The Silent King, page 32
‘The man you told me of is there?’
‘In quarantine. I would not waste your time with nonsense, I swear by the Throne,’ he said miserably.
He showed her to a run of steps that went under the ground. They were of plascrete, and clean. At the bottom a heavy plasteel door closed the way. A pump ran quietly at the side, keeping water out. She ordered her squad to a halt.
‘Pray with these men,’ she told them. ‘Go among them. Bless them. Remind them of their duty to the saviour of mankind. Recall their spirits to their bodies, the strength to their limbs. Lead them in song. Fortify their souls, my Sisters. These are the soldiers of the Emperor. See that they remember it.’
Her warriors moved away as bidden.
The captain waited for her by the door.
‘Call the Hospitallers,’ she said to Marian. ‘Get locations of all their medicae stations from their Munitorum officers. I want priests and Sisters in every one. Have them pray, Sister. All of them.’
Marian nodded her assent. ‘It shall be done, canoness.’
The door opened. Emmanuelle followed the captain inside.
They went into a long, dark room, the low ceiling punctuated infrequently by dim lumens. Like the men, they seemed sapped of energy. Rows of beds ran down each wall, a third row down the middle. There was an open door at the back leading into another ward, and Emmanuelle saw another door at the far end of that.
Exhausted staff of the medicae officios tended the sick. There were very few battlefield injuries. Emmanuelle supposed necron weapons were so powerful that not many who were hit by them survived. Besides the maladies of immobility, bed sores, bodily filth, and atrophy, most of the patients seemed unharmed. But empty eyes stared at the low ceiling uncomprehendingly. The best of them were listless, the worst catatonic.
‘Sister!’ A man in a doctor’s uniform hurried forward.
‘Doctor Gilus,’ Captain Trilthoilis said, a tired and perfunctory introduction. ‘This is Canoness Emmanuelle of the Argent Shroud.’
‘If we had known they were coming…’
‘You would what?’ said Emmanuelle. ‘Bid them walk?’
Her manner flustered the doctor. ‘I… No, I meant… I meant no disrespect. I–’
‘They suffer the stilling?’
‘Yes,’ said the doctor. ‘All of them.’
‘Then they shall no more,’ she said. She turned from the doctor. She lifted the icon she wore around her neck, a stylised ‘I’ surrounded by a starburst centred on a skull.
‘This is the symbol of the Holy God-Emperor of Terra!’ she said. Her voice was honed by a decade of prayer and command, and reached every corner of the medicae ward. ‘By this shall you know Him. Imperator!’
She turned slowly, showing it to the room, then began to walk slowly along the beds.
‘Imperator! He is not in this symbol. He is in you, and you.’ She pointed at men lying motionless on the cots. ‘Imperator! He is in me. I fear not the power of the xenos, for faith in Him shines in my heart, and reaches out to Him, and in return He suffuses me with His holy will that no xenos or heretic can douse. Imperator! Look inside yourselves, and you shall find it, for we are all the children of Terra!’
The soldiers in the beds stirred as she passed them.
‘Have faith, brothers, sisters. Have faith in Him, the Throne, the God-Emperor! Imperator! Imperator! Imperator!’
Heavy heads rose. Eyes clouded for weeks cleared. A catatonic man blinked. He raised an arm, and moaned. All through the bunker there was movement, an awakening. Men returned from dark sleep.
‘Impossible,’ said the medicae doctor. ‘That’s impossible.’
‘Nothing is impossible if you have faith in the Emperor of Mankind,’ said Emmanuelle. ‘Nothing. This is a lesson for you.’
The medicae nodded dumbly, ashamed, and fell to his knees, hands clasped in prayer. Emmanuelle rested one hand on his head and raised the other high, palm upward.
‘Faith will bear you up. Faith will wake you. Faith will bring you victory!’
The door to the outside opened and Sisters Hospitaller moved into the field hospital, examining men, helping them up where they were not too wasted away.
‘Any that can walk will take up a weapon,’ Emmanuelle commanded. ‘The Emperor has work for you. You have slept in silent darkness long enough.’
