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Defenders of Mankind – Extract

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An extract from The Death of Antagonis by David Annandale

CHAPTER 1

THE DUTY TO PROTECT

The Wars of Lamentation did not come to Elias Tennesyn in the person of the Dragon or the Gorgon. Those figures would come later. Visited upon him by the Wars, they would, for his sins, drag him through the hellscape of what had once been his life’s work. But if they were the avatars of war, they were not its herald. That role (and oh, by the Throne, had Tennesyn only known it) fell to a man whose smile told a tale of a soul eternally surprised by joy.

The herald was called Cardinal Rodrigo Nessun. Though he wore a gold medallion in the shape of a wide, almost circular eye suspended over the hilt of a sword, his robes had none of the adornment Tennesyn would have expected of a senior ecclesiarch. Instead, they were a blinding, quasar white, and their every fold winked, their every billow laughed. The movements of the clothing were the reflections of the man’s pale blue eyes, eyes whose sparkle was a flourish of delight in the universe. His hair was as white as his robes. There were moments when Tennesyn couldn’t distinguish one from the other, as if the hair that fell in a thick cascade down Nessun’s back spread and shaped itself into vestments. The cardinal’s skin was white too, a beyond-albino chalk. He could have been a ghost, and he did, it was true, seem to walk a few centimetres off the ground. He could have been a ghost, but he was much too happy.

And on the day the Wars of Lamentation began in the Phlagia system, on the planet Antagonis, Nessun wasn’t just floating. He was dancing. Tennesyn’s mood was darker. The xeno-archaeologist was happy that his sponsor was pleased. But now, on the very day that the dig site seemed bound to validate his theories, Tennesyn was having to rush off back to Aighe Mortis in the neighbouring Camargus system. Another of his best researchers was being conscripted into the Imperial Guard. It was the third time in a week. Tennesyn had no quarrel with duty to the Emperor, but there were different ways to serve, and how was he supposed to do any work of real value if his staff kept being poached by the Departmento Munitorum? If Tennesyn wanted to reach Aighe Mortis before his protégé was bundled off-world, no doubt to die fighting over a rise of rock that no one could possibly be interested in were it not for the other people who couldn’t possibly be interested in it, then he had to leave, and right away.

At this point, Tennesyn thought he knew the impact war would have on his life: problems with excessive staff turnover.

He had no idea how deep his naivete ran.

So on the day the Wars came to Antagonis (but not to Tennesyn yet, not just yet), Nessun asked, ‘The site is completely revealed now?’

‘It is.’

‘And the alignment is…?’

‘Tonight.’

The herald of war clapped his hands in excitement. Not at all seeing what waited in the wings, Tennesyn took his leave, and started down the road where the Dragon and the Gorgon waited.

In a week, a world can fall.

Volos jolted awake. He sat up. His feet sought the reassuring reality of the Immolation Maw’s deck. His hands squeezed the iron frame of the cot as he fought to steady the vertigo of his spirit. Volos did not dream, nor had he now. No images engaged in a fading dance through his mind. Yet his heart was sick with the perfect, absolute, unalterable knowledge that his hands would soon carry stains from an ocean of innocent blood.

Melus whistled, his helmet speaker distorting the sound into a high-pitched whine.

‘If you don’t mind, brother,’ Toharan said.

‘Apologies, brother-sergeant. I was just thinking…’

‘The same thing I am,’ Toharan finished.

They were standing in the doorway to the huge, shallow bowl of the refuge. The space was spare and unadorned, a coldly functional, open-plan bunker. There were at least a thousand people staring back at them with a mixture of fear and hope.

The orders had been to sweep the capital city for survivors. More specifically: hit the palace of Benedict Danton, high lord of Antagonis, and rescue what portion of the planet’s government might yet draw breath. If there were any encounters of opportunity along the way, lend help and gather civilians where possible, but get Lord Danton and his family out of there. Squad Pythios of the Black Dragons Second Company had gone in, working with the Fourth and 25th Companies of the Imperial Guard’s Mortisian Regiment. And here, in the sealed basement of the palace, hiding from the walking corpses that, as far as Toharan could tell, comprised the rest of the city of Lecorb’s population of twelve million, was everyone they could reasonably expect to find. And more. Toharan ran his eyes again over the huddled figures. His first estimate had been correct: a good thousand souls.

‘Too many for an airlift,’ Melus said.

‘Yes,’ Toharan agreed. ‘We’re walking out of here.’ He wasn’t worried. Between his squad and the thirty thousand Mortisians, there was more than enough force on hand to act as escort, especially given how non-aggressive the dead were. They had completely ignored the Dragons and the Guard on the way in, even though their behaviour was otherwise more frenzied than Toharan had seen before. The corpses ran, howled, tore at themselves and each other, clawed at walls, and beat their own heads to pulp. But they did not attack.

A man stepped forward from the crowd and approached the two Space Marines. Toharan pegged him as being in his early sixties, standard. His lined, patrician face showed no signs of augmetic or juvenat treatment, which was unusual. His suit was elegantly austere, a simple black adorned by the vermilion sash of his office. There was a child, a girl of about ten, peering out from behind his legs. He had a protective hand on her plaited hair. ‘I am Lord Danton,’ the man said. ‘And this is Bethshea. I’ve been trying to tell her that you have come to help us.’

Toharan turned his gaze to the girl. ‘That’s right. We have.’

Bethshea did not look reassured. She shrank further behind Danton.

‘She thinks you’re monsters,’ Danton explained.

Really? Toharan thought. The Black Dragons? Monsters? Towering head and shoulders over every human in the room, clad in black power armour emblazoned with a silver dragon, armour whose snarling helmet grilles were designed to strike fear into the enemy – why in Terra’s name would they seem like monsters to a little girl?

‘Don’t be afraid, child,’ Melus said, and started to unclasp his helmet.

Toharan raised a hand to stop him. ‘Allow me, brother.’ No point traumatising the child any further. He removed his own helmet and let Bethshea see his very human, if outsized, face. She appeared to relax. Slightly.

‘Well done,’ Melus said over the vox-link when Toharan had replaced his helmet. ‘My face would not have helped.’

‘That was my thought.’

