Treacheries of the Space Marines Read online

  There are songs that have been written about the final charge of Colonel Corvus Parthamen. But they are not sung in the mess halls of the Imperial Guard, and they are not stirring battle hymns. They are mocking, obscene doggerel, and they are snarled, rather than sung, with venomous humour, in the corridors of dark ships that ply the warp like sharks. A few men of the Imperium do hear it, in their terminal moments, as their positions are overrun by the hordes of Chaos. They do not appreciate it any more than Corvus would have.

  The charge was a rout. The men ran into las-fire and bolter shells. They were blown to pieces by cannon barrage. They were shredded by chainswords and pulped by armoured fists. Still, they made it further down the hill than even Corvus could have hoped. A coherent force actually hit the Chaos front lines and did some damage before being annihilated. Their actions might have seemed like glorious heroism born of nothing-to-lose desperation. But the fact that not a single man took cover – that not one did anything but run straight ahead, weapon firing indiscriminately – revealed the truth. They were running to their deaths, and were glad of the relief.

  Corvus was the last. It took him a moment to notice that he was alone, what with the joy of battle and the ecstasy of being free of the whine. He was still running forwards, running to his glory, but he wondered now why there didn’t seem to be any shots aimed at him. Or why the squad of Chaos Space Marines ahead parted to let him pass. He faltered, and then he saw who was waiting for him.

  The monster was huge, clad in what had once been Terminator armour, but was now a buzzing, festering exoskeleton. Flies swarmed from the funnels above his shoulders and the lesions in the corrupted ceramite. His single-horned helmet transformed the being’s final human traces into the purely daemonic. His grip on his giant scythe was relaxed.

  Corvus saw just how powerful disease-made flesh could be. He charged anyway, draining his laspistol, then pulling his chainsword. He swung at the Herald of Nurgle. Typhus whipped the Manreaper around. The movement was as rapid as it was casual and contemptuous. He hit Corvus with the shaft and shattered his hip. Corvus collapsed in the dirt. He bit down on his scream as Typhus loomed over him.

  ‘Kill me,’ Corvus spat. ‘But know that I fought you to the end. I have my own victory.’

  Typhus made a sound that was the rumble of giant hives. Corvus realised he had just heard laughter. ‘Kill you?’ Typhus asked. His voice was deep. It was smooth as a deliquescent corpse. ‘I haven’t come to kill you. I have come to teach you my anthem.’

  Through his pain, Corvus managed his own laugh. ‘I will never sing it.’

  ‘Really? But you have already. You believe you serve order and light, but, like your carrion Emperor, everything you do blasts hope and rushes towards entropy. Look what you did to your men. You have served me well, my son. You and your brother, both.’

  Corvus fought against the epiphany, but it burst over his consciousness with sickly green light. The truth took him, and infected him. He saw his actions, he saw their consequences, and he saw whose glory he had truly been serving. As the pattern took shape for him, so did a sound. He heard the anthem, and he heard its music. There was melody there, and he was part of it. Surrender flooded his system, and the triumphant shape of Typhus filled his dying vision. Corvus’s jaw snapped open. His throat contorted with ecstatic agony, and he became one with Ligeta’s final choir.

  Liberator

  by Jonathan Green

  It should be noted that desertion amongst the ranks of the honoured Adeptus Astartes is extremely uncommon. However, much as it pains me to write this, neither is it entirely unheard of. Those who have studied the works of Belteshazzar D’Aubigny and Master Filius Victor will speak in hushed whispers of the dark days of the Great Heresy, but, much as I hate to put this to the record, this has not been the only occasion when brother has turned upon brother and the very architects of the glorious Imperium of Man have sought to undo the great work of past noble deeds, and tear down that which they once fought so hard to establish.

  It has been calculated that there is one Space Marine for each of the million worlds of the Imperium, and that that number, though small, is sufficient to protect humanity from the foul schemes of the alien, heretics and the powers of the warp. But if even only one of those brothers should turn from the light of the Emperor’s Truth and fall upon his fellows like a thing run mad, how can it be enough?

