Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  Maro said nothing, though Toharan could read his scepticism. The helmsman believed he was crossing the line between daring and reckless stupidity. His feelings were understandable. He was impure, his skull topped by a massive club of bone. Perfect for smashing doors open head-first, but clearly insensitive to intimations of destiny. Maro was another who would be left behind as the Disciples of Purity rose from the ashes of the Black Dragons. Toharan would deal with him when the time came.

  Toharan watched the primary pict display in the strategium as the Immolation Maw made its attack run. Unlike on Flebis, the Revealed Truth was too low to approach from beneath. The assault was more frontal. The Chaos cruiser came into sight over the curve of the planetoid as the Maw opened up with its frontal turrets and a full torpedo salvo. Toharan felt the rush of destiny fulfilled when he saw that they had come upon the Truth on its starboard flank. Withering fire raked the superstructure, blasting apart the crown of the command spire. The torpedoes slammed into the hull, blowing open enormous holes. A series of hits to the rear detonated an engine compartment. The ship’s stern bucked upward, while its bow dipped towards the surface of the moon.

  ‘Well played, helmsman,’ Toharan said.

  Maro grunted. He sounded dissatisfied, not triumphant. He leaned back in the pilot throne and turned his head to look at Toharan. With the mechadendrites webbing him to the chair, he struck Toharan as even more disgusting than if he were standing free with only his natural deformities on view. ‘There is no return fire,’ Maro said.

  ‘Then we have landed an even more telling blow than we could have hoped–’ Toharan began.

  ‘And where are their void shields?’

  That gave him pause. ‘What?’

  ‘The Chaos ship had its shields down. I refuse to believe that was a mistake.’

  Toharan had no answer. He looked from the pict to the viewport and watched the Revealed Truth , its hull shuddering with secondary explosions and gouting flame, begin its funereal plunge into the Gemini moon’s atmosphere. A suspicion grew into a theory and, with a flutter of insect wings against his cortex, became a certainty.

  ‘They wanted us to destroy it,’ Symael muttered, echoing Toharan’s thoughts.

  ‘Where is it going to hit?’ Toharan asked.

  Maro absorbed data fed to him by the ship’s augurs. ‘Very close to where the Soulcage landed.’ After a pause, he continued, ‘There is some sort of structure there, too.’

  The sense of destiny ran through Toharan’s frame again like an electric shock. ‘That is our target. We land with full force of arms.’

  Nessun mounted to the observation dome of the temple. He looked at the assembled masses. Over a hundred thousand strong, the refugees were all looking up at the dome of the temple. He lifted his arms to them, and they lifted theirs back. Through the glass of the dome, he could hear the roar of worship and supplication. The people knew they had been taken to a holy place. But they didn’t know why, or what was to become of them. He would answer both of their questions. He pointed to the heavens. The vision of gold and light that greeted him filled him with enormous joy, and his ecstasy was contagious. For the next few seconds, the crowd shared his emotion, and he heard them exclaim in wonder. It was a pity this perfect unity wasn’t going to last, but he revelled in the irony while it did.

  The moment stretched out until the crowd realised what the flashes and fire above them represented. Shapes defined themselves, and the play of light and flame became the burning, erupting hulk of the Revealed Truth plummeting down to spread its final gospel. The swell of wonder became the howl of terror. The cruiser filled the sky. It was comet and cathedral, and the storm of its destruction drowned out the cries on the ground. The observation platform was high enough for Nessun to see the delicious patterns that panic drew in the crowd. He thought he saw some familiar symbols in the shifting, hysterical vectors of blind flight. Refugees on the outer edges of the multitude fled the apron. Nessun wasn’t worried. They couldn’t get far in a matter of seconds. They would still be part of the burnt offering, and would give their souls to the imminent beauty.

