Knights of Macragge - Nick Kyme Read online

  Gerrant muttered something to her and she backed down.

  ‘Navigator…’ Reda ventured, lowering her weapon, her off-hand outstretched to show she meant him no harm. ‘I need you to come with us.’

  Barthus didn’t move.

  Reda had never before met him in person. Barthus was a solitary creature and kept to himself. She knew little of his kind, save that Navigators were mutants and incredibly highly valued by the Imperium. But this was him, she had no doubt. In the lumens she made out a hooded cloak, its edges threaded with gold and fashioned into the sigil of House Barthus. Ornate chains rattled around his neck. His back was arched awkwardly, the Navigator bent over and practically on all fours. Gold hung from his ears in thick hoops and a chain looped from left ear to nostril. Long fingers festooned with glittering gemstone rings ended in sharpened, golden nail caps that tapped against the ground in a manic tattoo.

  ‘Why is he hunched over like that?’ asked Orrin. ‘Is he injured?’

  ‘Barthus, do you know what happened to Colonel Kraef?’ asked Reda, ignoring him.

  The Navigator jerked abruptly. His sudden weeping put the fear of the warp in Reda, who realised she might have made a mistake in drawing his attention to the stricken officer. ‘Back…’ she whispered to Gerrant and the others.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ said Pasco, her flamer back on high alert.

  ‘Just back up,’ hissed Reda. ‘Give him some space.’

  Barthus shuffled forwards, clicking fingers leading the way. His robes parted, revealing a pair of silver bionics glistening wetly in the light. His legs. Every step resulted in a sharp metallic clink. He appeared ungainly, as if walking on tiptoes, until Reda saw the bladed pinions he had in place of feet. Then something changed and his entire body began to unfold like a hinged bracket opening to its fullest extent. Long, reedy limbs hung down by his sides, gilded fingers loosely clicking together.

  ‘You must see…’ rasped the Navigator.

  ‘Holy Throne,’ said Ludik. He was already backing up, his fear starting to override his sense of duty. ‘Should we try and stop him?’

  Reda felt a tendril of unease worm into her gut as she watched the whole transformation in slow motion. The lank hair, the pale skin, the–

  ‘Don’t look at him!’ She turned as she cried out, knowing it would already be too late. Pasco froze, petrified like an old tree, a vein throbbing agitatedly in her forehead. She slowly opened her mouth, like a screw had been turned loose and the jaw allowed to fall slack, and then she died. Not in blood or dismemberment, just died standing there, a look of abject terror drawn horribly across her face.

  Orrin convulsed, clawing at his eyes, raking out the squishy sclera, his fingertips red as roses and wet and viscous as oil. He sank to his knees, burbling something under his breath and fell forwards. He started shaking, teeth smashing against each other in his mouth as loud as clattering shields.

  Careda was faster. He turned and was saved from madness but death touched him anyway, the plume of Pasco’s flamer igniting brightly in the darkness, triggered as she died, a finger’s rapid rigor mortis unleashing a tongue of fire that bathed Careda utterly. He writhed, emitting a short-lived scream before his lungs were overwhelmed by heat and his mouth turned into a seared ruin. He collapsed like a body suddenly without its skeleton and laid down, gently burning to death.

  ‘Throne of shitting Terra!’ Gerrant wailed, and the fact of it terrified Reda more than any of the grim spectacles before her. Gerrant had spine. It was forged of steel. It’s why she liked him. It’s why they… To hear him so unmanned, it spoke to a primordial fear she now unwittingly nurtured.

  Eye, Kraef had said. The warp eye, that which Navigators used to negotiate the empyrean sea. To look upon it was to court madness and death, or so the rumour held. As she grabbed Gerrant by the collar and ran, she knew the truth of that now and begged for ignorance. She ran and she heard Barthus running too, the bent-backed scuttling of an arachnid and not the natural gait of a man. Mercifully, the clacking refrain of his gold-and-silver claws receded.

  She rounded a corner, making sure Gerrant got there too, put her back to the wall and breathed.

  Careda was still burning. The crackle of fabric, the smell of hair and something like pig’s fat in the air. She almost vomited.

  ‘He killed them, Arna. He bloody well killed them all stone dead.’

