Warhawk, p.35
Warhawk, page 35
‘All units, full stop,’ he commanded, splashing through the slurry to join them. ‘New tasking.’
He switched his helm-view to the tactical cartoliths, the ones imprinted back at Colossi. Making progress would be difficult – it might all have changed, or been rendered impassable, or blocked by thousands of enemy troops.
‘Locate the nearest lifter shafts,’ he ordered nonetheless. ‘We will find him.’
Prophecy
Earthfall
Last blood
He didn’t find her, in the end. He found those who followed her. And that proved to be significantly less difficult, because there were thousands of them.
Until then, Loken had been fighting an increasingly lonely, difficult battle. The war-fronts had been closing in ever tighter, filling up the few remaining empty spaces across the desecrated urban wastes. None of the advance warbands were cultist dross any more – those poor wretches had soaked up their last bullets a long time ago. These were Traitor Marines, hunting in packs, roving ahead of their great war-hosts like hungry wolves.
He’d had to be careful. He’d killed where he’d had to, but mostly remained hidden, racing down lightless alleys and across the broken crater-fields while larger explosions masked his presence. He reserved the most hatred, of course, for the Sons of Horus. When he spied them, when he judged the risk worth taking, he let them see who he was before he killed them. That made them fight all the harder, because they loathed him as much as he detested them. He shouldn’t have done it, really. There was always the chance that one of them would end him, and their numbers were growing all the time, but the small pangs of satisfaction almost made it worth the danger.
So it was that he came across the believers. At first, he had thought they were just more crowds of refugees, fleeing towards the core in the hope that there might be room for them somewhere. Since the very start of hostilities, those crowds had been rampaging inwards, desperate and famished. They were cut down in their droves, of course, but there always seemed to be more of them out there, limping and shuffling with their rags clutched tight about them.
But these ones, they weren’t retreating. They were formed up, they were organised. They were marching like soldiers, all carrying some kind of weapon – a lasgun, a shotgun, a power tool. Many of them had flamers, constructed by the look of things from vehicle parts and plastek canisters. He almost mistook their front ranks for the enemy at first, until he saw the skulls they carried with them – on chains, around necks, atop long poles – and remembered the catacombs.
He came out into the open, shaking off the dust and lowering his bolter. They prepared to charge straight at him. He heard cries of ‘Kill it!’, and saw many in the front ranks activate their crude promethium nozzles.
But they weren’t complete fools. Several held up their hands, recognising that he was no traitor – those never came into the open without opening fire.
A man edged warily up to him. He wore the torn uniform of an Imperial Army trooper, and had a half-cloak draped over his shoulders. In one hand he carried a service-issue lasgun. In the other, incongruously, was a thick bundle of fabric. Just visible was a child’s head, tucked under the curve of a protective arm.
‘My lord,’ the man said. ‘Can we assist you?’
Loken found himself staring at the child. ‘Who are you?’
‘Katsuhiro, Kushtun Naganda, now in the service of the Church. Like everyone here.’
‘And… this?’
‘A survivor.’ Katsuhiro’s face was drawn and skinny. He didn’t have the look of a seasoned trooper, but there was a hardness to him all the same. That made sense – anyone still alive in all this had to have something about them, however things had started. ‘No one else was going to watch him. So I had to.’
Was that commendable? It would slow him down, hamper his aim. Still, it was a human gesture in this swamp of inhumanity. Hard to condemn it.
‘I seek the lady,’ Loken said. ‘Can you take me to her?’
Katsuhiro hesitated. It was one thing for him to run the risk that Loken might not be what he appeared to be. It was another to risk her.
‘We were… we are friends,’ said Loken. ‘I came to protect her. Can you assist me?’
Katsuhiro drew back, conferred with some of the others. Loken saw them gesturing towards the Imperial insignias still just about visible on his armour. The discussion became animated. He let them talk, despite his impatience to get moving – he could already hear the noises of combat drawing in closer from the east.
