Angron

by Matthew Farrer

  The image of Lorgar shook its tattooed head. ‘The Warmaster sent us here for a reason.’

  ‘I would take you more seriously if you did not hide behind Horus.’

  ‘Very well.’ The rasp of vox interference stole Lorgar’s voice for a moment. ‘I brought us here, and my plan stands on the edge of failure because you cannot control your rage. We will lose this war, brother. How can you not see that? United, we will take the Throneworld. Horus will rule as the new Emperor. But divided, we will fall. You may be content now, but will you be content if we lose? If history paints us as heretics and traitors? That destiny awaits us if we grind our Legions together out here in the void.’

  Lorgar hesitated, studying the other primarch as if he could glean some hidden answer. ‘Angron. Please, don’t force this battle, as you’ve forced so many others.’

  Angron’s hands began to shake again. He cracked his knuckles, to keep his fingers busy. The ache at the back of his head had become a rolling, tidal throb now – an unscratchable itch within his brain.

  ‘The Ursus Claws are ready,’ Captain Sarrin said softly. ‘Ready to–’

  Her words trailed away as the deck sirens wailed.

  They burst into the void in a silent storm. The violence of an Imperial arrival was nowhere to be seen: no vortices of howling light, no battlemented warships of dark iron spilling from wounds torn in reality. These vessels shimmered into existence, as if melting from the backdrop of distant stars. On they came, already cutting ahead at impossible speeds, each one a sleek paragon of bladed majesty.

  The Lex and the Conqueror came about first, each reacting to the new threat in their own way. The Fidelitas Lex lessened its thrust, slowing enough for its support squadron to keep pace. As the destroyers and escorts moved into attack formation, the Lex led them right into the enemy.

  The Conqueror powered ahead, heedless of the danger of going in alone. Gun ports rattled open, and the ship’s hull thrummed with the massing rise of its weapon batteries priming.

  The alien vessels swooped and rolled past the Imperial warship, not even bothering to fire. The faster ships, black against the infinite black, stirred the void around the Conqueror without committing a single volley. The World Eaters flagship was already unleashing its rage, spitting payloads in futility, consigning ammunition to the void. The deck guns shuddered as they fired, striking nothing.

  The alien vessels ghosted aside, as laser fire streaked the space between stars. More and more of the bladed warships joined the dancing formation, slicing around the surrounded Conqueror.

  And then, with precision that could never be born of Imperial technology, they opened fire in the exact same moment, in the time it takes a human heart to give a single beat.

  Hunting alone as she was, the World Eaters flagship lit up the darkness when her void shields caught fire. Pulsar streams lashed at the energy barriers, breeding violent colours across their domed surface, reflecting the flames back against the shadowed hulls of the alien raiders.

  The sirens still wailed on the strategium. The deck shook, as if at the mercy of great winds.

  Sarrin reviewed the ship’s tactical displays. ‘Shields holding,’ she called.

  Angron wiped his lips, grunting at the painful tics twitching the muscles in the left side of his face. When he spoke, his voice was a low, dangerous growl.

  ‘Someone tell me why we are vomiting all our ammunition into the void and missing every single enemy ship.’

  ‘We’re firing blind.’ The captain sounded distracted, hammering in commands to the servitors on her throne’s keypads. ‘The enemy’s shields allow them to slip out of target lock.’

  ‘At this range? These bastard eldar are on top of us!’

  ‘The rest of our fleet is almost ready to engage from maximum range. The Lex is closer – she’ll be with us in under a minute.’ Captain Sarrin swore as her head cracked against the back of her throne. ‘Shields holding,’ she said again. ‘Though not for much longer,’ she added in a whisper.

  The primarch roared as he aimed his axe at the oculus screen. One of the raiders shivered past the screen, while the slower Conqueror struggled to turn and keep it in sight.

  ‘Enough! I’m tired of shooting at ghosts! Fire the Ursus Claws!’

