Warhawk, p.6
Warhawk, page 6
Shiban Khan stood up. He extended his right arm, then his left. He tested the reactions of his power armour, the interface with his muscles, paying particular attention to where those muscles were bundles of Martian metalwork rather than products of Terran genecraft. He walked, just a few paces across the stone floor, letting the weight of the battleplate test his still-raw wounds.
He was recovering quickly. Part of that was his Astartes physiology, part of it was the superior augmetics he’d been given on his return to Terra. He was hard to kill. He always had been. Not as great a warrior as Hasik or Jemulan, to be sure. Certainly not in the class of Qin Xa or Jubal. But they were gone, all of those names, swept away by this murderous war. Somehow, he was still intact, his wounds knitting up, his weapons reconditioned, ready to go again.
Withdraw, then return, he thought.
The chamber was a small one – windowless, buried deep in one of Colossi’s many thick towers. Even so, he could feel the thrum of constant bombardment resonating up from the floor, making the slabbed stone walls shiver. The lumens blinked every so often when a big hit came in, and dust trickled from the whitewashed ceiling.
His knowledge of the wider battle was incomplete. The last he’d known, Colossi was where the Khagan had chosen to make his stand, and where much of the ordu’s strength had been gathered. Clearly, for the time being, that defence had succeeded. Marmax, too, was in the defenders’ hands, though the situation there had felt precarious in the extreme. Beyond that, he had little certainty. His long trudge through the outer wastelands, territory lost to the enemy, had shown him only what depravities waited for them all, should they fail here – it had been a desperate place, a fog-wreathed swamp where only the corrupted could linger.
The Eternity Wall space port was like that now, in all probability, for this enemy did not merely occupy territory – they changed it, twisted it, made it an incubator for their perversions. The bodies of those who had fallen at Eternity would be sunk deep into the warp-sick muck by now, denied an honourable burial or – for the White Scars among them – the rites of kal damarg.
He could so easily slip into hatred, for that. He had flirted with it, during the long years of the fighting to get back to Terra, his soul ravaged by the constant losses, but never quite given in. Nothing could ever be as carefree as it had been for them on the White World, back when the only enemy had been xenos, but if Yesugei had taught them anything at all, it was that the greatest failure was to lose yourself, the core of your being, the essence of the thing.
So he guarded it carefully now. Maintain the balance, remember that war is an art, treat it like the curve of a brush on paper. The Legion was not quite extinguished, and its numbers had been swelled by those hastily inducted into the ranks, neither Chogorian nor Terran, but gathered up and made use of from a dozen worlds before being thrown into the furnace here. They would need guidance, if they were not to fall into the trap that he himself had danced around. In the absence of the giants of the past, the ones who had forged the Legion in its infancy, they would still need schooling.
He didn’t feel like an exemplar. Perhaps, just after Prospero, when many had been clamouring for him to assume greater influence, he might have seized the chance, but the injuries just then had been so great, so debilitating, and after that the poison of betrayal had soured everything for too long. It had always been the Khagan’s choice to make, and Jubal had been the right one.
So what did it mean, then, to be the last one standing? Was there any particular honour in that, or were the flaws all still there, ready to be exposed in the final analysis?
It would have been good to speak to Ilya about it, though he doubted if it would be possible now. He didn’t even know where she was – not here, at the front, surely. But just then the chamber door opened, as if prompted by the very thought of her.
It wasn’t Ilya, of course – fate was never quite that neat. Stooping, as he always had to in these fortresses built for baseline humans, the Warhawk of Chogoris, Jaghatai Khan, his primarch, came inside.
Shiban bowed low. ‘Khagan,’ he said simply.
The Great Khan appraised him. ‘You seem better, Tachseer. I’m glad of it. Welcome back.’
‘Thank you.’
