Ghost of Nuceria

by Ian St. Martin

  Angron tasted destiny in the wind. He knew that this would be his final battle, yet seeing his family beside him and his truest enemy before him, he swelled with pride. They had hurt the high-riders, to stir them from their gilded nests atop the spires. They had made their masters see them. And Angron vowed that he would bleed them badly before he fell.

  ‘Dearest Angron, how we have missed you!’ said the lead high-rider, a morbidly obese man barely kept aloft by massive anti-grav boots and gauntlets wrought into gilded cherubs. Angron recognised the voice immediately: the voice had that buzzed out at them through the horrid maggot’s eyes, the arena’s announcer who gloated and mocked them in their dying moments, so that his ilk might gamble over their blood.

  ‘Come back to the arena,’ the Nucerian continued, coming to a halt with his fellows over Angron. ‘Without you all it’s got so dreadfully stale for us. Throw down your sticks and stones and all will be forgiven. The crowd wants its champion back, Angron. Won’t you oblige them and cease this little tantrum?’

  ‘I’m bored.’ Jochura shifted with a soft rattle of his chains. ‘Why don’t they just attack?’

  A sickening realisation dawned on Angron then; he understood why they were trying to lure him back with their honeyed words. Why they would not simply crush them here on the cliffs, eradicate the rebellion and end it all.

  They needed him. The grip of the high-riders over their people was slipping, and they needed to keep them pacified. Without the bloodshed of the arena to distract them, the common folk were left to look upon their lives, and the gilded towers above them, and ponder why they had so little, and their overlords so much.

  ‘You’ll never have us in chains again, paper-skin,’ Angron bellowed up at the Nucerian. His brothers and sisters howled, rattling their weapons and pounding their chests. Angron pointed his axe to the armies advancing towards them. ‘Afraid to come down and fight us yourselves?’

  ‘Now, we’ve had quite enough of that,’ chided the announcer from the arena, his sing-song accent grating Angron’s already frayed nerves. ‘You have caused quite the uproar, Angron. You’ve had your fun, now it’s back to the arena with you.’

  Angron spat on the ground, spinning his axe and pointing its blade up at the high-riders.

  ‘Come down and take me, then. If you think you can.’

  For a moment, the masters hesitated. They flocked together, shouting and hissing in an angry congress before finally spreading out in an arc over the gladiators.

  ‘Very well,’ the announcer sighed. ‘We did not want this. Remember that.’

  In the first moment, nearly half of the shield wall died. The weapons wielded by the high-riders were as varied as their trappings, but all of them were lethal. Sonic disruptors reduced flesh and bone to mist. Microwave blasters boiled blood to steam, and clouds of monofilament silver vines burrowed into bodies to rupture organs and grind skeletons to powder. All the while the Nucerians’ armies closed, coming within charging range of the bloodshed to add their weight to the fray.

  Chaos ensued. Angron saw Cromach fall, the brazier glaive tumbling from his hands as he was turned inside out by a conversion beamer. Klester ululated in tune with her bladed steed as she took the heads from a pair of high-riders, before Angron lost sight of her.

  Angron spotted the announcer in the melee, and sprang into the air. He leapt higher than any of their arrogant masters thought possible, and the Nucerian wailed as Angron seized hold of a dangling leg with each hand.

  ‘What are you doing?!’ shrieked the announcer, his usually dulcet tones now shrill with fear. ‘Let go!’

  Angron obliged him. He yanked down, and heard screams accompany the oiled-sackcloth sound of flesh tearing, before falling to the ground.

  Angron tilted his head back, savouring the shower of blood and entrails that cascaded over him from above. He threw the high-rider’s legs aside, watching the man’s torso as it rose up lazily into the sky on his anti-grav gauntlets, like a balloon that had lost its tether.

  Another Nucerian rode down on him, wrought into a gilded chariot, and Angron launched himself forwards, fist first.

  His punch never landed.

  Time froze. He watched blood spray from a dying kin-guard, spurting into the air in a spreading nebula of crimson. Though his body was locked in place, Angron found his mind and senses were still within his control, and they gravitated immediately to the presence that appeared before him in a blinding sphere of light.

