Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley Read online

  There was a solemnity to the structures and the spaces between them that suggested worship. Volos even experienced a touch of awe, and the sensation was novel enough that he rather enjoyed it. Set out in two concentric circles were a series of monoliths. Each was cylindrical, and tapered to a point sharp as a gladius. They all curved towards the centre. Volos pictured a clawed hand about to close.

  ‘That’s what we all guessed at first,’ Tennesyn said. ‘Maybe it did have some religious value to its builders, but I don’t think that was all. It’s too… functional.’

  ‘An observatory?’ Setheno suggested.

  ‘Nearer the mark,’ Tennesyn answered as he led the way towards the centre of the configuration of monuments. ‘But what I really think is that this is a signpost. A marker.’ He stepped within the circles as he spoke the last two words, and his voice dropped. When he passed into the first ring of monoliths, Volos understood why. The feeling of awe intensified. It had to do with more than size. The monoliths were big, rising thirty metres above Volos’s head, but they were hardly the largest xenos artefacts he had seen. There was something else. ‘How old are they?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re not sure. At the very least, many millions of years. But we had a few aberrant readings that suggested they predate Antagonis itself. I dismissed those results as absurd. I’m much less certain of that now.’ He gave Volos a shrewd look. ‘You feel it too, don’t you?’

  ‘I do.’ There was a buzzing on his skin like the writhing of a billion microscopic insects. It had started the moment he came within the grasp of the giant claws. Volos glanced at Setheno, and she nodded.

  ‘We mustn’t linger here,’ the canoness said.

  Tennesyn rubbed his arms. ‘The effect is much stronger than before,’ he said. ‘And much more is exposed. Your bombardment has been very helpful after all.’

  Lettinger had stopped just outside the first ring. He looked as if he had been mag-locked to the ground. ‘I will not go in there,’ he said. ‘It is unclean.’ With a visible effort, he lifted one foot, then the other, and backed away.

  Volos approached the nearest monolith. He rapped his fist against it. From a distance, he had assumed they were stone, though of what sort he couldn’t imagine. Tennesyn had described them as being black during the day. Now, near midnight, they were the white of bleached bone, and shone with an inner light that illuminated nothing of their surroundings. Closer up, Volos had wondered if they might be metal. They were not. Touching one revealed the density of granite. But it rang with a crystalline tone worthy of any cathedral bell. Up close, he could see that the surface was covered with a faint tracery of silver-on-white designs. They reminded him of runes, but there was something incomplete about them. ‘A signpost?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Tennesyn reached the centre of the rings. Volos and Setheno joined him. ‘We kept experiencing a partial activation while we were excavating, enough to give a sense of what this complex was built to do. We had only just finished uncovering the top sections of all the monoliths when I left, and then…’ He stopped, his eyes widening. ‘Could this have caused the outbreak?’

  Setheno shook her head. ‘The ritual of doubtworm is very specific, and conjured by an individual, not by stones.’

  ‘The inquisitor might disagree,’ Tennesyn said, looking over at Lettinger, who had made his way back to the Thunderhawk.

  ‘Let him,’ Setheno said, and Volos wondered how two words, expressed so neutrally, could be so contemptuous. ‘What happens next?’

  Tennesyn checked his chronometer and looked at the sky. ‘We wait just a few minutes. There is a planetary alignment currently under way in this system. All thirteen planets are in conjunction. You can imagine how rare that is. This signpost can only be read when it becomes part of the alignment. That was what Cardinal Ness–’

  ‘He is no cardinal,’ Setheno corrected.

  ‘I’m sorry. Nessun was very excited to witness the site’s full activation.’

  ‘You’re lucky you didn’t share the moment with him,’ Volos commented.

  They waited while the stars slowly wheeled through their dance. Most of Antagonis was under a thick cloud of ash thrown up by the eruptions that had followed in the wake of the bombardment. But the air over the rings of monoliths was clear. The clouds circled around the area, but did not pass over it. Volos saw the lights of Antagonis’s fellow planets move towards a point directly overhead. As they did, the buzzing on his flesh intensified. A subaural hum began, rising in power until Volos’s rear teeth ached with the tension. Tennesyn was trembling, but managed to stay upright. Setheno was rigid, motionless except for a slight quiver running the length of her frame.

