Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley Read online

  They ran for hours, outdistancing the enemy by kilometres, but not slowing even then. They still didn’t slow when the pass opened out into the bottom of a vast canyon. The path turned here and snaked thousands of metres up the near canyon wall. It led, at the top, to the narrow, graceful span of the Ecclesiarch Alexis XXII bridge. From this distance below, the bridge was as insubstantial as human hair. Stretching kilometres across the canyon, it was the unique access to Lexica Keep. Its lights glowering in the night, the fortress crouched against the far cliff face like a bird of prey. From between the dark wings of its walls, it peered with cold, contemptuous majesty at the warriors and their charges.

  It offered no comfort.

  Lexica Keep was a Ministorum redoubt. It had, at times, reserved a portion of its east wing for schola purposes, but its primary function had been as a librarium. Its collection was as famous as it was difficult to access. It was a repository of texts from all corners of the Imperium, and from all its ages. Some of its manuscripts, Werner Lettinger knew, were pre-Imperial. Still others, he suspected darkly, were pre-human. Some of his more radical colleagues, especially among the Ordo Hereticus, would give much to examine those works. Some, he knew, had traded their souls for the opportunity. He wondered if the knowledge acquired had been worth the additional cost – their lives. Given the choice, he would have pitched the entire collection into a blazing Act of Faith long ago. He took comfort, at least, in the fact that the books were under lock and key in a fastness never to be stormed.

  Captain Vritras of the Black Dragons was speaking. ‘We are, of course, grateful for any aid you might be able to provide, inquisitor.’

  They were in a council chamber whose door opened onto the dining hall that had become the Dragons command centre. Gas-burning torches were held by iron sconces along the curved walls. These ended in a floor-to-ceiling sheet of armourglass that looked down into the canyon. The brickwork of dark grey rockcrete was so fine that the mortar was invisible. The walls looked like a single block of stone. In the centre of the chamber was a long table carved from the enormous trunk of a berbab tree, shipped from Antagonis’s southern continent. The wood appeared to absorb light rather than reflect it. In its depths, bright pinpricks shone like swallowed stars. Data-slates, maps and transmission papers covered much of its surface now, and there were scars gouged by carelessly tossed weapons. Lettinger couldn’t imagine the Confessors of Lexica countenancing such disrespect, but the question was moot. The Ecclesiarchy of Antagonis had been among the first to succumb to the plague. The Dragons had purged every last one of them before making Lexica their own.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying,’ Vritras went on, ‘that I would have thought an officer from the Ordo Sepulturum would have been sent, given the nature of Antagonis’s taint.’

  Lettinger smiled to show he wasn’t offended. But he wondered how Vritras knew with such certainty that he wasn’t of that ordo. ‘Quite understandable, captain,’ he said. ‘The reason for my presence here is simple. Time is clearly of the essence, given that the situation has become this grave in, as far as we can determine, a matter of days. It would take months, at best, for a Sepulturum team to be despatched, and I, like you, was in the region.’

  ‘Quite a lucky coincidence,’ First-Sergeant Aperos of Squad Nychus remarked.

  Lettinger ignored the sarcasm and kept his smile. ‘It would seem that the Emperor has traced a path for us to tread together.’

  ‘I can’t help but be struck by how often the Black Dragons and the Ordo Malleus seem to wind up on similar paths,’ Vritras said. ‘You are always nearby to come to our assistance.’

  Lettinger started. Only the Grey Knights were supposed to know that there was even such a thing as the Ordo Malleus. He tried to keep his expression neutral. ‘I’m sorry, but there seems to be a misunderstand–’

  ‘Don’t insult my intelligence, inquisitor. If you think we haven’t had dealings with your ordo before, then you are too naïve to be much good at your allotted task.’

  It was becoming difficult for Lettinger to pretend he wasn’t aware of Vritras’s insolence. It was harder still to keep his own face friendly, and his eyes from narrowing, the longer he had to look at the Space Marine and his sergeant. Neither warrior’s mutations were extreme by the standards of the Dragons, but there was still a bony growth on Vritras’s forehead like a blunt, stubby horn, while Aperos had a ridged crest running from his crown down the back of his head. The deformations were the mark of deviant genetic practice, as far as Lettinger was concerned. Give me the proof, captain , he thought. Give me the proof of what we all know your Chapter is doing, and I will have you and your unclean brothers ripped cleanly from the purity of the Imperium. With these thoughts as his strength, he simply bowed. ‘As you say, captain.’

