Dark Imperium Read online

  The heretic roared with laughter as the gun slammed out bolt-rounds. Varens threw himself aside as men were cut down all around him. Mass-reactive shells pierced flesh and detonated, tearing men into red scraps that were quickly lost to the mud.

  ‘I said you first!’ Mumbling annoyance, the Plague Marine stomped forwards, crushing the rib cage of a wounded auxiliary. Red-tinged water filled his bootprints.

  The thing was monstrous, a blasphemy against mankind and his proper place in the universe, and it was unstoppable. Lasbeams pattered off its armoured hide. Expanses of exposed, leathery skin hissed as they burned. The Plague Marine acted as if nothing were amiss.

  ‘Father Nurgle waits for you in his garden, little man,’ he said as he racked a final bolt into his gun and levelled it at Varens. ‘Be glad, you go to a better place than this. When your joy has subsided at the sight of your new home, be sure to tell him Odricus of the Death Guard’s fifth sept sent you.’

  From nowhere, Bolus appeared, ducking in under the Plague Marine’s arm. The traitor moved to react, but its only weakness, or so it seemed, was that it was as slow as the dead it shepherded. Bolus was not.

  With a move that would have impressed the commandos of the Militarum Tempestus, he jammed his gun up and under the Heretic Astartes’ helm. The creature growled as the weapon forced the helm’s metal away from the conjoined flesh.

  ‘So you can be hurt,’ said Bolus. ‘Good.’

  He pulled the trigger as the traitor wrapped its diseased hand around his throat.

  Devised by the high sciences of the Emperor to withstand great damage, and made more resilient yet by the magics of Chaos, the Plague Marines of Nurgle were nigh on immune to harm. But they were not unkillable. Even they suffered from a point-blank lasgun shot to the face.

  The traitor’s head cracked open with a wet squelch. Curls of atomised flesh rose from its helmet. In the ruins of its throat came a last, bubbling breath, and then it toppled forwards, knocking Bolus back into the mud and landing squarely on top of him.

  Bolus was buried by his dead foe; only his arm protruded from under the traitor’s cracked battleplate.

  Varens threw himself forwards and dug into the mud. Bolus’ hand twitched and scrabbled. ‘Hang on, Bolus! Hang on, my friend!’

  As fast as Varens dug at the mud, trying to hollow out a space so that he could drag Bolus free, it filled up with dirty water. Vile fluids from the dead Heretic Astartes seeped into the mess.

  Bolus was drowning in that filth.

  In desperation, Varens hooked his hands under the shoulder plates of the dead traitor and heaved. Corroded ceramite flaked to pieces in his grasp, and though the plate shifted on its worn joints, he could not move the bloated Space Marine. A wet tearing pain stabbed beneath his shoulder. He did not remember being hit, but that did not matter. He could not exert his full strength. It wouldn’t be enough if he could. He might as well have pushed at Espandor and try to move it as shift the dead traitor.

  It seemed a long, desperate time, but perhaps only seconds passed.

  Hands shoved him away, making space for others to join him. The new recruits were there, those that had survived. Two of them jammed plasteel beams taken from the trench facing under the traitor’s armour.

  ‘Heave!’ they shouted, using the beams as levers. ‘Heave!’ The beams slipped in the filth. Bolus’ movements were lessening. The respirator had limited rebreathing capacity. He only had moments left.

  ‘Dig deeper!’ shouted Varens, scrambling up and grabbing a beam. ‘Find solid ground to push against!’

  He helped shove the plasteel down until it would go no further, then he leapt for the top, hung off it and leaned backwards, ignoring the hot pain in his back.

  ‘Heave!’ shouted the young soldiers. Teeth gritted, they shifted the giant’s shoulders enough to expose Bolus.

  Two of the youths pulled the acting sergeant out the instant before the beams slipped and the traitor fell back into the mud. Varens grabbed Bolus’ face.

  ‘Bolus!’ he shouted. He scraped mud off his friend’s visor. Bolus stared back at him with wide eyes. He was silent, but alive.

  The rain hammered down on a sudden quiet. The traitors were gone; whether dead or vanished, Varens could not see.

