Forgotten Sons - Nick Kyme

  Forgotten Sons

  Nick Kyme

  Landfall

  I

  Heka’tan rose from the smoke cloud like a statue of living onyx. The woman was alive but unconscious. Grey tendrils of smoke coiled off the warrior’s ebon skin from where he’d shielded her from the blast. Debris crunched underfoot – most of the ceiling, together with the lume-strip array, had collapsed. Somewhere in the crawl space above, an orange glow flickered.

  The fire hadn’t reached the meditation chamber yet and the billowing smoke coming through the vents was escaping upwards. At least she wouldn’t choke to death on the fumes. Others might be injured, in need of rescue. The ship lurched suddenly, throwing Heka’tan against the wall. It was in its death throes now. He could feel the shuddering of the failing engines through the bulkhead, hear the whine of rapid depressurisation from the gash in the fuselage.

  The door was blocked. Heka’tan felt the heat beyond it and heard the crackle of flames ravaging the adjacent corridor section. During meditation, his battle-plate was secured in the armourarium. He recalled the oaths of moment affixed to his shoulder guards and greaves. One of those vows was echoed in the onyx flesh of his naked torso too, branded eternally.

  Protect the weak.

  It was written in sigil-language, the ancient tongue of Nocturne. Heka’tan was born from fire on this hell-world. Rather than debilitate, the blaze invigorated him. He tore the door off its hinges, closing his eyes as the flames swept out and over him. They burned out quickly, devouring the oxygen. Heka’tan stayed anchored in place until it was done, a light tingling on his skin the only lasting evidence of the fire’s touch.

  A corridor stretched in front of him. The air hazed with the heat of conflagration. Again, the ship bucked. Not long now before impact. He glanced back at the woman.

  The vox alongside him crackled to life, the pilot’s last words.

  ’…ing down. Brace… selves… impact. Emperor… preserve us…’

  Detached and calm, even in the face of imminent and violent landfall, Heka’tan found the last remark curious. It sounded almost like a prayer.

  The engine drone became a scream. For a few seconds, Heka’tan remembered… The screaming, the death and blood. ‘Hell made real’ – they were Gravius’s words. Heka’tan staggered, but not from weakness or fatigue. He staggered at the memory of it, of that place where so many had died and so much had gone wrong.

  Father.

  The thought was a painful one, forming unbidden.

  Vulkan was alone. He was alone and surrounded. They were coming for him. He was… he…

  …shook his head to banish the nightmare. The smoke in the chamber and the corridor was thickening. Heka’tan heard shouting above the roar of the flames. The desperate ship was arrowing through the sky too fast, too steep. Its sides shuddered hard, presaging a terminal impact.

  A sudden change in pitch signalled the ship was coming to the end of its fiery trajectory. The hold was ahead. Heka’tan was halfway down the corridor when he realised he wouldn’t make it in time. Arcadese would have to protect the others, assuming he wasn’t already dead.

  ‘I’m coming, human

  ’ he muttered, turning on his heel and racing back through the door. At least he could save one life.

  As Heka’tan embraced her, the Stormbird hit the ground with all the force of a drop-pod and the world exploded into hell and fire.

  II

  Earlier…

  Persephia eyed her master with fear.

  Hulking plates, edged with gold, sat atop his shoulders. A blade as thick and long as her arm was strapped to the warrior’s thigh. Cobalt metal armoured his form. She found only cold grey stone in the giant’s eyes, glaring back at her with piercing intensity, and looked down again.

  The Immortal Emperor’s Legiones Astartes, His Angels of Death – no, that wasn’t right – his Angels of Death, created to protect mankind from threats beyond the stars. A billion, billion worlds; a million, million cultures all compliant – now at war.

  Who will protect us from ourselves? Persephia wondered, keeping her eyes on the shaking deck. Who will protect us from you?

  War was everywhere, or so it seemed, so the propagandists, the rabble-rousers and Imperial Army press-gangers would have the galaxy believe. Where then the promised era of prosperity and peace made possible through the pre-eminent Imperium? The reality was a galaxy divided.

