Lords of Blood, page 99
They were isolated upon the dais, but Danakan was right. Juvenel’s eyes flicked sideways. A watch officer overseeing gunnery command met his eyes and quickly dropped his gaze.
‘My apologies, lord admiral. It is good to see you on the bridge again.’ Juvenel almost asked what Dante had done to his commander. He refrained. He was sure he would find out in due course. Danakan liked to talk when in his cups.
Captain Arturo was taking a scrip from the vox-master. Important, if old Culin had got out of the vox-pit himself. The captain read it, then he too left his command platform at the feet of the dais’ stairs, climbed them, and gave Danakan a short bow.
‘My lord admiral, Commander Dante signals that he is ready to begin his orbital insertion.’
‘Very good,’ Danakan said. ‘Take up position in high orbit. Begin denial of signal broadcasts. Give word to ventral gunnery to prepare for bombardment.’
Captain Arturo bowed and returned to his own throne. Danakan watched as the taskforce spread out. It was a small fleet: the Dominance, a cruiser, two frigate squadrons and a handful of destroyers. Hidden amid the foremost units was Dante’s planetary assault cruiser, the Angelic Blade.
‘Denial broadcasts are in full effect,’ said the officer of the vox.
‘We have been targeted. Energy spikes detected. Incoming ground fire in three, two, one,’ a junior officer of defence announced.
Sheet lightning blinked throughout Ronenti’s atmosphere. Short-lived beams flicked across space. They targeted the smaller ships first. Void shield flare washed over the group of destroyers leading the flotilla.
‘They’re not stupid, are they?’ said Juvenel. ‘That’s the work of a gunnery officer who knows he can’t scratch the Dominance.’
‘Hold formation,’ Danakan commanded. ‘Prepare to return fire. Justified Malice, switch priority to the defensive arrays away from the principal target.’
The Dominance moved implacably towards the equator. Ronenti was a pretty world of bright deserts and small, green seas. Minimal ice caps covered the north, surrounded by a line of green forests like a monk’s tonsure. The grey spread of cities covered only a small part of its surface north and south of the tropics. The equatorial belt was a sea of sand mottled with dull brown mountains. A war raged down there, but from orbit it appeared peaceful. Ground conflicts between limited forces were nothing compared to the destruction the Dominance could unleash. They were beneath Juvenel’s notice.
The Dominance rolled. Its prow lifted. The planetscape dropped from view. The escorts moved in perfect formation with the capital ship.
‘Close-range target view,’ Danakan commanded. The tactical hololiths blinked, and showed a real time tri-d vid-feed of a small city in the south. Targeting reticules zeroed in on defensive installations dotted around it. Three defence laser silos, a missile installation, a military airfield. Moderate protection, but more than enough in that part of space, where the worst threats for centuries had been limited xenos and pirate raids.
The hololith shuddered with interference as the batteries below the fleet opened fire. Laser streaks were followed by the bright flash of missiles bursting from their underground launch tubes. They pushed voidwards on slow feet of fire. They were sluggish, and easy prey for the fleet’s point defence batteries. Atomic fire ignited in the atmosphere as they were shot down.
‘Return fire,’ said Danakan.
The ship shivered as its mass drivers launched solid slugs of metal at the surface.
Dominance was under fire now as the desperate defenders split their counter-barrage.
‘They weaken their hand,’ said Juvenel. ‘They are panicking.’
‘They are only men,’ said Danakan. ‘Pity them.’
The first of the mass shots hit the ground. The vid-feed gave an impression of earth wrinkling under immense force, and buildings crushed by overpressure, before the release of energy whited out the augur views.
‘Maintain bombardment while Lord Dante’s troops descend. Prepare broadcast demanding surrender.’
‘We should obliterate them,’ said Juvenel.
‘Lord Dante wants this world saved with minimal damage,’ said Danakan. ‘We must play stupid and pretend we think this a simple revolt to allow him time to complete his mission.’
‘Lord Dante’s drop force is away,’ a report came.
