Spear of the Emperor - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  I’ve lived my life around the Emperor’s Angels, and that perception of the world leaves a mark on their psyches. It would for any being in the same circumstances. That unrivalled ability to act, to change the world around them through a level of violence no other individual can match alone… It makes some warriors proud, it shifts others’ perceptions without them realising, and it can easily ripen into something darker beneath the surface. Things like that can fester.

  That day, Amadeus’ review of Tyberia’s response amounted to three words.

  ‘Acceptable. Keep training,’ he said, and left us alone.

  Included in our master’s reflections were his brief considerations of his three helots. He noted that the Chapter had assigned him three ‘efficient and diligent’ slaves for this operation. Though he rarely made specific references to any of us, he added a postscript regarding Kartash. One that matched my own perceptions.

  ‘I find his piety an olfactory irritant at times,’ Amadeus dictated, speaking of Kartash as if all three of us were not present, as if we weren’t the ones recording his words for the Chapter archives. ‘My Helot Primus carries the scent of blessed weapon oils and sacred incense with an intensity that becomes almost cloying.’

  I had noticed this. The holy scent permanently wreathed my fellow slave like an aura, and I’d wondered if there was some sin or chastisement in his past that necessitated this effort at holiness. Tyberia, in her cringing way, insisted it must have been a dark sin indeed, and regarded our superior helot with naked suspicion, as if his secret crime were contagious. Kartash, with infinite patience, assured us that it was a matter of simple devotion. I wondered if he had once held aspirations of priesthood, but when I asked, he gave a sad smile and said no more.

  Amadeus disregarded the matter as meaningless. It didn’t affect our competence, and thus it was tolerable.

  4

  It took a further forty-three days before we reached Nemeton – a journey that would have taken mere hours before the rise of the Great Rift extinguished the Emperor’s Light. More of the crew died. Dozens, then hundreds, and eventually thousands. Some starved when the botanical laboratories rotted. Some were poisoned by tainted water when the aquapurifiers failed time and again. Some killed themselves when they realised how far from the Emperor’s gaze we truly were.

  Because of our rank among the most valuable humans aboard the vessel, we were protected from privation. Amadeus wouldn’t let us die. Yet the innards of our warship became a necropolis. I organised funerary teams to gather the bodies and, for a time, in the name of purity, the shipboard furnaces burned flesh and bone as often as promethium fuel. Soon enough the dead were reprocessed as nutrient pastes for those of us that still lived. I don’t need an eidetic recollection to remember that foul flavour. Sometimes I still wake with the taste in my mouth.

  In Devout Abjuration stank like a charnel house. The air scrubbers couldn’t filter out the funeral pyre reek. Even Kartash’s holy incense, so pervasive in our communal chambers, was often overwhelmed by the smoky stench throughout the ship.

  When at last we drifted into the Ophion System, a sensation that was too weary to be called relief spread through the remaining crew. As the final day of our journey dawned in the light of Nemeton’s weak blue sun, our survivors numbered only ten thousand, one hundred and seventy.

  At the system’s very edge, the Emperor’s Spears strike cruiser Hex drifted into our engagement zone, its cityscape’s worth of weaponry rolling to bear on the far smaller frigate limping into their territory. She was haloed by fighter wings that painted the void with needle-thin plasma contrails, and was escorted by two destroyers, each one a match for the Abjuration in its own right.

  The Hex had been waiting for us. Deep-void satellites and monitoring outposts had evidently marked our approach weeks before our arrival. She demanded that we follow her in towards Nemeton, where we would be boarded and our vessel inspected.

  ‘If you refuse,’ her captain informed us, ‘you will be destroyed. If you raise your shields or run out your guns, you will be destroyed. If you seek to leave the system, you will be destroyed. Do you understand these terms?’

  We understood.

  ‘Will you comply?’

  We complied.

  II

  A WORLD OF STORMS

  1

  The Hex was a long blade of a ship, an ancient strike cruiser of a kind rarely seen in Imperial skies, modified down the generations with additional weapons, fighter bays, hull space and armour that should have left her hideous. She was a killer, a grand lady thousands of years old, and she looked both cantankerous and utterly lethal. I loved her the moment I set eyes on her.