  ‘Someone’s coming,’ Colonel Dysfield said. He’d been staying out of the exchange, standing by the window with his back to the room. He commanded the 25th Mortisian Rifles, but had provisionally handed over his command to Kervold so that the Guard tasked with the rescue should have the unity of a single command.

  The Space Marines and Lettinger joined him. They saw the figures racing across the Alexis bridge. There weren’t many. ‘Throne,’ Vritras muttered.

  ‘Incoming ship, too,’ Dysfield noted.

  The landing lights were on, and in the darkness, Lettinger couldn’t make out what sort of craft it was. He knew who would be on it, though. ‘That would be Canoness Setheno,’ he said. He enjoyed the sharp looks the Dragons and the colonel gave him.

  ‘The Canoness Errant?’ Dysfield asked stupidly, as if hoping that somehow there were two canonesses with the same name, and this wasn’t the one he dreaded.

  ‘Why is she here?’ Aperos demanded.

  ‘She was in the Maeror subsector. When I heard she was part of the tithing mission on Aighe Mortis, I contacted her and requested her aid.’

  Dysfield had recovered some of his composure and was trying to withdraw into cynical apathy again, implying that Setheno’s arrival couldn’t possibly be any concern of his. ‘It’s nice how some things work out,’ he deadpanned. Lettinger wasn’t sure who was being mocked, so he didn’t respond.

  ‘The Canoness Errant and an inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus, both of whom just happened to be in my subsector,’ Vritras growled. ‘Are you sure you are here simply because of the crisis on Antagonis?’

  ‘Proximately, yes.’

  ‘Proximately ? What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘What are your questions supposed to mean, captain?’ Lettinger asked. ‘Since when does the Inquisition have to justify its decisions to anyone? Do you have something you would prefer to hide from us?’

  ‘My conscience is clean and damn you for asking.’

  ‘Perhaps your personal conscience is. I do wonder about the collective one of your Chapter.’

  ‘Enjoy wondering,’ Vritras snapped. ‘I’m going to greet the warriors who have just given much for the Imperium.’ He and Aperos strode out of the chamber, the floor vibrating from the weight of their footfalls. Dysfield followed. He gave Lettinger a look that bordered on hostile, but was also wary. He knew he should be frightened of Lettinger simply because Lettinger was Inquisition and Dysfield was not. That fear was as it should be. Lettinger approved.

  He hesitated over whether to head to the courtyard or hurry to greet Setheno when she disembarked. He gambled that he had another few minutes before the canoness quit her ship. He wanted to see the Black Dragons as they returned. There were two, in particular, who interested him. There was an opportunity here, a chance to gather information that might finally bring about proper scrutiny of these Space Marines.

  Lettinger hurried after Vritras and Aperos, and arrived in the keep’s courtyard just as Squads Pythios and Ormarr passed through the gate. The Space Marines set the refugees down, then two of them loaded up with detonators and melta bombs and headed back to the bridge. The civilians huddled together, sobbing and shaking. Dysfield’s staf
f officer approached them, accompanied by a medicae team, who began to herd them into the keep. Dysfield walked up to one of the Dragons and spoke quietly. Lettinger couldn’t hear the conversation, but he guessed that the colonel was asking about the two companies of Mortisian infantry. The Space Marine shook his head. Dysfield looked stricken. No one else would be coming, Lettinger presumed. He thought about the loss of thirty thousand men, and his heart sank. He felt sorry for Dysfield. The man’s entire command, with the exception of the contingent in Lexica, had been wiped out.

  Lettinger would have liked to have spoken to the colonel. He would have liked to express his sympathy, to offer what support he could to an officer taking a staggering blow. But his own duty called. He saw Vritras and Aperos talking to the two sergeants who had just arrived. That was the opportunity he had been seeking. He moved towards them, walking softly over the cobbled surface of the courtyard, doing his best to be inconspicuous. As he drew near, the Space Marines removed their helmets, and he felt a rush of satisfaction and terror.

