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  Endurance – Chris Wraight

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  Endurance

  By Chris Wraight

  They are coming again now, stumbling out of the sulphurous night with their demented grins and their glowing eyes. Lystra is a hive world, populated by billions. Contact has been lost with most of it, indicating that the majority have been turned or are turning, and so the crowds are endless.

  Brother Sarrien does not use his bolter. The last ammunition for it ran out three weeks ago, and it has been stowed reverently in the Thunderhawk Votive IX, which will lift off, piloted by serfs, when the last wall is broken. He fights on the walls with his power sword and his gauntlets, slaying like a warrior-king of his old home world. His limbs are heavy and flooded with lactic acid, and it feels like powering through deep water.

  He is positioned at the jutting salient of a long, south-facing bastion. This is manned by the hastily amalgamated regiments of the surviving Lystran Proximal Guard, who are exhausted down to their marrow. Far off, chem-works are burning, making the horizon smoulder and the freezing air taste like gall. The spires at their backs glow with a million points of fading, flickering light.

  He chants as he fights. If he were fighting with his own squad he would have been roaring war cries or calling out tactical movements, creating the auditory hell that daunts the enemy and propels his battle-brothers to greater feats, but his battle-brothers are all far away with their own contests, and so he chants now, in the manner of a Chaplain, to inspire the Guard.

  ‘Stand fast, for Him on the Throne!’ he shouts, smashing his fist through the neck of a grasping stumbler.

  That is the word they use to describe them: ‘stumblers’. The euphemism hides the horror of it. It says nothing of their rictus faces and their awkward splayed limbs, their grey flesh hanging from yellow bones and the hot glow behind their bloodshot eyes. They are climbing up the high walls now, hoisting themselves atop piles of their own dead, limping blindly into the path of lascannon stations. Once they crest the parapet’s edge they start killing, grinning the whole time.

  ‘Remember your vows!’ Sarrien chants, swinging the bloodied stump of one stumbler-corpse into another, sending both sailing over the edge. ‘Endure! Remain steadfast!’

  The defenders would have collapsed by now, if he had not been there to keep them fighting. They are staring into the twisted faces of those that were once men and women. Perhaps, every so often, they come up against those they knew, and have to cut them down. Killing one of them is not difficult, for they make no effort to evade the las-fire. Killing hundreds is back-breaking, and every time a mistake is made and one gets through the gap, then the slaughter is prodigious.

  ‘Keep on your feet!’ Sarrien shouts, breaking the spine of a stumbler, kicking out to upend another, slicing his blade around to take out two more. His hearts are thudding out of sequence – they are becoming dangerously swollen. He is perspiring too much despite his dehydration. His hands are bleeding freely within his armour – the product of fighting the long retreat for weeks without respite. ‘Stay firm! Endure!’

  The world of Lystra will fall. All but the blindest of the blind see that now, and even the baseline troops are beginning to disbelieve their commissars. Sergeant Cleon of Sarrien’s squad knows it too, but he will not order evacuation. The orders remain the same as they were when first given – hold the line, make the enemy pay the maximal price. Distant minds on peaceful worlds have determined that it is worth the sacrifice of a single squad of Imperial Talons to keep Lystra out of the enemy’s hands for another month or two, perhaps longer.

  Orders, orders. Discipline. Resolve.

  For now, the defenders respond to his injunction. The walls are held. The lascannon turrets spit metronomically into the seething dark. Lystra Primaris remains inviolate, an island of purity within the gloom.

  But they keep coming, more and more of them. Their deranged smiles become maddening to witness.

  He hates them. He hates what they are doing to him. He hates that he will be ended by one of them – a foe without honour or stature – and not some champion worthy of his attention.

  Sarrien’s voice becomes hoarse.

  ‘Remember your vows!’ he cries again.

