Scions of the Emperor Read online

  His shoulder plate was almost gone.

  The pain was horrific.

  With a roar, the boy shoved the last zombie off and punched.

  His fist broke through teeth, through brain, through the back of its skull, and proceeded to do superficial damage to the bulkhead behind it. Switching algorithms, the cyborg attempted to grab him with its talons, only to find itself securely pinned by the boy's arm in its face. Claws raked the boy's already tattered armour as he planted his heel in the zombie's midriff and, with a growl of effort, tore the cyborg's torso from its legs. He dug inside the creature's rotten abdomen for the motive cortex and crushed it.

  Walking unsteadily, the boy planted his foot on the shoulder of the zombie he had left skewered in its half-crouch against the bulkhead and pulled out his bardiche.

  Then, breathing hard, pinning it to the floor underfoot, he smashed the animate construct to pieces using the butt end.

  The boy quickly decided that there was no way his body was going to fit through the drop hatch, so he entered the crawler via the corridor. With a fifty-fifty decision to make, he went right. The stale odours of a contained environment had sunk deep into the metal, and in spite of the gale that howled through the cupola mere metres behind him, the corridor still reeked of oil and urine and sweat. The fit was tight, even for a boy, and he crawled on his belly along what was supposed to have been a wall for about five metres before his nose wrinkled from a fresher and fouler stink.

  He dropped out of the 'wall' and into a cylindrical chamber of scuffed metal, fluff-choked ventilator stacks and crumpled radiation grilles. An array of consoles folded into the ceiling, now the left-hand wall, but the attack and subsequent cannibalisation of the vehicle had caused them to drop down, gut-like spools of heavy cabling looping towards the ground. The consoles and wiring had been well chewed. The half-eaten pieces of one of the crew lay scattered over the equipment trays. The source of the smell. There was not much of a face left to speak of, but enough to suggest a familial resemblance to the body that the boy had found outside. A man, like him. There was no sign of exo-armour. The boy supposed that there had been no need for such protection before the hull had been breached.

  Paying the body parts a cursory glance, the boy turned his attention to the consoles. They still had power. Just the occasional brown-out and sputter where the cyborg zombies had chewed through the data insulation. He checked over the displays quickly but methodically, noting anything that pertained to an inventory or an equipment manifest. Food. Fuel. Weapons. Material. The boy tugged ruefully on the pauldron of his armour, able now to fit all four fingers of his right hand through the bite that the cyborg zombie had taken out of the plate. A repair was long overdue anyway. His body had not stopped growing yet, and he had already started to outgrow the plate.

  The downed super-heavy certainly represented metal enough to rebuild the entire harness, but only if he could hold it, which he knew he could not.

  The cyborg zombies would just be the beginning. Every ghoul and reaver with an auspex unit and a taste for metal would be drawn to a carcass this large and the boy knew that even he could not fight them all.

  The northern tundras taught a boy to be strong, but they also taught him to be wise, to fight only the battles that he could win and to forget those that he could not.

  Chewing thoughtfully on the digits of a hand that he had torn from one of the cyborg zombies in passing, the boy tapped at a likely looking display. Operating the data interface felt almost akin to an instinct. In the same way that he had emerged from the wreckage of Karaashi knowing how to fight and how to survive, he somehow understood the belligerent pictorial text by which he could navigate the crawler's computer system. It was as if it had been purposefully designed and built for his mind. Or his mind had been purposefully designed and built for these systems. The boy called up what looked like a blueprint, enduring the agonising lag intervals as the simplistic interface intelligence rerouted his requests to bypass cannibalised pathways.

  He tapped on the image as it finally manifested.

  The screen fuzzed.

  There was a strong room in the middle of the crawler, at the furthest point from the exterior, equidistant between the critical locations of the engine plant at the rear and the drive room at the front. According to the schematics in front of him it had its own parallel power supply, environment shielding, and instrumentarium.

  If there was anything of value here worth scavenging then it would be there.

