not enough,’ said Dreagher.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Brond.

  ‘And when Khârn wakes, he will assume command. None will refuse him, Goghur included.’

  ‘He’s not waking up, Dreagher. You need to face facts.’

  ‘You do not know that.’

  ‘Dreagher,’ said Stirzaker. ‘Am I plotting a course?’

  ‘A moment!’ snarled Brond, rounding on the flag-captain. Stirzaker was not cowed. He stared back at the captain, his silver eyes unreadable.

  ‘I was not addressing you, captain,’ he said.

  Brond took a slow, calming breath.

  ‘Goghur is a killer of worlds, but he is no leader. He will drive the Legion to destruction. He’s leading us in a downward spiral from which we will never be able to return. Let us go our own way before he damns us all.’

  ‘Abandon the Legion? This is your proposal?’

  ‘No,’ said Brond. ‘We save the Legion. We forge our path, you and I, and we do as you envision. We rebuild the War Hounds.’

  ‘I want to unite the Legion, not be the one to sunder it,’ said Dreagher.

  Neither captain blinked. Brond’s frustration was plain.

  ‘Flag-captain,’ said Dreagher, not taking his gaze off Brond. ‘Plot your course. We stay with the Legion.’

  ‘It will be done,’ said Stirzaker. He rotated his command throne, ascending it as he turned, and began to speak his orders, even as his controls descended from the ceiling, ensconcing him within a curved bank of screens, each one flooded with data-streams.

  ‘This is a mistake,’ said Brond. He shouldered past Dreagher, and strode from the bridge.

  In his enclosed cell, Ruokh paced back and forth, muttering under his breath. Drool dripped from his lips in thick ropes. His yellow eyes were glazed and distant.

  He stopped abruptly, feeling a change in the ship’s engines.

  A savage smile cracked his tattooed face. Even in his madness, he knew what this change heralded.

  Soon it would be time to kill.

  In the apothecarion, Skoral remained in an induced coma. The medicae servitors tending her paid no mind to the shudder of the Defiant, the groaning of its hull as it came out of warp transit. It meant nothing to them. They continued their work, blissfully ignorant of the violence that would soon erupt.

  Maven was sleeping with his feet up on the work bench of his master’s arming chamber, but he woke with a start when the door hissed open and the lumen strips in the ceiling flickered on. He jumped to his feet, almost knocking his chair over.

  ‘My lord,’ he said, blinking against the bright light.

  ‘He is a deluded fool,’ said Argus Brond, storming into the room and slamming his helmet onto the desk, making the scattering of tools, scraps of armour plates, servos and an ash tray of lho stubs jump.

  ‘Who, my lord?’ said Maven.

  ‘Dreagher! He pins his hopes on a fool’s dream.’

  ‘You were not able to convince him, then?’

  ‘He will not be swayed. He’ll see us all dead before he stops believing,’ he said. He looked at Maven with a steady, angry gaze. ‘He’s given me no option. Open up the external comms channel.’

  Maven stood slowly, his reluctance clearly apparent. Still, he did as he was ordered, moving to the archaic, heavily modified comms-unit in the corner of the arming chamber.

  He sank into the padded chair before it and pulled on the headset, the heavy brass earpieces, hooked to the machine with a tightly spiralling cable, closing completely around each side of his head.

  ‘Are you sure, master?’ he said.

  ‘I gave him the opportunity to steer us away from this course of action,’ said Brond. ‘His blindness has forced my hand.’

  Sighing, Maven slid the vox-mic – a grilled sphere clasped on a bronze claw – towards
Brond, and continued to turn the dials, listening for the telegraph signal-trap to register.

  Not long after the 17th Company had taken up temporary lodging aboard the Defiant – their own Acheron-class cruiser having been obliterated during the assault on Terra – Maven had managed to tap a line into the Defiant’s communications channel, allowing him to intercept inbound ship communications, as well as project them. He’d fed a number of fail-safes and shroud-codes into the system, and had placed a number of decoy transmitters across the ship, but was under no illusions. Stirzaker would know that someone was broadcasting as soon as they opened the channel. He’d have to keep the communication short.

