Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley Read online

  The waiting area was like every other room in the complex. The building called itself a palace because the administrative pride of the Departmento demanded it, but it was no more palatial than Tennesyn was a death cult assassin. The walls were a dark grey, damp-stained, unadorned, pitted rockcrete. The seats were metal and dug into Tennesyn’s back. The lighting was dim and as filthy as the air itself. Bisset’s secretary was a dull-eyed, incompetently augmented man who must have been less than half Tennesyn’s age, but looked three times older. His face was so slack and apathetic that Tennesyn had, for a brief moment, mistaken him for a servitor.

  After half an hour, and without Tennesyn being able to catch any sort of communication, the secretary jabbed a thumb in the direction of doors behind his scratched and rusted metal desk. ‘You can go in now,’ he said, without looking up from the data-slates laid out before him.

  Tennesyn stood up. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and walked through the doors.

  On the other side, Bisset’s office was more of the same as the waiting room, only smaller. The only suggestion of rank was the unblemished, dark iron of the desk, and the presence of a window. Tennesyn was surprised. Disoriented, he hadn’t realised he had been this close to the exterior wall of the palace. The armourglass window was about a metre high, a tenth of that in width, and so layered with grime that it offered no view at all.

  Jozef Bisset walked around his desk to shake Tennesyn’s hand. He was the same age as Tennesyn, but looked both younger and more battered, thanks to his decades of active service in the Guard. He’d had more juvenat work done, and the limbs that were still his own had a suppleness of movement that Tennesyn envied. But his right arm was bionic, and Tennesyn thought he heard the subtle whine of servos in at least one leg as well. The left side of Bisset’s face, above the mouth, was a bronze mask. The implanted eye tracked its ruby gaze independently of the right one. ‘Elias,’ Bisset said. ‘It’s good to see you. Do have a seat.’

  The chairs were the same metal backbreakers as the ones in the waiting room, but Tennesyn sat. He gave Bisset his warmest smile and most open countenance as the man returned to sit at his desk. ‘Thank you, comptroller–’

  ‘Oh, stop it. We both know I’m Jozef to you.’

  ‘Jozef, then,’ Tennesyn said. ‘I suppose you know why I’m here.’

  Bisset nodded at the lone data-slate on his desk. ‘I have the file. I’m sorry. I wish I could help.’

  Tennesyn forced himself to go through the futile motions one more time. ‘This man is a valuable member of my team, far more valuable than he would be as a single green conscript.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. But at just this moment, utility is completely beside the point. The tensions are bad enough that the slightest appearance of granting anyone a favour could set off more riots. Or worse.’

  ‘Riots? What are you talking about?’

  Bisset blinked at him. ‘What cave have you been living in?’

  ‘This one!’ Tennesyn exploded in frustration. ‘I’ve spent the last week shuttling from office to office, napping in waiting rooms. I don’t even know what day it is!’

  ‘We’ve had to double the tithe,’ Bisset explained. ‘And it’s being resisted. But Sarcannis and Perethea are a mess, and between that and the situation on Antagonis–’

  ‘What situation on Antagonis?’ Tennesyn’s voice broke with a hint of hysteria.

  ‘Throne, man, how do you function in the real world at all?’

  ‘I should get back there.’ He rose.

  ‘Are you mad? That planet is–’

  A distant, but deep, boom cut Bisset off. The room vibrated. Dust drifted down from the ceiling. Tennesyn wondered what could shake them a thousand metres up in a building of this size. ‘What was that?’ he whispered.

  Bisset sighed, looking very, very tired. ‘That, I do believe, was a bomb.’

  The Revealed Truth was a gold that did not glitter. It was a gold that stole light. The Retaliator-class cruiser was a study in dark glory, bristling with flying buttresses and spires that invited the eye to think of shining triumph, but then somehow dimmed vision, threatening blindness if stared at for too long. It was a spectacle that repelled sight. It was brazen stealth.

  It was paradox.

