Immortal Duty - Nick Kyme Read online

  As well as our former ranks, our clans were also scoured from us. To be Immortal is to be alone, but despite this abject form of penitence I felt as closely bonded to these warriors as if they were all from Gaarsak and not spread the length and breadth of Medusa.

  The World Eaters hit us hard with a renewed strength born of rage. Bloodied, they carried on unbowed, proving as tough and determined as we knew them to be.

  I had seen their war-making first hand, not as an enemy but as an ally.

  I earned my shame that day on Golthya, during the Great Crusade, not long after we were reunited with our father…

  Inside the Retiarius we reached as far as a cross-junction before our progress was arrested. A hulking Dreadnought almost filled the corridor ahead of us with its sheer bulk. Our sudden stall also prompted World Eaters to attack us from either flank. Our steady advance was stopped at the nexus of the junction, forcing us into an arrow wedge.

  Katus and three others stormed the monstrous war engine.

  One of its weapon arms was missing, and I suspected it had been in the midst of ground deployment preparation when we breached the vessel. Instead, it had been reassigned to stop us getting any further. Sombrak carried a melta-charge. So did three other Immortals in the boarding party. Allowed to detonate in the enginarium deck, these incendiaries would wreak havoc on the Retiarius.

  Leading with his shield, Katus took a bruising blow that dashed him against the wall. His power pack ruptured and the small explosion threw him forwards into the Contemptor’s lightning claw.

  He spat blood. It sprayed the inside of his helm and leaked out through a crack in his faceplate. He was dead before he hit the ground. Bolt-shells caromed off the Contemptor’s armoured hide from the other three Immortals who had charged with Katus, but they were no more than irritants. The Dreadnought battered two of them down with its claw, gouging one through his shield and crushing the other under its armoured foot when the Iron Hand lost his footing.

  The fourth Immortal was Mordan, the only one to be alone out of the group that had gone forwards to engage the monstrous Contemptor.

  He wasn’t alone for long. A renewed shield wall rushed up to join him.

  I tried to suppress a twinge of envy at my brother’s glorious death as I advanced on the Dreadnought. It swung again, blood boiling on its energised talons and filling the corridor with the stench of burned copper. Mordan and I put up our shields as one, but I felt every pound of the Contemptor’s piston-driven force rattling down through my body. It put us both on our knees.

  ‘Your mistake…’ I snarled, as Azoth waded into the gap left by Mordan and staved in the Dreadnought’s head with his thunder hammer. Sombrak’s volkite speared it through the chest in the same coordinated attack. It staggered as if unable to comprehend the immediacy of its own demise and fell back into an inert heap of metal.

  The Dreadnought’s death barely registered with the other World Eaters. They were of the killing mind now and would not relent until either they or we were dead. For the first time since we had boarded the Retiarius, the thoughts of the Iron Tenth and the World Eaters aligned.

  We rode the storm of their fury. Without the Contemptor to break our ranks, the close confines of the corridors suited us.

  ‘Take it!’ shouted Azoth, now part of the front fighting rank where he belonged. ‘Take everything they’ve got!’

  Hammer blows pummelled our collective defence, but we held. The shield wall held and we were able to advance.

  The base of my shield scraped the floor with every hard-won step. My shoulder burned from having to thrust it into the reverse side of my shield to keep the enemy from overrunning us. Our strength came from cohesion. If one link failed then our entire chain would unravel.

  They hit us; we hurled them back. Each time we stood firm and absorbed the punishment, the World Eaters became more frenzied in their attempts to break us, and more reckless.

  It took over eighteen minutes for us to kill every warrior-berserker in the warren. By the time it was over, blood slicked the walls, and drenched the deck beneath us, and we emerged into the next chamber weary but victorious.

  I had expected to see the enginarium. What we found was something quite different.

