Horus Heresy: Scars Read online

  A Contemptor, Bjorn thought ruefully. This was a short boarding action.

  The Dreadnought towered over him, lumbering after him with the remorseless certainty of some gigantic saurian on the prowl. Twin rear smokestacks gouted oily smoke as it stomped through the wreckage, shrouding a chassis that hummed and sputtered and hissed with mechanical activity.

  In the space of a single heartbeat, crouched behind the flimsiest of protection, Bjorn assessed his options.

  Decision made.

  He burst back out, powering clear of the lifter debris even as the Contemptor’s assault cannon opened up again, shredding through the wreckage in a storm of firepower. Sprinting up one of the lifter’s half-crushed claws before it was blown away, Bjorn gained some height – just enough to see the Contemptor’s glowing eyes flash back at him.

  ‘Hjolda!’ he bellowed, almost laughing at the absurdity of what he planned, then hurled himself through the air.

  He sailed clear of the assault cannon’s fury and collided with the Dreadnought’s shoulder. Bjorn swung his crackling axe-blade, slicing deep into the casing of its armoured hood, lodging himself halfway up the torso. The Contemptor swung wildly, nearly dislodging him on the first attempt. Bjorn pulled himself higher, scrabbling clear of the whirling power claw. He landed a punch hard into the Contemptor’s helm, then another, hammering at it with his half-hand. His fist’s unfinished mechanics shattered quickly, but he smashed one of the slanted eye-pieces and let slip a growl of satisfaction.

  The Contemptor lurched round again, wrenching Blódbringer loose. Bjorn was swung clear and tumbled through mid-air – he crashed to the ground three metres away, just managing to keep hold of his blade. He twisted around, only to stare right into the barrels of the assault cannon.

  ‘Skíthof!’ Bjorn roared defiantly, bracing himself for the shell-rain that would end him, determined to keep his eyes open.

  But then a volley of mass-reactive bolts slammed into the Dreadnought from over to its left, blazing against its armour plating and dousing it in a rippling curtain of mini-explosions. The Contemptor’s assault cannon barrels slewed to one side, knocked clear by the barrage and unloading less than a metre from where Bjorn lay.

  ‘Fenrys!’ came Godsmote’s frenzied war-cry. ‘Fenrys faerir mord!’

  Three of his pack had made it, charging towards the Contemptor and loosing a hail of kicking bolter-fire. Bjorn leapt to his feet, scrambling out of the path of the still-firing assault cannon and flinging his axe at the Dreadnought’s damaged head. The blade scythed towards the target, but the Contemptor angled away. Blódbringer lodged fast on its upper carapace, spitting harmlessly.

  Bjorn drew his bolt pistol and fired with the others, darting from one crumpled mass of cover to the next as the hangar rang with the hard bang of bolter-rounds. All four of them emptied their weapons at the target, swamping it in a blaze of detonations.

  It kept coming. They damaged it, but it kept coming, wading through the firestorm just as it had been designed to do. The assault cannon swung round in a ruinous arc, smashing clear what remained of their scant cover. One of the Wolves – Eunwald, Bjorn thought – was too slow leaping clear and was knocked onto his back by the impact. Godsmote was bludgeoned aside almost as an afterthought, his armour split down the breastplate.

  They couldn’t bring it down. They couldn’t get close enough, and they didn’t have the weapons to hurt it at range.

  ‘Allfather!’ Bjorn roared, charging in close again, hoping against hope to somehow get a zero-range shot into its more vulnerable cabling before the Hel-damned thing’s claw ripped him away.

  He never got the chance. None of them did.

  The gale came from nowhere, as if the chamber-wall had been punched out to the void. The force of it knocked him sideways, flooring him once more. His vision reeled and his helm cracked hard against the deck. He heard what sounded like thunder breaking, followed by the actinic crackle of energy weapons igniting.

  With a lurch of recognition, he realised the rush was not that of decompression, nor was it natural – the winds that howled across the chamber had the ice-rimed redolence of Asaheim.

  Bjorn lifted his head, groggy from the impact, to see the Contemptor facing a new foe. Despite everything, he couldn’t resist a crooked grin at that.

  The game was over. The Wolf King had arrived.

