Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

  But... It was too easy. Too pointless. So he went down a level, and down again, and each time the madness cleared a little more. Something was jostling it in his brain, pushing aside the need to kill. Something much older than the rage, something stronger even than the Mont’au hunger.

  Survival. The need to stay alive. Oh, maybe surviving to one day fight again. Maybe to achieve great and noble things. Maybe to live out his days in solitude and silence, pondering upon everything and nothing. There was no “why” to it. It didn’t matter what reason he gave himself for staying alive; the need to do so was all that mattered.

  So a dec, more or less, passed. The insanity went away, piece by piece. He killed and fought and struggled. He descended past drop pods tumbling away into the void with gue’la or tau (but never both) cargo. He limped on a bloody, rotten leg, shut out the whispering madness in his skull and finally, mercifully-Clarity returned to him. Words from nowhere:

  No expansion without equilibrium. No conquest without control. Pursue success in serenity And service to the tau’va.

  Shas’la T’au Kais took a breath and shrugged off the horror. There was an unlaunched drop pod at the base of the shaft. He took a second, closing his eyes and allowing himself to reach equilibrium. He almost, almost managed it.

  He was interrupted. Someone, nearby, shrieked.

  The Blademaster Tikoloshe was mad. He knew it.

  He concentrated and somewhere deep in his fractured, buzzing consciousness a command was dispatched. Ancient, rust-corrupted servos growled, tangled power cords tightening brutally.

  His legs moved, a creaking werewolf cackle of protesting, unoiled joints and unnatural ossified growths shattering and grinding against one another.

  His mind rolled over and lost itself, briefly.

  Three thousand years ago: On an unnamed desertworld claimed by the Daemonlord Tarkh’ax he roars in silence, grappling his razor-talons against the shimmering wraith sword of a fiery Eldar monstrosity, its blazing eyes roaring with endless smoke—

  The links of his upper left limb locked briefly, too long out of service. He snarled without making a sound and overpowered the motors, shattering whatever desiccated impediment blocked their progress and venting a stinking serpent of purple-blue smoke.

  His thirteenth birthday, on far Cthonia: The Mountain Angels in their shining armour choose him above all others and take him away to their Summit fortress. In seven years he will be a Space Marine-@@ Light caught at the blades of his limbs in a wave of flashing reflection, a thousand razor edges to slice and de-tendon any unprotected meat. They pockmarked his shell like fish scales; ancient gobbets of carved flesh crumbling away in powdery necrosis.

  Six thousand years ago: He awakes from centuries of blood-dream slumber to answer the call of Gilgalash the Carnator. For a century the hiveworlds surrounding the Kreel Nebula face the Black Crusade of Sicklefell. Before it is sundered, thirty-three worlds will be systematically murdered, one by one by one—

  And the claws... ahh, the claws. Unoiled, untended, untreated by cunning artifice or ridiculous machine-god acquiescence. Their razor edges were maintained by a higher power, and they slid with a sorcerous glow from his vast energy-venting forelimb, emerging with a silken rasp that curled his dead features into a skeletal smile.

  Ten thousand years ago: Terra. The great betrayal. Ripping apart the palace in unquenchable fury, hacking at every horrified loyalist that dared face him. Even then, before his internment, he preferred the slow, dragging edge of a blade to the inelegant thunder of a gun—

  * * *

  Some of his circuitry was fused, delicate tech abused and twisted by the centuries of heresy. He flicked through optical sensors hungrily, seeking prey, ignoring the shattered or flimsy niters that rendered him blind and focusing on the glowing points of light that meant: Enemy.

  Back to his youth: Techs chant and pray and push their instruments into his brain, preparing him for the final biological manipulation before his graduation as a Marine. His mind is a hypnotically sealed crypt of Dogma and Imperial worship. This will change—

  The machine tomb responded to his commands with growing success. The movement of its limbs became familiar once more, insanity applied crudely to sensitive thought stimuli, manipulating and articulating its extremities. Limbs and life support filters squealed in protest and again his dead lips, locked deep in the machine’s black core, curled in a sneer.

