Lords of Blood, page 98
Death wrapped icy fingers about Dante’s chest, and attempted to pull him loose.
‘Lorenz!’
Lorenz gave out a great cry of anger, and pulled himself until he was squatting again on the floor. His feet clamped to the deck. Now secured, he reached back into the gap.
The doors slid shut, cutting off the roar of escaping air to a moan, then a squeak, then silence.
‘Remael is dead,’ said Dante.
‘They wanted us to come here,’ said Lorenz. He yanked out an ugly, jury-rigged module. ‘This is a trap.’
From down the corridor, gunfire sounded. Runes flashed in Dante’s faceplate as Aminus’ warriors came under attack.
‘They’ve come for us,’ said Lorenz. ‘We cannot get out.’
Dante looked back at the door.
‘There is a way,’ he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
BURDENS OF COMMAND
Dante set down his goblet.
‘The Black Legion did not only want to take our ships, they wanted to destroy our Chapter. What had brought them there at that time, I could not say. In hindsight, I can only suppose it was part of the Warmaster Abaddon’s great and subtle plan to topple the Imperium, a plan that has almost succeeded.’
As if provoked by the name of the Archenemy, Bloodcaller rocked. Danakan started.
‘An area of turbulence in the warp,’ said Dante.
‘We can no longer claim that the warp is an ocean, and nothing else,’ said Danakan. ‘It is alive. It watches us.’
‘It does, as do many other perils in this galaxy. This is the price of power, Seroen. The human race is in danger because it is worth something. These predators and daemonkin attack us because they covet our strength. There is a comfort in that.’
‘How can you say so, my lord?’ said Danakan.
‘We are a threat. That means we have the strength to beat our foes. If we were so weak they could safely ignore us, then we would have no hope of victory.’ Dante stared solemnly at Danakan. Such a weight of wisdom was in his regard, Danakan found it suffocating. ‘I have visited civilisations that thought they could hide. I have seen the remains of hundreds more who felt similarly. They are all dust now. To be a great power is to be a great threat. It is humanity’s destiny to rule this galaxy, I believe that with all my heart. The Emperor’s plan has surely gone awry, but it can be born anew. The return of Roboute Guilliman to us is only one proof of that. We do not fight only to stave off extinction for a little longer, we fight to win. I will not rest until mankind is safe, and master of his own fate, untroubled by xenos fiend or otherworldly horror. I took many oaths to that effect. I aim to uphold them.
‘If I have one virtue, it is that I am dogged,’ Dante went on. ‘I never give up.’ He sat forward. ‘We escaped the Black Legion by retreating into the void. I did not give up then, and I will not give up now.’
Dante’s salvaged bolt pistol kicked hard. He braced himself on maglocked feet, clinging to the giant, ragged cliffs of plasteel like an insect. His shot scored yellow rocket burn across the void. The shot was a little wild, but caught the Heretic Space Marine following him up the crags square on the shoulder. His shoulder blew apart. His arm sped away, chased by globules of blood. The shrapnel must have got into his innards, for the warrior stopped dead, his body locked to the hull by his magnetic boots.
The gun was empty. Dante lifted it and slapped another magazine in place. It was his last. He walked clumsily up, his boots thumping onto the skin of the battle-barge. The ship shuddered from a thousand small explosions, but Dante heard none of it. Only his breath, loud in his ears, and the rattle of the enemy’s comms-denial broadcast, punctuated by electronic squeals and rare voices that managed to break through. What was left of his company was spread all across the broken command superstructure. He was alone.
He came across a statue and began walking up it. It was perpendicular to his feet, a great golden angel armed with shield and sword, its blank eyes staring out at the battle in the void. Dante followed its unseeing gaze, and saw the fleet of his Chapter attacked from all sides. Most of the craft had been boarded. Both the Chapter’s battle-barges were present, and both were under threat. The Blade of Vengeance floated without power, harried by a flock of ancient ships in black and silver. Some of the smaller vessels still fought hard, looping and turning in the crowded battlesphere, but all were mobbed by swarms of enemy attack craft.
