Treacheries of the Space Marines Read online

  ‘In the captain’s roost all light was extinguished, as though he thought darkness might discomfit us. But we could see the smashed holotank, the displays and consoles slagged by the servitors’ torches, and we knew then how desperate we had made this man for him to mutilate his most sacred sanctum like this. He intended to take away all hope we had of breaking back through into the materium.

  ‘The captain himself was a dim shape behind the glassaic of his support cocoon. “Kill me now if you must, traitors,” he told us through the brass horns that clustered at the corners of the room, “or let the warp take me as it will take you. And let mine be the last loyal life you murder before you yourselves stand before Him for your final, immortal rebuke.”

  ‘With that he abandoned his threats and turned to prayers, which began to distort and be intertwined with more profane voices and more obscene words as warp influences trickled through the failing Geller field and began to alter the ship. But we realised that not all the screaming in the vox-horns was the work of… outside. No intruder from the warp would ever have cried out an Imperial prayer, or plead for the captain to show mercy and rescind his order. The voice was Vivyre’s, losing his mind to fear as he saw before him a fate that Navigators must understand more keenly than any of us.

  ‘The captain roared back, his voice shaking the horns, and even with only those mechanisms to give him speech rather than his own throat and tongue, even as the ship’s gravity began to fail and light and sound to distort, we could hear the note of command in that voice that must have propelled his crew to take up arms against us even in their terror. He shouted into the storm, telling the Navigator to obey his captain and his Emperor, lay down his life and soul and deny the traitors to the last.

  ‘Ulsh breached his cocoon and killed him then. “Traitor” has never been a label he has cared for.

  ‘Now the guidance of the ship fell solely to Drunnai, and I knew I would perish there. Navigator’s commands must pass through the captain’s own systems to be turned into intricate orders to the helm and crew, manipulating all the ship’s systems in concert. What little direct control a Navigator normally wields could not prepare him for this. We were as good as adrift, at the mercy of the vortex.

  ‘So I thought. So we all thought. But here is a lesson all Night Lords know: terror transforms. And when Drunnai thought himself lost, his terror ousted all conscious thought. He could not bring himself to abandon his soul to the warp.

  ‘And so we rode the vortex down. How? I do not know how. I am no Navigator, nor a seer,’ and here Hodir gave an inclination of his helm towards Khrove, who returned the politeness in kind. ‘But I have seen warriors lent a genius by terror. Who amongst you has not seen it, friend or enemy, terror fuelling their prowess until it burns them out entire? Navigator Drunnai, who had steered us into a suicide plunge against orders he had never wished to hear, now broke those orders and fought for his life against the storm.

  ‘I remember moments of calm when the ship spun in its length so fast that the failing gravity was overwhelmed and we skidded and crashed against the walls. Uzchel, our best demolisher whose chainfists had cut our way from the bridge, was thrown into the dead captain’s cocoon and vented his fury on the corpse and its systems.

  ‘I remember the times when the vortex stripped the field away from us, and Drunnai would shriek with panic to match the shrieking of the ship’s hull. The shrieks, too, of whatever was grasping the hulk of the ship. Cries of pain at contact with matter, perhaps, or of pleasure at having this new strange thing to play with. Perhaps they were born of no emotion any of us could understand. Perhaps some were even from survivors elsewhere on the ship, meeting the fate from which Drunnai was fleeing. At these times the whole ship would lash back and forth like a crotalid’s tail.

  ‘I remember seeing the controls come to life again. The slag of the instrument panels began to writhe and rearrange itself, and a ghostly form of the holotank lit up over the wreck of the original. They lit up and showed us our own faces, and faces we had murdered and faces we had fought with, and turned them into faces such as no human has ever worn. Electricity leapt between the craters in the instrument panels, the arcs rising up and taking on shapes I cannot describe, for they have left only pock-holes in my memory. I remember that the sound of the engines, the great deep note that permeates every starship, never ceased, but it faltered and choked, and sometimes became a rhythmic sound like a living heartbeat, and sometimes like laughter. Uzchel said he heard whispers in it, and when he tried to talk back to them whatever those whispers told him in reply made him howl and swing his chainfists at empty space in front of him.