  The monoliths flashed to life. The designs crackled, blazing with a light that Volos saw more clearly with his eyes shut. He understood now why the shapes had seemed incomplete: he had been looking at just one fragment of a massive pattern, one that ran from column to column and formed an intricate whole, one that was completed and made visible by the celestial configuration. Volos looked up. The glow of the pattern leaked into his peripheral vision, extended spider-web tendrils over the stars, and formed an image. The picture crystallised, and he realised he was looking at a pattern of stars overlaid over the real ones. The image was a map. He recognised constellations, and there was a moment of anticlimax. He wasn’t looking at some unknown, unreachable sector of the universe. Given a chart, he could work out precisely where this was. At the centre of the image, one light pulsed a cold blue, and as it did, Volos became aware of a sound. It was a tuneless whistle that rose and fell with the rhythm of breathing. Inhale, and the pitch rose while the volume ebbed, exhale, and the sound gathered force with the dropping pitch. The song was a single, endless, idiot note, but behind it, Volos sensed something huge.

  ‘How can we record this?’ Tennesyn whispered, a scientist to the last.

  ‘We won’t have to,’ Setheno said.

  Volos looked back down. The canoness was right. The chart was emblazoned on his mind’s eye. He would have no trouble reconstituting it for the Immolation Maw ’s navigator. ‘That’s where they’ve gone,’ he said. And that was where the Black Dragons would go, bringing the consequences of the death of Antagonis down on the Swords of Epiphany.

  Antagonis’s moon was a sprinter. It circled the planet every fourteen days. Its position was part of the alignment, Tennesyn had discovered, a small but critical element in the triggering of the monoliths, and so the Dragons had had to wait most of a sevenday after the bombardment for the moon to be right. These were lost days, Toharan thought. Second Company was in orbit over a dead planet, waiting to play with corrupt stones, doing nothing while rebellion spread and took firmer hold on Aighe Mortis. Vritras was in contact with the commanders of the Mortisian Guard regiments dispatched to quell the uprising, and the reports were troubling. But the Immolation Maw remained at anchor over Antagonis, waiting for Tennesyn to be able to make his observation.

  The lack of action was unconscionable.

  It was Symael who had suggested the meeting place. On the bottom deck of the Immolation Maw , in a straight line down from its chapel, was another, smaller, place of worship. It was no less sanctified, but saw much less use. It was the prison chapel. The Black Dragons did not take many prisoners. They left no wounded foe on their battlefields, only corpses. But the cells were there for those exceptional times when a target was, from a tactical point of view, worth more alive than dead, and the chapel was there for the penitent and the punished. The marble altar was stained brown from receiving centuries of justice spilled across its surface as heretics and traitors were shown the blade of mercy and truth. The aquila above it was iron-black, its edges sharp as if it would descend to scour the unworthy. The pews were rough stone. There were no viewports, and the few glow-globes gave off little more than a dim and mournful light. It was a space where faith was at its most harsh and most necessary. It was the sanctuary of brutal decision.

  It was fitting.

&nb
sp; It was fitting not just because of its severity, but because nearby was a reminder of why brutal decisions were needed. Sternward of the chapel, beyond the prison, was another set of cells. They held a special group of Black Dragons. They were the blessed, and they were the abominations. Mutated far beyond even Volos’s distortions, they were monsters of spikes and horns and scales. Huge, muscled, slavering, they were trapped in a permanent predator rage, and their snarls echoed faintly down the corridors to the chapel. They were berserkers who were kept alive until they could be unleashed to find their final peace in frenzied suicide missions. Toharan had heard that the Blood Angels had a similar squad of the damned, but those warriors, however tortured their minds, were not physical grotesques. The Dragons abominations were, he believed, an unconscionable risk. Even hidden, they were a provocation to the Inquisition. They should be exterminated as soon as they developed. But they were also the logical end-point of Chaplain Massorus’s theology. If one must bless the curse, then the most cursed were the most sacred. They could not be touched. Only the battlefield could end their torment and their duty.

