The Emperor's Gift Read online

  Twenty-six, remain calm.

  He felt like he was crying, but his face wasn’t wet. His hands were a protective screen over his closed eyes, a guard to wash out the pain.

  Twenty-six, remain calm.

  ‘I can’t see. It’s too bright.’

  Twenty-six, the voice said again, just as the pain began to pulse. Remain calm.

  He rose on shaking limbs, blinking as he dared a glance through his fingers. The light poured back in, fire-keen, burning his eyeballs in their sockets and dancing down the nerves into his head.

  He breathed a wordless, meaningless mishmash of curses, panting like a trapped animal.

  Twenty-six. Remain still.

  Not a chance. The second he heard the grind of a metal door opening, he bolted blindly towards it, one hand reaching out to feel for anything in the way.

  He crashed teeth-jarringly hard into something metal, something tall, that emitted a pervasive engine-growl heavy enough to make his gums ache. After thudding against it, he fell back to the stone floor.

  Footsteps. Heavy, booted footsteps, sending shivers through the ground.

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’ He still wondered if that were true. ‘Just let me go.’

  Twenty-six, came the voice in his mind again. Stand, be silent, and open your eyes.

  He could at least comply with the order to stand, though his legs barely obeyed. Being silent took even more effort, and as for opening his eyes…

  ‘It’s too bright.’

  The illumination is set to its lowest levels. You have not used your eyes in ninety-nine days. The pain will pass.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Your ignorance will also pass. That is why we have come.

  Another voice, deeper, with the edge of irritation, joined the first. Open your eyes.

  He tried again. It worked on the sixth or seventh attempt, though his vision offered nothing more than a slice of harsh light at first. His eyes watered continually, as if they could flush the sting from his eye sockets.

  Shapes resolved at last. Three shapes, each one a man – two clad in hooded robes the rich, dark shade of dirty iron, and the other wearing a hulking suit of armour, as bright as polished steel. The painful light came from this last figure, as the overhead illumination reflected from the burnished silver plating.

  All three kept their faces hidden; the former two beneath deep hoods, the latter behind an ornate helm with eye lenses of the most distressingly pure, piercing blue.

  Twenty-six. He had no idea from whence the voice came, for none of the figures moved. Look around you. What do you see?

  What indeed. Through straining eyes, he took in the chamber’s details. Every dimension seemed the same as before – the only exceptions were the door’s sudden existence, and the symbols inscribed in bright metal along the walls and floor.

  He knuckled his eyes free of tears for a moment. Blinking cleared up the rest. He should have felt these symbols, even in his blind questing. Each one was raised in bas-relief, stark silver against the dark stone. ‘These symbols, what are they?’

  Wards. Again, none of the figures moved. Hexagrammic wards. We had to be sure you were free from taint. We also had to be certain you recalled nothing of your former life.

  The second voice cut in. You have remained here for the mandated ninety-nine nights, as we scryed into your soul.

  The ritual is complete, a third voice spoke at last. We are satisfied with your purity.

  The armoured figure’s joints growled as it inclined its head. Though some doubts yet remain.

  ‘Why couldn’t I feel these symbols? Where was the door?’ He couldn’t stop trembling, though more from adrenaline than the cold, and more the cold than any real fear. Looking down revealed he was clad in a similar robe to two of the figures, though it was once white, and now only greyed by dust.

  The first robed figure reached up to lower its hood. The man was clean-shaven, and he looked anywhere between thirty and sixty, with evidence of every decade etched on his face: the smooth skin of youth; the knowing stare of experienced eyes; the fine lines of laughter and sleepless nights, with steely stubble gone to grey atop his shaven head.

  The indefinable quality of his age was, however, not the most bizarre thing about his face. He was a man enhanced to imposing proportions, as if his entire body had undergone a decade more growth and development than would be natural. Even in the robe, he cut a towering figure, dwarfing the prisoner.

  ‘Why won’t you answer me? Why was I blind?’

