Angron's Monolith - Steve Lyons

  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.

  Priority level: Magenta Alpha

  Transmitted: Sky fortress of the Relictors Chapter

  To: Adeptus Astartes battle-barge Blade of Vengeance, Armageddon High Orbit

  Date: 3812998.M41

  Transmitter: Astropath Prime Magwen

  Receiver: Astropath-terminus Xhian-Ji

  Author: Chapter Master Artekus Bardane

  Thought for the Day: Ignorance is blessed.

  Attention: Lord Commander Dante. Your communiqué has been received and understood. I have suspended all current operations and am hastening to join you. This affront to the Emperor will not be allowed to stand! The entire might of my Chapter will be brought to bear against the ork defilers. Praise be to the Emperor.

  One

  The last of the orks tried to run.

  The tangled jungle floor snagged its foot and brought it crashing down. The impact snapped its primitive spear in two; the stone head had been blunted against its enemies’ armour anyway.

  Tarryn reached the outmatched creature in three assured strides. Even prone, even helpless, it spat and kicked at him and mouthed a stream of obscenities, which he couldn’t hear over the roar of his chainsword. Like its fellows – all dead now – it had painted its face with red jungle dyes in hectic, swirling patterns.

  Tarryn did his duty, as he had done many times before. With a sweep of his blade, he parted the ork’s head from its shoulders.

  ‘We could be doing more,’ grumbled Baeloch.

  The Relictors had formed up into a five-strong arc again. They marched on, heading ever deeper into the twisted jungle. They made no attempt at stealth. They could hardly have stood out more starkly from their surroundings had they tried.

  The armoured shells that encased them, with their symmetrical greys and blacks and machine-smoothed edges, made for a sharp contrast with the brash greens, purples, oranges and browns that painted random patterns around them.

  The Season of Fire was approaching on Armageddon and the temperature had been rising steadily for days. The Relictors kept their helmets sealed because the air was swarming with disease-carrying insects and toxic spores.

  ‘We have killed scores of greenskins today,’ said Tarryn.

  ‘None of them combatants in the war,’ argued Baeloch. ‘Our efforts today are unlikely to have altered its course. Nor will they alter it tomorrow, I fear.’

  He was marching at one end of the arc, to Tarryn’s left. To his right, Sergeant Juster led the combat squad from its apex. Tarryn wondered if he was close enough to have heard his battle-brother’s mutterings. Most likely not, he supposed.

  The jungle was forced to give way to their belligerent presence. Sprawling branches broke against their ceramite plastrons. Wild plants were steamrollered beneath their armoured weight. Creepers clung to them and tried to hold them back, but were wrenched inexorably from their roots. The Relictors were cutting a wide, straight swathe through the tangled foliage, enforcing a semblance of order upon this realm where chaos, of a natural sort, had long held sway.

  Tarryn was uncomfortably warm. His auto-senses informed him that his body temperature was optimal, but the pores in his skin were itching.

  Baeloch was right about one thing. The jungle orks were different from the greenskins he had encountered before. They were just as tough and belligerent as any of their kind, but wilder, perhaps less intelligent and certainly less organised. They had not arrived with Warlord Ghazghkull’s invasion force. Rather, they were the remnants of a previous ork incursion onto this world.

  The Second War for Armageddon had ended over fifty years ago, in a glorious victory for the Emperor’s loyal forces. The invaders, however, had left their spores behind, and many of them had fallen on fertile ground.

  The jungle orks – feral orks, the Librarians called them – had sprouted from those scattered spores: a primitive offshoot of the species, armed and armoured with only what they had been able to scavenge or scratch-build for themselves. They had developed a language, but it was rudimentary at best, little more than a series of guttural grunts and snarls.

  The threat they posed, compared with that of their space-faring cousins, was relatively minor – or would have been, were it not for their extraordinary numbers. The jungle was riddled with them. Some days, it seemed like Tarryn and his squad could hardly take ten steps without disturbing another nest of them.

  It often felt as if for every feral ork they killed, another five immediately sprang up from the soil to replace it.

  ‘I’m detecting movement ahead of us,’ said Brother Nabori over the vox-link.

  ‘I hear it,’ confirmed Brother Kantus. ‘Sounds like a lone creature, and a small one. Insufficient body mass for an ork. It could be another squig.’

  The Relictors came to a halt, outwardly silent. Tarryn felt for the grip of his boltgun. He could just about discern the sombre shades of Kantus’s armour to Sergeant Juster’s right. Nabori, beyond him at the far end of the arc, he couldn’t see. Too much of the plant life between them had rebounded from their passing.

  ‘The target just cut across my path,’ said Nabori. ‘Coming your way, Kantus.’

  ‘Report as soon as you have eyes on it,’ Juster ordered.

  ‘I see it,’ said Kantus. He corrected himself: ‘I see him. It’s a man.’

