by David Guymer
‘I fight and serve, that is all. But,’ he crossed his arms, dazzling by candlelight, ‘you did not seek me out to deliver a compliment. And you did seek me out, Grand Master.’
Vangorich conceded a shrug, and then stood.
‘I find myself struggling with what to call you. Plain “Koorland” doesn’t quite do your position justice. Chapter Master no longer seems entirely appropriate either.’
‘You could call me Slaughter.’
Vangorich felt that he was expected to smile, and did. The Imperial Fist did not.
‘A pleasure speaking with you, Grand Master,’ said Koorland, turning away.
‘The defence of Terra permits no rest, does it?’ Vangorich called after the Space Marine’s broad shoulders. ‘Your diligence in preparing the Palace’s defences has been inspirational. Given the circumstances.’
‘I hold,’ said Koorland, face half turned over the black fist that emblazoned his left pauldron. ‘That is my duty. The circumstances are never irrelevant, but they will never change that fact.’
‘When I walk the Palace grounds I see Space Marines on the walls again. I realise that they can never replace the Imperial Fists, and yet Daylight, the others, the symbol they now wear…’
Koorland’s gaze dropped almost imperceptibly, brushing the curve of his pauldron plate – the black fist on its white field.
This time Vangorich’s smile was his own and quite genuine. Guile and discretion were the principal tools of his Officio, but there always came the time when an operative had to step out of the shadows and show the knife. Metaphorically, of course. But the good ones, the really good ones, could time their move so perfectly, manoeuvre their weapon so expertly, that they never wound up with blood on their hands.
‘You have been an inspiration even to them, lord. And the regular forces even more so. The Lucifer Blacks have worn, well, black, since before the Unification Wars, but I believe I have seen some yellow starting to appear these past weeks. They worship you, and I’m not speaking figuratively – you are as close to the God-Emperor as any of them will ever come.’
Koorland turned back. ‘I do not serve for accolades.’
‘Higher words of praise were never spoken within these walls, trust me. But from whom do you think those soldiers would rather take their orders? Some distant lord who hasn’t set foot beyond the Inner Palace since greasing his way out of the Navy, or one of the true defenders of humanity?’
‘I fight, I serve and I hold. That is all.’
Vangorich tilted his head back and looked pointedly up. A hairline fracture ran across the chapel’s ceiling, a millimetre incontinuity where the latest round of tremors had moved the north wall marginally westward relative to the south. This was a minor shrine, frequented by nobody of importance but the Grand Master of a shadowy Officio that few higher authorities much cared for. The repair detail was mired in the bureaucracy of the Administratum.
‘We need more from you. If the orks tire of our dithering tomorrow and launch their assault, what will happen? Can you hold Terra without the full backing of the Astra Militarum? Let’s say that you can, that you do, and that we are all still here to conduct the hunt for the Beast that you have been calling for. Do you really want to do it fighting the Navy, the Astropathica, and the Administratum every step of the way?’
Koorland said nothing. It was an opening, and Vangorich took it.
‘You do wish to confront the Beast?’
‘A firm defence is central to the avoidance of defeat, but a strategy of containment will never win a war. The Siege was the greatest defensive action in history, but it was the Emperor’s defeat of Horus that finally ended the Heresy.’
‘Politics is very much like war,’ Vangorich agreed softly. ‘Sometimes the only solution is to strike for the figure at the top.’
‘I serve the Imperium loyally,’ Koorland returned, shocked, angry.
Sometimes a failing organ needed to be shocked, Vangorich thought.
‘Have you paused recently to ask yourself what the Imperium really needs?’
The Imperial Fist fell silent, his eyes running deep.
Vangorich offered a slight bow and left the transhuman to his thoughts. He was not nearly important enough that the Senatorum would wait on his arrival, and Koorland had a lot to think about.
Thirteen
Prax
The matt-grey Thunderhawk gunship Penitence descended hard on the planet’s night side, ventral thrusters blasting up a tsunami of dust as the assault craft levelled out and dropped its troop doors. Dust billowed through the open hatch, whipping through handgrips and cargo netting and smothering the armoured forms of Veteran Squad Anatoq. With the enhanced senses of smell and taste granted by his neuroglottis, Zerberyn sifted the storm of particulates. Small stones. Dead soil. Bone chips. Blood. It chopped up the twelve helmet beams and the weak pastel glow of wall-mounted panels, banging and rattling inside the troop compartment.