  In Devout Abjuration sailed at her side, lost in the larger ship’s shadow. The Hex’s captain refused any further contact after the curt command that we sail with them to Nemeton.

  They guided us in over the course of several hours. Their approach vector seemed erratic at first, as the Hex flew in long arcs, avoiding entire spheres of space, rather than cut a straight line to the distant planet. The Abjuration shifted and swayed around as she followed her newfound sister. When we were slow to course-correct and cling to the Hex’s trail, we were granted a single, brief message from the Hex’s captain, ordering us to follow her with more care if we valued our lives.

  ‘Mines,’ Kartash said. ‘They’re leading us on a course through minefields.’

  For that to be true, it spoke of a conflict exceeding our bitterest expectations. Tyberia looked at him as if he’d spoken rank idiocy. ‘No one would mine their home system,’ she said.

  Kartash was implacable. ‘The Spears have.’

  He saw that Tyberia was ready to object, doubtless citing the threats to navigation and the unprecedented nature of such a defence, but he quieted her with naked logic. ‘Can you suggest any other plausible reason for the divergent courses being plotted?’

  She could not. Nor could I.

  Before we reached orbit, Amadeus ordered us to machine him into his armour. It took two hours and forty-seven minutes of chanting, blessing and ritualised effort before the final section of battleplate was drill-locked into place. Once it was done, he moved through his full range of motion, articulating every joint to its extreme, repeatedly testing every compression and lengthening of his fibre-bundle muscle cabling. This took a further three minutes and forty seconds.

  When he was satisfied, he stood motionless. Recognising the signal to continue, we bound his pistol holster to his hip, and fastened his belt pouches and grenade arsenal around his waist. Last of all, we presented him most reverently with his deactivated powerblade, sheathed in a scabbard of priceless leather from the flagellated backs of Terran pilgrims, and his heavily modified bolter, which required one of the servitors to lift in its hydraulic hands.

  Many Space Marine Chapters have traditions of naming their weapons, granting honour to the machine-spirits within. Amadeus, an exemplar of the Mentor Legion, was disinclined to follow such a custom. His sword was named Fulvus only because its creator had named it so. The blade was a gift, granted to Amadeus by a forgewright of the Desolators Chapter. Along its length were the words ‘For the blood of traitors, I thirst. For the honour of angels, I slay.’ I always cleaned that acid-etched declaration with the care of handling a holy relic. To my master, the words were nothing more than blood ­channels to make the blade more efficient.

  Amadeus was similarly without sentiment with his firearm. He referred to his boltgun as VCK-XA-1719, the weapon’s serial number, assigned when it was forged aboard one of the Mentors’ foundry ships a century ago.

  Once he stood ready, he conveyed no gratitude to us. We were slaves, we expected none. He simply walked from the chamber. I watched through his eyes as he moved through the ship, slowed by needing to force jammed bulkheads open, making his way around hallways blocked by debris.

  He paused on one of t
he remaining observation ramparts lining In Devout Abjuration’s damaged spine. There he ­lingered, watching the ringed planet Nemeton turn beneath him. Elara’s Veil, the nebula, stained the stars red around us. Behind us, like a bruise in the void, was the chasm of black poison we call the Cicatrix Maledictum, the Great Rift. Back the way we came was the true Imperium, and the Straits of Epona running through the wound that cut mankind’s empire in two. It would be visible from the surface of every world in Elara’s Veil as a rip torn across their skies. There could be no starker reminder of the galaxy’s frailty.

  And there was Nemeton, home world of the Emperor’s Spears. Its surface was half hidden by a thick caul of cloud, and its visible landmasses were slivers of geography amidst oceans that drowned most of the planet. Lightning flickered in the guts of those clouds, bathing the surface in storms. The Rings of Nemeton, kaleidoscopic from afar, were a ­danger to navigation up close. To call them mundane would do an injustice to their pale blue beauty, but in orbit they were nothing more than rocks of ice, ranging from the scale of mountains to the size of my master’s fist.