‘Could be worse. I could be Volos.’

Toharan chuckled, then switched to his speaker. ‘People of Lecorb,’ he announced, ‘we have come to lead you to safety.’

Squad Pythios brought the survivors out of the bunker. They mustered in the square of the palace compound, then joined the waiting ranks of the Mortisians. The convoy moved out from the palace walls, out onto Admiral Kiershing Square, with the Space Marines taking point.

And the dead attacked.

The change was instantaneous. The random wandering, despairing moans and acts of self-destruction turned into a furious charge. Five great avenues fed into the square, and from all of them came a storm surge of bodies. The dead ignored the Space Marines and slammed into the Guard. The Mortisians were fast. A wall of stubber and las-fire met the onrushing dead, but the momentum of tens of thousands of bodies wasn’t going to be halted. Five collective battering rams struck, and the Imperial lines buckled. Toharan turned, and saw the impossible. Already, within the first second of the battle, as the Mortisians found themselves in full melee, men were changing, their eyes blanking into mindless hunger and rage as they fell on their comrades.

‘Diamond,’ Toharan voxed. ‘Out then in.’ Squad Pythios plunged into the fight. They scythed through the dead with chainblade and fist, decapitating and crushing. It was like wading through molasses. The dead were so focused on clawing past the Mortisians to the civilians that they barely reacted to the Dragons advance.

Toharan forced a reaction. He and his brothers became the moving rocks against which the death tide broke. They split into two groups and worked their way around the defensive island of the Guard. They slashed across the flow of the dead, hundreds falling before them like threshed wheat. Halfway around the Mortisians’ perimeter, the Dragons split again, with one half of the squad moving to the rear lines, and the other heading to the front, tearing apart another rank of the enemy. The momentum of the dead stalled. There was a pause while the flood of reinforcements continued to pour in from the avenues, and the charge built up its strength again.

The Mortisians had the measure of their opponents now, though Toharan already had his doubts about what difference that would make in the long run. The reality of twelve million damned souls was sinking in. But for now, the massed power of the Imperial Guard unleashed a horizontal rain of projectile and las-fire. The barrage was continuous, and it pushed back the army of the dead before it could surge again.

Breathing space. Time to move.

‘Go!’ Toharan shouted over vox-link and speaker, and the caravan took its first, lurching steps. The Dragons moved to the interior perimeter. Toharan disliked not being on the front lines, but he had his orders, and the mission dictated strategy. It was not the Dragons’ remit to take on an entire city. Their battle, in this moment, was to save as many civilians as possible. The people would be needed after the next stage of the war, after the Black Dragons and the other vectors of Imperial might had purged Antagonis of its taint. There had to be a population to reclaim the planet, to celebrate the victory and prove that it was not pyrrhic. So Squad Pythios moved to protect the unarmed. As big as the area was that the thousand civilians took up, it was one whose bounds the Dragons could keep patrolled. The refugees marched, and the Space Marines circled them at a constant run, bringing bolter and chainblade to bear wherever the Mortisian defences needed shoring up.

Toharan paused in his run to jump up on the lead vehicle, a Hellhound. Colonel Burston Kervold, heading the joint command of the Fourth and 25th companies, rode standing in the roof hatch, magnoculars around his neck. His chin was a steel prosthetic. It was scratched and pitted as if he really did lead with it. Kervold’s cap perched on a head that was a phrenological map of his tours of duty. His eyes were narrowed flints, staring at the dead with a contempt so strong it should have blasted a path clear to the outskirts of the city. But when Kervold turned his head to face Toharan, the Space Marine thought he saw the tightness of fatalism in the officer’s gaze. Kervold had seen and noted the same things, then. The behaviour of the dead was unusual, unlike any plague of undeath Toharan had fought before. Even more than the speed of the dead, it was their focus that was alarming. There wasn’t just hunger in their frenzy. There was anger. There was passion. And then there was the rapidity of the contagion.

The elements were all wrong. Vital information was missing. The mission had the earmarks of a disaster.

‘If we stop,’ Kervold yelled over the roar of the inferno cannon’s spray of ignited promethium, ‘we’ll be finished.’ Ahead of them, the dead looked like a solid mass.

‘Then we don’t stop,’ Toharan replied. ‘Not for any reason. How is our route?’

‘We’ll stick to the big avenues for as long as we can. But once we’re into the hab zones…’ Kervold’s shrug was humorous in its understatement of despair.

Toharan nodded. ‘Then we fight harder. And we still don’t stop.’ He dropped back to the ground and resumed destroying. Already the defences were being strained again. Already Guard lines were thinning.

Kervold was right. The hab zones were worse.

As long as the caravan was in the administrative centre of Lecorb, on streets five hundred metres wide, the defenders held their own. Flame, faith and will kept them moving forward. Wheels, treads and boots crunched over the flattened and burned bodies of the twice-killed. Though the dead massed in the tens of thousands in the open spaces, there were only so many that could attack at once.

The hab zones were another story. The streets were narrow and none carried on straight for more than a few blocks. Lecorb’s history was preserved in its patchwork layout. Fragments of districts layered each other, the new never completely replacing the old, as if pieces from a random collection of jigsaw puzzles had been forced together, whether they fit or not. It was impossible to see what was coming. Each sharp corner slowed the caravan down, giving the dead, now a wall of meat in the confined corridors, longer and longer to press their attacks.

Bad as the streets were, the real nightmare was the architecture. Lecorb’s growth had been haphazard, its one burst of urban planning happening in M38, when Lord Hosman had ordered the centre of the city razed to make way for the new administrative complexes. Its style of construction, however, had remained unchanged since the Great Crusade. At some point, the tradition of using pilotis and open facades had become linked, in the cultural imagination, with the act of obeisance to the Emperor. Load-bearing walls had become heretical. But the preservation of any particular structure was unimportant. As a result, apartment had been built atop apartment, new growths of pillars sprouting out of decaying roof gardens to support a new building, whose roof would in turn birth another.