  The Conqueror shuddered again, though not because of the assault raining upon its shields. From ridged battlements and armoured ports along the warship’s hull, a tide of what looked like spears burst out into the void. Each of the lances was the size of a smaller escort ship in its own right, and of the dozen fired, seven punctured home in the hulls of alien vessels. Once impaled, the immense spears came active, locking to their prey’s ravaged insides with magnetic fusion.

  But while they were effective against conventional foes, the alien vessels were forged from synthetics beyond mere metal. Two of the ships managed to slide free, dragging their ruined carcasses away from the Imperial warship, their cores holed right through and open to space.

  They were the lucky ones. The five eldar cruisers still impaled shook as they were dragged off-course, stalling in the void. Their engines burned in silent heat, but each of them remained anchored in place. The spears driven through their bodies were more than projectiles, lances launched to cripple. They were harpoons, fired to claim prey.

  With malicious slowness, the Conqueror recalled its spears.

  The lances began to ratchet back towards the vessel that fired them, dragged home on massive chains. Only the World Eaters would deploy something so barbarous and primitive on such a scale, and only the World Eaters would make such crude weaponry into something so efficient.

  Link by link, the Conqueror dragged the five ships closer, its massive engines straining against their stagnant thrust. The other eldar raiders broke away, finding it increasingly difficult to fire at the Imperial warship now using five of their own ships as barriers to protect itself.

  One ship sought to cut its flailing kindred free, focusing its weapons on the great chains reaching between the Conqueror and its prey. Diving close enough to fire brought it within range of the warship’s laser batteries, and the eldar raider’s shimmering shields collapsed in an anaemic sigh. A moment later, the vessel itself came apart under the Conqueror’s rage.

  Angron watched all of this taking place, a smile on the slit of his lips.

  ‘Release the hounds.’

  Boarding pods spat from the Conqueror’s hull, crossing the short distance in the blink of an eye, and disgorging World Eaters into the bowels of the impaled eldar vessels.

  ‘Retract the Ursus Claws that failed to strike. Khârn?’

  ‘Sire.’

  ‘Come with me. Let us greet these eldar.’

  As he strangled the eldar warrior, Angron reflected on an unpleasant truth: perhaps Lorgar had been right.

  The warrior kicked in the primarch’s grip, struggling against the one hand Angron had wrapped around his throat. A tightening of the fist ended all struggle with the muted wet crackle of ruined vertebrae. He cast the corpse aside, bashing its skull open against the sloping wall.

  The eldar vessel sickened him. The sight and smell of it was an assault on the senses. As soon as he’d pulled his way from the boarding pod, chainaxe revving in his hand, the sheer alien foulness of the place set his mind aching. The bizarrely sterile, spicy scent that teased the nose. The odd angles of the walls, the twisting rise and fall of the deck, and the strange un-colours that seemed formed from a hundred shades of black. Beneath it all was the sickly-sweet smell of fear, and the copper tang of vein-fluid, leaking from broken skin. Even alien vessels could smell of blood, when their bellies were sliced open to reveal what lay within. There was purity in the smell – purity and purpose. He’d been born for such things.

  Splinters of alien metal clattered against his armour, tearing fresh scars along what little of his skin remained exposed. But what was
a scar, really? Neither evidence of defeat, nor a medal of triumph. A scar was nothing more than a mark to show that a warrior faced his enemies at all times, never once showing his back.

  Angron shoved his own men aside as he chased the retreating eldar. Their crackable armour and stick-thin limbs had a perverse grace when they moved, but it was a sickening, alien thing. One could admire a snake’s lethality, but one could never be deceived into finding it beautiful, let alone worthy of emulation.

  His axe fell without heed, without care, each of his merest blows slaying wherever it fell. Ahh, the Butcher’s Nails hammered into the back of his head were buzzing now. His muscles burned, and his brain boiled with them. All that mattered was keeping the feeling going. Each sensation was reddened by the delicious justification of honest anger. This was what it meant to be alive. Humanity was a wrathful species, and anger vindicated all of its sins.