She turned to the captain again. His eyes were shining with wonder. Even in the dim light of the bunker, she could see colour returning to his face.
‘Now do you believe?’
He too fell to his knees. ‘I do, I do, forgive me! Forgive us.’
‘There is nothing to forgive. You came close to losing your faith, but you stood strong. You passed your test. Now stand before me as a proud soldier of Terra, and show me what I must see.’
‘When the fleet moved on, leaving us here to secure the Paradyce System, we struggled to communicate. You have seen the effect on the men – it is far worse for our regimental witches. Several of them died. The astropaths sleep all the time, and when they are awake, they say they cannot see the beacon.’ He gave them a quizzical look.
‘They speak of the Astronomican,’ Emmanuelle told him. ‘The light of the Emperor. It guides the Navigators through the warp, though other mutants have the gift of seeing it, if they look. They are blessed, despite their deviancy.’
Trilthoilis led her down a long corridor. There were storerooms and operating theatres off to the sides. At the end was a heavy door.
‘He’s in there,’ he said.
They reached it. They stopped.
‘Lord Marron kept in touch by messenger relay,’ he said, ‘sending fast ships back along the route of the main advance. It took months for the ships to get here, but at first they came regularly. We heard that Ephrael Stern had joined them.’
‘The Heretic Saint,’ murmured Emmanuelle in distaste.
‘There were victories. The last message we received said they were driving for a major xenos world, many light years from here.’
‘This is privileged information, for a man of your rank,’ said Emmanuelle.
He shrugged. ‘Everyone above me is dead, so I sit on the council resettling the world’ – he caught himself – ‘attempting to resettle the world, as highest-ranking Astra Militarum commander.’ He pulled himself up a little, remembering his role and his responsibilities. ‘I receive the reports.’
‘And this man you have in here?’
‘From the last ship. I don’t trust what he says. His vessel came in damaged. You know the signs of their weaponry, they’re clear to see, as if the metal has been gnawed. It was them alright.’ He looked behind him nervously, and his voice dropped a touch. ‘They’d done something to them. Look.’
He reached into his satchel and pulled out a battered data-slate. He keyed the activation rune. The slate was an unsophisticated model, standard Militarum issue; the screen was small and low resolution. Vid-capt footage, almost certainly from a squad-leader’s helm vid-capter, filled the glass.
‘Watch,’ said Trilthoilis.
Another touch set the image in motion. Raspy, heavy breathing accompanied the picture, blurred with vox-thief distortion. The man was in a void-sealed suit. Navy, thought Emmanuelle.
‘Life signs are this way, we’re proceeding.’
Footsteps, muffled by distance, joined the breathing. The man kept up a steady commentary, but the rasping of heavy, sealed fabric on fabric drowned out half of his words. A shotgun barrel preceded him. Lumens flickered.
‘…obably more still…d,’ the man was saying. ‘Ahead, through that door, Chevenis, Rosik, take point.’
Two more Naval armsmen jogged by in armoured voidsuits. The stablights mounted above their faceplates shone huge circles on the door. These shrank and brightened as they approached. She admired the way the voidsmen moved. Their gear was heavy, awkward, and unpowered, yet they were hardly inconvenienced.
They took up position either side of the door. One covered the rune pad with a boxy tumbler cracker. The other aimed his gun at the door. The one by the rune pad turned back, his suit light dazzling the primitive optics of the vid-capter. It made the man seem alien, almost animal, like a deep-ocean thing.
‘Go,’ said the sergeant.
The voidsman activated the cracker. There was a brief flash of light round the edges. No sound – they were in vacuum, then.
The door flew up into the ceiling. Air blasted out. A single-shuttle hangar waited beyond, a squat Arvus lighter filling most of it, toothed void gates only just slightly bigger than the craft behind it. The mother vessel was a small one, she guessed.
Five men stood in a line on the other side. They gurned almost comically, hands twitching. They were armed, and with a chill Emmanuelle realised they were fighting with themselves not to open fire.
‘Drop your weapons! Drop your weapons!’ the voidsmen screamed. An alarm blared. Lights flashed. The sounds were distorted, carried uncertainly on the weak decompression wind.