  Shiban brought the Kaljian up into one-third speed, keeping a close eye on the tactical scanners clustered around his command throne. The bridge crew worked at their stations while Jochi, Chel and the others of his legionary command retinue stood in a loose semicircle close by.

  ‘Keep this heading,’ he ordered. ‘Do not exceed this speed.’

  The Kaljian had only just arrived at the muster, one of the last to respond to the summons, before being ordered right back out on fleet perimeter patrol as part of Hasik Noyan-Khan’s response to the Alpha Legion approach.

  Orders from the centre had been clipped. Shiban guessed that was because they had no idea what was going on – he certainly didn’t.

  ‘They’ll be in visual range soon,’ observed Jochi.

  Shiban could hear the doubt in his voice. The Alpha Legion were an unknown quantity. They hadn’t responded to communication requests and had just hung back on the edge of the system, quietly accumulating more warships across a wide sweep of local space.

  ‘Maintain the line, master,’ warned Shiban, noting a minor deviation in their trim respective to the vessels on either side of them. The White Scars response had been almost painfully proportionate – a thin line of attack-craft spread out within a lance-strike’s range of one another. The bigger warships of both fleets remained at the rear, brooding on the edge of detection.

  Everything had changed so quickly, garbled in a flurry of contradictory astropathy and secure comm-bursts: Russ of the Wolves had gone rogue; or the Warmaster had; the White Scars were ordered to reinforce the Alpha Legion at Alaxxes; they were commanded to return to Terra; Ferrus Manus had killed the peacock Fulgrim; Mars was in open revolt. Some of the warp-translated messages bore chrono-marks from months previously; some had been sent, it seemed, only hours ago.

  Shiban had reported his findings from Phemus immediately upon entering communications range of Chondax, but he had no doubt that they had sunk into the morass of briefings without trace.

  ‘Why do they vox nothing?’ asked Jochi. He’d complained of the same thing three times already, vocalising what the entire crew was feeling.

  Shiban smiled wearily. ‘This is the Alpha Legion, brother. Their gift is to be irritatingly obtuse.’

  Ahead of them, a thin line of glowing dots became visible through the real-view ports. At first they seemed like little more than a few extra stars. Then they became steadily brighter.

  A pinprick glimmered on his retinal display, indicating that Hasik’s orders had been updated. Shiban blinked to activate them.

  No response from XX Legion command. Attempts to make contact continue. First wave of ships incoming on planar trajectory. Do not escalate situation. Do not fire unless fired upon. Maintain perimeter integrity. Do not permit incoming craft to penetrate within range of core fleet. Stand by for further instruction.

  Shiban drew in a deep breath. Those orders had altogether too much of a whiff of contradiction to be entirely helpful.

  ‘We are being targeted,’ came a report from one of the bridge’s sensorium crew.

  ‘Pinpoint the source,’ Shiban replied. ‘Gain a lock and prepare main lance. Do not fire until I give the command.’

  The Kaljian crept forwards, moving far slower than he generally liked to power it. Everything about the frigate had been designed for sudden, violent movements in the heat of battle; nudging along at such meagre velocities exposed the rough edges of the engine design.

  ‘We were told the Alpha Legion had engaged the Wolves,’ said Chel thoughtfully. ‘Or was that just another scry-glitch?’

  Shiban couldn’t give him an answer. Either
the XX Legion had a suspiciously large number of operational warships, or something had gone awry with a star-speaker’s auguries. Both were possible.

  He felt tense. This was not the sort of encounter he enjoyed: a cagey, stepwise testing of boundaries.

  ‘What do they want?’ asked Jochi again, watching warily as the closest Alpha Legion vessels drew even closer.

  ‘It does no good to speculate,’ said Shiban. ‘They desire to keep us guessing, so I suggest we do not indulge them.’

  The lead Alpha Legion vessel emerged from the void, advancing as part of a line of warships in the mirror-image of the White Scars own deployment.

  Just like us, thought Shiban. Everything was similar – the ships, the weapons, their configurations. The Alpha Legion had sent lesser craft ahead, leaving the behemoths clustered at the rear. The symmetry of the advance was eerie.

  ‘Energy spikes?’ Shiban enquired, scrutinising its growing profile.

  ‘Nothing, khan,’ replied the sensorium operator.

