Hellforged, p.4
Hellforged, page 4
‘Target power levels fluctuating beyond parameters…’
‘Arming chamber!’ ordered Hepsebah. ‘Full recharge! Navigation, line us up for another shot!’
She spun the barrels of the multilaser she carried in place of her left arm. Nothing fired the passions in her like a direct hit: the sum of all her knowledge, brought forth in a single moment of destruction. Such a wonder could only be possible through the Omnissiah’s will.
‘Magos Hepsebah, excellent damage,’ said Voar’s voice from the Antithesis. ‘The Fleet Minor is disengaging. We will coordinate fire and complete the kill.’
‘Yes, archmagos,’ said Hepsebah. ‘The Soul Drinkers, they once did the Mechanicus wrong?’
‘Most gravely so,’ said Voar.
‘Then it will be a pleasure to call in the debt.’
The holo flared red. Indicators around the image of the space hulk showed an enormous power spike.
‘Gellar fields active!’ came an alert from one of the tech-priests in the sensorium.
‘They’re hitting the warp!’ shouted Hepsebah. ‘They’re insane. That space hulk’s bleeding to death. The warp will swallow it alive.’
‘It has survived an aeon in the warp,’ said Voar. ‘Do not presume to know the capabilities of such an enemy.’
‘Hit it with everything we have! Now!’
Most of the Constant’s offensive power was tied up in the nova cannon, but she still sported plenty of medium-range guns and torpedoes. Every one of them fired, spraying massive calibre fire towards the space hulk, even as the enemy ship was surrounded by a shimmering field projected by what power remained in its wounded reactors. Shots tore through the field and impacted against the hull. The Antithesis joined in, and a tremendous broadside hammered against the hulk’s side, ripping chunks of spacecraft away, and exposing burning metal innards below. Secondary explosions rippled where stored ammunition detonated, and plumes of vented air burst from the impacts.
Space tore. A slash opened up in front of the hulk, so dark it was blacker even than the void. Power boiled within it, a monumental, malicious reflection of the Veiled Region in another dimension. The space hulk sank into it, explosions still studding its gnarled surface as the rip in space swallowed it up.
The holo blinked, and the space hulk was gone.
‘We’ve lost them,’ said Hepsebah. She slammed her multilaser against the observatory wall. ‘Damn it! We had them! We had them, and we lost them!’ She sat back in the observatory command chair, watching the debris cooling and falling off sensor range.
‘Even in the Veiled Region, a wounded space hulk cannot pass without leaving a trail,’ said Archmagos Voar. ‘We have not lost them for long.’
‘Once, I saw the xenos as a terrifying threat, the harbingers of our galaxy’s destruction. Now I know them for what they are. Vermin, parasites, suckling at the wounds of a galaxy that belongs to humankind.’
Daenyathos, War Incarnate
CHAPTER THREE
‘I had thought,’ said Sarpedon, ‘that no one would find me here.’
The garden of reflection looked like it should have been part of a pleasure yacht, one of the lavishly appointed spacecraft occasionally launched by the fabulously wealthy to demonstrate their superiority to the lesser mortals around them. In fact, it was a part of an Imperial Navy craft, a command ship that had no doubt once served as the nerve centre of a mighty battlefleet. Its captain may have been in command of the most destructive force in the Imperial arsenal – a fleet of battleships that could level cities with their guns – but he still needed somewhere he could be away from the babble of command. The garden’s plants were mostly wilted, save for a couple of extremely hardy flowering vines and the artificial trees that flanked the entrance gates. Its raised stone flowerbeds were barren, and the trees that had once formed a secluded pocket of the spacecraft were now just sprays of withered branches. The corroded steel of the walls and ceiling loomed down over the fountain that fed a now-dry pool.
Techmarine Lygris sat down on the stone bench across from Sarpedon. ‘There are few places of solace on this ship, commander. I did not have to look very hard to find you.’
‘What is our situation?’
‘We were able to enter the warp, but we could not stay there for long. We made it to the nebula, though. If the Adeptus Mechanicus is looking for us then they’ll have a damned difficult time seeing anything through the dust clouds.’
