Lion El'Jonson- Lord of the First - David Guymer Read online

  It makes you look like a peasant, Griffayn of the Firewing had once said.

  'What can you tell us?’ said Stenius. The courtly, Calibanite manner of speaking whilst actually saying little was one that many of the older Terrans in the Legion found irritating. Stenius, though he masked it as well as any lord of Caliban, was assuredly one of them.

  Duriel frowned at the slate in his hand.

  '123997.M30. Two Chartist ships lost in the warp en route to Muspel. 125997.M30. A Mechanicum ark transiting the subsector is forced into an emergency translation. It isn't heard from again, presumed lost with all hands. 129997.M30. The first brigade of Muspellian irregulars is lost in its entirety, five thousand men-at-arms, in transit to a training exercise aboard the Muspel XII astropaihic relay station. No reasons given and no trace of the missing conveyor and its escorts is ever found. 131997.M30. A fire aboard one of the orbital substations effectively cuts off nine-tenths of the planet from vox and auspex coverage. That was six months ago. It still hasn't been repaired. A rash of accidents among the resident Mechanicum, apparently. And the transport that was supposed to be bringing in a fresh detachment along with a strengthened skitarii detail is months overdue.'

  'You make it sound like the Bermudan Tryptych,' said Stenius.

  'The what?' said Redloss.

  'An old Terran myth,' Duriel explained. Stenius looked at him, surprised. 'The libraries of Manraga were well conserved, brother, and its masters encourage broader study.'

  'There are no oceans left on Terra,' said Stenius, 'and yet we still tell ourselves tales of captains driven mad and ships lost without trace.'

  'Humans will always need their ghost stories,' said Duriel. 'It was the Ninth that brought this world to compliance, was it not?'

  'The original inhabitants of Muspel had regressed into a stale of savagery,' said Redloss. 'Barbarians, squatting in the ruins of Dark Age cities, crying out for the primitive gods that had abandoned them. According to Sanguinius' own writings the native populace was entirely passive, not a trace of choler in its humours at all.'

  'The Ninth didn't find even a single weapon,' said Stenius. 'Not so much as a flint axe.'

  Redloss crossed his arms over the broad curve of his breastplate. 'I've never seen anything like it anywhere.'

  'By every iterator's account, the Blood Angels left the world perfectly compliant,' said Stenius.

  A tectonic rumble passed through the command deck superstructure, and a burst of thrust from the Invincible Reason's colossal drives slowed her for the final half-million-kilometre coast into the planet's orbital fleet anchorages. Across the low wall of display panes that encircled the dais Duriel could see the icons of eighteen night-black battleships as they joined the flagship in her deceleration. Their actual appearance, as glimpsed through the flagship's crystalflex screens, was far less ordered or majestic. A positional thruster out of alignment. The faintest wobble in bearing. The oily shimmer of rolling shield blackouts. Others were missing sensor masts, or looked as though they had faced down an asteroid and lost. The scars of Rangda were fresh on all of them. And not just the ships. Only the Lion himself knew the true toll that the third and final xenocide had taken on the Legion. It was a burden he chose to bear alone. Duriel sighed.

  They would always be the First, envied and admired by all, but the X, the XIII, the XVI, even the XVII in spite of their own setbacks, all threatened to surpass them in strength and in deed now.

  But they had done their duty.

  The Dark Angels always did their duty

  'I wish I knew what we were doing here,' Stenius muttered, interrupting his commander's reverie. 'The warp claims its share of shipping, and some regions have always been more treacherous than others. A few hundred die-hard malcontents intent on disruption is only to be expected on a newly compliant world, even one as ostensibly peaceable as Muspel, whatever the Ninth claims.'

  Duriel gestured towards the peaceful pirouette of void-anchored ships in the crystalflex, a pair of semi-retired heavy cruisers wearing a collage of obsolete heraldries; a handful of destroyers and corvettes, all drifting in near-total EM-silence. A couple of the lighter escorts were signalling contradictory distress codes, one engine fire and one full-blown mutiny, but the rest were eerily quiet.

  'Does this not seem amiss to you, brother?'

  'This is beneath us,' said Stenius. 'Unless it's the Lion's intention to bring slight upon the Angel.'

  'That is beneath you, my son.'

