War Without End Read online

  At this, an image flickered through Corvo’s mind. The eidetic memory of the Legiones Astartes was a great gift, but carried a high price. It made all recollections that came before its bestowing pale and unreal in comparison. Another irony in a life of ironies, that every image of death seen by his transhuman eyes remained sharp, that every privation could be recalled and felt anew in painful clarity. He fought for humanity, while his own youthful experience of being human was reduced to sun-bleached flashes, opaque moments of dreamlike quality that could not be trusted.

  He treasured them all the same.

  This was what he remembered.

  The forecourt of his father’s house one hundred and twenty years ago. Bone-white flags snapped in the breeze bearing the badge of the Corvo line – a hollow, spiked circle. A stylised sunburst.

  His father was the last to fly that flag. There were no male heirs beyond Lucretius.

  Natural memory was imprecise but in its looseness was found the miracle of evocation, and it was far more emotive than the cold exactness of his Legion-gifted mind. Lucretius again felt his hair stir, he felt the goosebumps rise on his bare arms. Autumn was chill that year, and already the wind had turned to come down from the mountains. There was something invested in this recollection, so deep and fundamental to who he was as a human being, not as a Space Marine. Something that he had almost forgotten how to feel, and struggled daily not to forget.

  His father knelt before him, the proud scion of an old and powerful house. Corvo had never seen him kneel before. Not even in the old picts from when Sulustro was taken back into the fold of the Five Hundred Worlds.

  ‘My son, Lucretius,’ he had said. ‘You go from us, and for this I grieve.’ He grasped his son’s shoulders. His voice was unsteady. ‘I am proud of you. The Corvo name will die with you, and still I am proud.’

  Corvo could not speak. What could he say? How could he be strong for the Emperor if his father – the strongest man he knew – was not?

  Corvo’s father searched his eyes for a glimpse of the man he would never know. They stayed like this, his father’s hands warm on his shoulders, the wind cold on his skin.

  He embraced his son and stood. ‘Go now, Lucretius. Be proud of what you are to become, but never forget who you are or what you were.’

  ‘I swear, father,’ said Lucretius. ‘I swear I will not forget.’

  His father smiled. Corvo had never seen a sadder sight, before or since.

  The memory faded. He was with a different father now.

  It was hard to hold the Lion’s eye. Perilous, even. But Corvo did.

  The Lion glanced at Sanguinius. They seemed amused.

  ‘Well, captain?’ said the Lion. ‘What is the significance of your colours? Would you care to explain?’

  ‘It is simple, my lord.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I made a promise,’ said Corvo. He bowed from the waist.

  They were calling out the name of the next hero as he walked away.

  Gendor Skraivok, the Painted Count, Claw-Master of the 45th Company, stood motionlessly on the command deck of the Umber Prince. He ignored the bustle of the ship’s bridge crew and stared out through the last armourglass portal still intact. Ramrod straight, as if inspecting a flypast, he looked not upon a Legion fleet, but upon the remains of one – a filigreed junkyard of broken vessels drifting purposelessly against the raw, polychromatic fury of the aetheric storm shrouding Ultramar, framing it in twists of superstructure as delicate as ice patterns on glass.

  It was a wholly depressing sight. Beautiful in its own way, he supposed, but Skraivok had never been one for beauty. Though the opacity of the window was turned almost to maximum, the light of the warp-born disturbance pained his sensitive eyes. Without moving, he shifted his gaze to look out past the twisting tendrils of the storm, into the deep night beyond the borders of Roboute Guilliman’s pompous little kingdom.

  What few healthy ships had made it to this place had long since departed. He did not blame them. There was an anomaly at the edge of the Sothan System, a midnight blind spot out past the Mandeville point, framed against the corona of the distant Saphir Cluster. It had long been a favoured rendezvous for the Night Lords, who took delight in plotting their murderous business under the nose of the Ultramarines. That odd, shadowy blackness remained.

  But Sotha had changed.