  Gerrant wasn’t handling it well. Reda wondered privately if he’d caught a glimpse, a reflection of something perhaps? Did it work like that or was it more like the medusae of Terran mythic verse?

  ‘We’re alive,’ she said. ‘We’re still alive.’

  ‘Throne, Reda. He just turned that thing on them.’ He took a long, shuddering breath and seemed to regain some lost composure.

  ‘And then he fled,’ she replied. ‘I don’t think he meant to kill them.’

  ‘Three bloody corpses,’ snapped Gerrant. ‘I can still smell that poor bastard Careda and I don’t honestly know which of them had the worst end.’

  ‘They were bad deaths.’

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘Compose yourself, trooper.’

  Gerrant scowled. ‘Trooper?’

  ‘You heard me. Get a damn grip.’

  ‘If we stay here, he’ll kill us.’

  ‘He’s lost his mind, Vanko,’ said Reda. ‘And we need him. The ship needs him. We have to–’ She stopped suddenly as a thought occurred to her, and she looked out into the deeper darkness of the sanctum. ‘Where the hell is Ludik?’

  REBELLION

  The silos were burning and a thick, starchy smoke from their contents was starting to choke the air. It was furnace-hot down in the enginarium decks and the reek of all that slowly immolating protein grain only made the atmosphere more intolerable.

  ‘How shall we handle this?’ asked Iulus Fennion.

  He had not drawn a weapon, but kept his left hand on the pommel of his chainsword in readiness. His right, a bionic along with the entire arm, twitched with the random firing of a servo. Haephestus had promised to look at it, but his slate was already full with figuring out the cause of the power bleed affecting the ship. Iulus had not complained, the occasional misfire of one of his metal digits an irritant and nothing more.

  Standing beside him, Scipio Vorolanus trained his retinal lenses on the army in front of them.

  ‘Delicately, brother.’

  The emaciated labourers had stopped and gathered in a huge mob. Several work sections had broken with their designated tasks, the turbine grinders, the coolant haulers, the waste plasma gangs, and stood shoulder to shoulder, shouting at the thin shield wall of armsmen deployed to restore order.

  The presence of the Ultramarines had immediately stalled whatever the mob had planned and a tense, unspoken ceasefire had settled upon both parties. On the one side, several hundred deckhands and on the other, approximately fifty armsmen and a few Adeptus Astartes.

  ‘Well, at least they have stopped moving,’ offered Iulus, earning a reproachful glance from his fellow sergeant.

  A fragile no-man’s-land of about fifty feet lay between the two groups, but it was patiently eroding like a cliff before a turbulent sea. Eventually the land would collapse and the water would swallow everything. Servitors stood amongst the horde or rested on their stalled track-beds, their bodies still quivering with vitality but otherwise unmoving and unblinking. Hulking stock-still effigies, their doctrina wafers had been removed, and with them their agency and work protocols. Akin to flesh and metal statues, they were rocks amidst a wasted human surf who had chosen the rationing yard to make their stand.

  Scipio regarded the destruction. The caged defiles through which the labourers would be expected to line up to receive their protein grain or nutrient gruel had been torn down and the belt-conveyors that apportioned the food spiked and destroyed. Either side of a wide central aisle, plumes of thick mulch-smoke billowed up into the high ceiling to be captured by atmosphere vents. These were the silos, the
immense grain stores used to feed an army. Smaller drums, roughly the same height as one of the servitors, sat on metal pallets waiting to refill the larger silos.

  The Ultramarines had entered the ration yard from the upper decks. Discord had been minimal in those areas and now Scipio knew why. It was amassed here, almost in its entirety.

  ‘How many do you think are in here?’ he asked.

  ‘North of eight hundred, I would estimate.’

  Though the two sergeants had come together to discuss their plan, the rest of their men were spread out across this side of the chamber. Both Vorolanus and Fennion had left warriors behind in the decks above, either singularly or in pairs, to maintain order. Usually even one of the Adeptus Astartes was enough to remind men of their duty and dispel thoughts of discord. But here in the ration yard it was different.

  ‘They are afraid of us,’ said Scipio, noting the terrified faces that greeted the Ultramarines as soon as they had stepped into view. Recognition of the threat had spread like a bow wave through the masses, who physically and mentally took a backward step, clutching their improvised weapons a little tighter, huddling together a little closer. The herd had seen the predators at the edge of their domain and had decided to fight rather than be slaughtered.