  A wide slope led from the corridor section’s upraised bulkhead. We barrelled out onto it, maintaining good order and swiftly redressing our ranks in the process. It led to a pit, little more than a hollow basin of bare, bloodstained metal. It had been recently cleansed but some marks remained, the indelible legacy of a Legion’s bloodletting.

  More of our Immortal brothers were waiting for us in the pit, impaled from groin to crown on ugly iron spikes. I counted thirty and balked at the realisation that so few of us had even reached the Retiarius, let alone died on it.

  I heard the clenching of fists in impotent wrath, the muttering of vengeful oaths against the World Eaters. I kept my own emotions buried, but felt the deepest stirrings of hate begin to flare like a hot, angry welt against my pride.

  Azoth had been right in his assessment – this was a suicide mission.

  Glory and honour were not the rights of the damned, and we were damned men. Our shame had made us that.

  My shame had condemned me to that fate. On Golthya.

  It had been a bleak, ugly world. We were arrayed against the kethid, a hairless, perversely humanoid alien species who had, like so many others during the coming of Old Night, subjugated the native human populace. Deep into the yawning mouth of Jreth Valley, we deployed clouds of phosphex to kill the grey-skinned aliens, but the kethid had fashioned anabatic winds through their crude science. It turned our deadliest, most loathsome weapon against us.

  How we burned, the green flame flaying our flesh and turning our iron to nought but charred matter…

  Croen died first, our company’s vexillary. Then Laeoc, Garric, Maedeg… until there was only me, Sombrak and a handful of others left. Our flank had been crippled and we too surely would have died were it not for the berserkers clad in blue and white that descended from on high.

  We fought with them, but only in a supporting role. It was meant to be our victory. The World Eaters lauded us for our courage. I stood at the shoulder of Varken Rath, a legionary of singular skill, who thanked me personally for my efforts. Sombrak and the rest of our surviving iron-kin made similar sword-brothers.

  Alas, our father did not see it thusly. I have wielded a breacher shield ever since.

  I have often reflected on the cruelty of that and how the battle of Golthya mirrored that aboard the Retiarius in both its desperation and ferocity.

  At the edge of the pit on board the Retiarius, the World Eaters were waiting for us. Unlike the ones we had defeated in the warren, these men were armoured more like gladiators.

  I knew them. I had seen them emerging from the burned metal teardrops of their deep insertion pods, through the dissipating phosphex mist that had claimed over half my company before the alien kethid attacked.

  Savage, even back then, the Rampagers were much changed.

  Unhooded, they wore their facial tattoos openly. Chains and thick veils of iron ringlets accented their white and blue power armour, the spikes entwined between the links presaging a darker aspect to come. Head to foot, they were swathed in gore, baked hard over their war-plate by the Retiarius’s immense enginarium heat. Without needing it confirmed, I knew in my marrow that the blood was Medusan, wrung from the tortured bodies of our brothers in the pit.

  One of the Rampagers stood out amongst the rest. He nodded towards us, I thought. Then I realised he was actually gesturing to me.

  ‘Gallikus…’ his voice boomed across the echoing space, resonating off the pit and the shattered breacher shields lining its walls. ‘Well met.’ It almost sounded genial, a greeting.

  It was, of sorts. Or rather, a challenge.

  It was Rath. There could be n
o mistaking my former comrade in arms. It was blunt nomenclature for a genhanced instrument of war that was anything but. He was an exemplary swordsman and wielded a blade in each hand as if to prove it. I needed none. He had gutted kethid on those blades like they were swine. Falax, they were called, or so Rath had told me.

  ‘If you want to reach the enginarium then this is the battleground you must cross to do it,’ he said, calmly gesturing to the pit where they had staked our brothers out to die. He nodded to me again. ‘I’ll give you a good death. You’ve earned that right.’

  I wanted to crush him. For his unintended condescension and the barbarous way his kin had treated mine. I almost heard our sword-bond break in his casual laughter.

  ‘Some yet live!’ cried Sombrak, who jabbed a finger at an Immortal twisting on his metal spit.

