Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  The journey was as difficult as I expected. The Astronomican remained dark, and our Navigators struggled to make good headway. The span was short, such that in ordinary times even the lowliest of their breed could have made it in a single stage, but we were forced to drop into real space frequently to gain our bearings and make complex triangulations with both the physical stars and the arcane map references we still retained. I demanded much from them, just as I did from myself. One of the mutants sickened badly, and for a while his life was in the balance. I made him work. I took no pleasure in that, but the need for progress was acute.

  You might ask what I expected to achieve by this. For Aleya, the answer was obvious – revenge for the wrongs done to her. Even if she did not meet the ones responsible for the destruction of her home, she would encounter those of the same Legion, and that was enough.

  I had no desire for vengeance, though, and never have done. With me, the motivations were threefold. I have already alluded to the sense of rightness that I felt when considering this course of action, knowing that it formed an argument in the long debate about where our best place was within a galaxy of eternal war. Second, there was the debt of honour I had made to Aleya, who had now taken this concept up with some enthusiasm, reminding me often, I think in jest, that she had saved my life and thus had me under her obligation.

  And there was a third consideration. I remembered how I had felt on that battlefield after the destruction of the greater daemon, a feat far outranking any I had achieved before. I remember how much I had wanted that feeling to continue.

  I could no longer deny it to myself. The exercise of arms had become more than an intellectual pursuit, one conducted only in the furtherance of my sacred duty. I heard the old complaints made against us, that we had never experienced the war as others had, and for the first time the barbs found some purchase. For all our valour in the hidden conflicts we had always conducted, it had taken the daemon army arriving on Terra to remind us what we had once dared to measure ourselves against.

  So the moral imperative was there. The great heretic philosopher of M2 Emanule Qant had said that one should act only on that maxim that one could also wish to be a universal law, a credo I had never fully understood before. Now I believed I perceived the truth of it, even in an age when all laws were eroding before our eyes and the full spectrum of morality had been subsumed into the moribund category of duty.

  Forgive these rambling thoughts. I warned you of my penchant for theology. The short answer is, of course, that I have no short answer. I only had the dictates of my soul, of which I remain certain.

  Aleya thinks little of such speculation.

  You talk too much, she signed to me once.

  Not something anyone could accuse you of, I replied.

  We broke the veil as close as we dared, knowing that speed would be of the essence. I had my armour lifted into place, I donned my helm and took Gnosis into my fist once more. The weight of it was an assurance. My brothers did the same, as did the anathema psykana. There were more of them than us, and their weaponry was more varied. Whereas we carried guardian spears only, they bore flamers, greatblades, even chainswords.

  A little over forty of us, then, to contest the conquest of a world. We could not be faulted for our ambition.

  As the Chelandion accelerated I studied images of our inward attack run on the bridge-mounted image banks. Once past the Mandeville threshold, we powered swiftly towards the system-centre. For a long while, there was no sign of any other ship. This was not surprising – with the collapse of the Astronomican’s beacon, we assumed that warp travel had all but dried up across the Imperium, leaving our space-lanes empty.

  Only when we came within visual range of the planet itself, a sapphire-and-pink orb of considerable beauty, did evidence of the enemy become apparent. There was a single battleship in low orbit, surrounded by shoals of lesser craft and a huge cloud of floating debris. I recognised the profile of the master vessel immediately – an Executor-class grand cruiser, looming in gigantic splendour, though twisted and changed by its time spent in the Eye. Its vast flanks were black, ridged with brass, bearing the octed on heavily oxidised ablative plating. Any Imperial craft had been reduced to components in that debris cloud. Aside from a phalanx of escorts, the remaining vessels looked to be landers descending on the world below in steady procession.

  ‘So you were right,’ I told Aleya, sitting opposite me in the lander’s crew bay.

  We had no chance of engaging it directly and surviving. Even alone, an Executor was virtually a line battleship, built to survive voidwar encounters against whole squadrons of destroyers, and the Chelandion was both out-powered and outgunned. We had expected that, however, and our attack plan did not alter.

  ‘Signs of heavy assault on-world,’ came the clipped voice of my master of sensors, an indentured menial of our service with shaved head and eagle-sigil tabard. ‘Fighting detected across northern continental mass, considerable destruction, orbital defences in ruins. Seventy conflict sites identified by augur, more coming in.’

  The escorts had already locked on to us. The Executor was beginning to turn, and I watched its forward lance begin to churn with a clot of blood-red energies.

  ‘Good,’ I said, studying the schematics of the ongoing invasion. ‘Less of them to encounter on board. Enact attack run, as outlined. Keep us alive for just a little while.’

  We ramped up speed, and the plasma drives thundered. Across short distances I judged we had the advantage – our engines were far more advanced than the colossal power trains employed on those behemoths, even if that edge would likely only prove temporary. We took hits from the escorts – black-hulled close-attack craft with spiked ventral ridges and close-packed las-fire arrays. Macrocannon batteries began to flicker as the cruiser wallowed into closer range, sending hailstorms of shells fizzing past us.