  No longer a backwater, it practically swarmed with Guilliman’s miserable sons. As soon as the more functional VIII Legion vessels coming into the shadow caught sight of the streams of ships making their way to and from the planet – and the new orbital platform, and the babble of noospheric traffic – they had turned tail and fled back into the empyrean. The rest had departed one by one, limping away as soon as sufficient repairs had been made to their ravaged hulls.

  Those that remained were the hopeless cases. The Umber Prince, Skraivok reluctantly supposed, was one of them.

  He had spent many sleepless nights anticipating the wail of proximity alarms, but the XIII had not come. He had become as bored of waiting for them as he had of everything else here. But Gendor Skraivok reckoned he had a good idea, now, what the cause of all this increased activity was – and that it had something to do with the regular energy pulses coming from Sotha. Luckily for him, these emanations had made the Ultramarines, if anything, more blind to the enemy lurking beyond the reach of their sensors.

  For now at least, this remained a safe and shadowed place.

  Of the nine remaining vessels, only the Umber Prince, Dominus Noctem and Shadow Blow bore signs of activity. The rest were entirely dark, their reactors dead, legionaries evacuated. All lights out, they had become slab-sided shadows thwarting the stars.

  Skraivok wondered what terrors now played out within those cold hulls. What petty princelings ruled over the serfs, now that their masters had removed themselves, in the dark of the broken decks? Did they hoard dwindling supplies of food, air and water to support their impermanent thrones? He was sure that it must be so. If there was one thing Skraivok had learned in his decades of service, it was that humans always reverted to type, and that type was ugly.

  Considering the irony of these half a dozen Nostramos-in-miniature gave him a certain amusement. It helped stave off the boredom, at least.

  Lacking attitudinal control, the damned vessels were sliding into one another, their mass attraction pulling them slowly across the millpond-calm of space where, very soon, they would meet their final ends as an agglomerated mess of broken spars and mashed hull plating. He quite liked that idea. The collision was something else to look forward to.

  He had been there for seven months. He checked the chrono count in his lens displays, as he had come to do almost obsessively, counting the hours of every day off with increasing annoyance. Yes, he thought. Seven months of skulking in the shadows, licking my wounds. Marvellous.

  The Umber Prince had fared only slightly better than the dark ships, coming so close to destruction that it was no longer funny, and Skraivok was a legionary who found a lot of unpleasant things funny. His serfs had laboured incessantly to heal it. It had been an unconscionably long wait, and today was the day that would prove their efforts insufficient.

  The Dominus Noctem and Shadow Blow were leaving.

  He pondered then, with a twinge of unease, upon Lord Curze’s fate. Before his own ship had torn itself away from the battle against the Dark Angels, he had heard that Curze had boarded the Invincible Reason. A good number of the Atramentar had followed. Skraivok was more concerned with glory than some of his kin, but that had been a suicidal kind of glory that he wished to have no part of, and the Umber Prince had ripped into the warp with its hull aflame.

  And so, instead of the pyres of the guilty, he saw the plasma torches of repair crews as they went about their tedious business.

  I have only myself to blame, he thought wryly. Out past the
storm, the stars were a scattering of fractured diamonds against deepest black, and the ruined fleet hung under their unblinking glare. His hands tensed within his midnight-blue gloves, immaculate again; he had little else to do but polish his wargear. Arc-projected lightning skittered across their gleaming surfaces.

  Nothing, he thought. I can do nothing at all.

  Skraivok thought back to the boltholes he had favoured in his youth, running with the gangs. Hidden places where a fugitive might rest a while, until the search passed them by, though a lot of them turned just as easily into traps.

  A cough brought him out of the slum-stink and the greasy wet of foundry-tainted rain – back to the bridge, back from one hole and into another. He honestly couldn’t decide which was worse.

  ‘My lord?’

  Irritation prickling his scalp, Skraivok turned away from the hopeless view outside to take in the equally hopeless mortal addressing him.