  ‘The form of the ship began to soften and stretch around us. The captain’s remains flowed and blended, the debris they lay in bubbled and shifted. Parts of it turned to emerald, parts to blood and parts to light. The whole chamber stretched and narrowed. The deck under our feet suddenly darkened with corrosion and spat little puffs of dust, but as we looked back through the door we saw the antechamber’s walls turn to ribbed bone, gasp and rattle with some manner of life, then fossilise in seconds and become stone. Dancing lights cackled and chased each other around our heads. Gyaz shot a bolt-shell at one, and it turned from the chase and enveloped him for no more than a second. When it pitched him to the deck and departed, he thrashed on the floor and told us that it had dragged him into itself and toyed with him for thirteen years.

  ‘How long all this lasted I do not know. I can tell you that four months passed by the sidereal calendars between us breaching warp at Isith and overhearing our first Imperial transmissions at Molianis, but to most of us that plummet down the vortex seemed to take only days. But we all know the fickleness of the warp and time.’ The other legionaries made small motions to indicate their assent.

  ‘Finally, however, the vortex gave us up. After a final, wrenching convulsion, the ship began a steady turning that we realised was a drift through real space. The decks and bulkheads ceased to change, leaving the chamber in its strange, angle-less shape. Beyond it we could see the stone ribs of the remade antechamber walls lit by dim starlight. Cautiously, we left the captain’s sanctum to see what was left of our prize.

  ‘The warp had remade the Hymn of Phelinde beyond any recognition. Her whole form was drawn out and scattered as though something in the warp had pegged her out on a dissecting table. The hull had opened up to space, in some places looking torn open, in some places simply gone, as though melted or dissolved or stretched until it had parted. In some places it had even grown. A ridge of excrescences had pushed out of the hull along the port side that aped the shape of the bridge tower, even growing vestigial windows. Vanes and turrets had been shorn off or had sunk back into the surrounding hull to form strange, organic-looking shapes. The plasma engines had finally fallen silent, and we could see the tail of the ship cold, with no reactor heat or drive plume. In the plasteel of the decking was a set of neat footprints, of bare feet the size of a child’s, sunk into the metal the way they will sink into wet sand. They meandered into the bridge and ended there. We never learned what made them.

  ‘But when we turned out attention back the other way we realised that Vivyre Drunnai yet lived. The seals and provitae systems of the Navigator’s roost are intended to allow it to function while sealed off unto itself, so that any warp intrusion there might be checked before it can spread to the rest of the ship. Here they had worked in reverse, protecting him from the efforts of the warp to render the Hymn down to nothing.

  ‘As we walked back through the wreckage towards the roost we could hear Drunnai mewling on the vox, trying to hail the crew. His systems must have been wrecked by the transit, and his eyes out to the rest of the ship were blind. He did not know that we were the only ones he shared the hulk with now. He called for his captain and his retainers. He pleaded for status reports and sustenance. At times he even seemed unsure whether the ship was still in the warp – I think his senses we
re still ringing from the storm in the Jaw.

  ‘I think he realised what company the storm had left him with when we began trying to break into the roost. The roost was an easy thing to see now. It had largely withstood the warp erosion, but the hull and decking around it had been reduced almost to lacework. We linked the vox and auto-sensor systems in our armour under the guidance of Hotesh, our signal-smith. These roosts are built with defences and wards, but not against the kind of attack we were mounting now, and not against invaders of our skill. Soon we had control of the internal cogitators of the roost, cut off Drunnai’s vox-link and began to use the roost’s more powerful systems to spy out our location.

  ‘The sensors of our own armour had registered whipcracks of noise and flickers in our visors, which we dismissed as the after-effects of the tumult from the voyage. But coupled into the Navigator bubble we were able to decipher what they were. We were listening to a cascade of military-strength auspex pings: a stream of them, all tumbled over one another, some from mere light minutes away, others far older and fainter, sounded by ships prowling the other side of the system. The Molianis system.

