War Without End Read online

  He listened to the whispers when he was in the depths of his resting state, that trance-like phase of no-mind where time was malleable. Nothing existed there but bullet and target.

  Or so it was supposed to be.

  The whispers invaded that space. Sibilant and airy sounds, most often – meaningless exhalations of the ship as it went on its way. Ambient and empty.

  But they could trick the mind, yes. He might think that they were words or names, sometimes coming from far, sometimes from near. He did not like to sleep for fear that the sounds would infiltrate his slumbering psyche.

  This is the reason why, at first, he did not think that the man he saw was real.

  He heard the crewman before he laid eyes on him – a hollow, toneless hum from someone who had no understanding of how to carry anything resembling a tune. At first he thought it was some discordant noise from across the great iron chasm, until he turned beneath his inert cloak and spotted motion.

  Slowly and carefully, he pulled his mask up and fixed it in place. A blink-click activated the thermographic scan, and he perceived the man clearly now, a blotch of false colour picking its way along the line of some protruding heat exchangers.

  The menial crewman – the ragged, careworn uniform gave that away – was a glum little figure, as downcast as the lilting, humming dirge. Now and then, he would stop at some imagined terror, peering around as though afraid to be discovered.

  He watched the serf find a spot to sit and saw a shaky hand vanish into the folds of a greasy tunic. It returned with a lho-stick and lighter. The crewman lit the smoke and sucked greedily upon it. Every action seemed to say that this was a secret vice being indulged out of sight of those who would disapprove.

  Sensors in the mask registered the compounds in the stubby roll-up. Some mild narcosia, low-grade stimulants. All banned by Imperial decree.

  A smile came at that. As if Terran law had ever meant anything aboard this ship.

  He left his pistol behind. The suppressor had been damaged in the frantic egress of the saviour pod and despite the weapon’s insistence that the silencer would work flawlessly, he did not wish to test that unless there was no other option. Instead he gathered the cloak to him, for now leaving it unpowered, and picked up the knife. It barely deserved the name, in truth being little more than a shard of hull metal that he had stamped flat and crudely sharpened, but it would open a naked throat as well as any fractal blade or mollycutter.

  Off the hide he came, silent and fleet of foot. Close and closer. The serf did not become aware of him until a cable-train passed by and light from a green indicator lumen atop one of the cradles threw odd shadows over them both.

  The look of abject, childish terror was so stark upon the crewman’s face that it struck him as perversely comical. He released a rough, mocking chuckle, wondering if the crewman might soil himself in fright.

  The spark of humour went away, though, as he realised that he would still have to kill this fool, murder him and dump his corpse into the abyss. There could be no chance of the hide being seen, of course.

  And the serf, with his smoke and his tuneless hum, could not be allowed to dither nearby. Discovery could not be risked.

  ‘D-did they send you?’ said the crewman. Letae. The name was there, visible on a discoloured tab over his right breast. The lho-stick dropped forgotten to the deck. ‘This is it, isn’t it? They’ve had enough of me! This is how it ends…’

  ‘Who?’ He asked the question before it had fully formed in his thoughts.

  ‘The others!’ Hands were wringing now. Letae wavered, blinking back tears, clearly considering running away. But then the serf seemed to think better of it. The only avenue of escape was to go over the sheer iron cliff and into the bottomless dark. ‘I accepted the bloody tattoo. I said I was devoted – isn’t that enough?’

  He saw the oily ink that the crewman spoke of. It was a reddish-black design laid over the flesh of the man’s cheek. The like was commonplace on the lower ranks of starship crews, where menials would tattoo watch numbers and quadrant sigils on themselves as badges of loyalty and rank. A crude hierarchy for the loaders of shells, the stokers and other non-combatants.

  But this was different. The design was wildly complex, and in the dimness it played with the mind so it would seem to move of its own accord. Something about the star-like shape of it made him uneasy, and he refocused his gaze upon the serf’s watery eyes.

  ‘Who are you devoted to?’

