Valdor: Birth of the Imperium Read online

  Achilla threw his spent rifle to one side, thrust himself back to his feet and swung his maul. The electro-feeder flared, surrounding the hammerhead with a corona of bright white energy. It was a good weapon, one that had crunched its way through dozens of enemies in its time, but it bounced off this creature’s hide with a violence that nearly broke Achilla’s wrist.

  The warrior smashed the hilt of his grenade-launcher into Achilla’s face, dropping him back to the slush. Achilla’s head snapped away, wrenching his neck muscles, and he tasted blood across his teeth. Somehow he was able to evade the next attack – a drop-stamp from the warrior’s studded boot – and thrust the maul back up for a second attempt. He managed to drag it across some exposed cabling, causing the warrior to stumble, giving him a second’s opportunity. Achilla swung hard, struggling up to his knees, going for the weakness.

  This time, though, the warrior was alert to the danger. The maul was caught in a dun-grey gauntlet and held tight, fizzing away like a sprite caught in a specimen jar. Achilla tried to yank it back, but lost his grip on the hilt. Weaponless now, he looked up at the monster above him.

  As Slak had noticed, just before they’d got him, this thing looked so much like a Thunder Warrior. Pared-down, maybe, less bulky, with the flamboyance of the old Cataegis armour trimmed away and replaced by level-sunk rivets and hammered-down edges. It was grimmer, more functional, as if it had just rolled off the production line of some manufactorum somewhere. It didn’t fight like a Thunder Warrior either, and there was something about its movements – hesitant, just a fraction erratic – that gave away its rawness. This thing was learning. This thing was learning how to kill.

  ‘I taught you something, at least,’ Achilla grinned, watching the warrior hoist his grenade launcher up, hilt-first. There wasn’t much space for regret, in his world – this was always how he’d planned to go out, after all. ‘You’ll watch your cabling next time.’

  Then the gun slammed down, smashing through what remained of his helm, silencing him for good.

  Samonas sped up, racing through the narrow corridors amid a shifting twilight of fire and shadow.

  He felt his body being pushed for the first time in a mortal age, strained to its limits by the need for haste. He had outstripped even his brothers by then, propelled by urgent fear.

  Not fear for himself, of course. Since ascending into his modified state he was incapable of that, but there were other, more insidious kinds of anxiety – of failure, of falling short, of missing something or someone critical. This emotion was nothing so base as a desire to protect reputation or standing, but a locked-tight mania for the security of the Emperor and the Imperium, an obsession that never relaxed its grip on his soul. Every waking moment was punctuated by the semi-conscious tremors of imperfection and dissatisfaction – of not doing well enough, of needing to improve, of needing to ratchet up the levels of extremity just a little higher.

  In his more reflective moments, Samonas could appreciate the psychological role of this trait, implanted into him by careful hands during the excruciation of his second birth. He could understand that it drove all of his kind to excel in their narrow duties, to never rest, to punish themselves until the goal was accomplished. Everything about his essential make-up was orientated around this one quality. The irony of the Custodians was that, though they surpassed every other warrior on Terra by margins so huge they were almost incalculable, they alone were incapable of drawing satisfaction from their superiority.

  There were no victories, only opportunities for further study. There were no conclusions, only avenues for more strenuous application. The Legio Custodes were swords that were forever honed, becoming sharper with every iteration until they aspired to cleave the very heavens themselves.

  And so Samonas feared nothing for himself, nor for the standing of his order, but only for the danger now exposed in the heart of the Palace, the place he had been charged with keeping safe.

  He reached the heart of the Dungeon and tore through it like wildfire, smashing aside every resistance mustered against him. The entire level was still teeming with Exemplars, all of whom had been put there to slow him, to frustrate him, to keep him from where he needed to be for just a few moments longer. None of them lasted more than seconds against his whirling Sentinel blade, but even those momentary impediments added up. In the worst sections, where they had manned heavy barricades and donned infantry shields, it had taken whole frustrating minutes to clear them out.