  Nothing was as honest as rage – throughout the history of the human race, what release of emotion had ever been more worthy and true than depthless anger? A parent confronting their child’s killer. A farmer defending his family against raiders. The warrior avenging the deaths of his brothers. In rage, anything was justified. It was the highest state of sentience. With rage came vindication, and with vindication came peace.

  Angron charged through another cannonade of splinter gunfire. Blood bathed his neck as he felt the stinging crashes against his head. A sudden nerve-sharp coldness made him wonder, just for the shadow of a moment, if his face was blasted open to the bone. No matter. It had happened before. It would happen again.

  He charged on, screaming without realising it, hearing nothing and feeling nothing beyond the disgustingly pleasant whine of the Butcher’s Nails in his brain.

  The wrath brought clarity. At last, with the spikes buried in the meat of his mind finally spitting their most waspish outpourings, Angron was allowed to drift, to dream, to remember.

  Serenity. Never peace, no, never that.

  But serenity in rage, like the calm at the heart of a storm.

  Three months before, when they’d started this Shadow Crusade, Lorgar had asked him why he mutilated his own Legion. The Butcher’s Nails, of course. He meant the Butcher’s Nails.

  ‘Do you know what these things do to you? Do you know what they really do to your men?’ Lorgar had asked.

  Angron had nodded. He knew better than anyone.

  ‘They let me dream,’ he admitted. It was one of the few moments in his life he’d ever risked admitting such a thing. He still wasn’t sure why he’d said it. ‘They make it difficult to feel anything except the most fierce righteousness.’ A headache thudded behind his eyes, coiling all the way down his spine. He wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have such a talk, but Horus had sent them into Ultima Segmentum to work together. At this stage, so early in their journey, the cracks of tension had yet to show.

  Lorgar had smiled sadly and shaken his head. ‘Your Butcher’s Nails were not made for a primarch’s mind, brother. They steal the healing hours of sleep from you, not letting your brain process the day’s events. They also cauterise your emotions, feeding everything back into your basest urges. To kill. To fight. To slay. That is all that gives you pleasure, isn’t it? These implants, crude as they are, have remapped the cartography of your mind.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ Perhaps they did do all those things, but they also brought a maddening peace that had to be chased, and the purity of absolute fury. ‘They are not simply a curse, though they may seem that way to you.’

  ‘Then enlighten me. Help me understand.’

  ‘You want to remove them. I know you do.’ He’d die before he allowed that. For all the pain, for all the twitches, tics, spasms and aches right to his bloody bones, the Butcher’s Nails brought clarity and purpose. He’d never sacrifice that. He was not weak enough to even feel the temptation.

  ‘Brother,’ Lorgar had sounded disheartened then, his eyes cooled by concern. ‘They cannot be removed, not without killing you. I had no intention of trying. If it is possible for us to die, you will do so with those wretched things still inside your skull.’

  ‘You know we can die. Ferrus is dead.’

  Lorgar looked away, as if staring through the metal chamber wall. ‘I keep forgetting that. Events are proceeding so very quickly, are they not?’

  ‘Hnnh. If you say so.’

  ‘So why would you inflict this upon your Legion? Answer me that, at least. Why would you order your Techmarines to hammer these Butcher’s Nails into the heads of every warrior in your service?’

  Angron hadn’t replied at once. He owed Lorgar no answers. But a thought took slow bloom in his mind – the idea that if any of his kindred could understand, it might be Lorgar. After all, the lord of the XVII Legion had inflicted punishments of his own upon his favoured sons. Even now, the Word Bearers in the Gal Vorbak were severed beings, existing with daemons trapped in their hearts.

  ‘It is all I know,’ he admitted at last. ‘And it has never failed me. This is how I win my wars, Lorgar. You’ve done similar things to win yours.’

  ‘That is true enough.’

  From there, the memory grew hazy and indistinct. The degeneration followed over the course of weeks, as the two Legions suffered the rise of their masters’ tension. Forty thousand warriors in Word Bearer crimson, and seventy thousand in World Eater white, filling the decks and holds of a vast flotilla.

