Shadow Captain - David Annandale Read online

  None of this was surprising. What did surprise Caeligus was that there were frequent signs of much greater age. Some of the variations in construction appeared original. There were foundations, just visible above ground, that were not rockcrete. They were something else, a material that appeared to be almost organic. Caeligus had the impression of something that had been grown. He saw one building after another that had clearly been built atop a pre-existing structure. Yet he knew that, prior to the colonisation, Lepidus Prime had been uninhabited for as long as it had appeared in Imperial records.

  When the squad reached the bridge, he saw that it, too, was an anomaly. The surface of its span was not of Imperial construction. There were three arches across its width: one at each end, and one in the middle. The iconography chiselled into their surface was Imperial in subject, but the images looked like emendations. Caeligus suspected they had been added to wipe the memory of something blasphemous from the face of the marble.

  He walked to the foot of the bridge. On the other side of the gorge, the eldar were fighting hard. Most of them were mounted on skimmers the same deep crimson as their armour. Their movements through the trees were as sinuous as their strikes were rapid. They waged war with a quicksilver, alien elegance. They would be, Caeligus could tell, dangerous opponents.

  But what Krevaan had heard was true. Their position was untenable. They should retreat much further. Given the size of their force compared to the overwhelming numbers of orks, the eldar were using the wrong tactics. The orks were primarily infantry, and Caeligus could hear tanks and blasphemous Dreadnought imitations crashing their way through the forest. The eldar should be using their greater mobility and speed to full advantage. They should already have crossed the bridge, pulling back to return in harrying attacks against the ork flanks. Instead, they were holding their ground. They weren’t just risking their own annihilation; they were ensuring it.

  The only possible reason for not retreating was an attempt to defend the city. The eldar were mysterious, unknowable, and untrustworthy. But they were not fools. Yet a suicidal defence of a human city was an action so beyond fathoming that Caeligus wondered if the entire race was mad.

  ‘What do they think they’re doing?’ Havran asked.

  Caeligus shook his head. ‘If they think they’re doing anything other than offering themselves up to a slow slaughter, they’re mistaken. But their insanity is not our concern. Let’s get that bridge ready to fall.’

  Setting the melta bombs took a matter of minutes. The eldar were dying, but managing to hold the orks at bay. Caeligus knew them to be skilled warriors. He was still impressed. And more and more puzzled. They were fighting with last-stand desperation. Caeligus could think of few human forces that would give up so much for a city whose strategic value, in the final analysis, was nil. He believed in the defence of Reclamation, certainly. But the primary mission was the extermination of the orks. Perhaps the Salamanders would feel differently.

  He spoke into his vox-bead. ‘The bridge is ready, Shadow Captain.’

  ‘The orks are still on the other side?’

  ‘Both races are. We can cut off access to the west side of Reclamation at a moment’s notice.’

  ‘Good. Stand ready, but do nothing.’

  Vaanis was holding a detonator. He was watching Caeligus for the signal. The sergeant shook his head. ‘Shadow Captain,’ he said, ‘at this moment, neither the orks nor the eldar are approaching the city. We can finish our job here and join your assault.’

  ‘Remain at your current position,’ Krevaan said. ‘Do not destroy the bridge without my express order. Keep me informed of any changes in the situation. Am I clear?’

  ‘You are, Shadow Captain.’

  Krevaan signed off. Caeligus said to the squad, ‘We wait.’

  ‘For what?’ Havran asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Caeligus admitted. He was frustrated by Krevaan’s decision. He was not, however, embarrassed to reveal that he did not understand the reasons behind it. The captain treated information with the care due any great weapon. He was not deceptive with his battle-brothers. Caeligus did not think Krevaan had ever kept secrets that the company should have known about. But he guarded his thoughts jealously. Caeligus had never been able to read his face.

  He tried. He had tried earlier, during the briefing. Krevaan’s expressions were as opaque as if he were wearing his helmet. Caeligus knew the captain would not delay the demolition of the bridge without good motivation. He also knew that he would not be privy to those motives until Krevaan chose to reveal them. If ever.