  The crackle in his earpiece sharpened to a steady pitch.

  ‘I have it,’ he said.

  ‘Do it,’ said Brond. ‘Open a secure channel.’

  Maven took a deep breath and did as he was bid. The channel code he had been seeking was there, waiting, as he flicked the switch to project. A grating voice scratched through the vox almost immediately.

  ‘You took your time,’ it said. The voice was running through a vox-scrambler, keeping the speaker’s identity concealed. Argus Brond’s voice would be similarly distorted.

  ‘Are the Bloodborn ready?’ said Brond.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The way will be open,’ said Brond. He nodded, and Maven cut the connection. The seneschal sat there in silence, his eyes downcast.

  ‘It’s the only way,’ said Brond.

  Maven wasn’t sure who his master was trying to convince.

  ‘If he truly is the chosen of the Blood God,’ said Brond, ‘then let him intervene.’

  Chapter 6

  The Defiant slipped seamlessly from the tumultuous hell of the warp into the system-sized bubble of real space. The roiling ether clung to the crenulated flanks of the battleship, as if unwilling to relinquish its hold. Tentacles of un-matter scrabbled at its armoured flanks, like the writhing limbs of some vast, shapeless cephalopod.

  As the Defiant powered into the emptiness of real space, it pulled away from those clinging ungulae. They were sucked back into the un-mass of the warp, subsumed into its shapeless whole, sending vast ripples quivering out across the insubstantial border between the two realms.

  The bridge of the Defiant was a scene of ordered chaos, hectic with movement and vox traffic as Flag-Captain Stirzaker brought the battleship online. Officers and servitors rushed to enact orders, while scores of others seated at control panels in concentric half-circles around the bridge worked busily, either hard-wired into their machines, or connected to them via headsets, spinal-plugs and mechadendrites and cortical-wires.

  Binaric code ran down vid-screens in a constant stream, flooding in from across the ship and the fleet as a whole. Suspended panels showed real-time feeds of engine levels, shield power and such, while others showed officers from other parts of the ship, communicating in quick, clipped tones as they received and enacted orders.

  In the sunken central dais, the disposition of the World Eaters fleet was displayed in a shimmering three-dimensional projection. The officers stationed within the innermost semicircle interacted with this projection, their fingertips hung with wires and cables. With confident, well-drilled movements, they zoomed and rotated the display, focusing in on the different ships and bringing up swatches of data with subtle hand movements.

  The air swam with noospheric data, invisible to those not fitted with the requisite Mechanicum-crafted upgrades. This digital information flitted back and forth, transferring at a far quicker rate than binaric or machine-based methods.

  At the heart of the bustling action of the bridge was Stirzaker, conducting the affairs of the battleship with calm efficiency. His mind was working at levels far beyond the ken of unaugmented humans, and indeed, even beyond that of the Legiones Astartes. He was the absolute centre of the bridge’s focus – he was its mind. Everything passed through him.

  While physically he barely moved, his command throne was in constant motion, turning and shifting upon its suspensor arms as he addressed individual officers, issuing clipped orders before moving on. His augmetic steel-tipped talons tapped a constant dance upon his armrests, making slight course adjustments and subtly shifting the balance of the ship’s power output. At the same time, he manipulated the flow of noospheric data flowing back and forth across the bridge with the skill of a Magos of the Mechanicum.

  The only figure on the bridge who was not working at a frenetic pace was Dreagher. Standing alone, he stared out into the void as the armoured blast shutters slid back, allowing an unobstructed view beyond the bridge’s oculus portals. Those portals were curved, allowing a one hundred and eighty degree view out into the void.

  Dreagher looked out across the battleship’s port flank, back towards the bizarrely stark border between the warp and the system-sized pocket of real space the ship had entered. The only things that gave the vision any sense of scale were the last World Eaters ships pushing through from the ether alongside the Defiant.

  For a disorienting moment, it felt as though he were looking across an insane, roiling red ocean, and the Defiant and the other ships of the fleet were rising vertically from its surface. Of course, there was no notion of up or down in the void – that he thought in such terms was merely a weakness of his human-born spatial comprehension. With a mental shift, he was no longer looking down at the other ships rising towards him, but rather seeing them emerging horizontally from the wall that held the warp at bay.

