Lion El'Jonson- Lord of the First - David Guymer Read online

  * * *

  V

  Bullets spanked off the lowered ramp of the Stormbird Harpy of Sturnfane, fizzling off her void shield, driving Sergeant Tiburon Kaye of Squad Martlet back into the cover of its troop bay. Pockets of las-fire sputtered between the ranks of legion, auxilia and Muspellian aircraft parked alongside the runways. To Kaye's eye it was reminiscent of a forest fire, wind-borne embers of some murderous insanity alighting on the minds and the weapons of the readily combustible and catching Across Lament's crowded strips, he saw soldiers falling into prepared cover and unboxing heavy weapons, opening fire on each other, at shadows, and on the legionary forces rapidly moving out to engage them. Kaye felt no surprise in any of this, not even in the fact that the men his brothers were engaging appeared to be their Muspellian auxilia regiments.

  Duriel, with the Lion's seal, had commanded him to the planet to prepare for war, and though there had been no obvious sense to underpin the issuance of that command, war was what Kaye had prepared for.

  He grimaced as an old Muspellian Xiphon was ripped nose to tail by autocannon fire. A nearby stack of promethium drums went up in a mushroom cloud of flame.

  'What are your orders, sir?' said Trigaine.

  'The Lion demands we hold this island.'

  Kaye unlocked his boltgun and drew it to his breastplate, advancing down the assault ramp as he did so. Unflinching he strode through the Stormbird’s void shield bubble, hard slugs and las-beams pinging off his heavy armour. Trigaine and Squad Martlet followed, fanning out behind him as they left the ramp.

  'So we hold this island.'

  VI

  Savine froze. Her eyes widened, her mouth distending in an airless scream. It was as though the observable universe drew in, condensing into a single point of apocalyptic brilliance centred on her. The subtle whisper in her head became a shriek, became a summons, became a supernova of galactic white noise.

  Savine Grael, imagist, remembrancer, had no scope for resistance at all.

  'Savine?' The technician sitting opposite her reached across the table. 'Are you all-?'

  The inner maelstrom passed from her mind and exploded outwards. The invisible wave disintegrated the workbench, then the crewmen, atomically disassembling them before proceeding to annihilate the imagery equipment shelved against the laboria walls.

  A future echo turned her head.

  A Dark Angel filled the laboria's doorway, pushing aside the light screening curtain with his armoured bulk The warrior raised his bolter.

  With a thought Savine crushed his war-plate to a hundredth of its original size. A pinkish fluid dribbled from the armour's compacted softseals as she relinquished her psychic grip and the dead, now hyper-dense legionary thudded to the deck plate. She gave a giddy laugh as she rose. The stool she had been sitting on was the only fixture in the laboria that had remained intact.

  A mortal voice from the adjoining corridor screamed an order and a five-centimetre-thick metal door guillotined from the ceiling.

  With a flex of psychic muscle she tore the emergency-locked door-hatch from the bulkhead, and the alien mind that now rode the body of Savine Grael walked free onto the Invincible Reason.

  * * *

  VII

  The blast-front from the murdered Thunderhawk rattled the bartizan's armourglazed frontage. The Lion looked on impassively as burning chunks of Spartan rained over the ocean. He scoured the dark clouds for signs of hostile aircraft, or even the tracer glow or missile contrail of a surface-to-air battery, before satisfying himself that whatever blow had brought down the Thunderhawk had come with it from the Invincible Reason and been delivered from within.

  That was unexpected.

  Captain Lastoi Manev turned towards the Lion.

  The pane between them creaked before a sudden, inexplicable plunge in temperature. Saltwater rain froze against the armour-glass into twisted caricatures of crystal forms. In the time that it had taken the Legion gunship to die, the mortal's entire posture had altered. He stood fully upright now, shoulders square as though in the presence of a cowed subordinate, his lips hanging somewhere between nervous paralysis and a condescending sneer. His eyes had become black whorls in the fabric of the materium.

  'My name is not Manev,' he said, his voice resonating with the depth of a fissure into the warp. 'And you are the Harvest.'

  IMPERATOR SOMNIUM

  'May I be the first to congratulate you on your recent victory.'

