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  Warhammer 40,000

  I

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  WARHAMMER 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  ‘We know no fear. It was cut from our souls at birth. We can feel it only as an absence, as an empty shadow cast by the light of annihilation. In the face of a future of atrocity I stand mute, numb to the only feeling that would make me human. But I remember what fear was: its cold pulse in my veins; its echo in my ears. I remember fear, and remember that I was once human. I look towards what must come to pass and I wish that I could meet it as my ancestors did, with fear. The future deserves that, it deserves fear.’

  Epistolary Cyrus Aurelius, unheard confession

  I

  SUMMONED

  The vision unfolded into the present in a cascade of sensations.

  The sword is hot in his hand, the fury at its core bright with his rage. He cuts, feeling his armour move with the surge of his muscles. The edge meets deformed flesh, the sword shuddering in his grip as power flows through it. A bloated creature with a face like a flayed skull dissolves into smoke. Threat runes spin across his vision, pulsing red, swarming. A taste like burnt sugar and ruined meat fills his mouth.

  He is a figure in blue armour the shade of a clear sky, standing at the centre of a turning circle of countless twisted creatures. They close on him, pacing forwards, claws clicking on the stone floor. He can feel the creatures’ raw power, feel them thirsting for his soul. A death light fills their eyes. He stands alone and knows that he has failed.

  A shape with a wide mouth of glittering needle teeth comes at him, its limbs flowing into new shapes as it moves. The storm bolter roars in his fist, muscle fibres swallowing its kick. Detonations turn warp bloated flesh to red pulp. A threat rune blinks out. He turns, finger still squeezing the trigger, watching the ammunition count fall as the weapon trails a line of fire.

  I have failed, he thinks, and there will be nothing after this moment.

  The gun clatters silent. He raises his sword. A clawed hand bites through a leg joint. He feels the warm fluid pooling inside his armour. He steps forward, ramming the sword into the open mouth of a bird-shaped creature until its blade disappears in flesh. The power flows through him like a storm rush. The half-feathered body explodes in a blaze of light. He realises he is screaming. Lightning gathers around his body in a crackling spiral. The creatures fall back for a brief moment, turning their lidless eyes from the light. He raises the sword. His limbs are shuddering. Inside his helmet he is weeping blood.

  They come for him again, a tide of teeth and claws. He is striking, each blow a thunderclap. Many of the creatures fall, their distorted forms sliding back into shadow and smoke. But they are many and he is alone.

  This has not come to pass yet, he thinks, this is not happening. I am not dying. This is my fate, what shall be. This is the future, it has not happened yet. But the thought dies.

  The creatures around him howl and he feels the psychic crystals haloing his head shatter. He is blind.

  The world goes quiet and warm.

  I am dying, he thinks, I have failed and there will be nothing left, nothing but ash and hungering darkness.

  Something within him dims, fluttering to nothing like a flame fading to cold embers.

  He tries to raise his sword.

  He is falling…

  He was…

  … running the ashes of a dead world through his fingers. The vision faded, bleeding away into the grey present. He blinked, pushing away the sensations that remained coiled in his mind like a fever’s touch. He had seen echoes of possible futures before, but this had felt different; stronger, more instant, like a memory of something that had already happened.

  ‘Epistolary?’ said a voice, its sound flat inside his helmet. Cyrus looked up from the grey dust falling from his armoured fingers.

  He flicked his eyes across the green runes at the edge of his sight; the four green cruciform marks of Phobos’s squad winked back at him. He turned to look back at his escort spread behind him in a loose diamond. The white of their armour was bright beneath the shroud grey sky.

  Like him they were clad in monstrous Terminator armour. Their genetically enhanced physiques wrapped in layer upon layer of adamantium, their movements augmented by sheathes of fibre bundles that ran through the armour like a second set of muscles. The suits were relics of a lost time, their components replaced and repaired so many times that they were like walking scar tissue. To wear such armour was to feel the past as a cold shroud against one’s skin. Hundreds of his Chapter ancestors had worn Cyrus’s suit before it had passed to him. Most of those ancestors had died wearing it, he recalled.

  ‘Is everything well, brother?’ said the red-helmed sergeant.

  ‘Yes, brother. An errant thought, nothing more.’

  ‘As you say, Epistolary.’ Phobos’s tone was clipped and respectful, but Cyrus could feel the sergeant’s questions unspoken behind the blunt snout of his helm: why had they come down to the surface of this planet?

  A flat, grey plain extended away from them, its surface undisturbed by wind, rain or the tread of feet. Runes flowed across Cyrus’s vision, his sensorium searching for movement, heat, life, and finding nothing. Two hundred and thirty million people had died here. He blink-clicked away the questing runes; this world was dead, and it had died at its protector’s hand.