Eventually, they reached agreement. Katsuhiro came back to him. ‘I argued for it,’ he said. ‘I’d be grateful if you don’t make me a greater fool than I already am.’
The bulk of the ramshackle army started to move again, heading – with enthusiasm – in the direction of the coming enemy. Katsuhiro motioned for Loken to come with him the other way. The two of them started to clamber across the wreckage and mortar-impacts as the ranks marched off, breaking into poorly tuned singing.
‘They will not succeed,’ Loken said. ‘Against what is coming.’
‘No,’ said Katsuhiro. ‘We lose every battle we fight.’ He looked up at the Space Marine with bleak, tired eyes. ‘But we take some of them down with us. Better that, we think, than wait for them to come.’
‘Is that why you carry the skulls? You celebrate death?’
Katsuhiro shrugged. ‘I’m not a priest. They tell us to collect them. We do what they tell us.’ He smiled thinly. ‘You need a symbol, don’t you? People need that.’
‘But you were Army, once.’
‘Still am. Served at Marmax.’ He pulled his half-cloak aside to reveal regimental badges. ‘If there were any commanders still alive, I’d be taking orders from them.’ He pulled the fabric back over, and the half-asleep child clutched at him instinctively. ‘You take the help you can get.’
‘I could carry that,’ said Loken awkwardly. ‘For a while. If you wished.’
Katsuhiro shook his head. ‘It’s him. But no. Thanks. He’s my respons-ibility.’
They walked for some distance after that, heading roughly north-west. The habs around them became a fraction more stable-looking – stark outposts amid a static sea of rubble. Katsuhiro led him into one of them, past sentries half-buried in the rubbish, then up hollow stairwells. They eventually emerged at the very top level, an open platform with a low perimeter wall. The view from it was good, and a wide vista opened up. Hollow spires jutted up into the night sky, avenues smouldered, and greater constructions still towered up beyond them all, hunched and ringed with fire.
A few dozen fighters clustered at the summit’s western edge, peering into Army-issue magnoculars and conferring among them-selves.
As for her, she looked thinner than she had done. Dirtier, her hair longer and greasier. Her clothes were stained and hung from her meagre frame. No one’s idea of a saint, really. When she turned to face him, though, he recognised the old look – that defiant stare she’d always had, the disdain for untruth, that essential fierceness.
‘I didn’t preach,’ she said. ‘Not once. They came to me.’
‘As did I, Euphrati,’ said Loken. ‘And it took a long time.’
The two of them drew together. Both had seen better days.
‘So what is all this?’ Loken asked her.
‘What they wanted me to do.’ Keeler shrugged. ‘They were so precious about it all for so long. Now I guess they’ll clutch at anything.’
Loken glanced at the others. They were wearing tattered scholar’s robes, for the most part, or embellished Army uniforms. They, too, carried skulls. ‘But… you,’ he said. ‘Is it what you wanted?’
‘Does that matter?’
‘Of course.’
Keeler smiled indulgently. ‘So you think I’m the victim, here. The lost girl they sent into danger, against her will. You’d like to save me, I guess.’
‘Yes. I would like that.’
‘Garviel,’ she said. ‘Garviel.’ She reached up to his cavernous chest, pressing a finger gently against it, as if checking he was still real. ‘You can’t save everyone. It’s a blasphemy to try. That’s where we’ve been going wrong. It’s all about the numbers. Two platoons. That would do for you.’
‘Your pardon?’
‘Look. Come with me.’
She led him to the summit’s edge. Her magnoculars were waiting. She gave him the coordinates, and he let his helm-lenses do the work.
‘Over there,’ she said.
Thirty kilometres away, on the far side of a deep depression, another battle was taking place. It was a big one, just one of thousands no doubt raging all across the sector. Space Marines were grappling with one another, locked in their own uniquely brutal style of up-close combat. As Loken homed in on the coordinates, he recognised the armour styles instantly. Templar Brethren, supported by regular Imperial Fists, Blood Angels and auxilia, up against World Eaters and Sons of Horus.