  By then Shiban could make out details of the vessel’s hull on the magnocular viewers. It was blue, a deep, indigo blue, and marked with the chained Alpha device of the XX Legion. Marker lights flickered along its serrated flanks, blurry behind the interference of active void shields.

  It came forward steadily, neither hurrying nor dawdling. Something about the brazenness of its approach was annoying – the whole Alpha Legion presence smacked of arrogance, of a knowing superiority.

  They understand what has happened while we have been absent. Of course they are arrogant.

  ‘Any break in their formation?’ Shiban asked.

  ‘No, khan.’

  ‘Any break in ours?’

  ‘None.’

  He felt his fingers itch to drum along the armrest of the command throne. Every warrior instinct screamed at him to act, to seize the initiative, to transform the uncertainty into something he could take control of.

  ‘It has stopped, khan.’

  Shiban glanced down at his throne’s tactical hololith projection. The line of Alpha Legion warships had come to a standstill, strung out in a vast holding pattern.

  ‘Full halt,’ he ordered.

  All across the White Scars fleet, the other advance vessels did the same. The two fleet vanguards hung in the void, both immobile, a wall of ivory and gold staring at a barrier of blue and copper.

  Silence descended across the bridge, broken only by the movement of fingers over consoles and the click-click-click of servitor motors working.

  ‘So what now?’ asked Jochi, staring gloomily at the forward viewers.

  Shiban pressed his fingers together, bridging them in front of his face, his elbows resting on the command throne.

  ‘We see who blinks first,’ he said.

  Leman Russ slammed into the Contemptor, roaring a war-cry that made the distant ceiling tremble. He carried the frostblade Mjalnar two-handed, its toothed length spitting and shimmering with barely constrained energies. His ruddy, helmless face blazed with the fury of the god-marked, and his blond hair flailed around him like a corona of winter sunlight.

  Bjorn caught the look in those sky-blue eyes, just for a second, and felt even his war-seasoned hearts misgive him. The Wolf King in combat was like an avalanche crashing down a mountainside. The aura of murder he projected was incredible; the air hummed with it, a wall of soul-shock that crashed like a bow wave across everything in his path.

  The Contemptor swung around to meet the threat and was blown away. Russ charged through assault cannon shells in a hail of armour-deflected impacts. He smashed hard into the Dreadnought, hacking wildly. Mjalnar took out the cannon in a single swipe, severing the multiple barrels and sending them clattering.

  Rocked, the Contemptor lashed out with its claw, aiming for the primarch’s throat. Russ evaded the choke-hold and crunched his elbow into the Dreadnought’s helm. Then the blade jammed down again, clanging from the Contemptor’s ravaged carapace. The war machine staggered away and Russ surged after it, his blade sweeping in haymaking arcs that cleaved through ceramite and smashed armourglass.

  It was not artful, it was not elegant – every blow was brutal with primal potency, and the end came quickly. Russ hewed down, smashing open the Contemptor’s torso below where Bjorn’s axe-blade was still lodged. Its shell cracked open with a wet schlick, exposing bubbling amniotic tanks within. Russ piled in, switching to a one-hand grip so that his gauntlet was free to seize the enclosed flesh.

  The final scream was sickening – a thin, barely audible shriek of agony from the sliver of once-warrior that still endured within the Contemptor’s innards. Russ wrenched the meat-chunk free, dragging a tangle of feeder-tubes and neural bundles with it. Fluids – blood, tank nutrients and engine lubricants – splattered across his gold-rimmed armour.

  For a second, Russ held the Contemptor’s mortal elements before him. The creature was meagre and dripping, a sordid collection of barely viable organs. Something like a lung trembled wetly on strands of sinew; a lone eye stared out from a pulped cranial mass.

  Russ drew the remnant closer to him. ‘You should have stayed dead.’

  Then he twisted his fist closed, throttling the last life from the Contemptor’s erstwhile occupant and casting the corpse-matter to the floor with a damp, gory slap.

  Only then did Bjorn notice other souls: Lord Gunn was there, as were more than fifty warriors of Onn. The noise of bolter-fire echoed across the cavernous chamber as more infiltrators were hunted down.

  ‘You,’ said Russ, looking at Bjorn accusingly. ‘What are you doing on my ship?’