  ‘With a brilliance born of terror and reflexes strung with the raw instinct to survive, Vivyre Drunnai found a skein of warp-flow down through the vortex from the Tembine Drift into the warp storm of the Jaw. A needle’s eye that leads into a blind and undefended flank of a prime Imperial military system.

  ‘The Night Lords will ride on Molianis again.

  ‘And that is the prize. This is what I am empowered to offer you, Brother Chengrel. Take this crest as a token of alliance. What Drunnai did once, he will do again. Send your finest warriors to ride back down the vortex and through the Jaw with us, or honour us by leading the force yourself. Let us come upon the Imperial sentries whose eyes are all turned outwards, and fall upon them, become their red-eyed nightmares.

  ‘If you wish simply to wound the Imperium, then wound it we shall. If you wish the fortresses of Molianis as your prize then claim them, my Legion has no plans for them. If you wish a share of the plunder when the system is ours, then you shall return to your own fastness with great riches indeed.

  ‘That is the account and the bid of the Night Lords. What say you?’

  Hodir finished his tale standing directly before Chengrel’s tank, with his token upraised. The bodyguard’s tongue had once again slipped out and twitched in the direction of the skin. The other three Traitor legionaries sat and studied the embroidery again, allowing their host to be the first one to speak. After a long silence, he did.

  ‘My warsmith imparted good words to me,’ he said. ‘He told me “there are none among us more cunning than a Night Lord with the opportunity of murder put before him”. You understand why I recall those words now.’ Hodir made a gesture of assent. ‘You had all the makings of an offering that would honour the Night Haunter’s memory, Hodir,’ Chengrel went on, ‘and perhaps, with my own tale to inspire you, you will be able to leave this place and do so.’

  The other three, experienced in reading hints of posture and movement through bulky armour, saw the anger rise in Hodir. They watched as he folded the token with exaggerated care and clipped it at his waist, and they saw how his hands clenched the instant he was not consciously controlling them. Chengrel, not seeing this or not caring, talked on.

  ‘In exchange for your offering, Chengrel of the Iron Warriors gives his salute to your cunning and your audacity. But let my fortress and my account be an instruction to you. You must learn ambition, Hodir. A legionary with ambition befitting his stature would have come to me not begging for alliance, but piling trophies before me. The heads of the Naval captains and commissars, their caps nailed to their skulls, a barge-hold full of materiel looted from their vessels. From Navy vessels, mark you, Hodir. Warships. I would not have accepted an offering of your scroungings from a graveyard of hulks, or some fat and plodding supply convoy.

  ‘So this is your account? Chasing a handful of cargo haulers and being pulled into a storm you had no intention to enter? This is the tale that will have me think your warband great among the Night Lords? You belie your own pretensions to greatness. But still,’ and there was a slow burbling as Chengrel made what passed for a sigh, ‘if the offerings of these others are more meagre still then I may yet confer the prize upon you.’

  As the echoes of his voice died away, the enhanced hearing of the others, Emmesh-Aiye’s most of all, detected a small, rhythmic, metallic noise. It was the mechanised joints in Hodir’s armour. They were sounding as he rocked almost imperceptibly back and forth, one hand now openly gripping the hilt of the power knife slung at his left hip.

  ‘When the Night Lords return to Molianis,’ said Hodir in a voice plainly shaking with the strain of controlling his anger, ‘I do not think we will enlist the forces of Master Chengrel as our allies.’ For a moment he seemed to have more to say, but instead he walked stiffly to his seat, placed himself upon it and would say no more.

  ‘Drachmus!’ boomed Chengrel as his bodyguard lurched back into the shadows by his tank. ‘Drachmus of the Word Bearers! Your Legion has written its history with distinction. I have no doubt that you have a magnificent tribute and majestic tale to bid for my prize. Speak, Drachmus, and stake your claim.’

  For a few moments Drachmus still sat, staring down into the bowl of cinders on his lap and listening to the imp on his shoulder declaiming the Liturgy of Vilemost Blessing. Finally he seemed to see something in the ashes that pleased him. He placed the bowl carefully on the flagstones and walked to the centre of the half-circle. His gargoyle lowered its head and dropped its voice to a whisper, but never stopped speaking as Drachmus raised his own voice over it.

