‘Do not move,’ I shouted as the black-visored troopers moved through the crowd. They clustered around each of the stricken figures. Null collars and monowire bindings slipped over necks and limbs and the bound figures were dragged across the stone floor like sacks of grain. The shock in the rest of the crowd was palpable; they had just seen a dozen of their senior peers, men and women of power and distinction, overcome and dragged away. You could almost feel the thought forming in all their minds: traitors in our midst. The pale faced psykana lord nodded to me and I favoured him with a low bow of thanks. A murmur of anger and fear began to build in the chamber.
‘Our enemy is among us.’ I raised my hammer up and brought its adamantine head down on the granite floor. Silence gathered in the wake of the fading hammer blow. ‘It walks amongst us, wearing faces of loyalty.’ My voice was soft but it carried in the still air. ‘Our enemy has used our strength against us, directed us into traps, mired us in blood and shackled our strength with lies. A year ago, on this ship, that enemy came close to ending my life with his own hand. That such a thing was possible is a testament to his ability and audacity.’ I paused, looking around at the faces watching me, waiting to see what would come next. ‘But I survived, and in that attempt he exposed the extent of the treachery within our forces.’ I pointed to the dozen spaces on the tiered seats. ‘Today I have removed the heads of the hydra from among us.’ I paused as murmurs ran through the audience.
The traitors had been difficult to find without arousing their suspicion. It had been delicate work to find them, and more delicate still to prepare to remove them in a single instant. The twelve taken in the chamber had been the most senior, the most highly placed of Phocron’s agents and puppets. Some, no doubt, had not known what end they served, others, I was sure, were willing traitors. There had been generals amongst them, senior Munitorum staff, an astropath, confessor and even an interrogator. At the moment they had been taken, parallel operations had gone into action throughout the Persecution’s forces, cutting the corruption out from among us. Most of the infiltrators would be killed, but many would be taken and broken until their secrets flowed from them like blood from a vein.
‘The enemy has blinded us and led us by the hand like children. But at this moment he has also handed us weapons with which to destroy him. Knowledge is our weapon, and from the traitors that walked among us we will gain knowledge.’ I stood and picked the hammer up, its head at my feet, the pommel resting under my hands. ‘And with that knowledge, this Persecution will cut the ground from under the feet of our enemy. We will wound and hound him until he crawls to his last refuge. And when he is crippled and bleeding, I shall take the last head of this hydra.’
Twelve hours ago
A hundred warships came to bear witness to our victory. They ringed the jagged space fortress, their guns flaring as they hammered it with fire. The Hydra’s Eye turned in its orbit around the dead world like a prize fighter too dazed to avoid the blows mashing his face to bloody pulp and splintered bone.
In the end, it had been the words of a traitor that had betrayed Phocron’s refuge. One of those taken from the strategium of the Unbreakable Might had known of another agent in naval command. That agent had been taken in turn, and his secrets ripped from his mind by a psyker. That information had been added to fragments gleaned from others, winding together to make a thread that had led to the system of dead planets in which the Hydra’s Eye hid. That it was the current refuge for Phocron was implied and confirmed by many sources once we knew where to look. Once I had the location of Phocron’s base, I ordered an immediate attack.
The Hydra’s Eye was truly vast, an irregular star of fused void debris over fifteen kilometres across at its widest point. Its hull was a patchwork skin of metal that wept glowing fluid as macro shells and lance strikes reduced its defences to molten slag. There had been enemy ships clustering around the irregular mass of the space fortress like lesser fish beside a deep sea leviathan. Most had been pirate vessels, wolf packs of small lightly-armed craft. All died within minutes, their deaths scattering light across the jagged bulk of the Hydra’s Eye. Our guns went silent as a cloud of assault boats and attack craft swarmed towards the wounded fortress. I had not watched as Phocron’s last means of escape died in fire. This was the end of my war and I was ready to strike its last blow myself. When the first wave of attack craft swarmed towards the space fortress I was there, my old body wrapped in armour forged by the finest artisans of Mars.
