Storm of Damocles Read online

  Cadvan jumped down from the Corvus Blackstar’s cockpit, his reinforced power-armoured boots crunching into the dust. He took off his helmet and held it in one hand as he strode towards Nergui. The scar across Cadvan’s cheek gave the Storm Giant’s mouth a lopsided grin. He saw the damage to Priam’s shoulder pad and said, ‘So they’re dead?’

  Nergui nodded. ‘Priam most likely is.’

  Cadvan gave a low and humourless chuckle. ‘Has he found anything?’ He nodded towards where Domitian was pacing slowly across the ground.

  Nergui shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

  Cadvan waited for a moment. ‘Do you think they all died here?’

  Nergui was silent for a long time, then he nodded and said, ‘Perhaps.’

  Cadvan liked to talk. He stood there for a while, as if thinking of something else to say, then seemed to change his mind and wandered back towards the Corvus.

  Nergui let him go. He preferred to be alone. He watched Domitian move in a deliberate zigzag pattern, his psychic searchlight straining into the past, away from Nergui, looking for warp echoes of what had happened. Nergui’s thoughts began to drift for a moment, before the sudden presence of the Librarian’s mind made him shudder and his body stiffened.

  They died here.+

  ‘All of them?’

  All, I cannot tell. But more than one or two. The sense of death is thick. Some xenos, also.+

  ‘Where are their bodies?’

  Not here. But their presence remains. I feel anger. Frustration. Betrayal.+

  ‘Betrayal?’

  It is not hard to grasp what messages the dead leave behind them. The images that are easiest to read are related to the strongest emotions.+

  Nergui turned and regarded the scene. It was as if the battlefield had been scoured clean. He strode to the Corvus and swung himself up to stand on the wing. He had seen the crater from the heights and he brought that image back to mind, seeing it differently now.

  The smaller crater patterns were not asteroid strikes. Understanding went through him like a blade. He saw it all clearly. The clusters were where massive ordnance had been brought to bear.

  Jumping down from the Corvus, he jogged to the nearest crater. There were lumps of molten copper, ripped from the ore by the intensity of the blasts. He knelt, rubbed his fingers in the dirt, and lifted them to his nose.

  The scent had the unmistakable tang of plasma.

  ‘They made their stand here,’ he said. He could see it all. Where they had fallen back, desperate for shelter. Where they had split into pairs, dividing their pursuers, where each crater trail came to an end.

  He took Ganbold and roared over to the farthest cluster, nearly half a mile away from where the Corvus’ engines were turning over. Three overlapping craters marked the place. He shuddered. Brothers had died here.

  Nergui stopped suddenly, skidded round, bent from the saddle and plucked a spent brass bolt shell as easily as a Chogorean boy would swing from the saddle to pluck a ball from the ground.

  Hellstrike round. Fired within the last month. He was about to move on when he saw a skull lying in the dirt. A tiny thing, no larger than a simian’s head, plated with gold and with facetted eyes of shaped red crystal.

  He felt a cold shiver, as he did when Domitian entered his mind, but Domitian’s presence was nowhere near him.

  Nergui clicked his vox-link open. ‘Domitian. I’ve found Ellial’s totem.’

  Domitian’s mind was with him instantly. +Bring it to me.+

  Brother Ellial had come to the Deathwatch from the Mortifactors Chapter.

  The home world of the Mortifactors, Posul, was doomed to perpetual darkness, and that darkness had entered their souls, into their ways of being and ways of relating to the galaxy. Nergui had once been sent as an emissary to the Chapter.

  He remembered landing on their fortress-monastery – a vast star fort in high orbit. The landing bay walls were decorated with the oversized bones of thousands of Space Marines. No body was complete. Femurs were arranged in spiral patterns. Shoulder blades into another. It had seemed disrespectful to display the bones of the dead warriors in this way.

  A guide had appeared, hooded and pale.

  ‘This way,’ the guide had said, before leading him across the hallowed silence of the entrance hall to an arch of skulls. Adeptus Astartes’ skulls, Nergui saw, with distaste, some of the bones yellow with age and still bearing the violent marks of their death blows.