  Amadeus had meticulously studied his destination. We all had. Now we witnessed the memorised lore playing out before our eyes, in harmony with the active scanning data from the ship’s sensors spilling down each of our retinal feeds. We looked upon the one and only world of the vast blue sun Ophion, on the edge of Elara’s Veil.

  We also saw Bellona for the first time. The archives stated that when the tribes of Nemeton looked skywards through the rain clouds, they saw their world’s bright moon as the ­Emperor’s eye gazing down upon them. The primitives apparently considered this a sign of favour for their storm-choked planet. My view was somewhat less romantic. Scan-lists and population factoring streamed down the inside of my eyes, detailing Bellona for what it truly was: an allied Adeptus Mechanicus forge-moon of grey industry and silver rock. All our readings told the same tale: a moon of armoured spires and bunkered fastnesses, sheltering beneath an orbital defence array that bristled with torpedo platforms and shipyard docking rings. Bellona was militarised almost to the extent of a true forge world.

  It was the Bellonan fleetyards that captured my master’s eye more than all else. Though they stood mostly empty, the significance of their scale wasn’t lost on any of us. This was no mere shipyard; this was an orbital installation the size of a hive city, constructed to serve an armada. I watched through his eyes as a frigate in the red-and-black plating of the Adeptus Mechanicus slowly pulled free of her moorings, backing out on thrusters for several ­minutes until she had the clearance to come about and sail away from orbit.

  The fleet in-system was still sizeable, a portion of what was surely a far larger host. The Hex was the largest capital ship, sistered with a strike cruiser of almost equal size, plated in broken armour of burnished gold. She was docked, buried in repair gantries, swarming with mechnician shuttles. Whatever foe she’d been fighting before coming to Nemeton had mauled her almost unto death. A lion’s head showed on her flank, jaw wide, fangs bared, roaring into the void. I heard Amadeus exhale softly.

  ‘Scan that vessel,’ he ordered Captain Engel on the bridge.

  The reply came back at once, ‘The Kai’manah, lord.’

  Amadeus made no comment on the existence of a vessel believed to have been destroyed a century ago. He merely tuned his vox-link back to our private channel.

  ‘Record all you see,’ he commanded us. ‘And take note of what you don’t.’

  ‘The fortress-monastery,’ said Kartash. ‘I see no sign of a Chapter fortress on Nemeton.’

  ‘Exactly so,’ Amadeus concurred. ‘Further notation – one of the capital ships in high orbit is a Cardinal-class heavy cruiser in the colours of the Emperor’s Spears. A most adamant violation of the Codex ­Astartes.’ He sounded cold, but I took the words as an observation rather than a judgement. They required no reply.

  ‘Do you disapprove, master?’ Tyberia ventured, in her ingratiating tone. It was as if she spoke only to show Amadeus that she was paying attention.

  ‘I do not know, Helot Tertius. The law of the frontier seems to prevail here. Desperation has forced their hands.’

  Nor was it the only sin on display. We counted six more vessels in the flotilla that conformed to Standard Template Construct patterns barred from use by the Adeptus Astartes. A Space Marine Chapter using Imperial Navy vessels, scavenged or otherwise, within its own fleet was most severely punishable in other, better circumstances. But it wasn’t his place to offer judgement, let alone punishment. He’d come to observe. Imperial forces on the Nihilus side of the Rift were known to be fighting against destruction. Nothing would be achieved by taking them to task on transgressions of law made in the name of staving off extinction.

  Nemeton’s principal defence in the absence of a fortress-monastery – and if one chose not to count the incredible might of Bellona itself – was its orbital array. Thousands of weapon satellites controlled by monotasked machine-spirits orbited great launch platforms armed with torpedo banks and laser batteries. An Imperial Navy Grail-class carrier had been void-beached and converted to form the core of a high-orbit battle station. Her name no longer showed, her identity banished with her new role. Bellonan fighter craft flitted around her, ugly wasps of Martian red iron.

