Sarpedon let out a long breath. ‘Then that is the way it must be,’ he
said. ‘You have argued for a reckoning since you arrived on the
Phalanx. You will have it, if that is what you truly want.’
Reinez crouched down into a guard, hammer haft held across his
body. He flexed and bounced on his calves, judging distance and
winding up for the strike.
Sarpedon knew that Salk’s squad had all their guns trained on
Reinez. They would not fire. Perhaps they would if Reinez killed
Sarpedon, but by then it would not matter.
Reinez darted forwards, faster than Sarpedon remembered him
moving. Sarpedon whirled and swung the Axe of Mercaeno around,
slamming the head into Reinez’s side. He discharged a blast of
psychic power through the force blade and though Reinez caught the
worst of the blow on the haft of his hammer, the explosive force was
enough to throw him from his feet and into the flakboard side of the
fake church. The wall buckled under his weight, but Reinez rolled to
his feet and swung his hammer at ankle height as Sarpedon charged
to follow up.
Sarpedon leapt up. He scuttled along the wall, talons clinging to the
flakboard.
Reinez tried to get his bearings, unused to fighting an enemy who
could climb walls like a spider.
‘Now!’ yelled Reinez. ‘Now! Fire! Fire!’
From every direction, bolters hammered. Muzzle flashes betrayed
hidden firing positions around the far side of the mock village. Bullet
fire ripped into the flakboard around Sarpedon, and a flash of pain burst
through one of his back legs. Sarpedon ran up the wall and onto the
roof of the church, volleys of fire chewing through the church all around
him. In the lee of the church tower he found a semblance of cover, the
flakboard tearing apart and the tower sagging above him.
‘Contacts everywhere,’ voxed Salk. ‘It was a trap. Engage!’
‘Who are they?’ demanded Sarpedon.
‘It’s us,’ came Salk’s shocked reply. ‘It’s Soul Drinkers!’
Sarpedon could glimpse purple armour among the debris and
gunsmoke of the firefight erupting across the village. Iktinos’s Flock,
the Soul Drinkers who were loyal to the Chaplain first and Sarpedon a
distant second, whose allegiance Sarpedon had been too blind to
question.
‘You are too honourable, Soul Drinker!’ yelled Reinez from
somewhere below. ‘Too quick to give a sworn enemy a fair fight! Now it
will be the death of you all!’
Reinez clambered up the wall and vaulted onto the roof. Sarpedon
lunged and the two fought, axe and hammer flashing, blows parried
and driven aside as bolter fire shrieked around them. Sarpedon hacked
a chunk out of Reinez’s shoulder armour. In response, Reinez
stamped down on Sarpedon’s wounded leg to pin him in place and
crunched the head of his hammer into Sarpedon’s chest. Sarpedon
was faster than Reinez but the Crimson Fist had prepared for this fight
for many years and this time he had the advantage of numbers.
Iktinos’s Flock comprised many more warriors than Salk’s squad and
among the Flock were those with good enough aim to pick out
Sarpedon from the melee. Bolter fire slammed into the tower behind
Sarpedon or sparked from his armour, knocking him back a pace or
throwing him off-balance.
Sarpedon powered forwards, a desperate move more suited to a
rude brawl than a duel to the death. Forelegs and arms wrapped
around Reinez, forcing him down under Sarpedon’s greater weight.
‘What have you done, Reinez?’ growled Sarpedon.
‘Iktinos promised me a chance to kill you,’ replied Reinez, voice
strained as he fought to burst Sarpedon’s hold on him. ‘There was
nothing else anyone could offer me.’
‘Iktinos is the enemy! He is the source of all this suffering.’
‘Then I will kill him next,’ snarled Reinez.
Sarpedon picked up Reinez and threw him down, putting all his
strength into hurling the Crimson Fist off the roof. Reinez landed badly
and Salk’s return fire drove him into the cover of a ruined building
The Flock were moving across the village. More than twenty of them
had survived the breakout from the Atoning Halls, double Salk’s
numbers. Sarpedon recognised Soul Drinkers he had called brothers,
who had been stranded when their officers were killed. Iktinos had
taken them in and Sarpedon had been grateful that the Chaplain was
willing to give them spiritual leadership. But Iktinos had been warping
them, finding their sense of loss and turning it into something else, a
devotion to the chaplain alone that meant they followed him instead of
Sarpedon. The chapter master had been confronted with many results
of his failures as a leader, but none of them had struck him as sharply
as the sight of the Flock did then, moving with murderous intent
across the town square to batter Salk’s squad into oblivion.
Salk’s Soul Drinkers were falling. They were surrounded and
outgunned. Salk himself leaned out from cover to fell one of the Flock,
and in response a cluster of shots knocked him out of sight in a
shower of blood. Sarpedon’s twin hearts felt like they were tightening
in his chest, all the heat squeezed out of his body to be replaced with
cold and dust.
Sarpedon leapt down from the church into the centre of the village.