  So I say to you, whether you be a student of the ordos, a ranked interrogator or a Lord Militant of His Imperial Majesty’s Blessed Inquisition, be ever watchful of the primarchs’ get, the proud warriors of the Adeptus Astartes, for only the Emperor Himself is infallible.

  From the treatise Quis Custodiet Ipsos Angeles Mortes? by Gideon Lorr, Inquisitor, Ordo Hereticus

  REMOVE

  He has always known this day would come, one day.

  The skies of Constantinium are the colour of raw meat, the clouds crimson as fresh blood or hot iron, painted by the fires raging in the old Ecclesiarchy Quarter of Cirtus city. The Great Cathedral, re-consecrated to Constantinus the Liberator – a glorious edifice to one man’s over-reaching ambition, the size of an entire city sector – is ablaze.

  The raw-meat sky is streaked black by the trails left by falling drop-pods, descending Thunderhawk gunships and ground-to-air heavy ordnance fire. The atmosphere is thick with the smell of the burning promethium refineries and the cloying scent of death.

  He turns to the Iconoclast at his side, one of his honour guard. The warrior’s gold-edged armour is scuffed and scarred from the battles he has had to endure of late. In some places the battle plate is so badly marked that faint glimmers of blue and white can be seen beneath the gold and red-black, an echo of a memory of what the warrior had once been; of whom he had once served.

  ‘Brother Maimon,’ he says, addressing the Iconoclast, ‘tell me, who is it that comes against us now with sword and flame, with hammer and bolter.’

  The Iconoclast studies the incoming craft, the esoteric systems of his helmet visor locking on to the falling, swooping landing craft. Targeting reticules focus on the Chapter markings cast upon the vehicles’ atmospheric entry-heated hull plates, magnifying the badges and Adeptus Astartes insignia. The Iconoclast sees gunmetal-grey cross-crosslets against a black shield.

  The Liberator himself goes bare-headed, as he has done ever since the glorious day when he earned that honorific and liberated Nova Terra, as the planet was known then; when the people gazed upon the face of their saviour and knew him for the mighty avenging angel he was – the avenging angel he still is.

  ‘Iron Knights, my lord,’ Iconoclast Maimon replies, his voice a rumbling growl.

  ‘Iron Knights?’ The Liberator laughs. ‘Well, let us see how their iron might fares against the armour of faithfulness.’

  He takes in the shattered walls of the bastion behind him with a weary glance. After thirteen years of fighting the Imperium, his defiance and his contempt for the ailing Empire of Mankind is all he has left.

  The moment he broke his vows of brotherhood and obedience, he had known, somewhere deep inside of himself, that this day would come. If he had not launched his pogrom against the other worlds of the Viridis subsector, perhaps it might not have come as soon, but it would still have come. It had been as inevitable as the wrath of the False Emperor.

  He turns from the breach blasted through the ferrocrete walls of the bastion – a rift one hundred metres high, its heat-fused lips like dribbled black wax – and gazes across the lower slopes of his citadel stronghold.

  Much of Cirtus is ablaze now. The metropolis looks like it did all those years ago when he first liberated this world, only on that occasion it was he who had put its populace to the sword and set its streets alight. His gaze is slowly drawn back to the silhouette of the Great Cathedral, backlit by the firestorm engulfing that region of the city.

  The stern features of the golden edifice
that stands before the broken basilica seem to shift in the flickering light of the flames. One minute the cyclopean effigy is smiling upon the people of Cirtus, the next it is a furious deity of rage, its face a mask of hatred at the hubris of the invaders, that they should dare deny him that which was his by right, that which he had fought so long and so hard to win. That which he had finally won through great personal sacrifice – the greatest anyone on Constantinium had ever had to make.

  Within the canyon streets of the tenement habs, within the tekannibal-haunted industrial quarter, within the shattered ruins of the grand arena, the fighting is at its most intense.

  The battle-lust burns in his blood. He yearns for combat. The stink of fyceline and cordite has him panting for action once more. Despite the risks that such an action would bring with it, he wishes to be there in the thick of things himself. After all, it is the manner in which he has conducted his entire reign; it is how he raised a battle force that – at its height – conquered entire star systems in his name, plunging the worlds of the Viridis subsector into a new Age of Darkness.