Danakan had a hololith zero in on the Angelic Blade. Its drop ports flashed as craft were ejected towards the surface, conveying the Blood Angels to their landing zone under the cover of the shells and bombs of the Dominance.
‘Start the mission clock.’ A large, floating chronograph activated over one of the tactical displays. ‘Wait until the commander is down, then move the fleet over the southern capital. We’ll deliver our ultimatum once there. Who knows, maybe they’ll surrender and save us all an awful lot of bother.’
The crew laughed at Danakan’s humour. They were relieved their admiral had recovered his spirit, but Juvenel was closest to him. He could see the haunted look in Danakan’s eyes. He saw the sweat trickling down his neck.
Danakan could not fool Juvenel. The admiral was still afraid.
‘Nine hours,’ said Danakan to Juvenel, ‘then we level everything from orbit. Good fortune, Commander Dante. The population of a planet depends upon you.’
‘The Lying Emperor shows his true face,’ Hassij said. His feet crunched over the rubble of Edoni. ‘As the Prophet of Claws says, give him anything other than servitude, and he will rain down his displeasure.’
‘Never truer words said. There is nothing left of the city, only broken brick and bones,’ said his corporal, Enchay.
The squad advanced over a pile of shifting debris. They left their transport behind them, shrouded in spirals of dust and smoke whipped up by the heat radiating from the broken ground. That far out from the primary strike zone the buildings had been merely levelled. Further in, they had been vaporised. Hassij’s rad counter clicked ominously. He ignored it. His will to do his duty was strong. He would die for it.
‘There is nothing here,’ said Enchay.
‘The prophet commands we look, so we look. We must go further in. Too much smoke out here. Pick up the pace.’
The small squad jogged forward, skirting a vast fire still burning in a crater.
‘The Lying Emperor would never send his false angels here. He would not dare. He will see the majesty of the Four-Armed Emperor and he will cower.’
‘Have you ever seen a false angel?’ Hassij asked. ‘I have. Three of them came to Djesseli when I was a boy. They are huge, and deadly. Do not underestimate them simply because they are our enemies. One could kill us all. If they are here, the prophet must know.’ The memory provoked feelings of hatred in him, but also an uncertainty. A feeling of momentary disorientation troubled him.
The clatter of rock distracted him from his misgivings.
He held up a fist. His squad came to a halt, lasrifles at the ready.
Three shambling figures loped out of the smoke. They were a blend of human and alien. Their altered physiology meant they held their defence force issue rifles awkwardly, but guns were not their main weapons. Their extra limbs sported deadly triple claws, while their broad, human-like hands were tipped with diamond-hard nails.
They halted close by Hassij’s squad. The lead jutted his broad head forward. Knobbled vertebrae pushed at his skin as he sniffed suspiciously at the air.
Hassij had never seen such beauty. Every time he saw the Blessed Ones they stopped the breath in his mouth.
Its dark flesh was mottled ivory white with the marks of the prophet. It wore the same uniforms as Hassij’s squad, adapted to its Emperor-given body so that its third arm was on full display. It was possessed of a holy asymmetry that was glorious to see.
His squad knelt. The Blessed Ones shifted.
‘That way.’ Their leader croaked imperfectly formed words. Drool ran between sharp teeth when the Blessed Ones tried to speak, which they did infrequently, and always in short sentences. ‘Enemy,’ it said.
They turned and loped off into the smoke. The heat oppressed Hassij, and he could hardly breathe, but he followed, determined not to appear weak before the blessed of the Four-Armed Emperor.
The last of the Blessed Ones vanished through a wall of dust streaming down from the corpse of a shattered building. The sight of the fallen building angered him. Thousands had lived in Edoni. All of them had died.
A crackling gunshot came out of the murk, followed by a wet bang and an alien shriek.
‘The Blessed Ones!’ one of his squad shouted. All of them were urged forward by a powerful need to protect the children of their god, without thought, without fear.
A loud thrumming noise preceded a blocky transport that punched through the smoke at great speed. Hassij had time to see blood-red livery, and the buckling of the air under contragrav before it swept by. Then another came, and another.