‘Quickly in and quickly out,’ voxed Veteran-Sergeant Columba over the squad channel, one hand wrapped around a ceiling handgrip.
The sergeant was an iron-faced ascetic with ice water in his veins and heart of leaden grey. A narrow view of the Fists Exemplar creed of humility had led him to turn down the captaincy of the First more than once, and he had publically rebuked Koorland over the offer of a position in the reformed shield corps of Terra. Zerberyn liked him.
The narrow beam of his own helm light cut half a metre into the swirl, catching the whipped-up grit as if by surprise, stripping it from uniform night-black to white and grey and bloody brown. A crowd of gold runes representative of his squad slid around the periphery of his internal faceplate display, the gunship’s shaking, under the force of its own engines, unsettling the runes’ positions. The boarding ramp railroaded out into the dark. He could see neither the ground nor the end of the ramp.
‘We are Exemplars,’ he said into his helm vox. ‘No wall stands against us. No wall can stand beside us.’
‘You all know your objectives,’ Columba concluded.
Zerberyn led them into the vertical jetwash, running, a servo-powered leap plunging him into a rippling funnel of dust. For a moment a combination of his battleplate’s powered systems and the updraught of disturbed earth made him fly. Then he fell, five metres, half a tonne of ceramite slamming two-footed into dry earth. Suspensor grids dispersed the impact force throughout his armour, plates shifting, crunching to a crouch, then with a counter-whine of servos he came up, disengaged his pistol’s mag-holster and whipped the weapon up.
He could not see a thing. Dust devils gyrated between the ground and the gunship’s thundering exhausts, sieving the landing lights from above. Blinking runes in his helm display and the vibrations picked up by his boot sensors told of veteran-brothers thumping into the ground around him.
They fanned out from the drop zone, murky giants with boltguns raised and aimed.
Veteran-Brother Donbuss was triple-checking the belt feed to his heavy bolter and covering the advance from relative high ground. Antille dropped to one knee, hand to where his ear was underneath his helmet, the long antennae of a shoulder-mounted vox-booster whipping above him. Each Space Marine’s battleplate was independently vox-capable, but the volume of near-orbit communications noise and the signal diffraction of their own fleet’s place in hiding necessitated the booster should they need to raise their brothers around the eighth planet. Apothecary Reoch stood nearby holding his narthecium at arm’s length, sampling the wind for toxin traces or pathogens. It was almost impossible to kill a Space Marine by such means, but a reasonable excess of caution won more wars than abandon ever had. Veteran-Brother Karva was the twelfth and last down, pivoting on the spot as a promethium tank dropped through the darkness and catching it in the crook of his arms.
Zerberyn voxed up to the Thunderhawk that his squad was deployed, received two brittl
e clicks through his microbead in response, and then felt a slam of downwash.
With a tremendous roar of thrust, the gunship rose, re-angling its engines for horizontal flight, and pulled away. The dust storm began to settle, stones and larger debris falling to leave dried organic matter zipping about. It cleared the air enough for Zerberyn to see Penitence turning for a fly-past of the planet’s principal city, Princus Praxa, and its Crusade fortress approximately two hundred kilometres east across the daylight meridian.
A second gunship circled in low. Its metallic bodywork was embellished with unorthodox modifications: battle honours, ablative hull plating and variant weapon loadouts – not all of it was of obvious human make. The star-backed iron skull of the Iron Warriors stared grimly from its tailfin and nose section. Keeping low, it banked left and began to steadily climb, mapping the terrain with a pair of sweeping spotlights and searching for an appropriate drop-zone of its own.
Zerberyn processed his surroundings without thinking about it.
Left, a diagonal line of wind power converters, bi-blades, chomping sombrely through the dark. A greasy metal water tank, empty, riddled with holes, fenced off with wire that had been cut and trampled. Brother Tarsus advanced, boltgun sweeping the row of quietly whumping turbines.