He landed in the heart of the advancing Flock. Faces he had known for
years, since before the first Chapter war, turned on him and saw
nothing but an enemy. Sarpedon saw nothing in them any more, no
brotherhood, no hope, none of the principles that had made them turn
on the old Chapter’s ways. He was their enemy, and they were his.
Suddenly, it seemed simple.
Sarpedon knew the closest Soul Drinker to him was Brother
Scarphinal, one of Givrillian’s squad. Givrillian had been Sarpedon’s
closest confidant and best friend, and he had died on a nameless
planet to the daemon prince Ve’Meth. There was nothing left of
Givrillian’s command in Scarphinal now. His eyes were blank and his
bolter turned towards Sarpedon without hesitation.
Sarpedon struck Scarphinal’s head from his shoulders with a single
shining arc, the Axe of Mercaeno slicing through the Space Marine’s
neck so smoothly the blood had not yet begun to flow when
Scarphinal’s head hit the floor.
Something dark and prideful, a relic of the old Chapter, awakened in
Sarpedon. The love of bloodshed, the exultation of battle. Sometimes,
those places locked away in his mind could be useful, and it was with
a strange sense of relief that he let the bloodlust take him.
Sarpedon roared with formless anger, and dived into the carnage.
Chapter 11
The Phalanx had been designed – whenever it had been designed,
before the Age of Imperium – to survive. Any hostiles who boarded the
immense ship might find themselves trapped in the tight, winding
corridors of the engineering and maintenance areas just beneath the
hull’s skin, separate
d from the ship’s more vulnerable areas by
hundreds of automated bulkhead doors and whole sections of outer
deck that could be vented into hard vacuum with the press of a control
stud.
The hostiles currently on the Phalanx had bypassed every design
feature intended to contain them. They had been disgorged directly
into the ship’s interior, spilling through cavernous shuttle bays and
swarming into crew quarters, riding torrents of blood through
automated cargo motivator systems. The Phalanx had no way to stop
the daemonic invaders.
So it was up to the Adeptus Astartes instead.
Chapter Master Vladimir stood at the threshold of the Sigismunda
Tactica, and looked out across the battlefield. It spanned the barracks
deck and was a kilometre and a half wide. This was the vulnerable
heart of the Phalanx, the ground across which an invader could charge
with impunity from the lost starboard docking bays towards the
engines and reactors. The Forge of Ages anchored one end, beyond
which was a tangle of engineering areas and power and coolant
conduits. The other flank terminated in the Rynn’s World Memorial, an
amphitheatre of granite inscribed with the names of the Crimson Fists
lost in the infamous near-destruction of their fortress-monastery.
Beyond this memorial were the steel catacombs, tight nests of
cramped candlelit chambers where generations of crew members were
laid to rest in niches scattered with bones. The conduit decks and
catacombs would slow down the invaders’ advance, funnelling them
through the open areas of the barracks, chapels and hero-shrines
rolling out in front of Vladimir.
‘I can smell them,’ said Captain Lysander, emerging from the
Sigismunda Tactica behind Vladimir. ‘The enemy are close.’
‘Of course you can smell them,’ said Vladimir. ‘I wonder if we will
ever get the stink of the warp off my ship.’
‘Borganor is in position at the Forge of Ages,’ continued Lysander.
‘Leucrontas and the Ninth will hold the memorial.’
‘And everyone else will take the centre,’ finished Vladimir. ‘Can it be
held?’
‘Our Third and Fifth are enough to hold anything,’ said Lysander.
‘You realise you will stake your life on that belief?’
‘We all will, Chapter Master. If this line breaks, everyone on the
Phalanx will die.’
‘Tell me, captain. Is it wrong that I have dreamed of a day like this?’
Vladimir drew the Fangs of Dorn from the scabbards on either side of
his waist - twin power swords, their blades broad for stabbing, their
hilts semicircles of glinting black stone. ‘That I have knelt at the altars
of Dorn and prayed that one day I would face the enemy like this, in a
battle that will decide whether my Chapter lives in glory or is banished
to a penitents’ crusade in disgrace? I have begged the Emperor to give
me such a battle, toe to toe, no retreat, everything at stake. Is it wrong
that I feel some joy in me that it is here?’
‘We all see something else in battle,’ replied Lysander. ‘Perhaps it
is a mirror in which we see a reflection of ourselves. I see a grim task
to be completed, something ugly and crude, but an evil necessary for
the survival of our species. You see something different.’
‘Most Imperial Fists would simply have said “No”, captain.’
‘Well, that’s why you made me a captain.’
Among the complexes of barracks cells and the shrines to longdead
heroes, the Third and Fifth Companies of the Imperial Fists were
taking up their battle positions. Low buildings formed the anchoring
points beneath the grey sky of the ceiling. Battle-brothers knelt to
icons of past captains and Chapter Masters, their home suddenly
transformed into a battleground.