  What have they done to you?+

  The voice was thunder and ice in his brain. Angron’s Nails bit deep, punishing him and the invasion, demanding that he kill the speaker, and then everything else.

  ‘Who– hnng,’ whispered Angron, finding that he could still speak. ‘Who are–’

  I am the Emperor, and you are coming with me.+

  ‘Where?’

  Beyond this place. To the stars.+

  ‘My brothers,’ gasped Angron. ‘My sisters. I won’t abandon them.’

  They, and this planet, are no longer your concern.+

  ‘No. Whatever it is you want of me, I refuse. My place is here, with my true kin. I fight here. I die here.’

  The voice was silent for a moment. Angron almost sensed regret in the thunder that echoed through his mind when it spoke again.

  Then I am sorry.+

  There was a storm of light, and an excruciating sense of tearing. Angron thudded to the ground, but it was no longer covered in snow. His knee smashed down, cracking a floor of shining mosaic tile. The scent of blood was gone, replaced by stale ozone. His eyes stung from a sudden golden light – not from the weak sun of Nuceria, but a constellation of floating orbs gifting illumination to an immense vaulted chamber. The largest of them hung at the centre of the chamber, a brilliant sphere of radiance like a captured star. Angron recognised it as the source of the voice.

  Priceless artworks covered the walls, taking pride of place between torn banners and a myriad of exotic weapons. The floor shook beneath Angron, and his ears itched from the electric thrum of machinery. He fought to shake off the disorientation, and realised he was not alone.

  A phalanx of golden-armoured warriors surrounded him, each holding a crackling halberd longer than they were tall. Seconds before, Angron had been in the centre of a battlefield, and the Butcher’s Nails were still in command of him. He saw strangers on all sides of him, brandishing weapons. The Nails saw blood, begging to be spilled.

  The closest of the golden warriors took one step further, and Angron killed him for it. The blink of an eye was all it took before he cast the corpse to the ground, torn in half from collar to groin by his bare hands. The others advanced, their halberds at his throat and spasming with angry chains of lightning. Angron found a dozen weaknesses in each of them, angles left open and postures vulnerable. He would make this entire room red, until you couldn’t see the gold, he would–

  Cease.+

  Angron cried out at the renewed invasion of his consciousness. The Nails rebelled against it, and did the only thing they had the ability to do. He fell to his knees, stomach clenching as it sent a torrent of blood-laced vomit onto the deck.

  The searing light he believed a caged sun was in fact a being. Angron saw the silhouette of a man, or at least the shape of one, at its centre. The source of the voice stabbing into his skull.

  The golden warriors backed away in an instant, parting to allow the Emperor to come closer. Angron snarled, the very proximity of the entity causing his Nails to bite.

  ‘Where am I?’ he managed to hiss between clenched teeth.

  You are on my ship, away from that planet.+

  ‘My brothers,’ Angron glared up. ‘My sisters. Where–’

  What has been done to you is regrettable. What transpired below was regrettable. But we have not the time. You are meant for far grander things than a mere servile war.+
<
br />   The arrogance of the voice, the preening familiarity of it, roused Angron’s ire to boiling.

  ‘If you are so mighty, why not help us? Why not step down from your golden palace here, down into the mud where the real struggle is borne out? Instead you rip me out from my destiny – from the only chance I had to ever grasp serenity, to fall a free man beside those with whom I twisted the rope and cast off the shackles.’

  Because I am the Emperor, and my eyes are set upon this galaxy, all her stars and worlds, and not simply the wars or tyrants of any single one. So shall your eyes be set, as you take up the mantle you were brought into this life to bear, the mantle of primarch, to command your Legion and unite the stars beneath my banner.+

  Something cold and crumbling welled up inside Angron at those words. It was the same sickening realisation he’d had on the cliff. The reason why this Emperor, this blazing, incomprehensible being, had robbed him of a noble death. Why He hadn’t let Angron fall with his brothers and sisters as he’d sworn he would.

