Forgotten Sons - Nick Kyme Read online

  ‘No, that’s what he wants. Wait. Think.’

  The Ultramarine nodded. ‘You’re right.’ His mind was reeling – a Custodian, here on Bastion, trying to kill Horus’s iterator. What was this – Plan B? ‘Should we even fight him? Could we? I’m surprised we lived as long as we did.’

  Heka’tan only glowered at the dark. ‘We need to dig in and wait it out.’

  ‘He will pick us off, one by one. We cannot wait.’ He glanced back askance at the Salamander. ‘We could always just give him what he wants.’

  ‘No, something isn’t right.’

  ‘Then what do you suggest? The Custodians are loyal only to the Emperor. They are his lions, Salamander. They do not question, they merely do. If we are between him and his prey–’

  ‘That’s not a Custodian,’ Heka’tan interjected. ‘It is similar, but its movements are copied, its form a facsimile, a simulacrum.’

  Arcadese hissed, retreating into the light with his brother. ‘How can you be sure?’

  Their eyes met. Heka’tan’s flared with an angry glow.

  ‘Because if it was real, we’d already be dead.’

  IV

  There was panic in the auditorium. The shot and subsequent commotion had lit a spark of fear in the assembly that was growing from a flame into a conflagration. Streams of politicians and senators were rushing from their seats to pound on the doors to the auditorium. Some screamed, others sobbed, a few merely stayed seated and stared.

  By now the clave-nobles had been evacuated from the balcony and were on the main auditorium floor, surrounded by their bodyguards with the rest of the trapped civilians.

  Other soldiers were scanning the upper echelons and alcoves for further assassins. They would find none.

  Amongst the visitors, Vorkellen was profoundly unhappy and addressed the already stressed high-marshal who was trying to restore order. ‘What are you doing to get us out of here?’

  Insk was nearby, muttering soothing words to his master and requesting relaxants from another aide. Vorkellen waved them away with bitter tirades.

  V

  Arcadese was in unsympathetic mood and replied in the high-marshal’s stead. ‘We are trapped, you idiot. There’s nothing he can do.’

  The iterator looked about to respond but bit back his tongue when the Ultramarine glowered. Arcadese let him be, and approached Heka’tan. Frantic as they were, the people kept away from the two Legionaries.

  The Salamander leant in close, talking softly so that no one else could hear him.

  ‘Whatever that thing is, it will come for us.’

  ‘I know.’ Arcadese had his eye on the humans. They’d started to huddle around the sealed door and were spilling out into the centre of the chamber. ‘Their fear disgusts me. I thought this was meant to be a war-like world.’

  ‘They are not soldiers, not all of them, and they’ve never been trapped in a room with something like this before,’ Heka’tan paused, feeling sympathy for the panicked mob. ‘We have to hunt it down.’

  Arcadese nodded.

  Heka’tan went on, ‘You were right. We cannot wait. We waited at Isstvan.’ His eyes went off to a dark place, one from memory. ‘We waited and died.’ His hand was shaking again. He clenched it with his other hand to steady it.

  Arcadese lowered his voice. ‘I’m sorry that you’re still affected by it, brother. I cannot imagine the pain.’

  ‘The legacy isn’t mine to bear. It’s for those who follow, for whatever happens next.’

  Regarding the dead marshals, left where they’d fallen, Arcadese changed subject. ‘This matter was always going to be decided by blood. These entire proceedings were a farce. Unless we find that assassin, the Imperium will be accused of treachery. No one will negotiate with us.’

  Heka’tan was shaking his head slowly. ‘Perhaps? But I feel there is something else going on here, something from back when the Iron Warriors had a garrison on this world.’

  ‘Then we must expose the truth, whatever that might be. Our best chance is tracking the iterator’s would-be killer.’

  ‘I cannot help think it merely shrouds an even greater atrocity.’ Heka’tan gestured to the crowd. Some of the fervour had died down now. There was moaning and grim-faced acceptance. ‘And there are the humans to consider.’

  Arcadese looked nonplussed. ‘What about them?’

  ‘If we’re outmanoeuvred the assassin would make a red mess of them.’

  ‘They’ll have to look to their own defence.’

  ‘One of us should stay.’

  ‘We need both of us to kill this thing. Since when did the sons of Vulkan not present a united front?’

