Lion El'Jonson- Lord of the First - David Guymer Page 7

  'Her nest is just here below the ledge, Sire. I should have cleared it to make way for the upgrades, but.. ' He took a deep breath and looked out, uncertain whether his lord could understand.

  Even after a century and a half away from his birthworld Duriel still habitually walked the halls of his keep in full armour, and would often react to any unexpected sound as if it were a stalking predator. He did not think he would ever adapt to an environment where it was possible to walk unarmed or unclothed in perfect safety, a place where not every tiny life form was hell-bent on his misery. And yet here he was. The freedom to leave one blameless creature to go unharmed about its life was his one true source of pleasure. It made the burdens the Emperor laid upon the first of His angels seem less onerous.

  'What service can I be to you, Sire?' he said, after standing in silence long enough for the gull below to cease her screeching. Nestling coos rose from her hidden nest beneath their position.

  'You have already done well enough,' said the Lion, softly. 'Dorn himself could have done no better.'

  Duriel straightened. The Lion did not give out praise often or idly. Where it was given, it was duly merited.

  'Thank you, Sire.'

  A dull thump reverberated from the courtyard far below, the sudden blast of a war-horn sending the anxious seabird flapping from its perch and squawking out into the rain. The Lion peered down, and for a while lord and knight listened to the distant hammering of rain on Titan armour.

  'A scout maniple from the Legio Osedax. You have taken my authorisation of complete freedom to heart.'

  'I would have requisitioned more, but there is little room for them on these islands.'

  'You have done well, Duriel.'

  'I have downgraded the Muspellian militia regiments to ancillary support roles as you requested. I have rotated our own auxilia detachments from the 2003rd, and deployed Legion units throughout the fortress.'

  The Lion withdrew to contemplative silence and Duriel joined him, watching the rain, listening to the deep, gurgling growl of a black ocean with only the vague unease that comes naturally to those compelled to stand for any length of time in the presence of a primarch.

  'May I ask a question of you, Sire?' Duriel said, as the silence between them threatened to become an abyss.

  'Ask.'

  'Why are we here?'

  'To hold this world.'

  'Against whom?'

  'A foe who would have destroyed it without so much as a recourse to battle were we not here. I can tell you no more than that. But this a world of the Imperium, my son. It must stand against whoever would assail it, and be defended accordingly.'

  Duriel frowned in thought. 'The name "Muspel' means Harvest , Sire. Did you know that?'

  'I did.'

  'This sector of the Ultima Segmentum is riddled with the remnants of failed human civilisations. What is left of their written records demonstrates a common root language shared across at least nineteen systems, including this one.' The Lion said nothing, and Duriel took his silence as a lack of admonition. Duriel shrugged. 'The Great Crusade found nothing but graveyard cities and ancient writings. In the years before the final xenocide I worked with the Remembrancer order and like-minded brothers in the 15th to study them, but it is difficult to say what became of those civilisations. They seem to have just perished.'

  'Did you see how the Mechanicum had levelled Lament to craft a useable airstrip?' the Lion said, changing the subject. Or appearing to. With the Lion it was difficult to be sure.

  'Yes, Sire.'

  'Have you wondered why a pre-imperial human planet did not have one already?'

  Duriel paused while he considered.

  The Lion smiled as though, by abstaining from answering, he had showed unexpected insight. The distant lumens of the Sheitansvar glinted from the whites of his teeth.

  'Continue with your preparations, my son.'

  He turned to walk away.

  'How long do we mean to garrison this world for, Sire?'

  The Lion turned to look over his shoulder. 'As long as is necessary.'

  'There are other battles to be won.'

  'Greater battles?'

  Duriel hesitated for a moment, but then nodded.

  'As my father once saw need to remind me, all battles are equal, except in how we choose to portray them. Look out there.' The Lion turned back to the leaden vista. 'Tell me what you see.'

  Duriel looked.

  'I see the castles on the Nigris bridge. I see the headlamps of our armour squadrons as they navigate the roads of Nigris and Merigion. I see the gunships and shuttles ferrying more troops and equipment from the fleet to Lament.'

  'Shall I tell you what I see?' said the Lion.

  'Yes, Sire. Please.'

