Hammer and Bolter - Issue 2 Read online

  It was at this point, with everyone gathered in Bay One, the only bay in the station large enough to offer a berth to Altando’s lifter, that Sigma addressed Talon Squad over the comm-link command channel once again.

  ‘No witnesses,’ he said simply.

  Karras was hardly surprised. Again, this was standard operating procedure, but that didn’t mean the Death Spectre had to like it. It went against every bone in his body. Wasn’t the whole point of the Deathwatch to protect mankind? They were alien-hunters. His weapons hadn’t been crafted to take the lives of loyal Imperial citizens, no matter who gave the command.

  ‘Clarify,’ said Karras, feigning momentary confusion.

  There was a crack of thunder, a single bolter shot. Magos Borgovda’s head exploded in a red haze.

  Darrion Rauth stood over the body, dark grey smoke rising from the muzzle of his bolter.

  ‘Clear enough for you, Karras?’ said the Exorcist.

  Karras felt anger surging up inside him. He might even have lashed out at Rauth, might have grabbed him by the gorget, but the reaction of the surviving skitarii troopers put a stop to that. Responding to the cold-blooded slaughter of their leader, they raised their weapons and aimed straight at the Exorcist.

  What followed was a one-sided massacre that made Karras sick to his stomach.

  When it was over, Sigma had his wish.

  There were no witnesses left to testify that anything at all had been dug up from the crater on Menatar. All that remained was the little spaceport station and its staff, waiting to be told that the excavation was over and that their time on this inhospitable world was finally at an end.

  Saezar watched the big lifter take off first, and marvelled at it. Even on his slightly fuzzy vid-monitor screen, the craft was an awe-inspiring sight. It emerged from the doors of Bay One with so much thrust that he thought it might rip the whole station apart, but the facility’s integrity held. There were no pressure leaks, no accidents.

  The way that great ship hauled its heavy form up into the sky and off beyond the clouds thrilled him. Such power! It was a joy and an honour to see it. He wondered what it must be like to pilot such a ship.

  Soon, the black Thunderhawk was also ready to leave. He granted the smaller, sleeker craft clearance and opened the doors of Bay Four once again. Good air out, bad air in. The Thunderhawk’s thrusters powered up. It soon emerged into the light of the Menatarian day, angled its nose upwards, and began to pull away.

  Watching it go, Saezar felt a sense of relief that surprised him. The Astartes were leaving. He had expected to feel some kind of sadness, perhaps even regret at not getting to meet them in person. But he felt neither of those things. There was something terrible about them. He knew that now. It was something none of the bedtime stories had ever conveyed.

  As he watched the Thunderhawk climb, Saezar reflected on it, and discovered that he knew what it was. The Astartes, the Space Marines… they didn’t radiate goodness or kindness like the stories pretended. They were not so much righteous and shining champions as they were dark avatars of destruction. Aye, he was glad to see the back of them. They were the living embodiment of death. He hoped he would never set eyes on such beings again. Was there any greater reminder that the galaxy was a terrible and deadly place?

  ‘That’s right,’ he said quietly to the vid-image of the departing Thunderhawk. ‘Fly away. We don’t need angels of death here. Better you remain a legend only if the truth is so grim.’

  And then he saw something that made him start forwards, eyes wide.

  It was as if the great black bird of prey had heard his words. It veered sharply left, turning back towards the station.

  Saezar stared at it, wordless, confused.

  There was a burst of bright light from the battle-cannon on the craft’s back. A cluster of dark, slim shapes burst forwards from the under-wing pylons, each trailing a bright ribbon of smoke.

  Missiles!

  ‘No!’

  Saezar would have said more, would have cried out to the Emperor for salvation, but the roof of the operations centre was ripped apart in the blast. Even if the razor-sharp debris hadn’t cut his body into a dozen wet red pieces, the rush of choking Menatarian air would have eaten him from the inside out.

  ‘No witnesses,’ Sigma had said.

  Within minutes, Orga Station was obliterated, and then there were none.

  Days passed.