  ‘We’re pragmatists too, brother, and know when to adapt,’ said Heka’tan. ‘We cannot wait around to be murdered where we stand. So, I’ll go.’

  ‘You?’ Arcadese’s displeasure was obvious. ‘If you want to protect the humans so badly then stay behind and do just that.’ A few of the civilians had turned as the volume of the conversation rose.

  ‘I wish I could, but only one of us can hunt. You are not able.’

  The Ultramarine’s tone darkened. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Look at you,’ offered Heka’tan with traditional Salamander bluntness. He hadn’t meant to be insulting, he just didn’t appreciate his words and manner could be construed that way.

  ‘I am a warrior still,’ Arcadese asserted, ‘as strong and capable as any uncouth barbarian from a tribal culture.’

  ‘Prove it then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Attack me, see if you can humble–’

  Arcadese launched himself at Heka’tan, flash-sabre blazing. He was slow though, just a second or two, but enough of a lag for the Salamander to avoid the blow and head-butt the Ultramarine fiercely across the bridge of his patrician nose.

  Blood gushed, streaking Arcadese’s lips, before Heka’tan used the Ultramarine’s bulk against him and sent him sprawling across the auditorium floor. A few of the nobles had to scurry out of the way. There were fearful gasps as their protectors turned on one another.

  Arcadese was up as swiftly as his bionics allowed but found his flash-sabre taken and levelled at his neck.

  ‘I will hunt,’ Heka’tan told him. ‘You stay.’

  Breathing hard, the Ultramarine nodded slowly. ‘I won’t forget this, son of Vulkan.’

  ‘I know you won’t.’ Heka’tan jogged off into the darkness, flash-sabre in hand.

  VI

  The Salamander returned less than an hour later.

  Arcadese had his back to him. The Ultramarine’s demeanour hadn’t improved.

  ‘Have you given up already? I thought Salamanders were supposed to be tenacious.’

  ‘I found a spoor and followed it into the deeper conduits,’ Heka’tan replied. Arcadese noticed he was holding the flash-sabre in the opposite hand. ‘It seems the assassin had an escape route planned from the beginning.’

  ‘So, he’s gone?’

  Heka’tan nodded, ‘Through a way we can’t follow. It’s too narrow, too steep, and goes right to the bowels of the complex, to the geothermal sub-levels.’

  ‘We wait then,’ said Arcadese, turning his back on Heka’tan, ‘for the gates to open and our failure to be known to our Legions. Horus has won this world, brother.’

  ‘It is worse than that,’ said Heka’tan, in a voice that sounded only partially like his own.

  Rather than being shocked, Arcadese dropped his shoulder for the attack he knew was coming. He turned, bringing up another flash-sabre, parrying Heka’tan’s bone-blade that had rapidly morphed from his fingertips.

  ‘How did you know?’ asked the assassin.

  Their blades were locked, spitting sparks and bone chips.

  ‘The smell,’ Arcadese told his attacker. He smiled as a thunderous bulk rammed into the assassin, crumpling his flank.

  ‘I reek of ash and heat,’ said the real Heka’tan, having exploded from the shadows where he’d been lurking since his initial departure. ‘Your wound obviously wasn’t quite deep enough.’

  They wrestled, Salamander and assassin, the latter transforming even as they
moved.

  A metamorphic catalogue of identities blended and re-blended across the alien’s face, first the landman, then the subtle facial shift to the marshal, finally the Custodian upon which it settled.

  ‘You are no lion,’ snarled Heka’tan, snapping a vertebra in the creature’s spine.

  Around them, the crowd shrieked and shouted in terror. The throng pressing up against the door became a crush.

  The assassin mewled in pain, a tonal, bird-like resonance that set the Salamander’s teeth on edge.

  ‘Clever,’ it hissed through clenched teeth, bringing its knees up sharply into Heka’tan’s sternum and vaulting him off its body.

  The Salamander landed in a wide sprawl, a few metres away.

  ‘A lie to snare a liar.’ Arcadese came crashing in, two-handed, with the flash-sabre. A ball of light blazed and faded at once as the weapon connected with stone not flesh.

  The assassin bounded backwards, weaving to avoid the Salamander’s heavy cross as it came within range.

  The bone-blade became a Custodian’s training spatha in its right hand and it slashed at Arcadese.