  He had no time for relief. He suddenly felt very cold. A slow pulsing in his back reminded him of his wound. Bolus stared up at him, his expression empty.

  When this had happened back on Espandor, Bolus had been unharmed in body but something had gone in his mind. They had been through triage and taken away from the front line on medical transports back to Konor’s Reach. At the spaceport began the endless rounds of processing that had resulted in their evacuation to Iax.

  That was then. Now, nightmare departed from memory.

  A carrion movement within Bolus’ flesh had Varens recoil in horror, but his hands would not obey him and he could not release his friend.

  ‘Forty-nine! Forty-nine!’ Bolus giggled. His mask filled with writhing maggots that burst from his shrivelling eyes. But he laughed on and on. ‘All is ash!’

  Varens awoke screaming into the silence of the medicae ward. Feeble hands shook him. Varens screamed again, and lashed out.

  ‘Ouch!’ The hands were removed. ‘Shut up, Varens, we’re trying to get some sleep,’ groused Mukai, the man who had the cot next to his. He stood over Varens looking grumpy.

  Consciousness came, displacing sleep just as rushing water sweeps away sand. The horror remained. Varens clamped his mouth shut to stifle the last of his screams.

  ‘I’m sorry. Nightmares,’ Varens managed to say. Mutters from the beds nearby spoke of a lack of sympathy.

  Varens reached for his water, hands shaking. The battle had been just like he had dreamed it, and he dreamed it every night. The aftershocks of his nightmare receded, leaving him shaking.

  He fumbled for the water by his cot. His shaking hands knocked the plastek cup onto the floor.

  ‘For the sake of the Emperor! Keep it down!’ Hammadsen, the man on the other side, shouted into his pillow.

  ‘Sorry,’ Varens said. He was awake now. He needed a drink, so he slipped out from under the thin blanket and picked up his cup. His back twinged, but it was a good, healing pain.

  Rubbing at his wound, he padded between the long rows of beds. The ward was a wide hall, with eight rows of low cots. The men here were all injured in ways serious enough to warrant their evacuation, but not likely to be invalided. Nearly all of them would be sent back to the war, unlike the men on some of the other wards. There were halls in the hospital for whose occupants a hard life of poverty awaited, doing whatever work their disfigurements allowed. The richest could afford augmetics. The very brave might be patched up and sent back to the front as morale-boosting examples. The rest would do what they could.

  ‘For Ultramar, for the Imperium, for the grace of the Emperor,’ he whispered under his breath. He made the sign of the aquila obsessively over his chest.

  The lights in the small rest area calmed him down. Varens poured himself a cup of water that tasted of disinfectants. He drained it, pulling a face at the aftertaste as he took the cup from his lips. It was better than the water on Espandor, though, and in plentiful supply.

  He had another cup, then started towards bed, but a superstitious unease halted his steps, and before he knew it he was turning around and heading towards the ward where Bolus was.

  A medicae in low-ranking grey was in the chair outside Bolus’ ward, head bowed over a devotional pamphlet. He wore a small lamp over one eye that lit the cheap paper a livid yellow, each splinter of wood pulp a strong detail against the blue blur of night. The hands holding it were just as blotted, and blunted by hard work.

  ‘What do you want?’ The medicae looked up, the lamp shining into Varens’ face.

  Varens held up his hand to shield his eyes. ‘I c
ame to see my friend, Bolus. He’s in there. Patient 900018/43A?’ He waved at the scratched glass partition. A large ‘XVI’ was stencilled onto it.

  ‘What do you think you are doing? No visitors,’ said the orderly. He looked back at his pamphlet.

  ‘Please,’ said Varens. ‘It’s not for him so much as for me. I… I have these nightmares. If I could see he’s all right then I’ll sleep better. If I sleep better, then I’ll get out of here quicker, and be back to the fight.’

  The orderly sighed and set his pamphlet aside and looked up and down the corridor. He was the only man on duty. Unoccupied chairs sat outside the other wards.

  ‘Alright – just this once. No one’s looking. But if I see you around here again, I’m reporting you. Do you understand?’

  Varens nodded gratefully. ‘Yes. Yes, thank you.’

