Into Exile - Aaron Dembski-Bowden, page 1
part #0 of The Horus Heresy Series
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Into Exile – Aaron Dembski-Bowden
About the Author
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
Into Exile
Aaron Dembski-Bowden
10
Gritty ochre dust clings to the dead warrior’s open eyes. A shadow retreats from his stilled form, something immense yet hunched, something with rattling joints and grinding metal claws. It strides away, limping badly, its orders unfulfilled, its masters informed.
The legionary lies in the dirt, his duty done.
9
The scholar sits hunched in the chamber of stinking steel and bleeding bodies, breathing in the scorched scents of mangled automata and riven human flesh. The creature on his shoulder bears no small resemblance to a species of simian detailed in the archives of Ancient Terra. Its name is Sapien. The scholar named it himself when he constructed the creature from vat-cloned fur and consecrated metals.
The psyber-monkey gives a worried chitter at their surroundings. The scholar feels no such unease, only disgusted irritation. He sneers at these charnel house surroundings, this place of the ruined and the wounded that is supposedly his salvation.
The arched walls shake around him. Outside the ascending ship, the sky of Sacred Mars is on fire. Far below, Nicanor will be dead by now. Butchered, no less. The fool.
Arkhan Land huddles like some filthy refugee amidst the other survivors, praying to the Omnissiah that the reek of their cowardice and failure won’t infect him.
Sapien scampers to Land’s other shoulder. He chitters again, the tone wordless yet curiously inquisitive.
‘He was a fool,’ the scholar murmurs, idly stroking the cog-like vertebrae plates that made up the little creature’s spine. ‘Space Marines,’ he snorts the words. ‘They are all fools.’
But even to himself, those words ring a little hollow this time.
8
Nicanor stares into his slayer’s eyes. His own blood marks the bulbous golden domes of the war machine’s visual actuators, blood that he coughed into the thing’s face right after it drove the crackling, motorised spear through his breastplate. It keeps him aloft, impaled, his boots scarcely scraping the dust that makes up the useless yet priceless Martian soil. Each scuff smears away the red-brown regolith to reveal greyer earth beneath – a secret of the Red Planet concealed mere inches beneath the surface, yet unknown to most capable of conjuring the world’s image in their imaginations.
The machine leans in closer, the domes of its insect eyes inspecting the prey, recording Nicanor’s face and the markings upon his armour. The dying warrior hears the clicking whirr of an open transmission sluice as his killer exloads its findings to its distant masters.
This is prey. It knows that in the processes of its murderously simple consciousness.
But this is the wrong prey.
Nicanor swallows the pain. He doesn’t cower from it and he refuses to let it consume him. Pain is felt only by the living, and thus it is nothing to regret. Pain is life. Pain can be overcome as long as breath resides in the human, and transhuman, body. He will die, he knows this, but he will not die ashamed. Honour is everything.
Blood falls from Nicanor’s clenched teeth as the war machine shakes him, seeking to dislodge him from the toothed length of its spear-limb. The lance is buried too deeply in his innards, clutched by reinforced bone and armour plate, and refusing to easily come free. He feels his left boot connect with his fallen boltgun, the ceramite clanking against the gun’s kill-marked metal body. Even if he could twist to reach for it without tearing himself in two, the weapon is empty. Through his reddened gaze he still sees the scorched pockmarks cratering the robot’s head, where every bolt he fired found its target.
The war machine lowers its spear, slamming the impaled warrior hard against the dusty ground, and its taloned foot crunches down on Nicanor’s limp form for leverage. With a brace and a wrench of machinery joints, the lance tears free in a fresh scattershot of bloody ceramite and cooling gore.
The disembowelling also pulls the last breath from what remains of Nicanor’s body. He stares up, strengthless and silent, and he sees nothing in the robot’s implacable eye domes. There is no hint of intelligence or sign of who might be watching through the automaton’s retinal feed.