  ‘The Warmaster,’ came the reply, but it was so obviously forced, rehearsed to within an inch of its life. ‘Horus.’ Letae added the name as if one might be unsure of whom he was referring to.

  ‘Why are you lying to me?’ He advanced, bringing up the crude knife.

  Letae backed away instinctively, then froze. Beyond was only the yawning abyss. ‘I’m not!’ he insisted. ‘Warmaster… Praise…’ He made the vague sketch of a motion with his hands, like some old-religionist at prayer. ‘All glory to Horus. Death to… to…’

  ‘Say it.’ The rusty blade danced in the air. ‘Why can’t you say it? You are one of them, aren’t you? So speak.’ He goaded the crewman, prodding him with his free hand.

  ‘Death to…’

  The Emperor. The unspoken words hung between them, and yet Letae could not force them out.

  Why? Did this inconsequential little man understand that he was about to die? Was it that now, at this final moment, his treachery was failing him?

  That brought the cold killer’s smile back. In time, all those who had nailed their colours to the traitor’s mast would pay for that choice, from the most powerful primarch to the lowliest of deckhands. A traitor is a traitor is a traitor, he told himself, and death is the reward for all of them.

  ‘I am no traitor!’ The words burst from Letae in a sudden, spittle-flecked blast.

  Did I give voice to that last thought and not realise it? He frowned at himself.

  ‘Death take you all, you filthy whoresons!’ The crewman was immediately red-faced and sweating, furious and impotent all at once. This was true desperation, this was the dam breaking as the end loomed, knowing that it didn’t matter anymore. ‘I won’t say it again!’ he bellowed, his voice becoming a dull resonance robbed of meaning as it echoed away down the canyon. ‘I reject you all, do you hear me? Kill me then! But I’ll die clear of conscience! I am a son of Cthonia, loyal to Terra and the Emperor of Mankind.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Ten generations!’ he raged. ‘Fathers and mothers and sons and daughters, we toiled aboard this ship for the Luna Wolves!’ Letae turned his face upward and a great sadness swept over him, as though he were looking at a loved one lying mortally wounded. ‘What has he done to her? She was so beautiful and noble, and now she’s been… corrupted!’

  It took a moment for him to realize the man was speaking of the great vessel itself. ‘The Vengeful Spirit.’

  ‘Yes! So strong and faithful. But he broke all that from her. But not from me, do you hear? Loyal, damn you! Loyal…’ The last word became a weak, defeated cry. He knew that his end was upon him, and that final surge of righteous anger had not beaten it back. ‘I will not live the lie anymore,’ he said, starting to weep. For a moment, it seemed like the crewman might actually lunge for the crude knife to dash himself upon it, in some futile and final gesture of defiance.

  ‘Courage, Letae,’ he said, warily lowering the weapon. ‘You will not die today.’

  ‘No?’ The serf’s expression veered between pathetically grateful and deeply suspicious. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want to look into the eyes of a loyal man.’ He sat down on one of the inert exchanger hoods and after a while, the crewman did the same. ‘I want to know if there are any of those left.’

  Letae studied him, and abruptly he realised that he was still wearing his mission mask, regarding the serf through the blank
, emotionless gaze of the mono-band visor. He reached up to take it off, to show the poor fool that there was a human being beneath the tattered black cloak.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked the crewman. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘My name…’

  Now that he came to say it, it was hard to form the shape of the words. He was almost afraid that they would slip away from him.

  ‘My name is Eristede Kell,’ he said, at last remembering. ‘I am here to slay a monster.’

  What is the mask? It the lie of who we are. It is the truth of the same. Each mask we wear is identical and never differs. If you suffer the fate to perish behind it, the mask will consume your bio data and render you into slurry that no technology can ever reconstruct. Thus, behind the mask we all are faceless and we are all unkillable. Each time one of us falls, another rises. To those outside, we seem immortal.

  How did he reach this place?