  Once again, the Emperor received the Lion within the staterooms aboard His flagship. The glorious suite of golden chambers elevated Imperial majesty to the point of inconsequentiality. So rich were they, so sumptuously appointed that, like the Emperor Himself, it was difficult to form a distinct impression beyond a sense of humbling and of awe. Once again, the Lion recalled little of the antechambers and grand processionals that had preceded his passage. It was as if a part of him was always here in these rooms with his father, and that part could never leave.

  ‘Thank you, father,' he said.

  'You were not the first of my sons to reclaim a place at my side, but your tally of victories is second to no other. Even Horus looks upon them with envy.'

  'Horus inspires,' said the Lion. 'Magnus enlightens. Lorgar illuminates. Roboute raises an Imperium in miniature that celebrates his name and yours. I have left as many worlds behind me as any two of my brothers, but I fear that darkness and ash will be the legacy I leave to your Imperium.'

  The Emperor considered long, as He often did, before giving an answer.

  'In the lime of the Aegypta there was an empress named Hatshepsut. By all accounts of her that survive she was an equitable and proficient ruler, by the standards of her time. She rebuilt her land in the wake of war and occupation, erecting great monuments and bringing prosperity to her people. She reassembled the Aegypta's navy, using it to re-establish their old empire, and launched military campaigns against the nations who had once been their oppressors.'

  ’A legacy whose parallels are not hard to see,' said the Lion.

  'And yet those who came after her did all within their power to ensure that she would have no legacy. Her name was chiselled from every monument, her every deed and triumph stricken from public record. Even her body was removed from its royal tomb.'

  'Why, if her reign was so equitable?'

  'Because those who succeeded her desired it. Because sometimes what comes before is too troublesome to be paved over in rockcrete, to amend with a monument to compliance or a golden aquila on an Imperial flag. Sometimes it is enough only that it be destroyed, that no trace of it but darkness and ash be left to endure.'

  ‘And yet history still remembers this empress.'

  ‘The Emperor Thutmose the Third did not have his Dark Angels.'

  SEVEN

  I

  The Lion drew his sword, twisting as he did so to quicken its draw, depressing the activation rune the moment the blade's tip was a disruption field's width from the sheath. The draw instantly became an attack, a horizontal stroke that carved through the Manev thing from shoulder to shoulder.

  The captain rippled as the Lion Sword went through him. His arrogant smirk stretched to inhuman proportions. It split the man's face and swallowed it. The rest of his wobbling outline drained after it, following the head into a fissure in realspace like the tentacles of some cnidarian slime. The fissure snapped shut, leaving behind it the scent of every world that had ever died by the Lion's hand. The Lion frowned, narrowing his perspective, sensing as a hunter does the spoor of otherworldly energies left by Manev's teleport-hop down the hall. He appeared to the rear of the block of Muspellian troopers, stepping out of nothingness as if from behind an invisible curtain. Tendrils of wicked energies crawled over his singed uniform. His skin was blackened as though he had leapt through a fire, accentuating the void-black sinks of his eyes and the varicose ridges of his face. His smirk, however, was identical as he drew a bolt pistol from its holster.

  'This traitor usurps your right
ful governor.' Manev did not shout, but the Lion could sense the psychic power throbbing out of him with every word, soaking into the men around him like the sun's heat on black rocks.

  'Stand down,' said the Lion.

  The lasguns trained on him wavered.

  'You are soldiers of the Emperor!' Manev screamed, and the blunt shock of his power stunned the waverers back into line. 'Kill him!'

  The twin multi-lasers on the Rapier batteries at the end of the hall opened up with a sound like a pair of acetylene torches in an oxygen-starved chamber, a hundred sun-hot bolts per second thumping from their racked barrels and converging on the Primarch. Under such a volume of fire, evasion should have been impossible, but the Lion sidestepped the killing beams.

  A second later Manev's full platoon opened fire. It was too little, precious seconds too late.