His greying gaze slides skyward, slipping from the hunched and bolt-blasted carapace of his mechanical slayer. There, rising into the embattled sky, is the silhouette of the scholar’s transport vessel.
It would be poetic to say that this is Nicanor’s final thought, and victory is his final sight. Neither is true. His final thought is of the ruination of his breastplate, where the symbol of the Raptor Imperialis had shown so proud in ivory upon the golden-yellow plate. His last sight is of Mondus Occulum, where subterranean foundries and bolt shell manufactories burn beneath the Martian rock, and where the last of his brothers’ gunships stream into the sky.
The dust in the air begins to settle over his armour, upon his torn body, even on his eyes as they twitch one last time, yet fail to close.
The war machine casts a shadow across his corpse as it records his demise.
7
Land runs, breath sawing from his mouth, spit spraying with each heave. His boots clang up the gang-ramp, which rises already beneath his panicked tread. He doesn’t look back, not to bid the Space Marine farewell, not to bear witness to the warrior’s final moments. The hammer-crash of Nicanor’s discharging boltgun is the last thing that Land hears before the hatch grinds inexorably closed.
There, in the fresh dark, he collapses to his hands and knees, all dignity abandoned. Shaking hands drag the multilens focusing goggles from his face.
Safe, he thinks. Safe.
And for some reason the thought feels almost treasonous. Perhaps a lesser man might consider it guilt. The niggle of a weak soul’s conscience, knowing that Nicanor is still out there, selling his life to buy Land’s survival.
But pragmatism drowns any pathetic stirring of morality. Conscience and guilt are concepts brought into being by those too meek to face up to their failures, seeking to mark their hesitations as virtues.
He has to survive. That’s the beginning and end of it. He matters infinitely more than a single legionary. Nicanor’s own actions prove the truth of it.
‘Ascension,’ comes a servitor’s bland tones over the chamber-wide vox. The transport begins its rise in shaking inelegance.
Arkhan Land weaves through a compressed sea of moaning, wounded forms, and sits with his back to the chamber wall. Sapien squawks an entirely unsimian sound as he takes his place upon his master’s shoulder.
6
‘Run!’ Nicanor’s voice, even weakened, is a roar above the wind. ‘Run, damn you!’
He turns with his boltgun braced against his shoulder, trusting that the technoarchaeologist’s arrogance and fear will serve even if Nicanor’s command fails. The war machine lopes and lurches closer, leaping over the wind-smoothed grey rocks that lie across the Martian surface like the tumbledown shamanic stone circles of Old Earth.
And it is the same machine. It bears the scars that Nicanor already inflicted upon its armour plating with bolter and bomb back in the Mesatan Complex. It sprints forwards on backward-jointed legs, its chain-toothed limbs revving in the silence of its empty rotor cannons.
Nicanor’s boltgun barks in futility. Explosive shells strike true, detonating against the stalker-killer’s insectoid cranial housing, doing little more than jerking the head with its bulbous golden eyes to the side.
He knows he can’t kill it. He knows he doesn’t need to. Sigismund didn’t send him here to kill this thing.
He drops the bolter the instant his retinal display chimes that his magazine is empty. His power sword flares to life in both hands before the gun has even hit the ground.
The hunting machine could circle around him if its cognitive processes choose to do so, but threat sensors flicker with suggestions of caution. This prey has thwarted it once already, and time is short. The kill must be now, or it will be never.
It charges, janky legs clanking. Spear-limb joints bunch up, driving back into their piston housings. It leaps, emitting a scrapcode shriek for want of a true battle cry.
Nicanor hurls himself to the side, rolling in the dust and dirt, defacing his damaged armour further by occluding the proud symbols that have stood upon the ceramite for over three decades. His injuries leave him slow, slower than he has ever been. He comes to his knees in a sense-lost haze of disorientation, thrusting upwards with the blade.
