Ashes of the Imperium: The Scouring, Book 1, page 16
Rogue memories intruded, blending with the eerie blankness around her until she half-believed she was back on Ursis again, sent tumbling through time, still young, still full of anger and conviction. She remembered the thrill of reading the tracts, and how persuasive the agents from off-world had been. And when the uprising came, it had been she herself who’d killed the manufactorum supervisor. She’d stuck the blade into the fat woman’s chin until it had punched out the back of her skull, bathing them both in blood, and she’d laughed, because she was free now. The violence was a part of it, part of the release. It was justified, sanctioned, and so she could revel in it. Every slaying from that moment on had felt like vindication. She had swapped mere existence for a life of vivid, revealed excess. Everywhere she looked, everything she touched, was blessed by gods of impeccable cruelty and perception. This was the nullification of despair, the reverse of decay. Not once did any of her actions trouble her, because you had to engage in such things if you wanted to redeem the galaxy. All the prophets said that.
The hours passed, and turned into more dreadful days. They continued to travel by night, and looked for refuge when the thin grey sun shone. The plains gave way to more forests, but these had all been burned – the charred trees stood like black, bare sentinels over a landscape of ash. The rumble of imminent thunder never ceased, but neither did it rain. It felt like the entire weather system was stalled somehow, blocked up and prevented from evolving as it should.
As they broke through the far side of the ash forest, the land opened up again, revealing more plains ahead, running down to a wide river valley. The soil was broken by impact craters, many of them dozens of metres across. A road snaked down towards the sluggish river’s edge some distance to their left, but the asphalt had been smashed up, either by munitions or just the passage of heavy military convoys. The distant water glimmered coldly in the night air, steaming gently as if made acidic. On the nearside shore, maybe a kilometre and a half distant, the black silhouettes of buildings clustered together.
Thalis crawled forward, placed magnoculars to his face, and studied it. After a while, he passed the instrument to Julatta.
‘Can’t see any movement. Could be deserted.’
Julatta took a look. Most of the buildings had been badly damaged, with huge gouges torn out of their flanks. The stone and rockcrete were black from fires, and rubble was strewn across the spaces in between. No lights shone. It had never been an important site, by the looks of it – just a way station on the river route towards bigger and better places. No doubt one of the Armada’s armies had crashed through it en route to somewhere else. She swivelled the view around. On the edge of the old settlement, out where the landscape gave way to mudflats, bodies were hanging from makeshift poles. The decomposition was advanced – they had been there for months, she guessed, and were now little more than ragged skeletons slowly falling apart.
‘Could be,’ she said. ‘Stripped bare, I think.’
‘We should check it out, though. We’re running low.’
He was right. The few supplies they’d taken from the gunship were now gone, and thirst had returned. These places had always been sparsely populated, so it was anyone’s guess when they might get another chance.
She scanned the ruins carefully, taking her time, watching for any movement at all. ‘We’ll go down.’
The troops reached for their weapons, and the diminished group crept cautiously down the long incline towards the settlement. They stayed close together, keeping their bodies low, tensed for any signs of life. Julatta and Thalis led them, using the cover of the many craters and zigzagging ever closer to the settlement’s edge. Every so often they’d stop, hunker down, wait, listen. Every time, they heard only the languid gurgle of the acid river and the dull boom of the clouds above.
They reached the first buildings, all little more than empty shells. Thalis gestured for his troops to follow him in. It was eerily quiet. Nothing moved, and the shadows lay thick in the gloom, like oil spilled across the dirt. Two larger buildings loomed up out of the darkness on the side of a rubbish-strewn courtyard, one of which looked to have its old doors still hanging. Julatta saw the Imperial symbol for the Munitorum supply corps over a lintel, and beckoned to Thalis.
‘That one,’ she whispered.
Thalis nodded, and they all moved towards it. Before they had got halfway across the courtyard, Julatta heard something stir.