  The attack ship swaggers through the void. It has no need of subterfuge, for it is a predator gliding within a sea of prey. It is not large – by Imperial standards, it might be destroyer class – but there is little in this volume of space that could stand against it and so the designation hardly matters. The great warships are all gone, pulled into the wars that engulf the Carrion Empire and sap its strength. Out here in the wilds, there is only chaff and fodder, only grist to the ever-grinding soul mills.

  Dragan takes some pleasure in that. One day, greater battles will call him. One day, the Lords of Silence will convene again for something mighty, but until then he has learned to enjoy the licence. This is leisure for him – a casual slaying, a little light slaughter between so-serious campaigns.

  He stares out into the void, at the stars swimming across blurred viewports. His ship, the Incaligant, does not have a soul. Not like Solace. It is merely a machine, albeit one riddled with cankers and growths. Its weapons fizz with bacteria, and its old phosphex launchers have developed intriguing viruses within the decayed canister-barrels. Its decks run with rust and there are phages fermenting in the infested bilges.

  Death Guard, the enemy calls them. That is an irony. The Legion is more alive than anything left in this stagnant galaxy, albeit in ways not entirely in concordance with nature. Its days of glory are within spitting distance now. After a long time nursing grievances spawned at the dawn of the Imperium, the Death Guard are strutting. They are powerful, they are united. Only the Despoiler’s mongrel Legion of vagabonds and strays surpasses them in numbers, and those turncoats have their own problems. One day, Dragan is sure, the last doors will be blown open and the Eye’s borders will become irrelevant. Until then, there is killing in the emptiness to be had, and that is a fine enough thing to be going on with.

  Dragan’s eyes narrow. The Incaligant’s bridge crew respond. Something has strayed into sensor range.

  ‘Show me,’ he orders, his words grinding out from a rust-clogged vox-grille. His fingers, stiff from eroded cartilage, curl around the terminals of a verdigrised command throne.

  ‘Imperial,’ confirms his master of sensors, a man in a grease-streaked apron and a pox-red face who cannot leave his seat due to gurgling tubes inserted at regular intervals. ‘Running hard, plasma drives only. It can be taken.’

  Dragan nods. ‘Agreed. Come about.’

  The Incaligant swings towards the enemy. At this stage the ships are many thousands of kilometres apart, mere specks on the face of the void, but both of them know the score. More data comes in, streaming across cracked and blurry pict-feeds. It is a troop carrier, slow, armed only to the standard level required by the Navy. It should have escorts, but does not. So this will be easy.

  Dragan reflects that victories are coming more easily than ever before. Fortune seems to favour them. Every move they make results in triumphs. Perhaps the long-promised turn is coming quicker now. Perhaps they will break the back of the Carrion Empire even before the millennium ends.

  ‘Full burn,’ he commands, remaining seated.

  It does not take long to catch up. The transport is a typically uninspired thing – a hunk of dirty grey metal as long as it is high, all riveted slabs and heavy blast-plates. It has overloaded its engines t
rying to get away, and they are sputtering now like half-snuffed candles.

  The ship is disabled quickly – a scatter of shots across its bows knocking out its weaponry and blowing the void shields. Then Dragan sends the boarding parties in, composed of his battle-brothers and their slaved adjutants. He lets them slaughter for a while, leaning back in his throne and listening to the cries over the ranged comm. It amuses him to watch the silent, tranquil outline of that ship while knowing the carnage is taking place within it.

  Then he moves. He gets up, feeling his disease-thick bones creak. He does not reach for a weapon – his taloned gauntlets are enough for this. He stalks his way down the dank corridors towards the miasmatic hangars staffed by hunch-spined servitors, and takes an encrusted shuttle out across the gulf. He lands it in the corresponding intake hangar and thuds down the ramp and into action.

  Dragan never hurries. The decks around him are already filthy with clotted matter – body parts slapped on the metal grids, blood pooling with oils and coolants into a viscous slime. He can hear screaming and shouting from far off. The main lumens have been smashed by bolter fire, but he can see all he needs to.