  The first change he’d made to the dreadnought Skaarflax, all those millennia ago, had been to rip out its pain centres.

  Back to the crusade: He murders sixteen of the false-Emperor’s Space Marines in a single day and witnesses firsthand the fiery cataclysm that claims Forgeworld Barnassus. Mortally wounded in the bloodswamps of I’Ycklahl, his internment is ordered by the Carnator himself within the Dreadnought-hulk Skaarflax. Its previous incumbent is torn from its guts before his eyes, atrophied muscles spasming, left to shriek and ooze its fluids from ruptured connectors into the scarlet marshes—

  * * *

  He took stock of his situation, finally convinced of his readiness. The warp portal had delivered him onto a gunmetal deck at the base of a tall circular abyss, O-shaped gantries rising up in successive levels above him. He watched scurrying meat-things run and shout and fight in three different spectrums, the basso roar of launching drop pods a constant background growl.

  There would be much killing here. Yes.

  Back to Terra: The defeat. The flight. The thirst for vengeance. Ten thousand years of rage and anger and bitterness. His fury could drive a dynamo—

  They came at him in a gaggle — not even watching where they were going, too absorbed in the task of finding an evacuation craft. Two were locked in a running argument, shouting inconsequential rubbish in their inconsequential patois, waving their inconsequential weapons and making inconsequential threats. If they saw him at all from the corner of their eyes, perhaps they mistook him for a heap of piled crates. Cargo. Certainly not alive.

  He timed himself, just for fun. It took him 4.78 seconds to remove their legs, at the hip. By 6.34 seconds only one of them had any hands left, and both were shorn of fingers — opposable thumbs wriggling like lonely maggots. By eight seconds on the dot they were mewling, dying, shellshocked mannequins, limbs detached, heads flexing and twisting in splattershriek pain. He could have beheaded them at any moment.

  He left them to roll on the deck. It was more fun that way.

  * * *

  Back to the desert-world: Back to the eldar avatar, roaring and hissing and spitting its ember rage. Something’s wrong and the Chaos warhost knows it. There’s something in the air: a sound, perhaps, just beyond perception. The Daemonlord Tarkh’ax roars so loud that the skies go black and the Marines nearest to its vast hostbody clutch at their heads, and everything...

  Everything vanishes—

  The memory made him stop and flex his claws hungrily. Three thousand years of imprisonment was a scar worn heavily on his blistered, cancerous soul.

  No more reminiscing, he decided, just as someone shot him.

  Bright blue droplets rattled ineffectually on his chassis, lightning storm phosphorescence giving the circular chamber a ghastly strobelit animation. There was no pain. No damage, beyond a few more sooty chrysanthemums of plasma impact to be worn proudly on the dreadnought’s plating. Medals of honour, almost.

  If he could have laughed, he would have.

  The gun chattered again, as impotent as drizzle against a steel sheet. He raised his talons and flexed them slowly, one by one, letting the velvet remark of each metal-on-metal hiss echo softly around the room. The enemy was a white heat ghost in his eyes.

  He rushed forwards in a storm of clattering footsteps and snick-snacking knives, reaching out in a lover’s embrace to welcome the petulant little creature to its end. Moments before the mantis claws closed on their prey, the figure bounded up the curling ramp to the next mezzanine level, sidestepping clumsily. The Blade-master’s talons lacerated
the steel guide rail in a flurry of tube sections and hot-edged piping, leaving him roaring silently inside his mechanical tomb.

  The Skaarflax was rotated elegantly towards the ramp, stepping forwards and upwards in a succession of deck-gouging clawsteps. Tikoloshe was in no mood to play cat and mouse.

  He spoke to himself as he chased, words silent within his mind. “I will catch you and dejoint you, little thing,” he promised. “I’ll make boneless flesh sacks of your torso and cut out each eye, each ear, each fluid and gristle lump of offal in your guts — before I let you die.”

  The figure scrabbled away from its hulking pursuer, rolling a grenade down the ramp. The Blademaster stamped on the bauble nonchalantly and barely even wobbled when it detonated beneath his ablative feet. He stalked onwards, implacable.