  The boy punched the glass from the terminal, then ripped out the interface panel. He had already memorised the schematics and did not want to risk something or someone else finding the same information and cornering him in the tight passages of the hulk. Finishing off the zombie hand, his teeth grinding on bone, the boy spat metal nuggets into his own hand to stow for later.

  Then he took up his bardiche and crawled back into the corridor.

  There were six more cyborg zombies.

  Two scratched at the blast doors like mechwolves at a dirt grave. Another licked and gnawed at the control systems. Its electro-stimmed strength and undead patience had succeeded in tearing away the fascia panels, but the door lock's cryptex keys looked several orders of magnitude of complexity beyond the zombie's basic decryption wetware. The last three ate the lumes from the bulkhead sconces and the ceiling tubes. The few remaining lights flickered with their last life, casting the feasting zombies like the cyborganimated nightmares they were.

  On open ground the boy could take six. But in close confines like these, his armour already hanging off him like foil strips, he was not so confident. Not confident enough to charge headlong into another battle.

  But whatever was in that strong room that they wanted, he wanted.

  The boy undipped a grenade canister from his bandolier and rolled it into the anteroom.

  It clattered over the riveted wall-cum-floor, six sets of sense-augmetics swivelling towards the sound. He had picked it up from a wreck like this one, albeit much older, picked bare, forcing the boy to dig just for that much, but it had proven its value. He used it to carry water. When he had water. Now it was empty, but for a few grains of sand, but the cyborg zombies could not know that. Their sense-augmetics perceived a grenade, and their scavenger routines reacted to it accordingly.

  Tracking the canister with their 'eyes' they lurched out of the way, unbundling from the immediate vicinity of the blast doors and turning their backs as the boy entered.

  A scything blow from the bardiche beheaded the zombie nearest to the corridor. The boy took one more step inside, turning, using the combined momentum as he shortened the grip on his bardiche, wielding it like a sickle, and ripped it across the zombie's midriff. Ropes of atrophied intestine spilled from the cyborg's belly. The force of the blade's exit dragged the zombie forwards, lifted it a centimetre from the bulkhead. Flesh tore away from metal as the construct's abdomen sailed another metre after the boy's blade. Its legs folded to the bulkhead. The boy spun the bardiche back under control, turned again, then delivered an uppercut that carved a second zombie in two from groin to cranium. One half slumped to the ground, dead meat weighted with lead. The other spasmed in epileptic overload as it dragged itself with one arm and one leg towards the boy.

  By then, the other four had updated their algorithms.

  The air took on a tang of charge as electro-stimm grafts fired, filling the ante-chamber with the smell of soured meat and reheated blood. There was a pop of autopropellant as the nearest one still standing threw itself at the boy.

  He raised his bardiche like a barrier. The flying zombie smashed into it. Raw momentum forced it onto him. The boy backpedalled as it champed over the haft for his face. He roared, turning his upper body and driving the zombie up against the wall. Leaning into it, he relieved one foot, kicked back. The bone of his heel connected with a zombie's pectoral plating and knocked it to the ground, it fell on top of the bifurcated cyborg that was still crawling towards him, effective
ly terminating its spasms.

  The boy drew the bardiche across the cyborg he held pinned to the wall. Electrical discharge and sluggish fluid systems gushed from its chest as the boy back-handed the blade into the shoulder of another creature. Encased in thin plates of some ultra-dense metamaterial, the transdimensional blade simply banged off it. The actual damage might have been minimal, but the boy was strong enough that the force of the collision alone was enough to send the zombie sprawling.

  The boy made a mental note to return for that shoulder plating after the battle was done.

  Moaning cyborgs converged on him from all sides.

  Three left.