Some buildings overlapped the roofs of several smaller ones, and the facades, freed of the need to do something as mundane as hold the structures upright, had turned into a crazy quilt of murals, stained glass windows, or sullen, stained rockcrete. The zone was a lunatic collection of boxes on stilts that looked, at first glance, like a forest of spindle-legged Titans and Dreadnoughts in collision. Time, smog and decay had rotted the faces of the buildings, and what might once have looked festive, with strident colour offset by the sober grey of unadorned walls, was now a study in dour mud.

And from every one of the myriad openings came the dead. They were like insects streaming from the opened pores of a stricken giant. From all sides, from all floors, from directly above, they fell upon the caravan. Over the neural link, Toharan’s helmet transmitted threat detection so universal that he tuned it out. He simply struck at whatever was nearest, and he shattered bodies with every movement.

As the caravan dragged itself forward, the Dragons gave up their rotating patrol and each took ownership of a sector inside the Guard lines. The dead were a terrible hail coming down on top of the refugees, and the Space Marines had to move from the perimeter to the centre of the huddled survivors and back out again within seconds. It was like swatting individual insects in a swarm. They smashed many.

They didn’t smash nearly enough.

Two Chimeras ran into a stream of dead who threw themselves under the armoured carrier’s treads. The corpses piled higher, more and more sucked in beneath the vehicles, blood and bone-shrapnel spraying. Within seconds, the Chimeras had sunk into a quagmire of gore metres deep. Their crews piled out and were dragged down into the muck.

The casualties mounted. The dead pressed harder. The streets narrowed and the buildings crowded in. Mortisians transformed into howling creatures and clawed at their neighbours, spreading the contagion. But the civilians didn’t turn. The dead simply ripped them to pieces. This wasn’t battle, Toharan thought as he tore the head off a man whose idiot face was covered in the foam of his rage. This wasn’t even a retreat. This was a race against Chaos itself. There was honour in the effort, but his mind was troubled by the hard, insistent possibility of failure and futility.

Snarling, a man threw himself out of the third floor window just ahead and on Toharan’s left. The creature’s hands were hooked into talons of hate and hunger, his eyes locked on a sobbing Bethshea. Toharan snapped out a ceramite-clad fist and smashed the corpse aside, caving in the head. Another one down. Another drop in a limitless ocean. But a glance at Bethshea renewed the calm of perfect duty. Since Toharan had shown her that he was a giant, not a monster, she had cleaved close to his legs. She had to run to keep pace with his every stride, but she managed, a tiny remora to his black, remorseless shark. Toharan roared his encouragement to his brothers and the Guard.

They passed a side street. It was empty when Toharan looked down it. But as the rear elements of the caravan went by, they were hit by a sudden, shrieking, frenzied mob of the dead. A torpedo of damnation, uncountable thousands strong, shattered the lines. Toharan looked back to see Brother Xorion caught. The dead ploughed into and onto him in an unending tide. Only Brother Guerign was close enough to help. He waded in and, standing back to back, the two Black Dragons felled hundreds. Toharan and the rest of the squad supported them with a stream of bolter fire, but no amount of firepower was enough against the rushing, frothing wave of corpses. Xorion and Guerign died. Even ceramite could be crushed by the sheer weight of dead flesh.

As Toharan watched, helpless, his soul sickening, what made the scene even more horrific was the single-minded focus of the dead. Even now, the Space Marines weren’t actual targets. The dead hadn’t attacked Xorion and Guerign – they had run them down. The corpse faces, mindless slackness mixed with idiot hunger, all faced in a single direction. Their blank yet raging eyes were fixed on the herded survivors. They didn’t care about the Dragons. Toharan’s brothers had simply been in the way.

Had the enemy been sentient, there could have been no greater insult.

Toharan turned from the disaster. A quarter of the civilians gone. The Mortisians weakened by at least that much. An awful reality, but it changed nothing. The orders still stood. The mission was not done until there was victory. ‘Forward!’ he cried. To the refugees who stood still, mesmerised by unholy loss, he said, ‘Honour your dead and honour your planet. Survive and reclaim! Go!’ They did, one foot in front of the other, and, to their very great credit, without panicking.

They honoured their protector, too.

Harried and crushed, diminished and scarred, the caravan emerged from the hab zones and gradually left the city behind. The apartment warrens, now hives of the dead, gave way first to the manufactoria, and then to still-unspoiled forest. The survivors and their guardians picked up speed, and for a little while put some distance between themselves and the greater part of the city’s undead millions.

Ahead, the landscape rose in gentle foothills until it reached the jarring interruption of the Temple Mountains. The chain thrust from the earth like sudden, granite judgement, its faces vertical, towering, defiant. From there, the sanctuary of Lexica Keep was less than a day’s forced march away. The keep would be blessedly inaccessible to the dead horde on its cliff side, and the route to it wound through a long, narrow pass several kilometres long. If they could reach the pass, Toharan was confident he could see his charges to safety. The mountain walls of the defile were so close together that the dead would be streamed into a line that could be held off by even a modest contingent of Guard. Arrival at the pass would be a guarantee of victory.

Or of what little victory that could be claimed. By now, half the civilians were dead. The Mortisians had been decimated, reduced to barely a third of their original strength.

The tyranny of numbers caught up to them as they reached the foot of the mountains. The city had emptied, and when its masses arrived, the open spaces no longer worked in the caravan’s favour. The dead formed a single, coherent mass millions strong. A tsunami of rage slammed into the Imperial forces and pushed them up against the unforgiving granite of the Temples. The caravan couldn’t advance. The dead were a sea of bone and muscle, the blasted twelve million of Lecorb constricting the little flame of life until they could smother it.

On the line fighting to hold back the tide, a conscript flipped backwards and hit the ground hard and dead. His forehead was a scorched crater. He’d been hit with a las-round.

‘Brother-sergeant, did you see that?’ Melus asked over the vox-link.

Toharan had. He thought he’d seen the same thing happen a few times in Lecorb, but he couldn’t be sure in the confusion of confined spaces and the rainfall of dead. But now there was no doubt. The Guardsman hadn’t been killed by friendly fire. The shot had come from one of the dead, who shouldn’t even know what a rifle was, much less how to operate one.

Anger. Speed. And now weapons fire. All of it wrong, and Toharan seethed with frustration at the stalled advance. The entrance to the pass was barely a kilometre to the north. He could see it, a jagged shadow in the mountain wall, its contours outlined in the red glow of the setting sun. Squad Pythios could punch through the corpse legions easily on its own. The problem was doing so with even a handful of survivors. And the problem was looking increasingly academic as the siege wore on.