There had been a time when Shiban had been so eager to lay eyes on the Great Khan that he’d have fought his way across half a planet to be there. Jaghatai had been a force of the universe then, something to marvel at as much as to serve. In some ways, Shiban still felt the same way – the devotion was just as strong – but the endless conflict had ground away at all of them, and even Jaghatai had not been spared. He had always been lean; now he looked rangy. He had always spoken softly; now his voice was hoarse. Something had changed in him after Catullus – he was not diminished in raw power, as far as anyone could have gauged, but there was something colder in him now, something frozen. His ivory warplate was chipped, the gold lining had faded. His hair was loose and hung lank against his copper skin. The scar on his cheek seemed darker, more like a birthmark than something he’d cut himself.
The Khan looked around the sparse chamber – the narrow cot, the table, the chair, the comms-box and the sensor-jammer. ‘I never truly thought you’d died,’ he said.
Shiban raised an eyebrow. ‘Then you had more faith than I did. Some of the time, at least.’
‘I’ve begun to recognise the signs. The way I feel, before a soul of my people is lost.’ He smiled thinly. ‘So many gone now, I’ve had the practice.’
‘But Colossi holds. I didn’t know if you’d still be here.’
‘We won’t be. Not for long.’ Then the Khan stirred himself, drew in a long breath, shook off his torpor. ‘Tell me of the Eternity Wall port.’
Shiban recounted how it had been – the overwhelming assault, the gradual wearing down of the defences, the progress of the resistance, the price they had exacted from the enemy before the outer gates had finally fallen. He spoke quickly, precisely, giving only the information his master would wish to know. ‘At the end, we were trying to use the port’s tugs, to turn the drives into weapons. That was what kept me away from the final assault, as well as what launched me away from the fighting. The last thing I remember, after being hit, was striking the outer edge at speed. I woke up somewhere to the south of the curtain wall, I think. Then it was just a matter of finding a path back.’
The Khan nodded. ‘Just a matter. My guess is there’s a story in that, all of its own.’ He had been staring down at his clasped hands, and now looked up. ‘But I’m proud. Truly, I am. We needed a representative there, someone to remind my brother just what we contribute to his endeavours. I never believed in ceding the ports. I would have fought for longer at the Lion’s Gate platforms, but at least we learned our lesson from that.’
‘Maybe we should have done.’
‘But we did.’
Shiban hesitated, unsure how to respond to that. The words confused him. Could it be true? Had his master truly not known? In some ways, that made things easier. In others, far more difficult.
‘Then, you…’ he began. ‘You believe we were meant to hold it?’
‘Of course. You did what you could.’
‘You and the Lord Dorn both?’
Jaghatai’s dark eyes pinned him. ‘What are you trying to say, Shiban?’
It would have been impossible to conceal anything from his gene-father, even if he’d been minded to try. Still, trying to find the words, to determine how to break this painful truth, that was tortuous.
‘I may have been wrong,’ he said weakly. ‘That is always possible. But I spoke to Niborran, the commander. He made things as plain as they were ever likely to be.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Eternity Wall space port was allowed to fall. It could never have been held, not with what we were given.’
‘No. If that had been true, you would have been evacuated.’
‘We couldn’t have been. The enemy had to believe we were fixed on keeping it. Eyes had to be focused on it, to prevent them from lighting somewhere else.’
Shiban remembered then how he had first felt, knowing that truth. It hadn’t been so bad, back then – dying in battle, for whatever reason, was something that would come to all of them, sooner or later. Trying to reconstruct it all now, though, after all the deaths – that was miserable.
‘I don’t know what it was. Some other front, some other gambit. But, when I went up for the tugs, to buy us a little more time, I did so knowing that it wouldn’t be anything other than a stalling of the inevitable. I never expected to come back. None of us did. That was what a few of us learned. We were sent there to die, my Khan. It was a ruse.’
For a moment, a single moment that felt everlasting, Jaghatai said nothing. His scarred face remained rigid, digesting that. His lips remained sealed. Shiban suddenly remembered how the primarch had been during the Legion trials, when he had wielded the blade against those of his own people who had been tempted by Horus, and had been more deeply wounded than any of those he had passed judgement on.