  The three knights turned. Stenius blanched and dropped to one knee, head bowed, chin to his plastron. The command deck's titanic blast doors ground into the receiving blocks as Lion El'Jonson, primarch of the First Legion, swept up the ascent ramp to the dais.

  Huge in his intricately crafted harness of powered plate, a gift from the Emperor Himself, the Lion was an enigma to the laws of reality, somehow achieving the feat of being larger, greater, than the mighty Gloriana that conveyed him. Gilt scrollwork decorated the curved black ceramite, ornate reliefs depicting forest scenes. At one hip, the artificer edge of the Lion Sword rested in a sheath artfully fashioned to evoke folded leaves. In a holster worn from the other was the Fusil Actinaeus. The Emperor alone knew how many lives of human, xenos and sentient Al it had terminated since its conception in the Dark Age of Technology, before He had consigned it to the bottomless vaults of the First Legion's armouries. But it had found a fitting home in the left hand of the secular enlightenment's foremost god of war.

  The Lion moved as a predator moves through the forest, all about him hush and stillness as he swept his fur-edged cloak from behind him and took his seat in the carved wooden command throne. His majesty went beyond mere physical stature, his brooding presence alone enough to cow a hall of proud transhuman knights. The Lion was warrior above all other warriors. Seventeen brothers he may have had, but that was far from an acknowledgement that any had been made even remotely equal or that the Lion of Caliban was not the most singular of beings.

  Drawing a crown of dark ceramite from his head, allowing his long mane of russet-gold hair to fall across over his shoulders, he leaned forward, eyes the same brutal green of Caliban's forests taking in two dozen display panes all at once. The Dark Angels were capable of swift and incisive action, but in every endeavour, in peace or in war, it was the unseen hand of the Lion that guided them, providing for each of his sons a piece of the larger picture that he and he alone could see.

  The universe waited on his word.

  He made it wait.

  'Board those ships,' he said, a voice so authoritative it could never have been mistaken for human.

  'Which ones, Sire?' said Duriel.

  'All of them.'

  * * *

  III

  Aravain reached up into the cargo netting in the overhead space, carefully hanging the bundle of dried leaves and seed cones. When he pulled his hands away, the scent on his gauntlet was that of another world, a dark and hateful world, a world that had never wished anything for Aravain and his kind but the bloodiest of deaths. He closed his eyes and drew breath, and for the briefest of moments the reek of promethium and the howl of turbofans pitched for vertical uplift was no more. In its place, the lethal, still-wild dignity of the mountainous Northwilds, his home, still reigned. He opened his eyes, allowing the launch bay klaxons and engine noise to again pass his mental guard. The simple charm he had set bounced and turned on its wire as the rest of the squad trouped up the boarding ramp. He made a quick sign in the air, the emerald leaves of his psychic hood breathing the ice-cold winds of Mount Sartana over the nape of his neck, as he mouthed a prayer against the dangers of the void.

  'Brother-knights,' barked the squad sergeant as he came last up the ramp.

  His name, Kaye, had been etched in curving filigree into the edgework of his armour, the plasteel oiled and lapped to a dark mirror-shine. An elaborate hierarchy of symbols identified him as a knight of the Third Order, 15th Company, commander of Tactical Squad 'Martlet'. The emblem of the
Stormwing was etched into his breastplate. And it appeared again, more discreetly, alongside the unit markings on his right pauldron, together with a deliberately obtuse arrangement of subordinate sigils that denoted rank in the parallel echelons of the hexagrammaton. Each new examination of his armour revealed heraldic icons of secret orders more obscure even than these, enfolded within leaf and laurel motifs.

  He drew a long, cross-hilted Calibanite warblade from its sheath.

  'On the eve of battle, we give reverence.'

  The squad sergeant turned his sword point down to the gunship's deck plates and then went to one knee, his battleplate purring as he lowered his brow to the crosspiece. The Dark Angels crowding the troop aisle similarly took the knee, swearing on blades and bolters.

  The mortal woman already strapped into her too-large restraints reached instinctively for the confiscated imager unit that should have been in her satchel. From the corner of his eye Aravain saw her frown in annoyance.

  'For the Lion and Caliban,' Kaye declared.

  'For the Lion and Caliban,' came the rejoinder.