  Ridiculous. Heretical. Toharan would put an end to such perversity.

  He had spoken once to Symael since their first conversation. Jemiah, a brother almost as fair as Toharan, had been part of that talk, four days ago. Now, while Volos played escort to the xeno-archaeologist, it was time for more than discussion. As Toharan stood before the altar, far more than two brothers sat in the pews. There were fourteen warriors, coming from every squad except Ormarr. Most showed little sign of Ossmodula deformation, but a few did have crests. One, Danael of Squad Neidris, had a sharp, painful-looking growth poking out just above his right eye. They all came here from different experiences, but they were united by their concern and hope. Toharan vowed he would justify the faith they had shown in meeting him here.

  In his imagination, he could still hear the echoes of the ceremony anointing him first-sergeant. The entire company had filled the chapel. That space was a hall of worship and honour, the blood it celebrated heroically given, not extracted from the unforgiven. There, the air had trembled with the Dragons’ roar of approval as he had knelt, then risen, symbolically reborn as the new right hand of the captain. The honour had been enormous, but it was also a hollow one if he didn’t make use of it. The small group here was, he thought, an even greater tribute. It was a testament to the challenge and righteousness of what he was about to attempt.

  ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘I am more grateful than you can know for the confidence you are showing in me. But my gratitude will pale next to that of our Chapter once we have successfully brought it back to the embrace of the Codex. No longer will our fellow Adeptus Astartes spurn our comradeship in battle. No longer will the Inquisition cast a suspicious eye on us. No longer will our loyalty and faith be doubted. There are difficult choices ahead for us. There will be actions that we will have to take that will sever bonds of brotherhood that we have, mistakenly, valued. We will have to be strong for one another. We will need faith in what we do. And so it shall be, because not only are we Black Dragons, we are also their salvation. We are the Disciples of Purity.’

  As he took part in the oaths that followed, Toharan felt no misgivings.

  None at all.

  CHAPTER 10

  A CHOICE OF WARS

  Flebis was an orphan. It was a rocky planetoid, with an atmosphere thin as an excuse. It had no right to its own orbit around a Sol-class star, at a distance roughly equivalent to that of Mars, let alone be the only planet in the system that bore its name. Given its size, it should have been nothing more than a large moon. And once, it had been. But something had happened to its parent planet, and that world was now an asteroid belt that followed Flebis around on its orbit, keeping it in line with regular beatings. Nessun didn’t know what had happened to the planet. He had his suspicions. They involved what he had brought his children to find on the moon.

  Finding where the prize was hidden was easy. There was only one structure on the moon, and it was enormous. It was nestled between two mountain chains, an artificial peak higher than the natural ones on either side. Thunderhawks and drop pods streamed from the launch bays of the Revealed Truth , and the Swords of Epiphany gathered before the sublime. Rodrigo Nessun was the first on the ground, and he was at the forefront of the reconnaissance party that approached the vault.

  Nessun wasn’t touched by awe often. When he was, he was thrilled by the experience and fascinated as the emotion ran up and down the components of his being. His consciousness fluctuated between the collective mind that had taken over his body and the echo of the individual he had once been. Most of the time, there was no distinction between them, but when Nessun was in the presence of a source of wonder, the old human re-emerged, astonished into a brief existence.

  There was plenty of wonder before him now. The vault’s facade was smooth and raked slightly off the vertical. Apart from a seam revealing the outline of the entrance, the monument appeared to have been created using a single block of stone. It was as if a mountain had been carved into this squat shape, a mountain that did not belong here. The peaks surrounding it were sedimentary. The vault was igneous. The mountains were a light grey, covered in the dust of aeons of meteor strikes, slow erosion, and geological inertness. The vault was dark crimson. It was not made from the material of Flebis, nor from the shattered remains of its planet. Nessun tried to picture the technology required to transport a rock this huge from one system to another. He couldn’t. He tried to picture the warp magic, and thought he might be a bit closer. He thought about the necessary will, and he didn’t have to imagine that. He shared it.