  It was called Kataris, an agri-world of processing cities and endless plains of crops, ripening under a bright sun. It had died in less time than it took that sun to circle the sky. Something had drawn the eyes of the daemons to it, and they had come from beyond reality. Millions had died in the first assault. Their deaths had prepared the world for the arrival of more of their kind. More and more had slipped across the shadow divide between reality and the warp. The few, the very few people who had not died then became a defiant clutch of humanity clinging to the planet’s last fortifications. There they had muttered prayers, tears rolling down their ash-dusted cheeks, and waited for the end.

  An astropath had sent a desperate call out through the warp. It had
called for help, for the protection promised by the priests of the Imperial Creed. ‘The Emperor protects’ had been the last words of the message. And a single word of execution had answered that message: Exterminatus. The death sentence of a world and all who lived on it. Kataris had pleaded for aid and been answered by death falling from the tortured sky. For a moment the wide plains of ruin had been still, the sound of thunder settling with the dust. Then the inferno came, rushing across the world from horizon to horizon, consuming the tainted air in a roar like the war-cries shouted at the end of time.

  Cyrus could almost taste the pyre.

  ‘This was no victory,’ he murmured to himself.

  Decades before, Cyrus and his brothers had fought on Kataris against a raiding force of eldar. They had defeated the aliens and broken their hidden witch-gate. It had been a vicious war, but they had won and the world had lived. This time their answer to the dead world’s plea was too late. They had arrived many days after the ships of the Inquisition execution force had departed.

  If we had been here, could we have saved this world? The question had no answer, but that did not stop Cyrus asking it to himself. Unlike the rest of his brothers he could feel what had happened here as echoes lingering in the immaterium. He was a psyker, gifted with an ability to channel and manipulate the power of the realm beyond reality. The warp was a nightmare other realm of psychic energy, but the mind of a psyker could tap and shape that energy. To some it was sorcery. To others it was a step in the evolution of humanity. To Cyrus it was a weapon. It was a gift that allowed Cyrus to do things beyond even his brother White Consuls. But the gift also set him apart from the rest of his Chapter; it could not be otherwise. How could it be, when he felt the death of this world resonate over him like dust blowing over bare skin?

  That is why I ordered us to come to the surface, he thought. Because someone needed to witness what had happened, someone needed to touch it and remember the price of survival.

  ‘Epistolary,’ said a voice washed in static. It came from the bridge of the Aethon, the battle-barge that hung above them in high orbit.

  ‘Speak,’ said Cyrus.

  ‘We have received a signal. It seems to be another plea for help.’ The voice paused. ‘It includes the word “Fateweaver”.’

  Cyrus closed his eyes for a moment. It could only mean one thing.

  The world he stood on was only the latest to be subject to a daemonic incursion. World after world had fallen in this crescent of stars that edged the Eye of Terror. Thousands of millions had died as the Inquisition attempted to contain the incursion. And in the wake of this destruction a name followed like whisper made with a dying breath: Fateweaver.

  ‘Where?’ asked Cyrus.

  ‘The message is garbled but we have an origin location. An astropathic relay fortress in the Claros system.’ The vision of the future resurfaced in Cyrus’s mind. ‘What are your orders?’

  The astropath’s voice sounded like the rasp of a dying man. ‘…..report… Claros… the enemy beyond…’ The robed figure turned in a cone of cold green light, mouth flapping in a thin face as it spoke words which were not its own. ‘…lies…. Fateweaver, we… blinded…. failing…’ The man’s lips twisted, breath wheezing as he tried to say incomplete thoughts. ‘… soul… that hear this… send…. help…. accursed eternity.’

  Cyrus sat alone and watched the holo-recording. He wore no armour; his suit of blue Terminator plate was being cleansed and re-blessed after his journey to the surface of Kataris. A cowled robe of white covered his hunched form, its edges woven in blue and with the names of Chapter ancestors. Within the cowl’s shadow his gaunt face looked as if it were carved from white marble. Around him the battle council chamber was dark, the pale light of the holo-recording showing the outlines of a wide stone table and chairs. Beyond the circle of light the darkness hummed with the roar of the Aethon’s engines as it cut through the warp.

  As soon as he had stepped back onto the Aethon, Cyrus had asked for a recording of the signal. As an Epistolary of the Adeptus Astartes, he was capable of receiving the psychic messages that passed from the mind of one astropath to another. Passing through the warp, these messages crossed the vast distances of space faster than the light of stars. This message, though, had arrived while he was down on the surface of Kataris. Amongst the death echoes surrounding that world his mind had been deaf to such subtle telepathy. The Aethon’s own astropath had received it and now Cyrus looked at a recording of that moment.

  Something about the signal disturbed him. It was garbled, chewed by its transmission from one mind to another, but he felt as if he could almost hear the words that hung unsaid in the gaps.

  ‘It won’t change you know.’ The voice came out of the gloom towards the chamber’s door.