  The Relictors had already lurched into motion, converging swiftly upon their brother’s position. Juster and Nabori were the closest – and well placed to flank the unseen threat – but Tarryn and Baeloch didn’t need to be told to follow them.

  ‘I want him taken alive,’ said Juster.

  By the time Tarryn had caught up with the others, it was over.

  ‘He came at me.’ Kantus was speaking aloud now, through the vox-grille in his helmet. ‘He was in a blind fury, tried to barge me out of his way. You can probably make out the imprint of eagle wings on his face. He broke his shoulder.’

  A man lay in the trampled undergrowth at the Relictor’s feet. He was filthy, his clothes rags, clinging to an emaciated body. The man’s hair reached to his waist, grey, straggly and knotted, with an unkempt beard to match. He was clutching a hand to his s
houlder and moaning in pain.

  Juster rolled him over with his toe. The man landed on his back, and the remnants of his torn shirt flapped open. It was at that moment that Tarryn lost any sympathy he might have felt for him.

  A rune had been daubed on the man’s chest, in the same red dye that the feral orks often used. It was crude, unskilfully painted, and yet each of the five Space Marines looking at it knew what it was meant to represent.

  There was no mistaking the highly stylised skull symbol of the most savage of the Ruinous Powers: the God of Blood, War and Murder.

  Tarryn felt his blood rising at the sight of it, and knew that Baeloch felt the same because he stiffened and instinctively brought his bolter to bear. Sergeant Juster stayed his hand. ‘I said I want him alive.’ Baeloch didn’t question the order; nor, however, did he choose to lower his weapon.

  Juster’s toe nudged the man in the ribs again. His moans had subsided. His eyes snapped open, round and white, his pupils shrinking. He parted his cracked lips and tried to speak, but the effort almost choked him. The words he managed to expel from his throat were disjointed and mostly incoherent.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ demanded Juster, but the man couldn’t or wouldn’t answer him. His mouth filled up and overflowed with the froth of madness.

  ‘Are there any more of you in the jungle? Where are you based?’

  ‘Sergeant,’ Tarryn interrupted him. He was looking at the tatters of the man’s clothing. The coat, he had realised, had once been mustard yellow, worn over a set of black fatigues. He had lost one boot and the seams of the other had split.

  ‘He’s Imperial Guard,’ said Tarryn, and now he felt more contemptuous than angry, that a soldier of the Emperor should have been reduced to this.

  Kantus had seen it too. ‘Steel Legion. Must be operating out of Cerbera Base.’

  ‘That’s a long way north,’ said Baeloch. ‘The other side of the jungle, practically. How did he end up here?’

  Sergeant Juster stooped over their dishevelled prisoner. ‘What was your mission, Guardsman?’ he barked in the man’s face, amplifying his voice. ‘What happened to the rest of your unit? In the name of the Emperor, answer me!’

  The Guardsman’s eyes narrowed and, forgetting his injured shoulder, he seized Juster’s throat with both hands. He couldn’t hurt him, of course, but he clung to the sergeant’s gorget with unnatural strength all the same, until his fingers were prised from it one by one and he slumped into the dirt again.

  ‘He must have been lost, wandering in the jungle for months – years, perhaps,’ Tarryn mused. The Guardsman had lost his lasgun and every piece of equipment he had been issued with, along with his sanity.

  He had found his voice, though, as if his throat had been uncorked, and he was babbling about something. Tarryn couldn’t make out what it was. Something he had encountered in the jungle. Some manner of mutant? A face, or many faces, their eyes glaring at him with tangible hatred. ‘Couldn’t escape from it… Ran as far as I could… I kept running, but it was always there again in front of me… waiting for me…’

  ‘Where is it?’ demanded Juster. ‘Where is this horror?’

  With an effort that wracked his wasted form, the Guardsman lifted a quivering finger. He pointed over Sergeant Juster’s shoulder, towards the east. However, he then brought the finger around and pointed north, back the way the Relictors had come. He pointed southwards next, to where the jungle was deepest and darkest and as yet unexplored, and finally westwards, past Brothers Nabori and Kantus.

  Baeloch found he could hold his tongue no longer. ‘Sergeant!’ he protested.

  The Guardsman’s eyes clouded over, and he began to recite a blasphemous prayer. The words that spewed from his mouth were loud and clear enough now, and offensive to the Relictors’ ears. Juster glanced up at Baeloch and nodded curtly.

  Brother Baeloch didn’t hesitate to shoot the mad Guardsman in the head.

  They stood in silence, as the shadows around them lengthened.

  In the jungle, night fell quickly. It kept the sweltering heat of the daytime trapped beneath its canopy, however.

  ‘Most likely, he saw nothing,’ said Baeloch finally. ‘His mind was broken.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ agreed Juster. He glanced up at the darkening sky and made a decision. ‘Perhaps not. We should investigate, at least.’

  They formed up into their arc again, the same positions as before; but this time, they varied their heading by seventy degrees. They set off in the direction from which the mad Guardsman had come stumbling.