As he watched he saw a light frigate come to pieces, bombed into nothing by flight after flight of traitor assault ships. Its reactor broke, and it burst in a distended balloon of fire. The thruster array went one way, the prow the other. All in between was reduced to particles that added to the debris clouding space. Chunks of metal, some hundreds of tons in weight, hurtled across the black, weakening the protection of vessels on both sides as they slammed into void shields. Each craft still active sparkled with a hundred thousand debris impacts and displays of sickly lightning. Those that lacked shields blossomed fields of yellow across their skins with each significant hit. One heavy cruiser was heeling over, dropping out of the battlezone after being hit by a substantial section of a dead ship. Craft of that size and class were not supposed to fight so closely. They were elegant duellists disarmed, grappling desperately in the mud, their swords lost. Coming in so close and committing themselves to a boarding action was a bold plan for the traitors, one that could have gone against them, but despite their heavy losses it appeared they were prevailing.
Bloodcaller bled air from a thousand wounds. Fierce fires raged in oxygen-rich winds, sending curling banners of flame into the void that were snuffed out and endlessly replenished in a pattern that would last until every breath of air was gone.
For the first time since his apotheosis, Dante saw defeat.
He stood and looked across the blocky plains of the cliff. The wound in his chest throbbed. Air hissed slowly from the imperfect seal the gel foams made. A small counter blinked in the upper left of his malfunctioning helmplate, counting down his life in millibars of air. His armour was doing its best to make up the shortfall. The power plant split his water rations for additional oxygen, but it would not last. He had lost sight of his men. Lorenz was nowhere to be seen.
There was a choice at hand. To continue to fight and die, or to allow his body to submit to his sus-an membrane, let the mucranoid coat his body in a protective chrysalis and wait to be rescued.
It was no kind of choice at all.
Dante brought up the comms subsystem and through a rapid combination of blink clicking and neural impulse commands, he reconfigured his power feed to boost the vox. Sliders jagged with broken imaging cells moved up into the red zones. He had a minute, maybe less, of vox capability before the additional power burned out the system.
‘I, Captain Dante, speak,’ he said. ‘Loyal brothers, converge.’ He sent a data squirt of coded instructions, giving his position, and turned his signum on. ‘While one of us draws breath, we are not yet beaten. Join me. Let us end them.’
Hollow words that met with no response. If anyone heard, the enemy would. They would come for him, and he would die.
He shifted his grip on his power axe. He would make sure many of the foe would perish before he did.
Sure enough, he saw movement coming at him, not on the ship, but out in the void. A trio of Lightning fighters split away from their squadron in a long loop, and came heading directly for his position.
‘How disappointing,’ he said to himself. They would not even give him the opportunity of a glorious death.
He raised his pistol.
The fighters came at him, holding fire until the last second. They were attempting to impress their diabolical masters. He wondered what favour the death of a loyal Space Marine captain would bring a mortal enslaved in the warmaster’s armies.
They came at him recklessly fast.
His pistol spat a trio of bolts at the approaching attack craft. They were close enough for him to see the canopies glinting in the battle light. Lascannon beams slashed back at him in response. He was a small target, difficult to hit, and the beams hit the ship’s battered hide with soundless flashes. His own shots passed harmlessly over the lead ship’s wing.
He waited before firing again. The Lightnings were a handful of miles away. They were burning their reverse thrusters, but they would be on him in under a second.
This was it, the moment of his death. Luis Dante, raised on the saltpan of a dead sea, a stunted boy doomed to a short life, elevated to serve the Emperor as one of his angels of death, was finally going to die.
‘Ave Imperator,’ he said, and squeezed the trigger.
The lead ship exploded. The other two immediately split. Dante’s shot punched through the flame burst that briefly marked the craft’s demise. He looked upwards.