  Without the ability to reckon time, it was important to him to continue to reiterate the significant memories, the ones that had value and potency. He had lost much – that was undeniable. The blow to the head he had suffered as the pod breached the belly decks of the Warmaster’s flagship. The corrosive effects of the serpent venom. They had taken their toll upon his mind.

  I am the weapon.

  Kell had been quite ready to die, in those last moments. His mission, entrusted to him by his master within the Clade Vindicare and the Assassin-Lords of Terra, had all but crumbled by the end. He and the fractious team of killers and madmen that the High Lords had assembled did not complete the task at hand. They had been sent to terminate the Warmaster Horus with extreme prejudice, there on the surface of the planet Dagonet.

  And they had failed.

  He had failed. Only a proxy dead by the pull of Kell’s trigger, a ranked lieutenant of the Warmaster executed in the arch-traitor’s stead. But in the ashes of that error, they had found traces of an even greater evil lurking in the shadows. A warp-spawned thing, a murderous daemonic hybrid that defied all known laws of existence, a creature that should never have been and yet at once was something perfectly engineered for assassination. A living weapon, pointed straight at the heart of the Emperor of Mankind.

  Kell and the others, they did not question if such a thing might be possible. Even the faintest possibility of it had to be stopped at all costs.

  And so they did stop it, and the cost was all. Tariel of the Vanus and the Callidus change-face Koyne, the mad psyker waif Iota and the Eversor brute Garantine – all dead and ashes to end the existence of the Spear-thing.

  And sister too… His dear sister. What was her name? He could see the ghost of her face, hear her voice. But her name. What is my sister’s name? She too was dead, and he was robbed of her. Kell ground his hands into his scalp and pressed until he was in agony, but that particular memory was black and cold. It was an empty shell.

  In the end, he had wanted to die. To be the weapon.

  Taking the guncutter Ultio into the void, seeking out the Vengeful Spirit and knowing that Horus would be aboard. He had aimed the craft like a missile at the deck where the Warmaster stood, in that vain, vain hope that he could mortally wound the Emperor’s turncoat son in the collision.

  But so futile, as–

  –the ship burned around him–

  –a vista of red warning runes wherever he looked–

  –a tiny saviour pod, blue light spilling from the hatch–

  –he would only need to take a step–

  –the mission was all Eristede Kell had left in his echoing, empty existence.

  And so he had fled. He convinced himself that dying in that moment would prove nothing, and it would mean even less. He could not end there, not while he still had a single breath left in his body, a single bullet left to spend.

  In the confusion of his headlong attack run, the launch signature of the escape capsule had been lost in the backwash of nuclear fire from the Ultio’s destruction. Boring into the hull of Vengeful Spirit, the pod carried him into the domain of the enemy, lodged him there as shrapnel might settle in a raw wound.

  Kell went over this memory more than any of the others, more than the fragments of childhood or the past kills in their blood-spattered perfection, because of what it represented to him. This memory, this act, changed the conditions of his existence.

  On Dagonet, he had not killed Horus. He had failed.

  But here, aboard the Vengeful Spirit, hiding in her deep decks and planning that murder anew, the failure became meaningless.

  He had not failed. The mission had not ended. Kell still had yet to take his shot.

  ‘I am here to slay a monster,’ he said, and this time he vowed that he would succeed.

  Never question who they are. Never spend a moment of your time dwelling on the equation of their being. Do not ask yourself if they are fit to die or deserving to live. This is not a matter for you to address. That burden is taken on by men and women of greater knowledge than yours, and they bear it in your stead.

  Be grateful for the clarity this brings to you, and accept it without hesitation. Know that the target is the only truth.

  They fell into an uneasy peace, the Assassin and the deckhand. Letae had more of the lho-sticks, and with trembling hands he gave one to Kell. After the offering, they smoked in companionable silence for a while as each took the measure of the other.