  Cyrus looked up. His eyes turned the darkness into monochrome shades of light and shadow. The figure standing at the other end of the deserted council chamber wore a tunic of white fabric. His blunt head was shaved smooth and snaked with scars, and there were two chrome studs above his left eye. Bare forearms, thick with muscle and looped by heavy copper vambraces, hung loose at his side.

  ‘Phobos,’ Cyrus said, smiling as the figure walked forwards. ‘Come to shake me from my melancholy?’ Phobos said nothing but stopped on the other side of the circular stone table. Between them the holographic astropath still turned and spoke in its cone of light.

  Phobos stared at the projection. ‘You still judge it best to follow this?’

  Cyrus frowned: there was something wrong with his old friend. There was no trace of the usual stone dry humour in his words, just a tone that Cyrus could not place.

  ‘Yes, brother,’ said Cyrus, standing up from the iron backed chair. ‘You did not raise an objection when I ordered the Aethon to the Claros system. Is there something you wish to say now?’ Phobos was silent, but Cyrus could see emotions playing across the sergeant’s blunt features.

  Cyrus was commander of the force aboard the Aethon; he had no need to listen to the sergeant’s misgivings, but he would. As a psyker he had always stood apart from others. It was as true now as it had been when he was a shunned boy on a long forgotten world. But Phobos had never shown the remoteness that was common in his brothers. A sergeant of the First Company, a Proconsul, bearer of the Crux Terminatus, he was a warrior to the bone, and the closest thing to a friend Cyrus had ever known.

  ‘We have been wardens out here for three decades,’ said Phobos slowly. ‘Three decades of war.’

  ‘That was our oath and our duty,’ said Cyrus.

  ‘Yes, and a duty we paid in blood,’ said Phobos. Cyrus nodded. It had been paid in blood indeed. The Aethon was a battle-barge, a vessel for making war amongst the stars. It could carry three hundred Adeptus Astartes, their vehicles and tools of war. When it had left Sabatine it had been close to its full strength, but three decades of war in the margins of the Eye of Terror had demanded its price. Captains and veterans of hundreds of years of war lay dead on lost worlds, or drifting through the cold void. Silence filled the ship, its crew reduced to servitors, and its systems to the bare essentials necessary to serve the remaining White Consuls.

  Yes, and we paid that price many times over, my friend, thought Cyrus. ‘Is there any other way for the Adeptus Astartes to fulfil their duty?’ he said instead, with a sternness he did not feel.

  ‘We are White Consuls.’ Phobos leaned on the table looking at the raptor head emblems carved into the stone surface. ‘We are inches away from extinction. The Chapter calls and…’ His words fell away.

  ‘And what?’ Cyrus watched his friend swallow.

  ‘The Chapter calls, but we linger.’

  ‘You think that is what we do? Linger?’

  ‘I think that our Chapter needs us,’ said Phobos.

  Cyrus felt ice run through him at the words. It was true. The Chapter had gathered in great numbers to face a terrible foe, and it had been wounded to the point that its future hung by a thread. The call had come, d
rawing all the sons of Sabatine back to their home.

  ‘And what of the purpose of our Chapter, Sergeant Phobos?’ said Cyrus, and Phobos looked up at the coldness in his voice. ‘We are White Consuls, Primogenitors of Guilliman. We shepherd and guard mankind. That is what we were created for. That is our duty to our Chapter.’

  ‘And if the Chapter is no more?’ growled Phobos. ‘If it is destroyed and we are not there?’

  ‘If we forget our purpose, my friend, then there will be nothing but ash blowing across dead worlds.’ He thought he saw a flash of sympathy in Phobos’s dark eyes, and knew that he had seen the echo of lost Kataris in his words.

  ‘It had fallen,’ said Phobos, his voice softening. ‘There was nothing that could have been done to save it. Were we there, or ten times our number, there would have been no option but Exterminatus.’

  Cyrus thought of the dead world’s last scream for help before it burned.

  ‘We could not have saved it, and we will not be able to save Claros if the daemons come to it,’ Phobos added.

  ‘There is always something that should be tried before you step into annihilation.’ Cyrus growled. ‘Pay for the survival of humanity with atrocity and there will be nothing left.’ He shut down the holo-display, and walked away leaving Phobos alone in the dark.

  The Aethon cut towards the bronze-hulled space station, its auspex nodes filling the void around it with overlapping folds of sensor fields. It was over eight kilometres long, a blunt barb of off-white armour and macro weaponry folded in crackling void shields. The roar of its plasma engines at full burn made the bridge vibrate under Cyrus’s feet.

  ‘No signs of enemy activity, or battle residue, my lord,’ said the logistician bound into the main sensor dais. The man turned his green bionic eyes to Cyrus. ‘The station seems to be intact and unharmed. They are acknowledging our hails and have accepted our request to dock.’