Warhawk, p.8
Warhawk, page 8
‘Look at this.’
Jangsai opened up a lithcaster, and a spectral map of the eastern warzone spiralled into shaky life over his open palm. It was marked with a trajectory vector. Nuta took it all in, snorted, and shook his head.
‘Impossible.’
‘You didn’t study it for long.’
‘East of the Ultimate Gate? This thing doesn’t have any teeth left. What good would it do out there? They’ve got Titans walking west of the space port now, they tell me, and, in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re a hard target to miss.’
‘Also hard to bring down.’
Nuta laughed humourlessly. ‘To what end, though? Eh? To what end?’ He rubbed his temples, making his skin crease. He looked exhausted. ‘I was ordered here by the Lord Dorn. To eke out the last of our useful existence while we could. Unless I hear from him to the contrary, that’s what I plan to do.’
‘This comes from Lord Jaghatai, of the Fifth.’
‘Last time I checked, Lord Dorn was in overall command.’
Jangsai felt irritation rise up, and quelled it. This man was one of very few left – perhaps the only one, now – who understood fully how to operate an orbital plate. When Naranbaatar had tasked him with this mission, he’d felt a similar irritation. The fact that he hailed from the same world as this man should have made no difference, not in the Imperium of Unity where the only mark of allegiance was membership of the species, and to have it suggested that, in this case, a pre-ascension heritage might carry any kind of importance was almost something he could have been offended by.
But this was, clearly, no longer the Imperium of Unity. The spiritual sickness was everywhere now, dragging everything down, making good men and women weak and querulous. In such times, given such stakes, a warrior made use of every weapon to hand.
‘So what commune were you raised in?’ Jangsai asked.
Nuta blinked, surprised. ‘Which what, now?’
‘Which commune? Uyani, I’d say, by the way you pronounce your Gothic.’
Nuta chuckled. ‘Well, then. Either you’re very well prepared, or you’re a Rijan White Scar. I didn’t think such things were possible.’
‘Most things are possible, if you put your mind to them.’ Jangsai was not wearing his helm, but most of the giveaway signs of his original heritage had been overlaid with the heavy musculature and gene-imprint of the V Legion, so Nuta could be forgiven his surprise. ‘I was born on Gyuto, and I do not recall all the Dictates from your commune. Ours were derived from Praefectora Talyi, a heritage you would consider less than reliable, and anyway I was a child then. But I do know of one Dictate, one that stuck in my mind, and I am sure it was from the Uyani thought-strain. Tell me if I have it right – the traveller is the one who takes his truth with him into strange lands. The moment he forgets his truth, he ceases to be a traveller, and becomes the strange land.’
Nuta blinked again. This time, though, it was not from surprise, and his eyes glistened. ‘Ah, Throne. I never thought I’d hear the Dictates again. Least of all here, on this terrible world.’
‘What was your truth, commander?’
‘That I had command of this thing. That I had worked for it, and that I deserved it. That I would use it to give honour to my commune, to my home world. To the Imperium.’
‘You are not a part of this terrible world yet, commander. You can still do all of that.’
Nuta looked rueful. ‘No guns left. No supplies left.’
‘Did I ask you for any? I only asked that you move the plate.’
‘And what good will that do?’
He was still resisting, but the tone had changed. He wanted to be told now, to be reminded of who he had once been, and where his old ambitions had once taken him, and how he could recover all of that. Not that Jangsai had ever thought it, but Naranbaatar was no one’s fool.
‘So listen now with your whole mind and soul,’ said Jangsai, adopting the litany-rhythms of the praefectoras. ‘This is what the Khagan wishes you to do.’
The sword
The saint
The sinner
So he knew what he had to do.
Sigismund jogged down the corridor, his heavy armour clanking on the metal deck. Alarms were going off everywhere, resonating down the maze of interlocking passageways. The few active lumens were shaking on their chains now, rocked by the volume of ordnance slamming into the fringes of the Mercury urban zone. Fafnir Rann came with him, as did his brothers of the Templar order – not at full tilt yet, their gait heavy and purposeful. Their black-and-white plate was hard to pick out in the flickering light, like ghost-edged shadows, glinting from the chains that held their weapons.