  ‘Lorgar tells us in the eighth chapter of the Admonition to the Belocrine Crusade that “they are contemptible who seek an abdication of the self in subjugation to the transcendent”, and now you shall hear how I and my brothers gave exegesis to his words through bold action, through spiritual strength and through the war we brought to the world of Aechol Tertia.

  ‘How wretched was the furthest world in the Aechol cluster when we came upon it! Tertia had been a world of humanity since ages before our memory, paying tribute to the Great Crusade and its self-proclaimed Emperor. But the shadow of the Imperium waned over the millennia, the grip of the dead faith of the aquila began to slip. Aechol became fickle. One of its worlds fell to the lure of the four-armed marauders heralding the hive-fleets, and only then did the Imperium show a face in the system to stamp out the infection. But they won no love from Aechol by it, and before long Aechol Tertia was in open secession to seek shelter in the fold of yet more xenos – the ambitious and striving tau, who seek not to expunge other races but to subjugate and regiment them under the “Greater Good” in whose name they claim to rule.

  ‘But Lorgar tells us in the Varigon Encyclical that “the strong hand cannot be directed by the clouded eye” and as you shall see the eyes of the tau are clouded indeed. Their viceroys promised a just and firm rule of Aechol rather than the capricious and neglectful Imperium, but having taken the reins at Aechol the creatures could not hold them.

  ‘The tau do not understand the warp-touch in the way that humans can. They cannot feel the currents of the god-sea and respond to it, can never share our relationship to the primal. And thus blind, they knew not how to govern once a new generation began to grow on the world they had “freed” for themselves to rule. The children grew. Their children grew. The numbers of psykers grew. And the tau would not understand what was happening. They scoffed at the Imperial traditions as witch-myths peddled by Imperial confessors, to foment anger and weaken the flock for more effective control. And so the warp-touch spilled out upon Aechol Tertia.

  ‘Lorgar tells us in the Sixty-Four Primary Meditations that “the gifts of the god-sea must never slip the traces of understanding” and when we saw the fate of Aechol we gave praise to the primarch’s words. Here was a worl
d caught between two masters, slipping free of the xenos leash, but not yet back beneath the shadow of the aquila. A world ready for a deeper, grander, truly godly allegiance.

  ‘When we overflew the broad land that rode high against the planet’s polar circle like a pauldron on a shoulder, we found the frost-dusted shingle plains crisscrossed with railtracks and pocked with mass-driver silos. When Aechol had been in its prime, the tau had loaded shells full of Aechol’s silica sands and rich biocultures, and blasted them into orbit for their freighters to snare and drag back to their own heart worlds. After the tau quit the system, bands of humans came fleeing from the bloodshed further south and turned the stripped silo compounds into refuges. Some still held out, some were abandoned, some had become home to psyker-children and become charnel houses or worse.

  ‘Two of Aechol’s continents straddled the equator. The first was a jagged, dislocated thing split by two tectonic seams, knuckled with mountains and restless with earthquake and lava. The humans here were base creatures of no dignity who scavenged the rubble of tau-built cities. In the winters they formed great caravans, travelling to sell their salvage to the surviving cities along the temperate coast. The scavengers prized their psyker-children highly, and willingly took the risks of raising them in order to make them weapons against their rivals.

  ‘The second equatorial continent was low and flat, and stippled with seas and forests where survivors lived and warred. A belief had sprung up there that the psyker resurgence had come upon the world because the tau had fled it, not the reverse, and so they had turned the old tau sandmining rigs in the shallow inland seas into holy places. Here they would congregate according to ceremonial calendars, ritually hang those they suspected of psykerhood, and perform acts of worship to abandoned tau artefacts, pleading for their old xenos masters to return and deliver them. Between the great lakes the rest of the old citizens had taken their loyalty in the other direction, hailing the emergent psykers as their saviours, reaching back for old scraps of memory of the Imperial faith to weave fanciful stories of saints and angels around the mad and possessed creatures whom they made their kings and prophets.