  The Revealed Truth hit. The explosion filled the world. Fire of stellar brilliance washed over the dome. Nessun put a hand against the glass. It was cool, but the atomic inferno beyond was so close that Nessun rejoiced he had lived to touch the face of a sun. The refugees were annihilated in the light of truth, incinerated by the breath of Chaos and crushed by the weight of fate. Nessun couldn’t hear his own laugh, but he felt it threaten to tear his cheeks open. He exulted as the rage of the cruiser’s death embraced the temple. This was the apotheosis of his existence.

  And there was even greater beauty to come.

  As the bell reached the height of its swing and started back down, Volos saw the mountain-sized clapper arc towards the mouth. The movement seemed leisurely, though he knew that, given the size of the objects and the distances they covered, he was looking at an event that was occurring at thousands of kilometres per hour.

  There was time, though, time for Volos to anticipate the coming of the sound. But he couldn’t prepare for its immensity.

  The bell rang. It sounded a note that transcended the aural. The toll boomed out from the bell and expanded not at the speed of sound, but at the speed of light. There was no resisting it. The Dragon Claws fell as it hit, hammered by a fist the size of the universe. Volos felt Gemini Primus in its entirety reverberate. The resonance reached into his soul, and he had a momentary impression of the vibration stretching its grasp beyond the planetoid. He had the terrible sense of being tuned .

  The bell swung once only, and then returned to its position, motionless. The moment it finished, the piston fired upward again. The Dragons lay where they had been flattened by the bell’s ring. As the piston streaked towards its starting point, Volos was reminded of a gun mechanism. Gemini Primus was re-arming itself, ready for another sacrifice to be provided. Volos didn’t think one would be necessary.

  The whistle had been blown. The bell had tolled. One single note each time. That was all it took.

  With an effort, he turned his head. Nithigg was facing him. He couldn’t see his battle-brother’s eyes behind the red of the helmet’s lenses, but Nithigg managed a nod. Volos returned it. They had been reduced to ants by the scale of events. They had been outflanked and outmanoeuvred again and again. They had been betrayed.

  But they were alive. They were Adeptus Astartes. They were Black Dragons.

  They were the Emperor’s monsters, and no matter what resources the Archenemy had, no matter how many planets he threw at them, they would teach him fear.

  Toharan knew some moments of indecision as he chose who would descend to the moon’s surface with him, and who would remain on the Immolation Maw . He was torn between having sufficient force on the ground and ensuring he kept his grip on the Maw . In the end, he chose to hit the site of the temple with the entire contingent of the Disciples of Purity. He left the ship in Lettinger’s care, making it clear to Maro on the bridge and Ydraig in the engine room that the inquisitor had the captain’s absolute confidence and would be speaking with his voice. He did not like having Setheno out of his sight. He couldn’t command that she accompany the landing party, though he could, he was sure, enforce her presence. That was a battle that didn’t seem worth fighting. He would embrace his destiny on the Gemini moon, then return to deal with the canoness.

  He landed by drop pod in the company of the thirty loyal Disciples. It was the first time he had gone into action solely with the pure and the converted. He looked at his men with pride. In their armour, they were indistinguishable from most of the other Black Dragons, whose deformities weren’t sufficient to require helmet or vambrace modifications. But he knew what was under the ceramite. While only he was completely free of disfigurement, none of his troops had worse than a few bone gnarls on their heads. With time, and new recruits, he would reverse the damage done by the Dragon Apothecaries, and take his Chapter back to a physical i
deal that rejected the corruption of being. Some drastic measures might yet be necessary to hasten the process. He was not afraid of taking those steps. Transcendence awaited, and to hesitate or show mercy would be a surrender. He refused to be shackled to the filth of imperfection any longer.

  As the Disciples closed in on the temple entrance, he was struck by a new revelation. Why was he so concerned with remaking the Black Dragons? He had already rejected everything the Chapter stood for. Lettinger was right: it was beyond saving. So was anything that knelt to that disgusting mass of being on the Golden Throne. The Black Dragons were dead. The armour he and his true brethren wore was a thing of the past and a celebration of imperfection. The name they had chosen as a mark of their will and their goal was, he now realised, the true expression of their identity. They were the Disciples of Purity. They were not a mere group of like-minded battle-brothers. They were his Legion, and he would be their primarch.