  His armour was now covered in blood and criss-crossed with las-burns. The deeper he went, the more scant the lumen-cover became. In those gloomy reaches, his cloak in rags and his blade dripping with gore, he looked more like some revenant of a devil-plane than an anointed son of Unity.

  More explosions went off, just as he reached the processor decks. Bodies were everywhere, their necks snapped and their workstations destroyed. Long ranks of examination tables had been set alight, and the overhead lifter-claws ripped from their rails. The level of destruction was extreme and diligent. It had been done not just to hamper the work of the technicians, but to prevent it being resuscitated.

  The air shimmered with heat. Flames licked up from every shattered surface, exposing the facets of naked black rock. The copper tang of human blood was everywhere, spilled both from the bodies of the slain and the cracked culture vials.

  The chamber had been made… hellish. That, again, was a word that had almost died, and yet here it was once more, sprouting into fresh and foul existence like a black-sapped weed.

  He knew where he would find her. Every blood-soaked corpse marked out the path she had taken, distributed at intervals like macabre way-stones. He went down, and down, and down – past the points where not even senior technicians were granted regular access, to where the rock around him was hot to the touch and where the chisel-marks in the stone had, so they said, been carved by the hand of the Emperor Himself. The air became thick, hard to draw in, sluggish as bile.

  A final door presented itself, lurching out of the gloom with its seals in place and its security bar lowered. Samonas slashed once, twice with his blade, carving flickering lines of molten metal and exploding the power-unit. He kicked, sending the heavy adamantium panel tumbling away, and was across the threshold and into a world of dark crimson ambience and the nerve-fraying hum of massive engines.

  The vault was gigantic – a long, high, narrow shaft in the world’s crust that led onwards into occlusion. It was barely ten metres wide, but extended ahead for many hundred, like the nave of some half-formed cathedral, buried under the mountains’ roots and secure against any possible apocalypse on the surface.

  The floor was undressed rockcrete, antiseptically clean but bare and unadorned. The roof was lost in shadow, far out of mortal eyesight. The walls on either side were glassy, shining like a field of stars amid a sullen red glow of bank lumens. Every square metre was marked by the same detail – row upon row of vials, all stacked with perfect precision and marked with identifier runes. At regular intervals the colossal racks were scored with larger sigils engraved in gold – a raptor, a lightning strike, a drop of blood surmounted by stylised wings, a wolf’s head.

  Samonas barely had time to take those in, though, for his quarry was sighted and ahead of him. Gangs of Exemplars were finalising their work – hauling crates on chain-lifts, rigging cables, connecting power packs. Even as he sprinted towards them, Samonas was calculating the optimal path of slaughter. There were dozens present, some already firing at him, others busy with their work.

  He leapt, swinging his body around in a twist and hurling his blade’s edge out wide. That stroke took out four in a single movement, lacerating through their armour without slowing. Then he was properly among them, in close, punching, kicking, thrusting, a tornado of movement. He jutted his gauntlet out, catching an Exemplar in the chest and cracking him back against the vial-racks, breaking his back. In the same moment, his
blade punched through the stomach of another, lifting the victim from the ground before a flick of a wrist sent the flailing corpse bouncing three metres down the floor.

  Then he saw her, Astarte, twenty metres further up along the shaft, perched high up on a rack-mounted access platform slung between the twin walls of glass. He whipped his sword up and loosed two shots from its hilt-mounted bolter, aimed perfectly, before leaping up to grasp a handhold on the nearside wall.

  Astarte made no attempt to evade the shells, and they exploded harmlessly across a glittering ovoid barrier – a personal void shield, something beyond price, something even the greatest of the Emperor’s servants would have struggled to acquire easily.

  ‘Your presence here is pointless, Custodian,’ she called out wearily, activating the access platform’s motors. The flimsy structure began to shunt upwards, powered by an underslung battery of glowing suspensors. ‘All is completed. All is done.’