Since leaving Shard Bastion, Sigismund had done a hundred things. He had given unit commanders their orders. He had despatched reserve companies to their stations. He had enacted destruction plans for key bridges leading into the city core. He had chosen battle-brothers of the Legion to lead counter-attacks, measuring each threat against the characters of the warriors in question. It was nothing he hadn’t been doing since taking part in the defence of the Lion’s Gate space port, except that now there was no deferral, not to Rann, not to his primarch. He had sole command.
And it was glorious. He couldn’t lie to himself – this was the moment he had been yearning for. The words of his gene-father still echoed in his ears – the leash is off. For so long it had felt like he had been compromising, holding back, second-guessing every decision he made lest it somehow worsened the censure he’d been operating under. In the past, during the Crusade, there had been none of that, only certainty. That was what he had always thrived on, the surety of purpose, the absence of choices or hesitation. It was what had made him so deadly, and he had revelled in it, fully aware of what other warriors in other Legions had said of him. He had duelled them all, and beaten them all, and taken a pure martial pleasure in every moment of it – not in the disgrace of his opponents, mind, but rather in the edging closer to total mastery, to the knowledge that there was nothing more to learn or discover, and then he could simply exist in that truth, as an aspect of it, as a face of it.
He had always wanted the world to be just like that – no doubts, no lingering areas of hesitation or equivocation, just action, purity of will and deed, the knowledge that whatever he did could never be, and could never have been, otherwise. From the first day of this rebellion, everything had shaken that single-mindedness. The things he had relied on with total surety had proven to be illusory and weak, and things he had thought of as being fictive and simple-minded had proved to have unexpected power. He had been forced to recalibrate, to reorientate. As every sword-brother knew, the time of greatest weakness was during the correction of a defective technique. He had started to fight… and lose. He had faced Horus Aximand and had been made to withdraw. He had faced Khârn, whom he had not yet been able to bring himself to hate fully, and been beaten. He had even taken on a primarch. Had that been hubris? Or just frustration, a desperate bid to recover his now-so-elusive sense of superiority? If he had somehow done the impossible and bested Fulgrim, would that have finally banished the whispers of doubt?
Probably not. The fault had never been external, he knew now – it had always been within him, slowly metastasising, becoming impassable the longer he ignored it. He had needed to hear Dorn’s words of release to understand it. They had, all of them, been fighting with one hand behind their backs, trying to hold on to a dream that had already died. The enemy was utterly changed now. They were physically stronger and morally intoxicated, eagerly drinking up gifts that should have been shunned as poison. And yet, those who remained loyal had tried to cling on to what they had been at the very start. They had still mouthed pieties about Unity and the Imperial Truth long after fealty to such virtues had become impossible. Once he grasped that, once he faced up to it, he had what he needed to remove the fetters in his mind.
I no longer fight for the Imperium that was, he told himself. I fight for the Imperium as it will become.
So now, as he neared the exit ramps, the portals that would take him out into the night of fire and blood, all he felt was eagerness. Everything that had held him back had been destroyed, burned away, immolated in the consuming fire of this certainty.
But at the inner barbican entrance, just before the last of the sealed gates, he saw troops waiting for him, lots of them. They were heavily decked out in arcane armour patterns he didn’t recognise – dark green, smooth-faced, lined with gold. As Sigismund motioned for his escort to come to a halt, their leader made the aquila. The man flipped back his helm, which folded up and withdrew into the armour’s collar-array in a sliding series of servo-motions. The face it revealed was slim, dark-skinned, dark-haired, with the Sigillite’s mark prominent on one cheek.
‘Battle calls, adept,’ Rann growled, clearly unwilling to have the squad’s momentum halted. ‘Stand aside.’