  ‘They were already afraid,’ Iulus replied. ‘We cannot raise our weapons against these people.’

  ‘We may have no choice,’ said Scipio, eyeing the slack-limbed bodies hanging from the gantries. Several of the dead were overseers, torn from their positions of strength and made to suffer. Others were workers, driven to madness and death. Or perhaps they had spoken out against rebellion and been strung up alongside the oppressors. Whether worker or overseer, they turned gently with the movement of the air, slowly putrefying in the heat.

  ‘Prabian mentioned something that has me thinking,’ said Iulus.

  ‘A dangerous thing to do.’

  Iulus gave a short bark of laughter. ‘The cultists we fought,’ he said. ‘Their numbers. He thought they were excessive.’

  ‘It felt excessive.’

  Iulus snorted ruefully.

  ‘You know what happens if we engage.’

  ‘We are not negotiators, Scipio.’

  ‘Nor are we butchers. You have fought closely with mortals before,’ said Scipio, recalling the campaign on Damnos where Iulus had led the human conscripts he had dubbed the ‘One Hundred’. ‘How can we avoid bloodshed here?’

  Iulus reached up to his neck and disengaged the brace connecting his helmet before removing it entirely. His nose wrinkled at the stench of the unwashed and the sudden prickling of heat. ‘Let them see your face, brother,’ he said, revealing granite-like features and a flat nose. He had pronounced scarring around his mouth and nose where he had once worn a rebreather. Believed to be a permanent addition to his face, Venatio’s surgeries had freed him of the burden but left their mark all the same.

  ‘I’ll do better than that,’ said Scipio, having weighed up the options and determining there were few that did not end in a massive death toll and a significant blow to the ship’s ability to function. Warriors protected the ship, but without its labourers all they would be saving was a metal coffin.

  He approached the sergeant of the armsmen, whose shield wall would be overwhelmed almost instantly if the rioters charged. The man saluted as soon as he saw the Ultramarine. There was fear in his eyes, and that made him and the situation he was in dangerous.

  ‘My lord,’ he said with all due deference.

  ‘What’s your name, sergeant?’

  ‘Bader, sire. Harpon Bader.’

  Scipio gestured to the horde of labourers. ‘Why are these serfs not at their stations?’

  ‘I don’t know, sire. A dispute with their overseers, all of whom are dead and so we cannot ask.’

  ‘Have you asked them?’

  Bader blinked once, incredulous. ‘Whom, sire? The mob? That shield wall is the only thing preventing them rampaging through the rest of the ship. I dare not–’

  ‘Noted,’ said Scipio, choosing not to disabuse him of that falsehood. ‘So you have no knowledge of their grievance?’

  ‘Their grievance, sire? I don’t understand. They are serfs…’

  ‘They are afraid,’ said Scipio, ‘though not of you or I.’

  ‘Sire?’

  Bader looked like he wanted to break out the guns and have at the mob. It was a death sentence, he probably knew that, but the demeanour of the man implied he just wanted this to be over one way or the other. Dark circles around his eyes suggested a lack of proper rest, his slightly sunken cheeks a lack of decent nutrition, though what the armsmen were fed was of a higher standard than the nutrient gruel and protein grain supplied to the ship’s labour gangs. A tremble in his voice, a slight breathlessness that was difficult to detect without Scipio’s perceptive faculties, betrayed a mild warp sickness.

  ‘Stand your men back,’ he said.

  ‘What? I mean, sire, if we–’

  ‘Have them fall back ten feet. Do it now.’

  Bader was wise enough not to argue and gave the order. The shield wall parted, two men in the middle moving out and behind their comrades to allow a gap wide enough for a Space Marine.

  Scipio could feel Iulus tense behind him. The other sergeant’s voice came through his private vox.

  ‘I’ll wait here, shall I? I hope you know what you’re doing, Scipio.’

  ‘If this doesn’t work then you’re all that’s between these serfs and the rest of the ship.’

  ‘Then let’s hope it works. I don’t want the blood of Imperial citizens on my hands.’

  ‘Nor I.’