  Caeligus accepted all of this, but it still frustrated him.

  He walked to the edge of the bridge. He watched the war on the other side. He watched skill struggle with ferocity. He saw the inevitable draw closer. He saw extraordinary ability ground down a bit at a time, pushed closer and closer to oblivion. Behrasi should be here, he thought.

  The other sergeant had a better appreciation for the finer aspects of tragedy.

  A few thousand metres to the south of the bridge, Behrasi was a shadow among shadows. He was positioned at the edge of the tree line, before the narrow strip of land that ran between the forest and the gorge. The orks’ flanking advance had one quality that Behrasi appreciated: it was direct. They were taking the most obvious route to trap the eldar in a vice: loop around the edge of the forest and back up again. They were charging at full speed, a mass of fury operating more on instinct than strategy. That made them easy to anticipate. Their route forward was obvious.

  ‘There is a certain luxury in a foe who obediently enters the ambush,’ Krevaan said.

  Behrasi would have sworn the Shadow Captain hadn’t been at his side a moment before. His years of service in Eighth Company had taught him to expect Krevaan’s sudden appearances, even if he was never able to see his commander approach. Krevaan inhabited the shadows like no other warrior in Behrasi’s experience. He carried the night within him. It was present, a cloak waiting to cover him, even in broad daylight. The shadows began in Krevaan’s eyes. They lived there and emerged from there, as if the captain could blind whatever met his gaze.

  Sometimes, when they felt particularly in the dark about the reasons behind Krevaan’s decisions, and they attempted a futile parsing, Behrasi and Caeligus would wind up at the point of their captain’s physical obscurity. Caeligus maintained that Krevaan was hard to read. Behrasi disagreed. He thought Krevaan was hard to see.

  At a superficial level, Krevaan’s features were not invisible. He had the same bleached pigmentation of all the Raven Guard. His features were sharp, the hollows of his cheeks and eye sockets so deep that his flesh seemed to be being absorbed by his skull. The effect was enhanced by his pronounced brow and cheekbones. His eyes were almost hidden. They were narrow, dark, glittering judgement. They saw everything, and revealed nothing.

  And always, the shadows. Was it possible that his features themselves cast them? Was his face his own mask? The idea had occurred to Behrasi more than once. At other times, he assumed that he was seeing Krevaan’s supreme skill at work. He had mastered wraith-slipping to the point that it was his natural state of being. To pass unseen and unheard until the enemy’s final moment had gone beyond instinct with Krevaan. It was no different from breathing, or from the beat of his hearts. Every action, at every moment, evaded the gaze of the observer. Behrasi took some pride in his own wraith-slipping, but even when Krevaan was standing directly before him, his impression of the captain was uncertain. Krevaan existed in the gaps between perception. It seemed to Behrasi that it was an act of conscious choice for Krevaan to step out of the shadows – a choice he rarely made. But this was not sorcery. It was a skill as material as the wielding of lightning claws.

  Now Krevaan stood beside him, surveying the ambush preparations. They could hear the orks coming closer; perhaps still as much as a thousand metres away. The trap was set about a quar
ter of the way up the east side of the forest. The land was still high here, the gorge still deep. To the north, the eldar and the rest of the ork army were setting the woods on fire with their struggle.

  ‘The greenskins do not have too many routes open to them,’ Behrasi said.

  ‘Oh?’ Krevaan gestured to the trees behind them. ‘Are those trees an impenetrable barrier?’

  ‘For this style of attack…’

  ‘Precisely. These orks are wed to speed. Yet our arrival was clear. They have chosen to ignore us because we complicate the narrative of their battle.’

  Behrasi smiled. ‘I don’t often think of the orks as complicated.’

  ‘Few do. Which is why the struggle for Armageddon was so desperate. The orks are fully capable of shadow raids. There are many dead warriors who have learned that lesson too late. Our good fortune is that these orks have not thought of that.’

