[Warhammer 40K] - Sons of Dorn

by Chris Roberson - (ebook by Undead)

  “Here is an example that you should all fix in your minds,” Captain Taelos said as the youth was thrown to his knees by the Space Marine escorting him. “Remember this moment when you contemplate any action which is not in accordance with the rules of this ship and this Chapter.”

  Captain Taelos scarcely glanced at the aspirant who cowered on the deckplates before him. Less than four weeks had passed—four subjective weeks, at least, as several of them had been spent in transit through the warp, and as such any attempt to determine an absolute measure of the amount of objective time to have passed was not even worth contemplating—since the youth had been among those culled from a feral world visited only twice before, long centuries ago, by an Imperial Fists recruiting mission. This youth in particular had been selected from among the tribesmen by Taelos himself, and the captain had harboured hopes that this aspirant might well go the distance, and be welcomed as a neophyte by the Chapter on their return to the Phalanx. But then recent events unfolded which made clear that the aspirant did not meet the Imperial Fists’ standards of discipline and self-control. Nor, for that matter, would the aspirant be granted the opportunity to gain any discipline he might currently lack.

  Once a candidate proved themselves unsuitable, for any reason, the risks involved with keeping them on through the initiate stages—whether motivated by the vain hope of improving them or in an attempt to somehow eliminate the flaws or by an act of sheer desperation—were simply too great. Once unsuitable, always unsuitable, and so the Chapter was always quick to winnow undesirables from the ranks of aspirants.

  “Listen well,” Taelos said, his gaze fixed on the dozen Triandrians before him, his expression set and unreadable. “No aspirant may behave aggressively towards any other, or goad another into acting aggressively against them. Any such disruptions will not under any circumstances be allowed. Those who transgress against this simple precept will be dealt with severely.”

  Taelos raised a gauntleted fist, and extended a single finger at the wretch kneeling before him, green eyes lowered to the deck-plates, shoulders hunched in an attitude of defeat but with defiance still radiating from him, teeth gritted and bared.

  “This one has been amongst the hopeful candidates since before the Capulus reached your world, and he has already passed examinations which you twelve have yet to face. He is a fine physical specimen with a keen mind who likely would, if he were to survive the implantation procedure, make a fine addition to the Imperial Fists Chapter. However, though he fits both the physical and psychological profiles required to become a neophyte, and is free from any taint of warp or mental instability, he nevertheless is completely unsuitable, and will not be afforded the honour of becoming an Astartes.”

  Taelos scanned the dozen Triandrians with his gaze, monitoring their facial expressions, their gestures, even the non-verbal expression of their postures and slight hand movements. He studied and noted all that the aspirants were telling him without the youths ever realising they were communicating a thing.

  “This unsuitability has nothing whatsoever to do with his fitness to fight, or the keenness of his mind to grasp strategy and tactics. No, this aspirant is being expelled from your ranks because he lacks self-control, and cannot bring himself to follow the simple orders and precepts handed down to him.”

  The aspirant glanced up to the side, his eyes falling on Taelos’ face for the briefest of instants. The captain saw in those green orbs a momentary spark of rebellion, the fires of anger still burning somewhere behind the irises. Not deigning to strike a blow, Captain Taelos merely swung one of his massive booted feet forwards a fraction of an arc, the tip of the boot striking the aspirant’s midsection without sufficient force to injury, or even bruise, but with enough of an impact to knock the rusty-haired aspirant off his knees and send him sprawling across the deckplates on his side. Taelos knew that any respect the Triandrian dozen might have harboured for the still-defiant aspirant would waver and wane as they saw him lying so indecorously on the ground like a discarded rag.

  “This one before you,” Taelos went on, “this wretch, attacked one of his fellow aspirants in the dormitory. The assailed did not survive the assault, his injuries being too grave and too sudden for mending. By ending the life of another aspirant, the assailant has cost the Imperial Fists one potential neophyte who might one day have gone on to join the ranks of the Astartes, and become a proud bearer of the gene-seed of Rogal Dorn himself. As though this transgression was not insult enough to the Chapter, the assailant’s actions force us to expel him from your ranks, as well, and thus have his actions cost the Imperial Fists not merely one potential neophyte but two!”