  He bit, kicked, chewed, butted, ripped metal and flesh from decaying bodies even as their energy-wreathed talons tore at his. Brute strength dislodged one against a wall, threw off another, gave him a handful of moments in which to beat one to total shutdown before the other two could recharge and return. One was marginally swifter, leaping back on spring-blades. The boy caught it by the metal protrusions of its chest-plates. Turning his wrist palm-up he made a fist, and then with the strength of one arm and a cry of rage drove the zombie's head through the shattered lume sconce in the bulkhead above them. The boy let go as electricity jagged through the cyborg's body, animating it for one last flurry of kicks. The last zombie was still running at the boy as he backed off. He stamped down on its leg. He timed it perfectly. The zombie's metal-plated shin snapped in mid-charge, crashing it into the bulkhead and slewing it across the boy before he skewered its spinal cord with his bardiche. A flurry of up-and-down strokes walked the crooked length of its spine until all four of its limbs lost motor control.

  Its jaw continued to gnash at the bulkhead, but the boy could live with that.

  The boy took a deep breath, then bent to wrench the exotic metal sheath from the fallen zombie's shoulder. He attached it to his belt, then moved to crouch over the control console embedded in the 'floor' by the blast doors.

  The zombies' unsubtle attempts at decryption had done little to damage the core hardware. The doors were an adamantium alloy sheathed with some kind of energy dampening ceramic, designed to withstand a melta bomb or a chain fist or even a ramming by another armoured vehicle. That kind of durability would hardly have been worth the value of the materials involved if the underlying systems could be forced so easily.

  A cursory examination revealed several layers of defence around the core spirit, a series of biochemical and genetic keys providing the initial authentication screen before expanding to present a string of increasingly hostile runephrase and pattern recognition demands. The cyborg zombies would not have broken its encryptions in a thousand years of trying. If the boy, or whatever else would be drawn to the vehicle after him, had not intervened then they would very likely have continued to attack the door lock with basic combinations until their bodies crumbled around their working brains.

  It took the boy about five minutes.

  The fight beforehand was only marginally less challenging.

  There was a dunk of disengaging locks and the blast doors hissed open.

  The boy stepped inside.

  The walls were lined with aluminium shelving, bolted to the walls in order to keep them and their contents secure over harsh and changeable terrain. It had presumably worked too, before the crawler had been thrown onto its side, dumping tins and jars and packets of dried food onto the bulkhead. With his foot, the boy sifted through his haul. He smiled. It was food and water, mostly. There were also some medicae supplies and ammunition dips, neither of which he had any great use for, but added to the metal he could scavenge from the blast doors and the zombies, plus some of the instrumentation from the sense nest to upgrade his own auspex unit, then this would have proven a worthwhile expenditure of energy and time. The boy toed a packet of dehydrated protein bars from another corpse.

  This one was better preserved than the last. His white skin, black hair, and the hand-sewn leather panels of his clothing remained uneaten. Only the crater in his back and the ring of curdled, melted tissue that surrounded it spoke of an unpleasant end.

  'Drop the spear…'

  He looked up from the ground, and froze.

  A woman in scuffed black exo-armour crouched behind a small barricade of tins at the other side of the strong room. She was holding a weapon that fell somewhere in the grey categorisation zone between a heavy pistol and a compact assault weapon, all twitching vanes and bulky power cells.

  The boy was fluent in over a dozen languages.

  He had mastered the inscrutable linguaforms of the storm giants, translated the hieroglyph code of the great tomb computers, the tongues of past and future and of the realm beyond, where machine-spirits dreamed, but he had never heard the words of mortal flesh spoken until then.

  'You are… like me.'

  'Throw it on the ground.' She emphasised her grip on the trigger. 'You can drop whatever you have in those belt pouches too.'

  The boy looked down at his belt. He looked back up.

  'No.'

  'I am holding the gun.'

  The boy smiled. His eyes were as cold as silver.