‘Then we’re deeper in the Veiled Region?’
‘Very deep. This is unexplored space.’
‘Well, at least they’re as lost as we are. What about the reactors?’
Lygris had suffered facial injuries earlier in his service as a Soul Drinker that had required the reconstruction of his entire face. It had left him with a mask of synthetic flesh, a good approximation of his features, but without the same capacity for expression. Sarpedon had learned that Lygris could be read by his eyes alone. The techmarine’s eyes told him that the news was not good.
‘We’re down to the dregs of fuel,’ said Lygris. ‘The last broadsides from the Mechanicus destroyed much of the fuel we took on board at Nevermourn. With the reactors that remain intact and the fuel we have, I can make two more warp jumps. Three would probably kill the reactors entirely. We need more fuel or we will be permanently becalmed.’
‘Where can we get it?’
‘There are enough working refinery units on board to turn anything from crude oil upwards into fuel. Any civilised world could provide something I could use.’
‘Then let us hope we find one.’ Sarpedon crouched back on his rear legs, stretching the sinews. The chitin of his spidery limbs was still charred from the plasma fires. His single bionic leg had been warped by the heat and wiring hung from the knee joint.
‘You blame yourself,’ said Lygris.
‘Of course I do,’ said Sarpedon. ‘Who else is there?’
‘The Mechanicus.’
‘The Mechanicus wants us dead and they have good reason. They could hardly leave us be when they found us.’
‘Then chance, Sarpedon. Fate.’
‘No. I am responsible for my Chapter. Gorgoleon and Eumenes challenged me for command, and I killed them both. I cannot take the lives of my battle-brothers to rule this Chapter, and then pretend that I am not at fault when it suffers.’
‘The fact that we survive at all is down to you. We could have been wiped out by the old Chapter or the Inquisition years ago.’
‘We survive, Lygris? Barely a quarter of our strength remains. I have led us into warzones where we have escaped only at the expense of our dead brothers. Half my brothers disagreed with me so fervently that they rebelled against me and are now dead or fled. This very day, we lost more to the Mechanicus guns. What if we have not survived at all? What if we are in our death throes, wasting away to extinction?’
‘If that is what you fear, Sarpedon,’ said Lygris levelly, ‘then extinction is exactly what will happen.’
‘I will not give in, Lygris,’ said Sarpedon sharply. ‘I will fight until the end of time if that is what I am called upon to do. I would not have decided on this fate if I had been given the choice, but there was never a choice. We could not have fought on as the old Chapter, to pursue our own arrogance at the behest of a corrupt Imperium. When the time came there was no one else to take command, and I will not back down from the role fate has given me. That is why I am responsible for what happens to us, because I have made that choice.’
‘Then do not see things to doubt in our situation,’ said Lygris. ‘The old Chapter sent us technical aspirants to a forge world to study with the tech-priests and learn from them the practices of the Cult Mechanicus. There I learned that a wounded machine, a smouldering wreck, is not a destroyed thing but the potential for a masterpiece. That is how the Mechanicus can make the things they do, for they see everything as a potential vessel of their Omnissiah. We are not destroyed, Sarpedon. We are not lost. There is in our defeat the potential for victory. We just have to make it right.’
‘Then that is my duty. To turn this wreck into a victory.’
‘If I could tell you how to do that, Sarpedon, then I would.’
‘It is enough that you keep the Brokenback space-worthy, Lygris. Believe me, if you can do that then we will be halfway there.’
Lygris’s vox-unit chirped.
‘Graevus here,’ came the vox.
‘What news, sergeant?’ replied Lygris.
‘The sensorium has picked something up. There’s a planetary system nearby, just within the bounds of the nebula.’
‘How far?’
‘A short warp jump. We’re too far away to see much, but the inner planets are close enough to the star to be survivable.
‘At this point, sergeant, that will have to do.’ Lygris looked up at Sarpedon. ‘I am needed on the bridge.’