  The only things stirring within the crater were the skirts of dust kicked up by gusting winds. Ozyma-138 loomed vast and red in the sky above, continuing its work of slowly blasting away the planet’s atmosphere. With the last of the humans gone, this truly was a dead place once again, and that was how the visitors, or rather returnees, found it.

  There were three of them, and they had been called here by a powerful beacon that only psychically gifted individuals might detect. It was a beacon that had gone strangely silent shortly after it had been activated. The visitors had come to find out why.

  They were far taller than the men of the Imperium, and their limbs were long and straight. The human race might have thought them elegant once, but all the killings these slender beings had perpetrated against mankind had put a permanent end to that. To the modern Imperium, they were simply xenos, to be hated and feared and destroyed like any other.

  They descended the rocky sides of the crater in graceful silence, their booted feet causing only the slightest of rock-slides. When they reached the bottom, they stepped onto the crater floor and marched together towards the centre where the mouth of the great pit gaped.

  There was nothing hurried about their movements, and yet they covered the distance at an impressive speed.

  The one who walked at the front of the trio was taller than the others, and not just by virtue of the high, jewel-encrusted crest on his helmet. He wore a rich cloak of strange shimmering material and carried a golden staff that shone with its own light.

  The others were dressed in dark armour sculpted to emphasise the sweep of their long, lean muscles. They were armed with projectile weapons as white as bone. When the tall, cloaked figure stopped by the edge of the great pit, they stopped, too, and turned to either side, watchful, alert to any danger that might remain here.

  The cloaked leader looked down into the pit for a moment, then moved off through the ruins of the excavation site, glancing at the crumpled metal huts and the rusting cranes as he passed them.

  He stopped by a body on the ground, one of many. It was a pathetic, filthy mess of a thing, little more than rotting meat and broken bone wrapped in dust-caked cloth. It looked like it had been crushed by something. Pulverised. On the cloth was an icon – a skull set within a cog, equal parts black and white. For a moment, the tall figure looked down at it in silence, then he turned to the others and spoke, his voice filled with a boundless contempt that made even the swollen red sun seem to draw away.

  ‘Mon-keigh,’ he said, and the word was like a bitter poison on his tongue.

  Mon-keigh.

  The Inquisition

  ++Open vox-net++

  My liege,

  Our mission has been a success. Inquisitor Swallow, thought lost to the clutches of the eldar, has been returned to the light of the Imperium. Through endurance and faith, he has been able to bring back the following vital information on the Black Library.

  Inquisitor Vendal, Ordo Xenos

  BL: What are you working on at the moment?

  JS: As I write this, my next Black Library project is going to be Red & Black, an audio drama featuring the Sisters of Battle that serves a prequel to my 2006 novel Faith & Fire. I’m planning to follow that up with a new Sisters novel, entitled Hammer & Anvil (not to be confused with this fine publication, of course...) And outside the worlds of Warhammer, I’ve been working on a Star Trek novel called Cast No Shadow and a couple of videogame projects – Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

  BL: What are you working on next?

  JS: Fo
r the future, I’ve got a bunch of ideas for new Black Library projects. I’m certainly going to revisit Brother-Sergeant Rafen and the Blood Angels Chapter, maybe tell more stories about the Sisters and the Doom Eagles... But before then I want to tackle something that I think is going to be pretty epic – namely, the Battle for Signus, a pivotal event during the Horus Heresy where the Blood Angels and their primarch fought an army of daemons, and set in motion events that still echo ten millennia later...

  BL: Are there any areas of Warhammer 40,000 that you haven’t yet explored that you’d like to in the future?

  JS: The problem with the Worlds of Warhammer is that there’s so much cool stuff out there, it’s almost an embarrassment of riches! There are many interesting places to go to for stories, compelling characters, epic events. It’s hard to pick just one thing. I think what interests me the most are the mysteries and lost histories of the Warhammer 40,000 universe – those are the kind of places I’d like to visit and explore in fiction.

  BL: What are you reading at the moment? Who are your favourite authors?