  Samonas clambered after the rising platform, using the shelves as a ladder, noticing just how extensive the net of cabling around them both was, and how many heavy clusters of incendiaries had already been installed in position. It would take hours to untangle it all, and no doubt it had been rigged to blow if tampered with. Every movement he made – every grip on a metal shelf with his gauntlet, every kick with his boot – smashed more glass vials, sending cascades of twinkling shards falling to the floor below.

  ‘Remain where you are!’ he warned, firing at the platform’s suspensors in a bid to bring it down, only for more close-range void shields to extinguish the shell’s explosion. ‘The Emperor’s Judgement is upon you!’

  Astarte laughed sourly, still gaining height. Samonas saw that she was unarmed, save for something that looked like a remote detonator in one hand. He climbed faster.

  ‘I really would not expect you to understand this,’ Astarte told him, calmly. ‘Go carefully – you are trampling on your usurpers.’

  A shelf snapped, bent by his weight, and Samonas nearly lost his footing. He reached out with his one free hand, for a moment dangling precariously. ‘Do not do this!’ he called out again, feeling more shelves creak under his weight. ‘This is your work. This is your honoured work.’

  Astarte’s face, unhidden behind any helm or protection, twisted into a grimace. ‘True. Work I believed in.’ Her voice was wracked with unfeigned pain. ‘But it cannot be completed. It cannot be made perfect. We are making Thunder Warriors again. They will fail. There is sickness in their flesh, in all this flesh. They cannot but fail.’

  Samonas started to climb again, going carefully, trying to ignore the way the shelves flexed and distorted under his bulk. More vials tumbled to the distant floor, smashing as they hit. Astarte was running out of room – soon she would be as high as the platform would take her.

  ‘That is not your decision to make,’ he warned, reaching a support pillar and seizing it.

  ‘Ah, it is so very much my decision to make,’ Astarte replied, bitterly. ‘I created them. My knowledge is in them, mixed with all His chem-strands and gene-tangles. I worked so hard to cure them, but the originals are gone. Gone. You understand this? The whole project was them. We needed them. All we have left are the dregs, the by-blows to pull together and meld into something workable. It can’t be done. You hear me, Custodian? It can’t be done.’

  Samonas felt another shelf crack, and flung himself across a column-gap towards a more stable section. The platform’s ascent began to slow. They were both a long way up now. A fall would certainly kill her. It might even kill him.

  ‘I care not,’ he called out. ‘This is the Emperor’s domain. Unless He orders me otherwise, I will protect it.’

  ‘Ha!’ Astarte snorted. ‘You have no idea what He plans. He thinks He’s running out of time. You know that? He’s terrified of it, so He’s reaching out for anything that will keep the predator at bay for a little longer. He’ll go to war with this poisoned army of flawed monsters, because He never listens. Least of all to me.’

  The platform reached the upper levels, and its brakes began to squeeze the rails. Samonas scanned it for weakness, and saw a tiny potential gap where the runners met the chain-links. The void coverage would gape just a little there – less than a centimetre, but only fully when the platform was stationary.

  ‘Surrender yourself,’ he warned for a final time, gauging what would be needed. ‘I will not permit harm to come to this place.’

  ‘I cannot let them live,’ Astarte said, almost pleadingly, reaching for the detonator’s controls. It looked as though there were tears running down her cheeks. ‘I know what they would do. They are my children, but I cannot let them live.’

  ‘Stay your hand.’

  ‘We were so close. Let that be history’s verdict – we were so close.’

  The platform shuddered to a halt. Samonas flung his sword, blade over hilt, at the gap. The aim was flawless, and the tip sheared through the narrow cleft, jamming fast amid the chains and gears. The void shields blew, exploding in sequence along the platform’s length. Astarte disappeared behind a static-laced inferno, screaming incoherently, but by then Samonas was already racing up the last of the vial-shelves. He launched himself across the gap, his fingers clamping on to the reeling platform, his weight near-wrenching it from its rail-housings. He swung for a moment, suspended fifty metres up, before hauling himself onto the teetering surface.

