Spear of the Emperor - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  Regret is weakness. Guilt is weakness. But ­sorrow? Sorrow is a chamber in any soldier’s heart. Sorrow is felt even by the divine.’

  – High King Arucatas the Swordbearer

  Chapter Master of the Emperor’s Spears

  Proem

  THE HISTORIAN: II

  My hand keeps locking.

  It doesn’t stop the words, but it slows them. Sometimes as I write, I have to manipulate the knuckles, massaging my metallic fingers to restore flexion. It’s apt, that the scratches and dents that mark my machine hand are scars from the very past I’m committing to parchment.

  Vadhán has gone again. Back to war, back to face the Exilarchy. He fights as a Spear fights, without the opposing burden and blessing of humans at his side and in his helmet-vox, the way my master once fought. According to the stellar cartography, the enemy masses for an assault on Arikeus, one of the final bastions of resistance before Nemeton is laid bare. The Exilarchy, once grievously weakened by the blood we reaped from its mongrel flesh, now rises to eclipse everything in its path. Will I live to see Archenemy drop-ships plunge through Nemeton’s stormy sky, laying siege to the world I’ve come to love?

  An eidetic recollection of events can still deceive. I’ve never forgotten anything that happened, but it’s only in writing it all down now that I remember the emotions of those bygone moments, the sensations that burned at the time. They whisper like echoes, half-mocking memories, and when I look at my hands I can almost feel the weight of the Engager in my grip again. Information I haven’t tracked for years returns to me, melancholically spectral. When I close my remaining eye, the ghosts of hololithic data-feeds scroll down in the blackness. When my quill no longer scratches across the papyrus, I hear the elemental beat of Amadeus’ heart in the silence between sentences.

  The truth is that my knuckles have loosened enough to continue, and yet I find myself hesitating because of what comes next.

  The Exilarchy.

  Our great foe. The hordes of heretics and mutants serving those that call themselves the Pure. The face of the Archenemy in Elara’s Veil.

  By the time we joined the war, the Adeptus Vaelarii had been fighting the Exilarchy for almost a century. When the Eye of Terror burst open and the Great Rift ripped the Imperium in half, that alone would have savaged humanity’s empire beyond repair and reconquest. But there was worse yet to come. Foes lurked in that seething wound. Enemies and monsters poured forth from that coruscating galactic scar. Less than a decade after losing contact with the Imperium, this new war came to Elara’s Veil.

  The Rift isn’t constant. It ebbs and flows, going in and out like the tide, sometimes seeming to heal, freeing whole worlds from its vile embrace, at other times reaching out far enough to threaten stars previously immune to its foul touch. In those earliest years, it disgorged a host that swept across Elara’s Veil, burning and destroying.

  Yet what began as a flood soon broke, individual armies settling on the worlds they’d taken, entrenching themselves not simply as raiders, but conquerors. They didn’t just want blood and souls as sacrifices to their impossible gods. They wanted territory. They wanted the entire subsector, and they would claim it through fire and rage.

  I learned all of this from the databanks of the Hex, after Brêac gave us permission to board. I was no stranger to war. I’d fought the Archenemy before, serving other masters on other deployments. But no dry recitations in the archives prepared me for the nature of the Exilarchy, or their brutal lords, the Pure.

  The Hex encountered an Exilarchy force on the planet Kouris, two months after sailing from Nemeton.

  Back then, we were hunting them.

  On Kouris, I first heard the words that would reshape my future. The first time I heard the tribal cry of the Emperor’s Spears, dread-laced, drenched with guttural threat, in a tongue that owed as much to hatred as it did to its Gothic roots.

  I don’t need to write this chronicle to recapture the feeling of hearing that chant. The tremors I felt, the fear, the savage joy. I hear it still, in the quiet moments of what remains of my life. I hear it in dreams better described as nightmares.

  The warcry of the Emperor’s Spears, backed by the roar of golden lions.

  Skovakarah uhl zarûn.