  I departed the command dais. Aleya came with me, and we joined the others on a heavy platform set back from the main arch of the bridge. The deck rocked beneath us as we were hit again, the impact stressing our forward void shielding and making the real-viewers crackle.

  We ignored the lesser craft, speeding through their cordon and absorbing their punishment. The Chelandion powered straight towards the Executor, and soon I could begin to make out the detailing across the cruiser’s ancient lines. Everything had been mangled, tortured, flexed into colonnades of grotesquery. Every gun barrel was a gaping maw, every hull plate was disfigured with hammered-out eyes or claws or teeth. The black mass of its hide was mottled as though covered in a patina, the accumulation of centuries plying corrupted depths. Even its void-movements were sinister, as if crabbed by the laws of physics it suddenly and unwillingly had to obey.

  The Black Legion, Aleya signed.

  I looked at her. Her face was already twisted into hatred, an expression only part-hidden by her mask.

  ‘We will be among them soon enough,’ I said.

  The volume of fire picked up. The Chelandion shuddered, hit again by a brace of well-aimed shots. I saw warnings flash up on the status of our void shields. For the time being we had evaded the great lance weapons, but the Executor itself now swelled hugely, filling up the forward augur lenses like a cliff-face of burnished metal.

  We fired back. A single shot, concentrated on a single location, high up on the cruiser’s bridge level. The technology behind that beam was far beyond anything possessed by either the enemy or our own regular armies, and a blue-white column of searing energy pierced straight through the cruiser’s shielding, blowing a ragged hole amid an explosion of released static.

  It was all we needed.

  ‘Now,’ I commanded.

  The teleport chamber blazed into cold life, flooding all of us in columns of spitting witch-light. For a split second we were nowhere, ripped from the heart of the engagement and flung into the nether­world of the warp. I heard a sound li
ke rushing water, booming in my ears, covering an undertow that might have been screams.

  Then the world of the senses crashed back into solidity around us. We rematerialised within the cruiser’s bowels. The walls were concave and serrated, as if we were in some immense black ribcage, and spiked columns soared up towards a many-tiered hammer-beam roof hanging with stalactites of iron. The metal was dank, glistening with condensation, and the inner atmosphere was as hot as a furnace. Sparse red lumens barely broke through a thick miasma that swayed and undulated with something like sentience. I could smell a range of overlapping aromas – hot metal, old blood, the rotten-fruit stench of primordial corruption.

  My helm-cogitator immediately scanned through the decks, giving me a three-dimensional schema to navigate by. I could already hear brazen war-horns sounding in the depths. The distant report of cannon fire continued, indicating that the Chelandion still lived. With the Emperor’s blessing, it had hopefully now pulled clear again and run for sanctuary further out, but we had passed close by on that infiltration run and the ship had no doubt taken heavy damage.

  One reading on that schema made no sense to me. It was as if the scans dropped off a cliff when trying to probe a whole section of the lower hull. Something huge was masked, cut out as if physically excised. Instinct told me that was what we had come for, and I gave the order.

  We moved out, our weapons glittering in the darkness, only to find the enemy coming for us. They had reacted with predictable speed, charging down the ship’s clanging corridors to engage the boarders in their midst. They were legionnaires, for the most part, lumbering out of every corridor-mouth in a thudding ­chorus of heavy bootfalls, bolters booming, chainblades revving, vox-augmitters roaring. Their black-lacquered armour glinted, a livery that sucked the meagre light into itself as if famished for it.

  We swept into close-combat, Custodian and anathema psykana against heretic Legiones Astartes. My spear hurtled, trailing golden paths within the miasma. I saw Aleya tearing into them, kicking out with her armoured boot even as her blade danced. The Sisters had no daemonic aura to contest here, and so fought just as we did – warriors tempered in the furnace of physical conditioning, immune to fear, faster and stronger than all but the mightiest of our peers in the Emperor’s service.

  But the foes we faced were nigh as deadly. The rawest of them were hundreds of years old, the first among those who had marched with the Warmaster in the lost age, steeped in the cruel tutelage of the Eye and now advancing under the Despoiler’s colours. They had been bloated, changed and ravaged by the gifts of their gods, made both stronger and wilder, the heralds of a new age of ruin. This was their place, and they crashed through the clouds of vapour with a swagger of assurance.

  I slammed into the first of them, a thick-set champion with a tusked and bloated death mask, his lenses as red as coals and his armour draped with sheets of flayed hide. He punched his chainblade into me, and Gnosis met the lunge halfway, turning it back before the energy fields exploded in snarls of flame. I lashed out with my gauntlet, cracking into his gorget-seal, then switched my blade back to drive it under his breastplate. He was fast and he was strong, but I had ended many of his kind in hundreds of Blood Games. I knew the way they fought, I knew their doctrines and their habits, and so I thrust a final time, propelling Gnosis up into his lungs and ripping through the power pack beyond. The reactor cells, warped and corroded as they were, imploded noisily, burning him from the inside.

  I cast his spasming body aside and advanced further, fighting my way out of the hall and into the warrens beyond. My brothers came with me, as did the anathema psykana. Every step became bloody and laboured. The oncoming legionnaires clogged the narrow corridors, barrelling into us and dogging our movements. I felt my muscles burn, my auramite flex under the blows, my spear shiver at every impact.