  ‘They’re running with their first impulse.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The answer was so noncommittal that Behrasi asked, ‘You think they aren’t, Shadow Captain?’

  ‘No, I think they are. But there are elements here that we do not understand.’

  That was true. Behrasi gestured towards the battle in the north. ‘I don’t understand that.’

  ‘We are missing information,’ Krevaan said. ‘Our knowledge is incomplete, and that leads to mistakes.’ After a moment’s pause, he added, ‘As the orks are about to learn.’

  If Behrasi had spoken those words, he would have smiled. He imagined that Krevaan did, though he could not tell. It was night, they were in the shadows of the trees, and the captain was the ghost of a shape. Then, even as Behrasi looked, Krevaan was gone.

  Behrasi turned his attention to other shadows around him. They were the members of his squad. Each Raven Guard was in position, a motionless absence ready to uncoil and become a streak of lethal dark. Two of the absences were huge: the Dreadnoughts Karom and Raust. Four squads of Eighth Company were waiting at the edge of a long strip of land. They were only on one side, under cover of the woods. Krevaan had ordered this distribution of the forces. It doubled the extent of the kill zone. There would be no enfilading fire.

  ‘We won’t need it,’ Krevaan had said. He had picked a particularly narrow strip of land. There were only about ten metres between the forest’s edge and the drop into the gorge.

  The orks were close now. A huge snarl fell on the land. It came from engines, and it came from throats, and it was the sound of rampage. To the south, where the land dipped towards the plain, the orks appeared. At the head of the charge were warbikes. They fouled the air with exhaust, the noxious clouds darkening the night still further. They were followed by four-wheeled vehicles, each with a gunner on the rear turret. Behind them, after a gap, came the infantry.

  Behrasi was startled by how small the gap was between the vehicles and the foot soldiers. The terrain was rougher here, and the route narrow, forcing even the most reckless ork riders to slow down. Even so, the other orks were fast. They were keeping pace with their mounted kin. They had travelled many kilometres since splitting off from the main force, and been moving at a full run the entire way. As the horde stormed past him, Behrasi watched the greenskins closely. There was no sign of exhaustion. They ran as if they were fresh. They were sprinting, and they were speeding up.

  Krevaan had said it: Our knowledge is incomplete. The unanswered questions were about more than the eldar presence and their ferocious defence of Reclamation. There was something unusual about the orks. They were faster and more exultant than Behrasi was used to seeing, even in a race defined by its gigantic appetite for war. They were also bigger. The entire mob, even its most mundane members, was larger than the norm.

  Don’t underestimate them, Behrasi thought.

  His next thought was, Kill them.

  The lead bikes ran over pressure sensors, triggering cluster mines. Swarms of bomblets flew upwards and exploded. The first bikes caught the brunt of the blasts. They disintegrated in the fireballs of their fuel tanks.

  The orks coming behind overcorrected. One of them turned a hard right, and sailed into the air over the gorge. The ork screamed for the entire length of the plunge. Two more bikes went down, sliding and tumbling into the destruction of the others. Their explosions washed over the next. The orks’ momentum drove them into a growing wreck. Now the sounds of metal and flesh were shrieks instead of roars. More mines ripped out the bottom of one of the buggies. It veered sideways and flipped over, crushing driver and gunner.

  The way forward was blocked by a tangle of twisted vehicles and burning flesh. The orks at the front tried to stop, but the others, further back, could not see what was happening. They heard the sounds of war, saw flames and smoke, and pushed forward even harder. The carnage escalated. And when at last the horde began to react, to pull back from throwing itself on its own pyre, Krevaan’s whisper came over the vox: ‘Now.’

  Along almost the entire length of the ork advance, the Raven Guard struck. They began with frag grenades. The blasts rippled over hundreds of metres. The jostling orks were so crowded together that their bodies muffled the explosions. Limbs and organs rose into the air, bubbles in a tar pit. The horde reacted with rage and confusion. The orks were being hit everywhere, and they could not see their enemy. Some of the greenskins blamed each other. They caused eddies of riot as they fought and died.