Right, looming rockcrete-walled slurry pits, surrounded by dirty metal outbuildings. A petrochem generator. A silage tank, round-walled and massive. One of the sheds was a machine store. It was open, an upswinging outer door half-covering a weather-beaten wheeled truck. The vehicle was a rusted contraption of belts, pulleys, and funnels, with an articulated pallet lifter at the front end painted to look like an orkish mouth. It had a canvas top and a blood-splattered rear fender. Its tyres were flat. Brothers Galen and Borhune took firing positions, Karva moving up to cover the units with his heavy flamer. Behind, nothing, according to the Thunderhawk’s deep augur scans – just over-exploited pastureland and dust.
Ahead, the objective.
His enhanced low-light vision described the structure in sharp detail. It was a massive, industrialised agricultural unit, with dust-tanned steel walls and barred windows. A large, rectangular glyph of a twisting serpent had been graffitied over the upper storey windows. It was an ork structure, but it was only as Zerberyn closed and metrics gathered in his helm display that he realised that every feature was about twenty-five per cent too large for human standard. The dirt drive leading up to the main door was churned with tyre tracks and strewn with bone meal, dung and what looked like scraps of clothing.
He loped forwards at an easy run. Brothers Hardran and Nalis followed up behind, flanking and covering the upper storeys and secondary entrances with their bolters. Tosque and Columba kept pace, the former maintaining his aim on the door with a bulky combi-plasma.
The unit frequency crackled in Zerberyn’s ear.
‘Galen. No contacts.’
‘Tarsus. Same here, brother-captain.’
‘Reoch,’ voxed the Apothecary, voice double-distorted and animal. ‘I am reading high soil concentrations of antibiotics and human growth hormones. I cannot say why, but I see no danger.’
‘Vigilance, brothers,’ Zerberyn replied, unslinging his thunder hammer.
His predecessor had favoured the purist elegance of the power sword, but long before the moment he had been granted his pick of the Chapter armoury Zerberyn had known what he would select. The weapon was dormant in his grip, quiet, and would remain so until the moment of impact. And when that moment came, whatever it was on the end of it, Zerberyn meant for it to die. Such was the thunder hammer’s pragmatic beauty.
Up close, the main door looked solid. Heavy plastek, proofed with an oily black sealant coating, hinged outwards and reinforced with armaplas crossbars. For an unmodified trooper, forcing access would have proven a complicated and time-consuming matter.
But not for him.
He dropped his pauldron plate and crashed his leading shoulder through without breaking stride. Shrugging off splinters, he straightened and scanned the room.
It was dark, cut off from the light of the stars and the ships massed in orbit, too dark even for the light-scavenging cells of his occulobe. His helm light beamed across riveted walls, ventilation grilles, moving onto a staircase against the left-side wall. The beam tracked it up to a mezzanine level, shadows of the square-sided balusters stretching out towards the rear wall and then angling sharply back across it as the beam moved on.
Hardran, Nalis and Borhune spread out, their own helmet beams dispersing through the cavernous space.
Zerberyn could hear murmuring, weeping, the strained sound of many, many bodies breathing. He sniffed. Even through his battleplate’s rebreather apparatus he was getting the smell of something rancid.
His helm display busied his vision with floating markers. The position, facing, and condition of his squad showed as glowing gold numerals. Box reticules closed over objects of interest – an atmosphere conditioner, a swaying chain connected to some kind of overhead wash unit – furnishing them with a full tactical overlay of range, angles and threat recognition. Reticules floated against the dark, open, uncertain, as his helm light swept over a chain link enclosure.
Eyes glittered dully in the beam.
‘What is it, brother?’
Tarsus. Zerberyn barely registered the vox-scratch in his ear. He grunted in disgust.
‘Animals.’
Fourteen
Prax
The man looked up into the glare of Zerberyn’s helmet beam with distant eyes. His pupils constricted to pinpricks and he recoiled from the light with a grunt, but did not otherwise appear to notice the giant in front of him. He was bruised, shorn, naked, but unusually fat. This was not the maltreatment Zerberyn would have expected from an alien conquerer. There was no brutality here. Injuries aside, which looked to be postural from remaining in one position for too long, rather than inflicted, the man looked as well-fed as any planetary governor.