  You were never blind. We engineered your senses to serve our needs. The ageless one had the respectful demeanour of a holy man, but a murderer’s piercing eyes. His blue gaze lowered the temperature of the room. We manipulated your thoughts. Your eyes stayed closed, yet you believed they were open, seeing only darkness. We blunted your tactile sensitivity, so that you felt nothing but smooth stone beneath your fingers. You were a prisoner in your own mind. The door was never even locked. You were simply unable to feel its existence.

  He had to hand it to them, they made for some ingenious, twisted prison wardens.

  ‘Who am I?’ He hadn’t even meant to ask it, but it slipped out after dangling too long on the tip of his tongue.

  You are Twenty-six.

  ‘No,’ he shook his head, and regretted it immediately. Nausea swept back over him. ‘No, I mean before. Before I came here.’

  Irrelevant, said three voices at once.

  Your past is gone, cast aside in the name of necessity. From the moment you came to us, you were reborn.

  You will be addressed by your number until you earn your true name. What you were called is meaningless.

  All that matters is what you will become.

  He drew in another breath, suspecting he knew the answer before he even asked the question.

  ‘And what will I become?’

  You will become one of us, the first voice intoned. Or you will die trying.

  PART ONE

  HYPERION

  So begins [DATA RESTRICTED] testimony of

  [DATA RESTRICTED] Hyperion of Castian.

  Transcribed by the hand of Scrivener Elrek

  [DATA RESTRICTED] under oath,

  In the Year [DATA RESTRICTED] of His Imperial Majesty’s Eternal Reign.

  ONE

  EXECUTION

  IMPERIAL DATE: M41.444

  I

  They say Fenris breeds cold souls.

  I wasn’t certain how much of the sentiment was poetic license, but the frozen world definitely left something cold in the blood of its sons and daughters. For better or worse, we are all the children of our home worlds.

  Annika wielded her authority with curious ease. I was never a wordsmith to match my brothers, so I found her presence difficult to describe. Galeo would say it best: that she commanded authority with an economy of effort, as if she expected her merest words to be obeyed at all times.

  The night we set foot on Cheth I heard him thinking it again, even as I watched Annika work. Galeo read my mind, a passive perception, gently leeching my senses for residual information on what I was witnessing. It left him close enough for me to feel his own surface thoughts in return.

  Galeo, of all my brothers, was always the least intrusive. I let him remain in my mind to see what I saw.

  Annika was tall, but not unusually so. Her world bred its children tall and strong, and she was no exception. The dark flow of her mane was rare for a Fenrisian: long hair, the sable of clean black silk, was braided into obedience, streaming down one shoulder. Her skin was a healthy pale, the white of winter cliffs rather than the pallid bleach of a consumptive.

  The blue of her eyes was rich enough to make others uncomfortable. I had only seen that shade matched by one sight before, in the storm seasons of my own home world. The cryovolcanoes of Titan breathe liquid ammonia and nitrogen into the sky, and in the low gravity, their exhalations freeze into crystals that hang high in the air. Those that do not rain back down
to the rocks will drift into the atmosphere and beyond. The irises of her eyes could have been cut from those crystals – they were the same clear glass turned cerulean blue by the night sky.

  They were artificial, of course. Despite the exquisite craftsmanship to shape them in absolute mimicry of human eyes, I could hear the softest clicks when she would use her bio-optics to take a pict. I often wondered if she had chosen the colour for its inhuman hue.

  We did not talk often, so the chance to ask had never arisen.

  She no longer dressed as a warrior-maiden of her birth world, preferring to go clad in the bodysuits and jackets worn by so many ranking Imperial agents. Still, some trace of her origins remained: at her hip was a throwing axe of white wood and poor-quality bronze, its blade drenched in green patina stains. I sensed a theatrical edge in why she bore the antiquated weapon, but she claimed she’d used it the line of duty several times before. I’d never tried to read beyond her words to seek the truth.

  On her back was a bolter, and this gave me pause each time I saw it. She carried no scaled-down weapon to fit well with human hands. Hers was a mass-calibre Adeptus Astartes boltgun, Mk Vb Godwyn pattern, hefted like a cannon when she held it in her gloved hands. Evidence of its craftsmanship was in every contour along the weapon’s body: an artisan of rare skill had wrought the black iron alloy with jagged Cretacian runes of dirty gold.