‘The bastard,’ the Khan breathed softly. His eyes darkened. The mournful look hardened quickly into anger. ‘The lying, deceitful bastard.’ He turned away, fists now clenched, looking suddenly, alarmingly, as if he might tear the entire chamber apart. ‘He looked me in the eye. He stood right before me, closer than you are now, and lied. What did he think? That I’d blow his secret? That I’d prevent him? Damned right, I would have.’
Shiban almost had to suppress a smile then – not from amusement, but from a kind of relief. His primarch was still a force of the universe, after all – still as alive and passionate and fiercely protective as he had ever been.
‘They should have been told. You should have been told.’ The Khan shook his head in furious disbelief. ‘A warrior may sell his life for a cause, but he must know. When we created the sagyar mazan, we never lied to them. That foul habit is what got us into this damned mess in the first place – thinking the truth was something to be kept under wraps, to be hidden from those who did the work.’
‘If we had known,’ Shiban offered carefully, ‘the truth would have got out. The gambit would have failed.’
‘You really think that? You trust those you fight alongside so little, even now?’ Jaghatai’s lip curled in disdain. ‘Since this thing began, I’ve seen baseline detachments face up to horrors they had no business even being in the same galaxy with. I’ve seen them stand up, keep their weapons straight, stare down their own annihilation. Soul of the Altak, they have schooled us all. They should have been told.’
Slowly, the Khan brought himself under control, though anger still simmered under every gesture. He slumped back against the far wall, his long arms slack against the rockcrete. His chin sank against his chest.
Silence fell across the chamber again, and Shiban knew better than to break it.
The next thing he heard was unexpected – a low, sourly amused laugh.
‘But then, what kind of example am I, really?’ the Khan murmured. ‘My brother does what he has to. He cannot break his nature, any more than I could. I understand some things better now.’ His lips twitched into a wry smile. ‘He was right, of course. Saturnine, I’m guessing. That does not make it any less contemptible, but I am sure he was right.’ He pushed back from the wall, stood tall again. ‘And I was always indulged beyond belief, you know that? Rogal spent his life denying himself everything, curbing every urge that might have actually given him some kind of joy, and all that while we were given our head, cut loose, treating an order from the Throne like it was some kind of insult.’
‘We were true to our nature.’
‘We were lucky. And we were selfish.’ His expression became darker again. ‘So this is where we make amends for that. The cost has been too high already, and there are more payments to come, but now I am angry, I am furious, for no one has been listening, even while the source of our sickness is as plain as the scar on your face. If we fail to act now, we will die behind these walls, another wasted defence, and that cannot be borne, for wherever and whenever I am destined to meet my end, it will not be behind a damned wall.’
It was good to hear such words. Even if the Khan’s anger was colder than it had been, less joyous and harder-edged, it was still magnificent to behold.
‘Then you will call kurultai,’ Shiban said. ‘You will summon the khans.’
‘The call has already gone out,’ the Khan said. ‘Not just to the Legion. To anyone, anything, that can help us.’ He grinned then, the old expression of dangerous anticipation. ‘Which makes me glad you are back in time to join us, Tachseer. The hunt has been called. It will need its masters.’
It was still a city. You had to remember that. Millions of people still lived here, crammed up against one another, terrified, doing their best to stay alive as the tides of unreality crashed against the faltering barricades. Many, perhaps even most, were no sort of warrior at all. They were the scribes, the administrators, the operatives and the civil servants who had come here first to govern an empire. Nestled up against those were the refugees from the Outer Palace and the sprawl beyond, who were far too diverse to classify, and had now merged into the already crowded tenements and spire trunks, starving, terrified.
Ilya Ravallion watched the immense, interlocked buildings pass by in the night. The sky above her was lurid, inked both by the orbital assault against the shields and the closer explosions of terrestrial artillery. The few remaining street-lumens strobed and guttered. It was all filthy, coated with ash, piled up with rubbish that could not be collected. They were hemmed in, a sealed system now, surrounded on all sides.