Zerberyn moved his light on: blank faces luminesced under the beam, then returned to darkness and indignity as it passed. There must have been close to a hundred hemmed into the stall. There was no room for them to move, even to sit. The floor was perforated metal, for drainage, but the sheer volume of waste had clogged the pores and solid effluent heaped up in lumpen mounds over toes that were turning black with poor circulation and disease. The stink was infernal. Despite everything that he was, Zerberyn felt himself back away. Slavery and squalor he had encountered on many worlds. This was something other. Something worse.
‘There are more ahead,’ called Nalis.
‘Here also,’ said Hardran, voice echoing from the stalls away to the right.
‘There must be thousands,’ breathed Tosque, clumping forwards from behind, tracking the creaking stillness of the second level with his combi-plasma.
‘Tens of thousands,’ growled Columba.
Zerberyn spoke into his gorget pickup. ‘Reoch. I need you in here. Bring Brother Antille.’
An affirmative burred through his vox-channel. He killed the squad frequency and looked around again, easing his finger around the trigger of his pistol. Reticules wobbled across his visor, searching for something to target.
‘Detecting movement,’ said Columba, his vox dialled down to a low bass. He pointed up to the second floor.
‘More stalls, perhaps,’ said Zerberyn.
Columba shrugged.
‘Hardran, search the upper level. Tosque, secure the stairs and cover him. Nalis, run a circuit of the perimeter.’
The veteran-brothers nodded; in battleplate and deep shadow it was an ominous, inhuman gesture. Apothecary Reoch entered just as Nalis left. The glow of his binoptics intensified as they adapted to the gloom. Antille ducked through the splintered portico after him, vox antennae twanging against the lintel beam.
Mendel Reoch meanwhile continued to the stalls.
The Apothecary’s narthecium punched a sampler into the nearest captive’s jugular. The man moaned piteously, legs wobbling, but the press of filthy bodies held him steady.
Zerberyn hovered his helm light over the man’s gasping mouth, his curiosity piqued by something he had seen there. As well as having no hair, the man also had no teeth and, now he checked, no fingernails: nothing with which he could conceivably do harm to himself or another. A rare and unsettling cocktail of pity and disgust settled in his gut like one of Reoch’s analgesic slimes. His roving beam paused on the face of a woman who opened her mouth placidly as though conditioned to associate light with water or food. There was something branded onto her cheek. Zerberyn moved closer. She remained as she was, mouth wide and waiting, even as Zerberyn enclosed her head in his gauntlet and turned it gently to the side.
The brand was that of a snake.
The man under Mendel Reoch’s ministration gave one last grunt as the Apothecary’s narthecium retracted.
‘There are dangerously high levels of synthetic growth enhancers, testosterone, and other steroids in his blood. I would need to return him to Dantalion’s apothecarion for more thorough investigations.’
‘Take him and one other and begin what tests you are able. I think we have what we came for. Raise the gunship,’ Zerberyn added to Antille. ‘We need evacuation for these two test subjects.’
‘That deviates from the mission schematic, brother-captain.’
‘The fault is ours,’ said Zerberyn. ‘We failed to anticipate the possibility of survivors. As you were ordered, brother.’
‘Brother-captain!’
Straddling the top step and the next floor, Tosque swung his combi-plasma and helmet beam down onto whatever the veteran-brother had spotted amongst the stalls.
Zerberyn, Columba and Reoch instantly had pistols raised.
A human, unfettered and clothed, withered under the spotlight. Like his domesticated brethren, he was shorn and branded and denuded of teeth. Unlike them he had two off-white molars stapled into his brow. They reminded Zerberyn of rank pins, or the long-service studs that the veterans of other Chapters employed. The man licked his lips nervously, hugging a rusty pail to his chest as though to hide behind it. It slopped with a reddish-brown gelatin that Zerberyn initially hoped was waste but which, judging from the hanging mouths in the stalls to either side, he had the appalling suspicion was food.
