The Eternal Crusader - Guy Haley Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  About The Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Crusade’s End

  At the edge of the galaxy floated an iron cathedral, an edifice of great beauty raised not to peaceful gods but to war.

  For ten thousand years it had plied the stars, bringing destruction and salvation in equal measure. The enemies of mankind had long learnt to fear it, as had those it protected. War followed the ship as surely as night follows day.

  It was called the Eternal Crusader: a vast battle-barge, the mightiest of its type ever built, ten kilometres long, whose keel was laid in the inconceivable past. The sides and forward-thrusting spine of the Eternal Crusader were festooned with the tools of death; its hangars were the eyries of war-angels, ever poised to open and rain the champions of mankind upon benighted worlds. So long after others of its kind had ceased to be, or had turned away from the crusade of the Emperor to stage a faltering defence against the all-consuming dark, the Eternal Crusader fought on for a broken dream.

  Ancient, weakened by age, its corridors and chambers were empty compared to the days of its might, but its heart remained strong, its reactor pulsed hot. Still it sailed, bloody and furious, into reaches of space abandoned or forgotten, there to do battle with the alien, the heretic and the creatures of the warp, and to claim their domains as the Emperor’s own.

  The Black Templars, the Knights of Dorn, were the grim wardens of its precincts. Of all the sons of the primarchs, they reckoned themselves the true chosen of the Emperor. They and they alone saw through the myths and tales of their fellow Space Marines to recognise the divinity behind the man who made them.

  They held it an irony that the other Adeptus Astartes did not embrace the truth so easily seen by the inferior humans they were made to protect.

  The Black Templars had never abandoned their crusade, nor ever would, not until every last alien warlord and divergent human culture was cast down, or they died in the attempt.

  Steeped in blood, hardened by the failure of ancient dreams, the spirit of the Eternal Crusader was old and wicked in its bellicosity. Had it thoughts to form, it would not have cared for ideals of honour or of worship, only that there was a war to fight, and that it would be at the forefront of that war. How its masters would feel at this ambivalence, none would ever know. Ships have no voices, and if the Black Templars had an inkling of the nature of the ship’s spirit, they would not have told. The Adeptus Astartes are jealous of their secrets.

  Let it be known then that the aims and choleric nature of the Black Templars accorded well with the tempers of the Eternal Crusader’s angry soul. They were the same after all: weapons forged for a war that had been lost one hundred centuries ago, both cankered by time, both nevertheless dogged. That is enough.

  In orbit about a poisonous world bathed in the light of sinister stars at the edge of the reach of the Astronomican, the Eternal Crusader bridled. Every part of its immense superstructure creaked with suppressed tension. In its primal, inchoate way it yearned to break free of the shackles of gravity and strike out onwards, ever onwards, on, on, on!

  It could not. Its spirit was mighty in its way, but it had no will, no agency of action.

  Within his chilly bower, the lord of the ship’s masters brooded on a war he could not claim to have won, and so the Eternal Crusader was forced to wait.

  Restlessly, it bided its time.

  The Ghoul Stars Crusade was over.

  From his personal sanctum aboard the Eternal Crusader, Helbrecht, High Marshal of the Black Templars, watched the bombing of the last world of the cythor fiends.

  He stood in an armourglass cupola extending from traceried galleries. Glass glinted to his left and right in precise geometric procession. By cunning artifice, the heroes of his Chapter had been captured in the windows, forever to raise siliceous weapons against the eternal night. The effect within was gloomy, as starlight was dimmed from the glass – the shadows of the Galleria Astra behind were deep.

  The cupola, though, was clear, intended for unobstructed viewing. The ribbed shutters that protected it in battle were withdrawn into the metal supports like the lids of some monstrous compound eye.

  An arming servitor and three honoured neophytes removed the Chapter Master’s armour. The cupola was silent but for Helbrecht’s breathing and the whir of power tools, swift, soft footsteps behind him, the muted click of his brazen war-plate being replaced in its recess on the far side of the gallery, and the distant, constant rumbling of the vessel’s ordnance ravaging the unkillable planet.

  The world had no name the Imperium knew of, but for Helbrecht it was 9836-18, the eighteenth planet subjugated in the 9836th Black Templar Crusade. They had dubbed it with the code-signum ‘Grave Core’. Neither name would outlast its attempted destruction.

  A strange, blue world of gelid and toxic atmospheres – a mid-range gas giant as sour as Sol’s Neptune. No use to humanity at all, unfit for habitation. Too far from any human world to justify harvesting the useful elements of its dense air; too far, even, from any other of the galaxy’s vile races for them to make use of it. Helbrecht would have been justified in leaving it.

  He refused to do this.