‘Low atmospheric pressure, low atmospheric pressure,’ a machine voice moaned. Somewhere behind the sergeant, heavy doors slammed down. A pipe hissed.
‘G-g-g-get away!’ one of the men in the hangar shouted with painful difficulty. His jaw was locked, and didn’t want to cooperate with him. His hands trembled. The lascarbine he carried wanted to rise up and poke death at the voidsmen from its snub-nose. ‘G-g-get away!’
‘Drop your weapons!’
The convulsions of the men in the hangar worsened. Emmanuelle was sure she saw a flash of green in the eyes of one of them, like a nocturnal beast.
A brighter flash of las-fire interrupted the image. The sergeant’s view jerked wildly. There was shooting from all quarters.
The vid-capt ceased.
‘Xenos control,’ said Emmanuelle.
‘That’s what our medicae say,’ said Trilthoilis. ‘He’s lucid sometimes. Whatever influence they have is constant.’
‘He is the only survivor?’ Emmanuelle asked.
Trilthoilis nodded.
‘You say he has a message?’
‘For the Imperial Regent, can you believe?’ He smiled sadly. ‘This is probably sinful to say, but I feel sorry for him.’
‘Pity is a weakness we can ill afford,’ said Emanuelle. ‘Banish it from your heart. Now open the door.’
She never learned the man’s name. It was not important. He was not important. No individual human being could ever be called so.
Like the rest of the complex, the room was a rockcrete prefab stamped from an STC mould and buried underground. The messenger sat on the far side of the room in a filthy straitjacket, legs sprawled in front of him. He was manacled by the neck to a chain connected to a half-loop buried deeply in the wall. She could smell him from the far side of the room, a mix of sweat, human waste, and despair. When she entered, he had his head buried in his arms. He looked up when he heard the whine of powered armour, and once more Emmanuelle caught a glimpse of silvery green at the back of his eyes.
‘You have come for me,’ he said.
‘You have a message.’
The man nodded. ‘From them. I can feel it, scratching around at the back of my head. It wants to get out.’ He looked at her with an expression of pure misery.
‘Then speak it, and be delivered from your suffering.’
The man shook his head so hard the chain rattled.
‘I can’t, I can’t. It’s for him, you see? Only for him!’
Emmanuelle took a step further into the room. ‘I am a blessed bride of the Emperor. What you tell me, He will know.’
The man laughed. ‘The message doesn’t believe that,’ he said.
Emmanuelle walked over to him. His stench filled her throat. She did not balk, but knelt by him.
‘Do you know what the worth of an individual is?’ she said. ‘Do you know what his purpose is?’
‘To live. To serve. To raise a new generation for the eternal war so that mankind will survive and rule the stars. That is my purpose.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘That is not your purpose. You have no worth. An individual’s life is of no consequence to the Emperor. Not mine, not his,’ she said, nodding back at Trilthoilis. ‘Not even those of the Adeptus Astartes or those of the High Lords. Deeds. Deeds are what matters. Deeds to ensure the collective survival of our species, and our rightful domination of the stars. Deeds that see the xenos, the traitor and the heretic cast down into oblivion, so that children of Terra will rule all of space and time as He has promised we shall. Deeds. You shall not be remembered. You shall not be mourned. You have already been forgotten. Only your deeds matter. They are the bricks in the walls of His fortresses. Tell me this message, and His mercy shall be yours.’
She moved her hand to the bolt pistol holstered on her armoured thigh.
‘I can’t,’ he whimpered. ‘I would if I could, but it won’t let me. They boarded us. They killed everyone, then they did something to me. They put it in me. Metal skeletons. Things of death. Xenos!’ He was sweating hard. Corded tendons stood out upon his neck. He had to speak through gritted teeth.
‘Think,’ she said, her voice dropping to a soothing whisper. ‘I saw you aboard your ship. I saw you resist. Try, try for Him.’
The man rocked back and forth on his heels. His teeth ground. The noises he made were those of a man going mad.
‘Try!’ Emmanuelle urged. ‘Try!’