The Tactica itself was one of the most defensible buildings on the
deck. It was a circular building of black stone, its arched entrances
leading to dozens of map tables on which famous past battles of the
Imperial Fists had been recreated. The buildings over which Imperial
Fists had fought and died were scrimshawed from alien ivories and laid
out on miniature battlegrounds of polished obsidian. In the Tactica,
named after Sigismund, one of Dorn’s greatest generals and the
founder of the Black Templars Chapter, Imperial Fists officers could
contemplate victories of the past, dissecting the battle plans the
Chapter’s leaders had enacted and the follies of the enemies who tried
to stand against them. If the Imperial Fists and the other Adeptus
Astartes on the Phalanx could prevail, perhaps the Tactica itself would
be recreated on one of those ornate maps.
Lord Inquisitor Kolgo was walking among the map tables, casting
his eye over the Imperial Fists history. He wore deep red terminator
armour embellished with silver symbols of the Inquisition, giving him
the same bulk as a Space Marine in power armour. His Battle Sisters
retinue kept a respectful distance, Sister Aescarion waiting patiently
with power axe in hand.
‘I take it,’ said Vladimir, ‘that you know rather more about the forces
of the warp than can be entrusted to lesser minds like ours.’
Kolgo looked up, as if he had not expected to be interrupted, to see
Vladimir walking through one of the Tactica’s lofty archways. ‘It is a
burden we Inquisitors must carry, Chapter Master,’ he said.
‘If there is anything we could do with knowing, then now is the time
to tell us.’
Kolgo took a set of Emperor’s Tarot cards from a silver case set into
his breastplate. On one of the map tables, one which represented a
volcanic battlefield where the Imperial Fists had shattered an assault
by the xenos tau, he laid out three of them in a row.
‘”The Silver Ocean”,’ said Kolgo, pointing to the first card. ‘One who
cannot be grasped or comprehended, as subtle as quicksilver. An
unknowable foe. The second is “The Altar”, a symbol of majesty and
glory. But it is inverted, and followed by “The Plague”. The enemy is
inscrutable and majestic, but that majesty is false and conceals an
ocean of foulness beneath its beauty. It is a vessel of corruption in the
form of something wonderful. I see the hand of the Lord of Change in
the enemy we face, but the foe is its own creature, driven by its own
desires.’
‘You know what it is?’ said Vladimir.
‘I have my suspicions, which I will not share until they become
certainties, especially where the God of Lies is concerned.’ Kolgo
gathered up the cards and put them away. ‘This is more than a battle
over your vessel, Chapter Master. That is all I am willing to say.’
‘Then keep your own counsel, lord inquisitor, as long as you fight
alongside us.’
Kolgo smiled. ‘Have no fear on that score.’
‘Chapter Master,’ came a voice over the vox-net. The rune signifying
Castellan Leucrontas pulsed against Vladimir’s retina. ‘The enemy is
sighted.’
‘What is their strength, castellan?’ demanded Vladimir.
‘Hundreds
,’ came Leucrontas’s voice. ‘They are advancing on two
sides. Holding position.’
Vladimir strode out of the Tactica. His own Imperial Fists were in
position among the shrines and barracks, and he spotted the colours
of the Silver Skulls and Angels Sanguine among them. ‘Lysander,’ he
ordered. ‘Be ready to counter-advance on the castellan’s flank. Keep
the memorial from being surrounded.’
‘Yes, Chapter Master,’ said Lysander. ‘Other orders?’
Vladimir did not reply. Instead, he was looking past the Imperial
Fists positions ahead of him, towards the steel horizon broken by the
spires of hero-shrines and the fluttering banners of the mustering
grounds.
The daemon army was advancing. The horizon seethed, a mass of
iridescence bleeding into view like a bank of incandescent gas. The
sound of its music washed over the Imperial Fists lines, an awful
cacophony of a thousand shrieking voices. Shapes towered over the
lines, winged masses surrounded by mountains of daemonic followers
tumbling over one another like insects swarming from a hive.
‘The Emperor has granted you your battle,’ said Lysander. ‘Now is
the time to give thanks.’
‘There will be opportunity for that when the victory is won,’ said
Vladimir. ‘Kolgo! Get your Battle Sisters to the lines! We are attacked
on all fronts!’
From the daemonic horde emerged another winged monster, this
one bathed in light as if Kravamesh’s light was falling in a bright shaft
onto its pale, haloed form. It was framed by feathered wings and its
skin was so pale it seemed to burn, like ivory lit from within. Its perfect
face projected its beauty and authority even as far as the Tactica.
Even Vladimir found it difficult to tear his eyes away from it, as if it was
a vision that originated inside his head and burned its way outwards.
‘Behold, your future!’ the monster bellowed, its voice tearing across
the battlefield like a razored wind. ‘I am the end of empires! I am the
woes of men! I am Abraxes!’
Sarpedon skidded across the blood-slicked surface, the Axe of
Mercaeno smouldering in his hand.
Brother Nephael faced him. Nephael’s bolter magazine was empty,
his last few shots fired wildly through a storm of his own battlebrothers,
and he had no time to change the magazine. He snatched