  The warp stared back at him from those fathomless depths. Vast, incorporeal leviathans coiled out there beyond the veil, things immeasurably large and ancient. They stared in jealously, enraged that they were unable to claim this mortal pocket of existence, held at bay by… what? Some incomprehensible power was clearly at work within this system.

  He let his gaze shift forwards, looking out over the armoured prow of the mighty battleship. No stars were visible out there. In place of the cold blackness of the void there were just the bruised reds, purples and blues of the living warp, writhing and shifting like an aurora, like coloured oils swirling within water.

  The World Eaters fleet drifted, slowly awaking from slumber as power was routed to weapon systems and shields. Each ship moved on its own heading, powering forward on its own trajectory. This was no synergistic battle deployment. The Legion had long ago lost such coordination.

  Escorts, shuttles and attack craft swarmed around the World Eaters battleships and cruisers as they discharged from scores of launch bays. It was standard procedure for a fleet emerging from the warp, providing a screen of defence while the warp-capable battleships cast off their Geller fields and powered up their shields. To Dreagher’s eyes, they resembled flies hovering around bloated corpses, or vultures hovering around apex predators, waiting for the inevitable butchery.

  The waking predators were hungry. As their systems came slowly to life, they scanned their surrondings, searching for any threat, straining to sniff out any hint of blood in the water. As soon as they were able, the World Eaters began scanning for anything they could kill.

  Dreagher leaned forward, peering out into the void, as if he were able to overcome the colossal distance and spy whatever threat lay here. A pair of distant, dying suns burned at the heart of the unnamed system.

  ‘Do you see anything, flag-captain?’ he said over one shoulder.

  ‘Not yet,’ came the reply. ‘I am rerouting power for long-distance scans. I will… hmm.’

  Dreagher turned.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘There is something…’ the old flag-captain muttered, more to himself than to Dreagher. He swung away, the articulated arm holding his throne aloft extending with a series of mechanised whines. ‘Auspex!’ he ordered. ‘What is that? Focus and intensify the scan.’

  ‘Ships, captain, towards the core of the system,’ said the ranking officer amongst the score o
f mortals and servitors manning the ship’s auspex. ‘We cannot confirm numbers, but… they are gathered in strength. It’s an armada. They have us outnumbered.’

  ‘When have we ever cared about the odds?’ said Stirzaker.

  ‘Are they Imperial? Xenos?’ said Dreagher.

  ‘Impossible to tell from this distance,’ said Stirzaker. ‘Though that looks like a Legion fleet’s dispersal pattern to me. Wait…’

  A blaring klaxon sounded, and the bridge darkened, red attack lights replacing the few lumen strips that Stirzaker tolerated.

  ‘We have close contact, flag-captain!’ shouted the bridge’s second officer. ‘An unknown vessel has just moved into range.’

  ‘I see it,’ said Stirzaker. The flag-captain had a host of image projections hovering before him – logistical displays and binaric code that meant nothing to Dreagher. With a glance, Stirzaker shunted that work to a subordinate and retracted his command throne back to its central location before the oculus, the articulated arm, hung with wires and ribbed cables, whining softly.

  ‘Route power to shields and bring our weapons online. Bring us around three points to starboard, offset thirty degrees.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ came a flurry of responses.

  In a sunken hololith pit, a target locus appeared, haloing the new vessel that was emerging from behind a nearby moon. Its shape was vague, but sharpening. Dreagher narrowed his eyes as he stared at it.

  ‘Bring it up on screen,’ said Stirzaker.

  A section of the oculus zoomed in on the moon, which appeared as little more than a sphere of darkness rimmed in red light. It was still many hundreds of thousands of kilometres away, yet in comparative terms, it was exceedingly close to the fleet, only just out of weapons range. A vessel was emerging from behind this moon, hidden in shadow. Nevertheless, its profile was immediately recognisable.

  ‘That’s an Imperial cruiser,’ said Dreagher.

  Amongst the flurry of activity as the World Eaters reacted to the presence of the Imperial cruiser, one small shuttle went unnoticed.