  Like waves of goosebumps rising in shivery anticipation, the tiny blades covering every centimetre of the dreadnought’s chassis stood upright hungrily. In his mind, Tikoloshe saw giblet filth covering every planet, checkerboard slices on every skin surface. He’d eviscerate the world, dismember the galaxy, slice the universe! He reached the top of the ramp and swivelled again, following his prey.

  The figure was hurt, he saw, limping badly on a wounded leg that left a spatter trail of white heat on his vision. It paused against a rail, slumping breathlessly, chest gulping for air. The Blademaster upped the sensitivity of Skaarflax’s audio sensors, perversely keen to hear the figure’s burning lungs pumping and heaving.

  It was a dry rattle. A wondrous melody. Music to murder by.

  He spread his upper limbs to their full span, mantis claws extended like flesh cleaving wings. And he charged.

  It was the simplest thing in the world.

  Breathe deep. Groan.

  Kais put his weight on his good leg, exaggerating the feeble uselessness of the wounded one.

  He craned his neck and gasped for air he didn’t need.

  You’re exhausted, he told himself. You’re in pain. You’re ready to give up and you’re shaking. Yes, that’s it. You’re shaking in fear and madness.

  And the monster charged.

  Like a rampaging grazebeast. It pawed at the ground, articulated at its hips, displayed its glittering galaxy of knifeclaws and hurtled towards him. Every footstep shook the world.

  He didn’t know what it was. Didn’t care. It was an obscenity: a hulking corruption of the Machine his father spoke of.

  Its claws scissored against each other icily, grinding and hissing.

  Not yet.

  Highlights shimmered across it in waves, oscillating emergency lights distorted and shattered by each and every cutting edge.

  Not yet—

  Its spine-encrusted shoulders, vast chassis collar rolling and pistoning furiously, gouted a thick miasma of smoke and spent fuel.

  Not yet!

  Snick-snack-snick!

  He dived aside and rolled and rolled and rolled.

  Something slashed at his back distantly, slicing across his pack and flipping him over. It was a knife-tip cut, just beyond the metal monster’s reach, spilling ration packs and ammunition clips across the deck. The beast was moving too fast. It swivelled to follow his sideways movement, motors growling in protest, but it was too late. Its legs kicked effortlessly through the mezzanine-railing and for a second, for a perfect moment of stillness, it hung in the air over the drop to the deck below.

  Then it was gone.

  When it landed it cracked open like an egg, and when Kais examined the withered thing inside he thought of aborted reptiles and blind, nourishment-starved clonebeasts. It hissed a final protracted breath and was dead.

  Was this Mont’au too? A facade of brutality, a sham-devil with razor flesh and bloody claws, concealing within itself a shrivelled thing no more deadly than a corpse. There were too many thoughts in his head, con-flirting and battering one another. A Brownian motion of consequence and consideration, fighting for dominance.

  Weary with confusion, exhaustion hanging from every muscle and bone, Kais slumped into the one remaining drop pod and stabbed at the launch trigger.

  He slept the whole way down.

  VI

  16.12 HRS (SYS. LOCAL — DOLUMAR IV, Ultima Seg. #4356/E)

  The man in the dark place faced his captives and wet his lips. One of them moaned quietly, chains clinking in the gloom. The man took a deep breath, allowing a predatory smile to spread across his face, and began.

  “Now be quiet and pay attention, please. I won’t repeat myself and, let’s be clear about this, one way or another you will listen to me. We can do this the easy way or... the other way. The choice is yours, gentlemen.

  “Admiral? Do stop struggling. You’ll miss the good parts.

  “Now Where to begin? This is a story, I suppose, so one rather feels the need for a ‘Grand Opening’...”

  The man stroked at his immaculately sculpted beard thoughtfully. “People,” he said, with something akin to disgust in his voice, “have skewed views on what makes a story. They forget that everything we do, every day, every second of our small little lives, is part of a story’s middle; its guts, if you like. You’re born, you do things, you die. Where’s the beginning? Or the end? It’s never as simple as it seems.