  And that made it the very dear love of Cardinal Rodrigo Nessun, because paradox was the vital truth of the warp. It was a truth that had burst upon him five millennia ago. The Ministorum had seconded him to a detachment of the Inquisition’s Ordo Malleus. He had been a loyal slave of the Emperor then, and a participant in the project that had led to the founding of the Exorcists. That Adeptus Astartes Chapter was legendary for its incorruptibility. Rumour said that each had a daemon bound within his flesh as part of their initiation, making them immune to any further possession. Nessun had no quarrel with the accuracy of the legend, but he would, if asked, add a small amendment. The immune were those who had been successfully initiated. There had been failures. Many, during the work leading up to the founding. So many that illumination had descended upon Nessun. The failure, he had realised, lay not with the corrupted Space Marines, but in the goal itself. Those newly born daemonic warriors were the truth of the universe. That was the first paradox. He had embraced it, and them.

  He had gathered his sons to him, and baptised them the Swords of Epiphany. Then they had fled to the warp, and his true education had begun. Now he had progressed far beyond the simple paradoxes of the elastic time that had granted him a semblance of immortality, or of the fact that the further his physiological transformations took him from the human race, the better he understood his former species. These were simply the perverse truths of subjectivity, limited to his own perception. They gave surprise and joy, but they weren’t enough.

  He was a theologian, a Hierarch, an evangelist. He had a calling. He must make manifest the beauty of the warp’s truth for all to see. He would illuminate the Imperium with a scorching light, and sometimes, paradoxically , it was necessary to exterminate those whom one would save.

  He was standing in an observation blister on the top of the Revealed Truth ’s command spire, listening to the writhing of colours, watching the scream of space. There was a hiss as the door slid open, and Makaiel entered. The Space Marine captain’s armour was the same light-dousing gold as the ship. His helm grille was a maw of angelic fangs.

  Nessun smiled his blessing. ‘What news, my son?’

  ‘Aighe Mortis is reaching critical mass, father.’

  To have a being such as Makaiel address him with such reverence was a wonder that Nessun never tired of savouring. The Swords would, under other circumstances, have had a Chapter Master. But it was Nessun, the simple human (well, formerly so) who ruled these weaponised gods. ‘And our route to Flebis?’ Their destination was well to the galactic south of Aighe Mortis, halfway across the Maeror subsector, in the farther reaches of the Segmentum Tempestus.

  ‘The warp storms are minimal. We will arrive there in plenty of time.’

  Good. Destiny was unfolding before him with the beauty of a stained glass flower. He would be the bringer of light, and the destroyer of worlds.

  ‘Behave yourself,’ Toharan muttered. ‘That, over there, is the purity of faith made flesh.’

  Volos didn’t respond, but he picked up on an odd undercurrent to his brother’s remark. The cynicism sounded forced, as if Toharan were using mockery to avoid facing something serious.

  ‘Be still, sergeant,’ Vritras ordered under his breath. ‘Canoness,’ he said aloud and nodded.

  Setheno stepped forward, past the poleaxed Lettinger. ‘Captain,’ she said.

  Volos watched the reactions in the courtyard to her arrival. Lettinger was still rooted to the spot, and that was amusing. Lettinger wore black robes and went hooded, his face in shadow with little more visible than his convoluted electoos. His appearance was carefully designed to convey danger and authority. But his studied menace was comical beside Setheno. Beyond Lettinger, there was a ripple as the ot
her mortals moved away from the canoness. Whether refugees or Guard, they had the same tense, shoulder-hunched look of anxious prey. They did not want to be noticed, but they couldn’t tear their eyes away from the hunter. Setheno had done no more than step into the courtyard and utter two words, yet she was a presence that filled the space. Volos tried to put his finger on why that was. Certainly, by any measure other than a Space Marine one, she was physically imposing. She was one of the tallest humans Volos had ever seen. At two metres, she was the same height as Toharan. Then there was her reputation.