  Taelos paused for a moment, for effect.

  “This one no longer belongs among you. He is not now worthy to wear the gold armour of the Imperial Fists, nor will he ever be. Instead, he is to be reduced in status to a Chapter serf, and banished to the bowels of this strike cruiser. There he will tend her engines for the rest of his natural life, and if the Techmarine so wills it perhaps he will continue to serve the ship and Chapter as a servitor even after death claims him.”

  Taelos motioned to the battle-brother who had escorted the wretch from his place in the holding cell a few moments before. “Brother-Sergeant Hilts?”

  “Yes, brother-captain?”

  “Escort him to the enginarium deck, and deliver him to Techmarine Phaestus with my compliments.”

  “At once, brother-captain,” Sergeant Hilts answered, smashing his arm against his armour’s plastron with his hand clenched in a fist, then raising the fist in the Chapter’s salute before crashing it once more against his chest.

  Taelos turned back to regard the new candidates before him.

  “Learn from this one’s example. His chances of becoming an Astartes are over. Your chance still lies before you. Will you seize it, and join our brotherhood? Or will you allow it to slip through your fingers? The choice is yours.”

  Once the Space Marine sergeant had unceremoniously dragged the ousted candidate away, the captain dismissed the assembled aspirants, and ordered the other Imperial Fist in attendance to escort them to their dormitory. Taloc could not help noticing that the expelled candidate, who had managed to maintain something resembling a steely resolve while hearing the captain recite the doom that had befallen him, had when being dragged away lost all composure and restraint. Tears had flowed from the dark green eyes, leaving snail traces down the youth’s cheeks, and as he was taken away from the chamber and out of the Triandrians’ sight, the expelled aspirant had screamed until he was hoarse, his harsh shouts like the dying cry of some wounded animal. While the Triandrians were being led away through another corridor which branched off from the chamber, Taloc could still hear the faint echoes of the poor wretch’s distant cries, as faint as leaves rustling by night in trees overhead.

  Perhaps the blood-debt of Taloc’s fallen father would need to remain unpaid for a time yet. Though he knew little of the horrors and hardships that awaited any transgressors in the strange depths of the engineering section, Taloc was certain at least that he was in no hurry to sample them for himself. He would bide his time, and wait for an opportune moment to strike his father’s killer when such a fate would not as a result be his.

  The final plaintive wails of the youth being dragged to a life—and afterlife, perhaps?—of laborious servitude were still dying in Zatori’s ears as they approached the dormitory, and seemed to Zatori to echo the dishonoured cries of his late master in the land of the spirits. But for the moment it appeared necessary for Father Nei’s death to go unavenged, and his murderer to remain unscathed. Though he was unsure how Sipangish notions of honour might judge the strict discipline of the Imperial Fists strike cruiser, he knew enough to be certain that he would do his master’s spirit little service if he failed to kill the Caritaigne murderer outright, and in the failed attempt got himself packed off to the ship’s underbelly. He would need to wait for the perfect opportunity to strike, when he could b
e sure to end the Caritaigne’s life without the slightest possibility that the company Apothecary might mend his injuries. Only then would he feel free to put Father Nei’s spirit to rest. If after accomplishing his revenge honourably Zatori’s fate was to be consigned to the hardships of the engineering section for the rest of his days, or even the rest of eternity, so be it.

  The Space Marine threaded a course through the massive strike cruiser with Jean-Robur and the other Triandrians following close behind. They walked down corridors longer than the longest boulevards in Caritaigne, through halls that would have easily contained the largest warships that sailed on the seas of Triandr, and in and out of chambers not only large enough to contain the entire royal palace of Caritaigne, as the battlefield of Eokaroe had been, but practically large enough to contain the whole of the island of Eokaroe itself.

