Spear of the Emperor - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  Faelan replaced his helm, the high crest striped red and black. Tolmach and the three other Spears looked to the battleguard for orders, and Faelan hefted his bolt rifle. His voice was a deep growl through his helm’s vocaliser grille.

  ‘Everyone that can carry a weapon, come with me.’

  3

  All these years later, the Battle of the Hex is a saga among the Adeptus Vaelarii, in part because of what it led to, in part because of the lives we reaped, and in part because of how much blood on the iron decks ran from Nemetese veins.

  Throne, but we bled that day. Across the ship Spears led armsmen serfs and Chapter-thralls, cleansing their decks and linking up with other squads. The Hex was swarming with Exilarchy slaves in such numbers that most of the hallway battles devolved from close-range firefights to simply wading through a press of mutated humanity. Here were the tactics I’d seen on Kouris taken to their savage extreme. The Exilarchy knew how to kill Space Marines. They knew the weakness of gunfire against sacred ceramite, and that squads of laspistol-wielding, autogun-carrying militia were next to hopeless against warriors of the Adeptus Astartes. Through either fear of punishment from their masters or zeal in their twisted cause, the mutants hurled themselves bodily against the Spears. They used the meat of their own bodies as weapons as well as the blades in their hands, stabbing and scratching the surface of cobalt battleplate as they were cut down in their hundreds. Lucky thrusts found armour joints or sank deep into layered ceramite.

  In no time at all, the Spears were red from helms to boots. I could hear my master’s hearts beating over our partially restored link, his primary pulse going twice a second, his second­ary heart running a quickening tempo to support it. His vital signs peaked and never slowed down. I heard him as he fought, knee-deep in the fallen, heaving in great gusts of air to supply his straining muscles with oxygen. After an hour of the purging, deck by deck, his swordarm began to stiffen. Lactic acid was building up in his muscles. His movements slowed from a blur to perceivable motions – still beyond human limits, but no longer bordering on the supernatural.

  Around him, the Spears suffered too, even the enhanced warriors of the Second Generation. My place was behind the advance, firing around their hulking forms and executing downed mutants left wounded on the deck behind the Spears’ progress.

  The speed of that inexorable advance was breathtaking in both meanings of the word. They moved with a haste I’d have considered impossible had I not seen it with my own remaining eye, and I was breathless within minutes at the effort required to keep up. Our wounds slowed us as much as the madness through which we struggled. At one point I helped Tyberia to her feet after she stumbled over a carpet of the dead, only to have one of the corpses drag both of us down. The mutant’s melted-wax flesh was a riot of cancerous sores, and I yelled out as he sank his blunt, peggy teeth into my bionic forearm, cracking through the carapace armour and crunching into the metal beneath. I couldn’t get my sword free in the tangle of limbs and bodies; I had to move in closer and punch my wrist-blade through the thing’s fat neck, sawing through the monster’s spine. He never stopped smiling at me. Tyberia booted the severed head away, and I saw its dead grin flashing as it turned, crown over cut throat, before dropping, lost, into another corpse pile.

  The first Spear to die was Llydwyn. The invaders buried him beneath thrashing bodies, plunging energised knives into the softer armour at his throat and elbows and wrists, only to die when their fellows with flamers bathed them all in alchemical fire. The Exilarchy’s mutants, creatures that Faelan called blade-fodder, willingly incinerated their own kind for the chance to down one of the Spears.

  And it worked. Faelan and Amadeus led the resurgence to recover Llydwyn’s body, but the flames had done their work by the time they freed him from his attackers. Tolmach fell back from the formation only long enough to confirm that Llydwyn’s progenoids were unrecoverable.

  Amadeus fought in squad formation with the Spears, killing with his blade when he could, resorting to his bolter when he had to, and then his fists, boots, and with lascarbine blasts from his knuckle-mounted digital weapons. We tried to keep pace with them, while Tolmach’s blood-stimm narcotic cocktail sloshed through our veins. One moment my skin was painfully sensitive to the touch, the next I felt numb enough to take a las-round and keep running.