‘Go,’ said Sarpedon, ‘and if you need my permission to risk a jump towards a planet, then you have it.’
‘Yes, commander.’
Sarpedon watched Lygris go. The techmarine had been there from the very beginning, and he had never faltered, not even when Sarpedon had doubted, in the chaos following the break from Imperial authority or the bloody flashpoints at Gravenholm and Stratix Luminae. Even as a student of the Mechanicus ways, Lygris had always been constant in his loyalty to Sarpedon and the new fate of the Chapter.
Sarpedon told himself that he was right. Somewhere in the wreck of the Chapter’s situation in the Veiled Region, there was victory. The question was whether Sarpedon had the skill to build it.
The system was bordered by a triumvirate of dead planets, as smooth and lifeless as water-worn pebbles, standing silent guard over the approaches to the star. They were perfectly spaced from one another, surely just a fluke of the system’s gravity, but looking as if they had been carefully placed to act as dead sentinels. A pair of gas giants orbited lazily beyond them, and past a band of debris and asteroids lay the inner system where the Brokenback’s sensors had strained to pick up an echo of life.
The system’s star was swollen and reddish, entering the final stages of its life. In its aged light basked the rocky planets of the inner system, and one of them, a grey ball of heavy cloud broken by equally colourless landscapes, was alive. Sensor waves bounced back off structures that could only be cities or highways.
In high orbit over the planet, space rippled and burst, spilling the necrotic substance of the region’s morbid empyrean like gore from an infected wound. The Brokenback limped out, still trailing tangles of vented plasma and debris. Its engines flared weakly, as if the hulk was sick. The wound in its hull left by the broadsides and bombing runs against the Intolerant still bled.
The hulk settled into orbit over the planet. Through the heavy cloud cover could be glimpsed hints of habitation through the eyepieces and holo-displays of the hulk’s various sensors: irrigated fields of greyish crops, and black oceans sprinkled with oil platforms and spindly webs of flood defences. Lygris and the Soul Drinkers assisting him on the bridge interpreted the glimpses of structure and civilisation, and hunted for a city.
Slowly, the clouds swirled and the gaps between them passed over the surface. Eventually, they revealed the edges of a city, a cluttered sprawl of buildings piled up against a natural harbour near the equator. The sensors strained to zoom in and pick out signs of life. The city had all the hallmarks of great antiquity: unplanned and haphazard, cramped tangles of streets giving way to expanses of palaces, and concentric rings of harbour structures radiating out from docks reclaimed from the sea.
Soon afterwards, two of the Brokenback’s complement of armoured shuttles was launched.
It was completely silent.
That was the first impression that Sarpedon had of the planet. He had been prepared for hostilities, for indigenous humans or xenos to greet the Soul Drinkers with anti-aircraft fire and ground troops, but nothing had come out to see the shuttles land, not even gaggles of fearful spectators.
Sarpedon stepped off the ramp of his shuttle. The stubby, tough little craft had descended through the planet’s clouded atmosphere without receiving or intercepting any communications. There should have been something, anything, to suggest the people down there were talking to one another.
‘Still nothing,’ voxed Captain Luko. Squad Luko, Squad Graevus, Lygris, Apothecary Pallas and Chaplain Iktinos made up the landing party that Sarpedon had selected. Luko had been the first out of the second shuttle, and his squad had spread into a circle to cover the shuttles’ landing position from all angles.
‘This place is dead,’ said Graevus as his squad deployed behind Sarpedon. Graevus flexed his mutated hand, one of the Chapter’s more obvious deformities aside from Sarpedon’s own, which gave him the enormous strength with which he wielded his power axe.
‘Squad, give me a cordon! All angles!’ ordered Luko. His squad spread out and took aim at the buildings lining the area.
The shuttles had landed in a city square. Towering habitation blocks surrounded it, all in white or grey stone with dark grey or black tiles. False columns and carved lintels suggested wealth and age. One edge of the square was taken up with a large domed basilica flanked by equestrian statues; the riders were human, which meant that this was at least a human world. A few tattered merchants’ stands were scattered around the square. The roads leading away from the square were empty.