  All of this might in the night sky, defending barbarians that knew next to nothing of its existence. From the surface, the array’s individual components would blend in with the starfield and Nemeton’s beautiful rings.

  Part of Lieutenant Commander Incarius’ preparation necessitated studying the belief systems of Nemeton’s tribes. They were barbaric in every definition of the word: a melange of blood sacrifice and sky worship beneath the gaze of ancestor spirits who supposedly dwelled at the God-Emperor’s side.

  ‘They are as ignorant as the Cretacian clans,’ my master had once commented aloud in his cell, while reading translations of ancient Nemetese scrolls.

  ‘Master?’ At the time Tyberia had looked up from where she knelt in silent contemplation across the chamber. Her half-lidded eyes showed her surprise in the shadows of her hood. ‘You have need of us?’

  Our lord ignored the question, going back to his reading.

  On the observation deck, Amadeus still stared at the world turning so slowly beneath us. The landmasses of Nemeton, such as they are on an oceanic world, possessed no buildings above a primitive level of technology. The planet’s island-continents and archipelago chains seemed wholly given over to forested mountains. Everywhere we looked, everywhere we scanned, there was nothing but knuckly peaks capped with snow, their sides blanketed in evergreen trees.

  Of high civilisation we saw no sign, only the memory of cities. Ruins, abandoned generations ago, now devoured by the forests or sunk into the landscape. More curious still, these ruins were of marble, yet orbital auspices denied the presence of that precious stone occurring naturally on Nemeton. The marble was quarried elsewhere in the galaxy and brought to this world through the void.

  Someone had tried to imprint civilisation here. Evidently they failed.

  Some unspoken instinct lifted my master’s gaze from the watery world, to the heavens lit a hazy scarlet by the trails of Elara’s Veil. Dust. Reflective dust, scattered in bloom-clouds and trailing tendrils, too thin to hinder visibility or interfere with a warship’s systems. Just a smattering of random light on the cosmic canvas.

  Amadeus left the observation deck. He didn’t need to tell anyone of his destination. There was only one place he would be going. I informed Captain Engel that our master was on his way.

  2

  We weren’t permitted to fall into orbit. Instead, as the Hex completed its overbearing escort run, its captain commanded us to anchor in the void out of deployment range. Three other vessels left Nemeton’s orbit on intercept courses. Our sensors also chimed as we detected the minimal radiation from tight-beam auspex scans originat
ing all the way from the forge-moon Bellona.

  The Cardinal-class cruiser and two destroyers drifted into optimal lance range, yet none of the ships granted us a visual link upon our requests. They didn’t greet us or welcome us. They circled us in loose formation, weapons locked. Their stellar dance seemed a performance of almost weary aggression. Every ship in the defence fleet showed markings of recent wounds.

  The Hex contacted us first with a less-than-charming hail consisting of a single word.

  ‘Well?’

  My master gestured for the vox-link to remain open. ‘I am Lieutenant Commander Amadeus Kaias Incarius of the Mentors Chapter, commanding the warship In Devout Abjuration. We ran the Straits of Epona and emerged forty-three days ago.’

  There was a pause. The Hex’s captain’s voice, crackling over the bridge’s speakers, was inhumanly low but unmistakably alive. Not a servitor, nor a machine-spirit. A Space Marine commanded the strike cruiser.

  ‘And here you are,’ was the man’s answer. ‘Now state your purpose.’

  ‘I was sent by my Chapter Master, Nisk Ran-Thawll, to act as emissary to the Sentinels of the Veil.’

  ‘Very well. What is it you wish to say to us, emissary?’

  Amadeus hesitated in the face of their abruptness bordering on hostility. I could almost feel him weighing his words, and deliberating on how much truth they should be laced with. He wouldn’t lie, I was certain of that, but there are degrees of honesty in all diplomatic engagements.

  He told the truth. The whole truth, as I understood it then.

  ‘I was sent to see if Elara’s Veil still holds against the enemy. To see if the Lions and the Spears still live, still fight.’

  ‘We still live,’ came the reply. ‘And we still fight.’

  Amadeus waited for more. After ten seconds, it became clear that more wasn’t coming.