The Guardsmen were collapsing. Their lines were thinning, pulling back, and then disintegrating. Squad Pythios did what it could to shore them up. Toharan and his brothers ran the interior perimeter once more, dividing the circle into eight between themselves. They were not a patrol: they were a revolving scythe, a perpetual charge, blasting clusters of dead with bolter fire, pushing into the thick of the attackers with chainsword and fist, leaving barriers of inert flesh in their wake. They were relentless. They slowed the hordes down.

They couldn’t stop them.

They might have, if the Mortisians were able to hold position with just a bit more characteristic resolve. These men were veterans, blooded and war-tempered by a hundred battles, but they were going down like the rawest trainees. Toharan was baffled yet again by what he was seeing. How could the infection spread so quickly? The change from loyal Guardsman to savage corpse took seconds. There was barely time for a man to die before he turned on his comrades. The virulence of the contagion was beyond unholy. And still, not one of the civilians had succumbed. They were shredded into strips of meat when they were caught, but they never changed.

The refugees howled their terror and despair. For a moment, Toharan’s frustration veered into contempt. The terrible losses of this pointless mission had been for the sake of these bleating sheep? Where was the sense in that? Then his eyes landed on Bethshea, always running to be near him, looking up at him now not as a monster, not as a giant, but as a god come to keep her safe, and there was his answer. There was the sense of the mission.

His vox-link came to life. ‘Pythios, this is Ormarr.’

‘Volos,’ Toharan said. Even through the distorting static of the transmission, the rumbling rasp of Squad Ormarr’s sergeant was unmistakable. ‘Tell me you have good news, brother-sergeant.’

‘Would our imminent arrival qualify?’

‘It would.’

‘What do you need?’

‘A way through to the pass so we can move the civilians.’

‘You’ll have it,’ Volos promised. ‘Fire and bone.’

‘Fire and bone,’ Toharan responded, returning the Dragons battle-cry, and swallowing, as he always did, the twinge of regret that the words would never hold the full meaning for him that they did for Volos. He mag-locked his bolter to his thigh, conserving rounds, and tore into grasping, surging dead with renewed purpose. The warp take the Mortisians if they weren’t up to the task. The Dragons would complete the mission themselves. His sword lopped off limbs and heads. The ground beneath his boots had become a mire of blood, and some of the defending Guardsmen were losing their footing in the slickness, but he didn’t lose a beat. He was an engine of precise destruction, and mowed the dead down, slicing and trampling them to their second, final end.

But still they didn’t attack him. Still, with hands and teeth, they lunged only for the unaugmented humans. And as the Guard succumbed, there were more and more corpses with weapons. Many simply used the rifles as clubs. But even though there was only a tiny percentage that actually fired the guns, and there was no accuracy worthy of the name, the numbers were enough, and they were growing. The air was filling with the lethal web of hostile las-fire.

The music of the war was an atonal cacophony of howling corpse, shrieking survivor, and crying wounded, the high timbre modulated only by the chud-chud-chud of bolter fire, growl of chainsword and punctuating crack of bone. The steady, rotating, murderous sweep of Squad Pythios carried what rhythm there was. But now came the glorious bass: the huge, deep-throated, vengeful roar of the Thunderhawk gunship Battle Pyre. Flying low, it emerged from the pass, a stub-winged fist of black armour that reflected crimson sunset as the ship turned and began its strafing run. Hellstrike missiles flashed from their pods. They slammed into the undead army with a blast of purifying fire. Tiny suns rose between Toharan and the pass, and the sky rained fragmented body parts. The sponson cannons opened fire, and the ground erupted with geysers of dirt and corpses. For a moment, the pressure from the north ebbed. The Guard pushed hard, and there was movement. The refugees, their cries turning to whimpers of hope, inched towards the north.

Figures in jump packs detached themselves from the Battle Pyre.

Bethshea pointed up. ‘Look!’ she squealed. ‘More giants!’

‘Yes,’ Toharan said. But as he watched the Dragon Claws arrive, what he thought, despite himself, and to his burning shame, was, No, not giants. The monsters have come.

CHAPTER 2

FIRE AND BONE

From above, the dead were an undulating carpet covering the landscape. Volos saw eddies and currents in their movement, the formal thrust of the attack giving way in isolated pockets to the purely random. But there was no lack of focus in the forces surrounding Squad Pythios and the tattered remains of the Mortisian Guard. During the seconds of his flight, Volos eyed the distance between the caravan and the pass, saw what was needed if the refugees were going to have even a fighting chance of surviving the next hour. Brother Keryon had given the Claws a good start, ploughing a purging furrow of fire with the Thunderhawk, but the dead were flowing back quickly. Time to teach them that even a corpse could know fear.

The Dragon Claws slammed into the ground, punching craters in the enemy army. They came in at staggered distances, with Volos closest to the caravan. The goal: blast away the dead and form a chain along which the caravan could move once more. A jump pack assault normally called for close combat weaponry, but for this deployment, Volos had ordered a maximum ammo load and flamers for all. He straightened from his landing, unshouldered the flamer and let spray in a single movement. His back to the mountainside, he played the fire out over 180 degrees, incinerating the dead and pushing their masses back.

The leading Hellhound started up. Its cannon was silent, the promethium tank long since depleted. Volos stepped forward, the flamer on full, and the dead retreated still further. The Hellhound drew level with him. Volos glanced up, saw Colonel Kervold salute his thanks. Volos gave a slight nod and returned his attention to the enemy. The Hellhound passed at his back, between Volos and the cliff wall. Toharan’s voice crackled over the vox-link. ‘We’re advancing. Fine work.’

‘So is yours.’ He tried to picture the journey his fellow sergeant had made. It was song-worthy.

The Hellhound stopped. Its engine stalled out. Not letting up with the flamer, Volos turned his head. Kervold was looking down inside the vehicle, his expression a jagged mix of fury and puzzlement. He opened his mouth.