  That only raised more questions. I could speak three dialects of Cretacian Gothic, for it was one of the six hundred mongrel threads of the Imperium’s root tongue I studied in the course of my training. The weapon had been crafted for her, that much was undeniable. The scripture along the bolter’s side proved it, though what deeds she had performed alongside the Flesh Tearers Chapter that claimed Cretacia as their home world, I could not guess.

  The weapon, so monstrous in delicate human hands, was rendered usable by a streak of thumbnail-sized suspensors attached to the stock. The rare antigravitic coins – three tiny thimbles of bronze – buoyed the weapon by countering its weight.

  She carried the bolter slung over her back, on a thick leather strap.

  ‘My lord regent,’ she said, not bothering to smile. ‘We must speak.’

  The Imperial Regent of Cheth nodded. His expression showed indulgence, as if he had any right to refuse her demand. ‘Yes, inquisitor. Indeed we must.’

  He was fat to the point of being grotesque. By my estimate, he had fewer than thirty seconds to live.

  II

  Cheth was a world like ten thousand others.

  Populated, clad in a clanking grey covering of industrial cities, yet claiming neither a forge world’s honour, nor a hive world’s flesh resources. It paid its Imperial tithes in coin and trade to the subsector capital, which in turn shipped them to the sector hub, and theoretically on to the coffers of Holy Terra. The last Imperial Guard founding was eleven years ago, and raised almost two hundred thousand fresh Guardsmen, known under the collective regimental name ‘Cheth Sixteenth Rifles’.

  The regiment’s nickname for themselves was less official, and obscenely biological. I see no need for its inclusion in this archive.

  Cheth supported its own colonies on two nearby mining moons, and maintained a standing defence garrison of one million souls. The Cheth defence force was the usual mixture of veteran ex-Guardsmen and career soldiers, unified with a minor percentage of volunteers who possessed little more training than how to load and shoot straight. A million bodies between invasion and conquest, though. No small figure. Sheer weight of numbers counted where expertise did not.

  Even the heavens were well-defended. Thirty-seven weapons platforms orbited the world, and Cheth was a frequent resupply point for Imperial Navy patrols.

  Any invader coming to Cheth faced a long, grinding struggle to overthrow a well-defended and entrenched government, making it an unenviable task for the Imperial Guard, should they ever be summoned there.

  Even for a contingent of Space Marines, there was no guarantee of an easy victory, or a fast one.

  Cheth’s delicate infrastructure was ruled by the office of the Imperial regent. Unlike many Imperial worlds answering to a lord governor or governor militant, the seat of the Imperial regent was a spiritual post as much as a temporal one, named in honour of the man who would rule the world in lieu of the absent God-Emperor of Mankind.

  How very quaint.

  But Cheth differed in one crucial way to ten thousand other Imperial worlds. Those worlds were loyal. Cheth was not.

  While deviancy, dissidence and apostasy were hardly rare in the great kingdom humanity had carved across the stars, it was rare for a world in the Imperium’s heartlands – with no evidence of former corruption – to fall into sedition. Cheth turned sour, rotting at the core of its government, with the taint threatening to spread to the rest of society’s ruling tiers. From there, the spread would never be contained. I knew all of this after studying the Inquisition’s briefing data en route to the world. It made for bleak reading.

  The wider Imperium had two choices. The first was to wait for public evidence of rebellion, and thus declare a crusade of reclamation; the second was to cut out the cancer at the world’s core before it could infect planetary society.

  Inquisitor Annika Jarlsdottyr of the Ordo Malleus had chosen on the Emperor’s behalf, as was her invested right. She’d kept us at her side for a third consecutive operation, citing that ancient truth: the best way to win a war is to strike before the enemy can fire the first shot.

  III

  The Imperial regent smiled at Annika.

  He grinned, confidence emanating from him in an aura that was almost palpable. I’d seen it before, of course. It was always this way when they had no idea we were there. All he could see opposing him was Annika and her team, and they were plainly not arrayed to do battle.