  Maybe it was the damage to my cranial implants from the crack in my skull, but the defence of the Hex marks the beginning of flaws appearing in my memory. Rather than a meticulous, second-by-second recollection, I remember that endless, bloody day as a series of scattered moments and sensations. The pump of hot gore over my fist as I buried my wristblade in a mutant’s guts. The way he sagged against me, the breath driven from his body. The drag of his teeth against my helm as he tried and failed to chew through to my face. The chainsaw buzz of a las-bolt slicing the air a finger’s length from my left ear. The clattering of shrapnel as a clutch of fragmentation grenades detonated around the Spears’ boots, just ahead. The chanting to redden the earth, redden the earth.

  I fired at things that couldn’t exist and that couldn’t be there. I gunned down things that had no right to be real, and yet there they were. Discerning the difference between skull-cracked hallucination and daemonic intrusion from the realm of the dead left me sweating and shaking as much as any physical effort. Apparitions danced at the edges of my eyes, and my Engager barked at them rather than risk they were illusions born from my swimming senses. Sometimes those revenants burst open in blooms of spectral blood. Even then, I was never certain which ones were real and which were phantoms of my injured mind.

  During a lull in the fighting, Tyberia pulled her helmet free and vomited a slop of black worms onto the deck. When I said her name, she turned to me, and her eyes were hollow sockets of fire. The last worms crawled over her lips. The fire she cried ignited the creatures as they slipped from her mouth.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked me. ‘What’s wrong?’

  I closed my remaining eye tight, and when I opened it, she was herself again. Just Tyberia, breathing deeply before replacing her helmet.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  The lie didn’t fool her. ‘I know,’ she said across our personal vox-link. ‘I keep seeing things, too.’

  ‘I thought it was…’ I touched my helm, above where my skull was cracked.

  ‘I think it’s the Geller Field,’ she answered, reluctantly. I prayed she was wrong. The shield had only been down for a second, but the Hex might never be clean again if the corruption could take root.

  ‘Did you just vomit?’

  ‘No, I spat. What did you see?’

  You don’t want to know, I thought. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.

  When my vambrace pulsed with tracking data, I had to look at the display through a wriggling mass of the same worms that Tyberia hadn’t actually thrown up from inside her body.

  ‘Throne of Terra,’ she said from my side, and for a second I thought she was seeing them too, but her surprise was at the information flashing across the screen. ‘How long have you been tracking his beacon?’

  ‘I’ve only just made contact,’ I replied, and switched to a vox-channel that included Amadeus. ‘Master, I think I’ve found Kartash.’

  ‘Send me the information at once.’

  I did so, and as subtly as I could, trying not to draw Tyberia’s attention to my delusion, I also brushed the phantom worms from my bracer. They weren’t real, I knew they weren’t real, but I felt them resisting me, their clammy bodies curling for my fingers, trying to latch on to prevent being swept onto the deck.

  One of the damn things bit me. Its leech-mouth penetrated my glove and I felt the rows of its teeth tugging on my knuckle as it started to suckle on my blood. I slapped my hand against the wall to rid myself of the sensation. Tyberia was about to say something, likely about my behaviour, when Serivahn’s voi
ce crackled over the squad’s vox, blotted out by bursts of static.

  ‘…Chambers… Geller generation… Brêac… by the… fire-team…’

  ‘Vargantes?’ Faelan called back across the channel. ‘Say again. The astropathic bastion?’

  The captain’s words forced through the distortion, flawed but audible. ‘The Dreaming Chambers,’ he said. ‘The Pure are in the Dreaming Chambers.’

  I spoke to Tyberia, outside the main channel. ‘Kartash is nearby.’

  Her tracking was dead. She had to rely on mine. ‘Then I pray we reach him in time.’

  4

  We fought our way to the astropathic bastion; the conjoined district of the Hex given over to housing the psychic choir and generation of the Geller field to shield us through warp voyages. Casualties here had been immense after the Venatrix had detonated her psychic mine, and the first Spears to reach the temple-barracks had encountered seething horrors.