  He was quivering at the touch of glory as they arrived at the temple doors. They stood open. There had been no defensive line set up around the temple. There was no one inside the corridor that stretched ahead. Toharan paused at the threshold. The space was rather wide for an ambush, but the absence of resistance meant something had to be waiting for them here. He turned to Symael. The sergeant was consulting his auspex.

  ‘No one here,’ Symael reported, sounding just as puzzled. ‘I have multiple readings in the larger space beyond.’

  Were the Swords waiting to kill them as they emerged from the corridor? But the hall was much too wide to be an effective bottleneck. The strategy was ludicrous. If anything, the Swords were backing themselves into a corner.

  Jemiah said, ‘They can’t be this stupid.’

  ‘They haven’t been so far,’ Toharan agreed. He had the Disciples advance along three lines, one on either side of the corridor, and his reforged Squad Nychus up the middle. Halfway along, they could see what was waiting for them in the temple’s great hall. Rodrigo Nessun stood before an immense device of bone. He was flanked on either side by the Swords of Epiphany. They stood at attention.

  Their weapons were mag-locked.

  Nessun was smiling.

  Toharan knew that, from a tactical point of view, he should stop his advance immediately. He should retreat from the obvious trap. But destiny spoke louder, and kept him moving. The mind-writhing was agonising, and though the pain should have dulled his vision, instead it sharpened it. The world was crystalline. It was transparent all the way to the heart of existence, yet fragile, ready to shatter in his fist. This was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. He was walking towards the moment that the universe had prepared for him.

  ‘Captain…’ Symael began.

  Toharan said, ‘Walk at my side, brother-sergeant.’ He aimed his bolter at the ground.

  Nessun spread his arms. ‘Welcome, my sons,’ he said.

  The Swords of Epiphany began to beat their hands together. The rhythm built as the Dragons entered the hall, the smack of ceramite gauntlets becoming a wave of thunderous applause. Toharan saw the tension in the body movement of the Disciples. Their instinct to open fire was a difficult one to overcome. The fact that they triumphed over it told him that they, too, felt the truth and inevitability of this moment. The scrabbling insects retreated as he felt his spirit soar. One look at Nessun’s face, and at the exhilaration in his eyes, made it clear that he was in the company of a visionary. Toharan had been so wrong. They all had, to have seen the Swords as the enemy.

  Nessun reached towards him. ‘Will you take my hand?’ he asked.

  Toharan stepped forward and did.

  At that moment, the very cosmos tolled. Everything shifted. The resonance thrummed through moon and temple, bone and mind. Toharan’s vision shimmered as he staggered, then clicked back into place, and the moon was suddenly home as nothing had ever been in his life. He and Nessun caught each other, and he held the cardinal up. As they straightened, he looked around and saw that the other Disciples had lost their wariness as they recovered from the toll. They knew they belonged.

  ‘What was that?’ Toharan asked.

  ‘It was the tuning,’ Nessun answered. ‘The moon and Abolessus Gemini are now properly synchronised.’ He walked to the instrument and placed his hands on the massive vertebrae. ‘And now, if our latest burnt offering was large enough… Ah,’ he sighed, and the sound was almost humble.

  The blank eye of bone above Nessun opened. It was a pict screen of some kind, and at first it seemed to be merely a viewport, looking out onto the temple’s apron. There, the smouldering wreckage of the Revealed Truth lay in twisted fragments over a carpet of burned, crushed, melted and fused corpses. Nessun moved his hands. The corpses slowly flowed into one another, gristle and skeleton and blood becoming one, becoming nothing, thousands and thousands and thousands of souls absorbed by the capricious demands of the song of the warp. As the corpses disappeared into the glowing crimson surface of the moon, Toharan became aware of music. It did not play for his ear, but he sensed the melody all the same, gathering up his spirit, expanding his heart with the touch of the dark numinous as the song grew. The melody line was simple in the beginning, but as it repeated, it layered and doubled back on itself, intertwined with subtle variations, and gradually became a chorus that was majesty and power. As it reached its first enormous swell, Nessun cried, ‘Look! Oh, look!’