The man bowed in apology, but addressed Sigismund directly. ‘I have been seeking you for some time, First Captain. Khalid Hassan, Chosen of the Sigillite, operating on my master’s behalf. This will take but a moment.’
He gestured, and one of his soldiers brought up a weapon. The trooper held it two-handed, cumbersomely, barely able to keep it aloft despite wearing what looked to be a kind of power armour. It was a sword, still in its scabbard, far too large for a baseline human ever to have wielded.
As soon as Sigismund laid eyes on it, a faint shiver passed through his body. He almost thought he heard something emanate from it – a faint murmuring, unquiet and veiled. The body language of the man who held it up gave away what he thought of it – he was desperate to be shot of it.
‘What is that?’ Sigismund asked, doubtfully.
‘A gift,’ Hassan replied. ‘From my master’s own repository. Forged a long time ago, when the world was a different place.’
Sigismund found it hard to take his eyes off the blade. He could sense immediately, even before it was drawn, that it was beautifully made. Everything about it – its size, its profile, the fine gold-and-black decoration that ran from tip to guard – screamed of excess, of extremity.
‘I have a blade.’
‘You have a blade. This is the blade.’
‘Then give it to someone who wants it.’
‘It is for you.’
‘Who says it?’
‘The Emperor.’
Sigismund found himself gazing at the black hilt. He had to make an effort not to reach out and seize it. The damned thing was seducing him. A mingled sense of revulsion and awe froze him in place. ‘He speaks not.’
‘You truly believe that? The sword is yours. It has always been yours.’
Rann laughed harshly. ‘Witchery.’
‘Nothing further from it,’ said Hassan, never taking his eyes off Sigismund. ‘The hour is come. Take it.’
As if in some kind of trance, almost without meaning to, Sigismund did so. As he grasped the hilt, a shiver ran up his arm. He took the rim of the scabbard, and drew the blade smoothly. The metal was as black as jet, hardly reflecting the lumens. He lifted it to his face, and saw nothing. The surface drank in light, giving nothing back. It was selfish, this thing.
‘Why me?’ he asked, almost for the sake of form. Now that he had it in his hands, he sensed the truth of it all.
‘I have no idea,’ said Hassan, smiling wryly. ‘My orders were only to deliver it.’
Sigismund angled it, turned it, switched it to horizontal and looked down the blade’s length.
Heavy. Far heavier than any sword he had borne before, but something told him it wouldn’t slow him down. Its weight was just another aspect of its savage nature. The murmuring carried on, just beyond the edge of hearing, almost intelligible as he swiped it in practice arcs. It might have been his imagination. It wasn’t his imagination.
‘It has been here, all this time,’ he murmured.
‘Many ancient things are guarded in my master’s chambers.’
‘No, you do not understand me.’ Sigismund finally looked up at Hassan again. ‘When we went into the void, preaching the end of magic, this thing was already here. It had already been made. By Him. What does that tell you?’
Hassan shrugged. ‘I’m not minded to speculate.’
Sigismund laughed. With a deft movement, he unchained his old blade and handed it over to Rann. Then he shackled the black sword’s grip, and locked the scabbard at his belt. ‘Well, you are fortunate that it pleases me. Give my thanks to your master, and tell him that it suits my new mood.’
‘I will. And what mood would that be, captain?’
Sigismund moved past him. He could smell the promethium even before he crossed the threshold.
‘Murderous,’ he growled, and started to accelerate up the exit ramp.
Running, always running now, scampering into culverts and cubby holes, clamping her hands to her ears to muffle the stomach-churning bangs, wrapping rags around her mouth to stop her breathing in nothing but brick dust.
Euphrati Keeler fled from hideout to hideout, bedraggled as a half-drowned dog, barely able to pause for a moment to think properly about why she was there at all, back in the thick of things. It had been safer – sort of – in the Blackstone. At least in there she hadn’t had to zigzag across mortar-blown streets as the undermined walls around her were blasted apart. Dealing with monsters like Fo had been intimidating in its own way, but at least she’d been fed and watered in there, given a data-slate to work with, something to fill the hours. And after the trauma of the escape itself there had been more trials, more horrors to witness. Some encounters – one in particular – she could hardly bear to recall.