  He opened his mouth to speak again, to remind her that her crawler had been ambushed and immobilised, overrun by cyborg zombies, the basest vermin in the lands of shadow, and that she had been trapped in her own strong room. He would then have pointed out to her, for the boy did believe in fair warning, that with the charge level indicated by the colour gauges on the pistol's casing she would have at best one shot, one shot that she would in all likelihood miss, before he crushed that gun along with the bones of her hand. Considering the weapon, however, he hesitated. It was a plasma talon. He looked again at the marks on the body on the floor. He recalled the damage to the outer hull. He noted that the woman was wearing exo-armour. Both of the corpses he had passed inside of the vehicle had been clad more simply.

  'You are not one of the crew. You were one of the attackers.'

  The woman took a step forwards. 'I said drop the spear.'

  His smile broadened.

  'Last warning,' she snarled.

  'What is your name?' the boy asked.

  'What do you care?'

  The boy considered the truth of that, and nodded.

  'It took strength to bring down a vehicle this size. Its crew were too confident in its power. It made them weak.' He glanced at the bardiche in his hand, then threw it down. 'Take it. You have earned it. I do not need it.'

  The woman's gaze flicked to the discarded weapon, then up again. Her pistol's aim stayed fixed on the boy's face. The bars of glare on her visor masked her expression.

  'You could come with me,' she said. 'Between the cannibals and the crew I'm the last one left. My clan could use someone like you.'

  The boy gave it thought.

  He shook his head.

  'What is your name?' she said.

  'There is something I still have to do. When it is done… When it is done, perhaps I will be able to tell you.'

  Death closed in on Absyrtus like the mailed fist of a god. A fleet of grey ships, each of them powerful enough to lay waste to a world, shouldered through the planet's defence systems as if they weren't even there. Orbital platforms fired beam weapons pointlessly into void shields that barely flickered. The god's hand smashed the platforms aside contemptuously. It reached low anchor and struck its blow.

  At the head of the attack was a ship three kilometres long. It was the Fourth Horseman. No void ship this large should have still been descending, but the attack barque was heading for the planet's surface. Already, its heat shields were glowing red as it burned its way down through the mesosphere. It was brutish, merciless, unyielding.

  Mortarion stood on the bridge of the Fourth Horseman, his eyes on the main viewport, waiting for the murky clouds below to part and expose his prey to his sight.

  'Drop pods launched,' a vox-officer called out. 'Storm Eagle flights away.'

  Mortarion gave a bare nod of acknowledgment. H
e already knew. He had given the commands, and his Death Guard obeyed them as perfectly as if every ship and every legionary were extensions of his body. The hail of landings striking downwards was the sweep of his scythe. The Death Guard acted as a single entity, animated by his will.

  The Fourth Horseman plunged through the roiling clouds, searing them with its passage. The deck vibrated as the gigantic ship descended, the planet's atmosphere burning as it pushed back against the adamantine monster. The attack barque began to slow, but its landfall would still be a deathblow.

  As if defeated, the clouds parted. The city of Temnis appeared far below, a sprawling web, its walls no more than a gossamer perimeter thread. There were faint sparks on the wall's length as its guns opened up on the approaching colossus.

  Standing beside the primarch, Calas Typhon said, 'I can't imagine they think that artillery will slow us down.'

  'That is a gesture of defiance, not a tactic,' said Mortarion. 'Their primary defence will come at closer range, after we land.'

  'Their sorcery,' Typhon said quietly.

  'Their crime and their death sentence.'

  When the Death Guard had been tasked with bringing Absyrtus into compliance, Mortarion had gone over the data-slates reporting conditions on the world with cold, tightening anger. Absyrtus was an echo of Barbarus, with a sorcerous ruling class in power. Its physical conditions were harsh, and if they were not as toxic as those on Barbarus, that hardly mattered. It was the enslavement of the population by sorcery that had summoned his wrath. This was humanity's great torment. There would never be true freedom in the galaxy until its last traces had been exterminated.

  Liberation came through death. There was no other recourse for the poison that held Absyrtus in its grip.

  'What vox traffic from the other population centres?' Mortarion called out

  'We are picking up signs of alarm, but no organised response, Lord Primarch. Most of the traffic is calls for help and requests for instruction.'