  X

  REDDEN THE EARTH

  1

  I stared into the rockrete dust. A grey-white expanse clouded all my monitor screens: smoky dust that was dense enough to drown in and thick enough to swallow the sky. When cities die, they bleed dust. A single falling building will choke the streets for hours, over a mile or more. When it’s ten buildings, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, whole reaches of the world become a hazy afterlife where sound is distorted and sight completely stolen.

  We sat in a triangle, Kartash, Tyberia and I, back to back to back inside the confines of our master’s modified Damocles-pattern command Rhino. With all our equipment, the tank’s interior was a nest of power cables underfoot and connective cords against the walls, lit by our flickering monitors. Our ­fingers struck hololithic keys projected from our consoles, and the refiltered air tasted of our unwashed bodies. We’d been calling the Rhino home for several days straight.

  In our ears was an overlay of crackling vox-voices playing across the several communication networks. There in the screen-lit darkness, monitor glare tanned our bare hands and faces with the paleness of anaemia. Everything we saw, we witnessed through our servo-skulls. A storm pealed in the west, where the enemy was shelling the city. Sympathy quakes stirred the ground beneath us.

  We were on the ground because we’d been blind in orbit: the city was obscured from above by the caul of dust. Location coordinates meant little – we could drop troops into the mire, but when you knew nothing of enemy troop positions or what buildings were still standing, tolerable imprecision became useless guesswork. We needed eyes in the murk. We needed scanning data.

  That data spilled down my left eye. Echolocation pulse flares, visual feeds, rangefinding digitals and alternate vision filters, all endlessly updating, flashing and ticking. It helped with the dust. A little. Barely.

  A figure staggered from the mist, clutching a battered lasrifle as he ran. One of his eyes was bandaged. His uniform, the deep black and red of the 89th Novaskyr Adamants, was a shredded mantle of filthy fatigues and cracked flak-plate.

  ‘Contact, contact,’ I said to Tyberia and Kartash. I was dimly aware of Tyberia voxing the update over our shared channel to Amadeus.

  I tuned her out and thumbed my brass control spheres, drifting closer to the figure, rising to head-height. I had every officer of the 89th memorised, as well as lodged in my console’s archives in the unprecedented case of memory failure. The name Captain Jorothan Maybeck streamed across my monitor along with notable aspects of his service record. He was thirty-nine standard years old. There in the dust, scrabbling over rubble, with his wounds and the palette of exhaustion on his features, he could have passed for fifty. A hard-won fifty.

  ‘Report,’ I said into my vox-mic. Miles away, the word emerged through the tinny vocoder in my servo-skull’s jaw.

  ‘Tyberia?’ he asked.

  ‘Anuradha.’

  Captain Maybeck looked into the skull’s eye sockets. Right into my eyes. And he gave his report. It began with the words that mattered most:

  ‘We’re ready.’

  2

  The war raging across the surface of Kouris was decided before we began fighting it. The loyalist forces fighting the rebellion there were massing for an offensive to retake both continents from the Archenemy, and after two years of war, the end was in sight. They had projected victory in approximately five months, and at the cost of several million lives.

  Brêac deemed this unacceptable. Five months was too long, and the cost of life was too high. The men and women of the Imperial Guard fighting here were needed elsewhere in the Veil, on any number of
battle­fields across several dozen other worlds.

  Our arrival changed everything. From the moment we reached orbit, the clock was counting down. The Spears intended to win the war for Kouris in one week. Brêac would settle for nothing less.

  On the first day, he gathered the Guard commanders aboard the Hex for a comprehensive tactical analysis of the situation on the ground. I stood at my master’s side as Brêac and the officers of his warhost listened to the reports of the Guard commanders that had been embattled on the surface for the best part of two years. Although the humans were uneasy in the Spears’ presence, the observations and tactical appraisals flowed one after the other, until Brêac had a complete picture of the current conflict.

  I marked one instance of failure by Imperial forces that indicated command-level incompetence rather than mere defeat at the whims of war. It happened in every campaign: there would always be at least one officer promoted above their talents, a commander that endangered a battle and lost far more lives than necessary. I knew how my master would deal with this, as a veteran of working alongside other institutions of the Adeptus Terra. His role was to teach and guide, to secure victory through the methods laid down by our noble Chapter. We were named the Mentor Legion for a blunt, but pure, reason.