A pair of interdiction fighters in the dark blood colours of the Angels Numinous sped over Dante’s head. One leapt ahead of another, drum magazines spraying out a brass cloud of spent shells, speared past Dante, and annihilated a second Lightning. The third swept around, engines pushing it into an acceleration that would have been nearly fatal for its mortal pilot. The Angels Numinous ships sped after it, and were lost in the maelstrom of battle.
Bloodcaller shook with the gravity wake of an immense ship coming close. A shadow passed over him, and he saw sailing over the stricken battle-barge the Angels Numinous ship Crimson Tear, fully shielded, and with guns blazing. Around it flew the entire Chapter fleet. Depleted by the war, yet still strong, it raced towards the heart of the traitor armada.
Dante’s vox crackled into life. The enemy jamming signal abated, and a voice spoke clearly into his helm.
‘Captain Dante, I am your brother,’ said Captain Toranis, ‘and I have come to stand beside you.’
‘Then you were saved by the Angels Numinous. You did not escape yourself?’ said Danakan.
‘We were saved. We would have died without them.’
‘The point of this tale you are telling me, commander, is that your heroism was not a deciding factor.’
‘You know what I am telling you,’ said Dante. ‘You are not a foolish man, admiral. I made mistakes. I almost died. I lost good men. I nearly lost my brother Lorenz. There were no noble last words, no touching sentiments exchanged. He was with me, then he was not. The last I saw of him, he was being driven apart from me by the enemy, his hand black from void exposure. It was only days later, and by chance, that he was recovered from deep in space, so far into suspended animation he was almost dead. I was convinced he was gone, and that hurt me greatly.’
He fell quiet. Danakan watched him closely.
‘You are surprised,’ Dante said eventually. ‘After all I have said, do you still not think us capable of emotion? Brotherhood is the foundation of the Chapter. We feel the loss of our comrades deeply. Lorenz was with me from the beginning. He was the last from my intake. He was my friend, and my insistence on making for the command deck led us into a trap that nearly cost him his life.’ Dante sighed. ‘And yet, despite my stupidity, shortly after the Angels Numinous came to our aid, I was made commander. The decision was far from unanimous. Sometimes, we find ourselves where we are not because of what we do, but because of circumstance. I did no great deeds to be elevated to commander of the Blood Angels. I simply survived. All my achievements come hand in hand with tragedy. All of them come with errors.’
‘I have made mistakes.’
‘You have.’
‘But you can recover from yours, you are a Space Marine.’
Dante’s voice rose a little. He had a beautiful voice, like strong music in soft mountain airs. ‘What does that mean? Nothing. We are both men, you and I. Courage runs in every human’s veins. I, too, was not worthy. Others believed I was. Subsequent events seemed to bear out their opinion. I fought because I had to. I served because I must. I made errors. I learned much from them, and still the Chapter nearly perished while I was its Master. Eventually, I became worthy, because I had to be so. Because it was expected of me.’
‘I am not you,’ said Danakan. Defiance crept into his voice.
‘I am not me either. Look at me, admiral.’
Danakan could not. He dropped his eyes.
‘I said look at me.’ A feral growl entered the back of Dante’s voice.
The admiral raised his eyes painfully slowly, until he looked into Dante’s own.
‘What am I, really?’ said Dante. ‘Who is Dante? Is he the boy from the tribe in the sand? Is he the Emperor’s unthinking servant, His executioner and His vengeance? Is he instead a being with thoughts and choices of his own – not a tyrant, but a just and noble protector of humanity? Is Dante a hero, is he a monster? Does it in fact even matter, to those who call out for my aid, who is truly beneath Sanguinius’ golden mask? The people of the Imperium do not see me when I come to their worlds to free them or to slay their oppressors. They see our gene-father. They see Sanguinius. Dante is a construct. The stories about me are fabrication. The tally of the foes I have slain grows with every retelling. If you were to read all the histories accounting my actions, you would realise quickly that, even with my life being as long as it is, I could not possibly have been to all the places they say, or fought in all the battles I am supposed to have won. Look more closely at the stories, and you will see that I am in several places at once. Impossible – but to whom is the truth of interest, apart from the lord regent’s historitors? To whom, indeed, is it useful? It is useful to the Imperium that I am feted as I am. It is useful that my name is known, and spoken of as a mark of hope. This Dante they tell stories about, he is not me. I can never be him. But I can do my best to live up to what people need, and where I cannot be, I can allow the stories to bring comfort.’