  The Sisters slew with hatred in their eyes. Their speed and force came from anger now, just as it had done on Terra. They were giving themselves no quarter, risking all just for the chance to hurt those who had hurt them. In such confined spaces they were formidable, almost elemental, able to use their lighter frames to race into gaps and pull away from danger.

  We were different. We fought as we had always fought – methodically, precisely, falling into the numerology of the near future and racing ahead of mortal thought. These warriors were used to slaughter, either in the Eye against their own kind or against the mortal defenders of His realm, but we had been made to hunt them. That was perhaps the darkest of the many secrets we carried – that from the very beginning, from even before the Great Crusade itself, we had been prepared for this and engineered to surpass them. To the galaxy at large these warriors were the greatest of His created weapons, the apogee of His martial genius. We considered them only as our natural prey.

  So I laid them low. I tore through them and I ripped them apart. I cracked their armour open and I pulled their flesh into ribbons. My brothers did the same, working in perfect silence, each consumed with his own study of murder. The legionnaires cursed us in tongues long dead, repeating mockery that had been old even at the time of the Siege, but we made no response, and their fell weapons ground up against our shimmering auramite blades in cascades of thrown disruptor-light.

  More were arriving all the time to repel us, coagulating like cells in a bloodstream. I guessed that even greater numbers were being summoned back from the surface. There might already have been hundreds on that ship, and after a certain point those numbers would tell.

  But not yet. I had the signal on my augur, and it drove me onwards. Deck by deck, corridor by gore-drenched corridor, we burned our way towards the goal.

  That was the only thing that existed for us then. We were lost in that cloying dark, burrowing even deeper, going so far that soon light itself became a memory. I felt the entire structure close in around me, sensed the malign resonance of its tonnes and tonnes of corrupted metalwork, its ancient devices and its warp-infused chambers, and for a brief, heretical moment was reminded of that other catacomb, the one where I had been repelled.

  But there was no threshold that could bar me here. I was out, I was free, and now vengeance slavered at my heels.

  Aleya

  I let Valerian guide our path within that ship. All I wished to do there was cause as much damage as possible.

  We took losses from the very beginning. The first of our number fell in that rib-sparred hall, caught by heavy bolter fire and sent spinning into the murk. Even once we gained the corridors we were hard hit, for those enemies were relentless. They stank of blood and they were brutally hard to down. If we had not had the ­Custodians with us we would have fared much worse, but even they were tested by what they fought.

  It mattered little, for I had what I wished for in those moments. I could look my foe in the eye and test my blade against his. There were no duels of honour in that desperate struggle as there might have been in another age, for we only desired to inflict hurt. We ganged up on them, swamping them in those tight, claustro­phobic corridors before taking them apart in combined enactments of revenge. Our relative lack of bulk was even an advantage then, as we could crowd in close, cutting at their airways and smashing their eye-lenses.

  The Custodians set a punishing pace, and soon we were delving deeper, forging a path down into the engine-levels where heavy machinery thrummed and yammered. The entire ship was a haunt of semi-fused shedim, locked into the molten metal and spitting blasphemies at us as we ran. When I could, I shattered those fixtures, enjoying the shrieks as we cleaved daemon-iron from its mounting. I had no concern for my own safety, for I knew well enough we would die in that place, but every corpse we created still felt like a benediction, an offering on the altar of our long suffering. I thought of my sisters on Arraissa when I killed. With every life I ended, I signed another name, matching the corpses to those who I still remembered.

  Eventually we neared the very base of that huge vessel
, down in the ballast sumps where the air was thick with carbon dioxide­ and the decking throbbed with enginarium-heat. Our band had dwindled under the constant counter-assault, and even one of Valerian’s chamber had been killed at last, his head smashed in by a power-fisted brute with a daemon-blade. The rest fought on after that without the merest change in demeanour – their blows remained just as metronomically perfect, neither faster nor slower, an exactitude of tick-tock slaughter.

  It was only as we neared our destination, the place that Valerian had selected as the one where we would make our stand, that I felt something nag at me – a numinal drag, like a sudden flex of high-grav, slinking through the mire of semi-light. The corridors slipped by in a blurred orgy of close-packed carnage, and the drag became more pronounced, until I felt like I was heading into something at once totally new and also horribly familiar.

  We finally fought our way into a high chamber with a heavy pair of saw-toothed blast doors on the far side. Valerian dismantled a legionnaire guard single-handed, spinning bodily into him before breaking his neck, while we jointly took care of the rest. Then we laid charges against the doorway, dozens of them, and blew it into sprayed fragments.

  On the far side, a great cylindrical well gaped ahead of us, a circular shaft that disappeared into the body of the vessel above us and out through the lower hull below. The volume of it was colossal, over a hundred metres in diameter and far higher. When I looked down I could see straight out into the void, and the shining disc of Vorlese’s upper atmosphere glared back at us from behind a glitter of void shielding. Electric force snaked up and down the shaft, catching on feeder vanes jutting out at regular intervals. For a moment I was seized with a powerful lurch of vertigo, realising that we had raced onto a precipice over the infinite.