  Bjorn clambered to his feet, feeling awkward and superfluous. ‘The shields were down. We thought–’

  ‘I know they were down,’ said Russ disdainfully. ‘I brought them down.’ The Wolf King’s face was rigid with outrage. ‘I thought he might meet me, face to face. I thought I might get a reason. Not his way, it seems.’ He spat on the floor in the direction of the downed Contemptor. ‘Just this filth, and they give us no answers before they die.’

  Bjorn stared at the Dreadnought cadaver. He remembered the final words of the Alpha Legionnaire he had killed on the Helridder.

  For the Emperor.

  ‘Then... are the voids operational?’ Bjorn asked. ‘Is the ship secure?’

  Russ stalked over to the Contemptor’s empty chassis and yanked Bjorn’s axe free. ‘It’s always been secure. Think I’d risk the Hrafnkel just to blood Alpharius?’ He paused. ‘Actually, I might. But I didn’t.’

  Russ threw the axe back at Bjorn, who caught it with his right hand.

  ‘We’re pulling back,’ Russ announced, glancing over at Gunn. ‘Clear the rest of the filth from the lower levels, then report to me on the bridge.’

  Bjorn saw, with a lurch of humiliation, that he had never been needed. The whole episode had been pointless. He thought about the Helridder, and how in Hel they were going to get back to it – if it even still flew.

  ‘But you,’ said Russ, turning back to him with a thunderous look on his bloodied face. ‘You can come with me.’

  The sky was too dark, as if the stars had been snuffed out by some gigantic hand. The earth was bone-hard, as black as onyx, crystalline and glinting dully in the light of a single moon. Dust drifted across the landscape, pooling for a moment then stirring again.

  The Khan fought something – hard to make out what it was, the view was blocked by his swirling cloak. He moved fast, so fast, faster than Yesugei had ever seen him move before. The dao blade darted out, catching what little light remained and spilling out across that strange, black land.

  Yesugei caught his breath. Watching the Khan fight was like watching pure energy, like the forks of heaven-lightning that formed his emblem. The clouds above parted, revealing nothing but empty void. Dust kicked up from the Khan’s boots, hanging in the air before puffing away into nothingness.

  This is the land of the dead, Yesugei thought. Has he died? Surely I would know.

  Jag
hatai was a lone shard of light in the infinite darkness. Defiant. Beautiful.

  You told me you had no gift. I did not believe you then, and do not now. This is not the fighting of a mortal creature.

  The Khan pressed his attack, wielding his blade in both hands, his movements blurred by speed and precision. It was impossible to follow the pattern of the dao – the point flickered on the edge of sight.

  Why are you here? Why are you in this place?

  The thing he fought was massive, a shroud of null-light that seemed to suck vitality into its maw. Something about it was eternal, measureless and immortal.

  Death. Do primarchs die? What kills them?

  The Khan fought on. He was alone. The empty world stretched away from him, its horizons empty, its skies empty. Even the wind was listless, the last gasps of a million extinguished souls.

  When the Khan fell, Yesugei woke.

  The Stormseer jerked out of his sleep. The single blanket of his cell’s bunk was soaked in sweat. For a moment he remained locked in the memory, transfixed by the vision of the primarch slumping to his knees, lost amidst the black land. Defeated.

  His breathing was ragged, and he could feel both his hearts hammering. He opened his palms and saw the glossy sheen upon them, cooling fast in the chamber’s chill.

  ‘Lumen,’ he croaked, and the light in the chamber rose. On the far side of the room was a metal washstand enclosing a basin and a steel cup. He got up shakily and padded over to it, running water and splashing it over his face. Then he drank, draining the cup twice. Its contents tasted like water always tasted on void-craft – thin, briny, sterile.

  Yesugei looked at himself in the mirror above the washstand. He saw his face, creased with age, criss-crossed with tattoos and clan-marks, his bald pate raw from where the crystalline hood jutted against the skin.

  He thought he looked pale. His skin was bleached by the harsh light, casting deep shadows under his eyes.

  I look like a monster.

  He rubbed his face with his hands and stood up straight. The chamber hummed with the low grind of warp engines. The Sickle Moon was deep into the aether and the going had not been easy. The chronometers had whirled frantically ever since breaking the veil, warning them that the jump would be a wild one.