‘Open fire!’ he yelled.
Lasbeams scored the smoke, vitrifying the eddying dust into showers of glass spheres that pattered onto the rubble.
Their beams inflicted no damage on the speeding transports. Domes of energy shone over their open transport beds, deflecting all incoming fire. Hassij kept firing.
A third transport growled past. A giant in red stared down at him from the deck. Hassij’s eyes locked with the green eye lenses of the giant’s helm.
For a split second he remembered how he had felt when he had seen the Space Marines as a boy: excited, awed, protected. He had felt special.
That was before the prophet came.
He didn’t see the Space Marine raise his bolter. There was a yellow flash and an impact in his chest, then nothing after that.
Dante rode in the open bay on the back of the Impulsor. The Lord of Death stood beside him. The grav-transport swept rapidly over the ruined city, its repulsor array keeping it high over the upheaved terrain. Smoke billowed around it. Fires were beaten flat by its anti-gravity field. Two of Antargo’s veterans sat on the back of the transport, guarding their lords.
‘They were quick to respond,’ Dante said to Mephiston.
‘The cult mind is strong, even out here,’ said Mephiston. He looked to the sky. ‘They already call out to their so-called saviour. This rot must be stopped, or the tyranids will divert course and come here.’
‘You are contesting the scream?’
‘I am,’ said Mephiston. ‘I cannot blot it out completely. You were right to set the mission clock. We have limited time. Every passing hour the risk of the hive mind hearing increases.’
‘We will conduct a purge of the surrounding systems,’ said Dante. ‘The infection will have spread by now. The xenos here reveal their hybrids openly. Their infestation is complete.’
He changed vox-channel to speak to the Impulsor’s driver. ‘Make sure the enemy’s local communications are jammed. Conduct augur sweeps for any further signs of life.’
‘I sense none,’ said Mephiston.
‘There should be some survivors.’
‘I feel no living thing within a hundred miles of this place,’ said the Lord of Death.
The Impulsor dropped suddenly as it crested the wall of an outlying crater. The last remains of Edoni sped by; burning residential districts and shanty towns. They passed the city limits, and went out over agrifields of squat palmate trees arrayed in neat rows between the high pipes of an irrigation system. The whole area showed signs of neglect. Many of the trees were dead.
Over the trees the Impulsor arrays found a level. The force fanned out into a broad arrowhead, running parallel to a wide, dusty highway. It should have been crowded with ground vehicles, but it was empty, barred every few miles by deserted military checkpoints.
Dante surveyed the parched, empty landscape. ‘Did they know we were coming?’
‘I think not,’ said Mephiston. He closed his eyes. ‘There is something to the north-west.’
‘Is it worthy of investigation?’
‘There is pain. A great amount of pain. Old now, but the echoes persist.’ He looked at Dante. ‘We should investigate.’
Dante gave the order. Antargo’s demi-company obeyed, and the Impulsors swept around, heading obliquely towards the horizon.
They arrived as the sun was setting, staining the world with glorious orange light the colour of autumn fires. The dry grasses, the squat trees – all were painted a vibrant red-gold.
Through the last rays of day, Mephiston and Dante walked a field of bones.
An area many square miles in size had been flattened. Piles of earth and grass were heaped between bulldozed trees lying in untidy stacks around the periphery.
The lack of care taken in clearing the site was in awful contrast to the obscene diligence with which the bodies had been arranged, each laid with their heads to the north, their feet pointing south, each given the same amount of space for their repose.
The massacre had taken place some time ago, long enough that the sun had reduced the bodies to black skins shrunken onto white bones. The clothes they wore in life were discoloured by the leakage of corpse juices. Bright silks and dull utilitarian coveralls alike had been stained an ugly brown, but the diversity of people present was readily apparent. People of all ages, all occupations. Soldiers lay next to manufactorum workers, high bureaucrats beside lowly agricolae serfs.
A faint scent of decay, like aged spices, hung over the field. It stretched on for miles. The piles of debris scraped from the surface on the far side were distant blue marks against the dead orchards.