An animal is at its most dangerous when wounded and cornered. Phocron’s followers did not fail to hammer this lesson home. The forces on the Hydra’s Eye were a mixture of piratical scum and renegades inducted into Phocron’s inner circle. They spent their lives without thought, their only care being to make us pay many times over for each of them that we killed. I could see Phocron’s vile genius in their every tactic. Some hid in ceiling ducting or side passages, waiting for our forces to pass before attacking from behind. Others pulled guardsmen quietly into the dark, strangling them before taking their uniforms and equipment. Dressed as friends, the renegades would join our forces, waiting until the most advantageous moment to turn on the men beside them. The structure of the fortress itself spoke of a twisted foresight. Dead ends and hidden passages riddled the structure. Passages and junctions seemed to split and channel us, portioning our forces so that they became divided. We had bodies enough to choke every passage. We would win, that was without doubt, but every inch cost blood. Those bloody steps had led me here to this chamber and this final battle.
Yes every step had cost blood; every step for a hundred years, from the mustering fields of Ephisia, through the burning of Hespacia to here where I will face my enemy for the last time. I am alone, the rest of the Imperial force lost behind me in the bloody tangle of the Hydra’s Eye. So I will face my enemy alone, but perhaps that is as it should be.
Phocron moves and cuts, his blow so quick and sudden that I have no chance to dodge. I raise my arm, feeling the armour synchronise with the movements of my aging muscles. My fist meets his strike in a blaze of light. For a second, it is his strength against mine, the energies of weapons grinding against each other. I am looking into his face, so close that I can see the pattern of finer and finer scales on his face plate. The deadlock lasts an eye blink. I fire my storm bolter a fraction of a second before he moves. The burst hits him in the chest at point blank range and spins him onto the floor with the sound of cracking ceramite. I spray his struggling form with explosive rounds as he tries to rise.
I take a step closer – a mistake. He is on his feet faster than I can blink, spinning past me. The tip of his sword glides over my left elbow as he moves. The power field sheathing my fist vanishes, the power feeds severed with surgical care. I turn to follow him. His sword flicks out again, low and snake-strike fast. The tip stabs through the back of my left knee. Pain shoots up my leg an instant before it collapses under me. Tiles shatter under the impact. He is gone, moving into blind space behind me. I try to twist around, my targeting systems searching. He is going to kill me, one cut at a time. Despite the pain, I smile to myself. The Alpha Legion do not simply kill, they bleed you one bite at a time until you have no doubt of their superiority. But that pride is their weakness.
A cut splits the elbow of my right arm. I do not even see where it comes from. Blood is running down my alabaster-white armour and dribbling across the crushed tiles. My right arm is hanging loose at my side, but I hold onto my storm bolter through the pain.
He walks into my view. There is a casual slowness to his movements. He has stripped me of my strength, crippled me and now he wants to look into my eyes as he kills me. He stops two paces from me and looks down at me with green eyes. The tip of the blade rises level with my eye. His weight shifts as he prepares to ram the sword into my eye. This is the death stroke, and it is the chance I have been waiting for.
I bring my left arm around in a swing that hits him behind the right knee. The fist has no power fi
eld, but it is still a gauntlet of armour propelled by a layer of artificial muscles. It hits with a dry crack of fractured armour and bone.
Phocron falls, the hand gripping the knife splayed out to the side. I pull myself to my feet, gripping my storm bolter with the last of my strength. It does not take much. All I need to do is squeeze the trigger. Fired at point blank range, the explosive rounds shred his arm. Before he can react, I move and squeeze the remainder of the storm bolter’s clip into his left arm.
He flounders in a pool of blood and armour fragments. I put my knee on his chest and grip the horns of his helmet with my left fist. Seals squeal and snap as I wrench the helmet from his head. For an instant, I expect to see the face of a monster, a monster that created me, that drove me to become what I am. But the face under the helm is that of a Space Marine, unscarred, dark eyes looking up at me from sharp features. He has a small tattoo of an eagle under his left eye, the ink faded to a dull green.