  The sergeant rose with a whirr of servo-assisted knee joints as the rest of the squad backed into their restraint harnesses.

  Aravain found himself directly opposite the woman. Savin, Kaye had called her. She flashed him a nervous smile, which he ignored. Kaye banged his fist on the roof, reaching over the high rim of his gorget to manually vox-click a ready signal to the cockpit. The shriek of the turbofans redoubled in intensity. The human woman muttered her own prayer as the hatch swung up to mute the launch bay din and locked. Aravain's long moustaches obscured a thin smile. Her carefully secular phrasing, even in the midst of prayer, amused the cynic in him. That she was diligent enough to use it even whilst in the grip of fear of what was to follow spoke of an inner courage that impressed him. Despite the conspicuous medicae armband and flak vest that she wore for protection, the woman was clearly one of the remembrancers that had joined the Expedition fleet in the decades after Perditus. The Dark Angels were not the XVI or the III, whose embrace of the new order seemed to speak of poor taste, a boorish deSire to have one's achievements celebrated beyond the ranks of brotherhood, but that hadn't stopped a persistent and self-assured handful from trying.

  The allure of the First, he supposed.

  He closed his eyes, blotting out external noise, preparing himself to spend the minutes of void flight in meditation.

  'Is it normal for a Legion combat squad to be accompanied by one of its Librarians?'

  He gritted his teeth, eyes still closed. 'No.'

  'What's the significance of that... fetish you put in the ceiling?'

  Aravain said nothing, and the woman fell mercifully quiet. With a lurch the Thunderhawk lifted from its landing block, pirouetting on its slab-hulled axis towards the launch bay doors. The woman murmured. The gunship shuddered into forward motion. The sudden shift in velocity barely affected the enhanced humours of a Legiones Astartes legionary, but the remembrancer gripped the harness straps as though she feared she might be thrown into space.

  'Why... would the Lion... accept an... imagist... onto... his... ship... and then... deny her... her... imager?'

  'Who can say?’

  Unlike the human woman's, Aravain's vocal cords were scarcely perturbed by the gunship's vibrations.

  'What... do you... think... we're going to... find... over there?'

  Trigaine, Kaye's direct subordinate, chuckled as the rest of his brothers fitted helmets and performed last-minute checks on their weapons.

  'I don’t know about you, my brothers, but I'm still hoping for orks.'

  TWO

  I

  Norlev spun and sprayed the passage behind him with auto-fire, just as the ship's armsman charged into view.

  No.

  Before he charged into view.

  Flechettes scraped and banged the uncladded ductwork, riddling the trooper's tough flak vest and helmet, ripping through the unprotected limbs.

  The trooper slid down the bulkhead, a gore-sodden heap.

  Norlev ducked back behind a plasteel pavise, one of several deliberate projections designed to provide rolling cover for the Obrin's crew in the event of a firefight, as a blaze of auto-fire came back at him.

  Again, he was certain that he had pulled back a half-second before he had registered the second trooper's presence.

  He leant out of cover and fired back at her, but the autopistol's range fell way short of the trooper's heavier autogun and the result was an eruption of friction sparks from the bulkheads. There was an explosive crump about a hundred metres down the hall as the detonation packs he'd hidden in the walls went off. The lights to the entire corridor, to the entire deck blinked out as the conduit bundles running down from the reactors were devoured by a small and furiously short-lived sun.

  Norlev sprang from cover while the trooper was still distracted by the explosion and the sudden darkness. He swung the automatic shotgun he had liberated from the armoury locker to his chest and fired. The report thundered through the choke point, a muzzle flare like the discharge of a photon flash grenade in the dark, and the trooper was punched off her feet. The flare faded. Darkness again moved in. To Norlev's curious absence of surprise, he found he could still see. Every surface shimmered, painted in starlight.

  'Fix lamps!'

  The shout came from the passage behind him.

  Norlev whirled about as a trio of lumen beams stabbed from the next intersection. A powerfully built man-at-arms in rigid flak armour dazzled him with a lumen beam across the eyes.

  'I have him, sir!' the trooper yelled, already barrelling forwards.

  No time to swing his shotgun around, Norlev leapt from cover to meet the charge head-on.

