Forgotten Sons - Nick Kyme Read online

  Ortane Vorkellen knew this as he stepped onto the gangramp of his cutter, shielding his gaze against the dipping sun.

  ‘Smells of oil and metal,’ muttered Insk, his scrivener. ‘Should’ve brought rebreathers.’

  ‘And risk offending the natives,’ Vorkellen returned in a quiet voice, his painted smile pitched perfectly for the greeting party.

  A gaggle of archivists, lex-savants and codifiers followed him and Insk down the ramp as they descended to the deck floor.

  ‘Greetings, travellers,’ uttered a moustachioed clave-noble. He towered over the visitors in a bespoke rigger, an exo-skeletal frame of bronze that added a metre to his height and bulked out his limbs with its chassis. Weapon mounts, ordinarily positioned at either shoulder and below the abdominals, were absent, a concession that this was to be a peaceful engagement. Likewise, the noble’s three marshals wore only ceremonial flash-sabres – no barb-whips, no rotor-threshers or other hand-held cannon. A high-marshalaccompanied them, making five men in total.

  The Bastionites were a people that appreciated all things martial. Perhaps that was why compliance had been so easy to achieve here, despite the world’s obvious military might – they respected strength and knew its measure well. Certainly Perturabo’s Legion had experienced harder-fought, longer campaigns than the one to assimilate Bastion and its annexe-worlds. They had simply recognised the power of the Space Marines and sworn fealty then and there without the expected siege. A contingent of Iron Warriors had been left behind, presumably to garrison the planet, but had left prior to the outbreak of the war with no reason given. Their primarch’s influence was still felt, however, in the statues of Perturabo that rose from the cities like spires.

  ‘Greetings from the clave,’ added the noble. His russet and silver jacket was pressed and pristine, perfectly accenting the polished bronze of his exo-rigger. His boots, fastened in the machine’s stirrups, were black and shining.

  Vorkellen had never been to Bastion, but he had researched the world and its customs. He knew the clave represented the socio-political-martial inner circle of the world’s infrastructure and that every one of Bastion’s nine continents, be they ice-plain, desert flatland or mountain fastness, adhered to the will and guidance of a clave. A naturally occurring thermo-nuclear resource provided light and heat, heavily shielded and stockpiled in underground silos that ran throughout Bastion like arteries. Cullis was the capital and the prime-clave, which was why Vorkellen had travelled there for the negotiations.

  ‘My lord brings you greeting and honours the clave,’ he replied, bowing at the foot of the gangramp in the custom befitting obeisance to a clave-noble of Bastion. ‘Lord Horus conveys through me his gratitude at this meeting.’

  The noble nodded. ‘It is received and noted by Cullis-Clave. Please follow.’ He turned then, his exo-rigger whirring with servos and pistons and pneumatics, and proceeded to clank across the dock towards a great mechanised gate. It was magnificent on account of its size and the inner workings, displayed like a body’s perfect organs on a mortician’s slab. But it was ultimately artless and cold.

  Vorkellen followed, his lackeys in tow. ‘You’ve prepared our petition?’ he asked Insk.

  The scrivener proffered the data-slate to his master.

  Vorkellen took it and proceeded to read. The guards, high-marshal and clave-noble paid them no heed, eyes front and marching to the rapidly approaching gate.

  The visitors were shown into a long gallery festooned with banners and laurels.

  ‘This is where you’ll await audience with the clave-nobles,’ the high-marshal said.

  As he was taking in the austere surroundings, Vorkellen asked, ‘Have the representatives from Terra arrived yet?’

  ‘They are delayed.’

  ‘Doubtless the Emperor would prefer a show of overwhelming force to bend the clave’s will.’

  The high-marshal scowled. ‘You will get your opportunity to present your case to the clave in due course.’

  ‘Of course, sire. I merely hope to settle this matter of allegiance quickly,’ he replied contritely. A pity we cannot unleash the World Eaters on this place and raze it, he thought behind a strong smile that spoke of his sterling character and honourable ideals.

  The high-marshal saluted – a gesture curiously similar to the old sign of Unification, a clenched fist striking the chest. ‘The clave convenes in two hours and thirteen minutes.’

  Horus’s iterator smiled again, this time it was thinner, like an adder’s lipless mouth.