  He needed Angron. Just like the high-riders did. Blood sport on the hot dust, conquest of the galaxy, it was all the same. Two different masters, but in the end, Angron was always the slave.

  ‘I died down there,’ Angron said bitterly, drawing the radiant Emperor into his fiery gaze. ‘With my brothers and sisters, freezing, starving and free. Emperor or no, creator or no, all you will ever get of me is a shell, the ghost of Angron, who never left Nuceria.’

  The Emperor looked back at him, expressionless and aloof. Angron felt static crawl over his skin, and the reek of ozone flood his nose.

  Then a ghost will have to suffice.+

  The storm of light seized hold of Angron again. The sonic boom that folded and curled him in upon himself, the nauseating dislocation. An instant’s agonised terror as he witnessed a billion twisted, fleshless faces leering at him with impossible hunger, and then he was in another place.

  He found himself now in the centre of a grand hall. Light flickered from blazing braziers and sconces, bathing the stone walls in their warmth. Like the last place, the stone floor thrummed beneath Angron’s feet, and he heard the same endless clanking, clattering cacophony all around him, as though he were within the belly of a vast mechanical beast.

  Banners of cream and dark ocean blue hung from the walls, with the icon of a scarlet hound proud at their centre. Rolls of parchment accompanied them, filled with lines of inscriptions in a blocky text that was alien to Angron yet increasingly comprehensible with every passing moment he looked upon them.

  A deep thunk drew Angron’s eyes to a pair of great double doors at the end of the hall, up a flight of broad stone steps. The doors opened.

  A solitary figure descended. He came alone, though Angron saw many more like him crowded behind the threshold as the doors closed. He was larger than a man, far larger, though Angron still dwarfed him in stature. He carried the bearing of a warrior chieftain, his flesh speaking through its scars of wars fought and blood spilled. But for who?

  ‘My lord,’ said the man, his voice deep and low yet cowed by wonder. ‘Sire, my primarch, long have we awaited this day. Long has your Legion made ready for the hour you would come to lead us.’

  Primarch. Legion. Those words again. He understood the speaker, though he couldn’t guess how. Angron looked closer, poring over every detail of the man before him, not bothering to listen to the words passing from his lips. Icons gleamed at his shoulders and throat, a golden bolt of lightning. That Emperor’s sigil, and that was all that Angron needed to know.

  Angron roared. Finally he ceased to hear the machine noise devouring him, the rumble beneath his feet swallowed by the thunder of his heart. The stale, ozone cling of the air vanished, replaced by the wet copper tang of blood splashing his face.

  The man – he had never learned his name – came apart in Angron’s hands. He threw the bleeding chunks aside, howling again as he tore out the lights of the hall and cast it into darkness.

  There were more up the stairs, on the other side of the door. Let them come. Warriors. Legions. He would fill this hall with bodies before they dragged him down to hell. He would be a slave no longer. No matter who claimed him as his master, be it the Nucerians or this Emperor and His paper-skinned lackeys. Never again. Angron would fulfil his oath to the kin he had been stolen from. Until the day he breathed his last, and joined them in oblivion’s embrace, Angron would be free.

  About the Author

  Ian St. Martin is the author of the Horus Heresy: Primarchs audio drama Konrad Curze: A Lesson in Darkness. He has also written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Of Honour and Iron, Lucius: The Faultless Blade and Deathwatch: Kryptman’s War, along with the novella Steel Daemon and several short stories. He lives and works in Washington DC, caring for his cat and reading anything within reach.

  An extract from Heralds of the Siege.

  The Martian soil trembled. Beneath the Temple-Tarantyne assembly yards, something was rising.

  Once a glorious spectacle of magna-machinery and Titan production, the southern installation had produced the mighty god-machines of the Legio Excruciata. Now its great production temples glowed with the unholy light of corruption. Chittering constructs went to work on towering perversions – looming monstrosities that should have been Warlord Titans but instead were metal monsters of daemonic infestation and heretek weaponry.

  Row upon row of such beasts stood silent in the storage precincts, waiting for the orbital mass conveyers that would take them to bulk freighters destined for the Warmaster’s forces.