  ‘Blood of Medusa!’ Mordan’s gauntlets cracked as they clenched tighter around the handle of his shield.

  Rath was smiling. All the Rampagers were smiling.

  Azoth had seen enough.

  ‘Kill them! Avenge the fallen!’ he roared, and every Iron Hand in our slowly dwindling company drew swords and mauls.

  For what the Rampagers had done, we would have our vengeance at close quarters.

  Our desperate assault was over. All we had left was retribution and, some believed, a last chance for honour. Our immortal duty.

  To their martial credit, the World Eaters waited until we were halfway across the pit before they rushed to engage us.

  Then we clashed. There was no order to it, no unity. Just blood.

  We outnumbered the Rampagers two to one, but in the first eight seconds of the battle those odds were slashed drastically.

  As I closed on Rath, briefly allying with Mordan to bring down one of the Rampagers and watching the World Eater gut one of my brothers in return, I considered the very likely fact that we had been allowed to get this far. That we had been drawn here for the prospect of a good fight. Perhaps Angron needed his psychotics to have their blood up before he unleashed them?

  That arrogance would unstitch them, I decided.

  Rath and I met in the centre of the arena. I still had my shield – it would be a vital barrier against my opponent’s twin falax – but had drawn a gladius in lieu of my holstered pistol.

  Blade to blade. Honour demanded no less.

  At first, Rath seemed to appreciate the gesture but then his face locked up in an expression of pure, agonised rage. His eyes widened, the spontaneously rupturing veins turning the sclera a deep, visceral red. No trace of the man remained; now there was only a beast.

  For almost three minutes he hacked into my shield as I mustered a desperate defence. He only stopped when Sombrak tried to wade in and relieve me. Despite his murder-blindness, Rath reacted on instinct. He half-parried Sombrak’s thrust and let the blade pierce his side. With the other falax, he cut off Sombrak’s head.

  I sagged back, too exhausted to take advantage of Rath’s distraction. My breacher shield was split down the middle, the arm holding it numbed to lead. I watched Sombrak’s body slump to its knees and his head roll away into shadow.

  Then Rath turned, exultant with the kill, and came again for me.

  No martial quarter was given this time. Rath was drunk on murder-lust.

  His falax came in high and I twisted to let my shoulder guard take the blow. It found the vulnerable join between the metal plates of my armour and cut all the way down to the mesh beneath, cleaving through to my flesh. Blood welled instantly. I felt it seep into my armpit and gum around my chest.

  The second blade I blocked, turning it aside before aiming a stabbing thrust that sank my gladius two thirds of the way into Rath’s midriff.

  It was a debilitating wound, meant to slow and eventually incapacitate. Rath showed no sign of either. We were up close. I could smell his charnel breath. A savage headbutt smashed my faceplate, cracking the retinal lenses and sending the glass splinters back into my face. An elbow strike put me on one knee before Rath brought the falax round into my flank where it lodged like a nail.

  I screamed. He roared.

  The end was near, my immortal duty almost dispensed at last. I saw my breacher shield, smashed apart and discarded on the deck. Other shields and the bodies of my brothers had joined it.

  We should never have broken our ranks, given in to hate and fury. Ours was a colder creed, one of reason and the inviolability of tactical logic. We had erred, and now our atonement was due.

  Head bowed, I felt a chill progress through me. It matched the cold disembodied sensation of my cybernetics.

  But the blow did not fall. My neck and head remained attached.

  Instead, I heard the klaxon drone of emergency sirens as the arena was flushed with red urgent light.

  Azoth had fought his way from the pit. He was wounded, and his thunder hammer was bloody, but he still stood. He was venting the chamber, releasing everything into the void.

  The World Eaters had not cleansed the pit before. They had purged it in the vacuum of space. My brother had found the mechanism and did so again, only with us and our enemies present.