His eyes blazed. ‘I have read that to some cultures the truth was a principle, something to be strived for and protected as sacrosanct. If that sounds attractive to you, you must ask yourself, whom does the truth serve? Now, in these times, the truth is terrible. It serves only our enemies. So, lord admiral, allow me to tell you something. Your role is to play the part the people give you. It is to be what they think you are, until you die. As long as your given role is positive and has use to the Imperium, it is your duty to perform it, no matter what your feelings are. It is not to find some inner truth!’
Dante stood. ‘There is no truth. Your role is to serve. Lie to yourself if you have to. The Imperium sees you as a competent, heroic officer. You are competent. You were once heroic. I do not much care that is not how you feel. You should not care that is not how you feel. Lie to yourself. Play the part, even if you are screaming inside. That is what I need from you, and that is what you will do. Are we clear?’
Dante’s tawny eyes regarded Danakan with utter seriousness. The weight of his years and his wisdom pushed out from him in waves.
‘Is that an order?’ Danakan managed to say.
‘It is my command.’
Danakan nodded numbly. ‘Is it also a rebuke?’
‘If it has to be,’ said Dante. ‘We do not have the luxury of allowing you regret, admiral. Be who you were meant to be again.’
Dante moved a step closer. Danakan did his best not to shrink into the chair.
‘You will return to the Dominance, which you will command with a proud heart and with the elan you are known for. You will be leaving with us, to Ronenti. There you will protect us while we make war on the surface.’
The admiral finished his wine. Carefully, he stood. The screams of his burning crew shrieked at him from the candles and lumens and every other place there was light. But he ignored them, and he bowed.
‘If that is what you command, lord regent, then so be it.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
FIELD OF THE DEAD
The Dominance and its escort pushed through the spinning wreckage of Ronenti’s system monitors. A squadron of Sword-class frigates ran ahead, their laser cannons flickering out in a coordinated pattern of strikes, vaporising the biggest pieces of debris before they could impact the fleet’s shields. Voidship death created a billion fragments of metal, paint, ice and pulverised flesh. Particulate debris passed through the shields in shifting displays. Larger chunks vanished in shimmering waves of void shield displacement.
Upon the dimly illuminated command deck, purple and blue light played in submarine ripples over the crew, swamping the weak red of the combat lumens.
‘Beautiful,’ said Juvenel. He stood on the admiral’s dais beside Danakan’s throne. Danakan looked ahead, out of the oculus, his attention switching every few seconds to the hololithic tactical displays dotted around his command platform, and the grand strategic display set centrally on the deck.
‘Destruction is alluring,’ said Danakan, ‘but it should never be celebrated. Those were Imperial craft, they will not easily be replaced.’
‘That is true, my lord,’ said Juvenel, ‘but they had to die. There is nothing that could have saved them. I prefer not to regret, but to appreciate that which is set in front of me. Ergo, I see beauty.’
‘Very philosophical,’ growled Danakan. ‘Just remember there were men and women on those ships who died because they were enslaved to an alien will, or because they had no choice. Loyal Imperial subjects subverted by xenos evil. I will not celebrate it.’
The ships passed out of the far side of the debris cloud. Ronenti grew ahead, the crescent of its dayside growing fuller as the fleet sailed closer.
‘You have changed, my lord.’
‘For the better,’ said Danakan. ‘You will change too, and come to value regret.’
‘So long as it does not compromise my ability to lead,’ said Juvenel.
‘I know you’re keeping an eye on me, Juvenel, and I thank you for it, and for saving my life too, but don’t question me, not where others can hear.’