  Scipio stood his ground, reaching up to remove his battle helm as the wall of armsmen shrank away like the tide retreating from the shore. Iulus retreated with them. Scipio mag-clamped his helmet to his thigh. Curious eyes the colour of tanned leather looked out of a face younger than that of Iulus. Unlike his fellow sergeant, Scipio also still had a generous crop of dark brown hair, shaved back in the Ultramarian style. On account of his apparent youth, he suffered with good grace the gentle taunts of his veteran comrades, though he had fought in many campaigns and earned several battle honours. The bolt pistol he wore, which he now unholstered and laid reverently on the ground, was chased with gold filigree, its grip bound in red synth-leather. His other relic weapon was a power sword. It had been bequeathed to him by an old friend and the sight of it still brought grief to his heart. The edge was diamond-adamantium forged and it had a polished silver-plasteel casing embossed with the inverted horseshoe-shaped ultima. Scipio placed the power sword reverently next to his combat blade and alongside his sidearm, muttering a few words to their machine-spirits. Then he began to slowly walk forwards.

  The baying of the mob grew louder with every step. A few brandished weapons, shaking them at the Ultramarine and jeering. Several others backed away like frightened cattle.

  Ten feet away from the mob, Scipio stopped. His arms were by his sides, palms out to show they were empty. One man faced down a horde of hundreds. Scipio looked at them, undaunted. It was a small matter for one who had faced greenskin brutes and undying abominations.

  ‘Who speaks for you?’ he asked loudly.

  THE HELL WE BRING WITH US

  Ludik stopped running. He doubled over and was immediately sick. His heart thundered and he struggled to control his breathing. Plumes of white billowed from his mouth like steam from a ship’s funnel. Hearing a sharp, metallic echo, Ludik brought up his gun. The stock trembled in the darkness. He smacked the lamp pack with the side of his hand, trying to coax it back into life, but realised it was smashed and no longer operable. He cursed, his voice reedy and tremulous, and took a few tentative steps. He had no idea where he was, though he knew the sanctum wasn’t that big; in his panicked flight he had lost all bearings and dared not shout out for Reda or Gerrant for fear of rousing attention. Assuming they were still alive to hear him, of course.

  Barthus had gone mad, th
at much was obvious. Exposure to the warp, isolation in his quarters, something had driven the poor bastard insane and now he was killing. Intellectually, Ludik abandoned the idea of trying to apprehend the Navigator. That didn’t matter now. Instead, he focused on trying to find the way out. He wanted to stay put, to wait for help, but help wasn’t coming. He had to get himself out of this. They should have alerted the Adeptus Astartes, but it was too late for any of that now. Pragmatism was tamping down his fear, making it tolerable. Make a plan, focus on it, implement it. Ludik clung to this rope of sanity, suspended as he was above the abyss.

  He went slowly, listening hard for any betrayal of movement. The echo he had heard a moment ago had ceased and he couldn’t discern which direction it had come from. His teeth chattered so hard he tore a strip off his fatigues and jammed it between them to dampen the sound. It was so cold he had lost some feeling in his extremities, and had begun to worry about the lasting effects of exposure when he emerged into a large octagonal room.

  Ludik froze upon the threshold. It was dark, but with what minuscule ambient light was available he could make out shapes. Harder and blacker outlines presented themselves. A sodium lamp flickered once. It was suspended above in the middle of the room and fixed to an ornate chandelier. In the half-second of light, Ludik determined the nature of the shapes. They all wore armsmen’s uniforms.

  ‘Elam…’ he whispered, the rag keeping his teeth from chattering falling from his mouth.

  ‘The eye will see…’

  The voice, its sudden intrusion on the silence, made Ludik cry out. He shrank back, feeling the solidity of a wall behind him, and realised he had wandered into the chamber and no longer knew where the entrance was. He shuffled, sidestepping, one hand behind his back and guiding him along the wall, searching for a gap into which he could flee.

  ‘The eye will see…’ the voice said again, closer, stopping Ludik dead as soon as he realised he was moving towards it. He began to shuffle in the opposite direction but started to hurry and got tangled up in something and fell hard. Hot spikes of pain drove into his knees and elbows. The lascarbine he had been clutching skittered away into a gulf of blackness. His fingers touched something curved and metallically cold but they were shaking so much that he couldn’t grasp it, whatever it was, and it scraped away into nothing. Then he felt something else.