  Join the Emperor, a distant, untouchable figure – after all, who beyond His favoured sons had ever even seen Him? – or be denounced as traitor. Heretic.

  No, that wasn’t right again.

  Great pains had been taken to assert the empirical fact that the Emperor was not a god. There were no gods.

  The propagators, the pamphleteers, had not been seen or heard from again. Idolatry was to be stamped out – science and reason were the future; logic would bring the human race to its apex, and yet

  there were whispers.

  And what of the other choice? Horus. Warmonger, planet-killer, ruthless demagogue of a bloody crusade allied to old religion, old faith. The smear campaign had been waged with military brutality on Terra. Vilified, demonised, Horus was a monster, a thing of childhood nightmares. How quickly the gilded could fall.

  ‘Be still,’ said the cobalt giant.

  Persephia could barely hear her own thoughts above the droning engines, let alone her actual voice. The giant had heard her as easily as if they were engaged in polite conversation in a quiet room. And his voice had carried with all the force of a thunderclap.

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘I said, be still,’ the giant repeated. He had a stylised ‘U’ on his chest plate. A curved helmet, with a vox-grille for a mouth and cold crimson lenses, sat mag-locked to his thigh. Even without his full complement of weapons, secure in the ship’s locker, he was still formidable.

  ‘The vessel you’re riding in is a Stormbird – though, it scarcely resembles one any more – it has endured harder journeys.’

  Persephia was humble and contrite. ‘Yes, my lord. I’m sorry.’

  Seemingly satisfied, the warrior shifted back in his grav-harness but was no less threatening. Bionics beneath his armour whirred as he moved, betraying old injuries. It was why the giant had missed out on front-line duties and part of the reason Persephia accompanied him. She had once been an artisan, but since the Edict of Dissolution her role as a remembrancer was a memory long dead. War had come to the galaxy and Persephia’s talents were put to the forge like the rest of the human race.

  No one wanted to remember any more.

  A bout of turbulence rocked the ship, causing Persephia to stumble.

  The pilot’s voice came from the cockpit through the vox.

  ‘Entering Bastion’s atmosphere. Experiencing wind shear. Attempting to correct.’

  Persephia’s gaze alighted on the cobalt giant. His eyes were closed, his respiration barely visible in the movement of his chest.

  ‘I am not supposed to be here, not like this.’ She clenched her fists tightly, willing the turbulence to abate.

  ‘You and I have something in common, human. Neither of us should be here. We’ve both been left behind.’ His eyes snapped open, tainted with hurt and anger. ‘Heka’tan’s meditations are almost over. He will have need of his armour.’ The giant closed his eyes again as the artificer moved towards the back of the ship. His sonorous voice followed her.

  ‘Forgotten

  both of us.’

  III

  Heka’tan was naked but for a pair of training fatigues. He had prepared the ash and the brazier. He had observed the rites and warmed the branding iron. The flame was born in the cradle, and within its blazing grasp he found purity and a sense of truth. Repressed memory came with it

 
; The drop-ship was taking fire from all sides. Much of its armour plating was punched through by lascannon blasts and several of its heavy bolter armaments were destroyed. Heat emanated from the interior. Shadows lurked there, of broken bodies silhouetted a visceral red from the incendiary fires inside. The guts of the ship lay strewn across the Isstvan plain where a cloying fug of smoke roiled. Hot tracer whickered through air screaming with the discharge of bolters and heavy cannon. Somewhere in the distance, by a shrouded ridgeline, an explosion blossomed.

  ‘Ta

  king

  vy

  ire

  ’ The broken vox report crackled in Heka’tan’s ear.

  ‘Gravius! Is that you, brother?’

  ‘Affir

  mative, brother

  aptain

  ’

  ‘Fall back immediately and assume defensive postures.’

  Around him, the fight was intensifying. Gunfire, scores of overlapping bolter bursts, rose to a deafening frenzy. Enemy cohorts were massing from the east and west, and advancing on their position.

  Enemy cohorts.

  The notion was insane, a crazed nightmare brought to life on a dead world with only the dead to witness it. For surely, that’s what they all were.