  Kell sucked the narcosia deep into his lungs and he liked it. An eternity had passed since he been able to partake in a vice, or so it felt to him. In this little, trivial act, he felt something other than the bleak, endlessly hollow melancholy that had followed him from Dagonet. He did not have a word for the emotion, though. He had forgotten the names of such things.

  Letae broached the subject of his scars and the discolouration of his flesh from the serpent bites. But Kell was not ready to talk about those things yet. Instead, he asked the crewman to speak of himself… and slowly, warily, the man did so.

  ‘You will think I am weak,’ he said. Kell did, but saw no reason to say so. ‘Let me tell you of how it has been. I’ve worked the Spirit’s decks since I was old enough to lift a dyno-coupler, truth in that. I know all the stories about how her keel was laid down in the shipyards, and I can talk about the men who died making her live. That’s the book of this ship, y’see?’ He tapped his head. In the dim light, there were bruises and evidence of old contusions upon him. ‘In here,’ Letae went on. ‘I’m not forgetting it.’

  Kell knew of such things. Oral histories and traditions built up around the great warships of the Imperium just as they did about cities on the surface of planets, so big and so complex they were that legends could be spawned in their shadow. Ghost stories and modern myths, some with one foot in fact and the other in whimsy. The Vengeful Spirit was such a craft, and the Assassin did not doubt that there were tales that spanned centuries living inside her iron hide. The crew would share those stories, pass them down to each new generation who served, embellishing and enhancing the narrative along the way. In their own rough fashion, deckhands like this one were the crude remembrancers of their ilk.

  But their tales wouldn’t warrant a statue or an opera. Not like the epics of the Legiones Astartes, who strode over the heads of these lesser beings and never once paid them any mind.

  Letae talked and talked, and once started he didn’t seem to have a way to stop.

  ‘We fought in the Crusade we did, for high glory.’ Tears glistened in his gaze. ‘Oh, if you’d only known it. When Horus came to the ship, there was such celebration. We were whole, see? And we were the Warmaster’s boat, the first among equals. We were going to be known as the greatest crew in history… For a while, we were.’

  And then? Kell didn’t need to offer the prompt.

  The crewman looked at his feet, his words turning sorrowful. ‘Didn’t last. The beauty, it all burned away. I saw it, f
rom down here in the lowers. You didn’t need to be a man on the bridge to notice, no. We all saw. We all did.’ He pointed at his face. ‘Davin was the place. It began to change there. Maybe the seeds were rooted before, but the Delphos on Davin was where they bloomed.’ Letae’s voice dropped to a husky murmur, so fearful was he that he might be overheard even in this empty place. ‘Horus fell, and mark me for saying this, but we would have been better served if he might never have stood again. When he came back, he was changed.’

  ‘Explain what you mean by that.’

  ‘I don’t have the words. Not an educated man. But I see it. Saw it. Know it.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Then Isstvan. Oh, for Throne’s sake – Isstvan. What was done there haunts us all. It tainted this ship and every man-jack upon it. He killed kith and kin, the Warmaster did. In the name of betrayal, cloaked it in rebellion like it was something righteous.’

  Then Letae told him a story about a man – a tier-master, a kind of foreman for the decks where the serf worked maintaining the great focusing crystals of the warship’s lance cannons. This man was Letae’s superior, and by a commonality of birth he was also a distant relation to the deckhand. This was not an exceptional thing; the lower ranks on some ship crews became communities in some cases, living on their vessels and forming the same bonds one might come across in a small colony outpost or rural settlement.

  The tier-master spoke out against Horus’s rebellion and was killed for it. Tragic enough, if expected. But the horror was of how it was done. They lashed the man to the lasing crystal as it went through a rising-falling test cycle and his flesh was allowed to burn inside and out for sixteen days. The stasis matrix generator in the lance cannon’s inner workings made the torment go on and on, a peculiarity of the suspensive energy field slowing the relative passage of time for the condemned man. Every crew-serf in earshot was forced to listen to the sluggish, drawn-out screams.

  But this was not the worst of things, no. Letae explained that this had been just the start of them.