  Finally, when Jean-Robur thought for certain that they must either reach the ship’s end or his mind would burst from the vain attempt to fit the sight of it all within his skull, the Space Marine stopped before a large metal door. Wide enough for two members of the Adeptus Astartes in power armour to walk in abreast without brushing the frame on either side, as tall as three Astartes standing atop one another’s shoulders, the door opened easily with a single touch from the Imperial Fist, swinging noiselessly on its hinges. Whether the door was simply superbly balanced, or the strength of the Imperial Fist in armour was even greater than Jean-Robur had anticipated, or both or neither, Jean-Robur could not say.

  Though dwarfed by the grandeur and scale of the areas of the strike cruiser they had passed through to reach this point, the door was still on its own merits a massive thing to behold, far larger and grander than anything Jean-Robur had seen in his years on Triandr. But for the entire door’s massive size, the room which lay beyond was unimposing and sedate by comparison. Longer than it was wide, the chamber was roughly the size of the grand hall in the Caritaigne royal palace, which Jean-Robur had visited only on rare formal occasion when his ties of family required he make a brief appearance. And if its size might have impressed him before his perspective had been widened out of all proportion by the rest of the Capulus, the room’s fixtures and finishing were nowhere near so impressive. Along either long wall were arrayed beds every few paces, really little more than rude cots that were—somewhat distressingly—the same dimensions in width, length and breadth of the coffins which rested within the du Queste family crypts. Aside from the cots, of which there were some hundreds in all, most of them apparently untenanted, there was a row of long tables which ran lengthwise in single-file along the spine of the room, with benches on either side, fashioned of some dull-finished metal with which Jean-Robur was not familiar.

  When the twelve Triandrian aspirants entered through the now-opened door, there were already several dozen youths inside, perhaps as many as a hundred. All of them were wearing the same belted tunics, loincloths and boots, marking them out as fellow aspirants, but from the varying degrees of hairlessness—some with their pates barely shadowed by a dusting of newgrown hair, others with a crop hanging in a shag over their foreheads and the tops of their ears—it was clear that some of these other candidates had only been onboard the Capulus for a short time, while others had been on the strike cruiser for considerably longer.

  And if Jean-Robur had found it difficult to wrap his mind around the idea of a single native from another world that was roughly his size and age when he looked upon the aspirant that Captain Taelos was consigning to the netherworld of engineering, his mind threatened to explode out from the confines of his skull on first seeing the rest of his fellow aspirants. For here there were other youths not simply from another world, but seemingly from dozens of worlds. The riot of skin tones covered everything from the pale white of bleached bone, to the deep red of Triandr’s moon, to the brown hues of polished oak, to the inky black of a moonless night, and all values in between. And the amazing variation of facial and body features! Everything from noses short and fat to long and thin; faces round or pointed; small ears and large; long dexterous fingers and short, muscular digits. But for all their variability, Jean-Robur felt at first glance as though there were some indefinable quality in common with all of them, some fire burning in the eyes, perhaps, that bespoke a sense of resolution and stamina that most of the men Jean-Robur had encountered on Triandr had seemed to lack.

  Was it this light burning inside that Captain Taelos and the other Imperial Fists had seen inside Jean-Robur and the others brought up from the surface of their home world? Had the Imperial Fists been seeking that same fire on recruiting missions to other worlds, as well, perhaps on dozens of planets stately circling distant stars somewhere out beyond the curtain of night?

  If so, and this inner fire was the quality which the candidates shared which made them attractive to the Chapter, it was clear that it was a fire which could be extinguished, as evidenced by the poor wretch trundled off to the engineering section.

  Despite the strangeness of his circumstances, though, and the somewhat bewildering fact of humans living upon far-distant worlds, and ships capable of travelling between the stars, Jean-Robur was not terribly discomfited by his experiences. Since he’d accepted that he was not dead and suffering the torments of the damned, but was rather alive but in circumstances that he’d never before dreamed to be possible, everything else about the current state of affairs had been relatively easy to accept. His principle concern at the moment, as things stood, was that his stomach growled with hunger.