  Even Erebus couldn’t pull this off as well as me, he thought, hubris overflowing.

  ‘We’ll be ready,’ he promised.

  II

  The Stormbird’s side hatch burst open with a well placed kick. The portal was drooling smoke as a broad, flame-limned silhouette filled it.

  Arcadese was wearing his battle-helm and had the pilot’s body slung over his shoulder. The human was blood-stained, his fingers and hair blackened by soot.

  The angle was wrong as he reached the hatch’s threshold. The Stormbird had hit nose-first, crumpling its cockpit and breaking off portions of wing. Fuselage and engine components lay scattered in the wake of their descent like entrails. A dozen fires ravaged the hull but they were burning out.

  Arcadese leapt from the hatch, landing squarely a few metres from the wreck. The ground yielded underfoot and the Ultramarine sank a few centimetres. The lights and industry of Cullis were pinpricks on the horizon, no more than an hour’s march away. In the distance he could see the stilts lifting the platforms and rigs above the grey-brown ash sump surrounding it. It was a petro-chemical mulch, redolent of power plant refuse and engine yard effluvia.

  He set the pilot down and returned to the ship.

  ‘Salamander,’ he called into the dissipating smoke. Emergency lighting flickered.

  A figure emerged from the smog, another smaller one in his arms.

  ‘I’m here.’ The artificer was cradled in Heka’tan’s arms. Her eyes were red-ringed and stinging, and she coughed.

  A word resolved in Arcadese’s mind when he saw her: Burden.

  ‘What of the others?’ Heka’tan asked, stomping into the light halo from the broken hatch.

  ‘One survivor. Outside. Where is your armour, brother?’

  ‘Within,’ said Heka’tan.

  Arcadese reached for the woman. ‘Give her to me. Go retrieve your armour and our weapons. We may not be on neutral soil after all.’

  Heka’tan handed the female over and headed back into the carnage of the ship.

  III

  An awkward silence persisted between Arcadese and the artificer.

  ‘How will we get back?’ she asked at last.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Were we attacked?’

  ‘It appears likely.’

  She glanced around the industrial sump fearfully. ‘Are we safe here?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Will we–’

  ‘Cease with your questions!’ The Ultramarine turned his steel gaze on her and Persephia shrank a little.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘I was trained to question

  when I was asked to remember.’

  Arcadese looked away, his face like stone. ‘Not any more,’ he stated flatly and resumed his vigil outside the broken ship.

  IV

  Arcadese was relieved when Heka’tan emerged at the hatch carrying two bulky munitions crates. Each was Legion-stamped, the Eighteenth and Thirteenth respectively. He tossed them onto the ground, one after the other, and leapt out.

  Heka’tan frowned when he saw Persephia. ‘Is she injured?’

  ‘She’s human, brother – that is all,’ Arcadese replied, busy with unlocking the crate. He smiled at the sleek, gunmetal stock, the spare clips cushioned in tight-fitting foam. Running his gauntleted hand across the bolter, he found the grip and tugged the weapon free.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ Heka’tan asked the artificer.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she snapped, whirling to face him. She wiped at her tears. ‘I’m fine. Just let me do my work.’
/>
  Arcadese was about to intercede when Heka’tan stopped him. ‘Leave her.’

  The Ultramarine snorted, shucking the bolter around his shoulder on its strap. ‘There’s no threat out here, brother.’ He pointed towards Cullis. ‘Our enemies are in there.’

  Heka’tan had started to pull on the mesh under-layer of his power armour. He allowed Persephia to assist with some of the rear-mounted joints and clasps. ‘These are peaceful negotiations, Arcadese.’

  ‘You of all people should know the falsehood of that.’

  Heka’tan didn’t answer.

  ‘We are forgotten sons, you and I,’ Arcadese continued, ‘you by the Imperium and I by my Legion. To be revived from a coma and faced with this

  Nikaea, Isstvan V, our beloved Warmaster a traitor – it is beyond comprehension. I should be at Calth with my father and brothers, not on this backwater world, playing diplomat.’

  Heka’tan attached his greaves and chest plate in silence.

  An incredulous grunt from the Ultramarine made the Salamander look up.

  ‘Don’t you want vengeance?’ Arcadese asked.