  He had met the Chapter under a chandelier of ribs and scapulae, with skulls as the setting for the tallow candles. He had politely refused food and the Chapter Master had seen through his manners.

  ‘You will find recruits from our Chapter the most stalwart of all, for we do not fear death,’ the Chapter Master had explained, his face hidden in shadow. ‘We embrace it, for when we die, our souls are united with the Emperor on the Golden Throne.’

  He’d brought Ellial back with him that time.

  They’d served together for years, and before battle the Mortifactor always closed his eyes in meditation, his hearts almost stopping and his breathing slowing to a slight flare of the nostrils, once or twice a minute. It was the manner of the Mortifactors to withdraw like this before combat, just as it was the manner of the Space Wolves to brag and laugh at danger. Seconds before battle, Ellial would be sitting, eyes closed, body relaxed, and moments before the first shot his eyes would snap open.

  ‘We commune with the primarch, and all the brothers that have gone before us. They are our ancestors, in a manner of speaking,’ Ellial had told him. He’d been sitting in his cell – a shrine, really, to death – surrounded by the skulls of enemies he had taken. They were stacked up the walls and angled over into an arched ceiling of jaws and eye sockets, and the skulls of things that had no eyes – like the nicassar head that he had taken and which held pride of place in his room, the bulges in the thin, bird-like skull showing where the psychic glands had formed.

  ‘What do your Chapter believe?’ Ellial had asked, and Nergui laughed.

  ‘We do not think about death,’ he’d said.

  Ellial had blinked in surprise. ‘No?’

  Nergui had shaken his head. ‘No. We do not care for such things. We care for the wind in our hair, the blood of our foes, the ferocity of our assault. And after death, we sleep, because the battle is done.’

  And that was enough.

  Ellial was one of those who had been changed by his time within the Deathwatch. He had stopped drinking the blood of his foes, although he’d never given up collecting their skulls, or entering a near-death state of meditation as he approached battle.

  The tiny gold-plated skull was Ellial’s totem, the thing he meditated upon when he wished to go into a deep trance. As Nergui’s fingers touched it he flinched, as if stung. There was a psychic presence there. He had the strangest feeling that Ellial was standing next to him.

  As he rode Ganbold back, he held the tiny skull in his hand, as a Chogorean boy would carry a wounded bird, and he gave it to Domitian with due reverence.

  Domitian closed his eyes and focused.

  ‘He’s here,’ Domitian gasped before he was quite ready to speak. ‘He has stayed, knowing we would find him. But he is weak. No one else could have held his presence so long after death. Only a Mortifactor. I must concentrate.’

  The temperature began to drop.

  Nergui’s nose began to drip. He wiped it and saw a smear of blood on his armour. The cold was precipitating acid from the air. It was starting to corrode his nasal lining.

  ‘What is happening?’ Cadvan voxed. ‘Your readings are showing that you are bleeding.’

  ‘It’s Domitian. He’s got Ellial’s totem skull. He’s communing with it.’

  The Storm Giant was one of those brothers whose attitude was unchanged by the proximity of other Chapters and traditions.
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  ‘Throne!’ he said. ‘Tell me when they’re done.’

  Nergui stayed on, even as the noxious gases thickened about Domitian, creating a yellow mist of sulphuric acid. Nergui could feel the bite in his throat now. There was blood in his lungs. The blood in his nose had clotted but the scab hung like a red icicle, before he brushed it away.

  Domitian staggered from the acidic mist, his drawn face white. Fresh red blood dripped from his nostrils and ears, and even from the corner of his human eye. He coughed, and there was blood there too. Even the black of his armour had been eaten away to reveal the yellow of his Chapter, and in patches raw metal. He made a gesture which said, I cannot speak.

  Nergui felt the cold, wet, icy touch of Domitian’s presence slipping into his skull again. The world went dark. He resisted briefly, as he felt the Librarian taking over his mind. For a moment he was sitting in a Corvus, holding a storm shield, eyes closed as the craft bucked, weaved and lurched over hills and craters, gullies – and then he understood.

  This was Ellial’s memory, as the Mortifactor had passed it on to Domitian.