  'I see frustration. I see a predator that has been lying too long in wait for its kill. It is wary of us. It waits for us to move on but we do not. It grows hungry, and impatient for its feast. Once it becomes clear that we intend to stay in force then it will have to strike.'

  'Sire?'

  'Accelerate the demobilisation of the Muspellian units. Deploy another two companies from the Legion to replace them, and as much auxilia support as they require. Spread the burden beyond the 12th. Give me your hand, my son.' Duriel opened his hand and the Lion placed upon it a graven disc bearing a stylised rendition of a Calibanite lion. It was the Grand Master's seal. Whoever possessed it could command total fealty from the Six Wings of the hexagrammaton, and of the Dark Angels. The Lion muttered a complex phrase under his breath, too low even for Duriel's altered hearing to pick up, and a ring of electronic lights in the disc's rim pipped. 'I authorise the activation of Dreadwing protocols.'

  Duriel's mouth ran dry. 'Sire... the Dreadwing?'

  'See that it is done.'

  Duriel's hand closed over the Grand Master's seal. 'Yes, Sire.'

  'Let our foe-in-hiding see our resolve to hold this place. Let it know that its option is to strike at us now or to surrender this world to me unfought. Let it know too that regardless of what it decides to do, I am going to command the Dreadwing to burn it out.'

  * * *

  II

  The Vaniskray was next to deserted at this hour of the night.

  Lights buzzed from tubular brackets, under incessant attack by moths and by rain. The deluge pattered on the battlemented plas-crete, rapping like knucklebones on the thick defensive walls, and ran down the pitted curves of weapon casemates to converge in a string of cataracts that drenched the moats and esplanades below. From the near-four thousand legionaries who garrisoned the gates and parapets of the Vaniskray there was no sound. No servant of the Imperium would ever say that a Dark Angel could walk in the shadow of a Night Lord unnoticed, or lay an ambush with more patience than any legionary of the XX, but the reason for that was not that it was not so. The Legio Osedax patrols of the tiny fortress isle provided a rhythmic thud, like the slow grind of thunder -and under such a downpour almost possible to dismiss as such.

  The Lion liked the darkness.

  The cold stone walls reminded him of Aldurukh and the home he had forsaken in favour of duty. The dankness was the same, the elemental sense of oppression the same. Even the electric flutter of the lumen lubes was similar to that of a naked brazier, albeit with only the illusion of warmth and without the accompanying scent of ash.

  Those few mortals with business to conduct at this hour did so in thick fur hats and wax coats, but the Lion strode their halls bare-headed, clad in thick armour and the plain white surplice of a knight.

  To his own perception, he walked. To any human who might have been watching, he prowled: an angel come to earth to stalk the night in search of prey. With every step he took he invited ambush, daring the predator he knew was waiting to show its teeth. It grew impatient. The Lion knew. He could sense it. If it could see him now, then it would see a knight-king at his ease, his Companion guard left in his suite of chambers overlooking the wild ocean, nothing but the symbolic Lion Sword and t
he Fusil Actinaeus at his hips.

  Perception was a powerful tool. Or a weapon, if wielded with skill.

  A shudder passed through the castle's stonework as the Lion stalked past a promenade of high, angular windows. A dark flight of Stormbirds and their escorting strike-fighters flew low over the fortress in the direction of the landing strips on Lament, the brute force of the super-heavy flyers' engines rattling the thick sheets of armourglass in their frames. The armourglass had clearly been a recent addition to the bare bones of the original fortress' skeleton. Everything on Muspel looked as if it had been newly renovated, a lie stapled onto the naked half-truth of the old. To strengthen it, yes, there was some truth in that, but also, the Lion suspected, to make it look Imperial when it wasn't. The stones still smelled of mortar and fresh paint. The bright tapestries that hung from the walls were noticeably curled upwards from the ground, revealing where they had been rolled in storage aboard a IX Legion cruiser prior to their hanging.

  Halfway down the promenade the Lion slowed his pace and turned to watch the aircraft, left hand hovering over the holster grip of his plasma-fusil. The drab outlines of the craft and even the noise of their engines became progressively washed out as they descended deeper into the rain.