One duel dominated the entire scene. An Imperial Space Marine and a World Eater knocking chunks out of one another. The scale of destruction those two were capable of unleashing seemed of an order greater than those around them. Perhaps greater than any Loken had witnessed before, save for the primarchs themselves.
‘Sigismund,’ he said softly.
‘Magnificent, isn’t he?’ said Keeler, with feeling. ‘I brought them here to witness him. They all saw it, before they marched off to replicate the violence. It fuelled their sense of possibility.’
There was something uniquely chilling about the way the two warriors fought. They were polar opposites – one frantic, the other contained. All the same, it was strangely repulsive, that level of immersion, as if nothing mattered, or could ever matter, save the contest immediately before them.
‘It was about something, before,’ Loken found himself mumbling. ‘Exploration. Rediscovery. The end of superstition.’
‘Yes, it was. And now it’s about something different.’ Keeler’s eyes were shining in the magnocular lenses. ‘Something purer. Something more valuable.’ She put them down, and turned to him. ‘This is how it has to be. This, or destruction. Look at him. We tried to build an empire on enlightenment, and failed. But we could build an empire on that. It would last for ten thousand years.’
Loken deactivated the zoom. ‘It would not be enough.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Don’t extrapolate. He’s always been in his own category.’
‘He’s an inspiration.’
‘Only to madmen.’
‘Then we will all become mad. If that’s what it takes.’
Loken shook his head. ‘This has been a mistake. You should come back with me. To safety.’
‘There’s no safety. There is only service. I can perform that better out here.’
‘You cannot be in earnest.’
She looked right back at him. Her body had been ravaged, worn away, but her expression hadn’t. It was just as it had been on the Vengeful Spirit.
‘I’m not going back. They need me. There are hundreds of thousands here, millions, in every basement and undercroft. It would be the work of a generation to kill them all, even for these monsters. But we can turn that time against them. Make the survivors forget their fear, teach them to hate. Teach them to venerate the god on the Throne, teach them that their life means nothing in isolation from it. Give them a symbol, give them a means to make fire.’ She smiled. ‘You see a single Sigismund, and your stomach revolts. I will give you a million Sigismunds. A billion. A universe full of them. If that scares you, imagine what it will do to the enemy.’
‘I do not believe that, Euphrati,’ Loken said carefully. ‘I believe, from what I know now, that the enemy would rejoice at it.’
Keeler laughed. ‘You saw what he was doing. I don’t think his opponent was laughing.’
‘I do not refer to the lackeys. I refer to the masters.’
Keeler wasn’t deterred. When she got an idea in her head, it was damned hard to shift. That, too, was just as it had been.
‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘I’m not going back. You can try to take me, and see just how potent my army has become, or you can stick around, and benefit from it.’
Loken doubted very much that her entourage posed much of a threat to him. He felt confident he could kill them all handily, disable her, take her under his arm just as that trooper had carried the child. He could bring her back to the Sanctum, to what remained of the prisons inside, and reset things to how they had been.
But what would that achieve? What victory would that be? Just another use of force to quash a rising threat, another iron fist to snuff out another spontaneous expression of defiance.
And this was her, the last link to that lost world of youth and endeavour. Some things you didn’t touch, not even to save them.
‘You’re not going to make this easy, are you?’ he said.
‘I didn’t ask for any of it,’ she countered. ‘They sent me out here.’
He turned away from the battles. Somewhere down there, a few kilometres away, the believers he had encountered were now, no doubt, being butchered.
‘I will remain with you,’ he said. ‘Maybe you will see sense, before it becomes too late.’
‘You know I won’t.’
‘I never lose hope,’ he said wearily. ‘That seems to have become my creed, at any rate.’
The run in was as hellish as it had always promised to be.