  He was referring to Isstvan and the massacre.

  ‘I don’t know what I want. Duty will suffice for now.’

  Arcadese approximated a shrug and went to retrieve the prone pilot.

  ‘Leave him.’

  The Ultramarine stopped, looking to Heka’tan for clarification.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  V

  There was a jagged tear in the fuselage, fringed by incendiary burns. ‘I’ve seen a lot of downed ships. This looks like outside in rather than inside out.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Heka’tan replied. With Persephia’s help he was fully armoured, a forest-green monolith.

  Arcadese was nearby and could barely contain his anger. ‘We were shot down.’ He wanted retribution.

  Heka’tan could relate to that. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it now.’

  ‘What about her?’ Arcadese gestured to the artificer who stood a way back from the wreck, her head bowed.

  ‘She’s coming with us.’

  ‘She’ll slow us down.’

  ‘Then consider it a mercy that no one else survived.’ The rest of the small crew were all dead. ‘I’ll carry her if needs be.’

  With an all human crew, the Stormbird had been retrofitted and re-appropriated as a diplomatic vessel, shedding armour and weapons for private chambers, archives and sleeping quarters. Considering the condition of the wreck, Heka’tan wondered at the wisdom of those measures now.

  ‘This work,’said Arcadese at length,‘does not honour warriors.’

  ‘We are warriors no longer,’ Heka’tan answered, tired of the Ultramarine’s dissatisfaction, and traced his finger down the jagged blast gouge.

  Arcadese stalked off, ignoring the artificer. ‘Do what your conscience dictates, brother.’

  Heka’tan was no longer listening. He dwelled on the broken Stormbird. It reminded him of another damaged vessel, on another battlefield

  They were fleeing the landing zone, Stormbirds little more than armoured pyres with his brothers inside.

  He was being dragged. Lucidity eluded him, ears ringing with the sound of the blast.

  Burned into his mind, Heka’tan saw his father engulfed by fire and death. For a moment he panicked, and struggled against the two Salamanders hauling him.

  ‘Where is he? What happened? Why are we leaving?’

  He tried to get free but he was too weak. His armour was broken and bloody.

  A beaked battle-helm, the forest-green streaked with arterial crimson, looked down at him. ‘He is gone, brother.’

  ‘What? No!’ Heka’tan struggled again, but a jolt of pain from his injuries crippled his efforts. ‘We have to go back.’

  ‘There is no back. There is nothing there. Vulkan is gone.’

  Railing that they had to turn around, they had to find him, Heka’tan passed out and saw only darkness.

  Suddenly aware of being watched, Heka’tan came to and looked around. A landman, one of the labour-claves that worked the sump farms at the periphery of Bastion’s major cities, stood watching him. He wore a rebreather, anti-rad coat and sumper-boots. In his left hand, he carried a tilling-stave used to test the depth of sump-ash.

  The landman, never before looking upon such a warrior, nodded.

  Persephia had gone after Arcadese. Heka’tan nodded back, then went after them.

  Negotiation

  I

  ‘Relinquish your weapons, brother.’

  Heka’tan kept his voice calm and level inside the gallery. Beyond it, through a vast stone doorway, was the auditorium where Bastion’s clave-nobles would hear their petition. As well as being sealed for the duration of the proceedings, weapons were strictly forbidden in the chamber.

  It was a fact the Ultramarine didn’t take well.

  ‘A Legiones Astartes does not surrender his arms. Prise my weapon from my cold, dead fingers – that is the only way a warrior of Ultramar would give up his bolter, so says my Lord Guilliman.’

  ‘And my Lord Vulkan counsels temperance in the face of impasse. That pragmatism not pride is the solution to seemingly irreconcilable discord.’ Heka’tan unloaded his bolter clip and sprang a shell from the breech before handing it over to a sanctum-marshal. ‘Relinquish it, Arcadese. We cannot negotiate armed and armoured. Nor can we go back.’

  The Stormbird was destroyed, and the march through the sump swamp had done nothing to improve Arcadese’s mood, even though Heka’tan had carried the artificer to speed their progress.

  ‘We will be defenceless.’

  Heka’tan returned a carefully impassive expression. ‘A warrior of the Legion is never defenceless, brother.’

  ‘Cold, dead fingers, remember. I am an Angel of Death. I am death.’