There was not one person in sight. There were no birds in the sky. Even the trees were bare. It was as if the city had been drained of life, of sound and of colour.
Sarpedon let his mind reach out. As a psyker, he had enormous power but little finesse, and he could not read minds or extend his senses like some other Librarians of the Astartes. He was still sensitive enough to notice powerful psykers or the chatter of a million minds packed together, though, and, even to his mind, the city was silent.
Graevus’s squad, with their jump packs primed and their chainswords drawn, followed Sarpedon and Lygris as they headed towards the closest habitation block. Like the rest of the buildings, the block was monochrome, reflecting the pale greyish sky.
‘Nothing on the auspex scanner,’ said Graevus.
Sarpedon opened the front doors. Stale air rolled out, dusty and old. Inside, homes led off from a central hallway, with a staircase spiralling to the upper floors above.
‘Looks like post-feudal tech,’ said Lygris, ‘but not by much. They had electricity. One of the structures we saw from above looked like a space port.’
‘This city hasn’t been abandoned,’ said Sarpedon. ‘The buildings aren’t ruins. There isn’t even any sign of vermin.’
‘They could have evacuated the city,’ said Graevus, ‘when they saw us in orbit. There are plenty of cultures where something like the Brokenback would be an omen of the end of the world.’
The nearest home was intact. The people of this world favoured latticed windows and ornate archways, with alcoves everywhere for keepsakes. The table was still laid. Aside from a veneer of dust, the place might have been waiting for its owners to return at any moment.
‘Whatever happened here,’ voxed Captain Luko from outside, ‘they fought it.’
Luko’s squad had approached the basilica. By the time Sarpedon had joined them, the squad had flanked the main entrance, a pair of brass doors inscribed with images of soldiers marching. Sarpedon saw that the doors and the stone around them were disfigured with bullet wounds. The statues on either side of the doors were damaged, too, the verdigrised bronze battered by gunfire.
At a signal from Sarpedon, Luko ran at the doors and slammed into them shoulder-first. The doors banged open, and Luko’s lightning claws were sheathed in crackling energy as he prepared to fight. His squad stepped in behind him, guns tracking through the basilica’s interior.
The interior was a ruin. Once the basilica had been grand, inlaid patterns of black and white marble covering the walls and floor of an auditorium that held court below the central minaret. Wooden benches were in splinters and shafts of pale light fell through tears in the dome.
‘No bodies,’ said Pallas.
Pallas had been one of the Soul Drinkers that rebelled against Sarpedon at Vanqualis. Pallas had not joined the rebels that had left the Chapter after Sarpedon’s defeat of their leader Eumenes. Sarpedon had spoken to him rarely since then; the Apothecary had been key to the survival of the Chapter through controlling their mutations, but he had now withdrawn completely. ‘They fought it here, but they were defeated. Then the rest of the city just… gave up.’
‘This was somewhere important,’ said Iktinos, examining the murals on the nearest wall. They showed stylised humans in debate, or enthroned, or marching in parades through the city’s streets. ‘An enemy struck here, and when they had finished there was no one left to lead a resistance.’
‘And then,’ Sarpedon, ‘the people were rounded up, and… killed? Taken away?’
‘We are assuming,’ said Pallas, kneeling to examine the remains of a fallen statue, ‘that they aren’t still here: either the population, or the people who took them.’
Sarpedon caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. In a fluid reaction, his bolt pistol was in his left hand, and his right was at his back, ready to unsheathe the Axe of Mercaeno he carried strapped to the backpack of his armour.
A tiny black speck clung to the inside surface of the minaret.
‘Commander?’ said Lygris.
‘It’s a bird,’ said Sarpedon. ‘At least there’s something alive here.’
The bird flitted down off the minaret. It made a metallic buzzing sound as it swooped down and hovered just above Sarpedon.
It was not a bird. It was an oversized metal insect, held aloft on silver wings, trailing bladed hinged limbs. Tiny red lenses focused on Sarpedon, and its glinting mandibles worked as if in hunger.