  The eye-shaped screen was not just a viewport. When Nessun shouted, the view shifted to Gemini Primus and Secundus. The screen blinked, and the planetoids appeared closer, filling the screen. Toharan noticed Nessun’s head tilted back to look at the eye, and realised that it had become his sight, responding to his desire, following the focus of his attention and showing him what he wished to see. Toharan saw what had made Nessun exult. He saw where the music came from. It was the song of the Gemini configuration. The planetoids and the moon had become a choir.

  And they danced with each other. The music swelled again, and Primus and Secundus began to move. Their rotation was speeding up. Toharan could actually see their spin. He shook his head. At those speeds, the centripetal forces should have shaken the spheres apart. But they were adamantium, and what was one more impossibility in an entire system of miracles? One more was nothing. So why not another?

  Why not?

  As he watched and listened, the music sounded another triumph, and the planetoids began moving closer together.

  CHAPTER 26

  GRINDER

  Volos expected the piston to stop at its original position as suddenly as it had down below. He knew that his jump pack would not have enough power to counter his momentum, and that he and the other Dragon Claws would be splattered against the cavern ceiling. He knew this, but he would fight for his life anyway, as if sheer will could overcome the laws of physics. It can , he told himself. The Emperor Himself is the living proof .

  But as the light of the surface cavern reappeared, a pinprick at the end of the shaft, the piston slowed. There was only purpose in its instant deceleration where it was part of the sacrificial altar. It eased into its slot in the cavern and became nothing more than the floor again, until the next time blood would spur it to action.

  The Claws picked themselves up. They were greeted by Squad Pythios, knee-deep in dead cultists and a few dismembered Swords. Melus was standing by the edge of the piston. ‘Nice of you to join us,’ he said. ‘Now if you don’t mind, we should depart this Throne-accursed world immediately.’

  ‘Dare I ask?’ Volos said.

  Melus led them out of the cavern. He pointed up.

  Delacquo held Kaletha to his chest. They were on the ground, lying where they had fallen when the toll of the bell had shattered their strength and their comprehension. Delacquo didn’t want Kaletha to see the sky. He wanted to protect her from what he saw. But she was looking. They all were. The people of Fruition had come to see their fate, and now it was upon them.

  Delacquo had watched the conflict between the iron gods. H
e had expected destruction to come in the form of bullets, swords or explosions, as he and his fellow villagers discovered the face of war. Then war had shown itself to be far vaster than he could have imagined.

  The heavens had become a spinning insanity, but one that was not without a terrible purpose. Day became night and then day again. The sun rose and set in minutes, and it did so in fewer minutes each time. Gemini Secundus was spinning too. As it arced from horizon to horizon, again and again, Delacquo saw the lights of its colonies flash past. It seemed to be spinning at the same rate as Primus. Delacquo watched the same configuration of lights curve away each time the sister planet passed by overhead. And each time, the spin and the passage were faster. Delacquo felt he should be clutching the ground to keep from being thrown off into space.

  He also felt flattened. He wished he could dig himself deep into the earth to hide, because each time Secundus appeared, he could see the cities a bit more clearly. Clusters of lights that had been a blob resolved themselves into distinct communities. Secundus was coming closer. The perfect lines of the mountain ranges took on an awful significance. It was so easy to picture what was coming, it seemed strange no one had conceived of the possibility before. The mountain chains of Primus and Secundus would interlock. The two adamantine spheres would roll together.

  Grinding.

  Delacquo began to weep. He hoped he was the only one who had realised the shape of doom. Kaletha touched his face. He looked down into her eyes. She knew, too. How could she not? Everyone knew. No one was going to die alone.

  That was no comfort.

  The Black Dragons boarded the three Thunderhawks. There was enough room in the transports to haul all of the warriors back in one trip. The question was whether there would be somewhere to haul them back to.

  ‘The Immolation Maw is not at anchor over Primus,’ Keryon reported.