  The orderly took a heavy ring of keys from his belt and unlocked the door. Checking they were unobserved again, he held it wide and ushered Varens in.

  ‘One minute. Any disturbance, I’ll see you shot.’

  The halls for the psych cases were much smaller than those where the physically injured rested. During the day they were bedlams, but at night merciful drugs brought dreamless sleep. Machines pumped soporifics into arms chained to the sides of sturdy beds. Varens came to Bolus in eerie silence.

  Varens looked down. In sleep, Bolus wore a scowl that made him look like the hard man he had been. He was peaceful. Varens let out a sigh of relief.

  On the way back to the door, he heard Bolus speaking. He should not have been able to, not with the drugs, but he was.

  ‘Forty-nine,’ he mumbled. ‘Forty-nine.’

  Chapter Twelve

  The Cawl Inferior

  There was a place upon the Macragge’s Honour where none were allowed to go but Roboute Guilliman, and he went by invitation only.

  Guilliman’s shuttle landed in his personal hangar. From there, the primarch went straight to the depths of his quarters. Located in a hidden space was a gene-locked elevator whose inbuilt weapons were primed to kill any other who attempted to access it. A simple retinal scan allowed him inside, but once he was within the elevator, the security protocols Guilliman underwent were extensive. Arcane devices on armatures extended from the walls to test his body, mental state and spiritual aura. One by one, the machines croaked or twittered their approval, and the last withdrew into its recess. The elevator activated smoothly, descending two hundred decks in a matter of seconds. It stopped nowhere else. At the bottom, its rear doors opened onto a chamber lit by rubicund false light. His primarch’s eyes struggled with the illumination. A mortal man would have been virtually blind.

  The chamber was hot, loud with the chatter of hidden machinery and heavy with a sense of foreboding. Once through the doors on the far side of the chamber, that sensation would grow worse as Guilliman was exposed to the psychic circuitry of Cawl’s blasphemous device. First he must undergo another series of tests. Again, he passed each one, and the chamber’s far doors opened into a second and much larger circular space, lit the same bloody colour. The doors were complex, three interleaving sets of metre-thick bonded hexsteel whose toothed edges clunked ominously as they unlocked from each other. The chamber’s spherical exterior walls were similarly armoured. Cawl’s machine would survive the death of the Macragge’s Honour itself.

  Guilliman readied himself for the greater psychic pressure and stepped inside.

  His head throbbed. The air smelt of ozone, sanctified oil, curdled milk and old blood.

  At twenty metres across, the interior space of the machine was modest by voidship standards. A grilled floor was suspended over a pit full of humming machines, dividing the interior space into two. Quieter than virtually everything Guilliman had seen in this benighted era, the machines nevertheless made the room vibrate at a high frequency with the turning of their parts. Through the floor grille came the majority of the red light, confusing shadow and highlight and breaking down any visual sense of the space.

  ‘Lumens!’ barked Guilliman.

  The machinery’s high whine dropping to a grumble. The red crept down the walls, like fire dying. The metal of the room groaned in relief, as if the touch of the red light had a physical effect upon it. Hard-white lumens snapped on above, banishing the sanguine glow to beneath the flooring and bringing the room’s features into sharp focus.

  The chamber seemed smaller in the cleaner light, and its features were clearly resolved. A small door opened directly opposite the main gate. Closed panels at a man’s eye level lined the walls between the two doors, ten on the left and ten on the right. Pipes bound tightly by metal staples hung in swags from the ceiling. A small mercy, in Guilliman’s opinion, was that the chamber was free of the gothic extravagance that encrusted everything else in the 41st millennium. It was pure of form, if not of function. The Machina Opus glaring down from a rondel set into the domed ceiling was the sole decoration; even Belisarius Cawl was not radical enough to omit that symbol.

  The room’s other access slid upwards. It, too, comprised three massively thick doors that opened in sequence. On the far side were the quarters of Guidus Losenti. They were totally black, for Losenti had no need of light of any kind.