  In the armies of the Imperium he had been a mere sergeant. But free of the shackles of duty he had risen to become as a god. Worlds shook at the tread of his armoured feet. Entire dynasties were toppled at mere mention of his name.

  It is then that he sees them for the first time, making for the breach, emerging from the clouds of drifting smoke, giving voice to their mewling battle-cries, declaring their subjugation to the Golden Throne: a gaggle of soldiers in black and grey fatigues and ashen flak armour, lasguns held low, bayonets fixed, not a heavy weapon between them.

  He would laugh if it wasn’t so insulting that these insects thought they could challenge him, here on his world, coming at him like children, armed with wooden swords and shields.

  He does not need to give the command; those who follow him know what is expected of them. It is but one thing.

  The Zealous who fight in his name, making the invaders pay for every metre they advance in blood. The Enlightened, who have witnessed first-hand the fate of those who would challenge this dominion. The Iconoclasts – once his brethren, now his bodyguard – who helped shape this world, and the fate of a dozen others like it. Just one thing, that is all he asks; the one thing that was denied him in a former life.

  Loyalty.

  He leads the charge himself, striding down the scree of shattered walls and through the smoke, resplendent in his gold-chased, blood-black armour, the unutterable names of a thousand unspeakable things picked out in sigils and runes that seem to glow and smoke with molten heat.

  At his back march his personal bodyguard – his Iconoclasts – Maimon and Pius, the most loyal of all his devotees, their armour red-black and gold like his, the eight-pointed star raised from the ceramite of their left shoulder pads where once was displayed an altogether different insignia.

  Behind them come Kabaiel, also known as the Skull-taker, and Gha’gur Nor the Slythian, once of the warband of Ghorgoth the Oppressor, now Herald of Constantinus, the most faithful of the Enlightened, Foe-smiter held reverently in his gauntleted fists.

  Zipping las-bolts spang from ceramite plate that has withstood the slavering attentions of ravenous daemon-blades and even the excoriating blades of a degenerate Helbrute, some years before. His honour guard do not even break stride.

  Five demi-gods against ten times as many Guardsmen; demi-gods who made the star-realm of Man what it was, and who could tear it down and remould it just as easily. The invaders would be as wheat before the reaper’s scythe.

  The weapon in his hand hums with unnatural life. It is an instrument of destruction, a crackling golden blade set within an ebon hilt. It is a weapon that, in his hands, has taken the heads of his enemies by the score. It is a slayer of champions, a killer of kings. It has had other names in ages past, but it answers to only one name now: Ruin.

  The first Guardsman dies with a plaintive prayer to the God-Emperor on his bloody lips. It doesn’t stop Ruin cleaving him in twain from crown to groin.

  Then the Iconoclasts are upon the Guardsman pack and the broken ground runs red with the blood of mortals.

  The Liberator’s humming blade opens flak armour as readily as it cleaves flesh from bone and boils blood.

  Something much larger than a man comes at him then, a sweating abhuman ogryn; but it falls like the rest of them, Ruin stuck in the brute’s chest, the sword’s energy field cooking the mutant’s enlarged heart with its sun-hot coruscating discharge.

  He carries out the killings with clinical precision. No berserker battle-cries for him, no chanting to the gods of the warp. There is no need. What he achieves with his blade is his sacrament to the Powers that be, writ in the blood of those who would dare come against him.

  Then there is no more killing to be done, the broken ground awash with the vital fluids of the Imperial Guardsmen, steaming offal declaring the Powers’ approval, intestines spilling from opened bellies to form shapes pleasing to the true masters of the universe.

  He feels the boom of the great golden statue’s destruction as well as hearing it. His old eyes find the cathedral precinct, wherein once lay the Place of Testing, and he sees the cyclopean effigy topple from view behind the smoky ruins of the worker habs with the slow inevitably of a cliff-face sliding into the sea. The cheering tumult that comes after is almost as loud as the Shadowsword volcano cannon blast that has toppled the statue.