  ‘Brother

  aptain

  ’ There was a pause not caused by the static interference.

  Figures were resolving through the artificial fog. Their hulking forms wore the colour of hard steel, of grey unyielding metal. Iron.

  The Urgall Depression was no place for a last stand. The ravine resembled a charnel field and not a place about which great deeds were sung. There would be no glory, face down in the blood-drenched tundra slain by one’s own brothers.

  Gravius continued and for once the link was clean. ‘What’s happening?’

  Heka’tan had three hundred and sixty-two Legiones Astartes left in his command. They had forged a ring around the shattered drop-ship. Over half that number again was forever entombed inside their vessel, lost before the fight had even begun, a fight the brother-captain didn’t understand.

  ‘Assume defensive postures,’ he answered, for want of something better, something that made sense.

  The line of iron opened up with its weapons. Fusillade met fusillade as both sides engaged, hundreds of muzzle flares ripping up the smoke like jagged knives of hot light.

  It was but a skirmish in a maelstrom of death. This was a battle like no other. It was a reckoning. It was a show of force. But above all else it was fratricide on an epic scale.

  Heka’tan’s words to Gravius sounded hollow even to him. ‘Hold out as long as you can.’

  It was over. Even before he’d seen the armoured column advancing behind the infantry, Heka’tan knew it. He took a round to the shoulder, the explosive impact nearly tearing off the pad and spinning him. A second struck him in the chest and he staggered.

  One of his own, Ikon he thought, died to a throat wound. More followed, too numerous and rapid to count. Apothecaries were a pointless luxury during this nascent massacre. The air shimmered with the heat of shells passing so close that some struck one another and deviated from their original targets. Above, Thunderhawks and Stormbirds tried to escape. Heka’tan saw several in the livery of the Raven Guard and Iron Hands plunge from the smoke-blackened sky like broken comets. Distant explosions announced their destruction.

  Bleak was not the word for their chances.

  Fatalism, yes, but capitulation was not amongst Heka’tan’s emotional vocabulary. Sons of Nocturne were born of sterner stock. They came from the earth and its fiery heart-blood. They would not go to Mount Deathfire with the foe unbloodied.

  ‘Burn them!’

  A wave of super-heated promethium spewed from the Salamanders’ serried ranks. Several Iron Warriors fell to the flamers, first going to their knees before collapsing onto the shell-strewn earth.

  It wasn’t enough. More were coming. Tongues of fire spilled off their armour like bright vapour contrails. They brought autocannon and multi-lasers, Rapier and Tarantula guns.

  Brother killed brother in an endless firestorm that had yet to even reach its full fury.

  Now, the long turrets of the battle tanks made themselves known. It was easy to imagine skulls being crushed beneath their tracks, the slow and steady disintegration of civilisations under their massive bulk. Kill markings marred their hulls. How many would be attributed to the Salamanders Legion before this madness was done, Heka’tan wondered?

  The tanks were still manoeuvring into position when the Son of N’bel fell upon the line of iron, bending it to his will. A gleaming figure surged into the Iron Warriors, distant but still magnificent. Vulkan and the Pyre Guard slammed into the betrayers with unrelenting vengeance. The primarch’s hammer smashed a bloody wedge into the throng, slow to react to the flank attack.

  From below, Heka’tan found it hard to keep track of his father, but saw enough to know iron helms were sundered and chestplates crushed against his wrath. A spit of flame drove the traitors back up the hill, colliding with the advancing armour. Vulkan’s gauntlet engulfed them in a conflagration so intense that power armour was no defence against it.

  He reached the first of the battle tanks, a Demolisher that the primarch lifted with his bare hands and turned over. A second he punched through the hull with his hammer, wrenching out the crew within before the Pyre Guard, his retinue and inner circle warriors, followed up with grenades. The back of the tank blew out in a plume of fire, smoke and shrapnel.

  Then Heka’tan was running, back up the hill towards his father.

  ‘Forward in the name of Lord Vulkan! Unto the anvil!’