  But those mass conveyors would not come.

  With the Forge World Principal blockaded by the VII Legion, nothing was leaving Mars. Like the monstrous tanks, fevered warrior-constructs and ranks of empty battleplate sitting in storage bays across the surface, the Chaos Titans gathered Martian dust.

  Dust that now rained down about the towering abominations as the bedrock quaked beneath them.

  A Warlord Titan was a walking fortress of thick plate and powerful shielding. As any who had ever faced such an apocalyptic foe understood, it had few weaknesses. As a former princeps of the Collegia Titanica, Kallistra Lennox had the distinction of both piloting and felling such god-machines. She knew that one of the few vulnerabilities the Mars Alpha-pattern Warlord had was a weak point on its command deck, but the deck was almost impossible to reach for ground troops.

  Standing in the gyroscopic interior compartment of the Mole burrowing transport Archimedex, Lennox felt the adamantium prow drilling a phase-fielded tunnel through the Martian bedrock and soil, then finally breaking the surface into the assembly yards. While the large tunnelling vehicle emerged upright, like a rising tower, the crowded troop compartment maintained its rolling orientation within, which would make disembarkation a smooth affair. The princeps had directed the translithope to rise up next to a Warlord Titan identified as Ajax Abominata. Loyal constructs had been watching the installation for weeks from the scrap-littered sides of the surrounding mountains. The construction of Ajax Abominata was all but complete, although its armoured shell was still covered in a scaffold, complete with mobile gantries.

  It was a target ripe for sabotage – and the princeps knew exactly how to do it.

  Not that she looked very much like an officer of the Collegia Titanica any more. While she still wore her uniform amid scraps of flak and carapace, it was tattered and stained with oil. The black leather of her boots was scuffed and her gloves crudely cut to fingerlessness. She wore an eyepatch where her ocular bionic had been torn out, and a short chainblade sat heavy upon her belt where a ceremonial sabre used to hang. Grenades and hydrogen flasks dangled from a bandolier while in her hands the princeps clutched the chunky shape of a plasma caliver.

  ‘Stand by,’ she said, sternly.

  The loyalist Mechanicum cell to which Lennox belonged had been dubbed the Omnissian Faithful. Like all its adherents, Le
nnox was a Martian survivor. Left behind in the exodus to Terra, she had become a rebel on her own world. While the scrapcode tore through the Forge World Principal, corrupting everything it touched, there had been some Martians and constructs who had followed their instincts. As part of a disgust response – like a person making themselves sick after ingesting a toxin or poison – some true servants of the Omnissiah had had the strength to mutilate themselves. They tore bionics from their bodies, severed hardlinks and burned out wireless receivers. Ports and interfaces were gouged out, their bodies and minds cut off from the code-streams of the Martian networks. They had saved themselves from the infected data that brought madness, spiritual pollution and the warping of flesh and form.

  It was a corruption that had claimed nearly all who had not escaped the Red Planet, even the Fabricator General himself: Kelbor-Hal, now no more than a withered bundle of polluted workings. Like the magi below him and the constructs below them, he had become a slave to darkness. A puppet controlled by the renegade Warmaster Horus, light years distant.

  In the Mole’s troop compartment stood a motley collection of blank-faced adepts, battle-smashed skitarii, liberated tech-thralls, indentured menials, gun-servitors saved by their masters, vat-engineered work-hulks, harnessed ferals and bastardised battle-automata. All were pledged to the Omnissian Faithful but had needed a leader in the field. Someone of a tactical mind and destructive disposition to help the rebels in a campaign of sabotage and subversion.

  When Lennox had joined them, they had found just such a leader.

  ‘Ten seconds,’ the princeps told the rebel constructs about her. Her seconds, Omnek-70 and Galahax Zarco, waited either side of the bulkhead. Omnek-70 was skitarii – a Ranger who carried the length of a transuranic arquebus. Zarco, meanwhile, was a hulking enginseer who hefted a power axe in the shape of an Omnissian cog. Lennox listened for the sound of the drill and phase fields on different materials. She stamped on the deck.