  In the few seconds I had left, I saw the grim resignation on Azoth’s face. This wasn’t how he had wanted it to end.

  Then I was yanked out by the venting pressure. I felt light and not just because of the absence of air and gravity. Rath’s last defiant roar was stolen in that rushed exhalation, pitched into silence in dark and starless space. He swung for me, out of compulsion from whatever fuelled his rage rather than petty impotence, but the slow cut of his falax missed its mark.

  Las flashes cut through the darkness, spearing us on their incandescent beams. Rath was shredded, so too were my brothers. I saw Azoth impaled through the chest before I was struck a glancing blow.

  I spun, fading in the endless void, just another piece of debris.

  The vista of the battling starships expanded before me, terrible and beautiful at once. Broadsides carved through kilometres of space. Explosions bloomed, abject in their quietude. The Gorgonesque was listing, her engines dead, her shields and armour stripped bare.

  Her warp drives going critical was like the dawning of a miniature sun, a silent flash of awesome light that seared my retinas. I rode the resulting bow wave of pressure, my armour crystallising with hoarfrost even as I felt the explosive burn of the Gorgonesque’s dramatic last breath.

  ‘I remember little more after that,’ I told my accusers, the Obstinate’s black deck resolving before me as I left the memory of the Retiarius behind, ‘save waking in your apothecarion and being marched to this hangar bay for summary judgement.’ I could not keep the bitterness from my voice.

  ‘You believe you are being treated harshly, Legionary Gallikus?’

  I declined to reply, my head bowed with the cold weight of the axe blade upon my neck. The dead stares of my decapitated brothers frozen on the deck seemed mocking. And I was about to join them.

  ‘Before you kill me,’ I said at length, ‘tell me, did we break the blockade?’

  My accuser came forwards into the light. I heard some gesture he made, the whirring of old servos in a wrist or elbow, and felt the pressure against my neck ease. I looked up into the face of an Iron Father, but not one that I recognised.

  He was badly scarred and his left cheek and part of his skull shone dully in the half-light. A tight grey beard like wire wool was shaved into a spear-tip on a jutting, imperious chin. The venerable Iron Father looked down upon me like I was the dirty oil he had to scrape from his weapons.

  ‘We failed,’ he replied. ‘We were weak.’

  There were two others with him, a Salamander and one of the Raven Guard.

  ‘This is barbaric…’ I heard the son of Vulkan mutter, despite the low hum of the Obstinate’s impulse engines partly masking his voice. His eyes flared like burning coals.

&nbs
p; The Raven Guard gently raised his hand, warning the Salamander to silence, and they stepped back as one. This was Iron Hands business, conducted in the Medusan way as our father had taught us.

  I was finding it hard to process the situation, the incongruous presence of the other Legion warriors, the mood of fatalism emanating from the Iron Father. Then there was the last figure in the room with me, my would-be executioner, one I felt I recognized and that stirred a disquiet in me that I could not explain at the time.

  ‘Then what are our primarch’s commands? Is Horus defeated? Is Isstvan still contested?’ I had so many questions. ‘What of the Retiarius?’

  The Iron Father shook his head, sadly. ‘It’s over, Legionary Gallikus. You were the sole survivor of the attack on the Retiarius. The war for Isstvan is done. We lost…’ He paused, as if to telegraph the blow that was coming so I could be ready for it. ‘Ferrus Manus is dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ I tried to rise from my knees but a strong hand held me down. ‘Release me!’ I snapped, turning to meet the haunted eyes of an old friend. For a moment, I let slip my other concerns. ‘Azoth?’

  He gave no recognition of the fact I had just spoken his name. I thought he had died and yet here he was, aboard the Obstinate. But something was very wrong. His flesh looked cold, gelid, like the severed heads in front of me. Azoth’s fire had been extinguished. Ice filled his veins and countenance. A dead man stood before me with the axe, dead and yet animate, bereft of any sense of cognition that would mark him out as the warrior I once knew.