  In the beginning, the clashes between Legion ideology had manifested in manageable ways. Word Bearers warriors had been honoured to be invited into the XII Legion’s gladiatorial pit fights, and World Eaters had been offered entrance to the XVII Legion’s training chambers. It was only as the primarchs’ discontent filtered down to their warriors that divisions arose.

  The first crack in the alliance had happened at the world of Turem, a planet loyal to distant Terra. The unified fleet had only dropped from the warp to resupply, refuel, and move on deeper into enemy territory. The Legions had cast aside the pathetic excuse for planetary defences with no effort at all, and ransacked the world’s refineries for everything they required.

  Within a week, the Word Bearers had been ready to move on. The principal cities were put to the cleansing flame, and all icons venerating the Imperium were broken beneath ceramite boots.

  But the World Eaters weren’t finished. What followed were the long days and longer nights of bloodshed and butchery, as the XII Legion, led by their primarch, pursued the ragged remains of the population across the globe.

  Lorgar’s initial disagreement gave way to disgust, and in turn became the cold anger for which he was now becoming known. Angron couldn’t be summoned, couldn’t even be contacted, as he laid waste to what little life remained on the planet.

  When the last World Eaters returned to their vessels, the flotilla was ten days delayed, lagging behind its targeted estimates.

  Then came Garalon Prime. The first world of the Garalon system turned about its sun at the ideal distance not only to sustain human life, but to allow it to flourish. A rare jewel, a mythological Eden, Garalon Prime stood out as a beacon of Imperial compliance, providing vast numbers of men and women for the oh-so-glorious regiments of the Imperial Army.

  After annihilating the modest orbital defences, Lorgar had ordered a portion of the population enslaved, and the world burned. He vowed to leave Garalon Prime as nothing more than a blackened husk, with his fleet’s indentured crew and servitor contingents swollen by fresh meat.

  But once more, the primarchs’ desires diverged. Angron led the World Eaters down to the surface, ransacking the cities and destroying all hope of a cohesive assault. As ever, his tastes ran along bloodier lines. He had no desire to leave a charred cinder of a planet as an example to the Imperium. He would leave a grave-world, a planet of silent cities and a billion bones bleaching in the sun.

  And so it continued. World aft
er world, forcing the brothers apart through desire and ideology, bringing two of the Traitor Legions close to a civil war of their own. When Angron ordered his fleet to break from the warp to attack a fifth world, the primarchs at last came to the edge of violence.

  ‘If you seek to stop me, Lorgar, you and your deluded Legion die first.’

  ‘So be it, brother. We will not fire the first shot, but we will not allow you to pass us and waste lives and resources on worthless butchery.’

  ‘It is not worthless. They are the enemy.’

  ‘But not the true enemy.’

  ‘All enemies are true, Lorgar.’

  Strange, how Angron could remember those words with such biting clarity, but not the look upon his brother’s face. It had only been a few hours ago, yet it felt as intangible now as a childhood dream.

  ‘Sire.’

  The voice reached him from a great distance, faint through the coppery euphoria of absolute anger. Rage that deep left its taste on the tongue – something not far from fear or ecstasy, but sweeter than both.

  ‘Sire,’ the voice said again.

  He turned, but for a moment he couldn’t see, until he wiped the blood from his eyes.

  One of his warriors stood before him, carrying a black iron chainaxe, its teeth-tracks clogged with meat.

  ‘Sire,’ the warrior said. ‘It is done.’

  Angron’s sigh released the last of his clinging fury. In its place, pain swept back into his skull, filling the void once more. The muscles of his right hand spasmed, and he almost lost his grip on his own axe.

  ‘You know I despise that title, even in jest. Hnnh. Back to the Conqueror.’ He hesitated a moment, looking about himself, at the dark walls streaked with blood dappling. ‘The ship is still. No movement. No shaking. No thunder.’

  Khârn stood with his boot on a fallen alien’s breastplate. The dead warrior’s armour was sculpted in the image of the spindly, thread-thin musculature beneath.