  ‘They would liberate this world from me, would they?’ he purrs, his stony expression softening at last as a cruel smile curls his lips. ‘Well let them try.’

  The personal transport of Dvar Ghorgoth, Scourge of Worlds, rumbles to a halt before the broken gates that once marked the limits of an Ecclesiarchy compound, but which now forms the entrance to the arena.

  The arena has no particular name, it needs none. It is enough that it is the place to which they are called by their dark gods, champions and their warbands by their dozens, to test themselves against the upstart emperor of this beleaguered backwater world.

  Ghorgoth emerges from his transport then, heralded by the screams of slave-psykers and bound and blinded priests, as skull-faced cherubic-things goad the damned with crackling agonisers. One of the black-winged cherubs detaches itself from the rest of the flock, following the Packmaster with jerky fluttering movements.

  The place of battle is adorned with the heraldry of scores of petty tyrants and upstart kings, whose warrior bands now swear fealty to another.

  Icons of blood-quenched iron loom above the packed stands of the coliseum alongside tattered banners of weathered human hide. A thousand renegades, loyal to the Powers and sworn to follow the lord of this world, in whose name it has been remade, watch Ghorgoth as he enters the arena. Some watch in cold silence, others jeering and baying like beasts for his blood, all of them the spoils of a hundred previous gladiatorial contests.

  The Packmaster is resplendent in his scrimshawed battle plate. Even under skies choked with the smoke of a thousand bone-fires, the bony ridges and overlapping calcified plates give him the appearance of a simulacrum of death, a golem of ancient bone. It is as if the remains of one of those funerary pyres have risen from the ash and embers to be revenged upon he who liberated the unbelievers from the shackles of their misguided dogma. In his hands the Dvar holds the chainaxe Interfector.

  Gha’gur Nor has heard it said that Dvar Ghorgoth had once been loyal to the False Emperor, just as the lord of this world had been once; before he broke his own vows of brotherhood, along with the rest of the Calix Chapter, following the Massacre of Ravenscar.

  Gha’gur Nor had not known Ghorgoth then, of course. He had been recruited later, after the Calix Chapter became the Screaming Skulls, taken from his tribe during a raid on the planet he later learned was called Lithos VI, and implanted with cursed seed said to have been procured from the Apothecary Errant of the Emperor’s Children himse
lf in exchange for a thousand human slaves.

  Gha’gur Nor marches out of the Rhino along with the rest of the Oppressor’s elite. Their battle plate bears little resemblance to the Dvar’s ornate scrimshaw. Some wear the armour of conquered victims, or that scavenged during raids on worlds where mighty battles had once taken place. Others combine plate artificed by the heretek-magi of the Auretian Schism with relics that perhaps date back even as far as the Dark Age of Technology. There are those who still wear pieces of the vulgar armour they once brought with them from their primitive home worlds. But they all wear the mark of the Dvar upon their left auto-reactive shoulder guards, in mockery of a practice that dates back to the days when the Screaming Skulls had still been the Calix Chapter. The mark they all wear now is the eight-pointed star with a halved human skull set at its centre.

  Gha’gur Nor surveys the serried rows of cultists and vassal lords who have already sworn fealty to the Liberator of Constantinium.

  The effigy of a golden demi-god, thirty metres high – fashioned from the melted down idols and icons of the False Faith promoted by Imperial Terra – gazes down upon them all, but its burnished gaze weighs particularly heavily upon those who come to test their mettle against the master of this world. The giant’s head is bowed, its hands resting upon the hilt of a mighty sword, ready to pass judgement on all who come before it.

  Gha’gur Nor had heard the rumours of what happens here. Under the giant’s golden gaze, only the most worthy champions received the honour of engaging in their own trial by combat against the master of Constantinium. The prize they fight for is a worthy reward indeed. The winner claims all that the vanquished possesses – his warriors, his wargear, his battlefleets and even those worlds that pay him fealty.

  But Gha’gur Nor also knows that the master of Constantinium has not lost a battle yet. Some said that the Liberator had been marked out by the Powers, but then which champion of the warp had not received such a boon from the true gods of the galaxy?