  He kicks through the debris of his brothers’ attack, making for the hatchways beyond. He can smell the antiseptic barrenness of the original ship, now overlaid by altogether more vivid aromas. Soon he is nearing the bridge, and ascends a tight set of meshed-metal stairs, ducking under a lintel designed for smaller bodies than his.

  He meets his first resistance there – serfs in flak jackets carrying solid-round weapons. He does not break stride, but walks straight through the light dusting of impacts, feeling his armour absorb and spit out the bullets as they come. He reaches out to seize the closest of them, breaking her neck and flinging her to one side. Then he works through the rest, his mind only half-engaged on the task.

  They are absolutely terrified of him. In brief snatches of focus, as he breaks their helms open or is struck by a distinctive bodily reaction, he inhales raw, crippling fear. That means very little to him. He does not revel in it, nor does it distract him. It is just the way of things – he is strong, and they are weak. The weak have always been purged, creating room for the strong to flourish. To the extent Dragan has a creed, that is it.

  He kills the last of them with an absent-minded backhand, just as his second in command, Glask, emerges at the entrance to the bridge. Glask is a bloated creature, his armour blistered as if thrown into some heat-sink and left to stew. Glask’s lone eye glares from a wet helm-face, and his trailing left leg limps.

  ‘All done, brother?’ Dragan asks.

  ‘All done,’ says Glask.

  ‘What’s the tally?’

  ‘A few thousand,’ says Glask. ‘The brothers will be busy for a while.’

  A few thousand troops heading at speed into the void, unescorted. That indicates a degree of desperation. Perhaps a last throw of some dice.

  Dragan shuffles over to a command post, wheezing thickly. The cartilage issue seems to be spreading to his other joints, and he moves stiffly. That might mean that a true Gift is emerging, pushing its way through his body as a benison from the god he’s supposed to worship. Or it might mean he’s getting old.

  He punches depressors on a bronze-lined cogitator face and calls up a trajectory skein. It’s hard, for a moment, to remember how the Imperium represents void-volumes – that curious mix of archaisms and high technology, never truly understanding what they’re playing with – but then he gets what he’s after.

  ‘Might have been heading here,’ he says, pointing towards a blot of phosphor with his grimy thumb. ‘Lystra. Heard of it?’

  Glask shakes his head.

  The word means nothing to Dragan either. Then again, there are so many worlds and so many battles that very little stands out, his memories a long fog of patient hunting and slow corruption.

  ‘We’ll head there next, then,’ he says, turning away from the column. ‘Should be fun.’

  He has been alone for a long time now. Cleon left to spearhead the defence of the main land-gate, far to the north. Talis and Kerenon are roving through the underhives, knee-deep in sewage. The rest of his battle-brothers are dead, their gene-seed lost to this rabble-world.

  That angers him more than anything else. For Sarrien, for all of them, that is the sacred part, the thread that binds the Chapter to itself and to its distant progenitor. An individual brother might die, the spark of his life might be ended, and that is accepted. But to have the immortal remnant lost… that is infuriating. They have saved so little of it during this wearying campaign, and there is no guarantee that the last gunship will even make it back to safety.

  It feels futile. It feels like a decision has been made by tacticians a long way away, with no understanding of what priceless assets they are allowing to be cast into the wind. Does it really matter that Lystra stands for another month? What was the purpose of that order – to genuinely buy time for other, more strategic conflicts, or to burnish the ledgers of some scholar in a strategium on Terra?

  But Sarrien is a creature of command. He will follow an order or die in the attempt. His personal fury, his individual fatigue – these are irrelevant things. He cultivates the qualities taught to him by Chaplain Geracht: defiance, steadfastness, sacrifice to the will of the Throne.

  The southern walls of the city are overrun. They are fighting street to street now, making the stumblers suffer for every spire-crown they swarm through. They are beset by eruptions of plague at their backs, as well as the hordes closing in on them from the front. What is left of the Proximal regiment comes with Sarrien on his long retreat, and together they bolster what they can.

  He speaks to Lieutenant Voorn, the most senior soldier remaining in his segment of the city.