  Helbrecht hated Grave Core with the fury of the zealot. He hated it because it was a world of the bizarre cythor. But mostly he hated it because it had been empty, a tomb abandoned before the Black Templars had come to pass the Emperor’s judgement upon its abhorrent inhabitants, seemingly desolate for thousands of years when that could not possibly be the case. This was where the cythor had fled – the Black Templars augurs had been clear. This was to have been the xenos’ last stand. Instead of glorious victory, the Black Templars had descended to the platforms anchored in the clouds to find… noth
ing.

  Helbrecht’s slablike muscles tensed. One of his attendants flinched, interrupting the smoothness of his ministrations.

  Cheated of his prey, Helbrecht had ordered Grave Core destroyed. The world was as unnatural as the fiends, and deserved to burn. But it would not die. By rights, the atmosphere should have ignited under the punishment of the orbital bombardment. Modified fusion bombs slammed down in regular patterns, silently exploding at predetermined depths in the world’s thick sheath of gas. Their orange effulgence was muted; the world-fire did not take. Rather, the clouds burned reluctantly, and weirdly. Looping curls of blue skittered across the stratosphere. No more devastating than high-altitude lightning effects, these phenomena sparked strange auroras in the planet’s radioactive corona. They danced, mocking Helbrecht with their vitality.

  Why would it not burn?

  No glorianas accompanied the crusade’s conclusion. Melancholy ruled Helbrecht’s flagship. His servants worked quietly, tugging at him as gently as they could to take away his plate. None dared address him. His cloak went, his pauldrons and heavy powerplant were borne away by the uncomplaining servitor, and his greaves and vambraces were unclasped, each carefully unscrewed from one another and unplugged from his body. With efficiency they rendered him naked. He did not want to be disrobed; he was vulnerable to his shame without his armour.

  Forgive me, Emperor, for I have failed you, he thought. Strike me down now for my inadequacy.

  No strike came. Helbrecht yearned to find another battle. He would have done so immediately had ritual not demanded his disarming, his prayer and his repentance.

  Helbrecht moved his body with the ease of one long practised, lifting his arms or shifting his weight to aid his attendants. Otherwise he ignored them; he ignored too the sharp pains as interface spikes were withdrawn. He ignored everything but his anger and his shame. He could not hide from them.

  In the windows of the cupola, reflections of his face were superimposed over the planet. A noble visage, but harsh, an unreadable stone crag weathered by the unkindnesses of the Adeptus Astartes transformation and unrelenting war. Few could gauge his thoughts from his features. Helbrecht was a guarded man.

  For once, his anger was plain. It could not be seen, but it could be felt.

  The last piece of his armour came away from his black carapace. The arming servitor trudged back to its station beside the armour’s recess, slotted itself into its coffin in the wall and deactivated. The neophytes bowed and departed for a while, returning minutes later with hot water and warmed oils. They whispered the benedictions of cleansing as they wiped his body with damp cloths. With this done, two of the three worked warmed, scented oils into his scarred skin, massaging carefully at knotted post-human muscle. Then they scraped away the ingrained filth and war-sweat with bronze strigils. The third knelt and attended to Helbrecht’s artificial right arm, a gleaming brass construct that erupted from the scarred stump of his elbow. The novitiate oiled and polished it, murmuring simple maintenance cantrips. Helbrecht ignored them and glared at the planet.

  His doors chimed. The limbless servitor torso built into an alcove beside them announced his visitor, its beautiful voice at odds with the fleshless hideousness of its altered skull.

  ‘Master of Sanctity Theoderic requests ingress. Allowed, denied?’

  Helbrecht stirred, turning from the planet for the first time. His attendants skilfully accommodated themselves to his movements.

  ‘Is he alone?’ he asked.

  ‘Negative. Master of Sanctity Theoderic is accompanied by Captain Naroosh of the Death Spectres Adeptus Astartes Chapter.’

  ‘Leave me and return to your knights.’ He dismissed his attendants. Helbrecht’s voice was deep, made gruff and resonant by centuries of yelled orders and screamed prayer. As his face was emotionless, so too was his voice: bland almost beneath its roughness.

  The neophytes bowed. ‘As you wish, High Marshal,’ they said, and departed through a lesser entrance. Four Chapter-serfs, robes embroidered with the Templars cross and armed with pistol and sword, filed in as the young Space Marines filed out. They took their stations, ready to serve this most exalted son of Rogal Dorn.

  ‘Permit their entry,’ said Helbrecht. ‘Bid them welcome.’ He strode with sudden purpose from the cupola. His quarters were large, encompassing the Galleria Astra in which he currently stood, a private audience chamber, the Strategium Occultis, the High Marshal’s Librarius, his sleeping cell, armorium, armoury and other, more esoteric rooms. Situated at the peak of the Eternal Crusader’s central tower, many of the High Marshal’s chambers were capped by vaulted, armourglass ceilings that revealed the terrifying majesty of space.

  These rooms had once belonged to Sigismund, founder of their order, and had almost certainly played host to Rogal Dorn himself. Such storied history, such honour, meant little to Helbrecht at that moment. He shrank from it, feeling unworthy.