The order never came. His eyes widened. Volos saw something new wash over the colonel’s face, emotions that should have been foreign to that scarred stone. The first was fear. The second was doubt, and somehow, this seemed more intense and terrible than the fear. Kervold convulsed with spine-snapping force, his body shaken by the fist that was seizing his soul. His eyes glazed as his face twisted into the shape of blank fury. He thrashed himself free of the hatch and turned with a snarl towards the refugees who were just now passing the Hellhound.

His right hand holding down the flamer’s trigger, Volos pulled out his bolter with his left and shot Kervold, turning his skull into mist. As he acted, he processed what he had seen. The contagion had struck from the inside of the Hellhound, where no injury had been sustained. The implications staggered him, but they would receive his attention later. The consequences demanded a response now.

The plague spread through what remained of the Mortisians with the speed of a shock wave. The last of the Imperial forces succumbed in seconds. The disease leaped from man to man without needing injury or even contact. It was as if the fall of the colonel signalled the death of the companies’ collective spirit. Commissar and trooper alike frothed and lunged for the civilians.

Volos’s flamer ran dry. The enemy surged with renewed strength and reinforcements. Clawing for their prey, the dead slammed in a wave against Volos, knocking the bolter from his grasp, lifting him off the ground and throwing his weight against the Hellhound. Volos slid off the vehicle’s hull. The flood tried to crush him. ‘Toharan!’ he voxed. ‘The Guard is lost! Grab anyone and go!’ Buffeted by the infinite enemy, he vowed to the Emperor that he would give his life in the service of any victory that might yet be claimed from this day. Then he crossed his arms against his chest and flexed his wrists, fists down.

There was a familiar moment of agony so pure it bordered on ecstasy, and his bone-blades shot out from his wrists, passing over his knuckles. They were a metre long and sheathed in adamantium. He swung his arms down and out. Limbs and heads went flying. Arterial fountains burst around him, drenching his armour, covering his visor. He ducked his head and lunged forward, a maddened bull. His helmet had a large slit near the top, and from it protruded his forehead’s bony growth. He had sanded it into the shape of a crescent horn, the tips and edge as lethal as the blades that grew from his arms, and here too he had added the extra kill strength of adamantium. The dead fell before his charge. His vision narrowed as the euphoria of war descended on him. He saw nothing that wasn’t the next thing he was about to butcher. His fangs extended, hungry for the mangled flesh and blood whose sight and smell had become the sum total of his world. He was the destroyer, and however numerous his foes, they were pitiable in their fragility.

A moment came when he had nothing to kill, and his mind cleared with a neuronal snap. His system quivered with the residual ecstasy, but he was already thinking tactically again. Corpses in the dozens surrounded him. The army in his vicinity had staggered, and would need a few seconds before the torrent could flow again. Volos retracted his blades, recovered his bolter and vaulted to the top of the Hellhound.

The Mortisians were all part of the dead army now. There was still occasional weapons fire, but it was all sloppy, and all aimed at the refugees. There were precious few of them left. The brothers of Squad Pythios carried a civilian on each shoulder and were moving at a good pace towards the pass. They had just reached the next of the Dragon Claws. Brother Nithigg’s clearing was about to collapse as the onslaught closed in, but the dead were still seconds behind, and the Space Marines were gaining momentum. Handfuls of civilians ran in howling clusters, desperation giving their sprints a speed that was almost that of the Black Dragons jog.

Moment by moment, their numbers dwindled.

Volos joined the race. He came up behind a pair of scrambling humans, a man and a woman. They had been high administrators, to judge by their shredded finery. They held hands as they ran, as if that fragment of comfort was worth what they lost in speed. The gesture was so futile in the face of inevitable massacre, and so touchingly human. It was, Volos thought, the epitome of what he had been created to protect. A group of frenzied dead closed in on the couple. Volos swatted the enemy away, pulping the bodies. He scooped up the two humans. They screamed when they first felt his grasp. They seemed hardly more reassured when they realised what was happening. They stared at him with eyes that were near mindless with fear. But they didn’t struggle.

Volos ran faster, barrelling through the dead, exploding bodies with his juggernaut run. He reached Nithigg, who grabbed two civilians and joined the race. Behind, more clusters of humans fell off the pace and were swallowed by the horde.

By the time Squads Pythios and Ormarr reached the pass, the only refugees left were the ones they carried. They held two each, except for Toharan, who had three: there was a small child perched on his head. Thirty-seven survivors. A poor showing.

The Black Dragons pounded along the broken, twisting path of the defile. Behind them, the dead raged and followed, but lost ground. The walls of the pass closed in, barely a few metres apart at moments. They leaned in from the vertical, black stone slicked with moisture. Misting waterfalls thickened the air. The Temple chain was taking the intruders into its hard embrace, hugging them tighter and closer. Even with his enhanced vision, Volos found it difficult to see more than a few dozen metres ahead. But that was enough.

They ran for hours, outdistancing the enemy by kilometres, but not slowing even then. They still didn’t slow when the pass opened out into the bottom of a vast canyon. The path turned here and snaked thousands of metres up the near canyon wall. It led, at the top, to the narrow, graceful span of the Ecclesiarch Alexis XXII bridge. From this distance below, the bridge was as insubstantial as human hair. Stretching kilometres across the canyon, it was the unique access to Lexica Keep. Its lights glowering in the night, the fortress crouched against the far cliff face like a bird of prey. From between the dark wings of its walls, it peered with cold, contemptuous majesty at the warriors and their charges.

It offered no comfort.

Lexica Keep was a Ministorum redoubt. It had, at times, reserved a portion of its east wing for schola purposes, but its primary function had been as a librarium. Its collection was as famous as it was difficult to access. It was a repository of texts from all corners of the Imperium, and from all its ages. Some of its manuscripts, Werner Lettinger knew, were pre-Imperial. Still others, he suspected darkly, were pre-human. Some of his more radical colleagues, especially among the Ordo Hereticus, would give much to examine those works. Some, he knew, had traded their souls for the opportunity. He wondered if the knowledge acquired had been worth the additional cost – their lives. Given the choice, he would have pitched the entire collection into a blazing Act of Faith long ago. He took comfort, at least, in the fact that the books were under lock and key in a fastness never to be stormed.