  Hrantax was old, and bald, and very, very tired. His black Nostraman eyes were surrounded by deep rings in his pale skin – in the half-light of the command deck, blemished skin and eyes blended together, to make them seem impossibly huge. His uniform was loose upon his body, a consequence of surviving on half-rations. The command interface he wore at the back of his skull was crowded with bunched skin. His insignia had been poorly amended – he looked like a sickly boy playing dress-up, a caricature of a man.

  ‘Lieutenant Hrantax. I suppose you’ve another damage report for me?’ said Skraivok.

  ‘It is Shipmaster Hrantax now, my lord.’

  ‘It’s whatever I say it is, Hrantax.’

  Undaunted, Hrantax continued. One did not survive in Nostraman society by displaying weakness. ‘Your conference with Lords Klandr and Vost is due to take place soon.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Skraivok said impatiently. ‘So get on with it.’

  ‘Very well. If I may?’

  Hrantax waited for no reply, and pinched the haptics embedded in his fingertips to cast a hololithic representation of the Umber Prince onto a nearby display. The graphic wavered uncertainly in the air before taking something approaching a stable form. A good number of the projecting lenses were broken, and as the image rotated sections of it blinked out of existence sequentially.

  ‘We estimate that it will be three more days before the main power links to the Geller fields will be fully operational, my lord.’

  Skraivok sighed loudly. ‘This is getting tedious. I’m pretty sure I told you – by which you know I mean I am absolutely sure I told you – that you had until today.’

  Hrantax looked the giant warrior steadily in his red eye lenses. ‘Tedious it might be, my lord, but the progress we have delivered far exceeds our best estimates. I said fifteen days – it will be done in nine.’

  ‘Fear drives men well.’

  ‘Fear only goes so far. They have performed well only because of my oversight and planning.’

  Skraivok stared at Hrantax. ‘I should kill you. I could kill you.’

  ‘Perhaps so, but you won’t,’ said Hrantax.

  ‘Are you, then, immune to fear?’

  Hrantax’s eye twitched, his suppressed terror seeping out of him. Skraivok savoured it. The little man tried so hard, and it was a joy to torment him.

  ‘Of course not. But you will not kill me if you want this ship approaching anything like void-worthiness within the next few days,’ he replied, then added, ‘My lord,’ with just enough insolence that Skraivok laughed. It growled out of his helm speakers sinisterly.

  ‘So soon!’ said the legionary. ‘I should embrace you tightly instead. Or maybe now, after so many months in this pit, I am past caring and will crush your head just to alleviate the endless boredom...’ He raised his voice up to a shout. ‘...of being here!’

  The noise on the bridge, a bare fraction of the hubbub that had once filled the place, quietened for a moment. The surviving crew, all of them as hollow-eyed and exhausted looking as Hrantax, glanced nervously at the Space Marine.

  Hrantax ignored his commander’s posturing.

  ‘Nothing on this ship was untouched, my lord.’ The shipmaster waved his hand along the battered flank of the craft. The outline of the Umber Prince as it had been was sketched in a soft green wireframe, while what actually remained of the ship was painted in soft reds – pulpy marrow in a shattered bone.

  ‘Thirteen per cent loss in overall mass, seventy per cent crew mortality. Sixty-three of three hundred decks are open to the void. Eighty per cent reduction in weapons output. We have come close to reactor death on six separate occasions. And yet we are still here, mainly because of my efforts. If your time has been boring, my lord, mine has been anything but.’

  ‘I am so glad for you, lieutenant.’

  ‘I am master of this vessel, Captain Skraivok.’

  ‘Only on my sufferance.’

  ‘And your sufferance is predicated on my competence, so if you want to rot here forevermore, I would advise you to finish me now.’

  Gendor Skraivok laughed, but only once. It was both a concession to Hrantax’s point and a threat. ‘Three days? That is good news, I suppose.’ He paused a moment, before adding grudgingly, ‘Well done. But too late.’

  An insistent chime sounded in his helm. A communications officer approached, fear sweating from her every pore. She lacked Hrantax’s mettle and did her best to ignore the Space Marine, speaking only to her shipmaster.

  ‘Lords Klandr and Vost are requesting channels.’