  A furious barrage of las-beams flashed across the Primarch's armour as the Lion Sword ran a man through. The Lion ripped the artificer blade from the roasted corpse as blood steamed through the soldier's pores. A bayonet stabbed towards his hip joints. The Lion Sword spun full circle to parry it, shattering every bone in both arms of his attacker and cleaving the lasgun in half. With something more closely resembling a squashed tentacle than an arm, the Muspellian soldier unclipped a sidearm holster and drew. The Lion smashed the pommel of his sword into the trooper's face, destroying it, then turned, a backhanded sweep of the Lion Sword, cutting three men down like weed stems.

  A primarch was a god on the battlefield, forged by the gene-alchemy of the Emperor to win Him a galaxy. The Lion had faced down human foes many times, those too ignorant, too proud or too far gone from the path of reason to bend the knee to Terra and accept the Emperor's vision of humanity. Mortal men could not stand before such a being. Dread would freeze them even as the bolt shells hit and the sword blows landed. It was that, as much as their clear martial supremacy, that made the Legiones Astartes the incontestable force that they had become, and the Lion himself had never known defeat, either in personal combat or in war.

  Faced with the wrath of a demigod, the Muspellians should have been lining up to be slain, but whatever force of coercion Manev used to compel them made them fight without fear. They came at the Lion with the ferocity of a mob, kicking at armoured shins, blunting their bayonets on him like maddened wasps.

  The Lion hacked downwards with his blade. Displaying unexpected, almost inhuman agility, the soldier that the blow had been meant for jinked aside. He came in under the Lion's guard, then jabbed his bayonet towards his groin. The Lion caught the las-gun's barrel on the side of his knee, turning it across him just as the soldier emptied the charge cell, the shots hitting the soldier to his left. The Lion inverted his sword and plunged it vertically down through the back of the man's neck.

  The block-like gatehouse behind the sentry guns shuddered as something hit the massive doors from the other side.

  The soldiers did not turn.

  The Lion ignored it.

  'Fire again!' Manev yelled.

  The Rapiers pivoted towards the Lion.

  Volleys of las-fire mowed through the mob of troopers. The men made no effort to save themselves, throwing themselves on the Lion even as slashing beams tore them apart. Beams that punched so effectually through flak vests and incinerated mortal flesh skipped off the Lion's armour. Even those shots that glanced his brow barely puckered his skin, leaving behind red welts that his primarch physiology worked immediately to erase. Shedding the dead that had heaped themselves mindlessly about his legs, the Lion lunged towards the closest Rapier mount.

  With a flawless conservation of angular momentum, he pivoted on one foot, blade rising and then sliced down. The Lion Sword sheared through the linked multi-lasers, the sublime artifice of the Master of Mankind carving through energy-dampening ceramite layers and plasteel environment coating. The next volley was already on its split-second leap from the charge cell to the emitter crystal, the unfocused energy superheating the phase capacitors and incinerating the gunner. Arcs of frustrated electrical power ripped the weapon platform apart from the inside, cooking the flesh off the secondary gunner and striking down another three men crowded into the bartizan. A fourth ran screaming his dark red uniform on fire, before ending his life on the rising arc of the Lion Sword.

  With a growl, Manev aimed his blast pistol and fired.

  The Lion cut the first pair of bullets from the air. One fragment ricocheted into the wall with a small explosion of plaster. Another shot back on an angle, taking out the captain's strategos with a bullet sliver to the shoulder. The vexilarius drew a chamabal sabre. The Lion cut him down before the duellist's blade had left its sheath. Faster than a human should have been able to move, Manev adjusted his aim. Solid bolts hammered into the Lion's breastplate to no avail.

  Striking with the hilt of his sword, the Lion knocked Manev's hand aside. Bones exploded in rising sequence as far as the captain’s shoulder, the force wrenching the useless arm out of its socket and corkscrewing the xenos' host from his feet. Manev ploughed face first into the embrasure armourglass with force enough to crack his skull into a hundred pieces.

  Implausibly, the captain stood back up. Reaching over his head, he manually snapped his neck back into place.

  'Physical weapons are so limiting.' He gestured, and an irresistible force dragged the Lion's arms in to his sides as if he had been wrapped in chain. He raised his hand and the Lion lifted up from the ground, his cloak taking on a bestial animus to claw and snap at his unarmoured face. 'Don’t you agree?'