She leaned against the condensation-fogged window on her armoured transport, watching the narrow streets slide through the darkness. Crowds were everywhere. Troops ran and shouted. Administratum vehicles occasionally nudged their way through the clogged-up transitways, sirens wailing, some of them grav-plate skimmers, most old-model groundcars. If you looked carefully, you could catch snippets of more mundane forms of life in the gaps between the urgent war-business – queues for rations, huddles around burning promethium canisters, children in rags scuttling through the legs of the adults. You could see arguments, fist fights, couples holding on to one another desperately, glass-eyed loners stumbling amid the refuse. Despite the universe ending around them, they were still doing what they had to. They had to eat. They had to keep warm. They still squabbled over their place in the ration-lines, bickered about whether they should have taken that shuttle off-world four years ago when there had still been time, wondered if their overseer position at the tooling works would still be secure by this time next month.
This time next month. That made her smile.
It had taken humanity two centuries to spill out from Terra and smother the entire galaxy with its hubris. It had taken seven years for it to contract again, pulling all of that reckless energy back to a single city on a single world. Now, only days remained before it would all be over, one way or another. The few comms-bursts she managed to get from the Legion command indicated that the Mercury Wall had been breached, less than a hundred and sixty kilometres to the north-east. The war had been uncomfortably close to these citizens for weeks; soon it would be rammed down their throats, surging up every thoroughfare and through every hab-cluster.
But Ilya was not much different to all those scared souls, she knew. The long fight to bring the V Legion home had hollowed her out. She had been near the end of a distinguished career at the start of the war, and the privations of the extended void campaign had done the rest. She didn’t have any of the advantages of the Space Marines she worked alongside. They still deferred to her, called her szu-Ilya – even more so than before, especially the newbloods – but it had almost become irritating now, because she was so obviously dying, just like this world, just like the Imperium, and there was no real point in any of it any more.
They wouldn’t change, though. You had to love them for that. All the daemon-terrors of the species’ nightmares could be pouring through the air vents and scrabbling at everyone’s throats, and there would still be a White Scar on hand to ask if, szu, are you most well? Is there anything you are in need of? Can I be of any assistance?
‘We are almost there, szu,’ said her driver, right on cue. ‘Commencing descent to yard two-forty-one.’
The speaker was one of the ordu, a warrior named Sojuk. Such experienced fighters were like gold dust at the front right now, but still the Khagan had insisted on her being accompanied on her mission by a full battle-brother. When she’d protested, insisting that a standard Imperial Army escort would be sufficient so far back from the main combat zones, he’d fixed her with that heavy, unarguable stare of his, and said, ‘It’ll all be engulfed soon. Just take him.’
So she had. Now she was glad of it. The Inner Palace felt more dangerous than she’d ever known it, suffused with an air of mania that got under the skin, and having Sojuk at her side was a comfort. It was hard to pinpoint exactly what was going wrong. Civilians in warzones often panicked, but this was different. It was almost as if they’d begun to give up entirely, their vital spirits drained out of them by some vile, unseen miasma.
‘Very good,’ she said, adjusting her uniform jacket, glancing in the rear-view mirror to check her appearance, tucking in a stray wisp of grey hair. She was very thin now. However old and useless she felt these days, though, you had to look the part – sharp, together. ‘Bring us down.’
The transport swerved off the main transitway and trundled down a shallow rockcrete slope. A pair of heavy blast doors drew up, manned by sentries and gloomy under low lighting. Sojuk spoke briefly to the senior guard, and a moment later the doors were hoisted up, revealing a wide tunnel running further down below ground level.
Sojuk travelled another few hundred metres before the incline brought them out into a subterranean cavern, sunk deep into the solid bedrock of the city foundations. The air smelled strongly of exhaust fumes, and the space echoed with the ringing clang of power tools. He drew the transport up at a vacant berth, killed the engine, dismounted, and opened the door for Ilya. She stepped out, feeling her muscles ache, and looked around.
