The Blood of Sotha - L J Goulding
THE BLOOD OF SOTHA
L J Goulding
Everything that I had, and all that I am, was earned and paid for in blood.
My own, my brothers’, and that of my foes.
With the great axe of my office gripped tightly in both gauntleted hands, I stalked through the dismal corridors of the ship, seeking my elusive quarry. The tense exchanges of those under my command crackled back and forth across the encrypted vox as they swept the engineering levels and the upper decks.
Normally I would have reprimanded them for such laxity - this was a hunt, after all, and the best hunters remain silent until they have their prey - but under the circumstances I held my tongue.
Grief, it was, that had eroded their discipline. Grief for the loss of the Chapter’s home world.
The Great Devourer had come, and now that alien hunger for flesh and thirst for blood appeared to have followed them out into the stars. At their lowest ebb, it struck out at them from the darkness of their small sanctuary vessel as they fled, ploughing on through the madness of the warp. Should the renewed, savage heat of that bloodlust, that burning need to kill and to eat and defile, really have taken us so completely by surprise? Or was it something that we had brought with us from the very beginning?
So, under the circumstances, I held my tongue. As far as I could tell, by the time we finally abandoned the cerulean curve of Sotha’s near-orbit to the tyranids, the fourteen of us were the last survivors of the glorious Eighth Company.
My name is Brother-Captain Vosok Dali. I am - or rather, was - the appointed Lord Executioner of the Scythes of the Emperor.
The vox-link chimed inside my helm, though the channel was much distorted by hastily engaged encryption protocols. The voice was that of Brother Mitru, a promising young warrior who I believed hailed from the hive world of Radnar.
‘Brothers, there are more bodies here. Level six, crew quarters’.
He paused for a long moment, his tentatively advancing footfalls just audible over the background hiss.
‘Holy Terra. They’ve been torn to pieces’.
I had marked Mitru for promotion to squad leader some months before, though the fire of ambition had left his eyes in the instant that he first saw the great cephalopod-whirl ships of Hive Fleet Kraken reaching out towards us. Through the grand observation ports on the Aegida orbital, we had watched Sergeant Remas’s board¬ing party swallowed up by the lead xenos vessel at the very onset of the invasion, and in that moment I knew that I had misplaced my confidence in Mitru. Whether or not he truly feared the alien, deep down, he certainly did not feel the same overriding hatred for them that I did. I could tell that just from looking at him, with the clarity of insight that only such moments can offer.
Unlike Mitru, I would have been happy to remain and wreak a bloody vengeance upon the tyranids until the bitter end. 1 would have piled up their misshapen skulls a hundred high, all in the name of a planet for which, in truth, I cared little.
As it was, the battle was to be continued aboard our vessel long after we escaped the doom of Sotha.
I was born on Beremin, the smallest and most distant world of the Sotharan League. This felt like it should never have accounted for much, and yet it did - that was plain to see, though no one spoke openly of it. The Scythes of the Emperor maintained one of their many tributary outposts in the icy highlands beyond the plains where my mortal kin dwelled, and before my tenth winter I had been taken up to that cold bastion to begin my life again.
My fellow recruits and I did not set foot upon our new, adoptive home world until we were already fully initiated battle-brothers of the Chapter. I always wondered if even that had been the deliberate intent all along, keeping the low-born at arm’s length until the last possible moment, while our more fortunate Sothan cousins flour¬ished in the training halls of Mount Pharos from the first day of their induction. It was the same for all off-worlder initiates, speaking of a deep, cultural arrogance that chafed at my soul from the moment I first breathed the native air.
“We welcome you, brothers,’ Captain Pnagos, the Master of Recruits, had said upon the landing fields at Odessa. ‘Your journey has been long, but now you stand beside the rest of us as equals.’
Equals.
Equality. I doubt the old cur even knew what the word meant. He met us with an honour guard of Scouts - Scouts! - and proclaimed us all equals. Behind my visor, I ground my teeth until one of them cracked.
How telling it was, many decades later, that when I ascended to command of the Eighth I was the only company-level officer in more than nine centuries not to have been raised on the Chapter’s home world. Pnagos was gone by then, slain during the Xikun campaign and replaced by Master Levidis - another Sothan. I cannot lie, it was a disappointment. I should have liked to have seen the look on old Lagos’s face as I refused the ornate two-handed reaper’s scythe of my predecessor, instead taking up a bronzed power axe from Ber¬lin and swearing my captaincy oaths upon its blade.
Equals…
The flickering lumen strips cast long shadows in the corridor ahead. Mitru and the others had locked down most of the main arterial passageways remotely, sealing bulkhead ports in order to restrict hostile movement between compartments and bring the engagement forwards on their own terms.
That was clever. I had not expected that from him under the cir¬cumstances. Perhaps there was hope for him yet.
I made my way quickly and quietly back to the transit conveyors, from where the first panicked reports of further battle had origi¬nated. By the projected movements and attack spread, it had been assumed that it was most likely a xenos assassin-form that had slipped on board with those damnable refugees from the north¬ern hub, or inside the emergency cargo shipments that had been shunted into every available evacuation vessel. It would be impos¬sible to tell, now; it had been too chaotic in those final hours, when the futility of the planetary defence became apparent. We had been urged to seize anything that was not bolted down and make for the fleet rendezvous beyond the system’s edge. Stragglers from other companies - the Third, Seventh and Ninth in particular - brought whatever they had collected, too.