  The doors clanked back on giant cogs into the Eternal Crusader’s internal bulkheads. Master of Sanctity Theoderic walked into Helbrecht’s rooms. As tradition demanded, the Chaplain wore his battleplate and helmet. Captain Naroosh of the Death Spectres followed. He too wore his full armour.

  ‘My lord,’ said Theoderic. He waited until the doors were shut and removed his skull helm, exposing a face that was timeless in the Adeptus Astartes way, free of the signs of genes unwinding with age, but unmistakeably ancient. Leathery and hard, it was a face that was inexpressive because it had had time to try every permutation of expression and found them all inadequate. The single stripe of hair running down his skull was brilliant white. Five service studs were screwed into his forehead in the shape of a cross – two hundred and fifty years of service.

  The serfs averted their eyes. Only the marshals, the Inner Circle knights and the others of the Chaplain brotherhood were permitted to look upon the unshielded face of a Black Templar warrior-priest.

  Helbrecht’s face became stonier still that Theoderic should unmask before an outsider, but he did not voice his disapproval. Naroosh was a captain of a Chapter after all, albeit a foreign one, and worthy of the honour. The truth was that Helbrecht’s reaction was a personal one, and to comment on what he regarded as Theoderic’s lapse would be discourteous to his guest, unwelcome as he was.

  Helbrecht picked up a towel offered by one of his body-serfs and wiped his face and chest with it. Another brought him his robes – many-layered priestly garb in bone-white. Over that went a thick, black woollen habit, embroidered with the fluted cross of their order. So dressed, he had the look of a great man grown weary and gone into a monastery. If, that is, one did not look into his eyes. These were dark, and burned with a warrior’s zeal, flashing with the light of gunfire remembered and anticipated. He exulted in battle and sang his praises to the Emperor hardest over the ringing of blades. There was a hunger for war around him that could be tasted on the air. Righteousness, certainty and, in his few unguarded moments, impatience for bloodshed could be glimpsed in his eyes, if one had the will to hold that gaze long enough.

  His defeat had not dimmed the light in them at all. Far from it.

  ‘Brothers, what may I do for you?’ Helbrecht reached for a carafe, waving away the thrall that moved to pour it for him. He filled three fine pewter and glass goblets, their panelled sides as intricate as the windows, with thick blue Holschtian life-water and held one out to Theoderic. The older man placed his helmet on a table and walked forwards to accept it. Captain Naroosh stood aside. He did not remove his helmet. Not one of the Death Spectres had ever done so in any Black Templar’s presence. Helbrecht held out a second goblet to him for a moment, and replaced it upon the table without a word when the captain did not move to take it.

  Theoderic perceived Helbrecht’s dourness and made his point quickly. ‘My liege, we should discuss plans for the victory ceremony,’ he said.

  Helbrecht sipped lightly, a delicate gesture for so solid a man. ‘What ceremony? What victory? We do not celebrate.’
r />   ‘My liege…’

  ‘We do not celebrate,’ he said harshly. ‘My inaugural crusade as High Marshal has proved an abject failure. There is nothing to celebrate.’

  ‘Is that so, brother?’ said Theoderic. He used the mild tone the Chaplains employed when confronting a brother with doubts – kindly yet firm, it begged confession.

  ‘The world was empty. The fiends remain undefeated,’ explained Helbrecht, irritated he had to explain at all.

  The Death Spectre spoke.

  ‘All has played out as we said it would, High Marshal.’ Naroosh’s voice was leaden, rasping through his vox-grille. Sorrow and regret could be the only emotions conveyed by such a voice. ‘There is no victory to be had over the cythor fiends. We can only watch and contain them, as has been my Chapter’s burden for millennia. You have committed your bold warriors to a fool’s errand.’

  Helbrecht’s eyes flashed dangerously.

  Theoderic spoke before Helbrecht could respond, holding up a hand in a silent plea for reason. ‘Perhaps you are both correct. Perhaps this empty world is a failure of sorts. Looked at another way, the High Marshal has won a great victory. Seventeen worlds scoured. No evidence of the ghouls remains anywhere in this segmentum. They will trouble no one again. Brother, they will have to rename the Ghoul Stars, thanks to you.’

  ‘I do not think so,’ said Helbrecht. ‘Captain Naroosh does not think so either. Do you, captain?’

  ‘We warned you,’ said Naroosh dolorously. ‘You were vainglorious to attempt the impossible. Your efforts have come to nought. All is as we warned.’

  Helbrecht turned away from the captain. The Death Spectres were the guardians of this benighted stretch of space, posted beyond the bounds of the Imperium to ensure the inhabitants of the Ghoul Stars could never escape to threaten the wider galaxy. Helbrecht had thought them indolent, cowardly even, in that they obeyed their orders of containment and did not attempt to purge the aliens. He acquiesced to their demand that he take one of their ships along with him under great sufferance, and only after the production of Inquisitorial fiat.