  Astarte was on her knees. The detonator had been knocked from her grasp and was skittering across the tilted metal-mesh floor. She scrambled after it.

  Samonas was faster. Compensating effortlessly for the tilting deck, he pounced, crushing the metal box in his gauntlet before swinging back to face Astarte.

  She was wounded – lines of blood ran freely down her ravaged face – and she seemed unable to get to her feet. Her robes were ripped, revealing an emaciated body within – all ribs and bones and grey-stretched skin.

  She laughed grimly, struggling to get to her knees.

  ‘Strike the warrior, fool,’ she spat, extending her left arm shakily, ‘never the weapon.’

  Too late, Samonas saw the circuitry embedded in her forearm, skeined amid the flesh in a coil of glinting metal. The useless detonator, now crushed into scrap, had been the oldest trick in the lexicon.

  He lunged at her, snapping his blade around to sever her arm at the elbow, but even he, even Samonas of the Legio Custodes, fastest and best of warriors, could do nothing at that range. Just as his blade bit deep, he saw the sparks of power run down the conduits in her arm, turning Astarte’s withered body into a channel of destruction.

  Down below, the receivers picked up the signal.

  Down below, the incendiaries kicked into life.

  Down below, booming like the tolling of great bells, the inferno was born that would scour the chamber and all its contents from existence forever.

  Fifteen

  It would soon be another victory, one more to add to the tally that stretched back through the decades. The deployment had been flawless, a silent advance under the sensor-killing aegis of both static-throwers and the storm’s fury. And yet, as Valdor fought in his peerless, impeccable style, the air tasted of ashes on his lips.

  Ushotan, true to his training, never retreated an inch. He roared into contact, broadsword leaking raw disruptor plasma, armour trailing dirty lines of filth, power-unit bursting with smog. The rest of the Thunder Warriors did the same, tearing into the interlopers, emptying their guns at them before swinging their crackling blades. Reinforcements from the ridge arrived swiftly, racing down the slope to engage, headed by the many tanks that ploughed and laboured in the dirt-drifts, filling the night with the coruscating fire of their linked beam-cannons.

  It was valorous, as aggressive as anyone could have asked for. That was what the Emperor had made them to be, and they had never let Him down in that. They must have known, at some level, what Valdor
knew – that this would be the end for them, just one of a few lingering, grubby last stands before their short epoch was snuffed out. Still, they fought with vigour, determined to exit the stage as they had entered it – the slavering hounds of Unity, unrestrained, their jaws flecked with both spittle and blood.

  ‘What are these things, then, Constantin?’ Ushotan called out, hacking one of them down and striding across his lightning-arced corpse. ‘They fight like they’re constipated. Just like you.’

  Valdor knew what he meant. They were raw, these first ones – still bleeding from the last of their implants, their muscles chafing against the initial marks of power armour. Their minds were bruised and infantile, ravaged by imperfect psycho-conditioning, and their weapons had only recently been machine-spirit-locked to the counterpart systems in their tactical helms. There was so much that was rushed about them, so many points of potential failure, and yet they were going to win this, because, acting together, they were already terrifying.

  ‘They are the future,’ Valdor replied grimly, taking out a lurching Thunder Warrior with a one-two slice of the Apollonian Spear, leaving a wreckage of organs and metal plate in a smoking heap at his feet. ‘The Angels of Death.’

  He was getting closer to the primarch. Airbursts of munitions blew across them both, filming armour with embers, and the two armies grappled around them in every direction. The tanks that Ushotan had so painstakingly dragged up here were struggling, caught by the punishing altitude and the ability of these new troops to take them on unaided. Even as Valdor swung round to face the next foe, he glimpsed one of the Angels rip the turret from a Serpent troop carrier and fling frag-charges through the gaping hole. By the time combat was joined again, that machine was just another blackening ruin and its slayer was already racing towards his next target.