  JS: At this moment, I’m reading a modern thriller by an author called Tod Goldberg, and before that I was reading my colleague Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Horus Heresy novel The First Heretic. As for favourite writers, my list is huge: Joe Haldeman, John Brunner, William Gibson, Phillip K. Dick, Ian M. Banks, Richard Morgan, Stephen Baxter, Rudy Rucker, Neal Stephenson, Carl Hiaasen, Douglas Adams, Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein are just some of them...

  BL: Which book (either BL or non-BL) do you wish you’d written and why?

  JS: I feel kinda strange answering that, because if I’d written it, it wouldn’t be the book that I have such fondness for; but if I had to pick, I’d say Frank Herbert’s Dune or Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Both of them rank among the best military science fiction ever put to paper.

  Phalanx

  Ben Counter

  Chapter 3

  The cell block had been built for the use of the Imperial Fists’ own penitents. When battle-brothers believed themselves guilty of some failure, they came here, to the Atoning Halls. They knelt in the dank, cold cells lining the narrow stone-clad corridors and prayed for their sins to be expunged. They begged for suffering with which to cleanse themselves, a suffering regularly gifted to them by the various implements of self-torture built into the ceilings and floors of each intersection. Nerve-gloves and flensing-racks stood silent there, most of them designed to be operated by the victim, so that through pain he might drive out the weaknesses that had led to some perceived failing.

  The cells had not been built with locks, for all those who had spent their time there had done so voluntarily. But the Halls of Atonement had locks now. Its current penitents were not there by choice.

  ‘Salk!’ hissed Captain Luko. Luko was chained to the wall of his cell, with just enough freedom in his bonds to stand up or sit down. Like the rest of the Soul Drinkers imprisoned in the Halls of Atonement, he had been stripped of his armour, with his wargear kept somewhere else on the Phalanx to be used as evidence in the trial.

  ‘Captain?’ came Sergeant Salk’s voice in reply. The Soul Drinkers officers had mostly been locked in cells far apart from one another, but the Halls of Atonement had not been built to contain a hundred Astartes prisoners and so it was inevitable two would end up in earshot.

  ‘I hear something,’ said Luko. ‘They are bringing someone else in.’

  ‘There is no one else,’ replied Salk. ‘They took us all on Selaaca.’ Though Luko could not see Salk’s face, the despondency, tinged with anger, was obvious in his voice. ‘They must be coming to interrogate us. I had wondered how long it would take for them to get to you and me.’

  ‘I think not, brother,’ said Luko. ‘Listen.’

  The sound of footsteps broke through the ever-present grinding of the Phalanx’s engines. Several Space Marines, and... something else. A vehicle? A servitor? It was large and heavy, with a tread that crunched the flagstones of the corridor.

  Luko strained forwards against the chains that held him, to see as much as possible of the corridor beyond the bars of his cell. Two Imperial Fists came into view, walking backwards with their bolters trained on something taller than they were.

  ‘Throne of Terra,’ whispered Luko as he got the first sight of what they were guarding.

  It was a Dreadnought. It wore the deep purple and bone of the Soul Drinkers, but to Luko’s knowledge no Dreadnought had served with the Chapter since he had been a novice. He had thought the Chapter had not possessed any Dreadnought hulls at all.

  The Dreadnought’s armour plating was pitted with age. Its weapons had been removed, revealing the complex workings of the mountings and ammo feeds in its shoulders. Even so the half-dozen Imperial Fists escorting it kept their guns on it, and one of them carried a missile launcher ready to blast the Dreadnought at close range.

  As it stomped in front of Luko’s cell, the Dreadnought turned its torso so it could look in. Luko saw that its sarcophagus had been opened partially, and he glimpsed the pallid flesh of the body inside. Large, filmy eyes shone from the shadows inside the war machine, and Luko’s own eyes met them for a moment.

  ‘Brother,’ said the Soul Drinker inside the Dreadnought, his voice a wet whisper. ‘Spread the word. I have returned.’

  ‘Silence!’ shouted one of the Imperial Fists in front of the Dreadnought. ‘Hold your tongue!’ The Space Marine turned to Luko. ‘And you! Avert your eyes!’