  Heavier-armoured marshals entered the gallery and levelled rotator-cannons at the Ultramarine.

  Arcadese drew his combat blade with a belligerent shriek of steel. ‘To take arms against one is to take arms against all the Legiones Astartes!’

  A stern grip on his wrist brought more anger but stopped any potential bloodshed in the making.

  Heka’tan’s hold was unflinching. His red eyes blazed with captured fire. ‘Think. Any killing here won’t further our cause, it will end it

  And us. Use the wisdom your father gave you.’

  Though reluctant, Arcadese saw sense and relented. Scowling at the relieved marshals, he relinquished his weapons.

  He was about to move forwards into the auditorium when a pair of marshals blocked his path.

  Arcadese glared at them.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Your armour, too,’ said the high-marshal from behind him.

  The Ultramarine shook his head and gave Heka’tan a rueful look as he unclasped a gauntlet. ‘This gets better.’

  Persephia moved in to assist him.

  ‘See that they are well tended,’ Arcadese said in a threatening undertone. The artificer merely nodded, carefully removing a vambrace.

  The high-marshal looked on. ‘Who speaks for the Imperium?’

  ‘I will,’ said Arcadese. He’d removed his breastplate and pulled the torso portion of his mesh under-layer away. Grotesque bionics were revealed beneath, a legacy of Ullanor where he’d fallen in battle to the greenskin. He’d been comatose and hadn’t witnessed the Emperor’s last war, his greatest victory. Instead, he’d awoken to a world that no longer made any sense.

  Heka’tan smiled, starting to remove his own battle-plate. ‘Can’t you tell he’s the natural negotiator?’

  II

  They stood before the clave-nobles wearing borrowed robes.

  ‘We are a sight to stir even the Sigillite to laughter,’ Arcadese had remarked upon their apotheosis to diplomats.

  Persephia had rejoined them later, having disappeared with the equipment to ensure it was properly stored.

  Though they still wore their boots and mesh leggings, the fact of being unarmoured still rankled at the Ultramarine and he took the artificer to one side when she returned. ‘I need you to do
something for me

  ’

  The rest of his request was lost to the sound of the great doors to the auditorium closing behind them.

  After a loud, concussive boom, a quintet of sombre figures emerged in the sepulchral gloom. They were under-lit by a dimmed lantern array that cast haunting shadows over their faces, and seated on a dark balcony. In a gallery looking down on the auditorium floor and the petitioners was a host of shadow-veiled faces – lesser nobles of Bastion, their politicians and leaders. Judges all.

  In the darkness, the vast auditorium’s form was only hinted at. Heka’tan discerned more hard edges, square and functional. The air smelled of stone and steel. The chamber was much more than its name suggested. It had multiple levels, corridors and conduits. Labyrinthine, the auditorium was just a part, and a small one at that. The Salamander’s gaze rested on the other petitioners.

  ‘Hard to believe Horus sent an iterator and not a Legion.’

  Arcadese looked over at the oleaginous men and women clustered around a besuited central figure. ‘I thought the enemy had disbanded the remembrancers, like us.’

  ‘Horus is a conqueror, brother. He wants his victories to become a part of history.’

  ‘Aye,’ Arcadese agreed, bile rising in his throat at the sight of the craven humans, ‘he seeks immortality, and to assert his cause is righteous.’

  Heka’tan muttered, ‘Tell that to my cold brothers on Isstvan.’

  The Ultramarine was only half-listening. His gaze went to a benighted balcony, high in the auditorium’s vaults opposite the clave-nobles. ‘Don’t be sure the Warmaster hasn’t sent warriors. Our ship didn’t crash itself.’

  A brazier ignited with azure flame, ending the conversation on a tense note, and illuminated the form of the high-marshal standing in the middle of the auditorium floor.

  ‘All attend,’ he boomed, his voice augmented by a vox-hailer unit attached to his mouth like breathing apparatus. ‘Senate is in session.’

  Arcadese scowled at the ceremony. Fighting the ork would be preferable to this. ‘Take me back to Ullanor,’ he grumbled.

  III

  Vorkellen affected a serious and professional air. Inwardly, he was ecstatic. This was his battlefield, a war in which even against the Legion he had the surer footing.