I reach up and take my own helmet off. The air smells of weapons fire and blood.
‘Phocron,’ I say. ‘For your crimes and heresies against the Imperium of mankind, I sentence you to death.’
He smiles.
‘Yes, you have won. Phocron will die this day.’ There is movement of the edge of my sight.
I look up. There are figures watching me from the edges of the room. They wear blue armour, some blank and unadorned, some etched with serpentine symbols, others hung with sigils of false gods. They look at me with green glowing eyes. Amongst them is a normal-sized man wrapped in a storm cloak, his face hidden by a silver mask. The image of a figure in a mask stood against the burning backdrop of Hespacia, and caught in muzzle flash on the Unbreakable Might flicks through my memory.
The man steps forward. His right hand is augmetic and holds a slender-barrelled needle pistol. There is a clicking purr of gears and pneumatics as the masked man walks towards me. I start to rise. The masked man reaches up with his left hand and pulls the silver mask away. I look at him.
He has my face.
The needle dart hits the inquisitor in his left eye and the toxin kills him before he can gasp. He collapses slowly, the bulk of his armour hitting the tiled floor with a crash.
We move quickly. We have only a few moments to secure our objective, and we can make no mistakes. The inquisitor’s armour is stripped from his body, piece by piece, the injuries he sustained noted as they are revealed. As the dead man is peeled from the armour I remove my own gear and equipment, stripping down until there are two near identical men, one dead and bleeding on the floor, the other standing while his half-brothers finish their work. My augmetics and every detail of my resculpted flesh match the man who lies dead on the floor. Years of subtle flesh craft and conditioning mean that my voice is his voice, my every habit and movement are his. There is only the matter of the wounds that were carefully inflicted to injure, but not kill. I do not cry out as my Legion brothers cut me, though the pain is nothing less than it was for him, the dead man whose face I wear. The wounds are the last details, and as the blood-slick Terminator armour covers my skin, all differences between the dead inquisitor and I end. We are one, he and I.
They take the inquisitor’s body away. It will burn in a plasma furnace to erase the last trace of this victory. For it is a victory. They take away our crippled brother who was the last to play the role of Phocron. A corpse is brought to take his place, its blue armour chewed by bolter rounds and crumpled by the blows of a power fist. A horned helmet hides his face and a shimmering cloak hangs from his shoulders. This corpse is the final proof that the Imperium will require to believe they have won this day: Phocron, dead, killed by his nemesis. Killed by me. The Imperium will see this day as their victory, but it is a lie.
Phocron never existed, his name and legend only extant in the mind of the Imperium and the obsession of the man whose place I take. Phocron existed only to create this last meeting. Many of the Legion were Phocron, playing the role to create a legend that was a lie. I will walk from this chamber in victory and my legend will grow, my influence and power will spread further. Decades of cultivation and provocation have led to this one moment of transformation, the moment we give the Imperium a victory and transform it into a lie. This is our truth, the core of our soul, the essence of our craft. We are warriors unbound by the constraints of truth, assumption, or dogma. We are the reflection in the eternal mirror of war, ever changing, unfixed, and invincible. We serve lies and are their masters. We are their slaves and they are our weapons, weapons which can defeat any foe, break any fortress, and grant one warrior victory against ten thousand. I am the one who stands against many. I am Alpha Legion, and we are one.
Aurelian: An Extract
Aaron Dembski-Bowden
ONE
FRATERNITY
The Vengeful Spirit
Four days after Isstvan V
Eight of his brothers were present, though only half of them truly stood in the room. The absent four were nothing more than projections: three of them manifested around the table in the forms of flickering grey hololithic simulacra, formed of stuttering light and white noise. The fourth of them appeared as a brighter image comprised of silver radiance, its features and limbs dripping spiral lashes of corposant witchfire. This last projection, Magnus, inclined its head in greeting.
Hail, Lorgar, his brother bred the words within his mind.