  ‘My lord.’ Losenti appeared in the doorway and came into the room. As he detached himself from the blackness, pools of it came with him in his eye sockets. His body appeared old and frail, but as he drew near the primarch, the inner strength that allowed Losenti to withstand the psychic pressure of the machine became palpable. There was great power clinging to his aged mortal frame.

  ‘I came as quickly as I could, master astropath,’ said Guilliman.

  Losenti smiled, the skin wrinkling around the darkness in his eyes which, when one was close enough, revealed themselves to be shiny black orbs of jet. Losenti paced around the Imperial Regent restlessly. As he walked, he placed his staff with utmost surety, the ferrule that capped the black wood never once slipping into the holes of the grating.

  ‘To speak with my lord pleases me,’ he said. Losenti had the voice of much younger man.

  ‘Are you well?’

  ‘I am well.’ With one blue-veined, pale hand, Losenti pulled back the green hood of his robes. His scalp was hairless, and his skull clearly defined under its covering of parchment-thin skin.

  ‘I trust your duty remains onerous but bearable.’

  ‘I thank you for your concern. I do not enjoy my duty, Lord Militant. The nature of Cawl’s sendings are exceptionally tedious, and lack the vitality one experiences when minds touch across the immensity of the void. I think he might use a machine, although once I would have said such a thing were impossible.’ Losenti paused, waiting for Guilliman to confirm or refute this notion.

  ‘Perhaps he does,’ said Guilliman. ‘Having witnessed what I have of his works, nothing would surprise me.’

  Losenti resumed his walk around the primarch, staff clicking unerringly on the metal. ‘However, I do not wish to change it. Cawl’s missives are so simple they suffer no corruption of the like that has plagued astrotelepathy since the opening of the Great Rift. There is no interference, no unwelcome intrusion. I am alone here, and isolated from my own kind, and that is hard to bear. The times I must be within the machine pain me greatly, but I am free from insanity, and as much as we all wish to serve the Imperium above all things, I admit to a certain sentimental attachment to my own life and soul.’

  ‘If you ever crave release, Losenti, I can provide it.’

  Losenti had a clear, youthful laugh to match his voice. Its brightness angered whatever skulked in the machine’s depths, and the spiritual pressure grew. ‘My lord, forgive me. We both are aware of what “release” means. I assure you, I am content. You may keep the mercy of your boltgun for the time being. Now, shall we begin?’

  ‘If you would, master astropath.’

  Losenti worked alone as his
mission dictated. He had been selected from the strongest astropaths Guilliman could find. Among his many gifts, Losenti required no translator for his visions, but was able to recall the images from his fugues and explain them himself. Not a particularly unusual skill in an astropath, but a crucial one to the running of a machine that secrecy demanded have a sole operator, and when found in conjunction with his fortitude, rare indeed.

  ‘By the will of the Omnissiah,’ he said in his crystal voice. ‘Engage initiation sequence.’

  A crunching sounded from within the curved walls. A harsh machine voice boomed out.

  ‘Provide identity.’

  ‘Astropath Prime Ultra Guidus Losenti.’

  ‘Ident confirmed. Secondary unlock necessary.’

  ‘Primarch Roboute Guilliman,’ spoke the primarch. ‘Lord Militant of the High Lords of the Imperium of Man, and Imperial Regent.’

  ‘Secondary unlock ident confirmed. Stand by for gene scan. Gene scan.’

  A flat band of green light fanned out from the wall. It washed up and down the primarch and the astropath.

  ‘Gene scan confirmed. Ident confirmed. Code required.’

  A noise damper projected a cone of null-sound around Guilliman. He heard nothing; even the vibrations of the machines under his feet were robbed of auditory expression. From Guilliman’s position, Losenti’s lips moved wordlessly. Guilliman looked away. He could lip read. Cawl knew that. The first and only time he had idly let his gaze rest on the astropath’s face while he spoke his code, Guilliman been temporarily blinded by a las strobe.

  He could not fault Cawl’s dedication to security. Though his attention to detail bordered on pathological, for ten thousand years Cawl’s procedures had kept Roboute Guilliman’s secrets for him. He had no grounds for criticism.

  The null-sound cone snapped off. Guilliman spoke out his own code, a string of nonsensical words that changed depending on the date.