  That there were mutations in the ranks of the Black Dragons was no secret. The Dragon Claws assault teams were composed entirely of Space Marines whose Ossmodula zygote had gone berserk. The implanted organ was responsible for the enormous size and strength of Adeptus Astartes skeletons, but in the case of the Claws, it didn’t know where to stop. The bones kept developing, most visibly in the form of outgrowths on the skull and, most effectively for combat, as blades, some of them retractable, in the forearm.

  As far as Lettinger and many of his Ordo Malleus colleagues were concerned, it simply wasn’t possible that such a desirable mutation could be a chance development. Gene tampering was tainting the Black Dragons. Yet when the Chapter (reluctantly) submitted its tithe of genetic material, the samples were always of a purity beyond reproach. They were too good to be true, as suspicious in their own way as the bone-blades.

  But the evidence was circumstantial, at best. The Dragons were careful, and had never given the Inquisition proper cause or opportunity to put them to the question. They were also very good at keeping their distance. But now the Inquisition, in the person of Werner Lettinger, was deep in the Dragons Second Company, and the warp take him if he didn’t find the means to launch a full, formal investigation against this Emperor-forsaken result of the Cursed Founding of M36.

  As he took in sergeants Volos and Toharan, he felt the locks to the Dragons’ secrets tumbling open beneath his hands. Though he didn’t have any formal proof, he could see how the gene tithe passed the examinations. Toharan showed no sign of mutation at all. Underneath a mane of blond hair, his forehead was unblemished by disfiguring crest. His skin tone was lighter than that of the other Dragons Lettinger had seen. The norm was dark, lending credence to the theory that the Dragons were debased derivations of the Salamanders. But Toharan’s flesh had a glow that was almost human. All the Dragons would have to do to satisfy the tithing demands would be to send in material drawn from Toharan and others like him. He was, Lettinger realised, a very special kind of mutant: the aberrantly pure-born in a world of monsters.

  And beside him stood the supreme monster. More than three metres tall, Volos loomed over every other living being in the courtyard. He was so gigantic that he wore custom-made armour and used an oversized jump pack for lift. His eyes were black, glinting pits of obsidian looking out from dark grey, leathery hide whose overlapping ridges looked disturbingly like scales. His razored horn dispensed with all pretence, as far as Lettinger was concerned, of being anything other than daemonic. When he spoke to Vritras, his fangs poked out over his lower lip.

  As Lettinger watched the two Space Marines, each, for a moment, returned his stare. Toharan looked him up and down, his eyes pausing for a cold second at the inquisitorial rosette on Lettinger’s breast before moving up to his face and favouring him with an expression of absolute hostility and contempt. Volos barely glanced at him, and though he showed none of Toharan’s antagonism, his indifference was worse. It told Lettinger that he was beneath notice. He wasn’t even an irritant, merely a detail on the landscape.

  There was no trace of humanity in the creature, Lettinger thought. Volos was well down the path to becoming an actual dragon. Lettinger’s puritan soul demanded that he cleanse Volos from the Emperor’s sight. But his craven blood quailed before the embodied power of war. He needed reinforcement.

  ‘Inquisitor,’ a female voice said behind him.

  Lettinger smiled. He turned, expecting to greet his reinforcement. Instead, his smile turned into a rictus as he stared, frozen and stone, into the face of the Gorgon.

  CHAPTER 3

  ILLUMINATED

  The nature of his work meant Elias Tennesyn was, most of the time, spared the hive experience. He lived in the field, digging up and studying the relics of a past that receded to infinity. For the traces of xenos civilizations to be preserved on a planet, there had to be regions little touched by human development. Therefore, no hives. Antagonis was a world that suited him. Its temperate zones were broad, its two principle land masses were separated by large, life-giving oceans, and its cities, though large, were not monsters. Antagonis still boasted landscapes that were not only green, but actually wild. It had forests, veldts and tundra. Antagonis had space for antiquity and its secrets. So Tennesyn resented the occasions that took him away from the likes of Antagonis to the worlds that presented the human species in its most insect-like form. And a wasted trip, as this one to Aighe Mortis was turning out to be, was a special kind of hell.