It bites. It bites deep, with the snarling kiss of an aggravated power field knifing into sensitive mechanics. Sparks fly in place of blood’s spray. He feels the machine buckle above him, its thwarted core straining, the sword buried in the underside of its hip joint threatening to plunge the beast-machine to the ground.
He must live, Nicanor thinks, tasting blood in his mouth. And he will.
He pulls the blade free from the crippled war machine in exalted silence, stoic to the last, leaving the bellowing of war shouts for the warriors of lesser Legions that require such pageantry. The sword snaps near the hilt as the machine whines and staggers back.
Nicanor is rising, turning, just in time for the stalker-killer’s primary limb to emit
He coughs blood as the crippled machine drags him up before its alien face. He is grinning when he hears the engine cacophony from the transport lifting off.
‘He lives,’ he tells his killer. These will be his last words. ‘You have failed.’
5
They are almost to the landing site when Arkhan Land realises the severity of the Space Marine’s wounds. The warrior’s limp becomes a stagger, his stride arrested as he seeks to pull his helmet clear and breathe without the filtration grille. It comes free to reveal a dark face with a typical Terran equatorial skin shade, blood riming the gritted teeth. It is the first time Land has seen the warrior’s features. He makes no comment on this because he doesn’t care.
Since emerging from the underground complex, there has been no sign of their pursuer. Ahead across the rusty desert, the orbital lander sits with its gang-ramps down, accepting evacuees and materiel in a shuffling and stumbling trickle.
It is not the ship that Land would have chosen for himself. Nor would he associate with the scavengers and dregs now boarding it, had he any other choice. But it is said that beggars cannot be choosers. The same can be said for refugees.
Without even realising he is doing it, Land shields Sapien from the gathering wind, holding the psyber-monkey in the folds of his magisterial, crimson robe. Sapien accepts this treatment, displaying a fanged maw no natural simian had ever possessed. The expression may possibly be a smile.
‘Space Marine,’ Land calls over the wind.
‘All is well,’ the towering warrior calls back. Plainly, it is a lie. All is anything but well. Nicanor touches a gauntleted hand to the shattered ceramite at his side. The armoured fingers come away red.
‘Your kind do not bleed this much,’ Land accuses him with lazy vehemence. ‘I have read the physiological data myself. In detail.’
‘We bleed this much,’ the Imperial Fist replies, ‘when we are dying.’ He gestures to the segmented evacuation craft being slowly abraded by the rising wind. ‘Keep moving, Technoarchaeologist Land.’
But Land doesn’t keep moving. He fixes his multilens goggles over his eyes, looking back the way they came. Not for the first time, he wishes he was armed. His collection of antiquities boasts many archeotech weapons, the pinnacle of his hoard being a deliciously beautiful sidearm with humming aural dampeners, rotating magnetic vanes, and the capacity to fire micro-atomic rounds. But it – along with many of his possessions – is elsewhere. A significant portion of his priceless finds are safely secured and await him once he reaches the Ring of Iron that surrounds Mars in a sacred dockyard halo.
Even so, he is already cataloguing the innumerable precious items he has been forced to abandon on the planet today.
Evacuation is such a dirty word.
Sapien hisses in his cradle of robes. Land nods as if the sound held some kind of sense, adjusting his goggles’ visual range with a clicking twist of a side dial.
‘Space Marine,’ he says, looking over the dusty plain behind them. ‘Something is approaching from the southern ridge.’
It had followed them through the complex, after all. All of those byzantine twists and turns, hoping to put distance between themselves and their foe, had been nothing more than wasted meandering.
The wounded warrior clutches his weapons tighter as he turns. Land hears the click of Nicanor’s eye lenses resetting, cancelling their zoomed view.
This ends now, Land thinks. One way or another, this ends now.
‘Get to the ship,’ the Space Marine says. And when Land moves at a slow, exhausted jog instead of a sprint, Nicanor’s temper finally flares. ‘Run!’ he says, his voice a crack of breaking arctic ice. ‘Run, damn you!’