  Nergui braced himself as he prepared to watch the last moments of Ellial’s life.

  Chapter Two

  A golden light stabs through the darkness. It does not blind. It is warm upon his face. There is singing, distant voices, calling to him.

  ‘Faith in the Emperor,’ a machine-spirit’s servitor voice intones. ‘Hatred steels our resolve. The alien cannot embrace the Emperor. To attempt understanding with the xenos is folly. You must destroy, and put understanding to the side. You shall rest in the comfort of the Emperor when the battle is done…’

  The voice is the automated chant of the Corvus’ machine-spirit. It speaks to him in the same moment that he basks in the light of the Astronomican. His mind exists in both places. The here and now, the present and the other. He feels the tilt as the Corvus Blackstar banks and accelerates to the right. He breathes through his nose, circles in and out, impossibly long and slow. A voice comes as if from far away.

  ‘I’m taking her in. Landing in six, five, four…’

  At ‘one’ the inside of the Corvus snaps into light. In one hand he holds a storm shield, in the other a combi-plasma. He is already moving.

  Nidal, the Warmonger, is first out and then Tula, the Star Phantom, engaging his multi-melta as he follows. Priam, the Marine Errant, rests his combi-plasma on his lap. He turns and looks at Ellial.

  ‘Welcome back,’ he says.

  ‘I always come back,’ Ellial says. His hand slams the disengagment studs. He jumps down as the Corvus hovers a few yards above the ground, smells sulphur and dust through his helmet’s sensor array, and the distinctive peppery scent of tau.

  Next moment, Ellial is crouched at the crater lip. This is a mission to destroy a tau communication relay, but what he sees is all wrong. The wrong buildings, the wrong doorways. What they have discovered is a small city of domes and gun turrets.

  Nidal, the Warmonger, lets out a low whistle. ‘Throne!’ he says. ‘Look what we have found!’

  The pain of possession made Nergui retch. He saw the kill team moving out to observe the tau base. He saw Ellial moving through the landscape. The Mortifactor’s last seconds came at him in vivid and fragmented flashes. For a moment, Nergui dropped back into his own mind. He found himself on all fours, but then Domitian’s mind gripped the back of his neck like a vice, and he arched his back in agony.

  You must see this.+

  ‘We have contacts,’ Ellial says.

  The pilot, Gualtino of the Angels of Redemption, gives a short whistle.

  ‘Holy Throne,’ he voxes. ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Nidal is taking picts. We’ll scout them out, and then get out of here. Jotunn has to see this or he won’t believe it.’

  There is a sound like tearing cloth. Ellial rolls to the side as his retinal lens display flares an incandescent green. Rock showers on him. He is half buried. He kicks to get his legs back, and Nidal’s marker turns red. There is a smoking crater where he had been standing. Ellial has only minor wounds. He engages his bolter, rolls to the side, and sees a streak of blue as a pair of Razorsharks rips across the sky, contrails flaring white in the thin atmosphere. There are plumes of explosions that stitch closer, throwing up dark clouds of fractured rock. Another tau fighter screeches overhead, banking as drones drop from its belly in a long stream.

  Ellial puts two rounds into each, knocking them out as they turn towards him. One explodes, two more spin, winged to the floor, and the third comes on, tilting closer. He fires a third shot which blows it into pieces that pirouette down to the ground.

  ‘More contacts!’ Priam voxes. There is a hiss and puff of melta fire. A skimming Piranha nose plugs the earth and spins over and over, slowing with each spin, before exploding in a hail of black fragments. He curses as the sky is suddenly full of contrails and drones, banking fighters and scouts.

  ‘They have our position,’ Tula is shouting.

  Gualtino is swinging back around to try to extract them.

  ‘I’ll hold them off,’ he hisses, banking as a gun rig lands to fire its railguns. The Corvus Blackstar brackets a team of fire warriors. In the background comes the blast of railguns. Then he says, ‘Holy Throne! Look at those battlesuits.’

  Ellial has mistaken them for Riptides. But now he sees. There are a hundred of them, in the colours of at least ten septs that he knows, surging over the sentry lines with giant bounds, their shoulder-mounted railguns primed and ready.