Lorgar nodded in return. ‘How far away are you, Magnus?’
The Crimson King’s psychic projection showed no emotion. A tall man, his head crested by a sculpted crown, Magnus the Red refused to make contact with his one remaining eye.
Very far. I lick my wounds on a distant world. It has no name but that which I brought to it.
Lorgar nodded, not blind to the nuances of hesitation in his brother’s silent tones. Now was not the time for such talk.
The others acknowledged him one by one. Curze – a cadaverous, pulsing hololithic avatar of himself – gave the barest suggestion of a nod. Mortarion, an emaciated wraith even in the flesh, was hardly improved by this electronic etherealness. His image faded in and out of focus, occasionally dividing in the bizarre mitosis of distance distortion. He lowered the blade of his Manreaper scythe in greeting, which was in itself a warmer hail than Lorgar had been expecting.
Alpharius was the last of those present through long-range sending. He stood helmed, while all others were bareheaded, and his hololithic image was stable while each of the others suffered corruption from the vast ranges between their fleets. Alpharius, almost a head shorter than his brothers, stood scaled in crocodilian resplendence, his reptile-skin armour plating glinting in the false light of his manifestation. His salute was the sign of the aquila, the Emperor’s own symbol, made with both hands across his breastplate.
Lorgar snorted. How quaint.
‘You’re late,’ one of his brothers interrupted. ‘We’ve been waiting.’ The voice was a graceless avalanche of syllables.
Angron. Lorgar turned to him, dispensing with any attempt at a conciliatory smile.
His warrior brother stood hunched in the threatening lean that characterised his body language, the back of his skull malformed from the brutal neural implants hammered into the bone and wired into the soft tissue of his brainstem. Angron’s bloodshot eyes narrowed as another pulse of pain ransacked through his nervous system – a legacy of the aggression enhancers surgically imposed upon him by his former masters. While the other primarchs had risen to rule the worlds they’d been cast down upon, only Angron had languished in captivity, a slave to techno-primitives on some forsaken backwater world that never deserved a name. Angron’s past still ran through his blood, nerve pain sparking in his muscles with every misfired synapse.
‘I was delayed,’ Lorgar admitted. He didn’t like to look at his brother for too long at a time. It was one of the things that made Angron twitch; like an animal, the lord of the World Eaters couldn’t abide being stared at, and could never hold eye contact for more t
han a few moments. Lorgar had no desire to provoke him.
Kor Phaeron had once made mention that the World Eater’s face was a sneering mask made of clenched knuckles, but Lorgar found no humour in it. To his eyes, his brother was a cracked statue: features that should have been composed and handsome were wrenched into a jagged, snarling expression, flawed by muscle twinges that bordered on spasms. It was easy to see why others believed Angron always looked on the edge of fury. In truth, he looked like a man struggling to concentrate through epileptic agony. Lorgar hated the bleak, crude bastard, but it was hard not admire his unbreakable endurance.
Angron grunted something wordless and dismissive, looking back at the others.
‘It has been nine days, and we know our tasks,’ he growled. ‘We are already spread across the void. Why did you gather us?’
Horus, Warmaster of the cleaved Imperium, didn’t answer immediately. He gestured for Lorgar to take his place around the table, at Horus’s own right hand. Unlike his Legion’s sea-green ceramite, Horus stood clad in layered, dense armour of charcoal black, adorned with the glaring cadmium Eye of Terra on his breastplate. This last sigil, the symbol of his authority as master of the Imperium’s armies, had its black core refashioned into a slitted serpent’s pupil. Lorgar wondered, as he met Horus’s pale, elegant smirk, just what secrets Erebus had been whispering into the Warmaster’s ears in recent months.
Lorgar took his place between Horus and Perturabo. The former presided at the head of the table, all pretence of equality done away with in the aftermath of Isstvan. The latter stood in his burnished, riveted war plate, leaning on the haft of an immense hammer with an admirable air of casual disregard.
Hammer and Bolter Year One Page 136