  The passage ahead funnelled into a bartizan, a high-windowed corner turret that divided this segment of the Vaniskray from the next, overlooking the island and the stepped tiers of its fortifications below.

  A heavily armed detachment of human soldiers held the gatehouse leading to the castle's south-easterly wing, as well as the staircase up to the topmost tier of battlements and the Vaniskray's anti-air batteries. Four squads of Muspellian irregulars armed with autorifles and a sprinkling of special weaponry idled behind collapsible plasteel barricades and around portable heaters, hunched over canteens and smoking Iho-sticks. A pair of tracked Rapier batteries mounting multi-lasers had been set up to cover the approach to the roughly pentagonal bartizan. A pair of bored-looking gunners slouched behind the thick mantlets of their guns.

  The officer of the watch was a bulky man in the bronzed carapace and scarlet livery of the Muspellian regiments, a waxed cloak fluttering in a loose wind behind him, but his clean-cut appearance and captain's insignia suggested that his birthworld was elsewhere. The Muspellian units were as yet too raw to have minted an officer cadre of their own, and from all that the Lion had heard and seen they were fundamentally unsuited to high rank.

  The captain gazed blankly through the obtuse wedge of tall, toughly glazed windows as though wallowing in melancholia, watching the rain, accompanied by a proclamator, a vexilarius, and the rest of the standard Imperial Army five-man command complement.

  At the Lion's approach he turned from the sodden black vista and saluted.

  ‘I see that you've upped the Legion's deployment to the Sheitansvar. Lord lonson,' he said. 'Should I be concerned?'The captain smiled, his expression masked somewhat by the gross disparity in height between himself and the Lion, and by the clinically electric lighting in the bartizan. 'My superiors grow nervous, you know.’

  'Their feelings are beyond my power.'

  The captain turned away, gazing fixedly through the embrasure into the muted lights and rain. 'Do you know something of what’s coming to this world?’ he asked. 'Is that why you're so adamant on fortifying this island?'

  'What is your name, captain?'

  'Manev. Lastoi Manev.'

  'What do you know of what is coming?'

  The captain shrugged. ‘Look.' he said, and pressed his finger to the armourglass pane. 'A Thunderhawk transporter. A pattern Nine if I'm not mistaken. With some kind of Land Raider variant in its underclaws by the looks of it.’

  'It is a Spartan.'

  'Ahh. Manev has never seen a Spartan.’ The captain sighed as a sudden fireball consumed the Thunderhawk and its escorting fighters, drenching his pale, hideously black-veined face with light. 'A pity that he never will.'

  III

  Aravain charged through the flame-lit passageway, the subtle maze of corridors that served to turn the uninitiated from the sanctum of the Dreadwing situated at its heart.

  'Redloss!'

  He ran flat out, his secondary heart beating in perfect counterpoint to the rhythm of the first, his third lung straining to provide the oxygen for such a power-hungry physiology as that of a Legiones Astartes at full tilt.

  'Redloss!'

  At a right-angle bend, he cannoned into the wall rather than slow down, and carried on running

  'Redloss!'

  A squad of Legion auxilia in the maroon fatigues of the Claristan Grenadiers blocked the corridor ahead of him. They' were facing away from him, lasguns to their shoulders in marching order, moving up in two ordered files of five.

  ’Make way,’ Aravain yelled. 'Make way by order of the-’ A tremor of premonition closed Aravain's throat.

  The Claristans turned, swung up their lasguns, and opened fire.

  Forced beams of super-hot, cherry-red las stitched the corridor, blackening the walls and leaving steaming welts on his armour carapace. Holding his forearm over his face like an armoured visor, he charged into it. With his free hand he deactivated his bolt pistol's mag-lock and drew it. With his psychic intuition he felt for the presence of the men without needing to risk exposing his eyes. His mind's touch recoiled from the void chill that enwrapped the men. Their psyches were present but had been forcibly suppressed and suborned to an alien mind's control. He recalled the sanction carried out upon those touched by the khrave on Indra-Sul: death, now, would be a mercy.

  'For the Emperor!' one of the men cried, as he fired down the corridor on full-auto.

  'For the Lion,' another roared.