  She had been Canoness Superior of the Order of the Piercing Thorn. Minoris though the order had been, its members had made their presence felt, melding a learning worthy of the Sisters Dialogous with a commando military philosophy. They had been a sharp blade in the flanks of the Archenemy. Volos had heard many stories of the Piercing Thorn and what befell it. Some of those stories told of Setheno’s leadership. It was such that she had been seen as a possible contender for the vacant seat of Abbess Sanctorum of the Convent Prioris on Terra. But then the taint had come. Exactly what its nature was, and how pervasive the corruption of the Piercing Thorn had been, Volos didn’t know. The stories weren’t about the taint. They were about the response to it. Whatever Setheno had uncovered, she had denounced her order to the Inquisition. She had demanded its extermination. The Orders Militant had placed themselves at her disposal, and, in numbers overwhelming, had slaughtered the Sisters of the Piercing Thorn down to the last novice. Setheno herself had executed all of her prioresses. She had burned the order’s fortress-abbey to the ground, and spread salt over its shattered, blackened stones.

  She had refused posting to a different order. Instead, she had become the Canoness Errant, a singular position of vaguely defined, but immense, punitive authority. Her power did not exist at the official level. It emerged from an unspoken consensus that, between her unswerving, merciless faith, and her prowess at war, she was too useful to discard and too terrifying to confront.

  So yes, she had a reputation that cleared rooms of all but those who knew no fear.

  Her armour was another conscious echo of the dark past. It had been blasted of identifying colour. It was now the uniform grey of ash and cathedral stone. She wore a helm, and its design, Volos suspected, had cowed greater men than Lettinger. It was a woman’s face, eyes ablaze and mouth wide in a howl of horror and rage. A crimson tear in the corner of the left eye was the armour’s one note of colour, an emblem of brutal grief.

  When she reached the Space Marines, Setheno removed her helm. Volos blinked in surprise. The face of ceramite and the face beneath it were the same. But the flesh showed no emotion. It had the perfection and implacable impassivity of marble. It was, Volos thought, as if the frailties and passions of humanity had been so utterly scoured from Setheno’s being that it was left to her armour to show emotion. Her hair was white as death, and her eyes were a limpid, frozen gold. Volos had expected to see in them the blaze of fanaticism. Instead, he saw a clarity and a depth of knowledge that were worse. He understood how she made secular and spiritual authorities kneel before her will. He met her gaze, and felt his being become part of a perpetual flow of evaluation and judgement.

  Volos knew what Lettinger thought of him, but he didn’t care. Setheno was a different matter. She might constitute a legitimate threat to the Chapter. He couldn’t tell if that was her intent. He glanced at Toharan, and saw the same wariness in his brother’s face.

  ‘My sergeants have been informing me that the behaviour of the walking dead is unusual,’ Vritras said.

  ‘How so?’ Setheno asked.

  ‘The attacks are more directed than they should be,’ Toharan answered. ‘I sense a purpose behind them.’

  ‘What sort of purpose?’ Though Setheno’s low, euphonious monotone didn’t change, Volos sensed a spike of interest and urgency in her question.

  The thunder of heavy stubber fire cut off Toharan’s response. Volos spun around. The rampart turrets had opened up. He stormed across the courtyard and took the stone steps four at a time to the top of the curtain. The others joined him a moment later. He looked down the mountain face into the depths of the valley. ‘Cease fire, you idiots,’ he roared at the Mortisians manning the turrets. They were wasting ammunition, spitting into an ocean. ‘Blow the bridge!’ he ordered.

  Melus and Nithigg set off the charges. The melta bombs at either end of the bridge turned stone molten. The elegant span parted from the mountains, and there was a moment of graceful descent, as if the bridge thought to fly; then the centuries-old masterwork disintegrated in a tumbling roar. There was no longer a road to the keep.

  But the dead were pouring in from the defile, streaming across the valley floor to the base of the redoubt’s mountain. Volos followed the flood of corpses back as far as he could see into the pass. The dead were a swarm that put the tyranids to shame. Volos had a vision of the continental land mass tilting, funnelling its six billion souls into this one narrow passage. The dead were an army so huge that numbers ceased to have meaning. They slammed against the mountainside. Volos watched them bunch up for a few moments before he realised what must be happening. The dead were climbing over each other, crushing each other. Building on each other. Building a mound that would grow into a hill, into a mountain of flesh. A mountain that would fill the valley.