What had she been thinking? Why had she let them persuade her that it was a good idea to leave? It had all gone predictably wrong so quickly – a confusion of guns and transports, shouting and screaming, the spark of pure terror. Then she’d just run, run hard, never working out what had come after her, never looking back to check. She’d outpaced those faceless hunters, but now whole armies of killers were everywhere, swarming through the city-palace like flies. She’d be lucky to last a day or two out here. She didn’t even really understand why they’d ever tried to get her out.
Just don’t preach, they’d said. It’s you that’s important. So don’t preach. Just… be there.
At the time, it had been a way out, sent to her as if by providence, and she’d not argued, because you didn’t argue with providence. You let the river take you where it would, turning and kicking in the gyres, but never resisting. You had to trust that the current was taking you in the direction it was meant to, otherwise what was the point?
She scuttled across the face of a wide impact crater, skipping through the debris of something huge and metallic, before skidding under the shadow of an intact hab-block. The eternal night sky above her was lurid with the splash-patterns of munitions hitting the defensive aegis, underscored by the ground-mounted guns that were now being deployed liberally within the suspended barrier. It was so loud now, all the time, a tidal-wall of noise that crashed and reverberated from every intact surface, making her arms vibrate, making her teeth throb.
She crouched down, arms around her knees, panting hard. She was wearing nothing more than the prison fatigues they’d given her in the Blackstone, but she was still hot. The volume of explosives going off had made the Himalazian air as humid as the tropics, and slicks of sweat stained her tunic-top.
She had to rest there, just for a moment, despite the obvious danger. She had no idea which zone of the city this was, but the enemy was advancing through it, or close to it, because crowds of people had already surged back the other way, panicked as rats from a fire. Like everywhere in the beleaguered Inner Palace, the press of high buildings was close. The unlit towers around her were all massive, but half of them were mere shells now, and the rest had all sustained fearful damage. There was nowhere for all that disintegrated rockcrete and steel to go, so the transitways choked up, and even the flimsiest remaining frontages were propped with piles of rubble. It seemed to her that all the enemy was doing was creating a denser, more tortuous landscape to eventually bludgeon their way through, though millions of souls were probably still hunkered down in the semi-demolished husks around her, hidden from view or buried deep, gnawing at their own terror in the munition-lit dark.
She wormed her way backwards, pushing between two heavy beams that had come down from some shot-to-pieces balcony, letting the metal cool her skin. She was hungry now, and very thirsty. She’d have to move off again soon, if only to find something to drink. She had no plan, no direction. It would only take one stray mortar or las-beam, and she’d be gone, snuffed out, with nothing achieved.
Well played, Euphrati, she thought to herself. You’ve really excelled yourself this time.
It felt strange, despite everything going on just then, to think that somewhere up above her, probably at high orbital anchor, was the Vengeful Spirit. It had been years now since she’d been on that ship, but the memories were still so vivid that it felt like moments ago. She knew enough of the enemy to doubt whether any of the dorms and mess halls and recreation stations were anything like they had used to be, but she could still vividly picture how they had once been, with the civilians and the regular ship crew jostling up alongside the transhuman giants and Army personnel – good-humoured, for the most part, full of optimism, free to jibe and dispute, yet part of something, an endeavour, all pulling in the same basic direction.
That little band of explorers was diminished now. They had all been so young. Like children, really, sent off to caper around the galaxy, wide-eyed and ignorant. Mersadie was gone, Ignace was gone. Kyril still pursued something like his old trade, though it was so compromised that it bore little relation to what he’d once been proud to do. Did he really think that Dorn wouldn’t just yank the leash back, if he somehow prevailed in this desperate scrap for survival? The idea that they had been there to freely observe, record, report – that was dead now, and Sindermann surely knew it, deep down, in some part of his soul that he didn’t look at very often. She wondered what, exactly, he thought he was up to.