Captain Vritras of the Black Dragons was speaking. ‘We are, of course, grateful for any aid you might be able to provide, inquisitor.’

They were in a council chamber whose door opened onto the dining hall that had become the Dragons command centre. Gas-burning torches were held by iron sconces along the curved walls. These ended in a floor-to-ceiling sheet of armourglass that looked down into the canyon. The brickwork of dark grey rockcrete was so fine that the mortar was invisible. The walls looked like a single block of stone. In the centre of the chamber was a long table carved from the enormous trunk of a berbab tree, shipped from Antagonis’s southern continent. The wood appeared to absorb light rather than reflect it. In its depths, bright pinpricks shone like swallowed stars. Data-slates, maps and transmission papers covered much of its surface now, and there were scars gouged by carelessly tossed weapons. Lettinger couldn’t imagine the Confessors of Lexica countenancing such disrespect, but the question was moot. The Ecclesiarchy of Antagonis had been among the first to succumb to the plague. The Dragons had purged every last one of them before making Lexica their own.

‘I hope you don’t mind my saying,’ Vritras went on, ‘that I would have thought an officer from the Ordo Sepulturum would have been sent, given the nature of Antagonis’s taint.’

Lettinger smiled to show he wasn’t offended. But he wondered how Vritras knew with such certainty that he wasn’t of that ordo. ‘Quite understandable, captain,’ he said. ‘The reason for my presence here is simple. Time is clearly of the essence, given that the situation has become this grave in, as far as we can determine, a matter of days. It would take months, at best, for a Sepulturum team to be despatched, and I, like you, was in the region.’

‘Quite a lucky coincidence,’ First-Sergeant Aperos of Squad Nychus remarked.

Lettinger ignored the sarcasm and kept his smile. ‘It would seem that the Emperor has traced a path for us to tread together.’

‘I can’t help but be struck by how often the Black Dragons and the Ordo Malleus seem to wind up on similar paths,’ Vritras said. ‘You are always nearby to come to our assistance.’

Lettinger started. Only the Grey Knights were supposed to know that there was even such a thing as the Ordo Malleus. He tried to keep his expression neutral. ‘I’m sorry, but there seems to be a misunderstand–’

‘Don’t insult my intelligence, inquisitor. If you think we haven’t had dealings with your ordo before, then you are too naïve to be much good at your allotted task.’

It was becoming difficult for Lettinger to pretend he wasn’t aware of Vritras’s insolence. It was harder still to keep his own face friendly, and his eyes from narrowing, the longer he had to look at the Space Marine and his sergeant. Neither warrior’s mutations were extreme by the standards of the Dragons, but there was still a bony growth on Vritras’s forehead like a blunt, stubby horn, while Aperos had a ridged crest running from his crown down the back of his head. The deformations were the mark of deviant genetic practice, as far as Lettinger was concerned. Give me the proof, captain, he thought. Give me the proof of what we all know your Chapter is doing, and I will have you and your unclean brothers ripped cleanly from the purity of the Imperium. With these thoughts as his strength, he simply bowed. ‘As you say, captain.’

‘Someone’s coming,’ Colonel Dysfield said. He’d been staying out of the exchange, standing by the window with his back to the room. He commanded the 25th Mortisian Rifles, but had provisionally handed over his command to Kervold so that the Guard tasked with the rescue should have the unity of a single command.

The Space Marines and Lettinger joined him. They saw the figures racing across the Alexis bridge. There weren’t many. ‘Throne,’ Vritras muttered.

‘Incoming ship, too,’ Dysfield noted.

The landing lights were on, and in the darkness, Lettinger couldn’t make out what sort of craft it was. He knew who would be on it, though. ‘That would be Canoness Setheno,’ he said. He enjoyed the sharp looks the Dragons and the colonel gave him.

‘The Canoness Errant?’ Dysfield asked stupidly, as if hoping that somehow there were two canonesses with the same name, and this wasn’t the one he dreaded.

‘Why is she here?’ Aperos demanded.

‘She was in the Maeror subsector. When I heard she was part of the tithing mission on Aighe Mortis, I contacted her and requested her aid.’

Dysfield had recovered some of his composure and was trying to withdraw into cynical apathy again, implying that Setheno’s arrival couldn’t possibly be any concern of his. ‘It’s nice how some things work out,’ he deadpanned. Lettinger wasn’t sure who was being mocked, so he didn’t respond.

‘The Canoness Errant and an inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus, both of whom just happened to be in my subsector,’ Vritras growled. ‘Are you sure you are here simply because of the crisis on Antagonis?’

‘Proximately, yes.’

‘Proximately? What is that supposed to mean?’

‘What are your questions supposed to mean, captain?’ Lettinger asked. ‘Since when does the Inquisition have to justify its decisions to anyone? Do you have something you would prefer to hide from us?’

‘My conscience is clean and damn you for asking.’

‘Perhaps your personal conscience is. I do wonder about the collective one of your Chapter.’

‘Enjoy wondering,’ Vritras snapped. ‘I’m going to greet the warriors who have just given much for the Imperium.’ He and Aperos strode out of the chamber, the floor vibrating from the weight of their footfalls. Dysfield followed. He gave Lettinger a look that bordered on hostile, but was also wary. He knew he should be frightened of Lettinger simply because Lettinger was Inquisition and Dysfield was not. That fear was as it should be. Lettinger approved.

He hesitated over whether to head to the courtyard or hurry to greet Setheno when she disembarked. He gambled that he had another few minutes before the canoness quit her ship. He wanted to see the Black Dragons as they returned. There were two, in particular, who interested him. There was an opportunity here, a chance to gather information that might finally bring about proper scrutiny of these Space Marines.

Lettinger hurried after Vritras and Aperos, and arrived in the keep’s courtyard just as Squads Pythios and Ormarr passed through the gate. The Space Marines set the refugees down, then two of them loaded up with detonators and melta bombs and headed back to the bridge. The civilians huddled together, sobbing and shaking. Dysfield’s staff officer approached them, accompanied by a medicae team, who began to herd them into the keep. Dysfield walked up to one of the Dragons and spoke quietly. Lettinger couldn’t hear the conversation, but he guessed that the colonel was asking about the two companies of Mortisian infantry. The Space Marine shook his head. Dysfield looked stricken. No one else would be coming, Lettinger presumed. He thought about the loss of thirty thousand men, and his heart sank. He felt sorry for Dysfield. The man’s entire command, with the exception of the contingent in Lexica, had been wiped out.