  They stood behind her, not approaching the raised dais as she had. Darford was first, in his dark dress uniform – complete with silver aiguillette ropes from collar to shoulder – with his moustache and beard neatly trimmed close to his tanned features. He looked curiously incomplete without his weapons, though they would be useless in such confined quarters. I wondered where they were, and if he felt as incomplete as he looked. A simple brush over his thoughts would have provided an answer, but it was hardly the time to bother with such things.

  The Khatan was next to him. Her auburn eyes were narrowed, displeasure writ clearly in their depths, and she was clad in her animal furs with the ever-present spear over her shoulder. She had the look of a dreadlocked beast finding itself cornered, as she always did when standing beneath a roof. I didn’t need to read her mind to know she felt irritation rather than fear – the Khatan always pined for open sky. She never spoke of it, but her nightmares on long void journeys were loud and unpleasant. In her dreams, she was always trapped, always choking for air that wouldn’t come.

  Vasilla, robed in black, hadn’t come to make war. A lily flower was tattooed beneath her left eye, like some red-inked tear. Short hair the colour of mahogany framed her features. She could be no older than seventeen, and I doubted she was even that. I have never been skilled at judging human age, but Vasilla still walked the border between girl-child and the woman she would soon become.

  Like Darford, she lacked weapons. Unlike the elegant Mordian, she did not seem diminished for that fact. With no sloshing tanks of promethium fuel on her back, and no flamer unit in her small fists, her hands were empty, clasped together with fingers linked over her stomach as if in prayer.

  Garven Merrick carried his bulky shotgun slung over his back. Asking him to disarm was an exercise in futility, even when it was his mistress giving the order. He wore his scratched, sloping enforcer armour – all evidence of rank torn off, leaving only the beaten copper aquila on his chestplate. If Darford sought to display his former affiliation loud and proud with his dress uniform, Merrick was the unprepossessing opposite. He wore his armour because it was reliable, comfortable, and familiar. All traces of his fo
rmer life as a lawbringer were absent from the bare carapace gear. At his side, tall enough to reach his hip, a cyber-mastiff stood at motionless attention. The enforcer’s gloved fingers reached down to scratch behind the ridged sensor node clusters that served as the cybernetic hound’s ears.

  The wretch came last. Clovon, his face a mess of old scarring overlaid by aquila tattoos, was forever deadlier in a game of cards than with the pistol at his hip or the throwing knives across his chest. Not for the first time, I wondered how the inquisitor tolerated his presence. Foul creature.

  Annika tossed her head back, perhaps not realising how she resembled a spirited horse in that moment. Her crystal-cut eyes were cold reinforcements for her scowl. In truth, Inquisitor Annika Jarlsdottyr gave very imperious scowls, as an effective indicator of her temper. I’d been on the receiving end of several of them.

  The regent still smiled. ‘We welcome you to our court,’ he said, offering his signet ring to be kissed.

  Annika remained where she was, tall and proud, a daughter of Fenris and an agent of the Emperor’s Inquisition. I could feel her rising ire as she met his eyes. He was taking the wrong approach with her; not that it would matter for much longer.

  ‘And the last inquisitor.’ Annika’s voice was a displeased purr. ‘Did you welcome him?’

  Several of the courtiers laughed, as if she’d uttered some great witticism. Her displeasure grated hotter, higher. I could feel just how keenly she wished to reach for her bolter and end the charade, but the odds weren’t in her favour just yet.

  Even for a planetary governor’s palace, the royal chamber was ostentatious to the point of caricature. Psyber-cherubs flitted in the throne room’s rafters, carrying white silk banners proclaiming the regent’s holiness and the many wars won by Cheth’s distant Imperial Guard regiments. The vat-grown cloned infants flew on anti-gravitic angel wings of white iron, giggling and communicating in monotone buzzes of information to one another when they weren’t singing in choir. They had their uses to those enamoured of vile decoration, I’m sure. I still found the spawning of such things to be an abhorrent and blasphemous waste of resources. Was it mankind’s place to breed a soulless imitation of true life? Surely not.