  We waded through the aftermath, making for the inner chambers. Faelan hesitated at the cobalt corpses strewn among the dead and the damned, momentarily stunned by the sheer number of fallen brothers.

  ‘We’re here,’ he voxed over the master comm channel. The only reply he earned was static. Elsewhere on the deck, far from us, we could hear faint gunfire. This wasn’t the pitched battle we’d expected to charge into.

  Tolmach stepped forward, ready to begin harvesting the dead. Faelan’s raised hand warded the druid back.

  Tolmach, his black plate miserable with gore, objected with silence. He didn’t want to wait, you could see it in his posture. To delay extraction risked degeneration of the progenoids, lowering the chance of successful implantation in other candidates. The process of human decay begins in the first seconds after death – invisible to the eye but observable on the ­minute level through medicae lenses. Cells and particles no longer adhere without life to glue them together. The breakdown of a body is deeply underway long before signs of visible rot.

  ‘There,’ Amadeus said softly, drawing Tolmach’s eye across the chamber.

  It was just a child. Just a boy, sat amongst the dead, streaked with blood, washed by it, sheeted with it. He saw us, though our appearance did nothing to stop him. He ate by the fistful, his small hands clutching gobbets of viscera from the slain.

  The grotesque swelling of his head coupled with a waspish buzz in the air told us all we needed to know. Looking at him for more than a moment made my eye ache. The chamber around him shimmered with heat haze, though I registered no change in temperature.

  The boy looked at each of us in turn. As his bloodshot eyes drifted over me, his voice caressed the edges of my thoughts, as if I were hearing a whisper beneath a spoken conversation.

  Come to me.

  It’s easy to describe the effect those words had on us, for we obeyed them, but words are inadequate to define why we were compelled to obey. A psychic compulsion implies… what? An order that can’t be disobeyed? A shove towards obedience, like a push from behind? Something that can’t be resisted?

  It wasn’t like that at all.

  Come to me, he whispered, and I felt nothing but revulsion. His sticky, silent tone. His greasy, swollen flesh. The cranial deformities of an oversized brain that had blossomed along twisted genetic paths, at the whims of mad gods.

  Come to me.

  But if I moved forward, I could come at him from the side while my master and the Spears engaged from other angles. If I moved closer, I might be able to take him with my blade while he was focused on Amadeus. If I deceived him, walking towards him in obedience, I could strike him down at the last moment before he could turn his psychic malevolence on any of us.

  That’s what it felt like. That’s what it was. The danger of the compulsion wasn’t the loss of your muscles to another’s mind, it was your own mind fighting to make sense of the commands. I obeyed him, believing I was doing what I wanted to do myself.

  Tyberia stumbled forward into the room. Even Amadeus and Faelan tensed. The battleguard’s boot scraped across the deck as he reset his balance, fighting the urge to move forward.

  I followed Tyberia, certain I could get close enough to strike, only to be hauled back by my master.

  The child cringed away, his lips peeling from his teeth, and the heat haze projected by his boiling brain faded away. The trap was sprung.

  Tolmach died first. His head snapped back, shedding bloody debris, dead the second the bolt struck his helmet.

  The Pure melted out of the mirage. Not a lone warrior, this time, but a force to match our own, the white warriors leading masses of their shrieking underlings. They screamed at the Spears through amplifying vox-grilles, and the Spears met them head-on, blades on blades. The humans milling, fighting and dying around them were suddenly ignored.

  I buried my blade to the hilt in the guts of a woman with three faces. When I drew the power sword free, it parted her body from her hips, severing her in half. I fought in Amadeus’ shadow – he killed the cleaved mutant with a boot crushing her skull without even realising it. He was locked, blade on blade, with one of the Pure. They were vicious reflections of one another: white and green against white and age-greened bronze. Amadeus hammered a fist into the Pure’s faceplate and discharged his digital weapons. They flashed from his ­knuckles, blowing red matter from the back of the traitor’s helmet.