  ‘We’re wasting our time with this,’ Baeloch muttered, again too softly for anyone but Tarryn to hear him. ‘We could be doing more.’

  Baeloch was a more experienced warrior than Tarryn. It was certainly no secret that he felt he ought to have made sergeant by now. Still, Tarryn felt uncomfortable when his battle-brother voiced such opinions.

  It felt as if Baeloch were questioning the decisions of their leaders – although, of course, he never went that far.

  Tarryn trusted his leaders implicitly. Sergeant Juster, he felt confident, had never issued an order without good reason. Even so, sometimes he found those reasons difficult to grasp. Were they wasting their time in this jungle, Tarryn wondered, when there were bigger, more important battles to be fought in the cities outside of it?

  Could Baeloch be right?

  Two

  They reported in to base camp late the following day, having been out searching the jungle for ten days straight. The moons of Armageddon had come out, and they could hear the snuffling of nocturnal predators in the undergrowth.

  They were greeted by bad news. Sergeant Juster heard it from the leader of another combat squad and passed it on to them. ‘The orks have taken Hive Acheron.’

  Tarryn thought there must have been a mistake. Acheron was a huge city, to the east, housing billions of souls. How could it have fallen so easily?

  Sergeant Juster sounded angry as he answered that unvoiced question. ‘It is said that a traitor threw open the gates for them.’

  ‘If only we could have been there,’ said Baeloch with a shake of his head. Instead of tramping through this Emperor-forsaken jungle on a fool’s quest, he may as well have added. ‘We could have prevented this.’

  Their camp was a clearing, a kilometre in diameter, scoured out of the foliage with swords and flamers. It was ringed by transport shuttles, a steel barrier to any attackers. At its centre was a single prefabricated building, which served as their company’s command and communications centre.

  Five other combat squads were present, three of them on sentry duty, while Chapter-serfs and the occasional half-machine servitor scuttled between them on endless errands. A number of Apothecaries and Techmarines stood by to help tend to the combatants’ wounds and patch up damage to their equipment.

  The Relictors Fourth Company had established three bases before this one. A week or two from now, once their search of this area had been completed, they would fly further southwards, scour out another clearing and the process would begin all over again.

  Tarryn replenished his ammunition from the stores, held aboard one of the shuttles. He joined a group of battle-brothers who were stripping down and cleaning their boltguns. Sergeant Juster had dismissed his squad and reported to Captain Maegar in the command centre. Now, a serf came hurrying out of the centre on a mission.

  He returned with a heavy-set figure, enwrapped in an onyx-black cloak with a blood-red lining over a tarnished breastplate. His temples were adorned with patches of greying hair, and his cheeks were ruddy with sweat from the late-evening heat. A warhammer was slung from his hip, its iron head engraved with holy sigils. Otherwise, he cut an unassuming figure, particularly by the standards of his order.

  So, Inquisitor Halstron had been summoned to hear Juster’s news!

  Baeloch followed Tarryn’s gaze and nodded. ‘This is about what happened yesterday,’ he deduced. ‘You saw the vile symbols on that man’s chest.
’

  He explained to the other Relictors about his squad’s encounter with the mad Guardsman. One of them spoke up, thoughtfully: ‘We disturbed a greenskin nest four days ago. They had marked themselves with the symbol of the Blood God too.’

  ‘They’re growing bolder,’ another battle-brother remarked. ‘We’ve all seen it. The feral orks are congregating in ever larger groups and have taken to lying in wait for us. Some have even started to lay crude traps.’

  Baeloch nodded. ‘Such as the spiked pit that Sergeant Kharran’s squad discovered.’ Tarryn had heard of other examples too.

  Sergeant Juster emerged from the command centre. He had removed his helmet to reveal a chiselled, unscarred face, tightened by a thoughtful frown.

  ‘You know what I hate most about these xenos?’ Nabori grumbled. ‘It’s that they have no trophies worth the taking. Our only souvenirs of Armageddon are likely to be stone-headed axes and spears, and a handful of rat-skull bracelets.’

  Tarryn was aroused from his half-sleep shortly after dawn, by a sound he hadn’t heard in several weeks.

  Aircraft engines were droning overhead. Instantly alert, he levered himself to his feet and looked up to the sky. He saw the last of a squadron of grey and black Stormtalons, passing high over the clearing. Their contrails showed them headed south-south-east – towards the sector of the jungle that his squad had searched two days ago.

  He doubted that the pilots would see much through the trees. They never did. The Stormtalons’ very presence, however, suggested that something was afoot.

  Captain Maegar must have summoned the ships from the Chapter’s sky fortress at the edge of the system.

  Tarryn’s squad assembled, ready to head out into the jungle again. Before they left, the captain had them – and the rest of his company, those present – form up for a briefing. Normally, he would simply have reminded them of their mission and had his Chaplain bestow a blessing upon them. This morning, however, he talked at length about Hive Acheron’s downfall.