  The trooper stabbed at him, the lumen beam immediately followed by the gleaming point of a bayonet. Norlev knocked the blade aside on the heavy stock of his shotgun, then kicked the armoured trooper in the gut. There was a crack, like broken pottery, and the soldier flew a metre down the corridor. Norlev bent backwards, almost parallel to the deck plates, as a blizzard of auto-fire hammered across him. Another man raced forwards. Norlev whipped upright. A shock maul crackled towards him, cooking off the recycled oxygen in the ship's atmosphere into a smoke-trail of ozone as it swung. It hit his shoulder with a sound like thunder. Norlev barely felt it. He grabbed the horrified trooper by the throat with his uninjured arm and twisted, slamming the now-dead man twice against the wall before leaving him to slide down to the deck.

  A wild burst of auto-fire drove him back to the bulkhead, pressing flat to the naked plasteel of a bracing column. The lumen beam at the other end of the fusillade bobbed like a firefly in a bell jar as the last trooper hastily withdrew.

  As the light vanished around the intersection, Norlev felt his shoulder where the shock maul had hit. His fatigues were moist. His fingers came away red.

  'I barely feel it,' he mumbled.

  The pulse of an inhuman intellect threaded through his thoughts.

  'I just killed four armsmen.' He shuddered, sick, looking down at his hand. 'Single-handed.'

  A distant force pushed against his mind.

  'The mag-lifts,' he said, 'yes.'

  The petals of infinity unfurled.

  'I understand.'

  Walking to the intersection that the fifth trooper had fled down, Norlev turned ninety degrees on his heel and went the other way.

  Something was already there.

  Norlev snapped his shotgun around, but, for the first time since he had felt compelled to walk into the officers' dormitory and blow out Valdimir's brains, he fell resistance on the trigger. The thing wore the tattered shape and uniform of a junior officer, hunched over, oddly jointed. Black veins marbled its face and hands. Its eyes were holes punched through the materium of realspace, flecked with alien stars, wreathed in flame. He felt his weapon being lowered. The officer-thing did the same, as if it were some hellish reflection of himself. Thoughts passed between them, unimp
eded by the baseline matter of Norlev's physical brain. All he took from the exchange were feelings. Uncertainty. Frustration. Fear. Turning to anger.

  Heart pounding, breath hot, Norlev squeezed the barrel of his shotgun tight and brought it up.

  He blinked.

  He was alone.

  He turned to look over his shoulder, but the officer-thing was gone.

  As though recalling something from a dream, Norlev touched his face, feeling the marbled ridges where sclerotic black veins stood over his own limp, cold flesh.

  Screams and the hard chatter of auto-fire rang out from the intersection behind him and Norlev turned towards it, but the pressure on his brainstem intensified, any suggestion of an encounter with an other already sinking into the abyss of memory. Instead, he relented to the pressure, allowed the foreign will to direct him on towards the mag-lift terminus.

  Left. Right. Right. Another left. The Obrin was a maze and deliberately so, but Norlev knew every turn.

  A dread premonition came upon him as he hurried down the passageway. A moment later it was followed by a hum, a vibrating pain as though all his teeth were slowly working their way free of his gums. A heavy thud rang through the deck plates, then again, a giant's tread. Goaded onwards, Norlev broke into a run, shotgun swaying from the hip, as premonition became reality.

  A man. Three metres tall. Encased in slabs of black armour that growled with an unholy animus of its own. Its face, in the utter dark, was a distorted mask of extrasensory perception and grizzled internal lighting.

  'Legiones Astartes,' Norlev muttered, understanding now the uncertainty he had felt in the alien voice before.

  The myriad possibilities of the infinite focused on one destructive purpose.

  'Yes,' he snarled in answer.

  He opened up with his shotgun before the giant transhuman had a chance to react to his presence. The shot scattered off the warrior's battleplate as though he had thrown a bag filled with nails, ricocheting around the confined corridor and filling the darkness with flying sparks. He fired again, advancing on the legionary, the weapon's autoloader spitting out shell after shell. It was like throwing gravel at a tank. The Space Marine did not attempt to find cover. He did not even adjust his pace. Utterly unhurried, he look aim and then fired. The single high-explosive shell, designed for cracking the armour of abhuman giants, xenos abominations, and anything a hostile galaxy could throw against the martial ingenuity of mankind, detonated in Norlev's stomach.