4
They walk through tunnels of flickering light, the power systems feeding the Mesatan Complex failing one by one, falling to abandonment or treachery. Their passage is sung in the sound of their footsteps – the technoarchaeologist’s ragged, tired tread, and the Fist’s own fading gait.
Nicanor no longer disguises his limp. Fluid leaks from where the robot’s withering storm of solid slug gunfire savaged his armour plating. It’s worst in several medial and inferolateral locations that he doesn’t need his retinal display to describe. He can feel the grind of abused metal against – and inside – injured flesh, without the aggressive chime of warnings across his visor display.
He can smell his own wounds, smell their coppery openness from a refusal to heal with the expected speed. That isn’t a good sign.
‘You said there was a ship,’ Arkhan Land says without looking back at the warrior.
‘A sub-orbital,’ Nicanor confirms.
‘Already it sounds like some grotesque last gasp for refugees.’
That is exactly what it is, Nicanor thinks. ‘The arrangements were made with whatever resources were available.’
‘Arranged by whom?’ The technoarchaeologist, a wheezing shape of rippling crimson robes, radiates an aura of disapproval. ‘By you?’
‘First Captain Sigsimund,’ Nicanor replies, ‘and Fabricator Locum Zagreus Kane.’
Still he doesn’t turn, yet Nicanor hears the smirk in Land’s tone. ‘Fabricator General Zagreus Kane now, I’ll wager? Omnissiah preserve us from that punishingly dull creature and his limited vision.’
Nicanor casts back a sweat-stinging gaze into the flickering depths of the corridor behind. He sees nothing. No new warning chimes pulse on his retinal feed beyond the ones screaming of his injuries. His auspex scanner remains silent.
Corridor by corridor, they rise through the complex. Nicanor feels his limbs growing leaden as his body assimilates the adrenal sting of the medicae narcotics flooding his system. The strength they granted over the last hours deserts him by increments, inviting back the weary burn of his wounds.
‘I’ve never encountered one of those automata before,’ Nicanor says.
Arkhan Land turns his sharp features back upon his armoured companion. Amusement gleams in the scholar’s half-lidded eyes. ‘A Space Marine with a passion for idle chatter? My, my, my. The surprises never cease.’
Nicanor bridles. ‘I seek answers, not conversation.’
Land gives an unpleasant smile before turning to the tunnel ahead. The psyber-monkey on his shoulder noisily crunches on a steel ingot.
‘It is a Vorax,’ the technoarchaeologist says in an arch tone. ‘This one has been modified by a forge-noble to suit his or her own purposes, I’ve no doubt, but the chassis is that of a Vorax automaton. They rarely see use in the hosts of the Great Crusade anymore. We release them into the forge cities when overpopulation becomes a concern. They are,’ he adds with a refined air, ‘occasionally tasked for assassination protocols. But only against targets of sufficiently high priority.’
Nicanor reads the pride in the scholar’s voice. The man’s arrogance knows no bounds.
‘Who would want you dead, Technoarchaeologist Land? The men and women you were keen to remain and face alone?’
The robed man scratches his hairless crown – for no reason Nicanor can discern the psyber-monkey mimics the gesture, scratching its own head. ‘There you’ve asked a question of staggering ignorance, Space Marine. A great many of my contemporaries would enjoy the notion of me breathing my last. Not all, of course. But enough. On both sides of this new war.’
Nicanor grunts at the pain in his side. Land takes it as a question.
‘And why, you ask?’ the technoarchaeologist carries on, though Nicanor has asked no such thing. ‘Because I am Arkhan Land. Jealousy motivates them. Jealousy forged in their own insecurities. I suspect that says it all.’
The Imperial Fist says nothing. He’s seen unmodified humans do this before – the propensity that even overconfident souls have for fear-babble in times of duress.
When they emerge at last into the dubious light of the Martian dawn, the Zetek alkali plains stretch out before them.