‘Halt!’ she hissed, crouching down and bringing her laspistol up. The rest of them did the same, sweeping the muzzles of their weapons around.
For a moment, nothing changed. The empty facades of the buildings gazed back at them. The wind skittered through the wreckage.
Then, as silently as ghosts, figures emerged from the darkness. They came from all sides, first a few dozen, then more, until hundreds were around them. They were all baseline human, clad in rags, stick-thin. Even in the dark, Julatta could see that they were sick. Exposed patches of skin were a range of hues, from brown to grey; lips were covered in sores; eyes were weeping.
She froze. No one spoke. Her mind raced – were these creatures of the gods? Believers, like them, lost in the wilderness? Could they be reasoned with?
The expressions on their faces soon told her all she needed to know. No, they were not believers. They were wearing Imperial work-shifts and civil defence uniforms. Some had the aquila marked on their foreheads in what looked like ash. Others of them carried infants in their arms, hanging back but staring at the intruders with a cold, sullen hatred. Many of the rest held weapons. Crude things – wrenches, improvised machine-part blades, cudgels. No doubt these people had lived here for a long time. They had seen their world destroyed, their homes broken, their people slain. These were all who remained.
Thalis rose to his feet. He’d seen the same thing. One by one, the rest of them did the same. None of the townspeople had lasweapons, it looked like. That probably wouldn’t matter, given the numbers, unless they could be intimidated by a few well-placed shots.
Julatta addressed the man in front of her, who seemed as likely as any of the others to be their leader. ‘We just need supplies,’ she said, carefully. ‘Then we’ll go.’
He came closer. He made no attempt to guard himself. The look he gave her was one of pure, distilled hatred. When he spoke, the accent was so strong that she could barely understand the Gothic. She realised that this was the first time she’d heard a Terran native speak. All this way, all this anguish, and only now, when all was over, had she properly encountered the objects of Horus’ grand endeavour.
‘Why give you anything?’ he said. ‘You’ve already taken enough.’
‘If you fight us, more of you will die.’
The man laughed – an ugly snarl of a chuckle. ‘We’re dead already.’
He didn’t make a move, though. Why didn’t they attack? Were they scared to, for all their front? Then she realised the truth – they weren’t quite sure yet. Not completely. Julatta might almost have been one of them, by her looks, even more so Thalis and all his fighters. None of them still wore the markers of their allegiance – after so long in the wilds, they all appeared more or less the same as any other survivors. She glanced over at Thalis, who had clearly come to the same conclusion. It might be possible. Even now, they might be able to pass – claim to be loyal, attempt to hide the truth. He would want to do that. The deception would only have to be fleeting, just enough to get them past this ambush.
She smiled dryly. No. No, that would not do. If all the words she had spoken over the past seven years had not been entirely in vain, then there could be no deception. You might creep around on Terra for a few days, or weeks, or even months longer, but the end would be the same. Thalis was a good servant of the gods, but his hope was misplaced. Just as the Astartes had told her, this was the end now. She holstered her laspistol, reached into her jerkin and began to unwrap the witch’s sword.
‘Then you are still slaves of the Tyrant,’ she said, pulling herself up to her full height. It suddenly felt like the early days again, when crowds would cram themselves into the underground chambers to listen to her words of sedition. ‘Even now, when you have been shown your folly, you do not recant. Another way was shown to you. The path of truth. We fought across the stars to deliver it to you, and still you did not have the eyes to see it. Thus you are punished. Thus will all unbelievers be punished.’
She held the jewelled blade aloft, and its edge glinted strangely in the night air. Thalis whirled around at her, eyes wide with disbelief, but the crowd needed no encouragement. They rushed as one, men, women, even children, screaming now, driven by every atrocity and indignity they had endured. Thalis’ troops fired on them, as did those of her cult who had laspistols. A few of the Terrans went down, but not enough – soon they were all over them, kicking, lashing out, dragging bodies to the bloody dust. Julatta slashed once, twice, felling an assailant each time, but then a heavy fist smacked into her head from behind, and she staggered. A boot came in, a crack of something hard over her back. She sprawled in the dirt, face-first, and barely had the strength to roll over.