  “Oh, for warp’s sake — Aun! If you don’t stop fiddling with those chains I’ll have your hands removed. You’re putting me off.”

  He shook his head, exasperated, and began again.

  There was a beginning two days ago, when I captured a high-ranking tau ethereal on behalf of the Imperium. There was a beginning when I contacted Fleet Admiral Constantine to request a squad of specialist troops for that very job. There was a beginning, oh yes, twenty-three years ago when I arrived on Dolumar IV. It hasn’t changed much, this world. Did you know that? Oh, we built the odd factory, the occasional town, that sort of thing. But it’s what’s... underneath that counts.

  There was a beginning twenty-one years ago, when Magos-explorator Carneg visited me after a routine survey of the eastern mountains. But that’s a boring beginning and besides... the tedious little man is, I’m sorry to say, no longer with us. So, we can go further back than that.

  “There was a beginning, of sorts, in the thirty-first millennium when the Imperium rolled on its belly and realised it had been rotting from inside for years. The Horus Heresy blossomed and caught everyone off guard. Poor little creatures...” He grinned, envisioning the horror and shock that had spread across the galaxy like wildfire.

  “Of course your species, Aun, back then, was lurking in a puddle of primordial ooze. Perhaps... Perhaps things would have gone better for you if you’d stayed there.

  “But, listen. There’s another beginning. Just over three thousand years ago. The tyranids have not yet reached the galaxy, the orks are busy infesting the Straits of Halk and the tau... well. Maybe — just maybe — they’d mastered the art of simple tools by then. In any case, the eastern fringes were ripe for the taking.

  There was an army. A Chaos army—”

  The admiral began to thrash and groan, voice muffled behind the gag in his mouth. His face was twisted with revulsion and terror. Severus fixed him with a stare and shook his head.

  “Come now, Constantine. You shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Closing your mind is the first step to mundanity, and we can’t have that, can we?

  “Now this warhost... This tide of black death, this... this Chaos Undivided... It dragged a net of nightmares across the sector. It toppled a dozen systems, murdered a hundred planets. It spread the Dark Word throughout the Segmentum and doused a hundred cities in blood and plague and stink. It knocked down temples, laughed at the sanctity of Imperial shrines, built statues out of bone and pieces of meat... How does the ancient hymn go? “Mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Yes, that’s it. Then it reached Dolumar IV.

  “Imagine the sight! Black clouds on every horizon! A million shrieking daemon things filling the skies. Drums! Oh, the drums! There were humans, even here. Some forgotten col
ony, lost since the Age of Apostasy or before, it doesn’t matter. They lasted all of five minutes.

  “The warhost ordered their slaves to begin the excavation of a great pit; a Temple Abyss to collect and focus the energies of their Dark Lords. This pit, in fact. Oh yes: it’s still here, all these millennia later. Explorator Carneg stumbled upon the capstone shortly before his... ah... accident. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  He spread wide his arms and gloried in the cool darkness of the vast pit, sunlight little more than a distant memory at the top of the shaft.

  “To cut a long story short,” he smiled, locking eyes with the deadpan ethereal, “they summoned a daemon. Its name — oh, admiral, shut up!—its name was Tarkh’ax. Beneath the daemonlord’s dominion the warhost went on to greater obscenities, greater carnage, greater Chaos. Nothing could stand against them, and anyone idiotic enough to try was crushed underfoot.

  “What’s all this got to do with us? That’s what you’re wondering. Oh, don’t worry, Aun: all will become clear.

  “Here’s the thing. Just when Tarkh’ax was at the height of his power, when all the filth of the galaxy was drawn to his banner, when a Black Crusade into the Segmentum Solar seemed unavoidable, the eldar got involved.

  “Oh, don’t ask me how or why. Maybe some broad-minded Imperium fop decided that consorting with aliens has benefits over total annihilation. Ironic, wouldn’t you say, how history repeats itself? One way or another the eldar came to Dolumar and began to cause difficulties. They are a shrewd breed; cunning in the extreme and impossible to predict. They harried the warhost and vanished, popping up in strange places. Like ghosts.