  But I couldn’t guess how the Spears would handle this, and it was their decision to make, not ours. Surely it wouldn’t escape their notice.

  Indeed it did not. Faelan and Tolmach were next to me in the meeting, at the tactical hololith table that dominated the chamber. They spoke quietly, over my head.

  ‘We should deal with that colonel,’ Tolmach murmured. As if the meaning weren’t obvious, he brushed his black-armoured knuckles across his holstered Absolver pistol. The leather holster was still darkened by faded, years-old bloodstains from the times he’d used the tool to administer the Emperor’s Mercy to his wounded brethren. No amount of scrubbing could scrape the leather clean.

  Faelan, faceless in his mutilation, emitted a dry sound of amusement from his vocoder. It dawned on me then that they might be teasing me. I looked up at Tolmach, narrowing my eyes to enhance my augmetic vision, zooming in for even the subtlest facial signs of sincerity or mirth. After a moment he chuckled, a deeper, more natural sound than Faelan’s machine-snicker.

  ‘A demotion at least,’ he amended, with a slight smile. ‘We can be ruthless when it comes to the ranks of our allies. We don’t have numbers enough for incompetent officers to waste their soldiers’ lives.’

  They were both looking at me, as if expecting me to reply, perhaps rising to the bait of their teasing trap. One of them had his face torn off, unable to smile or scowl or even really speak; the other was part of a druidic order I didn’t and could never fully understand – and yet how human they seemed, in opposition to my master.

  ‘One shouldn’t jest over matters of life and death,’ I remarked. It seemed a safely neutral answer, but it didn’t work. They ­chuckled again, amused by my surprise at their inappropriate humour.

  On my other side, Amadeus softly cleared his throat. He stood upright, utterly focused on Brêac, the very image of a professional soldier. I took the hint and faced forward once more, though I caught Tyberia’s smirk at my wandering focus.

  Once everyone had spoken, Brêac gave his decision. We would attack, he said. On the first night, he launched the first wave of gunships and drop pods, committing the Spears to the war. He asked if Amadeus intended to fight, and my master utterly failed to respond to that sliver of sarcasm. Instead, he outlined that his expertise lay in aiding mortal forces, and that he would deploy alongside the Guard wherever possible.

  That had been five days ago. Five days of ceaseless deployment and redeployment, with my master fighting alongside regiments of the Novaskyr Adamants, the Kourian planetary defence force, and the black-cloaked hosts of the Bellonan Skitarii Legion. He hadn’t yet ­battled alongside the Spears.

  On the sixth day, with the Battle of Akamakar, that would change.

  The capital city, Akamakar, was the last remaining principal bastion of enemy strength, and taking it would break the Exilarchy’s hold on Kouris. We couldn’t bombard it from orbit, with its decaying void shield network still functioning. Nor could we deploy Adeptus Astartes warriors directly from the Hex. With the barrier operational, the Spears would need to advance with the troops.

  Brêac had commanded that all significant resistance must be shattered by sunset. Everything hinged on taking the regency palace, where the planetary leaders of the rebellion sought refuge. Once the treacherous regent and his supporters in the aristocracy were finished, the Exilarchy’s presence on Kouris would bleed out.

  We went in with the troops, to link up with the forces already established in the city. The honour of driving the Damocles armoured personnel carrier belonged to Kartash, as Helot Primus. Tyberia and I remained connected to Amadeus, to serve as needed. Although we were in the first wave, we weren’t at the vanguard. Our tank’s reinforced armour held a treasure trove of rare technology, and Amadeus commanded us not to risk it. We were observers – his aides – not combatants.

  The tanks rumbled around us as we advanced through the edges of the city, pounded to dust by the Novaskyr artillery. Armoured personnel carriers rattled along in line, filled with mechanised infantry. Gunships and transports droned overhead, their troop bays crammed with Guard. Our column was one of several entering the city’s outer districts, though we were braced for the sternest resistance.