‘Their purity links them,’ said Dante. ‘These were the people not in thrall to the xenos.’
‘It is so,’ said Mephiston. ‘Slaughtered. The same will be happening in the north.’
Dante stopped by a small corpse. The vibrant green of its headscarf was a shocking contrast to the decay of the flesh. He stared at it for a long moment. Insects chirred in the dried-out landscape.
‘I hate them all, Mephiston,’ said Dante. ‘These fiends and aliens we must fight. When will it ever end?’
‘When the last of them stops breathing, or we do,’ said Mephiston.
Dante stood, fixated on the dead. ‘Life is struggle. How I wish it were not so.’
‘So has spoken every wise man in every species ever to think,’ said the Lord of Death. He looked skywards. His pale skin glowed in the evening light. ‘Night is coming. We are an hour’s transit from Djesseli. The centre of this infection is there. I can feel it, even now, a blackness in the warp screaming out for attention. When I touch the warp, I feel the shadow cast by the hive mind, far away on the edge of perception. It is blinded, as we are, by the energies pouring from the Rift. Abaddon’s atrocity has bought us a little time. If we slay their leader, and the beasts that brought this disease to Ronenti, then this world may yet have a chance.’
‘Then we shall purge it.’
‘We might be best laying Ronenti to waste.’
In the dying day Dante’s golden death mask looked as if it were aflame.
‘If I can save one human life here, I will. I have called too often on Exterminatus this past year.’
‘It is not your fault, Dante.’
‘No,’ said the Chapter Master, ‘but it was my choice. It was I who gave the order, I who condemned billions to die.’
‘Only so that trillions might live.’
‘That makes it no easier to bear,’ said Dante. ‘I swore to protect the Imperium, Mephiston. The Imperium is not a collection of stars, or flags planted in far-off soils. This is the Imperium.’ He gestured at the bones cooling in the gathering blue of evening.
He turned back to the line of Impulsors waiting at the edge of the massacre ground. ‘Burn them, Lord of Death. Let your power shine bright in the warp. Commit these bodies to purifying fire. Let the enemy know we are coming, and let them fear.’
‘As you wish, my lord,’ said Mephiston. He observed the spectacle of the bones a moment more. Something in the arrangement was appealing to him. Then he reached into the warp with his mind and brought out fire.
The whole slaughter ground, end to end, erupted in sheets of roaring flame thirty feet tall.
Heat wafted Mephiston’s cloak as he left the field.
Chekeen paced the high walls of Djesseli’s Havamor Palace. Night brought relief from the heat of the day. Cool winds blowing off the agri-steppe around the city dried his sweat away. The banners of the Prophet of Claws snapped in the wind. The flag was a purple field bearing a tightly curled ouroboros, signifying the prophet’s great message, that in all people the truth of things waited to be awoken.
Chekeen’s footsteps crunched dust on the paving. The city was quiet. Not so long ago, night-time Djesseli had rung to immoral revelry. Drink ran freely. The wicked preyed on the weak. Not after the purge. After the purge, a perfect silence fell at every sunset.
He breathed in air scented by the baked lands of the plains. with no unbelievers, the city smelled better. There was less smog. Less effluent to pour into the great river Djess.
He continued on his patrol. As he rounded the Outgate turrets, he met another of the guards. Like Chekeen, he wore the uniform of Ronenti’s planetary defence force, and the ridged tattoo of the Blessed Prophet around his right eye.
‘Ascension awaits us,’ Chekeen said.
‘May the day come soon,’ the other said.
With a nod they passed each other.
A scrape from behind made Chekeen stop and turn around.
The other guard had vanished. He could have turned the corner, Chekeen supposed, but not at the speed he’d been walking. A sense of foreboding took hold of him.
He walked back to where the parapet turned to the south. Sure enough, the other guard was nowhere to be seen. He unhitched his bulky vox-set from his belt. As he did, he looked down, and saw blood on the rough sandstone of the parapet.