The man stood over her. In the darkness he looked towering, maleficent.
He crouched down, and she saw his face up close. Lined, marked with illness, coarse from labour, just like all the faces had been on Ursis. So little difference, for all that they came from opposite ends of the galaxy.
‘Death is too good for you!’ he spat at her. As he pulled his arm back for the blow, Julatta could see that his eyes were full of tears. She wondered how many souls he had lost. Family, friends, comrades – so many would have gone. This was more than anger. This was total despair, total humiliation. They had nothing left, all because of the inferno her actions had kindled for gods that had now fallen silent.
Before she realised it, her eyes spiked with tears too. She made no attempt to evade the strike.
‘I know,’ she breathed, as the cudgel came down.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When we talk of those times, we use terms that we recognise: Space Marines, Custodians, High Lords. It is natural, therefore, to assume that the nature of them is common between the two ages. It is not. All institutions were changed by that war. The Space Marines we venerate now, and rarely see, resemble their earlier brothers in form and function, but do not be fooled – they are new creations. The weapons and armour are much the same, as are some formations and tactical divisions, but crucial elements have undergone lasting transformation. Their minds are not what they were. Their dispositions are not what they were. Their imaginations, which beforehand were much as free as ours, have been curtailed. Their judgement on matters outside war has been limited. They are now both less and greater than the baseline human, a weapon forged solely against corruption. It was not always so, and yet history demanded the change. Too much blood had been shed, and too many had turned against their creator, for the old freedoms to be permitted. It happened quickly, this change, making use of protocols already in development within several separate institutions on Terra. There was no gradual progression, no slow evolution of the new type. Even as the last echoes of the Traitor’s demise ebbed through the wounded galaxy, the troops destined to replace their forefathers were being schooled and shaped into their new nature. Those who reconquered the galaxy would not, despite superficial similarities, be the ones who had first won it for humanity.
– Diomedon of Luna, A Study of the Reconstruction
It had become enjoyable again. To plan, to work, to engage. Archamus had always been a commander, and the gifts of command – to order, to cajole, to flatter, to threaten – had come naturally to him. He liked working with humans. He had liked it during the Siege itself, at least until the burden of it had gone beyond mortal tolerances. So now it was back to the old methods, the old patterns. The Legion had been battered beyond endurance, but still had resources. It had agents, many of whom were survivors of the final assault. It had prestige, it had clout, and – when all else failed – it had coin. The landscape of loyalty was confused, given the upheavals of the past year; so much needed to be stitched together again. Archamus sent his people out with orders to gather data – who was in control now, who was formulating plans, who was beginning to make the same kind of stealthy investigations into other sources of power. One consequence of recent events was that almost every surviving piece of the Imperial mosaic was present on Terra, from the most famous to the most obscure. Now that it looked likely they would each survive, they were already sharpening their claws in order to prosper. The old Palace warrens and mazes filled with chatter, with secret meetings, with dataslugs passed from palm to palm in the dark.
Once all his schemes had been set in motion, he made his way to one of the minor space ports back in operation, and took a Legion lifter up into orbit. As the craft boosted clear of the stage, he leaned back in his seat and took a look out of the viewport. The Palace spread out below him, rapidly falling away as the lifter gained altitude. The scale of the damage, so evident close up, was even more striking from above. The inward passage of the traitor armies could clearly be seen – enormous black-edged gouges worming their way from the devastation of the high plains into the remains of the old walls. The fires were out now, leaving vast tracts of ash-grey wastes slowly cooling under the weak sunlight. The dome of the Inner Sanctum, which had once been just one pinnacle of thousands, was virtually the only large structure still standing – everything else was either ruined or on the edge of being so, propped up by forests of scaffolding and new construction.