The lighter bucked and dived, sometimes as a result of John’s flying, sometimes after being hit and sent slewing off course. The impacts felt like small-arms fire, for the most part – lasguns aimed up at them as they speared overhead. A lot of those shots missed, but even a few clean strikes would start to cause serious trouble, so John worked the control columns hard, making the old lighter jump around like a kicked dog.
He sat alone in the cockpit, with the others all back in the crew hold, locked down tight in their restraints, no doubt gritting their teeth and waiting for it to be over. Once inside the city proper, visibility quickly dropped to near zero, and the scopes just gave him empty screens of static. The tilting remnants of the old towers lurched out of the gloom, and he burned in close to them, hugging the carcass-edges. He left the lumens off, making the craft virtually invisible in that thick, foul grime, and even the engine noise was almost entirely drowned by the ambient thunder of the continual barrages ahead. Still, it wouldn’t take much to be noticed by something capable of troubling them – a stray glance up into the smog, a functioning augur somewhere ahead – so John couldn’t relax, expecting at any moment to be detected, then swiftly destroyed.
Just the one life left, he thought to himself bitterly. Concentrates the mind.
For a long time, even after crossing the perimeter, the desolate cityscape remained strangely empty, as if the carnage had been so exacting that the place had been stripped down to hot stone. He spied scattered warbands amid the ash-thick chasms below, racing furtively from cover to cover, but no big formations. The skies, as far as he could see, were largely clear of aircraft, though the rows of downed fuselages at ground level were testament to the battles that had already taken place.
The biggest immediate challenge was the environment, which was punishing for the engines. Ash clogged everything, getting into the intakes, smearing over the external viewers, smacking hard all along the exposed armour plates. At times it felt like flying through solid matter, with the risk of blowing out the turbine-blades and sending the lighter spinning into the nearest intact spire-skeleton.
Just as John began to get used to that, he spied the first large detachments, filing down obscured pathways far below, thousands and thousands of them, moving fast. The soldiers veered like rats through the maze of ruins, some of them power-armoured monsters, many more just the mortal rabble caught up in the frenzy. He saw old banners, some probably dating back decades, all defaced, hoisted up at the head of endless ragged columns.
The further in the lighter went, the harder it became to avoid those concentrations. He was soon flying over sections where the ground was entirely obscured under a living carpet of bodies. Explosions lit up the surroundings intermittently, and then you could begin to gauge just how many there were down there – numbers beyond imagination, rammed up against the remains of walls and tower foundations, jostling with one another, fighting with one another, gasping for air even as they marched.
One tiny aircraft, flying erratically with its lights out, was not much of a target for any of them. From what John could tell, most of the troops looked to be in some kind of stupor, either stuffed full of combat drugs or just drunk on killing. The Traitor Marines among them carried bandoliers of skulls and empty helms around their shoulders, testament to how many they had already killed. In the distance, masked by the ever-present rolls of fog, he could see larger machines striding through the rubble – Knights, Imperial Army walkers, even Scout Titans. Those things weren’t even fighting yet, just trying to get to the front. The sheer volume of bodies in the increasingly confined spaces meant that it wasn’t easy to push on. The frequent outbreaks of brawls he witnessed came from frustration – these were the laggards, and they were frothing at the bit.
‘Are you seeing this, John?’ came Oll’s voice from back in the hold, where he was manning the secondary augurs.
‘Surreal,’ John replied grimly. ‘Like they’re queuing to get in.’
‘Any resistance yet?’
‘Nothing I’ve seen.’
He swerved around the still-burning bole of some kind of destroyed defence tower, then shot close under the lee of a semi-toppled habitation block. Targets kept flickering on his augur screens, disappearing as soon as they’d been picked up. He witnessed combat aircraft scoring their way northward a few times, far off, flying much higher, their bigger engines adding fresh tracks of night-black smog to the already filthy skies. Some were troop carriers; most were attack gunships, the last dregs of the gigantic forces that had opened the air assault, months back.