  Aravain put them down with snap-shots, guided by the light of their soul-fires, and was rewarded by a series of wet-meat explosions that saw both of those fires go out.

  A full-power round, sun-hot and screaming with intensity, drilled into his plastron. Energy-dissipating ceramite layers dispersed the killing force of the impact, leaving a black scar as large as two interlocked fists, but preventing it from penetrating more than a millimetre or so into the plate. It left the shot with power enough to stagger Aravain backwards and crack the side of his head on the bulkhead.

  Aravain's curse was consumed fully by the snarl of his battleplate as it drove him to his feet. The Claristans charged towards him.

  He brought up his bolt pistol.

  A tingle of forewarning held his finger off the trigger, and a split second later a blizzard of gunfire tore the mortal troopers apart. The narrow corridor contained and magnified the tertiary detonations of the mass-reactive spray, leaving precious little of the lightly armoured troopers intact.

  Farith Redloss strode down the corridor, sticky human residue clinging to the heavy ceramite plates of the Dreadbringer's harness. He offered Aravain a crimson gauntlet.

  'I heard you shouting, brother.'

  Aravain took the offered hand and allowed the other knight's armour to share the strain of hauling him fully to his feet.

  'Dreadwing protocols have been activated,' he panted.

  'Do you think me unaware?' Redloss looked at his hands. His gaze drifted back to the mortal soldiers he had so straightforwardly massacred. 'They were ours. What is happening, brother?'

  A line of screed blinked steadily in the screen sunk into the raised ring of Aravain's gorget. It was in the code idiom of the Order of Santales, and had appeared in his systems mere moments ago, flagged with the high preceptor's seal.

  'The santales will kill a forest overnight,' he said, speaking aloud as he translated the message, 'attacking from a thousand vines at once.'

  Redloss frowned, his unhelmed face filmed with mortal human blood, but then answered.

  'Though there is but one root.’

  'A root that can be culled with fire and poison.'

  Redloss made the sign of the santales. 'This way, brother.'

  IV

  Alert klaxons had turned th
e command deck red. Blast doors, automatically triggered in the event of a boarding action, rolled shut in spite of the crew's strenuous efforts to override them. Armoured legionaries took up fire positions in crow's nests overlooking the multiple-tiered decks, lenses glaring green from within deep hoods as the knights switched to tactical overlays to compensate for the sudden, red-tinged dusk. Crowded into the console pits and subdecks beneath them, a few of the mortal officers drew sidearms. But compared to the firepower of a combat squad of Dark Angels, the contribution of a few armed serfs was insignificant at best.

  'Report!' yelled Stenius. "Who commanded the lockdown?’'

  'I don't know, lord,' called a woman with a commander's insignia on the sleeves of her uniform coat, tapping furiously at a haptic display.

  'Shut it down.'

  'I'm sorry. I'm trying.'

  'Find where the command is coming from and kill it.’

  'Yes. sir!'

  The commander swung her legs under the command dais handrail and dropped into the cogitation pit beneath. A pair of junior staffers immediately stopped what they were doing to rush down the gangway steps to assist her.

  'Give me a teleportation lock on the Lion.'

  'Sir,' barked the most senior of the remaining command officers. She shook her head. 'Auspex is down. And the teleportarium reports an inability to draw sufficient power.'

  'What?'

  'Lord Stenius.' A junior officer silting in a high-backed chair amidst an array of communication hardlines and vox-sets turned his way. 'We've lost all contact with the Forest Sepulchre, the Oaken Throne, and the Sar Amadis. They're dead in the void.'

  'What is going on out there? Contact the Lion.’

  'Yes, lord." The vox-officer swivelled back to his station.

  'Lord Stenius! I think I know what's happening.'

  Stenius' armour whirred as it bent its power-assistance to his turn, just as another woman, this one in the plainer livery of a deck chief, sprinted up the steps on the opposite side of the dais. He recognised her as Enith Forsault, a recruit from the more recent intake, but a promising one. Stenius had had it in mind to groom her for an auspectoriae posting on the ship's command staff, ready for the opening when it arose. He had a moment to note the blank expression on her face, before she swung the laspistol she had already unholstered towards his throat and, point-blank, fired.