  The last time I’d raised the cupola hatch and looked out at the rest of the column, the eyes of several tank commanders locked on to me at once. Many of the Novaskyr Guard had fought beside Space Marines before, but the Adeptus Astartes were still an uncommon sight on the battlefield, and their human assistants rarer still. Our Rhino drew endless stares, until the battle began.

  I won’t belabour the point, for anyone reading this accounting already knows the ways in which the Adeptus Astartes wage war. The Battle of Akamakar wasn’t the grandest battle that will take place over the course of this chronicle, and it was far from the most brutal. It was, simply put, a city falling to siege. Tens of thousands died in a single day, many on our side. After the battle, long after we’d left aboard the Hex, servitors and citizens in their thousands spent months clearing the rubble and burying the dead.

  But of the battle itself, one moment does bear recalling in detail here – the first time I saw the Spears go to war, with my master among them. Until that day, I’d only seen Mentor Legion cadre officers alone, leading and supporting human forces. On the streets of dust-choked Akamakar, I finally saw an Adeptus Astartes battalion meet the enemy.

  Brêac had eighty-five warriors, enough to take a world. But their lives were a currency to be spent tactically and frugally. Space Marines are shock troops, a weapon of precision; they are a lance to strike at the enemy’s heart, not an indiscriminate bludgeon to waste crushing chaff. Throw them into a grinding war, and you win victory only by ignoring the advantages your greatest soldiers possess.

  Taking Akamakar would come down to timing and synergy as we advanced on the regency palace. Units needed to move through the city, reaching projected markers and holding ground for support to reach them. The bulk of the urban fighting would be fought by the Novaskyr Adamants and the Bellonan skitarii.

  The Spears were held back in order to break sections of unexpected enemy strength, or reinforce broken elements of our own advancing forces. They would be deployed, all of us knew that. The question was, when and where?

  3

  I had servo-skull probes embedded with the 89th Novaskyr Adamants when the regiment finally broke. They’d advanced deep into Akamakar and driven the Exilarchy’s militia back with the surging strength of a tide. That tide was now breaking. The enemy’s ranks swelled with reinforcements, including gunships strafing the roads, pinning down our forward platoons.

  By then, the fighting was
road by road, house to house, thickest there in the heart of the city. The 89th had fought the enemy to a standstill along the processional avenues leading to the palace, but they had nothing left to give except their lives. Tanks duelled through the wreckage of entire streets. Fire-teams of soldiers on both sides sniped at each other through the rubble.

  Adamants cried out for reloads, cried out for medics, cried out for orders – none of it was forthcoming. An ugly truth spread through the remaining ranks like poison: most of their officers were dead. Leadership was reduced almost to the squad level. Platoons voxed each other from where they braced and hunched in disparate ruined buildings, each surviving sergeant and lieutenant trying to piece together what remained of the main advance.

  Tyberia was the one to inform our master of the 89th’s desperate straits. She calmly relayed the details over the vox, and Amadeus replied at once. He was redeploying now. He would be there soon.

  So far, I’d seen little uniformity among the Exilarchy fighters. Sometimes ragged packs of them descended in sudden hordes; other times platoons of them ran forward in disciplined bayonet charges. I saw defaced Imperial Guard uniforms, the armour of noble house militia, and turncoat defence force fatigues. The Exilarchy had seeded Kouris with rebellion before landing their armies here. Half of the armed forces rose up with the enemy, betraying the Imperium before the first shot was fired.

  It was anticlimactic, in a way, to finally confront the enemy and to find them nothing but human. Deluded, traitorous, but otherwise no different from an Imperial army.

  I ask you, humbly: forgive me for my naivety. I thought these front-line rebels and recidivists represented the real Exilarchy. I had no idea then what was to come later.

  The dead lay everywhere, carpeting the shelled ground. Captain Maybeck was dead; he’d fallen an hour ago, shot through the throat while declaring a countercharge. One of his remaining lieutenants, Eskar, clutched at one of my drifting servo-skulls, fighting its anti-gravitic motors to drag it close to her face.