  Faelan was possessed, fighting over Tolmach’s body, screaming with a spear in one hand and a sword in the other. He whirled and lashed out in ceaseless lethality, cutting and ­gutting. I had no idea where or when he’d claimed either weapon. I had no time to care. I went down, again and again, pulled from my feet by the grasping hands of mutants who wouldn’t die. I can still feel the sickening bang, bang, bang of my gun stock crunching into the face of one of them, one that jabbed a shattered sword into my shin, trying to hamstring me.

  I don’t know if the collapse of his face killed him, I just know it bought me enough time to get away. I clambered over the dead and the soon-to-be-dead, slipping in guts, tripping on clutching hands, scrambling to link up with Tyberia. We slammed back to back, our Engagers roaring. Every bellowing shot was aimed low, to cripple the Pure so Amadeus and the Spears could finish them off.

  I caught one of them in the back of the knee, the shot blowing bone and ceramite outwards before the warrior went down, shouting not in pain but thwarted anger. Amadeus swept the Pure’s head clean from his shoulders with a swing of his energised blade.

  Bitch-bitch-Tyberia-bitch! The words burrowed into my brain. I felt them like thumbs pushing into my ears. A second later, Tyberia was gone, staggering away and calling my name.

  The boy-child was a blur of skinny limbs and jagged teeth clinging to Tyberia’s body armour, vomiting his undigested cannibal meal over her face. The thing glared at me over her shoulder and knifed its words into my mind.

  Save me help me protect me–

  And I would have done, I would have dreamed righteous reasons for doing it, had Tyberia not screamed my name so loud over the vox that it muted all other sense and sound.

  She dropped, her armour steaming, and I swung my Engager like a mace. The heavy casing struck with a thundercrack, sending the mutant brat tumbling across the corpse-strewn deck, where it kept howling. I’d broken the bastard’s neck and he still refused to die.

  Faelan ended the thing, driving his spear through its body hard enough to bite deep into the deck below. I saw the little monster’s bloodstained hands stroking uselessly at the blade that pinned it to the floor, slicing its fingers apart as it failed to get a grip.

  ‘Get it off,’ Tyberia was yelling. ‘My armour, get it off, get it off!’

  I tried. The steaming blood from the thing’s guts ate away at my gloves as I pulled Tyberia’s armour plating away. She ­managed to pull her helmet free and throw it away just in time, with only a smear of burned skin on one cheek. Around us,
above us, the Spears and Pure battled on. They were ­warring giants with no time to spare for those of us bleeding at their feet.

  ‘Run,’ my master voxed, tight, breathless. In my dizzy heat, I took it for another delusion. He would never say something so insane.

  I looked up at him in time to see one of the Pure catch ­Amadeus’ sword on the flat of an axe, twisting to shatter my master’s blade in a shower of sparking silver fragments. ­Several of those shards clattered, de-energised, against my armour.

  ‘Run,’ he voxed again, locked in a contest of strength with the Pure, trying to strangle the warrior with one hand, keeping the axe back from falling with the other.

  I rose on weak legs, ramming the barrel of my Engager under the Pure’s chin. He was fast enough to shove me aside before I could even pull the trigger, but the momentary distraction was enough for Amadeus to twist one hand and press his knuckles against the Pure’s throat. His digital weapons discharged in a flare of white las-light, sending the Pure falling backwards, his neck hollowed through.

  ‘Run,’ Amadeus snarled the word. ‘One of you has to ­survive. The mission. The mission.’

  The Pure closed in around him, around all of us. One of the warriors brought his bolter up towards me, only for my ­master to kick the gun aside before it fired. His knuckle-mounted lasblasters flared again, but their charge was drained. They did nothing but scorch the Pure’s white ceramite.

  I tried to reload, a motion as instinctive as breathing rendered unfamiliar by the shaking of my hands. One of the Pure pulled the Engager from my grasp; another grabbed me by the back of the head, throwing me aside like detritus. I hit hard, rolled harder and only regained my feet on the third attempt. My sight was reduced to a red smear. My cracked skull throbbed, freshly broken. Only the adrenal cocktail in my veins kept me standing.

  Faelan was gone, down on the deck for all I knew. Several of the Spears with us were on their knees, bound in chains of force emanating from handheld energy projectors. The Pure wanted captives.