  Faux-steel screeched against true-steel as the Ultramarine took the blow on his bionic arm. It was only his forearm that was augmetic but it provided an effective foil. He stomped, aiming for the assassin’s foot to cripple it. Rockcrete splintered beneath him, the ground webbing outwards in tiny fault lines.

  ‘Yield, you are undone,’ snapped Arcadese.

  Heka’tan loomed in snatches of the Ultramarine’s vision, just behind the assassin.

  He flung his arms out and snapped them together like mechanical foundry tongs, seizing the assassin in an onyx-black grip.

  ‘You are the ones who are undone,’ the creature cackled, spitting a gobbet of intestinal acid that seared Heka’tan’s cheek. The Salamander didn’t even flinch, he merely squeezed.

  Arcadese caved in the creature’s face with a bionic fist, the bone-blade ripped from the assassin’s grasp but still lodged in his forearm.

  It wheezed like a perforated lung as Heka’tan slowly crushed it. The integrity of the creature’s mimicry was breaking down with the onset of its death. Personas strange and familiar raced across its form and countenance like the changing of the seasons.

  ‘What was your purpose here?’ Heka’tan growled, bearing the lacrymole down, for it could be no other xenos abomination. ‘What greater evil are you masking?’

  Vampiric shapeshifters, the Emperor and his Legions had taken great pains to ensure the annihilation of the lacrymole and yet, like the Terran atom-roach, they refused to become extinct.

  Even its true form was nebulous, a conglomeration of wrongly shaped limbs and distended flesh-parts. Its eyes were discernable, however – pitiless black pinpricks of endless hate.

  It died laughing, a hot, wet sound more choke than mirth.

  ‘What I cannot fathom,’ uttered Heka’tan when it was done and the broken sack of muscle and bone shards slid from his forge-smith’s grasp, ‘is how it could emulate a Custodian?’

  Arcadese mashed the lacrymole’s quivering cranium with his boot. The bionic force he applied was enough to pulp it. The lacrymole needed to taste their prey, absorb them, before they could copy them biologically. To emulate one almost perfectly, it meant this alien had somehow bested and consumed the biological matter of one of the Emperor’s lions. Such a thing didn’t seem possible.

  The Ultramarine shook his head. ‘What did it mean, “You are the ones that are undone”?’

  Planetkill

  I

  The answer came with the thunderous boom that shook the flagstones of the auditorium floor. The explosion emanated from far beneath them, in the lowest levels at Cullis’s nuclear hub.

  Subdued by the death of the assassin and the relief that brought, the trapped Bastionites started to panic anew and hammered at the door again.

  Another explosion rocked the chamber and a crack formed underfoot. A clutch of senators disappeared into the darkness and in the plume of fire that spewed up after them.

  One of the clave-nobles had broken free of his bodyguards and was tugging at Arcadese’s robes. ‘Save us… please.’

  The Ultramarine looked down on the man with disdain.

  Heka’tan interrupted his response. ‘We have been doubly deceived, brother.’

  A twitch below Arcadese’s right eye betrayed the pain of the injuries the Ultramarine had sustained in the fight with the lacrymole assassin. He was angry at being duped. ‘A saboteur?’

  ‘Willing to destroy an entire planet to keep its secrets,’ said Heka’tan. Another tremor shook the chamber. A column split from its dais and crushed more of the civilians. There would be no hope of restoring order now.

  ‘Then these minor explosions are merely a preamble to something much bigger.’ The clave-noble was still scrabbling at the Ultramarine’s garb. He pushed the human away. ‘Begone! By holding court with Horus you have doomed yourself and your world.’

  ‘Perhaps not…’ Heka’tan was looking past the frightened crowd to the door. The broken masonry had fallen against it. The column had been heavy enough to put a wide crack in the door’s surface.

  Some of the trapped civilians were even now pulling at it.

  ‘Stand aside,’ Arcadese bellowed, ‘in the name of the Legiones Astartes!’

  The frightened throng parted for the two warriors who reached the door and each taking a side of the fissure, which was deep enough to get their fingers in, pulled. The stone door came away in chunks now that its structural integrity had been compromised. The crack widened.

  Bullied to the front by his entourage, Vorkellen was right behind the Legionaries.