  He smiled at the scale of the vault’s features. Its door frame was fifty metres high. Was that a reflection of the builders? What monsters they must have been, he thought, delighted.

  Makaiel sounded less thrilled. ‘How are we supposed to get in?’ he asked over the comm-feed.

  ‘Through strength, determination and power. What we seek will expect and respect no less.’ Nessun used a vox he wore around his neck, but he had no helmet. He didn’t need one, even in the thin atmosphere of Flebis. His chest expanded and contracted out of habit, and he enjoyed the expressiveness of sighs and laughter, but he had not had to breathe for millennia. The perpetual breeze of the moon sliced into his flesh with scalpel cold, dragging his smile wider. He strode forward, reached out and placed the palm of his hand against the seam that ran down the middle of the door. He was touching will embodied in stone. He felt a thrum in the stone, a coiled potential waiting to be unleashed.

  Jozef Bisset sat on a level piece of rubble. He was in the shadows, away from the light of the fire and the noise of the dancing. Karl Guevion made his way over the wreckage to the comptroller with a cup of recaff. Bisset took the beverage with his left hand. His right arm was in a sling. It didn’t have to be. The sling was a useful camouflage. The bionics would show through the shreds of clothing and synthetic skin that dangled from the limb. The cloth kept him covered and looking harmless. Best to keep things that way for the time being.

  His leap from the collapsing Munitorum palace had taken him to the roof of the next tower over. He had landed rolling. His momentum had brought him to his feet and he’d been up and running again. But he could not outpace ruin, and the palace had fallen against Bisset’s refuge, wounding it fatally. The building had screamed and cried as he leaped down the stairs from landing to landing, but in the end the steps had disappeared beneath his feet and he had fallen, caught in an avalanche of girders and stone.

  The landing had been hard, but the wreckage had tented over him as it had come down. For seven days he had squirmed through absolute darkness, several times becoming stuck, again and again narrowly avoiding being crushed as the rubble shifted. At the end of the seventh day, hands had pulled debris away and he had emerged into Aighe Mortis’s brown daylight, blinking like a mole and massively dehydrated. Guevion had been in the rescue party. He had patched Bisset up a
nd given him the sling before anyone else had come near. He was an old man, whether from years or labour, Bisset couldn’t say. His hair was a lank grey, his stubble a salt-and-pepper sandpaper over a wrinkled leather hide. Bisset guessed he had some basic medicae training, and pegged him as a manufactorum patcher – one of those workers whose additional duties consisted in quickly dealing with injuries, keeping the other labourers more or less in one piece and production uninterrupted.

  Guevion sat beside Bisset as the comptroller sipped his recaff. ‘You’re Munitorum, aren’t you,’ the man said. It was an observation, not a question. When Bisset didn’t answer, Guevion tapped his shoulder. ‘I recognise what’s left of the uniform.’

  ‘Good eye.’ There wasn’t much still on his frame, and what there was of it was a dust-caked mess.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to give you away.’

  Bisset nodded, thankful. The crowd in the street ahead of him was chanting and dancing before the ruins of the Munitorum palace. He knew what would happen if they realised he’d been part of the bureaucracy they had just brought down. He wasn’t feeling suicidal tonight. He was curious, though. ‘Why did you help me?’

  Guevion scratched at the bristles on his neck. ‘My little shot at trying to stop things from getting worse. Figured you might be able to get our message out.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Just leave us alone. That’s all.’

  Bisset shook his head. ‘You can’t be that stupid. This is an insurrection. You know how this is going to end.’

  ‘Why?’ Guevion pleaded. ‘Why did you have to take so much from us?’

  ‘There is no “you” and “us,”’ Bisset told him. ‘We are all subjects of the Imperium.’

  Guevion carried on as if Bisset hadn’t spoken. ‘You already get plenty of men from us. You could just take all the ones who want to go, and everything would be fine. But no, you have to suck everything away. You take one son. I accept that. You take the other, and who’s going to protect our women from the gangs? Me? And if you’re putting together another regiment, then you’ll be wanting all sorts of productivity up, too, and everything we make gets stripped from us. And what do we get in return?’