Lettinger would have liked to have spoken to the colonel. He would have liked to express his sympathy, to offer what support he could to an officer taking a staggering blow. But his own duty called. He saw Vritras and Aperos talking to the two sergeants who had just arrived. That was the opportunity he had been seeking. He moved towards them, walking softly over the cobbled surface of the courtyard, doing his best to be inconspicuous. As he drew near, the Space Marines removed their helmets, and he felt a rush of satisfaction and terror.

That there were mutations in the ranks of the Black Dragons was no secret. The Dragon Claws assault teams were composed entirely of Space Marines whose Ossmodula zygote had gone berserk. The implanted organ was responsible for the enormous size and strength of Adeptus Astartes skeletons, but in the case of the Claws, it didn’t know where to stop. The bones kept developing, most visibly in the form of outgrowths on the skull and, most effectively for combat, as blades, some of them retractable, in the forearm.

As far as Lettinger and many of his Ordo Malleus colleagues were concerned, it simply wasn’t possible that such a desirable mutation could be a chance development. Gene tampering was tainting the Black Dragons. Yet when the Chapter (reluctantly) submitted its tithe of genetic material, the samples were always of a purity beyond reproach. They were too good to be true, as suspicious in their own way as the bone-blades.

But the evidence was circumstantial, at best. The Dragons were careful, and had never given the Inquisition proper cause or opportunity to put them to the question. They were also very good at keeping their distance. But now the Inquisition, in the person of Werner Lettinger, was deep in the Dragons Second Company, and the warp take him if he didn’t find the means to launch a full, formal investigation against this Emperor-forsaken result of the Cursed Founding of M36.

As he took in sergeants Volos and Toharan, he felt the locks to the Dragons’ secrets tumbling open beneath his hands. Though he didn’t have any formal proof, he could see how the gene tithe passed the examinations. Toharan showed no sign of mutation at all. Underneath a mane of blond hair, his forehead was unblemished by disfiguring crest. His skin tone was lighter than that of the other Dragons Lettinger had seen. The norm was dark, lending credence to the theory that the Dragons were debased derivations of the Salamanders. But Toharan’s flesh had a glow that was almost human. All the Dragons would have to do to satisfy the tithing demands would be to send in material drawn from Toharan and others like him. He was, Lettinger realised, a very special kind of mutant: the aberrantly pure-born in a world of monsters.

And beside him stood the supreme monster. More than three metres tall, Volos loomed over every other living being in the courtyard. He was so gigantic that he wore custom-made armour and used an oversized jump pack for lift. His eyes were black, glinting pits of obsidian looking out from dark grey, leathery hide whose overlapping ridges looked disturbingly like scales. His razored horn dispensed with all pretence, as far as Lettinger was concerned, of being anything other than daemonic. When he spoke to Vritras, his fangs poked out over his lower lip.

As Lettinger watched the two Space Marines, each, for a moment, returned his stare. Toharan looked him up and down, his eyes pausing for a cold second at the inquisitorial rosette on Lettinger’s breast before moving up to his face and favouring him with an expression of absolute hostility and contempt. Volos barely glanced at him, and though he showed none of Toharan’s antagonism, his indifference was worse. It told Lettinger that he was beneath notice. He wasn’t even an irritant, merely a detail on the landscape.

There was no trace of humanity in the creature, Lettinger thought. Volos was well down the path to becoming an actual dragon. Lettinger’s puritan soul demanded that he cleanse Volos from the Emperor’s sight. But his craven blood quailed before the embodied power of war. He needed reinforcement.

‘Inquisitor,’ a female voice said behind him.

Lettinger smiled. He turned, expecting to greet his reinforcement. Instead, his smile turned into a rictus as he stared, frozen and stone, into the face of the Gorgon.

CHAPTER 3

ILLUMINATED

The nature of his work meant Elias Tennesyn was, most of the time, spared the hive experience. He lived in the field, digging up and studying the relics of a past that receded to infinity. For the traces of xenos civilizations to be preserved on a planet, there had to be regions little touched by human development. Therefore, no hives. Antagonis was a world that suited him. Its temperate zones were broad, its two principle land masses were separated by large, life-giving oceans, and its cities, though large, were not monsters. Antagonis still boasted landscapes that were not only green, but actually wild. It had forests, veldts and tundra. Antagonis had space for antiquity and its secrets. So Tennesyn resented the occasions that took him away from the likes of Antagonis to the worlds that presented the human species in its most insect-like form. And a wasted trip, as this one to Aighe Mortis was turning out to be, was a special kind of hell.

Even the briefest, most profitable stay on this planet would have carried a whiff of brimstone. Aighe Mortis was the sole inhabited planet of the Camargus system, just as Antagonis was in Phlagia. Unlike Antagonis, Aighe Mortis was a dying star of a hive world. The civilization on this planet was like a sun going red and huge before its final collapse. It had swollen to a final, absolute extremity of population density. The growth was so unsustainable that it could only be the precursor to a terminal, lights-out plunge into the wreckage of barbarism. The shallow oceans had long ago been drained and evaporated to make way for more and more ground-swallowing, sky-shrouding manufactoria. But the memory of seas lingered in the atmosphere, turning the faecal-brown and bile-yellow air into a thick sludge that sat in the lungs like pneumonic sputum. To breathe on Aighe Mortis was to drown slowly.

The closest thing the world had known to a golden era was in the Age of Apostasy, when its mineral resources had been plenty, and there had been enough space on the surface that the population centres could still boast that they were distinct cities. But the millennia passed, the cities merged into a single disease, and the mineral seams were exhausted. Misery and deprivation were a tide that rose but never ebbed. The last of the wealthy families fled early in M41. When the mining concerns were taken over by desperate, rioting workers, off-world owners decided it was cheaper to cut their losses than face the expense and effort of reclaiming valueless property.