  ‘You had word of incoming relief forces,’ Sarrien says. ‘Before the long-range comm-net went down.’

  ‘I did.’ Voorn used to treat Sarrien with a kind of awestruck timidity. Now, like all of them, he is too damned tired for anything but grey-faced mumbling. ‘Nothing further.’

  That is that, then. The brief hope that the sector authorities had managed to scrape together reinforcements proves as illusory as every other half-glimpsed snatch of redemption. Perhaps nothing was ever sent. Perhaps something was, and it never made it.

  Sarrien looks around him. The command chamber is an old chapel, barricaded with piles of rubble and smashed woodwork. Clusters of Guardsmen sit on the stone-piles, cradling their guns, some drinking from near-empty canteens, others staring blankly at the floor. They will not be able to assist him this night – they need at least an hour’s rest before they will be good for anything.

  ‘I will hunt, then,’ said Sarrien, reaching for his blade and activating the power. The weak energy field throws pale, shifting light across the chapel floor. ‘Remain in position until I return.’

  Voorn salutes, even though he can hardly lift his arm.

  Then Sarrien is moving again, slipping out of the chapel and into another seamy night. He glides almost silently, making use of his capacity for stealth as he has done so often over the past months. He looks up and sees artillery positions among the hab-units, still manned. He knows there are a few more stationed further back – clusters of lascannon teams behind barricades. They wait in the stinking gloom, knowing what comes for them.

  Soon he is beyond the regions still in nominal Imperial control, and out into the no-man’s-land beyond. He ghosts through craters filling with brackish liquid, and skirts the soundless, grave-dark silhouettes of bombed-out buildings. He smells the enemy before he sees them. He detects the faint buzz of flies, and hears the patter of vermin through the heaps of stone. His body twinges involuntarily, a disgust-response that he should be able to better suppress.

  He nears the skeleton of a manufactorum-unit, still hot from its bombardment, and scans body-signals within. There are fifty-seven, at least
as far as he can detect.

  Sarrien takes a breath. Those numbers would not have troubled him at the start of this campaign, but now he is weaker, deprived of adequate food and rest for a very long time, and must go warily.

  He leaps up, grips the lip of a window and swings himself through it, smashing the last shards of glass across a rockcrete floor. Figures turn in the gloom, startled. Before they can react he is right in among them, slashing and punching. Two are bifurcated instantly, another three fall before the next heartbeat. Then he is fighting hard, cutting them down as they shriek and swing at him. He smacks away crude machine-tool weapons and veers out of the path of poorly aimed las-blasts. He slices, switches, feeling the effort drag on his raw muscles.

  He is quickly panting. He feels old wounds open up. He slips, and nearly lets a whirring saw through his guard. After that he works harder, punishing himself, taking out his exhausted anger on those before him. His retinal lenses become translucent slicks of blood, and still he has to kill, for they do not run. They never run. It is as if they welcome release for what fate has made of them, despite the demented smiles.

  Sarrien hurls a snake-armed brute into the far wall and rips the throat out of a green-eyed stumbler. He breaks into a narrow chamber, lined on either wall with dormant, semi-smashed machines. The buzz of flies becomes pervasive, as does the soup-thick stench. The air seems syrupy, as if time itself has become sluggish in there. He feels dizzy, and pushes back harder against the signs of bodily weakness.

  A man lurches into view, huge, his bare skin taut with muscle. His head is bald and studded with iron ingots. He has green eyes, and a tattoo of death’s heads suppurating on a leather-hard, lumpy chest. He might be as big as Sarrien, out of his armour, which is astonishing.

  Sarrien moves to kill him, but his muscles do not respond readily to his command. He feels like his gauntlets are pinned down by lead bars.

  ‘Enough now, lad,’ the man says.

  Light-headed, Sarrien drops to one knee to catch his breath, gripping his blade tight lest he lose it. The rest of the stumblers seem to have melted away. Has he killed them all? It’s hard to be sure.