  ‘Fire,’ said Krevaan.

  The night ripped the orks to pieces. Concentrated bolter fire smashed into them. The mass-reactive shells did more than slaughter. Their impact was such that the ork line was pushed back, closer to the drop. The more heedless ran, so intent on finding their enemies that they did not look at the ground beneath their feet. They pitched themselves into the void.

  The casualties were great. The surprise was total. It was also brief. The orks recovered quickly. They were not concerned with the deaths of their brothers, as long as they were still in the fight. They began to return fire. Their weapons were crude. The guns were ridiculous in comparison to the bolters. But the orks still held the numerical advantage, and the barrage of bullets and flame took a toll. Behrasi heard the vox-chatter of damage reports begin. There was a sharp cry as one of his battle-brothers in another squad was brought down.

  ‘Take them,’ Krevaan said.

  After one more burst of fire, the Raven Guard charged. Darkness snapped out from the trees at the orks. The Space Marines moved as one, maglocking their bolter rifles to their thighs and striking with lightning claws. A wall of ceramite bladed with adamantium turned the ork lines into meat. The Dreadnoughts closed too, unstoppable as glaciers. The horde staggered again.

  ‘Space,’ Krevaan had said, ‘will be the other side of our attack.’

  It was. There was nowhere for the orks to take another step back, but they did, and they fell by the scores. The war music changed again. The yells of rage were interrupted by the wet, staccato thuds of bodies hitting the rocks far below.

  ‘Forward!’ Behrasi called. ‘Push them forward!’ He slashed and stabbed with short, quick gestures. He opened throats and punctured eyes. He used the full weight of his power armour, taking no step without being grounded. He was a mass that would not retreat. Eighth Company advanced into the orks at a slow, measured pace while their claws struck with eyeblink speed.

  The orks fell beneath Behrasi’s tread. And they fell from the cliff. Krevaan’s trap was wiping them from the face of Lepidus. Still, they fought. They fought well. The more heavily armoured orks were with the main force, destroying the eldar. These were the lighter infantry. They were here because they could move faster. They were no match for Adeptus Astartes. But Behrasi’s initial impression was correct. They were bigger, more ferocious. They struggled against him with an incandescent energy. Each greenskin was war given muscle, flesh and bone. They chopped at him with cleavers and clubs, shot him point-blank
with shotguns that more than once blew up in the wielder’s hands. His armour turned away the blades and projectiles. The xenos filth could do little against him. Their battle was futile, their end preordained. Yet they attacked as if the Raven Guard were the ones on the defensive. They roared with a savage joy. They fought as if their victory was at hand until the actual second of their demise.

  The Raven Guard finished their advance. Behrasi stopped one stride away from the drop. The mop-up was brief. He and his battle-brothers gutted the last few orks and tossed them over the edge. It was in the final minutes of the operation, when the mass of orks was reduced to individuals, that he found himself most troubled.

  The orks were laughing at him.

  Their numbers were down to a tiny handful, the massacre clear, and the orks showed no frustration or any other sign of acknowledging their defeat. But they laughed.

  Behrasi silenced one more greenskin, and there were none left to fight. He looked up and down the line. The battle was over. The flanking force was gone. Apothecary Madaar was dealing with the wounded. There were only two battle-brothers who had fallen, and whose progenoid glands he had to recover. The ambush had been a near-perfect success.

  The laughter of the orks rang in Behrasi’s ears. He tasted something bitter. Its flavour was uncannily like that of defeat.

  Krevaan emerged from the smoke that surrounded the burning vehicles. ‘Your evaluation, brother-sergeant?’ he asked.

  ‘Their confidence in the face of their extermination…’

  ‘The laughter was troubling, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What is it that they know?’

  Krevaan shook his head. ‘There was nothing sly or cunning in that laughter. I believe it emerged from a fact of their being.’ He looked back towards the struggle near the bridge. ‘The question is not about what they know, but what we don’t. We are too much in the dark.’