Something between a cooperative and a criminal anarchy had risen on Aighe Mortis, giving just enough obeisance to Imperial administrative bodies to achieve a state of mutual tolerance. The mines had tunnelled deeper into the earth, leaving exhausted regions to be remade as sunless habs, and enough new seams were found to jolt the planet’s economy into a semi-functioning state of undeath. By then, the population was such that almost all of Aighe Mortis’s resources were consumed by local needs for material and energy. In the end (and Tennesyn had seen enough civilizational graveyards to know that the end couldn’t be far down the road), Aighe Mortis kept itself going by exporting two things. One was small-arms, churned out in cut-rate but reliable form in the uncountable billions. The other was men. Human existence here was red in tooth and claw. Vicious natural selection was encouraged by gangs that recognised a valuable resource when they saw it, and a steady stream of Guardsmen and mercenaries swarmed from the hive into the rest of the Imperium.

Aighe Mortis was a world that Tennesyn didn’t enjoy thinking about, never mind setting foot on. But it was also an old world. Its historical records reached back to the Heresy and beyond. Hiding in the cracks and shadows between the belching chimneys and maggot-writhing hab complexes were pockets of scholarship. There were archives here that, even in their decrepit state, would be the envy of the great universitariats, were they widely known. But on Aighe Mortis, it was for the good of their continued existence that they remain forgotten and ignored.

Tennesyn knew about them. There were some scrolls in a private collection that he had thought might help with interpreting the find on Antagonis, and he had sent Granton Fellix here to seek them out. Fellix was a native Mortisian. It had made sense, at the time, for him to make the trip. But then had come the sudden announcement of a new and massive founding, and Fellix had been caught up in the tithe. Tennesyn had come to extricate him from that obligation, thinking his own standing as senior xeno-archaeologist at Bendridge Universitariat, the most prestigious in the Maeror subsector, might count for something.

Not for the first time, he hated himself for being so ignorant.

Tennesyn had spent the last seven days meandering through the warren of the Departmento Munitorum’s Mortisian palace. Now he was waiting outside the office of Jozef Bisset. He had been down so many administrative blind alleys that he had lost all track of hierarchical positions, and had no idea what Bisset’s precise title was. Tennesyn knew he was a comptroller, and that he had something to do with determining how many recruits would be press-ganged from which regions of the hive. Tennesyn knew two other things about Bisset. The first was that, over a century ago, they had been students together, and Tennesyn had helped Bisset through some exams that would have otherwise finished him off. He was hoping Bisset had a long memory. The second thing Tennesyn knew was that Bisset was his last resort. He had spent too much time on this fool’s quest already. He felt sorry for Fellix, but there was no point in both of them being gone from the dig site.

The waiting area was like every other room in the complex. The building called itself a palace because the administrative pride of the Departmento demanded it, but it was no more palatial than Tennesyn was a death cult assassin. The walls were a dark grey, damp-stained, unadorned, pitted rockcrete. The seats were metal and dug into Tennesyn’s back. The lighting was dim and as filthy as the air itself. Bisset’s secretary was a dull-eyed, incompetently augmented man who must have been less than half Tennesyn’s age, but looked three times older. His face was so slack and apathetic that Tennesyn had, for a brief moment, mistaken him for a servitor.

After half an hour, and without Tennesyn being able to catch any sort of communication, the secretary jabbed a thumb in the direction of doors behind his scratched and rusted metal desk. ‘You can go in now,’ he said, without looking up from the data-slates laid out before him.

Tennesyn stood up. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and walked through the doors.

On the other side, Bisset’s office was more of the same as the waiting room, only smaller. The only suggestion of rank was the unblemished, dark iron of the desk, and the presence of a window. Tennesyn was surprised. Disoriented, he hadn’t realised he had been this close to the exterior wall of the palace. The armourglass window was about a metre high, a tenth of that in width, and so layered with grime that it offered no view at all.

Jozef Bisset walked around his desk to shake Tennesyn’s hand. He was the same age as Tennesyn, but looked both younger and more battered, thanks to his decades of active service in the Guard. He’d had more juvenat work done, and the limbs that were still his own had a suppleness of movement that Tennesyn envied. But his right arm was bionic, and Tennesyn thought he heard the subtle whine of servos in at least one leg as well. The left side of Bisset’s face, above the mouth, was a bronze mask. The implanted eye tracked its ruby gaze independently of the right one. ‘Elias,’ Bisset said. ‘It’s good to see you. Do have a seat.’

The chairs were the same metal backbreakers as the ones in the waiting room, but Tennesyn sat. He gave Bisset his warmest smile and most open countenance as the man returned to sit at his desk. ‘Thank you, comptroller–’

‘Oh, stop it. We both know I’m Jozef to you.’

‘Jozef, then,’ Tennesyn said. ‘I suppose you know why I’m here.’

Bisset nodded at the lone data-slate on his desk. ‘I have the file. I’m sorry. I wish I could help.’

Tennesyn forced himself to go through the futile motions one more time. ‘This man is a valuable member of my team, far more valuable than he would be as a single green conscript.’

‘I’m sure you’re right. But at just this moment, utility is completely beside the point. The tensions are bad enough that the slightest appearance of granting anyone a favour could set off more riots. Or worse.’

‘Riots? What are you talking about?’

Bisset blinked at him. ‘What cave have you been living in?’

‘This one!’ Tennesyn exploded in frustration. ‘I’ve spent the last week shuttling from office to office, napping in waiting rooms. I don’t even know what day it is!’

‘We’ve had to double the tithe,’ Bisset explained. ‘And it’s being resisted. But Sarcannis and Perethea are a mess, and between that and the situation on Antagonis–’

‘What situation on Antagonis?’ Tennesyn’s voice broke with a hint of hysteria.

‘Throne, man, how do you function in the real world at all?’

‘I should get back there.’ He rose.

‘Are you mad? That planet is–’

A distant, but deep, boom cut Bisset off. The room vibrated. Dust drifted down from the ceiling. Tennesyn wondered what could shake them a thousand metres up in a building of this size. ‘What was that?’ he whispered.

Bisset sighed, looking very, very tired. ‘That, I do believe, was a bomb.’

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Final Journey copyright © Angels of Death 2013, Games Workshop Ltd.
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