The man let out a great howl of anguish, then gabbled, ‘He is coming! He is coming!’
‘Who?’
Another cry, and he spoke his final words.
‘The Silent King! The Silent King! The Silent King! Go from this place, go, or be destroyed!’
And with that, he spun round and drove his head forward onto the staple in the wall with such force that his skull cracked with a bang, and he slumped dead on the ground.
His feet twitched. The smell of blood was rich and strong.
Emmanuelle got to her feet. ‘We are no better informed.’
In the matter leaking from the dead man’s skull, tiny motes of green light sparkled.
‘Burn this,’ said Emmanuelle.
Trilthoilis gaped.
‘Burn it now!’
The captain recovered himself and summoned support.
A steady machine wail set up, rising and falling, a noise a human from any age would recognise. A warning siren. Vox-chatter crackled up from Emmanuelle’s collar.
‘A fleet,’ she said. ‘Dozens of ships.’
They went from the room, passing a soldier carrying a flamer. Before they reached the end of the corridor, the messenger’s corpse was burning in the cell.
Chapter Thirty-Three
pyramids
blasphemous interventions
a price to pay
Messinius had no idea how Cawl’s equipment worked. The drop pods’ seats had been removed, and replaced with ugly-looking fusions of Imperial and necron technology. When activated by his Techmarine, the machines shone barely perceptible cones of light which petered out a hundred feet into the air.
Messinius sent the signal pulse: low power, short, like everything else, designed to not reveal their presence. Twenty minutes later, four Thunderhawks touched down in tight formation. Cawl emerged from the first with his scarred giant, a group of skitarii rangers, and a trio of heavy, tracked combat servitors bearing plasma cannon, all of them equipped with the grenade-sized orbs of alien technology. From the second gunship came a second group of Martians led by an enormous death-cult cyborg, a four-legged magos and his shifty-looking acolyte. The other ships carried fifty more of Messinius’ men wearing heavier configurations of Mark X armour, mainly of the Tacticus and Gravis types.
‘Splendid, splendid, splendid!’ Cawl exclaimed, rubbing his hands together. His axe was suspended at his side in the metal grips of his mechadendrites. His guns nosed at the air, sniffing for targets. ‘An excellent job.’
‘We are ready to depart for the mission target,’ said Messinius. ‘This place is dangerous. We should be about our business and away.’
‘Oh, I agree,’ said Cawl. ‘If one of these machines here wakes up to our presence then we shall all be dead.’
He seemed almost excited by the idea.
Messinius detailed his more heavily equipped men to set up a perimeter around the gunships. As they were leaving, Techmarines were unloading crates that contained remote weapons platforms. The defences would look impressive when complete, but they would serve only to buy a little time.
Once he was satisfied his orders were being carried out, Messinius joined the tech-priest, Hiax, with thirty of his men. Cawl and Primus set off on their own course.
Messinius’ group descended the slope and headed for their target pyramid. The ground was shattered and covered in tiny flakes of noctilith. Crevasses radiated in angular jags out from the walls. The building had thrust itself up from the ground, grown rather than built, an intrusive parasite. An imperial edifice imposed upon the world. It had been made by a race that intended to dominate.
‘You are on edge, my lord,’ said the tech-priest, Hiax. His full name was one of those interminable lists of numbers and words the Martians favoured, more designation than appellation, as Cawl had jovially said.
‘There is an element of madness to this,’ said Messinius.
‘There is, I suppose,’ said Hiax, ‘but I have accomplished many missions on necron worlds. This one will be no different.’
Hiax’s acolyte Osel-den walked beside his master, and from the look on his face behind the clear plastek of his rebreather mask he did not share his master’s confidence.
‘This is a high-threat world from a purely classificatory standpoint,’ Hiax went on. ‘If one’s main criterion of threat is enemy numbers, then this would appear to be extremely foolhardy. The truth of it is more complicated. Each of these things you see flying around and scuttling about could kill me. The smallest outpost world of the necrons has thousands of these things. There are millions here. Is that objectively more dangerous? No. The number does not matter. The real danger is if they notice you or not. You’ll be dead anyway if they do, however many there are.’