  Then there is a Riptide! The battlesuits are dwarfed by this new construction. One of the giant battlesuits, in the pale colours of Vior’la, pauses for a moment, thrusters dampening recoil, and then it fires.

  The ground explodes in a great gout of rock and spinning debris. Ellial rolls to the side. Suddenly it seems they are all firing. The world goes dark as shots hammer about him. All is rock and fire and debris and pain. It goes on for what feels like an age: blast, explosion, pain.

  Gualtino is racing back in. ‘Are you still there, brothers?’ he voxes.

  There is a long pause. ‘Still here,’ Ellial manages to say. His legs are stumps. He grits his teeth against the pain. ‘But I might be alone now.’ Something vast rears up before him. It blots out the thin light of the sun.

  For a moment the world goes dark. Then impossibly bright.

  And hot.

  And then it is done.

  Nergui found himself coughing and choking. He threw back his head, and saw Domitian kneeling beside him.

  The blood had started dripping from his eye again. It rimmed his socket with red.

  You saw.+

  ‘Yes,’ Nergui said, and coughed and shook his head. He pushed himself to his feet, and held Domitian’s wrist to drag him up as well. The Librarian leant on him for a moment, and Nergui swayed. ‘Throne, yes. I understand now. What were those things? They had no chance against such an enemy. We must take word back. We must counter this thing.’

  Domitian caught the White Scar with one hand and held him up as they limped back towards the Corvus. Cadvan was aboard, starting up the engines.

  The ramps lowered and Nergui helped Domitian up.

  ‘Listen,’ the White Scar said. ‘Don’t ever do that again. Take me over. Without warning me.’ He hit the button to bring the ramps back up. They did not bother to strap themselves in as the Corvus’ engines whined and the craft lifted into the air.

  ‘I was losing him,’ Domitian said. ‘His soul, I mean. I wanted you to see what he saw.’

  ‘I know.’ Nergui wiped the scabs of blood from the corners of his eyes. ‘I saw it all. But just warn me next time.’

  ‘Find anything?’ Cadvan voxed, as the ramps closed behind them.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Nergui voxed back. We have found something, he thought.

  Chapter Three

 
; It was not usual for a Deathwatch shipmaster to stand on the landing deck to await the return of a kill team, but Shipmaster Loni Ferral far from ordinary.

  She was small, even for a human, but her diminutive size only made her tougher, like foil crushed by a mighty fist into a tight ball. Her face had been handsome once, despite the severe fringe, but years of rejuvenat had given her a slightly waxy look, while years of service with the Deathwatch had given her unaugmented eye a mean and wary light. At her side she carried a bolt pistol, and she’d used it a number of times, when the fighting had become desperate.

  Ferral saw the Corvus Blackstar settle on the landing decks of the Deathwatch strike cruiser Nemesis, and watched the black-power-armoured Space Marines stride towards her. She had positioned herself by the doors to the private chambers of the warriors and addressed Nergui as he approached.

  ‘Did you find them?’

  Nergui paused, took off his helmet and looked down. There was dried blood on his cheeks, and his eyes were rimmed with red. It was a point of pride for Ferrel that she alone of the bridge crew did not tremble when speaking with one of the Adeptus Astartes, but she caught her breath for a moment. ‘Was there a fight?’

  ‘No,’ Nergui said.

  ‘Then why the blood?’

  ‘Sulphur,’ he told her. ‘The atmosphere became acidic.’

  She seemed unimpressed – if a member of the Adeptus Astartes was going to bleed, her face seemed to say, there better be a damn good reason for it. Something better than environmental hazards. ‘You should have put your helmet on.’

  He did not laugh. ‘It is superficial. I wanted to smell the place where my brothers died.’

  Among the human crew members, only she was privy to the purpose of the mission. ‘So you found them?’

  Nergui absentmindedly brushed away the dried blood from one cheek. ‘We found traces of them.’

  She looked back to where tracked servitors were fussing about the Corvus Blackstar: reloading, checking, promethium pipes already refilling her tanks. ‘But there are no bodies.’