  ‘Get us out,’ he pleaded in a small voice, clinging to Heka’tan’s arm. ‘I too have been deceived.’

  The Salamander looked down at him like he was the intestinal remains of an enemy he’d just gutted. ‘Where is your ship?’ he demanded, before the majority of the auditorium floor collapsed into a fiery chasm. Most of the senators went with it. Only those clustered next to the exit were spared death by fire.

  ‘Close, at the end of the gangway just outside,’ said the iterator. All of his suave self-assurance was evaporating before the prospect of his imminent demise.

  Debris was falling from the ceiling, killing Bastionites by the score.

  The gap in the door was wide enough for the Legionaries to squeeze out, which meant it was also large enough for the humans too. There were precious few left, just the clave-nobles and a handful of senators and marshals, and the iterator with his cronies of course.

  Arcadese was first out and began waving the others on. Heka’tan was last through just as an almighty conflagration swept across the sundered auditorium. Smudged silhouettes in the smoke cloud screamed for rescue but the Salamander closed his senses to them.

  ‘They’re good as dead,’ he said as he met the hard gaze of the Ultramarine. It wasn’t an easy choice to make.

  II

  Then they were running, even as Cullis was collapsing around them. Portions of the city were giving way under the chain of incendiaries planted by the Iron Warrior. Out in the slums, great cracks were opening up in the ground, pulling in vast tracts of sump-ash. Distant landmen drove their hauler-trucks in crazy arcs to avoid the growing fissures. On the horizon behind them, the super-rigs and megaliths of other Bastion cities burned.

  Out on the landing platform the air hazed. Ash and flesh-smoke baked on the hot breeze. Girders and gantries groaned in protest as they buckled and fell in the expanding conflagration below.

  They were fleeing across the exit strip that led to the deck where Vorkellen’s ship was still anchored when a fuel hopper burst and sent a plume of fire and force into the air.

  Several of the civilians were thrown off the narrow companionway and plummeted screaming.

  Leading, Arcadese, turned to see another group crushed by a collapsed comms tower. They died without uttering a sound.

  Heka’tan was missing. Just a few more metres to the ship and he’d lost the Salamander. Vorkellen
, too, was nowhere to be seen. Smoke and fire dirtied the view.

  The Ultramarine waved the few survivors on. ‘Into the ship.’ He seized one of the iterator’s cronies by the arm as he hurried past. The scrivener had a cut to his forehead and looked dazed. ‘Wait for us,’ Arcadese told him. After the scrivener had nodded feebly, the Ultramarine let him go and went back into the smoke cloud.

  ‘Heka’tan!’ The pall was thick, getting thicker. Arcadese wished he still had his battle-helm; the task of finding his battle-brother was made more difficult without it.

  Below the belt of charcoal-grey, the Ultramarine saw four grasping fingers. They were black, like onyx.

  Arcadese cried, ‘Hold on!’ and rushed to the ragged lip of the companionway. He thrust his hand down but Heka’tan slipped and fell another half-metre. Gripping a twisted metal rebar, he looked up at the Ultramarine. There was blood on his face and one of his eyes was swollen shut.

  ‘Save him.’ He had to shout above the roar of the flames boiling below.

  Arcadese’s gaze flitted to Vorkellen, who was also stranded and clinging on desperately. The iterator peered down intermittently, white-faced and clammy.

  The Ultramarine shook his head and reached harder, farther. ‘You first. Reach up.’

  ‘Protect the weak,’ Heka’tan told him. ‘No matter who that is.’

  In no mood to debate, Arcadese growled, ‘Reach up. Now!’

  Still holding on with one hand, Heka’tan swung up the other and stretched. Their fingertips could almost touch.

  ‘A little more

  ’

  ‘It’s too far. Get out while you can.’

  Arcadese shook his head. ‘We are so close

  ’ he said. His face was wrenched with effort. He leaned and found purchase on Heka’tan’s fingers

  just as the Salamander’s hand began to tremble. As the nerve tremor took hold it shook Arcadese’s grip free. Heka’tan was flailing now. The explosions, the smoke and fire – he was reliving Isstvan all over again.

  ‘Steady yourself

  I can’t

  ’ Arcadese snatched at Heka’tan’s shaking hand, but was unable to get a grip. ‘Steady yourself, brother.’