  A mountain that would topple the plague into Lexica Keep.

  CHAPTER 4

  GOOD INTENTIONS

  ‘A bomb?’ Tennesyn demanded as he raced to keep up with Bisset. They were pounding up an endless wrought-iron staircase, heading for the roof. They weren’t the only ones. Above and below them, the faithful drones of Imperial military bureaucracy were pouring onto the stairs as the implications of what must have happened at street-level sank in. The lifts in the palace had stopped working in the wake of the explosion. The evacuees flowed in both directions, some heading to the nearer roof, others to the distant ground, where riot threatened but there was less far to fall. ‘Who is setting off bombs? Why attack a Munitorum building? What’s happening? Where are we going?’

  ‘Where we’re going is to get you into our shuttle and off-planet,’ Bisset answered. He was taking the stairs with an effortless, mechanical rhythm. ‘As to who the terrorists are, they could be anyone these days. Why? The new founding.’

  There was a second, deeper, thrumming boom from below. It echoed up the stairwell like a predator’s roar. The building shook. Tennesyn lost his balance and fell against the railing. Bisset caught him before he pitched over. A man one landing up wasn’t as lucky. He screamed as he plunged down the stairwell, body smashing on the railings. The muffled bell toll of his fall went on for a long time. Tennesyn put his hands over his ears until it stopped. Bisset tugged at his arm to get him moving again. He noticed that the stairs were no longer perfectly level.

  ‘What’s the problem with the founding?’ Tennesyn asked. He wanted his mind off towers and tilts and high places. He was giving himself a puzzle to chew on, a focus to distract himself from his fear. And here was what he knew: the founding was necessary. In the galactic north of the Maeror subsector, the neighbouring systems of Sarcannis and Perethea were in turmoil, ripped apart by the unholy combination of heretical rebellion and ork incursion. The Emperor’s will would be enforced once more on the benighted; of this no one had any doubt. The greenskins’ Waaagh! was a minor one, disorganised and strategically brain-dead even by their standards, while the rebellious worlds were feral and poorly armed. The only thing either enemy had in its favour was the sheer force of numbers. The tactical requirements for successful pacification were straightforward; even Tennesyn could see that. All that was needed was brute manpower. Lots of it. In the Maeror subsector, that manpower was first and foremost the Mortisian Guard, and it was being overstretched. Its forces needed replenishing. The founding was necessary. Tennesyn couldn’t see how anyone could dispute that, especially anyone from Aighe Mortis itself.

  ‘The problem,�
�� Bisset said, ‘is the drain on the local population.’

  Tennesyn was so nonplussed he forgot about the slant of the stairs. He almost lost his footing. ‘The drain ? On a population of how many billions? And Guardsmen and mercenaries being this planet’s big export? How does that make any sense at all?’

  The wall above Bisset cracked, raining rockcrete dust. The split zigzagged past Tennesyn, working its way down the levels. On the other side of the walls, from the core of the building, came groans. Tennesyn thought of iron trees creaking in a gale.

  Bisset glanced at the crack as he brushed powder from his shoulders. He climbed a bit faster. Tennesyn’s lungs and legs cried out, but he kept up. Fear was his spur.

  Bisset said, ‘You’re the expert on the big historical picture, so tell me this: how stable would you say Aighe Mortis’s civilization is?’

  ‘Not very. It’s terminal.’

  ‘So there’s your answer. A little push is all it takes to upset the equilibrium, and let me tell you that balance is pretty damned delicate in this latrine. One slip and we’re all in the piss. And this isn’t just a tithe we’re talking about. It’s another full founding. The second in a year.’

  ‘You sound like you’re sympathising.’

  Bisset shook his head, emphatic. ‘I’m not. Bunch of forsaken primitives here, is what they are, and just lucky enough to be living in what their ancestors built. It’s dog eat dog and daemons take the hindmost.’ He was angry, but Tennesyn thought he detected at least a trace of understanding that went beyond the purely academic.