  ‘Fantastic. Everything’s broken but I can still talk to those bastards,’ Skraivok said to her. ‘Fine. Put them through, full encryption. I don’t want any of this getting out and alerting the bloody Thirteenth Legion.’

  The woman swallowed – close to collapse, Skraivok could see. And well she should be. He imagined skinning her, and the thought piqued his interest. She looked like a screamer. But then, they all screamed on the skinning frames...

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  Two faces appeared in the hololith, displacing the Umber Prince into a fuzz of collapsing light.

  Captain Klandr, known as Quickblade in the 23rd Company, spoke first. ‘We are ready to depart as agreed, Skraivok. Will you be joining us?’

  ‘Nice to see you too, “brother”,’ said Skraivok acidly. ‘And you, Red Wing.’

  ‘Skraivok,’ Vost acknowledged him.

  ‘Are you ready?’ repeated Klandr dolefully. His long face always looked utterly miserable, although there was a touch more contempt to it than usual.

  ‘Three more days, or so my loyal shipmaster tells me.’

  ‘Then we must leave without you.’

  ‘Seventy-two hours. Can you not delay? Three vessels are more potent than two.’

  Klandr and Vost looked away from him. He supposed that they were exchanging glances, silently asking each other which of them would deliver the blow, although their projections looked past each other from his perspective. Good news never follows such a glance, he thought.

  ‘This war is done for us,’ said Vost. ‘We have no primarch, no orders and no purpose. If we remain here, we will be destroyed. The Thirteenth will notice us soon, and there are a great many of them around Sotha. I have no desire to face them on such unfavourable terms.’

  ‘They will not see us – this place has served our Legion well for a long time before now.’

  ‘Sotha is not what it was, brother,’ said Vost. He was less stern in character than Klandr, and closer personally to Skraivok, if such a thing could be said of any Night Lord. His sneer was polluted by the weakness of remorse – hardly apparent, but still there.

  ‘Such confraternity humbles me! Might I remind you that you cursed the others for leaving us behind?’ asked Skraivok.

  The ghost of a smile quirked the corner of Klandr’s perpetually downturned mouth. ‘That was them, and this is us. The Legio
n is finished, Skraivok. Perhaps, if we are fortunate, we might aid the Warmaster in some other, small way.’

  ‘But generally, it’s every bastard for himself?’

  ‘It is the Nostraman way,’ said Klandr. ‘We were foolish ever to forget that. We await the next pulse from Sotha to cover our departure.’

  ‘And that… the storm. You’ll brave that, will you? I don’t much like the look of it.’

  ‘A good job, as you are staying here,’ said Klandr. ‘I feel our passage will be safe enough back through it.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re so certain.’ Skraivok shifted tack, his tone became more conciliatory, an entirely transparent sham. ‘I don’t suppose you’d consider taking me and my men with you?’

  Klandr snorted. ‘And have you usurp me, knifing me in the back on the command throne? You never were one to take orders kindly from others. There is only room enough for one captain aboard this vessel, and that captain is I, Klandr Quickblade.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a no, then.’

  The two officers’ outlines flickered, a sure sign of their reactors powering up to full yield. Klandr gave him one last withering glare, and ended his transmission.

  ‘For what it’s worth, Skraivok, I’m sorry. We can’t stay here any longer,’ said Vost.

  ‘It’s worth nothing,’ said Skraivok coldly. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘No, I suppose it isn’t,’ Vost agreed. ‘Goodbye, Skraivok.’

  The hololith cut out.

  Skraivok ordered all hands to battle stations, in case his erstwhile brothers decided to raid his vessel for supplies, although evidently thirty-one Claws of Space Marines were enough to put them off. Nor did they open fire, almost certainly to avoid alerting their ignorant hosts at Sotha than from any sense of loyalty. With silent power, the Dominus and the Shadow ignited their engine stacks and pushed off from the graveyard.

  The XIII Legion were punctilious in everything. Right on cue, just over half an hour later, they did whatever they were doing on Sotha again, and the predictable pulse of energy washed out from the world.