  The Lion strained, his eyes seeing as only a son of the Emperor could, the ephemeral there and then not-there flicker of fine threads about his body. The Leonine Panoply purred as it supplemented his already boundless strength. The immaterial threads stretched, frayed.

  'Humanity has grown mighty,' said Manev. 'But you are not entirely human, are you. Lord Jonson?'

  With a dismissive gesture, Manev tossed him back.

  The Lion roared as the xenos’ power and his own great mass drove him through the bartizan's blast-hardened stone walls. He tumbled out of the crater and onto the floor, the empyreal bonds still light about his torso but weakening every second as his mind focused on the problem of unmaking them.

  Manev snarled, and as if in response the mortaring of the ceiling directly above the Lion disintegrated. Slabs of suddenly loose rock fell through, just as the Lion ripped his arms free of their bonds. He dived to one side and rolled, the rockfall piling up and partially blocking the corridor where he had just been. At the same time, he drew the Fusil Actinaeus and trained it on Manev.

  Another mighty blow struck the other side of the bartizan's gatehouse door. Manev's face, loosened from his skull by the primarch's blows, slid into a grin.

  'That will be more of my thralls. Your Space Marines may be too narrow of mind to be of use to us, but there are hundreds of millions on this world ready to rise up on behalf of the khrave. Why do you think we did not resist when the Blood Angels came?’

  'Because you wanted the Imperium to bring its people here.'

  The captain's arrogant mask slipped.

  'As I hoped you would bring your kind to me,' said the Lion, and fired.

  For a split nanosecond a blue-white ribbon of plasma connected each of the Fusil Actinaeus' twin barrels to the puppet captain, before a sunfire explosion incinerated a man-sized sphere of hallway. Armourglass flashed brittle and shattered. Rock ran like promethium. Baalite tapestries disappeared like so much smoke. With its origins in the dark years of Old Earth, the Fusil Actinaeus' destructive capabilities far exceeded the modern plasma weapons mass-produced by the forges of Mars.

  Seconds after they had been birthed, the conjoined sunblasts faded, firing out waves of skin-searing radiation as they collapsed in upon their own failing cores.

  In the midst of their decaying fury stood Manev, hair burned to a crisp and slick with sweat, coronal energies flaring across a psychically projected shield.

 
'Try again. Lord Jonson.'

  The Lion holstered the plasma-fusil and took the Lion Sword in a two handed grip, he raised the blade in salute to his foe. 'Then I will finish what I started.'

  Before the Lion could follow through, Manev drew a plasma grenade from one of the webbing pouches in his uniform.

  ‘I will come back for your sons,' he said, and depressed the ignition pin.

  The Lion was onto him just as the nuclear reaction within the device was beginning to chain. His hand closed over Manev's, crushing the grenade together with every bone in the captain's hand. It was enough to curtail the reaction, but not to abort it entirely. The micro-sun that birthed in the Lion's palm was a third the expected size for ordnance of the grenade's calibre and about half the usual temperature. The intricately layered ceramiie of his gauntlet trapped the blast at source and turned it. A star's point-blank intensity stripping the meat from Manev’s bones and reducing the latter to a fan of ash upon what remained of the walls. The man's shriek lingered after death, becoming bestial, almost a physical force around the Lion's throat before it faded, reality asserting itself once more.

  The Lion flexed his gauntlet, flecks of burned metal snowing from the fingers, and looked around. Everything that had been in his vicinity was dead.

  A third blow struck the gatehouse door and this time it gave. The Lion turned towards it as a black Tartaros-pattern power fist drove through the reinforced wood to rip out the latch. The doors gave inwards. Veteran-Sergeant Herodael of the Companions forced his way through. Two more Deathwing Terminators lumbered in behind him, sweeping the corridor with gauntlet-mounted combi-bolters and integrated auto-targeters. Herodael made a swift visual assay of the corridor, every action rendered ponderously deliberate by the bulk of Tactical Dreadnought armour, his helmet's emerald-green lenses flickering with sequential auspex returns.