  ‘If you wish me blinded,’ retorted Luko, ‘then you will have to put out my eyes.’

  Luko had a talent for eliciting a rough soldier’s respect from other fighting men. The Imperial Fist scowled, but didn’t aim his gun at Luko. ‘Maybe later,’ he said.

  ‘Daenyathos has returned! said the Dreadnought’

  Luko jumped forwards against his chains. ‘Daenyathos!’ he echoed. ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Daenyathos!’ came another voice, then another. Every Soul Drinker’s voice was raised in a matter of seconds. The Imperial Fists yelled for silence but their voices were drowned out. Even the bolter shots they fired into the ceiling did not quiet the din.

  Luko did not know what to call the emotions searing through him. Joy? There could be no joy here, when they were facing execution and disgrace. It was a raw exultation, a release of emotion. It had been pent up in the Soul Drinkers since they had seen Sarpedon fall in his duel with Lysander, and now it had an excuse to flood out.

  Daenyathos was alive! In truth, in the depths of his soul, Luko had always known he was not truly dead. The promise of his return seemed written into everything the legendary philosopher-soldier had passed down to his Chapter, as if the Catechisms Martial had woven into it a prophecy that he would walk among them once more. Amazingly, impossibly, it seemed the most natural thing in the galaxy that Daenyathos should be there when the Chapter faced its extinction.

  Only one voice was not raised in celebration. It was that of Pallas, the Apothecary.

  ‘What did you do?’ shouted Pallas, and Luko just caught his words. They gave him pause, even as his twin hearts hammered with the force of the emotion.

  ‘What did you do, Daenyathos?’ shouted Pallas again, and a few of the Soul Drinkers fell silent as they considered his words. ‘How have you fallen into their hands, the same as us? Have you come here to face justice? Daenyathos, warrior-philosopher, tell us the truth!’

  ‘Tell us!’ shouted another. Those words soon clashed with Daenyathos’s name in the din, half the Soul Drinkers demanding answers, the other half proclaiming their hero’s return.

  Daenyathos did not reply. Perhaps, if he had, he would not have been heard. The Imperial Fists hauled open a set of blast doors leading to a side chamber that had once been used to store the volatile chemicals required by some of the torture devices. Its ceramite-lined walls were strong enough to contain the weaponless Dreadnought. The Imperial Fists marshalled the Dreadnought inside and shut the doors, slamming the thing that called its
elf Daenyathos into the quiet and darkness.

  Outside it took a long time for the chants of Daenyathos’s name to die down in the Halls of Atonement.

  More than three hundred Astartes gathered in the Observatory of Dornian Majesty. Most Imperial battlezones never saw such a concentration of Space Marines, but these Astartes were not there to fight. They were there to see justice done.

  The Observatory was one of the Phalanx’s many follies, a viewing dome built as a throne room for past Chapter Masters, where the transparent dome might afford a dramatic enough view of space to intimidate the Chapter’s guests who came there to petition the lords of the Imperial Fists. Vladimir had little need for such shows of intimidation and had closed off the Observatory for years.

  It was one of the few places large enough to serve as the courtroom for the Soul Drinkers’ trial. The ship’s crew had built the seating galleries and the dock in the centre of the floor, an armoured pulpit into which restraints had been built strong enough to hold an accused Astartes. The Justice Lord’s position was on a throne the same height as the dock, facing it from the part of the gallery reserved for the Imperial Fists themselves.

  The whole court was bathed in the light from the transparent dome. The Veiled Region was a mass of nebulae that boiled in the space outside the ship, nestling stars in its glowing clouds and swamping a vast swathe of space in the currents of half-formed star matter. Kravamesh hung, violet and hot, edging the courtroom in hard starlight.

  The first in had been Lord Inquisitor Kolgo’s retinue of Battle Sisters, ten Sororitas led by Sister Aescarion. They knelt and prayed to consecrate the place, Aescarion calling upon the Emperor to turn His eyes upon the Phalanx and see that His justice was done.