  The ring of three hundred took up the charge, ragged banners snapping defiantly in the icy wind. Snow turned to slush with the heat of their flamers, levelled at the crumbling line of Iron Warriors.

  ‘Perturabo!’ The voice shook the very ridgeline as deep and forbidding as a Nocturnean lava chasm. Vulkan was enraged, battering tanks aside like children’s toys. He was not the most gifted swordsman, nor was he a master strategist or a psyker of any note, but his strength and fortitude

  in that, the Eighteenth Primarch was unrivalled.

  Had Ferrus Manus lived there might be cause for debate, but with the Iron Hands primarch’s head lying separate from his body in the shrinking snow that point was now moot.

  The low whine of a missile barrage cutting through the air at speed answered Vulkan and he looked to the heavens.

  Heka’tan followed his primarch’s gaze a second later and saw the danger too late.

  Fury lit up the ridgeline, ripping tanks and bodies the same, tossing Salamanders and Iron Warriors indiscriminately. The backwash boiled down the hill in a fiery bloom, thundering into Heka’tan just as Vulkan was obliterated from his sight. Then the world faded, darkening in every sense and–

  –he awoke.

  Something was scratching at the Salamander’s fingers. The efforts were frantic but ineffective. Heka’tan opened his eyes, still shaking. His hand was clenched around a woman’s throat. Eyes narrowed, he released her.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ He rose from his haunches but the artificer backed off when he tried to approach her. She massaged her throat, trying to breathe.

  The skin around her neck was already bruising and there were burn marks where Heka’tan’s fingers still carried the brazier’s heat.

  ‘Brother Arcadese

  ’

  ‘Should not have sent you.’ Heka’tan glowered.

  The artificer shook her head. ‘What did I do?’ She was raving a little now, afraid and a little incensed.

  Heka’tan rose to his full height, and loomed over her. ‘The rites of Nocturne are for Vulkan’s sons alone.’ There was obvious reproach in his voice. The artificer’s annoyance melted away with the sudden fire blazing in the Salamander’s eyes. They were red but stoked like a furnace. The effect, coupled with the warrior’s ebon skin, was disturbing. ‘Nor do we have use for artificers.’ He would speak to Arcadese later.

  ‘You’
re my first Salamander,’ she admitted, mustering her courage in the face of the diabolic warrior.

  ‘Then you’re fortunate, for there are few of us left.’ Heka’tan turned away. ‘Now leave me. A Salamander must be fire-touched before battle.’

  ‘Battle? I thought this was a diplomatic mission?’

  The Salamander glared at her. ‘Do I look like a diplomat to you?’

  ‘No, my lord.’

  ‘Don’t call me that. I am not your lord, I merely am. Now, go.’

  A sudden jolt through the chamber sent the artificer scurrying for footing. Heka’tan caught her. His grip was gentle this time.

  A vox crackle made them both turn towards the receiver unit on the wall. The frantic voice of the pilot quickly followed.

  ‘

  vasive action

  brace for

  mpact!’

  ‘Huh–’ The half-formed thought was smothered by the explosion rocking the hull and the blast wave ripping through the ceiling.

  Heka’tan bore down on Persephia like the coming of night.

  Then came smoke and the scent of burning.

  Debris

  I

  The sleek vessel touched down with barely a tremor. Its long silver prow shone in the setting Bastion sun, slightly at odds with the functional grey and bronze of the docking towers. This was not a sleek, smooth shipyard; it was a place of hard edges, of logical, minimalist architecture, of sprawling technological megaliths and super-rigs.

  Servitors, haulers, deckers, overseers and foremen clogged companionways, thronged dizzyingly high gantries and lofty work platforms. This was industry. It was grind and solidity. This was Bastion.

  Cullis was its prime-clave. A hard city, full of hard men, not just workers and engineers but military men, and it was their might and native arsenal that had afforded them choice.

  No real opposition to a Legion, Bastion none the less represented an expenditure of time, a manoeuvring of resources – a surfeit that neither side was willing to commit. Armies were stretched the length and breadth of the galaxy as it was. Better to court its people with words and argument than risk turning Bastion into a wasteland that was no use to either faction.