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The Word of the Silent King

L J Goulding

They had us, brothers. We were done for.

We had fought them hard. On Gehenna, those clanking mechanical xenos seemed to be without number. For three weeks, Dante had led the Third Company against their Legions – we in the Assault squads would strike and fall back with the commander, over and over, while Captain Tycho directed the long range engagement. It was a dry, dusty grind. The only blood that fell upon the barren wastes was ours.

That felt wrong. There was nothing to slake our thirst, no glorious crimson to bathe the armour of the damned.

Tycho was the Master of Sacrifice. That title seemed appropriate. We felt sacrificed.

Gehenna is nothing if not an altar upon which such offerings can be made, though the myriad alien races seem forever drawn to test the Imperium’s right to preside over it. A million souls more hallowed than ours had passed on the hive world’s plains, over the millennia. What more noble endeavour, what more glorious calling can there be than to defend such a place from the hordes of the restless xenos dead?

And so defend it we did, with every last ounce of our company’s strength.

We fell from the grey-streaked skies, the crimson of the Ironhelms Assault squads like a bloodstain upon the pristine gold of the Sanguinary Guard. Commander Dante was ever at the front, the tip of the blade thrust into the necrons’ flanks. The Axe Mortalis hewed left and right, cleaving through metal bodies as easily as it might through living flesh on any other battlefield, and in Dante’s divine shadow we were inspired. I led my squad in a freefall drop, the weight of our charge like the hammer of Sanguinius’s own wrath against the enemy, their dully glowing eyes turned upwards in those last heartbeats before we were in their very midst.

No towering necron lords swathed in fuliginous silks, no insectoid sentinels lashing us with electrum whips. These were the poorest stock of the Legions that we now faced, the meagre revenants that seemed almost without number and whose only tactical use seemed to be that they absolutely would not die.

Exhorting my battle-brothers onwards, I drove into the necron warriors with my blade held before me. Speed, we had found, was the key – they simply could not track us quickly enough as targets if we kept moving, and they seemed incapable of firing their gauss weaponry without first taking careful aim. And so we struck them down by the dozen, taking heads and limbs and blowing out armoured torsos with point-blank pistol fire, and stamping their remains into the dust beneath our boots.

Yet for every necron we tore apart, three more would trudge forwards to take its place; or else the supposedly dead warrior would simply rise up again once we had passed by, wounds reknitting under whatever baleful technomancy powered them.

Green flashes cast the seemingly endless horde in silhouette, and I looked up to see more of the great, gravitic monolith structures gliding ponderously down the slopes from the crags beyond. Their energy matrices cast thumping charges into the melee, scattering golden-armoured Blood Angels like leaves in the wind. Maddening, squealing static cut through the inter-squad vox-channels, and suddenly we were cut off from Dante’s command entirely.

And more necrons came. And yet more.

The press of cold, lifeless bodies around us become entangling, and the warriors began to jab at us with their hooked bayonet blades. Brother Jophael tried to free himself from the horde’s grasp by launching back into the air, but metal claws pulled him down, jump pack and all, beneath the ambling tide. His agonised screams were mercifully brief.

I planted a boot into the chest of the closest necron warrior and sent it sprawling backwards with a pair of frag grenades for its trouble. The blasts hurled a score more of them aside, but all that bought me was the space to truly see the inevitability and futility of our assault. We were outnumbered by hundreds to one, and hovering ark-transports would gather the xenos dead right out from beneath our feet to send against us once more. And on, and on, until we were buried.

We had been sacrificed. I did not know if Commander Dante had planned it that way, but I could no longer even see his Sanguinary Guard amidst the throng.

There would be no resurrection for us. Once fallen, the Angels of Death do not rise from the dead. There is purity in that – something that the necrons have failed to grasp in their eternal pursuit of… eternity.

Two more of my brothers fell. Then a third.

I don’t remember what it was that I screamed in that moment – likely it was something ignoble and suitably defiant. I struck a necron down with every swing of my blade, until it seemed that I could no longer even find room to draw it back between blows.

My pauldrons began to catch on the press of metal limbs. Unfeeling fingers clamped around my wrists, and my neck. My sword was pulled from my grip, and my plasma pistol too. I realised that I was being dragged over backwards, and I was no longer even screaming real words.

That’s when it happened.

The pause. The stutter.

As one, the necrons faltered. Just for a fraction of a second, their eyes dimmed.

Then, again as one, they put up their weapons and turned to withdraw. I crashed to the ground on my back, before scrambling free of my jump pack harness to see ten thousand immortal xenos warriors striding away from us as implacably as they had been advancing only moments earlier.

I snapped my pistol up and put down nine of them without thinking. I shot them through their retreating backs, hot plasma dashing their mechanical innards onto the ground. Others did the same, in futile impotent rage. Our blood was still up, and the wounded remnants of the front line squads harried the enemy with frustrated battle cries still upon our lips. Necrons fell, and still the Legions did not pay us any more regard that day.

It was as though we had simply ceased to exist.

It made no sense at the time. Why would they suddenly give up, with certain victory within their unfeeling, iron grasp?

The answer was the result of cold, mathematical logic. It would come to stun us all, and most especially Commander Dante.

We had misjudged them. We misjudged them so badly.

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