The materiel I could understand: provisions, ammunition, even livestock. But refugees? The arrogance of the notion that there was anything worth saving among the common people of Sotha made me sick to my stomach. The Chapter now rested upon a knife’s edge, its fortress-monastery lost and barely two hundred Space Marines accounted for, by the last estimate. What value was there in preserv¬ing the bloodlines of an otherwise dead world?
I was no nursemaid, no minder of human chattel. I was a killer. An executioner.
The Executioner.
And besides, would the same respect be afforded to any of the countless other worlds that would undoubtedly now fall beneath the shadow of the Kraken, throughout Sothara and beyond? Would their customs, history and traditions be deemed worth of salvation?
I found that hard to believe.
At the conveyor loading platform, I paused in the near darkness glancing into each open bay in turn to ensure that I was indeed alone. Between the poorly stacked containers and buckled haulage cages, the open space was littered with the dead. My brother Scythes were few amongst them, but their blood was brightest of all upon the dull plating of—
My baseplate’s internal sensors lit up. There were several distinct contacts approaching from the starboard hangars.
Without conscious thought, I activated the disruptor field of my bronzed axe and ghosted to a flanking position near the bulkhead hatchway. The weapon’s ruddy illumination was like glowing embers in the gloom.
I recalled my first kill of the invasion, upon the steps of the Pharos. It had been a seven metre-tall juggernaut creature that lumbered up the mountain slopes towards the fortress-monastery, shrugging off lascannon hits and letting heavy bolter-rounds caress its horned, armoured carapace like nothing more than a gentle summer breeze. It had torn at the defences as it came, using its powerful, clawed forelimbs to rend fortified emplacements and the armour of battle tanks alike.
As the great beast passed between the final gatehouse bastions and into the shadow of the mountain’s peak, I alone charged forwards while the bravest and brightest warriors of Sotha retreated from its path. I remember the incredulity that welled up within me, pierc¬ing my outrage and battle-focus - that my Chapter brethren should allow this monstrosity to breach the front gate of the greatest fortress of their home world, it was…
It was utterly incomprehensible to me.
All my life, I had fought to gain the respect and acceptance of those I called brother. I had butchered and bled and exhorted, and risen through a reluctant hierarchy by merit of my own achievement and boundless dedication.
I was not of Sothan blood, and yet I had been willing to die to protect that world where others, perhaps, had not.
Never faltering in my charge, I had locked eyes with the tyranid juggernaut. Beneath Mount Pharos, it was alike to a mountain itself - a mountain of flesh and bone and teeth and claws and eternal, undying hunger.
It threw its tusked jaws open and roared. Armoured all in dusky, blood-red chitin, it seemed like the most perfect embodiment of rage and fury that I could have ever imagined, and I wondered even then what I might learn from this singular foe. Now, looking down at my own battleplate, once pristine in black and golden yellow but lately much smeared with crimson, it was not so very hard to see the answer.
The hatchway opene
d, the bright beams of gun-lamps stabbing into the conveyor platform chamber. Two of my brothers from Eighth Company entered, chain-blades and pistols held ready, followed by a third carrying a power falx.
These were not tyranids - they were warriors that I had handpicked from the ranks of Levidis’s Scout squads myself, noble Scythes that I had trained in the art of war. They had fought under my command in a hundred battles, and together we had faced the horrors of the Kraken and barely escaped with our lives.
I took the first with an overhand swing. The axe blade cleaved down through his right pauldron and tore his breastplate open, blood fountaining from the ruin of his chest and staining my visor.
Planting a boot on his midriff as he crumpled to the deck, I tugged the axe free just as his companion fired a bolt into my side at point-blank range. The impact spun me around, but I turned it into another killing strike, hacking into the hapless Space Marine’s throat and nearly severing his head.
The third warrior backed away, his falx held out in a guard posi¬tion. He called out over the vox, his eyes fixed upon me.
‘I have found him! He’s in the conveyor loading chambers, level—’
I silenced him with an animalistic growl. It felt good, reverberat¬ing in my chest and echoing from my vox-grille. His falx edged up in response.
‘This is madness, Dali. You dishonour the memory of the home world with your treachery.’
‘Whose home world?’ I spat. ‘Not mine.’
Before he could utter another word, I ended him.
Brother-Captain Vosok Dali, Lord Executioner of the Scythes of the Emperor. That title would come to carry no little irony, by the end.
I deactivated the disruptor field and wiped the axe blade down with the flat palm of my gauntlet. Then I opened my vox-link for the first time in several hours.
‘I’m coming for you, Mitru. I’m coming for you all.’
As I passed, the blood of Sotha ran freely upon the deck. It was a weak draught indeed, now, and thinner than the coldest meltwater from the mountains of long-forgotten Beremin.
Warhammer 40K, The Blood of Sotha - L J Goulding
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