  The Imperial Fists Chapter had culled a group of potential candidates from the world below, deeming that these thousands might be worthy of being inducted into the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes. Well, Jean-Robur had always considered himself worthy of special recognition, of being singled out from the herd of such peers as his cousin Benoit Vioget, marked out for a position of privilege. Was it so strange that holy warriors from beyond the stars should mark him out as being just as worthy of recognition and privilege?

  And the fact that all but a dozen of the thousands of Triandrians brought to the Capulus had in the end proved unworthy in one way or another did little to dampen Jean-Robur’s sure conviction that he deserved any honours and accolades coming his way. After all, wasn’t he among the dozen who did not prove to be unworthy? And wasn’t that proof enough of his special quality?

  Surely, Jean-Robur was convinced, he would breeze through whatever examinations and initiations awaited them. And in short order he would be a proud member of the Imperial Fists, with all of the rights and privileges appertaining thereto, without any unnecessary pain or hardship.

  That was what Jean-Robur believed. He would soon learn, however, to his dismay and disappointment, that he was entirely wrong.

  “…and when not otherwise engaged, you will remain here in the dormitory, your barracks for the remainder of our journey,” the helmeted Imperial Fist was saying, his voice somewhat distorted by passage through the helmet which hid his features. “These are the rules of conduct that have been laid out for you. Any deviance from these rules will be dealt with accordingly, and without mercy. Better that you should break now, and prove yourself unable to continue with the initiation, than to fail later, whether in the process of implantation which precious organs might be wasted on you unnecessarily, or later when you take to the field of battle as a Scout, where failure on your part might additionally mean the loss of your fellow Scouts, the veteran-sergeant who will command you, or even the battle-brothers who you will follow into battle.”

  The Space Marine paused, and swivelled his helmeted head back and forth, his hidden gaze taking in the dozen Triandrians who still clustered near the entrance to the dormitory chamber.

  “Are any of you unclear about the rules of conduct as they have been explained to you? Do any of you require additional clarification?”

  None of the twelve newest additions to the ranks of the aspirants spoke up, but remained silent and still, eyes on the Imperial Fist.

  “
Then you will be expected to comply. Deviate, and disciplinary action will follow.”

  The Space Marine stepped closer to the open door.

  “You have until the next watch to rest and refresh, at which point the examinations will continue.” Pausing at the doorway, the Astartes’ helmet swivelled to the other hundred or so aspirants in the dormitory. The offspring of far-flung outposts of humanity, natives of hive worlds, feudal worlds, feral worlds and even some void-born sons of far traders—they represented all of the many-faceted aspects of the Imperium of Mankind, all of the far-flung children of Terra, whose God-Emperor it was the sacred duty of the Imperial Fists Chapter to defend. From among these hopefuls gathered here, it was hoped, might come the next generation of Sons of Dorn.

  “I will leave you now…” the Imperial Fist began, and then saw one of the new Triandrians gesture for his attention.

  “When we will eat?” the young Triandrian said in Imperial Gothic before the Space Marine had even had a chance to respond, his tone haughty.

  The Space Marine, still standing in the doorway, stepped back into the room. Perhaps it was too soon to hope that these aspirants might one day become Imperial Fists, at that.

  “I will restate the pertinent rules, Aspirant du Queste, but only this once. Aspirants will not address their superiors unless invited to do so, under any circumstances. Nor will aspirants address one another in the presence of a superior, without explicit permission to speak. Failure to comply will earn the offender disciplinary action, up to and including time spent within the pain-glove.”

  The aspirants who had already been onboard the Capulus for some time, and had seen the pain-glove in operation, involuntarily recoiled somewhat, many of them backing a step away from the Triandrian who had spoken up, as though proximity to his offence might earn them the same discipline.