  Even the briefest, most profitable stay on this planet would have carried a whiff of brimstone. Aighe Mortis was the sole inhabited planet of the Camargus system, just as Antagonis was in Phlagia. Unlike Antagonis, Aighe Mortis was a dying star of a hive world. The civilization on this planet was like a sun going red and huge before its final collapse. It had swollen to a final, absolute extremity of population density. The growth was so unsustainable that it could only be the precursor to a terminal, lights-out plunge into the wreckage of barbarism. The shallow oceans had long ago been drained and evaporated to make way for more and more ground-swallowing, sky-shrouding manufactoria. But the memory of seas lingered in the atmosphere, turning the faecal-brown and bile-yellow air into a thick sludge that sat in the lungs like pneumonic sputum. To breathe on Aighe Mortis was to drown slowly.

  The closest thing the world had known to a golden era was in the Age of Apostasy, when its mineral resources had been plenty, and there had been enough space on the surface that the population centres could still boast that they were distinct cities. But the millennia passed, the cities merged into a single disease, and the mineral seams were exhausted. Misery and deprivation were a tide that rose but never ebbed. The last of the wealthy families fled early in M41. When the mining concerns were taken over by desperate, rioting workers, off-world owners decided it was cheaper to cut their losses than face the expense and effort of reclaiming valueless property.

  Something between a cooperative and a criminal anarchy had risen on Aighe Mortis, giving just enough obeisance to Imperial administrative bodies to achieve a state of mutual tolerance. The mines had tunnelled deeper into the earth, leaving exhausted regions to be remade as sunless habs, and enough new seams were found to jolt the planet’s economy into a semi-functioning state of undeath. By then, the population was such that almost all of Aighe Mortis’s resources were consumed by local needs for material and energy. In the end (and Tennesyn had seen enough civilizational graveyards to know that the end couldn’t be far down the road), Aighe Mortis kept itself going by exporting two things. One was small-arms, churned out in cut-rate but reliable form in the uncountable billions. The other was men. Human existence here was red in tooth and claw. Vicious natural selection was encouraged by gangs that recognised a valuable resource when they saw it, and a steady stream of Guardsmen and mercenaries swarmed from the hive into the rest of the Imperium.

  Aighe Mortis was a world that Tennesyn didn’t enjoy thinking about, ne
ver mind setting foot on. But it was also an old world. Its historical records reached back to the Heresy and beyond. Hiding in the cracks and shadows between the belching chimneys and maggot-writhing hab complexes were pockets of scholarship. There were archives here that, even in their decrepit state, would be the envy of the great universitariats, were they widely known. But on Aighe Mortis, it was for the good of their continued existence that they remain forgotten and ignored.

  Tennesyn knew about them. There were some scrolls in a private collection that he had thought might help with interpreting the find on Antagonis, and he had sent Granton Fellix here to seek them out. Fellix was a native Mortisian. It had made sense, at the time, for him to make the trip. But then had come the sudden announcement of a new and massive founding, and Fellix had been caught up in the tithe. Tennesyn had come to extricate him from that obligation, thinking his own standing as senior xeno-archaeologist at Bendridge Universitariat, the most prestigious in the Maeror subsector, might count for something.

  Not for the first time, he hated himself for being so ignorant.

  Tennesyn had spent the last seven days meandering through the warren of the Departmento Munitorum’s Mortisian palace. Now he was waiting outside the office of Jozef Bisset. He had been down so many administrative blind alleys that he had lost all track of hierarchical positions, and had no idea what Bisset’s precise title was. Tennesyn knew he was a comptroller, and that he had something to do with determining how many recruits would be press-ganged from which regions of the hive. Tennesyn knew two other things about Bisset. The first was that, over a century ago, they had been students together, and Tennesyn had helped Bisset through some exams that would have otherwise finished him off. He was hoping Bisset had a long memory. The second thing Tennesyn knew was that Bisset was his last resort. He had spent too much time on this fool’s quest already. He felt sorry for Fellix, but there was no point in both of them being gone from the dig site.