Then the clouds swallowed them, and the lifter battled against ferocious turbulence. Once they were free of the last of the tortured atmosphere, the void opened up around them, glittering with its millions of points of light from both the endless starfield and the debris clusters that now ringed the planet. Despite the pilots’ best efforts, the lifter was smacked and clunked by chunks of spinning adamantine as it pushed up higher – clean-up operations had begun, they had told him, but getting the orbital zone free from wreckage would be the work of decades.
The lifter changed course just as the heavy profile of Imperial battleships began to swell into view. Most of those ships were Ultramarines, of course, but here and there other Legion colours were interspersed among them, all bearing signs of extensive damage. Their flanks fizzed with the activities of remote enginseer teams, strung out on chain-linked platforms and buzzing with clouds of servo-skulls.
‘Docking sequence commenced, lord,’ announced the lead pilot, as the lifter tilted and swung through the formations of voidships.
And then he saw it – the pride of the Legion, the jewel of the fleet. The Phalanx had always been a dominating presence, and even in its semi-ruin it made everything else around it look almost insignificant. It was colossal, truly colossal, looming up out of the night in a seemingly never-ending sequence of towers and pinnacles and gun batteries and galleries, its ancient thrusters burning a dull red, its majestic flanks soaring like the naves of stacked cathedrals, one atop the other, going on and on until the finials seemed to merge into the void itself. Smog banks from its mighty outtakes billowed like incense, wreathing it in a haze of sacred pollution. And yet it was wounded, terribly so, with half its grand faces ripped open to the vacuum, its gun ranks burned out, its high domes as cracked and gaping as those crowning the Sanctum itself. Whole swarms of Mechanicus void-adepts buzzed and flitted around its scaffolded extremities, encasing the gashes in layers of protective bracing and stasis fields. Entire clades of tech-priests had been assigned to that mission, hauling thousands of workers and servitors from other essential functions. Dorn himself must have ordered that, given the many other demands on their attention. He would not have let his prized citadel slip away from him, not when so much else had been lost.
The lifter slipped under the shadow of the void-station’s mighty prows, disappearing into a dark underbelly of metallic stalactites, before pulling inside one of the many receiving hangars. The clang of the docking claws followed, the doors slid open, and then Archamus was breathing the air of his people again – their own space, their own aromas, their own sigils, their own sounds and visual language.
I remain a son of Dorn yet, he thought to himself as he strode up into the innards of the station, surprising himself by how much he had missed it all. They had been mongrels for so long, fighting alongside those of other worlds, with other tongues and other doctrines, all thrown together by fate, that he had almost forgotten what it was to be on an Imperial Fists installation, surrounded by the gold and black, the strict orders of hierarchy, the stripped-back, martial aesthetics.
He took no escort, knowing the way well enough. Soon he was up into the inhabited regions, the chambers ringing with activity. Some of that was the ever-present physical rebuilding, but other forms of reconstruction were taking place too. As he walked across a high walkway spanning a cavernous hall below, he peered over the railing to take a good look.
The hall had been divided into many chambers, all roofless and relentlessly scanned by servo-skulls and remote picter drones. Aspirants were being drilled by Legion serfs. All were male children, none more than eleven or twelve standard years old. Some might have been taken from Terra, but others had physiques and pigmentation suggesting other worlds, ones plundered by the Imperium as it retreated in haste across the galaxy. They all wore training jerkins, revealing scars from both fighting and surgery – most had already had their first set of organ implants. As a result, their bodies were oddly proportioned, with rapid muscle growth over skeletons yet to adjust. The movements in the sparring chambers were clumsy, ill-aimed, but nonetheless far more powerful and more rapid than any non-adjusted human would have been capable of. They were learning, rapidly, painfully, to make use of what they had been given. In a few more years, with more procedures and longer training, they would be formidable. It couldn’t take as long as it used to – the thirst for soldiers was relentless.
